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June 26, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

48:05

Ep. 569 - Abolish Whiteness

Rioters go after Lincoln, a professor calls to abolish whiteness, and Michael sits down with Attorney General William Barr. Then, 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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	Political satire is now impossible.
	I have just returned from Washington, D.C. I was there for 24 hours.
	I was there talking to the Attorney General of the United States, which we will get to a little bit later in the show.
	And while I was there, the rioters, the peaceful protesters, promised to tear down, in the name of racial justice, a statue of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves.
	Yes, this famous statue in Washington, D.C., the Emancipation Proclamation statue, is one of Abraham Lincoln and a freed slave.
	It was paid for in 1876 by black people recently freed to honor the man who freed them, to honor their freedom.
	And now that statue, to freedom, is considered racist.
	They are tearing it down.
	Here are the geniuses who want to pull down our history.
	Our team today, some of my members out here, we don't want to tear down the statue today.
	We understand, we understand.
	We don't want to do it today.
	We are going to be doing it on Thursday at 7 p.m.
	Okay?
	Thursday at 7 p.m.
	Say it Thursday.
	Thursday.
	At 7.
	At 7 p.m.
	P.m.
	Okay.
	So we're not gonna be just sitting idly, side to side, going to Black Lives Matter Plaza.
	No.
	No, we're not doing that no more.
	We are going to show up and wake these rich white people up.
	Gonna wake those rich white people.
	You know, rich white people like Abraham Lincoln.
	Now, Thursday at 7 p.m.
	came and went.
	As you might imagine, the rioters are not the most reliable people on Earth, but they still plan to pull down the statue.
	D.C.'s fake congressman, Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, has called for the statue to come down.
	D.C.'s mayor has suggested the statue might come down.
	But we can't pretend any longer that this is about police brutality or systemic racism or about the Confederacy or the slaves, because right now we're talking about a statue of the guy...
	Who freed the slaves?
	Who beat the Confederacy?
	The anarchists are targeting the most ironic man.
	They're making it explicitly about race.
	And ironically, all that could do is gin up racial tensions.
	We'll get into it.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	Welcome back to The Michael Knowles Show.
	It is good to be back here in La La Land after a whirlwind trip to D.C. where I like to credit my presence there for delaying the teardown of the Emancipation Proclamation statue.
	I have no evidence that that is true, but look, it's a coincidence and so clearly there's something there.
	Before we get into that, because there's a racial point here that I think the anarchists and the radicals who defend them are completely missing And it's pretty ironic.
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	Obviously that rioter who talked about pulling down the Emancipation Proclamation statue is speaking in explicitly racial terms because he also was rallying everyone to go show up to Mitch McConnell's house and other people.
	He said, we're going to keep these rich white people up.
	It's all about white, white, white.
	And obviously now they can no longer say that it's about tearing down statues of slavers.
	Because Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
	They can't say it's about tearing down, I don't know, the Confederate flag, because you're talking about the man who saved the Union.
	It's a white thing for a lot of people, and that is true even of a lecturer at Cambridge University who tweeted out, abolish whiteness.
	This lecturer's name is Priyamvada Gopal.
	A lot of people reported her, because imagine if you said, abolish Mexicans, abolish blackness.
	If you said those things, that's...
	I suppose threatening.
	It's at least wishing ill on a whole group of people.
	And so you would be taken down.
	Twitter the other day took down, or censored rather, a tweet from President Trump because he said he would enforce the law against criminals.
	He said, we're going to enforce the law against criminals.
	They said this is violent.
	It's threatening harm to other people.
	And yet Abolish Whiteness stays up on Twitter.
	And then what's even crazier is the way that Cambridge University reacted to the tweet was to give this woman a promotion.
	She went from a lecturer to a full professor, which tells you just about everything that you need to know about the academy.
	But the tweet got me wondering, what is whiteness?
	This is a term that's come up among these radicals, abolish whiteness.
	Whiteness is toxic.
	What is whiteness?
	I don't think about whiteness very much.
	When I think about how I identify in my life, white is very low on the list.
	What constitutes my identity?
	Well, I'm Catholic.
	And if we wanted to get specific nationally, I guess I'm of Italian extract.
	Still don't think about that as white.
	A lot of people wonder if Italians are white.
	We're a little bit swarthy.
	I think that I'm a New Yorker.
	I was born in New York.
	I live in Los Angeles now.
	I'm an American.
	Obviously that's way up there on the list.
	I'm a man.
	That's way up there on the list.
	Whiteness is very low.
	And I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
	It turns out white people have a very low racial consciousness.
	So Pew Research did this survey in, it's the Race in America survey, 2019.
