Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 441 | Is Good Speech Better Than Free Speech? | Guest: Michael Knowles

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

Today we're talking to the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles. He has a lot going on right now — a new book and a new baby. We discuss all of the hurdles facing conservative parents right now, as well as the tactics the Left uses to control speech. Political correctness is a trap that progressives use to control the conversation with conservatives, so how can we turn the tide? Stop relying on constitutional arguments and start using moral arguments. --- Today's Sponsors: Annie's Kit Clubs have the perfect subscription boxes for both boys & girls that will keep them creative, constructive, & engaged at the kitchen table. Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE & save 75% off your first shipment. Good Ranchers safely delivers American craft beef & better-than-organic chicken, right to your door! You can place a one-time order or, better yet, subscribe & save 20% with each purchase. Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE to get $20 off & free express shipping. --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys. Welcome to Relatable. I am really excited about you guys listening to my conversation with podcast host and author Michael Knowles. We are going to talk about his new book, Speechless, and you guys are going to love it.

He is a very independent and I think compelling thinker. You guys are going to love his book and you're also going to love the conversation that I had with him. So without further ado, here is Michael Knowles. Michael, thank you so much for joining me. We're going to talk about a few things today. I want to talk about the birth of your baby, but also the birth of your book. Let's first talk about fatherhood. How is that adjustment been?

It has been fabulous and shocking, and you can see the under-eye bags are proof of my fatherhood. It's kind of a bit of cosmic sadism, though, or maybe Providence, that my book and my baby were both due on the same day. On the same day, wow. And, you know, my baby, very punctual, he came right on time. And so I was, I kind of wish he had, like, waited a day or two because I was there. I was in the room, the delivery room. The nurses must have thought I was the most callous man in the world because I'm just there, you know, typing away until midnight almost.

But baby came out fine. And I think the book came out fine too. So it was nice that they were both delivered on time. So are you getting any sleep? Like, how has the newborn stage been? Anything surprised you? What's it been like? The thing that surprised me is I've always thought that I would be a really good grandpa.

I don't know. It's sort of up in the air. about being a father, but being a grandpa, I thought, you know, the kid comes over. I like slip him a 20, you know, whatever. Yeah. Give him his first cigar. But I thought I would really enjoy fatherhood intellectually. It's sort of the thing that we're geared to do. And, you know, not everyone gets to do it. It was a little bit of a rocky road even for us to get there. So I thought intellectually, I'd really like it. But emotionally, I don't know, I'm not the most touchy-feely guy in the world. So I didn't think I'd have that. And then the minute that kid comes out. Yeah.

I tell it, not to get sentimental or anything, the emotional rush of it really did surprise me. And even, you know, when the little guy is just like screaming in my face, which is a frequent occurrence, there's something so cute and endearing about it. It's almost like our nature was made to react that way. It is almost like that. I talk about like the tidal wave of love that you feel when they put that baby on your chest. It's like all of a sudden, all of your hope. and fears that you had for yourself are transferred onto this human being. And you're like, I don't even care what happens to me. I would die a thousand deaths if it just meant that this

human being was happy. And yes, of course, you love your spouse. You love your parents. You love different kinds of people in your life, even in maybe an unconditional way when it comes to your spouse. But the love that you have for a child, I mean, like you said, it's just this otherworldly, never felt before inexplicable kind of thing. And I think that also, that's a price me too. People, you know, they tell you that, but you don't know until you experience it. Would you agree? Absolutely. And there, you know, on that very point, I was thinking in the final weeks before the baby was due, I said, well, you know, you've got, to my wife, I'd say, you've got the baby coming out. That's the birth that you're giving. And I've got my book that's coming out.

