The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 No one thinks Joe Biden is particularly with it. First, we had President Trump calling him

00:00:06.000 Sleepy Joe, right? Then we had conservatives generally raising questions about Biden's

00:00:11.520 cognitive decline. Then even you'd get the occasional leak from a Democrat acknowledging it.

00:00:18.460 But now you know things are really bad when Joe Biden's own current Secretary of State

00:00:24.320 refuses to answer on national television whether or not the president knows what's going on.

00:00:30.880 Does the president not know what's going on?

00:00:34.880 This is an incredibly emotional time for many of us, and including allies and partners who've

00:00:42.760 been shoulder to shoulder with us in Afghanistan for 20 years at high cost to themselves as well

00:00:48.160 as to us. They stood with us after 9-11, invoked Article 5 of NATO for the first time, an attack

00:00:52.680 on one is an attack on all. Sir, respectfully, look, I'm not questioning whether or not the

00:00:59.040 allies have a right to complain. I'm not questioning whether or not al-Qaeda has a presence. The

00:01:04.280 president said al-Qaeda is gone. It's not gone. The president said he's not heard any criticism

00:01:08.960 from the allies. There's been a lot of criticism from the allies. Words matter, and the words of

00:01:15.380 the president matter most. Does the president know what's going on? Well, you see, Chris,

00:01:20.320 it's an emotional time. I had an omelet for breakfast today. My middle name is Philip.

00:01:26.320 How many things can I say to avoid answering this question? Wouldn't be that hard to say,

00:01:32.360 yes, he does know what's going on, if he actually knew what was going on. As Biden bumbles, the rest

00:01:37.640 of America is catching on to what conservatives have known for years, namely that Joe Biden is

00:01:43.080 completely incompetent. In many ways, that was the whole point of nominating Biden. Biden is just

00:01:49.220 nothing. As I said during the campaign repeatedly, he's just an empty suit. He's just an avatar for

00:01:55.360 the liberal establishment, a return to normalcy, which is exactly what our ruling class said that

00:02:01.560 they wanted. What's troubling right now for the ruling class is that huge swaths of the American

00:02:06.520 people are beginning to realize that the liberal establishment isn't all that competent either.

00:02:11.480 I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:02:21.200 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment Friday is from Timothy Brinson,

00:02:25.180 who says, our founding fathers are rolling in their graves, wishing that they hadn't voted for

00:02:30.440 Joe Biden. I know, I'm sure they're very upset and they're going to be even more frustrated when they

00:02:35.720 vote for Gavin Newsom in the recall election in California. It's just, that's just the way elections

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00:04:04.020 shield. Is the president competent? Does the president know what's going on? Well, you know,

00:04:09.520 it's difficult. And when you bring that up, it's... No, he doesn't. He obviously doesn't.

00:04:14.760 Now they're trying to play catch up. So there's a report out that the Biden administration is trying

00:04:21.180 to reclaim or really just destroy the military equipment that they left in Afghanistan. So you

00:04:28.060 remember, there's a lot of military equipment, billions and billions of dollars of military

00:04:33.940 equipment in Afghanistan that everyone just abandoned. Some of it was given to the Afghan

00:04:39.520 army, which collapsed within days. Some of it was given to the American troops who were told

00:04:45.140 to get out of Dodge. So there's just all this equipment. And guess who's taking the equipment?

00:04:50.100 The Taliban. So now we've spent a taxpayer expense, hundreds of billions of dollars on military

00:04:55.340 equipment that is going ostensibly to our enemy. Now I know the Biden administration is trying to

00:05:00.600 cut a deal with the Taliban, but they don't seem to be particularly friendly right now.

00:05:04.340 So now the Biden administration is considering going in and destroying that equipment.

00:05:10.340 Maybe that's a good idea. Maybe that's not a good idea. The one thing I think we can all agree on,

00:05:15.500 even the most ardent Joe Biden supporter, whoever that may be, is that maybe they should have thought

00:05:22.140 about this, huh? Maybe they should have either taken the equipment or destroyed the equipment

00:05:27.620 before they left. Maybe anyone should have given this even two seconds thought, but they didn't.

00:05:34.640 We've been in Afghanistan for 20 years. We've been talking about getting out of Afghanistan for what,

00:05:39.660 15 years now. Then we went back in because Obama wanted a good war when he made the Iraq war,

00:05:44.840 the bad war. But then Joe Biden campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan. Donald Trump campaigned

00:05:51.000 on getting out of Afghanistan. We've been ready to do this for some time. And yet they say, oops,

00:05:56.140 maybe we shouldn't have left hundreds of billions of dollars worth of military equipment. Either there's

00:06:01.200 some really nefarious other motive here, or this is just gross incompetence. And the thing about the

00:06:11.240 liberal establishment is they come in, they take away democratic choice. They take away our civil

00:06:16.280 rights. They upend standards in society. They upend the way that we live our lives here. But the

00:06:21.980 promise that they make is your life's going to be more efficient. It's going to be better. This is

00:06:27.340 when the World Economic Forum says you're not going to own anything in the future, but you're going to

00:06:31.060 be really happy. It seems like a ghastly future, but maybe some people will go along with it if they

00:06:37.900 can actually deliver the happiness, if they can actually deliver the efficiency, if they can

00:06:41.920 actually deliver the competency. But they can't. The whole point about Trump was, yeah, Trump's giving

