WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki circles back on the questions she can’t answer, conservatives get cancel culture wrong, and the liberal establishment wants us to eat bugs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| The job of the White House press secretary is to take questions from the press and then answer them. | |
| And when the press secretary doesn't want to answer the questions, her job is to answer different questions and thereby evade the questions that she was asked. | |
| But our current White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, cannot do either of those things. | |
| So instead, she circles back. | |
| I'll circle back if there's more I can share with you. | |
| I'll circle back with you if there's more to convey. | |
| I'll have to just circle back with you. | |
| We can circle back. | |
| I'm happy to circle back with you. | |
| I can circle back. | |
| I will have to circle back on that one. | |
| That's an excellent question. | |
| Oh, such an important question. | |
| We will circle back with you and we'll circle back with you. | |
| It's an interesting question, but we'll circle back. | |
| I'm happy to circle back, but I'll have to circle back with you on it. | |
| It's a good question, but we'll circle back with you on this today. | |
| We will certainly circle back with you more directly. | |
| I hate to disappoint you, but I will have to circle back with you on that as well. | |
| No disappointment at all, Jen. | |
| I know you gotta circle back. | |
| We will circle back on all the things that she doesn't want to tell us about. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| closest to Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Welcome back to the show. | |
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| Conservatives have been having some fun at Jen Psaki's expense because of the incessant promises to circle back. | |
| And just in my own experience, maybe if you've heard this phrase, there are similar phrases that people just throw out and say, oh, we're going to follow up. | |
| Hey, you know, we're going to follow up and we're going to circle back and synergy and all this kind of jargon that millennials use. | |
| The thing about circling back is nobody ever circles back. | |
| They only say that because they don't have the answer, and then they leave the meeting or whatever, and that's it. | |
| And hopefully they never have to answer it again. | |
| So we were all making fun of Jen Psaki for this on the internet. | |
| Apparently she took note because now she finally did decide to circle back. | |
| And last thing I just want to do before we get to your questions, I often note I'm going to circle back. | |
| I hate to disappoint conservative Twitter, but I am going to circle back on a number of things, as we often do directly. | |
| Yeah, you're going to go circle back now because we all made fun of you because you never circled back. | |
| We made you do this. | |
| We conservatives of Twitter. | |
| Where Jen Psaki obviously was scrolling and scrolling and I think maybe we got under her skin a little bit. | |
| In a way, I miss those halcyon days when Jen Psaki would just not answer any questions. | |
| Because when she gives us the answers to questions, those answers are pretty radical. | |
| One example... | |
| This in the continued persecution of Donald Trump, who they're still trying to convict in his impeachment trial after he's left office. | |
| If that doesn't work, I'm sure they're going to go after him in the Southern District of New York or some other sort of court. | |
| Now they're trying to take away his intelligence briefings. | |
| So it has been a custom for a very long time in this country that former presidents receive intelligence briefings. | |
| And many presidents avail themselves of this opportunity. | |
| You know, it's part of the honor that goes with the office and to keep them involved in the public life. | |
| Now, many members of the press and the administration are suggesting that we deny Trump his daily intelligence briefings. | |
| Here is the softball question. | |
| Has the White House made a determination about whether it will continue to extend the privilege of intelligence briefings to former President Trump, given the concerns among some Democrats that he'll either misuse it or leverage it to enrich himself? | |
| This is a good question. | |
| I've raised it with our intelligence teams or our national security team, I should say. | |
| It's something obviously that's under review, but there was not a conclusion last I asked him about it, but I'm happy to follow up on it and see if there's more to share. | |
| Just think about how much Of a sort of Democrat propaganda that reporter was able to cram into that one question. | |
| Yes, Jen, do you know, is the White House going to extend the privilege, not the tradition, not the right, the privilege of intelligence briefings, Given that, you know, some Democrats, namely me, worry that he could use this to undermine the administration, enrich himself, or collude with Russia, or collude, I don't know, whatever nonsense. | |
| And she says, wow, yeah, what a great question. | |
| Oh my goodness. | |
| Wow, so smart. | |
| We're looking at that. | |
| We're looking into it. | |
| We're circling back everywhere. | |
| My reaction, first reaction to this is... | |
| Are the press and the members of this administration, are they trying to deny Trump his intelligence briefings because they think he's totally not popular at all? | |
| And he definitely lost that election, you know, without any sort of irregularities whatsoever. | |
| And is that why they're... | |
| Seems to me they're pretty afraid of the guy. | |
| Seems to me they think he might still be sort of popular. | |
| Seems to me they think that their grasp on power is a little tenuous. | |
