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Jan. 26, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:33
Ep. 686 - Sleepy Joe’s Eternal Lockdown

President Biden extends the pandemic timeline as “15 days to slow the spread” closes in on a year, Disney censors Peter Pan for political incorrectness, and lazy teachers justify their refusal to work by whining about “white supremacy.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On this 316th day of 15 Days to Slow the Spread, President Joe Biden has a message for all of us, and it's a pretty simple one.
It's common sense if you ask me.
This pandemic is going to take a whole lot longer before we can return to normal.
I'm going to shut down the virus, but I never said I'd do it in two months.
I said it took a long time to get here.
It's going to take a long time to beat it.
And so we have millions of people out there who have the virus.
We're just for the first day, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I've been doing other things this morning, speaking with foreign leaders.
But one of the things I think this is one of the first days that the numbers actually come down, the number of deaths and the number on a daily basis and the number of hospitalizations, etc.
It's going to take time.
It's going to take a heck of a lot of time and we still have as Dr.
Fauci constantly points out it's one thing when we have mass How can I say it politely?
Mass disregard of the warnings about not wearing masks and wearing masks and social distancing and failure to social distance and people getting together on holidays in ways that weren't recommended, etc.
We see the first thing that happens is we see the number of infections go up.
Then you see the hospitalizations go up.
Then you see the deaths go up.
Poor Joe Biden.
He's not the brightest bulb in the pack, so he realizes as he launches into this invective against the people who don't wear the masks and don't listen to the experts, even when the experts change their mind all the time in the 316th day of slow the spread, as he realizes he's going through this motion, he realizes he's not wearing the mask.
And people, they're not listening to the mask mandates in there.
Whoopsie-daisy.
And they're not going to be locked down forever.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Wesley Beyer, who says, Chuck Schumer's Freudian slip wasn't wrong at all.
I mean, there was an uprising.
That's...
You can't joke about that.
You're not...
That's...
This is too serious.
You're not allowed to make that kind of joke, but it's pretty...
Pretty funny.
You know...
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President Biden finally gets the message, because, and I said this in the months before the presidential election, I said, you know, we've all been joking about how the virus is going to be cured the day after the election, but I'm not so sure, because this is a tremendous amount of power that liberal elites have grabbed.
power in the administrative state, power in elective office, power in corporate America, especially big, big business like Amazon, for instance, power in all of these various sectors.
I don't think they're going to give it up so quickly.
And that seems to have been proven correct.
Now they're going to say, no, it's going to go on and on and on.
We're going to have to keep watching ourselves.
Why is this dragging on?
Because people aren't wearing masks.
Now, of course, that doesn't make any sense at all.
The places with the most draconian mask policies, the places with some of the highest mask compliance in the world, are also some of the cities where the virus has been surging.
Not Not uniformly, and there are plenty of places where people aren't wearing masks and the virus is surging too, just to say that perhaps Fauci's original guidance, that the masks are not quite as effective as people think, maybe that was correct.
But Fauci's changed his mind.
Yesterday, we reported on this new idea from the New York Times that people should wear multiple masks.
And I began to say that this was Fauci's new bright idea.
But I said, no, Fauci himself hasn't said it yet.
I knew he was going to because Fauci just goes along with whatever political current is convenient for him.
But at that time, he hadn't said it.
It took him about 12 hours to say it.
And now he's going along to Dr.
Fauci.
He says, come on, guys, it's common sense.
Just wear two masks.
A lot of folks are hearing now about double masking, wearing two masks or trying to get one of those N95 medical grade masks.
Do you believe that that's advisable and makes a difference?
You know, it likely does because, I mean, this is a physical covering to prevent droplets and virus to get in.
So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.
And that's the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95. Dr.
Fauci, If it's just common sense that we should all be wearing two masks all of a sudden, if that's just common sense and it's obviously going to provide more protection against the virus, why wouldn't you have told us that 10 months ago?
This has been going on.
For 10 months, we are closing in on a year of this epidemic.
If this is common sense, that we should just wear two masks, I guess pretty soon it's going to be three masks, pretty soon you're going to put a donut on your head and hop up and down on a pogo stick.
It's common sense.
If that's common sense...
