The White House promises masks and “social distancing” in perpetuity, the “fact-checkers” admit we’re right while calling us liars, and Democrats allege voter machine fraud in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| We just need 15 days to slow the spread. | |
| Okay, we slowed the spread. | |
| We just need to flatten the curve. | |
| Okay, we flatten the curve. | |
| We just, just one more thing. | |
| We just need to find a cure. | |
| Oh, we found a cure? | |
| Okay, well, hey, come on, man. | |
| We just need 100 more days. | |
| Okay, oh, we're going to give them 100 more days? | |
| Actually, haha. | |
| What we're also trying to do is make our health and medical experts available to ensure people understand, and I'll reiterate it here today, it's not just a vaccine. | |
| It's obviously an incredible medical breakthrough, and we want every American to have one. | |
| But even after you're vaccinated, social distancing, wearing masks are going to be essential, and we'll need to continue communicating about that through health and medical experts. | |
| You thought we were going back to normal? | |
| You believe that 15 days, slow the spread, flatten that? | |
| You believe that, you sucker? | |
| It was all a big lie. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Welcome back to the show. | |
| My favorite comment from yesterday is from Justin Croteur, who says, quoting Joe Biden here, I'm not creating new laws, I'm fixing bad policies. | |
| I'm not stealing. | |
| I'm reallocating misused funds. | |
| Yes, that's very true. | |
| It's amazing how synonyms can sound so very different when you put them through political correctness. | |
| They all sort of change, but the meaning remains exactly the same. | |
| And political correctness obviously being pushed not just by these politicians, but by everybody. | |
| By the schools, by the media, by big tech in particular. | |
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| I feel like this has been a very Jen Psaki-heavy week. | |
| I think that's because Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, is not really talking to the press. | |
| Remember, Trump would have these impromptu press conferences. | |
| He'd be walking to his motorcade, he'd be walking to a helicopter, and he'd just stand there and just start chatting with the press. | |
| Joe Biden is not doing that because Joe Biden can't do that. | |
| And so he sends poor Jen Psaki out to have to answer these questions and push his administration's policies. | |
| Now, a lot of the time, as we've mentioned on this show... | |
| Saki seems unprepared. | |
| She just doesn't have answers for the things that she should have answers for. | |
| That's why she's got to circle back. | |
| But sometimes her poor performance is not because she doesn't know what she's doing. | |
| It's because she can't give the real answer. | |
| Because if she gives the real answer, it will not be particularly palatable to the American people. | |
| A good example of this is on the CDC. The CDC has said, reopen the schools, right? | |
| Jen Psaki is asked a question by the press. | |
| She gets one real press question a day. | |
| All the rest are, how come Joe Biden is so handsome and beautiful? | |
| But she gets one or two real press questions, one of which is, hey, the CDC says we can reopen. | |
| Why aren't we reopening the schools? | |
| Here is her non-answer. | |
| I saw the comments of Dr. | |
| Walensky, but I will say that even she would say, if she were standing here, she's welcome to come anytime, but she's in Atlanta, that they have not released their official guidance yet from the CDC on the vaccination of teachers and what would be needed to ensure the safe reopening of schools. | |
| And so we'd certainly defer to that, which we hope to see soon. | |
| The president himself has talked about the importance and the priority of vaccinating teachers. | |
| And in most states, they're in the 1B category of vaccination. | |
| But it is up to states to determine prioritization. | |
| Obviously, there's federal guidelines, and we work closely with governors, but we leave it to them. | |
| But certainly, ensuring teachers are vaccinated, prioritizing teachers is important to the president. | |
| Okay. | |
| I don't know if you followed all that gobbledygook that was meandering and all over the place, but the gist of it was... | |
| And remember, Joe Biden's administration, they're going to follow the science. | |
| They're going to put science first. | |
| A lot of executive orders to this effect. | |
| The gist of that was, we need to vaccinate teachers, and the states are going to run things, but the federal government has a role, and we need to vaccinate teachers. | |
| That is very important for when we reopen. | |
| And since Joe Biden's administration is following the science, that's got to be what the science says, right? | |
| Because the CDC, they haven't issued any sort of guidance yet. | |
| Do you think that's right, CDC director? | |
| I want to be very clear about schools, which is yes, ACIP has put teachers in the 1B category, the category of essential workers. | |
| But I also want to be clear that there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely. | |
| The teachers do not need to be vaccinated to reopen safely. | |
| The schools can reopen. | |
| That's what the data show. | |
| And Joe Biden, who says that data and science are going to guide his administration, would appear to be denying the science here. | |
| And poor Jen Psaki's got to go out there and sputter in front of the press because she knows she's in this tight position. | |
| They've backed themselves into a corner where they say we're going to let the technocrats and the lab coats run our entire government. | |
| The press says, okay, the lab coats say that you get to reopen the schools, but Joe Biden is beholden to the teacher unions. | |
| The unions generally are important to Biden, and Trump did a lot to chip away at Democrats' union support, but surely the teacher unions are a very important one. | |
