The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 822 - Forget The Taliban—Anti-Maskers Are The Real Terrorists!

00:00:00.000 There are good predictions and there are bad predictions and there are bad predictions and

00:00:06.820 there are terrible predictions and there are terrible predictions. And then there are the

00:00:13.260 Biden administration's predictions about Afghanistan, which were given to us by

00:00:19.460 Biden's secretary of state, Antony Blinken, just days ago. I don't think that the fact that our

00:00:27.160 forces are withdrawing. One, we're not withdrawing. We're staying. The embassy is staying. Our

00:00:33.120 programs are staying. We're working to make sure that other partners stay. We're building all of

00:00:36.760 that up. And whatever happens in Afghanistan, if there is a significant deterioration in security,

00:00:44.200 that could well happen. We've discussed this before. I don't think it's going to be something

00:00:49.480 that happens from a Friday to a Monday. So I wouldn't necessarily equate the departure of

00:00:56.640 our forces in July, August, or by early September with some kind of immediate deterioration in the

00:01:05.000 situation. In case you missed it this weekend, between Friday and Monday, Afghanistan fell to

00:01:13.040 the Taliban. It is actually impressive how perfectly wrong the prediction of the Biden administration

00:01:20.560 was. This after Joe Biden said it was not inevitable that the Taliban would come back,

00:01:24.640 also just days ago, completely wrong. Republicans are blaming Biden. Democrats are blaming Trump.

00:01:30.360 Biden's blaming Trump. Trump is blaming Biden and once blamed Obama. Obama blamed Bush. The problem,

00:01:37.100 though, goes a lot deeper than Democrats versus Republicans. Afghanistan is not just a godforsaken

00:01:43.840 desert in the graveyard of empires. Afghanistan is the symbol of America's identity crisis. I'm Michael

00:01:50.560 Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment from Friday is

00:02:01.480 from Urian Van Dleen, who says, wouldn't surprise me when the Taliban gets a blue checkmark right away

00:02:07.780 after signing up for Twitter. It wouldn't surprise me at all. Actually, the fact that the Taliban is on

00:02:13.600 Twitter and the former president of the United States is not, it tells you a whole lot about this

00:02:19.080 identity crisis that we're having as Americans. It really, sometimes all the terrible news makes

00:02:24.360 you want to just pop in some earbuds and tune it all out, which when I do that, I always want to go

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00:03:38.080 What happened to Afghanistan? You've very likely been following the news, so I'll just give you a

00:03:44.920 very brief recap because I'm sure you're hearing lots of conflicting stuff. For instance, from the

00:03:49.640 Biden administration, you're hearing denials and silence, and from reality and from the reporters

00:03:56.520 who were on the ground and from everybody else, you were seeing this disaster unfold. So what happened

00:04:01.860 is Afghanistan's sort of fake president who was being propped up by the U.S., Ashraf Ghani,

00:04:07.940 gave up power. He just, he gave it up. It wasn't working. He ran away to Tajikistan. This means that

00:04:14.020 the Afghan government that the United States has been building for 20 years is deader than disco. It

00:04:20.600 folded like a house of cards. Then you've got the interim government now is being run by the Taliban,

00:04:28.140 Taliban. Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. The U.S. embassy in Kabul, this was now

00:04:34.720 two days ago, suspended all operations, told Americans to shelter in place. It was hearing

00:04:41.660 of gunfire at the Kabul airport. So absolute chaos, total surrender. You saw helicopters actually

00:04:48.820 landing at the embassy to lift people away just like they did with the fall of Saigon and the end of

00:04:55.180 Vietnam War. You are seeing the Taliban enter Kabul from all sides. Kabul, capital of Afghanistan,

00:05:02.300 Taliban totally taking over. Joe Biden has now approved more troops to go over there to try to

00:05:07.980 secure the exits. This is not more troops to stop the Taliban. That's over. That's not going to happen

00:05:12.520 anymore. It's just troops to go in to make sure that Americans and at least some of our Afghan allies

00:05:17.900 don't get killed on the way out. Initially, the U.S. was going to pull out of Afghanistan on September 11th,

00:05:24.060 on the 20th anniversary of the attacks seems a little dark. I don't know why. I mean, just from

00:05:28.840 an optics PR standpoint doesn't make a lot of sense. But that timetable has been moved up. It

00:05:33.880 wasn't moved up by the State Department. It wasn't moved up by the Pentagon. It wasn't moved up by the

00:05:38.540 White House. It was moved up by the Taliban because the Taliban knew that the American forces were

00:05:43.280 leaving. And so they weren't going to waste any time. There was an expression from the very beginning

00:05:47.380 of the Afghanistan. I don't even know what to call it. Was it a war? Was it an occupation? Was it a

00:05:52.720 liberation? I don't I don't know what it was. And unfortunately, neither did America, which is why

00:05:56.680 we lost. But from the very beginning of whatever we've been doing in Afghanistan, the expression

00:06:01.720 has been that the Americans have the watches, but the Taliban's got the time that the Americans are

00:06:06.840 really obviously very technically proficient. They can game all these things out. But the fact is

00:06:12.220 the Taliban are just going to be there. And then eventually the Americans are going to leave

00:06:16.320 and the Taliban's going to come right back in. 20 years, 20 years in that godforsaken desert.

