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Feb. 12, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
52:13
Ep. 699 - Everyone Loves Cancel Culture

Disney cancels a conservative actress for using the Left’s favorite rhetoric device, New York’s Democrat governor Cuomo gets caught in a coverup, and NBC botches a literary fact check. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Gina Carano, a star of Disney's Star Wars TV show The Mandalorian, has been cancelled.
She has been canceled, apparently, for something that she said about the Jews, which sounds really bad, you know, and bigoted and everything.
We're going to get into what she actually said.
I don't think she said anything wrong whatsoever.
But even more broadly, if Disney executives don't like what Gina Carano has to say about the Jews, just imagine their shock when they Google Walt Disney.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment from yesterday is from Django Mike, who says, I'm a brown-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed Native American who is a white supremacist, according to the woke left, because I don't want to toe the line with their lunatic ideas.
You are, I know.
I mean, I know that you're sort of saying this tongue-in-cheek, but they believe this.
I mean, they say this about Candace Owens or Ben Carson or Thomas Sowell or...
Or Clarence Thomas, especially black, but other racial minorities too, who are conservative, they will say, you are a white supremacist.
You're maybe not aware of it, but you're laboring under a false consciousness.
And that's why we need to raise awareness, raise consciousness, and make you woke.
It's all talking about the same thing.
And that way you'll realize that you're oppressed.
You think you're happy and content.
You'll have to realize you're oppressed.
And then you will stop supporting white supremacy.
That's the thing.
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It Go check out HIMSS. I think I was a little unfair to Walt Disney.
You know, Walt Disney, there's this kind of rumor that he hated the Jews or something.
He was kind of a bigot.
There's actually really no evidence of this, but I figure it's a funny enough hit.
Sam Canopy said a Baby Yoda, though.
I can't believe they haven't canceled that guy yet.
You get a couple drinks in Baby Yoda, you set him off talking about the Jews and the Mexicans and the Italians.
Oh my gosh, it's like little...
Green David Duke or something.
But Gina Carano didn't say anything wrong.
Disney put out a statement based on Gina Carano's old social media posts.
They say, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.
Gosh, abhorrent and unacceptable.
Okay, what did she say?
So I pulled up the post.
This is the worst post they could find.
This is the height of her bigotry.
On social media, Gina Carano wrote, quote, She's saying the Nazi regime had this hatred of Jews ethnically and
religiously.
And so it's not like they just came in one day and everyone was being really nice to the Jews.
And then the Nazis said, well, no, we're going to be awful to them and round them up and, you know, commit all these atrocities.
No, they fomented a culture in which Jews were otherized, castigated, whatever term you want to use.
And Gina Carano is saying this can be done politically as well.
This can be done to people based on their political views just as it can be based on their ethnicity or based on their religion.
Duh.
Of course that's true.
It's not denigrating Jews at all.
The issue is denigrating Nazis, but that seems perfectly fine.
Is the issue here for Disney that Gina Carano was making a Nazi comparison?
Is Disney saying, you know, it's wrong to invoke any sort of...
Nazi imagery ever when making a political point?
Fair enough, but if you were to hold that view, then most people would fall silent because the only two historical events most people, especially leftists, know anything about is World War II and the fall of the Roman Empire, right?
Those are the only sort of events anyone ever invokes.
Joe Biden just did this.
Joe Biden just compared Donald Trump to Goebbels like a few months ago.
The left, the entire left has been calling Donald Trump literally Hitler and calling 75 million Americans Nazis for years.
But it's wrong when Carano, she's not even exactly comparing the Democrats to Nazis.
She's just saying that this kind of culture in which conservatives are being ostracized and censored and deplored, that has historical parallels.
Is that the issue here?
Really, the reason they're doing this, because I actually thought Gina Carano had already been fired.
This story came up months and months ago, and it's not because she said anything about the Jews, or because she said anything about the Nazis, or because she said anything about anybody.
It's because she is a conservative, and she supports Trump, and she's made fun of woke culture, and so the fix was always in.
They were always going to try to get her.
Now they're using this ridiculous excuse.
It's kind of like what they did to Megyn Kelly, which is, you had people on network news who...
Wore blackface, right?
You had Joy Behar darkened her skin for a costume.
You had people on NBC, where Megyn Kelly was working, who would wear blackface in sketches.
Totally fine.
But then Megyn Kelly one day was discussing the topic of blackface.
She said, you know, if you were to darken your skin to be part of a costume to portray an individual, not a race broadly, but an individual, is that okay?
And they fired her for it.
They call it her blackface controversy.
As if raising the mere topic of blackface was so offensive, and yet for the other hosts to actually wear it, not offensive at all.
It's because there's no principle here, it's just that NBC didn't like Megyn Kelly, so they were going to kick her out.
