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Jan. 28, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

50:31

Ep. 688 - Let Them Eat Tendies

Internet trolls bankrupt hedge funds for the lolz, John Kerry tells fossil fuel workers to learn solar, and most Republicans support Trump for 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	A bunch of internet trolls are currently in the process of bankrupting a lot of hedge funds, a lot of Wall Streeters, and they're doing this through wild speculation, which is a huge problem, you see, because it's only hedge funds that are supposed to make money through wild speculation.
	When ordinary people try to make money through ordinary speculation in a way that threatens the financial establishment, Well, that's hateful.
	That's a threat to democracy.
	That is white supremacy.
	We will break down the math.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	Welcome back to the show.
	My favorite comment from yesterday comes from BizBoy5, who says, Someone needs to ask Joe if he's going to donate all his salary like Trump did.
	See him squirm.
	I think Joe's reaction, of course, would be...
	Come on, man.
	Come on, man.
	The big guy's got to get a little skim off the top.
	Come on, Hunter.
	What are you talking about, man?
	Yeah, so I don't think he would do that, but it would be a very hilarious point if that could occur.
	It will not, however.
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	Oh man, is Lightstream great.
	Great way.
	If you're not the big guy and you're not getting all that kind of free money coming out of the sky, go check out Lightstream.
	Speaking of financial services, this story about GameStop and the GameStop stock price going through the roof, this is the single funniest story that I have seen in years.
	And not only is it hilarious in and of itself, but it actually has deep political implications.
	And the political implications are simply delightful.
	I fear that because this involves finance and involves investing, this story might be a little too complicated for most people who aren't going to pay very close attention to it to understand just how funny it is.
	So I'll try to break it down very simply because I don't know anything about finance either, but I've at least read a fair bit about it.
	About this particular once-in-a-century type of event, once-in-a-lifetime type of event.
	A bunch of internet trolls on the Reddit board WallStreetBets decided...
	WallStreetBets, this is like an irreverent investing board.
	This is not like a sober, serious investing board.
	they just put up kind of crazy risky bet ideas.
	They noticed that hedge funds had taken a short position on GameStop.
	GameStop is this video game store, right?
	You know what GameStop is.
	It doesn't have a ton of growth potential.
	It seems like it's kind of heading out the door, kind of like Blockbuster, some of these old companies.
	So these internet trolls discover that Wall Street took out a big short position on this, specifically one hedge fund called Melvin And a short position is basically when you're betting against the stock.
	So if the stock price goes down, you make a lot of money.
	And if the stock price goes up, not only do you lose money, but you've got to start buying it up.
	So you've got to start putting more cash on the table to cover your losses, right?
	So GameStop, though, it was trading at like $6 not that long ago.
	It wasn't doing great.
	Hedge funds take out huge short positions on this.
	And these trolls at Wall Street Bets decide, you know, we're going to make this stock price on this kind of crappy company go through the roof.
	And maybe we'll make some money in the process.
	But more importantly, we are just going to mess with these hedge funds.
	These guys, we have no sympathy for them.
	We're going to completely mess with the financial establishment.
	And the craziest thing is...
	It's working.
	The board has, I think, two million members.
	And so I was asking myself when this was going on, why hasn't this been done before?
	And the reason is, you've never had this kind of The technology to do it, you know, to wrangle like two million of these kind of eccentric type of people, but you've also never had the memes.
	You've never had the humor.
	You've never had the specific political conditions of people wanting to flip the bird to the establishment, which they believe Has royally screwed them over in recent months.
	You've had individual aspects of that kind of thing, but you've never had it all coincide.
	This whole phenomenon is very internet-y.
	Okay, so it's very, the kind of lingo that people use, they'll be joking about how, you know, they're just going to grit their teeth and take some of the losses until their mom brings them chicken tendies into the basement, you know, and they're using all this kind of very internet-y lingo.
	They actually, they have, like, sea shanties that are being posted.
	They posted one last night about how we've got to, we've just got to hold on as the financial industry pushes back because we're all going to make a bunch of money and bankrupt Wall Street.
	There once was a stock that put to sea.
	The name of the stock was GME. The price blew up and the shorts dipped down.
	Hold my bully boys hold.
	Soon may the tendy man come to send a rocket into the sun.
	One day when the trading is done, we'll take our gains and go.
	She had not been two weeks from shore when Ryan Cohen joined the board.
	The captain called all hands and swore he'd take his shares and holds.
