The case for coronavirus hysteria collapses even further as the CDC changes its guidelines and admits that the virus does not spread easily if at all through contaminated surfaces. In other words, the masks and gloves are basically useless. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis takes a victory lap, the alarmist mayor of Atlanta makes excuses, and MSNBC’s Mika Scarborough has an on-air meltdown. Then, leaked audio surfaces of Joe Biden discussing with former Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko the decision to fire the prosecutor looking into Joe’s son in exchange for a billion dollar loan guarantee. And that’s just the beginning of Joe’s troubles. Finally the Mailbag.
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The case for coronavirus hysteria collapses even further as the CDC changes its guidelines and admits that the virus does not spread easily, if at all, through contaminated surfaces.
In other words, the masks and gloves are basically useless.
Republican Governor Ron DeSantis takes a victory lap, the alarmist mayor of Atlanta makes excuses, and MSNBC's Mika Scarborough has an on-air meltdown.
Then, Leaked audio services of Joe Biden discussing with former Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko the decision to fire the prosecutor looking into Joe's son in exchange for a billion dollar loan guarantee.
How convenient.
And that's just the beginning of Joe's troubles.
Finally, the mailbag.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Just when you think the experts who made us all lock down and destroyed the entire economy, just when you think they couldn't get more wrong, it turns out they were even more wrong.
Just when you think the experts who made us all locked down and destroyed the entire economy, just when you think they couldn't get more wrong, it turns out they were even more wrong.
We'll get to that in one second.
We'll get to that in one second.
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So...
I thought that we had debunked all that was going to be debunked about coronavirus.
You know, the 2.4 million Americans are going to die, and we've all got a lockdown in perpetuity, and LA is going to look like Italy in two weeks.
Right, we all thought, I thought that was all we were going to debunk.
And then yesterday, the CDC comes out.
It's being reported by Yahoo News.
It's being reported everywhere.
Coronavirus mainly spreads through person-to-person contact and, quote, does not spread easily on contaminated surfaces.
Do you know what that means?
Do you know?
Because some places, some headlines, they're trying to make it sound really clinical and really scientific.
Do you know what that means?
It means that the masks...
Pretty much pointless.
The gloves that people are wearing.
Pretty much pointless.
I've been saying it the whole time.
I've been behaving in that way the whole time.
People have said, I'm a monster.
I'm killing granny.
And it turns out, we were right.
We were right the whole time the skeptics were right.
The scientific experts in the lab coats who told us all to hop on one leg and put a top hat on while singing the national anthem, and if we don't do that, we're going to spread coronavirus, the experts who told us to do all of these things, they were wrong.
Okay?
This is from Yahoo News, not like this is some right-wing news source.
Even before COVID-19 officially had a name, public health officials said the virus could be transmitted through infected respiratory droplets and by touching infected surfaces and then touching your nose, mouth, and possibly your eyes.
You remember that?
Don't touch your face.
Don't.
You can't.
If you touch your face, you're going to die of coronavirus.
So people began snatching up face masks, wearing gloves, and ramping up hand hygiene to protect themselves.
While touching infected surfaces has always been part of the messaging on how the virus spreads, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently shifted its stance online.
CDC now says that COVID-19 spreads from person-to-person contact and then lists touching infected surfaces under a section titled, the virus does not spread easily in other ways.
So back in early March, CDC said it may be possible to spread it through these surfaces.
Now they don't have that.
Spreads through person-to-person contact.
Don't go around kissing strangers on the street, perhaps, as well.
At least be cautious when you do.
Otherwise, you're good.
Or if you're not good, the masks and the gloves aren't really going to help.
That, according now to the CDC. So I think I've kind of lost track of the tally, but I think we're now at the point where virtually everything the experts told us and then the politicians used the experts to tell us was wrong.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was one of the people who had a reasonable, cautious, but still He's a skeptical, normal reaction to the coronavirus.
He did not become hysterical.
He did not become an alarmist.
And he was pilloried for that.
They said he was going to kill people, right?
All the usual stuff.
Killing granny, especially in Florida, where a lot of older Americans live.
Now that he's correct, now that he's been shown correct, DeSantis was speaking with the vice president, Mike Pence, and he was responding to a health official, and he laid the smackdown.
