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May 17, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:28
Ep. 765 - The Secular Keffiyeh

Corporations drop mask mandates, Israel bombs an Associated Press building, and Liz Cheney hints at a 2024 presidential campaign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The masks are coming off.
We are finally losing our secular keffias, and some libs just can't handle it.
As a matter of fact, my doppelganger expressed this broad anxiety on the left on her TV show just last week.
I feel like I'm going to have to rewire myself so that when I see somebody out in the world who's not wearing a mask, I don't instantly think you are a threat or you are selfish or you are a COVID denier and you definitely haven't been vaccinated.
I mean, we're going to have to rewire the way that we look at each other because the CDC's guidance, which she just told me we are sure, is that if you're vaccinated, you don't need to wear a mask except in very specific circumstances.
And so that means as we change that as a country, we are going to look at each other differently and have to unwire our preconceptions about what a mask or a lack of a mask means.
President Biden spoke to that a little bit today, asking for people to—President Biden actually and Dr.
Dr. Fauci both spoke to that today, asking for people to essentially be patient, be compassionate, give people respect for whatever they decide on this front, because with these, with this changing guidance, we're going to now have changing norms and we got to give each other space to have feelings about that.
As we go through what's going to be a big change, that's going to create a lot of visceral, a lot of visceral reaction.
And a lot of us just in our day to day lives, a lot of visceral reaction from extremely neurotic Her point is very good, though.
Her point is that we need to unwire, rewire the way we look at people.
Now, I don't, because I never adopted the new stupid standards.
But the left did.
The people who went all in on the masks...
Did.
Their minds have been changed.
The social conventions have been changed.
This is why I've been against these masks from the very beginning.
It's because it's not just a private matter.
You do you, I'll do me, whatever makes you feel good.
This is a major social matter.
People are wearing these stupid pieces of cloth all out in public like banditos for a year now.
And some people can't go back to normal.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Chris, 1985, who says, Fries and a burger for a vaccination?
They really do look at us like nothing more than ignorant children.
That is true.
In reference, I suspect, to Bill de Blasio's disgusting video where he tried to get people to take the shot by chomping down on a cheeseburger in public.
Speaking with his mouth was so gross.
If there were a chance I was going to get the vaccine, that diminished it by about 99.9998%.
100%.
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The masks are a political matter.
A whole lot of things that we pretend are private matters are political matters, okay?
The left gets this, and actual conservatives get this, but the squishes in the middle, the, I don't know, say libertarian or classical liberal or kind of moderate or centrist, they don't seem to get it.
So the libs from the beginning said, you have to wear the mask.
You always have to wear the mask.
Wear the mask right now.
And the people in the middle said, look, if I want to wear it, I'll wear it.
And if I don't want to wear it, I won't wear it.
And why can't we be reasonable about this?
And I understand the impulse for that.
I totally get it.
But the thing is, we can't be.
We can't allow that to be the rule because the masks are...
The main thing you're seeing about people in public, that's the big change.
Man is the political animal.
Our speech is what makes us who we are, according to Aristotle, according to our political philosophy.
When you muzzle someone, when you put this weird thing on their face, it is not going to alleviate anxiety.
It's not just a private choice.
It changes a major ritual of society.
So the More right-wing conservatives realized from the beginning, oh, this is really bad, guys.
We've got to stop doing this.
We should not normalize this sort of thing.
We're all going to start looking like banditos or something like that.
Well, now the masks are finally coming off.
If we keep up the pressure, and the left is very upset about this.
The way you know that they're finally going to be coming off if we keep up the pressure is that Starbucks and Walmart are announcing they will no longer require the face masks for vaccinated customers.
But of course, it would seem to be quite a violation to require customers to show their vaccine cards.
cars.
It would just be so inefficient for the business too, that this is effectively just a blanket opportunity for people to take their masks off, regardless of whether or not they're vaccinated, because you're just, you're just not going to find out.
So now the masks are coming off.
Great.
Glad to hear it.
Why are they doing this?
The They're doing this, I suspect, in part because people are already ditching these conventions.
I'm not sure this is a case of, okay, the eggheads and the corporations are finally going to allow people to take them off, and then the behavior is going to follow that.
I'm just looking around, and I've traveled all over this country the past year.
I have not let up my travel, really.
And people just don't care as much.
They're all wearing them below the nose.
A lot of people aren't wearing them at all.
And I think that the PowerMad eggheads People are realizing they're losing power here, so they've got to get ahead of the story, and they're going to say, okay, now it's fine.
