The governor of NY admits they’re exaggerating COVID hospitalizations by as much as 50%, one of the inventors of mRNA vaccines says Dr. Fauci has “no integrity” and “lies all the time,” and the Left attacks Ashli Babbitt ahead of their January 6 festivities.
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The state of New York is exaggerating COVID hospitalizations by as much as 50%.
Now, before you censor me, I know you in big tech are itching to censor me for saying that.
I promise you, This is not merely my opinion, okay?
Not just little old me.
This is the opinion of the liberal Democrat governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, who on Monday admitted that she has seen firsthand how the numbers are being significantly overcounted.
Here's what she said.
Someone's in a car accident.
They go to the emergency room.
They test positive for COVID while they're there.
They're not there being treated for COVID. Now, someone's condition can worsen while they're in the hospital.
I'm not saying that won't happen, but I've just been doing a random call around to some of the hospital leaders that I touch base with, and I'm seeing numbers from 20% to sometimes 50%.
That's the governor of New York talking to a New York news outlet.
So the Democrat governor of New York is saying the sort of thing that we have been saying for two years now.
The only difference is that when we said it, we were called conspiracy theorists and threats to the public health and murderers.
When she says it, it's treated as scientific gospel truth.
So, instead of playing catch-up like conservatives always do, the logical question to ask right now is this.
What are they lying to us about today?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from TheFrogPrince89 who says, We need to start using the term fake science like Trump used fake news whenever the left changes the science like this year's fashion trend.
That's a great point.
Sometimes we conservatives, we overthink things.
We think, oh, what's going to be the most clever, subtle?
No, just use fake news.
First of all, fake news is a term that the left used to criticize conservative outlets, including and especially the Daily Wire.
And then Trump appropriated the term and used it and said, what are you talking about?
The Daily Wire and the conservative outlets, they're not fake news.
CNN is fake news.
MSNBC is fake news.
So why don't we just use that?
That's a great point.
It's so blunt.
It's so simple.
Everyone knows what we're talking about.
Dr.
Fauci, Joe Biden, the liberal establishment, they're peddling fake science.
So simple.
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We talked on this show yesterday about how the determining factor for censorship is not what is said, but who says it.
So when I say something about how hospitalizations are being exaggerated, that's fake news, that's misinformation, that's dangerous, it's a threat to the public health, we've got to censor the guy.
But then when the Democrat governor of New York says exactly the same thing, that's good, that's fine, because she's a Democrat.
She's a prominent Democrat and she's not a mean old conservative podcaster.
There's a complicating factor here.
And this complicating factor is exemplified by Dr.
Robert Malone.
Dr.
Robert Malone is one of the people who invented mRNA vaccine technology.
He was an early pioneer on that technology.
And even people who disagree with him give him a lot of credit for developing the technology that is now powering most of the vaccines we see around us for the coronavirus.
So, Robert Malone has gone out and criticized a lot of the public health response to...
Notably, he's criticized Dr.
Fauci, whom he says has no integrity and lies all the time.
Are cotton and surgical masks effective at preventing the spread of Omicron?
Yeah.
When the CDC says they are effective, in fact, they are.
Dr.
Malone, that's a lie.
Is that not true?
Yes.
I mean, it's Tony.
What can I say?
Tony has no integrity.
He lies all the time.
And me and my peers have been watching this for decades.
We just shrug our shoulders and shake our heads and say it's Fauci.
This is not just some disgruntled scientist or public health official complaining about Dr.
Fauci.
This has been said widely for decades, since the AIDS epidemic, that Dr.
Fauci is a bureaucrat.
He's not a great scientist.
He's a bureaucrat.
The good scientists stay in the lab.
The bureaucrats push paper like Dr.
Fauci, that all he really cares about is being on TV, that he jumps the gun, that he is incompetent, that he mishandles things.
I mean, this is going back decades and decades.
Dr.
Malone has been censored.
He's been kicked off of Twitter.
An episode that he did with Joe Rogan is being suppressed by big tech.
So what this shows you is it's not just about what is said, because the liberal establishments totally changed their tune on COVID, on the efficacy of vaccines, on the efficacy of masks.
It's not just about what is said, and it's not even just about who is saying it.
In the sense that it's not just about the credentials.
Often what I would hear when I would push back against big tech censorship in the last couple of years is I would hear, well, Michael, you're making a point that might turn out to be true, but you're not a credentialed scientist.