	And they asked what percentage of each group say that being white or black or Asian or whatever is extremely or very important to how they think about themselves.
	So among Asian people, 27% say it's extremely important to think of their race.
	29% additionally say it's very important.
	So 56%, most Asians say that their race is at least very important to their identity.
	Among Hispanics, the number is 31%, extremely important.
	28%, very important.
	So 59% say their race is at least very important to them.
	Among black people, that number jumps to 74% total.
	So 52%, most black people say that their race is extremely important to their identity.
	An additional 22% say very important, bringing it to 74.
	And then white people, do you know what the number is?
	Just 15 total.
	So 10% say it's very important to their identity.
	And just 5% say it's extremely important to their identity.
	15% racial consciousness.
	So ironically, when you have a tweet like, abolish whiteness, what that actually has the effect of doing is creating whiteness.
	Whiteness, as a concept, is not one that's really recognized by a lot of people.
	85% of white people probably wouldn't recognize that concept.
	And yet, if we are constantly being told, you're white, you're white, that is your identity, and it's terrible, and we shouldn't have it, there is no other effect that that could have than to create a racial consciousness.
	Now, perhaps that's the point.
	Because, on the one hand, it's easy not to have a racial consciousness if you're the majority population in a country.
	But I think beyond that, because in the West we have this idea of anti-racism, we have the idea that we're made in the image of God, that we have human solidarity come from a common ancestor, we just naturally have a lower racial consciousness.
	But I suspect the left is pushing this because they want there to be a white racial consciousness, because they want to pit racial groups against one another, and because liberalism seems to require overcoming the oppressive past and having a villain.
	When there are no more villains to have, then you just have to start Making them up.
	Now, that's the ideological side of things.
	How about the practical side of things?
	Are these riots still going to keep burning?
	You know, they're making up invisible villains and invisible enemies.
	At a certain point, you think that would burn out.
	The BHAZ, the Black House Autonomous Zone in DC, is still running.
	But the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle...
	It is no more.
	The dream of Chaz Chop is over.
	A statement from the Chaz Chop Twitter account says, quote, few people remain in our beloved Chop.
	The statement was signed by the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest Solidarity Committee and they said, very finally, the Chop project is now concluded.
	No more Chop.
	It's very sad, but that's just the way that it goes.
	It was always ever thus, right?
	It was always going to go away.
	It was a utopian project, and like all utopian projects, it was disgusting.
	It was terrible.
	It was violent.
	People died.
	It destroyed property.
	It destroyed the rights of certain people.
	Yet the mayor of Seattle, who was tolerating this, said it was going to be the summer of love.
	Didn't look very much like the Summer of Love.
	Now the Summer of Love has fizzled out.
	I think it went so quickly because we're just moving on a faster timeline here.
	We're moving on a faster news cycle.
	We're moving on a faster protest cycle.
	We went from tearing down Robert E. Lee to tearing down statues of St.
	Junipero Serra very quickly, right?
	To tearing down any depiction of Jesus that looks white, according to Sean King.
	Things are getting a little bit faster, and the bright side of that is things like the Chaz will fizzle out.
	Now, speaking of fizzling out, our good friend Joe Biden is still running for president.
	We'll get a little bit more into the presidential election later.
	But let's not forget, this man is still running, and he is losing more and more of his consciousness every single day.
	They are trying to go back and gin up this coronavirus idea.
	Well, Joe Biden has a scary number for you.
	He is under the impression that coronavirus has hit 120 million people already worldwide.
	I just got off the phone this morning with Dr.
	Vivek Murthy and he and others who, he was a former Surgeon General and a number of experts who work, I have a meeting, an hour and a half telephone conference with them, Zoom conference once a week, I mean four times a week.
	And that's why we have a major multi-billion dollar investment in mental health.
	What people drastically underestimate is the impact on the mental health Of people who now everything is complicated.
	Not only is the healthcare piece, but people don't have a job.
	People don't have anywhere to go.
	They don't know what they're going to do.
	And a lot of people you have unnecessarily.
	Now we have over 120 million dead from COVID. Over 100.
	I mean.
	120 million dead.
	You know, it's funny.
	I actually have to correct myself.
	The first time I heard that clip, I thought he was saying there were 120 million cases worldwide, which obviously is not true.
	No, what he said is even crazier.
	He's saying there's 120 million dead, and it seems he's implying, in America, which is a country of 330 million people.
	That's a lot, huh?
	Actually, though, the number is not anywhere close to that.
	It's multiple orders of magnitude lower than that.
	Watching or listening to Joe Biden these days, you have to think the man is not up to the job.
	And yet, the poll numbers show he's actually in a pretty good position.
	Are the polls lying?
