The Supreme Court might overrule Roe v. Wade, some Australians escape from a quarantine camp, and Dr. Oz runs for Senate.
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More people have officially died of COVID on Joe Biden's watch than did on Donald Trump's watch, which creates a problem for Joe Biden because last year Biden claimed that any president with as many COVID deaths as Trump on his watch has no right to be the president of the United States.
Here is Jen Psaki twisting herself into logical, illogical pretzels to defend her party's incoherent view of death.
In 2020, when roughly 220,000 Americans had already died of COVID, Joe Biden said about Trump, anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.
Is that still the standard now that more Americans have died under President Biden than President Trump?
Well, I think the fundamental question here is what are you doing to save lives and protect people?
And the former president was suggesting people inject bleach.
He apparently, reportedly didn't even share with people he was going to interact with that he had tested positive for COVID himself.
He continued to provide a forum for misinformation, which probably led to people not taking steps forward to protect themselves, to wear a mask, to eventually get vaccinated.
This president has made the vaccine widely available.
He's relied on the advice of his health and medical experts, and he is trying to be a part of solving this crisis, getting the pandemic under control.
And I think there's a pretty stark difference between their approaches.
So she lied.
Donald Trump never told anyone to inject themselves with bleach.
Whatever you think about the vaccine, Donald Trump is largely responsible for getting that vaccine out in time.
A timetable that Joe Biden and Chris Wallace and everybody in the establishment said could not happen.
Trump said it is going to happen.
It did happen.
But Jen Psaki also avoided the issue.
She never addressed the question that she was asked.
She never addressed Biden's argument about Trump.
And she tried to move the goalposts on life, death, and legitimacy.
Which, coincidentally, is exactly what the left has been doing on the issue of abortion for the better part of 50 years since the Supreme Court's decision in Roe versus Roe.
Wade.
Which, coincidentally, may very well be on the brink of being overruled after oral arguments concluded yesterday in potentially the most consequential Supreme Court case of our lifetimes.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Noles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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I can't wait for the Chris Cuomo show brought to you by the Daily Wire.
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The oral arguments yesterday in the Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health case were incredible.
They went on for two hours.
Very few people listened to the whole thing.
Though it actually was incredibly engrossing.
Mostly for the failures of the pro-abortion side and the pro-abortion justices to make their case.
I listen to every minute of it.
I've got the highlights for you.
It actually started with the pro-life side making their arguments and the more conservative judges asking questions.
But I want to start with the pro-abortion side.
Just to demonstrate What a thin argument they made.
Mr.
Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, Mississippi's ban on abortion two months before viability is flatly unconstitutional under decades of precedent.
Mississippi asks the Court to dismantle this precedent and allow states to force women to remain pregnant and give birth against their will.
The Court should refuse to do so for at least three reasons.
First, stare decisis presents an especially high bar here.
In Casey, this court carefully examined and rejected every possible reason for overruling Roe, holding that a woman's right to end a pregnancy before viability was a rule of law and a component of liberty it could not renounce.
The question, then, is not whether Roe should be overturned, but whether Casey was egregiously wrong to adhere to Roe's central holding.
Second, Casey and Roe were correct.
For a state to take control of a woman's body and demand that she go through pregnancy and childbirth with all the physical risks and life-altering consequences that brings is a fundamental deprivation of her liberty.
Third, eliminating or reducing the right to abortion will propel women backwards.
Okay, it goes on and it gets even vaguer and less grounded to reality.
Did you notice what was missing in her opening argument?
The Constitution.
The law itself.
She focuses on two things.
She focuses on precedent and stare decisis, which is just a fancy term for precedent.
And she focuses on liberty in the abstract.
But what about the Constitution?
What about the laws?
Where is the so-called right to abortion?
Where is it in the Constitution?
You're saying that this new law in Mississippi, this pro-life law, is unconstitutional.
Show me.
Where is it?
She can't.
She keeps going back to precedent.
The precedents being Roe versus Wade and then Planned Parenthood v.
Casey, which kind of affirmed Roe versus Wade but actually kind of changed the reasoning.
