Liberal journos are shocked to discover that the Pope believes in Catholicism, Cardi B jiggles at the Grammys, and the Washington Post corrects a major lie about President Trump and the 2020 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Breaking news, the Vatican has just declared that it still holds the same views that it has for 2,000 years on sex and marriage, which is absolutely shocking to mainstream media journalists who just cannot wrap their minds around the fact that the Pope is Catholic. | |
| Secular liberalism is a jealous God. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is the Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Welcome back to the show, Michael. | |
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| People are shocked by this announcement. | |
| The Vatican released a statement. | |
| It was on the question of same-sex marriage. | |
| You know, over the past, I guess, what is it, eight years or so, there has been a major movement in the West to redefine marriage from its historic definition as the union of husbands and wives, and more specifically for most of the time, the union of one husband and one wife to now monogamous unions. | |
| So they They kept the monogamy part but got rid of the sexual difference part. | |
| And people at the time, on the left, were arguing that this was a matter of rights. | |
| And people on the right were failing to argue, but were trying to argue at least, that this was not a matter of rights. | |
| This was a question of what marriage is. | |
| For all of human history everywhere on earth, marriage has had something to do with sexual difference. | |
| Now, if you're radically going to redefine that and you're going to take away the essential quality of marriage for the essential social institution, maybe we should proceed with caution on that. | |
| Conservatives lost that battle in the courts. | |
| Now, though, we were told at that time that, you know, look, if you have a certain religious view, that's okay. | |
| Why does my gay marriage have anything to do with your straight marriage? | |
| Now, people are really shocked to find out that the Catholic Church, the single most enduring institution in our entire civilization, Don Lemon went on The View and chatted on this issue with Meghan McCain. | |
| You got engaged to your fiancé, Tim, in 2019. | |
| And this morning, and you guys are so cute, we learned that the Vatican has said that the Catholic Church won't bless same-sex unions, quote, since God cannot bless sin. | |
| They go on to say that this does not imply a judgment on persons. | |
| But I want to know, do you think this sends a damaging message, and how do you feel about that, given that obviously you are now engaged and going to get married? | |
| Well, I think there are... | |
| Listen, I respect people's right to believe in whatever they want to believe in their God. | |
| But if you believe in something that hurts another person, or that does not give someone the same rights or freedoms, not necessarily under the Constitution, because this is under God, I think that that's wrong. | |
| And I think that the Catholic Church and many other churches really need to reexamine themselves and their teachings, because that is not what God is about. | |
| God is not about hindering people. | |
| I love this because I don't even really care about the media shock regarding Catholicism. | |
| The media are ignorant and arrogant and they vacillate in between those two poles. | |
| But what I care about here is the presumption. | |
| Don Lemon says, I respect people's right to believe in their religions. | |
| But, right, and then the but immediately contradicts everything he previously said, because he says, I respect people's right to believe in their religions, but if it contradicts my religion, if it contradicts my view, my interpretation of people's rights and freedoms and what people ought to be able to do, if it in any way, if other people's views contradict my beliefs, then those beliefs... | |
| Ought to cut it out. | |
| Then those people need to ditch those old beliefs. | |
| He's saying, because if it contradicts my rights, well, where do rights come from? | |
| Rights come from the law. | |
| Natural rights come from the natural law. | |
| Who gives us the natural law? | |
| God. | |
| All laws, all rights have ultimately come back to morality, who gives us morality, a religious view of the world. | |
| So Don Lemon says, sure, you can believe whatever you want. | |
| Just don't contradict me. | |
| And then he says, after this whole look, man, just don't, come on, we can all believe what we want to believe, you know, and just after all this kind of dishonest, hippy-dippy rhetoric, he then says, let me tell you what God thinks. | |
| He then says, the Catholic Church, bark of Peter, 2,000 years, if you're Catholic, you believe, instituted by Christ himself, hands the keys to the kingdom of heaven to St. | |
| Peter, the first pope, Who knows better about what God thinks? | |
| The Catholic Church or Don freaking Lemon? | |
| Even if you don't believe. | |
| I believe this, but let's say you don't believe this, that the Catholic Church is divinely instituted. | |
| Surely it is the case that an institution that has been devoted to interpreting Scripture and developing theology for 2,000 years might have more sophisticated views on the subject of what God thinks than... | |
| A CNN host named Don Lemon. | |