Our data is available.
Our data is transparent.
In fact, Dr.
Birx has talked multiple times about how Florida has the absolute best data.
So any insinuation otherwise is just typical partisan narrative trying to be spun.
And part of the reason is that because you got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York.
Wait two weeks, Florida's going to be next.
Just like Italy, wait two weeks.
Well, hell, we're eight weeks away from that, and it hasn't happened.
Not only do we have a lower death rate, well, we have way lower deaths generally, we have a lower death rate than the Acela Corridor, D.C., everyone up there.
We have a lower death rate than the Midwest, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio.
But even in our region, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida has the lower death rate, and I was the number one landing spot from tens of thousands of people leaving the number one hot zone in the world to come to my state.
So we've succeeded, and I think that people just don't want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative.
Yes!
Yeah, it goes on.
It goes on for like 20 more seconds.
We don't have time to play the whole thing.
It's...
Exactly right.
And the fear-mongering politicians and the fear-mongering health officials and the fear-mongering media deserve all of this.
Oh, how I love it.
What happened here is that the Democrats made a Faucian bargain.
Like a Faustian bargain, a Faucian bargain is where you make a deal with the devil, except that the devil is a petite man from Brooklyn.
Yeah.
I'm not calling Dr.
Fauci the devil.
But the deal that the Democrats made here is very much like a deal with the devil.
A Faustian bargain, a deal with the devil, is when you sell your soul for limitless knowledge and power.
And a Faustian bargain is when you sell your credibility, which is your political soul, for limitless knowledge and limitless power over the citizens.
And like a Faustian bargain...
A Faucian bargain doesn't turn out the way that you think it will.
This is the trouble with deals with the devil.
As you get to the end of the deal with the devil and you realize, oh no, I've made a terrible mistake.
I don't actually have all the things that I wanted.
It's the same thing with the Faucian bargain.
The Faucian bargain tells you, oh good, if we exploit this public concern over this virus that no one can see, if we generate mass hysteria, if we make people wear all sorts of crazy things and lock down the economy and stay home from work and 40 million people are going to lose their jobs and actually more people very likely are going to die because of these policies and we're going to take old people and put them in nursing homes because we're so incompetent in the way that we implement this, but we're going to get a new normal.
We're We're going to get the Green New Deal.
We're going to get all those policies that we want.
We're going to get socialist medicine.
Oh, the things we've wanted for a hundred years.
That's the deal that they made.
Now it's falling apart.
Okay?
You live by the lab coat.
You die by the lab coat.
If you stake your entire political credibility on the prognostications of these soothsayer prophet scientist experts, then when those predictions turn out not to be true, you've got nothing.
You've got no credibility at all, and Ron DeSantis smacks you down on national television, which is a wonderful thing.
It never works out the way that these guys want it to.
And I'm so pleased that it doesn't.
I love watching this sort of hysteria crumble.
There was the mayor of Atlanta.
Her name is Keisha Bottoms.
The mayor came out a few weeks ago, a few months ago at this point.
I'm losing track of time.
And she said...
When Georgia reopens, Republican governor, don't forget, Brian Kemp in Georgia.
When Georgia reopens, deaths are going to spike.
It's going to be a disaster.
Brian Kemp is going to have blood on his hands.
And if it doesn't happen that way, then I am going to admit that I was wrong.
Well, here we are all these weeks later.
Georgia was, I think, the first state to open, certainly one of the first, and the deaths haven't spiked.
So she goes on MSNBC. You'll be surprised.
She doesn't want to admit that she was wrong.
Mayor, I believe I remember when we were talking to you prior to the quote-unquote reopening of Georgia, which as we know was very early, and let's also note there's a robust conversation going on about the quality of the numbers we're all getting out of the state of Georgia,
but I think I remember you saying that you hoped Stop.
is it a little muddier than being able to say I was right or I was wrong?
Stop.
Are we, as of the time of this conversation, somewhere in the middle, do you think?
Stop, stop.
How long does it take you to just ask the question, hey, Mayor, were you wrong?
You said that you would say that you were wrong, and it looks like you were wrong.
Were you wrong?
Were you wrong?
It's three words.
But Brian Williams, I mean, look, to his credit, he at least brought up the question.
