Ep. 823 - The “Friendly,” “Peaceful” Taliban Takeover
MSNBC calls the Taliban takeover “peaceful,” CNN dubs the terrorists “friendly,” and Joe Biden blames everybody but himself for the collapse of Afghanistan.
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The scenes out of Afghanistan have been heartbreaking.
Desperate people doing whatever they can to flee the country as the Taliban reestablishes control over the capital city and the rest of the country.
Some people are calling it a catastrophe.
Other people are calling it a nightmare.
And MSNBC reporters are calling it a relatively peaceful takeover.
The country is essentially now in the hands of the Taliban for all intents and purposes.
They've taken over Kabul.
The president, or should I now say the former president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, has fled the country.
The Taliban have taken over the presidential palace.
They've renamed the country the Islamic Emirates, taken down the Afghan flag and hoisted up their own colors.
And it's been a relatively peaceful, if you like, process.
They haven't had to fire a lot of shots.
There hasn't been a lot of bloodshed in Kabul.
It was a pretty straightforward takeover for them.
They've also taken over the airport.
There have been reports of shots fired at the airport, and Taliban fighters are all over the place.
But they're not in any sort of clashes with U.S. personnel, although commercial flights have so far been suspended.
That's a lot of whiplash.
It's a mostly peaceful takeover of the country, and it's peaceful, and there are definitely shots being fired by the militants who are everywhere, but it's mostly peaceful.
Turns out that relatively peaceful takeovers, much like mostly peaceful protests, seem to involve a fair bit of violence.
But Joe Biden has doubled down on the strategy in his first comments since everything that he said wouldn't happen happened in Afghanistan.
With the president this week, is it any wonder that Democrats want to ban Donald Trump from ever appearing on a ballot?
Again, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Moles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from There's a Verse for That, who says, all the Afghan terrorists are going free.
Meanwhile, domestic terrorists who took pictures in the Capitol are rotting away in solitary confinement.
Good job, O'Biden.
Yes, this is what the liberal order wants.
They want to go easy on terrorists who want to destroy America, and they want to define you, to define half the country as terrorists, lock you up, and throw away the key.
At least.
That is the way our political order works.
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MSNBC sees the glass half full.
That's the same network, by the way, that called the George Floyd riots mostly peaceful protests with the buildings burning down behind them.
Now they're saying this is a relatively peaceful takeover.
I suppose as far as takeovers go, it actually is relatively peaceful, meaning, yeah, they're executing lots of people and beheading lots of people, but there's no major battle taking place in Kabul because the Afghan military didn't even fight back and the American forces were leaving.
The political leadership said pull out of the country.
The State Department taking a similarly optimistic view.
So the State Department spokesman, Ned Price, is confident in the ability of the United States to impel the Taliban to have an inclusive government.
Additionally, the UN Security Council issued a joint press statement earlier today calling for a new government that is united.
Inclusive and representative, including with the full and meaningful participation of women.
The Council spoke with one voice to underscore that Afghanistan must abide by its international obligations, including to international humanitarian law and ensure the safety and security of all Afghans and international citizens.
I'm sure that'll do it.
It's done.
It's over.
I don't know why we spent 20 years in a military occupation in Afghanistan when Ned Price could have just gotten on TV or, and frankly, he might still do this, written a strongly worded letter to the Taliban and said, hey, dear Taliban, To whom it may concern at the Taliban, we want you to elect women to your government.
And if you don't, well, we in the international community will be very disappointed in you, Taliban.
Okay, so maybe think about that.
Taliban, as far as I can tell, Completely ignoring the demands of the United States State Department.
One CNN reporter observing on the ground, a CNN reporter who is now wearing a hijab, because otherwise she'll be killed.
She's now wearing the hijab, but she's looking on the bright side.
She's saying, sure, you know, these guys seem pretty, they're saying mean things.
They don't sound like they're going along with this, but they seem friendly enough.
They're just chanting death to America, but they seem friendly at the same time.
It's utterly bizarre.
Look, they're mostly friendly terrorists who want to destroy our country.
Mostly friendly, though.
And actually, I hate to give credit to CNN, too, but...
In a way, they do seem kind of friendly.
In a way, that's the scariest part.
Because if you look at the clip, they're chanting, death to America!
