All Episodes
Previous Next
May 13, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
50:14
Ep. 763 - The Democrats’ Dead Rhetoric

Libs make a martyr out of Liz Cheney, Rand Paul rips Dr. Fauci, and Fareed Zakaria pushes a failed foreign policy by repeating the same old slogans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Guys, I think I have to leave the Republican Party.
I think I have to totally just re-envision how I think about things.
Because I saw a tweet from the actress Rosanna Arquette.
And this was just, wow.
Wow.
I'll just read it for you.
Democrats versus Nazi Party.
That's where we are at in America.
Oh, it's just, I've never heard it put that way before.
You know, it just totally makes me think about politics in a fresh new way.
That's the kind of rhetoric that's going to change our politics.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday from one time282 who says, put your hands up if you had to Google pinko.
And put your hands up if you're going to start using that word from now on.
Well, a few people wrote in to me.
I guess I used the word pinko in passing yesterday.
And they were unfamiliar with that.
Pinko is one of the great terms.
It's one of the great terms for the libs.
Or, you know, the commies.
But no, the libs are kind of like the commies.
And that's why we call them pinkos.
So I'm glad.
Yes, let's bring that back.
I didn't know it ever went away.
You know, when you want to make sure that things are ready for the future, things from the past are ready for the future, you've got to check out Trust and Will.
What a segue that was, baby.
At trustandwill.com, setting up an estate plan is simple, convenient, and secure.
For as little as $39, you can nominate guardians for your children, determine who gets your stuff, and plan for future medical care all from the comfort of your home.
And with live customer support seven days a week, TrustAndWill.com's team is available to answer any questions you have while setting up your plan.
TrustAndWill is a trusted name in online estate planning, the category leader on TrustPilot, and they've helped hundreds of thousands of people protect their families, assets, and legacies.
I have had a will since I was...
18 years old, 17 years old, something like that.
It's very important.
And then I got married.
You've got to update it.
Now I've got cute little June.
You've got to update it.
Again, Trust& Will, fabulous place to do it.
I really recommend them.
Gain peace of mind.
That's what this is all about at trustandwill.com slash Knowles.
Don't leave problems for your family.
Go check it out.
I get 10% off plus free shipping on your customized legal documents.
Don't wait.
Go right now.
This is extremely important.
Seriously, do it.
Do it now.
When people die without a will, it's a big problem.
Just do it.
Peace of mind.
10% off.
Plus free shipping at trustandwill.com slash Knowles.
Trustandwill.com slash Knowles.
Liz Cheney is gone.
No one really cares about that.
It's fine.
It's over.
It's no big deal.
The only people who are pretending to care and trying to make a huge issue out of this are the Democrats who are turning Liz Cheney into a martyr, and they are using Liz Cheney as an opportunity to regurgitate the stalest, deadest rhetoric that is the actual problem in our politics for anyone who wants to make progress.
Joy Behar calling Liz Cheney Joan of Arc.
She's the Joan of Arc standing up to the heretics at this point, and so she's very lonely in that position.
I do have faith, though, that she is a tough cookie and intends to persevere.
It is rather refreshing to see somebody stand up to the QAnon party who is not afraid to lose her job like the rest of those cowards who are shivering and quivering in the corner that they may have to go back to their old lives.
But I have to say that I have not been a Republican fan, as you might have noticed over the years on this show.
I mean, the big lie of the Iraq War was the Republican Party.
This is just another big lie that they're perpetuating on the American people.
This is just a stew of dead, stupid talking points.
This is a veritable smoothie of all the dumbest talking points that you can throw into the blender and then you put the top on you.
That is Joy Behar's monologue here.
So notice what she's doing.
You hear the big lie, which is this phrase that Democrats are using from Hitler.
They're borrowing it from Hitler in Mein Kampf.
And they're using that to accuse the Republicans of being Nazis.
Even though they don't realize that in their analogy, the way that they're using the big lie actually makes the Democrats into the Nazis and the Republicans into the Jews.
But they haven't read Mein Kampf and they don't know very much about history.
So, okay, they're using that to talk about the questions about the 2020 election.
But now Joy Behar is saying, but the big lie that the Republicans are pushing, the big lie is also the Iraq war.
You know, the big lie.
It's just one lie, and that's about the election having problems.
But it's also the Iraq War, and the Iraq War, that was all the Republicans.
Even though Hillary Clinton voted for it, and I'm pretty sure Joe Biden voted for it too, but it's the Republicans.
Okay, so that's the first part.
Totally wrong there.
But the first part, rather, is, like the earlier part in her monologue, is where she refers to Liz Cheney as Joan of Arc.
And she says that she's Joan of Arc against the GOP heretics.
What is that heretic against what?
What is the belief?
Is it against America?
If America is the true wonderful belief and the whole GOP, they're heretics, then Liz Cheney, I guess, is still a heretic because she's still a Republican.
That is her party affiliation.
So I guess in her very confused metaphor here, Joy Behar is saying that actually Liz Cheney is the Joan of Arc against the heretics of the GOP who have betrayed true conservatism or the true Republican Party or something like that.
But Joy Behar doesn't know anything about the Republican Party.
