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June 22, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:35
Ep. 566 - Brazen Lying Marxists

“Black Lives Matter” founders admit they’re trained Marxist organizers, rioters topple more statues, and President Trump holds his first rally since the WuFlu lockdowns. 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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Our national collapse continues as more statues come tumbling down.
It's very difficult to keep track of all the statues that have come down.
You remember initially, it was just Confederate monuments.
Then it was Robert E. Lee, who's got kind of a more special place.
Then, very quickly, it was Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Christopher Columbus.
Well, we've got even more statues coming down over the weekend.
A quick rundown.
First, Ulysses S. Grant.
This one maybe you were not expecting.
Ulysses S. Grant is of course the Union General who freed all of the slaves.
So you'd think that in the name of Black Lives Matter, probably wouldn't make sense to tear down his statue, but that's exactly what they did in San Francisco.
Next one up is Francis Scott Key.
Francis Scott Key wrote the National Anthem.
I guess no surprise there, because we know leftists hate the National Anthem.
They've been protesting the National Anthem for a very long time now, though it is a little bit ironic that they took down Francis Scott Key.
Part of the reason they did is there's a line in one of the verses of the National Anthem that talks about Slaves.
So the line is, no refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.
And there's actually some debate over what this line even means.
But of course, leftists are not looking for context on that at all.
So the word slave there might actually refer to the British policy of impressment, of enslaving people.
But again, all nuance is gone.
The other thing about Francis Scott Key is, though he owned slaves for a period of his life, He also publicly criticized slavery.
He gave free legal representation to slaves that were seeking freedom.
But his statue had to come down anyway.
And then I think the most ridiculous one, this was the third one over the weekend.
St.
Junipero Serra.
They are now pulling down actual, honest-to-goodness, honest-to-God saints.
St.
Junipero Serra was a missionary, came to the New World in 1749.
He was canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis.
There's a statue of him in the U.S. Capitol.
And, believe it or not, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden actually paid their respects to that statue not so long ago.
That was then.
This is now.
They're going to tear down every single statue.
And then, guess what?
Once all the statues are down, they're coming for you.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to The Michael Knowles Show.
President Trump talked about all this statue toppling in his first speech since the lockdown, which we will get to, because this weekend more than any showed the real aim of these protests and riots.
And it's a lot worse than anybody thought, and they're not just going to stop at statues.
So President Trump talked about all of this, all of the pulling down of statues.
A lot of normal people Most normal people oppose this kind of stuff.
You'll notice when you look at who was pulling down the statues, it's a lot of people clad in black.
They look like they're part of far-left organizations, either BLM, which we'll get to in one second, or Antifa, or other various anarchist and communist groups.
I don't think they speak for most people.
Actually, Muhammad Ali Jr., son of the famous boxer and civil rights advocate and social activist, he came out And strongly opposed all the statute toppling and the riots and the looting and the protests.
He used colorful language, which I'll have to clean up a little bit.
He goes, don't bust up stuff.
Don't trash the place.
You can peacefully protest.
My father would have said, they ain't nothing but devils.
My father said all lives matter.
I don't think he'd agree with the BLM movement.
Actually, Muhammad Ali Jr.
said that he thought the BLM movement was racist, and then he went on to defend cops.
He said, police don't wake up and think, I'm going to kill an N-word today or kill a white man.
They're just trying to make it back home to their family in one piece.
Obviously correct.
Muhammad Ali Jr.
I have been telling you this for many weeks now, that the Black Lives Matter organization is a very, very bad organization.
It is not what it purports to be.
It is a radical leftist, anti-American, no good, very bad organization, and nobody should have anything to do with it.
And as a result of saying that, I and others have been called racist, bigoted, terrible, dishonest.
Okay, well...
Over the weekend, the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement actually admitted that my take on it is correct.
Okay, I don't think they admitted it over the weekend, but the video finally came out over the weekend.
Patrice Cullor was caught on video admitting that the BLM organization isn't about Black Lives Mattering, that she is a trained organizer, and she is a trained Marxist.
I also think that it might...
I think of a lot of things.
The first thing I think is that we actually do have an ideological frame.
Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers.
We are trained Marxists.
We are When someone tells you that he or she is a Marxist, believe them, okay?
You hear a lot of People ranting and raving about conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats.
