Coronavirus is spreading, and economies all over the world are grinding to a halt. We will examine whether we’re all going to die before we go broke. Then, new polling shows a big boost to Bernie’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination. Freshman representative Ilhan Omar admits she’s un-American, and Harvey Weinstein is headed for the clink.
Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://www.dailywire.com/coldwar. In Part 1 we peel back the layers of mystery cloaking the Terror state run by the Kremlin, and watch as America takes its first small steps onto the stage of world leadership.
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Coronavirus is spreading and economies all over the world are grinding to a halt.
We will examine whether we're all going to die before we go broke.
Then, new polling shows a big boost to Bernie's chances of winning the Democratic nomination.
Freshman Representative Ilhan Omar admits she's un-American and Harvey Weinstein is headed for the clink.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
We have a lot to get to today.
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So much to get to, so we will get to all of it.
The coronavirus.
The coronavirus poses a major threat to the whole world, but that threat is not exactly the kind of threat you think it is.
The threat is mostly political and economical.
It's actually not as much biological.
There is a ton of misinformation going around about coronavirus, so let's just look at the numbers very quickly so you can see where the threat really lies.
So far, during the outbreak of this virus, 2,600 people have died.
It started in the city of Wuhan in China.
Wuhan has a population of 11 million people.
Wuhan is in Hubei province.
The population of that province is 58.5 million people.
So that's basically the population of Italy.
Italy, by the way, has one of the worst death tolls anywhere from coronavirus, and that death toll is now at five confirmed deaths.
Coronavirus has also hit Iran.
Iran has 12 confirmed deaths.
Obviously, very sad when anybody dies.
But to put that in perspective, we're also in flu season, right?
During this flu season alone, do you know how many people have died from the flu?
14,000 people.
So far, during just this flu season, five times as many people have died from the flu, the regular old flu, as have died from coronavirus.
Last flu season, when everything was said and done, over 61,000 people died.
Now, what is the death rate for the flu?
The death rate for the flu is 0.1%.
So, if you're healthy and you get the flu, most likely you're going to be totally fine.
If you're very, very young or very, very old, then it can be dangerous.
0.1% death rate.
In mainland China, the death rate for coronavirus is, in some provinces, about 0.4%.
So, higher, but still much less than 1%.
Even in Hubei province, right, the epicenter of coronavirus, the death rate has peaked at 2.9%.
So, that's mainland China, the province where it's happening, right, the city where it's happening.
If you control for America's vastly superior public health infrastructure, the death rate for coronavirus is not dramatically higher than the death rate for the flu.
So the unique threat that coronavirus poses right now, not really to our health as much.
I mean, people are monitoring it, but the real threat seems to be to the economy.
It is tanking the world economy.
Right now, China's economy.
It was already on the fritz, all right?
It was already at the lowest level of growth that we've seen since 1990, so 30 years.
As a result of this coronavirus, the country has more or less ground to a halt.
That's also true in Italy.
So Italy right now, the city of Milan, which drives the whole Italian economy, has ground to a halt.
Milan's more or less on lockdown.
Frankly, I am of Italian descent.
I've spent some time in Italy.
I think the Italians just look for any excuse to stop working.
But regardless, the economic effect is the same.
You're seeing a slowdown.
This is happening all around the world.
Yesterday, the Dow Jones dropped a thousand points because of coronavirus fears.
Maybe there's a little pricing in there of fears about Bernie Sanders.
They don't want the leading world economy to have a socialist president.
But I think probably a lot of it's traceable to coronavirus.
This was the third worst point drop in the history of the Dow Jones.
So this is why President Trump is downplaying coronavirus.
He tweeted out yesterday, quote, The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries.
CDC and World Health have been working hard and very smart.
Stock market's starting to look very good to me.
Now, he's obviously trying to boost confidence here.
I don't know if he really thinks the stock market's looking good because it was the third worst point drop in history.
Nevertheless, President Trump understands the real threat here is economic.
If the economy tanks, that is pretty much the only way that Trump loses this presidential election.
Okay, things are looking very good right now for President Trump.
You've got this wacko socialist who is double and tripling down on Fidel Castro, running away with the Democratic nomination.
