Ep. 858 - Australia's Horrifying Black Mirror Reality
An Australian state has citizens send selfies to the government to prove they haven’t left their homes, the CDC floats another “virtual Thanksgiving,” and most millionaires don’t want to leave money to their lazy kids.
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The 570 days of masks, social distancing, bankrupt businesses, canceled holidays, and injection mandates have been bad.
I do not mean to downplay them.
In the United States, the public health dictatorship has been onerous.
But, relative to some other parts of the world, we've actually gotten off easy.
If you want to know how far the libs are willing to take these lockdown measures...
Just take a look at Australia, where one state in Australia is pairing mandatory selfies with facial recognition software to make sure you never leave your home.
Today the call has gone out to everyone in home quarantine in Victoria to take part of our pilot program and what that means is that they will receive random phone calls and they have to answer within five minutes with a selfie sent to this app which will then geo-track where that person is and to make sure that they are who they say they are as well.
If they don't answer within that five minute period that's when health officers come knocking.
I did not believe that was a real clip when I saw it.
I actually had to look it up to find the news story to see that that is real.
Victoria in Australia is actually doing this.
They obviously want to spread it out much wider than just this test program.
Once a penal colony, always a penal colony.
And it's not just Australia.
Just this week, Dr.
Fauci and the CDC have made clear that the only thing preventing these sorts of measures here at home in the United States is the sheer intransigence of the American people.
They just can't get away with it.
But make no mistake...
If the ruling class could, it would.
And it still might.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Johnny Nallis, who says, You know Fauci is lying when he starts his answer with, Absolutely not!
This is true.
This is one of Fauci's tells.
When Fauci is caught in a lie, you see this especially when Rand Paul is grilling him on Capitol Hill.
When he gets caught dead to rights in a lie, Fauci's tell is not to waffle a little bit.
It's not even to hedge.
It's to double down.
Senator Paul, you...
You are absolutely incorrect.
And when he says that, you know that Rand Paul or whoever is interrogating him has totally got Fauci's number.
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I should have believed it.
With regard to this Australia story, obviously Australia has been sort of leading the way in these onerous lockdown measures, but I just couldn't believe you're telling me that some government flack or one of his proxies is going to call you up, say, okay, right now, send me a selfie, and you've got to send a selfie, and then they're going to use geo-tracking and facial recognition to make sure that you're not leaving your home, and if not, they're going to send the...
Police to your door, kick your door in, and tell you, hey, you've got to be home.
Where are you?
Send out a search party.
And yet, we already have this technology.
I remember I was coming back from France.
I was in France a couple of months ago.
It was actually right before I flew back in the day that all the really crazy lockdown measures went into place.
And I was just flying in, and I went through the global entry checkpoints.
If you have a card, you sign up.
It's like $100.
You get a card, and it makes it easier to go through customs.
So I go through, and you used to have to scan your passport, and then you'd enter your information.
Now, you just walk right by, you look at the machine, and it prints out all of your information.
It's very, very spooky.
How does it work?
It's facial recognition.
This is being used by private businesses.
It's being used by your iPhone.
It's being used by tech companies.
And it's also being used by the government.
And do you think that the government in cahoots very often with big tech, with these huge asymmetries of power, do you think they're only going to use that power for good?
Or do you think maybe they're going to use that power to deprive you of some of your traditional rights and liberties and way of life?
Do you think it's only in Australia?
You don't think Fauci would do this the second he could?
You don't think the CDC would do this?
You don't think the FDA would do this?
We know that they would.
They're already trying these things.
They're already testing the waters of the permanent public health state.
There was a headline just on Monday.
It comes out from Sinclair Broadcasting.
Headline, CDC recommends virtual Thanksgiving this year.
I did a double take because I remember last year the CDC said we had to do a virtual Thanksgiving.
That was just a few months after 15 days to slow the spread.
Now we're 570 days since 15 days to slow the spread.
We're still not allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving?
No.
No, we're not.
CDC wants you to stay away from your family, not travel, not gather together, not acknowledge the holiday in a traditional way.
Until there was an update.
Here was the update.
October 5th, Update, so it was just one day later.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed their 2021 holiday guidance Tuesday and said the update was a mishap.
The agency said its recommendations for future gatherings that mirrored 2020 guidance does not reflect this year's and new suggestions are coming soon.
What changed?
What changed?
The CDC said, yep, just like last year, you're going to have to lock down and have a virtual Thanksgiving.
