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May 25, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:24
Ep. 771 - Mutilating America

The media blame Trump for their own coverup of the Wuhan Lab, an increasing number of women are choosing to “de-transition” after “transgender therapy,” and DeSantis takes a big swing at the liberal establishment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Okay, so the public health establishment denied the links between the coronavirus and the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a year.
Okay, fine.
And yes, the media and big tech totally covered up for them and castigated anyone who ever suggested a link as a dangerous conspiracy theorist.
And sure, fine, leaked documents out of China do now show that the Wuhan lab very likely had a lot to do with the virus.
But, but...
The intrepid journalists at CNN and the New York Times, they have found the culprit.
Can you guess who the culprit is?
I'll give you one, two.
It's Trump.
It's obviously the culprit is Trump.
A lot of the discussion about the lab leak, I think, was clouded early on because there was the suggestion by some that it was somehow a Chinese weapon that caused this.
That's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about a lab accident.
But we've come a long way from people dismissing this as a conspiracy theory to a lot of people taking this seriously, Maggie.
We have, John.
And look, I do think it's important to remember that part of the issue when this was first being reported on and discussed back a few months after the pandemic had begun was that then-President Trump and Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, both suggested they had seen evidence that this was formed in a lab, and they also suggested it was not released on purpose, but they refused to release the evidence showing what it was.
And so because of that, that made this instantly political.
I think that it was, you know, Example 1000 When the Trump administration learned that when you have burned your own credibility over and over again, people are not immediately going to believe you, especially in an election year.
It's like that meme of that guy shooting the other guy and he says, he says, why did you do this?
Why did you, why did you do this, Trump?
These radicals have mutilated our government.
They're mutilating our young women, an increasing number of whom are coming to regret transgender therapy.
We'll get into that.
They're mutilating our educational institutions through critical race theory and mandatory porn workshops.
We will try to detransition America.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Debra Gessner.
Who observes that Fauci says, we have never funded gain-of-function research.
And Fauci also says, and this is why we had to do it.
He does.
He does that.
A little tricky.
He talks out of both sides of his mouth, that Fauci.
And he's really getting caught up in a major, major lie.
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The argument here is that Donald Trump has squandered his credibility.
And therefore, when he suggested, and when Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, suggested that there might be some link between the virus and the viral institute that was 400 yards away from where it was allegedly discovered, that's why nobody believed them in the mainstream media.
A lot of us believed him, and we talked about it for a long time, even beginning last year.
But the mainstream media, because Trump just lied about so many things, 10 zillion lies that the New York Times covered, that Trump, he's such a liar.
Where did he squander his credibility?
Where is it?
What's the lie?
I guess the big lie they point to is that he said that his crowd sizes were like a thousand or so, a few thousand people larger than they were or something.
Is that?
Because by my count, Donald Trump, when he had a disagreement with the media, was right about virtually everything.
and the media and the left, but I repeat myself, were wrong about virtually everything.
He was right about the virus.
He called, remember early on, he said, this virus is probably a little bit worse than an ordinary flu.
So we're going to shut down travel from China.
The media said, this is actually Joe Biden himself said, this is hysterical xenophobia.
And then turned out Trump was right about that.
But then Trump also said, it's not as bad as now they are making it out to be.
He was right about that too.
He was right about the vaccine.
Do you remember when Donald Trump was arguing with Chris Wallace and Joe Biden at that two on one presidential debate?
When Trump said, yeah, we're going to get a vaccine within a month or two.
We're going to get the vaccine very quickly.
It's going to be ready to go by the end of the year.
We're going to have people vaccinated by April.
And they said, that's crazy, Donald.
You've never, all of the experts and your own experts say that it won't happen.
And he said, I don't know.
I don't know what they're telling you, but yeah, that's what's going to happen.
He was right.
The trade deals.
Do you remember the trade deals?
He's going to destroy the global economy.
What happened?
The economy went up, up, up, up, up.
Peace in Israel.
Do you remember that?
Trump can't just deal with the Arab states.
Oh, what an idiot.
He's putting Jared Kushner and Avi Berkowitz in charge of Middle East peace.
And what happens?
Doubles the number of nations that recognize Israel.
Gives us relative peace in the Middle East.
NATO! Oh no!
He's going to abandon our NATO allies!
Nope!
They're just going to start paying more money like he said they would.
Lots and lots of other things.
I mean, and that barely scratches the surface.
But I just, if you look at the facts, every big issue where Trump disagreed with the liberal establishment, just about every single one, he was right and they were wrong.
He's got way, way more credibility than the Libs do.
And it's on this Wuhan Virology Institute point as well.
He said, yeah, I think it probably has something to do with the lab.
The media say, absolutely.
No, it doesn't.
Now they've got to fall in line.
We're seeing this more and more each day.
Scott Gottlieb, who was the former FDA commissioner under Trump, has now come out.
