Furious at crazy left-wing covid policies, Elon Musk takes the so-called “red pill,” prompting right-wingers to claim the Tesla boss as a conservative and left-wingers to call him a Nazi. (They think everybody’s a Nazi.) Speaking of which, a left-wing Harvard professor praises Nazi education policy, the American Civil Liberties Union comes out swinging against civil liberties, and the mainstream media get caught with their masks down. Red pills for everybody.
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Furious at crazy left-wing COVID policies, Elon Musk takes the so-called red pill, prompting right-wingers to claim the Tesla boss is a conservative and left-wingers to call him a Nazi.
But they think everybody's a Nazi.
Speaking of which, a left-wing Harvard professor praises Nazi education policy.
The ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, comes out swinging against civil liberties, and the mainstream media get caught with their masks down.
Red pills for everybody.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
This is a red pill buffet.
Enjoy.
I know buffets aren't allowed anymore amid COVID, but here they are.
What even is a red pill?
I don't know.
It's a little bit of a complicated question.
Elon Musk, just over the past few days, he tweeted out, take the red pill.
And then there's a little red rose emoji, which actually makes it a little bit confusing exactly what he was saying.
What does the red pill mean?
If you were to ask a hundred people in a room, you say, what is the red pill?
You might get a hundred different answers.
If you asked independent minded people, you know, not conservative, but not leftist, maybe they have some kind of confusing views.
They're left wing on one thing, right wing on another.
They would say that taking the red pill is to think independently.
If you ask a conservative, what does it mean to take the red pill?
They'd say it's to become a conservative, to stop being a liberal or a leftist or a progressive.
And if you were to ask a left winger, what is the red pill?
They'd tell you it's a code word for Nazi.
And they actually did.
When Elon Musk tweeted this out over the weekend, everybody just said, Elon Musk is a Nazi now.
He's a Nazi now.
There was a blue checkmark, Molly Jongfast, who said, Elon Musk is a racist.
He's a bigot.
It's anything, you know, the left has done this in recent years.
They've said that a bunch of innocuous symbols are code words for neo-Nazis.
So they did this to the OK hand symbol.
They said that's actually now like a secret Nazi symbol.
They did this to a glass of milk symbol.
That's now basically a swastika and they're doing it to the red pill, which is a reference to the movie The Matrix.
You know, people are forgetting that this red pill idea, it's not some dark recess of the internet, you know, it's on the hidden levels of 4chan.
It comes from the matrix.
And in the matrix, there is a choice presented.
It said you can take the red pill and you can see reality as it is, or you can take the blue pill and you can remain in the kind of matrix fantasies.
That, I think, is the most basic definition.
When you apply the red pill language to politics...
It means giving up ideology, realizing that ideology is a lie.
I think this is why Elon Musk put that little red rose there.
Because the red rose is another Twitter symbol that refers explicitly to the democratic socialists of America.
So you'll see a lot of very far left-wing accounts have the little red rose picture.
This is kind of odd, right?
He says, take the red pill and then a little red rose.
Was it because Elon Musk doesn't know what that red rose means?
Is it because he thought it was a red pill instead of a red rose?
Was he being ironic or sarcastic?
What is he?
Well, on the one hand, on the one level, the one thing we know Elon Musk is really good at is getting everybody to talk about him.
He's one of the greatest marketers of his age.
But on the other hand, I think there's actually some significance to it, maybe, which is regardless of exactly where you want to try to pinpoint me down, on the left or on the right or in the middle, take the red pill means rejecting these ideological categorizations.
It means, most basically, recognizing that the official narrative It means preferring reality to theory.
There's a big difference between the right and the left.
On the right, The conservatives at our best, we prefer reality.
We don't really care about how it works in theory.
We don't need there to be a big manifesto about how things work as long as it actually works.
And on the left, they don't care if things actually work.
They don't care if American society basically works pretty well.
They don't care if the West has led to a lot of human flourishing.
They want to know how it works in theory.
Elon Musk is not a typical Republican.
Joe Rogan He's another one of these.
He's not a typical Republican, right?
Joe Rogan was a Bernie bro as of two months ago or something.
But now Joe Rogan is saying, I can't vote for Biden.
I might end up voting for Trump.
And now the left is very upset with him for this.
He's resisting ideological categorization.
But I think there are a lot of people like Joe.
I mean, obviously there are a lot of people like Joe Rogan.
