The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 583 - Science Strikes Out

00:00:00.000 The accolades keep pouring in for Dr. Fauci. Oh, our beloved, exalted ruler, Dr. Fauci.

00:00:08.160 Not sure if you subscribe to InStyle magazine, perhaps not. But if you haven't, then you haven't

00:00:14.440 seen Dr. Fauci's beautiful spread where he's sitting by his pool. He's got Oxford shoes on

00:00:20.460 for some reason, kind of dad sunglasses, just sitting there looking cool, looking in style.

00:00:26.420 It's called the good doctor. Dr. Fauci says this, I kid you not, this is the headline. Dr. Fauci says

00:00:32.860 with all due modesty, I think I'm pretty effective. Pretty effective. 120 some odd days

00:00:40.040 after we were told 15 days to slow the spread. Well, don't worry if you miss the InStyle cover

00:00:46.680 because you can watch opening day of the Nats. That's right. The Washington Nationals are going

00:00:52.600 to have Dr. Fauci throw out their first pitch. Oh, isn't that so wonderful? That's after their

00:00:58.060 wonderful World Series win, they are going to honor Dr. Fauci. This, you know, to me, this doesn't seem

00:01:05.100 like how we're supposed to treat scientists. This seems to me like how we treat celebrities. This

00:01:09.560 seems to me like how we treat politicians. But this is not normally how we treat scientists. That's

00:01:16.100 because science has strongly overstepped its bounds. Science has failed. And in the face of

00:01:22.740 the failure, I don't know how you look at this coronavirus situation as anything other than an

00:01:26.980 absolute failure. You could look at it as a little bit of a political attack as well. But in the face

00:01:34.020 of all that, we give our honors to Dr. Fauci. We will take a look at the real story. I'm Michael

00:01:40.500 Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Dr. Fauci. Gosh, I can't wait till I get my InStyle

00:01:53.420 magazine cover. I don't know if I'm ever going to get that. I try to be stylish, but they don't,

00:01:57.740 I don't know. They don't, I guess I need to, I need to screw up a national epidemic, a global pandemic.

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00:03:07.340 slash Knowles. So Dr. Fauci has this cover and he says, in all modesty, I feel like I've been pretty

00:03:17.120 effective. I guess he, he has been effective in the sense that his constant urging has forced America

00:03:26.280 to shut down, even though his predictions has been, have been totally wrong. And his guidance,

00:03:32.400 like when he told us not to wear the masks and now he says we have to wear the masks,

00:03:34.920 has been extraordinarily contradictory, but it's been effective in that we really are,

00:03:38.940 we're locking down again, right? Dr. Fauci took this a step even further into the land of the absurd

00:03:46.760 when he went on PBS NewsHour recently. And when he was asked to kind of compare how various states

00:03:54.980 have reacted to the coronavirus, he decided to tell us that the state that has handled this thing the

00:04:00.700 worst has actually done it the best. We have a problem. We need to admit it and own it,

00:04:06.880 but we've got to do the things that are very clear that we need to do to turn this around.

00:04:12.680 Remembering we can do it. We know that when you do it properly, you bring down those cases.

00:04:18.380 We've done it. We've done it in New York. New York got hit worse than any place in the world

00:04:24.500 and they did it correctly. Correctly, I assume means they did it by sending very sick people

00:04:31.840 to nursing homes and killing all the senior citizens. That's, I guess that's correct. 1.00

00:04:36.440 It's only correct depending on what the question is, I suppose, what you're trying to do. If you're

00:04:41.160 trying to kill all the old people, then that would be the correct solution. If you're not trying to 1.00

00:04:44.820 kill all the old people, then you probably shouldn't do what New York did. I also love 1.00

00:04:48.880 this logic here, which is we know for a fact New York got, got hit the worst, right? But the line

00:04:57.620 between an event that happened to New York, that New York had no control over and New York's

00:05:03.280 participation in that event seems to be a little blurry here for Dr. Fauci. It may be the case that

00:05:09.820 New York, for whatever reason, would always have gotten hit worse than any other place,

00:05:13.740 but couldn't New York have been prepared on the ventilators? They weren't. Couldn't New York

00:05:19.620 have then, when they ordered more ventilators, gotten the number they needed, right? They didn't.

00:05:24.120 They vastly overestimated how many they needed. Couldn't New York have gotten its estimates on

00:05:28.500 who needed the hospitals correct, rather than set up an emergency hospital at the Javits Center they

00:05:33.540 didn't need and call in the federal ship that they didn't need? Couldn't New York have not sent sick

00:05:38.120 people to nursing homes? Yeah, I think they could have done that. Couldn't New York have not had its

00:05:43.200 politicians, encouraged people to go to the Chinese New Year parades at the outbreak of the virus? Yeah,

00:05:49.080 they could have done. New York did everything wrong. The Democratic politicians in New York did

00:05:53.860 everything wrong. And this guy, freaking Dr. Fauci, who also got everything wrong, this guy has the

00:06:01.820 audacity to come out and say that they got everything right. We should follow them.

00:06:05.320 I have to tell you, I've tried to be nice and circumspect about Dr. Fauci. He's got a hard job.

00:06:14.020 I'm kind of done with Fauci. I think we've had enough Fauci. Fauci got us to this point,

00:06:21.040 which is 120 days after we were told this thing would be over, 15 days to slow the spread. Fauci got

00:06:27.380 us to this point where he's given us contradictory guidance on what we are now told is essential,

00:06:32.200 an essential element of, of preventing the spread, namely the face masks. Fauci has gotten us to hear,

00:06:38.360 which is a chaos and rancor and economic collapse and vastly overblowing the, the numbers that he was

00:06:46.780 shooting for. Maybe we try someone else. Is Dr. Fauci the only public health official in America?

