← The Michael Knowles Show
The Michael Knowles Show
Ep. 1962 - Jimmy Kimmel's Trump Jokes Prove We Need Right-Wing Cancel Culture
00:47:50
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- [00:01]
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Michael Knowles
Jimmy Kimmel is facing renewed calls for his firing after airing a fake White House Correspondent's Dinner segment joking about the death of President Trump. Is this right wing cancel culture? It absolutely is and I'm here for it. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. You can tell the Dems have learned so much since the most recent leftist shooting trying to kill Republicans. They've learned so much that they've taken to CNN. Like J.B. pritzker, the governor of Illinois, a top Democrat presidential candidate, goes on TV and says yes, I do compare Trump to Hitler. Yes, I've learned nothing. I change nothing about my rhetoric. We'll get to that and how we should respond to that in a second. First though, I wanna tell you about Cardiff. Go to Cardiff co Knowles. Small business is very important. I'm a small business owner myself. I have multiple businesses but you know, one in particular that I love very much. There are more than 36 million small businesses in America. Over 70% of them need more capital just to keep things moving each year. The irony. Business is booming, revenues at record highs and yet the big banks are clamping down harder than ever, dragging their feet with miles of paperwork and a approval processes that take weeks, sometimes months. It's a perfect example of how our financial system talks big game about supporting entrepreneurs, but rarely makes it easy for them to succeed. If you want bank rates without the bank delays, you need to check out Cardiff co Knowles for up to $500,000 in same day funding. Cardiff is the largest privately held small business lender in America, having already funded more than $12 billion since 2004. Their process is fast, simple and respectful of your time. 5 minutes to apply 0hit to your personal credit and approval. That can happen in minutes. Do you need capital today? Cardiff can get it done same day. No wonder they are voted America's favorite small business lender two years running. Banks try to lock out small businesses. Cardiff has the key. Big banks may not want to approve your business loans, but Cardiff does. If you've been in business for at least a year and are pulling in $20,000 a month in revenue, apply now for half a million bucks in same day funding at Cardiff Co Knowles. That is Cardiff Co Knowles Real growth fast funding. Cardiff borrow better. So just before the White House correspondents dinner when a leftist California teacher who donated to Kamala Harris, who's part of all sorts of left wing groups, just before he went with a shotgun into the Washington Hilton, tried to kill the President and as much of the Trump administration, his supporters as he could. Just before that, Jimmy Kimmel aired a fake White House correspondence segment in which he joked about the death of the President.
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Melania Trump
Our first lady Melania is here.
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J.B. Pritzker
Look at melia.
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Melania Trump
So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have aglow like an expectant widow.
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Michael Knowles
Aglow like an expected widow. Ha ha ha. And it's using footage from, I think the State of the Union address. He's trying to piece it together, to pretend as if he were addressing the White House Correspondent's dinner. And in response to this, Melania Trump came out and said, this guy should be fired. So the first lady posts. Kimmel's hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family is not comedy. His words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel should not have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward. Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC's leadership enable Kimmel's atrocious behavior at the expense of our community? So this is cancel culture, right? This is right wing cancel culture. The right spent years inveighing against left wing cancel culture. But now that hypocritical right, they're calling for a cancel culture of their own. Right? Right. You're gonna hear a lot of conservatives twist themselves into pretzels to argue that this is not cancel culture. They'll say, no, this is different because. And they'll name all sorts of extenuating circumstances. But. But let's just be blunt about it. Can we be honest, please? What the first lady is calling for is cancel culture. And that's good. I love it. I'm here for it. You know, I've been one of the few conservatives, maybe the only conservative, but certainly one of the few conservatives who has been calling for precisely this kind of thing, a right wing cancel culture, for years now. And I think some people on the right are getting the message, this is important. Right wing cancel culture is not the same thing as left wing cancel culture. Left wing cancel culture was when you would lose your job, be kicked out of school for saying that a man can't really be a woman. That was left wing cancel culture. In other words, you would be canceled for telling the truth. In this case, the right wing cancel culture says you're not allowed to go