It came to the same conclusion, which is that there's this mythical right to abortion in the Constitution.
But it kind of used different reasoning for it.
So she goes back to those decisions, but she has to rely on story decisis and precedent because the decisions were obviously wrong.
The decisions were not based in the Constitution.
And so she can't point to the Constitution and say, here's your right to abortion.
She has to point to the precedent.
But there have been plenty of bad decisions in the history of the United States.
Dred Scott, right?
Decisions that said that black people could never be citizens.
Plenty of other, a lot of decisions regarding civil rights were bad decisions.
So in that case, would you point to precedent and say, well, it's precedent.
So black people can never be citizens.
Because it's precedent.
It's stare decisis.
What, do you want to overturn our whole system?
No.
So, extremely weak arguments, and then she makes this argument, and it's liberty.
Show me the liberty.
Show me the actual laws.
Show me the actual rights.
And then, that final argument you heard her make, she goes, it'll send women backward.
Oh, wow, really impressive legal argument, lady.
If we don't do this, if we overrule Roe versus Wade, it'll be not very progressive.
Okay, well...
Whoop-dee-doo.
Who cares?
Make an argument from the law.
She can't do it.
And Justice Clarence Thomas, probably the most conservative judge on the court, one of the most conservative judges on the court, and the longest standing member there, he hit her on this point.
He said, hey lady, can you bring it back from all this generality and actually come back down to earth?
What I'm trying to focus on is to lower the level of generality, or at least be a little bit more specific.
In the old days we used to say it was a right to privacy that the court found in the due process, substantive due process clause, okay?
So, or in substantive due process.
And I'm trying to get you to tell me what are we relying on now.
Is it privacy?
Is it autonomy?
What is it?
I think it continues to be liberty and the right exists whatever level of generality the court applies.
Yeah, I think it's like freedom, man.
You know, hold on.
Excuse me, Mr.
Justice.
One second.
Yeah, man.
It's just kind of like, you know, liberty, you know?
And so she refuses to do what Justice Thomas asks her to do, namely cite some provision of the Constitution to justify her legal claims.
And...
I guess even more incredibly, as bad as the performance was from the pro-abortion lawyer, the pro-abortion judges were possibly worse.
I'm thinking in particular of Sonia Sotomayor, who was less asking questions than making an argument herself, and it wasn't a very good one.
Probably her strongest argument was to compare babies in the womb To brain dead people.
Virtually every state defines a brain death as death.
Yet the literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain dreaded responding to stimuli.
There's about 40% of dead people who, if you touch their feet, the foot will recoil.
There are spontaneous acts by dead-brained people.
So I don't think that a response by a fetus necessarily proves that there's a sensation of pain or that there's consciousness.
Sonia Sotomayor calling anybody brain dead is the clearest example of a pot and kettle that I've ever seen from the Supreme Court.
When I was in college, I saw Sonia Sotomayor give a lecture.
My only comment on it, I don't even remember what the lecture was about, was that I and many other people who were in that room left the room thinking, huh, not the brightest bulb in the pack, that one.
And she has a reputation for being the dumbest judge on the court, and she is the dumbest judge on the court.
The point she's making just isn't even true, by the way.
If you are brain dead, you're not getting better.
You are only being kept alive or even appearing to be kept alive by machines.
If you are a baby in the womb...
You are growing.
You're going to become more and more conscious.
You're going to become more and more sentient, more and more aware.
The analogy is not only imprecise, it's absurd.
And it shows a ghastly view from the left of babies, that they think that they're dead.
It's unscientific, it's immoral, and it's not fit for the Supreme Court.
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Sonia Sotomayor then moves on from her silly brain-dead argument, brain-dead in all sense of that term, to make a political argument.
She says, if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, how will it survive the politicization?
Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?
Okay.
I don't see how it is possible.
It's what Casey talked about when it talked about watershed decisions.
Some of them, Brown v.
Board of Education it mentioned, and this one, have such an entrenched set of expectations in our society that this is what the Court decided, this is what we will follow.
That we won't be able to survive if people believe that everything, including New York versus Sullivan, I could name any other set of rights.
