More Prejudice, Less Bigotry

hello everybody my name is Vince a christen and I'm the president of Bruin Republicans it is my pleasure to introduce Michael J Knowles who holds a BA in history from Yale University he is the host of the Michael no show and the number one best-selling author of the thoroughly researched book reasons to vote for Democrats which has been endorsed by President Trump tonight Michael Mills of speech is titled more prejudice less bigotry our goal for tonight is to create an environment where true intellectual diversity can flourish flourish in keeping with this goal we will have a Q&A session after the speech thank you and with that Michael Mills thank you very much thank you so much for coming out thank you to Yap for hosting thank you to UCLA for having me it is such a pleasure to be here do you know what today is today is Ronald Reagan's birthday today is the 108th birthday of Saint Ronald the Blessed Gipper with a wonder for one out for Ronald Reagan this is my first stop on the 2019 speaking tour and so I would like to use this occasion to formally announce that I will be running for the Democrat nomination for president I thank you thank you I think it's pretty it's definitely at least as exciting as Julian Castro running for the nomination figured I'm the only person left in America who isn't running so perhaps I should throw my hat in a lot of Democrats are running for president 2020 and what differentiates these candidates is not their ideas you would think a primary campaign they would have different ideas they would debate them no no no no no they all basically have the same ideas they want to raise taxes soak the rich over regulate the government destroy the greatest health care system in the world destroy patient choice they want to extend abortion rights now past the point of birth what I have been referring to as fourth trimester abortion somewhat radical they want to they just what the same old thing is on and on and on actually there was one Democrat candidate for president who shared different ideas who wanted to debate different things in the primary his name is Howard Schultz and they kicked him out of the party so now he has to run as an independent candidate no disagreement in the primary campaign that's not what it's for primaries were once about vetting ideas now they're not what are they about instead the 2020 race will be all about physical characteristics it will be all about your race and your sex and your sexual activities or whatever you wanted that's all it's going to be about and this brings us to our topic tonight which is the bigotry of the present day left you can consider all of the various campaign rollouts we of course have senator spartacus cory booker than the hen who will never be President Cory Booker announced his campaign with a video that talked about all of the awful racial oppression that he endured as a child never mind that Cory Booker grew up in a very nice area both of his parents were executives at IBM he attended the finest universities on the planet Earth no no that real story would not earn Cory Booker any bonus points with the victimhood crowd he can't admit it he has to pretend that he's been oppressed he has to pretend to be a victim my mother washed more floors for less money than your mother did that's what the campaign is gonna be Kamala Harris launched her campaign not on her impressive career as a prosecutor no no no she launched it on a mood specifically a mood mix she talked about all of her favorite songs she said that she loved the song young gifted and black by Aretha Franklin she talked about how she went to and historically black college talked about that a lot she talked about how she grew up in an Oakland tough and Rumble city of course she didn't actually grow up in Oakland she grew up in Canada until she went to college but never mind all that she launched her campaign in Oakland she did it on Martin Luther King Day she also talked she talks about the rough-and-tumble upbringing her mother was a cancer researcher her father was a Stanford economics professor never let those facts get in the way though she is oppressed D'Arnot she needs the mood of oppression her mother washed more floors for less money than your mother did and then of course my favorite Elizabeth Warren Oh senator Lyle witha got into a little bit of trouble yesterday didn't she her campaign is so singularly focused on race that she launched her campaign by providing a pedigree she launched her campaign with genetic test results she this what she found out she proved it was sort of proved she sort of proved that she is possibly 1/1000 24th Native American and this this alone qualifies her to become President of the United States she thought that was going to work and of course we find out yesterday she's been saying this on the Texas State Bar's she's American Indian now she's going to apologize to all of the Cherokees that's too bad her campaign is so obsessed with it she didn't talk about her career in academia her career at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau no no no the fact that she might have had one bear little drop of Indian blood the one-drop rule a bigoted rule from the 20th century she's resurrected that that is how the present-day left is obsessed with racial identity the bigotry of the present day left is breathtaking just this week of course wheat this week is the key week for this when you look down at Virginia all you can possibly see as a bigotry you have in case you've been out of Twitter for the last 72 hours or something the governor of Virginia governor Northam he apparently wore blackface in the 80s he either according to a yearbook photo of him he either wore black face in the 80s or a KKK uniform which if it is the latter he would certainly not be the first Democrat governor to wear a uniform but it appears that he's the one wearing blackface so governor north and wears black face and they okay they say he's going to get out of office now because he's unfit to lead turns out the lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax has now been accused of raping a girl credibly actually really fair credibly accused I know that word has been abused in the last six months but a credible allegations maybe he's out then you get down to the third guy who could possibly be the governor the Attorney General guess what happened he also wore black face in the 1980s every single Democrat politician wore black face in the 1980s a party of rapists or racists in Virginia very very sad the entire line of succession but I'm actually not talking about that kind of bigotry I'm talking about Governor North rooms other bigotry which is that he called for the killing of babies after they've been born it's amazing blackface a picture from the 80s all of a sudden calls for him to