What took so long?
Because Fauci says it, and he seems totally reasonable.
He goes, look, hey, thanks so much for having me on.
Look, guys, it's common sense, all right?
Just do it.
I'm a follow-the-science kind of guy.
I'm a science guy.
Forget about...
I have no political views.
Just do exactly what I say because it's science.
But he sounded just as reasonable.
He sounded just as scientific when, 10 months ago, he said it was common sense that the masks don't do nothing.
Right now people should not be, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet.
But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.
And often there are unintended consequences.
People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
There is no reason to wear a mask, says Dr.
Fauci, in a perfectly commonsensical way.
In fact, maybe it stops a droplet, okay, but there could be unintended consequences that actually make all this worse.
No reason to, it makes people feel better, but come on, guys, use your head, common sense.
Until Fauci says, use your head, it's common sense to wear two masks, or three masks.
There are four masks.
It's common sense.
This is really pathetic that anybody is listening to this guy anymore.
It's sad.
I'm not saying this in a condemnatory way.
I'm not even making fun of people.
I pity the people who still think that this guy has any credibility or that any of these technocrats have any credibility.
These doctor dictators.
It's a sad thing.
You've got to think for yourself.
Use your common sense.
Listen to Dr.
Fauci only in this regard.
Use your common sense.
And they're all now, they're all condemning the former president, the former administration.
They're all running as quickly as they can.
Oh, it's so good to be in an administration now that believes in science and lets these technocrats do whatever they want.
Fauci is not the only one.
Jerome Adams, who is the former Surgeon General under President Trump, He is coming out now and begging the liberal elite and the establishment and the media for forgiveness for committing the heinous crime of working as the Surgeon General in the Trump administration.
And that is really pitiful.
He seems like a nice enough guy.
He's an impressive guy in his own right.
Isn't he an admiral, a Surgeon General?
But it's pathetic what he's reduced himself to.
And the way in which he's begging forgiveness is even more pathetic.
Jerome Adams writes, quote, people so freely suggest they would have left the Trump administration, but hold the one woman in the room to a different standard.
If Dr.
Birx or I weren't there, many medical slash public health conversations would have had no input whatsoever from a woman or a person of color.
That's a heavy cross to bear.
Are you kidding me?
Let me ask you, I'm going to try to make this point in the least provocative way I can because I know we're living in a very politically correct culture.
What is the benefit to the study of a virus and the implementation of policies that will slow the spread of the virus?
What is the benefit in and of itself of having a woman or a person of color give that opinion?
What medical and scientific benefit is derived from Dr.
Birx's genitals or Jerome Adams's skin color that uniquely qualified him to give advice on the virus?
First of all, as far as I can tell, that entire team of genius technocrat virus experts of all colors and all sexes This guy, Jerome Adams, is a real guy.
Admiral, career of military service, rose to the highest level of his profession in the government.
Surgeon General of the United States.
And the best thing he can say to recommend himself is the color of his skin.
What a bizarre world we're living in that that's the case.
Why on earth does this have to be a race thing?
Because race in particular, but sex also, and all of these various identity groups, has become a national obsession.
It's used by the left in a very destructive way, and it was developed over the course of at least 100 years.
And this is actually part of my new book that's coming out pretty soon, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
Just a little plug in there.
You can pre-order it, but it's not going to be out for a few months.
This was developed intentionally.
By the left as a means of subverting the traditional standards and getting all Americans to hate one another and implementing their agenda.
But it's not just the left.
Conservatives buy into this identity politics stuff too.
They are so afraid of being called a sexist or a racist or a this phobe or a that phobe that they play into this sort of thing.
And I don't think it's respectful.
I think what Jerome Adams is saying here Is so debasing.
He's so degrading himself by stooping to this level.
By, first of all, by apologizing for serving as Surgeon General, and then under the Mean Orange Man, and then defending it on the race card, or defending Burks on the sex card, that's pathetic.
Unfortunately, though, conservatives play into this sometimes too, and it gets to one of the great national debates of the last six hours that seems trivial, but actually I think is important.
Which we'll get to in a second.
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We are having the latest stage of a debate that has raged for years and years at this point.
Over whether or not we should replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.