But he had to preface the question with, well, there's a robust conversation about the numbers.
Yeah, the robust conversation is people think, in many places, numbers are being over-reported.
But he wants to insinuate that numbers are being underreported.
And there are a lot of factors at play here, and I never would want you to say that you were wrong, but do you think maybe now, here, here's the answer that you should say, Mayor.
It's too complicated, because it's in the middle, and we can't say it either way, so don't say that you were wrong.
Just...
If you're going to ask the question, ask the question.
And if you're not, if you just want to carry water for these hack politicians, these alarmists, then just don't bring it up.
Because now what happens is you look ridiculous and even as much as you're trying to help this mayor, this mayor Bottoms, she...
She still can't get out of it, because she was dead wrong, and now she's caught in this trap.
So, of course, finally, Brian Williams stops speaking.
She tries to answer the question, and she doesn't think she's wrong.
Well, what I can say, Brian, is it's not as bad as I thought that it would be, so I am pleased about that, but I still think it's too soon to say.
Okay, so if it's not as bad as you thought it would be, then you were wrong.
And what you said you would do is admit that you were wrong.
Admit that you were wrong.
I feel like I'm Ron DeSantis talking to that healthcare worker.
Just admit you were wrong, okay?
Or don't.
I don't even care.
Because people are realizing it day by day by day.
And the longer that the left and the Democrats cling to this hysteria, the more ridiculous they're going to look.
And the more they double down on this premise, on the Faucian bargain, that we don't design our own politics, we actually just outsource it all to the lab coats.
Okay, then what do we need you for?
What's the point?
You know, there are two political visions at play here.
There's, well, I couldn't even call them both authentically political.
There's the one political vision, which conservatives have, which is, hey, Politics is complicated.
Society is complicated.
There are eternal questions that don't have precise scientific answers, and we have to debate those things.
And that's why we have self-government, and we need to balance factors like making sure that we can protect public health while preserving our liberties and preserving the rule of law and not allowing the law enforcement to get too aggressive and...
Keeping the economy going because a down economy kills people just as much as a virus.
Actually, more.
So there are all these factors and we just have to debate what our priorities are.
That's politics.
Then there's the kind of leftist shortcut that they tried to take, which is politics is an exact science.
We know exactly what we should do.
It's not like we have to debate these questions.
We just know exactly what the scientific answer to politics is.
And we're going to let some guy in a lab coat decide it all for us.
Because conveniently right now he agrees with the things that we want.
Well, okay, what happens when that guy's power falls apart?
Sadly, this mayor of Atlanta has probably got the most coherent response of any of these lefties to their narrative falling apart.
We tune in on MSNBC to Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough's wife and co-host, who didn't really have any argument to make other than throwing a temper tantrum at Donald Trump and saying that she was going to call Twitter to get his account kicked off.
And your lack of ability to handle this massive human catastrophe, the fact that you've made it worse, and that you make it worse every day, and that you won't even wear a mask to protect people from your germs.
But the germs you're spreading on Twitter, first of all, Twitter, you shouldn't be allowing this, and you should be taking these tweets down, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
You'll be hearing from me on this, because this is BS. But Donald, you're a sick person.
You're really a cruel, sick, disgusting person.
So, as you know, Mika will not be changing her last name from Brzezinski to Scarborough, but she will be changing her first name to Karen.
If you've seen this, we mentioned it on the show the other day.
There's this meme that's going around about Karen, which is a sort of busybody lady who's telling everybody their business and asks to speak to the manager and everything's a big fight and very involved in what everybody else is doing.
That would seem to be what Mika is doing here.
It's like the par excellence example of this.
I'm going to get you kicked off.
You're going to hear from me, Twitter.
I'm hearing from you now because you're speaking on television.
You're going to hear from me.
I'm going to call your manager and I'm going to get Donald Trump kicked off Twitter because he's a meanie and I don't like him and he was right about everything and we were wrong.
We were totally wrong.
Not a great look.
Not a great look.
Obviously, they don't have any kind of argument to this.
They blew it.
Not just Mika Brzezinski.
All the way over in Washington, D.C., Nancy Pelosi was asked about Trump, asked about her comments on Trump.
You know, the last best argument she had against him is she called him fat.
