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Jan. 11, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
50:48
Ep. 677 - The “Free Speech” Myth

Social media boots Trump, the Internet bans conservative apps, and Biden/Harris promise to remake America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump has been kicked off of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and most other internet platforms.
A handful of oligarchs in Silicon Valley have the power and the willingness to censor the duly elected sitting president of the United States.
And conservatives let it happen.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, for now.
I guess we're still on for now.
I feel as though we're on.
Who knows?
This might cut out at any minute.
Judging by the way social media are going.
My favorite comment, though, until then, from Friday, is from user 115, who says, So when Kamala Harris raises money to bail out criminals arrested in violent riots, she is not inciting violence.
But when Trump says go home peacefully and be responsible, he is guilty.
Yes, that's the way that it works.
That is the way that the new standards work.
And it's obviously the left's fault, and the left is clamping down very hard right now, and it is legitimately threatening conservatives' ability to participate in our republic.
However, conservatives let it happen.
Conservatives got this thing wrong from the beginning, this debate over free speech, this debate over censorship, this debate over all manner of these questions, and we're paying the price right now.
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Big clampdown going on right now on conservatives on social media.
And it's important to remember the history that conservatives have had with social media.
Social media is the reason that conservatives were ascendant for much of the last 10 years.
Because before that, we were shut out of the mainstream media.
Even when we did manage to get presidents elected, they were pretty liberal, like George Bush, for instance, or the other George Bush.
Social media allowed conservatives to have a voice when we had been shut out of the TV networks, when we'd been shut out of the newspapers, when we'd been shut out of Hollywood.
The new media gave us that kind of freedom, and now they're taking that freedom away.
The clampdown that's going on right now is pretty significant in that basically every prominent right winger on social media is losing lots and lots and lots of followers.
And when people complain about this, it seems sort of petty.
It seems like a vanity contest.
Oh no, you lost 30,000 Twitter followers back.
Boohoo for you.
I've got real problems.
But I think actually that's sort of why big tech is pursuing this strategy.
Because it sounds petty, but it is significant.
Because if you take away conservatives' followers, all of a sudden conservatives no longer have a voice.
And it doesn't just affect some pundit, and it doesn't just affect some elected representative.
It affects all conservatives who can't get our voice out there.
That's what they're betting on.
Jake Tapper came out and he said, I don't know how many Twitter followers I've lost because I don't pay attention to that because I'm an adult, which is not true.
Jake Tapper has bragged about his Twitter followers in the past, but that's not even the point.
Tapper hasn't lost any Twitter followers.
Actually, they've increased significantly over the past few days.
Whereas every prominent conservative just about has lost a lot, up to and including the president who lost his entire voice on social media.
Why does Jake Tapper gain followers?
Why is Twitter gaming their system to give him a larger audience?
Because Jake Tapper is a submissive vessel for the liberal establishment.
So obviously they're going to reward him and then he's going to continue to do their bidding.
Whereas for conservatives, we're not going to do that and so Twitter won't either.
Twitter's ridiculous excuse to For the clampdown, up to and including the man that the American people chose to be president, at least until January 20th, that guy's the duly elected president.
Twitter says...
To clear up confusion about fluctuations in follower counts.
Fluctuations.
It's just going down, by the way.
It's not like going up 50,000 and then down.
It's going down.
To clear up the confusion, in order to prevent spam, we regularly challenge accounts to confirm details like email and phone number.
Until that info is confirmed, these accounts are not included in follower counts.
That's obviously untrue.
What Twitter is saying is, yeah, look, we think this happens every so often.
First of all, we've never seen this happen before, and it's not happening evenly.
It's only happening to conservatives.
But they're saying, look, what happens is there are a lot of accounts.
We don't know if they're real accounts or not.
So we just take all of them out of the follower counts, and then as people confirm their details, then all of a sudden we add them back in.
But if that were true, Then all the conservatives, I guess everybody, including liberals, their follower counts would drop dramatically and then slowly increase as people confirm those details.
That's not what's happening.
The follower counts are steadily decreasing, but only for conservatives.
And the only time it's not steady is when you're talking about the President of the United States and associated accounts, which have been shut down by some hipster-looking radical oligarch in Silicon Valley named Jack Dorsey, who runs Twitter.
