All Episodes
Previous Next
May 18, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
51:22
Ep. 766 - Public Health Propaganda

Brazil transforms Christ The Redeemer into a massive Dr. Fauci, Eric Clapton complains of a brutal reaction to the vaccine, and France bans woke language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Public health propaganda reached new heights this past weekend when Brazilian authorities lit up the very famous statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, lit it up in a line that says, Vaccine Saves.
Very creepy, extremely sacrilegious, and also just not true.
You know how I know this?
I know this with scientific certainty.
100% of people who get the vaccine will die.
I know that.
YouTube's going to try to shut me down for that.
It is simply a scientific fact.
100% of people who get the vaccine will die.
Now...
They're probably not going to die tomorrow.
Very possibly the vaccine will extend their lives, but they will die.
This substitute religion is ridiculous.
And so many people these days are beginning to tune it out.
They are realizing that the public health establishment has not only lost its credibility, has not only misled people in so many ways, but it is also grabbing so much power that it does not deserve.
Political power and religious power as well.
And many, many people are tuning it out.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Benjamin Watson, who says, The CDC's changes in masking restrictions is the equivalent to an employer shouting, You're fired!
right before their employee quits.
Far more about maintaining authority and control than anything else.
I think this is pretty true.
I think this is pretty fair.
The public health officials were trying to hold on to power, trying to force everyone to keep distancing, keep masking, and then people just ignored them and governors started ignoring them.
So now, Johnny, come lately, they say, no, actually, we wanted you to disregard the masks from the beginning.
So keep listening to us about everything else.
It's desperate and it's obviously political.
People are recognizing their rights.
They're protecting themselves.
When you want to protect yourself and exercise your rights, you've got to check out Armored Republic, You've heard me talk about how important the Second Amendment is to the foundation of our country.
I'm going to be getting into it a little bit more later in the show.
You might even be one of the over 5 million citizens who purchased a firearm for the first time in 2020.
If you have taken the first step of protecting yourself with a firearm, the next step in your personal protection plan should be considering body armor for yourself and your family.
Shopping for body armor may seem like something that you never thought you'd have to do.
I mean, I never expected to be wearing body armor.
You may not know where to begin.
In fact, you may not even know that you could buy body armor.
That is where AR500 Armor comes in.
I really love this company.
These guys have their heads on straight and they make a tremendous product that can protect you if things spin out of control, as maybe some of you have noticed very well can happen.
Maybe you've noticed that in recent years.
Best of all, they put together some packages specifically for listeners of The Daily Wire.
So there's something for everyone at AR500Armor.com.
Head on over to AR500Armor.com slash Knowles and see all their promotions and special pricing running right now.
You can use code Knowles for 20% off anything else in the entire store.
Right now, you can plan for how to protect yourself and your family for the future.
So So get yourself the body armor that we trust at AR500Armor.com slash Knowles.
You get 20% off with the code Knowles.
People are beginning to tune out, if they haven't already, they're certainly now beginning to tune out, the public health propagandists who are taking a lot of power for themselves.
Notably, Eric Clapton.
You know Eric Clapton?
Very famous.
One of the most famous rock musicians in the world.
Eric Clapton is saying things that could get him kicked off of YouTube.
Here's what he's saying.
I'm just going to report what he's saying.
Because if I were to say it, I could run the risk of being kicked off of YouTube.
That is how closely tied in the big tech industry is with the bureaucracy, with the government, with the public health administration.
So...
I'm just going to read what Eric Clapton said and his experience of the vaccine.
He said, We're good to go.
This guy is one of the most famous guitarists ever, you know, in popular music.
And so that's a very big fear.
He goes on.
I suffer with peripheral neuropathy and should never have gone near the needle, but the propaganda said the vaccine was safe for everyone.
So here's the issue.
Okay, I am not telling any tales out of school here, okay?
I'm not saying anything that is a conspiracy theory or anything like that.
Remember, they paused a vaccine because there were rare, but significant side effects.
Only affected a very small number of people, but they were very, very significant as they possibly can be.
And you're not really allowed to talk about that.
Even when the public health officials come out and say, yes, there have been these rare cases, but we're going to pause certain vaccines, but then we're going to start them again.
We, the public, and especially communicators, are not allowed to mention this.
We're called conspiracy theorists and we're called anti-vaxxers or something and taken off of the internet.
I'm nothing of the sort and I'm not even anti-vaccine.
Generally speaking, but I do think we should be able to report on these sorts of reactions.
A lot of people have heard these things anecdotally from friends or relatives or friends of friends or in this case from Eric Clapton.
But we're not allowed to do that because the scientific matter of the vaccines is not really considered a scientific matter.
Just like the scientific matter of the coronavirus is not really considered a scientific matter.
It's a political matter.
Whereby public health officials will lie to our faces, right?
They'll say, one day, they'll say, don't wear the masks.
The masks don't work.
You shouldn't wear the mask, you stupid sheep.
I'm paraphrasing our exalted Dr.
Fauci.