And then they said, oh, actually, JK... Nope.
Psych.
Never mind.
What changed?
Did the science change?
Wow, there must have been some real scientific discoveries between Monday and Tuesday.
No, what happened was the people derided them, mocked them, pushed back, protested.
Rent their garments and gnash their teeth.
And the CDC said, okay, actually, never mind.
That's what Dr.
Fauci said over the weekend.
Dr.
Fauci was on one of the Sunday shows, and they said, hey, can we have Christmas this year, or is it too soon to tell?
He goes, you know, it's really too soon to tell.
No, you might not be able to get Christmas this year.
And then there was pushback, and he goes, I never said you couldn't have Christmas!
Yes, you did.
You did.
You said it's too soon to tell, meaning there's a good chance we don't have Christmas.
Then the pushback happened, and then you said, no, of course you're going to have Christmas.
Never mind.
What changed was not the science.
What changed was the politics.
And this is, frankly, good news for us.
Because I know that some people are still believing the ridiculous narrative that the government is putting out, that this is all based on the science or whatever.
But it's not.
It's not at all based on the science, whatever the science is.
It's based on the political whims of our leaders and the bureaucrats that they have put in charge.
And so...
The good news about that is, while we might not be able to change the laws of physics, we might not be able to change the chemistry of a virus, although Dr.
Fauci did a pretty good job changing the chemistry of a virus by funding gain-of-function research.
That's another subject.
What we can do is change the political situation.
We can make it such that...
These people cannot get away with it.
One way to do it, which I've been recommending from, if not day one of the lockdowns, at least day two, is just ignore these people.
Live your lives.
Pay no heed to the Fauci's of the world and the bureaucrats and the busybodies who tell you to muzzle up all the time and who tell you to get 17,000 injections and who tell you not to have Christmas and who tell you not to get married or go to your Funerals.
Not your funeral, I hope.
To go to other family gatherings and religious rituals.
Just go.
Just ignore them.
Just go.
Live your life.
Don't give them power that they do not yet, at least, possess.
Speaking of the holiday season, it might be a leaner holiday season for people, not just Thanksgiving, but I'm looking ahead to Christmas.
The reason it might be a little bit leaner is that a very important inflation measure has reached its highest level since 1991.
1991.
That was just about 20 years after Joe Biden first entered the U.S. Senate.
1991.
Now we're approaching 50 years since he entered national politics.
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis...
Personal consumption spending.
So spending on your personal consumption rose by $130.5 billion in August.
So this is a 4.3% year-over-year hike in the personal consumption expenditures price index.
Stick with me here for a second.
Also in August, personal income rose.
So the consumption spending rose over $130 billion.
Personal income rose $35.5 billion.
So there's about a $95 billion gap here.
Personal consumption spending increased $95 billion more than income increased.
And by the way, The only reason that income increased that much is because of the government subsidies, because the government was just doling out money to try to keep people going, which is one of the things that is leading to this inflation.
Disposable income only rose $18.9 billion.
So, because the consumption spending is vastly outpacing the income growth, The growth of consumption spending is vastly outpacing the income growth.
Purchasing power is diminishing.
Your dollar is going much less far than it used to go.
And this is really, really bad news.
You are getting poorer because of the Biden administration's stupid policies.
That is happening in real time.
And it reminds us of an eternal political truth that the left always ignores and that the right sometimes ignores as well.
Namely, Eventually the bill comes due.
Eventually the bill comes due.
What you're hearing from AOC right now, notably, but lots of Democrats, is we can spend a zillion dollars and we can give people freebies all the time and we can shut down the economy and not work for a year or more than a year, and it's going to be fine.
It's not going to cost you anything, actually.
That situation has never existed.
That has never existed anywhere in the world.
People who are promising you that are promising you something that never was and never will be.
Eventually, the bill is going to come due.
If you shut down huge segments of the economy for a year, we're going to be less prosperous.
We're going to be less wealthy.
If you just print up a bunch of money and just give away a bunch of money, the money is going to be less valuable.
There is no magic wand that Joe Biden or anyone else can wave to change that situation.
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Huge problems on the economy right now, especially with regard to inflation.
Huge problems on foreign policy.
You saw the collapse of Afghanistan, weakness on the part of the United States on the world stage, or enemies aggressing.
You're seeing a huge crisis at the southern border.