| But then beyond that, which, you know, we're seeing that all the time and all the constant signs from the administration, no questions with the election, you know, all over big tech you see this. | |
| The Capitol, I think, is still under guard all over the place with a giant wall. | |
| You can't possibly get in there now. | |
| Beyond that, do you think Donald Trump is an intelligence risk? | |
| Donald Trump discovered many problems in the intelligence community. | |
| He discovered that the intelligence community was illegally spying on the political opponents of the dominant regime. | |
| He discovered that there was massive abuse from Obama Biden associates through the FISA process. | |
| He discovered that there were all sorts of problems with the IC. A lot of people got fired because of it. | |
| But do you think Trump himself is... | |
| I guess if you believe that Trump is colluding with the Russians or something, then you think he's in a security risk. | |
| We had a multi-year Mueller investigation. | |
| You remember that? | |
| Remember that saga? | |
| It's Mueller time. | |
| And they concluded that there was no collusion with the Russians whatsoever. | |
| However, there is some collusion with the Russians from the new administration. | |
| Namely, there's a photo of Jen Psaki herself... | |
| Standing with John Kerry, standing with some Russian dude, wearing a giant Russian hat with a hammer and sickle on it. | |
| I'm not joking. | |
| She's got the symbol of the Communist Party on her hat. | |
| She's wearing it. | |
| This was apparently a gift from the Russian delegation. | |
| And Jen Psaki foolishly put it on her head and took a picture. | |
| Do you think that the Russians didn't realize this would be very embarrassing for the Americans to have this official wearing a communist hammer and sickle hat? | |
| But they did it anyway. | |
| Ha ha, that's how we'll reset our relationship. | |
| If anybody in this situation is the security risk, one guy, Donald Trump, the one who hugs and kisses the American flag, one lady, the person wearing a hammer and sickle on her head in Russia, gotta tell you, I don't think it's Donald Trump. | |
| The other thing she's saying, just as radical, perhaps more radical, Jen was asked about President Trump I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| In what way? | |
| He'd create a lot of noise, right? | |
| He would have a certain gravitational pull of Republicans who may be more inclined to take a harder position. | |
| I wonder if that's been anything that you guys have thought about or kind of considered. | |
| This may be hard to believe. | |
| We don't spend a lot of time talking about or thinking about President Trump here. | |
| Former President Trump, to be very clear. | |
| Haha, she did it too. | |
| She did that same thing that Joe Biden did. | |
| Where Joe Biden just the other day was saying, well, you know, I was talking to the president. | |
| Uh, uh, I mean the former President Trump. | |
| The Freudian slip is where you say one thing, but you mean your mother. | |
| Jen Psaki just did the same thing. | |
| My broader take on the question, though, is, goodness gracious, White House press corps, get a room. | |
| Get a room. | |
| Uh, hey, Jen. | |
| Oh, yes, Johnny. | |
| Uh, isn't it awesome that Trump's off Twitter? | |
| Uh, Well, Johnny, you'll have to be more specific. | |
| What's awesome about it? | |
| Well, you know, he's bad, and he's orange and bad. | |
| Wow, great question, you know, but I don't even think about him. | |
| Ha ha ha, giggle giggle. | |
| She goes on, though, to actually address the substance of this question, and I don't think we're going to like it. | |
| I think that's a question that's probably more appropriate for Republican members who are looking for ways to support a bipartisan package and whether that gives them space. | |
| But I can't say we miss him on Twitter. | |
| Does President Biden support the continuing ban of President Trump on their sites? | |
| I think that's a decision made by Twitter. | |
| We've certainly spoken to, and he's spoken to, the need for social media platforms to continue to take steps to reduce hate speech. | |
| But we don't have more for you on it than that. | |
| The question was, does Joe Biden think that his predecessor should be deplatformed, kicked off of social media? | |
| Her answer was, that is a decision that Facebook and Twitter made. | |
| Which is true, but the question was, what is your boss's opinion on that? | |
| What is your boss's opinion on the handful of Silicon Valley oligarch billionaires who have the power to censor the then-sitting, duly-elected President of the United States? | |
| Don't you think that might be an issue that the current sitting President of the United States might be able to weigh in on? | |
| But she doesn't want to answer it, because, of course, Biden does support it. | |
| Trump's continued deplatforming. | |
| Because they're never going to deplatform Biden. | |
| They're never going to deplatform Democrats. | |
| They're going to deplatform Republican presidents. | |
| And she goes on, she actually underscores this, right? | |
| She says, Joe Biden, he's talked about how we need vigorous hate speech policies. | |
| And I know conservatives react to this phrase, hate speech. | |
| Kind of a knee-jerk reaction, because we know what the left means by that. | |
| What they mean is generally ridiculous. | |
| But I do think conservatives need to rethink how we're talking about cancel culture, how we're talking about deplatforming, how we're talking about censorship, and how we're talking about free speech. | |
| Because I think we're actually getting this topic wrong, and the fact that we are getting it wrong is what is allowing the left to just run absolute roughshod over us and claim that every single thing they don't like at all Up to and including Christian doctrine, sort of broad points about the moral order. | |