00:06:25.320 What did we achieve? That's what as as Americans are watching the footage of the Chinook

00:06:31.380 landing and taking off and the embassy falling and the whole government, we spent

00:06:35.640 zillions of dollars building, collapsing overnight. They were saying, what did we achieve?

00:06:41.400 It's not nothing. We we killed bin Laden, took about a decade to do it, but we killed bin Laden,

00:06:48.440 also not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. But surely our presence in Afghanistan helped

00:06:53.460 helped to do that. So we killed bin Laden and. Yeah, OK, I guess that's about it. I guess we

00:07:02.440 we arrested some terrorists, although we didn't even kill a lot of those terrorists. So now the

00:07:06.920 terrorists are just being released. We arrested a lot of these Taliban guys and then they were

00:07:10.440 released as well. So. So that's it. 20 years in the place to get a guy that we killed in Pakistan.

00:07:20.060 Where? Oh, where did everything go wrong? I know that Republicans are very eager to blame Biden for

00:07:28.900 all of this. And Trump is doing that, too. He's saying Biden's messing everything up. You famously

00:07:32.900 remember Barack Obama was quoted as saying, never underestimate the amount to which Joe Biden can

00:07:39.500 F everything up. This was during the 2020 campaign. And that's true. But I don't I don't really blame

00:07:46.240 Biden. I sure could he as a tactical matter, could he have handled it better? I guess so. But I don't

00:07:51.920 really blame Biden. I don't really blame Trump or Obama. I do blame Bush a little bit more. But I sort

00:08:00.600 of blame the broader ethos in America that the national identity crisis. And I've pinpointed,

00:08:06.780 I think, the exact moment when everything went wrong. And that was during George W. Bush's

00:08:15.300 second inaugural address. So this is in early 2005 when George W. Bush redefined not just the mission

00:08:23.880 in Afghanistan, which was already kind of ill-defined, but redefined the relationship of national security

00:08:30.980 to broader ideals and redefined the very purpose of America herself.

00:08:38.500 For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny,

00:08:44.240 prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive

00:08:54.260 power and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat.

00:09:01.100 OK, so there this was the diagnosis that Bush made. He said, as long as there is tyranny anywhere,

00:09:08.020 anywhere that that will pose an existential threat. The the tyrants and the people inspired by the

00:09:15.060 tyrants will fly overseas and attack the American homeland, which is a ridiculous claim. That's just not

00:09:21.520 true. I guess it was true in Afghanistan, which created a safe haven for terrorists. I mean,

00:09:26.820 I understand why Bush made this observation, but then he generalized it to all what all tyrannies.

00:09:32.420 If any government is not a Madisonian style democracy, Bush seems to imply, then they're going to come and

00:09:37.580 attack the American homeland. That's just not true. It's not true. Think of all the tyrannies in the

00:09:42.580 world, China, Russia, Russia, even at this time was an autocratic tyranny. And they hadn't really

00:09:50.440 directly threatened the United States in in decades. All those tin pot dictatorships in Latin America,

00:09:57.120 they're not directly really threatening the United States. So but that was the diagnosis. We have to

00:10:01.340 stop tyranny anywhere. And so what's Bush going to do about it? He is going to eliminate tyranny from

00:10:07.120 the world. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty

00:10:15.260 in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

00:10:24.060 America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. We have proclaimed that every man and

00:10:30.080 woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the

00:10:38.780 maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government

00:10:44.880 because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is

00:10:55.000 the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent

00:11:02.740 requirement of our nation's security and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United

00:11:10.300 States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and

00:11:18.660 culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. The mission of the United States in the

00:11:26.880 world imperative for her national security, for her very survival, the existential mission of the United

00:11:32.340 States is to eliminate evil from the world. And messianic mission, unfortunately, difficult to live

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00:12:58.420 George W. Bush's second inaugural address in early 2005 is called the Freedom Speech.

00:13:04.340 It used the words freedom or free or liberty 49 times in the speech. It was a redefinition

00:13:14.840 of America's role in the world. America was not going to be merely a nation that kept to herself.

00:13:23.100 America was not even going to be an empire that was taking territory to secure her own,

00:13:30.420 merely her own interests or to just grab other resources or anything like that.

00:13:35.100 America was going to be a purely benevolent empire. The only benefit America was going to get was

00:13:44.440 securing national security. But what America was going to give to the rest of the world

00:13:48.160 was to eliminate tyranny, topple every dictatorship, autocracy, oligarchy, anything that did not

00:13:56.620 seem to be perfect self-government in the view of the American experience.

00:14:04.480 That is a big claim that you're going to do that. A fundamental redefinition of the country. So what

00:14:11.160 does Afghanistan mean? Because Afghanistan is the test of this. Afghanistan is the consequence of this

00:14:18.340 idea and the test of this idea. I think it is ridiculous that Joe Biden is blaming Donald Trump.

00:14:25.320 That is really pathetic. So much for the adults in the room, so much for the buck stops here.

00:14:29.080 Joe Biden immediately, when under his watch, the thing falls apart. He says, it was Trump's fault.

00:14:33.360 Blame Trump. It wasn't me. Please. It was the orange man. He's responsible for everything.

