A major tech company tells its woke employees to shut up, Romney gets booed by the Utah GOP, and Maxine Waters says America gets more racist every day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| It's a familiar story. | |
| We've heard it so many times in recent years. | |
| The employees of a tech company want to get the company very involved in leftist social causes. | |
| It's so important to use the company for good and therefore the company's got to go woke. | |
| It's a not-so-familiar solution when this company, Basecamp, just told all of their woke employees to shut up and then a bunch of the employees quit And the company said, don't let the door hit you on the way out. | |
| We will examine this brilliant, sophisticated solution to the problem of wokeness in corporations by telling the workers to go pound sand. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is the Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Welcome back to the show. | |
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| Basecamp. | |
| Oh, more like Basecamp. | |
| Am I right? | |
| Am I right? | |
| Finally, oh my goodness, how long have we been waiting for a company to just tell their woke employees exactly where they can shove their new leftist ideas? | |
| The employees go to Basecamp, which is just a software company. | |
| They do kind of communication, management, that sort of thing. | |
| They go to the company, they say, we've got to get involved in this cause and that cause and diversity and inclusion and equity and this and that and this and that. | |
| And the CEO sent out a note which said, quote, We make project management, team communication, and email software, as the CEO Jason Fried. | |
| We don't have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. | |
| These are all important topics. | |
| But they are not our topics at work. | |
| Other executives at the company pointing out that when employees are spending all their time chiming in on Black Lives Matter or some social issue on the official communication channels, that is time that they are not spending working, doing their jobs, the things that they are paid to do. | |
| So as a result of this CEO missive, totally common sense stuff, one third of the company's 60 employees left the company, took buyouts and said, get out of here. | |
| And do you know what the executive said? | |
| See ya. | |
| Bye-bye. | |
| Okay. | |
| Of course they said see ya. | |
| Bye-bye. | |
| The employees thought that this would be a big blow to the company. | |
| Guess who comes out ahead here? | |
| You've got the most annoying, useless, unproductive, counterproductive employees. | |
| They're saying, you know, if you won't let us waste more of your time while we get paid, we might leave. | |
| The CEO sitting there says like, what's the catch? | |
| Hold on here. | |
| You're telling me that... | |
| I will not have to deal with you, and I don't have to deal with you? | |
| Wait, hold on. | |
| You're saying, I don't need to do the thing you're demanding now, and I won't have to deal with it in the future, and I'll get a more productive employee? | |
| Where do I sign up? | |
| There's got to be some hidden text here, right? | |
| No. | |
| There were a number of employees who, after they left, said, Basically, the company has told us, well, your opinions don't really matter unless it's directly related to the business. | |
| A lot of people are going to have a tough time living with that. | |
| Yeah, annoying, unproductive, counterproductive people are going to have a hard time with that. | |
| But good employees are going to love that. | |
| They're going to love that. | |
| Because obviously I have definitive political opinions. | |
| You listening to the show probably have some pretty strong political opinions. | |
| But I bet that you would prefer to go into the office every day and not have to worry about those opinions one way or the other. | |
| Not have to worry about pushing this view on tax cuts, this view even on immigration, this view on that. | |
| You probably just want to go do your job and then go home and spend time with your family and spend time in your community and maybe be involved in the politics of your community, but not have to conflate everything so that your whole personal life and your whole professional life and your whole political life they're all the same thing, right? | |
| Now, There is a further step here. | |
| So I love what they did. | |
| I think we should totally support these guys. | |
| But there are three opinions on politics in the workplace. | |
| There's the, we need to support every single leftist cause. | |
| We need to go woke because that's now part of the dominant liberal regime. | |
| That's one. | |
| The second view is, politics shouldn't have anything to do with our work. | |
| And economic choices shouldn't necessarily have to do with all these political views. | |
| I think that's where most of us want to be, and that's the message that Basecamp is trying to put out here. | |
| But then there's the third version, which I think is the real version, which is we need to actively support conservative companies. | |
| Companies that in any way break from woke politics, we as conservatives need to support those companies, and we need to punish companies that don't. | |
| And I know that's going to sound icky to a lot of people because a lot of us say, well, I shouldn't have to make political decisions when I'm buying sneakers or when I'm buying project management software or whatever at base camp. | |
| But you actually do. | |
| Because in politics and in war, your opponent has a say in the rules of the game. | |
| And what the left has told us is that every economic decision that... | |
| You make is going to be political, and they are going to reward the companies that go far to the left and undermine our political order. | |
| So you know what we've got to do if we in any way want to fight back against that? | |
| We need to do the same in the opposite direction. | |
| And we need to actively not use the project management software that goes woke, and we need to actively use Basecamp or any other company that resists the wokeness. | |
| We have to do that. | |
| I know that we don't want to do that. | |
| We want to go back to the halcyon days of, I don't know, four or five decades ago when the companies did not go woke. | |