The immigration issue, thousands and thousands, many, many thousands of illegal aliens pouring across the border.
Well over 1.2, 1.3 million illegal aliens already in the country this year who are now harassing U.S. senators in the bathroom.
Really bad stuff.
Mr.
President, what is your answer to all of these crises that are going on on your watch?
Parenthetically, when you build a charging station, it's like back in the day when my grandpa worked for the American Oil Company back in the turn of the 1920s in that area.
They went from state to state convincing people that they allowed them to put 20,000 gallons of gasoline under the ground.
They didn't want them around.
Thank you for clearing that up, Mr.
President.
I now am somehow more confused than I was before you started speaking.
We play these every so often on the show.
I guess more than every so often on the show.
These clips of Joe Biden just rambling incoherently.
Often not even speaking real English words.
Just sort of slurring words, making up words.
And then even if you can make out the words, talking about things that are just completely out of left field.
And my grandpapa said, when you see, when you go to the pool with the hairy legs and the corn pup says, well, hey, chogga chogga chip.
Chogga chogga chip.
Come on, Jack.
I play those on the show.
Not to make fun of Joe Biden for being a bit senile.
He's obviously on the decline, but happens to everyone.
It'll happen to you too someday.
Not just to make fun of him for being not the brightest bulb in the pack.
That's not a function of age.
That's always been true.
Joe Biden has always been at the lower end of the IQ spectrum in Washington, D.C., which is really saying something.
But I... I mention it because it shows you that there is not a lucid person at the helm of the United States government right now.
The person who is supposed to be in charge, Joe Biden, does not really know what's going on.
I'm not saying he's a complete vegetable and they just put him in his room and he watches Matlock all day.
They may do that, but I'm not even saying that.
I'm sure he goes to meetings and...
Does some things.
But he does not have his finger on the pulse of what is going on in the government.
And so other people are taking advantage.
And in some cases, the ball is just being dropped.
And so even in the crises that are not manufactured for Democrat political advantage, they're just happening because no one is really running the show.
You don't need to take my word for it.
I'm not just making some hack-partisan argument because I don't like Biden, and so I'm saying that he's just a completely incompetent leader.
Talk to John Kerry.
So John Kerry works for Joe Biden, was a colleague of Joe Biden for many years in the United States Senate.
John Kerry, former Secretary of State, now he's the climate czar.
For Joe Biden.
And so John Kerry has always had this very close relationship with the French, which of course just makes perfect sense.
And the French right now are very upset with the United States because we've formed a partnership with the United Kingdom and with Australia to help Stop the rise of China and France was very upset by this and they pulled their diplomats out of the United States and they made a big show and John Kerry was explaining how this went down and made clear to an interviewer he was not attacking Joe Biden.
He actually thought he was sort of defending Joe Biden, I think.
John Kerry made clear that not only did Joe Biden not handle the situation correctly, he didn't even know what the situation was.
President Biden asked me about it and I told him and expressed...
You told Joe Biden that it was not the right...
He asked me.
He said, what's the situation?
And I explained exactly...
He had not been aware of that.
He literally had not been aware of what had transpired.
And I don't want to go into the details of it, but suffice it to say that the president...
My president is very committed to strengthening the relationship and making sure that this is a small event of the past and moving on to the much more important future.
That is such a sad clarification John Kerry had to make there.
It's not, you know, headline, John Kerry destroys Joe Biden.
He's not.
He thinks he's defending Joe Biden here.
Because the question is, how did this happen?
Why did the United States diss France in this way and allow France, a decent ally, to now pull their diplomats and now there's all this rancor between the two nations?
And he said, well, you know, look...
Look, look here, puppet.
Look, monkey.
I told President Biden that.
And the reporter asked for clarification.
He goes, you told him that you did not think it was a good idea.
Oh, no.
I mean, I literally just told him that.
Like, he didn't know what was happening, so I just told him what was happening.
I said, yes, there's a country called France.
They speak with a funny accent and they eat snails.
And they are very upset with us now, Joe.
Why are they upset, John?
Well, because...
And he had to just explain the nuts and bolts of what had happened.
Forget about what the right course of action was.
Forget about what had led to that moment.
He had to explain that to the president.
Why is that John Kerry's job?
The climate czar.
It's not even as though John Kerry is the Secretary of State anymore.
He hasn't been the Secretary of State in a long time.
It's because the President has no idea what is going on.
He is completely checked out.
And you are seeing this reflected in our national policy.
