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Feb. 16, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
52:24
Ep. 701 - Conservatives On Trial

A Democrat congressman calls for a commission to punish conservatives, a prominent liberal writer admits there’s a Hollywood blacklist, and global warming alarmists cause Texans to freeze. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I mentioned yesterday on this show that the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, I'm sorry, the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, was not going to be the end of this left-wing onslaught that we've seen in particular over the last four years.
That in fact, this is the beginning of something because Trump is not their intended victim.
What the left is aiming at is all of us, anyone who would conserve anything about American history.
Well, this new trial is already beginning.
A lot of prominent people on the left are calling explicitly for a trial of sorts to reframe our entire national self-understanding.
For instance, Representative Sarah Jacobs, who's calling for a truth commission to reframe American history.
So I think part of what we're seeing now is because we haven't really done the reckoning with the racial injustice and white supremacy of our past that we need to do.
And so, you know, a truth commission, a lot of people will think of South Africa.
We've used them in countries around the world.
And basically what it is, is it's...
Communities, all the way up to the national level, having conversations about both the glory and the glory of our history and what happened, both throughout the history of our country and leading up to and on January 6th, so that we can come to a common narrative moving forward of what we want our country to be.
And so I think that there are a lot of us who know that this impeachment trial was just the start of holding Donald Trump accountable, but that we need to make sure that we're doing accountability of anyone who incited, encouraged, or committed acts of violence, and then really looking forward at kinds of things like truth commissions, like democracy, like institution building that we know are going to be the real fixes to what we've seen in this country.
To what we've seen in this country, everything that we've seen in this country up till now, which the left is absolutely rejecting.
They want a new sort of country, not just aimed at Trump, but aimed at any of us who would conserve that sort of thing.
A reframing of the narrative.
And if you don't get on board with that reframing, well, by golly, you're going to get blacklisted.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to The Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Sadface, who says, I hear after the third impeachment, you get one free.
I think that's true.
And by the way, you might be joking about that third impeachment.
But by the logic of this impeachment trial, there's really no reason that they couldn't impeach Trump again.
Probably they'll impeach him again.
At a certain point, you know, Donald Trump will have lived his life.
He'll be gone.
They'll probably dig him up and put him on trial again because they are litigating something that is not about the Trump administration.
It's about the American country.
It's about our nation and it's about anybody who would conserve anything about it.
They're saying this openly now.
People like this Democratic Congress lady and many others.
They're not just going after Trump.
It was probably the most insightful moment of Trump's 2020 campaign.
He posted that meme which said, they're not coming after me, they're coming after you, and I happen to be in the way.
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Jonathan Chait, a very prominent liberal writer, not a writer that I particularly enjoy reading, but every so often he'll make a comment that contradicts the broader left-wing narrative.
And he did this just over the past few days with regard to Gina Carano, who is my newest colleague at the Daily Wire.
Gina Carano is an actress.
She was in the Mandalorian show at Disney.
Disney fired her for simply being conservative.
That was it.
They barely even contrived an excuse.
They slandered her, said that she made anti-Semitic comments.
She never did any such thing.
And they canned her, so now she's going to be working with us.
That's great.
One way to push back against cancel culture and the new blacklist in Hollywood.
John Chait is admitting there is a blacklist in Hollywood against conservatives who contradict the liberal narrative.
Now, we've known this for a very long time.
Anyone who's spent any even fleeting time in Hollywood knows this is true.
In many ways, the Daily Wire was formed out of a super-duper secret conservative Hollywood group called Friends of Abe.
So secret it has a Wikipedia page.
Friends of Abe was a group that was really, you know, back when it was running, it's sort of defunct now, but was a terrific organization where conservatives who were actors, directors, writers, producers, people behind the scenes, gaffers, all sorts of people in Hollywood who were not liberals, met up to have some political fellowship. all sorts of people in Hollywood who were not liberals,
And the name came from an allusion to being friends of Abraham Lincoln because back decades and decades ago, if you were a homosexual and you wanted to hang out with like-minded people, you would use the euphemism friend of Dorothy.
You'd say, instead of saying, I'm openly gay, you'd say, oh, he's a friend of Dorothy.
And so if you're a conservative in Hollywood, you'd say, now I'm a friend of Abe.
Because today in Hollywood, of course, you're far more likely to face professional repercussions for being a conservative than for being gay.
You'd be celebrated now if you can claim some kind of intersectional identity.
Because intersectionality has now taken over so much of our national conversation.
