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April 12, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
51:45
Ep. 740 - A Nation Of Neurotics

Brian Stelter wants to watch conservatives get the vaccine, Pete Buttigieg says the roads are racist, and a public university demands that students adopt the woke religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm not against vaccines, okay?
I'm not even necessarily against the COVID vaccine.
However, the neurotic creeps that keep demanding that we all get this vaccine, no matter our risk level, no matter how young or healthy we are, who just insist on it, who want to watch us do it, they are making me significantly less inclined to get the vaccine.
Case in point, Brian Stelter, CNN, Who has this voyeuristic, creepy desire to watch conservatives on television getting jabbed with the COVID shot.
It's really important to see all these TV anchors, personalities, showing themselves getting the shot.
We've seen a lot of vaccine selfies from lots of folks at lots of different networks.
It's been really inspiring to see.
You know, the Today Show even brought the co-hosts outside for a live group vaccination this week.
And Rachel Maddow on Friday on MSNBC talked about how she was really fearful of the needle, really worried about it, and yet it was important to get the shot, and she did, and there she is talking about it on air.
So, I say all of that to make the following point.
Where are Tucker and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham?
Where is Ainsley Earhart and Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade?
Where are the biggest stars on Fox getting vaccinated?
I get it's a personal choice.
I get that's between, you know, the hosts and their healthcare provider.
But everybody else is doing it, right Matt?
I mean, all across television, all these anchors are rolling up their sleeves.
Why do you think we haven't seen the biggest stars on Fox News get vaccinated or show us their vaccine selfies?
It's really important that they show us their vaccine selfies.
There's nothing more important to public health than for some young and healthy conservative TV hosts to get a shot on TV, right?
I love, he says, it's really inspiring to watch these people who have done it.
And then he shows a picture of himself.
It's so inspiring.
It's so virtuous.
Because, of course, this is not about prudential judgments and risk assessment.
This is about a new scientific sacrament Welcome back to the show.
Really, really crazy stuff.
I spoke at Ave Maria College on Friday.
Was it Thursday or Friday?
It was my first speech back on campuses in 14 months.
I was supposed to do about 20 campus speeches last year.
They all got canceled, except for one or two just before coronavirus.
Then, starting in March, they all got canceled, obviously, because the colleges were closed.
It was great to be back.
And coincidentally, we spoke...
about this religion of secular progressivism, the same kind of craziness that Brian Stelter is implying.
And I recommend you go check out the talk.
I really enjoyed it.
Who knows how much longer it'll stay online because it questions not the science.
I'm using a lot of air quotes today, but I really am only using the air quotes around the word science.
It's this way of justifying all this So, if I tell them that I don't have any documents, you know, at the border in the country, do I get $15,000?
Hello, my name is Javier.
Where do I sign up?
Yes, New York is giving $15,000 grants.
A little over that, actually.
I think it's $15,600 to illegal aliens.
They're not going to let you, the American citizen, go out, run your business, work your job.
But they will pay people five figures to violate our laws.
That is how backwards things have become.
Please call me Miguel.
Miguelito.
Yes, Miguelito from that famously Latin American country of Sicily.
I guess they spoke Latin there some time ago.
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The insistence by these libs in the mainstream media that we all get this COVID vaccine, no matter how young and how healthy we are, is weird and creepy.
And the fact that they want to watch us do it is even creepier.
And the fact that they have been wrong about COVID from the beginning and they have misled people about two weeks to slow the spread, flatten the curve, find a cure, now we're going to be locked down, according to some people, for years.
At this point, the fact that their predictions have been wrong, 2 million people dead.
Donald Trump's timetable is never going to work.
Trump's timetable on the vaccine was absolutely 100% correct.
They don't have any credibility, so why on earth should I trust them?
I'm not saying that vaccines are terrible.
I'm not even saying I won't get the COVID vaccine at some point.
I'm just saying I feel no rush to do it, and their insistence that I do is making me less likely to do it.
They also have no explanation for why the states that have reopened are watching their coronavirus cases go down, and those are Republican states, and the states that are continuing to lock down, Democrat states, are seeing cases skyrocket.
They're trying to come up with a bunch of cockamamie answers, but they just don't have it.
Here's the Today Show trying to figure it out.
Call it a COVID conundrum.
In states with the strictest measures in the country, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and much of New England, cases are on the rise.
