Michael Knowles (b. 1990)
American conservative podcaster and Daily Wire host; Yale undergraduate (2012); Catholic; host of The Michael Knowles Show; the wiki’s named contemporary popular-conservative voice expressing positive view of Franco (“given the circumstances… Franco was pretty good,” 2023).
Why He Matters Here
Per Iberian Vistas, Knowles is one of the contemporary popular-conservative voices that has — without academic qualification or apologetic hedging — defended Franco on a major commercial conservative platform. The wiki’s reading: Knowles’s Franco defense is structurally similar to Pearce’s but reaches a substantially larger and younger audience via Daily Wire. The presence of Franco apologetics on Daily Wire (a flagship mainstream-conservative outlet rather than a First Things-style intellectual publication) is the wiki’s marker that the Iberian revival is not confined to elite intellectual venues.
Knowles is also relevant for the wiki’s Christian Nationalism track. His March 2023 CPAC speech declaring that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” was the cleanest single statement in mainstream-conservative venue of the eliminationist register the wiki tracks under Christian Nationalism.
Cross-References
Stub.