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The case against Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who shot leftist rioters that had been threatening him during the BLM attacks last summer, has been gradually collapsing since the trial began.
And yesterday, one of the leftists who was actually shot by Rittenhouse may have put the final nail in the case's coffin.
It wasn't until you pointed your gun at him Advanced on him.
With your gun, now your hands down, pointed at him.
Then he fired.
Right?
Correct.
Oh, s***!
That's it!
That's it!
Directed verdict.
Directed verdict on all the murder charges.
Kyle knows.
Yeah.
Directed verdict on the murder charges.
He just, he just exhaled.
Kyle, oh, he looks like he's gonna cry.
How do you not, how do you not, how do you not acquit after that?
Look at bigger, look at bigger, look at the big boy.
Oh, big boy.
You know testimony is not going the way the state wanted when one of the prosecuting attorneys ends the questioning with his head in his hands.
Kyle Rittenhouse was obviously acting in self-defense.
Given what we heard yesterday, not only should he not be convicted, he shouldn't even have been charged.
But Rittenhouse's crime has nothing to do with guns or homicide.
If he had different colored skin or different political views, the elite in this country would be calling for him to walk.
Rittenhouse's real crime, oh, it's one of the worst crimes of all.
It's being a right-wing white guy.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from M4, who says, Thank goodness I'm a senior and leaving this year.
Well, I'm very honored.
I am very honored to be subverting America's educational institutions from the inside.
From the inside of earbuds that you're listening to in class.
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The New York Times is lying about what happened yesterday at the trial, by the way.
Just so you know, if you're reading CNN or the New York Times or whatever, there was a tweet that went out from Julie Bozeman from the New York Times.
It says, quote, Julie Bozeman from the New York Times sent out that tweet after yesterday's testimony.
So after she knew it was bogus, she sends out that tweet.
Then this guy testifies and says, no, I was pointing the gun at him, and that's the only time he shot.
Eventually she deleted the tweet, but the media are really, really desperate to portray Kyle Rittenhouse as a White supremacist, right-wing white supremacist.
No, he was a guy acting in self-defense while BLM and Antifa burned down not just his city, but the country.
And why were they rioting?
They were rioting because police rightly shot someone named Jacob Blake, who had just sexually assaulted a woman and was driving off with her kids.
But the media and the left took his side, Jacob Blake's side, because they're anti-cop, because...
White people bad, black people good, because right-wingers bad, left-wingers good, because cops bad, criminals good, because they have a narrative in mind that they're going to push.
And Kyle Rittenhouse fit the narrative of the bad guy, and the problem is the facts on the ground completely contradict their narrative.
Because Kyle Rittenhouse, from everything we know about this case, was acting in self-defense.
They should call it a day now.
The prosecuting attorney should just walk off the job, say, you know what?
Sorry, we tried.
See you.
And let Rittenhouse off the hook.
Speaking of racism or alleged racism or perceived racism, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, he's back from his 17 years of paternity leave.
He is now back on the job and he is taking on the big problems, namely all the structural racism of bridges and highways.
Can you give us...
The construct of how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into the roadways as you talked to the GRIO earlier when you broke that information with us.
Can you talk to us about how that could be deconstructed?
For sure, yeah.
So the principle of Justice 40 is that at least 40 percent of the clean investments in this bill We'll go to benefit the communities that are overburdened and underserved.
So part one of that is defining those investments that are eligible, and that's a lot of it, and we're working to map out kind of program by program, mode by mode, what would qualify.
For example, if we're buying clean buses, right, how do we make sure in terms of where those buses go, but also looking at the business opportunities.
The jobs that are going to be created, the businesses that will have a chance to compete for the business opportunities it creates.
That too, I think, is a very important element of equity here that's in the spirit of Justice40.
And again, we have a lot of guidance and oversight from the White House since that's an administration-wide initiative.
We know that we've got to build our own internal kind of ways of aligning and defining that inside the administration.
Can anybody translate that into English for me?
Because I consider myself fairly capable with the English language.
I have no idea what he just said.
Actually, I know what he didn't say.
Bye.
I know what he's dancing around.
He's like the kid who shows up to class without doing the reading.
Whatever he's saying about the roads and the bridges, it really doesn't matter.
