Ep. 830 - Biden Leaves Guns, Lots Of Guns For Terrorist Maniacs
The U.S. abandons 1,000 Americans in Afghanistan, lockdowns kill newborn babies in Australia, and a new study finds that only 22% of cable “news” is news.
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As our withdrawal from Afghanistan comes to an end, we are finally getting an idea of just how much we're leaving behind.
According to a government watchdog group, the government won't give us these numbers, but the watchdog group will, the United States is leaving behind 75,000 vehicles, 600,000 weapons, 208 aircrafts, and very likely 1,000 208 aircrafts, and very likely 1,000 Americans that the government just can't evacuate.
Biden continues to stonewall the press, which is hard to trust to begin with in light of a new study showing that just 22% of cable news is actually news.
But the word is getting out, and people seem to trust the liberal gatekeepers less and less each day, which is how a conservative Fox News host has become the new king of late night, top ratings among all of late night, and how a conservative radio host may very well become the next governor of California.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from OldSchooled, who says, Little do the Afghan refugees know that they are simply fleeing one radical dictatorship to enter another.
That is true.
They will be going from the Taliban-run country into the country run by...
It's Tonhamid ibn Farouk al-Fauci, who is the supreme enlightened mullah of the progressive public health dictatorship.
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How much are we leaving behind in Afghanistan?
I think when people hear that we left some military equipment in Afghanistan, they're thinking, oh yeah, we left a crate of guns.
Oh yeah, we left some uniforms, probably left maybe a helicopter or two.
Maybe we left some trucks and Humvees and stuff.
No, we left an army's worth of extremely powerful weaponry, the most powerful weaponry on earth.
75,000 vehicles, 600,000 weapons, 208 aircraft.
That is a lot.
Since 2001, the United States has spent $83 billion on Afghan security forces and training and equipment for the alleged Afghan nation and the Afghan national security that folded instantly.
Like the very second that we said we were going to leave.
They just completely folded.
Which is really insult to injury.
It is really salt in the wound.
Because not only did we invade to get rid of the Taliban and now the Taliban is right back.
But all we've really accomplished...
Sure, we killed bin Laden in Pakistan.
We killed a bunch of other terrorists in the meantime.
But today, as a matter of geopolitics, who's running what nations, all we really managed to accomplish...
Give billions of dollars of arms to the government that we said we were going to kick out because they harbored the terrorists that perpetrated 9-11.
That is the sort of incompetence that it is very difficult to wrap your head around until you hear those numbers.
According to this watchdog group that said, we found a federal audit that detailed up to $200 million worth of drones that had disappeared.
Just gone.
We don't know where the 600,000 weapons are within the country.
And then beyond this stuff, I just got an alert yesterday on my phone.
It popped up from the Wall Street Journal.
Alert.
The U.S. believes that 1,500 Americans are still in Afghanistan and is actively in touch with and trying to evacuate 500 of them, Secretary of State Blinken said.
Go on.
Give me more.
It seems a natural question would be, what about the other thousand?
So you're saying there's 1,500 Americans still in Afghanistan for some reason, and the State Department is in touch with 500 of them.
So you're in touch with one-third of the Americans stuck in Afghanistan.
You're not even in touch with the other thousand, let alone you're going to be able to get them out.
How do you...
I was talking to my wife last night.
Sweet little Elisa.
Very perceptive young woman.
Doesn't work in politics professionally.
Doesn't study international relations, military, statecraft.
And yet, she had a very good question, which is, you know, we've been planning this evacuation for years at this point, for many years at this point.
And you've got the military there and you've got the civilians there.
Wouldn't, and forgive my ignorance, wouldn't it have maybe made more sense to get the American civilians out first?
I don't know.
I'm not Klaus Fitz, I'm not Metternich, but it seems to me that might have been smart.
A little too smart, it turns out, for our federal government.
Biden was asked about this.
He gave a press conference, again, about build back better and we're going to fund pre-K, so please don't ask me about Afghanistan.
He gave this statement.
I can't even say it's a press conference because he doesn't take questions from the press.
He is asked at the very end of it, what about the other Americans?
