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Dec. 17, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:19
Ep. 666 - Eternal Lockdown

The experts tell us we can’t travel or take off the masks even after we get the vaccine, British scientists demand we postpone Christmas, and AOC defends porn. If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/knowles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is the coronavirus vaccine is being shipped.
People are taking it.
It would seem as though our long international nightmare is over.
The bad news is, according to the experts, even after we get the vaccine, even after we get the last dose of the vaccine, Nothing can change.
You have to keep wearing the mask.
You're not allowed to travel.
You can't celebrate Christmas.
You have to remain locked down, I guess, forever.
This, according to the experts on MSNBC. Are you getting your vaccination this week?
Tomorrow morning, and I'm grateful for it.
Chuck, I just wanted to say, just a follow-up on what Yasmin mentioned.
Just for your viewers out there, I know one of the individuals who we just saw getting vaccinated is planning on traveling after the second dose.
This is a source of confusion, but this is one of the misperceptions here.
Just because you get vaccinated with that second dose does not mean...
You should be participating in things like traveling in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic or that you're liberated from masks.
Everything still applies until all of us get the two-dose regimen.
We don't think that's going to happen until June, July.
Again, this goes back to what we just talked about, Chuck.
We don't know if just getting the vaccination prevents serious illness or does it also prevent you from getting infection entirely, meaning you can still get infected with the virus potentially and pass it on to others.
So really, really critical.
Don't let your guard down just because you got vaccinated.
Oh, I guess that is confusing.
Because you see, I mistakenly, me, I'm inexpert.
I'm not scientific.
I thought that when you got the inoculation against the virus, you were inoculated against the virus.
But you're not.
Every single person on Earth has to get the vaccine.
And also, once you get the vaccine, you have to stay locked down forever.
Makes sense, right?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment from yesterday, from John Shine, who said, I hope President Trump's last three words as president are, I'll be back.
I think they are, actually.
We played a clip from the White House Christmas Party a week or two ago where President Trump said, look, I hope we get another four years, but if we don't, I'll see you in four years.
Love that kind of attitude.
I'm still holding out this kind of sliver of hope for the Compromise of 1877.
Unfortunately, not looking terribly good right now, and we just feel like there's not much that we can do.
You know, we're not feeling very well right now.
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Some of this other stuff, however, I'm listening to the medical geniuses on MSNBC and I'm told that if you get the vaccine, you're not vaccinated.
If you get the inoculation, you're not inoculated.
It's not going to change anything.
Talk about moving the goalposts.
We were told on March 16th, 15 days to slow the spread, because we had to flatten the curve.
Then flatten the curve became find a cure, so we got to extend 15 days to 15 months.
Then we did find the cure.
We got the vaccine.
It's something like 95% effective, and we're told, well, just because you get the vaccine...
Doesn't mean you're allowed to live your life again.
Oh, no.
You need to lock yourself up in your apartment forever.
And you can't see your loved ones and you can't live your life.
You know, if that's what the vaccine does, I don't think I'm going to get the vaccine.
If getting the vaccine in no way changes my life, if I'm a young guy, statistically I'm at very, very, very, very, very, very low risk of serious complications from this virus, and the vaccine isn't going to permit me to do anything new, have any of my life or freedom back, then why would I get it?
It doesn't make a lot of sense.
And there are some people who did get it who seem to be regretting that they got it.
I bet there are a lot of people who aren't going to get it because they're reading stories about, for instance, a healthcare worker in Alaska who experienced a, quote, serious reaction and was subsequently hospitalized after receiving a dose of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine, which was just approved by the FDA last week.
This is, by the way, not according to some fringe, right-wing conservative website that this person had a serious reaction.
This is according to the New York Times.
Even the left-wing media are admitting this.
This person remained in the hospital as of Wednesday.
The worker had no serious history of drug allergies or anything like that, though it remains unclear whether this person suffered from other types of allergies, but no history of drug allergies.
And so I think people are going to look at it and say, wait a second, you've got this vaccine that you've rushed through very, very quickly.
You know, it got the approval, so that's good, but you're seeing at least now early on, this person has a serious complication from it.
And also, the vaccine's not going to let me go back to living my life in any sort of normal way.
