Ilhan Omar calls for dismantling the American economy and political systems, Desean Jackson endorses and then disavows Hitler, and liberal squishes can’t pick a side.
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Freshman Representative Ilhan Omar has admitted that the recent protests and riots and rebellion and revolution, it's not just about police brutality.
It's not just about reforming the criminal justice system.
Actually, what it is about, in her own words, gotta give her points for honesty, is overturning, dismantling the entire system.
As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality.
So we cannot stop at criminal justice system.
We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.
So she wants to dismantle the entire system of oppression wherever we find it.
That's what gives her the out to pretend she's just talking about some narrow thing.
But she's already said she's talking about the U.S. economy and political systems.
It's not just some little tweak here, some little problem with the system.
She wants to overturn the whole damn thing.
And believe it or not, that's not even the most radical thing one of these lefties said yesterday.
We'll get into all of it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
There's a big fight here over which system to dismantle.
Someone is going to dismantle some system.
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At least Ilhan Omar is honest.
You've got to give her points for honesty.
I bet there are a lot of Democrats right now in the House and who are running for office who are not admitting that their real goal is to dismantle the entire system.
And yet that has been the goal of left-wingers, at least on the hard left, since at least the 1960s, maybe even earlier than that.
The issue here is not even that conservatives should be so shocked and outraged that Ilhan Omar wants to dismantle our system.
We already know she wants to do that.
We already know the left has embraced Black Lives Matter, which is an openly, avowedly Marxist institution that doesn't just want to destroy the police station or the fire department.
They want to destroy the, quote, Western prescribed nuclear family.
So we shouldn't be surprised.
The reality that we've got to face is that one of two systems will be dismantled.
Okay, and part of the reason that this is getting so heated up right now is because of Trump.
Because Trump is actually presenting a threat to the system.
The one system that could be dismantled, if Ilhan Omar has her way, is the American national system.
Our system, not just of criminal justice, but our economy.
They're trying to totally upend that with legislation like the Green New Deal, for instance, $93 trillion, creates jobs guarantee programs, creates massive redistribution of wealth, creates reparations for slavery, totally upends the system.
But also a cultural revolution, too, which dismantles all of our heroes, all of our traditions, tears down statues even of our founding fathers.
That system could be dismantled or...
The globalized liberal world order system could be dismantled, right?
You call it whatever, globalism, globalization, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it.
That's what Trump is threatening.
He ran on that.
He said, we've got to end globalism.
Those two systems are on a collision course.
And so now it's getting hotter and hotter.
People want to tear those down.
Trump's been very honest about wanting to tear down globalization.
And Ilhan Omar is being honest about wanting to tear down the American national system.
And the left is lining up basically behind Omar.
They might talk a little softer than her, but that's who they're backing.
And the right had better line up behind Donald Trump.
We should be honest about that when we talk about justice, when we talk about compromise, when we talk about cancel culture, okay, because we are not on an even playing field here.
I'll give you an example.
Ilhan Omar, an elected U.S. representative, has said she wants to dismantle the system.
I don't know why we still allow her in Congress.
I don't know why we still allow her in the United States.
It's an outrageous statement to make, and we should kick her out.
If you don't like this country and you want to completely overturn it, then get out.
We don't want you here.
Go away.
We want you if you like America and you want to help build America up.
If you want to tear America down, go away.
Bye-bye.
See ya.
But her comment was not even the craziest comment made yesterday on the internet.
That comment, I guess it was made a couple days ago, comes from the football player Deshaun Jackson.
Who quoted Hitler.
He didn't really quote Hitler because it was a fake Hitler quote, which is even worse, I think, than a real Hitler quote because it's like a dishonest Hitler quote.
But what he said, Hitler said, is because the white Jews knows that the Negroes are the real children of Israel and to keep America's secret, the Jews will blackmail America.
Now, this idea that This fake Hitler quote is espousing, that Deshaun Jackson is espousing, is one that has become popular in certain black nationalist circles, which is this idea that black people are the real Jews and the Jews are the fake Jews.