| That is all hate speech. | |
| You're not allowed to say it. | |
| And we don't want to listen to that. | |
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| One example of hate speech, according to the left, would be a Christian news organization that was just suspended from Twitter for saying that men cannot be women. | |
| which is a part of Focus on the Family. | |
| It's a sort of right-wing Christian group, engaged in, quote, hateful rhetoric, according to Twitter, because this is what they tweeted out. | |
| You know that Joe Biden has chosen for one of his senior health and human services officials, a man who believes that he's a woman and presents himself as a woman. | |
| So this is what the Daily Citizen tweeted out, quote. | |
| Quote, On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he had chosen Dr. | |
| Rachel Levine to serve as Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of HHS. Dr. | |
| Levine is a transgender woman. | |
| That is a man who believes he's a woman. | |
| That's, hey, you're not allowed to say that now. | |
| You may recall a couple years ago now, I had a speaking tour, a national speaking tour, called the Men Are Not Women and Other Uncomfortable Truths Tour. | |
| And I was giving various speeches on things that are perfectly common sense, such as babies are people, you know, and things like that. | |
| When I gave the men are not women speech, I was screamed at the entire time, full first 20 minutes of the speech, and then someone comes out with a super soaker and sprays me with some noxious sort of substance. | |
| Then the cops got him out of there and he leaves. | |
| Now, this issue has caused a lot of consternation on the left. | |
| And I think it's caused so much consternation because it's so undeniable. | |
| Men are not women. | |
| Men cannot become women simply by wishing it so or by dressing like a woman or putting on lipstick and high heels. | |
| Now, in order to affect the gender ideology that the left wants in the face of this, the clear things that we're seeing with our own eyes, in the face of this obvious truth, They have to censor you. | |
| And they think that by censoring you, by changing the words, by changing the speech codes, they will thereby be able to alter reality. | |
| And this is the kind of hate speech policy that the left wants to pursue. | |
| This ties in with something that we refer to as cancel culture. | |
| Ethan Hawke, who is not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, Ethan Hawke just came out against cancel culture too. | |
| He's plugging this new novel that he's written. | |
| And he said, quote, He's got this book, A Bright Ray of Darkness, where he's talking about confused sexuality. | |
| And he says, you know, well, if you talk about sex too much today, you could get canceled. | |
| And because of this cancel culture, we've got to watch what we say, so what we have to do is cancel cancel culture. | |
| And once you cancel cancel culture, then we can all say what we want. | |
| I think conservatives need to be a little more specific here. | |
| Obviously, there is something called cancel culture. | |
| It's a discrete phenomenon. | |
| It's what happens right now when the left destroys your career, destroys your livelihood, ostracizes you from society for contradicting leftist politically correct orthodoxy. | |
| That's specifically what it is. | |
| Nobody's getting canceled for being too conservative. | |
| Nobody's getting canceled for criticizing communism. | |
| People are getting canceled for criticizing the dictates of radical leftist political correctness for saying that men cannot become women. | |
| We have fallen into the trap that we continue to fall into through political correctness, wokeism, cancel culture. | |
| They're all basically describing the same phenomenon. | |
| Political correctness replaces the old moral standard with new speech codes. | |
| A moral code becomes a speech code. | |
| And in so doing, the left upends society. | |
| Conservatives react to this one of two ways, generally speaking. | |
| Either they acquiesce, they bend the knee, they're the squishy Republicans who go along with political correctness and follow the dictates of cancel culture and just say what the left wants them to say, or they abandon standards altogether. | |
| And they say, I'm a free speech purist. | |
| I think you should be able to say whatever you want. | |
| I think everybody should be able to say exactly what he thinks. | |
| And it doesn't matter how radical or how subversive or how threatening or how fraudulent. | |
| And he should face absolutely no consequences from that. | |
| And both of those reactions are wrong. | |
| And even the latter, which I think most conservatives are taking right now, is giving the left an opportunity. | |
| Because what the left is doing is they're going in and they're saying, wait a second. | |
| You were perfectly fine ostracizing people for holding this view or silencing people for holding this view or firing people for holding this view when it suited your purposes. | |
| But now, now that it's going in the other direction, now that we're doing it to people for saying conservative things, that's totally wrong. | |
| I don't think you'd find any conservative out there who would say that if some guy walks into his employer and yells, Heil Hitler, that the employer has some right not to fire him. | |
| Or rather, that the employee has some right not to be fired, right? | |
| That the employer doesn't have the right to fire him. | |
| I don't think anyone would suggest that if you walk into, I don't know, a government job or into your public school and you start screaming Heil Hitler, that you can't face some punishment for that, some consequence. | |
| Is that cancel culture? | |
| Well, it's not cancel, because when we talk about cancel culture, we're talking about what's happening right now, this very discrete leftist phenomenon. | |
