An improbable Republican floats a bid for president, a bunch of states pass excellent regulation, and BLM gets caught with its fingers in the cookie jar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| It's over. | |
| It's over. | |
| The 2024 presidential primary campaign has not begun yet, but it's already over. | |
| Ron DeSantis, go home. | |
| Ted Cruz, stay in Texas. | |
| Nikki Haley, don't even try. | |
| We know who the Republican Party nominee is going to be. | |
| She's floating the idea of a campaign. | |
| It was so obvious that Liz Cheney is apparently entertaining a 2024 Republican bid for president. | |
| It really, really is over, huh? | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is the Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Welcome back to the show. | |
| My favorite comment yesterday is from Donald Trump J on YouTube, who says, impeach Joe Biden, save our nation. | |
| Oh, my sweet, sweet child, would that it were so simple. | |
| But it is not so simple. | |
| If you impeached Joe Biden, do you know what would change? | |
| Absolutely nothing whatsoever. | |
| Because Joe Biden is nobody. | |
| Joe Biden is a suit in human shape. | |
| There's only air blowing in between that suit and There is nothing that he wakes up in the morning, he puts his finger in the air, he feels the wind blowing. | |
| He's nothing but the avatar of the liberal establishment which has power and which exercises power. | |
| And the GOP does not have any similar institutional or cultural sway. | |
| Which is why the GOP today is like herding a bunch of cats. | |
| It's so split. | |
| It is so absolutely out of its mind that Liz Cheney is actually considering running for president. | |
| Oh my goodness. | |
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| Liz Cheney, man. | |
| That lady. | |
| Is a representative of the very desiccated, shallow, ridiculous liberal wing of the party that dominated for, I don't know, the past 20, 30 years or so, but has really fallen out of favor, especially in beginning in 2016 and certainly through 2020. | |
| Liz Cheney was one of the only people on the Republican side to vote to impeach President Trump, even though she's in House Republican leadership. | |
| Kevin McCarthy, who is the Republican leader in the House, has finally come out and said, you know, this Liz Cheney lady, she's really making things tough. | |
| McCarthy made a good point. | |
| He said, there is a responsibility. | |
| If you're going to be in leadership, leaders eat last. | |
| And when leaders try to go out and not work as one team, it creates difficulties. | |
| When he says leaders eat last, he's referring to a buffet line. | |
| You go out there and you got to make sure all your guys are fed first. | |
| You got to make sure you're taking care of all the people in your team. | |
| But Liz Cheney doesn't do that because Liz Cheney is not really a Republican. | |
| And what I mean by that, I'm not just saying she's a rhino, you know, this very often overused line. | |
| What I'm saying is she doesn't care at all about the Republican Party. | |
| Obviously not. | |
| She didn't vote for the Republican for president. | |
| I don't think she did in 2016. | |
| She certainly didn't in 2020. | |
| Then she voted to impeach him. | |
| Liz Cheney represents her wing of the Democratic Party. | |
| Call it the neocons. | |
| That's the term usually applied to it. | |
| meaning people who are very, very much supportive of adventurism abroad, American empire abroad, but don't particularly care for conservative priorities at home. | |
| That group of people made up one third of the Reagan coalition. | |
| You had the Warhawk, former Democrat types in the Reagan coalition. | |
| Then you had the economic libertarians, and then you had the traditional conservatives and the religious right in there as well. | |
| And for the past 30 years or so, after the Cold War, when this coalition's been trying to hobble along, the traditional conservatives, they always cave. | |
| The religious right always caves. | |
| We go along, we get in line, we go along with, say, the libertarians. | |
| The libertarians sometimes cave too, particularly on foreign policy. | |
| But whatever, we go along, we get along, we vote, we go with the nominee. | |
| And then that third group, those war hawk, ex-liberal, neocon, whatever word you want to use, they don't go along. | |
| The minute they saw a candidate that they don't like, namely Donald Trump, they're out. | |
| They become never Trump. | |
| They vote for some Egg McMuffin candidate. | |
| They, in 2020, vote for Joe Biden, many of them. | |
| Well, then you can't be part of the coalition. | |
| A political coalition doesn't work that way. | |
| If two constituent parts of it always give up everything for the team, and then the third part, the minute they don't get their way, they don't go along with it, then you're just not on the team. | |
| And that's the issue with Liz Cheney here. | |
| I suspect, actually, the reason Cheney's talking about running in 2024 is because she knows that her chances of surviving a primary are very, very low for her congressional race. | |
| So she's trying to pretend like she's going to run for something else. | |
| No, that isn't going to happen. | |
| Liz Cheney, who is the past of the GOP, raises this question. | |
| If she's the past, then what is the future? | |
| What is the future of the GOP? | |
| And we have all, everyone has different sorts of answers. | |
| I've got a very basic answer that I think is the bare minimum if the GOP is to have a future. | |
| If the GOP is going to survive, the GOP needs to be the party of doing things. | |
| Doing things for a long time. | |
