The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 688 - Let Them Eat Tendies

00:00:00.000 A bunch of internet trolls are currently in the process of bankrupting a lot of hedge funds,

00:00:06.480 a lot of Wall Streeters, and they're doing this through wild speculation, which is a huge problem,

00:00:11.960 you see, because it's only hedge funds that are supposed to make money through wild speculation.

00:00:15.880 When ordinary people try to make money through ordinary speculation in a way that threatens

00:00:20.560 the financial establishment, well, that's hateful. That's a threat to democracy. That is

00:00:27.200 white supremacy. We will break down the math. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:39.420 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment from yesterday comes from BizBoy5, who says,

00:00:44.580 someone needs to ask Joe if he's going to donate all his salary like Trump did, see him squirm.

00:00:50.520 I think Joe's reaction, of course, would be, come on, man. Come on, man. The big guy's got to get a

00:00:56.820 little skim off the top. Come on, Hunter. What are you talking about, man? Yeah, so I don't think he

00:01:01.300 would do that, but it would be a very hilarious point if that could occur. It will not, however.

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00:02:34.460 Speaking of financial services, this story about GameStop and the GameStop stock price going through

00:02:43.160 the roof. This is the single funniest story that I have seen in years. And not only is it hilarious

00:02:51.020 in and of itself, but it actually has deep political implications and the political implications are

00:02:57.540 simply delightful. I fear that because this involves finance and involves investing, this story

00:03:05.760 might be a little too complicated for most people who aren't going to pay very close attention to it

00:03:10.640 to understand just how funny it is. So I'll try to break it down very simply because I don't know

00:03:16.620 anything about finance either, but I I've at least read a fair bit about this particular, uh, once in a

00:03:24.220 century type of event, once in a lifetime type of event, a bunch of internet trolls on the Reddit board,

00:03:32.100 Wall Street bets decided that Wall Street bets, this is like an irreverent investing board. This is not

00:03:39.500 like a sober serious investing board. They just put up kind of crazy risky bet ideas. They noticed that

00:03:45.560 hedge funds had taken a short position on GameStop. GameStop is this video game store, right? You know

00:03:53.440 what GameStop is. It doesn't have a ton of growth potential. It seems like it's kind of heading out the

00:04:00.000 door, kind of like blockbuster, some of these old companies. So these internet trolls discover that

00:04:07.600 Wall Street took out a big short position on this, specifically one hedge fund called Melvin Capital.

00:04:12.420 And a short position is when basically when you're betting against the stock. So if the stock price

00:04:17.400 goes down, you make a lot of money. And if the stock price goes up, not only do you lose money,

00:04:21.840 but you've got to start buying it up. So you've got to start putting more cash on the table to cover

00:04:26.280 your losses, right? So GameStop though, it was trading at like $6, not that long ago.

00:04:32.140 It wasn't doing great. Hedge funds take out huge short positions on this. And these trolls at Wall

00:04:39.200 Street bets decide, you know, we're going to make this stock price on this kind of crappy company

00:04:45.400 go through the roof and maybe we'll make some money in the process. But more importantly,

00:04:51.040 we are just going to mess with these hedge funds, these guys, we have no sympathy for them. We're

00:04:56.940 going to completely mess with the financial establishment. And the craziest thing is it's

00:05:02.640 working. The board has, I think, 2 million members. And so I was asking myself when this

00:05:07.980 was going on, how, why hasn't this been done before? And the reason is you've never had this

00:05:13.140 kind of the technology to do it, you know, to wrangle like 2 million of these kind of eccentric

00:05:18.760 type of people. But you've also never had the memes. You've never had the humor. You've never

00:05:27.080 had the specific political conditions of people wanting to flip the bird to the establishment,

00:05:33.940 which they believe has royally screwed them over in, in recent months. You've had individual aspects

00:05:41.680 of that kind of thing, but you've never had it all coincide. This whole phenomenon is very

00:05:47.460 internet-y. Okay. So it's very, the kind of lingo that people use, they'll, they'll be joking about

00:05:53.360 how, you know, they're just going to grit their teeth and take some of the losses until their mom

00:05:57.700 brings them chicken tendies into the basement, you know, and they're using all this kind of very

00:06:02.040 internet-y lingo. They actually, they have like sheet C shanties that are being posted. They posted

00:06:07.980 one last night about how we've got to, we've just got to hold on as the financial industry pushes back

00:06:14.540 because we're all going to make a bunch of money and bankrupt Wall Street.

00:06:17.440 There once was a stock that put to sea. The name of the stock was GME. The price blew up and the

00:06:24.560 shorts dipped down. Hold my bully boys hold. Soon may the tendy man come to send a rocket into the sun.

00:06:33.280 One day when the trading is done, we'll take our gains and go. She had not been two weeks from shore

00:06:40.460 when Ryan Cohen joined the board. The captain called all hands and swore he'd take his shares

00:06:46.840 and hold. Soon may the tendy man come to send a rocket into the sun. One day when the trading is

00:06:55.320 done, we'll take our gains and go. It goes on. I encourage you to listen to the entire shanty.

00:07:01.920 It goes on and on like this. So far, GameStop, not a great company, is up something like 2,500%

00:07:12.120 this month. The stock has hit, I think, $460 a share. AMC Movies, this is another company that's

00:07:18.860 basically headed for bankruptcy, right? Because no one's going to the movies anymore. AMC,

00:07:22.820 they sent this one through the roof. They sent BlackBerry up, you know, the old cell phone company.