We'll get to that in just a little bit.
You've got the so-called moderate, can't even say his own name on the campaign trail, Joe Biden.
You've got the other moderate, Pete Buttigieg, is actually a huge radical who drags nine-year-old boys on stage at his campaign events to come out as homosexuals.
Pretty, pretty radical.
Whose father was the head of the International Gramsci Society.
So, Trump is looking great, unless the economy tanks.
How on earth could the economy tank?
Record low unemployment.
Record high stock markets.
Great growth.
The way it could tank is if you have this totally unpredictable virus that's taking over the whole world.
Is that why the media are playing up coronavirus so much?
That's a good question.
Because we know the death rate is relatively low.
We know relatively few people have been affected by it.
And yet the media are treating this as though it's the next bubonic plague that's going to kill all of us.
Some prominent people in the media have been hoping for a recession.
And they've been hoping for a recession because even though it's going to hurt a lot of people, the recession will reduce the chances that President Trump gets re-elected.
That's not some right-wing conspiracy theory.
We saw this on Bill Maher's show just a few months ago.
Farmers out there saying, well, he must know what he's doing.
I guess they're just going to have to keep touching this hot stove.
I'm not wishing for a recession, but if the farmers want to keep touching the hot stove...
Well, you should wish for a recession, because that will definitely get him unelected.
Okay, but Bill, you don't really want a recession.
I really do.
We have survived many recessions.
We can't survive another Donald Trump term.
You're going to knock lower middle-income people out of work.
I do.
Get him at the ballot box in the intellectual marketplace of ideas.
Look, at least Bill Maher tells you what he thinks, right?
And I think a lot of other people in the media feel exactly the same way.
Okay, now, I don't think that liberals invented coronavirus.
I don't think they went to, like, the Lib Lab and developed this bioweapon so that they could get rid of Donald Trump.
However, I don't think it came from bats, either.
Remember, the initial story with coronavirus is...
Some people in Wuhan ate some bat soup, and that was dumb.
And now one of the bats had coronavirus, and now everybody's sick.
That story is starting to break down.
There is now a lot of evidence that the coronavirus was cooked up as potentially a biological weapon in a Chinese government lab.
The evidence of this is that the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology just released a new directive titled, quote,"...instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus." You say, well, how many of these labs do you have floating around China that just happen to be handling these radical viruses?
And the answer is they have one, and that one lab happens to be in Wuhan.
That's a lot of a coincidence.
So it may be the case that...
China, the Chinese government was cooking up this new biological weapon.
It got out somehow.
It's now affecting their own population.
It's now spreading around the world.
That is pretty bad news.
We've got more bad news for the economy, but I do want to remind you, if you are a Daily Wire subscriber...
If you're a member and you have the app or you're on the website right now, write in your questions, and we're going to be taking a few live questions during the show.
Your pressing, deepest, most burning questions that you've got, we will do our best to answer them.
On top of the coronavirus, we've got more bad news for the economy.
Namely, Bernie Sanders is freaking killing it.
Well, he's going to freaking kill the economy, but he's also freaking killing it in the Democratic primary race.
Bernie Sanders just took a major boost to his campaign.
Bernie has taken the lead among black Democratic primary voters nationally.
Huge news.
We've been talking about this for months now.
Bernie had the momentum, but Bernie's base has always been pretty narrow.
He's always had a very white, very far-left base, and so he was going to struggle in states like, say, South Carolina.
Joe Biden's only argument for electing him or nominating him this year was that he's the only guy who can win black votes.
Well, now Bernie Sanders is doing better among black voters than Joe Biden is.
This is according to a morning consult poll that was just released yesterday.
Nationally, Bernie Sanders is at 32% among black Democratic primary voters.
Bloomberg is in second place with 19%.
Biden is all the way down in third at 18%, followed by Buttigieg and Warren, who both have 11%.
And then everybody else comes after that.
Evidence of our thesis yesterday, which is that a classic blunder in politics is people think they can win by losing.
They think they can skip Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and Nevada, but, you know, they're going to come back afterward.
They can lose, they can lose, they can lose.
Now, Mike Bloomberg is technically skipping those elections.
