The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 566 - Brazen Lying Marxists
Episode Date: June 22, 2020“Black Lives Matter” founders admit they’re trained Marxist organizers, rioters topple more statues, and President Trump holds his first rally since the WuFlu lockdowns. If you like The Michael... Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/knowles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Our national collapse continues as more statues come tumbling down.
It's very difficult to keep track of all the statues that have come down.
You remember initially it was just Confederate monuments.
Then it was Robert E. Lee, who's got kind of a more special place.
Then very quickly, it was Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Christopher Columbus.
Well, we've got even more statues coming down over the weekend.
A quick rundown.
First, Ulysses S. Grant.
This one, maybe we're not expecting.
Ulysses S. Grant is, of course, the Union General who freed all of the slaves.
So you'd think that in the name of Black Lives Matter probably wouldn't make sense to tear down his statue.
But that's exactly what they did in San Francisco.
Next one up is Francis Scott Key.
Francis Scott Key wrote the National Anthem.
I guess no surprise there, because we know leftists hate the National Anthem.
They've been protesting the National Anthem for a very long time now.
though it is a little bit ironic that they took down Francis Scott Key.
Part of the reason they did is there's a line in one of the verses of the National Anthem
that talks about slaves.
So the line is, no refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.
And there's actually some debate over what this line even means, but of course,
leftists are not looking for context on that at all.
So the word slave there might actually refer to the British policy of impressment.
of enslaving people, but again, all nuance is gone.
The other thing about Francis Scott Key is though he owned slaves for a period of his life,
he also publicly criticized slavery.
He gave free legal representation to slaves that were seeking freedom,
but his statue had to come down anyway.
And then I think that the most ridiculous one, this was the third one over the weekend,
Saint Hunipero Sarah, they are now pulling down actual, honest to goodness,
honest to God's saints.
St. Huni Perocera was a missionary, came to the new world in 1749.
He was canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis.
There's a statue of him in the U.S. Capitol.
And, believe it or not, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden actually paid their respects to that statue not so long ago.
That was then, this is now.
They're going to tear down every single statue.
And then guess what?
Once all the statues are down, they're coming for you.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the Michael Knowles Show.
President Trump talked about all this statue toppling at his first speech since the lockdown,
which we will get to, because this weekend more than any, showed the real aim of these protests
and riots. And it's a lot worse than anybody thought, and they're not just going to stop
at statues. So President Trump talked about all of this, all of the pulling down of statues.
A lot of normal people, most normal people oppose this kind of stuff. You'll notice when you look at
who was pulling down the statues. It's a lot of people clad in black. They look like they're part
of far left organizations, either BLM, which we'll get to in one second, or Antifa, or other
various anarchist and communist groups. I don't think they speak for most people. Actually, Muhammad
Ali Jr., son of the famous boxer and a civil rights advocate and social activist, he came out
and strongly opposed all the statue toppling and the riots and the looting in the protests.
He used colorful language, which I'll have to clean up a little bit.
He goes, don't bust up stuff.
Don't trash the place.
You can peacefully protest.
My father would have said, they ain't nothing but devils.
My father said, all lives matter.
I don't think he'd agree with the BLM movement.
Actually, Muhammad Ali Jr. said that he thought the BLM movement was racist.
And then he went on to defend cops.
He said, police don't wake up and think, I'm going to kill an N-word today or kill a white man.
They're just trying to make it back home to their family in one piece.
Obviously correct, Muhammad Ali Jr.
I have been telling you this for many weeks now,
that the Black Lives Matter organization is a very, very bad organization.
It is not what it purports to be.
It is a radical leftist, anti-American, no good, very bad organization,
and nobody should have anything to do with it.
And as a result of saying that,
I and others have been called racist, bigoted, terrible, dishonest,
Okay, well, over the weekend, the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement actually admitted that my take on it is correct.
Okay, I don't think they admitted it over the weekend, but the video finally came out over the weekend.
Patrice Cullor was caught on video admitting that the BLM organization isn't about Black Lives Mattering,
that she is a trained organizer, and she is a trained Marxist.
I also think that it might...
I think of a lot of things.
The first thing I think is that we actually do have an ideological frame.
Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers.
We are trained Marxists.
We are super...
versed on sort of ideological theories.
And I think that what we really try to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many,
many black folk.
When someone tells you that he or she is a Marxist, believe them.
