The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 666

00:00:00.000 I've got good news and bad news. The good news is the coronavirus vaccine is being shipped.

00:00:05.480 People are taking it. It would seem as though our long national international nightmare is over.

00:00:11.300 The bad news is, according to the experts, even after we get the vaccine, even after we get the

00:00:18.300 last dose of the vaccine, nothing can change. You have to keep wearing the mask. You're not

00:00:25.020 allowed to travel. You can't celebrate Christmas. You have to remain locked down, I guess, forever.

00:00:33.060 This, according to the experts on MSNBC. Are you getting your vaccination this week?

00:00:38.920 Tomorrow morning, and I'm grateful for it. Chuck, I just wanted to say,

00:00:43.720 just a follow up on what Yasmin mentioned. Just for your viewers out there, I know one of the

00:00:50.320 individuals who we just saw getting vaccinated is planning on traveling after the second dose.

00:00:55.220 This is a source of confusion, but this is one of the misperceptions here. Just because you get

00:01:00.600 vaccinated with that second dose does not mean you should be participating in things like traveling

00:01:06.500 in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic or that you're liberated from masks. Everything still

00:01:11.440 applies until all of us get the two-dose regimen, and we don't think that's going to happen until

00:01:16.760 June, July. And again, this goes back to what we just talked about, Chuck. We don't know if just

00:01:22.320 getting the vaccination prevents serious illness, or does it also prevent you from getting infection

00:01:27.480 entirely? Meaning you can still get infected with the virus, potentially, and pass it on to others.

00:01:33.200 So really, really critical. Don't let your guard down just because you got vaccinated.

00:01:37.760 Oh, I guess that is confusing. Because you see, I mistakenly, me, I'm inexpert. I'm not scientific.

00:01:44.960 I thought that when you got the inoculation against the virus, you were inoculated against

00:01:49.540 the virus. But you're not. Every single person on Earth has to get the vaccine. And also, once you

00:01:56.780 get the vaccine, you have to stay locked down forever. Makes sense, right? I'm Michael Knowles.

00:02:00.980 This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment from yesterday,

00:02:13.860 from John Shine, who said, I hope President Trump's last three words as president are,

00:02:20.780 I'll be back. I think they are, actually. We played a clip from the White House Christmas

00:02:25.900 Party a week or two ago, where President Trump said, look, I hope we get another four years.

00:02:30.140 But if we don't, I'll see you in four years. Love that kind of attitude. I'm still holding

00:02:35.520 out this kind of sliver of hope for the compromise of 1877. Unfortunately, not looking terribly

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00:04:10.540 that is 4hymns.com slash Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L. Speaking, so that kind of medication,

00:04:17.720 that's straightforward enough. Some of this other stuff, however, I'm listening to the

00:04:21.240 medical geniuses on MSNBC and I'm told that if you get the vaccine, you're not vaccinated.

00:04:26.560 If you get the inoculation, you're not inoculated. It's not going to change anything.

00:04:31.720 We've been, talk about moving the goalposts. We were told on March 16th, 15 days to slow the spread

00:04:39.600 because we had to flatten the curve. Then flatten the curve became find a cure. So we got to extend 15

00:04:45.960 days to 15 months. Then we did find the cure. We got the vaccine. It's something like 95% effective

00:04:51.760 and we're told, well, just because you get the vaccine doesn't mean you're allowed to live your

00:04:56.820 life again. Oh no, you need to lock yourself up in your apartment forever and you can't see your

00:05:02.780 loved ones and you can't live your life. You know, if that's what the vaccine does, I don't think I'm

00:05:07.600 going to get the vaccine. If, if getting the vaccine in no way changes my life, if I'm a young

00:05:14.840 guy, statistically, I'm at very, very, very, very, very, very low risk of serious complications from

00:05:22.120 this virus and the vaccine isn't going to permit me to do anything new, any, any, have any of my life

00:05:28.680 or freedom back, then why would I get it? It doesn't make a lot of sense. And there are some people

00:05:33.660 who did get it, who seem to be regretting that they got it. There, I bet there are a lot of people

00:05:38.800 who aren't going to get it because they're reading stories about, for instance, a healthcare worker in

00:05:42.940 Alaska who experienced a quote, serious reaction and was subsequently hospitalized after receiving

00:05:49.260 a dose of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine, which was just approved by the FDA last week. This is by the

00:05:55.800 way, not according to some fringe right-wing conservative website that this person had a

00:06:00.740 serious reaction. This is according to the New York Times. Even the left-wing media are admitting

00:06:06.100 this. This person remained in the hospital as of Wednesday. The worker had no serious history of,

00:06:14.740 of drug allergies or anything like that, though it remains unclear whether this person suffered from

00:06:20.680 other types of allergies, but no, no history of drug allergies. And so I think people are going to

00:06:24.860 look at it and they're going to say, wait a second, you've got this vaccine that you've rushed through

00:06:28.260 very, very quickly. You know, it got the approval, so that's good, but you're seeing at least now early

00:06:35.340 on, this person has a serious complication from it. And also the vaccine's not going to let me go back

00:06:40.400 to living my life in any sort of normal way. Why would I get it? Why would I get it? If you look into

00:06:45.320 the UK, the National Health Service has confirmed that it's providing, quote, resuscitation facilities

00:06:51.540 in vaccination centers after reports of two individuals having very serious reactions after

00:06:58.400 receiving the vaccine. Now it is worth pointing out in, in Britain, those two healthcare workers

00:07:02.680 apparently had histories of allergic reactions. So that could be maybe a little bit more expected,

00:07:07.180 but still one has to weigh the risks. And this has always been my thought on not just vaccines,

00:07:14.260 but all sort of medical interventions. There's always risk. I know on the left or maybe the

00:07:21.180 extreme fringes of the ideological right, people want there to be this perfect abstract ideological