People are calling this cancel culture.
I wish we could retire that phrase.
Because I don't think it's helpful.
It's obviously describing a real phenomenon.
We're seeing it.
It's where conservatives or anyone who's not a radical leftist gets ostracized or fired or censored for refusing to adhere to left-wing orthodoxy.
So it's a real thing that's happening.
But a cancel culture doesn't describe it.
There are plenty of people who should be canceled.
I'll give you an example just at Disney.
James Gunn made all those jokes about how he wanted to have sex with children.
If anybody is going to be cancelled, James Gunn should be the one to be cancelled, not Gina Carano.
I'll give you a further example, though, because James Gunn might say, well, I was kidding, it was in poor taste, but I'm a comedian, and so, you know, you gotta give me a pass.
Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker, is accused of trying to coerce his son's girlfriend, who his son had knocked up, into killing the baby.
So Mark Hamill allegedly...
Pressured his son's girlfriend to kill his own grandson.
And there are apparently texts and messages and all this sort of stuff.
If that is true, Mark Hamill should be canceled.
He should be not just fired from Star Wars, not just fired from Disney.
He should be removed from polite society.
He should be ostracized.
He should be shunned.
He should be canceled.
He should not be invited to participate in things.
It's a very, very bad thing.
He certainly should not be invited to participate in things until he repents and says he's sorry and acknowledges how awful that is.
Because Nobody seriously opposes this broad definition of cancel culture.
Nobody seriously believes that there ought to be no consequences whatsoever for things that people say and do.
Nobody believes, if Gina Carano had walked onto the set one day and said, Zig Heil, Heil Hitler, had a swastika on her clothing, nobody believes she should keep her job.
When people oppose cancel culture, what they're saying is that not that there should not be standards by which people rise and fall in their careers, but rather that the standards that people are being judged by are ridiculous.
Because in the olden days, you would be judged by traditional standards.
If you violate the traditional moral order or traditional social mores, you would face consequences.
But now it's completely upended standards.
It's left-wing standards.
And that's the real problem.
But let's not overstate our case.
Let's not say we're free speech purists.
What does that mean?
There's never been such a thing as free speech purism.
There have always been categories of speech that are not permitted in society and sort of behaviors that are not permitted.
We're actually saying something a little harder.
I think conservatives think it's really simple, it's easy, it's inoffensive to just say, we support all speech, we support all actions, we don't want any standards.
It's really easy.
This is why we've lost on political correctness.
We need to say something that requires more courage.
We need to say some things are right, some things are wrong.
You should be permitted to say and do some things and you should face consequences for saying and doing other things.
We have to be willing to do that.
That kind of a regime of speech and behavior is going to exist.
It has in every society and always will.
It's just right now we've completely ceded that ground to the left.
Here's something else we should cancel.
Gender theory.
We should cancel it.
We shouldn't permit it.
This radical gender theory that says that men can be women and women can be men.
You can't have a society that holds both views at the same time.
Because they're contradictory views.
Either men are men and women are women and one cannot become the other.
Or there's no such thing as men and women and men can be men and women can become men.
Men can become women and women can become men.
See how confusing this is?
And there's really no such thing as an immutable, natural category of sex.
But you can't hold both at the same time because they're contradictory.
So we have to cancel one.
We have to exclude one.
We have to censor one.
And the one we're going to cancel should be gender theory.
This is what's happening right now in Utah.
Utah House of Representatives advanced a bill that would ban, quote, biological boys from competing on female sports teams.
There's no such thing As a biological boy, as distinct from some other kind of boy.
I mentioned this the other day, but I may have been a little confusing in my language.
There's just boys.
They're biological boys.
They're spiritual boys.
They're boys in every way.
And I actually think we err when we qualify these terms.
Well, he's a biological boy, but he's Therefore, he might be some other kind of girl.
Why are we qualifying?
Boys are boys, girls are girls, that's it.
Don't qualify it.
If you say, well, I'm a biological boy, but I think I'm a girl, well then, but you're a boy.
You're not a girl.
You're a confused boy.
Utah, trying to ban gender theory.
North Dakota just passed a similar bill.
The lesson here is that real freedom requires certain limits.
It excludes certain things.
It can't include everything.
Chesterton had a great line.
He said, there's a thought that undermines thought, and that's the only thought that ought to be undermined.
If we don't have any limits in our society, then we don't really have a society.
You see this most clearly with borders, the physical limits of our society.
If we don't have borders to our society, then there's no country.
Because people can just come and go as they wish.
There's no delineation of jurisdiction.
There's nothing holding the people together.
There is no people.
It's just nothing.
You need limits in all aspects of this finite world.
And we need to acknowledge that.
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Something else that we should cancel these days, Gavin Newsom.