Actually, the opposite view seems to be correct.
Every time the court has tried to base its decision on what it thinks will protect it from accusations of politicization, it appears more politicized.
This is one of the biggest problems with Chief Justice Roberts.
Roberts is so concerned with protecting the institutional integrity of the court that he often seems to be ruling against his own judgment.
The clearest example of this was Obamacare, but other decisions as well.
And ironically, what that does is makes us view the court in a more partisan and political way, because the judges are not acting on principle or constitutional text.
They're acting to try to manage the passions of the people.
So that objection from Sotomayor, I think, is totally bogus.
Then she moves on to what was lying underneath a lot of these arguments, which is their antipathy to Christianity and religion.
How is your interest anything but a religious view?
The issue of when life begins has been hotly debated by philosophers since the beginning of time.
It's still debated in religions.
So when you say this is the only right that takes away from the state the ability to protect the life, That's a religious view, isn't it?
Because it assumes that a fetus is life at — when?
You're not drawing — when do you suggest we begin that way?
Your Honor, aside from — I'm putting it aside from religion.
I think there might be more than one question, and I'll do my very best, Justice Sotomayor.
I think this court in Gonzales pretty clearly recognized that before viability, we are talking with unborn life with a human organism.
And I think the philosophical questions Your Honor mentioned, all those reasons that they're hard, they've been debated, they're important, those are all reasons to return this to the people, because the people should get to debate these hard issues.
How is your view anything different than a religious view?
I'm almost doing a Fauci for Sotomayor here.
I guess they're both from New York.
Well, I guess it is kind of a religious view, but so is your view, Your Honor.
The question is, when does life begin?
Now, just from a purely scientific view, we know life begins at conception.
All the qualities that we would describe as being involved in life are there from the very moment of conception.
But if Sonia Sotomayor is making some higher argument that you're not really alive until you speak, until you're conscious, until you feel pain, which creates all these bioethical questions.
What if someone's in a coma?
Are they no longer alive?
Can you just kill them?
Probably not.
But even beyond that scientific ignorance...
And the philosophical and religious ignorance is even the ignorance of the role of religion.
What Sonia Sotomayor is saying is that my religious view, this sort of materialist, feminist, leftist religious view, that is totally kosher, completely protected by our political tradition.
But your religious view that human life has worth and we should protect it, that is totally outside the purview of the Constitution.
How dare you force your religion on me?
But it's all religious.
You know, we say politics is downstream of culture.
Well, culture is downstream of religion.
Cult and culture come from the same root word.
So obviously, when we talk about the morality of killing people, we're talking about religion.
When we talk about the morality of taxes, we're talking about religion.
Okay?
You can't escape that.
And what these lib justices are blinded to...
Is their own religious views, which they consider to be common sense and totally accepted by everybody.
And they're willing to punish you if you don't accept their kooky religious views.
Justice Breyer did the same thing.
Religion kept popping up.
Justice Breyer is a slightly more intelligent lib lawyer on the court.
And he kept asking the pro-life side, Well, hold on.
I want you to cite secular people.
I want you to cite atheists in your argument.
Are there secular philosophers and bioethicists who take the position that the rights of personhood begin at conception or at some point other than viability?
I believe so.
I mean, I think there's a wide array, I mean, of people of kind of all different views and of no-faith views who would reasonably have that view, Your Honor.
It's not tied to a religious view, and I don't think, were it otherwise, this Court's jurisprudence on this issue would run right into some of its religious exercise jurisprudence.
So the pro-life lawyer there does a good job of remaining measured and respectful.
But I think the real answer to this question is, who cares?
Who cares what some secular, liberal, atheist philosopher thinks?
Those people are idiots.
They're wrong.
It's like saying, excuse me, counsel, can you cite a radical leftist who agrees with your view?
No, I can't because I'm a conservative and the leftist is wrong.
Hey, counsel, can you cite someone who is wrong about the fundamental question, the basic nature of reality?
Can you cite someone who's completely wrong about that, to back up your argument?
No, I can't, because I try not to base my arguments on the thoughts of dummies.
