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July 19, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:32
Ep. 808 - The Misinformers

The Biden White House calls to censor “misinformation,” a porn star shows up to a conservative student summit, and LA reinstates its mask mandate even for vaccinated Angelenos. 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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The Biden White House is calling on big tech companies to censor conservatives for spreading misinformation online, specifically when that information has to do with the Wu flu and its attendant vaccines.
Here is Jen Psaki explaining the policy.
First, it shouldn't come as any surprise that we're in regular touch with social media platforms, just like we're in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets about areas where we have concern, information that might be useful, information that may or may not be interesting to your viewers.
You all make decisions just like the social media platforms.
Make decisions, even though they're a private sector company and different, but just as an example.
So we are regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media.
And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform As you all know, information travels quite quickly.
If it's up there for days and days and days, when people see it, it's hard to put that back in a box.
Okay, it's hard to put it back in the box.
That's why the big tech companies need me to censor these conservatives spreading the misinformation, except that new evidence surrounding the virus and the vaccines show that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the rest of the liberal establishment have been spreading far more misinformation than the right has whatsoever.
So we will inform you.
We will give you the true information so long as the real misinformers don't stop us.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Lowe Show.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
My favorite comment, Friday, from Michael Larson, who says, does anyone else see the irony behind the statement that Biden wants to slow the spread of misinformation?
How long will that take?
15 days?
Well, if it takes 15 days, it'll probably take 15 months or maybe even 15 years.
A very good point.
It's so exhausting, those 15 days, to slow the spread, which is why I'm so happy that I can rest my head on my pillow.
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I want to get to the misinformation that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the rest of them have been spreading for over a year now.
But before we get into that, before we get into Biden making the case that he himself should be censored on social media, I have to point out that Biden is also making the case for President Trump's lawsuit against the big tech companies.
We covered this a few weeks ago.
Donald Trump is suing big tech companies, along with a few other social media influencers, including my friend Fleckes from Fleckes Talks, who I saw last night, actually here in Tampa, Florida.
A story we'll get to also in just a moment.
But Trump, along with some social media influencers, suing big tech for the violation of their First Amendment rights.
And a lot of geniuses have said that Trump's lawsuit has absolutely no merit because Facebook is a private business, as Jen Psaki just tried to say.
Said, look, Facebook is a private business, so Facebook can do what it wants.
But we are pressuring them to silence our political opponents.
And this gets to a legal framework under which Trump's lawsuit could be successful that, coincidentally, we laid out on my podcast with Senator Cruz verdict some weeks ago.
So Senator Cruz made this point.
He's the legal expert, not me.
But we put it out there on verdict.
And the point is this.
Yes, a private business can censor you, generally speaking, if it wants to.
And that's not a First Amendment issue unless the government is using that private business as a proxy to silence you.
So if it is the case that the liberal establishment, the Democratic Party, the government, is using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, as a proxy to silence their political opponents, then it actually is a First Amendment issue.
There are other problems, by the way, with private companies censoring you online that do not have to do with the First Amendment.
But that's the way that would work, and Trump decided to take the First Amendment route.
Well, Joe Biden and Jen Psaki are admitting that he's got a point, because they are now—I don't know what they're thinking— Other than they're just letting it slip because it's convenient to their other political narratives.
Because it's assuaging a leftist base that wants the government to pressure Facebook more to censor conservatives.
But they are admitting that they are using Facebook as a proxy here.
So giving a lot of merit, I think, to Donald Trump's lawsuit against big tech.
Now, even more ironic, while they're complaining about misinformation online about the virus and about the vaccine...
They seem to forget that they themselves have been spreading the anti-vaccine hysteria alarmism that they're accusing their opponents of pushing.
Please roll the tape.
Let's just say there's a vaccine that is approved and even distributed before the election.
Would you get it?
Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us.
If and when the vaccine comes.
It's not likely to go through all the tests and trials that are needed to be done.
When we finally do, God willing, get a vaccine, who's going to take the shot?
Who's going to take the shot?
You're going to be the first one to say, put me, sign me up.
They now say it's okay.
