Ep. 583 - Science Strikes Out
Episode Stats
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Summary
The accolades keep pouring in for Dr. Francis Fauci, the man who discovered the cause of the coronavirus that's killing senior citizens across the country. Michael Knowles and Alex Blumberg take a look at the science behind it.
Transcript
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The accolades keep pouring in for Dr. Fauci. Oh, our beloved, exalted ruler, Dr. Fauci.
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Not sure if you subscribe to InStyle magazine, perhaps not. But if you haven't, then you haven't
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seen Dr. Fauci's beautiful spread where he's sitting by his pool. He's got Oxford shoes on
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for some reason, kind of dad sunglasses, just sitting there looking cool, looking in style.
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It's called the good doctor. Dr. Fauci says this, I kid you not, this is the headline. Dr. Fauci says
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with all due modesty, I think I'm pretty effective. Pretty effective. 120 some odd days
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after we were told 15 days to slow the spread. Well, don't worry if you miss the InStyle cover
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because you can watch opening day of the Nats. That's right. The Washington Nationals are going
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to have Dr. Fauci throw out their first pitch. Oh, isn't that so wonderful? That's after their
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wonderful World Series win, they are going to honor Dr. Fauci. This, you know, to me, this doesn't seem
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like how we're supposed to treat scientists. This seems to me like how we treat celebrities. This
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seems to me like how we treat politicians. But this is not normally how we treat scientists. That's
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because science has strongly overstepped its bounds. Science has failed. And in the face of
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the failure, I don't know how you look at this coronavirus situation as anything other than an
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absolute failure. You could look at it as a little bit of a political attack as well. But in the face
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of all that, we give our honors to Dr. Fauci. We will take a look at the real story. I'm Michael
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Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Dr. Fauci. Gosh, I can't wait till I get my InStyle
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magazine cover. I don't know if I'm ever going to get that. I try to be stylish, but they don't,
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I don't know. They don't, I guess I need to, I need to screw up a national epidemic, a global pandemic.
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slash Knowles. So Dr. Fauci has this cover and he says, in all modesty, I feel like I've been pretty
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effective. I guess he, he has been effective in the sense that his constant urging has forced America
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to shut down, even though his predictions has been, have been totally wrong. And his guidance,
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like when he told us not to wear the masks and now he says we have to wear the masks,
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has been extraordinarily contradictory, but it's been effective in that we really are,
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we're locking down again, right? Dr. Fauci took this a step even further into the land of the absurd
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when he went on PBS NewsHour recently. And when he was asked to kind of compare how various states
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have reacted to the coronavirus, he decided to tell us that the state that has handled this thing the
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worst has actually done it the best. We have a problem. We need to admit it and own it,
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but we've got to do the things that are very clear that we need to do to turn this around.
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Remembering we can do it. We know that when you do it properly, you bring down those cases.
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We've done it. We've done it in New York. New York got hit worse than any place in the world
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and they did it correctly. Correctly, I assume means they did it by sending very sick people
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to nursing homes and killing all the senior citizens. That's, I guess that's correct.
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It's only correct depending on what the question is, I suppose, what you're trying to do. If you're
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trying to kill all the old people, then that would be the correct solution. If you're not trying to
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kill all the old people, then you probably shouldn't do what New York did. I also love
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this logic here, which is we know for a fact New York got, got hit the worst, right? But the line
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between an event that happened to New York, that New York had no control over and New York's
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participation in that event seems to be a little blurry here for Dr. Fauci. It may be the case that
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New York, for whatever reason, would always have gotten hit worse than any other place,
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but couldn't New York have been prepared on the ventilators? They weren't. Couldn't New York
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have then, when they ordered more ventilators, gotten the number they needed, right? They didn't.
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They vastly overestimated how many they needed. Couldn't New York have gotten its estimates on
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who needed the hospitals correct, rather than set up an emergency hospital at the Javits Center they
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didn't need and call in the federal ship that they didn't need? Couldn't New York have not sent sick
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people to nursing homes? Yeah, I think they could have done that. Couldn't New York have not had its
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politicians, encouraged people to go to the Chinese New Year parades at the outbreak of the virus? Yeah,
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they could have done. New York did everything wrong. The Democratic politicians in New York did
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everything wrong. And this guy, freaking Dr. Fauci, who also got everything wrong, this guy has the
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audacity to come out and say that they got everything right. We should follow them.
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I have to tell you, I've tried to be nice and circumspect about Dr. Fauci. He's got a hard job.
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I'm kind of done with Fauci. I think we've had enough Fauci. Fauci got us to this point,
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which is 120 days after we were told this thing would be over, 15 days to slow the spread. Fauci got
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us to this point where he's given us contradictory guidance on what we are now told is essential,
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an essential element of, of preventing the spread, namely the face masks. Fauci has gotten us to hear,
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which is a chaos and rancor and economic collapse and vastly overblowing the, the numbers that he was
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shooting for. Maybe we try someone else. Is Dr. Fauci the only public health official in America?