Gavin Newsom is the failed governor of California.
Some of us call him Nussolini.
He should be canceled.
He should lose his career.
We should hear from him no more.
He should go be a private citizen and enjoy fancy dinners at the French Laundry and live his life.
The effort to recall Gavin Newsom is actually picking up steam.
You know, this has been going on for years now.
They've been trying to get to one and a half million signatures to recall Newsom and then force a new election and you'll have a lot of different people running.
They've done this in California before.
That's how we got Schwarzenegger.
We have 1.4 million signatures right now.
You need to get, by March 17th, you need to get 1.5 million.
So you'd say, okay, we're very close.
It's easy.
We're going to get 100,000 signatures.
But it's actually not that simple because what's going to happen then is Democratic operatives are going to come in and start taking out signatures and disqualifying them and saying, that guy no longer lives here.
That's not that guy's address, right?
This happens in every campaign.
So you actually need to have many more signatures than the 1.5 million threshold.
You probably need like 1.8, maybe even 2 million signatures to really make this work.
Good news.
The RNC is investing a quarter million dollars into the California recall campaign right now.
So the Republican National Committee is finally getting involved.
This, to me, is a very good sign.
Thus far, the RNC has not gotten involved because...
These are long-shot campaigns.
The RNC has finite resources, so they don't want to blow it on a campaign that's not going to work.
The injection, even of just a quarter million here, is a signal that there's a chance this recall effort is going to work.
They're going to need to put some money in here, especially as the Democrats start putting more money to tamp down the recall effort.
Republicans are going to need to get a lot more signatures, maybe half a million more, even within the next month or so.
That's a good sign.
We should cancel Newsom.
Somehow, Newsom is not even the worst governor in the country right now.
The worst governor in the country, a man we should certainly cancel, Andrew Cuomo.
You know, Andrew Cuomo has gotten credit for being the greatest governor on COVID, even though his state leads in, or is at least very near to the top, in total death count, death rate, just an absolute failure in the handling of coronavirus.
And this guy had the unmitigated goal to write a book about leadership lessons from COVID. It probably has the same content as my first magnum opus, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, totally blank book.
So, we've been saying for months and months, I spoke to my friend who's a New York State Assemblyman, Kevin Byrne, the other day.
We've been saying that Cuomo is directly responsible in his policies for a lot of extra deaths, particularly among senior citizens, particularly in New York's nursing homes.
The media won't cover this sort of thing, but now it turns out we're right.
Andrew Cuomo's top aide, Her name is Secretary to the Governor, Melissa DeRosa.
She just admitted and apologized in a phone call to Democratic lawmakers for the cover-up in New York nursing home deaths during the COVID epidemic.
A cover-up.
I use that word very specifically.
This woman says that the Cuomo administration, quote, froze the Out of the fear that the nursing home deaths, quote, the numbers would be against us by federal prosecutors and therefore they wanted to hide the numbers from the feds so there wasn't an investigation.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of New York senior citizens died needlessly because of the Cuomo administration's policies.
They knew this at the time.
When they realized it, they hid the numbers.
Not just from you and me and the public but from federal investigators and prosecutors.
Because they knew how bad this looked.
She says, we apologize.
We do apologize.
I do understand the position that you were put in.
I know that it is not fair.
Now, I'm hoping, listening to this, that she's apologizing to the families of these dead senior citizens, right?
It was not fair.
We put you in this terrible position.
I'm so sorry.
No, that's not who she's apologizing to.
She goes on.
It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans.
The woman is not apologizing.
The Cuomo administration is not apologizing to the families of these dead senior citizens.
She's not apologizing to the senior citizens themselves.
She's apologizing to Democrats because their reckless policies that killed thousands of seniors and the cover-up that followed Put Democrats in a bad political position.
That's the kind of administration we're talking about.
This man, Andrew Cuomo, the worst governor in the country, a truly corrupt politician, I've had the privilege or displeasure of meeting Andrew Cuomo a couple times because I actually, we're from right around the same town in New York and I've run into him in other places.
A real bulldog type of a guy, a pure political animal.
He's been in it since his dad was governor.
It was clear to anybody with two eyes what was going on during COVID. But the mainstream media refused to report on it.
Take a listen.
As Andrew Cuomo's policies were killing all these seniors and as he was covering it up from the feds, this is how the media covered him.
David, we're standing by for Governor Cuomo's press conference, his daily briefing.
How would you contrast Cuomo and President Trump's handling of the crisis?
Truth versus mendacity.
Governor Cuomo, out there day after day after day, everything Trump isn't.
Honest, direct, brave.
Real leadership of the kind the President of the United States should have provided.
Governor Cuomo is clearly living in a totally different reality.
the actual one than the president of the United States.
Governor Cuomo has become a national leader.
