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May 21, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
50:56
Ep. 769 -The “Academic Freedom” Hoax

The “1619 Project” founder gets denied tenure at UNC, politicians start paying people to get the COVID vax, and the government pushes UFOs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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1619 Project founder Nicole Hannah-Jones has been denied tenure at the University of North Carolina.
Leftists are furious.
Squishes are worried.
And I, for one, could not be happier because academic freedom is for chumps.
It is a hoax, as you can see very clearly from all of our public debates, from transgenderism to the COVID vaccine.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Nolz Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from 21JackJordan, who writes,"...unrelated, but today my female teacher said that women get raped far more than men, and therefore it's ridiculous that men are the ones deciding how we fix that." I decided to raise my hand and said she was wrong.
If you include prison population, men actually get raped more than women.
She told me I should check my facts, and where in the world did you hear that?
So I told her at the Bureau of Justice Statistics dot gov, and she responded with, we don't need to talk about that.
I'm in high school and I'm already cancelled.
Wow!
This comment actually ties in so well to what we're talking about today, which is the idea of academic freedom, which the libs and the squishes are always pushing, which is just completely ridiculous.
Obviously, your point was right on the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and also her point was wrong in that just because someone experiences something, that does not mean that they cannot have an opinion on it.
It does not mean that they don't have faculties of reason and they can't have something to offer to the world.
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I love that Nicole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project propagandist, was denied tenure at UNC. So the Libs are furious because the Libs want this woman to push her propaganda even more than she already has.
Let's not forget, the 1619 Project, which is based on a lie...
The entire thesis of the 1619 Project is that the American Revolution was fought to protect the institution of slavery.
It's just not true.
There is no evidence of this whatsoever.
Even left-wing academic historians shot this down.
The Times persisted in error for seven months, but then even they corrected it, and it was kind of a fake half-correction where they just added in these words, some of.
They said some of the colonists fought the revolution for this reason.
Even that is bogus.
The American Revolution was not fought.
To protect the institution of slavery.
That doesn't even make sense.
Slavery would not be abolished throughout the West for quite some time afterward.
And there were people at the Constitutional Convention and at the Continental Congress who were fighting against slavery.
Regardless, we are now being told by the, what do you call them, libertarian right or the squish right, we're being told that this is a grave threat to academic freedom.
And I just don't want to hear it anymore.
This is what the libs do.
They push some bogus idea, and then for a while the conservatives fight against it, and then we accept all of their premises, and then we start arguing their points.
This is what happened with academic freedom.
The modern conservative movement, the one that started after World War II, began with William F. Buckley Jr. publishing a book called God and Man at Yale, the subtitle of which was called The Superstitions of Academic Freedom.
He called it a hoax.
It's a joke, and it goes back much further than that.
Academic freedom comes from the University of Leiden in 1575.
It begins after the Protestant Revolution.
The University of Leiden in the Netherlands decides that they're going to have academic freedom, and And yet, even this first university with total, you can say and think whatever you want, they refused to grant total academic freedom.
Then the Protestant Synod of Dort in 1618 restricted this even further because they wanted to combat the Armenian heresy.
Okay, keeping up so far?
Then some German universities tried to revive it for like five minutes.
Napoleon shut that down.
Then in 1636, Harvard was founded in America.
Was it founded on academic freedom?
No, it was founded to quash the antinomian heresy.
These universities were founded with a mission, with a purpose.
They have to have a mission.
If you're going to teach anything, you're going to teach some things, and you're going to contradict other things.
If you're going to teach that 2 plus 2 equals 4, you're not going to permit the teaching that 2 plus 2 equals 5.
And this is not just true in mathematics, it's true throughout the university.
In 1940, you have the American Association of University Professors.
We're talking about the peak of academic freedom in America, right?
They issue their statement on academic freedom and tenure.
So this is the actual professors.
These are the guys who are fighting in the trenches for academic freedom.
And in their statement on academic freedom, they say that teachers have the right to, quote, freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they, quote, should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject and And later they told them to exercise appropriate restraint.
So even the most out there full on endorsement of academic freedom says teachers can't mouth off about their stupid politics and they need to use restraint.
And they're obviously accountable to the trustees and to the parents and to the university administrators.
Obviously.
And yet the right somehow adopts these terms.
Even Bill Buckley's intellectual heirs, the people who call themselves Buckleyites and things like that, who now are, you know, they're writing for places like, I don't know, the Dispatch or something.
You know, these kind of left-wing, ostensibly right-wing outlets.
They'll endorse this.
They'll say, yeah, we support academic freedom.
It's just a joke.
Debates take place within limits, okay?
You see this very clearly.
Forget the schools for a second.
You see this very clearly on the vaccine issue.
Certain opinions cannot be held in public.
There are just limits on it.
There are just restraints, and we might not like that, and we might want the restraints to be different.
I certainly do.
But we have to acknowledge there are limits to these debates.
So, on the vaccine issue, a lot of people don't want the vaccine.
That's something like one in five Americans, and a huge portion of them say they will never get the vaccine under no circumstances.