Now, you might say, okay, well, you have no right to use Twitter's platform.
Twitter's a private company, after all.
Sort of.
We'll get into that in a second.
What very often liberals and squishy conservatives, fake conservatives, have said in recent years is, make your own Twitter.
Oh, come on.
You have no right to use Jack Dorsey's platform.
Make your own Twitter.
Yeah, okay, maybe Dorsey and Zuckerberg and Google have conquered the entire public square and they now control discourse in our republic.
But look, private company, they can do whatever they want.
There are many problems with this argument, but the main one, the most obvious problem with this argument is you can't make your own Twitter.
When they say go make your own Twitter, they won't let you make your own Twitter.
Dan Bongino did go make his own Twitter.
He called it Parler.
And he put it up there, and then when Twitter started censoring conservatives, a lot of conservatives went over there, and then Google and Apple came out, and they said, we're not going to allow Parler on our operating systems.
They're not going to be in the App Store.
So I guess if you've got it installed, good for you for now, but that's it.
It's over.
Google and Apple control 99% of the mobile operating system market share.
99%.
If they kick you out of their stores, you're gone from cell phones.
So they won't let you make your own Twitter.
Okay, well, hold on.
You can still access Parler through the web browser on your phone, can't you?
Sure, you can't use the app, but you have no right.
Google and Apple, private companies, sort of.
So you have no right to force your app into their app store.
Just go on the web browser.
Well, that's what Parler said they would do.
And guess what?
Amazon Web Services, the web host, said that Parler is not allowed to even have a website.
If you go to parlor.com right now, chances are it will not load.
Now, Dan, friend, friend of the show, says that he's got a backup plan.
I hope Parler is back online quickly.
But how long before that?
Web server says, no, we're not going to host you either.
This happened to Gab.
Gab was this alternative to Twitter that came up before Parler did.
Same thing.
Kicked out of the app stores, kicked off their web hosting, their domain registrar, GoDaddy.
They couldn't even get the website.
So all of a sudden we go from build your own Twitter.
Come on, just build your own Twitter.
To, come on, build your own mobile operating system.
To build your own cell phone.
To build your own web servers.
To build your own domain registrar.
To build your own internet.
To, I guess, build your own government.
Is that the end of it?
Oh, wait a second.
That's what we should have been doing the whole time.
We should have been engaging in politics so that we could wield political systems when the people gave us power.
And the fact that we did not do that on the right is the fault of conservatives.
You know, we stopped engaging in politics.
And part of the reason for this is that we took expressions, like Andrew Breitbart's famous expression, When he said politics is downstream of culture, that's obviously true to a degree, but we took an expression like that as an excuse not to engage in politics.
We took it as an excuse to say, well, no, government, it's always bad whenever government does anything.
And that's why you need to elect us so that we won't do anything that you want us to do.
And we need to let big business run roughshod over our culture.
Because we've exclusively got to focus on the culture and not on politics.
Well, look where that's gotten us.
As if, by the way, there were some totally distinct line between culture and politics.
There obviously isn't.
Culture affects politics.
Movies and TV and books and art affects politics.
And politics affects culture.
We know that.
Conservatives are willing to admit that in our most candid moments, right?
When conservatives talk about the disastrous policies of LBJ and the Great Society, all those welfare programs that trapped people in generations of poverty, That was politics affecting culture, wasn't it?
Thomas Sowell writes about this all the time when he says black Americans were doing a whole lot better before the Great Society and then the Great Society comes in and all of a sudden they start doing much worse.
What changed?
Did the movies change?
I guess a little bit.
Did the art change?
Yeah, sure.
No, what changed is the government policy.
Obviously, politics can shape culture.
And I think it's just a recourse for people who, in a cowardly way, don't want to engage in the political system.
Who don't want to go in and say, no, big tech, you don't get to do that.
We're going to break you up.
We're going to break you up under antitrust laws.
We're going to break you up because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
We're going to break you up because of the fraud that you've engaged in.
This was so predictable.
This was so predictable.
They had been signaling this for months.
The minute that Twitter put a fact check on the president's tweet, I thought it's only a matter of time before they kick him off.
The fact check was so ridiculous.
You remember, Trump said, I think we won the election.
And then Twitter says, this claim is disputed.
But they didn't really mean this claim is disputed.
