The Democrat Governor of Virginia says parents have no right to educate their kids, Biden yet again moves the goalposts on reopening society, and Joe Biden’s generals testify under oath that he lied about the lead up to the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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When we think of all our freedoms that the radical left wants to take away, we usually think of our right to free speech or our right to keep and bear arms or our right to keep our own property or our right to have a say in the course of our government.
All of those things are at risk, but the radicals who are emboldened after a successful year and a half of grabbing power are now after an even more fundamental right, even more fundamental than all of those, and they're not even hiding it.
Major Democrats in this country, including the governor of Virginia, are now claiming that parents have no right to raise their own kids.
The parents had to write to veto bills, veto books, Glenn, not to be knowledgeable about it, also take them off the shelves.
And I'm not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.
You vetoed it.
So, yeah, I've stopped the bill that I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.
Yeah, I don't think parents should be telling schools how their children should be educated from the age of 5 to 18.
Or really, now it's more like 3 or 4 years old until what?
Until you're out of college, 22, or graduate school, or your PhD.
I don't think parents have any right to determine how kids are educated for 20-some-odd years of their life.
According to Democrats, you no longer possess that right, the right to raise your own children.
Turns out the people of Virginia don't like that very much, as they made clear last night at a Loudoun County School Board meeting.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from JN, who says, Whoa!
The New York governor giving a literal sermon on the public health god, that is, science, is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen a politician do.
And that's a long history of creepiness and insanity.
I agree.
It reminds us of something that has always been true.
All politics is religious.
Sometimes it's more explicitly so, but it's always there.
All human conflict ultimately is theological.
And now you've got the new governor of New York, who got her job because Andy Cuomo got booted out, giving outright sermons, calling on people to be her apostles for the cult of progressivism and public health.
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When I did my book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide, number one best-selling blank book, about four years ago, still selling like hotcakes, by the way, so thank you to everyone who's giving the gift of knowledge to themselves and their friends.
When I did that book, some people gave me the title, King of the Trolls.
Okay?
And Vanity Fair called me a dapper, lib-triggering troll.
And they thought that this blank book was a really good troll.
And I agree.
It was fun.
I enjoyed it.
I may need to relinquish my crown.
I may need to hand my crown to a colleague of mine.
That would be Mr.
Matt Walsh, who wanted to go speak at a Loudoun County school board meeting.
This is a school board meeting in Virginia.
But he doesn't live in Virginia.
It's not a big deal.
You can go to public school board meetings.
Except that when the school board found out he was going to go, they had a requirement that you had to be a Virginia resident.
So what does Matt do?
Is he deterred?
No.
He just rents an apartment in Virginia.
Then he goes there and he shows up last night and they pulled a bunch of other shenanigans to try to keep him out, limit what he could say, not stream the speech.
But there was a big rally outside and Matt gets up there.
Matt, who, you know, I guess he's lived in Virginia for a few days now.
I'm not sure how much longer he's going to live in Virginia.
He has really only lived in Tennessee for some months now.
We're actually kind of new to the South in general.
But Matt gets up on the back of a pickup truck to give a speech, and the people there chant, all the parents in Loudoun County, Welcome home, Matt.
Thank you.
Welcome home, Matt!
Welcome home, Matt!
Thank you so much.
Welcome home, Matt!
Maybe it's not even Matt who gets King of the Trolls.
Maybe it is the concerned parents of Loudoun County.
They got it.
They went along with it.
Matt got to go say his piece.
I'm glad he did.
I think the message was clear.
Who cares what anyone said in the room?
The fact that there was a major rally outside of the school board meeting.
Frankly, that's all you need to know about sending the message to the school board.
But...
To me, what's more interesting than the critical race theory curriculum, or the kind of radicalism in the schools, or what's more interesting even than Matt going and showing up there, are those parents who are outside, who are cheering on a recent...
A recent resident of Tennessee who got a place in Virginia for a couple of days, they say, welcome home, Matt, and they're playing along.
What it shows me is politics is no longer local in this country.
There was an old expression, Tip O'Neill, former Democrat Speaker of the House, used to say, all politics is local.
