Ep. 822 - Forget The Taliban—Anti-Maskers Are The Real Terrorists!
As the Taliban takes over Afghanistan, the Department of Homeland Security insists that American conservatives are the real terrorists.
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There are good predictions and there are bad predictions.
And there are bad predictions and there are terrible predictions.
And then there are the Biden administration's predictions about Afghanistan, which were given to us by Biden's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, just days ago.
I don't think that the fact that our forces are withdrawing, one, we're not withdrawing.
We're staying.
The embassy is staying.
Our programs are staying.
We're working to make sure that other partners stay.
We're building all of that up.
And whatever happens in Afghanistan, if there is a significant deterioration...
I don't think it's going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.
So I wouldn't necessarily equate the departure of our forces in July, August or by early September with some kind of immediate deterioration in the in the situation.
In case you missed it this weekend, between Friday and Monday, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.
It is actually impressive how perfectly wrong the prediction of the Biden administration was.
This after Joe Biden said it was not inevitable that the Taliban would come back also just days ago.
Completely wrong.
Republicans are blaming Biden.
Democrats are blaming Trump.
Biden's blaming Trump.
Trump is blaming Biden and once blamed Obama.
Obama blamed Bush.
The problem, though, goes a lot deeper than Democrats versus Republicans.
Afghanistan is not just a godforsaken desert in the graveyard of empires.
Afghanistan is the symbol of America's identity crisis.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment from Friday is from Urian Van Dleen, who says, Wouldn't surprise me when the Taliban gets a blue checkmark right away after signing up for Twitter.
Wouldn't surprise me at all.
Actually, the fact that the Taliban is on Twitter and the former president of the United States is not...
Tells you a whole lot about this identity crisis that we're having as Americans.
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What happened to Afghanistan?
You've very likely been following the news, so I'll just give you a very brief recap because I'm sure you're hearing lots of conflicting stuff.
For instance, from the Biden administration, you're hearing denials and silence.
And from reality and from the reporters who were on the ground and from everybody else, you were seeing this disaster unfold.
So what happened is, Afghanistan's sort of fake president who was being propped up by the U.S., Ashraf Ghani, He gave up power.
He gave it up.
It wasn't working.
He ran away to Tajikistan.
This means that the Afghan government that the United States has been building for 20 years is deader than disco.
It folded like a house of cards.
Then you've got the interim government now is being run by the Taliban.
Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The U.S. embassy in Kabul...
This was now, two days ago, suspended all operations, told Americans to shelter in place.
It was hearing of gunfire at the Kabul airport, so absolute chaos, total surrender.
You saw helicopters actually landing at the embassy to lift people away, just like they did with the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War.
You are seeing the Taliban enter Kabul from all sides.
Kabul, capital of Afghanistan.
Taliban totally taking over.
Joe Biden has now approved more troops to go over there to try to secure the exits.
This is not more troops to stop the Taliban.
That's over.
That's not going to happen anymore.
It's just troops to go in to make sure that Americans and at least some of our Afghan allies don't get killed on the way out.
Initially, the U.S. was going to pull out of Afghanistan on September 11th, on the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
Seems a little dark.
I don't know why.
I mean, just from an optics PR standpoint doesn't make a lot of sense.
But that timetable has been moved up.
It wasn't moved up by the State Department.
It wasn't moved up by the Pentagon.
It wasn't moved up by the White House.
It was moved up by the Taliban, because the Taliban knew that the American forces were leaving, and so they weren't going to waste any time.
There was an expression from the very beginning of the Afghanistan regime, I don't even know what to call it.
Was it a war?
Was it an occupation?
Was it a liberation?
I don't know what it was.
And unfortunately, neither did America, which is why we lost.
But from the very beginning of whatever we've been doing in Afghanistan, the expression has been that the Americans have the watches, but the Taliban's got the time.
That the Americans are really, obviously, very technically proficient.
They can game all these things out.
But the fact is, the Taliban are just going to be there.
And then eventually the Americans are going to leave, and the Taliban's going to come right back in.