And it's a sort of odd theory.
I've spoken to people who preach about this sort of thing on the street, and it's always an entertaining time, but not very convincing.
An incendiary quote for a public figure to make.
Finally, he got enough, a little bit of pressure, that he apologized.
Even his apology, kind of weak sauce.
I just want to, you know, first off, extend an apology on the behalf of me and what I stand for because, you know, I'm one that's fair and I never want to put any race down or any people down.
And, you know, my post was definitely not intended for any Anybody of any race to feel any type of way, especially the Jewish community.
When I posted what I posted, I definitely didn't mean it to the extent that you guys take it.
And I just want to let you guys know that I'm, you know, very apologetic.
And I just want you guys to understand that it never was intended to be, you know, to put any race down or any religion down, you know.
I post things on my story all the time and, you know, I just probably should have never posted anything that Hitler did because Hitler was a bad person and I know that.
And, you know, I was just trying to uplift, you know, African-Americans and slavery and, you know, just enlighten our people.
So he did say one true thing in the apology, which is that Hitler was a bad person.
That's so big of you to concede that, Deshaun, that Hitler was a bad person.
But of course nothing else he said makes any sense.
What do you mean?
You posted a quote that you thought was from Hitler talking about how the evil white Jews are blackmailing America and they're not even the real Jews.
But you didn't mean that to be offensive toward any group of people or put down any race of people, right?
I mean, that's hard to believe that.
And then, even when he says, I didn't mean it in the way that you're taking it.
Well, it's like our fault.
It's the people's fault that we objected to this guy posting a Hitler quote.
And then he posts this video apology, which doesn't make any sense, and he'll get away with it.
It won't matter at all.
He will face absolutely no consequences.
Do you remember when the Oklahoma State football coach, just a few weeks ago, had the audacity to...
Be seen in a photograph wearing an OAN shirt.
A shirt of his favorite cable news station.
And he almost lost his job for that.
And the Oklahoma State football team almost fell apart because of that.
Because that was so outrageous and politically incorrect to watch a cable news channel.
That's how he was treated.
It was an international incident practically.
And yet, Deshaun Jackson...
Talking about how much he admires Hitler with a fake Hitler quote.
There will be no problem.
He'll be fine.
He'll face no consequences.
There's a double standard here.
Okay?
The double standard is...
Political.
Now, the political question here is a racial one, because the Democrats obviously exploit race all the time, so it ties in with that as well.
But it is ideological.
Don't forget, Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization that uses race.
But primarily what they're talking about is not even racial issues.
Primarily what they're talking about is old-school ideological Marxism, and Terry Crews actually called this out, and the left doesn't want to cover it.
We'll get to that in one second, and we'll get to the The double standard.
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lifelock.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. Deshaun Jackson quotes fake Hitler.
About how terrible the Jews are.
It's all good.
The Oklahoma State football coach wears his cable news shirt.
Very, very bad.
Terrible.
Almost loses his job.
Another example of this.
In Contra Costa County, California, the city government permitted a giant Black Lives Matter mural to be painted on the sidewalk.
I'm not saying that the government doesn't have the right to do this.
I'm not saying that Ilhan Omar doesn't have the right to go out and say she hates America and she wants to dismantle the entire system.
Specifically the political and economic systems of America.
I'm not saying they don't have the right to do that.
But they shouldn't do that.
And we should not tolerate that.
Because Black Lives Matter is Marxism.
And we should not permit Marxism to take any sort of hold in our society.
But the government does that.
And so a couple citizens decided to take this into their own hands.
Nicole Anderson and David Nelson.
And they went out and they just painted over the Black Lives Matter sign.
If someone came out onto my sidewalk and painted, Marxism is really good, yay communism, I would be very tempted to paint over that sign as well.
And that is exactly what is conveyed by the phrase Black Lives Matter, which, as we've talked about, almost ad nauseum, does not mean Black Lives Matter.
So they go do this.
Maybe they shouldn't have done it.
You know, the city government has the right to commission a mural, even if it's a politically insane mural.
