Ep. 827 - Terrorists Spit In The Face Of America - Joe Biden Thinks It's Rain
The Secretary of State refuses to confirm that Joe Biden knows “what’s going on,” the Taliban troll the West on Twitter, and Australia kills puppies to fight COVID.
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First, we had President Trump calling him sleepy Joe, right?
Then we had conservatives generally raising questions about Biden's cognitive decline.
Then even you'd get the occasional leak from a Democrat acknowledging it.
But now you know things are really bad when Joe Biden's own current Secretary of State refuses to answer on national television whether or not the president knows what's going on.
Does the president not know what's going on?
This is an incredibly emotional time for many of us and including allies and partners who've been shoulder to shoulder with us in Afghanistan for 20 years at high cost to themselves as well as to us.
They stood with us after 9-11, invoked Article 5 of NATO for the first time, an attack on one is an attack on all.
Sir, respectfully, look, I'm not questioning whether or not the allies have a right to complain.
I'm not questioning whether or not al-Qaeda has a presence.
The president said al-Qaeda is gone.
It's not gone.
The president said he's not heard any criticism from the allies.
There's been a lot of criticism from the allies.
Words matter, and the words of the president matter most.
Does the president know what's going on?
Well, you see, Chris, it's an emotional time.
I had an omelet for breakfast today.
My middle name is Philip.
How many things can I say to avoid answering this question?
Wouldn't be that hard to say, yes, he does know what's going on, if he actually knew what was going on.
As Biden bumbles, the rest of America is catching on to what conservatives have known for years.
Namely, that Joe Biden is completely incompetent.
In many ways, that was the whole point of nominating Biden.
Biden is just nothing.
As I said during the campaign repeatedly, he's just an empty suit.
He's just an avatar for the liberal establishment, a return to normalcy, which is exactly what our ruling class said that they wanted.
What's troubling right now for the ruling class is that huge swaths of the American people are beginning to realize that the liberal establishment isn't all that competent either.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment Friday is from Timothy Brinson, who says, Our founding fathers are rolling in their graves, wishing that they hadn't voted for Joe Biden.
I know!
I'm sure they're very upset, and they're going to be even more frustrated when they vote for Gavin Newsom in the recall election in California.
That's just the way elections work these days.
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Is the president competent?
Does the president know what's going on?
Well, you know, it's difficult.
And when you bring that up, it's...
No, he doesn't.
He obviously doesn't.
Now they're trying to play catch up.
So there's a report out that the Biden administration is trying to reclaim or really just destroy the military equipment that they left in Afghanistan.
So you remember, there's a lot of military equipment.
Billions and billions of dollars of military equipment in Afghanistan that everyone just abandoned.
Some of it was given to the Afghan army, which collapsed within days.
Some of it was given to the American troops who were told to get out of Dodge.
So there's just all this equipment, and guess who's taking the equipment?
The Taliban.
So now we've spent, at taxpayer expense, hundreds of billions of dollars on military equipment that is going...
Ostensibly to our enemy.
Now I know the Biden administration is trying to cut a deal with the Taliban, but they don't seem to be particularly friendly right now.
So now the Biden administration is considering going in and destroying that equipment.
Maybe that's a good idea.
Maybe that's not a good idea.
The one thing I think we can all agree on, even the most ardent Joe Biden supporter, whoever that may be, Maybe they should have thought about this.
Maybe they should have either taken the equipment or destroyed the equipment before they left.
Maybe anyone should have given this even two seconds thought.
But we've been in Afghanistan for 20 years.
We've been talking about getting out of Afghanistan for, what, 15 years now?
Then we went back in because Obama wanted a good war when he made the Iraq war the bad war.
But then Joe Biden campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan.
Donald Trump campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan.
We've been ready to do this for some time.
And yet they say, oops, maybe we shouldn't have left hundreds of billions of dollars.
Worth of military equipment.
Either there's some really nefarious other motive here, or this is just gross incompetence.
And the thing about the liberal establishment is they come in, they take away democratic choice, they take away our civil rights, they upend standards in society, they upend the way that we live our lives here.