00:06:47.220 you some things you like politically, but he's just, he's so wild. He's just, it's so abnormal and

00:06:52.460 extraordinary right now. Elect us and it'll go back to normal and we'll at least be competent at running

00:06:57.120 the government. Well, you got to at least deliver that. And that's, that's something that they are not

00:07:00.680 doing. So now Axios is reporting they might go in and destroy the equipment. The problem is though,

00:07:05.380 according to Axios, quote, they fear that such a move could provoke the Taliban at a time where the

00:07:09.720 U.S. is focusing on evacuating people from Afghanistan. So we, we allegedly have something

00:07:14.200 like 15,000 Americans there. Again, you think they would have given this a moment's thought

00:07:18.420 before they gave up the air base, gave up their embassy and retreated to, to Kabul airport. But

00:07:24.920 they've got to get these people out. If they go in and start strikes on the Taliban,

00:07:30.820 why things might not turn out very well for the people that they're supposed to get out. So

00:07:35.240 the Taliban is an extremely strong position. The United States is in an extremely weak position.

00:07:40.880 And what's driving me craziest, I guess, watching these images is finding out how good the Taliban

00:07:49.080 is at trolling. The Taliban, they've been around for a long time. They're these arch Islamic

00:07:55.400 fundamentalists, but apparently they're really internet savvy. They're really good at trolling.

00:08:01.060 It's really awful to see this as an American. They just posted a photo of them wearing American

00:08:07.360 military equipment, very expensive, nice American military equipment, hoisting the Taliban flag,

00:08:13.400 recreating the image from Iwo Jima. And they know exactly what they're doing. And they're posting it

00:08:18.360 now all over, all over the internet. They've been posting memes. You know, there's a meme. It's the

00:08:24.760 Chad meme of, it's hard to explain a meme on air, but it's of, you know, sort of wimpy liberal guys,

00:08:31.620 you know, complaining about something that they're doing. And then the sort of Chad, strong, tough guy

00:08:36.300 saying, yes. And then it's, and it's got all of these various internet-y characters. So either

00:08:41.600 they've got a great PR consultant or some members of the Taliban actually are following American pop

00:08:47.440 culture pretty closely. You remember the, the press conference they gave. It was one of the greatest

00:08:52.520 trolling performances I've seen in my lifetime. You've got these, these warlords from this backwater,

00:08:59.920 this God forsaken land, and they come up with their, their theological, theocratic views that have

00:09:07.600 not changed even in the slightest for about 1400 years. And they're sitting there being asked about

00:09:13.320 free speech and they say, oh, well maybe you should ask the West about Facebook because they, doesn't

00:09:17.540 seem like the West cares much about free speech. They're asked about the role of women in their

00:09:21.600 government. They said, oh, don't worry. We'll be very inclusive. We'll be very diverse and inclusive

00:09:25.780 within the boundaries of Sharia law, which is to say, obviously they're not at all. Are they going to

00:09:29.920 model their government after the West? But they know the language of the West. They know the idiosyncrasies

00:09:36.460 of the West. They know how the West is going to react. Going back to the very beginning of the

00:09:41.300 Afghanistan war. They said the West has the watches, but the Taliban's got the time, right?

00:09:47.760 We're just going to wait you out. We know that you're not going to want to stay here for a hundred

00:09:50.960 years. No one wants to stay in Afghanistan for a hundred years. So you're going to get tired.

00:09:55.380 Your democratic politics is going to pull you out of the country and then we'll come right back in.

00:10:00.880 And they're, and they're laughing at us doing it. They're, they're not only winning all of these

00:10:05.660 battles. They're laughing at us while they do it. Why? I think the reason here,

00:10:11.300 is that the Taliban has a substantive vision for society. I, I don't think it's a particularly great

00:10:18.740 vision. I think it's a perverse vision, but it has substance. They, in the Taliban, in this militant

00:10:25.520 group of ragtag people, who I guess they're not so ragtag now because they have all our military

00:10:29.560 equipment. They know what they want society to look like and they have cohesion among their group.

00:10:35.420 They've got buy-in on what, what they all want society to look like. We in the West do not.

00:10:41.860 We don't have a substantive vision. Certainly on the right, we don't. And we don't have cohesion.

00:10:47.960 Okay. All we do is sort of criticize or we, we deconstruct things on the left and we debunk

00:10:53.680 things on the right. And we all, we're all engaging in critical thinking or the, the prevailing

00:10:59.040 analytical lenses or critical theory or a critical race theory. It's all about tearing things down.

00:11:06.640 The West in part failed in Afghanistan because we didn't know what we wanted to do. Did we want to

00:11:12.740 just kill Osama bin Laden? Did we want to just kill some terrorists? Did we want to nation build? Did we

00:11:17.360 want to hoist the pride flag? Did we want to instill 1970s feminism in what, what are we doing?

00:11:25.160 Do we want to stop China? Do we want to stop Russia? Is it there to check their ambitions?

00:11:30.420 Do we want an empire? Do we want to just be a nation? What are we doing? The Taliban knows what

00:11:35.020 it's doing. If we want to effectively offer a different, an alternative for society, we need

00:11:41.960 to know what that is. We need to know what we're doing. If you know what you're doing when you're

00:11:46.960 buying auto parts, then you're probably going to rockauto.com. So the other day I needed a car part.

