While police departments around the country are springing child rapists from the slammer, law enforcement is turning a decidedly less lenient eye on another group of miscreants: Christian pastors. We will examine why preachers are getting arrested while the criminals run free. Then, everyone from politicians to grocery store workers are jumping to take advantage of this pandemic. We’ll take a look at ethics in times of plague. Finally, Joe Biden—remember him?—launches a podcast, and much like the entire mainstream media, he refuses to mention the #MeToo allegation against him.
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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While police departments around the country are springing child rapists from the slammer, law enforcement is turning a decidedly less lenient eye on another group of miscreants, Christian pastors.
We will examine why preachers are getting arrested while the criminals run free.
Then everyone from politicians to grocery store workers are jumping to take advantage of this pandemic.
We'll take a look at ethics in times of plague.
Finally, Joe Biden.
Remember him?
He's running for president.
He just launched a podcast.
And much like the entire mainstream media, he refuses to mention the Me Too allegations against him.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show.
You know, this pandemic has done pretty strange things to our criminal justice system or our criminal injustice system, if you prefer.
We talked yesterday about New York letting child rapists out of jail because they think that's going to slow the spread of the virus for some reason.
They let 50 criminals out of a jail in New York and of them, eight or nine were sex offenders.
And of them, three were child sex offenders who were rated level three, the most likely to reoffend.
And coincidentally, the least likely to respect social distancing.
So they let them out of jail.
That was a little strange.
Didn't make a lot of sense.
You remember we talked now, probably weeks ago, about Philly not arresting criminals anymore.
So Philadelphia, if you commit burglary, vandalism, if you're a pimp, if you're a fraudster, if you steal a car, if you do any of these things, you will not be arrested, even if the officer sees you in the act.
He won't arrest you in Philadelphia right now.
So that's pretty strange.
Seems a little bit backwards.
Now, there's a federal judge who's getting in on the jailbreak.
This is being reported by BuzzFeed News.
U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III is mandating the immediate release of 10 illegal aliens currently in ICE custody.
So now you can add to the list child rapists, vandals, burglars, car thieves, fraudsters, pimps, and now illegal aliens.
They get to roam free, but you, in the general public, have to lock yourself up in your home.
That's weird enough.
It gets even worse.
The question of what to do with the illegal immigrants and foreign nationals who are currently in the country and who are currently detained by ICE is a strange one.
So this guy, Johnny Jones III, he was appointed by George W. Bush.
So he was appointed by a Republican president, but don't forget, George W. Bush was in favor of amnesty and legalization of illegal aliens as just about anybody.
This judge said it would be barbaric to keep these 10 illegal aliens in custody during the pandemic.
Why?
Because they've got chronic conditions.
So they've got underlying health conditions, and if the coronavirus should make it to these jails, then there's a chance that they would suffer consequences from that.
Again, it's not even the case that it would be likely that they would die from it or that they would be seriously affected.
But there's a better chance than among the general population.
So better to release the illegal aliens into the general public.
This does raise a question for most of us who are maybe a little bit more reasonable than U.S. federal judges.
Why don't we release them back into their own countries?
They are foreign nationals.
They broke our laws and are here illegally.
We caught them doing it.
It is against the law.
We have them in custody.
Why don't we release them back to the place where the law says we're supposed to send them?
Their own countries.
Why do we release them here?
Why do we permit them and encourage them to continue breaking the law here during a pandemic?
Doesn't make a lot of sense.
We're all quarantining ourselves because walls work, because we're supposed to socially distance.
Well, how about we socially distance from the foreign nationals who break our laws?
That's a great question.
Thank you, Michael.
We'll get into why that is and how actually the criminal justice system is even more perverse during this pandemic.
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I wish that this were an April Fool's joke.
The springing the criminals in New York, springing the criminals in Philly, springing the illegal aliens on the federal level.
I wish that were an April Fool's joke, but it is not.
And it raises a question.
We're going to release these 10 illegal aliens because they have underlying health conditions, and therefore they have a statistically higher chance of being negatively affected if coronavirus enters that area.
Jail, which again, no evidence that it has or even that it will.
In New York, when they released those criminals, there was no evidence that anyone in the jail actually had coronavirus.
But it raises this question.
There are 38,000 illegal aliens currently being detained by ICE. What do we do with them?
Ten, okay, that's a good start.
But presumably more than ten of them have some health conditions, right?
We're just going to let all of them out into the general public?
Why can't ICE be permitted to do its job and return foreign nationals to the countries that they are citizens of?
There's a real irony here that while we're all being told to hunker down in our homes and we can't leave and we can only go out for essential activities, we can barely make it to the supermarket without a cop looking at you funny...
While we're all being told to do that, criminals all around the country are being sprung from their jail cells.
This seems a little bit backwards, but the police are not going easy on everybody.
