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Feb. 11, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:42
Ep. 698 - Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud

House Dems undermine their case for “impeachment,” the 1619 Project founder doxxes a conservative journalist, and France tells America to stop exporting wokeness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Democrats have impeached Donald Trump because of his actions on January 6th.
That is the reasoning that we have been told up until now.
Donald Trump incited an insurrection on January 6th.
Now the trouble with this line of argument, of course, is that you can go back to the tape and see what Trump said, and he said, be peaceful.
Don't be violent before, during, and after the riot at the Capitol.
So that doesn't work.
Well, Joaquin Castro, not Julian Castro, not the former future president, Joaquin Castro, the congressman, has the updated reasoning as to why they are impeaching Trump.
This attack did not come from one speech, and it didn't happen by accident.
The evidence shows clearly that this mob was provoked over many months by Donald J. Trump.
And if you look at the evidence, his purposeful conduct, you'll see that the attack was foreseeable and preventable.
Not just about one speech.
It was foreseeable.
It was predictable.
It was so vague.
It was in the penumbras and the emanations and in between the lines.
And when Trump said be peaceful, he was really saying be violent.
That probably does not stand up to legal scrutiny.
And unfortunately, while Joaquin Castro was trying to bail out the Democrats' failing case for impeachment, I think he just undercut it entirely.
I'm Michael Knowles.
It's the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment from yesterday is from Henry Knox, who says, this is actually pretty profound.
When victimhood is currency, there will be lots of counterfeiters.
That is very true.
That is extraordinarily true.
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I'm in a hotel room not too far away from the White House, also not too far away from the Capitol.
We are covering the fake impeachment trial, which is falling apart minute by minute.
I'm not going to cover, really, the play-by-play of all these arguments.
They're very foolish arguments, very glib arguments.
They have been from the beginning.
It was always pretty weak.
And I think, as you heard Joaquin Castro there, it's falling apart minute by minute.
So I don't think there's any reason to pay attention to it.
It's also, as we discussed yesterday, not a constitutional impeachment trial.
But it is worth looking at it for what it says about our broader politics.
You know, there's someone called Josh Hawley, the Republican senator.
He was like doodling on his paper during the trial today or yesterday.
He was reading material that was completely unrelated to the trial because this is not worth paying attention to.
Broadly speaking, we live in a very glib time.
We're now treating impeachment, which is a very, very serious constitutional process, like it's nothing, like it's just, you know, something that you do ordinarily.
I was in D.C. at this very hotel a year ago for the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
Now we got another one.
We're probably going to have another one in a year or two years after that.
We're living in a very glib time, not just on this issue of the impeachment, but on this issue of The entire Biden agenda, Jen Psaki, our favorite White House press secretary of the Biden administration, was just asked a question about Joe Biden's transgender executive order.
This basically, within the first week of Biden being in office, he abolishes women's bathrooms and women's sports, at least at the federal level.
Obviously, they're going to fight it more at the local level.
So she's asked, serious question, Hey, if you're going to let men play in women's sports and men use the ladies' room, don't you think that's sort of unfair to women?
Here's her answer.
What message would the White House have for trans girls and cis girls who may end up competing against each other and sparking some lawsuits and some concern among parents?
So does the administration have guidance for schools on dealing with disputes arising over trans girls competing against and with cis girls?
I'm not sure what your question is.
I'm familiar with the order, but what was your question about it?
My question is, does the president have a message for local school officials on dealing with these kind of disputes that are already starting to arise?
You know, trans girls are competing and cis girls in a level playing field, particularly in high school sports when it leads to college scholarships.
Is there any kind of messaging or clarification that the White House wants to give on the executive order?
I would just say that the president's belief is that trans rights are human rights, and that's why he signed that executive order.
And in terms of the determinations by universities and colleges, I'd certainly defer to that.
Joe Biden believes trans rights are human rights.
Our White House press secretary is mustering all the sophistication of a Twitter troll or a sort of an everyday feminism headline.
Trans rights or human rights?
That doesn't answer my question.
What about the girls who are now going to lose out on scholarships and lose out on awards and lose out on admission to various colleges and various athletic programs because men are competing against them and men are bigger and faster and stronger, so they're going to beat them.
What about little girls who now have to change in front of men at the public pool?