While in the South, states like Arkansas and Texas that have reopened businesses and ripped away mask mandates are seeing their numbers drop.
I'm announcing today that the statewide mask mandate will be lifted.
And businesses don't need the state telling them how to operate.
So what might explain the apparent contradiction?
One theory, differences in testing rates.
Alabama has experienced one of the biggest dips in reported infections more than 50% in two weeks.
But it's also dead last in the U.S. for COVID testing.
Only 56 tests per 100,000 people.
That's a fraction of what you'll find in places like Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York, where numbers are surging.
How much does lack of adequate testing have to do with the numbers that we're seeing right now?
When you don't test, you're blind.
And when you're not testing, you have a false sense of what the real problem is in your community.
Another theory, COVID fatigue.
This goes on for several minutes and they just go through a bunch of different theories as to why their main theory doesn't work.
It shows you how desperate they are.
Absolutely pathetic.
I think people should watch the whole clip at some point.
You go on the internet later, watch the whole NBC clip.
They're just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
But even to their point here, their best theory that they led with is, well, the reason that it looks like the states that reopened are fine and the Democrat states that are still locked down are surging.
The reason is because the Democrat states are testing more.
Okay.
Well, we're not seeing spikes in death, right?
We're not seeing spikes in people's lives falling apart.
It just looks like Texas and Florida and all the normal conservative states are fine.
I mean, I was in Florida a few days ago.
I've been to Florida several times this year, at least three, four times this year.
And it's great.
It's totally fine.
It's totally normal.
But they're not testing.
They don't know how bad it is.
I mean, this is the same sort of logic, illogic, that you hear from leftists when they say that oppressed groups of people just don't understand how oppressed they are.
They're laboring under a false consciousness when some allegedly marginalized group goes about its day without thinking about how terrible their lives are.
No, maybe you're just a bunch of neurotics on the left and you're worrying in an inordinate way about this virus, which requires some prudential judgment, but doesn't imply that you should completely shut your lives down.
Absolutely neurotic hysteria that has now been exposed that they are now scrambling to try to defend, but there is no way to defend it.
It is just a weird quirk of the left-wing psychology.
So people like Governor DeSantis in Florida have been right the whole time, and Democrats like, well, Andrew Cuomo, for sure, but other leading Democrat governors on coronavirus, too, Have been wrong the whole time, and that's just the way it is.
So DeSantis just held a panel in Florida.
It was with a number of experts on the virus, including Harvard professor Dr.
Martin Kulldorff, Oxford University epidemiologist Dr.
Sinitra Gupta, Stanford physician and epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, and Stanford professor Dr.
Scott Atlas.
He moderated this discussion regarding the response to the COVID pandemic, And the insanity that the left has foisted on us.
And do you know what happened?
They posted this on YouTube.
And YouTube pulled it down.
YouTube said we can't have this kind of misinformation, this violation of our community guidelines on the air.
So you can have Andrew Cuomo go on and spout a bunch of nonsense and lies about coronavirus.
Totally fine.
You can have that on YouTube.
You can have a bunch of other doctors, frankly, with less impressive credentials than these guys from Harvard, Stanford, Oxford.
You can have them go on and say that we all need to hunker down and maybe come out of our homes in 2027.
But if you get a successful governor and correct experts to go on and criticize the liberal establishment's insane response to coronavirus, that's not allowed.
And it doesn't matter.
Governor DeSantis was elected by the people?
Too bad.
Who cares?
YouTube's not going to have it.
Because YouTube has much more political power than Ron DeSantis.
YouTube has much more political power than any Republican politician in the country.
In the words of Mitch McConnell, big technology would appear, along with woke America, corporate America generally, this big business would appear to be running a parallel government.
And we need to stop that.
For several decades, Republicans embraced this really shallow ideology that suggested that big business, good, big government, bad.
Anything, frankly, anything government does, bad.
Anything these giant corporations do, totally good.
Including censoring the people's duly elected representatives when they tell the truth about coronavirus.
And even beyond, well, this is true and this is false and here's a fact and this is a lie, they're just expressing their political opinion about what measures were taken, which obviously there were a ton of mistakes made along the way.
I don't think anybody would deny that.
But that's not permissible, because that contradicts the state-established religion of secular progressivism, and so they are going to be shut down.
And I think Republicans need to wake up, we are starting to wake up, finally, and say, oh, big business when they behave in this way and undermine our whole country and subvert our constitutional order?
They're no better than big government.
