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A clear majority of Americans are willing to wear masks indoors at all times, indefinitely, according to a new poll from Axios and Ipsos.
That is the bad news.
The bad news is that Americans have lost their minds, dignity, and fashion sense.
The good news is that it is mostly just the libs.
So this same poll shows that only 38% of Republicans are willing to wear masks indoors all the time, compared to a whopping 82% of Democrats who are ready to muzzle themselves.
This is a massive difference about one of the most basic aspects of our lives, how we present ourselves in public, how we smile, how we speak, how we breathe.
Does this difference between the left and the right come about because our brains work differently?
Maybe.
Maybe a little bit.
Is it because we view life and death differently?
Maybe.
That plays a role, too.
But the biggest factor here at play is right before your very eyes.
And the libs are getting really nervous about it.
It's the media.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from sdog556 who says, I feel like the only person from America who should be going to the Beijing Olympics is Eric Swalwell so he can see his ex-girlfriend.
That's true.
This is really the toughest part of the diplomatic boycott is that a sitting member of Congress, the Democrat Eric Swalwell, might now not be able to see his Chinese spy girlfriend that he slept with for a very long time.
That's really sad.
People...
You know, sure, the athletes.
We talk about the athletes or the coaches.
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I've said from the beginning, the masks are a political symbol.
Whatever they do or don't do medically or for public health or whatever, we can all debate that.
Dr.
Fauci can debate that with himself because he's held opposite views on the question.
Whatever you talk about the medical side, it is a political symbol.
When I walk down the street and I see someone wearing a mask, I can know with a great deal of certainty I am looking at a lib.
That was true basically for the whole epidemic, but it's especially true now.
When I see someone not wearing a mask, I know I'm looking at a conservative.
I was on an airplane yesterday, and you look.
The degree to which the mask is below the nose, the lower the mask is on the face...
You can know almost with 100% certainty the more conservative the person is that you are looking at.
How did it get this way?
How did we get to the place where more than four out of five Democrats in America are willing to muzzle themselves, wear that filthy, disgusting cloth indefinitely?
Is it just because they're naive?
Is it just because they're a little bit kooky?
Maybe, sure.
I really think it's the media, though.
Because I peruse CNN every now and again.
I guess I'm a masochist.
Maybe that's my kink.
I don't know.
I look at the New York Times.
I read the Washington Post.
And if I were just reading those news outlets and just watching those TV shows, I would be scared to death of the Omicron and the Delta and the Phi Beta Kappa and all of them.
I would think that I were on the verge of death Because the bubonic plague were all around me.
Because those news outlets lie, but they're very effective at lying.
Now, thankfully, that's not all that I read and listen to.
It's not all that you read and listen to.
That's probably why you're not extremely neurotic about the Wu flu.
And increasingly, you have the opportunity not to pay attention to those fear-mongering demagogues on CNN and the New York Times and everywhere else.
And the libs are really upset about this.
Axios just ran a hit piece on conservatives called Right Wing Builds Its Own Echo Chamber.
And it shows the monthly downloads of U.S. right-wing apps...
So it's not just our podcasts, which are some of the top podcasts in the world, and it's not just our website, which is one of the most widely shared, actually the most widely shared news organization on Facebook, for instance, and it's not just our properties, it's the app in particular.
We're number one.
We're number one.
Then there's the MeWe.
You see the MeWe network here.
You see Blaze, Parler, Newsmax.
So these are all these conservative apps, and Axios is really upset that we're building our own echo chamber.
Now, of course, no matter how well Daily Wire does on Facebook, sure, we're the number one publisher on Facebook, but conservative stuff broadly is actually a very small portion of Facebook.
Yeah, Daily Wire is top of the heap, but we're just one outlet.
Even if you take into account all the different apps and conservative outlets, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the left-wing media landscape.
And so, it doesn't matter how well one company does, generally the left is going to get its views out there more effectively.
Now they're being threatened a little bit because the right is growing tremendously.
Specifically Daily Wire, not even just to toot our own horns, but the left has given us an opportunity.
The left keeps canceling people in movies, canceling people in TV, canceling people in sports, turning people off because of their awful politics, and then we just scoop it all up.
That's why we're joking about how we're about to hire Chris Cuomo.
It's because it seems like everyone...
We're not going to hire Chris Cuomo.
But everyone that gets canceled, we hire them up.
