The U.S. Navy names a ship after an infamous pederast, a tabloid journalist tries to #MeToo Dave Portnoy, and an appeals judge puts a stop to Biden’s vaccine mandate…for now.
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The U.S. Navy has officially launched a ship named after Harvey Milk, a controversial political activist who preyed on troubled teen boys and who defended Jim Jones, another sexual predator who became one of the most infamous murderous cult leaders in American history.
To top it all off, the official ceremony was presided over by a man who thinks he's a woman.
Paula, would you please christen the ship?
In the United States of America, I christen thee Harvey Milk.
May God bless this ship and all who sail in her.
The USNS Harvey Milk.
If you think we're living in clown world, you're right.
I'm sure our enemies overseas have noticed that too.
But, in the spirit of conservative optimism, the knowledge that things can and will get much worse, Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that he is going to create a new virtual reality where things are going to get even more clownish.
And the big tech oligarchs are going to control everything.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment from Friday is from Jim Lubke, who says, this is referring to that weird Microsoft presentation and really a lot of email signatures now where people acknowledge that they're on tribal land.
I've We want to acknowledge that the land we're sitting on was traditionally occupied by the following half-dozen Indian tribes, and they used to kill each other a lot.
This is true.
When you acknowledge that multiple other tribes in different periods of time have lived on a certain period of land, you're acknowledging that they conquered each other, and you say, that's all good, that's fine, that's wonderful.
But the fact that we conquered some land or bought some land or took some land after other people left, that, of course, would be unacceptable, because we're We Westerners, we're evil, but all the other people, they're really, really great.
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I'm always trying to look for the silver lining in things.
I mean, this is pretty bad.
Our country is extremely confused.
We're being humiliated to our adversaries overseas.
But on the bright side of this Harvey Milk ship announcement...
The Navy recruitment ads are about to get way catchier.
What can you learn to fly, play, and sports or skin, dive, and study oceanography?
Sign up for the big fan or sit in the grandstand when your team and others need.
In the Navy, yes, you can sail the 7C.
In the Navy, yes, you can with your money.
In the Navy, come on now people, make a stand.
In the Navy, can you say anything ahead?
I guess this has been a long time coming, you know?
And frankly, frankly, if the Navy were to use the village people as their recruitment ad, they would basically just be doing what the Army and the CIA are already doing with their super woke recruitment ads.
This is pretty weird, folks.
The other thing with Harvey Milk, by the way, what you're going to hear about Harvey Milk, he was a gay rights pioneer.
He was murdered by Martyred, really, for his sexual desires, and that's not true.
Harvey Milk was killed.
He was killed, along with the mayor of San Francisco, by a disgruntled former colleague, this guy Dan White, who was upset that he wasn't being paid enough money to support his family, and he just went in and went postal one day in City Hall, and he happened to find Harvey Milk, and he killed him, and he killed the mayor.
He was not killed for his sexual desires, but...
The truth will be made to fit the narrative here, okay?
That's the power of narrative.
Harvey Milk was a degenerate.
I mean, this guy would prey on homeless, runaway young boys well below the age of consent, and he was a sexual predator toward them.
He was a great defender of Jim Jones, who killed all those people in Guyana by making them all literally drink the Kool-Aid.
That's where the expression comes from.
He was defending him to President Jimmy Carter.
I mean, he was just...
He was not a good guy, okay?
He was not a good guy at all.
And then he was martyred, but he wasn't even killed for his sexual desire.
But it doesn't matter.
The reality of Harvey Milk will be wiped away, will be completely transformed for the narrative of liberation, specifically for the It's one of the most important themes in American history.
It's being able to sleep with whomever you want, being able to identify with whatever sex you want, being able to invent a bunch of new genders, and this has now affected the military.
Navy jokes aside, this is a new advancement of radicalism in the Navy.
Now, lest you think that I'm merely picking on the gays or something like that, you're seeing the consequences of the sexual revolution for the heterosexuals as well.
And this is one of the biggest tabloid stories of last week.
It just broke on Friday, I guess it was.
Thursday or Friday.
Barstool Sports.
Dave Portnoy, who is this larger-than-life character from Barstool Sports, and his whole shtick is he's big and he's brash and he's loud and he's irreverent and he sleeps with a bunch of girls and he eats a bunch of pizza and he does whatever he wants.
That's his whole character.