You can start to take it off.
Don't forget it.
A few weeks ago, they said, even if you're vaccinated, you've got to keep your mask on.
You've got to social distance.
And then two seconds later, they said, actually, never mind.
You can start to take your mask off because they realized they were not creating the right incentives to get vaccinated.
They realized they were looking like fools and as though they were feckless because people were just disregarding them.
So good stuff.
Keep the pressure on, folks.
That's great.
I can't wait to go get a Triple chai, whatever, Frappuccino later without the mask on.
Maybe I'll just walk in and walk out.
I won't even get the Frappuccino.
The bureaucrats, however, are still clinging to power.
So the CDC first says you got to wear your mask even if you're vaccinated.
Then they say you don't need to wear your mask even if you're vaccinated.
Now they're couching this guidance even further.
Here is Dr.
Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC. The guidance that we released on Thursday is about individuals and what individuals are at risk of doing if they are not vaccinated.
If they're vaccinated, they are safe.
If they are not vaccinated, they are not safe.
They should still be wearing a mask or, better yet, get vaccinated.
We also need to say that this is not permission for widespread removal of masks.
For those who are vaccinated, it may take some time for them to feel comfortable removing their masks.
But also that these decisions have to be made at the jurisdictional level, at the community level.
Some communities have been hit harder than others, have lower vaccination rates than others.
We wanted to deliver the science at the individual level, but we also understand that these decisions have to be made at the community level.
This was such a brilliantly stupid statement.
The reason it's stupid is because it doesn't make sense.
The reason it's brilliant is it shows you the inconsistencies in this political philosophy of the left right now.
And, frankly, a little bit of the right, too, which is the focus on the individual and private decisions, and everything comes down to the individual.
The left focuses on the social side of this, the right focuses on the economic side, and...
A little bit of the social side.
But it's all about the individual.
It's not about the community.
Okay, and what is the individual?
What's it going to be based on?
It's going to be based on the science and the objective, super-duper rational decisions of the people in the lab coats, at the administrative agencies.
It's not even through our elected representatives.
It's those genius technocrats who are going to follow the science and make the decisions for us.
And now we know the science says if you are vaccinated, you can take your mask off.
Except unless your community doesn't want you to.
Why is that?
Well, because if your community doesn't want you to, you need to focus on that jurisdictional question.
Why?
The science doesn't care about jurisdiction.
The science doesn't care about federalism.
The science is the science.
That's the premise of progressivism.
That's why you guys have obliterated localism, obliterated community standards, obliterated federalism, So why?
Why do I need to defer to the local community?
Well, because in some places, not as many people have gotten vaccinated.
Right.
But that doesn't matter because the vaccine works.
We're told the vaccine works.
You can't really get it.
You can't really spread it.
So you should be okay.
Generally speaking, right?
That's why we're not going to wear the masks.
But no.
But no.
Because there's this political issue because the left wants to have its cake and eat it too.
And to a degree, the right does as well.
Everything's about the individual, but also they want to hold on to their power.
The place you see...
This kind of ridiculous claim most clearly is in the restaurants, right?
Because we've been joking on the right the whole time, which is, and we've been saying, okay, so if I'm walking around the restaurant, I can get COVID, which is why I need to put my mask on.
But the minute I sit down at the table, then I can't get COVID, so I can take my mask off.
Right?
That's the kind of caricature of the left's argument.
But that's not really what the left was saying.
That's just how we made fun of them.
What the left was really saying is that you can't eat with a mask on.
So really, you all should be wearing masks all the time, but we recognize you can't eat with a mask on.
So we're going to open the restaurants a little bit, but you should have your mask off as little as possible.
Okay?
However, that didn't quite make sense either.
Because if this virus is so dangerous...
That you need to mask up in public, totally muzzle yourself for a year, that it's so dangerous that you can't even have it off while you're eating.
It's got to be kind of in between bites.
You can't even walk to the bathroom.
It's so dangerous.
Then obviously we just shouldn't open the restaurants.
If that were the case, then just eat at home.
Cook at home.
Do takeout or something.
But you certainly shouldn't open the restaurants.
But the left wants to have its cake and eat it too here.
Because the left is, while they're clamoring and saying, this is so dangerous, it's the most dangerous thing we've ever faced.
Don't ever take the mask off.
You've got to put a mask on a three-year-old.
While they're saying that, they are implicitly saying, it's not that big a deal.
Come on, you can go to a restaurant.
Just do what we say.
Just do what we say.
