A Daily Wire host with a really weird-looking smile became notorious on the conservative circuit when he called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated from public life entirely” at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend. The backlash was obviously swift, and now George Takei is chiming in on the issue.
Knowles said “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.” When Rolling Stone magazine said he was calling for the eradication of trans people in general, Knowles pushed back and said that wasn’t true, and demanded retractions from several publications.
Regardless of intent, his comments have been widely circulated and the above tweet has more than 10 million views alone. Right- wing pundits defending Knowles say he wasn’t calling to kill trans people, only for them to revert to their birth sex. One journalist attempted to make the distinction, saying that while “this was an extremist and highly objectionable thing for Michael Knowles to say” it’s fairly clear what he’s saying.
“That’s a wildly bad-faith interpretation of his already extreme enough on their own merits remarks,” Brad Polumbo said. This is where Star Trek and civil rights activist Takei comes into the picture. Takei made a stark and powerful statement about the parallels between Knowles’ rhetoric and that of Nazi-era Germany.
“The first thing that happened to Jews in Germany was having Judaism eliminated from public discourse and public life. Knowles fully knows what he is calling for, and we should, too.”
Takei is well versed in the way that people can be discriminated against regarding dangerous rhetoric or circumstances. He was famously put in a Japanese internment camp during WWII, when America rounded up the American Japanese people for fear of a revolt by them in America. He wrote a graphic novel about the experience called “They Called Us Enemy.”
We’ll keep you posted on this as it develops.