Ep. 577 - Everybody’s Been Woked
Summary
Joe Biden is not a well man. It s not exactly breaking news. But the trouble is that Joe Biden s obvious decline tells us something about the broader Democratic Party, and the broader left. This was Joe Biden's rousing campaign speech. It will go down in the annals of states, a statesman-like rhetoric with Winston Churchill s fight on the beaches and Ronald Reagan s time for choosing.
Transcript
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Joe Biden is not a well man. It's not exactly breaking news. Okay. Not exactly a man bites
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dog story. We know that, but the trouble is that Joe Biden's unwellness, his obvious decline
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tells us something about the broader democratic party and the broader left. This was
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Joe Biden's rousing campaign speech. I mean, this will go down in the annals
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of states, statesman-like rhetoric with Winston Churchill's fight on the beaches with Ronald
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Reagan's time for choosing and with Joe Biden's muttering incoherently.
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Lonnie knows I believe this every fiber might be. We're posed. What I proposed is it can be done.
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I think we're in a position to really make it happen. And my team and your team are already
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working closely together to light up the path forward here. Critical laws like the Pro Act
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to strengthen collective bargaining on politics like prevailing and look, I guess I'm getting,
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I'm taking too much time. If you pretend it's slam poetry, it's actually much less sad. If you
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pretend it's slam poetry, it's actually got a kind of vibe to it. You know, we're posed and the pro
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and the, and the, anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, but it's, we can all laugh. And in some
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cases we're not laughing. We're saying, this is really sad. No one should let this guy run.
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His decline, his selection, the things he's saying, the very fact that he doesn't know the
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lingo we're all talking about shows you completely how out of touch the democratic party is with the
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United States, with the American people and why they're just not going to fix it. We'll get into
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it. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. We're posed on this beautiful
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Ring.com slash Knowles. So you, Biden mutters incoherently and that's not surprising at all.
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But he, he also mutters incoherently on public policy itself. So he mutters incoherently on the
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culture itself and he's not exactly alone in this. What, what Joe Biden is showing us is it's not
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merely a process of mental decline, you would say. It's a process of political decline for the left
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and for the Democratic Party. Joe Biden wants you all to know, not only is he posed, but everybody
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is woked. All the talk the last 20 years about driving down the rationale for unions,
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all of a sudden this face, this phrase, everybody's been woked. Well, guess what? The rest of the
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working class people in America have been awakened and realized, whoa, why? Because I work at a fast
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food restaurant that I have to sign an agreement that I will not compete, a non-compete agreement
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that I will not go across town to another fast food restaurant and try to get a raise.
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What in the hell was that about? You know that phrase, everybody's been woked. People are
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attributing this to his mental decline, but it's not that exactly. Joe Biden is not the first
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Democratic candidate in recent years to not understand the popular culture, to not be able
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to meme as we, as we describe about the left. Hillary Clinton, you remember in, in 2016, she had one of
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the most cringe inducing political lines I've ever heard. This was when that app Pokemon Go was very
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briefly popular and you'd walk around with your phone and collect Pokemon. Anyway, she was trying
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to make this cultural reference and she had this line. She, she told you that you had to, to take
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your love of Pokemon and bring it in to the election booth. Cause we're going to have a lot of jobs, jobs
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from building infrastructure to coding, creating new apps. I don't know who created Pokemon Go,
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but I'm trying to figure out how we get them to have Pokemon go to the polls.
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Oh boy. Oh boy. Try, try the veal folks. Tip your waitress. You get it? Pokemon go to the polls. Take
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my wife, please. Oh man. That is, that would be too lame for like a 40s Borscht belt comic.
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But why, why does the left do this? It doesn't make a lot of sense because the left is the hip,
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hip, young, woke, cool, right? So how come the left can't meme? And that, this is an eternal
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question. It's at least a question that we've been asking ourselves for the last four years.
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The left always says they're the cool, hip future political movement. And yet they can't meme. They
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can't tell jokes. They can't make people laugh with spontaneous humor on the internet. They have to go
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through these contrived institutions. The reason for this is because the left controls the entire
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establishment. They run, they run everything. We've made this point on this show before they
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control the mainstream media, Hollywood, big tech, higher education, lower education, administrative
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government. They've got everything. Okay. The newspapers write everything and Hillary Clinton
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and Joe Biden are, are pretty good examples of this. So they can't meme because to meme is to
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subvert the establishment. To meme is to point out an absurdity of the establishment. I mean, this is in
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part, you could broaden this out, not just from internet memes or these little one-off jokes,
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but humor more generally. Humor thrives on incongruity and absurdity and recognizing a certain
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truth that is not being talked about and pointing out that truth to highlight then how ridiculous the,
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the mainstream established order is. But the left is the mainstream established order. They are the,
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not only creators of the established order, they're the enforcers of the established order.
