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July 15, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:58
Ep. 806 - Save Us, Florida Man!

Dr. Fauci demands that three-year-olds mask up, drug overdose deaths spike to the highest level ever recorded, and the feds spend a fortune prosecuting the horn guy from the Capitol riot. My new book ’Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds,’ is now available wherever books are sold. Grab your copy today here: https://utm.io/udtMJ  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is now selling merch on his campaign website that says, which is very effective merchandise because all sensible people think that Dr.
Fauci is a big jerk who should be exiled to St.
Helena.
But it also reveals that Governor DeSantis is seeing where the real divide is in America.
The real divide in America right now is not geographic.
It's not California, my Texas, or whatever.
It's not really that.
People leaving California to go to Texas generally are extremely conservative.
It's not partisan, by the way.
If you look at the federal government, very often it's Republicans and Democrats pushing the same stuff that the majority of Americans really do not support and which actually harms the interests of a lot of Americans.
The real divide, Right now in the United States is between the people and the technocratic ruling elite, which is symbolized and led by Dr.
Fauci, who is the most powerful politician in America.
That ruling elite right now is, as we're seeing with increasing news reports, poisoning people with drugs, censoring people from getting their views out there, and in some cases, even prosecuting Americans By a double standard that would make the Founding Fathers roll in their graves.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Christoph Rodriguez, who says, Democrats flying to D.C., I guess referring to the Texas Democrats flying to D.C., is actually the sequel to Snakes on a Plane.
That's true.
And I have had it!
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I actually saw Ron DeSantis last night.
I was at an event here in the great state of Florida and I saw Governor DeSantis and he's very impressive.
You know, he's obviously running for president.
He's going to need to be vetted.
There's going to be a primary campaign.
He's going to have to get through a governor's race first for re-election.
But he's a very impressive guy.
And all I know is regardless of the governor himself, whoever becomes the Republican nominee in 2024 needs to channel what Ron DeSantis is channeling right now.
Period.
That is the zeitgeist.
That is the spirit of what is going on right now.
Dr.
Fauci is the symbol and the actual politician that is representing so much that has gone rotten in our country.
And by the way, Dr.
Fauci is insistent.
After all the power grabs he's had, after all the demands he's made of you, wear the mask, take the vex, lock yourself up, don't have Christmas, don't have Thanksgiving, don't shut up, sheep.
All the demands he's made.
He now wants your three-year-old child to wear those filthy cloth masks.
Now we're a year and a half past 15 days to slow the spread.
He wants your little kid to wear those masks.
He said there is no doubt that that's the right thing to do.
The children who are not able to get vaccinated because of their age Should follow, their parents should follow with them, the guidelines of the CDC. That unvaccinated children of a certain age, greater than two years old, should be wearing masks.
No doubt about that.
That's the way to protect them from getting infected because if they do, they can then spread the infection to someone else.
So the CDC guidelines for unvaccinated people, including children, are not changed at all.
You see the three-year-olds, who even Dr.
Fauci, I think, is tacitly admitting here, face an infinitesimally small risk of any serious complication from COVID. The three-year-olds, you see, if they don't wear the masks, which Dr.
Fauci told us at the very beginning of the pandemic are not effective at preventing the spread of a virus, then he contradicted himself later on.
And there have been studies that have raised a lot of questions about this, which we've read on this show, even though big tech doesn't want us to.
What Dr.
Fauci is saying is even if the three-year-olds don't face a great risk from COVID, they can spread it if they don't wear the mask.
Now, you might be saying, Michael, all the other people are vaccinated.
So if you're in a demographic that is at very high risk of COVID, presumably you are vaccinated at this point.
The vaccines have been out for a very long time.
If you're not vaccinated, there's a very specific reason why.
It's very intentional why you would not be.
So...
If the vaccines work, then the three-year-old doesn't need to wear the mask.
But the vaccines, I guess, don't work at preventing the spread.
So, therefore, the three-year-olds need to wear the mask.
But no, the vaccines do work, which is why you have to get it, which is why anyone 12 and up needs to get it, and hopefully children younger than that, according to the Public Health Administration.
It's whim.
It's caprice.
It's changing every day.
Much like political correctness, actually, the public health...
Which is just sort of the most noticeable aspect of the broader progressive technocratic regime, is less about...
