All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 15, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:39
Ep. 629 - Big Tech Must Be Destroyed

Facebook and Twitter suppress evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, conservatives call to break up Big Tech, and Democrat politicians keep up the sexual creepiness with Amy Coney Barrett. 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

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
There's a huge scoop yesterday in the New York Post.
Leaked emails show that Joe Biden has been lying about Ukraine, he knew about his son's crooked deal, and he probably took a meeting with the oligarchs himself.
But that's not the biggest story.
The biggest story is that the largest media platforms in the world that control the flow of information around the Internet suppressed the story.
They blocked major accounts, including the White House press secretary, for sharing.
This is unacceptable.
This is probably illegal.
And this is the end of constitutional government if we don't stop it.
There can be no accommodation.
Big tech must be destroyed.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
There is no accommodation here.
It's very, very clear.
Gotta destroy big tech.
My favorite comment yesterday from Average Joe, who says, Democrats say that Trump is a homophobe.
Trump says, I will kiss that handsome man at his rally.
That is true.
President Trump looking very fit, very healthy.
He says, I beat coronavirus.
I've got a great immune system.
I'll even kiss that guy out there.
I won't enjoy it very much, but I will do it.
He does.
That guy's got to have one hell of an immune system.
And you should too, because flu season is right around the corner with the winter months approaching.
It is more important than ever to have a strong immune system.
When you're pushing your body hard and you're feeling run down, it's very important to take care of yourself with the proper vitamins and nutrients, which is why Liquid IV created hydration multiplier plus immune support to maintain and strengthen your immune system.
I really love Liquid IV.
I like the ginger in particular.
But, you know, people take it because they're athletes.
They're sweating a lot.
That's not me.
For me, it's I go out and have a couple Coca-Colas with the boys.
Next morning, I take Liquid IV. I feel much more hydrated.
It's very popular around the office.
People are always stealing it away, so I have to grab it when it comes in.
Hydration multiplier plus immune support is a cutting-edge blend of vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, and Wellmune in convenient single-serve packets.
Wellmune is a naturally sourced beta-glucan that is proven to help strengthen your immune system.
They're terrific.
They have a great flavor.
They taste very good, which is important for me, and it's powered by cellular transport technology.
Right now, head on over to liquidiv.com and use code MICHAEL at checkout to get 25% off.
You can also get it at Walmart, but if you want 25% off anything in the store, You can go to liquidiv.com, use promo code Michael.
Get better hydration today at liquidiv.com, promo code Michael.
Very quickly, before we get to the real story, the real story is obviously the suppression of this on social media.
I'll just quickly go over this dread, censored, dangerous New York Post article.
Breaking news.
A headline, Biden's secret emails revealed Ukrainian exec thanked Hunter Biden for the opportunity to meet his VP dad.
This Ukrainian exec, this corrupt Ukrainian guy, is named Vadim Pozarsky.
He allegedly, according to this story, sent Hunter Biden an email on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board.
He was making $50,000 a month.
Some reports actually say he was making a little bit more than $50,000 a month.
And the whole time, Joe Biden has said that he did not speak to this guy.
But we have an email here from Vadim Pozarski.
It says, Dear Hunter, Thank you for inviting me to D.C. and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spend some time together.
It's realty and honor and pleasure.
As we spoke yesterday evening, would be great to meet today for a quick coffee.
What do you think?
I could come to you office somewhere around noon or so before or on my way to Airport Best V. That's the email.
There's more that was included here.
How did they get these emails?
Apparently it was because Hunter Biden's computers were dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware.
Biden never picked up the computers, so they became property of the repair shop owner, and then it leaked from there.
Who knows?
I mean, obviously this is an October surprise, so we don't know how we got these emails, but...
The most important thing about the emails is they appear to be legitimate.
They appear to be legitimate.
First thing is, it proves that Joe Biden lied.
Joe Biden said that he never spoke to his son Hunter Biden about his business dealings in Ukraine.
How many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?
I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
Well, unfortunately, his derelict son ended up contradicting him on that point.
He contradicted him in an interview that he did with New York Magazine, where he described the conversation that he had with his father when he was talking about his overseas business dealings.
And then he did a television interview on Nightline, I believe, and he's describing the situation and And he knows the talking point is that he never spoke to his dad, but he accidentally lets it slip anyway.
Did you and your father ever discuss Ukraine?
No.
As I said, the only time was after a news account.
It wasn't a discussion in any way.
There's no but to this.
No, we never did.
Your dad said, I hope you know what you're doing.
I hope you know what you're doing.
I do.
And I said, I do.
And that was literally the end of our discussion.
Well, if that was the end of your discussion, that means that there was a discussion, which you had said there was at first, but then you remembered the campaign told you not to say that, so then you said, no, there was no discussion, there's no but.
But there obviously was a discussion because you've talked about it at length and even your interviewer brought it up.
What did Joe Biden say?
He said, I hope you know what you're doing.
Why did he say that?