out, especially on public airwaves that are regulated by the government for a reason. You're not allowed to go out and encourage political violence, make light of political violence, and specifically the political violence that is occurring right now. That's the right wing cancel culture that you see bubbling up a little bit in the first lady's comment. President Trump followed up. He said much the same thing. And some on the right are backing it. And I think we should back the first lady on this. I think this is exactly right. And what you have to understand in order to defend these calls for Jimmy Kimmel's firing. Jimmy Kimmel should have been fired long ago. He survived his last kerfuffle and kept his show, but he should not keep his show this time. What you need to accept is that not everything can or should be debated. That's the point. A lot of what the right has said for the last 10 years, a lot of friends of mine have said, is that we need to debate everything. And the answer to bad speech is more speech. And that way the true ideas are gonna win out. In the free marketplace of ideas is a liberal premise which always had guardrails on it, by the way, for all of American history. But the left, in the middle of the 20th century took it to an extreme, twisted it. They had the free speech movement at Berkeley and associated groups, and they argued that we just need no guardrails on speech whatsoever. And conservatives got duped and we went along with it. Now, they never really meant it on the left because the minute they got power, they immediately inserted guardrails of their own, which were intended to exclude truth, beauty, goodness, like all the things we want in society, to punish those things and to exalt their own degeneracy. But all societies need guardrails, of course. And what we have to accept is that not everything can or should be debated. A prime example of this occurred during the State of. Sorry. During the correspondence dinner. One of the worst things about what happened at the correspondence dinner, my mind went to it immediately. Even before there were any videos going around, which I'm not going to share because they should not be shared. I thought, oh, no, Erica Kirk is at the Correspondents Dinner. And so what must be going through her mind before there were any pictures of her, before, you know, I'm doing an event that Erica invited me to today with Matt Walsh. It's going to be at Idaho. If you're in the neighborhood, come on out. It's going to be a great TPUSA event. But my mind went to Erica immediately, and I said, this is so awful because she's experienced a major trauma and she has to relive it because there are bullets being fired. And of course, immediately people start attacking her. All these sort of anonymous and some not anonymous people on social media start attacking her again over the White House Correspondents Dinner. And I said, as I've said from the beginning, that's not the sort of thing that can be debated. There's no debate there. No, actually, we shouldn't harass widows. No, actually, don't you see? No, I'm gonna convince you in the free marketplace of ideas, I'm gonna convince you that it's actually not good to harass. There's no to be had there. There's no debate. Another example, we were talking about Hasan Piker yesterday. Hasan Piker calls for the murder of GOP senators. There's no debate to be had there. No, actually, we shouldn't murder senators. No, let me. In the free marketplace of ideas, let me use my facts and logic to convince you that we shouldn't murder our senators or murder the president. There's no debate to be had there. You're not going to win that in the field of debate. And by engaging in debate, you're granting a legitimacy to these sorts of premises that we should torment widows or we should murder senators or we should murder the president. You're granting a legitimacy that is undue. You are elevating people who should not be elevated. You are taking ideas seriously that should not be taken seriously. The way to deal with these sorts of things is precisely what Melania Trump is calling for, what the president has backed up and what we should all back up, which is that the way to respond to people calling for violence, making light of political violence, calling for the death of senators. What have you. The way to respond to that is to fire them. Then when they cross the line into criminal territory, as Hasan Baker has, you need to prosecute them. Then when they cross the line into defamation, you need to sue them. You need to wield the force of the law and the culture, because even beyond the law, you can ostracize people. You can refuse to platform people, you can refuse to elevate these ideas up into fodder for debate. You need to bring the weight of taboo down upon these people to exclude certain ideas from the conversation. This is a point I've made many times over the years. It comes from a line of GK Chesterton, which is that there is a thought that stops thought, and that is the thought that ought to be stopped. It's a line from William F. Buckley, Jr. When he was debating this very issue on Firing Line. He said he was an epistemological optimist in that he thought, we can make exclusions. We don't need to debate Nazis, we don't need to debate Communists. We can just exclude them and ideally prosecute them. That is the idea. That's a deeply conservative idea. It's very offensive to classical