	Possibly.
	But does President Trump think he's going to sail to re-election?
	I think probably not.
	We'll get into those numbers in just a little bit.
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	Now, the coronavirus is back, according to Joe Biden.
	120 million dead in America, obviously nowhere near that.
	But still, this is the message that's being sent to everybody.
	Coronavirus is back.
	We've all got to worry.
	But what about the past few weeks where the public health officials and the politicians have been encouraging people to go out, not social distance, be around hundreds of thousands of other people?
	The Seattle Autonomous Zone is the summer of love.
	What about all of that?
	Clearly, there is a political agenda at work here.
	If the virus is super-duper deadly dangerous, stay in your house, wear a mask one minute, and then when it's advantageous to the left, they say, no big deal, go out and protest for whatever racial or social issue you want to.
	Well, they're back on it shamelessly, and they want you to know that the reason the coronavirus is spiking has nothing to do with the protests.
	It's almost...
	Hilarious.
	If it weren't so corrupt, it would be hilarious that at this point, they actually have headlines like this in NPR. Parties, not protests, are causing spikes in coronavirus.
	Parties.
	So, those scenes that you've seen for weeks now of hundreds of thousands of people together, that has nothing to do with coronavirus, but when you go over and have dinner with your friend, that is what's causing the spike in coronavirus.
	You remember the public health officials, 1,200 of them at least, signed a petition that That said that you should encourage the protests because white supremacy is a public health issue that is causing coronavirus to spike.
	I kid you not.
	And social justice protests, SJW, radical BLM protests, will actually help reduce the spread of coronavirus.
	Based on what?
	Based on science, I guess.
	Another article, this one just came out yesterday.
	Black Lives Matter protests haven't led to COVID spikes.
	It may be due to people staying home.
	Oh, that's why we're getting a spike as people are staying home.
	All right, then lift the lockdown orders.
	They're probably not going to support that either.
	All they want to do, though, is protect BLM or Antifa or the Chaz Chop Zone.
	All they want to do is protect anything that can hurt Trump.
	And they will not permit any of that to lift for the next five months.
	It is all about the presidential election.
	And the sad thing is it may be working.
	I mean, even just the next time they bring up the masks to you, just a word to the wise, point to Denmark, point to Finland, point to Norway, point to Sweden, all of which governments are advising against wearing the masks in public.
	But the masks, as we know, have become a political symbol.
	Joe Biden, when he was giving a speech, wore the mask dangling from his ear.
	It wasn't covering his face, so it wasn't preventing the spread of the virus.
	But he couldn't take it down because now he's telling everyone they have to wear the mask.
	We're just dangling from his ear.
	That's the political symbol.
	It's incoherent.
	Obviously, the headlines are ridiculous.
	And yet I think it might be working because, not Cuomo, Biden's numbers are actually up fairly high.
	So according to a New York Times Siena College poll that came out on Thursday, Joe Biden is opening up a wide lead in important states, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
	Biden leads those states by double digits.
	Now, do I believe the polls?
	Not really.
	I don't.
	But we can see some frustration among Trump supporters because the riots have been allowed to carry on without very much in the way of consequences, although the Attorney General says consequences are coming, which we'll get to in a little bit.
	The economy, obviously, we threw 40 million people out of work over this lockdown, which now seems to be based on completely bunk science.
	So am I worried that if the election were held today, Trump would lose all those states?
	Not necessarily.
	But I am worried in general that if the president doesn't turn something around, if the president doesn't change his messaging a little bit, if the president doesn't show hard results and a return to law and order, he's going to have trouble in November because he's going to have trouble in November because all of the media complex, everything is geared against him.
	Just on this example of the coronavirus, consider how they are covering the coronavirus.
	So Andy Cuomo, governor of New York, has handled this worse than any governor in America.
	New York got hit the worst.
	They dealt with it the worst.
	They had no idea how to keep their hospitals open.
	They had no idea.
	They had to call in the federal government for that.
	They had no idea how many ventilators they needed.
	Then they got it wrong the first time on, on, they had too few.
	Then they had too many.
	They then sent sick people into nursing homes, the most vulnerable population, killed thousands of elderly New Yorkers.
	I mean, it's just been a bungled disaster, and the fault lies at the feet of Governor Andrew Cuomo.
	But you wouldn't know that if you watch the mainstream media, because the coverage he's getting is on a television show hosted by his brother on CNN. Watch the Cuomo Lovefest.
	Take a listen.
	Everything that he ever said mattered to him about public service is what you demonstrated right here and right now during this period when your state needed it most.
	And I hear it all the time.
	Not everybody likes you.
	Not everybody likes me.
	Everybody seems like Pop now.
