A new study shows vaccine lotteries wasted $89 million without increasing vaccination rates, Colin Powell dies of COVID complications, and Superman ditches America.
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States spent at least $89 million on vaccine lotteries trying to induce lots of Americans to get an experimental drug to go get the COVID vaccine, and they would have the opportunity to win cash as a result of that.
Now, although initial reports suggested that the vaccine lotteries were successful, there's a new report out of the Journal of the American Medical Association that shows that Absolutely none of the state lotteries increased vaccination rates in any way.
They were just a complete waste of a lot of money.
It turns out, actually, that people are not just economic animals that are to be lured and prodded with lucre and slop.
It turns out that people actually can think for themselves and make their own medical decisions.
Who would have thunk it?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Do you remember, I guess it was...
Coming up on a year ago now, that the vaccine lotteries started to be floated.
And it wasn't just the vaccine lotteries.
There was something even more offensive than telling people, you know, take this experimental drug and maybe you'll win a million dollars.
Oh, gimme, gimme, right?
The thing that was even more offensive, I remember the image clearly.
I can't get it out of my mind.
Was Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, holding up a Shake Shack cheeseburger and just stuffing it in his face, this disgusting thing.
He says, mmm, vaccination!
Mmm, get a vaccine and you can get a free cheeseburger, pigs!
He didn't call us pigs, but he was insinuating that we were pigs.
Yum, yum, yum!
Oh, eat it!
Eat your slop bucket, pig!
Look at the french fries, too!
And it was so...
Gross.
Physically, it was gross.
But also, psychologically, this idea that people were making their own prudential decision about their risk from the coronavirus, which for most people wasn't particularly high, and the long-term data on the vaccine, which did not exist because it was a brand new vaccine.
And, oh, but a cheeseburger?
Oh, shoot me up, Captain.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
No, that isn't how it works, and I'm not surprised that the states wasted $89 million.
You know, when a state only wastes $89 million, that's a good day, actually, compared to the other sort of money that they just incinerate.
But I am really pleased that they didn't work, because we're not just animals.
We're human beings.
We have a rational will.
We actually can think about these things and say, no, no, I know my odds of dying from COVID. I know my odds of certain risks from the vaccines.
And I know my odds of winning the lottery, okay?
And none of them actually are particularly high.
But this brings us to Colin Powell.
Colin Powell died yesterday.
He had a very distinguished career.
He's been a His career kind of fell apart when he sold the Iraq War to the United Nations and later came very much to regret that decision.
And toward the latter part of his career, he was much more of a Democrat.
And he would vote for Democrats and endorse Democrats.
And every time he would do that, the media would hold him out and say, lifelong Republican Colin Powell endorses a Democrat.
Just like he did last time and the time before that and the time before that.
So it...
I know that a lot of Republicans don't have a great deal of political admiration for Colin Powell, even if they have a great deal of professional admiration.
We're obviously grateful for his service to the country.
My point in discussing Colin Powell is not to assess his career.
He dedicated his career to the public service of the United States.
We salute him.
We wish his family well and can keep them in our thoughts and prayers.
The reason I bring it up is to focus on how he died.
Colin Powell died of complications of the coronavirus, and Colin Powell was very, very vaccinated.
So he took the vaccine.
He was fully vaccinated, but he was 84 years old, and he contracted the coronavirus, and he died of it anyway.
And This happens to people.
He was in a risk group and that's very sad.
And I just want to compare the coverage of Colin Powell's death with the coverage of Herman Cain's death.
Do you remember Herman Cain?
Herman Cain was the CEO of Godfather Pizza.
He ran for president in 2012.
He was a sort of colorful figure, had the 999 plan, if some of you recall that.
And he did not get the vaccine, and he didn't...
I think he may have died even before the vaccine...
But he didn't worry that much about the coronavirus, and he didn't wear 17 masks, and he didn't lock himself in a bubble for a year and a half.
And he went to Trump rallies, and he got the virus, and he died.
And the media made fun of him, and they said, ha ha ha, Herman Cain, that dumb idiot, that rube, serves you right.
This is what you get when you don't live in fear and do everything Fauci says.
You play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
You got the coronavirus as you well deserve.
That was what they all but said.
That was the tone of the reporting.