By the way, this country, America, which I know we're supposed to say is super secular and separation of church and state or whatever, America is based on the idea that there are certain unalienable rights that we are endowed with by our creator who exists, and those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If that creator, whose name is God, does not exist, then the premise of the country doesn't make any sense.
So far from being a secular atheist country like these silly people want us to believe, we are not.
The country is based on religion, and specifically it's premised on Christianity.
So Justice Thomas, thankfully, Justice Thomas comes in, and he tries to bring this back down to reality.
He says, hold on, wait, we're talking about abortion, right?
Can we get back to the thing about abortion, please?
General, would you specifically state what the right is?
Is it specifically abortion?
Is it liberty?
Is it autonomy?
Is it privacy?
The right is grounded in the liberty component of the 14th Amendment, Justice Thomas, but I think that it promotes interests in autonomy, bodily integrity, liberty, and equality.
And I do think that it is specifically the right to abortion here, the right of a woman to be able to control without the state forcing her to continue a pregnancy, whether to carry that baby to term.
The state isn't forcing the woman into a pregnancy.
The state isn't forcing the woman to become a mother.
The woman already became a mother at the moment of conception.
The question is, does the state have the right to make laws against killing the baby who already exists?
And of course, the state has the right to do that.
Of course, we the people have the right to do that.
We have plenty of laws against murder and assault and all sorts of laws, and we absolutely have the right to do that.
Thomas, he tries one more time, and then he gives up.
He says, can you please, I can identify the Second Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, but I can't, what right are you talking about?
What is confusing is that we, if we were talking about the Second Amendment, I know exactly what we're talking about.
If we're talking about the Fourth Amendment, I know what we're talking about.
Because it's written.
It's there.
What specifically is the right here that we're talking about?
Well, Justice Thomas, I think that the Court in those other contexts with respect to those other amendments has had to articulate what the text means and the bounds of the constitutional guarantees.
And it's done so through a variety of different tests that implement First Amendment rights, Second Amendment rights, Fourth Amendment rights.
So I don't think that there is anything unprecedented or anomalous about the right that the Court articulated in Roe and Casey and the way that it implemented that right by defining the scope of the liberty interest So the right specifically is abortion?
It's the right of a woman prior to viability to control whether to continue with the pregnancy, yes.
So, Justice Thomas says, can you cite the right?
Is abortion right?
Can you cite it?
Where is it?
And her answer is, no.
I'll translate all that legal jargon, try to dance around it.
No, she can't.
They had no argument.
Now, does this mean Roe will be overruled?
I'm cautiously optimistic, but just on the performance of the lawyers and the judges for that matter, the pro-life side made the best case that they could have, and it's an extremely strong case.
The pro-abortion side absolutely collapsed.
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After that, we'll be right back with a lot more.
You know, moving on from the Supreme Court, we're going to hear more about this case, obviously, in the months to come.
But beyond that, just to the issue, there is one objection that I have heard from even otherwise kind of conservative people on this issue of abortion.
And it actually does get to the heart of it.
It gets to the heart of the whole abortion debate.
And it's not even about the life of the baby.
And it's not even about competing rights between the baby and the mother.
It gets to this question of men and women.
And they will say, well, it's not fair.
It's not fair that if a man and a woman do that thing that they probably shouldn't be doing unless they're married.
If they head on up to lover's point and they do that thing and then the woman gets pregnant, the man can just walk away and the woman has this baby.
And that's not fair.
How's that fair?
How are we going to tolerate that?
Why is it That the man can just walk away and the woman can't.
Because men and women are different.
That's why.
That's why.
And I sympathize with you.
I empathize with you.
That this culture of feminism and liberalism and progressivism has persuaded you that men and women are exactly the same.
And their approach to sex should be exactly the same.
And their approach to...
The professional world should be exactly the same, and their approach to family should be exactly the same, but it's not.
That's just a lie.
It's just dumb and wrong and dishonest and false.
Men and women are different, and so...
Men and women's experience of the world is going to be a bit different.
And certainly men and women's experience of sex and pregnancy is going to be different.