His show is one of the biggest podcasts in the world.
I think there are a lot of people like Elon Musk who are a little bit more independent-minded and who are coming over more to the right.
If this were 20 years ago or 15 years ago, this were during the Bush era, you might see more independent-minded people leaning left.
But now they're heading in the direction of the Republicans or the conservatives or Trump.
Why?
It's because they're questioning their assumptions.
They're taking the red pill.
They're preferring reality to this kind of official story that permeates our whole political lives that we've been told that probably isn't all that true.
And the people most responsible for doling out those red pills, it's not me, it's not It's not even Donald Trump.
It's the media.
It's the mainstream media.
And the mainstream media have sort of exposed themselves because of Donald Trump.
He's helped them along.
But they have done it themselves.
When people realize that the mainstream media apparatus are not telling you the truth, are telling you lies, are constructing whole narratives out of whole cloth, then that difference between the ideology and the reality becomes very, very clear.
We will get to that in a second.
There was a protest over the weekend that showed pretty deservedly, I think, just the level of vitriol people have for the mainstream media.
We'll get to that in one second.
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So the great dispenser of red pills is the mainstream media.
There was a protest going on.
I think it was in Long Island.
It was about reopening New York.
And they had a local journalist, you know, so it's not even like CNN or ABC. It's one of the more local news channels, but still a left-wing news channel.
And they're going around with the cameras.
And the people protesting, they're not having any of it.
They're not being violent.
They're not being threatening.
They just look at them and they say, hey, you are fake news and we're not going to pay any attention to you.
I'm just trying to get by on the sidewalk.
That's all.
You shouldn't be here.
You fake news.
You stopped airing the Trump briefings and you keep airing Cuomo briefings.
Go home.
You fake news.
You're destroying something else.
You are the enemy of the people!
You are the enemy!
We all know it.
You are fake news.
We know that you're a liberal agenda.
We know you want to keep your job.
We get it.
You're not getting advertiser dollars in right now.
You're not going to answer, so you're just going to go live.
Yes, I am getting a paycheck.
I'm very happy, but other people are not getting paychecks.
That's why we're here.
There used to be a good channel at one time.
I don't know what happened to you.
I love that guy at the end.
I mean, I love all these guys because they're talking very blunt, right?
This is in Long Island.
This is in New York.
People tend to be a little more blunt over there.
They're not saying, I'm going to kill you.
You're a terrible person.
No, they're just saying, look, you're fake news.
You're not doing your job.
We know that you're telling lies now.
You used to hide it better.
Now you're not hiding it.
So go home.
What do we need you here for?
You're not covering the news, right?
I guess that would be your function.
You're not doing that.
You're just trying to harm us, right?
You're just trying to make us look bad.
So get out of here.
We don't need you.
And then that guy at the end, he says, you used to be a pretty good news channel.
What happened?
It's such a genuine, sincere interaction with the guy.
He goes, I used to watch you, but you became so transparently leftist.
The things you were reporting are so different from reality that I don't watch it.
Go home.
We don't need you.
Jim Acosta, the Ron Burgundy of CNN, tweets this out.
And he says, disturbing.
No, it's deserved.
It's deserved.
If the mainstream media had even continued to push their liberal agenda, which they've always had.
They've had in this country for a long time.
But they just didn't lie all the time.
They just didn't go so far.
People would still probably believe them.
But they couldn't do it.
They could not do it.
And you know, it's gotten more ridiculous and egregious in the Trump era, but the mainstream media have always had these lies.
I mean, Walter Durante, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, New York Times, he covered The Soviet Union and lied on behalf of the Soviet Union.
It wasn't just that he got it wrong.
He intentionally, willfully lied and covered up the crimes of the Holodomor and famines in the Soviet Union in the Western press because he was a communist sympathizer and he didn't care that much for the West.
And he got a Pulitzer Prize for it.
Durante actually was another weird...
I think he was the gay lover of one of the most prolific occultists and Satanists of the 20th century, Aleister Crowley.
That's a little...
It's just a little side tidbit.
We don't need to go into that too much.
Shows you kind of the corruption of some of these guys, though.
These guys are living radical lives, and yet the presentation, Walter Durante, Pulitzer Prize winner, mainstream media, this is the way it is, all the news that's fit to print.
Then you find out, no, it's not all the news that's fit to print.
It's all the news that fits the narrative.