resign not two days earlier he suggested it was not fine just simply to kill a baby as it's being born but the baby is born it's lying there on the table and at that point the mother and father should talk to the doctors and decide if they want to kill it that post birth abortion now that isn't even the worst part of it it gets worse because North and one on he said listen the baby maybe it's born with some deformities you know maybe it's born with some disabilities and so obviously you should be able to kill it this is the definition the leftists have a term for this which is called ableism this is the definition of ableism you say because a baby has a deformity we're going to kill it that's perfectly fine and this has happened for the left all across the world right now the left in Iceland brags they say that they have eradicated Down syndrome in Iceland they haven't eradicated Down syndrome in Iceland they have eradicated people with Down syndrome in Iceland in Denmark the number goes down just a little bit to 98% of people with Down syndrome are killed through abortion the United Kingdom 90% France 77 even in the United States 67% of people with Down syndrome are killed through abortion this is bigotry the left's vig 'try takes subtler forms do you remember the Covington Catholic High School kids maybe you don't because of the minute that the media got caught lying and that they just shut it out there just total blackout no apologies no those kids were there is a group of Catholic kids they were standing waiting for their bus and there was a short little video that went out and instantly the mainstream media Democrat politicians Democrat presidential candidates senator lieth herself tried to paint these kids as bigots as racists as harassing this man they're terrible is awful they're and you know why they because he was smirking the kid one of the kids as some maniac was banging a drum in his face one of the kids sort of smiled he's smart was a hate smirk it was an assault smirk we need to ban all of the smirking then hours of additional footage came out and what did it show it show that the kids had done absolutely nothing wrong actually what had happened was the kids were waiting they're a group of black supremacist started screaming slurs at them calling them gay slurs incest kids crackers and then some maniac Native American who lies about his military service runs up to one of the kids starts banging a drum in the kids face the kid is actually pretty restrained hear someone bangs a drum in my face I'm probably going to do more than smirk at that person right in his face and though the Native American man's friend yells go back to Europe and the kids just stood there and took it a lot of restraint so what happened when the mainstream media got it wrong did they apologize no they no good guess they did not apologize actually they doubled down the senior culture writer at BuzzFeed she wrote quote I have watched all of the videos and you can understand that the situation was more complex than the first video and still recognized why the sight of that face caused such a visceral reaction and so many the site of the Hat face was a little like nice kids smirking half smirking that fail what could that refer to that can only refer to physical characteristic she's talking about his face she's saying that because he's white and a male he is deserving of condemnation that is pure bigotry and you hear this specific example of bigotry all the time you hear it in the everyday language of the left you hear it in empty phrases such as white privilege or male privilege or check your privilege all of the privileges and what do they all amount to the amount of two words shut up and they specifically mean shut up cause of the way that you look they imply that only people who look a certain way people who possess certain genitals or certain gender identities have the right to speak they imply that the validity of one's opinion is sexually and racially determined rather than determined by the truth value of the opinion itself this is the leftist ideology of intersectionality and intersectionality relies on this bigotry according to intersectionality there are systems of oppression there are various categories of oppression racial gender sexual whatever they all sort of feed up in a pyramid some are more oppressed than others then when you get to the top when you get to the very tippy top you find the most nefarious villainous monstrous demon in the history of the world the straight white male oh the horror specifically in particular the straight white male who thinks that he is a male oh if he thinks that he's a woman goes a little bit lower down on the hierarchy this is the ideology that led this BuzzFeed writer to excuse the condemnation of innocent teenage boys based on race and sex surely you can understand why the sight of that face caused a visceral reaction in so many and bigotry does not simply degrade the target of the bigotry it degrades the bigot himself it degrades everybody you know my friend Andrew Clavin likes to point out that bigots are not necessarily wrong about the other guy the trouble is they're just wrong about themselves so maybe the other guy is terrible but we're all broken people we're all imperfect we all have foibles and nowhere is this I think the biggest issue is that you see this on as abortion have you ever seen this you talk about the issue of abortion and especially when men do it they say I have this I think it's bad to kill babies after they've been born they say shut up how did how dare you a man only women should be able to talk about abortion they said well I governor black faces in a woman and Governor Cuomo is not a woman and I know a lot of no well that there are they're they're different they're okay because they support abortion well what ok if it's only women how about the 44 percent of women who are pro-life now well no they don't they don't count either you got the system of oppression and the pyramid and no no say ok but even let's take them at their word let's say all women supported abortion all men opposed abortion which certainly is not the case but let's say that that were true how degrading is it to the woman to say that men have to shut up on that question what does that mean is it because the woman can't possibly hold her own in a debate with a man she couldn't a woman who couldn't possibly defend her own opinion no no we need Big Daddy leftism to come in and silence our opponents because we're incapable of making our own arguments how offensive to women how I felt why else would they be so afraid of letting men talk bigotry cuts both ways it degrades the bigot and it degrades the victim English ought to be the official language of the United States people who you they guess you know I'm sure people who come to this country