| So Joe Biden, forgetting, forgetting about the science for a moment, prioritizing the political demands of these teacher unions. | |
| This would not be an example of Jen Psaki being bad at her job. | |
| This is actually an example of her being good at her job, but it shows the tough position that the Biden administration has put her in. | |
| Speaking of lies and a compliant press, they've outdone themselves. | |
| They have absolutely, the press and big technology and the democratic establishment have outdone themselves on lies in the past day. | |
| And actually, the Daily Wire has played a role in this. | |
| So actually, I guess this show sort of played a role in this because we talked about yesterday how... | |
| After AOC recalled the harrowing experience of how she was almost murdered during the Capitol riot and how Cruz was going to murder her and she was having PTSD and trauma. | |
| Turns out she wasn't even in the Capitol building during the riot. | |
| Just a complete stone-cold sociopath liar. | |
| Didn't happen at all. | |
| So... | |
| The Daily Wire tweets out this headline. | |
| Quote, this was a headline on our website. | |
| Report, AOC was not inside Capitol building during breach on January 6th. | |
| Snopes, a fact-checking website, just a left-wing opinion website, but they call it a fact-checking website. | |
| Snopes rated this headline mostly false. | |
| Now, when Snopes rates headlines... | |
| They'll say maybe it's true or it's false or it's mostly true or it's mostly false. | |
| They will say, here's what's true and here's what's false. | |
| So the original headline was, report AOC was not inside Capitol building during breach on January 6th. | |
| Snopes, here's what's true. | |
| Wait for it. | |
| Ocasio-Cortez wasn't in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate chambers are located. | |
| Okay? | |
| What... | |
| That sounds like that was just the whole headline. | |
| AOC was not inside the Capitol building during the breach. | |
| What's true? | |
| AOC wasn't in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate are. | |
| What's false? | |
| When the attack on the Capitol began, Ocasio-Cortez was in her congressional office, which is located in a network of office buildings immediately surrounding the Capitol, and her office building was one of the two buildings that were evacuated. | |
| Our headline didn't say anything about that. | |
| Our headline didn't mention that. | |
| Our tweet didn't mention that. | |
| What we said was AOC was not in the Capitol building. | |
| Then what they admitted was true is AOC was not in the Capitol building. | |
| But then what they said was false was that we didn't mention that AOC was in an office building down the street. | |
| Well, yeah, she could have been in any building down any street. | |
| She just wasn't in the main building that we were all talking about. | |
| I guess there's no way really to appeal this sort of thing. | |
| And what do I care? | |
| I don't have any respect for Snopes, nor do any Republicans that I know or any conservatives. | |
| But the problem is that big technology companies team up with companies like Snopes to determine whether or not your social media accounts are going to be deplatformed, whether they're going to be suppressed, whether they're spreading fake news, whether they'll be suspended. | |
| I mean, Snopes is just outright lying. | |
| They absolutely should just delete the whole article and fire whoever wrote it, but they're not going to do that because they're not a fact-checking website. | |
| They're a left-wing activist group, and that's why the left-wing activists at big tech companies are teaming up with them, because they can provide the facade of fairness. | |
| They say, well, we're just talking to the independent fact-checkers. | |
| We're just talking to the experts, the lab coats. | |
| We're just following the science. | |
| But then, of course, when objective reality runs up against one's political convenience, guess what's going to win out? | |
| You heard Jen Psaki. | |
| You heard the Biden administration. | |
| Forget about that science when it runs up against our politics. | |
| Snopes, forget about objective reality when it runs up against our politics. | |
| You want to hear the kicker? | |
| Oh my gosh. | |
| We have heard now for two months, no voter fraud in 2020, no election questions. | |
| If you dare question the election, you're an insurrectionist. | |
| You're a traitor, murderer, rapist. | |
| You need to be deplatformed. | |
| You need to be kicked off of the air. | |
| You need to be kicked out of polite society. | |
| So there is a hotly contested congressional race in New York right now. | |
| This is in New York's 22nd. | |
| It's a race between Anthony Brindisi and Claudia Tenney, who I actually happen to know from New York politics. | |
| So Claudia Tenney had the seat, then Brindisi wins it. | |
| Now it looks like Tenney's going to win it again because Brindisi, the Democrat, is just behind. | |
| The Democrats are alleging voter fraud. | |
| Specifically, they're alleging that the voting machines are throwing the election to the Republican and demanding a recount. | |
| These candidates are separated by 122 ballots. | |
| And the Democrats, while they are saying that any questioning of voter integrity, and in particular any questions of voting machines, you can have billion dollar lawsuits over voting machine fraud claims. | |
| While they're saying that those are completely illegitimate and you basically need to be banished to a far away island if you bring them up, they're making the same claims themselves. | |
| Because they always do this sort of thing. | |
| And it just reminds me of these squishy Republicans who follow the Democrats' line here where they say, oh no, we have to agree with the Democrats. | |
| We have to, we can't, we can't bring up the question of fraud. | |
| That's wrong. | |
| We can't do that. | |
| We got to play by the rules here. | |
| Democrats don't believe that. | |
| They're, they're making the same claims when it suits their purposes. | |
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| Republicans just don't get it. | |