But the promise that they make Is your life's going to be more efficient, it's going to be better.
This is when the World Economic Forum says, you're not going to own anything in the future, but you're going to be really happy.
It seems like a ghastly future, but maybe some people will go along with it if they can actually deliver the happiness, if they can actually deliver the efficiency, if they can actually deliver the competency.
But they can't.
The whole point about Trump was, yeah, Trump's giving you some things you like politically, but he's so wild.
It's so abnormal and extraordinary right now.
Elect us and it'll go back to normal, and we'll at least be competent at running the government.
Well, you've got to at least deliver that, and that's something that they are not doing.
So now Axios is reporting they might go in and destroy the equipment.
The problem is, though, according to Axios, quote, they fear that such a move could provoke the Taliban at a time where the U.S. is focusing on evacuating people from Afghanistan.
So we allegedly have something like 15,000 Americans there.
Again, you think they would have given this a moment's thought before they gave up the air base, gave up their embassy and retreated to Kabul airport.
But they've got to get these people out.
If they go in and start strikes on the Taliban, why, things might not turn out very well for the people that they're supposed to get out.
So the Taliban is an extremely strong position.
The United States is in an extremely weak position.
And what's driving me craziest, I guess, watching these images is finding out how good the Taliban is at trolling.
The Taliban, they've been around for a long time.
They're these arch-Islamic fundamentalists.
But apparently, they're really internet savvy.
They're really good at trolling.
It's really awful to see this as an American.
They just posted a photo of them wearing American military equipment, very expensive, nice American military equipment, hoisting the Taliban flag, recreating the image from Iwo Jima.
And they know exactly what they're doing, and they're posting it now all over the internet.
They've been posting memes.
You know, there's a meme.
It's the Chad meme of...
It's hard to explain a meme on air, but it's of, you know, sort of wimpy liberal guys, you know, complaining about...
Something that they're doing.
And then the sort of Chad, strong, tough guy saying yes.
And it's got all of these various internet-y characters.
So either they've got a great PR consultant or some members of the Taliban actually are following American pop culture pretty closely.
You remember the press conference they gave?
It was one of the greatest trolling...
These performances I've seen in my lifetime.
You've got these warlords from this backwater, this godforsaken land, and they come up with their theological, theocratic views that have not changed, even in the slightest, for about 1,400 years.
And they're sitting there being asked about free speech, and they say, oh, well, maybe you should ask the West about Facebook, because it doesn't seem like the West cares much about free speech.
They're asked about the role of women in their government.
They said, oh, don't worry, we'll be very inclusive.
We'll be very diverse and inclusive within the boundaries of Sharia law.
Which is to say, obviously, not at all are they going to model their government after the West.
But they know the language of the West.
They know the idiosyncrasies of the West.
They know how the West is going to react.
Going back to the very beginning of the Afghanistan war, they said, the West has the watches, but the Taliban's got the time.
We're just going to wait you out.
We know that you're not going to want to stay here for 100 years.
No one wants to stay in Afghanistan for 100 years.
So you're going to get tired.
Your democratic politics is going to pull you out of the country and then we'll come right back in.
And they're laughing at us doing it.
They're not only winning all of these battles, they're laughing at us while they do it.
Why?
I think the reason here is that the Taliban has a substantive vision of I don't think it's a particularly great vision.
I think it's a perverse vision, but it has substance.
They, in the Taliban, in this militant group of ragtag people, who I guess they're not so ragtag now because they have all our military equipment, they know what they want society to look like.
And they have cohesion among their group.
They've got buy-in on what they all want society to look like.
We in the West do not.
We don't have a substantive vision, certainly on the right we don't, and we don't have cohesion.
Okay, all we do is sort of criticize or we deconstruct things on the left and we debunk things on the right and we're all engaging in critical thinking or the prevailing analytical lenses or critical theory or a critical race theory.
It's all about tearing things down.
The West, in part, failed in Afghanistan because we didn't know what we wanted to do.
Did we want to just kill Osama bin Laden?