should learn English and and yet we all agree with that the left would say that those opinions are bigoted how are they bigoted you've heard it before this have dare you say that how dare you complain about people who don't speak the language of this country coming to this country that took all that statement bigoted is itself bigoted because what does the implicate the implication of this is that someone who comes to this country couldn't possibly learn English oh how could they those people they're so unintelligent they're so lazy how could we ever expect them to be as advanced as we are we we people who speak English when it gets to the question of illegal aliens we're talking about people who have come to this country traveling sometimes on foot sometimes hundreds if not thousands of miles and then the left tells us well those people could never be expected to learn English them what have they ever done what are they capable of doing what could be more bigoted than the leftist suggestion that those people are simply inferior it is what Michael Gerson once called the soft bigotry of low expectations people by the way I should stop here for a second people are very confused about what bigotry means the end it's because the left is so abused language that now everything is considered bigoted you probably have you I was reading house googling this you know before the talk apparently the okay sign you know this this is bigoted now did you know that the okay sign the okay sign which has been around since the fifth century BC it's been around longer than white people I depend the okay sign statues in Thailand of Buddha but doing this sign apparently Buddha was a white supremacist there in Naples in Greece and the Mediterranean region this this is a sign of natural monie justice love and apparently white supremacy and I don't know I'm from a southern Italian family very debatable as to whether those guys are white I don't I don't know if they would agree and then of course the one that shocked me the most is Stephen Curry Stephen Curry six-time NBA all-star three-time NBA champion not like the whitest guy in the world he goes and sinks a three-pointer the biggest white supremacist of them all more so than Buddha outrageous not just the okay sign though turns that milk also very very bigoted no kids uh-huh oh yeah 1% 2% heavy cream all of it very bigoted The Huffington Post published an article quote the troubling link between milk and racism PETA PETA the people for eating tasty animals or riddance oh no I don't know the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals they sent out a press release they said yes yes that's right milk is racist stop drinking milk this I can't believe that I can't quite get behind that bigotry what bigotry really is is an extreme and obstinate narrow mindedness in the older sense of the word that it also connotes a certain religious hypocrisy and superstition and if the milk in the okay sign or any indication it still has a lot of superstition with it but bigotry is not just limited to physical traits it's also includes ideological questions now this is not to say that if you think one religion is correct and another is wrong that makes you a bigot or if you think one political system is better than another that that's bigotry or that one economic system is better than another no but two dismiss an idea out of hand - angrily not even consider entertaining the thought that is what bigotry is you see an example of this at Grand Canyon University this just it turns out Grand Canyon University just invited my pal Bench disinvited rather my pal Ben Shapiro from speaking and I'm very offended by this because they allowed me to speak on campus which means to them I am apparently more acceptable to the left and Ben Shapiro I wrote a blank book called reasons to vote for Democrats a comprehensive guide they will allow me to speak there but not bill what do I have to do to get disinvited from a campus they said of their decision quote our decision to cancel Shapiro speaking engagement is not a reflection of his ideologies link or the values he represents but rather a desire to focus our opportunities a focus on opportunities that bring people together so so the university is going to bring people together by banning them from campus they're going to unite America by silencing the half of America and it's not just colleges this is happening at high schools as well there's a national news story right now about a teacher in New York teacher is the lone open conservative at his high school he showed a documentary from Fox News produced by Fox News that was his big sin about due process on college campuses as part of a bigger lesson the superintendent of that school is now trying to have him fired a 30-year teacher the first time he ever even sort of tipped his hand about his politics how do I know this because that man was my teacher coincidentally I was in that class and that superintendent by the way his name's Christopher mano when he was at a different School in New Jersey in 2009 he encouraged elementary school students to sing ODEs to Barack Obama that was okay singing Owens to Morocco it's just good education but showing a documentary about due process that's politics you got to get that out of the classroom that is pure bigotry and the effect of that bigotry is hollowing out our educational system and it's imbuing that bigotry in a whole new generation bigotry crops up everywhere crops up on the left it crops up on the right it's in the center it's all over the place why because human beings are imperfect the imagination of man's heart is evil from the beginning it's going to happen everywhere sure I agree however today the vast majority of bigotry racial sexual ideological occurs on the left what are we to do about this they offer us some platitudes they say well you know man acceptance you know I mean tolerance you know multiculturalism what do those platitudes do for us they do nothing but double down on the problem they substitute other ideologies for this current one what are we to do they say multiculturalism well how do we treat someone who suggests cultural assimilation you'd have to throw them out we'd be right back to where we begin the only way to combat bigotry is prejudice this is another word that people don't understand because it's been totally abused in the English language people think that bigotry and Prejudice are the same thing they're not bigotry is an extreme narrow mindedness prejudice is prejudgment it's entertaining a preconceived opinion it's treating the wisdom of the ages and past generations with some reverence it's saying that perhaps we can't reinvent the wheel every single day probably we wouldn't want to if we could do that because maybe our forefathers weren't complete and total idiots maybe we're not the