| They think that Democrats are being on the level when they are opposing these claims of voter fraud. | |
| When we're talking about voter fraud in the 2020 election, some people are making these very, very extreme claims. | |
| Some might say outlandish claims about mass fraud in the machines and the CIA is involved and it's in Germany and it's, who knows, there's space aliens involved. | |
| There are extreme claims. | |
| But then there are the claims that are right before our very eyes, which are undeniable. | |
| Namely, Democratic election officials in Pennsylvania broke the law. | |
| They violated the state constitution, which clearly prohibits widespread mail-in ballots. | |
| How about the election poll watchers who were sent home illegitimately? | |
| Republican watchers sent home in Philadelphia. | |
| How about those videos we saw of... | |
| Election officials putting cardboard in the windows so that people who were outside couldn't see what was going on in the counts. | |
| How about the water main break, right? | |
| The pipe leaking that sent home the election officials in certain counties. | |
| All these little things, far more tangible. | |
| You can point to them. | |
| Meanwhile, Democrats are making more outlandish claims about voter fraud just in New York's 22nd congressional race. | |
| And there are two kinds of Republicans. | |
| There are Republicans who recognize that the Democrats are being cynical and they're being cheap and that we should be skeptical of their efforts to take away election integrity measures. | |
| Those are the good, tough, serious conservative Republicans. | |
| And then there are the squishes. | |
| There are the squishy Republicans. | |
| And I'm afraid to say Senator Ben Sasse, who has done some good things. | |
| I like actually many of the things he's done, but he falls into the latter category. | |
| He seems to prefer to scold Republicans than to deal seriously with these things. | |
| Ben Sasse just released a video because he's being censured by the Nebraska GOP. He's being censured because they think he's gone squishy, because in many cases he has gone squishy. | |
| On policy, you know, generally speaking he's been pretty good, but when it comes to these tough political fights, he's gone weak. | |
| And the Nebraska GOP is threatening to censure him again. | |
| Ben Sasse releases a defiant video pushing back against the censure. | |
| Guys, I want to talk to the State Central Committee. | |
| I've heard from many of you in the days since the attack on the Capitol, threatening another censure, for what I said about the President's lies after the election. | |
| As a friend and fellow Republican, I want to shoot straight. | |
| I'm not going to spend any time trying to talk you out of another censure. | |
| I listen to Nebraskans every day, and very few of them are as angry about life as some of the people on this committee. | |
| Not all of you, but a lot. | |
| Political addicts don't represent most Nebraska conservatives. | |
| When Melissa and I first ran back in 14... | |
| Pause it there. | |
| Pause it there. | |
| This is the first sign that something is a little off here. | |
| When Melissa and I first ran. | |
| Who's Melissa? | |
| I don't know who Melissa is, so I Google Melissa. | |
| Ben Sass. | |
| Melissa. | |
| Melissa is his wife. | |
| Melissa did not run for office. | |
| Melissa is not elected to any seat. | |
| This is something I've heard a lot of politicians do this. | |
| I've heard a lot of good politicians do this too, but it always grates on me. | |
| Because politicians, if they want to be kind of disingenuous, they'll pretend that it's not just them running for office. | |
| This isn't about me. | |
| This is about us. | |
| This is about when my family and I ran. | |
| No, I don't know who the family is. | |
| I'm not voting for the family. | |
| I'm voting for you. | |
| There's a job and there's only one spot and you're the guy who's running for it. | |
| So already to me, This is not, you know, totally worth writing the guy off. | |
| But already I'm hearing this kind of slick, disingenuous political language. | |
| So I'm already, I don't know if I like this. | |
| The other thing he says here is, look, the people who are obsessed with politics, they don't represent most of Nebraska. | |
| Sure, fair enough. | |
| I guess most people, right, we elect our representatives so that they can go be obsessed with politics instead of us. | |
| But we want you to be obsessed with politics. | |
| Your job is to be obsessed with politics. | |
| When I hear something like that, when I hear a politician making fun of people who are obsessed with politics, I think, oh, this guy doesn't like political fights. | |
| This guy's not in it for the fight. | |
| He wants to be nice. | |
| He wants to be liked. | |
| But when push comes to shove on the really, really tough fights, this guy doesn't sound like he's very interested. | |
| He goes on. | |
| Many of the same party officials who applauded in 14 cussed me out in 16 when I refused to vote for candidate Trump and again when I declined to serve on his re-election committee in 19 and again when I didn't vote for him in 20. | |
| Now, many of you are hacked off that I condemned his lies that led to a riot. | |
| Okay, here we go. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Did Trump lie? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Let's debate that question another day. | |
| We don't have time to deal with that right. | |
| Did he lie? | |
| Did he exaggerate? | |
| Did he have some evidence? | |
| Was he confusing certain things? | |
| Was he conflating? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Whatever. | |
| Whatever he said. | |
| Let's go with Ben Sass. | |
| Let's say it's a downright lie. | |
| Did it lead to a riot? | |
| Did Trump incite the riot? | |
| Well, he said, be peaceful. | |
| Don't be violent. | |
| He said that before, during, and after. | |
| So to me, this seems dishonest. | |
| And then we remember Ben Sasse was an ardent never-Trumper. | |
| So he's an elected Republican, but he didn't vote for the Republican nominee in 2016. | |