They're really good talents.
And then we help to grow.
And then we go further up on this list and the libs cry about it.
They're building an echo chamber.
So what if we are?
It's not an echo chamber.
It is an echo chamber, but it's not an echo chamber in the sense that the libs think.
The libs have a very large echo chamber.
Their echo chamber spans sea to shining sea and it's the entire media landscape.
And their voices echo and they reverberate and they're just kind of the background noise and everyone believes the nonsense that they say.
And we want our voices to echo too.
We want our voices to be out there and when people think about some political issue, to think about the Daily Wire report they heard about it.
To think about that thing that maybe I said on my show that debunks the nonsense that they heard from the New York Times or the Washington Post.
It's good to have your voice echo.
The libs have had their voices echoing for decades and decades, I mean at least 50 years and really longer than that.
And it has helped them utterly transform the country.
And now we're going to go fight back, and we're having a lot of success at that.
And they can cry about it, but too bad.
You did this to yourselves.
You have given conservatives an opportunity because of your obvious dishonesty and your corruption and your failures.
And now we're fighting back, and that's too bad for you, isn't it?
Speaking of the media and the left-wing echo chamber that reverberates around our country, Fredo!
Fredo Cuomo, because he has not yet gotten the call from Daily Wire, he's waiting by his phone.
Please, Ben, call me.
Give me the Chris Cuomo show on the Daily Wire.
Because that hasn't happened yet, he needs to make a buck.
And so how's he going to do it?
He's going to sue CNN. There's a report out now that Cuomo is hiring lawyers and preparing to file a lawsuit over the remainder of his four-year contract from last year.
Uh, the contract was reportedly worth six million dollars a year.
Six million bucks this jerk was- I gotta call Ben, man.
I gotta renegotiate my contract by- A few orders of magnitude, I think.
So that leaves $18 million to $20 million on his contract that would be owed.
CNN says, we're not giving you a penny, Chris.
CNN says, they have, quote, no intention of paying, this is through a CNN insider, so they're speaking anonymously, but this is clearly coming from CNN. They have no intention of paying Cuomo a penny, because if he gets a settlement, there would be an uproar.
Furthermore, another source says, CNN has a standard morality clause in their contract that says that if the employee does anything of disrepute, they can be immediately fired.
If CNN enforced the morality clause that if you fall into disrepute, if you do anything of disrepute, you can be fired, there would not be anyone in the CNN building.
There would be tumbleweed blowing through the hallways of CNN. Oh wow, we just found out.
This is breaking news.
We just found out Chris Cuomo is Andrew Cuomo's brother.
Wow, we just found out he's Mario Cuomo's son.
Oh wow, big news.
Alright.
The morality clause goes into effect.
Give me a break.
The network that employs Jeffrey Toobin is now puffing their chests about a morality clause.
Is that so?
Whatever Cuomo did, and who knows?
The one thing we know Cuomo did is help his brother, which he was obviously going to do and he's obviously been doing for his entire life.
Now there are these sort of dubious allegations of vague sexual harassment that it's clear CNN is leaking to try to get out of paying him the rest of his contract.
They don't seem particularly credible necessarily.
Maybe we need to see more evidence for that.
We know what Jeffrey Toobin did.
We know that Jeffrey Toobin, on a Zoom call with colleagues, exposed himself and performed an act of intimacy with someone that he loves.
That guy's still working.
That guy's still on air at CNN. Give me a break.
It has nothing to do with morality.
It has everything to do with political usefulness.
The Cuomos are no longer useful to CNN. CNN hired Chris Cuomo because the Cuomo family was a relatively minor but still substantial Democrat political dynasty.
Because now everyone forgets about him, but his dad, Mario Cuomo, was a very important Democrat politician who actually popularized the idea that you can be personally against abortion, but somehow politically for abortion.
And it was a way to give nominally Catholic politicians a way out to adhere to the leftist sacramental view of abortion while still pretending to be Catholic.
But now they're done, and Mario's out, Andrew's out, and Sofredo's out too.
And now they're going to bicker about morality, and I am here to see it because the corruption that we've been seeing leak and leak more and more for years is very likely about to break out into the open again.
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Speaking of getting caught, Do you know that there's a trial right now going on of Ghislaine Maxwell, the partner in crime to Jeffrey Epstein, who totally killed himself of his own volition, It was accidentally permitted to happen in that Manhattan correctional facility.