| But this is the world we're living in now, and we've got to reward companies like Basecamp. | |
| James Carville, legendary Democrat strategist. | |
| He's the guy who looks like an alien. | |
| He is breaking with the Democratic Party on the wokeness issue, and he's saying wokeness is going to be an absolute poisonous ideology for Democrats because it's going to show people how out of touch the Democratic Party is. | |
| It's going to cause the Democratic Party to lose the common sense. | |
| We should make clear, this is a political conversation. | |
| It's not that James Carville, and you correct me if I'm wrong, is questioning any one aspect of what gets lumped into wokeness. | |
| But I think you're saying, as a political strategy, this dog doesn't hunt. | |
| Well, not it doesn't hunt on several levels. | |
| First of all, it sounds like, I call it the politics of the faculty lounge. | |
| And in my view, if you want to, in politics, you should speak the language of the people. | |
| You should speak clear, direct English and address people as they address each other, not like the Humanities Department at Amherst wants you to address everybody. | |
| So there is an irony here that James Carville is saying people should speak very clear English. | |
| James Carville has one of the thickest Louisiana accents that anybody does in public life. | |
| But his point is absolutely right. | |
| And his point is exactly the point of... | |
| Antonio Gramsci, a radical theorist that we mention quite a lot on this show because he in many ways is the godfather of this woke, politically correct ideology that we're now seeing flourish today. | |
| But he was writing and calling for these things 100 years ago. | |
| The common sense. | |
| I'm sorry, I just missed a plug. | |
| I talk about this a lot in my book Speechless, available now for pre-order. | |
| There we go. | |
| Oh man, that was a close one. | |
| Oh my goodness, I can't believe I almost let that go. | |
| Thank you. | |
| So, Carville and Gramsci are saying, you've got to hold on to the common sense. | |
| And if you have the politics of the faculty lounge, and you've got Nike saying the American flag is evil, don't post anything with even the Betsy Ross flag, and you've got Coca-Cola saying we can't have election integrity laws, and you've got, I don't know, Gillette razors telling your little daughter to shave her face because she's going to be a little boy now, or Harry's razors, or whatever, then that's going to be a big problem. | |
| And he's right for a little while. | |
| He's right. | |
| If you do too much too fast, that's going to be a problem. | |
| But if you take this further and you follow more closely what people like Gramsci and the critical theorists and the new left later and the Maoists in the 60s and 70s and all of these people who followed from them, if you go a little further, what you realize is that gradual change here, taking positions of influence what you realize is that gradual change here, taking positions of influence and then exerting that influence throughout the For a little while. | |
| The goal is to transform the common sense. | |
| And that has happened to a large degree. | |
| Think about your favorite woke millennial. | |
| Think about even some of the Zoomers, the generation below. | |
| They are taught from kindergarten or pre-kindergarten or now, I don't know, you start school at age two now or something. | |
| You didn't do that when I was a kid, when I was a youth, but now they keep you in school longer and longer to indoctrinate you more and more. | |
| So you start school at age two or three and you don't leave until you've got seven graduate degrees in advanced lesbian studies. | |
| So you're there for a long time and you're steeped in this idea that Christopher Columbus, evil. | |
| George Washington, evil. | |
| The history of the West, absolutely evil. | |
| Literature, sexist and racist. | |
| William Shakespeare, he was probably a white supremacist patriarch. | |
| And you're taught to hate your culture. | |
| So obviously the left is going along with that. | |
| They're the ones pushing it. | |
| But many, many people who are in the middle, many, many people who are even center-right, Who are those kind of squishy conservatives? | |
| They have bought this line of argument because the left has in many ways successfully transformed the common sense. | |
| So Carville's right. | |
| It might cost Democrats some elections in the short term, but they are winning the long game. | |
| In a way, James Carville's thinking like a conservative here, just in that next election, that next election. | |
| But the Democrats don't even care so much about the next election. | |
| They care about winning that hundred years war, that long march through the institutions that conservatives don't recognize. | |
| So if we don't push back against that Instead of just gloating and saying, oh, well, we're going to do much better in the midterms now because Democrats are trying to trans the kids or something. | |
| If we don't focus on the longer game, too, then it's not going to matter if we win an election next year. | |
| Oh, good, we won the Congress back. | |
| Okay, what's that going to do if the Democrats are totally shaping the culture? | |
| They're going really, really hard, and maybe that gives you a sense of sensationalism and craziness right now, but you're going to see the effects of that carry through in the long haul. | |
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| And I know that next morning, my head's not going to feel so great. | |
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| I don't like to drink a lot of water. | |
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| So even many prominent Democrats are realizing now this wokeness thing is not great in the short term. | |
| I'll show you how crazy this is. | |
| Caitlyn Jenner Who is, I suppose, the leading Republican candidate for governor now in California. | |
| Shows you about the state of California. | |
| Caitlyn Jenner just came out and said, I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls' sports. | |
| It just isn't fair and we have to protect girls' sports in our schools. | |
| On the one hand, Good. | |
| I'm glad. | |