And there are many people who rant and rave about Marxism.
This woman is admitting it.
You don't need to feel bad about yourself if you posted the black square.
You don't need to feel bad about yourself if you posted the hashtag Black Lives Matter thinking that Black Lives Matter is about Black Lives Mattering.
But we now know it isn't.
We now have the founders of BLM admitting on video, in their own words, that this is a Marxist front.
Marxists have duped plenty of nice people in history.
Marxists have lied to many of nice people throughout history.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
I'm remembering the George W. Bush version of this, which is, fool me twice.
The point is, you're not going to fool me again.
That should be the point.
If they fool you the first time and you post the black square, that's on them.
But if you continue to give your support to the BLM organization, which is openly and avowedly Marxist, radically ideological, radically anti-American, that's on you.
Stop doing it.
Stop posting the hashtag.
Stop posting the black square.
That's not what this is about.
And this battle is playing out not just in the United States.
It's playing out all around the world.
Because over the weekend, you had the United Nations, which we fund for some reason, openly embracing another radical leftist organization, another communist slash anarchist organization, Antifa.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Go to Ancestry.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. The United Nations is now pro-Antifa.
How much more evidence do we need before we finally defund the United Nations?
This should be it.
You've got BLM admitting that they're Marxist.
How much more evidence do you need before you pull your support from BLM? Same thing here with Antifa.
They tweet, quote, UN hashtag human rights experts express profound concern over a recent statement by the US Attorney General describing Antifa and other anti-fascist activities as domestic terrorists, saying it undermines the rights to freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly in the country.
See how they're conflating.
Antifa with anti-fascists.
Now, Antifa is a communist anarchist terror group.
Anti-fascist just means you oppose fascism.
Let's take that example all the way back to when fascism had any sort of meaning, which is back in World War II with Mussolini.
And sort of with Hitler, though national socialism is sort of a different thing.
But lump them both together, fine.
That was the last time the word fascism really meant anything.
George Orwell wrote an essay about this.
After the Second World War, the word fascism lost all of its meaning.
But in that war, you see a lot of leftists these days talking about the allied troops as the original anti-fascists.
Remember, there were two kinds of anti-fascists in World War II. There were the Americans and the British.
Our guys, good guys.
And there were Stalin's communists.
Both anti-fascist.
When you're just opposed to something, that leaves it wide open to interpretation as to what side you are actually on.
Some anti-fascists are good.
If you're an American soldier in World War II, that's a good guy.
But if you're Stalin...
Just because you opposed Hitler at a certain point doesn't make you a good guy.
Doesn't mean that I want to ally with Stalin.
Okay?
And yet, the United Nations conflates the two.
We need to defund the United Nations.
We pay 22% of the UN budget to invite the worst people on earth to sit on a Human Rights Council.
Some of the worst, most despotic regimes in history sit on a Human Rights Council.
Then they fly to New York to the seat of the United Nations and criticize the United States.
And we, like masochists, pay the bill.
We say, thank you.
Thank you, Venezuela.
May I have another?
Thank you, North Korea.
Thank you, Cuba.
May I have another?
Thank you, Iran.
May I have another?
Why are we doing that?
The UN is situated on beautiful waterfront property.
We could knock down that building.
We could bring in some nice bulldozers.
We could create beautiful Trump condominiums.
And we would save a lot of money every single year.
Now's the time to do that.
We are in a battle that has become ideological.
It's not just in the US. It's international.
But it's the same issues.
What are we fighting for?
Why are we paying people and tolerating people, destroying our nation, our history, our culture?
Some conservatives go squishy on this.
They say it's a good idea to take down the statues.
Take down the statues, put them in a museum.
I say we take down rioters and put them in prison.
But some conservatives want to go along with the leftist mob, take down the statues, and put them in a museum.
Very misguided.
First of all, they won't stay in museums.
You think you're going to take it down from some public square and put it in a museum and then go get to look at it.
No, they're coming down from museums too.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York just took down a statue of Teddy Roosevelt.
Why?
What was so terrible about Teddy Roosevelt?
Nobody can tell, except that this statue of Teddy Roosevelt had a black man and an Indian in it, and they didn't like that for some reason.
Too much integration, I guess, so they're taking down the statue.
None of the statues that are going to museums are going to remain there for very long.