In many ways they're much worse because there's not even a semblance of accountability for these people.
YouTube will just pull it and Ron DeSantis can complain about it.
He can try to pass some laws in Florida.
Probably even that won't be very successful.
Who is really running the country?
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Beyond the coronavirus, there is another major public health threat that our country faces.
You probably haven't heard of this one.
Hard to take a look at it under a microscope.
But rest assured, the CDC director, Dr.
Rochelle Walensky, is focused on it.
This would be the serious public health threat of racism.
She says, quote, the disparities seen over the past year were not a result of COVID-19.
Instead, the pandemic illuminated inequities that have existed for generations and revealed for all of America a known but often unaddressed epidemic impacting public health.
Racism.
What we know is this.
Racism is a serious public health threat that directly affects the well-being of millions of Americans.
As a result, it affects the health of our entire nation.
Not one sentence in that statement was coherent.
Not one idea that was expressed by the CDC director made any sense.
Racism is not a public health threat.
It's not a serious public health threat.
It's just not a public health threat at all.
Not every bad thing is a public health threat.
But there is a reason that they're trying to frame it this way.
This is the heart of my talk, coincidentally, or providentially perhaps, that I just gave at Ave Maria College.
Everything needs to be made scientific.
That very narrow, empirical, modern idea of science.
Everything now needs to fit into that.
Racial hatred is bad.
It is not a public health threat.
But because the only way that we can discuss anything anymore is in this very shallow, narrow language of physical, material science, everything has got to be gussied up in that sort of language.
Why is racism bad?
I know we're all told racism is really, really bad.
So what is racism?
Hatred, antagonism towards someone on the basis of their race.
Bad stuff.
Why is it bad?
I can answer why.
It's bad because it's an offense against human dignity because man is made in the image of God.
That's it.
It's not complicated.
That's it.
Very simple.
What is that?
One sentence?
Good.
Okay.
Now, if you don't believe in God and you sort of deny or at least ignore all the metaphysical aspects of our life, you know, our hopes, our joys, our loves, dignity, all that sort of stuff, and you just believe in the physical stuff, why is racism bad?
You can't give an answer.
There is no answer.
You can't really say anything's bad or anything's good for that matter.
So these people, these people who have absolutely no political, philosophical, theological education or sophistication whatsoever, and frankly they don't have much scientific education either, they try to gussy everything up in the normal language that we hear about public health.
Manifestly, racism is not a public health threat.
And even if it were, it wouldn't be a threat to the people who aren't of the affected races.
You can't explain why racism is bad with that really narrow, silly vocabulary.
You have to expand your mind a little bit, but we can't because the minute that you start granting the existence of a metaphysical reality, of an objective moral order, of the supernatural, there's a natural world and then there's the supernatural world, the moment that you admit of that, then the state religion of secular progressivism falls apart.
And the state religion of secular progressivism, by the way, now hinging on this neurotic fear of death that has perfectly healthy millennials putting 17 masks on their face and getting shots on television to show their supreme virtue.
That is embarrassing stuff.
You should not make that your religion.
Speaking of racial hatred and actual public health threats, you're going to be shocked to hear this.
If you're driving, pull over.
If you're standing up, sit down.
There's a new report out that shows that cities that held Black Lives Matter protests saw their murder rate shot up, shoot up rather, in the last few years.
Isn't that shocking?
Because I've been told by places like CNN that the BLM protests are mostly peaceful.
So it's so weird how those cities where BLM takes over see their murder rates skyrocket between 2014 and 2019.
So not just 2020, but actually excluding 2020.
From 2014 to 2019, because BLM's been around for a while, these places saw a 10% increase in murders.
This was preliminary stuff from a study conducted by Travis Campbell, who's a PhD student at UMass Amherst, said that these cities with protests...
Red riots had, quote, somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.
Imagine what that number is going to look like when you add 2020 into it, where you had the most explicit street violence that we've seen, political street violence that we've seen in our country in a very long time.
By the way, this is not just being reported by The Daily Wire or a conservative outlet.
This is being reported by Vox, Vox.com, which is a left-wing outlet.
If we want to address the public health threats of racial hatred and tension, maybe we should shut down BLM. Maybe the federal government should go in and shut down that organization like they would shoot down the mob or the Klan.
I wish Bill Barr had done this when he was Attorney General during the madness of 2020.
I understand he was in a difficult position.
