Ep. 518 - The Least Bad Option
Episode Stats
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Summary
After days of fiery debate, the U.S. Senate passes a $2 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Package. Some are calling it the worst stimulus package in American history. Others are saying it s the best we ve ever had.
Transcript
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The U.S. Senate passes a $2 trillion coronavirus relief package after days of fiery debate.
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We will examine the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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Then more good news on the scientific front of the pandemic, more fury from the mainstream media,
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and a major Me Too allegation against, drumroll please, Sleepy Joe Biden.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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The reason I am is because I was up all night last night with Senator Ted Cruz, who came
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straight from the Capitol to our studio in Washington, D.C.
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He showed up there after midnight East Coast time.
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And that was the moment we even started to work on the podcast because we did an episode
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of Verdict with Ted Cruz for all of the minutiae and details and goings-on of how this thing
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We're going to get to what is in the bill and what it means for the scientific front,
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for the political front, for the economic front, because I think, look, the thing is a huge
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bill, $2 trillion, largest stimulus or relief package, whichever you prefer, that we've ever
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Some people are saying it's the worst abomination that has ever passed in the United States.
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As with any bill like this, there is a lot that's good, there is a lot that's bad, and
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Well, I think the first question you got to ask is why did it take so damn long to pass?
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Okay, we were supposed to get a vote on this coronavirus relief package Saturday or Sunday
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It's now Thursday, and we just got it in the middle of the night last night.
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Nancy Pelosi came in at the last minute and basically said, we'll only pass the coronavirus
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relief package if you also pass the Green New Deal in the coronavirus relief package.
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She tried to use it as an excuse to make airlines lower their emission standards,
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to make corporate boards answer to the government for some intersectional identity boxes.
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You know, it was a really cynical, cheap way to play the whole negotiation.
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Republicans, to their credit, did not play it that way.
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They actually focused everything on the coronavirus.
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Luckily, Nancy Pelosi got absolutely hammered in the press for trying to do this.
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Then the bill was slated for a vote two days ago, but it hit a last minute snag because
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Senator Lindsey Graham, among others, actually including Senator Cruz, pointed out that there
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I don't know if it was put there intentionally.
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It turned out that the bill actually incentivized people not to go back to work.
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If you're a nurse aide making $15 or $16 an hour, you're on the front lines here.
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A lot of doctor's offices are going to have to roll back because elective surgery is no
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longer a source of income for a bunch of doctors.
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So you're going to have all these well-trained nurses that are going to make $24 an hour on
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You're literally incentivizing taking people out of the workforce at a time when we need
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In the bill, the legislation gives an extra $600 per week in unemployment for up to four
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I mean, compared to say, if you just look at Texas, for example, Texas, you can make up
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If you add $600 to that, that's more than 100% raise.
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But then the trouble is, let's say you get paid $15 an hour for your job.
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All of a sudden, you're making $25, maybe $28 an hour for your job.
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You have no reason to go back to work to make the $15 an hour, right?
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It'd be much better for you to stay on unemployment for the four months that you can get it.
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You make significantly more money, but that will drag the economy.
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The whole point of this relief package is to keep the economy going to prevent a collapse.
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So if you have an incentive in there that tells people don't go back to work, you can
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actually make more money sitting on your couch, that's not going to be particularly helpful.
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That's actually going to be very counterproductive.
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Because you've got to remember, we'll see later in the show more evidence of this, the
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Democrats don't want the economy to recover, right?
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An economy that recovers hurts them in November.
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So they're trying to drag this thing out as long as possible.
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All the new scientific studies that have come out and scientific analyses that show that
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coronavirus may in fact be much, much less dire and much less deadly than we previously
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We went through those studies yesterday from Stanford, analysis from Yale, analysis from
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The left doesn't want to report on it because they want the economic crisis to go on.
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So the bad news is the Republicans lost when it came to that unemployment provision.
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But, you know, if you're spending $2 trillion, you want the thing to help the unemployment
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You know, you still want to prepare as though this is a very, very, very serious epidemic.
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You want to prepare for the worst case scenario.
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You just don't want to destroy the economy while you do it.
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So $100 billion to hospitals makes sense to me.
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None of us wants to give credit to airlines, but we do need air travel.
