The scientist whose disproven doomsday model destroyed the global economy has resigned from his position after it came out that he broke his own lockdown order to sleep with his married mistress. Why should we be expected to listen to scientists when they don’t even listen to themselves? Chris Cuomo goes on an unhinged rant, a salon owner in Texas tells a power-hungry judge to pound sand, and President Trump vows revenge on China.
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The scientist whose disproven doomsday model destroyed the global economy has resigned from his position after it came out that he broke his own lockdown order to sleep with his married mistress.
All of which brings up one question.
Why should we be expected to listen to scientists when the scientists don't even listen to themselves?
Chris Cuomo goes on an unhinged rant.
A salon owner in Texas tells a power-hungry judge to pound sand.
And President Trump vows revenge on China.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Oh, the scientists, how they reveal themselves, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally, apparently, to their married mistresses.
All of this as governors around the country are urging more caution, more heed, more fear, even as some of the states are reopening.
We'll see the effects of some of that in a little bit.
Even as they're saying that, they're saying you have to follow the rules, you have to do exactly what we say.
The governor of West Virginia came out and used even more colorful language than that.
Again, I encourage all businesses that are allowed to open to do so only if they f***ing follow the guidelines to keep West Virginia safe.
I don't know that we actually even had to bleep that, because at first I couldn't tell, look, West Virginia, that's a pretty serious place.
You know, that's a pretty direct, tell-you-like-I-see-it, you know, kind of American state.
I think what he was actually trying to say was, on his sheet of paper, it said, if you follow the guidelines.
But then he saw the word can.
So it was, if you follow...
Can follow the guidelines and the way it came out.
Obviously, we have to bleep it if we're going to play it on the show.
But I like that attitude.
We're going to open up if you follow the guidelines.
Okay.
Yes, sir.
Unfortunately, most of the people who are urging us to do exactly what they say are not doing it in this tongue-in-cheek or accidental sort of way.
And the chief among them, the chief offender of this, is Neil Ferguson.
This name...
It probably isn't going to go in the history books because he's probably going to be written out of the history, but he should because this is the guy, more than anybody, responsible for the global economic shutdown.
This is the guy who came up with the infamous Imperial College model that predicted 2.2 million deaths or more in the United States from coronavirus.
So, Neil Ferguson says...
If you guys pursue herd immunity, if you guys let the virus run rampant, you don't shut down your businesses, then you're going to have millions and millions of deaths on your hands.
You've got to stay in your apartment.
Okay, fine.
All the governments of the world, including the UK where he lives, shut down.
Then, turns out, Neil Ferguson didn't follow his own lockdown order.
Why am I surprised?
Neil Ferguson, on at least two separate occasions, this is a 51-year-old scientist, Broke the lockdown order so that his 38-year-old married lover could leave her home, travel all the way across London, and have a fun time, have a little lockdown and chill with the government scientist.
This is right after Neil Ferguson got finished self-isolating for two weeks for testing positive for coronavirus.
So it wasn't even out of an abundance of caution.
You know, I met a guy who met a guy who met a guy who had coronavirus and so I'm going to stay home.
The guy was self-isolating after testing positive.
And yet people are breaking these orders.
Neil Ferguson sort of accepted responsibility.
He has resigned from his government position.
It's not enough, okay?
And as we're seeing more and more scientists and the politicians who are using the scientists being exposed for getting this virus so wrong, you're going to see the excuses pile up.
I love Neil Ferguson's excuse, which we'll get to in a second, but it's not just Neil Ferguson.
It's other scientists.
It's media personalities.
It's governors.
It's everybody.
Colluding together to try to cover up for this terrible damage that they've brought.
We'll get to that in a second.
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All right.
Neil Ferguson accepts responsibility for violating his own order.
He says, I accept I made an error of judgment and took the wrong course of action.
I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in the government's scientific advisory group for emergencies.
I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus, and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms.
You see, it's not a full apology because he's making excuses.
Look, I thought I was fine, okay?
It's not actually a big deal, but it's a political issue.
And you pesky people with your politics keep getting involved in my science.
And so anyway, I guess I'll step down.
I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the continued need for social distancing to control this devastating epidemic.
The government guidance is unequivocal and is there to protect all of us.
Oh, okay, then why didn't you follow it?
Oh, if I have to hear the phrase social distancing again, once this pandemic is over, I never want those two words to be next to each other.
It's social distancing.
We're all repeating these phrases like we're robots.
We're all mindlessly repeating phrases.
The government's guidance is unequivocal.
The government is there to protect us.
Beep, boop, beep, boop.
Well, clearly, Neil Ferguson doesn't believe that because he violated it, which is fine.
Okay, admit that you don't think the government guidance is mandatory, necessary for everybody.
Admit that much of the science behind this whole response, this whole government reaction, was bunk, was bogus.
Admit that your study was wrong.
Okay?
That's...
I'll forgive.
