As more and more people around the country get arrested for leaving their homes, as we approach the 45th day since President Trump told us to hunker down for “15 days to slow the spread,” some people are beginning to wonder if these lockdowns are destroying our liberty. Unfortunately, our liberty problems run a lot deeper than being locked in your house for a few weeks, and both sides of the aisle are to blame. Then, more evidence emerges that Joe Biden got handsy with a staffer in the ‘90s as the mainstream media steadfastly and courageously refuse to ask him about it, the government confirms the existence of UFOs, and Nancy Pelosi wants to bribe you with your own money.
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As more and more people around the country get arrested for leaving their homes, as we approach the 45th day since President Trump told us to hunker down for 15 days to slow the spread, some people are beginning to wonder if these lockdowns are destroying our liberty.
Unfortunately, our liberty problems run a lot deeper than being locked in your house for a few weeks, and both sides of the aisle are to blame.
Then, more evidence emerges that Joe Biden got handsy with a staffer in the 90s, as the mainstream media steadfastly and courageously refused to ask him any questions about it.
The government confirms the existence of UFOs, okay, and Nancy Pelosi wants to bribe you with your own money.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Lots of worries about our liberty.
You'd Remember 15 days to slow the spread?
Then it was 20 days, 25, 30, 35.
I think we're about 45 days now.
We have slowed the spread and yet some politicians don't want to lighten up at all.
We will get to those incursions because I think some people are freaking out about a loss of liberty because of these particular regulations.
The problem is a lot deeper than that.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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I think we have fallen from reasonable lockdown measures into total farce.
We did that over the weekend in Oxnard, California.
In Gavin Newsom's left wing hellscape of California.
In Oxnard, some people went to the beaches.
The beaches are kind of opening up a little bit in California.
A 93 year old couple went to the beach.
They stayed far away from everybody, totally socially distanced, and they sat down on some beach chairs in the sand.
And a mounted police officer on a giant horse comes trotting over to them and says, Hey, you!
You can't sit in that chair.
This is Gavin Newsom's California.
He ordered the couple out of the chairs.
They were allowed to sit in the sand, but they were not allowed to sit in the chairs because apparently letting 93-year-olds sit in chairs spreads coronavirus, but if they sit in the sand, they're okay.
Here's the clip.
I'll narrate because it's a little hard to hear the audio.
Guy comes on over there on the horse.
You can hear an onlooker says, they're old people.
Not exactly the most polite thing to say.
The 93-year-old guy kind of gets out of the chair, stands up.
The cop says, they don't want chairs.
Sorry.
Chairs are permanent.
The sand is temporary.
Luckily, some...
Younger people are walking over now saying, how old are you?
It's kind of a rude thing to ask a woman, but they're saying they're old people, officer.
What are you doing?
Are you insane that you're going to tell 93-year-olds they can't sit in a chair?
And of course, this is insane.
But this is the state that we've come to in these power grab cities.
Look, I get it.
The leftists and the experts and the politicians are embarrassed that they got this so wrong.
They said it would be 2.2 million dead in America.
They said it may be 4 million dead in America.
Then they revised that down to half a million.
Then they revised it down to 200,000.
Then it was 100,000 now.
They're estimating between 60 and 100,000.
That's good news, right?
We've lowered the death toll projections by more than an order of magnitude.
But they're trying to justify it any way they can.
So they say, you can't go out.
You can't go to work.
You can't go to the beaches.
Even if you can go to the beaches, because obviously there's no reason that you can't go to the beaches, especially if you're socially distanced.
You can't sit in a chair, Grandma.
All right?
This is disgusting stuff.
And if we still had a backbone as a people, if we still had any sense of liberty, not in the shallow sense of let me do exactly what I want to do, but in the sense of being responsible people, Having the great traditions of Western liberty.
If we still had that, if we were still Americans, dammit, we wouldn't put up with this kind of thing.
But instead, we're being told from paternalistic politicians that we've got to do exactly what they say, no matter how arbitrary, or they're going to take away from us even the few liberties that we still have.
I'm sorry, Governor Gavin Newsom.
Governor Gavin Newsom comes out and he says, look, we're willing to lighten up a little bit on some of these regs, but you have to do exactly what I say.
And if you don't do exactly what I say, then we're going to tighten up again.
The reality is we are just a few weeks away, not months away, from making measurable and meaningful changes to our stay-at-home order.
That is a very optimistic point to emphasize.
However, that's driven by data.
It's driven by behavior.
And as we change our behavior, we can impact the science, the health, and the data.