| And we know that this is true because Don Lemon last year, talking about a different subject, made a little bit of a crucial theological mistake. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| Jesus Christ, if you believe in, if that's who you believe in, Jesus Christ, admittedly was not perfect when he was here on this earth. | |
| So why are we deifying the founders of this country? | |
| Many of whom owned slaves. | |
| Jesus Christ was admittedly, he says, not perfect when he was on this earth. | |
| So he's not merely denying the divinity of Christ, which is an ancient heresy. | |
| It's one of the earliest heresies in the church. | |
| He's also just making things up about the text of the Gospels. | |
| He's saying, yeah, admittedly, Christ admitted this. | |
| I... I would like to see that verse because it's pretty central to the whole thing, that Christ is perfect. | |
| Christ is blameless. | |
| The sacrifice on the cross is perfect because Christ is perfect. | |
| So, all of that to say, Don Lemon, not the most educated in theology, but he is very presumptuous. | |
| He is frequently wrong, but never in doubt. | |
| I bring up this story not so much for the sexual aspect but for the political aspect because it's coming back to freedom and rights and this very liberal interpretation of freedom and rights which now constitutes the secular religion. | |
| I don't think that people are really ignorant of the Catholic Church's teaching on marriage. | |
| I don't think that while people are clutching their pearls, I don't think it's out of ignorance. | |
| I think the shock is because they just assume that That eventually we're all going to ditch our own beliefs, our old sturdy beliefs that have endured for millennia, and we are going to adopt the new faddish beliefs of secular liberal modernity. | |
| In a sane culture, The shock would be if the Catholic Church, which has held one view for 2,000 years about a very crucial fundamental matter, just completely changed it overnight. | |
| That would be shocking to a sane culture. | |
| But because we're now in an insane culture, the shock to us is that they didn't change their views overnight. | |
| Because, and you heard this even in the way Don Lemon spoke, it gets back to something that Barack Obama used to use a lot, a certain rhetorical trick, which is we've gone from discussing freedom of religion and the practice of religion to freedom of belief, is what Don Lemon's talking about, or freedom of worship. | |
| As Barack Obama says. | |
| Because those phrases water down religion. | |
| Freedom of worship. | |
| What does that bring up in your mind? | |
| It means you get to go to your church on Sunday and sing some songs and then leave. | |
| And then get back to the business of liberal modernity. | |
| Then you get back to secularism. | |
| Monday through Saturday. | |
| Then Sunday you can have freedom to worship. | |
| Freedom of belief is just you can have some ideas swimming in your head. | |
| You can't even really articulate them necessarily. | |
| It's just freedom of belief. | |
| But freedom of religion is different because religion is not just a hobby. | |
| Religion is not just something you compartmentalize like we compartmentalize so much in modernity. | |
| Religion is everything. | |
| And we all knew this as a civilization until like five minutes ago. | |
| Our founding fathers understood this. | |
| They understood the religious basis of government. | |
| That's why they invoke the creator. | |
| That's why they invoke God and the natural rights given to us by God in the Declaration of Independence. | |
| Cardinal Manning famously observed that all human conflict ultimately is theological. | |
| But because liberalism is such a jealous God... | |
| Many liberals today, they can't even wrap their minds around that. | |
| That you wouldn't just ditch the enduring views that built our civilization and that edify the human soul and turn our eyes up toward the heavens. | |
| That we wouldn't just ditch that for... | |
| A bunch of technocrats in lab coats for a bunch of modern libs taking power and telling us what to do because they know the most efficient way to run society. | |
| Joe Biden, prime example of this, right? | |
| Joe Biden, devout Catholic Joe Biden was asked his view on the Vatican's perfectly anodyne statement that should have surprised nobody. | |
| He's upset about it. | |
| On a different subject to Vatican today said it would not bless same sex unions. | |
| The president's devout capital. | |
| Does he have a personal response to that? | |
| I don't think he has a personal response to the Vatican. | |
| No, he continues to believe and support same sex unions, as you know, and he's long had that position. | |
| He's long had that position. | |
| He's only had that position since, what was it, 2012? | |
| He's had that position for nine years. | |
| He's been in politics for something like 50 years. | |
| So even Joe Biden, who is the most radical president we've ever had, not because I think he has particular ideological commitments, he's just a sort of weather vane. | |
| He's an empty vessel for the Democratic Party establishment, which is moving further and further to the left. | |
| But even just by his own standard, for the vast majority of his political career, to say nothing of the vast majority of his life, he has held the Catholic view, or at least espoused the Catholic view. | |
| But now, because of the acceleration of this cultural radicalism, even that, absolutely anathema. | |
| Joe Biden has, back before I was shaving, Joe Biden held these views. | |
| And Joe Biden, I guess, doesn't hold these views anymore when I am shaving. | |