I don't mind that some scientific expert got things wrong.
I don't mind that the government got things wrong.
What I really mind is being gaslit about this whole thing and being told to repeat platitudes and being told to repeat scientific certainties that turn out to be not so certain.
Another hypocrite on all of this, another guy who clearly doesn't believe what he's saying, In another sector of the economy is on CNN. Chris Cuomo, brother of Andy Cuomo, governor of New York, one of the most famous politicians during the pandemic, telling people to lock down.
Chris Cuomo goes on CNN. Now that finally people are starting to push back a little bit, starting to open up, he doubles down in a largely incoherent rant.
I pulled out the most coherent parts to try to get to his argument.
But you can see increasingly desperate telling people to stay at home.
Personally, the lesson for me is obvious.
My lesson is gratitude.
It's my first day back in the office in more than a month.
So many of you were so good to me, both in my family and to my family.
I'll just say, thank you.
I will spend my time in this capacity trying to justify the faith that so many of you have put in me.
But while my own COVID battle is mostly over, I'm worried that so many seem to think it's mostly over for all of us.
And that is just dead wrong.
Facts.
Case numbers climbing pretty much everywhere.
68,000-plus deaths now.
Two weeks ago, the president said we would have 60,000 deaths, period.
Now, his administration is reportedly privately projecting there are going to be 9-11-like death tolls on a daily basis by early June.
And yet, they want to push reopening?
Now look, no one has accused this president of being fact-focused or even read in on any of this.
But you don't need him to mislead you.
In fact, don't put this on Trump.
We are deceiving ourselves.
No, you're deceiving us.
You, Chris Cuomo specifically, not even just CNN. You don't need Donald Trump to deceive you, because I, Chris Cuomo, will deceive you.
Do you remember, what was it, a week ago, two weeks ago?
Chris Cuomo pretended for a month to be isolated and quarantined in his basement of his house because he was diagnosed with coronavirus.
And then they filmed this big segment on CNN where Chris was walking up the stairs for the first time.
And he sees his wife and his kids.
He said, oh, this is what I've been waiting for.
Oh, I've just been waiting for this to see my beloved family for the first time in a month.
And then it turns out he had been violating the order the whole time.
Because he got into an altercation on the street, outside, walking with his family, with a 65-year-old guy on a bicycle who said, wait a second, you're the CNN guy.
You said you're being quarantined.
Your brother is ordering all of the quarantines.
What are you doing outside?
And they got into an altercation.
This guy was not taking the advice that he was giving you because...
There's one set of rules for the scientists.
There's one set of rules for the media personalities.
There's one set of rules for political elites.
And then there's another set of rules for you peasants.
Okay, look, it doesn't really matter if Chris Cuomo stays in his basement for four weeks.
Who cares?
Look, his family probably already was exposed to it anyway.
It's not that big a deal in their age group.
So, you know, he can go out.
But you, you peasant, you dirty person, you nothing, you pleb, You can't go outside because then that might threaten public health.
But everyone else, all the elites get to do it because, like, look, they're really clean and meticulous.
So just don't worry about that.
Don't pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
I love the numbers he gives.
He goes, this is not over.
Cases are rising every day.
Duh.
Yeah.
Unless the virus just completely stops, unless all time comes to a standstill, there will be more cases tomorrow than the day before, right?
Unless nobody gets infected anymore.
That's not how viruses work.
But that's not the number that we're looking at.
We want to look at how, first of all, deaths obviously lag infection rates, but how deaths are moving, how infection rates are moving, then we can see how this virus is going.
That's why even some liberal governors are beginning to reopen, because we have no other choice.
But Cuomo says, no, don't do it.
He gets more desperate the more the rant goes on.
Those are the facts.
But there's also feel.
Fatigue.
I've had it.
Season's changing.
It's getting warm.
I want to get back to it.
Look at these fools.
Fools!
I know they want to be out there.
Fools!
It's not about you.
What about the other people?
And look, I'm not going to castigate you.
That's not my job.
I'm not your daddy.
But we have to think about this.
We are rushing to get back out of want, not just out of need.
All right?
Beautiful weather does not make for a beautiful reality.
Yes, we're tired of bad news.
Yes, the government is not doing things it should be.
And there's no question that this is all real, but so are the numbers.
The relaxing of stay-at-home orders doesn't mean COVID isn't a problem anymore.
In fact, the opposite is the truth.
I know I said that already.
I'm going to repeat a lot of things because it's not getting through.
Things will get worse.
I don't care how you reopen.
Okay, Chris, things will get worse.
Okay, you bet, buddy.
That's why you're castigating all of those fools who are going outside.
He has the audacity to call them fools, even though he himself did the very same thing.
By the way, when the pandemic was far worse, when it was raging far more than it is right now.
Did any of you succeed at deciphering exactly what he was saying?
Because I couldn't really.
He just has these snippets of ideas, and then they kind of go away.
And then he realizes he's kind of retreading old ground, but maybe not quite.