That was like the best thing she could muster.
Now, she's saying that he has excrement on his shoe.
You're asking me about the appropriateness of the actions of this President of the United States.
So completely inappropriate in so many ways that it's almost a given.
It's like a child who comes in with mud on their pants or something.
That's the way it is.
They're outside playing.
He comes in with doggy-doo on his shoes, and everybody who works with him has that on their shoes, too.
For a very long time to come.
So, I don't know.
I hear doctors talk to me about saying, you know, what's the matter with him?
The things he says are so inappropriate for a president of the United States.
The comments he makes about women.
Comments he makes about women.
So inappropriate.
The things he says are so inappropriate for a president.
They're so unbefitting a holder of high office.
Also, his shoes are covered in doggy dew.
What?
You see how it kind of sounds like you're doing the thing that you're accusing him of doing.
The things that Donald Trump says about women.
Well, I don't listen to the things you say about men.
I understand Donald Trump has made some mean comments, including about Karen Brzezinski, but think about the things you say about him.
You went on TV and called him fat.
And then beyond that, beyond the stupid, like, you used a mean term and then I used a mean term, how about the allegations against Joe Biden?
Remember Joe Biden, your candidate for president?
He's being, I guess, somewhat credibly accused.
I don't know, who knows if the allegations are credible or not.
Democrats have ignored it completely.
He's being accused by a former staffer of doing a very specific action.
And there is some corroboration of that.
Okay, Donald Trump, I don't know, they always say, there are 7 million women accusing Donald Trump of rape.
Well, how come we haven't heard about any of them?
Don't you think if any of those allegations were serious, that the news would put them on television 24-7 all the time?
Of course, because none of them come even close to the allegation against Joe Biden, the way he talks about women.
What about your side, Nancy?
What about the things that you're doing?
There's a whole lot of projection.
She's got nothing.
There is a lot of dirt though, in terms of moving past the coronavirus for a little bit.
There's a lot of serious news that is not being covered by Joe Biden because Joe Biden got caught in leaked audio talking about that crooked deal with the leader of Ukraine.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Forget for a moment the top-line news story, the news story that everyone's talking about, which is this debate over the coronavirus.
Forget for a moment all the mud that Democrats are trying to sling on Trump.
Let's just go down and remember that there's a presidential race going on.
It is 2020.
Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee.
He's being accused not just of the sexual allegations, but of some pretty serious corruption involving his son and the Obama administration and Ukraine.
Right, obviously no one's covering that.
Now we've got leaked audio.
From Joe Biden, speaking to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko about this crooked deal where Joe Biden said, you've got to fire the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, looking into my son, and I will give you a $1 billion loan guarantee from the United States.
Here's the tape.
Hey, Mr.
President Joe Biden.
How are you?
Very well indeed.
As usual when I hear your voice.
Thank you very much.
Well, you are doing very well.
Congratulations on getting the new Prosecutor General.
I know there's a lot more that has to be done, but I really think that's good.
And I understand you're working with Iran in the coming days on a number of additional laws to secure the IMF.
But congratulations on installing the new prosecutor general.
It's going to be critical for him to work quickly to repair the damage that Shokin did.
And I'm a man of my word.
And now that the new prosecutor general's in place, we're ready to move forward in signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.
Wow.
When I heard this for the first time, I thought it was fake.
I assumed it was some Biden impersonator and some Ukrainian impersonator.
Because you couldn't have scripted this any better.
Hi there, Poroshenko.
This is Joe Biden, the vice president.
Thanks for firing that guy that was looking into my son.
Now I'll give you a billion dollars.
It's almost exactly what he said.
And I thought, there's no way.
That any sitting politician would be this careless to speak this freely about something that really stinks of corruption.
And then I remembered, oh wait, it's Joe Biden.
No, wait a minute.
If anybody is going to talk about this freely and imprudently, it would be Joe Biden.
So that's Joe Biden's side of it.
Then, later in the tape, Petro Poroshenko reiterates the very deal that Joe Biden mentioned.
The second thing is that I want to thank you, that you give me your word, that immediately when we change the legislation and I appoint the new prosecutor general, and it would be Yuri Lutsenko, as we agreed on our previous meeting in Washington.