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What happened to Dr. Birx, Dr. Scarfe, bring her back or anybody else? I think we've had enough,
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Dr. Fauci. You know, the president was asked in that Chris Wallace interview said, Mr. President,
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why are you criticizing Fauci? And he said, Oh no, we're not doing that. I mean, he was wrong about
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everything, but we're not doing that. So I think it's about time to lean into those instincts as
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well. There's, there are a lot of shenanigans going on with this virus. I mentioned on the show
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the other day, or I rather, I read a question that someone said they, they went to a medical center to
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get tested for the virus. The line was too long. So they left early and they never got tested.
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And they got a phone call and said they tested positive. And they said that this happened to
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a friend of theirs as well. So I said, look, I don't know anything about this. It's just a
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personal anecdote. Then there was that story out of Texas where this apparently happened to thousands
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of people and the government has now gotten involved because it seems so credible. Well,
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I spoke to a friend of mine last night here in LA, same story, different cities, same story.
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She went to get tested for coronavirus. The line was like two hours or something. So she signed in,
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but she did not get tested and she got a call that she tested positive.
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That's just one more anecdote, but it seems like these anecdotes are starting to add up.
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What is this? Is this a system of perverse incentives here? Is this just sheer incompetence?
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Is this something else? I don't know, but there are certainly lots of shenanigans going on
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with our response here. They've gotten it all wrong. One aspect they've gotten wrong seems so
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obvious. It's just common sense from the beginning. And yet from our public health officials, you could
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never expect common sense, which is that when you lock very old people up and keep them alone and away
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from their loved ones for months and months at a time, it doesn't go well for them. It's not good
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for their health. There's a study that's out now, uh, preliminary results showing that, uh, since
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April, 85% of older Americans say they're socializing less often or rarely or never. Not surprising. We
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told older people not to leave their homes. 88% said they were not involved in a community
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and 41% reported worsening loneliness. This is according to Dr. Carla Perezinotto. What a great,
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my great last Italian last name, a university of California, San Francisco professor and geriatrician.
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Uh, she said this in Senate testimony. We also know from these scientists, maybe not the other
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scientists that living alone without social interaction, uh, is implicated in higher rates of
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heart disease, worsening dementia, Alzheimer's, and death shortens people's lives. I got, I got a,
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I was speaking to my grandmother who has been locked up alone, has not been allowed outside,
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you know, does, doesn't go anywhere. Uh, a couple of weeks ago when church reopened and she said,
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I don't know. I'm very afraid to go to church, but I really, really want to go to church. And it's
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the only place I see people. And I made me think about this question. What should we tell
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our loved ones who were a little older to do? If, if, if this is actually going to drag on for a year,
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as some public health officials have suggested, or 18 months or something,
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in some cases for older Americans, you're talking about the last few years of their lives.
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Are we really going to tell them for this last period of their lives, don't go out of your home,
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don't see anybody, don't see your loved ones. I don't think so. I think people should take
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precautions, be responsible, wash your hands, even wear the stupid mask, whatever,
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be responsible about it. But I don't think we should condemn older Americans to living
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the rest of their lives in isolation away from anyone that means anything to them.
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I don't think so. I don't think FaceTime is enough. Not that most senior citizens
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use FaceTime all the time either. These questions are not questions for science.
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There's no scientific answer for whether you should allow grandma to come see people
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in the last years of her life. That's a political question. That's an ethical question.
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That's a personal question for your family. It's many things, but it's not a scientific question.
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We talked on the show yesterday about how what the left has done is take all of the political
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questions that we debate in our free society and then pretend that there is a scientific answer for
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them so that they can completely cut off debate. This has been the leftist game since Karl Marx.
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Pretend that politics is actually science. Politics, which involves disagreement and persuasion,
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is actually science, which does not, right? Science is set. There's a consensus, no questioning.
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And then apply that science to history and say there is a science of history and it's always
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progressing toward the leftist utopia. And if you stand in the way of that, not only are you foolish
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because history will march on forever, inevitably, but you're also evil because you're standing in
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the way of progress. That's the leftist game. We got to shatter that. We got to stop that.
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I joked on my show a few weeks ago. I said, we have to ban the word science from public debate.
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I'm only half kidding. We should use the word science as it pertains to science, maybe,
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even though even that's kind of silly because the word science refers to all knowledge. It comes from
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the Latin word for knowledge. So the idea that now we've truncated an all of knowledge into this tiny
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little sliver of material inquiry is a little silly to me as well. But what we certainly should not do
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is use the word science as a stand-in for politics because we've got to debate difficult questions
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where there sometimes aren't clear answers, where we have to weigh risks and offset certain goods with
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other goods and deal in this sort of finite political reality. Another great example of this in
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Kentucky. A Kentucky couple was just fitted out with ankle monitors by the local authorities
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because they refused to sign a public health declaration on the coronavirus.