20 years.
20 years in that godforsaken desert.
What did we achieve?
As Americans are watching the footage of the Chinook landing and taking off and the embassy falling and the whole government, we spent zillions of dollars building, collapsing overnight.
They were saying, what did we achieve?
It's not nothing.
We killed bin Laden.
Took about a decade to do it, but we killed bin Laden, also not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, but surely our presence in Afghanistan helped to do that.
So we killed bin Laden, and...
Yeah, okay, I guess that's about it.
I guess we arrested some terrorists, although we didn't even kill a lot of those terrorists, so now the terrorists are just being released.
We arrested a lot of these Taliban guys, and then they were released as well, so...
That's it.
20 years in the place to get a guy that we killed in Pakistan.
Where, oh where, did everything go wrong?
I know that Republicans are very eager to blame Biden for all of this.
And Trump is doing that too.
He's saying Biden's messing everything up.
You famously remember Barack Obama was quoted as saying, never underestimate the amount to which Joe Biden can F everything up.
This was during the 2020 campaign.
And that's true.
But I don't really blame Biden.
Sure, as a tactical matter, could he have handled it better?
I guess so.
But I don't really blame Trump or Obama.
I do blame Bush a little bit more, but I sort of blame the broader ethos in America, the national identity crisis.
And I've pinpointed, I think, the exact moment...
When everything went wrong.
And that was during George W. Bush's second inaugural address.
So this is in early 2005 when George W. Bush redefined not just the mission in Afghanistan, which was already kind of ill-defined, but redefined the relationship of national security to broader ideals and redefined the very purpose of America herself.
For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny, prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power and cross the most offended borders and raise a mortal threat.
Okay, so this was the diagnosis that Bush made.
He said, as long as there is tyranny anywhere...
Anywhere.
That will pose an existential threat.
The tyrants and the people inspired by the tyrants will fly overseas and attack the American homeland.
Which is a ridiculous claim.
That's just not true.
I guess it was true in Afghanistan, which created a safe haven for terrorists.
I mean, I understand why Bush made this observation.
But then he generalized it to what all tyrannies, if any government is not a Madisonian-style democracy, Bush seems to imply, then they're going to come and attack the American homeland.
That's just not true.
It's not true.
Think of all the tyrannies in the world.
China, Russia.
Russia, even at this time, was an autocratic tyranny.
And they hadn't really directly threatened the United States in decades.
All those tinpot dictatorships in Latin America, they're not directly really threatening the United States.
But that was the diagnosis.
We have to stop tyranny anywhere.
And so what's Bush going to do about it?
He is going to eliminate tyranny from the world.
The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.
The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.
We have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value.
Because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth.
Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave.
Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation.
It is the honorable achievement of our fathers Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security and the calling of our time.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
The mission of the United States and the world, imperative for her national security, for her very survival, the existential mission of the United States, is to eliminate evil from the world.
A messianic mission, unfortunately difficult to live up to that because it's utopian.
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George W. Bush's second inaugural address in early 2005 is called the Freedom Speech.
He used the words freedom or free or liberty to 49 times in the speech.
It was a redefinition of America's role in the world.
America was not going to be merely a nation that kept to herself.
America was not even going to be an empire that was taking territory to secure merely her own interests or to just grab other resources or anything like that.
America was going to be A purely benevolent empire.
The only benefit America was going to get was securing national security.
But what America was going to give to the rest of the world was to eliminate tyranny, topple every dictatorship, autocracy, oligarchy, anything that did not seem to be perfect self-government in the view of the American experience.
That is a big claim that you're going to do that.
A fundamental redefinition of the country.
So what does Afghanistan mean?
Because Afghanistan is the test of this.
Afghanistan is the consequence of this idea and the test of this idea.
I think it is ridiculous that Joe Biden is blaming Donald Trump.
That is really pathetic.
So much for the adults in the room, so much for the buck stops here.
Joe Biden immediately, when under his watch, the thing falls apart, he says, it was Trump's fault!
Blame Trump!
It wasn't me!
Please!