And all these people, and they're very serious, buttoned up coats and ties, and they're just giving you the facts.
Maybe not.
Maybe they have an agenda.
Maybe they're pretty radical people, actually.
So, a great example of these kind of lies...
In the Trump era, even this weekend, one of the most hysterical and sanctimonious reporters over at CNN is Caitlin Collins.
Caitlin Collins has been making herself the story now for weeks.
She's been standing up to Trump.
She's been harshly critical of Trump's motives on the coronavirus response, of his motives on even relationships to the reporters.
So she's talking about everyone's got to wear a mask, right?
She's got the mask on in the press briefing room, and she's given it to Trump, and it looks really good on TV. Then, the minute that the CNN cameras go off, do you know what she does?
She takes off her mask.
Luckily, there was still another camera going in the White House briefing room, so the briefing ends, and then CNN cameras go off.
She goes, okay, I don't need this mask anymore.
She just takes it right off, and she thinks that we're not all going to see that.
Take a look at this.
So, if you can't, if you're not, if you're just listening right now, she's, you know, they finally, they all leave the room And some of the reporters start to go.
And really, really bad stagecraft.
Caitlin Collins stands up, turns to face the other cameras that are still there, and takes that mask off.
Now, she's trying to spin it.
Some people around her are trying to spin it.
And say, oh, she was getting ready to do a television hit.
Oh, she was about to...
No.
She takes it off before she even leaves the room.
Because none of these people take their own, what they're saying seriously.
They're giving you, those rube masses, one set of rules, one set of narratives, and they're living by another one themselves.
And she wasn't even the worst one at this, at CNN. Unfortunately, Jake Tapper, who some conservatives say does a good job sometimes, he was the most egregious offender.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay.
It wasn't just Caitlin Collins at CNN.
It was also Jake Tapperson.
So Jake Tapper tweets this out, quote, President Trump and his team are launching an unprecedented, unprecedented smear campaign against rivals, leveling wild and false allegations against critics in the media and politics, ranging from bizarre conspiracy theories to spreading lies about pedophilia and even murder.
These smear campaigns are unmoored from reality.
They're deranged and indecent and seem designed, at least in part, to distract us from the horrific death, health, and economic crisis caused by the pandemic.
The pandemic, which impacts you, is what we will continue to focus on.
Blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, classic righteous indignation, Jake Tapper, even though it's not particularly righteous indignation.
What's he really saying with all this vague language?
He's upset that conservatives are going after Joe Biden.
Okay?
He's upset that conservatives are focusing on the allegations against Joe Biden in the same way they focused on the allegations against, for instance, Brett Kavanaugh.
And frankly, the allegations against Joe Biden, much, much, much more credible than the allegations against Kavanaugh.
He's talking about videos going around of Joe, like apparently groping little girls.
I'm not saying that any one of those videos is the evidence that Joe is, you know, Jeffrey Epstein himself.
I'm saying that all of the videos are a little bit weird.
And when you add them together, they show a pattern of behavior.
And if those videos were of a Republican, then we would never hear the end of this from people like Jake Tapper.
This is not a pedophile conspiracy theory.
There are lots of clips.
We've seen all the clips of Joe smelling all the women's hair and the women and girls and leaning in and feeling them and getting a little creepy.
We don't need to play the clip.
We've played them on this show a zillion times.
The one clip I will play you, though, is some evidence that this has been a joke For many years, not just among conservatives and Republicans, also among liberals and Democrats.
Jon Stewart did a whole riff about this back when he was still running The Daily Show.
I guess it would have been about five years ago now, four or five years ago, where Jon Stewart mocked Gropey Joe.
You know, they put an image up called the Audacity of Grope.
It was Joe Biden in the very same memes the conservatives are sending around now, smelling a woman's hair, saying that it's actually a Senate rite of passage to have one of the female members of your family grabbed by Joe Biden.
We've already seen that remorse about lady touching is the one thing Joe Biden will not feel.
Ah! I can still see it!
Ah!
Ah!
on what could you possibly be saying to her?
"Be still, my child, while I absorb your precious life song." It's apparently a Senate rite of passage.
You're not officially sworn in until Delaware Joe has felt up one female member of your immediately family.
You know, occasionally, occasionally, Jon Stewart would take a shot at some Democrat, right?
And, you know, it was mostly he was taking shots at Republicans.
Most of them were unfair.