Hopefully that's the birth that I'm giving. And not to be too cold about it, but I just, I was spending much more of my time thinking about the book than I was about the baby and, you know, vice versa for her. And then the minute the kid came out, it was really shocking. I had this sense that, oh, the book just doesn't really matter. Yeah, is that weird? I think it makes important arguments. I hope it changes the dialogue a little bit and the direction of the conservative movement. But broadly speaking, who gives a damn, you know, compared to the kid, like the book is nothing. Yeah. Do you have the same anxiety that I hear from a lot of parents? And I don't know if it's different between moms and dads, the different feelings that you have, just looking at the

craziness of the world, how we live in this kind of post-truth and as we're going to talk about this cancel-obsessed world. Does it give you any anxiety about raising a child in that kind of environment? It does for a number of reasons. But, you know, when I think of my own experience, and then I think of the way that I want to raise my son. I see a conflict and this creates a little bit of a problem. It's sort of the issue that every parent faces when you want to give your kid the best, but you don't want to spoil your kid. If you give your kid the best of everything,

the kid's going to be spoiled and that's actually not going to be good for it. And so I think now I look at public schools here, even here in Tennessee, where it's a little more sane than California or New York, but there's still this radical leftism. The most notable extreme of this is gender theory. Yeah. Has infiltrated all these institutions. So I think, okay, I can't send the kid to public school.

Then I look around some of the Catholic schools. I don't know. I've heard kind of mixed things. I don't know if that's great. Then some of the other private schools are, one, exorbitantly expensive. But two, you don't even really know if they're getting the education that you want there either. In Los Angeles, for example, the private schools are probably more crazy. than the public schools even.

So then you say, okay, I guess my option is to homeschool. I have a lot of friends who are homeschooled. It's obviously a great option. It's kind of a heavy load on the mother specifically. But okay, that's an option. But then you think of your own experience. I'm a product of public school. I met my wife in, I think, fifth grade technically,

but we only remember it in sixth grade. And I had all this kind of craziness that I was exposed to. And actually being in a very radical leftist environment made me, much more conservative. Being in a very atheist environment made me much more Christian. I don't think that that's what happens to everybody, but for a certain kind of contrarian personality, it does. So I think, well, if I could expose my son to the rigors of reality and not shield him from it, he'll probably be stronger for it. But you don't want to expose him to such dangers that it breaks the kid, that it ruins him. And so it's a very, very fraught question. Yeah, I think it is really difficult.

and there are a lot of different perspectives on this podcast. We talk about the dangers or the problems with our public education system a lot. And that's not to say that sending your kid to a private school, Catholic school, Christian school, you know, whatever it is is going to guarantee their salvation is going to guarantee that they have their head screwed on tight. I, you know, I went to private school, kindergarten through 12th grade, and I graduated with people who, you know, were taught all the same things that I was. We were all taught from a Christian perspective. And yet, you know, who are diametrically opposed to what kind of values we were raised with today. So obviously it doesn't guarantee that you stay sane or stay a believer your whole life. But I do worry about sending young kids into battle so early on. I do think that there's a point that you're making that, yes, they're exposed to reality and exposed to other views and hopefully it toughens them up and prepares them for the real world and being able to defend their faith and their values. But, you know, I mean, sending a kindergartner to battle to where they're having to hear eight hours a day, different definitions of gender and marriage and family and sexuality and morality and a different worldview and then expecting me to compete against that for the few hours at night that I have with them, that does kind of sounds like a losing battle and something that I don't really want to subject my kids to.

Of course. I mean, even I guess I came out of the whole process more conservative. And Christian, again, not just more Christian, but Christian rather than not being Christian. But that only followed probably a decade in which I was a little bit liberal. I had some dalliances. But moreover, I was an atheist for about 10 years. And I think if I had been catechized in a more robust way in Christianity, right, you know, and not quite so catechized as I was in secular liberalism, I might have been able to save myself a lot of trouble over those 10 years. All's well that ends well, but that is a hefty price to pay.

And, you know, the whole point of education is that you shape people. You know, education is not just even about the book learning that goes into your head, though it's obviously about that, but it's about your behavior. It's about training in the virtue. I think actually sometimes conservatives get confused on this point. They say, you know, we want to educate, not indoctrinate. But the words mean essentially the same thing. They both come from the same root word.