There's no limiting principle to tearing down the statues, to tearing down some statues but not other statues, of our history.
And where the rubber meets the road, I notice, for a lot of conservatives is Robert E. Lee.
Many conservatives who want to prove that they're not racist, prove to leftist mobs who don't care if you're not racist and to whom we don't owe any sort of explanation whatsoever, what those conservatives do is they say, okay, we'll keep up Lincoln and Jefferson, they're really good guys, and Washington and even Christopher Columbus, but we'll tear down Robert E. Lee because Robert E. Lee is a traitor.
This totally misunderstands the Civil War, our nation broadly, and how we look at our history.
If you want to tear down that Robert E. Lee statue, you find yourself exactly at odds with Abraham Lincoln's vision for what happens after the Civil War.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Here's the issue with tearing down the Robert E. Lee statue.
You say...
Conservatives are traitors.
Robert E. Lee was a traitor.
First of all, Robert E. Lee was a great American general who only returned to Virginia when war broke out because he was loyal to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
As a federalist, you have more local loyalties before the national loyalty in an issue like that.
But then he was instrumental in bringing about an end of the war.
And Abraham Lincoln made an excellent point on how the war should end.
He said, with malice toward none, with charity for all, we will finish up this conflict.
Correct.
That was good enough for the men who fought and won the Civil War.
That was good enough for the men who lost their brothers in arms in the Civil War.
That was good enough for the families who lost loved ones in the Civil War.
But it's not good enough for modern leftists.
Robert E. Lee had his citizenship reinstated.
It's good enough for people who came before us, not good enough for modern leftists.
When there is a civil war, often that spells the end of a nation.
But the nation did come back together.
That was not easy.
It took a lot of healing.
It took a lot of compassion for our fellow citizens, rebuilding love of our fellow citizens.
We succeeded at that.
And now, 150 years later, more than 150 years later, People are trying to tear that apart again, totally undoing all the good that Lincoln and those who came after him did.
The other reason why we can't tear down Robert E. Lee or why we shouldn't tear down Robert E. Lee is that the argument for tearing down Lee is an argument for tearing down everybody.
Robert E. Lee is an American citizen, so I don't think the traitor line works.
Really what you're saying, he's a traitor, he's a racist, he's a bigot.
You apply it to Jefferson and Washington.
Really what people are saying is, this man had flaws.
This man committed sins.
This man was not perfect.
The statue of the perfect man, who has lived any time in the last 2,000 years or so, would be an empty statue.
It would just be a platform.
If that's your argument for tearing down Lee, then you have to tear down all of the statues too.
And not just tear down the statues, you have to rename the institutions.
Over the weekend, hashtag cancel Yale was trending nationwide.
What did Yale do?
Yale has done many things in history.
But one thing it did was push forward this progressive idea that we've got to rename things, tear down statues.
Yale renamed Calhoun College.
Just a few years ago, because it was named after a guy who defended slavery, and you can't have that, so all these years later we have to rename Calhoun College.
At the time, Roger Kimball wrote an essay where he pointed out that if you rename Calhoun College, you've got to rename Yale, because Calhoun might have defended slavery, but Eli Yale was a slave trader, the man who Yale is named after.
So you've got to rename Yale.
Jesse Kelly, the conservative commentator, talked about this over the weekend.
Ann Coulter has been talking about this for a while.
And it's very ironic.
It's a little bit chickens coming home to roost because Yale in recent years more or less kicked off the cancel culture.
Perhaps you remember Shrieking Girl, that Yale undergraduate who met her professor, who was the head of the college that she was in, And started shrieking at him because his wife had the audacity to suggest that Yale students were able to choose their own Halloween costumes.
He was defending a principle of free speech and maturity in adulthood.
She didn't like that, so she went on a vulgar rant shrieking about how he should lose his job.
Be quiet!
It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Sylman.
By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master.
Do you understand that?
No, I don't agree with that.
Then why the did you accept the position?
I have a different vision than you.
You should step down!
If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down!
It is not about creating an intellectual space!
It's about creating a home here!
You are not doing that!
You are disgusting!
That's the future.
That's the future president shrieking girl.
Future senator shrieking undergraduate.
Guess what Yale did?
They didn't support the professors.
Professors ended up leaving Yale.
I think now they've come back, but they ended up leaving.
They did step down.
