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Jan. 15, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
52:02
Ep. 681 - With Trump Gone, They’re Coming For You

Jack Dorsey promises more censorship, Mexico’s left-wing president comes out against Big Tech, and “gender-creative parents” are accused of child abuse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You remember when President Trump during the campaign posted that meme to Twitter and it was a picture of him and it said, they're not coming after me.
They're coming after you and I just happened to be in the way.
I thought it was one of the high points of the 2020 campaign.
And Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, just proved it true.
Jack Dorsey obviously just deplatformed President Trump the other day.
He was just caught on a hidden camera, I believe from Project Veritas, pointing out on a phone call, this is not about Trump.
The censorship is going to be much, much broader.
We do intend to do a full retro, as I said in my note.
It is going to take some time.
And then the other thing, just to close out a little bit, we are focused on one account right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account.
And it's going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, the next few weeks.
It's going to go on beyond the inauguration.
We have to expect that.
We have to be ready for that.
So the focus is certainly on this account and how it ties to real-world violence.
But also, we need to think much longer term around how these dynamics play out over time.
I don't believe this is going away anytime soon.
And the moves that we're making today around UNAN, for instance, is one such example of a much broader approach that we should be looking at and going deeper So, the team has a lot of work and a lot of focus on this particular issue, but we also need to give them the space and the support to focus on the much bigger picture.
Much bigger, much broader.
You see, he's using the excuse of real-world violence to take Trump off of Twitter.
It doesn't really justify it at all.
It doesn't explain the real-world violence that Trump is inciting, right?
Trump is tweeting out saying, be peaceful, be peaceful, be peaceful.
But he's basically admitting that's just an excuse, because this is going to be much broader.
Then he says, okay, and then we're going to broaden out and talk about QAnon.
But even that, that's not the extent of it.
This is going to be much, much broader.
It's going to go on for weeks and months.
It's going to go on past the inauguration.
Big tech, the ruling liberal regime of which big tech plays a role, has had it with conservatives.
And they want to ostracize us from society.
I'm Michael Knowles.
calls us The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to The Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment from yesterday from VA fan who says, Trump is a type A personality.
I'm sure he's thinking, if Clinton can be impeached once, I can one-up him.
I can get impeached twice.
He's my kind of president.
You know, I think that's absolutely true.
Anything you can do, I can do better.
And it is true.
We made this point yesterday on the show.
If Trump had only been impeached once, that might tarnish his legacy.
I'm not sure that it would, but it might.
But the fact that he was impeached twice by these same crooks, in many ways to me, seems to help his legacy.
They hate him so much, he's such a threat to them.
I suspect the history books will look kindly on that double impeachment.
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They say make your own Twitter if you're a conservative.
And then you make your own Twitter and they kick you off of the internet.
Parler tried this.
Parler was Dan Bongino's platform.
You know, there was the Twitter alternative.
Then they go and, you know, they're getting a lot of new members when Twitter starts purging right-wingers.
And then Amazon Web Services kicks Parler off.
We were told that Parler was supposed to be back today.
Parler is not back today.
Parler, according to its CEO, may never return.
Why?
Is it because Parler just doesn't have a good business model?
I don't think so.
I think Parler can attract a lot of money.
I mean, you've heard people, financial analysts talking about how well Parler is doing.
Is it because Parler doesn't have a good user base?
No.
Parler, last I checked, had 2.3 million active users and 15 million total users.
And that, by the way, was before this crazy week of kicking Trump off of Twitter and everybody going over to Parler.
So I'm sure that number went up considerably.
Many multiples, perhaps.
Well, it's not because of that.
It's because...
The left does not want the right to have any say.
They want the right to be totally ostracized.
It's not about Trump.
That is a distraction.
It's not about QAnon.
That is a distraction.
It's about you.
It's about the 75 million Trump voters.
People who mainstream leftists have said are Nazis, neo-Nazi, white supremacist.
And therefore, totally, it should not be permitted in society.
It's interesting on a few levels how this works, because they've been doing this for a long time.
They call you deplorable, irredeemable, bitter clingers, right?
All these sort of ways to dismiss you and justify taking you out of society.
But the top charge, probably, is that you're a Nazi, right?
You've been hearing this ever since Gore Vidal was debating Bill Buckley many, many years ago.
He said, you're a crypto-Nazi, and Bill Buckley threatened to punch him in his face.
They call you Nazis because that is, in popular culture, considered the embodiment, the incarnation of pure evil, right?
