By Sarahann Kolder, Iowa City
Notes from the Nov. 11, 2024 event featuring conservative commentator Michael Knowles, hosted by the University of Iowa chapter of YAF at the Iowa Memorial Union.
There was a lot of security at the entrance. Young white men in blue suits welcomed people into the building and upstairs, but once you got to the hallway that led to the International Ballroom, there were at least 12 police officers and hired security personnel controlling entry. To enter the main hall, people had to walk through a metal detector, show their hands, and take off their hats.
I sat near the back of the totally packed room. I estimate there were 250-300 people. There was at least one baby in the crowd. The people behind me, before the event started, were talking about their investments in “dogecoin” stock and being “broke” from recent trends. While I didn’t see the people near the front or middle of the crowd, the only non-white person I saw was a dark-skinned woman, Jasmyn Jordan, the national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom. She gave the introduction for the main speaker, Michael Knowles.
Knowles started with basic crowd-pleasing: “haha we’re so hated by the libs.” He spent a while recounting the multiple Trump assassination attempts. In doing this he not only made an almost-martyr civil-war hero of Trump, attributing the attempted shootings to Democrats, but he also used this subject to talk about how “the press” is monopolized by “the left” and doesn’t report on what’s actually newsworthy.
He did work to refute the common portrayal of Republicans as stupid and as people that can be reduced to their nasty emotionality. The message: don’t think about how we feel and how it looks. Think about the chaos and disorder that needs repair — repair that only Trump is capable of providing. By acknowledging this sore point, the wounded collective ego, and also vaguely addressing frustrations with contemporary news culture, Knowles set the audience up to be open to what he had to offer in the following 30-minute speech.
One thing he did early on was establish Trump supporters as the last hope and only option for people with common sense — though the only “common sense” he explicitly stated was that “men are men and women are women and we all know that.” He conflated “the left” with Democrats and “the liberal elite,” then claimed that “the Democrats” are “offensive” in their lying about what reality is, “offensive” in their desire to enforce collective dishonesty about gender and “human nature.” Somehow conservative rights were in danger of being taken away, and the left’s endgame is for Americans to be subject to mass “humiliation rituals.”
It was unexpected to hear him cite “radical leftist” Antonio Gramsci and Karl Marx more than any other philosopher or historical intellectual. They were referenced for the importance their theories place on rigorous criticism, and this somehow led to a framing of the right as a positive revolutionary movement, and that the actual “woke” people are Trump-ist patriots. Marx was also cited when Knowles started talking about how human nature cannot be changed, “human nature” implying traditional gender roles.
Throughout his time on stage, he had a playful and upbeat attitude, making fun of Elon Musk and calling Joe Biden demented. He was able to make people laugh and make himself seem superficially kind and friendly.
His stances weren’t vague, but rather he avoided defining terms in a straightforward way. At one point, he said that trans women in women’s bathrooms were fine, but men dressed as women weren’t. I think the crowd was ready to cheer at trans people not having the right to exist, so he probably let some people down. He also said that undocumented Americans were Americans, but that “illegal aliens” were the problem. Another example: he said it wasn’t that “transgender is wrong,” it’s that transgender doesn’t exist.
In a confusing and too-quick-to-be-understood way, he essentially was logic-ing that “transgender” doesn’t make sense as a metaphysical concept, so anyone who uses it must be pitifully lacking in critical thinking and reasoning skills. As a skilled debater, he was careful to not say too much that could be taken out of context and used to prove hypocrisy, but instead he would point to things that conservatives tend to find upsetting, and then assure the crowd that it’s not actually complicated and this is how libs are trying to make themselves seem better than them.
The biggest argument Knowles made against “transgenderism” was castration, that the transgender agenda functions to castrate boys. He believes that through Trump leadership, America will “return to normal” (“make America great again”), where transgender people don’t exist and gender variance will be consolidated into small percentages of scientific abnormalities.
At one point during the Q&A section, he simplified being gay as being “kind of eccentric, like cross-dressing for fun.” He said, in such a practiced way, put so basically that you wouldn’t think he actually felt strongly about it, that the purpose of our sexualities is solely in child-bearing. Something about the way he said this made me think he actually knows that gay sex is awesome, but that he’s concluded that that kind of liberating pleasure is too scary and therefore must be banned from the public.
I think one aspect of what’s so dangerous about pundit figures like him, who are otherwise comically faithful to white America and hilariously ironic in their hyper-heteronormativity, is that he says nothing about the violence that results from criminalizing and socially alienating queer and trans people. He is patriarchal and paternalistic in such a normalized way. He aligns himself with “family values” while denying the validity of LGBT parenting, saying the “social cost” is too high and can only result in “great suffering,” with no specificity given regarding what that suffering is due to.
A few people challenged him in the Q&A. One person primarily addressed the audience, telling them that trans people are just like you, they’re not scary, they’re cool, and suggested they actually meet and connect with these people that they feel entitled to make decisions for. Another person questioned Knowles’ views on the rest of the LGBT community and asked what place gays have in this new/old America that the right wants. This person also brought up Knowles’ role in a college film where he played a gay man. Another person who went to the mic complicated the idea that transition is mutilation by trolling him and asking if he was circumcised himself. One of the sincere questions had to do with staying strong as a conservative who was surrounded by leftists. He advised not only fierce participation in “the crusade” but also to “live life,” meaning make conservative living look appealing and natural.
The maybe 40 protesters outside, with drums, buckets, and tambourines, chanted “fuck you fascists” and “trans right are human rights” as people left the IMU. Some of the conservatives yelled back “Trump is your president” and “Jesus loves you” to which someone replied, “suck my dick.”
A shorter version of this letter was published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
