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March 1, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:43
Ep. 710 - It’s Still Trump’s Party

Former president Trump dominates CPAC, Democrats appear to turn on NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo as another woman accuses him of sexual harassment, and a famous priest doesn’t respect God’s preferred pronouns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump addressed CPAC over the weekend.
This was his first public appearance since leaving the White House.
And President Trump took on rumors head-on that he was going to start a new political party to challenge the Republican Party.
Trump said that was a bunch of fake news.
He doesn't need to start a new party because he already runs one of the major parties in this country.
We will do what we've done right from the beginning, which is to win.
We're not starting new parties.
You know, they kept saying, he's going to start a brand new party.
We have the Republican Party.
It's going to unite and be stronger than ever before.
I am not starting a new party.
That was fake news.
Fake news.
No.
Wouldn't that be brilliant?
Let's start a new party and let's divide our vote so that you can never win.
No, we're not interested in that.
No, they're not interested in that whatsoever in the Trump world because, as the CPAC straw poll shows, Trump is still dominating the Republican Party.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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I'm so glad that they are doing that.
There is actually an update to the Woka-Cola story.
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Some might call it cancel culture.
I call it absolutely A-OK in my book.
You can listen to that just a little bit later in the show.
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President Trump is back.
He is demonstrating in his words and in public opinion polls that the GOP is still the Trump party and CNN is ecstatically furious.
This CPAC, with Donald Trump closing it out, is a liar-palooza.
It's a liar-palooza, zing!
Yeah, take that, Trump.
Yeah, you're a big meanie.
Yeah, it's a liar-fest.
This was the best day that Jim Acosta has had in months.
Jim Acosta has gone to his bed every single night since Trump conceded the election, and he's written, Dear Diary, It's another sad day here in the Acosta household.
I miss him.
I have nothing to talk about.
No one wants to put me on television anymore.
No one gives me headlines because my man is gone.
Well, Trump is back and the media are furious.
So, Trump's CPAC speech was generally more measured than some people said it would be.
Some people said he was going to announce a new political party.
Some people said he was going to declare himself the nominee for 2024.
Some people said he was going to do all this.
It was actually much more measured.
He reined himself in a little bit, but he still talked about the important issues, starting, most importantly, with election integrity.
Another one of the most urgent issues facing the Republican Party is that of ensuring fair, honest, and secure elections.
Such a disgrace.
We must pass comprehensive election reforms and we must do it now.
The Democrats used the China virus as an excuse to change all of the election rules without the approval of their state legislatures, making it therefore illegal.
It had a massive impact on the election.
Again, you have to go to the legislatures to get these approvals.
This alone would have easily changed the outcome of the election at levels that you wouldn't have even believed.
Now, people are going to be very upset.
Trump is pushing a lie about the election.
Show me the lie.
Where's the lie?
The Democratic election officials exploited the China virus to upend the election systems in the weeks and months before the election, often without the approval of state legislatures, in some cases in direct violation of the state constitutions.
So, show me the lie.
I don't see a lie there.
But then notice what Trump says.
He doesn't say, and that's why we actually won the election and Biden 100% actually lost.
He didn't say that.
He said it had a massive impact on the election, which is true.
You can at least say, even if you think that the whole rigging of the election systems was illegitimate and terrible...
You still can't say with 100% certainty Trump won the election, you know, and the votes that were fraudulent were enough to sway the election.
No one actually can say that.
People might have a hunch, they might have an intuition, but you can't.
But you certainly can say that...
These election rules were upended in the days and months right before the election, and this did have an impact on the election.
Of course you can say that.
So Trump holds himself there.
To me, what this means is Trump does not want to go out with a, you know, huge bang.
He doesn't want to go out, you know, with fireworks.
He wants to remain in the game.
And he's willing to play in a certain sense by the rules so that he can have a big influence in 2022 and who knows, maybe 2024.
Trump also, we'll get to 2024 in a second, in terms of 2022, he...
Named names.
He went after the squishy Republicans who he feels are not standing up for what the Republican base wants.
He didn't back off that.
This is another reason.
He's not just playing nice and trying to have a nice legacy here.
He is calling out the people that he wants to boot out of office as soon as he can.
Now more than ever is the time for tough, strong and energetic Republican leaders who have spines of steel.
We need strong leadership.
Top establishment Republicans in Washington should be spending their energy in opposing Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and the Democrats.