Any claim on social media could be disputed.
And if a claim is disputed, that means that the counter-claim is disputed, too.
But when Biden said, we won the election, they didn't put a claim that said, this claim is disputed, too.
Obviously, that claim was disputed by Trump.
They had picked a side.
Well, okay, fair enough.
You...
Questions of free speech and censorship, I suppose people can pick a side.
But are we comfortable?
Whatever you think about the election, whatever you think about Joe Biden, whatever you think about Donald Trump, ask yourself this.
Are you really comfortable with a handful of radical left-wing oligarchs in Silicon Valley, billionaires, censoring the duly elected president?
I did not elect Jack Dorsey.
I did not elect Mark Zuckerberg.
And conservatives helped this happen.
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Conservatives are largely responsible for this.
The left is, I don't want to victim blame.
The left is the aggressor here.
Conservatives let it happen.
How did we let it happen?
Well, first of all, we had four years of the Trump administration and two years of unified government to attack big tech, bring them down to size.
We didn't do it.
Do you know what we did instead?
We called in the big tech executives and then the legislators got really good sound bites on TV yelling at the big tech executives and they got really good campaign commercials out of it and then nothing happened.
And then Mark Zuckerberg goes on TV and he says, yes, we have to do better.
Oh, we will.
Yes.
Oh, this was bad and we'll do better.
And he's obviously lying, right?
He's obviously not telling the truth because they didn't do better.
They got a lot worse.
At least Jack Dorsey, to his credit, he's never even pretended to care.
Jack Dorsey looks like hipster Rasputin with his beard and he basically says, I don't care about any of you guys.
So we let that happen.
But the problem's even deeper than that.
And it's going to take a lot of soul-searching on the right.
Republicans have been shilling for big business for decades now.
For decades.
Really starting, I guess, in the 70s, but really ramping up in the 80s and 90s and 2000s.
Conservatives have been shilling for giant multinational corporations that hate our culture, that ship our jobs overseas, that don't give a damn about this country.
They've embraced this line, build your own Twitter.
Oh, you can never tell Mark Zuckerberg what to do.
He has his sacred right to censor the president.
It's his platform.
We shilled.
We made an idol out of the free market and a boogeyman out of big government.
Now, am I saying that I don't like free markets?
No, I think the free market is wonderful.
I think it is one of the most brilliant mechanisms ever devised and discovered that is conducive to human flourishing.
But it is not the moral arbiter in my political philosophy that If, if the free market, if the invisible hand of the free market and the morality of the free market tells me that I've got to let Mark Zuckerberg censor the duly elected president, then something's gone wrong in that ideology.
Same goes for big government.
We made this huge boogeyman at a big government such that we ended up defending big business.
This is not what the libertarians of the 1960s talked about.
The young conservative writer Saurabh Sharma posted a pretty funny meme the other day.
It was about how libertarians in the 60s, like Barry Goldwater, said, we're against big everything.
We're against big government.
We're against big monopolies.
We're against big corporations.
We realize that that kind of unrestrained power, unrestrained, there's the key, is what is the threat to liberty.
Some conservatives embraced small government.
There is no small government in America.
There cannot be small government.
You cannot govern a nation that spans not just an entire continent, but beyond a continent.
To Hawaii, to Alaska, to the Philippines, to Guam, to all of our overseas interests.
Do you know that we have something called AFRICOM? Have you heard of AFRICOM? That's the United States African Command.
Last I checked, we don't have a state in Africa.
Why do we have something called AFRICOM? Because we have a massive empire all over the world.
And you might say, well, that's bad and we've got it.
Okay, fine.
All I'm saying is you don't govern that country with small government.
You can, however, govern that country with limited government.
Those are not the same thing.
Limited government means you are restraining the powers.
You don't let the government do whatever it wants to do capriciously, arbitrarily.
Well, that's good.
You got to rein that in.
Absolutely.
But don't just give a blank check to big business.
Big business is just as capricious and dangerous as big government.
Actually, more so because there's no accountability whatsoever when Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey want to censor the people's representative.
At the same time that this was going on, the left was pursuing a similar policy.
So what the right was doing was shrinking the legitimate realm of politics, saying we actually can't question Mark Zuckerberg's behavior.
Private company, business good, government bad.
At the same time, the left was going in and also shrinking the realm of politics.