| I don't like some of the wording here, right? | |
| Because listen to the wording. | |
| He says, I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls sports. | |
| There is no who are trans. | |
| There is no trans identity. | |
| There is this contrived idea of the trans identity, but it doesn't have to do with our actual human nature. | |
| One cannot actually be a boy, but, you know, have the biology of a girl, but really, truly be a boy. | |
| That is a mistaken understanding of human nature. | |
| And he, Caitlyn Jenner, is obviously buying into this mistaken idea of human nature. | |
| So I don't like that, but hey, I'll give him credit. | |
| That's great. | |
| I'm glad that he opposes boys playing in the girls' sports. | |
| It would appear that Caitlyn Jenner has a more conservative view on transgender issues than Kristi Noem in South Dakota. | |
| How insane is that? | |
| It shows you the ramifications of this woke politics, these woke corporations, because why did Kristi Noem cave on the NCAA and college sports allowing men to compete against women? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know for sure. | |
| I'm just speculating. | |
| Did she get a call from some donors, from some corporations? | |
| Did she realize that she was going to have to get involved in a long, protracted battle with the NCAA, with the universities, with these ostensibly private institutions that exert a lot of political power? | |
| I assume some of that. | |
| Had something to do with her decision not to oppose the trans issue in sports at the college level, even though she would do it at the high school level. | |
| But I say appears here because I don't want to be taken in. | |
| This is always the problem with Caitlyn Jenner. | |
| On many, many issues, would Caitlyn Jenner be better than Gavin Newsom? | |
| Of course. | |
| Frankly, he might even be better as a policy matter on the transgender issue. | |
| But... | |
| What are we giving away if we get behind Caitlyn Jenner for governor? | |
| We are, I think, embracing the transgender issue. | |
| I think we're giving up our understanding of human nature, even if we might get some slightly better policy. | |
| That's my fear here. | |
| And that's a big give. | |
| You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who said the only way conservatives can endorse Caitlyn Jenner is if they form an organization called Conservatives for Bruce, and we only call him Bruce Jenner, and we basically ignore the fact that he thinks that he's a woman or pretends to be a woman. | |
| It's a funny answer, and I think it does address the problems that we have, but it's a little too clever by half, right? | |
| Because Caitlyn Jenner, if he is elected, he is going to put himself out there as a woman. | |
| People are going to look up and say, oh, he is a woman. | |
| We are now acknowledging this. | |
| Even the Republicans are acknowledging this in society. | |
| And Democrats, they're the real transphobes or something like that. | |
| So you lose a lot here. | |
| I also say appears because I don't know that Caitlyn Jenner really supports this. | |
| Don't forget, Kristi Noem talked a good game on the transgender issue until the rubber met the road, and then she caved. | |
| What does Caitlyn Jenner really feel here? | |
| Caitlyn Jenner wrote an op-ed in 2018, so not three years ago in the Washington Post. | |
| And the headline was, I thought Trump would help trans people. | |
| I was wrong. | |
| And this is the money line here in the piece. | |
| The reality is that the trans community is being relentlessly attacked by this president. | |
| Relentlessly attacked by Donald Trump, the most pro-LGBT president in U.S. history, waving the rainbow flag on the campaign trail. | |
| The leader of our nation has shown no regard for an already marginalized and struggling community. | |
| He has ignored our humanity. | |
| He has insulted our dignity. | |
| What? | |
| He has made trans people into political pawns as he whips up animus against us in an attempt to energize the most right-wing segment of his party, claiming his anti-transgender policies are meant to protect the country. | |
| Yeah, duh. | |
| He's saying that people who are very, very confused and take... | |
| Have various physical procedures on them that make them a little out of fighting shape shouldn't be in the military necessarily. | |
| He's saying that boys shouldn't compete against girls. | |
| He's saying that men shouldn't use the ladies' room. | |
| This is the vicious anti-transgender stuff that Caitlin's talking about? | |
| He goes on. | |
| This is politics at its worst. | |
| It is unacceptable. | |
| It is upsetting. | |
| It has deeply personally hurt me. | |
| Believing that I could work with Trump and his administration to support our community was a mistake. | |
| The recently leaked DHS memo that suggests preposterously and unscientifically that the government ought to link gender to one's genitalia at birth is just one more example in a pattern of political attacks. | |
| imposterously and unscientifically, he says, it would be to link one's sex to one's genitals. | |
| This guy who I'm not convinced that Caitlyn Jenner even wrote this op-ed because most of these celebrities don't write their own op-eds. | |
| But the guy who wrote and or put his name on this op-ed has absolutely no business in the Republican Party. | |
| This is insane. | |
| And if we endorse this stuff, if we endorse what is in this op-ed... | |
| We are not conserving anything because we're giving up human nature. | |
| And we are now saying that if you believe that men and women are different, you're a bigot and you have no place in the Republican Party. | |
| The people who hold those views have no place in the Republican Party. | |
| There are some people, though, look, this is a political winner of an issue to say boys shouldn't compete against girls. | |
| Everyone knows that this is true. | |
| This is totally common sense. | |
| The vast, vast, vast majority of Americans believe in this, which is why I suspect Caitlyn Jenner is putting out these statements here. | |
| Whether it's his campaign that's putting it out or whether he even agrees with this, who knows? | |
| But... | |
| Every governor in America, basically, is coming out and saying this. | |
| And some of them, I suspect, believe it. | |