00:06:53.340 What happened to Dr. Birx, Dr. Scarfe, bring her back or anybody else? I think we've had enough,

00:06:59.460 Dr. Fauci. You know, the president was asked in that Chris Wallace interview said, Mr. President,

00:07:04.480 why are you criticizing Fauci? And he said, Oh no, we're not doing that. I mean, he was wrong about

00:07:08.020 everything, but we're not doing that. So I think it's about time to lean into those instincts as

00:07:13.020 well. There's, there are a lot of shenanigans going on with this virus. I mentioned on the show

00:07:16.400 the other day, or I rather, I read a question that someone said they, they went to a medical center to

00:07:25.100 get tested for the virus. The line was too long. So they left early and they never got tested.

00:07:30.000 And they got a phone call and said they tested positive. And they said that this happened to

00:07:33.020 a friend of theirs as well. So I said, look, I don't know anything about this. It's just a

00:07:35.900 personal anecdote. Then there was that story out of Texas where this apparently happened to thousands

00:07:39.460 of people and the government has now gotten involved because it seems so credible. Well,

00:07:43.820 I spoke to a friend of mine last night here in LA, same story, different cities, same story.

00:07:49.780 She went to get tested for coronavirus. The line was like two hours or something. So she signed in,

00:07:55.880 but she did not get tested and she got a call that she tested positive.

00:08:01.840 That's just one more anecdote, but it seems like these anecdotes are starting to add up.

00:08:06.360 What is this? Is this a system of perverse incentives here? Is this just sheer incompetence?

00:08:11.180 Is this something else? I don't know, but there are certainly lots of shenanigans going on

00:08:16.260 with our response here. They've gotten it all wrong. One aspect they've gotten wrong seems so

00:08:21.780 obvious. It's just common sense from the beginning. And yet from our public health officials, you could

00:08:26.280 never expect common sense, which is that when you lock very old people up and keep them alone and away 1.00

00:08:32.480 from their loved ones for months and months at a time, it doesn't go well for them. It's not good

00:08:37.640 for their health. There's a study that's out now, uh, preliminary results showing that, uh, since

00:08:45.500 April, 85% of older Americans say they're socializing less often or rarely or never. Not surprising. We

00:08:54.540 told older people not to leave their homes. 88% said they were not involved in a community

00:08:59.620 and 41% reported worsening loneliness. This is according to Dr. Carla Perezinotto. What a great,

00:09:07.400 my great last Italian last name, a university of California, San Francisco professor and geriatrician.

00:09:12.760 Uh, she said this in Senate testimony. We also know from these scientists, maybe not the other

00:09:20.000 scientists that living alone without social interaction, uh, is implicated in higher rates of

00:09:25.840 heart disease, worsening dementia, Alzheimer's, and death shortens people's lives. I got, I got a,

00:09:34.180 I was speaking to my grandmother who has been locked up alone, has not been allowed outside,

00:09:40.700 you know, does, doesn't go anywhere. Uh, a couple of weeks ago when church reopened and she said,

00:09:46.420 I don't know. I'm very afraid to go to church, but I really, really want to go to church. And it's

00:09:49.300 the only place I see people. And I made me think about this question. What should we tell

00:09:55.460 our loved ones who were a little older to do? If, if, if this is actually going to drag on for a year,

00:10:02.700 as some public health officials have suggested, or 18 months or something,

00:10:07.520 in some cases for older Americans, you're talking about the last few years of their lives.

00:10:13.800 Are we really going to tell them for this last period of their lives, don't go out of your home,

00:10:18.200 don't see anybody, don't see your loved ones. I don't think so. I think people should take

00:10:23.980 precautions, be responsible, wash your hands, even wear the stupid mask, whatever,

00:10:27.960 be responsible about it. But I don't think we should condemn older Americans to living

00:10:33.740 the rest of their lives in isolation away from anyone that means anything to them.

00:10:39.440 I don't think so. I don't think FaceTime is enough. Not that most senior citizens 1.00

00:10:43.080 use FaceTime all the time either. These questions are not questions for science.

00:10:49.900 There's no scientific answer for whether you should allow grandma to come see people

00:10:55.420 in the last years of her life. That's a political question. That's an ethical question.

00:11:01.880 That's a personal question for your family. It's many things, but it's not a scientific question.

00:11:06.840 We talked on the show yesterday about how what the left has done is take all of the political

00:11:13.240 questions that we debate in our free society and then pretend that there is a scientific answer for

00:11:19.480 them so that they can completely cut off debate. This has been the leftist game since Karl Marx.

00:11:25.380 Pretend that politics is actually science. Politics, which involves disagreement and persuasion,

00:11:31.000 is actually science, which does not, right? Science is set. There's a consensus, no questioning.

00:11:35.920 And then apply that science to history and say there is a science of history and it's always

00:11:40.680 progressing toward the leftist utopia. And if you stand in the way of that, not only are you foolish

00:11:45.080 because history will march on forever, inevitably, but you're also evil because you're standing in

00:11:49.700 the way of progress. That's the leftist game. We got to shatter that. We got to stop that.

00:11:53.800 I joked on my show a few weeks ago. I said, we have to ban the word science from public debate.