liberals, which is kind of funny because classical liberals also want. The actual. Classical liberals actually did want to exclude lots of bad people and bad ideas. But what passes for classical liberalism today, what passes for libertarianism, it doesn't understand that a society needs to just say no sometimes. And so the question is, do we have the guts to do it? Do we have the guts to fire Jimmy Kimmel? That's what this is coming down to. Do we have the guts to say no? We don't actually need to take these ideas seriously. We don't need to elevate the ravings of lunatics, of violent people, of those who would undermine our whole political order? We don't need to take that seriously. We can just fire it, ostracize it, prosecute it, sue it. We can behave, in other words, as if we really do believe things, that we can come to conclusions, and therefore we can make exclusions from our society. The Kimmel issue is. Is a great test of whether or not the American right has the intellectual architecture anymore or the courage to just do that? That's the qu. Do we have the courage to do that? Do we have the courage to have a cancel culture? A culture, in this case, that would cancel legitimately bad things that are beyond the pale, that we don't need to debate, that we don't need to have all sorts of long conversations or podcasts or network television shows about can we just say no? That's a two letter word that is so beautiful on the right. And we've lost it because we've been infected by the spirit of liberalism that has tended toward libertinism. Do we have the ability to do that? Because there's a cancel culture today, even after we got rid of the woke cancel culture, there's a new cancel culture that the left has replaced it with and they're trying to cancel us with bullets. And they're being encouraged in doing so by major media figures on the left, by elected politicians on the left who say that Donald Trump and his supporters pose an existential threat to the country. That was Joe Biden who said that. Who say that we need to push back on Republicans in public. That was Maxine Waters who said that. Who said you can't be civil with Republicans. That was Hillary Clinton who said that. Do we have the courage and the clarity of vision to have a real cancel culture that just says, we're not platforming this stuff, we're not gonna take it seriously, we're gonna exclude it, we're going to repress it, we're going to put it out of mind for the common good? Do we have. No, people are gonna say that's authoritarian and so the problem will fester. Or we can fire Kimmel. We should fire Kimmel. The left is feeling the heat. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat leader in the House, is proving it. First, though, I want to tell you about Kexi. Go to kexi.com, k e k s I.com, mother's Day's coming up, folks, which means it's time to think about what you're actually going to get your mom or your wife. That is not always easy. Too many gifts end up feeling kind of generic and not heartfelt. And that is one reason I really love our sponsor, Kexi, which is a family run bakery. And they've put together a limited edition Mother's Day cookie box that is perfect for the woman in your life. The other night, I'm sitting, I wanna tell tales outta school. I'm sitting. We put the kids in bed and sweet little Elisa comes into the family room and she's holding something a nice, gooey, delicious Kexi German chocolate cookie, which is one of at least my five favorite cookies from Kexi. And I said, girl, you got that cooksie? I said, where's the rest of it? There's no more. Sorry. She just ate it all. Because it's very good. Other than, you know, I'm gonna exclude the cookies that my wife, my family. Other than those, it's the best cookie I've ever had. Their limited edition Mother's Day cookies come already packed in beautiful Mother's Day themed box. You're all good on wrapping. Go to kexi.com, grab your mother's Day box while they are still available. If you want to try anything else from their site, use code knowles for 15% off. Just not on the Mother's Day box. That is Kexi K E K S I@kecksi.com Hakeem Jeffries, furious. Furious in particular at the White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, who read out what the Democrats have said about political violence in such a way as to encourage their exclusion from political society. Hakeem Jeffries, furious at what exactly is that?
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Melania Trump
The so called White House press secretary, who's a disgrace, he's a stone cold liar, had the nerve to stand up there and read talking points being critical of statements all taken out of context that Democrats have made and didn't have a word to say about anything that MAGA extremists have said or done, including providing aid and comfort to violent insurrectionists here at this Capitol on January 6th, who brutally beat police officers.
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Michael Knowles
Wow, man, that is. It shows you how totally bankrupt the Dems are. That's the best and only example the Dems can use to counter their own words. What does he say? I can't believe the White House press secretary came up here. Read talking points. What do you think the press secretary does? Do you think the White House press secretary engages in extemporary oratory?
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Chuck Todd
I don't.
