The Senate prepares for the pseudo-impeachment trial of former president Trump, AOC compares Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to rapists, and BLM gets nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| The fake impeachment trial is officially about to begin. | |
| Both sides have submitted their briefs. | |
| Very important to note from the outset, this is not an impeachment trial. | |
| This does not meet the constitutional standards of an impeachment trial. | |
| They are not trying the president. | |
| They are trying an ex-president. | |
| The Chief Justice is not presiding. | |
| They've just got some Dem Senator presiding. | |
| It is not an impeachment trial. | |
| Nevertheless, they're going to pretend that it is. | |
| The House has submitted their arguments. | |
| Their arguments are in just a few words that Donald Trump is singularly responsible for the riot at the Capitol, which was an insurrection. | |
| And therefore, we've got to remove him from the office. | |
| He's already left. | |
| The Trump argument and the Trump legal team has submitted their briefs is that President Trump is no longer the president. | |
| He didn't incite an insurrection and the whole thing is a farce. | |
| So they're going to be making this constitutional argument that none of this is legitimate whatsoever. | |
| That is a timid, I don't want to say a timid argument. | |
| It's a modest argument. | |
| It's a smaller argument. | |
| It's not making claims about voter fraud. | |
| It's not making claims about the Biden administration. | |
| So the question for all of us is, will this Trump impeachment trial, fake or real, be the greatest show on earth? | |
| Will it be Trumpian? | |
| Will it keep us all glued to our seats? | |
| Or will it fizzle out? | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| It's the Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Welcome back to the show. | |
| My favorite comment from yesterday is from Chris1985, who's quoting Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary, when she says, I hate to disappoint conservative Twitter. | |
| What is conservative Twitter? | |
| Never heard of it. | |
| Well, actually, that's a great point. | |
| Because there, obviously, they are referring to the conservatives on Twitter. | |
| Who get kicked off more and more each day and silenced and shadow banned and censored. | |
| Now, some people tried to create a separate conservative Twitter, but the left would not tolerate that. | |
| They want us to be tame. | |
| They want us to be easily controlled. | |
| They want us to be pliable. | |
| Some Republicans, even in Republican leadership, are going along with that. | |
| Some are not. | |
| And it's why this impeachment issue, even if it's a fake impeachment trial, it's why this impeachment issue and this Trump issue is going to have a very, very, very long tail. | |
| If you want to know what's happening in the future, if you want to understand what's happening in the present, you can't do all of that without some knowledge of what's happening in the past, that knowledge of history. | |
| You can't do that without a basic knowledge of, oh, I don't know, mathematics, a basic knowledge of language, a basic knowledge of everything that we need to make sense of our world. | |
| One great way to do it, The Great Courses Plus. | |
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| What changed in 1066? | |
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| Trump never seems to go away. | |
| Trump, I'm glad. | |
| I miss Trump. | |
| I'm sort of glad we're going to get to see him on TV. The left has completely shut him up, deplatformed him, taken him out of life. | |
| But they can't let him all go all at once because they need him. | |
| For some reason, Trump represents something that will not go away. | |
| He represents this debate over the direction of the Republican Party and ultimately the direction of the country. | |
| Now, you know, there is someone in House Republican leadership who voted to impeach Donald Trump. | |
| I know this seems completely insane that the Republican Party, which overwhelmingly supports Donald Trump, still, majority of Republicans, according to recent polls, want him to be the nominee in 2024, okay? | |
| As far as I can tell, unprecedented sort of support for this guy within his own party. | |
| Someone in the leadership of the Republican Party in the House would vote for his impeachment. | |
| Seems strange. | |
| That would be Liz Cheney. | |
| Now, Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, has come out and defended Liz Cheney. | |
| He says, Liz Cheney is a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them. | |
| Okay. | |
| That's it? | |
| That's all you can muster? | |
| Barack Obama is a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them. | |
| He is a leader. | |
| Some people took issue with this when I pointed it out on the internet. | |
| He said, no, he's not a leader. | |
| He's a terrible person. | |
| Terrible people can be leaders. | |
| World history is rife with examples of that. | |
| He is a leader. | |
| He led. | |
| He was president of the United States. | |
| He won re-election. | |
| He changed the country. | |
| He was extraordinarily influential. | |
| He has deep convictions and he had the courage to act on them. | |
| That in and of itself does not qualify somebody to be in Republican leadership. | |
| The question is, what are the convictions? | |
| The question is, where are you leading your followers? | |
| And the question regarding Liz Cheney right now is, do Republicans believe that this woman and her convictions and her leadership... | |
| Best represents their party. | |
| It's hard to imagine how. | |
| In a way, it's quite courageous that Liz Cheney just hated Trump so much. | |
| She felt so convicted about this issue of impeachment that she decided she had to vote to impeach the Republican president. | |
| I think it was a stupid vote. | |
