The University of Buffalo condemned conservative commentator, author, and Daily Wire media host Michael Knowles for over a year on the website for its Department of Media Study apparently based on the false premise that he had called for genocide against transgender people. Knowles says the false claim represents the Left’s attempt to justify political violence against conservatives.
He threatened to sue the university for defamation and the attack promptly vanished from the website.
“After almost 18 months on the homepage of their website, I have been removed,” Knowles told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Thursday.
The University of Buffalo did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
Knowles noted that while he did speak at the University of Buffalo in March 2023, he did not graduate from the school.
“That they would see fit to dedicate room on their homepage to little old me is kind of charming,” he joked. “Nevertheless, it’s not nice to lie about people.”
The University of Buffalo Department of Media Study homepage included this statement directly beneath the introduction to the department:
The faculty of the Media Study department stand in solidarity with the transgender community and others who have been the target of Michael Knowles’ rhetoric. While we are committed to the free and open exchange of ideas, we are also committed to inclusiveness, social justice, and respect for all. There can be no open exchange of ideas without inclusion, justice, and respect. We view Knowles’ public appearance on our campus as contrary to the values and aims of our academic community.
The statement on Knowles disappeared Thursday after The Post Millennial reported the story and Knowles threatened to sue Tuesday.
‘Transgenderism Must Be Eradicated’
The controversy dates back to Knowles’ speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 5, 2023.
“For the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” he declared at CPAC.
Although Knowles called for “transgenderism”—the ideology—not “transgender people” to be eradicated, left-leaning media outlets published stories claiming that he had called for genocide.
“CPAC Speaker Calls for Transgender People to Be ‘Eradicated,’” ran a Rolling Stone headline.
“Michael Knowles Says Transgender Community Must Be ‘Eradicated’ at CPAC,” screamed The Daily Beast.
“CPAC Speaker’s Trans Comments About ‘Eradication’ Sound Downright Genocidal,” the HuffPost headline read.
“Did I sneak in a call for genocide anywhere? No, I didn’t,” Knowles told The Daily Signal on Thursday. “What Rolling Stone and these other outlets had done had transgressed the limits of mere political commentary and entered the territory of defamation.”
“I mentioned this publicly and they did change their headlines,” he added. “They tried to keep a strong face about it, but I think those lawyers knew. They folded like a cheap suit, and it looks like the University of Buffalo did the same thing.”
Knowles spoke to the University of Buffalo’s Young America’s Foundation chapter four days after giving his CPAC speech in 2023. Students protested the speech, repeating accusations that he had called for “genocide.”
In this context, the university’s media department put up its statement condemning Knowles—and kept it on the homepage until this week.
“I was permanently denounced for allegedly inciting genocide in a different speech on this academic department homepage,” Knowles said.
Justification for Political Violence
Knowles isn’t just concerned about his reputation. He warns that false accusations like the one he faced may represent the Left’s attempt to justify political violence against conservatives.
“There’s an irony to it, which is that they accuse us of inciting genocide, but in so doing they establish the justification for political violence against us,” he told The Daily Signal. “Ironically, they are the ones inciting violence.”
Knowles noted that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning nonprofit, keeps a “database of supposed hatemongers.” The SPLC puts mainstream conservative and Christian organizations on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, and that map has inspired an act of terrorism.
Knowles noted that his complete remarks at CPAC show compassion for those who struggle with gender identity.
“Even if one were so illiterate as these liberal journalists, it’s difficult to imagine how one could sincerely interpret my comments to be a call for violence,” he said. “If I’m calling for the good of some person, I’m probably not calling for the death of that person.”
“The Left speaks out of both sides of their mouth,” Knowles added. “Out of one side they say this is the crucial civil rights issue of our generation and out of the other side they say this is a trivial matter, why do you care about this?”
He said the first half of the statement is closer to the truth that “this is an important matter.”
No Neutrality on Transgenderism
“On the issue of transgenderism, one has to pick a side,” Knowles argued. “Either men can become women or they can’t.”
If men can become women, he postulated, it logically follows that even kids should be taught that gender is malleable. The truth must be true for everyone.
“If men can’t become women, as they obviously cannot, then transgenderism is false for everyone, too, and we shouldn’t encourage it because it is contrary to human flourishing,” Knowles said.
Societies can tolerate many things, but must agree on certain foundational truths, he suggested.
“What do we believe a man is? Political societies have to agree at least about the basics,” Knowles insisted. “If we can no longer agree on the very meaning of the word man or woman, then we can’t agree on anything.”
Matters of being—also known as ontology—and matters of how we learn—also known as epistemology—must be established in order to have the fruitful deliberation on which a representative government depends, he argued.
“This is why the Left’s mockery of the notion of truth in recent years—a cynical mockery evocative of Pontius Pilate’s words to our Lord—is so troublesome,” Knowles explained.
(The commentator referenced the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate’s question to Jesus, “What is truth?” In the gospels, Pilate orders the crucifixion of Jesus even after finding no guilt in him.)
“Any body politic, but especially a representative democracy, requires that we persuade one another,” the author added.
Seminaries of Transgenderism
Knowles lamented the decline of traditional Christianity in public life, noting that the rise of transgenderism in universities followed the Left’s push to remove the Bible from public schools.
“In the middle of the 20th century, the Left really attacks Christianity in public life by taking the Bible and prayer out of schools,” he said. “Americans of varied religious views could agree that God exists and the Bible is a good guide to understanding the world.”
“A vacuum was created and nature abhors a vacuum,” Knowles explained. “One view is going to prevail. There is going to be a religious view that prevails. It’s a religious question and we ought not to back away from that.”
“The universities in America were founded as seminaries and they remain seminaries of a different sort,” he noted. “It’s disturbing that the institutions of higher learning in America are enshrining as indisputable a demonstrably false and downright imbecilic view of human nature.”