	That's the benefit of being out for a while, maybe gone.
	I just hope you recognize what even I'm able to recognize, being spawned from the same wolf pack.
	I hope you are able to appreciate what you did in your state and what it means for the rest of the country now and what it will always mean to those who love and care about you the most.
	I'm wowed by what you did, and more importantly, I'm wowed by how you did it.
	This was very hard.
	I know it's not over, but obviously I love you as a brother.
	Obviously I'll never be objective.
	Obviously I think you're the best politician in the country.
	But I hope you feel good about what you did for your people because I know they appreciate it.
	They don't appreciate it.
	They don't like it because what you did is kill people unnecessarily through very stupid policies.
	Just consider this.
	In the same interview, Andy Cuomo attacks the governor of Florida, Republican governor of Florida, and says that he gambled on the virus and he lost.
	New York has ten times as many coronavirus deaths as Florida.
	Ten times.
	Florida reopened early.
	New York did not.
	They've been playing this up in the press as what a great job Andy Cuomo did.
	Cuomo's response to the virus led to more deaths than the Republican response in Florida.
	That's not the way it's going to be played.
	If they can lie as brazenly as all that, consider how the rest of the election season is going to play out.
	Trump has got to get on top of this messaging.
	It tends to be his strength.
	I mean, that's why he uses Twitter, but now Twitter is censoring him, right?
	He uses Twitter to speak directly to the American people.
	Well, now big tech is going to shut that down, too.
	Everything about the deck of this election is stacked against President Trump.
	But he's got to get tougher on his messaging.
	Otherwise, how do you stand up to these corrupt institutions?
	Meanwhile, they pretend to be moderate.
	They pretend to be the reasonable people here.
	Andy Cuomo was asked on NBC News what he thought about the rioters tearing down all of these statues.
	And I kid you not, with a straight face, he said that ripping down statues, roving mobs of anarchists, is a healthy expression of political opinion.
	The Teddy Roosevelt statue, I think it was less about Teddy Roosevelt, but the other parts of that statue.
	And look, people are making a statement about equality, about community, to be against racism, against slavery.
	I think those are good statements.
	And it depends, can you overdo it?
	Of course you can.
	But in New York, I don't think we've overdone it.
	And I think it's a healthy expression of people saying, let's get some priorities here, and let's remember the sin and mistake that this nation made, and let's not celebrate it.
	A healthy expression.
	I like that he uses the phrase healthy, too, because they tell us specifically on the question of health, if you go outdoors, you're going to get coronavirus and it's going to kill you and kill everyone around you.
	But when you're gathering to tear down statues, that's healthy.
	And obviously, on the metaphorical sense, it's not healthy either as a country to just roam around and rip down your own history, to hate yourself as a nation and to destroy property.
	Nothing about that is healthy.
	But what he does is he equates tearing down statues with opposing racism and opposing slavery.
	Let me ask you something.
	How many people do you know these days who are pro-slavery?
	You know they've got bumper stickers, and one of the bumper stickers is, I support slavery.
	Bring back slavery.
	Nobody.
	Nobody is pro-slavery.
	And yet it's this rhetorical sleight of hand.
	He's saying, look, they're making this bold statement.
	This brave, courageous statement that they oppose racism and slavery.
	And so we've got to let them make that expression.
	It's the same thing we've been talking about for a long time, which is they have to set up fake villains.
	Early on, they said that all these riots, all this mayhem, it's being caused by white supremacists.
	How many white supremacists are there in America?
	Like three?
	We went through the numbers.
	Very few people have any sort of white racial consciousness at all.
	And I think the only people wearing Klan hoods anymore, well, actually, they're a Democrat governor of Virginia.
	I guess he would be one.
	We have photographic evidence of that.
	Not that it caused his reputation to be canceled at all.
	But they have to invent this imaginary enemy.
	And so that's what Cuomo does with a straight face.
	Yeah, you know, we're the brave few who oppose slavery and racism.
	The implication being, by the way, that if you oppose the tactics of these anarchists and Marxists, then you support slavery and you support racism.
	That's the way it is.
	So they'll cancel U.S. Grant, who won the war that freed the slaves.
	They'll cancel Abraham Lincoln, the president who freed the slaves.
	They'll cancel St.
	Junipero Serra.
	They'll cancel Jesus himself.
	They'll cancel all of these people.
	Now, the cancel culture is having an effect beyond this.
	There is a person that I had never heard of until yesterday who is one of the most prominent YouTubers.
	Her name is Jenna Marbles.
	And very important stuff, Jenna Marbles.
	Jenna Marbles has a YouTube channel of 20 million people.
	20 million subscribers.