And Colin Powell now followed all the rules and took the vaccines and he died as well.
And the reality is here...
It's not that you die if you don't get the vaccine, or you die if you do get the vaccine, or it's directly attributable to this mask or this vaccine.
The reality is that old people get sick and die.
And sometimes young people get sick and die, too, though it's rarer.
And that's a reality that we used to understand.
We used to be aware of our own mortality, and we used to know that death comes for us all, and no one No man or demigod or great exalted figure, even the likes of Dr.
Fauci, is going to stop that.
And we used to not live in such a neurotic fear of sickness and death.
And I suspect with the decline of religion and the rise of secularism and the rise of the cult of health and...
It's associated pathologies that now we can't really accept that, so we're always looking for some kind of explanation, and we're always looking to spike the football.
Well, he didn't follow the rules, so he deserved to die.
No, we all die.
Frankly, we all deserve to die because of original sin, and there are certain things we can do to reduce those risks, but death is going to come for us all, and I think that ought to give us a healthier view of life when we come to accept that sort of thing.
But a lot of people won't do that, which is why they have a very unhealthy view of life and it's why we're giving up our political rights and our way of life here in the United States.
But it's a fool's errand because it can come for us all and it will come for us all.
What is harming us Is not mortality so much as the obsession over health.
What is harming us is the political power grab that is represented by the lockdowns and by the vaccines.
You see this right now at ESPN. Alison Williams, who is, or rather was, an ESPN reporter, is leaving ESPN after being denied a waiver for the COVID vaccine.
Take a listen to her explanation.
I have been denied my request for accommodation by ESPN and the Walt Disney Company and effective next week, I will be separated from the company.
A lot of people have brought up the moral obligation receiving the vaccine is to being a good citizen.
And I weighed that and I thought about the implications.
We all want to be good neighbors.
We all want to end this pandemic, but ultimately an injection that does not stop transmission and spread for me did not weigh in morally.
But I also want people to know who support these mandates that I fight for you because If this is the direction we take our country, there will come a time when the government or corporations mandate you to get something that does not align with your values.
Power given is seldom returned.
And when that day comes, I want you to at least know that we fought and we tried.
Power given is seldom returned.
That's a very powerful statement from this woman who is actually sacrificing something for her beliefs.
Beyond her beliefs about the vaccine, for her beliefs about politics and the legitimate limits of power.
Okay, she's losing money.
She's losing her career.
Power given is seldom returned.
We've talked about on this show, there are, I think, compelling arguments to get the vaccine for some people.
And I think there are compelling arguments not to get the vaccine.
If you have moral objections to the fact that they were developed and in some cases produced with fetal stem cells.
If you look at the possibility of blood clotting or of nerve damage or of myocarditis or pericarditis.
If you have questions about the long-term effects, obviously there are no long-term data on the vaccine because the vaccine was just invented.
If you think that your risk of COVID is very low, then you might say, well, there's no reason to get a vaccine at all, no particularly compelling reason.
And that's all academic until it comes down to the question of, are you going to keep your job or not?
And people can make prudential decisions about that.
But she's taking a stand here.
And I think As she says, the people who admire her here are not just the ones who are a little skeptical of the vaccine or skeptical of Fauci.
The people who should be admiring her here are the people who cherish our former American way of life and who want to hold the government to account and keep the limits on power that we had in this country until very, very recently.
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I want to turn to a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
Hooters.
You know Hooters?
It's the chicken place where you get wings and beer, and the women have kind of short shorts on and tight little t-shirts, and it's not the most politically correct place, and it's not the most feminist place, but it is a place where people often go on their bachelor parties.
So Hooters, and the reason they go is because they have great chicken.
It's like when people say, I read Playboy for the articles.
You go to Hooters for the chicken wings.
They are actually excellent chicken wings.
So Hooters has...
Hooters has a new uniform, and the uniforms were already a little risque.
And starting this month, all Hooters girls are required to wear these new shorts, which are even less modest than the old shorts, and they kind of display a little bit more in the way of the tights and the curves and the things that a lot of people go to Hooters to see.
So they say the old shorts should not be worn.
Some women are upset about this.
I doubt that really any of the Hooters staff members are upset about this.
They're working at Hooters.
