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- [00:01]
Ted Cruz
Communism, student radicals, second wave feminism, wokeness, political correctness, critical race theory, Pete Buttigieg. All of these are interconnected, and all of these are explained in a new book by the co host of this podcast, this is Verdict with Michael Knowles. And so the tables are turned, my friend. You're hawking a book, and actually this book, am I right that this book actually has words?
- [00:42]
Michael Knowles
Senator, this is backwards in so many ways. You opening the show Verdict with Michael Knowles, and craziest of all, a Michael Knowles book that actually has words in it. It is true. I can make that promise right now. And the words are pretty scary. Like on every page, on almost every page. You did write some of the words. I thank you very much for giving me a very kind blurb. I'll give you all your bribe money afterward. Obviously, I owe a lot to all these blurbists here.
- [01:11]
Ted Cruz
I can be bribed in liquor and tobacco.
- [01:14]
Michael Knowles
Very good.
- [01:16]
Ted Cruz
So let's talk about this book. Let's talk. I mean, the topic of this book. Censorship, speech codes, woke culture, political correctness. You start the book by explaining where all this came from, and you trace it to some 1930s Communists. What's up with that?
- [01:38]
Michael Knowles
Well, like all aspects of political correctness, the terms keep changing, so it's a little bit tricky to trace. That's kind of the central feature of PC is they change all the words. And the idea is if you can redefine the words, you. You can redefine reality. So it's difficult to look back. I think a lot of people believe that political correctness began, I don't know, in the 90s or the 80s, the kind of battles on campus. Or maybe some people say it went back a little further to those student radicals in the 60s, the advent of Maoism to the United States. Some people say it goes back to the critical theorists who now are really center stage because of critical race theory, this new academic movement that is really threatening so much at the heart of our country. And some people think it goes back even further. And I think it goes back, as so many evil things do, to a statement from Karl Marx. Karl Marx, in a letter to Arnold Rugge, called for the ruthless criticism of all that exists. No small feat to criticize everything, but it's a fallen world, and so everything's open to criticism. And what the Marxist theorists who came about in the 20s and the 30s realized.
- [02:49]
Ted Cruz
So let me stop you there, Michael. Why would Marx want to criticize all that exists? What is to be served by doing?
- [02:58]
Michael Knowles
Marx wanted a total revolution, a complete reordering of society from the ground up. Actually, Whitaker Chambers, a wonderful writer who wrote the great book Witness, he was an ex communist. He famously said that communism is not the world's newest ideology. It's actually the second oldest ideology in the world. Goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden when the serpent says ye shall be as gods. And that's the aim. This is nothing less than the total upending of the world. But the problem was this. Karl Marx dies a failure. The workers of the world did not unite. The revolution did not materialize. It turned out that those poor oppressed workers actually kind of liked their countries and their traditions and their way of life. They actually liked it more they than the kooky leftist theories.
- [03:47]
Ted Cruz
And so, Michael, I'm gonna stop you periodically as we discuss this, just to ask, well, the kind of questions that you're normally pestering me with, and I'm sort of enjoying asking you, but let's start with communism. All right? That's a big scary word that gets tossed around a lot. But what does communism mean? What is it?
- [04:04]
Michael Knowles
Well, there are these two related terms, socialism and communism. It's a little confusing to figure out what the relationship is. And Paul Kenger, the political scientist, once described it to me. He said, michael, Christians go to heaven and socialists go to communism. So you've got this, this takeover of the means of production by the workers, which really means by the state under socialism. And this is going to lead to a utopia of communism that just always seems a little bit out of reach. You know, looking back now on the communist movement, it's hard to imagine it, but, but at the time, especially at the turn of the 20th century, all the smart people were communists. They really, I mean, this was a major intellectual movement. And when people saw how that turned out under Stalin in particular, a lot of them became disillusioned. And you saw people trying to consign it to the ash heap of history. Now, unfortunately, all these years later, it's coming back. But there's a big distinction. There's a big difference. Marx viewed man as primarily an economic being, right? He viewed all of this class struggle in the history, history of the world as one of economic class. What the later Marxists understood, people like Gramsci, people like the critical theorists Marcuse, the people who we're now all talking about, is that it has much more to do with culture. And if you can get a hold of the common sense, if you can get a hold of the institutions, you will have a much easier time effecting a revolution. Through what Gramsci called a war of position. Take the positions of influence in all of the institutions. And then Hemingway describes going bankrupt as it happens gradually, then suddenly. So it happened gradually from the 20s to say, the 90s or 2000s. Now I think we're in the suddenly phase.