It's even affecting the U.S. military, which we'll get to a little bit later.
But if you're conservative, you will lose jobs.
There's no question about this.
And Jonathan Chait is saying there is a Hollywood blacklist.
This is the new McCarthyism.
This is very bad.
Now, I'm pleased that Jonathan Chait is acknowledging something that is really happening.
And as I've mentioned before with regard to terms like cancel culture, it's obviously true there is a phenomenon going on right now where you will get your reputation destroyed, your livelihood destroyed, your career taken from you, if you contradict the politically correct left-wing narrative.
However, in another sense this is false.
In another sense this is not the new McCarthyism.
Because politics has form and substance.
What I mean by that is, the new Hollywood blacklist, which absolutely exists against conservatives, is like McCarthyism, or the Red Scare, as people called it, which I think is the silliest term for it, because the Red Scare sort of implies that there weren't really communists running around in the country in high positions, and actually there were, which gets to my further defense of, for instance, the House Committee on Non-American Activities and some of what Senator McCarthy did.
But in form, they're similar, right?
You've got professional repercussions for people on the basis of their political activities.
So in that way, it's totally the same.
The secret communists of the 1940s and 50s were punished for their political activities, and regular old American conservatives are punished for their political activities today.
In form, the same thing.
But in substance, they're completely different.
Because on the one hand, you had these communists often working directly for the Soviet Union, or only slightly removed from the Soviet Union, the nation with whom we were at war for the entire Cold War.
And, in the modern sense, in Hollywood, you've got people who like Donald Trump, or you've got people who like the Constitution, or you've got people who like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln.
Those are not the same things.
And to punish people for engaging in activities that would promote the Soviet Union and American communism is not the same thing as promoting George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
And conservatives have fallen into this trap for so long, for decades now, where we have only a formal politics.
We only talk about procedure.
We only talk about the shape of politics.
We don't talk about the substance.
I think, I'm going to go out on a limb, but it's the same limb that Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr.
and basically every conservative until five minutes ago would have gone out on and said, it is good to cancel communists.
It is good that we destroyed the career of, for instance, Alger Hiss.
I think that's good.
I think if you go out and you say, I hate America, I hate George Washington, I hate everything our country stands for, and I want to overturn that system.
If you say that, you should be cancelled.
That's a good thing.
I don't want people subverting our entire country in the American way of life.
Be it in the universities, be it in Hollywood, or be it in our government.
It's so funny now because the way this is taught in schools is just McCarthyism.
You know, it's a perfectly universally terrible thing, McCarthyism.
Or sometimes you'll hear HUAC. The House Un-American Activities Committee.
But you only really ever hear these terms from critics of those activities, from people who are sympathetic to the communists of the 1940s and 50s, and today, by the way.
What's interesting is if you go back at the time and read documents in support of these committees, which, by the way, lasted a very long time.
I mean, similar committees existed well into the 1970s.
You don't hear HUAC, you hear the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
But they flip it, the critics of it flip it, they conflate it with McCarthyism, which of course is very different, right?
McCarthy was a Senator, HUAC or HCUA was part of the House.
But we've only got a history written from these critics.
I think we need to get much more serious about this and start talking about the particulars.
Not just is it good to ever have repercussions for things we say.
Of course we live in a world where you have consequences for things you say.
Founding fathers knew that and everyone else with two brain cells to rub together knows that too.
But what are we saying?
If the House Committee on Un-American Activities were around today...
They would have to haul senior White House officials before that committee to ask them why they're engaging in such un-American activities.
Take, for instance, Jen Psaki, the poor, beleaguered White House press secretary, who was asked what the opinion of the White House was on Mark Cuban's decision to ban the national anthem from his basketball games.
This is a layup.
This should be a simple question.
Either party, at least until very recently, hey, what do you think about these people disrespecting the American flag and the national anthem?
This is an easy one.
They say, I'm against it.
I support the national anthem.
I love the American flag and apple pie.
Simple, simple answer.
But now, we live in a country that's been so eroded and corroded spiritually, politically, that the White House is taking the side of people who would ban the American flag.
What does President Biden think about the Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, deciding to indefinitely stop playing the national anthem before his National Basketball Association games?
Well, I haven't spoken with the president about the decision by Mark Cuban on the Dallas Mavericks, or I should say the national anthem.
But I know he's incredibly proud to be an American and has great respect for the anthem and all that it represents, especially for our men and women serving in uniform around the world.