	Soon may the tending man come to send a rocket into the sun.
	One day when the training is done, we'll take our gains and go.
	It goes on.
	I encourage you to listen to the entire shanty.
	It goes on and on like this.
	So far, GameStop, not a great company, is up something like 2,500% this month.
	The stock has hit, I think, $460 a share.
	AMC Movies, this is another company that's basically headed for bankruptcy, right?
	Because no one's going to the movies anymore.
	AMC, they sent this one through the roof.
	They sent BlackBerry up, you know, the old cell phone company.
	That's up 250%.
	I think they were going to target Nokia as well, another cell phone company that nobody uses anymore.
	It's all just a huge meme However, the meme is becoming reality.
	So the internet joke is totally affecting reality, and it's going to put hedge funds out of business.
	Gabe Plotkin, who's the hedge fund trader at Melvin Capital, he was the one with the biggest short position.
	Yesterday, when this news broke, he had to raise almost $3 billion to bail out the fund.
	Squawk Box, which is, you know, the very serious sort of CNBC financial news show...
	They just couldn't make any sense of it.
	You know, we've mentioned social media.
	I couldn't help but...
	It's not obviously similar to some of this controversy surrounding Facebook and Twitter and everything else.
	But once again, what's one of the...
	One of the things that we're talking about is maybe misinformation and pump and dumps, and it's occurring on social media again.
	I'm wondering whether it's part of the same problem, the type of regulation that we finally need to consider.
	Like I said, we should always have a light touch with regulation, but You're seeing the way things can get started.
	Again, this is different.
	Maybe it's Reddit.
	Maybe it's not Facebook.
	But you're seeing the same situation.
	At this point, it's not about an election.
	It's not about an insurrection.
	But there are interesting things happening that seem to be spawned to some extent or at least blown out of proportion by social media again.
	That entire monologue was completely meaningless.
	That guy has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.
	First of all, some of the things he's saying are just factually not true.
	He's saying, this might be a pump and dump.
	It's not a pump and dump.
	Pump and dump is where you pick a stock, cynically, you...
	Bring up the price really, really high, and then you try to find a bigger idiot to sell it to, so you're going to totally mess that guy over, but you're going to make money at his expense.
	That's not what's going on here.
	What's going on here is these internet trolls found a giant short position from a giant institutional investor, and they said, nah, I don't think so.
	We're not going to let you guys do that.
	And so then this financial analyst on CNBC says, Well, I don't know.
	Maybe we need to regulate this.
	I mean, we want a light touch on regulation, but we can't let these guys do it.
	What he's really saying is...
	We don't want any regulation for the institutional investors.
	We don't want any regulation for Wall Street when they do this exact thing.
	But we do want regulation for ordinary people.
	We can't let individual investors do this kind of thing, then the whole game's going to be up.
	What is going on here is not primarily a financial phenomenon.
	It's a political phenomenon.
	And it is the same phenomenon that you've been seeing build up, coinciding, in part caused by, in part causing, The Trump phenomenon.
	It's ordinary people rebelling against an established elite that they don't have any faith in.
	A lot of times this word populism gets thrown around and I think it's often sort of a silly word because I don't think people are either populists or elitists.
	For instance, if we have a good elite, then I'm an elitist.
	If we can have a good, virtuous, smart, thoughtful elite, then great, works for me.
	Count me in the elitism category.
	But we don't have that.
	We have a bunch of corrupt, cynical idiots in our so-called elite.
	And so with that kind of an elite, I'm the opposite of an elitist.
	I'm the furthest thing from...
	I'm a total populist.
	If the elites that we are currently governed by are hipster Rasputin Jack Dorsey, a grown man with a nose ring, and the crooks of the Obama-Biden liberal dominant regime, and...
	The educational establishment, which is utterly upending liberal education, if those are the elites, I'm out, right?
	And that's what you're seeing here.
	And you're seeing all these unwashed peasants on these internet boards eating their chicken tendies.
	You're seeing them outfox the Wall Street elite.
	And they are not liking that very much.
	So now the financial establishment is pushing back.
	They're trying to shut these guys down.
	You know, in a way...
	The media understands this thing.
	So Chris Saliza at CNN posted this piece yesterday that people made fun of, but he actually had sort of a point.
	He said, how Trumpism explains the GameStop stock surge.
	And it is kind of a negative article, but if you take the preference out of it and you just look at the phenomenon, yes, it does sort of explain that.
	But then other media outlets do the same thing they do to all the Trump people.