And if she really believes that Liz Cheney is the good one or something, and that the rest of the GOP, the conservative types, are heretics.
Then in that metaphor, Joy Behar would have to become a Republican, albeit a Republican of the Liz Cheney variety.
But she's not doing that.
She doesn't believe anything that she's saying.
Or she doesn't even know what the meaning is that she is conveying.
She's just using slogans.
The slogans can contradict one another.
They can be internally inconsistent.
They cannot convey meaning.
It doesn't matter.
Her brain has been turned into a slogan machine.
And it's not just Joy Behar.
I bring this up because we're all susceptible to this right now.
This is always true in politics, but especially in the age of mass corporate media.
Our thoughts are very often not our own.
Look, we all talk to people and we get ideas from people and we bounce ideas off of others and then we take some good ideas.
I do it.
We all do it.
But in the age of mass corporate media, these ideas are just pummeled into our heads and they're all the same talking points and it's day in and day out.
And so we'll regurgitate them, but we'll have no idea what we're saying.
I remember once, right around when Ronald Reagan died, I was coming out of my liberal phase, and my mother was very sad that Ronald Reagan died.
And I didn't know, you know, I just didn't know as much about Reagan.
I said, oh, yeah, but mom, you know, everyone knows Reagan, you know, wasn't great.
And she said, why is that?
I said, ah, you know, like Reaganomics.
She goes, hey, Michael, what's Reaganomics?
I was like, ah, I don't know.
I don't know.
I just, I've been told.
It was, it was not even, forget about Ronald Reagan.
Forget about what it means on that particular issue.
It was my first awakening about the effects of the media.
On our own language, we can use it without even knowing it.
You want to talk about a real talking point machine?
Claire McCaskill, who is the former Missouri senator who got booted out by Josh Hawley, she is a queen of talking points.
And she was spewing all the same nonsense, also in this case, about Liz Cheney.
But McCaskill took it even one step further down the rhetoric rabbit hole.
Think how far the Republican Party has fallen.
That now, not only do they accept people committing insurrection and sedition against our government, not only do they accept the President of the United States committing a fraud, a big lie on our democracy, which we treasure, not only are they doing that, they're continuing to sit silently as they oust a truth teller.
You know, and I've got to tell you the truth.
If one of these Republicans has the nerve to talk about cancel culture with what they're doing to Liz Cheney, I would use such an unladylike word right now if I could.
I mean, F them.
You know, I mean, what about that?
They want to lecture us about Dr.
Seuss and the cancel culture, and they are canceling her.
They are canceling Liz Cheney because she has the audacity to tell the truth.
Shame on all of them.
And proving that we need a show on premium cable where we can use that word because it's so called for.
Oh yeah, we need a show.
We're so subversive here.
There's nothing more subversive than saying the F word, right?
I think like every show on premium cable does that, right?
The most subversive thing you can do right now is not use swear words.
South Park actually had a very funny episode about this.
Decades ago, back when TV started using all this subversive, vulgar language, which is now the norm.
I talk about this actually at length in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available now for pre-order.
You can get a signed first edition copy, by the way, at Premiere Collectibles.
But the whole setup is ridiculous.
She says, oh yeah, we need a place on cable where we can use those naughty words.
Yeah, it's called cable.
So that's the first part.
Then there's the big lie and the threat toward democracy, all this stale, platitudinous nonsense.
But then did you see what Claire McCaskill said within 10 seconds?
She said, Liz Cheney is a truth teller and she's being punished for being a truth teller.
And I've got to tell you the truth.
I've got to tell you the truth, meaning I wasn't telling you the truth before.
Ordinarily, I don't tell you the truth, but now I've got to tell you the truth.
This is so unusual for me, but now I've got to tell you the truth.
It's like the people who say, look, honestly, as opposed to, you know, dishonestly.
You know, to be honest, unlike what I usually am, which is dishonest.
What meaning did Claire McCaskill convey?
If you did not know The context of, and the partisan context of what these people are generally getting at.
And you just heard her say, the big lie is a threat to our democracy, which we cherish.
And the truth teller was kicked out for the lie and the truth.
And what are we talking about?
Nowhere does she talk about the big...
She doesn't get into the details of the election.
She doesn't get into the questions of why people maybe have some lingering questions with the election.
She doesn't get into what Liz Cheney said or did.
She doesn't get into what Liz Cheney believes.
She doesn't get into what her opponent said or did or believed.
There's no specificity here.
It's just the platitudinous talking points.
The other big one I'm hearing with regard to Liz Cheney is country over party.
You ever hear that one?
Country over party.
That might be the single most ridiculously silly slogan I've heard in my entire life in politics.
And I grew up in the coexist bumper sticker era, okay?
There have been a lot of silly slogans.
But country over party, what does that mean?
People join political parties because they think that will be good for their country.
They join political parties to advance a particular political vision for their country.
The idea that party is opposed to country is just a cheap insult, but it doesn't mean anything.
It's not true for anybody.
And if you want progress, such as it is, if anyone's really after progress in politics, it is simply the case that regurgitating these meaningless, vapid platitudes will do nothing.
