Ron DeSantis introduces the STOP WOKE Act in Florida, Putin tries to rebuild the Soviet Union, and high school girls protest “sexualization” by taking off their clothes at school.
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American politicians have come up with some pretty great acronyms over the years.
There is, of course, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, also known as the Patriot Act, USA Patriot Act.
There is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015, or the USA Freedom Act.
Boy, that's a good acronym.
But I think that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have just come up with the best one yet.
A new piece of legislation for the upcoming legislative session called Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act.
The STOP WOKE Act.
An excellent acronym and an even more excellent piece of legislation.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Jesse Riley, who says, I don't think we're giving Jesse enough credit for giving black people the roles typically played by white men.
You make such a great point, Jesse.
That's true.
We need more diversity in Hollywood.
The Oscars are too white.
And that's all Jesse was doing was diversifying.
Fictional roles.
Fictional characters.
That's what he was doing.
And that's great stuff.
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I totally love the Stop Woke Act.
I don't only love it because of how great the acronym is, that the acronym is magnificent.
I love it because of what the law does.
Governor DeSantis, tell us what it does.
And this will do a number of things that are very important.
One, it will put into statute the Department of Education's prohibition on CRT in K-12 schools.
No taxpayer dollars should be used to teach our kids to hate our country or to hate each other.
And that's important and that's all well and good.
But I think what we've seen recently is you can legislate things like Parents' Bill of Rights.
You can have certain things, and sometimes the school districts don't always follow it.
And so we are going to be including in this legislation giving parents a private right of action to be able to enforce the prohibition on CRT, and they get to recover attorney's fees when they prevail, which is very important.
This is really good stuff.
This is a great use by conservatives of the government to save our culture.
He says it right there.
He says the legislation has to have teeth.
It's one thing to pass it, but how are you going to enforce it?
Well, one way you're going to enforce it is allowing a private right of action for these parents to go after the schools.
This is just the sort of thing that you saw in the Texas pro-life law.
Where you are empowering citizens to sue the abortionists.
So there's a mechanism in there to actually hold these people accountable.
We know that the teachers, because of the teacher unions, are unaccountable There are plenty of good teachers out there, and there are a lot of really bad teachers out there.
And you can't really discriminate between the two because the teacher unions are so strong they're going to do whatever they want.
We know that administrations are not really held to account all that often in the school districts.
And so here's one way we can do it.
The parents can actually take legal action here for the Stop Woke Act.
I suspect the squishy people, I suspect maybe some of the libertarians are not going to like this very much.
Because this is imposing limits on academic freedom and the freedom of teachers and it's limiting things in the classroom.
Yeah, right.
That's what you have to do.
That's what you have to do.
That's the only way that you can have a coherent culture.
Academic, I've said it before, I wrote a book about this called Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now, a great book to put in a Christmas stocking.
The Libs used the nonsensical concept of academic freedom, the hoax, in William F. Buckley Jr.'s words of academic freedom, to cram in all of their insane ideas into the curriculum.
And when they put in all of their crazy ideas, that necessarily crowded out all of the other ideas.
The good, conservative, normal, true ideas.
And contradicted them in many cases.
So what we need to do, if we want to be able to take that back, if we want to be able to take back education, which means if we want to be able to take back the next generations of Americans, we have got to push out all the crazy left-wing ideas, and the Stop Woke Act is a great way to do it.
If you don't like the Stop Woke Act, boy, howdy, you are not going to like the other law that is being proposed in Florida.
Which is a bill to require sports teams to sing the national anthem before sporting events.
Ooh, ooh, speaking of some of the good uses of big government, this is a great one.
New bill filed by State Representative Tommy Gregory.
He's a Sarasota-area Republican lawmaker.
This would require professional, not all sports teams, not necessarily high school or college, but professional sports teams to play the national anthem before home games in order to receive government funding.
This legislation follows a similar bill in Texas that came up after that jerk who runs the Dallas Mavericks stopped playing the national anthem before their games.
Really good stuff.
So it's not as knuckle-dragging and authoritarian and right-wing as people are going to say.
It's not saying that you're going to go to jail if you don't play the national anthem.
It's saying if you want to receive government money, then you need to stand up for the flag and you need to support our Star Spangled Banner and our national anthem.
If you're going to be a professional sports team, you're already getting a ton of tax perks anyway.
You are affiliated with the state.
Sports, just like all games throughout all history in governments, have been a patriotic thing.
And so now they've been turned against patriotism because the left has abused concepts such as free speech and free expression and taken them to insane extremes to undermine the state itself.
So we're going to go in there and take that back.
This is great stuff.