You don't have a degree from some medical school or some epidemiology program.
You don't work at the NIH. So even if you're saying the same thing as someone else, you don't have the right to say it because you don't have the credential.
But there's nobody more credentialed than Dr.
Robert Malone.
The guy's got very impressive scientific degrees.
He was a fellow at Harvard.
He helped to develop the vaccine technology that is at issue right now.
But the problem is he's on the wrong side.
So it's not just what he's saying.
It's not just who he is and his credentials.
It's a much more basic political question.
Who are his friends?
Who are his enemies?
Who are his allies?
What side is he on?
He is right now not on the side of Biden, Fauci, the NIH, the woke corporations, the liberal establishment.
He's not on their side.
So they're going to shut him up.
And it doesn't matter how many degrees he's got.
Doesn't matter how central his role was to the development of these vaccines.
He's out.
He's out.
So how do we fight back against this?
One GOP representative is showing us how to do it.
Representative Troy Neils.
Has just submitted a Joe Rogan episode with Dr.
Robert Malone into the congressional record.
So this episode, you know, these Rogan shows go on forever.
And this episode is being suppressed on Big Tech.
So this congressman comes out and he says, okay, I'm going to read it verbatim into the congressional record.
Can't censor that, Dorsey, or whoever the new guy is, Agrawal.
Can't censor that, Mark Zuckerberg.
He says, quote, today I submitted the transcript from the Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode 1757 with Dr.
Robert Malone into the congressional record.
Big Tech wants to restrict your access to this information, but they cannot censor the congressional record.
For now.
For now.
But...
What we're seeing here is really great.
It's a reassertion of political rights.
And it's kind of weird for the conservatives and for the right in America.
Because for decades we were told by the right and by conservatives, government bad, everything government does is bad, corporations good, everything corporations do is good.
But now we're in a situation where we need to turn to the government to protect us against corporations.
Because the corporations, specifically big tech, are controlling all the speech in our government, in our society.
And in self-government, speech is politics and politics is speech.
So if they control the speech, they control the whole damn political system.
So now we're in this strange position where we're saying, no, help us big government.
Hey, big government, help us against big tech and big corporations.
Republicans are partially responsible for giving corporations all this power.
We are.
We are.
And I'm not saying you and me specifically.
I'm a little young.
I wasn't around during a lot of the battles of the 80s and the 90s, but a glint in my father's eye.
Still, Republicans had this idea that as long as you deregulated everything and gave all this power to corporations, you'd be in a better position.
And that's not always true.
Circumstances and threats change in politics.
Sometimes the threat is from big government.
Sometimes the threat is from big media.
Sometimes the threat is from big bureaucracy.
Sometimes the threat is from big corporation.
Sometimes the threats change, okay?
And a conservative movement that does nothing but repeat brainlessly the same platitudes from 1982 is not going to be very effective.
You need to respond to the threats we've got now.
And right now, what that means is growing our political power, asserting our political power, using the state, Not to put too fine a point on it.
To rein in corporations that are selling our country and our rights and our way of life down the river.
Speaking of the U.S. Congress and what people are allowed to say, I just read the most disgusting article I think I have ever read in the Associated Press.
This is really, really gross.
AP News headline, Ashley Babbitt, a martyr?
Her past tells a more complex story.
Ashley Babbitt is the military veteran who was shot at the Capitol, the January 6th insurrection, the worst attack ever, worse than Pearl Harbor.
You know, you remember that?
Where conservatives were killing cops?
None of that happened.
The only person who got killed that day in political violence was this lady, Ashley Babbitt, because of some trigger-happy cop at the Capitol.
And the AP comes out and says, yeah, yeah, you think she shouldn't have been shot?
I don't know.
She wasn't a great lady.
And what's the evidence?
Oh, the evidence was she got in a fight with her husband's ex-wife.
Seriously, they say, you know, Ashley Babbitt, everyone's saying she's like a good U.S. military veteran, but actually, she got into a big fight with her husband's ex-wife.
So they dig up all this dirt about her personal life and her romantic life, and they say, yeah, because of that, she's bad.
She deserved to be shot by a cop.
That's the insinuation.
They don't say it explicitly, but that is the insinuation.
Of course, the left would never do what they are doing to Ashley Babbitt to someone like George Floyd.
