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July 6, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:12
Ep. 799 - America Goes Through Puberty

Prominent leftists diss America on Independence Day, the nation’s largest teachers’ union promises to push CRT in all 50 states, and NPR adds a trigger warning to the Declaration of Independence. My new book ’Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds,’ is now available wherever books are sold. Grab your copy today here: https://utm.io/udtMJ  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Democrat Congressman Cori Bush decided to mark our nation's Independence Day by decrying America as a rotten, evil, illegitimate country.
Quote, The freedom they're referring to is for white people.
This land is stolen land, and black people still aren't free.
Now, Ms.
Bush did not elaborate on how an enslaved woman managed the liberty to tweet her inane musings, much less get elected to Congress, but unfortunately her point of view has become the mainstream one.
The nation's largest teacher union is now vowing to push critical race theory in all 50 states.
NPR added a trigger warning to the Declaration of Independence.
And a new report reveals the organized campaign to push radical sexual ideologies into kids' programming.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment from Friday is from Ryan Brewer, who says, if football is everything and everything is racist, doesn't that make the NFL racist?
I think it does.
I think that's pretty good argumentation.
Don't think the NFL is capable of that kind of A philosophical understanding.
Speaking of, I have a second place.
I have a runner-up for my favorite comment.
This from Tony L., who says, Nietzsche predicted it.
We killed God, the ground of all being and rationality.
Science couldn't survive once its metaphysical foundation was removed.
Now, that's a little heavy for a comment at the top of the show, but I think it's absolutely true, and it undergirds a lot of what we're going to be talking about, about why...
Half of the country seems to hate our country, at least at the level of the elites.
Very difficult.
How do these guys get any sleep?
They must be so just fired up all of the time.
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Make sure you use promo code DAILYWIRE. Cori Bush, not the only person tweeting and declaring insane nonsense this 4th of July.
There were a lot of people doing that.
There was a Twitter account named Lakota Man.
I thought this was a parody for a second, but I actually don't think it is.
I think it might be serious.
Or at least earnest and sincere.
I'm not serious.
This is not a serious person, but he might be earnest.
The Lakota man tweeted out, Hey America, F you for desecrating our sacred mountain, hashtag happy fourth.
And he's pointing to Mount Rushmore, which I just got to visit about a month or so ago.
And it's very cool and it's very beautiful and it's out in the middle of nowhere.
And this Lakota man is very upset, you see, because the Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota people until the evil white man and America came and stole it from them.
Give back the land.
Now...
This went viral.
A lot of people were agreeing with this man's sentiment.
His photo of him flipping off Mount Rushmore appears to have been taken on a Nokia phone from like 1992.
It was very weak sort of graphics.
I googled it.
I said, wait a second.
Because I know it's fashionable these days to believe that the evil white man, and America specifically, is the only group that ever conquered anyone else in history.
But of course, conquest is just how states have developed since the dawn of time.
So how long did the Lakota have the Black Hills for?
And it turns out...
The Lakota, they were not born as a people in the Black Hills.
They did not spring up in the state of nature in the Black Hills.
No, they conquered the Cheyenne Indians and stole the Black Hills from them.
And do you know when they did it?
It wasn't in prehistory.
It wasn't millennia ago.
It wasn't even all that many centuries ago.
It was 1776.
So as the Americans were fighting for their independence, the Lakota were stealing the Black Hills from the Cheyenne.
And now, some random dude who calls himself Lakota Man is demanding that the United States give the Black Hills back to...
The Lakota, who stole it from the...
Why don't we give it to the Cheyenne?
You know, something tells me the Cheyenne probably stole it from somebody else as well.
And it's not really stealing so much as conquest.
That is how America developed through treaties, first of all.
Let's not forget that in 1620, when the Pilgrims came to America, they initially established very strong diplomatic relations with the Wampanoag Indians and actually allowed the Wampanoag to become a pretty serious political power in the region.
That's why the Wampanoag partnered up with the Pilgrims against warring Indian factions, and they had a mutually beneficial relationship.
Because the Indians, contrary to modern racial theories, were not just some passive subhuman group.
They were men.
They were real men who knew how to engage in diplomacy and warfare with other men.
And they did that for some time until sadly the child of the Wampanoag chieftain stupidly declared war on the pilgrims and then it all went to hell in a handbasket.
