Thousands take to the streets around the country to protest draconian lockdowns. The liberals and the squishes are furious, but President Trump is cheering them on. And believe it or not, the anti-lockdown protesters are getting some encouragement from one of the world’s leading public health experts. Then, Congressman Dan Crenshaw destroys Bill Maher’s anti-Trump talking points, Harvard tries to ban homeschooling, and Brian Stelter cries.
Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://bit.ly/2z2j1NB. 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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Thousands take to the streets around the country to protest draconian lockdowns.
The liberals and the squishes are furious, but President Trump is cheering them on.
And believe it or not, the anti-lockdown protesters are getting some encouragement from one of the world's leading public health experts.
Then, Congressman Dan Crenshaw destroys Bill Maher's anti-Trump talking points, Harvard tries to ban homeschooling, and Brian Stelter cries.
All that and more.
more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Brian Stelter Cries is not exactly a man bites dog story, but we will get to it, not because it's a shocking event, but because it tells us something about our mainstream culture and certainly about the mainstream media for First, we've got to cover these rallies.
I believe, you know how much I hate to say I told you so on this show.
I never do it.
Well, I try not to do it, but I told you so.
I predicted a few weeks ago when we were asked, how long is this shutdown going to go on for?
People said it's going to go on for six months.
It's going to go on for 10 months.
It's going to go on for 18 months.
I said it's not.
It can't go on for 18 months because people will take to the streets.
And that is already happening.
I thought it would happen sometime after three weeks, four weeks.
In reality, what are we at now?
Like five weeks?
So pretty close.
People are taking to the streets around the country to protest the lockdowns.
And part of the reason they're protesting them is you'll remember everybody went along with the lockdowns when we were told we have to, millions of people are going to die, stay in your home, save lives.
Everybody went along with it.
There was no problem.
And then...
The numbers started to come out.
The real numbers started to come out.
And all of a sudden it wasn't 2 million people are going to die.
It wasn't 4 million people are going to die.
It was half a million people.
Then it was 100,000 people.
Then it was 60,000 people.
Now we just don't know.
First we were told very few people had it.
Then we were told actually many, many more people had it.
We've got some news on that today from various scientists.
So then all of a sudden we said, hold on, this is not nearly as bad as people were saying it was.
And instead of getting a little looser with the lockdowns, instead of the politicians reacting to the new scientific information and lightening up a little bit, instead they double down.
And that's why people are protesting.
It's happening in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Washington state, and another many states as well.
People are sick and tired of being told that they can't work, they can't make any money, they can't do any of the things that they want to do, they can't exercise their political rights, they can't even go outside in most cases.
And President Trump, for his part, is totally siding with the protesters.
Here is a reporter in the White House briefing room trying to egg Trump on, trying to get Trump to turn against these protesters, Trump having none of it.
Are you concerned that you're talking about liberation in the Second Amendment?
Are you inciting violence among a few people?
I've seen the people.
I've seen interviews of the people.
These are great people.
Look, they want to get, they call cabin fever.
You've heard the term?
They've got cabin fever.
They want to get back.
They want their life back.
Their life was taken away from them.
And, you know, they learned a lot during this period.
They learned to do things differently than they have in the past.
And, you know, they'll do it hopefully until the virus has passed.
And when the virus passes, I hope we're going to be sitting next to each other in baseball games, football games, basketball games, ice hockey games.
I hope we're going to be sitting next to each other.
I hope you have golf.
The Masters is going to have 100,000 people, not 25 people watching.
At the course.
I am not.
No, I'm not.
I think these people are...
I've never seen so many American flags.
I mean, I'm seeing the same thing that you're seeing.
I don't see it any differently.
They're who?
Nazi.
Well, that I totally would say no way.
But I've seen...
I didn't see that.
I see all...
Of course, I'm sure...
The news plays that up.
I've seen American flags all over the place.
I have never seen so many American flags at a rally as I have in the Israelis.
These people love our country.
They want to get back to work.
That's the right tone.
That's the right attitude.
Between Trump and the media on this question, Trump is the reasonable one.
The media is the hysterical one.
Because, of course, there are Nazis, right?
You heard that reporter at the end?
Trump says they're waving American flags.
They just want their lives back.
They want their rights back.
They want their economy back.
And the reporter said, they're Nazis!
Where's the evidence that they're Nazis?
That's what they say.
Anybody slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton, they call a Nazi.
Okay, Trump is the reasonable one here.
The media are the unreasonable ones.