And what do you think happened to them?
They are now being charged with three misdemeanors, including a violation of civil rights.
Now, you might say, okay, they should get some charge for defacing a government thing, or they should get a charge for defacing a mural.
Violating civil rights because you won't let a Marxist slogan be written on your city streets?
Deshaun Jackson gets to go out and quote fake Hitler, no problem, because that is absolutely fine according to the dictates of the left.
Because of who he is and the type of candidates that he supports and the type of ideology he supports, he gets away even with quoting Hitler.
No violation of civil rights there.
But if you go out and paint over that mural, you are charged with that.
This raises questions about cancel culture.
Yesterday when I came out and I said that Ilhan Omar has no place in Congress and frankly no place in America if she wants to overturn our entire system.
A lot of people came to me and said, Michael, this is an example of cancel culture.
You're just a cancel culturer, a canceller on the conservative side.
How do I put this bluntly?
It is not cancel culture to cancel people who cancel culture.
I understand that sounds kind of confusing.
There's this Chesterton phrase.
There's a thought that stops thought, and it's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
It's part of the reason why I think it's a good idea to have an amendment to permit laws against desecrating the American flag.
Because there is a thought that stops thought.
When you use the First Amendment to burn the symbol of the country that gives you the First Amendment, to burn the symbol of the country that gives you the First Amendment, that is incoherent.
You are symbolically threatening the very rights that you are invoking.
The same thing here with Ilhan Omar in Congress.
I'm sure she got elected democratically.
I'm sure that she has the right to make her abhorrent and disgusting speech.
But it doesn't mean we should tolerate that.
Okay?
Politics has to have form and substance.
So there's the form.
Yes, we have the right to say things.
But then there's the substance.
You ought to say good things.
You ought to say correct things.
And when you say things that are abhorrent, we have the right to object to those things.
That is not what cancel culture is.
It's a subtle distinction, but that's not what cancel culture is.
It's not cancel culture to object to things that people sincerely say and do.
That is just called culture and politics, okay?
And conservatives for too long have been neutral about many things.
We've only talked about the form, not the substance, because we're so cowardly.
You know, the left doesn't play by those rules, but the right does.
I think back to Dante.
Dante puts the people who remain neutral in the war in heaven, he puts them in hell.
They weren't rebels in heaven.
They weren't fighting on the side of the angels, but they were neutral.
Where do they go?
They go to hell.
What cancel culture is, is more specific.
Cancel culture is when you twist what someone says beyond recognition.
So you take what someone says and you disingenuously, you cynically pervert what they've said to sound like something that they did not mean and that people would not have heard in an ordinary time and you use that to try to ruin their career.
Cancel culture is not accepting a sincere apology.
All of us make mistakes, all of us are sinners and we fall short of the glory of God.
So if you make a mistake and you sincerely apologize and you change your behavior, but someone still doesn't accept that apology, That would be cancel culture.
Cancel culture is digging up years old, sometimes decades old jokes, just because you don't like some guy.
Kevin Hart is going to host the Oscars, and then you dig up some joke from 15 years ago that no one even remembers in a totally different context, in a totally different comedy culture, and you just use that to snipe him because you don't like the guy.
That's cancel culture.
Smashing statues because you get on your high horse and you feel so sanctimonious and so much better than all of your ancestors.
Judging them totally outside the context of their own times.
That would be cancel culture.
And most importantly, and I think this is the key here, letting some people off the hook for the same offense that you would cancel someone else for if they have the right political views or the right skin color or the right sex.
That is cancel culture.
Cancel culture is a strictly left-wing phenomenon because only the left has the institutional power to cancel people.
It's funny.
This is sort of like a version of the left's racism argument.
The left says only white people can be racist because only white people have the power because there's white supremacy.
Well, that's obviously not true.
I think we've seen a lot of that this week.
There's no such thing as white supremacy.
There's no such thing as white privilege or institutional whatever.
In the way that they're talking about it.
However, the left does control the major institutions of America, the mainstream media, Hollywood, big tech, higher education, lower education, administrative government.
