The Daily Signal - Michael Knowles Explains How the Left Manipulates Language

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

In politics, language is central -- the words we use, what they mean, and what we want them to mean. As our guest today, The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles, explains, the left is a master of language manipulation. Liberals often win political victories by redefining words and rewiring our brains. "The lie of the left that they're pushing is that the truth is somehow cruel and harmful and that delusion will make us happy and free," says Knowles. "That has never been true anywhere in history. " The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal Podcast for Wednesday, January 8th. I'm Kate Tranko. And I'm Daniel Davis. Well, in politics, language is central. The words we use, what they mean, and what we want them to mean. As our guest today explains, the left is a master of language manipulation. The left often wins political victories by redefining words and rewiring our minds. Michael Knowles is today's guest.

You may know him from the Michael Knowles Show at the Daily Wire. Our colleague, Rachel Del Judas, sat down with him for an exclusive interview. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes, and please encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. In a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had harsh words for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and signaled he was ready to move forward on impeachment. Pelosi still had not sent McConnell.

the articles of impeachment. Impeaching a president is just about the most serious action that any House of Representatives can ever take. How inappropriate and how embarrassing to rush forward on a partisan basis and then treat and treat, Madam President, what you've done like a political toy. How contemptuous of the American people

to tell them for weeks that you feel this extraordinary step. is so urgent and then delay it indefinitely for political purposes. How embarrassing, but also how revealing. Speaker Pelosi's actions over the past three weeks have confirmed what many Americans suspected about this impeachment process all along, that House Democrats have only ever wanted to abuse this grave constitutional process for partisan ends It's exactly what they had in the mind to use this grave constitutional process for partisan ends right from the beginning. Well, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats will force a decision on whether to call witnesses to the impeachment trial.

Schumer said in a statement, Make no mistake on the question of witnesses and documents Republicans may run but they can't hide. There will be votes at the beginning on whether to call the four witnesses, we've proposed and subpoena the documents we've identified. One of those witnesses is John Bolton, President Trump's former national security advisor who has agreed to testify if subpoenaed. Right now, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appears to have the 51 votes needed to set the impeachment rules without democratic support, meaning that a vote on whether to call witnesses

could be delayed until later in the trial. In a press conference Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed the Trump administration strategy for Iran and the decision to kill Iranian general Soleimani. You asked about the scope of the strategy and the maximum pressure campaign that we've had in place. It has a diplomatic component. It has had an economic component and it has had a military component. And what you have seen over the course of these past, May 2018, when we withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, you've seen us execute that with enormous vigor and energy. You've seen it diplomatically.

We've built out coalitions around the region with the Israelis, with the Gulf states, on certain files, on the missile file, and on the terror file with our European partners as well. Not just the E3. Go back and look from May of last year. Go look at the statement that was made in Warsaw, a United Statement centering the instability in the Middle East on the Islamic Republic of Iran. We've got a coalition now in the Straits of Hormuz. We've diplomatically isolated the Iranian regime.

Second, economically, we've all seen the sanctions put in place. It's now over some thousand sanctions. We've watched the regime struggle to figure out how it was. They were going to make it through 2020. They've got a budget that will fall short by a significant amount in 2020 as a direct result of the pressure that we've put on the regime. And then you saw over not just this past week, but over the last year, you've seen our security component to this.

You've seen us reinforce allies in the region by ensuring that the Emirates and Saudis and all of the others were prepared for what might happen if Iran decided to make choices that were bad for the Iranian people. And then you saw more tactically, just these last few days, the president's response when the Iranians made a bad decision to kill an American. We hope they won't make another bad decision just like that one. The Soleimani strike was part of the administration's maximum pressure campaign. And going forward, the Iranians should understand, as they develop their calculus, that similar actions, such as the Soleimani strike, could well continue to be a feature of this maximum

pressure campaign. I think the President has been unambiguous in his – both the remarks he made down in Florida as well as the tweets that he's put out about the seriousness of which we take this, the risk attended that we are deeply aware of and the preparations we've made to prevent those risks, as well as our determination, that in the event the Iranians make another bad choice that President will respond in a way that he did last week, which was decisive, serious, and methods. messaged Iran about the constraints that we are going to place on that regime so that it doesn't continue to put American lives at risk. At the end, our Iran policies about protecting and

defending the homeland and securing American lives. Meanwhile, Iran's leaders are ramping up calls for attacks on the U.S. military. And in potential preparation, Iran's parliament on Tuesday passed a measure labeling the entire U.S. military a terrorist organization. At Soleimani's funeral on Tuesday, Major General Hussein Salami said, we will take revenge, and if they make a subsequent move, we will set fire to the place they love, according to Iranian media. That funeral possession reportedly claimed the lives of 50 people who were killed in a stampede. Next up, we'll have Rachel's interview with Michael Knowles. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues?

Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. In the agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research. The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online, as well as media interviews from our experts. Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. We are joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Michael Knowles, the number one bestselling author of the book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide, which incidentally, President Donald Trump called a great book for your reading enjoyment.

Michael, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me. Thank you for promoting that sort of scholarship and my magnum opus. So before we get started, I'm just curious, what inspired you to write the book? It has actually a very low word count for those who have read. So I don't want to spoil it for people necessarily, but what was the inspiration behind it? Well, I wrote the book in about 15 seconds, but I researched the book for. about 27 years. So I had a lot been sort of observing politics for that long. There's an extensive

bibliography at the back of the book, and I was able to write the definitive apology for the Democratic Party, and I was able to list every single reason that there is to vote for Democrats, reasons to vote for Democrats available now on Amazon wherever fine blank books are sold. Well, you all have to check it out. It's a treat, so just plugging that for all. So were you always a conservative? Tell us about your journey to working in media where you are today at the Daily Wire. What was that journey like? Where did you start?

And how did you end up where you're at? I pretty much came out of the womb smoking cigars and talking about Edmund Burke, more or less. I was always sort of conservative. In my first grade classroom, I campaigned for Bob Dole. I was the only person in the country, as far as I can tell, who was excited about Bob Dole for president, including Bob Dole. I insisted that my mother who wanted to vote for Clinton, I insisted that she vote for Dole because all I knew about them was that Dole was a good war hero

and Clinton was a draft dodger and an all-around derelict, though I guess I didn't know the specifics of it quite yet. And I had a little liberal period. I mean, I played around in a liberal period from, I don't know, like 13 to 14, 15. It wasn't that long. And I was an atheist from age 13 to about age 23. And as I got into college, my freshman year, roommate convinced me that God exists with the ontological argument for God. I noticed that everyone

at Yale was pretty smart. They were all, many, many, much smarter than me. And then the very, you know, they were pretty much atheists, but the very smartest people were Christian or Orthodox Jews. And the smartest among them, I noticed, were kind of trending toward Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, which seemed to me like the coo-keest version of religion, you know, with all the smells and bells. So I was interested in that, and I became more conservative over my time in college. I thought more deeply about politics. It wasn't just like I read a blog post by Ein Rand in high school. I started to read Edmund Burke. I started to read Russell Kirk and these kind of great political thinkers of the modern era. It started to read on the religious side, C.S. Lewis and G.K.

Chesterton, that really deepened my conviction that God exists. And then ultimately around 23, I reverted to Christianity, aided in large part by Father George Rutler in New York, who happened to be William F. Buckley Jr.'s priest. So there's a sort of interesting coincidence in all of that here. And then I was working as an actor, and I was working in politics. Basically, when I was doing plays and films in New York and L.A., my waiting tables job was that I worked Republican political campaigns, because when you're a Republican in New York, you know, in the land of the blind,

the one-eyed man is king. And so that was my day job. And I've now combined the two. Obviously, I work in political show business or the show business of politics. And I work less in mainstream show business because when you write a blank book about how Democrats are no good, you don't work as much in Hollywood. But it's been a real treat. And I think I'm the only guy in history who got his own show for not writing a book. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

So as someone who writes and talks about American politics and some American politics, since American society all the time, what would you say is the biggest challenge we're facing right now in American society? If you were to pinpoint, hey, this is a big issue we need to work on. What would you say that is? The issue is the language. The issue is the way that we speak to one another and the words that we encourage us to use and the words that we're not using.

And this takes many forms. This takes the form of political correctness, which has been a scourge for a very long time. President George H.W. Bush actually mentioned this, Well, he was president. He said that the scourge of PC is really threatening the United States, and it's grown worse over time. 2016, Trump was elected in large part running against political correctness.

