Goya gets canceled, Trump gets tough on schools, and a dude wears a bikini on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
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First they came for Aunt Jemima, and I said nothing because I don't like pancakes.
And then they came for Uncle Ben, and I said nothing because I don't like rice.
And now they're coming for Goya.
And even if you don't like Puerto Rican black beans, you have got to speak out.
Because they are going to come for you, whether you like it or not.
That is right.
Robert Unanue, or Unanue, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it.
I will call him Mr.
Goya, the head of Goya Foods, was invited to the White House.
He was there to speak about his company.
And he committed a crime so atrocious, so outrageous...
That the popular culture will not forgive him for it.
He said something nice about the president of the United States.
We're all truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Trump, who is a builder.
And that's what my grandfather did.
He came to this country to build, to grow, to prosper.
And so we have an incredible builder.
And we pray.
We pray for our leadership, our president, and we pray for our country that we will continue to prosper and to grow.
It's basically like listening in to a Klan rally, isn't it?
It's just so, so shocking and outrageous.
Now, what's so funny is that the left is making a big deal out of this Goya endorsement of Trump.
Did it sound like he's endorsing Trump?
I mean, he's saying nice things, but he says, Donald Trump is a builder, just like my grandfather was a builder.
Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump, you have to admit the guy's at least a builder, right?
He's got his name on a lot of buildings all around the country.
Well, that was too far for the left.
Even though, by the way, this same man, the same head of Goya, when he was called in to work with the Obama administration, said nice things about Barack Obama.
It's just respectful.
And how basic, how obvious to say, we pray for our country, we pray for the President of the United States.
Well, they called him on it.
And a lot of people were just waiting for Mr.
Goya, like everybody else, to fold under pressure and say, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be nice to Trump.
Well, this guy's a little bit different.
He turned to the mob and he refused to bow.
I went to the White House later and introduced, in Hispanic Heritage Month, President Obama.
And so you're allowed to talk good or to praise one president, but you're not allowed, when I was called to be part of this commission, to Aiden economic and educational prosperity, and you make a positive comment, all of a sudden, that's not acceptable.
So, you know, I'm not apologizing for saying, and especially if you're called by the President of the United States, you're going to say, no, I'm sorry, I'm busy.
No, thank you.
I didn't say that to the Obamas, and I didn't say that to President Trump.
That's right.
My man, I'm not apologizing to the mob.
This is not only the best, wisest course of action when the mob comes for you, it is the only course of action because the left is going to cancel you whether you try to be nice to them or not.
It's in these small little seemingly trivial stories that the big issues play out.
Black beans matter.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Democrats are calling for a major boycott.
They're calling for a boycott of Goya.
Chrissy Teigen.
Who is Chrissy Teigen?
I don't know.
I guess she's a model or something.
I know I've heard the name before, but I'm sorry.
I can't pay that much attention to this dumb leftist culture.
Not eating Goya beans anymore because the CEO said something nice about the president and said that he would pray for him.
Rep.
Luis Gutierrez, former congressman posted in a now this video, this is a left wing media company.
He posted out his shock and horror and how Goya beans now are responsible for the oppression of Hispanic people.
This is a video of my pantry.
Filled with Goya products.
I say to the owners of Goya, You came as conquistadores.
You wiped out our indigenous population in Puerto Rico.
You exploited the Puerto Ricans for centuries under your colonialism.
And now you wish to bring about more of Donald Trump, who hates us, despised us, and has treated the Puerto Rican people with such cruelty.
No more Goya.
Boycott Goya.
I will never buy another product of yours again.
Never ever again.
Could you imagine if the left got this irate over an issue that actually matters?
Could you imagine if they got this irate over school choice or crime in Chicago?
Oh man, that would be great.
We could use a little bit of that passion as people are getting slaughtered left and right in New York and Chicago.
But they don't really care about that.
They don't care about school choice.
They don't care about giving people opportunity.
They just want to...
Stand on their soapbox on Goya beans.
AOC did it too.
AOC, the future of the Democratic Party, tweeted out, oh look, it's the sound of me Googling how to make your own adobo.
She's not eating Goya anymore either.
The left is canceling Goya.
It's crazy that they're focusing on this tiny little nothing issue, right?
Not really, because for the left, it's in these small issues that all their rot begins.
We'll get to that in one second.
We'll get to them...
Denying their own canceling, even though we just listened to all of it.