It was the orange man!
He's responsible for everything.
Likewise, I don't think it's really Biden's fault.
I don't think it's Obama's fault.
In a way, I think it's Bush's fault.
But more broadly, it's the fault of the American people to not really know what it is That we are.
And most especially, it's the fault of the elite that are running the institutions in the State Department and all the other places.
It's a lot deeper, though, than it is Republicans versus Democrats.
There are two main opinions here that come down on Afghanistan.
The one is the American nationalist position, which is pull out, stop the forever wars.
What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan 20 years later?
Bring the troops home.
Enough is enough.
The other is the empire position, the imperial position.
Well, of course we've got to stay in Afghanistan.
We've got to stay there.
We've got to prevent another 9-11 at the very least.
We've got to make sure that the girls can go to school.
We've just got to stay there because the Taliban are bad.
We're good.
And so it's going to be better for everyone if we're in Afghanistan.
in.
So it's a conflict between nationalists and imperialists.
And I gotta tell you, I'm sympathetic to both points of view.
I'm sympathetic to the point of view of, hey, let's do a little nation building at home.
Hey, America's collapsing in the homeland, so let's focus a little more on America.
Let's focus more on Detroit and less on Kandahar.
But I'm also sympathetic to the imperial point of view.
I don't think that the Taliban has any right to govern Afghanistan.
I don't think it's a violation of the rights of these Islamists that we're not letting them run their country, or that we weren't.
And I have no problem conquering other lands if I think it's in our interest and if we think it's for the best.
But then, the really hard question that I don't see anyone really talking about here is, if we're going to have an empire, What is that empire going to look like?
The way that I think you know that even the elites recognize that America doesn't want this liberal empire is they always hide the ball.
Whenever you say, okay, how much longer are we going to be in Afghanistan?
They'll always say, well, just a little longer.
We shouldn't pull out like this.
We've just got to stay there until the Afghan government is sufficiently strong, which, by the way, is never going to happen.
It folded in like six hours.
After 20 years of building it up, it folds in less than a day.
So that was never going to happen.
So the honest answer from the liberal imperialists is...
We're just going to stay there forever.
We're going to have a small presence there forever, and that's it.
Now Afghanistan's going to be a territory that is perpetually occupied by the United States.
Okay, if that's your position, then be honest about it.
But they won't be honest about it because they know that Americans don't want a liberal empire.
Because what is that empire?
What freedom are we spreading?
When George Bush makes the freedom speech, the liberty speech, the question is, what kind of liberty are we talking about?
Are we talking about...
A sort of Christian empire like we saw from Spain or Portugal or Britain?
Are we talking about spreading the gospel to new lands and spreading the vision that made the Western civilization that we all love?
No, I don't think we are.
The West now is largely secular.
We don't speak in those kinds of terms anymore.
The empire that we would be spreading is a liberal empire.
And so, what are we doing in Afghanistan?
Are we there to make sure that the Afghan people have the liberty to have Drag Queen Story Hour in every single library in Kabul?
Is that it?
Because if that's the case, then I don't want any part of that.
We need the liberty to make sure that every woman in Kabul can dye her hair pink and get a gender studies degree.
No, I don't think that's a good idea.
Now, sure, there's a lot of gray area between the Taliban locking everyone up under this very restrictive code and this radical conclusion of liberalism.
But what is it?
What are we doing?
What are we spreading?
Is it freedom as the founding fathers would have understood it?
Or is it freedom as the hippies of today would understand it?
We don't have the answer to that.
By the way, you're going to hear this one objection that I keep hearing from the liberal imperialists, the ones who want to stay in Afghanistan forever but don't want to admit it.
They keep saying, well, hold on, we're pulling troops out of Afghanistan.
What, do you think we should pull troops out of Korea?
What, do you think we should pull troops out of Germany?
We have troops all over the world.
Sure, we have troops all over the world.
But if we pull the troops out of Germany, the country isn't going to collapse.
If we pull the troops out of Korea, the country isn't going to collapse for that matter.
