All Episodes
Previous Next
April 27, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:30
Ep. 751 - Consequence Culture

BLM goes all in on the Ma'Khia Bryant shooting, the Oscars collapse, and Newsom officially gets recalled. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Is cancel culture real?
The left says absolutely not, you crazy conservatives.
The culture that we're living in right now is a consequence culture of accountability, where people are being held responsible for their actions.
And that's a very good thing.
That's a very conservative thing.
LeVar Burton, the host of Reading Rainbow, among other TV shows, he's sick and tired of hearing all this talk about cancel culture.
In terms of cancel culture, I think it's misnamed.
That's a misnomer.
I think we have a consequence culture and that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they haven't been.
I think that there are good signs that are happening in the culture right now.
And I think it has everything to do with a new awareness on people who were simply unaware of the real nature of life in this country for people who have been othered since this nation began.
So LeVar Burton is half right.
He's not even half right.
He's a quarter right.
Some people are being held to consequence in this country.
But a lot of times they're not being held to consequence for things they ought to be held to consequence for.
And if we've learned nothing for the past year and a half, it's that a whole lot of people who go out and pillage and burn and loot and steal and even murder are not being held to consequence at all.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Jay Hartman, who says, The compelled speech pronouns thing reminds me of the mask persuasion.
It's not for you.
It's for them.
Don't be selfish.
Just repeat lies with us and engage in superstitious nonsense because it's polite.
This is true.
It's all about this emotional blackmail to say, no, it's about them.
Don't be mean.
Don't be selfish.
Just put the donut on your head and jump up and down.
Hey, just come on.
Just humiliate yourself and say that up is down and black is white and east is west because that's so polite because lies are so polite.
Lies are not polite.
The truth is polite.
The truth will set you free.
Lies, very, very disrespectful and cruel.
How are you going to find out the truth?
Well, one great way, check out The Great Courses Plus.
With a library of over 13,000 audio and video lectures, there are so many topics to explore on The Great Courses Plus.
And with The Great Courses Plus app, you can watch from your phone or tablet or even stream them to your TV.
And you can start on one and go to the other one because people are very busy.
Maybe you're in your car for a little bit, then you go home, then you're sitting up with the baby.
I'm just describing my afternoons now.
You can really make this a very productive time for you.
I would highly recommend the brand new course, The Great Revolutions of Modern History.
I gravitate a lot toward the history courses on The Great Courses Plus, but there's also a ton of very practical stuff in all sorts of fields.
I would highly recommend you start making really, really good use of your time.
What are you waiting for?
Sign up for The Great Courses Plus today, right now.
You can sign up for the quarterly plan to get an extra month for free.
Just visit my special URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Knowles.
Do not miss out on this.
Sign up and redeem your free month right now at thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Knowles.
LeVar Burton's take here is not getting enough traction, but it's what the left has been saying for a long time, and I gotta tell you, you know that I have a very different view on cancel culture than a number of other conservatives.
A lot of other conservatives say that cancel culture is bad because it's censorship, and we're free speech absolutists, and you should be able to say whatever you want without any consequence whatsoever, and I don't think that's true.
I think that when the left says that canceling is about consequences, that's a very good thing.
When the left says that in the 1950s conservatives canceled communists, I think that's a very good thing.
I am all for canceling certain people who are trying to upend our culture.
Sign me up.
Where can I do that?
The problem with this current culture...
It's not that communists are being canceled.
It's that anti-communists are being canceled.
It's not that some people are being shut up or some people are being ostracized for abhorrent views.
It's that people are being ostracized for holding perfectly ordinary views.
They're being ostracized for waving the American flag.
The problem here is the substance.
This is the central issue that conservatives get wrong, which, coincidentally, I talk about at great length in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for pre-order.
People who are doing very bad things are not being held to consequence at all.
Case in point, Black Lives Matter just came out and effectively endorsed Makia Bryant's stabbing her, this young woman that she was living with.
Which was the cause of her being shot by that cop.
BLM just tweeted out, quote, Makia Bryant, we say her name, another black life stolen, but we refuse to define or remember Makia by her final moments.
We uplift, celebrate, and honor this black child for what she loved, doing her hair, making TikToks, having fun, just being a teen.
Rest in power, queen.
Makia Bryan, whatever else you want to say, it's a sad thing when people go down a bad path.
Even if they get their comeuppance, it's a sad thing to watch it happen.