The reason I bring up this clip is because Pete Buttigieg is the perfect representative of one of the biggest problems facing our society today, namely BS. He's a BS artist, is what he is.
Because he's very intelligent.
He's very intelligent.
You can't deny the guy.
And he's smooth, and he's a quick talker, and he smiles, and he's really nice.
But he's a BS artist.
And these guys tend to do really well.
I think Pete went to Harvard, or he went to some fancy schools, and he worked in consulting, which is the most BS industry there is.
It's a scam on corporate America, if you ask me.
Pete Buttigieg has been trained his whole life to just give the appearance of substance, give the appearance that he's saying something without saying anything at all.
And you hear it all the time in all the bogus ideological classes, like, I don't know, urban studies or ethnicity and migration or gender studies or all the studies classes.
And in consulting, well, you know, first what we're going to do is we're going to study equity and we're going to make sure that there's synergy between the different departments.
And what's really important is we want to make sure that our resources are going to the underserved.
And the places where they're not over-served, they're underserved.
And so it's going to be just, and what it's really about is equitable, and it's about the transfer, and it's about growth and synergy.
Thank you for listening to my presentation.
He doesn't even answer the question.
And what was the question?
How are you going to deconstruct the racism that was constructed?
So you're going to deconstruct and de-layer and you're going to through critical and it's all just bogus.
Hey, buddy, fix the roads.
How about that?
Fix the roads, deal with the supply chain crisis.
Isn't that the bare minimum of what the transportation secretary is supposed to do?
Make sure that things are capable of being transported?
I don't know what it is.
Well, you can't do that because we're all just high on our own fumes of absolute BS in this country.
And so we can all talk pie in the sky really, really well about climate change and And the metaverse and the systemic structural racism.
But the basic elements of our society are crumbling.
Our roads, literally crumbling.
Our highways and our bridges, literally crumbling.
Our elections, crumbling.
We don't have faith in those anymore.
Our basic institutions, crumbling.
All of that is falling apart.
Because we're all focused on this pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
Speaking of transportation, by the way...
An update to that race in New Jersey where a truck driver who spent a very little amount of money on his entire campaign beat the most powerful Democrat in the legislature.
So this guy, Edward Durr, beat the top-ranking New Jersey Democrat lawmaker, Steve Sweeney, president of the New Jersey State Senate.
But...
Sweeney won't concede.
He says we've got to count every vote, and he just found thousands of previously undiscovered ballots.
I don't know where they were.
They must have been hiding under a bed somewhere or something.
So he found these ballots, and he wants to make sure that every ballot is counted.
This is very on-brand for New Jersey, to have this transparent sort of corruption.
Because it wasn't supposed to happen.
The top-ranking Democrat was supposed to keep his seat.
This upstart truck driver was not supposed to win.
And he did win, and now they're going to make up a bunch of ballots and try to steal the election.
This happens all the time.
A reminder, just a reminder as we look ahead to 2022 and 2024, and even as we discuss 2020, election fraud is old as time.
LBJ and FDR used to joke about it.
Plenty of elections have been stolen in this country.
There's fraud, to some degree, in every single election.
So we got to be watching out for that sort of thing.
And we can't let the Democrats bully us and tell us that if you ever question the integrity of elections, you're promoting the big lie.
And you're basically a Nazi, even though they don't even really understand the origin of the phrase the big lie does go back to the Nazis.
But it was actually a line used by Hitler and accusing the Jews of perpetrating a big lie against a German general named Erich Ludendorff.
And so actually, if you accuse someone of perpetrating the big lie, you're putting yourself in the position of Adolf Hitler against...
Anyway, the Democrats don't know any of that.
They're trying to bully you.
They're trying to make you seem like a Nazi or a white supremacist or whatever.
Don't do it.
There's always going to be election fraud.
We need to be really on guard against it because the Democrats are going to try to steal elections.
They're trying to do it right now in New Jersey.
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What's going on in New Jersey right now is you're seeing a conflict between democracy and liberalism.
In the democracy, the voters in this district of New Jersey voted for a Republican truck driver over the Democrat president of the New Jersey State Senate.
More people voted for the truck driver than voted for the corrupt Democrat.