Then five seconds later, he says, you have to wear the masks.
And then later on he justifies it and says that he misled us in the first place because he thought that all of us peasants would go out and buy up the masks and he wanted to save them for the nurses.
But now that he knows there's enough masks, he's going to tell us that we need to buy them.
Okay, presuming to take a lot of political power and in the case of Rio, presuming to take the place of Christianity, to supplant Christianity in Rio for goodness sakes.
And on a very famous statue of Christ the Redeemer, a statue that says Christ saves, to cover that up and say no, vaccine saves, which is to say the public health officials save.
But there are downsides here, okay?
As with any scientific procedure, there is a risk.
Even now, the public health officials who paused one of the vaccines will acknowledge, yes, there are risks.
And you've got to make a risk calculation, which is why I've said from the beginning, if I were older, if I were fatter, if I were in poorer health, I would probably be much more likely to rush out and get the vaccine than I am now, as a relatively young, ostensibly healthy millennial.
I'm not saying I have no risk.
Don't you let, if anything ever happens to me, if I get COVID, you know, and God forbid something terrible happens, don't you let The libs write headlines about me that I was a COVID denier and I got my comeuppance.
I'm not denying anything.
I'm just saying that people ought to take risks into account.
There are downsides to everything that we do.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
The UK is seeing this right now.
The UK is now dealing with the downside of the COVID lockdowns, other than destroying the economy and people's political rights and shutting down churches and depriving people of so many of their traditions and liberties.
Here's another downside.
Even the public health officials in the UK are now worried that kids are going to get more common respiratory infections at higher rates with more severe reactions because they've been locked down for a full year.
So in the United Kingdom right now, medical professionals are telling The Sun, the newspaper, that models are showing that beginning this fall, there could be between 20% and 50% more cases of children needing to be hospitalized from respiratory synchial, I don't know, I'm mispronouncing that, virus, otherwise known as RSV, Which usually causes mild cold-like symptoms and can be serious for infants and senior citizens.
From one expert, quote, there is a concern that children this year have missed out on a normal RSV viral exposure.
They would normally be exposed to this, but they won't have been because of lockdown.
Another expert said, we may get a big surge of routine respiratory conditions this autumn and winter as most people avoided contact last winter.
It's not just kids.
Each year around 30,000 kids are hospitalized because of this virus.
It could be significantly more this year.
Now, I think that I'm going to be in a pretty good position.
I think a lot of you are going to be in a pretty good position.
Because from the beginning, I've just ignored the lockdown.
I just have.
In rare cases, such as on an airplane, when they make me wear the mask, I'll basically wear the mask the whole time.
But otherwise, I've ignored it.
And I've seen my friends, and I've seen my family, and I've gone out, and I've flown all over God's green earth.
And I feel great.
And so, thankfully, you know, I made it through just fine this whole year, and I've gotten to see family, I've gotten to live my life, and also now, I've exposed myself to the environment, because we do have an immune system.
I know that the public health professionals want to pretend that they are the only thing keeping us from sudden death at any given moment, but there are other things, folks.
We have our immune system, we have our common sense, we have our prudence.
We have our actual redeemer in his providence, okay?
We've got all of these things, and there is more to life than not coming down with the cough, okay?
And there are prudential risk assessments that people can make.
We're not allowed to say that anymore.
Actually, what we're told we have to believe is that if you don't get this vaccine immediately, regardless of your age, regardless of your risk level, that you are endangering not just the public, you're endangering yourself, and you will pay the price.
If the unvaccinated get vaccinated, they will protect themselves and other unvaccinated people around them.
If they do not, states with low vaccination rates may see those rates go up, may see this progress reversed.
Ultimately, those who are not vaccinated will end up paying the price.
The vaccinated will continue to be protected against severe illnesses, but others may not be if you're not vaccinated.
But given that the vaccination is convenient and free, it'll be a tragedy and a needless one to see COVID cases among those who do not get vaccinated go up.
So what Joe Biden has said right here, the unvaccinated will pay the price, that's simply not true.
If he wanted to be accurate, he would say the unvaccinated may pay the price.
Because there's risk and uncertainty in anything that we do.
Eric Clapton is paying the price.
And luckily, it's all okay now, right?
The experts tell us that, well, we know there are widespread mild reactions to the vaccines.
We all have a friend or relative who got the second shot and they were down for the count for a few days.
But in some cases, there are more serious reactions.
We are told by the experts that they're very, very rare.
So I'm not saying don't get the vaccine.
But I am saying there's always a risk in life.
And so, yeah, there's a risk to not getting the vaccine, too.
And people may pay the price.
That's the way this world works.
However, I think there's a serious reason to doubt Joe Biden here, okay?
Namely, he's been wrong about this thing from the beginning.
When Texas decided it was going to lift its mask mandate, this would have been a couple months ago now, Joe Biden came out and he said that this was Neanderthal thinking.
Last thing we need is the Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything's fine.
Take off your mask.
Forget it.
Yeah, that's what we're getting, Neanderthal thinking.