smartest thing that ever walked the face of the earth prejudice is the admission that our narrow reason perhaps cannot comprehend the immense complexity of our human nature and our experience of the world you can't boil everything down into a little manifesto into a little book into a five-point plan prejudice is understanding that there is a weight of the tradition that perhaps it would help us to tap into John Stuart Mill the philosopher explain this difference I'll put in my own terms but it's his idea that the leftist considers a received opinion a prejudice and he says is it true but the conservative considers a received opinion a prejudice the tradition and he asks what does it mean what does it mean maybe there's some wisdom here the night Chesterton put this in another way he talked about the fence he has this image of the fence you call some law or some institution picture it as a fence in the middle of the road we don't know how he got there we don't know who put it up we don't know when it went up the leftist reformer walks up to that fence and he says well I don't see the purpose of this fence so we're gonna rip it down now the conservative reformer the wise reformer walks up and he says no no no if you can't tell me the purpose of this fence if you can't tell me why this fence is here go away think about why the fence is here when you've figured out why the fence is here come back and perhaps then you will be allowed to tear it down but of course if that fence is along our southern border with Mexico and it's big and it's beautiful there's no way we're ever gonna let them tear it down I this is where the metaphor breaks down studies show that the right understands the left far better than the left understands the right this has been shown out in a lot of social science and this is one of the reasons why other surveys show that the left is far more likely to unfriend conservatives on social media and I guess in the real media then conservatives are to unfriend the left the reason is bigotry the reason is actually born of the defining problem of our age which is deconstruction and what a silly term by the way the word means destruction but the left they make it really nice and pretty that's as though you could destroy something and be building it up deconstruction we you know this on college campuses we deconstruct academic disciplines we deconstruct literature we debunk history we dismiss religion we deconstruct sex we now deconstruct sex so much that we pretend that men and women aren't different that they don't exist in reality we all know that men and women are very different but we pretend because we've deconstructed our whole civilization we're leveling our whole civilization all that we know is that the present is better than the past all that we know is that if something is happening now it's better than something that happened a long time ago this is the Creed of progressivism this is the creed that tells us that we are marching on the path to progress we know what's right never look in the rearview mirror there is nothing there to be gained we are marching toward utopia and yet looking around can we say that things have really improved our universities are falling apart our religious institutions are emptying nobody has any trust in government we're now legalizing the killing of babies after birth is that progress some things have improved obviously the most obvious example is the treatment of black Americans in the country black Americans were once enslaved and excluded now they have legal equality this appears to be an improvement however was this improvement arrived at by tearing down our prejudices or rather was this arrived at by fulfilling our tradition our prejudices you'll remember that all the abolition movements were Christian they were actually drawing on the most profound root of our tradition and when we have tried to destroy the tradition we once we use the tradition to get rid of the aberration of exclusion and slavery and then when we try to tear down the tradition when we for instance passed radical social policies designed to materially help racial minorities what happened Daniel Patrick Moynihan Bill Clinton admitted we ended up hurting the very people that we intended to help not a very good idea Edmund Burke put it very well the Godfather the big mack daddy of the conservative movement he wrote quote instead of casting away all of our old prejudices we cherish them to a very considerable degree and to take more shame to ourselves we cherish them because they are prejudices and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed the more we cherish them we are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason because we suspect that this stock in each man is small and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages reverence for the wisdom of Ages tradition prejudice this requires humility so not looking great around the world right now unfortunately for us the present-day left has not an ounce of humility they have actually managed to embrace pride as their highest virtue I don't know how they talked themselves into that pride is the queen of all sins and now they hold parades to pride fat pride skinny pride gay pride lady pride not white pride definitely not white pride black pride all sorts of prides the queen of all sins as the highest virtue if the left had any modicum of a capacity for self-reflection they would realize you know this is maybe a bad look maybe we should try a little humility but they can't they can't do it they can't look they are so certain that everything that came to you up for them was wrong and rotten and stupid they are so convinced of their own brilliance they have on such blinders that they can't reflect on their perverse ideology and so for the left the left today mistakes exclusion for tolerance censorship for diversity and bigotry for progress thank you very much I think we're going to open it up for questions hi everyone we will now go into a Q&A section please line up behind the pink line Maddie will help you when it is your turn step up to the pink X keep your questions short and in question format I will hold the microphone for you and yeah we can get it started there's a rule by the way at the Daily wire which I very much disagree with which is that if you disagree with me you cut to the front of the line I hate this rule I think this creates terrible incentives it incentivizes people to disagree with me but that's the rule anyway so if you do feel free to jump up high a bit of a disagreement um I don't know if you know Stephen Bunnell but he talks a lot about how college campuses have always been like there's always been crazy leftists and maybe now social sciences have infiltrated HR or bad Gender Studies ideas are on the internet for young children but who's to say that