He totally killed himself, and if you say otherwise, you're a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Jeffrey Epstein, the guy who had creepy pedo island where he invited all the world leaders and largely Democrats.
Some Republicans do, but largely Democrats and Libs.
So Ghislaine Maxwell now is still alive, which is impressive, and she's on trial.
We have not discussed the trial very much on this show.
It's been going on for about a week now.
The reason I haven't discussed the trial is, one, I'm still holding out hope that the deep state will give me a big payment not to talk about.
Everyone's on the take from the deep state except me.
How come no one's offering me any money?
Come on!
I'll play ball, guys.
Come on.
No, they won't call me.
No, the reason I haven't talked about it is not because the story isn't interesting and titillating and terrifying and creepy.
It's because there's no new information.
This is the scariest part of all.
We're not learning anything.
What are we learning?
In the trial, they're naming all the names of the people who were on Epstein's airplanes.
We already knew that.
We knew all those people were on the airplanes.
We're finding out that Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell visited the Clinton White House a lot.
Yeah, we already knew that.
Ghislaine was at Chelsea Clinton's wedding.
Which we've known for years.
Which the media knew for years and years before they would even touch the story.
It was only a handful of conservatives who would say, hey, what about this creepy guy Jeffrey Epstein?
And finally, we know all of this.
That's what's so depressing about the whole affair.
We know that the ruling class is deeply implicated in the affairs of Jeffrey Epstein, this bizarre international man of mystery who has apparently strange ties to international intelligence, who we don't really know where he got his money from.
We know he was surveilling and blackmailing people.
Everything about it is just so...
We know he got a sweetheart deal when he was first brought up on the weird sex charges.
We know that the United States attorney at the time...
Under Bush said Jeffrey Epstein belongs to intelligence.
So don't touch him.
And he gets this sweetheart deal and then finally they get him again some years later.
We know all of that.
So we know.
The ruling class knows that we know.
And we know that the ruling class knows that we know.
And it just doesn't matter.
This is why the meme Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.
This is why it became a meme.
Right?
Because no one thinks that this guy was just sort of accidentally allowed to kill himself.
And whoops!
The camera that was on his cell just accidentally went out.
And whoops!
The guards that were checking on him just accidentally fell asleep right at the perfect time.
No one believes that.
And the ruling class doesn't care because what are you going to do about it?
What are you going to do?
You know, when you look at the intelligence community component of all of this, We're good to go.
They cooked up a totally fake Steele dossier and they used that as an excuse to spy on him and to undermine his administration and to plant lots of bogus theories that got the guy impeached twice.
But regardless, what are you going to do about it?
What are you going to do about it?
Nothing.
Chuck Schumer, the line from Chuck Schumer was, don't go up against the intelligence community, they can get you nine ways from Sunday.
He was being honest.
They can.
It's a very powerful force in not just American politics, but in global politics.
What is there to talk about?
There's nothing to talk about.
The real story is not whatever creepy massage Jeffrey Epstein got on Petto Island.
The real story is...
How did Epstein become so powerful?
Where did he get his money?
How did he so successfully blackmail these people?
What privileges did he get because he had all this dirt on everybody?
Who was backing him?
Now, speaking of ways to fight back against the deep state, I'm not just talking about the intelligence community here now.
I'm talking about the entire blob, the whole just administrative apparatus.
You know, the Fauci's of the world.
Fauci is a deep stater, too.
Seven presidents come along.
Dr.
Fauci remains.
Highest paid employee of the federal government.
Crafting national policy in a more significant way than this president, right?
Joe Biden said, I will never, ever fire Dr.
Fauci.
It can't be done.
The last president, Trump, didn't fire Dr.
Fauci.
And Fauci outlasted him.
So how do we fight back against this stuff?
How do we return to some semblance of constitutional government?
If people still want to do that at all.
Well, Ron DeSantis is showing the way in Florida.
Ron DeSantis just posted a picture of a healthcare worker.
Governor DeSantis said, Jeff, a Florida doctor I met in Brandon at the special session bill signing.
Remember, he did that whole thing in this random town called Brandon, Florida.
I don't know why.
Just a coincidence, probably.
He was suspended from his job due to Biden's mandate.
He has now been reinstated due to our efforts to stop this heavy-handed federal mandate.
Freedom has a home here in Florida.