A history for another time, maybe when we get to the anniversary of the Mayflower landing.
But why is it that the United States is singularly responsible for all these terrible things?
Lakota Man, Cori Bush were not the only people criticizing the U.S. Mia Khalifa.
She's an adult film actress.
I'm very pleased to tell you, by the way, I don't mean to preen or boast.
I'm obviously a miserable sinner who has done terrible things in my life, just as has every single person.
But I can say, with total honesty, I have never seen this woman's work.
And I'm very glad, because if her professional work is anything like her political commentary, I bet it's not very edifying.
Mia Khalifa decided to take the occasion of the 4th of July to...
Criticize and deride the United States.
Morning!
Happy Fourth of July!
I just want to remind you guys on this beautiful Independence Day that all America does is destabilize other countries and then treat refugees and immigrants from those destabilized countries like second-class citizens and trash.
So, a very silly commentary.
First of all, because we only have one legal system of systemic racism in this country, and that would be affirmative action, which prioritizes Non-white people.
It gives an advantage to non-white people and disadvantages white people and Asians also.
So the idea that refugees and people from, say, the Middle East or Africa are treated as second-class citizens is just not.
As a fact of the law, they are treated much better than whites and Asians.
There is one other system of structural racism that gives an advantage to some people.
That would be our open borders.
So our open borders gives huge immigration priority to Latin Americans instead of other groups from around the world.
Again, though, to non-white people.
So her argument here, completely ridiculous.
But then let's take the first part seriously.
She said all the United States does is destabilize other nations.
The United States has destabilized other That's true.
For instance, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton decided to lead Libya into a revolution, that was probably a bad idea.
But they did that.
When the United States, under Obama and Clinton, decided to destabilize Egypt by pulling their support from our longtime ally, not Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, that was probably a mistake.
So it's true.
the United States has destabilized a lot of parts of the world.
Destabilized Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
Some people say that was a good thing to do, but nevertheless, certainly destabilizing.
Okay.
Is that, first of all, is the United States the only country that does that?
Of course not.
But second of all, is that all the United States does?
See, what Mia Khalifa here is saying that is important for a discussion of political philosophy, I never thought I'd say that statement, is the word all, because it's a matter of framing.
You're You remember the 1619 Project made up a bunch of stuff, right?
The central thesis of the 1619 Project at the New York Times is that the American Revolution was fought to defend slavery.
It's just not true.
It's completely fictitious.
But whatever.
The Times corrects that seven months later, as I write in my book Speechless.
What the issue is, is not the fact so much as the framing.
The 1619 Project comes out and says, we want to reframe American history to put slavery at the center of it.
And so the lie here that Mia Khalifa is telling, at least in that first sentence, is not that the United States destabilizes countries.
We have.
We've destabilized plenty of countries, as have many other countries.
The lie is that that's all that we do.
That's the center of the frame for Mia Khalifa is that the United States is this force of evil that destabilizes countries and then takes in refugees and treats them poorly, which is obviously that part is not true.
But it's that framing.
That's what you've got to say.
What is it?
Are we celebrating America or are we not celebrating America?
Is the 4th of July even our Independence Day?
There's some debate about that now because we have a second National Independence Day.
The Juneteenth holiday, which you might call critical race theory day.
I mean, the Juneteenth holiday, which was a local tradition in Galveston, Texas, it became a national holiday because of these radical leftist race hustlers.
Those were the people who were pushing for it.
That was the argument that they were giving for the holiday on the floor of Congress.
And it's in the very name, the National Independence Day of Juneteenth, in the bill that created this new federal holiday.
When they tell you that, you've got to believe them.
This is coming to a school near you.
The National Education Association, this is the nation's largest teachers union, is pushing for critical race theory in all 50 states.
The NEA president, Becky Pringle, that can't be a real name, Becky Pringle says that we need to be committed And that teachers specifically need to be committed to make statements in the media, quote, that support racial honesty in education, including but not limited to critical race theory.
Now, this is a contradiction, she said.
She said she wants to promote honesty when it comes to racial education.
And that includes critical race theory.
Critical race theory is dishonest.
Critical race theory is not just talking about slavery.
That's what they're now trying to do.
But it's a specific analytical lens that has its grounding in a Marxist understanding of the world, which I write about in Speechless.