| Ron DeSantis just came out and signed a bill saying the boys can't compete against girls. | |
| Gave a good reason why. | |
| Governor DeSantis, a bill of a similar nature is about to cross your desk. | |
| You're going to sign it. | |
| Oh, yeah, we're going to protect our girls. | |
| I have a four-year-old daughter and a one-year-old daughter, and they're both very athletic, and we want to have opportunities for our girls. | |
| They deserve an even playing field, and that's what we're doing with what Mississippi did, with what Florida did, and I know what other states are going to do, so I look forward to be able to sign that into law. | |
| Speaking of bodily transitions, to me, the most interesting part of this clip, and you wouldn't notice if you were just listening to it, but if you've seen this clip, Does Ryan DeSantis look like he's lost some weight? | |
| It looks to me like the guy has gone on a little bit of a diet. | |
| You know, his suits used to be kind of oversized. | |
| Now it's a little bit trimmer. | |
| Looks a little bit better on camera. | |
| His hair is a little bit better done. | |
| Looks to me almost like this guy is running for president. | |
| And I think it's pretty obvious Ron DeSantis has been positioning himself to run for president now for a while. | |
| And he's done a great job. | |
| I think he's doing a terrific job in Florida and he's doing a good job at running for president. | |
| I have the only bit of caution I've ever urged on everyone jumping on the DeSantis bandwagon is just that we need to see more from him. | |
| That's all I've said. | |
| Because in many ways, he reminds me of Chris Christie 2020. | |
| And by the way, I'm sorry, Chris Christie 2012. | |
| Chris Christie 2012 was a great candidate. | |
| He should have gotten the nomination, probably. | |
| And at least of the candidates who were being talked about later on in the race. | |
| He was a great contender for that. | |
| He, a couple years earlier, had started losing weight, right? | |
| And he really tried to gear up for 2016, and it was just too late at that point. | |
| State politician. | |
| Said all the right things. | |
| Did a lot of the right things. | |
| Was very adept. | |
| And I think that Ron DeSantis is a better candidate than Christie was. | |
| But we need to see more from him. | |
| I have a lot more trust that DeSantis will go ahead and do the right thing than I would in Christie Noem or Caitlyn Jenner for that matter. | |
| But we've just got to see this because the Republicans have been fooled before. | |
| We've had our hearts broken. | |
| We've been jilted by people that we have elevated to governorships, to the Senate, to the House, to the Republican presidential nomination. | |
| You know who I'm talking about here. | |
| I'm talking about Republicans' biggest mistake in a long time. | |
| Mitt Romney. | |
| Mitt Romney in 2012. | |
| Mitt Romney was the one candidate who was running for president who could not credibly oppose Obamacare. | |
| Obamacare was the biggest issue in 2009 and 2010 and 2011. | |
| In 2012, that was going to be the issue on the campaign. | |
| There was one Republican in America who could not run on this issue because he invented Obamacare when he was governor of Massachusetts. | |
| Who was that candidate? | |
| Mitt Romney, the one that we ended up nominating. | |
| And now Mitt Romney is persona non grata in the Republican Party. | |
| And largely for good reason. | |
| But think about this. | |
| It was not that long ago that Republicans chose him to be our standard bearer. | |
| That shows you how the Republican Party is divided, is unclear in which direction it wants to go. | |
| So Romney was the governor of Massachusetts and he ran for president. | |
| Then he became senator from Utah because he's just a rich guy who doesn't really matter where he lives. | |
| So he became senator from Utah. | |
| But he had a tough time at the Utah Republican Convention just a few days ago when he was booed off the stage. | |
| Now, someone you're not going to boo off the stage, Jordan Harbinger. | |
| The average podcast listener has six shows in rotation, so most likely you are not just listening to my show, or maybe you're just listening to it six times a day. | |
| But, you know, I would like to recommend a podcast to add to your list. | |
| The Jordan Harbinger Show, top shelf podcast, named Best of Apple in 2018. | |
| Jordan dives into the minds of fascinating people, from athletes, authors, and scientists, to mobsters, spies, and hostage negotiators. | |
| Without fail, he pulls out tactical bits of wisdom in each episode, all with the noble cause to make you a more informed, critical thinker, better able to operate in today's world. | |
| Definitely worth checking out. | |
| I love it. | |
| I love perusing lots of different podcasts and making sure I don't just get stuck, other than listening to The Michael Knowles Show every single day without fail. | |
| You know, you want to make sure that you switch up the other ones, too. | |
| You can't go wrong by adding The Jordan Harbinger Show to your rotation. | |
| It's incredibly interesting. | |
| Never a dull moment. | |
| Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show. | |
| That's H-A-R-B as in boy. | |
| I-N as in Nancy. | |
| G-E-R as in really. | |
| Go do it right now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. | |
| By the way, the establishment media are totally pushing us to be divided. | |
| They're totally pushing us toward civil war. | |
| Ben will be talking about that on his show today. | |
| And of course, you got to sign up for Daily Wire. | |
| Check out Candace. | |
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| Smooth like butter. | |
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| We'd love to hear from you. | |
| you. | |
| We'll be right back with a lot more. | |
| The former governor of Massachusetts who became the Republican nominee just, what, nine years ago? | |
| Was just booed off the stage in Utah where he is the Republican senator. | |
| My oh my how things can change. | |
| Take a listen to Mitt Romney's chilly reaction. | |
| Now you know me as a person who says what he thinks and I don't hide the fact that I wasn't a fan of our last president's character issues. | |
| I'm also no fan... | |