Ron DeSantis is such a good politician.
It's insane.
First of all, it's the right thing to do.
It is the right thing to do to give these healthcare workers their jobs back just because they don't want to take the Fauci-ouchie.
They were fired because they didn't want to take the Fauci-ouchie.
The former, the heroes, the great wonderful heroes who the Dems just threw under the bus the minute they wouldn't comply with their ridiculous demands.
And so DeSantis goes in.
It's the right thing to do.
It's extremely smart politics.
And the way that he's doing this personalizes it.
What was the old line you'd hear from Soviet Russia?
One person dead is a tragedy.
Five people dead is a tragedy.
A million people dead is a statistic.
When we just hear these, you know, 50,000 workers laid off because of the Fauci ouchie, 100,000, it doesn't mean anything.
What do I care about 50,000?
I can't even visualize that.
But that guy I can care about.
What's his name?
Jeff?
That's wrong for Jeff to lose his job.
And so DeSantis is saying, you want this guy to lose his job just because he won't go along with Fauci?
No, he shouldn't.
And the states should be fighting back against this sort of thing.
And DeSantis has really led the way.
In terms of people at the level of state government, no one has done it better than DeSantis.
Speaking of fighting back and speaking of weird sex stuff, actually, there's a really encouraging poll that just came out from Politico and Morning Consult.
This, with regard to abortion.
The Supreme Court right now may overturn or overrule Roe v.
Wade and Planned Parenthood v.
Casey.
There's a decent chance.
I spent a long time talking about this last night with Senator Ted Cruz on our podcast, Verdict.
So that episode will be coming out sometime in the next couple of weeks.
And Senator Cruz is...
Hopeful.
He thinks there's a very good chance.
He's more hopeful after the oral arguments in the new abortion case than he was beforehand.
So let's say there's a chance.
Well, at that point, it will return the issue to the state level.
And here's the biggest fear that Republicans have about the court overruling Roe v.
Wade.
They fear that right now the Democrats look terrible, their poll numbers are in the gutter, the Republicans are looking really, really great to win back the House in 2022 and the White House in 2024.
But if next spring the Supreme Court overrules Roe, maybe that electoral advantage will disappear because the Democrats will be so motivated to go out and vote to kill babies and that they'll actually keep the House maybe and they'll keep the Senate and they'll maybe keep the White House in 2024.
The polls don't back this up.
No one, no real people actually vote on abortion to support abortion.
Political elites do in the Democratic Party.
Very ardent Blue-haired political activists do.
Blue-haired meaning the young, crazy, radical people, not the older women.
I know it's confusing when you refer to the blue hairs.
Those guys care, but those are very small groups.
In terms of the great number of actual voters, no one votes on this.
According to Politico, 42% of respondents to their poll said they would vote for a candidate who does not align with their views on abortion.
42%.
We're told this is the most important touchstone, pivotal issue that will decide elections.
42% don't care whatsoever.
Only 32% said that a candidate's stance on abortion will determine their vote.
Now, a candidate's stance on abortion...
Very well might determine my vote as a pro-lifer, okay?
I think that's true for a lot of people in the pro-life movement.
But that's 32% of all Americans.
I'm just not convinced this is going to be a decisive issue.
Another 26% were unsure or had no opinion on the matter.
I've long suspected that this was the case.
Most people don't like abortion.
Even the ones who will go along with it and support it, they acknowledge it's a bad thing.
They're at the very least of the idea that it should be safe and rare.
Safe, legal, and rare.
The shout-your-abortion crowd is a very small, very insane political minority.
And if this poll is true, then the left...
is absolutely devastated politically because it means that their one big issue that they're hanging their hopes on is a mirage for them at the electoral level.
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For many years, the Republican Party elite believed that pro-life advocacy was a fringe issue that was going to hurt them electorally and it was really going to turn off people And the minute you mentioned supporting life, you were just going to lose elections because so many people were motivated by defending abortion.
And it's just not true.
And there are polls that show that that's not true.
But here's some really good evidence that it's not true.
South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem is appealing a district court ruling that stops the state from enforcing part of a state law that would require a woman to consult with a crisis pregnancy center before having an abortion.
So it's this very, very modest pro-life law.
It's good pro-life law, but it's very, very modest.
And some federal court strikes it down.
So Kristi Noem in South Dakota is taking this further up the courts.
Okay.