Why would I get it?
Why would I get it?
If you look into the UK, the National Health Service has confirmed that it's providing, quote, resuscitation facilities in vaccination centers after reports of two individuals having very serious reactions after receiving the vaccine.
Now, it is worth pointing out in Britain, those two healthcare workers apparently had histories of allergic reactions.
So that could be maybe a little bit more expected.
But still...
One has to weigh the risks, and this has always been my thought on not just vaccines, but all sort of medical interventions.
There's always risk.
I know on the left, or maybe the extreme fringes of the ideological right, people want there to be this perfect, abstract, ideological, 100% you have to do this all the time, there's no argument against it, or vice versa.
But for conservatives, we realize all of life entails risk.
If I were much older, if I were in very poor health, I'd probably say the risk of getting the vaccine is worth it, right?
Because it outweighs the risk of just getting the virus and possibly having a serious reaction to that.
But there is always risk, and we're making these kind of prudential decisions.
And this is true when we're talking about getting on an airplane.
This is true when we're talking about celebrating Christmas.
This is true when we're talking about major social issues actually completely unrelated to the coronavirus.
You've got to look at the risk.
Now, whether you get the vaccine or not, it would appear that the way our statistics are being counted, just about everything is a COVID death anyway.
So you could walk out into the middle of the street and have a heart attack.
And if they test you for coronavirus, they'll say, yeah, this was a coronavirus death.
You could even walk out into a bad neighborhood, get shot with a pistol and And be counted as a coronavirus death.
We've heard anecdotal reports of this over the past year now.
There is a state health department official, the Grand County Coroner in Colorado, who is sounding the whistle on this, saying that the coronavirus deaths in her county are not coronavirus deaths.
These people were actually victims of gunshot wounds.
It's absurd that they would even put that on there.
Would you want to go to a county that has really high death numbers?
Would you want to go visit that county because they're contagious?
You know, I might get it and I could die if all of a sudden one county has a high death count.
We don't have and we don't need those numbers inflated.
So you've got the county coroner, who knows this kind of information probably better than anybody, says they're counting these people as coronavirus deaths.
They did not die from coronavirus.
They may have had coronavirus, so they had the sniffles while they got shot in the head, but the death was caused by the bullet.
Now they have to count it as a coronavirus death because the state health department is making them.
And it's not even just the state health department's fault.
It's the CDC is telling the state health departments to do this.
So the CDC has these guidelines.
If you die with coronavirus, you are said to die from coronavirus.
Which means, at this point, if you believe that the coronavirus numbers are not inflated, you are peddling a conspiracy theory.
Because we now have firm evidence for months and months and months around the country.
We can say for sure that That a significant number of deaths that were not caused by coronavirus are being counted as deaths from coronavirus.
So what's the real number?
Obviously, this is a pretty virulent flu.
I'm using flu colloquially.
It's a virulent sort of virus.
But it is not accounting for all of the numbers that we're seeing.
We know that.
You can talk to the county coroners.
You can talk to health officials all around the country.
And that's to say nothing of financial incentives for people to classify these.
I'm just talking about the government mandates saying this must be a coronavirus death.
So we've got some pretty weak information here.
You heard that medical expert on MSNBC at the top say, look, we don't know.
If you take the vaccine, does that mean that you can no longer be infected or you just won't show symptoms or it won't be that serious?
We just don't know.
Well, yeah, it sounds like you don't know a lot of things.
Sounds like you don't know what the vaccine does.
Sounds like you don't know what the side effects are going to be.
Sounds like you don't know what the primary effect is going to be.
Sounds like you don't really know how many people have died from the virus as separate from dying with the virus.
Sounds like you don't know anything at all.
Experts.
Actually, it sounds like the people who are inexpert and just have a modicum of common sense know much more about this than anybody else.
The people who say, we're going to live our lives.
Well, for some reason, we're still deferring to these geniuses in lab coats, and those geniuses in lab coats are canceling Christmas.
Dr.
Fauci, who remains in that job now for almost a half century, seriously, this guy's worked in public health at a serious senior level for almost 50 years.
Dr.
Fauci is saying, no Christmas.
The guy's gotten basically everything wrong during this coronavirus epidemic.
But he's saying it's just science.