The rules themselves, the rules are changing all the time.
It's less about that, and it's more about the imposition of the rules.
The very fact that the Dr.
Fauci's of our technocratic elite can just get you to do whatever they want you to do.
And they can say, don't go to church, but you can go to a casino, and you can go to a liquor store, but you can't go to Thanksgiving.
And they can just make it up, and you have to follow it.
That's a big divide.
And I think people across the political aisle, across the partisan lines...
And on the point of this vaccine, by the way, a lot of people don't want to get it.
A lot of people don't want to get it, and I think they have perfectly good reason not to.
And the White House, despite bragging about how everyone's getting it, and we're almost at 70%, 80%, 90%, they clearly are not hitting those numbers because the White House and the ruling class are enlisting pop culture figures to try to get young people to get vaccinated, including Olivia Rodrigo, someone I had never heard of until yesterday, who showed up to the White House press briefing to get your kids vaccinated.
I have a special guest with me today.
Joining us in the briefing room is actress and multi-platinum recording singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo, who traversed red lights and stop tines to see us.
If you know her music, you'll get that dad jokes there.
And we just want to thank you for using your platform And your voice for elevating the important issue of young people getting vaccinated.
She's here today to meet with the President and Dr.
Fauci later this afternoon, but she agreed to come say a quick hello to all of you first.
With that, I'll turn it over to you, Olivia.
Hi.
First, I want to say I am beyond honored and humbled to be here today to help spread the message about the importance of youth vaccination.
I'm in awe of the work President Biden and Dr.
Fauci have done and was happy to help lend my support to this important initiative.
All right.
Olivia Rodrigo says it's important for kids to get the vaccine.
I guess it's true.
Because, you see, we've got to follow the science.
We've got to listen to the experts.
And that means that when a parent musician that I've never heard of tells you to do it, then you do it, right?
She's the expert.
She's...
They are the experts.
The ruling elite.
Not just the scientists, but the people in big business, the people in higher education, the people in media, the people.
They're all the experts.
CNN, it's the experts.
Pop singers, they're the experts too.
This sort of thing used to work a lot better.
I get why Biden is doing this, because Biden is 100 years old, and he was coming up in politics during a time when there was more of a common culture.
So if you could get The big movie star to come out and support your political cause, that was a really big deal.
If you could get the big pop singer to come out, that was a really big deal.
What has changed, though, is that the culture has fractured.
Part of this was cultural because the cultural revolutionaries of the 60s broke up our common culture.
So part of this is the chickens coming home to roost for the left.
Part of this is technological.
There are no longer just three TV networks.
It's Zillion TV networks, none of which anybody watches.
A lot of internet channels, a lot of podcasts.
So that's broken up to...
Because of that practical aspect, I suspect this is not going to have a great effect.
We talk about how difficult the political situation is right now on this show, but a glimmer of hope here is that the left is dealing with this double-edged sword.
They upended the common culture during the 1960s and 70s, and they broke the political consensus, and they made everything political.
So now who washes the dishes is political.
Your running shoes are political.
Your chicken sandwiches are political.
And everything is kind of divisive, and everything makes a political statement okay.
But the flip side of that is that now that they're trying to settle that culture back down along their own standards, people are still pretty divided up there.
There's still a lot of niche audiences out there, and I just don't think Olivia Rodrigo is going to convince people to take an experimental drug just because of the strength of her records or whatever she sells.
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When the liberal establishment is not trying to jab your kids with experimental drugs, the establishment is trying to mutilate them.
And when I say the establishment on this show...
Because I'm not just talking about the government.
By the way, I don't want to sound like I'm a conspiracy theorist or something.
It's a shadowy cabal of people operating in the shadows.
That's not what's going on.
They're operating out in the open and they're obviously colluding with one another.
When there is a negative news story that affects the Democratic candidate for president, We're good to go.
Institutions of higher education and lower education, which are indoctrinating your kids, into the ideology of the regime.
They're all sort of working together.
And so one ideology that they're pushing right now is transgenderism.
And they're doing this not because a zillion people in this country are men who believe that they're women or vice versa.
It's not because the psychological problem affects that many people, though there is a social contagion aspect, so it is spreading, actually.
But they're doing it because if they can redefine nature, if they can redefine sex itself, that is the culmination of their...