- [05:56]
Ted Cruz
So let me back you up a little bit. The way I think about socialism and communism is that socialism is a means of structuring the economy. So socialism stands in contrast to capitalism. Capitalism is what we have, at least in some form in the United States, where you could own capital, you can start a business, you can own property, you can hire workers, you can build a business and create opportunity and prosperity and jobs. Socialism is an economic system where the government owns the means of production or distribution in an economy. So rather than you starting a business, the government owns the business and it redistributes wealth from those who have it to those who don't. Now, communism is. It is a system of governance, but it is also a way of looking at the world about how that system of governance comes to pass. And socialism is the economic system of communism. So every communist country practices socialism, but communist countries have with them as well dictatorship. And Karl Marx, he built on the works of Hegel and others that posited a dialectic, posited a conflict. And they also were economic determinists. And so they believed that economic forces were at work in the world that couldn't be stopped, that would naturally and inevitably result in the way Marx viewed the world is as a never ending conflict between the owners of capital and those who were working, those who worked for them. And communism was a revolution of the proletariat, a revolution of the working men and women to overthrow the owners of capital and to transition into a socialist economy instead, where the government owns the capital and there are no capitalists anymore, that distinction. You mentioned that there was a time when all the smart people were communists. You know, if you go to our university faculties, that still is the case for an awful lot of them. The problem with communism, one of the many problems, is in practice. So it was theorized that it was dictatorship of the proletariat, that it was the people that were ruling. But in every communist country we've had, there's always been a brutal dictator, a brutal communist government that enforces its power through torture and murder and persecution, because it is the dominance of the state. If the state owns everything, that means the state's in charge of everything. And so we've seen communism doesn't work. But all right, all of that is background to say, well, how is that connected to political correctness and cancel culture and woke corporations and critical race theory? And you mentioned a guy, Gramsci, and you said, all of us are talking about him. And I gotta say, I don't know what circles you're running in. The folks I'm palling about around with, you know, Gramsci doesn't get mentioned more than six, seven times a day at most.
- [08:59]
Michael Knowles
At most.
- [09:00]
Ted Cruz
All right, who was this guy? Why should anyone care who this guy was?
- [09:04]
Michael Knowles
So I think your point is so great, Senator, because, one, you've got this aspect of economic determinism. You've also got historical determinism. That's where you get these phrases like the right side of history, the idea deeply held by the radicals today, just as it was then, that history is going to move in that direction. And so you've got rube, conservative reactionaries like you and me, but we're gonna stand in the way only for some time. Eventually history's gonna go in their direction. You get a guy like Antonio Gramsci, who is this? Founder of the Communist Party of Italy, brilliant Marxist theoretician. He's thrown in jail by Benito Mussolini. Mussolini did many terrible things, not the least of which was throwing a Gramsci in jail. Not because Gramsci didn't deserve it, but because it gave Gramsci an opportunity to write his greatest work. The prison notebooks, they actually said at Gramsci's trial in Italy that they had to stop this mind from working for 20 years. So what did they do? They put him in a cell and gave him a pen and paper. Not a very good way to stop a mind from working. And he understood. And I think when a lot of people hear that this has something to do with Marx, something to do with communism, something to do with Marxists, they're going to say, this sounds like a kooky conspiracy theory. I don't see people marching around with hammers and sickles out there. You're right, because this is much more subtle. Gramsci understood you need to get a hold of the common sense. You need to have what he called cultural hegemony. Right now, the conservatives have the cultural hegemony. It's why we can't get our theories through. But if we begin to dominate the culture, that will help. So you have out of that growth what's called the Frankfurt School, formerly called the Institute for Marxism, which develops in the United States. And it's more of these radical Marxist academics who create something called critical theory. And what is critical theory? There's a lot of jargon. I've got a whole big book here on critical race theory, which is a derivation of it. But at bottom, the theory is simple. The theory is to criticize. And what critical race theory in particular undertakes is nothing less than the total dismantling of the system. There are just a couple quotes in here because I know, just like nobody wants to talk about Gramsci at a dinner party, nobody wants to work their drivel of critical race theory. But just a couple passages to give you a sense of what this thing is. Kimberle Crenshaw is widely credited with popularizing ideas like critical race theory or intersectionality. She writes, the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite, that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences, and ignoring differences within groups contributes to tension among groups. Another problem of identity politics. What she's saying is, the problem with identity politics is it doesn't go far enough. It only talks about, say, black people and women, but it doesn't talk about black women. Talks about black women and lesbians, but not about black lesbians. Talks about this. That goes all the way down to an endless pit of identities that are seen to be posited against one another to divvy up society.