The students won.
Many of the students involved in that altercation won awards for social justice at graduation.
What happened to Yale?
That's what many of us were asking ourselves.
What happened to this place that they allowed this to happen?
Then it occurred to me.
Yale was founded as a seminary.
And it still is one.
Yale was founded as a place to train priests and preachers.
And it still does that.
All of the elite universities were founded as seminaries, and they are seminaries to this day.
The difference is that initially, they were seminaries of Christianity.
Today, they are seminaries of liberalism, of wokeism, of leftism.
Call it what you want.
They still train their students, indoctrinate their students, with the same exact religious zeal that they had when they were founded.
But the religion has changed a little bit.
Whereas we began with Christianity, now we are at liberalism.
And of course, if you're going to train students in that new woke religion, then you're going to get zealots like that girl shrieking at her professor.
And you're going to get zealots renaming everything.
Utter revolution.
The sad thing about all these elite institutions, don't forget, universities going back to the Middle Ages, the earliest universities, were liberal.
Outgrowths of the Catholic Church.
They were places to train monks and priests, people in the faith.
And now there's a new faith.
In Christianity, though, you have redemption because you recognize man's fallen nature and then you recognize your need of a redeemer and then you recognize that a redeemer actually came and redeemed mankind on the cross and rose from the dead.
In leftism, there's no redemption.
In the religion of liberalism, There is an inversion of Christianity.
You are told that you're perfect just the way you are.
And if you're not perfect, you can become perfect through your own actions, through your own self-liberation from bondage, from the oppressive past into the new future.
You can perfect your own human nature.
If there is some imperfection, it's society's fault.
It's not your fault.
And if there is some imperfection, there's no redemption for it because there's no redeemer.
That's the sort of religion that topples statues.
The original religion of our seminaries built up all of the statues, built up this great country, and the new one is tearing them down.
There is no middle ground in this political battle.
There is no compromise.
There's no reconciliation.
There's no meat in the middle.
There's no meat in the middle between build a statue and tear a statue down.
You can leave a statue up, I guess, but that's not really in the middle.
That's the former category.
That's building up a nation.
There's not going to be any middle ground here.
We are playing for keeps.
It is a battle over keeping our country, which means to continue to build our country.
Or tearing our country down completely.
And once they get past the statues, they're not going to be happy.
They're going to go for more institutions.
They're going to go for you.
President Trump talked about this in his first rally since the coronavirus lockdown.
And he talked about his strategy.
A lot of us, including on this show, we've talked about why is President Trump allowing this to happen?
Why won't he roll the tanks into Chaz, Chop, Soy Malia, Soy Viet Union, whatever you want to call it?
Why won't he do it?
One thought has been that perhaps he wants people to see how bad things get.
Trump knows a lot about stagecraft and about the media.
Maybe he wants people to see the city's burning and then realize that we need law and order and we have to vote for him.
I think that's a tough strategy.
But actually, at his rally over the weekend, Trump admitted that this is exactly what he's doing.
All of these places I talk about are Democrat.
You know that.
Every one of them.
Every one of them.
And I have an offer out.
I said, anytime you want, we'll come in, we'll straighten it out in one hour or less.
Now, I may be wrong, but it's probably better for us to just watch that disaster.
I flew in with some of our great congressmen who we're going to introduce in a second, and I said to him, Congressman, what do you think?
I can straighten it out fast.
Should we just go in?
No, sir.
Let it simmer for a little while.
Let people see what radical left Democrats will do to our country.
He makes a great point here and confirms what a lot of us thought was happening.
And even more than that, he gives you a peek into his thinking.
If President Trump were secretly letting the cities burn just so that we could see how bad it was going to get, I think a lot of people would accuse him of cynicism, saying, ah, you're willing to let cities go up in flames just to make a political point.
But the very fact that Trump is telling you what he's doing Take away that cynicism, right?
He's admitting it to you.
There's no guile here.
And that's the point of these rallies, is to take you behind the scenes, create this personal connection.
And I think he does that pretty successfully.
The one trouble with this strategy, though, is that we no longer live in a country that recognizes federalism very clearly.
We don't really understand.
If you asked 100 people on the street, probably very few of them would recognize that we have local government, state government, federal government, and actually the local government makes most of the decisions and administers most of the laws and regulations, and the state government a little bit more, too.
