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April 10, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
43:44
Michael Knowles Guest Appearance for The Washington Journal on CSPAN

Michael Knowles joined the show to talk about his podcast, news of the day, and take questions live from callers.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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All week at this time, we've been featuring political podcasters.
Joining us now is Michael Knowles.
He is the host of The Michael Knowles Show, which you can find on The Daily Wire.
Mr.
Knowles, thanks for joining us this morning.
Thank you for having me.
It's great to be here.
How do you describe your podcast to people?
Well, the traditional distinction is that we cover politics and culture.
But I think increasingly that distinction is a little bit blurry.
Certainly after the presidency of Donald Trump, that distinction is quite blurry.
So we cover that angle.
But, you know, Russell Kirk had an important observation, which is that Culture is downstream of religion.
We often hear of Andrew Breitbart, the patron saint of Hollywood conservatives, who says that politics is downstream of culture.
Culture is downstream of religion.
These questions are not so easily separated.
Cardinal Manning famously said that all human conflict is ultimately theological.
And so we like to go everywhere from the headline all the way down to the philosophical and theological premises that undergird those issues.
Give an example of a headline you're looking at in today's things that you cover and what are the cultural underpinnings there?
Oh, well, the clearest example probably is this transgender issue.
You saw the governor of Arkansas last night did not do a very good job defending his position on television.
He tried to make the argument that it is somehow conservative to give little children cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.
And so at the top level, you see the headline that there are these people and children specifically who have confusion about their sex and they boys feel like they're little girls and girls feel like they're little boys.
Then there is a cultural issue here of what this means, how this relates to, I don't know, pride parades, the broader LGBT movement, what the premises that undergird this are.
You know, for the for most of the history of the gay rights movement, we've been told people are born this way.
And, you know, if you're a boy and you're born and you have attraction to other boys, then, you know, society should be more tolerant of these views.
But then, immediately after that, we're told that, according to transgenderism, there is no such thing as biological sex, and if you're a boy, you can actually become a girl.
So those are premises that contradict one another.
And ultimately, there's a religious question here, which is, what is the nature of man?
You know, the traditional view in the West is that man is hylomorphic, to use the technical term.
So we're body and soul, and these are inextricably linked as long as we're here on Earth, and my body has something to do with who I am, and so does my soul.
According to the transgender movement now, our bodies have absolutely nothing to do with who we are.
So I can look like a man.
I can have an Adam's apple.
I can have a deep voice.
I've got all the various appendages.
But if on some deeper metaphysical level, I feel as though I'm a woman, then actually I am a woman.
It's not even complicated.
I simply am a woman.
My body has nothing to do with that.
And that is an ancient heresy called Gnostic dualism.
It's cropped up repeatedly over the course of Western civilization.
So I think if you want to understand that issue, which is about as sensational and topical as they get, it really helps to see all the layers all the way down so that one can have a more informed view on it.
When you talk about these kind of issues, what do you hear from perhaps people who support And do you have an avenue for those who maybe disagree with you on these issues, and what are you hearing from them?
Well, from what I hear from people who support me, they like having this extra context.
I think they enjoy pursuing these issues down to the bottom so that despite all of the emotion and all of the passion that often accompany these things, increasingly probably in our politics, one can...
Use their faculties of reason.
They can really think through these things and come to a decision on how they feel about this.
I certainly do have an avenue to people who disagree with me.
I didn't realize I had such an avenue, but then I look at my inbox every day on my email and my Twitter feed, and typically what I would hear from them is a more impassioned argument.
And I don't mean to caricature my political opponents, but usually what those criticisms involve I think that when our political opponents engage in that kind of evidence-free invective, it's a good bit of evidence that you've won the argument.
Michael Knowles joining us until 845 and if you want to ask him questions, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8002 for Democrats and Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can text us too at 202-748-8003.
How do you describe yourself politically and what shapes how you believe politically?
I suppose my friends have sometimes described me as slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.
But I think this is somewhat unfair, actually, because I think that the right and the left, first of all, they're terms that come out of the French Revolution.
So they're relatively modern terms in politics.
I don't know that they totally correspond to the way that our politics works right now.
And I think that there are a lot of problems on the right.