In the 70s, these awful, screechy second-wave feminists had this expression, the personal is the political.
What they meant by that is that personal behaviors, the way a husband relates to his wife, the way you relate to your kids, the way you educate your kids, that's all open to public scrutiny.
While at the same time, political questions get taken out of politics.
So a way to kind of bring this to earth and give a good example is abortion.
Abortion, highly controversial political issue.
Obviously, it's not addressed in the constitution.
The people have a right to debate and decide, do we want to permit the killing of a million babies a year in the womb or do we want to outlaw it?
Or do we want to outlaw it after 10 weeks?
Or do we want to outlaw it after 20 weeks?
Or do we, whatever, right?
That's a political question.
And then what the left said with Roe versus Wade is that they had the Supreme Court invent a fictional constitutional right to abortion.
So while everything is becoming really political, they take a very important political question, remove it from the realm of politics.
So in that way, the political realm will shrinking, the private realm growing, private realm taking over these political questions.
And who sets the rules?
Jack Dorsey.
Don Jr., to me, Nearly, he nearly got this exactly right.
He observed something that was very true and he just missed a couple words.
He tweeted out, big tech has totally eliminated the notion of free speech in America.
I think a lot of people feel that way right now.
It's not quite true, but it's close.
It's not that big tech has totally eliminated the notion of free speech in America.
It's that big tech has totally eliminated the American notion of free speech.
Let me ask you a question.
Is speech in America today freer or less free than it was in the past?
What do you think?
I think most people right now, most conservatives are going to say, well, speech is much less free.
We used to be able to speak more freely.
I'm not so sure about that.
Is speech today more or less free than it was in the 50s?
Well, for conservatives, I guess it's less free, right?
You know, now if you wave an American flag, you can be kicked out of school.
If you wear a Make America Great Again hat, you can actually be suspended from school.
So it's less free.
But it's more free today for communists.
In the 1950s, we had something called the Smith Act, through which hundreds of communists were prosecuted for their associations, for their beliefs, for their free speech.
In the 1950s, you had people who expressed communist political views.
They were blacklisted.
They couldn't work anymore.
So today, speech is less free for conservatives, more free for communists.
How about the 1790s?
In the 1790s, we had the Alien and Sedition Act.
There were a lot of aspects to this law, but if you were to criticize the government wrongly, if you were to lie and criticize the government, slander the government, you could be prosecuted for that.
So today...
Speech is much more free for dishonest critics of the federal government than it was in the 1790s, but it's much less free for conservatives.
Go a little further back.
Go back even before the Declaration of Independence.
Go back to the 1620s, earliest days of our country, you know, after the pilgrims came here.
There was a colonist by the name of Thomas Morton.
Thomas Morton He wrote poems and sundry verses, according to then-Governor William Bradford, that were lascivious.
They were verses that were kind of like sexy.
You know, he wrote some sort of sexy poems.
Governor Bradford marooned him on an island and banished him to Britain.
Do you think that speech is more free or less free today for people who want to write sexy poems?
Probably more free for them, but less free for conservatives.
The aspect of this social media purge, of this battle over political correctness or wokeism or big tech tyranny or whatever term you want to use, Everyone thinks it's about free speech and censorship.
It's not.
It's not.
At all times, in all societies, some speech is permitted and some speech is censored.
What it really is about is a fight between competing standards.
The conservative, the old standard, where you're allowed to wave the flag but not the hammer and sickle.
Or the new standard, where you're allowed to wear the Che Guevara shirt but not the MAGA hat.
That's the competition right now.
That's the debate.
Which standard are we going to live under?
And the more we talk about free speech absolutism, we don't censor any speech, the more we talk about that, we're actually playing into the left's hands.
Because they know there's got to be some censorship.
There's always got to be some censorship.
You're not allowed to say whatever.
No society has ever permitted that.
Least of all the United States.
You can't preach sedition.
You can't preach fraud.
You can't preach fighting words.
You can't preach threats.
There's got to be some censorship.
Which standard is going to reign?
Which is going to reign?
Right now it's not looking good.
It's really not looking good for us here.
I mean, as I referred to earlier, conservatives are being clamped down on social media.
We are losing tens of thousands of our audience by the day.
It's not because people are unsubscribing.
It's because big tech is limiting our reach.