And the federal government has relatively few powers, narrowly defined powers.
Most people wouldn't recognize that because it's become less and less true over time.
So you look around at the burning cities.
I think a lot of people look at Trump and say, well, you're the president.
Do something about it.
Action is a good spur to enthusiasm.
Action is very inspiring.
And so Trump is playing a game here.
That's why he said, I admit I could be wrong about this.
But I think it's better to let people see what happens.
I think what needs to happen is a little bit of a combination of the two.
I think it's good to watch Chaz and Chop.
It's hilarious.
It's sort of like when AOC proposed the Green New Deal, which was so absurd.
And Mitch McConnell immediately said, well, we got to vote on this ASAP.
We got to get the Green New Deal on the docket.
And we got to get everybody on the record.
Do you support destroying 90% of American energy?
Do you support spending $93 trillion?
Get on the record, Senator.
There is a little bit of that performance of seeing how bad it is.
But we also need to see action.
We have elected Trump in part for his energy.
We had other candidates who Trump perhaps aptly described as low energy.
Trump is high energy, so we want to see that energy in action.
Alexander Hamilton, writing in The Federalist, said that we want an energetic executive, an energetic government.
So we do have to see that eventually.
When is that going to be?
Perhaps we'll have to wait and see.
Trump took us a little more behind the scenes throughout the rest of this rally.
I thought it was overall an okay rally, but the mainstream media are knocking him for one thing and one thing in particular.
We'll get to both.
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So Trump talks about his strategy on the riots.
Then he gets even more personal than that.
He goes on this digression about how he was giving a speech at West Point, and then he tried walking down the ramp, but the ramp was slippery, so he had to walk slowly.
Most people are criticizing Trump for this.
They think this was a waste of time at his rally.
I think it's the key feature to his rally.
Here is Trump talking about that all-important shuffle down the ramp.
And this was a steel ramp.
You all saw it, because everybody saw it.
This was a steel ramp.
It had no handrail.
It was like an ice skating rink.
And I said, General, I have a problem.
And he didn't understand that at first.
I said, there's no way.
You understood?
I just saluted almost 600 times.
I just made a big speech.
I sat for other speeches.
I'm being baked.
I'm being baked like a cake.
I said, General, there's no way I can make it down that ramp without falling on my ass, General.
I have no rally.
It's true.
So I said, is there like something else around?
Sir, the ramp is ready to go.
Grab me, sir.
Grab me.
I didn't really want to grab him.
You know why?
Because I said, that'll be a story too.
He takes you through.
You know, I don't like it when the president uses vulgar language in public, but the story does seem to call for it, and I see what he's doing here.
The media, for how long?
For a week, basically, talked about how Trump was old and doddering by walking down this ramp.
Meanwhile, their candidate is Joe Biden.
Enough said.
But they talk about the rant for a week.
So he wants to take you behind the scenes on all these little moments.
At one point, the media accused him of maybe having Parkinson's disease.
Trump jokes about this, goes on a several-minute-long rant, basically a stand-up comedy bit, about how when you're drinking water, it's a good idea not to spill it on your silk necktie.
You had on a very good red tie that's sort of expensive.
It's silk because they look better.
They have a better sheen to them.
And I don't want to get water on the tie.
And I don't want to drink much.
So I lifted up the water.
I see we have a little glass of water.
Where the hell did this water come from?
Where did it come from?
And I looked down on my tie because I've done it.
I've taken water...
And it spills down under your tie.
It doesn't look good for a long time.
And frankly, the tie is never the same.
So I put it up to my lip and then I say, because I don't want it just in case.
And they gave me another disease.
- They gave me another disease. - So he takes a sip of the water.
And he throws the water to decide.
President Trump sips the water and then he throws it off the stage.
The guy gets stagecraft so well.
And you were watching, you say, why am I watching the President of the United States talking about how silk neckties have a better sheen and how you don't want to dribble water on it because they're kind of expensive.
Meanwhile, this guy's a billionaire.
It's very, very funny.
It's very, very personal.
And it makes you have a much tighter connection to the man speaking than you have to the mainstream media that are lying about him.
And it makes you trust him more than you trust them.
I actually think this kind of stuff, the tie bit, all of that, is some of the most important stuff in the speech.