I've said to some of them, I said, you know, during the Obama years and now during Biden, if you spent the same energy on attacking them, you'd actually be successful.
As you do on attacking me in many cases.
The Democrats don't have grandstanders like Mitt Romney, Little Ben Sasse, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, David Valadao, and of course the warmonger, a person that loves seeing our troops fighting, Liz Cheney.
How about that?
The good news is in her state, she's been censured and in her state, her poll numbers have dropped faster than any human being I've ever seen.
This is Donald Trump's party.
I say that not just as someone who likes Trump.
When I say this is Donald Trump's party, I'm sort of pleased that I can say that.
But even people who hate Trump's guts, even Romney and Liz Cheney and all the rest of them, Have to admit this is Trump's party.
Mitt Romney did admit it the other day.
He said, I, Mitt Romney, represent a very small sliver of the Republican Party.
Donald Trump would win the nomination in a landslide if he ran.
How strange is it that at CPAC, this is sort of the big conservative conference of the year, The chairman of the House Republican Caucus, Liz Cheney, gets booed, overwhelmingly booed on the floor like that.
Mitt Romney, who won the CPAC straw poll in 2012, Mitt Romney, who used to be pretty popular at CPAC, getting booed because the party is shifting and because politics always does change.
It changes according to circumstance.
So that's 2022.
Obviously, I think Trump is going to try to pick off some of his political opponents.
But what about 2024?
If Trump's got the party behind him, if Trump's got the conservative base behind him, if Trump's picking off his opponents, is he going to run in 2024?
Well, he doesn't say no.
But who knows?
Who knows?
I may even decide to beat them for a third time, okay?
Beat them for a third time.
That is a long, long, long round of applause and standing ovation.
And Trump does it in the most Trumpian way with such a showman's flourish.
He goes, and look, I may even...
You're kind of leaning in.
Look, I might even...
Decide to beat him for a third time.
Boom!
And then the crowd opens up and when he says beat him for a third time, he's obviously suggesting, this is the most I think Trump in his speech went to say, that election, you know, a lot of irregularities, a lot of irregularities there.
The CPAC straw poll is pretty interesting.
Because in terms of the candidates, Trump wins.
He walks away with it.
He got the majority of votes.
In a field of Trump, DeSantis, Noem, Haley, Pompeo, Trump gets 55% in the CPAC straw poll.
So even if all those other candidates were just one other candidate, Trump still wins.
DeSantis, no surprise there that he's coming up second by a lot too.
It's 55% to 21% for DeSantis.
Then when you get to Kristi Noem, it's 4%.
Nikki Haley, 3%.
Mike Pompeo, 2%.
Not really surprising numbers.
When you take a look at the straw poll without Trump, so let's say Trump decides not to run.
Ron DeSantis still crushing it.
He's got 43% up there.
Kristi Noem at 11%.
Don Jr.
at 8%.
Again, just evidence that the Trump family is dominating the party.
Even Don Jr., right, who was not the president, still doing pretty well.
Pompeo 7%.
Cruz 7%.
The one thing worth noting here is that The straw poll has a kind of 50-50 record.
So the straw poll was right about the nominee in 1980 and then obviously right in 1984.
They probably shouldn't have even held it that year, but Reagan got it again in 84.
They were right in 96, 2000, and 2012.
But the CPAC straw poll got the nominee wrong in 76, 92, 2008, and 2016.
Trump did not come in first or even second in 2016.
So these things can change quite a lot.
The other thing I would say about Ron DeSantis, he's doing a great job.
He's doing everything he should be doing, but it's a long time.
It's a long time away from 2024.
The people who tend to win this early historically have not actually gotten the nomination later on.
So we'll have to see.
More interesting even than the candidates are the issues.
The top issue for the CPAC audience, election integrity, followed by constitutional rights, followed by immigration, followed by reopening the economy.
It was pretty low on the list, followed by the second amendment, followed by taxes, followed by national security, finally followed by pro-life.
Pretty interesting.
I don't think it's because the CPAC crowd is pro-abortion now.
I suspect it's just because they feel that we're at a stalemate and no matter how many judges we get, we still keep losing.
The issue here is the corruption.
We keep winning these political battles, but we keep losing on these issues.
So that's actually my read of why pro-life is so down low.
It's people are very demoralized.
And I think it's why election integrity is so high.
Because they do not have faith in this system.
They don't really have the sort of faith in the institutions that we once had.
You've got to root out the corruption before you can solve these sorts of problems.