Did we want to just kill some terrorists?
Did we want to nation build?
Did we want to hoist the pride flag?
Did we want to instill 1970s feminism?
What are we doing?
Do we want to stop China?
Do we want to stop Russia?
Is it there to check their ambitions?
Do we want an empire?
Do we want to just be a nation?
What are we doing?
The Taliban knows what it's doing.
If we want to effectively offer an alternative for society, we need to know what that is.
We need to know what we're doing.
If you know what you're doing when you're buying auto parts, then you're probably going to rockauto.com.
So the other day I needed a car part, and what did I do?
You know what I did.
I went to the brick-and-mortar auto parts store so that I could answer a million questions from the guy.
I don't know the answers to most of them, and I got to wait for him to go in the back, not have the part, go online, probably to rockauto.com, order the part so that I could wait a few more weeks, and then pay twice as much.
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To give you an example of just how unserious we are in this country.
You've got the Taliban overseas just taking our equipment, taking our air bases, calling the shots on this evacuation, and the West sort of floundering because our political leaders don't know what they want to do.
You've got The liberal establishment locking down here in the United States.
So we're now being told the Delta Lambda Phi Beta Kappa is spreading.
You've all got to hunker down in your homes for just another 15 years to slow the spread.
We're being told you can't go outside.
You should mask your kid up.
You should never let your kid see anybody's face ever again.
You've got to stick everybody with a bunch of experimental drugs.
You've got to lose your business.
You've got to give up your way of life.
Meanwhile, there was a fundraiser apparently for the DCCC. This is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
It was in Napa and Nancy Pelosi was there giving an address.
There were at least 100 people by my count in the video, probably more.
None of them wearing masks.
None of them.
They're just sitting out in Napa.
They're having a nice time.
These are Democratic donors.
Some, you know, relatively small dollars.
Some much larger.
No one, not a single person at this event wearing masks.
Except the servers.
Could you imagine sending a worse message?
So Pelosi, no mask.
The guests, no mask.
But all the little peasant workers, all of the people bringing me my Chablis and my Chateau Neuf-du-Pape, while they have to wear masks, they're filthy, they're unclean.
We can't let them, but no, but we, we do not need to worry about that ourselves.
Mind you, this is the political party pushing the lockdowns.
This is the political party calling the governor of Florida, Ron Death Santus, because he won't force everyone to wear the face coverings.
Starting to see some parallels here between what's going on in Afghanistan and what's going on.
A lot of insistence on face coverings, a lot of destruction of traditional culture.
I'm not saying they're comparable, I'm just saying they're strange, eerie similarities.
And rampant hypocrisy.
Because we're not a serious country.
I was thinking about this when I was on a flight recently where they told us you're going to kill everyone if you don't wear the mask.
You've got to wear the mask the whole flight.
It's a nine-hour flight.
It doesn't matter.
Keep it on at all times while you're eating.
Unless you want this little warm cookie.
And then they put a little cookie in front of you and you're allowed to take your mask down and eat the delicious cookie.
But then you've got to put the mask right back up because you're at risk of dying or of killing other people.
It's such a serious risk that the only way you can really run that risk is if you want to eat a warm, delicious cookie.
It's just capricious.
It's just based on the whims of these politicians in whom we do not have any trust anymore.
Think about what happened last year.
The lockdowns...
Prevented a lot of elective surgeries and even some not so elective surgeries.
So when the hospitals shut down, when the doctor's offices went full bore on COVID, if you had a cancer surgery you were supposed to get, that would be pushed off.
If you had plastic surgery, just sort of regular cosmetic surgery, that would be pushed off.
If you had your regular sort of checkup type procedures, that would be pushed off, all to focus on the Wuhan cough.
So last year, US health services overall dropped 1%, even amid the COVID stuff.
Overall health procedures dropped 1%.
Non-COVID related services obviously dropped much, much more.
There was one type of surgery though that spiked last year.
Transgender surgery.
Transgender surgery Transgender surgery.
spiked significantly.