He's got nothing.
Thank you all very much, and thank the press for being here.
We're going to go private now.
We're going to go private.
What's the difference?
What have you been doing?
There's that smirk.
Mr.
President, what about the Americans?
What about the Americans still there?
The smirk.
And then you hear that?
The clip is still going on.
But they cut the...
He's still playing right now.
But the White House cut the microphone.
Because the White House...
One, they've clearly told Joe Biden, do not answer any questions about the Americans that you are stranding in Afghanistan.
But two, they don't even trust him to be able to resist.
So maybe he doesn't turn his back and run away this time.
Maybe he does accidentally give the press an answer.
And so they actually cut his microphone.
Disrespectful not only to the press, disrespectful not only to the American people, obviously very disrespectful to the Americans stuck in Afghanistan, disrespectful to the president.
They're just going to, uh-uh, can't let Joe answer an urgent question from the press.
By the way...
So the current estimate is that the Americans are only going to strand a thousand of their own people in Afghanistan.
Only a thousand.
But we just had a report.
There's apparently a serious threat of a terror attack at the Kabul airport.
This is where all of the Americans are now.
This is the epicenter of the withdrawal, because we gave up the airbase for some stupid reason.
So we've got just the Kabul airport now is how we're going to get people out of Afghanistan.
And ISIS-K, this is the new ISIS-2, electric boogaloo, has come back.
They are apparently warring with the Taliban, because let's not forget, while we've pretended that we've just been building up a country all these years and only fighting the Taliban, Afghanistan is in the midst of a civil war.
And sure, we're backing certain forces there, but there are a lot of forces at play, one of which is this offshoot of ISIS. And so ISIS is threatening to attack the airport.
So now the Taliban and the U.S. are saying, get away from the airport, do not come there.
So it's slowing the evacuation even more.
But the withdrawal date is still firm.
The Taliban won't back down, and Joe Biden doesn't have a spine.
So August 31st, we've got to be completely out of there.
The number of Americans we strand could be much, much higher.
Mr.
President, what about them?
He just smirks.
He smirks in part because he doesn't have an answer.
This is the classic Joe Biden tactic.
When he doesn't have an answer for something, he just kind of laughs and giggles and smiles.
He used it on Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice presidential debates.
It's really infuriating, but it's all he's got because there's not too much going on between his ears.
Speaking Of questionable air travel practices.
How's that for a segue?
Delta Airlines is going to be charging unvaccinated employees $200 per month extra on their healthcare bills if they refuse to take the jab.
The reason is they say that the hospitalizations for the unvaccinated employees, they're very high, and so, quote, this surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company.
In recent weeks, since the rise of the B.1.617.2 variant, all Delta employees who have been hospitalized with COVID were not fully vaccinated.
Okay, fine, whatever.
The policy, we don't even need to get into that.
I'm just curious, and maybe you've heard about this and I just haven't.
The B.1.617.2 variant of COVID. Oh, you mean the Delta variant?
Delta Airlines doesn't want to use the new politically correct term Delta for the COVID variant because that doesn't make them look good.
It's just bad PR. But they also don't want to use the term Indian variant, which is what it was called in the first place, but then it was deemed politically incorrect because you're not allowed to refer to non-Western countries that create viruses.
You're allowed to call them We refer to them by Western countries, like the UK variant, for instance, or even the South African variant.
We called that for a while because it's like sort of a, you know, obviously there's a complicated racial history to South Africa.
But the Indian variant, you're not allowed to say.
China virus, you're not allowed to say.
So Delta, as a very politically correct airline, is really, really stuck between a rock and a hard place.
This is where we're going as society.
I mean, forget COVID for a second, forget Delta Airlines.
This, to me, is the height of scientism, jargon, political correctness.
We've just got to refer to everything in the most clinical way possible.
B.1.617.2.
It's just jargon that does not actually convey any information, anything that we're actually talking about.
But even if, by the way, even if these employees get the vaccine, it turns out that the vaccines just aren't that good.