00:14:37.540 Likewise, I don't think it's really Biden's fault. I don't think it's Obama's fault.

00:14:42.180 In a way, I think it's Bush's fault. But more broadly, it's the fault of the American people to not

00:14:48.100 really know what it is that we are. And most especially, it's the fault of the elite that are running

00:14:54.520 the institutions in the State Department and all the other places. It's a lot deeper, though, than it is

00:14:58.120 Republicans versus Democrats. There are two main opinions here that come down on Afghanistan. The one is

00:15:05.940 the American nationalist position, which is pull out, stop the forever wars. What the hell are we doing

00:15:11.860 in Afghanistan 20 years later? Bring the troops home. Enough is enough. The other is the empire position,

00:15:20.240 the imperial position. Well, of course, we've got to stay in Afghanistan. We got to stay there. We got to prevent

00:15:24.860 another 9-11 at the very least. We got to, you know, make sure that the girls can go to school. We got to, we've

00:15:31.260 just got to stay there because the Taliban are bad. We're good. And so it's going to be better for everyone if we're in

00:15:35.440 Afghanistan. So it's a conflict between nationalists and imperialists. And I got to tell you, I'm sympathetic to both

00:15:42.420 points of view. I'm sympathetic to the point of view of, hey, let's do a little nation building at home. Hey, America's

00:15:47.840 collapsing in the homeland. So let's focus a little more on America. Let's focus more on Detroit and less on

00:15:53.640 Kandahar, right? But I'm also sympathetic to the imperial point of view. I don't think that the Taliban has any right to

00:15:59.740 govern Afghanistan. I don't think it's a violation of the rights of these Islamists that we're not letting them run their

00:16:05.940 country or that we weren't. And I have no problem conquering other lands if I think it's in our interest and if we think

00:16:12.820 it's for the best. But then the really hard question that I don't see anyone really talking about

00:16:18.620 here is, if we're going to have an empire, what is that empire going to look like? The way that I think

00:16:29.140 you know that even the elites recognize that America doesn't want this liberal empire is they always hide

00:16:35.680 the ball. They never say, whenever you say, okay, how much longer are we going to be in Afghanistan?

00:16:39.100 They'll always say, well, just a little longer. Just, no, we shouldn't pull out like this. We've

00:16:44.620 just got to stay there until the Afghan government is sufficiently strong, which by the way is never

00:16:49.380 going to happen. It folded in like six hours. It was after 20 years of building it up, it folds in

00:16:55.260 less than a day. So that was never going to happen. So the honest answer from the liberal imperialists

00:17:01.260 is we're just going to stay there forever. We're going to have a small presence there forever and

00:17:05.560 that's it. Now Afghanistan is going to be a territory that is perpetually occupied by

00:17:09.020 the United States. Okay. If that's your position that then be honest about it, but they won't be

00:17:14.060 honest about it because they know that Americans don't want a liberal empire because what is that

00:17:18.500 empire? What freedom are we spreading? That's when George Bush makes the freedom speech, the liberty

00:17:23.780 speech, the question is what kind of liberty are we talking about? Are we talking about a sort of

00:17:31.620 Christian empire like we saw from Spain or Portugal or Britain? Are we talking about spreading the

00:17:37.380 gospel to new lands and spreading the vision that made the Western civilization that we all love?

00:17:44.180 No, I don't think we are. The West now is largely secular. We don't speak in those kinds of terms

00:17:50.980 anymore. The empire that we would be spreading is a liberal empire. And so what are we doing in

00:17:58.440 Afghanistan? Are we there to make sure that the Afghan people have the liberty to have drag queen story

00:18:05.800 hour in every single library in Kabul? Is that it? Because if that's the case, then I don't want any

00:18:13.300 part of that. We need the liberty to make sure that every woman in Kabul can dye her hair pink and get a

00:18:20.500 gender studies degree. No, I don't think that's a good idea. Now, sure, there's a lot of gray area

00:18:29.060 between the Taliban locking everyone up under this very restrictive code and this radical conclusion

00:18:36.620 of liberalism. But what is it? What are we doing? What are we spreading? Is it freedom as the founding

00:18:43.300 fathers would have understood it? Or is it freedom as the hippies of today would understand it?

00:18:49.620 We don't have the answer to that. By the way, you're going to hear this one object before we move on

00:18:55.860 from Afghanistan. This one objection that I keep hearing from the liberal imperialists, the one

00:19:00.600 who want to stay in Afghanistan forever, but don't want to admit it. They keep saying, well, hold on,

00:19:05.200 we're pulling troops out of Afghanistan. What, do you think we should pull troops out of Korea?

00:19:09.100 What, do you think we should pull troops out of Germany? We have troops all over the world.

00:19:13.040 Sure, we have troops all over the world. But if we pull the troops out of Germany, the country isn't

00:19:17.260 going to collapse. If we pull the troops out of Korea, the country isn't going to collapse for that

00:19:21.300 matter. The occupation of Afghanistan was categorically different than us having bases

00:19:28.960 in various parts of the world. But we don't even know what it was. What was the war? What was the

00:19:35.160 victory? The reason we lost in Afghanistan is not because soldiers didn't make great sacrifices.