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So the left, you see, just calls, don't buy Goya.
Goya's terrible.
Down with Goya.
I'm never eating Goya again.
Because they said we'll pray for the president and pray for our country.
Then the left has to deny that this is happening.
Why do they do this?
Why the focus?
Why the rage?
Why is Rep Gutierrez like he's giving the We Shall Fight on the Beaches speech from Winston Churchill about black beans?
It's because in the 60s, the left told us the personal is the political.
Everything has to be politicized by the left.
This has been a theme that's come up for about 100 years now on the left.
You can call it cultural hegemony.
You can call it cultural Marxism.
You can call it the long march through the institutions.
You can call it the personal is the political.
You can call it whatever.
The left has been saying this for a long time, that they need to apply their ideology to everything.
That's why they care about political correctness.
That's why they care about which pronouns you use.
That's why they care about which euphemism you use.
And you're allowed to say people of color, but not colored people.
And you formerly could say African-American, but then it was black again.
And then these little minor details are how they will control the culture.
This actually comes back to an Italian man named Antonio Gramsci, who is this Marxist founder of the Italian Communist Party.
And Gramsci, along with other thinkers, applied the principles of Marxism to cultural issues.
And what they were hoping for is something called cultural hegemony, which is that when you...
Infiltrate the culture itself, the words, the way in which we think, the products that we use, the institutions that we go to.
When you infiltrate that, it's much easier to achieve your political goals than if you were to just be a kind of old-school activist and run a big campaign and try to get signatures on your petition and try to win various elections.
It's much subtler, and the left has had great success doing this.
So they have to care about the black beans.
I mean, we're joking a little bit when we say black beans matter.
That's now what the, that's now what a protest issue like Black Lives Matter, they're using the exact same passion to talk about Goya beans.
But it really is true.
It's in these minor details.
And as they do it, they need to deny everything.
It's funny.
We use the term cultural Marxism.
If you Google cultural Marxism right now, you'll see it says it's a conspiracy theory, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which is bizarre because the first cultural Marxist, an avowed cultural Marxist, a guy who says apply Marxism to culture, head of the Marxist party in Italy was not Jewish at all.
He was an Italian guy named Gramsci, but they have to deny it.
There have been so many thinkers who've said we need to apply these principles to the culture.
The leader of Black Lives Matter, actually all three leaders of Black Lives Matter right now are avowed, self-described trained Marxists, but then they deny it.
Why?
Because as many of these thinkers say explicitly in their writings, they need it to be subtle.
You need to not be aware that the culture around you is changing.
So now their new line is that cancel culture is not real.
This has got to be news to all the people who have been canceled, right?
We see these big cultural touchstones of, sorry, you can't be called this, you can't be named this.
Kevin Hart can't host the Oscars because you made a joke 10 years ago.
So they all get canceled and they say, you weren't really canceled.
Charles Blow from the New York Times tweets out, One more thing.
There is no such thing as cancel culture.
There is free speech.
You can say and do as you please.
Others can choose never to deal with you, your company, or your product ever again.
The rich and powerful are just upset that the masses can now organize their dissent.
This is what they're saying.
They're saying, look, we're not canceling anybody.
We're just telling you that if you have an opinion that contradicts the politically correct culture, then we're going to organize a campaign to destroy your life.
Or if you said something 10 years ago, we're going to organize a campaign to destroy your life.
That's just the free market of ideas, man.
You don't have the right to an audience.
AOC said the same thing.
People who are actually canceled don't get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets.
This has been a public service announcement.
So they're saying, look, whatever, you can still, if you still exist, if you maybe can get your voice heard, then you haven't been canceled.
The left denies that they cancel people, even as they cancel people, because it's a little bit of a subtle issue and they're trying to confuse some terms.
So let's get very specific on what canceling is.
We talked about this a little bit last week.
Are all boycotts or ostracisms cancel culture?
No, not necessarily.
We at one time had freedom of association, at least in America, and we still say that we do.
So if you choose not to buy a product or not to go to a certain place, then you're well within your rights to do that.
The difference is, cancel culture is when you boycott companies and ostracize people for saying and doing things that five minutes ago would have been perfectly appropriate, would have been encouraged.
I mean, the head of Goya said very similarly nice things about Barack Obama, but he wasn't canceled for that.
And all he said here was, I'm praying for the President of the United States.
He's a builder, and I'm proud of builders.
But he's being canceled for that.
It's an explicitly leftist phenomenon.