Okay, they're going to light on the child rapists and everybody else.
But there is one group that the police are not going easy on, and that would be Christian pastors.
Yes, that nefarious cabal of Christian pastors.
The cops are clamping down hard on them.
In Florida, Tampa police officers just arrested megachurch pastor Rodney Howard Brown.
That was on Monday, because he refused to close his church doors the day prior.
They charged Pastor Howard Brown with unlawful assembly and violating public health emergency rules.
So, unlike the child rapists, they decided they were going to take in Pastor Howard Brown.
Now, luckily, like the child rapists, they allowed this pastor to leave eventually.
But unlike the child rapists, again, they forced this guy to pay a $500 bond.
So, if you are a Christian pastor holding a church service, you'll be arrested.
You have to post bond.
If in certain areas of New York you rape a child, no big deal.
They'll let you go to the Holiday Inn.
They actually sent these people to the Holiday Inn.
Not just Florida that's doing this.
Louisiana.
Police in central Louisiana arrested another pastor, Tony Spell, of Life Tabernacle Church.
It was the same crime.
Pastor Spell had the audacity to hold church services.
And they issued him a misdemeanor summons for six counts.
Six counts being the number of times that he has held church services since the Democratic governor of that state ordered him not to.
Now, the act of it is outrageous enough, but the craziest part of this story is the hysteria with which the police chief has responded.
Central Police Chief Roger Corcoran says that he coordinated, quote, with the sheriff, state police, state fire marshal, and others to nab this Christian pastor.
It's a wonder that he didn't call in the National Guard.
He could have called in Interpol to try to track down this pastor who told everyone exactly where he was preaching and what he was doing for that horrible crime of spreading the gospel.
The police chief said Mr.
Spell will have his day in court where he will be held responsible for his reckless and irresponsible decisions that endanger the health of his congregation and our community.
That's how he fumed.
He was furious.
But they got him.
They got their man.
This has gone too far.
Public health crises, public crises in general, but specifically the ones that regard health and questions of life and death, offer demagogues a lot of opportunity to steal more power for themselves.
That's just how it works.
Andrew Cuomo said, if what we have done saves even one life, then it was all worth it.
Of course, that line didn't make any sense because if shutting down the global economy saves one life from coronavirus, how many lives is it going to end from suicide, despair, opioid overdose, not being able to access normal services that you're going to access?
How many lives?
How could you even make that calculation?
But Cuomo's line makes a lot of sense if you're a politician.
If everything we've done saves just one life, then it was worth it.
Yeah, of course it is, because it's a win-win for the politician.
If he saves one life, that's a good thing.
Even if he doesn't save any lives, he will leave this crisis more powerful than he started it.
That's true of all the politicians here.
They have so much more power now.
They have so much power that they are just flaunting it.
When you are releasing child rapists and arresting Christian pastors, you are flaunting your power.
You know, there's a rule in medicine and in politics.
We've talked about it the last few days.
You don't want the cure to be worse than the disease.
When child rapists are walking free and pastors are behind bars, the cure is officially worse than the disease.
That cannot go on.
Lots of demagogues here trying to take advantage of this virus.
And because they all do it in the name of public health, then we let them get away with it.
We don't even question.
But there are a lot of people trying to take advantage.
I'll give you an example.
In Washington, Ilhan Omar.
Bernie Sanders, AOC, they've now signed a letter they are calling for an end to American sanctions on Iran.
Iran, the largest state sponsor of terror in the world, have killed many of our soldiers over the last couple of decades and even before that.
We have sanctions on them.
They're a terrorist regime.
They are not abiding by the rules that we've all agreed to in the international community.
They got one foot in the international community, one foot out of it.
So we have sanctions on them.
And these guys, Ilhan Omar, Bernie, and AOC, are apologists for the Mueller regime.
They love Iran.
They want to normalize relations with Iran.
So they're calling for an end to sanctions.
What does American foreign policy in Iran, dating back to the 1970s, have to do with coronavirus?
The only thing it has to do with it is that people in Iran also have coronavirus.
And that's very sad when the Iranian people have coronavirus.
Some people in the regime have coronavirus too.
That's a lot less sad.
If we're talking about problems and solutions, that's a little bit of a tougher calculation to make.
But these three demagogues are jumping on this.
They're saying, oh, the mullahs are getting coronavirus.
We need to forgive them for killing American soldiers for decades and just let them have a lot of money, send them pallets of cash, give them the nuclear bomb.
I don't know what.
I don't know.
They're not calling for that right now.
They're just calling for the lifting of sanctions.
It has nothing to do with it.
You know, we saw this with Nancy Pelosi held up the coronavirus relief bill because she said we needed to stop the airlines from polluting as much.
What the hell does that have to do with coronavirus?
Nothing.