And on this question of...
The reopenings and the protests.
Guess what?
The protesters are the reasonable ones.
And the vaunted public health experts that say we need to remain imprisoned in our own homes for two years, they are the unreasonable ones.
What the left has tried to do this whole time is say that there are only two options.
Either completely grind the global economy to a halt, imprison everybody inside of their own homes, do not go anywhere, lose all of your political rights, or...
Go outside and do exactly what you want and everyone will die.
That's what we were told.
Those are the two options.
Those are not the two options.
Both of those things are unreasonable, right?
The middle ground is much more reasonable here.
Middle ground perhaps being, now that we've seen that the virus is not as virulent as we previously thought, maybe people who are basically healthy can go back to work.
People who are frail and who are old maybe should stay at home still or should take responsible measures.
Maybe we should all wash our hands.
Maybe we shouldn't shake hands all the time just yet.
Okay, obviously there is this reasonable middle ground.
The media doesn't want any of it.
We have a lot more credibility on this, the skeptical people, because we all took it seriously in the beginning, and then the doomsday models did not come to pass.
I'll give you an example of this.
You know, each day the models are being readjusted down.
Just look at what happened in Florida.
Florida model.
So this was as of Friday.
The main model that we are using to look at coronavirus spread and death, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation changed its model from Florida significantly.
It's said that the state will have 1,363 deaths from COVID-19 by August 4th.
That number is down from the original projection, which was 4748.
Oh, it's not even the original projection.
That's just the projection they had earlier in the week.
So earlier in the week they say almost 5,000 deaths by August.
Now we're told that's going to be about 1,300 deaths by August.
This is good news, right?
This is a reason to celebrate, but it's also a reason to take a look at some of our policies and say, this is an overreaction.
We don't need to give up all of our rights.
We don't need to give up our economy necessarily.
And yet some people don't like the liberation talk.
And we've got to get into that because There's a real debate going on over who's being responsible, who's being irresponsible.
And we've got to hear in from Joe Biden on this issue.
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So some conservatives are a little upset with President Trump and with the protesters.
Trump tweeted out over the weekend, he said, liberate Michigan, liberate the state, liberate America, right?
He's encouraging the protesters.
Some people don't like that liberation talk, and they say that it's irresponsible.
Really, what is irresponsible here is letting politicians get away with massive power grabs, which is what they are doing.
Okay, I want this to be crystal clear.
When this was briefly just a medical scientific biological issue, we were all on board to protect people and save lives.
Then the left politicized this thing and they started passing absurd policies that had nothing to do with the coronavirus.
They tried to get the Green New Deal into the coronavirus funding package.
Don't forget that.
They tried to hold small business funding hostage so that they could reduce fuel emissions in commercial airliners.
They took the opportunity to let criminals out of jail even while they were arresting law-abiding citizens because they weren't Paying enough heed to the public health experts.
Okay, these were huge power grabs.
What is irresponsible is letting the politicians get away with it.
We need to liberate America.
Simple as that.
Does not mean that we need to reopen Manhattan tomorrow, okay?
Doesn't mean we need to reopen the center of Boston tomorrow where we see some hot spots.
But we don't need to lock down South Dakota, okay?
We don't need to lock down Montana.
We need to start taking a much more...
Scientific view of this entire thing.
And looking at where the hotspots are and looking at where the hotspots are not.
We will do that in just a second.
This reaction has gone very, very far.
There is no evidence whatsoever that continued nationwide lockdowns are helping anything.
All right?
And the power grabs are too much.
For more on that, we turn now to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
We gotta...
It's just...
But you gotta...
I mean...
We gotta reassure...
Look, my message to everybody I talk to...
Yep, that's very insightful stuff.
Thank you, Mr.
Biden.
In New York City, we are seeing the flaws of this strategy already, okay?
I guess we've seen them for a while.
If you want to see flawed political strategy, look to New York City.
The Bolshevik mayor there, Bill de Blasio, is now using this crisis as an opportunity to try to turn citizens...
This new policy is, if you see anybody not listening to the vaunted public health experts, and more importantly, anybody not listening to me, Mayor de Blasio, you should take photos of them, you should upload those photos, and you should rat them out to the government.
Now look, thank you everyone who's done it the right way, but we still know there's some people who need to get the message.
And that means sometimes making sure the enforcement is there to educate people and make clear we gotta have social distancing.