Now, you've got multiple governors, governor of Ohio, governor of Maryland, governor of New York, COVID, are offering cash prizes, lottos, for people who get the vaccine.
You get the vaccine, you get entered in the lottery, maybe you could win millions of dollars.
Sort of undercuts the messaging here, right?
Because the messaging is everybody can't wait to get the vaccine.
Oh, it's so wonderful.
There's no questions about it whatsoever.
And that's why we're going to pay people millions of dollars to do it.
Because of how obvious a choice it is to go get it.
No, obviously some people have reservations here.
But you are not allowed to mention this.
A great example of it.
I was watching The View.
I wasn't really watching The View.
I was watching clips of The View.
And there was a debate between Meghan McCain, Republican, Joy Behar, Democrat.
And the debate was over the vaccine and why some people are not getting the vaccine right now.
Now listen to the debate.
Listen to the two sides of this argument and see if you can suss out what the differences are.
You know what?
It's not that complicated, people.
It's not nuclear physics, all right?
All you have to do is get the damn vaccine.
When you go inside, wear a mask.
Even if you have the vaccine, there might be variants around.
Wear the damn vaccine and then get the booster when that time is coming.
Well, what is the complicated problem here with people?
I don't understand it.
This is just to own the libs.
When I was a kid, the polio vaccine was available and everybody was dying to get it.
If you watch those kids on television, those iron lungs, that's what they used to show us.
A child and an iron lung.
And I was a child and I'd be like, oh my God, I don't want to be in there.
Get me that shot.
And of course, people did it.
Everybody's getting it, okay?
You guys out there, you're not owning the libs by not getting the shot.
Nobody's grown an extra arm.
Nobody's grown an extra head.
Everybody's fine.
It's the people who are not taking it who are not fine.
Okay, hold on.
So, pause for a second here before we get into Megan's side of it.
I know a lot of people who haven't taken the vaccine, and they're fine.
And they're totally fine, right?
Especially young people, especially people who are not really at risk from this virus.
They think, look, I'm not really at risk.
Statistically, I'm at a very low risk of this virus.
Even if I get it, I'm at very low risk of any complications.
So why would I get the vaccine?
Well, what about with a polio vaccine?
Right, COVID's not polio.
Especially for young people.
Polio, very dangerous for young people.
COVID, just not that dangerous for young people.
That's just the statistics of it.
I'm not spreading any kooky conspiracy theories.
Some groups are at greater risk than others.
It's not complicated, people.
Wear the damn vaccine.
Wait, what?
What does that mean?
Well, look, people got the polio vaccine.
Come on, what's so complicated?
Here's what's complicated.
The public health authorities had far greater credibility when the polio vaccine came out.
They've squandered their credibility now.
They've lied to us multiple times.
They've admitted they've lied to us multiple times.
And even when they haven't lied, they've just made predictions.
They've gotten the predictions wrong.
So pardon me if I don't rush to believe them when they say that something's totally fine.
I'm not saying I'm never going to get the vaccine.
I'm not saying that if I were 85 years old, I wouldn't get the vaccine.
But obviously, there are reasons that people are hesitating here.
One-fifth of Americans who are not only interested in owning the libs.
I love owning the libs.
It's a great thing.
But there are other reasons as well.
Okay, Megan responds.
The messaging is absolute garbage coming from Fauci.
And it's not just about owning the libs.
The demographics on who is vaccine hesitant, it crosses the gamut.
There's still a lot of hesitancy in the African-American community.
A nurse I know who actually was administering vaccines said that her daughter wouldn't get it because she was worried about fertility issues.
This is something I keep hearing a lot, that a lot of women are concerned about what it could possibly do If you're in childbearing years, all the women on this show, I assume, are done having babies except possibly me.
That's something that I would want to know.
I believe the science.
I believe it's healthy.
I think they have come out saying even pregnant women can get this vaccine.
But the fact that there hasn't been a summit or a discussion or figures that people trust on TV to try and help quell some of this, that's why the conspiracy theories keep growing and spreading.
People just don't understand and don't know, and I don't like to judge people who aren't accessible to the same kind of resources and education I am, but this is a serious, serious problem in this country.
Joy, you had something?
Yes, a lot of people of color have every right to be skeptical of the government.
All right, let's pause it right there.
So, Meghan McCain makes the point.
Yeah, this is about more than owning the libs.
And look, some, especially women in their childbearing years, have these worries because of stories that we've heard.
And these have been published, right?
It's not just like a friend of a friend of a friend said they had some issues.
These are things that have been written about in the popular press.
Public health officials have discussed some of these things.
So, sure, some worries beyond owning the libs.
But then notice...
Megan says, but I trust the scientists.
I trust the public health authorities.
And it's a big problem that some people are hesitant to get the vaccine.
But black people in particular can have a good reason to be worried about getting the vaccine.
And then Joy Behar comes in and she says, well, yes, you're right.
Black people are totally justified in hesitating to get the vaccine.
White people are not.
But black people totally are.
Even though it's the same vaccine, it's the same science.
We're all the same people.
No.
When black people hesitate to get the vaccine, that's totally great.