We have to manage and augment our behavior.
And that's why I cannot impress upon you more to those Californians watching that we can't see the images like we saw, particularly on Saturday in Newport Beach and elsewhere in the state of California.
The message is very clear, right?
The message is Be good little boys and girls, and maybe I'll let you go to the beach sometimes, but if you're not, I'm turning this car around and we're going straight home.
Okay, Daddy Newsome.
Okay, well, I promise I'll be a good little boy.
Just let me go to work, please.
Let me maybe walk to the beach or something.
Give me a break.
This guy, man.
Also, I cannot watch Gavin Newsom speak without getting just pure American psycho vibes.
I know he opened his mouth and he said, look, we need to social distance and change our behavior because then we can go to the beach.
All I could hear was...
Do you like Huey Lewis in the news?
It's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends.
It's also a personal statement about the band itself.
That's all I'm getting is just pure Patrick Bateman from him.
And it's a psycho message that he has for all of his constituents.
We want to reopen.
We're going to reopen the beaches, but you've got to change your behavior, little boys and girls.
Something tells me our grandparents would not have stood for this kind of condescension from the politicians.
This kind of arbitrary flex of power.
Because virtually every conservative I've talked to has not disputed that the states have police powers.
I'm not disputing that.
They do have police powers, especially during a pandemic.
No one's disputing that the local mayors do or frankly even that the president does.
What we're against is arbitrary exercises in power that don't do anything to actually protect the public health.
And day by day it's becoming clearer that that's what we're seeing here.
There are similar stories all over.
Undercover cops in Laredo, Texas just launched an incredible sting operation.
They did it.
You know, they're down in Laredo.
There are a lot of problems down there, okay?
Okay.
And they've taken out the two biggest criminals.
Two women who had a little private beauty salon in their house.
They did it.
They shut down people who were helping other women look nice.
That's it.
Forget the drugs.
Forget the crime.
They're letting criminals out of prison left and right, but they shut down two small business owners.
We'll get to that in one moment.
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Yes, the authorities in Laredo, Texas, have done it.
They arrested two women in an undercover sting operation.
Operation...
I don't know.
Operation Put Some Powder On and Comb Your Hair for violating the city's shutdown.
Ana Isabel Castro Garcia and Brenda Stephanie Mata have been operating a cosmetology business from their home because they're not allowed to go to work anymore.
People need to make money.
We got, what is it, 23, 24 million unemployed right now at least.
We've got nearly 20% unemployment.
So people got to make some money.
The $1,200 check you got from the federal government, not going to last you for three months.
And so they were taking some clients out of their homes.
And the Laredo lockdown says that you can't operate non-essential businesses, defined somewhat arbitrarily.
And so the women get arrested.
How did they even know this business was going on?
The women were reported anonymously through the department's Snitch app.
We've seen these apps in New York.
We've seen them all around the country.
It's a new app to turn citizens into government spies on each other.
It's the most disgusting part of the whole story, and you're seeing this spread all throughout the U.S. And guess what?
Once this pandemic's over, guess what's not going away?
Those apps, those snitch apps, that culture that turns fellow citizens into snitches on one another.
In both cases, an undercover officer working with the COVID-19 task force made contact with these women.
Asked for the service.
So this is a total setup, right?
It's not like the women were out there passing out flyers saying, hey, come to my basement so I can put some blush on you.
These cops went up there, set up these women, then charged the women with a Class B misdemeanor, which carries a maximum potential penalty of 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine for the crime of operating a cosmetology business and taking some clients when they weren't allowed to work.
Two women have already had to fork up $500 bunts for recognizance bonds to be released from jail.
Totally disgusting stuff.
And look, maybe these women will get out.
Maybe some judge will rule that this was an outrageous government overstep.
I hope that's what happens.
But the snitch culture is going to remain.
What's so crazy is that Texas is currently reopening.
They say that they're going to let their lockdown order expire on Thursday with some restrictions still in place.
But Thursday they're going to open up.
Doesn't matter.
The government is still, at the same exact time, going to flex their power arbitrarily.
Neighbors are narking on neighbors.
Cops are harassing 93-year-olds at the beach.
And teachers are wishing death on their students.
Yes.
Apparently, I thought that cops booting 93-year-olds out of their chairs was going to be the craziest thing I saw.
I thought cops wasting resources on shutting down cosmetology business, I thought that'd be the craziest thing.
No.
There's a teacher caught on tape in New Jersey, shrieking at her students, saying that she wishes death upon them because they were throwing a football in a public park.
We're close!