Well, it turns out that that guy...
Sleeps with a bunch of girls and eats a bunch of pizza and does whatever he wants and flouts a lot of conventions.
The headline from a business insider hit piece on him is, quote, I was literally screaming in pain.
Young women say they met Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy for sex and it turned violent and humiliating.
Okay.
The piece opens up with Dave Portnoy and some chick sexting.
So, Dave, and she messages Dave.
Dave says the conversation quickly turned to the topic of sex.
He sent her graphic videos of other women he'd slept with, according to Madison, and had messages reviewed by Insider.
He pressed her to tell him about her sexual fantasies.
I mean, actually, this one's kind of common.
She wrote, like a rape fantasy where I don't have any control of what's going on.
You and I are going to get along so well, he responded.
So then he sends her a first-class ticket to his mansion in Nantucket.
She flies out there, and they have sex.
And she's much younger than he is.
You know, she's, what, 19 or 20, 20 years old.
And they have sex.
And he started filming her without asking permission as she performed a sexual act on him.
She must have been shocked by this, except she couldn't have been shocked because he sent her videos of him doing this to other women.
I never said anything.
I was scared.
He was just so mean.
And then I felt like I was just a human sex doll.
And it was so rough, it felt like I was being raped.
And then she goes on to describe the acts that they engaged in.
Do you see the problem with this as a hit piece, as an accusation?
It opened up with her saying, I want to feel like I'm being raped.
And then she flew out there and hung out with him, and then she was shocked when he did the thing she asked him to do.
He just obliged.
She said she wanted to do this thing.
He did that with her, and then she regretted it.
Now, there's a few layers to this.
I don't want to just let Dave off the hook.
I mean, as a legal matter, and frankly, even as a reputational matter in this decadent world of the hookup culture and everything that we're living in, Dave Portnoy did nothing wrong.
Right?
Everything was consensual.
The woman literally asked for it.
You know, you're never supposed to say she asked for it.
She literally asked him to do this.
And then he did that.
And then she regretted it.
But there's a deeper level here.
That's the libertarian level.
That's the level of consent.
That's the level of, look, they consented.
And whatever two people consent, whatever two adults consent to do is totally fine.
That's the leftist level.
I guess now the leftist level is if the woman comes to regret it later, then it's a crime and you should be thrown in prison.
But that's the kind of liberal, do whatever you want, just everyone has to agree to it.
But there's a deeper conservative level, which is it's wrong to do this even if the people sort of consent.
It's still wrong because there's something beyond consent.
There's a moral standard that is even higher than consent.
Yes, you need the consent, but there's something, even if some woman says, degrade me, humiliate me, do all these, you still shouldn't do it because it's objectively wrong to do.
And I don't even really blame Portnoy here.
The whole culture is confused about this.
We're saturated in this kind of language of liberation and consent and the sexual revolution, so we don't even realize that it's just still wrong to do this.
And it's degrading, and it's humiliating, and people don't even really desire it.
There's a difference between what they think they desire, this woman thought she desired this rape fantasy, and what they actually desire.
She hated it.
She's like the dog that caught the car.
When she got it, she hated it, because it's degrading.
We have a lower will and we have a higher rational will.
And before the decadence, especially of the sexual revolution, we recognized that.
We pursued the higher will and we suppressed all of our creepy, pervy, weird urges.
But in the sexual revolution, we kind of turned it completely on its head.
And now, look, I kind of feel bad for Portnoy.
Portnoy played according to the rules of the liberal society.
And now he's getting burned because the liberal society doesn't like him.
Harvey Milk rapes young boys.
It doesn't matter because he was a leftist and he works with their narrative and so he's going to become a secular saint.
But Dave Portnoy, he's kind of politically incorrect sometimes.
He kind of goes against the left-wing narrative.
And so a reporter is going to spend eight months digging up whatever dirt she can find, talking to every woman he's ever slept with.
And you know what?
The thing is, she's going to get something.
She's going to get somewhere.
And people are going to feel like the rug was pulled out from under them.
Well, you've got to recognize, don't fall for it.
Don't fall for the culture of liberation and whatever people consent to do is fine.
It's a trap.
It's a trick.
It's not real.
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Speaking of sex scandals, former LoveGov, Andrew Cuomo, you know, the darling of the left, they were Cuomo-sexuals, they said, during COVID-19.