| He didn't vote for the Republican nominee even in 2020. | |
| Now I'm really skeptical of the guy. | |
| Because even people who were questioning Trump in 2016, they thought maybe he was going to be like a liberal Democrat or something like that. | |
| I kind of get it. | |
| I understand why. | |
| Because he had been sort of a Democrat for a lot of his life. | |
| But by 2020, you got to vote for the guy. | |
| He was an excellent, excellent president. | |
| You got to vote for the guy in 2020 if you're a Republican. | |
| So now I'm really skeptical. | |
| And then Ben Sasse... | |
| Sort of seals the deal. | |
| Personality cults aren't conservative. | |
| Conspiracy theories aren't conservative. | |
| Lying that an election has been stolen? | |
| It's not conservative. | |
| Acting like politics is a religion? | |
| It isn't conservative. | |
| I still believe every word from the campaign trail. | |
| What makes America great isn't power politics. | |
| It's what happens in the communities where you and I are raising our kids. | |
| What makes America great isn't power politics. | |
| But what makes politicians great is being willing to exercise power. | |
| What are you talking about? | |
| Of course, yeah, of course this guy doesn't like power politics. | |
| He's explained it. | |
| When push came to shove, when it was a little bit of a tough election, he didn't want to vote for the Republican nominee. | |
| Even after the guy proved himself to be a good Republican president, didn't want to vote for the guy. | |
| He keeps coming back to this motif. | |
| I don't like politics. | |
| I don't want to play politics. | |
| I don't want to get into tough power politics. | |
| Well, the opposite of power politics is weak politics, impotent politics. | |
| It's too bad. | |
| I think Ben Sasse holds many views that are pretty conservative that I would agree with. | |
| I like that. | |
| He's highly educated. | |
| I like that. | |
| But he keeps openly saying he doesn't want the fight. | |
| He doesn't want to be involved in the nitty-gritty fights. | |
| He doesn't like it. | |
| He doesn't think that's what makes America great. | |
| Democrats don't act like that. | |
| You ever notice that? | |
| Democrats, when they have some kooky congressmen, and by the way, they have the kookiest congressmen ever in the history of this country, many of whom are serving right now. | |
| They don't wring their hands and gnash their teeth and rend their garments and wail. | |
| They don't. | |
| They don't say, oh gosh, what do we do? | |
| We have to cast this person. | |
| They just kind of ignore it. | |
| And actually, in some cases, they promote these people to high positions. | |
| And they don't complain and say, I hate power politics. | |
| I hate, oh, I hate the fighting and everything. | |
| No, you know what they do? | |
| They wield political power. | |
| And it's extraordinarily effective. | |
| And it's actually responsible of them to do that. | |
| Because that's what their constituents elected them to do. | |
| It's good to hold all the right opinions. | |
| And Ben Sasse largely holds the right opinions. | |
| But he appears unwilling to do the other part of the job. | |
| Frankly, maybe the more important part of the job, which is exercise the power that you are given. | |
| He won't do that. | |
| One thing that people loved about Trump is they might disagree with him on this. | |
| They might disagree with him on that. | |
| They might not even like the way he talks. | |
| But the guy was willing to wield power. | |
| He was often prevented from doing that, especially after he lost the House. | |
| And even a lot of people in the Republican establishment would hamper his plans. | |
| But he was willing to do things. | |
| He was willing to follow up on his campaign promises, more so than any president of either party in my lifetime. | |
| But certainly more so than any Republican president in my lifetime. | |
| And he was not afraid to exercise power. | |
| He was not afraid of being called all sorts of names by Democrats. | |
| Really weak stuff. | |
| I mean, I don't care what the Nebraska GOP does, if they're going to censure him or not. | |
| I don't think that we should cast Ben Sasse even into the outer darkness. | |
| But I think the guy's got to come around and get tougher and be willing to exercise power. | |
| Because that's half the job and that's actually the important half of the job. | |
| Man, I'm really fired up. | |
| I feel like I've just got my blood flowing, testosterone pumping. | |
| I think I'm going to sprout a beard right here on set. | |
| That's how fired up I am. | |
| And if I do, I'm certainly going to check out Beard Supply. | |
| It's February. | |
| And besides Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day, and the occasional 29th day every four years, it's a pretty short month with not a lot to write home about. | |
| Except, of course, if you're familiar with February. | |
| That's right. | |
| Feb-u-hairy. | |
| Do I say Feb-ru-hairy or Feb-u-hairy? | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's very difficult to pronounce even that month. | |
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| And this month, what is it called? | |
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| You know, we were talking about President Trump and questions of voter fraud and tough political fights, like we're going to get into with this impeachment trial, which is not a real impeachment trial. | |
| It's a fake impeachment trial because it doesn't satisfy the constitutional requirements for impeachment trials. | |
| Namely, Donald Trump is not the president, so not an impeachment trial per the constitution, and he can't be removed from office because he's not in office, and the chief justice is not presiding as the constitution says he must. | |
| So there's some kind of trial going on in the Senate. | |
| This is really kicking off this week. | |
| All the preparation is going. | |
| The briefs have been filed this week and then we're going to move into next week. | |
| The House impeachment managers want President Trump to testify. | |