And when it happens, we can have at least long guarantee.
And thank you.
Why is Joe Biden so interested in this prosecutor general in Ukraine?
Why?
What Joe Biden would say is, it's because the previous prosecutor general was corrupt, and so we didn't want to support Ukraine because there was generalized corruption.
Who cares?
I mean, we're talking about these billion-dollar loan guarantees during a war, wartime, right?
Ukraine versus Russia.
Why do you care about generalized Ukrainian corruption?
Also, if you're worried about the corruption, you're talking to the main guy, Petro Poroshenko.
So the only corruption you've got to be worried about is that guy, right?
If you're worried that the money is going to be frittered away or something.
The story just doesn't add up.
Clearly, Biden had a personal vendetta against this prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin.
And he talks about it, and then...
Poroshenko reiterates.
He says, yeah, as you asked me to do when I was in Washington, we are going to ditch that guy and put in this other guy.
So thank you for the billion dollars.
Stinks to high heaven.
No one's covering it.
A few places have affirmed that this is a real tape, but they're only talking about the story as though the story were the fact that it leaked.
No, no, no.
The real story is what is in those tapes.
This thing has seemed extremely corrupt from the beginning and that only seems clearer now.
That's only the beginning of Joe Biden's troubles because nobody is taking Joe Biden seriously.
A lot of people are talking about the vice presidential candidate as the person who really matters here because Joe seems like he's in a pretty steep decline.
So there are a number of people vying for the vice presidential nod.
One worse than the next, We'll get to the main one in a second, the one everyone's talking about.
But another person who is apparently being vetted for vice president is maybe the least popular governor in America during this coronavirus, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.
Here's Gretchen Whitmer bragging about being vetted for vice president on NBC. How's the vetting process going so far?
Are you being vetted by Mr.
Biden?
You know, I've had a conversation with some folks, but the fact of the matter is, all of my energy is going into helping my state through this crisis, unlike one that we've seen in a hundred years in this country.
We have to get it right, and I was elected to be the governor of the state of Michigan.
It is the honor of a lifetime, and that's where I'm spending a hundred percent of my energy and focus.
This conversation that you had, how would you characterize the conversation?
It was just an opening conversation, and it's not something that I would call a professional, formalized vetting.
I am making a little bit of time to stay connected to the campaign, but the most important thing that I have to do right now is be the governor of my home state.
That's all that matters to me in this moment, and that's where I'm going to stay all my energy focused.
All that matters to me in this moment is being the governor of my state, and that's why I'm going on national network television to talk about how maybe I'll be the vice president.
But I don't really want to talk about that.
I know that I've been talking about it a lot.
Did I mention, by the way, that I might be the vice president?
Yeah, Joe Biden called me.
We had a chat.
But really, I'm not interested in that.
I just want to talk about being governor.
Okay.
I don't know whether Whitmer is being vetted or not.
I mean, in a way, I guess it makes sense because winning Michigan would really help the Democrats out.
In a way, it makes sense because Joe Biden has pretty dumb political instincts these days, at least at the presidential level.
He's been very good at remaining a senator and in national life for 50 years, but he's never had any talent at really going up to the next level.
And so this would be part and parcel of that.
The other possibility here is that she's not being really seriously vetted at all by the Biden campaign.
That maybe the Biden campaign is trying to keep her happy.
But really, regardless, Gretchen Whitmer is talking about this on television as a shot across the bow at Stacey Abrams.
Stacey Abrams has really changed the game here.
Stacey Abrams is this failed gubernatorial candidate.
She lost.
Then she wouldn't concede.
Then she keeps pretending that she didn't lose.
And now she's campaigning actively, openly, for vice president.
Really, it's really ugly.
It's an ugly thing to do.
Doesn't look good.
I mean, but...
The media are really enthusiastic about her for a number of reasons.
And so now the other people have to campaign as well, including people like Gretchen Whitmer.
So I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Biden campaign has never picked up the phone to talk to her.
She wants to take the shot across the bat and say, hey, wait a second.
This isn't just Stacey Abrams running for vice president.
I am running for vice president, too.
And she's not getting anywhere near the coverage that Stacey Abrams is.
I've wanted to get to this article all week.
This is an article from the Washington Post.