When he was killing grandma in nursing homes and lying about trying to prevent federal investigators from looking into his death numbers.
And he was still being fetid.
He was winning Emmy Awards.
Andrew Cuomo is being charged with a misdemeanor sex crime.
The misdemeanor sex crime stems from an incident that apparently took place at the governor's mansion last year where he felt up an aide or something like that.
There have been a lot of accusations over the course of Cuomo's career that he had inappropriate conversations and pinched his aides and all these sorts of things.
So now he's being charged with a misdemeanor sex crime.
I don't think this has anything to do with Andrew Cuomo feeling up his secretary.
I don't think this has anything to do with Democrats clutching their pearls over sexual misconduct.
I think, actually, the Libs just pushed to name a Navy ship after Harvey Milk, a very known sexual predator.
I think they supported the Clinton family for decades.
I don't think this has anything to do with that.
I think what this is about is 2022.
And this is where it matters for us.
What this is about is trying to take Andrew Cuomo off the table and stop him from running for governor again.
That's why I think the Democrats in New York are pushing, because there are other people now.
The Democrat governor of New York, the Letitia James, attorney general of New York, Bill de Blasio wants to run for governor of New York.
There are other people who are trying to run for governor, and they want to take Cuomo off the table, because Cuomo, believe it or not, is actually still fairly popular in New York.
Not popular among politicians who now want to move on from him, but he still has pretty decent approval ratings, all things considered, among ordinary New Yorkers.
That's what it's about.
And it's why you've got to be a little skeptical of these accusations that come out at these politically convenient times.
Now, speaking of weird sex, so much of our culture surrounds weird sex.
The real big sexual fight that you're going to see in the next 6 to 12 months is going to be over abortion.
More so than usual.
Abortion is kind of a perennial fight, but more so than usual because we have a big Supreme Court case coming down the pike that could overturn Roe v.
Wade and Planned Parenthood v.
Casey.
It could obliterate the fictional right to abortion that the Supreme Court invented 50 years ago.
And so, all of the legal geniuses are coming out and arguing, no, there actually is a right to an abortion.
Here's a piece that was going around the internet from the Atlantic headline.
No, really, the right to an abortion is supported by the text and history of the Constitution.
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, it will betray this 14th Amendment's promise of bodily autonomy by David H. Gans.
Okay, so in the tweet that the magazine sent out of this article, here is the argument.
From David Gaines, the rights to control one's body, establish a family, and have children necessarily safeguard the right to abortion as a fundamental right.
Now, this is really taking sophistry into the realm of the extreme because One, you know, you don't see these rights, the right to establish a family, the right to have children.
You don't see it exactly laid out in the Constitution.
Surely people do have these rights.
And if people have those rights, then there's really no reason to protect abortion because abortion negates all of those rights.
Abortion, the very rights, the purported rights that this guy is citing to justify abortion, Abortion takes away the right to control one's body.
Well, abortion deprives someone of the right to control his body, namely the baby.
There are two bodies involved.
Even abortion proponents have to admit that.
They might say that the baby's body doesn't really matter, or the baby doesn't have autonomy yet, or mom has the right to kill the baby because the baby's in her womb.
Some of the really sick Some ethicists like Peter Singer have made that argument.
Well, it's like a parasite, so you can kill a parasite.
But still, it's a baby's body.
So if a human being has the right to control his body, then abortion takes away that right.
The right to establish a family.
Abortion disestablishes a family.
You are establishing a family, but then when you kill your baby, you're disestablishing that family.
So abortion undermines that right too.
And then the right to have children.
Abortion undermines the right to have children.
Abortion causes you to lose children, not to have children.
So, abortion totally negates all of those alleged rights.
I bring this up because you're going to hear a lot of bogus arguments in favor of abortion.
And I fear what the squishes are going to do is try to parse all the little tiny nuances and little details of the law.
Say, well, actually, you know, if you look at this provision of this commentary that was written on this part of Roe v.
Wade or Planned Parenthood v.
Casey, and it's kind of missing the point.
I think we actually ought to zoom out a little bit.
Okay, I think it's perfectly right to make really basic arguments here.
It's wrong to kill people.
It's wrong to murder people.
It's wrong to kill babies.
If you're going to cite a bunch of BS to justify your right to abortion, then you need us to recognize...
