LA votes to mandate the vax at restaurants and movie theaters, a Texas judge deems transgender surgery child abuse, and Australia’s chief health officer bans conversation.
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As the Delta Sigma Phi Beta Kappa variant of the Wu flu reportedly rages around the country, Democrat states and counties are turning the tyranny up to 11.
Even some prominent Republicans are joining the calls to get you masked, vaxxed, and locked back in your home, including the governator, who does not think very highly of your freedom.
There is a virus here.
It kills people.
And the only way we prevent it is to get vaccinated, to wear masks, to do social distancing, washing your hands all the time, and not just to think about, well, my freedom is being kind of disturbed here.
No.
Screw your freedom.
Because with freedom comes obligations and responsibilities.
We cannot just say, I have the right to do X, Y, and Z. When you affect other people, Quite an about face.
We've gone from, don't be a girly man, to wear your mask and hide in your home.
My Schwarzenegger's not that good.
Believe it or not, Schwarzenegger is actually moderate in his views compared to the rest of the world, where some different countries' health officers are calling for an end to conversation in the name of saving lives.
Meanwhile, a federal judge tries to lock up Capitol rioters and throw away the key, even as Minnesota Democrats celebrate the The George Floyd arsonists.
Lots of people are going along with these new rules in the hopes of getting back to normal.
How long before they all realize this is the new normal?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Deborah Gessner, who says, we have now reached herd stupidity.
I'm glad that that has spread throughout.
Though, frankly, I actually don't think that the stupidity and the inanity and the neurotic aspect of this whole virus is among the people so much as it is among people.
The ruling class.
The ruling class are the ones pushing this.
I think people are pushing back against it, which is why you're seeing members of the ruling class come out and say, screw your freedom, or don't have conversations with your neighbors.
I think that's really the big divide that's going on now.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger was Sort of has a point.
He sort of could have a point.
Let's put it that way.
When he says that with freedom comes responsibility.
Of course, nobody denies that.
With rights come duties and obligations.
Yeah, of course.
Does that mean that because there is a cough that's been going around the world, we need to lock people in their homes, out of their businesses, out of their churches, take away their civil liberties, and shut down travel, shut down Christmas, shut down Thanksgiving, shut down conversation among your neighbors?
I don't think so.
That seems to be a step too far.
But that is the line he is articulating.
And don't forget, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a moderate Republican.
He's not even a far leftist.
And Arnold Schwarzenegger is articulating the excuse that the ruling class has relied on since the beginning of this lockdown.
Namely...
In the name of public health, we can do whatever we want.
And this is being taken to an even crazier extreme, not among the Austrians like Schwarzenegger, but among the Australians.
Australia's chief health officer, Dr.
Carrie Chant, has a message for anyone who has the audacity to leave their homes to, I don't know, go grocery shopping or something like that.
Namely, keep your mouth shut.
We all need to work together.
We need to limit our movements.
We need to consider whenever we leave our house that anyone with us, anyone we come into contact with, Could convey the virus.
So whilst it is a human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately, this is not the time to do that.
So even if you run into your next-door neighbour in the shopping centre, in the Coles, whilst you're at Coles and Woolworths or Aldi or any other grocery shop, Don't start up a conversation.
Now is the time for minimising your interactions with others.
Even if you've got a mask, do not think that affords total protection.
protection.
We want to be absolutely sure that as we go about our daily lives, we do not come into contact with anyone else that would pose a risk.
Do you get it yet?
Do you get what this is really about?
I suspect you do get what this is really about.
I suspect if you're listening to this program, you've known what this is about since the beginning.
But I think a lot of people have not.
From the beginning, many of us said, this is not about a virus.
This is not about the unique once in a millennium global health threat.
This is a political power grab to shut people up, isolate people, and to take away their way of life and their rights.
It's literally the symbol of the pandemic is a muzzle that you put over your mouth.
And if you in any way contradict the liberal establishment narrative, you'll be ostracized.
You'll be kicked out of the public square.
You will be deplatformed.
You'll be suspended from social media accounts.