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| So Joe Biden, devout Catholic, at odds with the Catholic Church on this sort of fundamental issue of marriage. | |
| But he continues to call himself a devout Catholic because one of the tools of political correctness, which is, you know, we use the term political correctness or wokeness or whatever, but these are just the instruments of political leftism. | |
| Joe Biden... | |
| Believes that by changing words, you can in some way change reality. | |
| That is one of the central conceit of political correctness. | |
| And so, forget about marriage, right? | |
| The idea that you can just, by changing the words, you can change the reality of that thing. | |
| Down at the southern border, Joe Biden is facing an historic crisis. | |
| People flooding over the border. | |
| We're seeing huge, huge spikes. | |
| Kids in cages, the likes of which we never saw under President Trump, despite media coverage to the contrary, despite the negative press covfefe. | |
| So Joe and his team believe that by redefining what's going on at the border, they can redefine the reality of it. | |
| Jen Psaki was asked about this crisis down there. | |
| She doesn't want to call it that. | |
| Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says the people coming into the U.S. right now see Biden, President Biden, as the migrant president. | |
| Does the White House take that as a compliment? | |
| Migrant? | |
| Give me a little more context. | |
| Well, he said they see him as the migrant president and so many feel they're going to reach the United States. | |
| We need to work together to regulate the flow because this business can't be tackled from one day to the next. | |
| Well, first it's Mexico will have to be, is an important partner in ensuring we're addressing the flow of migrants from Central America through Mexico, many to the border of the United States. | |
| We have conveyed privately and publicly as well that the majority of people who come to our border will be turned away. | |
| Okay, so still downplaying this. | |
| I mean, the reporters have been asking for weeks now, will you call it a crisis? | |
| Is it a crisis? | |
| She won't do it. | |
| Now you've even got the president of Mexico saying this is Biden's fault. | |
| Biden is creating incentives for people to be flowing to the border. | |
| And even that, just downplaying it. | |
| No, no, you understand. | |
| There are migrants. | |
| This is all perfectly normal. | |
| They're fleeing their countries. | |
| They're going through Mexico, but they're not staying in Mexico because Mexico's not that nice, and America's really nice. | |
| And, you know, they're just seeking safety from political persecution, but they want to seek the safety maybe more up here where we have a strong economy and a stable government, at least for now. | |
| And so is he the migrant president? | |
| Well, what do you mean by migrant president? | |
| Do you mean, well, I don't know, does the word mean this? | |
| What's actually happening? | |
| Joe Biden is creating incentives, massive incentives, including a mass amnesty plan for illegal aliens. | |
| And so you're getting more illegal aliens. | |
| This is a central tactic to distract us in these kind of semantic debates. | |
| But the problem is the words really do matter because they really do color how we view these things. | |
| Imagine, imagine if this had been President Trump, the kind of coverage this would be getting. | |
| But by using that kind of anodyne language, well, it depends, you know. | |
| They just move right on. | |
| Another PC tactic is playing to people's basest sexual passions. | |
| This is where The sex issue does kind of matter. | |
| I mentioned earlier, my interest in the story, my political interest in the Catholic story, has more to do with our understanding of freedom and rights and liberal modernity. | |
| But my interest in WAP... My interest in the Grammys, my interest in Cardi B's performance a couple nights ago, that actually does have to do with the sexual aspect. | |
| Because the left, certainly since the 1960s and the sexual revolution, but even before that, the left recognized that by arousing Certain sexual passions, you can deprive people of their control over their higher faculties, and you can make them easier to control. | |
| I will spare you the full WAP performance between Cardi B and some other musician. | |
| Is she a musician, I guess, during the event. | |
| but just take a listen to one brief passage. | |
| So you can't even be mad. | |
| You can't even be angry if you just look at this because I think you know I've mentioned this before. | |
| I'm not the most hip guy when it comes to popular music. | |
| I haven't listened to many Cardi B arias in my life. | |
| I haven't tuned into them. | |
| So this really is pretty foreign to me whenever I see this sort of thing. | |
| And watching it, I'm not the sort of person who is immune to desires of the flesh, okay? | |
| I'm not saying that there's no way to interest me to, you know... | |
| However, that does not interest me. | |
| That performance does not arouse me in the slightest because it is grotesque. | |
| It's not like... | |
| Do you ever wonder, when you watch old movies or you, I don't know, pick up a history book or something, about a hundred years ago, We joke about it now. | |
| If a woman showed, I don't know, a little leg, you know, there's a joke, she lifts up her skirt to show her ankle, men would go crazy because the culture was so repressed, the culture was so focused on maintaining certain sexual boundaries that any time you would transgress it even a little bit, it was pretty sexy. | |
