A new study shows Americans are worried. But they’re not worried primarily about the coronavirus. They’re worried about something that poses a far more imminent risk to their lives and livelihoods. As the backlash against our national lockdowns begins to brew, the response from mayors and governors separates the politician wheat from the politician chaff. Then, Joe Biden gets a major endorsement now that there’s no other choice. And the New York Times goes into full damage control mode to cover for grab-happy Joe Biden.
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A new study shows Americans are worried, but they're not worried primarily about the coronavirus.
They're worried about something that poses a far more imminent risk to their lives and livelihoods.
As the backlash against our national lockdowns begins to brew, the response from mayors and governors separates the politician wheat from the politician chaff.
Then, Joe Biden gets a major endorsement now that there is no other choice.
And the New York Times goes into full damage control mode to cover for grab-happy Joe Biden.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
You know, I hate to say that I told you so.
I hate it.
I would never do it, okay?
But, you know, sometimes it might seem...
Like, I told you so.
I told you this from the beginning.
I told you from the very beginning of coronavirus that I thought this was being overhyped, that I thought this was alarmism, that I thought people were becoming hysterical and they shouldn't become hysterical because there's no reason to.
And people, mostly on the left of me, but some people also who are on the right, were furious with me.
There were people who genuinely believed that we were all going to die from this thing.
On both sides of the political aisle.
And that turned out not to be true.
The skeptics were right.
The alarmists were wrong.
We're seeing so much evidence of that all around the country at virtually every level of our society.
We will get to that.
The alarmists were wrong.
Really want to drive that home, because what you're going to be hearing a lot in the next several weeks and months, and frankly for years, because this is a world-historic event, we've never seen anything like this in the global economy, and the government's response to it, people are going to try to be justifying this for a long time.
Do not lose sight of the fact that the alarmists were dead wrong.
Now the backlash to that is beginning.
The backlash is beginning at the local level, state level, the governmental level, federal level.
It's beginning all over the place.
And just think about why that is.
Okay, just consider Florida and California.
Just consider these two places, right?
California was not hit hard, even though we were told by all of our people in California, the mayors, the governor, we were told that California was going to be like New York.
It was going to be like Italy.
It was going to be worse.
But the reason that it wasn't, the reason none of their predictions came true is because California closed down early.
Okay, that's what they were saying at least.
Closed down on March 19th.
Okay, well, Florida did not close down for weeks.
It didn't close down until two weeks later on April 3rd.
And Florida has 198 fewer deaths as of last night than California.
So I guess maybe it wasn't the lockdown.
Because on top of that, Florida didn't even shut down completely.
Florida had more exceptions than California did.
On top of that, Florida hosts spring break, where a bunch of teenagers show up and definitely do not social distance.
Definitely a very good way to spread the virus.
Florida, I mean, on a whole, has fewer deaths.
And even if you look at deaths per million people, Florida has only eight more deaths per million people than...
California.
Also, if you look at the relative age of the population, Florida, a lot older, okay?
And yet, they look basically the same.
Florida's doing pretty well.
If the lockdown is what accounts for the relatively low death rate, then Florida should be getting creamed right now.
And that's not what's happening, which backs up some studies that we've seen elsewhere.
We just talked about the one in Israel yesterday, which is showing that the lockdowns really don't do very much.
So, in the face of all of this, the politicians who called for the alarmism are trying to save face.
One way they're doing this is cooking the books.
So, in New York right now, we just saw, within the span of 24 hours, 3,700 new deaths added to the tally from coronavirus.
3,700 in one day?
Well, they didn't all die in one day, and actually, we'd have no evidence that they died of coronavirus.
They just added 3,700 new people to the tally who never tested positive for coronavirus, but who they think maybe had coronavirus.
So this brings the total tally up above 10,000.
3,700 out of 10,000, that's a lot of people, okay?
If you just consider how many people they added to the tally yesterday, they increased the tally by about 55 to 60 percent.
Huge numbers.
That boosted the nationwide total to 26,000.
Well, okay, I mean, if it's legitimate, that's fine, but where's the evidence?