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It is Trump's party.
It is Trump's party.
And in part, that's because of Trump.
He is this sort of uniquely talented politician.
Even his opponents admit this.
Even Mitt Romney admits that Donald Trump just has a political gift.
But there's another reason, too.
Another reason that the GOP became Donald Trump's party and has remained Donald Trump's party is because the left makes no distinction between the moderates in the party or the liberals in the party and the conservatives and the super conservatives and the far-right fringy people and the kooky people.
The left...
Makes no distinction between any of them.
A classic example of this, Congressman Marie Newman.
Congressman Marie Newman is a Democrat and she has made transgender ideology one of her central issues.
This obviously very important with the passage in the House, not yet in the Senate, of the Equality Act.
The Equality Act obliterates the legal distinction between men and women.
It is the single most radical piece of legislation ever in American history.
It not only would sort of upend American society, it also removes specifically legal protections for women to have, for instance, their own sports leagues, to have their own bathrooms, their own changing rooms.
That goes away with the Equality Act.
And Marie Newman, very into this, Marie Newman actually put a transgender flag.
Can you believe they have a flag?
It's a transgender ideology flag outside of her office, leading Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene to put a sign outside of her office, which is right across the hallway, which says, there are two genders, men and women.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene is called the conspiracy theorist for that.
If you believe that men and women are different, you're the crazy conspiracy theorist.
If you don't, you're a sort of reasonable person.
Maureen Newman goes on CNN and says that the reason that the Republicans will not attack Marjorie Taylor Greene for having the sign out there that says men are different than women is that they are, quote, in fear of the QAnon kooks.
The QAnon kooks.
What is QAnon?
I suspect most people listening to this show don't really have any idea what QAnon is.
I don't really know what QAnon is.
I have, like, Googled it a little bit.
I sort of have some kind of idea.
Most Republicans...
Public opinion surveys have borne this out.
Don't really have any idea what this is.
Most Trump supporters don't really have any idea what this is.
It's just a new term to smear the right.
They take some sort of minor phenomenon and they smear the right.
In the same way that they say the right, they're white supremacists.
You think, really?
I don't think so.
Who are you talking to on the right?
But They're not just saying that these very far fringe extreme people are QAnon kooks, whatever that is.
It just means bad, right?
They're just using QAnon or white supremacist or whatever to mean a bad person who's not a good person.
But it's okay.
It's not just the fringe that's the QAnon kooks.
It's not just...
Conspiracy theorists.
They're not just bigots.
It's not even just Trump supporters.
It's not even just conservatives.
It's not even just the Republican Party.
It's anybody who believes that men and women are different.
Can you imagine that?
That is how broadly the Democrats are painting this.
And so in that world, when everybody is being lumped in and called the worst possible names, You need a tough guy.
You need someone with spines of steel like Donald Trump says.
And so I think Republicans and conservatives are willing to make some concessions.
Yeah, the tweets are a little mean or whatever.
Yeah, he sometimes speaks out of turn.
Yeah, he sometimes says things that are slight exaggerations.
Yeah, whatever.
Whatever.
If you're in a world where the Democrats are trying to utterly delegitimize anyone, not just even half the country, but people who think men and women are different, right?
You're talking about the majority of the country.
I should hope.
If you're in that world where common sense is not politically permissible, you need a tough guy.
You need a guy with spines of steel.
So the right...
It does seem a little bit divided right now between kind of the Trump faction and the, I don't know, call it the Romney faction or the more squishy faction.
It seems a little bit divided.
Trump still has control of it for now, but there's a lot of acrimony.
Democrats are seeming divided now as well.
I actually don't think they are divided, but they give the appearance of it.
I think actually Republicans have a lot to learn from this.
Case in point, Andrew Cuomo.
Andrew, we call him Governor COVID in New York.
You know, that leadership genius from COVID-19.
You know, the greatest, most admirable, wonderful governor in America who was just basically throwing elderly New Yorkers into disease-ridden nursing homes and then covering it up when the feds started looking into it.
So, Andrew Cuomo, separate from his actual scandal, which is the COVID stuff, He is being accused of sexual harassment.
And it's all sort of vague, but there was one woman who came out and said, yeah, you know, a while ago, Cuomo tried to kiss me at a meeting or something.
Now, a second woman is accusing him of sexual harassment.
Charlotte Bennett worked as an assistant of his, and then she left in November.
And she said that the harassment began in the spring of 2020.