| And the big question for Republicans and conservatives is, is Trump going to play it safe and are his lawyers just going to focus on how this is an illegitimate trial and doesn't meet the constitutional standard and you're going to have to acquit him? | |
| Or is the guy going to go for broke? | |
| And is he going to present all the evidence he's got of all the irregularities and all the shady deals that happened in Philadelphia and Georgia, wherever? | |
| Is he going to make the case that is now so politically incorrect that there were lots of irregularities in the election? | |
| And I don't know, I'm of two minds on this. | |
| One, it's probably safer, you know, get acquitted in the trial, make sure there's no question that you could run again if he wanted to run again. | |
| And moreover, have this kind of fun historical, you know, fact, which is he's the only president to be impeached twice and he got acquitted twice. | |
| Or, Is he Trump? | |
| You know, does he put on the greatest show on earth? | |
| Does he make this a spectacular, a total blowout? | |
| Go out not with a whimper but with a bang. | |
| Seems like we're getting an answer on this. | |
| Trump was invited to testify by the House impeachment managers and his lawyers have turned it down. | |
| They've called this a public relations stunt. | |
| They're not going to do it. | |
| They don't want Trump to testify. | |
| So if Trump is not going to testify, it seems to me they're not going to make this a big show. | |
| You'll remember my podcast with Senator Cruz verdict began during the last impeachment, which was just one year ago. | |
| And so we'll be covering this pseudo impeachment trial again. | |
| But it doesn't appear that it's going to be a big deal. | |
| Whatever is going on behind the scenes, Trump is signaling. | |
| He's not going to make big claims. | |
| They'll let this thing fizzle. | |
| And then who knows, maybe he'll come back and run again. | |
| Now, this doesn't mean that Trump has lost his gumption. | |
| This doesn't mean that Trump has lost his fire and his fight, his vim and vigor. | |
| Turning from politics back to Trump's other career in show business, President Trump is a member of the Screen Actors Guild. | |
| He's the second president to be a member of the Screen Actors Guild. | |
| Ronald Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild, as you'll recall. | |
| Screen Actors Guild emerged with another show business union called AFTRA some years ago, probably eight or nine years ago. | |
| So now it's SAG-AFTRA. And it's not a great union. | |
| It's actually a really terrible union. | |
| Back in my truly wayward, irresponsible days, I was for just about three years a professional actor and worked these union contracts under SAG-AFTRA. And the union does nothing for its members. | |
| I mean, it's really bad. | |
| And a lot of friends of mine have been in SAG leadership, right? | |
| They've helped run the union. | |
| Or a lot of friends of mine have been in the union. | |
| And it doesn't matter their politics, obviously. | |
| 99% of my friends who are in the Screen Actors Guild are left-wingers. | |
| They hate the union, too. | |
| This is a kind of ubiquitous sentiment. | |
| So SAG, you know, even though they don't do anything for their members, they want to make all these big political stunts, so they say they're going to kick out Trump. | |
| Trump writes a letter to them. | |
| If you'll indulge me, I want to read it in large part, if not in full. | |
| Ms. | |
| Carteris, I guess she's the head of the union or something, I write to you today regarding the so-called disciplinary committee hearing aimed at revoking my union membership. | |
| Who cares? | |
| Not a question mark! | |
| Exclamation point. | |
| While I'm not familiar with your work, I'm very proud of my work on movies such as Home Alone 2, Zoolander, and Wall Street Money Never Sleeps, and television shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Saturday Night Live, and of course, one of the most successful shows in television history, The Apprentice. | |
| To name just a few! | |
| It just keeps getting better. | |
| I've also greatly helped the cable news television business, said to be a dying platform with not much time left until I got involved in politics, and created thousands of jobs at networks such as MSDNC and fake news CNN, among many others. | |
| Which brings me to your blatant attempt at free media attention to distract from your dismal record as a union. | |
| I'm going to pause there, because Trump always attacks his opponents in these kinds of terms, you know, low ratings, no one likes you. | |
| But I mentioned all that stuff about SAG earlier to just tell you from whatever sort of slight insidery perspective I've got, truly the union members, regardless of politics, hate SAG-AFTRA. | |
| It is a bad union that does not negotiate well for its members. | |
| I'm going to pause there. | |
| Your organization has done little for its members and nothing for me, besides collecting dues and promoting dangerous un-American policies and ideas, as evident by your massive unemployment rates and lawsuits from celebrated actors who even recorded a video asking, why isn't the union fighting for me? | |
| These, however, are policy failures. | |
| Your disciplinary failures are even more egregious. | |
| I no longer wish to be associated with your union. | |
| As such, this letter is to inform you of my immediate resignation from SAG-AFTRA. You have done nothing for me. | |
| Regards, Donald J. Trump. | |
| Regards, President Donald J. Trump. | |
| Now, I read this not just because it's absolutely hilarious and it makes me feel a little better to know that Trump still has his typical fight in him and he's still pushing back against these guys, but there's actually a bit of political significance to this too. | |
| Because we think of SAG as just this kind of show business thing, but it's a union, right? | |
| And unions are the traditional domain of the Democrats. | |
| We actually began the show talking about this. | |
| Right? | |