| I do not think in any reasonable world he committed an impeachable offense. | |
| A second impeachable offense. | |
| Don't forget, it was the second impeachment vote against Trump. | |
| But fine, Liz Cheney thinks that. | |
| That's fine. | |
| If she's going to take that courageous vote, she's got to deal with the consequences. | |
| Namely, she is not fit for Republican leadership. | |
| She does not represent the views of the Republican Party. | |
| She might represent the views of a certain type of leadership class. | |
| You see, George W. Bush came out and defended Liz Cheney. | |
| Mitch McConnell now defending Liz Cheney. | |
| Fine. | |
| I'm not saying kick her out of Congress. | |
| I'm not saying kick her out of the Republican Party. | |
| In a way, it's sort of admirable that she has that courage of her convictions. | |
| It's too bad because her reasoning was extremely flawed when she took that vote. | |
| But fine, great, she's got that courage, got those convictions. | |
| Now you need to deal with the consequences of that. | |
| It's preposterous. | |
| And presumably she's going to remain in leadership. | |
| I don't see a major revolt. | |
| The only congressman, the only prominent Republican who's really come out and said Liz Cheney doesn't belong in leadership is Matt Gaetz. | |
| But, assuming that's not enough, assuming she stays in leadership, this is going to increase the divide between the GOP leadership class and the GOP base. | |
| Your courage matters and your leadership matters, but you need to have the right convictions. | |
| This is something we've talked about a lot on this show, how we've tricked ourselves for many years into thinking that all that mattered was the form of politics. | |
| The substance of the politics didn't matter. | |
| So we support free speech. | |
| We don't support saying anything in particular, but we just support free speech. | |
| We support religious liberty. | |
| We don't believe in anything ourselves, but we just support religious liberty. | |
| That's not enough. | |
| The left has form and substance in their politics, and it's really dangerous, but it's very effective. | |
| And we need to get a little bit more courage. | |
| I'll give you an example of one of the radicals in the Democratic Party, Raphael Warnock. | |
| This radical leftist, a socialist, who when he was helping to run a church, invited Fidel Castro to go there, who said that you can't serve God in the US military, who said many, many radical things in his life. | |
| Raphael Warnock just came out and said that we need to institute widespread unsolicited mail-in votes forever. | |
| This is essential to voting integrity. | |
| He pushed back against people who were trying to do the opposite. | |
| He said, this is shameful. | |
| We need to swiftly pass the For the People Act. | |
| Goodness gracious. | |
| In The whole scope of shameless legislation names, and a lot of them are pretty shameless, For the People Act, give me a break, to strengthen access to the ballot and prevent voter suppression from silencing our voices. | |
| And if you want to actually interpret that into English, he wants to take away election integrity measures and make it easier for Democrat machines to steal elections. | |
| That's what this whole thing is about. | |
| We, Republicans, need to get serious about this and get tough, and it's going to require us to actually put our convictions on the table and come out and say, we need to get rid of widespread mail-ins, make them illegal in places. | |
| We need to get rid of the drop boxes for the ballots, make those illegal. | |
| We need to take election season and get rid of all those extra days where you can vote and make it election day again. | |
| This is possibly an existential matter for our representative government. | |
| And I know a lot of Republicans are not going to want to do it because here's what they're going to say. | |
| They're going to say, Michael, if with all these things... | |
| All the mail-in and the Dropbox and, you know, you start voting 18 months before Election Day. | |
| If that will encourage even one more person to vote, well, don't we have to do that? | |
| Because we have to increase the voting for everybody, people who are unwilling to get themselves out of bed and actually vote on Election Day. | |
| We need them to vote. | |
| No, we don't. | |
| We don't. | |
| And all of that is sort of a facade to cover up the purpose of these measures, which is actually to get rid of election integrity. | |
| We need to come out there and be able to say that. | |
| Now, the most persuasive argument for this, I think, is that every illegal vote that is cast disenfranchises a legal voter. | |
| So actually, the real voter suppression is getting rid of election integrity and promoting fraud. | |
| But I don't know that the persuasion is really the key here. | |
| Do you ever notice this with the left? | |
| The left has such radical plans. | |
| I mean, within the first week or two weeks in Joe Biden's administration, he obliterated girls' sports and the women's bathroom through executive order. | |
| Not very popular stuff. | |
| But the left doesn't care. | |
| Because what the left lacks in persuasive power... | |
| They make up for, more than make up for, in the willingness to exercise the political power that they've given or that they've outright taken. | |
| And Republicans don't have that. | |
| Oh, we love persuading. | |
| We love talking about the free marketplace of ideas. | |
| We love think tanks. | |
| We love debates. | |
| We love all that sort of stuff. | |
| I'm persuading right now, right? | |
| This is one of the few areas that conservatives have any sort of leverage in is in certain small segments of alternative media. | |
| But what about the elected guys? | |
| What about the guys working in the government? | |
| Why can't they do their job? | |
| Namely, the exercise of the political power that they've been given. | |