We took over the country!
Hey, buddy, buddy, habibi, death to America!
Gosh, it's bad.
It's bad.
It's not looking good.
Seems like a contradiction, but there it is.
Chanting death to America, but mostly friendly.
A takeover of a country, but mostly peaceful.
If you like contradictions, by the way, you'll love Joe Biden's speech.
Joe Biden spoke yesterday.
He finally left Camp David.
He was ignoring the takeover Afghanistan for several days.
The takeover Afghanistan happened in exactly the way that he and his administration said it would not happen.
And so he finally addressed it.
It was a very, very interesting speech.
It tells you a lot about Joe Biden and the state of the crumbling American empire.
The highlights...
It did not begin in the strongest way.
My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every constituency, including, and contingency, including the rapid collapse we're seeing now.
So that's, I think, within the first 10 seconds of the speech, of his slurred speech, he confuses constituency with contingency.
They're very, very different things, obviously.
And the ruling class in this country doesn't seem to have much of either of an actual constituency that supports them or contingency plans because everything went wrong in Afghanistan.
The speech did get a little bit better from there.
He made a point that I think is pretty popular.
He said, we now, as the official policy of the United States, will not nation build in every despotic country around the world.
Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building.
It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy.
Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been, preventing a terrorist attack on America's homeland.
I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past.
Mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely.
So this is a direct contradiction of the Bush foreign policy.
The George W. Bush foreign policy is here.
We played it yesterday on the show.
He articulated it in the second inaugural address.
He said, it is now in America's vital national interest to turn every country in the world into an America-style democracy.
It's not just our ideal.
Even that is a little bit Wilsonian to say that every other country in the world has to look exactly like we do and we're going to invade you if you don't.
But he went even further.
He said the justification, which was never really plausible, is that any country that is not a Madisonian democracy poses an existential threat to the United States.
It's in our urgent national security interest to topple every country.
Government that does not resemble ours in the entire world.
It was a wild, I mean, it was more Wilsonian than Wilson.
It was more progressive than the wildest progressives.
But that came to define America's foreign policy and certainly the Republican Party's for years.
Joe Biden, along with Donald Trump, saying that is no longer our policy.
Along with George W. Bush, the first time he ran for president, by the way, who said we're not going to nation build.
This is a reversal of that policy.
Okay.
And then, you know, you know what Biden had to do.
There was no way he was going to give this speech without doing it.
He was not going to take responsibility for his disastrous exit.
He was not going to take responsibility for bungling the actual execution of this plan.
He was going to blame the bad orange man.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.
Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office.
U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country.
And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
This is so pathetic.
It just looks so weak for the president of the United States to come out and say, it was not my fault, it's everyone else's fault.
He also went on to blame the Afghan armies.
It's Trump's fault!
It's the Afghan army's fault!
It's not my fault!
Please don't blame me!
It's just weak.
Already our country looks extremely weak because we bungled the withdrawal.
And now the President of the United States can't even man up and take responsibility.
So it was pathetic and it was a rough start to his speech.
But then, incredibly, he then went on to contradict everything he said and he doubled down on his decision and said he was proud of it.
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Joe Biden opens up his first remarks on Afghanistan by blaming everyone but him and slurring his speech and mispronouncing words.
It was really weak stuff.
But then at some point, I guess as his speechwriter was writing the speech, he realized, man, this is bad stuff.
Okay, I'm going to have to completely change course, make a 180 degree pivot and say that I stand by this decision and it was the right decision.
And Joe Biden actually starts to make a little bit more sense when he does that.
I stand squarely behind my decision.
After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces.
That's why we're still there.
Here is absolutely right.
This is the point that all the people who say that we should have stayed in Afghanistan, who are many people in the kind of liberal establishment and some people in the neoconservative establishment, they're all sort of the same blob.
But the people who say we should have stayed in Afghanistan beyond this withdrawal and that it was a mistake to pull out.
The only logical conclusion of that is that we should stay in Afghanistan forever.
That's it.
I spoke to my friend Charles Kessler yesterday, who was giving his expert analysis of Afghanistan, and he pointed out that to democratize Afghanistan, as was George W. Bush's mission, would take about 800 years probably.