And so I wouldn't call myself a leftist, but there are a lot of issues on the right right now.
This is actually the topic of my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
It really takes more issue with the right because I think that conservatives, self-described conservatives, have fallen for traps that have been laid for them by political correctness or cancel culture or wokeness or use whatever term you want.
And so I think very often...
That they have not succeeded in conserving very much of anything.
And the governor of Arkansas' performance last night on television arguing that conservatives ought to chemically castrate kids, I think it proves that very well.
So I would like there to be not just this...
I want to take them seriously.
I want to see if they know something that perhaps the conservatives have unfairly dismissed or overlooked.
And I think they can.
I actually think one of the conclusions I reach in my book Speechless is that while the right likes to pride itself On this idea that we understand free speech so much better than the left does and they're just snowflakes who hate free speech.
Actually, I think the left understands free speech and censorship far better than the right does and I think that's how they've been able to amass and wield political power so effectively through political correctness and now its derivative cancel culture.
One of those issues that have come up in the last week or so is this Major League Baseball decision considering its All-Star game.
This connects to Georgia's voting laws.
This is something that the president referenced yesterday at the White House.
I want to play you a little bit what he had to say about that decision and then get your response to the topic.
Do you think the Masters Golf Tournament should be moved out of Georgia?
I think that's up to the Masters.
Look, you know...
It is reassuring to see that for-profit operations and businesses are speaking up about how these new Jim Crow laws are just antithetical to who we are.
There's another side to it too.
The other side to it too is when they, in fact, move out of Georgia, The people who need the help the most, people who are making hourly wages, sometimes get hurt the most.
I think it's a very tough decision for a corporation to make or a group to make.
But I respect them when they make that judgment, and I support whatever judgment they make.
But it's the best way to deal with this is for Georgia and other states to smarten up.
Stop it.
Stop it.
Mr. Knowles, the president from yesterday, what's your reaction?
That's quite the change in tune because just a few days ago, President Biden was absolutely encouraging Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game out of Georgia, which has led to an ironic consequence.
MLB has now moved the All-Star Game to Colorado in the name of racial justice and voting rights.
But of course, Colorado is a much whiter place than Georgia.
And Colorado has more restrictive voting laws than Georgia, even after this much maligned voter bill.
So that obviously backfired.
People of Georgia, including Georgia Democrats, are furious at President Biden.
And so now he's trying to reverse course and say, hey, hold on, other sports.
Please don't move your games out of here.
The issue with Joe Biden, and I say this actually with all due respect, is that I don't think Joe Biden has very many beliefs of his own at all.
I think he wakes up in the morning, he licks his index finger, puts it in the air, and figures out which way the wind is blowing.
He has been this way for his entire political career.
So he will change his positions according to the prevailing political winds.
And I think he thought that he was catching the zeitgeist.
He thought that he was with his base.
But then when the practical effects of that came in, $100 million leaving Georgia because of MLB, he realizes that he's got a reverse course right now.
It raises this question of...
On issues such as the woke corporations or immigration or voter ID. The Democratic Party right now, all the way up to the leadership, are pursuing a very unpopular policy.
The majority of Americans want a border that is secure.
The majority of Americans support voter ID. The Democratic Party does not do that.
Why do they not do that and why do they get away with it?
I think the reason is that they have waged for the last 100 years or so A war of position, to use the term of the radical theorist Antonio Gramsci.
They have attained positions of power and influence throughout the culture.
And as a result, they are wielding that power now.
So we can talk until we're blue in the face and the American people can respond to survey after survey after survey and say, we oppose this sort of thing.
But they lack the political power to actually effect those policies.
So I think that probably, you know, they'll recalibrate a little bit in the Democratic Party, But they're probably going to keep up the radicalism.
Our first call for you comes from New Jersey.
This is Mitchell, Democrats Live for Michael Knowles of the Michael Knowles Show.
Mitchell, go ahead.
You're on with our guest.
Good morning, Pedro.
Good morning, Mr.
Knowles.
I'm not familiar with Michael's show, but just a couple of comments on what I basically hear from conservative columnists and conservative talk show hosts is that there seems but just a couple of comments on what I basically hear from conservative columnists and conservative talk show hosts
You know, your guests started talking about sexual identity and what have you and also started to go towards the border.
