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Feb. 1, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

49:56

Ep. 690 - The Constitutional Stress Test

Fauci flips on double-masking, Redditbros buy a billboard in Times Square to drive up the price of Gamestock, and the Lincoln Project gets caught with its pants down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	On this 322nd day of 15 days to slow the spread, we have a new proclamation from on high.
	Science has declared through science's chosen priest, the exalted Dr.
	Fauci, that although some people are currently wearing two masks at the same time, which looks very, very funny, and I would therefore encourage people to continue doing it, Dr.
	Fauci now says it's not going to do anything.
	There are many people who feel, you know, if you really want to have an extra little bit of protection, maybe I should put two masks on.
	There's nothing wrong with that, but there's no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference.
	And that's the reason why the CDC has not changed the recommendation.
	So, absolutely no evidence whatsoever that wearing two masks does anything at all.
	If you want to put the two masks on your face, you can put a donut on your head too, that's fine, but it's no evidence at all that that would in any way help stop the spread of the virus.
	This just days after Dr.
	Fauci says it is common sense that two masks would help to stop the spread of the virus.
	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. That was the common sense a few days ago.
	That is no longer the common sense.
	So proclaims Dr.
	Fauci, who you may recall about seven or eight months ago declared from on high, channeling the spirit of science through his exalted genius brain, that you absolutely should not wear any masks whatsoever.
	Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.
	You're sure of it, because people are listening really closely to this.
	Right now, people should not be walking.
	There's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
	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.
	Thus declares science.
	With geniuses like this making our public policy, is it any surprise that our country is coming apart at the seams?
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is the Michael Knowles Show.
	Welcome back to the show.
	My favorite comment from Friday is from Bryn Muir, who says, When Robinhood starts working for the corrupt elite, he ceases to be Robinhood.
	That is true.
	That's true of legendary characters.
	That is true of retail investment apps.
	We have an update on that, by the way, because you've now got two camps on the Robinhood issue, and it doesn't cut evenly across partisan lines.
	But either way, there is some lie being told here.
	Either way, the app is not being honest, which we will get to in a second.
	I know, you know, if those hedge funds manage to make it out of this Robin Hood fiasco without losing everything in their major short positions, they'll have really avoided a very close shave.
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	Justice Sam Alito, a really solid conservative justice.
	Sam Alito just gave a speech to the Federalist Society where he described the coronavirus lockdowns as a sort of constitutional stress test.
	This is causing lots of consternation and lots of people are very angry at Alito for saying this.
	He pointed out that this constitutional stress test is placing restrictions on liberty that were, quote, previously unimaginable.
	He says, we have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive, and prolonged.
	Absolutely true.
	This is true with regard to individual liberty.
	This is true with regard to many political liberties that we even have in common.
	You know, the right of churches to remain open.
	The head shop in California can stay open and sell dime bags because that's an essential service, but the churches cannot remain open.
	And you're seeing this.
	Different individual rights and group rights being taken away from people.
	I'm not letting the BLM people off the hook for their riots.
	Certainly not.
	I'm not letting the Capitol Hill rioters off the hook for storming into the Capitol with the bullhorns on or whatever.
	I'm not letting anybody off the hook for their bad behavior during all of this.
	However, just as a descriptive matter, is it any surprise that when you lock people up for months and months and months and months and you throw a whole lot of people out of work and you upend the economy in many ways and you, even beyond all of those questions, upend society by shutting down all even beyond all of those questions, upend society by shutting down all the kind of normal social interactions that we have, canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas, for goodness sakes, is it any wonder that the country starts to rip apart at
	Particularly when all of this is being done at the behest of technocratic idiots like Dr.
	Fauci.
	Who contradict themselves within several days of the guidance that they're giving.
	And who repeatedly ignore their own mandates.
	They have mandates for other people, but they don't follow the mandates themselves.
	Be it on the masking, be it on going out to dinner like Gavin Newsom at the Michelin rated restaurant, the French Laundry.
	Be it Chris Cuomo, who's hanging out in the Hamptons, pretending he's locked up in his home, not going outside.
	Any of these people.
	No, it's no wonder at all.
	And I think this is the broader context in which you have to understand what happened with Robinhood and GameStop.
	It's still happening.
	These Redditors are driving up the price of physical silver right now.
	Why?
	What is this all about?
	We know that this began because these people on Reddit saw a massive short position from a hedge fund in GameStop.