George Floyd, complete degenerate career criminal, regardless of what you think about how he was killed, if it was justified, if it was murder, as the jury found, but I don't think it's very convincing.
Regardless of what you think about this, this guy was a thug career criminal who never reformed his life, who was committing a crime as he was killed, who was resisting arrest, who had a lethal dose of fentanyl in his system.
He was putting himself in a position where things were probably not going to turn out very well for him.
If not that day, then into the future.
And if you said that, if you mention that he robbed a woman at gunpoint, a woman who may have been pregnant, there was some question as to whether or not she was pregnant, but very well may have been.
If you bring that up, you're a racist, you're terrible, you're victim-blaming, you're doing all sorts of awful things.
Michael Brown.
Remember Michael Brown?
He was the young man in Ferguson, Missouri.
He robbed a store and then attacked a cop and grabbed the cop's gun and the gun discharged and then Michael Brown was killed in the altercation.
You remember that?
If you mention any of that, if you mention the fact that Michael Brown started it and was grabbing the cop's gun, you were a racist, terrible, victim-blaming...
Dante Wright.
Dante Wright.
This one's slightly more controversial.
Dante Wright, young man, career criminal, rap sheet a mile long, gets pulled over in a traffic stop.
The cop who has been found guilty of manslaughter is going to jail.
She meant to tase him.
She actually shot him with a gun, with a real gun, with bullets.
And if you mention, well, Dante Wright, you know, he was resisting arrest.
Well, he did have a rap sheet a mile long.
Well, if he had just kind of Gone quietly, if he had just done what he was supposed to do, he wouldn't be dead.
If you say that, you're a vicious, evil, terrible monster, racist, whatever.
But of course, when it's conservatives, yes, she deserves it.
She deserved the bullet, because she got in a fight with her husband's ex-wife.
She deserved it, of course.
Why are they doing this now?
Why is the Associated Press going after Ashley Babbitt almost exactly a year after she was killed?
Oh, right, that's why.
Right.
Because tomorrow, January 6th, is the most important feast day in the liberal calendar.
This is a sacred, sacred day.
It actually is a sacred day tomorrow, by the way, because tomorrow, January 6th for Christians, is the Feast of the Epiphany.
This is the Feast of Christ presented specifically to the three Magi, and this has been celebrated for a very long time.
So one way to really get the libs upset is if you say, oh God, I love January 6th.
I can't wait to celebrate January 6th.
January 6th is such a great day.
Oh yes, I'm planning my festivities.
I love it.
I think it's so wonderful.
And then you explain to them that it's the epiphany.
Maybe you're celebrating other things.
I don't know.
But certainly you could be celebrating the epiphany.
The left has a feast day tomorrow too.
And they need to rewrite the story before the feast day.
Their story of what happened on January 6th was fake.
It was made up.
The officer Brian Sicknick was attacked with a fire hydrant and he was killed.
Nope, didn't happen.
It was an armed insurrection.
Nope, it wasn't.
None of the people are being charged with insurrection.
None of them were armed.
It was, they almost took over the country.
Nope, they almost raped AOC. AOC wasn't even in the building.
They nearly, nope, they didn't.
You know what they did?
They danced around the Capitol with a horn hat on and they took Nancy Pelosi's lectern.
Not defending it.
You shouldn't take people's lecterns.
Wasn't the worst insurrection ever.
Wasn't the worst insurrection of that year, actually.
Not even close to BLM. So, they need to rewrite the history and they're going to go into overdrive to do it.
And the reason they're doing that is they recognize that sometimes you hear this phrase, politics is downstream of culture.
Okay, whatever that phrase is worth, culture is downstream of religion.
All human conflict is theological.
All of politics ultimately comes down to religion, whether you want to admit it or not.
All of our political debates raise moral questions.
Those moral questions have a religious foundation.
Our understanding of who we are as individuals, as a community, as a nation, comes down to religious questions.
What does it mean to be a man?
What are our obligations to our neighbors and ultimately to our God?
And the left knows this.
And so the left is crafting the religion, the feast days, the liturgical calendar, the secular saints.
St.
George Floyd is one of the most important saints in the American secular religion.
I don't think he's worthy of admiration.
Normal people don't think he's worthy of admiration.
But...
That is what the left requires because it serves their political agenda.
And so they're going to go into overdrive on January 6th, and there's probably very little that you can do about it.
The only way we're going to fight this is not just by saying, this is false, this is fake, this is not true.