But occasionally, he'd take a shot at a left-winger and a Democrat, too.
Now, you would never see that happen.
Now, if you're even to play a clip of Jon Stewart from 2015...
Then guys like Jake Tapper will say that these attacks are coming from President Trump and his team.
Jon Stewart's not on President Trump's team, okay?
And I guarantee you Jake Tapper saw clips like that from Jon Stewart because the only people who actually watched Jon Stewart when his show was on the air were members of the media because they were within an echo chamber of their own media narrative, which increasingly became divorced from reality.
The left used to make fun of this back when Joe Biden was just silly Uncle Joe.
He was VP. It didn't really matter.
Or before that, he was this kind of perennial candidate, right?
He ran in the 80s and he ran in the 2000s.
They knew he wanted to run again.
He's been in the Senate for a long time.
He was kind of like a nobody.
I actually think the first time I ever saw Joe Biden on television was on Jon Stewart's show.
And Jon Stewart asked him, are you going to run for president again?
And Joe Biden kind of was coy about how he wanted to run.
And I just thought, this guy?
Who is this guy?
I never even heard of him.
What, he's going to run for president?
I don't think so.
Now, though, but now it's different because Joe is going to be the nominee.
So all of reality has to change.
Everything has to go upside down for the narrative.
And I think a lot of people are tuning that out.
Jake Tapper talks about deranged conspiracy theories.
I've got some deranged conspiracy theories.
The Russia collusion story.
Remember that?
Remember when guys like Jake Tapper, including Jake Tapper, told us for years and years that Donald Trump was some sort of Manchurian candidate from Moscow?
He colluded, put in all these liberal Democrats like Adam Schiff who lied about the evidence that they didn't have for a Donald Trump collusion.
Remember the Moscow...
Urine tape.
You probably don't even remember this because the news cycle is so rapid now.
But for years we were told that there was a tape based on the Steele dossier, which was funded by Democrats, which was then used by the Obama administration to spy on Hillary Clinton's political rivals.
We were told that Donald Trump was caught on tape paying prostitutes in Russia to urinate on his bed.
That was the image that all the news channels talked about.
It's just completely fake, completely made up.
And then, of course, the most deranged conspiracy theory of all, promoted by Jake Tapper, was the idea that Brett Kavanaugh, milquetoast federal lawyer, was actually secretly a gang rapist.
The whole mainstream media perpetuated this one, but especially Jake Tapper.
There's now a third accuser.
The lead starts right now.
Breaking news.
New horrific accusations about Brett Kavanaugh's alleged behavior with girls in high school.
Kavanaugh denies it all.
He says the charges are from the Twilight Zone.
Michael Avenatti, who represents the woman in question, will be here in minutes.
These new serious allegations come just hours before Kavanaugh and his first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, are set to testify in front of the world.
Might these new charges derail that hearing?
Could they even sink his confirmation?
Could they?
I don't know.
We're just asking questions.
I'm Jake Tapper, a serious journalist.
Not like those deranged conspiracy theorists.
Those deranged conspiracy theorists who are playing videos of Joe Biden.
No, no, I'm not like that.
I'm just completely inventing stories about a federal judge gang raping people based on nothing.
Jake Tapper, deranged conspiracy theorist.
The media, obviously...
I mean, look, we actually have to move on because we can talk about the media as an example of this for probably six years straight, never taking a break and we wouldn't finish.
That's the clearest example.
When you see what's going on on television and you see what's going on in real life with your own two eyes, when you realize that those two things are not the same, then...
That's the beginning of what Elon Musk might call a red pill moment.
You also see it though outside of the media.
You see it in law and public advocacy.
A great example of this is the ACLU. There was a new policy that came down from Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education, which is now finally protecting the rights of the accused on college campuses.
The accused were having their due process rights completely trampled by kangaroo courts of leftist professors, rather than even having these charges brought up in the criminal justice system.
Betsy DeVos changes that.
The ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, comes out swinging against...
The accused against due process in favor of the narrative.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Betsy DeVos comes out, changes this rule, right?
So on college campuses, we're told, what is it, one in four girls is sexually assaulted on campus?
Makes basically Harvard Yard more dangerous than downtown Fallujah or something?
These...
These numbers are based on totally cooked, bogus statistics where the people who were taking the surveys very frequently will not realize that they've been sexually assaulted based on the criteria in the surveys.