Now, most specifically, cancel culture involves going through some guy's past.
And 10 years ago, he said or did something that by the lights of today's standards is no longer acceptable.
And so it's an activist campaign to try to ruin his life.
But I think the big difference here is that there is a substantive.
It's not just the form of it.
It's not just all boycotts.
It's the substance.
What are you being boycotted for?
Conservatives don't want to talk about this.
We want to just play umpire.
We want to just have a set of rules and an ideological manifesto and say we're going to play exactly by this and hold everyone to the same standards.
That's not what the left is doing.
And we need to be able to make moral claims.
Pulling up the American flag and honoring it in your backyard is not the same act as desecrating the American flag.
They're both rituals that you do with flags.
They're both expressions that you make with a flag, but they're not the same thing.
One is good and one is bad.
One should be encouraged.
One should be discouraged.
Nike Shoes goes out and spits on America.
They make the guy who disrespected the Star-Spangled Banner their spokesman.
They pull shoes that have the Betsy Ross Revolutionary War flag.
They pull them because they say America is so hopelessly bigoted and racist from the very beginning.
And that is perfectly fine.
That company gets rewarded by the popular culture, even though I think the particular expression that they're making probably is unpopular with a lot of people.
That's what we would call the silent majority.
We'll get into that later.
So Nike gets applauded for that.
Goya comes out and says, I'm going to pray for our country, and now we've got to boycott black beans.
That's not the same thing.
Those two things should not be treated in the same way.
Conservatives need to grow a spine and realize that politics is not just about form.
It's not just about procedure.
It's also about substance.
It's not just about the right to say things.
It's about what we're saying.
It's not just about the right to boycott somebody.
It's who are you going to boycott?
There is so much dishonesty going on in this debate.
Because it's also, unlike what AOC is saying and these other people, this is not just a grassroots expression of feeling, a cry from the heart of the people.
This is contrived BS from radical leftist activists, namely AOC, namely the people working at the New York Times.
And we need to be able to say, this is wrong and this is right.
We cannot trust, though, that institution.
I mean, we say that only the left can cancel people because the left controls all of the institutions.
Sometimes some conservatives go a little limp and they go along with the left, but the left initiates the cancellation.
Well, we can't trust the media anymore.
We can't even trust them on...
Obviously, forget their reporting on coronavirus.
They've been wrong from the very beginning.
But now, even when they talk about their own personal experience with coronavirus, we saw this with NBC News, a reporter describing his personal experience.
Even that we can't trust.
We'll get to it in one second.
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Just when you think they can't lose any more credibility, just when you think they're down to zero credibility, they somehow, they go into the red, they go into the negative on the credibility column.
An NBC News reporter, the science contributor and virologist Joseph Fair, went on TV to describe his personal experience with coronavirus, said it was the worst he ever felt.
Listen to his harrowing tales of the virus.
Dr.
Fair, let me start with you because I would like you to share a little bit about your recovery from COVID-19.
What should Americans take away from your experience?
Well, first of all, you know, I did not have any underlying conditions and, you know, I'm not like a triathlete or anything like that, but I was generally very healthy, could run, exercise probably four or five times a week.
That being said, I did not expect if I got COVID-19 that I would get that ill because I don't have any of those underlying conditions.
I'm 42 years old.
So you wouldn't think clinically that I would be one of those people that would get so very ill.
I can say that that's seven to eight days prior to me hospitalizing myself when I was doing the self-treatment.
That was the worst I've ever felt.
I probably spent 23 out of 24 hours in bed, and then obviously I developed the secondary pneumonia.
At the end and so the struggle in breathing and everything else.
So I was shocked at how severe my illness got, you know, without having those underlying conditions that we've discussed so many times.
I'm pretty shocked, too.
I'm pretty shocked to hear that 23 out of 24 hours in bed.
That's not what seems to be shown from the data, what's going on around the world, certainly around the country, certainly for younger men.
Gosh, that's really scary to me.
And the doctor here, or the scientific contributor, the virologist, has some advice, encouragement.
You young people, you better take this virus seriously.
So what I would take from that is, you know, everyone that's younger, everyone that is going out without masks now and being very cavalier with that and ignoring this kind of ongoing pandemic.
And, you know, we use the analogy and the band played on with HIV and its response in the early days.
That's really the analogy we should be using with coronavirus right now to a much greater extent.