| Joe Biden trying to play very safe with the teachers union. | |
| He's willing to ignore the advice of his CDC. Follow the science. | |
| Joe Biden is going to ignore the scientific experts just to keep the teacher unions happy. | |
| But what Donald Trump did was chip away at the support for Democrats among the unions. | |
| He got these guys in all sorts of different unions to endorse him. | |
| And so while Trump is, you know, blowing off steam and he's yelling at this union hack, whatever, Carteris, from SAG, he's also sending a political message. | |
| And Republicans would do very well to hear that political message. | |
| Ted Cruz, who I'm about to go fly down and see because we're doing an event for Young America's Foundation. | |
| We're going to do Verdict Live. | |
| Cruz has said, the Republican Party, if it's going to have a future, needs to be the party of Pittsburgh, not the party of Paris. | |
| It's got to be the party of working men and women, not the party that the Democrats had kind of caricatured us as, of oligarchs and, you know, billionaires and rich uncle pennybags. | |
| Trump is signaling that In this letter, he's doing it in a hilarious way, but he's signaling in this letter, that is the future of the Democratic Party. | |
| These unions, these elites, have lied to the constituents that they take for granted. | |
| You should vote for us. | |
| What have you got to lose? | |
| Give us a chance. | |
| Don't get fooled again. | |
| You know, Ben is going to be digging into the Biden administration undercutting the CDC director. | |
| He's going to be analyzing the science, as we like to say, and also the Biden administration's executive actions, proposed executive actions, to forgive student loan debt. | |
| So go take a listen to that. | |
| And also... | |
| You can get 25% off a new Daily Wire membership with code RHF for just a very little while longer. | |
| Not much longer. | |
| Sign up today. | |
| Watch our first feature film, Run, Hide, Fight. | |
| Run, Hide, Fight was our launch into the entertainment world just a few weeks ago. | |
| The critics hate it because the movie is not politically correct. | |
| It's not super conservative, right? | |
| It's not like a propaganda movie, but it's just not... | |
| It doesn't check the woke boxes, so... | |
| Critics hate it and the audience loves it. | |
| The audience score is super high. | |
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| We'll be right back with the mailbag. | |
| First mailbag question is from Ben. | |
| Is there a balance between attaining as much virtue as one should before entering into romantic relationships versus dealing with scruples? | |
| How do you know when you are ready to date if you are struggling with vices? | |
| Okay, excellent, excellent question. | |
| For those who don't know what scruples are or scrupulosity, it's kind of the opposite problem that most people are facing right now. | |
| Most people are facing this problem where they refuse to even acknowledge the reality of sin and vice, and they just think we can do whatever we want. | |
| As long as we all consent, we can do whatever we want, right? | |
| We've been talking about that this week on the show. | |
| The opposite problem, though, But it's also a serious problem is when you think that everything is a sin, even things that aren't sins. | |
| And so you're just so afraid and you refuse to do anything and you're kind of, you're hampered and frozen by fear of sinning, even on perfectly ordinary things. | |
| And how this relates to dating. | |
| It is certainly the case that if you are mired in vice and you're a total degenerate and derelict, then you can really hurt people when you're dating or dating casually, or maybe I'm even using the word dating too broadly. | |
| But when you're, you know, chatting up the ladies, yeah, you can do that. | |
| And that's something you should keep in check and just don't be a jerk, you know, and just every time you are tempted to be a Don't be. | |
| And when you do behave like a jerk, feel bad about it and maybe go to confession. | |
| This is my sort of Catholic advice on it. | |
| But just try not to do it again. | |
| But don't live your life in fear. | |
| Goodness gracious, man. | |
| I mean, the process of... | |
| Adolescence and beginning to date and chatting up different girls coincides with a period in which you're going to be learning a lot of things. | |
| That process itself will educate you as well. | |
| So I would say go out there, chat up the chicks, and don't be a jerk. | |
| But do not be hampered by fear. | |
| If you wait until you attain perfect virtue to go date girls, you're probably going to be sitting at home a lot. | |
| And if something tells me that one of the vices you're alluding to is internet porn because every guy basically who writes into the show with questions like this refers to internet porn at some point or is alluding to internet porn because it's a ubiquitous vice and temptation. | |
| It relates directly to relationships and to romance and to marriage. | |
| Over 90% of guys, well over 90% of guys have looked at it at some point. | |
| Many of those people look at it very young. | |
| I think the average or median age at which point young boys are exposed to this is like 11 or something. | |
| So yeah, it's a big problem and it can mess you up. | |
| You know, the only way out is through, right? | |
| You're not going to get everything about your life in order personally, privately, in your own head, and then you're going to be able to go out and interact in society. | |
| It ain't going to happen, so you got to just work on all of these things at once. | |
| You can't freeze time. | |
| We've been talking about this a little bit on the show, too. | |
| We're living in time, so you've got to be able to do multiple things at once. | |
| Work on yourself and go out and build your life and build your career and build your hobbies, and you can't just only do one of those at a time. | |
| From Nick. | |
| Hey, Michael, long-time listener, first-time mailbag question. | |
| The groundhog saw his shadow. | |
| Should we ask Dr. | |