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And so they can't be funny. It's why you, you think of, of political correctness, right? People
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scolding you for telling jokes, for saying words, canceling Kevin Hart because he made a joke 10 years
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ago. The left has this problem and they're trying to work it out now. And Joe Biden is just an,
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an egregious example of, of the failure of trying to work this out. You cannot simultaneously be
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the establishment and subvert the establishment, at least not in any serious way. You can, you can
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have the kind of typical liberalism of the rhetoric of liberation, but in terms of the actual, actual
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institutions, you can't be the establishment and subvert yourself. A good example beyond politics of
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why this doesn't work, why the left can't meme, why they can't speak to us directly, why there seems to
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be a disconnect between the mainstream media and the American people or Joe Biden and the American
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people. The reason for this is they don't know what we believe. They have no idea, even the most basic
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elements of what we believe. They are caught in a fantasy world. The left is living in a fantasy world
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that's easy to live in because it is based on their ideology. The thing about ideology is ideology is
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always wrong. There's reality. And then there is ideology, which tries to formalize reality into a
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five bullet point manifesto, but that just doesn't work. So they've got this ideology and because they
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have the protection of all of the institutions, they very rarely have to come up to face with
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reality. When they do, it's at moments where they let reality have a word in like the 2016 election
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or the Brexit vote or a few other of these moments in recent years. And they're shocked. They can't
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believe it because they've felt so comfortable in their reality, in, in their, in their fantasy,
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rather. Don Lemon on CNN goes on CNN with his friend, Chris Cuomo. And they're talking about
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how much they don't like the founding fathers. And we've got to pull the founding fathers off of
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pedestals. And the example that Don Lemon gives as to why this is the case is that not even Jesus
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was perfect when he was walking on this earth. Take a listen. Here's the thing. Jesus Christ,
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if you believe in, if you, if that's who you believe in Jesus Christ, admittedly was not perfect
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when he was here on this earth. So why are we deifying the founders of this country?
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Admittedly, who's admitting that? Uh, that guy, Don Lemon is saying that he's declaring that,
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but Jesus, just a little history, theology lesson for you all. Jesus is perfect and was perfect
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when he walked on this earth. And he necessarily must be. That is perhaps the most basic aspect
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of the incarnation. He is God. He has to be perfect. Don Lemon, he seems honest when he seems like he
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honestly is ignorant. He honestly doesn't know what he's saying, but consider that. I like to
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think, I don't think we're flattering ourselves that on the right conservatives, even more moderate
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people, we understand the left. We, we understand the left, not even through any great achievement of
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our own, just because we live in a leftist culture. So we're confronted with what the left
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believes all the time. The left does not believe the right. And to take this matter into religious
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circumstances, atheists don't understand Christianity. Very rarely has an atheist understood
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Christianity and rejected it outright. I think what is most evident here is that biblical literacy,
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the foundation of our, of our education does not exist on the left. They just don't, they just don't
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know the most basic aspects. And so how could they comment on it? How could they subvert something?
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How could they get a funny jibe in or a meme? They don't know even most fundamentally what they
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are talking about. Was this always the case? Was it always the case that the left just didn't get it
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or has the problem gotten worse? The left always lived in an ideological fantasy world, but the
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problem has gotten much, much worse. And actually Don Lemon proves it to us. We'll get to that in one
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more time doing what you love. The problem has gotten worse. The left has gotten more disconnected
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from reality. You have to look no further for proof of this than Don Lemon himself, who just
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seven years ago, this was in 2013, I believe, Don Lemon was on CNN. He was talking about some of the
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racial tensions that were cropping up back then. And he, he actually deferred to Bill O'Reilly. He
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deferred to conservatives. He deferred to people who were pointing out that most of the social
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problems among black Americans don't come from the cops. The vast, vast majority don't come from
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the cops. They come from social dysfunction that has arisen for a variety of reasons, but which can
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only be fixed within the black community. It's time now for some tough love on the subject.
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The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration
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of the African-American family. He's got a point. In fact, he's got more than a point. Bill?
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Raised without much structure, young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street
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culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that. Again, it is a personal decision.
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He is right about that too. But in my estimation, he doesn't go far enough because black people,
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if you really want to fix the problem, here's just five things that you should think about doing.
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Here's number five, pull up your pants. Number four now is the N word. Now, number three,
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respect where you live. Start small by not dropping trash, littering in your own communities. I've lived in
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several predominantly white neighborhoods in my life. I rarely, if ever, witnessed people littering.
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All right, slow down there, David Duke. Come on, Richard Spencer, cool it with the racism.
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Of course, nothing he said is bigoted or racist or anything like that. But today,
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could you imagine if he said that today? We had to play a slightly condensed cut of that,
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but I forget who posted it. Someone posted it to Twitter. You can see the entire link. He goes on
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and on. We actually had to truncate it a little bit. If Don Lemon were to say that today on CNN,
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well, he couldn't say it on CNN. But even if you said it on a conservative cable news channel,
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I'm not sure you could get away with it. Frankly, I think you might get canceled for it. You might be
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told. That's racially inflammatory. That's offensive. That's politically incorrect.
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Even CNN's own hosts were talking about this seven years ago. The problem has accelerated.