The occupation of Afghanistan was categorically different than us having bases in various parts of the world.
But we don't even know what it was.
What was the war?
What was the victory?
The reason we lost in Afghanistan is not because soldiers didn't make great sacrifices.
It's because we had no idea what victory was.
Initially, it was to go in and kill the guys who flew planes into the building and who trained them.
And then what?
We're not going to nation-build.
Then we did nation-build, but we didn't want to admit we were nation-building.
Then we were going to form a national security force in Afghanistan.
Well, how do you have a national security force if there's no nation?
But then it became about sending girls to school, which is fine.
I mean, I'm all for that, I guess.
But we're really going to create an empire so that we can send girls to school in some godforsaken region of Afghanistan?
What are we doing?
We couldn't win that war because we didn't know what we wanted.
Because as a country we don't know what we want because we don't know what we want to be.
And I think although the elites may still agree with the George W. Bush kind of liberal imperialist Wilsonian progressive vision of just spread this pie-in-the-sky vision of freedom all over the world, I don't think the American people want that.
This is why, increasingly, Republicans and Democrats have both had to campaign against that vision.
The American people don't like that idea very much.
By the way, the other scaremongering you're hearing right now about the pull out of Afghanistan is that all these terrorists are being set free.
The Taliban's coming in, and they're setting free some of these Al-Qaeda prisoners that were being held there, and now they're going to return to the battlefield.
That's bad.
That's too bad.
The Taliban overran Bagram Air Base, freed those prisoners.
Am I the only one who's wondering why those super-duper dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists were still alive?
We've been in the country occupying it for 20 years.
Why didn't we kill them all?
Oh, because it wasn't a war.
It wasn't a war and it wasn't an occupation.
It was a military involvement.
That was the euphemism.
Some of these Taliban guys were held by the United States and we just let them go.
Or they were held by our allies, or sort of allies, and then we just let them go.
If we were serious about fighting and winning a war, they would all be dead.
But they're not dead because we weren't really fighting a war.
So now, what we're ending, I guess, is not really a war.
It's just...
No one is more confused than the American political leadership who is supposed to be running the war.
By the way, this is going to have terrible effects for national security down the road.
You can't just let a ton of terrorists who have sworn that they're going to try to destroy the United States, you can't just let them all out and then give them a safe haven and then just assume nothing bad is going to happen.
It will have national security implications.
But the problem is, our genius ruling elite that got all the predictions wrong about, well, really about everything, but especially about Afghanistan, and that now are trying to manage this catastrophe, they're not so worried about the terrorists in Al-Qaeda as they are about the terrorists in MAGA hats.
They are, I'm not, this is not an exaggeration, are federal agencies that were, some of which were founded after 9-11 to fight against these Islamist bad guys in the Middle East, are now saying that the real threat is not from some guy in a turban are now saying that the real threat is not from some guy in a turban and The real threat is from a guy in a Trump shirt with a MAGA hat and an American flag.
The real terror threat is you.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
I don't know why people are so worried about terrorism coming from the Taliban or coming from Al Qaeda or coming from all of those terrorists who say that they want to destroy our country.
NBC News reporting on new missives from the Department of Homeland Security.
Remind us that the terror threat is not those guys in Al-Qaeda.
The real terror threat is you.
A new terror alert has been issued by Homeland Security tonight.
Pete Williams is here.
Pete, what do we know about this?
Well, DHS says this new terrorism advisory is not based on any actual threats or plots, but it says there's a rise in anti-government rhetoric.
Some of it is opposition to COVID public health rules like mask and vaccine measures.
Some calls for violent action are based on claims of election fraud or a belief that Donald Trump can be reinstated.
And DHS says the coming 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks and religious holidays later this year could be catalysts for violence.
The last terror advisory was issued in May.
It expired today.
This new one says domestic extremism remains a threat priority, Lester.
That's the priority.
If you think that maybe there were some shenanigans in the 2020 election, you know the 2020 election where they got rid of all the voter integrity measures beforehand?
If not all of them, a great many of them.