So, now it is easier than ever when you see a crowd, when you see a line that's not distanced, when you see a supermarket that's too crowded, anything, you can report it right away so we can get help there to fix the problem.
And now it's as simple as taking a photo.
All you gotta do is take the photo and put the location with it and bang!
Send a photo like this and we will make sure that enforcement comes right away.
Text the photo to 311-692 and action will ensue.
Enforcement will come to get the help we need, or you can use the 311 app, send that photo there, and you'll make sure immediately there's follow-up.
311-692 and enforcement will ensue.
Sure would be a shame if people texted their opinion of this policy in photos to that number, wouldn't it?
Sure would be a dirty, rotten shame.
You know, when I was a kid, I was told that snitches get stitches.
Ha ha!
Now we're being told that tattletailing is going to be the full-time policy of the city of New York.
It reminds me of very good advice that Mr.
Brady gave his daughter in a very Brady movie.
By tattling on someone, you're really just telling them, I'm a tattletale.
Now, is that the tale you want to tell?
Is that the tale you want to tell?
I don't think so.
And it's so profoundly hypocritical.
de Blasio is the most hilarious person to be pushing this policy because in the early days of the pandemic, when President Trump was taking it seriously and liberals like Bill de Blasio and Nancy Pelosi were not taking it seriously, and Joe Biden were not taking it seriously, in those early days, de Blasio didn't lift a finger.
when he finally did order the lockdown, he himself wouldn't lock down.
He got into a little bit of trouble because he was still going to his gym.
And they, they said, Mayor de Blasio, how come you're telling everyone else they can't go to gym, but you're allowed to go to your gym?
And he said, well, you know, I got to work out.
I don't feel good when I'm not working out.
Yeah, okay, well, Bill de Blasio gets to go do whatever he wants, but the people do not.
And that's what this is all about.
If this were about protecting public health, he wouldn't have gone to his gym.
But because it's not, because it's just a power grab, you've now got a policy that has been implemented in every tyrannical regime throughout human history, which is...
The trouble with tyrannical regimes is you can't police everybody all of the time.
There just aren't enough government thugs to police everybody all of the time.
So what you need to do is turn the people into the policemen for each other.
And you incentivize them in various ways.
You say, if you don't report on a crime, you're going to be punished.
Crime, meaning some infraction of whatever the policy is.
If you don't report on it, you'll be punished.
And if you do report on it, you'll be reported.
and it's so easy to report on it.
That is what de Blasio is doing.
Nobody in New York should follow this policy.
Everybody should do their best to make light of this policy.
It's outrageous.
There's also evidence from one of the world's leading public health experts that none of these policies are helping at all.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So de Blasio instituting this policy Governors, mayors around the country instituting these awful policies.
And yet, one of the world's leading public health experts, leading epidemiologist, says that the shutdowns are absolutely pointless.
Professor Johann Gisecki.
One of the world's top epidemiologists.
He's an advisor to the Swedish government.
He was the first chief scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
He is an advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization, but he probably doesn't get listened to very much.
He says, in three words, shutdowns are dumb.
So at the point we are now, what you're advocating then is we protect those groups better.
And as far as the rest of the population is...
We just allow it to pass through the population, essentially.
Essentially, yes.
Which is...
I mean, I know that it's now...
Herd immunity, yes.
That's what's commonly understood by what we call the herd immunity strategy, basically.
Yeah.
There are others.
It's not just the old and frail.
I mean, there are other people that should be protected, but I don't think you can stop it.
It's spreading.
You can stop it for some time, but then, I mean, countries that have been successful, South Korea is giving up now.
They can't maintain their policy.
Taiwan, I don't know about Taiwan.
They were quite successful.
Singapore, similar problem.
There's no way you can stop it.
Listen to what he's saying and listen to what he's not saying.
Because what we're hearing from people who are supporting the lockdowns, who are both liberals and conservatives and in the middle and everything in between, what they're saying is either we lock down the whole country or we throw granny out to die.
That's not what he's saying.
He's saying the old and the frail and the sick should be protected.
The immunocompromised and all the people who need to be protected should be protected.
But We're good to go.
How do you protect the most people in the long run?
Sure, let's say the United States flattens the curve and then the curve is like this until June or July and then the curve goes right back up again according to all of the models.
Well, okay, who cares if the curve goes up three months from now or today?
Maybe you're just prolonging the inevitable.
If you're prolonging the inevitable, why did we shut down the economy?
Okay, his point, this epidemiologist, is that there may be more deaths up front, but in the end, the results will be exactly the same.