| I know this sounds very basic, but it's something that the Republican Party, I think, needs to hear. | |
| For a very long time, the GOP predicated its entire identity on not doing things. | |
| They took up this sort of pseudo-quasi-libertarian language of, you know, if the government that governs best governs least, you know, anytime the government does anything, it's illegitimate. | |
| Taxation is theft, whatever, all these kinds of slogans. | |
| The minute the government passes any laws, that's over-regulation. | |
| We got to get rid of that. | |
| We got to cut taxes. | |
| We got to do less and less and less. | |
| No. | |
| Uh-uh. | |
| Never was particularly coherent. | |
| Certainly isn't coherent right now going up against a liberal establishment that controls everything. | |
| The GOP vision that will have a future, if it is to have a future, is a GOP that does things. | |
| Give you an example. | |
| The Montana legislature yesterday passed a bill prohibiting employers from requiring their employees to get the COVID vaccine as a condition of employment. | |
| This is a regulation that will be passed to create a new requirement for businesses to impede what businesses want to do. | |
| This is big government, if ever I saw it, and I love it. | |
| I'm really glad that the government is going in We the people, or they the people of Montana, through their elected representatives, using the government to stop businesses from doing what the businesses want to do to protect the rights and liberties and traditional way of life of Montanans. | |
| That's good. | |
| I know some people who are used to the libertarian language, they're going to say, I don't know, regulation on business that tells them they can't do what they want to do. | |
| That's a good thing. | |
| More regulation in this case means more freedom. | |
| More regulation in this case means a greater protection of the American way of life. | |
| I don't want to get the vaccine. | |
| I don't want to get it. | |
| I don't feel any need to get it. | |
| I am young. | |
| I think I'm healthy. | |
| My odds of facing a serious complication from this virus are not zero, but pretty close. | |
| I don't want private companies to make me get the vaccine. | |
| Not even as a condition of employment. | |
| I think I'm probably safe at this place. | |
| But as a condition of travel. | |
| As a condition of going into restaurants. | |
| And I want to use the power of the state to stop companies and the state from making me get the vaccine. | |
| Big government to protect my liberties. | |
| Joe Rogan seems to be on the same page. | |
| Politics is a very strange thing. | |
| Joe Rogan was a Bernie bro. | |
| Do you remember that? | |
| But Joe Rogan understands this, whatever this liberal establishment is doing with the coronavirus as the excuse, this is no bueno. | |
| This is really bad. | |
| This is not particularly sensible. | |
| Joe Rogan comes out and says, if you're young, don't get the vaccine. | |
| People say, do you think it's safe to get vaccinated? | |
| I've said, yeah, I think for the most part it's safe to get vaccinated. | |
| I do. | |
| I do. | |
| But if you're like 21 years old and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? | |
| I go, no. | |
| Are you healthy? | |
| Are you a healthy person? | |
| Like, look, don't do anything stupid, but you should take care of yourself. | |
| If you're a healthy person and you're exercising all the time and you're young and you're eating well, I don't think you need to worry about this. | |
| Yeah, I tend to agree with you. | |
| But there's a lot of jobs that will tell you you need to have this. | |
| Well, that's what's starting to happen now. | |
| People are worried about them doing it for their children. | |
| And we talked about this earlier, that you might have to have your children vaccinated. | |
| And I can tell you as someone who's both my children got the virus, it was nothing. | |
| I mean, I hate to say that. | |
| If someone's children died from this, I'm very sorry that that happened. | |
| I'm not in any way diminishing that. | |
| But I'm saying the personal experience that my children had with COVID was nothing. | |
| Preach, my man. | |
| Preach. | |
| Yes. | |
| Right. | |
| For most people. | |
| I know someone who died ostensibly from COVID or complications of COVID. It's a little tricky because we know that there was some overreporting here. | |
| But a former teacher of mine died. | |
| Ostensibly from COVID. He was 97 and still sad, but there is a difference between a 97-year-old and a 30-year-old and a 21-year-old. | |
| And what Joe Rogan is saying is, hey, if you're really young, you don't need to get this vaccine. | |
| You don't. | |
| And I'm not questioning the safety of the vaccine. | |
| Please, hey, YouTube, I'm not questioning the safety of the vaccine. | |
| Okay, please, let me, please don't cast me into the outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth. | |
| But what I am saying is this. | |
| This was a vaccine that was developed extraordinarily quickly. | |
| There have, by definition, been no long-term studies of this. | |
| Why would I get it if I don't need it? | |
| I don't get a flu shot either because I'm not afraid of the flu. | |
| I actually, I could suffer some long... | |
| It's not a 0% risk that I suffer some serious consequence from this virus or from the flu. | |
| I'm just looking at my risk here. | |
| And the fact that the liberal establishment is so dead set on making me get this thing and forcing my hand and not letting me travel and not letting me get on an airplane and not letting me go to work and not letting me interact in polite society if I don't get this thing is... | |
