The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 When we think of all our freedoms that the radical left wants to take away, we usually think of our

00:00:05.120 right to free speech, or our right to keep and bear arms, or our right to keep our own property,

00:00:12.040 or our right to have a say in the course of our government. All of those things are at risk,

00:00:17.840 but the radicals who are emboldened after a successful year and a half of grabbing power

00:00:22.920 are now after an even more fundamental right, even more fundamental than all of those, and

00:00:29.180 they're not even hiding it. Major Democrats in this country, including the governor of Virginia,

00:00:34.760 are now claiming that parents have no right to raise their own kids.

00:00:40.320 The parents had the right to veto bills, veto books, Glenn, not to be knowledgeable about it,

00:00:46.000 also take them off the shelves, and I'm not going to let parents come into schools

00:00:49.400 and actually take books out and make their own decisions.

00:00:53.180 You vetoed it.

00:00:54.140 So, yeah, I've stopped the bill that I don't think parents should be telling schools what

00:00:59.080 they should teach.

00:01:00.100 Yeah, I don't think parents should be telling schools how their children should be educated

00:01:04.080 from the age of 5 to 18. Or really, now it's more like 3 or 4 years old until what? Until

00:01:10.220 you're out of college, 22, or graduate school, or your PhD. I don't think parents have any right

00:01:16.520 to determine how kids are educated for 20-some-odd years of their life. According to Democrats,

00:01:21.660 you no longer possess that right, the right to raise your own children.

00:01:25.360 It turns out the people of Virginia don't like that very much, as they made clear last night

00:01:29.980 at a Loudoun County School Board meeting. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:40.400 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday from JN, who says,

00:01:43.800 whoa, the New York governor giving a literal sermon on the public health god, that is science,

00:01:49.640 is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen a politician do. And that's a long history of

00:01:54.740 creepiness and insanity. I agree. It reminds us of something that has always been true.

00:02:01.920 All politics is religious. Sometimes it's more explicitly so, but it's always there. All human

00:02:10.000 conflict ultimately is theological. And now you've got the new governor of New York, who got her job

00:02:16.280 because Andy Cuomo got booted out, giving outright sermons, calling on people to be her apostles for

00:02:24.720 the cult of progressivism and public health. It really makes you want to be able to do things

00:02:30.080 for yourself, fix things for yourself, which is why I would strongly recommend Rock Auto.

00:02:35.420 What kind of car do you have? What year is it? What's the model? Is it the EX or the FX? Is it,

00:02:41.620 is it the coupe or is it the four door or is it the this or is it the that or is it, do you like

00:02:46.520 being peppered with all these questions? I certainly don't. Once you give the answers to these questions,

00:02:51.660 if you even can, you know what the next, the next thing you're going to hear is in the brick and

00:02:55.480 mortar auto parts store. Okay. I'm going to go in the back, see if we have the part. You know what,

00:02:58.320 you know what else you're going to hear? Oh, we don't have the part. Then they go online,

00:03:01.620 probably to rockauto.com. They order the part. You got to wait a few days. You got to

00:03:05.320 pay twice as much. Why would you do that? You could just go to rockauto.com. The catalog is

00:03:09.720 so easy to navigate. Even I can navigate it. The prices are reliably low. Same for pros and

00:03:15.360 do-it-yourselfers. Family company serving auto parts customers online for 20 years. It's a no

00:03:21.400 brainer. Go to rockauto.com right now. See all the parts available for your car or truck and then

00:03:26.900 write Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S in there. How did you hear about us box? So they know that we sent you.

00:03:33.140 When I did my book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide, number one bestselling blank

00:03:40.540 book about four years ago, still selling like hotcakes, by the way. So thank you to everyone

00:03:45.140 who's giving the gift of knowledge to themselves and their friends. When I did that book, some people

00:03:50.800 gave me the title King of the Trolls. Okay. And Vanity Fair called me a dapper lib triggering troll.

00:03:58.960 They thought that this blank book was a really good troll. And I agree. It was fun. I enjoyed it.

00:04:04.820 I may need to relinquish my crown. I may need to hand my crown to a colleague of mine. That would

00:04:11.540 be Mr. Matt Walsh, who wanted to go speak at a Loudoun County school board meeting. This is a school

00:04:17.600 board meeting in Virginia, but he doesn't live in Virginia. It's not a big deal. You can go to public

00:04:22.980 school board meetings, except that when the school board found out he was going to go,

00:04:26.440 they had a requirement that you had to be a Virginia resident. So what does Matt do?

00:04:30.380 Is he deterred? No, he just rents an apartment in Virginia. Then he goes there and he shows up last

00:04:37.120 night and they pulled a bunch of other shenanigans to try to keep him out, limit what he could say,

00:04:40.920 not stream the speech. But there was a big rally outside and Matt gets up there. Matt, who,

00:04:48.940 you know, I guess he's lived in Virginia for a few days now. I'm not sure how much longer he's going to

00:04:54.520 live in Virginia. He has really only lived in Tennessee for some months now. And we're actually

00:05:00.120 kind of new to the South in general. But Matt gets up on the back of a pickup truck to give a speech

00:05:05.980 and the people there chant, all the parents in Loudoun County, welcome home, Matt.