Because what Hunter was doing looked kind of shady?
Because what Hunter was doing was corrupt?
So why is Joe Biden lying about not about having this conversation now?
Because obviously the whole thing stinks to high heaven.
A tough story for the Bidens because it implies that his son engaged in corruption and that Joe himself engaged in very high level corruption as the sitting vice president.
So, of course, social media had to shut this down.
Social media.
Facebook first comes out and they say, we are going to limit the reach of this article because it hasn't been fact-checked yet.
Actually, the spokesman for Facebook that came out and said we're limiting the reach is a former staffer for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for other Democratic political action committees, for Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer, one of the most left-wing people in the U.S. Senate.
He's a Democrat operative using an ostensibly neutral tech platform to censor and suppress damaging information about Democrats three weeks before a presidential election.
Wasn't just Facebook, though.
I mean, that would be outrageous enough.
It was Twitter.
Twitter suspended accounts that were posting this.
So the first thing Twitter did was make it such that you couldn't even post the link.
You got an error.
I tried it myself.
It said, nope, sorry, you can't send that.
Something went wrong if you pushed a little harder.
You thought, oh, sorry, this hasn't been fact-checked.
It could be dangerous, so they wouldn't let you post it.
They then suspended...
James Woods, very giant Twitter account and a famous actor.
James O'Keefe, conservative journalist.
Daily Caller reporter Andrew Kerr.
Others, and the White House press secretary.
Twitter would not allow the White House press secretary to post news from a major long-standing news outlet that was damaging to Democrats.
First thing to note about this, it's probably illegal for them to do that.
Federal law prohibits any corporation from making a contribution to a federal candidate for office.
And what is a contribution?
A contribution is anything of value.
Well, obviously, suppressing the most damaging news report about the candidate this cycle, obviously that has value to the candidate and to the campaign.
And pretty significant value when you are throttling the flow of this information around the internet.
Josh Hawley made this point that it's very likely illegal.
I suspect Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are going to be dragged to Capitol Hill to answer questions about this.
The way I know that they're going to be dragged to Capitol Hill, as a matter of fact, is that Jack Dorsey himself, the head of Twitter, immediately...
Well, I'm sorry.
I shouldn't say immediately.
By the end of the day.
So many hours had elapsed in the meantime.
But by the end of the day, he came out and said, wait, wait a second here.
Sorry.
We didn't mean that.
Things were not great.
Not great.
That's his exact...
He goes, our communication around our actions on the New York Post article was not great.
Not great.
And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we're blocking...
Unacceptable.
So he's not saying it was unacceptable to do it.
He's not saying that suppressing the article was not great.
He's saying our communication around it.
I just didn't explain to you.
I did not suitably explain to you why we were interfering in a presidential election in a way that would make the Russians blush and trying to suppress important information by censoring even members of the presidential administration.
Twitter Safety.
Ooh, chill goes up my spine.
Twitter Safety tweets out, We want to provide much-needed clarity around the actions we've taken with respect to two New York Post articles that were first tweeted this morning.
The images contained in the articles include personal and private information, like email addresses and phone numbers, which violate our rules.
Oh, that's it, huh?
Because, what is it?
I guess maybe one of these emails has some personal information.
I'm not even sure that they do.
I mean, I guess in some of the images you can see some personal information.
So that's why.
That's why they suppressed it, right?
Except that's obviously a lie because it contradicts the explanation they gave earlier in the morning.
When they blocked Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, Twitter wrote, We have determined that this account violated the Twitter rules, specifically for violating our rules against distribution of hacked material.
There's no evidence, first of all, that this was hacked material.
We were told that this explicitly was not hacked material.
But let's say it is.
First you're saying it's because it was hacked.
Then you're saying it's because it has personal information.
You know what I think?
I think that you guys wanted to suppress this information and you're making up the reason, ex post facto, as you go along.
That's what I think.
And now I think you hired some great crisis communications company because you realize that what you've done might be highly illegal.
And now not even the most libertarian of libertarians is defending you people because you have stolen our politics and our discourse You have completely taken it over as the public square with critical mass.
No one can beat you.
And you did that on fraud.
You did that by fraudulent means where you suggested, you told people as part of the agreement to use your services, that you'll be able to post things, you'll be able to read things.
You're a neutral platform exercising your liability protection in Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, which we've talked a lot about on this show and on Verdict and on other shows too.
You did all of that, and then it was all a fraud.
Because really what you are is political operatives.
You are publishers deciding what information people are going to get.
And that is simply unacceptable in the public sphere.
It's a very bad look.
You know what else is a bad look when you're losing your hair?
I think it's a terrible look.
Do you know that two out of three guys will experience some form of male pattern baldness by the time they're 35?
That's right.
The best way to prevent hair loss is to do something about it while you still have hair left.
Keeps offers generic versions of the only two FDA approved hair loss products out there You may have tried them before, but probably never for this price.
Prevention is the key.
Keeps treatments here typically take between four to six months to see results, so it's very important to act fast.
You know me.