| Fauci if that means six more years to slow the spread? | |
| Yeah, I think we absolutely should. | |
| The problem is we won't be able to trust whatever answer he gives us. | |
| Because he could come out and say, well, the groundhog is very clear, and I've been very clear from the beginning. | |
| The groundhog is six more years to slow the spread. | |
| And then six years later, we're going to say, okay, we're good now. | |
| We can all go. | |
| I never said that. | |
| The science is very, very clear. | |
| You've all got to wear the masks and put the donut on your head and jump up and down on the pogo stick for another 25 years. | |
| That's the science. | |
| That's what's very, very important. | |
| Next question from Bryson. | |
| Congrats on the baby. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| My pastor recently preached a sermon online where he said that we should follow... | |
| Oh, this is why it was online. | |
| Because he said we should follow government lockdown rules because of Romans 13, verse 1. | |
| Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. | |
| What is your response when Christians use this verse to say that we must follow the insane China virus restrictions? | |
| P.S. I love your show. | |
| Thank you for all that you do at The Daily Wire. | |
| Do you, or does your pastor read that line from Romans to mean that the earliest Christians should have worshipped pagan idols? | |
| Christianity spread, in many ways, through the blood of the martyrs. | |
| And there were many, many Christian martyrs during the Roman Empire who refused to worship the Roman pagan gods and worship pagan idols. | |
| It was the law, but they broke the law, and they suffered the consequences for breaking the law, and then they went up to heaven because they were martyrs. | |
| Does your pastor really believe that Romans is saying that we shouldn't do this? | |
| I can't imagine he thinks that. | |
| You know, one thing I would recommend on this point, because we do have to give great deference to civil authority, and the civil authority is there for our own good, and the state is not an illegitimate thing, and it is there for our own good, and hierarchies of rule exist for our own good, and exist all the way up to the kingdom of heaven, sure. | |
| However, St. | |
| Thomas Aquinas recognizes that there are times to overthrow a tyrant's shackles, And so the question is, what is that time and how should we do it? | |
| One recommendation I would give you is to go take a listen to Spencer Clavin's Young Heretics podcast. | |
| He just did, the last couple of days, he's done a series on the right of revolution and the right of civil disobedience and the right to push back against these things. | |
| That would be some great extra listening. | |
| I'll give you a short answer here, in case you don't want to take the time to listen to Spencer's show, which is... | |
| We are now told that we need to pay obeisance to many rituals of the liberal liturgical calendar, right? | |
| We are told it is right and just to go out and perform the BLM rituals, which mostly involve burning down cities and stealing Gucci handbags. | |
| We're told it's perfectly fine to observe the Antifa rituals, but we can't go to church. | |
| Churches are closed. | |
| The big left-wing events are open, which have a liturgical and religious character. | |
| Those are open. | |
| The marijuana dispensaries in California, they've been open pretty much the whole time. | |
| They're essential, but churches are closed. | |
| It would seem to me, obviously not a perfect analogy, a very diminished version, but there are still some similarities, to any government that would force you to participate in one religion and disregard your own religion. | |
| And I can say this especially for Catholics. | |
| Catholics can't stream the mass forever. | |
| We have an incarnational faith. | |
| Right? | |
| And many Protestant denominations, particularly the older Protestant denominations, have this, recognize this kind of incarnational aspect. | |
| We need to go there. | |
| We need to do it. | |
| We can't be cut off from the sacraments forever. | |
| And if the civil authority is going to cut you off from the sacraments forever, then you've got to disobey that authority. | |
| From Rebecca, I'm having a hard time meeting someone I want to date who is Catholic. | |
| Oh, Catholic question. | |
| But I met a lot of great Protestants. | |
| Is it okay to date and marry a Protestant as a practicing Catholic? | |
| I'm worried about secretly always hoping they'll change as I know I'd pray for their conversion. | |
| I expected you to advise against this until I heard that when you married your wife, she was a Protestant. | |
| She was not a Protestant, but she was not a Catholic. | |
| What was your thought process? | |
| Well, yeah, I mean, since you bring up the example of my wife, I'll bring up my own example. | |
| For most of the time, I guess maybe not most of the time, but for the early time that my wife and I dated, because you remember we were high school sweethearts and split for college. | |
| We were both practically atheists. | |
| We didn't practice any religion other than the religion of secular liberalism. | |
| And then I had this kind of reversion on the road to Damascus. | |
| I had this kind of coming back to the church. | |
| And then that, of course, spurred all of these conversations with my wife and her own thinking about this matter. | |
| So I always say you either grow together or you grow apart. | |
| And that will be an aspect of this. | |
| From a very practical perspective, though, you should know that if you want to be married, as you are a Catholic, if you want to marry a Protestant, you need to marry him. | |
| And you want to remain Catholic. | |
| You need to marry him in the Catholic Church. | |
| You need to get a dispensation from your bishop. | |
| And you need to agree to raise the children Catholic. | |
| Now, if your potential husband would agree with this, Then he will be practicing a different religion than his entire family. | |
| But he also has to be the head of the household. | |