00:05:11.240 Well, maybe it's not even Matt who gets King of the Trolls. Maybe it is the concerned parents of

00:05:24.800 Loudoun County because they, they got it. They went along with it. Matt, you know, Matt got to go say

00:05:31.820 his piece. I'm glad he did. Obviously the, I think the, the message was clear. Who cares what anyone

00:05:37.300 said in the room? The fact that there was a major rally outside of the school board meeting, frankly,

00:05:41.860 that's all you need to know about the sending the message to the school board. But to me,

00:05:49.040 what's more interesting than the critical race theory curriculum or the kind of radicalism in

00:05:54.080 the schools, or what was more interesting even than Matt going and showing up there are those parents

00:05:59.460 who are outside, who are cheering on a recent, a recent resident of Tennessee who got a place in,

00:06:09.700 in Virginia for a couple of days. They say, welcome home, Matt. And they're playing along.

00:06:13.020 What it shows me is politics is no longer local in this country. There was an old, old expression,

00:06:20.520 Tip O'Neill, former Democrat speaker of the house, used to say, all politics is local. And that was

00:06:26.100 common sense in America for a very long time. I don't think that is the case any longer.

00:06:32.420 Occasionally I'll go to a small town. I mean, I travel all over the country. And when I'm in a

00:06:36.460 small town, I don't always even see a local paper anymore, but sometimes they'll still have a local

00:06:40.980 paper. And I find it so refreshing. It reminds me of what the country used to be like 20 years ago,

00:06:46.320 not that long ago. And it's got the, the local head of the community and he's writing about the local

00:06:51.740 issues. And we just don't see that a lot anymore. Increasingly the issues that preoccupy our time,

00:06:57.920 even in small town America are national issues. You see this in Loudoun County. It's not just that

00:07:02.920 there's some weird, creepy thing going on in the schools there that's particular to Loudoun County.

00:07:06.920 It's that this creepy thing is going on in the schools all over the country. And that would be

00:07:10.260 the critical race theory curriculum. That would be the radical gender curriculum. And so you can have a

00:07:16.520 national conservative media figure like Matt Walsh come in there and he's welcomed like a hometown

00:07:21.160 hero. This is partially, I think, technological because you've, you've got the proliferation of

00:07:28.160 the internet and ways to connect to people now who might be on the other side of the country or on

00:07:31.740 the other side of the world. But also you've got a breakdown of the local community. So as our

00:07:39.300 local governments, local voluntary associations, the Lions Club and whatever, as the local churches,

00:07:46.400 even as the family breaks down, people move away, people have other unusual sorts of family

00:07:54.520 arrangements, people are living on their own more. As that happens, it's not that we're no longer

00:07:58.700 going to have community. We're just going to have different kinds of community. So now these parents

00:08:03.740 in Loudoun County have much more in common with Matt Walsh than they do with any member of their

00:08:09.400 school board. And I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm saying this just is

00:08:14.620 politics now. And so if you want to undertake effective political action, you've got to recognize

00:08:20.140 that and go on that. And by the way, the parents of Virginia have been somewhat effective. There

00:08:26.580 actually is some good news here. In Fairfax County, two books have been removed from the Fairfax County

00:08:35.280 public schools after a parent gave a dramatic reading of the graphic passages from some of

00:08:41.300 these books. So the books are Genderqueer by Maya Kababi and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Everson.

00:08:50.280 According to one parent, both of these books include pedophilia, sex between men and boys. The

00:08:56.520 illustrations include fellatio sex toys, sex with someone you love, to quote Woody Allen,

00:09:05.000 referring to individual acts, and violent nudity. And so I took a look at some of the, I'm not going

00:09:10.360 to repeat the dialogue on this show. This is a family friendly program, but this is sick, twisted,

00:09:16.100 perverted stuff. And these books were available for young children and they shouldn't be. This should

00:09:23.380 not be part of any curriculum. This should not be part of any public education program. One, obscene

00:09:31.360 material does not educate you in the right way. It's not, it's not essential or edifying for your

00:09:37.880 education. And two, you, any educational program is going to require limits. You can't just open up

00:09:45.080 the curriculum forever. You sometimes hear that phrase from the libs when they talk about education,

00:09:49.940 they say we need to open and expand the curriculum. You can't expand the curriculum. You can't, it's not

00:09:55.280 possible. There's only so many weeks in the semester. There are only so many books you can read.

00:09:58.960 When you waste your time reading some degenerate porn in schools, you're, you're necessarily going

00:10:06.940 to be spending less time reading Shakespeare or some other book that would actually be helpful for

00:10:13.420 one's education. This is something else that we're going to need to come to terms with. You know,

00:10:18.340 I've mentioned on this show before that our, our notion of academic freedom, a lot of conservatives

00:10:23.520 defend academic freedom. Now, completely mistaken, completely mistaken. One academic freedom. The

00:10:29.620 idea that teachers ought to be able to teach whatever they want has never existed anywhere.

00:10:33.980 Just about there's nothing particularly conservative about it. And the modern conservative movement began

00:10:39.660 with a book that was making fun of this concept of academic freedom. There, there are today many,

00:10:45.200 even prominent conservative voices in academia who defend academic freedom. It's a farce far more

00:10:54.460 important than academic freedom is, uh, academic edification. I don't know. I don't know what I need.

00:11:04.140 I need a pithy slogan for it here, but what, what you need is education that is aimed at true freedom,

00:11:11.120 right? Liberal education. And what that involves is not endlessly opening it up to all this filth,

00:11:17.660 but limiting the sort of books you read to the very best, using your time wisely and productively.