And it's all kind of vague stuff.
So it's, you know, he brought up sex.
But she's not saying he propositioned her necessarily.
She's not really bringing the context out of it.
It sounds, you know, kind of inappropriate, but it's really unclear.
Democrats are now coming out against Cuomo.
They're now saying, yep, that guy, at the very least, he needs to be investigated.
This from our favorite White House press secretary, who is currently the press secretary, Jen Psaki.
Governor Cuomo says he never made advances toward Ms.
Bennett, but does President Biden believe Governor Cuomo or Charlotte Bennett?
Well, first, President Biden has been consistent that he believes that every woman should be heard, should be treated with respect and with dignity.
Charlotte should be treated with respect and dignity.
So should Lindsay.
And there should be an independent review looking into these allegations.
And that's certainly something he supports and we believe should move forward as quickly as possible.
Nancy Pelosi is saying almost the same thing.
The women who've come forward with serious and credible charges, so she's calling it credible, against Governor Cuomo, deserve to be heard and treated with dignity.
The independent investigation must have due process and respect for everyone involved.
What's really going on here?
I don't think that Democrats have finally gotten a conscience on the sexual harassment claims or anything like that.
I think what's really going on is that there were claims like this before against Andrew Cuomo, and they completely ignored them, and they actually promoted him, and they had him speak at their conference, and they said he was the greatest leader on COVID-19.
Then it came out, they finally couldn't cover it up anymore, that his policies were deadly in COVID-19 and that he knew it and that he covered them up against the federal government.
So now, just coincidentally, just coincidentally, when his political fortunes are dropping and he's an embarrassment for the Democratic Party, now all of a sudden they're taking the sexual harassment stuff seriously.
But it doesn't even stop there because they're taking it seriously enough to say he needs to be investigated.
But this is what Democrats do.
They're not saying he needs to step down.
They're not saying he's unfit for office.
They're saying we need an investigation.
They do the same thing on reparations.
They do the same thing on all sorts of radical policies that they're proposing.
They say we need to commit.
They do this on statute toppling.
They say, we need a committee to study and review the issue.
And they basically, they slow walk it to buy themselves time and build themselves political consensus.
So what's going to happen now, because Cuomo's really, really in a hot water because of his mishandling of COVID and his cover up of, of the COVID issue, is they're going to say, okay, we're going to start threatening you.
We're going to start building consensus.
So if we have to deal with you, we're going to deal with you.
We're also coincidentally going to get COVID out of the news because everyone's just talking about your sex scandal.
And then we're going to buy ourselves time.
And then once the investigation's over in six months, if you're still in trouble, we'll boot you out if you're an embarrassment for us.
But if you're not in trouble, we'll let you come back in.
No big deal.
It's politically brilliant.
And Cuomo, by the way, is handling this in a pretty smart political way too.
Cuomo came out and sort of apologized and sort of didn't.
Here's his excuse.
It's a masterclass in political rhetoric.
He says, questions have been raised about some of my past interactions with people in the office.
I never intended to offend anyone or cause any harm.
I spend most of my life at work and colleagues are often also personal friends.
At work, sometimes I think I'm being playful and make jokes that I think are funny.
I do on occasion tease people in what I think is a good-natured way.
I do it in public and in private.
You have seen me do it at briefings hundreds of times.
I have teased people about their personal lives, their relationships, about getting married or not getting married.
Wow.
Wow, man, is this good.
He doesn't take on the allegation that he tried to kiss somebody during a meeting.
He doesn't take on the allegation that he's moved.
I mean, eventually he just sort of denies the idea that he's propositioning people and denying it.
But that's not what he's saying here.
He's admitting, yeah, I tease people.
He says, I do it in public and private.
You've seen me do it, right?
He's making you sort of accustomed to it.
You're saying, oh, I have seen that.
It's a beautiful, politically beautiful way to downplay this sort of thing.
And it'll probably help him.
Because when we're talking about that, we're not talking about the other allegations.
We're not talking about the real scandal, not the sex.
Sex scandal is the best thing that ever happened to Andrew Cuomo because we're not talking about his COVID scandal right now.
And we feel a little bit more comfortable with it.
The Democrats are just much, much better at this sort of thing than the conservatives are.
Ben is going to be talking about this very issue.
The end for Cuomo on his show today, so be sure to check that out.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Andrew Cuomo is not the only Democratic governor in trouble right now.
Gavin Newsom is also in trouble.