And I'm sorry that you were lied to by feminists and leftists and secularists and all the rest of them.
But it's just the case.
And so what the left has tried to do to hide the difference between men and women is give women this special right to kill their babies.
Because they think if women have the right to kill their babies, then they can at least kind of pretend that their experience of sex and pregnancy will be the same.
Right?
Because you won't necessarily have to raise this kid or even deal with the question of giving the baby up for adoption.
Right?
Plenty of parents who want to adopt babies.
Many more parents who want to adopt than babies up for adoption.
But you won't even have to deal with that.
Because you can just go to this doctor in this secret little room and the doctor will kill your kid.
And then it'll be just like you're a man.
You can just walk away.
Now, there can be laws to protect women here.
End no-fault divorce.
That would protect women.
Men already have to pay a lot of child support.
But toughen up the child support laws, sure.
You can pass laws to make this a little better, but the central fantasy here is that men and women are exactly the same.
And the grave crime and sin that has been used to defend this fantasy that men and women are exactly the same and to bolster that appearance is this special right for women to kill their babies.
That is a hideous crime, and the fantasy is wrong, too.
And when society lives according to fantasy, things don't turn out very well.
Speaking of which, there's a TikTok.
That's gone viral from our friends over at Libs of TikTok, one of the great Twitter accounts, of a transgender Satanist explaining, and he's got all these facial tattoos and lots of crazy piercings and looks, it would seem intentionally very scary, He's obviously got a lot of problems.
And he's explaining the philosophical center of his strange appearance.
I'm just going to post this every time people ask me the same questions over and over again.
My name's Farah.
I am a trans woman as well as an intersex woman.
My pronouns are she, her, they, them, or your grace.
My eyes are tattooed.
My nose is a piercing.
I identify as a threat, a nightmare, and a goddess.
So please bow down to me.
I do not believe in God.
I don't worship the devil.
But yes, I am a Satanist, which means I am my own God and I worship myself.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
So, a lot of people are looking at this and saying, man, there's a lot of untreated mental illness out there, and I bet this person has some psychological problems.
But the person also has spiritual and philosophical problems.
And today, because our country operates in this very materialist way, where we deny spiritual reality, and it makes us go kind of schizophrenic, because on the one hand, we say there's no such thing as the soul or spirit.
We're just meat puppets, and we're just bags of chemicals.
But then on the other hand, we say our bodies don't mean anything, and if I'm a man and I think I'm a woman, then I actually am a woman.
And the physical world, the flesh means nothing and the spirit means everything.
And we've got this really schizophrenic view rather than the reality of the situation, which is that we're body and soul combined, right?
Body and spirit together.
So, the more interesting thing that this person says is, beyond the eye tattoos and the face tattoos and the giant piercing through his nose and all that, he says, I'm a Satanist, but I don't believe in God.
And I don't worship Satan.
I worship myself, right?
I'm a god and I'm a goddess.
As though this is some clever thing.
You'll hear this from certain Satanist groups.
They say, we're using the word Satanism kind of ironically.
We don't really believe in gods and deities and devils.
We just worship ourselves.
As if that isn't what Satanism always was.
That is Satanism.
That's what Satan did.
That's what made Satan fall like lightning from heaven.
It was Satan, an angel, chose to worship himself and pursue his own will rather than the will of God.
This is just straight out of the Bible.
And then he falls from heaven.
And goes down to hell.
This is what John Milton writes about in Paradise Lost.
He says the mind is, Satan is saying this when he's cast down into hell, he says the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.
But that isn't true.
You actually can't do that.
And the more that Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost thinks that way, the worse off he becomes.
And eventually he becomes a snake.
And anywhere he turns, he's stuck in hell.
As are these people.
If you pursue your own will...
Divorced from the moral order.
If you pursue your own disordered desires, divorced from good.
And if you pursue your own fantasies, divorced from reality.
You are going to end up in hell.
In the afterlife, and in this life too.
And in your personal life, and in society too.
And that person who has all those problems on TikTok...
That person would seem to be living in a kind of hell.
And maybe we all focus on the chemical reasons for that.