Those people that are young and think they're invincible or people that just don't think it's going to affect them that greatly, even if they do get it, I can say that my own experience was the complete opposite.
I can't say that I had a brush with death, but it was enough to put me in the ICU for four days and in the hospital for six days.
Can't say it's a brush with teeth, but it's pretty close, huh?
ICU for four days, sleeping 23 out of 24 hours.
I mean, I know that the data, you know, have contradicted all the scaremongering from the mainstream media.
And I know that all the experts and the media and the politicians have gotten everything wrong.
But surely, surely you can't dispute this man's personal harrowing experience.
It's scary, right?
It's crazy, right?
Well, the craziest part is he never had coronavirus.
That guy tested negative for coronavirus and that guy tested negative for the antibodies for coronavirus.
He never had it.
It's just completely 100% fake news.
That video, that testimony scandalized even me.
And I have no respect for the media, and I don't believe a word that they say.
The mainstream media, the networks, and the New York Times, and the legacy newspapers.
I don't believe a word they say.
And even I was shocked with how brazenly dishonest that report was.
He didn't have it.
He had something bad, I guess.
It sounds pretty bad.
But it wasn't the virus.
And this is what we are basing our public policy on.
This is what we're basing the lockdown on.
This is how the media work you.
Because anybody listening to that, I don't care if you're the most hardened skeptic of the lockdowns, you are as conservative as they get.
You hear that, you say, gosh, I don't want that virus.
But it's fake news.
And it's not just fake news on the anecdotes, it's fake news on the data.
Have you seen the double standard in recent weeks?
Maybe not.
Maybe I should remind you.
Because the news moves so fast, sometimes you don't get to compare the headlines even one day to the next.
So here's a piece that came out in Time Magazine on July 11th.
So, not too long ago.
July 11th.
Three weeks after Trump's Tulsa rally, Oklahoma reports record high COVID-19 numbers.
It's pretty clear.
We know that correlation is not causation.
You can't attribute events that happen, you know, around the same time they seem to be related.
You can't attribute them to cause and effect, necessarily.
But it's pretty clear from this headline.
Trump's rally caused a spike in COVID. But then you think, wait a second.
Trump had that one rally in Tulsa, and you're saying this is going to cause all the super spreading of coronavirus.
What about the hundreds of thousands of people that poured out into the streets to burn the country down a few weeks ago?
Surely that must have had a super-duper effect on coronavirus, right?
Well, same magazine, Time magazine, writes, what, 11 days before June 30th?
Nationwide protests haven't caused a COVID-19 spike so far.
Here's what we can learn from that.
Trump holds a rally and there's any coronavirus?
It's all his fault.
Hundreds of thousands of people pour out into the street, but they're leftists?
Nope, it's not them.
Nothing to see here, folks.
Pay no attention.
Wasn't just Time Magazine.
NPR. Search results come out.
Parties, not protests, are causing spikes in coronavirus.
Parties, probably conservatives who don't take this seriously.
They're crazy conspiracy theorists or something.
WAPO, protests probably didn't lead to coronavirus spikes, but it's hard to know for sure.
Look at the subtlety here.
They realize how ridiculous it is to tell you that the virus can discriminate based on ideology, but they do it anyway.
They just say, well, look, we're not sure, but here's the best science.
See little evidence that protests spread the coronavirus in the United States.
Well, they're the experts.
And sure, they've gotten everything wrong, but they've got lab coats and stuff.
And degrees from fancy places.
So they must be telling the truth.
Even the places that are telling the truth aren't telling the whole truth.
Because there's a major focus on the exploding number of cases that are being diagnosed.
But there's an important measurement that's being left out, which we'll get to in one second.
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So all of the focus in the media, I'm sure you've heard it, the exploding number of cases.
There are new mask orders.
Even in Texas, they're trying to get people to wear masks and lock down.
The cases are exploding, all thanks to Trump rallies, by the way.
Not at all thanks to the rioting of the last month or so.
There's an important measure they're leaving out, namely, how many people are dying?
There are a lot of reasons why someone might be diagnosed with COVID. Could be that there's increased testing.
Could be that people are more on edge, so they're going and getting tested.
It could be that more people are getting it, but the death rate is significantly lower than the super-duper experts told us it was going to be, so it's not as deadly.
But how many people are dying?
Well, let's turn, not just across the Atlantic, let's turn to maybe the one country That did not lock down.
Sweden.
You remember Sweden?