| He also has to lead his family. | |
| So it would seem to be much easier for him to just become Catholic. | |
| Or he could defer to you in spiritual matters, but he still would... | |
| You know, have to go to mass, right? | |
| I don't see any world in which you could raise a Catholic family, but daddy doesn't go to mass. | |
| So he'd have to go to mass and he'd have to basically give all the kind of spiritual leadership to you. | |
| Maybe you are okay with that. | |
| Maybe he's okay with that. | |
| Maybe you're not. | |
| I have seen this work where, you know, good big old Catholic family where the husband does not convert, but he basically just goes along with everything and doesn't have really strong religious views himself. | |
| You could do that. | |
| I think that's probably the exception rather than the rule. | |
| Probably better to confront this issue and grow together rather than grow apart. | |
| Because if you grow apart after the marriage and after the wedding, that's going to be a very bad situation. | |
| From Sarah. | |
| Hey Michael, love the show. | |
| What authority are you speaking under when you criticize the Pope? | |
| Wow, this is a very Catholic heavy mailbag. | |
| What authority are you speaking under when you criticize the Pope and the Vatican? | |
| Oh, I'm going to pause there one second. | |
| I don't know that I have criticized the Pope and the Vatican. | |
| I've raised many questions about things that the Pope has said, and I've raised many doubts about things that the Vatican has done. | |
| In that way, I guess it's critical. | |
| There's no video on the internet of like, Michael Knowles destroys the Holy Father with facts and logic. | |
| I don't do that. | |
| Shouldn't all Catholics be looking to the same authority? | |
| Are there specific sections of the catechism being violated? | |
| So I guess if your question is, How dare a Catholic criticize the Pope? | |
| I would encourage you to read Dante, who puts two Popes in hell, being sort of tormented for eternity. | |
| There's a long tradition of the Catholic laity and of priests and even sort of lower tier members of the episcopacy raising questions and doubts about things that the Pope has said and done. | |
| There are filial questions that we can ask them, fraternal corrections we can make of our fellow Catholics. | |
| Cardinal Burke famously in this pontificate has raised dubia, a series of doubts to the Pope that he wants the Pope to clarify because certain things the Pope has said seem very, very questionable if not outright heretical. | |
| And the Pope has refused to acknowledge those dubia from his eminence, Cardinal Burke. | |
| So perfectly in keeping with Catholic tradition to raise these sorts of questions. | |
| I'm not suggesting that, you know, we ought to have a revolution, you know, and overthrow the Pope, or, you know, have a recall election or something. | |
| I don't believe any of that stuff. | |
| Likewise, I think we're really perverting the Catholic view of things when we say that nobody can question the Pope. | |
| Some of the greatest writings in the history of the Church come from vigorous questions, even some criticism of the Episcopacy and even the Pope. | |
| From Tyler. | |
| Dear Michael Knowles, I noticed that you have talked about how McCarthyism is twisted in our history books. | |
| I was wondering if you could share what sources show what really happened. | |
| Well, you know, a great book on this is by William F. Buckley Jr., who is credited with founding the modern conservative movement. | |
| Bill Buckley wrote his first book, God and Man at Yale, but his second book was called McCarthy and His Enemies. | |
| In that book, he said, and I'm paraphrasing but only lightly, that McCarthyism is a political movement around which men of goodwill, all men and women of goodwill, can surround. | |
| Around which they can surround? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I'm messing up the words a little bit. | |
| But, you know, a movement that they all can embrace. | |
| What did McCarthy do? | |
| McCarthy said there are communists working in the government, high-profile communists in high-profile positions, and we need to root them out because they're subversives who are working, in some cases explicitly, at the behest of an enemy state. | |
| That was true. | |
| That was 100% true. | |
| It was proven true in the Alger Hiss trial, and many other cases as well. | |
| You saw prosecutions under the Smith Act during the 1950s of communists subverting the country. | |
| But Alger Hiss was a high-ranking official. | |
| He helped found the United Nations, and he was an active underground communist. | |
| Another great book detailing that case was Witness by Whitaker Chambers. | |
| So McCarthy was right. | |
| He was twisted. | |
| He's been certainly defamed by history. | |
| He's a flawed guy in many flaws. | |
| Maybe he hurt the cause more than he helped it. | |
| Some people make that argument. | |
| But to say the cause was unjust is absolutely preposterous. | |
| The left has never forgiven him for being right about what they were doing, just like they never forgave Richard Nixon for being right about Alger Hiss, actually, because Nixon was one of the people who brought Hiss down. | |
| The real history, much more interesting than the revision that we get, the bubblegum history that we get from propagandists on the left, All right, that's our show. | |
| Check us out in Miami. | |
| I'm heading down there now. | |
| We will have a YAF Freedom Conference, Verdict Live. | |
| In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| See you next time. | |
| If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. | |
| And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. | |
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| 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, 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. | |
| Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show. | |
| You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood. | |
| But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started. |