So notably at the southern border.
They're border patrol agents trying to do their job, trying to stop the flow of illegal aliens pouring across the border.
When they are allowed to do their jobs, they do a pretty good job of it.
When they have their hands tied behind their backs, then the illegal aliens just pour over.
Now they're not even allowed to ride horses, so they're not even allowed to police certain areas of the border anymore.
The Border Patrol agents just finally caught up with a guy who was sneaking across the border illegally, who had previously been deported for murder.
So this was in the Rio Grande Valley Sector Border Patrol.
These agents arrest an illegal alien who had been convicted by a Florida court for homicide.
So, I guess it could have been manslaughter, too.
Either way, I don't really want this guy in the country.
The convicted killer re-entered the United States with a group of five other migrants.
They finally caught up with this guy.
And, you know, there's some percentage of the illegal aliens that they do catch up with.
There's a far greater percentage that they don't, who just get released into the country, and that's that.
But this guy, one of the migrants, a Honduran national, has a conviction from a Miami court for homicide.
How many more of these guys are coming into the country?
How many?
They're just trying to be liberated.
They're just coming from Latin America to be liberated.
Speaking of liberation movements from Latin America, there's a clip going around right now Of Ibram Kendi.
He's sort of the Mac Daddy of anti-racism.
This new ideology that's very influenced by critical race theory and other radical leftist movements from the 20th century.
So Kendi was speaking at a church.
I put that in quotes.
I'm not sure the exact nature of this church.
Doesn't sound very Christian to me.
And Kendi explained the religious underpinnings of his ideology.
Liberation Theology.
In other words, Jesus was a revolutionary.
And the job of the Christian is to revolutionize society.
That the job of the Christian is to liberate society from the powers on earth that are oppressing humanity.
Everybody understand that?
So, that's liberation theology in a nutshell.
Savior theology...
It's a different type of theology.
The job of the Christian is to go out and save these individuals who are behaviorally deficient.
In other words, we're to bring them into the church, these individuals who are doing all of these evil, sinful things, and heal them and save them.
And then once we've saved them, we've done our jobs.
And to me, anti-racists fundamentally reject savior theology.
This is a very telling clip.
This is a very important clip for understanding the anti-racist movement.
So from the beginning, you can tell that Ibram Kendi, though he seems to be talking about Christianity, is not.
You can tell this from the very first sentence when Ibram Kendi says, Jesus was a revolutionary.
As a general rule, if someone is referring to Jesus exclusively in the past tense, There's a very good chance you're not dealing with a Christian.
Because Christians believe that Christ was crucified.
He died and rose again from the dead and lives.
My Redeemer lives.
This is something we say very often.
This is central to our understanding of the world.
If you do not...
I mean, Christ himself says this.
Before Abraham was, I am.
That he is the being himself.
I am.
I am that I am is what God says his name is when he's speaking to Moses.
So, from the very beginning, we can see Ibram Kendi, whatever he's talking about, it's not really Christianity, but this difference between liberation and savior theology, in his words, this is the difference between Christianity and this radical sort of leftism.
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Also check out Ben's show, The Leftist Quest to Seize Control of Facebook.
They'll be talking about what's going on with the Facebook quote-unquote whistleblower.
And you also have to subscribe and start listening to Morning Wire on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Leave a five-star review.
review if you like what you hear.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Ibram Kendi, who is presently the head honcho of anti-racism, the capo di tutti copy of race who is presently the head honcho of anti-racism, the capo di Ibram Kendi has this viral video that was going around of him speaking in some sort of church or some sort of building.
And congregation that referred to itself as a church about liberation theology.
And he says, liberation theology holds that the purpose of Christianity and of the Christian in the world is to liberate everybody from the bonds of oppression and tradition and whatever else.
He says this contrasts with savior theology, which holds that the role of the Christian in the world is to go evangelize and spread the gospel and bring people into the body of Christ.
So what Ibram Kendi is derisively referring to as savior theology is also just known as Christianity.
That Christianity, which is the point, is to spread the good news, just as the apostles did, just as the disciples of Jesus did, go out and spread the good news of the gospel, bring people into the body of Christ.
Ibram Kendi says this is very bad.
We cannot go out and save people.
If you go out there and you say people are doing bad things and they need to stop doing bad things and start doing good things and accept Jesus and come into the church, that's very bad.
That's oppressive.
That reeks of white supremacy or whatever.