Oh, the civilized world said Sweden is going to kill all of their population because they're not shutting down the economy and they're not forcing people to stay indoors all the time.
Sweden took this approach, which I thought from the beginning was the most reasonable approach, which is if you're very vulnerable, stay home and use precautions and be fine.
Be okay.
You're fine.
Act responsibly.
You'll be fine.
Sweden's number of cases did shoot up and they had some higher numbers of deaths early on.
And now, Sweden's coronavirus death toll is approaching zero.
This was the argument from the beginning.
This is what people are forgetting now.
My friends who were telling me, I have many liberal friends who were telling me, we have to lock down, we have to wear the masks all the time, we can't go outside.
I said, what is the purpose of that?
And they don't know the purpose.
They don't remember that we were told, now it seems like years ago, 15 days to slow the spread.
Slow the spread.
Not stop the virus.
Slow the spread.
Flatten the curve.
What does flatten the curve mean?
It means exactly the same number of people are going to get it.
But it will spread it out over time so that the hospital system won't be overwhelmed.
Well, we found out even in New York where it was the worst, because Cuomo completely mishandled this, we found out they never even came close to overwhelming the hospital system.
So we succeeded at flattening the curve.
Maybe the curve would have been flattened anyway, even if we didn't lock down.
But regardless, because Sweden didn't lock down, they never overwhelmed their hospital system either.
But regardless, what else could the masks and the lockdowns achieve?
We're not going to get herd immunity.
Dr.
Fauci told us that.
Maybe we get a vaccine, maybe we don't.
It'll only work at best 70 to 75% of the time.
The thing is going to move through the population.
So what is the argument?
There isn't one.
Sweden knew this, so they took the early hit.
Now it's approaching zero.
Here's the headline from Business Insider.
Sweden's coronavirus death toll is now approaching zero, but experts are warning others not to hail it as a success.
Okay, that's it.
I'm done with the experts then.
That's amazing.
That headline is actually almost honest, which is that they're saying...
Yeah, this is working and it's great, but the experts are really upset because it proved them all wrong and it's destroying their credibility and it's not allowing them to control everybody.
Now, unfortunately on this, even as the skeptics, the conservatives, have been proved right time and time again, even as the hysterical people, the alarmists in the media, in politics, in activism, even as they're proven wrong, As the experts, the public health experts, they've been proven wrong every step of the way.
There is still a lot of pressure on conservatives to cave.
And I'm sorry to say, President Trump exhibited a little bit of this the other day.
He put on the mask.
He wore the mask.
I think it was a big mistake.
Now, I think he redeemed himself a little bit later.
We'll get into that as well.
But we'll get into the politics of the mask, these little tiny things where the rot begins.
First, though, I've got to thank you for subscribing to The Michael Knowles Show.
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Be sure to check out my interview we just had when I was hosting Ben's Radio Show with Maddie Kearns, my friend at National Review, and my debate with Jessica Tarlov, my friend at Fox News over voter excitement with Joe Biden.
We got a lot of stuff over there, so go check it out.
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We'll be right back.
President Trump put on the mask.
I suggested that this would be a bad idea.
I begged him not to do it, but he did it anyway, and I think it was a bad look.
It's not the end of the world.
It's a small thing, it seems, right, to put on the mask.
But the message that it sends is really bad.
It sends a message, first of all, to the rest of the world, which is projecting weakness.
When the leader of the free world muzzles his face, covers himself up, it shows weakness.
Now, you might say, well, masks are effective.
I don't think they're particularly effective, not the cloth ones at least.
But regardless, I'm not talking about the efficacy of masks medically.
That's a separate issue.
It's the message.
It's what it's showing.
And it shows weakness.
But it also shows weakness to the left.
Because what it says to the left is, you were right.
The masks are effective.
I shouldn't have not worn a mask.
I should have worn a mask weeks ago.
And that's exactly what the left is saying right now.
Do you think Trump got credit?
For wearing the mask?
No, of course not.
Karen Tumulty at Washington Post said that now this is evidence that all conservatives should wear the mask.
Jake Tapper said, quote, That's absurd, of course.
But they're right.
It's an absurd statement that we lost all these lives because Trump didn't wear a mask.
It's an absurd statement to say conservatives should now wear the masks.
But they're right in that Trump gave them the premise.
I don't know who's advising him.
I don't know who's advising him.
But it was a horrible look.
And whoever's advising him to do this should be fired.