00:07:27.560 hundred percent. You have to do this all the time. There's no argument against it or vice versa. But

00:07:32.820 for conservatives, we realize all of life entails risk. If I were much older, if I were in very poor

00:07:40.080 health, I'd probably say the risk of getting the vaccine is, is worth it, right? Because it outweighs

00:07:46.920 the risk of, of just getting the virus and possibly having a serious reaction to that. But there is

00:07:52.420 always risk. And we're making these kind of prudential decisions. And this is true when we're talking about

00:07:57.600 getting on an airplane. This is true when we're talking about celebrating Christmas. This is true when

00:08:00.780 we're talking about major social issues actually completely unrelated to the coronavirus. You got to

00:08:07.560 look at the risk. Now, whether you get the vaccine or not, it would appear that the way our statistics

00:08:15.200 are being counted, just about everything is a COVID death anyway. So you could walk out into the middle

00:08:20.820 of the street and have a heart attack. And if they test you for coronavirus, they'll say, yeah,

00:08:24.560 this was a coronavirus death. You could even walk out into a bad neighborhood, get shot with a pistol

00:08:32.660 and be counted as a coronavirus death. We've heard anecdotal reports of this over the past year now.

00:08:40.600 There is a state health department official, the Grand County Coroner in Colorado, who is

00:08:47.300 sounding the whistle on this, saying that the coronavirus deaths in her county are not coronavirus

00:08:52.700 deaths. These people are actually victims of gunshot wounds.

00:08:57.040 It's absurd that they would even put that on there. Would you want to go to a county that has

00:09:03.500 really high death numbers? Would you want to go visit that county? Because they're contagious.

00:09:10.000 You know, I might get it and I could die if all of a sudden one county has a high death count.

00:09:16.900 We don't have and we don't need those numbers inflated.

00:09:20.720 So you've got the county coroner who knows this, this kind of information probably better than

00:09:25.980 anybody says they're counting these people as coronavirus deaths. They did not die from

00:09:30.140 coronavirus. They may have had coronavirus. So they had the sniffles while they got shot in the

00:09:33.900 head, but the death was caused by the bullet. Now they have to count it as a coronavirus death

00:09:39.060 because the state health department is making them. And it's not even just the state health

00:09:41.700 department's fault. It's the CDC is telling the state health departments to do this.

00:09:45.600 So the CDC has these guidelines. If you die with coronavirus, you are said to die from coronavirus,

00:09:51.820 which means at this point, if you, if you believe that the coronavirus numbers are not

00:10:01.300 inflated, you are peddling a conspiracy theory because we now have firm evidence for months and

00:10:08.440 months and months around the country. We can say for sure that a significant number of deaths

00:10:15.200 that were not caused by coronavirus are being counted as deaths from coronavirus. So what's

00:10:21.460 the real number? Obviously this is a pretty virulent flu or I'm using flu colloquially. It's a virulent

00:10:27.980 sort of virus, but it is not accounting for all of the numbers that we're seeing. We know that you can

00:10:36.340 talk to the county coroners. You can talk to health officials all around the country. And that's to say

00:10:41.480 nothing of financial incentives for people to classify these. I'm just talking about the government

00:10:45.600 mandates saying this must be a coronavirus death. So we've got some pretty weak information here.

00:10:52.640 You, you heard that, that medical expert on MSNBC at the top say, look, we don't know if you take the

00:10:58.080 vaccine. Does that mean that you can no longer be infected or you just won't show symptoms or it won't

00:11:02.480 be that serious or you want, we just don't know. Well, yeah, it sounds like you don't know a lot of

00:11:06.280 things. It sounds like you don't know what the vaccine does. It sounds like you don't know what

00:11:11.140 the side effects are going to be. It sounds like you don't know what the primary effect is going to

00:11:14.880 be. It sounds like you don't really know how many people have died from the virus as separate from

00:11:19.000 dying with the virus. It sounds like you don't know anything at all. Experts. Actually, it sounds

00:11:25.040 like the people who are inexpert and just have a modicum of common sense know much more about this

00:11:30.480 than anybody else. The people who say we're going to live our lives. Well, for some reason,

00:11:36.260 we're still deferring to these geniuses and lab coats and those geniuses and lab coats are canceling

00:11:41.620 Christmas. Dr. Fauci, who remains in that job now for almost a half century. Seriously, this guy's

00:11:51.060 worked in public health at a serious senior level for almost 50 years. Dr. Fauci is saying no Christmas.

00:12:00.480 The guy's gotten basically everything wrong during this coronavirus epidemic,

00:12:03.980 but he's saying you have, it's just science. You have to cancel Christmas. Quote from Dr. Fauci,

00:12:08.920 he said this to the Washington Post. I'm going to be with my wife, period. The Christmas holiday is a

00:12:15.340 special holiday for us because Christmas Eve is my birthday. Hold on. Hold on. Not Christmas is a

00:12:24.680 special holiday for us because it's the birth of our savior. Not Christmas is important for us

00:12:30.560 because it's the incarnation of the second person of the blessed Trinity who redeems mankind. No,

00:12:37.600 which is usually why people say, no, it's because it's my birthday because everything's about Dr.

00:12:41.420 Fauci. It's a special holiday because it's my birthday. Oh, okay. And then he goes, and Christmas

00:12:45.920 day is Christmas day. And my daughters are not going to come home. That's painful. We don't like that.

00:12:50.680 But that's just one of the things you're going to have to accept as we get through this unprecedented

00:12:55.240 challenging time. Nothing about this virus is unprecedented. It's a new strain of some kind

00:13:00.320 of virus, but new strains of viruses pop up with some frequency. What makes this unprecedented is the

00:13:05.160 stupid, incoherent, inhuman, unconstitutional, anti-constitutional political response to the

00:13:13.160 virus. That's what makes it unprecedented. And you know what? We can fix that in two seconds.