It's very tricky when you've got the entire liberal establishment, the woke corporations, funneling tens of millions of dollars into this organization, which was effectively the militant wing of the Democratic Party.
I get it.
I get that it was really tough.
But BLM Was a terrorist organization, is a terrorist organization that targets civilians with violence to achieve political ends.
That should not be permitted to operate in the United States.
If there were anything even remotely like that on the right, the people who ran it would be in prison.
The FBI would be shutting that thing down.
But because it's left-wing, because the establishment, the public sector and the private sector, all working together, they all kind of look like the same sector.
Because they're so powerful and so rich, they're not being shut down.
And they're really rich.
They are really, really rich.
There is a great headline from the New York Post today.
After news came out that the co-founder of BLM, Patrice Cullors, has been spending millions and millions of dollars on houses, buying up beautiful homes, the headline in the New York Post is, Black Lives Manners.
Ha ha!
Or the other one is buy large mansions.
That's the other new meaning of BLM. Patrice Cullors is a leftist activist.
That is her career.
That's what she's done.
She did not start some business other than BLM. I guess that is a pretty effective corporation in America.
She did not invent some cool gizmo.
She didn't work in finance for a long time.
She's made all of her money on race hustling and radical Marxist activism.
Her words, not mine.
She's admitted this on air.
She's a trained Marxist.
She then readdressed this when that old video came to light.
And she said, yeah, I like Marxist activism.
Yeah, that's what we're doing.
This is the topic, by the way, of my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available now for pre-order.
Thank you to everybody who has pre-ordered it.
We have some great stuff.
We're going to be doing the audiobook soon.
You can order a first edition autographed copy of that at Premier Collectibles.
The topic of that book is how we went from some obscure, brilliant, actually, left-wing theorists about 100 years ago up to BLM today.
What that through line is, what political correctness is, what wokeism is, what cancel culture is.
So Patrice Cullors might be facing a little bit of a cancel culture on her own because now it's come to light.
She just snagged four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the U.S. alone.
Who knows what other purchases she's made.
Now, you're going to hear that Patrice Cullors, she made her own money in some places.
She made a little bit of money selling a BLM book.
Okay, that was her kind of her own money.
Where did the rest of this money come from?
I don't really know.
Now, you're going to hear people say, well, this is not fair, and this is awful, and maybe Patrice Cullors is going to be booted from BLM. Yeah, maybe, maybe not.
Something tells me, though, that she just wields political power in a very clever way, and she'll be fine.
It's not a big shock.
Oh my gosh, you know, wow.
She made a lot of money.
Of course she did.
Big politics makes big money.
That's the way it goes.
Big money invites big politics.
And you're going to hear some conservatives say, oh, well now this, now this communist is, is perfectly fine with capitalism now that she's rich.
Yeah, it was always sort of the same thing.
It was always a power grab.
What the left is doing is not coherent ideologically or otherwise.
And so, yeah, it's a big power grab.
But guess what?
They grab the power.
They have the power.
This broad left-wing movement from the radical, explicit communists like Patrice Cullors all the way to the more mainstream types in the elected office who support them.
They now have the power of the parallel government, of the liberal establishment.
They have more power than Ron DeSantis in Florida.
They have more power than elected Republicans.
Maybe we should start amassing and wielding political power for the good Not for the bad like they do, for the good ourselves.
One way to do that, you've got to get educated.
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You can check out the resistance today on Ben Shapiro's show because he's making a similar point to the one I'm making.
He's taking it from a little bit of a different angle that the resistance is actually basically the most powerful force in America.
Also, Episode 5 for The Candace Show.
We can't get enough of Candace Owens.
If you haven't checked it out yet, what are you waiting for?
This fearless thought leader hosts a lively series of guests each week for a panel discussion, interviews, and her signature cancel corner.
This week, she'll be hosting comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla.
Tune in because you do not want to miss this conversation.
The show streams on Fridays at 9 p.m.
Eastern, 8 p.m.
Central.
DailyWire.com.
You can get the audio podcast Candace on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
If you need some Candace Owens in your feed, look no further.
Head on over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and subscribe today.
Be sure to leave a five-star review if you like what you hear.
Head on over to DailyWire.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Welcome back to the show.
Nope.
Thank you.
Speaking of radicals throwing around big sums of money, you've got BLM buying up beautiful mansions in California.
Wow, that's great.
Big politics, big money.
And you've got Joe Biden throwing money in the other direction.