You will not be permitted to espouse these sorts of views in public.
Now, what this woman is saying in Australia is, yes, yes, the muzzle is not just about keeping the variants and the virus.
It's actually about shutting you up, about keeping you quiet.
From the beginning of the lockdown, I think there were well-intentioned and naive people who believed that if we just go along with it, if we just compromise a little bit on our rights and our way of life and going to church and having our businesses, if we just give them, okay, we'll just wear the masks.
Okay, well maybe we'll just get the shot.
Okay, maybe we'll just do this, we'll do that.
That that would be a way to go back to normal.
And what I said from the very beginning and what a lot of us said from the very beginning is no, it's actually the opposite.
Wearing the masks in public is not going to convince people to go back to normal.
It's going to do the opposite.
It's going to convince people that this is a once-in-a-millennium, insane, terrifying, most dangerous event you've ever seen.
And so we can't go back to normal.
When you see your neighbors running around like banditos...
That does not tell you things are normal.
That tells you that things are quite extraordinary and we've got to suspend our normal way of life.
Every inch that we the people have given to the ruling technocratic elite from the beginning of this has only further harmed our situation, has only taken away more and more of our rights, has only taken away more and more of our way of life, has only encouraged them.
The 15 days to slow the spread that we granted very quickly turned into, well, just maybe a couple more months to slow the spread.
Well, maybe just another year to slow the spread.
Well, maybe now we need to find a cure.
Well, now maybe actually we need to stop the surge.
Well, now we need to, let me check my notes, abolish conversation.
15 days to abolish conversation, but then we'll go back to normal, right?
I don't think so.
And this is coming to the United States, by the way.
This isn't just staying down under in Australia, and it's not just some questionable Austrian immigrants who once were the governor of California.
This is coming to the United States.
The LA City Council just voted 13 to 0.
this was an absolute unanimous vote for vaccine mandates at restaurants, movie theaters, and concert venues.
They just did this in France.
And very thankfully, by a stroke of providence, I left France before the vaccine mandate went into effect.
So I was just in France last week.
I was there for my buddy's wedding.
Fortunately, the country was not totally locked down yet.
You can still come in from the United States without a ton of regulations.
But the day I flew out, you had to start showing proof of vaccination to get in anywhere.
I wanted to get a cup of coffee at the airport.
They demanded proof of vaccination to get into the little cafe at the airport.
I said, all right, get the coffee on the airplane or something.
That's fine by me.
I mean, That could never happen here, right?
It already is.
It already is happening here.
And it's going to happen in New York.
I mean, LA right now is passing measures that are more draconian even than what's going on in New York.
But it's going to happen in Washington, D.C. It's going to happen in Chicago, unless we push back against that sort of thing.
And there's not going to be a compromise.
It's not going to be, well, let's wear our masks.
No, no.
Either you say no, or you go along with it.
The councilman at the LA City Council, Paul Koretz, said, quote, Frankly, I'm tired of our politicization of science and public health.
While people outside this building are protesting that this is a violation of their civil liberties, Angelenos are dying unnecessarily.
People die.
A lot of people die every day.
You and I are going to die.
I can tell you with 100% certainty we are going to die.
No one here gets out alive, okay?
Everyone in history has died.
You might have life everlasting.
That's a whole other aspect.
We'll get to that too.
But you are not going to get off this rock alive, okay?
And what the left has done so spectacularly is they have taken this one virus that has caused deaths.
I'm not saying that the virus hasn't caused deaths, but they have made it seem as though that is the only cause of death.
And of course, the lockdowns have led to other deaths as well.
Deaths of despair, deaths of drug overdose, deaths of not getting your treatment for various diseases, cancer treatments, for instance, suicides.
But none of that counts.
None of that, all that matters is if you die from this one particular virus, and as a result, you've got to take away people's civil liberties.
Listen to how incoherent this statement is.
I'm tired of our politicization of science and public health, says the politician.
Public health is, by definition, political.
The word political and the word public are synonyms.
They mean the same thing.
Politics is how we all get along together.
It's what we all do together.
