Today, on January 6, we commemorate a wonderful and glorious event, the Pope tells Millennials to stop treating their puppies like kids, and Elon Musk complains that there are not enough people.
Sign the petition to stop Biden’s vaccine mandate. Head to https://dailywire.com/donotcomply
DW members get special product discounts up to 20% off PLUS access to exclusive Daily Wire merch. Grab your Daily Wire merch here: https://utm.io/udZpp
My new book ’Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds,’ is now available wherever books are sold. Grab your copy today here: https://utm.io/udtMJ
Andrew Klavan's latest novel When Christmas Comes is now available on Amazon. Order in time for Christmas: https://utm.io/udW6u
Matt Walsh is now a self-acclaimed beloved children’s author. Reserve your copy of his new book here: https://utm.io/ud1Cb
Subscribe to Morning Wire, Daily Wire’s new morning news podcast, and get the facts first on the news you need to know: https://utm.io/udyIF
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today, on January 6th, we commemorate a glorious event.
We remember the wise men who traveled a great distance for their leader, the true leader of us all, in defiance of an unjust government.
The celebrations today will be wonderful, but can you imagine the blessedness of having actually been there when the event took place?
An event that changed the world infinitely for the better.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Feast of the Epiphany.
Welcome back to the show.
What a wonderful day.
Boy, do I love January 6th.
My favorite comment from Sergio Soto, who says, I'm not just celebrating January 6th once, but twice.
Celebration number one, the epiphany.
Celebration number two, my birthday.
Oh, that's wonderful.
Even more reasons to celebrate January 6th.
You know, the celebration on January 6th is when it recognizes when the Magi following the star made it to Bethlehem to behold the baby Jesus and to bring him gifts.
Of frankincense and myrrh and gold.
And when you want to acquire gold, I would strongly recommend you check out Birch Gold.
I am so excited to talk about a brand new sponsor to the show.
This is a sponsor that I have wanted on this show for years at this point.
Frankly, I kind of feel like I made it.
I'm talking about Birch Gold.
Birch Gold, a wonderful company and a really important one right now because inflation is at 40-year highs and it is here to stay.
Why?
Well, here's the government's dirty little secret.
The government wants inflation.
They want inflation because right now inflation rates are higher than the interest on treasury bonds, which means that with every day that passes, the government owes less on its mountain of debt.
Imagine if you had a negative interest rate on your mortgage.
Would you be in any hurry to pay that off?
I don't think so.
So your pain is their gain.
Protect your savings now.
Do it with gold from Birch Gold.
Wonderful hedge against inflation.
The government is sabotaging the value of the U.S. dollar.
So allow Birch Gold to help you convert an eligible IRA or 401k into an IRA backed by real gold.
That is peace of mind.
With thousands of satisfied customers, an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau, you can trust Birch Gold to protect your savings.
Text Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, to 989898 to get a free info kit on holding gold in a tax-sheltered account.
Then call Birch and protect your hard-earned savings.
Text Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, to 989898.
That's K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Text it.
Get your free info kit right now.
That was the greatest transition ever to be done in the history of this show.
Miraculous, you might call it.
And that makes perfect sense because today we celebrate this wonderful miracle.
The star that leads the Magi to Bethlehem to behold the Lord of the world.
Did anything else happen today?
Nothing of note as far as I'm concerned.
The reason I keep bringing up January 6th as being the Feast of the Epiphany is, one, because it's a genuinely wonderful holiday and we should acknowledge it.
But, two, because we need to just ignore the Libs histrionics about January 6th, the worst insurrection, the day that our sacred Capitol building was...
The day that what happened?
The day that...
Some people busted into the Capitol, that some people were just allowed in, were welcomed in through open doors.
No one died, as the newspapers told us they did.
No governments were overturned.
A guy in a horn hat danced around, and some other smiley guy took Nancy Pelosi's lectern, and now they're all rotting away in prison.
The issue here that the left understands that the right apparently has forgotten is that all politics is religious.
You might not want it to be religious.
You might want to have a firm separation of church and state.
Keep your religion out of my politics, but it's not possible.
As Cardinal Manning says, all human conflict ultimately is theological.
If we say that politics is downstream of culture, as many conservatives do, you got to remember culture is downstream of cult, of religion.
That's what's at the basis of all of our politics.
And the left understands this and uses it to their advantage.
This is how George Floyd, who was a career criminal, an unrepentant career criminal, became canonized as the greatest martyr and saint in recent memory.
This is how January 6th became a sacred feast day, a major feast day on the secular liturgical calendar.
All cultures have religious views, have religious practices, have religious feast days.
And so what the left has done is kicked out all the old, normal, good ones and replaced them with their crazy secular saints and secular feast days and secular rituals.
And this is also why the conservatives who are spending all day defending January 6th and defending the horn hat guy or whatever, they're a little bit misguided too.
It's a losing game.
However you react to January 6th and the Capitol and the insurrection, however you react to it, you are playing into the left's hands.
Whether you're defending it, whether you're bemoaning it and saying, I'm sorry, it was horrible, it was terrible.
Either way, You are granting the left's absurd premise that this relatively trivial political event, especially trivial when you consider the actual insurrection that took place for a year with BLM riots attacking federal courthouses and killing dozens of people.
When you look at this relatively trivial political event and you pretend and you accept the left-wing premise that the horn hat guy dancing in the Capitol Rotunda was some sort of world historic event, which it was not.
It's a lose-lose thing.
What I would recommend you do, as I intend to do, is just ignore the Libs' histrionics.
Don't grant the premise.
It just, in the grand scheme of American politics, the insurrection, it just wasn't that big a deal.
I know we're not allowed to say that.