	They say, well, the only way to explain what's going on right now is to say that the people doing this have awful, terrible intentions and they're evil and they're bigoted and they're neo-Nazis and they're white supremacists.
	And we got to shut the whole thing down.
	The elites are making the exact same mistake with regard to this kind of frivolous financial phenomenon that they have for the political phenomenon.
	And just like Trumpism, it isn't going anywhere.
	This is only more evidence that sure, you can vanquish Trump for now, but you're not getting rid of the forces that propelled Trump and that have supported him.
	This sort of a phenomenon is a time when, if you can picture Rich Uncle Pennybags and all these Wall Street fat cats, you know, sort of lighting up cigars and laughing about all their zillion dollars of profits, I think you can participate in that as well.
	You can light up your cigars, especially if you go to Thompson Cigar.
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	Mother Jones, the liberal outlet, I guess even further leftist outlet, is looking at the GameStop Wall Street bets phenomenon and following up on what the CNN types are saying.
	This isn't just Trumpism.
	This is neo-Nazism.
	This is white supremacy.
	One reporter from Mother Jones says, I can report from the Telegram channels that the Nazis appear to be trading GameStop and AMC as well.
	Now, why would someone say that?
	How do you know it's the Nazis trading this?
	To Mother Jones, everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is a Nazi.
	I think the reason to say that It's because it justifies shutting it all down.
	If it's Nazi, if it's ordinary internet trolls eating chicken tenders, you don't have a good argument to shut down trading on this stock because ordinary people are doing what institutional investors have done for a long time.
	But if it's Nazis, you can do whatever you want.
	A reporter for The Hill, a much more mainstream outlet, writes to the reporter from Mother Jones, what is your sense of the overlap between the Wall Street bets people and the Nazis on Telegram and elsewhere who stormed the Capitol and Ooh, good.
	Maybe we can use the FBI to go to their homes and shut them down and put them in prison and take away all their money.
	They can't do this, darn it.
	Discord, a social media platform, shut down the Wall Street Bets account for hate speech.
	For hate speech.
	Because they drove GameStop and AMC and BlackBerry, because they drove them through the roof to wreck some Wall Street investors for the lols, For the laughs.
	They booted them for hate speech.
	This is the same thing you see done to conservatives whenever they walk a little bit away from the liberal establishment.
	Whenever they question in any way the dominant liberal regime.
	What are we told?
	We're told that's hate speech.
	That's bigotry.
	It's dangerous.
	It's a threat.
	You're a Nazi or a white supremacist and we've got to censor you.
	NASDAQ Is considering halting trading to let the investors, quote, recalibrate.
	NASDAQ CEO Adina Friedman said that the exchange could halt trading activity for stocks in the event that they were targeted by these internet users.
	So you're going to let these giant bigwigs on Wall Street have a completely unfair advantage on investing when their investments get threatened.
	But, ordinary people, what happens when you're, with far less knowledge, by the way, what happens when you lose some money in the markets?
	Do they stop trading on NASDAQ for you?
	I don't think so.
	The White House, for their measure, are monitoring the situation.
	Jen Psaki, the press secretary, was asked about this, and she had a typically profound answer.
	Is the White House concerned about the stock market activity we're seeing around GameStop and now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary or whatever, the company that was Blockbuster?
	And have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to proceed?
	Well, I'm also happy to repeat that we have the first female Treasury Secretary and a team that's surrounding her and often questions about market.
	We'll send to them.
	Hold on.
	What?
	Hey, this is the strangest day in the markets that we've had in a hundred years.
	What's going on over there?
	Well, I'd like to remind you that the treasury secretary has breasts.
	Okay.
	Can you tell us anything about the markets?
	She identifies as a woman, and her pronouns are she and her.
	Yes, yes, Jen Psaki, I understand all that, but I need things that matter.
	I need information.
	I need information that matters, not just your ridiculous liberal identity politics claptrap.
	She goes on, she reminds us that we have a woman press secretary.
	Whoop-de-doo.
	Then she goes on and sort of tries to address the question.
	But our team is, of course, our economic team, including Secretary Yellen and others, are monitoring the situation.
	It's a good reminder, though, that the stock market isn't the only measure of the health of our economy.
	It doesn't reflect how working and middle-class families are doing.
	As you all know from covering this, we're in the midst of a K-shaped recovery.
	America's workers are struggling to make ends meet, which is why the president has introduced this urgent package to get immediate relief to families.