You won't get arrested if the maps come!
Wait, can we go over there?
Is that crazy enough for you?
Can we go over there?
We're close!
The whole area!
Get it through your thick head!
You are the reason we are in this situation.
You are the problem, not the solution.
Go ahead, keep recording.
Who are you going to show it to?
Post me on social media.
You're the idiot doing the wrong thing.
I'm just trying to save your a** and save your life.
But die, okay?
I hope both of you get the coronavirus.
I hope you both die a long, painful death.
Cool.
I hope you both die a long, painful death, says the teacher to her students.
And the most worrying effect of all of this, you see it a little bit in the snitch culture and the apps and everyone's on edge.
It's this frenzy.
It's this hysteria.
That is going to be a longer term problem.
Look how easily the American people have been whipped into a frenzy based on basically nothing.
I mean, what she says to these kids here is, you're the reason that we're in this mess.
You, kids throwing a football around in a park are the reason that we have a global Now, this just obviously on its face is not true.
China is the reason we have a global pandemic.
China and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, very likely, and certainly the Chinese Communist Party, which covered it up and allowed the pandemic to spread 95% worse than anyone expected it would, and the World Health Organization, which covered up for China, they're the reason.
Okay, not kids throwing a football in New Jersey.
But this woman, this crazy woman, has been whipped up into a frenzy by the mainstream media, for sure.
By the politicians, for sure.
By the public health experts who got everything wrong.
Zeke Emanuel.
Remember Zeke Emanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare?
He's the brother of Rahm Emanuel, big democratic operative.
Zeke, one of the leading, exalted, vaunted experts in the white lab coat.
He made a prediction.
A little while ago, about a month ago, that 100 million people would have coronavirus by now.
Trouble with making political predictions is occasionally you get called out for them.
You don't get called out by the mainstream media.
They just let them go and move on.
But occasionally some frustrating conservatives actually go back and rewind the tape and see how they did.
And it turns out they got them totally wrong.
And this kind of alarmism is part of the reason we're living in this culture right now.
We will get to that in a moment.
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Zeke Emanuel, one of the people who whipped everyone up into a frenzy.
And the frenzy is a real problem here.
Frenzy is compromising your liberty a lot more even than Gavin Newsom.
So Zeke Emanuel comes out on MSNBC a month ago and he says that we're going to have 100 million cases within a month.
Right now, if you look at the numbers, we probably have a million COVID-19 cases in the country.
And if this is doubling every three to four days, that means that we'll have 100 million people who have COVID-19 in about four weeks.
That's a frightening thought.
That is a frightening thought.
Also, according to the official numbers, off by 99%.
His estimate was 100 times higher than it actually is, according to the official numbers.
But what is Zeke Emanuel using, if not the official numbers, right?
He's a public health official.
So according to the actual numbers, not the Zeke Emanuel fantasies, we have over a million confirmed cases in the United States.
Just a little bit over a million.
Obviously, that's a lot of people.
It's not over 100 million, though.
Million confirmed cases, 57,000 deaths.
It's kind of difficult to track deaths with coronavirus.
We've talked about this on previous shows, because if you die with coronavirus, you die of coronavirus, according to the records, and this is disproportionately affecting people with serious health problems and who are older.
So, for instance, a former teacher of mine very sadly died of coronavirus and he was 97 years old.
He was about to turn 98.
I think the guy was strong as an ox and he would have lived until 105 probably, if not for this thing.
But it's very difficult to track these numbers because you're talking in many cases about people who are very old.
You're talking about people who have a lot of health problems.
So, for instance, let's say somebody is, I don't know, 90 years old, has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, Doesn't have very long to live, probably.
And then gets coronavirus.
That death will be marked as coronavirus.
Really, you'd probably attribute it to pancreatic cancer or to advanced age.
So, anyway, very difficult to track.
But again, we're using the official numbers, so we've got 57,000 deaths.
If Zeke Emanuel is right, and there are actually 100 million people who have this, who have not been tested, who have not been confirmed for it, then that is very encouraging.
That the death rate is so much lower than we predicted, right?
If 100 million people actually have it and the total number of deaths is only 57,000, obviously it's still a huge number, but relative to 100 million, that's an encouraging number in any case.
If the number is really that high, by the way, if it's 100 million people, then we are well on our way to herd immunity.
So it makes us question why we still have some of these lockdowns.
If the numbers that Zeke Emanuel was giving...
Are right, or if they are wrong.
Either way, I don't see the argument for continuing the lockdowns.
The whole point of the lockdowns was don't overrun the healthcare system and develop a vaccine.