And the question of whether it's real when it's there, that requires enormous transparency.
You've got to make all of it available to other experts across the nation so they can look and see.
So there's consensus this is a safe vaccine.
If the president announced tomorrow we have a vaccine, would you take it?
Only if it was completely transparent that other experts in the country could look at it.
Only if we knew all of what went into it.
If Donald Trump can't give answers and the administration can't give answers to these three questions, the American people should not have confidence.
But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I'm not taking it.
Wow.
I had no idea that there was such broad agreement between me and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Not on the Trump digs, but on the vaccine.
Vaccine comes out tomorrow.
Who's going to take it?
Are you going to take it?
You're going to be the first one?
No.
Probably I wouldn't want to be the first one.
I get why a lot of people don't want to take the vaccine.
Because it was rushed through.
Because it received an emergency use authorization.
But it didn't go through the normal channels to clear the vaccine.
And because of many other factors too.
Namely, the prudential judgment.
Am I really at a huge risk from the coronavirus if you're in...
Certain demographics, if you're a young person, if you're otherwise healthy, then you're not at very great risk.
So maybe you wouldn't want to take the experimental drug that both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden pointed out we have plenty of reason to think might not be safe.
But they get to remain on social media, and a lot of conservatives who raise questions about the vaccine do not.
Because, of course, it's not about the vaccine, it's not about the quality of the information, it is about who's giving the information.
It's about who's sending the message, like political correctness, like so much of the left's control over speech.
The issue is not the substance of the speech, it's the imposition itself.
Who gets to say it?
Look, what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris just said, I don't think that's misinformation.
They're just explaining the natural plain fact that when an experimental drug comes out, a lot of people are going to be reticent to take it, especially if the virus that it's supposed to stop is not all that great a danger to them.
So I don't think that's misinformation, but by their own standards...
That is misinformation and they should be kicked off the internet.
And they won't because this entire campaign for fact checking and the content filters and the do you want to read this article before you tweet it and the not even being able to privately message certain articles critical of the liberal regime.
That whole thing is just a political tool for the suppression of their political opponents.
Also, by the way, At this very moment right now, we are being told by public health officials that the vaccine is basically useless.
Now, they're not using those exact words, but when you look at my old state of California, run by Mr.
Nussolini, if you look at my old city of Los Angeles, also known as Gomorrah by the Sea, they are reinstituting a mask mandate.
Okay, I guess we've been hearing now from liberal scaremongers that we still have a raging epidemic, especially among the unvaccinated.
So, okay, I guess it makes sense that the unvaccinated need to wear the masks even.
Oh, wait a minute, no!
Everybody needs to wear the masks.
Now, as of Saturday night, everybody in Los Angeles...
Including vaccinated people needs to wear masks indoors because I guess the vaccines aren't working.
If the vaccines were working, vaccinated people would not need to wear the masks.
But I guess the vaccines are not working, but it's still very urgent that you take the vaccine to fight against the virus, which is the worst epidemic that we've ever faced, but it's not so terrible that you've got to shutter, I don't know, marijuana dispensaries.
It's not so terrible that you've got to shutter Casinos, it's not so...
But you do have to shutter churches, and you do have to shutter businesses, and the whole thing just seems a little bit like an arbitrary use of power.
Whole thing.
Seems like a lot of misinformation going around here.
You know, I'm very glad to be in Florida right now.
I'm very glad not to be in Los Angeles.
I'm very glad not to be in California, these places that are really locked down.
I'm in Florida for TPUSA. I'm going to be giving a speech this afternoon, 4.20 or so Eastern Time.
Very excited about it.
There have been some real rock stars here.
Rhonda Santa spoke yesterday.
Ted Cruz spoke yesterday.
We've got a bunch of great people coming out today.
And of course, TPUSA was trending.
It always is trending because the left finds something to make a big deal about.
And this time, the issue was...
Here's the headline.
Let me tell you the headline.
Porn star featured as VIP at TPUSA student conference.
I saw that.
That was the trend yesterday on Twitter.
I said, oh my gosh, they got a porn star speaking at TPUSA. So I looked.