	GameStop in itself doesn't seem like a very valuable growth company, right?
	It's kind of going the way of Blockbuster and all these other companies.
	The Redditors know that, but they want to take advantage of this short position, cause a short squeeze, force the hedge fund guys to buy up the stock that through these kind of complex systems they had already sold, and then drive the price up, and then these Redditors can make some money.
	But the Redditors know they might lose all their money because this is so volatile and crazy.
	This is the furthest thing from a sure investment you could possibly make.
	But what they were saying is, we would rather lose money to send a message than keep dealing in this system.
	They were kicked off of Reddit.
	I believe they were kicked off of Reddit.
	They were certainly kicked off of Discord.
	They were kicked off of various other social media platforms.
	So what did they do?
	They bought a billboard in Times Square.
	They bought a digital billboard in Times Square, 54th and Broadway, that said, dollar sign GME, that's the stock name, the ticker name for GameStop, GME go burr, which is meme language, right?
	It's the sort of internet jokes that you see about like the money printer going burr, this idea that we're just going to print money and money and money, and you see BRRR is the way to describe that.
	Well, same thing with GME, because they're saying it's going to go all the way up to the moon.
	These guys know that they could lose money and they very likely will lose money.
	Who paid for that billboard?
	I don't know.
	But whoever paid for it, definitely going to lose some money.
	But they believe that this system is corrupt.
	And it's hard to conclude otherwise.
	What happened at Robinhood?
	I want to be as fair to Robinhood as I possibly can, and I want to be as fair to the financial services industry as we possibly can.
	Some of my best friends are hedge fund analysts.
	I say that, you know, I actually mean that.
	Some of my best friends have worked for hedge funds and still work for hedge funds.
	So I want to be fair to these guys.
	But I also don't want to just take this kind of old GOP line where the GOP just like shills for the financial services industry and says they can do no wrong.
	What happened here with Robinhood?
	The argument that is being made right now That Robinhood is positioning themselves to make.
	They published an op-ed in USA Today and they published a blog post on their own website.
	This from Vlad Tenev, the head of Robinhood.
	He says that the reason that all of this happened is because they want to put their customers first.
	They're not shilling for the hedge funds.
	It's because they needed to put up a lot of money as a mandated deposit on the investment.
	So this is in his own words.
	Our clearinghouse mandated deposit requirements related to stocks increased tenfold in a matter of days.
	So when you go and you buy stocks on Robinhood, Robinhood then has to go to the clearinghouse and put deposits down.
	So if the deposits go way, way, way up and the investments go way, way, way up, then their deposit requirements are going to go way up.
	They are what led us to put temporary buying restrictions in place on a small number of securities that the clearinghouses had raised their deposit requirements on.
	It was not because we wanted to stop people from buying these or any stocks.
	We built Robinhood to provide access to investing for all.
	Yeah, okay, fine.
	He says the same thing in a blog post.
	He says, yeah, we basically just didn't have the cash to cover up all of these securities.
	These investments.
	With our clearinghouse to put the deposits down to make sure everything was hunky-dory.
	Okay, fine.
	A plausible argument.
	However, this guy seemed to contradict himself when all of this was going down on CNBC. When he was asked explicitly, is this a liquidity problem?
	Is this because you don't have the cash to cover these investments?
	He said, absolutely not.
	It sounds to me, though, that you're suggesting that there was a liquidity problem inside the firm.
	And my question about that, then, raises all sorts of new questions about whether there's a systemic issue underneath the system and underneath the company unto itself.
	No, no.
	There was no liquidity problem.
	And to be clear, this was done preemptively.
	So we did this proactively.
	And thousands of other securities remain tradable on the platform.
	Customers that held these positions were able to sell them.
	And we're doing what we can to allow buying and to remove these restrictions in the morning.
	So maybe this guy just isn't making himself clear enough.
	Maybe I just don't understand the intricacies of this aspect of financial services.
	But it would seem to me this guy is contradicting himself.
	It would seem to me on the one hand he's saying, yeah, we didn't have the cash to cover all these positions, so we had to shut it down.
	And then on the other hand he's saying, no, we have plenty of cash.
	Cash isn't the problem.
	Everything's great at Robinhood.
	Either way, whatever side you come down on, I can see arguments for, I can sort of see arguments for defending Robinhood.
	I mostly see arguments for not defending them.
	Either way, We need an investigation.