But it gives them a good opportunity to amass more power for themselves.
The Kennedy Center, speaking of Nancy Pelosi, she shoved this bit of pork into the coronavirus relief bill.
Kennedy Center got millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars, a $25 million bailout from the relief package.
And the whole idea was we've got to bail out the Kennedy Center so that they don't fire their musicians.
So what did the Kennedy Center do hours after they got their money in the stimulus bill?
You can probably guess.
They fired their musicians.
Hours later.
That's taking advantage of the crisis.
That's deceiving the American people.
That's getting all that money so they can throw more fancy parties but firing musicians because they don't need them right now.
They're not holding public performances.
Well, that's fine.
We don't need to give them $25 million either.
And there are people now in Washington who are trying to retroactively go back and take that money away from them.
But it's actually not even just our political and cultural elite that are getting in on the opportunism.
I didn't expect to be saying this, but even Whole Foods workers are trying to take advantage of the pandemic.
Whole Foods, the grocery store.
It's like the fancy grocery store.
Whole Foods workers are going on strike.
They're not even really going on strike.
It's not like a formal strike.
They're going on a sick out.
They're all calling in sick.
And not all.
I'm sure some people are still showing up to work.
But that's what's happening right now as a matter of the labor movement at Whole Foods.
What do they want?
They want protective gear to take care of their health and the epidemic.
And they want a pay raise.
A significant pay raise.
They want double their pay.
Now, part of this is reasonable.
Part of this is unreasonable.
Having protective masks when you're one of the few businesses that's still open, yeah, I guess that's reasonable.
Totally fair.
Whole Foods workers should be able to get as many masks as they want, just like all the grocery store workers, because grocery store workers have been pretty heroic here.
They're one of the few industries...
That has to show up for work, that's working with this kind of craziness and panic and long lines to get in and everyone's buying the toilet paper and they're out there so they're risking more exposure to the virus.
So I'm immensely grateful to them.
You know, after healthcare workers, they're probably the most overworked and undervalued people in this whole pandemic.
But that does not give them the right to take advantage of this crisis right now.
First of all, we're looking at something like 5 to 6 million Americans who could be unemployed within a week.
Insane numbers, unprecedented numbers of Americans unemployed.
So if you have the opportunity to work right now, you should be grateful for it.
I don't want to sound callous and cold, but you should.
A lot of people are losing their jobs.
A lot of people would love the opportunity to work right now.
Even the people who do have their jobs are taking pay cuts.
Virtually everybody I know who is still working has taken a pay cut.
And some people have just been laid off altogether.
So if you have the opportunity to work and to keep all your pay, you're doing very well, okay?
Like, thank you, you're doing a good job.
Also, you should be grateful for that opportunity.
Now is not the time for workers in any industry to be haggling for a raise, especially a raise of 100%.
Because you could make the argument, well, look, there are just...
Worry that they might get sick.
Sure, yeah, if they're going to get sick, then they should be able to get the masks, which they're getting, which they should be getting at least.
I think they're getting them.
They should be able to get workers' comp.
They can get that.
If they're unable to work and the workers' comp has run out, they should be able to get a good unemployment benefit.
Well, they can.
We know that we just got a huge stimulus package through, gave people a $600 raise anyway, so in many places you can make more money on unemployment than you could make before unemployment.
You get a lot of things, right?
We've actually done a fairly decent job at the federal level of taking care of workers in all of this.
But the fear here doesn't just seem to be about health.
The fear here seems to be, it's not even a fear, it's just an opportunity to make more money.
But while every other American is sacrificing and losing their money, that's not the time to do it.
It raises a question, what should Whole Foods do with these employees?
And one example that comes to mind is the old gipper, Ronald Reagan, who back in the 1980s, in a different circumstance, he had federal workers, the air traffic controllers, who went on strike.
This was in violation of the law, so it's different than the grocery workers who are not violating the law.
But it was in violation of the law, and people just expected Reagan to totally give in, give in to whatever demands they had, and instead, he fired them all.
But I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning, they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.
End of statement.
Why not some lesser activities?
What lesser action can there be?
The law is very explicit.
They are violating the law.
I love Reagan.
I just love, what lesser action can there be?
I'm going to fire them and they better show up to work.
Dagnabbit.
So, obviously this is not a perfect analogy here because the air traffic controllers...
We're federal employees.
They were not permitted to strike.
It was against the law.
And Reagan did absolutely what he should have done and fired them.
In the case of the grocery store workers, that is not the case.
They have every right to strike.
However, they might remember that we are in the midst of an unprecedented national and global crisis.
And looking back on this, I don't think that they're going to I don't think they're going to want to be remembered for squeezing an extra $10 or $15 or whatever, you know, based on the local regulations in different cities.
I don't think they're going to want to be remembered for squeezing a few extra dollars out of their employer during this epidemic.