He says, I know I'm repeating myself, but the reason he's repeating himself is because his argument is very confused.
And his argument is very confused because...
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
He tried to make the argument for weeks that we all have to lock down.
We all have to quarantine.
This is the end of the world.
We're going to have two million people dead.
And then that didn't happen.
And then more evidence that that didn't happen beyond just the numbers is Chris Cuomo wasn't believing it himself at the time and he went outside.
But still for some reason he doesn't want anything to reopen.
Maybe political advantage.
Maybe that's why some of these democratic politicians are so keen on keeping the economy depressed.
And then he's got to keep making that argument, but he can't keep making that argument because the evidence is all around us.
The rant that he goes on gets even weirder.
But I just, we can't play anymore.
Chris Cuomo, I'm not giving him any more of my show time.
But he gets more desperate.
And he tries to convince people, by the end of the argument, he tries to convince people that going outside isn't that great.
He says at the end, he goes, think about, look, if we reopen, think about what you're giving up.
What are you going back to?
What, you want to go back to, like, restaurants and seeing your loved ones and walking outside in the park and on the beach and going to work and earning a paycheck?
Who wants that?
Nobody wants that, because now you get to spend time with family.
Your family's going to starve, but you get to spend time with them.
They've gotten so desperate that now they're making the argument, what, you want to work and go outside?
Why not just live in your little pod for the rest of your life and plug Tiger King into your head and just consume trash media, including CNN, until the end of your days?
That's the argument they're making.
Why do you have to go outside?
This is the argument the left has been making for years now.
Why do you have to fly?
Why do you have to go on airplanes?
Why do you have to drive?
Why do you have to work and travel and move?
Why do you have to consume products?
Why do you have to do any of that stuff?
Can't you just work and go to sleep and not really bother anything and let me enjoy nature?
And the irony, of course, whether it's often the environmental left making this, whether it's Leonardo DiCaprio or anyone else, It's people who fly on private jets.
It's people who go on their own mega yachts.
It's people like Al Gore, who has a giant home that could power many, many homes if you divvied it up.
The rules never apply to them, and yet they are so willing to emotionally manipulate you, to castigate you, to use Chris Cuomo's word.
I mean, it's usually not as blatant as the chief scientist, the most famous scientist in the world on this issue, saying you all have to stay at home, and meanwhile he's slipping his mistress in through the back door.
It's usually not quite as obvious as Chris Cuomo saying, we've all got to stay home because my brother Andy Cuomo says we've got to stay home.
It's usually not that obvious, but the hypocrisy is always there.
Here's a doctor, a medical doctor, an expert, one of our benevolent betters who's going to run our lives for us and take politics away from self-governing people.
This guy, Jeremy Faust, MDMS. That's his Twitter name.
He's got to put his degrees on Twitter.
That's how you know he's a very serious person.
Yeah, I think I'm going to start doing that.
Michael Knowles, B.A. That's how you know.
I've got a degree.
I've got a credential.
So he puts this out on Twitter, and he proposes a new concept.
Listen to this.
Proposing a new concept, it's called your death number.
Your death number is the number of deaths of your fellow Americans you're willing to accept to save, say, 1,000 jobs.
For context, we've lost around 461 jobs for every one death so far.
What's your death number?
I don't know who this person is, obviously.
I haven't followed him.
He's a blue check from Harvard Medical School, so that gives me some context of his point of view.
What a disgusting thing to say.
It's just the same narrative we've heard from the beginning.
If you oppose shutting down the global economy, then you're killing people.
You're a murderer.
If you think that people should, like, ever go back to work, you've got blood on your hands.
You're a bad person.
Not a good person, like the good people who completely misled us based on bunk fake science and locked down the global economy and then didn't abide by the lockdown orders themselves, but forced everyone else to, all the peasants.
Those are the good people.
But the bad people are, say...
You, a middle-class salon worker in Texas who just wants to feed her family.
We'll get to that story in a second.
That's a true story.
It's not a hypothetical.
Those are the bad people in this bizarre world.
Of course, it's bunk, right?
We know it's not a choice between we've got to save this job or kill this person.
First of all, when you destroy 30 million jobs, people die.
People actually die from that.
Every one percentage point, the unemployment rate ticks up.
More and more people are dying.
People are going to die from suicides and drug overdoses and other things too.
So that part is gone.
The other side of it is, with the lockdowns, we're not sure that that saved even one life.
The purpose of the lockdown, as I've said before, is to not overwhelm the healthcare system and to buy time to get a vaccine.
No evidence we're going to get a vaccine before the virus spreads through the population, and we didn't even come close to overwhelming the healthcare system anywhere, including even in the epicenter of New York.
Javits Center was empty.
USNS Comfort, empty.
So...
No evidence that the lockdowns have saved lives.
Evidence that the shutdown has killed people.
The entire concept he's proposing is ridiculous.
But let me propose another concept.