There can be nothing even close to that amount of evil.
Why is communism not considered on that level?
Communism, a bloodier ideology, right?
And certainly, I think, in the ballpark of wickedness and how pernicious these ideologies are, right?
Why is it perfectly fine to be a communist?
Why are you permitted to wear a Che Guevara t-shirt?
Could you imagine if you wore a Nazi t-shirt?
Oh my goodness gracious!
You can wear Che Guevara, you can wear Chairman Mao, you could probably wear a Stalin t-shirt on a college campus.
Wouldn't get you into any sort of trouble.
It's a strange double standard.
Meanwhile, the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump are not Nazis.
But it doesn't matter.
Because if you just say, 75 million people disagree with me, they're not liberals, they're not very progressive, then it's hard to justify kicking them, not just off of social media, but out of banks, out of their jobs, out of their livelihoods, right?
But if you say they're Nazis, then yeah, sure, we don't want to do business with Hitler, do we?
All of this, of course, in the final days of the Trump first term, some people saying the Trump administration, he could run again unless they somehow convict him, impeach and convict, which they're not going to do in the next few days.
But all of this, we hear time and time and time again is, I guess the, the only other superlative, not just to say they're Nazis or white supremacists.
The other thing that you hear all the time is that this is worse than Watergate.
And for our daily worse than Watergate analysis, we turn to left-wing hack, Carl Bernstein, who sort of was involved in Watergate and has made an entire career out of it.
The Nixon comparison, part of your reporting, is interesting.
We wanted to bring in someone who masterfully told the story of Nixon's final days, Carl Bernstein, the investigative journalist, is also now a CNN political analyst.
Carl, President Trump lashing out over comparisons to Nixon is particularly interesting.
In many ways, you and I talked about this, I think it was last night, the end to this presidency, you were saying, is much worse than Nixon's.
Well, first of all, Nixon was not a secessionist, seditious president of the United States who inspired and celebrated a riot to burn down the Capitol, which is really what occurred.
He encouraged it.
Those people went there because of his incitement.
Nixon was in a different category in that regard.
He was a real criminal president who deserved having to leave office.
And Republicans got him out of office, forced his resignation.
Very different than what we've seen with Trump.
The Republicans have enabled him and allowed him to stay in office.
So that isn't true.
First of all, obviously, Trump did not call for a riot at the Capitol.
He did not incite all of this violence.
The things that Carl Bernstein are saying are just not true, which is typical of Carl Bernstein.
But beyond all of that, I just cannot believe at this point When they bring this old hack out once a week, practically, to do the same shtick, it is a vaudeville routine at this point.
They drag out Carl Bernstein and with some sort of, they give whatever the setup is, and then his role, like a good little Charlie McCarthy doll, is to go out and say, worse than Watergate.
This is worse than Watergate.
But that they can all do it with a straight face is astounding to me.
It shows you their showbiz professionalism.
So, you know, we're going to bring on Carl Bernstein now, CNN contributor.
And, you know, Carl, there have been some comparisons between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon.
And, but, you know, Carl, I was so shocked.
I was so amazed.
You, you've recently said that maybe President Trump is worse than Richard Nixon.
Are you, Carl, are you saying this might be worse than Watergate?
Oh, Carl, are you, hold on, I just want to make sure I'm following this correctly.
Are you saying the same and only thing that you have said on television for 40 years?
Yes, Anderson, I am saying that.
Orange man, bad, bad, bad.
Worse than Watergate, bad, bad, bad.
Oh, wow, great analysis, Carl.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Deja vu all over again.
Second verse, same as the first.
What a corrupt, what a shallow, what an embarrassing ruling elite we have.
And they justify anything.
I mean, they're going to call for Trump's head before he leaves office.
They're going to impeach him seven more times.
They're going to say they're going to take away all of his money.
They're already talking about that.
They're going to investigate him.
They're going to say they're going to throw him in prison.
Just get to the point.
Which is that you want some Marie Antoinette-style regicide or something.
I mean, that is the direction the left is moving.
At the very least, they want to tar and feather the guy.
And all of this is justified.
How?
Because he's a Nazi and worse than Watergate.
And he's a white supremacist.
And he incited violence.
And of course, none of that's true.
And ironically, the left actually did incite violence by providing material support to the BLM riots and explicitly encouraging physical violence.
But none of that matters.