That was not the case.
As always, I don't believe the headline.
Whenever you see the headline, Charlie Kirk is doing this terrible thing, I said, no, I don't think that's true.
So I looked, and what happened was a porn star decided to attend the conference, and she bought her own VIP ticket, and she was just showing up to listen to the speakers.
And this created two reactions on the right, both of which I think were wrong.
So there was the very wrong reaction, which was, Hey, porn is great.
That's true freedom.
We need to be the cool party.
We need to endorse porn and drugs and stuff, and that's awesome, and that's going to be the party of the future.
Yeah, and porn's more American than apple pie.
Okay, so that's obviously a ridiculous, libertine point of view.
Then there was the more conservative point of view, which is this is, you know, terrible, this is awful.
There was a lot of invective sent against this porn lady, people calling her all sorts of terrible names and saying she needs to be shunned from society and shouldn't show her face anywhere.
And I think that reaction was a little off as well.
I think there actually was a third way here that the conservatives should have pursued, and it's this.
Had this porn lady been a speaker, Had this porn lady had a booth to do what?
We don't know at the conference.
Had this porn lady been making a big nuisance of herself and making a big show of herself and trying to become a leader or a speaker or a focus of a conservative summit, that would be a very bad thing and obviously she should have been kicked off of the premises.
But as far as I can tell, that's not what happened.
As far as I can tell, this porn lady showed up.
She used her Christian name.
She didn't use her porn name, so no one even who would have heard of her had seen anything.
And she was just kind of minding her own business and watching the conservative speakers.
Isn't that good?
If she's just totally minding her own business, she's not trying to recruit anybody for her...
Pornography business.
Isn't that good?
Don't we want that to happen?
I just, I felt that the invective sent against this woman was really misplaced because I gotta tell you, Something tells me that if you work in pornography, if you're a prostitute or a porn actress, you probably don't have the strongest sense of self-dignity.
You probably don't have the strongest feelings of self-worth.
And to be called all sorts of names and to be told that you're the...
Root of all evil in society.
I don't think that's very nice.
I don't think it's nice to speak in a harsh, vulgar way to women ever, whether it's a prostitute or a princess.
I don't think that's right.
And I also just think, if this woman, she's still working in pornography, but she's clearly interested by some conservative arguments, and maybe she's only right now gone through the shallow conservative arguments, but she's obviously interested.
if I can get her into a room where she hears conservative speakers, where she hears me give a speech about how porn is bad and you shouldn't be in the industry, and if you're in it, you should get out, and if you're supporting it, you should stop supporting it, and if you are a legislator, you should restrict it or even ban it outright.
If she can hear those arguments and maybe be persuaded, I think that would be a good thing.
I know that when conservatives call for a big tent party, 99 times out of 100, what that means is they want to just get rid of all of our standards, and they want to just become Democrats light, if light, or just identical to the Democratic party and not have any boundaries at all.
I know that's how that works a lot of the time.
But the good version of a big tent party is we have these standards.
We hate porn, among other things.
You can't do that.
There's no spot for that in the conservative movement.
But there is a spot for you if you want to get out of it.
Look, obviously, I've been talking about speech lists for a very long time, which is available now for order.
I don't think there is anybody in the conservative movement who has been more vocal about the need for standards, about the need to suppress vice, about the need to stop saying that you can just say and do whatever you want all the time.
We certainly need standards.
But the point of standards is not to kick everybody out.
The point of standards is not to be insular and small and exclusive or exclusionary.
The point of standards is to bring as many people as possible along to hold themselves to a higher standard of speech and conduct.
I'm obviously much more sympathetic to the point of view that these porn stars need to be cast into outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth, but that actually isn't my view.
My view is that porn needs to be cast into the outer darkness.
And the people who are caught up in the industry, especially the women, who generally don't come from great backgrounds and haven't had a great life, they need to be welcomed in and they need to be given the arguments as to why this is terrible.
And I think it would be good to elevate their political views.
And so I just think...
The invective, the meanness, we gotta ditch that sort of thing and really use standards for their true purpose, which is elevating individuals and elevating society.