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So now they're essentially under house arrest and they were wearing ankle monitors like
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prisoners. They were fitted with this by the Hardin County Health Department because the wife
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tested positive for coronavirus and she was willing to be very responsible with how to,
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even though it's got a, what is it, a 99.7% recovery rate. She was going to be very responsible and not
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leave the house and quarantine. She's a young woman, so she's not really at great risk here. But she
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refused to sign one self-quarantine document which said that she would not get in an ambulance without
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getting permission from the public health authorities. And her reasoning made perfect sense. She said,
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you know, if I'm having a heart attack or something, I'm not going to ring up the public health authorities
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and get a permission slip that I'm allowed to go in an ambulance before I do it. I'm just going to go
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in an ambulance. So she wasn't going to sign that. And so the authorities slapped her with an ankle
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monitor. It's not a scientific question. It's a political question. Do we want to live in that sort
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of police state? Maybe some people do. But if you do, have the honest debate. Don't hide behind
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this facade of science with a capital S and a trademark over the E led by that wonderful
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disinterested scientist who's smiling at you by his pool on the cover of InStyle and throwing out
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the first pitch at the Nats opening day. These are the stakes of politics right now. The left is
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actually, it's not even like one issue or another issue where they disagree with you on this issue.
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It's that they want to take politics away from you. They don't want you to participate in politics.
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They want not just to silence you in the public arena. They want to silence you, you know, in the
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way that we debate these issues, they want to silence you in any way contributing to our political
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decision-making. And in the face of that, some worse than useless squish Republicans are siding with
00:14:48.100
the Democrats. We'll get to one very prominent one in just one moment. First though, I got to thank
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today. That is ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. The stakes are very high. You always hear that
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this election is the most important election of our lifetimes, and then you get the next election.
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In a sense, the people who tell you that are right because one election leads to the next election,
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leads to the next election. So if things are getting worse and worse and worse, then every
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election is the most important election in your lifetime. This one, though, I think is a little
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different in that roving gangs of anarchists are actually burning the country down all around us.
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So that would say they're tearing down George Washington. You know, that would seem to be
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important. And then most distressingly, they are taking politics away from all of us and shutting us
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up on social media and shutting us up in the public square and shutting us up as a matter of public policy.
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And in that arena, squishy, worse than useless Republicans like John Kasich are siding with the
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Democrats. John Kasich, his father's a mailman. Did you know that? Seriously, you might not have
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heard that if you had your ears plugged up for the entire 2016 presidential campaign. John Kasich,
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whose father's a mailman, who lost Donald Trump, who was governor of Ohio, is now effectively a
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Democrat. He is going to speak at the DNC in support of Joe Biden next month. There's a funny thing about
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John Kasich, which is that John Kasich, perhaps more than any other Republican, is responsible for
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Donald Trump winning that nomination. When it was clear that John Kasich could not win the presidential
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race, when the race was coming down to President Trump and a couple other people, John Kasich refused to
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get out. More or less cemented Trump's victory. Why did he do it? We all assumed that he had made a deal
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with Trump to be vice president or cabinet secretary or something, but he didn't. He came out and
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excoriated Trump afterward, but he stayed in anyway, presumably because it was all about him. It was all
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about his image. It was all about him getting plaudits. It was all about him getting nice articles in the
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New York Times. And that's what's happening again. These guys, I suppose in a way we should be thankful
00:18:22.660
that they're exposing themselves now because there are a lot of people on the Republican side who pretend
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to be true believers, who pretend that things really are pretty bad for our culture and for our country, who
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pretend to stand strong for solutions to fix our country, sometimes at personal cost. And then sometimes it
00:18:43.420
gets too real when they are on the verge of victory. When we are on the verge of talking about political
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issues that actually matter, that have not been spoken about by either party or have not been
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seriously dealt with at least. When we're on the verge of actually doing something, taking on the
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enormous risk of winning, they wilt. They fall away. They say, we can't actually do that. They'll talk a
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really good game. Look, a lot of us were a little nervous about Donald Trump in 2016, particularly because
00:19:10.280
some people thought he was a bit liberal. And so they'll say, Hillary is the worst person ever.
00:19:14.680
She's terrible. She's going to run our country off a cliff. She's going to take our second amendment
00:19:17.220
rights. She's going to take our first amendment rights. She hates the country. She's, oh, but I
00:19:22.000
can't vote for Donald Trump. Oh my God, he might actually win. Oh, no, we can't do that. I'll vote for
00:19:26.440
her instead. The thing that they said was so terrible and awful turns out to be perfectly fine when it's
00:19:34.380
actually threatened. They'd rather play their roles as the court jesters in the kingdom of liberalism
00:19:40.580
than actually win. That's John Kasich, totally useless Republican. No one needs to pay any
00:19:46.280
attention to him. There's another group of people doing this called the Lincoln Project. And the
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Lincoln Project is even more ridiculous and self-serving and unprincipled than John Kasich.