Okay, you hear a lot of people ranting and raving about conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats.
And there are many people who rant and rave about Marxists.
This woman is admitting it.
You don't need to feel bad about yourself if you posted the black square.
You don't need to feel bad about yourself if you posted the hashtag Black Lives Matter thinking that Black Lives Matter is about Black Lives Mattering.
But we now know it isn't.
We now have the founders of BLM admitting on video, in their own words, that this is a Marxist front.
Marxists have duped plenty of nice people in history.
Marxists have lied to many of nice people throughout history.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
I'm remembering the George W. Bush version of this, which is, fool me twice.
The point is, you're not going to fool me again.
That should be the point.
If they fool you the first time and you post the black square, that's on them.
But if you continue to give your support to the BLM organization, which is openly and avowedly
Marxist, radically ideological, radically anti-American, that's on you.
Stop doing it.
Stop posting the hashtag.
Stop posting the black square.
That's not what this is about.
And this battle is playing out not just in the United States.
It's playing out all around the world because over the weekend, you had to be a lot.
the United Nations, which we fund for some reason, openly embracing another radical leftist
organization, another communist slash anarchist organization, Antifa. We'll get to that in one second.
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The United Nations is now pro-Antifa.
How much more evidence do we need before we finally defund the United Nations?
This should be it.
You've got BLM admitting that they're Marxist.
How much more evidence do you need before you pull your support from BLM?
Same thing here with Antifa.
They tweet, quote,
UN hashtag human rights experts express profound concern over a recent statement by the U.S. Attorney General
describing Antifa and other anti-fascist activities as domestic terrorists, saying it undermines
the rights to freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly in the country.
See how they're conflating.
Antifa with anti-fascists.
Now, Antifa is a communist anarchist terror group.
anti-fascist just means you oppose fascism.
Let's take that example all the way back to when fascism had any sort of meaning,
which is back in World War II with Mussolini.
And sort of with Hitler, though national socialism is sort of a different thing.
But lump them both together, fine.
That was the last time the word fascism really meant anything.
George Orwell wrote an essay about this.
After the Second World War, the word fascism lost all of its meaning.
But in that war, you see a lot of leftists these days talking about.
the allied troops as the original anti-fascists. Remember, there were two kinds of
anti-fascists in World War II. There were the Americans and the British, R-guise, good guys,
and there were Stalin's communists, both anti-fascist. When you're just opposed to something
that leaves it wide open to interpretation as to what side you are actually on, some anti-fascists
are good, right? If you're an American soldier in World War II, that makes you, that's a good guy.
But if you're Stalin, just because you opposed Hitler at a certain point, doesn't make you a good
guy. Doesn't mean that I want to ally with Stalin, okay? And yet, the United Nations conflates the two.
We need to defund the United Nations. We pay 22% of the UN budget to invite the worst people on
earth to sit on a human rights council, some of the worst most despotic regimes in history,
sit on a human rights council. Then they fly to New York to the seat of the United Nations and
criticize the United States. And we, like massacists, pay the bill. We say, thank you. Thank you,
Venezuela. May I have another? Thank you, North Korea. Thank you, Cuba. May I have another?
Thank you, Iran. May I have another? Why are we doing that? The UN is situated on beautiful
waterfront property. We could knock down that building. We could bring in some nice bulldozers.
We could create beautiful Trump condominiums. And we would save a lot of money every single year.
Now is the time to do that. We are in a battle that has become ideological. It's not just in the
U.S. It's international, but it's the same issues. What are we fighting for? Why are we paying people
and tolerating people
destroying our nation, our history, our culture.
Some conservatives, some conservatives
go squishy on this.
They say it's a good idea to take down the statues.
Take down the statues, put them in a museum.
I say we take down rioters and put them in prison.
But some conservatives want to go along with the leftist mob,
take down the statues and put them in a museum.
Very misguided.
First of all, they won't stay in museums.
You think you're going to take it down from some public square and put it in a museum and then go get to look at it.
No, they're coming down from museums too.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York just took down a statue of Teddy Roosevelt.
Why?
What was so terrible about Teddy Roosevelt?
Nobody can tell, except that this statue of Teddy Roosevelt had a black man and an Indian in it,
and they didn't like that for some reason, too much integration, I guess.
So they're taking down the statue.
none of the statues that are going to museums are going to remain there for very long.