He's not on the ballot, but he's spending heavy.
He is on the airwaves in those states as though he is running.
And so because he's got a kind of unique candidacy, he came in so late, he's being considered among the candidates, even though he's not really on the ballot.
Joe Biden, the same cannot be said.
Joe Biden is not running competitively there.
His money is running out.
He is not showing up to these places as strongly as he used to be.
And he's losing.
He's been on the ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire, and he keeps losing.
So all of a sudden, Joe Biden then drops down to third.
You've got black voters in these states saying, gosh, Joe Biden was the number one guy.
He can't win any state that he's been on the ballot.
I guess our best shot is Bernie, who has been winning.
And our second best shot is Mike Bloomberg, who's not even on the ballot yet, but he's spending a lot of money.
It looks like he's running to win it.
And Joe Biden is reacting in exactly the way you would expect.
He is sputtering and stammering.
And recently on the campaign trail, just yesterday, he forgot what office he's running for.
You're the ones that sent Barack Obama the presidency.
And I have a simple proposition here.
I'm here to ask you for your help.
Where I come from, you don't get far unless you ask.
My name's Joe Biden.
I'm a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.
Look me over.
If you like what you see, help out.
If not, vote for the other by.
Give me a look, though, okay?
That's all I've really got to say to you.
What?
What just happened?
Forget what he just said.
What is he even doing?
What's firing in his head?
Joe Biden has not been in the Senate for 12 years.
A dozen years.
Remember, he was in the Senate, and he was the vice president after Obama won in 2008.
Then he did nothing for three or four years.
Now he's running for president again.
But he did run for Senate for a very long time.
He first ran for Senate in the 70s, and he was there forever.
All the way through Anita Hill.
He was the judiciary chairman during Anita Hill.
Then he was there all the way through 2008.
So I think he's just reverting back to his default mode, which is, Hi, I'm Joe Biden.
I'm a total glad-handing politician who doesn't stand for anything, and I'm running for the state of Delaware.
I'm running for the Senate.
Vote for me.
Even the way he closes it was like a...
A typical caricature of a politician from 20, 30 years ago.
I'm Joe Biden.
I'm asking for your vote.
If you don't like me, vote for the other Biden.
Get it?
If you don't like me, you should still vote for me because my name will be on the ballot.
Just give me a look.
All right, I'm running for Senate.
You don't even know what you're running for, so probably very few people are going to vote for you.
His campaign, I think, knows that this is falling apart, not just because he doesn't know how to speak on the campaign trail, also because his whole strategy was predicated on crushing it in South Carolina.
And now it looks like he's headed for not only a weak performance, I guess there's a chance he still wins, but he's neck and neck with Bernie right now.
There's actually a chance he loses South Carolina.
And Joe Biden said from the very beginning, he said, South Carolina is my firewall.
By the way, when you're a candidate running for president and you say that a state far from now is your firewall, that is evidence of a weak campaign.
That's evidence that you think you're going to do badly in the earliest states.
But you're going to come back in the later early state.
And that's simply not what's happening here.
So he said it was the firewall.
He's now collapsing.
He's asked about this on CBS News.
And Joe Biden immediately denies that he ever called South Carolina the firewall.
South Carolina, though, was your firewall.
You've said it my firewall.
I've never said it.
The campaign has said it's your firewall.
No, that's not fire.
I said, I'm going to do well there.
And I'll do well there.
And I'll do well beyond there as well.
I never said it was my firewall.
Let me quote Joe Biden about a month ago.
I think I'll do well in Nevada.
And I think I have a real firewall in South Carolina.
It's a direct quote that he gave to the press less than a month ago.
And then we go into the Super Tuesday states that have a significant number of minorities and African Americans.
I think I have a real firewall in South Carolina.
I never said I have a firewall.
Yeah, I said, look, I said maybe I'd do well there, but come on, you said I have a firewall.
No, now Joe doesn't remember.
What he said doesn't remember what office he's running for.
It doesn't remember what office he's not going to win.
I think he's starting to learn that.
He's starting to remember that part.
He's absolutely collapsing.
So the question is, how on earth can the Democrats beat Trump?