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Michael Knowles
What do you think? Do you think she's giving a cooking class? What are you. She reads talking points. That's her job. And these talking points, she had the audacity to read our words back to us. That seems more than fair. Buddy, she's not even putting words in your mouth. She's reading what you've said many, many times, including recently. Yeah, she. And it's crazy because. You know why? It's crazy because. Drum roll please. Because January 6th, that's the best you got. The best you got is a contrived nonsense from five years ago. A political event at which the only person who was murdered was a Trump supporter murdered by a trigger happy cop. That's the best you got? And then they said for years the right wingers on January 6, which was infiltrated by the FBI, probably we can't prove it yet probably funded by the SPLC January 6, where they told us for years that cops were killed by the right wingers. Didn't happen. None of that was true. Medical examiners contradicted all of that. But even if it were true, which it isn't, that's the best you got is a mob from five years ago in some cases being escorted around the corn hat guy getting private tour of the Capitol. How dare, how dare the press secretary read our words back to us. You can tell the left is feeling the heat here. And the only reason they're feeling the heat, by the way, is because the right is finally speaking in terms of borders and standards and exclusions and consequences. Cuz the right is saying Jimmy Kimmel needs to be fired. Hasan Piker is a toxic personality who needs to be prosecuted and maybe deported back to the backwater that he was raised in saying that the Democrat politicians who have associated with people like Hassan Piker need to be removed from office. That's why he's feeling the heat. He's not feeling the heat because we're just, we're gonna engage in the free marketplace of ideas. The point that I've made for the last eight months, I was making up before that, but you see it, especially in the last eight months since Charlie was assassinated by a leftist, is we tried to have a free marketplace of ideas. No one did that more graciously and more charitably than Charlie and the left shot him for it. So you can't have a free marketplace when the bandits keep shooting up the marketplace. The left is not gonna stop. In case you thought that the left had a sudden change of heart because of all the debates we've had. We've just had so many debates, they've changed their mind. Here is a top presidential candidate for the Democrats, Governor of Illinois J.B. pritzker on CNN asked about his extreme rhetoric against Republicans which justifies the assassination of Republicans. Has he learned anything? Your critics may point to what you said in the State of the State last year. When you compare the Trump administration to the rise of Nazis, what would you say to them?
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J.B. Pritzker
Well, Manu, remember what I was talking about was the fact that a constitutional republic was torn apart in 53 days in Germany in the 1930s and that we need to watch out for that in this country. That is what I was talking about and we've seen it. By the way, that speech was given in February of 25. I think over the last year, much of what I said has been proven to be true, that the Institutions of this democracy are being attacked by the Republicans and by Donald Trump.
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Michael Knowles
Excellent question from Manu here says, hey, you know, you've been calling this guy a Nazi, so that justifies political violence against him. So are you second guessing your rhetoric now? Do you take some responsibility? And Pritzker's response is, nah, he's a Nazi. By the way, if Trump is a Nazi, that means that his supporters are Nazis, which means that political violence against him and his supporters is totally justified. So they're just not gonna stop. The only conclusion that large swaths of the mainstream left drew from the foiled massacre attempt on Saturday night is that they need to try a little harder next time. This guy, the guy, the California school teacher, Kamala Harris, donor who tried to shoot it up, he was just incompetent. They just need to try harder, cuz Trump's still a Nazi. So what are we gonna do about that? Are we just gonna debate more? Are we just gonna try to make them see our point of view? Because, you know, we got the logic on our side. No, I'm all for debate, obviously. I'm all for conversations. I'm a podcast host, for goodness sakes. I'm a professional debater. I do all the. I'm all for it within its proper limits. But certain things are simply beyond the pale. And when you take them seriously as subjects for debate, you grant them a legitimacy that they do not deserve. We should not be debating Hassan, Piker or Governor Pritzker on this point. We should be ostracizing people. We should be firing people. We should have cancel culture, obviously. Listen to Chuck Todd speaking of the mainstream journalists learning nothing. Chuck Todd from NBC explaining. This is from Chris Cillizza on X explaining why he's not gonna show up to events that Trump is at anymore.
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Chuck Todd
I'm not going to anymore events where Trump's at him. I don't feel safe. Wherever Donald Trump, chaos follows him. Chaos follows him. And you are less safe, right? If you decide to go into his orbit, you have become less safe. If you. He's just, he does not care about your safety. He's not gonna protect you if you go into his orbit, because he's always gonna protect himself first. He's more likely to throw you under the bus. He's more likely to have you be the target of Iranian assassins if you're John Bolton or Mike Pompeo. And he's gonna pull any sort of federal support, right? You know, I think about when somebody using Donald Trump's words and actions targeted me and Bunch of other members of the press. You know who I didn't hear from?
- [22:07]
Michael Knowles
Donald Trump.
- [22:08]
Chuck Todd
Right. So the guy doesn't care when people commit violence in his name.
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Michael Knowles
Oh, do they? Do they?
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Chuck Todd
Only cares when the violence is committed against him. And he does not see that he is a contributor to the atmospherics of the world we're living in.