- [12:13]
Ted Cruz
So I gotta say, Michael, it strikes me that you're exceptionally poor at hawking your book because you actually pulled out another book and read from the other book, not your book that's sitting next to you, but some giant red book that you told us is really crappy. And then you said, I want to read you the really crappy book. So let's cut to the hundreds of thousands of people who have downloaded this podcast or listening to it now. Why should they go online right now and buy your book?
- [12:44]
Michael Knowles
Because we have totally failed to stop this scourge. What do you want to call it? We've been talking about neo Marxism, we've been talking about political correctness, we talk about wokeism, we talk about critical race theory. All of these terms we've utterly failed on the right. And it's not like we haven't been talking about political correctness. We've been talking about it till we're blue in the face for 30 years now. And yet it seems that the more we fight, the more ground we lose. Why is that? I think it's because we've misunderstood what political correctness is. I think that we have not taken these writers seriously. Guys like Gramsci, you know, actually just to give You a sense of Gramsci. Do you know that the only guy who has translated Gramsci's works for the American audience is a man named Joseph Buttigieg. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it's because he was the father of presidential candidate and now Transportation Secretary Joseph Pete Buttigieg, rather. So you've got one of the most moderate kind of milquetoast Democrat candidates, has this radical intellectual pedigree, Joseph Buttigieg, president of the Gramsci Society.
- [13:49]
Ted Cruz
Wait, wait, wait. You're saying Mayor Pete, sweet, inoffensive Mayor Pete, pretend to be a centrist Mayor Pete, that his dad was a radical communist academic who translated and edited this Italian communist that no one has ever heard of, but is really dangerous as.
- [14:09]
Michael Knowles
Hell, one of the most radical academics out there. And I pointed out, did he like.
- [14:16]
Ted Cruz
Lead a society or anything on this.
- [14:18]
Michael Knowles
You might call it the International Gramsci Society? Yes, he was one of the co founders. He was a president of that society. It just shows you how far the rot goes that even in the milquetoast mild corners of the liberal establishment, you have this kind of radicalism. And I think the problem here, I think the reason that we have lost is because political correctness or wokeism or whatever you want to call it, it lays a trap for conservatives, sets out with this purely negative purpose, right? They've been saying it from the very beginning, and you totally see this in the 60s. It just wants to tear down society. It just wants to rip it down to the ground. And what it does is it calls two different reactions from conservatives. The one, it's what the squishes do. They just go along with the new standards, right? And obviously that advances the left's purpose because it just gives in to them. But there is a more insidious way, a subtler way that this purpose is advanced. And it's from the more stalwart conservatives who say, look, I'm not going to go along with the left's new standard. I am going to get rid of standards altogether. I'm only going to talk about freedom in the abstract. I'm not going to talk about any practical traditions of freedom. But the irony here, of course, is that either way, you cut it. The traditional standards that political correctness aims at are destroyed. And you know, I know that we like to pride ourselves on the right about understanding free speech and the history of America so much better than the left does. But frankly, these crazy, kooky thinkers that I had to read for everybody so that they didn't have to read it themselves. And then tell the story in here. These guys were pretty sharp, and they've obviously been very politically effective.