| Because we can persuade and persuade and persuade until we're blue in the face. | |
| If we're not willing to actually exercise political power, that will all be for naught. | |
| And if we don't fix this election integrity issue, we're not going to have very much political power in the future, at least not in the races that count. | |
| There's a headline out of 538. | |
| This is a Nate Silver's publication. | |
| It's called, Where Did All the Bellwether Counties Go? | |
| Here, Ryan Matsumoto, who is the author, is examining how all those bellwether counties that have predicted the presidential elections for decades, the vast majority of them somehow got it wrong in 2020. | |
| Isn't that a little strange? | |
| What does that say about the 2020 election? | |
| We'll get to exactly what it does say because the answer doesn't have to be conspiratorial. | |
| It's right, actually, it's right in front of our faces. | |
| This is a time of great instability. | |
| And it's instability in politics. | |
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| So 538 wants to know, where did all the bellwether counties go? | |
| From 1980 to 2016, 19 counties voted for the winner of the presidential election every single time. | |
| The most impressive of those was Valencia County, New Mexico, which voted for the victor in every presidential election from 1952 to 2016. | |
| But in 2020, 18 of these 19 bellwether counties voted for Donald Trump. | |
| Just one, Clallam County, Washington, voted for Joe Biden. | |
| So, then they spend lots and lots of ink asking, where did the bellwether counties go? | |
| Where did they all go? | |
| Isn't that so weird? | |
| Facts like this will buttress people who have questions about the presidential election. | |
| Questions about, you know, boxes of ballots in Georgia and pipes bursting and all these sorts of irregularities. | |
| Thousands of votes, you know, accidentally being missed or discounted or they're only added later. | |
| Going to add a lot of fuel to that fire of election doubt. | |
| However, I'm not discounting that. | |
| You know, if there's evidence of these things happening and it being widespread, we've talked about this on the show a lot, more than open to looking at that evidence. | |
| Hope there is evidence. | |
| Hope we can see it. | |
| But obviously, even if there were, it's very difficult to show this stuff. | |
| Even in 1948, you know, I keep going back to this election because it's so famous and so consequential. | |
| LBJ stole a Senate seat in Texas. | |
| This has been extraordinarily well documented, most recently by Robert Caro, who is sort of the preeminent, LBJ biographer. | |
| He notes this in Means of Assent. | |
| 1948, LBJ, who'd been stealing elections since college, who'd been stealing elections for his staff club presidency when he was working as a staffer on Capitol Hill. | |
| This guy stole the election by stuffing the ballot boxes in Texas. | |
| He won by a statistically impossible margin. | |
| He then, this goes up to the Supreme Court. | |
| The Supreme Court won't even look into it. | |
| They just say, we don't have jurisdiction here. | |
| Goes back to the state. | |
| LBJ becomes Senator. | |
| LBJ becomes Vice President. | |
| LBJ becomes President. | |
| LBJ dies. | |
| And then, all those years later, they say, look at that. | |
| It was a fraudulent vote. | |
| So, sure, these things happen. | |
| However, there's a simpler answer here to what's going on with these bellwether counties. | |
| Let's say, forget about all the theories that various people have posited about the voting machines and even about pipes bursting and even about thumb drives going missing, whatever. | |
| Just consider this. | |
| We changed all the election rules weeks and months before the election. | |
| In places that mattered, we radically upended the election rules. | |
| In Pennsylvania, in contravention of the state constitution, So, even if there's nothing behind the scenes hidden nefarious going on, is it any wonder that if you change the rules of the election, you're going to have different outcomes in bellwether counties? | |
| The bellwether counties are only bellwether in normal elections, right? | |
| In elections where the rules remain the same. | |
| If you completely change the rules of the game, then those counties aren't going to tell you anything. | |
| They are fine tuned to tell you about the old rules. | |
| But what the left did is they went in and completely changed the rules to make them advantageous to themselves and, and harmful to us. | |
| And we don't even have the hootspa to come out and say, hey, get rid of the widespread mail-in, get rid of election month, get rid of all that. | |
| You guys are cheaters. | |
| You're, you're, uh, I'll, I'll even pull back from cheating because they, they did it out in the open, right? | |
| Thank you. | |
| In the case of Pennsylvania, I guess they did cheat because what they did was unconstitutional. | |
| But forget cheating. | |
| Let's just focus on rigging. | |
| They reoriented the system so that it would be more advantageous to them. | |
| That is what politicians do. | |
| In a way, you have to admire it. | |
| Just like you have to admire the people who have leadership and convictions and courage who are on the other side. | |
| It's very bad for the country. | |
| But you say, well, at least you're exercising political power. | |
| What are our guys doing? | |
| Absolutely, absolutely nothing. | |
| And for the handful of people who come out and say, guys, this is wrong. | |
| We need to look into this. | |
| I'm going to object to some of these votes. | |
| I'm talking about guys like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, other people. | |
| What does the left say? | |
| The left comes out, tries to ruin their careers. | |
| AOC, I kid you not, came out. | |
| She's been calling Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley murderers. | |