And that was common sense in America for a very long time.
I don't think that is the case any longer.
Occasionally, I'll go to a small town.
I mean, I travel all over the country.
And when I'm in a small town, I don't always even see a local paper anymore.
But sometimes, they'll still have a local paper.
And I find it so refreshing.
It reminds me of what the country used to be like 20 years ago.
Not that long ago.
And it's got the local head of the community, and he's writing about the local issues, and we just don't see that a lot anymore.
Increasingly, the issues that preoccupy our time, even in small-town America, are national issues.
You see this in Loudoun County.
It's not just that there's some weird, creepy thing going on in the schools there that's particular to Loudoun County.
It's that this creepy thing is going on in the schools all over the country, and that would be the critical race theory curriculum.
That would be the radical gender curriculum.
And so you can have a national conservative media figure like Matt Walsh come in there and he's welcomed like a hometown hero.
This is partially, I think, technological because you've got the proliferation of the internet and ways to connect to people now who might be on the other side of the country or on the other side of the world.
But also, you've got a breakdown of the local community.
So as our local governments, local voluntary associations, the Lions Club and whatever, as the local churches, even as the family breaks down, people move away, people have...
Other unusual sorts of family arrangements.
People are living on their own more.
As that happens, it's not that we're no longer going to have community.
We're just going to have different kinds of community.
So now, these parents in Loudoun County have much more in common with Matt Walsh than they do with any member of their school board.
And I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing.
I'm saying this just is politics now.
And so if you want to undertake effective political action, you've got to recognize that and go on that.
And by the way, the parents of Virginia have been somewhat effective.
There actually is some good news here.
In Fairfax County, two books have been removed from the Fairfax County public schools after a parent gave a dramatic reading of the graphic passages from some of these books.
So the books are Gender Queer by Maya Kababi and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.
According to one parent, both of these books include pedophilia, sex between men and boys.
The illustrations include fellatio sex toys, sex with someone you love, to quote Woody Allen, referring to individual acts, and violent nudity.
And so I took a look at some of the...
I'm not going to repeat the dialogue on this show.
This is a family-friendly program.
But this is sick, twisted, perverted stuff.
And these books were available for young children, and they shouldn't be.
This should not be part of any curriculum.
This should not be part of any public education program.
One, obscene material does not educate you in the right way.
It's not essential or edifying for your education.
And two, you...
Any educational program is going to require limits.
You can't just open up the curriculum forever.
You sometimes hear that phrase from the libs when they talk about education.
They say, we need to open and expand the curriculum.
You can't expand the curriculum.
You can't.
It's not possible.
There's only so many weeks in the semester.
There are only so many books you can read.
When you waste your time reading some degenerate porn in schools, you're necessarily going to be spending less time reading Shakespeare.
Or some other book that would actually be helpful for one's education.
This is something else that we're going to need to come to terms with.
You know, I've mentioned on this show before that our notion of academic freedom, a lot of conservatives defend academic freedom now, completely mistaken, completely mistaken.
One, academic freedom, the idea that teachers ought to be able to teach whatever they want, has never existed anywhere just about.
There's nothing particularly conservative about it.
And the modern conservative movement began with a book that was making fun of this concept of academic freedom.
There are today many, even prominent, conservative voices in academia who defend academic freedom.
It's a farce.
Far more important than academic freedom is academic edification.
I don't know.
I need a pithy slogan for it here.
But what you need is education that is aimed at true freedom, right?
Liberal education.
And what that involves is not endlessly opening it up to all this filth, but limiting the sort of books you read to the very best, using your time wisely and productively.
So you don't confuse children and fill their heads with a bunch of lies and filth, but you fill their heads with lots of true things, the good, the true, and the beautiful to help them tamp down their appetites, make sense of their freedom.
This is going to be the way forward.
This is when you see those parents out there in Loudoun County saying, limit the curriculum, get this crap out of the schools.
When you see the parents in Fairfax County saying the same thing, they are on the right side of this.
They are, ironically, I know we don't see it very well today, they are on the side of freedom.
The limits are the key to the liberty.