I know this debate seems trivial.
Most people say, who cares?
The left cares.
Because they've been pushing this for a long time.
The left cares a lot.
And maybe there's a reason for that.
You know, the left cares a lot about these things that seem kind of small.
Like, for instance, gendered bathrooms, right?
The idea that...
Men have to use the men's room and women have to use the women's room.
They say, I want some men to be able to use the women's room.
And what a lot of conservatives say is, oh, who cares?
Well, the left cares.
And their care about it is not frivolous.
They realize that in this symbol, this sort of, in itself, a relatively minor act, they can get a whole lot more of their political premises across.
That's what we're seeing here.
The proposal is to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman.
Harriet Tubman, the slave who escaped and got lots of other slaves to be freed as well, developed the Underground Railroad, supported John Brown, who was the great abolitionist, and so therefore we should put her on the $20 bill.
I'm against this idea.
I'm not against this idea because I don't like Harriet Tubman.
Harriet Tubman is a very admirable American.
I'm against this idea.
Because of the political message that the left is trying to push with it and that conservatives are acquiescing to.
I would say most conservatives I know are for replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman specifically.
And the argument usually goes something like this.
They say, well, Andrew Jackson's the founder of the Democratic Party and Harriet Tubman's a gun-toting Republican.
So yeah, fine by me, folks.
That's okay.
That's kind of what you hear in the general...
Kind of conservative blue checkmark sphere.
However, you'll notice that the people who are actually pushing this, not the people who are acquiescing to it, but the people who are pushing this are Democrats.
And the people who have resisted it are Republicans.
President Trump slowed this process down for four years.
It was supposed to happen four years ago.
He put the kibosh on it.
Now it seems to be speeding up again.
So why is that?
Why is it that the Democrats are pushing the gun-toting Republican and the Republican is defending the founder of the Democratic Party?
Well, what people will tell you, usually leftists, but I suppose some conservatives too will tell you, is the reason that anyone would oppose this idea is because you're a racist.
Because you don't want black people on money.
That's why, right?
And there it is.
They're There it is.
And I think a lot of the reason that Republicans are so quick to jump out and say, no, I'm for it.
I think it's great.
It's because they're doing the thing that Republicans always do, which is trying to prove to the left that we're not racists, which is a fool's errand because the left, first of all, the left harbors much more racial bigotry than the right does.
I think that's without question at this point.
They're instituting legal racial discrimination on the left.
But also, the left doesn't care.
They don't care that we're not racist or bigots or whatever.
They're just using it as a cudgel.
We're not, you know, bigoted, but that's sort of beside the point.
We're talking about this issue here.
I think what the move to put Tubman on the bill is for is largely to get rid of Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Jackson has been much maligned in this country over the past couple of decades.
And Republicans have gone along with it, you know, sort of cynically.
They want to prove they're not racists, I think.
But also because...
He's the founder of the Democratic Party.
Andrew Jackson is a great American.
He was a hero of New Orleans.
He was an important president.
He was a good American leader.
He had many flaws, as do we all.
And great men have great flaws.
But the attack on Andrew Jackson is a way to attack our traditions and our founding fathers and all the great men that we've revered.
They always go for the easy ones first.
They always ban Alex Jones from the internet before they ban Donald Trump.
Right?
They want to ban the guys that nobody's going to defend.
And then they ramp it up, and then they ramp it up, and then they ramp it up, and then they go for the sitting president of the United States.
And whole scores of mainstream conservatives.
It's the same thing with historical figures.
First they go for Robert E. Lee.
What are you, some kind of confederate?
What are you, some kind of racist?
And conservatives who understand what this game is about say, wait a second, it's not about Robert Lee.
They're going to go after Washington.
They're going to go after Jefferson.
Remember, Trump said that in the speech.
And the left says, no, that's not true.
And then the squishy Republicans say, no, that's not true.
Lee's terrible.
We've got to get rid of Lee.
And then two seconds later, they're toppling statues of Washington.
They're erasing his name from...
They're getting rid of Jefferson.
They're getting rid of, because there's no end to it.
So sure, we get this little victory.
Yeah, we topple the leader of the founder of the Democratic Party.
Okay.
They're coming for all of them, too.