By the way, conservatives have their own.
Conservatives do our, you know, conservatives will use this line.
This is one of the most popular ones.
Democrats are the real racists.
Okay, what does that mean?
Well, yeah, sure, it It is true that the Democrats pursue policies that are racist or racialist or race-based or they espouse hatred of people on the basis of their race.
That's true.
But Democrats are the real racists doesn't really mean anything because racism is an offense against human dignity.
It's a product of a fallen world and we've all got it.
The fallenness.
And therefore we all sinned.
I'm not saying we're all David Duke or anything like that, but I'm saying we all sin, we all have problems, we all have difficulties of perception in this world, there are always questions of prejudice, and solving these things is not so easy as slapping a bumper sticker on something.
So, when we engage in that kind of talk, it's...
It's not even that it's just so awful and evil and terrible.
It's a waste of time.
It does not do anything.
The left does it way more than the right does.
But we've got to watch it a little bit, too.
We've got to work on ourselves.
If you want to work on yourself, you got to check out Echelon Fitness.
Echelon is the affordable way to get the workout equipment, the workout community, and an instructor's motivation right in the comfort of your own home.
Echelon's fitness app provides you thousands of live and on-demand classes with great music from your favorite artists.
Just pick your class, climb the leaderboard, cheer each other on, and give it your all.
Full range of affordable workout equipment, including stationary bikes, smart rowers, Sleek fitness screens or the auto folding treadmill.
They're all available, all connected with the Echelon experience.
They're super, super cool.
These sorts of bikes can be ridiculously expensive.
Echelon will give you a great, great deal.
I really love these things.
Right now, my listeners will get a special podcast offer from Echelon.
For a limited time, start your 30-day risk-free trial offer with Echelon's EX3. That bike will be just $1.
$1 for 30 days.
Special risk-free offer for 30 days with Echelon's EX3 bike for just $1 to start, plus free shipping.
Only way to get this special offer is by going to echelonfit.com slash Knowles.
E-C-H-E-L-O-N-F-I-T dot com slash Knowles.
Echelonfit.com slash Knowles.
There's this great deal of importance on the quality of our thought, on the rigor of our logic, and on the precision of our language.
We've got to be very careful about that, okay?
I actually, coincidentally, just wrote a book about this called Speechless Controlling Words Controlling Minds, which is available now for pre-order, by the way, if you haven't pre-ordered it yet.
There it goes.
That bell was a little bit late, but you get the point.
However, I want to couch that.
I don't want to seem just like I'm, you know, We're 100% completely obsessed that everything's got to be exactly precise and we've all got to agree with each other on everything.
If you just sit and think about language all day long, you'll never do anything else.
So I think we need to train ourselves to be very precise in all those things.
But we also have to do stuff.
And in order to do stuff, you need coalitions.
And this is the other side of that argument.
This is what we're actually learning from the whole Liz Cheney nonsense and how the left is so thrilled with the Liz Cheney nonsense and most Republican voters aren't even aware of it.
We need to form political coalitions.
There's a woman who just showed up to a meeting in Ludin County, Virginia.
It was a school board meeting and she gave a fiery denunciation of critical race theory.
In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., I have a dream that my four little children will one day live a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Now I have a dream that we will implement love, not hate, or supporting another Jim Crow's agenda.
CRT is not an honest dialogue.
It is a tactic that was used by Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan on slavery very many years ago to dumb down my ancestors, so we could not think for ourselves.
CRT is racist.
It is abusive.
It discriminates against one's color.
Let me educate you.
An honest dialogue does not oppress.
An honest dialogue does not implement hatred or injustice.
It's to communicate without deceiving people.
Today, we don't need your agreement.
We want action in the backbone for what we asked for today, to ban CRT. We don't want your political advertisement to divide our children or belittle them.
Think twice before you indoctrinate such racist theories.
You cannot tell me what is or is not racist.
Look at me!
I had to come down here today to tell you to your face that we are coming together and we are strong.
This will not be the last.
Greet and meet.
Respectfully.
Okay.
Now, a lot of people are going to watch this, even conservatives, even people who oppose critical race theory.
They're going to watch this or listen to this and they're going to say, oh, well, I don't agree with all of her rhetoric.
Oh, well, I don't.
You know, some of those comparisons, they're a little bit much for me.
Ah, you know, this could have been a little more articulate or this could have been stated differently.
I agree, as we've just been talking about, I agree it's very important to be precise in our language, and it's very important to be aware of when people are not being precise, of when people are just using platitudes and things like that.
It is also important to be politically effective.
The main takeaway I get from this woman is, kick critical race theory out of schools.
I totally agree with that.
She's absolutely right.
We need to join with her.
We need to welcome anybody who will oppose critical race theory.
It is poison in schools.
It is terrible for our politics.
It is based on a lie.
It undermines our very faculties of reason.
You got to get rid of it.
So while, while we can do two things at once, you're, You often hear people say you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
We can improve our rhetoric.
We can be aware of the platitudes around us, especially from the left because those are the ones being pumped in from the schools, from critical race theory actually, from the big tech, from big corporate America, from big government, from big administrative state, from everybody, from big Hollywood.