00:19:39.360 It's because we had no idea what victory was. Initially, it was to go in and kill the guys who

00:19:45.060 flew planes into the building and who trained them. And then what? We're not going to nation

00:19:51.800 build. Then we did nation build, but we didn't want to admit we were nation building. Then we

00:19:55.940 were going to form a national security force in Afghanistan. Well, how do you have a national

00:20:00.840 security force if there's no nation? But then it became about sending girls to school, which is,

00:20:06.720 that's fine. I mean, I'm all for that, I guess. But we're really going to create an empire so that

00:20:11.540 we can send girls to school in some godforsaken region of Afghanistan. What are we doing?

00:20:17.740 We couldn't win that war because we didn't know what we wanted. Because as a country,

00:20:22.720 we don't know what we want because we don't know what we want to be. And I think, although the elites

00:20:27.560 may still agree with the George W. Bush kind of liberal imperialist Wilsonian progressive vision of

00:20:33.980 just spread this pie in the sky vision of freedom all over the world, I don't think the American people

00:20:39.500 want that. This is why increasingly Republicans and Democrats have both had to campaign against

00:20:45.000 that vision. The American people don't like that idea very much. By the way, the other scaremongering

00:20:49.220 you're hearing right now about the pull out of Afghanistan is that all these terrorists are

00:20:54.340 being set free. The Taliban's coming in and they're setting free all of these, some of these Al-Qaeda

00:20:58.340 prisoners that were being held there and now they're going to return to the battlefield.

00:21:02.980 That's bad. That's too bad. Taliban overran Bagram Air Base, freed those prisoners.

00:21:06.920 Am I the only one who's wondering why those super duper dangerous Al-Qaeda terrorists were still

00:21:13.840 alive? We've been in the country occupying it for 20 years. Why didn't we kill them all?

00:21:19.740 Oh, because it wasn't a war. It wasn't a war and it wasn't an occupation. It was a military

00:21:26.960 involvement. That was the euphemism. Some of these Taliban guys were held by the United States and we

00:21:33.220 just let them go or they were held by our allies or sort of allies and then we just let them go.

00:21:38.220 If we were serious about fighting and winning a war, they would all be dead, but they're not dead

00:21:42.100 because we weren't really fighting a war. So now what we're ending, I guess, is not really a war.

00:21:47.320 It's just very confused. No one is more confused than the American political leadership who is

00:21:53.240 supposed to be running the war. And by the way, I mean, this is going to have terrible effects for

00:21:58.460 national security down the road. There's no, you can't just let a ton of terrorists who have sworn

00:22:02.900 that they're going to try to destroy the United States. You can't just let them all out and then

00:22:06.400 give them a safe haven and then just assume nothing bad is going to happen. So it will have national

00:22:10.400 security implications. But the problem is our genius ruling elite that got all the predictions wrong

00:22:16.560 about, well, really about everything, but especially about Afghanistan and that now are trying to

00:22:23.700 manage this catastrophe. They're not so worried about the terrorists in Al Qaeda as they are about

00:22:30.560 the terrorists in MAGA hats. They are, I'm not, this is not an exaggeration, are federal agencies

00:22:38.320 that were, some of which were founded after 9-11 to fight against these, these Islamist bad guys in the

00:22:46.500 Middle East are now saying that the real threat is not from some guy in a turban and a beard and in the

00:22:52.940 Taliban. The real threat is from a guy in a, in a Trump shirt with a MAGA hat and an American flag.

00:23:00.800 The real terror threat is you. If you want to hear more of these dire warnings, I would recommend

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00:24:01.900 I don't know why people are so worried about terrorism coming from the Taliban or coming from

00:24:06.580 Al Qaeda or coming from all of those terrorists who say that they want to destroy our country.

00:24:10.940 NBC News reporting on new missives from the Department of Homeland Security remind us that

00:24:20.380 the terror threat is not those guys in Al Qaeda. The real terror threat is you.

00:24:26.480 A new terror alert has been issued by Homeland Security tonight. Pete Williams is here. Pete,

00:24:31.360 what do we know about this? Well, DHS says this new terrorism advisory is not based on any actual

00:24:36.500 threats or plots, but it says there's a rise in anti-government rhetoric. Some of it is opposition

00:24:41.460 to COVID public health rules like mask and vaccine measures. Some calls for violent action are based

00:24:46.880 on claims of election fraud or a belief that Donald Trump can be reinstated. And DHS says the coming

00:24:52.660 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks and religious holidays later this year could be catalyst for

00:24:57.960 violence. The last terror advisory was issued in May. It expired today. This new one says domestic

00:25:04.120 extremism remains a threat priority, Lester. That's the priority. If you think that maybe

00:25:09.900 there were some shenanigans in the 2020 election, you know, the 2020 election where they got rid of

00:25:16.420 all the voter integrity measures beforehand. If not all of them, a great many of them, you know,

00:25:21.160 the 2020 election where the election officials in Pennsylvania overtly violated the state constitution

00:25:27.260 by permitting widespread mail-in ballots. You know, the election in 2020 in Georgia,

00:25:31.940 where just one batch finally was subject to an audit and it had a widespread double counting of

00:25:37.680 ballots. We actually saw it. We can actually look at the ballots. You know, that one, you know,