You have to cancel Christmas.
Quote from Dr.
Fauci.
He said this to the Washington Post.
I'm going to be with my wife.
Period.
The Christmas holiday is a special holiday for us.
Because Christmas Eve is my birthday.
All done.
All done.
Not Christmas is a special holiday for us because it's the birth of our savior.
Not, Christmas is important for us because it's the incarnation of the second person of the blessed trinity who redeems mankind.
No, which is usually why people say, no, it's because it's my birthday, because everything's about Dr.
Fauci.
It's a special holiday because it's my birthday.
Oh, okay, and then he goes, and Christmas Day is Christmas Day.
And my daughters are not going to come home.
That's painful.
We don't like that.
That's just one of the things you're going to have to accept as we get through this unprecedented challenging time.
Nothing about this virus is unprecedented.
It's a new strain of some kind of virus, but new strains of viruses pop up with some frequency.
What makes this unprecedented is the stupid, incoherent, inhuman, anti-constitutional political response to the virus.
That's what makes it unprecedented.
And you know what?
We can fix that in two seconds.
You know how you fix that?
Ignore Dr.
Fauci.
Moreover, defy Dr.
Fauci, which I'm certainly going to do.
I'm going to gather with friends and family and loved ones on Christmas.
I encourage you to do that as well.
Be prudent if you have some particular reason why you're not going to do that.
Might not even involve health.
It might just be that you don't like your mother-in-law.
Okay, I understand that.
But as a general rule, celebrate Christmas, people.
Don't listen to this ridiculous person in a lab coat, this technocrat, who thinks that he can run your life now.
He should not be able to run your life.
By the way, he's not the only one.
I beat up on Dr.
Fauci because he absolutely deserves it and because he's the most prominent public health technocratic tyrant in this country.
But there are people doing this all over the world.
They're doing this in Britain too.
There are calls all over the place, not just don't celebrate Christmas.
Actually, maybe you just postpone Christmas to another time, which means that you are going to have to be waiting for that knock on your door, not just from Santa Claus, but from your in-laws all year long.
And I don't know.
Look, if you are going to have to do that, you have to make sure that you get a ring doorbell.
It is right now, it is doorbell season, right?
This is the busiest time of the year.
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K-N-W-L-E-S. So, not just Dr.
Fauci trying to cancel Christmas, you have these sort of more amiable public health tyrants in the UK saying, well, maybe we don't need to cancel it, just postpone Christmas.
The advisors, the officials, the scientists in Britain say, just have a summer party.
Seriously.
Celebrate Christmas in the summer.
I have friends who have done Christmas in July as a sort of silly party.
That's not a substitute for Christmas.
Christmas happens at a real time.
And I think this is one of the sort of temptations of liberal modernity, is we think that time doesn't matter.
Oh, you lose a year because Fauci told you to stay indoors?
Okay, that's fine.
We're going to live forever.
It doesn't matter.
You don't need to do things in real time.
You don't need to do things in real flesh and blood.
You can do it on Zoom.
Do it on Skype.
FaceTime.
Do it in July.
Who cares?
It's all the same.
It's this rationalizing, abstracting idea.
And that is completely antithetical to the Christmas season, right?
The whole point of Christmas is that this metaphysical being, the source of all creation, the second person of the Trinity, becomes incarnate in a particular body, in a particular cave, in a particular place, Bethlehem, at a particular time.
Coincidentally, 0 AD. What were the odds of that?
Probably pretty good.
In a particular moment in time, that particularity is key.
I have to dispel this.
I haven't done too much on the war on Christmas or the war on Advent, which is even subtler, but I have to dispel this myth that crops up all the time that Christmas, the date for Christmas was just chosen arbitrarily.
It could be July 5th.
We picked December 25th here in the West and January 6th in the East, but it could be whenever.
No, it can't.
Now, one explanation for why they picked December 25th is that early Christians decided that they were going to win over pagans by making the incarnation celebration to be right around, you know, right on these pagan feast days.
And you'll hear that the pagan feasts will be either the feast of Saturn or Or the Saturnalia, or the Feast of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, or the Feast of Mithras.
By the way, these claims have only been made really in the past 500 years or so is when they've become really popular.
And it's just not true.