You can be aware of that and you can try to call people's attention to that.
And you can also engage in political coalitions to fight these things.
That woman I would love.
Show me the next time she's talking at a school board.
I want to be there.
I want to be there to applaud her.
Because she's absolutely, absolutely right about what we need to do.
Speaking of lessons, Rand Paul.
Just taught a very lovely lesson to Dr.
Fauci.
Dr.
Fauci, only 10 more years, you sheep.
Put your masks on.
Only, what did I say?
I said only 12 more years.
No, Dr.
Fauci, you just said 10 more years.
Look, I just, it's only 15 more years of the masks, okay?
That is the saying.
So, Dr.
Senator Rand Paul just laid out a bit of a medical lesson for Dr.
Fauci.
Dr.
Fauci, we don't know whether the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan or evolved naturally, but we should want to know.
Three million people have died from this pandemic, and that should cause us to explore all possibilities.
Instead, government authorities, self-interested in continuing gain-of-function research, say there's nothing to see here.
Gain-of-function research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans.
To arrive at the truth, the U.S. government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus' ability to infect humans.
Juicing up super viruses is not new.
Scientists in the U.S. have long known how to mutate animal viruses to infect humans.
For years, Dr.
Ralph Barak, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr.
Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create super viruses.
This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. Brutal.
So there's the setup.
The setup, which is, by the way, there were a lot of people, even among conservatives, who early on in the coronavirus said, this is totally naturally occurring.
This has nothing to do with the Chinese government.
There's no issue here with the Public Health Administration.
It's because it's the bat markets in Wuhan.
And on this show, and on Verdict with Ted Cruz, we said very early on that...
The coincidence of the Wuhan Virology Institute being just 400 yards from where this virus was allegedly discovered, that's a little too much for us.
I bet it has something to do with the institute, and I bet that some American people are going to be held accountable or at least going to be exposed for this because, as we reported on that show too, U.S. money, U.S. taxpayer dollars were going in part to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was studying coronaviruses and bats.
People called conspiracy theorists.
All sorts of things.
By the libs and by even some self-styled conservatives.
Looks like we were right.
Rand Paul laying this out in the Senate.
Dr.
Fauci, he denies it.
But this is the importance of rhetoric.
Listen to the way in which he denies it.
Dr.
Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?
Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Do they fund Dr.
Barrick?
We do not fund...
Do you fund Dr.
Barrett's gain-of-function research?
Dr.
Barrett does not doing gain-of-function research, and if it is, it's according to the guidelines, and it is being conducted in North Carolina, not in China.
Oh, Dr.
Fauci, you know, you're a clever, tricky politician, but thankfully Rand Paul is too, and he's calling you out on it.
So Dr.
Fauci opens up and goes, Dr.
Paul, Senator Paul, you are completely and totally incorrect.
About this very narrow thing that I'm actually distorting your words on.
So he's not...
Fauci is...
Even though he says you're completely and totally incorrect, right?
You get the soundbite.
Then he qualifies that.
He says, about this very particular thing.
And then you think about the very particular thing, namely funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and you realize, wait a second, that's not quite what Rand Paul was accusing you of.
You're saying, you're totally wrong about that thing that you didn't actually say.
Well, okay, so...
Rand Paul, you're totally and completely incorrect about that thing that you didn't actually say.
The U.S. taxpayer dollars do not go toward gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
But, as Rand Paul asks, he says, well, are you funding Dr.
Barrack, this one particular doctor doing gain-of-function research, which he's then sharing with Wuhan?
And Fauci doesn't want to answer it, so he just keeps talking over Paul, and then Paul asks it again, and then Fauci gives to me, this is just the cherry on top of this little rhetorical sundae.
He goes, Dr.
Barrick is not conducting gain-of-function research, and if he is, it's fine.
Well, you don't...
Declarative statement.
Dr.
Barak is not doing this kind of research.
But if he is, it's totally cool.
It's not a problem.
What do you mean, but if?
You're making the statement that he's not doing it.
You can't then qualify that and say, yeah, but if he is, whatever.
Who cares?
Wear the mask, sheep.
His response to Paul, which is given such fire with such passion, is ultimately meaningless.
He doesn't refute a single thing Rand Paul accuses him of.
But people will think that he did.
The way that this is being portrayed in the mainstream media is as the Dr.
Fauci owns Rand Paul.
That's how it's being played.
And no one's going into this depth on it.
No one's analyzing what Dr.
Fauci actually said.
They're just taking it.
They're just taking the dead rhetoric for what it is.
But Rand Paul really did expose something here.
Doesn't matter.
Oh, you've got to wait to see the way CNN covers it.
CNN accusing Rand Paul of disrespecting medical science.
Rand Paul, a medical doctor.
Oh my gosh, this craziness just makes you want to crawl back into bed, especially when you've got Bowlin Branch sheets.
If you dream of comfortable sheets at a price that won't keep you up all night, look no further than Bowlin Branch.
Bowlin Branch makes the softest organic sheets on the market.
They get better with every wash.
Buttery soft, lightweight, organic cotton, and a classic sateen weave for sheets that get softer over time.