00:11:25.280 So you don't confuse children and fill their heads with a bunch of lies and filth, but you fill their

00:11:30.720 heads with lots of true things, the good, the true, and the beautiful to help them tamp down their

00:11:34.260 appetites, make sense of their freedom. This is going to be the way forward. This is when you see those

00:11:40.580 parents out there in Loudoun County saying, limit the curriculum, get this crap out of the schools.

00:11:45.900 When you see the parents in Fairfax County saying the same thing, they are on the right side of this.

00:11:50.540 They are ironically, I know we don't see it very well today. They are on the side of freedom.

00:11:56.900 The limits are the key to the Liberty. All right. Now, when you've got some leisure time,

00:12:05.600 when you're maybe sitting at back, you're trying to make sense of your freedom, you want to really

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00:13:28.180 Use promo code Knowles. Let me know what you think of the smokes. When we talk about how liberty

00:13:33.000 requires limits, whether that's in speech or whether that's in education, I think one way to

00:13:38.280 bring this home is to make it very personal. Bring it down to the level of your relationships.

00:13:47.100 Bring it down to the level of your marriage. If you want to have a good marriage, an edifying marriage,

00:13:54.380 a free marriage that helps you both act like free people, what do you do? Do you say you can sleep

00:14:03.500 with whomever you want? You can do whatever you want. You have no responsibility to me whatsoever.

00:14:07.820 Or do you say, no, you actually do have responsibilities to me. You can't do whatever

00:14:11.740 you want whenever you want to do it. You can't go sleep with whomever you want. There are limits here.

00:14:16.460 And within that, that limit is actually going to define the marriage. And the marriage is going to

00:14:21.240 help you be a freer, better, more flourishing person. I think I've put my finger on the scale

00:14:29.120 here of which way I think. It's the latter. The limits. I mean, that is the definition of a marriage

00:14:34.440 is that kind of limit that then frees you up to flourish. I only think of this because Will Smith

00:14:42.020 is back in the news. Will Smith famously has a bad marriage. He and his wife even joked about this.

00:14:48.220 They said, bad marriage for life, you know, like bad boys for life. And it's a marriage where I guess

00:14:54.380 it's open, whatever that means. And I guess they both cheat on each other. But what we've really

00:14:59.320 seen in the press is that she cheated on him and that he maybe was more interested in real marriage,

00:15:05.780 but she was not. And so this is from an interview with GQ. Will Smith just came out and he said,

00:15:12.760 Jada never believed in conventional marriage. Jada had family members that had an unconventional

00:15:17.640 relationship. So she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up.

00:15:21.620 There was significant endless discussions about what is relational perfection. What is the perfect

00:15:26.900 way to interact as a couple? And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose.

00:15:32.780 Not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection. So he's saying, we just need relational

00:15:37.420 perfection. And we do not believe that marriage is relational perfection. That's the traditional idea is

00:15:44.500 that yes, in this man and woman relationship, the point of it is marriage. That is the stable state.

00:15:50.440 He's saying, no, no, we got married, but we don't even know what marriage is. We don't even know what

00:15:53.960 marriage should be. We were trying to figure out what the perfect kind of marriage is. And so for much

00:15:58.480 of our marriage, we were actually married and we behaved like that. But then, then we decided

00:16:04.300 there was something more perfect, namely violating our marriage oath. So he says, we have given each other

00:16:11.260 trust and freedom with the belief that everybody has to find their own way and marriage for us can't

00:16:16.660 be a prison. I don't suggest our road for anybody. I don't suggest this road for anybody, but the

00:16:22.820 experiences that the freedoms that we've given one another in the unconditional support to me

00:16:26.620 is the highest definition of love. Okay. Now he's lost me. Now he's, he's saying what we've done

00:16:33.200 by cheating on each other and by allowing my wife to make me a cuckold and, and allowing my wife to

00:16:39.980 talk about this on television. How, how, how shameful that this woman would do that.

00:16:45.200 That is the highest definition of love. Okay. Well, so you think we should all do that then?

00:16:51.060 No, I don't think you should all do that. I don't suggest this road for anybody.

00:16:56.600 Hold on. So you're telling me this is the highest, most wonderful definition of love.

00:17:00.480 And also you don't recommend it for anybody, anybody, including you, you don't recommend it.

00:17:04.860 And we, of course, nobody wants his wife to go on television and say, yeah, I, I cuckolded my

00:17:10.900 husband. Yeah. Oh yes, I did. And it, and, and he better accept it. He better be happy. You better

00:17:16.240 smile. And then you see poor Will Smith. He's on camera. He looks like he's about to go jump off a

00:17:20.340 pier as he, as is understandable. I get it. But he says, this is the highest. So it makes people

00:17:26.800 miserable. You don't recommend it for anybody, but it's the highest definition of love. What has

00:17:30.560 something's gone wrong here? And it comes from this misconception of freedom. We've given each

00:17:34.920 other trust and freedom. No, you haven't. You can't trust each other. You lied and cheated to

00:17:38.900 each other on each other and you don't have freedom. You don't have the freedom that a marriage gives

00:17:44.880 you. The freedom not to worry about where your wife is when 10 o'clock rolls around the freedom,

00:17:51.560 not to worry about who's going to be there for you. Who loves you? Pretty baby. Who's going to help

00:17:54.760 you through the night? The freedom to be totally at ease with another person who is now

00:18:00.380 actually part of you, one flesh. You've lost that freedom. You've surrendered that freedom.