00:13:17.380 You know how you fix that? Ignore Dr. Fauci. Moreover, defy Dr. Fauci, which I'm certainly

00:13:23.000 going to do. I'm going to gather with friends and family and loved ones on Christmas. I encourage

00:13:27.740 you to do that as well. Be prudent if you have some particular reason why you're not going to do

00:13:32.080 that. It might not even involve health. It might just be that you don't like your mother-in-law.

00:13:35.640 Okay, I understand that. But as a general rule, celebrate Christmas, people. Don't listen to this

00:13:43.340 ridiculous person in a lab coat, this technocrat who thinks that he can run your life now.

00:13:50.960 He should not be able to run your life. And he, by the way, he's not the only one.

00:13:54.420 I beat up on Dr. Fauci because he absolutely deserves it. And because he's the most prominent

00:13:58.880 public health technocratic tyrant in this country. But there are people doing this all over the world.

00:14:04.160 They're doing this in Britain too. There are calls all over the place. Not just don't celebrate

00:14:08.700 Christmas. Actually, maybe you just postpone Christmas to another time, which means that

00:14:12.860 you are going to have to be waiting for that knock on your door, not just from Santa Claus,

00:14:16.700 but from your in-laws all year long. And I don't know. Look, if you are going to have to do that,

00:14:21.220 you have to make sure that you get a ring doorbell. It is, right now, it is doorbell season, right?

00:14:25.540 This is the busiest time of the year. You've got packages coming at you. You've got all sorts of

00:14:30.740 people coming and you want to make sure you know who is there. Definitely true at my house.

00:14:35.340 With Ring, you can keep an eye on all of this hustle and bustle, no matter where you are,

00:14:39.360 right from your phone. If someone stops by or something's going on, Ring lets you know,

00:14:44.160 and you can see and speak to whoever is there from anywhere. Ring makes the perfect Christmas gift.

00:14:49.600 So this Christmas season, give someone the gift of peace of mind. This is actually what I love most

00:14:54.340 about Ring is, sweet little Lisa, she can fend for herself, okay? She's a scrappy gal. She's a good

00:15:00.000 shot. But I like that she can know who is outside before she has to open that door. It's very,

00:15:06.620 very important. I think about this all the time. Just a little peace of mind goes a long way. And

00:15:11.960 it's technologically very, very impressive. For a limited time, go to ring.com slash Knowles,

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00:15:32.160 My favorite aspect of it, not just how impressive it is, also how inexpensive it is. So you get a lot

00:15:37.060 of credit for an amazing futuristic gift and you don't have to shell out a ton of cash.

00:15:41.660 Ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. So not just Dr. Fauci trying to cancel Christmas, you have

00:15:51.340 these sort of more amiable public health tyrants in the UK saying, well, maybe we don't need to

00:15:57.480 cancel it, just postpone Christmas. The advisors, the officials, the scientists in Britain say,

00:16:06.200 just have a summer party. Seriously. Celebrate Christmas in the summer.

00:16:12.700 I have friends who have done Christmas in July as a sort of silly party. That's not a substitute for

00:16:18.120 Christmas. Christmas happens at a real time. And I think this is one of the sort of temptations

00:16:23.560 of liberal modernity is we think the time doesn't matter. Oh, you lose a year because Fauci told you

00:16:30.800 to stay indoors. Okay, that's fine. We're going to live forever. It doesn't matter. You don't need

00:16:34.760 to do things in real time. You don't need to do things in real flesh and blood. You can do it on

00:16:38.460 Zoom, do it on Skype, FaceTime, do it in July. Who cares? It's all the same. It's this,

00:16:45.200 this rationalizing, abstracting idea that is completely antithetical to the Christmas season,

00:16:51.600 right? The whole, the whole point of Christmas is that this metaphysical being, the source of all

00:16:56.400 creation, the second person of the Trinity becomes incarnate in a particular body, in a particular cave,

00:17:03.840 in a particular place, Bethlehem, at a particular time. Coincidentally, zero AD. What, what, what were

00:17:12.020 the odds of that? Oh, I, probably pretty good. In a particular moment in time, that particularity is

00:17:20.040 key. I have to dispel this. I haven't done too much on the war on Christmas or the war on Advent,

00:17:25.800 which is even subtler, but I have to dispel this myth that crops up all the time that Christmas,

00:17:32.320 the date for Christmas was just chosen arbitrarily. It could, it could be July 5th. I don't, we,

00:17:37.100 we picked December 25th here in the West and January 6th in the East, but you know, it could

00:17:41.500 be whenever. No, it can't. Now, one explanation for why they picked December 25th is that early

00:17:50.580 Christians decided that they were going to win over pagans by making the incarnation celebration

00:17:58.720 to be right around, you know, right on these pagan feast days. And you'll hear that the pagan feasts

00:18:04.560 will be either the feast of Saturn or the Saturnalia or the feast of the unconquered sun,

00:18:09.660 Sol Invictus, or the feast of Mithras. Okay. And you've, by the way, these claims have only been

00:18:15.620 made really in the past 500 years or so is when they've become really popular. And it's just not

00:18:20.880 true. So the, there's no evidence of any pagan holiday on December 25th before Christmas was

00:18:31.800 celebrated on December 25th. The earliest source we have on this is the chronography of 354, which does

00:18:37.880 list a pagan holiday on December 25th, but it also lists Christmas on December 25th. So there's no

00:18:43.140 evidence that, that, that celebration on the 25th predated Christmas. Saturnalia, the feast of Saturn,

00:18:48.840 was established centuries before Christmas, but it doesn't quite coincide. Saturnalia was originally

00:18:55.940 on December 17th. Eventually it was extended to be a long celebration up to the 23rd. So it was a

00:19:01.880 week long thing, but it still didn't even go all the way to when we celebrate Christmas. No early

00:19:07.180 Christian source. If there were really some strategy here to make Christmas sometime around the pagan

00:19:15.080 feasts, you know, or on the pagan feasts even. The early Christians wrote a lot. We have a lot of their

00:19:20.980 writings. Someone probably would have mentioned this. There is no mention of that at all in any

00:19:25.740 early Christian feast. The, the earliest mention of even this coincidence doesn't appear until the

00:19:30.840 12th century, more than a thousand years after Christ. Uh, the real reason why it's on, on December

00:19:36.400 25th is, uh, because of the way that they dated, the way that, that early Christians and the ancients

00:19:43.620 generally understood a divine life, which was that it had to be a perfect, perfect in length.

