Republicans shoot down the Corrupt Politicians Act, a US Olympian fantasizes about burning the American flag on the Olympic podium, and the Chief of Naval Operations defends Critical Race Theory in the military.
My new book ’Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds,’ is now available wherever books are sold. Grab your copy today here: https://utm.io/udtMJ
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Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republicans, and the last two moderate Democrats on Earth blocked the Democrats' attempted federal takeover of elections.
The biggest power grab attempt that I have ever seen in my lifetime in this country would have likely given Democrats permanent majorities.
Later today, the Senate will vote on whether to advance Democrats' transparently partisan plan to tilt every election in America permanently in their favor.
By now, the rotten inner workings of this power grab have been thoroughly exposed to the light.
It's a recipe for undermining confidence in our elections, for remaking our entire system of government to suit the preferences of one far end of the political spectrum.
And if they could, many Democrats would pass it with the slimmest possible majority, even after its companion faced bipartisan opposition over in the House.
What a craven political calculation.
What a way to show your disdain for the American people's choices.
The Senate is no obstacle to voting laws done the right way.
The Senate is only an obstacle when the policy is flawed and the process is rotten.
Today, the Senate is going to fulfill our founding purpose.
Stop the partisan power grab and reject S-1.
And with that, Mr.
Cocaine Mitch shut down the debate and the law died, at least for now.
Democrats are complaining in particular that Republicans avoided debate on the bill.
But sometimes it's good to avoid debate.
As my friend Steven Crowder showed yesterday when some lib ambushed him.
As the U.S. Olympic team is learning right now, now that one of its athletes is promising to burn the American flag.
And now that critical race theory has infected even the U.S. military.
Maybe we have entertained a little too much debate from bad faith radicals.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Cocaine Mitch shut it down.
What would this bill have done?
Had Democrats gotten this through S-1 and H-R-1, colloquially known as the Corrupt Politicians Act, Democrats called it the For the People Act, but we all know what it really is.
The bill would have federalized...
Congressional elections would have declared that standard state and local election systems, ways to keep the voter rolls purged of ineligible voters, limiting voting by mail, requiring voter ID, all that sort of stuff, that would be gone.
couldn't really do that, required all challenges to the law to be filed in federal courts in Washington, D.C., so you wouldn't be able to get to fight it really at the state level.
It would have established online and automatic voter registration for the millions and millions of illegal aliens.
They knew, they knew that illegal aliens would have been registered to vote.
They denied that fact, but then the next provision of the law would have protected illegal aliens from prosecution if they did vote.
So they wouldn't have included that provision had they actually believed that the law would not be registering illegal aliens to vote, would have established same-day voter registration, would have registered minors to vote that That's what we need.
We need to lower the voting age in this country, right?
Would have mandated early voting, which is a terrible idea, and it would have established nationwide vote-by-mail without...
Voter ID. Also would have allowed ballots to be counted 10 days after the election day.
Remember what happened in 2020?
Remember that things were looking like they were going one way in the election?
Then everyone just kind of stopped counting.
Everyone took a little pause.
And then all of a sudden, the ballot count started to go the other way.
It's pretty strange.
Probably shouldn't be able to do that sort of thing.
So this is good stuff.
We so rarely report on good stuff coming out of Washington, especially out of the Republican establishment.
But stopping this power grab actually was a very important thing.
And I mention it not just for the good news about the policy, but I mention it because of what it tells us about debate.
The Democrats, who, as far as I can tell, are not all that in favor of free speech these days.
They're not very in favor of hearing out the other side and dealing with serious arguments and going back and forth.
They're complaining that We did not have a debate over S1. Sometimes it's good not to have debate.
debate.
When your opponents are not playing fair, when your opponents are not playing in good faith, then very often it's wise to avoid debate.
My friend Steven Crowder learned this yesterday.
I don't know either of the non-Steven Crowder involved in this incident.
There was Steven Crowder and then some lib that he was going to debate and then some other lib jumped in and he was secretly going to debate him instead or something.