Because political correctness isn't just some kind of stupid jargon that we all hear. You know, Julian Castro at one of the presidential debates, he said he doesn't support just reproductive freedom. He supports reproductive justice, and not just for women, but for trans women. He's just saying words that don't make sense. He didn't realize that trans women refers to men who don't have uteruses who can't have abortions. That's obviously hilarious. We can all laugh about that.

But, you know, speech is politics. Politics is speech. When the left shuts down our speech, they are precluding us from politics. When the left equates speech with violence, they are ending our experiment and self-government, and they're replacing the persuasion of our fellow citizens with mere brute force, insisting that we can force our will onto others without even making us. a reasonable argument for that. They changed the language in so much as we're now no longer allowed to refer to men

who now believe that they're women as he or she. Well, look, if you refer to them as he rather, you know, if you refer to them as she, then you're accepting the premise that men can become women. If you refer to him as he, you're rejecting that premise. The same thing happened with same-sex marriage. The way the left won the same-sex marriage battle beyond Justice Kennedy writing romantic poetry from the bench is that the left convinced us that same-sex marriage was about rights,

who has the right to get married. But of course that was never the debate. The debate was always, what is marriage? Everywhere at all times, throughout all of history, sexual difference has had something to do with the meaning of marriage. It's been at the center of it, that marriage is the union between husbands and wives. Now they've redefined that,

and said that marriage is any monogamous union, regardless of sexual difference. But I've got plenty of, I mean, I've got good buddies. That's a monogamous union, you know, Are we married? I don't think so. I've got a relationship to my butcher. Is my butcher, you know, are we married? No, that's a different kind of relationship. But they won the battle because they redefined the term before it even took place. And conservatives are letting it happen because we think that it's a trivial matter and who cares. Let's move on to something that matters like lowering taxes. But you ain't going to be able to lower taxes anymore if we give away the language, which is the stuff of our consciousness and the material of our politics. So how can conservatives communicate more winsomely? You mentioned how Democrats in the left are so good at communicating well, or at least changing the course of a debate.

How can conservatives be better and communicate more winsomely? Well, that's a wonderful word to use, winsome, you know. And another W.W word that I would use is whimsy. I think you should be a little whimsical about it. I don't think you need to be scolding or moralizing or boring. I think it's perfectly fine to say, look, Caitlin Jenner is a man. He won the decathlon for goodness sake. You know, he's definitely a man.

And that's fine. I don't dislike the guy. I harbor no ill will toward him. But he's not a woman. Just as you can say, look, I have plenty of gay friends, you know, but marriage still involves sexual difference. Those two things can be true at the same time. I think what the left succeeds at,

is telling us that we need to use their ridiculous jargon, that all of us kind of mocks. But they say we have to use that jargon because the jargon is compassionate. And if you don't use the jargon, you're a mean, old, cruel bigot. And we're not. We enjoy the truth.

The truth is a good thing. The lie of the left that they're pushing is that the truth is somehow cruel and harmful and that delusion will make us happy and free, and that has never been true anywhere in history. One way we can help that argument is not by getting all angry and pulling our hair out and having steam come out of our ears. Obviously, Caitlin Jenner is not a woman.

That's fine. You can do whatever he likes, but, you know, don't force me to say that 2 plus 2 equals 5. We're not yet living in the Big Brother dystopia of 1984, though. The left seems to be dragging us pretty quickly down that path. Not yet, at least. So one of my favorite pieces of yours was one that you wrote in June, and it was entitled The Problem with Pride. And in this piece, you talk about pride and how those on the left are equating it with sexual tolerance and acceptance, and also how pride has become essentially a virtue in our culture.

How has this happened? It has become the virtue in our culture. We have a secular liturgical calendar. Some people like to pretend that there's no established religion in the United States. There certainly is. I mean, we have whole months. We have Black History Month, which is not really about Black History. It's about a leftist vision of Black History.

We have Women's History Month. Same thing, not really about women's history, but about a leftist ideological vision of it. Then we have Pride Month. It used to be a Pride Parade. Then it was Pride Week. Now it's Pride whole month. And that's not even about homosexuality anymore. Now homosexuality is celebrated in October.

