The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 353 - Are We Getting Stupider?

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

IQ scores are plummeting in the U.S. and throughout the West. Meanwhile, at certain wealthy high schools, upwards of one in four students says a learn disability means he needs to take extra time on the SAT. Congressional Dems try to make Ben Carson look an idiot, CNN accidentally makes Kamala Harris look like an idiot, and hippies can now compost their dead. Date: 5-22-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

IQ scores are plummeting in the U.S. and throughout the West. Meanwhile, at certain wealthy high schools, upwards of one in three students says a learning disability means he needs to take extra time on the SAT. Congressional Democrats try to make former pediatric neurosurgeon and current HUD secretary Ben Carson look like an idiot. CNN's Allison Camerata accidentally makes Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris look like an idiot, and hippies can now legally compost their dead in the state of Washington. We will ask the question on everyone's mind. Is everyone getting stupider? I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles Show.

The answer is yes, by the way. Everyone is getting stupider. That's it. That's our show. Good night. See tomorrow. We have a crisis of intelligence happening, not just in the United States, but around the West. We will examine why that is happening and how we can try to fix it before it's too late. But first, support for the Michael Knowles show comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. Finding the right house isn't easy, but finding the right mortgage can be.

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Push button, get mortgage. Simple as that. People are getting stupider in the U.S. and around the other developed nations. How do we know this? Well, one, because we have eyes, so we open them and we can see it happening around us. We can measure it to a certain degree as well. So for much of the 20th century, IQ, intelligence quotes, quotient scores were increasing. They were increasing throughout most of the world. And this bewildered

a lot of researchers because IQ you would expect would be static. IQ is just supposed to be inherited. It's not, IQ doesn't measure the facts that you've learned throughout your life. IQ measures how smart you are. So we were told that by the age of 10 people's IQ is set. It's static. You inherit it from your parents. It actually turns out that environmental factors can play a role in your IQ. So over time, the IQ of whole populations can increase. It's more than just hereditary. This rise is called the Flynn effect. This was named after James Flynn, who was the first guy to bring this phenomenon to the attention of a lot of psychologists. So this was going on for much of the 20th century. Everybody was getting smarter. Now, fast forward to the 21st century, you're seeing the

exact reverse phenomenon. People are getting stupider. IQ scores are decreasing. And you don't to take my word for it, Flynn himself admits this. James Flynn admits the IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered. So in, by the way, it's not just reversing everywhere uniformly. It's reversing specifically in the most economically advanced nations, the United States being at the top of that heap. So why is IQ declining? There have been a few theories proposed. Some of them more eugenicist and racist than others. One theory that is being proposed is that people are getting stupider, on average, because stupid people are having more kids. So this is, this was the plot actually to the 2006 Mike Judge comedy film Idiocracy. The idea is that smart people delay having children, they have fewer children,

and stupid people all have a bunch of kids by the time they're 18. That's one theory. Another theory, and this one's even more eugenicist, is that because of massive immigration over the last 30 years, you've got a bunch of people from the undeveloped world coming into developed countries, and therefore the average IQ is being reduced. So the theory here is that you flood your country with stupid people, and on average, your nation gets stupider. Again, a little bit on the more racially provocative side. Turns out neither of those theories are true.

So a 2018 study came out of Norway that shot them down. It showed that IQ is not just dropping across all of society uniformly, or on average, it's dropping specifically within individual families. So within, over the course of generations, within the same family, IQ is dropping. That takes out the possibility that it's just stupid people having more kids, and it takes out the possibility that you can blame immigrants from poor countries for the average intelligence going down. So why is it really happening? One theory, the theory that seems to me pretty likely, is the internet. So now, because we have the sum total of human knowledge, allegedly, in our pockets, we don't need to memorize anything.

We don't need to really study anything. I remember, I was taught this in school. I was taught, you don't really need to learn these facts and these. historical dates and these people who did certain things, you don't need to memorize that because you can just look it up when you need it. You don't really need to figure out how to do advanced calculus or even basic arithmetic because we have computers. You can just look it up. You don't need to memorize those things. And so the end goal of this would be to say, just learn broad narratives, just learn the kind of ideological narratives that we tell you. And the thing is, you can't learn broad trends really unless you have the data that go into those trends.