- [15:58]
Ted Cruz
So this may be a place where I'm more libertarian than conservative in that I'm something of a free speech radical, and I believe in protecting everybody's right to spew idiocy. And in fact, I think free speech matters, the more idiotic it is, what you're saying. A lot of times you hear politicians today talk about we want to have reasonable speech. You hear college academics talk about we want to get rid of unreasonable speech, we want to get rid of hate speech. But the First Amendment doesn't exist to protect reasonable speech. You don't need it if it's reasonable, if everyone agrees with it. There are no constraints on. Is only when someone thinks the speech is unreasonable that you end up having that speech silenced. And so, you know, I do think there is a real difference between left and right in that the left, they believe in government. They believe in government power, and they believe in government control over you and silencing you if you disagree. From my end, I don't want to silence the people who disagree. I don't want to silence Bernie Sanders or aoc. And to be honest, I'd like people to listen to AOC a lot more. I think she does a great job of convincing them to support the other side. But. But now, that doesn't mean that you're a nihilist. And you say because everyone has a right to speak, every view is equally valid. I also believe in truth. And so does that mean the Nazis have a right to speak? Does that mean the Klan has a right to speak? Absolutely. And the Supreme Court, by the way, in a very famous case, upheld the Nazis right to protest, to march in the streets of Skokie, Illinois. I agree with that decision. That's the right decision. The Supreme Court also, in another case, upheld the right of a hippie to wear a jacket that had on the back f the draft. And it didn't. Just it spelled out all of F the draft, not just the one letter. I do think the ability to speak hateful, objectionable speech is protected in the Constitution, But I also think we have an obligation to explain why it's wrong. And so when the Nazis march, we all have an obligation to explain that the Nazis are evil, bigoted bastards. When the Klan marches, we have an obligation to make that clear. But I'm very much in the camp. John Stuart Mill on Liberty said the best response to bad speech is more speech. And I believe that that's the right way to counter it is to aggressively. I agree with you. The left is trying to tear down our culture, trying to tear down our institutions, trying to tear down marriage, trying to tear down families, trying to tear down fatherhood, trying to tear down motherhood. Or I guess it's not motherhood anymore, it's birthing, birthing, birthing personhood. That's a hard thing to say. Birthing, birthing. That's a very difficult. But all of this is systematically tearing down institutions. And by the way, in communist countries, you see this fully developed, where, you know, one of our first podcasts, we interviewed my aunt, my Theasonia, who talked about life in communist Cuba, and she described how the communist government there tries to tear down your allegiance to your family, to your parents, to your spouse, to your kids, to your church. They push atheism because. And this is right at the heart of communism, if you have no other loyalties, if they can undermine every other loyalty you have, then you're only loyal to the state. And that is a powerful thing. And it goes back to when I asked before, why would Marx want to tear down our institutions? Because they want the state to be the dominant institution. Now, the state is ostensibly operating for the people, but anytime you see a revolutionary say, the people demand this. You know, somehow the jackboot and machine gun are right there, and the people just happen to want that dictator to stay in power and do whatever the hell they want for the rest of their lives.
- [20:15]
Michael Knowles
Right? And on this point, of the institutions, of course, you're right. We love our very broad free speech tradition in America. And where there are standards, and there are always standards, every society is going to have certain taboos. Every society is going to have certain things that you will be ostracized for saying, maybe not by the government, but by society broadly. In the traditional American context, it is institutions that, with the church, the local community that will enforce this. There are some guardrails from the federal government even as well, things like fraud, for instance, or obscenity laws, also more at the local level, but some guardrails there in a lot of the institutions. As you erode that, I think the claim made by the politically correct radicals and by the people who were claiming the mantle of free speech in the 1970s, the radical leftists at Berkeley, they were saying, we need to get rid of all of these restrictions, and then we will have true freedom and you'll be able to say whatever you want. But it was always a trap, it was always a trick, because no sooner had they broken down those standards than they created a whole bunch of new standards in their place. That the way I think of it sometimes is, especially coming from Hollywood, having fleed from Mussolini's failed state, is there was a blacklist in the 1950s. Some cases it was kind of ugly. There was the smith act in the 1950s, where if you were working for the communist party, if you were working for a foreign state, you could be prosecuted. Actually, getting back to whitaker chambers, that's what happened. There actually were communists in the government, guys like alger hiss. In the 1950s, you would be canceled for being a communist. Today you can be canceled for not being a communist. You can get canceled for the opposite reason. It seems that that standard has totally shifted. And so what I would like to do at least, is preserve this wonderful American free speech tradition where you really can speak your mind, where you really can maintain your way of life without handing over to the left the keys to create a radical new dictatorship of speech, which we have now seen, notably through big tech. You know, it might not be through the government, but big tech is now controlling the way that we communicate around our public square.