It took 700 years from the Magna Carta in England to a full inclusive democracy, the sort of thing that the State Department's talking about.
It took 700 years for the English.
I'm going to say the English were a little better suited for it and their political institutions were better suited for it.
It wasn't imposed by an invading force, but let's say 700-800 years for the Afghans.
Are we going to stay in Afghanistan for 800 years?
Maybe some people think we should.
Maybe some people believe that we should just hold Afghanistan as an imperial territory forever.
Notice, though, how the people who think we should have stayed in Afghanistan, they never admit that.
They never admit that that's what they're really saying.
Because they know the American people don't want it, because 70% of the Americans wanted to get out of Afghanistan, because we don't want to have an overseas empire, because we still view ourselves as a republic and a nation-state that doesn't just govern the entire world.
And maybe that's right, and maybe that's wrong, and maybe we have to be a world empire, but that's the way the situation stands.
And so Joe Biden's saying, you know, five more years, ten more years, wouldn't have made a difference.
But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years, or 20 more years, The U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.
That part is absolutely right.
That part is absolutely right.
I hate to say that Joe Biden got it, you know, like a stop clock twice a day.
He got that part right.
And I think a lot of conservatives understand that too.
Five more years wasn't going to do anything.
20 more years wasn't going to do anything.
800 more years might have done something.
Do we want to do that?
We want to run Afghanistan for 800 years?
We want to be there?
Not like we're in Germany.
Not like we're in...
South Korea, even.
If we withdrew, those places wouldn't completely collapse.
Even before we got there, those places did have some kind of a political tradition.
Afghanistan does not.
Afghanistan is a group of warring tribes that have been killing each other and repelling invaders for a very, very long time.
With no political tradition of democracy or whatever else you want to install there.
It basically always kind of would have looked like this.
I mean, Biden bungled it.
There's no question about that.
But the just a few more years brigade, I think, is not being totally honest here.
Then Biden goes back to his ridiculous, mealy-mouthed excuse-making.
You know, there were a lot of excuses in this speech, but I think his excuse for the scenes that are going on right now of people falling off of airplanes, scrambling, of helicopters lifting people out of the embassy, of all these sorts of things, that one took the cake.
We're taking over air traffic control.
We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats.
Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well.
Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport.
That is a really clever way of saying that the Taliban ran you out of your embassy, chased you down to the airport with thousands of Afghans, and they were clinging to your planes as they were taking off.
And then, of course, afterward, after he gave this speech, which was pathetic, it didn't satisfy anybody.
I felt, frankly, it was just about the best he could do.
After he gave the speech, he didn't take a single question.
I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism and pass this decision on to another president of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one.
Because it's the right one.
It's the right decision for our people.
The right one for our brave service members who risked their lives serving our nation.
And it's the right one for America.
Thank you.
May God protect our troops, our diplomats, and all brave Americans serving in harm's way.
See, thank you.
I'm brave.
I'm strong.
I'm making the right decision.
And I'm not going to take a single question.
Bye.
And then he went right back to Camp David.
He went right back to vacation.
Even still, did you notice the trick of this whole speech?
You notice the trick of this whole speech is Joe Biden didn't answer the question.
The question that prompted this speech was, why did the administration bungle the withdrawal from Afghanistan?
Why did this go basically as poorly as it possibly could have, not even by our own standards, but by the Biden administration's standards?
The Biden administration said the Taliban wasn't going to come take over right away.
The Biden administration said it wasn't going to happen from a Friday to a Monday.
The Biden administration said we're not going to see helicopters like Saigon.
That's exactly what we saw.
But he wouldn't answer it.
He didn't even address that question.
Because Joe Biden is a good politician.
He is.
I don't think he's intelligent.
I don't think he's particularly moral.
I don't think he's competent when it comes to actual statecraft.
But when it comes to being a politician, the guy is a genius.
And I know that some Republicans push back at me on this.
But the guy has lasted in national politics for 50 years, even being a bumbling buffoon.
The guy managed to get himself picked to be vice president.
The guy managed to become president of the United States.
He didn't even campaign.
The guy didn't even campaign last year he became president.
And what he is pursuing here is the number one rule of political communications, which is, don't answer the question you are asked, answer the question that you want to answer.
You see this, good politicians do this on TV all the time.