Maybe this person needs to take this drug or that drug or this antidepressant or whatever.
But there's a spiritual and philosophical issue here too.
And the same thing goes for our public life.
The same thing goes for abortion.
And a lot of other political issues, but abortion is a pretty clear one because it involves a mother killing her own child.
You can't escape it.
You can't escape moral reality.
You can try, and a lot of people try, even on the right.
The left certainly tries.
Even on the right, the kind of more libertarian point of view is that we can escape the moral order.
We don't need to be beholden to any moral order.
It's just our willfulness, our choice, our desires.
That's all that really matters.
But it's not.
It's not.
And the men who developed our country knew that.
And great statesmen throughout history have known that.
And we, stupidly, have forgotten that.
And the more we forget it, the crappier our country looks.
And it's as simple as that.
Speaking of living in an increasingly decayed and scary looking civilization, there's a news report just came out of Australia that some fugitives are on the loose.
These fugitives did not commit murder, theft, arson.
These days, if you commit those crimes, you'll actually be celebrated as long as you're a member of BLM and Antifa.
No, these men, they are fugitives not from justice, but from a COVID quarantine camp.
We've been told the trio scaled the fence in the early hours of this morning.
Police receiving reports around 4.40am.
Now major police checkpoints have been set up around Howard Springs for the past several hours.
As you can see in these pictures, they've been conducting thorough searches in car boots, checking vehicle registrations, cars and buses alike.
But in the last half an hour, what we understand is they've actually been dismantled.
Exactly why?
That hasn't been confirmed.
Hopefully good news.
We're also not sure yet who these people are connected with, whether it's a repatriation flight or those Aboriginal community members who have been staying here following the Catherine cluster.
Davina, what we do know...
is that this is definitely going to bring this gold standard facility under intense scrutiny.
On Sunday we had a man escape and found on Darwin's party precinct and this latest situation is only going to put us under the microscope further.
So we're going to get...
Alright, forgive my accent.
We're going to get all the cops out there and they're going to bring them back and drag them back to the detention camp where everybody is being held because of the virus.
Alright, back to you.
How's the weather?
Yeah, yeah.
Watching this clip, I did not believe it was serious news.
I thought it had to be The Onion or Babylon Bee or a satirical outlet.
How the hell did we get here?
How did we get to COVID detention camps in a Western, allegedly civilized nation like Australia?
How did we get here?
A lot of people, beyond the COVID camps, beyond that specific issue, want to get to the broader political issue.
A lot of people thought this kind of thing could never happen.
Oh, come on.
Don't worry about it.
A lot of people thought that all the kooky stuff that was going on on college campuses in recent years, oh, that'll never get into the real world.
It can't happen.
Those snowflakes, they'll get into the real world and then they'll straighten out.
What happened?
The real world bent down to the snowflakes.
Oh, that'll...
Stop worrying, you conspiracy theorist.
There won't be COVID detention camps.
There actually are right now in Australia.
And there are huge police chases trying to track down people who escaped the COVID camp.
The problem here for conservatives is a failure of political imagination.
It's And conservatives are especially guilty of this because conservatives kind of like the way things are and we're kind of more normal and we're a little more grounded.
And so we just think, oh, it's fine.
They're never going to redefine marriage.
Oh, that'll never happen.
They're never going to redefine sex itself.
That'll never happen.
They'll never lock down the world for two years over the Wu flu.
That'll never happen.
They'll never have COVID camps.
In Western Asia, it'll happen.
It can happen.
It actually can happen, guys.
And this is actually a lesson that I think conservatives can learn.
Sometimes when the more eccentric thinkers on the right, the thinkers a little more outside of the mainstream, I'm thinking of people like Patrick Deneen or Adrian Vermeule or the Integralists or, I don't know, the people who, Maybe you haven't even heard of these guys, but they're writing in a little more fringy way for the mainstream right-wing thought.
And we think that can never happen.
We need to lower our expectations.
We need to make a deal with the left.
We need to concede a lot of things to the left.
We need to concede on all of these cultural issues.
Actually, maybe the fringier guys are more correct.