	Absolutely, the baseline take that you need to have on this is we need to investigate what happened here because we're getting conflicting information, in this case, from the same guy.
	Talking about all of these securities.
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	At this point, all of these little seemingly disparate political incidents...
	I think cannot be separated from the feeling that people have across the parties actually in this country, certainly across the political spectrum, that there is a gap between the people and the elite, that society is being totally upended and there's nothing that we can do or say about it.
	And it's being upended for months and months and a year now, I guess, even though we were told it would be 15 days.
	And there's very little that we can do about it.
	And as the political system is fraying, anything that conservatives or Republicans do about it is called evil, illiberal, authoritarian, Nazi, fascist, whatever.
	And then when Democrats undertake the same sort of procedures, that is wonderful, that's perfectly acceptable, that's a return to normal.
	Even when the form of the politics looks the same, the key on this would be the executive orders.
	When Trump was signing executive orders, this was evil, this was awful, this was the worst thing in the world.
	And it is worth pointing out that when Obama was signing executive orders, Republicans were complaining about that too.
	Not just complaining about the substance of the executive orders, which I think is totally legit, but they were also complaining about the very fact of signing executive orders.
	Saying that governance through executive orders is I agree.
	I wish that our laws were being passed by the legislature, but the fact is they're not.
	Most of the laws that we actually live under in this country are being written by bureaucrats in the executive agencies.
	And given that political reality, the best way to attack them is through executive orders, right?
	That's the way you direct the executive agencies.
	But the approach to this on the left and the right, the reaction to it, has been totally different.
	You'll notice, listen to this CNN headline.
	Tell me if anything sounds strange to you.
	Biden has signed 42 executive actions since taking office.
	Here's what each one does.
	Now, one thing you might notice about this is it's not wailing and gnashing their teeth and saying, these are terrible executive actions and here's how awful they are, right?
	Which is what you would see if Trump had done it.
	But even just the language, executive action, that's kind of a new phrase.
	We haven't heard that very much in the past, but it's bubbling up a lot now under the Biden administration.
	You see, when Trump would sign these very same things, they were executive orders telling you what to do, forcing it down.
	That's order, awful, bad.
	When Biden does it, it's an executive action.
	Action.
	We want action.
	Like an action hero.
	Oh yeah, I like action.
	Because Joe Biden, we all know, is so full of energy, right?
	He's so with it.
	He's got a lot of action in him.
	Now Biden, to his credit, is not using this kind of rhetorical sleight of hand.
	He's coming out and saying, yeah, I'm signing a whole lot of executive orders and here's what they are.
	But today I'm about to sign two executive orders and basically the best way to describe them to undo the damage Trump has done.
	There's nothing new that we're doing here other than restoring the Affordable Care Act and restoring the Medicaid to the way it was before Trump became president, which, by fiat, he changed, made more inaccessible, more expensive, and more difficult for people to qualify for either of those two items, the Affordable Care Act or Medicaid.
	The second order I'm going to be signing also changes what the president has done, the president, what the former president has done, and that a memorandum reversed my predecessor's attack on women's health, excuse me, health access, and as we continue to battle on COVID-19.
	We could spend probably three hours just talking about that train wreck of an announcement because there was so much in there.
	An apparent Freudian slip where Biden referred to Trump as the president.
	What does that say?
	What does that tell you about Joe Biden's mental state and what he thinks about the state of the country?
	Then...
	He goes and says that we've got to help women's health and we're going to restore women's health.
	And that's just a politically correct euphemism that means abortion.
	So through executive fiat, he's going to restore some of the funding for abortion and some of the access to abortion that Trump took away.
	Meanwhile, framed right behind Biden is a photo of him meeting the Pope.
	How disgusting is this?
	That Joe Biden, a putative Catholic, sitting right next to a very intentionally placed photo of him meeting the Pope, talks about how he's going to restore the butcher of innocent babies around the country.
	So, one of the most genuinely wicked things I've seen a president do, so casually, in my lifetime, and earlier even, you know, even looking back through history.
	Then Biden...
	A tax Donald Trump for all of these changes he had made by fiat.
	He said, Trump did it by fiat, so I'm going to restore it.
	Biden is also restoring it by fiat.
	He's doing the same thing.
	They both were signing executive orders.
	It's just that even the procedure of Trump's I'm not, there's nothing new here.
	Nothing new here, folks.