So I'm sure the cases have skyrocketed, deaths have skyrocketed in Texas, right?
Let's see the latest.
Let's check in on the science.
Oh, wow.
How about that?
Texas is reporting zero deaths from the coronavirus for the first time now in nearly 14 months.
This is months now after they lifted the mask mandate.
So the issue here, someone wrote in to Ben's radio show, actually, when I was filling in and they said, you got to talk to your friend Knowles.
He's an anti-vaxxer and he's being selfish.
I'm not.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
I don't think that my reticence to rush out and get the vaccine, I don't think it's selfish at all.
I don't think the science suggests that this will in any way harm anybody else.
But the point I will make for the one in five Americans who are a little skeptical of these vaccines and a good portion of them who say they won't get it under any circumstances, which is a much harsher stance than I have, is...
It's not my fault that the public health administrators squandered their credibility.
That's not my fault.
It's not my fault that they misled people and got caught.
It's not my fault that their predictions were wrong.
It's not my fault that Joe Biden's predictions were wrong.
That ain't my fault.
If they want credibility, they have to earn it.
Speaking of earning people's trust, has anyone done that more so than City Journal?
City Journal, a great, great outlet to go check out.
If you're interested in learning more about what's going on in our nation's cities and in our culture, you absolutely need to be reading City Journal.
Published by the Manhattan Institute, City Journal is the nation's premier urban policy magazine with fearless writers such as Heather McDonald.
Love her.
Christopher Ruffo, he's terrific.
Chris Ruffo's work right now is reporting on the woke craze and critical race theory that is going on in our schools around this country.
Each issue is designed with beautifully inspired covers, making it excellent material for your coffee table, your living room, or anywhere else that you'd like to impress your friends and family.
Now, for a limited time, our listeners can enter for a chance to get their hands on a print issue of City Journal, the magazine, for free.
Just go to city-journal.org slash giveaway.
Enter your information and you will be contacted if you are selected.
So head on over right now.
That is city-journal.org slash giveaway.
I love these guys.
I've read City Journal for years.
I think that for a long time they've put out tremendous stuff and they're still putting out really, really great stuff.
stuff.
Some of the, some of the most important reporting and commentary out there head on over to City Journal today.
So we're, we're hearing from the federal government that you got to get this vaccine, get it as soon as you can.
You'll pay the price if you don't.
But, but yet from the federal agencies, we're not really seeing that being implemented because if, if truly we all need to get the vaccine, then that means that we've got to have a vaccine passport or your employers have the right to ask for it.
Your, your businesses that you frequent have the right to ask for it.
Everybody does.
The government has the right to ask for it, but that's not what we're seeing.
The department of justice, according to reports, will not ask employees to confirm their vaccination status after allowing them to go maskless indoors, following updated guidelines from the CDC, according to a report now out from the Hill.
So, they were initially suggesting that they would force employees to confirm that they had been vaccinated.
This would seem to violate some norms and traditions in this country.
This would seem to open them up to litigation, and so they're not going to do it.
We heard this news yesterday.
Starbucks and Walmart are going to open up their stores to the unmasked.
And the policy is, if you're vaccinated, you don't need a mask.
If you are unvaccinated, you do need a mask.
But they're not going to check.
So, effectively, what this means is everyone's going to take the mask off.
And it just shows you the conflicting propaganda we've got.
On the one hand, COVID is so super duper serious that we've got to wear masks even as we walk from the receptionist to the hostess stand to our dinner table at a restaurant.
It's so super duper dangerous that we've got to wear that mask then, but we can take it off at the table.
Well, why?
Because you can't eat...
With a mask on.
Well, so why is the restaurant open in the first place?
Well, because COVID's not that dangerous.
If it were really as dangerous as they were all saying it is, then they should just keep the restaurants closed.
But they didn't do that.
So you're getting such conflicting messages here.
And that's why people, I think, increasingly are tuning them out, which is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned.
Speaking of controversial scientific claims, we're getting a really controversial claim from the NFL. As it tries to stave off lawsuits from people who have been injured playing in the league.
So, get a load of this one.
This is really quite politically incorrect.
The NFL, which has gone very, very woke in recent years, which has in many ways led the country in disrespecting the American flag, in the protest of the Star Spangled Banner because of white supremacy and how they stand for Black Lives Matter.
So the NFL is reportedly trying to stave off a $1 billion brain injury settlement fund and claims made on that fund by arguing that blacks are stupider than whites.
That is one of the arguments that is being made.
So this accusation right now is being made by former Redskins.
Oops, am I allowed to say that term?
I know that we're, what are they called now?
They're called the Washington football team.
This is the most vague, bland name ever.
I'm going to stick with Redskins, I think.
The former Redskins running back, Ken Jenkins, just delivered 50,000 petitions to the billion dollar funds administrator, senior US district judge Anita Brody.
And, And Jenkins is highlighting something here, which is that You've got to prove that you've had cognitive impairment in order to be entitled for some of this settlement fund, or entitled to it, rather.