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So funny, some of these never Trump Republicans, the five remaining people on earth who are never
00:20:02.580
Trump Republicans. They say that they're principled. They seem not to have very many
00:20:07.280
principles. All the principles that John Kasich said he was fighting for in his entire political
00:20:11.400
career until 2016, he threw them out the window to get nice reviews in the New York Times.
00:20:15.720
Same thing with these guys, the Lincoln Project. You might've seen it on Twitter,
00:20:19.640
maybe on TV if you watch left-wing news channels. It's this group that pretends to be principled
00:20:24.600
Republicans. They say that they are persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans,
00:20:28.620
and Republican-leaning independents in swing states. Actually, though, they're not really
00:20:32.580
doing that. There's a great expose of them in National Review right now. They are a bunch of
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unemployable political consultants from the Republican and sometimes Democratic side who
00:20:41.920
can't get any jobs now because Trump booted them out of their sinecures. And so they are raising money
00:20:47.240
exclusively from leftists to do what? To kick Trump out of office? No, to pay themselves.
00:20:56.220
I know some of these people. They spout these Democratic talking points. They'll say Donald
00:21:05.140
Trump is a Russian stooge, things like that, which is very funny because one of the founders of the
00:21:09.820
Lincoln Project, by the way, is actually a paid agent of Russia. He's a registered lobbyist for
00:21:14.780
Russia. Shows you the kind of hypocrisy here. But what they do broadly is they raise money from
00:21:20.800
Democrats to fight Trump as Republicans, and then they pay themselves, they pay their own political
00:21:27.840
consulting companies a lot of money. Listen to some of these companies. Summit Strategic Communications,
00:21:34.200
that's run by the Lincoln Project treasurer, Reed Galen. TUSK Digital, Tusk Digital, run by former
00:21:42.360
Lincoln Project advisor, Ron Steslau. As of July 13th, the Lincoln Project paid at least $5.6 million
00:21:50.880
to those two companies. $5.6 million. They've raised something, I think like $20 million so far,
00:21:58.120
and they just pay their own political consulting companies. They did spend $1.67 million on ads
00:22:03.460
across Facebook and Instagram, but those ads are just targeting leftist donors to pay them more money
00:22:07.880
to pay themselves. They have aired some TV ads. Do you know where they air TV ads? This is a group
00:22:12.560
ostensibly trying to convince conservative voters not to vote for Trump. They aired the TV ads on
00:22:17.260
Morning Joe. Morning Joe is a left-wing television show on a left-wing cable news channel. How many
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conservatives do you know that watch MSNBC? Not very many. But they air the ads to get more donors
00:22:29.120
to pay themselves. A total con. A total con. It is a way to use politics to aggrandize themselves,
00:22:40.540
aggrandize their own bank accounts, and not do anything. No principle whatsoever. Principle be
00:22:46.200
damned. And in the face of that, in the face of these frauds like John Kasich and like the Lincoln
00:22:52.000
project, I see a guy like Kanye West who is a little eccentric, a little out there, probably not
00:23:00.640
fit today to be president, not just yet at least. But I look at a guy like that. I see what he's
00:23:06.840
talking about. I think that guy has a lot more business in American politics than any of those
00:23:13.260
frauds. Kanye West, you know, he did his first campaign rally. We played some of it yesterday on
00:23:17.980
the show. There's one bit that you can't find in a lot of places. I don't know. It seems like it's
00:23:22.340
being covered up by the internet or something. No one has clipped it out at least. So I went through
00:23:27.240
the whole rally yesterday. I had to go through several versions of it to find this bit because
00:23:30.860
sometimes audio drops out at these important parts. Kanye West gives a definition of freedom
00:23:36.140
that is more sophisticated than probably 70% of Republicans and conservatives could come up with.
00:23:44.020
Politics, America, Trump, Biden, nor Kanye West can't free us. The only thing that can free us is by
00:23:54.780
obeying the rules that were given to us for a promised land. And the freedom does not come from an
00:24:01.500
election. The freedom comes from you not loading up pornography. The freedom comes from you not
00:24:08.120
taking the Percocet. The freedom comes from you not counting your brother and your sister. The freedom
00:24:14.340
comes from you putting that gun down and not shooting people at the gas station. It has nothing to do with
00:24:20.400
this election. It only has to do with God and God's people. Kanye West has given a more conservative
00:24:29.400
and more precise definition of freedom than the vast majority of conservative and Republican
00:24:34.500
politicians and thinkers could today. It's so funny after this rant that he gave, there are many people
00:24:41.740
on the left and the right who are saying, Kanye, he's crazy. He's gone insane. He needs to get the
00:24:46.460
help that he needs. I see this all over Twitter. He needs, he needs help. Kanye West sounds more sane
00:24:52.800
than the vast majority of people in our public life and certainly than, than most people on Twitter.