Makia Bryan's life was not stolen.
Her life was forfeited.
She forfeited her life when she went in and got that knife and tried to plunge it into that other girl.
That was when that cop did the right thing by killing her.
By shooting her to neutralize the target and in so doing, killing her.
She was doing what she loved.
If she had not loved stabbing people, if she had not loved committing this violence, she would be alive today.
Is it a sad thing that she went down that bad path?
Of course that's a sad thing.
Yep.
Fallen world.
We refuse to define or remember Makia by her final moments.
You see this.
What they're really saying is, we refuse to define Makia Bryan by the act that got her killed, namely trying to stab this girl.
We're going to reframe what happened.
If Makia Bryant was killed because she stabbed a girl, that's totally just.
If Makia Bryant was killed because she liked making TikTok videos and having fun, well, that's not just at all.
They are reframing the situation here, just like the 1619 Project reframes American history.
It's the same argument as the 1619 Project.
The author of which gleefully took credit for the 2020 riots all around the country.
The 1619 Project says, yeah, we're not going to look at American history through the lens of all these wonderful, great accomplishments from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and all the great stuff America's done in the world and all the brilliant reasoning and the wonderful acts that brought America into existence.
We're only going to focus on the bad stuff.
And so we're going to hold to consequence some of the greatest men who have ever walked the earth, and we're going to let vicious people get off the hook.
That's what all of this talk about, systemic racism, all this is about.
Is reframing the narrative so that some of the greatest people on earth, George Washington, right, are held to account for all the worst things they've ever done.
And people, other sorts of people who are in favored groups, never get held to consequence at all for the bad things that they've done.
Lindsey Graham was asked about this on Chris Wallace's morning show.
Is there systemic racism in the United States?
His answer, an excellent answer, of course not.
Senator, is there systemic racism in this country in policing and in other institutions?
No, not in my opinion.
We just elected a two-term African American president.
The vice president is of African American Indian descent.
So our systems are not racist.
America is not a racist country.
Within every society, you have bad actors.
The Chauvin trial was a just...
Result.
What's happening in Ohio, where the police officer had to use deadly force to prevent a young girl from being stabbed to death, is a different situation in my view.
So this attack on police and policing.
Reform the police, yes.
Call them all racists, no.
You know, America is a work in progress, but best place on the planet.
And Joe Biden spends a lot of time running the place down.
I wish you'd stop it.
Much of the talk about systemic racism is designed explicitly so that people are not held to consequence for their actions.
Because according to the systemic racism argument, only straight white men who know that they're men have any agency whatsoever.
So they have to be held to account.
The cops, good example.
Somehow, even if they're a black cop or a Hispanic cop, somehow it's still part of the white supremacy system.
Cops Held to account all the time.
They have to wear body cameras.
Even when they engage in a just killing, like this officer in the Makia Bryant case, he's going to have his life ruined.
He's going to have LeBron James say, you're next.
He's going to be doxxed.
He's going to face all sorts of consequences.
But what about everyone else?
What about people who are committing crimes?
Well, they're only committing crimes because of systemic racism.
The systemic racism made me do it.
What about people who are not taking care of their families and their communities?
The systemic racism made me do it.
Johnny, where's your homework?
The systemic racism ain't my homework.
That's where it is.
It's not designed for accountability, to use the fashionable word.
It's designed to allow people to evade consequences.
Now, if you have a gripe, if you can even contrive some sort of gripe or some complaint, you can get away with basically anything, which is why people always want to keep grievance at the forefront of one's mind.
The Oscars were the other night.
You didn't watch?
I didn't either.
Nobody did.
There was an award given out for the best live-action short film.
Not exactly the most prestigious category here, but the winner.
If you were to win, An Oscar for anything, including Best Live Action Short Film.
And these are people, the ones who are working in the short films, usually are not the superstars here, right?
These are people who have been working in obscurity in Hollywood for a long time.
They finally, their work of art that they've created gets the industry's highest honor.
What would you, you'd probably go up there and say, gosh, thank you, I'm so honored.
Wow, what a privilege it is to be here.
You'd either do that or, or you would go whine about police killings or whatever.
Today...
The police will kill three people.
And tomorrow, the police will kill three people.
And the day after that, the police will kill three people.
Because, on average, the police in America every day kill three people.
Which amounts to about a thousand people a year.
And those people happen to disproportionately black people.
And, you know, James Baldwin once said, the most despicable thing a person can be is indifferent to other people's pain.