Sometimes you'll hear, we want to teach students how to think, not what to think. And the thing about that is you need to know what to think to know how to think. You need to know that two plus two equals four if you want to know how to think about mathematics. And so we're very reluctant to use anything that might seem coercive, especially on the right. But, you know, all education is coercive. You're teaching people some things. You're not teaching them other things. And, you know, if a student is raised on Shakespeare and the King James Bible and the best that has been written, he's going to have a much more robust education than if he's raised on Ibram-Kendi in Common Core. Right. I think that you make a good point that in an effort to try to be opposed to progressivism, we try to say, well, no, no, no, we don't want to indoctrinate in the same way that secular progressives do. So we just kind of want to be hands off and allow our kids to figure things out. But, I mean, the world isn't neutral. There is no neutral ground. Secularism is not a neutral perspective. It's not a neutral worldview. And I think some people think that that if you just raise your kids void, of any kind of religious doctrine or religious values, then they'll just learn how to critically think

and they'll come up with their own conclusions. But that is a faulty. It's a misunderstanding of how the world works, how worldview works. They're going to be indoctrinated one way or another. I remember reading this article by a Harvard professor, I think her name is Elizabeth Bartholette, where she said that homeschooling is very authoritarian.

And I brought this up with someone that I was interviewing to try to get their counterpoint. And he actually made a better point than the one that I thought that he was going to make. And he said, well, it is authoritarian. Parenthood is authoritarian. Teachers, teaching kids in school is authoritarian in the sense that they have the authority. They're telling them what to think. They're telling them how to think.

They're telling them what conclusions to come to. They're even indoctrinating them with a certain kind of worldview and morality. And so the question is for parents is not whether or not there's going to be an authority in your child's life. but who is that primary authority going to be? And what is your child going to learn from that authority? So I think you're right. Conservatives need to not be so scared to say, yeah, we are going to also teach what to think in addition to how to think.

This is such an important point. I'm so glad you've said it. The classroom is not a democracy. It can't be. The teacher is there to convey information to educate people and the students are there to learn. The very liberal, but still smart guy, former president of Yale, Rick Levin said during his speech once that the truth is arrogant.

And it's kind of a modern liberal way to say something that we all know that is true, which is, you know, there is objective reality and, you know, you can't descend into this kind of radical subjectivism. You're not going to learn anything that way. It's not going to tell you anything about the world. William F. Buckley, Jr., actually, in his book that is often credited with launching the post-war conservative movement, God and Man at Yale, he quotes another president of the university who said, skepticism has utility only in as much as it leads to conviction. You know, keeping an open mind is an important thing, but you don't want your mind to be so open that your brain falls out. The only reason to have an open mind is to consider different points

of view and then to come to what you think. You have to know what you think. You can't just remain totally open forever, then you really don't possess any thoughts at all and you're utterly incapable of action. Yes, exactly. And I do think that that is, that's one thing that, unfortunately, I won't even just say public education, but probably a lot of education centers and a lot of different kinds of schools in general fail to do for our kids. Like we said, it is, you know, it's inevitable to teach kids what to think, but you do also have to teach them how to think. And unfortunately, I don't think that's happening. In some, you know, public schools that are saying, well, we're going to replace curriculum about history with curriculum

about activism or we're going to not talk about the Holocaust and instead we're going to talk about Black Lives Matter, something that I think that parents can do really well. The only people in the world, by the way, who really have the best interest of your child at heart is to say, yes, this is our values, this is what we believe, this is the worldview from which we are approaching these issues. But look, I also want you to be able to critically think. I also want you to be able to challenge these positions and think through these positions and not just agree with me on everything. I think that conservatives do a better job of that than progressives do because progressivism really crumbles under any kind of scrutiny. Would you agree?

