Daily Wire host Michael Knowles addressed his viral CPAC comments on transgenderism Monday, saying the remarks would not have been controversial before the Obama administration started pursuing pro-trans policies.
Knowles opened his podcast on Monday by telling the audience that he was surprised by the firestorm that ensued, considering his comments match what he’s been saying about transgender ideology all along.
“I was giving a speech on the main stage,” Knowles began. “I said something that I’ve said for many, many years. Something that everybody in the entire country agreed on until about five minutes ago. And I said that men and women are different and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise for the purposes of public life.”
“Put simply, eradicating transgenderism from public life would mean behaving as American society did before, say, 2015 … [when] we did not have any acceptance of transgenderism in public life,” Knowles continued.
“And it started to be introduced into public life around 2015 when Barack Obama instituted transgender military policies and some liberals in North Carolina decided to invite men into the women’s bathroom and pass all sorts of weird ordinances about bathrooms.”
Knowles mentioned how several media outlets took the opportunity to distort his remarks, making it sound like he was calling for the eradication of people who identify as transgender when really he was talking about the concept of transgenderism itself.
“The press decided to call me a genocidal maniac. I have been called many crazy things by the libs over the years. I’ve been called all sorts of nasty names. Genocidal is a first,” he continued.
Knowles recalled how the original Rolling Stone headline said, “CPAC speaker calls for transgender people to be eradicated,” and also mentioned similar headlines from The Daily Beast and Huffington Post, which were also later revised.
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“The idea that I or anybody else called for trans people to be eradicated is obviously a total lie,” Knowles said. “I choose my words, generally speaking, pretty carefully. I’m pretty precise in my language.”
“If you want to eradicate a medical condition, you’re not saying you want to eradicate the patients. I don’t see how they could get that,” he continued, claiming the editors likely understood what he meant but intentionally misled their audiences with the erroneous headlines.
“I think they were acting with actual malice to libel me,” Knowles said.
Knowles said that approving of transgenderism in adults but not in children is a losing strategy for conservatives, too.
“You can’t deal with transgenderism only by saying we’re not going to trans the kids,” Knowles said. “I think there are a lot of conservatives who say, okay, look, if transgender adults, if a man wants to identify as a woman, he’s an adult, that’s fine. Just don’t do it to the kids. That’s missing the point. I actually think this is what motivated these news outlets to lie about what I said.”
He continued: “… If you want to deal with the transgender issue, it’s kind of all or nothing. Furthermore, the argument that the liberals make for trans the little kids is they say, transgenderism is real. A man can be a woman secretly, or a woman can be a man born into the wrong body.”
“You’re born that way. And so if you’re born that way, if it’s real, if that’s a true anthropology, then it’s got to be real for everybody. If transgenderism is real, then we certainly should trans the kids because the kids are already trans. And so to deny their true nature would be cruel.”
“The issue is transgenderism is not real for anybody,” Knowles concluded. “A man can’t really become a woman, and a woman can’t really become a man.”