So that's democracy.
But liberalism says the Democrat should win because the Democrat is on the side of progress and the Republican is on the side of regress and he's on the wrong side of history and he's not supposed to win elections.
So you're seeing the conflict right now between democracy and liberalism.
And usually when the left refers to democracy, they're really referring to liberalism or progressivism or leftism.
There's obviously a lot of overlap between all of those concepts.
This is why when the majority of Americans vote for Donald Trump, that's a threat to our democracy.
When Hillary Clinton loses an election, that's a threat to our democracy.
When Stacey Abrams loses an election, that's a threat to our democracy.
On the surface, it's not a threat to democracy.
More people voted for the Republican.
But in the deeper sense, it's a threat to liberalism, and the left equates liberalism and democracy.
Barack Obama did this yesterday at the UN Climate Summit.
So Barack Obama can't keep his trap shut, so he flies over to Glasgow to give a speech on global warming.
And he blames, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump and nationalism for global warming.
Back in the United States, of course, some of our progress stalled when my successor decided to unilaterally pull out of the Paris Agreement in his first year in office.
I wasn't real happy about that.
And yet, the determination of our state and local governments, along with the regulations and investment that my administration had already put in place, allowed our country to keep moving forward, despite hostility from the White House.
I recognize we're living in a moment when international cooperation has waned.
A moment of greater geopolitical tension and stress, in part because of the pandemic, in part because of the rise of nationalism and tribal impulses around the world.
But there is one thing that should transcend our day-to-day politics and normal geopolitics, and that is climate change.
There is so much in Barack Obama's statement there.
It's a bunch of lies, but then a really big secret truth.
On the lies, he says, well, it's Donald Trump's fault that we're not meeting our commitments.
We're not doing that because of my successor.
That is not true.
Here we have great reporting from the Daily Wire, reporting on a great study that came out in the Statistical Review of World Energy.
It shows the U.S. leading the world in reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the year after the election of Donald Trump.
We pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, and yet we led the world in reducing CO2 emissions much more so than anyone else who actually remained signed on to the Paris thing.
So on the factual claim Obama's making, it's just not true.
But on the political claim, It shows you what this climate change stuff is all about.
The climate change stuff is about taking power.
It's about taking power away from nations, taking power away from the people of nations, and giving it to a global elite.
He says it himself.
He says nationalism is the problem.
Again, on the factual level, it's not.
Donald Trump pursued a course of relative nationalism, pulled out of the global compact, and he did better on reducing carbon dioxide emissions than all the other guys did.
Obama kind of acknowledges it when he says, now look, now listen, yeah, sure, the numbers kept going down and everything, but that's only because the businesses and the locals and the states and the communities kept listening to me.
Regardless of the motivation, you're still proving the Trump point.
You're still proving that the nation, working on its own, outside of this transnational UN compact, or Paris Climate Agreement, can and did do a better job than all of the nations working in concert.
For whatever reason.
Maybe it's because California just prefers to do it this way.
Maybe it's because some company prefers to cut the image.
But they still did it.
But what Obama says there at the end is the key.
He says, if there's one issue that should transcend our politics, it's climate change.
What do you mean, transcend our politics?
You can't transcend politics when you're talking about public questions.
Politics and public mean the same thing.
Politics means things that relate to public affairs, how we all live together.
So what you're calling for is not putting politics to the side.
You're calling for a different kind of politics.
Whenever Democrats say, don't make this political, you can be dead certain they are about to say something very, very political.
And so what Obama's really saying is, take your traditional political order, the traditional political order of national sovereignty and constitutionalism and the people deciding how they want to live, and trade that in for globalism, for internationalism, for having the UN tell you how you're going to live.
If there's one issue that should do it, it's global warming.
And of course it is.
That if you can really make the claim that the world is about to end unless we give up our sovereignty and our political power to the UN or whatever global institution, then we'll do it.
If it's really an existential threat and we're all going to die in 12 years or 18 months or whatever they keep telling us it is.
Now, of course, those doomsday predictions, which they've been making at least for the last 50 years and actually much further back than that, those never come true because it's not real because it's a lie and it's a lie of demagogues to steal your power away.
And Barack Obama's doing it, and he's even acknowledging it.