One of the arguments from the Squishes and maybe some libertarians is that this is tyrannical.
If a sports team doesn't want to stand up and play the national anthem, then they shouldn't be forced to.
The law merely has to enable people to do whatever they want.
The law needs to respect the individual choices.
That's not exactly true.
By its very nature, applies to everybody, not just to the individual whims of individual people.
So no, obviously the law is an imposition to some degree.
And while we, in recent years, come to think of the law as merely just reflecting our own will, we the people have a will, and then we push that It goes the other way as well, and I think we need to recognize this.
The law does not just react to what we want.
The law also instructs and informs what we want.
Statesmen throughout all of history, everywhere in the world, have known this.
That, for instance, some people might want to do drugs, but the law has a prohibition against drugs, and it discourages the use of drugs, and then it creates perhaps taboos around the use of drugs, and then people do fewer drugs less often.
These rules have weakened in recent years because people have changed the law, and the law doesn't merely reflect cultural changes, but the law pushes cultural changes as well.
Before the gay marriage decision from the Supreme Court, before Obergefell, the culture had a far less accepting view of the idea that marriage means something totally different than it had always meant.
Now, because of that change in the law, people have a very different view.
I don't, for the moment, even care to talk about gay marriage or drugs or whatever.
I'm just pointing out the fact that the law can affect the way people think about things.
And so, I think we ought to use the law and the government for good stuff.
If the libs are going to use the law and the government to attack our country and take away patriotism, I think we should use it to instill patriotism.
If the libs are going to use the coercive education system to teach people radical, crazy gender theory and terrible racial ideologies, we should use it for the opposite because that's a good thing.
Well, what's the difference between the right and the left if we're both willing to use the law and we're both willing to use the education system?
The difference is the substance.
What are we teaching?
What laws are we imposing?
Are we standing for the national anthem or are we disrespecting the national anthem?
Those are different things, even if the law is impelling you to do something in both cases.
Now, a great use of big government.
This is going to be all about how great big government can be.
What conservatives oppose is not big government.
What we oppose is unlimited, arbitrary, capricious government.
There's no such thing as small government in a country of 330 million people where we've got imperial holdings all the way from Guam to Puerto Rico.
You're not going to have some tiny little Republican form of government where everybody knows each other and we all go to vote in the forum or something like That's not going to happen.
So what we want is a limited government that is not tyrannical and arbitrary and just ruled by the whims of Dr.
Fauci.
We want it to be good government.
And so probably the most basic use of big government is to stop crime.
During crime waves, it's good to have big government.
During the 1970s and 80s, New York was a very bad place and there was a lot of crime.
Then Giuliani came in and used big government and lots of cops to arrest all the criminals and stop them from committing their crimes.
And guess what?
New York became a much better place.
Much more flourishing, much more conducive to human flourishing, and much more conservative.
Allowed people to sleep easy at night.
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So there is a major crime wave going on right now all over the United States.
I guess you could say it's been going on for over a year now because left-wing activists and peaceful protesters and demonstrators decided to burn the country down from sea to the shiny sea.
But you're seeing this now without even the facade or pretense of activism.
You're just seeing gangs of criminals go into Walgreens and CVS and just steal tons and tons of stuff, break into jewelry stores.
It's being filmed.
Sometimes it's happening in broad daylight and the cops aren't doing anything about it.
I don't blame them.
The politicians won't let the cops do anything about it.
And if the cops do anything and it contradicts some racial narrative or it falls into a certain narrative category on the left, then the cops could have their lives completely ruined.
As these left-wing lawmakers are calling for the police departments to be defunded and for prisons to be abolished.
So, I don't really blame the cops here, but what are we going to do about it?
Well, Nancy Pelosi was just asked about this, and she basically just shrugged her shoulders.
What do you think about some of this crime, specifically in San Francisco, smash-and-grabs?
And also, generally, is there some sort of a federal response?
You know, we've passed crime bills here before.
Is there something looking at some of these problems?
What it is, it's absolutely outrageous.
Obviously, it cannot continue.
But the fact is that there is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from, I don't know where.
Maybe you do.
And we cannot have that lawlessness become the norm.
There's an attitude of lawlessness, but who knows where it comes from, says Nancy Pelosi, one of the leaders of the Democratic Party that has been saying for years now, That we need to abolish the police, that we need to defund the police.
And in their defense, sort of in their defense, the logic of their argument is that America is an evil place.
The reason that they're saying we need to defund the police and empty out all the prisons...
Is not even because they think that there's no such thing as justice or justice is not a worthwhile goal or virtue.