this won't always be around and it's not necessarily new so like is this really that bad of a problem you're right your premise that the universities have always been a little kooky is true also this is that bad of a problem and the reason for it is the breakdown of even the idea of the University of Pope Benedict in his Regensburg lecture talked about the idea of the University John Henry Newman wrote a book called the idea of the university but the very essence of the university is breaking down the idea that you have people from all of these different fields all of these different disciplines real academic disciplines not just ideological activists departments coming together and working together in a search for truth that is a wonderful thing and there gonna be a lot of crooks and weirdos there but fine by me it's been true since the Middle Ages the trouble today is the tyranny of relativism the trouble today is that you have people at institutions that ostensibly are seeking the truth who won't even admit that the truth exists in the first place you have particularly with the ideology of interest if a basic relativism a basic denial of the truth accept the reality of oppression which is why all of these various disparate groups that would seem to disagree with one another all can band together to go get get Big Daddy oppressor big patriarch this is a subjectivism that will hollow out and destroy the university this has begun you know in this iteration of it about 50 years ago now you have what Roger Kimble calls tenured radicals the inmates running the asylum and it's hard to see how the liberal education as we once knew it could possibly survive today and my dear alma mater of Yale you can graduate with a degree in English and honors without reading Shakespeare or Chaucer that is a profound failure of the university and from what I can tell it's only getting worse and worse much faster so you talk a lot about I guess how it's always been wonky but things are worse now than they've been um weird where do you see this paradigm shift to where it is today looking into the future or how we got where we are how we got where we are well the way we got where we are is what I just said which is the radical subjectivism I suppose what you I just spoke to these guys who did the grievance studies hoax they submitted nonsense papers to academic journals and they all were peer-reviewed and accepted into them crazy things about you know lesbian dog parks and rewriting mind Kampf and a really wacky stuff to show the failure of the university and those guys say it's this is a symptom of post-modernism which is to say it's a denial of the truth now looking down the pike what does that mean I think I'm neither an optimist or a pessimist optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin one is foolishly and eternally happy the other is foolishly and eternally upset I have hope I have real hope in a certainty that things will get much much worse before they get better but I have a real hope because the truth will reassert itself reality this is why when Russell Kirk wrote the conservative mind one of the early books of the modern conservative movement it was initially called the conservative route the idea that conservatism was done these ideas were dead and he changed it he took a little more hope because reality reasserts itself and frankly it's reasserting itself right now the fact that these speaking tours exist the fact that student groups bring in outside speakers the fact that there were on new media cracking through the ridiculous untrue dishonest mainstream news media the fact that those exist is a real sign of hope and it's a sign that reality is breaking through um so you mentioned like all the kinds of bigotries that we see from the left i think that one that you didn't mention that I feel like has become more pronounced especially maybe in the last year especially in the last month is the way they've tried to make the words rich and billionaire into insults and like some kind of like negative quality do you find that this bigotry might catch on and big replace bigotry against white people as the primary bigotry on the left and also do you find it to be more dangerous than their other forms of bigotry I don't think it's an either/or situation you know I think the left is perfectly happy to turn their eye on any group unfairly by definition very wealthy people are a small minority I mean this was the line of the Occupy Wall Street is we the 99% need to go get the 1% well I bet it'd be even easier to get them if you defined it down to that point five percent or the point one percent soak the rich is an easy idea and this is why our founders and framers were so fearful of too much democracy because the people one day will realize they can vote themselves some more money and then they can take the property of somebody else but I find on the Left today it is a jumbled up mess of emotion emotivism would be what it's called horace walpole the english writer said that life is a comedy to the man who thinks and a tragedy to the man who feels this is why the left is so upset these days they hate everybody the billionaire the billionaires and the millionaires and you know straight guys and whatever they're really angry and upset about all of that but I think the rest of us find a little comedy in it and it will only be the case that they can break out of that when they first as I mentioned toward the end when they first get a little bit of humility you know fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall there is no way to argue them out of these bigotries whether it's against billionaires or white guys or straight guys or whatever there's no way to argue them out of it unless they first are in a position to speak to reason to have some humility so have a little on wonder at the world to have a little reduction in their pride we're not going to see that yet and I don't see them getting any less prideful so if you have any ideas on how to humble the Left let me know in the meantime we'll just have to humiliate them okay hi I'm very curious because you know I keep hearing Ben say this over and over and I tried googling in I can't find out why why does he call you X purple like all the time in horrible and to know where that started I'm pretty I'm pretty sure he's saying excellent Michael I'm pretty sure I don't know I have listened to the show and I'm pretty I hear the excellent Michael Noel's my good buddy whom I love I don't maybe you know I do I'm now vaguely remembering something Ben has written like a dozen books or something like that all of them with words in them why I couldn't possibly tell you and so then I if this the thing between us it's a thing between best-selling authors he and I you know I I came out with my book I sold more copies of my book than all