I think they'll probably want to be remembered for solidarity and showing up to work and helping people out.
And if you want to do that, then...
Trying to squeeze a few extra bucks is not exactly a great look.
Now, it's not only them.
It's not only Whole Foods.
It's not only AOC. It's not only the Kennedy Center.
It's not only even elected Democrats who are trying to seize opportunity from this crisis.
Republicans can occasionally do that too.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
President Trump showed us that yesterday.
Yesterday's press conference was probably the most information-packed press conference that we have gotten in a number of days.
You know, I watch them every single day beginning to end, in part because they're extremely entertaining.
I assume at this point Jim Acosta is just on the payroll because he's giving so many opportunities for Trump to just dunk on the press and it's very enjoyable to watch.
But Sometimes they're more informative than others.
Yesterday was one of those times.
There was a lot of new information here about the pandemic, about the government response to the pandemic, and even about a plan for what happens to get us out of this biological and economic crisis.
Part of that is something that President Trump used to talk about a lot, then he stopped talking about it for a couple years.
Now it's back on the table, and that is a massive infrastructure bill.
We're anticipating that, like after the economic crisis of 2008-2009, America will need to have so-called shovel-ready jobs ready to go to get people back to work.
Well, the problem with that one is they had Maybe shovel-ready jobs, maybe not, but they never used it for the purpose of infrastructure.
So far, nobody's been able to find any money that was spent on infrastructure.
I want to use it for infrastructure.
And one of the reasons I'm suggesting it, John, is we're paying zero interest.
The United States is paying almost zero interest rate.
The Federal Reserve lowered the rate, the Fed rate.
And that and a combination of the fact that everybody wants to be in the United States.
You know, we have a dollar that's very strong, and I know that sounds good, but it does make it hard to manufacture and sell outside because other currencies are falling, and our currency is very strong.
It's very, very strong.
Proportionately, it's through the roof.
So we have a strong dollar.
People want to invest in the United States, especially nowadays where they're looking at safety.
They have all of the problems, plus the virus at 151 countries.
They all want to come into the United States.
And so we have a zero interest rate, essentially.
And I said, wouldn't this be a great time to borrow money at zero interest rate and really build our infrastructure like we can do it?
I'm having deja vu all over again here.
This is starting to look very similar to what happened after the financial crisis in 2008.
I mean, just look at the analogy.
After the financial crisis, we saw first the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, to stabilize the economy, to stabilize the industries that were really affected, and get the system working again.
Then you had the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Also known as the stimulus bill.
That came later, and that was to give us shovel-ready jobs and to get people working again to address unemployment.
Here, you're seeing a similar thing.
You have first the relief bills that went into effect just a week or two ago.
Massive $2.1 trillion that they levered up to be about $6 trillion.
Now you're hearing about addressing unemployment.
Now, the thing to keep in mind here is while they look very similar, you can see the same structure and same process, they really are different situations.
Why are they different?
Well, the last relief package is different than TARP because TARP was addressing industries that had their own internal problems.
TARP was bailing out people who acted inappropriately.
TARP was bailing out financial institutions that in many ways dug their own grave.
That's why people hated TARP so much.
In the case of the last coronavirus stimulus bill, that's not what happened.
The people who were given relief, restaurant workers, small businesses, they didn't do anything wrong.
They were told by the government to shut down, not shut down the global economy.
And so they needed some relief for that.
Those are different.
In the same way here, and Trump is making this argument, an infrastructure bill is fundamentally different from the bailout under Barack Obama.
How is it different?
The bailout under Barack Obama, the shovel ready jobs, weren't so shovel ready.
They didn't work.
They didn't actually bring down the unemployment rate because they went to a bunch of nonsense.
It was a lot of cronyism in there.
It was a lot of fat that didn't actually end up employing people.
A real infrastructure bill, if we could ever manage to get that, would not be quite the same.
Why?
Because if you're making a stimulus bill and you decide, okay, I've got a billion dollars to play with, let's just pick a number at random, a billion dollars to play with, and you put all that, every single penny of that billion dollars into employing people, and the way you're going to employ people is you're going to give them all little sporks, little plastic sporks, and tell them to dig holes in the ground and shovel dirt from here to here.
Right?
And you're not doing anything actually productive.
You're just kind of keeping people occupied.
That's really no different than a handout.
Right?
That's really no different than just writing people a check.
They're not doing any actually productive work, and that's not going to have a great effect on the economy.
Whereas, if you were to take that same amount of money, put it into an infrastructure bill, That actually went to infrastructure that we need.
You would help the economy because we do have crumbling infrastructure in the United States.
This has been a problem now for decades.
Crumbling roads, crumbling bridges, just a shoddy infrastructure system that needs an update.