Maybe the fringier guys have a saner view of the boundaries of politics.
Maybe actually our modest political aims in the mainstream right have been our downfall.
I'm Maybe we need to think more imaginatively and maybe we need to move that Overton window a little bit more or we're just going to keep losing and losing and losing.
One of the conservative politicians right now who is doing a great job of using his imagination and thinking outside of the mainstream, Governor Ron DeSantis, who is, I assume he's seen the news reports out of Australia, and he's looking at a lot of the measures that not just the government, but the woke corporations and big tech and the media are pushing in America, and he's saying, no, we won't let them do it.
Let me just say, in Florida, we will not let them lock you down.
We will not let them take your jobs.
We will not let them harm your businesses.
We will not let them close your schools.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
The lockdowns didn't stop COVID. Force masking, they said last year, would end the pandemic if 80% wore masks.
Many more than that were wearing masks, and it hasn't worked.
They said you could get COVID off surfaces, which isn't true.
They've not been honest about the origins of the virus, and they haven't been forthright about natural immunity.
And we're not going to let them do it.
This is conservative.
And all the hoops that you're seeing, the squishes jump through on the right to say, no, but we can't.
We can't rein in Amazon.
No, we can't rein in Google.
Google's a private company.
Build your own Google.
No, we can't tell companies that they can't force everyone to take the Fauci-Ouchi experimental drug.
Those guys are wrong, and they have a failure of imagination or a failure of intellect or just a failure of courage.
But what DeSantis is doing here is right.
A handful of politicians on the right who are doing this.
DeSantis at the governor level, Ted Cruz, I don't just say it because he's a friend of mine, he's doing a great job, Josh Hawley also, both of them at the Senate level, other people as well.
Donald Trump did a pretty strong job on this, maybe not so much on COVID, but on a lot of other issues he did that from the presidential level.
You've got to just stand up and take on reality as it is.
Conservatives for a long time said that the left didn't really care about reality.
You know, the left says, who cares if it works in practice?
Does it work in theory?
That's why all their policies kept failing.
But we conservatives were grounded in reality.
Well, how about we apply that to trade?
How about we apply that to our manufacturing policy?
How about we apply that to our regulation of big tech and the media and private corporations?
If the point here is we don't think Americans should be forced to take the Fauci-ouchie for the virus that doesn't pose a particularly grave threat to most of them, then why are we okay if Nike forces them to do it?
Or GE? Or Coca-Cola?
Or why are we okay with that?
We're okay with people being treaded on as long as it's not big government.
Give me a break.
DeSantis and some other people have it right here.
This COVID issue is a big one and the political realignment that's taken place around it.
It actually might give us a new senator from Pennsylvania who you may have heard of before.
His name is Dr.
Oz.
I invented a heart valve that saves thousands of lives.
Then I started a TV show to advocate for you taking control of your health and took on the medical establishment to argue against costly drugs and skyrocketing medical bills.
But COVID has shown us that our system is broken.
We lost too many lives, too many jobs, and too many opportunities because Washington got it wrong.
So, Dr.
Oz may soon be Senator Dr.
Oz.
Not unprecedented, by the way.
Talk about a failure of imagination.
A lot of people are laughing at this, saying this could never happen.
Come on, some TV star, a doctor guy, that could never happen.
Have you ever heard of Donald Trump?
TV star guy could never become a prominent politician.
You ever hear of Ronald Reagan?
You ever hear of Sonny Bono?
You ever hear of Jesse Ventura?
You ever hear of, I don't know, Al Franken?
Yeah, of course they can.
Of course they can.
This could never, it could never be Trump.
It could never be Reagan.
It could never be, yes, it could.
Dr.
Oz could be a senator.
And he's running on a pretty convincing campaign here because people are upset about the COVID lockdowns and they are going stir-crazy, as rightly they should.
Dr.
Oz's platform, by the way, he went on Sean Hannity's show.
His platform is just a very basic kind of 2000s right-wing platform.
Cut taxes, reduce regulation.
You know, there's nothing particularly shocking or new about his platform.