That's why some politicians use scientific data to manipulate our politics.
And he says stop politicizing.
What he's saying is shut up.
That's all that means.
Whenever they say don't make this political, all that means is shut up.
Let me affect my political agenda and you don't say boo about it.
And too many people are going along with it.
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There is a fight going on right now.
Between the people who want vax mandates at the restaurants and the movie theaters and in the schools and the mask mandates everywhere and the people overseas who want to abolish conversation and the handful of conservative politicians with a spine.
One of those conservative politicians that seems to have a spine, Ron DeSantis.
Ron DeSantis is standing up.
He is threatening to withhold pay from Broward County school administrators who are violating the state anti-mask mandate rule by instituting a mask mandate.
And what does that mean?
This is kind of complicated and there are so many layers to this.
Some schools in liberal places want to force kids to wear masks.
That's wrong.
That's stupid.
They shouldn't do that.
That's wrong for many, many reasons.
So, some misguided conservatives have said, well, it's not government's place to tell people that they can or cannot have mask mandates, right?
You know, the usual way that we've talked about policy for the last 10 or 15 years is between big government and free choice, right?
But But it's a little more complicated here because, sure, the big government of the school board wants to take away the free choice to wear a mask or not.
But then you've got the big government of the state coming in and taking away the free choice of the school district.
And then you've got the big government.
So I don't think it's so simple as big government versus small government.
I don't think it's so simple as tyranny versus slavery.
I think it's actually a question of prudence.
I think it's actually a question of the substance of it.
Should these kids be forced to wear the masks?
And so DeSantis goes in and he says...
Absolutely not.
We will not permit school districts to force kids to wear these stupid masks.
So now, the school boards are fighting back against DeSantis, especially in Broward County, a very corrupt school district, and they're saying, no, we're going to do it anyway.
So DeSantis is going in through the Florida Department of Education and is saying that if these school districts force the kids to wear the masks, he's going to take away their pay.
This is, frankly, Reagan-esque.
People have been making a comparison between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump recently because he's doing all the hand gestures, you know, and his skin seems to be getting slightly more orange.
He's probably got a can of, you know, yellow hairspray in the corner.
He's clearly running in the Trump lane.
But my pal Andrew Klavan pointed out, it's less Trump that DeSantis is going for And a little more Ronald Reagan.
And this line to the school administrators, it reminds you of Ronald Reagan when the air traffic controllers illegally went on strike.
I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning, they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.
Why have you taken such strong action as your first actions?
Why not some lesser action this morning?
What lesser action can there be?
The law is very explicit.
They are violating the law.
And, as I say, we call this to the attention of their leadership.
Whether this was conveyed to the membership before they voted to strike, I don't know.
But this is one of the reasons why there could be no further negotiation while this situation continues.
You can't sit and negotiate with a union that's in violation of the law.
And their oath.
And their oath.
Classic Reagan.
What lesser action can there be?
They're in violation of the law and this ought to be our attitude too.
There is no reconciliation.
There is no negotiation here.
The negotiation has failed.
The negotiation has lost us everything because we thought that we could negotiate in good faith here on how to return to our normal way of life.
And we can't.
They just lied to us.
They lied to us about everything.
They lied to us about the masks.
They lied to us about the 15 days.
They lied to us about the vax mandates.
They just lied to us about everything.
They're not playing in good faith.
They're idiots, frankly.
They're incompetent at best and they're liars and deceivers at worst and more likely.
So I just don't think we should play that game.
It's also not going to be a battle between individual autonomy and strong government.
The real battle is going to be between their strong government and our strong government.
One of the worst mistakes that the right has made in recent years is that we have given up political power.
What we have done, we've taken Andrew Breitbart's basically true statement that politics is downstream of culture, and we have allowed Republican politicians to use that as an excuse not to do their job.
Politics is downstream of culture does not mean that you completely give up the government and the political sphere because it's somehow unjust ever to rule.
It means you use the government, you use political power on the happy occasions that the people give it to you for just purposes.
That's what Ron DeSantis is doing here.
