Michael Knowles

Michael Knowles.

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Michael John Knowles (1990–) is an American failed actor, conservative political commentator, and host of The Michael Knowles Show, a podcast at Ben Shapiro's online tabloid The Daily Wire. He is most well-known for releasing a 266-page book on February 8, 2017 called Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide, which consists almost entirely of blank pages.^[2]

During the 2016 Presidential Election, Knowles supported Ted Cruz in the Republican primary. He starred in Cruz's campaign ad "War Room" among a circle of political operatives in a dimly-lit room, taking turns criticizing then-candidate Trump.^[3]

Interestingly enough, following the Unite the Right rally, Knowles interviewed white supremacist YouTuber James Allsup regarding the rally.^[4]

Wingnuttery[edit]

Xenophobia and racism[edit]

• In a PragerU video, he associated the alt-right with the contemporary American left. The same video has him acting as if 600 people attending the Unite the Right rally wasn't that alarming (nevermind the fact that movements can grow), in the process claiming that the alt-right is "really small."^[5]
• He supports the continued existence of Guantanamo Bay.^[6]
• A self-proclaimed anti-abortion advocate, he fully endorses the death penalty.^[6]
• He supports holding undocumented immigrants in prison without due process.^[6]
• He fully endorses the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the government of Saudi Arabia, as he considers Khashoggi to be a Islamic terrorist.^[6]
• He claims that hate for Andrew Jackson is "tedious"^[7] and denies that Jackson committed ethnic cleansing and genocide.^[8]
  • Similarly, he believes that any criticism of Christopher Columbus is completely unwarranted and anti-American.^[9]
• Endorses Donald Trump's racist temper tantrum against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, saying "all of these women constantly present themselves as foreign."^[10]
• He claims that birtherism isn't racist, and that people believed in the conspiracy theory because Barack Obama "doesn't speak like an American".^[11]
• He claims that Ilhan Omar dragged Elliot Abrams during a Congressional hearing because he is Jewish,^[12] and not because of his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal and the war crimes committed against Latin American countries during the Reagan era.^[13]
• He claims that soccer is anti-American because it involves non-American teams.^[14]
• In an interview aired on Fox News, Knowles claimed that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a myth without any evidence to back up his claims, instead descending into a rant about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.^[15]
• He believes that police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted in 2021 of suffocating African-American George Floyd to death with his knee, was unjustly convicted.^[16]
• He has claimed that Juneteenth is about "communism, black nationalism and "pride"" rather than commemorating the end of slavery.^[17]
• In one video he called Mitt Romney a fake conservative because he marched with BLM.^[18]

Climate change denial[edit]

• Knowles claims the scientific consensus on climate change "is just a lot of political alarmism."^[19]
• In September 2019, he slandered climate activist Greta Thunberg as "mentally ill", as if Asperger's Syndrome had any bearing on the reality of climate change. Even FOX News had the sense to apologize for his remark while he doubled down on his bigotry statement.^[20] Later he went on Tucker Carlson claiming he wasn't an ableist he was just calling someone with autism mentally ill and easily exploitive.
• He implied that the "climate hysteria movement" was being led by politicians rather than scientists. ...no really, he said that awareness of climate change wasn't "about science".^[21]
  • Whenever he is reminded of the statistic that 97% of scientists agree on the existence of man-made climate change, Knowles will handwave it by saying that "scientific decisions are not made by consensus" as if that somehow disproves the statistic.^[22]

• Due to Knowles disagreeing on the scientific consensus for climate change (as well as transgenderism and transhumanism), on a July 12 2023 edition of his Michael Knowles Show, Knowles called science "mostly fake".^{[23][note 1]} Previously, in late November 2022, the Franciscan University of Steubenville hosted Knowles. Reportedly in his speech to students, he similarly argued against what he saw as "fake science" in favor of "an authentic Catholic understanding of truth."^[24]

Homophobia[edit]