	So she's just not, she's not going to touch it.
	You can just tell this woman is not nearly as talented as her predecessors, as Kayleigh McEnany and as Sarah Sanders, certainly.
	You know, Sarah and Kayleigh are extraordinarily intelligent and even more so prepared.
	And this gal is just not, she isn't.
	Whenever they ask her questions, she usually says, well, I'll have to check.
	You know, I'll have to go talk to the secretary of such and such.
	And yeah, but I'll get back to you.
	It's...
	If she were a Republican, there's no way she would have gotten this job because the reporters would be tough on her and she wouldn't be able to stand up to it.
	But because she's a Democrat, the reporters don't care because they're all on the same team.
	They're all on the same team.
	And that is quite a lot of what the GameStop thing is about.
	People thinking that there is a game that is rigged against them.
	And so what do they want to do with this kind of corrupt establishment that they have no respect for?
	They want to just throw rocks at it and see what happens.
	And the establishment is striking back.
	When I say that the GameStop phenomenon...
	It's about a meme.
	You know, it's about the sea shanties and the chicken tendies and just laughing their way through this whole thing.
	There's actually, on the message board, this is a little offensive, I'll probably get my stream shut down when I even read what they say.
	The people on Wall Street Bets have a slogan on their message board, which is, we can remain retarded longer than they can remain solvent.
	This is something they've been writing on their message board.
	Meaning, we can behave irrationally longer than these guys can hold their short positions.
	And we're going to behave irrationally because we want to crack this liberal establishment.
	Because we believe this liberal establishment.
	It's not particularly rational and not serving our interests.
	And the establishment keeps proving it.
	Do you remember some years ago, maybe it was four or five years ago, there was a Twitter account.
	It was a troll account called Ricky Vaughn.
	And he posted very offensive things.
	And, you know, he was, you know, just, it was an anonymous account.
	But it was politically incorrect.
	It was outright offensive.
	Okay.
	Then the account went away.
	The guy who ran that account is facing 10 years in prison.
	He's facing 10 years in prison for posting memes.
	Specifically what he did is he posted these memes and it said, if you want to vote for Joe Biden, or I'm sorry, at that time I guess it would be Hillary Clinton.
	If you want to vote for Hillary Clinton, text your vote to 532, you know, whatever the number was.
	This is a joke.
	Of course, you can't text your vote.
	Vote by text.
	It's so much easier than showing up to the polls.
	We posted these memes.
	This is a variation on a very long-standing joke, which is, if you've ever worked on a political campaign, you know this joke.
	You'll say, hey, are you a Republican or a Democrat?
	And they'll say, Republican.
	You'll say, okay, good.
	Make sure you vote on Tuesday.
	Then someone else comes up.
	They say, when's election day?
	You say, are you a Republican or a Democrat?
	I say, I'm a Democrat.
	You say, good, make sure you vote on Wednesday.
	Right?
	Make sure you vote after the election.
	It's an old joke.
	Now this guy, for posting a variation on it, a meme, is going to prison.
	I'd like to remind you that in this past year, the Democrats changed all the election rules in key areas in Weeks and months before the election.
	Completely upended them.
	In some places, in contravention of state constitutions.
	So the peasants joke about elections.
	They get 10 years in prison.
	The crooked Democrats change all the election rules.
	Get rid of election integrity measures.
	They get to throw the people in prison.
	Does that seem fair to you?
	Does that seem like a fair system?
	Not to me.
	And it's so much bigger than GameStop.
	It's so much bigger than internet regulation.
	It's so much bigger than Trump.
	The left has been doing this for a very long time.
	You remember when some people who were in manufacturing, they worked in factories, they worked in middle America, when neoliberal elites shipped their jobs overseas, when they made the conscious decision to outsource their jobs, These guys would complain and say, hey, man, we voted for you and now you're taking away all of our jobs.
	And these elites would come in and say, no, no, you don't understand.
	GDP is going up a little higher.
	No, no, it's okay because GDP is going up and, you know, cheap Chinese goods or their prices are falling.
	So you can buy a TV for less money.
	So really you're doing well.
	And anyway, learn to code.
	Remember that?
	Learn to code.
	Then when a bunch of journalists lost their jobs, a lot of conservatives said to them, hey guys, go learn to code.
	And you know what happened?
	When the conservatives said that they got booted off of social media.
	You were not permitted to say that on social media.
	Totally different sets of rules.
	They've been pushing this argument.