00:11:59.400 I'm only half kidding. We should use the word science as it pertains to science, maybe,

00:12:05.280 even though even that's kind of silly because the word science refers to all knowledge. It comes from

00:12:09.260 the Latin word for knowledge. So the idea that now we've truncated an all of knowledge into this tiny

00:12:13.380 little sliver of material inquiry is a little silly to me as well. But what we certainly should not do

00:12:18.400 is use the word science as a stand-in for politics because we've got to debate difficult questions

00:12:24.580 where there sometimes aren't clear answers, where we have to weigh risks and offset certain goods with

00:12:30.700 other goods and deal in this sort of finite political reality. Another great example of this in

00:12:37.460 Kentucky. A Kentucky couple was just fitted out with ankle monitors by the local authorities

00:12:45.160 because they refused to sign a public health declaration on the coronavirus.

00:12:49.620 So now they're essentially under house arrest and they were wearing ankle monitors like

00:12:56.380 prisoners. They were fitted with this by the Hardin County Health Department because the wife

00:13:03.820 tested positive for coronavirus and she was willing to be very responsible with how to,

00:13:08.720 even though it's got a, what is it, a 99.7% recovery rate. She was going to be very responsible and not

00:13:15.340 leave the house and quarantine. She's a young woman, so she's not really at great risk here. But she

00:13:20.380 refused to sign one self-quarantine document which said that she would not get in an ambulance without

00:13:26.140 getting permission from the public health authorities. And her reasoning made perfect sense. She said,

00:13:30.220 you know, if I'm having a heart attack or something, I'm not going to ring up the public health authorities

00:13:34.820 and get a permission slip that I'm allowed to go in an ambulance before I do it. I'm just going to go

00:13:38.760 in an ambulance. So she wasn't going to sign that. And so the authorities slapped her with an ankle

00:13:43.900 monitor. It's not a scientific question. It's a political question. Do we want to live in that sort

00:13:49.200 of police state? Maybe some people do. But if you do, have the honest debate. Don't hide behind

00:13:56.580 this facade of science with a capital S and a trademark over the E led by that wonderful

00:14:04.940 disinterested scientist who's smiling at you by his pool on the cover of InStyle and throwing out

00:14:10.200 the first pitch at the Nats opening day. These are the stakes of politics right now. The left is

00:14:16.860 actually, it's not even like one issue or another issue where they disagree with you on this issue.

00:14:21.400 It's that they want to take politics away from you. They don't want you to participate in politics.

00:14:27.560 They want not just to silence you in the public arena. They want to silence you, you know, in the

00:14:32.960 way that we debate these issues, they want to silence you in any way contributing to our political

00:14:39.160 decision-making. And in the face of that, some worse than useless squish Republicans are siding with 0.97

00:14:48.100 the Democrats. We'll get to one very prominent one in just one moment. First though, I got to thank

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00:16:01.600 today. That is ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. The stakes are very high. You always hear that

00:16:11.280 this election is the most important election of our lifetimes, and then you get the next election.

00:16:16.720 In a sense, the people who tell you that are right because one election leads to the next election,

00:16:23.940 leads to the next election. So if things are getting worse and worse and worse, then every

00:16:27.600 election is the most important election in your lifetime. This one, though, I think is a little

00:16:31.740 different in that roving gangs of anarchists are actually burning the country down all around us.

00:16:38.880 So that would say they're tearing down George Washington. You know, that would seem to be

00:16:43.240 important. And then most distressingly, they are taking politics away from all of us and shutting us

00:16:49.900 up on social media and shutting us up in the public square and shutting us up as a matter of public policy.

00:16:55.020 And in that arena, squishy, worse than useless Republicans like John Kasich are siding with the

00:17:03.580 Democrats. John Kasich, his father's a mailman. Did you know that? Seriously, you might not have

00:17:10.040 heard that if you had your ears plugged up for the entire 2016 presidential campaign. John Kasich,

00:17:16.900 whose father's a mailman, who lost Donald Trump, who was governor of Ohio, is now effectively a

00:17:23.300 Democrat. He is going to speak at the DNC in support of Joe Biden next month. There's a funny thing about

00:17:31.880 John Kasich, which is that John Kasich, perhaps more than any other Republican, is responsible for

00:17:37.380 Donald Trump winning that nomination. When it was clear that John Kasich could not win the presidential

00:17:43.000 race, when the race was coming down to President Trump and a couple other people, John Kasich refused to

00:17:48.920 get out. More or less cemented Trump's victory. Why did he do it? We all assumed that he had made a deal

00:17:55.940 with Trump to be vice president or cabinet secretary or something, but he didn't. He came out and

00:18:02.520 excoriated Trump afterward, but he stayed in anyway, presumably because it was all about him. It was all

00:18:09.500 about his image. It was all about him getting plaudits. It was all about him getting nice articles in the

00:18:13.620 New York Times. And that's what's happening again. These guys, I suppose in a way we should be thankful

00:18:22.660 that they're exposing themselves now because there are a lot of people on the Republican side who pretend

00:18:28.160 to be true believers, who pretend that things really are pretty bad for our culture and for our country, who

00:18:34.340 pretend to stand strong for solutions to fix our country, sometimes at personal cost. And then sometimes it

00:18:43.420 gets too real when they are on the verge of victory. When we are on the verge of talking about political

00:18:48.060 issues that actually matter, that have not been spoken about by either party or have not been

00:18:52.560 seriously dealt with at least. When we're on the verge of actually doing something, taking on the

00:18:59.480 enormous risk of winning, they wilt. They fall away. They say, we can't actually do that. They'll talk a

00:19:05.900 really good game. Look, a lot of us were a little nervous about Donald Trump in 2016, particularly because

00:19:10.280 some people thought he was a bit liberal. And so they'll say, Hillary is the worst person ever.