| And then over time, as, as sexual mores began to be eroded, you would require more and more to stimulate you sexually. | |
| So, you know, then it became women would wear even looser clothing or then it became women would wear bikinis and then it would be, it became, you know, even I was watching some movies from the nineties over the past few weeks. | |
| And even the way that sex was hinted at there, and this was not that long ago. | |
| It was not nearly as grotesque as it is now. | |
| But because now we've lost all boundaries, because now we're in a culture that is saturated by high-speed internet pornography, for one, and then even in the pop culture you get stuff like WAP, because of that, we're just kind of desensitized to it. | |
| And so you need more and more and more to stimulate you. | |
| I suspect this is why you see pornography proliferating as it has. | |
| You're seeing now porn getting so violent that you had under the Bush administration, the federal government prosecuting pornographers because it became so violent. | |
| Sure, if you have a culture where young boys are exposed to this at a very young age, you're just going to be desensitized. | |
| But don't you think... | |
| If you're finding WAP really arousing to you, hasn't something gone wrong with you? | |
| If that's what you need to stay stimulated, don't you think there might be a problem with that? | |
| What we are told is that being able to WAP ourselves all day long is somehow the height of freedom. | |
| What we are told by liberal modernity is that Cardi B... Bumping and grinding on a stage with that other chick and yelling about her WAP. That is the height of liberation and empowerment and, you know, I'm woman, hear me roar. | |
| But of course that's not true. | |
| You just look like prostitutes, right? | |
| There's no... | |
| There would be no difference. | |
| But if you were to show that video maybe 10 years ago, people would think it was porn, right? | |
| But now it's actually mainstream entertainment that kids can watch. | |
| They can't watch Dumbo the Elephant on Disney +, but they can watch WAP on TV. Is that empowerment? | |
| No. | |
| Is that liberty? | |
| No. | |
| That is the opposite, actually. | |
| Because the conservative view of liberty, the classical view of liberty, the Christian view of liberty, all of them recognize that liberty and licentiousness are not only not the same thing, they're opposites. | |
| The more you give into your base appetites and desires, the less free you will be. | |
| The man who sins is a slave to sin. | |
| Our free government is built for a moral and religious people. | |
| It's unfit to any other kind of people, according to John Adams. | |
| The left, though, has made this excellent little trick, this very clever little trick, where they've conflated those two terms. | |
| And now we get very confused by all this sort of stuff. | |
| Shockingly, though... | |
| WAP was not the most wild thing at the Grammys. | |
| This was not the most controversial thing whatsoever. | |
| That honor would have to go to Bill Burr, the comedian Bill Burr, who did not jiggle around his WAP, thankfully, because that wouldn't have shocked and offended anybody. | |
| He contradicted political correctness. | |
| He made jokes about the overarching liberal framework that we're all living under. | |
| And that they are not going to so easily forgive. | |
| Ben, who you know is one of the most famous rappers ever to cover WAP, he's a WAP-er, I guess. | |
| He will be talking about Cardi B, so definitely go check that out. | |
| Also, the wait is over. | |
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| We'll be right back with a lot more. | |
| Bill Burr, the comedian Bill Burr made the biggest splash at the Grammys. the comedian Bill Burr made the biggest splash at the Bill Burr contradicted political correctness. | |
| Take a listen to his introduction to one of the awards. | |
| How are you? | |
| Was I the only one who wanted to kill himself during that piano solo? | |
| I bought a suit for this! | |
| I thought I was going to be on TV! I'm such a moron! | |
| I am losing so much money right now! | |
| All right. | |
| Shout out to all the rock stars that I wanted to meet tonight who are watching at home instead. | |
| I'm talking to you, Don Dockin. | |
| All right. | |
| What? | |
| I'm old. | |
| That was my first concert. | |
| All right. | |
| Here are the next categories. | |
| All right. | |
| Hey, how many feminists are like going nuts? | |
| Why is this white male doing all this Latino stuff? | |
| It was by far the highlight of the night. | |
| I didn't watch the whole thing. | |
| I'm just assuming. | |
| It was the only clip I've seen that made me chuckle. | |
| So Bill Burr walks out there. | |
| He says, wait a second. | |
| This isn't even the Grammys. | |
| No one's here. | |
| You're all just zooming in, you idiots. | |
| What are you doing? | |
| Okay, well, this is a waste. | |
| And okay, now I've got to read all these Spanish guy names. | |
| I bet they're going to get really angry at me, right? | |
| And so people are trying to cancel Bill Burr. | |
| And call him a racist and a white supremacist and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Now, if you're not a fan of Bill Burr, you might be persuaded by these kinds of attacks. | |
| However, if you do follow Bill Burdall, you will know that he's married to a black woman. | |
| He's obviously not a racist. | |