00:25:42.600 that election in 2020 where there were just ballot drop boxes and motor voter permissions and ballot

00:25:49.260 harvesting and where the voting just magically stopped at various points in the middle of the

00:25:54.720 night. And then it sort of started again days later. And it took days and days and weeks and

00:25:58.000 weeks to figure out who won. You remember that? If you, you, you terrorist, if you raise any questions

00:26:04.400 about that, you are a far greater threat than Osama bin Laden. If you raise questions, oh, what was the

00:26:13.020 other one? If you're, if you're anti-mask, if you think that maybe a handful of unelected eggheads

00:26:19.860 should not be able to completely upend our way of life and take away our civil liberties and upend

00:26:26.960 the American tradition. Yeah. You, you're probably a terrorist and that's, that's a far greater threat

00:26:32.440 than anyone else. Did you notice what, what they said at the top of that warning and NBC is the sort

00:26:39.740 of propaganda mouthpiece of the liberal regime, reading the threats from DHS. They said that there

00:26:45.560 are no actual threats or plots. So the current guidelines that classify half of America as terrorists,

00:26:53.880 classify any conservatives as terrorists. That is not based on anything in reality.

00:27:02.680 It's just based on, I don't know what some guys at DHS sort of think about, you know, hypothetically.

00:27:13.860 We got, we're going to spread liberty abroad. Oh yes. As long as there's a tyranny anywhere in the

00:27:19.100 world, we are going to go fight it because our national security depends on it. Also,

00:27:23.400 if you question anything about the regime, you're a terrorist. You were going to go,

00:27:28.400 we've got to go to Afghanistan because we're going to spread all that wonderful liberty. I,

00:27:34.080 you know, I sort of feel like liberty has taken a hit in America. Have you felt that way?

00:27:38.860 You know, because like you haven't been able to go to work in a long time. Hopefully, you know,

00:27:43.520 hopefully you were in one of the fields that didn't get totally shut down during the lockdowns, but

00:27:48.520 it was capricious. It changed every day. You might not have been able to go to church for large portions

00:27:53.960 of last year. You have to muzzle yourself when you go out in public. If you say anything that's

00:27:58.820 really critical of the regime that dissents really in any way from the leftist orthodoxy,

00:28:03.720 you'll be, you'll be deplatformed. You'll be removed from the public square. You might be placed

00:28:07.820 on a no fly list. And now DHS says you might be labeled a terrorist. Can't wait to spread that

00:28:13.820 liberty. All that liberty. Hmm. Seems strong. Maybe before we go build up liberty in the other

00:28:21.080 nations, maybe we should build it up here as well. It's not just Democrats who are doing this, by the

00:28:24.900 way. There is that, that jokester, Adam Kinzinger. He is one of the court jester conservatives. He's a,

00:28:31.140 he's a Republican. He's elected official as a Republican, but he's really just a prop of

00:28:37.720 the liberal regime. His entire point is to, the entire purpose of his political career is to

00:28:43.140 make a show of being a Republican, to appear as though there's opposition within the dominant

00:28:49.080 political order. But actually, whenever it matters, he, all he ever does is give support to the broader

00:28:55.200 liberal establishment. So Kinzinger goes on CNN, of course, and he's talking to Anderson Cooper,

00:28:59.980 of course, and he's defending the DHS view that conservative Republicans are terrorists.

00:29:06.140 When you look at online rhetoric and you look at chatter that's happening and you look at,

00:29:11.380 you know, maybe a hundred people post insane comments, like bring out the gallows, even if

00:29:16.300 only two of those out of the hundred are serious, that leads to violence. I think what the biggest

00:29:21.720 concern is, is all this talk, a lot of times just, you know, people trying to sound tough on the

00:29:26.620 internet, but that ends up kind of feeding itself. And particularly when people start brainwashing

00:29:32.280 folks with the election was stolen, look at what all these patriotic people did in the 1700s. This

00:29:38.500 is the same thing. The mask mandate is basically the equivalent of not allowing you to practice

00:29:43.120 your religion, you know, which is 1776 taxation without representation. Ultimately that does grow

00:29:49.980 into action and it's a real concern. So before we get to his broader stupid point, I do want to

00:29:55.020 focus in on his, on his minor stupid points. He's, he's suggesting that somehow the American

00:30:00.880 revolution was based on people not being able to practice their religion, which that he's getting

00:30:05.460 his history confused here. That was, but then he corrects himself because then he, I think he

00:30:10.260 realizes that a way that actually wasn't part of it. So he says, you know, they're, they're comparing

00:30:13.820 having to muzzle yourself ad infinitum, you know, at the whims of some random technocrat.