	I'm just returning this all back to normal.
	You see, I had instituted, I, with Barack Obama, had instituted the liberal policy, which is obviously what we should have.
	That's normal in this country.
	And then Trump, this guy had the audacity to get elected and use his constitutionally prescribed executive orders.
	And, you know, the very thing that I'm using right now, he had the audacity to do that, and that's wrong and abnormal.
	And so now, when I switch that back, it's just a return to normalcy.
	Nothing new here.
	Of course, it is new.
	When you change the policy of the previous administration, that is something new.
	But he's saying no.
	What he's very subtly saying here is, liberal policy is permissible.
	Conservative policy is not legitimate.
	You used to hear people would talk about the alt-right.
	You know, look, we like conservatives, but the alt-right, they're the bad ones.
	And I guess for a while there was a distinction.
	The whole reason that there was the term alt-right is because some people were saying we are an alternative to more mainstream conservative thought.
	But now, very quickly, that term just painted over all right-wingers, and now it's disappeared entirely.
	You don't hear the term anymore because what the left is doing is delegitimizing the entire right.
	Even the duly elected center-right president, Donald Trump, who Joe Biden seems to think is still the president.
	Maybe a lot of people think he's still the president.
	Joe Biden said it.
	You come on, kick him off Twitter.
	Joe Biden is not just signing those executive orders.
	He also is signing an executive order to increase the number of refugees allowed into the United States by tens of thousands.
	And very often these refugees are not exactly refugees.
	This is just another mechanism to increase immigration beyond its already historically unprecedented levels.
	The movement into the United States over the last 60 years is the largest movement of human beings ever in the history of the world.
	And it's certainly the most open immigration policy that any nation on earth has right now.
	Most people, according to a Harvard-Harris poll not too long ago, want to reduce that level of immigration dramatically.
	But Biden, through executive action, through his executive orders, is going to increase that.
	And he's probably going to try to do it through legislation as well.
	All of which raises this question.
	And I think people who look at the Trump phenomenon, you know, how many people showed up to those rallies, how many people show up to defend this guy, who look at the Robin Hood phenomenon, how do all the people get together and beat this hedge fund at their short position?
	When they look at the popular opposition to so many of Biden's policies, why can't conservatives effectively counter Joe Biden and the left?
	Why?
	Why is it?
	I think we've got generally the people on our side, if not in raw numbers, then at least in terms of people who actually go out there and are active and vote and protest, and maybe not with mail-in ballots, which makes it easier, and maybe not with dead people voting in Philadelphia, or maybe not with election officials undermining the state constitution of Pennsylvania.
	Why can't we ever fight the left at all?
	The reason is because the left is more or less completely unified behind the progressive ideology.
	Some are more progressive, some are less progressive, but they're all basically on the same team.
	On the right, that is not true.
	On the right, conservatives, just as a matter of our natural disposition, we love to bicker with each other and pick fights and all divide all the time and say it'd be very nitpicky.
	But also, there are just genuine, massive differences of opinion and purpose on the right.
	And we're so divided, we cannot unite.
	And some of the more subversive elements on the right are Have just been caught with their pants down.
	So we might have to divide a little bit more before we can unite, but we'll get to that in one second.
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	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	The right has always been somewhat splintered.
	When William F. Buckley Jr.
	helped to form the, in many ways founded the post-war conservative movement, he united three groups, the traditional conservatives and the religious right.
	Also, they're not identical, but it's got sort of similar.
	The economic libertarians and the foreign policy hawks.
	Many of whom were Democrats.
	And those three groups didn't have a whole lot in common, but they all opposed the Soviet Union.
	The traditional and religious conservatives opposed the Soviet Union because of the state-mandated atheism.
	The economic libertarians opposed the Soviet Union because of the economic collectivism.
	And the foreign policy hawks opposed the Soviet Union because of their imperial ambitions.
	And they all came together.
	They had this common enemy.
	And it was actually quite effective.
	After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this movement stopped being totally coherent.
	The right didn't exactly know what it was fighting for.
	You had kind of the confusion of the 1990s and the 2000s.
	What are we about?
	What are we for?
	Some people on the right are these Wilsonian internationalists in foreign policy who want to adventure all around the globe and never saw a Middle Eastern country they didn't want to bomb.
	Some people are sort of isolationists.
	You think of the Ron Paul wing of the right.
	They don't want to go to war basically for any reason whatsoever.