I mean, if we just counted every single person who dies every day as a coronavirus death, that's 7,500 people per day.
So, we have to look a little bit more closely here.
There's a very big political incentive for the alarmists to try to pretend that they were not wrong.
for the alarmists to try to pretend that they didn't just destroy the economy for no reason.
However, the backlash is beginning.
We'll get to that in a second.
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They're still the alarmists.
They're still trying to say that everything they did was right, and really, frankly, it's going to get even worse.
So CNN sent out this tweet yesterday.
That's how you know you've got to take it with a grain of salt.
CNN sent out a tweet, quote, New study from Harvard researchers published today in the journal Science finds that prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022.
Yeah, okay.
Sure, whatever.
Reopen the country.
Oh, yeah, okay, no, you guys are super smart, definitely.
Yeah, we're going to have to social distance until 2075.
Yeah, okay, whatever, egghead.
Open the country up.
All right, you are wrong, and I don't care that you're trying to save face.
Move on, guys, okay?
People are getting the picture here, and the protests are cropping up all over the place.
As, by the way, I predicted on this very show, they would.
So there's a Facebook group in Michigan.
That is now trying to defy the governor's continued draconian stay-at-home order.
This is Michiganders against excessive quarantine.
And they got a whole number of new members.
They now are up to, I think, 300,000.
This is also happening in North Carolina and Ohio.
So last week in Ohio, dozens of protesters showed up.
They were carrying placards.
They were carrying signs.
One of the signs said, quarantine worse than the virus.
And there's a lot of hard evidence that people consider this to be the case.
They think that very likely the cure is worse than the disease.
A little bit more on that later, but outside of Ohio and North Carolina, North Carolina is my favorite in terms of the reaction here because it shows you just how shameless the government has been in trying to cover their political derriere.
There's a Facebook group called Reopen North Carolina It started last Thursday.
It already has 21,000 members calling for protests.
I mean, why in North Carolina would this be the case?
Well, just consider a few numbers.
10.4 million people in North Carolina.
That's the population of the state.
How many people there have died from coronavirus?
This whole time.
How long has it been around now?
A month, two months, three months?
81.
81.
Not 81,000, not 8100, not 810.
81 people have died in a state of 10.5 million.
How many people have been hospitalized?
Because you might say, okay, the death rate's low, but the hospitalization...
331 people have been hospitalized in a state of 10.5 million.
That's why they shut down the entire state.
I don't think so.
So how are the states reacting?
There's a big difference here.
This really separates the politician wheat from the politician chaff.
Okay, the dumb politicians, the way they're reacting to this backlash is they're doubling down.
So I saw this in Raleigh, North Carolina the other day.
There was a protest to reopen North Carolina.
The local officials there reacted by sicking the cops on them.
So they sent the police to go break up this perfectly peaceable, perfectly compliant protest.
Some people were outraged by this on Facebook.
So they go into Twitter and all over social media.
They tweeted at the Raleigh PD. They said, why did you break up this protest?
And the Raleigh PD, in perfect obliviousness, sent out a tweet.
They said, protesting is a non-essential activity.
Tell that to Thomas Jefferson.
Tell that to Sam Adams.
How don't you?
Protesting is a non-essential activity?
Take a little gander at the Constitution.
Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles, also reacting in a very stupid way.
He's doubling down rather than taking the exit ramp.
Because there's a beautiful exit ramp right now available to the alarmist politicians.
They can still say, and a lot of people will believe them, that all the draconian measures they took were the whole reason that the virus stopped.
There's not a lot of evidence of that, but whatever, okay?
This is politics.
They could very easily take that exit ramp.
But some dumb politicians, like my own mayor here in Los Angeles, are doubling down.
And so when Mayor Garcetti in L.A. says two weeks ago that there is no world in which two weeks from now L.A. is not like New York, then two weeks shows up.
We're nothing like New York.
Things are doing fine.
He extends the lockdown order.
He institutes fines for people who don't wear face masks.
He's just so insistent.
I was right.
I was right.
Except he wasn't.
It's clear that the most pressing political liability right now for these guys is not the virus.