00:19:49.020 So, uh, an exact number of years, uh, you have at the turn of the third century, Tertullian,

00:19:54.900 uh, dates the crucifixion to, uh, March 25th. And so if the crucifixion, so Good Friday is March 25th,

00:20:03.980 then that would mean that the conception would have to be March 25th. And if the conception is March 25th,

00:20:08.720 then exactly nine months later, what do you have? Christmas. Uh, early, uh, other Christian

00:20:15.280 writers saying Hippolytus of Rome said this, that the world itself was actually created on March 25th.

00:20:19.020 So you have the perfect symmetry of the conception of Christ and the conception, the creation of the

00:20:23.660 world. Then nine months later, you get Christmas. Uh, St. Augustine agrees with this. The, uh,

00:20:29.380 anonymous Christian work on solstices and equinoxes agrees with this. But, but Augustine writes about

00:20:34.960 it specifically in On the Trinity, uh, this idea of the conception. Uh, this would explain the

00:20:39.320 discrepancy, by the way, as to why in the East they celebrate Christmas on January 6th is, uh,

00:20:44.160 because they also celebrate, uh, the, the crucifixion on or recognize crucifixion on April

00:20:49.840 6th. Uh, Pope Benedict made this point just a few years ago. He said, there were these theories

00:20:54.240 that it coincides with pagan holidays. Uh, those theories can no longer be supported. The history

00:20:58.400 just doesn't support it. That is the end of my rant on, on moving Christmas and saying that Christmas

00:21:04.020 is, you know, some really just some pagan holiday. It's just not true. It's just kind of like when,

00:21:09.680 when modern liberal scientific people, uh, make fun of the old idiot people from the back old and past

00:21:17.820 days for thinking that the earth was flat. Really nobody thought the earth was flat. No educated

00:21:23.660 person thought that the earth was flat going back to the ancient Greeks. The idea that people thought

00:21:28.880 the earth was flat is itself a modern creation. Uh, it just is absolutely infuriating, but the people

00:21:36.080 who push this stuff or they're, they give you a fake history, they give you a fake scientific argument

00:21:43.280 and the people who fancy themselves to be the most educated, the most serious, the most wise

00:21:49.720 are, are often the most ridiculous. And a clear example of this, George Clooney, George Clooney,

00:21:57.500 who plays himself in every Coen brothers movie, right? He plays some absolutely sort of empty headed

00:22:03.680 actor. He has an argument for you about how to react to this epidemic. And it's very, very scientific.

00:22:11.420 He says, put on an effing mask. We're losing 3000 people a day right now. So that's right.

00:22:19.920 You know, it's a, this is going to, you know, we're, it's like, you just want to yell at everybody

00:22:24.760 and say, just put a mask on, you know, this whole, this, this, this crazy thought where everybody's

00:22:30.800 going, well, it's my freedom. It's like, that's not how this works. Dumb it. It's, I know here's

00:22:35.840 your freedom. Your freedom is this. You're free to smoke until your lungs turn black, but you can't

00:22:42.460 do it on the bus, you know, and you're free to drink until your liver pops and comes out your

00:22:48.180 but you can't drink and then get behind the wheel of a car. There have to be certain rules. This is one

00:22:54.240 that says, put on a mask and we'll get through this. We got vaccines coming. Let's save another

00:23:00.800 60,000 lives before the vaccines. Wow. Brilliant political philosophy from George Clooney.

00:23:07.680 It's like I'm reading Lord Acton or something or John Locke, isn't it? No, not quite.

00:23:13.840 George Clooney though, if you take the sort of profanity and the arrogance aside, which is very

00:23:18.740 difficult. If you took that aside from George Clooney, you'd be left with like 3% of George Clooney.

00:23:23.100 But if you, you try to get to the argument he's making, the argument itself is also extremely

00:23:27.700 stupid. He's making this argument. We talked about it a little bit yesterday. It's kind

00:23:31.080 of a liberal argument that look, you, you can do whatever you want personally. You're completely

00:23:35.840 entitled to do whatever you want to your own body as long as it doesn't affect anybody else.

00:23:40.740 And the reason this argument is stupid and has never worked anywhere in the world is because

00:23:44.580 the things we do in private have effects in public. They do, they have some, some more so

00:23:52.980 than others. But if you have a whole society doing, you know, lots and lots of vicious things

00:23:59.800 in private, that is going to have an effect on the public because the public is just all

00:24:03.300 the private people. And, and a clear example of this would be gender theory, right? Which

00:24:06.600 is you're allowed to be a man who identifies as a woman, but don't expect me to call you

00:24:13.440 a woman. Oh, wait a second. That's what the liberal left is making all of us do right

00:24:16.500 now. Yeah. How come, how come this idea that you can do anything in private, but it can't,

00:24:23.220 doesn't, it can't have any public effects. How come that works when you're talking about wearing

00:24:26.720 a mask, but it doesn't work on your gender identity? Well, because it's obviously an

00:24:30.900 incoherent argument. And I'm, by the way, I'm not taking the right wing libertarian version of

00:24:35.080 this either. I don't, I don't adhere to the argument of freedom that George Clooney is

00:24:41.020 strawmanning and saying the right wing believes. I don't think that there is no argument ever

00:24:45.700 to take certain health precautions, that the government has no right to institute certain

00:24:51.300 health measures. I think the government does have a right to do that. I think that the

00:24:55.160 government has during emergencies has police powers. I just think that the current use of

00:25:01.760 those powers is imprudent, incoherent, and deeply unjust and extremely stupid. The freedom we're

00:25:09.700 talking about here is not the George Clooney sort of mockery of freedom. This idea that I can,

00:25:15.700 pursue my appetites however I want, or I can pursue my will however I want. I have an idea,

00:25:21.060 to use Edmund Burke, the great conservative philosopher's phrase, of an exalted freedom.