Then when we try to go to other platforms to get the message out so that we can communicate with one another, they shut those down too.
How long before they come after us?
How long before they kick these shows off of social media?
It could be days.
I hope it's not.
I hope we get to stay on.
But it could be days.
They've already tried shenanigans.
And then how long before...
We're kicked off of the internet.
I don't know.
This is going to go through a period of pain right now, and we've got to be very careful.
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It's the only way that we can fight back and get a voice out.
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Become a member.
Remember, we'll be right back with a lot more.
We have got to ditch these shallow slogans like free speech absolutism.
Or these shallow ideas like, we don't want to censor anything.
I want to censor threats.
I think we should censor threats.
I think we all agree with that.
I want to censor fighting words.
I think we all agree with that.
I want to censor fraud.
I think we all agree with that.
I want to censor sedition.
I think most of us agree with that, don't we?
I think so.
I want to censor ideas that undermine the very basis of the country, the philosophical basis of America.
Conservatives always agreed with that.
Now, I don't know, maybe it's more split.
Conservatives used to agree with the idea that we shouldn't be able to desecrate the American flag because it's an incoherent act.
You're not allowed to claim First Amendment protections as your justification for burning the American flag, which is a symbol of the entire country, including your First Amendment protections.
It doesn't make sense.
In recent years, we've taken a much more permissive stance.
What's it gotten us?
Not very far, not very far.
Big tech used this excuse of the Capitol riot to clamp down on us.
So, If the riot had not happened, I think they would have eventually found something else.
I think they've been looking for an excuse for a long time.
And they've done it to some people, right?
They kick Alex Jones off the internet.
And no one really says boo.
Some of us did.
I mean, at the time, I said it was a very bad thing.
But most people didn't care.
Because Alex Jones, he's that crazy guy who talks about how they're turning the frickin' frogs gay.
Remember that?
Which, you know what's funny?
Of all the things that Alex Jones has said, some of which are a little more out there than others, the thing about the gay frogs actually turned out to be true.
I looked it up one day.
There was some study, I think it was between Yale and the EPA, that some chemicals in the water had been making frogs hermaphroditic.
So actually, it's not that they were turning the frickin' frogs gay, they were turning them trans.
Alex Jones was actually too reserved in his take on things.
Neither here nor there.
Very few people spoke out for Alex Jones.
Now they're taking off the president.
Even the New York Times, which has gone so insane, even Kevin Roos, the technology columnist at the New York Times, published a column.
They said, man, this is bad.
This is at least very scary that this amount of power resides in the hands of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and these unaccountable billionaires.
But they're going to keep using this.
They're going to use the Capitol Hill riot as the excuse to shut us all up.
And you're going to have squishy fake Republicans, guys like Mitt Romney or Arnold Schwarzenegger, come out.
Remember, Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California.
He basically governed like a Democrat.
He wasn't particularly strong.
They're going to come out and use any manner of hyperbole to...
Cram this narrative down our throats.
Schwarzenegger just came out.
He posted a video comparing the Capitol Hill riot to the Nazis in Kristallnacht.
I grew up in Austria.
I'm very aware of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.
It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out in 1938 by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.
Wednesday was the day of broken glass right here in the United States.
The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol.
But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol.
They shattered the ideals we took for granted.
They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy.
They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.
Is that so, Arnold?
Last I checked, during Kristallnacht, rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland.
They murdered at least 91 Jews, very likely many more.
7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
And during the Capitol Hill riot, one of the pro-Trump rioters, Ashley Babbitt, was shot and killed by police.
And a police officer sadly died.
And a rioter took photos messing up Nancy Pelosi's office.
And some other fellow took a podium and posed for funny pictures with a podium.
Both bad things.
I'm not saying that either of those events, or, you know, Kristallnacht or the Capitol, right?
I'm not defending either of those events.
Not on the same level.
Very different.
Torching hundreds of synagogues, deporting tens of thousands of people, killing lots and lots of people, damaging 7,000 businesses.
Different.
Very different.
Not every bad thing is the Holocaust.
This should be emblazoned on every debate stage, on every camera that films a political commentator or a politician.
I wish people would take this to heart.
Not every bad thing is the Holocaust.
Idiots compare bad things to the Holocaust all the time because they don't have any other historical perspective.