He said there is growing circumstantial evidence that the lab had something to do with the virus.
And he said this not on Newsmax, not on OAN, not on the right-wing media.
He pointed it out on CNBC. We're good to go.
Would put it within that realm.
I think the challenge right now is that the side of the ledger that supports the thesis that this came from a zoonotic source, from an animal source, hasn't budged.
And the side of the ledger that suggests this could have come out of a lab has been continuing to grow.
So you got this evidence.
And Scott Gottlieb's trying to be very diplomatic here.
And he's like, look, you know, there was evidence that it was from an animal source, just a totally natural source without any connection with the Wuhan Institute.
But now the evidence that it's from the lab is beginning to grow.
I think he's being a little too diplomatic here.
Anybody with two brain cells to rub together Could have deduced a year ago when the bat coronavirus escaped right next to the bat coronavirus lab that, huh, maybe the bat coronavirus lab has something to do with it.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist.
It doesn't take an epidemiologist.
It doesn't take a Dr.
Fauci to come to that conclusion.
But there was a lot of political pressure not to come to that conclusion.
And by the way, they had a lot of intel even last year as...
Maggie Haberman was admitting on the news show that there was a lot of intel that Trump and Pompeo alluded to last year that the mainstream media simply chose to ignore.
And Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, is now discussing this very intel on television.
And he's pointing out a lot of other people in the public health sector had this intel as well.
We spent a lot of time working on this problem set.
In January, we were able to declassify a whole lot of material that I knew about much earlier.
I made remarks over a year ago now, in early May of 2020, talking about this risk, and it was outrageous.
It was outrageous to see scientists, even government, U.S. government scientists, who were denying this when they surely must have seen the same information that I had seen.
That includes certainly Dr.
Fauci as well.
We need to know what happened here.
The Chinese Communist Party knows what happened here.
They know who Patient Zero was.
They know precisely where this began.
These three individuals who became sick, the symptoms were consistent with what someone would get, that would be symptomatic of if they had COVID-19, the Wuhan virus.
We need to get to the bottom of this because this could happen again.
They're still conducting research in these same laboratories today.
It's being done in ways that were similar to what happened back over a year ago.
This is dangerous.
We could end up with something much like this again being foisted upon the world.
The United States has a responsibility to demand that the Chinese Communist Party give us the things that they simply know, Dana and Bill.
They know the answer to these things and they refuse to hand over this information.
Who had the information and when?
Mike Pompeo, also a bit diplomatic.
He was the nation's top diplomat.
He's sandwiching that in here.
He's discussing the virus and the connections.
He's discussing the virus and the connections at the end.
In the middle, he says, Dr.
Fauci had the same intel that I did.
These public health geniuses had the same intel that I did, and they chose not to talk about it.
I do not have a top-secret security clearance.
I am not privy to this secret intel that all these guys were getting.
And yet...
I knew that there was a great likelihood that that Wuhan Institute had something to do with it.
You're telling me that Dr.
Fauci did not.
Plus, Dr.
Fauci had intelligence that we all are not privy to.
And you're telling me that he did not.
This guy who has lied to us, outright lied to us, about pretty important things during this pandemic.
From the very beginning, he lied to us about his true views on the efficacy of masks.
What else are they lying to you about?
This is the thing that I think really separates the right, the true right-wingers.
I'm not talking about the squishy people who basically just exist to prop up the liberal establishment.
I'm not talking about the ones who write op-eds in the Washington Post about how terrible Republicans are and that sort of thing.
You know which ones I'm alluding to.
The ones who think the drag queen story hour is a blessing of liberty.
I'm not talking about them.
I'm talking about the actual conservatives, the actual right-wingers.
The big thing that separates...
Us, from the libs, I think, is perspective, sure, ideology, whatever, sure.
It's that the conservative has seen the dishonesty.
The conservative, it's that example, Drew uses this a lot.
You're reading the newspaper and you say, okay, here's an article about Iran.
I guess they're right.
Okay, here's an article about the economy.
I guess they're right.
Here's an article about the Yankees.
Wait a second, I know something about the Yankees and this article's wrong.
This isn't the truth.
Oh, well, here's an article about foreign trade.
I guess they're right.
You think, the one thing I know about, I can tell they're being dishonest here.
But I guess I'm going to continue to believe them on other things.
When the liberal establishment is this corrupt, they have such a losing track record.
They keep getting things wrong and wrong and wrong, whether through incompetence or through dishonesty, intentional lies.
If you recognize that, then you're just not going to fall for it.
And you think, what else are they lying to me about?
Maybe, sure, they're lying about some of the virus stuff.
Yeah, they're lying about this, that, and the other thing.
But there are even big lies, if I can borrow a phrase that's very popular right now.
A big one, probably the biggest ideological delusion that's being foisted on us right now is transgenderism.