If Bernie is the nominee, You've got a radical candidate out there, so presumably you're going to have to balance that out with some kind of moderate.
However, the new chatter among the left-wing pundit class is that they're not going to go for some kind of moderate.
They're actually going to go for the next most radical candidate that Bernie Sanders might nominate, Elizabeth Warren.
So there's a poll here from Zogby Analytics.
Their analyst, Jonathan Zogby, just reported that the Sanders-Warren ticket currently beats President Trump and Mike Pence by 48 to 45 percent.
Sanders-Warren.
Could you imagine more of a nightmare?
Sanders Warren.
It would be terrible because Bernie Sanders is pretty old.
So there's actually a chance that you had a President Warren by the back door.
This guy, Zogby, believes that this is an easy way to beat President Trump.
No way.
No chance.
Elizabeth Warren is horribly unlikable.
The more people see Warren, the less people like her.
Remember, she was doing very, very well early on when she wasn't out there as much, and then she did all those stupid social media videos, then she came out with her health care plan, and she tanked.
The more people see of her, the less they like her.
VP picks usually don't matter.
People really just vote on the president.
However, here it actually could hurt Bernie because he just actually had a heart attack on the campaign trail and he's now refusing to release his medical records.
So who knows how the guy's ticker is doing?
Who knows how long he's going to be with us?
Hopefully for a very long time, but still we don't know about the guy's health.
Everything we do know doesn't look good.
So you've got a serious chance that this vice president becomes president and Elizabeth Warren is simply awful.
It's not even like a sexist thing.
Everyone says whenever you criticize Liz Warren, it's sexist.
Women like her least of all.
She doesn't ball very well among women.
Bernie Sanders, at least he is honest, right?
He's terrible and he's dangerous, but he's honest.
We'll get to that in a second because he's doubling and tripling down on his support of Fidel Castro and other communist thugs, but he's not the only Democrat to do that.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, A question from the audience.
From A, I'm in a Super Tuesday state.
Should I attend the GOP primary and show my support for the president?
Or should I vote Bernie in the Democratic primary and sabotage the left?
Very, very tricky question.
President Trump is going to win the primary.
I don't think you need to worry about that.
If some states are closed primaries, so you can only vote for the party that you're registered in, which seems to me to make sense, some states are open primaries.
So a Republican can vote in the Democratic primary and vice versa.
My bet is on Bernie.
Okay, I think...
Conservatives should want Bernie to be the nominee.
I think he does have the least chance of being elected in November.
I'm not saying he has no chance.
I don't want to get cocky here.
This is a risky bet because if we take this risk and we lose, all of a sudden you've got a communist president.
At least a very strong socialist president.
And that's pretty scary.
However, my other theory is that Bernie Sanders is pretty much just as radical as the other Democrats.
Actually, some Democrats are even more radical than Bernie.
It's just that Bernie is more honest about it.
So for me, I'm here to be entertained.
I'm here for an honest vote and I want to sabotage the left.
So, look, if you made it into the Democratic primary, you voted for Bernie, and we got the battle that America deserves, Trump versus Bernie, you know, there are worse things in the world.
Bernie is honest, okay?
And I like the honest fight because I think we win the honest fight.
Bernie, you know, he said he liked Fidel Castro.
Then they asked him about this on 60 Minutes.
He said he really liked Fidel Castro.
Then they keep asking him about it.
He keeps defending Fidel Castro.
This line of attack is not totally fair to Bernie.
Okay, because Bernie is just saying what other Democrats have said.
He's just saying it more honestly and more forcefully.
Even Barack Obama...
Not that long ago, just a few years ago, was defending Fidel Castro with the same talking points that Bernie Sanders used.
Oh, they have good health care in Cuba.
Oh, they have good literacy programs in Cuba.
If you just read a transcript of what Barack Obama said about Castro and what Bernie Sanders said, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart.
I said this to President Castro in Cuba.
I said, look, you've made great progress in educating young people.
Every child in Cuba gets a basic education.
That's a huge improvement from where it was.
Medical care.
The life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States despite it being a very poor country because they have access to health care.
That's a huge achievement.
They should be congratulated.