For a lot of people, Andrew Cuomo has become the leader of the Democratic Party.
He is conveying incredible strength.
You spoke to National Guard troops today in a stirring speech that, if I wasn't listening carefully, I thought you were sending soldiers off to war.
This has been a remarkable show of leadership by Governor Cuomo in recent days.
He's providing hope But not false hope?
Governor Cuomo, I think, is one of the heroes on the front lines.
With all of this adulation that you're getting for doing your job, are you thinking about running for president?
Are you?
You should be.
You're doing such a good job, Andrew Cuomo.
You're doing such a wonderful job, says his brother, Chris Cuomo.
How corrupt is this whole edifice?
All the while they were pushing this propaganda, this dude, Cuomo, Was through his policies killing senior citizens and through his other policies covering it up.
Remember that next time you trust the media.
The media, frankly, that might not even be the most embarrassing set of clips I've seen from the media recently.
The most embarrassing one might go to the eulogy for the founder of Hustler, Larry Flint.
I actually didn't even realize Larry Flint had died.
Larry Flint dies, and this guy is one of the most famous pornographers in the country, other than Hugh Hefner, probably the most famous one.
And To show you how far our speech regime, our understanding of the moral order has fallen and how much it has shifted in recent decades, listen to the way that CBS covers the death of this pornographer.
Flint fought several high-profile legal battles and became a target for feminists and the religious right.
Flint died of heart failure in Los Angeles.
He was 78 years old.
Love him or hate him.
He was a controversial figure, but he really did change the way people thought about the First Amendment.
That's absolutely true.
He was also, I mean, it's interesting.
He was, he opposed the death penalty.
He favored same-sex marriage.
He spoke out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Politically, he was very progressive.
He was not what you might think that Larry Flint was going to be.
Yeah.
And some reader of Hustler left a copy in a construction site when I was 10 near my friend's house.
What'd you do with it?
And it changed my life forever.
And here you are on CBS's Point.
How about that?
This is very embarrassing for these people on many levels.
It's a funny line.
You know, I found this porn magnet changed my life forever when I was 10 years old.
I think that's true.
You know, I think that actually is true.
And part of the reason right now that on the right, this porn debate has come up, this question of should we regulate porn or ban porn?
You'll notice it's come up not from Gen X or the boomers or even millennials.
It's really come up from Gen Z. Why?
Because Gen Z is the first generation that grew up with the internet all the time, basically in a world saturated by not just a little nudie magazine, but by high-speed internet porn from the age of 10 or whenever.
I think on average, people are about 11 years old when they first discover porn in these younger generations.
And it can really ruin your life.
You know, it can really make your life a lot harder.
I think people make fun of these Zoomers when they say, we need to regulate porn.
They say, oh yeah, you probably look at porn.
Yeah, they probably do.
Because something like, what is it?
92% or something of men look at porn.
So, Certainly have looked at porn.
I think in terms of have seen naked ladies on the internet, it's like 92% of men have done it and 8% of men are lying.
It's what people say about the statistics.
Yes, they realize it's a real problem.
And Larry Flint is in no small part responsible for that.
I couldn't get over it when that reporter said, you know though, believe it or not, Larry Flint was politically very progressive.
Gee, you don't say.
Oh, I thought he was a conservative Republican.
I thought he was like Edmund Burke, but oh, he's progressive, the pornographer?
Wow, shocking.
Yeah, Larry Flint, when Republican politicians would oppose the ubiquity of porn, he would go in and try to gin up sex scandals for them in the 1990s.
He endorsed Mark Sanford in 2013 for South Carolina's first congressional district.
He said, quote, his open embrace of his mistress in the name of love, breaking his sacred marriage vows, was an act of bravery that has drawn my support.
That guy should be cancelled.
That sort of culture should be cancelled.
That view of the First Amendment, which is completely at odds with the understanding of our founding fathers and most of the history of our country, that should be cancelled.
It has to be.
You can't have both views.
You can't have the view of the founding fathers of the First Amendment and the modern view at the same time.
One view says we need to prioritize liberty, not licentiousness.
Licentiousness will destroy liberty.
The modern view says licentiousness is liberty.
Can't have them both.
You've got to pick one.
We should pick the founding fathers.
We can all pray for Larry Flint's soul.
But when we think about his legacy, we should not celebrate it in the way that CBS is doing.
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So the journalists have completely humiliated themselves, not just in the last few weeks, obviously over many, many years, but especially in the way they've covered Cuomo, especially in the way they're eulogizing pornographers.
That is embarrassing stuff.
Meanwhile, real journalists, real investigative reporters doing real work who are exposing crooked leftists are getting canceled themselves.
James O'Keefe.
James O'Keefe from Project Veritas.
He's having his main Project Veritas account being kicked off of Twitter.