If there's one thing that should transcend our politics, it's global warming.
Maybe that's the reason that they keep harping on that one thing, even though their predictions keep failing.
Speaking of Donald Trump, there's a poll out that looks pretty good for Donald Trump.
NPR, PBS NewsHour, Marist Poll, 50% of Republicans and right-leaning independents believe that Donald Trump has the best chance to win in 2024.
Not just win the nomination, win the presidency.
The poll found that 35% of respondents want someone other than Trump.
14% said they didn't yet know.
So if you have the people who don't want Trump and the people who don't yet know and you add them together, it's almost the same as the number of people who think that Donald Trump has the best shot of winning the presidency.
But the people who think Trump has the best shot still edge them out a little bit.
Which is why everyone now is moving on.
Who's going to be the nominee?
Is it going to be DeSantis?
He's getting a lot of buzz because of what he's doing in Florida.
Is it going to be Cruz?
Is it going to be Hawley?
Is it going to be Kristi Noem?
She's kind of not getting as much talk anymore.
Is it going to be Nikki Haley?
Is it going to be, you know, they keep floating all of these names.
And I like at least most of those people.
And I'm friends actually with some of those people.
But the question that you're going to have to answer first is, what is Trump going to do?
What is Trump going to do?
If Trump gets in, very likely he just clears the field.
He's still got a ton of political support.
Now, maybe it's good if Trump runs.
Maybe it's not good if Trump runs.
Maybe Trump is going to blow it.
Maybe Trump is a singular candidate.
Maybe people have had enough of Trump.
Maybe Trump didn't get to finish the job.
I don't know.
that's going to be debated during the primary or during a pre-primary when everyone's jockeying for position.
But the one thing you can be sure of is you should not count Trump out yet.
He still has a huge amount of influence.
And even if he doesn't run, the numbers in this poll make it seem like he sure could be the kingmaker.
And there are a lot of Republicans who don't want Trump to run.
Okay, there is Frank Luntz, who I think he was a never Trump Republican.
He He's more of the centrist, moderate wing of the Republican Party.
He, for many years, did those focus groups where he'd go on Sean Hannity's show and talk to 20 random people and say, hey, what did you think of the debate?
And that was supposed to tell us something about what the American people thought.
I don't know.
It seemed a little gimmicky to me.
But Frank Luntz has come out.
Big news.
He goes, quote, John Carl, who's a left-wing journalist, is about to break a major story about Trump, the GOP, and January 20th it will embarrass a lot of people.
It's also in his new book, John Carl's new book, Betrayal, which isn't out yet.
Clue.
It's been over 100 years since the President of the United States did this.
So we're all waiting with bated breath.
What is it, Frank?
What's he going to reveal?
What did Trump do?
In his new book, John Carle reports that Trump actually quit the GOP before his plane took off on January 20th, 2021.
He also will be the honoree at the House GOP Gala tonight.
Does Trump deny he quit the GOP? Does anyone deny this?
Trump!
Hold on, you're telling me the big shocking report, whether it's true or not, I don't know, probably isn't true given the source, but you're saying the big shocking news, the bottom of the whole story is Donald Trump?
Has a tense relationship with the Republican Party?
No, my gosh, stop the presses!
No, no, who is supposed to be shocked by this?
All the people who love the GOP? No one loves the GOP. That's why Donald Trump was able to successfully lead a hostile takeover of the GOP. What planet are these people living on?
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While it is an unprecedented move for The Daily Wire, We don't see any other option.
We are not going to get into Joe Biden's unconstitutional mandate.
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The Republican Party can't win for losing.
The Republican Party, as ever, seems dead set on clutching defeat from the jaws of victory.
These people have no idea what's going on.
I can't get over it.
I cannot get over it.
What just happened in Virginia?
Virginia...
We took this governor's race that by all rights we should have lost...
Virginia is a very blue commonwealth.
Terry McAuliffe had a big organization there.
And we won Virginia by focusing on education.
By focusing on real culture war type issues.
The radical racial theories being taught in schools.
The radical sexual theories being taught in schools.
The transgender bathroom policies.
That allowed a boy in a skirt to go in and rape a girl in a girl's bathroom in Virginia, Loudoun County.