Otherwise, you're just taking somebody's word for it. So, for instance, if I said in the United States, race relations have improved over the last 150 years, 200 years. You might say, oh, I don't believe you, Michael. And I say, no, I can prove it because in 1860 we had slavery. In 1865, we had the abolition of slavery. Then we had Jim Crow, but then we got rid of Jim Crow, and then we had segregation laws, and we kept black people out of certain neighborhoods, then we got rid of those laws. Then we elected a black president in 2008.

See, I've got all these data points, and I can see the trend. The races are coming together in the United States. They'd say, okay. Now, plenty of students could be told, as they are in public schools all around the country, that race relations haven't really improved. It's all a lie. Things are just as bad today as they were 100 years ago. And if you don't have all of those facts,

you might have the broad trend, but you wouldn't know if that's true. You'd be ignorant. And you wouldn't even know to look it up. You wouldn't even know to Google it because you don't know what you don't know. Donald Rumsfeld, when he was Secretary of Defense 10 years ago, he said there are known knowns, known unknowns,

and unknown unknowns. So there are things that you know, that you know that you know. Then there are things that you know that you don't know. For instance, I don't know much about the reign of Charlemagne. I know that Charlemagne existed. I know he was an historical figure. I just don't actually know the specifics. And then there are certain things that you don't know that you don't know.

Increasingly, that category is expanding. And so I think that's a big part in why we're all getting stupider. There are other theories as well. A bunch of left-wingers are blaming it on global warming. they're saying that because of global warming somehow food is getting less nutritious and it's killing our brains and you know the smog and the sun monster

and of course there's no evidence for any of this really we don't know for certain we have a couple hunches but the effect does seem to be real I really like this story for a couple of reasons one because it does cut against the premise of progressivism what conservatives like to point out

is that history doesn't go in a straight line. Sometimes things get better, sometimes things get worse, sometimes things get better in one place, but worse in another place. History is kind of like a big zigzag, and the individual actions of men and communities and nations really matter. And what the progressives want to say is, old time bad, modern time good. Old people stupid, modern people smart. That's what they like to tell us. So this is why we scoff at our own history. Why we want to rename the Thomas Jefferson dinners because we say, oh, he's a bad old guy. He owns slaves. He's bad.

We're good because we're modern. We live in the modern age, which is much better. So this obviously cuts against that premise. We are not smarter than our forebears. At least our forebears 20 years ago, they had a higher average intelligence than we do. The other reason I like this story is I don't put a whole lot of stock in IQ. I do put stock into certain standardized tests, like the SAT. The SAT is a standardized test that tests something really specific,

which is whether students are ready for college. You get a score, and that score reflects a student's readiness to go to college. The graduate school tests test that. The LSAT tests your readiness for law school. The GRE, your readiness for graduate school. The IQ test isn't like that. The IQ test purports to test the generalized, total, complete intelligence of somebody, which I don't really think you can do.

And I know people with very high IQs. I know people with very low IQs. And I don't see a huge correlation between success. Some of the most successful people I know have significantly lower IQs according to tests than people who have higher test scores and haven't done as well in life. Now, we are still getting stupider. And this is true, not just on these generalized tests, it's true even on the specific tests, like the SAT, speaking of which, now at wealthy schools, huge numbers of students are pretending

to be learning disabled in order to get extra time on the SAT. We talked about the SAT just the other day, because the SAT is now adding an adversity score, so they're unstandardizing the standardized test. They're now pretending not just to measure a student's verbal scale. or math skills, but also to measure the suffering that student has undergone. So the SAT's in trouble to begin with. Now we find out students at wealthy schools are all pretending to have learning disabilities to cheat, to get extra time on the test.

At Scarstale High School in New York, which is right near where I grew up, one in five students at that school has a learning disability, 20 percent, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. I know a lot of kids from Scarisdale High School. I had a college roommate from Scarisdale High School. 20% of those kids do not have learning disabilities. At Weston High School in Connecticut, that number is 1 in 4 have a learning disability.

