Michael Knowles at UB’s Thursday Night Pogrom

The hilariously misnomered “Young Americans for Freedom” right-wing club has invited Michael Knowles – a right-wing polemicist angling to be a dollar-store Julius Streicher for Gen-Z – to speak at SUNY Buffalo. Knowles made headlines literally just this week by calling for the “eradication” of “transgenderism” from “public life entirely,” then whining about coverage that correctly interpreted this as genocidal.

Universities are places of higher learning and by their very nature they should default to the free and open exchange of ideas. This is especially true with state-owned universities, since any act of censorship has direct First Amendment implications. So, the question becomes whether an overt public call for genocide is enough for SUNY Buffalo to disallow Michael Knowles from spreading his eliminationist rhetoric here in Buffalo.

Thing is, probably not. Even the expression of morally depraved ideas cannot easily be silenced.

Instead, this will devolve into a lowest-common-denominator, dumb culture war issue-of-the-week with right-wing commentators decrying how the “intolerant left” is trying to cancel this poor guy who just thinks transgender people don’t exist and should be eliminated somehow. The right will quite overtly find itself defending the free speech rights of a barely-known propagandist who simply rejects the fundamental humanity and existence of an entire group of Americans.

As always with conservatives, they’re punching down at one of the most defamed, misunderstood marginalized populations around.

Michael Knowles tells CPAC that "there can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. … Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely." https://t.co/57hJF4frgq pic.twitter.com/szvnC1qWrP

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 4, 2023

I see all the different attempts to silence, cancel, or otherwise to protest UB and Knowles, but honestly what is the best way to combat this genocidal clown? Personally, I would find great satisfaction if Slee Hall was literally filled with people who just laugh hysterically at his every pronouncement and condemnation. Point and laugh at the absurd right-wing blue check who says this with a straight face:

According to the event flyer, Knowles is going to give a speech about how “radical feminism destroys women and everything else.” That’s an oldie but a goodie. Radical feminism – in this day and age? What is this, a Limbaugh bit from 1993? When there’s big bank to be made calling overtly for extermination? Pretty lazy for this guy to take student money and fall back on passé right-wing greatest hits such as “women are men’s property and not individuals with free will.” Maybe they can get Andrew Tate to Skype in from his Romanian jail cell.

Honestly, the best argument for keeping Michael Knowles off campus is that he’s really really bad at this.

This banal, provocatively unbuttoned twit claims that some amorphous “they” is “encouraging” transgender people to “mutilate themselves” to be more like the gender with which they identify, and that this is incompatible with the “radical feminist” idea that men and women are the same. His argument is that normal people are inconsistent when they argue that, on the one hand, e.g., both women and men can be good at math or science, while simultaneously agreeing that “transgenderism” exists as a thing in the world.

This is what passes now for conservative thought? That the left’s belief that a person’s sex chromosomes or genitals don’t affect their abilities or intelligence is somehow incompatible with a belief that in some they might adversely affect how a person interacts in life and how they feel? I mean, what’s one more depressed or suicidal closeted transgender person to YAF and Michael Knowles, right? As long as they don’t have to refer to someone who looks, e.g., vaguely masculine as “they”, it’s worth it, right?

We know all about genitalia, Michael. They don’t affect one’s abilities or intelligence any more than skin pigments do. This UB speech is nothing more than a warmed-over reactionary EIB microphone eruption. Whatever it is, know that it will be as boring as it will be stupid. UB should shut this speech down because it is so fundamentally dumb as to defeat the purpose of higher education. Of what use is a “free exchange of ideas” when the idea itself is so facile? YAF and Michael Knowles, when “conservative intelligentsia” emphasizes the “moron” in oxymoron.

Streicher Knowles is now crying foul at suggestions that he called for the eradication of transgender people, but this is a distinction without a difference. Knowles is just another in a long list of right-wing loudmouths making millions out of spreading fear and hatred – this time of transgender people – all the while pretending like his words are not thinly veiled incitements to commit violence against his targets.

“Transgenderism” is the weasel word Knowles concocted to allow him to feign outrage and demand retractions from entities which rightly characterize his language as explicitly genocidal. He claims that he is not calling for the eradication of transgender individuals or the transgender community – but of “transgenderism.” He claims that “transgenderism” is some sort of ideology, but that’s not how he really defines it. What he is saying is that the state of being a transgender person is not something that exists.

“I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology,” Knowles said on The Michael Knowles Show. “And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology.”

“Nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category,” he added. “It’s not a legitimate category of being.”

See? It’s simple. Since being transgender is “not a legitimate category of being,” it’s ok for UB’s YAF chapter and Knowles to call for the extermination of the very idea of “transgender,” which by definition, (to anyone with a brain sharper than that of a garden slug), includes transgender people. Not being able to countenance people different from him being happy in their own skin, this is Knowles’ last answer. It’s his “final solution,” if you will.

Knowles isn’t clever. He’s just another in a long line of amoral but media-savvy people cashing in on hate. He justifies his eliminationism through a somewhat novel feint – by simply declaring that transgender is a made-up thing that does not really exist. He’ll sue you if you correctly decipher what he’s saying. He doesn’t have to say that transgender people are Untermenschen – they are Niemalsmenschen; not inferior, but non-existent and the bare idea of them is fair game for extermination. What if Knowles decided that “Catholic” was a wholly made-up thing that does not exist in nature. His argument would be that it was not actually genocide for someone to call for the extermination of Catholicism because (1) no one said “Catholics,” per se, and (2) etymologically, Catholicism is a belief and not “genetics” or “biology.”

As he mansplains genocide, Knowles ignores that one cannot have what he calls “transgenderism” without there being transgender people. Whether or not he believes in them is irrelevant, but his argument can be boiled down to: he cannot call for the extermination of that which does not exist.

It is especially galling that the UB chapter of YAF has invited idiot Michael Knowles to speak in Buffalo less than a year after another adherent of the “great replacement theory” came to Buffalo from Binghamton to carry out his retribution at a Jefferson Avenue supermarket. Knowles, for his part, is also a big proponent of the “great replacement theory”.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles accused the left of attempting to “radically change American culture” through immigration in order to “flood this country with people who will — are more likely to support them politically.” 

Wow. Knowles is sexist, bigoted, and racist. The YAF trifecta!

What we are witnessing is a reactionary neo-fascist nascent modern pogrom against anything not explicitly ye olde cisgendered. The violent protests and unconstitutional state legislative bans against drag shows is part of this pogrom.

The normalization of professional Fox-hit pundits calling for the extermination of transgenderism-wink-wink-we-all-know-what-he-means is part of this pogrom.

The denigration of anyone or anything having to do with homosexuality as “grooming” is part of this pogrom.

The pogrom itself seeks to completely eradicate and eliminate from America anything and everything that is not explicitly heterosexual and cisgendered from public life, pushing it underground.

Why? Mostly because right-wingers are so deeply triggered by the idea of people not like them being happy; calling someone by their preferred pronouns. The thing that is evident to anyone with an even passing, casual knowledge of history is that pogroms are about violence, expulsion, and murder. There will be more and worse acts of violence against drag queens and gay people and transgender people. People like Knowles don’t think this is enough – they want this elimination and violence to be state-sanctioned, systemic, and final.

They will tell you to your face they don’t want to exterminate transgender people while they’re measuring the camps for bunks.

UB doesn’t have the power to silence Knowles the way Knowles would silence transgender Americans, female Americans, gay Americans, and whomever else he targets. We have the power to ridicule and condemn him and his hosts.