It was It was all this kind of inner YouTube drama that I really don't know anything about.
But it actually highlights the very same principle that we're talking here that was going on in Washington, D.C. So just to give you some context...
Crowder agrees to debate this one guy.
He actually jokes.
He says, I bet this guy doesn't want to debate me.
And then at the very last minute, it was a bait and switch, and he swapped him out for some other lib.
Take a listen.
Hi, Steven.
Hey, Ethan.
How you doing, brother?
Hey, I just want to say on a serious note that I'm glad your wife is okay.
I heard you had a little bit of an issue with your wife.
Yeah, thanks.
Well, she's pregnant with twins.
Yeah.
Well, by the way, congratulations, too.
I know you guys are in the same process.
All right, man.
Well, I appreciate you coming on and doing this.
A lot of people don't, so just talking, you know, avoiding kind of the social media pissing contest drama.
All right, okay, I'm really glad to have my next guest on the show, and I've always said this, I always respect people who enter into the arena.
Ethan, thanks, man, for making the time.
You're very welcome, and I just want to say, I know you called me, you said that I would be a layup.
I think I used something like that.
I think you're right, because I don't think I'm a very good debater.
I think you know that.
So I didn't want to make it too easy for you.
Oh, okay.
So I've prepared.
Okay.
Stephen, do you know that the Spartans are...
Did they practice man love with children?
Oh, jeez.
Okay, so this is what's going to happen.
What did I tell you?
He was going to do anything he could to avoid...
Oh!
Oh, there he is!
Oh, no!
Sam Seder!
Whoa, what a f***ing nightmare!
I had no idea this was going to happen!
I have a general rule.
This is a great opportunity.
I don't start a debate based with people on a lie.
Or sabotaging.
Stephen, show yourself, you coward.
Stephen, show yourself.
Okay, I think we can pause the debate there.
I think we've gotten all of the important content that we can get out of this.
Crowder agrees to debate this one guy that I've never heard of.
But then, at the last second, some other guy that I'm not familiar with, who, actually, one of the reasons this was called to my attention is because people were saying that this other guy, Sam Sater, looks like the Kroger store version of me.
I don't know, he's got similar skin and kind of glasses or whatever.
So, then he jumps in at the last minute, and then they just start insulting one another.
And Crowder says, okay, I'm not doing this.
This is not what I signed up for.
Crowder was right not to debate these guys.
Frankly, the only mistake that Crowder made was agreeing to debate this jerk in the first place.
These guys, again, I don't want to speak out of turn because I really don't know who these people are other than Stephen Crowder, but they don't seem like very serious people.
It doesn't seem like anything productive would come out of just talking to either of these guys.
So don't do it.
Here's a very important political lesson for you.
Never wrestle a pig.
You will both get dirty, but the pig will like it.
I love debating people on the left.
I like debating people on the right.
I especially love debating squishes in the center because I want to pry them over to my side.
But you have to have a purpose to the debate.
We, I think, on the right have really gotten high on this idea of the free marketplace of ideas and you challenge bad ideas with good ideas.
Yes, that's all well and good, but you need to make sure you're actually engaging with ideas.
You need to make sure that you and the debate opponent agree on the purpose of the debate.
If the purpose of the debate is to hash out some issue to prove your side or to persuade one another, that's all well and good.
If the purpose of the debate is to just score some cheap point and try to humiliate somebody or try to insult or make jokes about somebody without any real substance there, there's no point to that.
There is nothing dignified or wonderful about engaging in the free marketplace of ideas to get in the mud with pigs.
I don't know why anybody would do that sort of thing.
You need to at least agree on the basic premises before you get into it.
We're actually seeing this play out, not just on the internet, but also on the U.S. Olympic team.
These people who are on the Olympic team, they can do for themselves, generally.
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A U.S. Olympian, a transgender athlete who was chosen as an alternate to represent the U.S. at the Summer Olympics, Is a BMX freestyle rider.
Apparently there's a bicycle sport in the Olympics.
And his name is Chelsea Wolfe.
I guess he's a guy who now pretends to be a woman.