And they're focusing on just one type of transgender plastic surgery, which is for young women who think that they're men or who want to be men and who are mutilating their bodies to look more like men.
Apparently, young women with gender dysphoria are having their breasts removed in order to seem male in record numbers.
Those surgeries rose 12% last year 12% from 14,602 in 2019 to 16,353 in 2020.
This number does not include mastectomies, surgeries, and transgender treatments done by other medical professionals too.
This is only the ones done by plastic surgeons, but there are other procedures that are done by other doctors.
It's not a serious country.
First of all, that's not a country that really believes that we need to put off all elective surgeries until after COVID. Just like the party in Napa is not a gathering of people who really believe the Delta is super dangerous, who really believe the masks do anything, who really believe that we can't go out of our homes.
If they really believe that, they just wouldn't go to the lunch.
And they certainly would wear masks, but they don't really believe it.
They just want you to believe it.
It's just about the imposition of the rule from the party that is single-handedly just about pushing these rules.
The same thing goes even among these medical professionals.
We have to shut down all of the elective surgery except for the most delusional, unnecessary surgery of all, namely the one that mutilates perfectly healthy organs to indulge a fashionable delusion that runs contrary to reality.
But it's politically correct.
It's probably the most politically correct surgery.
And so now, everyone gets behind it.
Is it any wonder that our enemies are mocking us?
Meanwhile...
Here in the United States, even in generally red states, the coronavirus lockdown measures and the punishments are increasing dramatically.
Even in some of the red states.
So as RONA cases rise up in Mississippi, the state's Department of Health sent out an alert saying that people who test positive for coronavirus need to isolate for 10 days.
If they don't isolate for 10 days, they can face COVID. A fine of up to $5,000 and five years in prison.
Right now in California, for instance, if you don't disclose to your sexual partner that you've got AIDS, you won't be punished for that.
You won't be punished.
But if you have the Wuhan cough that for a lot of people doesn't even present as particularly serious, for the vast majority of people actually, you can go to prison for five years.
Is that a serious country?
It's not just our country.
It's over in Australia.
In Australia right now.
Australia makes Mississippi look like it's child's play.
Australia is so freaked out about the spread of the Rona that they are telling people to take all these precautions, lockdown, don't go out, don't buy things.
One animal shelter was so worried that people would come adopt the rescue dogs amid the surge of coronavirus that they just shot all the dogs dead.
They just killed a bunch of puppies to stop people from adopting the puppies.
Because if the people adopted the puppies, they would leave their homes and interact with them.
I'm not much of a dog person.
I always consider myself a people person.
I'm not like a dog guy or a cat guy.
Even I know that killing puppies is pretty extreme and not a great PR look.
But that's mass hysteria that you're seeing.
There was a woman who tweeted yesterday who said, this doesn't even relate exactly to coronavirus, only tangentially.
She tweeted out and said that she can no longer speak to her son, that she and her son always had a great relationship, but her son voted for Donald Trump.
And he's a conservative and she doesn't even, she doesn't understand him anymore.
She doesn't even know him anymore.
And at first I thought this was just a hoax, but I'm beginning to think it isn't a hoax.
It was this very long tweet threader saying I've been crying for days and days, but I just had to cut him out of my life completely.
I had to.
Because I can't, because he voted for Trump and so he's bad and he's evil.
But I miss, I hate this.
This is terrible.
It's really, stop sending me mean tweets, people.
This is so awful.
I think this could be real.
I think this is happening.
I think people are in the grips of a mass hysteria with their neurotic response to the coronavirus, with their neurotic response to Donald Trump, with their neuroses generally.
I don't mean this as if people all have these clinical problems.
There's a social contagion effect too.
Just as there is such a psychological condition as gender dysphoria, but there's a social contagion whereby it spreads when people accept these things.
The same is true for neurosis.
The same is true for hysteria.
People are really on edge.
Why is that?
Because we don't have cohesion.
Because we don't have things that are settled.
Because we don't agree on anything.
We don't even agree on the definition of man and the definition of woman.
And so we've had this debate about Afghanistan.
This actually does relate back to Afghanistan.