00:07:27.660 That's up 250%. I think they were going to target Nokia as well, another cell phone company that

00:07:32.260 nobody uses anymore. It's all just a huge meme. However, the meme is becoming reality. So the

00:07:41.600 internet joke is totally affecting reality and it's going to put hedge funds out of business.

00:07:46.920 Gabe Plotkin, who's the hedge fund trader at Melvin Capital, he was the one with the biggest short

00:07:53.720 position. Yesterday, when this news broke, he had to raise almost $3 billion to bail out the fund.

00:08:01.500 Squawk Box, which is, you know, the very serious sort of CNBC financial news show, they just couldn't

00:08:07.880 make any sense of it. You know, we've mentioned social media. I couldn't help but, it's not obviously

00:08:12.960 similar to some of this controversy surrounding Facebook and Twitter and everything else. But once

00:08:20.840 again, what's one of the, one of the things that we're talking about is maybe misinformation and,

00:08:27.980 and pumping dumps and it's occurring on social media again. It just, I'm wondering whether it's

00:08:33.500 part of the same problem, the type of regulation that, that, that we finally need to, to consider.

00:08:39.660 And like I said, we should always have a light touch with regulation, but

00:08:42.660 you're, you're seeing the way things can get started again. This is different. Maybe it's Reddit,

00:08:48.360 maybe it's not Facebook, but you're seeing the, the, the same situation. At this point,

00:08:53.760 it's not about an election. It's not about a, uh, an insurrection, but there are interesting things

00:08:58.840 happening that, that seem to be spawned to some extent, or at least, uh, at least blown out of

00:09:03.720 proportion by social media again. That entire monologue was completely meaningless. That guy has

00:09:09.560 absolutely no idea what he's talking about. First of all, some of the things he's saying are just

00:09:14.140 factually not true. He's saying this might be a pump and dump. It's not a pump and dump pump and

00:09:19.340 dump is where you pick a stock cynically. You bring up the price really, really high. And then

00:09:25.320 you try to find a bigger idiot to sell it to. So you're going to totally mess that guy over,

00:09:30.020 but you're going to make money at his expense. That's not what's going on here. What's going on

00:09:33.720 here is these internet trolls found a giant short position from a giant institutional investor.

00:09:38.660 And they said, nah, I don't think so. We're not going to let you guys do that. And so then

00:09:42.520 this financial analyst on CNBC says, well, I don't know, maybe it's, uh, maybe we need to regulate

00:09:49.220 this. I mean, we want a light touch on regulation, but we can, we can't let these guys do it. What

00:09:54.080 he's really saying is we don't want any regulation for the institutional investors. We don't want any

00:09:59.980 regulation for wall street when they do this exact thing, but we do want regulation for ordinary

00:10:06.040 people. We don't, we, we can't let individual investors do this kind of thing. Then the whole game's

00:10:10.480 going to be up. What is going on here is not primarily a financial phenomenon. It's a political

00:10:15.320 phenomenon. And it is the same phenomenon that you've been seeing build up coinciding in part

00:10:20.980 caused by in part causing the Trump phenomenon. It's ordinary people rebelling against an established

00:10:28.860 elite that they don't have any faith in. A lot of times this word populism gets thrown around. And I

00:10:33.940 think it's often sort of a silly word because I don't think people are either populists or elitists.

00:10:39.960 For instance, if we have a good elite, then I'm an elitist. If we can have a good, virtuous,

00:10:46.460 smart, thoughtful elite, then great works for me. I count me in the elitism category,

00:10:52.460 but we don't have that. We have a bunch of corrupt, cynical idiots in our so-called elite.

00:11:01.000 And so with that kind of an elite, I'm, I'm the opposite of an elitist. I'm the furthest thing for,

00:11:05.000 I'm a total populist. If the elites that we are currently governed by are hipster Rasputin,

00:11:10.900 Jack Dorsey, a grown man with a, with a nose ring and the crooks of the Obama Biden liberal dominant

00:11:17.560 regime and the educational establishment, which is utterly upending liberal education. If those are

00:11:24.740 the elites, I'm out, right? And that's what you're seeing here. And you're seeing all these unwashed

00:11:30.460 peasants on these internet boards, eating their chicken tendies. You're seeing them out Fox the

00:11:37.820 wall street elite. And they are not, they are not liking that very much. So now the financial

00:11:42.580 establishment is pushing back. They're trying to shut these guys down. You know, in a way the media

00:11:49.340 understands this thing. So, so Chris Saliza at CNN posted this piece yesterday that, that people made

00:11:56.460 fun of, but he actually had sort of a point. He said how Trumpism explains the GameStop stock surge.

00:12:01.940 And it is, it's kind of a negative article, but if you take the preference out of it and you just

00:12:06.380 look at the phenomenon, yes, it does sort of explain that. But then other media outlets do the same

00:12:14.740 thing they do to all the Trump people. They say, well, the only way to explain what's going on right

00:12:18.380 now is to say that the people doing this have awful, terrible intentions and they're evil and

00:12:23.000 they're bigoted and they're neo-Nazis and they're white supremacists. And we got to shut the whole

00:12:27.620 thing down. They're, they're the, the elites are making the exact same mistake with regard to this

00:12:34.520 kind of frivolous financial phenomenon that they have for the political phenomenon. And just like

00:12:40.380 Trumpism, it isn't going anywhere. This is only more evidence that sure you can vanquish Trump for now,

00:12:46.620 but you're not getting rid of the forces that propelled Trump and that, that have supported him.