	One set of rules for me, one set of rules for you, for years and years and years.
	And they're doing it again, right from the White House.
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	member.
	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	When Joe Biden was running for president, he said he would not.
	Get rid of fracking.
	He would not go after the oil industry, right?
	Because he was trying to get voters specifically in Pennsylvania.
	And then Trump said, yes, you will.
	You've promised that you would.
	And he said, no, I won't.
	That's a lie.
	Kamala Harris said, no, I won't.
	That's a lie.
	And now that's what he's doing.
	That's exactly what he's doing.
	He's killing all of these jobs in energy and oil and natural gas.
	So John Kerry, who I guess is the climate czar, I guess that's his, who knows what he's, he's the czar of yachting, I think.
	He's the Thurston Howell III, the czar of riding around on fancy boats.
	So Kerry comes out and is asked about this and he is the learn to code of 2021.
	Coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years.
	So what President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels.
	They were making them here at home.
	That is going to be a particular focus of the Build Back Better agenda.
	And I think that, unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative.
	No surprise, right?
	For the last few years, they've been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense.
	No, it's not.
	What's happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.
	And what the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is, there's a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new jobs in these sectors.
	Well, you see, they've just been fed a false narrative.
	They're currently being fed a false narrative, actually.
	And can't forget, I forgot to mention coal.
	Coal workers especially are being hit.
	Well, you see, look, the jobs, they've been going away for 20 years.
	Right, because you, you guys, in your crooked liberal establishment, were getting rid of those jobs.
	People weren't complaining about losing those jobs under Trump.
	Actually, that was a defining point of the campaign.
	Trump said, look, I'm trying to fight to keep your jobs, and Joe Biden is going to lose your jobs.
	And what did Joe Biden say?
	He said, no, I won't.
	Absolutely not.
	You're going to get to keep your jobs in coal and oil and natural gas.
	And then what's John Kerry coming at?
	No, of course you're going to lose your jobs because of the sun monster.
	The sun monster is going to destroy all of life on Earth six months ago by my calculations.
	And so that's why we've got to completely upend society and build back better.
	And you can't do a damn thing about it, peasants.
	Learn to solar.
	Learn, learn to solar.
	That's your answer?
	No, how about we just get rid of the whole position that Kerry has, this idea of the climate czar, get rid of all these silly ideologies, get rid of this apocalyptic fear of the sun monster, and allow people to keep their jobs.
	It's not inevitable.
	The left wants to pretend that their very narrow ideology is the inevitable path of politics, and none of us can say a word about it.
	The right side of history sort of thing.
	But it's not.
	We can fight back against it.
	That's in many ways what the Trump year has represented, and that's certainly what this GameStop thing represents.
	Notice John Kerry not wearing a mask.
	Could you imagine with his lock-jawed accent, if you were wearing a mask?
	Jen Psaki, press secretary, not wearing a mask.
	Joe Biden has been better about this because he's telling everyone to always wear a mask on federal property.
	So you'll see now a lot of photos of Joe Biden, even in the Oval Office, he'll be wearing a mask.
	He's a little smoother at this kind of retail politics.
	John Kerry's violating Joe Biden's mandate right now.
	Jen Psaki's violating Joe Biden's mandate.
	The reporters have to wear masks, and they are, at least while the cameras are running.
	But these guys don't have to.
	Because there's a different set of rules for them.
	NASDAQ is going to halt trading if they're at risk of losing money.
	Joe Biden's going to suspend his mandate for John Kerry.
	All of the main environmental activists, Kerry, sure, but Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio, these guys use so much more energy than the ordinary person.
	And what do they do?
	They scold ordinary people and say, do less, buy less, live less.
	I'll be on my yacht.
	Contact me when global warming is over.
	It's a different hierarchy here.
	It's a new sort of a caste system.
	You know, Twitter, oh my goodness gracious, if you say the wrong thing on Twitter now, if you question, oh my heaven forfend you raise any questions about the 2020 election, you'll be gone in two seconds.
	If you use the letter Q... Oh, buddy, you're out of there.
	If you are the sitting president of the United States in 2020 and they don't like the cut of your jib, they'll kick you off.
	They won't remove child porn, but they'll remove conservatives.
	That's according to one lawsuit just came out.
	A lawsuit going after Twitter saying they refused to take down widely shared pornographic images and videos of a young teenage boy who was a victim of sex trafficking because a Twitter investigation, quote, didn't find a violation of the company's policies.