| Because she came out early on and said that nearly half the members of Congress were killed in the riot at the Capitol. | |
| Of course, no member of Congress was even injured, but almost half of us were killed. | |
| And then she said, Ted Cruz is trying to murder me. | |
| And now she's saying that guys like Cruz and Hawley are tantamount to rapists. | |
| I'm a survivor of sexual assault. | |
| And I haven't told many people that in my life. | |
| When I see a party who cheered on violence, violence that killed five, maybe now six people, a second Capitol Police officer took their life in the aftermath of the attack this past week. | |
| These people are just trying to tell us It's not a big deal. | |
| And they're trying to say, you're making too big a deal over it. | |
| Or, my favorite, this past week, Ted Cruz and now representatives Chip Roy and oh, by the way, some of the other representatives who actually encouraged people to threaten members of Congress or tweeted out the location of the speaker are now telling me to apologize. | |
| For saying and speaking truth to what happened. | |
| These are the tactics of abusers. | |
| Or rather these are the tactics that abusers use. | |
| I don't know why she makes that distinction because it means the same thing. | |
| So she's saying Ted Cruz, because he followed a constitutional process and voiced his objections to some of the irregularities on the record, he's a murderer. | |
| He tried to murder me. | |
| And when Cruz and Hawley and some of these other guys came out and said, apologize to us. | |
| You can't call us murderers. | |
| That's so wrong. | |
| She says, oh yeah, you're rapists too. | |
| She says, I was sexually assaulted. | |
| I've never told anybody this, but I was sexually assaulted. | |
| And you are just like rapists. | |
| So I guess the breaking news here is that AOC says she was sexually assaulted. | |
| The question you have to ask is, is that true? | |
| Maybe. | |
| Maybe it was true. | |
| I don't know. | |
| If people make that kind of a claim, it's a claim you want to take seriously. | |
| The trouble with AOC is that she's a pathological liar. | |
| She's lied brazenly about not just public policy, in a way that even PolitiFact has given... | |
| You know, PolitiFact is a left-wing outlet. | |
| Even they have given her some... | |
| Difficult ratings because she's just lied about, I don't know, defense spending or immigration enforcement. | |
| She's lied about the apocalypse, saying the world's going to end in 12 years. | |
| But even more to the point here, she's lied about core aspects of her biography that very few people pointed out. | |
| I actually was one of the few people that was able to point this out because I grew up in the town next to AOC at exactly the same time. | |
| So AOC, when she was campaigning, pretended that she was raised in the Bronx. | |
| She was not. | |
| When she was very, very little, she lived in the Bronx. | |
| But then she grew up in one of the wealthiest counties in the country. | |
| I know this because I lived in the town right next door. | |
| And she lived in the town that was wealthier than my town. | |
| And she went to very, very good schools. | |
| And then for college, she went to a very expensive private school. | |
| So she was portraying herself as Jenny from the block. | |
| She got called out for it. | |
| And she's never given a good answer on that. | |
| So is this story that she's telling true or not? | |
| It could be, but it's just you can't take it as gospel truth when somebody has a proven track record of lying even about fundamental aspects of her biography. | |
| The other reason that we have to be skeptical here is because she's being so flippant. | |
| She's being so glib about what I think is a serious issue. | |
| Rape is a pretty serious issue, guys. | |
| It's about as serious as they get. | |
| And she is using this, something we've never heard about before, she's using it as just a cudgel to attack Chip Roy and Ted Cruz. | |
| She's saying, you guys are like rapists? | |
| That's not the language of somebody who takes that issue seriously. | |
| So she won't take it seriously. | |
| I will take it seriously. | |
| She'll trot it out for a cheap political shot. | |
| I want to take it much more seriously, I think, than the left does. | |
| Because there is, right now, a group of women who are accusing Marilyn Manson, this pretty famous rock star from the 90s. | |
| I guess he's still pretty famous. | |
| They're accusing him of abuse. | |
| And this term sexual assault, which has only been popularized in recent decades, it's broader than the term rape, but it does raise big questions about our sort of sexual environment, about our legal regime on this question, and on where exactly the problems really begin. | |
| Because the left has all the wrong answers on this, but I think if we pursue the issue a little bit, you'll see that Where the seeds of this kind of culture were planted? | |
| Because in a way, I can't believe I'm saying this. | |
| In a way, the left has a point. | |
| They just don't have the point they think that they have. | |
| We'll get to that in one second. | |
| You know, if you want to check out misinformation, if you want to check out people telling lies, you need to look no further than the current occupants of the White House. | |
| And yet, ironically, the White House is saying they're going to crack down on misinformation. | |
| You can hear about this on Ben's show. | |
| He will break it down point by point. | |
| Earlier this month, you know, we released our first film, Run, Hide, Fight. | |
| This was exclusively for Daily Wire members. | |
| You can now catch it over at dailywire.com on our mobile app, on our streaming app at Apple TV, Roku. | |
| If you're not a Daily Wire member yet, if you use promo code RHF to get 25% off, you can join. | |
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| off. | |
| We'll be right back with a lot more. | |