Gavin Newsom is Governor Patrick Bateman from California, Governor American Psycho over there in my old state.
And when I say they're in trouble, yes, they're in trouble, but not nearly the sort of trouble they'd be in if they were Republicans.
And maybe not politically terminal trouble.
You know, maybe they'll be able to survive this.
What they really do, I find, they just flaunt their power.
So Gavin Newsom got in trouble a few months ago because he ordered all these lockdown rules and his mandates and he's shutting down businesses and restaurants.
Then what does he do?
He shows up with his friends to the French Laundry, a Michelin rated restaurant, These meals at the French Laundry are often $1,000 a plate, sometimes more.
He shows up.
He's sitting right next to his friends.
Looked pretty indoors to me.
Shoulder to shoulder.
No one's wearing masks.
And they're all laughing and having a good time.
And they're all laughing at us because we believe the kind of nonsense that they're spouting about how we need to stay home and social distance and all that stuff that they themselves are not following.
So Newsom got in trouble for that, but he survived.
Now he posted another video With George Lopez, the sitcom star from the 2000s.
Now all he does is really turn up in political videos.
And he's inside a restaurant with George Lopez.
They're wearing masks.
But they're inside a restaurant in an area that is supposed to have closed, no indoor dining.
How do I find out if I can get a vaccination?
George, you've got to go to myturn.ca.gov.
Wait a minute!
Thank you, Governor!
It's wonderful to be of service, George.
First of all, just 100% pure grade A cringe in the video, right?
I mean, that is so, they're like, hello!
Hey, fellow TikTokers!
Hello!
How do you do, fellow kids?
But beyond that, what are they doing in that restaurant?
What are they doing?
They're not supposed to be in that restaurant, in that county, in that area.
So they're inside there.
Well, maybe they're just there for a film shoot, right?
Well, they were sort of posting some pictures.
It looks like they had some food there.
Actually, the way I know they had some food there is because when you film anything, you have craft services so that the crew and cast members can eat.
So you got Newsom again.
I think it is not unfair to infer.
He's certainly inside a restaurant, so he's already breaking that rule.
And I suspect they might have had a bite or two to eat.
I suspect.
That's what the photos sort of suggest.
They just flaunt their power and they know that they're going to not get into any trouble for this.
Speaking of the virus, by the way, some good news.
Sort of.
Sort of.
I guess it's good news, but it's kind of frustrating.
It's frustrating because we don't know who to trust anymore.
The medical experts...
We've told us that the mitigation efforts for coronavirus, they've failed.
We're not wearing our masks enough.
We're not locking down enough.
We're not social distancing enough.
That's why the virus is spreading.
That's why we've got to keep locking down.
If only you rubes had locked down for two weeks, we would have slowed the spread in 15 days.
Now we're going on 350 days.
So they tell us none of that works.
But then we're also told The flu has basically disappeared.
Flu season peaks between December and February.
The CDC estimates that flu causes up to 45 million illnesses each year, up to 810,000 hospitalizations, and up to 61,000 deaths.
How many flu cases?
I'm not talking about Deaths, I'm not talking about hospitalizations.
I'm talking about cases.
Normally, 45 million illnesses.
How many cases do you think have been reported from the flu this year?
925.
Not 925,000.
That would be an amazingly small number, compared to 45 million, right?
That's a small number.
Not 925 million.
925 cases of the flu, according to Johns Hopkins.
The flu has basically been eradicated this year.
How did this happen?
Either there is widespread misdiagnosis Of things maybe that were flu and they're diagnosed as COVID. Maybe they're COVID, they're diagnosed as flu.
Maybe they're, who knows?
So that's one, and now that's a big claim.
I'm not saying there's evidence for that claim.
Or you can say that the mitigation, this is what the left is saying.
They're saying the mitigation measures that we put in place for COVID stopped the spread of the flu.
So no surprise here, of course we got rid of the flu because we're all washing our hands and wearing the stupid masks and we're all social distancing, to use the Orwellian phrase, and that's why there's no flu.
Okay, that would make sense, except at the same time that you're telling me that all the mitigation measures stop the flu, you're telling me that they utterly failed to stop the coronavirus.
So which is it?
Are they really, I guess they could be different.
It seems to me kind of incoherent.
It seems to me, just like every other aspect of Of the public health response to the coronavirus, that they are just making this up as they go along, and they are contradicting themselves, sometimes day by day, like Dr.