At Newton North High School outside of Boston, a very wealthy high school, one in three. Does anybody really believe that 33% of students at these wealthy schools have learning disabilities? No, it would explain the IQ question, or would explain why these numbers are getting jumbled, but no, it's because they're cheating. But the very fact that they're cheating on these tests

reflects a cultural problem that does help to explain why we're getting stupider. We'll get to it in a second, and we'll get to stupid politicians. But first, one thing that is really stupid is carrying around revolving debt if you're not paying off your card every month and you could be paying thousands of dollars

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so do we really think that a third of students at really rich high schools have learning disabilities no these are obviously fake diagnoses that are caused by a few factors one caused by a culture that values victimhood over accomplishment the SAT used to be very simple you go into a room there's a teacher, they time it, you have to finish the test in the amount of time, you were always right up against the wall, it is a tough time limit, and you finish the test and you're done. Very simple, very standardized. Now, you have a culture that doesn't value that real accomplishment nearly as much as it values victimhood. Ironically, victimhood has become a privilege. If you can pass yourself off as a victim, as some aggrieved group, as someone with a learning disability, even if you don't

have one, then you get the privilege of extra time on the test and you get to cheat and you get an unfair advantage over all of your classmates. So it's a bad thing in our society that students would do this, that students would be willing to cheat on these exams, but it's even worse that their parents are letting them do it. Their parents are encouraging them. If the kid is going to, kids are always going to cheat on tests. That's been true forever and it's always going to be true. parents and teachers are supposed to come in and say, no, you can't do that, Johnny. You need to take the test. You need to study. You need to be able to take it in the right amount of time. You don't have dyslexia, Johnny. You just don't want to study. And the parents aren't doing that now. The parents are encouraging their kids to cheat. They're losing their scruples. They're losing their moral foundation. And why? Because this is being caused by a culture that values college degrees over educational. education itself. Right?

We talked yesterday about the millennials. The millennials are doing awful on every measure. They're poor, they have a ton of debt, they don't get married, they don't have kids, they don't have houses. The one area where they're allegedly doing well is education, because they all have a lot of fancy college degrees. Except they don't know that much. When you actually test their intelligence, when you actually test their knowledge, they

score worse than other generations. We talk about all the time how the left likes the appearance of the thing, but not the essence of the thing. They like the appearance, but not the reality. So they want to eat vegan bacon. They want to drink decaf coffee. Very bad idea in the long run, because you can get a fancy degree. But if it doesn't actually reflect what you're learning, that's going to hurt you and your society in the long term. According to MarketWatch, nine out of ten new jobs go to college graduates. Now, why is that? in part it's because so many more people are going to college.

But does that really reflect students' education? Does that really reflect what a student knows? No. As the education, I mean, we've got a lot of studies of this. We know that students are learning less than they have in the past. We know that in some cases students are graduating from college, knowing less than they knew going into college. So as the educational value of a college degree plummets,

the social value of a college degree skyrockets. It's a credential. that allows you into a certain class, and that's being reflected in our whole society. We have become a society that cheats on the test. It's not just these kids at a high school in Massachusetts or in Scarsdale, New York. We as a society cheat on the test.

We just get shuffled along from grade to grade, from year to year, without actually doing the things that all of that shuffling used to signify. when you graduated from high school, that used to mean something. Now it means much less. And now, actually, we've gotten so stupid. We can't even recognize the difference between real intelligence and bloviating.

And this has never been clearer than in congressional testimony yesterday. You had congressional Democrats interviewing Ben Carson, the former, well, the current secretary of housing Urban Development, former presidential candidate, and former pediatric neurosurgeon, one of the smartest guys in this entire country. Ben Carson was the first guy to separate conjoined twins, conjoined at the head. This guy is super duper sharp. And you've got these congressional Democrats interviewing him. And the videos went all around the internet trying to portray the Democrats is really smart and Ben Carson as an idiot. How did they do it? Because the video was pretty effective. Here's how. I'd also like you to get back to me, if you don't mind, to explain the disparity in REO rates.

Do you know what an REO is? An Oreo? No, not an Oreo. An R-E-O. R-E-O. Real estate? What's the O stand for? E-organization.

Owned. Real estate owned. That's what happens when a property goes to foreclosure. We call it an REO. Oh, good. You got him. You got him. First of all, I love Ben Carson's.

answer here. They're trying to make fun of him for this answer, but he's obviously joking. Because she sets it up. This is the classic example of a gotcha question. We're talking about housing and urban development. She goes in and she finds this really specific jargony term, and she doesn't ask him a question about it. Notice the way she phrases it. She starts to say, I want to ask you about REOs. But then she doesn't ask him a question about REOs. She just says, do you know what an REO is? Ben Carson, so thanks for coming here. Do you know what the capital of Thailand is?