So based on those numbers, we've been told that we've got to trample over the due process rights of the accused on college campuses.
And instead of having rape, which is obviously very serious crime, should be dealt with in the criminal justice system.
Instead of having it treated seriously there, it's treated frivolously by panels of professors and left-wing deans and deputy assistant deputy deputy dean of leftist inclusion and diversity on campuses.
They just trample over these kids' rights.
They will expel people from school.
And when I say people, I mean boys because they're the ones being accused.
They will expel them from school without any sort of due process.
So, obviously, you can't tolerate that.
And, frankly, we shouldn't have professors adjudicating questions of rape anyway.
They're not qualified to do that.
They don't have any training to do that.
So, we should put this in the criminal justice system.
Betsy DeVos makes a few tweaks to it to protect the rights of the accused.
ACLU furious.
DeVos is rolling back protections for sexual harassment and assault survivors in schools.
We're suing to put a stop to it.
So the ACLU is actually suing because the Department of Education wants to protect civil rights.
There are two levels here.
Some people look at that and say, wait a second, this doesn't make any sense because the ACLU is the American Civil Liberties Union.
And sometimes in the past, they've protected civil liberties.
So it's so wacky, I can't possibly understand why they would come out against civil liberties.
That's one level.
And then you get a little more red-pilled understanding, and you realize that the ACLU was never about civil liberties.
It was always about radical leftism.
Explicitly, it was about communism.
The founder of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, was a communist.
He wrote a book called Liberty Under the Soviets.
He didn't write that ironically.
It sounds like it was a precursor to my blank book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
You think of the same exact content, Reasons to Vote for Democrats and Liberty Under the Soviets.
But it was a serious book making the argument for liberty under that communist regime.
In 1943, the California Committee on American Activities said that the ACLU, quote, may be definitely classed as a communist front.
At least 90% of the efforts of the ACLU Early on, and perhaps even since then, have been expended on behalf of communists who come into conflict with the law.
The Daily Worker, the communist newspaper, wrote glowingly about the ACLU early on.
The thing wasn't what it said it was.
The news isn't the news, and the ACLU isn't about civil liberties.
It's just about radical leftism.
When you realize that, then it starts to make sense.
The ACLU came out strongly against Brett Kavanaugh.
And...
Trampling his civil liberties on behalf of unsubstantiated allegations.
And they're doing it again now.
It's fine.
We can either, you know, express shock and indignation over this for months and months and years and years, or we can realize that that thing is corrupt intrinsically and ignore it, rip it down, do something else.
It's not just even in legal advocacy.
We're seeing this kind of red-pilling in education.
And we're seeing President Trump pushing back against it.
We'll get to that in one second.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
You see the red pilling in the media.
You see the red pilling in legal advocacy.
You're also seeing it in education.
Homeschooling has become very popular in recent years.
Much, much more popular than in past years.
School choice has become more popular.
People want to break out of this monopoly of government education.
And as that is happening, the government is trying to take more and more power.
So even if they can't expand the percentage of kids that they're getting, they want to expand the timeline.
So, for instance, when I was, you know, when my father was a kid, you didn't have to go to kindergarten.
That was kind of a new thing.
And so he just went straight to first grade.
And when I was a kid, you had kindergarten, but I didn't go to like preschool or anything like that.
And now kids go to preschool at age four or age three.
I've even heard of people sending their two-year-olds to preschool, right?
So you extend the amount of time that the government gets with your kids.
And that even if it's private preschool, that the, the kind of liberal apparatus gets with your kids, then now they want everybody to go to college, even if they're going to go way into debt, even if they're going to get a worthless degree that deprives them both of education and job prospects.
They just want to keep you in those instant, that, that state liberal institution longer.
Obviously in COVID people are going to have to start homeschooling and Harvard is having The elite academic apparatus is trying to shut down homeschooling.
You heard from this woman, Elizabeth Bartholet.
She's a Harvard Law School professor.
She came out and basically said she wants homeschooling banned.
Now she's got another article...
This was published in the Harvard Gazette.
A warning on homeschooling.
Nationally renowned child welfare expert, Elizabeth Bartholet.
You know how great those experts are.
We've been talking about them a lot on the show in the last few weeks.
Those experts, you can't question them.
So I don't know what it is that makes her an expert, but Harvard says she's an expert, so she is.
She wants to see a radical transformation in homeschooling.