You drive around Havana and this economy's not working.
So, as usual, Barack Obama totally misrepresenting things, not surprising at all.
But he's saying the same thing as Bernie.
They're both wrong because, first of all, Cuba cooks the books on their healthcare.
And part of the reason that they have a relatively high life expectancy is because they do everything they can to prevent infant mortality to make sure that that number looks pretty good.
I've been around Havana with Cubans.
They've pointed to that great Havana hospital.
They say, there's the Havana hospital.
Universal.
Anybody can go into it.
Of course, there's no medicine when you go in.
You've got to bring your own medicine.
You've got to bring your own toilet paper.
These are direct quotes from people in Havana.
But yeah, anybody can go in there.
How great, right?
Still, Barack Obama says the same thing.
How come we don't give him as much guff about it as Bernie Sanders?
Because Barack Obama was a little slicker.
He was a little oilier.
I like the honest battle.
It's not just Barack Obama either.
Here's what the media were saying about Fidel Castro when he died just a few years ago.
Declared socialist, he dramatically improved healthcare and literacy.
I think he will be revered as someone who brought education and social services and medical care to all of his people.
Well, Fidel Castro was considered, even to this day, the George Washington of his country.
There is no doubt that he is considered here a revolutionary hero, not only in Cuba, but in many places around the world, and also for his defiance of the United States.
You know, that's the media for you.
That's, by the way, that last part isn't true either.
The people in Cuba despised Fidel Castro every single person that I talked to.
But the whole left, the whole Democratic Party, has been trending this way for a very long time.
They've been trending hard left and now they're just being more honest about it.
Left wing candidates for the last hundred years would hide the fact that they were socialists.
We all kind of suspected they were deep down socialists, but they would hide it.
They would protest.
They would say, how dare you?
How offensive that you would call me a socialist.
It was considered a really offensive thing, a real insult.
Same thing with atheism.
They If you called someone an atheist, they'd say, how dare you?
And most of them were atheists, but they would say, no, you couldn't possibly call me that.
That's when it was considered socially unacceptable to be an atheist and a socialist.
Now it's socially preferable, and so now they're a little bit more open about it.
When you think about how Joe McCarthy is taught in schools, people say Joe McCarthy was so terrible, he so crossed the line, he had no dignity, he had no shame, because he accused people of being socialists.
And very often they were socialists.
And we caught many socialists working in the government.
Now you've got people bragging about it.
So if it's okay to be a socialist, why was it so terrible when Joe McCarthy would accuse people of that?
Now they're admitting it.
Now they're even admitting their un-American-ness.
Until yesterday, if I called Ilhan Omar, that squad member, freshman representative, if I called her un-American, I would be pilloried as racist, xenophobic, bigoted, hateful.
President Trump implied that she was not American.
When he sent out that tweet, he said, you should go back to your countries.
People went after him for it.
They were so upset.
That he would say this to somebody like Ilhan Omar.
Well, it turns out that he was right by her own admission.
Ilhan Omar yesterday tweeted out, I am hijabi, Muslim, black, foreign-born, refugee, Somali, easily triggering conservatives, right-wing bloggers, anti-Muslim bigots, tinfoil conspiracy theorists, birthers, pay-me-money-to-bash-Muslim fraudsters, pro-occupation groups, and every single xenophobe since 2016.
It's a long list.
Notice anything missing on that list?
I am hijabi, Muslim, black, foreign-born, refugee, Somali.
She never says she's American.
She doesn't consider herself American.
It's not even that she doesn't mention nations on that list.
She does.
Somali.
She considers herself Somali, but not American.
So when people say, go back to your country, that's considered bigoted, except it's by her own admission that her country is Somali, not American.
That is radical stuff.
If you ever question somebody's patriotism, that was considered off the table, right?
But what about when the candidates themselves are questioning their own patriotism?
If you called someone a socialist off the table, what if the candidates themselves are calling themselves socialists?
I prefer that battle.
I prefer that honest fight, because then Americans have an honest choice.
We have a question come in from a listener, from Casey.
What are the odds Ilhan Omar is Bernie's VP choice?
Probably a step too far.
I think it's a little low.