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And as it accelerates, it's going to create more problems. The Democrats would have a better chance
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of winning elections. The left would have a better chance of winning hearts and minds if they were a
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little bit more connected to reality. This is the great conservative consolation, by the way,
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because the left always takes the culture because they promise you free stuff. They don't only promise
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you free money, though they promise you that as well, but they promise you free sex. They promise
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you free leisure. They promise you free indulgence of your appetites. They promise you fundamentally
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that things don't have costs. You can do whatever you want sexually and not face any consequences.
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You can eat as much as you want, not face any consequences. You can laze around as much as you want
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and not face any consequences. And the conservatives have to come in with this unpopular message
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which is, no, everything in life has a consequence. You can't free yourself and liberate yourself from
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every single thing in the world. And even if you did, it would make you miserable.
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So we're at a disadvantage when it comes to that kind of messaging because the left gets to come in
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and give you free stuff. But reality reasserts itself in the end. That's the great conservative
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consolation. Because when the left gets so completely disconnected from reality, people know that.
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And we joke about that and we laugh about that and we send memes around about that. So no matter what
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they're telling you in the mainstream media, and I think there are things that the Trump campaign can
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fix, and I think they got to reopen the country ASAP where the left is going to have a real
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advantage. Actually, that's another great example. There's now no scientific reason whatsoever for
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the lockdown. The lockdown was meant to flatten the curve so that we could spread out the cases,
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not overwhelm the health care system. We're nowhere close to overwhelming the health care system.
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We never got close. We never even got close in New York. We had empty hospitals in New York
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and an empty hospital ship in New York. There is not one argument for a renewed lockdown
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scientifically, but there's a major political argument for the lockdown, which is that it
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helps Biden because it lets him stay in his basement where he doesn't have to talk too much
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and it shuts down Trump from campaigning. And it puts us on the road to having national
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widespread mail-in ballots, which are rife with fraud. And we've pointed out cases of that fraud
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over just the past few weeks on this very show. Okay. That's a, this is a great example actually
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of the disconnect between the scientific reality and the political ideology here. And there are a
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lot of people looking around and saying, wait a second, you told us not to wear masks a few months
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ago. We see on the CDC website that masks don't do very much at all. Your own arguments are
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contradictory. You told us that a zillion people are going to die. That hasn't happened. You told us
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the point of the lockdown wasn't even to save people's lives, just to spread out the deaths.
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What are we doing? That moves in our favor. So the left, if the right can wake up to it and finally
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actually advocate for our own positions, the left is not in a good place. And we know this because
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as I predicted just a few days ago, they are already calling for Joe Biden to skip out on the
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debates. Tom Friedman, the great, the inimitable Tom Friedman writing in the New York Times says,
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Biden should not debate Trump unless I worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump. He should only do
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it under two conditions. Otherwise he's giving Trump unfair advantages. First, Biden should
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declare that he will take part in debate only if Trump releases his tax returns for 2016 through
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2018. Biden has already done so. They're on his website. Don't, okay. What, what does that,
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what do tax returns have to do with coronavirus and the arguments against the debates? Nothing.
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They just know that it's going to put Trump in a very difficult position because Joe Biden has been
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on the government dole his entire adult life. And Donald Trump has, is a businessman. So he's
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obviously got complex finances and they just want to open up some new attacks. Second, Biden should
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insist that a real time fact checking team approved by both candidates, but hired by the nonpartisan
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commission on presidential debates and the 10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate,
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this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies that either candidate has
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uttered. There is a fact checking team at all presidential debates. It's called the candidates.
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That's what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to say, no, that, that isn't true.
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You just lied about that. That number is not right. Now what the left does is they cheat.
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They put in their own moderators and their own fact checkers like Candy Crowley, who did this in 2012
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when Barack Obama was debating Mitt Romney and it became a two-on-one debate, both of the Democrats
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against Mitt Romney. And she lied through her teeth by the way, and only apologized after the debate when no
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one was watching anymore. They know though, Tom Friedman knows, New York times knows that Joe
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Biden can't do that. He's not up for it. He can barely pronounce his own name. And so they're trying
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to set the stage to get Biden not to debate as they should because Joe Biden is now personally a
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little bit divorced from reality, but more broadly his party and his political worldview is very divorced
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from reality. Now, ironically at this time of presidential candidates being separated from reality,
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we've got a new entrance into the race. Kanye West is running for president. I got to tell you,
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I read through his very long interview that he just gave to Forbes. I kind of like candidate Kanye.
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I, I know it sounds, I unironically am pretty pro Kanye. I'm going to vote for Trump. I'm not going
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to vote for Kanye in 2020, but I got to tell you, Kanye has a lot of good things to say politically.
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Here's just the, uh, the top line from the interview. He says he's running for president
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in 2020 under a new banner, the birthday party. That's the name of his political party, the birthday
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party with guidance from Elon Musk and an obscure vice presidential candidate. He's already chosen.
00:21:07.620
The vice presidential candidate is just a preacher. I think from the Midwest love that. Oh yeah. Are you
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telling me you could pick either like some random congressman, some, some empty suit sociopath,
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like most people choose for running mates or political appointments, or just a good old preacher
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from the heartland of America. Sign me up, man. I I'm, I'm with Kanye. Uh, he says that he's okay
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with siphoning off black votes from the democratic nominee, thus helping Trump. He says, I'm not denying
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it. I just told you to say that the black vote is democratic as a form of racism and white supremacy.
