I go away for one week — one week! — and I come back to pedo movies on Hollywood’s biggest platform and the town literally on fire. Ash covering my front steps. Lots to catch up on before the well-deserved fire and brimstone takes us all out.
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And I come back to pedo movies on Hollywood's biggest platform and the town literally burning to the ground.
Ash covering my front steps.
There is a lot to catch up on before the well-deserved fire and brimstone takes us all out.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Good to be back, everybody.
I had a great time in Utah.
I missed you all very much.
Also, I have to come.
I know it's been a little while.
It's been a full week, but I have to get to my favorite comment from the last show from David Winokur.
Political science, the only science that ignores all the rules of science, like logical thought and analysis of cause and effect.
That is true.
Political science does ignore all the rules of science.
It also ignores all the rules of politics.
We'll get to that a little bit later.
Also got to thank our friends over at Ring.
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I had a great time in Utah, okay?
I haven't taken a vacation since my honeymoon, and I was so excited to go and relax.
It was sweet little Lisa and me, and we were there with a couple of friends, and I was having a great time until Ben ruined it.
I did not do any work.
I barely tweeted.
But Ben calls me.
So I say, okay, I've got to pick up the phone.
Hey, Ben, what's going on?
He says, hey, Knowles, you've got to watch Cuties.
Cuties!
Why I have to watch Cuties?
Okay.
He made me watch it because obviously it's the hottest topic that anybody...
It's not hot.
It's not a hot...
Please don't misconstrue what I'm saying.
But it is a hot topic and it's a hot political issue.
There are now calls for investigations of it.
So he said basically you're a cultural commentator.
I want your take on what this is.
I said I don't want to watch this degenerate filth.
And that's the question, right?
Is Cuties degenerate filth, or is it being misinterpreted like Netflix is saying that it is?
Now, I knew from the beginning that it was degenerate filth, because it's a French movie, and all French film is degenerate filth.
So I kind of knew that it was going to be like that going in.
I then pull up my Netflix, and I see the first movie that they're promoting is Cuties, this movie about 11-year-olds twerking and being sexualized.
That's the first movie.
The second movie?
Lucifer.
All right, a little on the nose here, Hollywood.
Thought we're not in for a great trip.
Then we start watching the movie.
It's me, sweet little Lisa, my two friends sitting there on the other couch.
My friend's fiance storms out of the room crying because of how creepy the movie was with the sexualizing shots of young girls.
Netflix defends it.
The left right now, largely defending this movie, saying that the right is completely misconstruing it.
They didn't see it.
They barely watched the trailer.
Well, I saw it, so I can give you an honest take.
But this is what Netflix says.
Cuties is a social commentary against the sexualization of young children.
It's an award-winning film and a powerful story about the pressure young girls face on social media and from society more generally growing up.
And we'd encourage anyone who cares about these important issues to watch the movie.
And the thing about it is, That description is actually correct.
Sort of.
Sort of.
But it misses the most important point.
The message of the movie could be interpreted, could be, doesn't need to be interpreted, but could be interpreted as against the sexualization of young girls.
The movie is about this young girl who's from a Muslim family.
And the film basically says that the Muslims are sexualized young girls too by marrying them off very young.
But then Western degenerate decadent France is also sexualizing young girls with twerking and, you know, rap music and whatever, all kind of modern culture.
And it sort of opposes that.
It shows some of the pitfalls of that.
It could also be interpreted as saying that young girls need to explore their sexuality, and sometimes they go too far, but they need to explore it anyway.
So I'm not even saying that it totally does what Netflix is saying in the message.
But just for argument's sake, let's just say that is the message of the movie.
The problem is that in presenting that message, the movie sexualizes and exploits the 11-year-old girls.
It does the thing that it says that it's against.
It would be like having a movie about how terrible it is to torture animals.
And then for an hour and a half of the movie, it's people literally torturing animals and stomping on them and punching them and throwing them against the wall.
And then at the end of the movie, it says, but maybe it's bad to torture animals.
Say, okay, well, did you have to torture all the animals to tell me how bad it is to torture animals?
No.
And that's what's going on in the movie.
Because the movie doesn't star 16-year-old girls playing 11-year-old girls, or 18-year-old girls playing 11-year-old girls, or 20-year-old girls.
You could imagine a world, Hollywood does this all the time, where you get an older actor or actress to play a younger actor or actress.
But they didn't do that here.
It's actually 11-year-old girls.
With gratuitous, exploitative, close-up shots of their various body parts.
I mean, there are parts of this movie that are genuinely nauseating, and they're needless.
You do not need those shots to convey the message that Netflix is saying that the movie is portraying.
Part of Netflix's defense is they said, okay, well, the poster was a little exploitative, but the movie's not that way.
The poster's from the movie.
The poster is a shot from the movie, more or less.
It's a shot from the end of the movie.
It doesn't convey the message necessarily of the movie, but it is part of the movie.
So it is exploitative.