| Aren't you embarrassed? | |
| And I'm also no fan of the president's... | |
| Yeah, sure. | |
| My friends, this is the moment I was talking about. | |
| Please, thank you. | |
| Show respect. | |
| So, yeah, I understand that I have a few folks that don't like me terribly much and I, I'm sorry about that. | |
| Oh yeah, you can, you can boo all you like, but I've been a Republican all my life. | |
| Tough crowd, Matt. | |
| Tough crowd. | |
| And Mitt always presents himself as he's the adult in the room. | |
| He's Mr. | |
| Republican. | |
| I'm the old principled kind of Republican, but now you guys have gone crazy. | |
| I've been a Republican all my life, you Johnny-come-latelys. | |
| I've been a Republican all my life. | |
| Is that so, Mitt? | |
| Let's rewind the tape to when you were running for senator from Massachusetts against Ted Kennedy in 1994. | |
| Were you a Republican all your life? | |
| Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. | |
| I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush. | |
| My positions don't talk about things that you suggest they talk about. | |
| Oh! | |
| Oh, I guess you weren't a Republican all your life. | |
| I guess during the most important Republican administration in recent memory before Donald Trump, and I guess in that there were two terms, defeated the Cold War, I guess it ends up being a more consequential Republican administration. | |
| Mitt Romney was not a Republican. | |
| I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. | |
| I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush. | |
| Now, he may have been a Republican during that time, and he may have just been lying to Ted Kennedy. | |
| But this is the problem with Mitt Romney. | |
| I am not saying that I despise Mitt Romney. | |
| I detest him. | |
| He's just weak. | |
| That's the problem. | |
| There are many things I admire about Mitt Romney. | |
| Well, there's one, his hair. | |
| I admire the hair. | |
| He's got great hair. | |
| But as a political matter, Romney represents the liberal wing of the Republican Party, just like his dad did, George Romney. | |
| And Mitt Romney has been on the wrong side of a lot of issues here. | |
| He was on the wrong side of the Reagan administration, for goodness sakes. | |
| He was on the wrong side of Obamacare. | |
| He's on the wrong side of BLM. The guy was out marching with BLM last year. | |
| BLM was torching the country coast to coast, starting in Minneapolis, but not ending in Minneapolis. | |
| And what does Romney do? | |
| Does he go out and say, hey... | |
| Don't burn down the country. | |
| Hey, this is bad. | |
| We oppose this organization. | |
| No, he goes and marches with them. | |
| So, I think Romney got exactly what he deserves there at the Utah State Convention. | |
| Not every Republican who showed up there got booed. | |
| Mike Lee, who is a pretty strong conservative, comes a little bit more from the libertarian wing, but he's still got his conservative bona fides. | |
| That guy got cheered as well he should. | |
| He's been on the right side of a lot of issues. | |
| But there's a big divide here. | |
| Which way, Republican man, which way are you going to go? | |
| You've got Romney, who opposed the Republican president. | |
| Didn't vote for him. | |
| He probably voted for Joe Biden. | |
| I don't know who he voted for. | |
| In 2020, you've got George W. Bush. | |
| George W. Bush, former Republican president, who is now actively working to get amnesty for tens of millions of illegal aliens. | |
| I think piecemeal probably makes sense. | |
| And I think the president, if I could be so bold, is calling Republicans who are like-minded and say, let's see if we can't get something done. | |
| You know, border security is always a touchstone issue on this, and Americans have got to be assured that the government's doing everything they can to enforce the border. | |
| But there ought to be a recognition that without some reforms, let me rephrase it, reforming will make it easier to enforce the border. | |
| Comprehensive may be too big a reach right now. | |
| And so if they... | |
| If they can get DACA done with some border enhancement plans to give Republicans comfort in voting for the bill, then all of a sudden there's confidence to be gained. | |
| And then they can deal with the work or they can deal with the undocumented. | |
| But yeah, that may be a better approach. | |
| George Bush has been pretty consistent about this throughout his career. | |
| He's said that he supports DACA. Amnesty, basically. | |
| He tried to work on a big amnesty bill and that didn't really work. | |
| Tried to get the wall built, kind of, but that also didn't really work because it didn't have teeth. | |
| He's now saying you've at least got to get DACA. DACA is for the dreamers, right? | |
| And the dreamers, we're told the dreamers are these cute little six-year-olds who are brought over across the border. | |
| It's not their fault. | |
| At this point, the dreamers are like 40 years old. | |
| And they're not as cute when they turn 40. | |
| If we deport the Dreamers, who will watch their grandkids? | |
| So, yes, the Dreamers are the big issue. | |
| So we've got to give amnesty to millions and millions. | |
| But that's only the first step. | |
| Because then we've got to give amnesty to all of them. | |
| And if you get a little border security in the meantime, that's okay. | |
| That'll be good. | |
| Why is this such poison for the country right now, to talk about amnesty? | |
| It's not because of... | |
| I don't know. | |
| Racism, or this-ism, or that-ism, or this isn't who we are, all these kind of abstract principles. | |
| There's a very basic issue here, which is, what binds us together? | |
| What binds us together? | |
| I had a lovely, truly magnificent weekend. | |
| I was down in Florida visiting my grandparents. | |
| I was very excited to introduce cute little baby June to his great-grandparents. | |
| Wanted to make it a priority to now, you know, he's finally smiling a little bit. | |
| So took June down to see the great-grandparents and the rest of the family. | |
| And... | |
| We were down there. | |
| We were seeing my aunts and uncles. | |
| We're all sitting around. | |
| We've got all sorts of different political points of view. | |