Oh, yes. I love your point on the curriculum because this is another trap, I think, that conservatives fall into, which is we buy the language about inclusivity very often or or expanding the curriculum. You know, you've recently heard that activists are trying to decolonize different academic departments. They even, I thought this one was pretty funny, they said they want to decolonize the English department at various universities by getting rid of all the English writers. So there are too many, you know, old dead Englishmen who are in the department. So we need to add all these other people. You say, well, it sounds like you're re-colonizing the department. You know, to colonize is to sort of invade and put a for a...

an element in. So anyway, they obviously get that one a little bit wrong. But let's take their argument for what it is. What they're saying is they want to add new voices to the curriculum, say Robin DiAngelo, this race hustling woman, or Ibram Kennedy, similar sort of things, radical left-wing activists. Because there's a limited amount of time, because we live in a finite world. When you include some absolute waste of ink like Robin DiAngelo or Ebram Kendi, you necessarily have to exclude something. Every minute you spend reading Robin DeAngelo is a minute that you can't be spending reading Shakespeare or Chaucer or Wordsworth or whoever. So you've got to make these choices. If you want to expand the curriculum, just realize you're not expanding it. You're

simply taking time away from other writers. And you finally have to make a value job. Regiment. What is more valuable for my kid to read? Shakespeare or some 21st century race hustler? Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular.

This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Do you think the conservative should be reading books like white fragility or how to be an anti-racist, even if it's just for Apo research? Or do you think it's actually better to spend time?

reading that which is good and right and true and affirming, you know, what we believe to be a virtuous value system rather than reading the other side of the argument? My answer is yes. That is my answer. I think you need to have a basic level of understanding of the good, true, beautiful beliefs before you can expose yourself to these other ideas. But I think you should expose yourself to the other ideas. It actually gets back to what you were saying earlier. You don't want to throw a kindergartner into the lion's den, but when someone has sort of formed a little bit more what they think,

then I think it's very important to do this. This is actually kind of the point of my book, this book, Speechless, is I want to take seriously the left-wing authors who have pushed political correctness and wokeness and cancel culture and censorship and whatever you want to call it. I don't think the conservatives take those authors. seriously. I don't think they read what they have written, and I don't think that they really know what they think. And so I dug into a lot of these very influential leftists who kind of

created political correctness. And my main takeaway from it is I actually think that the left, the intellectuals on the left, understand free speech and censorship and culture much better than conservatives do. The left comes to all the wrong conclusions, and what they want to do to our culture is absolutely terrible, but I think they actually understand the problem much better than conservatives do. And part of that, I think, is because we shut ourselves off from taking seriously their arguments. And can you unpack that a little bit more? What do you mean when you say that they understand free speech and these things more than conservatives do? I think political correctness lays a trap for conservatives. You know, there's this strange phenomenon over the past, at least

three or four decades that we've noticed political correctness advance. And my contention in the book is it's actually been going on for about 100 years since about the 1920s. And the trap is this. Any way conservatives react to political correctness, even as they think they're fighting against it, we lose ground. Because political correctness is a left-wing campaign, a radical leftist campaign to ruthlessly criticize the prevailing culture and to destroy the traditional moral standards. It exists in a purely negative way to knock down all the old moral standards that we have long cherished. Conservatives react to that in generally speaking one of two ways. Either they go squishy and they totally give in, and a lot of people do that.

You'll hear this in the pronouns. Maybe they'll refer to a man who says he's a woman. maybe they'll start referring to him as her. Maybe they'll go along to get along with some of these cultural issues on marriage or even life or who knows. So that's one way is they just give in. The other way they react, though, is they reject standards altogether. So if the left comes in, as they did in the 1960s and they say, we hate all your traditional social mores when it comes to sex, when it comes to speech, when it comes to behavior, and we're going to get rid of all of them in the name of freedom and liberation. what conservatives have come to do, I think, is say, well, we oppose the new speech codes that

you're laying on us. We oppose the new mores and standards that you're pushing on us in the form of political correctness or cancel culture, whatever. So we oppose standards altogether. We oppose censorship altogether. We're free speech absolutists. We think you should be able to do absolutely whatever you want. And the thing about that response is, it gives the, left what they wanted in the first place, which is to destroy the traditional moral standards. No matter how conservatives have reacted, the left gets exactly what they want and political correctness advances. I've noticed that about conservatives as well.

There's a couple of things that came to mind when you were speaking. Number one, you talked about becoming squishy on these cultural, social, controversial issues. We're so afraid. We truly are afraid of not just being canceled, but being called bigots. And we say that we're not afraid of that, but we really are because we start to soften and bend our language or add caveats and qualifications to what we believe just to try to insulate ourselves to a little bit longer from the rage mob.