People are saying it's child pornography.
I mean, I guess it's not technically child pornography because the girls aren't naked or I don't know.
I mean, what is pornography, right?
As a famous Supreme Court justice said, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.
At the very least, though, at the very least, we should all be able to agree this is sexually exploitative of children, of little girls, And it has no place in a decent society.
I guess it has a place in France, but it has no place in a decent society.
So what are we to do about this?
Don't forget, Netflix is super-duper left-wing.
98% of the time that Netflix employees donate to politicians, they donate to Democrats.
And this is not some new thing on the left.
This is not some fantasy imagined by the right.
The left has been sexualizing children for, at this point, 80 years.
80 or 90 years.
This began, we talked actually a little bit about this on this show the week before I took my vacation, which is that you have these theorists, these weird left-wing theorists in the beginning of the 30s, talking about how we need to sexualize young kids.
There was this guy Wilhelm Reich, very popular theorist for the left, who said that the reason and cause of war and famine and disease and cancer was that people weren't having enough orgasms.
Seriously, you can read about this.
He said he had discovered the life force of the universe, the orgones.
He developed a box called the orgone accumulator.
It was just a wooden box.
Woody Allen parodied it as the orgasmatron.
And there were very prominent leftists who had the orgasmatron box.
J.D. Salinger, a guy who wrote Catcher in the Rye, Norman Mailer, considered one of the great geniuses of the left in the 20th century.
They all had this weird orgasm box.
It wasn't just this weirdo Wilhelm Reich.
Goes all the way up through the 60s and 70s and Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders, who made a good play for the presidency even in 2020, he wrote very creepy essays in the 1960s and 1970s about how we have to sexualize children based on Reich's theories.
Because Reich's theories is that sexual repression is why we have all these evils in the world.
And when are you most sexually repressed?
When you're a child.
So we need to allow children to explore their sexuality and molest one another.
Bernie Sanders wrote essays explicitly about this, okay?
It's been building on the left for a long time, which is why they are normalizing this kind of stuff with the pederasty bill that we just saw in California, also the week before I went away, and now with cuties.
So what do we do about this?
Are we now hypocrites on the issue of free speech because we don't like this creepy, exploitative movie?
I don't think so.
Right now, Senator Ted Cruz, someone I'm visiting in Washington, D.C., so that we can film more episodes of our podcast, Verdict, is calling for an investigation into Netflix for promoting Cuties.
He's not the only politician doing that.
Many others are as well.
I think this is very good.
It's a good political point.
This brings up a larger philosophical point, which is we need to get more precise about the term free speech.
You're going to see a lot of squishy conservatives, quote-unquote, who are defending cuties on the grounds of free speech.
And we should be totally clear about this and have some basic historical understanding.
The founding fathers would have jailed the people who produced cuties.
At least.
I think some of the founding fathers would have done more than jailed them.
The founding fathers, and for most of the people in our country's history, would have had no thought that cuties is somehow protected by the First Amendment, that it's protected free speech.
What do we mean by free speech?
The left has backed us into a corner here because we are now, we conservatives are now the ones saying that any type of speech is protected speech, which is simply not true in American history.
We're saying that we're totally opposed to any kind of standards on speech, which has never been true, not just in this country, it's never been true anywhere.
All societies, at all times, in all places throughout history, have had and have enforced standards about speech.
Especially in this country.
The question is, what are the standards?
Well, there are plenty of things that have never been considered protected speech in this country, beyond cuties.
We'll get to that in one second.
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In American history, obscenity has never been considered protected speech.
It is still not, it depends where you are, but still in some places it's not considered protected speech.
Pornography, same thing, was never considered protected speech.
We permitted it in some cases, but we also have heavy restrictions on it.
Don't forget during the George W. Bush administration, at the end of the George W. Bush administration, we jailed a pornographer simply for being so obscene.
This is not some anachronism.
This is not some anti-American idea.
It's been going on for the entirety of our country, including as recently as two presidents ago.
Sedition, not protected speech.
You cannot be seditious, or you can at least be prosecuted for being seditious.
Threats are not considered protected speech.
We have broad and wonderful free speech protections in this country, but we've got to get Specific.
The brilliance of political correctness.
Nobody talks about this, but it's the genius of the whole thing.
The brilliance of political correctness is that it backed conservatives into a lose-lose situation.
We all know that political correctness, which the left has used to gain a lot of power in the last several decades, more than several decades, is the speech code.
But the But the thing about it is, it's kind of an anti-speech code speech code.
It's a speech code designed to destroy all of the previous standards we had on speech.
On issues of sex, on issues of obscenity, on issues of blasphemy, on issues of all these sorts of things.
It's an anti-speech code speech code.
And so it puts us in a tough position.
Because if conservatives oppose political correctness, which we should, then we've either got to come out against speech codes in general, which is kind of what they wanted in the first place, Or, we look like hypocrites and we've got to embrace their speech code, which would be terrible as well.