There's no limiting principle to tearing down the statues, to tearing down some statues,
but not other statues, of our history.
And where the rubber meets the road, I notice, for a lot of conservatives, is Robert E. Lee.
Many conservatives who want to prove that they're not racist, prove to leftist mobs who don't care if you're not racist,
and to whom we don't owe any sort of explanation whatsoever,
what those conservatives do is they say,
okay, we'll keep up Lincoln and Jefferson,
they're really good guys, and Washington,
and even Christopher Columbus,
but we'll tear down Robert E. Lee, because Robert E. Lee is a traitor.
This totally misunderstands the Civil War, our nation broadly,
and how we look at our history.
If you want to tear down that Robert E. Lee statue,
you find yourself exactly,
exactly at odds with Abraham Lincoln's vision for what happens after the Second World War,
after the Civil War. We'll get to that in one second. First though, I got to thank our friends over
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Here's the issue with tearing down the Robert Ely's statue.
You say conservatives or traitors.
Robert E. Lee was a traitor.
First of all, Robert E. Lee was a great American general who only returned to Virginia when war broke out because he was loyal to the Commonwealth of Virginia as a federalist.
You have more local loyalties before the national loyalty in an issue like that.
But then he was instrumental in bringing about an end of the war.
And Abraham Lincoln made an excellent point on how the war should end.
He said, with malice toward none, with charity for all, we will finish up this conflict.
That was good enough for the men who fought and won the Civil War.
That was good enough for the men who lost their brothers in arms in the Civil War.
That was good enough for the families who lost loved ones in the Civil War.
But it's not good enough for modern leftists.
Robert E. Lee had his citizenship reinstated. It's good enough for people who came before us,
not good enough for modern leftists. When there is a civil war, often that spells the end of a nation.
But the nation did come back together. That was not easy. It took a lot of healing. It took a lot of
compassion for our fellow citizens, rebuilding love of our fellow citizens. We succeeded at that. And now,
150 years later, more than 150 years later, people are trying to tear that apart again, totally
undoing all the good that Lincoln and those who came after him did. The other reason why we can't
tear down Robert E. Lee or why we shouldn't tear down Robert E. Lee is that the argument for tearing
down Lee is an argument for tearing down everybody. Robert E. Lee is an American citizen, so I don't
think the traitor line works. Really what you're saying, he's a traitor, he's a racist, he's a
bigot, you apply it to Jefferson and Washington. Really what people are saying is this man had flaws,
this man committed sins, this man was not perfect. The statue of the perfect man who has lived
any time in the last 2,000 years or so would be an empty statue. It would just be a platform.
If that's your argument for tearing down Lee, then you have to tear down all of the statues too.
And not just tear down the statues, you have to rename the institutions over the weekend.
Hashtag cancel Yale was trending nationwide.
What did Yale do?
Yale has done many things in history.
But one thing it did was push forward this progressive idea that we've got to rename things,
tear down statues.
Yale renamed Calhoun College just a few years ago because it was named after a guy who
defended slavery and you can't have that.
so all these years later we have to rename Calhoun College.
At the time, Roger Kimball wrote an essay where he pointed out that if you rename Calhoun
College, you got to rename Yale because Calhoun might have defended slavery, but Eli Yale
was a slave traitor, the man who Yale is named after.
So you got to rename Yale.
Jesse Kelly, the conservative commentator, talked about this over the weekend.
Anne Colter has been talking about this for a while.
And it's very ironic.
It's a little bit chickens coming home to roost because Yale in recent years more or less
kicked off the cancel culture. Perhaps you remember shrieking girl, that Yale undergraduate who met
her professor, who was the head of the college that she was in, and started shrieking at him
because his wife had the audacity to suggest that Yale students were able to choose their own
Halloween costumes. He was defending a principle of free speech and maturity and adulthood.
She didn't like that. So she went on a vulgar rant shrieking about how he should lose his job.
It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Cilliman.
By sending out that email that goes against your position as master, do you understand that?
No, I don't agree with that.
Then what the fuck?
I have a different vision.
You should step down if it is nothing about that.
You're disgusting.
That's the future.
That's the future president shrieking girl.
Future Senator Shrieking undergraduate.
it, guess what Yale did? They didn't support the professors. Professors ended up leaving Yale.
I think now they've come back, but they ended up leaving. They did step down. The students won.