The Biden administration tacitly admitting that there is a crisis on the southern border.
We've got record number of foreign nationals pouring over here, record number of unaccompanied minors.
I was going to say children, but a lot of them are like 16, 17-year-old gangsters.
So some are children, some are, they're minors sort of, but you know, it's a little bit dicey.
Joe Biden's big strategy to deal with this problem, he's going to give them a lot of money.
Not just the foreign nationals.
Places like New York are cutting checks, $15,000 checks to the illegal aliens themselves.
But what Joe Biden wants to do to try to stem this tide of illegal immigration is he wants to send a bunch of money to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
This, according to Roberta Jacobson, who is the White House's southern border coordinator, she told this to Reuters.
She didn't say exactly who would get the cash.
She didn't say exactly how much money, but that's the plan.
Do you see how backwards this is?
Two totally separate visions for dealing with this problem and for America.
You had Donald Trump Whose, whose program was, we're going to cut off your money if you don't stop sending people, right?
It was, it was about threats.
It was about reworking trade deals.
It was, we're going to build the wall and Mexico is going to pay for it.
And then is Mexico going to write a check?
No, not exactly.
But they are going to negotiate things on trade, on tariffs, right?
So you've got the threat.
You've got build the wall.
You've got do not come here.
You've got, we're going to make it really hard if you do come here.
We're going to send you right back.
Get tough is the Trump administration plan.
And you've got Joe Biden who says, come to the border.
Surge.
Come into our country.
And then it's politically disadvantageous to him.
So he says, okay, well, I still, yeah, come, come, but maybe not yet.
Come in a week or two.
And we're going to send more taxpayer money.
We're already straining our resources, but we're going to send more money to these countries.
Please maybe keep your people here.
What?
What do you think is going to happen?
So when Trump did it, the numbers went down.
Good.
When Biden is doing it, the numbers will not go down.
The numbers will not go down, one, because the base of the Democratic Party doesn't want them to.
But two, no one has an incentive for them to go down.
The foreign nationals are going to pour over the border because they've been told to by Joe Biden, for one.
And two, they know that there's going to be a mass amnesty if Democrats can grab enough influence.
So they want to get here before the amnesty comes through.
But what about these countries?
Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras?
Do you think that this government, which is now going to be making a ton of money because of the crisis from the United States, do you think that they're going to try to minimize the crisis?
No.
They're going to get a lot of money.
And it's bad for the country because they're losing a lot of people who could be You know, young, ambitious people are now leaving those countries and going to the United States.
But it doesn't really matter that much because a lot of these governments, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, are not particularly strong.
And the cartels have a lot of political power there.
There's a ton of corruption.
So the money is going to dissipate.
And then the crisis is going to persist.
And then we're going to spend more money.
Doesn't make sense.
And what are we doing it for?
Because we're told this is how you remedy racism.
That's kind of what it all comes down to, isn't it?
Racism.
Racism this and racism that.
I think most pro-immigration arguments center around that.
Never mind that we take more people by a lot, by a country mile, than anywhere else in the world.
Never mind that immigration into the United States over the last 60 years is the largest movement of people ever in the history of the world, ever recorded.
Still, we can never do enough to make up for our awful racism.
Pete Buttigieg just made this point.
Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend.
His father, actually, one of the most prominent radical theorists in the academy.
He was a founder and a former president of the International Gramsci Society, referring to Antonio Gramsci, this brilliant Marxist philosopher and communist politician.
One of the people really credited with creating political correctness, whom I detail in my book.
Buttigieg is now the transportation secretary.
And Buttigieg says, you know, we need to really rethink the way we do roads.
I'm not just here to fill potholes, baby.
Racism is built into our roads, and we gotta fix it.
We're gonna create billions and billions of dollars in economic opportunity, and we have to make sure that happens equitably.
So let me talk about two parts of that.
The first is where the investments happen.
Where are we going to fix the bridge?
Where are we going to improve the road?
Where are we going to lay the pipe?
And we've got to make sure we're doing that equitably, especially knowing that it was often in black and brown communities that there was either a failure to invest and you didn't have a good road or transit system in a certain neighborhood, or the investment came through in the wrong way, like a highway dividing a black neighborhood in two.
There's been a lot of that.
And the interstate system, the interstate system was built to keep certain groups in and certain groups out.
So it was built on a racist system, correct?
Yeah, often this wasn't just an act of neglect.