| So there is a group of women accusing Marilyn Manson of sexual assault. | |
| So there is a group of women accusing Marilyn Manson of sexual assault. | |
| Evan Rachel Wood, who is an actress. | |
| I've actually never seen her work, but she and I got into some kind of Twitter spat one time. | |
| And so that's the only way I became aware of her. | |
| But she is probably the most prominent person leading this charge. | |
| Other women are doing it too, though. | |
| We'll get into those accusations because I actually think that no matter how sort of cheapened this debate has become, the left does kind of have a point here. | |
| I just want to zoom out for a second. | |
| I mean, Marilyn Manson. | |
| He took his stage name from Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, one of the most famous killers in American history. | |
| Marilyn Manson, the highest profile Satanist in America. | |
| He was friends with Anton LaVey, who was the head of the Church of Satan. | |
| He described himself as a minister in the Church of Satan. | |
| He was a devotee of Aleister Crowley, maybe the other most famous Satanist of the last hundred years. | |
| He quotes Crowley in his autobiography, says that Crowley's sort of central dictum is very important to him, which is, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. | |
| A lot of other references to Crowley. | |
| Turns out the Satanist abuses people. | |
| Not exactly a man-bites-dog story. | |
| But it is in our culture, because we have so lost our perspective on these things, that we would be shocked. | |
| We say, oh, there's nothing strange about being a Satanist. | |
| No, it's fine. | |
| It's actually good. | |
| It's all the same. | |
| We can't discriminate. | |
| You see this in lawsuits often. | |
| You'll have some Satanists suing a church, or suing rather a courthouse, because they have the Ten Commandments. | |
| We say that the Church of Satan and the actual church, the Christian church, they're sort of the same thing. | |
| We have to be neutral between those two. | |
| Our founding fathers are rolling over in their graves on this. | |
| But let's get into the actual accusations. | |
| Viewer discretion, if people are younger right now listening to this, maybe just close their ears for about a minute or two. | |
| Evan Rachel Wood, before she said that she was abused by Marilyn Manson, testified before Congress and said she was abused by a sort of former ex-boyfriend, you know, who she's going to leave nameless. | |
| Here is her description of the abuse. | |
| My experience with domestic violence was this. | |
| Toxic mental, physical, and sexual abuse which started slow but escalated over time, including threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me, raping what he believed to be my unconscious body. | |
| And the worst part, sick rituals of binding me up by my hands and feet to be mentally and physically tortured until my abuser felt I had proven my love for them. | |
| In this moment, while I was tied up in being beaten and being told unspeakable things, I truly felt like I could die, not just because my abuser said to me, I could kill you right now, but because in that moment I felt like I left my body and I was too afraid to run, he would find me. | |
| I froze, and it was as if I could see myself from the outside, and for the first time in months I felt something, utter shame and despair. | |
| I had no idea what to do to change my situation so I went numb and soon I couldn't feel anything. | |
| I wasn't alive. | |
| My self-esteem and spirit were broken. | |
| Okay, pretty ugly stuff. | |
| Jenna Jameson, who is a former porn star, who dated Manson, sort of at the height of his fame, didn't describe anything like that, but she did say he bit her. | |
| You know, he was very into, like, biting in sort of a bruising and painful way, and said that he had fantasies about burning her alive, so I guess it does kind of jive a little bit with what Evan Rachel Wood is describing about the unnamed ex-boyfriend. | |
| There are two important parts of this story that show how modern liberal culture exacerbates all of this stuff. | |
| These left-wing women are not complaining, other than AOC taking a cheap political shot that has nothing to do with the actual issue. | |
| These women are not complaining, generally speaking, about conservative men. | |
| Marilyn Manson is not exactly a conservative Republican or something. | |
| They're complaining about people who buy into this leftist idea. | |
| The Me Too movement is focusing on all these leftist dudes from the sort of least serious accusations. | |
| You think of like Aziz Ansari, where they're basically describing this like very crass, bad date, or all the way up to Harvey Weinstein. | |
| These guys are liberal Democrats, right? | |
| So whatever the issue is, if it has a political dimension, the political dimension is going to be on the left. | |
| In the case of Jenna Jameson's descriptions here, and in the case, at least in part, of Evan Rachel Wood, the sick behavior that they're describing was consensual. | |
| When Evan Rachel Wood's talking about it, and we had this ritual that we would do, so we'd do it multiple times, right, if it's a ritual, where he'd tie me up and beat me and say all these horrible, terrible things to me, and I didn't, it was ruining my self-esteem, but that was obviously consensual. | |
| And there are even many people on the right now, certainly the left says this, but even many people on the right who say, look, if it's consensual, it's totally cool. | |
| That is the highest political good, is consent. | |
| Look, as long as you two consent to it, you can do whatever you want, there's nothing about it. | |
| But actual conservatives, conservatives who understand that there is a transcendent moral order, realize, no, things can be done consensually that are still extremely wrong. | |
| On paper, not the first part about waking up, but all the rituals, what Evan Rachel Wood is describing was consensual and it was still wrong. | |