Notice here, even beyond the effort to put CRT in schools, notice how they keep shifting strategy.
Initially, the left was defending critical race theory.
Then, you remember, they shifted to this theory of denying that critical race theory, or the strategy, rather, of denying critical race theory exists.
They said, what is critical race theory?
Come on.
Now they're back to defending it.
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The 4th of July has become so controversial because America has become so controversial.
That on the 4th of July, National Public Radio, NPR, added a trigger warning to the Declaration of Independence.
The thing that our taxpayers support that is supposed to be our national public radio added on our nation's Independence Day, a trigger warning to warn people about reading the founding document that we are celebrating on Independence a trigger warning to warn people about reading the founding document that we are celebrating
Editors note, they write, this document contains a racist slur against indigenous people.
It's referring to this line, everyone knows we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
Among these rights are the lights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is really misunderstood these days.
And people who are trying to upend our tradition of free speech in America, our tradition of education in America, are misunderstanding what that means with regard to freedom of religion, with regard to freedom of speech.
We'll get into that later because Joe Biden is missing what that means.
But everyone remembers that part.
You know, the Declaration goes on.
And it details specific issues that the colonists have with King George.
They're not saying we're just going to fight a revolution just to have a good time.
We're going to fight a revolution because the king insulted us once.
They're detailing all of these insults that they believe would justify even a revolution, which they're not taking lightly.
And one of them is...
That the king has, quote, Important to remember, first of all, because the Indians were real people, they weren't subhuman, that they did fight wars with the colonists.
This was a real problem, and they did fight in ways that were particularly brutal.
Our word cannibal comes from the Carib Islanders.
We didn't have a word for cannibal before them.
And the Iroquois and upstate New York practiced cannibalism and lots of other things.
Scalping, attacks on women and children.
This was real.
This is not the whitewashing of history and the propaganda.
No, the only propaganda you're getting is the idea that the Native American Indians were living in harmony, singing Kumbaya in drum circles before the evil white man got here.
It just wasn't true.
There was vicious, vicious, barbaric warfare going on among the Indian tribes, and the colonists had to deal with this.
And one of the issues here is that King George was not helping out very much, and this is a big problem.
Now, NPR says you're not allowed to say that.
Well, what if they were behaving as merciless savages?
You know, what the word savage means, it derives from the woods, it derives from forests, and these Indian tribes were living in the woods.
It's an actual, a clinical term.
Alright, enough of defending the Declaration of Independence.
What the NPR is saying is, even if that's true, you're not allowed to say it, because that's offensive now.
Even if this was integral to our history as a nation, we're not allowed to say that.
We're not allowed to.
You've got to exercise caution when you're reading even the Declaration of Independence.
Proving Donald Trump right, once again, when he said they're not just coming after Robert E. Lee, they're not just coming after Stonewall Jackson.
They're coming after Washington.
They're coming after Jefferson.
They're coming after the Declaration of Independence.
The left is coming after the whole country.
And they're doing it largely through the schools.
They're doing it through all the institutions, but largely through the schools.
They're trying to educate you, indoctrinate you into hating your country.
Enter David French.
I've always had a perfectly fine relationship with David French, even though he's a former Republican.
He was considered a conservative columnist.
He might still consider himself a conservative columnist, but I think he's now decidedly in the liberal category.
But he sort of gives cover to the liberal regime.
And very famously, he defended drag queen story hours, one of the blessings of liberty, in a debate with the conservative So Rab Amari.
So David French has an article in the New York Times.
And I can't, it's not just David's article.
It's Camele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams.
This is four people writing one column.
I think they took five words each.
How many people does it take to write a column?
In the New York Times, who knows?
Anti-critical race theory laws are un-American, say the columnists.
I won't read the whole thing because I just, I can't.
I can't.
We all had a nice weekend and I can't voice that upon us.
But it is important to understand the argument they're making.
They say, what is the purpose of a liberal education?
This is the question at the heart of a bitter debate that has been roiling the nation for months.
Schools, particularly at the kindergarten to 12th grade level, are responsible for helping turn students into well-informed and discerning citizens.
At their best, our nation's schools equip young minds to grapple with complexity and navigate our differences.
At their worst, they resemble indoctrination factories.