00:30:20.320 They're comparing that with no taxation without representation as though that's just as bad. And I think,

00:30:26.440 look, maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but I think he's realizing as he's saying this,

00:30:32.100 oh, wait a minute, having to muzzle yourself indefinitely, not through the processes of the

00:30:40.260 constitutional order and the elected government, but because some random bureaucrat just orders you to,

00:30:46.580 that actually is a bit more egregious than a tax hike, isn't it? To me it is. I don't,

00:30:52.280 when I think of, you know, I'm trying to put myself in the mindset of 1776 and I don't have

00:30:58.000 representation in parliament exactly, but you know, I'm having my taxes raised a little bit to

00:31:02.520 pay for a war that was fought on my shores. And, and I compare that to having to muzzle myself

00:31:10.780 forever, not being able to push back against that. If I even try to voice my political opposition to

00:31:15.360 that, I'll be labeled a terrorist by the dominant regime, also by agencies that are unelected and I have

00:31:20.460 no recourse against that actually does seem worse. That actually, that actually does raise some

00:31:25.840 questions about the political order. And so Kinzinger is trying to work his way through all of

00:31:30.880 this. But Kinzinger's broader point is that if you question any of this, you're, you're a terrorist.

00:31:39.380 This can lead to really large scale, terrible stuff. It's not even just the conservative adults.

00:31:44.660 It's the kids. If the kids in any way disobey Dr. Fauci, they're not just terrorists, but murderers.

00:31:52.440 A member of an Oklahoma school board just came out during a school board meeting and said that if,

00:31:57.500 if kids do not wear the masks in class, they could be murderers.

00:32:01.980 It's just not okay for kids to commit murder by coming to school without a mask. And when it comes

00:32:08.040 down to it, it's possible. They will, they will cause a death of another child because they come

00:32:16.480 to school without a mask. These are the people leading us. And you know, this woman is hysterical

00:32:22.760 and not the brightest bulb in the pack, but I'm not sure that she's so much, so much more ignorant

00:32:28.140 or so much stupider than Adam Kinzinger or than Antony Blinken or any of the ruling elite that are just

00:32:34.180 getting all of this stuff wrong. First of all, to this woman's point, she just obviously doesn't

00:32:38.420 know what murder is. Murder involves intention. So if she's saying that kids are killing people

00:32:43.380 because they're not wearing masks, again, also a ridiculous claim, but that would not be murder.

00:32:48.340 So she certainly doesn't know what she's talking about. And then, then to go out and she's saying,

00:32:51.900 look, if a kid shows up to school without a mask, he could spread the coronavirus because the kids

00:33:00.360 are not vaccinated, right? But we've also been told that vaccinated people are spreading the

00:33:05.500 coronavirus. And we've also been told that the masks don't offer perfect protection against

00:33:10.020 spreading the coronavirus by Anthony Fauci, actually, of all people. So what she's saying is the kids

00:33:16.840 could spread the coronavirus. And then if it spreads far enough, you know, someone might,

00:33:20.900 might die from that. And maybe the masks don't offer perfect protection to stop that. And the vaccine

00:33:26.000 certainly don't offer perfect protection to stop that, but still the kids can be involved in it.

00:33:29.000 This would be like saying that if a guy on an assembly line in Detroit

00:33:35.940 polishes the windows on a brand new car, and then the car makes it to a dealership somewhere else

00:33:45.960 in the United States, and someone looks at that car and says, gosh, that, look how beautiful that

00:33:51.400 shiny windshield is. You know, I think I'm going to go buy that car. And then that guy goes and buys

00:33:55.220 that car and he drives that car around for a little bit. And then maybe he decides, you know,

00:33:58.420 he's not going to like that car anymore. Maybe he wants to get a different car. So he goes and he

00:34:02.460 sells that car and he sells that car to someone else. And then that other person goes and he goes

00:34:06.020 to a bar one day and he has a few too many drinks and he gets in a car and he accidentally gets into

00:34:10.120 a car accident and somebody dies in that car accident. That windshield wiper killed somebody.

00:34:15.080 That guy, because that guy, way back on the line, he did a thing. And that result, do you realize,

00:34:23.040 I mean, this is now the logic that the COVID people are foisting on all of us, that anything we,

00:34:30.660 any ordinary thing we do to live our lives somewhere down the line of causation could cause someone

00:34:37.040 to die. And so you, you are a murderer. It's not just on the COVID stuff. I mean, this is,

00:34:42.980 this is their point on, on DHS and the terror threat of conservatives. Yeah, there's no threats.

00:34:48.260 Yeah, there's no actual plots or anything. But if someone says that maybe there were shenanigans in

00:34:52.940 the 2020 election, well, that could inspire someone else to maybe think there's a problem

00:34:56.960 with the government that could inspire someone else. And then someone someday might throw a punch

00:35:00.720 against a guy at a bar and look, he's a terrorist. That logic is so muddy. That logic is so, so,

00:35:09.680 it's not credible. It's just not credible. We used to have an idea in America that

00:35:17.200 you had some kind of personal liberty and that we had political liberties. And this involves danger.

00:35:23.720 You know, liberty does involve some element of danger. Okay. When people are left to their own

00:35:29.500 devices to govern themselves in some way, the political community is left to govern itself.

00:35:33.620 There's the possibility that things could go wrong, but that's, that's in the nature of liberty.

00:35:38.760 Anthony Fauci says Americans just need to push aside all those concerns about personal liberty.