And he says that, quote, my goal is to win the Olympics so I can burn a U.S. flag on the podium.
There are many problems with this fella joining the U.S. Olympic team.
Not the least of which is he would be competing as a woman, but he's not a woman, he's a man.
But actually, even more important than that, this guy wants to represent the United States at the Olympics, but he hates the United States.
He wants to represent the United States so that he can humiliate the United States, so he can burn the symbol of the whole country.
He should not be permitted on the team because he's a dude.
There are many reasons he should not be here.
But he should not be permitted on the team, more importantly even, because he's not on the team.
He's not on the bigger team, which is the American team.
This is a good example of cancel culture.
He posted this comment to Facebook when he said he wants to burn the American flag on the podium.
We should cancel him for that.
That's a good use of cancel culture.
I always go back to that Chesterton line.
There's a thought that stops thought.
And that's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
There is an American Olympian that stops the American Olympians.
It undermines our presence there.
That sort of thing ought to be stopped.
The Olympic podium is not a free marketplace of ideas.
When you're out there representing...
Actually, the same thing could be said of all of our sports.
This is one of the aspects that was so offensive about the Colin Kaepernick thing.
Games, sports, always have a patriotic quality.
When you abuse those sorts of things to attack your own country, that is ugly, it's counterproductive, and you shouldn't be permitted to do it.
Kaepernick shouldn't have been permitted to do it on the football field, and especially this fella should not be permitted to do it at the Olympics.
But, there are different flags now that people believe represent them.
This guy on the Olympic alternate team does not believe that the American flag represents him.
I think that might be true of a great many liberals.
I don't think a lot of them will kneel, not in veneration, but in protest of the American flag.
A lot of them seem to prefer the rainbow flag or the BLM flag.
There's a new flag, which is, it's like...
The rainbow flag on steroids, it's like if you took the rainbow flag and mashed it up with the BLM flag and probably the hammer and sickle too, it's called the progress pride flag.
And the progress flag, it's like the rainbow flag with some weird other rainbow angles coming in and there's a transgender thing and there's a black thing.
It's very, very confusing.
The State Department is now going to fly that flag.
I'm not joking.
The Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, made the announcement at an Atlantic Council event, talking about the liberal establishment.
This is one of these shadowy organizations that just sort of pushes the broad internationalist liberal establishment consensus.
Blinken says, I think this is going to be a significant couple of days and we will see the progress flag flying at the State Department.
It's a, quote, symbol that encompasses the diversity and intersectionality of LGBTQI persons and communities around the world and has been approved to fly this month all over the place.
Very distressing, very sad for our country, but this is not surprising.
I was not surprised when I saw this at all.
The American flag is the symbol of the American country.
The pride flag is the symbol of the liberal empire.
The American flag represents a specific country with borders in a specific place.
The pride flag makes universal claims about every country on earth.
Makes universal claims about human nature, who we are, our sexual desires, what people should be permitted to do in countries around the world.
So it is no surprise to me that the State Department, which has always been liberal and is basically the institutional defender of the American liberal empire, would gravitate toward that flag.
That is the flag that more accurately represents what that institution wants to do and what many liberals who support that institution want to do.
It's very sad, but when Trump came out and said that the battle in the election would be one between nationalism and globalism, He might as well have said it's a battle between these two flags.
Do we want the American way of life, the traditional American understanding of our country and who we are, or do we want this radical new universalist thing that's been bubbling up at least since Woodrow Wilson and has been gaining steam more and more and more?
That's a real battle, and radicals have infiltrated our institutions, up to and including the State Department, to push us toward that latter direction, which you can read a lot about in my New book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for order.
It's hard to get used to saying that.
I would say my upcoming pre-order, but no, it's out now.
It was released yesterday.
Thank you to everybody who ordered it.
This book is doing very well on the sales charts.
I really want to stick a finger in the eye of the New York Times and make them put me on the list.
But really, I appreciate everyone who's written, people have written in and said, you know, they've read several chapters already.
So that's very kind.