00:12:52.380 And this sort of a phenomenon is a time when if you can picture rich uncle penny bags and all

00:12:59.600 these wall street fat cats, you know, sort of lighting up cigars and laughing about all their 0.96

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00:14:17.960 promo code Knowles, T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N cigar.com, promo code Knowles. Mother Jones, the liberal outlet,

00:14:26.920 I guess even further leftist outlet, is looking at the GameStop, Wall Street bets phenomenon

00:14:34.280 and following up on what the CNN types are saying. This isn't just Trumpism. This is neo-Nazism. This

00:14:42.220 is white supremacy. One reporter from Mother Jones says, I can report from the Telegram channels that

00:14:47.000 the Nazis appear to be trading GameStop and AMC as well. Now, why, why would someone say that?

00:14:53.580 Why would someone say, I don't, how do you know that it's the Nazis trading this? How do we, I mean,

00:15:00.880 to Mother Jones, everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is a Nazi. I think the reason to say that 0.75

00:15:06.840 is because it justifies shutting it all down. If it's Nazi, if it's ordinary internet trolls eating

00:15:13.280 chicken tenders, you don't have a good argument to shut, shut down trading on this stock because

00:15:18.100 ordinary people are doing what institutional investors have done for a long time. But if it's

00:15:22.680 Nazis, you can do whatever you want. A reporter for The Hill, a much more mainstream outlet writes

00:15:27.980 to the reporter from Mother Jones, what is your sense of the overlap between the Wall Street bets

00:15:32.700 people and the Nazis on Telegram and elsewhere who stormed the Capitol? Ooh, good. Maybe we can use 0.99

00:15:38.840 the FBI to go to their homes and, and shut them down and put them in prison and take away all their

00:15:44.480 money. They can't do this, darn it. Discord, a social media platform, shut down the Wall Street bets

00:15:50.320 account for hate speech, for hate speech because they drove GameStop and AMC and BlackBerry, because

00:16:00.000 they drove them through the roof to wreck some Wall Street investors for the lols, for the laughs. 0.93

00:16:08.440 They booted them for hate speech. This is the same thing you, you see done to conservatives. Whenever

00:16:14.240 they walk a little bit away from the liberal establishment, whenever they question in any

00:16:19.720 way, the dominant liberal regime, what are we told? We're told that's hate speech. That's bigotry.

00:16:26.380 It's dangerous. It's a threat. You're a Nazi or a white supremacist. And we've got to,

00:16:33.360 we've got to censor you. NASDAQ is considering halting trading to let the investors, quote,

00:16:40.900 recalibrate. NASDAQ CEO, Adina Friedman, said that the exchange could halt trading activity for

00:16:46.500 stocks in the event that they were targeted by these internet users. So you're going to let these

00:16:53.380 giant bigwigs on Wall Street have a, have a completely unfair advantage on investing when

00:17:01.380 their stocks get, when their investments get threatened. But ordinary people, what happens when

00:17:06.620 you're, with far less knowledge, by the way, what happens when you lose some money in the markets?

00:17:12.460 Do they, do they stop trading on NASDAQ for you? I don't think so. The White House, for their

00:17:17.760 measure, are monitoring the situation. Jen Psaki, the press secretary, was asked about this and she

00:17:24.600 had a typically profound answer. Is the White House concerned about the stock market activity we're

00:17:30.480 seeing around GameStop? And now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary or whatever,

00:17:38.580 the company that was Blockbuster. And have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to

00:17:45.480 proceed? Well, I'm also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team

00:17:52.280 that's surrounding her and often questions about market. We'll send to them.

00:17:55.940 Hold on. What? Hey, this is the strangest day in the markets that we've had in a hundred years.

00:18:05.860 What's going on over there? Well, I'd like to remind you that the treasury secretary has breasts. 1.00

00:18:16.260 Okay. Can you tell us anything about the markets? She identifies as a woman and her pronouns are she and

00:18:25.700 her? Yes. Yes. Jen Psaki. I understand all that, but I need things that matter. I need information.

00:18:31.260 I need information that matters, not just your ridiculous liberal identity politics claptrap.

00:18:39.740 She goes on. She reminds us that we have a woman press secretary. Whoop-dee-doo. Then she, 1.00

00:18:45.060 then she goes on and sort of tries to address the question. But our team is of course, our economic team,

00:18:50.080 including Secretary Yellen and others are monitoring the situation. It's a good reminder though,

00:18:54.580 that the stock market isn't the only measure of the health of our economy. It doesn't reflect how

00:18:59.520 working and middle-class families are doing. As you all know from covering this, we're in the midst

00:19:04.240 of a K-shaped recovery. America's workers are struggling to make ends meet, which is why the

00:19:08.400 president has introduced this urgent package to get immediate relief to families.

00:19:13.060 So she's just not, she's not going to touch it. You can just tell this woman is not nearly as 0.99

00:19:18.560 talented as her predecessors, as Kayleigh McEnany and as, as Sarah Sanders. Certainly,

00:19:24.220 you know, Sarah and Kayleigh are extraordinarily intelligent and even more so prepared.