Fauci, who says, don't wear masks, masks are terrible, they don't do anything.
Then two seconds later, he says, yeah, you should have to, you have to wear masks.
You must wear masks.
And then he's caught on camera not wearing masks, even though he's next to a lot of people.
Then he, doesn't matter, changes day by day.
Sometimes it changes within the very same breath, while they're explaining the flu thing away.
But let's just take it as it is with the flu.
Let's say that we can get rid of the flu every single year if we do all this stuff.
Wear the stupid masks and social distance, quote unquote, and don't have Thanksgiving.
I don't want to do that.
I would rather get the flu than do all of this inhuman, anti-constitutional nonsense that we've been doing for almost a year now.
Our freedom and our traditions and our way of life Are worth more than not getting the flu.
And I think this is true of the Wu flu too.
I think this is true.
As you know, I wear a mask if I have to go on an airplane because that's the one place where they say you can't, you cannot do this if you don't have a mask on.
And so I do it in cases where I think it's more important that I go fly, be able to give a speech, be able to go to a political event, be able to talk about how dumb the masks are.
I'm making that calculation.
I think it's worth it.
But otherwise, you know, I ignore all this stuff and I practically French kiss people when I meet them on the street.
So...
I would rather do that than not get the virus.
I'm just not that afraid.
I'm taking my risk into account.
I understand there's some risk, so don't...
I'm not saying I'm invincible, but I'm just taking risk into account.
Really what this is, what the whole COVID lockdown thing has been, what some statesmen are calling the reset, building back better.
It's just the Green New Deal by the back door, right?
It's just...
The same massive political and social upheaval that the left has wanted for decades and decades and decades.
They're just getting it this way instead of the other way.
Back in the 70s, they said that we're heading to a new ice age.
Global cooling is about to take over the world.
And that's why you need to give us a lot of power and we need to depopulate the earth.
And this is well known.
There were...
There's books that were very prominent written about this, and you've got very prominent public figures that are still talking about why we need to depopulate, why we need to increase access to abortion, why we need to increase contraception, we need to have fewer children.
I'm talking about people like Bill Gates and Al Gore who have given speeches on this very topic.
So in the 70s they said it's because of global cooling.
Then, like five seconds later, they said, no, it's actually because of global warming.
You say, oh, good.
Well, it sounds like cooling is not a big issue now.
We're all good, right?
They said, no, we have to do all the same stuff that we asked for before.
Much more government power, much less control of private property, have fewer children, live less, do less.
You say, wait, you're telling me that for the opposite problem, we have the exact same slate of solutions?
They say, yes.
Then, when the warming kind of peters out for a little bit, they say, okay, it's actually climate change.
Say, climate?
Well, climate's always changing.
Yeah, well, it's climate change.
Anyway, you got to do all that same stuff.
Say, okay, well, seems a little strange to me.
Then they say, yeah, and actually, since you're not going to give us the Green New Deal, and people don't really care about the global warming stuff, and they're not afraid of the sun monster, it's actually the virus.
Yeah, there's a virus, you know, and that's why you got to give us all the same stuff.
We have to much more government control over the economy, and we need to...
We rebuild lots of edifices in this country and we can't have that many kids and we've got all the same stuff.
Massive redistribution of wealth.
You say, hold on.
I could sort of follow when you said it was one weather problem and another weather problem and you give me the same answer, but how come now it's a virus and you're giving me the same slate of answers?
The reason for this is...
That these extremely progressive policies are part of an entire politico-religious worldview.
This worldview was summed up by no less an intellect last night than Mark Ruffalo at the Zoom Golden Globe Awards.
I did not know that the Golden Globe Awards were going on until I saw this stupid Mark Ruffalo headline trending.
They didn't really hold the Golden Globes.
This actually was just on Zoom.
These people just Zoomed in from their homes and accepted the award on a little tiny screen, how pathetic is that?
And Ruffalo, one of the most insufferable people in Hollywood, decided to use his acceptance to give a theological diatribe about our filial relationship to the earth.
We have a dying mother, just like the mother in our story.
She's Mother Earth.
And we must come to balance with her and honor her.
And she'll heal too.
So let's be courageous together, guys.
And let's turn the page on the cruel past of this nation.
The good news is inclusion and justice and care for Mother Earth is breaking out everywhere.
The godly light of decency is breaking through the hideous dark storm we've been living through.
We are all in this together.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
So let's do this now.
I love you.
Oh, where to begin?