They control all of it, okay?
And so cancel culture is a left-wing phenomenon because only the left really has the power to cancel.
I'll show you this example.
Take a listen to this.
This was on CNN. Terry Crews has become very unpopular on the left because he's a black guy who is opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement because he sees it for what it is.
His problems with the Black Lives Matter movement are not that black people shouldn't be treated well.
His problems are that it is radical, Marxist, leftist.
So he's invited on Don Lemon's show on CNN to talk about this.
Don Lemon will barely let this guy get a word out.
The Black Lives Matter movement was started because it was talking about police brutality.
If you want an all-Black Lives Matter movement that talks about gun violence in communities, including, you know, black communities, then start that movement with that name.
But that's not what Black Lives Matter is about.
It's not an all-encompassing.
So if you're talking about...
If someone started a movement that said...
Cancer matters.
And then someone comes in and says, why aren't you talking about HIV? It's not the same thing.
We're talking about cancer.
That's not a very good analogy.
I don't know if you caught that.
What Don Lemon is saying is that Black Lives Matter refers explicitly to police brutality.
You know that totally widespread systemic scourge that's totally real.
Not...
Not overhyped by people in the media like Don Lemon.
He says it refers to police brutality, not other killings of black people.
So you can't talk about how very, very few unarmed black men per year are killed by police and many, many more black people are killed by criminals in their own neighborhoods.
And BLM's mum on that.
You can't say that because we're only talking about police brutality.
It would be as if...
You had Cancer Matters and then you started talking about some other disease.
But the thing is, Black Lives Matter claims to talk about black lives.
It's not called Police Brutality Matters.
It's not called Reform the Cops.
It's called Black Lives Matter.
So it's completely legitimate to say, wait, you only care about this very small number of black lives, but you don't care about the vast majority of black lives that are lost to crime in their own neighborhoods.
Don Lemon, I don't think he's so thick-headed as to not understand that.
So I don't actually want to give him the benefit of the doubt because that will make him seem dumber than I think he is.
And the rest of his interview, I think, shows how cynical the guy is being.
Because finally, he runs his mouth, he runs his mouth, he runs his mouth.
Terry Crews finally starts to get a word in that smacks down Don Lemon's point.
What does Don Lemon do?
He jumps right back in and shuts him up.
So the Black Lives Matter movement is about police brutality and injustice in that manner, not about what's happening in black neighborhoods.
There are people who are working on that issue, and if you want to start that issue, why don't you start it?
Do you understand what I'm saying?
But when you look at the organization, police brutality is not the only thing they're talking about.
I know that.
I agree, but that's not what the Black Lives Matter movement is about, Terry.
Black Lives Matter is about police brutality and about criminal justice.
It's not about what happens in communities when it comes to crime, black-on-black crime.
People who live near each other, black people, kill each other.
Same as whites.
Eighty-some percent of white people are killed by white people.
Because of proximity.
It's the same thing with black people.
It happens in every single neighborhood.
But that doesn't, again, I'm not saying that's not important that those kids die, but it's a different movement.
Wow, that is one cynical liar right there, isn't it?
You see, he starts out that segment, well, first of all, he starts out with a nonsense, which is he says, look, there are already people working on crime in black neighborhoods.
So if you want to do that, start that.
Well, why would you start it if people are already working on it?
Because no one's actually working on it.
But beyond that, Terry Crews comes out and says, I'm talking about the organization which talks about things that are very different from police brutality, like dismantling the nuclear family, like upending our social order.
And as he's saying that...
Don Lemon says, I know that, Terry, but that's not what police brutality, that's not what Black Lives Matter is about.
Beep, boop, beep, boop.
He actually says, I know that the organization is not about police brutality, but the organization is about police brutality.
He immediately contradicts himself, and then he just filibusters.
Then he just says words to talk over Terry Crews, because heaven forfend, Terry Crews gets the truth out about this radical organization.
They won't let it happen.
In a way, that's sort of like a mild version of cancel culture because he invites the guy on the show and then he won't let him get a single word in.