And what I noticed, even going back to what is so scandalous to talk about now, like the definition of marriage and the government's role in all of that, is that conservatives, and especially Republicans in Congress, were afraid to our. argue for the traditional definition of marriage on its merits. And it's starting to be the same thing, I think, when it comes to gender. We're talking about it in terms of religious liberty or we might be talking about it in terms of privacy rights, which are all very important. But are you willing to argue for it on its merits that a man is a man, that a woman is a woman. And fundamentally, no matter what the law says, like, that is not going to change. And it's good for us to have those

sexual biological distinctions and to have rights based on that. I feel like conservatives get into like the other realms to try to be like, well, morally, I'm not against that. I'm just talking about constitutionally. The left never does that. The left is always talking on moral grounds. And it's like we don't want to have the moral argument as conservatives. We only want to have the legal argument. And I think we lose when we do that. We do. And by the way, when we're simply speaking procedurally or formally or abstract. we're completely missing the point. This is what I mean when I say the left understands free speech better than we do. From the very beginning of our country, there have been whole swaths of

speech that have been illegal from the very beginning and all the way through. Fraud, sedition, obscenity, which was, we prosecuted even at the federal level up until about 14 years ago. Now we don't really do it as much, but obviously from the very beginning of the country, fighting words, all manner of speech. There were huge swath. So you can't say from the beginning of the country or at any point since then that there has been perfectly, wonderfully pure, abstract, free speech. That's never existed anywhere. In part because if you say one thing, you can't say another thing. I'll bring it down to earth with your point on marriage. The debate over marriage was not over rights, though I guess it became a debate over rights when the left through political correctness

manipulated the conversation. The debate over marriage is what is a marriage? The contention of conservatives is that marriage involves sexual difference. It's the union of husbands and wives. You can no more change the definition of marriage than I can change the definition of my coffee mug. I can call my coffee mug a pineapple, but it doesn't turn it into a tropical fruit. The same thing is true with marriage. But the right did not want to acknowledge that they There are limits on these things. You can't just expand and liberalize and make inclusive concepts that are defined and concrete forever.

At a certain point, you know, if a man is a man, then a man is not a woman. If the categories man and woman are to mean anything at all, then a man cannot become a woman. And yet you see conservatives going squishy on this point, too. They'll start to add caveats, as you say. Now, even conservatives who don't buy into gender theory, they'll start referring to biological males, as though there's any other kind of male. As though there's a, you know, there isn't. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. But that sounds very exclusive. It sounds authoritarian to use a popular word. It doesn't sound very liberal. And so I think people in a misguided way on the right have refused to make those arguments. But it is not enough to defend free speech in the abstract. Free speech in the abstract means absolutely nothing for people who have nothing to say.

And explain that a little bit more. So obviously you are an advocate of free speech, but your argument is that there's always been limitations on free speech. And the left is simply saying, well, we don't like those limitations. We want new limitations. And the right tends to disagree with those kinds of limitations. So how do we kind of, how do we fight that battle? how do we set the standards of what we think free speech should include and what it shouldn't

and why? How do we make that argument? I think you've summed up my views on this very well. I'm a great defender of free speech in the actual American tradition. I'm not a defender of free speech in fantasy land floating out in outer space, but I am a defender of the way that it has existed in the American tradition. And this word tradition is very important here. I'm going to say something that is so controversial. You're not even allowed to say it in our highly rationalist culture. I think the way that we can start to form a view of these things is to look at what has worked in the past. You're not allowed to do that anymore. But when you look back at the great defenders of free speech, you'll notice they all wanted limitations. Not just that they wanted.

They recognize that all speech regimes necessarily have some limitations, such as the ones we discussed earlier. John Milton wrote Aereo Pagiticus considered the greatest defense of free speech in the English language. And in it, he says, we need to tolerate all sorts of speech, except for speech from those Catholics. And now you may agree with this point. I have to sort of push back against it, except even as a Catholic, I understand the point that John Milton was making.