	How on earth are those two groups on the same side?
	You had these kind of libertarians, and I actually don't even think that phrase is fair to libertarians.
	You had kind of a more libertine element of the right.
	P.J. O'Rourke joked about this group in a very famous essay called Republican Party Reptile.
	How to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and not spill your drink.
	I believe that was the title of the essay.
	Kind of joking about this actual phenomenon on the right.
	This kind of wolf of Wall Street, you know, go out there and...
	Totally violate the moral order, but we're all about making money and, you know, keeping the GDP going up or something, right?
	So you have that element, and then you have the traditional guys on the right who, you know, show up to Latin mass with their 13 children, and they're all buttoned up, and they're all very proper.
	How do those two elements work together?
	You have the neoconservatives who were kind of liberals who got mugged by reality.
	I think that was the word of Irving Kristol.
	Now you have the populists.
	You have all these different groups.
	The most loathsome among any group that even pretends to call itself right-wing is the Lincoln Project.
	You know the Lincoln Project.
	These guys were funded by left-wing billionaires, and their whole purpose is to go out and say, we're conservatives and Republicans, but we hate Trump, you know, and we also hate Senate Republicans, and we also hate House Republicans, and we only work for Democrats now.
	And they milk Democratic donors for money, and they get themselves fancy houses and pay off their debts.
	Well, they have just hit a snag.
	I wasn't going to bring up this story because it involves someone named John Weaver.
	John Weaver is a former McCain top strategist, a former top strategist to John Kasich.
	He's been around GOP politics for a while.
	He worked for Democrats for a little bit too, and now he's obviously working for Democrats again, but generally he's known as a sort of liberal Republican.
	I wasn't going to mention this story when it first broke, before it had really been thoroughly investigated in public, because I coincidentally happened to have briefly been on a campaign with John Weaver.
	I don't know him very well, and it's not like we were bosom buddies or anything, but I just felt, okay, you know, I'm not going to start taking snipes, even at former Republicans, until the story is really fleshed out.
	Now the story is fleshed out, and we've got to talk about it.
	Ryan Jerdusky broke this story.
	Great, very tough-minded, young conservative journalist and thinker and writer.
	Jerdusky breaks this story that John Weaver had been Messaging young boys and young men, but even people as young as like 14 years old, on the internet and sort of grooming them and things were becoming sexually explicit.
	And he was kind of dangling, poor choice of verb, he was offering kind of political opportunities in exchange for sexual activity.
	21 men have since come out and said that Weaver did this to them.
	Nobody wanted to cover this story.
	Jurdusky basically single-handedly forced this story on people.
	When he started to break the story, all the news outlets kind of played defense for Weaver.
	The Lincoln Project remained completely mum about it.
	They were just hoping the thing would blow over.
	John Weaver came out and made the Kevin Spacey defense.
	He came out and said, look, I'm a deeply closeted gay man, but now I'm a gay guy, and please don't look into any of the details about what just happened.
	The Lincoln Project styles itself, the principled conservatives, they are so much more principled than Donald Trump, who's unprincipled, and all the conservatives who support him, they're unprincipled, fascist, terrible, authoritarian, illiberal, whatever, you know.
	Nobody is less principled than the Lincoln Project.
	They finally have to acknowledge this when the New York Times picked up the story, after Ryan had done all of this good work.
	Finally, the New York Times picks it up, and now the Lincoln Project pretends to just learn about it.
	They put out this press release because they're so disloyal.
	They don't even have the integrity to defend their guy whose actions it would seem they knew about for quite some time.
	They don't even have that integrity.
	They say, it's deplorable what he did.
	It's awful.
	He's odious.
	He lived a double life.
	People knew.
	These rumors were going on about Weaver for a long time.
	They worked with him.
	They obviously knew about it.
	Steve Schmidt.
	Who's another ex-Republican, one of these guys whose whole job is to go on liberal outlets and talk about how terrible Republicans are.
	He made his whole career and all of his money off of Republicans.
	And then the minute that dried up, he goes and dances for the liberals.
	According to the New York Times, Steve Schmidt, co-founder of the group, said its leaders had learned last summer from social media posts that Mr.
	Weaver, who has a wife and two children, might be involved in relationships with men, but emphasized there was no awareness or insinuations of any type of inappropriate behavior when we became aware of the chatter at the time.
	Pause.
	Hold on for a second there.