And we are told, as a result, we need to kick Trump off Twitter, kick him out of society, and ostracize all of his followers too.
Not just QAnon, but all of them.
It's going to be much, much bigger than that, in the words of Jack Dorsey.
Believe it or not, some people outside this country, even on the left, see what kind of a game this is.
They see what kind of a dangerous trick this is from the ruling elite.
Even the left-wing president of Mexico is calling them out and pointing out this danger.
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Mexico's left-wing president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Thank you.
Has now promised to take on the big tech companies.
He says, quote, I can tell you that at the first G20 meeting we have, I'm going to make a proposal on this issue.
He's not just taking on big tech in the abstract.
He wants to take on big tech because they kicked off President Trump.
Specifically, but we're told.
All left-wingers have to hate President Trump and want to ostracize him from society.
But we're told Mexico especially has to hate President Trump.
But we're told he's an evil villain, Nazi, Klansman, whatever.
Well, this left-wing president of Mexico gets it, sees through all of this BS being pushed to you by corporate media.
He says, yes, social media should not be used to incite violence and all that.
I love the dismissal.
Yeah, and all that, and all that.
But this cannot be used as a pretext to suspend freedom of expression.
How can a company act as if it was all-powerful, omnipotent, as a sort of Spanish inquisition on what is expressed?
Great question.
Now, He's speaking as a politician there.
I'd be willing actually to grant social media companies a little bit more than that.
They obviously have to cut certain content down.
As we said, we all agree, you know, if there are direct threats or direct incitement of violence, okay, that we agree, we should take it down.
What about obscenity?
We've always had laws and sort of customs in this country against obscenity for important reasons.
You know, there's the think of the children argument, which is you don't want kids to get hooked on naughty images when they're very young, especially if they're, you know, high-speed videos or things that are really going to mess with your head a lot more than like a Playboy, you know, under your brother's mattress or something.
But, so there's that kind of argument against obscenity.
There's also a deeper political argument against obscenity, and it's the sort of thing our founding fathers made, sort of arguments our founding fathers made, which is that when you're living in a culture that believes that licentiousness is liberty, you're going to lose your discipline, you're going to lose your virtue, you're going to lose your faculties of reason, you're going to lose your discipline, you're going to lose your virtue, you're going to lose your faculties of Forget, forget, be deserving of liberty, you won't even, even be capable of having it.
So you've got to make sure you rein in some of those base passions so that you have your higher faculties, you're more in command of your body.
You're thinking with your brain and not with other parts of your body.
So I think we generally agree with that.
I mean, even the tech platforms have always sort of done that, right?
Instagram has a no porn policy, I think.
I don't know, I guess, I don't know if Twitter does, but there have always been some of these policies.
I'm sure we would all suggest other aspects too.
One thing I think we ought to all agree on, at least I somehow agree with the left-wing president of Mexico, and I agree with Angela Merkel on this in Germany, and I agree with other world leaders.
This hipster Rasputin weirdo, Jack Dorsey in Silicon Valley, a grown man with a nose ring, Should not have the ability to censor the duly elected sitting president of the United States.
Something has gone seriously wrong if that has happened.
And if he is going to continue down this very destructive path, a path that is a great danger to our country, then we should use the full power of our politics to stop him from doing that.
Not just a conservative opinion, also an opinion that some liberals share.
Not just an American opinion, but an opinion that foreign leaders share.
That is a threat to the global order if some creepy billionaire weirdo with a nose ring can censor duly elected world leaders.
We need to have some kind of standards.
We can't pretend that free expression just lives in the abstract.
There's never been such a thing as unlimited free expression.
Free speech that has just been without bounds.
It's never happened anywhere.
It's because this is a finite world and we are finite people and we have to have order in society.
So it's not possible.
We can have broader versions of it or narrower versions of it.
We have a very robust system of free speech in America.
We should preserve that.
But we should recognize that there are some limits on this.
I'll give you a great example.
There's a story out about a mother, Kyle.
I think her name is Kyle, K-Y-L Myers.
She is a Utahan.
I thought people from Utah were very conservative.
Apparently not this lady.
She's the mother of a four-year-old child who refuses to disclose whether the child is a boy or a girl.
And she says she's going to let the child decide his own gender.
I say his because his is the singular gender-neutral pronoun.
And this mother has now been accused of child abuse.
Here's her take on it.
She says, my partner Brent and I... Not husband, not boyfriend, partner.
Like she's started an accounting firm or something.