The most egregious example of this kind of...
Institutional acceptance of lies permeating the whole system came from a headline in The Hill last week, which I will get to in one second.
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This headline will show you the kind of dishonesty we're dealing with, if Don Lemon didn't do it already.
Headline.
Phoenix protesters demand body cam footage after police kill man in parked car.
It's another one of these examples of police brutality.
Cops come up.
I'm sure the man was black, because that's what would make it newsworthy, right?
Police come up.
There's a man in the car.
And they probably woke him up and they just started shooting, right?
Is that what happened?
Not quite.
So you've got to skip one, two, three, four, five, six, seven paragraphs.
Don't tell you anything about what actually happened.
They bury the lead by the eighth paragraph, we say.
The Phoenix Police Department said in a statement Sunday that an officer-involved shooting occurred after a 911 caller said that a man who tried to kill him last week had returned with a knife and was threatening to harm him.
The department said that the caller pointed out the alleged suspect's location after they arrived on the scene.
Officers requested additional backup before locating a man sitting in a parked car in the driveway of a house, the department said.
Officers are said to have told the man that they were investigating an aggravated assault.
As the conversation continued, officers instructed the man to get out of the vehicle.
At this point, he refused, instead rolling up his window and armed himself with a handgun.
And then the man began to lift his weapon.
Then, one officer broke a passenger window to attempt to distract the man after seeing him point his weapon at a fellow officer.
As that happened, two other officers fired into the vehicle, the department said.
And the man was pronounced dead.
We actually don't have any info on who this man was or what happened before.
But this, you've got to wait eight paragraphs to find out that this guy had already tried to kill somebody, was armed with a gun, pointed the gun at the cops.
Absolute dishonesty.
Meanwhile, it's not just the media.
The city of Seattle is now hosting a conference for its city employees on how to undo whiteness.
That's the system that they're trying to undo in Seattle.
Undo whiteness.
Could you imagine if there were a conference called Undoing Blackness?
Probably wouldn't go over very well, but undoing whiteness.
City of Seattle had this training session for white employees aimed at teaching them how to, quote, practice self-talk that, quote, affirms their complicity in racism and about undoing their own whiteness.
There are lots of overlapping systems here, okay?
The left uses all of our institutions to push their system.
And then every so often you get some weirdo candidate like Donald Trump.
Or, I don't know, I mean Trump is kind of the unique candidate, at least in presidential politics of late.
And he poses a threat to that system.
We can't have it all.
We can't have a system in America where you punish people for criticizing Black Lives Matter by destroying their lives, but you don't punish people at all who post Hitler quotes to the internet and talk about how terrible the Jews are.
We can't have a system where you punish people for wearing OAN cable news t-shirts, but you don't punish people for racial bigotry in the other direction.
We can't have a system where a city government tries to get you to undo your own whiteness, shames you for the color of your skin, but only if you've got a certain skin, not if you've got another kind of color skin, and at the same time have a system of color blindness and moving past race and having racial harmony.
You can't have them both.
You've got to pick.
Do you want racial harmony and assimilation, or do you want a...
Racially bigoted country where you have to undo your whiteness.
You've got to pick.
Do you want a system of globalization and neoliberalism where we have essentially a one-world government system that comes out of a one-world economic system?
Or do you want a system of nation-states?
Do you want the UN and the IMF and the EU and the WHO to control the world?
Or do you want your own elected officials to control the world?
Those are the choices.
The reason that this is getting so ginned up right now, four months before a presidential election, is those are actually the stakes.
These little incidents here, the little Black Lives Matter protest or riot or whatever, the little Antifa thing, these little incidents are indicative of a huge fight over which system we're going to have.
We got some good news on part of that system with President Trump's announcement on the World Health Organization.
But that's going to be the debate.
That debate is only going to get hotter, and you've got to pick a side.
There's a group of, call them, I guess, liberals to classical liberals to slight progressives.
They're trying to stand in the middle.
They're trying to be neutral.
Well, if you stand in the middle of the road, you are going to get hit by a truck.