So there's no evidence of any pagan holiday on December 25th before Christmas was celebrated on December 25th.
The earliest source we have on this is the chronography of 354, which does list a pagan holiday on December 25th, but it also lists Christmas on December 25th.
So there's no evidence that that celebration on the 25th predated Christmas.
Saturnalia, the Feast of Saturn, was established centuries before Christmas, but it doesn't quite coincide.
Saturnalia was originally on December 17th.
Eventually, it was extended to be a long celebration up to the 23rd, so it was a week-long thing.
But it still didn't even go all the way to when we celebrate Christmas.
No early Christian source.
If there were really some strategy here to make Christmas sometime around the pagan feasts, or on the pagan feasts even...
The early Christians wrote a lot.
We have a lot of their writings.
Someone probably would have mentioned this.
There is no mention of that at all in any early Christian feast.
The earliest mention of even this coincidence doesn't appear until the 12th century, more than a thousand years after Christ.
The real reason why it's on December 25th Is because of the way that they dated, the way that early Christians and the ancients generally understood a divine life, which was that it had to be perfect, perfect in length.
So an exact number of years.
You have at the turn of the third century, Tertullian dates the crucifixion to March 25th.
And so, if the crucifixion, so Good Friday, is March 25th, then that would mean that the conception would have to be March 25th.
And if the conception is March 25th, then exactly nine months later, what do you have?
Christmas.
Other Christian writers, St.
Hippolytus of Rome, said this.
The world itself was actually created on March 25th.
So you have the perfect symmetry of the conception of Christ and the conception and the creation of the world.
Then nine months later, you get Christmas.
St.
Augustine agrees with this.
The anonymous Christian work on solstices and equinoxes agrees with this.
But Augustine writes about it specifically in On the Trinity, this idea of the conception.
This would explain the discrepancy, by the way, as to why in the East they celebrate Christmas on January 6th.
It's because they also celebrate the crucifixion or recognize the crucifixion on April 6th.
Pope Benedict made this point just a few years ago.
He said there were these theories that it coincides with pagan holidays.
Those theories can no longer be supported.
The history just doesn't support it.
That is the end of my rant on moving Christmas and saying that Christmas is really just some pagan holiday.
It's just not true.
This is kind of like when modern liberal scientific people make fun of the old idiot people from the back old and past days for thinking that the earth was flat.
Really nobody thought the earth was flat.
No educated person thought that the earth was flat, going back to the ancient Greeks.
The idea that people thought the earth was flat is itself a modern creation.
It just is absolutely infuriating.
But the people who push this stuff, they give you a fake history.
They give you a fake scientific argument.
And the people who fancy themselves to be the most educated, the most serious, the most wise, are often the most ridiculous.
And a clear example of this, George Clooney.
George Clooney, who plays himself in every Coen Brothers movie, right?
He plays some absolutely sort of empty-headed actor.
He has an argument for you.
How to react to this epidemic.
And it's very, very scientific.
He says, put on an effing mask.
We're losing 3,000 people a day right now.
That's right.
You know, it's like you just want to yell at everybody and say, just put a f***ing mask on, you know?
I know.
That's what we...
This thought where everybody's going, well, it's my freedom.
It's like, that's not how this s*** works, dumb a**.
I know.
Here's your freedom.
Your freedom is this.
You're free to smoke until your lungs turn black, but you can't do it on the bus.
And you're free to drink until your liver pops and comes out your ass.
But you can't drink and then get behind the wheel of a car.
There have to be certain rules.
This is one that says, put on a f***ing mask and we'll get through this.
We got vaccines coming.
Let's save another 60,000 lives before the vaccines.
Wow, brilliant political philosophy from George Clooney.
It's like I'm reading Lord Acton or something, or John Locke, isn't it?
No, not quite.
George Clooney, though, if you take the sort of profanity and the arrogance aside, which is very difficult...
If you took that aside from George Clooney, you'd be left with like 3% of George Clooney.
But if you try to get to the argument he's making, the argument itself is also extremely stupid.
He's making this argument, we talked about it a little bit yesterday, this kind of liberal argument that, look, you can do whatever you want personally.
You're completely entitled to do whatever you want to your own body as long as it doesn't affect anybody else.