Good journalists call them out for it, but good politicians do this in their speeches.
And so, instead of saying, hey, here's the explanation of why we bungled this withdrawal, he said, hey, I think we should pull out of Afghanistan.
Yet, duh, 70% of Americans agree with you on that.
There's nothing courageous about offering that point of view.
We've already settled that question.
The question is, why did it not work?
Then he goes right back to vacation.
And now you know the next question.
You know the next question is, how many refugees can we take in?
Okay, we went in, we bungled Afghanistan, we accomplished virtually nothing in 20 years because of failed political leadership, and now we're going to take in tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Afghan refugees.
These are people who are not being vetted from one of the most terrorist-laden countries on planet Earth.
We're just going to take them in.
That's a good idea, right?
Ann Coulter made this point, and other people have said it over the years.
She said the strategy is invade the world, invite the world.
Well, that's what we're doing.
We invade the world, we disrupt things like in Libya, like in Syria, and then we bring all of those refugees, we bring all of these foreign nationals to America.
Is that a good idea?
I don't know.
Doesn't seem like the wisest idea.
Actually, even many more liberal left-wing countries in Europe are pushing back.
They're saying, absolutely not.
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The United States is preparing to take in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people from Afghanistan.
On the idea that you broke it, you buy it.
Frankly, I don't think the United States broke Afghanistan.
Actually, Afghanistan today is exactly the same as when we found it.
Although they got a little slap on the wrist for 20 years and we put the Taliban out of power for them.
But it's not as though the country is in worse shape today than before we invaded.
We invaded in...
20 years ago now, in 2001, because the Taliban had allowed terrorist cells to flourish there.
We kicked out the Taliban government, we occupied the country militarily for 20 years with varying degrees of success, and then we left and now the Taliban is back.
So I actually don't want to hear that we've left the country worse off than we found it.
We didn't leave it much better off.
We left it exactly the same.
And the argument is going to be now we've got to take in endless numbers of Afghan citizens to come into the United States.
This seems kind of crazy to me because...
One, if the Afghans are not going to stay and fight for their own country, then should they at least go to countries in the region?
We have a lot of allies in the region.
Why don't they go to nearby countries and then plan their assault back on the oppressive regime in their own country?
Why don't they fight for their countries, is what I'm saying.
The argument you hear from the liberal imperialists is, well, these people, these people, they fought for us, they helped us, and now we've got to bring them to the United States.
As though the Afghans have no interests of their own.
As though their helping the United States was just pure charity.
It was charity to the United States.
I appreciate their help.
I am glad for the Afghans who helped the government of the United States to accomplish some of its objectives.
But they're not just a charity case here.
They made a strategic decision.
They believed that it was in their interest, in their personal and national interest, to ally with the United States.
And they did that.
And now the United States is leaving after 20 long years.
And so Afghanistan does need to form its own country.
Afghanistan does need to defend itself at a certain point.
And the people there need to stay and fight for their country.
And if they're not going to, they should at least stay in countries nearby.
Why don't they go to Iraq, another country that we invaded?
Why don't they go to Syria?
Why don't they go to any of our allies in the region?
Why don't they go to Saudi Arabia?
Why don't they go to Israel?
Why don't they go to places around, at least in the general area of the Levant, so that they can go back into Afghanistan when the time is right and defend their country?
You just don't see it.
The United States and Europe are expected to take in all of the world's refugees, which is why the movement of people into the United States over the last 60 years is the largest movement of human beings ever in recorded history.
So some people, even in far-left countries like France, are wising up to this.
Emmanuel Macron, who is a liberal leader, sort of technocrat leader of France, he said, we've got to make sure that we aren't expected to take in all of the refugees.
I'd play the clip, but it's in silly French, you know, and there's no reason to put that language on the show.
Okay, you get the idea.
He's like, blah, blah, blah, moi j'aime les croissants, ces sont très bons.
But what he says, it's important what he says.
He says, the situation, we're monitoring the situation in Afghanistan, and we need to make sure that we are protecting against an influx of migrants that are going to be coming.
We can't do that.
We can't take in all the migrants from everywhere else in the world, because then we're going to lose our own country and our own civilization, is the implication.
He doesn't go quite that far in his conclusion, but that's obviously the implication here.