That's what he says later in the interview.
So the only question is, do you take away rights and destroy the economy first?
For comment, we turn to presidential candidate Joe Biden.
I sat with a guy yesterday on a telephone, and he's telling me, he said, I don't know.
He said, look, I worked at the hospital.
And he said, then I got myself in a position where I got the virus, so they quarantined me, and they put me in the hospital, and I made it out, and so I'm out.
But they don't want me with my family.
I'm on the third floor.
I spent 15 minutes on the phone with him saying, he said, I have a three-year-old and a four-year-old.
And they come to the door outside and they just knock on the door and say, Daddy, Daddy, can I see you, Daddy?
Can I see you, Daddy?
So we spent time going through it.
I used to do it with my kids when they were little and I couldn't see them.
And we'd play games.
I said, knock, make up a game.
Knock on the door and say, this is, you know, practical things.
The guy's scared to death.
Very insightful, Mr.
President, Mr.
Vice President, Mr.
probably not going to be future president.
Thank you very much.
What is the purpose of the lockdowns?
I think people don't understand what the purpose of the lockdowns is.
Is the purpose of the lockdowns to stop the spread of the virus?
No.
No one has ever said that the lockdowns are going to stop the spread.
That cannot happen.
Is the purpose of the lockdowns to reduce the spread of the virus?
No.
No, it's not.
No matter how much you flatten the curve, the same exact number of people are going to be infected.
Eventually.
Flattening the curve is not reducing the number of people who get the virus.
It's just spreading them out over time.
Okay?
So it's not reducing the spread.
The only purpose of the lockdowns is to slow the spread.
Why do we need to slow the spread?
So that we can not overwhelm the healthcare system.
Because if the healthcare system were not even a consideration here, then you wouldn't have to reduce the spread.
Who cares?
You're either going to get it tomorrow or you're going to get it today.
Might as well do it today.
Why procrastinate?
But the whole point is not to overwhelm the healthcare system.
And guess what?
We've succeeded at that.
There are empty hospital beds in New York.
They converted the Javits Center into a makeshift hospital.
Completely unnecessary.
They sent that federal ship down to be a hospital ship in New York.
Didn't need it.
New York was the epicenter in the United States.
I suppose it still is.
And we have not overwhelmed the healthcare system.
So, good.
That's great.
We'll see whether or not the reason for that was the lockdowns.
Sort of beside the point.
We now know the only reason the lockdowns existed, we've achieved it.
So why do we still have the lockdowns?
Right?
That's one argument right there for ending the lockdowns, is they no longer will serve any purpose.
There is no longer a purpose left that they could serve.
But we've got another reason.
Another reason to possibly lift some of the lockdowns is there's a lot of evidence now that the lockdowns might not have reduced the spread of the virus much at all.
Where are we getting this information?
We're getting it out of Massachusetts, which is now flaring up as a major center of the virus.
So researchers with Massachusetts General Hospital took to the streets of Chelsea, which is becoming a real hotspot, To get blood tests for people to see if they had not the coronavirus, but coronavirus antibodies.
That is, to check on people to see if they've already had coronavirus and now have the antibodies because they've moved past it.
This has been one question the whole time is how many people have it?
All the models are suggesting that it's a very small number of people who have it.
It's just the confirmed cases.
A lot of us who are skeptical have said, I don't know, maybe you've got ten times as many cases as people actually think.
If you have way more cases, then obviously the death rate is much lower.
The hospitalization rate is much lower.
So, these guys, Massachusetts General, just go out there and they talk to 200 random Chelsea residents.
And they prick their fingers and they get their blood.
Guess what percentage of them had antibodies for coronavirus?
All of them looked healthy.
None of them were showing symptoms.
Guess what percentage of those 200 people have already had coronavirus and have recovered from it without even knowing it, without going to the hospital?
One-third.
Almost exactly one-third, 64 out of 200, have already had the coronavirus.
They didn't even know they had it.
Okay, now, Chelsea is a particularly hot spot right now for the virus.
So I'm not saying it's one-third of people throughout the United States.
But that means that the number of people who have had it is so much larger.
the flu comparison might be fairly legitimate.
Another person who suggests this is Jay Bhattacharya.
He's that Stanford scientist who made huge headlines a few weeks ago when he went on Peter Robinson's show and when he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed and he said, you know, we think that the actual infection rate is much higher.
We think that the death rate is significantly lower.
Well, what is he doing?
He's not going to be a good one.