These religious wars had been plunging England into absolute madness and bloodbats and death. And, you know, England could have been on the cusp of losing all sorts of legal protections because order was breaking up. And so he said certain things are simply beyond the pale of our norms. I wish it had been otherwise at the time of Milton. But it wasn't. John Locke in his letter on toleration, the founder of liberalism, in his letter concerning toleration, talks about how we need to. tolerate all these ideas, except for atheists, because atheists don't believe in the, in the transcendent moral order that we do. We can't really reason with them on the same premises that we're

reasoning with one another, and so we shouldn't tolerate that. The founding fathers took a similar view of this. And so I suspect the biggest criticism and biggest attack that's going to come on my book is that I'm advocating something that is authoritarian, or, you know, the left is going to call it fascist or it's illiberal. And I just think when you look at the actual history of these ideas, if this book is illiberal, then John Locke is a fascist. John Milton is an authoritarian. But of course that's not the case. It's that the left has perverted our understanding of free speech and of censorship and of how to get along in society. And sadly, too many conservatives have taken the bait. That's really interesting. I haven't thought about it like that. But my question is,

is who decides, who decides what the standard is? Because we do kind of see a movement towards saying, yeah, all this speech is, it's fine. And we can tolerate it except for, for example, Christian conservatives or except for Trump supporters. And so is that not the danger of this kind of thinking that whoever is in charge or whoever has the most cultural social capital, whoever is in charge of these major institutions like, you know, big tech and these major corporations, in addition to now, you know, the White House in Congress, that they set the standard of, you know, what is acceptable speech? And then when we get back power, if we ever do, we set the standard of acceptable speech. Like, is it not just going to be this kind of volleyball with what should be just a fundamental right that shouldn't change based on who's in power?

This is the sort of, I think, most persuasive argument that carries the most weight against any sort of substantive political vision. basically, you know, weighing in on one side of a moral question or the other. But the reason I think it's a pretty weak hypothetical warning is because it's already happening. The objection is always, well, who will decide? And my answer to that is somebody, somebody is always deciding the norms and the standards and the boundaries of our discourse and politics. There has never been a society in which somebody isn't deciding that. Now, it used to be that the way we decided those boundaries and those standards and those norms was based on our traditional culture, was based on a Christian understanding of the world, was based on the specific American political development and the American regime.

And what has happened with the rise of political correctness is a new regime has come in to decide totally different standards. They went in and you can, I detail it in the book, you can read these thinkers going back 100 years saying, we hate that the conservatives broadly have what they called cultural hegemony. The reason that a political revolution won't work is conservatives have this culture and they have their standards and they have their norms and they have their behaviors. And so what we need to do is destroy that. And once we institute our own standards, then we can pave the way for a political revolution. And so if, as you say, this kind of neutral playing field is not an option, and I'm saying it is not an option,

The idea that secular liberalism is neutral is ridiculous. That is purely for the left. So if that's not an option, and the two choices I have are a set of cultural norms and standards decided by radical leftists who want to pump three-year-olds full of hormones and tell little Johnny he's little Jane, or the traditional Christian and American culture that has served our country very well for a long time, I'm clearly going to choose the latter. You know, the way you can really highlight this distinction is the debate between David French, former writer for National Review and the Rights for the Dispatch, and So Rob Amari, who is a writer for the New York Post.

And David French referred, and I suspect he might regret this comment now, but he referred to Drag Queen Story Hour, where these transvestites would twerk for toddlers at the public library. He referred to that as a blessing of liberty. And I think the implication here was that if you tell some radical drag queen activists that they can't twerk for toddlers, then they might just as reasonably tell you that you can't go to church. First of all, they already are telling us we can't go to church. That has been maybe the most contentious aspect of the entire COVID lockdown regime where you could go to the marijuana shop, but you couldn't go to church. but even putting that aside for a second, I'd like to think that we possess enough reason,

faculties of reason and good sense, that we can distinguish between transvestites twerking for toddlers and going to church. I think any way that we can fight back against this politically correct tyrannical regime is going to require that we trust our moral conscience and we trust our faculties of reason to make distinctions between Drag Queen's Story Hour

and going to church on Sunday. If we can't do that, then we're just going to keep up, the only other option is to keep up the same losing strategy we've had for decade upon decade. And at that point, we might throw our hands up because it's simply not working. I'm seeing how this applies to so many different issues. And you're kind of bringing a lot of different questions that I have had kind of bouncing around in my mind for a long time. how we kind of balance the basic fact that we live in a pluralistic society with people who don't agree with our values, who aren't going to align with our values, and we don't want to force them to agree with us and believe the same things we believe, but also depending on the only moral order that we know has stood the test of time and is defined by what is good and right and true. And we do believe is good and beneficial.