| The chief reason why I'm not interested in getting it. | |
| It's weird. | |
| It reminds me of Antonin Scalia's dissent in Obergefell v. | |
| Hodges, the gay marriage case, where he said, what the law has to say about marriage is of relatively little interest to me, but it is of great interest to me. | |
| Who rules me? | |
| Who rules me? | |
| I think the GOP gets this. | |
| I think we're now in a, in a world where the Democrats are the party of public health, of the experts, of the bureaucracy, of Dr. Fauci. | |
| That's been the case for a hundred years, since at least Wilson. | |
| And the GOP is the K, the party of the traditional American way of life, of prudence, of not being governed by a bunch of eggheads in lab coats. | |
| Well, okay, good. | |
| Stand up for it then. | |
| And if that means passing big government regulations to stop private businesses from forcing us all to get the jab, even if as a matter of statistics, and risk, it's, it's not really all that necessary, then so be it. | |
| Much more important to protect the actual liberty, right, and traditional way of life. | |
| When I think of tradition... | |
| I want to go back to, before all this crazy time when we have everything is newfangled and highly technical and all that, I want to go back to a simple time when a man could grow out a beard, you know? | |
| And a man could grow out a beard and look like a caveman. | |
| How traditional is that? | |
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| And good luck winning the stash of goods. | |
| Joe Rogan comes out and says, look, if you're young, you're really not at much risk of this virus, so don't let them force you to do a bunch of stuff you don't want to do. | |
| Joy Reid on MSNBC takes the opposite approach. | |
| She says that she has been vaccinated And yet when she goes outside to exercise, she still wears not one, but two masks. | |
| Dr. | |
| Gupta, I am among the fully vaccinated. | |
| Joined Team Pfizer. | |
| And I did go jogging today in the park. | |
| And I did, this was the mask that I wore with a doctor's mask under it. | |
| And most of the people that I saw that were in the park, the park was packed. | |
| I would say like 95% of the people still had masks on. | |
| There are people who are getting really upset about that. | |
| I won't name them. | |
| Should people be freaking out that some people like myself who are vaccinated are still wearing masks outdoors? | |
| Should we do that? | |
| So first of all, I don't think anybody is freaking out on the side of take your masks off. | |
| I think if we were to judge relative levels of freak out, I think it's the neurotics who are wearing two masks while they go jogging and jabbing themselves with 25 vaccines, even if they're relatively healthy. | |
| I think just as a matter of who's freaking out. | |
| I also don't think that Joy Reid did this. | |
| It's very difficult to run when you've got a mask on, much less two masks on, and I just don't believe her. | |
| But let's say that she did it. | |
| There were three positions on the masks. | |
| One is, you must wear the masks all the time, outdoors, two masks, right? | |
| There's some version of that. | |
| Then there is, well, wear one if you want. | |
| Don't wear one if you don't want. | |
| Just don't make me do it. | |
| You know, this is all about individual choice and you can have the choice to do whatever choice you want to choice. | |
| And then there's the third position. | |
| This is the conservative position, which is cut it out with the masks. | |
| It is weird to be wearing these masks and It is dysfunctional for society for us all to walk around looking like banditos. | |
| People should be able to see each other's faces. | |
| We should be able to see one another smile. | |
| We should be able to see one another speak. | |
| We should not muscle up ourselves all the time. | |
| The cloth masks are ugly. | |
| They're a weird social convention and I don't like them. | |
| And if there ever was a scientific argument for it, remember we read a peer-reviewed scientific article from the NIH on this show just last week. | |
| Which suggested that the masks are actually bad for one's health. | |
| But sure, let's say that there are other studies and articles that say the masks are good for one's health. | |
| Okay. | |
| There is no argument to be made anymore when everybody can get the vaccine. | |
| When even the exalted Dr. | |
| Fauci, in his 75th position on the masks, I think at last count, is saying that no, you don't need to wear them outside. | |
| We should actively discourage it. | |
| The left has a point when they say that personal choices have political consequences. | |
| This was a phrase of the second wave feminists in the 1970s. | |
| They said the personal is the political. | |
| They have a point. | |
| Our individual choices in our private lives have political effect because politics is just all of us together. | |
| It's the most basic definition of politics. | |
| It's the same problem that you see with the transgender issue. | |
| Well, look, if you want to call Bruce Jenner or Caitlyn Jenner, if you want to call him her, that's your personal choice. | |
| And my personal choice is to call him him. | |
| And we're just all a bunch of personal choices. | |
| Isn't that what politics is? | |
| Just everyone making personal choices? | |
| No. | |
| Because then you can't even communicate. | |
| The most basic thing we need to be able to do in politics is speak to one another and understand what these symbols of our words are referring to out there in objective reality. | |
| If we can't agree on pronouns, we have nothing in politics to bind us together. | |