| But broadly speaking, of course we have standards. | |
| Of course we think people should face consequences for the things that they say. | |
| Bill Buckley, he was the sort of founder of the modern conservative movement, as mainstream as they get, founded National Review, hosted Firing Line, the longest-running public affairs program with a single host in television history. | |
| Bill Buckley, totally urbane, totally acceptable. | |
| He was doing an interview in 1966 on his show Firing Line, and they were discussing McCarthyism and talking about the original cancel culture. | |
| McCarthyism really gets into it, but it was in the other direction. | |
| And the guest of Bill Buckley's on the show, He said, wait a second, Bill, if you're in any way defending Joe McCarthy, that means you're not for a totally open society. | |
| You're not for free speech absolutism. | |
| You're not for the perfectly open marketplace of ideas. | |
| And Bill Buckley, as mainstream a conservative as it gets, came out and he said, of course I'm not. | |
| The society must be closed to certain ideas. | |
| Because as I read you, listen to you, speak with you, The open society is an urgently necessary aspect of all that we both value. | |
| I don't agree, no. | |
| I don't want the society to be open to certain ideas. | |
| I am an epistemological optimist, as is the unfortunate word they use. | |
| To describe people who believe that by reason you can make certain exclusions, and those exclusions don't have to be reconsidered. | |
| I don't feel any obligation to protect the liberties of a Nazi or of a Communist or, for that matter, anybody who seeks class legislation or genocidal warfare between people. | |
| So I want it to be closed, at least to that extent. | |
| Of course. | |
| And by the way, every society has been closed to some extent because societies are finite things, because language is a finite thing. | |
| If I call a man a man, if we all agree the man is a man, then the man cannot be a woman. | |
| If the man can be a woman, then we are talking about totally different things. | |
| We use words in society to communicate to one another so that we use these symbols of words to refer to real things. | |
| But if the words that we're using cannot be known what they refer to, If it cannot be known what we mean by a certain word, then we can't communicate with one another and we can't have a society. | |
| And this is true at the very basic level of what words mean, and it's true at a higher level of what we all believe, what binds us together, what we're all doing here as a country. | |
| We have to share certain things. | |
| This is why we've had broad prohibitions against seditious speech. | |
| Against subversion from the very beginning of the country. | |
| And it's taken different forms over the years, but we've always had it. | |
| Is it because our founding fathers were authoritarian, fascist? | |
| No, it's because they understand that all speech regimes have to be somewhat constrained because this is a finite world. | |
| So, what does that mean for us? | |
| It means we need to be, I think, more honest with the left. | |
| We are not saying that we have no standards whatsoever and we can all say whatever we want and we'll descend into meaningless cacophony, all in the name of free speech, which ironically, of course, if we're just spouting nonsense and words have no meaning, it's the opposite of free speech, right? | |
| We've totally undermined free speech. | |
| We need to be more honest with the left and with ourselves and say, no, we stand for certain things. | |
| It's not merely enough to stand for free speech. | |
| We have to stand for something to say, right? | |
| This gets back to something we were talking about yesterday with Ryan Anderson over at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. | |
| It's not enough to say we stand for religious liberty. | |
| Sure, religious liberty is a great thing. | |
| Free speech is a great thing. | |
| We also have to say we stand for what we believe. | |
| What do we believe? | |
| What are we doing here as a country? | |
| Where are the boundaries, the inevitable boundaries of society? | |
| Where are they going to be? | |
| Is it going to be on wokeism and gender radicalism and pumping kids full of hormones to convince little boys they're little girls and that's going to be the acceptable realm of speech? | |
| Or is it going to be in the other direction? | |
| Little boys can't become little girls and we're not going to confuse them and we're going to love our country. | |
| We're not going to burn our flag. | |
| We're going to have a more traditional moral order. | |
| Which one? | |
| They're mutually exclusive. | |
| We can't We can't have a society that simultaneously holds all of those ideas. | |
| It requires courage to come out and say what we actually believe. | |
| It requires courage and conviction. | |
| Buckley said this very well in God and Man at Yale. | |
| Buckley pointed out something that we all used to know to be true. | |
| Skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction. | |
| What is our conviction? | |
| What is our conviction? | |
| Speaking of convictions, Ben is going to be talking about the impeachment trial and whether or not Trump is going to be convicted on his show, so be sure to stay tuned for that. | |
| Earlier this month, we released our first film, Run, Hide, Fight, exclusively for Daily Wire members. | |
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| The critics, they did not love it. | |
| This was a politically incorrect film. | |
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| We'll be right back with a lot more. | |
| We always have speech codes. | |
| The speech codes used to be that you couldn't openly avow your allegiance to the Communist Party in Soviet Russia. | |