Come on, follow the science, whatever the science is that we say at this particular moment.
And you can't have those two things at the same time and be consistent.
I think ultimately what this is coming down to is the tension, not even between the science and the preferences of the people and the experts and the elected politicians.
I think what this is coming down to, I think it actually has very little to do with the coronavirus.
It comes down to a tension in our liberal society between The public and the private.
On the right right now, there's a big disagreement between the individual rights libertarian type conservatives and the common good conservatives.
And they're just both recognizing an aspect of the right that we should be able to recognize, but people have become so ideologically fanatical here that now you have people who would call themselves libertarian who actually They refuse to acknowledge that there is such a thing as a public good.
They refuse to acknowledge that there is a common good, that there is society at all.
It's just all about me, me, me, me, me.
But that is a tool of the left.
As we're taking our masks off now, some women do not want to lose the masks.
There was a piece in a newspaper here, headline, The people who want to keep masking, it's like an invisibility cloak.
This is from The Guardian, okay?
And just interviewing, generally, just women who don't want to take their masks off.
Here are some of the quotes.
Tell me if this is about the science or if this is about something a little deeper.
Quote, I don't want to feel the pressure of smiling at people to make sure everyone knows I'm friendly and likable.
Both in quotes.
It's almost like taking away the male gaze.
This is some feminist term.
I guess the feminists object to men having eyes.
So that's a feminist term.
They don't like the male gaze.
There's freedom in taking that power back.
So this isn't about I'm afraid to get the virus or whatever.
This is I don't want to have to smile at people.
And this woman is framing it in a feminist way, saying this is about the male gaze and taking power back from men.
But no, what this is about is her selfishness and her self-indulgence.
She doesn't want to even have to smile at people to show that she's friendly and likable.
That most basic demand of society to just sort of be friendly, to smile and not be ornery all the time, she doesn't want to have to take on that obligation of society.
She wants to do whatever she wants to do at any given time, and you can't say boo about it.
Another one, quote, Maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker.
Maybe it's because I always feel like I have to present my best self to the world.
But it has been such a relief to feel anonymous.
It's like having a force field around me that says, don't see me.
Wow, this is really profound.
And especially coming from a New Yorker, because I think a lot of people believe that if you're in a city, you know a lot of people, because you're always around a lot of people.
And if you're in a small town, you don't know that many people.
But it's actually the opposite.
If you're in a city, you can be anonymous.
If you're in a small town, you cannot be anonymous.
And the people who are drawn toward that sort of anonymity want more and more and more of it.
The mask here, not about the science, the mask being about this idea that I can just totally do whatever I want without being judged for it, without being known.
Think about this.
this.
When people have fantasies, they'll often pretend to be invisible.
They can just totally be invisible.
When a little child is playing, one of the pretend games they'll play is invisibility, and I can just do whatever I want.
And what invisibility fantasies and games are about is about the ability to live without the forces of the moral universe on you, without the judgment, without the accountability.
I don't want to be accountable to anybody.
I don't want anyone to know who I am and to hold me accountable for what I'm doing.
And then finally, quote, it's a common consensus among my co-workers that we prefer not having customers see our faces.
Not having customers see our faces.
Oftentimes when a customer is being rude or saying off-color political things, what does that mean?
Being a Republican?
Off-color political things?
Meaning non-leftist?
I'm not allowed to grimace or make a face because that will set them off.
Oh my goodness gracious.
This woman's obviously in retail.
The old expression, the customer is always right.
That's wrong.
According to this woman, I am always right.
The retail worker is always right.
When a customer says or does something that I don't like, I'm not even allowed to grimace at them.
Yeah, you're not, because you're a retail worker.
You're doing your job.
Oh my, yeah, I'm not allowed to.
You know, it's so outrageous.
When I'm sitting here and doing this show, I'm not allowed to just sit around and smoke a cigar and read a book.
Isn't that crazy?
I want to be able to do that.
I have to actually talk.
I have to actually read things out loud.
I have to react to things.
I have to give my views.
Isn't that crazy that I can't just do whatever I want, even when I'm doing my job?
That's what this person is saying.
This is what the liberal society does, on the left and the right, for that matter.
The liberal society exalts entitlement to selfishness and anonymity.
This is why in a great many moral matters, even in the cultural, even in the sexual matters, even in the social matters, the left and the right are almost in perfect agreement that all that matters is consent.
As long as you consent to do something, people ought to be able to do whatever they want.
Now this is a very new idea.