Give me an answer on that.
Don't just give me some ridiculous slogan, trans rights or human rights.
Did you hear that term that Jen Psaki used?
She said cis.
Cis, for those of you not in the woke, know.
Cis is the opposite of trans.
So if you're a cis woman or a cisgendered woman, that means you're a woman who knows that you're a woman.
You're not a woman who thinks that you're a man.
So this brings up an issue that I've seen some conservatives do.
I myself have done it a couple times, but I don't want to do it anymore.
I don't think you should qualify woman or man.
Some conservatives do this now.
They'll say, well, you know, Caitlyn Jenner is a biological man.
Caitlyn Jenner is a man.
Not a biological man, spiritual man, whatever.
When you say things like biological man or whatever, you qualify man or woman in any way to better accord with gender ideology, you are granting the premise of gender ideology.
You're granting the premise that your biology can be one thing and your spirit can be another thing as though your true identity has nothing to do with your spirit.
It's kind of the flip side of the gender argument.
The gender ideologue argument is that, you know, I look like a man, but I feel like I'm a woman.
So because, you know, forget about my physical body.
Deep down, I feel like a woman.
Therefore, I am truly a woman.
My body has nothing to do with who I really am.
Well, the kind of biological man qualifier is just the opposite side of that.
It's saying, well, you know, the way your body is, that's exactly what you are.
You're purely material.
You're not a soul.
And the real answer is, you're a soul and a body.
And it's one and it's united together.
And a man is a man and a woman is a woman.
And there's no reason to qualify these things at all.
I don't think we should in any way Validate this Gnostic delusion of gender ideology.
But they're doing it.
They're doing it everywhere.
In Great Britain right now, I kid you not, a group of hospitals is instructing midwives in the maternity departments to use different terms when treating transgender patients to be more gender inclusive.
Meaning, instead of breastfeeding, you have to use the term chestfeeding.
Instead of breast milk, you have to use the term human milk.
Instead of breast milk, you could also say milk from the feeding mother or parent.
That's another long one.
Very inhuman.
This kind of language erases women, right?
It says, no, there's no such thing as women.
We're all just kind of generic people.
And so anything that might distinguish women from men, we're going to get rid of it.
But it's inhuman more broadly.
We shouldn't use this kind of thing.
We shouldn't indulge it in any way.
And conservatives, to be polite, want to do that.
You want to say, well, look, I don't care.
If a man thinks he's a woman and he wants to wear a dress in his own private life, far be it from me, who am I to say?
You are somebody.
You can have an opinion on this.
Men should not dress like women and behave like women.
If they do it, it should only be as part of some very sort of outrageous costume or something.
It should be with the acknowledgement that this is strange, out of the ordinary, and not the way things are supposed to be.
Conservatives need to get much more serious about this sort of thing.
We live in such a glib time that you have the radicals saying, well, there's no rules to anything.
We can liberate ourselves however we want.
Men can be women.
Women can be men.
There's chest milk and whatever, you know, milk from the feeding parent.
But then on the other side of the glibness, you've got these conservatives who are refusing to offer any other vision.
They're saying, yeah, whatever you want to do.
As long as I don't have to pay for it, as long as it doesn't affect my bottom line, do whatever you want.
No, guys.
That is not a serious political vision.
When you offer a political vision, you have to be able to say, this is the way the world is, and some things are true, and some things are false, and I'm going to stand up for the things that are true, and I'm going to oppose the things that are false.
But the identity politics is not primarily at the level of sex.
The identity politics today is primarily at the level of race.
It's an ugly fact, but the racial identitarians...
But overwhelmingly of the left are dictating that.
You even hear it from guys who are sort of fake Republicans like Joe Scarborough.
Joe Scarborough who is, you know, his job is to basically be the court jester in the kingdom of liberalism.
He's supposed to say, I was a Republican congressman and all the Republicans today are bad.
And, you know, then the liberals applaud him.
And they give him some money.
So Joe Scarborough went on TV on his show that very few people watch, but a lot of journalists watch.
And he said, the problem with our politics right now is that some people in America cannot accept the fact that they are not going to be in the majority.
Now what does that mean?
People can't be in the majority.
Are we talking about religion?
Are we talking about race?
Are we talking about sex?
I don't know.