I'm not a hulking Adonis of a man, necessarily.
I'm not an Olympic athlete.
One thing I've always had going for me in the ladies' department is I've got this head of hair.
So go check it out.
Find out why Keeps has more five-star reviews than any of its competitors and more than 100...
1,000 men trust Keeps for their hair loss prevention medication.
Keeps treatments start at just $10 a month.
That is very, very low price.
Totally worth it to keep your head of hair.
Plus, for a limited time, use your first month free.
If you are ready to take action and prevent hair loss, go to Keeps.com slash Knowles.
Receive your first month of Keeps treatment for free.
That is K-E-E-P-S dot com slash Knowles.
K-N-O-W-L-E-S. So Twitter is obviously lying about this.
Oh, it's because it was hacked.
Yeah, Twitter, it wasn't hacked.
Oh, it's because, yeah, it had private information.
Really?
Well, why didn't you say that in the first place?
Oh, yeah, we didn't communicate well.
Not great.
Not great.
Then Twitter added to their thread about how it was...
How it was including this private information.
They said, and as noted this morning, we also currently view materials included this as violations of our hacked materials policy.
Look, obviously this is BS too.
How about Melania Trump's telephone conversation?
That was really perfectly innocuous.
She just joked about how everyone was attacking her and how she had to do the Christmas decorations and how people were completely lying about the kids in cages issue.
Remember that?
That seemed like hacked material.
How come Twitter didn't suppress that?
The fake steel dossier that was cooked up by the Democrats.
Complete lies.
Demonstrable lies.
How come that wasn't suppressed?
That was going all around Twitter.
The Access Hollywood tape.
You remember that?
Where Trump is making jokes with Billy Bush?
That was the October surprise in 2016.
You remember that?
I don't think that was suppressed.
That was hacked.
That was private.
No, it's just obviously BS. Because Twitter got a lot of flack for not suppressing the President of the United States.
And so now they're going to try to throw the presidential election.
So big tech must be destroyed.
This is very important.
Some very ignorant, shallow-thinking left-wingers on social media are accusing conservatives of hypocrisy here.
Because they're saying, oh, now you like regulation.
Now you like big government.
Because you want to shut down big tech.
They don't understand the conservative position.
Now you like regulation.
Now you like...
Conservatives like just laws and their enforcement.
We like that.
We've always liked that.
We are not anarchists.
We're not libertarians.
Although, frankly, libertarians are getting on board with this too.
Why?
Because these companies are almost certainly violating the law.
We just went through a couple laws that they're violating.
And as a broader issue, they are undermining self-government through fraud.
We have a situation now where a few oligarchs control the flow of information.
They are the public square, which perhaps can work fine if they are a public square.
But when they pretend to be a public square and then decide to rip the rug out from under us and now are going to control that public square, we cannot permit that.
If we were in the old timey days in the 18th or 19th centuries and some oligarch came in to the actual public square, to the physical public square, and started putting tape on people's mouths and starting deciding who can speak and who can't speak.
We would not be able to tolerate that, simply as a matter of constitutional government.
The same thing is true here.
People say, try Parler.
I like Parler.
I have a Parler account.
There's no comparison.
Parler will never get the critical mass that Twitter has.
It's not Parler's fault.
It's just that...
The only reason Twitter is Twitter is because it got that critical mass.
And it got that critical mass through a fraud.
So Parler is good for what it's good for.
But we can't simply throw up our hands and say, well, Twitter is a private company.
Okay, well, this is our country.
This is our self-government.
And if we're going to allow a few highly ideological oligarchs to control our speech, which, by the way, in self-government is politics.
Speech and persuasion is politics in self-government.
If we're going to allow them to censor us, including our duly elected representatives, we are ceding self-government.
We are making it even clearer than it already is that we live in an oligarchy.
It's also not hypocritical to use Twitter to oppose Twitter.
It's not hypocritical to use these platforms to oppose these platforms.
Again, it all comes back to this issue.
They are the public square.
And the only way that you can advocate changing the public square is to be in the public square.
You have to do it.
Perfectly legitimate.
Even, by the way...
Even someone with as libertarian an inclination or someone as deeply conservative as Clarence Thomas agrees with us here.
Clarence Thomas has now weighed in on the issue of Section 230 protection with, you know, the publisher platform distinction.
Thomas writes...
When Congress enacted the statute, most of today's major internet platforms did not exist.
And in the 24 years since, we have never interpreted this provision.
But many courts have construed the law broadly to confer sweeping immunity on some of the largest companies in the world.
But the Supreme Court's never weighed in, and obviously the situation is very different now.
One need not feel any hypocrisy, any pangs of worry that we're now empowering the government to do something.
I love this is always the kind of silly, squishy Republican argument.
They say, well, we cannot permit the government to enforce the laws that are already on the books.
Because if we do that to stop the left from suppressing our speech, well, then when the left gets into government, they might suppress our speech.
Right.
They're already doing it.
It's happening now.