And so I just ask that you please not be indifferent.
Please, don't be indifferent to our pain.
The most despicable thing that a person can be is indifferent to other people's pain.
Like this guy.
Like this guy, who's spouting off and saying every day the police kill three people.
Who are the police killing?
They're killing largely black people.
Not most people.
Largely black people.
Okay.
What sort of black people?
He doesn't say that.
The vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of these police involved killings are justified.
The cops are killing bad guys who are committing crimes.
you Thank you.
But you're being insensible to the suffering of others.
What about the suffering of the victims of those crimes?
What about them?
This guy is doing exactly what he's accusing others of doing when he is defending criminals.
Here, I'll give you another slogan that you can lump in with your James Baldwin slogan.
This one from Adam Smith.
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
We just saw a clear example of this in San Francisco.
A seven-month-old baby is dead in San Francisco because the district attorney refused to do his job.
Because the narrative that now exists is that any use of police force is evil and wrong.
That going after criminals is somehow unjust.
Because the criminals, they didn't choose to become criminals.
It's the systemic...
Racist, injustice, patriarchy, white supremacy, toxic.
It's everybody's fault but their own.
You know, now, thank goodness, we're living in a consequence culture, as LeVar Burton says.
And in this consequence culture, all the criminals get to go free.
Even the Republicans are endorsing this kind of nonsense.
It was the most misguided action of the Trump campaign, or of the Trump administration, rather.
I thought Trump did such great stuff.
Huge fan of the president.
Former president now, I guess I have to say.
But he focused so much time and energy on what?
On springing people out of the clink.
Why?
Why would we do that?
When did Republicans become the party of springing criminals out of the clink?
You know what happens when you spring criminals from the clink?
More people suffer.
Chesa Budin, I don't know how to pronounce this guy's name.
He is a radical district attorney in San Francisco, elected not that long ago.
Jaysa Budin, with his lax policies, allowed a guy with a long rap sheet to get out of the clink.
He was already booked on domestic violence, but hey, you know, it's just not fair because disproportionately men of certain communities are targeted by The argument is that black men are targeted.
In fact, criminals are being targeted by the criminal justice system.
If there's some overlap there, that's a coincidence, I guess.
That's not the primary motivator.
So, okay, you let the guy out on all these cockamamie racial theories.
What happens?
Kills a seven-month-old kid.
Where is the consequence for that guy?
Okay, now he'll go back to jail, I hope, I guess.
Where's the accountability?
Where's the justice?
Where are the crocodile tears from the Oscars stage?
What about this compassionate, wonderful district attorney for prison reform?
We do need prison reform in this country.
We need to put more criminals in prison for longer, and they need to face stiffer consequences.
I don't think that anybody can look around at the last year and a half as the country is going up, cities being torched every other night, and say, you know the problem in this country?
We don't have enough criminals on the streets.
We need to let criminals out of prison.
I don't think so.
I don't think that's the problem.
The Oscars, however, were not all bad.
And not everyone made these stupid speeches like this short film guy.
Tyler Perry, very, very successful filmmaker, came out and made an important point, I felt, which is you shouldn't judge a book by its cover and we shouldn't vilify people on the basis of their race or even if they're cops.
My mother taught me to refuse hate.
She taught me to refuse blanket judgment.
And in this time, and with all of the internet and social media and algorithms and everything that wants us to think a certain way, the 24-hour news cycle, it is my hope that all of us would teach our kids, and not only to remember, just refuse hate.
Don't hate anybody.
I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican or because they are black or white.
Or LBGTQ. I refuse to hate someone because they are a police officer.
I refuse to hate someone because they are Asian.
I would hope that we would refuse hate.
And I want to take this Gene Herschel Humanitarian Award and dedicate it to anyone Who wants to stand in the middle, no matter what's around the wall, stand in the middle, because that's where healing happens.
That's where conversation happens.
That's where change happens.
It happens in the middle.
So anyone who wants to meet me in the middle, to refuse hate, to refuse blanket judgment, and to help lift someone's feet off the ground, this one is for you too.
Basically a good speech.
There are three kinds of Oscar speeches.
One is...
The typical leftist, you whine about everything.
The second type of Oscar speech is the one where you say nice political things and you take the temperature down a little bit.
Then the third kind of Oscar speech is where you thank the Academy for recognizing your artistic work.
And really, all the Oscar speeches should just be that third one.