| And some of us are very conservative Republicans. | |
| Some are liberal Republicans. | |
| Some are left of Lenin Democrats, like one of my dear aunties. | |
| And we're all talking. | |
| And my grandmother had this very astute question. | |
| She said, why is it that America can't be like this? | |
| Why can't we all get along? | |
| Why can't we all... | |
| Have these interesting conversations and start to persuade one another and why doesn't the country work like this? | |
| And the reason, of course, is that we have very little binding us together. | |
| Why does the family work like that? | |
| Because we all love each other. | |
| We all have a shared experience and a shared history and we're invested in one another's success. | |
| And a country can have that, but over time we've chipped away at these sorts of things. | |
| What unites Americans? | |
| We don't have a common race. | |
| Some countries are just racial countries, right? | |
| You think of Japan. | |
| Race binds Japan together. | |
| America has always had a kind of bit of a mix, obviously dominated by English settlers who came from the Mayflower and then later on, but there were the English, and then there were the Dutch in New York, and then there were alliances with the Native Americans. | |
| They weren't part of the same polity, but they did have alliances. | |
| Then you had African slaves brought over. | |
| Then you had the Irish come. | |
| Then you had the Italians come. | |
| Then you had Chinese people come. | |
| So you've always had this kind of melange of races, and that has increased over time. | |
| So you're not going to have a common race. | |
| We did have a common religion in Christianity. | |
| That went away. | |
| We don't have a common religion really anymore. | |
| And the common religion in America, the Christian religion, was a little strange because there were all these different sects and denominations, but still broadly Christian. | |
| We had a common language, which was English. | |
| That is dropping by the day. | |
| We had a common... | |
| Civic religion, right? | |
| That was the next thing that Abraham Lincoln suggested in the Lyceum Address. | |
| He says we need to have a civic religion where we venerate our founding fathers, where we venerate our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, the men who built this country. | |
| That's totally gone. | |
| The 1619 Project takes aim squarely at that idea of the civic religion and blows it to smithereens. | |
| And we've now for decades had students in schools taught that our founding fathers were actually evil. | |
| We're really great, but the founding fathers are evil. | |
| And the Constitution is a horrible white supremacist document. | |
| And the Declaration of Independence just seeks to enshrine the property rights of rich white men, those jerks. | |
| And so that civic religion is going, so what binds us together? | |
| Into that totally divided country, you're now going to introduce tens of millions of foreign nationals. | |
| That's what's going to bring us together. | |
| That kind of diversity is going to be our strength. | |
| That's insane. | |
| Unity is strength. | |
| Unity is part of the transcendentals, right? | |
| That is what binds people together. | |
| And so you can have people from different backgrounds, but they have to be unified in some way. | |
| What unifies us right now? | |
| Until we answer that question, I don't think we should admit another immigrant. | |
| It would be bad for them. | |
| It would be bad for the country. | |
| I'm being slightly hyperbolic, but not much. | |
| This is an existential problem for the country. | |
| You've got to figure out what binds you together. | |
| And you have forces who are only pushing division. | |
| Forces from the left, because it aids their social revolution. | |
| And some forces from the right, from the old establishment right, because it serves their economic purposes to keep people sort of divvied up and divided. | |
| So... | |
| That is the old Republican Party of the last 20-30 years. | |
| That's the Republican Party that's pushing it. | |
| We need more amnesty, more immigration, more open trade deals that benefit other countries more than they benefit us. | |
| And then you've got the conservative wing, which is represented, wild as it sounds, by Donald Trump, by other people who've come in. | |
| Meanwhile, Are we at least moving in the right direction on that kind of national unity? | |
| No. | |
| Maxine Waters, that wonderful unifying figure Maxine Waters is coming at you saying, you know, look, it's not that America was racist, evil, terrible, but now it's gotten a little bit better. | |
| Like Tim Scott says, it's not that it was bad in the past, but now it's better. | |
| The Republican senator who gave that response to the State of the Union. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Maxine is saying we're getting more racist every single day. | |
| Is America not a racist country? | |
| Well, you know, I don't know if he was counseled to say that or whether he really believes that. | |
| If he really believes that, then he has missed not only the history of the country, but what is going on right now. | |
| As we watched the invasion of the Capitol on January 6th, Those people following Trump saying they were taking back their government and they were willing to harm people. | |
| As a matter of fact, not only were they willing to harm people, but the Capitol Police, who happened to be police of color, African-American. | |
| They were calling their names, the N-word. | |
| Every day we have seen this nation get more racist than anybody thought perhaps would be at this point in time. | |
| So, first of all, there is no reason to ever take anything that Maxine Waters says seriously. | |
| She's a very unintelligent woman who is very clever and shrewd at politics, so I want to give her credit for that. | |
| But more than her lack of stuff going on between the ears, she is so cynical. | |
| She does not give a wit about the truth. | |
| This woman just called for a riot. | |
| Before the George Floyd verdict was given out, she said that if the verdict doesn't go exactly her way, people need to get in the street and get more confrontational. | |