They know what they're signing up for.
This is not some Victorian bed and breakfast or something.
This is a place where you are there to cater to guys who want to see women wearing skimpy little outfits.
But some people are offended on behalf of the people who are at Hooters and they're saying this is awful and terrible and patriarchal and sexist and whatever.
I find myself a little bit torn here because I don't think that we ought to encourage more licentiousness in the I think we've got plenty of that, and I'm not of the opinion of the libertines, or sometimes the libertarians who trend a little libertine, to say, yeah, woohoo, do whatever you want.
Fulfill any base desires that you have.
Just don't make me pay for it, or something like that.
I think it's good to orient our public policy toward virtue and away from vice.
But I think there's a pretty conservative argument for Hooters, okay?
And it's a distinction that increasingly in our culture, the left especially, but even the right kind of fails to understand.
And that is the difference between something that is suggestive and something that is obscene.
On the grand scope of our culture, Hooters is actually pretty wholesome.
We live in a culture that is saturated in porn.
So obviously there's hardcore porn all over the internet.
We live in a culture where you can barely turn on a TV show without seeing all sorts of crazy sex stuff and all crazy sorts of violence and really bizarre sorts of things.
You can barely look at a billboard.
I was in New York.
I was on the subway in New York.
They've got advertisements all over the subway car.
And it was for one of the dating apps.
And it's all sorts of people licking each other in all sorts of crazy positions.
And it's a guy and a girl and two dudes and two chicks and a guy and a girl and a goat.
I don't know.
It's all weird stuff.
And you think, compared to that, Hooters is fine.
Hooters is actually, in a way, kind of modest.
The women are totally clothed.
All right?
And they're not...
It's not a brothel.
It's not a strip club.
It's a chicken restaurant.
It reminds me of the perennial debate, the non-traversy, over Baby It's Cold Outside.
You know, it's a Baby It's Cold Outside.
Well, I really can't stay.
Baby It's Cold Outside.
And the libs listen to the lyrics...
Which are of a guy inviting this woman in to have a cup of cocoa or to have maybe something a little stronger than that.
And the woman says, no, no, I really can't.
No, I really shouldn't.
He says, no, baby, come on.
Come on.
It's cold out there.
You don't want to go back out there.
No, I should go home.
No, really?
Come on.
Come on in.
And the libs say, well, this is a song about rape.
It's rapey.
He's trying to rape her.
Because the libs don't understand the difference between rape and coercion and seduction.
Right?
The whole point of Baby, It's Cold Outside is that the woman actually does want to stay.
It's not that she's fleeing the man.
It's like, no, get me out of here!
Call the cops!
She is attracted to the man.
The man is attracted to her.
And in the traditional way of doing things, until about five minutes ago, the man would pursue the woman.
And the woman would be modest and resist in a way.
And then acquiesce if she liked the guy or not acquiesce if she didn't like the guy.
And now we pretend that men and women are exactly the same, and men need to take six months of paternity leave or whatever to chest feed or something.
I don't know.
There's a lot of jargon now.
But men and women actually are different.
And maybe it's cold outside, even though it's a song about a guy wanting to sleep with a girl, and a girl wanting to sleep with the guy.
In a way, it's sort of wholesome as well, okay?
There's something...
It's perfectly normal about recognizing that men are attracted to women, women are attracted to men, and we need to constrain those desires in a certain way and limit them and not just have everybody running around naked, putting all sorts of things in all sorts of places, but actually need to restrain them, even if it is just with.
A skimpy Hooters outfit.
Speaking of triggering things, if you turn to another den of licentiousness and obscenity, Yale University, the administrators of Yale Law School are clamping down on free speech and students' rights.
They are demanding that a student apologize for sending a triggering email.
The student is a Native American student, So on the hierarchy of victimhood, Native Americans are pretty much at the very tippy-top.
If this student were, I don't know, also a lesbian, you could add some little accents on this victimhood.
But to be a Native American, basically, you can claim any sort of victimhood you want and have deference at liberal places like Yale.
But this student made a big error.
This student is...
So that gets rid of all of his victimhood.
This student sent an email about the Federalist Society.
He said, we will soon be christening our very own world-renowned NALSA Trap House, NALSA meaning the Native American Law Students Association, by throwing a Constitution Day bash in collaboration with the Federalist Society, which is a conservative law society.