I'm not saying that these aren't real issues, but I don't think they're ones of major import for most of us.
A couple of thousand kids at the border is certainly a serious situation.
but it's not one that's changing our lives.
LGBTQ issues where, you know, are men getting involved in women's sports or are women, you know, using the wrong bathroom now that they've changed their sexual identity or things that generally don't impact us on a daily basis.
And my point is that These issues are being brought out to kind of get people to act, get people on the right to act with somewhat of a cognitive dissonance and acting against their own best interests.
You know, serious issues in this country like climate change, the way we respond to the pandemic and not trusting science, The insurrection at the Capitol and what that really means in terms of maintaining our democracy.
Okay, Mitchell, we'll leave it there.
We'll let our guests respond to it.
You know, I think that Mitchell sounds a lot like the putatively Republican governor of Arkansas on television last night where he says, we need to stop talking about these issues like, you know, immigration or the enforcement of our national border or whether grown men should be able to follow little girls into the changing room at the public pool.
We need to talk about things that people actually care about, like marginal tax rates.
I have to tell you, not only do I not wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night thinking about marginal tax rates, I don't think anybody else does either, but these egghead technocratic considerations that people would rather us focus on carry with them a lot of political premises.
I think that what Mitchell is implying here...
Is that look, we've already solved all the basic social questions and political questions.
So now we're just trying to make trade a little bit more efficient.
You know, we're just trying to get that GDP up just a little bit more.
And okay, it's yeah, we're pumping kids full of hormone blockers and destroying their biochemistry.
But look, come on, that's just progress.
That's just going to happen.
We just have to trust the science because the science works.
This is the progressive vision of government.
Woodrow Wilson, our most consciously progressive president, laid this out very well in an essay called, What is Progress?
Woodrow Wilson said, "Under the old constitutional system of government, "we lived under the laws of Isaac Newton "with fixed laws of the universe, "and therefore we have a fixed human nature, and we need to have checks and balances and balance power out and make deliberative decisions as a body politic.
But that's all bunk, that's all over.
We're now living in the age of Darwin.
Nothing is fixed anymore.
We are simply evolving toward progress.
So ironically, what the effect of this is, is that everything becomes political.
Our chicken sandwiches are political.
Our sneakers are political.
Our Coca-Cola is political.
Everything is political except for politics.
Which, Woodrow Wilson argued, has to be outsourced to bureaucrats and administrators who are beyond the scope of legitimate political debate.
You see this most notably during 2020 with the rise of the exalted Dr.
Fauci, peace be upon him, our great national leader.
Dr.
Fauci says, look, I've never had a political view in my life.
I'm just doing what works.
Well, in order for something to work, it has to have a purpose.
A lawnmower works when it cuts lawns.
Right?
You need to know where you are going, what you want to do.
And that is certainly beyond the scope for someone like Anthony Fauci or the public health apparatus.
But I think the premise here in the question or in the comment from Mitchell is that we've already decided all that.
Yeah, there is no fixed human nature.
All those things we were talking about earlier about whether or not body and soul are linked or whether or not a nation should even be able to decide who comes into the country and who has the right to vote and who has the right to access government services.
Look, that's just not for you to decide.
Puny little American people, you peasants, you don't have the right to your political process.
We're going to outsource that to the experts because they can run our lives better for us than we can run them ourselves.
And I simply can't go along with that.
I don't think that those eggheads in Washington...
I don't think they have much of a sense of the American way of life.
I don't think they're particularly philosophically sophisticated.
And frankly, a lot of the time, I don't think they have my best interests at heart.
So I would prefer for we, the people of the United States of America, to exercise the political authority that was given to us in the Constitution that a lot of people want to take away.
So let's hear from Brick, New Jersey.
Kevin, Republican Line.
Go ahead.
Good morning, Sr.
Kofefe.
I'm a huge fan of yours, Michael.
I've been a long-time viewer, and I'm a Daily Wire subscriber.
My question is, as a young conservative...
How do you think we can take back our media and academia?
I think those are the two biggest problems right now for our country.
I just don't know how we can do that.
Do you recommend conservatives go into teaching and media?