So we can't have any of that.
Instead, we need to liberate people.
And the key here is this word, liberation.
Because to my mind, as a Catholic, as a Christian, in the broadest sense, the two are the same thing.
When you come to faith, when you accept Jesus, when you accept theological religious truth, you are freed.
You are freed from the bonds of sin.
And what does it mean to be freed of the bonds of sin?
Well, you see it in the Gospels.
Jesus says, the man who sins is a slave to sin.
Take the religious stuff away for a moment.
Just focus in this very practical, tangible way.
We all know that when we sin, when we pick up bad habits...
We become slaves to those sins.
We call this addiction.
When you do too many drugs, all of a sudden you can't control whether or not you do the drugs.
Your lower will runs away with you.
Your appetite runs away with you.
This is true even with food.
If you overeat, you can't put down that cupcake.
You can't say no.
You don't have self-control.
The point of liberal education...
Which we mention on the show a lot, is to make sense of your freedom, tamp down those base appetites, cultivate the higher rational will, which mediates between the appetite and the divine will.
Okay, that's the two-second summary of what we mean by this.
What Ibram Kendi believes is that true liberation is being able to do whatever you want.
I think it even goes further.
True liberation is the freedom to commit vice and sin and to pursue your appetites.
And that is slavery.
That is a Christianity without Christ.
That is Christianity without God.
Because you can do it all yourself.
As long as we, the liberators, come in and we free you from the bonds of tradition, as long as the anti-racists go in and free you from the bonds of whatever oppressive social structures there are, then you can be free to do whatever you want, and you don't need God, and you don't need Christ, and you don't need grace, and you don't need religion.
It is a God without wrath leading a people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross, So that you can do you and do whatever you want.
It's the opposite of Christianity, but it adopts the language of Christianity.
It's important to know where this ideology comes from because it's pervading the military now, the schools, our workplaces.
But it comes down to that same old problem that we've been talking about.
What do we mean by liberty?
Is liberty just the ability to do whatever you want, or is it the right to do what you ought to do?
A related point from Jennifer Aniston.
You know that other great philosopher, Jennifer Aniston.
Rachel from Friends.
Jennifer Aniston just posted a series of stories to her Instagram talking about how upset she is that babies in Texas won't be killed quite as often anymore.
She hates the pro-life laws.
She supports the...
Abortion industry.
And she posted a clip of herself from that absolutely insufferable show, Friends, and she writes in it, I repeat, no uterus, no opinion.
So if you're not a woman, you have no right to have an opinion about abortion.
I mention it.
Look, Jennifer Aniston is not, I don't think she's the leading mind on public matters in this country.
But a lot of people say this, and we talk about a lot of other stupid slogans in the pro-abortion movement.
This one may be the stupidest.
One, now it's becoming outdated.
I think Jennifer Aniston is revealing how unhip she is because, of course, we're now told that non-women can become pregnant.
Men can become pregnant.
Non-binary, you know, all sorts of made-up sexes and genders, they can become pregnant too.
So that distinction no longer exists.
But also, even the principle that unless you can perform a certain action, you should have no...
You should have no say in that action as a matter of public policy.
We don't apply that to any other aspect of society.
We don't say, well, unless you have tumors, you can't make cancer policy.
No tumor, no opinion.
We don't say, well, unless you have murdered someone, you do not have the right to craft laws about murder.
Well, unless you this, unless you that, unless you this, unless you that.
No, of course not.
We wouldn't do...
We wouldn't tolerate that because politics refers to the public.
It refers to public matters, not just personal matters.
Public matters as well.
To say nothing of the fact that abortion involves another person.
Not just you and not just the mother, but also the baby.
Right?
So...
They repeat these slogans on the left because they don't have arguments to make, but a lot of people confuse cheap slogans with arguments.
And it's important every so often to remind ourselves that these things that we hear, that's just my body, my choice, reproductive rights, no uterus, no opinion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that we can become, I don't know, asleep.
We can become unconscious of just how stupid these arguments are.
And the The reason it matters that Jennifer Aniston said it is because that show had such cultural influence.
I actually enjoyed the show when it was on the air.
I recently went back and tried to watch it.
It's unwatchable.
It's so trite.
It is so...
Every decision these people make is just wrong and bad for them, and it's not all that funny even, and it's just so shallow, and in a way, it's actually quite radical, but that's how the establishment pushes their agenda.
Okay, very important to see through these things.