So you actually are going to need a booster shot from the vaccine, even if you just got the vaccine a couple of months ago, this being pushed by Pfizer, by Johnson & Johnson, by the whole blob.
Just 15 more days, just 15 more jabs, just 27 more boosters.
Johnson & Johnson is the latest vaccine company to come out and say that people who took it are going to need a booster joining Pfizer.
Pfizer was the two-shot vaccine.
You remember, you got the first one, you wait a few weeks, you get the second one, then you're good.
99.99, 127% protection from the virus.
It's the greatest vaccine ever made.
It wasn't rushed.
I I mean, I know they made it in like five minutes, but it's not hasty.
It's not rushed.
It's totally...
There's no side effects.
Well, okay, maybe there's myocarditis and periocarditis, and it's happening in young, healthy people, but there's no...
Johnson& Johnson, one and done.
There's Johnson& Johnson.
You don't even need two shots, and there's zero side effects except for the blood clots that killed some of those women, but there's...
Otherwise, there's no...
Well, they did actually have to pause it because it was that scary, but it's fine.
Now get your booster.
It's so effective that you need a booster within a few months.
What a joke.
What vaccine have you ever taken where you need a booster shot?
Not just as part of a series of vaccines, but you need an unaccounted for, unexpected booster shot a few months later.
I've never heard of that.
You've never heard of that.
Because the public health bureaucracy is just making this up as they go along.
Caught with their pants down, making it up as they go.
Do you know what I think this is about?
I think there are broader economic and political implications here.
I think just everything's moving toward a subscription model, you know?
I think your TV, obviously, is a subscription model.
Now, movies, books are on subscription.
Your software, you know, Microsoft Word, that's a subscription model now.
Everything.
Your razors are a subscription.
Everything, including now...
Your vaccines.
It's okay.
It's cool.
You sign up for Dollar Vax Club.
And every month you get another booster that you can shoot up to protect you from the Wuhan cough that poses a grave risk to very few people.
Strange stuff.
Strange how that would happen.
You know what we're going to hear, by the way.
In six months, a year, we're going to say, look, just take your fourth booster.
It's just the fourth booster and we can get back to normal life.
And then you know what the conservatives are going to say?
They're going to say, hey guys, you shouldn't take your fourth booster.
Look, maybe your third booster is fine, but you shouldn't take your fourth one.
Hey!
They're going to say, you know, you need to wear 15 masks whenever you go outside, and your kids need to wear 20 masks.
And you know what the conservatives are going to say?
They're going to say, hey, hey, that's crazy.
Nineteen, at most.
That's what they're going to do.
That's been the effectiveness of the conservative movement for many years.
Now, there are inducements to get you to take the shots and the boosters and everything.
You remember Bill de Blasio, that slob, that disgusting man?
The mayor of New York would go out, and he had, seriously, in public, he had a cheeseburger and french fries.
And he, like an animal, and to us, who he certainly considers to be animals, he starts chewing on the burger.
He goes, mmm, good burger!
Take the experimental drug, let me shoot you up!
Then you get free burger!
Yes, hogs!
We'll give you extra slop if you let us inject you with these chemicals!
And french fries!
So, de Blasio pioneered this method, but different companies have been following suit, including Krispy Kreme.
Look, I love Krispy Kreme.
I love the burgers that de Blasio was talking about.
Krispy Kreme has been offering people a free donut if they show their vaccine card.
Anytime, any Krispy Kreme, you show your vaccine card, you get a free donut.
Pretty good.
That's great.
I would love a free donut.
That's not attracting enough people to get the vaccine.
So now, Krispy Kreme is offering two free donuts.
That's how you know our society has become extraordinarily decadent.
One free Krispy Kreme is not enough to bribe us into taking the chemicals.
You need two.
You need two Krispy Kremes.
Who eats two Krispy Kremes at a time?
That's too much.
Now, the Daily Caller pointed this out.
There is an irony to Krispy Kremes' campaign.
Namely, 78% of COVID hospitalizations have been of obese people.
You'll hear very often that there are disparities in the people who are going to the hospitals.
One was that black people are being affected.
Communities of color are being affected much, much more than white communities.