I guess just as a raw numbers, women make up most of the population.
They're the only aggrieved minority that happens to be a majority in the world.
What Scarborough is talking about here is race.
And it's ironic because he's a white guy.
And he's talking about how white grievance is driving the Trump phenomenon.
It's the same sort of thing you hear from all Democrats.
The only reason that Republicans do what they do is because they're racist.
And they hate people who aren't white.
And they're neo-Nazis and they're white supremacists.
And we've got to get rid of them.
But his argument reveals what is so rotten and frustrating to people about the rise of identitarian politics at a time when we're told we're all supposed to be equal.
It is remarkable that so much of this is all about an America that is changing and certain people who cannot accept the change.
And don't understand that they're not going to be the majority in this country anymore.
And it's fascinating.
I have been reading, along with Kate, going back and reading Flannery O'Connor short stories.
And one after another after another after another is written about white people in the 50s and early 60s adjusting to changes and not being able to understand what is happening around them in the South.
There's so much here to digest.
It's such a glib statement.
One, because you're ascribing racial animus to one group of people, I think baselessly, in a way that you would never ascribe it to black people.
You never say, oh, black people, they're just all upset because they're black.
Or, oh, Hispanic people, they're all just upset because they're brown.
But Joe Scarborough is saying, no, these white people, they're just upset because they're white racists.
But moreover...
There was a Pew Research survey on racial consciousness in America.
The question was, how important is your race to your identity?
Is it important or is it very important or is it not really important at all?
White people in America have the lowest racial consciousness and it's not even close.
For basically every other racial group, these people consider race to be either important or very important to their identity.
Greater than 50%.
For white people, it's about 15%.
Now, I think most people I know would say, oh, that's a good thing.
I don't consider my race to be the number one aspect of my identity.
I don't know, it's probably like number 100 or something, right?
I'd say, hey, Michael, what are you?
I'm Catholic.
I'm American.
I'm a conservative.
I'm a conservative.
I'm a New Yorker originally.
I'm Italian-American.
I guess that's sort of a race.
It's kind of more like your family background, especially in America where people come from a lot of different backgrounds.
But sure, but it's pretty low down, right?
And then at what point would I say I'm a white guy?
I don't know.
Pretty low down the list.
So I think what Joe Scarborough is saying here is wrong just as a matter of social science.
You know, the surveys don't really back that up.
But let's say it's true.
White people are upset because they're not going to be the majority anymore and that's just the way it is.
People like Joe Scarborough, people on the left, are ginning up racial consciousness for every racial group.
They're saying it is good to be racially conscious.
Black people need to be more racially conscious.
That's why there's all these anti-racism, quote-unquote, re-education trainings.
That's why we have Black Lives Matter, right?
All these kind of woke racial groups.
So everyone needs more racial consciousness, except for white people.
At the same time, we're told, white is not a race, it's a social construct.
There's no such thing as white people.
But then the left says that whiteness is evil.
It's terrible.
It's the worst thing in the world.
White people need to have certain disadvantage.
White people need to apologize and feel very sorry about themselves.
We need to decolonize all manner of society and take the white people out of it.
On and on and on.
So they're saying there's no such thing as white people, but also white people are the worst people in the world.
And then they're saying if there is any white racial consciousness, which, by the way, I don't really think there is, but they're saying if there is, that's the worst thing in the world.
What is supposed to happen here?
What is Joe Scarborough proposing?
He's saying white people should have no sort of group thought and also, man, white people are the worst and we're just going to get rid of them and they're not going to have any political power.
What is supposed to happen there?
Now, what I think would be nice is if race were not the primary mode of thinking in American politics.
But I think the left knows that it is greatly to their advantage to increase racial consciousness for their likely voter groups.
So you see this all over the place.
Elon University is hosting a white caucus You might think that the KKK is being revived.
That's not the case.
The White Caucus is for white students to, quote, unpack race and systemic oppression.
This is what the email from Elon University reads.
A white caucus is a space for white-identifying individuals.
What's a white-identifying individual?
I guess that could be like me, right?
I'm sort of swarthy.
I've got this Sicilian skin.
I guess I could pass for not a white guy, but do I identify as a white guy?
I guess.
For white-identifying individuals to engage in conversations that unpack race and systemic oppression.