00:19:29.140 And this gal is just not, she isn't. She, whenever they ask her questions, she usually says, well,

00:19:35.020 I'll have to check, you know, I'll have to go talk to the secretary of such and such. And yeah,

00:19:39.220 but I'll get back to you. It's, if she were a Republican, there's no way she would have gotten this

00:19:44.760 job because the reporters would be tough on her and she wouldn't be able to stand up to it.

00:19:48.200 But because she's a Democrat, the reporters don't care because they're all on the same team.

00:19:52.320 They're all on the same team. And that is quite, quite a lot of what, what the GameStop thing is

00:20:00.340 about. People thinking that there is a game that is rigged against them. And so what do they want to

00:20:07.320 do with this kind of corrupt establishment that they have no respect for? They want to just throw

00:20:11.240 rocks at it and see what happens. And the establishment is striking back. When I say

00:20:18.920 that the GameStop phenomenon is, is about a meme, you know, it's about the sea shanties and the,

00:20:24.920 the chicken tendies and, and just laughing their way through this whole thing. There's actually

00:20:29.700 on the message board, this is a little offensive. I'll probably get my stream shut down when I even

00:20:33.420 read what they say. The, the people on Wall Street bets have a slogan on their message board,

00:20:39.620 which is we can remain retarded longer than they can remain solvent. So this is something 0.98

00:20:46.220 they've been writing on their message board, meaning we can behave irrationally longer than

00:20:53.020 these guys can hold their short positions. And we're going to behave irrationally because we want

00:20:57.440 to crack this liberal establishment because we believe this liberal establishment is not

00:21:02.740 particularly rational and not serving our interests. And the establishment keeps proving it.

00:21:08.140 Do you remember some years ago, maybe it was four or five years ago, there was a Twitter account,

00:21:12.620 it was a troll account called a Ricky Vaughn. And he posted very offensive things. And, you know,

00:21:18.220 he was, uh, you know, just, it was an anonymous account, but it was politically incorrect. It was

00:21:24.800 outright offensive. Okay. Then the, the account went away. The guy who ran that account is facing 10 years

00:21:33.840 in prison. He's facing 10 years in prison for posting memes. Specifically what he did is he posted

00:21:41.980 these memes and it said, if you want to vote for Joe Biden, or I'm sorry, at that time, I guess it would

00:21:46.940 be Hillary Clinton. If you want to vote for Hillary Clinton, text your vote to five, three, two, whatever,

00:21:53.520 you know, whatever the number was. This is a joke. Of course, you can't text your vote,

00:21:58.700 right? Vote by text. It's so much easier than showing up to the polls. We posted these memes.

00:22:04.260 This is a, a variation on a very longstanding joke, which is, if you've ever worked on a political

00:22:10.880 campaign, you know, this joke, you'll say, Hey, are you a Republican or a Democrat? And they'll say

00:22:18.440 Republican. You'll say, okay, good. Make sure you vote on Tuesday. And someone else comes up. They

00:22:22.780 say, when's election day? You say, are you a Republican or a Democrat? I'm a Democrat. You say,

00:22:25.880 good. Make sure you vote on Wednesday, right? You make sure you vote after the election. It's an old

00:22:29.520 joke. Now this guy for posting a variation on it, a meme is going to prison. I'd like to remind you

00:22:40.540 that in this past year, the Democrats changed all the election rules in key areas, weeks and months

00:22:50.880 before the election, completely upended them in some places in contravention of state constitutions.

00:22:55.880 So the, the peasants joke about elections. They get 10 years in prison. The crooked Democrats

00:23:03.760 change all the election rules, get rid of election integrity measures. They get to throw the people

00:23:10.340 in prison. Does that seem fair to you? Does that seem like a fair system? Not to me. And it's,

00:23:18.780 it's so much bigger than GameStop. It's so much bigger than internet regulation. It's so much bigger

00:23:24.820 than Trump. The left has been doing this for a very long time. You remember when some people who

00:23:32.400 were in manufacturing, they worked in factories, they worked in middle America, when neoliberal

00:23:37.440 elites shipped their jobs overseas, when they made the conscious decision to outsource their jobs,

00:23:42.900 these guys would complain and say, Hey man, we voted for you. And now you're taking away all of our

00:23:47.680 jobs. And these elites would come in and say, no, no, you don't understand. GDP is going up a little

00:23:52.020 higher. No, no, you, it'll, it's okay because GDP is going up and, you know, cheap Chinese goods are,

00:24:00.120 are their prices are falling. So you can buy a TV for less money. So really you're doing well.

00:24:04.640 And anyway, learn to code. Remember that? Learn to code. Then when a bunch of journalists lost their

00:24:12.180 jobs, a lot of conservatives said to them, Hey guys, go learn to code. And you know what happened

00:24:16.720 when the conservatives said it, they got booted off of social media. You were not permitted to say

00:24:20.580 that on social media. Totally different sets of rules. They've been pushing this, this argument.

00:24:27.040 One set of rules for me, one set of rules for you for years and years and years. And they're doing

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00:26:38.620 When Joe Biden was running for president, he said he would not get rid of fracking. He would not go

00:26:49.100 after the oil industry, right? Because he was trying to get voters specifically in Pennsylvania.

00:26:53.900 And then Trump said, yes, you will. You've promised that you would. And he said, no, I won't. That's a

00:26:58.420 lie. Kamala Harris said, no, I won't. That's a lie. And now that's what he's doing. That's exactly what

00:27:02.920 he's doing. He's killing all of these jobs in energy and oil and natural gas. So John Kerry,

00:27:10.040 who I guess is the climate czar, I guess that's his, who knows what he's, he's the czar of,

00:27:14.840 of yachting, I think. He's the Thurston Howell III, the czar of riding around on fancy boats.