She argues...
That the lack of regulation in the homeschooling system poses a threat to children in society.
So we've got to shut it down.
Two points she makes on homeschooling.
One is more laughable than the next.
She says, behind the rapid growth of the homeschooling movement is the growth in the conservative evangelical movement.
Dun, dun, dun!
Not those evangelicals.
Not those conservatives.
Conservative Christians wanted the chance to bring their children up with their values and belief systems and saw homeschooling as a way to escape from the secular education in public schools.
Yeah, well, no, it's not a way to escape from secular education because the secular education is all around us in the culture, in the government, in the law, everywhere, right?
Right.
But it's a way to have an alternative.
So you're going to get bombarded with secular liberalism all day long, but maybe you can get a little bit of an alternative in homeschool.
They fought the battle with public school systems to have their children exempted from exposure to alternative values in the schools and lost.
That part she gets completely backwards.
The whole reason for homeschooling is to show children an alternative.
This apparatus of media and legal advocacy and education and Hollywood and everything together, that is the monolithic liberal secular culture that you're being bombarded with 24-7.
So, going to church, which they're not allowing us to do right now, and they're exploiting COVID as a reason to shut down churches and arrest pastors, or doing homeschooling, which they don't want to allow us to do, some of the great legal child welfare education experts want to ban that sort of thing, that would be the alternative.
And yet they don't want an alternative.
They don't want any competition to their system, to their narrative.
They don't want you to take the red pill.
So the Gazette asks this Professor Bartholet, could you compare the homeschooling phenomenon in the U.S. to other countries?
And here is the part where you can't even believe that they're this unselfaware.
If we look at what goes on in other countries, the U.S. stands out as an anomaly.
When other countries allow homeschooling, they regulate it much more strictly.
They demand that parents show they are qualified to teach and that they turn in the curricula they plan to use to the state.
So these other countries, they basically make homeschooling just a facet of the state.
So it can't really provide an authentically alternative possibility toward the kind of shallow leftist Education that people are getting now because the state's got to sign off on it.
And then here's the money lot.
They also mandate that the homeschooling curriculum provides an education equivalent to public school and includes teaching about the fundamental values of our society.
Some countries, like Germany, effectively ban homeschooling altogether.
In the U.S., there is essentially no effective regulation.
So...
I'm a little bit of a history buff, you know?
And I got friends in Germany.
I've quite a bit of respect for some elements of German culture.
But Germany's got a little bit of a checkered past, you know, on history and everything.
So whenever I see Germany did it, and that's why we should do it too, I just, I Google.
You know, I just want to double check, okay?
So I Googled and I tried to figure out, when did Germany effectively ban homeschooling altogether?
Under what notoriously mustachioed regime?
With that screaming guy, did they ban homeschooling?
And yeah, you guessed it.
It would be the Nazis.
So the left, think about how perverse this is.
When a guy like Elon Musk says, hey, I'm taking the red pill.
I'm questioning the official narrative.
I'm thinking of alternative ways to envision society and education.
When you say that, they call you a Nazi.
But when you explicitly endorse...
Nazi policies, and admit that they're Nazi policies.
You say, I want to do what the Germans did in the 30s.
Then you're not a Nazi.
Then you're a good, wonderful, liberal, open-minded person.
And they won't get called out for it because the education is so weak, even in places like Harvard, which was once one of the top universities in the country.
And by the way, it would be one thing if the education that people were getting were a decent education, but it's not.
We know that it's not.
We know that it's shallow, that they're hollowing out the educational system.
That was the cause for the rise of homeschooling in the first place.
So what's the red pill?
The news isn't the news.
The ACLU isn't for civil liberties.
Education isn't about education.
The ideological system that we are living in is corrupt.
It's really, really, really corrupt.
It's transparently corrupt.
It's decadently corrupt.
So when the system is basically working, when it's relatively honest, We can play by the rules.
We kind of go along with it.
Even though we think Walter Cronkite's kind of a big lib, we just go along with it.
We all go along to get along.
We can be nice.
We can be polite.
We can be genial.
When the system becomes too corrupt, too transparently dishonest, then we need to stop playing by the rules.
And that's what Trump does.
And that's why Trump, I guess in a certain sense, is the great dispenser of the so-called red pills.
Because Donald Trump...