My partner Brent and I do something called gender creative parenting.
I believe gender is up to an individual to determine and does not need to be assigned at birth.
I know a lot of people who are intersex, transgender, and non-binary.
I myself am a genderqueer woman who uses they, them, and she, her pronouns.
So, first of all, this woman is not genderqueer because there's no such thing as genderqueer.
It's a meaningless expression, and I think what genderqueer really means is, give me attention!
I'm a give me attention woman and I'm really special.
Give me attention.
She says she knows a lot of intersex, transgender, and non-binary people.
She doesn't know any non-binary people because that's not real.
She might know some intersex.
You know, that's where you're born with some ambiguity as to your sex.
It's an exceedingly rare condition.
And she might know some, she may certainly know some transgender people, men who think they're women or vice versa.
But she doesn't know a lot of them.
And the way I know she doesn't know a lot of them is there aren't a lot of them because it's an extraordinarily rare condition.
Certainly, the biological ambiguity on sex is very rare, and the psychological issue has been rare, though it is growing by leaps and bounds, because it has not only a psychological or biological component, but it has a social component, and it is growing as a social contagion, particularly among young people who are being abused by their elders who should know better, like this lady's child.
Gender creative.
You cannot have a functioning society in which there is normal parenting and gender-creative parenting, at least on a broad scale.
You can't have a functioning society because those two expressions make contrary Ontological claims.
They begin from contrary premises about nature, about biology, about the human person, about how we all interact with one another, about how education happens, right?
Do you teach children?
Do you educate them?
Do you raise them in a certain way?
Or do they, in a sense, teach you and then discover haphazardly the reality of the world, right?
Completely different views of things.
She says, I believe gender is up to an individual.
It's not.
It's not.
It is a given fact of nature, and nature doesn't change.
I suspect this lady believes nature can change, which means it's not really nature anymore.
And it does not need to be assigned at birth.
I am a genderqueer woman.
No.
How can you be genderqueer and a woman?
Doesn't make a lot of sense.
She says, I use they, them, and she, her pronouns.
Which is it?
Is she multiple people?
Maybe.
Perhaps she has issues with multiple personalities as well.
She would appear to.
She's saying, I am two kinds of person at the same time.
If you have a society...
In which men can be women and women can be men, then you don't have a society in which men are men and women are women.
And that has huge effects.
For instance, actually I remember Andrew Sullivan wrote, Andrew Sullivan is a gay sort of conservative writer.
He wrote an essay a few years ago in which he pointed this out.
He said, if we live in a society with transgenderism, then I can't be a gay guy.
And I can't be a gay guy because the premises that I'm beginning with are there are men and there are women and sexual orientation has a very strong biological component to it.
And it's sort of hardwired in and I'm born this way and, you know, I didn't choose this or whatever.
And so, therefore, I'm a gay guy, right?
If you live in the transgender world, there's no such thing as men or women.
And it's not hardwired in.
Not only can you change your desires, you can change your sex itself.
You can be a man and then become a woman.
You can't live in a functioning society with both of those things.
The reason that the left has sort of encouraged all these various contradictory new standards and ethics is because...
They attack the old system, right?
And with the left, when they wield political correctness, it's a negative instrument.
It's an instrument to just destroy the old system, the old standards, the old rituals, the old mores, the old moral order.
So it doesn't matter if they contradict one another.
As long as you destroy the old order, you've kind of accomplished your goal.
But that is child abuse.
For this woman, either it is child abuse...
To tell your child he doesn't have a sex and he can pick it later on.
Or it is child abuse to tell your child he has a sex.
And it depends which premise you begin with.
But you cannot have both.
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You know, there was a little bit of a break.
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Dailywire.com will be right back with a lot more.
So you know that what happened at the Capitol is not just bad, which we all agree, not just condemnable, which we all agree on.
It's the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of America, much worse than Pearl Harbor, and it was only right-wingers.
There were no left-wingers that were involved at all.
They did happen to arrest a BLM activist who was there, but forget about that.
And he was on CNN, but no, that's not a big deal.
But actually, it is the case.
I think they were mostly right-wingers, right?
And very bad thing.
But we did just have a whole year of political violence from the left, didn't we?
We did just have a whole year of BLM burning down city after city after city, torching businesses, killing dozens of people.
We did just have Antifa, a radical left organization, set up a sort of sovereign city We're at a city-state called the CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Authorized Zone, or Independent Zone, or that would be CHIS, I guess.