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The airlines are absolutely hemorrhaging money right now.
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It just seems like the sort of thing you have to do.
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It's unfortunate, but you probably have to do it.
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It includes a tax credit for retaining your workforce.
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So businesses, if they don't fire their workforce during the shutdown, they will get a major tax
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What we want to incentivize here is not simply businesses remaining profitable, or if they're
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not going to remain profitable, at least keeping cash.
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What we want to incentivize is them not firing their workforce.
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This is something the Democrats were asking for and Republicans more or less caved.
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Now, there is a federalism argument here, which is that most of the epidemic relief is going
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to come from the states and the local governments.
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So you can empower the states to use that money.
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What are they going to really use the money for?
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If I were writing the bill, that would have been significantly lower.
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I mean, this epidemic is in many ways a national security issue.
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Drop in the bucket when you're talking about $2 trillion.
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I mean, obviously they're getting disrupted because of this total shutdown.
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$24 billion to food stamps and child nutrition.
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However, in the shutdown, one big issue has been that schools very often are providing
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the only nutrition that children are getting per day.
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And parents should be held to account for that.
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And if you can't feed your kid one meal a day or two meals a day, you should not be able
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That's criminal because I think a lot of the time it's, you know, we're not talking about
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Jean Valjean and Les Mis, you know, people living on the street trying to steal a loaf
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Very often it's about poor economic choices and not prioritizing feeding one's children
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over other spending habits and relying on the government to do that for you.
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Nevertheless, you probably had to include it in there.
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And then the most important provision is $500 billion to industries.
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These $500 billion, fortunately, comes in the form of loans.
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Now, if the industries and the businesses meet certain criteria, then they will have those
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Criteria like, for instance, not firing your workforce.
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There are also a lot of shackles put on the businesses.
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They can't, they can't just use this $500 billion loan to line their own pockets.
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I think actually that's the best part of the bill.
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That's the part Republicans were really pushing for and the Democrats were pushing against.
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And then there's probably maybe the most controversial part of the bill, which I'll get to in one
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It's like the cost of an expensive cup of coffee, you know, like one per month.
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You're talking about, what do you need to pay, like around seven bucks a month?
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The most controversial part of this, as far as I'm concerned, is the $1,200 check that's
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If you make more than $100,000 a year, you're not going to get a check.
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And if you make more than $75,000 a year, the check starts to get phased out.
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The reason I'm least jazzed about it is not because people don't need money.
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But it'd be much better for those people to be able to keep their job than to just get
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a one-time $1,200 check from the government, right?
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And so you could have put those resources into making sure that we protect those jobs.
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$1,200 check, by the way, very likely not going to do much to stimulate the economy.
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Um, there's more or less an economic consensus about that.
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And the downside of it is it gets people habituated to this idea of universal basic income, which
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is a horrible, anti-human, very bad, no good, dumb Andrew Yang idea.
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Um, however, it was certainly going to go in there.
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Uh, you know, that was, that was being pushed by Republicans and Democrats and in the grand
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scope of this bill, you know, not, not the biggest issue.
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This is a fundamentally different from TARP or the Obama era stimulus because those stimulus
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They were bailing out companies who in many ways had dug their own grave.
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In this case, people didn't dig their own grave.
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They had, you know, we're, we're just told because of a Chinese epidemic that they couldn't
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If this brings us a step closer to getting out of this China inflicted economic disaster,
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And the thing we're all dealing with, even as we complain about it, is the fact that the
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So it gets us, it's getting us, I think, a step closer to getting out of the economic
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It's also getting us closer to getting out of the China inflicted medical disaster.
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The, you know, the stimulus itself might not be getting us out of that medical disaster,
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but we are, we are apparently getting closer to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
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We noticed this from, you know, major scientific experts.
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We went through some studies yesterday and now Dr. Deborah Birx, who is one of the top
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people on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, is saying that the numbers that we're
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all hearing in the mainstream media are frightening.
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The numbers that have been put out there are actually very frightening to people.
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But I can tell you, if you go back and look at Wuhan and Hubei and all of these provinces,
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when they talk about 60,000 people being infected, even if you said, oh, right, well, there's
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So you get to 600,000 people out of 80 million.
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That is nowhere close to the numbers that you see people putting out there.