Do you recommend they try to apply to CNN or work for Harvard, go to Harvard, and teach there, or do you think we should start our own colleges and media?
I would not be so much of a sadist as to suggest that you should work for CNN or Harvard or something like that.
But it's a very important question, and it's actually something I detail at great length in my upcoming book, Speechless.
The left focuses on the media, certainly, and especially on academia.
This is where you saw the rise of political correctness much earlier than you saw it in other parts of the culture.
And why is this?
It's because...
This is how you take a hold of the common sense.
Gramsci, that radical theorist, he understood that the reason that a Marxist revolution did not succeed is that the allegedly oppressed classes, the proletariat, didn't feel all that oppressed.
You know, the radicals had their theories, but the common people didn't really like those theories very much.
And so the left undertook a sophisticated and well-thought-out plan to take over academia and to take over systems of mass communication, and they've done it rather effectively.
So we're starting from a real disadvantage here.
And now, how do we do this?
For a long time, you've heard conservatives say, like Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream of culture, therefore forget about the political questions.
We've just got to go out there and...
I think that's very important.
I think absolutely we should do that.
Obviously, that is what I do for a living.
So I think that's a very important side of it.
We also need to wield political power.
We also need to...
And you're seeing some Republicans waking up to this.
You're seeing Ron DeSantis waking up to this.
Mitch McConnell even is waking up to this, saying that we can't just let woke corporations and allegedly private industries We're good to go.
Political correctness is designed to undermine traditional standards.
It is a purely negative campaign.
It engages in what Marx would call the ruthless criticism of all that exists.
From that, you saw the academic movement of critical theory and its recent derivations that are very much in the news, like critical race theory.
Out to destroy the old order.
And conservatives traditionally react in one of two ways.
You have the squishes who just go along with it and they say, okay, well, you're going to pump kids full of cross-sex hormones.
Yeah, that's fine.
You know, we want to broaden the party after all, like the governor of Arkansas.
But then even the more ornery, obstinate conservatives will come out and they'll say, look, I'm not going to go along with political correctness because I'm a free speech absolutist or I'm a free market absolutist or some other kind of absolutism that only exists in the air and has never existed in the actual political tradition of the United States.
And as a result of that, they will eschew standards altogether.
The irony here is that either way you do it, either if you give in to the left's new standard or you eschew standards altogether, either way the left gets what it wants, namely the obliteration of the old standard.
So I think, yes, as a shorter answer to your question, it's very important for conservatives to go into teaching, it's very important for conservatives to go into media, but that is not sufficient.
We also need to recognize that these entities exist within a broader political landscape, a broader political framework, and we need to be willing, we need to have the courage to wield that political power when we have it.
You know, President Trump, I hope he lives a long life, and then I hope when he goes to his eternal reward, he donates his body to science and his spine to the GOP, because if they would only have courage, which is the prerequisite for all the other virtues, I think that we could tackle this problem much more effectively.
It's much too early, but I'm sure you'll be asked or have been asked about if President Trump should run again for another term of president.
It is much too early.
I would agree.
I'm not sure.
I'm a supporter of President Trump.
I think he was a tremendous president, best president of my lifetime.
However, he himself has said that Republicans have a deep bench of good candidates.
So to me, especially if it's President Trump making that comment, That would signal that he's probably not going to run.
I'm not sure.
But there are a lot of great candidates out there.
I'm partial, certainly, to Senator Ted Cruz, with whom I host a podcast, and I have encouraged him to run.
I think obviously Ron DeSantis in Florida looks like he is eyeing a run and he's doing a very good job.
You've got other governors and senators around the country who seem to be interested in it.
So I'll take President Trump at his word.
I think if there is a deep bench, he could probably play a very significant role in determining who is going to get that nomination.
And he may end up running himself.
He obviously still has a ton of political support.
But I just, you know, if you were to think in 2013, who will the Republican nominee be?
I think very few people would have said Donald Trump will be the nominee.
And so it's simply too early.
At this point, we're all just sort of wish casting, I think.
Here's Michael in New York in Syracuse.
Democrats line.
Good morning.
I'd like to say that dips Donald is the worst thing that happens.
And you are ignorant for thinking that any other way.