You're afraid that sometime in a hypothetical future, the left might do what they are currently doing now.
And for that reason, you don't want us to stop them from doing it now.
Doesn't make any sense.
Also, there's nothing principled about not enforcing the law.
Nothing principled whatsoever.
There was more lurid stuff, by the way, in this New York Post leak.
You know, we talked about creepy sex stuff yesterday.
There's a lot more creepy sex stuff that's been going on.
We will get to all of that creepy sex stuff.
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, before this creepy sex stuff comes, I just want to get out of here.
I just want to get away.
Well, fair enough.
Whether you want a new way to get around town or out in nature, even with the kids in tow, you've got to try rad power bikes.
Rad power bikes are a great way to get outdoors without getting hot or sweaty.
They're a ton of fun.
They're a cross between a traditional bike and a moped.
It doesn't require a special driver's license like a moped would.
You can go up to 20 miles per hour without pedaling.
You can get out.
You can get out and about without getting sweaty.
Rad power bikes are very affordable.
Most e-bikes usually start around, I don't know, $3,000.
Rad power bikes start at just $999.
Most of them are under $1,500.
Really cool, especially these days.
It makes a perfect gift for someone who loves being active and outdoors.
I really like it.
It's great as a hobby.
It's also great for your commute.
I mean, I really like these things.
Rad Power Bikes offers flexible financing for as low as 0% APR. It's pretty good.
Now for a limited time, you get a free accessory valued at up to $100 with the purchase of a bike.
That is a free gift of up to $100 in value with your purchase, plus free shipping to the lower 48 states.
To get this special offer, text the word NOLS, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, to 64,000.
That is K-N-O-W-L-E-S to 64,000.
NOLS to 64,000.
Some creepy sex stuff before we get to the mailbag.
As part of this New York Post expose...
It seems that there are now photos and videos of Hunter Biden in some compromising positions.
Hunter Biden with a crack pipe.
Hunter Biden filming sex scenes.
Yuck.
I mean, the photos look very bad.
I actually think this is a bad route to pursue, though.
I think this actually helps Biden, Joe, and Hunter because it's so pathetic.
It's so pathetic to see Hunter Biden with a cigarette hanging out of his teeth with some woman somewhere off screen or him smoking crack or whatever.
It's really pathetic in that it evokes pathos.
Many of us know people who have died from drug overdoses.
Probably all of us know people that are addicted to drugs in some way.
It's so pathetic that I think it actually evokes some sympathy for him.
I think we should avoid that and just stick on the creepy corruption, not the creepy sex stuff.
But speaking of creepy sex not involving the Biden family...
Katie Hill, who resigned in disgrace from Congress amid a sex scandal.
She was having a thruple with her husband and one of her staffers.
There were lurid photos of her posted everywhere.
Katie Hill tweeted out about ACB. Prim and proper, beautiful, glorious ACB. Katie Hill writes, I hate to be someone who judges women on their clothes, but I'm sorry.
ACB's outfits are all way too hands-madey.
Referring to that Margaret Atwood book that she probably hasn't read, but it was made into a TV show, so she should maybe watch that.
The Handmaid's Tale.
Now, they keep using this word hands-made because the illiterate liberals probably have never read the Gospel according to St.
Luke, where the word hands-made is uttered by the Virgin Mary, who says, I'm the hands-made of the Lord.
Let this be done to me according to his will.
And Mary becomes incarnate with the second person of the Trinity, Christ.
And this is a wonderful, wonderful moment.
But this is transformed by Margaret Atwood's Psychosexual Trash, this paperback book that became a TV show.
And now, hands-made is a bad term.
Why is Katie Hill calling her this?
Because she wore a red dress.
Women are now not allowed to wear red dresses, apparently.
I think if you gave reasonable people the choice between the sexual ethic of Katie Hill and of Amy Coney Barrett, I think they would probably choose the latter.
They took their creepy sex, though, during the hearings yesterday to another level when they asked about more and more sexual issues.
You see, some of these Democrat men were very worried That ACB was going to cut off the sexual revolution.
They began with the issue of IVF, in vitro fertilization, particularly from Democratic Senator Dick Blumenthal.
IVF treatment, and I'm not going to ask again, just this last time, criminalizing it.
Would it be constitutional?
I think there's a clear answer.
Senator, I've repeatedly said, as has every other nominee who sat in this seat, that we can't answer questions in the abstract.
That would have to be decided in the course of the judicial process.
Some legislature would actually have to do that, and then litigants would have to come to court.
There would have to be briefs and arguments and consultation with colleagues and opinion writing and consideration of precedent.
So an off-the-cuff reaction to that would just circumvent the judicial process.
Well, again, I'm disappointed.
I think Tracy would find that response somewhat chilling because she and thousands, maybe millions of women, potential parents, would be horrified to think that IVF treatment could be made criminal.
And I understand you're not answering the question.
Amy Barrett gave a good judicious answer here.
The simpler answer is, of course you can pass a law to outlaw IVF. Why do I say that?