That's awesome.
And when white people hesitate, that's really bad.
They agree.
They agree over the fundamentals of the debate, which is that everyone should get the vaccine.
Everyone should trust the public health authorities.
When white people hesitate, it's bad.
When black people hesitate, it's good.
Where is the debate?
I mean, I don't mean to be too harsh.
I think Megan's raising some good points here, especially in the first part of her answer.
But in the fundamentals of the debate, you're not really allowed to disagree.
And I don't think on network television it would be permitted for anybody to disagree, which is why it's important to find alternative channels.
Not just in watching our political debates, but even in, say, shopping for auto parts, which is why you should check out rockauto.com.
Rockauto.com is so much easier than walking into a store and someone demanding quick answers to these sort of questions.
They'll say, hey, how you doing, auto parts guy?
And they'll say, hey, is your Honda a G3Z or an XQL? They'll say, I don't know, man.
Come on, it's kind of early.
How am I supposed to know that?
And then they'll say, well, okay.
Then they go out, they'll do it.
They'll look for the part.
They don't have it in the back.
They'll order it online, probably from rockauto.com.
And then they'll come back and charge you twice as much.
Don't do that.
Don't do that.
That's an unpleasant experience.
rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible.
Rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like some gimmicky companies do.
Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
RockAuto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
I also want to thank those of you who have sent me in screenshots.
I talk about how easy the RockAuto.com website is to navigate, how even I can do it.
And I've gotten messages from people, the screenshots of how easy it is to navigate the website.
So I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Go to RockAuto.com right now.
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And they write Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know that we sent you.
For months, we were told that it is a wacky, kooky conspiracy theory to suggest that the virus that was discovered 400 yards from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the coronavirus associated with bats, discovered 400 yards from the place where Chinese officials were studying coronaviruses and bats, That's insane to suggest there's any link.
Right now on this show, right when the story came out, right at the very beginning of the epidemic, we pointed out, huh, that's a coincidence.
Huh, that's a little strange.
Maybe we should look into that.
We were told, no, this is a kooky, crazy conspiracy theory.
PolitiFact said, no way.
This is fake news.
This is crazy.
You can't suggest that.
Now it's looking more and more like the Wuhan Institute of Virology had something to do with the leak.
There's a lot more evidence of this now.
Public health officials have changed their tune.
They're saying, okay, after a year of Dr.
Fauci saying, no way, don't bother my friends at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that people associated with me have been working with for a long time, even on some of these issues.
No, no, no, don't worry about that.
Don't look over there.
Well, now we are paying attention to the man behind the curtain, and it looks as though there might be a connection.
Jen Psaki was asked about this at the White House.
And her non-answer, I think, is the answer.
House Republicans are claiming that they have significant circumstantial evidence that COVID-19 originated in a lab.
Has the White House seen any circumstantial evidence that it did not originate in a lab?
I will say that our view continues to be that there needs to be an independent, transparent investigation.
And that needs to happen with the cooperation and and data provided from the Chinese government, We don't have enough information at this point to make an assessment.
At what point would President Biden call President Xi and say we've got 587,883 dead Americans.
We're just trying to figure out if this happened, if COVID originated in one of your labs.
Let us in.
Well, I would say that we have made that call publicly many times.
We have conveyed that privately, and we have certainly communicated that they were not transparent from the beginning.
That's not acceptable.
There's an opportunity now in the next stage of this effort Oh, okay.
Okay, that's fine.
Because initially, you all said this was completely insane.
Now here, Jen Psaki actually made the point when she opened up her answer.
She said, look, well, you can't disprove a negative.
And she obviously misspoke, as she sometimes does.
She went to say, you can't prove a negative.
But for a year, now more than a year, all these guys said the Wuhan Institute had nothing to do with it.
They were trying to prove the negative.
They said, nope, it had nothing to do with it.
They're saying, well, now we're hearing people have evidence that they did have something to do with it.
Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
Well, no, we need, look, there'll be talks and investigations.
And hey, it's no big deal.
I think it is a big deal.
I think it is a big deal.
Forget about China for a second.
Forget about the CCP and the Wuhan Institute.
The same public health officials...
Who told us, don't wear masks, masks don't work.
Then they said, you have to wear masks, masks do work.
And then they told us, get the vaccine, there's no problems whatsoever.
And then they said, well, you know, if you get the vaccine, there's this clotting issue, so we're going to pause the vaccine for a little bit.
But okay, now there's no problems again.
And hey, the Wuhan Institute had nothing to do with it.
Actually, they might have had something to do with it.
We just don't trust them, okay?
And it's not our fault that we don't trust them.
And it's not that we're conspiracy theorists, because we don't trust them.
They have squandered their credibility.
That's their problem.
Speaking of conspiracy theories...
Aliens!
Have you been reading the headlines?
Aliens are around!
They're afoot!
The UAPs, which is the new term for UFO, the Army and the Navy and the Pentagon are coming out and saying they've got a lot of evidence of UFOs and it's all coming out now and there's going to be a big report from the Pentagon.