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
We've got to be much more specific.
We use a lot of slogans in this country.
We're using a lot of slogans these days with Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, all that kind of stuff, which we'll get to later.
But we need to be more specific.
What do those things mean?
What kind of speech is not protected?
Libel is not protected.
And the Trump campaign is zeroing in on this right now.
So while I was away, there was this absolutely preposterous, stupid, irresponsible, fraudulent Atlantic story that was published.
It was written by the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic based on four anonymous sources saying that Donald Trump denigrated fallen U.S. soldiers.
That sounds about right, right?
Because the media, they haven't lied to you for the past four years.
And we know Trump hates the military, right?
The guy who stoops down and picks up a Marine's hat.
The guy who runs his whole campaign about how much he loves the military.
He probably hates the military, right?
Well, sure, the Atlantic confirmed it with four anonymous sources.
And then, a Fox News reporter came out and said that she confirmed the report by talking to an anonymous source.
Which is, by the way, not possible.
I'm not saying it's not possible because she didn't talk to someone.
I'm saying it's not possible because you cannot confirm an anonymous report story with an anonymous source.
Ontologically, you cannot do that.
That is not possible.
So absolutely irresponsible stuff there.
By the way, 21 people have gone on the record to contradict this report that was written by a bunch of anonymous sources.
Then, within one day of this report, Joe Biden puts up an ad about it.
I think it was within like 12 hours.
Was there some collusion going on, perhaps?
Was this a setup?
I don't know.
It kind of looks that way.
Here's the Biden ad.
You see it in a cemetery.
Why should I go to that cemetery?
It's filled with losers.
That's what Trump allegedly said about a military cemetery.
It's like written cartoonishly with some Hollywood reject writer.
Suckers!
Allegedly says that mean old Mr.
Trump.
We're not going to support that loser's funeral.
Talking about John McCain.
I suppose that one he might have said.
Not because he didn't like the troops, but because Trump and John McCain famously did not get along.
I don't get it, Trump says.
What was in it for them?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Because Trump's such an idiot, right?
So he doesn't understand the role of the military in civic life.
If you don't respect our troops, you cannot lead them.
That's what Biden is saying here at the end of this Joe Biden ad.
So vote for Biden.
That's the point.
He was ready to go.
I wonder if they got advance notice of that.
Probably they did.
Anyway, now, Jenna Ellis, friend of the show, you've certainly seen her on this show, and when I fill in on radio for Ben, she emailed the tech firms.
She's now Trump's legal counsel.
And she instructed the big tech firms to use their so-called fact checkers to take down this ridiculous Joe Biden ad based on absolutely nothing.
This libelous ad based on nothing.
Let's not forget, libel is not protected speech.
Does this add rise to the level of libel?
There's no evidence for it.
We can at least say that.
Also, this is again on the broader philosophical point that conservatives need to recognize because we need to deal in the realities of our world.
There is no such thing as free speech when your political opponents do not recognize free speech.
There's no such thing.
You are not able to live in a regime of free speech When half of the country and most of the people in power refuse to play by those rules, then you're just a sucker.
Talk about the word sucker.
Then you are a sucker because you're playing by a set of rules that your opponents will not play by.
So you will be held to standards that they will not be held to.
So what rules do we play by?
There's a new report, another, I suppose, anonymous report, but this one I think we should believe and for a reason which I'll get to in a second.
There's a report that Democrats, if they take the Senate and they get a lot of power in the 2020 election, they will move to kill the filibuster.
Okay, and this report comes from NBC News.
The reason I believe this report is because NBC News is on the same side of the political aisle as the Democrats who are going to do this thing.
So I think they've got good sources here and I think they're leaking it for a reason.
They're going to kill the filibuster.
Now, what is the filibuster?
Okay.
Filibuster is basically this rule that any member of the Senate can get up and talk for a really, really long time and slow down or stop legislation.
And so you need not just a simple majority of the Senate to get something through, but very often you need 60 votes.
And this has been a treasured part of the Senate for a long time.
And they said, this is according to NBC, But that's BS. That's just a lie from NBC News.
The Democrats already nuked a lot of the filibuster during Obama's presidency because they wanted to get more of Obama's executive and judicial appointees through, and the Republicans were holding it up, so they just nuked the filibuster.
And by the way, when they did that, Mitch McConnell warned them that it was a horrible idea and they were going to come to regret it very quickly.
Here's Mr.
Cocaine himself.
Once again, Senate Democrats are threatening to break the rules of the Senate, break the rules of the Senate, in order to change the rules of the Senate.
And over what?
Over what?
Over a court that doesn't even have enough work to do?
The majority leader promised.
He promised.
Over.
And over again.
That he wouldn't break the rules of the Senate in order to change them.
If you want to play games, set yet another precedent that you'll no doubt come to regret.
Say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you'll regret this.
And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.
You may regret it a lot sooner than you think.
So what does this mean for Republicans?
What should we do?