This is an even newer concept than this doctor's.
My concept is, let's reject the modern ideologies that reduce politics to bean counting and utilitarianism and this death or not this death, and that reduce all of life to matter.
And let's maybe reject those stupid modern ideologies Now we would say leftist ideologies in favor of a fuller view of politics that takes into account what human life really is and what it means to live in society.
Just a crazy idea, I know.
Maybe that's an older concept.
The older concept that we not just export all of our politics to these experts in lab coats who don't even believe what they say.
The emperor has no clothes.
That's what it comes down to.
The scientist has no clothes.
Literally, in the case of that guy in the UK, Neil Ferguson.
Part of his problem right now is that he didn't have his clothes on for quite a bit of the pandemic.
They have no clothes.
And yet the left treats science like it's a god.
Oh, listen to the scientists.
I follow science.
I believe in science.
They actually use this kind of language.
Well, if science is your god, then science is a god that failed.
God that failed is a phrase that was used to refer to communism back in the 20th century.
For all these communists, guys like Arthur Kessler, people like Whitaker Chambers, who believed it.
You know, communism was a replacement religion for people who had lost their religion and became atheists.
But the utopia, the perfection of communism, it failed.
It was not infallible.
And that was when a lot of people became disillusioned with that.
But scientism, which is what we've seen throughout this pandemic, scientism, the way to outsource all of our politics, all the hard decisions, the serious eternal questions about ethics and how we live, the decision to export all of that to some guy in a lab coat because he knows how to run my life.
He knows how to make moral decisions for me for some reason because he got a degree in chemistry.
That scientism is a god that failed too, and we've got to stop allowing demagogues and hack politicians push that onto us.
President Trump is showing the way here a little bit.
President Trump...
He's been criticized for being too tough.
You know, he uses his press conferences to argue with the scientists.
He's rambunctious.
He's tweeting about liberating different states.
He's not showing enough empathy.
He's not deferring entirely to the scientists.
He was asked in an interview on ABC with David Muir.
How do you pronounce his name?
Muir?
Muir?
I don't know.
He was asked what he would say to the families of...
The people who have been killed by coronavirus.
And he expressed a keen sense of empathy.
We've lost more people now than we lost in the Vietnam War.
What do you want to say to those families tonight?
I want to say I love you.
I want to say that we're doing everything we can.
I also want to say that we're trying to protect people over 60 years old.
We're trying so hard.
I want to just say to the people that have lost family and have lost love and the people that have just suffered so badly and just made it and just made it that we love you.
We're with you.
We're working with you.
We're supplying vast amounts of money like never before.
We want that money to get to the people and we want them to get better.
And we want them.
You can never really come close to replacing when you've lost some.
No matter how well we do next year, I think our economy is going to be raging.
It's going to be so good.
No matter how well those people can never, ever replace somebody they love.
But we're going to have something that they're going to be very proud of.
And to the people that have lost someone, there is nobody.
I don't sleep at nights thinking about it.
There is nobody that's taking it harder than me.
But at the same time, I have to get this enemy defeated.
And that's what we're doing, David.
That's what we're doing.
Remember that answer.
You should write that answer down.
You should clip that answer out.
That is such a wise distillation of the conservative sense of politics.
I know.
People don't consider Donald Trump to be a political philosopher.
I generally don't either.
But he gets it.
He gets it at least on that point.
What do you say to the people who have died from coronavirus?
What are you going to do?
The premise of the question is a leftist premise.
Okay.
There's this epidemic.
People are dying from it.
You're the president.
What are you going to do?
You've got to stop it.
The leftist premise is there's no limit to politics.
We can solve any problem with politics because politics is a science.
And so when we just put the experts in charge, they'll figure out the perfect scientific political solution and then we won't have any more death or misery anymore.
That's what you're supposed to say on the kind of leftist progressive idea of politics.
And what does Trump say?
He says, I would tell them I love them.
This is such a hard thing.
I love you.
That's all we want to hear.
I love you.
A sense of empathy, a sense of human solidarity, and a sense of humility that politics can't fix everything.
It can't.
We've done everything we can.
We've thrown spaghetti at the wall.
Don't wear masks.
Wear masks.
Lock down.
Don't lock down.
Hydroxychloroquine.
Some other drug.
This kind of drug.
UV light.
We've thrown everything.
Lock down travel from China.
Lock down travel from Europe.
We've done everything.
And the virus is just going to spread.
And it's going to spread like other viruses spread.
Like other plagues have spread throughout all of human history.
Because we're not immortal, we're not invincible, our brains are not infinite, and our politics can't solve every problem.
Don't overwhelm the healthcare system, but we didn't.
Buy time to get a vaccine.
Okay, we bought a lot of time.
But that can't go on forever.
Even the whole idea was flatten the curve, right?
That was the best idea they could come up with.
Flatten the curve means the same number of people are going to get it, and assuming you don't overwhelm the healthcare system and you don't have a vaccine, the same number of people are going to die.
