Daily Wire's Michael Knowles calls the House Committee on Un-American Activities “great” and “fabulous”
Published
Citation From the July 3, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): Obviously, we support Steve. We support anyone who's being unjustly persecuted for being a conservative. But what he said here isn't true. He said there's no difference between that communist being sent to prison and Steve Bannon being sent to prison. There's a big difference. The big difference is that guy was a communist and Steve Bannon is a conservative. Steve is not giving himself anywhere near enough credit. There's a big difference. The people who are putting Steve Bannon in jail right now are communists or communist sympathizers, or at least we would say radical leftists. Why would Steve Bannon draw a comparison between himself and a communist and express sympathy for the communist? His speech here is taking a liberal line of argument. To say, look — there's no — it's not about the particulars of political philosophy or the particular political ends we want to achieve. All that matters is procedure. I am being targeted for my political speech. Forget about the substance of that political speech, the substantive goods we're after. No, no, it's just about procedural norms. I'm being targeted by the government for things that I'm saying about politics and that's why I'm the same as a communist.
Now, Steve Bannon is a very intelligent guy. So I suspect that he didn't just make this argument accidentally. Probably he is intentionally making a liberal line of argument here in order to persuade more liberal and moderate centrist independent voters. But it is kind of funny to hear him say this because, you know, here he's criticizing the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The HCUA was great. It was fabulous. There were actual communists, not only in Hollywood - there were communists in the State Department. We know this for a fact because Richard Nixon doggedly pursued one of them who was a very senior member of the State Department who helped found the United Nations for goodness sakes. That was Alger Hiss. And this was based on the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, a former communist who left the Communist Party, wrote an excellent book called Witness. And nobody believed Whittaker Chambers other than Richard Nixon, and no one believed Nixon. They always mocked Nixon. And Nixon, and Chambers, and the hardcore conservatives, and McCarthy — a man who was defended by William F Buckley Jr, so urbane a conservative as that in McCarthy and His Enemies — and the House Committee on Un-American Activities - they were all right. There were communists who had infiltrated the government who were trying to destroy the government from within. And we nabbed at least one of them. We nabbed Alger Hiss. We got some other spies too, you know, during the effort to root out communists. For goodness sakes we were in a cold war with the Soviet Union that was trying to subvert our country and install communism as they did in a number of other countries around the world.