Because I think a lot of Republicans, myself included, like the filibuster.
Makes the Senate more deliberative.
It slows things down.
I really like it.
But that's not enough.
Liking it is not enough.
Okay?
What this means is that even though we like the filibuster, Senate Republicans should probably get rid of it.
Especially if we win big in November, then we should definitely get rid of it, even though we like it.
Why?
Because we're not going to get a cookie.
We're not going to get a special prize for preserving this wonderful rule that we all really like when our opponents are not going to preserve it.
And they're telling us to our faces that they're not going to preserve it.
So they're going to use it to ram through their agenda, but we're supposed to play by a different set of rules.
That ain't how politics is supposed to work.
That's not how winning politics works, okay?
Also, it's not as though the filibuster is some part of the Constitution.
Okay, the filibuster has only been even theoretically possible since, I think, 1806, is it?
Yeah.
The Senate changed a rule, and it's been possible since then.
It was never used, not even once, until 1837.
Then it was barely used after that until the 1970s.
Some Senate rules changed it around, made it a little stronger, made it a little more in use.
Okay, I like it, and it makes the Senate more deliberative.
We're not in a deliberative time, and we need to recognize those rules.
It's the same thing with the speech.
It's the same thing with the slogans.
It's the same thing with, I mean, if you're looking at the speech, it's the same thing with cuties, right?
What some of the conservatives, the liberal conservatives say is, well, look, if we admonish cuties and tell Netflix to take cuties down, well, then maybe they'll take down the passion of the Christ.
No, I don't think so.
I don't think those are comparable.
I think we can make judgments here along the way.
By the way, they're already taking things down.
They're taking down cop shows.
Cop shows are not going to be allowed on streaming platforms anymore.
They're taking down Gone with the Wind, one of the greatest films ever made.
But we're supposed to keep up cuties.
This is what the conservatives do.
The liberal conservatives do this.
They are always so nervous about some hypothetical, abstract world, if we ever exercise any power whatsoever, they miss the fact that the left is already exercising that power against us in the real world.
But we're not supposed to fight back.
Okay, and they're trying to do it now to get a complete lock on virtually every election in the country, and it has to do with their creepy obsession with kids.
We'll get to that in one second.
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How else is the left trying to completely dominate politics?
Well, they are looking again at kids.
Creepy.
And this time it's not just to sexualize them in weird French movies.
It is to allow them to vote.
The left has for a long time wanted kids to vote.
Now in San Francisco, they are trying to let 16-year-olds vote.
San Franciscans rejected a similar proposal in 2016, but they only lost that by two points.
And you know what the left does.
They just try, try, try again until they get their way.
This is not just some lunatics out in San Francisco.
Well, I guess it is lunatics in San Francisco, but even lunatics San Franciscans at the national level.
Nancy Pelosi supports this.
She told us so years ago.
I myself...
Personally, I'm not speaking for my caucus.
I myself have always been for lowering the voting age to 16.
I think it's really important to capture kids when they're in high school, when they're interested in all of this, when they're learning about government, to be able to vote.
Why are they doing this?
Why do they want 16-year-olds to vote?
Is it because 16-year-olds are so mature?
No.
These days, I don't think 60-year-olds are very mature.
I think people are getting much more immature, even as the population gets older.
So I don't think it's for that reason.
I think it's for purely partisan reasons.
Young people vote for Democrats.
One of the people pushing for this new ballot initiative, it basically confirms the purely partisan basis here.
Crystal Chan, who's an organizer for Vote 16 SF, says, I really think that Vote 16 will help youth of color in San Francisco establish the habit of voting at an earlier age and really provide them with the support and resources that they need to continue building on that habit as they grow older.
Now notice that you say, Vote 16.
This is about age.
Why is this organizer of the project bringing race into it?
It's going to help youth of color.
What about youth of whiteness?
What about youth of translucency?
It's not going to help them vote?
No.
The reason that they're focusing on the young voters is the same reason that they're focusing on black voters and some other racial minorities is because the Democrats think they have a lock on that vote.
So if they can get more of those groups to vote, then they're going to win more of the elections.
This is a purely naked, partisan move.
But on the philosophical level, there's another issue here.
It's based on a false understanding of human nature that the left has been pushing for a long time.
The kind of traditional understanding of human nature is that man is born a slave to his passions.
Little babies can't do very much on their own.
And little children are monsters.
Think Lord of the Flies, right?
Little children are little tyrants and they don't know how to behave themselves and they're constantly following their appetites and they always stuff themselves full of cookies and And they drink too much soda and they get a stomach ache and they need to be educated into controlling themselves and understanding their freedom.
And only once they're educated in the best sort of freedom and civic traditions, then can they participate in the civil society.
What the left tells you is the opposite.
What the left tells you is, and in some ways liberalism broadly tells you, is that people are born free.
They're born free and perfect in a beautiful blank slate and they're totally free and there's no such thing as broken human nature.