And that's a sad fact.
It's a tragic fact of life.
The left denies that tragic fact of life.
To a degree, they deny mortality.
I mean, in some ways, they explicitly deny mortality.
You hear all these kind of leftist futurists talking about how they're going to get the cure, and through technology, we're going to live forever, right?
But more generally, they deny the fact that we're all going to die someday.
So everything is about living in fear and clutching your pearls, and if the coronavirus doesn't get us, then the sun monster's going to get us, and global warming, and we've all got to hide indoors and not go outside, lest, heaven forfend, we die.
Which we're all going to do at some point.
Hopefully not soon.
We want to minimize that risk.
But conservatives accept the tragic fact of life.
Human nature has fallen.
We are mere mortals.
Our politics is not able to do every single thing.
It's not able to do very much at all.
And when we try to create a politics that can solve every problem, very often it creates more misery than we started with in the first place.
Trump goes from that keen insight Maybe he wasn't even aware of that.
Maybe it's just his gut.
Maybe he's not formulating all of this in his head.
Good.
I mean, I think a key part of that sort of conservative insight is that your gut can lead you in a pretty correct direction.
But he goes straight from that into what we're going to do now facing China, how we're going to move forward in the realm that politics can achieve things in.
Namely, in international trade, in manufacturing, in shoring up our supply chain.
We'll get into that in a second.
Then we'll get into an important symbol that Trump showed.
You know, I feel the messaging out of the White House has been a little back and forth, unfortunately, during this pandemic, right?
Sometimes you think, okay, it's going to be really hopeful.
We're going to start pushing.
Then we've got to hunker down again.
Then we're going to leave it up to the states.
Then we're not going to leave it up to the states.
It's just been Of course, it's a pandemic, so there's going to be some confusion.
But I think now the White House is getting really on the right track here.
And you see it even in a symbol.
Donald Trump walking through a manufacturing plant.
He's not wearing that mask.
The left is furious about that.
We'll get to it in a second.
Then, we'll get to a great bit of resistance from a salon owner in Texas who refuses the Orwellian political power grab of a judge.
Then...
I don't know if I mentioned this to you.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is in the hospital.
We'll get to what that means.
Obviously, it has a lot of implications.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
So Trump says, I love you.
Obviously, there's no amount of technological, utilitarian, leftist calculation that can ever replace one person who's died in your family.
That's the right attitude.
Very conservative attitude.
Very correct.
Then he moves on to what politics can accomplish, which is in all these other political realms.
Namely, in manufacturing, he makes the announcement that the U.S. is taking back our manufacturing from China.
This pandemic has underscored the vital importance of reshoring our supply chains and constructing a powerful domestic manufacturing base.
I've been talking about that for a long time.
Oftentimes, you'd see a plant like this in a different country doing the work you could be doing, and you'll do it better.
The United States declared its independence nearly 250 years ago.
But in recent decades, Washington politicians allowed our independents to be offshored, outsourced, and ceded to foreign countries.
But we're taking it back.
And we've been taking it back.
When you look at our job numbers, you knew that we were taking it back.
So Trump is following up this announcement with some specific features of the policy.
So Reuters is reporting that the Trump administration is trying to create an alliance of trusted partners, which will be called the Economic Prosperity Network.
This would include companies and civil society groups operating under the same set of standards on everything from digital business, energy, and infrastructure to research, trade, education, and commerce.
Presumably, China will not be a part of this.
You've got to ask yourself why we shipped everything over to China in the first place.
And there's two reasons.
There's a kind of philosophical political reason, and then there's a straight economic reason.
The philosophical political reason was that there was this idea among liberals on the left and the right that We'll get them hooked on some American culture.
We'll get them hooked on the U.S. dollar.
Then they'll begin to democratize.
Because you can't possibly become rich and not want to follow in the liberal democratic traditions of the West.
Right?
Isn't that how it's going to work out?
No.
Turns out that's not how it worked out at all.
Actually, the richer China got, the more it clamped down on its own population, the more it put millions of its own citizens in concentration camps, the more it relied on slave labor, the more it forced its population to kill its own children through the one-child policy until finally they realized they the more it forced its population to kill its own children through the one-child policy until finally they realized they were going to have a dying population, so The more China started aggressing on the United States, on our interests in the South China Sea, for instance, it just didn't work.
It just failed.
It was dumb.
We should not have admitted China to the World Trade Organization.
We should not have cheered them on as they were rising up because now we're facing the worst geopolitical adversary we've had since the Soviet Union.
So, political side, it totally flopped.
Why did we persist in this so long?
You know why?
Because we liked the cheap stuff.
Because we liked the money.
Because when you buy something in America...
It's more expensive.
It's higher quality, but it's more expensive.
You know, sweet little Lisa said to me the other day when this pandemic was starting off, she says, we've got to stop buying all this cheap stuff, like cheap clothing and stuff from China.