First of all, our mother, the earth.
The earth is not my mother.
The earth is a rock floating in space that I like very much.
I really, I love the earth.
I think it's great.
It provides a very nice home for me.
The earth is not my mother.
When people say the earth is our mother...
They are espousing a religious point of view, just as I might say that my mother is the Holy Church, just as I might say in another sense that my mother is Mary, the mother of God.
Just as I might say that, so too some crazy lib might say that the earth is our mother.
If the earth is our mother, we have a filial responsibility to her.
And on the other side of that, if we are the children of the earth, then we're just kind of like dirt, right?
That's kind of all we are.
We don't really have the higher spiritual faculties that, say, Christianity or even other theistic religions would put on us.
But the religious way he's talking is even more explicit.
He says, he keeps coming back to this, he says, the good news is Inclusion and diversity.
The good news is the gospel.
When people who don't have this kooky lib religion, when people who are Christians say, the good news is, what's the good news?
The good news is that the earth, I'm not the child of a rock, that I'm actually a child of God.
I'm a man made in the image of God.
God sends his only begotten son, Christ, to die for us and we can be part of the body of Christ and Christ can live in us and redeem mankind if we accept him through faith and we sort of understand this kind of or we grant this kind of This relationship of us to the Son of God,
who is God in the triune God, in the Godhead, and therefore we have a special relationship to creation and to the Creator.
Okay, right?
That's one version of the good news if you're a Christian.
But if you don't believe any of that stuff, then what is the good news is diversity and equity and inclusion, which is treated as a religion.
There's something really, really spooky though.
I do need to touch on this.
There's a very famous priest by the name of Father James Martin.
He's a Jesuit who is known for making statements that people widely interpret to be heretical.
And, but he's very, very popular, especially with liberals.
I think he spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
I know he's friends with very high-profile liberals.
And it would seem to me, from my position in the laity, seems to often contradict or at least scandalize and confuse important aspects of the faith.
Father James Martin posted yesterday, quote, Preaching for the second Sunday of Lent, Vicki McBride reflects on everything that changed last Lent and offers a reflection on allowing God to reveal herself to us.
So, for as progressive as Father Martin is, he seems not to respect God's preferred pronouns.
God is pretty clear about which pronouns he prefers.
You know, the Our Father, for instance, the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity as a man named Jesus.
It's pretty clear to me that God uses, and the Bible is replete with other examples of this.
And a very famous priest is now referring to God as her.
And he's now, to sort of justify it, he's invoking some sort of mystical visions of people like Julian of Norwich or some other people.
But James Martin is going much, much further.
Father Martin is making claims here that would seem very contrary to the church teaching.
I hope that bishops, and I pray that bishops, would be able to summon the courage and the compassion to educate Father Martin and so many other people who are so confused, even within the church.
It's very difficult to educate ourselves these days because we're not being permitted to read great works or important works.
We know that in classrooms, great books are being removed from the classroom.
They're being removed from curricula either because they're politically incorrect or because they were written by that dread character, the dead white man.
And so instead, we're getting kind of lower quality modern books pushing ridiculous theories.
But it's not just in the classroom.
Amazon is banning books.
Now, we know that they were banning our friend Ryan T. Anderson's book, When Harry Became Sally.
Great title.
The reason they did this, and they've now sort of admitted it, is they've removed an exception for books.
they would remove politically incorrect objects from Amazon in the past, especially when a scandal would come up, but they kept books there.
They didn't want to be seen as banning books.
Now, now they're doing that.
They're, they're not going to sell.
They say, quote, we won't sell certain content, including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism or other material that we deem inappropriate or offensive.
All you need to pay attention to here though, is the hate speech part, because that's going to be used.
You know, it is being used specifically to target perfectly anodyne conservative books.
I have a book coming out in June.
It is currently listed on Amazon.
It's called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
If they got rid of Ryan Anderson's book, Thank you.
They will get rid of my book.
There is no logical reason why they wouldn't if they're willing to get rid of Anderson's book.
So I would encourage you to pre-order it now while you still can.
I'm not saying this just to sell books, though I'd like to do that.
I'm saying this because I would like this book to get out there.
I think it actually takes on this very issue, and I do suspect it's going to be suppressed by the big tech companies.
So anyway, just a quick plug to order it while you still can.
It's obviously not evenly applied.
You can still order Mein Kampf on Amazon right now.
You can order books by Hitler, but you can't order mainstream American conservative books.