Because there's no protection for IVF, this modern medical technology that has huge bioethical implications, some of which are very grisly.
There's no protection of that in the Constitution.
Where is the protection for IVF in the Constitution?
Show it to me.
It's right next to the protection for abortion and right next to the redefinition of marriage.
It's just not there.
And what our framers decided to do is to protect our right of self-government.
They would allow us to pass laws.
If you want to have IVF, you can pass a law, you have IVF. You want to not have IVF, you want to ban it, you pass a law, you can ban it.
Let's not forget, by the way, the thing with IVF is, in practice, it's often a pretty grisly process.
Sometimes, often actually, it involves selective abortion, because multiple embryos are implanted, and if all of them take, then you...
You might choose to, what is the phrase they use?
Reduce them, I think.
You have a reduction or something to that effect.
But it just means abortion.
You kill the embryo.
And in order to do IVF, in virtually all cases, you create a large number of embryos and then you just use them as you go and the rest you throw into a freezer.
So that's not a good thing either.
You don't want to just have a bunch of souls on ice for eternity.
Of course they're bioethical questions.
And Dick Blumenthal shocked.
Oh my gosh, are you saying that a free people have the right to debate this issue for themselves?
And I can't just impose my radical, creepy sex will on the American people?
Yeah, that's what we're saying.
Though Amy Barrett, of course, can say, well, it's a hypothetical.
I'm not going to answer that.
Then he got even creepier because he said, Judge Barrett.
If you, by your standards of, by the way, not even by your moral standards, by your standards of constitutional interpretation, you're saying that there's not a sacred constitutional right to condoms and the pill.
But, oh my gosh, Judge Barrett, this is horrifying because it means that now maybe some young women aren't going to pop the pill.
Loving involved interracial marriage and Griswold involves a ban on contraception, criminal ban on the use of contraceptives, which in turn also involves Eisenstadt v. Baird.
These are fundamental cases.
And I'm asking your legal position.
I want you to keep in mind how many people are listening and watching because they may take a message from what you say.
They may see what you say and be deterred from using contraceptives or may feel the fear that it could be banned.
Well, Senator Blumenthal, the position that I've taken is whether a question is easy or hard that I can't offer an answer to it.
And I would be surprised if people were afraid that birth control was about to be criminalized because I said to Senator Coen, You may be surprised, but...
You may be surprised, Judge Barrett, but I am very, very nervous that women will stop taking the pill, and then men will have consequences for sex.
I'm very...
You better not...
Oh, heaven forfend, Judge Barrett.
Some woman is convinced not to take birth control, and then men will actually have consequences for sex.
Oh, Judge Barrett.
You better not...
You better find the constitutional right to birth control pills.
Where's that one?
Article what?
Where?
That's right next to the constitutional right to IVF and the constitutional right to abortion, right?
And the redefinition of marriage, right?
That's all in the same section that was written in invisible ink, I think, right?
It's weird.
It's very weird to watch a grown man nervously badgering a woman because he fears on no basis whatsoever that she's going to outlaw birth control pills.
So that young girls hearing this might not keep popping those pills.
Very, very creepy.
But Dick Blumenthal is a very creepy guy.
To show you how pervasive this kind of thing is, probably listening to Dick Blumenthal, you think, oh my gosh, how did we get to the point in the country where we just started inventing rights in the Constitution?
We all went along with that as though that were the case.
How did we get to that point?
It's because the liberal establishment controls Everything.
Everything.
The administrative government.
Big technology, obviously.
The mainstream media.
Hollywood.
Education.
All levels of education.
They control everything.
And for decades, they control the judiciary.
They control it all.
And so, they force their will on you by redefining reality.
I mean, this is what political correctness is, right?
Right?
They are changing words in an attempt to change the way we perceive reality.
This can happen in the blink of an eye.
Webster's Dictionary.
As a result, we talked about this yesterday.
We touched on it at least a little bit.
There were some Democratic senators who were furious.
Cory Booker and Maisie Hirona specifically.
Amy Barrett used the phrase sexual preference.
They said this is very offensive to people who have unusual sexual preferences.
They said the proper term is orientation.
Now, what is orientation?
It's just a kind of way you're fixed, way you're set.
But a preference can be the same.
A preference can be innate.
In fact, I don't know of many preferences that are chosen.
A preference is something, I can't reason my way through it.
I just happen to prefer, I prefer chocolate ice cream.
I don't know why I didn't reason that.
I didn't choose that.
But yet these Democratic senators are saying the term sexual preference is offensive because it implies that gay people choose to be attracted to the same sex.
But it actually, it doesn't do that.
I mean, they don't understand the meaning of the word preference.
Within 24 hours, at most, you had the entire left, which was using the phrase sexual preference, within the past few weeks, no big deal.
Because the word went out that that's offensive, they all say it's offensive now.
The news reports say it's offensive.
They won't use that term.
All these different institutions, including the dictionary, Merriam-Webster's dictionary, included a definition of preference as orientation or sexual preference.