That's what won us the race.
Right-wing culture war issues that talk about the kooky theories on race and sex being pushed by the left.
So what does the GOP do?
Well, the GOP, the Republican Party, just announced, heading into the midterms, a new pride coalition.
A pride coalition.
An LGBT coalition.
You win a race.
You win a race in Virginia by running against transgenderism.
And the first thing you do is start a transgender coalition for the GOP. Can we just dissolve the party now?
Can we start a new party?
Is there a new party I can join?
No, I'm not going to join the Libertarian Party.
Give me a break.
No, I'm not going to.
I don't even know what the other ones are.
No.
I guess not for now.
I guess we just need to fire the people working at the GOP, the RNC, and put serious people in their place.
By the way, this is not to say I don't think gay people should vote for Republicans.
I think they should.
Many of my dearest friends are gay Republicans.
Alright?
But they're not pride Republicans.
What do I mean by that?
I mean, there are all sorts of people who have all sorts of unusual desires and sorts of things.
It's a very diverse world.
But I would say most of the people who identify as gay or bisexual or lesbian or transgender or whatever, they tend to go Democrat.
They tend to lean left.
There are some who do not go Democrat.
The ones who are not voting for Democrats are the ones for whom their sexual desires are not the be-all and end-all of their identity.
They have deeper foundations of their identity as well.
And their sexual desires are a complicating factor for that.
And there may be an aspect of their identity, but they're not the basic thing.
We are never, ever going to win over people for whom sexual identity politics forms the essence of their being.
It cannot happen.
Because it is intrinsically leftist.
It is intrinsically not conservative for your sexual desire to be the foundation of your identity.
So there might be a fella who's sexually attracted to other fellas, but he votes Republican because he thinks about God.
He reveres the Founding Fathers.
He likes sound economic policy.
He wants to pursue American interests on the world stage over other interests.
And those things are just much bigger for him than who he is attracted to.
Pride.
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Goodness gracious people.
Pride we're running on now.
This is the RNC, the people who run the RNC, They seem to be Democrats from four or five years ago.
I wouldn't even say Democrats from ten years ago.
Democrats ten years ago wouldn't run on pride.
Democrats ten years ago believed that marriage was a sacred bond between a man and a woman.
Barack Obama said that.
Hillary Clinton said that.
So they're not even Democrats ten years ago.
They're Democrats five years ago because they don't believe in a damn thing.
And worse than that, I mean, you can just say, well, they're just cynical, opportunistic politicians.
But they're not even smart about it.
Not one single vote will be won by a Republican Party pride coalition.
Not one vote.
All of the people with eclectic, unusual sexual desires who are going to vote for Republicans are going to vote for Republicans for other reasons.
Now, a pride coalition might turn off a lot of voters who think that there's really no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and they've got good reason to think that.
Just as a tactical political operation, you're not going to win a single vote.
Leave it to the RNC to try to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory.
So pathetic.
Now, there's one counter-argument here.
The counter-argument as to why the GOP needs an LGBT pride coalition is that the country is turning super-duper gay super-duper fast.
And this is backed up by some social scientific data.
So there's a survey out from Arizona Christian University that shows that 39%, almost 2 out of every 5, 18 to 24 year olds in the United States, identify as LGBTQ. 2 in 5 young Americans say that they're gay.
But they're not, okay?
They're not.
You're not.
I'm sorry.
You're not.
You're not that interesting.
You're not that special.
You're not.
You're just confused.
And I don't even mean to be this harsh to nearly 40% of young Americans who insist that they're part of the alphabet soup.
But you're not.
You're just a young person.
Your human sexuality and human desire is a complex thing.
And you need to get over yourself, okay?
What this says to me from a political standpoint is something that we all should have known for a very long time, namely that LGBT, the whole sexual identity alphabet soup, they are not oppressed.
On the contrary, there is a certain privilege that goes along with identifying as LGBTQ.
There is a social currency that goes along with that.
That's what I'm saying.
This is just basic incentives.
That is why more and more people are identifying that way.
Unless you're going the Alex Jones route and you believe that they're just putting something in the water that's turning the frickin' Zoomers gay, then I think you need to recognize there is a social contagion aspect to this.