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I think on a freely, on a model that you just run full out, you can get to those numbers
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And we know that every American is doing something.
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Even if you don't trust China's numbers, Deborah Birx there is saying, OK, let's say it's
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an order of magnitude more in terms of infections.
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That's still not a huge percentage in that area.
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You know, a lot of the hysteria came from that Imperial College study out of the United
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People concluded in the United States that two million Americans could die.
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But increasingly, the analysis shows that might have been very hyped.
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And what Deborah Birx is saying there is maybe you can get to those numbers on your computer
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models if nobody changes any of their behavior, if nobody even starts washing their hands a
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But everybody has radically changed their behavior.
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So there would seem to be some place between don't even wash your hands and destroy the
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global economy and lock everything down and don't leave your apartment that would be a
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happy medium that would mitigate the risk significantly and also acknowledge the reality of how we all
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However, there is this reaction on the left that hasn't kept up with the science.
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So what the left keeps saying is we need we need to listen to the scientists.
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And yet when you get new analysis out of Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Deborah Birx updating people,
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calling out the mainstream media for hyping this thing.
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When you get all of that new information, the left doesn't change their tune.
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And here is Andrew Cuomo, furious at the president for declaring that he hopes to be done with
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all of this and get the economy going again by Easter because of the science.
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Easter Sunday and you'll have packed churches all over our country.
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I'm sorry for confusing you with your brother, Chris Cuomo, the Fredo of the Cuomo family.
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I'm sorry that I confused the far superior Cuomo damning with faint praise, but still with
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I just recited to you the scientists we've read in the last few days who have stated explicitly
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that fears of coronavirus, the panic of coronavirus is overblown, including a Nobel laureate, including
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people from all those fancy schools with all those fancy degrees and all those fancy professorships.
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You know, those two Stanford scientists we read yesterday said that the mortality rate might
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be orders of magnitude lower than what is being projected and reported in the press.
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But apparently, Dr. Chris Cuomo, Professor Chris Cuomo knows so much more about the science,
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capital S with a trademark over the E than the actual scientists do.
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They always, they invoke science as though it were a deity as they're, they're, they're
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giving homage, they're worshiping the science, but that doesn't have a lot to do with the
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It has a whole lot to do with the kind of invention of science as merely affirming their own prejudiced
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I'm not sure the president knows Easter's theme.
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But assuming he does, why would he invite the opposite of rebirth and renewal?
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Fact, more than 100 Americans died from coronavirus today.
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So with those as the facts, give me one reason it would be safe or smart or effective to reopen
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Fact, he says, 100 people died of coronavirus in one day.
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Another fact, 100 people died in car accidents on the very same day and every single day.
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When you just state these facts completely out of context, they, they don't tell us much
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Chris Cuomo says that the virus is accelerating.
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The big complaint from the left is the testing has not been available.
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But are we sure that the diagnosis increasing is because of the virus itself accelerating?
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I think actually the models we've looked at around the world suggests probably that isn't
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When you see spikes in flu-related, pneumonia-related illnesses and deaths even a couple of months
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ago, do we think that has no relationship to the virus?
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We really think the virus just dropped out of thin air on March 1st or something at the
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Chris Cuomo says that it is a fact that Easter Day will be especially bad for coronavirus.
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That is the prediction of a TV political pundit and the Fredo of the Cuomo family.
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The most troubling aspect of this for me is the left using science, capital S, TM over
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You see this exemplified by a writer named Molly Jong Fast, who I love using her tweets
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and things as examples because she's just so out there.
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I mean, she's out there giving the opinion of the left.
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So she tweets out, OMG, I would kill for a presser with only doctors and scientists.
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She doesn't want Trump or the coronavirus task force to give press conferences, just
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First of all, something tells me she wouldn't actually like a presser with those scientists.
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I don't think she'd like a presser with the Yale scientist, Dr. Katz, who wrote in the
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I don't think she'd want a presser with the Stanford scientists.
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I don't think she'd want a presser with the Oxford scientists, right?
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She only wants a presser with the scientists who she and others on the left have been citing.
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But beyond that, I don't want my policy dictated by scientific tyrants, okay?
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I don't, I didn't, I didn't elect Dr. Fauci, okay?