Synonymous.
Yesterday, they changed the definition to include the word offensive.
Because now they're listening to the left.
The people who put the Webster's Dictionary together heard the left come out and say, this is bad, change everything, and they secretly changed the dictionary.
That is the world we're living in.
We talk about George Orwell a lot.
There's a touch of George Orwell 1984.
There's almost more a touch of Aldous Huxley though, Brave New World.
This techno-dystopia that we're living in.
And you know what we all say?
I mean, even I say this sometimes.
Wow, I really like my iPhone.
Wow, I really like my iPad, whatever.
Wow, I really like my cheap, cool TV. Aren't things so much better?
Our technology is in a certain sense getting better, quicker, more computing power, and our politics is totally collapsing.
Our sense of self-government, our sense of the constitutional order, totally decaying.
And the technology has something to do with that.
That is not acceptable.
Because pretty soon what we're going to find ourselves in is a situation where we're distracted forever and ever by addictive apps.
We scroll, scroll, scroll all day drooling out of the side of our mouths.
And all of our political liberties, our traditions, our institutions will have been stolen from us while we were all too distracted by that black mirror.
You need to unplug a little bit from those things sometimes.
I'm not saying don't get your information.
I think it's very important to do that.
For instance, listening to certain podcasts or reading certain outlets.
You want to do that, but you want to be in control.
It's an age-old issue.
You want to have your possessions.
You do not want to be possessed by your possessions.
You don't want to be possessed by technology.
You need to develop good hobbies, for instance.
One of my favorite hobbies, as you know, is smoking cigars.
It probably is my single favorite hobby.
Whether you are working from home or just kicking back after a week of being an essential worker, we're all essential workers, there is no better way to relax than with a premium cigar.
I trust Thompson Cigars.
I have been using Thompson Cigars since I was 16 years old and my mother gave me a box of cigars for Christmas.
A box, by the way, that I still have some of.
With over a century in the business, these guys know what they're talking about.
They got the best prices, hands down.
They have the biggest brands, hands down.
They've got everything.
Names you've heard of, Macanudo, Monte Cristo.
Maybe names you haven't heard of quite as much, like Liga Privada, or like Armada, or like My Father, or I mean some of my favorite cigars.
There are over 12,000 different cigar options available with new in-demand brands added weekly.
I smoked one the other day from Thompson.
It was the Armada Man of War.
This is a little bit more of an expensive cigar.
If you bought it in a store, it would be like $50 a stick.
You get it on Thompson, I think it's like $20 a stick.
Oh my gosh, this thing blew me away.
Now, I don't smoke those kind of cigars every day, but for you, what you can do...
If you're like me, maybe sometimes you want a really top-shelf cigar.
Maybe sometimes you want your everyday smoke.
You've got to check out their bundles, their five-pack bundles.
They just know how to select these cigars.
Even me, I've been smoking cigars 15 years, half my life.
They're stills.
Thompson will send me cigars.
Think, oh, I haven't tried that.
All of a sudden, it'll become my new favorite cigar.
For a limited time, Thompson's offering 15% off orders over $75, or 20% off orders over $99, and they're already very low price.
To take advantage of these savings, go to ThompsonCigar.com.
Use promo code Knolls when you are ready to check out.
T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N, cigar.com.
Promo code Knolls.
By the way, thank you for subscribing to my YouTube channel.
We've got some cool new interviews coming out this week, including with my friend Amanda Milius about her new movie, The Plot Against the President.
You've got to go check that out.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
Was abortion common in the founding era, and did founders ever comment directly on this issue?
I've been unable to find any direct quotes, and the only book on abortion from the era uses the term to represent miscarriages.
Many thanks.
The thing that's difficult about this question is the term abortion.
Because when we talk about abortion, we're talking about a modern surgical procedure that did not exist back then.
So to even use it as kind of anachronistic.
Now, there have, for all of human history, been women who wanted to get rid of their pregnancy by killing the baby.
There have been women who wanted to miscarry, and sometimes they wanted to induce that miscarriage, and there have been men who have wanted that for women as well.
So there have always been kind of folk remedies, different sort of teas you would drink, different sorts of procedures and things, some of which are a little grisly, but some of which are also just kind of silly.
You know, now with modern medical technology, we just know those sorts of things couldn't be relied on to work very well.
The idea of a modern surgical abortion is anachronistic.
The idea of a legal modern surgical abortion is completely anachronistic and ridiculous.
And most importantly to this issue, the idea of a legal protection for abortion is preposterous.
Nobody in the founding era who's writing the Constitution would have believed that the Constitution protects abortion.
Most of them wouldn't have any real sense of what an abortion is.
Nobody for the vast majority of our history believed that that right existed.
Just because a version of something may have been practiced at a certain time does not mean that there's a constitutional right to it.
Actually, I'll give you a great example in one that the Democrats keep bringing up, which is Lawrence v.
Texas, which banned sodomy laws, laws that prohibit homosexual actions.