00:18:05.640 You can't have all of those things at once. I really have great pity for these people,

00:18:12.000 Will Smith, especially Will Smith, but also Jada, who I guess was pushing it, his wife, because

00:18:16.760 I think it's an honest mistake you can make in our modern culture, which is so obsessed with the idea

00:18:23.480 of emancipation and liberation and breaking all constraints, whether it's from society, whether it's

00:18:29.040 from the political institutions, whether it's from biology itself. We can't be constrained by anything,

00:18:33.880 even reality, even nature. And we think that this will make us happy. It won't. And we think this

00:18:41.820 will make us free. It won't. Paradoxically, it seems to many, it actually enslaves us. It makes us less

00:18:50.180 free when we break all of those constraints. Freedom requires limits. Speaking of limits,

00:19:03.320 you can see how Democrats sometimes take this, leftists take this in the other direction because

00:19:10.340 limits can enslave you. Limits can liberate you. And like the meter and rhyme scheme of a poem can

00:19:20.080 liberate the poet to create great art. So too, limits can constrain you like chains and slavery.

00:19:26.640 So what you need to find are just limits. You need moderation. You need justice. You need prudence.

00:19:32.600 These are virtues that we don't really talk about all that much anymore, but they're essential to

00:19:36.420 understanding this. Democrats right now are taking it in the other direction. They're taking limits to

00:19:41.540 the point of enslaving people, enslaving people to the whims of politicians. Joe Biden just received

00:19:49.200 a booster shot for his coronavirus vaccine because the vaccine is so effective that

00:19:54.340 only months after you receive the full vaccination cycle, you need more of the vaccine. That's how

00:19:58.580 effective it is. 100% effective for a few weeks and then you need to get more of it. So Joe Biden

00:20:04.320 is getting his booster shot, reveals that he has fairly surprisingly hairy arms, neither here nor there,

00:20:11.020 but it was kind of weird to see. Joe Biden is taking press questions. This is one of the rare

00:20:16.820 occasions when he was taking questions from the press. He couldn't get up because a doctor had a

00:20:20.280 needle in his arm, so it really forced him to sit down there. And the press asked, okay, Joe,

00:20:26.160 we've been doing this a long time now. How much longer until we can go back to normal?

00:20:33.100 How many Americans seem to be vaccinated for us to go back to normal? What is the percentage

00:20:37.840 of total vaccinations that have to be deployed? Well, I think, look, I think we get the vast

00:20:49.080 majority, like it's going on in some of the, some industries and some schools, 97, 98%. I think

00:20:58.140 we've got awful close. But I'm not the scientist. I think, but one thing for sure, a quarter of the

00:21:06.540 countries can't go unvaccinated and us not continue to have a problem. 97, 98% vaccination. That's when

00:21:15.320 we can go back to normal. 90, you're never going to get that. You're never going to get anywhere near

00:21:22.640 that. 97. And there's no reason even to believe those numbers. 582 days ago, we were told 15 days

00:21:35.580 to slow the spread. 582 days ago. Then flatten the curve. Then find a cure. Then we found a cure.

00:21:44.860 Then make the cure available. The cure was made available. Then get people their shots. Okay. A lot

00:21:52.040 of people got the shots. Then get people another shot because the cure was apparently not as effective

00:21:55.900 as people said it was. Then, then, then, then. Now 98% need to get vaccinated. By the way,

00:22:05.180 let's say that 98% of people got vaccinated, which won't happen.

00:22:09.800 They're not going to be vaccinated for very long. The vaccine doesn't last that long. That's why Joe

00:22:14.140 Biden was just getting the third shot. When we were told there were only two shots that you needed,

00:22:19.060 who's getting the third shot within months of getting the second shot.

00:22:22.040 So you'll never get there. Okay. We got 98% have had their third shot. And so, but unfortunately only

00:22:29.800 42% have had their fourth shot. So we just look, look, Jack, look, corn poppy, Jack, come on. I'm

00:22:36.740 just, come on now. Let's not, come on now. We just need to get 99.7% need to get their 10th shot.

00:22:44.500 All right, Jack. And I'm not a scientist, but then we can get back to normal. I'm not joking around.

00:22:48.580 Okay. Come on. Come on, man. Come on, man. Come on, wake up. It's just a freaking farce at this

00:22:55.340 point. These people are just taking away your freedom and your way of life and your traditions.

00:23:05.680 And it can happen, can happen both ways. Okay. You can lose your freedom when the politicians outright

00:23:13.040 come and take it. And you can lose your freedom when you are incentivized to surrender your freedom

00:23:19.460 yourself, to surrender your freedom to your lusts and your base passions and your appetites. This is

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00:25:29.100 to enter. We'll be right back with a lot more. According to the mainstream media, I don't even

00:25:45.480 want to call them that, the legacy media, the establishment media, the only people who are

00:25:51.100 refusing to take the Fauci ouchie again and again and again with the booster and the booster and the

00:25:56.160 booster are radical right-wing, dupe, rube, idiot, Trump-supporting conservative Republicans, right?

00:26:04.880 That's what you are being told. That has never been true, but that is what you're being told. And now

00:26:10.640 we're really beginning to see that that isn't true. It's just a white supremacist insurrectionists

00:26:17.460 won't get the vaccine. Okay. Uh, the NBA, not, not a league that I follow particularly closely.