Right?
Because you don't want to overrun the healthcare system because then more people die than otherwise would.
And you want to have the lockdowns until you can get a vaccine because then you've slowed the rate so much, then you have a vaccine and it knocks it out.
We now know we're not going to get a vaccine within a year or a year and a half, at which point the virus will have already spread everywhere.
And we know that we're not overwhelming the healthcare system because the Javits Center Emergency Hospital in New York was empty and the USNS Comfort, the hospital ship, was empty.
It was gone.
So we don't need to worry about that.
Yet, Despite all of that evidence, the politicians double down.
You want to know how wrapped up we are in the drama of the coronavirus, in the drama of the lockdown, in the drama of Orange Man Bad?
Yesterday, the US government admitted that there are UFOs and nobody cares.
The US government came out yesterday and after...
16 years of questions about one particular aerial phenomenon, but obviously decades of other questions about UFOs.
The U.S. government actually came out and said, yeah, there are UFOs.
And everyone said, yeah, okay, who cares?
Orange man bad.
What did Trump say at the press conference?
Well, we will get to what Trump said at the press conference.
But first, we've got to talk about the aliens.
Or I should be more specific.
The UFOs.
Here is some video.
I'll narrate it because you can't really hear that well.
Here's just some clips of what people are looking at when they talk about these UFOs.
So, it's this object that people are calling a tic-tac.
Because it looks kind of like a tic-tac.
It doesn't have wings.
It doesn't seem to be being propelled by anything in particular.
And some Navy pilots have been able to get it on camera.
So they're tracking it.
It's moving in this kind of weird way.
Doesn't look like a normal airplane or even a drone.
It's kind of turning in the air and it just comes to a stop.
They just have no idea what this thing is.
There's another one.
They caught it.
It was very, very high up in the sky.
And then it just plummeted and got very close to sea level and then just kept flying along the sea level.
And according to some of these Navy pilots, they're actually...
There were a whole bunch of these things.
There were like a dozen or even more.
And then by the time they actually went to film them, they only caught this one.
But it is really weird.
It's moving in a weird way.
And some of these videos came out, they leaked, you know, a year or two ago, maybe a year or two before that.
But some of them actually leaked as early as, I believe, 2004 and were published.
So we've already seen a lot of these videos.
But anyway, the government is acknowledging that they exist now.
Seems to me that there are three possibilities here.
This could either be U.S. government technology, foreign government technology, or, to quote that guy on the History Channel, aliens.
Right?
You can't discount the third possibility.
I mean, I don't think it's exactly the likely one, but those are the three options.
U.S. government, foreign government, or aliens.
I suspect, as I've suspected the whole time, that this is U.S. government technology.
The government has been stonewalling on this for a long time, now upwards of 16 years.
And they've determined that there's nothing particularly classified in these videos.
And so, you know, if there's no risk that the Chinese or someone else is going to get this first, then they can release some of these videos.
That would be one reason to do it.
Another reason to do it would be to make it clear that Navy pilots and other people should feel comfortable reporting this stuff and you're not going to seem like a total kook.
I think maybe part of the reason why some people haven't wanted to report that they've seen these aerial phenomena is they don't want to seem like they're tinfoil hack conspiracy theorists.
But if the government does know that these kind of things exist, then they want the people who are seeing them to feel more comfortable reporting them.
That would also be true if this is from a foreign government.
We don't know exactly what the technology is or which government is putting it out there, or more importantly, who is intruding on U.S. airspace.
Because don't forget, we're doing all sorts of exercises in the skies in our airspace.
If some unidentified flying object comes in and knocks out some of our equipment or, God forbid, one of our pilots or something, that's a huge deal.
So they might want to sound the alarm on that a little bit as well.
And then the third option is that they're aliens.
And I don't think that's necessarily the most likely option.
There are some interesting analyses of these things, though, that are floating around the Internet.
One piece, I retweeted it earlier, was written by a guy who said, okay, bear with me, here's the craziest version yet, that this is like an alien or something, something we just genuinely don't know what it is.
The way in which this technology is moving is about 20, 22 times faster than, for instance, an F-18 technology that we're very familiar with.
And the analogy that this author draws is that looking at this Tic Tac object compared to an F-18 would be like someone on a horse and buggy 500 years ago looking up at the sky and seeing an F-18.
It would be about 20, 22 times faster than the horse and buggy, just as the Tic Tac is 20, 22 times faster than the airplane.
We don't know what it is.
It's kind of interesting, and it says a lot about our political culture right now, that we don't care.