He'd also say that, of course, that part of pride in our country means recognizing moments where we as a country haven't lived up to our highest ideals, which is often and at times what people are speaking to.
When they take action at sporting events.
And it means respecting the right of people granted to them in the Constitution to peacefully protest.
That's why he ran for president in the first place.
And that's what he's focused on doing every day.
So Joe Biden totally supports the flag and the national anthem, except when America doesn't live up to her ideals.
Well, no country ever lives up to her ideals because it's a fallen, finite, imperfect world.
So, she's saying, oh, Joe Biden, he loves the national anthem and he loves the flag, except he hates the flag and he hates the national anthem.
And it's great that our sports leagues would, and sports teams rather, would ban the American flag.
Joe Biden says this because he's an old school, old politician who remembers the old way of doing things, but he's an empty suit who's beholden to the political winds of his party.
And the political winds are now no longer just against this candidate or against this policy.
They are fundamentally against the country.
They are trying to, in the words of the 1619 Project at the New York Times, reframe American history in the words of this crazy Democrat congresswoman calling for a truth commission.
They're trying to reframe the narrative that the Country is bad and we've got to do something different.
That radical point of view now has an audience and a supporter all the way up at the highest office in the land.
Very, very bad stuff.
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The left really doesn't like us.
Now this doesn't seem like a groundbreaking insight here, but it's actually something that conservatives...
I think still haven't made their peace with.
There are still many conservatives, like, for instance, those loser, squishy Republicans who voted to convict at the farce impeachment trial.
And many other people who maybe aren't quite as bad as they are, but who believe that, you know, ah, the left, they just hate Trump's tweets.
If he weren't so mean, they'd like us more.
If we just tone our rhetoric in a certain way, if we disavow certain Republicans, then we can come together.
We'll meet in the middle.
There is no middle.
There is no middle right now.
You know, this I think is why Joe Biden is so confused, is Joe Biden was always a moderate Democrat.
That's how he styled himself, because it was for his political interest to style himself a moderate Democrat.
That no longer works, so he's embracing the radical left of the Democratic Party.
When you've got, say, a moderate Democrat and Republicans, you can kind of meet in the middle.
Why?
Well, you're going to disagree on abortion.
Abortion is kind of a binary issue, right?
Either you think we ought to kill babies in the womb or not kill babies in the womb.
But, you know, there's going to be some compromise where abortion, maybe it'll be legal until a certain date or under certain circumstances.
I don't want there to be compromise, but at least it is possible.
To compromise in that regard.
On immigration, well, you'll let this many people in, but not this many people in.
You can compromise.
It's something like that.
Tax rates, well, it's not going to be quite as high as the Democrats want.
It's not going to be quite as low as the Republicans want.
They'll meet in the middle somewhere.
Foreign trade, right?
Whatever.
You go down all the list.
You can do that with moderate Democrats who agree, at the very least, this is a good country.
We support our country.
But you can't do that with radical Democrats who support political violence and embrace it.
It's funny that the left accuses Trump of supporting political violence.
He doesn't do that, right?
He explicitly said, be peaceful, don't be violent, always be peaceful.
Whereas the left does explicitly endorse political violence, as I feel the Trump legal team showed quite well during their video presentation at the impeachment trial.
You can't compromise between one political party, the Republicans who support the country, and one political party that doesn't support the country, that doesn't support the idea of the country, that doesn't support the symbols of the country like the American flag, that doesn't support the national anthem.
That calls for half the country to be utterly excised and ostracized.
Because what is the compromise between have a country, don't have a country?
How do you meet in the middle?
You have a city-state?
What do you have?
You meet in the middle and you have an NGO? You can't compromise between those things.
One side is going to win.
Either we have a country with borders and loyalty to our fellow citizens and some shared sense of purpose.
Or we don't.
We don't have borders.
We don't have a common language.
We don't have any shared sense of purpose.
We hate our history.
And if you hate your history, guess what?
You're going to hate your future, too.
It's not just about Trump.
The left feels this way about all of us.
Cenk Uygur, who is a very prominent left-wing commentator, he runs The Young Turks, he just showed this today.
He tweeted out something that I thought was incredibly stupid and revealing.
True of much of Cenk's commentary.
He said, quote, There are many things Trump got right about right-wing voters.
They don't care about policy.
They're driven mainly by fear and hatred of others.
They're greedy, incredibly selfish, and driven mad by envy.
And lastly, they prefer violence to democracy if democracy means equality.
Obviously, this is not true.
The charges are not true.
Republicans care about a lot of policies.