Why is he being kicked off of Twitter?
Allegedly for sharing private information.
The real reason is because he's investigating big tech.
So one of his investigators goes up, finds Facebook's VP Guy Rosen, and starts talking to him outside of his home.
Twitter now says this is private information because they showed part of the guy's house in the shot.
Obviously, he was outside there.
And therefore, you know, he's got to be kicked off of Twitter.
James O'Keefe responds and says that's a ridiculous double standard.
Project Veritas talked to Rosen outside his residence.
We asked him for comment.
He did not reply.
There he is.
"When you talk about freezing comments containing hate speech, what do you mean by that?" "The VP of integrity at Facebook." "Showing how much integrity he has." There's nothing in this tweet that violates private information.
By the way, it's the paragon of television reporting to speak with residents outside their homes when it comes to matters of public importance.
CNN also confronted an alleged Russian operative inside an apartment building.
The Telegraph does this all the time.
Many reporters speak with people outside Fair enough.
James O'Keefe is making a very narrow point here, which is...
This is a typical practice of journalists, and they're holding me to one standard, and they're not holding everyone else to another.
Broadly speaking, I think it's very wrong to go to the houses, even if prominent people are public figures, where their wife and children sleep.
I'm very fortunate to live in a state with a broad understanding of the Second Amendment, and if anybody shows up to my house to try to do any of us harm, that would be unfortunate for that person.
So in a way, I'm actually quite sympathetic.
To the Facebook VP's point of view here.
But we're talking about a speech regime.
We're talking about how big tech is going to handle this.
And the way they're going to handle it is not with a standard.
I'd actually be perfectly fine saying, can't show up to people's houses anymore.
Sorry.
Can't do it.
Okay, fine.
You're going to apply that across the board?
I think maybe that actually is a little bit more civilized than what we're looking at now.
But that's not the standard.
The standard is you can do whatever you want to the conservatives.
You can have elected Democrats saying, go show up to conservatives' houses and scream in their windows and scare them half to death.
You have actual prominent Democrats doing that.
Meanwhile, if a conservative reporter shows up to a liberal guy's house and starts asking questions, can't do that.
Speaking of investigative journalism, this is a story, we don't have too much to talk about here, but I do want to at least bring it up.
Interesting piece in National Review by Andy McCarthy.
This was based on reporting by Revolver News.
Asking a simple question, what happened to Officer Sicknick?
Officer Sicknick is that Capitol Police officer who was killed following the riot on January 6th.
We've been told by the New York Times and others he was killed by this pro-Trump mob.
We've been told that he was killed because someone smacked him over the head with a fire extinguisher.
But what Annie McCarthy does here and what the Revolver News piece does that the National Review piece is based on is asking, is asked this question, why is the timeline changing?
We still don't have a cause of death for Officer Sicknick.
This event happened more than a month ago.
The story has changed.
Now we're told he didn't die at the Capitol.
He wasn't taken to the hospital from the Capitol, as we were initially told.
He actually went back to his office, and then something happened, and the story doesn't really add up.
He had texted an associate of his later on after the Capitol and said, oh, I'm fine, you know.
It doesn't say anything about a head wound.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence of a head wound now.
So the story is very strange.
Obviously, the death broadly, terribly sad event.
But we need to know exactly what happened because this is being used as basically the chief piece of evidence against Donald Trump in this impeachment trial.
The chief mode of ginning up this emotion is During the impeachment trial, we don't know what actually happened and no journalists are really looking into it other than these guys at Revolver and now Andy McCarthy at National Review.
The central feature of this impeachment trial, as you'll have noticed if you've been paying any attention to it, which I don't recommend that you do, is not argumentation.
They're not making the argument.
That Trump really committed this impeachable offense that they're referring to as incitement.
They're not establishing any serious legal standard for incitement.
They're just trying to gin up emotion and playing lots of videos that really have not a lot to do with the case.
So Senator Cruz was asked about this.
And he said, yeah, the impeachment trial, I was just with Senator Cruz in D.C. We were talking about it as well.
He said, you know, this trial, it's a lot of smoke, but there's a lot of hot air, but there's nothing really there.
Well, I think we'll see that the trial continue for the rest of the week.
It is reminiscent of Shakespeare, that it is full of sound and fury, and yet signifying nothing.
Right.
It sounds about right.
Andrea Mitchell from NBC heard Senator Cruz describe the impeachment trial this way.
And she took to Twitter to say, quote, Senator Cruz says the impeachment trial is like Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
No, that's Faulkner.
I saw that tweet and I thought, is this real?
Is this a real tweet?
And it's funny, I saw Senator Cruz maybe an hour after she sent this, and he comes to me and says, you're going to get a real kick out of this.
Did you see what Andrea Mitchell just said?