00:27:22.440 So Kerry comes out and is asked about this and he, he has, he has the, the learn to code of 2021.

00:27:29.520 Coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years. So what president Biden wants to do is make

00:27:37.620 sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who

00:27:43.060 go to work to make the solar panels. They were making them here at home. That is going to be a

00:27:48.160 particular focus of the, uh, build back better agenda. And, and I think that, that unfortunately

00:27:56.260 workers have been fed a false narrative, no surprise, right? For the last few years, they've

00:28:03.020 been fed, uh, the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense. No, it's not.

00:28:11.500 What's happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.

00:28:16.620 And, and, and what the, what the, what the financiers, uh, the big banks, the asset managers,

00:28:22.520 private investors, venture capital are all discovering is there's a lot of money to be

00:28:27.600 made in the creation of these new jobs in these sectors. Well, you see, they've just been fed a

00:28:34.420 false narrative. They have been fed, they're currently being fed a false narrative actually.

00:28:39.920 And can't forget, I forgot to mention coal, coal workers, especially being hit. Well, you see,

00:28:44.760 look, the jobs, they've been going away for 20 years. Right. Cause you, you guys in your crooked

00:28:51.900 liberal establishment, we're getting rid of those jobs. People weren't complaining about losing those 0.97

00:28:58.180 jobs under Trump. Actually, that was a defining point of the campaign. Trump said, look, I'm,

00:29:03.160 I'm trying to fight to keep your jobs and Joe Biden is going to lose your jobs. And what did Joe

00:29:07.440 Biden say? He said, no, I won't. Absolutely not. You're going to get to keep your jobs in coal and

00:29:12.300 oil and natural gas. And then what's John Kerry comment? No, of course you're going to lose your jobs

00:29:17.800 because of the sun monster. The sun monster is going to destroy all of life on earth six months

00:29:25.400 ago by my calculations. And so that's why we've got to completely upend society and build back better.

00:29:32.640 And you can't do a damn thing about it. Peasants learn to solar, learn, learn to solar learned. That's

00:29:42.440 your answer. No. How about we just get rid of your ridiculous, get rid of the whole position that

00:29:48.840 Kerry has, this idea of the climate czar, get rid of all these silly ideologies, get rid of this

00:29:56.100 apocalyptic fear of the sun monster and allow people to keep their jobs. It's not inevitable.

00:30:02.600 The left wants to pretend that their very narrow ideology is the inevitable path of politics.

00:30:08.740 politics. And none of us can say a word about it. The right side of history sort of thing.

00:30:13.280 But it's not. We can fight back against it. That's in many ways what the Trump year has

00:30:18.260 represented. And that's certainly what this GameStop thing represents. Notice John Kerry not wearing

00:30:24.560 a mask. Could you imagine with his lockjawed accent, if you were wearing a mask? Jen Psaki,

00:30:32.020 press secretary, not wearing a mask. Joe Biden has been better about this because he's telling

00:30:36.880 everyone to always wear a mask on federal property. So you'll see now a lot of photos of Joe Biden,

00:30:42.740 even in the Oval Office, he'll be wearing a mask. He's a little smoother at this kind of retail

00:30:47.200 politics. John Kerry is violating Joe Biden's mandate right now. Jen Psaki is violating Joe Biden's 1.00

00:30:54.640 mandate. The reporters have to wear masks and they are, at least while the cameras are running.

00:30:59.500 But these guys don't have to. Because there's a different set of rules for them.

00:31:07.660 NASDAQ is going to halt trading if they're, if they're at risk of losing money. Joe Biden's going

00:31:13.120 to suspend his mandate for John Kerry. All of these, all of the main environmental activists,

00:31:20.560 Kerry, sure, but Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio, these guys use so much more energy than the ordinary person.

00:31:27.840 And what do they do? They scold ordinary people and say, do less, buy less, live less.

00:31:33.780 I'll be on my yacht. Contact me when global warming is over.

00:31:39.820 It's a, it's a different hierarchy here. It's a new, new sort of a caste system.

00:31:45.680 You know, Twitter, if you, oh my goodness gracious, if you say the wrong thing on Twitter now,

00:31:50.020 if you, if you question, oh my heaven forfend you raise any questions about the 2020 election,

00:31:55.340 you'll be gone in two seconds. If you use the letter Q, oh buddy, you're out of there. If you

00:32:02.820 are the sitting president of the United States in 2020 and they don't like your, the cut of your jib,

00:32:10.020 they'll kick you off. They won't remove child porn, but they'll remove conservatives. That's

00:32:16.460 according to one lawsuit just came out. A lawsuit going after Twitter saying they refuse to take down

00:32:22.520 widely shared pornographic images and videos of a young teenage boy who was a victim of sex

00:32:28.340 trafficking because a Twitter investigation, quote, didn't find a violation of the company's

00:32:33.620 policies. This lawsuit was filed yesterday by the victim and his mother in the Northern District of

00:32:39.920 California. The boy, by the way, I think he's still 17 years old and the video depicts him at 13 years

00:32:46.440 old engaged in sex acts and, and Twitter refuses to take it down. Now they probably, I guess they'll

00:32:53.740 take it down now probably, right? But now that, now the lawsuit's getting bad press, but they don't care.