That people are being incentivized to identify this way.
It makes perfect sense.
It goes back to the Kyle Rittenhouse thing.
The worst possible thing you can possibly be in society today is a straight white male.
You are the incarnation of evil if you are a straight white male.
You are told that straight white males are the most privileged people in the country.
The reality is you are the least privileged person in the country, at least according to the law and at least according to the new prevailing social norms.
You're a terrible person.
You should be disadvantaged in college admissions.
You should be disadvantaged in the job search.
You should be segregated out of certain social spaces.
But if you can, if you're, let's say you're a white guy and you think, gosh, I'm awful.
How do I make myself seem oppressed and thereby, paradoxically, become privileged?
Well, you would identify as LGBT or whatever.
Being LGBT is cool and hip and trendy, and it's the official state religion, right?
The...
So metaphysical claims of LGBT, especially the T part, namely that your body has nothing to do with who you really are, that is now officially pushed by the state, it's pushed in the schools, it's pushed everywhere throughout our society.
So you can either go along with that or you can be a heretic.
If you're a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or you just hold a basically Aristotelian view of human nature and sexuality, you're a heretic away from the state religion.
What's funny is there's the other side of this, which is the LGB part of it, which says that you basically are only your body.
The T part says you're not your body at all, you're only this kind of spirit.
And the LGB part says you're basically only your body, you're born this way, whatever your sexual desires are, you have to follow them, you have to pursue them to their logical conclusion, and you basically have no right to control or rein those things in because that would be repressive and repression is really bad.
So it's incoherent, but the one view they don't hold is that we're body and soul and spirit, right?
That we're both of these things, physical and metaphysical.
The reason I mention this silly survey is political, though.
The reason I mention it is we ought to use this knowledge to our own advantage.
We as conservatives.
We ought to use the knowledge...
That people can be easily swayed, even about an increasingly important aspect of their identity, by prevailing social wins.
I promise you, if tomorrow it became less cool to identify as transgender or whatever, fewer people would do it.
If it carried less social currency, less privilege, less legal advantage in some cases, fewer people would do it.
And that's how things were before, and now it carries all of these sorts of privileges and advantages, so more people are doing that too.
Contrary to, I guess more the libertarian right, what they have said, the politics, the government actually can shape the culture and can shape people's identities and the way that social mores and standards and taboos and things like that evolve.
And kids are being taught this stuff in school.
I mean, it's no surprise that after being taught in school that straight white guys are evil and being taught critical race theory and being taught transgender ideology and being taught this for many years at this point, that more and more students would identify in accordance with those beliefs.
And meanwhile, the left is denying that those things are being taught in schools in the first place.
Rick Scott just went on CNN. He was talking to one of the CNN ladies.
Her name is Brianna Kyler.
But she's just one of the sort of interchangeable automatons on CNN. And he mentioned the importance of critical race theory to this race that we just saw in Virginia.
And the CNN lady interrupts to say, beep boop, beep boop, critical race theory is not being taught in schools.
Parents know their kids are being indoctrinated with critical race theory in Virginia, and the Democrats wanted to deny it.
Well, it's not in the curriculum.
The parents showed up because they don't like being lied to.
Just to be clear, it's not in the curriculum in Virginia.
Let me just read you a few things.
In 2015, while Terry McAuliffe was governor, the Virginia Department of Education promoted incorporating a critical race theory lens in education.
You can still find it on the Department of Education's website.
It's still there.
In February 2019, a superintendent memo for the Virginia Department of Education promoted crystal race theory and the idea of white fragility.
It's not part of the curriculum.
I looked at it yesterday.
It's still there, Breonna.
I do want to ask you, just to be clear about where you are.
Breonna, wait a minute.
Let's all agree.
They were trying to indoctrinate kids.
Terry McCullough denied it.
It's still on the website.
This is happening.
And I hope Democrats continue to say it's not happening because parents are dumb.
They can see it.
Parents are dumb, you said?
Aren't dumb?
No, they're not.
I think parents are smart.
Okay, well, it's not being...
And she goes on, by the way.
She keeps going on.
She goes, it's not being taught in schools.
Okay, we just need...
And he kind of leaves it there and then they move on.