00:26:26.540 They were speaking to the press a few days ago and there's this big problem right now in the NBA,

00:26:30.300 which is that a lot of teams and a lot of cities are mandating that people get the vaccine.

00:26:36.480 And a lot of these players, these zillionaire star athletes, some of the fittest people in the world

00:26:41.840 who are very important for these franchises and for the league and for the economy,

00:26:46.060 they don't want to get it. So Bradley Beal, who I take it as a professional basketball player,

00:26:52.260 uh, he is, he has thus far not gotten the jab, the vaccine. He was asked a lot of hostile questions

00:27:00.040 from the press about this and, uh, he, he just kind of laughed at them. He joked and he held his ground.

00:27:06.260 Every player, every person in this world is going to make their own decision for themselves. Um,

00:27:11.740 I would like an explanation to, you know, people with vaccines. Why are they still getting COVID?

00:27:18.060 If that's something that we are supposed to highly be protected from, like, that's funny that,

00:27:23.420 oh, it reduces your chances of going to the hospital.

00:27:27.120 It doesn't eliminate anybody from getting COVID. Right. So everybody, is everybody in here vaxxed?

00:27:33.340 I would assume, right? So you all can still get COVID, right?

00:27:38.600 Unless, like, they die or go to the hospital.

00:27:42.580 Okay, but you can still get COVID. Right. So, and you can still pass it along with the vaxx,

00:27:52.940 right? I'm not, I'm just asking a question. I'm just asking questions. You're asking pretty

00:27:58.540 good questions, pal. It is a pretty sorry state for American politics and public health when some

00:28:06.260 basketball player has a much more sophisticated view of science and politics than most of our

00:28:14.040 scientific politicians and our politician scientists. Do you see the point he's making?

00:28:18.660 He's making a good point. The press are making fun of him, but he's making a good point.

00:28:21.520 He says, you're calling this a vaccine, but the vaccine doesn't stop you from getting the virus.

00:28:28.560 Right. We get the polio vaccine. We don't get polio. Great. That's, we get all sorts of vaccines.

00:28:33.420 We don't get the virus that the vaccine protects against. But with this vaccine, you do still get

00:28:38.520 the virus. Now you say, here's the big counter that they have. They say, sure, you can still contract

00:28:44.560 COVID, but your, your risk of hospitalization and death is greatly diminished. And he, Beal,

00:28:51.240 acknowledges that. He says, yeah, sure. Okay. So it doesn't stop you from contracting the virus,

00:28:58.120 but it, but if you get the vaccine, your chances of going to the hospital or dying are greatly

00:29:03.960 diminished and you all have the vaccine, right? So then why do you care if I have the vaccine?

00:29:09.500 Why do you care? Well, if the vaccine really worked to stop you from getting the virus or to

00:29:16.020 stop you from transmitting the virus, then maybe you would care, right? Because I, the awful unvaccinated

00:29:20.960 person, I might uniquely be passing this virus around. I might uniquely be, be, um, encouraging

00:29:27.660 you or putting you at risk of contracting the virus, but I'm not because this vaccine, you do get the

00:29:33.120 virus and you do transmit it. So the only thing the vaccine does is, is, uh, prevent you from going to

00:29:38.300 the hospital or prevent you from dying or greatly increase your, your, your chances of, of not going

00:29:43.480 to the hospital or dying. So then who cares if I get the vaccine? You all have it, right? But you can

00:29:48.900 still get it and you can still spread it. That's very, it's too bad that a man who has been trained

00:29:56.580 from a very young age, basically just to dribble and shoot, right? A man who has, I would imagine,

00:30:03.220 has not had a huge focus on his scientific and political education. There's just not enough

00:30:08.280 time. You're, you're going to become one of the star athletes in the world. That guy is better

00:30:14.220 educated on these questions than the press that went to all these fancy schools that are asking

00:30:17.680 him the questions. It's not just him. Andrew Wiggins, another athlete that I had never heard

00:30:22.200 of until yesterday. Andrew Wiggins plays for the Golden State team. Apparently I'm the Golden State

00:30:27.960 Warriors. There we go. Uh, Andrew Wiggins went even further. He said, you're going to ask me about

00:30:34.240 whether or not I've gotten the vaccine. My vaccination status is none of your business.

00:30:41.180 What's the reason for not just explaining what you believe? Um, it's just none of your business.

00:30:47.920 That's what it comes down to. You know, I don't ask you guys about your beliefs. I don't ask you guys

00:30:53.800 what you think is right or wrong. You know, we're different people. You know, I'll say something when

00:30:58.380 I'm ready. You know, the only thing the media has done is kind of make it bigger than it has to be.

00:31:05.380 Uh, so like I said, I'll say my side of everything when I'm ready. You know, I don't work on y'all's

00:31:15.980 time. I work on my time. You know?

00:31:18.200 In terms of bigger than it has to be. I mean, you stand to, to lose a lot of money.

00:31:25.280 And it's my problem, not yours. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that's my problem. Not

00:31:29.880 yours. Right on, man. Right on. This guy who is man of few words. He's a little, little more soft

00:31:35.720 spoken than some other athletes. He is making much more sense than the people who are running their

00:31:40.820 mouths. He's saying my vaccination status is my business, not yours. Now you might counter,

00:31:46.160 you might hear the libs counter and they'll say your vaccination status is everybody's

00:31:51.180 concern because the whole point of a vaccine is to prevent the spread of an epidemic. And we live

00:31:55.900 in a society and we're not just atomized individuals. And so if you get vaccinated or

00:32:00.120 not, as a general matter is everybody's concern. I agree. I agree. You're right, but not on this

00:32:05.520 vaccine, not on this. Do you see, do you not see the point that Bradley Beal and Andrew Wiggins

00:32:11.060 are making? If Andrew Wiggins said my vaccination against smallpox is none of your business, he

00:32:18.520 would not be, he would not be correct because, or, or many other inoculations and vaccinations

00:32:26.460 over the years, because most of them prevent you from contracting and spreading the virus.