Often this was a conscious choice.
There is racism physically built into some of our highways.
Those damn roads.
I hate those racist roads.
White supremacist roads.
Gotta cancel those roads.
We gotta kick those roads off Twitter, you know?
We gotta, those, oh man, it's one thing for, according to Democrats, half the country to be Nazis and white supremacists, racists, you know?
But the roads, too, we gotta lose?
All right.
Gotta remake the whole country, then.
What is Buttigieg saying?
Why is he saying it?
He's saying that the highway system, he's obviously exaggerating immensely, but I want to get, I want to Give a good argument for, for the point he's trying to make.
He's saying that America is totally racist, right?
The whole, the whole country is racist.
It's been racist forever until like right now when we're still racist, but we're in a crisis and the future is not going to be racist, but racism, racism, racism.
And so we got to fix that.
And you know, the roads being a part of America are part of this American racism and they were used, they were built by racists for racists and everything is about race.
And, therefore, we need to do something about it.
Now, I'm going to grant, I'm not going to grant his point that the roads are racist or something, but I am going to grant his broader observation about human nature.
Take race out of it.
Race, just like science is the only way that we can now think about the world, race is the only way that we can think about sin.
So, if you use the correct language here, it starts to make more sense.
He's saying, look, human nature is broken.
People are sinful.
And the people who built the roads are sinful.
And there was sinfulness built into this.
And therefore, it's not perfect.
And therefore, there's some injustice involved, and that's why we need to correct that injustice.
Okay, that's a sort of unobjectionable point, right?
Of course, all human endeavors involve some sin because our free will has been compromised by sin because Adam had to eat that damn apple, right?
Really evade it first, but it's Adam, you know, okay.
I don't want to get into the gender politics of it, okay?
We're sticking with race for now.
The problem here is Buttigieg seems to exclude himself from the sinfulness of man, from this brokenness.
The left broadly, when they say everything was racist in the past, but now we're going to redo everything and make it better.
They seem to, and you know, they're using this term race as a stand in for sin.
They're excluding themselves.
They think they're so perfect.
So, the reason they're going after the roads is because the roads just connect the whole country.
They're right at the heart of the country.
It's how we move.
It's how we live.
So, if you can remake even the roads, you can remake the whole country.
It's about how ambitious this revolution is going to be.
And the reason that their revolutionary, radical plans are destined to fail is because they themselves are just as sinful as the people that they castigate.
And furthermore, because they don't even recognize that they're talking about sin.
They think it's all just about race or something.
Because of this secular religion of progressivism, they can only see skin deep.
They can only see the physical stuff.
They can't really make sense of the metaphysical stuff, which is really what is the motivation here.
This is the creed that is now being taught at American universities.
That America is racist and rotten to the core.
University of Oklahoma now is mandating not just diversity and inclusion and equity training.
By the way, someone pointed out to me, diversity, inclusion, and equity, the letters spell die.
Maybe that tells you something about the country.
I don't know.
Maybe it's just a coincidence.
They are mandating not just this diversity, inclusion, and equity training.
they're also mandating that students agree with their preferred answers.
So you do the training, you take a test.
What do you think about this?
What's your opinion about that?
It's not just that they require you to take the test.
You now have to agree with their positions.
And certain first amendment activists, right?
Putative First Amendment activists.
You might call them free speech absolutists, which is a group.
It's a sort of...
I like their impulses, but I think they've really gone wrong, and I think they've actually kind of screwed up the battle over political correctness.
It's the thesis of my book, Speechless.
They're really upset about this.
They say, I think that's ridiculous.
And I know some really excitable conservatives, more libertarians, but some excitable conservatives over recent years have bought into this idea, but it's just preposterous.
Of course, schools and universities can mandate a viewpoint.
Education is necessarily coercive.
That's what you do.
They're going to mandate the viewpoint that two plus two equals four, right?
Yeah.
A good school would mandate the viewpoint that America was founded on Christian principles first in 1620 with the Mayflower and later in 1776.
Right?
That's history.
Schools would mandate that Shakespeare wrote a play about the Prince of Denmark, not the Prince of Tibet.
Right?
That's just what the book is about.
And if the book is about one thing, it's not about some other thing.
But universities, education has a mission.
It's oriented towards something.
William F. Buckley Jr., the most mainstream conservative that ever there was in the 20th century, in God and Man at Yale, his book about what's gone wrong at the universities, explicitly rejected the argument that many conservatives now are mistakenly making.