And the mixer would have American-themed snacks like Popeye's chicken, which is a very famous Popeye's chicken on Yale University's campus.
It's very delicious.
There are sometimes shootings there, but it's great chicken.
There's kind of a fried chicken theme going through today's show.
And, in addition to fried chicken, apple pie and other sorts of American snacks for the Constitution Day.
So, less than a day after the email was sent, the student was called into a meeting with the associate dean and the school's diversity director.
And was told...
To apologize, to recant, not because he's inviting people over to the Native American house, not because he's throwing a party, but because he's doing that with those evil, rotten conservatives in the Federalist Society.
So this student, I'm pleased to say, recorded the meeting.
It's a very long recording.
You should go check out the whole thing, because it's spooky and Orwellian.
Take a listen to just a little bit.
To be quite frank, that as a man of color, there probably isn't as much of a scrutiny of you as there might be of sort of a white person in the same position.
And I just want to acknowledge that there's a complexity to that too.
I think the female's association with FETZOC was very triggering for students that already feel like FETZOC. It belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive to certain communities through policies, right?
That, of course, obviously includes the LGBTQIA community and black communities and immigrant communities.
Several people said they didn't even know if you were, but they were just concerned about the rhetoric.
So I think what you seem to say makes sense of, like, This isn't a conversation about whether you did anything wrong.
It's about language that was used, that was triggering, and you're just trying to take responsibility for managing through some of the tension related to that.
I just got to chill up my spine listening to these ghouls, the diversity director and the dean of this school, saying, you know, look, thankfully, oh, thankfully, you're not a white guy.
If you were a white guy, you'd have a lot more scrutiny.
You'd be out.
I think that's the insinuation.
Thankfully, you're a person of color, so you get a free pass, but...
Oh, the Federalist Society.
You can't...
Oh, that's triggering.
Some students didn't even know what that was, but they didn't like it.
They knew they didn't like it.
And, by the way, the Federalist Society is about as milquetoast as it gets, okay?
I guess it's conservative, but barely, you know?
But no, that's too much for Yale Law School.
And so, look, it's not about you doing anything wrong.
It's just that things were said...
Okay?
And responsibility should be taken because of the students.
And you've got to listen.
I mean, it goes on and on and on, where this dean and this diversity director, these ghouls, say, you know, it might not be great in your career if this may be.
You're going to want to apologize.
Hey, we'll help you draft the letter.
But hey, let's do it.
Let's just draft a little apology.
Yeah, let's just, okay.
And you'll sign it.
And you'll sign it.
And at your Stalin show trial, you will flagellate yourself and beg for forgiveness.
And maybe we'll give it to you, but probably we won't.
Okay?
There is no free speech protection at Yale.
They talk a good game on it, and they don't cover it up.
And this has been happening for over a decade now, and it really accelerated when that crazy girl on campus screamed at her professor and said, this is not an intellectual space.
This is supposed to be a place of comfort and home for me.
And she cried and whined and yelled and said all sorts of vulgar things.
And it's only gotten worse and worse since that time.
And it's a big problem.
Because Yale used to be one of the most, if not the most, prestigious university in America.
And it has gone the way of the culture.
That is to say, to take away people's rights to create a new social hierarchy.
an explicitly racial and ideological hierarchy whereby if you are in any way a conservative, if you in any way support the traditional American society, the Constitution and apple pie, you will be targeted, you will be harassed, your career could be over even before it begins.
I will be back in studio tomorrow.
It's great.
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If you didn't catch that, you can catch it all on the YAF YouTube channel or the Verdict YouTube channel.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Speaking of censorship, you are very likely familiar with Barry Weiss.
Barry Weiss is not a conservative.
She used to work at the New York Times.
Now she just has her own substack and her own podcast.
And it's more credible than anything you're seeing in the New York Times.
But she's not a conservative.
Sometimes conservatives make this mistake where whenever anyone questions the dominant liberal regime in any way, we just take them in and we say, you're one of us.
You're one of us.
But she is not.
She is a liberal who does not go along with the dominant regime.
So she was just on CNN. She's liberal enough that she still gets invited on CNN. And she called out that liberal ruling class for the corruption and the coercion that it involves.