We want to make abortion illegal.
We want to have stable families.
We want to be able to keep more of our property.
We want to close up our borders and have a functioning nation.
We want to keep national sovereignty away from transnational institutions.
There are a lot of things.
I mean, we could go down the list, right?
So those are policies.
He's just flat out wrong there.
He says that we're selfish.
We're selfish in that we're human.
All humans are selfish to a degree.
But, in fact, conservatives propose a politics ordered toward higher goods.
Generally speaking, maybe the libertarians a little bit less so, but the conservatives generally support a politics ordered toward a higher good, a transcendent moral order.
That maybe limits some of my appetites and desires, but ultimately it's for a higher good.
Conservatives are not particularly envious, right?
On the contrary.
What did Winston Churchill call socialism?
He said it was the gospel of envy.
Conservatives say we ought to be able to keep the things that are ours.
The left is saying we want what is yours.
Give me what is yours.
I deserve that which you already have.
Are conservatives violent?
Well, they can be violent, I suppose, but much less violent than the left.
Compare the three-hour madness of the Capitol riot compared to the six-month-long BLM and Antifa riots.
Even longer than that.
And, moreover, on this equality question, conservatives embrace a far deeper and more substantive vision of equality than liberals.
The left right now has created a new caste system whereby people have greater or lesser value based on their race, based on their sex, based on their sexual desires, based on various claims of grievance.
Conservatives don't say that.
We say, no, we have a sort of spiritual equality and a political equality as citizens.
And that's that.
We obviously are different physically.
We look different.
Some people are taller, shorter.
But we do have this kind of spiritual and political equality.
The left basically denies the spiritual equality through the various ideologies that they entertain, which are overwhelmingly materialist or even worse.
But more than this tweet being wrong, it's extremely stupid.
Just imagine dedicating your career to political commentary and this is the best you can muster.
The right wing is bad.
Trump got right.
They're bad.
They're evil.
They're terrible.
I really would hope for better from our left wing commentators.
It's why I began the show talking about Jonathan Chait, who I don't really like, but occasionally says something that's at least interesting, at least unexpected.
I don't think that the left is uniformly driven by fear and hatred and they don't care about policy and they're greedy and all this.
Sure, I mean, that stuff exists.
But I think that the left is motivated by ideas.
I think generally speaking, maybe not Cenk, I don't know how, you know, he doesn't have too much going on in between the years.
But...
I think there are many leftist intellectuals who shape the ideas that drive the left, and I think those ideas are bad, and I think their motivations are suspect, and I think their moral vision is perverse.
But I do want to take those ideas seriously, try to work through them.
In fact, in many ways, my book that I just have coming out, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for pre-order, the whole point of the book is to take the left's ideas seriously and say, this is actually kind of interesting, and maybe we can learn from this, and this is completely wrong, but here's what it led to, and take that seriously.
Chunk doesn't want to take any of this seriously.
The left, broadly right now, I think, doesn't want to take any of us seriously.
They just want to write off half the country.
And re-educate us and have truth commissions and bar us from running for office like they tried to do with the impeachment farce.
It's not just Cenk Uygur.
It's not just some dumb, you know, sort of shallow-thinking left-wing commentator whose every other word is some sort of profanity because his vocabulary isn't particularly large.
It's also the elected Democrats, like, for instance, Ilhan Omar.
The decisions, sadly, that the Republican Party has made was a calculation based on power and violence being more valuable to them than protecting this democracy.
What we saw in this week's impeachment trial, where nearly every single Senate Republican voted to block even the consideration of charges against Trump, tells us everything that we need to know.
Tells us everything we need to know.
They prefer violence and power to democracy.
I won't rehash the obvious hypocrisy here, which is the The Democratic Party has openly, explicitly embraced violence in their rhetoric.
Kamala Harris bailed the violent rioters out of jail during the George Floyd riots.
They went back onto the streets.
So obviously, they're accusing us of things that they do.
But moreover, forget the violence thing for a second.
Forget even the power thing.
Frankly, I think Republicans are not that interested in power.
We don't know how to use political power when it's given to us.
We squander our political power because we're too cowardly to offer a substantive vision of politics.
Say what you will about the left.
They're offering some substance.
They know what they want, at least, on the left.
Conservatives can't really muster much of a vision at all.
So I think the left is certainly better at power.
But I want to focus in on democracy.
Because you'll notice when it comes to the left, it's only democracy when the people support the left.