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I don't want him to have total control over our response to the coronavirus epidemic.
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We have politics in this country so that we can discuss and debate different priorities.
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It's about weighing different priorities, taking into account in our country the opinions
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of the American people, viewing things not just through a lens of completely stopping
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a virus, which is not possible, but also by balancing our liberties, also by balancing
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what is likely to occur, also by balancing the economy.
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The left, you know, scratch out leftist and you get a tyrant underneath.
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But ironically, in this case, the tyrants that they want to put up are increasingly disagreeing
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We've got to go to Trump calling out the fake news in a beautiful way.
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We've got to get to how the coronavirus is a gendered crisis, but not in the way that
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And then we've got to get to Joe Biden's Me Too moment.
00:23:15.220
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It is now transparent that the left wants this crisis to go on regardless of what economists
00:24:27.920
suggest and regardless of what the medical experts suggest.
00:24:32.320
So, the Washington Post just sends out this new piece.
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It's titled, Trump is spreading false hope for a virus cure and that's not the only damage.
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This is an editorial put out by the editorial board, not by scientists, by the editorial
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board, which says that the drug that's now being touted, not just by Trump, but also by
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Andy Cuomo, by a lot of people, hydroxychloroquine has shown promise in terms of mitigating the
00:25:03.860
virus and yet they're saying it's false hope, there's no cure, stop it, don't go away.
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They actually talk about how it's been shown to be somewhat effective and more effective
00:25:14.900
than anything else we've looked at, but they don't want that answer.
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It kind of reminds me how in the New York Times, they ran this op-ed the other day from
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Dr. Katz from Yale saying this is all being overhyped and then the editorial board comes
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out and says, no, no, it's not, panic, be worried, be alarmed.
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So, you've got the scientists saying, not a huge deal.
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Then you've got the journalists who, I use that term loosely, they're just left-wing
00:25:36.720
political operatives out to get Donald Trump and every other Republican.
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They're the ones saying, no, you should panic, no, you should worry.
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He was giving another one of his daily pressers, one of the greatest things to come out of this
00:25:51.400
coronavirus pandemic, and he called them out as fake news.
00:25:55.180
Is this Easter timeline based on your political interests?
00:25:59.860
You tweeted, you said that the media wants the country to remain closed to hurt your office
00:26:05.280
No, no, I think the media, yeah, no, the media would like to see me do poorly in the election.
00:26:09.060
Lawmakers and economists on both sides of the aisle have said that reopening the country
00:26:17.740
I think there are certain people that would like it not to open so quickly.
00:26:21.400
I think there are certain people that would like it to do financially poorly because
00:26:25.340
they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls.
00:26:29.380
And I don't know if that's so, but I do think it's so that a lot of, that there are people
00:26:34.700
in your profession that would like that to happen.
00:26:37.620
I think it's very clear, I think it's very clear that there are people in your profession
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There are people in your profession that write fake news.
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They would love to see me for whatever reason, because we've done one hell of a job.
00:26:56.720
And it's lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem, or you wouldn't
00:27:05.320
Some people in that profession are writing fake news.
00:27:11.560
A great example of this, the Washington Post, I kid you not, ran an article going after a random
00:27:21.780
guy on Twitter for suggesting that maybe we shouldn't panic and maybe we shouldn't destroy
00:27:28.980
Scott McMillan, a 56-year-old lawyer, tweeted that it's more vital to revive the economy than
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to save people who are not productive, like the elderly and infirm.
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The Washington Post is so pissed off that this pandemic is not going to completely destroy
00:27:50.860
the world and we're not going to shut down the global economy for six months, that they
00:27:56.940
This guy, Scott McMillan, had 400 Twitter followers, not 400,000, 400, and then found
00:28:03.640
his parents' phone number and called them to tattletale on their son.
00:28:10.560
The parents told the Washington Post, yeah, maybe we shouldn't destroy the global economy
00:28:14.620
based on these numbers that, you know, some people are going to become ill with the
00:28:19.340
virus because people get ill with viruses all the time.
00:28:22.060
You don't freak out about the other viruses, but this one is politically convenient.
00:28:25.640
So anyway, a great example, very embarrassing for the Washington Post, even that they would
00:28:32.800
I mean, you'd think that they would come to their senses and some self-awareness, but
00:28:36.220
self-awareness is just simply not a trait among the left.