I appreciate that.
The first time I write a book with words, I'm glad to know people are reading them because we are seeing this play out right now.
It's in all of the institutions.
No institution is safe from this.
The one institution that we used to believe in this country was safe from this kind of woke craziness.
Obviously, it's not Hollywood.
It's not the media.
It's not the bureaucracy.
It's not big tech.
We used to think the military was safe, but it no longer is.
The chief of naval operations, the CNO, was just asked by Senator Tom Cotton, the military veteran himself, Whether he would disavow the statement that is in part of the Navy's reading list now, that capitalism is racist.
The Navy has this reading list that they put out and they're recommending that sailors read these insane leftist critical race theory books.
And Cotton said, hold on.
Do you really believe that this is the sort of thing that's going to get our servicemen in fighting form?
And the CNO refuses to disavow.
You're saying as the senior leader of the Navy that you want 18-year-old sailors and 22-year-old ensigns.
to read a book that asserts that capitalism is essentially racist.
Do you agree that capitalism is essentially racist?
Sir, with all due respect, I'm not going to engage without understanding the context of statements like that.
In talking to sailors over the past year, it's clearly obvious to me and others that the murder of George Floyd and the events surrounding that, the discussions in this country about racism, which go back for years and years and years, Are still a painful part of our culture.
And that talking about them, understanding them is the best approach.
And that offering books like Kendi's for people to read.
And they don't have to agree with every assertion that Kendi makes.
I don't accept every assertion that Kendi makes, and I wouldn't think that all sailors would as well.
But they need to be exposed to it so that they're making facts-based.
We need critical thinkers in the Navy.
Somebody put a pink hat on his head.
Somebody paint his fingernails rainbow.
This is so pathetic.
Maybe all those colors that he's wearing on his chest, you know, I thought that had military significance.
It might be the progress pride flag.
This is so pathetic to see this coming out of our U.S. military, for goodness sakes, defending CRT, defending radical racialist theories.
Good grief, man.
How pathetic.
We gotta clear some house with the top brass over there at the Pentagon.
Let's just take his argument for what it is.
It's completely preposterous.
He's saying, and you hear this a lot, he's making the same argument that everyone makes with the free marketplace of ideas.
Well, we might not agree with Ibram Kendi's book, but our sailors and our ensigns, they need to be exposed to all of these ideas.
And then he starts bringing up George Floyd, which is an entire other matter, but it shows that this guy's obviously accepting radical leftist premises.
But it's just BS. This guy doesn't believe this.
This guy doesn't believe that the ensigns and the sailors need to be Opened up to every single idea.
Is the guy going to put Mein Kampf on the reading list?
I don't think so.
Is the guy going to put Speechless on the reading list, for that matter?
Probably, according to this insane chief of naval operations, probably those are equally evil, terrible, bigoted books.
No, of course not.
The reading list is only so long.
The sailors are only going to be exposed to so many ideas.
The military literally brainwashes you.
That is one of the points of military training.
It is not a student cafe where we can just debate all sorts of ideas.
And what this CNO has decided is that radical leftist ideology, critical race theory, Ibram Kendi, all that excruple trash is worth being put into our sailors' minds.
It's worth poisoning our sailors' minds.
It's just outrageous.
This stuff needs to be banned.
We should not be permitting this sort of thing to infect our military.
They should be reading good books, like Speechless.
Thank you so much to everyone who's pre-order.
It's now available everywhere at your local bookstore, at Amazon, Barnes& Noble.
You may still be able to get a copy of Premier Collectibles.
I'm actually not sure about that.
That may have ended with a pre-order.
I know they sold out there.
They might be getting some more in.
So anyway, you can check that out if you want to get an autographed first edition.
Thank you to everyone who has bought it.
Sincerely, I really, really appreciate it.
I hope you enjoy the book.
Let me know what you think about it.
It's no secret that the left has gone too far left.
That is why it is time for some voices of reason, such as the people in this studio, to discuss how we can save America from its radical fate.
Join me, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, and Andrew Klavan for another cigar-packed session of Backstage.