00:25:25.880 What I want is a political freedom, which is, I'm not saying that I get to do whatever I want

00:25:31.080 individually all the time, but I'm also not saying that I have to acquiesce to every whim of Dr.

00:25:36.180 Fauci. I have the political freedom in this country to persuade my fellow citizens,

00:25:40.980 to overthrow the illegitimate regime of these technocratic public health expert idiots who

00:25:47.580 don't know anything, who don't know anything about anything. I don't think they know very

00:25:52.340 much about science, capital S with a trademark over the E, and they certainly don't know anything

00:25:56.900 about political philosophy and the way this country ought to be run. And I think that we

00:26:02.380 should use our political power to kick Dr. Fauci out of his job. I think he's been there about 50

00:26:06.980 years too long and to, to give ourselves our culture back, to allow ourselves to celebrate

00:26:14.700 Christmas, to allow ourselves to see one another smile and breathe in fresh air and not wear these

00:26:19.100 ridiculous masks. I think that's very important. I do take safety pretty seriously and I take freedom

00:26:26.220 seriously, but not in this shallow, degraded way that you hear about mostly from the left and a little

00:26:31.080 bit from the right. I want an exalted sort of safety that takes into account all of the,

00:26:37.040 the many goods in society. And I want an exalted freedom that allows me to exercise my political

00:26:42.660 rights in this country as our founding fathers intended. It's very important to be safe and to

00:26:47.900 be prudent. And with more online shopping during the Christmas season this year, some experts are

00:26:53.160 saying, real experts are saying that consumers may be at higher risk of identity theft. Now that,

00:26:59.380 I know that's, that's for real. I've seen that happen in real time. I know that's some serious

00:27:03.180 expertise, right? People are falling victim to deals that are too good to be true and sophisticated

00:27:09.540 phishing attacks. Experts recommend checking your credit score, not overspending, limiting new retail

00:27:14.460 credit cards and freezing your credit if needed, even after the holidays. It's important to understand

00:27:19.320 how cybercrime and identity theft are affecting our lives. Get LifeLock, the leader in identity theft

00:27:24.980 protection. LifeLock helps detect a wide range of identity threats. For instance,

00:27:29.040 your social security number for sale on the dark web. It's very, I know you think no one's after

00:27:34.340 my information. Ah, they'll go for someone else first. They'll attack somebody else. They'll do

00:27:37.900 you need to protect your information. They are after your information. Okay. And it's an ounce of

00:27:44.260 prevention is worth a pound of cure. Now no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all

00:27:47.760 transactions at all businesses, but LifeLock can help you feel warm and protected this holiday season.

00:27:52.200 Save up to 25% off your first year. Go to LifeLock.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. That is LifeLock.com

00:28:00.700 slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S for 25% off. I want an exalted political freedom. It's the sort of thing

00:28:09.980 that Rand Paul was just talking about yesterday. We haven't even talked about the election today.

00:28:15.680 I wanted to save that for, I wanted to open up in a way that, that didn't just fill me with complete

00:28:23.380 fury. And right now, somehow the coronavirus is, is the easier pill to swallow. The lockdowns are the

00:28:30.340 easier pill to swallow to, to compare to what is going on with our elections. Because we know

00:28:36.440 that irregularities occurred. We know that fraud occurred. We know that illegal acts occurred,

00:28:44.020 crimes by, by election officials who would pretend that they were going to stop counting

00:28:51.340 votes for the night and send all the poll watchers home, the lead, the poll watchers that the candidates

00:28:56.420 are legally entitled to have there. And then they would secretly count the ballots throughout the

00:28:59.860 night or they would send the poll watchers home or, or you would have these machines that,

00:29:04.180 that turned up errors that then the errors would go to a hand count. No, no oversight to that sort of

00:29:11.120 thing. What are, are we allowed to call this out? Are we allowed to say this was, this was fraud?

00:29:17.900 Well, at least one Senator is saying we, we can, and that would be Rand Paul.

00:29:22.720 I think we should have hearings going into the next year, hearing from state legislatures and what

00:29:28.400 they're going to do to make sure election law is upheld, not changed by people who are not

00:29:33.880 legislators. And I, we do have an interest in that. I don't want it to be federalized. Many on the

00:29:39.440 other side of the aisle would just soon federalize it and mail everybody a ballot and we'll have this

00:29:43.300 universal corruption throughout the land. But what I think we need to do is keep it at the state

00:29:48.140 level, but we can't just say it didn't happen. We can't just say, oh, 4,000 people voted in

00:29:52.860 Nevada that were non-citizens and we're just going to ignore it. We're going to sweep it under the rug.

00:29:57.700 So the courts have decided the facts. The courts have not decided the facts. The courts never looked at

00:30:02.440 the facts. The courts don't like elections. And so they stayed out of it by finding an excuse,

00:30:07.600 standing or otherwise to stay out of it. But the fraud happened. The election in many ways was

00:30:13.360 stolen. And the only way it'll be fixed is by in the future, reinforcing the laws.

00:30:19.880 Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Now we don't know. I mean, this is gets to Rand's point.

00:30:26.760 We don't know the full extent of these kinds of illegitimate vote counts or ineligible ballots.