The only way we're going to fight this overwhelming force of religion is by having our own religion.
And this is why I jokingly sort of bring up the fact that there is an actual feast tomorrow called the Feast of the Epiphany.
You should celebrate it.
You should have your own religion.
You should have, you should, if you want to fight back against the religion of leftism, it's not going to be enough to just poke holes in it.
You're going to need your own form of worship.
I would recommend the religion that formed our country and our civilization and the whole world, if you ask me, Christianity.
But I would recommend that.
Because nature abhors a vacuum.
And in the vacuum of belief that exists in America, kooky ideas are going to fill it.
What's the old line?
When you don't believe in anything, you believe in everything.
Because you just become extremely superstitious and gullible.
Speaking of crime, there's a new program in New York.
New public health program in New York.
You know, there's a big drug problem.
Leading killer of young Americans had over, what, 100,000 Americans die of drug overdoses, I think, last year.
Well, this pilot program is going to install vending machines to give druggies needles and other drugs that will make it easier for them to do drugs without killing themselves by overdosing.
They're calling these public health vending machines.
I don't think giving syringes to heroin addicts necessarily promotes the public health.
It's sort of the opposite of health, you would think.
This is being pushed by the Fund for Public Health in New York.
They opened a request for these stalls in December, and they're going to offer the overdose drugs and the syringes and quote, other harm reduction and wellness supplies.
Do you think this is compassionate?
I don't think this is compassionate.
I don't think it's compassionate to create incentives for druggies to do more drugs.
Now, their argument is, well, at least they're not using dirty syringes.
Yeah, but they're still shooting up a bunch of heroin and other drugs.
They're making the problem worse.
Yes, well, but it's Look, if they're going to do it, and look, they have the right.
They have the right to do what they want with their bodies.
And so I think that's what a lot of these people believe.
A lot of them are on the legalization train.
They think, oh, well, just legalize it, regulate it.
People have a right to do drugs.
You don't have any right to tell them they can't do drugs.
And so we'll just make it a little bit safer.
It's a safety issue.
The war on drugs failed.
You ever hear that?
I hear this all the time.
The war on drugs was a failure.
Michael, you're defending the war on drugs?
Yes.
Yeah, I'm definitely defending the war on drugs.
The war on drugs totally worked.
Okay?
From the 1970s to the 1990s, during the height of the war on drugs, use of illegal drugs in the United States dropped precipitously.
And then we stopped really enforcing the war on drugs.
And guess what happened?
The use of illegal drugs skyrocketed, and now we're in the worst opioid crisis ever, and we're in, more broadly, one of the worst drug crises ever, and we've now got 100,000 Americans a year killing themselves on this stuff.
So yeah, the war on drugs did work.
The pro-drug conservatives are shockingly gullible.
They know that the liberal media lie to them about basically everything.
They know that the activists and the bureaucrats and the politicians lie to them about almost everything.
And yet they think they're telling the truth about the war on drugs.
The war on drugs was great.
The reason that people oppose it has very little to do with the science, because according to the science, the war on drugs worked.
It has to do with this ideology, this obsession with individualism and autonomy.
This obsession, this idea, it's not a scientific idea, this is a philosophical idea, that you have the right to shoot yourself up with poison.
And you don't.
You don't.
And this crazy philosophical idea that it makes you more free to be able to shoot up yourself with poison.
It doesn't make you free.
It makes you a slave.
Drug addicts are not free.
They're the least free people in the world.
They are slaves to their most base passions and desires.
And if you could talk to any of them when they're in their right mind, 100 out of 100 of them will tell you they don't want to do drugs because it makes them miserable.
Pretty dubious science there in New York.
Speaking of New York and dubious science, there's a great piece in the New York Times.
I know, I know.
Never say I'm not fair.
I know, I know.
A chilly day in hell to say there's a great piece in the New York Times.
It's a piece about genetic testing for pregnant women.
So you know if you've ever had a kid, if you've ever gone through any kind of fertility programs, or if you just had a kid yourself, or if you just read about it, you know that when women are pregnant, there are these genetic tests.
And you get them early on and they tell you, oh yes, your kid is very likely to have Down syndrome, or your kid is very likely to have this disease, or this disorder, or this thing.
They'll give you a whole litany.
And the purpose of these tests maybe is to help you prepare for life with a child who has these challenges, but really what the tests are for is to impel you to abort your baby.
