Author: Michael Knowles

Publisher: Regnery Publishing

Politically correct radicals seek to suppress and ultimately transform our moral intuitions, deny our rational faculties, and erase the wisdom of the ages.

Speechless

It was a remarkable marketing ploy to condition everyone who listened regularly to think of this book every time they heard a bell ring. Annoyingly remarkable. But despite that, I still wanted to read (or rather, listen to) this book by Michael Knowles. Unlike his previous book, Speechless not only contained words but was actually about words. How do we use them? What is their context? What meaning do they convey? I do not mean just definitionally, but historically, ideologically, and manipulatively. Speechless is about the meaning of words and why that matters.

I’ve wanted to get ahold of this book for some time, but it seemed my library would never get around to offering it. So, I finally bought a copy on Audible. I wasn’t completely sure what to expect from this book. I knew it was about words and their manipulative use, and I knew it was coming from a conservative perspective, but that was about it. But this book was more than that, as though words are such a small thing. In short, Speechless is about words, history, politics, cultural issues, and a scathing rebuke of conservativism.

Conservatives have lost their way. The question comes down to: what are we conserving, and why? Conservatives, in an effort to be factually correct, have lost the narrative game by adopting some level of political correctness. Thus, Conservatives lost the culture war by losing the cultural narrative. Conservatives became Libertarians, trading standards and something to conserve with “you do you, just leave me alone.” And along the way, they adopted the words that controlled their minds along with the culture, essentially letting the progressives win.

Political correctness did not begin as a crusade for civility; it began as a political campaign to upend Western society. Its instigators viewed our culture as unjust and oppressive, and they undertook to remake that culture by forbidding traditional perspectives and enforcing the fashionable views of leftist ideologues. The new standard took the name of political correctness, a variation of an earlier Communist slogan.

Speechless

There is a lot in Speechless, and I could see Knowles writing a second book as a follow-up to this one. In general, Knowles shows that our nation looks a lot more like Brave New World than any other dystopian out there. Our world is being reshaped into an elitist utopia through words, rewriting history as it happens like in 1984, but with a sexual and moral perversion that would make Huxley blush. Knowles explains the history of free speech absolutism, the purpose of values (and how they aren’t neutral), the origin of the term politically correct, and how a subtle, slow, but progressive revolution reshaped our country in such a way that the last decade feels like a 50-year morality leap.

When conservatives eschew any political vision of the good, we do not leave each individual free to pursue his own conscience in the supposedly neutral and value-free playing ground of secular liberalism, as many seem to believe. Instead, we give our ideological foes free rein to define and enforce their opposite vision of the good, to which everyone will ultimately be forced to submit or else face censorship and ostracism, as we see occurring now in real time.

Speechless

Speechless is the book for you if you like history, politics, and religion. It is the book for you if you want to understand our current culture, how we lost what we had, and how we can fight back against this war of words and culture before it really is too late. While this book denounces the culture, Knowles also calls out conservatives. We dropped the ball, and to the detriment of the county. So he reminds us: What should we be conserving, and why? We the people have become speechless not only because we are being controlled by the manipulators of political correctness, but also because we have forgotten the things to say. I think I will need to listen again to fully grasp the scope of the book, but I think Speechless is one worth listening to and learning from again and again.

We must not merely demand the right to speak. More importantly, we must have something to say.

Speechless

Blessings to you and yours,

~Madelyn Rose Craig