00:11:51.840 And what did I do? You know what I did? I went to the brick and mortar auto parts store so that I

00:11:56.720 could answer a million questions from the guy. I don't know the answers to most of them. And I got

00:12:01.000 to wait for him to go in the back, not have the part, go online, probably to rockauto.com,

00:12:05.580 order the part so that I could wait a few more weeks and then pay twice as much. And I just felt

00:12:10.280 that that was the psych. I would never do that. Why would I do that when there's rockauto.com?

00:12:16.760 Rockauto.com makes it so easy. The website is super easy to navigate. They've got all the parts

00:12:21.280 for your car or truck. The prices are always reliably low. No gimmicks. It's not like you

00:12:26.420 got to log in on Tuesday afternoon to save 10% or whatever. It's always reliably low.

00:12:30.900 They're a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years. Just go to

00:12:34.820 rockauto.com right now. See all the parts available for your car or truck. Then write Knowles,

00:12:39.660 N-O-W-L-E-S in there. How did you hear about us box? So they know that we sent you. That is

00:12:44.000 rockauto.com. To give you an example of just how unserious we are in this country.

00:12:53.320 You've got, you've got the Taliban overseas, just taking our equipment, taking our air bases,

00:12:59.140 calling the shots on this evacuation and the West sort of floundering because our political leaders

00:13:03.580 don't know what they want to do. You've got the, the liberal establishment locking down here in the

00:13:10.900 United States. So we're now being told you, the Delta, the Delta Lambda Phi Beta Kappa is spreading.

00:13:17.900 You've all got to hunker down in your homes for just another 15 years to slow the spread.

00:13:21.980 We're being told you can't, you can't go outside. You really, you should mask your kid up. You should

00:13:26.960 never let your kid see anybody's face ever again. You got to stick everybody with a bunch of

00:13:31.120 experimental drugs. You got to lose your business. You've got to give up your way of life.

00:13:36.540 Meanwhile, there was a fundraiser apparently for the DCCC. This is the Democratic Congressional

00:13:43.200 Campaign Committee. It was in Napa and Nancy Pelosi was there giving an address. There were at least

00:13:50.160 a hundred people by my count in the video, probably more. None of them wearing masks. None of them just

00:13:56.440 sitting out in Napa. They're having a nice time. These are democratic donors, some, you know,

00:14:01.140 relatively small dollars, some much larger. No one, not a single person at this event wearing masks

00:14:07.220 except the servers. Could you imagine sending a worse message? So Pelosi, no mask. The guests,

00:14:16.980 no mask. But all the little peasant workers, all of the people bringing me my Chablis and my

00:14:22.600 Chateau Neuf-du-Pape, while they have to wear masks, they're filthy. They're unclean.

00:14:26.880 We can't let them. But no, but we, we, we do not need to worry about that ourselves.

00:14:33.320 Mind you, this is the political party pushing the lockdowns. This is the political party

00:14:39.840 calling the governor of Florida, Ron Death Santus, because he won't force everyone

00:14:45.340 to wear the face coverings. Starting to see some parallels here between what's going on in

00:14:50.860 Afghanistan and what's going on. A lot of insistence on face coverings, a lot of destruction of

00:14:56.040 traditional culture. I'm not saying they're comparable. I'm just saying there are strange,

00:15:01.580 eerie similarities and rampant hypocrisy. That's what's, because we're not a serious country.

00:15:09.800 I was thinking about this when I was on a flight recently where they told us you're going to kill

00:15:13.460 everyone if you don't, if you don't wear the mask, you gotta wear the mask the whole flight.

00:15:16.260 It's a nine hour flight. Doesn't matter. Keep it on at all times while you're eating. Unless you want

00:15:21.760 this little warm cookie and then they put a little cookie in front of you and you're allowed to take

00:15:24.520 your mask down and eat the delicious cookie. But then, then you got to put the mask right back up

00:15:30.020 because you're, you're at risk of dying or of killing other people. It's a, it's such a serious

00:15:35.640 risk that the only way you can, you can really run that risk is, is if you want to eat a warm,

00:15:40.500 delicious cookie. It's just capricious. It's just based on the whims of these politicians

00:15:45.760 in whom we do not have any credibility or we do not have any trust anymore.

00:15:51.760 Think about what happened last year. The lockdowns prevented a lot of elective surgeries

00:15:57.460 and even some not so elective surgeries. So when the hospitals shut down, when the,

00:16:02.580 the doctor's offices went full bore on COVID, if you had a cancer surgery you were supposed to get,

00:16:09.560 that would be pushed off. If you had a plastic surgery, just sort of regular cosmetic surgery,

00:16:15.580 that would be pushed off. If you had your regular sort of checkup type procedures,

00:16:21.240 that would be pushed off all to focus on the Wuhan cough. So last year, U S health services overall

00:16:29.560 dropped 1% even amid the COVID stuff. Overall health procedures dropped 1%. Non COVID related services

00:16:38.380 obviously dropped much, much more. There was one type of surgery though, that spiked last year.

00:16:45.080 Transgender surgery. Transgender surgery, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons,

00:16:51.720 spiked significantly. And they're focusing on just one type of plastic surgery, of, of transgender

00:16:56.620 plastic surgery, which is for young women who think that they're men or who want to be men and who

00:17:01.420 are mutilating their bodies to look more like men. Apparently young women with gender dysphoria are

00:17:06.660 having their breasts removed in order to seem male in record numbers. Those surgeries rose 12% last

00:17:18.460 year. 12% from 14,602 in 2019 to 16,353 in 2020. This number does not include mastectomies, surgeries,

00:17:31.100 and transgender treatments done by other medical professionals too. This is only the ones done

00:17:35.320 by plastic surgeons, but there are other procedures that are done by other doctors.