And it's based on this idea, by the way, that is identity politics.
I think Harriet Tubman could deserve I mean, she's been honored in many ways in this country, but sure, put her on some denomination or something.
Put her on some money.
Make up a coin like they did for Sacagawea.
Give Harriet Tubman some money.
That's fine.
It wouldn't be enough because it's about replacing Andrew Jackson.
And I think Harriet Tubman is being used here because of her sex and even more so because of her race.
If this is really just about putting an abolitionist on money, why wouldn't we put John Brown on the money?
Why not replace Andrew Jackson with John Brown?
Harriet Tubman herself Greatly admired John Brown, said that John Brown in his death did more than a hundred men could living.
Harriet Tubman aided John Brown, not in the actual raid on Harper's Ferry, for which he was most famous, because she was either recovering from a sickness or whatever.
She couldn't be found at that point, but she did aid him quite a lot.
So why not John Brown?
Well, John Brown's a white guy.
And the people who are pushing this, they don't care about Harriet Tubman.
They just care about identity politics.
And we give in on this because we all like Harriet Tubman.
But we're giving them this premise when we replace a great American, Andrew Jackson, when we fail to defend more broadly our American tradition.
Don't do it.
Don't fall for it.
It's a trick.
I mean, I get why political correctness has succeeded.
I get why the left has been so successful on the cultural front for the last 50 years, certainly, and really for the last 100 years.
Because it's so subtle.
It's so hard to defend.
But I think we should.
Speaking of these sorts of putting people of various backgrounds on money, I should remind you, by the way, it's not as though we don't have women of color on money.
Sacagawea, I just mentioned, we had Pocahontas on money as early as 1865.
We had her on banknotes as early as 1865.
Not Elizabeth Warren, who would not be a woman of color, but the actual Pocahontas.
Well, speaking of Pocahontas and these tedious racial politics, Disney Plus is banning classic movies from young audiences, audiences under seven, namely the people who watch Disney movies.
Which movies?
Dumbo, Peter Pan, Swiss Family Robinson, and The Aristocats.
No longer available for young users on the Disney Plus streaming service.
Why, you ask?
Well, because of political incorrectness.
Because of racism.
Here's why your kid can't watch Peter Pan right now on Disney+.
The film portrays Native people in a stereotypical manner that reflects neither the diversity of Native peoples nor their authentic cultural traditions.
It shows them speaking in an unintelligible language and repeatedly refers to them as redskins, an offensive term.
According to white liberals, but not really deemed offensive by Indians themselves.
Peter and the Lost Boys engage in dancing, wearing headdresses, and other exaggerated tropes, a form of mockery and appropriation of Native people's culture and imagery.
All of that's gobbledygook and it's completely meaningless.
Culture requires appropriation.
If you want to become cultured, you need to appropriate different aspects of culture.
You need to behave in certain ways.
You need to speak in certain ways.
You need to develop and cultivate, cultivate, from the same word as culture, certain tastes.
I always tell you I try to be as unprovocative as I possibly can.
I'm Italian.
I am well aware of Italian stereotypes.
We like eating lasagna.
We talk with our hands, as you can see I'm doing right now.
We have certain stereotypes that go along with that culture, right?
If I strip away all of those stereotypes, I take away all the lasagna, all the pizza, all the bippity-boppity-boo, all the speaking with your hands, all that kind of stuff, all of the physical characteristics, because I don't want to be racist or culturally appropriative, I have just erased the culture.
I have ironically done the thing that the left pretends they don't want to do.
Because the left castigates conservatives when we appropriate culture, but they also castigate conservatives when we don't appropriate culture, when we erase culture.
It's a damned if you do, damned if you do scenario.
But we give in to this because we're so afraid of being called racist or whatever.
Don't do it.
Racism is bad because it's an offense to human dignity.
That's why we shouldn't do it.
Good.
Done.
Put that in a box.
Tuck it away.
You're good.
Don't worry about it anymore.
Don't worry what these cynics and idiots and nefarious political actors think about you.
Got to get rid of political correctness, folks.
That's what we're trying to do here at The Daily Wire.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
These racial identity politics are, they've been farcical for a long time, but they're becoming even more so.