You know the 2020 election where the election officials in Pennsylvania overtly violated the state constitution by permitting widespread mail-in ballots?
You know the election in 2020 in Georgia where just one batch finally was subject to an audit and it had a widespread double counting of ballots?
We actually saw it.
We can actually look at the ballots.
You know that one?
You know that election in 2020 where there were just ballot drop boxes and motor voter permissions and ballot harvesting and where the voting just magically stopped at various points in the middle of the night and then it sort of started again days later and it took days and days and weeks and weeks to figure out who won.
You remember that?
If you, you terrorist, if you raise any questions about that, you are a far greater threat than Osama bin Laden.
If you raise questions, oh, what was the other one?
If you're anti-mask, if you think that maybe a handful of unelected eggheads should not be able to completely upend our way of life and take away our civil liberties and upend the American tradition, yeah, you're probably a terrorist.
And that's a far greater threat than anyone else.
Did you notice what they said at the top of that warning?
And NBC is the sort of propaganda mouthpiece of the liberal regime, reading the threats from DHS.
They said that there are no actual threats or plots.
So the current guidelines that classify half of America as terrorists, classify any conservatives as terrorists, that is not based on anything in reality.
It's just based on, I don't know, what some guys at DHS sort of think about, you know, hypothetically.
We're going to spread liberty abroad.
Oh, yes.
As long as there's a tyranny anywhere in the world, we are going to go fight it because our national security depends on it.
Also, if you question anything about the regime, you're a terrorist.
We've got to go to Afghanistan because we're going to spread all that wonderful liberty.
I sort of feel like liberty has taken a hit in America.
Have you felt that way?
You know, because you haven't been able to go to work in a long time.
Hopefully you were in one of the fields that didn't get totally shut down during the lockdowns, but it was capricious.
It changed every day.
You might not have been able to go to church for large portions of last year.
You have to muzzle yourself when you go out in public.
If you say anything that's really critical of the regime, that dissents really in any way from the leftist orthodoxy, you'll be deplatformed.
You'll be removed from the public square.
You might be placed on a no-fly list and now DHS says you might be labeled a terrorist.
Can't wait to spread that liberty.
All that liberty.
Hmm.
Seems strong.
Maybe before we go build up liberty in the other nations, maybe we should build it up here as well.
It's not just Democrats who are doing this, by the way.
There is that jokester, Adam Kinzinger.
He is one of the court jester conservatives.
He's a Republican.
He's an elected official as a Republican, but he's really just a prop of the liberal regime.
His entire point is...
The entire purpose of his political career is to make a show of being a Republican, to appear as though there's opposition within the dominant political order, but actually, whenever it matters, all he ever does is give support to the broader liberal establishment.
So Kinzinger goes on CNN, of course, and he's talking to Anderson Cooper, of course, and he's defending the DHS view that conservative Republicans are terrorists.
When you look at online rhetoric and you look at chatter that's happening and you look at, you know, maybe a hundred people post insane comments like bring out the gallows, even if only two of those out of the hundred are serious, that leads to violence.
I think what the biggest concern is, is all this talk, a lot of times just, you know, people trying to sound tough on the internet.
But that ends up kind of feeding itself, and particularly when people start brainwashing folks with the election was stolen, look at what all these patriotic people did in the 1700s, this is the same thing, the mask mandate is basically the equivalent of not allowing you to practice your religion, you know, which is 1776, taxation without representation.
Ultimately, that does grow into action, and it's a real concern.
Before we get to his broader stupid point, I do want to focus in on his minor stupid points.
He's suggesting that somehow the American Revolution was based on people not being able to practice their religion, which he's getting his history confused here.
But then he corrects himself, because then I think he realizes that that actually wasn't part of it.
So he says, you know, they're comparing having to muzzle yourself ad infinitum, you know, at the whims of some random technocrat.
They're comparing that with No taxation without representation.
As though that's just as bad.
And I think, look, maybe I'm giving him too much credit.
But I think he's realizing as he's saying this, oh, wait a minute.