Go, go, ha ha, you don't. You're an idiot. Yeah, yeah, hello, Secretary Carson. Thank you so much for being here. What number am I thinking of? Idiot. You can't even guess it, can you? She's asking him to use,

to define this jargon for her. The whole thing is set up to make him look ignorant and to make him look stupid. And he is having none of it because Ben Carson is much, much more intelligent than this woman, Katie Porter, Democrat Congresswoman. So she's there, he says, do you know what an REO is? Are you, you're asking me about Oreos during congressional testimony?

You want, no, not Oreos. REOs. I don't know. It's some stupid jargon that has to do with real estate. Well, yes, it does have to do with real estate. But do you know what the O is? She even presses him on that letter. No, why don't you tell me. Tell me what the O is. It's owned. See, I've got you. How dumb you are. But who cares? Who cares what the term is? What are you asking about? What is your question as it relates to housing and urban development? As it relates to poor families in public housing, as it relates to the running of that government agency. It's just a way for this woman to try to get on TV and to grandstand. And it worked. But for the people who are going around trying to say that this is evidence that she's really smart and Ben Carson is really stupid, you could do that to anybody about anything. Just ask, even if it's in their own field, people are saying Ben Carson should have known this acronym because he's the head of HUD. There are a zillion acronyms in the government. There are a zillion jargony terms.

I am certain that if I were interviewing Katie Porter and I looked through enough house, bills that have been passed just in this session, I could stump her on some acronym. It doesn't tell you anything about the actual intelligence of the person. Her colleague, Ianna Presley, tried to do the exact same thing to Carson. It was even more egregious when she did it. Do you believe the substandard public housing conditions pose a risk to tenants' physical, mental, and emotional health? You already know the answer to that?

Yes or no? You know the answer. Yes or no. I know the answer. Do you know the answer? Yes or no? Reclaiming my time. You don't get to do that.

The time belongs to the gentle lady. Would you let your grandmother live in public housing? You know very well. Would you let your grandmother live in public housing? Yes or no? You know very well. Under your watch and at your helm, would you allow your grandmother to live in public housing? Under these conditions.

It would be very nice if you would stop. I love Ben Carson so much because he, he is having none of it. She asks, look, Ben Carson has made very clear that public housing is really awful and really dangerous and he wants to curtail it and stop it from spreading. And why is this the case? Because he grew up in horrible conditions. And he is so thankful he says that his mother, who had him when she was 13 or something,

kept him out of public housing because of how dangerous it was. so he says you know the answer to that question. And she keeps pushing and she's getting angry and Ben Carson remains super calm. And this again, people make fun of him for this. They say, why is Ben Carson so calm? He's sleepy. The reason is that Ben Carson wasn't always calm.

Ben Carson was a real tough guy. He was a maniac. When he was younger, he was getting into fights, hitting people with baseball bats. He stabbed one of his friends when he was 14. This guy grew up in horrific conditions. He writes about it. he says, this was in one of his memoirs. He says, there was pretty horrendous violence, gangs,

broken glass and boarded up windows and doors, murders. I had two cousins who were killed. I remember as a nine-year-old sitting on the ghetto stairs looking to the building across the street out of which all the windows had been broken. And there was a sunbeam shining through and it made me think about my future and I remember thinking I probably won't make it to 25. That's what he grew up in. that guy knows something about public housing, that guy knows something about poverty in America, that guy knows something about his job. And he's highly intelligent. But these silly, frivolous congresswomen are trying to make him look stupid.

And people who are getting dumber by the day, overall in our society, can't tell the difference. Ayanna Presley is nobody. Her jobs, before she became a congresswoman, was she was a community organizer, so practically unemployed, and she was a model, like model for photographs, for planned parenthood. So that's what she did with her life. Ben Carson fought his way out of the ghetto while his cousins were being killed and there were gangs all around him, fights his way out of the ghetto, and goes on to, graduates from Yale. I think he went to Johns Hopkins, and then he becomes one of the leading neurosurgeons in the world.

That guy, much more intelligent. Also, by the way, even on the point of HUD, he's been a pretty good HUD secretary. HUD probably shouldn't even exist as a department in the federal government. It was a product of the great society. It was one of these LBJ poverty programs that has often hurt people that had intended to help. And he's been pretty good there. First of all, the less he does at that department, the better, and he has deregulated. He has cut various program budgets.

He has empowered local housing authorities, in particular, to impose more stringent work requirements on those who are receiving government benefits. He's done a pretty good job there. If these people actually wanted to ask him a question and learn something about what he's doing, do their oversight job in Congress, they could have asked him a serious question about HUD. They didn't do that. They're just trying to make him look stupid. And we are not even able to understand the difference between those things.