It's bad.
At this point, it's unpatriotic of us to do that.
We've got to start buying American clothing.
I said, well, good luck finding it.
Very little clothing is made in America.
Very little of anything is made in America these days.
But yes, I agree.
You're right.
We've got to stop buying stuff from China.
We'll start buying stuff from America.
And if we've got to pay a little bit more, that's fine.
Then I look at how much more you've got to pay.
You've got to pay like double or more, okay?
But of course you do.
Of course you do.
We would not have upended the world order and allowed this tyrannical power to rise for just a little bit of a good deal, right?
Right?
No, it was very seductive.
Everything about the idea of a rising China was very seductive, very tempting, and we fell for it.
Now we've got to pull back on that temptation.
There are going to be costs to that.
It's going to cost us more money to get cheap consumer goods, which are not going to be so cheap anymore.
It's okay.
There are bigger questions here.
All of politics can't be boiled down to some stupid scientist in a lab coat who gets everything wrong and sleeps with his girlfriend and violates his own orders, for instance.
All of politics can't be boiled down to just bean counting and economics.
That's what the left wants to do.
That's not what conservatism has ever been.
There's some things that are worth paying a little bit more for.
And anyway, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
So President Trump, very big on this manufacturing point, as he's been talking about for a long time.
He then tours a Honeywell plant.
Honeywell is manufacturing protective personal equipment.
And so he tours the plant.
He's got his goggles on because you have to wear the goggles when you're in a manufacturing plant.
But notably, he refuses to wear a mask.
So Zeke Miller, one of the top journalists in the country, tweets out, the president is wearing safety goggles but no mask on his tour of Honeywell PPE manufacturing line.
And if you look at the responses to Zeke's tweet, the liberals, the left, furious at him.
And the conservatives, basically appreciative of this.
Why?
What's going on here?
Of course the president can't wear a mask, a face mask.
The president of the United States cannot wear a face mask in public.
That projects weakness.
That looks awkward.
Politics is about pictures.
It's about what we see.
Trump knows this.
He's a TV star.
He can't wear that.
I don't want Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un, or the ghost of Kim Jong-un, or anyone else, any other nefarious actor, Xi Jinping, looking at a picture of the American president so afraid of getting this virus that he's going to put the mask on.
Trump is obviously being tested constantly, so there's no risk of him transmitting the virus to anybody else.
And he's going to accept the risk of maybe coming into contact with the virus in the air or on some surface or something.
That's a risk he's got to take.
Because the images matter here.
The projection of U.S. power matters.
George W. Bush, after 9-11, during the World Series, walked into the center of Yankee Stadium and threw out the first pitch.
Now, obviously, he had Kevlar on.
You could see it, which made it all the more amazing that he threw a strike in the game.
But obviously, it's a huge risk.
You've got, what, 50,000, 60,000 people in that stadium?
Maybe not quite that many, but you've got a lot of people in that stadium.
Packed-out stadiums.
Anyone could have taken a shot.
Security at Yankee Stadium was never that great.
It was fine.
Anyone could have taken a shot.
You're taking a risk to project strength.
That's one of your jobs as president.
And if George Bush can throw a pitch out at the World Series, then Donald Trump can walk out in public without a mask on.
It reminds me of Reagan and Gorbachev.
You know, Reagan, the first time he met Mikhail Gorbachev, His counterpart in the Soviet Union.
This was in 1985.
It was in Geneva, I think.
And Reagan was already at the house.
And Gorbachev pulls up.
And it was freezing outside, right?
They're in Geneva.
And Ronald Reagan's an old guy.
And he refused to wear a coat.
And he's arguing with his advisors, wear the coat, don't wear the coat.
Reagan didn't want to wear the coat.
He sort of trots down the stairs to meet Gorbachev.
Gorbachev, who was younger than Reagan, comes out all bundled up.
And that image was worth, it was priceless.
You had this older American president looking like a young, vigorous man, trotting down the stairs without his coat on.
And you had this guy, the Soviet leader, looking all bundled up and afraid and cold and It just, that, he was, Gorbachev was furious about this because Gorbachev knows the power of symbols.
Well, in this case, the mask is a symbol too.
I'm not saying that if you come into contact with your grandparents in your private life that you shouldn't wear a mask.
I'm not saying that.
I'm not saying if you go into a grocery store, you shouldn't wear a mask.
I'm saying that the president of the United States has to think about more than just protecting his own grandparents, who I suspect are not alive anymore.
The President of the United States has other things to think about.
That's been a big problem in this whole pandemic, is we've only been focusing on this one narrow aspect, the science of it, which a lot of it turned out to be bunk.
Exalted Dr.
Fauci tells us how to run our lives.
You've got to think about more.
You've got to think about the economy.
You've got to think about geopolitics.
You've got to think about what China's doing in the South China Sea.
You've got to think about how Iran is responding.
You've got to think about so much more.
And you've got to think about how it looks.