So, if we could manage to take all of that money and employ people in actually productive work to fix all of these things, to make our business run more efficiently, I'm not so sure.
year.
We'll have to wait and see.
But regardless of how it actually would turn out, it shows us that Trump is craftier than a lot of people give him credit for and certainly craftier than a lot of Republicans because Trump is taking democratic political advice on this infrastructure bill.
He's not letting a crisis go to waste.
We'll get to how that is.
We'll get to the other important information that came out of this press conference.
We'll get to so much more.
Remember Joe Biden?
I barely even...
Who is that guy?
Joe, he's running for president because there's a presidential election.
That's right.
I had forgotten.
Well, there's some big no's.
Big no's?
Big no's?
Big no's on Joe Biden.
That is coming up.
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It's not even really a show.
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Trump is taking the democratic political advice here and not letting a crisis go to waste.
That's a very good thing because while the left is doing it to release criminals, which they always want to do, while the left is using it to let illegal aliens run free, which they always want to do, while the left is doing it to stuff a bunch of environmentalist proposals into stimulus packages or try to lift sanctions on Iran or try to fill the pockets of the people at the Kennedy Center while they lay off workers or whatever,
Trump is using it to get a bill that he's wanted for a long time that actually would be productive for America if it were properly implemented.
And that is infrastructure.
I encourage him.
I mean, that's great.
If everybody else is taking advantage, then the right cannot unilaterally disarm.
Though, ideally, we would reduce the opportunities for people to take advantage of this crisis by default.
Phasing it out.
I'm trying to think of the most diplomatic way to put this.
Phasing it out.
It would seem to be that in many different sectors we're getting to the place where the cure is worse than the disease.
So it's time to start gearing up again.
Now, President Trump doesn't want to gear back up too quickly.
He explains why in the press conference.
His main purpose of this press conference was to prepare Americans for a terrible two weeks.
I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead.
We're going to go through a very tough two weeks.
And then hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting after having studied it so hard, we're going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel.
But this is going to be a very painful, very, very painful two weeks.
When you look and see at night The kind of death that's been caused by this invisible enemy, it's incredible.
I was watching last night Governor Murphy of New Jersey say 29 people died today, meaning yesterday, and others talking about numbers far greater.
But you get to know a state, I know New Jersey so well, and you get 29 people and hundreds in other locations, hundreds in other states.
And this is going to be a rough two-week period.
So there's a lot of conflicting information here.
Trump is saying it's going to be a rough two weeks.
So two weeks is the time we've got to focus on.
But then we're also hearing it's going to be another full month of lockdown.
But then we're also hearing from other people it could be more than a month.
We're even hearing this from Dr.
Fauci would seem to be implying this.
So why all of the confusion here?
Fauci actually explains why.
Part of the Difficulty here is that deaths lag the illness.
So, you know, the illness spreads, but people don't just die immediately.
The people who are going to die get sick, the symptoms worsen, they go to the hospital, and eventually they die.
So you could get into a situation where the pandemic is actually getting much, much better, even though the death numbers are increasing.
The deaths and the intensive care and the hospitalization always lag behind that early indication that there are less new cases per day.
The way we saw in Italy and the way we're likely seeing, I don't want to jump the gun on it, we're seeing little inklings of this right now in New York.
So what we're going to see, and that's we've got to brace ourselves, in the next several days to a week or so, we're going to continue to see things go up.
We cannot be discouraged by that because the mitigation is actually working and will work.
The slide that Dr.
Berg showed, where you saw New York and New Jersey, and then the cluster of other areas, our goal, which I believe we can accomplish, is to get the hotspot places, the New Yorks, the New Jersey, and help them to get around that curve, but as importantly, to prevent those clusters of areas that have not yet gone to that spike, to prevent them from getting that spike.
Okay, so that makes perfect sense.
But the question then becomes, they're talking about mitigation.
What is full mitigation?
The question on everybody's mind, as we're considering as the disease, is the cure worse than the disease, is when does this end?
Because it's got a real long tail on it.
What is full mitigation?
Do we get to...
There's going to be a bad two weeks.
Do we get to stop after two weeks?
No.
The president's saying we've got to stop.
We've got to go another two weeks after that.
But you're still going to have deaths at that point.
Are we going to just reopen on April 30th?
Or is it going to be another two weeks?
And another two weeks?
What Dr.
Fauci points out is it all relies on the models, but the models are not necessarily reliable.
100,000 is the number with full mitigation.
How do you push it lower?
We'll go together.
We've been at this a long time.
You go first.
John, it's an obvious, very good question.
If this is full mitigation and it's 100,000, why am I standing here saying, I want to make it better?
Because that's what the model tells you it's going to do.
What we do is that every time we get more data, you feed it back in and re-look at the model.
Is the model really telling you what's actually going on?