	This lawsuit was filed yesterday by the victim and his mother in the Northern District of California.
	The boy, by the way, I think he's still 17 years old, and the video depicts him at 13 years old, engaged in sex acts, and Twitter refuses to take it down.
	Now, I guess they'll take it down now, probably, right?
	But now that the lawsuit's getting bad press, but they don't care.
	It's just not a priority for them.
	And one could spend many, many hours discussing the bizarre sexual ideologies of radical leftists.
	But it just doesn't matter.
	They've got bigger priorities, namely keeping down common sense.
	Perfectly mainstream conservatives have been kicked off of Twitter just as easily as the more eccentric types.
	The duly elected sitting president kicked off of Twitter.
	Because the establishment didn't like him.
	And this, I think, helps to explain why a new poll just came out from Politico and Morning Consult shows that a majority of Republican voters want Donald Trump to run for president again in 2024.
	I get it.
	I totally get it.
	I was having a discussion yesterday with a pal of mine over why Republicans stick with Trump.
	He's such a jerk.
	He messed things up in some places.
	He didn't fight hard enough in Georgia.
	He didn't do this.
	He didn't do that.
	Why is it that we go after all the other Republicans, but somehow we stick with Trump?
	Because Trump is our rock that we throw against the edifice of this crooked establishment.
	That's why.
	Why is Wall Street Bets sticking with GameStop and BlackBerry and AMC? Is it even because they think that GameStop is this deep value company?
	No.
	They just know that that's a great cudgel against this establishment.
	And Negative politics, the idea of fighting against somebody, that's not a dirty concept.
	That is often how politics works, perfectly natural.
	And it's especially true when the dominant regime is as corrupt as the regime that we're living under right now, which is unprecedented in American history.
	We always like to pretend, oh, everything's doing fine.
	GDP is doing well.
	It's all okay.
	You haven't been able to leave your home without a filthy piece of cloth covering your mouth in 10 months.
	Many of you have not been permitted to work and you haven't been given relief from the government, which has banned you from working.
	You've been given $600, maybe a little bit more with the second relief package.
	You have been kicked off of social media.
	You have been told not to go over to Christmas, not to have Thanksgiving, not to hug your loved ones, not to bury your dead by an elite that doesn't believe any of this, that flouts these rules left and right and changes the rules whenever it suits their political interests.
	And people are very, very angry about that.
	And they're very justified in that anger.
	And they want a cudgel.
	And Trump remains that cudgel.
	In some ways, Trump's political prospects, if he does want to run again, will depend less on the field in 2024 and more on the establishment.
	If the establishment remains this brazen, or gets more brazen, which it seems like that's the direction they're going in, It's going to be very difficult for another Republican to come up and claim the mantle.
	Even if that other Republican would be more capable in terms of legislation.
	Even if that other Republican would be more competent in terms of organization of political apparatus.
	Don't forget, Trump worked in business his whole life, right?
	The guy never ran a formal campaign until 2016.
	Doesn't matter.
	Doesn't matter.
	People are very, very angry.
	Is it any wonder?
	You know, in San Francisco on Tuesday, the San Francisco School Board voted to accept the recommendations of a renaming committee that voted to officially rename 44 public schools bearing the names of controversial historical figures.
	Do you know who these controversial historical figures were?
	Abraham Lincoln.
	George Washington.
	Teddy Roosevelt.
	Franklin Roosevelt.
	Franklin Roosevelt.
	A Democrat icon.
	His portrait is hanging in Biden's Oval Office.
	Herbert Hoover.
	Paul Revere.
	The regulars are out.
	The Revolutionary War hero, Paul Revere.
	Thomas Edison.
	If those schools have light bulbs, it's a little ungrateful for them to rename Edison School.
	Even Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is a far-left person, she's the woman who said that Amy Coney Barrett perhaps shouldn't be a judge because she's Catholic.
	Renaming her because they allege that she said or did something that could be sort of construed as racist five million years ago or something.
	No evidence that she said or did anything like that.
	This is my argument against the Tubman $20 bill.
	I won't rehash my arguments we've talked about the last couple of days.
	I don't think we should put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
	I don't have anything against Tubman, but I don't think the Tubman 20 is about Tubman either.
	I think it's about getting rid of Andrew Jackson and pushing leftist identity politics.
	And that is poison.
	It's poison because it will overthrow not only our understanding of the American regime and our appreciation for it, not only will it reframe American history and cast it in a negative light, to use the terms that the 1619 Project uses, But it will rip the country apart.