He's conducted a lot of research on this, far more scientifically rigorous than just going out and talking to 200 people.
And he found recently that the infection rate, when you're not looking at a hot spot, when you're controlling for different factors, is something like 3 or 4 percent.
So obviously not nearly as high as 30 or 35 percent.
Sure.
But what that means is even if the infection rate is just 3 to 4 percent, Then when you compare that to mortality, it would bring the mortality rate down to something like a very bad flu, which is what the skeptics have been saying from the beginning, which is what they have been pilloried for from the very beginning.
You know, it's a great thing that Sweden is remaining open.
Sweden is not locking down.
Sweden, we're going to see what happens when you don't institute these national lockdowns.
It gives us a control case, okay?
We're not going to know the right answer for many, many months because the death rate is going to be higher there for a little bit, but in the long run we're going to see after the second wave.
If there's at least one country that does not shut down, then in two years or however long it takes to get a vaccine, we will be able to know.
What that looks like.
That's going to be very important to assess our response here because every single day, all of the new information that's coming out hour by hour is justifying the skeptics.
It's justifying the Liberate America protesters and it is smacking down the doomsday predictions of the Opportunistic politicians, the mainstream media, and the self-appointed public health experts who want to dictate our lives for us.
For more on this, we turn to Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden.
You know, there's a, during World War II, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing that, you know, was totally different than a, than the, he called it the, you know, the World War II, he had the war production board.
I think Joe Biden is rubbing off on me.
The more Joe Biden clips I play, the less I am able to speak.
So that's not great.
Imagine if that guy becomes our president.
There is Obviously we're talking about the scientific news of coronavirus and there's a lot of important information coming out there.
There's also a lot of information coming out on the international front.
I spoke to Senator Ted Cruz on our show Verdict just a few days ago.
Senator Cruz broke some news on that show because he had spoken to the National Institutes of Health.
It's all starting to become a little bit clearer why a lot of politicians, a lot of people in the media are trying to cover for communist China, why they're trying to parrot Chinese propaganda on how this virus got started.
There was a big bombshell in a report that NIH gave to Senator Cruz.
We'll get to that in just one second.
We will get to Dan Crenshaw committing absolute murder on the Bill Maher show.
It was just devastating.
We'll get to a Harvard homeschooling invective.
And we'll get to Brian Stelter crying.
We'll get to all of it.
But first, I've got to take a quick break and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Head on over to dailywire.com.
You already should do that, by the way.
You should be members already.
Why?
Because you get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, the Ben Shapiro show, the Matt Wall show, you get the all-access stuff.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
So, you know, obviously I would never say I told you so, but on this show about three weeks, four weeks ago, but on this show about three weeks, four weeks ago, we suggested maybe, hey, just maybe there was a link between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the virus found in Wuhan.
And that maybe this story we were hearing from the Chinese government and the American mainstream media, but I repeat myself, was a little bit of a cover.
That maybe this didn't just come from a bad batch of bad soup, but it had something to do with that level 4 viral lab that was just a few hundred yards away.
Turns out, increasingly, that seems to be the case.
Why on earth then was everybody covering up for China?
Was it just the money?
You know, China buys up a lot of American media.
Was it the ideology?
The media obviously hate Donald Trump.
Or is it the case that people knew about this lab?
They knew about the research that was being conducted there.
And maybe even just maybe the U.S. government was funding the research at the lab, hugely Here's Senator Cruz breaking the news.
Well, it turns out there wasn't just one.
There were two labs within miles of where this outbreak occurred that were studying coronaviruses from bats And that there were internal State Department wires before this pandemic raising concerns about the security in those labs and that an accidental virus could escape and cause a global pandemic.
But I'll tell you, it's worse than that.
And let me give you some breaking news right now, which is the U.S. government.
Was funding the Chinese research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Your taxpayer dollars and my taxpayer dollars.
And let me give you specifics that we just got today.
Today, in inquiring of the National Institutes of Health, did any of your money go?
To the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the answer is yes.
And here's what they told us in writing today.
They said in fiscal year 2019, the funding for the Wuhan Institute for Virology was $76,000 and the $301.
$76,301.
So you and I and all American taxpayers were spending over $76,000 to fund the research at this laboratory.
What research were we funding?