Pause it right there.
Education and indoctrination mean the same thing.
They derive from the same word, they just have different connotations.
Education, good.
Indoctrination, bad.
But either way, you're teaching people stuff.
And education is a coercive act.
And liberal education, apparently these guys don't understand that, but liberal education even is a coercive act.
Because the point of liberal education is to make sense of your liberty.
And in order to do that, you need to tamp down your basest appetites, and you need to cultivate your higher virtues.
And you need to unlearn things that are false, and you need to learn and practice things that are true.
And you need to suppress things that are vicious, and you need to cultivate things that are virtuous.
This is a bit of a paradox.
It seems tricky because we want to be free people and we want education to be liberated.
But in order to cultivate our virtues, we need to be coerced into that.
But that coercion will then lead people to be free and then to be able to think about greater complexity.
So you have to be forced to learn that two plus two equals four in order to have the freedom to understand more complex mathematics.
You have to be forced, rather, to learn the dates, 1776, 1620, 1860, on and on and on, in order to have the freedom to think about the higher complexity.
And by the way, you have to be forced to learn the Ten Commandments.
You have to be forced to learn what they mean.
You have to be forced to learn things in ethics and philosophy and religion in order to then have the freedom to think and to act at a higher level in all of these things.
Okay.
So they make one crucial error already.
They believe that a third grade classroom is a free marketplace of ideas.
It's not.
It is an indoctrination factory.
It has to be.
Because students have to learn one thing, and when you learn a thing, it excludes other things, because the truth is arrogance.
So there's that first little sleight of hand there.
Get this out of your mind.
A third grade classroom is not a free marketplace of ideas.
They say these initiatives that are going around are marketed as anti-critical race theory laws.
We, the authors of this essay, have wide ideological divergences on the explicit targets of this education.
They say, by the way, that the people who wrote this column, one's a conservative, one's a libertarian, one's a moderate, one's a liberal, one's this, one's that.
I don't see a single conservative here.
Who is the conservative?
None of these people, as far as I can tell, is a conservative.
But they go on and they say, this is why in the name of freedom, in the name of free marketplace of ideas, in the name of academic freedom, we need to teach CRT in schools.
As you may have known, I just wrote a book that is making the exact opposite case from what this very stupid New York Times column is making.
I highly recommend you read the book.
I thank everybody who has read the book.
You know, the book just on...
I think it was on Friday after we were off air.
The book hit number one on all of Amazon.
There was a little bit of a controversy last week because our book outsold every other non-fiction book in the country.
By the way, no bulk sales, no cheating.
This was all...
Just people going out and buying books.
And the New York Times snubbed us, even though we had something like 40% higher sales than the number one on their list that week.
And we had many multiples of the sales that were lower on that list.
It's fine.
Who cares about the New York Times?
People went out and bought it.
Then on Friday, it became the number one book in the country.
We beat Quentin Tarantino, his new book, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Which is this novel he had released last week from the movie.
We were beating that.
Now, we're still toward the top of the list, but it's not number one as of right now until you all go out and buy that book.
This is very important because this debate is going to define the right into the future.
And I think it's going to define whether we want to win or we want to lose.
You have people who I think are pretty dishonest and at the very least terribly, terribly, terribly naive.
But I think it's a little worse than that even.
They are making the argument that if conservatives ever assert our political right, if parents ever, for instance, have a say about the curriculum, if we ever observe that curricula are necessarily exclusive, if you teach one thing, you're not going to teach the other thing.
There's only so many weeks in the semester, only so many books you can read.
If we just acknowledge those basic truths, then we're somehow un-American.
There's nothing more American than Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo and tearing down statues of George Washington.
It's false.
It's a lie.
There are court jester conservatives who are upholding the liberal regime and pretending to try to conserve something.
They're not.
You've got to...
I mean, this may be the dumbest New York Times column I have read in months, which is really saying something.
So if you want the antidote to that column, you can check out the book, and thanks to those of you who have already done it.
Not everyone hates America.
We'll get into George Foreman in just a second.
First, though, in a time when the prevailing narrative is an oppressive and evil America, The Daily Wire is here to remind you that your long weekend of Independence Day celebrations was made possible by the legends who sacrificed their own lives for the future of America.