	Steve Schmidt is saying that his close business partner, someone he's known for a very long time, John Weaver, who has a wife and two children, was cheating on his wife with dudes, But that was not inappropriate behavior.
	He's saying, look, yeah, we knew he was cheating on his wife with dudes all the time, but we didn't.
	We didn't think he was doing anything inappropriate.
	What does that say about your moral compass, Steve Schmidt?
	What does that say about your moral compass, Project Lincoln?
	Obviously, obviously, it's just a bunch of preening and nonsense.
	These are the sort of guys who say, country over party, another meaningless phrase.
	You join a political party because you think it'll help your country.
	To say there's some dichotomy between country and party, it doesn't make any sense.
	It's just sanctimony.
	It is a grift.
	I try not to use that word because it's overused in politics.
	This thing is a grift.
	Rick Wilson, one of the founders of the Lincoln Project, is as foul-mouthed and vicious as anybody, far more so.
	He makes Trump look like a Boy Scout.
	And he's got photos of himself waving the Confederate flag around.
	He's not holding it up.
	I think the Confederate flag is on his cooler while he's tossing back brewskis.
	Now he's going to say, oh, the illiberal, awful conservatives.
	They've abandoned their principles.
	These guys are essentially the least principled people in politics.
	It's funny because I didn't want to mention the Weaver story because it's very sad.
	It's very sad for his family.
	If it's already out there, I didn't feel I needed to pile on.
	In many ways, I feel I'm sort of defending Weaver against the rest of the Lincoln Project here.
	Because Weaver, whatever he did, Weaver has done some really, really, really shady things in politics.
	Some things that I learned out, actually, that he'd even done to groups that I was involved with after the fact.
	But these guys are no better.
	Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, these guys are no better.
	If we are going to have a united...
	The other reason I bring this up, not just to dunk on the Lincoln Project, which is a fun thing to do, not just to go after squishy Republicans who dance for liberals for a living, but it's because...
	The reason we can't fight the Biden administration right now is because we're not united.
	But the reason we're not united is because, in large part, of people like this.
	In part, it's because conservatives have this disposition to nitpick and be contrarian, but in part, it's because there are genuinely subversive elements that have absolutely nothing to do with the conservative movement broadly, which do not share our aims, which do not share our vision of the country, and they need to be excised from the conservative movement or from the American right.
	Very few people would consider the Lincoln Project to be right wing, at least among conservatives today.
	But among liberals, it is considered right wing.
	And some of us, I think, cotton to that sort of thing.
	We give quarter to it.
	We shouldn't.
	There's more infighting even among elected officials.
	Right now, Matt Gaetz, who is generally speaking quite a talented congressman.
	Matt Gaetz is going after Liz Cheney.
	Liz Cheney is the chairman of the Republican caucus.
	It's technically a leadership position in the House, but it's not a very important one.
	Liz Cheney, though, voted to impeach Donald Trump.
	Liz Cheney supports the impeachment of Trump very much at odds with her caucus, very much at odds with her party.
	And Matt Gaetz flew to Wyoming to attack Liz Cheney.
	Take a listen.
	I love Wyoming!
	I think if Liz Cheney had a rally with all of her supporters, they could likely meet inside one of the elevators in the Capitol and still have plenty of room for social distancing.
	I want to thank Representative Ocean Andrew.
	His first day as a state representative was yesterday, and he invited me to be here with all of you today.
	I'd say that's a pretty good start for the young man.
	I'll confess to you, this is my first time in Wyoming.
	I've been here for about an hour, and I feel like I already know the place a lot better than your misguided representative Liz Cheney.
	Pretty rough attacks.
	Now, I know that a lot of people in Washington, a lot of Washington Republicans, they say, come on, stop it.
	Stop the infighting.
	Stop the infighting.
	And this is where conservatives need to be very focused.
	We need to be very precise.
	Do we really want to kick out of the party Liz Cheney and people like Liz Cheney?
	People who maybe they're more like Bush Republicans.
	Maybe they're more like Cheney Republicans.
	I don't know.
	Maybe they're kind of more foreign policy hawks.
	I don't know.
	More liberal Republicans, generally speaking.
	Do we want to completely kick them out of the party?
	I think that would be crazy.
	You wouldn't have enough people.
	You'd lose more people than I think those of us on the conservative side would be willing to admit.