Namely, that schools shouldn't have any points of view.
And schools shouldn't coerce any beliefs that we can have academic freedom.
The subtitle of the book is The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.
He calls academic freedom a hoax, and it is a hoax.
And I think as, I understand that some conservatives are making this argument that schools shouldn't have any viewpoints or require any viewpoints because they think that that's the best way to protect against the woke, insane leftist viewpoints that the schools are pushing now, but it's not because the argument itself is incoherent.
And honest conservatives admitted this until about five minutes ago.
So it's not going to work in the long run.
The longer we've made that argument, the more ground we've lost.
We have to make the more difficult argument.
The more courageous argument, but the much more coherent one.
That yes, of course educators are going to have a point of view.
And of course they're going to teach you things.
Not just how to think, but specifically what to think.
Because the only way to figure out how to think is to understand what to think.
The only way you can start to think about mathematics is to understand that 1 plus 1 equals 2.
And 2 plus 2 equals 4.
And you learn a bunch of rudimentary things and only then can you start thinking about higher calculus or analysis or whatever.
You have to learn that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066.
You have to learn that the American Revolution kicks off in 1775, 1776 before you can start thinking about the broader themes of history.
We need to acknowledge that and say, yes, obviously educators can teach us things.
They just shouldn't be teaching us this rotten, woke nonsense that is anti-historical, that is deeply un-American, and that makes everyone ignorant.
That's the point.
I know it requires courage.
It requires a spine to make that argument, but we got to do it.
Sorry.
Speaking of good mandates, I've got to get to this.
This is a great new law.
It's in Tennessee, my wonderful state of Tennessee.
All my exes are in Texas, so I hang my hat in Tennessee.
A bill is advancing through the Tennessee state legislature that would require abortion facilities to bury or cremate the remains of aborted fetuses.
This is an example of a good government mandate.
You know, right now, Tennessee code requires that pets and animals be disposed of by burial or cremation, but little human babies who are killed in the womb are not.
You can just throw them out.
Or, I guess, Planned Parenthood can sell their body parts like they've been caught on camera doing.
So little puppies get better treatment than human babies.
Even if you don't buy into the argument, even if you don't understand, rather, that a baby is a baby, that human life exists and grows and matures, and I'm an adult now, but I used to be a toddler, and I used to be a baby, and I used to be a fetus.
It's all the same thing.
Surely you would admit that whatever you want to call the little baby in the womb, he's got to be worth as much as a puppy, right, or a cat.
Don't you think?
And if so, don't you think they should be entitled to the same sort of dignity?
Now, in the really shallow, ossified conservative movement of the last couple of decades, we've been told any government mandate, any regulation is bad.
It makes us less free.
This kind of government mandate makes us more free.
Certain government mandates, such as requiring abortionists to premate or bury aborted babies, certain mandates like that make us more free.
How so?
Because it acknowledges humanity.
A better government mandate would be you can't have abortions.
That would make us much freer.
It would certainly make the babies freer, the babies who are being killed for abortion.
But it's a little tricky to see this with the topic of abortion.
So I'll give you a clearer example about how certain mandates can make people more free and how this mistaken conception of liberty has really messed up the conservative movement.
Heroin is a very, very addictive drug.
People who get hooked on heroin will do anything they can to get more heroin.
If you make heroin illegal, some people will still use heroin, but fewer people will.
I know that there is a kind of fantasy among some anarchist types, or you might say libertarian types.
I don't even want to use that word, though.
I think it's offensive to real libertarians.
That say, well, if you make heroin legal, then no one will use heroin.
That's just not true.
That's not how it works in practice.
It's never how it's worked in practice.
If you make heroin illegal, fewer people will use it.
If fewer people are using heroin, the country will be freer.
Okay?
According to the modern liberal ridiculous conception of liberty, being able to shoot up heroin is the height of freedom.
The heroin addict, he's the freest man in the world, but we all know that's a lie.
We know that the heroin addict is a slave.
He's a slave to his basest desires and appetites and passions.
He hasn't cultivated his will.
He hasn't cultivated his intellect.
He cannot use his higher faculties.
They are dead and atrophied, and he is basically an animal pursuing his lusts and his appetites.
Ironically, if you make heroin legal, and you say anyone can use heroin if you want to, you are making people less free.
Now, we all can see this, I think, when it comes to something like heroin.