| You actually need to move beyond this weak, ridiculous language of personal choice and say, personal choice to do what? | |
| Freedom of speech, right? | |
| Freedom of speech to say what? | |
| Freedom of belief. | |
| Freedom of belief to believe what? | |
| What are we talking about here? | |
| Same thing goes for the masks. | |
| If you have a society where half the population is wearing these secular keffias on their face all the time, these scientific mantillas, and they look like they're in full burqa, and then you've got half of society, which looks normal, You're not going to have a coherent, cohesive society. | |
| It's just not going to work. | |
| You have to make a choice. | |
| Are we going to be a society that dresses up like banditos or are we going to be a normal society? | |
| I think we should be a normal society. | |
| So we need to discourage masks. | |
| Say, for instance, when you walk into a bank, you're not allowed to wear a mask. | |
| When you're walking around in public, you are actively discouraged from wearing these sorts of things. | |
| It's the party of doing something. | |
| But Michael, personal choice. | |
| Yeah, there is more to politics than personal choice. | |
| Idaho, proving this beyond the masks, proving this beyond the COVID issue. | |
| Idaho just signed a great heartbeat bill. | |
| The Idaho Republican governor, Brad Little, signed a bill on Tuesday that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be protected. | |
| It's called the Fetal Heartbeat Pre-Born Child Protection Act. | |
| Prohibits medical providers from performing abortion procedures after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is around four to six weeks of pregnancy, which would get rid of a whole lot of abortions. | |
| A woman who receives an abortion would be allowed to sue the medical provider who provided it. | |
| Really clever way to do this. | |
| Because you're making the abortionists the bad guys, which is important. | |
| The way that the pro-abortion people have been able to advance their argument. | |
| It's not really an argument, it's just an emotional appeal. | |
| As they say, you want to turn women who are desperate into criminals. | |
| No, no, we're just trying to turn the abortionists into criminals, actually. | |
| And that seems fine by me. | |
| And it actually creates an incentive for the women, even the ones who have procured abortions, to sue the people who provide the abortions. | |
| So it really puts a lot of pressure on the abortionists. | |
| Love that. | |
| Fabulous. | |
| But this is a big government. | |
| This is a big regulation. | |
| We can't. | |
| Come on, we're the party of personal choice. | |
| There are many people in the, call it the Liz Cheney wing of the party. | |
| The liberal wing of the Republican Party that will vote for, say, pro-abortion Democrats if the Republicans nominate someone that they don't like. | |
| There are a lot of them who will say, no, we can't do this. | |
| We need a big tent. | |
| Right, we need a big tent party for pro-abortion people. | |
| We need a big tent party for people who want to erase the fundamental distinction in human nature. | |
| We need a big tent party for people who want to go bomb the Middle East. | |
| But we don't have a big tent party for traditional conservatives. | |
| We don't have a big tent party for old-school libertarians. | |
| So how big is the tent, really? | |
| This language of personal choice as the be-all and end-all of politics, this was a trap that was laid before us by the liberal wing of the Republican Party, the adventurous overseas wing of the Republican Party that would go bomb the Middle East as their number one political priority. | |
| It was a trap. | |
| Because politics cannot just be about the formal question of personal choice. | |
| It has to be about what choices we're making. | |
| That's what we decide in self-government. | |
| What about this issue of abortion in Idaho? | |
| You know, we have a devout Catholic president. | |
| I don't know if you know that. | |
| The White House has really promoted this idea a lot. | |
| That the president, he's a devout Catholic. | |
| How dare you question his Catholicism? | |
| Well, he's really at odds with the Catholic Church on a fundamental question, which is life. | |
| Which, as Pope St. | |
| John Paul II pointed out, is not just merely one issue among many. | |
| This issue of life is... | |
| A basic issue. | |
| It's the basic right from which all the other rights come. | |
| So a reporter asks Jen Psaki, your devout Catholic boss there, Joe Biden, seems to be at odds with the Catholic bishops on this issue of using cells from aborted babies for scientific research. | |
| You want to explain that for us? | |
| Jen Psaki doesn't have much of an answer. | |
| As you well know, the administration just lifted the ban on researchers using fetal tissue from elective abortions. | |
| In the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the leaders of the president's own faith, said in reaction, it is deeply offensive, quote, to millions of Americans for our tax dollars to be used for research that collaborates with an industry built on the taking of innocent lives. | |
| How does the White House respond to that criticism? | |
| Look, I think the White House respectfully disagrees and we believe that it's important to invest in science and look for opportunities to cure diseases and I think that's what this is hopeful to do. | |
| Yes, the White House respectfully disagrees with this, with the bishops. | |
| But you're not allowed to respectfully disagree, by the way, if you're a Catholic. | |