	She's been around making videos now for 10 years.
	And they're just kind of funny videos.
	Well, she's quitting now.
	She's quitting the whole thing.
	Because people are digging up old videos of hers that she had deleted, where I guess she told some jokes that she now thinks are offensive.
	And they're trying to ruin her reputation 10 years after the fact, after they were deleted.
	Here is her tearful goodbye.
	And I don't want to put anything out in the world.
	It's gonna hurt anybody.
	So I need to be done with this channel for now or for forever.
	I don't know.
	So, alright.
	Good talk.
	See you guys.
	Miss Marbles is apparently such a prominent YouTuber that she actually has a statue at Madame Tussauds Museum.
	Although, certainly that statue at this point, all the statues are coming down, and especially that one of her.
	That line she says, I don't want to put anything out in the world that hurts anybody.
	This is the problem.
	What we are now being told is that if you, if a person has done anything bad ever, anything that is not perfect, that is grounds to tear down the statue.
	But consider the argument in all of these shootings.
	And all the shootings that allegedly led to the protests.
	Candace Owens got in a lot of trouble because she pointed out that the media haven't told the whole story about some of these officer-involved killings.
	And that in some cases the people who were killed had a long criminal rap sheet.
	Maybe they were committing crimes at the moment that they were killed.
	The response to that, the popular response is, how dare you bring up that person's past?
	That person's past has nothing to do with what happened in that moment.
	And we shouldn't judge a man based on the bad things that he did in his life.
	Even if they've done years and years of long, terrible things, beat their wife, abused their kids, we can't judge them for any of that.
	We should only judge them on...
	There are few best moments.
	And yet the statue argument, the cancel culture argument is, doesn't matter how much good you do in your life, if you've committed one or two bad things, that's what you should be judged by.
	The double standard is absurd and it's obviously incoherent.
	But we are long past the stage of making finely tuned arguments.
	This is about brute political force.
	This is about an ideological group clubbing everybody to On the head for their own interests.
	Whether their arguments make any sense, that isn't the point.
	This is a bare-knuckle brawl at least until November.
	And I think, unfortunately, one side of this is going to go wishy-washy and buy into the lying premises of guys like Andrew Cuomo and the anarchists and the avowed, admitted Marxists who are running BLM. And they'll say, well, I just don't want to hurt anybody.
	Please don't come after me.
	I'll quit.
	We can't quit, folks.
	We can't quit.
	This is the fight.
	We're in it now.
	And you can either stand up and fight that fight and hopefully preserve America before they tear the whole thing down.
	Preserve American solidarity before they divide us up.
	Completely.
	Or you can surrender.
	Well, that's it.
	Luckily, I sat down with a fighter yesterday, two days ago, in Washington, D.C. I was there for 24 hours, and as part of my show with Senator Cruz, Verdict, we sat down with the man, the myth, the legend, the Attorney General of the United States, William Barr.
	Take a listen to a quick part of our conversation.
	Senator, you have brought a friend.
	Thank you, Mr.
	Attorney General, for being here.
	You know, the news broke just moments ago that you will testify before the House Judiciary Committee next month.
	So we are honored that you would sit down with us first and very much appreciate it.
	I want to get right into this.
	Obviously, there's so much going on, and it occurs to me.
	We have a man who writes the laws.
	We have the man who enforces the laws.
	And we have popular calls for utter lawlessness in the country.
	How do we restore order?
	Well, it's going to take both state and local government as well as federal government.
	The federal government is best positioned to address this kind of violence and lawlessness after it occurs because we don't have FBI agents walking the beat.
	And in fact, when the real violence started around...
	May 25th, 6th, and so forth.
	We started using our Joint Terrorist Task Forces around the country.
	And there are 35 of them around the country.
	It involves all state and local in those jurisdictions and all the federal agencies.
	And it's the system we designed to follow terrorists.
	And now they are starting to go full-bore, cranking out investigations, indictments against the people who were involved in this violence.
	So we've had scores of indictments already for such things as arson, destruction of federal property, things like that.
	And we have right now about 500 investigations underway.
	So it's picking up pace, and we are committed to holding accountable the people who are engaged in this.
	But we still have to try to stop it before it happens, and that's where the burden is right now on state and local.
	And in many places, they're not stepping up to the plate.
	They're not doing their job.
	So I know it's early, but how much indications are you all seeing of coordination and planning rather than spontaneous acts of violence?
	Right.
	We are seeing strong evidence of coordination in many of these violent episodes.
	Fundamentally, what you have here is you have demonstrators.
	Some of them go there with the intent of demonstrating.
	But you have a group of provocateurs and agitators, sometimes a significant group, that try to convert those into violent activity.