But this is true of other matters as well.
A good example of this would be one of the touchstone issues in the culture war, internet pornography.
From the very beginning of our country, before the beginning of our country, and for hundreds of years after the beginning of our country, Our statesmen understood that there is no free speech protection for obscenity.
They understood that obscenity is licentiousness.
And licentiousness is not the same thing as liberty.
It's actually the opposite of liberty.
So they either outright banned or heavily regulated obscene materials.
You have to show an ID if you want to go buy a Playboy at the magazine stand, if those even still exist.
If either Playboy or magazine stand still exist.
With the advent of the internet, porn became ubiquitous.
During the Clinton administration, there was a direct attempt to try to regulate this stuff.
It was totally bipartisan.
There was the Communications Decency Act, which is actually where we get the battle over Section 230 in big tech that comes from a law that was in part designed to clean up obscenity on the internet.
And there was another law that came out around this time called COPA, the Child Online Protection Act.
I detail all of this in my upcoming book speechless, by the way.
Available now for pre-order.
That law was held up in the process and then eventually over the last 20 years we've gotten so shallow in our thinking in this country that it lost political support and it didn't really go anywhere.
You'll notice that a lot of the conservatives clamoring to get rid of porn, online porn, are young men.
The people who write into my show or I see at events who are really the hottest on this topic are Zoomers, are teenage boys and guys in their early 20s.
Well, that's weird.
Shouldn't those be the guys?
Those guys are probably the ones most likely to look at porn.
Right.
That's the point.
It's so funny that in our culture, we always hear that young men need to talk about their feelings.
These angry young white men especially, they need to talk about their feelings.
Well, okay, now they are talking about their feelings.
They're saying, get rid of this porn because it's screwing up their lives.
And what does the culture tell?
Oh, you're a bunch of incels.
You're a bunch of losers in your basement or something.
Maybe they are.
Maybe that's the problem.
Maybe they're recognizing that like heroin, there is other sort of material like porn that enslaves you to other base desires.
And this is really bad.
And this does not expand your liberty like some shallow people on the right have said, you know, over the last 20 years.
But it actually constricts your liberty.
Not good stuff.
Before we go, I have to Actually, this is a great point to mention this on, this difference between liberty and licentiousness, this difference between duty and entitlement.
Prince Philip, got to pour one out for Prince Philip.
I wish he could have lived another 99 years.
I'm not going to actually pour out my leftist tears here, but what an admirable guy he was.
Britain's Prince Philip, the husband to Queen Elizabeth.
He died.
He was 99 years old.
He lived a good life.
But I think the reason that so many people are crestfallen that this guy died is not because, you know, gosh, he was cut down in his prime flipping his vet or something.
No, he had a good run.
We all die eventually, despite the neurotic hysteria of people wearing 17 masks, even though they're 30 years old and perfectly healthy.
Prince Philip epitomized an age and an attitude that is gone.
He's sort of the anti-Meghan Markle.
They're polar opposites in the royal family.
He is the representative of what has been called the greatest generation.
And she is a representative, sadly, of millennials, I'm sorry to admit.
This was a guy who endured a lot of hardship.
He was born in Corfu.
His family was deposed.
They had to escape under threat of death.
Much of his family was killed in Russia.
His mother was a schizophrenic.
He endured terrible, terrible hardship.
He was schooled at basically a Spartan academy where he had to take cold showers and run around barefoot.
He comes into Britain.
And as a man without a state, he didn't have a state.
He was a stateless person.
He comes in, becomes an adopted Brit.
He didn't even have a last name because he was part of a royal family.
He marries Queen Elizabeth and his entire life is about duty and service.
Because that is a good thing to do and that is what is expected of people and that is dignified and that actually speaks to an exalted freedom.
He did not indulge his own appetites.
Very, very few stories, if any, of Prince Philip just indulging himself in his own base desires.
It was all about service and what ought to be done.
And he did it very admirably.
And I think a lot of people fear that that generation is passing away.
Elizabeth still demonstrates that.
Will we be able to demonstrate that afterward?
Or are we all going to be a bunch of hysterical little ninnies running around, fearing death, fearing everything, fearing our own shadow, crying about what we're entitled to, crying about all the ways that we've been slighted?
Or are we going to stand up?
Stop indulging that lowest aspect of our character and walk with a bit of dignity and true freedom.
Hope we can.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
See you tomorrow.
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Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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