Many of the students involved in that altercation won awards for social justice at graduation.
What happened to Yale? That's what many of us were asking ourselves. What happened to this place
that they allowed this to happen? Then it occurred to me. Yale was founded.
as a seminary. And it still is one. Yale was founded as a place to train priests and preachers.
And it still does that. All of the elite universities were founded as seminaries, and they are seminaries to
this day. The difference is that initially they were seminaries of Christianity. Today, they are
seminaries of liberalism, of wokeism, of leftism. Call it what you want. They still train their students,
indoctrinate their students with the same exact religious zeal that they had when they were founded.
But the religion has changed a little bit. Whereas we began with Christianity, now we are at
liberalism. And of course, if you're going to train students in that new woke religion,
then you're going to get zealots like that girl shrieking at her professor. And you are going to get
zealots renaming everything. Utter revolution. The sad thing about all these elites,
institutions. Don't forget, universities going back to the Middle Ages, the earliest universities,
were outgrowths of the Catholic Church. They were places to train monks and priests,
people in the faith. And now there's a new faith. In Christianity, though, you have redemption
because you recognize man's fallen nature, and then you recognize your need of a redeemer,
and then you recognize that a redeemer actually came and redeemed mankind on the cross and rose from
the dead. In leftism, there's no redemption. In the religion of liberalism, there is an inversion
of Christianity. You are told that you're perfect just the way you are. And if you're not perfect,
you can become perfect through your own actions, through your own self-liberation from bondage,
from the oppressive past into the new future. You can perfect your own human nature.
If there is some imperfection, it's society's fault. It's not your fault. It's not your
fault. And if there is some imperfection, there's no redemption for it, because there's no
redeemer. That's the sort of religion that topple statues. The original religion of our seminaries
built up all of the statues, built up this great country, and the new one is tearing them down.
There is no middle ground in this political battle. There is no compromise. There's no reconciliation.
There's no meat in the middle. There's no meat in the middle. There's no meat in the
middle between build a statue and tear a statue down. You could leave a statue up, I guess,
but that's not really in the middle. That's the former category. That's building up a nation.
There's not going to be any middle ground here. We are playing for keeps. It is a battle over
keeping our country, which means to continue to build our country, or tearing our country down
completely. And once they get past the statues, they're not going to be happy. They're going to go for
more institutions, they're going to go for you. President Trump talked about this in his first
rally since the coronavirus lockdown. And he talked about his strategy. A lot of us, including on this
show, we've talked about why is President Trump allowing this to happen? Why won't he roll the tanks
into chas, chop, soy malia, soy via union, whatever you want to call it? Why won't he do it?
One thought has been that perhaps he wants people to see how bad things get. Trump knows a lot
about stagecraft and about the media.
Maybe he wants people to see the city's burning and then realize that we need law and order
and we have to vote for him.
I think that's a tough strategy.
But actually, at his rally over the weekend, Trump admitted that this is exactly what he's doing.
All of these places I talk about are Democrat.
You know that.
Every one of them.
Every one of them.
And I have an offer out.
I said, anytime you want, we'll come in, we'll straighten it out.
one hour or less.
Now, I may be wrong,
but it's probably better for us to just watch that disaster.
I flew in with some of our great congressmen
who were going to introduce it a second,
and I said to him,
Congressman, what do you think?
I can straighten it out fast.
Should we just go in?
No, sir.
Let it simmer for a little while.
Let people see what radical left Democrats will do
to our country.
He makes a great point here
and confirms what a lot of us
thought was happening. And
even more than that, he gives you a peek
into his thinking. If President Trump
were secretly
letting the cities burn, just so
that we could see how bad it was going to get,
I think a lot of people would accuse him of cynicism,
saying, ah, you're willing to let
cities go up in flames just to make a political
point. But the very fact
that Trump is telling you what he's doing
takes away that cynicism, right?
He's admitting it to you.
There's no guile here.
And that's the point of these rallies
is to take you behind the scenes,
create this personal connection.
And I think he does that pretty successfully.
The one trouble with this strategy, though,
is that we no longer live in a country
that recognizes federalism very clearly.
We don't really understand.