I think it's like 60 pages long.
It's a profile of Stacey Abrams.
I'm not joking.
I think it's a novel-length profile in the Washington Post of this failed governor candidate.
Stacey Abrams, all she's ever been is a state rep.
And yet, she's being talked of as one of the most important politicians in America.
Just a few lines to give you the sense of this fiction.
Just a few lines to give you a sense of this propaganda.
The power of Stacey Abrams, despite losing the Georgia governor's race in 2018, she has moved quickly to political prominence.
Right, because you gave her political prominence.
She hasn't moved quickly to it.
You've just given it to her because you wanted to pretend that she won the race anyway.
Will she be the vice presidential pick for Democrats?
I don't know.
You guys are doing this, so I should ask you, watching a post.
You're the ones who are going to pick this kind of thing.
First line, there is a big buzz at the Loudermilk Convention Center in downtown Atlanta at a gathering called Paradigm Shift 2.0.
When she, Stacey Abrams, is finally introduced, the women shout and leap to their feet.
Young women stand on chairs, camera phones flash.
Abrams, who appears both amused and slightly disturbed by the fuss over her.
Yeah, I bet she's real disturbed.
Stacey Abrams hates the limelight.
Yeah, there's one thing I know about Stacey Abrams.
She hates getting attention, right?
This woman who refuses to admit that she lost the race, goes on television all the time, pretends to be the governor of Georgia.
Yeah, no, she's disturbed by the fuss over her.
She takes control of the chaotic scene.
She takes control.
She's a leader.
I've witnessed this level of affection for very few political leaders in the democratic circles I've been in since the 1980s.
Yeah, no, you've witnessed this level of affection for whichever one you guys are elevating at any given moment.
Sure, I guess you can only really elevate one at a time, but you pick it.
You are the circles.
You are the affection.
And then this is the best line.
Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage like a runway supermodel.
I'm not going to make any comment about that.
I'm just reading the Washington Post.
You can't trick me into making a comment about that.
The word say, it's right there.
She walks across the stage like a runway supermodel, stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly, and smiles.
Camera flashes explode!
She pivots.
She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there and repeats the pose.
Again, the flashes explode!
They explode.
They don't explode.
Cameras haven't worked that way in a hundred years.
The image that she's giving you is like at some old-timey press conference, and the guy's holding up the flash, and he's got the camera, and they click it, and the light bulb, and the camera explodes.
None of that happened.
None of what is being described here happened.
Except in the imagination, the fevered imagination, of the partisan operatives who pretend to be journalists at places like the Washington Post.
That's living in fiction.
That's living in fantasy.
That's living in delusion.
And it's something that Democrats do regularly.
The trouble with that, it ties right back in to what we were talking about with the coronavirus, with the Fauci and bargain.
The trouble with that, with staking all of your credibility on this fantasy, rather than just like calling it like you see it, having a little bit of skepticism, looking at the facts, and interpreting them as accurately as you can.
trouble with just pushing this fantasy as if by merely saying certain things, you can change reality.
This has been the left's pitch going all the way back to intellectuals like Karl Marx, right?
If you just change the words, you will change the reality.
If I call a boy a girl, then the boy really is a girl.
If I say that the disease is, the virus is going to kill everybody, it's going to kill 3 million people, then it really will.
If I say that the spreads and uncertainly, and it really will.
If I say that this failed gubernatorial candidate is a runway supermodel, the most important politician in the last 20 years in American history, then that really will be the case, but it won't be.
But it won't be, because reality reasserts itself in the end.
And that is our wonderful conservative consolation when we consider all those shady deals, Fauci and bargains, that the left makes.
All right, we've got to get to the mailbag first, though.
Join us for a backstage Memorial Day special, May 27th at 7 p.m.
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Pacific.
You know, a little while ago we did this double Tumblr promo.
So if you signed up for the Daily Wire, you got two Leftist Tears Tumblrs.
It was extremely popular because it's double as good, right?
So we're bringing that back.
But there's a catch.
Here's the catch.
The double tumbler.
Do I have my second one?
I do.
Good.
I need it.
I need it today for the Washington Post.
We've got these two tumblers, right?
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We'll be right back with the Mailbag.
From Kevin.
Hey, Michael.