• On March 10, 2023, Knowles stated in a speech that gay marriage is immoral and must be banned.^[25]
• Had Joseph Nicolosi Jr., who, like his father, is a practitioner of conversion therapy on his show as a guest.^[26]
• After Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion ruling that workplace discrimination against LGBT people is unlawful, Knowles called him "one of the worst jurists in American history"^[27] and claimed that banning people from being fired because of their gender identity or sexual orientation goes against "the most fundamental aspect of our nature".^[28] This makes one wonder exactly what Knowles's vision of a perfect America is...
• In the video about the Pantene advert, he implied that he opposes gay adoption, repeatedly expressing confusion as to how the lesbian couple shown in the video could have gained custody of their child, and talked about the lesbian agenda.^[29]
• Knowles stated that he wants to make the LGBT pride flag and other LGBT-related symbols "toxic" and use political pressure to "ban" them.^[30] He has also called for drag queens and people who attend gay pride parades to be arrested, describing them as "perverse and unnatural" while hypocritically defending Lauren Boebert performing sex acts in public.^[31]
• When a student jokingly asked Ted Cruz if he'd give blowjobs to end world hunger, Knowles responded by saying that same-sex activity is "flagrantly immoral behavior".^[32]

Hypocrisy[edit]

Ironically, as a Yale student^[33] Knowles starred in the 2012 student film House of Shades, as a bisexual twink^{[note 2]} who is shown in bed naked with a male athlete, whom his character seduces after a breakup with his girlfriend.^[34]

Transphobia[edit]

• Knowles claims that trans women are men,^[35] and equates being trans to having schizophrenia.^[36] While expressing this viewpoint during a speech at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he was sprayed with lavender oil and other liquids.^[37]
• After Pantene released an advert featuring a transgender child, he accused the company of "mainstreaming the sexual abuse of children" and called it "the most disturbing commercial I have ever seen".^[29]
  • He also said that the parents depicted in the video were abusing the child by allowing her to identify as transgender and called for them to be locked up.^[29] This led to YouTuber Hunter Avallone branding him an "uncharitability factory".^[38] Kinda hard to disagree with that.
• Knowles attacked actress Sophia Bush for connecting the suicides of transgender children with whether they are given hormone blockers.^[39] It is a statistical fact that trans kids who are given blockers are less likely to commit suicide.^[40]
• On March 4, 2023, Knowles stated in a speech at CPAC that "transgenderism ^[sic] must be eradicated from public life entirely" and was met with applause from the crowd.^[41][42] Knowles then successfully pressured The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone into changing their headlines by threatening to sue them for libel after they reported that he called for transgender people to be eradicated. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting responded with a comparison: "it’s hard to imagine media outlets being so generous to an incendiary speaker if the tables were turned. If someone said, 'Christianity should be eradicated,' and media heard that as a call against all Christians, the excuse 'I didn’t say I wanted to eradicate Christian people—I just want to eradicate their ideas, liturgy, houses of worship, freedom to identify as Christians and their entire way of life' is probably not going to hold up well in the court of public opinion."^[43][44]
• In April 2023, after YouTuber Mr. Beast's longtime friend and sidekick Chris Tyson came out as gender non-conforming and was revealed to be on HRT, Knowles released a video in which he accused Tyson of being a pedophile, based on old tweets joking about loli hentai (hentai depicting young girls) and claimed that loli hentai makes people trans. ^[45]

Miscellaneous[edit]