If you asked 100 people on the street,
probably very few of them would recognize.
that we have local government, state government, federal government, and actually the local
government makes most of the decisions that administers most of the laws and regulations and the state
government a little bit more too. And the federal government has relatively few powers,
narrowly defined powers. Most people wouldn't recognize that because it's become less and
less true over time. So you look around at the burning cities, I think a lot of people look at
Trump and say, well, you're the president. Do something about it. Action is a good spur to enthusiasm.
Action is very inspiring. And so Trump is playing a game here. That's why he said, I admit, I could be
wrong about this. But I think it's better to let people see what happens. I think what needs to happen
is a little bit of a combination of the two. I think it's good to watch Chaz and Chop. It's hilarious.
It's sort of like when AOC proposed the Green New Deal, which was so absurd. And Mitch McCorm,
McConnell immediately said, well, we got to vote on this, ASAP. We got to get the green new deal on the
docket and we got to get everybody on the record. Do you support destroying 90% of American energy?
Do you support spending $93 trillion? Get on the record, Senator. There is a little bit of that,
that performance of seeing how bad it is. But we also need to see action. We have elected Trump
in part for his energy. We had other candidates who Trump perhaps aptly described as low energy.
Trump is high energy, so we want to see that energy in action.
Alexander Hamilton, writing in the federalist, said that we want an energetic executive, an energetic government.
So we do have to see that eventually.
When is that going to be?
Perhaps we'll have to wait and see.
Trump took us a little more behind the scenes throughout the rest of this rally.
I thought it was overall an okay rally, but the mainstream media are knocking him for one thing and one thing in particular.
The crowd sizes were underwhelming.
Why was that?
We will get to it.
There is a conspiracy afoot, which the left is admitting, just like Black Lives Matter
admits that it's Marxist, just like the UN admits that it supports Antifa.
But there is a campaign problem, too.
Get to both.
First, I want to thank you for helping us make it to 75,000 subscribers on YouTube.
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So Trump talks about his strategy on the riots.
Then he gets even more personal than that.
He goes on this digression about how he was giving a speech at West Point.
Then he tried walking down the ramp, but the ramp was slippery, so he had to walk slowly.
Most people are criticizing Trump for this.
They think this was a waste of time at his rally.
I think it's the key feature to his rally.
Here is Trump talking about that all-important shuffle down the ramp.
And this was a steel ramp.
You all saw it because everybody saw it.
This was a steel ramp.
It had no handrail.
It was like an ice cream.
getting rig. And I said, General, I have a problem, and he didn't understand that at first.
I said, there's no way. You understand it? I just saluted almost 600 times. I just made a big speech.
I sat for other speeches. I'm being baked. I'm being baked like a cake.
I said, General, there's no way I can make it down that ramp without falling on my ass, General.
I have no rally.
It's true.
So I said, is there like something else around?
Sir, the ramp is ready to go.
Grab me, sir.
Grab me.
I didn't really want to grab him.
You know why?
Because I said, that'll be a story too.
So he takes you through.
You know, I don't like it when the president uses vulgar language in public.
But the story does seem to call for it.
And I see what he's doing here.
The media for how long?
For a week, basically, talked about how.
how Trump was old and dottering by walking down this ramp.
Meanwhile, their candidate is Joe Biden.
Enough said.
But they talk about the ramp for a week.
So he wants to take you behind the scenes on all these little moments.
At one point, the media accused him of maybe having Parkinson's disease.
Trump jokes about this, goes on a several minute long rant, basically a stand-up comedy bit
about how when you're drinking water, it's a good idea not to spill it on your silk necktie.
You had on a very good red tie that's just sort of expensive.
It's silk because they look better.
They have a better sheen to them.
And I don't want to get water on the tie.
And I don't want to drink much.
So I lift it up the water.
I see we have a little glass of water.
Where the hell did this water come from?
Where did it come from?
And I look down on my tie, because I've done it.
I've taken water and it spills down into your tie.
It doesn't look good for a long time.
look good for a long time. And frankly, the tie is never the same. So I put it up to my lip
and then I say, because I don't want it just a case. And they gave me another disease.
They gave me another disease. So he takes a sip of the water, and he throws the water to decide.
President Trump sips the water and then he throws it off the stage. The guy gets stagecraft so well.
And you were watching, you say, why am I watching the president of the United States talking about how silk neckties have a better sheen and how you don't want to dribble water on it because they're kind of expensive? Meanwhile, this guy's a billionaire.