In this world, where you're told that white people are like the worst thing ever and whiteness is a synonym for evil, who would choose to identify as a white person?
I don't know.
This is why, by the way, the sort of public acceptability or even encouragement of castigating whiteness as a category, this is why you get the Rachel Dolezals of the world.
This is why it seems every month or so you find another person who's, you know, a gender theory professor or a critical studies professor who's been pretending to be Hispanic or black for their whole lives.
It turns out they're just white people because they're trying to identify as another race because they've been told that being white is a very bad thing.
The email goes on.
White caucuses allow white-identifying allies to have these conversations in a way that does not burden or re-traumatize people of color.
Re-traumatize.
White caucuses give white people a space to learn about and process their awareness of and complicity in unjust systems without harming their friends of color.
A lot of woke white liberals believe this sort of thing.
It's very sad.
Just as sad, if you were to grow up, actually I guess from the same ideology, if you were to grow up and be told, because I'm black, I cannot succeed.
I can't get ahead.
The system is just out to get me.
People who push this idea are like Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Who is a very wealthy, very famous, very admired writer.
Why he is admired, I have no idea.
But he's admired by all the very fancy people.
He wins half a million dollar MacArthur Genius Grants.
And his message is basically the whole system is rigged against black people and they can't do anything.
It's a horrible message to tell somebody.
And it's manifestly a lie, right?
Ta-Nehisi Coates' life is evidence that that's a lie.
In the same way, how awful is it to tell some white kid, yeah, man, you're evil.
You're awful because of the color of your skin.
We're not saying you're oppressed.
We're saying you're the oppressor.
You're just a vile, vicious, evil person.
And there's no way you can ever fix it.
You are oppressed.
White.
You know, you participate in this thing called whiteness, which has become a synonym for evil.
That's a horrible thing to tell kids.
I don't know.
I guess I'm immune to what liberals might call white guilt.
You know, I don't feel guilt because of my skin color.
I don't feel pride, you know, racial pride.
I don't really take glory or shame in the color of my skin.
But increasingly, this is what we're told to do.
It's not just at Elon University.
Purdue University.
It was just proposing a mandatory class in anti-racist thought.
What is anti-racist thought?
It's racist thought.
I know.
Isn't that ironic?
The Purdue Musical organizations announced in January its members would be required to complete six classes on anti-racist thought.
This includes white privilege, white supremacy, white fragility, And white saviorism and how to be a better ally.
This according to emails that were seen by the Washington Free Beacon.
They have backed off of this since the emails came out.
These courses would have been taught by well-known con artists Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.
They were supposed to start this month.
They've now been postponed.
This is Purdue.
Purdue's a pretty conservative university.
Purdue is run by Mitch Daniels, former Republican governor of Indiana, conservative guy, very intelligent, has a keen understanding of education.
Even he is being forced to adopt, in some ways, this vicious, vile, bigoted sort of stuff.
It's sort of trite at this point to even say it.
It's glib to say it, so I don't even want to, but to say, imagine if there were a course called black privilege or black supremacy or black fragility.
Oh my God, could you imagine?
But that's not the way it works.
Because, actually, as our friend told us, Henry Knox, at the top of the show, my favorite comment yesterday, when victimhood is currency, there's going to be a lot of counterfeiters.
When victimhood becomes the currency of a society, then victimhood is actually going to become a privilege, and people are going to claim victimhood as best they can.
And then the pièce de résistance...
Nicole Hannah-Jones, probably one of the biggest race hustlers in America, one of the most prominent racial identitarians in the country, she created the 1619 Project to, quote, reframe American history to say it's evil and bigoted and racist.
This woman just doxxed a conservative journalist.
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Nicole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, probably their most famous journalist at this point of 1619 probably their most famous journalist at this point of 1619 fame, just doxed the Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sebarium.
Aaron Sibarium reached out to her because the Times has this very strong policy now, no use of the N-word.
Doesn't matter if it's to give context.
Doesn't matter if a reporter is quoting somebody.
They had a reporter who was discussing this word in a sort of academic fashion.
Two years ago, in a private conversation, they fired him for it.
They said, we will not tolerate this word in any form.
But then they find out that Nicole Hannah-Jones, is that her name or is it Hannah Nicole Jones?
I always forget.