And it would seem that there's no limit for it.
What has happened right now in politically correct culture, out of wokeism, whatever you want to call it, intersectionality, is that white has just become a synonym for bad.
Right?
Whiteness is an actual term that people use, is simply a synonym for bad thing, badness, evil.
That's why we have to eradicate whiteness.
We need to root out our own whiteness.
I mean, it's being used, really, if you want to be very specific about it, to refer to original sin, the fallen nature of man.
Which is now, formerly we understood that this was a universal aspect of our human nature.
Now it's being wielded by political leftists to suggest that only some people are guilty of this and they've caused all the problems in the world.
Part of this also is because of the We could go on for hours and hours about this, but because of the left's anthropology, because over the past, certainly 150 or so years, the left has indulged these theories that man is essentially good, but that society is what corrupts him.
And so, you know, you just need to perfect politics, you need to perfect especially education, and then once you do that, crime and disease and everything is going to go away.
That raises the question, of course, if individual men are good, how come society got bad?
But one way that the present day left is answering that is they're saying, well, people are good generally, but there's this one group of people that's bad, and they have this thing which is evil, and it's called whiteness, and so we've got to root that out.
And that lies at the heart of a lot of this intersectional kind of racial ID politics.
This is now being wielded.
By lazy teachers in Washington State as an excuse not to go back to work.
So it's being used for, like, hey, Johnny, why didn't you finish your homework?
Oh, you know, man, white supremacy and stuff.
I can't, I didn't do it.
Hey, how come you didn't wash the dishes?
Ah, man, you know, white supremacy.
Why else?
So the head of the Washington State Teachers Union claimed last week that reopening schools for in-person learning 10 months after two weeks to slow the spread Is not only an example of white supremacy, but furthermore, when objections were brought up, pointing out that students are really suffering from this, Las Vegas just had to reopen their schools because students are committing suicide at much higher rates.
Students' mental health is deteriorating.
Well, the head of the teachers' union said that concerns over students' mental health are a form of, quote, white privilege.
White privilege.
This comes after the Chicago Teachers Union also refused to go back to work, also for the same reason.
They said that reopening schools for in-person instruction is racist and sexist.
And the president of the POSCO Association of Educators in Washington State went on what our friend Jason Rance up there referred to as a series of unhinged remarks at this school board meeting.
The city of Chicago, moving then down to Illinois, the city of Chicago wants the teachers to go back to work.
Teachers Union doesn't want to do it.
The Chicago Public Schools now are issuing a warning.
They're saying, if you don't show up for work on Monday, you will be deemed absent without leave and will not be eligible for pay.
This is good.
They should do that.
This is actually what Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s when the air traffic controllers went on strike.
Public unions are not supposed to be able to strike because while a company might be able to shut down for a little bit, the government is not permitted to shut down.
So, For years and years, liberal politicians had indulged this sort of thing, the government worker unions striking in violation of the law.
Reagan didn't do it.
He came out and said, if you don't show up to work, you've violated your terms of contract and you'll be terminated.
It is for this reason...
That I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning, they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.
Classic Reagan.
I mean, this is one of his stellar moments.
And the union didn't really believe him because the entire liberal establishment was egging the air traffic controllers on.
So one of the reporters in that press conference, after Reagan finished speaking, he says, wait a second, wait a second.
What, you're going to fire them?
Can't there be some kind of lesser action?
And then Reagan, the actor, comes out and musters all of his Hollywood chops and just sort of feigns indignation.
Or maybe it was sincere indignation.
He says...
Lesser action?
What are you talking about?
What lesser action can there be?
The law is very explicit.
They are violating the law.
And, as I say, we call this to the attention of their leadership.
Whether this was conveyed to the membership before they voted to strike, I don't know.
But this is one of the reasons why there could be no further negotiation while this situation continues.
You can't sit and negotiate with a union that's in violation of the law.
And their oath.
And their oath.
What lesser action can there be?
It's just a great moment, and...
Incredibly now, you have the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, basically saying the same thing, a little softer than Ronald Reagan, but still coming out and saying, look, guys, you have to go back to work.
Even I, liberal left-wing Lori Lightfoot, am saying, it's been 10 months, you know, go back to work.