	Now, many people on the liberal side want to kick out people like Matt Gaetz, or they want to kick out people like Josh Hawley, or they want to kick out people like Ted Cruz, who don't even all agree with one another, but they all represent sort of less liberal elements.
	Do we want to kick those out?
	No, we can't do it.
	Do we want a new patriot party?
	That was another suggestion.
	Should there be a new third party?
	No.
	If we had a patriot party, you'd just give all the elections to Democrats.
	However, you can't let this kind of division just fester and fester and fester.
	So it would seem to me perfectly reasonable that Liz Cheney should not serve in Republican leadership.
	I don't think she should be kicked out of the House of Representatives.
	I don't think she should be kicked out of the Republican Party.
	But her position on a very, very important issue, the historic, unprecedented second impeachment of the ex-president, her position on that is...
	It's too serious.
	It's too at odds with the party.
	She cannot make a credible claim to be leading the party.
	So, she should return to be rank and file, and she should still have her rights to be exercised within the caucus and within the party.
	But conservatives are not going to effectively counter the Biden administration if we have leadership that opposes the conservative base.
	It's just not going to happen.
	Matt Gaetz talked about, in this same speech, he talked about something I'd never heard about before, but it's an interesting lens through which to view all of this stuff.
	The opposition to Fauci, the Robin Hood stuff, the infighting on the GOP. He called it prairie populism.
	My grandfather was a small town mayor in not too distant North Dakota.
	He passed before his time, but not before passing into legend.
	And he passed along a little wisdom to my dad.
	My old man calls it prairie populism.
	Do right by your people.
	Never sell out.
	Fight their dislikes.
	And never, never let the powerful run over the weak.
	Inspire people through courage and tell the truth.
	The truth is that the establishment in both political parties have teamed up to screw our fellow Americans for generations.
	I know that there are many Republicans and conservatives, they get shivers when they hear this word populism.
	This is happening.
	This is something that the American people are sensing.
	And they are sensing it for good reason.
	They are sensing that there is something very corrupt about this establishment.
	Are we really to believe that the educational establishment is totally corrupt, the administrative state is totally corrupt, Hollywood is totally corrupt, but the big tech totally corrupt, but the financial establishment is like totally fine, 100% totally fine?
	No.
	Foreign policy establishment, totally.
	No, of course not.
	There is something happening here.
	Senator Cruz talks about this as the Republican Party becoming the party of Pittsburgh and the Democrats becoming the party of Paris.
	It's a very nice political formulation of that.
	For most of my life, Republicans have appeared to be the party of plutocrats.
	Now they are the party of the people.
	Some people are not adjusting well to that.
	If the Republican Party is to have an effective governing coalition, an elective coalition moving forward, they have to be able to make that claim.
	It's why the left is so focused on burying these guys who dare question the establishment and who dare invoke the language of populism.
	Speaking of Republican division, President Trump's legal team has collapsed.
	So his lawyers have left.
	We are now being told that it is a mutual separation.
	The lawyers wanted to leave and Trump wanted them to leave too.
	This ahead of his impeachment trial.
	You know, earlier I said that Trump was impeached after he left office.
	That's not...
	Not quite right.
	I mean, that's not precise in that he was impeached while he was in office, but then he left because they impeached him days before he was leaving office.
	Now the trial is going to be of an ex-president.
	So is it an impeachment of a president or impeachment of an ex-president?
	It would seem, if the question of conviction is going to be after he's left office, it's the impeachment of an ex-president, which is constitutionally absurd.
	Chief Justice not presiding, so it's probably, by the letter of the Constitution, not even an actual impeachment trial.
	And this is why I'm not too worried about Trump losing his lawyers.
	You know, he'll get new lawyers.
	I think he already has new lawyers.
	It might upset whatever arguments the other guys were presenting.
	It might have been a missed opportunity.
	But the impeachment itself is a joke.
	You have on the record...
	Enough senators saying this is completely absurd, that barring some totally unforeseen event, Trump wouldn't be convicted.
	So who cares?
	They could go there, the Trump legal team could go there and read Dr.
	Seuss.
	Probably wouldn't change anybody's views.
	Certainly not enough people to convict the president.
	Even that, though, even the continued fighting over Donald Trump and the person of Donald Trump, I guess it has to do with these divisions that are going on within the GOP. We need to be very, very careful here in this moment.
	We need to avoid papering over differences that are substantive, right, and just pretending that we can all go along to get along and the only thing we can agree on is cutting taxes, but that's fine.