We've had this debate.
Should we project power in Afghanistan?
Should we pull back?
The simple fact is, if you don't have cohesion at home, if you don't know what you stand for, what you're doing, you can't project strength abroad, even if you want to.
Ben today...
He must have been listening to my show this morning because his title is Joe Biden is not competent in any sense.
He was either listening to me or Joe Biden's own Secretary of State.
Go check out Ben's show today.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
We have a mass hysteria going through not just the United States, just the Anglosphere, at least, and in the West, probably more broadly.
We're not focusing on the real challenges that we have as a country.
We are inventing new challenges.
We are indulging in delusions of victimization.
While the Taliban is taking all of our weapons in Afghanistan, hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons, We here in the West are worried about microaggressions against pan, tran, pseudo, bi, non-binary, sexual, whatever.
I mean, just completely fictitious categories.
In the United Kingdom right now, This is a symbol of our broader understanding of justice and how to run a society.
In the United Kingdom, they're retiring old patrol cars, old just regular run-of-the-mill cop cars to keep peace on the streets.
They are retiring them and replacing them with rainbow-colored anti-hate crime cars.
A police officer in the United Kingdom explains the move.
The rainbow cars, the hate crime cars, whatever we want to call them, they are part of our vehicle fleet.
So, you know, we're always replacing vehicles.
They get all of the police sort of insignia put on them as normal, but there will normally be then something added on that is to do with the rainbow side of things.
But they're out there as normal patrol vehicles.
Sometimes people will ask us, how can you afford to do that?
You know, that's not right to spend money on putting a rainbow on a car.
Well, actually the cost is quite minimal, but the confidence that it can bring by just having that rainbow on there.
And people say to me, you know, the impact of seeing the rainbow is so huge.
And the idea is that the cars are there in the communities, generally on normal policing patrol, just again to show the community that we want you to come forward.
If something is happening that you know isn't right, then we absolutely want you to come forward.
So it is there to try and give confidence to our LGBT plus community, but also to other underrepresented groups.
And unless we have an organisation where all of our staff feel that they can feel included, that they are included, I don't think we can deliver the best service to our communities.
Now I know that that was in another language.
That was in British.
So I would like to translate that for you into American.
Dear Taliban, dear China, please come invade us.
Please, we are no longer a serious people.
We do not understand anything about our society or criminal justice.
Oh, I'm becoming a little...
I don't know, my accent's not great.
This is pathetic.
This is like a Monty Python sketch.
This is...
I want to be a woman.
You want to be a woman?
I want to have babies.
This is literally a Monty Python sketch.
And now it is...
Police chiefs in the United Kingdom saying we're not going to focus on real crime anymore.
We're not going to focus on people stabbing you and taking your property.
So then at the philosophical level, we're not going to focus on the protection of private property.
We're not going to focus on the protection of our political order and our political tradition.
Instead, We're going to focus on finding out whether or not anyone in the community has any objection in their own mind or conscience to men dressing up like women.
And we're going to root that out because transphobia, that's not what we're going to stand for here in the United Kingdom.
Look, it's ridiculous in the UK that they have rainbow-colored police cars trying to root out thought crimes among people who object to the idea that men should be dancing around in stilettos.
But we have the same sort of thing happening here in the United States.
We do.
Right now...
Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK. Tony Blair, who was the Prime Minister who brought his nation into the war on terror.
He was PM while George Bush was the president.
He was a representative of the kind of neoliberal consensus of the 1990s.
He was sort of the equivalent of Bill Clinton, but Bill Clinton wasn't all that different from George W. Bush.
It was all the same kind of thing.
We're going to have, really, rip-roaring economy at home.
We're going to cut taxes a lot.
We're going to cut some regulation, but we're going to project power overseas.
We're going to project the kind of liberal vision of society over on the Middle East.
Tony Blair is furious.
He said the decision to pull out of Afghanistan is imbecilic.
And he wrote a 2,700-word piece on his website about this.
I will spare you the piece.
But it's worth pointing out his problems here, because I think it actually gets to the heart of what we're all dealing with.