We'll get to all of that in one second.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Little bit of a win on this system fight between neoliberalism, globalism and the nation state.
The United States is withdrawing from the World Health Organization.
The World Health Organization is a prop.
It is a puppet of the Chinese government, which hand-selected their own puppet leader of the WHO. The WHO is the reason that the coronavirus epidemic spread so broadly.
They covered up for China.
China covered up the epidemic.
They've continued to lie about it.
Democrats are very upset about this.
Eric Swalwell, who is me and is you and we are all Eric Swalwell, the erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate, he tweeted out at this news.
He said, my car just broke down.
I'm calling and canceling my AAA membership.
That's his analogy for the WHO. But I don't know.
These Democrats are not making very good analogies these days.
Him, Don Lemon.
Because the only way Eric Swalwell's analogy makes sense is if AAA conspired with the man who broke your car and then covered up for the man who broke your car for three months straight and continues to work with the man who broke your car right now.
In that case, if that's what AAA is doing, I would cancel your AAA membership.
I would get some other organization to help you, or I would help yourself.
That's good news.
The left is very upset about this.
They push back.
Even this battle over the coronavirus and the lockdowns is ultimately a battle over these systems.
Who is going to govern you?
What system are you going to live under?
This fight over the system has really irritated Tom Hanks.
Tom Hanks is very angry with you.
You know Tom Hanks, the Hollywood actor.
He is very upset that you are not doing exactly what he tells you to do and what the WHO tells you to do by wearing the mask.
And he's not afraid to tell you what he thinks.
I don't get it.
I simply do not get it.
It is literally the least you can do.
And if anybody wants to build up an argument about doing the least they can do, I wouldn't trust them with a driver's license.
I mean, when you drive a car, you got to obey speed limits.
You got to use your turn signal.
You got to avoid hitting pedestrians.
If you can't do those three things, then I get it.
You shouldn't be driving a car.
If you can't wear a mask and wash your hands in social distance, I don't understand.
I got no respect for you, man.
I don't buy your argument.
Finally.
Finally, a Hollywood celebrity is mouthing off on a political issue about which he knows absolutely nothing.
It's about time, frankly.
I've just been waiting for this my whole life.
And now, I've got to tell you, I'm a little upset because it means Tom Hanks has no respect for us.
I put so much of my self-esteem in the respect that Tom Hanks has for me.
But this is it.
Why are they so focused on the masks?
Where are the damn masks?
That's what they keep saying.
And they tell you it's just about science.
Very little evidence that the masks do much at all.
You can read some of it on the CDC website.
This is the reason that the surgeon general came out early and said, don't wear the masks.
It's the reason Eric Swalwell came out early.
Eric freaking Swalwell came out and said, don't wear the masks.
Don't buy the masks.
Because they just don't, especially the masks that we're using, these cloth masks or bandanas, there's very little evidence that they're having much effect.
It is a psychological tool to convince people that we're doing something and we're helping out and we're really in it together.
And it's a political symbol.
To show that you're willing to do what the left tells you to do and you're on the right side of this social question.
Even something as apparently trivial as wearing a mask is intended to tip this political battle that we're having one way or the other.
And there is no way to look at the current debate over the lockdown as anything but political.
Ever since the so-called health experts came out and said that if you protest for conservative causes, you're killing people with the virus, and if you protest for leftist causes, you're actually stopping the spread of the virus, which they actually said a few weeks ago.
Ever since then, the public health establishment has no credibility.
And so we need to have an authentic politics and actually have these debates ourselves.
The minute you get a little close to that debate, what happens?
They shut you up.
They change the subject.
Don Lemon jumps in, doesn't let you get that kind of news out.
The other bit of absolutely stupid, irrelevant news that they're distracting with right now?
But it does tell you something about their system.
Is this new book by Mary Trump.
Mary Trump is some niece of Donald Trump, I guess.
And she's publishing a tell-all book about how Donald is awful and she hates her uncle.
By the way, a note to any of my nieces or nephews watching right now.
If you ever...
Think about doing this to me.