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Damn right. It is absolutely the way that they're taught. You, you see this constantly people
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attacking Kanye because he's stealing votes. He's stealing black votes from Joe Biden,
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meaning Joe Biden owns those black voters. Debra Messing, the actress said this just the other day.
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So that's absolutely disgusting. She said, quote, he's playing Jill Stein. He's trying to take young
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black voters from Biden. It's disgusting. Biden doesn't own those voters. Sorry, lady. And Kanye West
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points that out. Love that. Uh, he says that he believes quote, planned parenthoods have been
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placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the devil's work. Yup. Preach man. Absolutely.
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That's the most concise description of planned parenthood that I have heard. And their, their
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political strategy of expansion into cities that I have ever heard from any American politician.
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Now he's wrong on China. He kind of likes China. So that's bad. And he wants to spring people from
00:22:38.040
prison. That's not good. We don't, we don't like that very much. Uh, but you know, he's right on
00:22:42.860
the Democrats. He says, it's a line of his too. Let's see if, uh, the appointing is at 2020 or it's
00:22:49.500
at 2024, but God appoints the president. If I win in 2020, then it was God's appointment. If I win in
00:22:56.000
2024, then that was God's appointment. What Kanye West is giving here. I know people think that sounds
00:23:01.200
kooky and crazy. This is just a description of what St. Paul tells us in the scriptures. And it's a
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description of what Edmund Burke describes about providence, that there is a, an overarching
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providence to the world. Uh, great stuff. I dig that. I like, he was, he says that we need to
00:23:15.420
pray. We need to pray for freedom. It's all about God. And we need to stop doing things that make God
00:23:20.100
mad. Yeah, man. That's like my political philosophy. Let's stop doing things that make God mad and pray
00:23:25.920
and pray for your freedom. Bingo, buddy, man, this guy's great. I can't wait for this guy to run for
00:23:31.340
president. Maybe like 2024. I don't necessarily want him to take over. Uh, oh, on abortion. I'm
00:23:36.700
pro-life because I'm following the word of the Bible. Oh, good stuff. This is great. On being a
00:23:43.660
political novice. He says, I have to say with all humility that as a man, I don't have all, all of
00:23:48.280
the pieces in the puzzle. He is humble. It's one of these things they say this with Trump too. They
00:23:52.960
say he's a narcissist. He's an egotist. They say this about Kanye, but when you get past the jokes,
00:23:57.720
there is a certain humility here that is necessary, especially if you convert or revert
00:24:02.440
to Christianity. I mean, he goes on. There's so many issues in this whole, I strongly encourage you
00:24:10.780
to read this piece. There's one bit too I want to hit on. Just one last bit at the end. He was asked
00:24:15.920
about his policies and he says, I don't know if I would use the word policy for the way I approach
00:24:20.040
things. I don't have a policy when I went to Nike and designed Yeezy and went to Louis and designed
00:24:25.280
a Louis Vuitton at the same time. It wasn't a policy. It was a design. We need to innovate
00:24:29.920
the design to be able to free the mind at the same time. Yes, that's right. That's my
00:24:35.960
view of, I know that's my view of politics though. We have been caught in this technocratic
00:24:41.340
egghead politics of just managing spreadsheets. What Edmund Burke might've called the sophisters,
00:24:50.460
economists and calculators who he derided. And so Kanye comes in, he goes, yeah, I don't want all
00:24:56.340
those stupid egghead things. I've got a vision. We got to pray for our freedom. Got to do the
00:25:01.160
right thing. Got to stop killing babies. I think it's great. It's terrific. I look forward to the
00:25:07.200
future Kanye run. He even said in there, he goes, I'm not sure. I don't have total clarity if it's
00:25:10.560
2020 or 2024. I, if he runs in 2020, that's fine. I don't, I think he's probably gonna miss the
00:25:15.580
filing deadline. And, uh, you know, I, I like Trump, so I, that wouldn't be, but whatever.
00:25:21.100
I don't care if he, even if he runs, that's fine by me. All the libs think he's going to steal votes
00:25:24.720
from Biden anyway. So whatever. That's what we'll let them get very upset about that for a few
00:25:29.180
months. But regardless of whether or not Kanye becomes president, I'm not, I'm not willing to
00:25:33.620
give my endorsement, uh, for president Kanye yet, but regardless of whether or not he does what he
00:25:39.100
says about politics there has more sophistication and political wisdom than a hundred percent of
00:25:46.740
Democrats in terms of actually like a virtuous politics and really more than probably 70% of
00:25:53.600
Republicans. So I, I congratulate Kanye. I think that's good. Also on some good news for our politics,
00:25:58.500
uh, the little sisters of the poor have just beaten Barack Obama. It's amazing that Barack Obama
00:26:05.160
would pick a fight with a group of nuns called the little sisters of the poor, but he did.