It's very, very funny. It's very, very personal. And it makes you have a much tighter connection to the man speaking than you have to the mainstream media that are lying about him. And it makes you trust him more than you trust them. I actually think this kind of stuff, the tie bit, all of that, is some of the most important stuff in the speech.
He probably could have cut it down a little bit in terms of the length of time, but it was really good stuff.
Then he shows you why this personal stuff matters because he pivots from a story that isn't completely trivial, like the ramp or the necktie.
He pivots into a personal story about negotiating over the price of an aircraft.
And now all of a sudden, very subtly before anybody knew what happened, Trump blends the personal element and the political element.
And he shows you his political philosophy, which more or less boils down to make,
good deals. I said, cancel the contract. I want to cancel. I said, General, can you cancel the
contract? He said, yes, sir. I'm very proud of it. Oh, good. Cancel it? Okay, sir. By the way,
to cancel it, do you have to pay anything? Yes, sir. We have a cancellation fee, sir. How much is it,
general? $250 million, sir. I said, what? Sir, we made a good deal. 250 million to kid. You mean,
buy the plane. We have to hand them $250 million. That's not good, right? Look at these two guys.
They're looking. By the way, that's like a good story compared to some I could tell you,
like with aircraft carriers. So I say, General, don't cancel. Don't cancel. Just tell him I don't want
the planes. Don't put anything in writing. Don't put it in writing, General. Why, sir? Because I don't
want to pay $250. You don't want to pay $250. The speech was largely like this.
It was much funnier than Dave Chappelle's recent stand-up special on Netflix, right?
This is Trump's superpower, and he does it very well.
Why does this matter?
Well, because most politicians, they don't care about $250 million.
$250 million is a drop in the bucket of our federal budget.
It's a rounding error, so nobody worries about that.
Trump is showing you he does worry about that,
that the President of the United States, leader of the free world, is personally negotiating
over the cost of airplanes because most politicians don't care about that.
this stuff, but most Americans do budget. They think about things. Even if you go buy a t-shirt or you go
buy a box of cereal or something, you're looking at the numbers. You say, okay, well, I don't want to
spend $5, I'd rather spend $4. I don't want to spend $15 or rather spend $14. And you're thinking
about these things. It's very relatable. It shows you that this guy is different from everyone in
Washington, and he's much more like you. He then moves on to more ideological questions. And this
question, I think, shows a major debate that's going on on the right right now between the old
kind of more libertarian consensus and the new, more conservative, traditional idea that's emerging.
And this is on the question of flag burning.
Is President Trump echoed a sentiment he's mentioned before, sentiment that I have supported on
this show, which is, we ought to have laws or a constitutional amendment, I suppose,
in this country, against burning the American flag?
And you know, we ought to do something, Mr. Senators.
We have two great senators.
We ought to come up with legislation that if you burn the American flag, you go to jail for one year.
One year.
This is a great idea.
I know that some conservatives are going to shrink back instinctively.
Like if you're at a doctor's office and he hits the hammer on your knee and the knee goes up.
You're going to shrink back at that because we support free speech.
So you can't be for a flag burning, anti-flag burning amendment, right?
wrong, not quite. What's the issue here? The issue is the debate. Are conservatives going to get
serious or are we going to let the left run roughshot over the country? For a long time in this country,
for most of our nation's history, we've had laws against burning the flag. For a lot longer than
we haven't had laws against burning the flag. This was just part of our nation. Then this was challenged
in recent decades and it was found to be unconstitutional to have a law against burning the
American flag. And actually, Antonin Scalia, the great originalist justice, was one of the people
who opposed, who found that it was unconstitutional to have an amendment, or a law against
burning the American flag. The conservatives tended to support the flag burning laws,
liberals opposed the flag burning laws. Scalia sided with the liberals on constitutional grounds,
because he said that burning the American flag is clearly an expressive action. It clearly
is about political speech, and so
those laws are unconstitutional.
Now, one solution to this would be
pass a constitutional amendment saying you can't
desecrate the American flag.
Because in some cases, when you want to dispose
of an old American flag, a tattered American flag,
you do burn it. We're not worried about the burning.
It's the desecration that we don't like.
I think this is a very good idea.
There's a reason why we, for most
of our country's history, had laws against burning
the American flag, and we all thought that they were perfectly
constitutional. It's because
it's incoherent to burn the American flag
and to do so in the name of the First Amendment
because the American flag is the symbol of the whole country.