The reason for this is that Mein Kampf doesn't pose any problem to the dominant liberal regime in America.
Nobody is going out and really, I mean, like three people, no huge number of people are going out buying Mein Kampf and reading it and saying, oh yes, now I'm going to transform my views and become a Nazi.
Generally speaking, the people who are reading Mein Kampf are reading it for historical and scholarly purposes.
Makes sense.
Or if they're reading it because they have an affinity for Hitler, then they've already got the affinity.
If you're searching out Mein Kampf because you really like Hitler, then Mein Kampf is not going to convince you to like Hitler anymore.
That's not the same as a conservative book.
There are people who, with these issues that are coming up right now, not dead issues like Nazism, but issues that are still hot right now like gender ideology, you could pick up a conservative book and change your mind and realize that the narrative that the liberal regime is pushing to you is not true.
And so that is why Ryan Anderson's book, or other conservative books too, are much more dangerous than To the dominant liberal establishment than anything by Hitler or Mussolini or whatever.
They actually don't really care about that because it doesn't threaten them.
This is being called cancel culture.
I've told you I don't think cancel culture is a particularly helpful term because I think it's a trap of political correctness.
I think that the trap that political correctness leads us into is to believe that when they overturn the old standards with their new crazy left-wing standards, the only choices we have are either to give in to the new standards or to eschew standards entirely and say, okay, well, you can say and do whatever you want.
We don't believe in it.
I don't think that's true.
I think that we should watch what we say in certain instances.
I think that we should enforce laws against obscenity to varying degrees.
I'm not saying ban everything outright.
I'm just saying we should, in the American tradition of free speech, We discourage some offensive speech that is actually offensive or that is obscene or that is threatening or that is seditious or any of the other broad swaths of speech that in the American tradition we have said is off limits.
I think the only way that we're actually going to beat political correctness is by recognizing that it's not a battle between free speech and censorship as the left wants to trick us into believing it is.
Because then either way, either way, the left wins, right?
Because if we give in or we eschew standards entirely, either way, the left gets to obliterate the old standards.
What we need to realize is political correctness is actually, instead of a battle between free speech and censorship, it's a battle between two competing sets of standards, the old moral codes and the new speech codes.
And we need to defend our substantive moral vision.
So I don't really use this term cancel culture.
And Well, I'll give you an example of how cancel culture, though it's not, you know, I don't really use it.
It can be a good thing if it supports a conservative view.
An example of this is LinkedIn.
LinkedIn was hosting that Woka-Cola be less white employee diversity training thing.
Remember that?
So Coca-Cola was accused of themselves putting out this training.
What they actually did was they trained their employees to access this other platform, which was on LinkedIn, which included a training by Robin DiAngelo, which said you need to be less white.
I think that's bad.
I think that's wrong.
And I think they should get rid of it.
And I don't think that Coca-Cola employees should watch that.
I don't think they should have to watch that.
I don't think Coca-Cola should be even giving them access to watch that.
I think it's just trash and it's terrible for the country and nobody benefits from it.
Well, Coca-Cola gave in, or I'm sorry, rather LinkedIn gave in.
LinkedIn removed a racist diversity training program that told people to be less white.
Isn't that cancel culture?
Isn't that censorship?
In a way, kind of, but not really.
It's just standards.
It's just finally, for once, we pressured corporate America to go back to our good old standards instead of embracing the new radical, wicked, politically correct standards.
That's a good thing.
So when we use cancel culture as just a Technical term, you know, it's fair.
People are going to keep using it.
I'll probably use it at some point, too.
But we need to remember, that refers to the specific phenomenon of left-wingers destroying the lives and livelihoods of conservatives because the conservatives are uttering mainstream points of view.
Cancel culture does not.
It cannot refer to the consequences for anybody for saying or doing anything that Because conservatives traditionally, and I think still do, believe that there ought to be consequences for saying and doing certain things.
Nobody thinks that if you wear the swastika at your water cooler and start screaming Sig Heil in the office, that you're somehow entitled to a job.
Well, likewise, nobody thinks that we need to support these vicious, bigoted, racist trainings that say, be less white on LinkedIn.
No way.
We need to grow a spine.
We need to offer a substantive moral vision.
And I think if CPAC showed us anything, it's that the GOP is still clamoring for that.
Who can give it to them?
What's it going to look like in 2022 and 2024?
We'll have to wait and see.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
See you tomorrow.
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