	If you don't have loyalty and respect for your country, you're not going to flourish.
	You're probably not going to stay together very long.
	And the country is fraying.
	It's ripping apart.
	And it's because of that crooked establishment.
	In the midst of all this, Joe Biden is pursuing a radical agenda.
	We were told he wouldn't.
	We were told he'd be moderate Joe.
	I don't think so.
	You know, the Democrats have been clamoring for court packing, adding new judges to the court.
	Well, some Democratic senators say, no, I don't really want to go for that.
	I'll vote against that.
	So Joe Biden just appointed a bipartisan commission to study reforms to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.
	So according to the Washington Post, it's an attempt to make a nod at both camps.
	There are the activists on the left who want him to pack the court, and there are the swing voters who aren't that interested in it.
	So he wants to nod to both of them and create this commission.
	If you make a commission to propose reforms, The commission has to propose reform.
	Coming back and saying we don't think you should change it at all is not really an option.
	If there's enough of a public outcry, maybe.
	But that's not why you form one of these committees.
	You do it to give yourself the institutional cover to make radical changes.
	And this is how the left wins, by the way, through incrementalism and gradualism.
	If...
	You have two sides being represented here.
	The side that wants radical change and the side that wants no change at all.
	When you create a commission to reconcile those two, you get a lot of change.
	There's no way that the conservatives can possibly win in that situation.
	Unless the public outcry is simply so great that the commission loses its mandate.
	But absent something like that, there's going to be this change and there's nothing we can do about that.
	A change to the Supreme Court Could be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of respect for our institutions in this country.
	I think that's why the court refused to hear any of the election challenges.
	They just thought, we need to preserve the institutional integrity.
	We don't want to weigh in on this election.
	When we weighed in on Bush v.
	Gore, which we didn't want to do even then, it undermined the court and we just can't do it.
	Joe Biden doesn't care.
	The country's a powder keg right now.
	Joe Biden's smoking a cigarette.
	About to flick that butt.
	And it's not just the court.
	It's a whole slew of executive orders.
	It's a whole heap of radical policies that are so disconnected from the will of voters and from what he promised on the campaign trail.
	Not on the campaign trail 10 years ago.
	This year, this past year, he's lying right to their face because he knows the people can't do anything about it.
	32 executive orders.
	Joe Biden has signed 32 executive orders in his first week.
	Now, you might be confused about this.
	If you were paying any attention to the presidential election, which really none of us were because it was a fake presidential election.
	Because no one was allowed to go outside, no one was allowed to hold rallies, it was all controlled by the media.
	And big tech censored conservatives and news that was damaging to Biden.
	However, if you were watching at all, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton's communications director, who now pretends to be a journalist at ABC. He was hosting Joe Biden.
	And he says, all right, Biden, how are you going to govern?
	You're going to get this done?
	You're going to get that done?
	You're going to ram through your agenda?
	Joe Biden says, hey, I need to build consensus.
	You cannot govern through executive order like a dictator.
	I have this strange notion.
	We are a democracy.
	Some of my Republican friends and some of my Democratic friends even occasionally say, well, if you can't get the votes by executive order, you're going to do something.
	Things you can't do by executive order unless you're a dictator.
	We're a democracy.
	We need consensus.
	You can't govern by executive order unless you're a dictator.
	In a democracy, you need consensus.
	So, if you take Joe at his word there, and then you observe that he signed 32 executive orders in his first week, Can you do that math?
	What is Joe saying about himself?
	He's saying he's a dictator.
	And he's saying we're not properly a democracy.
	And I don't want to use hyperbolic language here.
	When I say Joe's a dictator, I mean that in the purest sense of that word.
	He is just saying things and that is becoming the law of the land.
	He's dictating.
	So that is just what's happening in the first week.
	It's not like they've been passing laws in the Congress.
	And for a long time in this country, that's not really how you govern.
	You govern through the executive agencies and the bureaucracy and by EOs.
	And if you're governing that way, what Joe Biden is saying there to Stephanopoulos is we're not a democracy.
	And there have been many sophisticated political thinkers who say that at this point, the United States more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy.
	We've spoken on this show before about the cycle of regimes, kind of classical cycle of regimes.
	You have democracy, then that decays into an oligarchy, then that transforms into a monarchy, then the monarchy can be overthrown or reformed into a democracy, so on and so forth.