| On an issue such as this, there's no like, well, you do you, and I'll do me, and that's my personal choice, and then we'll all just go sing the acoustic guitar songs at church on Sunday. | |
| No, it doesn't work that way. | |
| You've got to make these choices. | |
| And if you diverge from the church, from the moral order on this issue, you are putting yourself in grave danger. | |
| You're making a decision to not be a devout Catholic. | |
| This idea of personal choice doesn't take you very far. | |
| Ultimately, we will be judged on the specific choices. | |
| So we need to start talking in that kind of language because... | |
| With regard to Joe Biden and the Catholic Church, I'm speaking in a really eternal sense here and in the long game of judgment. | |
| But we will be judged as a political party for the choices that we are making here. | |
| This mealy-mouthed language of you-do-you ain't going to take us very far as a party either. | |
| Ben is going to be talking about all these crazy COVID choices that Joe Biden has made and how he's totally blown it. | |
| So make sure to check that out. | |
| Also join us tonight for a special episode of Backstage, where we will finally be watching Joe Biden's first congressional speech live. | |
| Who knows if it's live? | |
| I assume it's pre-taped for Joe Biden. | |
| I just assume anytime Joe Biden speaks, it's free taped. | |
| But he says it's going to be live. | |
| We will certainly be live. | |
| That's going to be a lot of fun tonight, 8.30 p.m. | |
| Eastern, 7.30 Central, on dailywire.com and on our YouTube channel over at Daily Wire. | |
| Also, we have another great episode of Candace coming at you this Friday. | |
| This week, Candace is hosting Dave Rubin. | |
| They're going to have a whole lot to discuss, especially what's going on in California, my old failed state of currently being run by New Salini. | |
| The new potential opponent, Caitlyn Jenner. | |
| Yep. | |
| Go check it out. | |
| Subscribe and stream Candice live on Fridays at 9 p.m. | |
| Eastern, 8 p.m. | |
| Central, only at Daily Wire. | |
| 25% off right now from a new membership with code Candice at dailywire.com slash subscribe. | |
| Subscribe. | |
| We will be right back with a lot more. | |
| Three cheers for big government. | |
| Once again, in Idaho. | |
| Idaho's passing a lot of great bills right now. | |
| They passed that great heartbeat bill, and now they're passing a bill to ban critical race theory in schools. | |
| This is HB 377, which will now be sent to GOP Governor Brad Little, and I hope he signs it. | |
| Total big government regulation here, folks. | |
| Limiting the choice and specifically the academic freedom of teachers to teach critical race theory. | |
| Oh, it's so backwards. | |
| It's so backwards. | |
| It's restrictive and depressive and not liberating and it's not for small government and it's perfect. | |
| It's terrific. | |
| I love it. | |
| I love it. | |
| Three positions on critical race theory. | |
| There is the mandate critical race theory. | |
| That's the left-wing position. | |
| There is the, look, if your school wants to teach it, that's fine, but just don't mandate it and just don't make me show up to that mandatory training on CRT. Come on, personal choice, right? | |
| That's the Kind of squishy position on critical race theory. | |
| Then there is the conservative position, which is that this is poison. | |
| This cuts at the heart, not just of the country, but of education itself. | |
| And it needs to be excised and banned and cast into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. | |
| That's the right view. | |
| Chesterton has a great line, which is that there is a thought that stops thought. | |
| And that is the only thought that ought to be stopped. | |
| There is. | |
| Critical race theory is among those thoughts that stop thought. | |
| Critical race theory, which is a derivative of critical theory, which is a derivative of the Western Marxist tradition that focuses much more on culture. | |
| It is one of the key components of political correctness. | |
| It's also one of the key aspects that I discuss in my upcoming book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for pre-order. | |
| You can even pre-order the audiobook, by the way, because I've been recording the audiobook for the past couple days. | |
| It's been a lot of fun. | |
| One of the aspects of critical race theory is not just that it castigates America as bigoted and racist and terrible, and it teaches children who are educated, in part, to learn about and love their country. | |
| It teaches them to do the opposite. | |
| It teaches them to hate their country. | |
| So that alone would suffice to get it banned. | |
| But critical race theory goes further and it doubts the possibility of reason itself. | |
| It undercuts the idea that we have faculties of reason, that we can know things about the outside world, the objective reality. | |
| It, in many ways, will dismiss essential aspects of our education as mere excuses for white supremacy. | |
| Do you remember a few years ago, the Smithsonian sent out a guide and it said that language like hard work and objective truth, that's, those are just code words for white supremacy. | |
| So we got to get rid of hard work and objective truth. | |
| That's the sort of gobbledygook and nonsense that comes out of critical race theory. | |
| So you see, if you go into an educational institution and you teach people reason and objective truth are false, you have not expanded the curriculum. | |
| You have not opened students' minds. | |
| You have undermined the entire education. | |
| You have limited education. | |
| Seems like you're expanding it, but you're actually limiting it. | |
| So here in Idaho, they have a bill that seems like it's a big government intrusion on freedom. | |