for all people, maintaining freedom and true tolerance in a pluralistic society while also saying, look, these are the values that are good, these are the parameters that are good, these are the definitions that are good. The left is doing that. Conservatives seem to not be doing that, which it makes a lot of sense what you're saying, that we're losing that battle because they're talking morality, they're talking values, they're talking principles, they're talking worldview, whereas we're talking in the abstract, and we just keep on moving back and back and back saying, oh, I'm just for everything. Oh, that's all I'm for. I'm just for tolerance. Like, I'm just for, you know, total freedom to do whatever you want. That's all I'm for.

That seems to be the conservative line right now. And what you're saying is that, look, that's not going to work. You're bringing a, you know, plastic spoon to a knife fight, metaphorically, everyone. Right. And I'm, I think that's totally right. And I'm saying not only is it not working, but it's not particularly conservative. And frankly, it's not even liberal in the sense of John Locke or, you know, thinkers of his era. I'm reminded of this great debate. I think it was in 1966 between William F. Buckley Jr., totally mainstream as mainstream a conservative as ever there was, and his guest, Leo Chern. And they were debating McCarthyism.

And so what Leo Churn. Churn's point was, the guest, was that we need an open society and Senator McCarthy by going after people who were, by the way, violating the law, and we know that there were communists working for the government, one of them very famously was convicted of this, Alger Hiss, gave us President Nixon. That's a sort of history lesson for another moment, though I think I do talk about it in the book. Leo Churn said, we need a totally open society. And Buckley said, no, I'm not for a totally open society. I think there are some ideas that we have considered that we can now cast to the side. I don't think that a Nazi or a communist who espouses ideas and is seeking to subvert the

entire American system that he's entitled to some broad freedom. I don't think that anybody in our day and age who invades against cancel culture, which is a discrete phenomenon, we all see it happening, where conservatives are getting their lives ruined for saying perfectly ordinary things. I don't think any of us believe that if a guy shows up to his water cooler and he's got a swastik on his arm band and he starts yelling Zig Heil at the office water cooler, that that guy has any right to keep his job or to keep his reputation or to be accepted into polite society. I don't think it's cancel culture to speak out against that and say, no, we have a substantive vision of the world, and it opposes your vision of the world. Now, does this mean that each of us should

install ourselves as the autocratic dictators of America where everyone has to believe exactly what we believe? No, far from it. I mean, if I were king, trust me, I would reformulate society in a very different way, but nobody is proposing, no serious conservatives is proposing that we all be kings. What we're saying is we need to return to the more traditional American understanding that is pluralistic that allows for a lot of views, that has in reality served us well for a long time, while still having the courage and the moral and political vision to say that certain things are simply beyond the pale. For instance, the people who on the left are now actively working to utterly subvert our system, to reinstall racial caste systems, to say all manner of

horrible things that are now being embraced even in public schools, even for Gindergendar. We should be able to say that is wrong. Yeah. And the way I think that Christians in particular get scared from doing exactly what you're talking about and speaking up for values and saying that, okay, these are good for society. Our ideas are good for society. They're good for kids. They're good to teach children is this accusation of Christian nationalism, that if you want

to influence society or influence laws in any way with your Christian worldview, then you're a Christian nationalist. you're pushing for some kind of theocracy. And I say, well, you should be seeking to influence whatever spheres you occupy with the worldview that you have just as much, if not more than progressive secularist deal. Because like we said, that is not a neutral worldview. And they certainly aren't worried about bringing their worldview and their religion or pseudo-religion into the workplace, into the school, into the spheres that they occupy.