So the two things you'll hear, everything is either the Holocaust or the fall of Rome.
I suppose some things are like the Holocaust and the fall of Rome, in some ways, but very few.
There are other historical events.
And you know, Schwarzenegger was not alone in this kind of hyperbole.
AOC, everyone's favorite darling socialist congresswoman, went on television and said, look, you think that, you know, it was a demonstrator who died and then a police officer died later from wounds and apparently some other medical condition, but it's sort of unclear.
No, it wasn't that.
And then I think three other people just happened to be around the protest and had heart attacks, things like that.
Obviously not from the violence.
But regardless, five people, four of whom were demonstrators, three of whom then died from their own medical emergencies.
Okay, very, very sad, right?
AOC took that and somehow read that as nearly half of Congress almost dying.
Well, you know, I absolutely believe that impeachment should be scheduled for several reasons.
One, of course, our main priority is to ensure the removal of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
Every minute and every hour that he is in office represents a clear and present danger, not just to the United States Congress, but frankly, to the country.
But in addition to removal, we're also talking about complete barring of the president or rather of Donald Trump I don't think that we did.
I don't think nearly half of the House almost died.
I don't think nearly any member of the House almost died.
I don't think any member of the House was even injured.
That's just a complete lie.
It's just completely made up.
AOC is very good at this.
You might call it the big lie.
AOC is very good.
That's a phrase, by the way, that you're going to be hearing a lot of left-wingers now referring to.
Like, for instance, because Joe Biden has been comparing Republican politicians to Joseph Goebbels because Joe Biden is a liar and an idiot and a cynic and a hack and a very, very, very bad man.
And so they're all going to call everyone Nazis, and then AOC is going to come out and lie and say, oh, half the members of Congress almost died.
None of them.
The last time that members of Congress almost died like that was not the Capitol Hill riot.
It was 2017 when a Bernie bro shot up the congressional baseball game and very nearly killed Steve Scalise.
And other members of Congress.
Steve Scalise really was close to death, but other guys, Rand Paul was hiding out, right?
Rand Paul could have been hit.
Other people too.
That story disappeared from the news.
You didn't hear about the Nazi Democrats and all these sorts of things because that was not helpful to their narrative.
So even though the congressional baseball game shooting was much, much, much, much, much more dangerous to members of Congress, that one disappeared.
And you didn't see the hand-wringing and all of these sorts of hysterical calls for, for instance, the impeachment of the president.
Why do they want to impeach the president?
He's going to leave office in what?
Eight days or something?
Ten days?
Why do you want to impeach him?
Because they don't want him to be able to run for office again.
Why don't they want him to run for office again?
If this guy's such a failed president, he never would have a chance, right?
Wrong.
They are not doing this because they believe that Donald Trump is very, very weak and Joe Biden is very, very popular.
Quite the opposite.
They are not shutting up every conservative on social media and trying to legally bar the president from running for office again because they think that he could never get a lot of votes, that he could never win, that he's not popular.
That's not it at all.
Raises a lot, a lot of eyebrows.
Moreover, if we're told that now because President Trump said, hey, attend a rally in D.C. to support me and the Make America Great Again movement, but don't become violent, be very peaceful, go home if you're getting violent, don't be violent.
If we're told that that is an incitement to violence that is worthy of impeachment, what do we make of Kamala Harris who actively encouraged the BLM riots that burned down cities coast to coast and killed dozens of people over the summer?
I know that there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States.
I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks.
That's right.
But they're not going to stop.
They're not going to stop.
This is a movement, I'm telling you.
They're not going to stop.
And everyone beware, because they're not going to stop.
They're not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they're not going to stop after Election Day.
And that should be, everyone should take note of that on both levels.
That this isn't, they're not going to let up and they should not.
And we should not.
They're not going to let up and they should not and we should not.
They had been burning cities and burning businesses and killing people all around the country to achieve a political end.
And Kamala Harris encouraged it.
The equivalent would be if Mike Pence came out after the Capitol.
Let's say, for instance, that the Capitol Hill riot was much deadlier than it was.
Let's say that they burned down, I don't know, the Capitol building, or they burned down some other government buildings, or they killed dozens of people.
And then the next day, Mike Pence came out.