It used to be that at least, actually the left and the right in this country both used to agree that Society and the moral order make some demands of us, and we have to do certain things.
True freedom, true liberty is not just doing whatever we want all the time.
It's doing what we ought to do.
The right to do what we ought to do.
That's true liberty.
Then the left kind of lost that in the 60s, maybe a little bit earlier.
And then the left convinced the right to adopt the same stupid view, which I detail at great length in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for pre-order.
You can also get an autographed first edition at Premier Collectibles.
The right adopted the left's view on this sort of thing.
And so now we basically just seek the same things.
We seek a total private sphere, no demands on us from society.
The way this expresses itself on the left is to say that society is awful, so it has no right to make a demand on us.
Or to say that, you know, our true selves are just whatever our most base desires are.
And we have an obligation to follow those desires no matter how crazy they are.
That's how it expresses itself on the left.
And on the right it expresses itself in this kind of Ayn Rand craziness of, you know, the virtue of selfishness that actually charity and care for our neighbors.
Somehow that's wrong because of some paperback writer from the 20th century who convinced people to throw away the moral order and the conservative tradition.
This liberal emphasis on privacy, on individual choice, on anonymity, explains a phenomenon that a lot of people have been wondering about.
This phenomenon has bedeviled religious observers all around the country, which is, you have people like Joe Biden coming out and saying, I'm a devout Catholic.
Oh, yeah.
Whenever you see Biden's religion referenced in print, it's always very Catholic, devout Catholic.
Why do they call him devout?
Because he goes to mass sometimes.
And he actually violates the central tenets of his religion.
Remember, Joe Biden was denied communion at a church in North Carolina.
And all the criticism went on the priest for denying him communion.
But he ought to be denied communion.
He is denying the faith.
And not just denying the faith.
He has created scandal.
He's endorsed radically pro-abortion policies in direct contravention of the Catholic faith.
So yes, he's being denied communion as an act of compassion because he's compromising his mortal soul.
That's not a good thing.
So he does this, but he's still a devout Catholic.
Nancy Pelosi, same thing.
On the same issue...
She was asked a question by a reporter that referred to these bishops.
The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops are saying, look, we've got to do something about this.
These politicians on the left who say that they're Catholic are misleading the faithful.
And they're creating this idea that it's perfectly fine for Catholics to support abortion, which it is not.
And we might have to bring some consequences upon them.
Pelosi was asked about this.
this, she said, never mind, I'll just use my private judgment.
The U.S. starting bishops and the bishops conference doesn't want to give any money or doesn't want to give, allow you to receive communion.
No, I think I can use my own judgment on that, but I'm pleased with what the Vatican put out on that subject.
Did you read that?
That'll be up to the individual priests?
No, it basically says, don't don't be divisive on the subject.
Thank you.
Oh man, she was wrong and then she was extra wrong and the reporter even called her out on that.
I think I can use my own private judgment on whether or not to receive the Eucharist.
Look, I don't purport to be a theologian.
I'm a practicing Catholic, but I'm not saying I'm an expert or anything.
But I'm pretty sure you can't.
I'm pretty sure you can't use your own private judgment.
I just think it might serve Pelosi well if she would at least consider Googling Catholicism at some point.
Because it is a very important aspect of the faith that your private judgment is not the be-all and end-all, actually.
We have priests.
We have bishops.
We have the magisterium.
We have the tradition.
We have dogma.
We have things that you actually need to follow before you follow your own In the case of Nancy Pelosi, extremely flawed moral conscience.
I don't even know that her conscience is wrong.
Her conscience may well guide her in the right way, and she's just refusing to cooperate with that.
You can't do that.
And then she goes, well, no, I prefer what the Vatican said.
Oh, the Vatican saying that individual priests should make this decision?
What?
No.
Don't be divisive.
What?
You're just quoting some line completely out of context.
That is not what we're referring to here.
Goodness gracious.
But speaking of religious conflict, it's not only the Catholics that are having this issue.
It is...
Now coming to the forefront on our nightly news broadcasts in Israel, because there is a major religious conflict going on here in Israel.
And once again, just like this liberty issue, you know, the left and the right broadly used to agree on liberty, and now, then they started to disagree, and now they've both adopted the far left's version of it.
Same thing with Israel.
The left and the right both used to basically support Israel.
Now, at least the left, parts of the right, but certainly the left, Almost uniformly opposed to Israel.
And Israel under a lot of fire right now for blowing up a building that was inhabited by the Associated Press.