That's what it's really about.
And the doctors will tell you this.
I asked a doctor once.
I said, hold on, why do you want to do all these tests?
They say, well, just to figure out how to proceed.
What do you mean how to proceed?
The baby's going to grow a little bit more and then he's going to pop out of my wife.
What do you mean?
That's how you proceed with a pregnancy.
Well, no, but you're going to, yeah, we'll just figure out.
Just sort of, and then we'll just come to a decision.
And no, there ain't no decision, lady.
You're not killing my kid.
There is a shocking new report about the efficacy of these tests in the New York Times.
Now, as you likely have already heard, this Friday the Supreme Court will convene to hear arguments on the legality and constitutionality of the Biden administration's vaccine mandate.
That means this week is going to be huge for the lawsuit that we filed against the Biden administration.
We have over one million signatures, thanks to you.
That is on our do not comply petition.
We need that to increase before Friday.
Help us send our message loud and clear.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash do not comply right now.
We're counting on you to help us put a stop to this disgusting federal overreach.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Shocking new report out of the New York Times.
New York Times still does good reporting.
Their editorial is awful.
The way they frame the stories is terrible.
The way they select the stories is terrible.
And a lot of the articles themselves, even in the news reporting, is really bad.
But the reporting itself is often fairly high quality.
Headline.
When they warn of rare disorders, these prenatal tests are usually wrong.
So there are a number of tests that doctors will give to pregnant women to determine if their children are perfect or if they're defective.
And if they're defective, they suggest that you abort the baby.
How often do you think they're wrong?
This shocked even me.
You'd say, okay, they do these tests all the time.
Gosh, could you imagine if 5% of the time they're wrong?
5% of the time where a mother is told, oh, your baby's going to have all these terrible problems, you should just abort the baby, and then the mother aborts the baby, and then it actually turns out the baby was just fine.
And so even by the mother's own...
The priorities of wanting to have a perfect baby, not a defective baby.
Even then she would have kept the baby.
The baby was killed when she wouldn't have done that.
Oh my gosh, could you imagine 5% of the time?
What if it were 10% of the time that the tests were wrong?
That first one, The chance that the positive test results are wrong and that the results say the baby has this syndrome but actually the baby doesn't, chances that it's wrong, 81%.
1P36 dilation, 84%.
Wrong.
False positives.
Cree-Duchat syndrome, 80% wrong.
Wolf-Hirschborn, 86% wrong.
Prader-Willi and Engelman syndromes, that can cause seizures and the inability to control food consumption.
You know, really, you should probably abort your baby, right?
Hey, listen, ma'am, this is going to be really bad quality of life for you, especially, but also the baby is going to be, you should probably abort the baby.
How often is that one wrong?
93% of the time.
It is always wrong to kill your baby because you consider your baby defective.
Okay, that is always wrong.
You shouldn't do that.
We all have imperfections.
You do too.
Even you.
You, whom everyone loves so.
Everyone has imperfections.
So it's always wrong to kill your baby, even if your baby has imperfections.
But these parents who are having abortions on this information...
Usually, the vast majority of the time, are not even killing a baby that they would consider to be defective.
The lesson here, one is, don't trust the science.
These people are idiots, and they're wrong most of the time, and they're extremely dishonest.
So that's the first part.
But the second part is, justice is a better guide to action than statistics is.
I have long said on this show that I think statistics is mostly bunk and you shouldn't trust it.
Including maybe these statistics.
Everyone has their own statistics.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Sometimes conservatives push back at me.
But one of the reasons for this is statistics do not a moral argument make.
The question is, should I kill my kid or not?
Should I kill my kid or not?
And so...
Right now, if we're going to argue it from statistics, you say, well, actually, the kid has a 67% chance of having this problem, and he'll have a 72% chance of this problem, and so I think his life is only worth a 41% chance of this.
And so when you do the calculation, and you pull out your calculator, and you say, actually, his life isn't worth saving.
Kill him.
Beep.
That would be the statistics argument.
That would be the egghead argument.
How about the justice argument?
Regardless of what diseases the baby might have, or that might get later on in life.
Maybe the baby, oh, God forbid, could you imagine the baby gets childhood leukemia?
That's not going to come up on a test in the womb, but it might happen.
And that would be tragic.
That would be so horrible.
Or imagine the, I don't know, the kid, it turns out he grows up, he's 25 years old, and he gets some other disease.