Speaking of bringing lots of people in, you know, speaking of the big tent, the big tent of our country has really gone quite wrong.
I think that the way this applies at the national level speaks to the idea that there are no boundaries and there are no borders.
And there's really not even much of a country because we've got lots and lots of people pouring into this country from other nations.
And they have been told by people at the highest levels of government That they can stay and it's no big deal and don't worry about it.
For instance, DACA. This was Barack Obama's, one of his signature achievements, where he just gave executive amnesty to lots and lots of what we were told were very young, illegal, alien children.
Turns out they're like 40 years old.
It's people who are in the middle age and younger who came here when they were minors.
They were given executive amnesty.
Well, there's some good news here, which is a judge has come in Federal Judge Andrew S. Hainan of the U.S. District Court in Houston, who is a George W. Bush appointee, he came in and said that the executive order for DACA was unlawful, that Obama exceeded his authority when he issued it.
He's saying that the executive order violated the Administrative Procedure Act because it failed to allow public comment.
So great!
Oh, this is good.
I'm glad.
DACA is illegal.
Big victory for conservatives, right?
Right.
No, it's not.
I mean, I'm glad that the judge is admitting that it was wrong for Obama to do what he did, but the simple fact is Obama succeeded at doing it.
He gave the illegal aliens the protection to stay here.
And we can't just take that back because some judge ordered it.
It just won't happen.
We already knew that DACA was illegal.
Barack Obama already admitted that DACA was not just illegal but unconstitutional.
Obama said in October 2010, Quote, I am not a king.
I can't do these things just by myself.
In March of 2011, Barack Obama said that, quote, with respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case.
And then in May of that year, he said that he couldn't, quote, just bypass Congress and change the immigration law myself.
That's not how a democracy works.
And then what did Obama do?
He did that.
He just did it.
And we all rent our garments and gnashed our teeth.
But he won.
He got it.
No judge is going to undo that.
And this is a problem with illegal immigration generally.
You're not going to get mass deportations.
It's just not going to happen because it's politically untenable.
If anyone was going to do it, it was going to be Donald Trump.
And he didn't.
He didn't do it.
And now, you actually did see at the beginning of the Trump presidency, you saw a big dip in illegal immigration when they thought that he could enforce the law and he wanted to enforce the law, but he was stymied by the bureaucracy.
And then illegal immigration jumped up again.
Now we have reached truly record levels of illegal immigration, much higher than anybody seems to know about.
And nothing's going to happen.
Which is why there's no substitute for victory, folks.
I think a lot of people believe, okay, we'll let the illegal aliens in now.
Okay, we'll deal with executive amnesty now and we'll fix it later.
Some things really can't be fixed later.
Because you've already messed it up.
Once an illegal alien comes into this country, it is virtually impossible to deport that person.
As a legal matter, as a political matter, we have to secure the border.
At the border.
You can't do it after the fact.
There's not time to do all...
We actually have to stand up and win the victories.
Losing with dignity is not an option.
You can't correct that later.
You've got to win.
You know, speaking of winning, I think The Daily Wire is really winning right now because they've got a new show coming up.
That would be The Morning Wire.
If the American people have an enemy, you know what that enemy would be?
It would be the establishment media, which uses its platform to lie and lie and spin and spin.
And they do it all, not just on their opinion programming, but on their alleged news programming.
They have their really soft voice.
And welcome.
This is The Daily Morning News show.
I'm bababababaro.
And here are the facts.
And the fact is, Donald Trump is a terrible fascist.
And you're all racist, white supremacists.
That's just the facts.
But because they sound really smooth about it, you know, people believe it.
And bourgeois housewives in the middle of the country believe it too.
So...
We've got to stop that, all right?
And Daily Wire is leading the fight.
We have got our new morning news show.
It's short.
It's packed full of facts.
It's going to come out every morning.
It's hosted by Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley and co-host Georgia Howe.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
188,000 illegal aliens entered our country in June. illegal aliens entered our country in June.
Last month.
188,000.
Not entered our country this year.