But Israel had a pretty good argument for it.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Israel under the direction of Bibi Netanyahu blew up a building that the Associated Press had been using.
I will refrain from making any jokes about this.
I know there have been a lot of jokes, and people have made them, but that would be very, very much in poor taste.
So I will refrain from making any jokes.
I will point out, though, the facts of this here, which is that Hamas was using the building, the building that the Associated Press is saying, this was our building.
How dare you come in?
This is an attack on journalism.
Well, Bibi and the Israelis come back and they say, what are you talking about?
You were housing terrorists in the building.
It's about Palestinian terrorists.
An intelligence office for the Palestinian terrorist organization housed in that building that plots and organizes the terror attacks against Israeli civilians.
So it's a perfectly legitimate target.
And I can tell you that we took every precaution to make sure that there were no No civilian injuries.
In fact, no deaths, no injuries whatsoever.
I can't say injuries.
I don't know if somebody received a fragment of a stone.
I don't know that.
But no people are killed.
Now, imagine, ask yourself, how is that possible?
You see these high-rise towers that are used by Hamas over and over again.
They collapse and no one is killed.
Why does that happen?
Because we, unlike Hamas, take special precautions to tell people, leave the building.
Leave the premises.
We make sure that everyone is gone before we bring down those terrorist facilities.
And that's the difference between Israel and Hamas.
They deliberately target our cities, deliberately target our civilians.
They glorify the death of children and civilians and old people.
They are happy with it.
So, this is obviously true.
This is incontrovertible.
It is very impressive that they took down this building that the journalists, who seem to be a little cozy with Hamas, if you ask me, the journalists are saying this is an attack on speech and the press.
And you say, well, hold on.
They took down the whole building and they didn't kill anybody?
How did they do that?
Because they did it very, very carefully.
So, there is a...
An old idea on the right, that Israel is always right, regardless.
We're always with Israel.
We're just reflexively with Israel.
Israel's our greatest ally of all time, and Israel's terrific, right?
Now, on the left, you're hearing this idea, Israel's always wrong.
Israel's the worst place in the whole wide world.
It's an apartheid state.
We'll get to that in a second.
It's evil, and we need to support the Palestinian terrorists.
Okay.
Why can one not have what I think is the reasonable take on this, which is, you say, look, Israel's a sovereign country.
We may have different interests at some point.
I'm not saying we do.
I'm just saying we may have different interests, okay?
And they're a sovereign country, and they're going to pursue their national interest, and we're going to pursue our national interest.
And we're not going to treat Israel as though it's the 51st state.
But also, if you're deciding between supporting the Israelis and Bibi Netanyahu and Hamas and people who danced in the street on 9-11 in Palestine, you can watch the videos.
I remember watching it on 9-11.
And you're going to look at people who don't seem to have America's best interests at heart.
Why on earth would we support the creation of some Palestinian nation state being led by a terrorist group?
Why on earth would we not support Israel in this case?
Doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Another good argument, I think, for backing Israel in this little dispute is that all of the worst political people in our country are defending the Palestinian Arabs and opposing Israel.
So just as a rule of thumb, when I see people like AOC or Joy Reid supporting one side of a political question, I'm going to do my own investigation, probably, okay, but it is a perfectly natural and justifiable prejudice, a prejudgment.
I'm just looking at who's backing them, and I'm going to probably go on the other side, just knowing how we line up on other issues as well.
So Joy Reid on MSNBC, one of the worst people on that channel.
Joy Reid goes in and she says, and what her guests say more specifically, is this is about Jewish supremacy.
Jewish supremacy is the main goal of Israel Apartheid.
And I say the word apartheid because former prime minister of Israel, two of them, Uhud Olmert, Uhud Barak, security services, head of the Mossad, and many others use this word saying in absence of any political solution, we will be entering apartheid.
We're already in a...
We're already living a project of ethno-religious exclusion and purity.
This is what happened after years of Bibi Netanyahu incitement, weaponization of religion and weaponization of race, where it doesn't matter democracy for even Palestinians who live inside.
What matters is their ethnicity.
What matters is their race, their religion.
And it's basically this stage where the occupation is metastasized.
Everywhere, not only in Gaza or the West Bank or East Jerusalem, but also inside Israel.
So what is the claim here?
Because there's a lot of these buzzwords, these slogans, apartheid, ethno-nationalism.
Okay, what is this woman actually saying?
Jewish supremacy?
We did a whole show last week on the dead rhetoric of the left.
What is she saying?
She's saying that Israel is a Jewish state.
Yep, that's true.