Goodbye.
You know, I have to tell you, that was not the most persuasive argument I've heard, but it is among the more articulate arguments that I've heard from the left.
I suppose, though, that I am damning with faint praise.
You spend a lot of time on college campuses talking about these kind of issues.
What responses do you get?
Because I understand that you were hit by a water gun at one of these events.
I was.
I don't know what was in that water gun.
It was not water.
Fortunately, it wasn't any particularly noxious substance.
So the only casualty of the day was my blazer.
But it's funny.
I have a speaking tour.
Before COVID, we spoke at 10, 20 schools every year around the country.
And I called it the Men Are Not Women and Other Uncomfortable Truths Tour.
It's actually the reason that I answered your question earlier as to what is one of the most controversial issues that has deep philosophical premises.
Believe it or not, it's the idea that men are not women.
I gave other speeches on this tour.
I said babies are people.
I said that cancel culture is bad.
I don't know.
Sort of various truths.
And the one that really got everybody...
It was that men are not women.
And so I walked into this room.
It was at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
And immediately, I don't know, a third of the audience were these eccentric-looking young activists.
And they started screaming at me at the top of their lungs.
You couldn't really hear it on the video feed because my microphone was feeding directly into the camera.
But in the room, you really couldn't hear the speech.
So I went on undeterred.
I had prepared my speech anyway.
So even with what they were screaming, I could still continue to read it.
Then eventually they tuckered themselves out and they went to leave.
And one of them went behind the podium, opened up a fire door, And some mask-clad lunatic comes in and sprays me with some sort of chemicals.
And the police did a great job of taking that guy down.
He seemed shocked that he would face any consequences for his actions.
And then eventually everyone was let out of the room.
And what's really bizarre is that the following day, the chancellor of the university wrote a letter apologizing.
Not to me, but to the students that I was invited in the first place.
And suggesting that the idea that men are not women is not a value of the university.
And it was really through the looking glass.
I really felt as though I was in wonderland at that point.
But that is the usual response I get.
There have been a handful of times on these campuses that there have been really thoughtful leftist responses, which I... I mean, you know, that's what I wrote my recent book on, is thoughtful leftists and taking their ideas seriously.
But unfortunately, you don't get a lot of that.
And I think part of the reason why the conservatives on campus tend to be much more thoughtful and articulate than the leftists is a circumstantial matter, which is that if you're a conservative on campus, The culture is completely against you.
You are constantly having to defend your beliefs, think through your beliefs, perhaps discard some of your beliefs, maybe deepen others.
Whereas if you are in the left these days, your ideas are rarely challenged.
They're not challenged at work, they're not challenged at school, they're not challenged in the broader culture, and they're certainly not challenged in the political realm.
So I just think they're at a real disadvantage here.
And if there are...
Intellectual and thoughtful and articulate leftists.
I've got speeches coming up this year, so I look forward to seeing you on campus.
Please don't ruin any more of my blazers.
This is Michael Knowles of The Michael Knowles Show on The Daily Wire.
It's part of our political podcast series this week.
Maria in Westville, New Jersey, Independent Line.
Hi.
Good morning, Pedro.
Your guest has a very arrogant mind, and I appreciate that.
But I'd like to get back to something else he said.
I think it was Jefferson who said, eventually our country will be saved by the people.
And I feel that we can't wait for all these elections where most of our government are foreign agents, to be honest with you.
Is there a way to have petitions to really recall most of them right now?
And the second point I wanted to make is, There's an $11 trillion shortfall at the Pentagon, which has not been accounted for.
Nobody's auditing them.
We're in secret wars all over the world.
And we're with five eyes, which gives Britain and the Commonwealth and Israel all our secrets.
I think it's nice to talk about party versus party, but I think now it ought to be citizens of the United States against the globalists.
And I think that the battle has to start in earnest now.
And I like his opinion.
Thank you.
Maria, those are a bunch of great questions and comments.
You know, what a lot of people are going to say when they listen to you is they're going to say, Maria, these are crazy conspiracy theories that you're talking about.
There is no way that a foreign spy could ever influence the U.S. government.