Specifically, we were paying the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study viral diversity in bat reservoirs and survey people who live in high-risk communities for evidence of bat coronavirus infection and to conduct lab experiments to analyze newly discovered viruses. we were paying the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study
So we were paying them to do all of the research that it seems increasingly likely was the cause of the coronavirus outbreak that they then lied about for months and caused to spread all the way around the world and shut down the greatest economy ever and throw 22 million Americans out of work and kill another 40,000 at last count Americans.
And this is a very bad situation.
It also reminds us, I think, of two things here.
One, politicians, the media, people in government have a lot of incentives here to cover up what really happened.
A ton of political incentives.
A ton of financial incentives.
Okay, they have a lot of incentive to call.
Anyone who raises questions, wacky, crazy conspiracy theorist, right?
That's what they did.
They called Tom Cotton, the senator, a conspiracy theorist, because he said maybe the virus has something to do with the laboratory.
Now it turns out he was almost certainly right, and they were completely wrong.
That's one thing.
Calls for a little bit of courage when you're standing up there.
Calls for maybe not being so condescending to the liberate America people, who maybe there's actually a good cause to liberate America.
That's the first part.
Second thing we know, Is that China lied.
They lied from the very beginning and the U.S. media are helping them do it.
So here was a report.
This is, it's so insidious how they do it.
I was reading the Associated Press yesterday for some reason.
Here's the report from the AP. Quote, the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus rose to more than 40,000 on Sunday, the highest in the world, and almost double the number of deaths in the next highest country, Italy, according to a Reuters tally.
So, that's not true.
That nothing...
Listen to how silly this is.
The novel coronavirus.
They won't call it the Chinese coronavirus.
They won't call it the Wuhan coronavirus.
It's the novel coronavirus.
Death toll rose to 40,000, the highest in the world.
It's not the highest in the world.
The only way that the U.S. has the highest death count in the world from this is if China is giving honest numbers.
We know China's not giving honest numbers.
You can see the growth of the virus in every single country.
It looks like this.
And it goes up, up, up, and then eventually it kind of levels off.
Here's how it looked in China.
It starts to go up, up, up, up, up, then it levels, and then it just completely crashes down.
Because they stopped reporting the numbers.
Because they lied.
By the way, you don't need to believe me on that.
Even the Chinese government is beginning to admit some of their lies.
They say the death count out of Wuhan was not accurate.
They increased it just a few days ago by more than 50%.
And that's still nowhere near enough to get to an actual honest number.
So it is simply a fact that the U.S. does not have more coronavirus deaths than any other country in the world.
China does.
But let's even say that we could move past that.
They then write, this Reuters tally, The United States has almost double the number of deaths in the next highest country, Italy.
What they fail to mention is that the United States is more than five times bigger than Italy.
Population more than five times as large.
So if the U.S. has double, then that's not nearly as bad as Italy, right?
Because you're not interested in the total number of deaths.
You're interested in per capita deaths.
That's a much more meaningful statistic.
So this is the one silver lining, I would say, about the coronavirus.
It's exposing the mainstream media.
Obviously, you can look at reports like that and just say, this is so absurd.
It's also taking away a lot of the mainstream media's power of persuasion.
Dan Crenshaw, U.S. Congressman, former Navy SEAL, He showed this the other night on the Bill Maher show.
All of the talk shows are still going on.
All the late night shows, all the talk shows, the news shows, they're still going on, but most of them are being filmed in people's homes.
So Bill Maher has his show, but he doesn't have his audience.
He doesn't have his applause sign.
He doesn't have all of the majesty that goes along with the TV show.
So it's just him in front of a camera.
And then it's Dan Crenshaw in front of a camera.
And without all of those props to help Bill Maher seem like he's being the persuasive one, Dan Crenshaw just wrecks him.
Without all of the props to That allow the liberal media to make it seem like the liberal position is always correct and the conservative position is ridiculous.
The conservative position shines through.
Just take this one example of Bill Maher going after President Trump for coronavirus and Dan Crenshaw smacking it down.
Peter Navarro, somebody else who talks to Trump a lot, told him directly January 29th, you've got to get ahead of this.
Two days later, he implemented a restrictive travel ban from China, which he was widely criticized for.
That same day, on January 31st, Nancy Pelosi proposed the No Ban Act, which would be congressional limitation on what President Trump's actually able to do with that travel restriction.
Okay, but he lies about that.
First of all, he didn't...
How does he lie about it?
What do you mean?
He said he stopped people coming in from China.
He did not.
He said he was ahead of it.
Forty-three countries did it before we did.
There are still people coming in from China.
He only stopped foreign nationalists.
Let me address that, because I know that's what people are saying right now.