The former head of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which is the Defense Department's UFO program, said that he believes the government is in possession of mysterious exotic technology.
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
A lot of people are talking about this.
I had a little bit of a debate with my pal Matt Walsh over this because he's totally on board the alien train.
He says, yep, I'm 100% there are aliens.
I'm skeptical.
I'm not just skeptical because it's a rather outlandish claim.
We haven't seen a ton of evidence of this yet.
I'm not just skeptical because it poses challenges for one's worldview.
I'm skeptical because of the politics of it all.
The leaks that we are seeing about the UFOs, where are they coming from?
They're coming from the federal government.
They're coming from the federal agencies.
The government that we have been told is totally infiltrated by woke radicals who are opposed to our traditional way of life.
The military that just aired an ad about how their ideal soldier is a soccer-playing girl raised by lesbian mothers or something— The same defense apparatus that the CIA, for instance, just posted a commercial saying that we need to, you know, hire strong intersectional feminist Latina women.
That's the ideal James Bond now or something.
The idea that these guys are just accidentally dripping the UFO stuff, it strains credulity, I think.
I don't buy it.
I think this is an intentional leak.
I think that the propagandists in the federal government know exactly what they're doing.
And I think it's a distraction.
I think that there is an...
I don't know...
I'm not saying that's a grand conspiracy.
I'm not...
I don't know...
What is the agenda?
I don't know what the agenda is.
I'm just saying this sort of information doesn't drip, drab, drip, drab out.
this kind of headline-grabbing sensationalism, does not just accidentally leak in this very steady, methodical way from the federal government, especially the Pentagon, on accident.
That's not what happened.
There is a messaging plan here.
There is a communications plan.
This is how people run PR.
This is how people run communications.
Now, what is the point of it?
I suspect it's too...
Just grab a lot of headlines and grab all of our attention and get us all talking about this, perhaps so we're not talking about other things.
I don't know.
I don't know exactly what the aim is, but I'm not taking the bait.
Until I see more evidence that the UFOs have landed and the Martians are running the government, which I guess I might believe that.
I might believe that Joe Biden is actually just a sort of, you know, Martian or something.
That would explain a lot of his verbal faux pas.
But until I see some evidence of that, I'm not taking the sensationalist bait.
I want to focus more on the mundane political matters that speak here.
Talking about these foreign enemies of ours, either from another universe or from right across the ocean, compare the army ads.
This has now gone viral.
Two army ads that are running.
One out of Russia, one the aforementioned lesbian woke army ad in the United States.
Which do you think represents a better prepared army going in the right direction?
Giant, hulking, muscular guy.
No, разве ты...
Big, muscular guy gets out of bed.
He's doing push-ups.
Looks like a James Bond villain jumping out of airplanes.
Got guns full of rounds shooting at their enemies.
With a little girl raised by two moms.
Oh my gosh.
I also marched for equality.
Oh my goodness.
I like to think I've been defending freedom from an early age.
Oh my goodness.
To marry my other mom.
With such powerful role models, I finished high school at the top of my class.
And after meeting with an army recruiter, I found it.
A way to prove my inner strength.
I'm U.S. Army Corporal Emma Malone Lord, and I answered my call.
So if you're walking down a back alleyway somewhere at night and you see...
The Russian guy with the guns, with the black rifles, which is going to be more intimidating, that guy or the little girl sort of blushing on Santa Monica Pier, talking about how wonderful her lesbian mothers are and how she's been fighting for freedom her whole life.
Presumably by freedom here, she's referring to the redefinition of marriage, which even Barack Obama opposed like eight or nine years ago.
Hillary Clinton, when they ran for president, they said marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman.
So this infantry woman is obviously way more woke than even the most left-wing presidents we've had, I suppose, until Joe Biden.
Now, why is this?
Why are they pushing this out there?
I actually, I think I understand the logic behind the U.S. Army and the CIA pushing this out.
They believe we're not going to fight real wars anymore.
It's all going to be propaganda wars.
It's all going to be messaging.
It's all going to be drip, drab, drip, drab from the government and foisting that on the rest of the world.
And our most lethal propaganda that we can put out there is this woke insanity.
So they are trying to recruit people for that.
It's the last institution that hasn't been totally taken over by the left, the military.
But they're trying to.
I think a lot of the officer class has been.
And now they're saying, yeah, we don't want guys who look like that crazy Russian.
We want super woke girls who are far to the left of Barack Obama, who all they want to talk about is their lesbian mothers.
We want them.
Because that will be the final institution to fall.
And by the way, there is a strategic purpose here.
They're very good at propaganda.
Very, very good at politics on the woke left.
Does not make us feel very safe, though, does it?
Doesn't make me feel very safe.
And so when things are going a little kooky, I think it's a very good time to invest in precious metals.
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In this debate here over the woke army ad, in the woke CIA ad, for instance, we compare it to the Russian army ad where it's the crazy guy with the giant muscles shooting guns, and we laugh about that.
But in our public discourse, you're not really allowed to suggest there's anything wrong with the woke army ad.
What's wrong?
Are you saying it's wrong to redefine marriage?
Are you a bigot?