And instead of condemning it, like all the Republicans did, including the president, let's say Pence came out and he said, hey, they're not going to stop.
Those guys, they're not going to stop.
Nor should they stop.
And we shouldn't stop either.
They're never going to stop.
So give us power.
Could you imagine?
No, you can't imagine.
Because Republicans don't do that sort of thing.
But the left does.
And they've somehow, because they've just taken over the whole culture, and they've taken over the politics, and they've taken over the language that we use, They have somehow convinced us that the Capitol Hill riot, bad as it was, was worse than months and months of BLM death and destruction across the country.
And the apparently elected vice president-elect Kamala Harris encouraging it.
Kamala Harris, when people got arrested for burning down Minnesota, do you know what she did?
She posted a fundraising link to their bail fund.
Some of that money was used to bail out a child rapist, a guy who raped an eight-year-old girl.
She's apparently going to be the vice president.
Imagine that.
And we're hand-wringing about, oh, Donald Trump, well, he should have condemned the violence eight minutes prior.
He waited five minutes too long.
Give me a break.
Goodness gracious, people.
Somehow, some people are still sort of listening to Mitt Romney.
Well, he lectures all of us.
Romney marched with these guys, BLM and Antifa.
He marched with them.
Well, no, he only marched with the peaceful BLM protesters, not the violent BLM and Antifa rioters.
First of all, didn't see a whole lot of a difference if you look at the rubble of the cities the day after.
But do you think that that subtle distinction is being appreciated on the right?
Between the 99.999% of peaceful demonstrators and the.001% of people who stole a podium and messed up Nancy Pelosi's desk?
I don't think so.
Not the only ones.
Slate, former CNN contributors, other prominent leftists, current CNN anchors, all promoting violence.
All promoting violence.
These are the BLM stuff and the Capitol Hill stuff.
They are analogous, except in one way, two ways.
One, BLM was much deadlier, much more ruinous, caused much more damage to businesses and people's lives.
But two, BLM got something out of it.
BLM got political concessions out of it.
BLM helped shape the Democratic Party agenda on defunding the police.
Talk about, you know, attacking the heart of our democracy.
Law and order is the heart of our democracy, right?
The police are the law enforcement agency that go in and defend the American system.
That seems like a threat to me.
The left got something out of it.
The right didn't get anything out of the misguided and very, very bad Capitol Hill riot.
Slate comes out, quote, nonviolence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence.
They tweeted that out June 4th, 2020.
This was during BLM. Nonviolence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence.
Imagine if the Daily Wire the next day tweeted out, you know, nonviolence is good for the Make America Great Again movement.
But violence is important too.
Should have taken a few more podiums.
Should have smashed a few more windows.
Maybe worse.
That would be the equivalent.
Slate still has its Twitter account.
If the Daily Wire ever tweeted anything like that, I assure you not only would our social media accounts be gone, our web hosting would be gone too.
The president tweets out, be peaceful.
They take away his Twitter account.
And Facebook access.
Other leftists, CNN's Riza Aslan, who is actually a cannibal.
He's actually eaten human brains.
That's the kind of person they put on CNN. He tweets out, quote, if they even try to replace RBG, we burn the entire effing thing down.
I don't need to point out what would happen if a right-winger said something similar.
Emmett McFarlane, who's some blue check mark on the left, I don't even know what he does.
Burn Congress down before letting Trump try to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court.
Laura Bassett, same thing.
If McConnell jams someone through, which he will, there will be riots.
Okay, well there were, I guess.
Charlotte Clymer, who is this transgender fellow who is very vocal and left-wing.
We're now walking to Mitch McConnell's house to protest.
So now we're actually going to threaten the guy's house.
Obviously.
Chris Cuomo, I guess, is probably the greatest example of this.
Cuomo, openly on national television, if you can call CNN national television, it's mostly just an airport intercom system.
But theoretically, it's a big TV network.
Goes out and defends violent protests.
Now, too many see the protests as the problem.
No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets, persistent and poisonous inequities and injustice.
And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
As we have noted before, the First Amendment is where it says that protests are supposed to be peaceful because you have the right to peaceably assemble.
But I actually can't believe I'm saying this.
I want to defend Chris Cuomo for a second.
Not defend the point he's actually making, but to defend the thinking behind the point that he's making.