I think she's over 35, so she's constitutionally allowed to do it.
I bet that's a little over the line for the Democratic Party.
I don't think they're going to let them get too Total radicals out there.
I think the most radical you're going to be allowed to get is somebody like Elizabeth Warren, who obviously checks the boxes, right?
She's got some left-wing credentials.
She's a woman, and she's at least one 1024th Native American, so she checks the intersectionality boxes as well.
Ilhan Omar just has too many legal questions surrounding her.
I mean, especially the suggestion that seems very likely that she married her brother for immigration purposes.
You know, I know that the Democrats have never been the party of family values.
But if you start promoting people who marry their own brothers, well, maybe that's the way that they can recover family values.
I guess in a certain sense, that's the most family value you can have.
I still don't think it would play well in Peoria.
So I think luckily we have avoided that.
Although, frankly, we live in the age of Trump.
We live in the age of Bernie soaring to the nomination.
Anything can happen.
We've got a lot more to get to.
We've got to get to Harvey Weinstein, which we will in just one second.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
The trial of the century.
Harvey Weinstein.
Will he be found guilty for leading the Me Too crimes of Hollywood or will he walk?
Harvey Weinstein was found guilty.
A little bit.
He wasn't found guilty on all of his counts.
He was found guilty on a couple of them.
He's looking at 5 to 29 years in prison.
So at the long end, this could be a life sentence for Harvey.
The Harvey Weinstein verdict matters not just because what it says about our legal system, but what it says about the relationship of our legal system to our culture.
That's the part that nobody's talking about, but that's actually the only really interesting part of the case.
So the jury took five days to deliberate, and they found Weinstein was guilty of third-degree rape and criminal sexual act.
But the jury acquitted Weinstein on the three other counts, which included the most serious counts, predatory sexual assault.
So they got him on the lower end.
They didn't get him on the higher end.
This was actually a somewhat controversial case.
I know that Harvey Weinstein is just an absolute monster who, in the light of perfect moral justice, would be put down like old yeller.
But in terms of the legal aspect of it, it was a little bit controversial.
Why?
Because Weinstein allegedly raped these women or assaulted them or abused them.
But he had a relationship with them after the assaults.
So you would see these emails and messages between them that were very nice between both of them.
The most prominent incidents that we saw took place not in a dark alleyway.
They took place in Harvey Weinstein's hotel rooms.
And they would happen over years and the women would keep coming back.
There was a real question over whether or not Harvey Weinstein would get off because he'd say, look, I've had relationships with these women for years.
If I raped them, why did they keep visiting me and being nice to me and going to my hotel room?
When the verdict was read, if you saw it in the courtroom, Weinstein looked shocked.
He genuinely couldn't believe it.
He was muttering to his lawyers, I'm innocent, I'm innocent, how can this happen in America?
The actual, the funniest moment of the whole trial is that Harvey Weinstein was so shocked when the verdict was read that when he walked out of the courtroom he forgot to take his walker.
So for the whole trial, he's been pretending that he's really old and decrepit and handicapped, so he would use this walker and he could barely walk up the stairs.
And then when the verdict was read and he was found guilty, he's like, all right, well, I guess I don't need that walker anymore.
And he just walks right out there.
Obviously, Harvey Weinstein is a sicko and should be kept very far away from polite society.
For many, the question remained unclear as to whether he committed the crimes that he was being accused of.
It took the jury five days, and they only got him on the two lower counts.
The aspect that matters here is less the legal aspect, more the cultural aspect.
Harvey Weinstein had to be punished.
Okay, Harvey Weinstein, regardless of what the jury found, regardless of any aspect here, Harvey had to be punished.
It was far from clear that he violated the law of the land.
Many analysts thought he'd be acquitted, but it was very clear that Harvey violated the moral law.
And our culture is extremely permissive when it comes to that sort of thing, right?
We live in a permissive culture where we say, oh, if it doesn't obviously hurt anybody else, it's okay.
You can do whatever you want.
You've got your personal autonomy.
You own your body.
Do whatever you like.
But justice must be served.
And so even if Weinstein didn't commit the specific crimes that he was accused of, he was going to be punished.
You see this from the perspective of rights all the time in politics, right?