There's no such thing as the fall.
They're perfect, you know?
But then society, man, that damn society, it ruins them.
And William Reich and Bernie Sanders would say they're sexually repressed.
And, you know, they don't have enough orgasms, and they need orgone accumulators in their room.
Whatever kind of crazy stuff Bernie Sanders was saying in the 60s and 70s, and leftists obviously are still pushing today.
Society makes them imperfect.
Society, and if you just fixed those issues from the social engineering level, you know, more poverty programs or something, and at the personal and even sexual level from this anti-repression and the weird boxes that Norman Mailer and William Reich were pushing...
Then we would have a perfect society.
Basically that politics and social engineering has the ability, as long as we make politics totally personally, even all the way down to the sexual level, has the ability to perfect society.
And if you're trying to do that, if you're looking for the most pure, wonderful, put-together people, you don't look to the wisdom of the ages.
You don't look to older people who have matured and educated themselves.
You look to children.
That's the philosophical basis here.
It's based on this false understanding of human nature.
Of course, actual wisdom does not come from children or from pedophiles.
It doesn't come from either of those, despite our culture's misunderstanding today.
Actual wisdom tends to come from older people.
There's a great story that just came out from this guy Lawrence Brooks.
He is the oldest living World War II veteran.
He just turned 111 years old, born in 1909.
Okay, this guy says he has the secret to life.
Lawrence Brooks says, the secret to life is, serve God and be nice to people.
So simple.
So simple.
And yet we've completely forgotten that.
And both sides of that are really important.
Because if you just say be nice to people, I guess that's what the left says, but their niceness isn't all that nice.
It isn't kind.
It isn't generous.
It's just saying, oh, we all need to just be tolerant with a capital T and just kind of get along.
And we don't care about truth and we don't care about purpose and we don't care about any injustice or anything.
We're just going to be really nice.
No, you've got to serve God first and be nice to people.
Because you can't serve God without being charitable.
And so you don't want to just be a jerk curmudgeon all the time.
You need to be charitable, but you also need to be courageous.
You also need to be just.
You also need to be honest.
Okay?
Very good wisdom for life.
If I had my druthers, that guy, Lawrence Brooks, would pretty much be the only guy to vote.
I don't even know if he's a Democrat.
I don't think he's a Democrat.
But I'd probably say that guy should vote.
Because he has some wisdom, and we should encourage people who have wisdom to share it with the rest of us in our society.
Speaking of people who are almost as old as Lawrence Brooks, but who unfortunately don't have any wisdom, Joe Biden.
This is a weird story.
People were tweeting this to me, even on my vacation.
I had to see it because I thought I was living in a kind of bizarro world universe.
You know, over my vacation, I didn't shave.
So I had like a kind of little goatee.
And then I saw my evil twin.
He was the one without the goatee, and I was the one with the goatee, but it was my evil twin.
T.J. Ducklow, Joe Biden's national press secretary, went on Fox News, went on Brett Baird's show, and was asked specifically what Joe Biden would have done differently on coronavirus.
He had no answer.
The vice president was not against the travel ban, first of all.
Second of all, let's remember an important distinction.
Donald Trump was the president of the United States.
I'm asking you if Joe Biden was the president of the United States.
It was on Donald Trump to take action to actually protect the American people.
Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in USA Today in January warning that the threat was coming.
Joe Biden said in February that Donald Trump should get people on the ground in China.
What did Donald Trump do?
Donald Trump was praising China.
Donald Trump was praising President Xi's response, saying that they had it under control.
When clearly he knew, as we now know from Bob Woodward, they did not have it under control.
He should have been protecting the American people.
He should have been putting real plans in place.
So let me just clarify.
To actually confront this inconvenience.
An incredibly dangerous threat.
Understand.
Let me just clarify.
You're saying that Joe Biden was for closing down travel from China when the president did it?
Joe Biden has been clear, and I can send you the fact checks if they're helpful, Brett.
Joe Biden has been clear that he was not against that travel ban.
But he was for it?
Joe Biden has been clear about this, Brett.
Again, I can send you the fact checks if they're helpful.
This has been fact checked into oblivion.
It only got worse from there.
You see, he can't give an answer.
He just talks about the fact checks.
People did point out at this point that Mr.
Ducklow bears a striking resemblance to me.
They were asking if he was me.
And I guess I just owe the people an explanation.
I'll just come clean.
Well, you all thought I was on vacation.
I became Joe Biden's national press secretary.
I figured right now that's the only way I can get on Fox these days, is just pretend to be a liberal and Joe Biden's press secretary.
So that's what I did.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that I did it, but I thought it would be a fun troll of the Joe Biden campaign.
And obviously Joe Biden would have no idea because he doesn't know what planet he's on these days.
I got to tell you, though, I, T.J. Ducklow, am a pretty weak liberal spokesman.
Because, you know, I clearly had no answer to that question.
And the reason is, Bret Baier, I mean, this guy is so great.