I think a lot of people think the number would probably be, you know, this year, six months in, maybe we've had 188,000.
No, no, no.
We have officially surpassed 1 million migrant encounters this year.
We are on track for 2 million by the end of the year.
This is record-shattering numbers, way higher than anybody thinks.
Poll after poll shows that the American people want to drastically reduce not just illegal, but legal immigration.
If we've got 2 million illegal aliens pouring into the country this year, we've got another 1 to 2 million legal aliens.
That is an untenable number, folks.
Over the last 60 years, the migration into the United States is the largest movement of human beings ever in recorded history.
All while we are being told that we cannot encourage assimilation, all while we are being told that our country is evil and terrible and rotten.
If it's so evil and terrible and rotten, why are 3 to 4 million people coming here every year?
Even under the best of circumstances, you can't assimilate that many people.
But certainly not under these circumstances.
This is what you might call a hostile takeover.
I'm not even saying by the illegal aliens themselves.
I'm saying by the leftist radicals and liberal elites who are using the immigration issue as a way to radically transform our country.
And make no mistake, that's what they're doing.
They've given us a new American flag.
No longer the stars and stripes.
It's the rainbow flag.
Actually, it's the new one with the rainbow and the racial stuff in a triangle.
It's called the progress flag.
It's very strange.
We've got a new National Independence Day.
It used to be the 4th of July.
Now it's Juneteenth.
The Juneteenth National Independence Day holiday.
We used to have the 1776 founding of our country.
Now it's the 1619 founding.
It's a new country that they're trying to push on us.
And some of the radical leaders are not really hiding it.
The head of one of the NAACP chapters was just caught on camera saying that if you are a parent who protests critical race theory in the schools, who protests the sort of anti-American ideologies that are tearing down our country, you should just die.
Let's meet and remain steadfast in speaking truth, tearing down double standards, and refuting double talk.
Let's not allow any double downing on lies.
Let's prepare our children for a world they deserve.
Let's deny this off-key band of people that are anti-education, anti-teacher, anti-equity, anti-history, anti-racial reckoning, anti-opportunities, anti-health people, anti-diversity, anti-platform, anti-science, anti-change agent,
anti-social justice, anti-health care, anti-worker, anti-LGBTQ +, Let them die.
So, on the one hand, I think this is a threat.
Because we have heard, especially from BLM and Antifa, and we have seen, especially from BLM and Antifa and other leftist radical groups, the use of political violence, the use of terrorism, the use of violence against civilians to achieve a political end.
We've seen that a lot over the past year.
So I do think this is a threat.
But it's not just a threat.
It's actually even more insidious than a threat.
It is the explanation of what the left means by progress.
It is an avowal of belief in progress with a capital P. What this woman is saying is...
We radicals are going to win.
We are going to transform this country.
We are going to fundamentally invert this country.
And it's just going to happen.
That's the arc of the moral universe.
It's long, but it bends toward justice.
That's what progress is.
And so, if we just wait them out, they will die, and that'll be a good thing, and then we can move on.
Now, It's worth noting what she's saying here because sometimes you'll hear people on the right talking about replacement migration or this idea that the traditional American demographic makeup is going to be radically transformed and this is part of a political agenda.
And that belief is called white supremacist and Nazi and fascist and all the things that they call every other thing that anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton believes.
But what this woman is saying is that.
She is giving credence to that theory.
She's saying, yeah, let them die.
Whether it's the evil straight white men, whether it's the terrible conservatives more broadly, yeah, let them die.
They're going to die out and they're going to be replaced by good radicals of this wonderful new coalition that we're putting together.
There have been other prominent leftists who have said this.
And then, even in the Washington Post and in other major outlets of the legacy media, you will see them come out very often and say, ha ha, this terrible straight white man are about to be supplanted as a big portion of the population.
So, they give credence to this theory, too.
And I don't think that they would refer to themselves as Nazis and white supremacists and so forth.
But they believe that that is part and parcel of progress.
And they're obviously willing to engage in acts of violence to do so.
They not only say it in speeches like this, but they actually have committed it during, for instance, the BLM riots.