When the people do not support the left, when, say, they vote for Trump by accident, you know, in 2016, somehow he gets through, well, that's, by definition, illegitimate.
That somehow is a perversion, a distortion of democracy.
The left constantly outsourcing so many of our political rights to these technocrats, these unaccountable bureaucrats who run our lives for us.
You know, Republicans are putting forward a pretty interesting pro-democracy bill that something tells me Ilhan Omar and many Democrats will oppose.
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Only a matter of time.
As the left increases their political persecution of conservatives, it's only a matter of time before we get kicked off of those places.
They're trying to cancel people.
They just tried to cancel the actress Gina Carano.
We hired her.
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Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe if you want to stand up against this new kind of censorship and political persecution.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Ilhan Omar claims that the Republicans and conservatives are trying to subvert democracy.
I don't think that's true.
These terms, things like democracy are very broad terms, so I want to bring it down to earth for a second.
But I will make the broad claim.
I think conservatives are much more interested in defending democracy than liberals and leftists and progressives and whatever term you want to use.
And I'll give you an example of this.
That I think throws it into stark relief down in Tennessee.
There's a new bill in the Tennessee General Assembly that is trying to create a legal procedure by which a man can prohibit a woman from aborting his child.
I love this bill.
I think this is a great bill.
It's SB 0494 in Tennessee Senate and HB 1079 in the Tennessee House, sponsored by State Senator Mark Pody and State Rep Jerry Sexton.
It, quote, permits a person to petition a court for an injunction to prohibit a woman who is pregnant with the person's unborn child from obtaining an abortion.
We've been told by the left...
Men cannot have an opinion about abortion.
Squishy Republicans say this too.
Men should not have an opinion.
This is a woman's issue.
It only involves a woman's body.
Of course that's not true.
It involves a baby.
And that baby, by the way, is not just the product of a woman.
It's a product of the love between a man and a woman.
It's not just the woman's child that she would be killing, but the man's child too.
So I sort of would offer the exact opposite advice that we hear from the left, which is a man should have no opinion about abortion.
I think a man should absolutely be able to prohibit an abortion.
If we still have legal abortion, which is unfortunate, at the very least the father should be able to stop a woman from killing his child.
This is very democratic.
How is this democratic?
One, there's no constitutional right to an abortion.
There was an invented fictitious constitutional right from Roe v.
Wade that even honest liberal jurists will admit is nowhere in the Constitution.
When you ask the constitutional scholars, you say, where is it in the Constitution you find that right?
They'll say, well, it's in the emanations, in the penumbras.
In between, an invisible ink between lines 35 and 36.
Okay, I don't really, I don't see that in there.
Of course, the Constitution doesn't say anything about abortion.
The only thing it maybe could say about abortion, actually, is the 14th Amendment, which would prohibit abortion, right, by protecting people, equal protection.
But the question broadly has been left up to democratic processes.
You persuade your fellow citizens, okay, we should have abortion, legal abortion, or we should not have legal abortion, or we should permit this kind of abortion.
Okay, well, that's what's going on in the Tennessee legislature right now.
Certainly, it's democratic to allow a man to have a say over the future of his child, in addition to the woman.
Adding that say would be an increase in democracy, would it not?
Or you have the alternative, which is some robed lawyer on a court invents a right and takes away your political freedom to make a law.
Now, I hope conservatives get behind this bill.
One, because it's pro-democracy or whatever.
I just want to show that Ilhan Omar is a hypocrite.
But also because this is offering some real substance here.
Oh, you're pro-life?
Okay, good.
Then prove it.
Put up or shut up.
I think most of the pro-life activists, probably all pro-life activists, would support it.
But I want Republicans, even who are moderate on this issue, I want them to get behind this.
There is no reason whatsoever that this bill should not pass in Tennessee.
And as the states are laboratories of democracy, no reason why this shouldn't be tried out elsewhere in the country.
We need to stop playing on the terms of the left.
We need to stop allowing them to say, well, it's a woman's issue.
Well, it's kind of touchy.
Well, I don't know.
It's a third rail.
I don't want to touch it.
No, touch it head on.
If we're not willing to say that you shouldn't kill children, and if we do have a system where you can kill children, at least the dad should be able to stop it.
If we're not willing to say that, we're not willing to say anything.
And the left, they've already won.
Then we should just roll over.
They're promising to persecute conservatives right now.
Not just Trump, but all of us.
The congressmen are saying this out loud.
Media figures are saying this out loud.
If we're not willing to stand up for ourselves, then let's have it be done with.