The Constitution affords us lots of different rights.
The Constitution also is built for a moral and religious people.
That's according to John Adams.
The Constitution is not fit for people who are not moral and religious.
So, as moral and religious rigidity has fallen away, often through a concerted effort in our culture, the effect of that has not been more freedom.
That's what they promised us in the 60s, right?
They said, look, we've got a very pervasive legal system and we've got this rigid morality, so just get rid of your moral discipline and then you'll be very free.
Finally, you'll be in control of yourself.
Paradoxically, though, the effect of that has been less freedom.
As people have become less morally disciplined, the government has stepped in to discipline them.
The reason for that is that order must be preserved.
So, as a result, we lose our personal discipline, we lose our local and our family discipline.
The effect of that is endless regulations, new speech codes, now an ever-changing sexual ethic that you see at workplaces and campuses.
It's because societies need order.
So either we could discipline ourselves, or we will have discipline imposed from above.
Either Harvey Weinstein can act like a civilized human being, or he's going to go to the clink.
And that doesn't matter how well his lawyers can argue that he did not violate the law.
Speaking of sexual ethics, now this is this left-wing outlet.
They post all these little videos all over social media.
They have a new cause.
They're following Joaquin Phoenix's speech recently where he called to end the terrible, awful cruelty of drinking milk, right?
It's all about animal rights.
Now this has come out with one that talks about how fish...
Actually, on some level, can feel pain, and that's why it's so unthinkable that we should ever pick them up with our little hooks and eat them.
Here's now this.
You probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about fish.
And when you do, it's likely in the context of dinner.
Humans don't relate very easily to fish.
They're so different from us, they might as well be aliens.
It's hard for us to attribute thoughts, emotions or any kind of inner life to them.
For many of us, they might as well be plants or furniture.
This is a big problem for fish.
Because our being unable to relate to these creatures as live, conscious beings means that many of us can't even conceive of them having the most basic element of sentience, the ability to feel pain.
So we treat them as if they didn't.
But fish do feel pain.
Scientists have demonstrated this decisively.
Fish have the same pain receptors as humans do, and they act just like any animal would when those receptors are activated.
The obliviousness is simply shocking.
Take the exact same video, the same script, and replace fish with babies.
You know, we can't really relate to unborn babies.
We think they're different than us, but actually, they are a lot more like us than you think.
Unborn babies are definitely a lot more like us than fish are.
Unborn babies actually can feel pain by at least as early as 20 weeks and in some senses as early as 7 weeks.
Maybe even earlier.
And that's why we need to start thinking of unborn babies more like humans, which is what they obviously are.
It's such a bizarre characteristic of the left.
That they care so much for the little delta smelt, for the little fish, for the milk, but they don't care that much for people.
You know, they always care so much for humanity, but they don't care all that much for actual humans.
But I think animal rights is an interesting angle to talk about this issue of abortion, because the more and more we're learning about the brain, the more we're learning about sentience and consciousness...
The more we can apply that to human beings as well.
In the short term what that means is you should never take seriously these left-wing arguments about animal rights if those people are not also pro-life.
I don't think that being pro-life means that you have to become a vegan.
Far from that.
But certainly it is the case that if you are a vegan you have to be pro-life.
Because the kind of Ethics, bioethics that surround veganism are so much more narrow that you've absolutely got to apply that.
They're so much more rigid that you've absolutely got to apply that to human beings.
Because otherwise it looks ridiculous.
Think about how ridiculous you have to be to shed tears like Joaquin Phoenix over the milk or to shed tears over a fish.
Which, by the way, the science is very inconclusive that fish can feel any sort of pain.
But let's even say that it's true.
Think about how crazy and absurd you've got to look to shed tears over a little flounder.
But to be perfectly fine, just chopping up a baby doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
We've got to get to the dumbest article on the internet today.
This is about the CIA, care of the New York Times.
And this is so funny.
I mean, this is really just the leftist tears article of the day.
The left is now defending the CIA. For the vast majority of the history of the CIA, the left has been calling for it to be abolished.
President Trump is in charge, and he's appointed a new acting director of national intelligence, so a new acting top spy who is a very impressive person, Richard Grinnell.