It's having really negative effects for a lot of women and girls.
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The big delusional ideology that is being pushed right now by the liberal establishment, it's not just by the blue-haired radicals on the crazy college campus in the middle of nowhere.
This is an ideology being pushed by the biggest corporations, the biggest tech platforms, and the government itself.
Transgenderism.
It's not, don't forget, you've got major companies all waving the transgender flag.
Did you know there's a transgender flag?
Apparently there is.
And this is everyone celebrating this sort of thing.
The actress Ellen Page, who is now calling herself Elliot.
But, you know, I think I'm going to stop doing this.
I think I'm going to stop indulging in the name changes.
Because we, for a long time, have said that we're not going to indulge in the pronouns because I'm not going to call her him.
You can't force me to lie.
Some people are doing that, though.
Some people are going along with it, or they're just choosing not to use the pronouns, or they're going to use the singular they, as though, you know, we've got lots of demons inside of us, and we are legion or something.
But we've said, okay, you know, we on the conservative side, we're not going to go with the pronouns, but we will call them whatever name they want.
If they, you know, anyone can change their name, that's perfectly fine.
No, I don't think so.
Caitlyn is a girl's name.
Caitlyn's not a boy's name.
So if I refer to Caitlyn Jenner as him, but I continue to refer to him as Caitlyn, I'm still kind of confusing the issue, aren't I? I don't know that you can just go along and change your name willy-nilly like that.
It's a little confusing because you've got George Eliot, one of the greatest female novelists of all time, and you've got Evelyn Waugh.
It's not a lady, not Evelyn, you know, it's not a gal.
He's a guy.
So I know, look, there's a little ambiguity with the names, a little more so than with the pronouns, but I think I'm going to have to go with Ellen Page.
So Ellen Page posts this photo of herself topless.
This photo would not be permitted if any other woman did it, but because Ellen Page is pretending to be a man, she gets to post this picture.
And she looks much more like a boy.
She's had breast mutilation.
She's got some abs now.
I don't know if that was surgical or if that's...
You know, from lifting weights or something like that, from doing crunches.
You can tell I don't really know exactly how these muscle groups have developed.
Man, it's not my thing.
Wearing men's swim trunks and saying, you know, look, I'm a boy now.
Look how happy I am.
Big smile on her face.
A lot of women and girls and a lot of boys and men, for that matter, are now seeing this and saying how wonderful it is.
I can be.
I can really become the other sex if I suffer either from a psychological delusion that I am or from this impulse that I very much want to be this or if it's just I'm taken up in the social contagion that boys are girls and girls are boys and I think that's cool.
So, you know, if a girl goes through a tomboy phase when she's 12, all of a sudden she's going to mutilate her body in some ways that are irreversible.
There is another side here, as you can probably tell from the way that I'm discussing this issue.
There is another side here.
There's a lot of regret going on.
And CBS News, got to give them credit where credit's due.
60 Minutes ran a special about transgender regret and the girls who regret looking like boys and the boys who regret looking like girls.
In her early 20s, Grace Ladinsky-Smith was seriously depressed and developed gender dysphoria.
She began searching for answers in transgender communities on the internet.
And when I saw them being so happy and excited about doing this wonderful transformative process to really, like, become their true selves, it was, like...
Grace says she found a gender therapist on the internet and told her, I'm thinking of transitioning.
Because she was over 18 and didn't need parental consent, she says she merely signed an informed consent form at a clinic and got hormone shots.
Just four months after she started testosterone, she says she was approved for a mastectomy, what's called top surgery, that she told us was traumatic.
I started to have a really disturbing sense that, like, a part of my body was missing.
Almost a ghost limb feeling about being like, there's something that should be there.
And the feeling really surprised me, but it was really hard to deny.
And so she detransitioned by going off testosterone.
You get the idea.
This goes on and on.
I recommend you watch the whole thing.
Very pretty girl, going through a bad period where she was depressed, and then some perverts and psychos and idiots.
I mean, to be fair to them, some of these people might just be stupid, but I think a lot of them are just perverts and they're preying on people's confusion.
But some of them might just be totally ignorant and stupid.
They take advantage of this.
And they say, oh yeah, you want to mutilate yourself?
You want to lop off perfectly healthy organs?
Fine by me, here you go.
And, by the way, it's not just children.
You'll hear a lot of conservatives say, well, you know, look, whatever adults want to do, that's fine, but just don't do it to the kids.
Well, she was an adult, right?
This woman was 18 years old.
Do you think it's right that some pervert doctor was able to facilitate this depressed, troubled woman's decision to mutilate her own body, which she almost instantly came to regret and has now gone back a little bit, but has suffered irreversible damage?
Do you think that's good?
I don't.
I think there are, as there often are, I think there are probably three positions on this issue.
The left's position is trans everybody, including and especially the kids, right?