I have no doubt that Kristi Noem is pro-life.
I'm really not questioning her pro-life bona fides.
But one thing that we have learned about Governor Noem in recent months and years is that she is a little more of the moderate variety of Republican.
She's a little more of the risk-averse variety of Republican that doesn't want to get terribly involved in the cultural issues, and she's going to squish a little bit on, for instance, transgenderism, and she's going to say, no, it's okay, we can let boys compete against girls at the college level, and I don't want to upset the Chamber of Commerce too much.
She's a moderate I really don't even mean this to disparage her.
You know, we need a big coalition of Republicans.
Whatever they say.
Let's bring in all the moderates.
Okay, fine.
But pro-life is a winning issue.
And no matter what Christine Ohm's views on pro-life, I have no reason to question that she supports life.
I suspect that the fact that this is a winning issue is playing into her calculation.
That it is so mainstream now to support life and to oppose abortion or to discourage abortion that even the moderates, even the risk averse are doing it.
Something has changed.
You're seeing it in the courts.
You're seeing it at the level of electoral politics.
You're seeing it in grassroots advocacy.
It is totally cool.
It is totally mainstream to be pro-life.
That Overton window has shifted considerably.
Not just since Roe v.
Wade, even since I was a kid.
Very, very mainstream.
Now, speaking of various factions of the GOP... My friend Dan Crenshaw is under fire right now because of comments he made about the Freedom Caucus and the conservatives and the moderates.
And the comments he made are wrong, so I'm not going to defend the comments he made, but I am going to offer an exit ramp to people who have fallen into the same sort of error that, unfortunately, Dan has in this case.
Take a listen.
There's two types of members of Congress.
There's performance artists, and there's legislators.
Now, the performance artists are the ones that get all the attention.
They're the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well.
They know how to recite the lines that they know that our voters want to hear.
Let me tell you guys something.
In the first two years of Trump's presidency, When Republicans were in control, when every single time we were voting on Donald Trump's agenda, who do you think was at the top of that list, voting with Trump, and who do you think was at the bottom?
A lot of names you would recognize were at the bottom of that list.
A lot of names you would recognize are at the top of that list.
Number two, it's probably gonna make you cringe a little bit, is Adam Kinzinger.
Voting with Trump almost 99%.
He was number two.
One of those at the bottom, Everybody in the Freedom Caucus.
All of them.
We have drifters in our midst.
I don't think he's a terrible, awful guy who necessarily needs to be cast into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I think there are actually a fair number of Republicans and people to the right of center who would go along with this kind of thinking.
And I just think it's because of a misperception of what's really going on.
On two fronts, both on the Trump administration and on the members of Congress.
So he says here, he says, Adam Kinzinger, who is just disgraceful, just an absolutely disreputable squish, he's just awful.
He makes Liz Cheney look like Ronald Reagan.
He's just terrible.
He's saying, well, Kinzinger voted with the Trump agenda a lot of the time.
Yeah, sure, he did.
I have no doubt about that.
Trump did a lot of things, lest we forget, that weren't that great.
I gave a speech on one of them just a couple of days ago at the Colorado Christian University.
One of the Trump administration's signature achievements was a jailbreak bill.
It was a bill to let criminals out of prison.
I don't say this to diss Trump.
Trump is one of the toughest conservative politicians I've seen in my lifetime.
I admire him greatly.
I voted for him twice.
But that was a bad bill.
He shouldn't have promoted that.
There were, I think, squish elements in his administration that promoted it, and he went along with it, and it was a bad idea.
A fair bit of the Trump administration agenda, in part because he was constrained by the establishment arm of the GOP, a fair bit of it was just the kind of regular old Chamber of Commerce, moderate stuff that we've seen before.
And so, sure, you can have a voting record where you align with even someone like Trump a lot of the time, but on some crucial issues you might break.
And so what Dan is saying here is there's a difference between the showboaters And the real serious legislators.
And those eccentric Freedom Caucus people, they're just showboaters who talk a good game, but they're not really talented or whatever.
And the ones who are Squishes like Kinzinger or Liz Cheney, they're the real serious legislators.
And I just think that Dan is overstating the shortcomings of conservatives.
And I think he is overstating the virtues of the squishes.
Okay?
It's very easy to pile on someone like Lauren Boebert, another friend of mine.
Or Marjorie Taylor Greene.
It's very easy.