Are you a phobe?
Are you saying it's wrong for two lesbian women to raise a child?
Who knows whose child it is, but are you saying that's wrong?
That's somehow not the same as a husband and a wife raising a child?
How dare you?
Are you saying it's wrong that this girl is fighting in combat?
How dare you?
You're really not allowed.
I mean, I guess we'll do it on this show for as long as they let us stay in the air.
To suggest, huh, maybe that isn't ideal.
Maybe there are more ideal ways of raising children or fighting wars.
But we'll say it.
But you're not really allowed to say that at universities, at the workplace.
You're not really allowed to say it anywhere.
So much for academic freedom.
There's always going to be boundaries on these things.
And by the way, it's about to become much harder to raise questions about this.
This is the ideology of Drag Queen Story Hour now throughout the entire culture.
Remember we were told by all those squishes, all the quote-unquote conservatives who were totally cool with Drag Queen Story Hour called it a blessing of liberty.
We were told, oh, it's just a, come on, just a little thing.
It's a little thing at some library in San Francisco.
It's no big deal.
So now PBS is teaming up with the New York City Department of Education.
They're partnering up on Drag Queen Story Hour programming.
Here is Miss Little Hot Mess, one of the leaders of Drag Queen Story Hour, talking about the new venture, which is geared towards kids aged three to eight.
Get your singing voices ready.
And we're going to start with our hips.
The hips on the drag queen go swish, swish, swish.
Swish, swish, swish.
Swish, swish, swish.
The hips on the drag queen go.
Swish, swish, swish.
All through the town.
The dance of the drag queen goes.
Twirl, twirl, twirl. Twirl, twirl, twirl. Twirl, twirl, twirl.
The dance of the dragon goes.
Twirl, twirl, twirl.
All through the town.
Big finish.
Excellent.
Give yourselves a round of applause.
Okay, I've had enough round of applause.
That's too much round of applause.
What's wrong with that?
Hey, what's wrong with that?
Are you seriously going to say it's wrong for drag queens to be dancing around for children?
You can't say that.
The New York City Department of Education says it's great.
PBS, public broadcasting, says it's great.
This is no longer just in some library.
Your kids are going to see this if they're watching PBS, which means you're a bad parent.
But let's say they flip, you know, you're trying to show them the good stuff.
You know, you're trying to show them wholesome entertainment.
Like, I don't know, anything else.
But then they accidentally turn on PBS and they see this.
This is what's going out there in the culture.
There is no academic freedom in the classroom or at work or in the government to disagree with this sort of thing.
You'll be called a bigot, you'll be called a phobe of some sort, and you will lose your job.
And that's just the way it goes.
It's not the only thing crazy going on in New York right now, by the way.
Andrew Yang, running for mayor of New York, some kind of imaginative conservatives...
I really enjoyed Andrew Yang when he was running for president.
I always thought he was one of the worst candidates in the race, and I was totally right.
Now he's talking about giving non-citizens the right to vote.
Now how can we continue to invest in our democracy to make it better here in New York City?
I think we should enable young people to vote Starting at age 16.
The second thing we should do is expand the franchise to non-citizens, lawful permanent residents.
Now we're here in part inside of the Statue of Liberty because New York City is a city of immigrants.
I myself am the son of immigrants.
And immigrants form the core of so many of our neighborhoods and communities.
There are approximately 622,000 lawful permanent residents.
You probably think of them as green card holders.
Who are responsible for tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.
Their kids go to our schools.
They supply many of the jobs that we rely upon.
They should have a say in the future of their city, too.
We can enable green card holders, lawful permanent residents, to be able to vote.
So young people, non-citizens, but we have to invest in the mechanics of our democracy at a higher level.
There it is.
Yang wants to invest in our democracy.
He wants to expand freedom by letting foreign nationals vote in our elections.
Now, do you see the problem here?
The problem that Andrew Yang is showing you is the problem with this, this whole abstract notion of freedom.
And sometimes you see it expressed in freedom of speech and sometimes you, you especially see it expressed in this like academic freedom canard.
It's true.
You In a certain sense...
By giving foreign nationals who are in our country the right to vote, you would expand freedom, certainly the freedom of these foreigners to vote, and you would expand democracy in the sense that more people would be voting.
But by doing that, you would be undercutting freedom, and you would be undercutting democracy.
Because democracy requires a distinction between the citizens and the non-citizens, the people who are in and the people who are out.
The country and not the country.
That's the point of national borders, which people like Andrew Yang are trying to erase.
If the citizens are going to have freedom, you've got to limit the freedom of non-citizens to interfere in the citizens' government.
If the democracy is going to be strong, you need to deny democratic rights to the people who are not in the democracy.
There is a thought that stops thought.
That's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
A line from Chesterton that is more and more apt each day.
If you want there to be freedom in the classroom, you need to limit certain things.
The whole purpose of liberal education is to teach you how to use your freedom.
That's why it's the liberal arts, right?
It's liberal education to make sense of our freedom.
It's not to learn how to do a trade.
It's not to learn how to do a job.