Drag queen story hour into schools, let's confuse kids on their sex, let's teach kids in preschool as they're doing in Brooklyn that little boys can be little girls and let's get everybody on transgender ideology.
Then there's the middle squish position, which a lot of self-styled conservatives hold, which is bad for kids, but if adults want to mutilate their bodies, totally fine.
And then there's the actual conservative position, which is, I don't care if you're 18, I don't care if you're 80, you should not be able to do this.
Doctors should not be mutilating perfectly healthy body parts.
And people who are troubled and want to do this or believe that they have to do this to be their true selves are disturbed people and they need psychological help, but they don't need their bodies mutilated to make their problems worse.
Those are the three positions.
Pick your choice.
You know, the left authoritarian position and then the nice, wonderful, liberal, open-minded position like women such as this who are 18 years old should be able to mutilate themselves even if they're going to regret it terribly.
And then there's the right-wing authoritarian, they're going to call it authoritarian, position that you shouldn't be able to mutilate perfectly healthy body parts and take advantage of disturbed people.
Where do you fall in that issue?
I think you can tell which side I fall on.
It's horrible what we've done to these girls.
Obviously, this is the topic of Abigail Schreier's book, Irreversible Damage, which I think I blurbed that book.
I loved it so much in the advanced copy, and then it became a big seller.
So I recommend you go out and read that one.
This is not just one isolated case that CBS News is covering.
This is happening a lot, and it's happening increasingly.
And for parents...
Who don't know what to do.
I understand how confused one would be, especially if your kid's going to public school, where this insanity is being foisted on them constantly.
And you've got a kid who is very confused about this.
I understand it's a hard decision.
What do I do?
You've got a family member who's going through this.
But there's a dark side to this story that only very rarely comes out into public light.
So well done to CBS for covering it at all.
These are transparent lies.
To tell that pretty girl, that pretty 18-year-old girl, you're actually a boy and you need to mutilate yourself.
That is such a transparent...
She's not a boy and she wasn't a boy when she underwent the surgery and she's still not a boy now that she recognizes that she's a woman.
She probably has some resentment.
Maybe not, hopefully, you know, but I probably would have some resentment at a culture and at these sicko doctors who would take advantage of me.
The lies are so transparent.
Obviously, this one, that a boy is a girl.
The lies are even more transparent, though.
Jen Psaki is trying to convince us of something even more preposterous.
Jen Psaki is trying to convince us that Joe Biden is energetic.
What more can you tell us about the president's health regime?
We hear he's lifting weights.
What sort of weights is he lifting?
Does he have a personal trainer?
And what happened to his Peloton bike?
Did he bring it to the White House?
I didn't know where this was going, but I'm intrigued by it.
I will say I have nothing to read out on the president's private exercise regime, but I can tell you, having traveled with him a fair amount, sometimes he's hard to keep up with.
Sometimes he's hard to keep up with.
Like when he goes wandering off in the middle of the night and doesn't know where he is, I suppose that would be hard to keep up.
But I don't think that during the usual course of the day he's particularly hard to keep up with.
Joe, do you remember during the campaign, Joe Biden would be, he'd be walking out of an office.
There's a video of this.
He's walking out of an office and you've got one of his staffers holding him by the arm, like you would hold an elderly relative and say, okay, over here.
And the reporters are saying, hey, Mr.
Biden, Mr.
Biden.
They say, no questions, no questions, please.
I guess Joe wasn't having a good day.
They'll call a lid on campaign events at what, like 1.30 in the afternoon?
No, he's not.
Give me a break.
I get it.
I know that press secretaries have to spin, but you can convince me of a lot of things.
But you cannot convince me that Joe Biden is energetic.
If they're lying to you about that, what else are they lying to you about?
If they're lying to you about the origins of the virus, what else are they lying to you about?
If they're lying to you about when the vaccine's going to come up, what else are they lying to you about?
If they're lying to you about boys being girls and girls being boys, what else are they lying to you about?
If you want to break through the lies...
I think you should check out my friend Liz Wheeler's new show.
You know Liz Wheeler.
Liz Wheeler had a popular TV show.
Then she went away.
She disappeared.
Where'd she go?
I knew where she went, but I'm not sure everyone else did.
She had a baby and took care of that baby and then had the baby come in.
Somehow she's like in fighting form all the way again.
And Liz Wheeler is launching the Liz Wheeler show.
Episode 1 drops today.
You can get it all over the podcast apps and you can get it on her YouTube channel.
So go check that out.
Also, I sat down with Liz.
We talked about a whole wide range of things, from Dr.
Fauci and the masks all the way to space aliens.
You can check that out on my YouTube channel this Saturday.
You're not going to want to miss Liz either on my channel or on her show.
America may currently be in the middle of a gas shortage, but we're even shorter on sanity, if you ask me.