00:32:33.000 So if the vaccination is the determining factor between you being able to spread the virus to

00:32:37.140 someone else or not, then I guess it is my business. But this vaccine doesn't stop you from

00:32:43.780 contracting or spreading the virus. It just protects you against hospitalization and death.

00:32:51.260 That's, that's the, the only, that's the claim that they're making. They're not even pretending that

00:32:55.640 it stops you from contracting and transmitting it. So in that case, at this moment on this vaccine

00:33:02.380 against this virus, Andrew Wiggins is 100% correct. These people, they don't understand these things.

00:33:12.140 They don't understand. You're right. In some cases, it really is none of your business. Speaking of

00:33:16.080 business, Jen Psaki, gosh, maybe we need to get a professional basketball player to go become the

00:33:21.620 spokesman for the White House because they seem to have basic comprehension skills. They seem to have

00:33:28.660 greater cognitive abilities than many people in the Biden administration. Jen Psaki was just asked

00:33:35.880 about this, this play to raise taxes on corporations and how if the, if the corporations get the taxes

00:33:41.900 raised on them, they very well will pass those, those increased costs on to the consumer through higher

00:33:48.880 prices. So Jen Psaki was asked about this very basic economic concept. She laughed it off. She said it was

00:33:55.500 absurd. Obviously, the president's commitment remains not raising taxes for anyone making less

00:34:00.740 than $400,000 a year. There are some, and I'm not sure if this is the case in this report, who argue

00:34:05.780 that in the past, companies have passed on these costs to consumers. I'm not sure if that's the

00:34:12.100 argument being made in this report. We feel that that's unfair and absurd and the American people

00:34:17.360 would not stand for that. But I will take a closer look at this report and get you a more substantive

00:34:21.100 response. It's unfair and absurd to think that when you make companies pay more money, the companies

00:34:28.560 make the customer pay more money. How is, that's just, that's just common sense. That's, that's

00:34:36.440 inevitable actually to some degree. How do you think businesses work? I guess the Biden administration

00:34:42.160 doesn't know a whole lot about this. So businesses, right, they, they spend money on two kinds of

00:34:48.520 things. Capital and labor. They spend money on stuff and they spend money on employees.

00:34:55.320 And then they, the mixture of the capital and the employees make products and then the consumers,

00:35:01.980 the customers go out and buy those products. And the, and the products have a price and the price

00:35:06.880 pays for the capital and the labor and a profit margin to the shareholders and taxes and taxes.

00:35:14.180 So now if you increase the cost of the taxes, what's going to happen? Well, I guess the shareholders

00:35:21.580 can receive a lower profit. Is that going to happen? Do you think the shareholders are going

00:35:25.720 to stand for that? I'm not so sure about that. Maybe a little bit, but it's, you know, I'm not so

00:35:30.220 sure. It's going to be, do you think that, are we going to cut the, the wages of the labor? I guess

00:35:36.060 you could, you might run into some problems there and then also you're going to have trouble

00:35:38.860 attracting labor. Are you going to pay less for capital, like for the stuff, for the machines,

00:35:45.200 for the capital expenditures? Well, the prices on that probably are not going to change. If,

00:35:48.620 if we're raising taxes on the businesses, actually those are probably going to go up.

00:35:52.120 So the money has got to come from somewhere. Where's the money going to come?

00:35:57.320 Either it's going to come from the shareholders or it's going to come from the customers or it's

00:36:02.220 going to come from both, which seems fairly likely. But the idea that customers are going to be

00:36:06.120 completely insulated against higher prices when you raise taxes on business, that is, that is absurd.

00:36:11.960 That is, that is unfair and absurd to use a phrase from Jen Psaki. And even, look, I don't even care

00:36:18.120 that much about economics. Okay. I think we've looked at our politics through too narrow an economic

00:36:23.340 lens for far too long. So I'm willing to talk about these kinds of things and, and being a little

00:36:27.660 more creative with the way we view the relationship between the economy and the politics.

00:36:31.160 But this does require some very basic economic literacy, doesn't it? Which the Biden administration

00:36:37.500 seems not to have, which is why prices on just about everything you're buying right now

00:36:41.760 are going through the roof as a result of Biden inflation.

00:36:47.180 Even Jen Psaki though now, who is doing her best to flack for her boss, even Jen Psaki

00:36:52.760 is admitting that Joe Biden has not been entirely forthright. He's not been entirely honest.

00:37:01.160 In the statements that the White House has put out, notably on Afghanistan. So you remember

00:37:07.920 on Afghanistan, Joe Biden said, the position of the White House was that Joe Biden followed

00:37:16.920 the advice of his top advisors and generals in withdrawing from Afghanistan. They all told

00:37:22.940 him this is what you should do. And then he did it. So don't blame Joe Biden when things

00:37:26.360 went wrong. Jen Psaki now admits that that was not true.