00:26:11.420
He pushed for his Obamacare law to force the little sisters of the poor and other religious groups to
00:26:18.340
pay for abortion inducing drugs and birth control in obvious violation of their conscience. This was
00:26:24.540
litigated and went all the way up to the Supreme court. It's been going on for years and we got a
00:26:28.420
decision and luckily actually it wasn't even a five, four decision. It was a seven, two decision.
00:26:36.820
So you had the, you had, I believe it was Sotomayor and RBG sided against the little sisters of the
00:26:44.040
poor because one of those is the least impressive member of the court and the other one is the most
00:26:50.380
partisan member of the court. And you had Kagan and everyone else, but Kagan, probably the most
00:26:57.640
notable liberal go over and side with the little sisters of the poor. There, there's just no
00:27:01.680
argument here. I mean, it's not even close. Obviously the federal government should not force
00:27:06.140
nuns to pay for abortion inducing drugs. The fact that this is even a religious question though
00:27:12.060
should worry us. The fact that the state religion of liberalism, of doing what you want, of if it feels
00:27:19.400
good, do it has this much sway over our religion, traditional religion. If you're a Christian,
00:27:27.640
if this would affect you, this could affect you if you're Jewish or Muslim, the fact that they have
00:27:32.920
this much sway over it is troublesome because it means this isn't over. What the, what the left
00:27:37.600
understands that the right doesn't is that court decisions are not final. They will keep relitigating
00:27:42.360
them until they get the decision that they want. A nice win for the short term, but we're going to
00:27:48.660
have to rethink our conservative legal movement in the longterm, I think. But for today, let's be happy
00:27:54.060
with the little sisters of the poor and with Kanye, let's pray for freedom because the state religion
00:28:02.220
is pretty broad. You know, there was a, there was this, this story that came up out of Canada.
00:28:10.800
So it's America's hat. It's not in America, but it's similar ethos. And I, I wouldn't at all be
00:28:17.460
surprised if we saw the same story in America. They, in Canada, they painted a crosswalk in rainbow
00:28:24.020
colors, not to remind man that God will never again destroy the earth in a flood, but to, to
00:28:29.640
support sexual liberation and gay rights. But now it's so much, so much more than just homosexuality.
00:28:36.580
They're very upset up in Canada. The cops are investigating a major serious crime
00:28:41.580
because they found tire marks in the crosswalk. Pride crosswalk defaced outside West Vancouver
00:28:50.520
police station. They're looking for a black Ford Mustang with red racing stripes along the top
00:28:55.400
and sides because there were tire marks in a crosswalk. Have you ever seen tire marks in a
00:29:01.720
crosswalk? Probably you have because you know what drives over crosswalks? Cars. You know what cars
00:29:06.800
have? Tires. You know what happens when you hit the brakes? You get tire marks.
00:29:11.580
But this is, any offense to part of the state religion, which is the rainbow, not the old
00:29:17.800
rainbow, the new rainbow, is considered a hate crime. The, the worst possible thing imaginable.
00:29:23.420
We saw yesterday, two people are being charged in America with civil rights violations with
00:29:28.060
hate crimes for painting over a, a black lives matter, Marxist slogan in the streets of a city.
00:29:37.940
That sort of thing, that's not going to have to go up to the Supreme court. These people are going to
00:29:41.160
get the hammer laid down on them, whether it's in America or in Canada. And the little sisters of
00:29:45.920
the poor are going to have to wait and wait and fight and fight for years and years in court.
00:29:51.280
That is the religion of liberalism. Even, even this is one story. I mentioned it a little bit
00:29:57.840
yesterday on Ben's radio show, but I have to get to it before we get to the mailbag.
00:30:01.640
Single people right now, single people are having kids with strangers as part of a trend called
00:30:08.280
co-parenting. Now you would think co-parenting is a man and a woman love each other very much.
00:30:12.720
They get married. They call the stork hotline. The stork brings them a baby. They raise the baby
00:30:16.640
together out of their love for each other. But liberalism, as it always does, has inverted
00:30:21.140
things. So now, instead of bringing your love for another person into it manifestly, a love that is a
00:30:28.220
person. And then, and then you give your love to that little baby. Now we only love ourselves.
00:30:32.320
We are only out for ourselves and everything is about giving us pleasure and giving us what we
00:30:37.600
want. So the, the story goes, they're skipping love and marriage. They're going straight to the
00:30:42.980
part about a baby in a carriage. Yelena Pranoza, 41 year old accountant living in Staten Island has
00:30:47.420
an 18 year old daughter, but that hasn't stopped her from yearning for a brother or sister for my
00:30:51.260
daughter. After her hubby of eight years made it clear he doesn't want any more kids. She split from
00:30:55.700
him four years ago and turned to the internet for answers. There is much that is wrong here,
00:31:01.900
but basically what's come up is that people go on the internet and they say, they swipe. It's like
00:31:05.740
swiping right or left, but not for a romantic relationship, just to have a kid. Much wrong
00:31:13.100
with it. Much is backwards. First of all, you want a child to grow up in a stable, loving home, not with
00:31:17.820
two random people who met one time and live in different places and maybe sort of know each other,
00:31:21.720
but they're gonna have a kid together. You don't want to intentionally deprive a child of one of its
00:31:26.780
natural, natural parents, which is happening more and more these days. You don't want to make the kid
00:31:32.860
all about you. That's the worst kind of parenting. And if you, if you begin parenting that way, it's going
00:31:39.220
to have miserable results. That's what our culture has done. We've made it all about us. We've made it all
00:31:43.560
about our own fantasies. And you know what? It's not, it's made us all miserable. You can, you can see it
00:31:48.160
in public opinion polls. We're more anxious, we're more stressed, we're more suicidal than just about
00:31:52.920
ever. This is true across age groups. It's truer of women than it is of men even. Men are committing
00:31:59.820
suicide at higher rates as they always do, but women's happiness as, as measured by various polls
00:32:04.240
has declined both in relative terms to men and in absolute terms over the past five decades.