Or they should at least be sidelined and not listened to anymore.
It was a bad idea.
First of all, why is it absurd what these mainstream media people are saying?
Because back in March, I know it got memory hold and we all forgot, but all the experts told us not to wear masks.
Even the exalted Dr.
Fauci, who was sitting opposite his interviewer, neither of them wearing masks, he said it would be stupid for people to walk around.
At the height of coronavirus, by the way, at the moment that this thing was exploding, he said it would be stupid to wear a mask.
Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.
You're sure of it?
Because people are listening really closely to this.
Right now, people should not be walking.
There's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
So now, after the virus has already spread, that's when we need to wear masks.
But when it was exploding in the country and we were trying to flatten the curve, that's when we didn't need to wear masks.
That doesn't make any sense.
We were told the masks are not effective.
Then we're told they're effective.
Now it seems they're not effective again, but they're still telling us to wear them.
There's only loss to be had if Trump wears the mask.
What's to be gained?
He hasn't worn a mask yet.
He hasn't gotten the virus.
Seems healthy to me.
The messaging has been good.
It's rallied the base, which is what he's going to need to do in November.
There's no gain here.
There's no win.
President Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted out a picture of Trump wearing the mask.
I can't believe it.
I can't believe he would promote this.
This image that is going to be dispiriting to the base, and it's going to be encouraging to Trump's most vociferous critics.
Because they're going to take a victory lap and say, we were right.
Based on nothing, needlessly.
But he tweeted it out and he said, hashtag America first.
What does that get us?
What does that get the campaign?
What does that get the public health?
He should be tweeting out videos of Fauci in March telling people not to wear masks.
That's what we should be tweeting out.
Very frustrating.
Whoever advised him to do this, Is probably the reason why the rest of the messaging and the imaging right now and the campaigning is not going as well as it could be.
Now, that's sad.
The good news is Trump has been very strong in some other areas.
He's been very strong on insisting that schools must reopen in the fall.
Again, though, mixed messaging.
Is it full steam ahead, let's reopen?
Or is it, we've got to take this very seriously, we've got to muzzle ourselves and wear masks all the time, even if the science is out on whether they're effective or not, and we can't go certain places?
Which is it?
You've got to pick a lane.
If you stand in the middle of the road, you're going to get hit by a truck.
So, at least on the school issue, it's full steam ahead, we're going to punish schools if they don't reopen.
You've got to do it.
No surprise, the left is furious, including...
The former Democratic vice presidential nominee, the man who was just one, almost one heartbeat away from becoming the second woman president, Senator Tim Kaine.
I am really, really distressed with the way the administration is handling this.
The question is not whether schools will reopen.
They will reopen in the fall.
The question is, will they reopen online or in person or in some combination?
Give me a break, dude.
You are obviously gaslighting on this.
Nobody believes that going online is reopening.
Reopening is reopening.
Doing Zoom classes is not reopening.
That's closing.
And all the issues that go along with keeping the schools closed, like what parents are going to do with their kids, how they're going to arrange their work schedules, what quality the education is going to be that the kids are receiving, those all remain.
So he gaslights at the beginning, denies the problem, and then, of course, he accuses Trump of promoting quack medicine.
Who do parents of school-aged kids trust to make that decision?
Do they trust local principals and superintendents or school boards?
Or do they trust Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos?
Donald Trump has preached quack medicine.
Donald Trump denied this was a health problem.
Donald Trump wouldn't wear a mask until the sixth month of this crisis.
Donald Trump makes his own supporters sign liability waivers before they attend campaign rallies.
Who would the parents of school-aged kids trust?
Their own principals, superintendents, school board members, or Donald Trump?
It's not a hard question.
So the accusation is that Trump preaches quack medicine.
Did you catch that verb, though?
The verb gives away the whole game.
He says, preach medicine.
You don't preach medicine.
You prescribe medicine.
You study medicine.
You analyze medicine.
You cultivate and develop medicine.
But you don't preach it.
Preaching is a word that is associated with religion.
Not hardened, materialist, empirical medical science.
But the way that the left is treating this virus, the way that the left is treating science generally, is in a religious way that is divorced from data, that can tell you that one protest is good for the virus, one protest is bad for the virus.
That can tell you one day don't wear the masks, the next day wear the masks, and they pretend that nothing has changed.
They gaslight you on these little issues.
It's that religious fervor.
And let me ask you, to Tim Kaine's point, who do you trust on the virus?