• Despite claiming to be a champion of free speech, he supports a Constitutional amendment to ban burning the American flag.^[46]
• Months after Obama granted clemency to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, Knowles whined that she should still be imprisoned.^[47]
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, a novel virus commonly understood to exist in airborne droplets, he argued that the general public should not wear masks, citing this one CDC review of influenza (Note: Not Coronavirus), to base his entire understanding of facemasks on. The study even says that mechanistic studies support facemask efficacy for preventing spreading disease - thus proving himself wrong with his flimsy evidence.^[48]
  • He also downplayed the severity of the crisis and used it to instead whine about Draconian policies (even though early and drastic measures seemed to help COVID stay contained, and apparently with a Republican majority, they still couldn't fight against Democratic policies??? Or, if he's complaining about states.... why?) and about "The Left" (which he doesn't seem to realize doesn't exist at a large substantial amount in America).^[49]
• After singer and satanist Marilyn Manson was accused of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse by Evan Rachel Wood, Knowles claimed that it was consensual because she used the word "ritual" to describe it, and asserted that the real problem was that the woke left allowed satanism to flourish.^[50]
  • In the same video, Knowles appeared to claim that there is no such thing as casual sex. He went on to say that if casual sex existed, then rape would be no worse than common assault.^[50]
• Knowles defended Rudy Giuliani after the Borat Subsequent Moviefilm caught him on camera attempting to seduce who he believed to be a young female reporter, in the process displaying snowflake tendencies by expressing offense at the film being nasty about Republican politicians.^[51]
• Knowles has implicitly defended the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot on multiple occasions, claiming that the killing of officer Brian Sicknick was irrelevant because he wasn't beaten to death with a fire extinguisher^[52] (ignoring the fact that he was killed when rioters sprayed him with a chemical agent^[53]), asserted that it was because of the COVID-19 lockdown rather than the misinformation that actually incited it^[54] (probably because he himself helped spread this misinformation^{[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63]}), derided Jackson Reffitt for turning his father over to the FBI for participating in the coup^[64] and implied that it doesn't matter because it was Not as bad as the Black Lives Matter riots the previous year.^[18]
• He supports Joseph McCarthy, describing him positively as a "tough anti-communist crusader". In the same video where he said this, he went into an outright McCarthyist rant in defense of Richard Nixon, claiming that he took on a communist conspiracy in the highest echelons of the U.S. government and had the presidency stolen from him by the deep state because of it, implying that he believes the Watergate scandal was made up to discredit Nixon.^[65]
• He believes that the United States was founded by the Pilgrims when they arrived on the Mayflower; the Mayflower voyage was in 1620 and the declaration of independence was in 1776. Not to mention that the first attempt at establishing a British colony in North America was in 1585 (Roanoke), and the first successful attempt was in 1607 (Jamestown). He also implied that the pilgrims were Marxists.^[66] Keep in mind that Knowles has a degree in history from Yale University.
• In a video, Knowles argued that he believed that American society would be better off if it was as conservative as it was in 1220, basically calling for a return to feudalism and decrying "liberalism" as a cancer. ^[67]
• Knowles defended the rule of Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco as "broadly speaking, pretty good". ^[68]
• When American actor Danny Masterson was sentenced to three decades in prison for raping two women, Knowles described the sentence as "unjust" (despite believing that Masterson was guilty) simply because the rapes were committed a long time ago. In the same segment, Knowles implied that the women were partly at fault because they did not end their relationships with Masterson afterwards, and because they did not immediately report Masterson to the police.^[69]
• Admitting he doesn't care about choice, free will, and democracy, just wants all abortions banned because he can't tell the difference between abortion and infanticide, or understand the former's importance. ^[70]
• He claimed that yoga is demonic.^[71]
• Despite acknowledging that Kristi Noem made a massive mistake when she bragged about murdering her puppy for her own failure to train it properly, he defended her from a moral standpoint because apparently killing animals in a rage is a) common on farms, b) fine as long as it's done "humanely", and c) not inherently inhumane in the first place.^[72] Note that no other wingnut was defending Noem,^[73][74] meaning this can only be attributed to blind contrarianism or a "Republicans can never be bad people" mindset.

Stopped clocks[edit]

• In the aforementioned PragerU video, he condemned the alt-right and their major figureheads Richard Spencer, Theodore Beale, Paul Ramsey, and Sam Francis for their rampant white nationalism and atheism. The bar is indeed low for Michael, but IT EXISTS!
• In a Q&A at the University of Kentucky he rejected the idea that voting patterns are determined by the predominant race of the electorate.^[75]
• Though he opposes environmentalism, Knowles is in favor of conserving the environment.^[76]
• In the aforementioned Joseph Nicolosi Jr. video he called conversion "therapy" child abuse.^[26]
• In the aforementioned James Allsup interview he called Allsup on his inability to answer the questions properly, to the point that many of Allsup's fans accused him of twisting Allsup's words to make him contradict himself.^[4]
• Knowles has called out Nick Fuentes and referred to him as "dishonest".^[77]

See also[edit]

• Ben Shapiro
• Matt Walsh

Notes[edit]

References[edit]