You need to allow us to point out that abortion negates all of those rights.
If you're going to call it reproductive health, you've got to let us explain how it's actually the opposite of reproduction and the opposite of health.
It's kind of like there's this meme of the IQ curve.
At the bottom is the really dumb guy with a really low IQ, and he just goes like, duh, it's wrong to kill babies, duh.
And then in the middle, there's like the really, the midwit types, and they say, well, actually, no, you have a right to bodily autonomy, and to establish this, and to do this, and the 14th Amendment implies that you have a right, and that this amendment implies you have a right to privacy, and therefore you can kill your baby, blah, blah, blah, right?
And it's all these egghead idiots from like Yale Law School.
And then you get to the really top end of the IQ curve, and it's this real genius type guy, and he just goes, It's wrong to kill babies.
It's just wrong.
It's just wrong.
It actually is that simple.
But you're going to hear a lot more of these crazy arguments as we get closer.
You're going to see it on SNL. There was one of the weird...
Not that I watch SNL. Okay, no one watches SNL anymore, but this was making the rounds.
There was a sketch that I guess was supposed to be funny, but I'm not even sure it was supposed to be funny, about...
Abortion, because the libs are so worried that this Supreme Court case could lead to the overturning of Roe v.
Wade and Planned Parenthood v.
Casey, that one of the cast, I don't know their names anymore, but one of the cast members from SNL came on as a clown to defend the right to abortion.
Did you know one in three clowns will have a clown abortion in their lifetime?
You don't, because they don't tell you.
They don't even know how to talk to other clowns about it.
Because when they do talk about it, if you were a clown who wasn't the victim of something sad like clown says, they think your clown abortion wasn't a righteous clown abortion.
I mean, what the dick is that?
Hold my finger.
No.
Laugh!
I need it.
I need you to laugh so hard.
Like the way I laugh when the doctor asked if I got pregnant on the way over to the clinic because I wasn't very far along.
And that is one of my favorite jokes to this day.
I love that joke.
It's such a good joke.
Not like a funny ha-ha joke, but like a funny you're not an awful person and your life isn't over now joke.
The best kind.
A honka honka!
Surprise!
Good lord.
And in the waiting room, they had a little guest book where all the clowns could write their clown abortion story for the next clown to read it so she wouldn't feel so alone.
Awooga!
Here's my truth.
I know I wouldn't be a clown on TV here today if it weren't for the abortion I had the day before my 23rd birthday.
Clowns have been helping each other end their pregnancy since the caves.
It's gonna happen, so it ought to be safe, legal, and accessible.
We will not go back to the alley.
I mean, the last thing anyone wants is a bunch of dead clowns in a dark alley.
This is so sad.
So I guess it's supposed to be funny.
When she says clown, she's just referring to women.
And I guess it's supposed to be...
Is it supposed to be funny?
Or is it the new Hannah Gadsby type of humor?
It's the new comedy.
It's called Tragedy.
It's really sad and weird.
This woman is saying, I'm really happy with my decision and I'm glad.
She seems to be insinuating that she herself had an abortion at 23.
And she's saying, I'm okay with it and I'm really happy with it and it was a great decision.
But she doesn't seem okay, does she?
She seems like the opposite of okay.
She seems psychotic.
She seems like it led her to have a mental freaking breakdown that's happening on TV right now.
She says, you know, if I didn't have an abortion, I wouldn't be a clown on TV right now.
Right.
You'd have a good life instead of a bad life.
Instead of literally being a clown and humiliating yourself and degrading yourself and having a mental breakdown on TV, you would have a good life with a family.
People make bad decisions.
I know many, not many, I know a lot of women who have had abortions.
Some have had multiple abortions and it harms them.
It harms the baby, obviously.
It harms them.
And there are so many lies about abortion in the culture that they don't realize how bad it's going to be.
And you're going to end up like this lunatic woman on TV who is clearly, clearly still trying to process this trauma that happened to her and that she perpetrated as well.
She's obviously not okay.
And she's trying to justify it with these bogus lines about how lots of women died in back alley abortions.
It's just not.
It's completely made up.
That did not happen.
Dr.
Bernard Nathanson was one of the abortion leaders who pushed these statistics about all these women in back alley abortions dying.
Didn't happen.
It was very few.
It was a couple to a few dozen who would die in the year before Roe versus Wade, before medical technology was advanced.