- [22:28]
Ted Cruz
So explain something for me, which is we were talking about the communists. You talk about the critical thinkers. There's a school of the critical thinkers that went into law schools that were called critical legal theory. And the hotbed of that was my alma mater was Harvard law school. And when I was there, there were a bunch of crits. That's what they were called. One of the more prominent crits drove a green brand new jaguar. It's amazing how communists always seem to have a whole lot of wealth and comfort and life tenure, can't be fired, and thus they have no needs to worry about the means of production in society. But the crits were relatively obscure, and they took the ideas of marxism and they applied it to the legal system. And what they said was the class conflict that Marx posited is at the base of everything in society, that the class conflict is also reflected in our legal system. And the crits attacked that there is anything like fairer, objective law, that it is possible to apply the law, that it is possible to understand the law, that any judge can ever follow the text of the law. Instead, they said, the entire legal system in America exists as a means of perpetuating the class oppression and perpetuating the oppression of the owners of capital over the proletariat. And so it combined the two notions you said before tearing down institutions with the ongoing class conflict. And it mapped that onto the legal System. And I got to say, there are crits now that have proliferated at law schools all over the country. When it was at the law schools, it was. And by the way, they have this weird habit of speaking in like 12 syllable words, writing the most impenetrable prose. I mean, I remember when I was on the law review, we had this one article submitted by this crit academic that was completely unreadable. I mean, it had words. I'm sorry, I think I've got a decent vocabulary. And it was so thick that, that I. And I remember like other kind of lefty law students, like, oh, this is really deep and profound. And I think a law student doesn't want to admit he doesn't understand something. He doesn't want to be seen as dumb. So if it's. If you can't understand it, well, then it must be really deep and profound. I'm like, look, I'm sorry, this is not written in the English language. I have no idea what the hell the guy is saying. And the reason he's using so many big words is because his ideas are stupid. And he figures if he uses big words that everyone will be afraid to call out the emperor for having no clothes.
- [25:10]
Michael Knowles
Right?
- [25:11]
Ted Cruz
But the crits were in law schools, they were relatively benign. And then suddenly critical legal theory took a leap into critical race theory. Now, how did it change? What's the difference between critical theory, critical legal theory, and now the new thing, Critical race theory? What is. You know, we're hearing a lot about that. And I think just today, walking down the halls of a capitol, a reporter walked up to me and said, hey, what is critical race theory? And I think it was supposed to be a gotcha question, like, you know, let's show that people are against critical race theory and they don't know what it is. And I think he was a little startled that I had actually an answer. But let me ask you that. What is critical race theory? For someone listening, you hear this term a lot, but a lot of people aren't sure what it means.