Now, these laws were on the books, I guess, as late as 2005.
Was anybody prosecuted under sodomy laws?
No, not really.
I don't think so.
Were people prosecuted under sodomy laws to any significant degree, even a century before that?
No, not really.
The role of sodomy laws, there was actually a feminist, Naomi Wolf, who just wrote a book about how people were killed under sodomy laws, and it turns out the thesis of her book was just completely wrong, and she got embarrassed in real time on a radio interview talking about it.
The purpose of these sodomy laws was to acknowledge a certain understanding of sexual ethics or morality.
The purpose of those laws were not to jail homosexuals or kill homosexuals or anything like that.
That's really not how they were practiced historically.
So, if you say that the Constitution does not protect the right to homosexual activity, which obviously it does not because there were sodomy laws on the books when the Constitution was ratified, if you say that the Constitution does not protect that kind of activity, Does that make you a homophobe?
Does that make you a bigot?
No, it means that you have the same view of the government that the founding fathers did, namely that the federal government is limited and bounded.
And there can be all sorts of laws at the state level, but by the way, even when you look at those state laws, you have to see how those laws were actually enacted, how they were enforced, what the purpose of them were.
Modern ideologues who are trying to radically reshape our country and our politics are counting on your ignorance.
That's what they're hoping for.
So that they can pretend that all these gay people are being executed for their sexual behavior.
It just doesn't happen.
It didn't happen.
As always, the reality of the situation is much more interesting than the shallow ideological lie that people are being told.
And the reason they're being told that, by the way, is to transform the politics.
If there were really...
The seeds of this leftist ideology that we now see today, you know, in the words of Pete Buttigieg, the modern judges, they understand the true meaning of the Constitution.
If that were so, they wouldn't have to transform it.
They wouldn't have to hide the reality of it from you.
Good question.
From Jeff.
Mr.
Knowles, I just wanted to let you know you have stepped up your segue game significantly over the past couple weeks.
I think you should require your advertisers to pay more since viewers and listeners are less likely to fast forward through the ads.
You know, on that point, I will say, I decided, because I got bored with the way the ads were going, so I decided I was going to challenge myself to see how smooth I could make those segues.
And, you know, listen, Jeremy Boring, he does great segues.
I really wanted to beat him, so thank you.
I'm glad that you appreciate it.
He goes on.
I do have a quick question as to why you and Mr.
Shapiro have completely opposite views on presidential polling.
Are you cherry-picking which polls you're looking at in order to be so upbeat about President Trump's chances of getting re-elected?
Well, first of all, I'm not saying I'm upbeat about it.
I think if the election were fair, were held fairly today, I would bet a small amount of money that he would win.
But I don't know that it's going to be held fairly.
I mean, I suspect it won't be held fairly because of widespread unsolicited mail-in voting, which we've never had in this country before.
And we have seen evidence that that could lead to fraud.
So I don't know that it's actually going to work out that well.
And I'm not, I wouldn't say bet the farm on President Trump winning.
But yeah, I do think Ben and I look at this differently, which is Ben trusts data.
You know, he actually, when I won an election bet in 2016, he wrote the check that he owed me for the bet.
And in the memo line, he said, for ignoring data.
But I just, I don't trust this kind of modeling.
I think Ben comes at these things from a little bit more the perspective of, say, political science.
He comes at it more from the perspective of the social sciences, which I just don't buy that much.
I don't really trust the social sciences much at all.
I think they're highly politicized, and I think that polls very often are used not as a way to take a measure of what the people are feeling, but as a way to form public opinion itself.
Because the social sciences came out of the progressive project in America, I just am a little more skeptical of it.
Not to say that they don't have a use.
I mean, Ben is right about a lot of things, and he's made some good predictions.
Thankfully, not when we had money on the line, but he's made good predictions.
But I come at it from a different angle, because I think the social sciences very largely are kind of bogus.
From Wolfgang.
Dear winner of political bets.
That's actually very funny that that followed.
I am 25 years old.
A majority of my friends and colleagues are on the leftist spectrum.
I doubt I could convince anyone to vote red, but I could potentially sway a few people to stay home.
My question is, given that I've already voted straight Republican, donated to the Trump campaign, is it ethical for me to advocate for voting third party or sitting out the election?
Thank you.
Of course.
Of course it is.
You can give your opinion.
You truly believe, you honestly believe it would be better for the country if your friends did not vote for Joe Biden.
You think it would be better if Trump wins the election.
Ways to do that would be to get your friends to vote for, I don't know, some third party person or Kanye or something or not to vote at all.
There's nothing intrinsically good or virtuous about voting.
If you're ignorant and you're voting, that's actually kind of a bad thing, right?
Because you haven't informed yourself on the issues.
So you're just kind of skewing this process of self-government without any reason.
If you are voting for a very wicked candidate, there's nothing good about voting.
There's nothing virtuous about that.
If I go into the polling place and I see that there's, you know, super Stalin Mao Hitler Mussolini on the ballot, I don't know.