Contrary to what many conservatives say about how you've got to major in STEM or whatever.
No, the point of liberal education is actually so you can read a bunch of literature and history and make sense of human nature and your freedom and tamp down your vices and exercise your virtuous habits and your higher will.
So in order to do that, For instance, you should not be taught things that undermine the notion of objective reality or goodness or truth or beauty, which is precisely what these radical leftists are doing.
If you want to have true academic freedom, as William F. Buckley makes very clear in the book that launched The Modern Conservative Movement, that must mean the freedom of parents and trustees and people in our political system to limit the curriculum.
People can have, look, if some kooky professor like Hannah Nicole Jones, or Nicole Hannah, I keep confusing her with Anna Nicole Smith, who is a much more admirable person than Nicole Hannah Jones.
Nicole Hannah Jones, if she wants to teach her kooky trash, her anti-historical nonsense, If she wants to explore that in her own intellectual pursuits on her own time and her own dollar, that's totally fine by me.
I got no problem with that.
But she does not have the right to foist that trash on students in the classroom, particularly not in a taxpayer-funded classroom.
You want true freedom?
Then you got to...
Put limits on all of that disgusting libertine garbage that would undermine freedom.
This is one of the themes of my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Mind.
You can head on over to SpeechlessBook.com to pre-order your copy today, or if you want an extra personal touch, which I would strongly recommend, text Speechless to 53445 to pre-order a signed copy.
What I would recommend, actually, best of all, is you should get three copies.
Seriously, you should get through.
I know a lot of you have pre-ordered.
I love that you pre-ordered the book.
That's great.
You should get that copy to read.
Thumb through.
You should get the signed copy to keep.
A nice little keepsake.
That'd be kind of fun.
And you should get the audible.
You should get the audiobook so that you can read it in the car.
Now, some people might think that I'm saying this just so that we can triple the book sales.
Well, they're sort of right.
But I actually do this a lot.
I will often get the audiobook and the physical book, and then I'll switch back and forth.
If you want to understand the PC police better than they understand themselves, you know what you should do?
You should go pre-order Speechless.
There we go.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
Welcome back to the show.
My first question comes from Andrew.
Sir Knowles, I bid the assist, for I am speechless.
Controlling words, controlling minds.
Does that count?
Does he get a ding?
Okay, I guess he doesn't.
I thought they got dings, but that's okay.
That's fine.
We already got two.
I've been very Italian for my entire life, but a few weeks ago I heard you use a presumably Italian word that I had never heard before and could not find anywhere because I have no idea how to spell it.
The words sounded like gulions.
Ha ha ha!
Or maybe Gullionis or YouTube captions spelled it Gullion.
Please enlighten me.
So that word that I used, if you're from New York, if you come from a southern Italian family like Sicily or Calabria or Napoli or something like that, you might have heard this term.
Gullions is a kind of New York bastardization of a southern dialect of the Italian word Coglioni.
Coglioni is the sort of thing that Caitlyn Jenner once had, you know, colioni is the, it's like the word cojones is where it comes from.
It's a great word, and gulions just really is a terrific way to say it.
I'm glad that I could teach you New York Italian slang.
From Alexander, Michael, you and Ben seem to have somewhat different notions of free speech.
You frequently say that not all cancel culture is bad, for example, or that is rather canceling communists.
Critical race theory proponents, etc.
And that's good.
Whereas Ben seems to take a somewhat more libertarian, free speech absolutist approach and often warns of wielding political or cultural power that you wouldn't want to be wielded against you if the other party culture became more dominant.
My question is this.
How do you strike the ideal balance between canceling abhorrent ideas while still maintaining the appropriate amount of free speech principles?
Thanks, Active Duty Marine, a long-time fan.
Thank you very much.
I know that Ben talks about this a little bit.
You know, he definitely speaks much more in the free speech absolutist camp.
But I actually don't think our ideas on this are very far apart.
Because I think that if you asked Ben, hey Ben, do you think racists should be canceled?
I think he would probably say yes.
In fact, I think he has said yes in the past.
If you asked Ben, hey, if someone, you know, says Heil Hitler at the water cooler, do you think they should not lose their job?
I think he would obviously say, yeah, no, that person has no right to keep their job.
So I think in practice he would acknowledge those limits.
Maybe his language would be a little more in the free speech abstraction camp than mine would be, but I think that actually kind of proves the point.
We would all acknowledge that speech has limits.
This is true as a matter of law.
There are certain speeches that are just illegal, direct threats, fraud, copyright infringement, sedition, these sorts, obscenity, obviously.
So those sorts of things, and those protections, especially obscenity, have been whittled away over the years.
But the point of it is, the reason we have those protections is that some speech undermines other speech.
So I'm not even saying...
It's great to cancel people.
I mean, I think it's great to cancel communists.
I think it's awesome.
I think it's great to cancel Nicole Hannah-Jones.
I'm totally for that.
But more than that, I guess I'm saying we will cancel people.
People will be canceled.
Every society throughout all of history, including and especially our own, has canceled people.
The thing that's changed, and it's what we're referring to now with cancel culture, is just what people get canceled for.