Streams tomorrow, June 24th at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central at dailywire.com and on our YouTube channel, Daily Wire.
It's easy to remember because it's just the name of the company.
Head on over there.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
The chief of naval operations says that sailors need to read trash like Ibram Kendi's stupid book because we need critical thinkers in the military.
I think what he really means is we need critical theorists in the military.
I think he means that we need these radical ideologues.
And do you know how we're hovering right above the target, to use a military analogy?
Do you know how I know that the right is right to go after critical race theory and its associated academic movements?
Because the left is retreating.
They're running away.
You'll notice that their new argument is...
Critical race theory doesn't exist.
They'll say, what is critical race theory?
It's a retreat to nominalism, as my friend Matt Peterson at Claremont pointed out.
Nominalism, this idea that, you know, the only general category is, they're just names.
They don't really refer to any real things.
Critical race theory, what do you mean by that?
You know, come on.
Oh, I mean a body of work.
I think I have a book right here.
Here it is.
I mean this body of work...
It's called Critical Race Theory by writers such as Kimberly Crenshaw, Neil Gontonda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas, and a number of other people who have developed this academic movement out of critical theory more broadly that is attempting to subvert our entire national self-understanding, our personal self-understanding for that matter.
That's a problem.
We should not be doing that.
The left will now say, there's no such thing as critical race theory.
That's out of one side of their mouth, and then out of the other side of their mouth they'll say, and also critical race theory is great.
They're doing this with Juneteenth.
I knew it, by the way.
I hate to say I told you so.
They push for Juneteenth.
The squishes just roll over on Juneteenth.
And then what happens?
They say, well, we have the Juneteenth holiday, but, you know, Juneteenth doesn't mean anything because you're not even allowed to teach people about their race.
The Republicans don't even want us to teach people about slavery because they're kicking critical race theory out of the classroom.
You're telling me.
You're telling me.
Without critical race theory, people would not be taught that slavery exists?
I think they would.
Pretty sure we've taught that before.
Critical race theory is something quite different and quite radical.
This is real.
This is infecting not just the universities, Not just the high schools, but corporate boardrooms, even the U.S. military.
And it's leading to some really kooky suggestions.
The Washington Post just came out and said that in order to grapple with racism and in order to cast a truly critical lens, white people need to form and engage in white accountability groups.
Racism, racialization, white body supremacy is not episodic, it's structural.
Remember that there were thousands of George Floyd before the one that you saw.
Your bodily response to this horror, right, is not the same thing as you dealing with the structural aspects of this.
George Floyd's death became a deeply personal and racial tragedy for many Americans.
For the first time, white people were becoming aware of their whiteness and the systemic ways that white supremacy affects all of us.
White people in particular get aroused, get upset, say this is unjust, this isn't right, this shouldn't happen.
There's like an awakening that happens.
And so part of their racial identity development is seeing that awakening.
White accountability groups are really helpful in terms of having a place to process, having a group of people whose responsibility it is to call me on things or to challenge me.
Okay, there are two things going on here.
Obviously, these women are absolutely daft, but the points they're raising speak to true things.
The first one, probably the most interesting aspect, is that these radical leftists are calling for a white racial consciousness.
White people do not have much racial consciousness.
The Pew Research Center showed this just a few years ago.
They measured racial consciousness.
They asked people, is your race somewhat or very important to your identity?
For every racial group, other than white people, More than 50% of the respondents said, yes, race is somewhat or very important to my identity.
This was true among Asians, it was true among Hispanics, it was especially true among black people.
Black people's racial consciousness is higher than 70%.
For white people, it's 15%.
It's very, very low.
Contrary to what you've heard about white supremacy and all the other nonsense, white people do not have a racial consciousness.
There have been white identitarians.
There have been people who have called for a white racial politics who have said whites need to get their racial consciousness up.
And some people who say that today.
for the purpose of creating racial solidarity in the way that other racial groups do it.
But these leftist radicals do not advocate racial consciousness among whites for the purpose of giving them solidarity, obviously.