It's very difficult in a world where the entire establishment is pushing these shallow messages.
What we're hearing from the elected representatives now on the left is don't pay attention to those details.
Don't pay attention to those facts.
AOC just goes on one of the Sunday shows.
She says, look, when you're talking about the big budget bill, don't focus on the numbers.
President Biden, according to our reporting from Ed O'Keefe, our correspondent, says you're going to have to settle for about two trillion dollars.
Is that an acceptable ceiling for you?
So here's the here's where I think the problem is, is that when we talk about top line numbers, There's a lot that is hidden in that discussion.
And so the reason why this conversation shouldn't be about numbers, but it should be about what substantive programs are willing to be excluded or that...
It's coming from the White House.
Yeah, but the White House isn't making the demands to exclude universal childcare or universal pre-K. This is coming from the more conservative wing of the Democratic Party.
But those are the conversations that we need to have.
When you're talking about the budget, you shouldn't talk about numbers.
That's what AOC says.
And you know what?
Oh, I hate to say it.
I hate to say it.
She's right.
She's right.
I mean, she's not right if you're an accountant.
She's not right if you care about the health of the national economy.
But she is right as a political matter.
What she's saying is, yeah, these Democrats say $3.5 trillion is too much money.
You only want $2 trillion.
Okay, what program do you want to cut?
Oh, you want to cut universal pre-K? First of all, I don't think pre-K should even exist.
I didn't go to pre-K. Did you go to pre-K? I did not go to pre-K. I made it out just fine.
I learned my letters and numbers just fine without pre-K. Now, I actually have friends, I kid you not, who say they're sending their kids to school at age two.
Because they don't want to say that they're sending the kid to daycare.
So it has to be really fancy.
So I say, I'm sending my child to school.
Your child who can't speak and who drools all day.
They're going to school.
They're going to work on differential equations or something?
No, I don't think so.
But the reason for this is that the reason as a political matter that the left pushes pre-K and pre-pre-K and post-high school and post-college and everyone needs to get a PhD in gender studies is so that the influence of the family on the individual will be diminished and And the influence of the state will be increased.
And this is not some crazy conspiracy theory.
I mean, this has been in the discussion of political philosophy going back to Plato, at least.
And the left is pretty open about this, that they do not want these families with their peculiar traditions and their Bible-thumping to form...
Children, they believe that it's the state's role to form these children, and so they push for these things.
And the reason that parents are tempted to do it is because it's a tough economy out there, and you can't really survive.
Most people cannot really survive on one income, and so both parents have to work, so you've got to pay someone to watch your kid.
The wife has to go work for some guy so that she can make money so that the husband can go pay some other woman to go raise the kid, and it's a very convoluted system, but As a result, a lot of people are going to say, well, hold on.
You better not cut my pre-K. Hold on.
You better not cut whatever goody program I want in the budget.
And that's how you get to preserve the $3.5 trillion budget.
It's because no one wants to cut the specific programs.
As a political matter, AOC is absolutely right.
And I wish Republicans would learn from her.
Nancy Pelosi said the same thing the other day.
She said, let's not talk about numbers.
Let's talk about values.
Yeah.
Hey, Republicans, take notes.
Get your pen out and take notes.
Stop just talking about, well, actually, you know, but the GDP, blah, blah, blah.
Who cares?
Who cares?
What do you want to do with the money?
What do you want to do with the government?
Why should we vote for you?
What are you going to do with it?
What are you going to do with the power?
The left is giving us a vision.
It's a bad vision.
What are you giving us?
Well, what we're going to do is we're going to outsource even more jobs so the GDP takes up another $20.
Oh, cool, bro.
Great.
I'm definitely going to vote for you then.
That makes a lot of sense.
Speaking of wealthy Americans, most wealthy Americans find themselves in a conundrum right now.
And it's a conundrum that we actually talked about with respect to AOC yesterday.
The conundrum is this.
They've got a lot of money, but they don't trust their lazy kids not to squander their money and ruin their own lives in the process.
There's a survey that just came out from The Motley Fool, It was a survey of 2,000 American adults with net worths over $1 million.
And a little over three quarters of these individuals plan to leave inheritances.
And almost as many, 76% say they're going to leave inheritances.
And I guess a quarter of them are just going to go on a spending spree before they die.
And 68% of those millionaires plan to have that money accessible.
Only after their heirs meet certain conditions.