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Michael Knowles
Right, well, that's it. That's it. The three assassination attempts against the president, the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk, the countless violent actions against conservatives in public life, all of which have been encouraged by many elite liberals. It's really all about Chuck Todd. Because some unspecified rhetoric from Donald Trump allegedly inspired some unnamed, unknowable, I think, right wingers to vaguely threaten Chuck Todd at some point that we don't know anything about. That's what it's about. It's all about Chuck Todd. He's the real victim. The liberals are the real victims here. Trump just keeps making them try to kill him and us. It's like, why did you make me do it? Why'd you make. This is what the domestic abuser says to his wife after he smacks her. Why did you make me do that? It's just something about Trump, you know, Chaos follows him. Is that what we're calling it now? That chaos is chaos, the new euphemism for left wing terrorists? It's just chaos keeps following him. Chaos that donates to Democrats, like the Butler assassin. Chaos that donates to Kamala Harris. Like the most recent would be assassin. Chaos just keeps falling. We just gotta stop this chaos. We need chaos, control. But it's not chaos. The problem is not political violence generally, it's left wing violence, as even the Atlantic admits. The problem is not chaos, it's the left wing assassins. And it's not just lone wolf left wing assassins. It's assassins who to this day, to this very minute, are being encouraged by very prominent left wingers who I can name. It's not even just general left wingers. It's JB Pritzker, it's Hasan Piker, it's Hillary Clinton, it's Joe Biden, it's Kamala Harris, who bailed violent rioters out of prison, out of jail during blm. It's Maxine Waters, it's we could be here all day, that's the problem. And Chuck Todd has the temerity to say, you know, I'm not gonna show up anymore. These left wing terrorists, I mean, sorry, this chaos is too much. I'm afraid for my life, you know, until they finally succeed at murdering Trump. I mean, until Trump is out of office, I'm not gonna show up anymore. Yeah. Where's the chaos coming from? Chuck Todd is nervous that he might be caught with a stray bullet when one of his own followers tries to murder the president again. I don't want to wait for that. I don't want to wait for that. And I don't want Chuck Todd to be invited to follow him either. I want these people. You have to be precise about it. You have to be judicious about it. Can't exclude half the country, but you can exclude the people who go beyond the pale. You can. We've done that for most of American history. We can do it. You want to talk about chaos beyond the realm of speech? Let's get to the realm of violence again. There's obviously a nexus between speech and violence, but if you look in New York and a lot of Democrat cities, people are suffering the consequences of the chaos that has been bred by leftists, including this bodega owner who was just killed because of crime. That has been encouraged by the left. The bodega owner was on television a year ago, openly fearful that this sort of thing would happen. We will get to totally expected consequences. First, though, I want to tell you about TooThPillow. Go to ToothPillow.com, use code KNOWLES. We've started calling dysfunction normal, even in our kids. Narrow faces, crooked teeth, receding chins, mouth breathing. The list goes on. No one seems to ask why. Here's the truth. When a child's palate doesn't grow properly, their airway cannot develop as it should. Breathing becomes a struggle. The signs are all around us. Snoring, restless sleep, poor focus, constant congestion, teeth grinding. Does that sound familiar? 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That's what a tragedy is. In this case, though, the victim is not being victimized by his own flaws. He is being victimized by the perfectly observable threat of left wing governance. So here you have a bodega owner worrying Openly almost exactly one year ago, May 2025 on ABC7 in New York about the threat posed by crime in the city.
- [27:33]
Carrington College Announcer
Himself spoke with Eyewitness News a year ago, saying he worried about violence against bodega workers. He'd say seen on social media, people
- [27:40]
Michael Knowles
got shot, killed, sometimes got robbed, and the police never responds quick.
- [27:46]
Carrington College Announcer
Tonight, the organization is wondering if the person who shot Abdul Saleh was someone who shouldn't have been on the street.