This guy is so great at his job.
He's pretty much a straight shooter when it comes to these things.
He says, okay, you're saying that he was always clear that he didn't oppose the travel ban.
So was he for the travel ban?
Was he for it?
And the answer is, absolutely not.
How do we know that?
We have Joe Biden on record decrying Trump's travel ban from China when it was instituted as hysterical xenophobia.
Coronavirus emanated from China.
A national emergency, you know, worldwide alerts.
The American people need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it.
That he is going to act rationally about it.
In moments like this, this is where the credibility of a president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do.
This is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysteria xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia.
No time for that.
No time.
By the way, it wasn't just Joe Biden.
At the same time, Nancy Pelosi, during the height of the rising coronavirus, Nancy Pelosi goes to Chinatown in San Francisco, no mask, ton of people all around and says, come on down to Chinatown.
Bill de Blasio doing the same kind of stuff in New York.
All of these liberals were completely downplaying the virus, trying to keep travel open with China, trying to get people out in the open.
They're still doing it with the BLM riots.
They're saying, yeah, go out and riot and we'll be together.
But if you ever show up to anything conservative, then everyone's going to die of coronavirus.
So they have no answer whatsoever.
I do feel a little bit sorry for Mr.
Ducklow.
Because the campaign is only as good as the candidate.
Most of the time.
And Joe Biden as a candidate is completely failing.
He was asked a question about whether or not he's losing a step or two.
Whether he loses his train of thought.
And what does he do?
He says it's completely ridiculous, and while he's explaining why he doesn't lose his train of thought, he loses his train of thought.
Just look at us, okay?
Just look at us.
Who seems to be in shape?
Who's able to move around?
I mean, this idea of, you know, slow Joe.
Anyway, I shouldn't laugh about it because...
Anyway, Donald Trump, just look at us both.
Watch us and determine whether or not you think I'm misleading anyone.
Not you personally, but the public.
You know, look at me.
What?
You think I would lose my train of thought?
What do you think?
People have said that I would lose my train of thought.
What, just because I saw a butterfly?
What, you mean like a monarch butterfly?
One of those cute little black and orange butterflies fluttering all around, you know, every which way, kind of blowing around in the wind, and it's so nice on a nice, light, breezy day at the end of August.
Labor Day weekend is a great time.
I love Labor Day.
Love American Labor Day.
What were we talking about?
What were we talking about again?
What was that?
Losing my train of thought?
Yeah.
So, with that guy at the top of the ticket, he's obviously not calling the shots.
And so, even with old moderate Joe, who's, by the way, not moderate.
He's just an empty suit who goes like that butterfly, whichever way the wind blows.
The party is being led by the radicals.
And the radicals hate this country, and the radicals don't understand this country.
Most especially that...
Very poor, dishonest historian who did the New York Times' 1619 Project.
We'll get to that in one second.
First, oh, gotta say goodbye to YouTube.
Actually, I sort of do have to say goodbye to YouTube in a larger sense.
Because if you're watching this show on YouTube, you're probably watching this on the Daily Wire YouTube channel.
But starting on September 28th, we are only going to be broadcasting the show on YouTube on the Michael Knowles Show YouTube channel.
Only on that one, because I want to get all the clicks, and I don't want Ben to get the clicks.
No, because we just find it's a little bit easier these days with big tech if we have the shows on the show channel.
So make sure you head on over to the Michael Knowles Show YouTube channel.
Subscribe, ring the bell.
They might still unsubscribe you anyway, because there's a lot of shenanigans going on these days of the 2020 election.
But head on over there anyway.
We'd appreciate it.
Go over there, ring the bell right now.
We also have a lot of extra content there beyond just the show.
I just took a cognitive test that Joe Biden, That's apparently taking that President Trump aced.
We can figure out whether I'm a very stable genius like the President or if my brain is full of tapioca pudding like the Democratic nominee.
Subscribe to the channel.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
In the mental absence of Joe Biden, the Democratic Party is being led by anti-American radicals. the Democratic Party is being led by anti-American radicals.
And I can even get over their hatred of the country, or at least I can understand it.
What's harder to get over and to understand is how these people of prominence on the left don't even understand the words that they're using.
The head of the 1619 Project, that, well, what's her name?
Hannah Jones?
Hannah Jones over at the New York Times.
This completely astroturfed project where the New York Times deceptively used $3 million to try to promote it, even though academic historians, on the left even, were saying that it was completely anti-historical.
The central thesis was complete BS. Now this is being taught as history.
Turns out this woman, who's come out against American exceptionalism, Doesn't even know what American exceptionalism means.
The audio is a little hard to hear.
This was on a 1619 Project conversation from Campus Reform.
Take a listen.
If this country, you know, I don't think that we are an exceptional nation.
I think that that's ludicrous for any nation to make that claim, and we certainly cannot make that claim.
We're a nation founded on genocide and chattel slavery and classism and gender discrimination.
I mean, we're not.