And she did this specifically with Brian Stelter on the ironically named show Reliable Sources.
Take a listen.
You're right.
There are tens of millions of Americans who aren't on the hard left or the hard right who feel the world has gone mad.
So in what ways has the world gone mad?
Well, you know, when you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for the New York Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad.
When you're not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad.
You say we're not allowed, we're not able.
Who's the people stopping the conversation?
Who are they?
Um, people that work at networks, frankly, like the one I'm speaking on right now, who try and claim that, you know, it was, it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory.
It was, I mean, let's just take an example.
But I'm just saying that when you say allowed, I just think it's a provocative thing you say.
You say, you say, we're not allowed to talk about these things, but they're all over the internet.
I can Google them.
I can find them everywhere.
I've heard about every story you mentioned.
So I'm just suggesting, of course, people are allowed to cover whatever they want to cover.
Who's shutting down the conversation?
Who's not letting people speak?
Hold on.
Shut up, Barry.
Who's not letting...
Keep your mouth shut.
I'm not done talking.
Who's doing that?
No one's doing that.
Okay, I'll give you the last word.
Actually, no, I won't.
Shut up.
Who's shutting down the...
You.
You are, Brian.
You are literally shutting down the conversation right now.
And I'm not sure that he really believes what he's saying.
What he is saying is that the establishment media...
Do not in any way suppress questions about Dr.
Fauci questions about the COVID origins and the associated public health tyranny that they do not in any way suppress, I don't know, the distinction between men and women.
And that's just preposterous.
I could be kicked off of social media for seeing that men are not women.
And there are specific rules around it, which we try to get around without compromising the truth and the reality of what we're reporting.
But we've been dinged on it before on this show, at the Daily Wire, elsewhere.
And then what is his argument?
He says, look, yeah, maybe we don't cover any of these things on CNN.
Maybe the New York Times doesn't cover these things.
But you can Google it.
First of all, Google will suppress the search results.
But second of all, is that that's really your answer?
Virtually all the newspapers, virtually all the TV stations, virtually all of the main media outlets, also run by big tech, which are going to suppress certain stories like the Hunter Biden laptop story, or anything regarding COVID that doesn't go along with Dr.
Fauci.
So yeah, all of the power structures are going to suppress Those sorts of views.
But, you know, if you poke around the deep recesses of the internet, maybe you'll find something.
So it's the same.
It's not being said.
What are you talking about, dude?
It's really frustrating.
Barry Weiss is totally right here, and Brian Stelter is demonstrating how wrong he is.
But I think we need to go a little further here.
Right?
Barry Weiss is a good liberal.
I like her.
I'm glad there are good liberals.
I'm glad she's doing what she's doing.
She's doing real work.
We need to go further, though.
A lot of times this trap conservatives fall into is we pretend that good liberalism is the goal.
That relatively open-minded liberals like Barry Weiss, that's it.
That's the gold standard and that's what we need to aim at.
And the conservatives whine about authoritarianism or they whine about illiberalism or they do this both sides kind of thing.
That's just not going to cut it.
And this is why we lose.
Because those words don't really mean very much, okay?
Authoritarianism or illiberalism.
Go read John Locke, okay?
John Locke, the father of liberalism, reads as much more authoritarian or illiberal or whatever slogan we want to use than anybody who is being accused of those things today.
The mealy-mouthed, both sides, let's just kind of go back to five minutes ago.
Let's just preserve and conserve the culture of 2013.
That's not going to work.
We need to actually have a view of what is true and We need to be willing to stand by that.
I mean, this is the point of my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which, thanks to you all, became a number one national bestseller.
I think it became a number one national bestseller in part because it looked at this thing and said, no, the answer is not just to repeat the same old slogans about...
Keeping an open mind and having free speech absolutism and not telling people what to think, just how to think and authoritarianism or whatever.
Liberty entails limits and we need to be willing to set those and stand by those things and say, look...
If men and women, to use Barry's example, if men and women really are different, then that entails certain things.
And that means that men can't go into the girl's bathroom.
And it means that men don't have a right to dress up like women and pretend to be women.
And it means that, actually, marriage has a specific meaning.