No, it's not being taught.
It's not being taught in schools.
Then he reads from the Virginia Department of Education website, where it lays out exactly how critical race theory is being taught in schools.
And what does she do?
Does she admit that she was wrong?
No, she goes, glitch.
You can see the smoke is starting to come out of her ears.
She goes, no, it does not compute.
Critical race theory is not in the curriculum.
Beep, boop, beep, beep, boop, beep.
No, but Brianna, I'm just reading, it says, from the Virginia State Department of Education, critical race theory is totally being taught in the curriculum.
Dot com, right?
It's just like exactly from the website.
But does not, no, critical race theory, beep boop, beep boop, and they can't do it.
They have no answer to that because she obviously got a talking point from her bosses at CNN to say, at all turns, deny that critical race theory is being taught in schools.
And unfortunately, she was not prepared with the evidence that it is being taught in schools.
And that's what the whole race was about.
The best she can muster at the end is, did you just say parents are dumb?
Ha ha ha.
And he goes, no, no, I said the opposite of that.
Once again, it's the opposite of what you're saying that it is.
But keep it up.
Keep it up, Democrats.
Keep it up.
Because they don't know what we think.
They don't know how to respond to the points that we make.
And sometimes that ends in disaster for them, as it just did in that Virginia governor's race.
Speaking of woke indoctrination, there is a new university being founded here in the United States, University of Austin.
The University of Austin is being pushed by Barry Weiss, former New York Times writer, who is now off on her own.
She was not sufficient.
She is a liberal, but she wasn't sufficiently woke for the New York Times.
So now she has a substack, and her substack is, frankly, much more interesting than anything put out by the New York Times.
Headline, we can't wait for universities to fix themselves, so we're starting a new one.
I left my post as president of St.
John's College in Annapolis.
Oh, well, this is a post from Pano Canelos, who was president of St.
College in Annapolis to build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.
And they go on and it's an interesting manifesto here to say that universities are extremely left-wing now and extremely woke and there's not freedom of speech on campus and freedom of inquiry.
They write, in these top schools and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth, once the central purpose of a university, remains the Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end, freedom of inquiry and civil discourse, prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?
So they go on and they say, you know, this is bad.
People are being treated like thought criminals.
There's a lot of censoriousness, which actually doesn't mean what people think it means.
People think censoriousness means censorship.
And that to be censorious is to be the sort of person who censors someone.
But it's actually not.
It means to be harshly critical.
So anyway...
It comes up, it turns out that fear can become endemic in a free society.
This is very oppressive, and that universities are supposed to defend, quote, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.
Okay, so what they are founding right now is a liberal university.
And these words get really confusing, because we talk about liberal education.
But that's not the same thing as a liberal university.
Liberal education and the liberal arts is not the same thing as liberalism.
Liberal education and the liberal arts Those are phrases that are really popularized in the 11th century, 12th century, 13th century.
These are phrases that actually have roots in antiquity that refer to the things that you need to know to be free, to make sense of your freedom.
You are educated to become a free person.
If we're not educated, then we're just slaves to our own appetites and desires and all we do all day is shoot up drugs and stuff our faces and get drunk and have sex.
But if you study the liberal arts and you become educated in this liberal way, you will be able to tame down all of those passions.
You will cultivate the mind.
You will cultivate all the deepest truths that your civilization has uncovered and you will become a free person and a rational person and able to control yourself.
Liberalism is an ideology that developed during the Enlightenment, and liberalism is a sort of rationalist ideology that branches off in lots of different directions, but it posits certain rights and certain forms of government, and we're living in the world that liberalism created.
They're not the same thing.
So how would I distinguish between the two?
Liberal, like liberal education, liberal arts is focused, as these guys say, on truth.
Right?
There is a certain truth and we need to pursue that truth.
And some things are right and some things are wrong.
And if you put the wrong answer down, you're going to get punished.
And if you put the right answer down, you're going to get rewarded with good grades.
Liberalism as an ideology pursues lots of other things, like free speech absolutism, or like academic freedom, this idea that you should be able to say and preach whatever you want in the university.
Everyone should have the right to speak in the university.