00:28:47.400
This is what we're being told by the political left, specifically by an Australian senator,
00:28:57.380
Now, she's right in that there is a gender component to the coronavirus, but it's not exactly
00:29:05.100
Let's not forget that COVID-19 is a gendered crisis.
00:29:08.800
Nurses, nurse aides, teachers, child carers and early childhood educators, aged care workers
00:29:18.980
They are on the front line of this public health crisis and carry a disproportionate risk of
00:29:26.680
Let's also not forget that not all homes are safe places.
00:29:30.680
Quarantine or self-isolation at home will put women and children at risk.
00:29:35.080
Women's advocates and domestic violence experts are warning us that domestic abuse increases
00:29:42.860
And I'm terribly worried that these warnings have not been heeded by this government that
00:29:47.340
has long resisted adequate funding for the needed resources and refugees.
00:29:56.840
The vast majority of coronavirus patients are men.
00:30:00.960
So it's a gendered crisis in that it is affecting men more.
00:30:04.080
But the left can't handle that because men, they're not victims.
00:30:15.700
Purely as a physical illness, the coronavirus appears to affect women less severely.
00:30:19.380
So at least they admit that purely as a viral, medical, physical illness, but as a spiritual
00:30:27.680
In the past few days, the conversation about the pandemic has broadened.
00:30:30.500
Yeah, it's broadened because all your facts are falling apart.
00:30:35.300
The coronavirus smashes up the bargain that so many dual earner couples have made in the
00:30:40.000
We can both work because someone else is looking after our children.
00:30:43.620
Instead, couples will decide which one of them takes the hit.
00:30:48.220
They're saying like, yeah, the promise of the developed world is that none of us has to
00:30:54.800
But now one of us is going to have to take the hit of actually interacting with our child.
00:31:01.800
Shows you how perverse these guys are looking at it.
00:31:04.260
By the way, we're just getting some breaking news.
00:31:08.040
We've been talking about how the scientific hysteria is now breaking down.
00:31:11.700
So much of it was based on the Imperial College study.
00:31:14.040
There is now another expert coming out saying that unlike what the Imperial College study
00:31:20.460
said, that Britain is going to get decimated by this thing, it now seems that Britain does
00:31:25.820
have enough intensive care units for the patients that the Imperial College study, which sparked
00:31:33.820
Does that mean we shouldn't take the virus seriously?
00:31:44.960
But does it mean that the evidence shows we should shut down the global economy?
00:31:50.220
Before we get to Mailbag, I've got to get to one quick story.
00:31:59.440
Joe Biden has a serious Me Too allegation against him.
00:32:02.400
Tara Reade has apparently been trying to tell her story since this altercation in 1993
00:32:10.660
Now, for some reason, we haven't heard about it until right now.
00:32:17.500
And then I handed him the thing and he greeted me.
00:32:23.060
And then we were alone and it was the strangest thing.
00:32:34.620
And I was wearing, like, a skirt and, you know, business skirt.
00:32:45.300
And I remember my legs had been hurting from the marble, you know, of the Capitol.
00:33:05.460
And then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes.
00:33:08.140
And, yeah, and then he went, oh, he went down my skirt, but then up inside it.
00:33:22.300
Whoa, man, that's a whole lot more than shoulder massages.
00:33:25.660
That's much more than we've heard from Biden before.
00:33:28.260
You know, this woman, she came out a little while ago and said that Biden put his hands
00:33:36.280
on her shoulders and ran his fingers up and down her neck.
00:33:39.340
She did that last spring after Lucy Flores, another political opponent of Joe Biden's,
00:33:48.340
I definitely believe that sort of thing happened.
00:33:50.200
But only now we're hearing he, what, he actually just went down and got, like, very aggressive
00:33:58.320
For him saying first, like, as he was doing it, do you want to go somewhere else?
00:34:02.740
And then him saying to me, when I pulled away, he got finished doing what he was doing.
00:34:11.340
And he said, he said, come on, man, I heard you liked me.
00:34:15.480
And it's that phrase stayed with me because I kept thinking what I might have said.
00:34:20.780
And I can't remember exactly if he said I thought or if I heard.