And it means that, no, maybe the transportation secretary shouldn't take two or three months of paternity leave amid a transportation crisis.
And it just implies certain things.
And it doesn't just imply that we can do The Taliban are back in the news because,
as they have now taken power in Afghanistan, Some news crews are getting interviews with them and one news crew is making fun of a Taliban official because they handed him a globe and they said, where is Afghanistan?
And this dummy can't point to Afghanistan on a map.
You see the guy?
He's holding up the globe.
They're speaking some barbaric language.
I think it's known as French.
And he's looking all around.
He just can't find it.
And they zoom in.
This little clip has gone viral on TikTok.
They zoom in.
Taliban official there is, you know, he's struggling.
And then the guy walks in and says, there it is.
There's Afghanistan.
Ha ha ha.
What a dumb idiot.
Ha ha, that stupid Taliban guy.
He doesn't even know where it is.
Man, he's so dumb.
Ha ha.
So, the Taliban official can't identify the country on the map.
You know what he can do, though?
Conquer the country and send the most powerful nation on Earth packing within like 11 days.
That's what he can do.
So, ha ha ha, he doesn't know how to use maps.
Ha ha ha.
Oh, but you know what he can do?
Conquer the nation that we spent 20 years trying to conquer.
He might not have a whole lot of technical knowledge.
He might not have a whole lot of book learning.
But he's got a lot of practical knowledge.
He knows how to control Afghanistan.
He knows how to do that better than The Americans?
Better than the Soviets?
Better than the British?
Better than a whole lot of really highfalutin, fancy, educated people.
There is a difference between technical and practical knowledge.
Book learning and how to really do stuff.
And the ruling class of the United States is really obsessed with technical knowledge.
And it's why now we are sending kids to school for...
Many more years than we used to, and we're obsessed with funding pre-K and funding college and funding post-graduate work and funding all sorts of things.
And yet people seem to be getting dumber.
Our ruling class, which has so many degrees, they're so credentialed, they can't keep the supply chain running.
They can't keep our money valuable.
They can't keep the country running all that well.
But they've got degrees.
Pete Buttigieg has very impressive degrees.
He doesn't know anything, but he's got really, really impressive credentials.
And I think part of the cause of this is our hubris.
Specifically, it's the hubris.
I don't want to both sides of this.
It's the hubris of the ruling class, where they say, those deplorable, irredeemable rubes, those bitter, clinging, guns-and-bible-toting idiots, they didn't even go to Princeton!
I bet they can do more things than you can.
They might not know a lot about Foucault or gender theory or something, but I bet they know more about things that actually matter and things that, frankly, are actually...
Speaking of world leaders, Superman is no longer on our side.
I don't think he's on the side of the Taliban yet, but he doesn't seem to be on our side.
Superman, who used to stand for truth, justice, and the American way, now stands for truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.
Now, I remember years ago, 15 years ago, there was some Superman movie.
I can't keep track of the superhero movies.
But there was a Superman movie that made waves because it replaced the motto, truth, justice, and the American way, with truth, justice, and all that other stuff.
It was kind of like a joke, an aside.
Ha ha.
We no longer believe in the American way.
Oh no, we're just ironic.
We recognize that's all a lie, and we're evil Americans, and so we don't stay.
Ha ha.
It's just all that other stuff.
Now they've taken it further, and they've earnestly replaced it with a better tomorrow.
The chief creative officer and publisher of DC Comics just announced this.
And everyone right now is focusing on cultural Marxism.
They're saying, this is cultural Marxism.
It's a cultural revolution to overturn the, I mean, in this case, literally to overturn the American way.
And sure, that's true.
There's an aspect of that.
But I think they're missing out on the bigger problem, which is not the Marxists.
It's the liberals.
Part of the reason they're making this change in Superman, which reflects broader cultural patterns, is because they hate America, and they actually do think we're the bad guys, and they want to topple statues and tear down the American flag and disrespect it.
Part of the reason, though, a more cynical reason is they want to make more money in China.
They want to make more money in global markets where appealing to the American way will not get you the highest return on your investment.
Part of the reason they're doing this is because they have greater loyalty and affection for the almighty dollar than they do for the red, white, and blue and for their countrymen.
It's not just the commies that are the problem.