00:19:14.680 She's terrible. She's going to run our country off a cliff. She's going to take our second amendment 1.00

00:19:17.220 rights. She's going to take our first amendment rights. She hates the country. She's, oh, but I 1.00

00:19:22.000 can't vote for Donald Trump. Oh my God, he might actually win. Oh, no, we can't do that. I'll vote for

00:19:26.440 her instead. The thing that they said was so terrible and awful turns out to be perfectly fine when it's

00:19:34.380 actually threatened. They'd rather play their roles as the court jesters in the kingdom of liberalism

00:19:40.580 than actually win. That's John Kasich, totally useless Republican. No one needs to pay any

00:19:46.280 attention to him. There's another group of people doing this called the Lincoln Project. And the

00:19:50.120 Lincoln Project is even more ridiculous and self-serving and unprincipled than John Kasich.

00:19:57.440 So funny, some of these never Trump Republicans, the five remaining people on earth who are never

00:20:02.580 Trump Republicans. They say that they're principled. They seem not to have very many

00:20:07.280 principles. All the principles that John Kasich said he was fighting for in his entire political

00:20:11.400 career until 2016, he threw them out the window to get nice reviews in the New York Times.

00:20:15.720 Same thing with these guys, the Lincoln Project. You might've seen it on Twitter,

00:20:19.640 maybe on TV if you watch left-wing news channels. It's this group that pretends to be principled

00:20:24.600 Republicans. They say that they are persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans,

00:20:28.620 and Republican-leaning independents in swing states. Actually, though, they're not really

00:20:32.580 doing that. There's a great expose of them in National Review right now. They are a bunch of

00:20:36.600 unemployable political consultants from the Republican and sometimes Democratic side who

00:20:41.920 can't get any jobs now because Trump booted them out of their sinecures. And so they are raising money

00:20:47.240 exclusively from leftists to do what? To kick Trump out of office? No, to pay themselves.

00:20:54.080 That's what it is. It's a big con.

00:20:56.220 I know some of these people. They spout these Democratic talking points. They'll say Donald

00:21:05.140 Trump is a Russian stooge, things like that, which is very funny because one of the founders of the 0.99

00:21:09.820 Lincoln Project, by the way, is actually a paid agent of Russia. He's a registered lobbyist for

00:21:14.780 Russia. Shows you the kind of hypocrisy here. But what they do broadly is they raise money from

00:21:20.800 Democrats to fight Trump as Republicans, and then they pay themselves, they pay their own political

00:21:27.840 consulting companies a lot of money. Listen to some of these companies. Summit Strategic Communications,

00:21:34.200 that's run by the Lincoln Project treasurer, Reed Galen. TUSK Digital, Tusk Digital, run by former

00:21:42.360 Lincoln Project advisor, Ron Steslau. As of July 13th, the Lincoln Project paid at least $5.6 million

00:21:50.880 to those two companies. $5.6 million. They've raised something, I think like $20 million so far,

00:21:58.120 and they just pay their own political consulting companies. They did spend $1.67 million on ads

00:22:03.460 across Facebook and Instagram, but those ads are just targeting leftist donors to pay them more money

00:22:07.880 to pay themselves. They have aired some TV ads. Do you know where they air TV ads? This is a group

00:22:12.560 ostensibly trying to convince conservative voters not to vote for Trump. They aired the TV ads on

00:22:17.260 Morning Joe. Morning Joe is a left-wing television show on a left-wing cable news channel. How many

00:22:23.040 conservatives do you know that watch MSNBC? Not very many. But they air the ads to get more donors

00:22:29.120 to pay themselves. A total con. A total con. It is a way to use politics to aggrandize themselves,

00:22:40.540 aggrandize their own bank accounts, and not do anything. No principle whatsoever. Principle be

00:22:46.200 damned. And in the face of that, in the face of these frauds like John Kasich and like the Lincoln

00:22:52.000 project, I see a guy like Kanye West who is a little eccentric, a little out there, probably not

00:23:00.640 fit today to be president, not just yet at least. But I look at a guy like that. I see what he's

00:23:06.840 talking about. I think that guy has a lot more business in American politics than any of those

00:23:13.260 frauds. Kanye West, you know, he did his first campaign rally. We played some of it yesterday on

00:23:17.980 the show. There's one bit that you can't find in a lot of places. I don't know. It seems like it's

00:23:22.340 being covered up by the internet or something. No one has clipped it out at least. So I went through

00:23:27.240 the whole rally yesterday. I had to go through several versions of it to find this bit because

00:23:30.860 sometimes audio drops out at these important parts. Kanye West gives a definition of freedom

00:23:36.140 that is more sophisticated than probably 70% of Republicans and conservatives could come up with.

