Michael Knowles One-on-One with OutKick

Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire spoke with OutKick about releasing his new book, Speechless, the Left changing the meaning of words, what "racist" actually means, and the lab-leak theory.

Later, we discuss who is the most powerful person in the world. Is it still the president of the United States?

Bobby Burack: Word is your new book is lengthier than your previous, Reasons To Vote For Democrats. 

Michael Knowles:Speechless is my second book, but my first book with words. That's a milestone. It's also ironic that my second book would be about language itself, which is probably the most important political issue right now.

Over the past 50 or 60 years, the Left's most effective tool is how they populate and control language to end culture and gain political power.

We have lots of terms for this: "political correctness," "localism," "cancel culture," or "censorship." Political correctness is about 100 years old. It was developed by a very intelligent, really educated Leftist theorist, and it has been extraordinarily effective at transforming our culture.

The Right likes to pride itself on understanding free speech much better than the Left. In writing and researching my book, it occurred to me that the opposite is true. The Left understands free speech much better than the Right. They've laid a trap for conservatives in political correctness, by which, either way, conservatives react to PC.

There are two major ways that conservatives react to political correctness. The first one is the squishy way. The sort of moderate or liberal conservatives who just go along with the new standard. The Left tells you that you have to call Bruce Jenner a woman, so you refer to him as "her." Obviously, that advances the Left's purpose because it just rolls over and gives them what they want.

There's another breed of conservatives, who are extremely obstinate. Who says "I'm not going to get into these new standards. I'm not going to call Bruce Jenner a woman. You can't make me famous." But they pursue this course of action by abandoning standards altogether. So they will say, "You can't tell me what to say. I'm a free speech purist. I'm a free speech absolutist." But the problem is that political correctness is a purely negative campaign.

Either way, the left-wing position wins. And this is why no matter how hard we fight against political correctness, it only seems to advance the pace.

We have redefined marriage. We've redefined sex itself. The American flag is now considered partisan and painful. We seem to have lost the whole culture. Political correctness is not a battle between free speech and censorship. Rather, a battle between two competing sets of standards. Even more specifically, the traditional standards that describe the American way of life that we all cherish, which the Left seeks to abolish entirely.

I really appreciate people ordering my book. We have seen a number of conservative books outright banned by Amazon because they contradict the dominant Leftist narrative. We can always buy Hitler Mein Kampf though. That's good. But if a conservative scholar publishes a book criticizing transgender theory, that will somehow disappear. As of now, my book is still on that platform. I hope it remains, but I would encourage people, if they want to order, to do so sooner rather than later, before the powers that be figure out what's in it.

Burack: Ironically, as the Left has redefined words, they have inadvertently taken meaning away from their most useful tool: the word "racist."

When they can't win an argument with facts, they label the threat "racist." It's how second-graders weaponized the word "stupid."

Knowles: Of course. All they mean when they say "racist" is something they don't like.

We've lost our ability to have any sort of serious moral discourse. The word "racist" today is just a synonym for "bad." And so everything that we don't like is racist. We were told by the Smithsonian Institution that hard work is racist. Maybe even white supremacy.

Now, this is not just a result of the Left's ridiculous theories. This is also a result of the Right refusing to offer a substantive moral vision of politics. You'll hear the Left come in and try to undermine all sorts of American traditions and standards.

Instead of defending those standards, what conservatives end up doing is adopting the premises of the Left. They'll say things like, "You can't legislate morality." That's one of the silliest bumper sticker slogans we've heard over the past 20 years on the Right. Not only can you legislate morality, but you actually have to legislate morality. When you pass a law against abortion, even before abortion, you're making moral arguments. The same is true of the death penalty, taxes, and parking tickets.

Everything in our legal system refers to moral laws. Everything in our justice system refers, ultimately, to our understanding of justice.

The Right has basically ceded all grounds to the Left. It's no wonder that the only kind of moral language anyone is able to use is whatever left-wing hobbyhorse is the obsession of the day, be that racism, homophobia, or the ever more difficult to define, fascism.

Burack: If the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab and was subsequently covered up, is this one of the most significant crimes in world history? Look at the reach, the impact, the deaths, the job lost.

Knowles: Bobby, you're not allowed to ask that question. I'm really shocked by your audacity to raise a point that our experts and our public officials have told us is simply impermissible.