They're saying that America is unjust, intrinsically unjust.
It'll always be unjust because it's white supremacist and racist and whatever nonsense they spout.
So because of that, the American system of law is necessarily evil and unjust.
And therefore we've got to get rid of it.
I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that the cause of the lawlessness in America is entirely the fault of the left.
They are openly calling for lawlessness.
You even see it in the way they approach the constitution.
Right?
Their interpretive principle for the Constitution is that America's evil and terrible and unjust and all our laws are terrible and it's based on white supremacists and blah blah blah blah blah.
And therefore, we need to just rewrite the Constitution from the bench.
And yeah, there's no right to an abortion in the Constitution, but there should be, so we're just going to put it in there.
What are you going to do about it?
That is lawlessness.
And so it is no surprise that When criminals go out on the streets.
And then, the cherry on top of that Sunday is that when all of these thugs went out on the streets and started burning and stealing and looting and killing last year, these people, these elected Democrats, actively encouraged that.
They donated to the bail funds for these people.
Kamala Harris donated to the bail funds for these people.
Or posted the link and encouraged other people to donate.
Staffers for Joe Biden did the same thing.
So that's where That's where the lawlessness comes from.
Now, speaking of crime, the left does not want to talk about the smash and grabs.
AOC, you'll remember, wouldn't even go so far as Pelosi to acknowledge it.
AOC said, oh, it's not happening.
Don't believe your lying eyes.
Don't believe the retail associations.
Don't believe Walgreens.
So, Pelosi will at least acknowledge it.
But the Democrats want to talk about a far worse crime than, you know, the zillions of dollars being stolen and the arson and the looting and the killing and all that.
The libs want to talk about January 6th.
Here is James Carville, very influential and prominent Democrat strategist, describing the massive criminal act of January 6th.
It was a massive criminal act.
The people who penetrated that capital were criminals.
The people that helped them penetrate the capital are criminals.
You're a lawyer.
You know this.
If I drive the getaway car or I case the place out, I'm just as guilty as the trigger man.
All right?
That's the way the law operates.
And they're going to find that members of Congress were aiding and abetting this.
That Trump was behind it.
Major people in the administration were behind it.
And we have to remember, this is a massive criminal attack.
It just wasn't an assault on the Temple of Democracy or whatever we say.
These were criminals in that building.
And these were people on Fox who were aiding and abetting criminality.
That's not a good thing.
Not international laws.
And I hope that they stay very, very aggressive and expose these criminals and the people that supported them to the very extent that they possibly can.
Man, these Democrats, they get real tough on crime when you're talking about the horn guy dancing around the Capitol Rotunda.
They get really tough on crime when some Midwestern dad cracks a Coors Light and puts his thumb up in front of a picture in the Capitol.
They are ready to send you to Gitmo.
They're probably going to bring back the death penalty in a lot of their states when you're talking about that Florida guy who was smiling with Nancy Pelosi's lectern as he walked out of the Capitol with it.
Not so tough when it comes to actual crime.
And not so tough when it comes to actual looting and robbing and killing.
Because this is friend-enemy politics, right?
The BLM people are my friends, the Antifa people are my friends, so I'm just not going to prosecute them.
And the horn guy is my enemy, and so I am going to pretend that this guy is the gravest threat to the United States ever that we've ever faced.
And there's no objective standard here.
It's just, I like my friends, I hate my enemies.
That's what they're talking about.
And Carville goes pretty far.
He doesn't just say that the eccentric people at the Capitol, who didn't kill people, who didn't kill cops, who didn't do any of the things that the libs say that they did.
He's saying it wasn't just them who were the terrible criminals, it's Trump.
Trump was behind it.
We got him now.
Stay tuned.
Buckle up, buckaroo.
There is really serious stuff coming out of the January 6th commission.
How stupid do they think we are?
Very stupid, I guess.
Stupid they think we are.
How many times are they going to pull this?
Oh, just you wait.
We've got a Russia investigation.
Trump is behind a massive crime.
Oh, just you wait.
We're going to get him.
We're going to get him.
What happened with that?
They didn't get him.
Oh, but we forget Russia for a second.
Now, Ukraine.
You know, Russia's enemy.
Well, he was actually...
Yeah, maybe he wasn't colluding with the Russians, but he's colluding with the Ukrainians.
Yeah, we got him.
Massive crime.
We're going to get him.
What's going to...
And what happened with that?
No, they didn't get him on that.
Oh, it's Mueller time, baby.
No, no, that didn't.
Well, we're going to...
The Southern District is going to get him.
Is that okay?
Is that...
Investigation!
And we're gonna...
