BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): Michael, why is this profile controversy -- controversial in your mind?
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST, THE MICHAEL KNOWLES SHOW): I can't quite figure it out. I think that the controversy actually justifies the article, doesn't it? It's a very brave piece. And it's brave because in this moment, the left has decided that it hates young white men. In this era of identity politics and intersectionality, young white men are the one group that the culture permits, and actually encourages people, to detest, to condemn. We saw this with those Covington [Catholic High School] boys waiting for their school bus in Washington, D.C. After it turned out that the kids had done nothing wrong, everyone had jumped to condemn them, the senior culture writer at BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen, came out and said, “Regardless of the video, you should understand why that face caused a visceral reaction in so many.” That face, the face of a young white teen boy.
They have driven themselves on the left so crazy with the politics of victimhood, the identity politics of race and sex, that they have convinced themselves that there is this one evil category of person. The Yale Daily News, the student newspaper the other day just ran a piece about how all white, brown haired young men are evil. This is the consequence, the toxic consequence of leftist identity politics. And I give Esquire a lot of credit for running this timely piece.
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): Well, Michael, you read it and it is a sympathetic – you know exactly what this kid is going through in his life and talks about his mom andeverything else. But some have suggested it is tone deaf to be putting him on the cover of Esquire during Black History Month.
KNOWLES: Well, they don't yet have a middle class teen white boy month. So I don't know what month would be suitable for them to run it. It's not as though Esquire hasn't run covers of Black men. They've had two Black men, at least, on the cover in the last year, Chadwick Boseman and Donald Glover. They had at least another two Black men the year before, Idris Elba and Pharrell. I think that really what has happened here is the left has found a conclusion and now they are searching for an argument. The conclusion being, we should never have any sympathy for these awful oppressors, the young white men. And the argument now saying that February is an inappropriate month for that. But if they had done it next month they would have called that one inappropriate too. The problem for the left is the subject, not the timing.