This decades, actually centuries-long political plan of liberation, the political plan of emancipation, the political plan of redefining nature.
I mean, this was what Marx set out and his ideological heirs set out explicitly to do, and it's what so many revolutionaries in the modern era have set out to do.
They've set out, as Whitaker Chambers, the ex-communist says, to pursue what the serpent told Eve in the Garden of Eden.
They set out to pursue the plan of ye shall be as gods.
And so that's why the pronouns are such a big political fight.
That's why transing the kids is such a big political fight.
So two Amazon employees just quit.
At least two, maybe more.
Because Amazon is continuing to sell my friend Abigail Schreier's book, Irreversible Damage, about people who come to regret transing their kids and the kids who come to regret having their bodies mutilated by irresponsible parents and by pervert public health officials.
Now, this is good.
Abigail Schreier actually responded to Amazon and said, you're welcome, Amazon HR department.
I've just relieved you of some terrible employees, which is true.
But I make this point because we've been having some discussions over the past few days, just with various friends of mine and colleagues, trying to work through this issue of transgenderism.
And some people have said, look, we don't want to throw bombs.
We don't want to just be needlessly provocative.
And so...
We shouldn't needlessly call Bruce Jenner Bruce.
Bruce, that's his dead name.
Now he's Caitlin.
And my response to that would be, well, Caitlin is a woman's name and he's not a woman, so he's not Caitlin.
Well, and maybe we shouldn't call him he.
Maybe we shouldn't call him she, because he's obviously not a woman, but we should avoid pronouns altogether.
We shouldn't just be throwing bombs.
Now, I think, first of all, compassion involves telling people the truth.
I don't think lying to people is particularly compassionate or kind.
I think the truth will set you free, and I think lies are actually very disrespectful.
I think that comforting people sometimes involves a little tough love.
I'm reminded of the bio-tapestry.
It's the depiction of the Battle of Hastings.
There's a guy with a big club, and he's beating people with it.
And it says, here, Bishop Odo holding a club comforts the boys.
Yeah.
We don't think about comforting in that way, but he was comforting them.
He was saying, get back in the fight, you guys.
He's smacking them with a club.
Sometimes you need a little tough love, even if that means explaining reality in a way that might offend people who are living in a delusion.
But even beyond the redefinition of sex and the pronouns and everything, consider this.
No one is suggesting that we call Bruce Jenner a pervert.
No one is suggesting that we call Bruce Jenner a degenerate or a language that would really be quite offensive.
We're suggesting that we call Bruce Jenner, who is a man, by the male pronoun.
And that is now considered provocative.
That is now considered bomb-throwing.
That is now considered red meat to the base.
Red meat to the base has been redefined, has been so hollowed out that it now involves calling a man a man.
That's the red meat.
And no polite person would ever do that, and we should be compassionate.
I think that is evidence in itself of this hugely successful process of redefining all of reality.
And speaking of transitioning, we can't just talk about sex.
We've got to talk about race.
And Hilaria Baldwin.
Hilaria Baldwin is Alec Baldwin's wife.
I guess she's something of a social media star herself.
His wife got caught pretending to be Spanish.
For years and years and years, Hilaria Baldwin pretended to be Spanish.
She's not really Hilaria.
She's Hillary.
She didn't grow up with, you know, exclusively speaking Spanish or anything like that.
She grew up in America and she speaks English.
She got caught because people noticed that her accent would change depending on what interview she was giving.
So she was on an NBC show and she somehow couldn't remember the English word for a cucumber.
Very few ingredients.
We have tomatoes.
We have, um, what do you say?
Cucumber.
Cucumbers.
We have, um, red pepper.
Okay, we have, um, what is, uh, how you say, how you say in English, uh, oh, a cucumber, right.
So, okay, wow, this woman, she doesn't speak English very well, but she's trying, that's good.
But then, then you hear another interview of her and her English is, is perfectly fine.
It's not easy and I think part of it is that I'm in shape before I have a baby and then I stay active when I'm pregnant and I'm not trying to stay thin I'm just trying to keep my circulation going and stretching and keep my muscles going up and then when I have the baby I've been so lucky to have pretty good labor and delivery so then I can kind of hit the road right afterwards.