But I guess that's out the window now.
I guess people don't really do that very much anymore.
So if you're going to have to deal with a political speech anyway, I guess we want one that says what Tyler Perry said.
Tyler Perry, notice how clever this is.
I don't think Tyler Perry is any particular conservative.
He doesn't present himself that way.
But he goes out there, he says, refuse hate.
It's kind of this slogan-y, bumper-stickery line.
Okay, refuse hate.
Refuse hate against Mexicans.
Okay, yeah, I know, everyone's really harsh on the Mexicans, right?
Refuse hate against black people.
Yeah, we're living in a white supremacist country, right?
Of course, everyone hates black people, right?
Refuse hate against white people.
Well, that's interesting because we live in a culture right now where the only socially acceptable form of racism is against white people.
Tyler Perry calling that out.
Refuse hate against police officers.
Whoa, that's interesting.
We are basically told that if you don't come out and hate cops, that you're somehow a white supremacist.
So that's a very interesting line.
Refuse hate against Asian people.
We have...
Enshrined in our law, discrimination against Asians and whites in the form of affirmative action.
That's interesting.
He's slipping these very important things in here.
It's actually a pretty productive speech, I think.
But the best speech of the night.
You know, this is a really tailored-down Oscar, because nobody was watching.
We'll get to that in a second.
This is a really tailored-down film here.
But in this small room, a musician named Jean-Baptiste, never heard of him, he won an award for Pixar's Soul.
And this guy got up there, and he gave the best Oscar speech I have heard in years.
Man, you know what's deep is that...
God gave us 12 notes.
It's the same 12 notes Duke Ellington had, Bach had.
It's the same 12, Nina Simone and all the nominees.
I just want to first point out that every gift is special.
Every contribution with music that comes from the divine into the instruments, into the film, Into the minds and hearts and souls of every person who hears it.
The stories that happen when you listen to it and watch it and the stories you share.
The moments you create, the memories you make.
Man, it's just so incredibly special.
And I just want to first recognize the nominees and say that I'm incredibly, I'm speaking for all of us, we are incredibly humbled and grateful to the academy for this recognition.
And I'm just thankful to God for those 12 notes, man.
That's so dope.
I love that line.
I'm just so grateful to God for those 12 notes.
Man, that's so dope.
It is.
It is.
That's the right answer.
And it's not false modesty, by the way.
I was talking about this with Tim Poole and the whole show the other night.
False modesty is not the same as humility.
False modesty is another form of pride.
So when people refuse to take a compliment, that's very often false modesty.
Or, you know, when they make a big, big deal about getting a compliment, that's a form of false modesty.
True humility, though, is the sincere and totally justified acknowledgement that you are not totally responsible for your accomplishments.
You're not because you're not responsible for your own life.
You did not choose to be born into this world.
You did not create your own life.
Your life is a gift from God.
Your inborn talents are a gift from God.
Even the things you work at, even the ways you cultivate those talents and nurture them and express them are important.
It's derived from God.
Your work ethic, your energy, the food of this world, the coffee that you drink to give you energy, all of that is a gift.
And you work in accordance with that grace, or you don't, you can reject it too.
But ultimately, you've got to just say, well, thank God for all this stuff, right?
If you're being really humble and really honest with yourself, that's what you would do.
That would be a great consequence culture, to use LeVar Burton's phrase.
If we were to acknowledge that all these great things in life that we want to take credit for, they're not really ours.
All these bad things in life that we do, they are our fault when we reject the free gifts that we have been given because of this fallen world that we're living in and because of our compromised and corrupted free will.
That would be a real consequence culture.
But what we're seeing right now is the opposite of that.
What we're seeing right now is we're pretending that we deserve all the wonderful things in life.
And the minute that something doesn't go our way, we complain and we say this is a grievance and we are victims and things are being taken away from us because of the patriarchy or the white supremacy or the whatever.
And then we refuse to take responsibility.
We refuse to face consequences for the evil things that we do.
A world in which you can go out and stab somebody, and then if you are in any way held to account for that, you complain and say that's unjust.
I'm all for a consequence culture.
What we're living in right now is the total opposite of that.
Ben is going to be talking about some political consequences right now in the redistricting and in the addition of, of congressional seats.
That's actually going better for Republicans than for Democrats.
Go check that out.
Also join us tomorrow for a special episode of Backstage where we will be watching Joe Biden's first congressional speech live.