Do you trust the people who've gotten it wrong from the beginning?
The experts and the media?
Or do you trust Trump, who has a much better record on it than any of these other people?
So I thought this was good on the schools.
Trump took it a step further, too.
He's now threatening the Funding, the government funding of the university system, not just for coronavirus or reopening or whatever, even though we've seen these silly stories last week about Harvard still charging students 50 grand a year to do Zoom classes.
But he's threatening them generally because they are not fulfilling their educational mission.
He tweets out, Now again, there's a little bit of...
There's a little bit of a difficulty here, because the word education and the word indoctrination basically mean the same thing.
To indoctrinate comes from the word docere in Latin, which just means to teach.
So one has a good connotation, one has a bad connotation.
I think we've got to stop talking about the form only, the procedure only, and talk about the substance.
The universities and the K-12 school systems still have the form and the procedure of the same old educational systems we've known the whole time.
The kids show up, they go to classes, they have teachers, they have certain, they choose a major in college.
Even with Zoom, they still have a similar structure in the way that their education will be We'll progress.
What has changed is not the form, but the substance.
And conservatives don't want to talk about the substance because we want to pretend to be hands-off, because we want to pretend you can't legislate morality, because we want to pretend that everything's neutral.
It ain't neutral.
Nothing is neutral anymore.
Everything is political.
Maybe it always was, but the left has told us everything is political, right down to Goya beans, okay?
So you're not going to get out of this.
You're not going to be able to say, I'm not telling you what to think, just how to think, because...
Part of education is teaching you what to think, what to know.
What about history?
You know, historical revision is one of the clearest ways that the education system has been perverted.
Historical revision and historical erasure are at the heart, in many ways, of the present madness of toppling all the statues and defacing George Washington.
Well, take this story.
It just came out, I think, on Friday.
Hagia Sophia, one of the most beautiful, oldest cathedrals in the world, which was then taken by Muslim invaders and turned into a mosque, and then since 1934 has been a museum.
It's in Istanbul, which used to be Constantinople, is now reverting back to a mosque.
So after almost 100 years, the Muslim government in Turkey is taking this world heritage site and turning it back from a museum into a mosque.
Now, All the coverage is saying it's being converted back.
It's going back to what it was.
It feeds into this idea we need to go back and give people reparations for historical wrongs.
We need to go back and give the land back to the Indians.
We've got to give Oklahoma back to the Indians.
We've got to give Mount Rushmore back to the Indians.
Why stop there?
With the Hagia Sophia, it's so clear.
Why would you just stop?
In 1453, which is when the Muslim Ottomans stole the Hagia Sophia, one of the most beautiful cathedrals.
Why not go back, I don't know, for the 916 years before that, when that building was built to be a Christian cathedral and stood that way for almost a millennium?
Why don't we revert back to that?
Why don't we revert Istanbul back to Constantinople?
Because all of these claims, the anti-colonialism, the anti-racism, they only go in one direction.
They only seem to be used to exploit the West.
And no other civilization is ever held to those standards.
They're simply attacks.
And we say they're minor little things.
Oh, this debate over words, this debate over one little site, one little piece of territory.
Who cares?
When you grant those little premises, who cares with the mask?
When you grant those little premises, you grant the left its entire cultural hegemony.
And it has real effects.
I'll show you one very practical effect.
We're in an election year.
We're coming up on an election in November.
We're all worried about voter fraud, especially with the mail-in ballots, because, because if we grant the premise that the virus is super duper deadly and we're all going to die if we don't put the mask on and we lock, we have to stay locked at home.
We can't go back to school.
Well, one consequence of that premise, which is BS, but one consequence of it is people can't be expected to go vote.
That'll be very busy.
So they, we have to have nationwide mail-in ballots and that we are told is not going to result in any voter fraud.
That's what the left tells us.
Even though we've been prosecuting cases of obvious voter fraud just in the past couple months.
Well, in Atlanta, the Timms family, Ron Timms, goes to his mailbox and he takes out his voter registration, mail-in voter registration, and he got one.
It was a card for Cody Timms.
Who's Cody's?
Cody, his wife.
Cody, his brother?
Cody's one of those names.
You know, it kind of cuts either way.
Is Cody his son?
No.
Cody is his dead cat who died 12 years ago.
Here is Ron's wife, Carol, describing the cat.
A great cat.
Indoor, outdoor.
Loved his family, loved the neighborhood.