You better lawyer up, kids.
Because I ain't going to tolerate...
Trump's been very nice to his niece, Mary Trump.
But she publishes this absolutely awful book.
I don't even know if these two know each other that well.
Can you imagine how many nieces and nephews and cousins Donald Trump has?
So she cashes in.
She wants to make money on this book.
And one of the big accusations in it is that Donald Trump...
Are you ready for it?
He cheated on his SATs.
Did he do that?
I don't know.
I don't see any reason to believe that.
I don't see any reason to believe anything that I read in the news anymore because they lie to me or in these tell-all books from people who hate Donald Trump.
But even if he did, let's say that 40, no, 50 years ago now, Donald Trump paid some guy to take his SATs for him, which apparently all of the wealthy liberals have been doing for years now.
You remember that scandal a few years ago?
But even if he did that, does anybody care about that?
Does that change any single person's mind about who Donald Trump is or why they're voting for him?
No.
It's actually almost charming.
It's sort of pitiful that the left believes they still have such faith in their institutions, the SAT, the credentialing institution of the college board, to get into the credentialing institutions of the American universities, which now don't really offer education.
We talked yesterday about how Harvard's charging the same price for correspondence courses because it's not about the education.
It's about the credential.
It's about the system.
It's about the network.
They think that really matters still.
They don't realize how far past that we are.
They don't realize that even the modern, liberal, politicized university itself is part of the debate that we're having right now about dismantling the systems.
I think a lot of conservatives wouldn't mind dismantling the current university system, which is a grotesque, hollowed-out farce of what a proper university is.
That's up for debate right now.
We can believe very little on face value.
We can take very little on face value.
I'll give you an example.
There's this Oregon politician Jonathan Lopez who has been talking about how he's the victim of a hate crime, of hate threats because of his race.
I take it by the name Lopez that he's Hispanic.
So he apparently received this letter that said, don't waste your time trying to become anything in this county.
We will make sure you never win and your family suffers along with all the other effing Mexicans in the area.
Sincerely, America.
Now, I think most conservatives, if they saw that, they would say, yeah, that's a fake letter.
Just like how most conservatives, when they heard there was a noose in the NASCAR race, they said, no, there isn't.
Well, turns out, surprise, surprise, It was fake.
It was a fake letter.
Meanwhile, Lopez responded to it.
He goes, I hold no resentment for whomever wrote this.
Yeah, probably not because it was you who wrote it, Buster.
I'm just simply heartbroken for the lack of knowledge, education, and respect missing.
I pray for you and wish you prosperity in your life.
God bless us all.
Yeah, he wrote it.
Cops figured it out.
Lopez finally admitted to it.
Of course it was fake.
Only leftists think that people say this kind of stuff.
Or that, you know, I suppose any people have wickedness lurking in all of our hearts, but that on any large scale this kind of thing happens.
It doesn't.
The left thinks that.
This is why the nooses are almost always fake.
The nooses as the hate crimes is because only the left views the noose as this universally racist symbol.
Most people look at nooses and they think of suicide, or they think of the Wild West, or they think of a symbol of death that goes back to the Bible and Homer, that goes back through all of our civilization.
Only the left, which is living in this very particular racial fantasy land, views the noose as this racial symbol.
And so when it comes up as a racial incident, we all know that 9 times out of 10, 99 times out of 100, that's going to be fake.
And usually it is.
This is where the left is pushing us.
They want us to live in this system that they have created.
Conservatives don't.
We want to tear down that system and return to proper institutions that are not based on fantasies.
Then there are The liberals.
The squishes.
The classical liberals.
Even the moderate progressives.
They're the people in the middle who think that there is a middle ground between all of this.
And they published a letter in Harper's Magazine just yesterday.
a letter on justice and open debate.
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial.
Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform.
Yada, yada, yada.
The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump who represents a real threat to democracy.
The free exchange of The lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We all need to have free thought and free ideas and we all need to be liberals in the best sense of that word.
And it's signed by lots and lots of people.
I think about 150 people signed to this.