00:32:08.880
Selfishness has made us miserable. That living in a fantasy world has made us miserable. And I think
00:32:15.980
we might be at a breaking point. I think we might be at one of these points that happens every so often,
00:32:20.640
every, every few decades, maybe only every few centuries where reality begins to reassert itself
00:32:26.540
and people are waking up to that. And that's an ugly thing. When you, when you wake up from a dream,
00:32:31.900
when you wake up sleepwalking, things can go wrong. It can be very jarring. It can be very scary.
00:32:37.100
That may be the moment that we're in this election that we're talking about, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
00:32:41.660
That is, that is one symbol. It's a clear symbol of it too. Which way are we going to go? How are we
00:32:46.800
going to, how are we going to wake up from this? Is it good? Is it going to be nightmarish or are we
00:32:52.100
going to be happy to welcome ourselves finally back into reality? That remains to be seen. We
00:32:58.300
will get to the mailbag in just one second. First though, I have got to thank all of you for heading
00:33:03.480
over and subscribing on Apple podcasts to the Michael Knowles show. And I've got to thank you
00:33:07.060
for going and subscribing to the Michael Knowles show YouTube channel. And I want to thank all of you
00:33:10.780
for going to my MySpace page, you know, cause I hadn't seen that in probably like 15 years or so.
00:33:14.780
So that was, that's really cool too. Be sure to check out my chat with Donald Trump Jr. on the
00:33:18.960
YouTube page. We, we spoke to him yesterday and we spoke to the man, the myth, the legend,
00:33:23.800
Mark McCloskey. He's the guy in St. Louis with the gun outside his house in the pink polo shirt
00:33:29.460
and the white chinos. He's a hero. He clears up a lot of misinformation that people are spreading
00:33:35.400
about him. Super cool guys. So check that out. Also get a daily wire reader's pass 99 cents for your
00:33:39.860
first month, three bucks a month after that. You get lots of great insight going into the election.
00:33:43.400
So it's absolutely terrific. Head on over to dailywire.com for that and buy Ben's book.
00:33:47.720
Head on over. Ben has a new book out. Ben writes a new book every, it seems 36 hours.
00:33:52.780
This is a terrific book. It's how to destroy America in three easy steps. He seems to have
00:33:58.900
pre, pre-visaged what, what is going on right now in this country. People tearing things down. He talks
00:34:05.340
about the disintegrationists as our country is disintegrating. So you can pre-order your signed
00:34:10.940
copy at dailywire.com slash Ben. Get that today. Head on over to dailywire.com. We'll be right back
00:34:15.320
with the mailbag. First question from Josh, Mr. Knowles. Why does the left seem to only discuss
00:34:32.580
right wing straw man arguments when discussing conservative positions? Do they honestly not
00:34:37.500
know conservative positions or is it part of a strategy to discredit those more serious positions?
00:34:42.760
Thanks. It's funny you should ask that. I actually did not realize that that was going to be the
00:34:47.880
first question in here and it ties in exactly to our theme of the show and it ties in exactly to Don
00:34:52.680
Lemon. I think it's two parts. One, they genuinely don't know. They actually don't know. And two,
00:34:59.260
they don't care. If you live in the liberal worldview, in a liberal culture, with a liberal government,
00:35:06.560
you are generally not very interested in leaving that ideological bubble. Even if the ideology
00:35:14.700
doesn't totally correspond to reality, you would be more interested in forcing that fantasy on the
00:35:19.940
world and making it into a reality, which is a premise of liberalism. We can do whatever we want
00:35:24.840
to do. We can liberate ourselves completely. We can liberate ourselves from the confines of reality
00:35:28.780
than you are in understanding the other point of view.