He doesn't play like a Democrat, and he doesn't play like a Republican used to play back when we all just went along to get along and were nice and genial, and Republicans would lose a little bit more slowly than they would have lost otherwise.
Trump doesn't do that.
Trump, you know, is now pursuing through the Department of Justice In the executive branch, through the Department of Justice, they are pursuing all these crimes that took place at the end of 2016, at the end of the Obama administration.
Things like the unmasking of Michael Flynn.
Things like spying, illegal spying on the Trump campaign.
All of these shenanigans in the deep state.
Obama's coming out swinging because I think Obama thinks that the best defense sometimes is a good offense and he's really nervous that all of the trails point back to Barack Obama knowing about a lot of these nefarious, unprecedented, possibly criminal activities.
So Obama's going really hard after Trump.
You know, in the old days, the president would refrain from criticizing his successor.
That's what Bush did.
Bush refrained from criticizing Obama.
They all, oh, they played along really nice.
But that's not what happens when it comes to Trump, because Trump is actually threatening their corrupt ideological system.
So Obama goes yelling.
He's saying all awful things about Trump.
In the genial, nice, in the old way, in the sort of Bush administration way, they wouldn't They'd say, well, Mr.
Obama has his opinion, we have ours, but they wouldn't come out swinging.
They ask Donald Trump about this.
He goes, yeah, Obama's totally incompetent.
That's just the way he is.
I didn't hear it.
Look, he was an incompetent president.
That's all I can say.
Grossly incompetent.
Thank you.
That's the full statement.
I'd like to make a full statement.
He's completely incompetent.
Thank you very much.
And then he walks away.
People are shocked.
They clutch their pearls.
On the left and the right, that's not how presidents are supposed to talk about other presidents.
Well, Barack Obama started it, didn't he?
Barack Obama started this fight.
Because he's getting a little nervous because of the investigations into his wrongdoing.
But according to the old system of rules, the Republicans are supposed to just hang back.
Oh, it's okay.
Look, the media is unfair to us.
Yeah, you know, the ACLU is unfair to us.
Yeah, the education system is unfair to us.
Yeah, Hollywood is unfair to us.
Yeah, the bureaucracy is unfair to us.
But hey, that's just the system and we wouldn't want to be impolite.
So I guess we just got to go along with it.
You can only push that so far.
You can only tolerate that tension between the official narrative and the reality so far before you say, nope, we're just going to reject it.
We're done with that.
What's your response?
What the press was waiting for was some kind of really nuanced statement from Trump and he's going to resist attacking Obama.
No.
Obama is incompetent.
He should have added the word corrupt to that.
And we're not going to play by those rules anymore.
James Woods, great actor, great political observer.
He tweeted out this observation.
Let's face it.
Donald Trump is a rough individual.
He is vain, insensitive, and raw.
But he loves America more than any president in my lifetime.
He's the last firewall between us and this cesspool called Washington.
I'll take him any day over any of these bums.
Trump 2020.
And Trump tweets it.
He retweets it.
He goes, I think that is a great compliment.
Thank you, James.
James also insulted him here.
He said he's vain, insensitive, and raw.
So, you know, there's this story, there's this idea that Donald Trump is a hair trigger, he's so sensitive that he's going to, you know, if you say any even remote criticism of him, he's going to lash out at you.
No, in this tweet, James Woods did criticize him.
To call somebody vain is a, you know, that is actually a harsh criticism.
But I think Trump actually has, in a way, a sort of humility.
I mean, he's joked about this a few times.
I remember famously, he was asked about drinking beer.
He said, I'm the only president who's never had a beer.
It's the only good thing you can say about me.
Could you imagine if I drank beer?
Oh, I'd be the worst.
If I was a drunk, you know?
That does show a little self-awareness to say, the only good thing you can say about me is I don't drink beer.
Trump knows who he is.
He knows what kind of guy he is.
He knows that in normal times, when we're all playing genially by the system, there is no Trump.
Don't forget, Trump has been interested in being president since the 80s.
But the times were not ready for Trump in the 80s or the 90s or even in the 2000s.
He threatened to run for president a few times in the 80s, in 2000, in 2012.
But then this is the moment.
This is that red pill moment where people say, okay...
All the nice, nuanced, subtlety, charm, you know, Marquess of Queensbury rules that we all played by.
Trump can't win in that situation.
But now we're past that.
Now that difference between the reality and the illusion has gotten so big that we're ready for a guy like Trump.