And the reason this argument is stupid and has never worked anywhere in the world is because the things we do in private Some more so than others, but if you have a whole society doing, you know, lots and lots of vicious things in private, that is going to have an effect on the public, because the public is just all the private people.
And a clear example of this would be gender theory, right?
Which is, you're allowed to be a man who identifies as a woman, but don't expect me to call you a woman.
Oh, wait a second, that's what the liberal left is making all of us do right now.
How come this idea that you can do anything in private, but it can't have any public effects?
How come that works when you're talking about wearing a mask, but it doesn't work on your gender identity?
Well, because it's obviously an incoherent argument.
And by the way, I'm not taking the right-wing libertarian version of this either.
I don't...
Adhere to the argument of freedom that George Clooney is strawmanning and saying the right wing believes.
I don't think that there is no argument ever to take certain health precautions.
That the government has no right to institute certain health measures.
I think the government does have a right to do that.
I think that the government has, during emergencies, has police powers.
I just think that the current use of those powers is imprudent, incoherent, and deeply unjust, and extremely stupid.
The freedom we're talking about here is not the George Clooney sort of mockery of freedom, this idea that I can pursue my appetites however I want, or I can pursue my will however I want.
I have an idea, to use Edmund Burke, the great conservative philosopher's phrase, of an exalted freedom.
What I want is a political freedom.
I'm not saying that I get to do whatever I want individually all the time, but I'm also not saying that I have to acquiesce to every whim of Dr.
Fauci.
I have the political freedom in this country to persuade my fellow citizens to overthrow the illegitimate regime of these technocratic public health expert idiots who don't know anything, who don't know anything about anything.
I don't think they know very much about science, capital S with a trademark over the E, and they certainly don't know anything about political philosophy in the way this country ought to be run.
And I think that we should use our political power to kick Dr. Fauci out of his job.
I think he's been there about 50 years too long.
And to, to give ourselves our culture back, to allow ourselves to celebrate Christmas, to allow ourselves to see one another smile and breathe in fresh air and not wear these ridiculous masks.
I think that's very important.
I do take safety pretty seriously.
And I take freedom seriously, but not in this shallow, degraded way that you hear about mostly from the left and a little bit from the right.
I want an exalted sort of safety that takes into account all of The many goods in society.
And I want an exalted freedom that allows me to exercise my political rights in this country as our founding fathers intended.
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I want an exalted political freedom.
It's the sort of thing that Rand Paul was just talking about yesterday.
We haven't even talked about the election today.
I wanted to open up in a way that didn't just fill me with complete fury.
And right now, somehow, the coronavirus is the easier pill to swallow.
The lockdowns are the easier pill to swallow compared to what is going on with our elections.
Because we know that irregularities occurred.
We know that fraud occurred.
We know that illegal acts occurred.
Crimes by election officials who would pretend that they were going to stop counting votes for the night and send all the poll watchers home.
The poll watchers that the candidates are legally entitled to have there.
And then they would secretly count the ballots throughout the night.
Or they would send the poll watchers home, or you would have these machines that turned up errors, that then the errors would go to a hand count, no oversight to that sort of thing.
Are we allowed to call this out?
Are we allowed to say this was fraud?
Well, at least one senator is saying we can, and that would be Rand Paul.
I think we should have hearings going into the next year, hearing from state legislatures and what they're going to do to make sure election law is upheld, not changed by people who are not legislators.
And we do have an interest in that.
I don't want it to be federalized.
Many on the other side of the aisle would just soon federalize it and mail everybody a ballot and we'll have this universal corruption throughout the land.
But what I think we need to do is keep it at the state level.
But we can't just say it didn't happen.
We can't just say, Oh, 4,000 people voted in Nevada that were non-citizens, and we're just going to ignore it.
We're going to sweep it under the rug and say, oh, the courts have decided the facts.
The courts have not decided the facts.
The courts never looked at the facts.
The courts don't like elections, and so they stayed out of it by finding an excuse, standing or otherwise, to stay out of it.
But the fraud happened.
The election, in many ways, was stolen.
And the only way it'll be fixed is by, in the future, reinforcing the laws.
Absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
Now, we don't know.
I mean, this gets to Rand's point.