Not too hot, not too cool.
The perfect year-round sheets for most sleepers.
Best of all, Bowling Branch gives you a fair price, plus a 30-day risk-free trial with free shipping and returns.
I first got Bowling Branch sheets when they advertised years ago, and I had a queen-sized bed.
We love them, we love them, we love them, then we get a bigger bed.
Uh-oh, we don't have the Bowling Branch sheets.
What am I going to do, shockingly?
And you know what a cheapskate I am?
I'm going to buy more Bowling Branch sheets.
Then, Bowling Branch sends us another pair.
Truly, my wife has never been happier with any advertising experience.
Experience the best sheets that you've ever felt at BowlingBranch.com.
Get 15% off your first set of sheets when you use promo code Michael at checkout.
15% off at BowlingBranch.com.
Also, make sure you check out Ben Shapiro's show.
Ben is going to be talking about Bidenflation.
Oh, Ben...
Never can resist a good pun.
And some bad puns, too.
Ben has never met a pun he didn't like.
It's a very important topic, though.
So go check that out about Bidenflation and also be on the lookout for Ben's new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
This is the second best book that's coming out in the next two months.
If you want to preserve the American way of life and protect the ones you love from mob rule, go check out that book today.
It's available for pre-order.
It's actually really terrific to pre-order Ben's book.
After you pre-order my book, it goes very well in the cart.
First you click Speechless Controlling, Words Controlling Minds, and then only after that is it great to pre-order The Authoritarian Moment.
You can pre-order it at Amazon, Barnes& Noble, or any other major bookseller.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Rand Paul rips Dr.
Fauci at the Senate.
Brings names, brings evidence, and brings serious questions.
Dr.
Fauci can't refute any of them.
The best he can muster is to answer questions that Rand Paul didn't ask and to ignore the questions that he actually did ask.
How is this being covered in the mainstream media?
Why Anderson Cooper of CNN is accusing, and people on his program are accusing Dr.
Rand Paul of disrespecting medical science.
He's an ophthalmologist.
You would think that he would be, you know, have more respect, at least for medical science.
Dr.
Fauci, he later told CNN's Dr.
Sanjay Gupta that he thinks senators might be playing to the cameras.
It's certainly, you know, that could certainly be it.
The idea that Fauci is somehow a villain to Trump-allied politicians.
What does one even say to that idea?
This is, look, obviously, the substance of what he's saying is very silly.
The idea that Anderson Cooper, this TV host, Vanderbilt, is somehow the great defender of medical science against Rand Paul, who is disrespecting medical science, even though he's a medical doctor.
That's very silly stuff.
But I want to focus in on that little rhetorical trick at the end.
Did you hear what he said there?
He says, it's just crazy.
It's just so ridiculous that...
Dr.
Fauci would become the villain to these Trump-allied politicians.
So first of all, in the example he's giving here, Rand Paul, who's probably the greatest foe that Dr.
Fauci has in politics, Rand Paul is a scientist.
He's a medical doctor.
So it's not scientist Fauci versus politician Rand Paul.
It's scientist versus scientist.
They're both scientists.
But moreover, they're both politicians.
Dr.
Fauci is a politician.
Dr.
Fauci gets his paycheck from the government.
Dr.
Fauci reports to presidents.
He's reported to presidents going back to Ronald Reagan.
Dr.
Fauci is one of the most seasoned politicians in the country, and he has more political power than virtually anybody in the country.
Presidents come and go.
Dr.
Fauci remains.
Can you believe the politician versus the scientist?
No.
It's scientist versus scientist and politician versus politician.
Public health is about applying a supposedly scientific lens to politics and giving supposed scientists a lot of political power.
If you wanted to have a real...
Substantive discussion about this.
You would not do what Anderson Cooper is doing.
You would not do what, I don't know, any of these people on television are doing.
Any of these libs, pinkos, to use a phrase that some of the audience likes.
You would say, okay, you've got two scientist politicians here.
And you've got a scientific disagreement, first of all.
And frankly, I don't even know, I don't want to accuse Fauci of bad motives or of hiding the ball, even though he has clearly misled and lied to people, so maybe I can accuse him of that.
But Fauci, maybe Fauci actually understands that there's a very good chance that the Wuhan Institute was somehow involved here.
But Fauci just doesn't want to admit that because of the political considerations.
But let's just say, best case scenario, you've got a scientific disagreement and you've got a political disagreement between the U.S. senator and the egghead technocrat.
Now, in the constitutional order, it seems to me preferable for the senator to win in that situation, as the senator is accountable in some way to the people in our constitutional system.
And the egghead technocrat is not, you can't kick him out.
You can't fire Fauci.
The guy is going to be there for our grandchildren are going to be answering to Dr.
Fauci.
Because I don't know what kind of deal that guy made, but he doesn't, you know, Dr.
Fauci is at least going to live until 250.
I think we all know that at this point.
He still won't be able to throw a baseball, but he's going to be around a long time, okay?
That would be the honest discussion.
Where do we disagree on the science and where do we disagree on the politics?
And how do those two things relate?
Because they obviously do.
But we can't have that discussion because of all this stupid dead rhetoric.