So Ilaria Baldwin is like that person who studies abroad for a semester in college in England, for instance, and then comes back and says, like, well, I write there, governor.
You're going to the pub later tonight for a pint, eh?
I want some more.
You want some more?
And I actually, I know a person who did this, and it's very strange.
I mean, it is...
Clearly something has gone a little awry in their psychology.
There was a gal that I knew who, she went to London for like a month or less, and she came back and had the most preposterous fake British accent I've ever heard.
And actually a friend of mine who's from the UK asked me, he said, oh, where did you live in the UK? He doesn't have an accent, by the way.
And she said...
Oh, you know, in London.
Yeah, we're in London.
Well, you know, like next to the tube or whatever, you know, next to the pub.
So this is very sad and embarrassing.
And so Ilaria Baldwin, you know, took her licks and kind of, you know, just tried to disappear for a little bit.
So now she's back and she's saying that actually she is transcultural.
And this is perfectly good.
She's culturally fluid.
She says, when you are multicultural, Whatever, multi.
Everyone's multi now.
We all contain multitudes.
It can feel hard to belong.
You're constantly going back and forth, trying to be more this or more that.
You feel you have to explain why you are the way you are, trying to fit into a world of labels where there might not be one that perfectly defines you.
You will never quite fit in because of the other parts of you shape and influence all your parts.
We need to normalize the fact that we're all unique.
Our culture, our languages, sexual orientations, religions, political beliefs are allowed to be fluid.
No two of us are completely alike.
Gotta be fluid.
We're all fluid these days.
Nothing's fixed.
Nothing's set.
You see this reflected in language, by the way.
People no longer state plain facts.
They no longer say, this is true.
They'll say, I think this is true.
Then it became, I believe this is true.
Then it became, I feel like this is true.
Because I feel like is unfalsifiable.
You can't have an argument with someone who feels like because they're not making a truth claim.
They're just...
Talking about their feels, man.
And I know this seems subtle, and some people might say I'm reading too much into it, but I don't think I am.
Michael, you're just talking about semantics.
Well, semantics means meaning, right?
I mean, this is the premise of my book, Speechless, and I think this is the most important tool that has reshaped our culture, and these things really do matter.
No one wants to be pinned down on anything.
Everyone's a pan, bi, trans, fluid, whatever.
You know, nobody is the plain old thing that they say that they are.
Which brings me to a tweet yesterday from The Economist.
I don't watch soccer.
I don't like soccer very much, as I've mentioned on this show.
So I didn't follow, I guess it was the World Cup or some big soccer game, and Italy won.
And The Economist tweets out, quote, The most striking aspect of Italy's 26-man squad before it took to the pitch was that, alone among the main contenders, it did not include a single player considered as being of color.
Even that phrasing is strange.
Considered as being of color.
What they're saying is, there's no black people on the team.
That's very bad.
That must be racist or something.
But then I thought, hold on a second.
Italy is not a propositional nation founded on an idea where everyone just comes in from all over.
Italy is the country of the Italians.
So the economist says, the most striking aspect of Italy's soccer team is that they were Italians.
But you never see the reverse.
The most striking aspect of Nigeria's soccer team is that it did not include even one single Norwegian.
That's not striking.
That would be expected because it's the Nigerian soccer team.
But it's striking that the Italian soccer team contains Italians.
Because we're all supposed to be trans and fluid, man.
No one's supposed to have a nation at all.
Even Italy.
It's like one of the oldest nations.
It's a nation that has been conquered and has been a little fluid on its borders over time.
But the idea that Italy would comprise Italians, this is too shocking to people.
No one wants to be pinned down in this culture.
Things are not going very well in the West right now, as Candice will tell you today on her show.
Go check out Candice.
You can subscribe right now to Daily Wire, dailywire.com.
Use code CANDICE. You'll get 25% off your new membership.
Candice is going to be talking about Cuba and communism and all sorts of terrible things.
Also, you can pre-order Ben's new book.
This is a great book to pre-order after you order my book, Speechless.
It's great.
It's a great one-two punch.
You order Speechless, you pre-order Ben's book.
I really like the title of Ben's book because it will be my campaign slogan.
The Authoritarian Moment.
So go check that out and prepare for Noel's 2028, The Authoritarian Moment.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Things are not going great for the West right now.