Having to muzzle yourself indefinitely, not through the processes of the constitutional order and the elected government, but because some random bureaucrat just orders you to, that actually is a bit more egregious than a tax hike, isn't it?
To me it is.
I don't...
When I think of, you know, I'm trying to put myself in the mindset of 1776, and I don't have representation in Parliament exactly, but, you know, I'm having my taxes raised a little bit to pay for a war that was fought on my shores, and I compare that to having to...
Muzzle myself forever, not being able to push back against that.
If I even try to voice my political opposition to that, I'll be labeled a terrorist by the dominant regime, also by agencies that are unelected and I have no recourse against.
That actually does seem worse.
That actually does raise some questions about the political order.
And so Kinzinger is trying to work his way through all of this.
But...
Kinzinger's broader point is that if you question any of this, you're a terrorist.
This can lead to really large-scale terrible stuff.
It's not even just the conservative adults.
It's the kids.
If the kids in any way disobey Dr.
Fauci, they're not just terrorists but murderers.
A member of an Oklahoma school board just came out during a school board meeting and said that if kids do not wear the masks in class, they could be murderers.
It's just not okay for kids to commit murder by coming to school without a mask.
And when it comes down to it, it's possible.
They will cause a death of another child because they come to school without a mask.
These are the people leading us.
And you know, this woman is hysterical and not the brightest bulb in the pack, but I'm not sure that she's so much more ignorant or so much stupider than Adam Kinzinger or than Antony Blinken or any of the ruling elite that are just getting all of this stuff wrong.
First of all, to this woman's point...
She just obviously doesn't know what murder is.
Murder involves intention.
So if she's saying that kids are killing people because they're not wearing masks, again, also a ridiculous claim.
But that would not be murder.
So she certainly doesn't know what she's talking about.
And then to go out and she's saying, look, if a kid shows up to school without a mask, he could spread the coronavirus.
Because the kids are not vaccinated, right?
But we've also been told that vaccinated people are spreading the coronavirus.
And we've also been told that the masks don't offer perfect protection against spreading the coronavirus.
By Anthony Fauci, actually, of all people.
So, what she's saying is, the kids could spread the coronavirus, and then if it spreads far enough, you know, someone might die from that.
And maybe the masks don't offer perfect protection to stop that, and the vaccines certainly don't offer perfect protection to stop that, but still the kids can be involved in it.
This would be like saying that if a guy on an assembly line in Detroit polishes the windows on a brand new car, and then the car makes it to a dealership somewhere else in the United States, and and then the car makes it to a dealership somewhere else in the United States, and someone looks at that car and says, gosh, look You know, I think I'm going to go buy that car.
And then that guy goes and buys that car, and he drives that car around for a little bit.
And then maybe he decides, you know, he's not going to like that car anymore.
Maybe he wants to get a different car.
So he goes and he sells that car and he sells that car to someone else.
And then that other person goes and he goes to a bar one day and he has a few too many drinks.
And he gets in a car and he accidentally gets into a car accident and somebody dies in that car accident.
That windshield wiper killed somebody!
Yeah!
Because that got way back on the line.
He did a thing and that resulted.
Do you realize, I mean, this is now the logic that the COVID people are foisting on all of us.
That any ordinary thing we do to live our lives somewhere down the line of causation could cause someone to die.
And so you are a murderer.
It's not just on the COVID stuff.
I mean, this is their point on DHS and the terror threat of conservatives.
Yeah, there's no threats.
Yeah, there's no actual plots or anything.
But if someone says that maybe there were shenanigans in the 2020 election, well, that could inspire someone else to maybe think there's a problem with the government.
That could inspire someone else.
And then someone someday might throw a punch against a guy at a bar and look, he's a terrorist.
That logic is so muddy.
That logic is so, so...
It's not credible.
It's just not credible.
We used to have an idea in America that...
You had some kind of personal liberty.
And that we had political liberties.
And this involves danger.
You know, liberty does involve some element of danger.
Okay, when people are left to their own devices to govern themselves, and some when the political community is left to govern itself, there's the possibility that things could go wrong.