A lot of people consider this a religious issue.
And, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to be argued in religious terms.
You can just say like, hey, look, there's a baby in there.
The baby's obviously alive.
The baby's obviously human.
And therefore, this raises bioethical questions.
And you should support keeping that baby alive.
And you should oppose plans to murder it.
But...
All of these things were argued in religious terms.
As Cardinal Manning famously said, all human conflict ultimately is theological.
When we're arguing about, I don't know, taxes even, we're arguing about immigration, we're arguing about any political issue, we are proposing ethical and moral considerations.
We're talking about parking ticket regimes.
We're discussing ethics and morality, which has a cultural basis and ultimately a religious basis.
That's where it comes from.
So, thankfully, some of our religious leaders are starting to take this seriously.
You know that Joe Biden, he's a devout Catholic.
I'm sure you've heard this.
The White House can't say it enough.
He's a devout Catholic.
He's the most radically pro-abortion president in American history.
He was actually denied the Eucharist at a church in North Carolina, rightly so, because he's so opposed to the church's teaching on this fundamental issue.
But he's a devout Catholic, and some liberal clerics let him get away with this, and it's a great scandal.
Well, there's a bishop, the Archbishop of Kansas City, who's coming out and saying, nah, no more, we're not going to do that.
Archbishop Joseph Nauman of Kansas City says, Mr.
Biden professes to be a devout Catholic, yet is 100% pro-choice on abortion.
Or, I'm sorry, he was answering this question.
How do you think the bishop should respond?
He says, quote, I can tell you, this bishop, The president should stop defining himself as a devout Catholic and acknowledge that his view on abortion is contrary to Catholic moral teaching.
It would be a more honest approach for him to say he disagreed with his church on this important issue and that he was acting contrary to church teaching.
When he says he's a devout Catholic, we bishops have a responsibility to correct him.
Although people have given this president power and authority, he cannot define What it is to be a Catholic and what Catholic moral teaching is.
What he is now doing is usurping the role of the bishops and confusing people.
Absolutely right.
More bishops should speak out in this way.
It would be an act of mercy to Biden, who is imperiling his soul by carrying on the way that he has.
That's some clear moral teaching.
And politics has a fundamentally moral aspect to it.
The left does not have this clarity.
I thought the Cenk Uygur tweet was going to be the dumbest thing I saw on the internet for the past several days.
No.
Sean Penn.
You know that brilliant actor, Sean Penn.
He actually is an excellent actor, but he's not a brilliant person.
He had the dumbest thing I've seen on the internet in a long time.
I've read the New York Times recently.
I've read the Washington Post recently.
Sean Penn takes the cake.
He said, quote, evangelical leaders should themselves be impeached by the Vatican Wait for it.
There are many things wrong with this tweet.
First of all, evangelical leaders probably will not be impeached by the Vatican because they are not Catholic.
They don't recognize the authority of the Pope, the Vatican.
Sean Penn doesn't understand that there is something called Protestantism.
And Catholicism, they're different.
He then talks about how great Nicky Healy is.
He then misspells Satan's name, the Satin, which makes...
You know, I suppose Satan is this slippery sort of figure, so the images are similar, but Satin, much comfier than the father of lies.
And then he gets in this jive at sex parties.
The reason I mention it is not really to probe Sean Penn's deep religious and political thoughts or the lack thereof, but to show...
As Ronald Reagan once said, it's not what people don't know that gets them into trouble.
It's what they know for certain that just ain't so.
Sean Penn doesn't know anything.
Especially during the Bush administration, they tried to make Sean Penn out to be this intellectual leader of the left.
Because he's a good actor, so he kind of looks really intelligent.
He's got this kind of squishy, smoldering face.
It seems like he's deep in thought.
I think all that is going on in his head is the whistling going from ear to ear.
I don't think there's a whole lot going on in there.
But he looks that way.
And I think this is true of the left.
When the left is talking about any topic, American history, the nature of the regime, American government and civics, the cultural and moral considerations, they just not only don't know what they're talking about, but they know so many things that aren't so.
And they're offering this kind of narrative.
You'll notice they always use this term narrative.
That crazy Congress lady that we discussed at the beginning of the show who's calling for a truth commission does this.
The 1619 Project does this.
They say we need to reframe the narrative.
And in part the reason that they do this...
Is because the way we tell stories affects how politics will play out, but also because the left seems to have embraced a radical skepticism about objective truth.
You know, when they talk about intersectionality or, you know, lived experiences, that's another term they use.