So the vast majority of these people, and the vast, vast majority of people who are leaving inheritances, say they're not just going to leave their kids the money.
Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank Quote, designed a trust that skips his adult children and will support his grandchildren until they graduate from college.
And this is a design that over 60% of people who were surveyed by this outlet, The Motley Fool, said that they were considering doing.
Why is that?
Is the reason just that they have some vendetta against their kids or the kids aren't good enough for them or they think the kids aren't going to use the money as well as the grandchildren are?
No, it's not just that.
It's that they don't want the money to ruin the kids' lives.
They don't want the kids to just become lazy and degenerate and give into libertinism and just basically drink or shoot up or squander all of that money and ruin their lives in the process.
We were talking about this yesterday with regard to AOC's proposal for a four-day workweek.
People should have a four-day work week and they should have three days off.
And oh, could you imagine all the things you would do with your three days off?
Oh my gosh, you would become an artist or a painter or a poet or whatever.
And this is what everyone says.
Nancy Pelosi made the same claim many years ago with regard to the Obamacare debate.
And the reality is, for most people, or almost everybody, you won't do that.
You'll just sit on the couch.
Some people think, oh gosh, if only I could retire.
Oh, I wish I could retire at age 35.
And then, oh man, I'd sit on a beach somewhere.
I'd be so happy.
No, you wouldn't.
You'd be miserable because you were made to work.
I'm not saying you've got to work at the widget factory or in the coal mine all day.
There are other kinds of work.
You can work On your family, building up your family.
You can work on actually cultivating a hobby, but it's not just, you know, sitting with a glass of Chablis painting something.
Painting is hard work.
Writing poetry is hard work.
All these things that we consider to be very simple recreational activities, if you want to do them well and you want them to actually do something for you, then they're going to require a lot of work, okay?
And what these millionaires are, they're acknowledging this.
Even if it's not consciously, it's subconsciously.
We are made to do things, to be productive.
And in a society that is told, now just stay home, whether it's stay home because of the lockdowns, or stay home with the universal basic income, or just go away, we're going to pay you off to go away with welfare benefits or whatever.
That is an inhuman society.
Not only is that not good for the society as a whole, it's really bad even for the individuals that it is purportedly going to help.
Just laziness.
Mankind is not meant to be lazy.
Speaking of children.
Speaking of children.
Won't somebody please think of the children?
A woman has come forward at Facebook.
She used to work at Facebook.
Then she left Facebook.
And now she is a whistleblower.
She is a whistleblower.
She is speaking truth to power.
Yes, that's right.
And she's speaking truth to power so clearly that everyone in the ruling class loves her and is giving her lots of plaudits.
Hmm.
That's weird.
That's a strange fact.
The woman is coming forward.
She was a former Facebook product manager.
Her name is Frances Hogan.
She is saying that Facebook has...
She's making two claims.
Facebook is not good for kids, and when kids use Facebook and Instagram too much, it's not good for their mental health.
And also, Facebook is not censoring conservatives enough, and that's a bad thing.
And one of the reasons she quit Facebook is because they were not willing to interfere even more in the political process and suppress conservatives even more than they already are.
So those are the two angles here.
And as a result of her heroic whistleblowing, The Senators on Capitol Hill and the mainstream media and everyone else are giving her a big round of applause.
My name is Frances Haugen.
I used to work at Facebook.
I joined Facebook because I think Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in us.
But I'm here today because I believe Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy.
The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, But won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.
Congressional action is needed.
They won't solve this crisis without your help.
Yesterday we saw Facebook get taken off the internet.
I don't know why I went down, but I know that for more than five hours, Facebook wasn't used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.
We can have social media we enjoy, that connects us, without tearing apart our democracy, putting our children in danger, and sowing ethnic violence around the world.
We can do better.
Now this is confusing, because she keeps using these two lines in the same breath.
It's harming girls, it's really bad for children.
Okay, well, yeah, okay, I guess we could all agree with that.
Maybe there's some regulation there.
And it's harming our democracy.
Well, hold on.
That seems like a totally separate issue.
What do you mean harming our democracy?
Oh, you mean because...
Conservatives, while they are censored on Facebook, are not censored quite as much on Facebook as they are on other platforms.
And therefore, conservatives do well on Facebook.
And actually, do you know who she's talking about?
She's talking about us.
She's talking about us right here at the Michael Knowles Show and the Daily Wire.
Because we are the top publishers on Facebook, and we have been for a very long time.