We're not interested in these kind of crazy wonders of the world, because we're all busy arguing about the orange man's press conferences and how bad he is, right?
I think it was at Chesterton who said, the world is not perishing for want of wonders.
It's for want of wonder.
There are a lot of wonders in the world that we can look at, but we humans don't have the capacity to wonder at them.
And this actually gets to our problem on liberty here, which is a lot, a lot deeper than just some governor taking away some right for some period of time.
We'll get to that in a second.
We will get to the danger of frenzy, the Trump press conference and the final knock on our liberty, which is coming care of Nancy Pelosi.
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I've got to thank you for joining The Daily Wire.
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We'll be right back.
We're in this kind of frenzy right now where the news is telling us zillions of people are going to die.
And we're just, we're so focused on the present that we can't zoom out and get some perspective.
Okay, we're like so focused on the political present, we're even ignoring the UFOs.
It's just unreal.
If you imagined what it would be like the day the government said, hey, there's such a thing as UFOs, you would have thought it'd be world news, everything would shut down, it would be shocked, the president would come out and make a statement.
Instead, they're ignoring it.
That's like page seven of the newspaper.
One thing I've been trying to encourage since the beginning of this whole pandemic is some historical perspective.
Right?
Saying, okay guys, let's see, we're shutting down the global economy for this pandemic.
We've had pandemics before, like the Spanish flu, which was very bad, but we didn't do this, we didn't do that.
We've had other virus scares, Zika, Ebola, HIV. We should, you know, kind of maybe temper our...
And no, the left doesn't want you to temper any of your hysteria with perspective.
The one thing the media are trying to discourage, number one, is historical perspective.
They won't let you talk about historical precedent.
They won't let you talk about other illnesses.
If you say, hmm, let's compare this virus to the flu, they'll scream and yell at you and say you're not allowed to do that.
Why?
I couldn't tell you why.
This is the real threat to liberty.
This is why tyrannical regimes, like in fiction or in reality, always want to erase the past.
Because the past is a great bulwark against the political overreaches of the present.
And so in 1984, George Orwell says, there was no such thing as history.
History was erased.
There's only the eternal present in which the party was always right.
The party is always changing its narrative.
The left has changed its narrative.
The media changed its narrative on the coronavirus as they've been more and more wrong.
But they just deny all the predictions they made the week prior, two weeks prior.
This is the threat to liberty, our lack of perspective and our lack of self-control.
Trump is not letting the press derail him, though.
He never does.
Can't stump the Trump.
So, the press now have devolved to asking questions that are more or less, President Trump, when did you stop beating your wife?
They're now accusing President Trump, not only of being responsible for the coronavirus, because I guess President Trump was leading the research in the Wuhan laboratory or something, or he was cooking up bad batches of bat soup, They're not only blaming him for that, they're comparing it to the Vietnam War.
If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be re-elected?
So, yeah, we've lost a lot of people.
But if you look at what original projections were, 2.2 million, we're probably heading to 60,000, 70,000.
It's far too many.
One person is too many for this.
And I think we've made a lot of really good decisions.
The big decision was closing the border or doing the ban.
People coming in from China, obviously, other than American citizens, which had to come in.
Can't say you can't come in.
You can't come back to your country.
I think we've made a lot of good decisions.
I think that Mike Pence and the task force have done a fantastic job.
I think that everybody working on the ventilators, you see what we've done there, have done unbelievable.
The press doesn't talk about ventilators anymore.
They just don't want to talk about them, and that's okay.
The reason they don't want to talk, that was a subject that nobody would get off of.
They don't want to talk about them.
We're in the same position on testing.
We are lapping the world on testing.
And the world is coming to us, as I said.
They're coming to us saying, what are you doing?
How do you do it?
We're helping them.
So, no, I think we've done a great job.
A great answer from Trump.
I would have probably been testier with this reporter because it's such an absurd question.
As though President Trump is responsible for a global pandemic that started in China and has gone to every country in the world.
Is Trump responsible for the deaths in Italy or the deaths in Iran or the deaths in the rest of Europe or the deaths in the UK?
No, of course not.
It said, What are you talking about?
But Trump, what he keeps going back to is he says, you know, we've done a great job.
We did a great job on this.
We did a great job on this.
We did a great job on ventilators.
Remember the ventilators?
Until he said that, I forgot about the ventilators.
The ventilators were the biggest story.
It's all anybody would talk about.
We need to get more ventilators.
Andy Cuomo said, we don't have enough ventilators.
By the way, it turns out the ventilators don't even really work that well.