Is it because the virus is racist?
It's a white supremacist virus from China.
It's a Chinese white supremacist virus?
No.
No.
It's because the actual criterion that will determine how severe the infection will be.
One of the most severe ones is obesity.
And black people are much more likely to be obese, especially black women.
So, in order to solve this problem of public health, Krispy Kreme giving out some of the fattiest, sugariest donuts on earth, people stuffing their faces, I'm sure that'll fix it, right?
Right?
The CDC is pushing it too.
Carrot and stick.
You know, there's the carrot of the Krispy Kreme, and then there's the stick of the government.
And the government is coming out and demanding that people take their vax boosters.
We are told by the CDC, quote, the vaccines remain highly effective against hospitalizations.
The bulwark they provide against infection with the virus is weakened.
So...
The vaccine, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
The vaccine's very, very effective.
Very effective.
They're really good.
They stop, you know, the hospital, but the infection is bad.
Okay, well, if it does not prevent infection, but it does prevent any severe complications from infection, then you're good, right?
Why do I need...
Why do I need the booster?
Well, no, it's a great vaccine, but you need to shoot it up again because it's not working.
Okay.
If you want more information on the vaccines, I've got even worse news for you.
The federal government does not have its act together there either.
Joe Biden, President Biden trying to avoid talking about Afghanistan, trying to exclusively talk about COVID because, according to a Daily Wire poll we just put out, People are blaming him for Afghanistan.
It's really hurting his poll numbers, but the only positive he's got going is his handling of COVID. So he says, if you want information, go to vaccines.com.
If you go to vaccines.com, vaccines.com, or text your zip code to 438829.
Now, for those of you who are listening to that rather than watching it, We sort of alluded to this with the
Krispy Kreme mention.
There are negative side effects, unintended consequences of the COVID lockdowns and all the COVID measures.
So you see it very clearly, Krispy Kreme.
Here, show your Vax card.
Oh, you're healthy.
Good, we're going to stuff you full of donuts and put you at a far greater risk of severe complications of coronavirus.
In Australia, it's much worse than that.
It's much sadder than that.
Four newborn babies just died in Australia.
Because of the COVID restrictions.
So four newborn babies in Adelaide needed heart surgery when they were born.
A great number of newborns who need heart surgery.
And thanks to modern medicine they can get it taken care of.
But they were not able to get it taken care of because in Adelaide they did not have the resources to perform the heart surgery and they could not be transferred interstate because of travel restrictions that are keeping people locked in their homes.
So in order to prevent People from getting the cough, because there were one or two cases in Australia, and because of that they locked down everything.
We're not even talking about lots of deaths or even lots of hospitalizations, just some cases of the virus that doesn't pose a grave threat to most people.
Four newborn cute little babies died, and their parents are going to have to deal with that for the rest of their lives.
And a cute little baby whom they carried for nine months, a cute little helpless vulnerable baby, was sacrificed on the altar of neurotic public health fears over a cough, over something that for most people feels like a bad flu.
Actually, for a lot of people, it doesn't even feel as bad as the flu.
That's bad stuff.
That's not a good situation for anybody.
If it only saves one life, it's worth it.
That's what Andrew Cuomo told us during the COVID lockdown.
If it only saves one life, and this is the fear, forget even a second about the virus itself.
Forget even just dunking on Democrats or Republicans or left or right.
This is what happens when society loses its sense of balance, its sense of the broader picture, when it misses the forest for the trees.
During even the Trump coronavirus briefings, the only people who would speak were Fauci and Dr.
Scarfe.
What about the military?
We didn't hear.
What about the economics advisors?
We didn't hear.
It was almost exclusively Fauci and Dr.
Scarf.
They focused only on public health, and the rest of the country went to pot.
That's going on around the world as well, and we still haven't learned our lesson.
You know, speaking of economics, The Daily Wire is currently looking for a podcast marketing manager to join our marketing team.
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you here.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
A lot of death on the mind these days.
So Kind of a morbid thing.
We're hearing about Afghanistan.
We're hearing about the coronavirus.
We're hearing about the victims of the COVID lockdowns.