00:24:59.460
What is Kanye saying? He's saying freedom will not come from an election. Freedom will come
00:25:06.500
when you stop watching porn. Freedom will come when you stop taking drugs. Freedom will come when you
00:25:13.860
put the gun down and stop shooting people at a gas station. This definition of freedom is an ancient
00:25:20.960
definition of freedom and it is the Christian definition of freedom, which says the man who sins is a
00:25:26.120
slave to sin. Coincidentally, it is the definition of freedom that many of our founding fathers would
00:25:32.280
have understood. John Adams, who says our constitution is built for a moral and religious people, is unfit
00:25:37.760
to the governance of any other kind of people. You need to be a free people to have free government.
00:25:45.060
It's not the other way. The government does not make you free. The government cannot recognize a
00:25:50.960
freedom that you do not possess. You have to be free to govern yourself. And what is freedom?
00:25:56.900
There are these two competing visions of freedom. There is the kind of modern, squishy, lib, weak
00:26:02.060
version of freedom, which is you're born free. And then society tries to stop you from being free
00:26:08.140
and educate your freedom out of you. But as long as you get naked and protest in Portland and do whatever
00:26:13.400
you want all the time and take whatever drugs and have sex with whoever people and eat whatever you
00:26:18.180
want, drink whatever you want, just follow your appetites as far as they can go, then you'll be
00:26:22.320
truly free. That's the lib, squishy, crazy version of freedom. The correct version of freedom, which is
00:26:28.120
conservative and ancient and recognized by our founding fathers, is the idea that actually
00:26:33.240
you're not born free in the sense that you can govern yourself. You are born as a little baby. Babies
00:26:42.300
aren't free. They can't, they're very dependent. And then you are educated in freedom. That's why we have
00:26:46.680
the liberal arts. We educate ourselves to make sense of our freedom, to tame our passions and
00:26:51.760
appetites, to be, as John Adams says, a moral and religious people. And then when you can control
00:26:56.640
all of those passions, then you are free to govern yourself. That is a higher freedom. It's a freedom
00:27:02.440
that eludes virtually everybody today because we are bombarded with things that compromise our freedom.
00:27:08.620
And I don't think it's a coincidence that many people who have a strong interest in continuing to
00:27:17.620
compromise our freedom and bombarding us with things that send us down bad paths. I don't think it's any
00:27:23.180
coincidence that those people and, and they're kind of lemmings in the public are trying to call
00:27:32.200
Kanye West crazy. Is Kanye West a little crazy? Yeah. He's always been a little bit crazy. I think,
00:27:36.320
I think most celebrities are a little bit crazy. I think he would tell you that. But ironically,
00:27:40.680
the thing he's being called crazy for now is some of the most sane stuff we're hearing on our
00:27:45.840
political scene. And so they've got it. The left has to use that science, capital S trademark over
00:27:50.820
the E to diagnose him as crazy and shut him up and probably send him to an insane asylum for speaking
00:27:56.060
the truth. They'd like to do that to all of us. I think. Luckily though, there is a little bit of
00:28:03.700
hope here in politics. I was talking actually to a priest who, who said, you know, with all this crazy
00:28:11.140
news stories and floating around, how do you stay positive? And he said, I know, I know, you know,
00:28:17.420
our, our savior lives and the, you know, this wonderful faith that, but, but politically from
00:28:21.860
a political standpoint, how do you say, stay positive? I thought about it. I thought it was a
00:28:25.520
very good question. And there is an answer. There is an answer. And we're seeing the fruit of that
00:28:30.520
answer play out right now. We'll get to that in one second. First though, I've got to thank you.
00:28:35.380
Thank you for subscribing to the Michael Knowles show YouTube channel. Be sure to hit that bell and
00:28:38.800
check out exclusive content posted at that channel. Like our latest piece, the best of the worst TikTok
00:28:45.260
videos. Also backstage live will be this Friday, July 24th, 7 PM Eastern, 4 PM Pacific. Also Ben has a new
00:28:55.680
book. Do I have a copy of that book here? I do. The book is called how to destroy America in three
00:29:01.740
easy steps. The book goes on sale tonight at 6 PM Eastern, 3 PM Pacific. Ben will be doing a virtual
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00:29:13.100
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00:29:31.660
We'll be right back with a lot more. Where's the hope from a political perspective? How do you stay
00:29:48.160
positive from a political perspective? Beyond religious assurances, beyond hope in the next
00:29:55.140
life? It's this issue that Russell Kirk talked about in the conservative mind. It's this issue
00:30:01.860
that crops up even among the most pessimistic conservatives, which is this reality reasserts
00:30:09.500
itself in the end. That is the great conservative consolation. No matter how crazy things get,
00:30:15.940
no matter how ideological and delusional and fantastical the left becomes and the culture
00:30:22.440
becomes, reality ultimately will reassert itself. You can't urinate on people's legs and tell them
00:30:33.120
that it is raining forever. Eventually they'll wise up and they'll get sick of it. Today, you see this
00:30:40.560
probably most clearly on the transgender issue. The left is telling us that men are really women
00:30:47.260
and that men should be able to use the women's bathroom and that men should be able to change
00:30:52.840
next to your daughter in the girl's changing room. Some excitable people on the left will tell you
00:30:59.320
that if you are not sexually attracted to men who are pretending to be women, that you're a bigot.