| If a guy married to a black woman can be a racist, then racism doesn't mean anything anymore. | |
| This reminds me of one time David Webb, a conservative commentator, he was hosting radio and a woman called in, a black liberal woman called in and they were disagreeing and she said, well you only think that David because of your white privilege. | |
| And David said, are you sure about that? | |
| Yeah, I know. | |
| It's your white privilege. | |
| He goes, you know, I think if we were in studio or on TV right now, you might change your opinion because David Webb is a black man. | |
| You hear this phrase, racism, white supremacy. | |
| It's just thrown out. | |
| It just means bad. | |
| It's just like throwing spaghetti at the wall. | |
| And then occasionally people get embarrassed by this sort of thing. | |
| I think Bill Burr, though, has exactly the right approach. | |
| Just laugh at this kind of nonsense. | |
| Laugh at the PC stuff. | |
| They get so angry when you laugh at it. | |
| So first you have to laugh. | |
| Then you have to be bold, though. | |
| You have to go out and follow that up with action. | |
| I have a great example of what we could do to show what we mean. | |
| University of Wisconsin-Madison. | |
| The student government, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, famously left-wing school, has just taken a vote. | |
| To double the ethnic studies requirement for graduates. | |
| The student government vote is not really going to matter, but it really caught my attention. | |
| Because if you can double the ethnic studies requirement, that means that there is an ethnic studies requirement. | |
| And that is a very bad idea. | |
| That's really bad. | |
| Ethnic studies, we also call this grievance studies, is an outgrowth of critical theory. | |
| It is a strictly ideological type of education based on very narrow leftist ideologies of the 20th century. | |
| It has destroyed, in many ways, classical liberal education in this country. | |
| It has no purpose in the university. | |
| Even the people who developed it acknowledged this was a different sort of thing. | |
| This was activism disguised as education. | |
| I detail this in my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available for pre-order now, but it won't be available once Amazon realizes what the book's about and kicks it off. | |
| So if you want to pre-order it, you can pre-order it now. | |
| This should not be permitted in the universities. | |
| Now, the trap that the left left for conservatives and that conservatives have fallen into is that some conservatives give in to this and say, yeah, it's great. | |
| Ethnic studies love that. | |
| You know, the kind of squishy types. | |
| But then even the other conservatives, a lot of them will say, well... | |
| You know, academic freedom, we support. | |
| We're the true liberals. | |
| We support all this kind of crap in the university. | |
| We want total inclusion and you expand the curriculum, but just don't make me take the class. | |
| Just don't make me take ethnic studies. | |
| But absolutely, you can have this poisonous ideological indoctrination in the universities totally. | |
| Academic freedom, free speech, right? | |
| No. | |
| No. | |
| William F. Buckley Jr., when he founded the conservative movement with his book, God and Man at Yale, subtitled that book, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. | |
| Academic freedom, he noted in the book, is a hoax. | |
| It's not real. | |
| It is a fraud that the left is perpetrating on us to destroy our institutions of education. | |
| It is not enough to say, hey, you have your ethnic studies courses, but just don't require us to take it. | |
| No, it should be banned from the university. | |
| It's poison. | |
| And not enough to say, hey, you know, you've got that punch bowl over there, and you want to put some cyanide in it? | |
| Okay, well, but just make sure the cyanide is only in your part of the punch bowl, okay? | |
| You're free to put it in, but just don't make me drink from that portion of the punch bowl. | |
| First of all, it's a punch bowl. | |
| We're all in it. | |
| The university is a university. | |
| Theoretically, it's got a coherence to it. | |
| So if you poison part of it, you poison the whole thing. | |
| Our society is not just atomized individuals who can all just live completely on their own and not have any effect on one another. | |
| If we go back to this example because it's the clearest. | |
| If our society is confused about who a man is and who a woman is, then that is a social problem. | |
| We can't live in a society where we all get to define our own words, where some of us call Caitlyn Jenner he and some of us call Caitlyn Jenner she. | |
| That just means we can't communicate with one another. | |
| That means we're speaking different languages. | |
| That means that we don't have a society, certainly not a functioning one. | |
| We have to come to terms with certain things and agree on certain things. | |
| And in this finite world of ours, we're going to include certain ideas, we're going to exclude certain ideas. | |
| And that's just the way it is. | |
| Nowhere is that truer than at the universities. | |
| The right, I think, has been very accommodating in the last century, certainly on the cultural matters. | |
| We've just rolled over, okay? | |
| But I think, even generally speaking, we try to play fair. | |
| You know, you have that conservative who's like, well, I respect your point of view, and we can all have these different points of views, and fair marketplace of ideas, and some students want to take this poisonous course in universities. | |