You know, a lady in Texas...
Recognizes the power of images as well.
Recognizes that there's more to this whole pandemic than just, you know, sort of getting your material goods satisfying your own immediate desires.
This woman is a salon owner.
She opened her salon for a week in defiance of the lockdown and she was arrested for it.
And a judge sentenced her to a week in jail and a $7,000 fine.
For opening her salon business and just, you know, trying to feed her kids.
So the judge, Eric Moy, told this owner, Shelley Luther, owner of Salon Alamode, that he would not make her go to jail if she just admitted that what she did was selfish and wrong.
Here's this woman's answer.
Judge, I would like to say that I have much respect for this court and laws.
And...
And that I've never been in this position before.
And it's not some place that I want to be.
But I have to disagree with you, sir, when you say that I'm selfish.
Because feeding my kids is not selfish.
I have hairstylists that are going hungry because they'd rather feed their kids.
So, sir, if you think the law is more important than kids getting fed, Then please go ahead with your decision, but I am not going to shut the salon.
Damn right.
Oh, this woman deserves a prize.
I want President Trump to give her some kind of medal.
I don't know.
Medal of Freedom, Medal of...
I love this.
It's such...
It's such an obscure moment, right?
She's in some tiny courtroom in Texas.
Nobody's watching.
No cameras.
I mean, I guess there are cameras now because we're in this lockdown.
And I guess that's how we got this footage.
But she's not on a big stage.
She's not on a TV show.
And yet, the question came down to one of integrity.
And that's where questions of integrity really come, when you think nobody's watching.
The judge said, this is like out of George Orwell, this is out of 1984.
He goes, I'll go easy on your sentence.
If you just admit that feeding your children was selfish and wrong, and you'll always do exactly what the government tells you to do, even if it's based on bunk science, even if it's an arbitrary power grab, you do what we say.
Say uncle.
He's basically twisting your arm behind your back.
Say uncle.
Say uncle.
And she said, nah, I think I'd rather go to jail because you can take my week away from me.
You can take my money away from me.
You can take me away from my kids.
But you can't take my integrity.
You can make me scream, but you can't make me sing.
I love it.
I'm so inspired by this woman.
We should get this video going all around.
The judge should be ashamed of himself.
Those are the kind of subtle acts of defiance that we need to start seeing.
You know, already we're seeing the effect of some of this pushback.
The government really clamped down.
The government started arresting pastors because they thought people ought to be able to go to church.
The government clamped down.
Gavin Newsom in California decided to specifically close the beaches of his political opponents.
He said, I'm talking about Orange County.
The only conservative metropolitan county in California.
The county did not vote for Gavin Newsom.
I'm closing your beaches.
And you know what people said in Orange County?
Yeah, okay.
All right, Gavin Newsom.
Great.
I was one of those people, actually.
I was at the beach on Sunday.
And he's, oh, we're going to get you.
Now, all of a sudden, he's saying, well, maybe we'll start reopening in the next few weeks.
Yeah, maybe.
Oh, thank you, Daddy Newsom.
They're not even talking about reopening out of the goodness of their heart or because they're looking at the science.
What science?
What science?
What mask order?
Don't forget, the Surgeon General told us not to wear masks with three exclamation points.
It's to stop buying masks.
Now, we've got to buy masks.
Everything that's not prohibited is mandatory in this bizarre, arbitrary power grab culture.
No, the reason that Newsom and other people are loosening up a little bit is because we're forcing them to.
Because You can't, as Drew Clavin said the other day on his show, you can't lead people where they don't want to go.
Good leaders understand that they've got to take people where they want to go, and they've got to convince people that they want to go where they want to go.
You can't just force us.
We're not going to do it, okay?
If we don't go, they can't take us there.
If we all just go to the beach, they can't shut down the beach.
And these subtle acts of defiance, I think, are very important, and I fully intend on embracing them.
Before we go, I've got to get to the dumbest article on the internet.
Actually, well, two.
I'll give just a quick update.
There's not really much to say about this.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is in the hospital.
How do you think that's being reported in the mainstream media?
This is from CNN Politics.
I love this.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg resting comfortably after non-surgical treatment for benign gallbladder condition.
Because they just, they know, the minute the left sees Ruth Ginsburg in the hospital, they say, oh no, batten down the hatches, the country's lost.
No, all of our hopes are resting on this one elderly jurist.
Obviously, we hope Ruth Bader Ginsburg is doing just fine.
One, because...
She's a human being, and we like that.
But perhaps more importantly, she was friends with Antonin Scalia.
So, you know, you've got to wish her well.
I just love the headline.
All the coverage of whenever Ginsburg goes to the hospital, which is fairly often, is Ginsburg.
We're doing well after a benign non-surgery.
It's all good.
Nothing to see here.
Don't worry about it.
Who knows?
This is why some people joke that we might be living in a weekend at Ruthie's situation.
But I would not joke about that.
Never.