of his book together so I don't know and and you know the other the other thing is the during the 2016 election he said I bet you that Trump won't win and I said well it's not looking great right now you know will you give me odds so he said sure I'll give you four to one odds so now I'll take those odds and now I have a beautiful framed cheque from one ben shapiro sitting in my sty mobil deposited it i took the money but then i framed the cheque so i don't know why he would ever call me execrable I can't imagine very very good question I'm gonna continue to think it's excellent [Applause] so I just wanted to come up because I'm someone who has conservative values but it's not necessarily a religious person and I just had a slight disagreement because you did bring up the lack of people in religious institutions I don't know if you were implying is that as a problem or something I am but I wanted to bring this up because you mentioned bigotry and religious bigotry is actually something that does come up and so as someone who thinks that you are not a moral if you are real if you are not religious you know anybody's a moral right and so I just think coming in an opposition and thinking that someone who is not religious doesn't have morals is already putting you at a place where you're not going to be able to compromise and so I'm wondering how you would respond to that well you're arguing with a position that I don't hold I don't think that people who are not religious are a moral or immoral or anything like that I myself was an atheist for 10 years would have aged 13 to 23 and let's say you know gets a little blurry around the edges but I was an atheist for a very long time I think it is perfectly possible to be a conservative atheist you won't make a lot of sense but but I don't think really there are a whole lot of atheists anyway I think naturally we are always thinking about the transcendent and the divine and one of the reasons that atheism has taken hold is because we have a really squishy wishy little feelings based culture and so we were taught to think of God as a big teddy bear in the sky but he's not a big teddy bear in the sky we obviously find religion and God through our reason God gave us reason for a purpose and we find it through find him through revelation this of course requires humility and it is certainly the case when you just look at the effect on society participation in religious institutions it will make you live longer it will make you happier it will make you more content with life it will make you feel greater purpose you're free to do whatever you want to do but those are all wonderful things and you can't fake it you also can't fake it I'm Christian I've come back to the faith not because I really want to feel comforted though that's a nice plus but because I followed the truth as far as I could and it took me right there time and time again from a hundred different roads CS Lewis had a line on this he said if you look for truth you might find comfort in the end but if you look for comfort you'll find neither truth nor comfort only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin and in the end despair the decline of religiosity in our culture has a lot of negative effects the personal effects obviously which we've touched on also on society because either you will order yourself either you will discipline yourself or discipline will be imposed on you by the government or by some other institution and I've never seen a society that has lost its religiosity that has over time been able to maintain a coherent morality a coherent social structure and not to say that individuals can't but then the question of course is why be moral if there is no lawgiver why be moral if the morality isn't etched in the nature of reality if it isn't a metaphysical truth and if it's a metaphysical truth then who wrote that truth who is the arbiter of that truth who is that truth and I think those are just a few of the roads that maybe could lead you lead you back to the good place very good question oh hi Michael I've studied a critical theory and some of the philosophers from the Frankfurt Frankfurt School I'm sorry yeah not me then Mac as I wanted to learn from them but just cuz I just wanted a like track like the origins of these crazy lefty ideologies and so what I got from them is that they're trying to create this like tension or dislike conflict to pin different groups against each other and so I like you mentioned earlier the the chief offender is the the straight white male who thinks that he's he's a guy and so what would what is like their end goal so I've often a read articles by lefty publications about them celebrating that uh why people have like lower fertility fertility rates and how they can't wait until a white people become a minority in this country so even if that happens and why people become a tiny minority in this country what would be their end goal with that either way wouldn't that just kind of repeat the cycle over in Oregon because some other group was just and they're becoming the majority and also why do they have a special hatred for white people because they could make the argument of whoa hey they've oppressed people and and whatnot but like Japan oppressed a bunch of countries in Asia and yet they don't complain about they oppressed our country briefly in the 1940s complain about Japan being like 98% ethnically Japanese and stuff so well what's their end goal it's all an attack on the tradition that's what it's all about I mean there are obviously we've had a whole talk tonight about the bigots predominantly on the left and there is a enough bigotry to go around what it all boils down to though is an attack on the tradition they hate the tradition and so when you think of the Western tradition you might have a white guy a straight white guy who thinks it he's a guy pop into your mind now I don't know Saint Agustin wasn't like the whitest guy in the world but they kind of forget that because they have a generally poultry understanding of history and our civic institutions that's not an insult this is borne out by many surveys so they use the the white guy's a metonym for the tradition that they're attacking but that's what it is they hate their tradition because they hate themselves there was a deep self-loathing I hate to delve into psychobabble but you asked so I'll answer there is a deep self-loathing in I guess in the case of racial politics it comes in the form of white guilt or an ordered in gender politics it's the male guilt you know the the male feminists the creepiest breed that has ever walked the face of the earth he for she or whatever those guys do I don't know it's a it's a self-loathing and I think it is tied down ultimately to religious questions it's been said by many political thinkers all political