00:17:42.260 It's not a serious country. That's first of all, that's not a country that really believes that we

00:17:49.380 need to put off all elective surgeries until after COVID. Just like the party in Napa is not a gathering

00:17:56.800 of people who really believe the Delta is super dangerous, who really believe the masks do anything,

00:18:02.220 who really believe that we can't go out of our homes. If they really believe that, they just

00:18:05.700 wouldn't go to the lunch and they certainly would wear masks, but they don't really believe it. They

00:18:09.700 just want you to believe it. They just, it's just about the imposition of the rule from the party that

00:18:14.880 is single-handedly just about pushing these rules. The same thing goes even among these medical

00:18:20.080 professionals. We have to shut down all of the elective surgery except for the most delusional,

00:18:26.080 unnecessary surgery of all. Namely, the one that mutilates perfectly healthy organs to indulge a

00:18:33.200 fashionable delusion that runs contrary to reality. But it's politically correct. It's probably the most

00:18:42.100 politically correct surgery. And so now everyone gets behind it. Is it any wonder that our enemies are

00:18:48.220 mocking us? Is it any? Meanwhile, here in the United States, even in generally red states,

00:18:56.140 the coronavirus lockdown measures and the punishments are increasing dramatically,

00:19:01.820 even in some of the red states. So as Rona cases rise up in Mississippi, the state's Department of

00:19:08.660 Health sent out an alert saying that people who test positive for coronavirus need to isolate for 10

00:19:14.420 days. If they don't isolate for 10 days, they can face a fine of up to $5,000 and five years in prison.

00:19:25.860 Right now in California, for instance, if you don't disclose to your sexual partner that you've got AIDS,

00:19:34.840 you won't be punished for that. You won't be punished. But if you have the Wuhan cough that for a lot of

00:19:43.340 people doesn't even present as particularly serious, for the vast majority of people, actually,

00:19:48.580 you can go to prison for five years. Is that a serious country? It's not just our country.

00:19:53.980 It's over in Australia. In Australia right now. Australia makes Mississippi look like it's child's

00:19:59.380 play. Australia is so freaked out about the spread of the Rona that they are telling people to take all

00:20:09.680 these precautions, lockdown, don't go out, don't buy things. One animal shelter was so worried that

00:20:16.220 people would come adopt the rescue dogs amid the surge of coronavirus that they just shot all the

00:20:24.000 dogs dead. They just killed a bunch of puppies to stop people from adopting the puppies because if

00:20:31.120 the people adopted the puppies, they would leave their homes and interact with them.

00:20:35.180 I'm not much of a dog person. I always consider myself a people person. I'm not like a dog guy or

00:20:42.780 a cat guy. Even I know that killing puppies is pretty extreme and not a great PR look. But that's

00:20:53.440 mass hysteria that you're seeing. There was a woman who tweeted yesterday who said, this doesn't even

00:21:03.520 relate exactly to coronavirus, only tangentially. She tweeted out and said that she can no longer

00:21:10.120 speak to her son, that she and her son always had a great relationship, but her son voted for Donald

00:21:15.760 Trump and he's a conservative and she doesn't even, she doesn't understand him anymore. She doesn't even

00:21:20.720 know him anymore. And she, and I, at first I thought this was just a hoax, but I'm beginning to think it

00:21:24.980 isn't a hoax. It was this very long tweet thread, her saying I've been crying for days and days,

00:21:28.700 but I had, I just had to cut him out of my life completely. I had to because I can't, because he

00:21:33.880 voted for Trump and so he's bad and he's evil. But I miss, I hate this. This is terrible. It's

00:21:39.020 really, stop sending me mean tweets people. This is so awful. I, I think this could be real. I think

00:21:46.460 this is happening. I think people are in the grips of a mass hysteria with their neurotic response to

00:21:55.460 the coronavirus, with their neurotic response to Donald Trump, with their neurotic, with their

00:22:01.420 neuroses generally. They aren't, I don't even, I, I don't mean this as, as if people all have these

00:22:08.800 clinical problems. There's a social contagion effect too. Just as there is such a psychological

00:22:17.140 condition as gender dysphoria, but there's a social contagion whereby it spreads when people

00:22:22.380 accept these things. The same is true for neurosis. The same is true for hysteria.

00:22:27.680 People are really on edge. Why is that? Because we don't have cohesion. Because we don't have

00:22:36.480 things that are settled. Because we don't agree on anything. We don't even agree on the definition

00:22:39.540 of man and the definition of woman. And so when we've had this debate about, this actually does

00:22:43.920 relate back to Afghanistan. We've had this debate. Should we project power in Afghanistan? Should we pull

00:22:47.860 back? The simple fact is if you don't have cohesion at home, if you don't know what you stand for,

00:22:52.160 what you're doing, you can't project strength abroad, even if you want to.