So now it's January 6th.
And then Carville goes out.
It's the most implausible of all.
Now, you had Fox News, Fog News, and Trump.
It's not a great James Carville impression.
And they were doing wrongdoing.
What wrongdoing?
The texts that came out, which, by the way, were doctored, we recently learned.
The texts that came out from Fox News hosts and...
Conservatives texting the White House, and Don Jr., even, texting the White House, texting Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff, and saying, hey, this is bad.
Stop this.
Have Trump go out there and speak.
If anything, they show that the prominent conservatives were discouraging any sort of violence at the Capitol.
They weren't saying, yeah, go get him.
They were saying, no, get the president out there to go tell people to go home.
And then what happened?
That's exactly what happened.
Trump went out and said, hey, stop it.
Go home.
Totally exonerates everybody.
But they're going to gin it up and gin it up and gin it up.
And then nothing's going to come of it.
And you know what?
They're just going to do it again.
They're going to pick another topic and do it again.
Another non-traversy and do it again.
And it's going to be mostly Democrats leading the charge with a handful of court jester conservatives there as well.
Like Liz Cheney.
Speaking of January 6th and the January 6th commission.
Turns out that at least one of just two nominally Republican members on the January 6th commission is getting a ton of money.
From Lib donors.
Liz Cheney raked in about 55 grand from the same donors who fund the Lincoln Project.
The Lincoln Project is this scandal-ridden left-wing operation by a bunch of disgruntled former Republican operatives who couldn't get jobs anymore, so they started to work for Democrats.
And then one of them got in trouble because it turned out he was grooming young boys for sex.
And so the Lincoln Project, not a very reputable, honorable organization.
And the same donors to the Lincoln Project are funding Liz Cheney.
A lot of money.
A billionaire, John Pritzker, who's given $100,000 to the Lincoln Project, gave Cheney over $21,000.
Another Silicon Valley investor, Ron Conway, top donor to the Lincoln Project, gave Liz Cheney and her campaign committees the same amount of money.
For the people who say, Liz Cheney's actually, her voting record's fairly conservative.
Yeah, whatever.
When push comes to shove, at the crucial moments, she sides...
With the other guys.
This is friend-enemy politics.
Gets right back to it.
Where it counts, she sides.
With the other guys, that's a lot of money.
We're talking about $21,600.
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Also excited to announce a new series exclusively on Daily Wire.
If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall for some Ben Shapiro behind the scenes, then you're in luck.
In the premiere episode, Jordan Peterson joins Ben for coffee while he's visiting Nashville.
Take a listen.
All righty, so I'm here in Nashville with Jordan Peterson.
Jordan's spending a lot of time in Nashville.
In fact, I think Jordan may know Nashville better than I do.
Last night you dragged me to Robert's Western world, and you were like the guy of the house.
Like they all knew you.
No, no, Luke McCrary was the guy of the house, the guitarist.
Playing the guitar at the sea?
He's a deadly man, yeah.
Kelly's Heroes, they're a deadly band.
I will say, I feel like I was a little more dressed for it.
Like, I was wearing a t-shirt and a leather jacket, and you were wearing this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I didn't have my COVID boots.
I haven't bought them yet, but I'll get a cowboy hat and cowboy boots for my show here.
Soon enough, we're going to get you Nashville'd up, exactly.
It was really fun being there with you.
Oh, yeah, no, that was awesome.
You're a classically trained violinist.
I am, I am.
And you like the music.
Oh, yeah, I love that stuff.
I mean, if you're a good musician, you're a good musician.
Yeah, no kidding.
They really know how to play.
Sunday special is a lot more formal.
I mean, I'm coming in with questions, and it's much less of kind of a discussion between the two of us, and it's much more of kind of just me probing and Jordan's ideas.
But this is much more like how we talk normally.
I mean, Jordan, you called me.
We talked on the phone like a month ago, and this was basically the same conversation.
This is how we talk when...
Different topics, but...
Yeah, different topics, but I mean, like, this is how we talk when the cameras aren't on us.
People really love being in on those conversations.
Yeah, no, I think that the fact that people are going to kind of get the fly-on-the-wall view of these kind of conversations is pretty awesome.
So you'll be able to see clips of my conversation with Jordan here at the coffee shop on YouTube.
But if you want to see the whole conversation, which really is the way you should see it, you need to head on over to dailywire.com or check us out on the Daily Wire app.
You'll be able to see the whole thing there, and it's pretty fantastic.
Not only do I want to listen to that conversation, but I want Jordan Peterson's suit.
It's a great suit.
Oh my gosh, that guy has the best suits.