That's why you should join Jeremy, Ben, Matt, and me tomorrow night for another cigar and logic-packed episode of Backstage.
Streams at 7 o'clock Eastern.
6 p.m.
Central on dailywire.com and on our YouTube channel, Daily Wire.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Jen Psaki says that Joe Biden is sometimes he's tough to keep up with.
Oh man, he's so energetic.
Judge for yourself.
Coincidentally, Joe Biden just gave a commencement speech, the first commencement speech of his presidency, at the Coast Guard Academy.
So he was talking to these young cadets, and coincidentally, Ronald Reagan also gave a speech to the Coast Guard Academy.
Ronald Reagan, the oldest president in American history up until that point, then beat out by Trump and then beat out by Joe Biden.
Listen to the two speeches.
Tell me which one seems more energetic.
My Coast Guard aides have been excellent.
One of them taught me that, and I quote, the Coast Guard is that hard nucleus about which the Navy forms in time of war.
I can only assume that you will enjoy educating your family about how the Coast Guard is, quote, the hard nucleus around the Navy forms in times of war.
You are a really dull class.
Now look, Ronald Reagan is one of the great orators in American history.
And Joe Biden cannot string a sentence together.
But Joe Biden used to be able to string a sentence together.
This is not just making fun of old Joe.
He's just not talented at this.
Joe Biden has a lot of deficiencies.
He's dishonest and he's not particularly intelligent, but he was always a good talker.
The guy always had the gift of gab.
He was a smiling, simpering, back-slapping politician.
That's all he did.
And if you look at clips of him from five, ten years ago, he was speaking just fine.
But he's slowed down.
He's obviously losing something.
Probably not too difficult to keep up with.
The only way he's difficult to keep up with is people have no idea what he's saying.
He's a you and the marmy and the small...
Nucleus and corn.
Corn.
What?
You're a dull class.
I will say one nice thing about Joe Biden.
Joe Biden, I have to.
I want to be fair.
I want to be a real journalist, unlike the ones on cable news, CNN and all those places.
Joe Biden is reportedly dropping student loan forgiveness, which is, this is a promise he made during the campaign.
He said that he was going to forgive certain student loans.
Well, the budget is here, and four months into his term, People still want Biden to forgive $10,000 in federal student loans for every borrower, and according to Yahoo Finance, probably not going to happen.
So that's good.
This is going to be used as evidence among squishes that Joe Biden is not as radical as he said he would be.
This is a very small, minor win for conservatives in an overall radical agenda, the most radical agenda ever.
So yes, that's good.
I'm glad that Joe Biden won't be forgiving 10 G's of student loan debt.
This would have been very hard for him to do because even though the left wants it, especially the more affluent, radical, whiter Democrat base really was into this.
But the fact is, A relatively small number of people graduate from college and have these sorts of student loans.
So you would have a situation where you'd have people who don't go to college subsidizing these relatively affluent people who do go to college.
It's just a political loser for Biden, so he's going to drop that.
But he's going to be pushing through lots of radical agenda items.
We've already seen that.
We've seen a hint at even crazier things like court packing, adding new states, totally upending, federalizing elections.
As a rule, the administration is the most radical one we've ever seen.
How do we fight back against this?
Well, Governor Ron DeSantis is showing us one way to do it.
Ron DeSantis just signed an anti-big tech bill.
I love this.
The anti-big tech bill does three things in particular.
It says that all Floridians who are treated unfairly by big tech companies will have the right to sue the companies that violate the law and win monetary damages.
So, it safeguards certain rights of Floridians by requiring social media companies to be transparent about how they're moderating content.
Right now, it's very opaque.
They do not publish the rules, and very often they violate their own rules to give users proper notice if they're going to change the rules.
And it's going to prevent big tech bureaucrats from moving the goalposts to silence viewpoints that they don't like, which really means conservatives.
Okay, that's good.
I like that.
Number two, the Attorney General of Florida can bring action against big tech companies that violate the law.
That's good.
They'll be using Florida's Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
That's really good.
If they're found to violate an antitrust law, they'll be restricted from contracting with any public entities.
So they're going to break up a little bit the relationship between big tech and the government.
And big tech is prohibited from deplatforming Floridian political candidates.
So now you see politicians definitely going to start protecting themselves.
The Florida Election Commission will impose fines of a quarter million dollars per day on any social media company that deplatforms any candidate for statewide office and 25 grand per day for deplatforming candidates for non-statewide offices.
So, obviously, look, any social media user can just block candidates or not follow candidates that they don't want to see.
But that is a right.
I like this.
I'm glad that they're doing this.
There are going to be, as usual, three positions on this.
The left is going to hate it because the left uses the big tech companies to enforce their political agenda without democratic accountability, right?
The left can rely on these private companies and can rely on the rights, you know, decades-long shilling for private companies, right?