00:32:59.100 It's, it's just not a priority for them. And one could spend many, many hours discussing the bizarre

00:33:06.820 sexual ideologies of, of radical leftists, but it just doesn't, it just doesn't matter. They've got

00:33:13.780 bigger priorities, namely keeping down common sense. Perfectly mainstream conservatives have

00:33:21.440 been kicked off of Twitter just as easily as the more eccentric types. The duly elected sitting

00:33:28.660 president kicked off of Twitter because the establishment didn't like him. And this I think

00:33:33.660 helps to explain why a new poll just came out from Politico and Morning Consult shows that a majority

00:33:39.900 of Republican voters want Donald Trump to run for president again in 2024. I get it. I totally

00:33:47.820 get it. I was having a discussion yesterday with a pal of mine over why, why Republicans stick with

00:33:55.780 Trump. He's such a jerk. He messed things up in some places. He, he didn't fight hard enough in

00:34:01.880 Georgia. He didn't do this. He didn't do that. Why do, why is it that we go after all the other

00:34:07.120 Republicans? But somehow we stick with Trump because Trump is our rock that we throw against

00:34:15.320 the edifice of this crooked establishment. That's why. Why, why is Wall Street bets sticking with

00:34:22.900 GameStop and BlackBerry and AMC? Is it, is it even because they think that GameStop is this deep value

00:34:30.520 company? No. They just know that that's a great cudgel against this establishment. And negative

00:34:39.380 politics, the idea of fighting against somebody, it's, that's not a dirty concept. That is often

00:34:45.280 how politics works, perfectly natural. And it's especially true when the dominant regime is as

00:34:51.340 corrupt as the regime that we're living under right now, which is unprecedented in American history.

00:34:57.920 We always like to pretend, oh, everything's doing fine. GDP is, is doing well. It's, it's all okay.

00:35:05.840 You haven't been able to leave your home without a filthy piece of cloth covering your mouth

00:35:11.420 in 10 months. Many of you have not been permitted to work and you haven't been given relief from the

00:35:19.380 government, which, which has banned you from working. You've been given $600, maybe a little bit more

00:35:26.960 with the second relief package. You have been kicked off of social media. You have been told not to go

00:35:34.560 over to Christmas, not to have Thanksgiving, not to hug your loved ones, not to bury your dead

00:35:39.720 by an elite that doesn't believe any of this, that flouts these rules left and right whenever,

00:35:47.200 and changes the rules whenever it suits their political interests. And people are very,

00:35:51.800 very angry about that. And they're very justified in that anger.

00:35:59.260 And they want a cudgel and Trump remains that cudgel. In some ways, Trump's political prospects,

00:36:08.460 if he does want to run again, will depend less on the field in 2024 and more on the establishment.

00:36:15.060 If the establishment remains this brazen or gets more brazen, which it seems like that's the direction

00:36:22.380 they're going in, it's going to be very difficult for, for another Republican to come up and claim the

00:36:27.540 mantle. Even if that other Republican would be more capable in terms of legislation, even if that other

00:36:33.820 Republican would be more competent in terms of organization of political apparatus. Don't forget,

00:36:40.160 Trump worked in business his whole life, right? He didn't, the guy never ran a formal campaign until

00:36:44.200 2016. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. People are very, very angry. Is it any wonder? You know,

00:36:52.380 in San Francisco on Tuesday, the San Francisco school board voted to accept the recommendations

00:36:58.460 of a renaming committee that voted to officially rename 44 public schools bearing the names of

00:37:05.220 controversial historical figures. Do you know who these controversial historical figures were?

00:37:10.020 Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln. George Washington. Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin

00:37:20.220 Roosevelt. A Democrat icon. He's now, his portrait is hanging in, in Biden's Oval Office. Herbert Hoover.

00:37:29.340 Paul Revere. The regulars are out. The Revolutionary War hero, Paul Revere. Thomas Edison.

00:37:36.140 Edison. If those schools have light bulbs, they, it's very, a little ungrateful for them to rename

00:37:43.560 Edison school. Even Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is a far left person, the one who,

00:37:52.220 she's the woman who said that Amy Coney Barrett perhaps shouldn't be a judge because she's Catholic. 0.98

00:37:58.200 Renaming her because they allege that she said or did something that could be sort of construed as racist

00:38:03.500 five million years ago or something. No evidence that she said or did anything like that.

00:38:09.880 This is, this is my argument against the Tubman $20 bill. I won't rehash my arguments we've talked

00:38:14.040 about the last couple of days. I don't think we should put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. I don't

00:38:19.700 have anything against Tubman, but I don't think the Tubman 20 is about Tubman either. I think it's about

00:38:23.780 getting rid of Andrew Jackson and pushing leftist identity politics. And that is poison. It's poison

00:38:30.300 because it will overthrow not only our understanding of the American regime and our appreciation for it,

00:38:35.560 not only will it reframe American history and cast it in a negative light to use the terms that the

00:38:41.460 1619 project uses, but it will rip the country apart. If you don't have loyalty and respect for

00:38:47.380 your country, you're not going to flourish. You're not, you're probably not going to stay together very

00:38:52.580 long. And, and the country is fraying, it's ripping apart. And it's because of that crooked

00:38:59.880 establishment. In the midst of all this, Joe Biden is pursuing a radical agenda. We were told he wouldn't,

00:39:10.260 we were told he'd be moderate Joe. I don't think so. You know, the Democrats have been clamoring for

00:39:14.900 court packing, adding new judges to the court. Well, some democratic senators say, no, I don't,

00:39:21.880 I don't really want to go for that. I'll vote against that. So Joe Biden just appointed a

00:39:25.880 bipartisan commission to study reforms to the Supreme court and the federal judiciary. So according to the

00:39:32.240 Washington post, it's an attempt to make a nod at both camps. There are the activists on the left

00:39:37.800 who want him to pack the court and there are the swing voters who, who aren't that interested in it.