That is why we started a new podcast called America's Forgotten Heroes, which boasts seven episodes detailing the lives of seven brave men.
Subscribe now to America's Forgotten Heroes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you might listen, because the sixth episode is out today.
Tuesday, July 6th, and the last action-packed episode drops tomorrow, July 7th, for a total of seven episodes.
Too many heroes never receive the recognition they deserve.
Sharing their stories with you this Independence Day holiday was our small tribute to their heroism.
If you like what you hear, leave a five-star review, please, and help share these incredible stories.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you to the heroes that made this terrific podcast.
I really, really like this podcast, who made it possible.
We will be right back with a lot more.
Not everyone hates America.
A lot of people hate America.
Cori Bush, the Democrat congressman seems to hate America.
The silly people who wrote in the New York Times defending critical race theory, they definitely don't get America.
I wonder what kind of vision of America they really want to have going into the future.
Mia Khalifa, the adult film store.
She doesn't like America.
I mean, this is the whole culture.
So much of the politics.
You know who loves America?
George Foreman, the master of grilling, the Olympic gold medalist, the heavyweight champion boxer.
George Foreman still loves America.
He tweeted out, quote, For about 54 years, people have asked me not to keep saying I love America.
Well, I do, and I'm not ashamed.
Don't leave it.
Love it.
Happy Fourth of July.
I really like that.
This is still really powerful stuff.
You know, I know people are feeling a little down in the dumps about America right now because so many of our liberties are being taken away.
Our traditions are being upended.
Our standards have been upended by the radicals for the past 50 years or so.
And we've been impotent on the right at fighting back because we've misunderstood what it is because we read stupid columns in the New York Times like the one that defends critical race theory.
But George Foreman says, now, hold on.
And it does remind me that when you see an American flag, generally speaking, you're looking at a conservative, right?
It didn't used to be that way.
Both sides used to wave the American flag.
That is no longer true.
And actually, there were some journalists who were reporting on that this week.
You know how much I hate to say I told you so on this show.
Well, I've been saying it for a while.
I said the American flag has become a partisan symbol.
Because the left hates America, so they hate the symbol of America, so they protest the symbol of America.
And everyone told me, no, that's crazy.
You're misinterpreting it.
It's wrong.
People are protesting police brutality or whatever.
That's why they're protesting the flag, which is the symbol of the whole country.
But I said, no, they don't like America.
They want to upend America, so they have their own flags.
They'll wave the rainbow flag.
It's like a new racial rainbow transgender flag.
It's called the progress flag.
That's the flag of the liberal empire, or the BLM flag.
They'll wave that, but they're very unlikely to wave the American flag.
Well, George Foreman still waves the American flag.
I still wave the American flag.
American patriots, I think, still wave that flag.
There were some customers at Walmart, just spontaneously, over the weekend, broke out into song, singing our national anthem.
Who's my stripes and my stars?
Through the perilous fight O'er the ramparts we watched Were so gallantly streaming?
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
USA! USA! It's a really beautiful scene.
People were tweeting this around a lot of leftists and saying, what a weird country this is.
How strange.
No, it's weird.
It's weird for you because you are a selfish narcissist.
If you find that weird, that says more about you than it does about the country and about the people who are seeing that.
It is natural and right to love your country as an extension of filial piety, as the love that you have for your family.
A lot of people don't love their families very much though either or respect their families.
They get rid of all of that for the cult of the individual.
People on the right do this as well.
It's much, much more common on the left, but people on the right have done this as well.
Both the left and the right have really made an idol out of the individual and maximizing individual autonomy.
The left has done it in the realm of sex, basically, in the social realm.
And the right has done it in the realm of economics and business, for instance.
But both are true.
And, you know, there is something to having a country where you have to care about your countrymen.
You have to care about history.
You have to care about posterity.
You have to sacrifice a little bit.
It's not all about you.
And those people in that Walmart who come in all shapes and sizes, multiracial, right?
There's no lens where the left can say, see, it's really, it's just white people, or it's just men, or it's just this, or it's no.
The difference is those people love their country.
And they're just ordinary Walmart shoppers.
And members of Congress cannot even be bothered to show a little respect for their country.
Wealthy pornographers cannot be bothered to show respect.
People who are very, very flamboyantly selfish.
And look, we all have a temptation toward pride and selfishness.