But sometimes when you find out people are going to die, it's not the worst thing in the world.
Like, for instance, Dylann Roof.
Dylann Roof is the guy who murdered a bunch of black people in a church.
In cold blood, he knew some of these people, but he had these sort of racial theories that he was a white supremacist type guy, and so he just goes in and in cold blood, murders them all, and he is convicted of this, and then he's sentenced to death.
Then he appealed his death sentence, and then it was affirmed yesterday.
He will be placed on death row and ultimately executed by the state.
Now, I noticed something.
There were some people Who said, I oppose the death penalty and I oppose the death penalty even for Dylann Roof.
But for most people, when I was seeing most of the commentary on this, popular and otherwise, it was people saying something to the effect of, look, I oppose the death penalty.
But there are exceptions.
Yeah, we're getting, yeah.
I oppose the death penalty, except for this guy.
Yeah, I'm not going to miss this guy.
And I just think they're missing the point entirely.
That's actually the worst take you can possibly have on the death penalty, in my view.
Because I'm very pro-death penalty.
I'm pro-death penalty for the people who are convicted of their capital offenses and sentenced to it, including Dylann Roof.
I'm pro-death penalty because I think that it's good for the question of justice.
I think it helps society to understand justice.
I think it meets out the just retribution for the people who have committed the offenses.
I think it offers a deterrent effect, especially when it is carried through.
And I think, by the way, it's rehabilitative because hanging concentrates the mind.
I think that the death penalty, when it is just in a just system, is...
Totally right.
I am in agreement here with the Bible.
I am in agreement here with St.
Paul, with the great doctors of the church, St.
Thomas Aquinas, among many others.
And I am in agreement with many, many, many popes throughout history, if that sort of thing is persuasive to you, including the popes, saints, and including a beatified pope who carried out the death penalty, ordered the death penalty himself in the papal states.
I think it is totally a hard-locked case for the death penalty.
And yet, the argument against the death penalty is just revenge.
I don't think it's revenge.
I don't think it's vengeance.
I think it's just punishment.
I think the state does not carry the sword in vain.
But the people who say, I oppose the death penalty, except for this guy, they are engaging in revenge, right?
I mean, they are actually...
Proving their own point on the death penalty, at least as regards their view of it.
The reason that they are especially upset with Dylann Roof is because he's committed this special crime of white supremacy.
But if the situation were reversed, if it were a black supremacist or something who killed a bunch of white people, I strongly suspect they wouldn't make a big deal.
Actually, I know that because in the Capitol offenses that do fall closer to those lines, they usually stay mum.
This is very bad.
We either need to have a standard of justice or we're just going to descend into various interest groups clamoring for revenge.
Not a very good situation for society, which unfortunately is the way that we're going.
Which brings me to the news.
The news.
What you are getting on the news.
There is a new study out, allegedly a damning study, that shows that 22% of cable news is news.
The study finds that hard news, in terms of the statement of facts and on-the-spot reporting, amounts to just 22.3% of what goes on in cable news.
That's 9 minutes and 15 seconds of hard news for every single hour of broadcasting.
There is nearly twice as much commercial time, time for advertisements, as there is for hard news.
Then interviews with newsmakers account for another 16% of broadcast time.
And then the rest...
The vast majority of cable news time, 60%, is commentary from a host or panel discussions or analysis from a panel of talking heads.
Everyone is, on the left and the right, they're reacting to this as though this is an indictment of cable news.
It's only 22% news!
60% is just opinion!
That sounds about right, actually.
I think that's probably about right.
Norm MacDonald, the great political philosopher Norm MacDonald, did this bit where he said that back in the day, you only had half an hour of news per day.
You know, you just turn on the nightly news, it was half an hour of news.
And even then, they'd have some fluff story.
And now it's 24 hours of news, but actually half an hour is about right.
So they just fill it up with a bunch of other nonsense.
There's only so much news, and there are only so many facts that But, even though I know around here we like to say facts don't care about your feelings, and facts are really important, and I'm not in any way casting aspersions on facts, but there is more to life than just plain, shallow, narrow facts.