While we're all getting blue in the face, yelling about the double standards here, We are failing to acknowledge that this is about standards.
Getting back to what we were talking about earlier in the show.
This is not about free speech.
This is not about censorship.
All societies permit some amount of speech, and they all enforce some degree of censorship.
This has been true everywhere throughout the entire history of the world, and it has been true in the United States, maybe particularly in the United States.
Areopagitica, which is the greatest defense of free speech in the English language, says that we shouldn't give free speech to Catholics.
And Milton actually makes some good arguments for it.
John Locke, in his letter on toleration, says we shouldn't tolerate atheists.
And he makes some good arguments for it.
Even the most robust liberal defenses of free speech acknowledge that there are limits in censorship.
What the left is saying is that If you go out and you protest and it becomes violent and you loot Gucci stores in the name of BLM, that is a good thing and we will tolerate that.
But if you go out and wave the American flag and let's say it becomes somewhat violent, we will not tolerate that.
We will give BLM spots at the Democratic National Convention and we will put the MAGA protesters in jail.
And certainly the rioters are going to jail.
Those are different standards.
But we've always had standards.
In the 1950s, if you went out and held a big protest, even a peaceful protest, for communism, you could be prosecuted for that.
As well you should be.
Frankly, if we were a little tougher on communism today, we might not be in the position that we're in.
And if you went out then and waved an America flag, or you said, make America great again, you'd be totally fine.
We had standards then too.
We will always have standards.
And what conservatives have unfortunately done is we've come out and we've said, hey, I support all sorts of speech.
I don't want any standards at all.
Say whatever words you want on television.
Oh, drag queen story hour?
It's a blessing of liberty.
Oh, it's wonderful.
I would never.
Because if I tell...
You, that you're not allowed to host a drag queen story hour and have transvestites twerk for toddlers.
Well, then you might tell me that I can't go to church.
And so we're all just going to throw up our hands because they're all the same, right?
No, no.
Good to go to church.
Bad to go to drag queen story hour.
We should encourage people to go to church or, you know, practice their religion generally.
Good religion, though.
Not like Satanism.
I don't think we should promote Satanism.
Don't think we should promote secular liberalism.
That's a pretty weird religion.
There was just a video that went around, the New York Post sent it out, of this white woman forcing her children to kneel down and pray to black women.
Actually to make an idol out of black women.
Actually to objectify black women.
Which is kind of ironic.
She doesn't think she's doing that.
I just thought, man, secular liberalism, that is a weird religion.
That is one of the strangest religions I've ever seen.
But you want to promote the good.
You want to discourage the bad.
We've always understood this in America.
Conservatives, libertarians, liberals, all understood this.
Well, liberals and progressives still understand this.
They still understand.
You've got to promote some things, you've got to discourage other things.
Just, they flip the standards.
Right now, there's a tweet, one up on January 7th, from the Chinese embassy in the United States.
It says, quote, study shows the population change in northwest China's Zhangjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region involves the overall improvement in population quality.
Oh, man.
An increasing number of youths chose to spend more time and energy on personal development.
Population change.
And population improvement.
This is an open call by an enemy nation for genocide.
Open promotion of genocide on Twitter.
Totally fine.
That's okay, according to the new standards.
But the duly elected sitting president of the United States calling for peace.
Not permitted on Twitter.
Are we going to say, well, I can't take a side.
We can't promote one over the other.
We need to support every single view.
Viewpoint neutrality.
We're going to say that?
It doesn't seem to be working well in practice.
Speaking of racial caste systems, Joe Biden is proposing one.
President-elect Joe Biden says his priority when he gets into office is going to be to support black businesses and Latino businesses and all sorts of businesses, but not white businesses.
Our focus will be on small businesses on Main Street.
That aren't wealthy and well-connected.
That are facing real economic hardships through no fault of their own.
Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American-owned small businesses, women-owned businesses.
And finally, having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild.
That's a new standard.
The older standard, which we've had for, you know, at least about 50 years, at least half a century in this country, is we're not going to push racial preferences.
We're going to let people stand on their own.
We're not going to prioritize race.
Now we've got a new standard, which is we are going to prioritize race.
Certain races are going to get preferences.
Certain races are not.
Pretty ugly stuff to me.
That's the future unless you stand up for a standard of your own.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
show.
See you tomorrow.
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