You've got to tamp that down.
And our nation's birthday is a good day to do that, to remember what you love about the country.
Zuckerberg proved it, by the way.
There was this very strange video of Zuckerberg going around the internet where he was hoverboarding on a lake, waving an American flag, and it looked...
He must have just woken up one day and he was like, what do Americans do?
Siri, what do Americans do?
Okay, yes, I will wave a flag.
I mean, it looked great.
It was an amazing video.
He still didn't quite look human, but it was a very cool video of him doing this hoverboard thing.
He got some great, nice background music to it, old John Denver.
There is a political lesson to learn from this.
Mark Zuckerberg is a very, very intelligent person.
I don't know about his views on the country.
I hope he likes the country, but I don't know.
I'm not venturing against one way or the other.
But what I do know is that Mark Zuckerberg thinks it is good for him to be seen waving the red, white, and blue.
That that symbol still has power.
That despite what the Antifa people and the BLM people and the leftist people...
Despite their...
Ceaseless attacks on the Star-Spangled Banner.
That symbol still stirs the heart.
It still makes people think about what is good and right and true and just and beautiful.
And we should not surrender that symbol.
We should not abandon that.
It's still powerful.
Matthew McConaughey actually had some pretty good thoughts on this whole thing.
I can't believe I would say that, because Matthew McConaughey has said some things recently, politically, that were just a little strange.
He appears to be wanting to angle to run for office at some point.
He's got this new book out, Green Lights, which, by the way, Speechless, was a little higher on the charts in Green Lights for the past few days.
I don't know now where it is.
Maybe we've fallen behind again, but I've heard people are enjoying that book.
McConaughey obviously has political ambitions, and he had a really important point on how to think about what's going on.
The riots in the streets burning down the country, the vitriol that's largely, almost exclusively, coming from the left, the politicization of every institution, the feeling the conservatives have lost so much power.
Now we're arguing over Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson and the Star-Spangled Banner.
McConaughey says the country is just going through puberty.
Happy birthday, America!
Yes, indeed, as we celebrate our independence today, as we celebrate our birth as a nation, a day that kick-started a revolution to gain our sovereignty.
Let's admit that this last year's trip around the sun was also another head-scratcher.
But let's also remember that we are babies.
As a country, we're basically going through puberty in comparison to other countries' timelines.
And we're going to go through growing pains.
We are going through growing pains.
This is not an excuse to say this.
This is just a reality.
And this is good because we've got to keep learning.
We've got to keep maturing.
We've got to keep striving.
We've got to keep climbing.
We've got to keep building.
And we've got to make sure we maintain hope along the way as we continue to evolve.
Why?
Because it's who we are.
Why?
Because the alternative sucks.
Okay, so then he goes on and it's kind of just platitudinous nonsense about progress and evolve, man, you know, all right, all right, all right.
But the first part is actually really smart.
McConaughey is saying, this is a young country and we're going through puberty.
And that is certainly true.
And conservatives sometimes get a little nostalgic.
Okay?
And we cling to the past.
As my friend Father George Rutler says, nostalgia is history after a few drinks.
And as my dead friend, I think we would have been friends had I met him.
I hope I meet him someday.
Chesterton famously says, when you leave a white fence, just you leave it.
You leave it out in the middle of nowhere.
You go away.
When you come back, it will not be a white fence any longer.
There will be dirt.
There will be bugs.
There will be stuff all over it.
Because you don't leave it in stasis.
You leave it in a torrent of change.
The thing that is constant is change.
There is no such thing as stasis in this world.
And so when we pine for this time of 1776, we're pining for something that we can never go back to.
None of us would actually want to go back then.
No one actually wants to live outside of his own time because our time has in some ways shaped us.
And so we are suited.
For the time that we are in, uniquely suited for this time that we're in.
And we need to do something with that.
We are very, very young as a country.
250 years old, just about.
So what is our narrative going to be?
The narrative was not settled 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago.
It is still settling now.
And the left understands this.
The left understands the power of narrative.
So they are trying to shape what the narrative of our country is.
In order to destroy the country, they're trying to say the country is essentially evil and everyone who made it is evil.
So we've got to just knock down their statues and clear it away so we can re-found a country along our lines.
We obviously have to push back against that, but we need to offer a different narrative.