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When we talk about how liberty requires limits, whether that's in speech or whether that's in education, I think one way to bring this home is to make it very personal.
Bring it down to the level of your relationships.
Bring it down to the level of your marriage.
if you want to have a good marriage, an edifying marriage, a free marriage that helps you both act like free people, what do you do?
Do you say you can sleep with whomever you want, you can do whatever you want, you have no responsibility to me whatsoever?
Or do you say, no, you actually do have responsibilities to me.
You can't do whatever you want whenever you want to do it.
You can't go sleep with whomever you want.
There are limits here.
And within that, that limit is actually going to define the marriage and the marriage is going to help you be a freer, better, more flourishing person.
I think I've put my finger on the scale here, which way I think.
It's the latter.
The limits, I mean, that is the definition of a marriage, is that kind of limit that then frees you up to flourish.
I only think of this because Will Smith is back in the news.
Will Smith famously has a bad marriage.
He and his wife even joked about this.
They said, bad marriage for life, you know, like bad boys for life.
And it's a marriage where I guess it's open, whatever that means.
And I guess they both cheat on each other.
But what we've really seen in the press is that she cheated on him.
And that he maybe was more interested in real marriage, but she was not.
And so this is from an interview with GQ. Will Smith just came out and he said, Jada never believed in conventional marriage.
Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship, so she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up.
There was significant endless discussions about what is relational perfection.
What is the perfect way to interact as a couple?
And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose.
Not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection.
So he's saying, we just need relational perfection.
And we do not believe that marriage is...
Is relational perfection.
That's the traditional idea.
Yes, in this man and woman relationship, the point of it is marriage.
That is the stable state.
He's saying, no, no, we got married, but we don't even know what marriage is.
We don't even know what marriage should be.
We're trying to figure out what the perfect kind of marriage is.
And so, for much of our marriage, we were actually married and we behaved like that.
But then...
Then we decided there was something more perfect, namely violating our marriage oath.
So he says, we have given each other trust and freedom with the belief that everybody has to find their own way, and marriage for us can't be a prison.
I don't suggest our road for anybody.
I don't suggest this road for anybody.
But the experiences, the freedoms that we've given one another in the unconditional support to me is the highest definition of love.
Okay, now he's lost me.
He's saying, what we've done by cheating on each other and by allowing my wife to make me a cuckold and allowing my wife to talk about this on television, how shameful that this woman would do that.
That is the highest definition of love.
Okay, well, so you think we should all do that then?
No, I don't think you should all do that.
I don't suggest this road for anybody.
Hold on, so you're telling me this is the highest, most wonderful definition of love.
And also, you don't recommend it for anybody.
Anybody, including you, you don't recommend it.
And we, of course, nobody wants his wife to go on television and say, yeah, I cuckolded my husband.
Yeah, oh, yes, I did.
And he better accept it.
You better smile.
And then you see poor Will Smith.
He's on camera.
He looks like he's about to go jump off a pier.
As is understandable.
I get it.
He says this is the highest.
So it makes people miserable.
You don't recommend it for anybody, but it's the highest definition of love.
Something's gone wrong here.
And it comes from this misconception of freedom.
We've given each other trust and freedom.
No, you haven't.
You can't trust each other.
You lied and cheated on each other.
And you don't have freedom.
You don't have the freedom that a marriage gives you.
The freedom not to worry about where your wife is when 10 o'clock rolls around.
The freedom not to worry about who's going to be there for you, who loves you pretty baby, who's going to help you through the night.
The freedom to be totally at ease with another person who is now actually part of you, one flesh.
You've lost that freedom.
You've surrendered that freedom.
You can't have all of those things at once.
I really have great pity for these people, Will Smith, especially Will Smith, but also Jada, who I guess was pushing it, his wife, because I think it's an honest mistake you can make in our modern culture, which is so obsessed with the idea of emancipation and liberation and breaking all constraints, which is so obsessed with the idea of emancipation and liberation and breaking all constraints, whether it's from society, whether it's from the political institutions, We can't be constrained by anything, even reality, even nature.
Thank you.
And we think that this will make us happy.