It's for the purpose of instilling shame in them.
So it's this unique case.
And this has been going on for many decades now, especially since the 1970s.
There's been a real effort on the left to cultivate racial consciousness among Hispanics, among Asians.
These are, by the way, two racial categories that were basically invented in the 1970s.
Before that, you would talk about Mexicans or Guatemalans or Chinese or Japanese, but you wouldn't talk about Asian.
That's so many people.
Hispanic, it's like a quarter of the earth.
I don't know, it's so many people.
But it was felt on the left that in order to mirror the political achievements of, the black civil rights movement, they would have to create these groups.
So for all the other racial groups, the left cultivates racial consciousness to instill racial pride.
you For white people, the left cultivates racial consciousness to instill racial shame.
It is so perverse.
It is so weird.
Now, I think every group could probably learn more from the shame part of it than the pride part of it.
Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
And shame gives us a sense of sin.
So I think what's going on here, when we talk about a racial, what do they call it, the white accountability group, What these people are really trying to get at is confession.
Whiteness for them is just a synonym for sin, and accountability groups is a synonym for confession.
Like you go into a confessional and confess your sins to a priest, or some people confess their sins to one another in a small group.
That's what's going on, except the sin here is just being white.
That's the standard.
And so, under this perverse theory...
No one has anything to feel sorry for except for white people because no one has free will.
No one has moral agency other than white people.
That, according to this idea.
Very bizarre.
You can see how serious ideas can just be so perverted to make no sense whatsoever.
According to these guys, and specifically according to the mayor of Washington, D.C., But mayors across the country, you see this with Lori Lightfoot in Chicago and other race hustlers.
According to these people, white supremacy is pervasive and invisible and we need accountability for it.
Now, Black Lives Matter violence is very visible, quite pervasive.
We can see it happening before our eyes, and we all need to deny it.
If you asked any lib on the street today, what's a bigger problem in America?
White supremacy or Black Lives Matter terrorism.
I bet, especially if people were in public and they couldn't tell you what they believe in their heart of hearts, they just had to say the line that is socially accepted.
They would say white supremacy, it's a horrible, white supremacy is the greatest problem in America!
Where is it?
Show me the white supremacy.
Show me on the map where the white supremacy is.
Because I can show you where the BLM terrorism is.
It's in Minneapolis.
It's in Washington, D.C. It's in Los Angeles.
It's in New York.
It's in Chicago.
It's all over the place.
It's in Nashville, for goodness sakes.
Not anymore, but during the heat of the 2020 riots, there was violence.
They set a courthouse on fire.
So I can show you that, but you can't show me the white supremacy.
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican.
Just grilled the mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, about this issue of BLM terrorism.
Do you have a property damage estimate from the summer riots?
I'm glad to hear you say that you are opposed to riotous behavior, whether it happened on 16th Street or here.
Madame Marie, could you answer the question?
Do you have an estimate of the property damage during the summer riots?
I know that we had one night of rioting in the district.
One night of rioting during BLM in Washington, D.C. Is that true?
I was personally in Washington, D.C. for more than one night of leftist BLM violence.
Okay, we all know that that is BS. There's video of this sort of thing.
And she just lied.
Ron Johnson asks a perfectly fair question.
What was the cost of the BLM riots?
Yeah, I'm glad that you're interested and I don't, but I don't.
Answer the question, Mayor Bowser.
What was the cause?
Well, we had one night.
One night.
Just total gaslighting.
Total gaslighting.
This is not someone engaging in the free marketplace of ideas.
This is not someone having a real deliberative exercise here.
This is unreasonable, logic-free, grunting interest politics.
A lot of violence in our streets.
There was a lot of violence on Juneteenth, our most sacred national feast day.
Juneteenth.
You know, as of about eight minutes ago.
Juneteenth is the National Independence Day.
That's actually the name of the act.
The Juneteenth National Independence Day Act.
So, the left contrives this holiday out of some local tradition in Galveston.
They invent this whole new national holiday.
And there was violence at Juneteenth celebrations.