According to various studies that have been done, most people who go on the ventilators end up dying.
The ventilators are kind of a last-ditch effort and they don't really seem to work.
So even the idea that the ventilators were the key to stopping the carnage of the virus does not appear to be backed up by evidence.
But that was the whole story.
And then President Trump ramped up production of the ventilators, worked very well, and all of a sudden the press forgets about it.
It's had a memory hole.
All of these stupid talking points on the virus.
And what Trump is trying to do is bring that back up.
It's part of the reason that he keeps going back.
He says, wait a second, you remember when you guys tried to impeach me?
Hey, remember when you tried to say I was a Russian stooge?
You remember that?
Do you remember that?
Because you wouldn't if you're just watching the mainstream media.
You become hypnotized by the mainstream media.
You become whipped up into a frenzy.
You lose all perspective.
And when you're whipped into a frenzy, that's the threat to liberty.
I can't stress this enough.
It's not...
Just the edicts that come out of the governor's mansions.
It's your own behavior.
And we are increasingly being accustomed to behavior that is not befitting a free people.
Speaking of unfree people, we do have to check in on North Korea because we don't know if they have a dictator still or not.
President Trump seems to know something more about that than he's letting on.
But we have Schrodinger's dictator over there.
He might be dead and alive at the same time.
He's in this sort of suspended state.
President Trump has asked on it, and he refuses to answer.
Have you gotten any update on Kim Jong Un's health as he responded to your letter from March?
When Kim Jong Un?
I can't tell you exactly.
Yes, I do have a very good idea, but I can't talk about it now.
I just wish him well.
I've had a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.
If I weren't president, you'd be in war.
You would have been in war with Korea.
You would have been in war with North Korea if I wasn't president.
That I can tell you.
He expected that.
That I can tell you.
I hope he's fine.
I do know how he's doing, relatively speaking.
We will see.
You'll probably be hearing in the not-too-distant future.
I think you have a good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
But last Saturday, Senator Graham, he mentioned in Fox News, he interviewed, he said...
He didn't say anything last Saturday.
Nobody knows where he is, so he obviously couldn't have said it.
This is breaking news.
That Kim Jong-un made a statement on Saturday?
I don't think so.
Okay, there is the, there is Trump's admission that Kim Jong-un is not doing particularly well.
As the reporter says, he made this statement on Saturday because the North Korean government put out a statement with his name on it.
And Trump says, he made a statement?
Yeah, I don't think he made a statement.
From what I know about Kim Jong-un's condition, something tells me he is not making statements at the moment.
So it would seem likely that he is in either a vegetative state or some kind of a coma or...
He's brain dead.
I don't know.
You've seen all of the reports that are all just rumors, but based on what we're seeing from President Trump's reaction, one would suspect that perhaps he's not dead yet, but he's in a pretty bad way.
Not great timing, of course, amid a global pandemic, heightened tensions, possibility of wars increased, particularly with China, and then you have the Chinese client state, North Korea, loses their dictator.
So, sort of a tight situation, but again, there, perspective, nuance, totally gone.
Then-President Trump is asked this question about the economy versus people's lives.
And Trump makes an important point here.
He says these are not totally separate questions.
When people lose their freedoms, that can lead to death as well.
It would depend on the state.
It would depend on the circumstances of the state.
I mean, some states are, you know, perhaps a little early and some states are a little bit late.
And the attorney general, I read that and I saw that.
And frankly, the attorney general doesn't want to have rights taken away because, you know, there are some people they're not allowed to open up a store or you're going to lose their livelihood.
And by the way, that causes death also.
Between all of the things that happen, and this has been a big study, you know, the fact that people aren't allowed to have their freedom causes a tremendous amount of problems, including death.
That's true.
He makes a good point.
This is a point other conservatives have made, is when you have this false dichotomy between opening up the economy or saving lives, you know, some people are saying, I'm not going to sacrifice lives on the altar of the Dow Jones.
This is a false dichotomy.
The economy is people, right?
The economy is not only this abstract notion.
It's actually people and how we go to work and how we live.
And when you completely shut that down, you see spikes in things like drug overdoses and suicides.
And so that leads to death as well.
A good point to make.
It's an easy way to knock down their false dichotomy.
But it's not really the argument.
Okay?
Okay.
Even if freedom, even if true liberty meant that there's a slightly higher death rate in normal times, generally speaking, It would still be a good thing.
In fact, we know that there is.
A good example of this is driving around.
We have various speed limits in the United States and we have 38,000 driver deaths per year.