And so you've got to show that your brain is dropped below the average performance here, what would be expected.
But there's a two-tiered system, apparently, in here, because what the NFL is allegedly arguing is that black people ordinarily have lower cognitive skills than white people.
So, on the one hand, the NFL is arguing, we're Black Lives Matter, we're so supportive, yeah, let's protest the flag, down with white supremacy.
And then out of the other side of their mouth, they're saying, but actually, you know, blacks are dumber than whites.
They're saying those both at the same, do you see the conflicting message?
Do you see why this tarnishes the credibility of, and not just the credibility of public health people, but the credibility of allegedly woke institutions like the NFL? Really ugly stuff.
Really bad PR for them.
Obviously, I haven't seen every detail of every legal document here, but this is the claim being made by Ken Jenkins.
And one suspects that the NFL is going to want to tamp down this publicity.
So let's see.
Let's see if they can answer for it.
Speaking of locker rooms, Tennessee.
My wonderful state.
My home state of Tennessee.
It's my new home, but it's my home nonetheless.
They have now passed a law that will put schools at risk of lawsuits if they let men into the girls' locker room or into the girls' bathrooms, any gender bending rule like that.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has just signed this bill.
That will open the schools up to punishment if they permit transgender students, meaning men who are pretending to be women or vice versa, use locker rooms that do not reflect their, quote, gender at birth.
So this is a phrase being used in the reporting here, their gender at birth.
This is great legislation.
I'm very glad that...
Tennessee is standing up for the women's room.
I didn't know that we would need to elect rock-ribbed conservatives to stand up for the ladies' room, but apparently we have to.
We've really got to watch our language here, too, folks, because you're going to hear reporting on this and say it refers to transgender students, singles out transgender students.
Transgenderism is not a thing.
It's a social phenomenon, but it isn't real.
What is contained in the phrase transgenderism is the belief that a man can really be a woman.
But that isn't true.
A man cannot really be a woman.
And so transgenderism, as a concept, is a fantasy.
Lock that away with the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy.
That isn't real.
We should stop using that phrase.
Another phrase I hear from conservatives a lot is this phrase, biological males.
Maybe you've used it yourself.
I know, look, it's tricky.
The left lays all these linguistic traps for us, and very often we fall into those traps.
But this is a very bad idea because it advances the left's purpose, a process that I write about at great length in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available now for pre-order.
You can also pre-order the audio book.
I just finished recording the audio book.
It's available on Audible and other places.
You can pre-order that as well.
Thank you to everyone who's pre-ordered.
I think there are a lot of conservatives who believe that by being really specific, they're going to outfox the left.
So the left says, I'll use Caitlyn Jenner as an example, that Caitlyn Jenner is a trans woman.
And a trans woman refers to a man who now pretends to be a woman.
Now he's a trans woman.
And when conservatives don't want to go along with that kind of jargon, they'll say, actually, Caitlyn Jenner is a biological male.
Now, they think they're being very specific here, but they're actually accepting the whole premise.
The whole premise of transgenderism.
Because if you use the phrase biological male, you're implying that there's some other kind of male.
That you can be a non-biological male, which is the whole idea of transgenderism.
So I think we can't do it, folks.
I know we're trying to be polite.
We're trying to be specific.
But if you wanted to be most specific, and by the way, if you want to be most respectful...
By telling people the truth instead of lies.
Then you gotta drop the qualifier.
He's a man, baby.
He's a man.
I sound like Austin Powers.
It's just a man.
You'll notice that political correctness often uses this formula, actually the very phrase politically correct uses this formulation, where you put an adverb before an adjective to not just transform, but actually negate the adjective.
What I mean by that is, you got something like correct.
What does correct mean?
It means true.
But then you've got the phrase politically correct, and politically correct is ironic because the politically negates the correct.
Politically correct just means not true.
This was mocked in PC's early days as the formulation of the adverbially pre-modified adjectival lexical unit.
Because that's the way the jargon sounds.
It's this kind of silly language that either obscures or more often outright negates the meaning.
So don't do it.
We're kind of slow on the uptake here.
We like to consider ourselves pretty sturdy, conservative.
We love freedom.
We're blunt here in America.
But we're not.
Actually, believe it or not, France is doing a better job on this issue than we are.
The freaking French are more conservative on this issue than the Americans are.
But France is right now banning the use of gender-neutral language in schools.
So there was a push a couple of weeks ago to include full stops in the middle of written words.
They'll call this midpoints, which would therefore allow both male and female forms to be represented simultaneously.
You know, France, French is a gendered language, just like Italian and just like Spanish, like the romance languages, right?
The La biblioteca in Spanish is a female word.
Ends in an A, it accepts the article la, right?
There are male words and female words.
This is actually what gender referred to.
It just referred to grammar until the 1960s when the use of gender as referring to sex was popularized, and that's where we got the sex-gender distinction that sent us down this crazy rabbit hole.
But the French came out and they said no.
And what the French officials came out and said was that if you use this sort of thing, you will actually butcher the French language.