But no, because the left has given ideologues across the sexual and racial spectrum an excuse.
This blank check.
You can blame all of your problems on...
White supremacy or whatever.
You know, they come up with new terms all the time, but today that would appear to be the term.
And it's very harmful to believe that sort of thing just for your own personal growth, and it's absolute poison to society.
And our current president...
Joe Biden is letting these guys get away with it.
He was asked a question directly during a press conference about the teachers' unions refusing to go back to school.
And classic slippery Joe, he just completely dances around it.
Do you believe, sir, that teachers should return to schools now?
I believe we should make school classrooms safe and secure for the students and We need new ventilation systems in those schools.
We need testing for people coming in and out of the classes.
We need testing for teachers as well as students.
And we need the capacity, the capacity to know that, in fact, the circumstance in the school is safe and secure for everyone.
Cool, Joe.
Can you answer the question, though?
Because that had absolutely nothing to do with the question that was asked.
Joe Biden was asked, should teachers go back to school now?
He says, I think teachers should be safe.
And schools should be clean.
Uh-huh.
Hey, quick poll.
Here's a quick audience poll.
Do you think schools should be filthy and dangerous?
How many people?
Raise your hand.
Oh, nobody?
Okay.
Okay, right.
We all agree with that, Joe.
But you have to lead.
You need to give an answer here.
Should teachers go back to work 10 months after their two-week vacation?
Duh.
Of course they should be.
He can't say that because he's beholden to the teacher unions.
This reminds me, this tactic, Mike Bloomberg used this too, when Bloomberg wants to basically overturn the Second Amendment, and it's been his crusade for decades now.
But he knows that if you come out and say, billionaires against the Second Amendment, that doesn't look very good.
So Bloomberg started this campaign.
He called it mayors against, not billionaires against, he said mayors against illegal guns.
Mayors against illegal guns.
How many people do you know who are for illegal guns?
I guess some.
Probably some people are for them.
But generally speaking, people are for legal guns.
We want to make more guns legal.
I think certain guns that are currently illegal should be made legal.
But nobody's for illegal guns, really.
But he has to say that because it sounds more palatable.
That's Joe Biden.
Presidents for safe, clean classrooms.
Okay, sure.
But he won't give the answer.
By the way, there's a study out now.
I know the left loves studies.
I take them with a grain of salt, but I'll use them when they suit my purposes.
New study produced in the United Kingdom by the Office for National Statistics examined rates of death from COVID among teachers.
Shows that death rates among teachers are not higher than among the general population.
There is no specific threat to teachers' lives if they go back and go to work like the rest of us.
Remember, I thought teachers were supposed to do this very sacred, important duty of raising up the next generation, and they're some of the greatest heroes in the country.
And I'm not even really being facetious here.
I have a great respect for education.
I have a great respect for my teachers, specifically.
They've had some of the greatest impact on my life of anybody.
So I'm actually buying into that argument to a large degree.
They sure ain't acting like it, though, are they?
No, they're trying to get now, what, a year off of work with full pay?
And in some of these places, their pay is pretty good because of the negotiations of the unions buying off politicians like Joe Biden.
How corrupt?
But this is the kind of corruption we're just going to see for however long this charade lasts.
CNN ran a chyron yesterday that sums it all up.
They were playing clips of Jen Psaki.
She's the new press secretary.
And the chyron read, Psaki promises to share accurate info.
And then in parentheses, how refreshing.
That kind of fawning coverage for the state and for the regime would make Kim Jong-un blush.
I never want to hear again about the The tyrannical rule of, I don't know, Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin does not have as cozy a relationship to his state media as the American regime, the liberal regime has, to CNN and the Washington Post and the New York Times and NBC and ABC and CBS and all the rest of them.
With, I guess, sort of the exception of Fox News and the smaller networks, Newsmax and OAN. Newsmax and OAN are quite conservative.
But they're smaller.
They have a smaller reach.
And Fox News is somewhat conservative.
I don't know.
Sort of like not always very liberal.
I mean, in 2020, I don't know.
Obviously, the network repositioned itself a little bit.
But that is not the recipe for a serious self-governing republic.
It's a grift.
It's a grift all the way down.