| Actually, it is a regulation, but it is expanding people's freedom. | |
| It is expanding people's education. | |
| It is making people more free by imposing more limits on what these lunatic teachers can do. | |
| That is fighting back by doing something. | |
| We need to fight back by doing... | |
| We're not going to fight back by doing nothing. | |
| We're not going to fight back by using the Andrew Breitbart doctrine as an excuse to not actually exercise political power. | |
| Breitbart said politics is downstream of culture. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| Like all slogans... | |
| Well, I'm sorry. | |
| It is true. | |
| Some slogans are not true at all. | |
| But like all slogans... | |
| It is not totally true. | |
| Yes, culture influences politics. | |
| We need to make better movies. | |
| We need to take over cultural institutions. | |
| No doubt about that. | |
| I'm 100% in agreement with that. | |
| But that is not an excuse for politicians who we elect to not do their jobs. | |
| Because politics influences culture too. | |
| The example I keep going back to is East Germany. | |
| East Germany is an atheist region. | |
| I think it's got a 10% rate of religiosity. | |
| West Germany, greater than 50% self-identification as religious. | |
| What's the difference? | |
| Is it a cultural difference in the flavors of bratwurst in the two areas? | |
| No, it's a political difference because the West was free and East Germany was dominated by an officially communist Soviet regime for the Cold War. | |
| So the Berlin Wall falls, the Soviet Union falls, but the cultural effects of that political regime continue to dominate in East Germany. | |
| So we need to be able to exercise that too. | |
| Great way to do it, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb just signed a law last week that will protect the state's churches by designating them as essential and forbidding state authorities from treating them differently than secular establishments during public health emergencies. | |
| You saw this happen. | |
| I especially saw this happen firsthand in California during the height of last year's coronavirus hysteria. | |
| Churches were shut down. | |
| You weren't allowed to go inside churches. | |
| You were told then if you did go inside, you were not allowed to sing. | |
| They really did persecute the churches. | |
| But the marijuana dispensaries were essential. | |
| That had to stay open. | |
| That was an essential service. | |
| You saw this in other places where churches were closed but casinos were open, let's say. | |
| That is not hypocrisy, exactly. | |
| It's a hierarchy. | |
| Certain things are more important to the dominant liberal regime than churches. | |
| Basically, everything is more important to the dominant liberal regime than churches. | |
| That's the state-established church of secular progressivism that we're living under. | |
| So we need to fight back. | |
| By passing a big government regulation that says that churches are essential. | |
| They're at least on par with marijuana dispensaries and casinos. | |
| Because while politics is downstream of culture, there are some rivers in this world flow in the other direction. | |
| And one might say with equal seriousness that culture is downstream of politics. | |
| The left does not recognize the religious character of its political program. | |
| I think this is in part why conservatives are so bad at actually doing things in politics. | |
| Part of it is because we've been tricked by stupid cowardly language from the Liz Cheney wing of the party for 20 years. | |
| But part of it is because we have churches. | |
| Part of it is because for the right... | |
| Our policies are not everything. | |
| You know, we have churches, we have civic associations, we have our families, and the left has less and less of that. | |
| And they combine a lot of these things. | |
| For the left, their politics is their religion. | |
| I'm not the first guy to say it. | |
| But more people are catching on to that. | |
| Whereas the right is pretty clear. | |
| Yeah, here's my church. | |
| Here's my religion. | |
| Here's my politics. | |
| Here's how they interact. | |
| Here's how they're separate. | |
| For the left, they say, we don't have a religion. | |
| No, we don't have a church. | |
| We're scientific. | |
| We just do what works. | |
| You know, whatever our high priest, Dr. | |
| Fauci, tells us to do. | |
| They don't understand. | |
| They're not aware of it. | |
| But some people are waking up, like Rose McGowan, who is this actress. | |
| She was very central to the Me Too movement. | |
| Rose went on Fox News and came out and said that the Democratic Party is a replacement church. | |
| It's like a cult. | |
| As some of you know, as some of you don't know, if you've heard my name or read anything on me in the media, I grew up in a cult. | |
| And it was a very famous cult called Children of God. | |
| And it gave me a superpower. | |
| It gave me the ability to see the control. | |
| And the propaganda machine, especially in the U.S., for what it is and how it harms people and how the left can harm people just as much as the right if they go very, very deep into it and ignore all other aspects of kind of reality in a way and that you're serving a master that might not be serving you. | |
| And I always say I come in peace. | |
| I am not here To make people feel bad about their political choices. | |
| But I am here to say that you might be in a cult, too, if you don't know the signs. | |
| And I do believe Democrats most especially are in a deep cult that they really don't What she's saying here is not merely that the Democrats are a cult. | |