Apparently this is invite only.
We will be giving our expert genius analysis in real time.
And as Joe Biden daughters along there, we're going to be drinking a lot of whiskey.
So the analysis is going to get more and more expert throughout the night.
Make sure to go check that out.
Streams tomorrow at 8.30 Eastern, 7.30 Central on dailywire.com and on our YouTube channel, The Daily Wire Channel.
Also, another excellent high-energy episode of Candace coming at you this Friday.
Candace is going to be talking to Dave Rubin.
They're going to be talking about all sorts of stuff, especially what's going on in California, because Gavin Newsom is officially being recalled, and he's running against Caitlyn Jenner, because we are living in a very strange world.
Candace streams on Friday, 9 p.m.
Eastern, 8 p.m.
Central, only at Daily Wire.
Get 25% off with a new membership and code CANDACE at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
How do we come back from the political brink?
You've got BLM torching the country and defending kids, stabbing other kids just to own the cops, calls for abolishing the police entirely, and now the Republican standard bearer, at least in California, is a man who thinks that he's a woman.
We have really...
Something has gone wrong in our political world.
Do you know who has the answer?
One of the few politicians with crossover appeal in this country, Tulsi Gabbard, who says, hey guys, chill out, hang loose, and just embrace the spirit of aloha.
My dear friends, my fellow Americans, please, please let us stop the racialization of everyone and everything.
It's racialism.
We are all children of God and are therefore family in the truest sense, no matter our race or ethnicity.
This is Aloha and this is what our country and the world need.
The mainstream propaganda media and politicians, they want us to constantly focus on our skin color and the skin color of others because it helps them politically or financially.
Aloha means respect and love for others.
It's what enables us to see beyond our skin color and see the soul, the person within.
So let's do our best to cultivate this Aloha in our hearts and see and treat others through this prism of love, not through the prism of race and ethnicity.
Please let us not allow ourselves to be led down this dark and divisive path of racialism, Love this.
Absolutely brilliant.
What most people are going to hear is this sort of platitudinous thing about, you know, it's just about Aloha.
Just chill out and pop a coconut, you know, and have a few drinks.
It's cool, man.
We're all people.
Let's just sing Kumbaya.
That's not what she's saying.
She got a little bit of that because she's a politician.
But what she's saying is more specific and more insightful.
She says, a lot of people in this country who are in very powerful positions are Have a financial and political stake in keeping us divided, especially on this fault line of race.
She's saying that the establishment, which doesn't like her any more than they like Donald Trump, actually.
They're in different political parties, but the liberal establishment, the blob, the corporations, the multinationals, the administrative state, the sort of permanent government, the...
Big tech sector, all of these, the things that all work in tandem, don't like Tulsi Gabbard because she contradicts their narrative.
And she's saying those guys have a real incentive to keep you all divided up so they can maintain their grip on power.
It is just like what Amazon does, for instance, when various local Amazon worker groups want to unionize.
You've seen some memos come out about this.
Amazon will always go in and find ways to get them to hate each other.
And it's not just Amazon.
Big companies have been doing this for a long time.
They'll go in and figure out the fault lines in the company among the workers so that the workers don't unionize.
And then, once they get all the workers to hate each other, the big corporation gets to maintain power.
The left has recognized this for a long time, and the right, for a long time, especially when the right was shilling for big corporations, refused to acknowledge it.
But this is true.
This is a very basic political strategy, and it's obviously what's happening right now.
And it does account, I think, for a lot of the focus on these physical characteristics.
Notice what she says here.
She says, we're all children of God.
We're told to think in a racial way, primarily, but we're all children of God.
What she's saying here as a matter of philosophy is we're told to think about the physical, but actually we have something that binds us at a metaphysical level.
This is, by the way, why Christians, regardless of their views on evolution or the origins of mankind, the church has always insisted upon the descent of the human race from two parents.
Regardless of how that all came to be, human beings must descend from these two parents.
It's called monogenism because that accounts for our human dignity and our human solidarity.
Now, we are made in the image of God.
We all have this common link all the way back.
Tulsi Gabbard pointing that out.
Really, really good stuff.
Beneath all of the lines you've heard about how we should all get along, that key, the propaganda media, that's what you've got to be on your guard against.
People don't like it.
People don't like the messages that we're being told by the establishment media right now.
However, they continue to do it.
The numbers are in from the Oscars.
This was the lowest rated Oscars ever.