He was the ambassador to Germany, the longest-serving spokesman at the UN. He's got a great record, and there's been some suggestion that Grinnell is going to weed out some bad actors in the intelligence community.
The left is furious.
Here it is from Jane Harmon in the New York Times.
She is a former Democratic congressman.
She said, I helped create the nation's top spy job.
It's about to be destroyed.
There's a lot of blah, blah, blah.
Then it gets to the money line.
While our intelligence community is the most impressive in the world, we can't see and know everything.
We'll signal to them that new management is coming and current relationships aren't useful any longer.
Allied services also won't trust us if our own officers face constant pressure to politicize intelligence.
A so-called house clearing could damage our intelligence abilities for at least a generation.
Recruitment and retention will, of course, plummet, Jane Harmon, a Democrat representing California in the Congress.
Where to begin?
The issue of politicizing intelligence is crazy.
The intelligence apparatus serves in our political system.
It's intrinsically politicized.
But what she's really saying is, we should not allow the people The intelligence apparatus, the deep state or part of it, should operate without any accountability to the people whatsoever.
Because we might miss out on some clues if we have any oversight whatsoever.
Now, to be clear, there's no evidence that Richard Grinnell or Donald Trump or anybody else is going to gut the intelligence apparatus.
They're just going to fire some bad guys if the guys are shown to be bad.
And we've seen that there have been some shenanigans up in the intelligence community in recent years.
That's all.
And even the suggestion that they would fire the worst employees, the most corrupt employees, that creates all this pushback.
This is the deep state.
This is what the Democrats want.
You know, there is such an irony here because the Democrats say that they want this sort of democratic ideal where the majority rules and we've got power to the people.
But in practice, that's not what they want.
In practice, what they want to do is take rights away from people.
And when they get into power, install a bunch of technocratic experts who know how to run your life better than you know how to run your life and who are sitting on panels and boards and agencies that have no accountability whatsoever.
That's the democratic ideal.
And if the left wins this election, you're going to see that hardened.
You're going to see it harder to take away.
The fact that now the intelligence community, which is not that old, it's an invention of the last hundred years, that we can't even fire bad people within it.
And that when you try to do it, even the left, which has pretended for years that they hate the intelligence community, are the ones defending them.
That tells you that Ronald Reagan was right when he said that a federal job, a federal agency, is the nearest thing to eternal life on Earth.
We've got to be very, very careful about that.
Because if the left wins in this year's elections, you're going to see that hard, and it's going to be even more difficult to fire those bad people.
Last question before we go.
From TZ. Who is in that picture on the shelf?
Some bearded guy?
You know, I have absolutely no idea who that is.
It seems like so long ago.
I think I know that person, but I can't quite place him.
That does bring us, though, to...
A quick thank you that I have to make because today is our 500th episode, which is an absolutely shocking number, mostly shocking to Ben, who was hoping that he would be able to can us somewhere around episode 12, but it's also shocking to me, and I just want to take a moment to thank everyone for listening.
The show has grown an order of magnitude and many multiples in size since our early episodes, and it is because of all of you who tune in and post it around the internet and send it around to your friends.
When we started, I was but a wee blank book author.
And thanks to all of you who have listened in, we've been able to launch so many new projects.
The YAF Campus Tours, Three Seasons of Another Kingdom, The Book Club Show at PragerU, and obviously most recently, Verdict with Ted Cruz, which incredibly rose to become the number one podcast on the charts for two weeks.
And I'm actually flying out this afternoon to D.C. to start filming that again.
The senator and I are going to be doing a live show at CPAC this year, so if you're in Washington, I hope you will come out.
And if I don't see you there, then I'll look forward to meeting you around the country on the YAF tour, which is going to kick off in about a week or so.
And if I miss you there, too, where are you?
Where do you live?
I will at least look forward to hearing from you in the mailbag.
So get those questions in.
The mailbag will be on Thursday.
Thank you again for these first 500 episodes, and I look forward to 500 more.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies and directed by Mike Joyner.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Harvey Weinstein is going to jail, but the creepy left-wing culture that created him is still on the loose and running for president.