To enforce their political agenda without having to go through usual political democratic means.
Okay, that's the left's view.
Then there's the squish moderate view, which is, well, build your own Twitter.
Build your own Facebook.
This is wrong.
We need to...
There's nothing more conservative than letting hipster Rasputin in Silicon Valley silence half of the country.
That's just democracy.
Oh, no, James Madison would be furious that we're not letting Mark Zuckerberg control our politics or something, right?
That's...
You can tell my view of that particular opinion.
Then there's the conservative view, which is use the state to put pressure on these private companies to stop them from controlling and dominating our politics.
I know some conservatives are going to be uncomfortable with that because they've imbibed this pseudo squishy libertarian bumper sticker Bush era slogan airing, but there's nothing conservative about letting hipster Rasputin run our public discourse.
Okay.
Nothing conservative about that at all.
It is good.
It is positively good and conservative to use the enforcement arm of the state wisely.
We're not anarchists.
I know that.
I know that if you listen to some of the ridiculous propaganda from the squish wing of the GOP over the last 20 years, you would think that Republicans are anarchists, that we don't think it's ever legitimate for the government to do anything.
Because we want small government, according to them.
We don't want small government.
We want limited government.
We want government to stay within its limits.
But we want government to do the things it's supposed to do.
And one of those things is to prevent zillionaire oligarchs in the most radical parts of the country from controlling our entire political system.
So good on DeSantis.
Glad that he's signing this bill.
He's not stopping there, though, baby.
No way.
Ron has his eyes, I think, on a big political prize, so he's doing a lot as governor.
I'm glad to see that.
Incentives are obviously aligned.
Ron DeSantis is going after critical race theory.
He's trying to boot it out of Florida classrooms.
You can put lipstick on a pig.
It's still a pig.
And, you know, you can rename.
So what we're doing, the Department of the Florida Board of Education is meeting, and they are addressing this.
It's offensive to the taxpayer that they would be asked to fund critical race theory, that they would be asked to fund teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.
It's also based on false history.
When they try to look back and denigrate the founding fathers, denigrate the American Revolution, doing all these different things that even very liberal historians say is not supported by the facts.
And so I think what we need We need the Constitution back in classrooms.
We need to make sure civics is a priority.
But it needs to be taught accurately.
It needs to be taught in a fact-based way, not an ideological-based way.
And if we have to play whack-a-mole all over the state stopping this critical race theory, we will do it.
We'll be taking action.
Don't you worry.
Alright, love it.
This is a very conservative perspective.
What are the three views on this?
The liberal view, the left-wing view rather, is the one that we need to indoctrinate kids to hate their country.
Basically, they say the country's evil.
We've got to teach them that the country's evil.
We've got to teach them that whiteness is evil and needs to be abolished.
We've got to put this stuff in the classrooms.
It's got to be mandatory.
The squish view, well, maybe we should just have different perspectives.
And so in one class, they teach you to hate your country.
And then in the other class, they teach you maybe don't hate your country so much.
And that'd be cool.
And then there's the conservative view, which is this stuff is poison.
This stuff undermines education.
There is no real such thing as academic freedom.
It's never existed in practice.
In the words of Bill Buckley, launching the conservative movement after World War II, he said it was a hoax and a superstition.
Don't fall for it.
There's a thought that undermines thought, and that's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
To borrow an idea from Chesterton.
So you've got to kick it out.
You can't just expand the curriculum forever.
There's only so many weeks in the semester.
There's only so many books you can read.
If you're reading Ibram Kendi, you're not reading a good book.
If you're reading Robin DiAngelo, you are missing out on reading a worthwhile book that will teach you something.
So boot it out.
Ban them.
Censor them.
Cancel them.
Get them out of there.
That is the conservative point of view, which I expound upon in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now for pre-order.
Critical race theory is not the only crazy thing that's being taught in schools.
Critical race theory, don't forget, is just one derivation of critical theory, which is actually just one major, but only one component, of the politically correct project.
But there are a lot of other crazy things being taught in schools.
Right now, Students attending the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in Manhattan.
This is a very expensive school.
I think it costs just shy of 50 G's a year to attend.
They are being forced to take an explicit class on porn without parental consent.
Would be bad enough to force them to take the class on porn.
They're not even telling the parents.
Echoing sorts of things we've heard a lot this year.
Where radical educators will say, hey, be careful.
The problem with Zoom class is the parents will know what's being taught.
You've got to be very careful.
Don't you think the parents maybe should know what's being taught?
No, it's very bad.
Very bad for their education.
So, at this school, they were teaching a very explicit porn class.
And I'm not just saying, like, the birds and the bees and look at this and look at this flesh mashing up against this flesh.
I'm talking about, like, very...
I'm not going to say it on this show.
This is a family program.
But, like, really graphic, gross stuff.