| And it was wrong for her to consent to it, I suppose. | |
| I mean, wrong just because of how it obviously hurt her and tore her up inside. | |
| But it was wrong for the dude, even if he got consent, to do it. | |
| It just remains wrong. | |
| Consent is not enough. | |
| There is a higher good than consent. | |
| The second aspect of this, though, that sort of... | |
| Overturns this leftist prevailing notion about sex is this shows that sex is not a casual thing. | |
| The culture that we're all living in, the ubiquitous culture, especially on college campuses, but especially just among young single people, is that sex is kind of casual. | |
| It's basically like a handshake. | |
| Well, now handshakes are illegal because of COVID, but I guess it's even more casual than a handshake. | |
| And it's totally fine, and you go and you just hook up with whoever you want, and then next day is no big deal, and nobody gets hurt because it's consensual, right? | |
| It does tie into that issue. | |
| And that's just obviously not true. | |
| And here's how I'll show you it's not true. | |
| The punishments for sexual assault are more severe than punishments for simple assault. | |
| Right? | |
| If I go up to some dude on the street or we're in a bar or something and we're talking and we're getting angry and I punch that guy in the face, I'll get in trouble. | |
| You know, that involves some punishments. | |
| But the punishments are not as severe as rape. | |
| Why? | |
| Because sex is not just a casual thing. | |
| If it were, simple assault and sexual assault would be indistinguishable. | |
| But sex is a very serious thing. | |
| It's very significant. | |
| And it's not even purely a physical phenomenon. | |
| It has a spiritual component, too. | |
| And I know that liberals, and the modern left in particular, and even some segments of the right who are a little more licentious, don't want to admit any of that because, I don't know, because some of this stuff is fun, you know, when it's happening and when everyone's doing it. | |
| But nevertheless, that is true. | |
| There are these scare tactics that go around, like college campuses, and they've become very popular over the last 30, 40 years. | |
| The statistics you'll hear is that one in four women, or one in five women on college campuses, will be sexually assaulted while they're there. | |
| They'll be raped while they're on campus. | |
| That is obviously not true. | |
| If that were true, no parent would ever send his kid or her kid to college. | |
| If someone would say, hey, we've got a great place where your daughter can read Aristotle. | |
| They're probably not anymore. | |
| They'll probably read Ibram Kendi or something now. | |
| But we've got a great place where your daughter can go. | |
| She'll read some books. | |
| She'll get a credential. | |
| One in four chance, though, that she'll be the victim of rape. | |
| Would anybody, if anybody actually believed that, would they say, oh, okay, sign me. | |
| Where do I sign up? | |
| Oh, and I get to pay a quarter million dollars for the privilege? | |
| Great. | |
| Terrific. | |
| No, of course nobody believes that. | |
| But those numbers come from these sort of activist surveys. | |
| I detail some of this actually in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which you can pre-order now. | |
| It's not coming out for a few months though. | |
| One of the tricks to some of these surveys... | |
| They'll ask women, describe these experiences, describe if you believe you're a victim of rape or sexual assault, and then they will, after the fact, define many women who do not think that they're victims of rape as victims of rape. | |
| And the reason that they'll do this, or rather the theory that they're pushing as they do this, Is this idea of false consciousness, which is a Marxist idea that became very prominent in the 1970s with second wave feminism. | |
| It's become very prominent with the rise of things like critical race theory, which people have been talking about over the past few months. | |
| That you are not aware of your own oppression. | |
| So you need to have your consciousness raised. | |
| This was a ritual of the New York radical women's groups. | |
| And when your consciousness is raised, you'll realize how oppressed you are. | |
| There's actually a funny essay about this. | |
| Where a woman describes how she went to a New York radical women's consciousness raising party. | |
| She says, you know, when I showed up, I was totally happy. | |
| I was just a regular housewife. | |
| I was totally happy. | |
| Only by the end did I realize how oppressed I am. | |
| And thank goodness for that women's group. | |
| Did you really get your money's worth there? | |
| It doesn't seem like a great way to spend time. | |
| So the statistics are crazy. | |
| Nobody really believes that Harvard Yard is more dangerous to women than downtown Baghdad, right? | |
| Nobody seriously believes that. | |
| But it's about redefining all of those terms. | |
| Well, as they've done so, they've also redefined what would be, by any normal standard, abusive sex as perfectly fine and dandy and kind of fun and kinky and consensual. | |
| But the testimony we're seeing, just with regard to the Marilyn Manson case, the testimony we're seeing is, no, that can still be abusive as well. | |
| And I think it's just, we've got to shake, this is part and parcel of something we've been talking about for a couple weeks now. | |
| We've got to stop pretending that consent is the be-all and end-all. | |
| There is something higher. | |
| It's not even just... | |
| It ties in with the idea that it's not just that we protect freedom of speech. | |
| That's great. | |
| You need something to say. | |
| You need to believe certain things and exclude other things. | |
| It's not just about consent. | |
| It depends what you're consenting to. | |
| The acts themselves really matter. | |