00:23:44.020 Politics, America, Trump, Biden, nor Kanye West can't free us. The only thing that can free us is by

00:23:54.780 obeying the rules that were given to us for a promised land. And the freedom does not come from an

00:24:01.500 election. The freedom comes from you not loading up pornography. The freedom comes from you not

00:24:08.120 taking the Percocet. The freedom comes from you not counting your brother and your sister. The freedom

00:24:14.340 comes from you putting that gun down and not shooting people at the gas station. It has nothing to do with

00:24:20.400 this election. It only has to do with God and God's people. Kanye West has given a more conservative

00:24:29.400 and more precise definition of freedom than the vast majority of conservative and Republican

00:24:34.500 politicians and thinkers could today. It's so funny after this rant that he gave, there are many people

00:24:41.740 on the left and the right who are saying, Kanye, he's crazy. He's gone insane. He needs to get the

00:24:46.460 help that he needs. I see this all over Twitter. He needs, he needs help. Kanye West sounds more sane

00:24:52.800 than the vast majority of people in our public life and certainly than, than most people on Twitter.

00:24:59.460 What is Kanye saying? He's saying freedom will not come from an election. Freedom will come

00:25:06.500 when you stop watching porn. Freedom will come when you stop taking drugs. Freedom will come when you

00:25:13.860 put the gun down and stop shooting people at a gas station. This definition of freedom is an ancient

00:25:20.960 definition of freedom and it is the Christian definition of freedom, which says the man who sins is a

00:25:26.120 slave to sin. Coincidentally, it is the definition of freedom that many of our founding fathers would

00:25:32.280 have understood. John Adams, who says our constitution is built for a moral and religious people, is unfit

00:25:37.760 to the governance of any other kind of people. You need to be a free people to have free government.

00:25:45.060 It's not the other way. The government does not make you free. The government cannot recognize a 1.00

00:25:50.960 freedom that you do not possess. You have to be free to govern yourself. And what is freedom?

00:25:56.900 There are these two competing visions of freedom. There is the kind of modern, squishy, lib, weak

00:26:02.060 version of freedom, which is you're born free. And then society tries to stop you from being free

00:26:08.140 and educate your freedom out of you. But as long as you get naked and protest in Portland and do whatever

00:26:13.400 you want all the time and take whatever drugs and have sex with whoever people and eat whatever you 0.83

00:26:18.180 want, drink whatever you want, just follow your appetites as far as they can go, then you'll be

00:26:22.320 truly free. That's the lib, squishy, crazy version of freedom. The correct version of freedom, which is

00:26:28.120 conservative and ancient and recognized by our founding fathers, is the idea that actually

00:26:33.240 you're not born free in the sense that you can govern yourself. You are born as a little baby. Babies

00:26:42.300 aren't free. They can't, they're very dependent. And then you are educated in freedom. That's why we have

00:26:46.680 the liberal arts. We educate ourselves to make sense of our freedom, to tame our passions and

00:26:51.760 appetites, to be, as John Adams says, a moral and religious people. And then when you can control

00:26:56.640 all of those passions, then you are free to govern yourself. That is a higher freedom. It's a freedom

00:27:02.440 that eludes virtually everybody today because we are bombarded with things that compromise our freedom.

00:27:08.620 And I don't think it's a coincidence that many people who have a strong interest in continuing to

00:27:17.620 compromise our freedom and bombarding us with things that send us down bad paths. I don't think it's any

00:27:23.180 coincidence that those people and, and they're kind of lemmings in the public are trying to call

00:27:32.200 Kanye West crazy. Is Kanye West a little crazy? Yeah. He's always been a little bit crazy. I think,

00:27:36.320 I think most celebrities are a little bit crazy. I think he would tell you that. But ironically,

00:27:40.680 the thing he's being called crazy for now is some of the most sane stuff we're hearing on our

00:27:45.840 political scene. And so they've got it. The left has to use that science, capital S trademark over

00:27:50.820 the E to diagnose him as crazy and shut him up and probably send him to an insane asylum for speaking

00:27:56.060 the truth. They'd like to do that to all of us. I think. Luckily though, there is a little bit of

00:28:03.700 hope here in politics. I was talking actually to a priest who, who said, you know, with all this crazy

00:28:11.140 news stories and floating around, how do you stay positive? And he said, I know, I know, you know,

00:28:17.420 our, our savior lives and the, you know, this wonderful faith that, but, but politically from

00:28:21.860 a political standpoint, how do you say, stay positive? I thought about it. I thought it was a

00:28:25.520 very good question. And there is an answer. There is an answer. And we're seeing the fruit of that

00:28:30.520 answer play out right now. We'll get to that in one second. First though, I've got to thank you.

00:28:35.380 Thank you for subscribing to the Michael Knowles show YouTube channel. Be sure to hit that bell and

00:28:38.800 check out exclusive content posted at that channel. Like our latest piece, the best of the worst TikTok

00:28:45.260 videos. Also backstage live will be this Friday, July 24th, 7 PM Eastern, 4 PM Pacific. Also Ben has a new

00:28:55.680 book. Do I have a copy of that book here? I do. The book is called how to destroy America in three

00:29:01.740 easy steps. The book goes on sale tonight at 6 PM Eastern, 3 PM Pacific. Ben will be doing a virtual

00:29:08.320 live signing event that you can't miss. And maybe, maybe I'll show up there. I don't know. Maybe you'll

00:29:13.100 see me there. Uh, with your purchase of a signed copy, you can write in a question, which may be read

00:29:18.720 and answered as he signs your book live on the air. You can pre-order your signed copy and write in your

00:29:23.180 question at dailywire.com slash Ben and get a reader's pass one buck for your first month,

00:29:27.240 three bucks a month. After that, you get a lot of exclusive content. Head on over to dailywire.com.