00:30:35.180 We don't know. And I think that's why he said the election in many ways was stolen. He's not,

00:30:39.040 he's not actually claiming that I know for a fact, a hundred percent that Trump got more of these

00:30:43.740 legitimate votes. Well, you can't know that because the courts won't take up the case. And you can't

00:30:47.860 know that because you've got problems that are so pervasive that you can't possibly go in and check in

00:30:52.420 every single place. But one thing we can know for sure is that the way voting was conducted in

00:30:57.500 Pennsylvania was illegal. That was illegal. It was unconstitutional. The way that vote was

00:31:02.100 conducted in Pennsylvania, the most important swing state. So when Rand Paul says the election

00:31:07.940 in many ways was stolen, yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say. By the way, even if the votes

00:31:14.540 after this unconstitutional action, even if Biden got more of the votes, if the way that the vote was

00:31:22.200 conducted is illegitimate, then the whole election in Pennsylvania is illegitimate.

00:31:27.480 And yet then the courts come in and they refuse to hear the case.

00:31:32.100 So what, where does this leave us? This leaves us in this morass. There's nothing

00:31:35.460 particularly clear about it. I know ideologues on the left and on the right really want it to be

00:31:40.620 perfectly crystal clear and you can have a do-over. You don't get do-overs in politics.

00:31:44.880 You don't. You don't get do-overs even in the courts, really.

00:31:48.060 So what Rand Paul is saying here is, look, let's fight this thing to the very end. Let's go down

00:31:54.940 to the very last wire. Fine by me. But let's also, if, if we lose this battle, and it looks like

00:32:02.360 we will, and I'm just being prudent here or just being practical. I don't, I don't see the route

00:32:08.020 out other than the compromise of 1877 and Mitch McConnell shot that one down yesterday.

00:32:12.100 Okay. But at the very least then you, you can't give up the fight generally. If you give up the

00:32:16.720 fight, Republicans aren't going to win elections like ever again. Okay. At least at the national

00:32:21.660 level, at least important elections, decisive elections. They won't. If the, if the left is

00:32:28.540 permitted to get away with these kinds of shenanigans, how are Republicans supposed to win

00:32:33.240 again? So you got to keep up that fight. There are some ways to do it. I think president Trump's

00:32:37.200 looking into it now. Various investigators you could appoint. Senate could do this as well.

00:32:44.340 But there is a lot at stake here. We have more elections coming up in January. We have other

00:32:48.880 fun stuff coming up on Monday, December 21st. The historical docuseries, Apollo 11, what we saw

00:32:54.060 will be available exclusively at dailywire.com. The docuseries takes a detailed look at the Apollo

00:32:59.880 11 mission to land a man on the moon. Apollo 11, what we saw is a fantastic series to watch with

00:33:05.340 your loved ones over the holiday break. And right now, get it for 20% off with code WATCH,

00:33:09.900 W-A-T-C-H, when you become an insider or above member over at dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:33:17.040 That's dailywire.com slash subscribe to get 20% off your membership with code WATCH and access to all

00:33:23.280 of our new and exciting content. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more.

00:33:35.340 I want to get back to this idea of freedom because I think I may disagree with some of my colleagues

00:33:45.500 here a little bit. And I may sort of a little bit like 5% defend AOC, but only to make a point

00:33:52.560 about why AOC is wrong about everything. AOC tweets out yesterday, quote, sex work is work.

00:34:00.140 The federal government has done almost nothing to help people in months. We must pass stimulus

00:34:05.300 checks, unemployment insurance, small business relief, hospital funding, etc. Keep the focus

00:34:10.760 of shame there, not on marginalizing people, surviving a pandemic without help. This is in

00:34:16.820 response to a political controversy that's been stirring up in recent days over Pornhub. Pornhub's

00:34:23.200 getting knocked pretty hard right now, which is great. Over OnlyFans, which is this democratized

00:34:29.400 pornography where basically this website lures in any kind of young girl to become a pornographer

00:34:37.580 herself and then make, you know, the promise is you're going to make a lot of money and the 97%

00:34:42.500 of these people or even higher don't really make much money at all, but they end up degrading

00:34:47.100 themselves and have these photos on the internet forever and it's really not good for their lives.

00:34:50.200 Now, I'm skeptical of AOC's premise here that, you know, the only way to survive the pandemic

00:34:58.440 is to get involved in prostitution and pornography. I don't think that's true. I think there are other

00:35:03.440 ways to make money. Maybe, maybe you can make more money per hour or something doing that, but, you

00:35:09.160 know, the, the costs of that to your reputation, to your personal life, to your psychology, you know,

00:35:14.520 it's not, not great. I'm also sort of skeptical that we shouldn't have shame, feel shame for these

00:35:21.340 kind of lurid sexual behaviors, but instead we should feel shame because politicians, you know,

00:35:26.540 haven't done their job. I think that all people involved in sex work and politics should probably

00:35:34.720 feel some shame. You know, those are the two oldest professions, right? Prostitution is the oldest one

00:35:39.680 and then politics is just right after that. And as, as Reagan pointed out, they bear a lot of

00:35:45.400 similarities to one another. However, the place I will agree with AOC and disagree with some of my

00:35:51.420 conservative colleagues is when she says sex work is work. Obviously that's true. Of course it's work.

00:35:57.640 It takes time. You get paid for it. It does require skill. I won't think too much about the skills,

00:36:05.480 you know, because that's not as a family program, but it does, it does require, I suppose, some kind

00:36:09.960 of skill, even, even a little business savvy to attract a customer or, you know, it's, so it is work.

00:36:16.700 It's just bad work. It's not good work. It's not good for anybody. It's bad for the guys buying the

00:36:24.280 services. It's bad for the women providing the services. It's bad for society. It's bad. You know,

00:36:32.800 there was, there was a while ago, who was it? Obama said, I think it was Obama.