It won't.
And we think this will make us free.
It won't.
Paradoxically, it seems to many, it actually enslaves us.
It makes us less free when we break all of those constraints.
Freedom requires limits.
Speaking of limits, you can see how Democrats sometimes take this, leftists take this, in the other direction.
Because limits can enslave you.
Limits can liberate you, like the meter and rhyme scheme of a poem can liberate the poet to create great art.
So too, limits can constrain you, like chains and slavery.
So what you need to find are just limits.
You need moderation.
You need justice.
You need prudence.
These are virtues that we don't really talk about all that much anymore, but they're essential to understanding this.
Democrats right now are taking it in the other direction.
They're taking limits to the point of enslaving people, enslaving people to the whims of politicians.
Joe Biden just received a booster shot for his coronavirus vaccine because the vaccine is so effective that only months after you receive the full vaccination cycle, you need more of the vaccine.
That's how effective it is.
100% effective for a few weeks, and then you need to get more of it.
So Joe Biden is getting his booster shot, reveals that he has fairly, surprisingly hairy arms, neither here nor there, but it was kind of weird to see.
Joe Biden is taking press questions.
This is one of the rare occasions when he was taking questions from the press.
He couldn't get up because a doctor had a needle in his arm, so it really forced him to sit down there.
And the press asked, okay, Joe Biden, We've been doing this a long time now.
How much longer until we can go back to normal?
How do Americans seem to be vaccinated for us to go back to normal?
What is the percentage of total vaccinations that have to be deployed?
Well, I think...
I think we get...
The vast majority, like, is going on in some industries and some schools, 97%, 98%.
I think we've got awful close.
But I'm not the scientist.
I think, but one thing for sure, a quarter of the country can't go unvaccinated and us not continue to have a problem.
97%, 98% vaccination, that's when we can go back to normal?
You're never going to get that.
You're never going to get anywhere near that.
And there's no reason even to believe those numbers.
582 days ago, we were told 15 days to slow the spread.
582 days ago.
Then flatten the curve.
Then find a cure.
Then we found a cure.
Then make the cure available.
The cure was made available.
Then get people their shots.
Okay, a lot of people got the shots.
Then get people another shot because the cure was apparently not as effective as people said it was.
Then Then, then, then.
Now, 98% need to get vaccinated.
By the way, let's say that 98% of people got vaccinated, which won't happen.
They're not going to be vaccinated for very long.
The vaccine doesn't last that long.
That's why Joe Biden was just getting the third shot when we were told there were only two shots that you needed.
He was getting the third shot within months of getting the second shot.
So you'll never get there.
Okay, we got 98% have had their third shot.
And so, but unfortunately, only 42% have had their fourth shot.
So we just, look, look, Jack.
Look, Corn Poppy Jack, come on.
I'm just, come on now.
Let's not, come on now.
We just need to get 99.7% need to get their 10th shot.
All right, Jack, and I'm not a scientist, but then we can get back to normal.
I'm not joking around, okay?
Come on.
Come on, man.
Come on, man.
Come on, wake up.
It's just a freaking farce at this point.
These people are just taking away your freedom and your way of life and your traditions.
And it can happen both ways.
You can lose your freedom.
When the politicians outright come and take it, and you can lose your freedom when you are incentivized to surrender your freedom yourself.
To surrender your freedom to your lusts and your base passions and your appetites.
This is why self-government requires that you can govern yourself.
It means working on yourself, disciplining yourself.
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According to the mainstream media, I don't even want to call them that, the legacy media, the establishment media, I don't even want to call them that, the legacy media, the establishment media, the only people who are refusing to take the Fauci-ouchie again and again and again with the booster and the booster and the booster
That has never been true, but that is what you're being told.
And now we're really beginning to see that that isn't true.
It's just the white supremacist insurrectionists won't get the vaccine.
Okay, the NBA, not a league that I follow particularly closely.
They were speaking to the press a few days ago, and there's this big problem right now in the NBA, which is that a lot of teams and a lot of cities are mandating that people get the vaccine.