And, of course, you might point them to Alger Hiss, a top-ranking State Department official who was working for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
This was detailed in Whitaker Chambers' excellent book Witness, which was one of the books that moved Ronald Reagan from the liberal camp to the conservative camp.
You mentioned that the bureaucracy seems to be unaccountable to the American people.
This is obviously the case.
I remember Antonin Scalia.
I had the privilege of meeting him a couple times before he died.
He said that the greatest threat to liberty in the United States is the administrative state because it has had such a mission drift.
It has become so unaccountable as well to the American people.
So, you know, the degree to which these issues are affecting our day-to-day might be disputed, but certainly there are a lot of problems here.
You mentioned these wars that we seem to crop up all the time.
I remember the old joke in 2008 was, they told me if I voted for John McCain, we'd start another war in the Middle East, and they were right.
I voted for John McCain and we started more wars in the Middle East.
So these problems are really frustrating.
However, the way that I think, the conservative way that one would begin to address them, and frankly the way that the left has addressed them to great effect, is It's through evolution, not revolution.
I don't think that we need to go kick the doors in at some administrative agency and say, you're all fired, you all need to get out of here.
One, it wouldn't work.
And two, it probably wouldn't have much of the political effect that you're hoping for.
Have incremental change.
So you need to be able to identify the Republican office holders who are not fulfilling their campaign promises, who are not pursuing a particularly conservative policy, and you need to get them out through the old-fashioned electoral process.
Then, when we have political power, you need to wield that power to fire a lot of bureaucrats who are undermining the administration.
I'm not saying this is easy.
President Trump faced a lot of pushback at this.
You consider just one department in the government, the Department of Homeland Security, I think the Department of Homeland Security alone has upwards of a quarter million employees.
So this is a huge problem, and one or two elected officials are not really going to change that.
But it's why you need that steady, steady, incremental change.
The left, for the last 100 years, as I detail in the book Speechless, For a hundred years, they amassed that sort of power.
And it reminds me of Ernest Hemingway's description of going bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises.
The question is, how'd you go bankrupt?
And the answer is, gradually, then suddenly.
And I think the left has amassed power in this country gradually, and then they exercise it rather suddenly.
That's what's happening right now.
And I think conservatives would do well to learn a lesson from that strategy.
From East Syracuse, New York, Ellie, Democrats Line, good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, Mr.
Knowles, I find you offensive your pompous way.
The Conservative Party has done nothing for America but divide us.
And your book, I probably would purchase it to read it, I don't agree with anything you're saying.
Check out history.
I am a history buff.
And I read history.
And I was an independent all of my life until 2008.
And I realized that I sided more with some of the ideas of the Democrats.
You have conservatives.
What about the conservative movement in 1953?
Pushing religion, right?
Did you see the documentary, The Family?
I haven't seen that documentary.
Well, I think you should watch it because it's very telling.
And it tells you all about how a certain set of Republicans, conservative, religious, which is in the Constitution, no laws written, Okay?
Freedom means freedom to practice your religion that way you want, if you want.
Freedom means if you are a lesbian, a gay, LPGQ, whatever you call it, that's your right.
Right.
Okay, well...
Okay, Ellie.
Hold on, Ellie.
We'll let our guests respond.
So, all interesting points.
I appreciate your willingness to buy and read my book, even if you suspect that you won't agree with it.
To your point on religion, you say that the United States does not have any religious underpinning and you should be free to have whatever religion you want.
Let's not forget...
Religion factors into the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence, the entire American Revolution, is premised on the idea that there is a God, our creator, who endows us with certain unalienable rights.
So that idea, which is a very Christian idea, is the philosophical basis of the entire country.
And if you were to posit a religious view that would undermine that religious basis, that would seem rather incoherent.
Beyond that, all governments, all regimes have some kind of religious basis.
This is inevitable.
At the ratification of the Constitution, by the way, this is very misunderstood.
But the First Amendment is ratified.
There's no established church at the national level.
One of the reasons for that is that there were many established churches at the state level, and those church establishments at the state level persisted for decades after the ratification of the Constitution.
We have a state religion now.
The state religion now is secular progressivism.
We are now being told that it is unacceptable in this culture to question the idea that a man can become a woman.