The one nice thing I'll say about someone on CNN, about Don Lemon, of all people, is that Don Lemon cracked out, and he actually has done this in the past, he has cracked out of the dead rhetoric.
Years ago, he used to agree with Bill O'Reilly on things, right?
That's certainly breaking the mold on CNN. But even when he's offering liberal talking points, he very often comes at it from an oblique angle.
I mean, do you remember some years ago, Don Lemon would talk about aliens, and he'd talk...
Talk about weird things.
He spat off on religion and he doesn't know anything about it.
But at least it was different.
At least you could tell he wasn't just regurgitating the same nonsense that many of his colleagues do.
He did this recently on the vaccines.
He was doing his little handoff, the Tweedledee Tweedledum thing, you know, to Chris Cuomo.
And they were talking about Mother's Day.
And Don Lemon made a fairly interesting point.
I'm kind of jealous that you got to spend it with your mom, because I'd love to spend it with my mom.
But my mom won't leave.
I keep saying mom.
She has to fly, though.
She is fully vaccinated, Chris.
I know.
And if you're going to say, during the entire pandemic, and I'm talking to you, mom, and I'm talking to you, my other friend, I won't say her name because she'll get mad at me.
If you're going to say, I believe in the science and the scientists, then now on this side of the pandemic, Then you must believe in the science and scientists as well.
I agree.
We're saying to you, if you're fully vaccinated, you don't have to wear a mask outside.
If you want to travel, you can wear a mask, follow the protocols.
But it is 99.99 or whatever percent chances that you won't get vaccinated.
The COVID. You won't get COVID. Then you should trust in that science as well and get back to your life.
My mom is a woman of a certain age.
I don't know how much time any of us has.
I could walk out of here and get hit by a bus.
I want to live my life.
I want to see my loved ones.
So can we get back to some semblance of normalcy?
Preach.
Preach, Don.
Man, that was great.
I totally agree.
I totally agree with what he said.
In part because he couched a lot of it hypothetically.
So he said, if you always believe the scientists and if you think it's important to wear the mask.
So obviously I don't.
I don't care what Dr.
Fauci says.
I don't think he has any credibility.
I don't wear the masks almost ever unless people absolutely force me to.
Like, for instance, to get on an airplane.
And then I have to make a calculation.
Is it worth even traveling to this place to wear this stupid mask?
But sure, I don't, you know, some of the hypothetical parts I don't get into.
But the argument he's making here is completely right.
Even if you've gone along with all this craziness, all the Fauci, whatever Fauci says this minute, that's the gospel truth.
Well, now we are being told by the egghead health professionals, you don't need to wear a mask outside.
You can see your family if you've been vaccinated.
That's the point of a vaccine.
You can do this, you can do that.
So the people who have done all those things have to be consistent.
And he says, look, who knows how long we have to live.
A lot of us have put off seeing our grandparents.
A lot of us have put off seeing our parents.
And who knows?
As he says, you can walk out and get hit by a bus tomorrow.
And certainly the chances of something happening increase with age and with deteriorating health.
So go out and live.
You have to live your life.
I'm shocked this made it through on CNN. It'll only make it through on the handoff.
Now, okay, I can't, I'm saying too many nice things about Don Lemon, saying too many nice things about CNN, so let's get back into their really stupid rhetoric again.
Fareed Zakaria goes, actually goes on Don Lemon's show, and Fareed Zakaria goes into the issue of Israel and the violence breaking out and Palestine and peace in the Middle East.
And the problem with his argument here is not even so much the specifics of how this applies right now.
People could have an honest disagreement about what's going on right now.
It's that he is retreating to the same dumb platitudes that have failed for decades.
Bibi Netanyahu, meanwhile, was trying to do things that would make it as impossible for there ever to be a Palestinian state as he could do.
So he makes peace with some moderate Gulf states with the help of the United States.
And he had been essentially ruling out any possibility of any deal with the Palestinians.
So after a while, I think what happened is there was a certain amount of frustration that, you know, these events then get triggered by something or the other.
But the reality is that Israel had almost forgotten that they had this Palestinian problem on their hands, and it has now exploded.
But ultimately, this thing is only going to be solved if Israel decides that it wants to, as a matter of morality, It wants to give rights to Palestinians, that it does not believe that it can be a Jewish democratic state and have these four million people living essentially in conditions where they have no political rights in Israel and, you know, has control over them.
Okay, do you see the problem with what he's just said?
So he opens up with a brief history of the past few years, which has overseen relative peace in Israel and relative peace in the Middle East.
That is, this was the Trump strategy.
For years and years and decades and decades, we were told by the foreign policy establishment that you would not see peace in the Middle East Unless, and you would not see normalization of states with Israel, unless you first deal with the Palestinian issue.
And the Palestinian issue is this group of Arabs that are kind of in a no man's land where none of the Arab states want them, and they want to destroy Israel, and they elect Hamas, a terrorist organization, but Israel doesn't just totally wipe them out, and so there's just this conflict, right?
If you don't deal with the Palestinian problem, you're never going to get peace with Arab nations and Israel.