Okay.
They're still living in the world of two weeks ago where their most pressing political liability is if they underreact to the virus.
That's not the new world war annex.
According to the public opinion polls, according to everything we're seeing, the bigger liability is the economic shutdown.
This is backed up by Nate Silver over at 538.
According to the latest poll averages, 538 is reporting that 38.8% of people, of Americans, are very worried that someone in their family or someone else they know will become infected with coronavirus.
Then on top of that, another 36.3% say they are somewhat worried that that will happen.
The percentage who say that they are very concerned has increased by about 6% or so.
Now, a total of 75.1% say they are somewhat worried about the virus.
Now we're seeing 23.6% say they are either not very worried or not at all worried about the virus.
But meanwhile, at the same time, you're seeing a huge percentage of people, major surge in the virus or major surge in the population, saying that they are very concerned about the economy.
And these numbers have been shifting, right?
So it starts out people very, very concerned about the virus, not worried about the economy.
Steadily, those two numbers have been shifting where We're now at the tipping point where, all of a sudden, it's going to be all about the economy as we are very clearly on the downslope of virus infections all around the country, even in New York, which was the epicenter of the virus in the United States.
The best evidence that the backlash to this whole episode has begun, you don't have to take my word for it, the best evidence is, That the A-list politicians, the varsity politicians, the creme de la creme of knowing how to work the levers of political power, the wheat, not the chaff, they are now moving to reopen.
Across ideological lines, including very liberal people in very liberal states, They are now moving to reopen because they can tell which way the wind is blowing.
Andrew Cuomo in New York, Gavin Newsom in California, totally different sides of the country, major states.
But Andy Cuomo had this to say, there is a coalition coming out to reopen America.
Those numbers say we can control the spread.
Feel good about that.
The worst is over.
It has not overwhelmed the healthcare system.
We have controlled the spread.
And there is confidence to be taken in that.
And that's an accomplishment.
And it was a heck of an accomplishment.
Those healthcare workers, for the rest of my life, I will say nothing but thank you to them.
And I was not sure that we could keep the tide going.
From overwhelming our hospital capacity.
And they did.
Feel good about that.
And I believe the worst is over if we continue to be smart.
And I believe we can now start on the path to normalcy.
And we can have a plan where you start to see some businesses reopening, understanding the delicate balance.
This is a very different Andrew Cuomo than we've seen over the past few weeks.
And Cuomo's a very talented politician.
You got to remember this guy's father was governor of New York and he wasn't just any governor.
He was an extraordinarily successful, popular liberal governor of New York.
People wanted him to run for president and Andy Cuomo was basically running the guy's campaign.
So this guy has really good political instincts.
Two weeks ago, you saw Andy Cuomo in the polo t-shirt, walking around the hospitals and the Javits Center, you know, in the midst of this crisis.
We got to shut everything down.
Andy Cuomo.
Now he realizes the alarmism didn't quite come true, even in New York, which was the worst in America.
People now, they don't want to see Andy Cuomo in the polo shirt with whatever was going on on his pectoral muscles.
I don't know if you saw those nipple ring rumors.
I'm not going to spread them, but it looked a little weird.
They don't want to see that for many reasons, physical and ideological.
Now people want to see Andy Cuomo in a suit talking about how we've got to reopen America.
He's not the only one doing that.
We will get to some more evidence that the politicians see which way the wind is blowing.
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It's much more important if you're a politician to get out ahead of this story and say that we've got a plan than to actually formulate the plan.
They can fill that in later.
Andy Cuomo was put together, obviously governor of New York, but then governor of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Delaware.
Put together this coalition, said they're going to reopen the region's economies and schools and other important aspects of their state.
Looks like Massachusetts is joining in, too.
So that's the sort of Northeast contingent.
They're all coming together real quick.
I don't know.
Maybe they're all reading the same public opinion polls.
But they realize this alarmism is not going to help them when they're all up for re-election.
So now they're moving to reopen the economy.
It's not just the Northeast.
The West Coast is doing it, too, with our very own California Governor Newsom.