Or he grows, he's 60 years old, and he gets some other disease.
Gets cancer.
Yeah, that would be sad too.
Right, that would be very sad.
Should you kill your kid because of a probability that he'll suffer?
Just don't kill innocent people.
That's a much better rule.
Because, as the New York Times is showing us, even when you think you're making these really sophisticated calculations, well, 93% chance he's got this horrible.
Often, they're just totally wrong.
Just as wrong as all the eggheads have been.
If you haven't learned that the eggheads, the scientists, can be wrong over the past two years, you haven't learned anything.
Speaking of health...
Not public health, but private health.
Lizzo.
Lizzo is a performer.
She's a singer and a dancer who makes being morbidly obese a big part of her act.
And so it's not just that she's a larger lady and deals with that and that's just part of her life.
She makes it Sort of the point of her act.
And she encourages it among other people.
And they call it body positivity.
And she says, oh yes, you know, you should get really, really fat.
That's really good.
That'll be really good for you.
So Lizzo just posted a new video to Instagram, dancing around in a bathing suit.
And you don't need to watch this if you don't want to.
You can close your eyes.
It's not, uh, and not exactly Mozart.
Not the highest sort of.
But, okay, it's her sort of jiggling around.
And she says, I gained weight.
I look T.F. good.
G-O-O-D-T. I had to look that up.
Good is a way of emphasizing the word good because it's got this emphatic point at the end.
Good.
There's no question about how good it is.
I am good.
And then T.F. refers to the F. I look at the F good.
I'm not going to be rude or say anything about how Lizzo looks.
But the philosophical point she's making is just not true.
We are told in our skeptical society that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
What you consider beautiful maybe isn't beautiful according to someone else.
It's all just taste and there's no accounting for taste.
Beauty, it's just like preferences.
This is how we ended up with all this hideous modern architecture and all this ridiculous modern art and just this very ugly society all around us.
This is why now when you look at billboards, when you're going through Times Square or anywhere else, the billboards no longer have hot models on it usually.
Often the billboards will have officiously ugly models on it.
To make a point, they're making a political point, which is that this is the new beauty.
Ugliness is the new beauty.
Just like when that comedy, quote-unquote comedy special Nanette came out with Hannah Gadsby, and it was just really sad.
And she wasn't telling jokes, she was just saying sad things.
And she said, this is the new comedy.
Yeah, the new comedy is not comedy, it's tragedy.
But that's comedy now.
And ugliness is beauty, and up is down, and right is left, and it's all opposite day.
And that is certainly what you see in political correctness.
Men are now women.
Women are now men.
And it's all just words, words, words.
And we can define things however we want because there are no objective standards.
That's what the left is saying.
And the right has kind of bought into it too.
The right has a very skeptical approach to politics now too.
And they say, well, look, who am I to tell you How to live your life.
Who am I to legislate morality?
We shouldn't teach students what to think, only how to think.
All that kind of babble is very skeptical and buys into the same idea.
But actually, there is beauty.
Go to the Sistine Chapel and then go to that modern art piece of a urinal on the floor of a museum.
Tell me.
Try to convince me that one of those things is not more beautiful than the other thing.
Try to convince me.
You can't.
This is also why the live and let live stuff, you do you, don't yuck my yum, just do whatever you want, just as long as it doesn't affect me, that was never going to work.
It was never going to work because we are not just individuals.
None of us is just an individual.
We are in community.
Human beings, by their very nature, are in community.
Jordan Peterson had a great quote the other day.
It was going around the internet.
I loved this quote.
I'm going to be paraphrasing it, but he said, Rationality is a community endeavor.
Meaning, you don't just form yourself or your thoughts or even your own reason on your own.
You do it in conversation with other people.
And you know this from your own experience.
When you're alone for a little too long and you don't talk to people and you don't interact with anyone, you go a little crazy.
We all do.
We all do.
This is why Aristotle says, man is the social animal.
Man is the political animal.
What's politics mean?
It means the stuff we all do together.
And there are going to be standards.
And the standard is either going to be Beauty or it's going to be not beauty?
And we are going to force those standards on people.
Or we're going to have standards forced on us.
Is it going to be the real goodness, truth, and beauty?
Or is it going to be some insane leftist redefinition toward ugliness and falsehood?
What do you want?
What society do you want to live in?
Speaking of standards, CNN does this thing every year where now on New Year's Eve...