And you roughly had the same likelihood of dying from a legal abortion and an illegal abortion.
So it was just complete BS. It was a really illustrative moment.
Do you want to end up like that woman?
Do you want to end up as a crazy clown on TV, or do you want to end up as a stable, happy, normal person?
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
A lot of problems in the country.
Economic problems, national security problems, social problems.
We don't have trust in our institutions anymore.
A lot of issues.
We're naming U.S. Navy ships after sexual predators and cult leader defenders.
We've got a lot of problems.
How do we fix them?
Senator Josh Hawley, an increasingly interesting and serious-minded member of the United States Senate, has a solution.
Young men need to stop wasting their time on porn and video games.
What's a man?
Well, a man is a father, a man is a husband, a man is somebody who takes responsibility.
As conservatives, we've got to call men back to responsibility.
We've got to say that spending your time not working, and we have more and more men who are not working, spending your time on video games, spending your time watching porn online while doing nothing is not good for you, your family, or this country.
You know, people are going to make fun of him and call him the church lady and say, oh, here we go.
We're going to hear about the video games and the violence and the porn.
Okay, church lady.
But, of course, Josh Hawley is completely right.
Wasting your time, hours and hours and hours on video games, looking at porn.
I don't want to sound holier than thou.
Really, quite the opposite.
I want to point out that But virtually every man in the country, at least at some point, has done these things, has wasted time on screens.
I mean, even if it's beyond the video games or beyond porn, which is kind of an extreme example, even just mindlessly watching TV for 10 hours a day or whatever, just kind of...
Turning off your brain, turning off your productivity, turning off your sense of responsibility and diligence, that's a really bad thing.
And there are increasing temptations for that in society.
And we've got to resist it because it's not good for anyone.
It's not good for you.
It's not good for your family.
It's not good for society.
And what this is really getting at is something beyond just do the right thing.
Don't do the wrong thing.
Be virtuous.
Don't be vicious.
Pursue good.
Don't be sinful.
There's actually a technological political problem here, which is that we are moving into virtual reality.
We're living more and more of our lives virtually rather than in the real world.
You know, I mentioned the Harvey Milk stuff and the Navy ship being launched by a man who thinks that he's a woman.
We talk about transgenderism a lot on the right.
And it's the most controversial thing we talk about.
I was attacked at a speech at University of Missouri, Kansas City, not for any of the actually somewhat controversial things I've said at speeches before, but for the most basic one, which is that a man is not a woman.
Why?
What is that issue about?
Well, James Poulos, one of the writers over at Claremont, has this theory that I think is correct, that transgenderism is less about Sex as an end unto itself, and more a foothold into transhumanism, meaning it's a way to transcend our ordinary human limits in the real world and basically all become weird cyborg robot type things.
And I do think there's quite a lot to that.
The denial of one's body, the denial of the significance of one's body, is obviously the centerpiece of transhumanism and, to use a new word that was coined by Mark Zuckerberg last week, Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space.
It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually, it has things that are only possible virtually, and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful.
Hey, are you coming?
Yeah, just gotta find something to wear.
All right.
Perfect.
Oh, hey, Mark.
Hey, what's going on?
What's up, Mark?
Hey, guys.
We're all hanging out in the metaverse.
And if you didn't see the video, one of the...
So it's all these people who have avatars that look like themselves.
One looks to be basically a video of a girl.
Then some are more cartoonish.
And then one guy is just a...
He's just a giant cartoon robot.
Because you can also choose that.
If you don't like your body, you can just portray yourself as someone else entirely.
We know this at the most basic level.
You know this with your profile picture on Twitter or on Facebook.
It can either be a real picture of you or it can be just some random picture of someone else.
And you say, okay, this is going to be my new avatar.
And what Zuckerberg is announcing, and he tied this into his announcement that Facebook is changing its name to Meta.
He said there's going to be this whole new experience where we're going to live in the metaverse.
We're going to put on our virtual reality headset, and we're going to hold our virtual reality controllers, and we're not going to go to the bar anymore.
And we're not going to go to our friend's house anymore.
We're going to sit in our pods and we're going to play a really, really elaborate video game with our friends.
And it's going to be great.
What if your friend is on the other side of the world?
Well, you can instantly connect with them.
You can hang out with them.
Not in reality, but in the metaverse.
Doesn't that sound fun?