- [27:53]
Michael Knowles
It's always the ones you most expect and notice who the victim is. Here you hear Zoran Mamdani, all of these very left wing city politicians, they say, you know, we need to protect the immigrants, we need to protect the working class, the minorities. And well, this guy, this victim checks all of those boxes and he was killed by the other people that Zoran Mamdani says that we need to protect, namely the criminals. Because Zoran Mamdani has called for the abolition of police. He's called for going much lighter on crime. He's called for not cleaning up the streets. And so this brings us back to a concept that again, much like my calls, which I think now are pretty well understood by many people. But getting back to my calls for cancel culture, this is a related term that a lot of right wingers are gonna react against, especially from the libertarian side, but they shouldn't. It's this term, the common good. For much of my life, the common good was understood to be communist gobbledygook, a euphemism for collectivism and socialism and communism. And no doubt it can be used that way by leftists, but it's not a term that was invented by the left and it doesn't properly belong to the left. The common good is something that conservatives for virtually all of history have defended because the common good is actually rather different from what the socialists and the communists mean. When Zoran Mamdani invokes the common good, he's talking about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. When he invokes the common good, he's talking about taking from the disfavored factions, the bourgeois white people, and giving to the supposedly the now favored factions, the immigrants, the leftists. But the common good is different. The common good is that good which is common to all, that is not diminished when one person has it. One person getting a piece of the common good doesn't diminish what another person gets. The common good is that which helps us all. And so one way to advance the common good is to lock up criminals. When criminals are locked up, that's good for the criminal because it might help to rehabilitate him. And it's definitely good for the criminal's victims. It's good for the bodega owner. Getting crime off the street in New York would help everybody. This is something that we've known since Plato's Gorgias great dialogue to read in which Plato points out that it's actually harmful, it's cruel not to punish the criminal. It hurts the criminal because it degrades his soul and it will encourage him to live a bad life. And it certainly is harmful to the victims and it's harmful to society generally because we're scandalized when justice is not enforced. So you need a true common good. That's the only response. The response to socialism and communism cannot be an atomized individualism that is indifferent to value, that is indifferent to virtue. More precisely, that is indifferent to what is good and what is bad. The response constantly that you hear from the more libertarian side when you invoke the common good is, well, who decides? Who decides what's good? And the answer is somebody does. Somebody surely does. But you cannot have a society that is good without recourse to the common good, without recognizing what is good and what is bad. You can't have a self government, certainly that way you can't have any kind of government really. And everyone's gonna suffer, even the groups that you pretend that you're supporting. So how does this apply at the federal level? What do we actually do about it? Well, here's an example. The FCC is set to review the TV rating system for all the weird sex stuff, all the LGBT stuff that the libs are trying to cram down our throats. So Brendan Carr, the head of the fcc, says that he's going to reexamine. You've got a story in Variety here. Trump's FCC wants input on whether transgender and gender non binary TV programming is appropriate for children. The FCC is opening a new front in its anti woke campaign. The agency is seeking feedback about whether the TV industry's voluntary rating system needs to be changed, specifically with regard to how shows with child friendly ratings treat content with transgender and gender non binary themes. So the way this is all framed is that this is authoritarian, it's censorship, it's cancel culture. And there's a slippery slope. And these right wing religious fanatics want to exclude LGBT stuff from tv. Well, I don't know. I guess to some degree maybe that's true. But I guess ask yourself about all the premises here. First of all, there is a rating system, right? And the Variety tries to dismiss this. They say, well, it's a voluntary rating system adopted by the TV industry. Well, that's half the story. Why did the TV industry voluntarily adopt the rating system that says, you know, kids 14 can watch this, kids under 14 can watch this. Why did they voluntarily adopt that? In response to a law passed by Congress in the 90s. So it's voluntary. Ish. But it's not this anarchist utopia where the law is never to be wielded, that's in response to the law because the law is a teacher. And so you gotta ask yourself this basic question. Do you think kids should be seeing weird transgender stuff? Do you think that in your heart of hearts, I don't care how hardcore libertarian you are, if you're a leftist, you think, absolutely, we need to teach, we need transgender content for babies in the womb. But if you're a reasonable person and you say, well, I don't want authoritarianism, I don't want repression, I don't hate cancel culture, I hate censorship. Do you really seriously think that little kids should be exposed to trans stuff or weird gay stuff? Do you really think that? No. They're gonna try to get out of it? They'll say, well, I don't think that kids should be exposed to sex, sexual stuff generally. Okay, well, what do you mean by that? Do you think, for instance, that in a kid's show you can have a mommy and a daddy who are married because that is sexual related content? Right. Do you think that a mommy and a daddy can be married in a kid's show? Okay. Do you think kids shows, according to the