| They've already burned the country down for six months, so we've got to get more confrontational. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| Detonate a nuclear weapon? | |
| How can you get more confrontational? | |
| This woman was defending the violence during the Rodney King riots 30 years ago. | |
| This woman is an absolute cancer on American politics. | |
| And she has the gall, she has the temerity to come out and say... | |
| The Trumpers. | |
| They went into the Capitol and they were screaming the N-word. | |
| Do you have any evidence of this? | |
| Of course not. | |
| And they were, there was an insurrection. | |
| Lady, you just called for an insurrection like two weeks ago. | |
| But then it didn't need to materialize because you got the verdict that you wanted because you pressured the judiciary just like the president did. | |
| Give me a break. | |
| There is a real social incentive here for Leftists like Maxine Waters to divide people up and get everyone agitated on race. | |
| Do you know what the real racism in this country looks like? | |
| Well, there is actual legal racism in the form of affirmative action that disadvantages whites and Asians in university policies and advantages black people and Hispanic people and some other groups. | |
| So that's legal racism. | |
| But do you know what racism as we talk about it looks like in America? | |
| It looks like a Jeopardy winner having to apologize for showing the number three on camera. | |
| That's the real racism. | |
| I am serious. | |
| This really happened. | |
| A Jeopardy winner, Kelly Donahue, just was absolutely eviscerated on social media. | |
| Because he was accused of flashing a white power sign. | |
| What was the white power sign? | |
| He did the little circle with his index and thumb, and then three. | |
| It's the okay symbol, first of all, and also it's three. | |
| You'd see basketball players flash that when they hit a three-pointer. | |
| But he apologized anyway. | |
| He said, I'm truly horrified with what has been posted about me on social media. | |
| I absolutely, unequivocally condemn white supremacy and racism of any kind. | |
| People who know me personally know that I'm not a racist. | |
| But for the public at large, it bears repeating, I'm not a racist. | |
| I reject whites and condemn white supremacy and all forms of bigotry for the evil they are. | |
| It's shameful to me to think anyone would try to use the stage of jeopardy to advance or promote such a disgusting agenda. | |
| Nobody would ever. | |
| It's not even close. | |
| There aren't white supremacists. | |
| There's like, what, like three people that you're thinking? | |
| There's a zillion bigots in BLM. There's a zillion bigots in Antifa. | |
| There's a zillion bigots in Congress, like Maxine Waters. | |
| White supremacy. | |
| Not really a thing. | |
| But he goes on. | |
| He goes, during the taping of my fourth episode, I was simply raising three fingers to mark my third win. | |
| There was nothing more I was trying to indicate. | |
| I deeply regret this terrible misunderstanding. | |
| Stop it. | |
| Please don't stop embarrassing yourself. | |
| He goes on. | |
| He goes on because he buys the lie. | |
| He buys the lie that white supremacy is a big, gigantic, horrible epidemic in America. | |
| And his symbol, he could really be seriously interpreted as OK symbol or the three symbol. | |
| It could really be interpreted to mean white supremacy. | |
| And he's got to apologize. | |
| I'm sorry, I'm sorry. | |
| It's not about any of that. | |
| These people, these race hustlers like Maxine Waters, they're not trying to fight white supremacy. | |
| White supremacy is not a thing. | |
| They are trying to elicit the very reaction that this poor schlub gave them. | |
| They are trying to impose upon you a new understanding of symbols. | |
| They are trying to impose upon you a new understanding of language. | |
| They are trying to get you to grovel and apologize. | |
| This Jeopardy winner, who apologized for making the three sign, for making the okay sign, shows you... | |
| The whole game that the left engages on political correctness, on wokeism, they're the same thing. | |
| It's a new term for the same old thing. | |
| Just like political correctness always changes the terms, they've changed the term even for political correctness. | |
| The trick of political correctness, which, by the way, is the subject of my upcoming book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available now for pre-order. | |
| You can also get a signed first edition, which, you know, it's just throwing that out there. | |
| The trick here is that they politicize all of the terms. | |
| This was... | |
| Part of the agenda of the early theorists in PC, and then it became explicit in the 70s when the second wave feminists said that the personal is the political. | |
| So even the way that you wash the dishes, even the way you interact in your most intimate relations, that is political in some way. | |
| So now, what's so brilliant about this, what's so brilliant about, say, critical theory, which just puts this harshly critical lens on everything, is that even if it's ridiculous, even if the idea that the OK sign with the three, or the three-point sign, that that stands for white supremacy, how? | |
| I have no idea. | |
| Even if that's so preposterous when they make that claim, the very fact that they do make that claim and that other people echo that claim means that now this symbol, which nobody has earnestly meant to mean white supremacy, now it does come to connote that by the sheer will of the leftists who say so. | |
| Now we have to think about that. | |
| Now if I make the okay sign, hey Michael, are you going to come out and have a drink with us later? | |
| Sounds great. | |
| I make the okay sign, this now could be Posted all over the internet. | |
| I've done it about a hundred times in the show now, so I'm sure it's already going to be posted on the internet. | |
| That can be posted now to say Michael supports white supremacy. | |
| And a bunch of idiots are going to go along with that. | |
| And even some conservatives are going to think, well, it's what the symbol means now. | |
| This is why the left is so concerned with appropriating symbols. | |
| They appropriated the rainbow, for goodness sakes. | |