00:36:39.280 Some democratic politicians said, you know, if you don't work and study hard, you're going to end up

00:36:42.360 being a barista. Being a barista is honest work. That's an honest, you're, you know, you're going

00:36:48.440 out, you're providing a service. I love my barista, you know, sex work and a certain type of politics is

00:36:56.680 not honest work, but it is work. It's just, you, you don't, you don't want that for, you know,

00:37:02.520 there was a troll who tweeted out, obviously this was just to, to troll conservatives into a frenzy.

00:37:07.600 He said, I'm, my daughter is thriving on Pornhub and OnlyFans. I'm the proud father of a sex worker.

00:37:14.140 And, you know, obviously that isn't true. Nobody, nobody feels that way because there is something

00:37:20.640 intrinsically shameful about looking at porn and about performing in porn. And people at both sides

00:37:27.540 have psychological effects from that. You know, there's, one of the reasons that Pornhub has

00:37:33.440 become such a big issue is because you've got generations of young boys who are getting hooked

00:37:38.100 on this, on this thing, which is categorically different and more categorically more dangerous

00:37:42.180 than a playboy under your uncle's bed in the seventies, you know, or something like that.

00:37:46.300 This is very different. It has very damaging effects to people. This has been studied

00:37:51.120 scientifically and obviously that's true ethically as well. And it would seem to me that the way to

00:37:57.460 attack this problem is not to stigmatize or marginalize people who are in it. And it's,

00:38:06.260 it's not to permit it entirely and just say, well, you've got to raise your kids better,

00:38:12.140 but the government has no role. Politics has no role. No, it's obviously bad.

00:38:15.740 It's really bad. I mean, it's really shameful of AOC to encourage young girls to get involved in

00:38:20.780 prostitution, which is what she's doing. That's, that's a shameful thing. And that,

00:38:24.920 that could ruin lives. We should not do that. We should discourage girls from getting involved

00:38:29.280 in pornography and prostitution. We should discourage men from looking at and engaging

00:38:34.620 in those sorts of things. We can have prudence and recognize there's always going to be some kind

00:38:40.040 of shady pictures on the internet. There's always going to be, you know, a strip club or a brothel

00:38:44.660 in the red light district. And there's always going to be the temptation of women to get involved

00:38:50.180 in that. There's always going to be the temptation of men to get involved in that too, but we should

00:38:53.380 try to minimize it. You know, even getting back to St. Augustine, who I mentioned earlier with regard

00:38:59.160 to Christmas, St. Augustine defended legal prostitution in the sense that it's, it's prudent.

00:39:07.580 You know, it's, it's, it's impossible to eradicate entirely. There can be some externalities if you

00:39:12.700 do eradicate it entirely, but you don't want to encourage it. You want, you know, I understand

00:39:16.540 that that's not satisfying to either the liberal left who says, oh yeah, everybody should be a porn

00:39:21.360 star. And to the extremely ideological rigid right that says we've got to eradicate lust from the heart

00:39:26.920 of man. I don't think either of those are particularly practical. I think what we should just do is

00:39:32.300 through prudence, discourage all of this activity. And that involves some shame for everybody involved.

00:39:39.280 That can be a good thing. Shame is good. That's your, that's your conscience having a red blaring

00:39:44.020 light saying, woo, woo, woo, danger, danger. Don't, don't do this. And we should encourage that faculty.

00:39:49.960 That is a faculty of our reason. That is, that is a sense that we should cultivate. So right now,

00:39:56.120 Pornhub is getting hit with this $40 million lawsuit. Victims of a sex trafficking operation

00:40:01.580 are, are suing MindGeek, which is the parent company of Pornhub, because there was a sex

00:40:09.820 trafficking operation called Girls Do Porn, very creatively titled. And basically this was a

00:40:16.080 fraudulent porn company and they lured the girls in and said that actually these videos are only

00:40:21.440 going to be released on DVD in foreign countries. Don't worry, none of your friends, none of your

00:40:26.340 family is going to find it. What do they do? They immediately upload it to the internet and apparently

00:40:30.220 to Pornhub in particular, because I guess the biggest, biggest website, right? So they upload

00:40:34.420 all of that. These girls have their lives ruined. They, some of them threaten suicide. Some of them

00:40:39.360 attempt suicides. You know, their, their lives are completely shattered, which should be a warning

00:40:43.220 sign to anybody who wants to get on onlyfans.com because they think they can make a quick buck.

00:40:48.360 Obviously affects that you're not taking into account here. And these websites are preying on

00:40:51.960 girls who are not taking these things into account. So each victim here is asking for at least a

00:40:57.460 million bucks. Plus they're asking for the profits of their videos and legal fees as well.

00:41:03.100 That's good. That's a good thing. I don't know if the right or the left feel perfect about the way

00:41:10.700 that people are attacking, they're attacking Pornhub because they've got misogynistic content,

00:41:15.260 according to Nick Kristoff at the New York Times and racist content. And because they've got underage

00:41:20.400 girls, yeah, definitely go after them for that. And because they've got fraud videos and they've got,

00:41:23.960 okay, fine. That's sort of death by a thousand cuts. And you're not going to eradicate Pornhub

00:41:28.800 entirely, but you are going to cut it down to size. Just the other day, they deleted something

00:41:31.900 like half of the videos on their platform. How many millions of videos do they have on their

00:41:35.420 platform? They deleted half of them. That's good. That's good. That's a win. That's a good standard

00:41:42.660 to have. And you know, when, when people say you can't legislate morality, well, that's obviously

00:41:47.420 ridiculous. All laws by definition legislate morality. But I think what people are really saying is

00:41:51.780 you can't have a, you know, establish this perfect moral society without any sin. Yeah. Duh. Of

00:41:57.640 course not. Of course people are going to violate these sorts of things, but you can at least have

00:42:01.520 the standard and that goes a long way. What we've done, what, what really what political correctness

00:42:05.700 has done for the past 50 years, a hundred years is to invert the standards that we have in this

00:42:10.620 country. You saw this on ESPN, forget about porn for a second and go to something even less savory,

00:42:15.160 ESPN. ESPN commentator and former football player, I guess, Dominique Foxworth,

00:42:21.000 a man I've never heard of before. Cause I said, not only do I not watch ESPN now cause it's gone

00:42:26.180 woke, but I never really watched it all that much to begin with. So Dominique Foxworth said

00:42:30.560 on a podcast that he roots against another player on the Buffalo Bills, Josh Allen. And it's not

00:42:38.340 because he doesn't like Allen personally, or, you know, he thinks Allen's a bad player or whatever.