Their hosts get hammered on air.
And I think it's real.
I think they actually are drinking.
It could just be a fake sort of performance, but I think they actually are.
And then they babble, and they get all goofy, and they're drunk on screen, and this is supposed to be really funny and festive.
So, Anderson Cooper leads this show, and Andy Cohen, who's a radio host, Andy Cohen comes on, and he went into an admittedly satisfying drunken rant about what a terrible mayor, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was.
Let me tell you something.
Oh please, tell us something Andy.
Watching Mayor de Blasio.
Don't go on a rant.
Do his victory lap dance.
After four years of the crappiest term as the mayor of New York, the only thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on is what a horrible mayor he has been.
So, sayonara, sucka.
Wow.
2022!
It's a new year!
Because guess what?
I have a feeling I'm going to be standing right here next year.
And you know who I'm not going to be looking at?
Dancing as the city comes apart!
Totally right.
So he's completely right about Bill de Blasio.
He's been a complete disaster.
All the Democrats I know in New York, almost every single one, Which is most of my friends in New York.
Despise the guy.
I think Andy Cohen at least may have actually been drunk there.
Because Anderson Cooper keeps trying to reel him in.
And Andy Cohen just says, no, I'm not going to do that.
And he goes on this drunken rant.
Which was enjoyable.
But generally...
I think the CNN drunk thing is just so stupid.
This has become a meme in our culture.
That now, if you want to make something really fun, if you want to make a form of entertainment really fun, just get the performers drunk, and that's going to make it better.
There's drunk history.
Oh yes, instead of just talking about history, they're going to get drunk and talk about history.
Or the drunk Shakespeare.
Yeah, instead of watching good actors perform great plays well, they're going to just get drunk.
And do it.
Isn't that going to be...
They're going to impair their skills and abilities, and that'll be better somehow.
Yes.
And you know what we're going to do?
We're going to have these people go on CNN, watching CNN, always in an unpleasant experience, but they're going to get drunk, and that'll be better.
It's just so lazy and unattractive.
It just reminds me that we're not a serious society in any way.
I am no teetotaler.
Far from it, let me tell you folks.
I love a good drink.
Good cigar with a good drink.
I love it.
I've loved it for a very long time.
But I don't like being drunk.
This is where we've lost all sense of proportion and we've lost the idea of the virtue of moderation.
Drinking is fine.
Christ's first miracle was turning water into wine for people who had been partying for quite a few days.
But you need to hold your liquor, people.
That is a good thing.
You ever read how much Winston Churchill would drink in a single day?
He'd wake up, he'd start his day with scotch and soda.
He'd move on, he'd have champagne, he'd have brandy, he'd have this.
He'd be drinking all day.
Winston Churchill was almost never seen in public drunk.
If ever.
I'm not sure that he ever was.
That's what we've lost.
It reminds me of that Chesterton line.
A lot of Chesterton in today's show.
Where Chesterton said, the modern world is not so awful because it's so bad.
It's in many ways so awful because it's so good.
We've got a lot of virtues, but they're totally out of whack.
And we don't have a sense of moderation anymore.
We don't have a sense of balance anymore.
And when you get these things out of whack, when you don't have a balanced society, things start to break down.
Speaking of standards, did you know that babies are transphobic?
I actually did know that babies are transphobic, but I have had this point reinforced by libs of TikTok, my favorite Twitter account, one of my favorite Twitter accounts, and a viral video that's going around TikTok right now.
I've talked about the transphobic baby at work before.
I went in a room with him today and I had my wig on, which I took off now because it's like nine o'clock at night.
He didn't cry and he was like babbling at me and I had a look at him and like, do you like me now because we've had a moment or do you like me now because I have long hair and look more feminine because And then he started to cry, so that was my answer.
I truly do not know if this is satire or not.
I don't know.
I could see it 100% being a joke, and I could 100% see this being real.
And I don't know, because our society is completely through the looking glass now.
When you can be kicked out of polite society for saying that dudes are not chicks and chicks are not dudes, then you really don't know.
Then your ability to discern between satire and reality is gone.
But let's just take it seriously.
This idea that babies are transphobic.
I know a lot of conservatives have pushed back.
They've said, you're calling babies transphobic?
How crazy is that?
That's insane.
That's not right.
You're saying that babies are afraid of...
Yeah, of course they are.