In the 50s, you get canceled for being a communist.
Today, you get canceled for not being a communist.
And so I just, I think that the real squishes on this.
I'm not talking about Ben.
I'm talking about people who won't acknowledge that there are any limits to speech whatsoever.
The real squishes on this are just burying their head in the sand and just denying reality.
I think politics goes a lot better for you when you acknowledge reality.
The reality is there are going to be standards.
There are going to be things that people face consequences for and get ostracized for and even are censored for.
And I would just much rather those standards be good and true than false and wicked, like the ones that the left is trying to push forward.
And we've fallen into this trap for a long time, and it's the problem that I'm trying to fix, urgently trying to fix, in my upcoming book, Speechless.
From Grace.
Dear Michael Knowles, I'm a college student.
Next year is my senior year.
I'm going to be a middle school math teacher.
It's not a popular age, but yeah, it's not.
Good luck for you.
Oh my gosh, you're a saint.
But those kids need lots of love and someone who won't force them into the leftist lie.
Next year, my college is going to be requiring the vaccine to attend.
We'll still be required to wear masks on campus.
I don't want to get the vaccine because of the stories I've heard about its effects.
I've brought up my concerns with family and close friends.
I was offered a chance at a forged vaccine card.
Because of my faith, I feel as though lying is wrong, and I don't think that people should be forging vaccine cards.
Do I get the vaccine and just pray that it does more good than harm?
Thank you for your wisdom, O suavest of the Daily Wire hosts.
Sincerely, a concerned college student.
Tricky question.
Other people have written in with this question.
If you have very serious concerns about the vaccine, I think it's perfectly right not to get the vaccine.
Now, there is a question over how dishonest it would be to imply to someone that you have had that vaccine when you have not had that vaccine, and how one might say it without committing a sin, without lying overtly, but while maybe obscuring one's real actions and desires and motives.
I think that if you don't want to get the vaccine, that's a perfectly legitimate thing.
I think you're obviously a young person.
You're not really at risk of this virus.
I think the overreach here is outrageous by the government, and I don't think that the public health officials have very much credibility at all.
And I think that there are ways to be creative in one's language and communication that would not require one to commit a mortal sin while still avoiding this vaccine.
Take that for what it's worth.
From Paul.
For example, Demi.
I want to get this right, Michael.
I would hate to offend someone, especially in a way they don't yet know is offensive to them.
Thank you, Michael.
Have a wonderful weekend.
I need a drink after that question.
I don't know if I... Did anybody...
Well, there's another trick, too.
Because when I moved to the South, Senator Cruz said, Michael, have you started to speak Southern yet?
And I said, how do you speak Southern?
He said, well, instead of referring to you, you have to refer to y'all.
I said, oh, well, you'd refer to y'all in the second person plural, right, when you're talking to multiple people.
He said, no, no, you refer to y'all even when you're talking to one person.
I said, well, if you refer to y'all when you're talking to one person, then what is the plural of y'all?
He said, well, it's all y'all.
So I don't know, you know, I'm obviously not the expert on these various dialects.
I'm pretty good on Southern Italian, Southern American, and woke leftist.
A little bit harder for me.
But I agree, it's very, very tricky.
And even the verb agreement is tricky here.
If Demi Lovato is now they...
Would you say, they is Demi Lovato?
Their name?
You'd say their name is Demi Lovato.
That's not complicated.
But they is?
They goes?
They goes to the store.
Now this sounds ungrammatical.
I guess it's ungrammatical from the very beginning.
From Ken.
Are we coming at the abortion issue from the wrong perspective?
It seems obvious that the left does not think or care that a fetus is a living thing with rights.
Should we then switch the argument to men's rights to have a say on what happens to their unborn child?
I was not always a Christian, and in my younger years there were two times I had to drive my lady to get an abortion.
Oh my gosh.
And both times I begged her not to do it.
Gosh.
I don't mean to be crass, but if sperm is found on a body or a rape victim...
Or a rape victim.
It's his DNA. But if it's used to help create a brand new life, we're told it's no longer his.
Hmm.
Maybe changing the minds of the left is the wrong angle.
Maybe we should change the minds of the quiet men afraid to speak up for their 50% of the decision.
Yeah, I mean, fair enough.
The issue here, gosh, what a horrible thing.
I mean, I have many thoughts on this experience.
Sorry.
Sorry that you were involved in that.
Sorry, especially for the kid.
Uh, Should the man have rights here?
Yeah, certainly the man should.
I mean, we should just outlaw abortion, so it should not really be even a question of the men or the women.
It just should not be legal.
And obviously the men should have some say here, because man is one of the parents, one of the two parents of the little child, regardless of what the U.S. Army says about that, and lesbian mothers, and all sorts of things.
Now, the problem here, though, is If you're having sex out of wedlock, which statistically everybody is doing, so I'm not trying to sound holier than thou because now I happen to be married and did not find myself in that awful situation.
Really, it is incumbent on the men to kind of man up and not put women in a bad position.
And if they do put women in a bad position, to man up and get married.
And not facilitate these sorts of awful things, but to say, hey, let's go.