If we lower the speed limit to 20 miles an hour, we would have zero driver deaths per year, or virtually zero.
And yet we don't reduce that down to 20 miles an hour because we're tolerating certain risk because we want to exercise our freedom responsibly.
We're not saying that the speed limit is 400 miles an hour.
That would be irresponsible, too.
But we are saying that we are going to have a responsible exercise of our liberty that's going to entail certain risk, but the liberty is worth the risk, right?
Americans are losing that idea of the argument.
We're only arguing from this very utilitarian, narrow perspective of how many deaths.
If one extra person dies, then that's unacceptable, and if we save even one life, to quote Andy Cuomo, then everything will have been worth it, even though it ends up costing lives.
Nancy Pelosi is now taking this She's pushing for the universal basic income.
And unfortunately, the Republicans kind of let her get away with it because the Republicans were behind this idea that everyone should get a stimulus check straight from the federal government.
Now Nancy Pelosi is saying, wait a second, people can't live on $1,200.
We should continue to give them these stimulus checks, this universal basic income, into the foreseeable future.
Well, I think we should extend the time.
I really do.
I always thought that was too short a time.
I think we should extend the time.
I think what you suggest makes all the sense in the world.
And then, again, as we go forward, let's see what works, what is operational and what needs other attention.
Others have suggested a minimum income for A guaranteed income for people, is that worthy of attention now?
Perhaps so, because there are many more people than just in small business and hired by small business, as important as that is to the vitality of our economy, and other people who are not in the public sector, you know, meeting our needs in so many ways, that may need some assistance as well.
So there it is.
Nancy Pelosi speaking broadly about more money to small businesses, which she actually was holding up herself, and then more money to the people and this idea of extending stimulus to everybody over longer periods of time, the UBI. has been entertained by both sides of the political aisle.
It's been entertained by progressives like Pelosi and by people on the right like Charles Murray and even the Libertarian Cato Institute has written in defense of something like the UBI, Universal Basic Income.
This shows us something about how we understand liberty.
It shows us that hyper-individualists on the right and statists on the left have more in common than we might think.
That somehow libertarians and progressives, maybe they have something in common.
Classical liberals and leftist liberals, maybe they're not opposites.
Maybe they actually have something in common.
Everybody thinks he's for liberty.
Every person around thinks he is for liberty.
The wackos in the French Revolution and the good people in the American Revolution both thought they were fighting for liberty.
Obviously very different conceptions of liberty.
The question is, what is liberty?
Right now in the United States.
The focus is on economic liberty.
Leave me alone to keep more of my money.
Leave me alone to buy the things that I want to buy without interference.
And I'll be free.
On the left, the focus is on social liberty.
Leave me alone to sleep with the people I want to sleep with.
Leave me alone to change my body in ways that I want to change my body.
Leave me alone to define reality in the way that I want to define reality as Justice Kennedy talked about in the Planned Parenthood v.
Casey decision.
Leave me alone to define my own gender and use the bathrooms that I want to use.
Both define liberty.
In a very similar way, actually, they both define liberty as doing whatever you want to do, following your own desires, following your own passions.
Obviously, that represents a little differently.
On the right, it's more economic.
On the left, it's more social.
But it's the same basic definition of liberty.
They might disagree about the details, but they both agree on the primacy of individual desire.
And the trouble with that is, as individual desire grows and gets unleashed, and as the restraints on individual desire break down, the state grows too.
This always happens.
And we never think it's going to happen, but it does.
So as the focus on the individual grows, the focus on the family, the focus on the local community, the focus on local bonds of loyalty and unchosen obligations, you know, we always talk about consent.
We'll talk about consent in a moment when we get to Joe Biden, right?
The things that we don't choose freely, that we're just kind of born into, and obligations we have, and duties that we have, and inherited conventions that we have, and traditions that we have, those things go away when you just focus on the individual and following individual desires, whether it's on the right or on the left.
Whether we're talking about globalized free trade, or we're talking about gender neutral bathrooms, or we're talking about moving away from your family or whatever.
Things that everybody does in this modern society.
The problem with that is, when you are left with just a bunch of atomized individuals, then that group is very vulnerable to the state.
When you're left with just a bunch of atomized individuals, there's nowhere to turn when we're in trouble, like a global pandemic, but to turn to the state.
Because all those other institutions that we might have turned to before, the family, most importantly, but the Lions Club, the local community, the parish, those things have been so weakened that they actually can't take care of the people, so you've got to turn to the state.
This is the premise of the Obama campaign's Life of Julia.