00:31:05.680
Right. That's a bridge too far. That's just a bridge too far. The left can delude a lot of people
00:31:14.000
on, for instance, abortion. Another issue Kanye has been talking about. The left can delude a lot of
00:31:18.900
people and pretend a baby's not a baby. The left can delude a lot of people in the popular culture,
00:31:25.640
entertainment culture, sell people a bunch of tripe and tell them that it's high art. They can delude
00:31:30.880
people that way. The left can get people to go along with a lot of their issues, but it just seems
00:31:36.000
to me that pretending that men are women is a step too far. And the numbers bear that out. Media
00:31:41.660
Matters. You know our friends over at Media Matters. They're our private PR firm. They just clip out
00:31:47.780
parts of our shows all the time and post them all over the internet. We say, thank you so much. Thank you
00:31:51.420
for the advertising. Media Matters put out a piece yesterday. They were very upset. The right
00:31:56.860
is dominating Facebook engagement on content about trans issues. They actually named Daily Wire.
00:32:02.660
Daily Wire is right there at the top. Right-leaning sources earned more than 65% of interactions on top
00:32:11.020
trans-related content. Media Matters study of interactions on published online content about
00:32:19.400
trans topics shared on Facebook found that right-leaning sources earned higher engagement.
00:32:23.040
We looked at 225 pieces of high-performing content on trans topics, which earned a combined total of
00:32:28.560
66 million interactions on Facebook. And the content and related topics from right-leaning sources
00:32:34.560
can constitute 65.7% of those interactions. Comparatively, 15.4% of interactions were earned by
00:32:41.680
queer sources, whatever that is, 3.9% from left-leaning sources, 10.4% from non-aligned, and 4.6%
00:32:48.480
from other sources. And the Daily Wire apparently performs right at the top there on a lot of that
00:32:55.300
content. The study goes on and on. I recommend you go read it. Media Matters doesn't get it.
00:33:00.440
They think, they think that the reason that right-wing content, right-wing content on transgender issues
00:33:07.500
performs better on social media is because we're gaming the system somehow. We're cheating.
00:33:12.540
We're doing something nefarious. Do you know why right-leaning content on trans issues does better?
00:33:21.240
It's because men are not women, and everybody knows that. And right-leaning on this particular
00:33:29.300
issue just means stating what is perfectly obvious, that men are not women. It's amazing. You know,
00:33:35.880
I did this whole speaking tour last year called the Men Are Not Women Tour. It was a joke. It was a joke
00:33:41.740
because that's the most obvious thing you could say. You'd say the sky is blue. You'd say 2 plus 2
00:33:45.840
equals 4. But today, on the left, in the leftist culture, it's considered controversial to say that
00:33:52.220
men are not women. Do you know why the right-wing content does so well? It's because you can't fool
00:33:58.700
people forever on some of the most basic facts of their lives. The right-leaning content does better
00:34:07.720
because reality reasserts itself in the end. How did Donald Trump win in 2016? It was the Russians.
00:34:15.720
It wasn't the Russians. Remember, we had that whole two-and-a-half-year investigation, millions of dollars
00:34:19.440
wasted to find out it wasn't the Russians. It was the, it was the, I don't know, the Ukrainians. It wasn't
00:34:25.840
the Ukrainians. It wasn't anybody. Do you know what it was? Reality reasserts itself in the end. You had the entire
00:34:31.120
American establishment, media, politics, administrative government, big tech, higher education, lower
00:34:38.780
education, everything working against Donald Trump. And he still won. Barely, but he won.
00:34:46.280
How did he win? Because people recognized that they were being defrauded by Hillary Clinton and by the
00:34:53.780
left. If you want your content to perform better on social media, say true things. Don't delude people.
00:35:02.300
Don't urinate on their leg and pretend that it's raining. If you do that, if you do all those terrible
00:35:08.140
things, you, you will have success for some time because the left has a lot of power. But in the end,
00:35:13.340
in the end, reality is going to peek through. Yet the delusions move on. In the media, the Associated
00:35:22.500
Press has just issued a new rule. The Associated Press is always issuing new rules on grammar,
00:35:27.880
spelling, how to, how to format things, you know, for all of the other journalists around the world.
00:35:33.780
Well, they've now decided that they are going to capitalize the B in black as in a black person,
00:35:39.160
which is a little odd to me. I, I, when I write, I don't capitalize people's, the color of people's
00:35:45.200
skin, but okay, that's the new rule. They're going to capitalize the B in black, but they're not going
00:35:50.180
to capitalize the W in white. That's, that's lowercase. Uh, come again. Why is that? Why
00:35:57.160
is that double standard? I mean, what they're saying is black people are good. White people are bad.
00:36:01.180
That's really, that's all that it means. We're going to, we view this capitalization as a form
00:36:05.280
of respect. Why else would they change it during this period where everyone is walking on eggshells
00:36:10.160
on issues of race and black lives matter. And if you don't post the black square, you're going to be
00:36:13.500
ostracized. So they're, they're, they think the capitalization is a good thing to do.