00:35:32.200
But they don't know what we think. A great example happened this week. Ayn Rand was trending because
00:35:39.300
Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. She was this kind of anarcho-capitalist
00:35:46.680
type figure. She wants very, very small government. She just wants to build things. She loved
00:35:51.140
industrialism. She was an atheist. She was a rationalist. And she was famously written out of
00:35:57.880
the conservative movement. When she came on the scene, some conservatives liked that she wanted to at
00:36:01.760
least make a little money and save a little money. But Whitaker Chambers, William F. Buckley Jr., a lot
00:36:07.260
of people said her vision of the world just has very little to do with the transcendent moral
00:36:11.700
universe that conservatives believe in. And so that's not really what conservatism is. But the
00:36:16.780
left was dunking on the Ayn Rand Institute this week because they took government money. And they
00:36:21.200
really thought that Ayn Rand was the representative of the conservative worldview when really that isn't
00:36:26.860
true. If it ever was true, that's decades in the past now. And really, I don't think it was true
00:36:31.420
ever. They're tilting at windmills. They're fighting against straw men. And it's why, by the way,
00:36:39.920
they are always welcoming of squishy conservatives. They invite squishy conservatives on their news
00:36:45.540
channels. The system actually needs the squishy conservatives to give legitimacy to the larger
00:36:53.100
liberal project. But you know who they don't like? Conservatives who tell it like it is.
00:36:58.540
Conservatives who are a little too real. Conservatives who speak their mind and puncture
00:37:03.200
their ideology, who don't accept their premises. They don't let those guys on their news channels
00:37:08.660
because those guys, rather than being a support for the system, are actually a major threat to the
00:37:15.480
system. And they don't want to hear it. Maybe they don't know about it, but they sure don't want to
00:37:19.260
hear it. From Pasquale. What a great name, Pasquale. Dear Swarthi, Mr. Knowles, I'm a big
00:37:23.900
fan. Also a registered nurse. Now, I don't have as much medical or scientific knowledge or experience
00:37:30.420
as our elected career politicians. So I was just wondering how wearing a surgical mask
00:37:34.480
or face covering protects others, but not the person wearing one. Many mask wearers aggressively
00:37:41.140
attack people who don't wear one. But if spit droplets are not able to go out, wouldn't that also
00:37:45.300
mean they can't go in either? Or is that $1 bandana made of some magical one-way material?
00:37:50.880
P.S. I'm also an Italian American and I'm extremely offended by your use of the word Swarthi,
00:37:54.460
which I'd never heard before. I'm going to raise money to build a Michael Knowles statue,
00:37:57.600
then knock it over because I'm bored and have nothing else to do. Fair enough. Totally understand.
00:38:02.140
That's the age we're living in. You got to build up statues just to knock them down.
00:38:05.100
On the point about the masks, of course, you're right. Initially, people wear masks to protect
00:38:09.800
themselves, generally speaking. And that was one of the ideas early on in this coronavirus thing.
00:38:16.760
But they realized that if you're just wearing a mask to protect yourself, then that gives you the
00:38:20.800
right to decide whether or not to wear the mask. Because in this country, we still believe,
00:38:26.160
at least to a large degree, that you have the right to take some risks yourself.
00:38:32.180
So they couldn't have that narrative continue because then no one would wear the masks and no one
00:38:36.860
would be as freaked out about the lockdown. And they couldn't push nationwide mail-in ballots and
00:38:42.380
they couldn't lock Joe Biden in a basement and not have him make mistakes. So there are many,
00:38:46.000
many implications to these policies. So what they had to do was say, it's actually not about you.
00:38:50.980
You have to wear the mask because if you don't wear the mask, you're killing grandma. You're killing
00:38:54.740
someone else. It creates, it's much more effective at whipping up hysteria and it's much more effective
00:38:59.960
at getting people to fall in line. But it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense when reality
00:39:06.040
reasserts itself as it does for some people in the end. From Aaron. Hi, Michael. Do you think
00:39:11.700
religiosity will decline in America? What do you think it would take for atheism to decline? Thanks.
00:39:15.700
No, I don't think religiosity ever really declines, not in the long run. I think religiosity just gets
00:39:21.760
replaced by another religion. So everybody's got to serve somebody. That is a fact of life. Man is
00:39:29.280
fundamentally a religious being. Our longings are not primarily just of the appetite. Like,
00:39:34.900
I need coffee. I want this food. I want this drug. I want this sex. We have those longings too,
00:39:39.320
but we have deeper longings, more sustained longings, a longing that cannot be satisfied except
00:39:48.040
with religion, except by God, what you would call the God-shaped hole in man's heart. That is the most
00:39:54.820
enduring, eternal, deepest longing. And so when you, that has fulfilled, been fulfilled traditionally
00:40:01.560
everywhere by religion. But in this enlightened liberal age, as people have seen it fashionable
00:40:08.140
to become atheists, they just replace it with something else. So they replace it primarily with
00:40:12.180
political ideology, the ideology of liberalism or communism or fascism, or they replace it with
00:40:18.980
some kind of modern spins on those ideologies like environmentalism, which has all of the hallmarks
00:40:24.220
of religion, right? It's got sin in pollution, redemption in recycling, the sale of indulgences
00:40:29.740
and carbon tax credits. It's got an entire order, a moral order that happens to have to do with the
00:40:37.420
earth rather than the metaphysical world. But you have to replace it with something. And so
00:40:42.460
I think there are a lot of squishy conservatives, the conservative liberals, you know, the classical
00:40:49.160
liberals even say, who believe that really what we need to do is create this separate space for me to
00:40:55.660
practice my religion. But you're free, not to practice any religion at all. And just to every,
00:41:00.620
we're all good. Nobody has anything to do with each other. And we'll be fine. Leave me alone.