| Speaking of strange sex and double standards on all of this... | |
| Twitter is permitting the Turkish Interior Minister to remain on their platform, even though the Turkish Interior Minister said very offensive things about gay guys. | |
| He tweeted out, quote, Should we tolerate the LGBT deviants who insult the great Kaaba? | |
| Of course not. | |
| That was Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, referring to a shrine in Mecca. | |
| Now, Should we take down this guy's tweet? | |
| I don't really care, right? | |
| What do I care about the Turkish interior minister? | |
| However, what I do care about, regardless of his culture or his country or the minister of Turkey, I care that Twitter is going to let that tweet remain up, but they're going to take down the tweets of the duly elected sitting president of the United States at the time, Donald Trump. | |
| And not just that, they're going to take him off the platform. | |
| Twitter is going to give greater deference to the Interior Minister of Turkey than they are to the President of the United States. | |
| And actually, one thing I really love about this story is it shows that the left does not particularly care about, say, LGBT people or whatever fashionable grievance group they're focusing on at the time. | |
| They care about the exercise of power. | |
| They're just, it's just a negative campaign against the United States, against tradition. | |
| So this guy tweets out this offensive thing about LGBT people. | |
| But it doesn't, if they take him down, that's not going to look good. | |
| It's going to look like, wow, maybe the United States has a better view on something than people around the world. | |
| And so we're not going to, we're just going to leave it up. | |
| We're just going to leave it up. | |
| And it's better. | |
| It's in the public interest to leave up these statesmen. | |
| Oh, well, you don't really believe that because you took down Donald Trump. | |
| Which is why I am so sick and tired of hearing about cancel culture. | |
| I'm sick and tired of hearing about it. | |
| Cancel culture is a slogan. | |
| And like all slogans, it refers to something real. | |
| But the slogan itself should be basically disregarded. | |
| Kind of like pro-life. | |
| You'll hear people say this. | |
| They'll say, you're pro-life, huh? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, but you support the death penalty? | |
| What a hypocrite. | |
| No. | |
| Pro-life refers to one specific thing. | |
| It refers to opposition to killing babies in the womb. | |
| There are other questions about life that come up. | |
| I don't believe that we... | |
| I still think the civil authority has the right to kill criminals. | |
| I don't think that we can eradicate death. | |
| I guess if I were really pro-life, I would want to abolish death. | |
| Well, you can't abolish death, right? | |
| It doesn't mean any of those things. | |
| It's a slogan that refers to a specific thing. | |
| We can talk about those other things later, but that's not what we're talking about here. | |
| Same thing with cancel culture. | |
| Cancel culture refers to a specific phenomenon of leftist censorship and ostracism of anyone who contradicts politically correct orthodoxy. | |
| Have conservatives censored liberals before? | |
| Yes. | |
| McCarthyism is a great example. | |
| Is McCarthyism a very good thing? | |
| Perhaps we'll get to that at some later point. | |
| But sure, yeah, absolutely. | |
| Does that mean that we can say whatever we want whenever we want and there's no limits on free speech? | |
| No, that's never been true in America. | |
| But we're talking about something specific. | |
| The issue that is going on right now is not conservatives censoring leftists. | |
| It's the opposite. | |
| So let's focus on that issue. | |
| But the left doesn't want to have that honest argument. | |
| It's why they resort to these cheap, ugly tactics. | |
| You see it from AOC. You see it from all sorts of bad faith actors on the internet and in the public square. | |
| And there's no reason to engage in that debate. | |
| No debate in that context is possible. | |
| BLM has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. | |
| Some people are calling it the Nobel mostly peaceful prize. | |
| I think that is probably true. | |
| Everyone is very upset because BLM obviously was torching the country for like six months. | |
| Doesn't seem very peaceful. | |
| However, I think this is pretty in keeping with past winners. | |
| You've got Yasser Arafat. | |
| Yasser Arafat, a terrorist from the Middle East, right? | |
| He won. | |
| So surely if he won, BLM can win too. | |
| Beyond that, you've got Barack Obama. | |
| One, Barack Obama started multiple new wars. | |
| Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. | |
| He didn't start any wars, as far as I can tell, but... | |
| He has supported a campaign of population suppression. | |
| He has supported abortion and contraception in the third world to keep Africans from having too many babies. | |
| That doesn't seem peaceful. | |
| Jimmy Carter. | |
| Jimmy Carter didn't start any new wars. | |
| Kind of feckless. | |
| I don't know. | |
| He didn't bring a ton of peace, but fair enough. | |
| So, sure, BLM is up for this. | |
| A lot of conservatives are saying, we should not nominate BLM for this. | |
| I would like to go further, and this ties in to cancel culture. | |
| I think BLM should be canceled. | |
| We should not permit that organization to operate in the United States. | |
| It is a subversive organization. | |
| It is not only opposed to the structure of the U.S. government, but it actively tries to overturn those structures by setting government buildings on fire, by burning down businesses, by torching city after city after city. | |
| It is opposed in idea to the United States, and it is opposed in practice to the United States because it attacks law enforcement and because it attacks politics. | |