He probably could have cut it down a little bit in terms of the length of time, but it was really good stuff.
Then he shows you why this personal stuff matters, because he pivots from a story that isn't completely trivial, like the ramp or the necktie.
He pivots into a personal story about negotiating over the price of an aircraft.
And now all of a sudden, very subtly, before anybody knew what happened, Trump blends the personal element and the political element, and he shows you his political philosophy, which more or less boils down to make good deals.
I said, cancel the contract.
I want to cancel it.
I said, General, can you cancel the contract?
He said, yes, sir.
I'm very proud of it.
Oh, good.
Cancel it.
Okay, sir.
By the way, to cancel it, do you have to pay anything?
Yes, sir.
We have a cancellation fee, sir.
How much is it, General?
$250 million, sir.
I said, what?
Sir, we made a good deal.
$250 million.
You mean, if we don't buy the plane, we have to hand them $250 million?
That's not good, right?
Look at these two guys.
They're looking.
By the way, that's like a good story compared to some I could tell you, like with aircraft carriers.
So, I say, General, don't cancel.
Don't cancel.
Just tell them I don't want the planes.
Don't put anything in writing.
Don't put it in writing, General.
Why, sir?
Because I don't want to pay $250.
You don't want to pay $250.
The speech was largely like this.
It was much funnier than Dave Chappelle's recent stand-up special on Netflix, right?
This is Trump's superpower, and he does it very well.
Why does this matter?
Well, because most politicians, they don't care about $250 million.
$250 million is a drop in the bucket of our federal budget.
It's a rounding error.
So nobody worries about that.
Trump is showing you he does worry about that.
That the President of the United States, leader of the free world, is personally negotiating over the cost of airplanes.
Because most politicians don't care about this stuff, but most Americans do budget.
They think about things.
Even if you go buy a t-shirt or you go buy a box of cereal or something, you're looking at the numbers.
You say, okay, well, I don't want to spend $5.
I'd rather spend $4.
I don't want to spend $15.
I'd rather spend $14.
And you're thinking about these things.
It's very relatable.
It shows you that this guy is different from everyone in Washington and he's much more like you.
He then moves on to more ideological questions.
And this question, I think, shows a major...
Debate that's going on on the right right now between the old kind of more libertarian consensus and the new more conservative traditional idea that's emerging.
And this is on the question of flag burning.
As President Trump echoed a sentiment he's mentioned before, sentiment that I have supported on this show, which is we ought to have laws or a constitutional amendment, I suppose, in this country against burning the American flag.
And you know, we ought to do something, Mr.
Senators.
We have two great senators.
We ought to come up with legislation that if you burn the American flag, you go to jail for one year.
One year.
This is a great idea.
I know that some conservatives are going to shrink back instinctively.
Like if you're in a doctor's office and he hits the hammer on your knee and the knee goes up.
You're going to shrink back at that because we support free speech.
So you can't be for a flag-burning, anti-flag-burning amendment, right?
Wrong.
Not quite.
What's the issue here?
The issue is the debate.
Are conservatives going to get serious or are we going to let the left run roughshod over the country?
For a long time in this country, for most of our nation's history, we've had laws against burning the flag.
For a lot longer than we haven't had laws against burning the flag.
This was just part of our nation.
Then this was challenged in recent decades, and it was found to be unconstitutional to have a law against burning the American flag.
And actually, Antonin Scalia, the great originalist justice, was one of the people who opposed, who found that it was unconstitutional to have an amendment or a law against burning the American flag.
The conservatives tended to support the flag-burning laws.
Liberals opposed the flag-burning laws.
Scalia sided with the liberals on constitutional grounds because he said that burning the American flag is clearly an expressive action.
It clearly is about political speech.
And so...
Those laws are unconstitutional.
Now, one solution to this would be pass a constitutional amendment saying you can't desecrate the American flag because in some cases when you want to dispose of an old American flag, a tattered American flag, you do burn it.
We're not worried about the burning.
It's the desecration that we don't like.
I think this is a very good idea.
There's a reason why we, for most of our country's history, had laws against burning the American flag and we all thought that they were perfectly constitutional.
it's because it's incoherent to burn the American flag and to do so in the name of the First Amendment because the American flag is the symbol of the whole country, the country which includes in it the First Amendment.
If you burn the American flag, you are burning symbolically the First Amendment.