00:39:42.580 So he wants to nod to both of them and create this commission. If you make a commission to propose

00:39:48.580 reforms, the commission has to propose reform. Coming back and saying, we don't think you should

00:39:55.340 change it at all is not really an option. If there's enough of a public outcry, maybe, but it's not,

00:40:01.200 that's not why you form one of these committees. You do it to, to give yourself the institutional

00:40:07.320 cover to make radical changes. And this, this is how the left wins, by the way, is through

00:40:12.600 incrementalism and gradualism. If you have two sides being represented here, the side that wants

00:40:19.820 radical change and the side that wants no change at all, when you create a commission to reconcile

00:40:25.020 those two, you get a lot of change. There's no way that the conservatives can possibly win in that

00:40:32.560 situation. Unless the public outcry is simply so great that the commission loses its mandate.

00:40:38.720 But absent something like that, there's going to be this change and there's nothing,

00:40:42.780 nothing we can do about that. A change to the Supreme Court

00:40:46.060 could be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of respect for our institutions in this

00:40:54.040 country. I think that's why the court refused to hear any of the election challenges, is they just

00:40:58.920 thought we need to preserve the institutional integrity. We don't want to weigh in on this

00:41:03.620 election. When we weighed in on Bush v. Gore, which we didn't want to do even then, it, you know,

00:41:08.260 undermined the court and we just can't do it. Joe Biden doesn't care. Country's a powder keg right

00:41:14.200 now. Joe Biden's smoking a cigarette, about to flick that butt. And it's not just the court.

00:41:21.300 It's a whole slew of executive orders. It's a whole heap of radical policies that are so disconnected

00:41:31.560 from the will of voters and from what he promised on the campaign trail. Not on the campaign trail

00:41:36.780 10 years ago. This year, this past year, he was lying right to their face because he knows the people

00:41:42.020 can't do anything about it. 32 executive orders. Joe Biden has signed 32 executive orders in his

00:41:54.100 first week. Now, you might be confused about this. If you were paying any attention to the

00:42:00.660 presidential election, which really none of us were because it was a fake presidential election

00:42:04.200 because no one was allowed to go outside. No one was allowed to hold rallies. It was all controlled by

00:42:08.060 the media. And big tech censored conservatives and, and news that was damaging to Biden.

00:42:15.420 However, if you were watching at all, George Stephanopoulos,

00:42:18.740 Bill Clinton's communications director, who now pretends to be a journalist at ABC,

00:42:22.760 he was hosting Joe Biden and he says, all right, Biden, how are you going to govern? You're going to,

00:42:28.560 you're going to get this done. You're going to get that done. You're going to ram through your agenda.

00:42:31.080 Joe Biden says, Hey, I need to build consensus. You cannot govern through executive order like a dictator.

00:42:36.760 I have this strange notion. We are a democracy. Some of my Republican friends and some of my

00:42:43.680 Democratic friends even occasionally say, well, if you can't get the votes by executive order,

00:42:48.100 you're going to do something. Things you can't do by executive order unless you're a dictator.

00:42:52.220 We're a democracy. We need consensus. You can't govern by executive order unless you're a dictator.

00:42:58.540 In a democracy, you need consensus. So if you take Joe at his word there and then you observe that

00:43:06.380 he signed 32 executive orders in his first week, can you do that math? What is Joe saying about

00:43:14.720 himself? He's saying he's a dictator and he's saying we're not properly a democracy. And there have been,

00:43:19.880 I don't want to use hyperbolic language here. When I say Joe's a dictator, I mean that in the purest

00:43:24.740 sense of that word, he is just saying things and that that is becoming the law of the land, right?

00:43:29.040 He's dictating. So that is just what's happening in the first week. It's not like they've been

00:43:32.800 passing laws in the Congress. And for a long time in this country, that's not really how you govern.

00:43:37.720 You govern through the executive agencies and the bureaucracy and by EOs. And if you're governing that

00:43:44.260 way, what Joe Biden is saying there to Stephanopoulos is we're not a democracy. And there have been

00:43:47.860 many sophisticated political thinkers who say that at this point, the United States more

00:43:53.560 resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. We've spoken on this show before about the cycle of

00:43:59.700 regimes, kind of classical cycle of regimes. You have democracy, then that decays into an oligarchy,

00:44:05.780 then that transforms into a monarchy, then the monarchy can be overthrown or reformed into a democracy,

00:44:10.720 democracy, so on and so forth. I'm not saying this country is purely an oligarchy at this moment,

00:44:18.880 but it certainly is somewhere between, at the very least, it's somewhere between a democracy and

00:44:24.420 an oligarchy. And as you see the rise of Trump's, as you see the rise of Wall Street bets, the GameStop

00:44:33.340 insurgency, as you see the political violence in the streets, I guess on both sides, much more violent

00:44:39.240 on the left and on the right, but there has been some on the right too. What you are seeing, I'll

00:44:43.600 use the language of the left, is this is the cry of the people that haven't been heard. Sure, I'm not

00:44:50.320 saying this as a way to endorse it or in a prescriptive way, I'm using it in a descriptive

00:44:53.880 way, the exact same way the left does. All of these aspects, you're seeing people who believe that

00:45:00.320 democracy in this country is not really functioning, that we are more effectively an oligarchy.