What they're suggesting is my truth or your truth or, you know, this is how I feel.
What they're saying is that we can't rely on objective reality.
Maybe there isn't any such thing as objective reality or objective truth.
It's all just a social construct.
You know, there's no men or women.
It's all socially constructed.
And so the narrative is everything.
A lot of this comes from what some kind of radical academics during the mid to late 20th century, Derrida in particular.
And some of Derrida's followers will claim that this is not really what he meant.
But he said, there's nothing outside the text.
It's a very famous line in this kind of radical academic movement.
There's nothing outside of the text.
And what this has been at least interpreted to mean for many years is...
It's just, it's all words, words, words.
To use Hamlet's line when he was feigning madness.
It's all just kind of stories.
And there's no fundamental reality that it's connected to.
So if we change the words, we can change the culture.
This is the fundamental premise of political correctness.
If we just redefine reality, then reality actually will change.
That is what we're up against here.
And it's why we kind of argue things a little bit differently.
So what conservatives do is they say, no, these American figures did this.
They said this.
They meant this.
It's not just all being made up in our minds every day.
We can't just redefine history however we want.
We're referring to some reality.
The left, broadly speaking, isn't really playing that game.
They're playing a different game, a game of narrative construction, which is why they try to blot out history, tear down statutes, rewrite historical and literary documents that have been so influential to our tradition.
And the result is pretty unpleasant, unfortunate for a lot of people.
You know, there's one very tangible, practical way that left-wing policies are disrupting people right now, that left-wing fantasies are hurting people's real lives.
It's going on in Texas.
If you're watching this show on video, you'll see that I'm not in my usual studio.
I'm actually at home.
We've had snow days at the Daily Wire because there's a big storm in Tennessee and the roads are icy and they don't want people to come in.
Okay, that's fine.
This is really affecting Texas, all this crazy weather.
Texas is getting hit with a horrible winter storm and compounding that problem There are rolling blackouts all throughout the state.
But the cause of the blackouts is not just the weather.
It's also bad left-wing policies.
The overall power input of Texas has declined pretty significantly after half of the state's wind turbines were frozen in a winter storm over the weekend.
Parts of Texas are now down to zero degrees Fahrenheit.
Texans are freezing right now.
More than 2 million homes and businesses have experienced power outages because the wind turbines froze.
Why is Texas, which is basically just a state made of oil, made of fossil fuels, why are they relying on wind turbines?
Because radical environmentalists are so afraid of the sun monster That they say is going to destroy the world through global warming within, what do they say, 12 years, AOC says, and Prince Charles said 18 months, but he said it like two years ago, so I guess the world is over already.
They're so afraid that global warming is going to destroy the world that they reordered Texas's energy policies, and now Texans are freezing.
We all, it's become sort of cliché to even say this, we could all use a little global warming right now, it's pretty chilly.
Well, Michael, weather isn't climate.
Except when it's convenient for us to say that weather is climate.
Well, the weather conditions have nothing to do with climate.
Okay, I don't want to relitigate the climate issue.
We'll talk about that some other time.
I'm just pointing to the political issue here.
The fantasy of imminent Armageddon because of the sun monster is leading to insane policies...
By the way, the way to rectify these wind turbine issues is to pour chemicals made with fossil fuels, aircraft made from fossil fuels, wind turbines also made from fossil fuels, probably not really great for the environment, to make up for these policies that were put forward because the left is living in a fantasy that is having very unpleasant effects in reality.
Even the United States military is not immune from the crazy fantasies of the left.
I could not believe this.
I thought this was like a Babylon Bee or an Onion article this week.
But it's not.
This is real.
A new report from the U.S. Navy on inclusion and diversity...
We'll force these members to pledge to, quote, U.S. Navy exists to kill our enemies.
He's now talking like some woke, blue-haired chick on a college campus freshman year.
The task force is called Task Force One Navy.
It was announced in June of 2020.
And their role is, quote, to analyze and evaluate issues in our society and military that detract from Navy readiness.
Oh, okay.
So what?
Like, you don't have enough ammo?
You don't have enough jet fuel for the planes that are going to fly off of the aircraft carriers and bomb our enemies?
No.
No.
No, no.
What the task force believes stops Navy readiness is, quote, racism, sexism, and other structural and interpersonal biases end to attain significant, sustainable, inclusion, and diversity-related reform.
That's what's keeping our military from being prepared to take on violent jihadis and China, the growing superpower.
Here are just some of the pledges that the committee will have you take.