Doesn't it?
I mean, to me, it sounds like a horror movie.
It sounds like a 1980s dystopian horror movie that's about five seconds away from The Terminator.
But to a lot of people, I think it sounds great.
Oh, yeah, I've got my friends.
Look, we don't even go to the office anymore.
I don't really need to see people.
We'll just communicate virtually, and that'll be a lot of fun.
My friend Spencer Clavin, also at Claremont, made this point, which is What is so wrong about this?
The thing that we all know, we all kind of have a hunch that something's really wrong about it, but maybe we can't quite put our finger on it, is that the move from reality to the metaverse is tantamount to us saying, who wants to live in this world created by God when we can live in a world created and controlled by Mark Zuckerberg?
We live in reality right now.
We've got our physical bodies and we go and move in three dimensions.
And this is a world that was created and is sustained constantly by God.
But a lot of people don't like this world because there's suffering in this world.
There's pain in this world.
There are limits.
There are social mores and taboos.
We live in a society and not everyone agrees with us in that society.
So let's get rid of that world.
Let's get rid of that fallen, broken, that world that God made.
Let's live in Zuckerberg's world.
Where if you don't like people, you just never have to see them.
Even if you live right next door to them, you log into the metaverse, you'll never have to see.
You'll only see the people you choose to see.
And if you have certain affinities and desires, you can only see people who share those affinities and desires.
And if you don't like your body, you think you're a little overweight, you think you're a little short, you think you're a man, but you're really a woman or vice versa, well, you can just change your body.
You really can, for all intents and purposes, in the metaverse, become, if you're a man, you can become a woman because your body doesn't matter anymore.
Isn't that great?
A lot of people will be tempted to that.
Delusion, fantasy is a real temptation that everyone deals with.
But if you're coming down on the question, though, do you want to go to the metaverse or do you want to stay in reality?
I guess the question is this.
Who do you trust more, God or Mark Zuckerberg?
Pretty easy answer for me.
And I don't mean to deny the actual suffering and difficulties of this world.
There are many of them.
You know, death, decay, injustice, childhood cancer.
There's no childhood cancer in the metaverse, right?
I mean, I guess characters could just disappear.
But there's no, those kind of really difficult, hard things just don't exist there.
Whereas they do exist in the real world.
Okay?
But who do you trust more?
God or Mark Zuckerberg?
For me, it's an easy answer.
But a lot of people are going to trust Mark Zuckerberg, which is why these guys, these tech...
You can't even call them oligarchs.
They're like demigods at this point.
They are taking more power.
There is a greater asymmetry of power between them and other people on Earth than has existed basically anywhere in the history of the world.
Okay?
And they're coming after your kids, okay?
To sound like the church lady, won't somebody please think of the children?
Sesame Street, moving on from the metaverse to the traditional boob tube, Sesame Street, streaming through the good old TV, is trying to convince your kid, trying to market to your kid the COVID vaccine.
This is from my COVID vaccine.
My mommy and my papi took me to get it this morning.
Rosita, that's great.
Getting the COVID vaccine is a great way to stay healthy.
See, my mommy and my papi said that it will help keep me, my friends, my neighbors, my abuela all healthy.
Your parents are absolutely right.
You know, COVID vaccines are now available for children five years and older.
And the more people who get them, the better we're going to be able to help stop the spread of COVID and keep everyone healthy.
This is sick.
This is really, really sick.
And I think a lot of people do not appreciate how sick it is.
Because I think what a lot of people see is, yeah, the libs are pushing the vaccine, and so they're doing it through any means they can.
They're doing it on TV, they're doing it in the news, they're doing it through influencers.
They're just going to try to sell it, right?
Okay, sure, I get that.
But Sesame Street is a show that is almost exclusively watched by children.
Maybe a parent happens to be sitting in the room, but it's a show for kids.
Are kids now supposed to be making their own medical decisions?
Is that what's going on?
Last I checked, it's not up to five-year-olds to make their own medical decisions.
It's up to their parents.
Shouldn't you be marketing this on parents' shows?
CNN, for instance.
Sanjay Gupta's over there.
Shouldn't CNN be saying, hey, parents, here's why you need to get your kids vaccinated?
No, because these people know that some parents are going to say, no, actually, my kids don't really face a great risk from the coronavirus pandemic.