Ben's conversation with Jordan drops tomorrow.
It'll only be available at dailywire.com.
If you're not a member yet, now is the perfect time to sign up.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to sign up today.
Clips of the show will be available on YouTube, but make sure to subscribe to hear the whole thing.
thing.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Just thinking of Liz Cheney, for some reason, Liz Cheney brings to mind Vladimir Putin.
I don't know.
Maybe it's just because they're both very deceitful people.
I don't know.
But Vladimir Putin is top of mind right now and in the news because there is a real chance that tanks are about to roll in Ukraine.
I guess that would be another reason, is because you had all of these never-Trumper types attacking Trump for colluding with Russia, then they attack him for colluding with Ukraine.
But Ukraine and Russia might go to war, and it won't be much of a war.
If Putin invades Ukraine, he's just going to take it.
I was talking to Senator Cruz just a week or two ago about this.
He thinks that tanks could roll into Ukraine starting maybe beginning of, sometime in January.
Why would this happen?
And what should the United States' response be?
This would happen because Vladimir Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.
And there were a lot of geopolitical disasters in the 20th century, so if he thinks that the collapse of the evil empire is the greatest one, we should take him seriously.
And here's his explanation.
He says, what's the disintegration within the USSR? That's the collapse of historical Russia called the Soviet Union.
We turned into a completely different country, and what had been built up over a thousand years was largely lost.
So this is an interesting take from Putin because the traditional take of Russia and the Soviet Union is that you had the Russian nation and the Russian empire and it had been built up until the revolution, until the Russian revolution when the commies came in and then they created this entirely new entity that destroyed Russian history and executed the family of the czar and created the Soviet Union.
But that's not what Putin is describing.
Putin is saying, no, the Soviet Union was just an extension, it was just the next step of the historic Russian nation.
And so when you destroy the Soviet Union, you're actually destroying a thousand years of Russian history.
So Putin is not viewing it as some communist ideologue who hates Russia's history and wants to completely change it.
He's viewing himself, it would seem, as a new kind of czar, as just an extension of all the old czars of Russia.
And so he wants to get that back.
He wants to take back the territory that was lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now, in 1991, as the Soviet Union is collapsing, Ukraine votes in a landslide to become an independent nation.
Now, it's a little complicated because there are still some people in Ukraine who wouldn't mind being part of Russia, and there's just an internal political battle within Ukraine.
So the claim against Trump for the past, what, five years is that Trump was colluding with the Russians.
And the traditional conservative response to this is, no, he's not colluding with the Russians.
How dare you say he's colluding with the Russians?
Now, I've got a little bit of an out there kind of suggestion.
I've got a kind of out there, left field thought when I hear this accusation that Trump is colluding with the Russians.
Namely, Should we maybe collude with the Russians?
Look, please don't yell at me.
I know I'm a little out there right now.
But if you asked me today, who is our number one geopolitical enemy and threat?
Is it Russia or China?
Who poses the gravest threat to American power?
I'll ask you that question.
What do you think?
China, right?
It's not even close.
It's not even close.
China is stealing our technology.
They've got an extremely robust economy.
They've got a gazillion people in there.
They're threatening United States interests around the world.
They've got all of our manufacturing.
That's a huge national security threat.
They own our debt.
They're buying up a lot of our land.
They're a huge threat.
So, when the Soviet Union was the big threat during the Cold War...
What did the United States do?
China, a growing power.
Soviet Union, evil empire, our number one enemy in the world.
What did we do?
We cozied up to China.
We cozied up to China to box in the Soviet Union.
It was a Cold War strategy.
So I guess my question now is...
If China is the grave threat, why would we also want to wage a two-front war against China and Russia?
Would it not be better?
I'm not saying we need to put out the welcome mat and let the Russians roll into whatever country they want.
But I am suggesting, wouldn't it be better to have better relations with Russia as we are heating up our tensions with China?
It seems to me...
That we would.
And that's not what we're doing.
What we're doing is actually pushing China and Russia closer together.
Moscow is Beijing's largest arms supplier.
They provide 70% of China's arms imports between 2014 and 2018.
Relations between Moscow and Russia are at a, quote, unprecedentedly high level, according to Vladimir Putin.
China is a friendly nation, he says.
It has not declared us an enemy, as the United States has done.
China and Russia are united like a mountain and our friendship is unbreakable, says the foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian in China.
So this is obviously what Putin wants.
Putin wants a super tight relationship with China.
That's obviously what China wants.
So why do we want that?
Why are we pushing them together?
There are a lot of wedges here that we could have.
We could use trade.