One thing the left has done very well is they've redefined perfectly innocuous speech acts as acts of violence, and they've redefined violence as speech.
And it's been largely successful.
Well, the American Booksellers Association has joined the bandwagon.
The American Booksellers Association is a 121-year-old trade organization for booksellers.
They mentioned in one of their mailers a very popular book by my friend Abigail Schreier, a book that I actually blurbed.
It's called Irreversible Damage, and it's about how young girls are being seduced into the transgender nonsense and are having great regrets because of this and are mutilating their bodies for no reason.
Very important book.
It was banned from Target, I think, and from some other bookstores, but it's still sold very, very well.
The ABA mentions this very popular book, and they've received huge backlash.
So they sent out a statement saying, quote, an anti-trans book was included in our July mailing to members.
This is a serious, violent incident that goes against ABA's ends, policies, values, and everything we believe and support.
It is inexcusable.
Pause right there.
Goes against everything you believe in.
So you're telling me, American Booksellers Association, That everything you believe is that we should mutilate little girls to make them look more like little boys.
That is everything.
You don't believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4.
You don't believe that the sun shines during the daytime.
You believe, the sum total of your belief, is that we should mutilate little girls.
I don't know if I buy that.
This is a violent incident.
No, a violent incident is when you mutilate little girls because of your sick life.
That your body has nothing to do with who you really are.
That's a violent incident.
Mentioning a book that reports on that is not violence.
That's journalism.
And it's journalism, actually, that aims at reducing violence.
They go on.
We apologize to our trans members and to the trans community for this terrible incident and the pain we caused them.
We apologize to the LGBTQIA plus every day.
There's one more letter.
Community at large and to our bookselling community, apologies are not enough.
We've begun addressing this today and are committed to engaging in the critical dialogue needed to inform concrete...
Steps to address the harm that we caused.
Those steps will be shared in the next three weeks.
So just notice this language.
Harm, violence.
This is all part of the same thing that Biden and Jen Psaki are talking about.
They are redefining innocuous speech acts as violence.
And they are then going to try to ban that sort of speech.
And they're going to try to ban it on social media, say.
And what we are going to be told is these are private entities, but they're not private entities.
They are, first of all, by definition, public if they're controlling the flow of information around the public square in a republic.
But moreover, they're working very often at the behest of the government, as Biden and Jen Psaki are approving.
And conservatives, we need to be very careful in our language here because there are some narrow types of speech that do constitute an act of violence.
If you engage in a direct threat, that is not protected speech.
That is assault, actually.
That is already defined as an act of violence.
If you engage in certain fraud, these sorts of things, you could make an argument that that is in itself causing harm and that is an act of violence.
And so I think we need to be very specific here.
What Abigail Schreier is doing is engaging in not only innocuous speech, but actually speech that is good and speech that is aimed at reducing violence.
And in this upside-down world that we're all living in now, that is being redefined as violence and violence is being defined as peaceable and innocuous.
We need to get even more specific than the traditional, and I think very useful idea that speech is not violence and violence is not speech.
We need to get even more specific now.
Because the left is not only clearly interested in redefining these things, but they have the political power to do it.
And they're being pretty successful.
Now, speaking of acts of violence, right now in Cuba, there is a mass protest movement going on.
People are going out and protesting the Cuban communist dictatorship.
And the government is clamping down.
The president, or the dictator, rather, of Cuba has come out and said they will do anything they can to preserve the regime, up to and including using violence on the citizens, which they're currently doing right now.
They're maiming people, beating people, and actually killing people in the streets.
And those crickets that you hear right now are from Bernie Sanders.
Because Bernie Sanders, who very nearly was the Democrat nominee for president twice in 2016 and 2020, longtime Democratic senator, very longtime gadfly, who's been in politics for 50 years, Bernie Sanders has spoken in very positive ways about the Cuban dictatorship.
What I said is what Barack Obama said in terms of Cuba, that Cuba made progress on education.
Yes, I think...
Really?
Really?
Do I support their economic policies or their political policies?
Of course I don't.
But you know what else?