Oh, the media, they found her Facebook posts, and she has said some kooky things in the past, and so we've got to pile on.
It's very easy to do that, especially when it's being repeated by the left-wing media all the time.
Because they seem...
They're not polished.
They're not sophisticated.
They're not...
They say things that are a little eccentric, that even their supporters sometimes say, Oh, that was a little far.
Oh, I don't know about that.
Oh, gosh.
How can I defend that?
But...
I think their hearts are in the right place.
I think generally those conservatives have their finger on the pulse of what actually matters.
I think that generally they do a good job.
And I think generally the squishes don't have their finger on the pulse of what actually matters.
And I think even if they vote 99% of the time with the conservatives, on those crucial issues they squish.
And what they end up doing, people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, is they end up serving nearly as court jesters in the kingdom of liberalism.
On the crucial political matters, when it really matters, on the presidential election, on impeachment, on the January 6th nonsense, what do they do?
They ignore the Republican Party.
They ignore the conservative base.
They do it worse than ignore it.
They denigrate the conservative base.
They go on CNN of all places and waste all of their time attacking fellow Republicans.
When it counts, not just on voting to cut taxes, which everyone can agree on, not just on the easy votes, but on the really tough ones, the January 6th committee or whatever crap Nancy Pelosi is pushing, on the really important moments, Kinzinger and Liz Cheney squish.
And how do they squish?
In the most flamboyant, showboaty way possible.
You think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a showboater?
Tune into CNN to watch Adam Kinzinger.
It's like watching a drag show.
It's so over-the-top and sensationalist.
But it doesn't seem that way all the time because of this facade that the left-wing establishment puts on.
Where Kinzinger, he's the very serious one, you know, and he wears a tie, and he speaks in these very serious tones, and he's, oh, and then whoever the lid interviewer is, they'll say it's really serious, and they'll talk about January 6th, the greatest insurrection ever in...
Whatever you think about January 6th, not only was it not the most dangerous insurrection in America in history, it wasn't the most dangerous insurrection in America that year.
That would be BLM and Antifa that burned city after city for six to eight months.
It's not even close.
It's not even close.
Okay?
So I understand.
The reason I wanted to take a moment to talk about this is because I don't think that whenever a right winger goes in and starts, you know, saying lines that you might hear on CNN, that necessarily we need to just throw them overboard or push them even further in that direction.
I think we have to offer an exit ramp and say, look, I get...
Why you can look at an Adam Kinzinger when he goes on CNN and say, oh gosh, he seems so serious.
I get how you can be tricked into that.
I get how you can see a news report about Marjorie Taylor Greene's Facebook posts and you can be tricked into thinking this is a terrible, awful person and a threat to America.
But it's just not true.
It's just not true.
Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are not more serious legislators than Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boeber.
They are much less serious legislators.
They are much more flamboyant showboaters.
It's just that the show that we're watching is purporting to be reality, but that show is crafted by CNN and big tech, and it's just bogus.
Speaking of the House Freedom Caucus...
Paul Gosar.
Paul Gosar is a member of the House Freedom Caucus.
He's one of the more right-wing members of Congress.
He has come out to decry the treatment of those alleged insurrectionists and terrorists from January 6th.
It's been nearly a year that has passed since the treatment of political prisoners held in detention facilities in Washington, D.C. in relation to the events on January 6th, and it is appalling.
The physical conditions described by my friends of these inmates can only be described as inhumane.
These are not hardened thugs, murderers, or gang members with long histories of crimes.
These are not unruly or dangerous violent criminals.
These are dads, brothers, veterans, teachers.
All political prisoners who continue to be persecuted endure the pain of unjust suffering.
Mr.
Biden, Attorney General Garland, why are you so interested in ruining the lives of these folks instead of equal justice?
Why won't you publicly release the hours and hours of video surveillance taken on January 6th?
What are you afraid of?
What are you hiding?
The heart of this country is equal treatment, especially by the courts.
The public demands and the defendants deserve equal justice under the law.
What is being described by these political prisoners is nothing short of human rights violation.
The silence from the ACLU and Amnesty International is deafening.
I gave this speech on America's under-incarceration problem.
I gave that speech at Colorado Christian a couple days ago.
You can watch it on YouTube.
It was with YAF, Young America's Foundation, at the Centennial Institute there.
And one of the arguments...