And a lot of these players, these zillionaire star athletes, some of the fittest people in the world who are very important for these franchises and for the league and for the economy...
They don't want to get it.
So Bradley Beal, who I take it is a professional basketball player, he has thus far not gotten the jab, the vaccine.
He was asked a lot of hostile questions from the press about this, and he just kind of laughed at them.
He joked, and he held his ground.
Every player, every person in this world is going to make their own decision for themselves.
I would like an explanation to people with vaccines.
Why are they still getting COVID? If that's something that we are supposed to highly be protected from.
Like, it's funny that, oh, it reduces your chances of going to the hospital.
It doesn't eliminate anybody from getting COVID, right?
So everybody, is everybody in here vaxxed?
I would assume, right?
So you all can still get COVID, right?
We're less likely to die or go to the hospital.
Okay, but you can still get COVID, right?
And you can still pass it along with the Vax, right?
I'm just asking questions.
You're asking pretty good questions, pal.
It is a pretty sorry state for American politics and public health when some basketball player has a much more sophisticated view of science and politics than most of our scientific politicians and our politician scientists.
Do you see the point?
He's making a good point.
The press are making fun of him, but he's making a good point.
He says, you're calling this a vaccine, but the the vaccine doesn't stop you from getting the virus.
Right, we get the polio vaccine, We don't get polio.
Great.
We get all sorts of vaccines.
We don't get the virus that the vaccine protects against.
But with this vaccine, you do still get the virus.
Now, you say, here's the big counter that they have.
They say, sure, you can still contract COVID, but your risk of hospitalization and death is greatly diminished.
And he, Beal, acknowledges that.
He says, yeah, sure, okay.
So, it doesn't stop you from contracting the virus.
But if you get the vaccine, your chances of going to the hospital or dying are greatly diminished.
And you all have the vaccine, right?
So then why do you care if I have the vaccine?
Well, if the vaccine really worked to stop you from getting the virus or to stop you from transmitting the virus, then maybe you would care.
Because I, the awful unvaccinated person, I might uniquely be passing this virus around.
I might uniquely be encouraging you or putting you at risk of contracting the virus.
But I'm not.
Because this vaccine, you do get the virus and you do transmit it.
So the only thing the vaccine does is prevent you from going to the hospital or prevent you from dying or greatly increase your chances of not going to the hospital or dying.
So then who cares if I get the vaccine?
You all have it.
Right?
But you can still get it and you can still spread it.
It's too bad that a man who has...
Been trained from a very young age basically just to dribble and shoot, right?
A man who has, I would imagine, has not had a huge focus on his scientific and political education.
There's just not enough time.
You're going to become one of the star athletes in the world.
That guy is better educated on these questions than the press that went to all these fancy schools that are asking him the questions.
It's not just him.
Andrew Wiggins, another athlete that I had never heard of until yesterday.
Andrew Wiggins plays for the Golden State team.
Apparently.
The Golden State Warriors.
There we go.
Andrew Wiggins went even further.
He said, you're going to ask me about whether or not I've gotten the vaccine.
My vaccination status is none of your business.
What's the reason for not just explaining what you believe?
Um...
This is none of your business.
That's what it comes down to.
I don't ask you guys about your beliefs.
I don't ask you guys what you think is right or wrong.
We're different people.
I'll say something when I'm ready.
The only thing the media has done is make it bigger than it has to be.
So, like I said, I'll say my side of Everything, when I'm ready, you know, I don't work on y'all's time, I work on my time, you know.
In terms of bigger than it has to be, I mean, you stand to lose a lot of money.
And it's my problem, not yours.
Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, that's my problem, not yours.
Right on, man, right on.
This guy, who is man of few words, he's a little more soft-spoken than some other athletes, he is making much more sense than the people who are running their mouths.
He's saying, my vaccination status is my business, not yours.
Now, you might counter.
You might hear the libs counter, and they'll say, your vaccination status is everybody's concern, because the whole point of a vaccine is to prevent the spread of an epidemic, and we live in a society, and we're not just atomized individuals.
And so, if you get vaccinated or not, as a general matter, is everybody's concern.
I agree.
I agree.
You're right.