It's the liberals, too.
And a lot of right-wingers have given into this.
For many years now, a lot of right-wingers have shilled for woke, multinational corporations that hate our country and hate our way of life and hate the American people.
We've said, there is nothing more conservative than building a bunch of sweatshops in China and outsourcing all American manufacturing and taking meals off American tables to go make gizmos in China.
And there's nothing more American than selling out our traditional way of life to try to make an extra buck in some far-flung region of the world.
No, there is.
And there are more important things in life than money.
And if anyone should understand that, it's conservatives.
What are we conserving?
High GDP, is that it?
That's not all I want to conserve.
I want a robust economy, but I want a country too.
And I want to actively discourage our stewards of our culture and our corporations from undermining our country.
And I want to use politics to do that because there has been a privatization on the left and the right over the past 50, 60, 70 years.
The left has privatized on the social issues.
Basically, you can sleep with whoever you want.
Just don't make me pay for it.
And you've got the right-wingers who have privatized on corporations.
You can sell to whoever you want.
You can buy from whoever you want.
You can run your company however you want.
Just don't make me pay for it.
And that privatization on both sides has led to a collapse of the American culture.
We don't have social cohesion.
We don't have national borders.
We don't even have a flag, really, anymore.
And the one that we do have, we sort of disrespect.
The libs, the neoliberals, the kind of ruling establishment, uses this language of wokeism to...
Placate the people and put a little patina and a facade over their obvious cynical quest for money.
You're seeing this right now with the NCAA, the college sports organization, is suggesting they need to eliminate the SAT and ACT requirement.
So they no longer think that student-athletes should be tested on how smart they are and how much they know.
And the argument that they're using to justify getting rid of this very basic test of one's intelligence in preparation for college is that they need to do it to promote racial equity.
So that's the line.
We need to get rid of all these standards to promote racial equity.
So the NCAA Task Force has recommended that high school students who are looking to play D1 or D2 sports should not have to submit their SAT or ACT scores as part of the recruiting process.
The Daily Caller is reporting...
That they made these recommendations on Friday to promote racial equity.
This is a prime example of neoliberalism using woke language to chase the almighty dollar.
Because, first of all, what they're saying here is that black people are dumb.
That is, when you get past all the woke jargon and language, what the NCAA is saying is black people are dumb and they don't do well on tests.
And so if you want black people to go to college, they need to not be tested.
Because if they are tested, they won't get in.
I think that's offensive.
I don't think that's a nice thing to say.
I don't think that is particularly racially equitable.
I don't think that promotes racial equity.
But that is what the NCAA is saying.
Now, why are they doing this?
Because they...
I don't think it's to promote the education of their students.
I don't think it's to promote the racial equity among their student athletes.
I think it's because they want their student athletes to only be focused on sports.
And I don't think they want their student athletes to ever be thinking about history or literature or math.
I bet the NCAA doesn't want their students pretty much ever to step foot inside a classroom.
They want them to be dribbling and shooting and weightlifting and practicing their sports so that the NCAA can make more money.
And because these student-athletes are not paid, they're not paid anything comparable to professional athletes, but they bring in a ton of money, the NCAA is going to try to wring every penny out of them that they can.
But they're not going to be able to make that argument out in the open.
They're not going to be able to say, you know, dressed up like rich Uncle Pennybag saying, yeah, let us make even more money on these athletes.
Yeah.
They don't need to learn anything in school.
Oh, they're not going to have a career afterwards?
Who gives a damn?
We're going to make some more money for those years that they're in college.
No.
What they're going to say is, no, it's actually...
It's for race, just equity, diversity, inclusion.
That's why our students shouldn't learn anything.
And the libs are going to go along with it.
The libs are going to go along.
We've always...
Viewed in this country, or at least the line from the left, is that the Republicans are the party of the rich and the ruling class, and the Democrats are the party of the poor and oppressed masses.
No, there is a ruling party in America.
It's the Democratic Party.
Some Republicans kind of go along with it, the squishes, the court jester conservatives.
But they're the junior partner in that relationship.
And the Democrats use the language of wokeness.
To push for the same cynical, dollar-chasing ends that any ruling class or any oligarchy might.