And again, I know my modeling colleagues are going to not be happy with me.
But models are as good as the assumptions you put into them.
And as we get more data, then you put it in, and that might change.
So even though it says, according to the model, which is a good model that we're dealing with, this is full mitigation.
As we get more data, as the weeks go by, that could be modified.
Now, I really like, actually, what Dr.
Fauci said here because the short version of his answer is, yeah, we don't know.
I don't know.
How are we supposed to know?
But within that answer, what he's saying is, we're just working on models, and the models are as good as the data that you're putting in, and the data we have right now aren't very good.
That's how models work.
They predict, they project into the future, but you can't know the future.
So very often you see this with global warming.
Global warming models have very often been wrong because they take a little bit of data and they extrapolate that data to look 50, 100 years into the future.
But if you get it just slightly off at the beginning, you end up with wild results at the end.
So they say, well, what does full mitigation look like?
I don't know, says Dr.
Fauci.
What data do you have?
It's changing every single day.
So I think what the reporter is getting at here is you've got full mitigation, you're going full steam ahead.
How low can we get that number?
And crucially, once we stop the mitigation efforts, is the number just going to jump right back up again?
Is there going to be a second wave?
To talk about second wave, I think you're really talking about two different things that are a little bit different.
So, for example, after the 30 days, if we get the mitigation that we hope will get us to the suppression that Dr.
Birx was talking about, There's a danger, if we don't continue to maintain that, that will we have a resurgence right within the current outbreak.
That's sort of a second wave, but it really is an exacerbation of the current wave.
So, what do we mean by maintain that after the 30 days?
See, it was hidden in there, and people aren't talking about this as much, but initially we told 15 days to stop the spread.
And we're told it's another 30 days to stop the spread.
So now we're at 45 days to stop the spread.
That's 3x what the federal government told us initially.
Now we're being told if we don't maintain that after the 30 days or 45 days total, then we could see a second wave.
So are we going to be expected to lock down after this new 30 days?
That seems to be what Dr.
Fauci is employing.
Man, I sound like Joe Biden these days.
We'll get to Joe Biden in a second.
It is going to have a major effect on how and how many people employers are employing.
At this point, I'm feeling fairly pessimistic about this whole thing, right?
It's not sounding great.
It's sounding like it's going to be a tough two weeks.
We're going to have to go through April 30th of a shutdown.
Then maybe we'll have to go even after that.
Maybe there's going to be a second wave.
And of course, in my pessimism, in my despair, Jim Acosta swoops in to make it even worse.
Is there any fairness to the criticism that you may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security when you were saying things like it's going to go away?
Well, it is.
And that sort of thing.
But, Jim, it's going away.
It's going to go away.
Hopefully at the end of the month.
And if not, hopefully we'll be soon after that.
Has your thinking on this evolved?
You're taking it more seriously now?
I think from the beginning, my attitude was that we have to give this country...
I know how bad it was.
All you have to do is look at what was going on in China.
It was devastation.
Look at the numbers from China, those initial numbers coming out from China.
But, you know, I read an article today, which was very interesting, They say we wish President Trump would give more bad news.
Give bad news.
I'm not about bad news.
I want to give people hope.
I want to give people a feeling that we all have a chance.
Of course this is the right attitude.
I mean, what a dumb question from Acosta.
He's asking the same question that other reporters have been badgering Trump about for weeks, which is, are you giving people a false sense of hope?
And by the way, the real question underlying that is, hey, are you a liar?
Why are you such a liar?
And you're telling people lies.
And you're saying it's going to be okay when actually it's going to be terrible and there's going to be death and destruction all around us.
You're a liar.
A bad question.
It's Jim Acosta.
What do you expect?
And Trump gave a good answer.
He goes, look, I'm a bad hope.
We're going to get through this.
This is the one thing that actually does give me some political hope in all of this is...
Trump has been good so far.
He's got a good track record.
He's handled this crisis admirably.
It's a very difficult situation he's been put in.
So that does give me a little political hope.
I don't ground my hope ultimately in politics, but in so much as there is political hope, that gives me some.
But it's going to be a tough two weeks and that's just a fact of life and we're all going to have to deal with it and hopefully it won't be a tough month or month and a half or two months.
Remember Joe Biden?
Joe Biden, who was he?
He was the guy, he's this guy who gives the shoulder massages, I think, right?
Yeah, that's him.
Well, nobody's talking about that one.
Joe Biden, still running for president.
I guess there's still a presidential election, even no one's talking about him.
Joe Biden is launching a podcast, and this is really brilliant.
Charlie Kirk, my friend, who actually I just sat down and had a long discussion with, and we'll play a little clip of that, and then the full thing will be out on Friday.
Charlie Kirk just tweeted this out, though.
It's a pretty interesting observation.
He goes, it's been six days since allegations of sexual assault came out against Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee.