| That might have some professional consequences for you. | |
| That would incur some opprobrium. | |
| Now... | |
| The speech codes mean that even if you're a duly elected senator, you're not allowed to criticize the vice president of the United States if the vice president is a member of certain protected and aggrieved identity groups. | |
| This we just learned from Kamala Harris. | |
| Really, we learned it from Whoopi Goldberg, describing an interaction between Kamala Harris and Joe Manchin. | |
| So Joe Manchin is the sort of moderate Democrat from West Virginia. | |
| Kamala Harris, radical Democrat, most radical member of the Senate back when she was fully a senator. | |
| Now she's the vice president, but she'll also vote in the Senate. | |
| Obviously, they don't agree on a lot of things. | |
| So Kamala Harris did something that was pretty tough by political measures. | |
| They're trying to work out this new stimulus deal. | |
| And Kamala Harris went down to go on local television in West Virginia and Arizona, two states where the Democrats are a little bit more conservative, to go circumvent those slightly more conservative Democratic senators and try to convince the voters in those to go circumvent those slightly more conservative Democratic senators and try to convince the voters in those states themselves and put pressure on those senators to go vote for the Biden-Harris plan without even talking to people like Sinema in | |
| So Joe Manchin was very upset about this and he expressed his displeasure on TV. I saw it. | |
| I couldn't believe it. | |
| No one called me. | |
| We're going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward. | |
| I think we need to, but we need to work together. | |
| That's not a way of working together what was done. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| It's not like he was out there throwing bombs, but he came out and he said, you know, this was really unprofessional, uncalled for, you know, pick up the phone, let me know what's going on, don't go behind my back to try to turn my voters against me. | |
| Whoopi Goldberg was very offended, not by what Kamala Harris did, but by what Joe Manchin did. | |
| Okay, so let me just point this out. | |
| Joe, she is the vice president. | |
| She does not work for you. | |
| She doesn't need your permission to go do this. | |
| And when you talk like that, it sounds a little bigoted, like you think you have the right to tell her when she can and cannot come someplace. | |
| So Republicans are offering less than a third of what President Biden requested. | |
| Less money for emergency employment benefits, smaller checks for individuals. | |
| Why would she need to come to you first, or would come to him first, Sonny, when she knows what she's supposed to be talking about? | |
| This is such a cheap and lazy political shot. | |
| When I'm considering all of the sort of left-wing commentators out there, Whoopi Goldberg is one of my favorites. | |
| I actually don't consider her the worst of the worst. | |
| To me, this just seems like she was hastily putting her show notes together and didn't want to take two seconds to formulate an interesting and serious thought about it, so she just plays the race card. | |
| But it's really, really pathetic. | |
| Because what she's saying is, Kamala Harris, she doesn't work for Joe Manchin. | |
| Well, first of all, Kamala Harris is the vice president, right? | |
| So she's not the president. | |
| Vice president, not one of the most important spots in the federal government. | |
| In this administration, she'll be fairly important because she'll be casting the tie-breaking vote. | |
| But the tie-breaking vote means she's got to work with senators, right? | |
| So her job is to work with the senators to get consensus and pass legislation. | |
| She especially needs to work with members of her own party, the Democrats. | |
| One way to really undermine all of that is to go behind their backs and apply a lot of pressure to them in their own states without even giving them a heads up. | |
| Forget calling them first without even giving them a heads up. | |
| And Joe Manchin expressing his displeasure. | |
| Do you think he's displeased because Kamala Harris is black? | |
| Do you think he's displeased because Kamala Harris is a woman? | |
| No, I think he's displeased because she behaved in a very disrespectful and unprofessional way, and they're supposed to work together for the entire administration. | |
| Does Whoopi even believe... | |
| That this is about race or sex or something like that? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| I think it's just so easy. | |
| That is the reflex now because, speaking of standards, our new national standard is this kind of bizarre racial and sexual caste system whereby you can just throw every sort of complex issue or any kind of grievance onto those matters. | |
| It reminds me of when David Webb, the political commentator, he had this woman on She was a black left-wing woman. | |
| And they were debating some issue. | |
| And it was a radio show. | |
| So she says, well, David, you only think that because of your white privilege. | |
| And David starts laughing. | |
| He said, you know, if you knew me, lady, I don't think you'd make that claim. | |
| She goes, no, it's because of your white privilege. | |
| For those who don't know David. | |
| David Webb is black. | |
| He is not a white guy. | |
| He does not. | |
| I don't know him terribly well, but I've spent some time with the guy. | |
| I've never seen any evidence of white privilege, you know, dripping out of the man. | |
| So she just said this to him because it's just a reflex. | |
| It's easy. | |
| Sure. | |
| Throw it off. | |
| That's what Whoopi was doing here. | |
| And it's really, really dangerous for society to be engaging in those sorts of things. | |
| It's so unreasoned. | |