I said, I did, I couldn't, I didn't know if I was missing something.
And I actually see how she might have gotten a little confused, because Faulkner has a novel called The Sound and the Fury, which is, but the title is based on Shakespeare.
The Sound and Fury signifying nothing.
This is one of the most famous lines of Shakespeare.
In his entire body of work.
I'm sure you've heard it before.
The whole little bit is, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out, grief candle.
Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and fritzes hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Tale told by an idiot.
What I loved about Andrea Mitchell's tweet, and to her defense, she later apologized and she left the tweet up, kind of took her lashings on social media.
What I love about it is this combination of ignorance, right?
She doesn't know where the quote is from, and arrogance.
To me, that perfectly describes our liberal elite.
Ignorant, uneducated, They have good credentials.
I think Andrea Mitchell went to a fancy school.
I think she majored in literature or something.
A lot of good that did her.
But also, extraordinarily arrogant.
They really think that they're so much smarter than all the people who came in the past, than all the Republicans, than all the half of these deplorable Americans.
You know, you're going to hear a lot of calls for unity and healing.
You already are.
But There is a way we can unify and heal.
And the left understands it and the right does not.
Actually, Bruce Springsteen summed this up.
One of the great minds of the left.
Relatively, probably is.
Bruce Springsteen, a far left winger.
He had an ad during the Super Bowl where he talked about how we got to get back to the middle.
This was an ad for Jeep, cars, and trucks.
But it was really a political ad.
Take a listen.
There's a chapel in Kansas.
There's a chapel in Kansas.
Standing on the exact center of the lower 48.
It never closes.
All are more than welcome to come meet here in the middle.
It's no secret.
The middle has been a hard place to get to lately.
Between red and blue.
Between servant and citizen.
Between our freedom and our fear.
Now fear has never been the best of who we are.
And as for freedom, it's not the property of just the fortunate few.
It belongs to us all.
Whoever you are, wherever you're from, it's what connects us.
And we need that connection.
We need the middle.
We need the middle.
Now, it's ironic because Bruce Springsteen is one of the most radical left-wing guys in public life, you know, in the entertainment industry, and he's talking about how we need to be in the middle.
It's also ironic because it's an ad for Jeep, and Bruce Springsteen, just in the last few days, got busted on a Dewey.
He was drunk driving, so that's kind of funny, too.
But I actually want to get to the point he's talking about.
He's saying it's all about the middle.
We've got to meet in the middle.
How is the middle defined?
The middle has moved a lot.
In the last 60 years in this country, it's moved very far to the left.
Why?
Because the middle is defined by boundaries.
The middle is defined by the leftmost limit and the rightmost limit.
And beyond those limits, you get canceled.
Right?
Beyond those limits, you are not allowed to say those things.
Those are not socially acceptable.
Some people call it the Overton window, the window of acceptable dialogue.
The middle is defined by where the ends are, where the limits are.
Therefore, we need to define those ends.
We need to get past this kind of vague talk about cancel culture and actually talk about the limits, talk about those ends.
What the left has done very successfully is they've pushed the right side of it way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way in their direction.
So now if you're just a mainstream regular old conservative, you're Gina Carano and you say, I like Donald Trump.
And you use a kind of basic political metaphor that everybody uses.
You get canceled.
You're not allowed to say that.
Meanwhile, on the left, you can say, I hate my country.
You can bail out rioters.
You can do it.
You can kind of do whatever you want.
And you're totally fine.
So if we want to reclaim the middle, we've got to reclaim the boundaries and move them back in a saner direction.
Drew is going to be talking about Gina Carano getting canceled.
So tune in for that on The Andrew Klavan Show.
He's also going to be talking about China and Christian politics.
You know, a Daily Wire membership.
It's the only way you should be viewing Daily Wire content.
Right now, using promo code Knowles, you'll get 10% off any membership plan you choose.
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We'll be right back with the mailbag.
My absolute favorite time of the week, the mailbag.
First question from Skylar.
Dear Mr.
Knowles, on your show, you said that you were strongly opposed to the free market mentality that many conservatives continue to maintain in light of the big tech oligarchy.
Regarding this, what is the remedy you propose outside of the free market?
And if your remedy is found in government intervention, how do you justify it looking to the government to solve our problems?
I hope that this piques your interest.
I'm a big fan of your show and The Daily Wire is all.
Thank you very much.
I want to clarify because I don't think this is my position at all.
I'm not strongly opposed to the free market.
I love the free market.
I consider myself a strong defender of free markets in their proper place.
The free market is a wonderful instrument for human flourishing, but the free market is not an end in and of itself.
It's not a political end in and of itself, nor is it even a practical concept.
There is no such thing as a purely free market.
The market is defined by its boundaries, which are defined through politics.