00:36:18.420
And so they're not going to do that for white people, even though black and white are totally
00:36:22.540
analogous, right? You're just talking about people's race and people's skin color.
00:36:27.760
So their excuse here is that this is according to the AP. The AP is reporting what the AP said in
00:36:35.920
the AP. The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture and don't have
00:36:42.380
the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Uh, starting to think we might be
00:36:47.860
having that experience AP because you're, you're obviously using this double standard and, and, and
00:36:53.720
doing so in an insulting way to a race of people. But imagine, imagine what they're saying here. The
00:36:59.560
one, the one criticism of the AP that's coming from the left is that what they're doing is actually
00:37:03.120
disrespectful to black people. And in a way I think they're probably right. They're saying white people
00:37:07.500
have much less shared history and culture. So what they're saying is black people are a monolith and
00:37:11.260
white people are diverse and, and varied. You know, Africa is a pretty big place. Africa is much,
00:37:18.580
much, much larger than all of Europe. But you're saying that black people are all the same,
00:37:25.140
even though they come from this much larger continent with all sorts of varied nations and
00:37:29.680
tribes. But Europe, which much smaller and smaller relative to nations and tribes is totally diverse.
00:37:39.400
The New York times defends this. They say white doesn't represent a shared culture and history
00:37:45.140
in the way that black does. And I assume this also ties into this discrimination question,
00:37:51.980
which I would remind you, we have one regime of legal discrimination at this point. I'm not saying
00:37:57.360
there isn't private discrimination that happens sometimes. Surely somewhere it does though. I don't
00:38:01.340
think it's as widespread as the left says it is not even close, but as a matter of legal discrimination,
00:38:05.420
there's only one kind of legal racial discrimination that is called affirmative action. And it discriminates
00:38:10.860
on behalf of black people, Hispanic people, other racial minorities, and it discriminates against
00:38:15.940
white people and Asian people, which is why Asian people are suing Harvard right now.
00:38:20.140
It's poor Asian people. They immigrate to America. They get discriminated against.
00:38:23.860
Then they do well in America. What do they do? They get discriminated against all the time.
00:38:28.140
What the AP and the New York times are saying is that there is no white racial consciousness
00:38:32.160
and they're basically right. There's not much of a white racial consciousness. Pew backs this up.
00:38:37.720
Most races have over 50% racial consciousness. White people have 15%. And when you talk about
00:38:44.360
extreme racial consciousness, it's only about 5%. However, what the AP and the New York times and
00:38:50.520
the whole culture is doing right now is going to have the effect of raising that racial consciousness,
00:38:55.880
which most conservatives I think would like to lower the racial consciousness. We don't think that
00:39:00.760
viewing yourself primarily through race is particularly fruitful for Democratic-Republican
00:39:07.060
politics. We don't think it's particularly important for our own identity. We would probably
00:39:13.180
prioritize things that are more religious or philosophical or political over issues like
00:39:19.260
race. But what the left wants to do is gin up that racial consciousness. That's going to get
00:39:25.560
ugly because eventually people are going to respond to that. When they say, you know, if the argument
00:39:32.140
that the AP and the New York times is making is that being discriminated against will form a racial
00:39:37.640
consciousness, which I think is in part the argument they're making. And then they're saying, so we're
00:39:41.840
going to discriminate against white people in a way that we're not going to against other races.
00:39:47.000
What's the effect of that going to be? It's not going to be a very good one, but I think it's the one
00:39:50.700
that the left actually wants to accomplish. Lots of topsy-turvy politics these days. Lots of upside
00:39:58.800
down. You know, the left saying they want racial healing. What do they do? They sow racial division.
00:40:03.160
Also totally inverted, upside down, the St. Louis authorities are now officially charging
00:40:10.040
the McCloskeys, you know, the Brooks Brothers model couple, the pink shirt and the chinos with the guns
00:40:15.160
defending their lives and property against armed vandals. They're charging them for unlawful use
00:40:21.640
of a weapon, a felony. They're saying it's illegal to wave weapons in a threatening manner at those
00:40:27.180
participating in non-violent protest. Non-violent protest. The non-violent protest has destroyed
00:40:32.460
the McCloskeys' property, their giant gate, metal gate, and they were waving weapons in their face.
00:40:38.820
Those guys don't get charged. The McCloskeys defending their own property do get charged completely
00:40:43.700
backwards, completely upside down. I hope this is immediately pardoned by the governor or laughed
00:40:49.980
out of court by the judge. But I doubt it will be, at least early on, because the whole apparatus
00:40:57.040
is against these guys. Talk about reality reasserting itself. All of us around the country are saying,
00:41:02.820
you can't, hold on, if I go on someone else's property with a gun and threaten them, I'm fine.
00:41:07.480
That's a legitimate expression of my political views. But if I defend my own property with a gun,
00:41:11.960
I don't even fire it. I just hold it. That's a felony. You say, that's completely upside down.