Who knows?
It was this radical left-wing social experiment that was tolerated.
It was perfectly tolerated for quite a long time.
A lot of this stuff Ted Wheeler, mayor of Portland, has come under a lot of fire because he has tolerated, and you might even say encouraged, through his negligence and through his ideological declarations, This kind of left-wing violence that's plagued Portland and the surrounding areas.
So one intrepid local news host was interviewing Mayor Wheeler and said, you know, yeah, we all agree Capitol Hill, that thing's really bad, but don't you think you're permitting this left-wing violence to go on for so long?
Don't you think that might have had, I don't know, something to do with it?
Three weeks ago, protesters broke into the Oregon State Capitol.
I have heard people at these protests elsewhere saying, well, they let it happen in Portland, so why not do it here?
It seems in some way the actions of these small groups that you're referring to have set the stage for what has happened on a state level and potentially a national level.
I know you said it will take time to crack down on these groups, but do we have that time?
Are you blaming me for what happened at the U.S. Capitol?
Wait a minute.
Are you saying that because I've permitted and one might even say encouraged the violence from the left here and that the left broadly has encouraged violence for months and months and months and burned down sea to shining sea?
Are you saying that might have something to do with the mostly right-wing violence that took place for a few hours at the Capitol?
That is what we're saying.
I'm glad that you are hearing what we're saying.
Because for a week now, the left has deflected.
And they've said, no, that's whataboutism.
No, it's only right-wing violence.
No, it's completely different.
No, it's not.
It's not.
It's not.
Bad to, like, go attack the Capitol for a few hours.
That is bad.
It's much, much worse to burn the country down for several months.
It's bad to go in and disrupt the offices of members of Congress.
It's worse to destroy many, many, many, many, many business owners' livelihoods and buildings and property and lives in some cases.
That is what we're talking about.
We are blaming you, Ted Wheeler, and we're blaming you, Maxine Waters, who called for violence, and we're blaming you, Chris Cuomo, who defended political violence, and we're blaming you, Hillary Clinton, who said you can't be civil with your opponents, and we're blaming all of you guys.
You did this.
Donald Trump didn't do this.
Donald Trump didn't do this at all.
Some Trump supporters did some political violence, For a few hours at the Capitol.
That was bad.
After months and months and months of what you did.
Of what you did.
The double standards are insane.
There's a story I wanted to get to a few days ago.
It was actually from January 7th.
A Chattanooga assistant football coach was fired because he sent a hateful tweet about Stacey Abrams.
I'm not like a huge football fan generally, so I don't really know who this guy is, but he's an offensive line coach and he posted this social media thing.
Where he mocked Stacey Abrams' appearance and, quote, falsely claimed there was cheating in Georgia elections.
And that's why he was fired.
So the tweet says, congratulations to the state, Georgia, and Fat Albert Stacey Abrams.
Called her Fat Albert.
That's not nice.
That's mean.
You know, don't do that.
Hey, hey, hey.
Don't do that.
Because you have truly shown America the true works of cheating in an election.
Again, enjoy the buffet.
Big girl, you earned it.
Hope the money is good.
Still not governor.
You know, I actually, I do think it's very distasteful to mock people's appearances.
I really don't like that stuff.
So obviously the left has been doing this now for how long?
They're calling big fat orange man and all sorts of mean names about Trump.
None of them would ever lose their job for that.
And if they're not going to lose their job, I don't think this guy should lose his job for making a sort of distasteful physical joke about the not governor of Georgia.
But that's the part, that's the part that I want to focus on.
The report here from the Associated Press says this guy, Chris Malone, was fired because he mocked Abrams' appearance and falsely claimed there was cheating in Georgia elections.
So, if you should be fired for falsely claiming that there was cheating in Georgia's elections, don't you think this should not only apply to the person who mocked Stacey Abrams, but to Stacey Abrams herself, who has claimed for years falsely that there was cheating in her election?
How do they write this stuff and not see what they're saying?
How do you write a piece about how it's absolutely horrible to criticize Stacey Abrams and simultaneously claim there's cheating in George's elections?
When Stacey Abrams has been doing that for years, it doesn't matter because Stacey Abrams is good and And this guy is bad because Stacey Abrams is a liberal and she checks a lot of intersectional grievance group boxes.
And this guy is bad because he's a conservative and he doesn't check those intersectional grievance group boxes.
And so it's not even, obviously there's a double standard, but...