He says, the world is now uncertain of where the West stands, because it's so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was not driven by grand strategy, but by politics.
We didn't need to do it.
We chose to do it.
it.
We did it in an obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending the forever wars as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even 10 years ago and in circumstances in which troop numbers had declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat in 18 months.
The absence of across the aisle consensus and collaboration and the deep politicization of foreign policy and security issues is visibly atrophying US power.
And for Britain out of Europe and suffering the end of the Afghanistan mission by our greatest ally with little or no consultation, we have serious reflection to do.
So he's also bringing up Brexit here.
He also didn't really like Brexit.
So notice what he's saying.
First, he calls out, I think this is the most important part, he calls out the politicization of foreign policy.
Now, it's got that word policy in it, you know, from politics, and he's saying it shouldn't be politicized.
What he's saying is that the people should have really no say over foreign policy.
This shouldn't be open to democratic debate.
This should be done by the experts who know what liberalism stands for, and they're going to spread it around the world, and don't you dare oppose it.
He's saying that we pulled out of Afghanistan because of this imbecilic political slogan about the forever wars.
This imbecilic democratic process whereby the people decided they didn't want to be there anymore.
By the way, in some ways following the wisdom of the founding fathers, virtually all of whom warned explicitly against continual warfare.
I'm thinking of James Madison.
I'm thinking of Washington's warnings about entangling alliances and Jefferson then invokes them too.
It's imbecilic that we would allow the people to make this decision.
Now, people don't know what the West stands for.
Right, Tony.
That's the problem.
You've identified the problem, but you're getting the order wrong.
It's not that now we don't know what the West stands for because we pulled out of this godforsaken backwater in the Middle East.
We pulled out of the godforsaken backwater...
And we bungled the political mission there because we don't know what the West stands for.
What is it?
What are we after?
This was the grave problem of the 1990s.
The 1990s, we won the Cold War.
At the turn of the 1990s, the Berlin Wall comes crumbling down.
The Soviet Union is dismantled.
Largely because Ronald Reagan spent them into oblivion.
And so now, the United States leading the West broadly is the superpower in the world.
And I remember there was a battle at the 1992 convention, the Republican convention.
Who was going to be the nominee?
Was it going to be George Bush, the kind of liberal moderate internationalist?
Or was it going to be Pat Buchanan, who's this sort of acerbic conservative culture warrior?
And the rival speeches gave rival visions of society.
George Bush, he barely talked about the culture.
Already you had political correctness, wokeism, the proto-wokeism, leftism, rotting out the country since the 1960s.
And George Bush didn't want to touch it.
He said, forget the culture war at home.
We've just got to win the peace.
We've got to spread our markets overseas.
We've got to trade with everybody.
We've got to dominate the global economy.
That's all that matters.
Shoot up GDP. Pat Buchanan said, no, it was called the culture war speech.
We've got a big culture war coming at home.
We are going to be grappling with what the relationship of the citizen is to the state.
We're going to be grappling with what the nature of man is.
We're going to be debating what marriage is.
We're going to be debating who we are, what we stand for.
So we've got to figure out those questions.
In order to effectively project power abroad.
And obviously George Bush won.
The right ignored the culture problems for decades.
And now look where we are.
And the same thing was true of the sort of Clinton Democrats.
Same thing was true of Tony Blair and the neoliberals everywhere.
They just got the order wrong.
They couldn't get their own house in order.
And so they very ineffectively projected power overseas.
You're seeing this play out right now in Jamaica.
Jamaica of all places.
Jamaica right now, there's a clip going around of a protest outside of an American embassy in Jamaica.
And were they protesting the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan?
No.
Were they protesting the lack of concern for black lives and George Floyd?
No.
They were protesting the fact that the U.S. embassy in Jamaica was flying the rainbow flag.
And as you might be able to see in the background, the U.S. Embassy continues to fly the LGBT flag, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender flag, in breach of the Vienna Convention, Articles 31E, Article 20 and Article 41.
They are being hostile towards our laws, our culture, and our own democratic system.