00:41:18.220
Well, it gets crazier. There's a piece, it's a true, truly magnificent work of journalism from the
00:41:24.120
LA Times with a naked woman sitting spread eagle on the asphalt in Portland. She's one of these
00:41:31.940
rioters sitting completely naked. And the headline is, out of Portland tear gas, an apparition emerges,
00:41:38.100
capturing the imagination of protesters. Some people have tweeted, they said, oh, you know,
00:41:43.000
that's pretty nice. Get to see a naked lady. I don't know if you guys have ever met Antifa,
00:41:47.280
if you've ever seen them up close. I have. They're not like the most hygienic people on earth, okay?
00:41:52.080
They're not, they tend not to be supermodels. So I think we can only see this woman from the back,
00:41:57.260
but I don't, I don't envy the cops who have to look at this. Listen to the headline. Listen to the
00:42:04.480
article, rather. She emerged as an apparition from clouds of tear gas as federal agents fired
00:42:11.000
pepper balls at angry protesters in early Saturday darkness. Wow, am I reading like a, reading like a
00:42:18.460
romance novel or something like that? A woman wearing nothing but a black face mask and a stocking cap
00:42:24.000
strode toward a dozen heavily armed agents attired in camouflage fatigues lined up across a downtown
00:42:30.340
street. The agents dispatched by the Trump administration over vociferous objections of
00:42:36.380
state and city officials are part of a force that has fired projectiles at and detained activists
00:42:43.100
protesting nightly since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, May 25th. Let me,
00:42:48.280
I'll translate that to you into English. Rioters have burned down cities and attacked people and
00:42:53.960
in instances killed people. And so the cops are now arresting them. That's it. That's you could
00:42:59.700
have, was that one sentence? It was one sentence. That's what's actually happening here. Numerous
00:43:05.360
photos and videos posted to Twitter show the unidentified woman as she halted in the middle
00:43:09.300
of the street at 1 45 AM. She stood calmly, a surreal image of human vulnerability in the face of an
00:43:16.300
overpowering force that has been criticized nationally by civil rights advocates. Oh, has it? It has been
00:43:24.100
critic, the cops have been criticized by, oh, by the LA times, right. For arresting rioters. Okay. The thing
00:43:32.200
goes on. I mean, I can't, before it was over, she struck ballet poses and reclined on the street. She also sat on
00:43:39.180
the asphalt in a yoga-like position facing the officers before they left. Wow. That is, that is a
00:43:48.920
poetic journey. It reminds me of, uh, Kennedy's Supreme court decision in Obergefell, which read less
00:43:54.920
like law and more like romantic poetry. That reads less like journalism, more like romantic poetry.
00:44:00.620
Imagine, imagine that kind of talk. How about, how about we just arrest rioters and people who are
00:44:07.420
engaged in public indecency, like sitting spread Eagle on the asphalt in front of cops?
00:44:13.500
That's not going to happen. That is not going to happen at all. What we are in the midst of is a,
00:44:22.100
a narrative. We are living in a narrative that we are told is the truth. It's not just political truth.
00:44:29.140
It's scientific truth. Rioters good, cops bad. Burning down the country good, building it back up bad.
00:44:37.280
George Washington, very, very bad. Leftist Marxist activists, very, very good. We were told this is
00:44:44.400
eternally true. Science. If you disagree with it, not only are you wicked, but you're crazy. You're
00:44:50.920
insane. You probably have to be sent to an insane asylum. And we lionize the politicians who pretend
00:44:56.440
to be doctors, who pretend to be scientists, who push this ridiculous agenda and lie to our faces.
00:45:03.200
I think science, as it has been perverted, has struck out. I think we've got to put that aside,
00:45:11.080
at least until the election and recognize that the questions that are being posed as scientific
00:45:15.880
and the statements that are being posed as scientific are nothing but naked politics.
00:45:21.500
Naked is that lady sitting spread Eagle on the asphalt. And we need to engage in those political
00:45:26.300
debates. And we need to stand up. If we actually care about the political principles,
00:45:31.160
we say we believe in, we have to do something about it. We have to fight back. We have to make
00:45:35.800
sure we stand up, win the political battle, and then hopefully we can reclaim our politics
00:45:42.460
and get back to all the debates that we'd like to be having. That's our show. I'm Michael
00:45:47.060
Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you tomorrow.
00:45:48.620
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
00:45:59.840
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends
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00:46:10.220
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show,
00:46:14.860
The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show. The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
00:46:20.900
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
00:46:26.580
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00:46:32.280
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00:46:39.340
assistant, Ryan Love. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire,
00:46:44.700
2020. Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show. The left breaks the law,
00:46:50.020
but they don't want to be arrested. They're violent, but they don't want us to fight back.
00:46:53.580
They lie, but demand that we trust them. Basically, their message is,
00:46:57.200
don't interrupt us while we're destroying America. We'll take a closer look on The Andrew Klavan Show.