It is positively good to fire him, and it would be very, very bad to take out Stacey Abrams from whatever her job is.
I don't even know what her job is right now, other than political shenanigans.
That's what we're seeing.
Jack Dorsey is not going to clamp down on the left, folks.
And I guess there's a double standard, but here's his standard.
Right wing bad, left wing good.
Right?
We're not going to take off the violent accounts on the left.
We are going to take off the Much broader than violent accounts on the right.
It's not just Trump.
It's not just QAnon.
It's a lot of people even after the election.
His words, not mine.
Let's get to the mailbag.
Derek says, Hey Michael, I have an interesting thought experiment for you.
If a person wanted a custom cake to say something like, Trump, hero of the republic, do you think a leftist bakery would make it?
Worth testing, I think.
Thanks for all your good work.
Probably they wouldn't.
They wouldn't make it.
But they wouldn't have to make it because we have certain legal protections in this country and they protect religious views, though they don't protect them very well, but at least on the books they protect religious views.
They protect sex.
But now they also protect sexual orientation and gender identity, which is ironic because that undermines sex, right?
This is the issue with the girls' sports, right?
If you have a protection on the basis of sex, that means that the girls get to have their own sports leagues.
But if you have a legal protection on the basis of gender identity, that means girls don't get to have their own sports leagues because the boys can play in the girls' sports leagues.
So they're very contradictory.
But nowhere in any of those protections do you have a protection for political point of view.
So, you're out.
Unfortunately, you can go there.
They'll turn you down.
Supreme Court wouldn't hear the case.
From Brooklyn.
Hey, Michael.
My name is Brooklyn.
I knew that because it was in the name line.
My name is Brooklyn.
I'm from Illinois.
I started by listening to The Ben Shapiro Show and now find myself addicted to your show.
I'm very pleased to hear that, Brooklyn.
My question is about whether you think, as conservatives, it would be more effective for us to outright ban using the big tech apps, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or if we should remain on these platforms for as long as we can and share as much conservative stuff as possible to reach out to others until we are forcibly removed.
Thanks.
I don't think this is an either-or scenario.
You said, should we use the government to crack the unprecedented power of big tech to control our political conversation and therefore to control our politics and our republic?
In a republic, speech is politics and politics is speech.
If these guys have the right to censor the duly elected president, that's too much power.
They have the right to censor half of the political conversation.
That's too much power.
So do we use the state to bring big tech down to size and point out that they're getting legal protections like according to Section 230 that they should not be getting?
And point out that maybe they've engaged in some fraud in the way that they've gained critical mass and market share and then kind of switched the ballgame.
Should we do that or should we stay on social media?
And I think both.
We should stay on social media for as long as we can, and we should continue to affect the public conversation for as long as we can, and simultaneously, we should try to break these guys up and bring them down to size.
Those are not contradictory things.
This is a trick the left always tries to make us fall into, which is they want us to Remove ourselves from the conversation.
They want us to play by a set of rules that they will not play by.
But the thing about politics is the same thing that can be said of war.
Your opponent gets a say.
You don't get to pick every single circumstance of politics or war.
You've got to, to use a cliche, you've got to play the hand you're dealt.
All right, how many more metaphors can I mix?
You've got to deal in the circumstances that you're in.
Right now, the circumstance we're in is that big tech controls the political conversation, and that's a bad thing, and we've got to fight against that.
But one of the ways in which we can fight against that is by using those systems against big tech for as long as they'll tolerate us.
And we should take all of the above strategy.
From Caleb.
Michael, I just subscribed about 10 minutes before writing this, and I'm excited to receive my Tumblr so that I can consume those salty and delicious tears.
Simple question.
If you had to pick today, what Republican candidate do you see having the best chance of unseating Joe Biden in 2024?
If it's still Joe Biden by then.
Let's not forget, the guy's pretty up there in age.
So, you know, these days, I guess I'm hoping he lasts quite a while because Kamala Harris is so awful.
But who knows?
We could be running against Biden or against Kamala in 2024.
Just...
Looking at life expectancies in the United States.
For the sake of argument, let's assume both Trump and Kanye are off the table.
Also, you should have won an Emmy for Another Kingdom.
Hashtag came for Ben, stayed for Michael.
Thank you very much.
Who do I think is the 2024 guy?
I don't know.
It would be very hard to have picked Trump in 2012.
Right, four years before the 2016 race.
So I'm not sure.