Now, there's another even better video of a politician accidentally looking stupid that was going around CNN. We'll get to that in a second. Then we'll talk about how a presidential candidate for the Democrats and the governor of Washington is allowing hippies to compost. They're dead. And I think come to the final answer on why we're getting dimmer and dumber as a society. But first, you've got to go to dailywire.com. $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me, you get the Andrew Claven show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Mount Walsh show,

you get to ask questions in the mailbag, you get to ask questions backstage, you get another kingdom, and you get this. Oh, that's good. That tastes like Oreos. That's got that delicious Oreo taste as the left screams and yells and cries. Go to DailyWire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more. So you've got those videos.

of Ben Carson. And you've got all of these people going around saying, see, he shouldn't be in the government, see he's stupid, see how much smarter the Democrats are. There's another former presidential candidate who has explained why that is not a measure of intelligence. And it's one of the all-time great presidential candidates, Herman Kane, who put this very well in 2012.

Are you ready for the gotcha questions? They're coming from the media and others on foreign policy. Who's the president of you, Beka, Stan? You know, all of this stuff. It's coming. Yes. And how are you dealing with that? I'm ready for the gotcha questions.

And they are already starting to come. And when they ask me who's the president of you, Becky, Becky, Becky, Becky, stand, I'm going to say, you know, I don't know. Do you know? And then I'm going to say, how's that going to create one job? I want to focus on the top priorities of this country. That's what leaders do. Absolutely fabulous answer.

By the way, Herman Kane, another very serious guy that everybody tried to make fun of. Herman Kane was the CEO of a major pizza company, and he was on the Federal Reserve Board, I think in Kansas City or something like that. This is a very serious man, and he gives a good answer. Anybody can ask a gotcha question. You can ask it of anybody, and you can always get your zing in, and you can always get a viral video clip. That does not measure intelligence.

There's another video, though, on the Democrat side over at CNN, which if it doesn't tell you something about this candidate's intelligence, It does tell you something about her absolute failure to be able to run seriously as a presidential candidate. CNN's Alison Camerata gave the opposite of a gotcha question to Kamala Harris. If we're talking about REO and the chairman and president of who's Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan, if that's the gotcha question, this is the polar opposite of that. And yet, Kamala Harris couldn't even answer a simple question about naming one song by her allegedly favorite musical artist.

We have a little fun kicker that we like to do with all of the presidential candidates that come on New Day. It's called Candidate. That was the musical sting for it. And we like to talk a lot about music here on this program. So what is your favorite musical genre? Oh, I mean, I'm hip-hop and reggae and jazz. as those are some of my favorites. Okay, do you have a favorite band or a favorite musician?

I'd say one of my favorites is Bob Marley. Good choice. You can't go wrong with that. That's a crowd pleaser. On your mixtape, what would be like your favorite three songs? Oh, okay, let's see. Aretha Franklin, anything, Aretha Franklin. I would say Bob Marley and then, I don't know, I love Cardi B.

As she says. Those are great. Thank you for playing along. Oh, gosh. First of all, Aretha Franklin is not a song. Bob Marley also not a song. And Cardi B, not a song. Those are people.

They're people that Kamala Harris is obviously unfamiliar with, and she's just saying she likes them to try to appeal to certain demographic groups. This is so not a gotcha question that Kamala Harris launched her campaign. You'll remember this. Her presidential campaign launched on a mood mix where she talked about all the songs she's listening to and how they get her in the mood to run for president. And she named Aretha Franklin. She said one of her favorite songs was young, gifted, and black. And one thing throughout this whole video, throughout Kamala Harris' whole campaign, is she's so clumsy about how she's trying to appeal to identity politics. So she names that song, Young, Gifted, and Black.

And she said she always loved listening to that song when she was young. And what she's obviously trying to tell you is that she was young, gifted, and black, and so you're supposed to like that. She doesn't talk ever about her actual career, which is as a prosecutor. She doesn't talk about that because she thinks that will hurt her in the Democrat primary. She talks ad nauseum about anything in her past that can be related to race or sexual politics. She's always talking about how she's of Jamaican descent. She's always talking about how she loves traditionally ethnic musical genres.