And this drug is pretty experimental and, you know, there have been side effects, some of which have been deadly and documented by the FDA and CDC. So, no, we're just not going to do that.
We're going to wait a little bit.
And the libs really want to get everyone to take the Fauci-ouchie and so they're going to go directly to the kids as if the kids are a higher authority here.
Kids are idiots, by the way, right?
That's kind of the definition of a kid, is they don't know anything.
That's why they have to go to school and be educated.
Isn't that the reason they're watching Sesame Street in the first place?
Because they don't know anything, so they need to learn their ABCs.
But now you're telling me a kid is so sophisticated that he knows better how to make these complex medical decisions than his own parents?
That's what they do, though.
And it gets to something else we talked about on Friday, which is the different ways you can look at politics.
For the left and for libertarians, the basic unit of politics is the individual.
Everything is about the atomized individual.
For conservatives, the basic unit of politics is the family.
Those are very different ways of viewing the world, okay?
But the hyper-focus on the individual means, of course, they've got to market it to kids.
And by the way, of course, kids can choose if they want to get a transgender surgery, which increasingly many of them are, and they're going to come to regret it, but that's their individual choice.
And the family has no role here, because the family is the actual impediment to the left taking control.
The family is the actual structural obstacle, that obstinate little...
Adam of society that will stop the left from totally taking control.
Now, fortunately, forget about Sesame Street, we are getting some good news on this vaccine mandate.
A bunch of states, including my own state of Tennessee, are suing the government.
So the Daily Wire is suing the government in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
We are making a stand as an employer of a company with more than 100 people.
State Attorneys General...
Including Tennessee, Kentucky, Idaho, Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia at last count, are suing the Biden administration for its vaccine mandate in the Court of Appeals as well.
Now, the lesson here is we all need to band together, okay?
It's not enough.
The Daily Wire could have sat back and said, you know, I'm sure the states are going to challenge this unconstitutional vaccine mandate, so we're just going to stay back.
We're going to spend some insane amount of money fighting them, and we're opening ourselves up to a liability that could basically bankrupt the company.
But we're going to take a stand anyway, because we can't just leave it up to the state attorneys general.
We have got to fight back as private employers, too.
And individuals should be fighting back, and communities should be fighting back, and school districts should be fighting back.
We all need to band together here, folks.
Join or die.
You band together, or you...
You win together or you lose alone.
We're getting some really good news on this, by the way.
Because the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has just given us some good news yesterday.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is issuing a stay for the vaccine mandate.
Quote, In other words, we called their bluff.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is the first step in this process where they've said the mandate is not going to just proceed along without any obstacle.
We need to hear this out.
We need to find out if this is constitutional or not.
So until further notice, this mandate is on hold.
Now, some of us, you might recall, you know, I hate to say I told you so, we called this early on.
Early on, when Joe Biden first made his announcement about the mandate, I thought, this has nothing to do with whether or not he has the legal authority to send out this mandate.
He kind of admitted that he didn't have the legal authority early on.
So then he used this bizarre workaround with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that was then going to use employers of 100 or more employees to try to push the mandate.
And I said, look, the thing's probably going to be struck down in court.
Maybe it'll be upheld.
Maybe it'll be struck down.
The Biden administration doesn't care.
They didn't even release the rule for months after they made the announcement.
What this was about was bullying people, pressuring people in to get the vaccine.
Because between the time Biden made his announcement and the time OSHA actually released the rules, how many employers forced their employees to get the vaccine?
How many tens of thousands?
hundreds of thousands maybe, were forced to get it.
Between the time Biden made his announcement or OSHA sent out the rule and the time a court potentially could strike down the mandate, it will be a moot point because all the employers will already have forced the employees to get the jab.
So they get struck down, okay, oh well, too bad.
You all already did what we wanted you to do anyway.
Okay.
Aw shucks.
And so what's happening right now with the Daily Wire and with these state attorneys general is they're calling the bluff.
They're saying, okay, you're going to push this unconstitutional mandate and you're just going to hope we all go along with it before it gets struck down?
Okay.
Well, we're going to fight you in the court as vigorously as we can to get a stay on the mandate.
So, okay.
Now, we need an answer.
Before we proceed any further, we need an answer.
Is this constitutional or not?
I don't think this is helping Biden.
People always try to cite these surveys and say the mandates are very popular and vaccine mandates are really great.