They actually saw this as a colonization by the English, by the Americans of France, that wokeness, that PC is a form actually of imperialism.
How ironic.
We're told that the whole point of wokeness and PC is to decolonize the white supremacy.
Actually, what does it do?
It's actually colonizing every other culture.
Now, where can you learn all of these sorts of arcane, really behind-the-scenes historical things.
You can check out a great podcast from Wondery.
Wondery's new podcast miniseries, The Vaping Fix, is a story of Silicon Valley idealism, blind ambition.
And how the now infamous e-cigarette company Juul hooked a new generation on vaping.
In 2015, the founders of Juul set out to create the iPod of e-cigarettes, a perfectly designed device that would disrupt the tobacco industry and help traditional smokers quit.
But their fruit-flavored vaping options, high levels of nicotine, and youthful influencer endorsements led to consequences that would put millions at risk.
As plumes of vape clouds surrounded schools across the nation, parents, politicians, and the government demanded answers.
Was this Juul's plan all along?
Or did ambition blind them from seeing the pitfalls of their invention?
Hosted by Laura Beal and from the team behind Dr. Death and Bad Batch comes The Vaping Fix.
Listen to The Vaping Fix on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or you can also listen early and ad free by starting your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.
You know, not everyone has the privilege of getting to know the one and only Candace Owens, live and in person.
Did Candace This is very, very flattering.
You know, though, you might be able to meet her.
You might, seriously.
Not just because I'm going to hook it up.
Don't text me in dry skin.
No.
Here's how you can do it.
If you sign up as a Daily Wire member with code VIP, you will get 20% off your new membership and be automatically entered for a chance to win a trip to the Daily Wire studios to see Candace live.
Not only will you be meeting Candace, you'll be getting an inside look at her studio, Our office and front row seats to watch her live and in action on her talk show, Candace.
Go enter to win a Candace VIP pass right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code VIP for 20% off and for an experience that only Joe Biden could forget.
Go check it out.
out.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
I hate to say that the French have more common sense than the Americans, but they do on this issue of wokeness.
I I actually, when I was researching my upcoming book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for pre-order, I noticed that even in the PC debates of the early 90s, The French said, no, we're not doing this.
PC never infected France.
For all their crazy, radical, leftist, liberal inclinations, the French never really went along with PC. They're a very politically incorrect people.
And the point that the French government is making right now...
That Nathalie Elimas, the State Secretary for Priority Education, pointing out that woke language is a, quote, danger for our country, and the death knell for the use of French in the world, points out that, quote, with the spread of inclusive writing, inclusive writing, the English language, already quasi-hegemonic across the world, would certainly, and perhaps forever, defeat the French language.
But the woke language is a creation of the Anglo-American culture, And when you go into other languages, notably those with gender, you're going to impose a sort of cultural tyranny on them.
You see it with the word Latinx.
You know, now it's very popular to call Mexicans and Guatemalans.
First of all, you've got to lump them all together.
There's no distinction anymore to be had between Guatemalans and Hondurans and...
So Nicaraguans and Mexicans, and there's no distinction whatsoever.
They're all just the same.
It used to be Hispanic.
Then it was Latino.
But then Latino, that's a male term.
So now it's got to be Latinx.
You say, wait a second.
Words don't end that way in the Spanish language.
So now we're imposing English linguistic structures on a foreign culture all in the name of decolonization.
Very crazy.
We should learn something from the French.
Never thought I would utter that phrase.
Speaking of political correctness, abroad, you've got to swim across that little English channel out of France to England, where the royal family is facing a woke problem of its own.
Prince Harry.
You know, Prince Harry, all he wants is privacy.
All he wants is to be out of the media spotlight, which is why he just goes on as many podcasts as he possibly can.
Poor, aggrieved Harry.
Harry just recently went on a show to viciously attack his family once again, in harsher terms than he has even to date, and to decry what he considers to be a genetic cycle of abuse.
There's a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway.
As parents, we should be doing the most of what we can to try and say, you know what?
That happened to me.
I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen to you.
I never saw it.
I never knew about it.
And then suddenly I started to piece it all together and go, okay, so this is where he went to school.
This is what happened.
I know this bit about his life.
I also know that's connected to his parents.
So that means that he's treating me the way that he was treated.
Exactly.
Which means, how can I change that for my own kids?
And, well, here I am.
I've now moved my whole family to the U.S. That wasn't the plan.
Do you know what I mean?
But sometimes you've got to make decisions and put your family first and put your mental health first.
Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing.
This man is a combat veteran.
This man, this was a tough guy from a family devoted to duty and responsibility, whose whole purpose is to serve the country.
And now he's whining about mental health and the way his father was raised.
And his father was raised poorly, too.
By the way, this guy's grandfather just died.
Prince Philip, after, what was it, 97 or 99 years of public service?
He finally dies after giving his life to his adopted country, and what does this ingrate do?
He comes out and he says, yeah, he was a horrible father to my father, and my father was a horrible father to me, and I'm really wonderful.