00:41:05.140
That's not how society has ever worked. That's not how politics has ever worked. Politics comes from
00:41:11.600
the Greek polis, the city states where people live together. That's what it's about. How do we all live
00:41:17.820
together? And so it does have an effect. We got to get this kind of ideological, libertarian notion
00:41:24.480
out of our minds that we have no effect on other people and other people have no effect on us. We
00:41:28.160
live in society. We are social creatures. That's how Aristotle defines man. And when you're living in
00:41:34.940
a culture that is avowedly atheist or liberal or environmentalist or whatever, that is going to
00:41:39.600
have an effect on your religion. They are going to come knocking on your door. Ask the little sisters
00:41:43.500
of the poor about that. They've been fighting this for years and they got a little mild wind,
00:41:48.360
but they're going to be fighting it for years more. I promise you. So the key, it is not merely
00:41:53.380
enough to leave everybody alone. What we have to do if you're Christian is to follow the commission
00:41:59.480
that you were given, which is to evangelize. We need to persuade people of our ideas. If we don't do
00:42:07.280
that, if we're not winning, we're losing. From Katie. Hey, Michael, I'm dating a liberal.
00:42:11.780
Here's your first problem. Things started off fine, but more and more he's trying to empower me by
00:42:16.980
insisting that I pick up the check at restaurants and open doors for him. I don't think it'll work
00:42:21.920
out, but I'm also confused about how to break up with him since he already encourages me to see
00:42:26.020
other men in our relationship. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks. I can't tell you if that
00:42:35.700
letter is a joke or is serious. That's how crazy our culture has gotten. That I could see that being
00:42:44.280
a joke. You know, some conservatives wrote that in as a joke. I could also see that being an article
00:42:49.780
on Slate. And I've read articles like that on Slate. And I've heard experiences like that from my
00:42:55.900
female friends who have dated liberals. That's a very bad situation. I guess, though, we're all
00:43:04.420
focusing on the guy. This liberal guy who has these crazy ideas of, you know, you should sleep with other
00:43:09.740
men and you should, you should pick up the tab. But really, maybe you're the one who's got a, who's got
00:43:16.860
the craziness here. Maybe you're the one who's got the, the mental problems. You're the one dating the
00:43:22.360
guy. I think that's a lesson there for all of us. We conservatives. We're the ones going along with
00:43:26.180
all this craziness. We're the ones not fighting back. All right. One more question from Chris.
00:43:33.440
Hello, Michael. I keep reading on places like Forbes and NPR that the recent spikes in coronavirus
00:43:37.880
cases are not due to the recent protests. Of course. However, I just find that difficult to
00:43:43.760
believe. Are they just lying, omitting relevant information or what? What is the cause of this
00:43:48.560
recent spike? Thanks. Keep up the great work. It would seem to me that if there is a spike in cases,
00:43:56.500
it might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of people around the country who were
00:44:01.420
rioting for the past several weeks. The fact that public health officials, quote unquote, want to tell
00:44:08.180
you with a straight face that the virus can discriminate between political worldviews and it knows that
00:44:16.720
it's going to attack and spread among the conservatives, but not among the leftists.
00:44:20.840
That is ridiculous. And the people who say that have no credibility. And the scientific establishment
00:44:26.100
that's been wrong at every turn about this virus has no credibility. I think the virus is in many
00:44:33.700
ways, it only occurred to me actually doing the show today. The virus is in many ways, one of these
00:44:38.240
incidents that is hastening the final confrontation of at least this era between illusion, delusion,
00:44:47.400
and reality. Because we're looking around and we're saying, you told us 2 million people, 2 million
00:44:52.200
Americans were going to die of this thing within weeks. That didn't happen. You told us flattening the
00:44:57.280
curve was about spreading out the infections. Now you're changing that and saying it's about saving
00:45:02.760
lives, which is not possible. You told us the hospitals would be overwhelmed. That never happened. You told us
00:45:08.880
that it was bad to protest the lockdowns, but then you told us it was good to loot and riot for a Marxist
00:45:14.840
organization. You can't believe that stuff. And I think the most enduring legacy of the Trump era will be cracking
00:45:21.680
finally that patina of credibility that the mainstream media and the political establishment had. They're not
00:45:29.120
credible. They don't deserve our, our credence. They are, they are no better at running this country
00:45:36.180
than anybody else, including Kanye West. And frankly, people like Kanye West seem to have much
00:45:42.160
more promise than that desiccated liberal establishment of both parties. That's how you get
00:45:47.940
Donald Trump. And I hope that's how you get another four years of Donald Trump. All right, that's our show.
00:45:52.100
I have got Ben's radio show coming up tomorrow, so you can listen then. In the meantime, I'm Michael
00:46:04.520
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
00:46:09.840
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends
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00:46:20.240
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show,
00:46:24.880
The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
00:46:27.940
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
00:46:33.220
Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
00:46:50.720
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:46:56.060
You know, The Matt Walsh Show, it's not just another show about politics.
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I think there are enough of those already out there.
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We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.