You've got the media, obviously.
You've got big technology backing up the regime.
You've got education backing up the regime.
You've got all of these groups.
It's a grift.
I don't use that word grift too often because I think it's an overused word and it's used imprecisely right now, you know, a con or something like that.
But with Biden, it really is a grift.
I mean, Biden has sold his influence, just like the Clintons.
You saw this in all of Hunter Biden's scandals.
But even the other day, there was a big headline.
They said the presidential motorcade stopped in Washington, D.C. so that Hunter Biden could run out and pick up bagels for him and his dad.
And I saw this story, and it was some kind of kooky story.
Oh, wow, how funny.
They stopped the motorcades.
Everyday Joe is going out and getting bagels, right?
And the second I saw that headline, I said, this is a grift.
This is a grift.
There is obviously something shady about this.
I Google for two seconds, and I find out what it is.
Joe Biden coming back from mass, from which he should be excommunicated, but whatever.
He Guess he's not.
It's above my pay grade to make that determination.
So the motorcade stops for nine minutes so Hunter can go get bagels at a shop called Call Your Mother to pick up the takeout order.
Okay, go call your mother.
What's up with this bagel shop?
Oh, Joe Biden's coronavirus response director, Jeff Zients, is a major investor in that deli, according to The Atlantic, which first discovered this.
So Joe Biden I assume he can get a bagel at the White House, right?
I don't think the President of the United States, like you and I, if we go to church, we drive home, maybe we're going to pick up breakfast along the way, bring it home, eat it on the couch.
If you're the President of the United States, someone will bring you bagels.
You probably have many bagels in the White House.
But he stops there.
He stops the motorcade for nine minutes to get a lot of publicity to his friend's bagel shop so that it can become very popular and his friend can make more money.
This is the way politicians generally work, and it's the way that Joe Biden has worked especially.
That is Joe Biden's career, is back-slapping, you do me a favor, I'll do you a favor.
Hey, you better fire that prosecutor looking into my son, otherwise you're not getting a billion dollars.
Son of a bitch, he fired him.
Ha ha, back-slapping Joe.
That is what we are getting a whole lot more of.
This is...
A scary growth of state power, because it's not just the state and the kind of narrow sense of the government.
It's all these affiliated groups, the public-private partnerships.
Nothing like the President of the United States to plug your bagel shop to really show that coziness between the public and private sector.
But it's, as we've said, it's education, it's technology, it's the media, it's all these things.
They all form the blob.
They all form the liberal establishment.
And they are all seriously threatening our liberties, right?
Most notably because they're going to keep us locked down for months and months and months and months, according to the president.
But it's scarier than that.
There's a purpose to the growth of all this kind of state power, and I use that term state broadly to include tech and education and all those sorts of things, and the media notably.
The most disturbing story I've seen on CNN in quite some time occurred over just the past few days.
An 18-year-old guy, Jackson Reffitt.
Turned his dad in to the FBI because his dad went to the Stop the Steal rally at Capitol Hill.
Maybe he was part of the riot.
I'm not sure.
He was certainly around the area.
And so this kid calls the FBI to turn his dad in because his dad said, hey, if you turn me in, you're a traitor.
I guess the kid had been threatening to turn him in or suggested he might turn him in.
He says, if you turn me in, you're a traitor.
And you know what happens to traitors.
They get capital punishment.
So this kid calls the FBI, gets his father arrested, and then CNN has him on to talk about the wonderful story.
Now, maybe you're of two minds on this.
Maybe the kid, maybe it was a serious threat.
Maybe he had to turn his dad in.
Well, I don't know.
It doesn't sound like a serious threat.
Listen to Refit tell the story to Cuomo, who's lapping it up.
I know you love your family.
And I know this is hard.
So help people understand.
Why did you feel you had to let authorities know about what was being done to your father and what was happening in his own head?
I don't really know how to explain it.
It was...
It was just...
It just felt like the right thing, regardless of my emotions and how I felt and how much I loved my family and my dad.
I was worried.
I didn't think he would actually do anything bad, but him saying anything even remotely threatening to me and my sister and my family and government officials, it was just too much.
Now, listen here.
This is an important point that he's making.