Instead of flying the Jamaican flag for emancipendence, they have decided to fly that flag, and that is an insult to our country.
A lot of liberals in America are going to be very confused by this clip.
No, you're black.
You're from a small island nation.
You're on our side.
You don't totally go along with the latest liberal fashions and ideas?
No.
Because the rainbow flag is not primarily a symbol of being nice to homosexuals.
It's not primarily a symbol of being nice to men who think that they're women.
It's not primarily a symbol of kindness or charity.
It is a symbol of imperial hegemony.
That's why it's being flown at the U.S. embassy.
That's why the United States flies it at embassies all around the world.
Including in Kabul.
Wow, can you wonder why we lost the country?
It is a symbol.
The reason it's a symbol is because the LGBT flag, now they've expanded it even more.
It's the progress flag, so it includes all this other racial and sexual stuff.
Regardless of what it includes, it is a symbol not of a nation, not of a particular people, not of a particular place.
It's a symbol of Of allegedly universal values.
The meaning of the LGBT rainbow flag would be the same in Jamaica as it is in the United States.
Would be the same in Timbuktu as it is in the United States.
Whereas the symbol of the stars and stripes would not be there.
The stars and stripes, the American flag, is a symbol of the American nation.
It refers to a particular place and a particular people.
But the LGBT, the rainbow flag, that's for everyone.
The BLM flag does this to some degree as well.
And so we fly it as a symbol of our empire.
But not everybody likes our empire.
The Jamaicans who are protesting don't support men becoming women as their raison d'etre, as the beating heart of their nation.
They actually don't approve of it.
And I would say probably most other countries around the world don't approve of it or just don't think of it very much.
It's not what animates them as a people.
And frankly, a lot of people in the United States don't believe that that flag represents them either.
Probably most people don't feel that that flag represents them.
And so you've got this, what I think is kind of a secondary debate.
Do we project power overseas?
Do we have an American empire?
Do we hold territories?
Do we hold firm?
What American power?
What are we standing for?
By the American empire, we mean flying the rainbow flag everywhere and defending the right of men to become women.
By mutilating themselves in cosmetic surgery, then I don't want to project that power.
That would be bad to project that.
If American power means projecting Christendom and the values that traditionally have animated our culture, then yeah, I'd like to project that.
But you've got to decide what exactly.
This is what gives me a little sympathy for Joe Biden.
He has blown this thing as much as you possibly can.
I mean, he has bungled, he has withdrawn from Afghanistan in the most incompetent way possible.
But the problem is a lot bigger than Joe Biden.
Joe Biden, this was some days ago now, he's somewhat changing his tune, but his tune changes by the hour because he doesn't know what end is up.
Joe Biden, in a very testy interview on ABC, defended himself because he said there was no non-chaotic way to get out of Afghanistan.
When you had the government of Afghanistan...
The leader of that government getting in a plane and taking off and going to another country.
When you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off.
That's what happened.
That's simply what happened.
But we've all seen the pictures.
We've seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17.
We've seen Afghans falling.
That was four days ago, five days ago.
What did you think when you first saw those pictures?
What I thought was we have to gain control of this.
So you don't think this could have been handled?
This actually could have been handled better in any way?
No mistakes?
No, I don't think it could have been handled in a way that there...
So that clip was four or five days ago.
I didn't want to miss it.
I wanted to get to it because it's, one, just the snapping.
It shows you things really are not working out the way that the blob, the liberal establishment, had thought that they would.
You know, Joe Biden didn't campaign for president.
We now forget that.
He didn't campaign.
The whole blob just protected him the whole time.
But now they're not protecting him.
Now there's a little discord, even among the liberal establishment.
He's sticking by his story, though.
There was no non-chaotic way to pull out.
He's probably right about that.
There were better ways than this, that's for sure.
You didn't need to leave hundreds of billions of dollars worth of equipment and thousands of Americans.
You didn't need to lose Bagram Air Base.
You didn't need...
It could have been handled better.
But the broader problem is bigger than Joe Biden.
