Michael Knowles shared a message of what the new America First coalition must agree on at AmericaFest 2024, hosted by Turning Point USA. He noted the incredible crowd at the event — about 20,000 — and said there was a three-word reason for the largest crowd in history of the event.
“Because we won,” he said. “And we didn’t just like, win, you know, we won everything. We won the presidency of course with the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. We won the House. We won the Senate. We already have the Supreme Court.”
Republicans won by winning “huge swaths” of voter groups that typically vote for Democrats, he added.
“We won people that they say we can’t win,” he said. “The Left wants to pretend that Republicans only ever get votes from white men. And we love white men. They’re great. We’re great. But what about the other groups? We also won almost half of Hispanics. We also won 1-in-5 black guys. We also won married women. We also won, I think it was, what, most women 45 and older. We won 45 percent of women under 45. We won 40 percent of women under the age of 30. That is the most Kamala group. The Trump campaign was so strong in 2024 it won votes from Democrat presidential candidates. Just consider this crazy fact – plural, candidates. When you add up all of the Democrats in 2020 and 2024 who ran in the presidential primaries and I’m even counting the minor candidates…when you add them all up, Trump won 17 percent of Democrat presidential candidates. That’s a win.”
Knowles joked that Joe and Jill Biden likely voted for Trump also.
Why did Republicans win?
“Because we appealed to common sense,” he said. “This is in part why the Democrats’ embrace of transgender ideology has been so disastrous for them. It’s not just that transgenderism endangers children, though it does. It’s not just that transgenderism infringes on the legitimate rights of women to have their own spaces and associations, although it does. It’s that transgenderism is manifestly absurd and most everyone knows it.”
When Democrats insist a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man, voters have a difficult time trusting their judgment.
“If a politician cannot tell the difference between a man and a woman, that politician probably doesn’t know much about anything at all,” he said.
That issue has led to a lot of new people moving to the Right. And while that shift is mostly a good thing, Knowles noted there is a risk when a political party becomes a “big tent.”
“The risk is that newcomers will change us more than we change them. That we’ll lose our identity,” Knowles said.
He said it is important to clear things up as the new coalition begins to move forward.
First, we believe in God, he said.
“Even beyond revelation and private experience, we believe in God because His existence can be known with certainty from the created world by human reason,” Knowles said. “Just as a cause can be known from an effect. Just as Shakespeare can be known from Hamlet. Just as a mover can be known from the thing moved. Belief in God’s existence is not a matter of subjective opinion any more than belief in calculus is a matter of subjective opinion.”
The men who built America – the people on the Mayflower, the Founding Fathers, the framers of the Constitution – all understood that God exists.
“That fact constitutes the basis of our whole country,” Knowles said. “Thomas Jefferson grounded the Declaration of Independence in that fact. John Adams declared Christian morality to be the principle on which independence was won. Our first national holiday was a day of Thanksgiving to God. In God, We Trust is on our money and in our national anthem. More than anything else, America is predicated upon a certain conviction in the existence and providence of God.”
This matters in politics because by knowing something about God, we can know something about ourselves.
“Namely that we are made in the image of God,” he said. “Once you know God, now we can know something about ourselves.”
Humans possess intellect and will, while lesser animals have just instinct and appetite.
“We’re different. We can reason. We can know something about the truth. We can know something about justice and be held to account by judges when we commit injustice,” Knowles said.
That same will and intellect can be abused, however. Appetites can run away with our reason, he added.
“Pretty soon we can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman,” he said. “The Founding Fathers warned us about this explicitly. They warned that if we abused our liberty to licentiousness, that we would lose the whole country. Which is why they instituted laws to discipline our appetites in accordance with reason. Because politics can be downstream of culture, but the law is also a teacher, and there is no neat way to separate politics and culture. Which is why we cannot help but legislate morality.”
The libs and the squishes often say we can’t legislate morality, but Knowles said it’s almost always people doing something immoral who make that claim.
“It’s kind of funny how that works,” he said. “The phrase itself doesn’t make any sense. All laws legislate morality. All laws delineate between right and wrong. They are enforced by a system of justice. Not only can we legislate morality, we have to legislate morality because that’s the only way to legislate.”
The question is who decides what is right and wrong.
“We don’t decide what’s right and wrong, we perceive what’s right and wrong using our reason and then we enact laws based on our conclusions using our will,” he said.
Knowles said the most basic principle to determine what laws should be passed is to do good and avoid evil. And we can know what is good and what is evil through the use of reason grounded in truth.
“Good law is necessarily grounded in truth,” he said. “Laws which insist that there is no difference between a man and a woman – be it in bathrooms, be it on sports teams, be it in marriage – are necessarily bad law.”
Knowles said laws that demand we not enforce the law, violate the principle of non-contradiction, claim babies aren’t babies – are all bad law, not because they violate what one believes, but because they contradict the truth and law is in ordinance of reason for the common good.
“Goodness and truth go together,” Knowles said. “We describe our country at its best as a nation of laws and the land of the free. Law and freedom are not in opposition. Law and freedom are mutually dependent. Good law helps us to be free because the truth helps us free.”
The fundamental political unit isn’t the individual, Knowles said, it is the family.
“That is why the Left spends most of its energy, time and money attacking the family,” he said. “They’re trying to redefine the family as if that were possible. Convincing people to kill the fruit of the family through abortion. Discouraging people in the names of careers or independence or climate change from starting families in the first time. Because family is what politics boils down to.
“If you want to be on the team, that’s what we believe. There are lots of other things you might believe too, but those are the basics. Those are the non-negotiables. If you do not believe those basic facts about God, law, man and politics, not only does conservatism not make any sense, America doesn’t make any sense. Really nothing makes much of any sense. That is the basic stuff that you have to believe.”
However, ideas are not enough. Living a life disconnected from those ideas has been a waste of time. Learning political truth and not doing anything about it is a mistake.
“In politics, ideas are worthless if you don’t put them into action,” Knowles said. “I am sick of hearing about the death of the West from people who refuse to get married and have children. We have had a below-replacement birth rate for 50 years. You want to whine about the urgent need to have kids while you’re filling up your shopping cart with another box of condoms? Save it. I don’t want to hear it. Keep your mouth shut. You obviously don’t mean it. I’m sick. I am sick of hearing about the erosion of morality from people whose favorite hobbies involve doing drugs and watching porn. I don’t want to hear it.”
Those people aren’t wrong about public morality, they’re right, but people must be willing to actually try to do something about it.
We have hope now, Knowles said. People imitate each other’s behaviors and desires, he said.
“Human beings follow the leader and a little courage goes a long way,” he said. “When a guy stands up against a corrupt political establishment, when he stands up against their lies, and their lawsuits and their bullets, people take notice and they start to stand up too. They become a little more confident in their convictions. They become a little more willing to act on their convictions. They set a better example and others start to follow them. Enough good examples and you have a good community. Enough good communities and you have a good country.
“We have been given an opportunity we do not deserve. A providential jerk of a man’s head at precisely the right angle at precisely the right time in a field in Pennsylvania, gave us the political opportunity that we have right now. When that man stood up bloodied but alive, he demonstrated courage and conviction. If we follow suit, we will have a great country again.”