Well, if the vaccine mandates are so popular, why are Biden's poll numbers through the bottom of the floor?
Right now, Joe Biden's approval rating, according to a USA Today and Suffolk poll, is down to 38%.
38% as we close out 2021 and get into the 2022 midterm season.
That is devastating for Democrats.
Assuming that Republicans stop them from the most egregious sort of their cheating with the ballot harvesting and election day turning into election six months and batches of 3 a.m.
ballots coming in.
By the way, there's a news story about that in New Jersey.
We'll get to that either later or tomorrow.
But the usual ways Democrats cheat to steal elections.
Assuming we can work around that.
If the elections were held today, Republicans would sweep the country.
I mean, the Democrat numbers are pathetic on basically every single issue.
So something needs to turn around for the Democrats.
And actually, I think that there's some wisdom here that they can learn from, oh, it hurts me to say it, from AOC. On the election front, I actually think we have good news as well.
I know that Virginia was a huge bummer.
And honestly, if anything, I think that the results show the limits of trying to run a fully 100% super moderated campaign that does not excite, speak to, or energize a progressive base.
And frankly, we weren't even really invited to contribute on that race.
Everyone's making fun of AOC. Oh, you crazy socialists.
You think that the Democrats aren't radical enough?
They're so radical, their approval ratings are approaching single digits.
They just keep plummeting, 38% or lower.
You're crazy, AOC. No, I think she's right, actually.
I do think she's right.
I think one of the problems that happened in Virginia, not that Terry McAuliffe is some radical.
He's not.
He's a regular corporate Democrat.
But he ran on licking his finger, putting it up in the air, figuring out which way the wind was blowing.
And Glenn Youngkin, who's also a fairly moderate candidate, but he ran on a right-wing culture war campaign, especially by the end of that race.
He ran on education, critical race theory, transgender bathrooms, Loudoun County schools.
That's what he ran on.
Red meat, serious, important culture war issues.
And AOC's looking at this and she's saying, why don't Democrats do that?
They probably should.
You've got to be careful with it.
It's not just that you need to find the most bloodthirsty, far, extreme candidate and run that person.
You've got to be careful with it.
If Glenn Youngkin had run as Donald Trump in Northern Virginia, that probably would not have worked.
But if Glenn Youngkin had ran against, I don't know, if he had run on traditional marriage and overturning Obergefell and getting rid of the new definition of marriage, he probably would have lost by a lot.
You know, if he had run on that kind of a social issue, if he had run even on abortion, I think he probably would have lost.
But he found a culture war issue that united a lot of people, not just the far right conservatives, but the wine moms and the suburbanites and all of these people, which is don't teach terrible racial and sexual theories to my kids.
And that worked.
And I think Democrats could probably learn a lot from that.
Right now, though, they're just running on the ruling class.
They're just saying, yeah, just trust us.
We're doing great.
Right now, the energy secretary for Joe Biden was asked what she has to say to people who are worried about rising gas prices, who are worried about heating their homes and filling their cars this winter.
And her answer was to laugh at them.
In Sturgis, Michigan, it is $2.89 a gallon.
I guess that's better than in California.
What is the Granholm plan to increase oil production in America?
Oh, my God.
That is hilarious.
Would that I had the magic wand on this.
As you know, of course, oil is a global market.
It is controlled by a cartel.
That cartel is called OPEC. And they made a decision yesterday that they were not going to increase beyond what they were already planning.
You can't heat your home.
You can't fill your car.
It's the funniest joke I heard since SNL. It's the clown world is what we're living in.
We're living in a clown world where the ruling class is increasingly divorced from reality.
And that's really bad for our country when our rulers don't have any kind of grip on reality and they're laughing like a bunch of clowns.
But I think the one positive, the one silver lining here is a lot of Americans across a lot of different demographics are recognizing that they have a much better hold on reality than the ruling class does.
And the upcoming elections are going to be about that.
It's not just going to be about taxes going up and down.
It's not just going to be about the normal political issues.
It is going to be about much more fundamental questions.
What is our country?
Who are we?
What do we stand for?
What is true and what is false and do we have to keep living in a clown world?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I'll show you all tomorrow.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
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Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals puts a hold on Joe Biden's vaccine mandate, a handful of congressional Republicans give Democrats a win on infrastructure, and California rewrites how math should be taught.