I probably shouldn't vote for that guy.
If you do vote for that guy, that's a bad thing.
It's not good just because you voted.
Voting is an instrument toward good government.
Absolutely, you should tell your friends to vote for Kanye.
Frankly, I'm tempted to vote for Kanye.
If I weren't voting for Trump, I would certainly vote for Kanye.
From Dan.
Hey, Michael.
I need your wisdom on how to define my relationship.
Okay.
My girlfriend only sleeps with seven out of every 100 guys she meets.
I guess you could say she's mostly faithful.
Is that the proper way to view her commitment in the eyes of liberals?
Thanks.
Yes, it is.
I think, actually, the most precise way to describe your girlfriend is that she's fiery but mostly faithful.
She's clearly fiery.
I mean, those, you know...
Seven out of a hundred, that's a significant minority of people.
I mean, you know, that's a lot of people.
It's very fiery.
But mostly faithful.
From Chris, I noticed some drivel being repeated openly even in a few news articles about the settlers from Europe giving Native Americans disease-infested blankets as an act of genocide.
Why are schools teaching this?
From what I know of history, the settlers, though much rougher than our civilized society, didn't harbor a genocidal bend toward the Native Americans.
They may have desired to live amongst them.
In fact, during this period, I doubt either the Native Americans or the Europeans knew about pathogens beyond the outcomes that happened seemingly sent from God to punish.
This lie appears more and more each circle around the sun.
It might be nice to hear your thoughts on this.
Well, yeah, I'll temper that actually a little bit.
During wars between the settlers and the Native Americans, they used all sorts of terrible weapons.
It would seem including some bioweapons, some kind of primitive bioweapons.
So I'm not discounting that at all.
I don't think you need to discount those incidents to defend the settlers and to say that this country isn't just hopelessly rotten to the core.
I think it actually diminishes the humanity of the Native Americans when we treat them like they are less than human, right?
When we treat them as though they're not dignified men who were engaged in battles over real things.
Whenever I hear that we need to give the land back to the Indians, I always say, well, which Indians?
Do we give the land back in the Southwest to the Comanche?
Okay, we can give them back to the Comanche, but the Comanche took it from the Apache.
So do we give it back to the Comanche or to the Apache?
Or do we give it back to the people who were in it before?
If we were to give land back in Central or South America, would we give it back to the Aztecs or would we give it back to the people that the Aztecs conquered?
The people whose hearts they ripped out while they were still alive.
Are we going to give back the land in New York to the Iroquois?
Are we going to give back the land of New York to the victims of the Iroquois?
Who the Iroquois also practiced ritual cannibalism, by the way.
This term, by the way, the term cannibalism, you know, comes from carib.
It comes from the New World.
It was a word introduced by these explorations in the New World.
Who do we give them to?
When, you know, we're about to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock.
When the settlers on the Mayflower, when the Pilgrims landed, they had a difficult relationship with the Indians.
They saw a bellicose party of Indians come out.
They raised their guns.
They didn't know how this was going to work out.
They found some corn that had been stored by the Indians.
They took it so that they would not starve.
They then made peace with the Indians.
They made peace in particular with an Indian chief named Massasoit.
Or with the people, the Massasoit people.
When they formed this alliance, this led to a whole broadening of the Indian nation in the area.
There was a good alliance that was made between real men who understood real diplomacy and politics.
So you had the settlers and the Indians getting along fairly well.
Though the Indians actually told the settlers about another group of Indians that were going to attack them.
They banded together and then attacked them.
Things broke down, in particular because of one Indian who was called King Philip.
He took an English name, King Philip, who misunderstood the way that the settlers were behaving, particularly with regard to his family, and came out and attacked them and basically led to the breaking down of peace there.
As always, I mentioned this earlier, the real history is much more interesting and much fairer to all of the people involved than the ideological shallow version of this.
Was there war between the settlers and Indians?
Yes.
Was it always war?
Was it a genocide?
No, but there was war that broke out.
And the victors of that war went on and formed the rest of the civilization.
That's the way the world works.
You might not like that that's the way the world works, but that's the way that every single civilization, including the Indian civilizations, have worked since the dawn of time.
And I think we ought to at least show the Native Americans enough respect to treat them like men, like everywhere else, The rest of the world over.
All right, that's our show.
I can't wait, by the way, to do a show on the Mayflower.
That is going to be a lot of fun because you've heard a lot about the 1619 Project.
We'll have to focus on the 1620 Project.
But not yet.
We're going to have to take a break.
Have a good weekend.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you Monday.
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
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.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Assistant director, Pavel Wadowski.
Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.
Audio mixer, Robin Fenderson.
Hair and makeup, Nika Geneva.
And production assistant, Ryan Love.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
If you prefer facts over feelings, aren't offended by the brutal truth, and you can still laugh at the insanity filling our national news cycle, well, tune in to The Ben Shapiro Show.
We'll get a whole lot of that and much more.
▲
Export Selection