00:34:23.820
But it's like he implied, like, that I had done this.
00:34:28.520
Well, look, the phrase, come on, man, is a classic Bidenism.
00:34:40.200
Not saying it couldn't have happened, but I need more evidence before I'm willing to
00:34:50.460
It's been a really long time and we've never heard anything about this.
00:34:55.080
We've heard that Joe Biden gets creepy with the shoulder massages and the hair smelling,
00:34:58.300
but we've never heard this kind of thing, right?
00:35:02.540
He doesn't have the reputation of Bill Clinton.
00:35:07.680
She came out a year ago and said that he gave her shoulder massages and then that didn't
00:35:16.180
Maybe it happened, but evidence doesn't seem to back that up.
00:35:19.440
And then the other problem is she does seem like a genuine nut.
00:35:25.060
She's since deleted it, but it's been circulating, where she says she left politics because America
00:35:39.820
Quote, I can't understand the xenophobia that's come from my own American government.
00:35:44.980
Quote, President Putin scares the power elite in America because he's a compassionate,
00:35:50.740
Look, whatever you think about Vladimir Putin, compassionate is probably not one of the words
00:36:02.480
Maybe you can say he's a typical Russian leader or he's a strong Russian leader, but I don't
00:36:09.480
President Putin has higher approval ratings in America than the American president.
00:36:14.340
President Putin is beloved by Russia and he's not going anywhere.
00:36:17.080
Okay, so to President Putin, I say, keep your eyes to the beautiful future and maybe just
00:36:27.460
One thing that we know about the girl is she pushes Russian propaganda and loves Vladimir Putin.
00:36:33.860
So just makes me think she's not totally all there with it.
00:36:38.380
We don't, we don't really know anything, anything else about the gal, but from all the
00:36:43.600
evidence we see here, I won't take this claim terribly seriously except for this reason.
00:36:50.920
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
00:36:53.020
Joe Biden during the Brett Kavanaugh thing, by the way, the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh
00:36:56.500
were much less serious and much less credible than the allegations against Joe Biden.
00:37:03.080
All right, at least we know Joe Biden gets creepy with people and massages their shoulders
00:37:06.060
and smells them and stuff. Brett Kavanaugh, no evidence he ever did any of that. During
00:37:09.480
Kavanaugh, Biden says, what should happen is the woman should be given the benefit of the
00:37:13.080
doubt and not be, you know, abused again by the system. I hope that they understand what
00:37:16.940
courage it takes for someone to come forward and relive what they believe happened to them
00:37:20.640
and let them state it, but treat her with respect. Okay, buddy. Well, it looks like we're
00:37:24.720
going to do that to you too, because if we're going to completely destroy due process rights and
00:37:29.040
we're going to allow political adversaries to come and destroy people with uncredible allegations,
00:37:34.700
then what's good for the goose is good for the gander. We will get to the mailbag. We're typically
00:37:38.940
running late. First, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. You know, we launched the
00:37:42.300
All Access show, All Access Live. We're coming to you every day during this quarantine. Be sure to go
00:37:48.880
sign up at dailywire.com slash subscribe. You get so much content. That show is only for All Access
00:37:53.740
members. Right now, we're opening up to all of our members. So head on over there if you're
00:37:57.820
enjoying it. Upgrade your membership. Dailywire.com slash subscribe. We'll be right back.
00:38:13.940
I am going to burn through these questions, because we only have limited time and I want
00:38:18.660
to answer as many as possible. First one from Matt. Dear austere religious podcaster and Lord of
00:38:23.900
Covfefe. Your comment about Italy not having a functioning government since Octavian caused me
00:38:28.600
to reflect on Rome's first emperor. Was Octavian a tyrant or a father to the Romans in the same vein
00:38:35.060
as Washington or Lincoln? Keep up the great work. Came for Ben, stayed for Michael. A great question.
00:38:42.540
Octavian, or Caesar Augustus, is one of the most interesting historical figures that has ever lived.
00:38:50.580
By far the greatest leader of Rome. And now you're asking to compare him to Washington or Lincoln.