Well, that is enshrining in our law The Gnostic religious idea of dualism, that our bodies and our souls have nothing to do with one another, and we really are our souls, as we discussed earlier in the show.
To quote the great political philosopher Bob Dylan, everybody's got to serve somebody.
There's no question about that.
And then you raise this point on freedom and liberty, which I think is so important because it's misunderstood not only on the left, but it's misunderstood on the right as well.
There are two conceptions of liberty here.
There is the modern, call it liberal idea of liberty, which is that liberty is the ability to do whatever you want at any time and to pursue your own desires, whatever they may be.
And this is an idea that's held by the left, but by a huge portion of the right as well.
Then there is the classical idea of liberty.
The idea of liberty held by our founding fathers, held by Christianity, held by the pre-Christian philosophers.
And that idea is that liberty is not the ability to do whatever you want at any time, but it is the freedom to do what you ought to do.
So, just to bring that down to earth, what that means is...
According to the modern idea of liberty, the heroin addict is the most free person in the world, because no one's, especially in states where that drug is legal, because that person is not being told he can't do something.
If he has the desire to shoot up heroin, why, gosh darn it, he's going to do it.
And as long as he's got a couple bucks in his pocket, gosh, could you imagine a person any more free?
Of course, we all know that guy is not free at all.
He's a slave.
He's a slave to his base passions.
And his appetites and his sin.
This is why in the traditional understanding of liberty, as Christ says himself, the man who sins is a slave to sin.
In the pre-Christian, philosophical, Greek understanding of liberty, The way that we become free is by practicing the virtues, by cultivating our minds and disciplining our wills.
This is the purpose of liberal education.
The idea of liberal education is that we will come to make sense of our liberty, of our freedom, and be able to exercise it.
So that we can tamp down those base passions that we don't want to follow that compromise our will and our intellect and be able to pursue these higher things.
This is what the Founding Fathers knew.
This is why they wrote at great length, and I detail this at great length in my book Speechless, about the difference between liberty and licentiousness.
In the modern era, in the modern age today, the left and the right both seem to think That liberty and licentiousness are the same thing.
What our founding fathers knew, and what wise people throughout history have known, is that liberty and licentiousness are actually polar opposites.
That licentiousness totally undermines liberty.
It's what you're seeing around us right now, and it reminds us of John Adams' warning that our Constitution, our Republic, is built for a moral and religious people, and it's unfit to the governance of any other sort of people.
This is not just some Sunday school scolding that he's giving us.
He's telling us a fact about liberty.
If we can't tamp down our base passions, we are not going to be able to govern ourselves.
Mr.
Knowles, there's a viewer who writes in about the transgender topic and writes this, say, I am a, quote, leftist who believes that transgender issues are personal medical procedures and are as much my business as a person who receives a kidney transplant.
I just don't need or want to have power in someone else's medical procedures.
Sure.
Well, it's funny.
Very often the people who tell us that we need to stay out of their medical procedures are also calling for greater government influence in the medical industry, in our healthcare decisions.
People who support socialized medicine, for instance.
But, of course, this is not the case.
And I think Republicans are as guilty of this misunderstanding as the left is.
This idea that politics is this really, really narrow realm and that the private sphere should be totally opened.
On the right, they want to pretend that politics has nothing to do with how the economy should work.
So we should have just a totally free market and I should be able to trade whatever I want and build whatever I want.
On the left, they take this idea and they apply it to the social realm.
So I should be able to sleep with whoever I want.
I should be able to mutilate my body however I like.
And politics has nothing to say about this.
But of course, politics has quite a lot to say about this.
At the very most basic level, our political institutions should be able to protect people, should be able to protect vulnerable people, should be able to protect the most vulnerable people like children.
And so if a political regime says you are not permitted to mutilate children and chemically castrate them, that is going to be one kind of polity.
And if the political regime says...
You have a right to chemically castrate children if they give their consent which is a dubious concept in itself because children are not able to give informed consent.
That's why we have age of consent laws that say that children are not permitted to engage in certain behaviors below the age of 17 or 18.
Those are very different polities, and we can pretend that those are questions that we should ignore or push to the side, but indecision is a certain kind of decision here.