He's saying, oh, you're going to use your government power in Broward County to try to force this ridiculous thing on children?
Okay, I'm going to use my government power here in Tallahassee to stop you from doing that.
That's a good thing.
We need to encourage the largely cowardly Republican politicians to do just that.
The left is not very happy that people are pushing back against forcing the kids to wear the masks.
There was a liberal professor.
You know, I've got to give thanks to one of my favorite Twitter accounts.
It's called Libs of TikTok.
I do not participate in TikTok.
I feel that Xi Jinping has enough of my data already, so I don't need to give him any more of it.
Also, as far as I can tell, TikTok is just like 16-year-olds jiggling around, and I don't want to unwittingly commit a felony.
So I don't look at that app.
But there are great clips that go on TikTok, and so I'll see them on Twitter from Libs of TikTok.
So there's this gal, Rachel Kessler.
Rachel Kessler is a liberal professor at Kenyon College.
She also styles herself a priestess of some sort, some sort of kooky cult or something.
So she calls herself Reverend.
The Reverend Professor Rachel Kessler has come out now screaming, crying, wailing, rending her garments and gnashing her teeth because at her children's school district they're not going to force all the little kids to muzzle themselves.
I need to go home.
Instead, I'm sitting at my desk crying because we just got word from our superintendent that masks will not be required in our school district this year because the school has to respect the choice of parents that don't want to have their kids in a mask.
And that's just the most bullshit reasoning and I'm so over it because there is no such thing as a personal choice in a pandemic because I have no choice now to send my child to school in a way that will be safe for them because my child's mask will do a great job of protecting the other kids around her but I have no choice not to have my kid coughed on by her classmates.
I am so tired of this.
I'll do what works for me.
You do what works for you.
Take on a public health crisis.
And we are never going to get out of this if we cannot start collectively thinking about how our actions impact the people around us.
She said one thing there that's probably true.
Did you catch what it was?
We are never going to get out of this.
That was the only thing she said that might very well be true.
Now her argument is we're never going to get out of this if we don't give in to all the new measures and give up all of our rights and upend the standards of society.
Of course the opposite is true.
We're never going to get out of this if we do constantly wear the mask and allow them to jab us with whatever they want and give up all of our rights and give up our churches and give up our business.
That's the way we're never going to get out of it because when people take power, they usually don't want to give it back.
They don't give it back very easily.
She has another interesting line there.
She says, there is no such thing as individual choice during a pandemic.
Right.
Right.
That's the premise.
That's the whole premise.
And so the pandemic can never end.
And so when the pandemic is ending, you've got to change the rules, which they have done now like five times.
So the goal has to go from flatten the curve to slow the spread, to find a cure, to spread the cure to everybody, to stop the surge.
They're already talking about the Lambda variant, the Sigma variant.
There's going to be a million more variants.
And it will never end because they don't want you to have individual choice because they basically agree with Arnold.
Screw your freedom!
I really have to work on my Schwarzenegger.
Everyone has a good Schwarzenegger but me.
What they really believe is what Dr.
Fauci said yesterday when he was salivating.
Oh, Fauci was so happy.
He said, I know all you people.
You want your individual liberty, but we cannot have that now.
And he was so thrilled that he could take more power from you for himself.
Dr.
Fauci has never appeared on a ballot anywhere.
No one has ever cast a vote for Dr.
Fauci.
He has been in his position of power.
For, I think, what, five presidential administrations now?
Let's see, it was Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Obama, Trump, Biden, seven presidential administrations.
This guy has been in political power.
So no, they don't want you to have any of that.
What is the pandemic?
What is the pandemic?
From the very beginning, the death rate was much, much lower than people warned us that it was going to be.
Among children, which is what we were talking about right here, way, way, way, way, way lower.
Beyond that, we know that the media and the scientific establishment and the politicians have been lying to us from the beginning.
And when you compare it to other, not just other pandemics, but even just public health problems, you can see in its context, not quite as big a risk as people have made it out to be.
But as long as it remains the pandemic, then your individual freedom, your way of life, more importantly, goes by the wayside.