00:38:58.540
That's very difficult because Octavian kind of shows us that Rome is moving away from a Republican form
00:39:05.320
of government into an imperial form of government. Whereas Washington or Lincoln were strong advocates
00:39:11.260
of a Republican form of government. So in that way, not similar at all. But Octavian was a really
00:39:17.400
terrific ruler. People talk about the end of the Roman Republic and how everything went downhill.
00:39:21.500
Don't forget you had centuries of peace and prosperity after Rome became an empire. For a
00:39:26.180
while it was pretty good. And then it fell apart. And there's also the interesting historical coincidence
00:39:30.220
with Caesar Augustus or Octavian, which is that he lives a kind of parallel life to Christ at the time
00:39:36.700
of Christ. So Christ is called the Prince of Peace, right? His father is an adopted father,
00:39:43.580
or Joseph, because his true father is God. He's called the son of God. He institutes peace on earth.
00:39:51.980
Caesar Augustus, also an adopted child, is called the son of the divine because they viewed Caesar Augustus
00:39:59.620
as, in a way, divine. He also instituted an era of peace called the Pax Romana. And it happened at the
00:40:06.480
same time. You can call that coincidence. I think probably it's a little closer to Providence.
00:40:10.160
From Annie, quick question. On the lockdowns episode you did with Jeremy, you mentioned your
00:40:14.900
go-to drink when you're sick is a hot toddy. You know it. Do you have a favorite recipe you can
00:40:19.640
share? I did a search and discovered there are many variations of what would seem to be a simple
00:40:23.920
classic concoction. Thanks in advance. Yes, my recipe is very simple, very basic. Hot water,
00:40:31.020
lemon, honey, Weller's bourbon. Okay, that's it. Some people put tea. Some people use other kind
00:40:42.520
of whiskeys. I like Weller and I like my lemon, which is good. That's what, you know, those two
00:40:46.880
things kill the disease and hot water and honey. That's it. That's all you want. From Nick,
00:40:51.620
dear Michael, if you were only allowed one item from the store before being locked in under house
00:40:58.120
arrest, what one item would you grab? Thanks. Eggs. Duh. You don't really need toilet paper
00:41:05.900
for like, you don't need a lifetime supply of toilet paper. You know, if you're stuck at home,
00:41:12.320
maybe you've got a really nice palatial home and you've got a bidet. You know, you've got a shower,
00:41:16.700
you've got other pieces of paper. You'll be fine without that. Do you need water? No, you've got a
00:41:20.460
sink. Do you need booze? Well, hopefully you're stocked up already. Same thing with stogies.
00:41:24.980
What you do need though is eggs because with eggs, you can make breakfast, obviously.
00:41:29.460
You can make fresh pasta. You can make bread. Everybody's already got flour and stuff in
00:41:34.380
their home. So you just, what you need is the eggs. That's what people should be buying the
00:41:38.580
stores out of. From Vanessa, dear Michael, where the hell is the UN? All we hear is how important it is
00:41:45.720
to have a strong United Nations. But when it comes time to do anything like that, it seems like the USA
00:41:49.980
is the only one to bear the burden. Have you done any investigation into where the UN is now? Like,
00:41:57.820
what are they doing? And should the establishment continue? Thanks.