There's an old African proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.
That's the spirit of regionalism that's defined our approach to addressing this pandemic.
That regionalism extends throughout the state of California and beyond.
We have had the Deep, collaborative spirit advanced now in states large and small all across the United States, but none stronger than the relationships we have formed in Washington state and the state of Oregon.
We just sent out a joint statement of a shared vision for a process and protocol, a framework, we refer to it, for reopening, not just within our states, but more broadly as a region.
Okay, sounds like he's doing a great job, doesn't it?
Can anyone tell me what the plan to reopen is?
No, of course not.
Gavin Newsom doesn't know what the plan to reopen is.
Gavin Newsom is a cartoonishly empty-suited politician.
But empty suits tell us some important facts about the state of politics.
I think what really happened is Gavin Newsom was sitting back watching the news and he saw Andy Cuomo come out there and say, we've got a coalition to reopen the states.
And so Gavin Newsom said, ah...
Drats!
Call me a press conference.
I'm not letting Andy Cuomo have all the fun.
So he goes out there and says, yes, we must reopen.
Not close.
We've got to get working.
Not sitting.
And he puts together this coalition as well.
He's just doing his own version of what Cuomo is doing.
That's what all the politicians have been doing this whole time.
Don't forget.
This was part of my exasperation early on.
Because I have been...
Well, I'll just say it again.
I told you so.
I've been predicting since the very beginning that this was an overreaction and that the data would bear that out.
But the data didn't matter to the reaction.
The government reaction actually wasn't a reaction.
It wasn't reacting to the data that we were seeing of hospitalizations and mortality.
It was being proactive, looking at the models.
And the models are only as good as the data that go in, and the data were bunk on the models.
So...
They were projecting out there going to be 100,000 deaths, 200,000 deaths, 2 million deaths, 4 million deaths.
Who knows?
There was never any number too large for them.
And all of the political incentives were to one-up each other.
So I remember it crystal clear when my own mayor here in Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, came out.
And he said, we're going to have a lockdown order in the state.
So, you know, you can't go out unless you're an essential business.
We're going to lock down L.A. because we're taking this seriously.
Gavin Newsom, once again, sitting back, probably watching TV, he says, I can't get one-upped by that two-bit Mayor Eric Orsetti.
Call me a press conference.
We're talking about within one or two hours.
Gavin Newsom goes on TV, we're locking down the state.
Yeah, you thought you could steal my limelight, Mayor Garcetti.
No way, we're going to lock down the state.
And the other mayors, governors all over the country, we're going to lock down.
No, we're going to double lock down.
No, we're going to triple lock down.
And they were all trying to one-up each other on who could react most intensely to the coronavirus.
Very different situation today.
Now they're all trying to one-up each other again, because that's all they ever do, but they're trying to one-up each other on who has the quickest, fastest, most efficient plan to reopen the economies.
This is a very good thing.
It shows you that the coronavirus phenomenon is officially over.
How does it tell us this?
Because what we're hearing so often is the way that we'll know when coronavirus is over is by listening to the experts.
The way we'll know when coronavirus is over is by monitoring all the data.
No, not really.
I mean, the data are showing us this too.
They've showed us that the disease has accelerated very quickly, then it kind of plateaued for a little bit, and now it's on the decline.
Whether that's because of lockdown or not, we don't know.
There's a lot of evidence that that's the way the disease spreads even in countries that didn't lockdown or only locked down recently.
But it's actually not the data and the science that are going to show us when this coronavirus epidemic is over.
Because the disease itself, the virus itself, is only a small part of the phenomenon of coronavirus.
The lion's share of the phenomenon is the government reaction.
The coronavirus itself is not what's unprecedented.
We have plagues.
We've had plagues for all of human history.
We've had flus.
We've had Ebola.
We've had bubonic plague.
We've had all sorts of diseases that have spread.
Epidemics, pandemics.
What makes this unique, what makes this a world historic event, what makes this hotly debated probably for the next hundred years, is the reaction.
We've never ground the global economy to a halt within a matter of days.
Because of a disease.