We don't know the full extent of these kind of illegitimate vote counts or ineligible ballots.
We don't know.
And I think that's why he said the election in many ways was stolen.
He's not actually claiming that I know for a fact, 100%, that Trump got more of these legitimate votes.
Well, you can't know that because the And you can't know that because you've got problems that are so pervasive that you can't possibly go in and check in every single place.
But one thing we can know for sure is that the way voting was conducted in Pennsylvania was illegal.
It was unconstitutional, the way that vote was conducted in Pennsylvania, the most important swing state.
So when Rand Paul says the election in many ways was stolen, yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say.
By the way, even if the votes after this unconstitutional action, even if Biden got more of the votes, if the way that the vote was conducted is illegitimate, then the whole election in Pennsylvania is illegitimate.
And yet, then the courts come in and they refuse to hear the case.
So where does this leave us?
This leaves us in this morass.
There's nothing particularly clear about it.
I know ideologues on the left and on the right really want it to be perfectly crystal clear and you can have a do-over.
You don't get do-overs in politics.
You don't.
You don't get do-overs even in the courts, really.
So what Rand Paul is saying here is, look, let's fight this thing to the very end.
Let's go down to the very last wire.
Fine by me.
But let's also, if we lose this battle, and it looks like we will, and I'm just being prudent here, just being practical, I don't see the route out other than the compromise of 1877, and Mitch McConnell shot that one down yesterday.
But at the very least, then, you can't give up the fight, generally.
If you give up the fight, Republicans aren't going to win elections, like, ever again, okay?
At least at the national level, at least important elections.
Decisive elections.
They won't.
If the left is permitted to get away with these kind of shenanigans, how are Republicans supposed to win again?
So you've got to keep up that fight.
There are some ways to do it.
I think President Trump's looking into it now.
Various investigators you could appoint.
Senate could do this as well.
But there is a lot at stake here.
We have more elections coming up in January.
We have other fun stuff coming up.
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I want to get back to this idea of freedom because I think I may disagree with some of my colleagues here a little bit.
And I may sort of a little bit like 5% defend AOC, but only to make a point about why AOC is wrong about everything.
AOC tweets out yesterday, quote, Sex work is work.
The federal government has done almost nothing to help people in months.
We must pass stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, small business relief, hospital funding, etc., Keep the focus of shame there, not on marginalizing people, surviving a pandemic without help.
This is in response to political controversy that's been stirring up in recent days over Pornhub.
Pornhub's getting knocked pretty hard right now, which is great.
over OnlyFans, which is this democratized pornography where basically this website lures in any kind of young girl to become a pornographer herself and then make, you know, the promise is you're going to make a lot of money and the 97% of these people or even higher don't really make much money at all, but they end up degrading themselves and have these photos on the internet forever and it's really not good for their lives.
Now, I'm skeptical of AOC's premise here that You know, the only way to survive the pandemic is to get involved in prostitution and pornography.
I don't think that's true.
I think there are other ways to make money.
Maybe you can make more money per hour or something doing that.
But, you know, the costs of that to your reputation, to your personal life, to your psychology, you know, it's not great.
I'm also sort of skeptical that we shouldn't feel shame for these kind of lurid sexual behaviors, but instead we should feel shame because politicians haven't done their job.
I think that all people involved in sex work and politics should probably feel some shame.
You know, those are the two oldest professions, right?
Prostitution is the oldest one, and then politics is just right after that.
And as Reagan pointed out, they bear a lot of similarities to one another.
However, the place I will agree with AOC and disagree with some of my conservative colleagues is when she says sex work is work.
Obviously, that's true.
Of course it's work.
It takes time.
You get paid for it.
It does require skill.
I won't think too much about the skills, you know, because it's not a family program.
But it does require, I suppose, some kind of skill.
Even a little business savvy to attract a customer.
So it is work.
It's just bad work.
It's not good work.
It's not good for anybody.
It's bad for the guys buying the services.
It's bad for the women providing the services.
It's bad for society.
It's bad.
You know, there was a while ago, who was it?
Obama said, I think it was Obama.
Some Democratic politician said, you know, if you don't work and study hard, you're going to end up being a barista.
Being a barista is honest work.