This is true in our political system crumbling, the lockdowns everywhere, faith in our institutions falling apart, divisiveness across all sorts of lines, through the roof.
But especially...
You can see it in the population.
We are not having babies.
And that's a weird thing.
It's weird when populations decide to die.
And so the United States has been below replacement level birth rate for a very long time now, and it keeps dropping steadily.
Which is part of the reason, by the way, that the country floods itself with illegal aliens, and legal immigrants for that matter too, is just to kind of keep the country afloat while the native population across races is not replacing itself.
That's bad.
And then the flip side of that is people are killing themselves.
They're killing themselves by committing suicide and they're killing themselves with drugs, especially with drugs.
In 2020, drug overdose deaths hit the highest number ever recorded, according to the CDC. Ever.
There is a good...
I know people who...
Friends of mine...
I think a lot of people know people who have dealt with drug problems, especially during 2020 when everyone was locked indoors.
The number rose by 30% year over year.
The drug deaths skyrocketed to 93,000 deaths in 2020.
That's an increase from 72,000 in just 2019, and it was already bad in 2019.
You could say right now the biggest problem in America is the drug overdose death.
And I don't think it's coincidental that it happened in 2020.
I don't think it's coincidental that when you locked people inside for a year and you told them that they can't see their families and they can't go to Christmas and they can't be with their loved ones while they're dying and they can't have their weddings and they can't have their college graduation, they can't do anything that you would see more deaths of despair.
You are seeing here...
The culmination of two really bad arguments that our ruling elite have been pushing for a long time.
The first one is fairly narrow, and it was an argument made during the early days of the lockdown, which is, and Andrew Cuomo made it actually, which is funny because he was the worst governor in America on COVID, as we call him.
Andrew Cuomo said, if we can save just one life, it'll all be worth it to shut down the entire state of New York.
If we save just one life, okay, maybe he saved one.
I don't think he did.
I think, actually, his policies are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of senior citizens, which he knew about and covered up from the federal government.
That's actually what I think happened.
But even if, hypothetically, you could say, okay, well, one life was saved from COVID because of the lockdown policies.
Even if that were true, which it is not, how many lives were ended because of those lockdown policies leading to deaths of despair?
Like suicide and especially like drug overdoses.
How many?
Looks like 93,000 people killed themselves.
That increase, that 21,000 death increase, hard to explain that apart from what was going on in the entire society last year with the lockdowns.
If you can only save one person and kill 21,000 people, it will have been worth it.
Really?
I don't think so.
I mean, I think even that calculation is pretty crass, isn't it?
These calculations of just utilitarianism.
It's really ugly stuff.
So I think the if we can save one life argument just was preposterous because there's more to society.
There's more to human life than just...
Staying alive from a virus.
I mean, this is actually a problem that Trump had, too.
At Trump's COVID press conferences, the only people he had behind him, for the most part, were public health officials.
But America is about more than public health.
Our government, our society is about more than public health.
He should have had the public health, not Fauci.
That guy should have been exiled to an island somewhere.
But some public health guy, okay.
And you should have had an economic advisor.
And you should have had a military advisor.
And you should have had all sorts of advisors behind him to say, okay, well here's the effect on COVID infection rates, and here's the effect on our national security, and here's the effect on our economy, and here's the effect on people's livelihoods, and here's the effect on this, that, and the other thing.
And then I think we would have had a very different decision.
The other argument here that is really too bad on the drug overdose deaths is an argument that the left has made for a long time that the right has bought into.
And it's one that we've talked about on this show a lot, so we don't need to go too much into it.
But it is the confusion of liberty and licentiousness.
The idea that freedom means that I should be able to do drugs whenever I want.
You hear a lot of people on the right calling for the legalization of drugs.
All sorts of drugs.
You're seeing this push go on now in state after state after state.
And it's just a bad idea.
That if you legalize all the drugs, fewer people will do them.
You can't legislate morality anyway.
And, you know, you can't control people's behavior or shape people's behavior with the laws.
And politics is downstream of culture, whatever.
You necessarily legislate morality.
That's what all legislation does.
If legislation doesn't shape behavior, then it doesn't do anything at all.
The entire, the exclusive function of legislation is to shape behavior, to encourage certain behaviors and discourage other behaviors.
And when you create incentives for some behaviors and you punish other behaviors, do you know what happens?