| Leftist homosexuals and transgender people and whatever, you know, leftist sexual revolutionaries I've noticed that my conservative friends, who might be a little bit light in the loafers, you know, of different sort of sexual persuasions, They don't go around waving the rainbow flag. | |
| Unless they're Donald Trump. | |
| I felt that was a mistake on the campaign trail. | |
| But they don't post the rainbow flag in their Twitter bios. | |
| They don't embrace that symbol. | |
| Because while the left says that that's a symbol of their sexual identity, they themselves say, no, that's not it. | |
| That's representing something that I don't want to be a part of. | |
| That's representing something even other than sexual desire. | |
| It's a political symbol. | |
| And the left took this political symbol, the rainbow, the symbol of hope, this beautiful symbol, That shows us that God's not going to destroy the world in a flood again. | |
| And they say, no, this is ours now. | |
| And so now when you see the rainbow, that is what the symbol means. | |
| You have to be very careful about that. | |
| Not give up the symbols to the left. | |
| We need to embrace our symbols. | |
| We need to lean in. | |
| We need to offer that substantive view of politics. | |
| And this is all to justify insane policies. | |
| To me, one of the craziest examples of politically correct redefinition in the last few years is they redefined criminal or convict to be justice-involved person. | |
| Yes, justice-involved person. | |
| Which is ironic because criminals are injustice-involved people. | |
| They're not involved in justice. | |
| They're involved in injustice. | |
| But why? | |
| Because justice-involved person? | |
| That sounds okay. | |
| That sounds nice. | |
| It makes them sort of passive figures. | |
| California is now planning to increase the rate of early release for 76,000 inmates, including about 63,000 people who were convicted of violent crimes, including about 20,000 people who were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. | |
| So people who did really... | |
| Really bad stuff. | |
| They are now going to see their chances at early release increased tremendously. | |
| Why? | |
| Because if you take the leftist view of criminal justice, it's not their fault that they went to prison. | |
| It's not their fault that they committed their crimes. | |
| It's our fault. | |
| It's society's fault. | |
| They're just passive people. | |
| And actually, you know, On the racial politics side, black people are over-represented in prison among the convicted criminal population. | |
| So that's evidence of racism. | |
| So you've got to let them out, even if they committed horrible crimes. | |
| Plenty of people. | |
| It's awful. | |
| It's racism. | |
| It's bigotry. | |
| So you let people out. | |
| You let them off the hook. | |
| And then what happens? | |
| They go commit more crimes. | |
| Illegal alien, Jesus Leal Corona. | |
| He's a 49-year-old illegal. | |
| He pled guilty to second-degree vehicular homicide. | |
| He killed a 24-year-old guy. | |
| Because he was drunk driving and then he hit this guy. | |
| This guy had a record. | |
| This guy, Jesus, had been arrested in Texas and New Jersey, but he was never deported. | |
| The guy should have been deported the first time a cop saw him. | |
| He's here illegally. | |
| He's violating the law. | |
| But no, because it's not his fault that he came here illegally. | |
| It's society's fault. | |
| It's our fault that we had borders in the first place. | |
| We should have just invited him in. | |
| We take in, what, two million people, more than two million people a year. | |
| It should be four million. | |
| It should be seven million. | |
| We should take everybody in. | |
| What's the effect of that? | |
| Well, this poor 24-year-old gets killed. | |
| If Jesus had been deported like he should have been, that 24-year-old would be alive today because the guy who killed him wouldn't be here. | |
| But no, he's not going to be deported now. | |
| He's going to get about five years in prison. | |
| He'll probably be released early after three years. | |
| And he'll go right back out and be just fine because of sanctuary policies. | |
| Sanctuary for whom? | |
| I think that the left understands that that's not popular. | |
| They know that immigration is a big loser issue for them. | |
| It is. | |
| The majority of people in this country, according to multiple polls, want to reduce not just illegal, but legal immigration, too. | |
| That includes a lot of Democrats. | |
| That includes a lot of independents. | |
| They want to drastically reduce it. | |
| According to one Harvard-Harris poll, they want to bring it down by 50%, at least. | |
| Legal immigration, too. | |
| So why does the left push for this? | |
| Because, while James Carville is right, this might hurt them in the short term. | |
| They might lose an election or two, although, frankly, if they change all the election laws and they federalize congressional campaigns, they're going to have a distinct advantage now put into the law. | |
| But, even if they lose a campaign here or a campaign there, they go a little too far here or there, in the long run, they will have positions of power, they will have an electoral advantage, not six months or a year down the line, but ten years down the line, twenty years down the line. | |
| That's going to give them the long game. | |
| So how do we push back against this? | |
| We've got to get much more serious on the electoral front, on wielding power when we've got it, but also on these corporations. | |
| We might not want to reward a corporation or punish a corporation or make everything so political, but if we want to push back against what the left has done so successfully, that's the only way that we are going to do it. | |
| Can't wait to log into my base camp right after we end the show. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is the Michael Knowles Show. | |
| I'll see you tomorrow. | |
| I'll see you tomorrow. | |
| 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. | |
| A real concerted effort to push back against critical race theory in schools is finally underway. | |
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| And a male Democrat congressman tells a Republican woman to shut her mouth and is, of course, applauded by the left for it. |