00:29:31.660 We'll be right back with a lot more. Where's the hope from a political perspective? How do you stay

00:29:48.160 positive from a political perspective? Beyond religious assurances, beyond hope in the next

00:29:55.140 life? It's this issue that Russell Kirk talked about in the conservative mind. It's this issue

00:30:01.860 that crops up even among the most pessimistic conservatives, which is this reality reasserts

00:30:09.500 itself in the end. That is the great conservative consolation. No matter how crazy things get,

00:30:15.940 no matter how ideological and delusional and fantastical the left becomes and the culture

00:30:22.440 becomes, reality ultimately will reassert itself. You can't urinate on people's legs and tell them

00:30:33.120 that it is raining forever. Eventually they'll wise up and they'll get sick of it. Today, you see this

00:30:40.560 probably most clearly on the transgender issue. The left is telling us that men are really women

00:30:47.260 and that men should be able to use the women's bathroom and that men should be able to change 1.00

00:30:52.840 next to your daughter in the girl's changing room. Some excitable people on the left will tell you

00:30:59.320 that if you are not sexually attracted to men who are pretending to be women, that you're a bigot.

00:31:05.680 Right. That's a bridge too far. That's just a bridge too far. The left can delude a lot of people

00:31:14.000 on, for instance, abortion. Another issue Kanye has been talking about. The left can delude a lot of

00:31:18.900 people and pretend a baby's not a baby. The left can delude a lot of people in the popular culture,

00:31:25.640 entertainment culture, sell people a bunch of tripe and tell them that it's high art. They can delude

00:31:30.880 people that way. The left can get people to go along with a lot of their issues, but it just seems

00:31:36.000 to me that pretending that men are women is a step too far. And the numbers bear that out. Media

00:31:41.660 Matters. You know our friends over at Media Matters. They're our private PR firm. They just clip out

00:31:47.780 parts of our shows all the time and post them all over the internet. We say, thank you so much. Thank you

00:31:51.420 for the advertising. Media Matters put out a piece yesterday. They were very upset. The right

00:31:56.860 is dominating Facebook engagement on content about trans issues. They actually named Daily Wire.

00:32:02.660 Daily Wire is right there at the top. Right-leaning sources earned more than 65% of interactions on top

00:32:11.020 trans-related content. Media Matters study of interactions on published online content about

00:32:19.400 trans topics shared on Facebook found that right-leaning sources earned higher engagement.

00:32:23.040 We looked at 225 pieces of high-performing content on trans topics, which earned a combined total of

00:32:28.560 66 million interactions on Facebook. And the content and related topics from right-leaning sources

00:32:34.560 can constitute 65.7% of those interactions. Comparatively, 15.4% of interactions were earned by

00:32:41.680 queer sources, whatever that is, 3.9% from left-leaning sources, 10.4% from non-aligned, and 4.6%

00:32:48.480 from other sources. And the Daily Wire apparently performs right at the top there on a lot of that

00:32:55.300 content. The study goes on and on. I recommend you go read it. Media Matters doesn't get it.

00:33:00.440 They think, they think that the reason that right-wing content, right-wing content on transgender issues

00:33:07.500 performs better on social media is because we're gaming the system somehow. We're cheating.

00:33:12.540 We're doing something nefarious. Do you know why right-leaning content on trans issues does better? 0.97

00:33:21.240 It's because men are not women, and everybody knows that. And right-leaning on this particular 0.79

00:33:29.300 issue just means stating what is perfectly obvious, that men are not women. It's amazing. You know, 1.00

00:33:35.880 I did this whole speaking tour last year called the Men Are Not Women Tour. It was a joke. It was a joke

00:33:41.740 because that's the most obvious thing you could say. You'd say the sky is blue. You'd say 2 plus 2

00:33:45.840 equals 4. But today, on the left, in the leftist culture, it's considered controversial to say that

00:33:52.220 men are not women. Do you know why the right-wing content does so well? It's because you can't fool

00:33:58.700 people forever on some of the most basic facts of their lives. The right-leaning content does better

00:34:07.720 because reality reasserts itself in the end. How did Donald Trump win in 2016? It was the Russians. 0.53

00:34:15.720 It wasn't the Russians. Remember, we had that whole two-and-a-half-year investigation, millions of dollars

00:34:19.440 wasted to find out it wasn't the Russians. It was the, it was the, I don't know, the Ukrainians. It wasn't 0.94

00:34:25.840 the Ukrainians. It wasn't anybody. Do you know what it was? Reality reasserts itself in the end. You had the entire 0.95

00:34:31.120 American establishment, media, politics, administrative government, big tech, higher education, lower

00:34:38.780 education, everything working against Donald Trump. And he still won. Barely, but he won.

00:34:46.280 How did he win? Because people recognized that they were being defrauded by Hillary Clinton and by the 0.96

00:34:53.780 left. If you want your content to perform better on social media, say true things. Don't delude people.

00:35:02.300 Don't urinate on their leg and pretend that it's raining. If you do that, if you do all those terrible

00:35:08.140 things, you, you will have success for some time because the left has a lot of power. But in the end,

00:35:13.340 in the end, reality is going to peek through. Yet the delusions move on. In the media, the Associated

00:35:22.500 Press has just issued a new rule. The Associated Press is always issuing new rules on grammar,

00:35:27.880 spelling, how to, how to format things, you know, for all of the other journalists around the world.

