Daily Wire host: “I don't love the Statue of Liberty”
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From the March 18, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): I don't love the Statue of Liberty. Can I say that? I don't love the — I like liberty. I like true liberty. I love America. I have a cigar company called Mayflower Cigars, which is, you know, about the founding of America. I don't — but the Statue Of Liberty — what is the Statue Of Liberty? What does the Statue Of Liberty symbolize? What was it intended to symbolize?
The Statue Of Liberty — look, I'm a New Yorker. OK? I grew up in New York, which means I've never visited the Statue Of Liberty, never visited the Empire State Building, never visited the Statue Of Liberty. That's what happens when you grow up in New York. But I've gone by it on the Staten Island ferry plenty of times. The Statue Of Liberty is a liberal enlightenment symbol. That's what it is. What does the Statue Of Liberty symbolize? Statue of Liberty symbolizes Enlightenment, liberal ideas. It was sculpted by a Freemason and received by a Freemason, and it was dedicated by the grand master of the New York Masons — and I'm not knocking the Masons. Look, I've got some great friends who are Freemasons. I'm just pointing out Freemasonry is largely an enlightenment era practice and organization that really, really reaches its heights of power and social influence during the Enlightenment.
And on top of all that, the Statue of Liberty was given to us by the post-revolution French. Not even the good French regime, the old regime, good old King Louis who helped us win the American revolution, but by those crazy bloodthirsty Jacobin radicals who were lopping off people's heads. It was that that post-revolution French. So if even if they took it back, it wouldn't bother me too much. But it would bother me a little bit in that, what do you do? This is a deeper political problem.
What do you do with things that were intended for one purpose that you don't support, namely the promotion of liberalism, French Enlightenment values, you know, kinds of all wacky modern ideas. What do you do with something that is intended to represent something you don't support, but which has come to represent something you do support? Because now the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of America. Whatever it was initially intended to be, people think of the Statue of Liberty — there's a copy of the Statue of Liberty in France. You can walk right by it in the the Luxembourg Garden. But we think of America. What do you do? Well, I don't think it's a big problem. You just recognize that the the meaning of the symbols changes. You've gotta kind of rededicate the symbols. And this has happened in our civilization.
One of the great works of Western architecture is the Pantheon in Rome. The Pantheon in Rome was a pagan temple. And then in 609, Pope Boniface the fourth received permission from the emperor to rededicate the temple, to consecrate the temple to Saint Mary and the martyrs, and then it became a church. It's OK to do that. It's OK to take things that are pagan — in this case, the Statue of Liberty is literally a pagan symbol. It's the goddess Libertas, though it's the pagan symbol understood in the revival of classical paganism that came up in the Enlightenment, so it's got all these liberal Enlightenment ideas associated with it.
But we should just — we should — I don't know, just rededicate it. Let's take it take that stupid poem off the bottom of it that the libs always used to justify mass migration. Ignore the Constitution, ignore federal statute. There's that stupid poem on the bottom that says, give me your poor unwashed masses. OK. That means that the entire world can come into America regardless of the law. Yeah. Get rid of that poem, and then — I sometimes refer to the Statue of Liberty as the Statue of Lib Mary. It's like in Christendom, we had statues of Mary, the holy mother, all over the place, and then now it's like pagan goddesses and Enlightenment symbols. But OK. That's fine. It's a new symbol now, represents the American version of Liberty, very different from the French version of Liberty. And they don't get it back. They wouldn't — they — the French wouldn't know what to do with American liberty even if we did give it to them. Alright.