Juneteenth partiers shot up a celebration in Oakland, but that wasn't even the craziest part.
You had about 5,000 people gathered at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California to celebrate Juneteenth.
And seven people get shot at this celebration.
Gosh, sure got rowdy.
Then an ambulance shows up and the feast goers started twerking on the ambulance.
Oh, my God.
You can see when they're trying to wheel people into this ambulance, and there's a young woman, multiple young women, twerking on men on the ambulance.
Everyone filming it.
Probably making it pretty tough to put the injured people into the ambulance.
Filming, laughing.
Then some guy just jumps up, climbs on top of the ambulance.
Yeah, he's throwing a football.
That looks fun.
They're trying to be nice maybe.
When I see an ambulance behind me in traffic, I usually pull to the shoulder of the road because I don't want to impede the ambulance's journey.
But these guys didn't want the ambulance to impede their ability to grind on one another and dance on a car and throw the football.
I mention this not only because I think the Juneteenth national holiday is a farce and a very bad idea, but also because I never want to hear about police brutality again.
I never want to hear about over-incarceration and the white supremacist law enforcement.
You saw this the other day, actually.
There were people twerking on a cop car in, where was it, Chicago or New York?
And the car kept driving.
They're like, get off the car.
Stop it.
but they're not really doing anything about it.
You, you have a very dangerous situation where people are getting shot, where people need to be taken back to the hospital, where you got to get out of the way of the ambulance.
Then you've got a bunch of absolute degenerates dancing and jumping and climbing on a car.
Nothing happens, no consequences whatsoever.
You've got crime spiking right now in cities around the country, notably Chicago, where shootings and murders are up 50%.
And what happens?
No one does it.
They all complain about police brutality on the left.
They all complain about the over-incarceration.
We have a severe under-incarceration problem in this country.
Just by definition, if crime is spiking, if criminals are running free on the street, then we are under-incarcerating people.
We need criminal justice reform to put more criminals in prison.
It's not going to happen, though.
BLM rioters are getting completely off the hook.
I mean, we talked about it either yesterday or the previous episode on this show.
In the Bronx, the majority of BLM terrorists are just having the cases dismissed.
The looters, the rioters, just doesn't matter.
Now, if you go and dance on Nancy Pelosi's desk in a horn helmet, then you're going to get the book thrown at you.
You're probably going to go to Gitmo.
But if you shoot up parties, if you dance on ambulances and cop cars, if you riot city after city after city and you loot stores, totally fine.
Does that seem fair to you?
Does that seem like the sort of civilized society where everyone's playing by the rules and we can engage in the free marketplace of ideas?
I'm not so sure about that.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, tells us that there is one real threat in this country that we need to focus on.
Not the thugs shooting people in Chicago.
Not the BLM and Antifa terrorists that have burned down the country for a year.
Not the looters and the rioters and the killers, and no, we need to worry about Trump.
There is a reporter, again, I don't know what outlet he's from, a leftist reporter who pointed out that President Trump is about to start holding rallies again, and he wants to know if the White House is concerned about the inevitable violence.
Is the administration concerned that actual violent extremists and people espousing secessionist rhetoric are finding a home in Republican primaries and could actually be elected to office?
And then I have that second question.
Well, I'm not going to label people domestic violent extremists officially from here.
I think we have certainly seen problematic rhetoric, rhetoric, followers of QAnon and conspiracy theories who not just who don't just run but are elected to office.
So there's already a record of that.
President Biden's predecessor is going to return to his campaign style rallies in Ohio this coming weekend.
Has anyone from the administration reached out to Governor DeWine Or anyone in Ohio's government about the possibility of violence resulting from his return to the trail?
And is there any concern about him going back out there and continuing to insist that the election is fraudulent and that he actually won could result in people being hurt or killed?
Obviously, we take the rhetoric of the former guy, as we like to say, quite seriously, as everyone should.
But I don't have any readouts or calls with Governor DeWine.
Jen, could you say that the Republicans are all evil, terrible, anti-American people, and you're afraid of all the violence?