And a great counterexample to this is Justin Amash.
Do you know who Justin Amash is?
Probably not.
He's this former Republican congressman who got his feelings hurt by Donald Trump, and so he left the Republican Party.
He's the only one who voted for impeachment, that sort of thing.
But he's not a Republican, so it doesn't really count.
And Amash said he was going to run for president.
He wanted to run for president on the Libertarian Party ticket.
And he was so excited because he's going to take down Trump.
It's the most important thing to take down Trump.
He only announced this a few weeks ago.
Now he's already ending his campaign.
What happened?
Here's the quote.
After much reflection, I've concluded that circumstances don't lend themselves to my success as a candidate for president this year.
Therefore, I will not be a candidate.
Pause there for one second.
If it requires you much reflection to realize that the Libertarian Party candidate for president isn't going to win whoever the candidate is, then you're probably farther gone than you thought.
You might need a whole lot of reflection on a whole lot of other things that you're thinking.
He goes on.
This was a difficult decision for me, especially having seen grassroots supporters put so much effort into this campaign.
Pause there again.
Justin Amash does not have a single grassroots supporter.
Not one.
He has, like, old Weekly Standard guys, like a couple of them, who are really upset at how much they hate Trump, pushing him to run.
He does not have a grassroots supporter, okay?
It's been humbling and awesome.
Justin Limash.
Wouldn't call him a humble guy, but that's just from what I see on TV. Today, most Americans are understandably more interested in what life will look like tomorrow than they are in broader policy debates, and news coverage has reflected these priorities.
At the same time, fundraising challenges posed by an idle economy will hinder advertising.
So I actually think that the money line here, the most important line to look at, is that last one.
It's not all the BS about, oh, people really wanted me to run, and I was really going to become president until, you know, I guess I won't.
But I was close.
I was the man who was almost president.
That line there at the end, today most Americans are more interested in what life will look like tomorrow than they are in broader policy debates, and so therefore I won't run, is to say that my campaign is a joke.
And when everything is perfectly fine and we all have the luxury and the decadence to think about stupid nonsense like the Justin Amash presidential campaign, then I really stand a chance.
Then I should really run.
But during real times, when people have real problems, then I certainly can't run.
That is...
Justin Amash-style conservatism.
And even more damning, the other reason that he's not running, there were a lot of people, actually some of the old Weekly Standard people, and some of the hardcore remaining never-Trumpers, who, they were the people who would have liked Justin Amash as a candidate, but they actually came out against him once he said he might run, because they said he might help re-elect Trump.
They thought that Amash would not take votes away from Donald Trump.
Not a single Donald Trump supporter was going to vote for that guy, not a chance, but he might take votes away from Joe Biden because Joe Biden is this completely desiccated, declining, doddering guy who was not impressive even when he was with it and who now has these, you know, kind of creepy allegations doddering guy who was not impressive even when he was with it So they might vote for Amash.
That's not a good one.
That might help Trump win.
And so Justin Amash, who would have called himself pro-liberty, pro-freedom, he would have counted himself on the right even just a few weeks ago.
The proximate, urgent reason why he dropped out of the race is because he might hurt the left-wing candidate and help the genuinely right-wing candidate.
That is some weak sauce.
And that is the difference between the red pill and the blue pill.
The red pill is Trump and the blue pill is Justin Amash.
You know, the sort of genial loser who exists specifically not to upset the liberal ideological system.
And the red pill is shaking that up and very basically saying, I don't believe what I'm seeing on TV. I don't believe what I'm being told.
And the proof of this, of course, is That the minute you even mention questioning the narrative, you use a phrase like the red pill, all of a sudden, the mainstream media, the one who wants you to believe their narrative, they're saying, hey, look, some Nazi once used the phrase blue pill, so you're a Nazi, don't question us, listen to what we're saying 24-7, even if it's not true.
Well, sorry guys, I think the genie's out of the bottle, and I don't think it's just hardcore conservatives who are recognizing the lies of that leftist ideology.
I think it's guys like Elon Musk, who might now move his businesses, actually, out of California because of those leftist policies.
I think it's guys like Joe Rogan.
I think it's a lot of people who are more in the middle, who are a little more independent.
They're beginning to wake up to that, and that is a wonderful thing.
Gosh, those pills go down great, don't they?
That's our show.
Got a lot more to get to.
We'll do it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
See you then.
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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.