By the way, it's not just the Afghans who want to come into America.
It's the Americans who are stuck in Afghanistan.
Right now there are, quote, this is according to reports, thousands of U.S. citizens trapped in Kabul with no ability to get to the airport.
The Taliban right now is going door to door looking for Westerners.
Door to door.
This is a major crisis.
We're stranding thousands of Americans there.
We should not be considering I'm not saying we can't take in any Afghans on a limited basis.
But surely the priority has to be the Americans, not the Afghans.
And I think this confusion represents the broader confusion brought up by Afghanistan.
Namely, are we a nation that has citizens where the government has a special responsibility to the citizens?
Or are we a liberal empire that has no special responsibility to Americans that actually is just promoting universal values all over the world?
Because we're the world's only superpower.
We're the world's only power, if these people are to be believed.
And no distinction is to be made between a citizen of Afghanistan and a citizen of the United States and a citizen of Mexico and a citizen of El Salvador.
It's all sort of the same.
If anything, if anything, the liberal imperialists treat foreign nationals with greater care than they do the citizens of the United States.
Speaking of which, I think this is why Juan Williams, liberal commentator, liberal commentator on Fox News, but he's still a liberal commentator, It is now proposing, in a column in The Hill, to prevent Donald Trump from ever running for president again.
Here's the column.
Let's agree.
Former President Trump is running again.
He's got a ton of money in his war chest.
People are, you know, liberals are trying to sue him for various things or investigations.
But none of that is likely to stop him from launching Trump 24th.
But Attorney General Merrick Garland might be able to stop him.
Garland has the power to rule out another Trump run by citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone from holding office who engaged in insurrection against the United States.
What Williams is citing right here is advice from a leftist, Robert Reich, who was a former labor secretary.
And so Williams says if Garland takes Reich's advice, he is sure to set off alarms about the attorney general playing politics.
But Garland has the facts on his side.
So you just declare that Trump staged an insurrection, and then you prevent him from running again.
Now, the issue, of course, is that Trump did not do this.
I don't think there's any argument.
No one's even really suggested it until Juan Williams' Hail Mary here to stop Trump from running again.
Think about what this means for the election.
We were told...
That Donald Trump got trounced.
Oh, he lost by more votes than any president ever.
Joe Biden got the most votes of any guy who ever ran for president.
Trump got crushed.
It wasn't even close.
And that's why we need to rewrite the Constitution to prevent him from ever appearing on a ballot again.
You see the contradiction here.
You see how they're kind of undermining their own art.
Trump is so unpopular that the American people elected this vegetable who can't pronounce his own name, Joe Biden.
They elected him by the widest number of votes ever.
And that's why we need to fundamentally reorder our constitutional republic to make sure that people never have the chance to vote for Trump again.
Seems to me like they know that Trump is actually pretty popular.
Seems to me that they know that Joe Biden is actually not very popular.
Seems to me that the people who are proposing an insurrection, a coup d'etat, an upending of our republic, are the people on the left.
The left is not very popular right now.
Among the ruling class, it's obviously that they're the same thing, but among the American people, not very popular.
There's a new CBS poll over in California.
Gavin Newsom, Democratic governor in a Democratic state, as Democratic a state as ever there was, where Republicans are out-registered by huge, huge margins.
Right now, the campaign to recall Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom, basically 50-50.
CBS News YouGov poll released on Sunday shows 48% of likely California voters want to recall Newsom.
52% oppose his removal.
And here's the kicker.
The margin of error is 4%.
So this is statistically a dead heat.
That is shocking.
In a place where Democrats outnumber Republicans, what, two to one or more?
You've got the recall question for the governor at 50-50.
And so, the way that the recall election works is, the voters will have a choice, recall or don't recall.
If they vote to recall him, then the first guy, then the second question is going to be, who should replace him?
And there's going to be a list of a lot of candidates.
But the guy who gets the most votes on that list will just be the governor.
That's how it works.
Which means that libertarian conservative radio host Larry Elder...
Could very possibly be the next governor of California.
Gavin Newsom knows that, which is why he is now going after elder by name.
What could happen on election day if we don't turn out in historic numbers to vote no on this recall?
You have someone that's not just opposed to a woman's right to choose.
He is.