Joe Biden right now, he's going to just be focused on trying to cling to whatever power and approval he's got.
A reporter just confronted him at a press briefing.
Asked him about a public opinion poll that shows that most people no longer think the man is competent.
A new poll out today shows Americans wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan.
But they disapprove of the way you've handled it.
The poll also found that based in part on what's transpired in the last week, the majority of Americans, and forgive me, I'm just the messenger, no longer consider you to be competent, focused, or effective in the job.
I haven't seen that poll.
It's out there.
From CBS this morning.
What would you say to those Americans who no longer believe that you're up to the job?
I had a basic decision to make.
I either withdraw America from a 20-year war that, depending on whose analyses you accept, cost us $150 million a day for 20 years or $300 million a day for 20 years.
Or I end the war.
And I decided to end the war.
So, Biden reacted with his most frequently used political tool, which is to laugh at the reporter, or to laugh at the opponent.
You'll remember he did this during the vice presidential debates with Paul Ryan when Romney was running in 2012.
Anything Ryan would say, most of which was true, Joe Biden would just laugh at.
With the big Joe Biden teeth.
Those gigantic artificial teeth.
And he would just laugh it off and shrug it and let it go.
And so that's what's happening here.
The reporter, who is presumably on his side, or at least sympathetic to it, is saying, hey, most people don't think you're confident.
I'm sorry, don't shoot the messenger.
I hate to say this to you, but most people don't think you're confident.
He goes, ha.
And then he just keeps going back to, I think in a way that's actually pretty smart, to his most defensible position, which is he's trying to make it about should we have pulled out, should we not have pulled out.
But that's not the debate.
That isn't the debate.
The majority of Americans said we should pull out.
The debate is how should we have pulled out?
Could this have been handled better?
I think everyone believes it could have been handled much, much, much better.
But Joe Biden doesn't want to answer for his gross incompetence because that would put the debate on the wrong side of things.
The defense secretary right now refuses to state how he advised Joe Biden.
Not just on whether or not to withdraw, but how he could withdraw.
Defense secretary was asked this on ABC. He knows it's a poisonous political issue, and so he's got no comment.
Did you want to see a small force remain in Afghanistan?
Martha, and you know I'm not going to tell you what my recommendation to our president was.
I would just tell you that like everyone else, the president listened to our input.
Again, he conducted a very rigorous and thoughtful process and he made a decision.
And I support that decision.
And at the end of the day, the president made his decision and he wouldn't say, obviously, which one he was leaning toward.
The reporters are still going after them.
You know it's bad when the reporters are going after the elected Democrats.
There was a reporter who asked a Pentagon spokesman and said, how did you get this so wrong?
And he didn't really have an answer for that.
But I do have an answer for that.
I know how they got this so wrong.
And it's not...
It's not just having to do with this air base or that embassy or we had to pull out at this day and the Taliban made this deal in the previous administration.
The reason we got this so wrong is one...
Politics is not just about zingers.
It's not just about one-liners in debates and on Twitter even, or as much as I love good zingers on Twitter.
There is a basic competency that you need to have, and many of the people staffing, not just the elected side, but the State Department, the Defense Department, the bureaucracy side, a lot of them don't have even basic competence.
That's gone now.
And The other way we got this so wrong is we can't answer the most fundamental questions about our country.
What are we here for?
What do we stand for?
Who are the American people?
What is the American nation?
Where is the American border?
What is the difference between a man and a woman?
If we can't answer those basic questions about who we are, what we stand for, then we are never going to know what we're doing.
What we're doing in our specific job or what we're doing as a matter of grand strategy.
You've got to answer the basic questions first.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
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.
Many people in this country and across the West are eager to give up their basic rights and liberties for fear of COVID, but I have a different solution, which I'll suggest today.
Also, President Biden warns those in the path of Tropical Storm Henry that they must remember to wear their masks when the storm hits.
Also, the media claims there is a rising trend of anti-mask parents physically assaulting teachers.
And finally, the cancel mob has taken a special interest in the hunt for a new host of Jeopardy.