We had exceptional ideas, but we are not an exceptional nation.
We're not an exceptional nation.
We had exceptional ideas, but we're not exceptional, exceptional, exceptional.
She doesn't know the meaning of the word exceptional in American exceptionalism.
I think even some conservatives don't quite get it.
They obviously get it a lot better than she does.
The idea that America is an exceptional nation is not merely a boast.
It is not saying America is just a super-duper greatest nation ever.
That's not all it's saying.
about the country.
It's also making just a purely descriptive positive statement about the country, which is America is an exception to the general rule of nations.
Why?
Because it was founded and developed in a different way.
Okay.
It's just different.
It's the exception to the rule.
What's the rule of nations?
Well, they exist for a very long time and their origins go all the way back to the murky foundations of history that are often lost to history.
This is true of the European nations.
This is true of nations and proto-nations in Asia and the Americas and in Africa.
But our country, the United States, was founded after the discovery of the New World by these European settlers who came over there, who had Distinct ideas who broke from certain general habits of how nations are founded, and that's why it's exceptional.
Because of America's unique founding and development, it has a unique role and position in the world.
Simple as that.
You can't deny that.
That's merely an historical fact.
But this gets to our broader point today on the slogans.
You've got to get down to what the slogans mean.
September 11th, the anniversary of the September 11th attacks was just a few days ago.
Top trend on Twitter that day was hashtag never forget.
The second top trend was hashtag all buildings matter.
Get it?
Aha, get it?
I guess they were making a point That because conservatives say that all lives matter in response to black lives matter, that when we talk about the September 11th terrorist attacks, we need to say all buildings matter and not talk about the September 11th attacks.
The blue check marks on the left were celebrating this hashtag for making some point, allegedly, about all lives matter.
But like all slogans, you've got to get down to what the slogans mean.
You know I hate slogans.
I hate slogans because I hate ideology.
Because slogans, like ideology, can never...
We comprise and sum up the totality of the human experience.
So you've got to get into it.
What does it mean?
Well, what does never forget mean?
Never forget means that the September 11th terrorist attacks were horrific.
They were traumatic.
They changed, in some ways, American policy.
They showed us our vulnerabilities that we thought we didn't have or we had at least forgotten that we had since at least 1941 and really even before that.
Because Pearl Harbor was not in the continental United States.
9-11 was.
Pearl Harbor targeted soldiers and sailors and 9-11 targeted civilians.
So it changed things.
Changed the nature of war.
That's what it means.
What does all buildings matter mean?
Well, what people who say that really mean is, yeah, don't worry about 9-11.
It wasn't that big a deal.
It's just like other attacks.
What does that mean?
It doesn't just mean Black Lives Matter.
What it means is that America is systemically oppressive and unjust against black people, that there's a scourge of cops in this country who are racist, hunting down innocent black men who, like LeBron James says, can't even leave their home without being hunted down.
That's just not true.
That's just demonstrably false.
You can look at any of the facts of that situation.
You see that is simply not happening.
And then All Lives Matter.
What does All Lives Matter mean?
All life is sacred.
It kind of gets back to the equality principle from the Declaration, that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights by their creator, which is true very much in the American tradition.
Those things mean different things.
So what do we like?
Well, yeah, I like All Lives Matter.
I don't like Black Lives Matter.
I don't like All Buildings Matter.
I do like Never Forget.
There's nothing hypocritical about saying that.
You've got to go beyond the headline.
Sometimes the left will say, well, you say you're pro-life, but you don't want a bunch of stupid welfare programs.
So you're not really pro-life.
Well, okay, what do we mean by pro-life?
I don't think you should be able to kill babies in the womb.
That's what I'm really saying when I say I'm pro-life, so...
You say you're pro-life, but you're for the death penalty?
Yes, I think we should be able to execute rapists and murderers, and it's perfectly legitimate for the state to have that power, as it always has.
And also, we shouldn't kill innocent babies in the womb.
Yep, that's what I'm saying.
Nothing hypocritical about that.
You just have to go beyond the slogan.
Okay?
Same goes for free speech, as we were talking about.
What does free speech mean?
Does it mean you could always just say anything that you want?
No, it's never meant that anywhere, including and especially in the United States, for all those examples we listed earlier.
And we know, we know that the left's most effective tool is language.
That's how they manipulate the culture, with things like political correctness.
Here's a great example.
Here's a great example.
A group of black families just bought 97 acres for a safe haven in eastern Georgia.
Nineteen black families pooled their resources.
They purchased 97 acres of land in eastern Georgia as a safe space for black families.
And the real estate agent who did this, Ashley Scott, declared to CNN that, quote, I'm hoping that this will be a thriving safe haven for people of color, for black families in particular.
Okay?
That sounds so nice, right?
Doesn't that sound like a safe haven?
That's so wonderful.
Now replace the race.
Let's say 19 white families pooled their resources and purchased 97 acres of land and said, I'm hoping this is a thriving safe haven for white people, for white families, not for black people.