But actually wrote an op-ed saying women are not as smart as men.
And issues of civic affairs, and issues of economics, and issues of politics.
He's someone that doesn't believe in assault weapons ban.
Someone that doesn't believe in a corporate tax should be zero.
Doesn't even believe in a minimum wage.
Fight for 15.
He doesn't believe there should be a minimum wage, should be zero dollars.
Doesn't believe the time of historic wildfires and droughts, the challenges we all face here in the Bay Area, the looming prospects of an earthquake.
Doesn't even believe in FEMA, thinks FEMA should be eliminated, as he does Alright, this is preposterous.
It's just not true.
Larry Elder is not to the right of Donald Trump.
I wish he were.
I really like Larry Elder, but he's a little libertarian compared to the rest of us.
He's still, I think, by far the best candidate to replace Newsom because he's got the name recognition, he's got the ability to raise money, he's got the ability actually to do it, and he's pretty good.
It would be such a vast improvement over Newsom, it's not even funny.
But the hyperbole is so preposterous.
He's to the right of Donald.
He's a libertarian.
Donald Trump's politics are a little complicated, but he has, I think, a little bit more of a conservative gut.
Larry Elder is certainly more of a libertarian.
What this shows is not only that Gavin Newsom is dishonest.
What this shows is that Gavin Newsom is terrified of Larry Elder.
Terrified.
Because...
Kevin Faulconer, he might be a great Republican down there in San Diego, but he's just not raising the money.
He doesn't have the name recognition.
John Cox already ran against Gavin Newsom last time.
Didn't work out.
He got trounced.
And a lot of the other Republicans don't even know their names.
And then the only other one whose name we know is Bruce Jenner, who says he's not loyal to the Republican Party.
He doesn't have particularly conservative views.
Actually, he says he's loyal to his community, meaning the LGBT community, with an emphasis on the T. That's the most conservative candidate we can put up?
A guy whose number one issue is pretending that men can be women and women can be men?
A man who's obviously suffering from a great deal of confusion about elemental aspects of the world?
So that was going to be a joke.
That was the Democrats' best hope, was that Bruce Jenner becomes the number one candidate, and then Newsom just marches back into the governor's mansion.
And then along came Larry Elder.
Larry Elder actually offered voters a choice.
He might not be as far right as people wish that he were, but especially given that it's California, especially given this particular race, that's real.
I mean, you can see Newsom sweating.
It was even in that interview at the Sacramento Bee where he just lost his temper.
He goes, this damn state, I'm not getting enough damn credit.
People, everyone here, they're all complaining about me.
They're jealous of me.
They're jealous of my success.
But they're not.
People are fed up with that.
The people, I think, the American people, and even the people of California are fed up with the failed leadership of the ruling class, which has hollowed out our country, not just for the tenure of Gavin Newsom, but for decades now.
There's some great governors in this country, even with the Cuomos, even with the Newsoms.
There's some great governors, including my own governor, Bill Lee, here in Tennessee.
Governor Bill Lee just issued an executive order on masks in schools.
And Governor Lee presented it in this way.
He said, quote, No one cares more about the health and well-being of a child than a parent.
I am signing an executive order today that allows parents to opt their children out of a school mask mandate if either a school board or health board enacts one over a district.
This is good stuff.
This is good governing.
It's smart.
The thing that's really smart here is he's not going all the way and saying, I ban school districts from even enacting a mask mandate.
I sort of would prefer that, frankly, because I want to send a very clear message.
But this is politically going to be a lot easier to implement.
Because what he's saying is, okay, school boards, yeah, sure.
Yeah, you can institute whatever mandates you want, guys.
But I'm signing an order that anyone that wants to can opt out of it.
And by doing that, he's just completely gutted their power.
It's almost more humiliating, because they can pass their mandates, but the mandates won't have any teeth.
And this is absolutely right.
It is child abuse to force little kids to muzzle themselves for, what, now years on end?
We were told it was 15 days, now it's going to be years on end.
It's wrong.
It's not good for them psychologically.
It's not good for them spiritually.
It's not good for them politically.
And dare I say it?
It's probably not all that great for them medically, either, to just have some filthy cloth over your face all the time.
Just ask Dr.
Fauci about that.
Great stuff out of Tennessee.