But not on this vaccine.
Not on this.
Do you not see the point that Bradley Beal and Andrew Wiggins are making?
If Andrew Wiggins said, my vaccination against smallpox is none of your business, he would not be correct.
Because, or many other inoculations and vaccinations over the years.
Because most of them prevent you from contracting and spreading the virus.
So if the vaccination is the determining factor between you being able to spread the virus to someone else or not, then I guess it is my business.
But this vaccine doesn't stop you from contracting or spreading the virus.
It just protects you against hospitalization and death.
That's the claim that they're making.
They're not even pretending that it stops you from contracting and transmitting it.
So in that case, at this moment, on this vaccine against this virus, Andrew Wiggins is 100% correct.
These people, they don't understand these things.
They don't understand.
In some cases, it really is none of your business.
Speaking of business, Jen Psaki.
Gosh, maybe we need to get a professional basketball player to go become the spokesman for the White House.
Because they seem to have basic comprehension skills.
They seem to have greater cognitive abilities than many people in the Biden administration.
Jen Psaki was just asked about this play to raise taxes on corporations and how if the corporations get the taxes raised on them, they very well will pass those increased costs on to the consumer through higher prices.
So Jen Psaki was asked about this very basic economic concept.
She laughed it off.
She said it was absurd.
Obviously the president's commitment remains not raising taxes for anyone Making less than $400,000 a year.
There are some, and I'm not sure if this is the case in this report, who argue that in the past, companies have passed on these costs to consumers.
I'm not sure if that's the argument being made in this report.
We feel that that's unfair and absurd, and the American people would not stand for that.
But I will take a closer look at this report and get you a more substantive response.
It's unfair and absurd to think that when you make companies pay more money, the companies make the customer pay more money.
That's just common sense.
That's inevitable, actually, to some degree.
How do you think businesses work?
I guess the Biden administration doesn't know a whole lot about this.
So businesses, right, they spend money on two kinds of things.
Capital and labor.
They spend money on stuff, and they spend money on employees.
And then the mixture of the capital and the employees make products, and then the consumers, the customers, go out and buy those products.
And the products have a price, and the price pays for the capital and the labor and a profit margin to the shareholders.
And taxes.
So now if you increase the cost of the taxes, what's going to happen?
Well I guess the shareholders can receive a lower profit.
Is that going to happen?
Do you think the shareholders are going to stand for that?
I'm not so sure about that.
Maybe a little bit, but I'm not so sure.
Are we going to cut the wages of the labor?
I guess you could.
You might run into some problems there, and then also you're going to have trouble attracting labor.
Are you going to pay less for the stuff, for the machines, for the capital expenditures?
Well, the prices on that probably are not going to change.
If we're raising taxes on the businesses, actually, those are probably going to go up.
So the money's got to come from somewhere.
Where's the money going to come?
Either it's going to come from the shareholders, or it's going to come from the customers, or it's going to come from both, which seems fairly likely.
But the idea that customers are going to be completely insulated against higher prices when you raise taxes on business, that is absurd.
That is unfair and absurd, to use a phrase from Jen Psaki.
Look, I don't even care that much about economics.
I think we've looked at our politics through too narrow an economic lens for far too long, so I'm willing to talk about these kinds of things and being a little more creative with the way we view the relationship between the economy and the politics.
But this does require some very basic economic literacy, doesn't it?
Which the Biden administration seems not to have, which is why prices on just about everything you're buying right now are going through the roof as a result of Bidenflation.
Even Jen Psaki, though, now, who is doing her best to flack for her boss, even Jen Psaki is admitting that Joe Biden has not been entirely forthright.
He's not been entirely honest in the statements that the White House has put out, notably on Afghanistan.
So you remember, on Afghanistan, Joe Biden said the position of the White House was, That Joe Biden followed the advice of his top advisors and generals in withdrawing from Afghanistan.
They all told him this is what you should do, and then he did it, so don't blame Joe Biden when things went wrong.
Jen Psaki now admits that that was not true.
The President said his military committees were split.
We now know that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, the head of CENTCOM, General McKenzie, and the commander on the ground, General Miller, all recommended that the President keep 2,500 troops.