So she loves reggae. She loves this, she loves that. But then when you push her just even one question in on what she likes about those genres, she can't name a single song. When she gets that question, what are your favorite? genres. You can just see, going through her mind, she goes, okay, which musical genres are going to most appeal to racial and identity politics? Um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, reggae. Okay, that's good. Hip hop. That's good. Jazz. Uh, okay, those are my answers. And you can see it on her

face. You can hear it in her voice, how awkward she feels saying those things. And then you can almost hear her say, please don't ask me anything else. Allison Camerata asks, well, who are your favorite musicians? He goes, um, Bob Marley. Yeah. I've heard that name before. Bob Marley. It was, okay, great. Name any Bob Marley song ever. And she draws a blank. Say no woman, no cry. Say any, Bob Marley is a very popular musician. But probably Kamala Harris doesn't listen to those musicians a lot. She says she likes hip-hop. And then she was asked, she said, well, when did you listen to hip-hop? She said, oh, when I was in college, I was always smoking joints and listening to Snoop Dog and all the time.

And then you Google that for five seconds and you realize Snoop Dog didn't release his debut song until years and years after Kamala Harris graduated from college. It's just a lie. She's just probably, here's what Kamala Harris listens to. Because she's a serious woman who is a powerhouse in politics and has had a serious career. She probably doesn't listen to that much music. She's probably just a very busy lawyer who doesn't sit around and listen to music. She's probably never smoked pot before. when she does listen to music, she probably listens to Bach or Brahms or something because she's fairly educated and she exists in very elite tiers of society where that's what

people listen to. But she doesn't think she can say that on TV. So she has to pretend that she's a member of the Chum Gang puffing away on Blunts listening to Bob Marley or something. I am genuinely shocked at how bad that woman is at running for president. But it's not the same as Ben Carson's video. Ben Carson was asked a gotcha question. Kamala Harris was asked a total softball question that she had already talked about multiple times. She couldn't do it. She couldn't fill it in. She wasn't being portrayed as stupid. She was revealing herself at least as unprepared and bad at running for president. But I think that is not the stupidest gaffe of any 2020 presidential candidate. That honor goes to Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, he's the presidential candidate whose logo

looks like a CD-ROM from the 1990s. He gets the award because he just signed into law the nation's first bill that will allow hippies to throw their dead in the backyard and let them rot. He signed the first bill to allow people to compost their dead. It's called the Recompose program. Get it? Like repose, but compost? Recompose? Recompose, this is in the hill, recompose would be similar to a crematorium, but it uses a longer and less carbon-intensive means of organic reduction, commonly known as composting. So what that means is it's similar to a crematorium in that it's something that happens to dead bodies, but it's less carbon-intensive, meaning they don't light the bodies on fire,

they just throw them in the backyard and let them rot. They go on. It says, the process uses wood chips, straw, and other materials, and takes about four weeks. It is similar to livestock composting, which farmers use to turn animals into odorless soil. Yikes. First of all, credit goes to Jay Inslee. We've talked a lot about how environmentalism is a top issue in the 2020 Democrat primary. The Green New Deal has become the biggest issue. And if this is turning into an environmentalist primary, Jay Inslee is really turning this up to 11. Jay Inslee is throwing dead human bodies into the backyard and letting them compost like dead cows for the environment or something. I mean, it's hard to beat that. So credit on him for

turning the wacko up to 11. This story in particular brings us right back to how we are all getting much stupider as a civilization. This gets to one of the basic behavior. This gets to one of the basic of civilized society. We bury our dead. Why do we bury our dead? Before we start letting people throw granny into the backyard and let her rot, why do we bury our dead? I think it's becoming popular in this culture to say we shouldn't bury our dead. We can cremate them or we can throw them into the backyard or throw them out in the water or something. Can you answer why we bury our dead? Because it's not just some social construct. It's not just some social construct. It's not just something we decided to do a few hundred years ago. Burial of the dead goes all the way back

to prehistory. The Neanderthals buried their dead. Non-human ancestral relatives buried their dead. This has been around a long time. Why? On a cultural level, it's because we have a relationship with our dead. More broadly, we have a relationship with our past. Leftist politicians want to erase the relationship we have with our past. They want to tear down murals and monuments. They want to tear down murals and monuments and statues and rename buildings and renamed towns. But we have a relationship to our past, not just our national past, but our family past. We like to have a gravestone where we can go and visit the remains of our dead relatives. We have that relationship. You go and you pray, or you go and you remember. It brings you back to a certain memory of your past. On a religious level,

we bury our dead because, at least in Christianity and in the Christian West, we expect the resurrection of the body. This is what Christians say in the Nicene Creed. We look forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. When Christ was crucified, he was put into a tomb, and then he was bodily resurrected. He resurrected, not just in some spiritual sense, but physically as well. And so we bury our dead because we look forward to not just life in heaven, but the resurrection of the body in the glorified body, whatever that means. That's the religious reason. On an ethical and political level, why do we bury our dead? Because we respect humanity.