And then Trump said, you know, that just sounds like BS. So, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to do the exact opposite.
John Kerry goes out and says, it is a fact.
It is a reality.
You will never have a separate peace in the Middle East if you don't deal with the Palestinian issue.
Trump says, no, forget that.
We're just going to deal with the actual Arab nation states and Israel.
And what does Trump do?
He doubles the number of Arab states that have normalized relations with Israel.
Doubles them.
He got two in a month.
Two in a month.
Major peace treaties, the Abraham Accords, shocking, upended all of the foreign policy establishment, made them look like a bunch of idiots.
Then what happens?
Biden becomes president and just retreats back to the exact same old issue.
He starts sucking up to Iran again, starts sucking up to the Palestinian Arabs again, pulls a little bit of support from Israel, says we've got to solve the Palestinian problem.
What happens?
Violence breaks up.
And Fareed Zakaria, at least, he says, look, the Israelis during the Trump administration, they just kind of forgot the Palestinian Arabs exist.
They didn't forget.
They just ignored them.
That was the strategy.
Ignore this problem.
Ignore Hamas.
Ignore.
That was the Trump strategy.
Just ignore them.
Don't try to deal with them.
Just deal with the other countries, and then you're going to get peace.
So, yes, you know, and that led to some peace, and it led to...
But then what does Farid say?
He says, and that is why we now need to go back to the Palestinian...
He just, he ignores all the stuff he just said, all of the actual interesting specific stuff that's going on right now.
And he just retreats back to the old dead platitudes.
Just a stale talking point.
Often these slogans are not just wrong.
They're actually the opposite of true.
A real great example of this is in the current prosecution of that Looney Tune who shot up the Asian massage parlor.
Do you remember this?
It was a couple months ago, a sex addict walks into a Asian massage parlor and just starts shooting people.
Presumably there was more than massages going on in the, in the massage parlor.
Now this was not only an Asian massage parlor.
There were people that were non-Asian as well.
On Tuesday, this guy gets indicted of killing eight people.
Okay.
And not only is he being brought up on the murder charges, which is obviously right, not only are they seeking the death penalty, which they obviously should, but he's also being brought up on hate crime charges.
What's a hate crime?
It's opposed to a love crime, I guess.
It's opposed to an indifference crime.
It's a hate crime.
It's kind of a silly identity politics category that...
It increases punishments based on perceived motives of the killers.
Six of the eight people who were shot were of Asian descent.
And the shooter here is white.
So he's being brought up on a hate crime because he must hate Asian people, right?
But there's no evidence that he hates Asian people.
He says, and all the people around him say, and all the investigators are saying, that the motive was not race.
It was actually sex.
It was that this guy...
He has a sex addiction and that he felt that there was a temptation from the Asian massage parlors and so one day he goes in and blows them to smithereens.
That doesn't change the nature of the crime, whether he hated them for their race or he hated them because he's got a sex problem.
It doesn't change the effect of the crime.
And I don't think that the punishment should be any different.
But furthermore, they're now adding this on because a lot of them were Asian and because he's white.
They're saying it has to be racist.
It's not racist.
You don't learn anything about the crime.
You don't learn anything about the actual situation.
You don't deter crime.
You don't prevent anything by pretending that...
Every bad thing in the world is motivated by racism.
This is from the Fulton County District Attorney, Fannie Willis, who says, the hate crime charges are based on the actual or perceived race, national origin, sex, and gender of the four women killed, the notice says.
Only four women, so not even six.
Okay.
And then this DA goes on and says, this will send a message that everyone within this community is valued.
But that's not the message it sends.
It actually sends the opposite message.
It sends the message that some people are valued more than others.
If this guy had gone in and killed a bunch of white masseuses, you know, in this kind of dodgy massage parlor, he would face less of a charge.
Because they're Asian, he faces a greater charge.
The message that sends is that Asians are valued more than white women.
But that shouldn't be the message sent at all.
And regardless of whether or not that should be the message sent, it's obviously not what's being sent.
It is the opposite of what this stale rhetoric is pushing.
Speaking of sex addiction, not addiction, we're just talking about the masseuse shooting issue.
There is a very famous guy who is admitting to another kind of sex addiction, porn addiction.
Terry Crews is opening up about his porn addiction and how it almost destroyed his marriage.
It was like, wait a minute.
I actually just need to be a better person for myself.
And he basically said, I can't promise you whether your wife was ever going to come back to you.
You may have lost her forever, but you still need to get better for yourself.
And I went, this is crazy.
You're right.
Because this is another thing.
Success is the warmest place to hide.
I had so many people that were telling me I was great.
That it was no problem.
That you're doing this.
And you know what?
Hollywood didn't care.
It still doesn't care if you lose your family.
It happens every day.
They're like, hey man, but now we can put you in three movies.
And I wanted to add that this addiction preceded the marriage.
So fame just made it worse.
And it's really true that power, that success amplifies what's already going on inside you.
And that is why I couldn't help him.
And I'm thankful and I'm lucky that he made the choice to do that.
This porn addiction thing is a big problem.