We also need to know what those facts mean, which is where that other 60% comes in, and actually the 16% of the interviews, too.
It's not enough to know I'm two hands, I'm two feet, I'm a head, shoulders, I'm blood and lungs and kidneys and organs and guts and gore.
It's not enough to know just the kind of plain physical facts if I don't know that I'm also a person.
And if I don't know that I also have some meaning and a place in the world and some purpose and context.
It's not enough to know That there was an explosion in Kabul or even that the explosion was perpetrated by the new ISIS group.
It's also helpful to know The context of that.
What that means.
I actually think the right is pretty bad about this.
Because the left has gone totally into the realm of feelings.
The left has gone into this crazy realm of just everything subjective.
And if I say that I'm a purple spotted elephant, then I really am, even if I'm just a dude.
And so I get that the right has reacted to that by focusing in on facts.
You know, we're just going to talk about the physical, plain, incontrovertible facts of the world.
But that's not politics.
That's not philosophy.
That's not human life.
That's not actually how we experience the world.
There's the physical stuff, but then we need to know what it means.
And I think if the right would, sure, keep your focus on facts, enjoy your facts, but then go a little further than that.
And if we would recognize that it is important to know how these things make us feel, one, but also what they mean in the broader philosophical, theological context, I think that would serve us a lot better.
Good job, cable news, for not having so much news.
Speaking of cable news, shocking story, Greg Gutfeld is the king of late-night comedy.
Greg Gutfeld, a Fox News host of many years at this point, now has a late-night comedy show.
He has a larger audience than Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert.
Which is even more shocking because he's on cable and they're on network.
And many, many, many, many more people have network TV than have cable TV. It's also shocking because they're hosting traditional comedy shows.
He's on the conservative news channel.
But he's crushing them.
He's crushing them because people...
I think are beginning to tune out.
I think the gatekeepers lost their stranglehold, especially with the advent of the internet.
They tried to grab it again with big tech.
Even that, it's not totally working out for them.
And so they're nervous.
Gavin Newsom right now in California, New Salini, he's very nervous.
He faces a recall election.
Now, it's going on right now.
It's a yes or no vote.
And then if they vote yes to recall him, Then the top vote-getter on the list of candidates is going to become the new governor of California.
Gavin Newsom was playing it cool for a number of weeks.
Now he's losing it.
He just had an interview with my friend Alex Michelson, and he's turning the fear-mongering up to 11.
We're going to win overwhelmingly.
We just have to remind people the imperative to vote no on the question that is in front of them.
And you say that Larry Elder is the clear favorite on the other side.
Yeah.
So I think there are a lot of people that have asked me, how much can a governor really do in a year with a Democratic supermajority?
What's the answer to that?
I mean, you can lie down and veto everything coming out of the legislature.
You can veto everything that comes from the legislature.
But there's a veto-proof majority, right?
There is and there isn't.
A lot of things are stubborn.
There's a lot of diversity even within the Democratic caucus.
At the end of the day, you could start to vandalize all the executive orders.
You can eliminate the masking requirement for public schools.
You can eliminate the vaccine requirements for public health care workers.
So many of the things that I signed through an executive order can be done overnight.
You can appoint judges without any oversight and consideration.
That's going to have an impact for years and years and years.
So it is a profound consequence.
And also you have the bully pulpit of the fifth largest economy in the world.
And you have a midterm election coming up with another California who wants to take out Nancy Pelosi.
Consequences are pretty extraordinary.
Pretty, pretty extraordinary.
Man, good on Alex Michelson.
I don't think Alex is particularly conservative.
In fact, I think he's a liberal, sort of like a more sane, moderate liberal.
But he's pretty fair.
He pushes pretty hard.
Did you see that?
He said, hey, so the guy who wins the recall is just going to serve out the remainder of your term.
That's not a lot of time.
And you've got a ton of Democrats in the legislature.
So what's the big deal?
Well, you know, it's a really big deal because he could veto stuff.
Yeah, but you've got a veto-proof majority, the Democrats do, in the legislature.