00:22:58.860 Ben today is coincidentally, he must have been listening to my show this morning because his

00:23:03.400 title is Joe Biden is not competent in any sense. He was either listening to me or Joe Biden's own

00:23:08.760 secretary of state. Go check out Ben's show today. Also make sure you get the reader's pass. For four

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00:23:38.720 we are offering a one month free trial. Head on over to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot

00:23:43.320 more. We have a mass hysteria going through not just the United States, just the Anglosphere at least,

00:24:04.180 and in the West probably more broadly. We're not focusing on the real challenges that we have as

00:24:10.720 a country. We are inventing new challenges. We are indulging in delusions of victimization.

00:24:18.020 While the Taliban is taking all of our weapons in Afghanistan, hundreds of billions of dollars of

00:24:24.240 weapons, we here in the West are worried about microaggressions against pan-tran,

00:24:32.160 pseudo-bi, non-binary, sexual, whatever. I mean, just completely fictitious categories.

00:24:40.380 In the United Kingdom right now, this is a symbol of our broader understanding of justice

00:24:46.480 and how to run a society. In the United Kingdom, they're retiring old patrol cars, old just regular

00:24:53.040 run-of-the-mill cop cars to keep peace on the streets. They are retiring them and replacing them

00:24:59.440 with rainbow-colored anti-hate crime cars. A police officer in the United Kingdom explains the move.

00:25:11.660 The rainbow cars, the hate crime cars, whatever we want to call them, they are part of our vehicle

00:25:15.940 fleet. So, you know, we're always replacing vehicles. They get all of the police sort of

00:25:21.260 insignia put on them as normal, but there will normally be then something added on that is to do

00:25:25.600 with the rainbow side of things. But they're out there as normal patrol vehicles. Sometimes people

00:25:30.620 will ask us, how can you afford to do that? You know, that's not right to spend money on putting

00:25:35.660 a rainbow on a car. Well, actually, the cost is quite minimal, but the confidence that it can bring

00:25:40.760 by just having that rainbow on there. And people say to me, you know, the impact of seeing the rainbow

00:25:45.320 is so huge. And the idea is that the cars are there in the communities, generally on normal

00:25:50.240 policing patrol, just again, to show the community that we want you to come forward. If something is

00:25:55.420 happening that you know isn't right, then we absolutely want you to come forward. So it is

00:25:59.780 there to try and give confidence to our LGBT plus community, but also to other underrepresented

00:26:05.700 groups. And unless we have an organization where all of our staff feel that they can feel included,

00:26:10.920 that they are included, I don't think we can deliver the best service to our communities.

00:26:16.100 Now, I know that that was in another language. That was in British. So I would like to translate

00:26:22.980 that for you into American. Dear Taliban, dear China, please come invade us. Please, we are no longer

00:26:32.940 a serious people. We do not understand anything about our society or criminal justice. Oh, I'm becoming

00:26:41.540 a little South African. I don't know. My accent's not great. This is pathetic.

00:26:45.560 This is real. This is like a Monty Python sketch. This is, I want to be a woman. You want to be a

00:26:53.860 woman. I want to have babies. This is literally a Monty Python sketch. And now it is police chiefs in

00:27:01.200 the United Kingdom saying, we're not going to focus on real crime anymore. We're not going to focus on

00:27:07.660 people, you know, stabbing you and taking your property. So then at the philosophical level,

00:27:13.940 we're not going to focus on the protection of private property. We're not going to focus on

00:27:17.540 the protection of our political order and our political tradition. Instead, we're going to focus

00:27:22.740 on finding out whether or not anyone in the community has any objection in their own mind or

00:27:31.340 conscience to men dressing up like women. And we're going to root that out because transphobia

00:27:37.140 is not, that's not what we're going to stand for here in the United Kingdom.

00:27:42.820 It's, look, it's ridiculous in the UK that they have rainbow colored police cars trying to root out

00:27:48.000 thought crimes among people who object to the idea that, you know, men should be dancing around in

00:27:53.420 stilettos. But we have the same sort of thing happening here in the United States. We do. Right,

00:27:59.520 right now, Tony Blair, former prime minister of, of the UK, Tony, Tony Blair, who was the prime

00:28:08.600 minister who brought his nation into the war on terror. He was PM while George Bush was the

00:28:15.620 president. He was a representative of the kind of neoliberal consensus of the 1990s. He was, he was

00:28:23.900 sort of the equivalent of Bill Clinton, but Bill Clinton wasn't all that different from George W. Bush.

00:28:27.700 It was all the same kind of thing. We're going to have really rip-roaring economy at home.

00:28:32.560 We're going to cut taxes a lot. We're going to cut some regulation, but we're going to project

00:28:36.560 power overseas. We're going to project the kind of liberal vision of society over on the Middle East.

00:28:43.200 Tony Blair is furious. He said the decision to pull out of, of, uh, Afghanistan is imbecilic.

00:28:51.280 And he wrote, he wrote a 2,700 word piece on his website about this. I will spare you the piece,

00:28:56.460 but it's, it's worth pointing out his problems here because I think it actually gets to the heart

00:29:01.620 of what we're all dealing with. He says, the world is now uncertain of where the West stands because

00:29:06.240 it's so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was not driven by grand

00:29:10.660 strategy, but by politics. We didn't need to do it. We chose to do it. We did it in an obedience to an

00:29:15.260 imbecilic political slogan about ending the forever wars as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely

00:29:21.080 comparable to our commitment 20 or even 10 years ago. And in circumstances in which troop numbers had

00:29:26.400 declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat in 18 months, the absence of

00:29:31.340 across the aisle consensus and collaboration and the deep politicization of foreign policy and security

00:29:36.940 issues is visibly atrophying us power. And for Britain out of Europe as for Britain out of Europe and

00:29:44.480 suffering the end of the Afghanistan mission by our greatest ally with little or no consultation, we have

00:29:48.700 serious reflection to do. So he's also bringing up Brexit here. He also didn't really like Brexit.