It's Anna Nicole Smith and Nicole Hannah-Jones.
Nicole Hannah-Jones Used this word jokingly on a podcast recently, and of course she's not going to lose her job because the New York Times is not going to enforce this across the board as they say they will.
They're not going to enforce this regardless of context.
They're going to let people who can claim racial grievance say it, and people who cannot will be fired, no matter the use of it.
So they're obviously going to let Nicole Hannah-Jones off the hook and they're not going to let this other guy off the hook.
They're just going to do it based on how they perceive someone's grievance to be that will permit them to say various other words.
It's an ugly system.
I don't like it.
I think it's very silly and I don't think we should indulge that sort of thing.
But think about how Nicole Hannah-Jones is playing this game.
She's not playing it according to logic.
She's not even pretending that there is a logic to what she's saying.
Nicole Hannah-Jones wants to reframe American history.
She hates the country, and she wants to say that the country is not good, the country is bad.
And here's why.
She lied to do it.
The central thesis of the 1619 Project is that the American Revolution was about preserving slavery.
It wasn't.
Academic historians, even on the left, said that was complete BS. Finally, after a long, long time, they issued a slight correction, but they didn't erase the project.
Now this woman, when she's asked any question about her behavior, doxes some kid.
You know, when you get doxed as a public figure, that can threaten your life.
That can threaten your family's life.
Doesn't matter.
She sent out this kid's email address and this kid's cell phone number to half a million followers.
She eventually deleted it, but she kept joking about it.
She doesn't care.
I've said before on this show, there are times in politics when you can try to work together, you can try to do a little kumbaya, you can try to have a little unity and healing.
No matter what Joe Biden is saying right now about unity and healing, that's not what the left is interested in.
And the right cannot force it.
I know there are some squishes on the right who, they're in the professional loser caucus, you know, guys like Mitt Romney.
All they want to do is be loved by the left.
Fair enough.
Sometimes there's a reason to try to reconcile a little bit, meet in the middle, but your opponent gets a say.
In politics, your opponent gets a say.
In war, your enemy gets a say.
And the left does not want to reconcile.
They want to dox us.
They want to impeach us after we leave office.
They want to call us Nazis and evil, rotten people.
They want to attack us on the basis of our race or certainly on the basis of our politics, on the basis of our religion.
They think we're deplorable, irredeemable.
I'm just using Hillary Clinton's words there.
That is a virus in the country.
That's a real dangerous virus in the country.
Some viruses are a little less dangerous than that.
That one's real dangerous.
And I'm not the only one who thinks so.
Emmanuel Macron, leader in France, is describing woke American politics.
Call it political correctness.
Call it radical leftism.
He's describing it in the way you would describe a virus.
He's saying that it is being imported now into France.
It's not native to France.
It's coming from America, and it already screwed up American society, and now it's screwing up French society.
He said, I assume that's how he begins every sentence.
I don't speak French very well.
He says, we have left the intellectual debate to others, to those outside of the French Republic, by ideologizing it, sometimes yielding it to other academic traditions, meaning American and Anglo ones.
When I see certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States with their problems, which I respect and which exist, but which are just added to ours, I say to myself that it is reasonable to make this choice.
So we must very clearly reinvest on a massive scale in the field of social sciences, history, understanding of civilizations, by creating posts, stepping up dialogue, on and on and on.
We need to basically defend the French intellectual life against woke American leftism.
Because he knows that this stuff is poison for a society.
It's absolute poison.
I remember in the early political correctness debates in the 90s, a big topic of my book that's coming out soon, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which you can pre-order right now, by the way.
A big topic of it is these political correctness debates, even much earlier on.
And early on then, the French said, you know, we don't have a problem with this.
France has their own problems.
They're like burning cars in the streets every day, you know, blood running down the Champs Elysees.
But we don't have this problem of political correctness.
That's an American problem.
And now we're seeing the flourishing of that sort of problem here in the United States.
And I guess we're exporting it around the world too.
We can't make peace with that.
They don't want peace.
When we try to reconcile with that, what are we getting?
We're getting more and more political violence.
It's just not possible.
To have a peaceful society if you're coming to terms with that.
You have to fight it.
You have to stop this kind of woke ideology in its tracks.
That's the only way that you're going to have peace.
You have to be firm on these kind of academic and political movements.