You get more of the former and less of the latter.
That's just the way it works.
You know, actually, because the law has all these inverse relationships with behavior, we need to legalize murder, because then we'll have less murder.
Will we?
I don't think we will.
Call me crazy.
I guess I'm not an economic expert.
But I'm pretty sure that when you reward some behavior and you punish other behavior, you get more of the former and less of the latter.
And there is no natural right to do drugs.
It is not good.
It does not lead to freedom.
It leads to slavery.
And the right needs to shake itself out of that very silly idea.
Otherwise, we're going to become a nation of Cuomos who spout a bunch of preposterous platitudes and end up governing ourselves in the worst possible way.
Actually, on the Cuomo aspect, on COVID here...
Not only does Cuomo have the sex scandal, which I always felt was just a Democrat distraction so that people wouldn't talk about his actual scandal, which is about lying about the number of COVID deaths.
So he was lying about the number of COVID deaths in the nursing homes.
But then, turns out, he also very likely was undercounting COVID deaths more broadly.
So the irony of this is so, so sweet, especially because I saw Governor DeSantis last night.
Chris Cuomo last year tweeted out, Can we trust the data from Florida's governor?
This is Fredo Cuomo, the one who's on CNN. He said, can we trust the data?
Yeah, the data show that DeSantis is doing a better job in Florida than Cuomo's doing in New York.
Even though the media are saying DeSantis is doing the worst job on COVID and Cuomo's doing the best job on COVID and he's going to win Emmy Awards for it.
Which makes sense because it was a fiction that was going on in New York.
But he says, can we trust the data from Florida's governor?
And it turns out we can.
We can trust the data from Florida's governor.
He counted the deaths, and he just is doing a good job on his policies.
But it turns out we can't trust the data from Chris Cuomo's brother, Andrew.
It turns out that Andrew Cuomo in New York was doing the exact same thing that the left was accusing the Republican governors of doing.
Once more, an example of the projection of the left.
They do this all the time.
They accuse you of doing what they are brazenly doing themselves.
Cuomo's COVID death count includes only laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 deaths at hospitals, nursing homes, and adult care facilities.
Now, other states have taken the approach that's more in line with the CDC. And these states, some are Republican like Florida, some are Democrat like California, some have unconstitutional election practices like Pennsylvania, some are left-wing like New Jersey.
All of these different states have have followed the approach that's in line with what the CDC says to do, which includes, in fatality counts, all cases where COVID-19 is an associated or contributing factor.
This has been such a broad count that in some cases it's led to this ridiculous over-counting of COVID deaths, where if you have COVID and you don't even know you have COVID, then you get shot in the head, you get counted as a COVID death because you tested positive at your autopsy or when you're brought to the hospital.
So all of these states are doing that, but Cuomo, because he did such a bad job in New York, Speaking of bad governors, Governor Mussolini, the leader of my former state of California, is being recalled, and the campaign has been pretty rough.
Because the only major nominal Republican who's running against Newsom is Bruce Jenner as Caitlyn, who says that he has no loyalty to the Republican Party and the only thing he really cares about is LGBT issues with an emphasis on transgenderism.
So you think, well, hold on.
The Republican candidate is somehow worse than the sitting Democrat.
He was a terrible governor, but he's somehow worse...
Because, at least with Newsom, you know what you're getting.
With Bruce Jenner, he's saying he's a Republican, but then he's saying he's not a Republican, and he's saying all he cares about is transgenderism, which is very much the opposite of the sort of policy Republicans want to pursue.
Well, now there's some hope, because a friend of mine has announced he's running for governor.
The sage from South Central, Larry Elder, who just last week announced his run.
We have rising crime, ridiculous laws that allow a person to steal up to $950 a day without being a felon, without fearing going to jail.
We have an attack on the police, calling the police to pull back.
We have incredible homelessness here in California.
It is estimated that maybe one quarter of all the homeless population in America is here in California.
And why not?
We're not dealing with the underlying problem.
We're throwing money after money after money, building homes.
And attracting other people who get free homes without dealing with the underlying problems.
And maybe, just maybe, I can do something about that.
So I am hereby announcing that I am running for governor of California in this recall election to be held on September 14.
And if you want to help, please go to my website, electelder.com.
That's electelder.com.