Not the lowest rated Oscars in the last five or ten years.
Ever.
The total viewers dropped 58% year over year.
So just from last year.
But last year was also a record low.
So this is an absolute cratering, an absolute collapse.
Last year you had 23.6 million people tune into the Oscars.
This year 9.85 million.
Fewer than $10 million for the first time ever.
And in the key demographic, 18 to 49, these are the people who are going out and buying stuff, a decline of 64%.
15 years ago, Michael Moore got up and gave a political speech at the Oscars bashing George Bush, and he got booed.
He was actually booed, even by the Hollywood liberals, because that sort of thing was frowned upon.
The Oscars have had political moments for a long time, but they were few and far between.
This really began in the 70s, when Marlon Brando did not show up to accept his Oscar, and he sent a woman who was part Indian to give a speech protesting the treatment of Indians in Hollywood.
Sitchin Littlefeather.
Take a listen.
My name is Sachin Littlefeather.
I'm Apache, and I am president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee.
I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening, and he has asked me to tell you in a very long speech, which I cannot share with you presently because of time, but I will be glad to share with the press afterwards, that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award.
And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry excuse me and on television in movie reruns and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.
I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening and that we will, in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity.
Thank you on behalf of Marlon Brando.
So you can hear in the background when she goes out and gives this somber speech about this relatively minor issue in Hollywood.
It wasn't even, you know, he's not going to take this because he's protesting the Vietnam War.
Or he's not, because he's protesting whatever, some other major.
He's protesting the depiction of Indians in Hollywood movies?
In the 70s?
What?
And you hear people boo, and some people applaud, and some people boo, and that seems about right.
It's gotten so much worse, though.
Now, nobody would boo that speech.
Now, you'd have to say, wow, oh, that's so beautiful.
Every speech has to be Sachin Littlefeather now.
Nobody likes it.
The audience is totally going away.
Why does the left keep this up?
Because they have the power.
We, I think, like to delude ourselves in this country and say, look, Either in the political realm you say, look, this is a democracy, okay?
The people get what they want.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard, as H.L. Mencken said.
Or this is a capitalist country, okay?
The almighty dollar is what decides what's going on.
If Hollywood's pushing a bunch of crazy propaganda, it's because they're going to make an extra buck out of it.
No.
Both of those are so reductive.
The political view actually does not encompass the way that our system of government works in reality.
And the economic view reduces man to a purely economic animal, which is not what he is.
That's not what we are.
We are much more than that.
What's actually going on here...
Is something that I document in my book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
Available now, by the way, for pre-order.
What's actually going on is that radicals, who have very, very unpopular views, were able, over decades and decades, to attain positions of power and influence throughout the culture.
In this case, specifically in the entertainment industry.
And they've been able to slowly change the culture.
Try to get a hold and create a cultural hegemony that the common people are still resisting.
They're still tuning this stuff out.
But because they have the positions of power, they are not directly accountable.
They're not directly responsible.
They are not directly held to consequence for their craziness.
Eventually, if things trend in this direction long enough and there are no viewers left, at a certain point you think the Oscars are probably going to have to call it quits?
But they'll go on for a very long time.
This is not a responsive system right now.
This is a minority of radical ideologues have taken over huge positions of power everywhere and they're going to keep pushing their garbage whether the common people like it or not.
They don't like the common people.
They think the common people are deplorable and irredeemable.
They tell us that to our face when they tell you that you should believe them.
Now, occasionally, some people face some consequences for their incompetence and radicalism, as is happening to Governor Newsom right now, Mr.
Mussolini out there in California.
It is official, this is relatively breaking news, Gavin Newsom will be recalled.
The threshold for the recall on the signature petition was 1,495,709 signatures.
That's the number that they needed to get to.
Now, you might say, Michael, they got way more than 2 million signatures.
So he was obviously going to be recalled.
No, because what happens in politics is then you go in and you take out signatures that you can say, oh, no, that address wasn't right.
That signature doesn't look right.
That person moved.
So you take them all out.
And what Newsom was hoping was that he could disqualify enough signatures that he wouldn't even have to face the recall.
That's long gone.
He's now at 1,626,042 signatures.
It's going to go up and up from there.
So this guy is officially getting recalled.
He might survive it.
The reason he might survive it is that the recall process is set up to favor the incumbent.
What's going to happen is there's going to be one question on the ballot.
Even though he's being recalled, you still have to answer the ballot measure should Governor Newsom lose his job.