The country, which includes in it the First Amendment.
If you burn the American flag, you are burning symbolically the First Amendment.
And so it's an act that doesn't make any sense.
Moreover, I think of it in the way that G.K. Chesterton talked about
how there is a thought that stops thought,
and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
there is free expression that stops free expression, and that is the only free expression that
ought to be stopped by the lights of the First Amendment. That would be something like burning a flag.
Another reason is that nations need to have things that hold them together.
And in the early days of America, we all shared, we shared largely a common actual ancestry
in the Anglo-American tradition. We shared a language. We shared political institutions.
we shared a religion, we shared all of these things.
And increasingly over time, we don't share those things anymore.
We don't share any of those things, really.
You need to have something that holds you together.
And if you can't even agree on the symbol of the whole country,
then there's nothing left.
Another reason, this is a great idea,
and why it's actually conservative to have an amendment,
a constitutional amendment against bringing the American flag,
is that the conservative worldview needs to have not
just form, but substance. It needs to have not just procedure, but actual stuff. So, for instance,
we support free expression. We support the First Amendment. But we also need to support specific
things to express. It can't just be you're free to make any decision you want. Well, what
decision are you going to make? It's like the pro-choice people. They say, we're pro-choice.
Okay, you're choosing to do what? Really what they mean is they're pro-abortion. We need. We
to have stuff to our conservatism. For the last 50, 60 years, conservatism has more or less just
boiled down to procedure. We're, okay, we're going to oppose the certain procedures that are
destroying America. But if you use the right procedure to tear down statues, that's a good thing.
Or even on the question of immigration, we let him more and more and more immigrants in the
country and less and less assimilation. We say, okay, well, we can, of course, we would never oppose
that left-wing policy, but you've got to do it legally. You've got to follow the right procedure,
but we're not going to oppose you on the substance. We need to have some substance to it.
We've seen the effects. Look at originalism. We've said, we need to have these originalist judges.
They don't need to have any conservative content, but they need to file this procedure of
interpretive principle. Well, guess what? We've lost virtually every important case over the last
20, 30 years, 40 years, more than that. The procedure is not enough. We need to have substance.
We need to stand for something. I think that would be a good.
future for the conservative movement. Frankly, I think it's the only future if we want to stop
before all the statues and all of our country has tumbled down. And of course, no one is talking
about the substantive points of that rally. Everyone is just talking about the crowd sizes.
So the left is now attacking Trump for not having a big enough crowd. We were promised a zillion
people were going to show up and then there weren't as many. Ironically, before the rally,
the left was preemptively attacking Trump for having too many people at the rally. He was
going to have too many people and it was going to spread coronavirus. Then there were more spaced
out. There were some empty seats. They were making fun of Trump for having not enough people.
Three theories of this. Was there intimidation outside the rally? Was it leftist sabotage or was it
lack of enthusiasm for Trump? We know that there was leftist sabotage. AOC admitted it. She said,
actually, you got rocked by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign with fake ticket
reservations and tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist
open mic to pack an arena during COVID shout out to zoomers. You'll always.
make me so proud. She was saying it was teenagers who did all this. Turns out it wasn't really teenagers.
It was older leftist activists. Here's one woman admitting, as AOC did, that she was pushing for all
of this, a woman named Mary Jo Laupe, who does not exactly look like a teen or a resumer, but here's
the TikTok she made. If you've been paying attention to the news, you know that Donald Trump
was planning on holding his first political rally post-quarantine on June 19th in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Now, if you don't know why that's a big deal, I want you to Google two phrases, Juneteenth,
and Black Wall Street.
You'll find out why people are really upset about this
and why it's a slap in the face to the black community.
Somebody on another TikTok post
commented that he was offering two free tickets
on his campaign website to go to this rally.
So I wouldn't investigate it.
It's two free tickets per cell phone number.
Because when you register, you have to give them your cell phone number.
They send you a code.
You put the code in and your tickets are reserved for you.
So this probably means having worked on a political campaign
this past fall, it probably means that I'll start getting text messages
from his campaign.
All I have to do to get rid of those is
text stop. That's all you have to do. Once you text up, they have to stop texting you. That's the law.