| It's so... | |
| Speaking of degradation and a lack of reason, and the new standards, PETA is giving us an even more radical set of standards. | |
| PETA is very concerned about speciesism. | |
| This is a story from last week. | |
| We didn't have time to get to it, but I think it actually fits in better with what we're talking about this week. | |
| So PETA writes, quote, words can create a more inclusive world or perpetuate oppression. | |
| Calling someone an animal as an insult reinforces the myth that humans are superior to animals and justified in violating them. | |
| Stand up for justice by rejecting supremacist language. | |
| All gobbledygook, but it gets even crazier. | |
| In the image that PETA attaches to this, they say, using animals as insults perpetuates speciesism. | |
| Speciesism, it's the new racism, I guess, or the new sexism, or whatever. | |
| Instead of chicken, say coward. | |
| Instead of rat, say snitch. | |
| Instead of snake, say jerk. | |
| Instead of pig, say repulsive. | |
| Instead of sloth, say lazy. | |
| Because otherwise the sloth's feelings will be hurt. | |
| And that's no good for anybody. | |
| Most people have been talking about this and making fun of it as just a kind of ridiculous example of the extremes of the left. | |
| There is something deeper here. | |
| I think undergirds a far more mainstream cut of the left. | |
| They want us to fight against speciesism because it reinforces the myth that humans are superior to animals. | |
| And this is sort of supremacist. | |
| So to briefly try to understand what all of that nonsense means... | |
| Their argument is this hyper-egalitarian argument that we can't be supremacists. | |
| Not just every person has to be equal to every person, and not just equal as a matter of natural rights or spiritual equality before God, but equality of outcome, equality of property, equality of condition. | |
| But it's not just among people, it's among animals too. | |
| That any kind of natural hierarchy, the difference between me and a cockroach, And between the angels and me, right? | |
| Any kind of natural hierarchy is wrong. | |
| It's illegitimate. | |
| It's supremacist. | |
| Okay. | |
| Obviously, that's crazy, but you start with a crazy premise, you get to crazy places. | |
| We therefore, because we're just the same as animals, right? | |
| We're no different than animals. | |
| We need to use all of these kinds of words. | |
| And we need to change the meanings of words more broadly. | |
| It's kind of the politically correct project. | |
| Speech is what distinguishes human beings from other animals. | |
| Aristotle wrote about this many, many years ago. | |
| Speech is our distinguishing characteristic. | |
| Other animals can grunt and they can make certain sounds and they can communicate even sort of in very, very basic ways that are proper to their nature. | |
| But only human beings have speech. | |
| And because we have speech, we can persuade one another and we are the political animal. | |
| We can discuss how to live together and debate and have civilization. | |
| Great. | |
| When you rob words of their meaning, when you utterly pervert words, when you try to use the distortion of words to rewrite reality, You rob human beings of our humanity. | |
| You do exactly what PETA is trying to do. | |
| You lower us to the level of animals, of brutes, which is what has happened to our politics. | |
| You'll notice our politics has become far less reasoned, far less sophisticated over the past couple of decades. | |
| The classic example is Look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates. | |
| These debates that would last for hours. | |
| It wasn't sniping and interrupting each other with foul language and jabs and barbs and all these kind of vulgar things. | |
| They were making very, very long reasoned arguments and people would stand there and listen to them for hours. | |
| Now, if you watch the most recent presidential debates... | |
| You'll see how degraded it's become. | |
| That's because our language has become very degraded, too. | |
| Our attention span, our ability to reason has become very degraded. | |
| As that happens, our Republican form of government starts to crack, starts to break. | |
| As I said, we're sort of coming apart at the seams. | |
| Now politics becomes less the matter of reasoned groups debating one another and it becomes the matter of brute interest. | |
| We no longer have high-flying oratory. | |
| We have grunts and shouts and screams and ultimately political violence in the streets like animals. | |
| PETA is not just making some flippant sort of silly radical comment. | |
| They are prophesying what is happening right now, which is that we are lowering ourselves to the level of animals. | |
| We are giving the left exactly what they want, and society does not seem the better for it, at least from my vantage. | |
| Now, there is at least one area of disagreement between a leftist interest group and the liberal establishment. | |
| Namely, The liberal establishment wants us to eat bugs. | |
| They do. | |
| They do. | |
| Don't doubt me on this. | |
| I'm not being hyperbolic. | |
| Obviously, I think PETA would take some issue with this, with eating bugs. | |
| But the liberal, sort of mainstream, neoliberal, globalized left has been trying to get us to eat bugs for many years. | |
| The Economist just ran a headline on this. | |
| The Economist, a classic sort of center-left liberal magazine. | |
| They say... | |
| Yes, we still think the world should be eating more insects. | |
| Still not convinced? | |
| We explain why bugs are coming to a table near you in the world in 2021. | |
| Notice this language. | |
| This is always the language you hear from the mainstream left. | |
| It's this language of inevitability. | |
| We think you should eat bugs. | |
| Oh, you're not convinced? | |