00:42:01.900
Where is the UN? The simple answer to that question is it's on the future site of the Trump
00:42:06.640
luxury condominiums on the east side of New York overlooking the East River. Yeah, the United
00:42:11.980
Nations is a almost entirely useless institution. What you've got to remember is, as John Bolton famously
00:42:18.200
said, there is no such thing as the United Nations. There is the interest of the United States and
00:42:25.100
there is the international community. Sometimes those two things intersect, in which case the
00:42:31.980
United Nations can be a fine vessel to mediate that. But when those things don't intersect,
00:42:38.860
it doesn't matter. I mean, the UN just doesn't do anything. Very often what it does is give a
00:42:43.820
platform for the worst people on earth to come and lecture us about how awful we are. And that's
00:42:47.960
ridiculous. And probably we shouldn't pay for that anymore. In so much as the UN allows us to build
00:42:55.280
some consensus to do what we were already going to do anyway, I suppose that's fine. But that sure is
00:43:00.720
an expensive way to do it. From Tyler, to the excellent Michael Knowles, the man with the greatest
00:43:05.900
hair and my spirit animal. I am getting married, hopefully without delays from Wuflu, in May and
00:43:11.480
my fiance is Catholic and I'm Methodist. After attending multiple masses, pre-Cana classes and
00:43:16.220
listening to your show, I felt more of a connection with the Catholic religion. My question is, what is
00:43:21.000
the process to convert and how long is this process? Thank you for all that you do. Well, Tyler,
00:43:26.800
congratulations. I'm very pleased to hear that you're getting married and that you're interested in
00:43:34.040
coming back to the church and swimming across the Tiber, as we say. The process is actually very
00:43:40.040
straightforward. You can enlist in something called RCIA classes. This is the rite of Christian
00:43:47.020
initiation and you'll learn everything that you need to learn. You know, it's not just like you're
00:43:52.580
jumping in without any knowledge of what it is. Really great classes. I've got friends of mine who
00:43:57.440
have converted from Judaism, taken the RCIA classes, who've converted from evangelical Christianity or
00:44:03.620
other Protestant groups. They've all gotten a lot. Even if you already know a ton about Christianity,
00:44:08.120
which if you're interested like this, you probably do, still really great refresher and might show
00:44:13.660
you things you haven't heard before. So get into RCIA. There are several steps in the process and then
00:44:18.420
you can become a full-on Catholic by next Easter or maybe even sooner, depending on your diocese.
00:44:26.040
From Claire, Michael, how do you define if an extremist group or regime is right-wing or left-wing?
00:44:31.720
It seems that most belief systems this extreme don't even remotely resemble either mainstream
00:44:36.440
view, so I never know how it is decided whether a group is right-wing or left-wing. Thanks. Well,
00:44:42.220
when you get to the fringes and the extremes, it does get a little bit complicated. I mean,
00:44:46.480
the classic example of this is the Nazis. Are the Nazis right-wing? In a way, they are. You know,
00:44:52.820
some conservatives want to say they have nothing to do with the right-wing. No, they do have something
00:44:56.140
to do with the right-wing. They are a little more interested in history. They're a little more
00:45:00.240
interested in tradition. They're a little more interested in, I don't know, monarchy or a kind
00:45:08.480
of like perverted version of monarchy, which tends to be historically more of a right-wing
00:45:13.520
preference. So in that way, I guess they're right-wing. They're also very left-wing in the sense that
00:45:19.320
Nazism, National Socialism, well, for one, is a form of socialism, but it's also very modernist. I mean,
00:45:27.380
it was very secular. It was actually very anti-Christian, anti-religious. All of that is
00:45:32.960
very left-wing. In many ways, it was pagan. Paganism was adopted by many members, high-ranking
00:45:39.440
Nazis. So in that way, it's very left-wing. It's very hard to classify it. The trouble is that even
00:45:45.720
our concept of right and left comes from the French Revolution. People who sat on the right side were
00:45:51.580
royalists, more favorable toward the established order, and people who were on the left side were
00:45:57.780
more radical. And so that moment, the French Revolution was such a radical moment in many
00:46:02.140
ways, the beginning of a modern era, doesn't totally correspond to all of those modern movements.
00:46:08.040
I'm a conservative, but I despise so much of political modernism that, you know, to put it into
00:46:15.700
a modernist framework would be so antithetical to anything that I like. So you've got to speak about
00:46:20.380
it precisely. To say it's totally left-wing or totally right-wing very often misses the point.
00:46:25.960
All right, we've got so many more questions, but we just don't have time. I'm sorry. I've tried to
00:46:31.840
bring you everything that I possibly can because so much is happening in our politics, in our biology,
00:46:38.420
in our medical field, and in our economy. So that's the update for now. Of course, this is changing by
00:46:43.880
the moment. So perhaps on Monday, everything will be completely different again, and we will get into it
00:46:48.760
then. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:46:51.780
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
00:47:02.860
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends
00:47:07.240
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00:47:13.240
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show,
00:47:17.880
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00:47:20.900
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies and directed by Mike Joyner.
00:47:25.760
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00:47:31.460
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Ryan Love. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
00:47:50.820
If you prefer facts over feelings, aren't offended by the brutal truth, and you can still laugh at the
00:47:55.240
insanity filling our national news cycle, well, tune in to The Ben Shapiro Show. We'll get a whole lot