That's the new month for LGBTQ history. We're now actually celebrating Pride, which is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. The place I think this comes from is pretty deep. I actually don't only mean to make fun of the left for celebrating pride, which is not a great PR move. I think it comes from viewing politics primarily through a lens of rights, as in, and this can go all the way back to our view of natural rights even, to say, I enter into politics as my own individual, floating in free space, and I am entitled to certain rights. Gimme, gimme, gimme, protect me, protect me, protect me. And that's just not the most effective way to look at politics. It won't make you happy.

obviously rates of happiness in so much as they can be measured have declined precipitously in recent decades as these ideologies have taken off. The proper way to look at politics is not primarily through a lens of rights, but through a lens of duty, of obligation. Edmund Burke talks about this a lot. We come into this world not as free-floating atoms in the sky with no bonds to anybody. We come in as the babies of our parents, and we're in that family, and then we have a local community,

and then we've got voluntary associations, and then we've got our state, then we've got our church, then we've got our federal government, we have our national identity, we have all of these bonds of loyalty, one to another. JFK put it well, which is a rare thing for him, but he put it well, he said,

asked not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. And I think that if we approached politics in that way, we'd have a much better society, if we approached it not from an angle of pride and celebrating pride as though it were the greatest virtue, but from an angle of huge, Humility, fear of the Lord, the beginning of all wisdom.

That would be a prerequisite for the other virtues. And then the other prerequisite for the other virtues is courage. And unfortunately, both courage and humility are sorely lacking these days. Very short supply. It's very sad to say. Well, another virtue you talk about in this piece about the problem with pride is selflessness. And you wrote, we have a culture that values the self above all other things. So in a good culture, you have selflessness.

You have people doing acts of charity for each other. and you have people sacrificing for each other for their children, for future generations. But in our culture, we don't have selflessness. We never talk about selflessness, I feel like today, ever. And that's why I love this piece so much. I'm like, this is, selfless people are the most amazing people. And I think they're the people that have the biggest impact because they're not doing it for them. They're basically living their life for others, and that's such an amazing quality.

So how can society be more selfless? You've got to let go. You have got to let go. of the belief that you own your life, that you've somehow invented your life and you can do whatever you want, you have no obligations to your creator. You've got to let go of the idea

that you can take it with you, that you can bring your material goods into the hereafter. Many people have tried. As far as I can tell, only one has ever succeeded, and half the country now doesn't even believe in that guy. You've got to lose this fiction. We have this belief that by defining our own reality as the romantic poet Justice Kennedy said in Planned Parenthood v. Casey,

he invented the constitutional right to define reality. We believe that by defining our own reality, by pursuing only our interest, by acquiring all of the material goods we can possibly amass and hoarding them to ourselves, that that will make us happy. And I get why. I understand why people think that would make them happy. But it's a funny little trick of the world that it doesn't.

It actually makes you miserable. And the way that you can feel fully huge, human, that you can feel dignify, that you can feel joy, is actually by not talking about yourself, it's actually by giving away to others, giving to charity. It's a wonderful thing to do that. You know, Chesterton said, the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. And the other little aphorism here is that a man wrapped up in himself makes a small package indeed. So you've got to always recognize. that temptation for what it is.

It's a temptation that you'll have the illusion of joy and happiness in front of you, but inexorably it will lead you to misery. A man wrapped up in himself makes a small package, indeed. That's my new favorite quote. How great is that quote? That's incredible. I'd like to take credit for it. But I can't.

I'll give that credit away to someone else, selflessly. So working in media, it's no secret to those of us who do. It can be exhausting and even discouraging, depending on the day. So given that, how do you stay encouraging? How do you stay grounded? How do you mean? Because, I mean, obviously, you get a lot of mean tweets and threats. Well, Twitter's kind of like a wasteland, honestly.

It is just a cesspool hellscape. There's no question. So how do you rise above that and also just remember what you're fighting for, I guess? Well, I'll actually say something nice about the hellscape of Twitter, which is increasingly difficult, which is that it really does keep you grounded. I mean, I don't mute people and I don't block people. I've never blocked any person on Twitter. And I get, I mean, all, like sort of Media Matters, bots,

and all of these far-left accounts that, you know, were just opened up and have zero followers, and they're obviously being astroturfed by a political organization. They will say horrific things. I mean, things that should make people with the conscience feel deep, deep shame. But I think it's actually good that I see those because the Internet is very honest, and you really want to stay grounded.