Some well-known leftists like Noam Chomsky and many other people.
150 liberals signed it.
Now...
The hard left is trying to cancel people for signing that letter.
It's not the conservatives trying to cancel them.
It's the hard left trying to get people fired for signing even that milquetoast letter.
Already two people who signed it have backed out.
So much for standing up for free exchange of ideas.
So much for defending our liberal institutions.
Already two people have backed out.
Carrie Greenidge, who's an historian, she said, I do not endorse this letter.
I'm in contact with Harper's Better Retraction.
And the author and transgender activist, Jennifer Finney Boyle, who says, I did not know who else had signed that letter.
I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague message against internet shaming.
I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.
The consequences are mine to bear, I'm sorry.
So she's saying, yeah, I agree with everything in the letter, but I don't want to be associated with some of the people who are slightly...
Like, slightly to the right, almost center-right.
This shows you the, there is no middle ground.
And I know there are a lot of conservatives who say, I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal.
I just want to return to the free exchange of ideas.
This is why people are upset when we criticize Ilhan Omar and say she has no place in Congress, no place in the United States if she wants to tear the whole country down.
They say, what about the free exchange of ideas?
Yes, of course, we defend the free exchange of ideas, but not at the expense of the free exchange of ideas.
Because we're speaking too abstractly, let me put it in more concrete terms.
We defend our American political traditions of free speech and open debate in so much as they don't undermine the whole country.
We actually have something to say.
As a conservative, I don't merely stand for the free exchange of ideas.
I also stand for some of the ideas that we're exchanging And too many conservatives have bought into this kind of pathetic letter, this lie, that there is this liberal, middle, neutral ground that we can stand on, where really all we care about is the process, the form of talking about things.
No, we stand for things as well.
We stand for some of the content of the speech.
And for the last several decades, the left has offered not only a form of debate, but substance to the debate.
And the right has been too squishy and too cowardly to do that.
We can't do that any longer.
It's coming to a head, guys.
They're ripping down statues of George Washington and torching cities, okay?
They wouldn't call them racist because the racism goes against Asian people and against white people, but they're doing it.
I mean, there is...
Even consider this kind of racism, which I would find to be an anti-black racism.
Princeton just wrote a letter, and a number of faculty members and people at Princeton wrote it to the university.
And they said that they must educate the Princeton University community about the legacy of slavery and white supremacy, actively confront Princeton's ties to and culpability in slavery and white supremacy.
You're going to hear a lot about white supremacy.
Form an internal committee of faculty and students of color to hold the university accountable.
So you're going to give people special power based on the color of their skin.
And then this is my favorite part.
On racial equality, they say, remove questions about misdemeanors and felony convictions from admissions applications.
They are actually conflating being black with being a felon.
By the way, how many felons apply to Princeton?
I guess some, but probably not that many.
My guess, not that many.
And how bigoted!
Ha!
How outrageous to say that it's synonymous to call someone black or a felon.
That is the kind of insane racialized system, though, that they are pushing.
There's no middle ground.
Take a stand here.
This is the moment to do it.
I fear that if we lose this battle right now, this election actually does seem to matter.
I know every election is the most important election of your lifetime, but they're burning down the country.
So, you know, I think this one matters a little bit more than say Bush v. Gore.
Okay.
I fear that conservatives are going to sit in the middle, sit on the sidelines, say, well, I don't, I don't want to say anything.
I don't want to offend anybody.
I'll post the black square and go along with Marxists because they're bullying me.
I'll vote for Biden because, you know, Trump colluded with a porn star in Russia and didn't pay his taxes or whatever other lie the New York Times is going to write.
And then we're going to look back and say, gosh, we should have stood up.
Where were the conservatives then?
Well, here's your chance, guys.
Here's the call.
Stand up for something.
A system will be dismantled.
It's up to us which system that is.
A lot more to say.
We'll have to do it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
See you then.
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Hey everyone, I'm Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
150 mostly liberal writers are protesting cancel culture, but they don't understand.
The left no longer believes in free speech.
They're on the wrong side in the war against reality.