The trade between China and Russia is extremely imbalanced.
We could use China encroaching on some of Russia's economic territory, buying up resources in Russia, just like they're buying up resources in the United States.
We could use it.
But I just...
It seems to me that the thinking of the 1980s is not necessarily going to work in 2020.
And a lot of the problems on the right are because we don't recognize that while principles and values remain the same, circumstances change.
And so my humble suggestion, I just look, did you see Vladimir Putin built this beautiful cathedral in Russia?
This gorgeous, beautiful, beautiful art, architecture.
It wasn't merely aping the past.
It was taking the best of the past and kind of adding some modern elements.
This beautiful orthodox cathedral.
And then you look at what the Western secularists are doing and they want to turn Notre Dame into some fruity Disneyland.
Maybe, all I'm saying is maybe we should consider, to some degree, colluding with the Russians.
Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world.
Because whatever strategy we're pursuing now is not working.
And speaking of bad strategies, there's a story out of Oregon.
A group of Oregon high school and middle school students These young girls decided that they were going to protest sexualization by taking off their clothes at school and just wearing their bras.
This is a real story.
It's not the Onion.
It's not the Babylon Bee.
At Southridge High School in Beaverton School District, students came to school in lace bras that revealed...
Everything.
Did not leave very much to the imagination.
Lingerie bottoms, according to one parent.
And they did this.
They wrote actually some protest slogans on their bodies and some of their clothing that said, rape culture, or educate your boys, or my body, or my clothing choice.
My body, my clothing choice.
I don't know what young man at this high school came up with this idea, but he is a genius.
He is a devilish, clever man to convince the women that they were going to protest sexualization by taking all their clothes off and parading around for the boys.
That's...
That is like protesting obesity by eating a bunch of donuts.
That is like protesting lung disease by just slurping up cigarettes and not just chain smoking non-stop.
But there is a kind of logic to it.
Just like there's a kind of logic to defund the police and abolish prisons.
If you think America is hopelessly unjust, then obviously you've got to dismantle the system of laws.
Well, it's the same thing here.
This is the logical consequence of this liberal conception of the individual being able to do whatever the individual wants based purely on the individual's will.
If I want to be a woman, then I really am a woman.
And my will will transform reality.
If I want to pursue whatever desire I want, then I can do that.
And you have no right to stop me from doing that.
Well, this is the logical conclusion of that.
The girls are saying...
I don't want boys to look on me with lust.
Okay, and I don't want to have to watch where I walk at night.
I don't want to have to worry about walking down a dark alley wearing a miniskirt in the middle of the night in the bad section of town.
I shouldn't have to worry about that.
I'm the victim.
Stop victim blaming me.
Just teach boys not to rape.
Just teach boys not to look lustfully on women.
Well, sure, yeah, there are laws against rape, right?
Of course, that's good.
We like that.
The law is an instructor.
The law is...
But you will never, never stop boys from getting a thrill out of seeing naked ladies.
It just can't happen.
No matter how much you desire that, no matter how intransigent you are and...
Obstinate you are about your rights and your will, you will never convince boys not to think that naked ladies are cute and hot.
It can't happen.
Well, just teach boys.
No, what you are doing is denying reality and making the problem worse.
If you are protesting sexualization by prancing around in your bras, it just won't help.
When we deny reality, we make problems worse.
Though you do wonder, with these high school sort of protests, how much of it is just, you know, the more things change, the more things remain the same.
How much of this is just the girls putting on a show for the boys, and how much of this is the boys, you know, trying to flirt with the girls.
You wonder these things.
Whatever it is, it's not an effective political protest.
Whatever dudes, whatever creepy dudes convince the girls to do this, stop it.
That's not nice to do.
Speaking of creepy dudes, I just read the creepiest opinion column I have ever read in my whole life, and I read a lot of op-eds.
Headline, Men Like Me Benefit from Safe Abortion Access.
This is by Kavon Shroff.
He is a senior advisor to the Institute for Education, which is some D.C. NGO. He's got degrees, I think, from pretty fancy schools.
Kayvon Shroff, and he says that he, a man who has promiscuous sex with women that he doesn't care very much about and doesn't want to be with, he benefits from abortion.
Quote, men like me I've long been the direct beneficiaries of safe abortion access.
Most of the women I've had sex with were also students, like me, also progressive, and also not at a point in their lives where they were looking or ready to have children.
I try to share responsibility for birth control, and if a woman tells me she's on it, I also trust that.
Oh, he's so progressive.
Believe all women, right?
If she got pregnant, however...
Though entirely her decision, I assume we would both want the same thing, an abortion.