Because presumably, the reason he called the FBI on his dad is because his dad threatened to kill him, right?
He says, you'd be a traitor.
You know what happens to traitors.
But the kid says right here, he doesn't think his dad would have done anything bad.
He doesn't actually think it was a threat.
But he turned his dad into the FBI anyway.
His dad's since been arrested.
Why did he do it?
Well, he makes clear it's because they have different political views.
It's been definitely over the past four years that it's grown and just snowballed into what my dad's become now.
And he's still my father, but he's changed a lot.
How so?
He's been more active on the internet and obviously the militia and the far-right extremists he's been involved with recently.
He's been a lot more I don't want to say aggressive, but more scared.
Would he talk to you about it?
No.
I actually never even knew he was going to D.C. until the day he left.
I'm sure it was because of my political views, but I'm not sure.
And there you have it.
I'm sure it's because of my political views.
Presumably, this kid is quite left-wing.
And then he posted a fundraiser because his mother kicked him out of the house for getting his father arrested.
And from the picture, you know, he's got very long hair.
He's wearing a pink hat.
He doesn't look like a right-wing conservative.
I'm not even really attacking this kid.
I mean, he's 18 years old.
I guess he's an adult.
And it's wrong to get your father arrested, generally speaking.
Especially for just being a Republican.
But I'm not attacking this kid.
My heart kind of breaks for this kid.
And certainly it breaks for the family.
The sisters and the mother.
The kid acknowledges.
He says, oh yeah, I've broken their hearts.
I've totally destroyed their lives.
Yeah, because I got my dad arrested.
But I felt like I had to do it.
I'd do it again.
And Chris Cuomo...
That disgusting man, lapping it up.
So happy.
Oh yeah, tell me more about how you got your dad arrested, because he's so right-wing.
Yeah, tell me.
Oh, you had to do it.
You had to do it.
I mention this whole story, not even to comment on the kid, or the dad, or even Chris Cuomo.
I bring up this story because it It has a lot to do with how the left operates.
It actually tells you a lot about the difference between the right and the left.
They begin with fundamentally different views of society, and their political agendas are oriented according to those premises.
So, for conservatives, the fundamental building block of society is the family.
It's not the individual.
It's the family.
That is the fundamental building block.
We are not born as free-floating atoms flying around in outer space.
Then we land and through our consent we choose to join a family.
It's not how it works.
We are born out of an act of love between our parents and at a higher level out of the act of love of God our creator who creates the world through an act of speech.
Let there be light and so on.
And we are born with duties, with obligations, with loyalties.
We are stewards of ourselves, our life, which is a gift from our parents as a proximate cause and from God ultimately.
And we are stewards of this creation.
That's where conservatives begin.
The left, and I include liberals in this, I include libertarians in this, the left libertarians certainly, Begin with this idea that the individual is the building block of society and we are born primarily to rights and entitlement and not loyalty and not duty and not obligation.
But I, darn it, I better get mine all oriented toward the ultimate liberation and that liberation must occur by overcoming the institutions of society.
Which now we use the term white supremacy, I guess, is the term du jour.
It's a faddish idea.
But you hear all the patriarchy is another one of these.
And ultimately, the family, which is that bedrock institution.
It's the smallest political institution you can have of multiple people in society organically.
That is why the left is always attempting to destroy the family, to destroy the family by any means necessary, by redefining the family, by taking power away from the family, by increasing the role of the state.
This is why even radical individualists sometimes become defenders of state power because if the fundamental unit of society is the individual, then the only way to do anything together is by amassing all those individuals together.
That is truly the theory of fascism, and it's in the true meaning of that word, where you bundle all the sticks together in the state, and the state is the highest good.
And, of course, the progressive left has this exalted view of the state, and even mainstream liberals have an exalted view.
Those are different scenarios, and you're going to see a whole lot more of this.
It's deeply disturbing that this is what it looks like.
We talk about it in the abstract a lot.
This is what it looks like on the granular level.
And this is going to be a process that goes on like the lockdowns according to Biden for months and months and months and months and even longer.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the teachers' unions across America resist school openings and Democrats defend them.
Plus, 100 Politico staffers are still whining that Politico printed a column by me two weeks ago.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
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