The class involved a slideshow and a lecture by an instructor, which included lots of raunchy images, lots of presentations on the most lurid porn genres, and only fans, which is the democratization of porn.
And if you oppose this sort of thing, you will be called closed-minded.
Oh, come on, you're just a prude.
You're a prude.
Come on.
That's fine.
What could go wrong with porn?
Well, we're hearing what goes wrong with porn.
How many people write into this show?
I've read them in the mailbag.
People write in all the time and say, we got to do something about porn.
This is really bad stuff.
Do you know who's writing?
It's not the old fuddy-duddy's writing in.
It's not the boomers.
The boomers...
Seem to be the ones who are most fine with porn.
They say, oh, it's not a big deal.
They tend to fall a little more in that squish libertarian camp.
Oh, come on.
It's not, come on.
Looking at porn, that's as American as apple pie.
It's protected by the First Amendment.
It's not a big deal.
But the people who write in to me and say this is a big deal, Or the young men who get hooked on this stuff.
I think the median age is something like 11, according to surveys.
So they get hooked on this stuff before they can know anything about it.
It ruins their lives.
It messes up their relationships.
It hurts women.
Obviously, the industry hurts women, but just even the kind of vision of sex that it presents is very degrading toward women.
It messes up people's relationships.
There's an epidemic of young men who have ED because they're hooked on porn.
You used to just read about these stories in Japan.
Apparently this has come to the West as well.
It's really, really bad stuff.
Why would that be taught in schools?
Oh, come on.
Keep an open mind.
Obviously, we used to know this in this country, but now we've forgotten it.
Liberty and licentiousness are not the same thing.
They're opposite things.
If you arouse people's vices and base passions, you're going to undermine their true liberty.
Kick it out.
Fire teachers who push this.
Don't just vote with your dollars.
Vote with your politics.
Use your government.
Get this stuff.
Take a lesson from DeSantis.
DeSantis knows what's up.
Pay attention to this stuff and kick it out.
Porn has become, in a certain sense, it's become part of the liturgy of liberalism.
And I won't get into too graphic detail of what these liturgical practices look like, but it really has sort of become part of it.
It is something that one enacts.
It is considered good.
Do you remember at the start of COVID when people were told they couldn't see one another?
The New York City Health Department encouraged people to, how do I put this, to use Woody Allen's term, to have sex with someone you love, you know, alone in a room.
And this was being encouraged.
This is a good thing.
It's good for your health.
Blow off a little steam.
I've heard this described, that historically speaking, our views of the mind tend to map onto our views of technology.
So when the printing press was big, we had this view that what was being imprinted on your mind, that's going to form your mind.
To some degree, that's true.
When the steam engine was the big technology, we were told, you had Freud, right?
You had this idea that you have to stop repressing things.
You need to let off a little bit of steam, right?
And And to a lesser degree, that's not quite true.
Now today, our view of the mind is that the mind is like a computer, because the computer is the main technology.
So you should be able to upload things and download things and also upgrade your mind or something like that.
Okay, I understand all these various theories of the mind.
When you blow off a little steam with something like porn, forget even just porn for a second, with any kind of vice, if you think that if you commit a vice that's going to blow off a little steam, that's not really how it works.
The more vice you commit, the more you're going to commit.
The more virtue you practice, the more you're going to practice.
That's the way it works.
We've known this since good old Uncle Aristotle, but we seem to have forgotten it.
The purpose of education, liberal education, is to train yourself in that liberty.
So do it.
Any education that undermines that is the sort of thing you've got to boot out of the classroom.
Speaking of leftist liturgical practices, Mayor Bill de Blasio says he's going to kneel during an event in Harlem to mark the one-year anniversary of George Floyd's death.
He's going to kneel for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, which is the amount of time that the police officer Derek Chauvin was kneeling on George Floyd's neck and back.
And he's going to kneel, and he's going to do it at the event hosted by race-hustling extortionist Al Sharpton and his National Action Shakedown Network.
And this is going to call for the passage of some new George Floyd bill.
First of all, it seems pretty bizarre to honor George Floyd by reenacting what his ostensible murderer did to kill him.
Isn't that weird?
If a guy were murdered in a shooting, Would you honor him by going to the shooting range and just pew, pew, pew, or acting that out with your hand?
Pew, pew, pew, and now I'm honoring him.
No, that's very strange.
But moreover, it's also just absolutely disgusting that this absolutely sensationalized event that involved the death of a career criminal who was actively resisting arrest and committing crimes as he was arrested.
Not to say that maybe the cop was using excess force, but I think we heard during that trial that It didn't seem like he was necessarily using excessive force.
He was following certain protocols, but maybe not others.
Anyway, it was complicated, and the jury seems to have been compromised as well.
And you had political leaders on the left putting a lot of pressure on the jury to convict him of murder, which even the judge himself said is probably going to help you on appeal, all to say it's a complicated story.