In longer term relationships, we've had explicit discussions about this.
So he'll sit down.
If he sleeps with a woman, and maybe he doesn't really like her, like he doesn't want to marry her or anything, but he likes her well enough to keep sleeping with her for at least some period of time, he's going to sit her down and say, hey, missy, don't you get any ideas in your head?
There is a product of our fake love, the love that I'm performing even though I don't actually feel any love for you.
If there is any product, namely a new beautiful human being that is a little bit from me and a little bit from you, we're going to kill that thing.
And if not, I refuse to keep having casual sex with you for some undetermined amount of time.
He says, what if I got a woman pregnant?
What if she didn't want to continue the pregnancy but could not get an abortion?
Would we try to stay together even if it wasn't a fit?
Hey, Buster, pretty sure it was a fit.
Okay, I'm pretty sure that's kind of the issue in the first place, right?
But it's a fit physically.
But it's not, I don't actually like her soul or her spirit or her mind.
I don't like, it's not a fit.
Would we stay together?
How would I provide for the child?
Would I have to get a job?
Oh, God, I don't want to get a job.
What kind of custody or visitation rights would I get if we weren't together?
Oh, God, would I want that?
I'd have to see the kid and work and then pay for the kid?
Would adoption really be a consideration as Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently glibly suggested?
I love that this guy is accusing someone else of being glib.
This guy who thinks it's Unjust and insane not to let him kill his children with all the women that he's using.
He's suggesting that a Supreme Court justice with adopted children is being glib about adoption.
If so, would the child face an abusive welfare system?
I'm going to pause there.
No, the child wouldn't.
Because for every infant put up for adoption in the United States, for every newborn baby, there are an estimated 36 couples trying to adopt that baby.
The children who end up in the foster care system or the government system are...
Obviously, that's a terrible system.
We should reform it as best we can.
But it's not little babies being put up for those systems.
It's older kids being taken out of bad homes, and those are harder to adopt.
In terms of the little babies, there is no shortage of adoptive parents.
The questions and worries abound.
So I read this creepy column by creepy Kevin Shroff.
And I see just a lot of red flags.
Not for me.
What do I care?
I don't have any intention of sleeping with Mr.
Shroff.
But for all these other women, if it's him or if it's some other dude who's really, really into abortion, run!
Run for your life, lady!
Let there be a lady-shaped hole in the wall where you run away from this guy.
What do you get out of this?
The one thing you could say you get out of this is some pleasure from sex.
But does anyone, if we're all being really, really honest about reality, and we're not buying into crazy left-wing ideologies, does anyone really believe that women get the same sort of pleasure from sex that men do?
I don't really buy that.
And I don't think women, if they're being honest with themselves, really buy that either.
Talk about tricks that dudes play on chicks.
I think all of feminism is basically just a trick that dudes played on chicks.
Oh yeah, you know what would be a really effective political protest?
If you took all your clothes off and danced around in front of me.
Free the nipple.
Remember that movement?
There was the free the nipple movement to try to have more obscene imagery on social media.
Oh yeah, that would be empowering.
If you got naked and jiggled in front of me, yeah, that would be really empowering.
And you know what else would be really empowering?
If you slept with me without asking anything of me whatsoever and not requiring me to be accountable or responsible to you at all.
That would be, you would be so, man, that'd make you so strong.
So we're doing that.
That's cool.
That's good.
That works.
No.
What do women get out of that?
What do women get out of creepy dudes like Cave and Shroff?
Nothing!
You get nothing!
You just get used!
And then he's going to move on, and if he does knock you up, he's going to make you kill that kid, or he's going to really put a lot of pressure on you to kill your kid, and then he's going to leave you, and then there's going to be another Cave and Shroff who comes along and does the same thing.
And then you're going to do that, and probably you're in some liberal social circles, and you're going to be in some major metropolitan area, and like a hundred guys are going to do that, and then guys aren't going to like you anymore because they're going to go for some younger girl that they convinced to dance around naked for them.
And you are going to be left high and dry, lady.
Don't do it!
Don't fall for these guys.
Goodness gracious.
I'm on a mission of mercy here.
Come on!
What are you doing?
Speaking of abortion, who gets abortions?
Who gets abortions?
Asks the New York Times.
It's a big piece.
This is a big do not overturn Roe vs.
Wade activist piece in the New York Times.
They say the typical patient, here we go, typical patient is already a mother, is in her late 20s, attended some college but doesn't have a degree, has a low income, has a low income, I'm going to underline that one, is unmarried, is in her first six weeks of pregnancy, is having her first abortion, lives in a blue state.