00:29:53.980 So notice what he's saying. First, he calls out, I think this is the most important part, he calls

00:29:59.460 out the politicization of foreign policy. Now, it's got that word policy in it, you know, from politics,

00:30:07.740 and he's saying it shouldn't be politicized. What he's saying is that the people should have really no

00:30:12.060 say over foreign policy. This shouldn't be open to democratic debate. This should be done by the experts who

00:30:18.100 know what liberalism stands for, and they're going to spread it around the world, and don't you dare

00:30:23.280 oppose it. He's saying that we pulled out of Afghanistan because of this imbecilic political

00:30:30.240 slogan about the forever wars, right? This imbecilic democratic process whereby the people

00:30:36.740 decided they didn't want to be there anymore. By the way, in some ways, following the wisdom of the

00:30:41.880 founding fathers, virtually all of whom warned explicitly against continual warfare. I'm thinking

00:30:47.800 of James Madison. I'm thinking of Washington's warnings about entangling alliances, and Jefferson

00:30:52.220 then invokes them too. He said, imbecilic that we would allow the people to make this decision.

00:30:59.360 Now, people don't know what the West stands for. Right, Tony, that's the problem.

00:31:07.420 So you've identified the problem, but you're getting the order wrong. It's not that now we

00:31:13.480 don't know what the West stands for because we pulled out of this godforsaken backwater in the

00:31:17.720 Middle East. We pulled out of the godforsaken backwater, and we bungled the political mission

00:31:25.000 there because we don't know what the West stands for. What is it? What are we after? This was the grave

00:31:32.160 problem of the 1990s. The 1990s, we won the Cold War. At the turn of the 1990s, the Berlin Wall

00:31:41.160 comes crumbling down. The Soviet Union is dismantled, largely because Ronald Reagan spent

00:31:48.240 them into oblivion. And so now the United States leading the West broadly is the superpower in the

00:31:54.920 world. And there was, I remember there was a battle at the 1992 convention, the Republican

00:32:00.980 convention. Who was going to be the nominee? Was it going to be George Bush, the kind of liberal,

00:32:04.820 moderate internationalist? Or was it going to be Pat Buchanan, who's this sort of acerbic

00:32:09.300 conservative culture warrior? And the rival speeches gave rival visions of society. George Bush,

00:32:15.960 he barely talked about the culture. Already you had had political correctness, wokeism, the proto-wokeism,

00:32:23.140 leftism, rotting out the country since the 1960s. And George Bush didn't want to touch it. He said,

00:32:28.500 forget the culture war at home. We've just got to win the peace. We've got to spread our

00:32:32.080 markets overseas. We've got to trade with everybody. We've got to dominate the global

00:32:36.240 economy. That's all that matters. Shoot up GDP. Pat Buchanan said, no, it was called the culture

00:32:42.160 war speech. We've got a big culture war coming at home. We are going to be grappling with what the

00:32:49.460 relationship of the citizen is to the state. We're going to be grappling with what the nature of man is.

00:32:54.960 We're going to be debating what marriage is. We're going to be debating who we are, what we stand

00:33:00.960 for. So we've got to figure out those questions in order to effectively project power abroad.

00:33:07.440 And obviously George Bush won. The right ignored the culture problems for decades. And now look

00:33:13.720 where we are. And the same thing was true of the sort of Clinton Democrats. Same thing was true of

00:33:18.200 Tony Blair and the neoliberals everywhere. They just got the order wrong. They couldn't get

00:33:24.940 their own house in order. And so they very ineffectively projected power overseas.

00:33:30.440 You're seeing this play out right now in Jamaica, Jamaica of all places. Jamaica right now,

00:33:37.220 there's a clip going around of a protest outside of an American embassy in Jamaica. And what were

00:33:43.960 they, were they protesting the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan? No. Were they protesting the lack

00:33:51.560 of concern for black lives and the, uh, and George Floyd? No. They were protesting the fact that the

00:33:59.060 U.S. embassy in Jamaica was flying the rainbow flag. And as you might be able to see in the background,

00:34:05.000 the U.S. embassy continues to fly the LGBT flag, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender flag in breach of the

00:34:12.200 Vienna convention, articles 31E, article 20 and article 41, right? They are being hostile towards

00:34:18.980 our laws, our culture and our own democratic system. Instead of flying the Jamaican flag for

00:34:24.040 emancipation, they have decided to fly that flag. And that is an insult to our country.

00:34:28.780 A lot of liberals in America are going to be very confused by this clip. Well, no, but no, you're,

00:34:36.820 you don't, you're, you're black. You're from a small island nation. You're, no, you're,

00:34:43.360 you're supposed, you're on our side. You're not, what you, huh? You don't totally go along with the

00:34:49.600 latest liberal fashions and ideas. No, because the rainbow flag is not primarily a symbol of

00:34:59.580 being nice to homosexuals. It's not primarily a symbol of being nice to people who, you know,

00:35:06.600 men who think that they're women. It's not primarily a symbol of kindness or charity.