That's not a particularly conservative opinion, and I fear what's going to happen with this university, the University of Austin, is that it's going to devolve in the same way that the other universities have in our country.
Because academic freedom is a hoax.
It's BS. I mean, the conservative movement was founded with a book, Making Fun of Academic Freedom.
You actually shouldn't have total academic freedom at a university.
A Nazi should not be able to teach your sociology class.
A communist should not be able to teach your economics classes.
The point of the university is bringing together all of these disciplines and pointing toward truth.
And unfortunately, there is a reason that the university is created by the Catholic Church.
There is a reason that the university is invented within Christendom at the highest point of Christendom.
And then it kind of just starts to collapse as Christianity fades away from our culture.
Because you need...
A unity of truth.
You need a monopoly on truth.
You need to be able to say this is true and this is false and we are not going to teach these ideas and we are only going to teach these ideas and they're going to lead towards something.
The idea of truth, pursuing truth fearlessly, and the idea of academic freedom are actually kind of opposites.
They don't really go together that well.
Because truth says that there is objective reality and the academic freedom ideology says that everything's kind of relative and we need to hear everybody out.
But you actually don't.
To quote Bill Buckley, skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction.
So, I don't want to be too down on this effort.
They've got some conservatives and a lot of it is just kind of Classical liberal types.
But they've got some conservatives involved.
So Rabbi Amari is involved.
Some pretty serious conservatives.
So I wish them well.
I don't really mean to criticize.
They're getting enough criticism from the left, and I really hope this thing goes well.
But they are going to have to resolve that tension.
And they are going to have to choose.
Are they going to be a university that just pursues the liberal ideology?
Academic freedom?
Relativism?
Subjectivism?
Or are they going to say, no, some things are true and some things are false and we're going to teach the true stuff and we're going to kick out the false stuff?
Speaking of good and bad and right and wrong, we've only got about a minute left, but I really want to get to this story.
The Travis Scott story.
You know, a bunch of people were killed at a Travis Scott concert.
Eight people were killed between the ages of 14 and 27.
As young as 14, which really makes you ask, I mean, it's a horrible tragedy.
It does make you ask, why was a 14-year-old at this kind of concert with this filth and this demonic imagery, and why were they there?
I don't know.
I mean, I went to concerts when I was 14 and 15, and so I really feel for these parents and everything, but The concert was run very poorly.
There were way too many people in there.
It was very unsafe.
There are these theories coming around that this was some kind of demonic sacrifice or something.
I think that's probably a little extreme as well.
But one thing we can't deny is there are demonic symbols here.
Travis Scott was wearing a t-shirt of people walking through a portal and turning into demons.
The motto for the show was, see you on the other side.
One of the entrances was a gigantic mouth that looked like the Garden of Earthly Delights painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
Yesterday, satanic panic was trending.
This idea that, you know, oh no, everyone's worried about Satan like they were in the 80s and 90s.
First of all, you shouldn't panic about Satan, but you should reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises.
And furthermore, I had never heard of Travis Scott.
I listened to some of his music.
I watched some of his videos.
And it's filth.
I mean, it's just degenerate filth.
And if you listen to it, you are going to degrade yourself.
There's just no reason to listen to it.
And so, there's a lot of blame, I'm sure, to go around here.
The people who put the concert on, the security staff, maybe the guy himself, Travis Scott.
But this is really bad stuff.
This is an ugly culture.
This is an ugly culture that gins up all of the worst kind of base passions.
Great writers have been talking about this since antiquity.
It's got all this sort of ugly satanic imagery, kind of like Little Nass X. And so if the argument now is that, well, all these bad, vicious, evil, terrible, demonic things, they're just being used ironically, or they're just being used kind of in jest or something.
Well, the fact is, if you behave ironically for your whole life, then there's no difference between that and behaving sincerely.
Really, really terrible story all around it.
Regardless of how exactly this is going to shake out on who is responsible for what, don't listen to Travis Scott.
This is bad stuff.
It's going to decay your mind and your soul and your culture.
Bad stuff all around.
We need higher things.
We need higher things.
Pursue the good.
Avoid the evil.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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On today's episode, more details emerge on the fatal Travis Scott concert, the latest from the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, and Texas changes its constitution to combat restrictive COVID policies.