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It is a wonderful book to order immediately after you order my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
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The schools are the epicenter of the fight right now because the schools are the intersection of the family, They're the intersection of the culture.
They're usually run by the government.
They are a way to shape the next generation.
If you want to look at what your country is going to look like in 20 years, look at a classroom.
A classroom is a crystal ball.
And so now there are battles going on, not just over whether the kids have to muzzle themselves in class, What the kids are going to be taught.
You've seen these battles on critical race theory, people showing up to their school boards to get the crazy gender theory and the crazy race theory out of the classrooms.
You've seen teachers during remote learning say, hey, make sure that the parents aren't paying attention to what their kids are learning on the computers.
Make sure, you've got to be very careful, because if the parents knew what their kids were learning, they'd get the teachers fired as well they should.
So there was a lesson plan that just popped up from Virginia.
This is a third grade lesson plan from the Virginia State Education website, which glorifies communism.
Virginia Department of Education has third graders learning that police hate black men.
They have them watch a video that seems to glorify communism.
The lesson, first of all, the lesson plan is just written with typos, which is a third At the most basic level, shows you the state of American education.
But it's provided for use by any teacher in the state.
The lesson plan, which is very radical on gender theory, very radical on racial theory, and explicitly Marxist and anti-American.
The lesson plan was developed by Chesapeake public school teachers.
Their names are Candace Anthony Kazanov, Jamie Markietz, They have children especially focusing on this book.
A is for activist.
A radical leftist book has no place in the classroom.
So what should happen here?
What should happen?
I think there are three schools of thought.
There's the leftist school of thought, which is yes, that's right, that's what education's about.
It's not about teaching kids facts.
It's not about teaching them how to think.
No, it's about turning them into activists to fight the system, even though we're the system, by the way.
It's about turning them into radicals who are going to end oppression.
So that's the leftist view, right?
This is all great.
This is basically all that they should be learning in schools.
Then there is the kind of squish view.
This is the view of the conservatives for the past 10-15 years, which is, well, you know, that's not good.
So, okay, they can read their radical gender racial theory in the classroom.
I don't want academic freedom.
I don't want to tell them they can't.
But maybe could they also possibly read a history book or something?
Maybe, please.
So that's the squish academic freedom view.
Then there is the conservative view.
This is trash.
This is harming children's education.
This is harming the children's understanding of the world.
It should be banned from the classroom, and the teachers behind it should be fired.
Simple enough.
A teacher doesn't have a right to go teach Nazism in the classroom.
A teacher shouldn't have the right to teach Communism in the classroom.
I'm not saying teach about Nazism or Communism.
Of course, they should teach about these things.
But they shouldn't be able to teach through this lens of ideology.
They shouldn't be able to teach you, yes, Nazism is good, Hitler's awesome, you should all Goose March and Zieg Heil.
Likewise, they should not teach you Communism is good, the tenets of Communism are wonderful, and you should all become Communist activists.
Fire them.
Academic freedom, to quote William F. Buckley Jr., as mainstream a conservative as ever there was, founded the post-war conservative movement.
He said academic freedom is a hoax.
It's a farce.
It's never used.
To justify teaching things that are more conservative or right-wing, it's only ever used as an excuse to teach your little boy that he's a little girl or to teach white kids that they're evil or to teach every child that America's a rotten, terrible place and to teach them all that communism's terrific.
Fire them.
Fire them.
Ban it from the classroom.
Some people get it.
Again, in Florida, they're actually doing a pretty good job at this.
Other Republican politicians need to follow suit.
Speaking of child abuse...
Just a light topic for your morning.
Speaking of child abuse, there was an image, an award-winning image that was going around the internet yesterday.
That award-winning image was from the Netherlands.
It's of a little kid, I guess a little girl, I can't tell.
Everyone's gender-bending these days, so who knows.
But a little child at a swing set with a bunch of Creepy men wearing leather straps and little leather booty shorts behind them, obviously preparing for some sort of perverted sexual thing.
And they're all, you know, some of them, they're not really engaging in any overtly sexual act, but they're all sort of hanging around, preparing to go on some sort of perverted adventure.