And if the majority of people say yes, then they will look at the answers to the next question, which is who should replace him.
There are going to be seven zillion candidates.
So the only way that the Republicans are going to have a chance is if they solidify around a candidate.
Now, as of now, at least in the media, the leading candidate is Caitlyn Jenner.
And we talked yesterday on this show, can a conservative go in for Caitlyn?
On the one hand, his policies will be better than Newsom's.
On the other hand, we'll be mainstreaming transgenderism.
That would be absolute death for any sort of conservative movement.
And you know that misguided conservatives are going to start parroting stupid things like, you know, Democrats, they're the real transphobes.
Oh, we're totally cool with men putting on dresses and pretending to be women.
So how do you do this?
I was speaking to some friends of mine last night.
I said, is there any way for a conservative to get behind Caitlyn?
And they made a somewhat, I'm not sure that I'm totally persuaded by this yet, but they did make a somewhat compelling case that the only way to do it is if you had a group called Conservatives for Bruce.
Conservatives for Bruce that insisted in all cases to refer to him as him and probably just to call him Bruce because the Caitlyn thing is very confusing.
What you would need is a real assurance that Caitlyn Jenner Bruce Jenner was not going to push gender ideology on conservatives and on the people.
And as far as I can tell, the only way to do that, while still letting him prance around in dresses or whatever he wants to do, whatever makes him feel more like how he wants to feel on the inside, is if he drops the female pronouns and, frankly, if he goes back to his old name.
Could a guy vote for, could a conservative vote for Bruce Jenner if Bruce Jenner has this sort of strange sexual desire?
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe.
But could a conservative vote for Caitlyn, who insists on going by she, and who insists on abolishing same-sex bathrooms?
I don't think so.
I think that would be very, very difficult.
So, if you're in that world where Caitlyn Jenner, or Caitlyn, she, is the leading Republican candidate, then probably Newsom is going to survive that, and will not be held to account.
The people who are in power are very clever.
They're very crafty.
Who's the most powerful politician in the country right now?
This should be a simple question.
If you hesitated, you haven't been paying enough attention.
It's not Gavin Newsom.
It's certainly not Joe Biden.
It's not Kamala Harris.
Come on.
It's a very easy answer.
The most powerful politician in the country is Dr.
Fauci.
He's one of the most powerful politicians in the history of this country.
He has no democratic accountability.
Presidents come and go.
He's worked for five of them.
He always stays in his position of power.
He is almost single-handedly crafting national policy right now.
He's been doing that from the Trump administration.
He's doing that now in the Biden administration.
And even Fauci knows, even Fauci knows, that he's got to be sort of clever about this because his power is not totally unlimited.
Dr.
Fauci He's been ruling with an iron fist now for over a year.
But he went on one of the Sunday shows on ABC, and he was asked, okay, come on, we're over a year into this now.
Do people still need to wear the masks all the time?
They even need to wear the masks outdoors?
Fauci said, well, you know, look, maybe we can negotiate here.
You know, I don't want to get ahead of them, George, but I think it's pretty common sense now that outdoor risk is really, really quite low.
Particularly, I mean, if you were a vaccinated person wearing a mask outdoors, I mean, obviously the risk is minuscule.
What I believe you're going to be hearing, what the country is going to be going to be hearing soon, is updated guidelines from the CDC. The CDC is a science-based organization.
They don't want to make any guidelines unless they look at the data and the data backs it up.
But when you look around at the common sense situation, obviously the risk is really very low, particularly if you're vaccinated.
Okay, so now we have, I think this is the 17th mask position from Dr.
Fauci.
Remember, the first position was masks are dumb and stupid and they don't do anything and you shouldn't wear one even at the height of a pandemic.
Maybe it will block a droplet, but it'll be bad because you'll touch your face.
So do not wear the mask, sheep.
Then he changes his position and he says, actually, masks are really good.
They're necessary.
You have to wear the masks.
I only told you that you shouldn't wear the masks because I wanted to save them for the nurses.
Okay, then we got to wear double masks.
Now we don't need to wear masks outside.
Soon, maybe.
What's going on here?
Fauci is not giving a scientific proclamation.
He is a very, very adept and clever politician who is navigating the political waters as best he can and trying to hold on to power.
There is no simple answer here.
When people tell you that the answer in politics is clear, it's so clear what to do.
I'm reminded of a saying of my priest.