This is the premise of a lot of...
Thought experiments in recent years on the right and the left.
It's the reason why the right sometimes embraces the UBI. So societies that start out very individualistic end up very statist.
Isn't that strange?
You can actually see it.
If you want to watch this happen in real time, you can see it in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
So all the way back then, in the early days, the American Revolution, you see Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, they start out writing.
They're like hyper-individualist, classical liberal, libertarian, sort of right-wing, and then by the end of their lives, they're writing in this very statist way, very progressive way, about how we need the state to come in and provide lots of things for people.
It's not that they flipped.
It's not that they're total opposites.
It's that that's the natural progression of things.
I bring this up because coronavirus is making this a very stark reality, okay?
People right now are feeling isolated.
They're feeling socially isolated.
They're feeling economically helpless.
We're all just trapped in our apartments, right?
And we know from the social science people have been getting lonelier and lonelier in recent decades.
Now we see just how lonely we are.
Because, you know, if this had happened 70 years ago, we probably wouldn't be trapped in our apartments alone.
For a lot of people, we'd probably be in big houses, in big communities, with thriving local associations.
And...
Now we just have less of that.
You know, we're more urbanized.
We move more to the cities.
We are more ready to live alone or live apart from family and social connections.
This is why any authentic conservative alternative...
Needs to really offer an alternative here, okay?
Conservatives traditionally had a different definition of liberty than we started with.
That definition of liberty that the right and the left right now both share, which is just doing whatever you want to do, following your own individual desire, that's not the traditional definition of liberty from conservatives.
The traditional definition of liberty is something that you had to earn.
Right?
So, the liberal idea, the kind of left and right, classical liberal and progressive liberal idea, is based on this false premise that man is born free in a state of nature.
And he's a free individual in a state of nature, and then he chooses through consent and a social contract to constitute a government.
Trouble with that is that's not actually how any society has ever developed, and that's not how people are born.
We are not born free in a state of nature.
We are born into families with obligations.
We're not free-floating.
We're born into places with duties and conventions and associations and bonds of loyalty.
And we're not free.
We're slaves to our own passions.
Little babies are not free.
Little toddlers are not free.
They're monsters who can't do anything to resist their passions.
They eat all the cookies, right?
And what we have to do through, for instance, the liberal arts and liberal education is to learn how to make sense of our freedom and to earn our freedom because freedom is a responsibility.
And we have to learn how to do that to pursue the good and govern ourselves.
And that's how you have a free society.
The less we control ourselves, the more order will be imposed on us.
Which means, actually, in a way, Gavin Newsom, at the top of our show, has a point.
Gavin Newsom, who says, look, I'll let you go to the beaches, but you've got to behave yourselves or else I'm not going to let you do it.
In a way, he's got a point.
If we cannot discipline ourselves, if we cannot think of liberty as anything more than just pursuing my own individual appetites and desires, then we're not going to be a free people.
Because we won't be able to make sense of our own freedom.
We've got to start viewing liberty as something that we earn.
We've got to start thinking about liberty as something bigger than just fulfilling whatever short desire I have.
And we know that Joe Biden's not going to be able to do that because all Joe Biden ever does is fulfill his own desires.
Sometimes a little bit too much, apparently.
Before we go, I just have to point out, you know the Biden story.
He's got the allegation against him that he sexually assaulted a former staffer.
The woman doesn't necessarily seem super credible.
The story was never talked about for decades.
When she initially came out with it, it was not nearly as egregious as what she's saying right now.
Obviously, the timing is convenient because he's running for president.
There was a little corroboration because her mother coincidentally called into the Larry King show the week or something that she got fired, left the Biden office to corroborate this issue that she was having.
Now, The accuser, Tara Reid, her former neighbor, Linda Lacasse, has confirmed that Reid told her of the assault.
And she says, this happened, and I know it did because I remember talking about it.
That's what she told Business Insider.
So now we've got...
The accusation from a former staffer, not just some random person, corroboration apparently from the mother, corroboration from a friend at the time.
This makes it a much more serious allegation than before.
I'm not even saying it's credible yet.
I don't know.
I want to give Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt, just like everyone deserves due process.
We know this is a much more serious allegation than anything ever against Brett Kavanaugh.
We know Tara Reade is much more credible than Christine Blasey Ford or any of those other people were.
And yet the media won't ask them about it, because the media are certainly not pursuing truth.
They're certainly not pursuing the story.
They are too busy whipping us up into a frenzy, and they're hoping we're going to take the bait.
Let's not take the bait.
All right, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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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.