It's disgusting that we have got political leaders honoring this kind of person.
We went through yesterday on the show how...
We're told that there's an epidemic of anti-black white supremacist hate crime in this country, and it's just not true.
You look at the statistics, black people are much more likely to commit hate crimes than white people are, much more likely, relative to their proportion of the population.
But you just don't hear about those stories.
I had a liberal friend ask me, Michael, why do we always see these police shootings?
Because the media want to sensationalize them to create a racially divisive narrative.
That's obviously why.
And that's what's going on right now.
It's disgusting stuff.
But even beyond that, just look at the action.
De Blasio is going to kneel down for the nine minutes.
This is a perfectly natural human longing.
This is a religious ritual.
I go kneel down on Sundays when I'm at mass.
And I kneel down in the memorial sacrifice of a death, of a redemptive death, the redemptive death of redeemed mankind, of Christ on the cross.
That's a religious ritual that I'm doing.
And all people have religious rituals.
Moreover, they must have religious rituals because man is a fundamentally religious being.
When you recognize that you're engaging in religious liturgy, you can think about it a little more clearly.
You can apply more rigor and logic and systematic thought.
When you're completely unaware of it, as the left is, as Bill de Blasio is, you get into some really kooky stuff, some really superstitious stuff.
Speaking of leftist rituals...
AOC. AOC, another one of the goddesses in the pantheon of modern leftism.
Another icon and quasi-religious figure, depending on who you're talking to.
She is opening up about how ever since the January 6th insurrection, she has been going through therapy.
She's had a very difficult time.
She still has not recovered from that trauma.
After the 6th, I took some time and it was really Ayanna Pressley when I explained to her what had happened to me, like the day of, because I ran to her office and she was like, you need to recognize trauma and that this is something that you went through, but we're all going through.
And it's really important to pause after that because that's how you process it.
And I feel like I learned this the hard way after my father had passed away when I was a teenager.
So that happened to me at a young age and I socked it away.
And I had to live with that for years.
So you're doing therapy?
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
I'm doing therapy, but also I've just slowed down.
I think the Trump administration had a lot of us, especially Latino communities, in a very reactive mode.
I have no doubt that AOC endured suffering as a child, as a teenager, when her father died.
Coincidentally, there's very strange parallels between my life and hers, because we grew up in the towns right next to each other at exactly the same time.
And I also lost a parent when I was a teenager, and it's a very difficult thing.
I do not in any way minimize the trauma and suffering of that.
You like to think that time heals all wounds, and over time you can get over that and go on, move on, and live your life.
So I hope she can do that.
I've no doubt that's a real trauma.
I don't think that January 6th was a real trauma for her because she lied about it.
I'm sorry, let me be more specific.
She exaggerated it.
You can't say she lied because all she ever talked about was her feelings.
She said, I felt as though I was about to be killed.
I felt as though my life was at risk.
So sure, I guess that's your feelings.
I can't...
I can't disagree with what you felt subjectively, but she never was at risk of dying.
She wasn't even in the Capitol that day.
She was across the street, or rather down the street.
It was a bit of a walk away.
She was in her office building, and no one busted in there.
It was actually a cop who came in to protect her.
And she's milked this for all it's worth, and she says, I'm just in the trauma.
I'm so broken.
I've had to slow down.
I'm in the therapy for this.
I can't.
It's hard to process, and it's really traumatic.
We are exalting weakness and brokenness in this leftist culture.
We are exalting these things.
We are actually trying to find ways to claim that we are broken, hurt, aggrieved, disordered, unstable.
It's got cachet.
It's got social currency.
If you are really that messed up, if you're really that shaken up and you can't handle it, you should not be in government.
You should not be in political leadership.
You got to be tough.
It's hard, but you got to be tough.
You got to move on.
You got to take chin up, stiff upper lip, and move on.
Look, everybody goes through traumas.
Everybody goes through suffering.
Sometimes it's real, like AOC had when she was a teenager.
Sometimes it's contrived, like she exaggerated in her office building on January 6th.
But whatever it is, maybe she felt terrible on January.
I don't know.
Chin up.
You've got to cut this out.
We've got to stop mutilating ourselves.
Ideologically, philosophically, physically, we've got to stop mutilating ourselves and taking things that are relatively healthy and making them weaker and having social currency for grievance and all trying to grab grievance and weakness.
We've got to get strong.
If you're not going to be strong, you're not going to have a flourishing country.
You're going to be mutilating America.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
We shall see you tomorrow.
We shall see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production coordinator McKenna Waters.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, as evidence mounts that COVID began in a Chinese lab, social media's crackdown on the lab leak theory looks worse and worse.
We discuss what has changed on the first year commemoration of George Floyd's death, and the media are fascinated with Joe Biden weightlifting.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
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