Shotgun wedding, baby.
We're getting married in a month or two.
And, you know, people don't want to do that.
And maybe it was just a one-night stand or something, but that's why you shouldn't do that sort of thing.
And, you know, if you do, a lot of people do it.
But then there are going to be consequences to that.
And no matter how awful the consequence of that would be, one imagines it could not be worse than killing a kid, right?
So yes, men should have greater rights here, but men also need to behave in a more civilized way.
And if they make mistakes, they gotta take responsibility for those mistakes.
By the way, also, if the mistake is a child, if the consequence of the mistake is a child...
It's not a bad reward.
Not a bad reward for your mistake.
From Matthew.
Hey, Michael.
I recently turned 19, which is the legal age to purchase tobacco products where I live in Vancouver, Canada.
Oh, my gosh.
Canada is freer than America?
They raised the age here in the United States to 21.
When I was a kid, I was 18, but now it's 21.
Oh, my gosh.
That's pathetic.
I've been curious to give cigar smoking a try with my friends, particularly because our ridiculous provincial health guidelines still only permit outdoor gatherings.
And I see it as a good way to have something to do while hanging out together.
When I mentioned this to my mother, she was absolutely horrified.
Doesn't help that when you Google, are cigars harmful, the top result is a page from the CDC that basically says cigar smoking will turn you into a tooth decaying cancer magnet.
Since you mentioned on your show that you started smoking cigars at an early age, do you think it's a worthwhile habit to adopt and convince my mother of?
If so, how should I go about changing her negative perception of cigars?
Cigars entail health risks.
That's just the case.
Drinking entails health risks.
Eating fast food entails health risks.
You can mitigate some of this by only doing it in moderation.
I wouldn't call it a habit.
I think of cigarette smoking as a habit.
it.
That's that we're really an addiction that satisfies the appetitive part of our souls.
Whereas I think of cigar smoking as a hobby that appeals to the thumatic part of our souls.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that cigarette smoking is just more about kind of base appetites, whereas cigar smoking is more spirited.
It's more of a jubilant activity.
It's more of a celebratory sort of thing.
And so I don't, you know, if I don't have a cigar for a while, I don't start getting the shakes and scratching my neck.
I like, I enjoy smoking cigars.
I I had one for breakfast, as a matter of fact.
Just a few puffs of one for breakfast that I didn't finish last night.
But you should be aware there are health risks, okay?
There's health risks to a lot of things in life.
And so if you do it in moderation, I mean, that's what I do, and I think it's terrific.
But, you know, there is a world in which you have to face health consequences for that.
There's no way to escape consequences in life.
I think there was a line, though, from Churchill who said that he's taken more out of cigars than cigars have taken out of him.
From Mason, Michael, I've got to admit, I look forward to watching your show daily just to see what outfit you have on.
What?
Wow, this is great.
I should have put this question further up in the show.
You're the most consistently best dressed man other than Jordan Peterson.
Do you just have good taste or does your wife help pick your wardrobe?
Wow, to be compared to Jordan Peterson in the sartorial department is a great honor.
Jordan always wears those wonderfully tailored Seville row suits.
I appreciate the compliment on my taste.
I consider myself to be a man of simple taste.
I am easily satisfied by the very best.
Another line borrowed from Winston Churchill.
From Joshua.
Why is everyone complaining that Biden seemingly didn't get anything in return for lifting sanctions on NS2 pipeline instead of wondering what Russia did to earn it?
More Democrats elicited Russian election interference.
Yes, of course.
There's a ton of shady stuff.
It was so preposterous when the left...
I mean, specifically with regard to Russia.
The idea that the left would accuse the right of cozying up to Russia after the left spent...
Almost a full century sucking up to the Soviet Union and in some cases working directly on their behalf is crazy.
But yeah, it's not just feel-good ideological stuff.
There's some brass knuckle money and power politics behind a lot of this.
From Sophia, Michael, I watched Candace's show today and her argument with Nicole Arbor reminded me of what you always say about cancel culture.
It seems like the right is indeed confused about what we stand for.
And I think the problem is a semantic one.
How we define cancel culture.
We should be canceling celebrities, not regular people, who do heinous things online, like harassment, right?
Give the libs a taste of their own medicine, except we stand up for the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Did you watch the episode?
What do you think?
Subscribe for Ben, stay for Klavan, renewed for Knowles.
Thank you.
I'm I'm so pleased to hear that.
In our final 10 seconds...
Candace was right.
Yes.
Canceling is totally fine.
I mean, I really, I like Nicole Arbor.
She's a very, very nice gal, but I disagree with a lot of conservatives on this.
As I think I've made clear in this show, People will be canceled.
There will be standards.
People will face consequences.
The question is what for?
What are the consequences?
What are the things that are acceptable to stay?
What are the things that are unacceptable to stay?
The reason that we've lost so much of the culture, I think, is because we've thrown our hands up and disavowed standards entirely, which we continue to do at our own peril.
Learn how to avoid it in my upcoming book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
We'll see you Monday.
We'll see you Monday.
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.
Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
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