00:37:31.520 The president said his military committees were split. We now know that the chairman of the

00:37:35.780 Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, the head of CENTCOM, General McKenzie, and the commander

00:37:40.020 on the ground, General Miller, all recommended that the president keep 2,500 troops. So who

00:37:46.240 in his military advisors told him it'd be fine to pull everybody out?

00:37:51.120 I'm not going to get in specific details of who recommended what, but I can, I would reiterate

00:37:56.360 a little bit of what I conveyed before, which is that there were recommendations made by a range of

00:38:01.380 his advisors, something he welcomed, something he asked them to come to him clear-eyed about,

00:38:07.500 to give him candid advice. What is also clear, though, and I'd also note again what Secretary

00:38:12.980 Austin said today, is that was not going to be a sustainable over-the-long-term troop presence.

00:38:18.100 We were always going to look at escalating the numbers, at potentially going back to war with

00:38:22.800 the Taliban, at risking casualties. That was not a decision the president was going to make.

00:38:27.500 But of course, he welcomes advice. He welcomed advice. Ultimately, it's up to the commander-in-chief

00:38:31.980 to make a decision. He made a decision it was time to end a 20-year war.

00:38:35.520 So I agree with that last part, and I think she's probably telling the truth in that last part,

00:38:39.420 and I think the last part is smart. Yes, it is up to the commander-in-chief to run the country.

00:38:44.620 It's up to the president. It's not, it's not the generals who get to run the country.

00:38:48.400 Nobody elected the generals. It's the president who gets to run the country. Okay, I agree with that.

00:38:53.520 It's the first part I don't agree with. The first part, this might be the first time that the White

00:38:59.160 House has just gotten caught in an outright lie, like an outright lie. They said that at least some

00:39:08.140 of the top advisors, and really it's even more than that, told Joe Biden, it's totally fine to

00:39:14.100 pull out of Afghanistan. Everyone's on the same team. And they went out there with that message,

00:39:18.760 and that message was not true because the top generals in our country testified yesterday that

00:39:26.080 they told Biden to keep a small troop presence there. A couple of thousand troops, the number of

00:39:32.240 troops that were there. And so this is where the credibility really, spinning is one thing,

00:39:37.940 or defending the decision is another thing. I actually kind of defend the decision too,

00:39:41.740 in the sense that the civilians get to run the country. But when you lie through your teeth to

00:39:47.320 the American people, that diminishes your credibility, and it diminishes our trust

00:39:52.660 in our basic institutions of government. Joe Biden, when he pulled out of Afghanistan and the

00:40:01.820 country collapsed within days, and then American servicemen were killed, and hundreds of Afghans

00:40:07.080 were killed, and it was just a disastrous, disastrous exit. Joe Biden was asked by George

00:40:12.680 Stephanopoulos, who was a Clinton operative, okay? This is a Democrat operative. He was the comms director

00:40:17.000 in Clinton's White House. He said, hey, Mr. President, what went wrong? Did you really follow

00:40:24.400 the advice of your advisors? What happened? And Joe Biden said, I absolutely, I was on board with

00:40:30.500 the advisors. Your top military advisors weren't against withdrawing on this timeline. They wanted

00:40:35.180 you to keep about 2,500 troops. No, they didn't. It was split. That wasn't true. That wasn't true.

00:40:40.860 They didn't tell you that they wanted troops to stay? No, not in terms of whether we were going

00:40:47.400 to get out in a time frame, all troops. They didn't argue against that. So no one told your

00:40:54.300 military advisors to not tell you, no, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It's been a stable situation

00:40:59.080 for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that. No, no one said that to me

00:41:03.900 than I can recall. Now notice, so what Joe Biden just said there is very different from what Jen

00:41:10.880 Psaki said happened right now, but it's not different than what she previously said happened.

00:41:15.080 But notice Joe Biden contradicted himself within that statement. George Stephanopoulos said,

00:41:21.840 your top advisors all said to stay and to keep a small number of troops in Afghanistan. Biden said,

00:41:28.540 no, they didn't. They were split. And then Stephanopoulos asked for clarification. And then

00:41:33.660 Biden rambled incoherently for a little bit and it didn't make any sense. And then Stephanopoulos

00:41:39.120 asked for clarification again and said, hold on, you're telling no one told you to keep the troops

00:41:43.700 there in Afghanistan? And he said, no, they didn't. No one did. Hold up. Wait, there's three options.

00:41:50.720 Either they all said, keep the troops there, or they were split, or they all said, pull the troops out.

00:41:58.560 And Joe Biden held two of those positions during that one answer. And it turns out that neither of

00:42:05.840 those were true. It was actually the third one that actually happened. That is a president who is

00:42:11.240 either so senile that really you do need to invoke the 25th amendment, or he is a liar. And I actually,

00:42:21.140 in fairness to Joe Biden, I think he's just a liar. I think he lies with ease. I think he had to drop

00:42:26.000 out of the 1988 presidential contest because his lies were so preposterous and so egregious that he

00:42:31.960 couldn't continue his campaign. And I just think he has basically no relationship with honesty or the

00:42:36.860 truth whatsoever. But the generals smacked him down yesterday. Credit where credit's due.