Because they haven't had their brains poisoned by leftism yet.
It's not irrational.
But yeah, babies are afraid of a lot of things.
My baby's afraid when I sneeze.
Okay?
Babies get scared of lots of things.
And it's because they're extremely vulnerable.
And so when...
Maybe dudes dress up like chicks in big crazy costumes and babies look at them and say, something's not right there.
Something's a little bit off.
Stranger danger, get me out of here.
That is perfectly reasonable and makes sense.
And maybe, you know, the left used to always say, we need to learn from the children, learn from the babies.
Maybe we can learn from them a little bit and say, huh, maybe the baby's right.
Maybe this isn't quite right.
Maybe something is a little off here.
Maybe we need to fix things.
I am not of the opinion that when we're young, we know everything, and then we just get corrupted by society.
I don't think that's true.
I think that very often young people have all of their untutored desires and appetites and emotions, and that's the whole point of education is to kind of tamp that down and give yourself some command over your own liberty.
But sometimes babies are more correct than us, okay?
And when our minds become so poisoned by ideology that they divorce themselves from reality, maybe we need to look to the wisdom of the babes.
Speaking of threats to our life and to our liberty...
Just in case you didn't have enough things to be afraid of and to freak out about and to go into panic mode over, the liberal establishment has given us a new one.
This sounds like a cheap B-movie.
The new thing to be afraid of is Fluorona!
Flu-rona.
It's...
Oh, you...
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the restaurant.
Oh, no.
So, what is flu-rona?
Israel records its first case of a patient with COVID and the flu at the same time.
And, you know, they're fine.
The person's fine.
But, yeah, you got the flu and coronavirus.
And it's kind of hard to tell the difference because it's all the same symptoms.
Really, it's all the same symptoms as the common cold.
Before you freak out over this, before you run for the hills, lock down, put on 15 masks, take like 27 more jabs, before you do that, recognize perhaps that if you can't tell the difference between the deadly novel pandemic that's going to wipe out humanity and the common flu or the common cold, You're probably fine.
You're probably going to be okay.
I think you're going to make it.
I hope we don't get flu-rona.
I just got the rona.
It's not pleasant.
I was down for the count for a couple days.
I was kind of tired.
But I think you're going to make it.
Speaking of death, a really shocking breaking news story that I have to get to.
I'm glad we had time to get to it today.
According to the New York Post, here's the New York Post headline.
Betty White's cause of death revealed.
Betty White, beloved screen icon, died at the age of 99 around Christmas and New Year.
And so now the investigative reporters at the New York Post have uncovered Betty White's cause of death.
Before I read the article, I admittedly am no pathologist.
I'm not an expert.
I did not go to medical school.
But I am going to wager a guess that That Betty White's cause of death has something to do with being extremely old.
Yep, that looks like what it was.
There was some question as to whether or not Betty White had just gotten a booster shot for COVID, and so that was kind of going around the internet.
And I don't know, maybe she did, maybe she didn't.
But regardless, when a 99-year-old dies...
I don't, you know, she probably didn't flip her Corvette on the PCH. It probably wasn't that she did too many lines of coke off of the amplifier at the rock concert.
You know, people die.
I had one friend die of COVID. A teacher of mine.
He died of COVID. Wynn Hanman.
Wonderful, wonderful teacher.
He was 97.
He was going to turn 98 in, I think, two weeks after he died.
Very sad.
It's always sad.
Death is a sad thing.
But it's okay.
It's okay.
People are going to die.
I suspect that a lot of the reason that people freaked out during COVID and allowed bad political actors to take so many of our rights and freedoms and way of life is because we're uncomfortable with death.
We're unfamiliar with death.
We don't know how to think about it.
We don't, we just put it out of our minds.
And then when it creeps back into our minds, we take drugs to try to numb that feeling and ignore the fact that we are going to meet our maker someday.
And maybe that means we need to think about how we're living our lives and how we're going to prepare for that.
And what we think the relationship of our soul to our body is in our body and our time in this earth to maybe a life after this earth.
And And maybe we've got to think about these ultimate questions.
Or we can just stay panicked and nervous and doing a bunch of drugs and keeping our heads in the sand.
That's where our political rulers want us to keep them anyway.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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On today's episode, prosecutors choose not to press charges against former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, prenatal genetic tests are found to be producing false results at an alarming rate, and Prince Andrew comes under fire following the Maxwell trial.