They have to leave you alone. So I recommend that all of those of us that want to see this 19,000 seat
auditorium barely filled or completely empty, go reserve tickets now and leave him standing there
alone on the stage. What do you say? Okay, so she admits it. AOC admits that there was some
sabotage going on. There were some protesters out there, intimidating Trump supporters who
wanted to come in. I think there's also a campaign issue. The campaign could have handled this better.
We know that the left pulls these sort of tactics.
They do this to every speech that I give on campus.
They always reserve a lot more seats and then they either don't show up or they show up and they leave early.
That's why we have a wait list line outside to immediately fill in the seats.
I was actually giving a speech about six or eight months ago defending George Washington at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
You might say that I saw this coming, this toppling of the Washington statues.
So I was giving a defense of Washington.
and at a certain point about five, ten minutes in, a whole group of leftists left, and we immediately
filled the seats back in. Campaign should have seen that coming, and the campaign should not have
caved to the mob on moving the date. You remember, initially the Trump rally was supposed to be on
June 19th. June 10th, now the most important holiday in all of America. Juneteenth is the day that
Republicans told the slaves in Texas that they were free, and this has somehow become a political
issue for Democrats. I don't know how they managed to do that.
So they said, the Trump campaign has to move the rally.
Can't be on June 19th, June 10th.
And the Trump campaign acquiesced to this.
They shouldn't have done that.
First of all, it created some confusion over when the rally was.
And it dispirited people because they caved to the leftist mob,
needlessly and counterproductively.
So I think the campaign should learn some lessons from this.
Be better prepared.
Next time, look, this was the first rally in three months, right, since the lockdowns.
That's fine.
the important thing is we need to get back out there and see some more rallies.
The cancel culture, the statue toppling, the anti-American activities are going to continue.
All right, they're already trying, you know, they canceled Christopher Columbus a long time ago.
They're now trying to rename Columbus, Ohio, as I said, would certainly happen.
If you take down a statue of Columbus at Columbus High School in Columbus, Ohio, the next question is,
why is the high school named after, or the community college named after Columbus?
Why is the town named after Columbus?
So they want to change the name.
And I think this encapsulates the whole of liberal modernity.
They want to change the name of Columbus, Ohio, to Flavortown, Ohio.
This is what they say about it.
They say, Columbus is an amazing city, but one whose name is tarnished by the very name itself.
Its name, say, Christopher Columbus is in the bad place, by which they mean hell, but they can't use the word hell because they have a very religious worldview.
but they don't have our religious worldview.
They've replaced it with leftism.
He's in the bad place because of all his raping, slave trading, and genocide.
That's not exactly a proud legacy.
So again, they get Columbus completely wrong.
They accuse him of crimes.
He did not commit, but you don't expect historical literacy from people who would name a town Flavortown.
Why not rename the city Flavortown?
The name is twofold.
One, it honors Central Ohio's proud heritage as a culinary crossroads in one of the nation's largest test markets for the food industry.
second, Chef Lebrity, Guy Fierry, was born in Columbus, so we can honor him.
This is what happens in liberalism.
Liberalism, and this happens as liberalism spreads out, not just over time, but geographically.
It replaces real culture, profound culture, real history, real literature, real art, real tradition,
with nothing but consumption,
nothing but the idea that we should feed our appetites.
In this case, literally feed our appetites,
with debased pop culture and cheap food,
cheap, salty, fatty food.
Feed me, feed me, feed me.
We have squandered our culture on our own ravenous appetites.
That's what happens.
The old idea of liberty, the old idea of freedom
is that we have to tame our appetites
so that we can conquer our passions
and actually be free in the world.
And the modern, liberal idea of liberty
is you give in to your passions,
you give in to your appetites
and only when you do exactly what you want to do,
whenever you want to do it,
then only are you free?
What culture do you want to live in?
We're all headed toward Flavor Town, folks.
when the last statue finally falls,
then we will be living in Flavortown, USA.
Is that the culture you want?
Do you want to live in the world of George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln
and our beautiful monuments and our religion
and our traditions and our institutions?
Or do you want to live in Flavortown?
Unfortunately these days, probably most people want to live in Flavor Town.
Not a good sign for our country, though.
That's our show.
We've got more to get to.
We'll do it tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles show.
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Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Claven.
Host of the Andrew Claven Show.
A top reporter at the New York Times has said the quiet part out loud.
She's proud of inspiring nationwide leftist riots.
The press and their pet Democrats, they are the mob.
We'll talk about it on the Andrew Clayton Show.