So who in his military advisers told him it would be fine to pull everybody out?
I'm not going to get in specific details of who recommended what, but I would reiterate a little bit of what I conveyed before, which is that there were recommendations made by a range of his advisors, something he welcomed, something he asked them to come to him clear-eyed about, to give him candid advice.
What is also clear, though, and I'd also note again what Secretary Austin said today, is that was not going to be a sustainable, over-the-long-term troop presence.
We were always going to look At escalating the numbers, at potentially going back to war with the Taliban, at risking casualties.
That was not a decision the president was going to make.
But of course, he welcomes advice.
He welcomed advice.
Ultimately, it's up to the commander-in-chief to make a decision.
He made a decision it was time to end a 20-year war.
So I agree with that last part, and I think she's probably telling the truth in that last part, and I think the last part is smart.
Yes, it is up to the commander-in-chief to run the country.
It's up to the president.
It's not the generals who get to run the country.
Nobody elected the generals.
It's the president who gets to run the country.
Okay, I agree with that.
It's the first part I don't agree with.
The first part, this might be the first time that the White House has just gotten caught in an outright lie.
Like, an outright lie.
They said that at least some of the top advisors, and really it's even more than that, I told Joe Biden, it's totally fine to pull out of Afghanistan.
Everyone's on the same team.
And they went out there with that message.
And that message was not true because the top generals in our country testified yesterday that they told Biden to keep a small troop presence there.
A couple of thousand troops, the number of troops that were there.
This is where the credibility really...
Spinning is one thing, or defending the decision is another thing.
I actually kind of defend the decision too, in the sense that the civilians get to run the country.
But when you lie through your teeth to the American people, that diminishes your credibility, and it diminishes our trust in our basic institutions of government.
Joe Biden, when he pulled out of Afghanistan and the country collapsed within days, and then American servicemen were killed, and hundreds of Afghans were killed, and it was just a disastrous, disastrous exit.
Joe Biden was asked by George Stephanopoulos, who was a Clinton operative, okay?
This is a Democrat operative.
He was the comms director in Clinton's White House.
He said, hey, Mr.
President, What went wrong?
Did you really follow the advice of your advisors?
What happened?
And Joe Biden said, I absolutely, I was on board with the advisors.
Your top military advisors warned against withdrawing on this timeline.
They wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops.
No, they didn't.
It was split.
That wasn't true.
That wasn't true.
They didn't tell you that they wanted troops to stay?
No, not in terms of whether we were going to get out in a time frame all troops.
They didn't argue against that.
So no one told your military advisors to not tell you, no, we should just keep 2,500 troops.
It's been a stable situation for the last several years.
We can do that.
We can continue to do that.
No, no one said that to me that I can recall.
Now notice, so what Joe Biden just said there is very different from what Jen Psaki said happened right now, but it's not different than what she previously said happened.
But notice Joe Biden contradicted himself within that statement.
George Stephanopoulos said, your top advisors all said to stay and to keep a small number of troops in Afghanistan.
Biden said, no, they didn't.
They were split.
And then Stephanopoulos asked for clarification, and then Biden rambled incoherently for a little bit, and it didn't make any sense.
And then Stephanopoulos asked for clarification again and said, hold on, you're telling me no one told you to keep the troops there?
In Afghanistan?
And he said, no, they didn't.
No one did.
Hold up, wait.
There's three options.
Either they all said, keep the troops there, or they were split, or they all said, pull the troops out.
And Joe Biden held two of those positions during that one answer, and it turns out that neither of those were true.
It was actually the third one that actually happened.
That is a president who is either...
So senile that really you do need to invoke the 25th Amendment.
Or he is a liar.
And I actually, in fairness to Joe Biden, I think he's just a liar.
I think he lies with ease.
I think he had to drop out of the 1988 presidential contest because his lies were so preposterous and so egregious that he couldn't continue his campaign.
And I just think he has basically no relationship with honesty or the truth whatsoever.
But the generals smacked him down yesterday.
Credit where credit's due.
