Michael Knowles Speechless Quotes

Under political correctness, saying the right thing supplants doing the right thing.

People who worry about microaggressions usually have never faced macroaggressions.

Boundaries must constrain free speech if only to protect speech, as in the case of laws against sedition or rules against the heckler’s veto. Tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance. And openness cannot leave itself open to closed-mindedness.

There will never be a firm ‘wall of separation between church and state,’... because all laws invoke a moral order, and any moral order relies upon religious tenets. p. 167

Bush warned, ‘The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land, and although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones...What began as a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship.

Civilization cannot stand for nothing.

Until the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Texas v. Johnson, which created or recognized, according to one’s point of view, the constitutional right to burn the American flag, the law could prohibit desecration of venerated objects. Now courts hold that the First Amendment protects flag-burning.29 And yet in 2019, an Iowa judge sentenced thirty-year-old Adolfo Martinez to fifteen years in prison for the “hate crime” of stealing and burning a rainbow flag, which symbolizes colorful sexual desires.30 So in fact, the government still outlaws desecration of venerated objects; it’s just that the objects of veneration are different.

Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” declared George Washington in his farewell address.43 Benjamin Franklin observed, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

Irony thrives in liberal and decadent societies because it permits the evasion of responsibility. One never need commit too much. The ironic utterance of a phrase or performance of an action allows one to conceal his true motives. He may mean what he says, or he may mean the opposite; in any case, no one can ever hold him to account.

When ‘global cooling’ reversed course and became ‘global warming’ over the ensuing decades, ‘science’ demanded the same solutions to avoid the opposite calamity. Politically correct reformers undermined the old standards by appealing to ‘free speech’ and inveighing against ‘censorship’, but no sooner had the radicals cracked the old moral order than they began to enforce a new standard of speech with all the force and rigidity they once claimed to oppose. p. 228

Both leftist critiques of the ‘American dream’ and conservative defenses of social mobility, each based on its side’s cherished statistics, miss the more fundamental transformation: radicals have replaced the virtue of diligence with the sin of sloth in the pantheon of public values.

Psychology Today admitted in 2019 that ‘people with conservative political attitudes tend to have better health than their liberal counterparts because the former place greater value on personal responsibility.

Moreover, undergraduate liaisons involve impaired judgment almost by definition. (If wanton young women had sound judgment, they would demand a ring.)

(About college policies regarding consent in dating relationships:) “The policies merit reflection because they show the necessity and inevitability of standards… The radicals then turned their critical eye on the university itself, which they portrayed as a hotbed of racial bigotry and rape. This dishonest depiction gave the radicals pretext to complete their takeover by installing rigid new rules more favorable to their political agenda.

Political correctness did not begin as a crusade for civility; it began as a political campaign to upend Western society. Its instigators viewed our culture as unjust and oppressive, and they undertook to remake that culture by forbidding traditional perspectives and enforcing the fashionable views of leftist ideologues. The new standard took the name of political correctness, a variation of an earlier Communist slogan.

If homosexuals sought mere acceptance for their preferences or behaviors, why organize under the banner of the deadliest sin, pride? Why not organize a ‘Gay Acceptance Month’?... Traditional society discouraged the seven deadly sins, which in addition to pride include envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. But over the past century, radicals have established an inverse standard that recognizes those sins as virtues.

The gospel of radical leftism- call it any name you like- trades the virtue of charity for the sin of envy. According to the radicals’ new standard, it is greedy to keep one’s own property but charitable to covet and steal the possessions of another, a perfect inversion of the old standards of justice…. The greedy want something for themselves; the envious merely want others not to have it.

Political correctness works to destroy traditional standards of speech and behavior, and it succeeds both when it coerces some people to adopt the new code and when it convinces others to disavow standards entirely; either response overthrows the old order. p. 174

Gender theory abolishes the possibility of disinterested debate by recasting any disagreement with people who can claim to suffer as ‘erasing their lived experience.’ p. 182

If man and woman do not exist as real sexual categories- if ‘gender’ is a mere ‘social construct’- then the logic behind ‘gay rights’ falls apart. Conversely, if men really are men, and women really are women, and men cannot become women by simply declaring that they are, then the logic behind ‘transgenderism’ collapses. Yet political correctness demands that we hold both contradictory views at the same time. p. 184

Many young children might rejoice at the chance to identify as Superman or Wonder Woman, but their inevitable failure to fly or melt steel with a glance can only lead to confusion and disappointment. Education once existed to correct delusions and disordered desires; through political correctness, it has come to encourage those fantasies and destructive appetites. p. 188

These accommodating conservatives misunderstand the nature of liberty in the American regime by failing to recognize the distinction between liberty and license so important to the Founders’ conception of republican government. p. 189

Politically correct radicals seek to suppress and ultimately transform our moral intuitions, deny our rational faculties, and erase the wisdom of the ages. p. 191

Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb, in the 1970s) had been perfectly wrong. Not only had his doomsday prophecy failed to materialize, but the greatest cause of mass death in the subsequent decades was the coerced abortions that his book spurred. p. 205

The technology giants’ tacit policy had become clear: speech would be tolerated or censored according to ideological content… The entire liberal establishment seemed to have forgotten not only that th eleftist organizations Black Lives Matter and Antifa had spent much of 2020 burning down cities coast to coast, but also that they had often enjoyed the explicit support of prominent liberals in the media and even elected office.

There has never been any such thing as absolute ‘free speech’, and conservatives’ delusions to the contrary have afforded radicals the opportunity to dismantle the traditional moral order that conservatives purport to uphold.

Vague harangues against ‘cancel culture’ miss the mark because they fail to acknowledge the justice of ostracizing certain people and marginalizing certain ideas… All cultures ‘cancel.’ In the 1950s, American society ‘canceled’ Communists; in the 2020s, it ‘cancels’ anti-Communists. If conservatives hope to recover anything akin to traditional standards, they must not only articulate a moral and political vision but also suppress ideologies and organizations that would subvert that vision. p. 231

From the Glossary of Jargon: “Racism/ n: the refusal to judge people on the basis of their race (archaic: judging people on the basis of race).” “Reproductive justice/ n: infanticide.” “Reproductive rights/ n: the contrived right to stop reproduction.” “Riot/ n: a mostly peaceful protest.” “Social justice/ n: getting what one does not deserve because one is a member of a favored group.” “Socialism/ n: an inhuman ideology based on a false anthropology that has bred misery wherever tried but which, its supporters insist, will turn out better next time.” “Systemic racism/ n: the refusal to grant special treatment to people on the basis of race.” “Woman/ n: a person who may or may not be a man.

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