They can't come in here.
No, I don't think we would like that, would we?
We'd say that's illegal.
That's unconstitutional.
That violates the Civil Rights Act.
Actually, they're doing it right now.
President Trump has been touting this new executive order he has, which rescinds an Obama-era rule called the AFFH rule.
He keeps referring to it as the suburban lifestyle dream.
Basically, there was this rule under Obama that said that the federal government could seize a lot of power from local communities, in particular in the suburbs, and bring in a lot of low-income housing.
It was ostensibly in the name of racism, or anti-racism.
It wasn't really that.
The whole reason was to basically just shift reliable Democratic voters up into the suburbs because the suburbs are purple.
So if you can bring in more Democratic voters, they'll shift blue.
And they said this is all in the name of racial equality.
So, okay, that's good.
The federal government can come in, take a ton of power away from local communities, and all in the name of racial equality.
But when black families purchase some land and they say, we don't want any white people here, that's totally fine.
Of course not.
It's just about the way you look at it.
It's the way the language is used.
Are we talking about a safe haven or are we talking about segregation?
Meanwhile, BLM rioters are celebrating the attempted murder of two cops.
You may have seen this video.
This happened in, I think this happened in L.A. while I was away, just getting back.
Some thug walks up to two cops sitting in a car, totally unprovoked, and shoots the two cops.
Then, BLM activists blocked the hospital where they were supposed to be treated.
They blocked the emergency room because they wanted the cops to die.
Take a listen.
And I want a definitive message to the f***ing people.
F***. Alright, it's hard to hear because you've got to bleep so much of this guy, but he says, yeah, I hope they effing die.
Who are they?
31-year-old mother and a 24-year-old man.
Think about this.
Think about the Me Too movement.
We're told that if a man treats a woman, if a man propositions a woman, that that's evil and awful.
If a man asks a woman out on a date in an inappropriate situation, that's evil and awful, terrible.
But...
A man can go shoot a 31-year-old mother.
Totally fine.
If a man, God forbid, beats a woman, beats his wife, beats his girlfriend, it's like the worst thing ever, right?
But then this man goes up and shoots a 31-year-old mother and prominent left-wing activists, a BLM movement, right, which has tormented our cities for months now.
Says, oh, that's all well and good.
What happened to that kind of stuff?
By the way, what happened to Me Too with Cuties?
Cuties is sexually exploiting these young girls.
All in the name of opposing sexual exploitation of young girls.
Okay, but they're sexually exploiting them.
All during the Me Too movement.
What kind of a country celebrates this stuff?
What kind of a country?
What kind of country do we want to have?
What kind of country do we have?
I come back from my vacation...
Hollywood is promoting pedo movies and is literally burning to the ground.
We haven't been permitted to go outside in a very long time.
Okay, Dr.
Fauci.
Dr.
Fauci just came out.
Remember 15 days to slow the spread?
I think that was 187 days ago.
You know what he says now?
He says now we're going to have to hunker down through the fall and the winter.
We're rounding the turn.
You see what's happening.
You see the numbers are plunging.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with that because we're plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day, and the deaths are around 1,000.
I just think we need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it's not going to be easy.
Just got to hunker down.
Just got to hunker down for another 15 days.
Sorry, I meant 15 months.
Sorry, I meant 15 years.
Just hunker down forever, says Fauci.
That's not science.
And that's not self-government.
And that's not life.
I loved going to Utah because I was basically free.
I could kind of do whatever I want.
My mask pretty much never leapt above my nose.
Often it was kind of dangling down.
No one cared.
Nobody was following these draconian measures not rooted in science and not rooted in philosophy and not rooted in our best traditions.
What kind of country do we want?
Do we want to be a country that has gone with the wind and cop shows and Or do we want to be a country that has cuties?
It looks like we can only have one.
It looks like either you're going to have some of the greatest movies ever made, or you're going to have cuties.
Are we going to be a country that hates itself, that wants to burn it to the ground, or do we want to be a country that wants to build it up?
Are we going to be a country that all lives together, gets along?
We're going to be a country that segregates ourselves.
What kind of country do we want to be?
That's a question for self-government.
That's a question that forces us to use our free speech, proper speech.
Do we want to be a country ruled by 16-year-olds and the exploiters of 16-year-olds and the exploiters of 11-year-olds?
Or do we want to be a country that is governed by good people trying to do good things?
What is that?
What the right has done for many decades is cede all of that ground and say, well, we can't know what's right.
I don't know.
We'll just let the left have the only positive definition of good or bad and we'll just kind of pretend everything's neutral and we'll sit back and we won't do anything.
Well, Neutrality in times of great peril and evil is perilous and evil itself.
You've got to have a content here.
Free speech?
Well, what are we going to say?
We have to know what we're going to say, and we have to know what we're going to do.
That's our show.
Very pleased to be back with you all.
I will see you tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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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.