And they believe that the Jews should have some special connection to the state of Israel.
Yep, duh, that's a Jewish state.
Are you going to object if Saudi Arabia is an Arabian state?
There aren't enough Japanese people in Arabia.
Yeah, I guess.
What about Japan for that matter?
Japan basically does not permit immigration.
Are they going to complain because there aren't enough Nigerians in Japan?
Japan is a Japanese state.
Well, it's ethno-nationalism.
Yeah, right.
Like most states, I guess.
Yeah, right.
Israel is not just an idea.
It's become fashionable in recent decades to say that countries can be just an idea, but that's obviously reductive and absurd.
Countries can have a creedal aspect, no question about it, but countries also have a people.
Japan is a Japanese country.
It has a connection to the Japanese people.
It's the country for the Japanese.
Israel is a Jewish state.
That is what it is.
So yes, is it Are Palestinian Arabs going to have a different relationship to Israel than Jewish people will?
Yeah, of course.
Duh.
They do have relatively good access to the political system.
It's not as though Muslims are totally kicked out of the political system in Israel.
Far from it.
Muslims participate quite actively, actually, in the Israeli political system.
But it is to say there is a special connection here for the Jews.
Just like there'd be a special connection for the Arabians in Saudi Arabia and the Japanese in Japan.
It makes perfect sense.
Why we're not allowed to say that now about countries is pretty strange, isn't it?
Pretty strange to me.
Supremacy, apartheid.
It's an apartheid state.
AOC just tweeted that.
She said, apartheid states are not democracies.
So we've got to be pretty specific here.
Because AOC is wrong in her particular claim where she's implying that Israel is an apartheid state and this is not a democracy, right?
But she's also wrong in her broader claim because apartheid states certainly can be democracies.
This word apartheid has a very specific context.
Apartheid refers to the policy of South Africa for many decades which instituted racial segregation and discrimination between blacks and whites.
And At the end of the 20th century, there was a big political international pressure campaign to end apartheid.
They did end apartheid.
And this term, this slogan, was deemed to be politically useful.
So instead of just coming out here and saying, in the specifics, well, Israel's certain policies on different races and religions, those are unjust and we need to fix these specific policies.
They realize that they'll probably lose that argument.
So instead, they're making this link between Israel and South Africa.
They're saying it's apartheid.
But let's get specific.
What is apartheid?
It's the system of racial segregation and discrimination.
Can democracies be apartheid states?
Of course they can.
Of course they can.
I'm not saying that's a good thing.
I'm just saying, duh, yes.
Very often that is the case.
Very often democracies do have policies that are racially discriminatory or that involve segregation.
Right?
We have racial policies in the United States right now, don't we?
We have policies at the level of college and employment that privilege certain races and disadvantage other races.
In affirmative action, black and Hispanic students get an advantage, and white and Asian students are disadvantaged.
That's a legal policy.
I'm not saying it's the same thing as apartheid South Africa, okay?
But I am pointing out that is a system of racial discrimination.
And there's an increasing system of racial segregation, especially on American college campuses, where you'll hear about things like blacks-only dorms.
So...
The issue here isn't apartheid.
It isn't democracy.
It isn't all these big, silly slogans that actually obscure the political issue.
If the left wants to make the point that Israel is doing something wrong, they should just get specific and say, this is why the Israeli policy is awful.
This is why the Palestinian Arabs should have a nation state.
This is why, and I think many of them believe this, this is why Israel should not exist and the Palestinian Arabs should just have the whole territory.
There have been members of Congress and the Democratic Party who have chanted slogans to that very effect.
But if you're going to make that, okay, fine, make the claim.
I'm not saying you can't make the claim.
But at least be honest about it and then make the argument and let the people decide.
I think they realize, though, that if they make that argument, people aren't really going to go for it.
Speaking of democracy, I've got to get to our own democracy.
You know, we've talked a little bit in recent weeks about how Liz Cheney was going to get booted out of GOP leadership, as well she should.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Set up to be replaced by Elise Stefanik, which I thought was unfortunate because Stefanik is more liberal than Liz Cheney, has a way worse voting record than Liz Cheney, and was not always even pro-Trump, even if that had been the determining factor.
So a guy named Chip Roy came up.
Chip Roy, also, you know, I guess, look, every politician has issues, but I thought he was much more conservative.
So anyway, Elise Stefanik won.
She was voted in 134 to 46 over Chip Roy.
So it wasn't a total knockout, but it was obviously a very, very decisive win.