Obviously, I am friends with Ted Cruz, and I strongly think he should run, and I would encourage him to run for president.
I don't know.
I don't have any insider information as to whether that would happen, but I hope he does, and I would encourage him to.
Ron DeSantis in Florida seems like he would be running.
He would be a good choice, or at least it seems like he would be a good choice.
We don't know as much about him because he's kind of newer on the political scene, but he's done a great job down in Florida.
Josh Hawley appears like he wants to run.
I guess a similar thing to Ron DeSantis.
He's saying and doing some interesting things.
We don't know a ton about him.
That's the purpose of a primary campaign is to vet some of these candidates.
It would appear that Nikki Haley wants to run.
She's kind of positioned herself in a way where she could run.
Kristi Noem in South Dakota, it would appear that she kind of wants to run.
I think it's going to be important.
I'm not going to, I mean, you know, I'm encouraging Senator Cruz to run for president.
I hope he does.
But beyond the kind of horse race of this person or that person, I think more broadly, I think that the kind of person who could win the nomination and the presidency in 2024, the kind of person who should win the nomination and the presidency in 2024, is going to have to be someone who can make a credible claim to Trump voters.
Not just the establishment squishes, not just the old kind of bushy foreign policy, Conservative types who want, you know, to invade every country around the world.
But people who can make a credible claim, who are not just going to regurgitate the platitudes of the 90s and early 2000s.
And so I think there are, you know, at least, I'd say two or three candidates right now that could sort of make that claim.
And who knows?
Others might emerge.
And obviously, we've got four years to do it.
But that's the only way it's going to work.
I know that there are many conservatives right now who are praying that the Trump faction of the conservative movement is going to disappear.
It's not going to disappear, guys.
It's been around for a long time.
Before it was the Trump movement, it was called the Tea Party.
Before it was the Tea Party, it was the cultural conservatives of the 2000s and the 90s.
Before that, they were the Reaganites.
Before that, they were the Goldwater people.
And it's a very sad fact that people today who claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan very often...
Are not like Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was much more conservative than they were.
Many people today who claim the mantle of William F. Buckley Jr.
invoke him all the time.
They don't seem to read a lot of William F. Buckley Jr.
The time that has elapsed since they were in politics has weakened their memory, has made them seem kind of squishy.
There has always been on the right a conservative side and a squish side.
And the conservative side now, kind of old school conservative side, is going with Trump.
And I know there are all these arguments about the true conservatives.
And to be a true conservative, you just have to be super duper liberal and libertarian on everything.
Well, no.
That just historically is not true.
It's changed.
Political circumstances change all the time.
But those two sides of the Republican Party, And of the right generally, those have persisted for decade upon decade.
And we're going to call it the Trump people now.
It's going to be called something else in five years.
But that side, what that represents, that is not going away.
And if you want to make a credible run, I know a lot of people think the way to win the presidency is to nominate some squish from the liberal Republican side of things.
How has that worked out historically?
Bush 41 only won because he got Reagan's third term and then he lost.
George W. Bush ran as a conservative.
Might not have been super hardcore, but he was more hardcore than his dad.
John McCain ran as a liberal Republican.
Mitt Romney ran as a liberal Republican.
Donald Trump ran as a conservative Republican.
Make of that what you will.
If you want to be a credible candidate, you've got to appeal to the conservatives, to the base.
From Simeon.
What a great name.
I am currently in the market for a new job.
I was recently in consideration for an engineering management position at Procter& Gamble.
The day of my interview, however, my conscience got the better of me and chose to rescind my application due to the utter embarrassment I would feel working for such a socially just company.
Did I make the right decision or is the best way to affect change from the inside out?
Thanks.
I'm not going to give you a principled answer here.
I'm going to give you a prudential answer because prudence is one of my principles and it's a virtue and we should follow it.
You've got to get into the specifics here.
What is your goal in your professional career and what is your circumstance?
For instance, T.S. Eliot.
Did not make his sort of career his career.
And what I mean by that is T.S. Eliot, one of the great poets of the last hundred years, a little earlier than that, T.S. Eliot worked at a bank.
And that was his day job.
He just worked at a bank and then he wrote some of the greatest, last great poems in the English language.
Dana Gioia, who's a living poet, really like Dana Gioia's work.
He just worked at like a corporation.
He was just like a marketing guy at a corporation.
He went to business school.
And he's one of the great living poets.
His day job was not what he felt he was really called to do.