What tells us that the coronavirus effectively is over is the political response.
Because the coronavirus has been primarily a political phenomenon.
We were talking earlier about separating the wheat politicians from the chaff politicians.
Successful politicians have one defining characteristic.
They know which way the wind blows.
That's what makes a successful politician, regardless of their ideology, regardless of their policies, regardless of what they want to accomplish in office.
The really, really good ones know which way the wind blows.
They can smell public opinion turning.
And Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo, these are successful politicians.
Donald Trump, very successful politician.
You've seen all the really talented ones shift their tone over the past few days.
Now this is about reopening.
Very good news.
Now for guys like, you know, maybe Newsom, maybe some of the alarmists, Eric Garcetti, certainly for some of these local politicians, let's not let them forget that they were dead wrong in the first place, but we can celebrate at least that the tide has turned.
And by the way, I don't think we should rub their faces in it.
I mean, I keep mentioning, you know, that, what was that?
Oh, that I told you so.
I keep mentioning this because I want it to be clear for all of us to know that What this epidemic really was, as we get a barrage of misinformation over the next few weeks, as people start inflating death numbers or changing, I don't want to even use that language,
as people start changing the criteria by which they record deaths, it's a little more neutral way to put it, meaning they're going to add thousands of people to the death rolls, even if they were never diagnosed with coronavirus, they're going to do a lot to cover their political rear ends.
But, look, there are plenty of people who've held every extreme position on coronavirus.
Some people who said, it's going to kill us all, and then immediately after that said, actually, it's totally fake and there's nothing to it at all, we've got to reopen.
Okay, I don't care, whatever.
I don't care their progression on this issue as long as they end up in the right place, which seems like we are right now.
Big political news afoot, not just on the coronavirus front, but in the presidential race.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Big political news afoot beyond coronavirus.
virus.
Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic nominee for president, he finally gets the big endorsement he's been waiting for.
His former boss, Barack Obama.
Now, you might have thought that Barack Obama would have endorsed him when it mattered at the beginning of this presidential race.
Nah, because Barack Obama rather didn't think that Joe could win.
You might have thought that as the field narrowed, it was initially 27 candidates then, let's say it narrowed down to 5 or 6, you thought maybe then Barack Obama will weigh in.
Nope, he wasn't going to do that.
And it was so awkward, people kept asking Joe, Joe, why hasn't Barack endorsed you?
And he said, I didn't even want his endorsement.
Yeah, okay, buster.
Then it gets down to just him and Bernie.
Then, of course, that's the time that Barack Obama is going to weigh in, right?
It's the politically safest time for him to weigh in?
Nope, doesn't do that.
Then Bernie drops out.
Barack Obama still doesn't weigh in.
Actually, Bernie Sanders endorses Joe Biden before Barack Obama does.
But finally, Barack came around and offered Joe his tepid endorsement.
I'm so proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States.
Choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made.
And he became a close friend.
And I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now.
He's someone whose own life has taught him how to persevere.
How to bounce back when you've been knocked down.
When Joe talks with parents who've lost their jobs, we hear the son of a man who once knew the pain of having to tell his children that he'd lost his.
I know he'll surround himself with good people.
Experts, scientists, military officials who actually know how to run the government and care about doing a good job running the government and know how to work with our allies and who will always put the American people's interests above their own.
My favorite part of this endorsement, which has a lot of blather in it, you know, the typical Obama mean girl jabs at his political adversaries.
Obama's very different than Trump, right?
Trump just goes right for the jugular and acts like a man.
Barack Obama just gets these little mean girl jibes in there.
Yeah, Joe's actually...
He's going to work with people who actually care about America.
Not like Trump.
Those guys hate America.
He doesn't even...
Call out Trump directly.
He doesn't call out his adversaries directly because he's too much of a little mean girl and he's not a man.
Very different, obviously, if you look at the Republican side of things.
But okay, that's whatever.
We expect that from Barack Obama.
The saddest part of this endorsement is, the big focus of it is, he'll surround himself with good people.
That's not an essential part of a political endorsement.
All the other stuff goes along with every political endorsement.