You know, I'm a good person, which is why I abandoned my family and my country and my duty and fled to Gomorrah by the sea out in California.
How pathetic this is.
It's very unmanly and unseemly to whine.
This is true for anybody.
I don't care.
Everybody's got problems.
Okay, one of my favorite lines is from the Tennessee Williams play, Orpheus Descending, where the derelict is trying to shack up with a lady, and he's trying to, you know, spend the night at her place, and she won't have it.
And he says, but I've got nowhere to go.
And she says, well, everybody's got a problem, and that's yours.
Okay.
I love that line.
Everybody's got a problem, and that's yours.
You know, there's very popular advice, which is when you're dealing with people, you know, just be aware they might be going through a lot.
They might have a lot of inner turmoil, so have sympathy and empathy for them.
I totally agree.
I think that's very important advice.
Don't be cruel to people.
Now I sound like Elvis.
Don't be cruel.
Good advice.
You should treat every interaction with someone as though you might not get to see them again.
Very important.
I know the vaccine saves and it's going to give us all immortality, but probably that's not going to happen.
So yes, be empathic, be kind to people, be charitable.
But the flip side of that is, everybody's got a problem.
And you got yours and they got theirs.
And sometimes you got to man up and quit whining and And quit blaming your parents for all of your problems.
Well, you know, but I had really terrible parents.
They wouldn't even take me to the country castle every weekend when I wanted them to.
Yeah, well, you know, boo-hoo, buddy.
Sorry.
Just man up, for goodness sakes.
I think so many of our political problems come from this problem because the family, contrary to popular leftist propaganda, the family is, in a sense, private, right?
It is protected against the predations of the state.
But in a sense, it's public because the family is the bedrock political institution.
It's where politics begins.
It's where society begins.
It's the fundamental unit of society.
And as the family breaks down, as people have no respect for their families, for their parents, they will have no respect for their broader community.
If I don't respect my own family, why am I going to respect the family of the guy two blocks down the street?
Why am I going to respect the family of the guy two states away?
Why am I going to respect my country more broadly?
Patriotism is an extension of filial piety.
So if we lose the latter, we're going to lose the former.
And that's what's happening.
I mean, you have Harry.
Actually, this is the perfect example of this.
He's deriding his own country, or his own family, rather, and his family is the symbol of the country.
They are the royal family of the UK. But this is true at a smaller scale for all of us.
Brits are saying very stupid things these days.
They are.
They are.
I love our Anglo motherland.
I even like the royal family, those German interlopers.
I even like them.
I really like Queen Elizabeth.
But some Brits are saying really, really stupid things, such as John Oliver.
It occurred to me the other day that John Oliver is consistently vulgar.
His version of a joke is just to say some unfunny line and then yell the F word or something.
And in performative outrage, right, he does a lot of that.
And with reliable ignorance, he never really knows very much about anything, but he pretends to know a lot about it.
He has very little humility and he yells and he shrieks and he says the F word a bunch and that's supposed to pass for a joke.
So in a way, the performative outrage, the reliable ignorance, the absolute haughtiness and vulgarity, John Oliver might be the voice of a generation.
I think he really sums it all up.
And now Oliver is weighing in.
On Israel-Palestine, a sort of hack TV comedian, is finally going to clear up one of the longest standing geopolitical religious problems in the history of the world.
All right.
Solve it for me, John.
Both sides are firing rockets, but one side has one of the most advanced militaries in the world.
Both sides are suffering heartbreaking casualties, but one side is suffering them exponentially.
And it's not like the US is operating from the moral high ground here.
It's obviously no stranger to drones striking weddings and saying, we were just trying to target enemy combatants.
This country has blood on its hands too.
And look, if you believe Israel's actions are warranted and proportionate this week, you're welcome to try and make that argument.
But we have got to start having this conversation honestly, and falling back on convenient sanitized terms like real estate disputes and airstrikes on militants feels a little disingenuous when what you're describing is forcing people from the homes they've lived in for decades and killing civilians and children.
And again, none of this frees Hamas from responsibility.
But Hamas doesn't represent all Palestinians, just as what Israel is doing right now doesn't represent all Israelis or indeed Jewish people.
Lots is complicated here.
But some things are pretty simple.
One side is suffering much more.
So, there is a lot of philosophical confusion here that John Oliver has, and just even the point of war and how one responds to aggressors and the distinction between terrorism and justified state violence.
We'll get into that in a second.
But he's also just made a claim that is absurd on its face.
Namely, he says that Hamas doesn't represent the Palestinian people.
But the thing is, it does.
Hamas got elected by the Palestinian Arabs.
So if you believe in any way in self-government, democracy, then Hamas very much represents the so-called Palestinians.
Just like the government of Bibi Netanyahu represents the people of Israel.
It does.
And so, if people in Palestine don't like the way Hamas is acting, they shouldn't have elected them.
But they did elect them, and now they're facing the consequences.
Also, the idea that Israel, if Hamas sends a rocket over and kills five Israeli civilians, targeting the civilians, the idea that Israel should respond by only targeting five civilians Well, no one would suggest that Israel should target five Arab civilians.