This just won a prize.
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It was won by Jan van Breda.
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Three of them won.
This is the description.
This photo in its composition, Child in the Foreground, Men Preparing for Canal Pride in the Background, Everyone busy with their own activities and fascinations sublimely depicts what will hopefully remain self-evident, that we, unhampered by prejudices and almost unsuspectingly, all may and can exist side by side.
That's what the jury said about this photo.
You know, if the consequence of getting rid of prejudices is having kids play around among a bunch of sick leather daddies at a parade, maybe we could use a little more prejudice.
Maybe people haven't stood up enough for prejudice.
Actually, you know who did stand up for prejudice is Edmund Burke.
Not prejudice in the sense of, you know, I'm going to hate you because of your skin color.
Prejudice in the sense of prejudgment.
Prejudice in the sense of, we actually can know things.
When we have a natural visceral reaction to seeing a bunch of these sickos oiling each other up around a little kid, that visceral reaction, though it may not be totally conscious, and we might not have a 10-paragraph reason to argument as to why this situation is bad, that reaction is right.
That actually is bad.
We shouldn't permit that.
These things should not exist side by side.
The BDSM people whipping each other should not exist side by side with the little children.
But it raises a question also about the limits of autonomy, which is kind of what we're all talking about today.
What are the limits of freedom and autonomy?
We all know.
You look at that picture.
If you're listening right now, you can Google the picture later.
Or maybe you shouldn't because it's just gross.
But when you look at that picture, we all know that there's something wrong with that.
But what's wrong with that?
Is it just that there's a kid there?
Why is it wrong that there's a kid there?
If there's nothing wrong with what the guys are doing in their kind of leather daddy costumes, if there's nothing wrong with that intrinsically, then why is it wrong that there's a kid there?
Why should kids be protected from that?
If there is something wrong with what the guys are doing, With the kind of leather stuff in public and, you know, getting a little in your face.
Then why are we encouraging it?
Why?
If there's something, like, so disordered about this that we should protect children from it, then why are we encouraging it for everyone else?
And why are we pretending, by the way, that you can encourage all these sorts of things everywhere, ubiquitous, in the middle of Main Street for adults, but yet somehow protect kids from it?
Obviously, you cannot.
We are not totally isolated beings.
We do live in a society.
We do have neighbors.
We do want to talk to people when we go outside, even though the Australian health minister doesn't want us to.
Why are we encouraging the liberty to do things that we all agree are very bad?
That, I think, that's actually a problem for the right to figure out.
We're trying to work on that right now.
There's a big debate on the right over that, and I think the kind of desiccated libertinism of the last 10 or 15 years, it's just complete, it's deader than disco, man.
Put that away with your bell-bottoms.
It is over.
Now, there is some good news, by the way, coming from the Departments of Health on this issue of radical gender theory and child sex abuse.
The Texas Department of Health Was just asked by Governor Greg Abbott a simple question.
Abbott, deferring to the agency, said, Is pumping little kids full of cross-sex hormones and mutilating their bodies because their psycho mothers think that the little boys are little girls?
I think Governor Abbott used more clinical language than I did, but that's obviously the situation that we're talking about.
Is performing gender surgery on kids proper medical treatment, or is it child abuse?
This is a difficult question, apparently, for some Republicans.
Asa Hutchinson, the allegedly Republican governor of Arkansas, says that it's a wonderful medical treatment.
He refused to sign a bill banning genital mutilation gender surgery on little kids.
Remember, he said, no, this is an important medical treatment.
So the Texas Department of Health came out and said, yes, it is child abuse.
Genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse subject to all rules and procedures pertaining to child abuse.
Such mutilation may cause a genuine threat of substantial harm from physical injury to the child.
Good stuff.
Good stuff.
Now this raises another tricky question.
I'm glad we should take this win.
I mean, we should pursue this state by state by state to ban the genital gender reassignment mutilation surgery for children.
Obviously.
Obviously.
But there is an even further question here, which is, if this is not medical treatment, if this really is mutilation, when you do it on children, then why are we doing it on adults?