00:35:12.360 It is a symbol of imperial hegemony. That's why it's being flown at the U.S. embassy. That's why

00:35:19.860 the United States flies it at embassies all around the world, including in Kabul. Wow. Can you,

00:35:24.980 can you wonder why we lost the country? Can you wonder why? It is a symbol. The reason it's a symbol

00:35:31.180 is because the LGBT flag, now they've expanded it even more. It's the progress flag. So it includes

00:35:37.000 all this other racial and sexual stuff, regardless of, of what it includes. It is a symbol, not of

00:35:44.440 a nation, not of a particular people, not of a particular place. It's a symbol of allegedly

00:35:52.700 universal values. The meaning of the LGBT rainbow flag would be the same in Jamaica as it is in the

00:36:01.060 United States, would be the same in Timbuktu as it is in the United States. Whereas the symbol of the

00:36:06.300 stars and stripes would not be the, the stars and stripes, the American flag is a symbol of the

00:36:09.740 American nation. It refers to a particular place and a particular people. But the LGBT,

00:36:14.540 the rainbow flag, that's for everyone. The BLM flag does this to, to some degree as well.

00:36:19.320 And so we fly it as a symbol of our empire, but not everybody likes our empire.

00:36:24.940 Not everybody abroad, the Jamaicans who are protesting don't support men becoming women as their,

00:36:32.580 as their, as their raison d'etre, you know, as their sort of, as their, as the beating heart of

00:36:37.400 their nation. They actually don't approve of it. And I would say probably most other countries around

00:36:43.020 the world don't approve of it or just don't think of it very much. It's not what animates them as a

00:36:47.660 people. And frankly, a lot of people in the United States don't believe that that flag represents them

00:36:53.920 either. Probably most people don't feel that that flag represents them.

00:36:57.720 And so you've got this, this, what I think is kind of a secondary debate. Do we project power

00:37:06.420 overseas? Do we have an American empire? Do we hold territories? Do we hold firm and what American

00:37:11.760 power, what American, what are we standing for? If, if the, by the American empire, we mean flying

00:37:17.060 the rainbow flag everywhere and defending the right of men to become women by mutilating themselves in

00:37:23.640 cosmetic surgery, then I don't want to project that power. That would be bad to project that. If,

00:37:28.260 if American power means projecting Christendom, you know, and, and the values that traditionally

00:37:34.200 have animated our culture, then yeah, I'd like to project that, but you've got to decide what exactly

00:37:39.600 it is that we're doing. This is, this is what gives me a little sympathy for Joe Biden.

00:37:45.960 He, he has blown this thing as much as you possibly can. I mean, he has bungled the, he is,

00:37:52.160 he has withdrawn from Afghanistan in the most incompetent way possible. But the problem is a

00:37:57.280 lot bigger than Joe Biden. Joe Biden, this was some days ago now, he's somewhat changing his tune,

00:38:05.000 but you know, his tune changes by the hour because he doesn't know what end is up.

00:38:08.720 Joe Biden, in a very testy interview on ABC, defended himself because he said there was no

00:38:15.680 non-chaotic way to get out of Afghanistan.

00:38:18.860 When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government getting a plane and

00:38:26.600 taking off and going to another country. When you saw the significant collapse of the top of the

00:38:33.440 Afghan troops, we had trained up to 300,000 of them just leaving their equipment and taking off.

00:38:40.420 That was, you know, I'm not, that's what happened. That's simply what happened.

00:38:46.080 But we've all seen the pictures. We've seen those hundreds of people packed

00:38:49.080 into a C-17. We've seen Afghans falling.

00:38:52.920 That was four days ago, five days ago.

00:38:55.100 What did you think when you first saw those pictures?

00:38:57.160 What I thought was we're, we have to gain control of this.

00:39:00.140 So you don't think this could have been handled? This actually could have been handled

00:39:02.840 better in any way? No mistakes?

00:39:05.320 No, I don't think it could have been handled in a way that there.

00:39:11.200 So that clip was four or five days ago. It was, I didn't want to miss it. I wanted to get to it

00:39:17.260 because it's one, just the snapping. It shows you things really are not working out the way that the

00:39:23.920 blob, the liberal establishment had thought that they would. You know, Joe Biden didn't campaign

00:39:30.560 for president. We now forget that. He didn't campaign. Every, the whole blob just protected

00:39:36.100 him the whole time. But now they're not protecting him. Now there's a little discord,

00:39:40.760 even among the liberal establishment. He's sticking by his story though. There was no

00:39:45.500 non-chaotic way to pull out. He's, he's probably right about that.

00:39:50.300 There were better ways than this. That's for sure. You didn't need to leave hundreds of millions,

00:39:55.940 hundreds of billions of dollars worth of equipment and thousands of Americans. And you didn't,

00:39:59.340 you didn't need to lose Bagram air base. You didn't need, I mean, you, there,

00:40:02.680 it could have, it could have been handled better, but, but the broader problem is bigger than Joe

00:40:08.240 Biden. Joe Biden right now, he's going to just be focused on trying to cling to whatever power and

00:40:14.640 approval he's got. A reporter just confronted him at a, at a press briefing, asked him about a public

00:40:20.440 opinion poll that shows that most people no longer think the man is competent. A new poll out today

00:40:25.120 shows Americans wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan, but they disapprove of the way

00:40:30.720 you've handled it. Paul also found that based in part on what's transpired in the last week,

00:40:36.080 a majority of Americans, and forgive me, I'm just the messenger, no longer consider you to be

00:40:41.180 competent, focused, or effective in the job. I haven't seen that poll. It's out there from CBS this

00:40:48.600 morning. Um, what would you say to those Americans who no longer believe that you look to the job?