When anybody with two brain cells to rub together last year pointed out that the discovery of this bat coronavirus, 400 yards from the Wuhan Institute of Virology -- which studied bat coronavirus -- was a bit of a coincidence, we were told that we were kooks. We were told we were conspiracy theorists. If we posted this notion to social media, we could have our posts taken down. The Leftist fact-checking websites "debunked this as a hoax." And only now that we know -- speaking of leaks out of the lab -- scientists there came down with COVID-like symptoms much earlier than we were told was possible, we are allowed to ask. Only now do we have to confront this possibility.

The genius experts told us it was impossible. The average person on the street with just a modicum of common sense knew that this was not only possible, but likely a year ago. I think we should challenge the way that we put our trust in different segments of society.

Every step of the way, not just on the lab leak, but on the efficacy of masks. On the likelihood of asymptomatic transmission. On the risks posed to young healthy people by the virus. Every step of the way, the common people have been right and the genius experts have been wrong, deceptive, or both.

Obviously, if China unleashed this virus intentionally or unintentionally, that ought to have major implications for geopolitics. But unfortunately, very likely, it will not.

You and I, Bobby, can yell out that we were right the whole time, but it won't matter. We do not have very much political power. Those who have political power -- the Faucis, the Bidens of the world, the WHO, the administrative bureaucracy, the public health establishment, the Chinese Communist Party -- don't want to know the truth.

If you ask the question right now, Bobby: will China be held to account for what it did? If the powers that be have anything to say about it, probably not. But if you asked: Do the American people want China to be held to account? Then the answer is absolutely yes.

So why? Why is there a disparity there? I thought we were a government of, by, and for the people? I thought we were a representative democracy? Take China out of it, let's look at immigration. The majority of Americans, according to survey after survey, want to drastically reduce immigration into this country, illegal or legal. This cuts across party lines. The movement of people into the United States over the past 60 years constitutes the largest mass migration of human beings in recorded history, and we haven't done a very good job of assimilation. The Left has discouraged assimilation.

Why is that? Why is there a disparity between what the people want and what is actually being done at the political level? It's because these radicals have attained positions of outsized influence.

Burack: From George Washington to Donald Trump, we've been told that the sitting US president is the most powerful person in the world. Is Joe Biden?

Knowles: Bobby, you named the most powerful person in the world earlier in our conversation. It's Dr. Fauci. Joe Biden doesn't have anywhere near the political power of Dr. Fauci. Nor did President Trump. Nor did many of his predecessors. Since the 1980s, since Ronald Reagan, presidents have come and gone and Dr. Fauci remains.

I'm using Dr. Fauci as an example of a much broader problem. These faceless, nameless, unaccountable bureaucrats are the real problem. These people make the laws that actually govern us. These administrative agencies were set out largely in legal ways. I'm not denying that Congress has the right to outsource some of its decisions to administrative agencies, but these are a grave threat to our liberty. These agencies have become so powerful, so arrogant, and so able to hide their influence. 

You saw this, notably, during the 2016 election when the federal agencies on behalf of Democrats spied on the Republican candidate for president. Then when that Republican candidate won, in a fluke, they proceeded to use the power of the state to undermine his presidency at every single turn. They never stopped until he had finally been ousted from office.

Was Joe Biden doing that? He was involved in some of those conversations, even going back to 2015. We know that for a fact. But I don't really blame Joe Biden. I don't think Joe Biden knows what time it is. Joe Biden wakes up in the morning, licks his index finger, puts it in the air to figure out which way the wind is blowing so he knows what his political views are that day. Then he's handled around the White House by people who have a more radical agenda and have real beliefs.

The caprices of the Left are carried out by the bureaucracy, which is so large and powerful that it can affect a Leftist political agenda with great efficiency. It can impede a conservative agenda with equal efficiency, as we saw under the Trump administration.

President Trump would pull for things to be done, and the bureaucracy would disobey. I don't mean only to single out the administrative state, I mean the whole block. It's the government working in concert with Big Tech. Jack Dorsey, some billionaire oligarch in Silicon Valley, had the audacity to censor the duly-elected president.

We can be angry if we like about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, but we need to recognize that they are just the tip of the iceberg. If we want to wrest power back from our political opponents, we need to first know which opponents are actually wielding that power. Then, most importantly, we need to have the courage to take the power back.

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