So I think there the argument falls apart already.
But even the idea that Israel should only target five Hamas operatives is insane.
That's not how war works.
You don't just say, okay, you're just going to kill one of me and I'll kill one of you and then five and five and five and five until what?
Until it goes on forever.
No, the point of war is to defeat your enemy.
That war is the extension of politics by other means, right?
So unless you want there to be a stalemate forever, which will lead to far more suffering and death and misery, then someone's got to win.
No one wants to win wars anymore though.
I mean, even the way America wages wars now, we're not permitted to win them anymore.
We used to be permitted to win them.
We obviously would win them militarily.
We're the greatest military force ever in the history of the world.
But the political forces here, mostly coming from the left, will not permit that sort of thing because it's considered icky or yucky or somehow wrong to defeat an enemy, particularly when the enemy is considered to be less powerful.
But the reason that the less powerful enemy feels justified and confident in picking on the far more powerful enemy, in this case Hamas picking on Israel, is because they know that Israel will not be permitted to defeat them.
John Oliver is right in saying that this is a complex situation, but what is his argument here?
That the answer is to give the Palestinian Arabs a nation state?
Well, the Palestinian Arabs elected a group that explicitly is calling for the destruction of Israel, so Israel can't tolerate that.
Anybody who thinks Israel has a right to exist, or even that it is preferable that Israel exists, can't tolerate that sort of thing.
I don't even know what his argument is.
Other than all these muddled philosophical premises that representative government isn't legitimate.
I guess he denied representative government.
He denied that people have the right to win war when they have war waged upon them.
And if he's supporting a so-called Palestinian nation, he's denying the right of Israel to exist.
So, okay, then go out and make that argument.
He's not making that argument because he doesn't know what he's saying.
He's just yelling profanity and performing his outrage.
But the people who yell a lot and who use a lot of profanity usually do so because their arguments aren't particularly sound.
Speaking of shills for Hamas, Andy Ngo, perhaps the last journalist in America, just posted a video of some pro-Palestine hoodlums who were going around breaking into a YouTuber's family's home because the YouTuber apparently defended just posted a video of some pro-Palestine hoodlums who were going around breaking into a YouTuber's family's home This was a dirty dog, Abu Leit, who disrespect our brothers and sisters of Palestine.
There you go, smashing up the windows.
Light goes on on the upper floor.
These lunatic hoodlums coming in, breaking more windows.
Filming it, too, like a bunch of dopes.
Now smacking the nice car.
You hear people screaming in the house.
And now they enter the house.
Look at that.
Look at these criminals entering the house.
Videos like this, scenes like this, really, really make me happy that I'm an American.
Because in America, we have a Second Amendment.
If they had a Second Amendment in the UK, you wouldn't see as many scenes like this.
Because if a group of people entered my house like this, frankly, even if they just started throwing things, they would be blown to smithereens.
Because people have the right to defend themselves.
I guess that...
I guess that's a lot of what this conflict in the Middle East is boiling down to right now, too.
Whether or not and how people have the right to defend themselves and against whom.
But this is the side that people are aligned with.
You know, there's so much propaganda coming out right now, especially from the left against Israel, but really just Israel to them is an avatar for the West generally.
They consider Israel to be a sort of colony of the West and the Middle East, which they think really should belong to Arab Muslims or something to that effect.
And the more videos like that come out, and the more the details of what's really going on in this conflict come out, I think the clearer it is.
Any side that has those pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas hoodlums breaking into innocent people's homes and has John Oliver on it, frankly, I don't know which one's worse.
I'm just very likely not going to be on that side.
We're talking a lot about bullies.
Bullies in the government, bullies in the media, bullies on the global stage.
So I have assiduously avoided learning anything about Chrissy Teigen.
I'm very proud that I don't really know anything about Chrissy Teigen.
And I've told people I don't want to know anything.
I don't think that my life would improve by knowing who Chrissy Teigen is.
I know she's being canceled or something like that, and now I know she's got a line at some department store.
Then I learn she's married to John Legend.
I still don't really know who John Legend is.
Apparently he's either a musician or an actor or something, so now I know that.
I wish I didn't know that.
and they're both apparently, you know, huge left-wingers and they're always calling on other people to stop being hateful and mean and they're calling for empathy and all this stuff.
And then it turns out, I'm sorry to say, I now know kind of who she is because she has been exposed for saying vicious wholeness.
Horrible things to some woman.
This woman named Courtney Stodden, who apparently received all these insane messages, vicious, vile messages from Chrissy Teigen, telling her even to kill herself.
And this is a woman, Courtney Stodden, who apparently has a history of mental problems and actually attempted to commit suicide.
Here is Stodden describing the verbal abuse.
I just couldn't believe how hypocritical it was.
Um...
Hypocrisy Teagan.
Hypocrisy Teagan.
It was just so hypocritical of her.
I think for me, because I experienced so much harassment and bullying from her, When I was just 16 years old, it really affected me.