00:45:05.000 And there's one set of rules for Wall Street. There's one set of rules for John Kerry and

00:45:09.940 Jen Psaki and Joe Biden and the Biden family overseas and in the United States. It's one set

00:45:16.220 of rules for all those guys. And then there's another set of rules for ordinary people.

00:45:22.460 Joe Biden in his first week decides to take on the very important issue of taxpayer-funded

00:45:28.200 genital mutilation for US soldiers. So he takes away Donald Trump's ban on men who think that

00:45:37.680 they're women and women who think that they're men from serving in the armed forces, which had

00:45:41.820 been common sense until 2015. So right before the end of Obama's administration, he decides,

00:45:49.700 okay, I'm now going to permit men who think that they're women and women who think that they're

00:45:52.860 men to serve in the armed forces. And somehow that's going to be really good for American

00:45:58.240 military might, right? So he says that Trump comes in a year later and he says, nah, we're a year and

00:46:03.480 a half later. Nah, we're going to get rid of that, okay? So he reverses that. Joe Biden has an

00:46:07.320 important civil rights issue. We're going to let men who think that they're women serve in the

00:46:12.180 military. And we're going to force taxpayers to pay for the surgery, cosmetic surgery, to make them 0.99

00:46:18.080 look more like the sex that they are not, but that they imagine themselves to be.

00:46:24.280 And you have ordinary people, I think, across the political spectrum, plenty of left-wingers too,

00:46:33.300 looking at it and saying, what? That's what you're spending my money on? You're spending my money to

00:46:40.460 force me to participate in this ancient heretical religion called Gnostic dualism that posits that a 0.55

00:46:47.740 man can be a woman simply by believing himself so? What? That is so divorced from reality. You guys, 0.99

00:46:54.660 you governing elites are so divorced from reality that you are forcing us all to live in that fantasy

00:47:01.120 as well. Getting worse, folks. The majority of Senate Democrats, we'll move, we'll move past the

00:47:08.900 executive orders. We'll get into legislation. The majority of Senate Democrats now want to make

00:47:14.740 Washington, D.C. estate. 39 members of the Democratic Conference. So not enough to get it

00:47:19.860 done yet. This has been building up for some time. They want to do it. Tom Carper says this isn't a

00:47:25.560 Republican or Democratic issue. It's an American issue because the lack of fair representation for

00:47:29.660 D.C. residents is clearly inconsistent with the values on which this country was founded. That is

00:47:34.300 so illiterate that I'm surprised that this man, Tom Carper, can walk around throughout the day without

00:47:41.180 clunking himself in the head wherever he goes. It's so idiotic. The entire purpose of Washington,

00:47:47.420 D.C. is to not be a state. If Washington, D.C. were supposed to be a state, then we would have had

00:47:53.600 the federal seat in Maryland or Virginia. But we didn't. We actually took territory away from Maryland

00:48:01.860 and Virginia so that we could give it to a federal district so that the federal government would not be

00:48:06.000 within any particular state. That's the whole point of it. That's been the way D.C. has been

00:48:10.840 organized since 1801. Not only is it not contrary to the values of the country, that is a natural

00:48:19.920 product of the values of the country, which says this is a federation. This is the United States

00:48:24.860 of America. No one state is going to dominate. When Carper, I can't tell if he's just being cynical

00:48:30.340 and a liar or if he's really that stupid. I do know some, I know many people in Washington, D.C.,

00:48:36.600 and so I'm not going to discount the idea that he might just have no idea what he's talking about.

00:48:40.780 When he says that this isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, in a way, he's sort of right.

00:48:45.000 It's really, it is as of now a Democratic issue. But really what he's saying is Washington people,

00:48:49.620 Washington elites want more power. And that cuts across party lines very often. And the ordinary people

00:48:56.740 with their ordinary constitution, they might say one thing, but we, the established elites,

00:49:01.580 are saying something else. And we're going to play by a different set of rules and we're going

00:49:06.960 to make you bend the knee to us. And the rest of us are saying, man, how do I crack this

00:49:13.360 establishment? How do I go to the sun, go to the moon, send this rocket ship up, whether it's on the

00:49:17.940 internet, whether it's in the stock market, whether it's in politics, that process only just

00:49:24.220 beginning. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.

00:49:26.740 The Michael Knowles Show is produced

00:49:54.860 by Ben Davies. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Our technical director is Austin Stevens.

00:50:00.840 Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling. Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky.

00:50:06.560 Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico. Audio mixer, Mike Coromina. Hair and makeup by

00:50:12.580 Nika Geneva. And production coordinator, McKenna Waters. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire

00:50:17.820 production. Copyright Daily Wire 2021. Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Wall Street gets stonked

00:50:24.260 as Reddit games, the GameStop stock. Plus, John Kerry is reporting for climate duty.

00:50:29.920 That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show. Tune in.

The Michael Knowles Show - January 28, 2021

Ep. 688 - Let Them Eat Tendies

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