	And they seem to be very well coordinated when they show up.
	A number of them are associated with the movement called Antifa, but they go by various names, but frequently anarchistic.
	They want to tear down the country.
	They're different than many traditional groups, and frequently the signs of coordination and activity are very close to the event itself, like the morning of or the day before, and things are very fast moving.
	But we definitely see signs out on the street that Of communication, of organization, of pre-planning, pre-positioning of things.
	So it's definitely organized activity.
	Well, if you're calling in the terrorism task force, that means presumably that we're dealing with terrorism here.
	I know the president came out and said just a couple of days ago that this will not be tolerated on federal land.
	You cannot destroy federal property.
	And he's authorizing the government to go and hold people accountable.
	What will this mean in terms of a change of policy or an acceleration of a policy that was already in place?
	Well, it's not a change in policy in the sense that we've always had the obligation as the federal government to protect federal facilities and federal landmarks and monuments and so forth.
	But now, because in some places the local police are not doing an adequate job, we're going to have to step up the federal effort to do that.
	And there are two aspects to it.
	Obviously, we're going to prosecute Right now, all the videos involved in the attack on President Jackson's statute are being carefully reviewed, and we will go after people.
	So if you attack a monument on federal property, you're going to get prosecuted.
	That's right.
	That's good to hear.
	And the criminal statute has serious jail time.
	Ten years.
	Ten years, yep.
	And the other thing is, we have to do a better job of trying to stop these groups before they are able to do damage to these monuments and statutes.
	It's fine to punish them afterward, but I think a lot of us would like the statues to remain up.
	We spent another probably half an hour or so with Attorney General Barr.
	He got into some real specifics on not just the riots and what's happening and how many people are being indicted, but he got into big tech, what the administration is doing to combat big tech, and what we can expect in the next few weeks.
	He got into Obamagate.
	He got into some of the politicization of the DOJ before he took office.
	And Senator Cruz gave Bill Barr a nickname.
	I won't tell you any more than that, but go check out the episode on Verdict, which is called Bill Barr is the Honey Badger.
	Also, thanks so much for getting our Michael Knowles Show YouTube channel way up there in the subscriptions.
	We are nearly going to pass 100,000.
	We will do that with your help, so thanks.
	I appreciate you checking out the Daily Wire YouTube channel, but then, you know, Ben doesn't need all those views.
	Head on over to the Michael Knowles Show YouTube channel.
	got a lot of fun bonus content and interviews and things like that.
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	For the first month, my gift to you, it is only 99 cents.
	You'll get access to our mobile app, articles, ad-free access to exclusive editorials like this one.
	Which one is this?
	This is from Christian Toto.
	Great writer.
	Great writer on Hollywood, too.
	And Toto has an article up now just for Daily Wire members.
	Fallon, Kimmel, and Stern.
	Here's the naked truth behind cancel culture.
	Gives you a real insider view into Hollywood from a conservative perspective.
	We have so many other pieces back there from a lot of different other writers.
	So head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	We'll be right back with the mailbag.
	All right.
	First question from James.
	Hi, Michael.
	I've heard a lot of people say statues coming down don't erase history.
	Read a book.
	What are your thoughts on this?
	Thanks.
	This is an excuse made by people who are trying to rewrite history.
	So it's true, as long as you're not burning books, which is going to be the next thing that they try to do, they're already rewriting historical books, and they're already kicking many books off of curricula, and already banning books from schools.
	But, let's say it were true.
	Let's say you could read the history in the book.
	That's all well and good, but very few people read books.
	Something like only 30% of Americans read a book at all last year.
	So when you say that, what you're really saying is, okay, if you have this silly little preference of wanting to know the facts about your country's history, that's fine, but don't stop us from rewriting it, because for most people, seeing statues, seeing monuments, is how we really live our history.
	It's how we acknowledge our history as a country.
	Think about it in, say, the Middle Ages, when many people could not read, and when books were so expensive that many people did not have access to the Bible.
	The way that you would...
	See the faith and understand the faith would be through statues and icons, iconography, stained glass windows, works of art.
	That's how you could experience it and see it and take it in, even if you couldn't read a single word.
	It's the same way that we understand ourselves as a country.
	When we knock those things down, then we knock down the history itself.
	We knock down what is important.
	Regardless of your modern feelings of being offended by looking at a Confederate statue, the Civil War is a very important part of our history.
	There is a lot for us to learn.
	It's a lot for us to learn how we got into the Civil War and how we got out of the Civil War and what the people who won the Civil War told us we should think about it, suggested that we think about it.
	And when you tear down those statues, you lose all of that sort of thing.
	What it's really about is an antipathy for the past because the past constrains radicals who want to rewrite the future.