And it's not just going to say, keep the statues up.
Yeah, we want to keep the statues up.
But what are we offering?
What is our substantive vision?
It's the point I've hammered home for some time now.
It's not enough just to argue about procedure.
It's not enough just to argue about form and to say, for instance, I defend free speech in the abstract.
No, you've got to have something to say.
You've got to recognize there will be standards.
There will be a narrative.
There will be taboos.
What are they going to be?
What do we think is good?
Are we willing to promote what we think is good?
Are we willing to suppress what we think is bad?
We have to.
That's how culture works.
It's inevitable, but we so far have not really had the courage to do it over the past 15-20 years.
And if you read dumb columns like this CRT one in the New York Times, then you're not going to have the courage to do it ever.
Are we really willing to say this is true and suppress things that are false?
I hope so.
I think that's the only way that we're ever going to be able to fight back at all.
I mean, we've uniformly, ceaselessly lost over the past 20 years that the left duped us into falling for their trap.
And they're setting the narrative.
We need to set the narrative.
Look what's going on.
There's a report from Entertainment Insider right now.
There is a campaign to cram a lot of LGBT people.
Transgender, radical sexual ideology into children's programming.
This is not just an organic movement.
We've covered it, the bizarre drag queens on Nickelodeon and all this kind of crazy stuff.
We've been covering it, but it's not just organic.
It's not just happening by accident.
Entertainment Insider points out, There is an overt campaign to instill queer themes and elements of LGBTQ culture into these shows.
There are, according to the insider, 259 LGBTQ characters in mainstream children's programming today.
That's weird.
I'm not saying you can't have a gay character or something.
I'm pointing out it's very strange how disproportionate the representation is here.
How many characters are there in kids' shows?
I don't think there are that many.
How are there hundreds and hundreds of characters who are going along with transgenderism?
That's just weird.
That doesn't reflect reality, which is the argument that very often you'll hear people who are promoting radical sex ideology in schools or critical race theory in schools.
They'll say, well, we just want to expose children to reality and show them, you know, but this isn't reality.
What are you talking about?
Drag Queen Story Hour isn't reality.
This is a very strange niche sexual fetish that some people have.
Why are you now presenting this in as many public libraries and schools as you possibly can?
Why are you putting this all over children's programming?
Critical race theory isn't reality.
Critical race theory denies reality, for goodness sakes.
Why are you putting that in schools?
Because you're trying to transform reality.
You're trying to redefine reality.
This has been the campaign of the left for a very, very long time.
This is, in part, using GLAD. GLAD is one of the LGBT organizations in the country.
By the way, not even the most radical.
The most radical, I think, goes to the Human Rights Campaign, ridiculously named Human Rights Campaign.
They're the ones that really successfully redefine marriage.
But you have, for instance, one...
Showbiz type.
His name is Petoskey.
He says, I had to fight with the help of GLAAD to get the actual word pride in a script instead of it being called Rainbow Parade or something like that.
He had to fight.
He had to go in, in writer's rooms.
There are these people who are campaigning to get this ideology in there.
They're campaigning to get this ideology into schools.
We need to fight back.
There is nothing American about permitting radicals to upend the whole culture.
Conservatives used to know this.
William F. Buckley Jr.
launched his career on a book talking about how insane it is to allow radicals to do this sort of thing in schools.
Now we've forgotten that because of the squishes and the court jester conservatives who have outrageously claimed the mantle of conservatism to undermine that tradition.
Is that America?
No.
If that's America, then something's gone seriously wrong.
We need to reclaim an older tradition.
A lot of people don't know what America is.
Joe Biden just made this statement.
Joe Biden came out, he said, it's impossible to define what America is.
I've often said that America is the only nation in the world founded on an idea.
Every other nation in the world is founded on basically either That your geography or ethnicity or religion.
You can define almost everyone else based on those characteristics.
But you can't define an American.
I defy you to tell me what constitutes an American.
You can't do it.
We're an incredibly diverse democracy.
But there is one thing that does define us as a country.
We're founded on an idea that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by their creating with certain inalienable rights.
Pause it right there.
Did you catch the contradiction?
I bet a lot of people didn't catch the...
I mean, you.
You, the listener, I'm sure did.
But a lot of people listening to Joe Biden's droning, half-asleep speech probably did not.