I cannot do it without a great deal of money because my opponent, Gavin Newsom, has no spending limits.
I do.
He doesn't.
So this is really great news, I think, for Republicans in California because there are other candidates in California who are running who I think could be perfectly decent governors.
I'm thinking of Kevin Falconer down in San Diego.
Seems like a...
I think he's running for governor.
But the problem is he doesn't have very high name identification.
He's not doing great in terms of fundraising.
So it doesn't matter.
He could be the second coming of Coolidge or Churchill or Reagan or Washington all combined.
And nevertheless, it would be a very uphill battle, especially because no other Democrats are running in the race.
So Newsom doesn't really face any challenges in that regard.
But he doesn't have that name idea.
And I think Larry Elder does.
Larry's been on the radio for a long time.
He goes on TV quite a lot.
I agree with him on a great many things.
He's probably a little more libertarian than my views.
He's not quite to the right of Attila the Hun.
But he's good.
He's a good guy.
He would be a good governor.
And I am glad that now there is an alternative to Bruce Jenner.
I think the embrace of Bruce Jenner is...
It's just the death of the Republican Party in California.
It's just pathetic.
The GOP, I get it, in California or New York, also my home state, New York, I know that they've had to make compromises to be in any way electorally viable, even in some local races, and I understand that's a political reality that Republicans have to deal with there.
If we as Republicans cannot even stand up for the difference between men and women, if we cannot stand up and conserve the ladies' room for men entering into it, we're not conserving anything.
And as far as I can tell, the only thing we would get out of a Bruce Jenner governorship is a misguided sense of owning the libs by adopting their most sacred metaphysical premises.
Which doesn't seem like totally owning the libs to me.
All you'll hear, you're actually hearing this now from some prominent Republicans.
They're saying, you know, Democrats are the real transphobes.
What?
What is that even?
I don't even think that word means anything.
Now we're adopting that kind of language.
I'm really glad.
Great to see.
That Larry Elder is running for governor.
Wish him the best of luck in his campaign.
I hope that he can raise some money.
I hope that he can really mount a challenge because if he just went in there and just cleaned up the crime and fixed the budget even slightly, that would be such great news for California.
There are a lot of Republicans and there are a lot of conservatives and there are a lot of disaffected liberals in California.
This is how Gavin Newsom got recalled in the first place.
And so I certainly wish Larry the best of luck, because at the federal level right now, the federal government is really, really clamping down on right-wingers, and I think that the advances we're going to make in the near future are going to be at the state level.
The federal government right now is spending $6.1 million on just a database, just an evidence database, To prosecute the Capitol rioters,
you know, the participants in the insurrection, the coup d'etat, the greatest threat to our republic since World War II, since Pearl Harbor, since 9-11.
Seriously, people on the left, prominent leftists, have made that comparison between September 11th Between planes flying into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the guy in the horn helmet dancing around the Capitol.
They've compared those two things.
I'm not saying the federal government's spending $6.1 million to prosecute them.
They're going to spend a lot more than that.
I'm saying they're spending $6.1 million on just the evidence database.
Now you might say, Michael, I think what happened at the Capitol is ugly.
It's bad.
I don't like it.
I don't want that to happen in our country.
It was ill-advised.
It was wrong as a matter of justice and also wrong as a matter of tactics.
Okay, sure.
Yeah, right.
I'm not making any comment on that.
I'm pointing out that Horn Guy danced around the Capitol and Smiley Guy took Nancy Pelosi's lectern.
And the only person who was killed in the violence of that day was a Trump supporter named Ashley Babbitt.
Killed by a police officer.
Despite all the lies told to us by the New York Times and the Washington Post, which they later had to retract about Trump rioters attacking police officers.
I'm pointing out that for reasons.
For six to eight months, BLM and Antifa burned down the country and killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of property and stole a lot of property.
And they're largely getting off the hook.
And there's no $6.1 million database and there's no massive law enforcement campaign to hold these people responsible.
And in a lot of cases, they're getting plea deals to plead way, way down and avoid jail time.
And in some cases, the charges are just being dropped entirely or not even brought in the first place.
This is an unacceptable double standard.
And it's really, as we pointed out before, it's hierarchy.
It's saying that when the Democrats riot, it's good, and when Republicans riot, it's the worst thing in the world, even when the Democrat riots are by every measure much, much worse.