| I think that's true, largely, but that sounds like a relatively more shallow political hit, right? | |
| That's just, yeah, you're in a cult. | |
| You're okay, fine. | |
| But she's taking this further and making a very insightful point here. | |
| She said, at least for the Republicans who are in a cult, and culture and cult have a lot to do with one another. | |
| People call all sorts of religions cult. | |
| But at least for the Republicans, at least for the people on the right, they know that they're in it. | |
| Plenty of people call the Catholic Church a cult. | |
| I would call it the one true church. | |
| I know that I'm in it. | |
| I'm right out with you here. | |
| I say, yes, I am in the Catholic Church, which believes certain things and doesn't believe other things. | |
| Maybe you're a Methodist. | |
| People call that a cult. | |
| Well, very few people are Methodists still these days. | |
| But let's say that you are. | |
| You know that you're in it. | |
| You use that term. | |
| People on the left don't know that they're in it. | |
| They don't know that when they say that a baby is not a baby that a baby is a baby if the mother wants the baby but a baby is not a baby if the mother doesn't want a baby that they are making a very Bizarre religious claim about personhood and ensoulment and human dignity. | |
| They don't realize that when they say that a man who believes that he is a woman is really a woman, that they are making a religious claim called Gnostic dualism in that particular case. | |
| They're not aware of that. | |
| They don't possess the language to understand that. | |
| They don't have the sort of philosophical or theological education to make sense of that. | |
| And what Rose McGowan here is saying is, and this is true even beyond these most obviously philosophical and theological questions, this is true just in the structure of the Democratic Party. | |
| People don't know that they're in the cult. | |
| You know, one, two most famous things about cults. | |
| What are they? | |
| The two things you can always expect from a cult. | |
| Sex scandal, financial scandal, right? | |
| This is true of all human institutions. | |
| We were talking about the Catholic Church before. | |
| Catholic Church has faced both of these sorts of things. | |
| Sex scandal and financial scandal. | |
| People try to pretend that the Catholic Church is the only group that's ever faced this. | |
| Of course, for those who have actually looked into the numbers, public school teachers are much more likely to sexually abuse children than members of the Catholic clergy. | |
| The Catholics in many ways were singled out for this, but this is true throughout religious groups, and it's true certainly far more so in the secular society. | |
| But financial scandals, too. | |
| There was that great documentary on the Waco siege. | |
| It was a docudrama, rather. | |
| It was a fictionalized account of this. | |
| There's a great line in it where the FBI interrogator and negotiation guy is talking to the people in the house. | |
| He said, hey, do you ever find it weird how all these prophets of God always seem to have sex with all the women? | |
| Isn't that kind of strange? | |
| God is always telling them to have sex with all the women. | |
| Isn't that bizarre? | |
| So you see this especially in cults. | |
| Lots of sex scandals, but more so even lots of financial scandals. | |
| We got that in BLM. BLM, one of the most religious aspects of the left establishment right now. | |
| They provide this idea that the pervasive sin that has caused the fall of man is white supremacy, and the only way that we can ever redeem ourselves is by chanting this incantation, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, performing these kind of rituals in the streets. | |
| This idea that if you go out to... | |
| I don't know, go to the playground during COVID, you're killing everybody. | |
| If you go walk on the sidewalk, you're going to kill everybody with the virus. | |
| But if you show out by the thousands and you loot and riot, that that's actually going to help solve the problem of COVID because it's going to solve white supremacy. | |
| Public health officials actually wrote that in a letter. | |
| Well, here comes the scandal. | |
| We know that BLM now stands for Buy Large Mansions. | |
| Patrice Cullors, the co-founder of it, has been buying up lots of very swanky property all around the place. | |
| She's denying any impropriety. | |
| She says, I never took money from BLM. Not in several years at least. | |
| Well, now we're finding out how she got the money. | |
| According to campaign finance records, an LA-based jail reform group called Reform LA Jails, founded and led by Patrice Cullors, made payments to multiple figures and organizations linked to Cullors herself, including her own consulting firm, as well as a luxury resort in Malibu. including her own consulting firm, as well as a luxury So she was, she founds an organization that is affiliated with Black Lives Matter. | |
| She then has the organization raise a ton of money on the arguments presented by Black Lives Matter. | |
| Then she pays her private company through the organization with the money raised because of the arguments made by Black Lives Matter. | |
| So she paid herself just through that one organization in that one place to that one company, 60 grand. | |
| She paid another 44 grand to Bowers Consulting Firm, whose founder and president, Shalamia Bowers, appears to be a board member on another non-profit founded by colors, Dignity and Power Now. | |
| It is, my friends, a racket, but this is how political organization that is effective is really done. | |