00:35:33.780 Well, they've now decided that they are going to capitalize the B in black as in a black person, 0.83

00:35:39.160 which is a little odd to me. I, I, when I write, I don't capitalize people's, the color of people's

00:35:45.200 skin, but okay, that's the new rule. They're going to capitalize the B in black, but they're not going 0.92

00:35:50.180 to capitalize the W in white. That's, that's lowercase. Uh, come again. Why is that? Why

00:35:57.160 is that double standard? I mean, what they're saying is black people are good. White people are bad.

00:36:01.180 That's really, that's all that it means. We're going to, we view this capitalization as a form

00:36:05.280 of respect. Why else would they change it during this period where everyone is walking on eggshells

00:36:10.160 on issues of race and black lives matter. And if you don't post the black square, you're going to be 0.80

00:36:13.500 ostracized. So they're, they're, they think the capitalization is a good thing to do.

00:36:18.420 And so they're not going to do that for white people, even though black and white are totally 0.71

00:36:22.540 analogous, right? You're just talking about people's race and people's skin color.

00:36:27.760 So their excuse here is that this is according to the AP. The AP is reporting what the AP said in

00:36:35.920 the AP. The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture and don't have

00:36:42.380 the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Uh, starting to think we might be

00:36:47.860 having that experience AP because you're, you're obviously using this double standard and, and, and

00:36:53.720 doing so in an insulting way to a race of people. But imagine, imagine what they're saying here. The

00:36:59.560 one, the one criticism of the AP that's coming from the left is that what they're doing is actually

00:37:03.120 disrespectful to black people. And in a way I think they're probably right. They're saying white people 1.00

00:37:07.500 have much less shared history and culture. So what they're saying is black people are a monolith and

00:37:11.260 white people are diverse and, and varied. You know, Africa is a pretty big place. Africa is much,

00:37:18.580 much, much larger than all of Europe. But you're saying that black people are all the same, 0.99

00:37:25.140 even though they come from this much larger continent with all sorts of varied nations and

00:37:29.680 tribes. But Europe, which much smaller and smaller relative to nations and tribes is totally diverse.

00:37:39.400 The New York times defends this. They say white doesn't represent a shared culture and history

00:37:45.140 in the way that black does. And I assume this also ties into this discrimination question, 0.96

00:37:51.980 which I would remind you, we have one regime of legal discrimination at this point. I'm not saying

00:37:57.360 there isn't private discrimination that happens sometimes. Surely somewhere it does though. I don't

00:38:01.340 think it's as widespread as the left says it is not even close, but as a matter of legal discrimination,

00:38:05.420 there's only one kind of legal racial discrimination that is called affirmative action. And it discriminates

00:38:10.860 on behalf of black people, Hispanic people, other racial minorities, and it discriminates against

00:38:15.940 white people and Asian people, which is why Asian people are suing Harvard right now.

00:38:20.140 It's poor Asian people. They immigrate to America. They get discriminated against.

00:38:23.860 Then they do well in America. What do they do? They get discriminated against all the time.

00:38:28.140 What the AP and the New York times are saying is that there is no white racial consciousness

00:38:32.160 and they're basically right. There's not much of a white racial consciousness. Pew backs this up.

00:38:37.720 Most races have over 50% racial consciousness. White people have 15%. And when you talk about 0.92

00:38:44.360 extreme racial consciousness, it's only about 5%. However, what the AP and the New York times and

00:38:50.520 the whole culture is doing right now is going to have the effect of raising that racial consciousness,

00:38:55.880 which most conservatives I think would like to lower the racial consciousness. We don't think that

00:39:00.760 viewing yourself primarily through race is particularly fruitful for Democratic-Republican

00:39:07.060 politics. We don't think it's particularly important for our own identity. We would probably

00:39:13.180 prioritize things that are more religious or philosophical or political over issues like

00:39:19.260 race. But what the left wants to do is gin up that racial consciousness. That's going to get

00:39:25.560 ugly because eventually people are going to respond to that. When they say, you know, if the argument

00:39:32.140 that the AP and the New York times is making is that being discriminated against will form a racial

00:39:37.640 consciousness, which I think is in part the argument they're making. And then they're saying, so we're

00:39:41.840 going to discriminate against white people in a way that we're not going to against other races.

00:39:47.000 What's the effect of that going to be? It's not going to be a very good one, but I think it's the one

00:39:50.700 that the left actually wants to accomplish. Lots of topsy-turvy politics these days. Lots of upside

00:39:58.800 down. You know, the left saying they want racial healing. What do they do? They sow racial division. 0.80

00:40:03.160 Also totally inverted, upside down, the St. Louis authorities are now officially charging

00:40:10.040 the McCloskeys, you know, the Brooks Brothers model couple, the pink shirt and the chinos with the guns

00:40:15.160 defending their lives and property against armed vandals. They're charging them for unlawful use

00:40:21.640 of a weapon, a felony. They're saying it's illegal to wave weapons in a threatening manner at those

00:40:27.180 participating in non-violent protest. Non-violent protest. The non-violent protest has destroyed

00:40:32.460 the McCloskeys' property, their giant gate, metal gate, and they were waving weapons in their face.

00:40:38.820 Those guys don't get charged. The McCloskeys defending their own property do get charged completely 1.00

00:40:43.700 backwards, completely upside down. I hope this is immediately pardoned by the governor or laughed

00:40:49.980 out of court by the judge. But I doubt it will be, at least early on, because the whole apparatus

00:40:57.040 is against these guys. Talk about reality reasserting itself. All of us around the country are saying,

00:41:02.820 you can't, hold on, if I go on someone else's property with a gun and threaten them, I'm fine.