	I'm not saying this country is purely an oligarchy at this moment, but it certainly is somewhere between, at the very least, it's somewhere between a democracy and an oligarchy.
	And as you see the rise of Trumps, as you see the rise of Wall Street bets, the GameStop insurgency, as you see the political violence in the streets, I guess on both sides, much more violent on the left than on the right, but there has been some on the right too.
	What you are seeing, I'll use the language of the left, is this is the cry of the people that haven't been heard.
	Sure, I'm not saying this is a way to endorse it or in a prescriptive way.
	I'm using it in a descriptive way, the exact same way the left does.
	All of these aspects, you're seeing people who believe that democracy in this country is not really functioning, that we are more effectively an oligarchy.
	And there's one set of rules for Wall Street.
	There's one set of rules for John Kerry and Jen Psaki and Joe Biden and the Biden family overseas and in the United States.
	There's one set of rules for all those guys.
	And then there's another set of rules for ordinary people.
	Joe Biden in his first week decides to take on the very important issue of taxpayer-funded genital mutilation for U.S. soldiers.
	So he takes away Donald Trump's ban on men who think that they're women and women who think that they're men from serving in the armed forces, which had been common sense until 2015.
	So right before the end of Obama's administration, he decides, okay, I'm now going to permit men who think that they're women and women who think that they're men to serve in the armed forces.
	And somehow that's going to be really good for American military might, right?
	So he says that Trump comes in a year later and he says, nah, we're a year and a half later.
	Nah, we're going to get rid of that, okay?
	So he reverses that.
	Joe Biden has an important civil rights issue.
	We're going to let men who think that they're women serve in the military.
	And we're going to force taxpayers to pay for the surgery, cosmetic surgery, to make them look more like the sex that they are not, but that they imagine themselves to be.
	And you have ordinary people, I think, across the political spectrum, plenty of left-wingers too, looking at it and saying, what?
	That's what you're spending my money on?
	You're spending my money to force me to participate in this ancient heretical religion called Gnostic dualism that posits that a man can be a woman simply by believing himself so?
	What?
	That is so divorced from reality.
	You guys, you governing elites, are so divorced from reality that you are forcing us all to live in that fantasy as well.
	Getting worse, folks.
	The majority of Senate Democrats...
	We'll move past the executive orders.
	We'll get into legislation.
	The majority of Senate Democrats now want to make Washington, D.C. a state.
	39 members of the Democratic Conference.
	So not enough to get it done yet.
	This has been building up for some time.
	They want to do it.
	Tom Carper says this isn't a Republican or Democratic issue.
	It's an American issue because the lack of fair representation for D.C. residents is clearly inconsistent with the values on which this country was founded.
	That is so illiterate.
	I'm surprised that this man, Tom Carper, can walk around throughout the day without clunking himself in the head wherever he goes.
	It's so idiotic.
	The entire purpose of Washington, D.C. is to not be a state.
	If Washington, D.C. were supposed to be a state, then we would have had the federal seat in Maryland or Virginia.
	But we didn't.
	We actually took territory away from Maryland and Virginia so that we could give it to a federal district so that the federal government would not be within any particular state.
	That's the whole point of it.
	That's been the way D.C. has been organized since 1801.
	Not only is it not contrary to the values of the country, that is a natural product of the values of the country, which says this is a federation.
	This is the United States of America.
	No one state is going to dominate.
	When Carper, I can't tell if he's just being cynical and a liar or if he's really that stupid.
	I do know many people in Washington, D.C., and so I'm not going to discount the idea that he might just have no idea what he's talking about.
	When he says that this isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, in a way, he's sort of right.
	It is, as of now, a Democratic issue.
	But really what he's saying is Washington people, Washington elites, want more power.
	And that cuts across party lines very often.
	And the ordinary people with their ordinary constitution, they might say one thing, but we, the established elites, are saying something else, and we're going to play by a different set of rules, and we're going to make you bend the knee to us.
	And the rest of us are saying, man, how do I crack this establishment?
	How do I go to the sun, go to the moon, send this rocket ship up, whether it's on the internet, whether it's in the stock market, whether it's in politics?
	That process, only just beginning.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	See you tomorrow.
	See you tomorrow.
	The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
	Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
	Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky.
	Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.
	Audio mixer, Mike Coromina.
	Hair and makeup by Nika Geneva.
	And production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
	Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Wall Street gets stonked as Reddit games the GameStop stock.
	Plus, John Kerry is reporting for Climate Duty.
	That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.

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