| That's I respect that, right? | |
| And, you know, but if you want to go to Drag Queen Story Hour, that's wonderful. | |
| And, you know, have transvestites twerking for toddlers at public libraries. | |
| I respect that, but just please let us go to church on Sunday. | |
| Oh, you're not going to let us go to church on Sunday because Dr. | |
| Fauci said no? | |
| Okay, well, whoopsie-daisy, we'll try again next time. | |
| Conservatives try to be really accommodating. | |
| You can tell my views on this sort of accommodation. | |
| The left does not. | |
| The left does not play fair. | |
| Nowhere is this clearer than in Washington Post correction that they just made. | |
| Washington Post, you'll recall, reported during the heat of the election and the election recounts, they had a headline, quote, Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction. | |
| This was... | |
| To some people, the basis of the case for impeaching Trump. | |
| It's a power grab. | |
| He's a tyrant. | |
| He's a dictator. | |
| He's trying to pressure this Georgia Secretary of State. | |
| This is illegal. | |
| It's unconstitutional. | |
| This was based on a scoop. | |
| That Trump, quote, urged Georgia's lead elections investigator to find the fraud in a lengthy December phone call, saying the official would be a national hero. | |
| The Washington Post cited a single anonymous source who, it then said, confirmed the details of the private conversation. | |
| Now, you'll note, if you have followed anything about journalism, anonymous sources cannot confirm. | |
| There's no confirming. | |
| Anonymous sources give you something, then you have to confirm it with a real source. | |
| They didn't do that. | |
| They just said, yeah, see, Trump, he's a terrible guy. | |
| So here's the correction. | |
| Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia Secretary of State released an audio recording of President Donald Trump's December phone call with the state's top elections investigator. | |
| The recording revealed that the Post misquoted Trump's comments on the call based on information provided by a source. | |
| Trump did not tell the investigator to find the fraud or say she would be a national hero if she did so. | |
| Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, asserting she would find dishonesty there. | |
| He also told her that she had the most important job in the country right now. | |
| A story about the recording can be found at this link. | |
| The headline and text of this story had been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump. | |
| Thanks. | |
| Thanks, Washington Post. | |
| That's good. | |
| First of all, no one, very, very few people are going to read that correction. | |
| Conservatives are people who listen to this show, maybe some others. | |
| Most people are not. | |
| Even if they were, even if this were national news all over all the networks being covered wall to wall, wouldn't matter because the reporting, which was really a Democratic hit job, already accomplished its goal of putting the political pressure on Trump, swaying the narrative surrounding the election, and giving Georgia cover not to conduct an exhaustive recount. | |
| Hmm. | |
| Oops. | |
| Do you think the Washington Post is going to change anything about the way that it operates after this? | |
| No. | |
| Doesn't matter. | |
| They got away with it. | |
| Oh, oops. | |
| Yeah, we had to issue a correction. | |
| The whole story was bogus. | |
| Haha, we won. | |
| What incentive does the Washington Post have right now to ever change the way that they do anything? | |
| They won't face no consequences. | |
| I do not think that conservatives should act in any immoral or unjust way. | |
| But it would be nice if we grew a spine. | |
| It would be nice if we played as tough as the left does. | |
| It would be nice if instead of conservatives constantly finding themselves in a circular firing squad where all we ever try to do is just police what all the other right-wingers are saying and thinking and doing, it would be nice if we focused any of our attention on the left and maybe had any kind of unity. | |
| The left is pretty unified. | |
| For a group of sort of squabbling radicals, they're pretty unified when it comes to political action. | |
| The right, not so much. | |
| Speaking of presidents, by the way, just in case you were sleeping too soundly at night, I would like to give you some nightmares. | |
| Meghan Markle, the erstwhile Duchess of Sussex, It's reportedly networking with top Democratic Party leaders and mulling a bid for the US presidency in 2024. | |
| This, according to the Daily Mail, which cites an unnamed British Labor Party official. | |
| Is this true? | |
| Do I believe this? | |
| I don't believe generally the things I read in the papers, but given the sort of Given the fact that Meghan Markle got her husband to leave his family, his royal family, move back to America, and she's constantly courting fame and public favor, yeah, wouldn't be shocked. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Stranger things have happened. | |
| She believes that Biden, who will be 82 in 2024, might not run for a second term. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| Meghan's biographer and longtime friend, Omid Scobie, has claimed that the actress, quote, has her eyes set on the U.S. presidency. | |
| First of all, why does Meghan Markle have a biographer? | |
| This is news to me. | |