I cannot tell you how many letters I get into the mailbag and people sending in tweets and things like that who are young men who are asking about porn addiction who are in despair because they got hooked on porn from when they were 8 years old or something.
I mean, I think that the average age that boys are exposed to porn is like 10 or 11.
And because it was when they were so young, it totally warped their minds and they got stuck and it screws up their relationship and it screws up their sense of self-worth and it screws up their sense of the world.
And this issue is one that is not really talked about.
And when it is talked about, it's talked about with flippancy and glibness and the stale rhetoric of the left and the right for that matter.
On the right, what you hear from the kind of basic boomer libertarian conservative rhetoric is, come on, you can't ban porn.
It's free speech.
Come on, you don't want to ban porn.
First of all, you hear it from the right-wingers who, they just really want to be cool.
You know, like I'm not a usual kind of right-winger.
I'm a cool right-winger.
It's like the mother in Mean Girls.
You know, I'm not a regular mom.
I'm a cool conservative.
You know, yeah, I like porn or whatever.
And so you hear that kind of There's nothing conservative about porn.
But also, porn is not protected free speech.
It's just not.
It never has been.
And it may very well be, but only because people are conflating liberty and licentiousness.
Obscenity has never been protected by law.
Going back to the earliest days of our Actually, even before the country was officially founded in the late 18th century, going back to Governor Bradford, going back to the Mayflower and Plymouth colony, there was a guy from a nearby colony Who wrote what Governor Bradford considered to be sort of lecherous sonnets, you know, little poems that he felt were a little too titillating for puritanical austerity.
And Governor Bradford very nearly executed him for that.
And ultimately, he said, ah, it'll be kind of bad for the diplomatic issues here.
So instead, Governor Bradford, in his great mercy, marooned him on an island until a ship from England could take him back and get him out of the mother country.
Okay, that tradition goes back very far in America.
And in the early days, we had protections against obscenity, and we were still enforcing them as recently as 2009.
2009, at the tail end of the Bush administration, there was a pornographer who was sent to prison for obscenity charges.
It's not even like it was child porn or it was this.
It was just for obscene stuff.
We have lots of limitations on this.
We always have until recently when conservatives, putative conservatives, bought the liberal stupid rhetoric about how there's nothing more American and nothing more protected by the First Amendment than looking at ladies jiggle on the internet.
Or weirder stuff.
You know, there's basically a porn for everything, right?
The expression goes, if you can think it, there's a porn for it.
That stuff, we've got to take that seriously.
So you've got to ditch the stupid right-wing rhetoric on it, and you've got to ditch the stupid left-wing rhetoric on it that this is somehow good for you.
I mean, the left has been pushing the sexualization of children for decades and decades and decades.
It goes back at least to one of these kooky left theorists, Wilhelm Reich, who was writing a century ago, almost a century ago.
And then you see this same nonsense...
Espoused by Bernie Sanders himself, very prominent left winger, almost got the Democratic nomination for president.
He's been a senator forever.
And he would write essays in the 60s in the Vermont Freeman about how we need to sexualize children and how that's good for them.
And how we need to normalize these sorts of things.
You can read about that, by the way, in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for pre-order.
The left has been pushing that.
We've got to ditch that kind of crazy rhetoric.
And by the way, you want to talk about stale rhetoric?
The left always says that young men, toxic young men, they need to talk about their feelings and their problems.
Well, okay.
The ones who are writing into my show talking about this very real issue, they're talking about their feelings and their problems.
And what happens?
They get made fun of.
They get called incels.
They get called losers.
They get called basement dwellers.
By the very libs who are saying that the young men need to talk about their feelings.
But we are not allowed to talk about that because of this.
It's not even because we don't understand that there is an issue.
I think people do sense that there's an issue on the left and the right.
But we're just locked in this prism of stupid, stupid slogans.
And it's being enforced by the liberal establishment.
There is some good news, though, on this messaging front.
So the Baltimore state attorney, Marilyn Mosby, one of the most radical loons out there in office today, she filed a complaint with the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, saying, It's not even Fox the cable channel.
It's Fox the local affiliate.
Because they weren't spouting the left-wing line, that that's racist and that endangers her family and the FCC's got to kick them off.
So FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had a great response.
He said...
The state attorney's office, led by Democrat Marilyn Mosby, has launched a chilling and direct attack on free speech and journalistic freedom.
It is particularly troubling that a public official would work to silence reporters that are investigating her work at a time when federal prosecutors have already opened a criminal investigation into her activities.
The FCC should make clear that it will not operate as the DNC's speech police.
Good.
I'm very glad that at least the government is not totally getting involved here in enforcing the left's stale crazy rhetoric.
They're involved to some degree, but not at the level of the FCC. That's what we're going to have to crack.
We have to pay clear attention to language here, folks, which, of course, is the sort of thing that you can read about in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for pre-order.
Is that...
Uh-oh.
What's going on?
That was one too many plug.
Oh, no!
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
See you tomorrow.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky.
Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.
Audio mixer, Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup by Nika Geneva.
And production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, President Biden's policies blow up prices, panic buying hits the southeast as the gas runs out, and Liz Cheney's firefight with the GOP is everything the media could hope for.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
▲
Export Selection