According to the ruling liberal elite, the conservatives are the big problem.
The country hasn't been this divided since the Civil War, and the GOP, they're the Confederates.
The assault on free and fair elections is just such a threat, literally.
I've said it before.
We're facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.
That's not hyperbole.
Since the Civil War, the Confederates back then...
Never breach the Capitol, as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.
I'm not saying this to alarm you.
I'm saying this because you should be alarmed.
So I'll make the point, I don't want to harp on it, but it's an irony, so I have to point it out, that the Confederates were all Democrats, and the Union were all Republicans.
The parties did not switch, as the left insists that they did.
But of course, political parties change and they evolve, and so it's not a direct analog.
I don't want to just retreat to that typical Republican talking point of, you know, Democrats haven't been this angry since we freed their slaves or whatever.
Yeah, political parties do change over time, and so I think that's a little bit of a cheap shot.
Though it is ironic, and one has to point it out.
But notice, here is a real comparison between the Democrats and the Confederates.
The Confederates seceded.
The Confederates wanted the war.
The Confederates...
I mean, that was the very essence of secession, is saying we are no longer a country.
And they hoped that the North would just let them go and that that doesn't happen in a country.
You can't just secede from a country.
The logic of a country does not permit you to do that.
Okay.
Who's talking about the civil war right now?
I know some people on the right ask questions about this.
Are we headed for a civil war?
There's so much political violence.
But I'm talking about at the top level of politics.
Who's talking about civil war?
Is it Donald Trump?
No.
Is it Ron DeSantis?
No.
Is it Ted Cruz?
No.
Is it Josh Hawley?
No.
It's the Democrats.
It's Joe Biden.
It's Other people.
Hillary Clinton saying you can't be civil with your opponents.
It's Maxine Waters saying go become violent with Republicans.
It's Kamala Harris bailing out leftist rioters who were committing violence against their political opponents, among other people.
They're the ones talking about civil war.
They're the ones calling for violence against conservatives.
And yet, because they control all the organs of communication, they say that it's us.
They're gaslighting.
It's projection.
It's exactly the opposite of reality.
And the regime is backing them up.
The regime, the broad, the blob, the establishment, the ruling class is backing them up.
Kevin McCarthy, who's the House GOP leader, he tweeted the other day about how inflation is really spiking.
And he's tying this to Joe Biden's policies, which is...
Certainly fair.
But it's just a tweet about inflation.
Twitter slapped a sensitive content label on them.
Not a call to violence, arms, insurrection.
No, just pointing out that inflation is spiking because of Joe Biden's stupid economic policies.
Sensitive content.
That is big tech, which controls the flow of information around the internet, controls speech in a republic, meaning it controls politics, doing the bidding of the dominant liberal regime.
Sensitive content.
There's a video, I'm not even going to play the video, there's a video going around right now from Cuba of the government shooting a man.
They're now killing the protesters in the street, shooting a man in front of a toddler.
And this follows the threat from the dictator of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, who said we will do anything to preserve the quote-unquote revolution, to preserve the ruling regime.
We will do anything.
It's a very nearly explicit call for violence, and then he backed it up with violence.
Miguel Diaz-Canel is still on Twitter.
The dictator of Cuba, who is killing his own people now, still on Twitter.
Donald Trump was booted off of Twitter after telling his followers to be peaceful.
Remember, be peaceful.
Don't be violent.
Be peaceful.
You're getting kicked off Twitter, Mr.
President, for inspiring violence.
Miguel Diaz-Canel saying, we will do anything and go to all measures possible to preserve the regime.
He's still on Twitter.
Because it's not about a principle, and it's not about violence, and it's not about preserving our democracy or anything like that.
It's preserving the dominant liberal regime.
That's what this is.
That's the divide here.
And so we say, save us, Florida man!
Florida man, you're our hope!
Please, save us, Florida.
And really, help us out any Republican who will channel that, who understands what DeSantis in particular is recognizing right now, but I think the majority of ordinary Americans are recognizing too.
That's the divide, and we've got to defend the people, and we've got to defend the Constitution against a technocratic elite that wants to undermine both of those things.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles.
and I'll see you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, BLM proves once again it is a garbage communist organization.
We'll talk all about it.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
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