He was 18 and a half when he passed away.
We have a voter registration application for Cody Timms.
How'd this happen?
I mean, it's not reality.
He's a cat.
Here he is.
And he's been dead for a long time.
There's a huge push, but if they're trying to register cats, I'm not quite sure who else they're trying to register.
I don't know if they're registering dogs.
It could be dogs.
What's next?
It's the slippery slope.
Democrats have always relied on dead voters to win elections.
We can trace this back at least to John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Sometimes they rely on dead people to be their presidential nominees, but they've always relied on dead voters.
But now they're taking it a step further, more brazen.
They're relying on dead cats.
If we grant the premises of the masks and the lockdowns and the schools and all these little things, it's not a coincidence.
It's not just by accident.
That we will end up granting the premises that will give the left a major political and cultural advantage.
Even as other countries that don't have presidential elections in three months are reopening and everything is going just fine over there.
I wonder why.
I guess Sweden doesn't have a very highly contested presidential election this year.
Even in seemingly ridiculous news stories, you see the run.
Sports Illustrated, swimsuit issue.
Do you get that?
When I was a kid, you know, occasionally if there was one lying around, maybe I would have taken a look, but not in a while have I ordered Sports Illustrated.
I don't read Sports Illustrated.
I don't think many people do.
But they've made history this year because for the first time, they will have a dude on the cover of their swimsuit issue.
Now, it is a dude who thinks that he's a woman or who pretends to be a woman or who dresses like a woman.
But it's a dude.
Talk about gender parity.
Talk about rising up over the oppressive yoke of the established class.
Finally, men who have been excluded from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for so long.
Finally, we get to overcome that oppression from the women, from the matriarchy, and wear bikinis on the cover of the issue.
This guy, Valentina Sampaio, is going to appear on this cover.
On the face, it seems like a stupid story.
Nobody cares, no one even reads Sports Illustrated, but this little story carries a lot of significance.
The reason that the left is pushing this trans issue, which affects what?
How many people are genuinely confused about their sex?
Well, more and more each day, but as a medical matter...
Very few.
A vanishingly small percentage of people.
But the left has pushed this for years.
The bathrooms, the transgenderism in Hollywood.
Halle Berry is now not allowed to play a woman who thinks that she's a man.
Because women who think that they're men can only be played by men.
I guess that's another win for the oppressed men over the matriarchy.
The reason they're pushing this is because at the heart of that is a cherished leftist premise, which is that there's no difference between men and women.
The sexes are not complementary.
They don't go together.
They're indistinguishable.
They're identical.
Men can be women.
Women can be men.
We're all just sort of the same.
We're all just these floating atoms.
We have no natural constraints by our biology, no natural social constraints by, say, our family or our local communities or our voluntary associations.
We are all just free-floating atoms.
This is why sometimes you'll see when there are big debates between the most arch-libertarian, the most arch-communist, they both have the same premises, which is that people are just individuals that can do whatever they want, basically, And then one group says they should all be separated all the time, and one group says they should all be brought together all the time.
When they're all separated, it's much easier to bring them together, which is why the advance of hyper-super-duper individualism tends to lead to a growth of the state.
Now, is all of that contained within the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue?
Are all of these premises contained within a dude wearing a bikini on the cover of a magazine?
This radical liberation that we can overcome?
Yes, it is.
But we don't notice it.
That's cultural hegemony.
That's political correctness, whatever you want to call it.
That's how insidious it is.
It's why we have to pay very close attention to the small things.
On the great television show, The Crown, the Queen's private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, has this great line, which is he's talking about why it matters that we pay attention to our rituals, to our traditions.
He's talking about it in the wake of the abdication of Edward VIII. And the line is, it's in the small things that the rot starts.
Do the wrong thing once.
It's easier to do it again.
Do the individualistic thing once.
It's easy to do it again.
That's what we're seeing here.
That's why this relentless push.
Wear the effing mask.
Just do it.
Use the effing pronoun.
Call him her.
Just do it.
It's nothing.
It doesn't matter.
It's not important.
Let men go change in the little girl's room.
Just do it.
It's not important.
Well, If it's not important, why do you seem so intent, left-wingers, on forcing us to do it?
If it doesn't matter.
If it's just a small thing.
Because it's not just a small thing.
Even small things are not small things.
That is where the rot begins.
And that is why, even as a matter of grave national importance, black beans matter.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental and that's what this show is about.