And you want to have a robust market set up But there's no such thing as a market without boundaries.
Just think of a regular physical marketplace.
The physical marketplace has...
It has boundaries to it.
It has different shops in it.
It's got different rules of how exchange is done.
It has currency.
It has all of these kinds of features that we get not from our brilliant reason and abstraction exclusively.
We get it also from our tradition.
We get it also from practice.
We get it also from our ritual.
We get it also from how it's existed in America before.
So, specifically to your question on big tech.
You're right.
I think that the heretofore conservative line of, you don't like Big technology companies controlling the flow of information?
Build your own Google.
Build your own Twitter.
I think that's preposterous.
These are not private companies in any real sense of that word.
They work with the government.
They work with the ruling regime.
They are monopolistic in many ways.
They've grown in large part through fraud, by defrauding customers on what they are really getting, what kind of freedom they'll have on the platform, and by exploiting legal loopholes.
Notably, as we've often talked about, not just on this show, but on the right, through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
So, yeah, I don't think we should have any sentimentality for these big tech companies.
What they are doing is controlling the flow of information in what is the public square now, which is the internet, and in a republic, in a self-governing republic.
That communication, that ability to persuade people, that is politics, right?
That is how politics is conducted.
So we can't allow them to have that kind of power.
What am I proposing?
You're saying, are you going to turn to the government for help?
You can't turn to the government.
Government can't help you.
This presumes what I think is an unfortunate view of politics that has cropped up over the last 20 or 30 years or so on the right that says basically there's no legitimate role for government whatsoever to do anything in society.
If we really believe that we are anarchists, do you think that conservatives, if they're really being true to their principles, are anarchists?
No.
No.
The only anarchists we see in public life right now are the ones in Portland with Antifa burning down buildings.
Do you think they're conservative?
Do you think they're right-wing?
No.
There is a role for the state.
I'm a great defender of the state.
Just like I'm a great defender of free markets, I'm going to go on the other side now and say, I'm a great defender of the state.
In its proper place.
The state is good.
Law and order is good.
You can't have freedom without law and order.
Without a state to protect the rules, you know, to police certain people, to protect private property, among other things.
You don't want the state to get out of its place.
When you make an idol out of the state, you become a statist.
Statism is wrong.
When you make an idol out of the free market, you become, I don't know, a worshipper of mammon or something.
I don't know.
You go very wrong, though.
Chesterton had this great line.
He said that, you know, heresy, generally speaking, he's talking about religion here, obviously.
Heresy is not the promotion of vice over virtue so much as it is the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of the other virtues out of place.
He's talking about his friend George Bernard Shaw, who was a sort of radical atheist socialist.
Pretty good playwright, actually, but radical left-winger.
But he was friends with Chesterton.
He said that the problem with Bernard Shaw is not that he doesn't have a great big heart.
He's got a very great big heart, but it's in the wrong place.
So we want things to be in their proper place.
We want markets.
We want We want respect for the individual.
We want a respect for family and these civil institutions.
We want them all ordered toward the good, which is what society aims at.
The Constitution is clear about this, right?
To promote the general welfare, to secure the blessings of liberty.
Not even liberty as an end in and of itself.
Liberty as an instrument to secure the blessings of liberty, which is...
Human flourishing ultimately ordered toward the good.
I hope that clears it up.
it up from Timothy.
Hey, Michael, thank you for your insights and wisdom.
Thank you for the compliment.
I have a question about George Orwell.
I recently looked up Orwell on Wikipedia.
I was shocked to see them proudly proclaim that he was a democratic socialist.
How can that be true?
It seems to me that 1984 is not just a rebuttal of totalitarianism, but also of socialism.
Orwell describes in the book how capitalism created so much surplus in the world that the governments had to come in and control the supply so that the people were kept in a state of constant misery.
How could a socialist write this book?
Thank you.
Yeah, it's a good question.
This comes up a lot.
Orwell was a democratic socialist.
And he said, actually, in other writings, he said, everything I've written is in defense of democratic socialism.
With an important caveat.
As I understand it.
And I hate to presume to say that he didn't understand it very well.
But you have to understand the historical context of the times.
End of these terms.
You just used the term capitalism.
Capitalism is a word basically popularized by Karl Marx.
It's a term that is...
The reason we use it today is basically because of communists.
Marxism presupposes capitalism.
Capitalism is actually a part of Marxism.
It's a stage in historical development after which we can then overthrow our shackles.
There will be a big class revolution and there will be no state in this kind of utopian world.
That, of course, never happens in reality.
So when Orwell is writing, he's writing against Stalin, Stalinism.
That is to say, the reality of the Soviet Union.
But he's still laboring, as so many intellectuals labored at that time, probably most intellectuals labored at that time, under the idea that socialism, or even, I suppose, communism, could be redeemable.