Father Ruttler, where he says, Shallows are clear.
Shallow thinking is clear.
Complicated things, deep things, true things are profound.
They're murky.
They're a little trickier.
Someone came in and said, look, advanced calculus is clear.
You say, well, I don't know if it is.
I think it's pretty advanced, actually.
It's sort of complicated.
That same thing here.
If we want to take power back from these people, if we want to hold these people to consequence, we're going to have to be clever and crafty, and we have to ditch the old bumper sticker slogans.
This is much more complicated than, come on, just free speech.
Free speech absolutism.
Just read the Constitution.
Just go back to the 1780s.
That's not a serious answer.
That is not going to wrest power back from these people.
We're going to have to be cleverer than them.
We are seeing some consequences right now in our legal system.
Consequences of the past year and a half, more than that, where the liberal establishment has told us that cops are evil, racist, terrible people, and anytime they do their job and enforce the law, they could have their lives ruined and end up in the clink for life.
Right now, people are quitting the NYPD in droves.
There is a 75% increase Year over year in the number of cops retiring, quitting their jobs.
75% increase year over year, amounting to 15% of the total number of officers on the force.
Some people are saying, good, good, you know, the left wants to abolish the police, fine.
Get the police out of their crappy neighborhoods and see how they like it.
Good, give them what they want.
Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
I don't think that's the right idea.
I don't think we should cede this ground.
I don't think we should allow the left to abolish the police.
I don't think we shouldn't cede any of that at all.
That is the same failed strategy that we have been practicing for years and years and years.
It's that same strategy of, forget about politics, only focus on the culture.
It's that same failed strategy of, hey, look, I don't care what you say or do, just don't make me pay for it.
I'm for freedom in the abstract.
Totally ahistorical understanding of freedom that has no basis in the actual American tradition.
Founding Fathers would find it completely foreign.
No.
We need to get involved.
We need to say, no, you want to abolish the police?
We're going to double the police.
And we're going to send them into your neighborhoods.
And you're going to call us sexist and racist and this, this, this.
I don't care.
We're going to enforce the law.
We're going to enforce our traditional American standards.
Okay?
We're going to enforce the good and the true and the beautiful.
And not the bad and the wicked and the ugly and the unjust and the false.
We're going to actually stand for a substantive message here.
Which brings me to...
That MMA fight between the ladies that happened this weekend.
This was the fight between Rose Namahunas and Zhang Wiley at the UFC. I didn't watch this.
We did cover it on the show a couple weeks ago because there was this great moment before the fight where Rose Namahunas said, look, I'd rather be dead than red.
I stand for the West.
I stand for the tradition of freedom that we have here.
I don't like communist China.
I don't stand for that.
There's a real...
Ideological battle going on and I stand on the side of freedom.
Wow, love that.
That's great.
Totally for them.
But I did not watch the fight.
I had no desire to watch the fight.
I don't intend ever to watch one of these fights.
I guess I'm glad that the freedom girl won.
That's good.
Namahunas beat the other girl.
She was very happy about that.
Good for her.
We should not be watching women beat each other up.
That is just wrong.
That's just disorder.
A healthy society doesn't do that.
Hate to be a wet blanket.
Hate to be a fuddy-duddy here.
But I don't want to watch a woman get her head beaten in.
That's weird.
That's a perverse thing.
People shouldn't be doing that.
But Michael, come on.
You know, they can do it.
They're really strong.
They are really strong.
I bet actually some of them could beat me up, even though men are physically much stronger than women.
These are pretty tough ladies, okay?
I'm not doubting that at all.
But it's still wrong.
And when the right goes in on this stuff and says, oh, come on, whatever they want to do, if they want to do it, that's cool.
Just don't make me do it.
When the right goes in on this, we give up the whole game.
No, women should not be beating each other up in public.
Whether it's in sport or whether it's in the streets or wherever.
That is wrong.
We might as well vote for Caitlin.
We might as well use the pronouns if we're saying that there's no difference between men and women.
No.
We have to stand for something more, guys.
We've got to stand for something more than just do whatever you want.
We are going to live in a consequence culture.
LeVar Burton is absolutely right.
But what are the consequences going to be?
What is the standard going to be against which we are judged?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production coordinator McKenna Waters.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, red and purple states gain congressional seats as blue states lose population, the anti-cop movement continues to gain steam, and we discuss the single worst example of woke mob targeting I've ever seen.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
▲
Export Selection