| I guess the fact that the guy's a friend of hers would make sense because she's like, hey, get me a biography. | |
| I'm trying to run for office. | |
| On the one hand, this seems far-fetched. | |
| On another, Meghan Markle is the voice of a generation. | |
| She is. | |
| She is the classic millennial woman. | |
| Millennial person. | |
| Who would rather pretend to be a princess on Disney than be an actual princess. | |
| She would rather have the appearance of the thing, right? | |
| She would rather have the perks and the privileges of the thing rather than the substance of the thing. | |
| Big divide between left and right and, I think, a big marker of the millennial generation. | |
| Meghan Markle is no less qualified to be president than AOC, right? | |
| AOC is a clever politician. | |
| Meghan Markle is a clever politician. | |
| AOC doesn't know nothing about nothing with regard to, say, history, philosophy, geopolitics. | |
| But neither does the other one. | |
| Neither Markle nor AOC really know anything about that sort of stuff. | |
| Hasn't hampered either of their political careers. | |
| And Meghan Markle is a politician. | |
| Meghan Markle is an extraordinarily gifted politician. | |
| Meghan Markle nabbed herself a prince. | |
| And Meghan Markle not only nabbed herself a prince, she convinced him to leave the palaces, the castles, the country that his family symbolizes, and move with her to LA, right? | |
| I think they're living in LA. It's a city that I fled. | |
| LA, not a great place right now. | |
| Convinced Prince Harry to move with her to California, To do what? | |
| So that she could like do voiceovers for Disney? | |
| There's a great clip of Harry begging some entertainment CEOs, you know, you might hire my wife to do some voiceover work, yes? | |
| So that she can be an actress. | |
| That's pretty powerful political skill. | |
| Is Meghan coming up in 2024? | |
| Maybe. | |
| It'd be hard to imagine that Kamala Harris, who is a really skillful politician, which I've said from the very beginning. | |
| I said early on in 2016, or 2020 rather, I said, watch out for Kamala Harris. | |
| She's a shark. | |
| And then it seemed like my prediction was totally wrong because she was the first to drop out. | |
| But I think I was actually vindicated because she, more than anyone else on that stage other than Joe Biden, has been able to amass political power. | |
| And frankly, maybe more so than Joe Biden because I think very few people believe Joe's actually running anything over there at the White House. | |
| Speaking of people who want to be president, but who are also long shots at being president, poor Andrew Cuomo. | |
| Poor Andrew Cuomo. | |
| Poor, deadly Andrew Cuomo, whose policies directly led to the deaths of thousands of elderly New Yorkers. | |
| He's really under fire. | |
| Jen Psaki was asked whether or not he should resign. | |
| What's the White House's opinion? | |
| Here's her answer. | |
| Does the president believe the governor should resign? | |
| No. | |
| The President believes that every woman who's come forward, there have now been six, I believe, who have come forward, deserves to have her voice heard, should be treated with respect, and should be able to tell her story. | |
| There also is an independent investigation that is ongoing, of course, in the state, with subpoena power overseen by the Attorney General, and he certainly supports that moving forward. | |
| We, of course, have watched the news of a number of lawmakers call for that, but I don't have any additional announcements from here. | |
| So, still playing it safe. | |
| Classic Biden move. | |
| Well, yeah, you've seen a lot of lawmakers calling for his resignation. | |
| You know, we're monitoring closely. | |
| We work. | |
| So, they're still holding on for now. | |
| I have told you, look, it looks like it's difficult for Cuomo to survive this, so he might have to finally go. | |
| But if anybody is going to survive this scandal, it's going to be Andy Cuomo. | |
| That guy is a political animal. | |
| He has been in the game since he ran his father's governor campaign in New York at age 23. | |
| A lot of people owe him a lot of favors. | |
| It's a very corrupt state. | |
| And Andrew Cuomo knows how to exercise the levers of power. | |
| But a lot of lawmakers are calling for his resignation. | |
| It started out, it was just a few here and there. | |
| Then AOC calls for an investigation. | |
| Then the leaders of the Senate and the Assembly in New York, both Democrats, call for his resignation or impeachment, says he can't be governor anymore. | |
| Then Schumer and Gillibrand. | |
| These are the two senators from New York. | |
| They've been there a long time, especially Chuck Schumer. | |
| I remember the night Schumer got elected. | |
| In, what was it, 98? | |
| Something like that? | |
| You know, this guy's been in office for a long time. | |
| He's a big power broker. | |
| He's the Senate majority leader. | |
| Schumer and Gillibrand say, quote, Confronting and overcoming the COVID crisis requires sure and steady leadership. | |
| We commend the brave actions of the individuals who have come forward with serious allegations of abuse and misconduct. | |
| Due to the multiple credible sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, it's clear that Governor Cuomo has lost the confidence of his governing partners and the people of New York. | |
| Governor Cuomo should resign. | |
| Brilliant piece of political messaging. | |
| Classic Schumer statement. | |