And you might ask the same for you.
What are you doing?
What do you, you know, is it just you're going to go get a paycheck and then you're going to go write beautiful poetry?
Well, then I guess it doesn't really matter if you're working at Procter & Gamble or whatever.
Is it that you want to have an effect on the way this company is moving, whether it's in a very limited way or even if it's in a larger way?
Well, maybe you can do that at Procter & Gamble.
Maybe you can't.
Is Procter& Gamble really a super left-wing company?
Or do they just make a bunch of BS commercials to try to fool the woke people?
I don't know.
I mean, you'd have to know from the inside of Procter& Gamble.
What is the effect of Procter& Gamble on the world?
You know, I can't answer your question because...
The question does not permit a simple ideological bumper sticker answer.
You've got to get into the circumstances of these things.
And I think one reason conservatives have failed to really capture a lot of the culture We refuse to get into this kind of nitty gritty.
We just want like three bumper sticker maxims, at least for the past 15-20 years.
And that ain't how politics works.
That's not how political and cultural change works.
From Jennifer.
Hey Michael, a few years ago I asked you a mailbag question about the moral dilemma of having taken Plan B after being sexually assaulted.
I remember it very, very well.
Good to hear from you again.
In your kindness, you told me to focus on healing from the trauma first.
Enough time has passed, and I think I'm quite strong enough now to ask you again, from one Catholic to another, how sinful is it to take Plan B in such a circumstance or in any circumstance?
Is it considered an abortion drug, and if it is, should I confess this as such to a priest?
Thank you, as always.
I love your show.
Thank you very much.
It's so good to hear from you again.
I remember that was years ago that you asked me that question.
I was still back in my broom closet, I think, at the old studio in L.A., The short answer is I don't know.
I don't know.
As a moral matter, I just don't have the authority to give you really an answer on that.
I can give you my views of things and my opinion as I understand it, but when in doubt...
Confess.
You know, when in doubt, go to a priest.
And I also don't know because plan B is very unclear in the way that it operates.
So plan B is the morning after pill.
They call it emergency contraception, but it can be an abortifacient drug because plan B does three things.
It can prevent ovulation.
No abortion.
Though I guess the use of contraceptives at all would constitute sin, you know, according to Catholicism, so you should confess that too.
Obviously different degrees.
But it can prevent ovulation, so not an abortion.
It can block fertilization of an egg, not an abortion, or it can keep a fertilized egg from implanting in the universe, which according to secular liberalism is not an abortion, but according to the Catholic church, it is an abortion because the Catholic church believes that life begins at conception, not it is an abortion because the Catholic church believes that life begins So I don't know the statistics.
You You know, two out of three ways that this operates, it would not have induced an abortion.
One way, it could have induced an abortion.
And so I would just recommend, you are simply not going to be able to know what happened.
And you can try to look into the statistics of what is most statistically likely, but it will involve what time of the month it was and all these other sorts of questions that probably you just wouldn't know.
When in doubt, you should avail yourself of the great grace that is before all of us, which is confession.
I know for some non-Catholics don't really, they think confession is kind of weird.
A way to think of it in the Catholic view of things is that it's like a laundromat for the soul.
I would go in and bring it up, and just as a matter, not only of psychological healing, which of course it does, but as a matter of spiritual healing, I would avail yourself of that as well.
I'm very pleased to hear you're doing much better now, and it's so good to hear from you.
From Bradley.
Michael, I finally became an All Access member.
I'm excited to help you guys grow and see what the future holds for The Daily Wire.
As a veteran, I see everything I've fought for going down the drain.
I see our country going in the wrong direction.
I'm curious to see what you think of the Biden administration, what they'll do if they have control of everything.
What agenda are they going to put up and pass without fail, considering the support they have now?
Thanks.
For everything you do.
I think they're going to try to get rid of the filibuster.
Manchin says he's going to be against it.
I hope that's true.
They're going to try to pack the court.
They're really pushing that.
Biden doesn't want to do it, but the people around him really do.
They're going to try to add new states.
That would be radical.
It would give the Democrats a permanent majority.
There's a ton of support for that among the base.
I'm not sure how much among guys like Manchin, you know, who might now be the most powerful people in Washington.
Conservative pessimists say things can't get any worse.
Conservative optimists say, of course, they can.
And that, I think, is the...
My cautious view of the Biden administration.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you next week.
See you next week.
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, production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production coordinator McKenna Waters.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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