But that's in the nature of liberty.
Anthony Fauci says Americans just need to push aside all those concerns about personal liberty.
We've got to do mitigation, put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties and personal liberties and realize we have a common enemy, and that common enemy is the virus.
And we really have to all pull together to get on top of this.
Otherwise, we're going to continue to suffer as we're seeing right now.
You've got to just push aside your entire American way of life and your tradition and all your civil liberties and everything you hold dear.
Push it aside, just for now.
Just for 15 days, just for 15 months, just for 15 years, just push it aside, and then someday we'll give you your power back.
Someday we'll give you your liberty back.
Oh, by the way, we also need to spread liberty to every country on earth.
How about we spread liberty to America?
Is there any way that we could have a liberating operation?
That would be great.
Maybe through our politics.
Maybe we could do that.
Maybe we could retake some of our political power, vote out these awful politicians, fire these terrible bureaucrats, shrink the power of these awful would-be tyrants in the United States.
We probably need to agree on what those words mean.
We've got to agree.
What do we mean by liberty, freedom, authoritarianism?
What do we mean by those words?
Because as long as they're pie in the sky, vague out in the air like George Bush used at the second inaugural, they're not going to mean anything in practice.
The director of the NIH, he has identified the real enemy that we face.
The real enemy that we face right now Maybe it's not the Taliban.
Maybe it's not even the coronavirus.
It's misinformation that is tearing us apart.
It's really unfortunate that politics and polarization have gotten in the way of a simple public health measure.
This mask that I'm holding has somehow become a symbol that it never should have been.
This is basically just a life-saving medical device.
And somehow it's now being seen as an invasion of your personal liberty.
We never...
We never should have gone there.
It's heartbreaking for me as a person who's not a politician, I'm a scientist, I'm a public health person, I'm a doctor, to see how masks have gotten into this very strange place with parents and others shouting about it.
We never should have allowed that to happen.
If I have one thing I'm worried about, it's not just the epidemic of COVID-19, it's the epidemic of misinformation, disinformation, distrust that is tearing us apart.
If misinformation is our greatest public health threat, then the public health officials are the super spreaders.
There's no question about that from the very beginning.
How did there become all of this confusion over the masks?
Oh, I don't know.
Do you think it was because Anthony Fauci told us masks are dumb and don't do anything and you shouldn't wear them at the start of the coronavirus pandemic?
And then five seconds later he said, no, actually you should.
I was just telling you that so that you wouldn't take them all from the nurses.
But believe me, I lied to you then, but believe me now.
Do you think that might have something to do with the misinformation?
Worse than that, worse than the cynical political rhetoric that we hear from the head of the NIH, is this really, I think, honestly ignorant statement that he's upset that the masks are politicized.
He says, I'm not a politician.
I'm just a public health guy.
Anything that is public is by definition political because those words are synonyms.
If you are setting national policy, you are a politician.
If you're a private doctor living in the country somewhere who's just treating patients, then you're not a politician.
Then you're just a health guy.
But if you're in Washington, D.C., running the National Institutes of Health, getting your paycheck from the government, setting national policy for hundreds of millions of people, you are a politician.
So own up to it.
But they don't want to own up to it.
They don't want to acknowledge...
This is actually just like the Afghanistan issue.
They don't want to acknowledge that they are imposing a way of life on people.
They don't want to acknowledge that they are making certain declarative political statements and they are saying that everyone's got to go along with this and we are going to be the empire.
We are going to be the order.
So they just say, no, we're not...
We're not in Afghanistan to occupy or to nation build.
No, we're just kind of there.
We're just, come on, this isn't political.
Look, when we tell everyone to muzzle themselves in public and radically change their way of life and wear something that is clearly a symbol, we're not doing that in a political way.
Whenever people tell you something's not political, they say, don't make this about politics.
You know that they are making it about politics.
The other reason I think that people don't have a lot of faith in these guys is that they themselves don't believe it.
So first of all, that guy who was clearly in a TV studio while he was giving this interview wasn't wearing a mask.