00:42:43.520 Mark Milley, our woke chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he showed it. Thankfully,

00:42:47.360 he took the pink hat off before he walked in. He didn't paint his nails or anything before he

00:42:53.960 walked in to testify. Mark Milley came in and testified to say, no, we wanted to keep a base

00:43:04.160 level of troops there. But I'd ask General McKenzie, did you agree to the recommendation

00:43:09.480 that General Miller had two weeks ago? Senator, again, I won't share my personal

00:43:20.820 recommendation of the president. But I will give you my honest opinion. And my honest opinion and view

00:43:25.860 shaped my recommendation. I recommended that we maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.

00:43:31.440 And I also recommended earlier in the fall of 2020 that we maintain 4,500 at that time. Those are my

00:43:38.040 personal views. I also have a view that the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably

00:43:42.960 to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government.

00:43:47.400 Yeah. So I understand that. And General Milley, I assume you agree with that in terms of the

00:43:51.840 recommendation of 2,500? What I said on my opening statement and the memoranda that I wrote back in

00:43:59.340 the fall of 2020 remained consistent. And I do agree with that. And I'm confident that the president

00:44:04.060 heard all the recommendations and listened to them very thoughtfully. So very important. This was a

00:44:09.160 little Milley sandwich. You had General McKenzie on the first part and the third part, and then Milley was

00:44:13.960 there. So in the first part and the second part, they're both saying, yes, our recommendation was

00:44:17.980 keep a couple thousand troops or a few thousand troops in Afghanistan. Now, the third part's

00:44:23.040 important here with McKenzie because maybe Joe Biden didn't hear it. Maybe Joe Biden never got that

00:44:28.060 advice. Maybe it never made it up to the president. Maybe he wasn't paying attention. And McKenzie says

00:44:31.340 there, no, he was. He heard it. He thought about it. He did process what we told him and he ignored it

00:44:38.060 anyway. Now, I don't want to let Milley off the hook. All right. Just because Milley did a good

00:44:45.300 thing here. I don't want to let Milley off the hook. Don't forget, Mark Milley is someone who

00:44:50.420 when Donald Trump was still the president of the United States, Mark Milley called China,

00:44:56.660 the top generals in China and said, if Trump orders an attack, I'll give you a heads up. This is

00:45:00.340 according to a new report and Milley hasn't really denied it. So I think there's no reason not to

00:45:05.860 believe it. So Milley subverted civilian control of the military, subverted the chain of command,

00:45:12.280 and now he's got an answer for that. He doesn't have a very good answer. By law, I am not in the

00:45:17.600 chain of command, and I know that. However, by presidential directive and DOD instruction,

00:45:23.640 I am in the chain of communication to fulfill my legal statutory role as the president's primary

00:45:30.800 military advisor. After the Speaker Pelosi call, I convened a short meeting in my office with key

00:45:36.880 members of my staff to refresh all of us on the procedures which we practice daily at the action

00:45:43.000 officer level. Additionally, I immediately informed acting Secretary of Defense Miller of Speaker

00:45:49.600 Pelosi's phone call. At no time was I attempting to change or influence the process, usurp authority,

00:45:58.120 or insert myself in the chain of command. Oh yeah, then why did you call the Chinese and said

00:46:04.300 you give them a heads up if the president of the United States orders an attack? Why are you

00:46:10.880 corresponding and colluding with Nancy Pelosi? Why are you leaking information if you're not trying

00:46:17.260 to usurp? Of course you're trying to usurp power. Please, if you're going to do it, please at least do not

00:46:24.420 urinate on the collective leg of the American people and tell us that it's raining. Please, at least have

00:46:29.460 the integrity to tell us what you're doing. This is what you're seeing all around the country, from the

00:46:34.900 military, from Washington, D.C., all the way to these local governments, all the way down to the school

00:46:39.720 board. You are seeing a usurpation of power, a disorder of the system. Teachers, administrators,

00:46:46.000 politicians telling parents they can't raise their kids. The military telling the civilian leaders, the

00:46:50.500 elected officials, no, you don't get to run the country. You don't get to run the military.

00:46:55.200 I think if we want to have a truly free country, we've got to impose limits and order on the people

00:47:01.100 who are exceeding their just bounds within our traditional political system. We need to rein

00:47:07.920 things in, have a little temperance, have a little prudence, have a little bit of justice.

00:47:12.480 That means for some people, giving them a little bit more freedom to move around,

00:47:16.260 and for some people, reining them in. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you tomorrow.

00:47:19.600 We'll see you tomorrow.

00:47:49.600 Jeremy Boring. Our technical director is Austin Stevens. Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.

00:47:55.680 Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky. Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico. Associate

00:48:00.960 producer, Justine Turley. Audio mixer, Mike Coromina. And hair and makeup by Cherokee Heart.

00:48:07.280 Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.

00:48:11.520 We finally descended upon Loudoun County yesterday, my new home, to make our voices heard. But the Loudoun

00:48:15.900 County situation is part of a larger and more important conversation about who exactly should

00:48:20.020 be determining what our kids are taught in schools, the state or the parents. We'll talk about that

00:48:24.440 today. Also, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is asked why he won't resign for his failures in

00:48:28.780 Afghanistan. And Greta Thunberg babbles incoherently and receives a raucous applause anyway. And a black

00:48:34.500 teacher in California is not pleased with the special gift basket that she was given from the district for

00:48:39.400 being black. And then Will Smith is saying that his marriage is open and his open marriage with his

00:48:44.820 wife is perfect and beautiful and loving. And somehow I tend to doubt that. We'll talk about all that and

00:48:49.580 much more today from the Matt Walsh Show.

Ep. 853 - The Fresh Prince of Affairs

Summary

Transcript