warning system, should feature a daddy and a daddy who are supposedly married? Maybe you do, maybe some of you think that's okay. I bet some of you, though, will say, no, I don't think that's appropriate for little kids. I don't think they should have same sex parents in Bluey. I don't want my kids to watch that stuff. Okay, but let's say some of you, you're okay with it. Do you think that there should be a transgender character in kids cartoons? Do you think that's appropriate given the rating system? I think most of you would say, well, that's probably a bridge too far. But no, no, no, they're not doing any sex stuff. It's not like. It's not pornography or anything. It's just gonna be a guy who identifies as a woman, who's wearing a dress, who's called by female pronouns in Bluey. Is that okay? I don't think Bluey's actually doing any of this. I'm just using it as the example. It's the most popular kids TV show. Do you think that would be okay? They should get the totally fine for all kids rating TVY if they. No. Okay, so now you're drawing a substantive distinction. You are saying that it is better for a kid to have a mommy and a daddy than for a kid to have a transgender single parent or to have two daddies or two mommies. Maybe you are making a substantive. You're saying it's better to be straight than gay. You're saying that. And furthermore, you're saying that the government should give preference, should put its finger on the scale, should not be neutral to say, actually we should encourage married mommy and daddy, not lgbt. And this is where a lot of people. There's gonna be a disconnect. This is where there's gonna be a little cognitive dissonance. Cuz a lot of people even on the right here say, well, I don't want the government to have that much power. I don't want the government to do that. I don't wanna make a decision like that. Who am I to judge? So you know what? I don't know. It's fine. Nevermind. That's what a lot of people on the right are gonna say. That's not what Brendan Carr is saying at the fcc. That's not what the Trump administration is saying. That's not what I'm saying. I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to say some things are good and some things are bad and we actually can make decisions about this and conclusions, and we must. And furthermore, the cowardice or the ignorance that leads one to say, I will not make a distinction between mommy and daddy and daddy and daddy and transgender stepdaddy in kids programming. The refusal, the cowardly or ignorant or both refusal to do that in kids programming is a decision itself. Because at the end of the day, the kids programming is going to have the weird LGBT stuff or it's not. And your answer to the question of what, if anything, the government should do how, if at all, the government should pressure industry groups or network television or cable television, that is going to have an effect. Do you have the clarity and the courage to say what kind of society you want to live in? Because if you're tempted, if you are tempted to say, well, that's un American. First of all, give me a break. Every single Founding Father would be rolling into his grave if he thought that it were a serious matter of public debate whether or not we should show lgbt. That term didn't even exist at the time, of course. Whether we should show weird sex stuff to little kids. They would be rolling in their graves at the very thought of that. But if you're tempted to say it's un American for me to impose a vision for the kind of country I want to live in on my fellow citizens, the opposite is true. Our Founding Fathers gave us self government, and they did it within certain confines, constitutional confines, pretty light confines. The rest of it is up to us, not just how we will live at an individual level, but how we will live at a political level. That's the meaning of self government. Self government is not merely self discipline. It's establishing the way that we're all going to live together. There is no better way to pay homage to the Founding Fathers than to come to real conclusions about how we want to live. To exclude really bad stuff, to ostracize bad people, to not take these things seriously as the subjects of endless debates, but to come to conclusions and move on and be a serious, thriving country. Now, speaking of debates and what's on our screens, Russell Brand has gone viral for an interaction over the Bible with Piers Morgan tonight, Matt Walsh and I are joining TPUSA at the University of Idaho for their this Is the Turning Point tour. After what happened Saturday night at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, a question is not exactly subtle. How do we get the left to stop trying to kill us? Is that even possible? Are we all just supposed to keep pretending this is normal while the people who lecture us about threats to democracy keep producing the threats? We will also be taking questions from the audience live. Watch the whole thing 9:30pm eastern on dailywire.com and in the daily wire app Hablas Espanol sp.
- [39:01]
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Michael Knowles
I want to tell you my favorite comment yesterday. Now, I didn't pick this. The producers picked it. We'll see if I agree. This is from Bergman9168 who says, and this is why we need a ballroom. Yeah, we do. We do need the ballroom. This occurred to me as the shooting was taking place. So what's the hotel that they're having the Correspondent's Dinner at? Someone said the Washington Hilton. I said, that rings a bell. Oh, right. The Washington Hilton is the place where President Reagan was almost murdered and then President Trump was almost murdered there too. And I'm sure it's a fine hotel. I don't think I've ever stayed at the Washington Hilton. But you know what? Maybe we need to start looking at the Marriott, okay? When two presidents are almost murdered at a single hotel, maybe I don't wanna weigh in this chain or that chain. Maybe we should stop hosting events at the Washington Hilton. And really, maybe we should start hosting these events, including and especially during our political climate, which