It creates what you might call the permissive society with horrible effects for constitutional government and also for these kids who are being mutilated because of the fashionable ideologies of radicals.
From New York, Republican Line.
Samuel, you are next.
Um, hi.
First of all, I'd like to say I'm a big fan, and I think it's really cool that I'm talking on the line to you.
But besides that, I'd like to ask a question about, like, in terms of the culture, it's like, I think about a lot, it's like, we used to have, there used to be, like, slavery, Jim Crow, and then this changed the culture.
Caller, caller, I'm gonna have to pause you a little bit.
Could you step back a little bit from your phone only because you're becoming muddled?
Can you try again?
Yeah, I'd just like to ask a question about, like, in terms of, like, culture, like, you know, we used to have a lot of bad moral systems, used to have slavery, used to have all these things, and then the culture changed, the laws changed, and then, like, there's no real opposition to it that's significant,
and everyone agrees on it, and I was just wondering if you think there really will be a day where that becomes the case for, say, the whole transgender fight with Okay, we'll stop you there only because you become muddled, but Mr.
Knowles, if you want to take anything from that, go ahead.
That's a great question, and an even greater compliment.
I thank you for the compliment at the top of that question.
What you're pointing out is that in the past, things used to be bad, but now in the present, things seem to be better.
And this is, of course, true in certain issues, but in other issues, this is not true.
So the...
Notably, we no longer have legal slavery in the United States.
That's great.
Good.
Totally for that.
Unfortunately, we kill a million babies a year through abortion.
Well, that's bad.
You know, so some things got better, some things got worse.
What the progressives will tell you The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice, and things are always getting better, and the past is always worse, and the present is always a crisis, and the future is always going to be terrific.
This is in part why the left always needs to tear down the statues, even statues of people they once liked, because the past is always bad, and we here in the present, who are standing on the shoulders of giants, think that we're flying.
And this is urgent, and it's a crisis, and it's why we've got to get into that utopian future.
And the utopian future is utopian precisely because it doesn't exist.
That progressive view of history is not going to get anywhere.
Now, I think sometimes conservative criticisms of the progressive view of history are a little bit dishonest.
I myself am a Catholic.
I have, in a certain sense, a progressive view of history.
I think that, to quote the Creed, Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
So, you know, I guess that's kind of a progressive view of history, right?
But it's a little bit different than the one that is espoused by people on the left.
Namely, I think things are going to get a little bit worse in the meantime.
There's a great line a priest friend of mine uses.
He says that the difference between a Scottish optimist and a Scottish pessimist is a Scottish pessimist says things can't get any worse, and the Scottish optimist says, oh yes they can.
And I think that the same might be said of conservatives as well.
So yes, I think that in some ways issues may get better.
Like slavery.
And I think in some ways issues might get worse, like abortion.
I hope, notably, that abortion issue does get better and people realize the absolute moral horror of what we as a society are doing.
But I do not hold out a utopian hope that it's all going to be kumbaya and the Big Rock Candy Mountain any time in the near future.
I think we should have political humility.
We should improve what we can improve with deference to the tradition that we've inherited.
But I don't think that we should hold out hope for any utopia on Earth.
It just ain't going to happen.
Michael Knowles joining us for this conversation.
The Michael Knowles Show.
The MichaelKnowles.com is the website that you can find it on.
How often do you produce a podcast and what other things do you do aside from the podcast?
Well, I will correct you just slightly, because there's a writer and an actor, I think, who has michaelknowls.com, and he never forwards me my emails.
But you can find all my stuff at michaeljknowls.com.
Correct.
Apologies.
Not at all.
I just don't want his inbox to be flooded.
So you can find there my show at The Daily Wire.
You can subscribe to The Daily Wire to watch The Michael Knowles Show.
It goes up five days a week.
You can watch my show, The Book Club, at PragerU.
You can watch my show with Senator Ted Cruz, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
You can order my new book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
You can order my previous blank book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
A comprehensive guide.
And so you can find all that stuff, links for all that at michaeljknolls.com.
And you can also please do write in on social media in the mailbag, because I was so pleased to be able to come on this show today, because I do love speaking to callers all around the country.
So I really appreciate that opportunity.
Mr.
Knowles, thanks for your time today.
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