| All of these sorts of institutions. | |
| It is a subversive organization. | |
| It should be prosecuted under the Smith Act. | |
| We were just talking about McCarthyism. | |
| The Smith Act is an act that was popular and actually used in the mid-20th century before the Supreme Court watered it down to prosecute communists because you can't be an open subversive. | |
| You can't actively be trying to overturn the system. | |
| We can't tolerate that amount of free expression, the sort of expression that's going to overturn the entire system of free expression. | |
| Can't have it. | |
| Like Chesterton said, there's a thought that stops thought. | |
| That's the only thought that ought to be stopped. | |
| Same with Antifa. | |
| We should not tolerate Antifa. | |
| You might say, Michael, you're an authoritarian. | |
| Your views sound so authoritarian. | |
| My views are not in any way authoritarian. | |
| We've had these kinds of rules against sedition and subversive organizations since the very beginning of the country. | |
| My views are no more authoritarian than Thomas Jefferson's. | |
| My views are no more authoritarian than John Locke's, who wrote the letter concerning toleration. | |
| In the letter concerning toleration, John Locke says, atheists under no circumstances should ever be tolerated. | |
| John Locke is the father of liberalism. | |
| So I just don't want to hear it. | |
| I don't want to hear about illiberalism. | |
| I don't want to hear about authoritarianism. | |
| We need to have substance. | |
| This goes all the way back. | |
| To Mitch McConnell's defense of Liz Cheney, where he says, you know, she has convictions, and she leads, and she has courage. | |
| Yeah, so does BLM. BLM, they lead, they have courage, they have convictions. | |
| What matters is what the convictions are. | |
| And if the convictions are opposed to the country itself, those cannot be tolerated. | |
| We want specific action. | |
| I think we're finally waking up out of the slumber of just lulling ourselves to sleep to do nothing politically for a couple of decades. | |
| Conservatives are realizing, oh, we actually have to wield political power. | |
| Ron DeSantis down in Florida is realizing this. | |
| He just came out and announced big actions on big tech. | |
| In Florida, we're going to take action. | |
| We're going to take aim at those companies and pull back the veil and make sure these guys don't continue to find loopholes and gray areas to live above the law. | |
| Under our proposal, if a technology company deplatforms a candidate for elected office in Florida during an election, A company will face a daily fine of $100,000 until the candidate's access to the platform is restored. | |
| Again, any Floridian can deplatform any candidate they choose to simply unsubscribe, and it's a right that I believe belongs with the citizen. | |
| Further, if a technology company promotes a candidate for office against another, the value of that free promotion must be recorded as a political campaign contribution enforced by the Florida Elections Commission. | |
| And lastly, if a technology company uses their content and user-related algorithms to suppress or prioritize the access of any content related to a political candidate or cause on the ballot, that company will also face daily fines. | |
| Love this. | |
| This is actually the perfect issue to see what we're all talking about here. | |
| Because on one level, What DeSantis is doing is very pro-free speech, right? | |
| Pro-free expression. | |
| He's saying, if you deplatform people who are running for office in the way that big tech did to Donald Trump, right? | |
| Because it's not just even kicking the candidates off. | |
| It's suppressing the news stories. | |
| It's taking away the Hunter Biden story, which Twitter did in the run-up to the election. | |
| It's then after the election, while it was being contested, kicking Trump off of the platform. | |
| In that way, very pro-free speech. | |
| But in another way, this is authoritarian. | |
| This is illiberal. | |
| This is suppressing the speech of the tech companies. | |
| Build your own Twitter. | |
| Build your own Google. | |
| No, that's just bunk. | |
| That's ridiculous. | |
| Give me a break. | |
| Big tech controls the flow of information around the internet. | |
| The internet is the public square. | |
| Big tech controls our political discourse effectively. | |
| And if they are putting their finger on the scale, we need to go in. | |
| If we regulate them as Ron DeSantis is doing, that is not an attack on free speech. | |
| That is a defense of free speech. | |
| It's using the state to defend free speech, which I know seems so crazy to so many on the right who have thought that that's not possible over the last couple of decades. | |
| The right used to understand, not that long ago, the right used to understand, of course that is the case. | |
| Through politics, we set the parameters of the free marketplace of ideas, of the marketplace, meaning the economy itself. | |
| We set those things, and then we want it to operate freely within those boundaries. | |
| This also tells me, Ron DeSantis is running. | |
| This guy is gearing up for 2024. | |
| It is so obvious. | |
| And he's setting himself up in a good position. | |
| Can he go all the way? | |
| Who knows? | |
| It's still so early, nobody could guess these things early on. | |
| But he's positioning himself very well, and he is showing clarity on this issue. | |
| I hope that the Republicans get some clarity, too, and we don't just keep spewing platitudes about leadership and conviction. | |
| All right. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
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| The White House calls for big tech companies to censor so-called hate speech. | |
| Governor Ron DeSantis takes steps to rein in big tech. | |
| And a Maryland school district tries to instill anti-racism in preschoolers. |