00:41:07.480 That's a legitimate expression of my political views. But if I defend my own property with a gun,

00:41:11.960 I don't even fire it. I just hold it. That's a felony. You say, that's completely upside down.

00:41:18.220 Well, it gets crazier. There's a piece, it's a true, truly magnificent work of journalism from the

00:41:24.120 LA Times with a naked woman sitting spread eagle on the asphalt in Portland. She's one of these 1.00

00:41:31.940 rioters sitting completely naked. And the headline is, out of Portland tear gas, an apparition emerges,

00:41:38.100 capturing the imagination of protesters. Some people have tweeted, they said, oh, you know,

00:41:43.000 that's pretty nice. Get to see a naked lady. I don't know if you guys have ever met Antifa, 1.00

00:41:47.280 if you've ever seen them up close. I have. They're not like the most hygienic people on earth, okay?

00:41:52.080 They're not, they tend not to be supermodels. So I think we can only see this woman from the back, 1.00

00:41:57.260 but I don't, I don't envy the cops who have to look at this. Listen to the headline. Listen to the

00:42:04.480 article, rather. She emerged as an apparition from clouds of tear gas as federal agents fired 1.00

00:42:11.000 pepper balls at angry protesters in early Saturday darkness. Wow, am I reading like a, reading like a

00:42:18.460 romance novel or something like that? A woman wearing nothing but a black face mask and a stocking cap 1.00

00:42:24.000 strode toward a dozen heavily armed agents attired in camouflage fatigues lined up across a downtown

00:42:30.340 street. The agents dispatched by the Trump administration over vociferous objections of

00:42:36.380 state and city officials are part of a force that has fired projectiles at and detained activists

00:42:43.100 protesting nightly since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, May 25th. Let me,

00:42:48.280 I'll translate that to you into English. Rioters have burned down cities and attacked people and

00:42:53.960 in instances killed people. And so the cops are now arresting them. That's it. That's you could

00:42:59.700 have, was that one sentence? It was one sentence. That's what's actually happening here. Numerous

00:43:05.360 photos and videos posted to Twitter show the unidentified woman as she halted in the middle 0.95

00:43:09.300 of the street at 1 45 AM. She stood calmly, a surreal image of human vulnerability in the face of an

00:43:16.300 overpowering force that has been criticized nationally by civil rights advocates. Oh, has it? It has been

00:43:24.100 critic, the cops have been criticized by, oh, by the LA times, right. For arresting rioters. Okay. The thing

00:43:32.200 goes on. I mean, I can't, before it was over, she struck ballet poses and reclined on the street. She also sat on

00:43:39.180 the asphalt in a yoga-like position facing the officers before they left. Wow. That is, that is a

00:43:48.920 poetic journey. It reminds me of, uh, Kennedy's Supreme court decision in Obergefell, which read less

00:43:54.920 like law and more like romantic poetry. That reads less like journalism, more like romantic poetry.

00:44:00.620 Imagine, imagine that kind of talk. How about, how about we just arrest rioters and people who are

00:44:07.420 engaged in public indecency, like sitting spread Eagle on the asphalt in front of cops?

00:44:13.500 That's not going to happen. That is not going to happen at all. What we are in the midst of is a,

00:44:22.100 a narrative. We are living in a narrative that we are told is the truth. It's not just political truth.

00:44:29.140 It's scientific truth. Rioters good, cops bad. Burning down the country good, building it back up bad.

00:44:37.280 George Washington, very, very bad. Leftist Marxist activists, very, very good. We were told this is

00:44:44.400 eternally true. Science. If you disagree with it, not only are you wicked, but you're crazy. You're

00:44:50.920 insane. You probably have to be sent to an insane asylum. And we lionize the politicians who pretend

00:44:56.440 to be doctors, who pretend to be scientists, who push this ridiculous agenda and lie to our faces.

00:45:03.200 I think science, as it has been perverted, has struck out. I think we've got to put that aside,

00:45:11.080 at least until the election and recognize that the questions that are being posed as scientific

00:45:15.880 and the statements that are being posed as scientific are nothing but naked politics.

00:45:21.500 Naked is that lady sitting spread Eagle on the asphalt. And we need to engage in those political 1.00

00:45:26.300 debates. And we need to stand up. If we actually care about the political principles,

00:45:31.160 we say we believe in, we have to do something about it. We have to fight back. We have to make

00:45:35.800 sure we stand up, win the political battle, and then hopefully we can reclaim our politics

00:45:42.460 and get back to all the debates that we'd like to be having. That's our show. I'm Michael

00:45:47.060 Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you tomorrow.

00:45:48.620 If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.

00:45:59.840 And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends

00:46:04.220 to subscribe. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

00:46:10.220 Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show,

00:46:14.860 The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show. The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.

00:46:20.900 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.

00:46:26.580 Technical producer, Austin Stevens. Assistant director, Pavel Widowski. Editor and associate

00:46:32.280 producer, Danny D'Amico. Audio mixer, Robin Fenderson. Hair and makeup, Nika Geneva. Production

00:46:39.340 assistant, Ryan Love. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire,

00:46:44.700 2020. Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show. The left breaks the law,

00:46:50.020 but they don't want to be arrested. They're violent, but they don't want us to fight back.

00:46:53.580 They lie, but demand that we trust them. Basically, their message is,

00:46:57.200 don't interrupt us while we're destroying America. We'll take a closer look on The Andrew Klavan Show.

The Michael Knowles Show - July 21, 2020

Ep. 583 - Science Strikes Out

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