| Well, we're going to tell you why you will eat bugs. | |
| Not why you will want to eat bugs. | |
| Not why you will choose to eat bugs. | |
| But you will eat the bugs. | |
| This has led to a meme on the internet that people have sent around, which is, I will not live in pods. | |
| I will not eat the bugs, and I will not consume. | |
| You know, this kind of caricature of neoliberal modern society, whereby... | |
| We're all locked in our tiny little apartments, and we can't really go outside, and we're supposed to just work from home, and we can get everything delivered to us, and we probably don't even own our apartments. | |
| We're just probably renting them. | |
| And we're not going to eat, you know, really inefficient, sort of fancy, nice meals. | |
| We're going to eat the most utilitarian, efficient way to get nutrients, and that's going to be good. | |
| It'll be good for the environment. | |
| It'll be good for society. | |
| We're going to eat the bugs, and we're going to consume whatever mass-produced products through globalized trade are given to us, because it'll be cheap. | |
| And that's progress, and that's modernity. | |
| It doesn't sound like the sort of future that I want to live in. | |
| You know, when people today, when all the advanced modern people talk about, oh, in the Dark Ages, people lived, they had this horrible life. | |
| Oh, in the Middle Ages and in antiquity, oh, it was so terrible. | |
| You mean antiquity with the Roman Empire? | |
| You mean the Middle Ages of the height of Christendom, the height of Western art and architecture? | |
| We were building beautiful Gothic cathedrals instead of hideous modern architectural blights on our landscape. | |
| They're so ugly and disgusting. | |
| You mean the antiquity in the Middle Ages where there was a cultivated sense of taste rather than eating the bugs? | |
| Rather than this kind of sterilized modern culture. | |
| I'm not engaging in nostalgia, by the way. | |
| Nostalgia, they say, is history after a few drinks. | |
| I'm not saying everything was better in the past and nothing's better in the present. | |
| There have been many great changes that have happened in modernity. | |
| You know, more people are fed. | |
| They're sort of better fed, even forgetting the bugs for a second. | |
| There's certain things that are nice about modernity. | |
| But overall, I don't think it's this perfect, wonderful era that's uniformly better than the past. | |
| In many ways, it's much, much worse than the past. | |
| Now, a lot of people are saying, in response to the Economist article and these many protestations that we're all going to eat bugs. | |
| A lot of people are saying, I won't eat the bugs. | |
| I'll never eat the bugs. | |
| Let me ask you something. | |
| If they can make you wear a mask or two masks wherever you go in society, always like you're some sort of bandito or you're wearing a full burqa, if they can lock us up in our pods for months and months and months at a time and not let us go out and not let us socialize and cancel Thanksgiving and cancel Christmas and sort of cancel Election Day by totally upending our electoral system in the weeks and months before the election through, in some cases, explicitly unconstitutional measures, You really think they won't make you eat the bugs? | |
| You really think they won't find a way to inject sort of new regulations into our agricultural system that strongly encourages the use of bugs or something? | |
| I'm using a sort of intentionally outlandish example to show society has been extraordinarily upended over the past year alone, but certainly over the last 10 or 20 years. | |
| How... | |
| How would you ever conclude that it's just going to stop? | |
| There is hope for reopening society. | |
| At least we're told this by the geniuses at the CDC. After almost a year of school closures and social closures, the CDC is coming out in a paper that was just recently published saying that schools operating in-person learning with appropriate antiviral precautions have seen only, quote, scant transmission of the virus, according to a number of studies conducted in districts across the country. | |
| So all these teacher unions, these lazy, overpaid teacher unions in Chicago and elsewhere Who don't want to go back to work. | |
| The great heroes don't want to go back to work. | |
| There's no evidence for that. | |
| That's not based by the science. | |
| Finally, the scientists are telling us, good, we can sort of restart society. | |
| How do you restart society? | |
| How do you do it? | |
| You've shut down the country for a year. | |
| You've totally reordered how we all get along together. | |
| You've reordered how we conduct our government. | |
| You've reordered our political, our social, even our familial world. | |
| Loved ones aren't allowed to see one another. | |
| We're not allowed to bury our dead. | |
| We're not allowed to celebrate occasions. | |
| We're not allowed to get married. | |
| We're not allowed to do anything. | |
| Or at least we're strongly discouraged from doing all those things. | |
| How do you just reopen? | |
| You can't. | |
| It's so much easier to destroy these things. | |
| It's so much easier to break society than it is to get it going again. | |
| This is a central conservative insight. | |
| Very easy to destroy. | |
| Very difficult to build. | |
| And cynical politicians have spent the last year, really in a broader sense they've spent the last hundred years, but in a very, very tangible way, they've spent the last year destroying society. | |
| We're just going to flip a switch and we're all going to go back then? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| I think the tail on this thing is going to be very, very long. | |
| Even just think, among your friends and relatives, all the varying degrees of concern about coronavirus they have. | |
