Daily Wire host Michael Knowles took the stage at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, where he discussed America’s “identity crisis” and the disunity caused by the illegal immigration crisis.
Knowles’ CPAC speech comes a year after his remarks at the conservative event triggered backlash from leftists after the Daily Wire host said that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.” Some media outlets falsely reported that Knowles called for the eradication of transgender people when the host had instead focused his speech on ridding society of the trans ideology. This year, Knowles focused on how the U.S. must focus on unity, not diversity, arguing that for the country to find its identity, it must get back to acknowledging the principles it was founded upon.
“What that whole little kerfuffle demonstrated,” Knowles said, referring to the Left’s response to his speech last year, “was that America is experiencing an identity crisis. We no longer know who we are.”
“Lots of little errors have led to our present identity crisis. The most obvious being that we no longer have functional borders,” the Daily Wire host continued. “Over the past three years, Joe Biden has invited almost six million foreigners into our country illegally.”
Knowles then slammed one party in particular for allowing the massive influx of illegal immigrants into the country.
“This Democrat-led invasion is the largest human trafficking operation in human history,” Knowles said. “The vast majority of Americans knows that it’s wrong. The vast majority of Americans wants it to come to an end, but we are told that we must tolerate the destruction of our borders and the invasion of our country because we are a nation of immigrants.”
The conservative commentator disputed the argument that the U.S. is “a nation of immigrants,” saying that “neither that phrase nor that sentiment appears anywhere in our founding documents.”
He added that the common phrase was hard to find anywhere until the mid-1960s when the Democratic Party instituted its policy in support of mass migration.
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“They believed as they believe today that doing so would give them a permanent electoral majority,” said Knowles. “Even so, we are told, we must tolerate this cynical political trick because ‘diversity is our strength.’”
The Daily Wire host then argued that America’s strength is not found in its diversity but in its unity. Knowles said that for most of the country’s history, America placed tight restrictions on immigrants, “not because we didn’t like immigrants, we liked them very much … but we had always understood, as all wise statesman had understood, that a country with an unlimited influx of unassimilated foreign people becomes unstable and risks losing its very identity.”