00:42:41.540 It's because Allen's fans are apparently somewhat conservative and specifically they have American

00:42:50.360 flags in their social media bios. And because of that, this guy roots against Josh Allen.

00:42:58.500 My biases are not based on Josh Allen. It's based on the people that are defending Josh Allen. I would

00:43:05.100 be 100% lying if I said that when Josh does something dumb, a little part of me doesn't get happy. And it's

00:43:11.500 not because I want Josh to succeed. It's because the people who are telling me that Josh is the second

00:43:17.680 coming and Josh is better than everybody are people with American flags and dogs and skull and crossbones

00:43:24.460 and the abbeys. And then if you go just take a dip into their tweet history, it's some really

00:43:31.040 concerning retweets and likes.

00:43:34.240 Some really concerning retweets and likes. Like, I'm just going to throw this out there as a guess.

00:43:39.780 Do they like retreat Trump or something? Oh my gosh. Do they retweet us at the Daily Wire? Do they

00:43:47.700 retweet conservatives? Because what do they have in the bio? They've got skull and crossbones. That's

00:43:52.620 the Jolly Roger, you know, kind of old pirate symbol. It's kind of like, you know, you see it on some

00:43:56.520 ties and things like that. Dogs. Oh no, dogs. Man's best friend. Nice, wholesome pet. And then worst of all,

00:44:05.380 the American flag. That's bad. That's a warning sign.

00:44:11.220 Used to be, according to the old standards, that the American flag was unassailable. That was the

00:44:18.320 one thing that we all could agree on because we all have to agree on it. It's the symbol of the whole

00:44:25.840 country, right? It's not just a symbol. It didn't used to just be a symbol of the Republican Party

00:44:32.760 or of MAGA or of, or I guess we all liked MAGA, right? We all wanted to make America great again.

00:44:39.660 It wasn't just a symbol of conservative. It was the symbol of all of us. And so we all saw ourselves

00:44:43.760 there. And increasingly that is not so. I suspect if you went to the left and you showed them either

00:44:52.540 the rainbow flag, the sort of gay rights, now it's more than that though. It's LGBT, the whole

00:44:58.560 alphabet line. If you showed them that flag or the American flag and said, which one do you feel

00:45:04.200 represents you? I bet you even straight left wingers, great many of them would choose the

00:45:09.960 rainbow flag. Because the rainbow flag has become a kind of, it's, it isn't even just a symbol of LGBT

00:45:15.860 anymore. It's a symbol of leftism in America. And it's an evidence, not just the rainbow flag,

00:45:22.900 but other sorts of symbols like this. It's an evidence that leftism is refuting something about

00:45:29.700 America. And you don't need to look to flags for that. You can see it in the 1619 project.

00:45:34.560 You can see that in the, you can see that in the protests in the NFL.

00:45:39.320 Protesting the symbol of the country itself. That now, now just conservatives are left alone with

00:45:46.040 this symbol of America. Democrats tried to bring out a few flags during their convention this year.

00:45:51.060 It wasn't very convincing. They've moved on. They're, they're trying to refute the country.

00:45:56.740 They've got a new standard. They've got a new standard on sex, obviously, but a new standard on

00:46:02.020 politics generally, a new standard on science, right? We have to defer to the scientists,

00:46:07.000 not just on certain medications, certain medical procedures, but on Christmas, on when we're allowed

00:46:14.860 to celebrate Christmas. That day used to be set by the church authorities, by bishops, by, you know,

00:46:19.580 by the early church fathers. Now it's being set by British health experts. What on earth do they

00:46:27.500 have to do with that? Now we're being told how we can travel, what family we can see,

00:46:32.380 what we have to wear, how we, how we dress is now being dictated to us by this new scientific

00:46:37.000 standard, which is obviously an extreme bastardization of that term. But that is, that is the new standard.

00:46:43.660 So what, what's the deal? Are we going to celebrate our freedom, that ultimate freedom bought for us

00:46:48.900 by the incarnation, then on the cross? That, that freedom that has guided our understanding of freedom,

00:46:56.760 shaped it in our civilization for 2000 years? Are we going to have some new idea for, I don't know what

00:47:03.920 that idea of freedom is from George Clooney and Dr. Fauci. Looks like an eternal lockdown. Which one do

00:47:09.720 we want? This would be a good time of year to contemplate that and make a decision. I'm Michael

00:47:14.280 Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.

00:47:22.320 If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the word,

00:47:27.360 please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. We're available on Apple

00:47:32.040 Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Also, be sure to check out the other

00:47:37.340 Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Andrew Klavan Show, and the Matt Walsh Show.

00:47:42.400 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring. Our

00:47:47.440 technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling,

00:47:53.260 production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, audio mixer Mike

00:47:59.460 Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production assistant McKenna Waters. The Michael

00:48:05.240 Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2020. If you prefer facts over feelings,

00:48:11.580 aren't offended by the brutal truth, and you can still laugh at the insanity filling our national

00:48:15.860 news cycle, well, tune in to the Ben Shapiro Show. We'll get a whole lot of that and much more. See you

00:48:20.440 there.

The Michael Knowles Show - December 17, 2020

Ep. 666 - Eternal Lockdown

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