	And of course, they've put us in a ridiculous position because they've said, why don't you want us to smash statues?
	Say, that's not the question.
	I think the burden of argument is on you, the people who want to smash the statues.
	Smashing statues is not a normal thing to do.
	It doesn't go in the normal course of daily events.
	It's a radical change.
	If you want to effect it, then you've got to explain why you want to do it.
	But they won't tell you why, and the real reason is because they have a radical vision for the future of the country, and they can't effect it if they are constrained by the past.
	From Andrew.
	Have you or your fellow Daily Wire hosts or contributors at all joined or considered joining Parler?
	Parler.
	I think it would be nice if you and your hosts did join in order to bring a larger audience to the platform and challenge the likes of Twitter.
	Why not?
	Give it a shot.
	Thanks.
	You know, I actually did join Parler yesterday.
	I joined it because, first of all, they're going to kick us all off of Twitter soon enough, and they're currently censoring the duly elected president of the United States on Twitter.
	So I started a Parler.
	The trouble is, because it's new and it's just getting started, I realized there was a fake account pretending to be me.
	It wasn't like a parody account.
	It was actually a guy just pretending to be me.
	So I think Parler's getting rid of him.
	But if you're on Parler and you want to start following me, I'm just at Michael J. Knowles.
	J is important there.
	That's in the real one.
	And I'll probably post a few things on over there, but...
	This doesn't solve the problem of big tech censorship because the issue with big tech, and we spoke about this with A.G. Barr, is they have cornered the market.
	They are the public square.
	And they did it on a false pretense.
	Two false pretenses.
	One, they pretended to be a neutral platform rather than a publisher that curates content.
	And so that got a lot of buy-in from people.
	And two, they said that this would be an open forum.
	For all sorts of ideas.
	And then, those are distinct concepts, but they are related concepts.
	And then when they got a critical mass of people, when they became the public square, then they changed the rules.
	But it was too late.
	The whole point of social media, the whole reason you would go and use a certain social media platform, is because everybody is there.
	So once everybody's there, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to get them to move to another platform.
	You know, sometimes people say, oh, Michael, if you think that big tech has a monopoly, that they've cornered the market, don't forget about MySpace.
	Remember when everyone said that about MySpace?
	MySpace never cornered the market.
	They never had the kind of critical mass that Facebook and Google and Twitter have.
	They didn't.
	They had like funny little gifs and it was mostly used by teenagers and kids, right?
	Your mom was probably not on MySpace.
	Your grandma was probably not on MySpace.
	And yet your mother or grandmother very likely are on Facebook and possibly even on Twitter.
	They've cornered that market.
	So we do need to use the legal remedies available to us to stop them from abusing their power and violating the law, which is what they are.
	Parler might be a good use, a nice stop gap in the meantime, but it doesn't excuse us from going after big tech.
	From Daniel.
	Why hasn't Trump sold red MAGA masks yet?
	That's the best way to get Democrats to give up the charade.
	There'd be a national announcement saying that masks are useless and only racists and white supremacists wear them.
	Checkmate.
	Not a terrible idea, except it does cut against some of the argument here, because the mask itself has become a political symbol, and it's a political symbol for the left.
	I'm not saying masks are not ever useful.
	I mean, I don't think they're useful in the way that the left tells us they're useful right now, which is what the left says is the whole point of the mask is to stop other people from being infected.
	But their argument before was that it stopped you from being infected, and their argument before that was that masks are totally useless.
	So they keep changing their story.
	But I'm not saying they don't have any uses.
	there's a reason why surgeons wear masks.
	The question is, are they useful now in stopping the spread of the virus?
	Well, we showed you those, those facts out of Scandinavia that show that they don't really seem to matter very much there.
	They don't seem to matter very much here either.
	They are merely a way to signal your virtue.
	It's why Joe Biden wore one dangling from his ear.
	He didn't care if it would affect his breathing.
	He just, he just wanted to show everybody that he's on the right team because he's wearing the right symbol.
	So even if you put a MAGA symbol on it, very likely that would still cut against your argument.
	Now, some people who are especially vulnerable to the virus or who are germaphobes or something like that, you can understand why they would wear the mask regardless of their political views, but the left has undeniably turned it into a political symbol, and so Trump probably can't sell them.
	From Xavier...
	Hi, Michael.
	Big fan of your show.
	I'm listening from Europe here and Belgium.
	Oh, my grandparents lived in Belgium for a while.
	Maybe they...
	I've never been, but maybe I'll come visit now that I know we have one Belgian listener.
	I see that you commented that the French Revolution was the worst thing that happened.
	Well, that's not quite true.