For letting criminals out of jail that the libs and some of the squishes put forward is that America has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
We have the highest prison population in the world.
So therefore, we obviously have to let some of them out of prison.
The question that matters is not how many people are in prison.
The question that matters is what kind of people are in prison.
Are violent thugs in prison?
Good, they should be.
That's where violent thugs are supposed to go.
Or is it political dissidents who are in prison, like we see in China?
Well, that would be bad.
That's not exactly the kind of thing that you want.
America generally does not imprison political dissidents.
The nearest thing we have to political dissidents in prison right now are the January 6th people.
And it's not because they didn't do anything wrong.
I'm sure a great many of them did do things that were wrong.
It's not that they're totally innocent and they're in there merely for their political views.
It's that they're in the can on trumped up charges.
So BLMers go in and loot stores and burn buildings and burn whole cities down.
And they get off the hook.
In Manhattan and in the Bronx, they are released from prison.
Or their charges are just missed or they're greatly reduced.
And that's happened for most of them who were arrested last year.
Meanwhile, the January 6thers who go in and they, I don't know, they've got the horn hat on and they dance around and maybe they take some pictures.
Those people, maybe they break a window, I don't know.
Those people are thrown into solitary confinement indefinitely.
One of them was killed.
One of them was shot by a cop.
The people on January 6th did not kill anybody.
The only people who were killed in that political violence was Ashley Babbitt, who was one of the January 6thers.
Same cannot be said of BLM, who killed dozens of people.
So it's the nearest thing we have to imprisoning political dissidents here.
And the House Freedom Caucus, those eccentric showboating people, they're the ones calling it out.
And it requires a lot of political guts to do that because the media have crafted this narrative.
But it's very important to call it like it is right now.
If you're stuck in the echo chamber of the mainstream...
If you're stuck, then it's a little difficult to perceive that.
But if the right builds its own media apparatus, if the right actually goes in and highlights important stories and tells the stories that the left doesn't want them to, then one can notice it a little more clearly.
Speaking of crime, you know that there is this crime wave going on all over the West Coast.
There is an organized crime wave where looters are going in and just robbing stores, CVS, Walgreens, that kind of thing.
AOC was just asked about this.
Said, well, you know, you're all about abolishing the police and abolishing prisons and letting all the criminals out.
But there's all this huge crime spree going on.
Isn't that a problem?
And so AOC's response is not to...
Change her position.
Her response is not to say, oh yeah, you're right, okay, I guess my ideas didn't work, maybe we shouldn't close all the prisons.
Maybe we shouldn't abolish the police departments.
Her response is also not to double down and say, well, it's perfectly fine, it doesn't matter, sure there's a crime wave, but for my vision of justice, that's what we need to have.
Her response is just to deny reality.
Her response is to just put her head in the sand, put her fingers in her ears, and say, la, la, la, la, la, I can't hear you, I can't hear you.
She said, quote, I don't do a good AOC impression.
A lot of these allegations of organized retail theft are not actually panning out.
I believe it's a Walgreens in California cited it, but the data didn't back it up.
That's what she's saying.
It's just not real.
It's just fake.
It's being made up by the right-wing media echo chamber.
Is it?
Is it?
So, the Associated Press report, the Associated Press, you know that infamously right-wing news outlet?
The Associated?
No.
Pretty left-wing, actually.
Says, quote, national retail groups last month estimated the annual losses to be in the tens of billions of dollars from this stuff.
Just last Friday, authorities in the San Francisco Bay Area conducted what they described as one of the largest retail theft busts in California history.
They uncovered upwards of $8 million worth of merchandise from CVS, Target, and Walgreens.
That's just in the San Francisco Bay Area.
So you might say, yeah, sure, retailers are losing billions, but, you know, it's kind of a weird year, and maybe it's because people aren't shopping as much.
Well, how do you explain the San Francisco...
The San Francisco cops finding $8 million worth of stolen merchandise.
That's not just a guy here or there going in to get some bread for his family.
That is an organized crime spree that is being done by gangs of criminals and that is being encouraged by left-wing politicians.
The lib way of solving problems is to deny that the problems exist at all.
I don't think I'm being hyperbolic here.
Their way of solving problems is to deny that they exist at all and hope they go away or hope that people don't notice.
This is true of abortion.
The way to solve the problem of abortion, to deal with the problem, is to pretend that a baby isn't a baby.