Speaking of France, by the way, this is my favorite headline of the entire week.
France is not living up to the Paris Climate Accord.
Why is this so ironic?
I don't know if you're familiar with geography.
Paris, a very prominent city in France.
This is a French project, the Paris Climate Accord, France not living up to it.
We already knew many countries weren't living up to it.
Actually, after the Paris Climate Accord was signed and then Trump came in and pulled us out of it, actually the United States led the way in meeting the goals outlined in the Paris Climate Accord that we weren't even a member of.
Now Joe Biden signed us back up.
But it's all just fake.
It's all just glib.
It's all this shallow nonsense.
No one takes it seriously.
Not even France takes it seriously.
It's just a facade to permit the liberal establishment to continue on its path of national and I suppose international destruction.
You can't take these things at face value.
The impeachment trial is not an impeachment trial.
The environmental protocol is not an environmental protocol.
The same goes for climate change, climate change broadly, right?
It's this sort of larger-than-life topic that is just a way to push through the same policies that the left has wanted for a hundred years.
It's all so shallow.
Is there any way to fight back?
I think there is.
I don't know about the Paris climate thing.
I don't think it's going to matter all that much.
But there is a way to fight back.
When I think of the shallow politicians in this country, one guy who comes to mind is Governor Patrick Bateman, you know, Governor American Psycho out there over in California.
Gavin Newsom says one thing, does another, locks down the state, says you can't go to restaurants.
Next, they catch him at a Michelin-rated restaurant sitting next to his buddies.
Nobody's got any masks on.
They're eating $1,000 meals.
He doesn't believe in any of it.
Well, Newsom might have to face some consequences for that.
There has been building for a while now.
A recall effort for Gavin Newsom.
If they get enough signatures, Newsom's critics will be able to force a new election, hopefully kick him out of office.
They're pretty close.
They needed one and a half million signatures.
It's very hard to get one and a half million signatures here for anything in California.
They need to get it by March 17th.
The petition to recall Newsom currently has 1.4 million signatures.
There are only 100,000 signatures off.
That's the good news.
They've still got a month, more than a month, to do this.
So it's very possible it's accelerated in recent weeks.
Now, the downside is it's not really just one and a half million, because what's going to happen then is the political operatives working for Newsom are going to go into the petition and start taking off signatures, if maybe, I don't know, let's say the address doesn't match the name of the signatory.
They're going to cross that out.
If the person's not a resident of the state of California, they're going to cross that out.
Maybe if someone's moved.
I know some people who've left California recently.
So they're going to take off a lot of signatures.
Every political campaign does this.
Republicans and Democrats both do this.
Which means that this petition to recall Newsom is really going to need more like 1.8, 1.9, maybe even 2 million if it actually wants to take hold.
Can they get that?
They do have a month.
Very hard to get half a million signatures in a month, but that's what they have to aim for.
Because otherwise, I think what you're going to see is they'll get one and a half million or they get 1.6 or something, and then, ah, whoopsie-daisy, the system beat them again because they took off and disqualified enough signatures.
This is a concerted effort here.
To push the agenda of the liberal establishment.
They've got big tech.
They've got the administrative state.
They've got now a lot of elective offices.
They've got universities.
They've got Hollywood.
They've got the media.
They've got so much.
They've got sports.
That it's very easy.
We've got to be really on our game here.
Very serious.
Otherwise we're going to get rolled.
Which does seem to be happening a lot.
This liberal establishment does not have the best interests of the United States at heart.
I know that sounds hyperbolic.
I don't mean it just to throw bombs.
I'm saying it as a purely descriptive matter.
So much of the national debate over the past five years, I guess, is between globalism and nationalism.
And whenever we use these isms, you know, they're a little imprecise, but what do we mean by globalism?
By globalism, we mean people who do not feel particularly strong bonds to their nation, to their country.
They feel that they are citizens of the world.
You know, people in New York who feel they have much more in common with people in London and Paris than they do with people in Peoria or Omaha or something.
So they want a much more globalized world, globalized markets, and a lot of conservatives used to be all for the globalized markets.
The trouble with the globalized markets is inevitably globalized regulation will follow.
Globalized political institutions will follow.
You lose a little bit of national sovereignty.
That's what we're seeing.