It's just they got the wrong one, you know?
You see this with the Trotskyists and the Trotskyites.
They're called both terms, which is people who were disillusioned with how Stalin was running the Soviet Union, but they couldn't admit that Stalin was a natural conclusion of their ideology.
So they had to say, no, it just went wrong.
You know, true socialism, true communism has never been tried.
If Trotsky had held power, you know, this kind of rival, If Trotsky had held power, then we would have this utopia on Earth.
And it's just not true.
You know, Trotsky, because he didn't really amass, ultimately, this political power, he's made this kind of martyr of the true good communism.
But, you know, if Trotsky had power, it would have been the same exact thing.
Stalin just managed to do it.
And one could go on at great length about what actually happened in the Soviet Union.
But suffice it to say, Orwell...
Was writing against communism and socialism in practice, and he was not able to give up his views of what socialism could be, which was true of virtually all the smart people at the time, and even many smart people today, even though they're so misguided on them.
From Owen, Dear Michael, I was just confirmed into the Catholic Church, and my saint name was Thomas, after St.
Thomas Aquinas.
What was your saint name and what is your advice for me as I move on to the next phase of my faith?
Thanks and God bless.
Wow, that's so wonderful.
My confirmation name is also Thomas.
I don't know if it was Thomas the Apostle or Thomas Aquinas.
I picked it.
When I was 13, when I was a precocious and ignorant little agnostic veering toward atheism, and I chose that name, one, because Thomas was a doubter, and also because Thomas Aquinas was very intelligent.
So I think I chose Thomas the Apostle.
I consider Thomas Apostle to be my confirmation saint, but I don't know, I guess it could have been Thomas Aquinas too.
Hope I get both of those guys to...
You know, pray for me.
I am right now reading Boethius, rereading Boethius.
I haven't read him since college.
On whose consolation of philosophy and on whose writing Thomas Aquinas, or from whose writing Thomas Aquinas draws great inspiration.
And I'm also watching all these series from the Thomistic Institute, so I'm really trying to delve a little bit more into Thomas Aquinas.
So that's great.
I would encourage you to check out Boethius and the Thomistic Institute, and most importantly, to just make sure your prayer life is...
And the ultimate prayer, you know, going to the Holy Mass and receiving the Eucharist and receiving the sacraments, to make sure that you are doing that regularly.
Nightly rosary is a very important sort of thing.
And welcome home.
That's great.
From Bernard.
Hello, Michael.
I wonder if this is Bernard Shaw.
Wouldn't that be weird?
From beyond the grave.
He's looking up at us right now from the afterlife.
I hope that you and your new baby are doing well.
Greetings from a fellow trad Catholic.
Oh, that's great.
Good to hear from you.
So my question has to do with something you said that was not the focal point of anything that you were saying, but it always irritates me when people say it.
Why did you say that America was founded with Plymouth Rock in 1620, not Jamestown in 1608?
I get that you have a personal connection to the Mayflower, and I'm asking you this question realizing that it is commonly taught.
I just do not understand why people place so much importance on Plymouth Rock.
That they literally act like Jamestown never existed.
I mean, isn't that kind of insulting to Virginians like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, etc.
to write out the first English settlement in the States?
Great, great question.
I'm so glad you asked this because it's true.
Jamestown happened before the Mayflower.
Jamestown was 1608, right?
The slave ship arriving, the 1619 project happened before the Mayflower.
It was 1619, the Mayflower was 1620.
We just celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower.
The reason I trace America's founding to the Mayflower, and the reason that so many people in American history have traced it to the Mayflower, is that the Mayflower provides a philosophical and a theological basis for the country in a way that Jamestown did not.
Obviously, Jamestown contributes to the founding of America.
Christopher Columbus greatly contributes to the founding of America.
I guess 1619, in a way, contributes to the founding of America.
I guess a lot of these things did.
1776, obviously, is the founding of the country, and yet we tend to trace the founding of our country earlier.
It's the founding of the United States, but we tend to trace the founding of our country earlier.
I choose 1620 because I think it represents the, in economic ways, in cultural and social ways, in religious ways, a sort of coherent vision for the founding of the country.
The 1619 Project did not seek to rewrite American history.
That's what they ended up kind of doing because they had, they lied in many ways about the American Revolution.
But what that woman, Nicole Hannah-Jones said, is she wants to reframe American history and History has to have frames.
You know, you're kind of defined by the limits, right?
And I think we ought to frame American history largely on the Mayflower, on 1620.
I think that frames the country in a way that is true to its history.
Conservative history and even the kind of puritanical, neo-puritanical progressives.
I think American history makes a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of the Mayflower than through other lenses.
All right, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you Monday.
See you Monday.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
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