We have formed our business in many ways to be able to compete at a very serious level in the new media.
We're not an old media company.
We're not an old TV company or an old newspaper company.
So we were able to be agile and focus our business and tailor it to those specifications for new media.
And so we're the top publisher on Facebook.
Now, the left still dominates Facebook because, yes, there's the Daily Wire.
Yes, there's the Blaze.
Yes, there are a handful of conservative outlets out there.
But the vast majority of them are left-wing outlets.
So while, yes, the Daily Wire punches above our weight, absolutely...
When you consider the right-wing outlets compared to the left-wing outlets, the left-wing outlets totally dominate, but that's not good enough for this woman.
And so she says, no, you've got to suppress the conservatives.
And in order to make that argument more palatable, she is couching it in protecting children.
But those two issues have nothing to do with one another.
They're just going after Facebook because Facebook is the fairest, and they're not even particularly fair, but they're the fairest to conservatives.
The way that you know that this woman is not a whistleblower, that she is not speaking truth to power, is that the most powerful people in the country are promoting her.
The entire ruling class, I guess with the exception of Facebook, which is one of the big tech companies, but in this case it's sort of the odd man out.
Other than that, all of the institutions in our country, with power, are promoting this woman.
Because she is not speaking truth to power, she is the power.
And they are all turning on Facebook, which is another power, because in this case, Facebook is not going along entirely with the agenda and completely shutting up conservatives in the way that Google and YouTube and Twitter are moving.
And so they're giving Facebook a warning.
They're giving Facebook a slap on the wrist.
And this is an important lesson to remember.
We love this idea of speaking truth to power, and this is a very romantic notion.
My friend Spencer Clavin just did a whole episode on this as it pertained to St.
Thomas More on his show Young Heretics.
And we love this idea.
Yes, we're going to speak truth to power.
When you are really speaking truth to power, the way that you will know that you are doing that is that everyone is going to hate you, and you are going to be derided and mocked and slandered and persecuted and very likely killed.
Okay, that's how you'll know that you're actually speaking truth to power.
What we're seeing play out right now on Capitol Hill, just like what we were seeing play out with the BLM riots and all these other astroturfed social justice movements, is the play-acting version of speaking truth to power.
When in fact, these people, this quote-unquote whistleblower, or the BLM pawns, or anyone else, What they're actually doing is upholding the dominant power structure.
That's what we're seeing.
I think there are lots of good reasons to reign in Facebook.
That whistleblower lady isn't it.
But what is this about?
She's talking about the division within Facebook.
Well, you'll see this actually happening in New York right now.
A statue that involved a bronze bust of George Floyd was defaced on Sunday morning in New York.
Someone threw some paint away.
At the idol to George Floyd.
The great bronze icon of St.
George.
George of the blessed fake $20 bills or whatever.
So what is this about?
Why are we defacing monuments of George?
Why is there a monument of George Floyd?
I have no idea.
Why are we defacing monuments of George Floyd?
And...
Why are we defacing monuments of Christopher Columbus, who's a good man?
Why are we defacing monuments of George Washington, good man, of Abraham Lincoln, good, why?
Because we're disagreeing over what our national symbols are, right?
That's where a lot of this division comes from.
We can't agree.
The left wants our symbol to be this guy who was killed under sad circumstances, but who was also a career criminal, who robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, who did a ton of drugs, who was committing a crime while, and resisting arrest while he was killed.
And so that's sad.
It's sad when any man is killed.
But very different than, you know, an innocent martyr.
And the right wants our statues to be George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, these great men who built our civilization.
Which is it?
We will not resolve this rancor in this division until we can agree on the shared symbols, because the symbols represent what the country is.
And right now, we have no idea who we are, which is why people are trying to grab power as tightly as they can, whether they're in the government, they're in big tech, they're in industry, to clamp down and make that decision.
That decision is being made right now, and we need to fight as hard as we can to keep the country that we want.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
See you tomorrow.
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The Senate held a hearing with the Facebook whistleblower yesterday, setting the stage for the most far-reaching censorship campaign in American history.
Also, an ESPN anchor has pulled off the air after criticizing vaccine mandates.
And Dave Chappelle has a new comedy special out.
The news media insists that it's incendiary and bigoted, so you know it must be good.
And finally, Ray Spader Ibram X. Kendi preaches his version of the gospel message, and it is as heretical as you might expect it to be.