| For instance, me, I am living my life It's effectively as though there is no such thing as coronavirus. | |
| I wear the mask when I have to to go pick up takeout, sometimes even, sometimes I don't have to, or when I get on an airplane because they won't let me on the airplane if I don't wear the mask. | |
| Otherwise, I don't wear the mask. | |
| I don't take any sorts of precautions. | |
| I shake hands. | |
| I hug people. | |
| I practically French kiss people I see on the street, okay? | |
| Except when they ask me not to. | |
| But other people take insane amounts of precautions. | |
| They'll wear multiple masks. | |
| They won't see anybody. | |
| They'll lock themselves up at home for a long time. | |
| And then everybody in the middle taking varying degrees. | |
| Well, I'll wear the mask, but I'll shake hands. | |
| Well, I'll wear two masks and I won't touch anybody, but I'll go out and I'll touch this person. | |
| I'm in this cluster with people. | |
| And it's so awkward because in the casual social interactions that we have, everything is now politicized. | |
| Anything you do, if you go to shake a hand, if you go to say hello without a mask on, if you go to hug somebody, if you even go to see somebody, you are making a political statement. | |
| This has been Another tactic of political correctness for about a hundred years, it became clearest during 1970s, 1980s, especially through the second wave feminists who said that the personal is the political, that every kind of personal interaction has a political connotation to it. | |
| Well, they succeeded. | |
| They did it. | |
| They've politicized everything now. | |
| Everything is open to criticism. | |
| Everything is open to public scrutiny, your most intimate interactions. | |
| How do you just restart that? | |
| I don't really see how you can. | |
| Joy Behar over at The View. | |
| This is a really view-heavy show today. | |
| I usually don't put two view clips in a show. | |
| I'm going to have to talk to the producers after this. | |
| This is too much for me even to stomach. | |
| But Joy Behar did make a stupid point, but it's therefore interesting for us to discuss. | |
| How do you send the kids back to school? | |
| How do you get this all going again? | |
| We've basically paused our lives for a year, but you can't really pause life. | |
| So she says, sending kids back to school this year is so fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. | |
| Why not just have everyone repeat the year? | |
| Is that such a far out idea? | |
| Another way to put that, I suppose, is why not have everyone just circle back? | |
| Just circle back. | |
| Because you can't circle back. | |
| You can't go back in time. | |
| You can't repeat the year. | |
| You can't pause life. | |
| One of the subtle temptations I've noticed about liberalism is that we all forget about time. | |
| We think that time doesn't matter. | |
| This, I think, is why you have the perpetual adolescence of so many people today. | |
| Who want to put off moving out of their parents' house, who want to put off getting married, who want to put off having kids, who want to put off buckling down on their job, who want to put off everything and everything into the future. | |
| They want to put all of that off because they think time doesn't matter. | |
| What's the difference? | |
| If I do these things today or I do these things in 10 years, it's no big deal. | |
| Well, the difference is the death of society. | |
| The difference is, I mean, very specifically on the birth rates and marriage rates, because people keep putting these things off so long, and they put them off more and more each year, we now have a dying population, which is one of the arguments that the open borders left has for why we need to flood the country with immigrants, is because otherwise we don't have enough people to replace the current American population. | |
| You can't just pause things. | |
| You know, this is one of the lines of John Maynard Keynes, the liberal economist, who said he was asked about the effects of his policies in the short term. | |
| He said, oh, these are great effects in the short term. | |
| They said, what about in the long term? | |
| He said, in the long term, we're all dead. | |
| At a certain point, you run out of time. | |
| You're going to tell kids who you have psychologically tortured for a year, keeping them locked up in their little pods, away from their friends, away from learning, put their life on pause. | |
| You're going to tell them, hey, we're going to delay it another year too. | |
| Ha ha, whatever. | |
| Doesn't matter. | |
| Just click pause. | |
| It's like a video game. | |
| It's not a video game. | |
| Life is not... | |
| A video game. | |
| Life is not some simulation. | |
| Life is not something that can be lived purely virtually or digitally. | |
| Ordering in everything you need to your pod. | |
| Doing all of your work from your couch. | |
| Never going out and living. | |
| That is not life at all. | |
| Putting everything off into the future. | |
| We're going to circle back and we're going to circle back. | |
| You have to do things. | |
| Life involves action, doing things right now. | |
| But has society become so lethargic, so decadent, that we can no longer muster ourselves to do those sorts of things? | |
| I sure hope not. | |
| We're going to keep trying to do things here. | |
| I know you want to do things too. | |
| Let's do more things tomorrow. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| 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. | |
| Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the Democrats unleash their impeachment strategy and it is all about emotions. | |
| Plus, President Biden moves to ram through a $1.9 trillion stimulus package. | |
| Doesn't sound like a lot of unity is breaking out. | |
| That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show. |