And I think the bottom line is I never had a chance to forgive her, I think.
Like, I've never really...
She's never given me a chance to forgive her.
And I guess forgiveness, right, starts with ourselves, but it's so damaging when you have somebody like Chrissy Teigen bullying children.
So I take it this gal was younger.
She was a teenager or something when this began, and the messages were really, really vile.
And so now this woman is being canceled, and that's perfectly fine.
I mean, you know that my view on cancel culture is not exactly the same view that a lot of...
Right-wingers are pushing.
A lot of people are making the mistake on the right of saying that cancel culture is terrible because we need to be free speech absolutists, and we need to oppose censorship in the abstract all the time, and we need to never limit what people say.
And I think that's total BS. I'm all for it, man.
Let's cancel more people.
I love it.
You know, in the 1950s, we canceled communists.
Awesome.
We should have kept doing that.
I wish we continued to do that.
We canceled obscenity in this country for many, many decades, for centuries.
We're still supposed to do it on the books, but we don't do it as much.
We should do that sort of thing.
That compromises our freedom.
So I'm all for that, and I'm all for people facing consequences.
But I just don't want people to have their lives ruined for saying ordinary, normal, mainstream things or for minor transgressions or even more significant transgressions that people repent.
I'm all for canceling unrepentant people who are pushing bad things.
I think that's perfectly fine.
There is obviously hypocrisy here, but when I saw the story, when I actually finally delved into who Chrissy Teigen is and what this issue is between these two women...
It rang so true, because you see this so much from the left.
The people who talk about stopping hate and love Trump's hate, we've got to stop the bullying and the meanness and the hatred and the intolerance, they are always, without exception, the most hateful, the most bigoted, the least tolerant people that you ever see.
And it's because of I think these two religions.
I think it gets back right down to what we were talking about at the top of the show.
There's the religion of Christ the Redeemer with the arms outstretched, and there's the religion of Fauci the Redeemer with the vaccine saves written on it.
And one is true religion, Christianity, and the other is the secular liberal religion of scientism.
And one is based on humility, one is based on pride.
One is based on the complexity and fallenness and brokenness of the world and one is based on this utopian scheme that through scientific rationalism we're going to create the perfect world and fix human nature and cure death even.
One is based on a recognition of our mortality.
One is based on the pursuit of immortality here on earth.
Those are different religions.
One time I got a call.
From a guy that I went to college with, who I didn't really keep up with him.
We weren't particularly close, especially in later years.
I rarely saw him.
And he was a big leftist.
And he got in trouble.
He committed a really bad crime, really bad, as bad as it gets.
And he reached out to me.
I thought, why are you reaching out to me?
I barely even know this guy that well.
And I He said, you know, I always thought because of your politics, and at school, I was an atheist when I was in college, but politically I was still right-wing.
And he said, you know, I always thought you were a big jerk because of your politics, but I was reaching out to see if you have any advice and just to tell you my problem.
And I thought, that's strange.
But then it kind of clicked into me.
In the really shallow sense, conservatives, Christians, we're the most judgmental people.
We are.
We will look Caitlyn Jenner right in the eyes and say, you are not a woman and I won't call you she.
You can't get me to lie.
I'm not going to do it.
Not going to go along.
In the very shallow sense, we're extremely judgmental.
We're making judgments about the world.
We're not tolerant of many things.
But in the broader sense, when the tough times come, we're by far the most tolerant people.
The conservatives and the Christians are much, much more tolerant and open-minded than the leftists.
The leftists are far crueler, far more narrow-minded here because their vision of humanity is just wrong.
They have a false anthropology.
They don't seem to have a whole lot of sense of mercy for people and what matters to them is what they say much more than what they do.
This is also a premise of political correctness.
The grace goes away because their worldview is a world without grace.
Right?
I mean, this is why they're so angry.
This is why they're entitled.
This is why they're resentful.
And I don't just mean this as personal flaws that everybody has, to some degree.
I mean, that is the ideology, right?
This is what, you know, BLM and knocking down the statues and bad-maffling your own family on podcasts like Prince Harry's doing.
That's the ideology.
Whereas, for the conservatives, the philosophy is based primarily in our own brokenness and our humility and our own need for grace and the grace that we've received unmerited.
We...
One would hope would give to someone else, very clearly summed up in the Lord's Prayer.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who trespass against us.
That's what we're asking for here.
Those are two different visions of the world.
And as we exalt the one, as we put Dr.
Fauci on Christ the Redeemer's head in Rio de Janeiro, We are necessarily going to lose the other, and that sort of propaganda is the sort of thing that would be very, very difficult to come back from.
That is a much uglier, much stupider, much less pleasant society.
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.
The left screams in horror as a case-challenging Roe heads the Supreme Court.
Fauci finally admits that he's been masking for symbolic reasons.
The ties between Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein come into focus after months of the media canonizing Gates.
And finally, should we start eating crickets and cockroaches instead of bacon and hamburgers?
Tough question.
▲
Export Selection