is much more violent now. Maybe we should start hosting them at a secure location. Maybe, maybe the White House can have an event space. Maybe that's not so crazy. And if some district judge wants to stop it, I flick my finger under my chin like a good Sicilian, who cares? We should just do it. Yes, that's why we need a ballroom. Among many other reforms that we need after the shooting on Saturday, at least in the top 500. Yes, the white House should have a ballroom and we should ignore the libs who want to stop it now. Now, speaking of what's on our screens, Piers Morgan has gone viral for an interaction with Russell Brand. Russell Brand, the eccentric actor and comedian who used to be very much on the left, now he's kind of on the right. He goes to, he spoke at Turning Point, actually right before I spoke at America Fest. And he's got a new book coming out with Tucker Carlson's publishing company. And so he goes on the Piers Morgan show amid very serious accusations against him. One is that he dated a 16 year old and was rather rough with a 16 year old when he was 30. And a bevy of criminal complaints that he allegedly raped women some years ago. Russell Brand now is promoting this book where he says he's become a Christian. And I think the book is called how to be a Christian in Seven days or something like that. And so Piers Morgan grilled him on his Christianity. You're the very one. Okay, what was your thinking of taking it into court and what you were seeing, looking at some passages, what were the relevant passages for? You? All right. Thank you for asking me. Thank you. I didn't hurt, did I? A little bit. It was. What passage were you looking at? You're right. Beer did say, you know, be chilled. Sometimes I lose the chill, man. So he's just looking for the passage. Here's Morgan sitting still as could be. Is this. They don't like that, do they, in the old gallery. But remember, you just said it's a hired spot. This is from Isaiah. Okay, I'm cutting out part. It's too long to play on the show. Pierre's dead silent, just looks up at the audience. Whatever you think about this interaction, whether you defend Russell Brand here, whether you think Russell Brand is a charlatan, you gotta give it to Piers. He is a generational television talent. He's just a broadcast talent, I should say. Now he's on YouTube. He's just so good at this. He plays it perfectly. As Brand is looking for the Bible verse that he said that he was going through his mind, Piers dead silent, looks mugs for the camera. What's going on here? Some people insist Russell Brand is a complete degenerate and his conversion is totally fake and he's just putting on a show for everybody, trying to dupe everybody. Some people insist that the prosecution is political of Russell Brand and he has had a genuine conversion. And as is often the case, I have the least comfortable position in that. I'm kind of skeptical of the whole thing. Okay. I hope that Russell Brand has converted. I hope that's true. I can pray that that is true. And I'll always err on the side of grace in these matters. I don't know. Yeah, the timing is a little funny that the conversion happened right around the prosecution. Maybe. Look, maybe that is expected too. Likewise with the prosecution. I mentioned earlier some of the charges against him. So one claim is that he dated when he was 30 years old. He dated a 16 year old and he was rather rough with her. I won't go into lurid details. What's strange, though, about that claim is he isn't being prosecuted for that. That apparently wasn't against the law. I guess 16 was the age of consent when he did it. And then the rape charges against Russell Brand. They all stem, by my calculation, from between 17 and 25 years ago. So it does raise this question, why are they coming up now? 17 to 25 years. The most recent ones, I think were 17 years ago, and some of them go back a quarter century. Why are they coming up now? Why wasn't this investigated or prosecuted before? Because before, when this stuff happened, Russell Brand was firmly on the left and he was a Hollywood mainstay. Why are they only coming up now that he seems to have switched sides politically, talks about different issues that, I don't know, the mainstream doesn't like? I'm skeptical of the whole thing. I'd be curious to see where you weigh in on this. But it is okay to be skeptical of all of it. You know, I guess that's my main takeaway from it. I don't really. I am unwilling to say that Russell Brand's conversion is not genuine. I don't want to say it. And I want to err on the side of grace. I don't know, maybe we should talk about it. I'm unwilling to say that, but likewise, you know, I've said this in the. During the. I don't know, every time during the whole MeToo movement, I said I'm a little skeptical of some. Not that a lot of these guys aren't total degenerates, but just why is it coming up now, decades and decades later? The only thing that I am certain of is that that was absolutely masterful TV from Piers Morgan. So much more to get to. Speaking of foreigners, we got a lot coming out of Hungary after the ouster of the most right wing prime minister in all of Europe. Kind of the last remaining really solid right wing prime minister in Europe, he was ousted. We were told that the new guy is even more right wing than Orban. And we're getting a lot of news out of Hungary that maybe that isn't the case. They're about to launch their own LGBT network, like fully. Just a rainbow TV is what it's called. And I do want to get to the war in Iran. We haven't gotten an update on this. We haven't really gotten an update from the government, but we're still kind of in this war. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The double blockade is still on. We don't know how this is going to land. I think it's going to have major political ramifications, economic ramifications, political ramifications. We'll have to get to all of that tomorrow because today is Tee Hee Tuesday. The rest of the show is continuing now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code Noel's Canada Wles at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.