00:40:55.340 I had a basic decision to make. I either withdraw America from a 20 year war that depending whose

00:41:04.800 analysis you accept cost us $150 million a day for 20 years, or $300 million a day for 20 years,

00:41:12.200 or I end the war. And I decided to end the war. So Biden reacted with his most frequently used

00:41:25.000 political tool, which is to laugh at the reporter or to laugh at the opponent. You'll remember he did

00:41:30.560 this during the vice presidential debates with Paul Ryan when Romney was running in 2012.

00:41:34.560 Anything Ryan would say, most of which was true, Joe Biden would just laugh with a big, you know,

00:41:40.100 the big Joe Biden, Biden teeth, those gigantic artificial teeth. And he would just laugh it

00:41:45.160 off and shrug it and let it go. And so that's what's happening here. The reporter who is presumably

00:41:50.220 on his side, or at least sympathetic to it is saying, Hey, uh, most people don't think you're

00:41:56.680 calm. I'm sorry. I don't, don't shoot the messenger. I don't, I hate to say this to you, but most people

00:42:00.320 don't think you're competent. He goes, and then he just keeps going back to, I think in a way that's

00:42:07.380 actually pretty smart to his most defensible position, which is he's trying to make it about

00:42:10.920 should we have pulled out? Should we not have pulled out? But that's not the debate. That isn't

00:42:14.840 the debate. The majority of Americans said we should pull out. The debate is how should we have

00:42:19.740 pulled out? Could this have been handled better? I think everyone believes it could have been handled

00:42:23.000 much, much, much better. But Joe Biden doesn't want to answer for his gross incompetence because

00:42:29.180 that would, that would put the debate on the wrong, wrong side of things. The defense secretary

00:42:32.660 right now refuses to state how he advised Joe Biden, not just on whether or not to withdraw,

00:42:40.060 but how he could withdraw. Defense secretary was asked this on ABC. He, uh, he, he knows it's a

00:42:46.840 poisonous political issue. And so he's got no comment. Did you want to see a small force remain in

00:42:54.400 Afghanistan? Martha, and you know, I'm not going to tell you what, uh, what my recommendation to our,

00:43:00.420 to our president was. Uh, I would just tell you that, uh, that like, uh, everyone else, uh, the

00:43:08.040 president, uh, listened to our, our, our input. Uh, again, he conducted a very rigorous and thoughtful

00:43:16.520 process and he made a decision and I support that decision. And at the end of the day, the president

00:43:21.480 made his decision and he wouldn't say obviously which one he was leaning toward. The reporters are

00:43:26.180 still going after them. Uh, you know, you know, it's bad when the reporters are going after the

00:43:31.920 elected Democrats. There was a reporter who asked a Pentagon spokesman said, how, how did you get this

00:43:36.460 so wrong? And, and he didn't really have an answer for that, but I do have an answer for that. I know

00:43:40.840 how they got this so wrong. And it's not, it's not just having to do with, you know, this air base

00:43:48.160 or that, that, that embassy, or we had to pull out at this day and the Taliban made this deal in the

00:43:53.180 previous administration. And the reason we got this so wrong is one, politics is not just about

00:44:00.780 zingers. It's not just about one liners and debates and on, and on Twitter even, or, you know,

00:44:05.360 as much as I love good zingers on Twitter, there is a basic competency that you need to have. And

00:44:09.960 many of the people staffing, not just the elected side, but the, the state department, the defense

00:44:15.660 department, the, the bureaucracy side, a lot of them are, don't have even basic competence.

00:44:21.380 That's gone now. And the other way we got this so wrong is we can't answer the most fundamental

00:44:27.100 questions about our country. What are we here for? What do we stand for? Who are the American people?

00:44:31.280 What is the American nation? Where is the American border? What is the difference between a man and a

00:44:36.540 woman? If we can't answer those basic questions about who we are, what we stand for, then we are never

00:44:44.260 going to know what we're doing and we're, what we're doing in our specific job or what we're doing as a

00:44:50.420 matter of grand strategy. You've got to answer the basic questions first. I'm Michael Knowles.

00:44:55.560 This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.

00:45:02.980 If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the

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00:45:18.400 Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.

00:45:23.480 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies. Executive producer, Jeremy Boren. Our technical

00:45:28.800 director is Austin Stevens. Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky.

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00:45:46.860 Copyright Daily Wire 2021.

00:45:48.500 Many people in this country and across the West are eager to give up their basic rights and liberties

00:45:53.580 for fear of COVID, but I have a different solution, which I'll suggest today. Also,

00:45:56.860 President Biden warns those in the path of Tropical Storm Henry that they must remember to wear their

00:46:01.220 masks when the storm hits. Also, the media claims there is a rising trend of anti-mask parents

00:46:06.440 physically assaulting teachers. And finally, the cancel mob has taken a special interest in the hunt for

00:46:11.440 a new host of Jeopardy. We'll talk about that today and so much more on The Matt Walsh Show.

Ep. 827 - Terrorists Spit In The Face Of America - Joe Biden Thinks It's Rain

Summary

Transcript