He'll exercise good judgment.
He'll work with our allies.
He'll X, Y, and Z. But Barack has to get in there that he'll surround himself with good people because Joe Biden is too old to be president.
Joe Biden will be 82 by the end of his first term in office if he were elected.
So a lot of people are thinking, gosh, is Joe going to make it?
And it's not even just the age thing as a merely chronological factor.
If he literally is 82, he looks like he's 102.
He's forgetting where he is.
He's forgetting his name.
He's wandering off camera.
He doesn't have it.
So it's going to be very important that he surrounds himself with good people because you don't know who's going to actually be running the country.
What Donald Trump said is, Joe Biden, if he gets elected somehow, he's not going to run the country.
They're going to put him in a home.
He's going to be watching TV and the cabinet is going to be running the country.
So Sadly for Joe, Barack Obama seems to be accepting Trump's premise that Joe isn't going to be really leading here, that it's going to matter much more who he surrounds himself with.
I also love the rest of it.
He's going to work with our allies.
Allies like Iran?
What's he going to do?
Let Iran capture more of our sailors and ship them pallets of cash like the Obama administration did?
Yeah, he's working with our allies.
Great stuff.
What's he going to do?
Piss off the United Kingdom?
Piss off Israel?
Go after it?
Yeah, okay, great.
Okay, Obama.
I just forgot what a terrible president that guy was.
In theory, in the hagiography, in the revisionist history that the left has made for Obama, he's this great guy.
Everything was wonderful.
And you remember, the economy was absolutely terrible.
He stole our health insurance.
He gave money, pallets of cash, to our enemies.
He let our enemies take our sailors hostage without any consequences, other than giving them money.
He had a bunch of scandals, like the Fast and Furious scandal.
He weaponized the IRS to go after his political opponents.
He was just awful.
He was just a horrible president who now has no legacy because Donald Trump took it from him.
But the one thing I've always marveled at with Barack Obama is his ability to make absurd statements with a perfectly straight face.
You know, he says, Joe will actually put the interests of the American people first.
What, by taking away their health insurance?
Saying they can keep their doctor, but then taking their doctors away from them?
By admitting that it would be illegal to give millions of people amnesty and then just giving them amnesty anyway?
Unbelievable, this guy.
But then, on this point of being able to make absurd statements with a straight face, he outdid himself.
He said the real reason we've got to elect Joe is because the Republicans have this formidable, terrible electoral machine.
The Republicans, they own the media.
The Republicans have a major war chest.
And so it's an uphill battle, but the Democrats may be able to pull it out anyway.
So our country's future hangs on this election.
And it won't be easy.
The other side has a massive war chest.
The other side has a propaganda network with little regard for the truth.
Massive war chest and a propaganda network with little regard for the truth.
Eight out of the ten richest people in the United States are Democrats and major Democrat funders.
The news network that Barack Obama is referring to as being conservative is Fox News.
Fox News has many liberals and Democrats on the network.
Compare that to every other news network, which is explicitly and exclusively left-wing.
CNN, MSNBC, obviously the major TV networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, everybody, every single media outlet is conservative.
Single-mindedly and explicitly left-wing.
Except for one, which is slightly conservative.
And that's it.
They've got a propaganda network.
What about all the other networks that are all left-wing?
What about their war chest?
Okay, virtually all of the billionaires in America are left-wing.
Now, this reeks a little bit of desperation.
And there was no way for Obama to avoid this.
Unless he came out early for Joe Biden, it would look like he was just settling for Joe Biden.
And that's what it looks like the Democrats are doing, and that's a strong position for President Trump.
Trump is ignoring the 2020 election, more or less.
He's plowing right ahead with his agenda.
Major decision came out yesterday.
President Trump announced it.
He is going to be cutting funding for the World Health Organization, a failed mouthpiece for communist China.
He had threatened cutting funding for a little while.
Now it's actually going into effect.
Today, I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Virus.
Everybody knows what's going on there.
American taxpayers provide between $400 million and $500 million per year to the WHO.
In contrast, China contributes roughly $40 million a year and even less.