	We'll put the other stuff for another day.
	That has not served us very well for the past 20 years.
	Likewise, we can't be so vicious that we just divide ourselves so that we're each simply a party of one and we can't get together and do anything in politics.
	I remember, I forget who told me this, but he was describing the difference between Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
	This was years ago.
	He said, Bill Clinton is the kind of politician who could go into a room with a hundred people who disagree with him and each other And he could find the one point of agreement with each of them.
	Yeah, you like cigars, me too, huh?
	You know, maybe not that, maybe even more substantive than that.
	Rudy Giuliani is the opposite kind of politician.
	He could go into a room with a hundred people who agree with him and each other, and he would find the one area of disagreement.
	And I think this gets to the difference between the liberal and the conservative disposition.
	Because conservatives, especially in this culture, we're just by nature sort of contrarian and all we want to do is talk about our differences, the differences between the libertarians and the traditional conservatives and the neocons and the this and the that and the this and the that.
	We can't do anything together in politics if we refuse to ally with one another.
	Now, I think one key aspect to uniting conservatives moving forward is we've got to just stop focusing on, rather, we've got to stop focusing on the formal aspect of politics to the exclusion of the substance.
	And what I mean by that is, we've got to stop putting 100% of our focus on free speech, you know, bumper sticker or slogan, free speech, and we've got to start talking about what we want to say.
	We've got to stop talking about 100% of the time bumper sticker slogan, religious liberty.
	We've got to start talking about what we believe.
	There was an excellent, excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by Ryan T. Anderson, who was for a long time at Heritage Foundation.
	Now he's leading the Ethics and Public Policy Institute.
	It's called Religious Liberty Isn't Enough.
	Religious liberty isn't enough.
	Cultural conservatives also need to defend our views, which are scientifically sound and popular.
	I've talked about this before.
	I think conservatives, really only the last 15 or 20 years, have started to believe these shallow bumper sticker slogans, which in the past conservatives did not believe.
	So we believe that free speech in the American tradition means you can say absolutely whatever you want to say at all times and we should encourage all manner of speech.
	Conservatives have never believed that.
	First of all, it's never been true.
	There have always been broad swaths of speech that are not permitted, namely threats, sedition, fighting words, fraud, obscenity, all these sorts of things.
	Conservatives were never the ones saying we need to get rid of all...
	Barriers to speech.
	Because we know that standards must exist.
	This is a limited world.
	We have limited language.
	If we do have a certain speech regime, we're not going to have a different one.
	This is even clearer with religious liberty.
	Right now, in public schools in New York, in certain public schools, students are taught that boys and girls can choose their own gender.
	And there's no such thing as immutable biological sex.
	Four and five-year-olds are being taught this.
	The trouble with that, if you want to protect that view under, I guess, religious liberty, because that religion is called Gnostic dualism, if you want to protect that view, you are necessarily excluding the traditional view, the Christian view, the Jewish view, the Muslim view, that there is such a thing as men and women, and men can't become women, and women can't become men.
	You can't simultaneously protect both views.
	You have to choose one.
	If a little child in school is going to get in trouble for saying that Sally can't become Steve, then he can't practice Christianity openly, or Judaism, or Islam.
	We need to come out and defend certain views.
	That requires doing the work that we've basically been putting off since the end of the Cold War.
	And really, maybe you could say we've been putting off for much longer before that, which is figuring out what we stand for.
	From 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, we stood for opposing communism, right?
	And various sort of political ideas fell downstream from that.
	Afterward, what did we stand for?
	It just was totally unclear in the 90s and the 2000s.
	Now that Trump has really accelerated that debate because he does stand for certain things.
	He's willing to go out on a limb and say, no, we need less immigration.
	No, we need to protect American industry.
	It was really ripping up some of the old kind of orthodoxies that had ossified over time.
	What do we stand for?
	We can't just bury our heads in the sand.
	The country will continue to rip apart at the seams if we do that.
	We've got to answer that.
	That takes courage.
	Which is the prerequisite for all the other virtues.
	We have to acknowledge that there is such a thing as virtue.
	Can we do it?
	Or are we just destined to descend into more and more decadence?
	I guess we'll find out.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is the Michael Knowles Show.
	See you tomorrow.
	See you tomorrow.
	Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
	The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
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	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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	BLM gets a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
	And the Lincoln Project tries to distance itself from one of its founders.

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