It's not as though reality is one way if you're under 18, and then reality is completely different if you're over 18.
It's not as though a surgery is completely different For people who are 17 and a half, but not for 18 and a half.
But we don't want to come to that term, in part because we so value individual autonomy.
We say, well, if you're a man and you want to be a woman, then you have the right to do that.
If you're a man and you want to mutilate your body to look more like a woman and harm yourself in that way, you totally have the right to do that.
But you don't.
You don't.
Why do you have the right to do that?
Why is it cruelty and abuse when you do it on a child, but not when you do it on an adult?
Just because of the issue of making a decision?
No, I think there's more to good and bad and right and wrong than just who makes the decision.
Consent is very important, don't get me wrong, but I think there's more to it.
I think the substance is there as well.
Speaking of transitions, I can't miss this today.
Valparaiso U University has changed its mascot from crusaders to beacons.
They used to be the crusaders, now they're the beacons.
Why?
Because the crusaders are very bad, right?
The crusaders, Christian soldiers who protected Christians in the Holy Land from Muslim invaders, the crusaders are bad because the crusaders represent Western civilization and so you've got to get rid of them.
They've changed it to beacon because they say that their students should be a beacon of hope.
A beacon of hope.
Okay.
Crusaders were a beacon of hope in the late 11th century to the Christians who were being persecuted by Muslims in the Holy Land.
But we now take this as just common sense.
We take this for granted that anything that the West ever did is bad and anything that other civilizations ever did is good.
We now take it for granted that Muslims should control the Holy Land.
Why?
Christians and Jews were in the Holy Land a lot longer, way before the Muslims.
Why do the Muslims?
Because the West is bad and everyone else is good.
That is the sometimes not so tacit premise that our education begins with.
And if you raise generation upon generation to hate its own civilization, you're not going to keep that civilization and you're not going to keep those rights.
You're not going to keep that way of life for very long, which we're seeing happen to us right now.
Speaking of political violence...
An Obama-appointed federal judge has just come out against the Biden DOJ, specifically with regard to the January 6th political insurrection coup d'etat, the worst event in American history.
You know that thing.
Worse than Pearl Harbor.
Worse than 1812.
Okay.
So, this is good news, right?
An Obama-era judge is now coming out against the Biden DOJ. The problem is, This judge, she's coming out against the DOJ because she thinks the DOJ is going too light on the Capitol rioter people.
She thinks that they need harsher punishments.
Already you see these guys whose worst crime is dancing around the Capitol in a horn helmet who, you know, come in and maybe they broke a window, maybe not.
The one smiley guy took Nancy Pelosi's lecture and you remember that.
Not defending it, just saying...
There are worse crimes in the world.
And these guys are getting the book thrown at them already.
And she is saying that they need even harsher punishments for terrorizing members of Congress.
Meanwhile, as we've reported on this show...
Actual terrorists, BLM leftist terrorists, who burned down private businesses.
They actually went after civilians.
They killed people.
They killed infinitely more people than the Capitol 6th rioters did, because the Capitol January 6th rioters didn't kill anyone.
And the BLM people killed a lot of people.
The BLM people who also went after federal courthouses, burned down federal courthouses, burned down police stations, they're basically getting off the hook.
In Manhattan and in the Bronx, they're being released without any charges in many cases.
And when they are being charged, they're being charged with much less serious offenses.
This is the new normal.
This is the new regime.
I think a lot of conservatives believed that if we went really, really hard after January 6th, if we kind of bought into the leftist line that January 6th was the worst event in the history of the world, why then, maybe they'll recognize that BLM was bad too, and we'll reconcile, and it just didn't happen.
It didn't happen.
During the BLM riots, you had members of elected Democrats in Congress calling for more violence.
Actually, even before that, you had that sort of thing.
You had the now Vice President of the United States bailing out the rioters from jail.
You had staff members for now the President of the United States bailing the rioters out from jail.
And they basically want the Capitol conservative people to go to Gitmo, okay?
And it's not even close.