As the organization's leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability.
One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China.
and other nations.
They were very much opposed to what we did.
Fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China, saving untold numbers of lives.
Thousands and thousands of people would have died.
This is very good news from President Trump.
The WHO is worse than useless.
Just to give you an example, a WHO official said on Monday that she suspected that you could have human to human transmission of the coronavirus as early as December 31st of last year.
But the WHO officially was saying the Communist Party line for weeks and weeks after that, saying that there was no human to human transmission, saying Just one example.
They've been parroting the Chinese communist line this whole time.
Also, the WHO is just a big waste of money.
They spend less than 15% of their...
Funding each year on the actual priorities of world health.
The rest is going to bureaucratic overhead and slush funds.
It's just a waste of money.
And it'd be one thing if it was our waste of money, but it's not.
It's China's waste of money.
They took over the organization and they installed the new head of it.
So just pull the money.
Good idea.
Meanwhile, over in the mainstream media, back to the 2020 politics, the New York Times, as representative of the Are going to full damage control mode because Joe Biden is the nominee and Joe Biden has a sexual assault allegation against him.
And the sexual assault allegation against him is not all that credible, but it's much, much, much more credible than the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that we saw two years ago.
And the New York Times and everybody else went crazy with those allegations against Kavanaugh and now they're basically silent on the allegations against Joe Biden.
Now, They're publishing op-eds about this.
The executive editor of the New York Times actually just published an interview in his own newspaper to try to defend his indefensible decision not to cover the accusations against Biden.
Here's the headline of this one.
The Times took 19 days to report an accusation against Biden.
Here's why.
Dean Beckett, the executive editor of the Times, said the article was published when there was enough reporting to present to readers for them to make their own judgment.
But they didn't wait for there to be any information on the baseless claims against Kavanaugh before they ran them two years ago.
It's a very long and pointless interview, but here are a couple of important moments.
So from the interviewer, I've been looking at the Times' coverage of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
I want to focus primarily on the Julie Swetnick allegations.
She was the one who was represented by Michael Avenatti and who suggested that Kavanaugh had been involved in frat house rapes and then appeared to walk back elements of her allegations.
The Times wrote that story the same day she made the allegation, noting that, quote, none of Ms.
Swetnick's claims could be independently corroborated.
Why was Kavanaugh treated differently?
And now listen to the logical gymnastics this guy goes through.
Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way.
This is Brett Kavanaugh, the obscure federal judge, not Joe Biden, the U.S. Senator and Vice President of the United States who we've all known for 50 years.
Kavanaugh, he was in a public forum in a big way because he was a federal judge nominated to the Supreme Court.
Unlike Joe Biden, a three-time presidential candidate.
Kavanaugh's status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation.
The very serious allegation with no evidence to back it up.
That's the one.
The very serious allegation made by a woman who had not made the allegation before for decades and decades.
Very serious allegation that was not even backed up by that accuser's friend who was allegedly at the party where it happened.
Very serious.
And when I say in a public way, I don't mean the public way of Tara Reade's.
They're both in public ways, right?
If you ask the average person in America, they didn't know about the Tara Reade case.
Right, because you didn't report on it, dude.
The only reason they knew about the allegations against Kavanaugh is because you blew them up and made them into a thing.
If you had reported on the Tara Reade case, then the American people would have known about it against Joe Biden.
He's pretending that he's not the New York Times.
He's pretending that he's just some observer instead of the crafter of news.
So I thought in that case, if the New York Times was going to introduce to readers this story, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective.
That's a pleasant change of pace.
Kavanaugh was a very different situation.
Right, because you were just trying to assassinate his political career.
It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country.
Right, again, because you made it the biggest political story.
It was just a different news judgment moment.
Yeah, like now you're trying to exercise some judgment.
Or you're actually just acting hypocritically and defending it with judgment, whereas the previous time you didn't use any judgment.
The interviewer then goes on, Christine Blasey Ford seemed to remember it clearly and told the story very, very clearly.
Pause.
No, she didn't.
She changed her story multiple times.
She couldn't even remember how many people were at the party.