00:35:45.360 We've got to do mitigation, put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties and personal

00:35:52.700 liberties and realize we have a common enemy and that common enemy is the virus. And we really have to

00:35:58.720 all pull together to get on top of this. Otherwise we're going to continue to suffer as we're seeing

00:36:04.400 right now. That's what you've got to just push aside your entire American way of life and your

00:36:09.320 tradition and all your civil liberties and everything you hold dear. Push it aside just for now,

00:36:14.880 just for 15 days, just for 15 months, just for 15 years, just push it aside. And then someday we'll

00:36:21.100 give you your power back. Someday we'll give you your liberty back. Oh, by the way, we also need to

00:36:27.040 spread liberty to every country on earth. How about we spread liberty to America? Is there any,

00:36:32.100 is there any way that we could have a liberating operation? Are there, is there any, that would be

00:36:37.160 great. I'd like it to be, maybe through our politics, maybe we could do that. Maybe we could retake

00:36:42.040 some of our political power, vote out these awful politicians, fire these terrible bureaucrats,

00:36:48.760 shrink the power of these awful would-be tyrants in the United States.

00:36:54.720 We probably need to agree on what those words mean though. We got to agree. What do we mean by

00:37:00.260 liberty, freedom, authoritarianism? What do we mean by those words? Because as long as they're pie in

00:37:05.440 the sky, vague out in the air, like George Bush used at the second inaugural, they're not going to

00:37:10.900 mean anything in practice. The director of the NIH, he has identified the real enemy that we face.

00:37:19.600 The real enemy that we face right now, it's not, maybe it's not the Taliban, maybe it's not

00:37:24.720 even the coronavirus. It's misinformation that is tearing us apart.

00:37:30.940 It's really unfortunate that politics and polarization have gotten in the way of a simple

00:37:35.320 public health measure. This mask that I'm holding has somehow become a symbol that it never should

00:37:40.660 have been. This is basically just a life-saving medical device. And somehow it's now being seen as

00:37:46.460 an invasion of your personal liberty. We never should have gone there. It's heartbreaking for me

00:37:51.280 as a person who's not a politician. I'm a scientist. I'm a public health person. I'm a doctor. To see how

00:37:57.860 masks have gotten into this very strange place with parents and others shouting about it, we never

00:38:03.520 should allow that to happen. If I have one thing I'm worried about, it's not just the epidemic

00:38:07.940 of COVID-19. It's the epidemic of misinformation, disinformation, distrust that is tearing us apart.

00:38:16.940 If misinformation is a super spreader, or rather, if misinformation is our greatest public health

00:38:22.680 threat, then the public health officials are the super spreaders. There's no question about that

00:38:27.820 from the very beginning. How did there become all of this confusion over the masks? Oh, I don't know.

00:38:33.220 Do you think it was because Anthony Fauci told us masks are dumb and don't do anything and you

00:38:36.600 shouldn't wear them at the start of the coronavirus pandemic? And then five seconds later, he said,

00:38:40.960 no, actually you should. I was just telling you that so that you wouldn't take them all from the

00:38:43.640 nurses. But believe me, I lied to you then, but believe me now. Do you think that might have

00:38:48.180 something to do with the misinformation? Worse than that, worse than the cynical political rhetoric

00:38:54.320 that we hear from the head of the NIH is this really, I think, honestly ignorant statement

00:39:03.240 that he's upset that the masks are politicized. He says, I'm not a politician. I'm just a public

00:39:10.020 health guy. Anything that is public is by definition political because those words are synonyms.

00:39:20.600 If you are setting national policy, you are a politician. If you're a private doctor living in the

00:39:29.280 country somewhere who's just treating patients, then you're not a politician. Then you're just a

00:39:32.780 health guy. But if you're in Washington DC running the national institutes of health, getting your

00:39:38.380 paycheck from the government, setting national policy for hundreds of millions of people, you are

00:39:44.380 a politician. So own up to it, but they don't want to own up to it. They don't want to acknowledge

00:39:49.220 this. This is actually just like the Afghanistan issue. They don't want to acknowledge that they are

00:39:55.800 imposing a way of life on people. They don't want to acknowledge that they are making certain

00:40:02.320 declarative political statements. And they are saying that everyone's got to go along with this

00:40:07.520 and we are, we are going to be the empire. We are going to be the order. So they just say, no,

00:40:12.300 we're not, we're not in Afghanistan to occupy or to nation build. No, we're just, we're just kind of

00:40:19.860 there. We're just, come on, it's, this isn't political. We're not, look, when we tell everyone

00:40:25.520 to muzzle themselves in public and radically change their way of life and wear something that

00:40:30.460 is clearly a symbol, we're not, we're not doing that as in a political way. Whenever people tell

00:40:37.960 you something's not political, they say, don't make this about politics. You know that they are

00:40:41.820 making it about politics. The other reason I think that people don't have a lot of faith in these

00:40:49.740 guys is that they themselves don't believe it. So first of all, that guy who was clearly in a TV

00:40:54.380 studio while he was, while he was giving this interview, wasn't wearing a mask. I bet there

00:40:58.740 was a camera operator in that room, but there were plenty of people in that room, but he wasn't

00:41:03.440 wearing a mask. Okay. Cause it would look ridiculous to have the mask on, on television,

00:41:06.660 right? How about Obama's birthday party? None of those people were wearing masks. We have video

00:41:11.700 of it, even though the video was quickly deleted. Now, reportedly there's a COVID spike in Martha's

00:41:15.840 Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard has a spike in COVID cases. According to the Daily Mail,

00:41:20.120 after Barack Obama's birthday party, it's the higher number of cases in a week on the island

00:41:24.360 since April. Now, am I blaming Obama for this? No, I don't think it really matters. I just don't

00:41:29.540 think it's that big a deal. Clearly Obama doesn't think it's that big a deal. Clearly none of the

00:41:33.780 people at the party think it's that big of a deal. So they're not, these guys are not practicing

00:41:39.440 what they're preaching. We can see just looking at their behavior and looking at the insane rhetoric

00:41:43.920 that they're foisting on us, that if a little kid doesn't wear a mask, he's a murderer. We can just,

00:41:48.400 we can just tell that the rhetoric is wrong. It's not true. And they don't even believe it themselves.