Probably a missed opportunity for the GOP, but whatever.
Now we've just got to win.
I wish Elise Stefanik the best.
I hope she does a good job.
I hope she doesn't squish out.
I hope she has rethought her views on amnesty and the Equality Act and lots of other crazy radical legislation.
I hope she's more conservative now, and I hope she rallies the GOP to win.
Meanwhile, Liz Cheney, the ousted Former head of the GOP conference in the House.
She's got her sights set on higher office.
So this woman, this woman, she lost the Senate seat, right?
And then she won the House seat in Wyoming.
And then she's obviously going to lose re-election, I think, right?
You know, unless the primary just doesn't go anywhere.
She's certainly going to be primaried.
And she gets booted out of her leadership position.
So what's next for her?
She's going to run for president, of course.
What will it take for you to run for president?
I am right now focused on my reelection in Wyoming.
Of course you are, and you very much need to be.
But what would it take for you to run for president?
I heard you on the radio in New Hampshire today, so it's not too far out of your mind.
Look, I think it's really important that we, as Republicans, be in a position where we can present to our voters, to my voters in Wyoming, and to our voters across the country, A set of issues and policies that reflect conservative principles, but also hope and opportunity and inspiration.
Would your father like to see you run?
Well, yeah, but he's my dad, so...
He's not objective.
Good point.
Oh, ha ha ha, yes.
Now, if Liz Cheney were not going to run in 2024, if she were not intending to run in 2024, she would have had a very simple answer.
Are you planning to run?
No.
Absolutely not.
I'm very happy representing the people of Wyoming.
I'm not going to run.
When she says, look, what would it take?
Well, you know, the country would have to be...
I bet your dad would like you to run.
I bet he would.
I bet a lot of people who like Dick Cheney would want me to run.
I don't know.
I mean...
So she's obviously trying to spin up a campaign.
Bill Kristol tweeted this out the other day, so take that for what it's worth.
He tweeted out, oh, Liz Cheney, she's set the stage for a great campaign for president.
Just a reminder that when Liz Cheney was trying to hold on to her leadership position in the House, no one spoke out in her defense.
Liz Cheney voted for the second farcical impeachment of Donald Trump.
Liz Cheney never missed an opportunity to attack her constituents.
And people like Adam Kinzinger, a nominally Republican, a liberal Republican in the House, he would defend her, he voted with her, he stood by her.
Not even he, not even he would speak out against her being removed from leadership.
But she believes that she could maybe mount a run for 2024.
How much of the party does she represent?
I don't mean to just dunk on Liz Cheney and the more liberal elements of the party, and I don't mean to just defend the Trump side or the Reagan side or the conservative side of the Republican Party.
I'm just trying to look at this coldly right now.
If you thought about what percentage of the party goes for whom, how much of the GOP does Liz Cheney command?
She doesn't even command her own allies in the House.
On what planet is this woman going to win the nomination for president in 2024?
Adam Kinzinger.
Liz Cheney's buddy in the house who supported all her squishy plans until, you know, finally even he wouldn't defend her when she was getting booted out.
Kinzinger is going on liberal news shows, as they all do, and he's going on Chuck Todd's show on NBC. And he is making the claim that That he is a greater representative of the Republican Party than Donald Trump.
He is insisting that he will not let Donald Trump hijack his party.
I've been a Republican far longer than Donald Trump has, and I'm not going to let him come in and hijack my party and turn it into something that, you know, great people like Ronald Reagan and George W. and George H.W. Bush and all the great leaders back did not want it to be.
I'm not going to let him win.
I'm not going to let Donald Trump win at that.
So that's what the fight's about.
And I believe in what we used to believe in with 21st century solutions, though.
Okay, so I believe in what we used to believe.
Okay, what did you used to believe in?
You know, I support the party of Reagan and Bush.
Well, hold on.
Now we've got a problem.
Because Reagan and Bush represented opposite ends of the Republican Party.
That's why they had the unity ticket in 1980.
The reason that Reagan and Bush fought out a brutal primary...
George Bush coined the term voodoo economics to make fun of Ronald Reagan.
They represented totally different elements.
They had a unity ticket to bring the party together.
And then Reagan served eight years.
Bush had basically nothing to do with that.
And then in 1988, when Bush took over and got Reagan's third term, Bush famously called for a kinder, gentler nation, to which Nancy Reagan responded, kinder and gentler than whom?
It was an insult aimed at Ronald Reagan because they had very different visions of the country.
When George W. Bush came in, he said, I'm a compassionate conservative.