What happened at the Capitol on January 6th is not even in the same galaxy as what happened during the BLM riots, city after city after city for six to eight months.
It's not even close.
It's nothing compared to what BLM did.
And BLM mostly gets off the hook.
That's the real political situation.
There's not going to be a negotiation.
There's not going to be a come together and you give a little and I give a little.
This is a bare knuckle political fight over who can wield political power more effectively.
That doesn't mean that it's absent logic and justice.
Obviously we want to wield political power with justice, with logic.
But you've got to wield that power.
Devin Hogan, chairman of the Minneapolis Democratic Farmer Labor Party, which is an affiliate of the Democratic Party in Minnesota, has just said, quote, Like it or not, setting the third precinct on fire was a genuine revolutionary moment, an act of pure righteousness to open new worlds of understanding.
The people declared themselves ungovernable and unilaterally took their power back.
The largest international human rights movement in modern history had begun.
The youth of Minneapolis carried all of this.
The cops started it.
Doesn't get clearer than that, does it?
The Democrat activist, a Democrat official, it's a part of an affiliate, but a Democrat nonetheless in Minnesota, defending the burning down of police stations and saying, yeah, the cops started it.
I think they call that victim blaming.
That's what we're talking about.
And there's something we can learn from him when he says, the people declared themselves ungovernable and unilaterally took their power back.
The way the left did that, the substance of what they were doing, was wrong.
It was unjust.
It was very bad.
But we can do that too, in a just way.
We can declare ourselves ungovernable.
Under these unjust laws, we can, using logic and persuasion and not being terrorists like the left was, but we can assert our political right.
You're seeing some people do it, right?
You're seeing DeSantis do it in Florida.
You're seeing some of the governors do it.
We can do that, but it does require some courage.
It does, and that unfortunately is in short supply in a lot of places.
But speaking of terrorists, I can't leave today.
Before I note some actual important news that's being swept under the rug.
We just lost the war in Afghanistan.
We've been fighting this war in Afghanistan for 20 years now, and we just lost.
We've basically officially lost the war.
Now, the soldiers didn't lose the war.
Soldiers did a great job.
The soldiers achieved all of their military objectives.
But the political leadership did lose that war.
They chose to lose that war.
And they chose to lose that war Because they didn't even know what they wanted to win.
What was winning?
What is winning the war in Afghanistan?
I couldn't even tell you.
I couldn't even tell you.
But here's what I do know.
George W. Bush came out after 9-11 and he said, those who are harboring terrorists will be treated as the terrorists themselves.
We will make no distinction.
And what he was talking about was the Taliban harboring Al-Qaeda terrorists and we're going to go in and we're going to make no distinction and you're not going to have a moment's peace until we kill all of you.
And now the Taliban is coming back.
So they won.
And we lost.
And what does Jen Psaki, the White House Press Secretary, have to say about this?
Well, you know, they've just got to figure out what they want to do in the international community.
The Taliban is clearly on the march.
Your objective is to have a negotiated political settlement.
What gives you confidence that the Taliban is interested in that?
Well, the Taliban has to make an assessment.
One, we have also said that there's no question that the Afghan National Defense Security Forces would be strengthened, as would the Afghan political leadership If they were to have more success in fighting back.
There's no question about that.
We're not hiding from that in any way, shape, or form.
The Taliban also has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.
And I know that Ambassador Khalilzad made comments when he was at the political negotiations yesterday, making clear that the international community is going to watch closely how the Taliban behaves.
They have a range of tools in their arsenal as well to take steps should they choose.
Well, the Taliban just has to figure out what it wants its role to be in the international community.
These are the people that are governing us.
Spoiler alert, the Taliban doesn't want a role in the international community.
It took 20 years for these ruling elites to figure that out.
Sometimes some better, sometimes some worse.
These are the people governing us.
I don't think they have any credibility.
I don't think we should follow their orders.
I think we should, using every just and right and legitimate political tool at our disposal, fight back against them tooth and nail before they terminate our way of life.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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The showdown between Texas Republicans and Democrats heats up, and the California recall election tightens.