We can see the baby on the sonogram.
We know it's a baby.
We know philosophically it's a baby.
We know scientifically it's a baby.
But what they say is, nope, never mind.
I have this ideological vision, and so I'm going to have to deny the reality of that baby and just not acknowledge it.
La, la, la, I can't hear you.
On crime, well, this is what AOC is doing.
No, it's just not happening.
It's not real.
If you say it's real, you're a racist or whatever.
It's not happening.
La, la, la, la, la.
Education.
You've got these failing schools.
What does the left say?
Nope, no problem.
Get rid of charter schools.
Get rid of homeschooling.
Nothing that you will do to reform education is acceptable because there's no problem in the first place.
La, la, la.
Failing schools.
People's lives being ruined.
Transgenderism.
A man pretends to be a woman, thinks he's a woman, wants to be a woman.
But he's a man.
Well, no he's not.
La, la, la, la, la.
We're going to deny that reality.
It doesn't work.
Nobody benefits from denying reality.
But so much of the left political program is to try to redefine reality.
That's the purpose of political correctness, is to redefine reality by redefining all of the words.
John F. Kennedy, when he says in his speech, his famous speech that was repeated by countless Democrat politicians, some people see things that are and say, why?
I dream things that never were and say, why not?
Where he's actually quoting a play by George Bernard Shaw and the line, which Kennedy didn't know, is the line is coming from the serpent in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve.
He's quoting the devil.
He's saying it as though it's inspirational.
Some people see reality and accept it, but I ignore reality and indulge in fantasy, and that's really great.
That's what he's saying.
Speaking of the Garden of Eden, this is what Whitaker Chambers said.
He said, Communism is not the newest political ideology.
It's the second oldest.
Began in the Garden of Eden when the serpent told Eve, Ye shall be as gods.
Forget reality.
You, you in your own mind, you will craft reality.
Doesn't work out very well.
Hasn't worked out for any of those people.
Going back to the Garden of Eden, actually, has not worked out very well at all.
Speaking of crime and of denying reality...
I've got to get to the Jussie Smollett trial.
I've got to get to it.
It's much more important than the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, if you ask me, because we actually are learning new things.
So Jussie Smollett, now he's changing his story a million times, and apparently had a little bit of a weird relationship with those dudes that he set up to go pretend to rob him and say it's MAGA country, even though they were giant.
They pretended to be white supremacists, but they were giant Nigerian dudes.
So, now what Smollett is trying to do to get off on this trial is he's just trying to pester the prosecutor and play the race card and play the victim.
So, the prosecutor here was reading text messages from Jesse Smollett.
These are messages to and from Jesse Smollett.
And in it, Jesse Smollett uses the N-word.
You know the N-word?
The N-word, it's the only word that we're not allowed to say.
It has the sacred significance of the name of God for the ancient Israelites.
We're not allowed to ever say the N-word.
But Jesse Smollett said the N-word.
And so the prosecutor reading the text says the N-word.
And then Jesse Smollett says, hey, you can't use that word.
Stop using that word.
Stop using the word that I used.
And the prosecutor said, well, I'm not going to...
What do you want me to...
I'm reading your texts, dude.
No, say a different word.
Call it the N-word.
Don't say the N-word.
You have to call it the N-word.
You know, the N-word.
And the prosecutor says, no, I think I'm just going to read the text.
I'm not going to edit your language.
This is...
A perfect example of the logic that animates modern liberalism and leftism.
Don't do what I did!
Hey, you can't do what I did!
Kind of ties in with the Freedom Caucus stuff, because the Freedom Caucus tends to take the political fight to the left, and then people who are a little bit more moderate or a little more genteel, they say, well, we can't do that.
That's wrong.
We can't engage in some of the tactics that the left engages in.
Then we'd be just like them.
And Basically, they're saying we need to indulge in this kind of, no, don't do what I did, but it's not going to work.
We should never do things that are immoral or unjust, but as a tactical matter, we can't just let the libs get away with everything.
We can't let them get away with having their own completely different set of standards than the ones they hold us by, whether that is in the courts, whether that is in prisons, whether that is in the media.
Whether that is in politics generally.
Cannot do it.
Got to take the fight to the lives.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Joe Biden's poll numbers swirl the drain.
U.S. Surgeon General warns of a mental health crisis among young Americans.
And we talk about the true causes of our civilizational malaise.