- [25:57]
Michael Knowles
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up because you're going to start hearing a lot of these gotcha questions, maybe from reporters if you're a US Senator, and maybe just from your liberal friend down the street who wants to get you because you don't know what critical theory is. Critical race theory, critical legal theory. This is an analytic lens through which to view society. That's why it's not just one discipline. It has infected virtually all of the disciplines in the university, frankly, including the hard sciences and mathematics in some cases. To your point on property, to your point on this, the legal aspect, there's a very important text in critical race theory called Whiteness as Property. Listen to how radical this is. The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination. Even in the early years of the country, it was not the concept of race alone that operated to oppress, say, blacks and Indians. Rather, it was the interaction between conceptions of race and, and property which played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination. The idea being, you think that, look, slavery, very bad forms of racial discrimination, very bad. Okay, we're gonna fix that problem, then we're fixed. No, they say it's the whole thing. It's capitalism, it's private property, it's everything. You've got to tear this down. So there is simply no end to this. And the fact is, of course, Senator, when you were in law school, this was the vanguard of the craziness of critical theory. Now this has sp into the mainstream. It's at every school. It's in your high school, it's in your middle school. And I think this is what a lot of conservatives are asking right now. Because for years and years we've embraced this language of academic freedom. You know, total free speech in the classroom. Now, we love academic freedom in the sense that we want to be able to pursue our own ideas and think for ourselves. But does academic freedom mean that you have the right as a radical leftist teacher to indoctrinate your students in whatever you want, regardless of what the school board says, regardless of what the parents say, even if it will harm the student's education? Going back to that great conservative, William F. Buckley, Jr. Who kicks off the post war conservative movement with his book God and Man at Yale. The subtitle of that book was the Superstitions of Academic Freedom. In that book he calls academic freedom as we use it, he calls it a hoax. He says it just doesn't really happen that way. That actually you do have a right as a parent, you do have a right as a taxpayer to know what's being taught in your classroom. In your classroom, they're going to teach certain facts. They're going to say two plus two equals four. Well, that's what they used to teach. These days they're going to teach you two plus two equals five. And they're going to teach this sort of radicalism, anti historical, untrue, really bad stuff. And I think it is up to us to summon the courage to say no. You know what? The crits, the critical race theory, the legal theory, the political correctness in all of its forms, we just can't take it. It is so destructive to us. Nobody wants to throw you in prison for saying something, but we're not going to subsidize this in our schools.
- [29:05]
Ted Cruz
Well, and Michael, let me say a couple of things in response to that one. Look, does someone have a right to try to indoctrinate kids or everybody else? Yes, you have a right to try. What you don't have a right to do is stay employed at a college or university that is in the business of educating kids, that you don't have an entitlement to that job. And for any college or university, they're not performing their function if they are allowing their professors to indoctrinate anything. Look, I for several years taught at University of Texas Law School. I'm a conservative. I didn't try to indoctrinate my students to be conservatives. I wanted to be a good teacher. So I tried to present them. I taught a seminar on Supreme Court litigation. And so I would teach them what the views of the different Justices were. I'd teach them what Justice Scalia believed. I'd teach them what Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed. I would, in the course of it, say what I thought. But actually, that very much took a backseat to trying to get them to understand the range of views and come to their own conclusions. And I would have the students argue actual cases that were pending before the Court. So it was a fun class. It was a small class. And the students would argue typically seven cases that were actually being argued before the Supreme Court that term. And every student would brief and argue two cases. And on the remaining cases, they would sit as Justices. And they were actual Justices. So one week you might be Chief Justice Roberts, the next week you might be Scalia, the next week you might be Breyer. And the first hour of the class was the oral argument, where the students would present the argument. The second hour of the class, the justices retired to conference and debated the case and voted. And they had to vote in the shoes of the justice who they were playing, and then they had to write an opinion on it. And it was designed. Some of the best teaching moments were when you had people arguing contrary to their ideological disposition. So I remember there was one very liberal woman who was arguing on behalf of some pro life protesters, and I think that was a valuable teaching moment for her to present those arguments. There was another fellow who was A West Point grad, very conservative student who was arguing on behalf of a Gitmo terrorist. And I think that also was valuable. But let me step back for a second and go back to the question we were talking about a minute ago, which is, what is critical race theory? I'll tell you what I told the reporter as we were walking down the hall of the Capitol. I said, listen, critical race theory traces its origins to Karl Marx and the Marxists. Marx posited that all of society can be explained by a fundamental conflict between the socioeconomic classes, between the owners of capital and the workers. Critical race theory uses that same lens, except instead of socioeconomic status, it uses race. So critical race theory explains everything in America and everything in the world through the lens of racial oppression and through the fundamental lens that all of history, all of America, is explained by racial oppression. Now, what does critical race theory teach? It teaches that all white people, 100% of white people, are racist. If you are white, you are racist. It is inherent in being white.