I bet there was a camera operator in that room.
I bet there were plenty of people in that room.
But he wasn't wearing a mask.
Okay, because it would look ridiculous to have the mask on television, right?
How about Obama's birthday party?
None of those people were wearing masks.
We have video of it, even though the video was quickly deleted.
Now, reportedly, there's a COVID spike in Martha's Vineyard.
Martha's Vineyard has a spike in COVID cases, according to the Daily Mail, after Barack Obama's birthday party.
It's the higher number of cases in a week on the island since April.
Now, am I blaming Obama for this?
No, I don't think it really matters.
I just don't think it's that big a deal.
Clearly, Obama doesn't think it's that big a deal.
Clearly, none of the people at the party think it's that big of a deal.
So these guys are not practicing what they're preaching.
We can see, just looking at their behavior and looking at the insane rhetoric that they're foisting on us, that if a little kid doesn't wear a mask, he's a murderer.
We can just tell that the rhetoric is wrong.
It's not true.
And they don't even believe it themselves.
They don't actually care.
And nevertheless, it's the whole bureaucracy pushing this stuff.
Jerome Adams, who is Trump's former Surgeon General, he was the one who early on tweeted out, he said, all caps, stop buying masks, people!
Multiple exclamation points.
Stop it.
Don't buy the masks.
They don't work.
Don't.
Stop wearing the masks.
And then five seconds later, he said, oh, actually, you should wear the masks.
They're very important.
So Jerome Adams, this guy, completely declowned himself.
He's come out and he said that Ron DeSantis standing up against the mask mandates, that is unconscionable.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr.
Jerome Adams joins us now to talk about all this.
Dr.
Adams, good morning.
Good morning.
So Florida's governor says the state could withhold the salaries of school officials who defies order to ban mask mandates.
As a physician, as a father, what's your reaction to that?
Well, as a physician, as a public health expert, it is deeply troubling that it seems we're letting politics get in the way of protecting our youth.
As a father, I quite frankly think it's unconscionable.
I really do.
I think you can't tie the hands of school and public health officials based on what you perceive to be the reality when your public health officials are telling you they need these tools.
It's unconscionable.
It's unconscionable.
Jerome Adams, since leaving the Trump administration, since the end of the Trump administration, he's become basically a liberal commentator, and he goes on all the liberal networks, and I think he even at one point suggested that conservatives were racist.
He brought up some kind of race-hustling nonsense, too.
It just shows you, I don't care about what Jerome Adams says, ever, but what it shows you is The whole bureaucracy, including those who were ostensibly serving under the Republicans, they're all kind of on the same page.
And they don't seem to be on the same page as the American people.
They all seem to be clamping down on your civil liberties and clamping down on your way of life and clamping down on your political rights even to question that sort of thing.
And what can we do about that?
I don't know.
We're not allowed.
I mean, it's taken us 20 years to get out of Afghanistan.
It's not because people haven't tried.
It was just very hard to overcome the inertia of being there.
We haven't been able to dislodge Fauci or any of the other people.
We have a problem of political power in the United States, and I think it comes down to this question.
What are we?
Are we a nation that governs itself?
Or are we an empire projecting power overseas?
And if we are an empire, what are we projecting?
They don't seem like the traditional American values.
What is it?
What are we?
What is it that we stand for?
These battles that we think are just kind of these narrow battles over policy or political parties.
It's not.
The question is, who are we as a country?
Before we try to remake Afghanistan, let's figure out what America is first.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boren, our technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producer Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, associate producer Justine Turley, audio mixer Mike Coromina, and hair and makeup by Nika Geneva.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
President Biden goes into hiding as his Afghan withdrawal plan falls apart.
The American Academy of Pediatrics gaslights the critics of masking children, while the Surgeon General declares that you do not have the right to share opinions that he deems misinformation.
Plus, Tim Tebow made his NFL debut, which is proof of racism, according to many people in sports media.
And finally, I'll respond to my critics who say that I'm a white supremacist conspiracy theorist because of something that I said on my show on Friday.