Yeah, well, but he's got the bully pulpit.
Okay, this is really weak stuff from Newsom.
And Newsom's a slick politician.
But what this is about is Gavin Newsom trying to hold on to his political career.
There won't be a ton of consequences for Democrats.
There will be some, but there won't be a ton of consequences for Democrats.
If Larry Elder or whoever wins the election.
But Newsom's political career almost certainly will be over.
And that's what they're really worried about.
Which is why they're going hard at Larry.
Larry's the front runner.
If not for Larry Elder in this race, probably the recall would not be going as well for Republicans as it is right now.
And so here it is.
Here's the sex scandal.
Here we go.
LA Times, Larry Elder's ex-fiancee reports an alleged 2015 gun incident to the LAPD. So we found out, too, Larry Elder's ex-girlfriend is supporting one of Larry Elder's rivals in the contest, Kevin Faulconer down in San Diego, I believe it was reported.
So this is the same paper that called Larry Elder the blackface of white supremacy, just for starters.
This is not real.
This is fake.
I'm willing to say with almost 100% certainty this is fake.
I'm not saying Larry, the accusation is that they were having an argument and Larry Elder was cleaning his gun.
And this was threatening and this was abusive, so I don't know, maybe Larry Elder was cleaning his gun or something.
I don't think Larry Elder has ever threatened his girlfriend, or anyone really, with a gun in any kind of altercation.
If this were real, she would have done this sooner.
This was six years ago.
If this were a real thing, she would have done this six years ago, five years ago, four years ago, three, two, or even one year ago.
If this were real, and she said, well, look, I didn't want to do it at the time.
He was just a private citizen then, which is BS, by the way.
He was an extremely influential national radio host, but it's beside the point.
Huge name recognition.
Go on TV a lot.
She certainly would have done this when he got into the race, right?
Shouldn't this have come out at least when he got into the race?
No, it's just coming out now because it's getting close.
This is BS. This happens in so many races, especially when...
It doesn't happen to Democrats a whole lot, but it happens to Republicans when they're threatening the status quo.
You know, I have a message to all of my ex-girlfriends.
Every ex-girlfriend out there.
I'm not intending to run for, you know, governor of California or anything like that.
But if I do, right now, here's your chance.
Get all your grievances out.
Whatever.
I didn't pick up the tab for dinner one night.
Whatever.
You're upset.
Now's the time.
Because I don't want to hear it when we're a few weeks from an election, okay?
Such BS. I don't think it's going to work on Larry Elder.
I think that, look, the Larry Elder campaign of it all, it's getting some enthusiasm up there, but this is all going to come down to one question.
It's not any Republican.
It's Gavin Newsom.
Should we kick out Gavin Newsom or should we not?
And the fact that it's this close tells you California does not like their Democrat governor.
Speaking of bias against conservatives, the Federal Communications Commission is now threatening a $5.1 million fine against two conservative dirty trickster types.
Their names are Jacob Wohl and John Berkman and their kind of company, J.M. Berkman& Associates.
Over a $5 million fine from the FCC. Why?
Because Wohl and Berkman pulled a political dirty trick.
They made 1141 unlawful robocalls that made false claims about mail-in voting.
This was what their robocall said.
Quote, did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts?
They also claimed that the CDC might use these data to enforce vaccinations.
So first of all, I don't put anything past the federal government at this point because they do a lot of things that they tell us that they will not do and cannot do.
For instance, spying on Tucker Carlson.
But even let's say that it's all bogus and this was a dirty trick.
It was supposed to suppress some votes.
Sure.
People are saying it was intended to suppress the black vote.
Okay, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know the details of this.
Regardless, five million bucks for some dirty tricks on robocalls?
Democrats do this stuff, too.
Democrats go further, actually, and they just upend our election process, and they actually violate the state constitution in the state of Pennsylvania, for instance, when they're conducting that election process.
But in terms of these calls, or the motor vote, or the mail-in, or the ballot harvesting, or whatever, they do a lot of this stuff, too.
And they don't get very public $5 million fines.
I'm not defending the dirty tricks of the Republicans.