More compassionate than whom?
More compassionate than the actual conservatives, in his mind.
And I'm not even just dunking on the Bushes.
Okay, whatever.
Bushes did some nice things.
They've done some impressive things in their lives.
George H.W. is a war hero.
George W. seems like a perfectly amiable fellow.
But you can't claim that you're representing all of them.
You have to get more specific here, folks.
What part of the GOP? The idea that Adam Kinzinger is the true Republican and Donald Trump is not, give me a break.
These guys, Cheney and Kinzinger, represent the liberal faction of the party, which right now is going along with something that I think is an egregious miscarriage of justice, namely the January 6th commission.
Yes.
We've had the 9-11 Commission.
Now they want the January 6th Commission.
What is that?
Being pushed by House Homeland Security Chairman Benny Thompson, who's a dem, and Representative John Katko, who's nominally at least a Republican.
They want a bipartisan commission to look into the events surrounding the Capitol on January 6th.
The commission, quote, will be charged with studying the facts and circumstances surrounding the January 6th attack on the Capitol, as well as the influencing factors that may have provoked the attack on our democracy.
Our democracy, which I think it was Angelo Cotevilla at the Claremont Institute, he said that when they refer to our democracy, they're actually referring to their oligarchy.
You'll notice that the people who use that for our democracy, they seem to be some of the least democratic people around.
They seem to have the greatest disdain for the people, and they seem to support the machinations of the Very, very clearly oligarchic, in some elements, state of theirs.
So, what about the January 6th commission?
In a way, I sort of support it because everything we were told about January 6th has crumbled, really.
The idea that the Trump supporters killed a police officer, that fell apart, even though it was printed in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The idea that they set bombs out, remember?
There were bombs being set.
We still don't know anything about those bombs.
The FBI... Hasn't told us anything about them.
Don't you think if they were set by a Trump supporter, we might have heard about that by now?
It's kind of strange, at least.
I'd like an answer on that.
The idea that people were being killed, the only person who was killed in the political violence of the day was the Trump supporter, Ashley Babbitt, killed by the Capitol Police.
So, in a way, I kind of want it, but on the other hand, I don't really want it.
I don't want this commission because it's so ridiculous to compare the Capitol riot, bad as it was, to 9-11?
Are you insane?
So we're going to have a January 6th commission, but we're not going to have a summer of 2020 commission?
Because summer of 2020, when BLM and Antifa burned down the country, that did result in a lot of deaths.
That did result in a lot of destruction.
Attacks on government buildings, attacks on courthouses, attacks on private businesses, attacks on civilians.
But we don't have a commission to study that.
I want to study that.
I want to know where the funding came from.
I want to know which Democrats actively encouraged it.
I want those people to be held accountable.
But they won't be, because one of them is the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris.
So I don't support it because it's such a ridiculous double standard.
I don't want to give credence to any of that nonsense.
Meanwhile, we're told the real threat here, the real threat to America, white supremacists.
This according to Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary.
Unfortunately, the horror of domestic violent extremism is still with us.
Indeed, the FBI assessed that 2019 was the deadliest year for violent domestic extremism since 1995.
In March of this year, the intelligence community in a report drafted by DHS, the FBI, and the National Counterterrorism Center Under the auspices of the Director of National Intelligence, assessed that domestic violent extremists pose an elevated threat in 2021.
And in the FBI's view, the top domestic violent extremist threat we face comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.
That's it.
That's the big threat.
Don't you remember when White Lives Matter burned down the country last year, right?
You remember that.
Oh, you don't?
Oh.
But hey, the heads of the administrative agencies say so, and they would never lie to us.
They would never be totally wrong.
Oh, this is obviously preposterous.
How many white supremacists are there?
I'm not saying there aren't isolated incidents, but compared to burning down the country, I just don't see it.
Meanwhile, white supremacy now explains everything.
We're told by Patrice Cullors, you know, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, BLM, also known as Buy Large Mansions.
She's now trying to, she's trying to explain away how she bought all these really nice houses.
So she's saying that there's a history of racism inside the housing market.
And this is why black homeownership has always been a way to disrupt white supremacy.
She's justifying her extortion and corrupt purchase of nice houses as a way to fight white supremacy.
Completely ridiculous.
As we are unmasking around this country, we need to unmask The very subtle, very corrupt premises at the heart of so much of the left's action.
That's going to require us to get very specific and to tune out the disingenuous and very corrupt officials here who want to keep it all masked up.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
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.
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