Mark Milley, our woke chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he showed it.
Thankfully, he took the pink hat off before he walked in.
He didn't paint his nails or anything before he walked in to testify.
Mark Milley came in and testified to say, no, we wanted to keep a base level of troops there.
But I'd ask General McKenzie, did you agree to the recommendation that...
General Miller had two weeks ago.
Senator, again, I won't share my personal recommendation to the President, but I will give you my honest opinion, and my honest opinion and view shaped my recommendation.
I recommended that we maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, and I also recommended earlier in the fall of 2020 that we maintain 4,500 at that time.
Those are my personal views.
I also have a view that the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government.
Yes, I understand that.
And General Milley, I assume you agree with that in terms of the recommendation of 2500?
What I said in my opening statement and the memoranda that I wrote back in the fall of 2020 remained consistent and I do agree with that.
And I'm confident that the president heard all the recommendations and listened to them very thoughtfully.
So very important.
This was a little Millie sandwich.
You had General McKenzie on the first part and the third part, and then Millie was there.
So in the first part and the second part, they're both saying, yes, our recommendation was keep a couple thousand troops or a few thousand troops in Afghanistan.
Now, the third part's important here with McKenzie because maybe Joe Biden didn't hear it.
Maybe Joe Biden never got that advice.
Maybe it never made it up to the president.
Maybe he wasn't paying attention.
Mackenzie says there, no, he was.
He heard it.
He thought about it.
He did process what we told him.
And he ignored it anyway.
Now, I don't want to let Milley off the hook.
Just because Milley did a good thing here, I don't want to let Milley off the hook.
Don't forget, Mark Milley is someone who, when Donald Trump was still the President of the United States, Mark Milley called China, the top generals in China, and said, if Trump orders an attack, I'll give you a heads up.
This is according to a new report, and Milley hasn't really denied it, so I think there's no reason not to believe it.
So, Milley...
Subverted civilian control of the military, subverted the chain of command, and now he's got an answer for that.
He doesn't have a very good answer.
By law, I am not in the chain of command, and I know that.
However, by presidential directive and DOD instruction, I am in the chain of communication to fulfill my legal statutory role as the president's primary military advisor.
After the Speaker Pelosi call, I convened a short meeting in my office with key members of my staff to refresh all of us on the procedures which we practice daily at the action officer level.
Additionally, I immediately informed Acting Secretary of Defense Miller of Speaker Pelosi's phone call.
At no time was I attempting to change or influence the process, usurp authority, or insert myself in the chain of command.
Oh yeah, then why did you call the Chinese and said you'd give them a heads up if the President of the United States orders an attack?
Why are you corresponding and colluding with Nancy Pelosi?
Why are you leaking information if you're not trying to usurp?
Of course you're trying to usurp power.
Please, please, if you're going to do it, Please, at least, do not urinate on the collective leg of the American people and tell us that it's raining.
Please, at least have the integrity to tell us what you're doing.
This is what you're seeing all around the country, from the military, from Washington, D.C., all the way to these local governments, all the way down to the school board.
You are seeing a usurpation of power, a disorder of the system.
Teachers, administrators, politicians telling parents they can't raise their kids.
The military telling the civilian leaders, the elected officials, I think if we want to have a truly free country, we've got to impose limits and order on the people who are exceeding their just bounds within our traditional political system.
We need to rein things in, have a little temperance, have a little prudence, have a little bit of justice.
That means for some people, giving them a little bit more freedom to move around, and for some people, reining them in.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is Michael Knowles.
and I'll show you tomorrow.
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We finally descended upon Loudoun County yesterday, my new home, to make our voices heard.
But the Loudoun County situation is part of a larger and more important conversation about who exactly should be determining what our kids are taught in schools, the state or the parents.
We'll talk about that today.
Also, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has asked why he won't resign for his failures in Afghanistan.
And Greta Thunberg babbles incoherently and receives a...
Raucous applause anyway.
And a black teacher in California is not pleased with the special gift basket that she was given from the district for being black.
And then Will Smith is saying that his marriage is open.
And his open marriage with his wife is perfect and beautiful and loving.