I'm criticizing the double standard.
And that, it's a distinction that you're not really allowed to make anymore.
Because now, if you defend these guys, or if you in any way think this is wrong, you're going to say, well, you want to suppress the black vote?
You're a racist?
You support illegal activities?
No.
I support selective prosecutions.
You remember some years back, Dinesh D'Souza was thrown in the clink.
Dinesh D'Souza, the perfectly calm, nice, scholarly commentator and author and filmmaker, he was thrown into a halfway house because he gave a little extra money to a friend of his from college who was running in a doomed Senate race in New York.
And he gave her a little extra money beyond the limits of the federal government And he had to go to the clink.
And at the time, he said, no, no, I'm not saying what I did was right.
I'm saying that I was selectively prosecuted.
Because Democrats do this stuff all the time, and they get away with it.
I don't even want to call it hypocrisy.
It's just a hierarchy.
It's just that the Democrats have one set of permissions, and the Republicans have another.
Speaking of these kinds of comparisons...
It's a little bit of a vague transition, but speaking of these kinds of comparisons, I've got to get to Tony Hawk.
Tony Hawk.
A figure from the childhood of many millennials, Tony Hawk.
Skateboarding star, video game skateboarding star.
Tony Hawk's releasing a skateboard that includes some of his own blood in it.
It's weird and a little bit creepy.
I guess the idea is, you know, I put my blood, sweat, and tears into skateboarding, and now you can have some of that too.
Okay, whatever.
I think it's kind of weird and creepy.
But Lil Nas X, who is that Satanist rapper, he came out, and he said, quote, Now that Tony Hawk has released skateboards with his blood painted on them, and there was no public outrage, are y'all ready to admit y'all were never actually upset over the blood in the shoes?
And maybe you were mad for some other reason.
Lil Nas X, you'll recall, when he released his Satanist music video, where he's literally twerking on Satan and saying, like, hell's maybe not the worst place in the world and we can make ourselves into the king of hell.
I did a long exegesis.
A long reading and analysis of that music video, which you can check out elsewhere.
Lil Nas X released these Nike sneakers that included pentagrams and scriptural references to Lucifer, to Satan, and allegedly a drop of human blood.
And people were up in arms over this.
He says, well, Tony Hawk used blood too.
So, you're just coming after me because I'm gay.
You're just coming after me because I'm black.
I don't know.
Because I'm oppressed.
It wasn't the blood per se that people were upset about, necessarily.
That wasn't a big part of it.
It was what the blood represented.
For Tony Hawk, he doesn't have pentagrams.
He doesn't have numerical and scriptural references to Satan.
It's just like a weird marketing ploy.
You did.
It was about, I think, at least for me, the outrage was about the overt Satanism.
But you hear this all the time, and this is a broader problem that you hear in politics.
They'll say, Michael, if you think that we should regulate pornography, then you're no better than the left, which says that we should censor conservatives on the internet.
You're no different, Michael.
No, I think I'm very different.
Because pornography and First Amendment protected political speech are different.
Yes, the form censorship is the same.
But the substance of what you're censoring is different.
Yes, the symbol here, the blood, is the same.
But the significance of that is different.
And I think we just need to be able to talk more about substantive matters.
This was David French's big problem.
When he said, if we ban Drag Queen Story Hour, then they're going to ban us from going to church.
That was the implication, at least, of what he was saying.
We can know the difference.
We can.
I promise you.
We possess the faculties of reason and the moral conscience sufficient to tell the difference between drag queen story hour and going to church on Sunday.
Sufficient to tell the difference between a skateboard marketing gimmick and an overt satanic liturgy.
We can do that.
We actually possess those faculties.
For now we do.
For now.
Maybe not for much longer.
What...
What are we doing?
It all comes back to Afghanistan.
I think this is why Afghanistan is such a lightning rod.
You can't build up another country, another civilization, another set of principles and practices and another way of life if you do not possess one yourself or if the one that you once did possess is disintegrating all around you.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I'll show you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Secretary of State Antony Blinken admits Americans will be stuck in Afghanistan past the August 31st deadline.