She couldn't even remember what happened at the party.
She couldn't remember when the party took place or where the party took place.
She changed her story so many times.
She then said that she had a separate door installed in her house because of the PTSD from what happened at this party so many years ago.
But there's no evidence of that.
Actually, there were many other explanations that she'd given for why she had that particular door installed to her house.
Then she said she didn't have any political points of view.
She had posted her left-wing political ideology all over the internet.
Her story was bogus.
Do you think that her allegation on its face is more credible than Tara Reade's?
And Dean Bickett says, well, I don't mean to imply that, and blah, blah, blah.
B.S. There's another one in the New York Times.
This one comes out from Michelle Goldberg, the columnist.
What to do with Tara Reid's allegation against Joe Biden?
Since Reid made her latest accusation, people on both the left and the right have been demanding, with a mix of genuine outrage and gotcha glee, that the Democratic Party live up to its Me Too commitments and believe Tara Reid.
As I've written repeatedly, I think Biden's a weak candidate, and I wouldn't be unhappy if the Democratic Party were forced by some last-minute emergency to replace him.
Maybe with one of the Democratic governors who has shined in response to the coronavirus crisis.
But absent other allegations, that's not going to happen.
Reid seems almost engineered in a lab to inspire skepticism in mainstream Democrats, both because her story keeps changing and because of her bizarre public worship of Vladimir Putin.
And then she goes on to other political issues.
If the story changing were enough to get Democrats to drop uncredible allegations, they never would have even talked to Christine Blasey Ford on television.
They never would have put her in the newspaper.
They certainly wouldn't have put her up there at the Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
Christine Blasey Ford is some strange person.
I'll put it that way.
I don't want to be too mean to Christine Blasey Ford.
She was a strange character in American history.
Sort of came out of nowhere.
Came out with this crazy accusation against Brett Kavanaugh.
Had no evidence of it.
Even her best friend couldn't back it up.
Couldn't remember any of the details.
Kept changing her story.
And yet, the mainstream media believed her.
And she kind of went away.
That's fine.
Now she's gone.
This person, Tara Reid, who's accusing Joe Biden, was a Joe Biden staffer, had a direct relationship to Joe Biden.
Much, much more credible.
But unfortunately, the mainstream media are just going to keep pushing that.
We should not let them get away with it.
You know, we're now seeing, obviously, this backlash at the time.
The New York Times trying to move on.
The mainstream media trying to move on.
They're just trying to get into the 2020 election, trying to move past even their own hypocrisy of the last few years.
There's a little glimmer of hope here.
Mike Pence just announced that the FDA is going to approve antibodies tests for coronavirus within a matter of days.
This offers us a little hope on setting the record straight.
Because you know, you see it in the New York Times, they're going to rewrite history any chance they get.
We can now set the record straight, at least on this big issue, this world historic event of coronavirus.
You need to get the antibodies test if you think you may have had coronavirus.
Okay, there are big political incentives right now to inflate the numbers, to rewrite the history of this whole episode.
The numbers are already inflated.
The only way that we are going to get anything close to accurate numbers is if people who think they've had the virus take the antibodies test.
Pence knows this.
The Trump administration knows this.
That's why they're saying we could get as many as 20 million of them per month.
Because the more people who take that test, the higher the infection rate we can see.
If the infection rate is much higher than we thought it was, then the whole rationale for the shutdown goes away.
The point of the shutdown was to slow the spread.
If the shutdown didn't really slow the spread, if everyone got infected anyway, it shows us maybe we didn't need this global shutdown.
Also it brings the death count, or the death rate rather, way, way, way down, right?
If the number of people infected increases dramatically, but the same number of people died, then the death rate goes way, way down.
It's a way to shine a little bit of clarity, and it's very important.
You know, I hate to say I told you so.
Well, it's very important for us, at least in the near future, to remind people that we told them so, so that the alarmists, the rewriters of history, the revisionists, And the political hacks don't get away with changing their tune on a world-historic episode that's going to have a lot of implications for our politics going forward.
All right, got a lot more to get to.
We'll do it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
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