	I said it was one of the worst events in the history of the world.
	It was a bad thing.
	It's definitely up there.
	Could you explain to me a bit why?
	I vaguely remember my history class about this period and Louis XVI and other bourgeois...
	I think I understood.
	It's funny, as I read that, I could hear it in an accent.
	But thank you, Xavier, for the question.
	The French Revolution is now taught in schools as a good event.
	It's the beginning of the modern world.
	And yet, it was one of the worst events in the history of the world.
	The way it's presented in school is that it overcame an oppressive past and gave people freedom.
	Freedom and equality and fraternity.
	And that's not really what happened.
	Consider this.
	At least over three times as many people were killed in one year of the terror of the French Revolution as were killed in the entire 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition.
	At least three.
	That might have been as much as five times or even a little bit more than five times as many people were killed.
	The French Revolution is the guillotine.
	The French Revolution took everything that came before it and ripped it apart, said all of the inherited wisdom of the world is trash.
	They took down a statue of Our Lady in Notre Dame, put up the goddess of reason.
	They created a religion of reason, of secularism.
	They rewrote all the neighborhoods in Paris.
	And made them finely tuned rationalist experiments.
	They redid the entire calendar.
	They thought that they could create the world from scratch on the promise of a rational utopia because it would be so much better than what came before it.
	And what did that lead to?
	The guillotine.
	It led to a far worse, far crueler society, perhaps the worst social experiment ever in history, and a precursor to all of the evils that we would see later in modernity, national socialism, fascism, and communism.
	Finally, though, a little bit of the old tradition crept back through again.
	Turned out people weren't quite as smart and rational as they all thought that they were and that there was something to learn from the inherited tradition.
	There's much more to be said about the French Revolution, but we do have to move on.
	That's just a beginning, at least.
	From...
	Matt, austere religious podcaster and lord of Covfefe, I've heard you and Klavan refer to the American Revolution as a conservative revolution.
	That's a funny position of that question.
	Can you elaborate on what that means?
	How can a revolution be conservative?
	Also, I've heard you say that as American conservatives, we're defending a liberal tradition.
	Sort of.
	What does that mean and how can the concept of a conservative revolution be reconciled with defending a liberal tradition?
	Thanks.
	We're using these words kind of broadly, conservative and liberal, but the big difference here between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is the French Revolution sought to destroy everything that came before it and overturn society entirely.
	The American Revolution did not.
	The American Revolution maintained most aspects of the society that it had left and it maintained its Anglo tradition and that's why we have such a special relationship with the United Kingdom even still today.
	That was not the case when the revolutionaries in France overturned the old regime.
	In America, they kept their way of life, they kept their institutions, most of them, they kept their families, they kept their religion, they kept most of their political ideas and their system of law and government.
	In France, they did not.
	They overturned all of those things in France.
	And so the American Revolution is far more conservative.
	You could call it a conservative revolution.
	That's why Edmund Burke defended the American Revolution and opposed the French Revolution in his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was the beginning in many ways of modern conservative political philosophy.
	Now, in America, we do have this...
	liberal tradition in the sense that some of the prominent liberal thinkers impacted the way that we thought about our government.
	Now, I think the effect of those liberal thinkers has been overstated.
	So, for instance, we're told that John Locke basically created the American regime.
	I'm not totally convinced of that, but it does put American conservatives in kind of a weird position in that in some ways some of the tradition that we're defending is somewhat liberal.
	But the way I think about it There was a writer, I think it might have been Patrick Deneen, who described this problem.
	And the problem is that we have this high-flying Lockean liberal language in documents like the Declaration of Independence, and yet we had a very conservative society.
	And I think it was Deneen, but it was one of these conservative writers who's writing today, described that as saying that Americans in the revolutionary era talked like Lockeans.
	They talked like liberal revolutionaries.
	But they lived like Burkeans.
	They lived like conservatives.
	They didn't always preach what they actually practiced.
	And Alexei de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America, coming from France, observing the American Revolution and how that led to our society in the 19th century, he described this.
	He said they have their civic associations, they have their traditions, they have their family, they have their religion.
	Things that ultimately liberalism would come to oppose The Americans still maintained.
	And you can see the breakdown of American society.
	The more we've come to embody those rationalist, ideological, liberal ideas, and the less that we've come to live our own conservative institutions.
	Probably the only way we're going to be able to get that back is if we can rebuild those institutions and turn down the ideology.
	That's the battle we've got right now in Chaz and Chop and all the way to November.
	Will we stand up or will we surrender?
	I sure hope it's the former.
	I guess we're going to have something to say about which one it is, and then we can wait and see.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	See you Monday.
	And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
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	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.
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	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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