And so it's an act that doesn't make any sense.
Moreover, I mean, I think of it in the way that G.K. Chesterton talked about how there is a thought that stops thought, and that is the There is free expression that stops free expression, and that is the only free expression that ought to be stopped by the lights of the First Amendment.
That would be something like burning a flag.
Another reason is that nations need to have things that hold them together.
And in the early days of America, we all shared, we shared largely a common actual ancestry in the Anglo-American tradition.
We shared a language.
We shared political institutions.
We shared a religion.
We shared all of these things.
And increasingly over time, we don't share those things anymore.
We don't share any of those things, really.
You need to have something that holds you together.
And if you can't even agree on the symbol of the whole country, then there's nothing left.
Another reason this is a great idea and why it's actually conservative to have an amendment, a constitutional amendment against burning the American flag, is that the conservative worldview needs to have not just form, but substance.
It needs to have not just procedure, but actual stuff.
So for instance, we support free expression.
We support the first amendment.
But we also need to support specific things to express.
It can't just be, you're free to make any decision you want.
Well, what decision are you going to make?
It's like the pro-choice people.
They say, we're pro-choice.
Okay, you're choosing to do what?
Really what they mean is they're pro-abortion.
We need to have stuff to our conservatism.
For the last 50, 60 years, conservatism has more or less just boiled down to procedure.
We're okay.
We're going to oppose the certain procedures that are destroying America.
But if you use the right procedure to tear down statues, that's a good thing.
Or even on the question of immigration.
We let more and more and more immigrants in the country and there's less and less and less assimilation.
We say, okay, well, we can, of course, we would never oppose that left-wing policy, but you've got to do it legally.
You've got to follow the right procedure, but we're not going to oppose you on the substance.
We need to have some substance to it.
We've seen the effects.
Look at originalism.
We've said, we need to have these originalist judges.
They don't need to have any conservative content, but they need to file this procedure of interpretive principle.
Well, guess what?
We've lost virtually every important case over the last 20, 30 years, 40 years, more than that.
The procedure is not enough.
We need to have substance.
We need to stand for something.
I think that would be a good future for the conservative movement.
Frankly, I think it's the only future if we want to stop before all the statues and all of our country has tumbled down.
And of course, no one is talking about the substantive points of that rally.
Everyone is just talking about the crowd sizes.
So the left is now attacking Trump for not having a big enough crowd.
We were promised a zillion people were going to show up, and then there weren't as many.
Ironically, before the rally, the left was preemptively attacking Trump for having too many people at the rally.
He was going to have too many people and was going to spread coronavirus.
Then there were more spaced out.
There were some empty seats.
They were making fun of Trump for having not enough people.
Three theories of this.
Was there intimidation outside the rally?
Was it leftist sabotage?
Or was it lack of enthusiasm for Trump?
We know that there was leftist sabotage.
AOC admitted it.
She said, actually, you got rocked by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign with fake ticket reservations and tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic to pack an arena during COVID. Shout out to Zoomers.
You all make me so proud.
She was saying it was teenagers who did all this.
Turns out it wasn't really teenagers.
It was older leftist activists.
Here's one woman admitting, as AOC did, that she was pushing for all of this.
A woman named Mary Jo Laup, who does not exactly look like a teen or a Zoomer, but here's the TikTok she made.
If you've been paying attention to the news, you know that Donald Trump is planning on holding his first political rally post-quarantine on June 19th in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Now, if you don't know why that's a big deal, I want you to Google two phrases, Juneteenth and Black Wall Street.
You'll find out why people are really upset about this and why it's a slap in the face to the Black community.
Somebody on another TikTok post commented that he was offering two free tickets on his campaign website to go to this rally, so I went and investigated it.
It's two free tickets per cell phone number.
Because when you register, you have to give them your cell phone number, they send you a code, you put the code in, and your tickets are reserved for you.
So, this probably means, having worked on a political campaign this past fall, it probably means that I'll start getting text messages from his campaign.
All I have to do to get rid of those is text STOP. That's all you have to do.
Once you text STOP, they have to stop texting you.
That's the law.
I have to leave you alone.
So, I recommend that all of those of us that want to see this 19,000 seat auditorium barely filled or completely empty, go reserve tickets now and leave him standing there alone on the stage.