I recently got into an argument with a leftist on social media about socialism.
He said, America is a socialist country because we have a publicly funded police force, fire departments, public schools, and roads.
What would you say to rebut that?
Thanks.
Came for Ben, stayed for Knowles.
A great question.
And you hear this one a lot.
They say that if the government has any sort of public service, then that is socialism.
But that's obviously preposterous on its face.
How do we know that?
Because socialism as an ideology is not very old.
A couple of hundred years old, right?
A little more than that now, I guess.
Two to 300 years old.
And yet societies had public services more than two or 300 years ago.
Actually, they've always had public services and the government has provided certain things to the people.
So it just, by definition, all of those things can't be socialism because socialism is very recent and young and that phenomenon is very old and has long standing.
When we talk about things like the military or the police or the fire department, These are services that the government in many ways is instituted to establish, right?
To protect us from threats abroad and to maintain law and order here in the United States.
We've had them since, certainly since the very beginning of our country and every civilization in the history of the world has had that as well.
Socialism is a little bit different.
Socialism takes a very specific ideology developed by people such as Karl Marx.
It views the world as a class struggle between the proletarians and the bourgeoisie.
It says that the workers of the world need to unite, the workers need to come together, seize the means of production, the way that this would be.
Effected in reality is that the government would nationalize whole industries, which you see a big push right now on the left, which is more and more each day openly socialist, to do, and that this will create a sort of utopia on Earth.
The difference between socialism and communism, I know those terms get a little bit confused sometimes, it's a little bit of a distinction without a difference.
So a good analogy would be this.
Christians go to heaven, and socialists go to communism.
So, in other words, there is this utopian idea, which for Christians would be heaven.
It's a utopian place.
It's like paradise.
It's perfection.
And for socialists, it's actually utopian, meaning no place, because they try to make a heaven on earth, which is communism.
And you never get there, which is why...
All of these socialist experiments always end up in tyranny.
They somehow never get to that wonderful, blissful place that they always promise.
Very different subjects, obviously.
I think part of the reason this gets confused is because in the United States, we have distilled conservative thought down to this very shallow, narrow ideology where anytime the government does anything, we say that it's socialism.
But that's not true.
That's never been true in this country.
That's a very reductionist...
Kind of hyper, super-duper libertarian view of government.
And it's just not very helpful to think about.
So I think we've got to broaden our scope a little back, a little bit, look both more deeply philosophically and more broadly historically.
And you can see that not every time the government does anything is it socialism.
But what the left is pushing now very much is.
From that...
Dear austere religious podcaster and Lord of Covfefe, what are your thoughts on the Benedict option as outlined by Rod Dreher and to a lesser extent Pope Benedict XVI? Is it a viable option for Christians in the U.S. as the culture continues to decline and becomes more hostile to Christianity and Christian values?
If not, how do you think the church should proceed into the future given the immense challenges from the culture?
Love the show.
Keep up the good work.
Broadly speaking, the Benedict option is this idea that That Christians need to go live in the woods, more or less, and, you know, follow things like the rule of St.
Benedict.
As empire collapses, then you can go and form these sort of monasteries and be a part of the world and preserve the faith and preserve our culture for when we get to a more civilized time because we are rapidly descending into darkness.
I mean, I think there's a place for that, but I don't think we're quite there yet.
And, you know, all of the proponents of the Benedict option, I notice, are still...
Going on television and still writing things.
I just don't think we're at this point yet where we're all living in the woods and we're kind of fully really removed ourselves from society.
But at a certain point that very likely will happen.
And that's an important thing because you need to keep the flame of the faith and the flame of civilization going even during those periods of persecution and darkness.
And we are descending gradually into a period of persecution.
We've gone from what you would call a Christian culture into now a secular materialist culture with all sorts of kooky superstitions and ideologies and false religions, such as socialism or environmentalism or spiritualism, you know, kind of the religion such as socialism or environmentalism or spiritualism, you know, kind of the religion All of these things, or transgenderism, which is Gnostic dualism.
All of these things are cropping up now and becoming increasingly hostile to Christianity.
So be on the lookout for that.
Be willing and ready to do that if you have to.
But in the meantime, I think there's still a little chance that we can convince our fellow citizens not to hasten the dissent.