| People amass positions of influence within the culture, and they raise big money, and they wield that big money for big political influence, and it doesn't matter how much we investigate this woman. | |
| There's very little that we can do about it because she's got the power. | |
| Because the liberal establishment, more broadly, has the power. | |
| We can point it out, but if we're not willing to wield power, it's not going to matter very much. | |
| That and $1.50 will get us a cup of coffee. | |
| BLM is not the only left-wing organization that's got a financial scandal right now. | |
| A former Obama White House advisor has been caught stealing money, reportedly, from a charter school network that he founded. | |
| Very similar scandal to the scandal that we're seeing from Patrice Cullors at BLM, except that she was apparently a little more clever about it. | |
| Federal authorities arrested the former Obama White House advisor, Seth Andrew, for allegedly stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a charter school network that he founded. | |
| DOJ announced this in a press release. | |
| He's facing charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements to a financial institution related to a scheme stealing a couple hundred grand. | |
| It's amazing that these people would destroy their lives for 200 grand. | |
| But he got caught. | |
| That's the problem. | |
| BLM appears to be doing all the same sort of stuff. | |
| They found these non-profits for the prisoners, for the people, for the oppressed, and then they use that to send money to their own private companies, which are going to send money back to these people, which are going to pay off political favors to other people on the boards of other organizations, and they're going to raise more money. | |
| They're just better at it. | |
| It's the same sort of thing. | |
| So, what I am suggesting, I know this is radical, is... | |
| What if we build up political organizations that are just as effective? | |
| I don't want them to be dishonest. | |
| I don't want them to be immoral. | |
| I don't want them to be unjust. | |
| I don't think we have to. | |
| But I think we can build up political organizations that can influence private companies and influence the government, just like BLM has, that do have lots of money. | |
| How much money did BLM raise? | |
| Something like 90 million dollars. | |
| So much money that you had the BLM activists in Ferguson demanding a cut. | |
| They say, hey, give us a little taste. | |
| How come you guys are making all that money? | |
| BLM New York is now looking at Patrice Cullors and saying, hey, how come you're getting all that money? | |
| Give us some of that money. | |
| A lot of money in these organizations. | |
| What if we did it the right way, in the moral way, but we did it nonetheless so that we could wield real political power? | |
| Right now, John Kerry is being accused of some serious impropriety. | |
| John Kerry is the climate czar in the Biden administration. | |
| He is being accused of leaking information to the Iranian foreign minister, who's his very good friend, Javad Zarif. | |
| We used to, we used to make fun of this when John Kerry was the secretary of state. | |
| He'd spend his days, Javad, hello, Javi. | |
| Javi, baby, I'm sorry what they're doing to you, honey, but we're, don't worry. | |
| I mean, he would actually, he was caught back channeling to Javad Zarif during the Trump administration and saying, hey, don't pay attention to this guy. | |
| We'll switch things. | |
| Don't come on, don't rip up the Iran deal. | |
| Come on, baby, please. | |
| So the Iranian foreign minister, Javad, has revealed in a leaked phone call that Kerry told Iran that Israel was behind hundreds of attacks on Iranian assets in Syria. | |
| Hey, Jen Psaki, do you have an answer about this? | |
| Come on, what's the answer here? | |
| In tapes obtained by the New York Times, Iran's Foreign Minister says that former Secretary of State John Kerry informed him that Israel attacked Iranian interests at least 200 times. | |
| As the Secretary has shifted roles, he still continues to represent the United States on a world stage. | |
| Does the President have any comment or reaction to Kerry telling the Iranians about covert military action on the part of Israel? | |
| We're not going to comment on leaked tapes. | |
| We're not going to comment on that because it's obviously true. | |
| So we're just not going to comment on that. | |
| And she doesn't have to comment. | |
| She'll get one question maybe from a reporter in the room. | |
| Very few people are going to cover this. | |
| This is probably one of the few shows that's going to cover this. | |
| She doesn't need to give an answer because she is an avatar of the left which has institutional power. | |
| And so they just don't need to worry about this sort of thing. | |
| And if the right wants to affect anything, if the right wants to advance its agenda, it's not enough to have the best arguments. | |
| It's not enough even to have the best candidates. | |
| We need to amass institutional power, and then we need to know how to use it. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is the Michael Knowles Show. | |
| See you tomorrow. | |
| See you tomorrow. | |
| The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies. | |
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| Copyright Daily Wire 2021. | |
| Our lords and masters in the CDC and the White House have blessed us with new COVID guidelines. | |
| Justin Bieber is accused of cultural appropriation for wearing dreadlocks. | |
| And we'll deal with the claim that there is systemic racism against black NFL players somehow. |