How many stories have the mainstream media run on this?
Do you want to venture a guess?
You're right.
The guess you're thinking of, you're right.
Washington Post, zero.
New York Times, zero.
CNN, zero.
MSNBC, zero.
Do you remember Justice Kavanaugh?
Do you remember Christine Blasey Ford?
Do you remember Michael Avenatti?
He got a whole career peddling that trash.
All baseless allegations, and the mainstream media ran with it 24-7.
Now you've got what very likely is another baseless allegation, but it's far more credible than the Kavanaugh allegations, against Joe Biden, and the mainstream media refused to say a single word about it.
So Joe Biden is releasing a podcast now.
He doesn't even have to worry about the mainstream media going after him, but he still can't handle that because he can't remember his own name.
So even friendly interviews go very, very poorly for Joe Biden.
He can't allow himself into that venue as much anymore.
So he's launching a podcast.
This is the perfect venue for Joe Biden.
Take a little listen to the intro.
Hey, Team Biden, it's Joe, and I'm sitting here in Wilmington, Delaware.
It's a scary time.
A lot of people out there are confused.
Things are changing every day, every hour.
So I wanted to have this conversation with you now, if we could.
Why am I doing this?
Well, first, so we can keep talking with each other.
We can't hold rallies anymore, but we're not gathering in large public spaces.
We're living in the new normal.
But I want you to know that I'm with you, I'm on your side, and We're going to get through this together as a country.
And the second reason is I think this podcast could offer some really helpful information.
I've seen these kinds of crises before, and I've sat in the Situation Room in the Oval Office, and we've grappled with crises from Ebola outbreak to the Iran nuclear deal to the auto industry rescue.
And during that time, I've been able to work with some pretty accomplished experts.
Wow, he seems so much more put together on that highly produced podcast that he himself is releasing than he does in the debates or at his rallies or on television.
Wow, so strange.
What a coincidence.
The reason this is a great medium for Joe Biden is because Joe Biden has never had message discipline, has never had very much political self-control.
But especially now that he's kind of losing his marbles, he's got even less of it.
So you can control the medium and control the message in podcasting.
That's why it's good for him.
The thing that they're taking too far here is that they're trying to make him sound too good.
So you can hear, they've sped him up.
They recorded whatever they were going to record and then they just sped it up probably to 1.1 or maybe even a little bit higher than that.
So it's moving faster than he has ever talked in public.
The other thing is they're taking out all the breaks.
So all the stumbles, all the times he gets things wrong, but even all the times that he breathes.
So the thing is just running so fast, there's no air in it.
It's very clear that this was highly produced.
That might come back to bite Joe Biden because it's like the same reason actors mess up their headshots, you know, very often actors, let's say it's a totally bland, mediocre looking actor.
They'll have a headshot that's so photoshopped that the person looks like a supermodel and that's fine.
Maybe that gets you the audition, but then you show the headshot and they say, wait a second, that's not you.
I don't, you don't look like that picture.
Well, it's the same thing with this podcast.
Joe Biden, they're, they're making him seem so much quicker, so much sharper, so much faster that when you hear that, not that anyone's going to listen to the show, but if people did listen to the show, when you hear that and then you compare that to Joe Biden in real life, you're going to say, wait a second, this isn't the same person.
So they've got to be very careful with this, but the Biden campaign's not careful, so it's probably not going to happen.
I mentioned that I sat down with my friend Charlie Kirk while we were both in quarantine.
We did this for his podcast and it's released there on audio.
We're going to release it on video, though, on Friday.
So stay tuned for that.
And here is just a short clip from our discussion.
Because, you know, Charlie and I, we love to debate different aspects of politics.
Somehow we're both on the same side.
We're both on the same team.
We do events together all the time.
And yet we manage to disagree about a lot of different subjects.
And one of them is the nature of political coalitions and where the right is moving into the future.
Here's just a little bit of that discussion.
I guess the question is, is the left trying to loop us all together because they don't know better?
Or they know better and they're doing it intentionally so they can just have leftist domination?
basically?
You know, I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, because it surely is convenient and helpful to them to lump us in.
You know, everybody to the right of Hillary Clinton is Hitler, and it makes them easier to shut us up.
So there's a real convenience to it.
But I do also think, in the left's defense, that they simply don't know what we believe.
You know, there was that study that came out a few years ago from John Haidt, which showed that while the right generally understands the left...
The left actually does not understand the right and just anecdotally, but don't forget the pearl of anecdote is data.
You talk to a lot of leftists and they actually don't know what you believe.
They actually don't understand the arguments that you're making.
So it's obviously a little bit of both, but I, I will give them credit for their ignorance.
I mean, look, I think, I think some leftists know better.
I think leftist followers don't.
And I think that the leaders do know better.