But the reality is, it was about 40,000 people came in after that.
These are U.S. citizens and green card holders and passport holders being repatriated.
U.S. citizens.
So you have to make the argument then that we shouldn't allow them in.
It sounds to me like you're fully agreeing with President Trump on this when everybody else disagreed with him.
And if you're saying that you wish that that travel restriction had been more extreme, Okay, fine.
You apparently had the foresight back then when nobody else did.
But the fact is, you know, if Joe Biden was in charge at that moment, he's already said he wouldn't have done it.
He criticized it at the time.
Nancy Pelosi actually proposed legislation to stop it.
Okay, but people are still coming in from China.
It wasn't just foreign nationals, but let's get off that.
Let me just go back to the timeline for a minute.
Let's get off of that because uncle, uncle, stop it, Dan.
This hurts too much.
Stop smacking me down.
Now, if they had done that in Bill Maher's studio, he would have had the audience and the lights and the camera and the close-up on his face and kind of smirk or something.
The audience would drown out Crenshaw with his cheers.
But because it's just these two people, it's just the arguments.
And obviously the conservative argument is much stronger here.
I really like this.
This really is a silver lining.
If the left loses all of their institutional aids to pretending to be more persuasive, to propping up their weak arguments, then we're going to do a great job at persuading the American people.
This is why President Trump is holding daily press briefings.
He's holding daily press briefings because it is the Crenshaw-Bill Maher moment, right?
It's not NBC News at night with the lights and the cameras and the editors and everything designed to make Trump look bad.
It's just the reporter and it's Trump.
And when you get a fair fight and it's one-on-one and it's live, Trump wins.
When it's edited and it's later at night and they can chop it up and make it look bad, then the media win.
Same thing here.
I don't think conservatives should ever do a pre-taped interview again.
We only live interviews from now on because we win every single one of those.
It's not just that the media are trying to maintain their stranglehold on culture.
The Academy is doing it too.
This is the dumbest article I saw on the internet all weekend.
It came from Harvard Magazine, so, you know.
And the title of it is The Risks of Homeschooling.
The Risks of Homeschooling.
The photo, you can see, it's got this house and it's a jail cell.
And there's some poor little kid locked behind the jail cell.
And she's looking out so sad at all the kids playing outside, but she's locked in in homeschool.
I guess those kids are in public school or something.
And then the house just has these books and it says, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Bible.
Oh, heaven forfend you read the most important and wise book ever written.
No, we've got to read like Sula or something.
You've got to read some modern thing.
That's so much smarter than the Bible.
What's really funny about this though, you can't see it on this photo because I believe they've updated it.
The first photo I saw attached to this article, they misspelled arithmetic.
I'm not joking.
You can look it up.
It's still on Twitter.
So this is reading, writing, arithmetic, Bible.
But the original one, it said arithmetic.
They come.
Okay, well, look, Harvard can't spell the word arithmetic.
I bet you every homeschooler I know can spell the word arithmetic.
And this is the irony.
Most homeschoolers I know, and I know many of them, are much better educated than people who went to public school or private school or elite colleges.
And many homeschoolers I know went to elite colleges.
They were some of the smartest kids at the elite colleges.
The article begins, a rapidly increasing number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home.
Homeschooled kids now account for roughly 3% to 4% of school-aged children in the United States, a number equivalent to those attending charter schools and larger than the number currently in parochial schools.
Yet, Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and Faculty Director at the Law School's Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children and society in homeschooling and recommends a presumptive ban on Not just a discouragement of it, a ban on homeschooling.
You've got to send your kids to that public school.
How else are they going to learn that there are 56 genders in preschool, which is actually being taught right now in Brooklyn Public Schools?
Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children's right to a meaningful education and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.
Yeah, they're not going to learn how to go and campaign for Bernie Sanders if they go to homeschool.
You know, they can't be productive.
This is the real money line.
Again, this, this paragraph shows you everything you need to know about the, the article.
In a paper published recently in the Arizona Law Review, she notes that parents choose homeschooling for an array of reasons.
Some find local schools lacking or want to protect their child from bullying.
Now look, that's undeniable.
Many public schools in different places are absolutely terrible and don't equip your child to learn anything at all.
Barely teach them to read.
Others do it to give their children the flexibility to pursue sports or other activities at a high level.
That's okay, too.
If your kid's getting bullied, it's okay.
If your kid wants to play baseball, that's okay.
Probably soccer, if we're being honest about these people.