Now, some other people outside the governor's mansion are not so happy about the Republican rule in this state.
You've got the people who want the good conservative government.
And then you've got the ruling class.
And the ruling class is very often not even elected.
They're usually just the bureaucrats.
They're the Fauci's of the world.
They're the technocrats who are unaccountable to the people who can just tell you what to do.
And they think that you ought to just follow them regardless of their whims and their caprices.
So the top Tennessee public health official is very upset that people are not listening to her demands.
And so she is now claiming that she was sent a threatening package.
This is the top vaccine official in Tennessee, Michelle Fiscus.
She is claiming that she was sent a muzzle.
This was one week before she was fired from her position.
That's pretty bad.
So then there was an investigation into this taken up by the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security.
And do you know what I found out?
I found out that Michelle Fiscus sent the package to herself.
And this happens so, so often.
Not just with claims from public health people, but with people who are claiming racist attacks, people claiming sexist attacks.
Time and time and time again, it turns out to be a hoax perpetrated by the people themselves.
And Jussie Smollett, this woman, the top Tennessee health, former top Tennessee health doctor, health official rather, is the Jussie Smollett of Tennessee.
Sending the package to herself.
It wasn't even hard to find it out.
It was an Amazon account that she opened up and it was purchased on a credit card in her name.
The state said the case was closed on Monday.
Victimhood carries a great deal of currency.
Which brings me to Lizzo.
Lizzo, you know, she's a sort of famously husky singer.
You know, she makes her large, her corpulent appearance a big part of her act.
She just released a new song and now she's upset and complaining about what she called fatphobic comments on the video.
It doesn't matter how much positive energy you put into the world, you're still going to have people who have something...
something mean to say about you.
I just feel like I'm seeing negativity directed towards me.
It's fat phobic.
It's racist and it's hurtful.
If you don't like my music, cool.
If you don't like rumors and songs, cool.
But a lot of people don't like me Okay, so I'm going to preface my comments here by saying there's a very good chance that this is just a publicity stunt.
It seems to me that anything that entertainers do in the media while they are promoting a new song or a new book or a new movie or whatever is crafted by publicists and geared to get publicity.
So it might just be the case that Lizzo is just pulling a publicity stunt here.
But let's take her at her word.
And that is sad.
We feel bad about that.
We don't want someone to be made fun of for the way they look or being overweight or something like that.
Now, Lizzo uses this term fat phobia as though it's irrational to not want to be very unhealthy.
And I think that's the problem that people are having here.
I think the reason that people are pushing back against this stuff, at the crazy sex stuff and the crazy, you know, saying that it's really good to be extremely unhealthy or it's really good to whatever, you know, have any kind of quality about you that traditionally we would want to improve, but now we're saying, no, actually, this is much better this way to be unhealthy.
It's that we're pretending that there aren't Standards at all.
Actually, the standards are inverted.
And that people push up against.
That people are saying, no, actually, it's not good to be a man who mutilates yourself to look more like a woman.
That's not good.
We don't want to be mean to you.
We don't want to be cruel to you.
But it's not good.
It's not good to be really unhealthy.
For your own sake, out of compassion, we should try to help you not do that.
But...
But what has happened in our culture where victimhood carries currency is that actually, in a way, it is politically and socially advantageous to have one of these things about you.
You know, the sort of oppression Olympics, the idea if you're a man who thinks that he's a woman, this is actually really good for you.
It kind of gives you a pass in society from certain criticisms.
But it is assuming that Lizzo's feelings really are hurt and people really are being mean to her.
This does remind us of something.
I was actually just reading Plato on the airplane on the way here a few days ago.
And Socrates makes this point.
He says, it is worse to harm somebody than it is to be harmed.
And this is a uniquely Western concept.
And it actually helps make sense of what's going on in Afghanistan and what's going on in the rest of the world.
It is worse to harm somebody than to be harmed.
That is a concept that comes from the deepest Western traditions.
It is developed fully in Christianity.
And we'll just have to go into that tomorrow.
There's a lot more to say on this topic, but we'll have to save that for tomorrow.
How's that for a cliffhanger?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, President Biden triumphantly announces America's surrender in Afghanistan as the Taliban reimpose dystopian theocracy and murder our erstwhile allies.