Cuba produces a lot of physicians in this country.
And you know where they go?
They go to poor countries around the world doing a lot of good.
By and large, Cuba's educational system for a poor country is pretty good.
When Castro came to power, they did a lot to eliminate illiteracy in that country.
But I remember For some reason, I've been very excited when Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba.
I was a kid and I remember reading that.
And it just seemed right inappropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people.
I was watching the debates.
You remember the famous Nixon-Kennedy debates?
That was the first time the presidential candidates actually debated.
Kennedy was saying that Nixon was too soft on communism.
Usually I'm sufficiently unemotional not to be sick, but I actually got off in the room and almost left the puke.
He almost left a pew.
He was so upset because Bernie Sanders has supported communism in those terms, right?
The guy honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
It doesn't get more supportive than that.
And now what we're seeing is the people of Cuba, long oppressed by an evil, evil system of government, rising up against that.
And Bernie has nothing to say.
He has nothing to say because he obviously does not speak for the Cuban people.
He obviously does not speak for the oppressed masses.
I mean, this is the problem that the Marxist revolutionaries had going back to the days of Karl Marx.
Namely, that they had all these wonderful theories for the liberation of the oppressed masses, but the allegedly oppressed masses didn't like the theories very much.
Turned out that the oppressed masses actually liked their own traditions and their own countries.
And their own families and rituals.
They didn't like the crazy radicalism.
This is what you're seeing right now with Marxists, avowed Marxists in our schools and in other institutions.
And you're seeing the actual oppressed masses in America coming out and protesting and saying, I don't want my kids being taught this stuff.
You're seeing black mothers, white mothers, Hispanic mothers showing up to the school board saying...
Look, we don't have a ton of money to send our kids to private school.
We don't have a ton of time to homeschool.
We've got to send our kids to these public schools.
And you nutbags are coming in and saying that we've got to teach our kids critical race theory or teach our kids critical gender or radical gender theory.
And the elites are saying, well, no, these are actually wonderful ideologies for you.
They're going to liberate you.
They're going to help you.
Calm down, you oppressed masses.
You just don't get how wonderful this is.
That's what Bernie's done on Cuba now for 50 years.
And it turns out it doesn't work out very well.
So he's not going to continue to defend it right now.
He's just got to remain totally silent, as the Biden White House, by the way, has done until just recently.
Jen Psaki.
Jen Psaki has a very difficult job, and she's been under fire a lot lately because while Cubans in the streets are protesting the dictatorship...
She refuses to call out communism.
She has been asked, hey, well, can you acknowledge this is about the communist dictatorship?
And she says, well, it's about, you know, economic mismanagement and COVID vaccines.
Can't you hear them?
I know it sounds like they're chanting libertad, but they actually are saying, no, COVID vaccinos.
Can't you hear that?
No, that's not, I don't think that's what they're saying.
So finally, she's faced so much pressure from this.
She had to acknowledge that this comes down to the failed ideology of communism.
Does this White House still think the protests in Cuba are happening because people are upset about a rise in COVID cases there?
Or is there some thought maybe given to the possibility that they are protesting because they are sick of communism?
Well, Peter, first I would say communism is a failed ideology.
And we certainly believe that.
It has failed the people of Cuba.
They deserve freedom.
They deserve a government that supports them, whether that is making sure they have health and medical supplies, access to vaccines, or whether they have economic opportunity and prosperity.
Instead, this has been a government, an authoritarian communist regime that has repressed its people and has failed the people of Cuba.
Hence, we're seeing them in the streets.
But I would note that the ideology of the government, which has failed, has led to a lack of access to economic opportunity, to medical supplies, to COVID vaccines.
So all of those pieces are true.
Good, good.
It only took her two weeks to say communism is bad.
Not because I think Jen Psaki or Joe Biden are communists, but because a lot of the base is.
A lot of the real interest groups on the left that have a lot of influence are avowedly Marxist.
I mean, BLM, for instance, says that itself.
BLM's founders say they are trained Marxists, and they've spoken very highly of Marxist leaders.
But the problem is not just Marxism.