Others do it for this reason.
But surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families, by some estimates up to 90%, Bartholet notes that some of these parents are extreme religious ideologues who question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy.
They had to get white supremacy in there because any time that anybody is slightly to the right of Barack Obama, then you're a white supremacist, neo-Nazi, right, whatever.
Now, Extreme religious ideology, very bad.
Gender ideology and telling four-year-olds that boys can be girls and they should chop off their genitals, that's really good.
That's not extreme.
That's not an ideology.
But saying that Jesus Christ died for your sins, that's extreme.
That's crazy.
Nobody can even be exposed to that.
Because if you're raised reading the Bible, the most important text ever written, the most profound work that has completely shaped our culture, if you're raised reading that ever, like even once being exposed to that, then...
You're going to become a total dunce idiot and not be able to contribute to society.
Whereas, if you are actually prohibited from reading the Bible in school, then you can become a really smart person and not know how to spell arithmetic.
Then you'll know that boys can really be girls and babies aren't really people and there are 56 genders.
Then, you know, in other words, you'll be educated.
Like the people at Harvard.
I guess they're oblivious.
I guess it's not intentional.
I guess it's oblivious.
This article is very dumb.
If this is indicative of the kind of education that you can get at Harvard, no one should go to Harvard.
Okay?
Harvard charges $70,000 per year for a gender studies degree.
And they are now saying that homeschooling is unfair to students.
You know what this is really about?
It's about the same thing we've seen throughout this whole pandemic.
Control.
That's what it's about.
The politicians who are arresting pastors for having church services, it's not about public health.
It's about control.
They're letting the marijuana shop remain open.
They're letting prisoners...
Out of jail.
Violent criminals out of jail.
They're allowing all that stuff to happen.
They're allowing abortion clinics to operate 24-7.
But they won't let people go to drive-through church where they won't touch anybody.
That's not about public health.
That's about control.
Mainstream media here.
They're concerned not about public health, not about what really happened in China, not how these mitigation strategies are actually affecting the virus, not how we can prevent a pandemic in the future.
They don't care about that.
They care about control.
They want to control the narrative.
They want to control their financial access to the Chinese market.
They want to control you and what you can understand.
Does not care about how children can be educated.
The schools are all shut down.
The only way that children can currently be educated is homeschooling.
They're all locked at home.
There's nowhere else to go.
And Harvard is actually saying this should be illegal.
They're saying it would be better for your child not to receive an education than for you to teach your child something that, God forbid, contradicts leftist orthodoxy.
Which, by the way, is another term for idiocy, for unreality, for ignorance.
56 genders, that's ignorant, okay?
Arithmetic, that's ignorant.
But they'd rather your kid be uneducated Then educated in the tradition of our civilization.
In the tradition that gave us William Shakespeare and Dante and Isaac Newton, like all the greatest thinkers of all time.
Thomas Aquinas, right?
Forget that.
Either you read postmodern drivel or it's child abuse.
That's the control.
And these people are cultural elites, self-appointed.
They're really upset that they're losing that control.
Brian Stelter, the representative of CNN, the representative of this whole culture, he cried.
And he didn't cry because he's afraid of coronavirus.
And he didn't cry because he's lost his job.
He hasn't lost his job yet.
He cried because this pandemic is changing things.
Obviously some for the worse.
But maybe it's exposing some weaknesses of our culture.
Maybe it's causing some people to start to lose their control.
Brian Stelter tweets, I crawled in bed and cried for our pre-pandemic lives.
Tears that had been waiting a month to escape.
I wanted to share because it feels freeing to do so.
Now is not a time for faux invincibility.
Journos are living this, hating this, like everyone else.
For comment, we turn not to Joe Biden, but to the godfather, Don Vito Corleone.
You can act like a man!
What's the matter with you?
Is this how you turned out a Hollywood Pinocchio that cries like a woman?
What can I do?
What can I do?
What is that nonsense?
Ridiculous.
You can act like a man.
What's the matter with you?
What's the matter with you?
This is obviously very humiliating for any man to tweet out ever and he should feel humiliated.
But more than that, the mainstream media, the academy, the stewards and gatekeepers of our culture, They should feel afraid.
They should be crying because I think they've lost a lot of credibility in all of this, and I don't think they're going to get it back once this is over.
In fact, I think that we're going to keep flattening that curve of their credibility as we move forward, and I think maybe we're developing a little bit of a herd immunity to it.
All right, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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The Matt Wall Show is 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.