The left right now is promising to burn the American flag on the Olympic podium.
The left right now is actively encouraging political violence as it has for years.
And I'm not just talking about kooks, I'm talking about Maxine, well, I am talking about kooks, but very prominent kooks.
Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris bailing rioters out of jail, calling for riots in the case of Maxine Waters, calling for Democrats to be uncivil with Republicans, instituting a new National Independence Day, and waving a new American flag.
And this guy is worried about the secessionist rhetoric of Democrats?
The left spends a year burning down the country, And this guy is worried about the violent extremism of...
Republicans?
What?
What on earth does this...
How do you...
I'm actually speechless.
It was just the title of my upcoming book.
It's my book that's out right now, actually.
How do you respond to that when a man is so tuned out of reality...
Democrats are committing virtually all of the violence, and you say you're worried about the Republican violence.
The left actively calling for this sorts of violence?
You say, well, the right, this is the really violent, terrible party.
The former guy.
The former guy.
I can't wait for Trump to hold more rallies.
They're going to call us terrorists if we so much as litter at any of these rallies.
You can't let that bother you.
It's just not true.
They're not engaging in good faith.
This is not a fair debate that's going on right now.
Just...
We gotta do our thing, guys.
We gotta tune it out.
We should not be wrestling with pigs.
Speaking of Trump supporters, and firearms for that matter...
I owe an apology to the McCloskeys.
You remember the McCloskeys?
Mark and Patricia McCloskey were the should-be Brooks Brothers models who were standing outside their home when BLM terrorists busted in, started breaking their property, started threatening their lives with weapons.
And the McCloskeys had guns and said, get off my lawn.
Great, great people, great Americans.
Well, they pled guilty to misdemeanor charge just last week, I think.
I had to turn over their guns.
And I said, oh, what a pathetic surrender.
Oh my God, you did nothing wrong.
You defended your property.
You defended the Constitution.
Now you're giving up your guns, your Second Amendment right.
You're pleading guilty to this thing.
Well, Mark McCloskey just posted a photo where he said, checking out my new AR. And he was at the gun shop buying a new AR-15.
So what's going on here?
I suspect this is a case of the McCloskeys being wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
Meaning, there was some charge.
The cops were trying to get them on a felony.
What was the felony?
I don't know.
They got the lawyers to plead it down to some misdemeanor or something.
They had to turn over just one or two guns.
But they're very wealthy people, obviously.
And then they just went out and bought more guns.
To survive another day to keep on fighting.
Sometimes one needs a tactical retreat.
The line between courage and recklessness can be a little bit blurry.
So if we're talking about S1 and HR1 over on Capitol Hill, you don't always need to engage in the debate.
Sometimes you just got to kill the bill.
If you're talking about my friend Stephen Crowder, you don't always need to engage with these jerks.
You don't always need to jump in with the pigs.
You can tactically retreat.
If you're the McCloskey's, You don't always need to make every battle a federal issue.
You can take your light, see where it is, and then try to live to fight another day.
You're seeing this kind of radicalism bubbling up everywhere, and we really need to push back against this sort of thing.
You're seeing it in the movies.
There's a new movie coming out, demonizing white women called Karen.
We'll have to talk about that perhaps tomorrow.
There's much to say about that.
There are new events, leftist events around the country, that are charging extra fees to white attendees.
There are reparations fees to show up.
The left is playing...
To win.
The left is not playing to really convince anybody or persuade anybody.
This is just club you on the head type of interest politics with physical threats in many cases.
The right has no obligation to engage in the very formal Marquess of Queensberry style rules of debate.
I don't think that the left is interested in that.
And I think that we should take our wins when we can get them.
And I hope we can all have civilized debate again someday.
But for right now, we need to take those political wins.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
We'll show you tomorrow.
We'll show you tomorrow.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
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Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the Washington Post concludes that higher numbers of black traffic deaths are the result of, you guessed it, infrastructure racism and, before the people act eyes, an ignominious death to the wails and teeth gnashing of the media.