Also, before we go, the dumbest article on the internet comes from The Atlantic.
It's by writer Connor Friedersdorf.
And it basically gets everything we've been talking about today exactly backwards.
The title is, Masks are a Tool, Not a Symbol.
Lives will be lost if Americans allow the culture war to determine whether they cover their face in public.
Getting mask use exactly right may be impossible.
We lack full information about the efficacy of masks in many settings, and different people have different value judgments about mask mandates.
But, here's where he just obviously negates everything he just said.
So Still, the evidence is now quite robust that masks are effective in at least some settings.
Is it?
I don't know.
There's been a lot of robust evidence this whole time that nobody's been paying attention to, including the people pushing it.
And all that robust evidence gets reversed within a week or two.
If Americans simply studied the evidence and behaved accordingly, erring on the side of caution, many lives could be saved, which makes it frustrating that highly influential broadcasters who reach millions of Americans, by that he means conservatives, are turning masks into yet one more front in the culture war, telling their audiences that elites favor the use of face coverings to take away the freedom of the masses.
This is leftism.
This is a totally leftist manifesto at this point.
If Americans only studied the evidence, they would realize that we've got to do everything the leftists tell us to do.
It's the evidence.
It's the science.
It's not even, forget politics.
It's just the science.
They've just got to, look, many lives could be saved.
No evidence of that at all.
There's evidence that the lockdowns are killing people.
There's no evidence that they've saved a single life.
It doesn't matter.
That's the science, but we're not talking about the science.
We're talking about the science with a capital S, the narrative.
That's what they really mean.
The leftist narrative.
And, and, you know, the conservatives are just opening up one more front in the culture war.
No, you're opening up the culture war.
I love this.
They accuse conservatives of being the aggressors in the culture war.
Conservatives aren't the ones who decided that we need to invent a fictional constitutional right to kill babies.
Conservatives aren't the ones who decided to radically redefine marriage, the bedrock institution of society, away from what it has meant everywhere throughout all of human history.
Conservatives aren't the ones who brought Drag Queen Story Hour into schools, and conservatives aren't the ones who said that we've got to shut down the entire global economy, throw 30 million people out of work based on false scientific models.
Not us.
Okay?
That's you that did that.
And force us all into these arbitrary, cultural, symbolic moments.
Using phrases like social distancing as though they're now the most important phrase in our lexicon.
Wearing the masks as though they're a virtue signaling badge.
Which they are.
If people want to protest, can't they wear masks just in case, if only to err on the side of caution for their neighbors?
Were they to decide, based on the merits of the mask alone, rather than the culture war premise that eschewing masks is a way to own the libs, marginally more would use face coverings?
That's if the protesters and the communicators were to say that.
It's the culture war premise.
No, no.
I think the culture war premise is that Governors and politicians and self-appointed dictator scientists can tell us all exactly what to do without very much evidence, arbitrarily, reversing their decisions day by day, and we all just have to go along with it because you said so, because we serve you.
Dr.
Ferguson, or we serve you, Connor Friedersdorf.
That's a very radical cultural war premise, and I ain't going with it.
Fox News and the Limbaugh program are not niche products.
Many rely on them as a primary source of information.
When they turn public health tools into symbols, they hurt the country and their loyal audiences most of all.
The masks are a symbol.
They're also a tool.
They can be a tool.
If you're around people who are vulnerable, if you are a person who is particularly vulnerable, Perhaps you should wear a mask.
Certainly in certain instances, you could wear a mask.
Okay.
Nobody is suggesting otherwise.
For a lot of people, this virus is not particularly dangerous.
In a lot of instances, the masks don't do anything at all.
Don't take my word for it.
Listen to the surgeon general and all the scientific experts who told us that for weeks.
In that case, the mask is not a tool whatsoever.
It is merely a symbol.
It's covering your face.
How much more symbolic do you need to get?
And what the left is doing, I mean, this is exactly what they do with political correctness.
This is exactly what they, I mean, political correctness, that is the definition of political correctness, is the left forcing us all to use their symbols while pretending that the symbols aren't symbols.
Right?
They're forcing us all to use their words, to use their jargon, all of which are symbols, while pretending that it isn't.
The left forcing us to believe their political premises and to advance their political premises while pretending it's not political at all.
It's just science.
It's just neutral.
I don't think so.
It's very important that we push back on those symbols.
Prudence is a virtue.
We should use the tools that can help protect us and other people when that is appropriate.
But There are things beyond matter as well, and we've got to pay attention to those symbolic things because the ideas, the politics, our loves and our joys and our hopes and all the things that really matter to us, those are ineffable.
Those are In many ways, represented by symbols, and the symbols we use matter.
So be more like that lady in Texas.
Be less like the cowards cowering in fear of leftists yelling at them, and the people listening to hypocrites in the media, in the scientific establishment politics, who won't even follow their own advice, and yet they expect us to follow it instead.
All right, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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.