We respect human beings simply for being human beings. We don't want animals gnawing at Granny's body in the backyard. We don't want to feed old granny to the coyotes. We respect human beings. beings, even after death. This is why it's a crime to desecrate bodies, to improperly handle dead bodies. We offer them a certain respect. Now, however, we are losing that respect for humanity. We are literally killing our own children through abortion. We are killing our elderly through assisted suicide, which they call euthanasia. But sometimes we're killing them against their will.

There's a big case in the Netherlands where a woman said, please don't kill me. I don't want drink the poison, and her family held her down and the doctor poured the poison down her throat. We are killing our sick, people who are ill, even if they're young, through assisted suicide. We're killing those who have mental deficiencies through abortion. We are losing respect for humanity as they are humans. One of the arguments for this law to compost the dead was, well, we do it to cattle. Why shouldn't we do it to humans? In the old days we would have said because humans matter more than cattle. Now, however, we don't say that. We say, yeah, it's a good point. We're just animals. We're no different than a bug or a snail or a dog or a

cow. But those are the reasons that we bury our dead. We're obviously getting stupider. We can see it on the tests. We can see it when Kamala Harris goes on CNN. We can see it in these stupid laws that are being passed, like allowing us to have dogs eat granny. But as we get stupider, this is affecting our politics. As we forget our past, it's getting worse. So we're getting stupider. It's that line we keep talking about from Ernest Hemingway. He's describing bankruptcy. He says, how do you go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly? How do you get stupider? Gradually, then suddenly. As you get stupider, you get stupider. As you forget your past, you really start to forget your past. You discard even more traditions more quickly. You sever that connection to your civilization even more greatly.

This is what the Make America Great Again slogan is all about. Make America Great Again. It's about a real sense that we've lost something. It's a process that is speeding up and it does threaten our civilization. I don't think we're all going to start walking around and become total nincompoops who can't spell our own names. But we are socially becoming stupider as well. And before we go, just one

story that I guess it offers a little bit of hope in this is, it sums up this neglect of our past, this forgetting of our past and this hatred of our past. Steve Mnuchin, over at Treasury, just announced that Harriet Tubman will not be going on the $20 bill.

During the Obama administration, they announced Harriet Tubman was going to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill. And this was widely criticized, even among left-wingers. This was widely criticized because of the popularity of the musical Hamilton. So young liberal people like Hamilton now. So they said, okay, we're not going to replace Alexander Hamilton. We'll replace Andrew Jackson, that awful, terrible founder of the Democrat Party. We're going to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman.

And everyone said this was a great idea. And Andrew Jackson, for most of our nation's history, has been considered a very, very good president. And in recent years, he has been portrayed by the revisionist left as this genocidal maniac. And he's been accused of crimes he didn't commit. And he has been smeared as saying things that he never said. But the result of all of this rewriting of history has come out that people on both sides of the aisle hate Andrew Jackson. And it's totally unfair. And I'm very glad that Harriet Tubman isn't replacing him on the $20.

bill. I like Harriet Tubman very much. I'm a huge fan of gun-toting Republicans, but if they want to give her some denomination, they can give her a denomination. That's make a $3 bill or something. But you shouldn't erase Andrew Jackson from history, which is what people are trying to do, because Andrew Jackson was pretty great. Andrew Jackson was a hero. It was literally a hero. He was the hero of New Orleans in the War of 1812. So he's a military hero, saves the United States. He, as President threatened to invade South Carolina. If South Carolina seceded, the first time South Carolina wanted to cede from the Union was in 1828. He threatened to go in there, kept the Union together. He settled a most favored nation treaty with the British, which is pretty impressive since he's

one of the toughest hombres fighting the British in the War of 1812, and then he comes in and secures that most favored nation treaty. He recognized the Republic of Texas, so he brings Texas closer to the United States. He did a lot of good things. He had a lot of accomplishments. The question to ask, when you want to remove Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill,

is why did they put him on the $20 bill to begin with? What the revisionists will tell you is because America was a terrible, awful place in the past, and everyone was stupid, and they really liked him because of how evil he was. That's not sufficient.