The liberal establishment going in for what you could broadly call globalism.
And the right going in for what you could broadly call nationalism.
I don't really consider myself a nationalist.
I'm not saying the nation state is the be-all and end-all of political order.
However, in this debate, do we have some affection for our country or do we give it all away to the UN or something?
Yeah, give me America.
I'm with America.
But some people are not, and I'm not just castigating them in a hyperbolic way.
Mark Cuban has decided that the Mavericks, his sports ball team, is no longer going to play the national anthem before the games.
The Mavericks have not played the anthem before any of the team's 13 home games.
This is the first instance, I think, of any pro sports team in the U.S. taking the anthem out of a game.
Why is he doing that?
Because he doesn't like America very much, obviously.
And there's a business angle to it as well.
There's a report out now that sources close to Mark Cuban say that he chose not to play the anthem before the games anymore.
Not because he doesn't love the U.S. He totally loves the U.S. But because, quote, many people feel that the anthem doesn't represent them.
And they want a continued discussion of how to represent people from all communities when honoring the U.S. at a game.
You've heard also in recent months the idea of a black national anthem.
In order for there to be a black national anthem, there has to be a black nation.
Black nationalism.
How much have we heard in the past years of the scourge of white nationalism rising?
Well, here we have the mainstreaming of other kinds of racial nationalism.
It's being encouraged for certain groups and obviously discouraged for other groups.
It's not that the left has a problem with racial identitarianism or nationalism, broadly speaking.
They just have a problem with it for certain people and they like it for other people.
Now, there's so much wrong with this.
I mean, obviously, the flag has to represent everybody.
The reason that some people feel it does not represent them is because the left has been attacking American national identity and stoking other forms of identity in a very, very shallow and cynical way.
The NBA is coming out and saying, no, the Mavericks are not allowed to do this.
Sorry, you'll have to keep playing the national anthem.
Sorry, Mark Cuban.
Part of the reason Mark Cuban's doing this, obviously, is this identitarian woke politics.
There's an economic reason, though, too, which is that the dude is owned by China.
The NBA is owned by China.
So much of American media, to say nothing of manufacturing and other interests, is owned by China.
China's a really big market, pays these guys a lot of money, and they value the almighty dollar more than they value bonds of loyalty to their country.
To me, I hope conservatives are paying attention to this, because to me, this is maybe the clearest example of how the free market, quote-unquote, is not sufficient to craft a political vision.
That's the free market.
Mark Cuban hates his country, and he wants to sell out to China.
It's the free market.
It's his economic freedom, right?
He can do whatever he wants.
No.
No.
Free markets are great.
They're a wonderful instrument to human and national flourishing.
But there has to be another end.
There has to be something deeper.
There has to be bonds of loyalty to your family, to your community, and to your nation that has given you so much.
Speaking of giving back to your nation, President Trump, or at least people around President Trump, have suggested that he might run again in 2024.
I guess Trump at the White House Christmas Party suggested this too.
He was going on camera.
They might run for president.
But he's kicked off Twitter.
How's he going to run?
The CFO of Twitter was asked, If Trump runs again, if he wins again, will he be allowed back on Twitter?
Absolutely not.
Former President Trump was banned.
If he came back, ran for office again, and was elected president, would you allow him back on the platform?
So the way our policies work, when you're removed from the platform, you're removed from the platform, whether you're a commentator, you're a CFO, or you are a former or current public official.
And so, remember, our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence, and if anybody does that, we have to remove them from the service, and our policies don't allow people to come back.
President Trump could be good enough for the American people, good enough for the Electoral College, not good enough for Twitter.
We were talking about how if your entire political ideology is the free market, which, by the way, is not possible because the civil authority, people through politics, need to set what the free market is.
It's not totally open.
This is a finite world.
Everything has limits on it.
So it has a certain shape.
To make an idol out of the free market is sort of a nonsense in itself.
But if you do that, then there's nothing wrong with what Twitter's doing.
Yeah, you can kick off the duly elected president.
They already did.
They already kicked Trump off while he was the sitting duly elected president.
And it is astounding to me that there are not many, but there are still some conservatives, people who call themselves conservatives, who say, well, that's great.
Build your own Twitter.
We won't let you, of course.
You can build your own Twitter, but we'll shut it down.