problems are theological problems and so st. Andrew Breitbart the patron saint of Hollywood conservatives he said politics is downstream of culture culture of course is downstream of religion it's related to the cult what we worship if you hate yourself that will expand outward you will hate your institutions of government you will hate your culture and you will hate God and you have a really aggressive sort of atheism and religious and on affiliation not from the lovely lady who just asked a question but from a lot of other people in this culture and ultimately that's what it comes down to and this makes perfect sense as it's borne out of pride the queen of all sins you see this happen throughout all of history and so would this just end up being like a repeating cycle it's just like a deconstruction of like cultures just like non-stop or I've heard some conspiracies about how that's their way of creating a vacuum to expand the powers of the government friends to say hey look there's all of these inequalities so we need big government to straighten out these or sort out all of these inequalities certainly it is the case that the atomization of society into the hyper individualism that people have promoted in the culture is a way to grow the government hyper individualism is the distract to collectivism there with Barack Obama's campaign in 2012 issued this ridiculous sort of scheme they talked about the life of Julia Julia was their typical American they showed from cradle to grave how Barack Obama's government would help her and the most terrifying thing about it is the only meaningful relationship that Julia had in her whole life was with the government a hyper individualism that led to a collectivism that is certainly I mean we're seeing that happen already I don't think that's a conspiracy theory the quote you're asking me to predict the future what happens after we've deconstructed everything I hope that we stop ourselves before we deconstruct everything I hope that we stop ourselves before we've ripped our civilization down into even more ruins that we presently have and that we can rebuild from there but at a certain point you can't tear down anymore and I think you're already seeing a little pushback to that and ultimately the best hope I can give you is that reality will reassert itself hi do you live near the Los Angeles area yeah I've been around here for a little bit from New York originally but now I live here so I know Ben Shapiro lives in LA too and Dennis Prager lives in California and I'm here too so do you think are you asking me on a date what's going on so with the online like how YouTube is like so conservative and how we're managing to push a lot of conservative ideals out do you think there's any possibility maybe not next election or in a decade that California may start to turn light blue or purple or may even like you know maybe go back to and Ronald Reagan was there will you bring up a great point California was a Republican state not too long ago now I think part of the reason that so many conservatives in the media or in the culture or even in political activism I think part of the reason they live out here is because they're so surrounded on all sides by the left it really fires you up it really makes you wake up ready to work every day I think the best hope that we have is that right now because the Democrats have so destroyed the state of California they've made it so utterly unlivable for people who owned businesses who want to control you know like any aspect of their own lives all of the lefty Californians are now fleeing to Texas where things are a lot better so basically what we need to do here's my plan we empty out all of California you can go to Texas it's a nice big place is a little dusty buts fine then we take all the good conservative Texans bring them over to California we can all hang in the Pacific Palisades or something and then we're all set [Applause] hello I really enjoy your show and I just want to say thank you so much for coming thank you so much so I know you talked a lot about been payin peanuts so I was wondering if you would if you would be in favor of a living wage specifically if it meant that Ben would finally have to pay you a proper salary thank you that is such a great question Ben if you're watching no I have to say I'll both defend my own economic views and talk myself out of a living wage the reason is I have very very expensive tastes I like only the finest cigars smoking jackets really good booze i if they were to pay me a living wage that company would not last more than one week and then I would lose my job and then I wouldn't get my wage anymore so even the peanuts that I get even you know just like the sponsorships I got you know I got a purple mattress the other day that's pretty good I'll take what I can get in my broom closet at the Daily wire hi Michael so I don't disagree with you but I wanted to run this by you as like an alternative why not embrace the collapse of the university and hopefully built something better from the ashes most people in history didn't I mean back in the day didn't go to college you can get learned just about anything on the internet now we'll get any book I mean and you know I mean why should we panic about a university class when it's publicly funded you said like you said leftists are always entrenched in it there's degree inflation student debts there's fellowships like the Thiel fellowship I mean let's just why not just let it burn down I am with you almost I think that I fear throwing the baby out with the bathwater the universities have basically destroyed themselves the left has come into the this shell of the University and pretended like a weird zombie university that it's still providing a liberal education many of us you mentioned the teal fellowship I had a number of fellowships while I was in college where I learned probably more than I learned in college I learned at those fellowships the Hertog program the Hudson program of wonderful opportunities I think those are great those should be encouraged we should fund them it's also true student loans are very high Huayra student loans very high because the federal government it creates all of these incentives to go to college and it backs up the loans so what's gonna happen the price is gonna go way up what's the other thing we're told we're told that everybody has to go to college which is absurd there is no there are far far too many people getting Liberal Arts degrees in college going to college what we would call a four-year university period far too many people why do I say that I love liberal education I assume if my kids are geared for it that I will send them to get a liberal education a liberal education is not intended to prepare you for a job in fact it is explicitly intended not to prepare you