And so, come on.
Even you pro-lifers need to admit, we need abortion, right?
We need abortion because abortion mostly just kills poor people.
Look, she's poor.
You want more poor babies?
And they're going to be all wanting your money, and they're going to be all poor, and it's going to be icky, and you're going to have to walk by them on the street.
Ugh.
And she's unmarried, so you might need to pay more in taxes.
Or really, the welfare systems, the foster care system is so terrible, and the government-run child care systems are so terrible.
Maybe you'd have to give more to charity.
That's no good.
And look, she doesn't even have a college degree.
She's not even educated in the way that the liberal establishment wants her to be.
What the New York Times is saying is that the women who get abortions are...
We're poor and dumb and we don't want them to have kids, right?
That's what's underlying all of this.
Pretty ghastly take.
I'm going to go out there.
I'm going to, again, this is going to be kind of wacky and crazy and out of left field.
I don't think that we should kill all the poor people.
I don't think that we should kill all the people who are below a certain IQ or a certain level of educational attainment.
Especially the latter.
Good grief.
As though a college degree implied really much of anything these days with the collapse of our educational system.
But I don't think we should kill dumb people either.
And I don't think we should kill people based on their race.
And I don't think we should kill people based on their geography.
And I just don't think we should kill innocent people.
But this is how they think.
This is how they think, which is ghastly.
And this is how they think that we think.
Which is pretty sad as well.
Just a little final point on this.
Dr.
Oz.
Dr.
Oz is TV host.
He's running for Senate as a Republican in Pennsylvania now.
But there was a video that came out of him making fun of the pro-life movement and pro-life people.
This was some time ago.
And so now he's being grilled about this on Fox News.
He refuses to really give an answer on when he thinks life begins.
What is your position as both a doctor and a senatorial candidate on when life begins?
When should we draw the line when abortion is legal?
As a doctor, I appreciate the sanctity of life.
And for that reason, I'm strongly pro-life.
With the three exceptions I mentioned, that's how I would vote.
And when does that life begin?
Again, if I'm pro-life, then it's a decision that comes back to the sanctity of when you think life does begin.
And I believe it begins when you're in the mother's womb.
When you're in the mother's womb?
But that carries you all the way up to nine months of pregnancy.
No, of course not.
Life's already started when you're in your mother's womb.
But it's a rat hole to get trapped in the different ways of talking about it.
We need, as a nation, to make sure the Constitution is appropriately followed, and people like me, and you may be in the same camp, who are pro-life, have our feelings respected.
And this is something that should not be taken away from us by judiciary legislating from the bench.
Yeah, but that's also something that's going to have to be legislated, and that answer is going to have to be given specifically.
Good on this guy.
This interviewer is doing a great job here.
That is some weak sauce from Dr.
Oz.
How hard is it to say conception?
How hard is it to say...
This is the simplest answer.
This is the most tried-and-true answer.
This is the true-by-definition answer.
When does life begin?
It begins at conception, at the conception of life.
It begins, you know, when does life begin?
It begins, you know, when we decide, when we need to have people make their decision about, and it comes to the question of when does life begin?
Yeah, buddy, that's what I'm asking you.
When does it begin?
It begins, and that's a clever answer.
He says it begins when you're in the mother's womb.
Yeah, we all agree with that.
Even the most radical pro-abortion people, I guess with maybe a couple of exceptions, believe that life begins, you know, at least by the day before birth.
When you're in the mother's womb.
So, when though?
When?
When does it be?
Well, you know, and it's already begun.
You know, okay, well, so just say it.
Say it, but he can't say it.
Even John McCain would say it.
Remember John McCain, who is, you know, a little on the squishier side when it comes to conservatism?
John McCain said it during his presidential race.
He said, I believe life begins at conception.
Why is it so hard for Dr.
Oz?
Maybe because Dr.
Oz doesn't really believe it.
We are in a moment right now where we are moving the Overton window, where we are aggressive, where conservatives are actually making substantial wins.
We're stopping woke.
We're doing this Stop Woke Act.
We're making big wins.
Don't settle for squishes, folks.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, a new survey reveals that huge numbers of Americans have left religion in recent years, especially since COVID. But that's not actually correct.
Americans aren't leaving religion.
They're going from one religion to a different one.
I'll explain.
Also, Ron DeSantis continues to lead the charge against wokeness in the school system.
And airline CEOs try to explain why it's stupid to require masks on planes.
Plus, a leading climate activist and quote-unquote scientist calls for more censorship of climate denialism.
And a daily cancellation.
Kamala Harris is canceled, but perhaps not for the reasons you may think.