You know that isn't true. Andrew Jackson's vices, which are legitimate. I mean, he's an imperfect guy like everybody, and great men tend to have great imperfections. His vices have been vastly exaggerated, and his many, many virtues and accomplishments have been totally ignored by history. People aren't learning it. We're severing our connection to the past and we're getting dumber. The thing that he gets dinged on all the time, and they say it's the reason we need to erase him from history, is Indian removal because he presided over the removal of some Indians from the southeast of the United States.

This whole period of Indian removal has been totally misrepresented. When you say Andrew Jackson to a left-winger and a revisionist, the first thing they're going to say is the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson, he caused the Trail of Tears on which the Indians were removed. He didn't. He wasn't even president during the Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears was enforced by his successor, Martin Van Buren. As with everything in history, the true story is much more interesting and much more complicated.

The way that Indian removal happened was that the United States purchased tribal land in exchange for land to the west that were outside of state borders. So you had this real political problem, which is you had whole Indian nations inside relatively newly formed states in the relatively newly formed United States. did anybody really think that the United States was going to develop and permit these relatively large nations, independent nations, to exist within their boundaries? Of course not. That would not be able to happen. The United States could not develop that way. If you were president, you would have removed the Indians too.

You would have secured treaties to do it, which is what he did. So the early treaties stipulated the tribes could either move west or surrender their sovereignty and obey the state laws. So there was either or. One of the first tribes to move were the Chickasaw. The Chickasaw moved with relatively little trouble. So they secure this treaty

and the way the Chickasaw moved is they got a sum of money and they were able to pay for much of their own removal. So there was tragedy along the way, but relatively little, relatively little famine, relatively little death. They quickly agreed, they agreed to favorable traditions, they did it. That was an act

of pretty brilliant diplomacy. Then the Chalktall were a little tougher because the chiefs of that nation were bribed. They also came to a treaty, but at pretty unfavorable terms, they moved during the winter of 1831, 1832. There was a lot more misery on that route. Then you get the Seminoles. The Seminoles agreed to move. They signed a treaty, the Treaty of Payne's landing, but then they refused to move. Renegged on the treaty, this launched the Second Seminole War. This happened to other tribes as well. In the case of the Cherokees, this is what people think that they remember in history.

That case made it to the Supreme Court. And it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the line that everybody remembers is, after Chief Justice John Marshall made his decision, Andrew Jackson said, John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it. This was seen as a tyrannical move to steal power

and upset the balance of powers in our government. The trouble with that line, which everyone knows Andrew Jackson said, is he never said it. There is no evidence that he ever said, it. The line comes to us from Horace Greeley, who said that he heard it from another guy, who said that he heard it from Andrew Jackson. The way that we know Andrew Jackson almost certainly didn't say that is there was nothing about the Supreme Court decision to enforce. So the sentence

itself doesn't make any sense. How did this play out? Eventually the Cherokees signed a treaty. But then some rejected that treaty because they said that the chiefs who signed it were not legitimate leaders of the tribe, and this led to the Trail of Tears in 1938, which I don't mean to underplay it. The Trail of Tears was horrific. The particulars of lots of Indian removal was horrific. However, again, that wasn't Andrew Jackson. Martin Van Buren was the president. Jackson didn't preside over that. If you want to remove Martin Van Buren from the, oh yeah, he's not on any money, okay, fine, I guess. Van Buren was not a great president. But Andrew Jackson actually was a pretty great figure in American history. And as the culture gets stupider, I think the key thing,

one of the key symptoms of it is we think we're getting smarter. We think we have fancy college degrees. We think the millennials are the smartest, best educated generation ever. This is a key among stupid people. Stupid people think they're smart. Smart people know that they're not smart. Socrates famously said, all that I know is that I know nothing. That's a key. And so when you, as this 2020 race goes on, as the political battle heats up, you're going to have a lot of people trying to convince you of how smart they are. And the more they protest about it, I think the clearer it is that those IQ scores are right, those SAT scores are right. The culture, unfortunately, getting dumber and dumber.

That's our show. We got more to get to. We'll do it tomorrow. Come on back. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Nulls Show. I'll see you tomorrow. The Michael Noles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

Edited by Danny Domeco. Audio is mixed by Dylan Case. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan. The Michael Noles show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2019. Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the left moves to embrace abortion as a moral good, and they let the homeless run wild in major cities around the United States. That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.