He said, you can't define Americans by their religion.
You can't.
You can't.
I defy you to define an American by his religion.
No, it's defined by an idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
Hold on.
Sounds kind of religious to me.
What are religions?
Religions have ideas.
They make certain claims about history, perhaps about the world, about ideas, about what this whole world is, who we are in relation to the world.
First of all, America is not just an idea.
America has a creedal aspect to her character, but it's not just an idea.
It's also geography.
It's also specific people.
It's also things that have happened.
It's also the sea to shining sea and the great plains and all these things.
But there is a creedal aspect to her character, and that creedal aspect is a religious idea that, by definition, excludes other ideas.
If our country is founded on the idea that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, then America excludes atheism.
It excludes it.
It's not part of the American idea.
If you are a militant, diehard, atheist, we need to get religion out of all aspects of public life, you are anti-American.
I'm sorry to tell you that.
I'm not saying if you're one of these amiable sort of agnostic types who just says, ah, whatever, I don't really.
I'm saying if you are knock down the Ten Commandments at the courthouses kind of atheist, you're anti-American.
According to Joe Biden's own logic.
Because America was founded on an idea, right?
And the idea is a religious idea.
That God endowed us with rights.
So that, yeah, I can at least define an American in that way.
Well, what is an American?
Not bound by race?
Well, that's true.
I mean, you can trace racial groups in the country.
It was settled by Englishmen.
That's just a fact of history.
America was settled by Englishmen.
Then, you know, some Irish came in.
Then some, you know, there were obviously African slaves brought over, but they were not considered citizens for quite a long time.
There was a bloody civil war to resolve that problem.
Then you had some waves of migration.
And then you tamped down on migration.
We had effectively closed borders for a long time.
So yeah, you can kind of trace these things.
Well, what binds us together then?
One, that religious idea.
How about language?
Increasingly, we speak other languages in this country, but we speak English, right?
All our founding documents are written in English.
We speak English on the street.
So that binds us together.
If you don't speak English...
Better learn it.
Because America speaks English.
For now.
And we should.
We're going to speak one language or another.
Words are necessarily exclusive and discriminatory.
They discern one thing from another.
So you better learn it.
And if you can't speak English, you are putting yourself outside of the American tradition.
Freedom requires limits, as I have said many, many times.
Now, Joe Biden doesn't understand that, and he's just given us his two cents.
He's actually given us his 16 cents.
The Biden administration actually bragged, I'm not joking, actually bragged that the cost of a 4th of July cookout is down this year.
I said, thanks to the policies of Joe Biden, the cost of a 4th of July cookout is down.
You know how much?
16 cents.
The White House social media accounts put out a graphic that said the cost of a 4th of July cookout in 2021 is down.
16 cents from last year.
Gas is through the roof, by the way.
But even if it were, even if you actually had...
What is that to brag about?
That's the best they could come up with.
Because the country is doing much, much worse under Joe Biden.
That's it.
And it's not even just the money, by the way.
Obviously, I want our economy to thrive.
I want people to be able to be doing well and support their families.
But there's more to it.
And this is a mistake the right has made.
By focusing exclusively on economic matters, on plugging GDP up for any and all excuses to do that, without any question about the wisdom of that, whether we ship jobs overseas, whether we completely open up the border, it's totally fine.
There are cultural issues here that matter, too.
Even when the cultural conservatives say politics is downstream of culture, well, okay, then there's more to life than 16 cents.
I think that's true.
The question is, who are we as a country?
A country is going to be defined not by its expansiveness, but by its limits.
No matter how expansive the country is, no matter how broad-minded the country is, whether it's very narrow-minded, very broad-minded, the thing that will define it will be the limits.
A nation is defined by its borders.
A culture is defined by the borders of what it believes, what it thinks about itself, what it says.
This is why speech is so fundamental.
I think this is why the book hit number one on Amazon.
Why my book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, hit number one.
It's because, it's not just, I think the book is really terrific, but I think it's because we know that this issue is what's at stake here.
This issue is going to define the country.
What is it that we say?
What is it that we believe?
What is it that we're celebrating on the 4th of July for those of us who celebrate it?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, prominent leftists in politics, media, and culture protest America on Independence Day.
Plus, the National Education Association pushes critical race theory.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
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