From Catherine.
Hi, Michael.
You said, you can make me scream, but you can't make me sing the other day on your show.
I want to clarify.
I didn't say that to you.
That's not something I said to you, but I was saying that broadly.
Is that a quote from somewhere, or did you turn this particular phrase?
Google has availed me nothing.
It's a delightfully macabre and visceral idea, and I would like to properly attribute it when I use it in the future.
Thank you so much.
It's not my own.
Like so many great phrases that I have parroted, I cribbed it.
I took it.
This exchange I heard from my good friend and priest, Father Rutler, one of the great wordsmiths around whose writing you should read and whose homilies you should listen to.
And I heard this, I think I just heard this in his church one time.
He mentioned, now I forget the name of the opera singer, and I forget the name of the Nazi official, but it's a story of during the rise of Nazism in Germany.
An official wants to hear this opera singer sing, and she refuses to go on stage.
He goes backstage and says, go out there and perform.
We can make you sing.
And she says, you can make me scream, but you can't make me sing.
I don't think the story is apocryphal.
I think it did happen as I recall hazily the details though I'll have to look it up and try to find the specifics on it.
Even if it were apocryphal it gets to a real truth about That culture and our culture as well.
Increasingly, you're seeing the left try to coerce us into untruths and into pretty dark things.
And they're saying, we'll ruin your career if you don't spout lies.
Just a very simple one.
If you don't say that little boys should be injected full of hormones and chemicals to look more like little girls, even though it will fundamentally distort and destroy their biology...
If you don't say that now, you could lose your job.
You could be kicked out of school.
You could be called a hater and a bigot and ostracized from society.
And what the left is telling us is We can make you sing.
We'll make you sing the tune that we want you to sing.
And what we need to say to all of them is, well, you can make me scream, but you can't make me sing.
From Joel, partisan traditionalist Knowles, I seem to have noticed that you seem to be strongly against the prospect of a Libertarian Party presidential candidate.
Need I remind you that Abraham Lincoln was a third-party candidate of the Republican Party?
Do you see a possibility of an electorate significantly disgusted with the Democratic Party that it would fall to third place and be thrown into the wastebasket of history along with the Whig Party?
I would be open to fully kicking those donkeys off the national stage for the sake of the Constitution and preservation of the Republic.
Thank you for reading my query and partial rant.
I am interested in your question because usually when you hear, is there going to be a third party, it's people who are disenchanted with their own parties.
You say, I don't like the Republican Party, but I'm still obviously not a Democrat, so can I... Do you think there's going to be a third party, like a libertarian or something?
But what you're saying is, I am a Republican, I don't like the Democrats, and I want there to be a third party to destroy the Democrats.
I wish that would happen, but I don't think it's going to.
I don't see any evidence that it's going to.
Democrats are still a pretty sturdy party.
They're still fairly coherent.
The only split that you would get is between the more old school moderate wing and the woke progressive wing.
But that old school moderate wing doesn't really believe in anything.
So, you know, they'll kind of, you think of guys like Bill Clinton or Joe Biden.
It's not that they're moderate by conviction.
It's that they're moderate by circumstance and by convenience.
If the winds blow in the other direction, they could become very woke.
So I don't see the moderates, so-called, putting up any sort of fight.
And I think that the woke people have more or less taken over the party.
I think when Tom Perez, the head of the DNC, said that AOC is the future of the Democratic Party, he's probably right.
And so if the party does collapse, which would be nice if it did at some point, I don't think it's going to happen for some time.
By the way, I do have to thank somebody in the mailbag.
I forget who it was.
We may have lost.
Oh, here it is from Becky.
I have to thank Becky.
Speaking of me cribbing people's slogans because I saw in Becky's question the phrase Fauci and bargain.
We don't have a chance to answer all of her questions.
Maybe we'll try to get to it next time in the mailbag.
But I do want to thank her for that because I think that phrase totally encapsulates an idea that a lot of us are thinking about, that Democrats made a short-term deal to, you know, really exert a lot of power over all of us.
And it's in the long run falling apart as all deals with the devil do.
And we can all laugh while that political calculation, while that hysteria, while that alarmism falls apart.
A silver lining in a storm cloud.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you on Monday.
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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.