| Andrew Cuomo should resign because his policies killed thousands of New Yorkers needlessly during COVID because he handled COVID worse than any other governor in the entire country. | |
| That's why he should be booted from office. | |
| He should not be booted from office because he gave a reporter a hot dog at a political event or looked at some staffer funny or who knows. | |
| Now the allegations are getting a little bit more serious, but the methodical way in which they have been trotted out makes me a little skeptical that the sex allegations are really what's doing it. | |
| I just, I just don't buy it. | |
| It's all too politically convenient. | |
| And it redounds to the benefit of Democrats for Cuomo to be booted out for sex inappropriate behavior. | |
| What is it even? | |
| What are the allegations? | |
| Now they're saying he groped someone. | |
| That's only the very most recent one. | |
| Most of them are, yeah, he looked at me weird. | |
| Yeah, he said something weird. | |
| Yeah, he gave me a hot dog. | |
| And then the reporter that he gave the hot dog to says, it didn't bother me at all. | |
| I thought it was fine. | |
| Confronting and overcoming the COVID crisis requires sure and steady leadership. | |
| So they get to the COVID thing. | |
| They're like, yeah, COVID is the point. | |
| But we're not booting him because Democrats mishandled COVID. No, no. | |
| What? | |
| Huh? | |
| No, it's because of the serious allegations of giving an Italian sausage to a reporter. | |
| It's a sandwich, you know, peppers and onions. | |
| That's why, very serious, that he's got to be kicked out. | |
| No, it's obviously because of COVID. If he's going to go down, let him go down because of COVID. If he goes down for the vague sex allegations, only Cuomo goes down. | |
| If he goes down for COVID, other people go down too. | |
| Other Democrats who were involved in this go down too. | |
| Maybe it reaches up a little bit higher than people think. | |
| Maybe the state democratic machine in New York has a lot of culpability. | |
| Maybe we should prod into that. | |
| The real threat Cuomo faces right now, I don't think, is from these howling politicians. | |
| He doesn't care less. | |
| He couldn't possibly care less what they think. | |
| It's from his ability to actually run the government. | |
| There are reports now, who knows how true they are, but this is according to the New York Post, that members of Cuomo's staff have stopped showing up for work. | |
| They're not showing up for work because they're afraid that if they continue to fight to the very last with Cuomo, that will harm their political careers. | |
| So I'm going to take this story at face value. | |
| People are saying that the state capitol building is virtually empty. | |
| Okay, fair enough. | |
| Now, how busy has it been even before this? | |
| I don't know. | |
| People have been working from home and telecommuting, particularly in New York, because coronavirus was bad there because of Cuomo's policies. | |
| So... | |
| How bad is it really? | |
| Can Cuomo still command his team? | |
| Doesn't really matter if he can command some howling politicians in the Assembly or the Senate or Schumer or Gillibrand even. | |
| Can he command his team? | |
| If he can, he might be able to survive. | |
| And he's a pretty ruthless administrator. | |
| Before we go, I have to mention Daylight Savings Time. | |
| Because we're talking about evolution or revolution. | |
| You know, we're talking about how to conserve things. | |
| We're talking about the Catholic Church, right, is a good model for this, actually, because the views have developed over time. | |
| The Church has not contradicted itself. | |
| The Church can't contradict itself because on matters of dogma, that is the truth, and the truth doesn't just magically transform overnight. | |
| But doctrine has developed, fair enough. | |
| Daylight savings time. | |
| Speaking of people not showing up to work, daylight savings time. | |
| I have long defended daylight savings time. | |
| I think it's kind of a fun, weird, quirky tradition that we have. | |
| However, I always say that in the fall when we get an extra hour. | |
| Then in the spring, I don't like it so much. | |
| This might be a tradition that we might try phasing out. | |
| This is actually how we're doing it in the country. | |
| Different states are kind of getting rid of it or modifying it or slowly phasing it out. | |
| That might be good and I might look more rested this week if we had done that. | |
| But this is actually a pretty good model, I think, for all sorts of policy. | |
| Doing things gradually, trying things out in different areas, laboratories of democracy, evolution, not revolution. | |
| This is a conservative way to look at things. | |
| That's not what the left wants. | |
| The left wants a radical cultural revolution, and they're shocked. | |
| The only shock they can feel is when we don't get on board immediately. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| show. | |
| See you tomorrow. | |
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| The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production coordinator McKenna Waters. | |
| The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021. | |
| Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the Washington Post issues one of the worst retractions in modern history. | |
| The media justify Joe Biden's absence from press conferences. | |
| And the Vatican shocks the world by being Catholic. | |
| And Don Lemon is really mad about it. | |
| That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show. |