Quote, Interesting consideration for the military.
And other structural and interpersonal biases.
I pledge to be actively inclusive in the public and private spheres where I live and work and proactively encourage others to do the same.
I pledge to engage in ongoing self-reflection and knowledge.
I pledge to be an example in establishing healthy, inclusive, and team-oriented environments.
I pledge to constructively share all experiences and information gained from activities above to inform the development of Navy-wide reforms.
Xi Jinping must be grinning from ear to ear, reading that this is the kind of nonsense that the United States military is spending its time on.
Can you imagine the mullahs right now in Iran?
Can you imagine the belly laughs they're having reading about how the Navy is spending resources on Trying to develop the intersectional lived experiences of all the inclusive members of the blah!
I can't even get through it without getting sick to my stomach.
How insane that is.
The purpose of the military is to be really, really strong and really, really focused and kill our enemies.
That's the job of the military.
But now I guess the purpose is to have slam poetry sessions or something.
To have drum circles and talk about our feel-feels.
Are you kidding me?
Can you imagine Putin?
What Putin is thinking right now?
Oh my gosh!
Obviously the Democrats don't want us to have a national border.
Who cares?
If this is the sort of thing...
That is being implemented from our political class now even to affect our military.
What's the point of having a border?
It's not going to do us very much good.
What is the point?
What is the country?
You know, one of the things that we were promised by Democrats, if they got unified government, was that they would push for Puerto Rican statehood.
They also want to push for D.C. statehood.
Why?
Is it because they particularly like Puerto Ricans?
Is it because they really don't even understand the purpose of Washington, D.C.? Maybe that's true.
But really what it's for is because those two places, if they became states, would give Democrats much more power.
The people there would support Democrats and We just know this given the political affinities in the areas that would give Democrats four new senators, new members of Congress, new advantages in presidential elections.
Now that push for Puerto Rican statehood is really beginning in earnest.
Here's the governor of Puerto Rico explaining his reasoning for it.
What I anticipate is that there will be considerable support for a statehood bill in this Congress.
Diversity is happening all over.
Puerto Ricans will always We'll be Puerto Ricans.
We'll be Puerto Rican Americans.
Bilingual is beautiful.
Speaking more than one language is an asset for anybody.
So if anything, the challenge in Puerto Rico is to make sure that our population ends up being fluent in both Spanish and English for their well-being.
These are very interesting comments, actually, because it shows to me this governor of Puerto Rico, Pedro Pierluisi, actually does understand some of the questions that are at play here with Puerto Rican statehood.
Because beyond the raw political calculation of Democrats only want it because it's going to get them more power, there is this question.
Puerto Rico has a distinct culture.
If Puerto Rico becomes a state, can that culture become part of the American national culture?
And what Pierluisi says here is, Now, in a sense, that would add to the diversity of the United States.
But in another sense...
Puerto Rico would be the least diverse state in America.
As he says it's a truly completely Hispanic state.
We don't have any completely white state, any completely black state, any completely Asian or Hispanic state.
So Puerto Rico would be the least diverse state in America.
But it would add to the diversity of the country.
Well, could it?
We don't really even have a common language.
I mean, obviously many people in Puerto Rico speak English, but the predominant language there is Spanish.
And what he says is, well, people should speak both.
I agree.
I think it's great to study languages.
I love studying languages.
But that cannot be the case.
If Puerto Rico were to be admitted, even if I were to somehow support this, they would have to speak English.
They would have to predominantly speak English.
They should stop encouraging Puerto Ricans to speak Spanish if they want to be part of America.
Because in America, we speak English.
We have very little that unites us.
At the very least, we need to speak the same language.
But the left doesn't want us to speak the same language.
The left wants us to speak very, very different languages.
Because the left wants to reframe the country.
All that was old, all that makes up the country right now, the real stuff of the country, the language, the customs, the beliefs, the principles, the legal system, the people, all that, they don't like that.
They want to change that.
And so now we're in a political battle, not just even for the direction of the country, or a little change here or there, a little evolution, not revolution.
We're in a battle for the very character, the very fundamental character of the country.
That's the real trial, and conservatives are the ones that are going to be facing that trial.
And we'll just have to see if conservatives can stand up to it.
I hope they at least understand the game that we're in.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Show.
See you tomorrow.
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Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, as President Biden's plans to become more and more radical, the media are focused laser-like on two important topics, President Trump and also that President Biden loves playing Mario Kart.
That's today on The Ben Shapiro Show.
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