Kick it out of the App Store.
Kick it off of Amazon Web Services.
Kick you out of your banks.
Kick you out of society.
Build your own internet.
Build your own economy.
Build your own government.
That's what we try to do in politics.
We try to go in, get political power, have the people give us political power at the ballot box, and then we have to wield that political power.
And there is no free marketeer, no libertarian economist who can convince me that it is at all acceptable for some big tech oligarch to censor the duly elected president of the United States, be it in 2020 or be it possibly in 2025 or 2026.
Very glib time when even conservatives would consider defending this sort of stuff in the name of some abstract free market that does not exist in reality.
But not all is bad.
I don't want to, you know, we're living in this glib time.
I'm in Washington right now, so it's kind of rubbing off on me.
I'm just very frustrated by this place.
It's kind of like Baghdad here right now.
There's just National Guard everywhere.
Streets are locked down.
It's not right.
It doesn't feel, you know, the Capitol, it's like Fort Knox right now.
White House, you can't get near.
So I don't like that.
But There are some glimmers of hope in the country.
One bit was actually during the Super Bowl.
There was an ad during the Super Bowl.
These are usually extremely woke.
That was maybe the most pro-life TV commercial I've ever seen.
You have this swimmer.
And she is missing part of her legs.
Very well shot.
Mrs.
Long?
Yes?
We've found a baby girl for your adoption, but there's some things you need to know.
She's in Siberia, and she was born with a rare condition.
Her legs will need to be amputated.
I know this is difficult to hear.
Her life, it won't be easy.
Mrs. Long?
It might not be easy, but it'll be amazing.
I can't wait to meet her.
We believe there is hope and strength in all of us.
Toyota, proud partner of Team USA. It's a beautiful advertisement.
It's really great.
This girl, you know, was going to be adopted, born in Siberia.
She's got this condition.
They say, well, yeah, we're still going to take her.
We don't care that she has a disability.
And she becomes this Paralympic athlete.
That's wonderful.
Now, they couldn't have made it.
About, you know, a woman who's contemplating abortion and maybe, you know, the kid in utero is diagnosed with some condition.
Well, he's going to have a tough condition.
Oh, well, I'm going to have the baby anyway.
They couldn't get away with that.
But it's exactly the same issue.
Am I going to keep the kid or am I going to give the kid away, either to Siberia or to death?
And the ad was saying, no, choose life.
It's good, even though there is suffering in the world.
It's okay.
It's better to live.
This world involves suffering.
I was reminded of this on my flight to D.C. Because basically the only time that I ever wear the mask these days is when I'm on an airplane.
Because they won't let you on the airplane if you don't wear the mask.
If you refuse to wear the mask while you're on the airplane, they will arrest you.
Then they'll put you on the no-fly list and you just can't travel anymore.
So it's the only time where I've made a prudential judgment.
I think it's better to put the mask on and go...
Talk about how Fauci is a jerk and no one should listen to him.
You know, go talk about him on various shows and things like that.
Then to not travel at all.
I was very sort of crestfallen at this sad state of affairs for the country.
The way we're all locked down like lemmings wearing these stupid muzzles on our faces.
These filthy pieces of cloth flying in to cover this fake impeachment trial which is dominating the national attention.
All sorts of glib nonsense.
Vile racial politics creeping up all over the place.
Republicans without a spine.
And I was joking, though.
I had Boethius in my bag, this writer who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy.
He wrote it while he was in prison, about to be executed by the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and he wrote the Constellation of Philosophy about how, you know, look, fortunes go up, fortunes fall, and there's a lot of suffering in this world, and...
Compared to what Boethius was facing, probably, we've got it pretty good.
But by pursuing truth, you can rise above that.
You can realize, yeah, this is a broken, fallen world.
Boethius, a lot of people don't know, was a Christian.
He's actually venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church.
You can rise above that sort of thing, and you shouldn't let that get you down.
I think we're in that kind of place right now in our country.
Things just look terrible.
They just look really bleak, and there are very few glimmers of hope.
But hope springs eternal in the human breast, and I'll probably be more hopeful when I get out of Washington, D.C. See you tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
It's The Michael Knowles Show.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Gina Carano gets fired from Disney +, basically for being a conservative.
Because that's the way things work now.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
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