What do you say?
Okay, so she admits it.
AOC admits it.
There was some sabotage going on.
There were some protesters out there, intimidate protesters, intimidating Trump supporters who wanted to come in.
I think there's also a campaign issue.
The campaign could have handled this better.
We know that the left pulls these sort of tactics.
They do this to every speech that I give on campus.
They always reserve a lot more seats, and then they either don't show up or they show up and they leave early.
That's why we have an...
A waitlist line outside to immediately fill in the seats.
I was actually giving a speech about six or eight months ago defending George Washington at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. You might say that I saw this coming, this toppling of the Washington statues.
So I was giving a defense of Washington, and at a certain point, about five, ten minutes in, a whole group of leftists left, and we immediately filled the seats back in.
Campaign should have seen that coming.
And the campaign should not have caved to the mob on moving the date.
You remember, initially the Trump rally was supposed to be on June 19th.
Juneteenth.
Now, the most important holiday in all of America.
Juneteenth is the day that Republicans told the slaves in Texas that they were free.
And this has somehow become a political issue for Democrats.
I don't know how they managed to do that.
So they said the Trump campaign has to move the rally.
It can't be on June 19th.
Juneteenth.
And the Trump campaign acquiesced to this.
They shouldn't have done that.
First of all, it created some confusion over when the rally was.
And it dispirited people because they caved to the leftist mob needlessly and counterproductively.
So I think the campaign should learn some lessons from this.
Be better prepared next time.
Look, this was the first rally in three months, right, since the lockdowns.
That's fine.
The important thing is we need to get back out there and see some more rallies.
The cancel culture, the statue toppling, the anti-American activities are going to continue.
They canceled Christopher Columbus a long time ago.
They're now trying to rename Columbus, Ohio.
As I said, it would certainly happen.
If you take down a statue of Columbus at Columbus High School in Columbus, Ohio, the next question is, why is the community college named after Columbus?
Why is the town named after Columbus?
So they want to change the name.
And I think this encapsulates the whole of liberal modernity.
They want to change the name of Columbus, Ohio to Flavortown.
Labertown, Ohio.
This is what they say about it.
They say, Columbus is an amazing city, but one whose name is tarnished by the very name itself.
Its namesake, Christopher Columbus, is in the bad place, by which they mean hell, but they can't use the word hell because they have a very religious worldview, but they don't have our religious worldview.
They've replaced it with leftism.
He's in the bad place because of all his raping, slave trading, and genocide.
That's not exactly a proud legacy.
So again, they get Columbus completely wrong.
They accuse him of crimes he did not commit, but you don't expect...
Historical literacy from people who would name a town Flavortown.
Why not rename the city Flavortown?
The name is twofold.
One, it honors Central Ohio's proud heritage as a culinary crossroads in one of the nation's largest test markets for the food industry.
Second, Chef Liberty, Guy Fieri, was born in Columbus, so we can honor him.
This is what happens in liberalism.
Liberalism, and this happens as liberalism spreads out, not just over time, but geographically.
It replaces real culture.
Profound culture.
Real history.
Real literature.
Real art.
Real tradition.
With nothing but consumption.
Nothing but the idea that we should feed our appetites.
In this case, literally feed our appetites with debased pop culture and cheap food.
Cheap, salty, fatty food.
Feed me, feed me, feed me.
We have squandered our culture on our own ravenous appetites.
That's what happens.
The old idea of liberty, the old idea of freedom, is that we have to tame our appetites so that we can conquer our passions and actually be free in the world.
And the modern liberal idea of liberty is you give in to your passions, you give in to your appetites, and...
Only when you do exactly what you want to do, whenever you want to do it, then only are you free.
What culture do you want to live in?
We're all headed toward Flavortown, folks.
When the last statue finally falls...
Then we will be living in Flavortown, USA. Is that the culture you want?
Do you want to live in the world of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and our beautiful monuments and our religion and our traditions and our institutions?
Or do you want to live in Flavortown?
Unfortunately, these days, probably most people want to live in Flavortown.
Not a good sign for our country, though.
That's our show.
We've got more to get to.
We'll do it tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
as The Michael Knowles Show.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
A top reporter at The New York Times has said the quiet part out loud.
She's proud of inspiring nationwide leftist riots.
The press and their pet Democrats, they are the mob.
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