for a job when I was in college I studied history and Italian literature and I would go to these things and I would joke and say oh yes it's a very useful major but of course liberal education is not supposed to provide useful majors not anything practical if you want something useful you go to law school or med school or business school or whatever afterward now if you want to go and get a job right away you should do that if you want to go to a trade school you should do that if you want to enlist in the military right away you should do that however the value of a liberal education is that the liberal arts are the way by which we make sense of our freedom it's the way by which we earn our freedom if we just go out and we're just working all the time we are not going to be able to understand our culture and our own civilization we will not be able to understand our own institutions we certainly won't be able to think of how our human nature relates to our systems of government our philosophical ideas our religious ideas our cultural ideas the culture will die we will have a totally leveled society which frankly we're already on the road to so in my ideal scheme I'm with you I will go I will be an arsonist with you I will burn down 97% of the metaphoric University and I will keep that 3% remnant and I will hide it away from leftist administrators and the deputy assistant deputy Dean of equality or whatever they have I will hide that part away and then I would encourage everybody else to go and stop wasting money at this ridiculous facade of a university and go and do something productive [Applause] so obviously living in California we're all surrounded by leftists all the time and I've noticed that they they choose to assume that you just know everything about them just by looking at them way especially in the train that means rankly we do you know when I see the purple hair I kind of know that's not that's not nice no but I see that as a point of pushback when you see other people who are maybe a little bit more center-left or even more left than that but not quite to that extreme leftist point then kind of looking at that and going that's really strange and really weird and I think that that could be a place where we could kind of bridge a gap between the between that so I was wondering at you what your what your thought on the fact that they'd that they you know they make you they push us into a corner and they want us to punch bad absol I think you're totally right there is a huge opportunity to bring people over from the left and from the Democrat Party we're seeing it happen all around us there was the walkaway campaign and which is a real thing you see the testimonials you see people walking away from the left my pal Dave Rubin is an example he would have called himself firmly on the left he worked for Chang Kyogre for goodness sakes and now he what is he a classical liberal is Center right I guess Center left that is wonderful how do we do that well we don't pull them over by mollycoddling them we don't bring them over by saying Oh sweetie no we don't bring them over by diminishing our views or modifying our we're not gonna do that at all we should treat them like adults the left doesn't treat them like adults the left doesn't behave like adults they behave like screaming children we should treat them like adults and when we are speaking to them we should always have a good sense of humor about it this is why I strongly defend owning the libs I think owning the libs is a wonderful thing I think using humor in politics is a wonderful thing you're not angry you're not vicious you're not mean or you're confident you say what you think you ask them what they think you're patient that they haven't thought about what you've thought of yet and you bring them over I think we're already doing it I think it's working thanks for coming I have one question in one comment so my question is in terms of that GK Chesterton quote what are some of those fences that we really need to retain that are being plucked down so like what values do you think are most important and are there any American values that are being picked at and perhaps rightfully so we want to leave them behind and the comment is as a Bay Area resident I just feel responsible to let you know it's Stefan Currie not Stephen Curry oh so yeah so your future talks I see nothing just caught me coming because he's the ballplayer he's these doors player oh yeah okay the white supremacist I googled him I said well Donna say like I at least got his sign though right his design he is still a bigot yeah yeah right it's just his name is dick it's a good point I'll put that in my notes as far as the defense's go I think the the most pertinent one to all of us here is free expression freedom of thought academic thought we this is a pillar of the West we've always had wonderfully free expression the university is the outgrowth of that free expression the ability to use our right reason to discuss reality with one another and it's being ripped apart it's being ripped apart right here I mean I'm very pleased that I got to come speak tonight sometimes I'm not allowed to go to universities sometimes ben shapiro gets invited to university I think it's disinvited from a university that's bizarre and that that is I would understand if it were just the students because students are ignorant that's the definition of a student I would almost understand if it were the faculty not really a little less so but the faculty or they can be a little kooky too but it's all three bits of the administration and the faculty and the students nobody is defending free expression free thought academic discourse nobody is defending that anymore that is a fence that they are already clawing down it is barely there anymore and we need to you know build it up ten feet higher and get Mexico to pay for it or something that's probably the most important one right now though there are many others good question so that is the end of our Q&A session Michael if you have any closing remarks please go ahead well I had a soliloquy to recite you all but now you know it's late I know I don't have any closing remarks the one thing I will say if we get to see each other afterward or take photos or anything I believe I have the bubonic plague right now you can probably hear it in my voice so I will not shake your hand this is not an example of bigotry I promise you this is not an example of some animus but in any case thank you very much for having me it's been a pleasure to talk to you all [Applause]

Channel: DailyWire+

Views: 19,058

Keywords: Michael Knowles, Daily Wire, YAF, bigotry, Democrats, covfefe, MAGA, Republicans, GOP, UCLA, academia, religion, politics, Donald Trump, Cory Booker

Id: 24trKoFIaos

Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2019