00:41:53.480 They don't actually care. And nevertheless, it's the whole bureaucracy pushing this stuff.

00:42:01.500 Jerome Adams, who is Trump's former surgeon general, he was the one who early on tweeted out,

00:42:06.600 he said, stop, all caps, stop buying masks, people, multiple exclamation points. Stop it.

00:42:12.320 Don't buy the masks. They don't work. Don't stop wearing the masks. And then five seconds later,

00:42:16.820 he said, oh, actually you should wear the masks. They're very important. So Jerome Adams, this guy

00:42:20.120 completely declowned himself. He's come out and he said that, that Ron DeSantis standing up against

00:42:26.260 the mask mandates, that is unconscionable. Former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Jerome Adams joins us now

00:42:32.380 to talk about all this. Dr. Adams, good morning. Good morning. So Florida's governor says the state

00:42:37.860 could withhold the salaries of school officials who defies order to ban mask mandates. As a physician,

00:42:44.380 as a father, what's your reaction to that? Well, as a physician, as a public health expert,

00:42:49.500 it is deeply troubling that it seems we're letting politics get in the way of protecting our youth.

00:42:56.600 As a father, I quite frankly think it's unconscionable. I really do. I think you can't

00:43:01.660 tie the hands of school and public health officials based on what you perceive to be

00:43:07.080 the reality when your public health officials are telling you they need these tools.

00:43:11.800 It's unconscionable. It's unconscionable. Jerome Adams, since leaving the Trump administration,

00:43:15.940 since the end of the Trump administration, he's become basically a liberal commentator and he goes

00:43:21.040 on all the liberal networks. And he, I think he even at one point suggested that conservatives were

00:43:25.720 racist or something like he brought up some kind of race hustling nonsense too.

00:43:29.540 So it just shows you, I don't even, I don't care about what Jerome Adams says ever,

00:43:34.860 but what it shows you is the whole bureaucracy, including those who were ostensibly serving under

00:43:41.720 the Republicans, they're all kind of on the same page and they don't seem to be on the same page

00:43:47.980 as the American people. They all seem to be clamping down on your civil liberties and clamping down on

00:43:53.160 your way of life and clamping down on your political rights, even to question that sort of thing.

00:43:59.540 It, and, and what can we do about that? I don't know. We're, we're not allowed. I mean,

00:44:04.320 it's taken us 20 years to get out of Afghanistan. It's not because people haven't tried. They just,

00:44:08.180 it was just very hard to overcome the inertia of being there. We can't, we haven't been able

00:44:12.960 to dislodge Fauci or any of the other people. It's, we, we have a problem of political power

00:44:18.380 in the United States. And I think it comes down to this question. What are we? Are we a nation

00:44:22.540 that governs itself or are we an empire projecting power overseas? And if we are an empire, what are

00:44:28.360 we projecting? What are the, they don't seem like the traditional American values. What is it?

00:44:33.560 What are we? What is it that we stand for? These battles that we think are just kind of these narrow

00:44:37.360 battles over policy or political parties. It's not. The question is, who are we as a country? Before we

00:44:43.000 try to remake Afghanistan, let's figure out what America is first. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the

00:44:46.700 Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.

00:44:57.260 And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends

00:45:01.360 to subscribe. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

00:45:07.860 Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show,

00:45:12.400 The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show. The Michael Knowles Show is produced by

00:45:16.560 Ben Davies. Executive producer, Jeremy Boren. Our technical director is Austin Stevens.

00:45:22.000 Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky. Editor and associate

00:45:27.420 producer, Danny D'Amico. Associate producer, Justine Turley. Audio mixer, Mike Coromina.

00:45:33.420 And hair and makeup by Nika Geneva. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:45:38.060 Copyright Daily Wire 2021.

00:45:40.520 President Biden goes into hiding as his Afghan withdrawal plan falls apart. The American

00:45:44.800 Academy of Pediatrics gaslights the critics of masking children, while the Surgeon General

00:45:48.860 declares that you do not have the right to share opinions that he deems misinformation. Plus,

00:45:53.540 Tim Tebow made his NFL debut, which is proof of racism, according to many people in sports

00:45:57.660 media. And finally, I'll respond to my critics who say that I'm a white supremacist conspiracy

00:46:01.760 theorist because of something that I said on my show on Friday. All of that and much more

00:46:05.780 today on The Matt Walsh Show.

The Michael Knowles Show - August 16, 2021

Ep. 822 - Forget The Taliban—Anti-Maskers Are The Real Terrorists!

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