They know where the true hateful lines are drawn.
But they don't even police the evil in their own ranks.
In fact, they endorse and tolerate it.
I mean, Linda Sarsour, who's an anti-Semitic, anti-Western, she's a Jew-hater is what she is.
She's a Jew-hater.
She's an America-hater, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, exactly.
And then she just promoted to be, what, spokesman of the Comrade Sanders, the Make Bolsheviks Great Again breadline advocate campaign or whatever it is.
Oh, she would go to the Women's March and hold hands with Gloria Steinem, the great feminist.
What do the hijab and the pussy hat have in common?
Very little, except they are both opposed to our sort of traditional culture.
Yes, and the more you study the left, the more you fight the left like you brilliantly do.
You understand that the left is not, they're not united by truth and they're not united by values.
Because truth is not a left-wing value.
And they actually don't have values.
They're united by hatred.
That's all they have.
That's all the left has.
And so you can find, for example, you can find what is the most, you can find what people believe in, what their nearest and dearest values are based on what they build alliances around.
And so we as conservatives build alliances around truth and commonality and goodness and optimism and love of America, right?
But the left, they build alliances around hatred.
They, I mean, for example, you have Sarsu and Gloria Steinman, If you sat them in a room together and you said, what are the things that matter to you most?
Sarsour would probably say implementation of Sharia law, the abolition of Israel, and all sorts of crazy, you know, basic, you know, fundamentalist ideas.
Yeah.
Where Gloria Steinman would say free abortions on demand for every single woman, you know, always.
And basically...
And shout for abortion.
Right.
Precisely.
And so...
Those things are at odds.
And then you add into there the transgender stuff.
I mean, they're totally at odds with each other.
But what they have in common is that we're bad.
They have in common that the conservatives and the Americans and people that want to preserve the Western civilization, the geochristian ethic, they want to destroy us.
They want to silence us.
They're united by their hatred.
That's what drives the left.
Right.
Well, you know, though, I will say in a word of defense in the politics of opposition, you know, very often having a common foe does bring disparate groups together.
So, like, it's a strange thing, right, on the right, that there are people who are trad, Catholic, social conservative guys who wear suits and ties to church every Sunday.
And have like 15 kids and they're 25 years old.
I don't even know how that's possible.
And then there are also guys who are atheist, homosexual, libertarian, socially liberal, whatever.
And yet they do have a coherent coalition because the common foe right now for both of them is this woke leftist culture, which is trying to silence both of them.
I think the difference, though, Michael, and I anticipated that counterargument from you or for someone listening to this, I would say the difference, though, is that person that might be totally different than the Catholic-going Latin Mass ceremony attending like you, that wears a three-piece suit and recites the rosary backwards in original Aramaic or whatever.
I've got to work on my Aramaic, I guess.
Yeah, that was the language that Jesus spoke.
That's true.
The difference is that they actually have a love for America.
That's what really unites them.
If you go a level deeper, the left is the greatest threat to that love, though.
Yes, that's certainly true.
The left doesn't have the love for the country, and all they have is the hatred.
All they have is at the most elemental core of their alliances between the transgender deconstructionists and the Gloria Steinman feminists and the Linda Sarsour Islamic fundamentalists is that they actually don't have a commonality of what they want to exist.
The commonality between your somewhat accurate depiction that you have the atheist, you know, and the Catholic three piece going Latin mass ceremony attending individual like yourself Building a coalition is that if you actually break it down, they actually want an America that has markets and private property and constitutional rights.
And then they find agreement that the left is the greatest threat to those things.
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
And it's so much, you know, it's not just us Latin mass going Catholics here.
It's also evangelicals, evangelicals being the most reliably conservative voter base.
And I know you're doing a ton of work in that area with the Falkirk Center.
And what do you see moving forward?
I mean, do you think that we're going to have a kind of Christian resurgence in America?
We have to.
Fall apart.
We have to, and I have so much respect for my Catholic friends, and you know I'm always kidding when I say these things, and we have fun, and I actually do have some very serious Catholic theological questions at the end of this.
All right, lay them on me.
I'm ready.
I would love to have you answer and they're Corona related.
Will I convert Charlie Kirk to Catholicism?
Probably not, but you can listen and get the answer on Friday.
We'll release that whole exchange.
I think it was about an hour.
We cover coronavirus.
We cover the political coalitions.
We cover politics, culture and religion and everything in between.
And I always love talking to Charlie.
You know, we try to, that guy's on a plane every three minutes pretty much.
And so now that the quarantine has happened, he is forced to stay in one place.
It's the longest time he's stayed in one place, I think in about eight years.
So he called me up afterward and said, hey, I'm actually grounded somewhere for a while.
You want to do a show?
And so go check it out on Friday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies and directed by Mike Joyner.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental and that's what this show is about.