But as soon as a Christian does it, as soon as a conservative does it, that person is. that person is bigoted and invasive and colonizing. And I think Christians just have to kind of roll your eyes at that criticism and continue to remember that you don't check your worldview at the door. You don't have to. You're not obligated to leave your Christianity at home. And actually, you're obligated to bring it with you. And I can't believe. Go ahead. I just, I can't believe that anybody would accuse me of being a Christian nationalist. When I'm very clearly a Christian imperialist, I'm a very different thing. Thanks. But to your point, seriously, this is something that conservatives have gotten wrong,

and it does tie in with everything that we've been saying, which is you hear this line come up again and again on the right, which is you can't legislate morality. And that is, I think, the silliest statement. It is. It's so perfectly wrong. Because not only is it not true that you can't legislate morality. You must always legislate morality. All laws from capital punishment and abortion all the way down to parking tickets makes a moral claim. Is a compelling action based on an interpretation of the moral order. And so you can't get around that. And just as you say, I think you said it beautifully, what Christians have done is basically seed all of that ground to people who are utterly wrong. The secular left has no problem legislating morality because they understand,

I think better than we do, that you necessarily legislate morality. So the question is, what are you going to legislate? You know, I'm beginning my understanding of politics with the assumption that people generally speaking can separate right from wrong. If we can't do that, if we can't rely even on our ability to separate right from wrong, then it's preposterous to have system of criminal justice. We have no access to justice. If you can't separate right from wrong, you can't pass a single law, you certainly shouldn't enforce a law, you can't get along in society at all. I think we need to have the courage and the confidence to say, no, you know, we do have a moral conscience. We do have faculties of reason and we can actually look to our forebears in this

country and even further back to get a general idea of what has worked and maybe take some wisdom from them and to be able to exercise our own understanding of that moral order. Otherwise, what are we even doing here in politics? Yes. Well, I hope that people catch on to these ideas because I think there's a lot of cowardly conservatives who don't want to accept everything that you've just said. But you're right. We're going to continue to seed ground. We're going to continue to lose ground if we don't have the same understanding of morality and moral order in law and speech that the left does. Obviously, like you said, coming to different conclusions, but we need to have the same kind of understanding and seriousness that they have when it comes

to these issues. Okay, can you remind everyone what day your book is coming out, what your book is called, where they can get it, all that good stuff? Absolutely. The book is called speechless. I figured that the only way to follow my first bestseller, which was a book without words, is a book called Speechless, which is entirely about words. So you can get that speechless, controlling words, controlling minds. It is available for pre-order. The book is coming out June 22nd. I do fear, as some of my friends, more provocative, conservative books have been taken off of the internet.

I do fear we might get canceled as well. But you can pre-order it right now. So I would encourage you to do that. It's available, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, all. over the place. And I hope that people will read it. It took a lot longer to write than my first book did. Oh, that's so weird. I know. You know, the first book, which was entirely blank called Reasons to Vote for Democrats, that took my whole life to research, but it took about 15 seconds to write. And this one obviously took a little bit longer, but I hope worth it. I hope it

does wake conservatives up from what I think has been a totally losing strategy to fight what is probably the greatest threat to our national future, which is this total control over our culture, control over our politics, which comes from, at the most basic level, a control over our language. Is the title purposely ironic that this book is entitled, Speechless, and yet it has lots of speech in it, and your last book had no speech in it? Is there supposed to be some irony in there, or did I just point that out? entirely coincidental, I'm sure. There's no, no relation could there be. You know, I figured, one thing I loved about the topic of political correctness is it's naturally just a very funny topic.

You know, when you start referring to criminals as justice involved persons and, you know, all this sort of crazy lingo, it's just a funny topic. So I decided I might have a little fun with the title as well. Well, that is wonderful. I can't wait to read it. I'm super excited. can watch your show on YouTube on your YouTube channel. They can listen to the Michael Noel show wherever they get their podcast, correct? Absolutely. Thank you, Allie. It's so good to be with you as always. Thank you so much. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality

itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase. narratives and we don't offer false comfort, we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.