That's an honest...
You're going out, you're providing a service.
I love my barista.
Sex work and a certain type of politics is not honest work.
But it is work.
It's just you don't want that.
You know, there was a troll who tweeted out, obviously this was just to troll conservatives into a frenzy.
He said, my daughter is thriving on Pornhub and OnlyFans.
I'm the proud father of a sex worker.
And, you know, obviously that isn't true.
Nobody feels that way because there is something intrinsically shameful.
About looking at porn and about performing in porn.
And people at both sides have psychological effects from that.
One of the reasons that Pornhub has become such a big issue is because you've got generations of young boys who are getting hooked on this, on this thing which is categorically different and categorically more dangerous than a playboy under your uncle's bed in the 70s, you know, or something like that.
This is very different.
It has very damaging effects to people.
This has been studied scientifically, and obviously that's true ethically as well.
And it would seem to me that the way to attack this problem is not to stigmatize, marginalize people who are in it, and it's not to permit it entirely and just say, well, you've got to raise your kids better, but the government has no role, politics has no role.
No, it's obviously bad.
It's really bad.
I mean, it's really shameful of AOC to encourage young girls to get involved in prostitution, which is what she's doing.
That's a shameful thing.
And that could ruin lives.
We should not do that.
We should discourage girls from getting involved in pornography and prostitution.
We should discourage men from looking at and engaging in those sorts of things.
We can have prudence and recognize there's always going to be some kind of shady pictures on the internet.
There's always going to be, you know, a strip club or a brothel in the red light district.
And there's always going to be the temptation of women to get involved in that.
There's always going to be the temptation of men to get involved in that too.
But we should try to minimize it.
You know, even getting back to St.
Augustine, who I mentioned earlier with regard to Christmas, St.
Augustine defended the Legal prostitution in the sense that it's prudent.
It's impossible to eradicate entirely.
There can be some externalities if you do eradicate it entirely, but you don't want to encourage it.
I understand that that's not satisfying to either the liberal left who says, oh yeah, everybody should be a porn star, and to the extremely ideological rigid right that says we've got to eradicate lust from the heart of man.
I don't think either of those are particularly practical.
I think what we should just do is, through prudence, discourage all of this activity.
And that involves some shame for everybody involved.
That can be a good thing.
Shame is good.
That's your conscience having a red blaring light saying, danger, danger, don't do this.
And we should encourage that faculty.
That is a faculty of our reason.
That is a sense that we should cultivate.
So right now, Pornhub is getting hit with this $40 million lawsuit.
Victims of a sex trafficking operation are suing MindGeek, which is the parent company of Pornhub, because there was a sex trafficking operation called Girls Do Porn, very creatively titled, And, uh, basically this was a fraudulent porn company and they lured the girls in, uh, and said that actually these videos are only going to be released on DVD in foreign countries.
Don't worry.
None of your friends, none of your family is going to find it.
What do they do?
They immediately upload it to the internet.
And apparently to Pornhub in particular, because I guess the biggest website, right?
So they upload all of that.
These girls have their lives ruined.
Some of them threaten suicide.
Some of them attempt suicide.
Their lives are completely shattered, which should be a warning sign to anybody who wants to get on OnlyFans.com because they think they can make a quick buck.
Obviously, it affects that you're not taking into account here, and these websites are preying on girls who are not taking these things into account.
So each victim here is asking for at least a million bucks, plus they're asking for the profits of their videos and legal fees as well.
That's good.
That's a good thing.
I don't know if the right or the left feel perfect about the way that people are attacking, they're attacking Pornhub because they've got misogynistic content, according to Nick Kristoff at the New York Times, and racist content.
And because they've got underage girls, yeah, definitely go after them for that.
And because they've got fraud videos and they've got, okay, fine.
That's sort of death by a thousand cuts.
And you're not going to eradicate Pornhub entirely, but you are going to cut it down to size.
Just the other day, they deleted something like half of the videos on their platform.
How many millions of videos do they have on their platform?
They deleted half of them.
That's good.
That's good.
That's a win.
That's a good standard to have.
And, you know, when people say you can't legislate morality, well, that's obviously ridiculous.
All laws, by definition, legislate morality.
But I think what people are really saying is, you can't establish this perfect moral society without any sin.