Speaking of sports going woke, last Wednesday, EA Sports announced that they will be removing John Gruden from their Madden NFL 22 video game.
So Gruden, you'll remember, is that LA, or Las Vegas rather, Raiders coach who a dozen years ago made some politically incorrect jokes in his private email and has now lost his career and is being erased from everyone's memory before our very eyes.
He's now being erased from a video game that's already out.
The video game's already done.
He's going to be released after the fact.
He will be replaced.
This is so creepy.
We are taking steps to remove him from bad in NFL 22.
We will replace him with a generic likeness via a title update in the coming weeks.
John Gruden is being unpersoned in a manner reminiscent of Stalin and evocative of George Orwell.
And the totalitarian ideology here is not Soviet communism and it's not English socialism in Orwell's book.
It is diversity, inclusion, and equity.
Which spells die, for those of you who pay attention.
But it's diversity, inclusion, and equity.
That's what's going on at Yale.
Why does Yale have a dean of diversity?
What does that even mean?
Because that is the new chaplain of the new seminaries.
The seminaries of wokeness have a chaplain, and the chaplain is the dean of diversity and inclusion and equity.
And they are going to enforce the new moral order.
And the new moral order is radical leftism.
The new moral order is wokeness.
At Harvard, they just announced that they have an atheist chaplain there, and everyone was up in arms.
I'm not surprised at all.
Harvard started as a seminary.
It's still a seminary.
It used to promote Christianity.
Now it churns out clerics of wokeism.
So of course their chaplain is an atheist.
The religion of Harvard and of our country, the official religion, is secularism and atheism, and it's the ideology of diversity, inclusion, and equity.
Diversity, inclusion, and equity.
It is a jealous god.
When traditional religion goes away, it doesn't leave a vacuum.
What replaces religion is ideology, and that's been true for several centuries now, and we're seeing that play out before our very eyes.
And a lot of Republicans don't know how to push back against this sort of thing.
I'm thinking of the shill, the guys like Asa Hutchinson, who's the governor in Arkansas, the Liz Cheney types, the Adam Kinzinger types.
They don't know how to push back against this sort of thing.
And actually, before we go, I want to turn to the United Kingdom, because there's a story that's not getting a ton of play in America, but it shows you what's going on here.
There is a conservative member of parliament who was just killed in a Muslim terror attack.
His name is David Ames.
I may be mispronouncing that.
He died on Friday.
He was stabbed multiple times.
He was 69 years old, and he was holding a meet-and-greet with his constituents.
He was first elected to parliament in 1983.
He's been there for a very long time.
He's survived by his wife and his five kids.
He was a devout Catholic, and he was killed by a radical Muslim.
And so the circumstances of his death are being covered up by the PC police.
But even more concerning, the man was a devout Catholic.
When he died, or as he was dying, a priest heard about this, ran to the scene to administer last rites.
This is a very important thing in the Catholic faith.
And the priest was not allowed on the scene.
The cops said, no, sorry, it's a crime scene, and you're not allowed here.
The cops just didn't get it.
Traditionally, priests are allowed to go to these crime scenes to administer last rites.
This is very important.
If I am dying, if it's not going to turn out well for me, it is much more important that a priest show up to give me last rites than that a doctor show up or than that a cop show up.
It's much more important for my soul.
Okay.
But even though we understood this for centuries and millennia in our culture, that has been wiped away.
We don't even understand it anymore.
But there are more important things in life than money.
Actually, the raw pursuit of money or pleasure or the pleasures of the flesh, that is not the be-all and end-all.
And actually, the dominant ideology of diversity, inclusion, and equity, or wokeness, or call it whatever you want, that is not the true moral order.
Okay, that does not, it certainly doesn't represent my views and it doesn't represent reality either.
But we are forgetting that.
We have lost our principles in the UK, in the United States, throughout the West broadly.
And if we do not hold them back, if we do not stand up for our principles right now, like that lady at ESPN or anyone else, some of the heroic people that you see crop up every so often, if we do not stand up for them now, they will be lost.
And like that cop who wouldn't let the priest come give last rites, we won't even know, we won't even remember what it is that we have lost.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, as vaccine mandates hit home, police departments begin firing cops en masse.
Plus, the New York City Council removes a statue of Thomas Jefferson.