But he's running on, I'm a doctor, the medical industry sucks, they've really messed with you for the past.
The public health officials have really ruined your life the last couple of years.
And so I'm running.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he won.
Speaking of running and winning, Stacey Abrams, the alleged current governor of Georgia, she lost that race, but she pretends to be the governor of Georgia, and most Democrats go along with her and pretend that she's the governor of Georgia, and that she won her Georgia race.
She is running for governor again.
Take a listen.
You see, I'm here to tell you that just because you win doesn't mean you're won.
We've got folks who are ready to take back what they think is theirs, but they are not entitled to our progress.
They are not entitled to our justice.
They are not entitled to our votes.
But either we use them or we lose them.
I come from a state where I was not entitled to become the governor.
But as an American citizen and a citizen of Georgia, I'm going to fight for every person who has the right to vote to be able to cast that vote.
That was just a couple months ago when Stacey Abrams was campaigning in Virginia for Terry McAuliffe, who also lost.
And Stacey Abrams was claiming then that the election was stolen in Georgia.
Stacey Abrams, according to the logic of the left, is a threat to democracy and an insurrectionist who needs to be shut out of public life, right?
No, actually, they just go along with it.
Terry McAuliffe during that race was denying the results of the 2000 presidential election.
That's totally fine.
It's only when the right wing raises questions about elections, then there are threats to the country.
So Stacey Abrams has just announced she's running for governor again, and of course she is.
And the lesson we've got to take from this is persistence.
Persistence.
The left is really good at this.
When they win, they push further.
No sooner had the left redefined marriage for the first time ever at this kind of radical level.
No sooner had they done that than they moved on and redefined sex.
Sex itself.
Right?
They keep proving the conservative slippery slow argument right, and they don't care.
They just keep pushing.
They take their victories and they push further.
They take their losses and they deny their losses and push further.
They never stop.
And that's the lesson.
It goes right back to Roe versus Wade.
That's the lesson for the right.
The one issue that we've come close to winning on, and we might still win on, is pro-life.
Since Roe versus Wade, we have pushed hard and hard and hard for 50 years and garnered a lot of support and really moved the needle in the pro-life direction.
Now we might actually overrule Roe vs.
Wade.
And the lesson there, too, by the way, is once we do it, if we can do it, God willing, push even further.
Don't stop.
It's not the end.
It's only the beginning.
Now, The Daily Wire has been hard at work keeping their promise of bringing you tons of content that you won't get anywhere else.
We are very excited to share one of our highly anticipated trailers with you.
The trailer features our first original production.
We released a movie last year called Run, Hide, Fight, but we didn't make that movie.
We acquired that movie when Hollywood didn't want to distribute it because it wasn't politically correct, but we didn't actually produce it.
This one we produced.
It's called Shut In.
It'll be available to stream in early 2022.
The film follows the story of a young mother who is barricaded inside a closet by her violent ex-husband.
I haven't even seen the trailer yet.
Here it is.
I'm gonna take off tonight so the kids can sleep most of the way.
Well, I'm mostly done.
I just need to finish cleaning out the pantry.
I love you so.
It's all around.
You turn me on.
So I'm leaving.
Oh, even thinking through the night.
No, stop! stop!
Please let me out!
Please!
Lady! - Your daughter, she's very pretty.
Don't you touch my kids!
Rob!
Rob owes me money.
There's money.
There's a lot of money.
There's thousands of dollars in the pantry.
Have it all.
Please come out.
I'm scared.
That looks good.
Not that I'm saying I didn't think it would be good.
I did know it would be.
There's a lot of talent at the Daily Wire.
But still, when conservatives have made movies, sometimes, look, some conservative movies have been terrific, and some have been a little schmaltzy, a little saccharine, you know, a little kitschy and sentimental.
Not that.
That looks pretty real and gritty.
I can't wait to watch it.
Can't wait to watch the whole movie.
Make sure you go like and share the trailer on YouTube.
Your support makes all the difference.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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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, Roe vs.
Wade may be on the chopping block after oral arguments at the Supreme Court.
And Joe Biden's team prepares for more COVID authoritarianism.