Yeah, duh, of course not.
Of course people are going to violate these sorts of things.
But you can at least have the standard.
And that goes a long way.
What we've done, really what political correctness has done for the past 50 years, 100 years, Is to invert the standards that we have in this country.
You saw this on ESPN. Forget about porn for a second and go to something even less savory, ESPN. ESPN commentator and former football player, I guess, Dominique Foxworth, a man I've never heard of before.
Not only do I not watch ESPN now because it's gone woke, but I never really watched it all that much to begin with.
So Dominique Foxworth said on a podcast that he roots against another player on the Buffalo Bills, Josh Allen.
And it's not because he doesn't like Allen personally or, you know, he thinks Allen's a bad player or whatever.
It's because Allen's fans are apparently somewhat conservative and specifically they have American flags in their social media bios.
And because of that, this guy roots against Josh Allen.
My biases are not based on Josh Allen.
It's based on the people that are defending Josh Allen.
I would be 100% lying if I said that when Josh does something dumb, a little part of me doesn't get happy.
And it's not because I want Josh to succeed.
It's because the people who are telling me that Josh is the second coming and Josh is better than everybody are people with American flags and dogs and skull and crossbones in their abbeys.
And then if you go just take a dip into their tweet history, it's some really concerning retweets and likes.
Some really concerning retweets and likes.
Like, I'm just going to throw this out there as a guess.
Do they like retweet Trump or something?
Oh my gosh, do they retweet us at the Daily Wire?
Do they retweet concerns?
Because what do they have in the bio they've got?
Skull and crossbones, that's the Jolly Roger, you know, kind of old pirate symbol.
It's kind of like, you know, you see it on some ties and things like that.
Dogs.
Oh, no.
Dogs.
Man's best friend.
Nice, wholesome pet.
And then, worst of all, the American flag.
That's a warning sign.
Used to be, according to the old standards, that the American flag was unassailable.
That was the one thing that we all could agree on.
Because we all have to agree on it.
It's the symbol of the whole country.
Right?
It's not just a symbol.
It didn't used to just be a symbol of the Republican Party or of MAGA or of...
Or I guess we all liked MAGA, right?
We all wanted to make America great again.
It wasn't just a symbol of conservative.
It was the symbol of all of us.
And so we all saw ourselves there.
And increasingly, that is not so.
I suspect...
If you went to the left and you showed them either the rainbow flag, the sort of gay rights, now it's more than that though, it's LGBT, the whole alphabet line.
If you showed them that flag or the American flag and said, which one do you feel represents you?
I bet you even straight left-wingers, a great many of them, would choose the rainbow flag.
Because the rainbow flag has become a kind of, it isn't even just a symbol of LGBT anymore, it's a symbol of leftism in America.
And it's an evidence, not just the rainbow flag, but other sorts of symbols like this.
It's an evidence that leftism is refuting something about America.
And you don't need to look to flags for that.
You can see it in the 1619 project.
You can see that in the protests in the NFL. Protesting the symbol of the country itself.
That now just conservatives are left alone with this symbol of America.
Democrats tried to bring out a few flags during their convention this year.
It wasn't very convincing.
They've moved on.
They're trying to refute the country.
They've got a new standard.
They've got a new standard on sex, obviously, but a new standard on politics, generally.
A new standard on science, right?
We have to defer to the scientists, not just on certain medications, certain medical procedures, but on Christmas, on when we're allowed to celebrate Christmas.
That day used to be set by the church authorities, by bishops, by the early church fathers.
Now it's being set by British health experts.
What on earth do they have to do with that?
Now we're being told how we can travel, what family we can see, what we have to wear, how we dress is now being dictated to us by this new scientific standard, which is obviously an extreme bastardization of that term.
But that is the new standard.
So what's the deal?
Are we going to celebrate our freedom, that ultimate freedom bought for us by the incarnation, then on the cross?
That freedom that has guided our understanding of freedom shaped it in our civilization for 2,000 years?
Are we going to have some new idea?
I don't know what that idea of freedom is from George Clooney and Dr.
Fauci.
Looks like an eternal lockdown.
Which one do we want?
This would be a good time of year to contemplate that and make a decision.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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