If you're in the media, if you go on camera, if you give speeches, it's very easy to get a swell head. And so actually getting criticism, having people insult you, is one good way of grounding yourself a little bit. And then ultimately what you have to do is recognize that your life is not ultimately your own. Any sort of puffing up of yourself you're going to do is going to end in disaster because no one here gets out alive. You know, I mean, we're all headed to the same place. and that is a pretty grounding lesson to learn. I think I have it a little easier in this regard because I got my show by not writing a book.

I got anything in my professional blessing I got in this perfect embodiment of the unearned grace of God, which is a blank book. So that to me is illustrative of this greater example, which is that everything we have is a blessing, our very life is a blessing. we didn't do it ultimately ourselves. And so we should be grateful for that.

We should even be grateful for suffering, which offers an opportunity to grow spiritually. Thank you so much for sharing that. So as we start a new year, it's no secret that we're going to continue to see attacks on so many of the values we hold dear. Some of those include traditional marriage. You mentioned how the ball was dropped.

A lot of conservatives dropped the ball in the marriage debate. We're going to see continued attacks on the unborn, religious liberty. The list goes on. We all know it. If you could say one thing to those who are listening and encourage them to not give up, to stay fighting, what would that be? Oh, we're winning. People forget, you know, President Trump won in 2016. I know that the media haven't granted that yet.

I know the House is still trying to overturn the election unsuccessfully. But we won, and we're winning on abortion, and we're winning on open borders, and we're winning on this whole crazy gender ideology, and we're just winning. And it might not look that way, because the reality. really serious-looking people in suits and ties on television tell us that everything's going to hell in a handbasket and the American people hate everything that we stand for. But it just isn't true. It's not borne out by the facts. And when the left is really going after you and they're calling half the country deplorable and irredeemable and saying the world is going to end in 10 years if we don't give ourselves over to some sort of socialistic,

collectivist, atheist hellscape, if we, the minute that they're coming after you with that kind of hyperbole, that's, I think, the best evidence of all that we're threatening what they're trying to do and we're coming out ahead. So final question. We all hear feminists talk about toxic masculinity, and I think we all can see, or at least I can see even as a young journalist working in D.C., the effects of that where men feel like they can't lead, they feel like they should step aside and just kind of like acquiesce themselves to women. and what would you say as a healthy view for men to embrace and to not basically fall prey to that ideology? Well, you should ground it in religion.

I mean, you should, like Andrew Breitbart famously said politics is downstream of culture. And culture, as Russell Kirk pointed out, is downstream of religion. What the culture worships will define that culture. So you don't want to be in the position of being a reactionary. You know, when the left uses, let's use the issue of race, left are just total race hustlers, right? And they constantly divide people on race and they demonize white people. And they do this as a matter of course. Now, the way to fight that, I guess you could become a reactionary and become some kind of identitarian and accept their premises.

Or you can fight that by rejecting their premise. And I think the same is true on sex. So the left says, you know, woman good, man, bad, other than man who dresses like woman. And then that one's good again or something. I don't know. It changes every day. They'll probably change by the time this podcast comes in. Probably. So you can either become a reactionary and say, no, women bad, men good, except for the men who, I don't know, I'm losing my train of thought. Or you can say the sexes each have dignity. Eve was taken from Adam's rib, not from his head and not from his feet.

She's not above him. She's not below him, but she's right from the center of his body. And men and women are complementary, meaning they have aspects that perfect the other one. Men are a little bit more this way. women are a little bit more that way. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and that's a beautiful thing. If we could push that message and not be tricked into going down the leftist path, which ultimately they're going to win because they're better at leftism than we are,

I think it would help us on the marriage debate, I think it would help us on abortion, I think it would help us on love of our nation and national solidarity, I think it would help us on the question of race. We've got to be very tricky. We are walking a tightrope here, and you've got the left square. and you've got a monopoly in the mainstream media, and you've got the whole federal bureaucracy against you. So, you know, it's a tough battle.

But what an honor that we've been chosen to live during this time. What an honor that we get to fight this fight. We were put here for a purpose, and we ought to do it. Amen. Michael, thank you so much for joining us on the Daily Simmel podcast. Always great to talk to you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast,

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