The influence of communism on the American left is a problem.
It's been a problem going back over 100 years now.
But there's a further problem within this regime of what you might call managerialism, the liberal establishment.
That's a problem, too.
That is a problem of an overwhelmingly managed economy where the government exerts a lot of influence on allegedly private corporations.
And the private corporations do the bidding of the dominant liberal regime and they suppress political dissent.
And they won't allow you to raise any concerns about, for instance, Jen Psaki, vaccines and coronavirus and the misinformation that's been coming out of the regime itself.
There are some similarities here.
While communism is a big problem, it's not the only failed ideology in the world.
And I think we've got to recognize that there are some other problems going on here.
And it's not exclusively the commies hiding under the beds, but there are also issues with neoliberalism.
There are also issues with managerialism.
There are also issues with the misinformation in our own regime.
Speaking of failed communist regimes, or rather repressive communist regimes that are maintaining themselves in power very well, the Chinese communists, it turns out, lied about the coronavirus, and even the Biden officials are willing to admit this now.
Senior Biden officials, according to CNN even, according to Pravda for the regime, quote, senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild.
A dramatic shift from a year ago when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called Lably Cleary.
Gee, you don't say.
The bat coronavirus that we've never seen before that happened to be discovered right near that lab that works on bat coronaviruses.
They might have had something to do with each other.
Oh, wow.
Gosh.
Amazing.
Experts, thanks for admitting that.
Last year, when some of us on this show, for instance, said that it seemed very likely that it escaped from the lab, the Washington Post put out headlines like this.
That was the headline in WAPO. Then in early June they had to change it.
They said, quote, Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.
Now I think the headline should read, Tom Cotton says a thing that is obviously true and is just common sense to anybody with two eyes in their heads that is not being suppressed by the liberal establishment.
Yes, of course the lab had something to do with this.
And yet...
When we said this last year, we were called fringe nut misinform or conspiracy theorists who, by the rules of the Biden administration and Facebook, very easily could have been censored and taken offline, and in some cases were.
The Biden administration, people who now make up the Biden administration, were the misinformers.
The Washington Post, CNN, the New York Times, they were the misinformers here, and they continue to be the misinformers even as their lives fall apart.
By the way, the WHO now is admitting that the virus didn't come from the Wuhan wet markets.
The WHO, which has worked to help China cover up what's going on, and in many ways works at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party, is now demanding audits be conducted of Chinese labs that were in the vicinity of the first COVID cases because they're admitting that the first cluster of cases did not come from the wet market in Wuhan.
Obviously.
Obviously.
But they control the language, and they control the means of communication, so they'll drip this out when they want, and they'll redefine information as misinformation, and misinformation as credible information, and we can't do anything about it.
We're still going to be kicked off of the internet if we transgress what the regime has set out for us.
You're seeing this.
This is a little bit of a tangent, but you're seeing a similar principle right now.
There's a headline in the New York Post that shark advocates I guess that's a category of people, picturing lawyers, you know, just lawyers for sharks.
You know, all right, all right, shark, we've got, we're going to make a really strong case for you.
Here's the case that they're going to make.
They want to change the term shark attack to the less incendiary shark interaction.
It's an interaction when you get your leg bit off by a shirt.
I myself prefer underseas contingency operation.
I think that would be the more technical term.
But they want it to be a shark interaction.
And it seems ridiculous and it seems so crazy.
No one's going to use this language.
And people are going to use this language.
I bet they are.
If not on this issue, then on many others.
If we are now calling Bruce Jenner she...
They can change the language to mean whatever they want.
And so, is it any surprise that only 6% of Republicans, according to a new Gallup poll, trust the TV news?
Only 16% of all U.S. citizens say they believe what they see on television.
No surprise at all.
Because the real information is coming from the top.
And they have the gall and audacity to accuse the rest of us of pushing misinformation when we question them.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I'll show you tomorrow.
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On today's episode, a U.S. district judge alters the immigration landscape.
The Biden administration calls on big tech to crack down on misinformation.
And the Tokyo Olympics already faces a litany of issues.
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