- [32:19]
Michael Knowles
You can never change it.
- [32:20]
Ted Cruz
It teaches that you can never change it. There's nothing you can do. If you say you want to change it, you're being racist. That it is. It is. Just like the capitalist in Marx's world can never cease to be a capitalist unless he no longer has any capital. So unless you are no longer white, you can never cease to be a racist. It's the same absolute determinism. Critical race theory also teaches that America is inherently racist, that the system is racist. You hear this phrase, systemic racism, and people don't quite know what it means. And if you get someone who says, well, no, I don't believe in systemic racism, people go, well, hold on a second. Are you saying there's no racism in the world? That's crazy. Of course they're bigots. Systemic racism is not saying there's racism in the world. There have always been bigots. There probably always will be bigots. Systemic racist is saying the entire system is inherently racist. The criminal justice system, the legal system, the political system, everything that exists in America is inherently racist. The New York Times embodied this with the 1619 Project, where they tried to rewrite American history to say that America wasn't founded in 1776, it wasn't founded in 1787, it was founded in 1619 when they say the first slaves arrived on the American soil. And they go on to say, the entire history of America is understood as a history of fighting to preserve slavery and to continue white supremacy. Now all of this is complete and utter Garbage. And what's terrifying about Critical Race Theory is it's infiltrating our schools. If you have grade school kids at a lot of schools in America, they're being taught this nonsense. But I think understanding the lies that are at the heart of it. And this is Marxism. This is Marxism combined with intense racial bigotry. If you put Marxism and racial bigotry in a blender, you get Critical Race Theory. And this is what's being taught to our kids. And what I think is helpful about your book is for folks that are trying to understand this, your book does a good job of tracing the history of it and making it so you can understand what really is going on.
- [34:39]
Michael Knowles
Well, this is such a good point that you're making about the classroom, which is if you sometimes to really understand your own views, it helps to make the argument from the other side. And so what I try to do in Speechless is I go all the way back. I don't want any loose ends. I want to make sure I'm really making the right connections here. We got the right intellectual pedigree of what this phenomenon is. And to say, okay, here are the best arguments that these guys are making. Here's the absolute strongest argument. Here's why it's bunk. Here is why it is evil. Here is why it's going to destroy the country if we let it continue to go on even more so than it already has. And I think, frankly, if I had to pitch it to you, Senator, the best thing about this book, Speechless, is you get to learn what these kook, crazy, just terrible, dreary, polysyllabic, awful writers say without having to slog through 10,000 pages of their impenetrable, terrible prose.
- [35:37]
Ted Cruz
And Michael, I do want to clarify one thing. If someone goes on Amazon, say, right now, and orders your book, pre orders your book, because I guess it's coming out the 22nd, they could also bundle it, say, with my book One Vote Away, and they could buy One Vote Away and Speechless. And so they could understand the theoretical origins of censorship and cancel culture, and they could understand the legal protections we have, and you could get them both shipped to you, probably even in the.
- [36:01]
Michael Knowles
Same box, probably in the same day even. Senator, you know, a man filled with brilliant ideas, a man who has excellent taste in books. I have to observe as I read these blurbs here. Well, I'm a capitalist, you're a capitalist, and a man who wrote a great book himself. Yes, I really appreciate it. I tell you, Senator, I can't even. This is so it's so backwards to me to have the book with words and to be interviewed by you that I now I have to take over again. Make sure that when you all go out there, I appreciate you going out and pre ordering Speechless. Make sure to bundle it with one vote away. Senator, I think that's all the time we've got. Next week, things might be back to normal. I'll be writing blank books again. You will be answering all the important questions. There are a lot, a lot of things going on right now, but we'll have to hold it until then. Thank you for reading the book. Thank you to all of you out there. Hopefully you'll read the book as well. I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
- [37:00]
C
This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Package, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations and candidates across the country. In 2022, Jobs, Freedom and Security PAC plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.