But truly in the grand scheme of all the threats to our republic, of all the insurrections, of all the attacks on the Capitol, there have been many attacks on the Capitol, of all the insurrections even from the year running up to January 6th, it just wasn't that important.
Okay?
So what I would recommend you do is spend January 6th.
Praying.
It's good.
Maybe go to church.
And maybe have a nice meal with your family if you can.
Maybe fight to make the country a better place.
And don't take the bait from the libs.
A lot of people are doing that.
Donald Trump gets this.
He totally gets this.
President Trump, I didn't even know he had scheduled this.
But he had scheduled a press conference for the anniversary of January 6th.
And had I known that he had done that, I would have advised him to cancel the press conference, but didn't even need to because he already canceled it.
He sent out a memo.
You can't say he tweeted anymore because he got booted from Twitter, but he sends out these press releases, which are just tweets, and then he sends them out and then people tweet the pictures of them.
So this is what he said.
In light of the total bias and dishonesty of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Democrats, Because they're not the highest selection.
Two failed Republicans and the fake news media.
I am canceling the January 6th press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday.
And instead we'll discuss many of those important topics at my rally on Saturday, January 15th in Arizona.
I look forward to seeing our great American patriots in Arizona next weekend for a big rally to save America.
Totally the right thing to do.
Donald Trump, maybe you hate the guy, maybe you love the guy.
Donald Trump understands politics and he understands stagecraft.
And he understands when he's in a winning situation where he can get a big win, and he understands when you're in a situation and you can't get a win.
The way the libs have framed January 6th is a complete loser.
You can't win if you play into it.
And so he recognized this, and he said, okay, never mind.
Whatever.
We're going to have January 15th.
That's going to be the new big day.
And we're going to have a big rally, and we're going to talk about how great America is, and we're not going to buy into their nonsense.
And the myriad lies that they told about what actually happened at the Capitol, lies such as the rioters killing a police officer, Brian Sicknick, it was just completely made up, So yeah, we're going to ignore that.
We're just going to move on.
He had the right idea.
We should follow course.
Because Donald Trump knows a thing or two about politics.
He knows a whole lot about stagecraft and show business.
And he's right.
And he's looking pretty good right now, by the way.
I don't know if you've been paying attention to the current occupant of the Oval Office, but he's not particularly popular.
There's a new poll out from CNBC and Change Research.
This is not a right-wing poll.
This is a left-wing poll.
They surveyed voters between December 17th and December 20th.
They found that Joe Biden's disapproval numbers are now at 56%.
A clear majority of Americans disapprove of Joe Biden's presidency.
The same poll, same outlet, was done in April.
They found his disapproval was 49%.
They took the same poll in September as 54%.
Now it's gone even further up to 56%.
The trend line is not in the right direction for Biden.
Nobody believes that Joe Biden is the most popular president ever elected.
Remember, that was the claim.
The Democrats said Joe Biden got 80 million votes.
He got 80 bazillion votes, the most votes ever of any president's It's the most popularly elected president ever.
Now, of course, the Democrats changed all the rules right before the election.
So the election is not comparable to other elections.
And this is a point Glenn Beck made before the 2020 election.
Glenn Beck, who's fairly moderate, actually, in a lot of areas, and he was asked his thoughts on the 2020 election.
It's not as though he loved Donald Trump.
He opposed Trump the first time.
I think he voted for him the second time.
And Glenn said...
Then no one's going to trust the results of this election because it's not being conducted like other elections.
So you extend election day, now it's election month.
You have widespread unsolicited mail-in ballots.
You've got the disrespecting of the constitutional provisions of elections in Pennsylvania, for instance.
You've got days and weeks to count the ballots afterwards.
So people weren't going to trust it.
And that's true.
A lot of Republicans especially don't trust the results of the election with a lot of reason not to trust it.
Democrats did not trust the results of the 2016 election.
Actually, a higher percentage of Democrats did not trust the results of the 2016 election as Republicans not trusting the results of the 2020 election.
So when you want to hear about eroding faith in democracy and And a threat to our republic.
Look at the Democrats in 2016.
And they had far less reason to because it's not as though that we changed all of the election rules right before the 2016 election.
But still, there was not a lot of trust in that election either.
Democrats in particular have sown distrust in the elections going back to the 2000 election.
Terry McAuliffe, who was running for governor of Virginia, he just lost.
He refused to concede the 2000 presidential election this year, this past election year.
So...
There are a lot of questions about the elections.
One thing I can tell you, looking at these poll numbers right now, and it's not just the disapproval rating among Republicans, it's Democrats too.
If Joe Biden were somehow to be re-elected in 2024, given his situation right now, nobody would believe it.
Jill, Dr.
Jill, wouldn't even believe it.
That's how bad he's doing.
He's breaking down.
The whole administration's breaking down.
Now, when your car breaks down, what you're going to want to do is go check out Rock Auto.
The weather's getting pretty cold.
There's snow.
There's ice out there.
People are driving.
They're going to see their families for Christmas and New Year.
They're going, driving on vacation.
And sometimes that car needs a tune-up.
So when you need a part for your car or truck, where are you going to go?
Are you going to go to the brick-and-mortar auto parts store where you go in, You've got to wait to see when they're open.
You drive over there.
That's 15 minutes.
You go in.
You wait in line.
It's another five minutes.
And you get up there.
You say, hey, do you have this part?
They say, what car do you have?
You say, I don't know.
It's a 2012 Honda.
Is it the EX? You answer like 5,000 questions.
He goes in the back.
The guy doesn't even have the part.
There's just too many parts.
There's too many makes and models, of course.
Then he orders it.
You pay twice as much.
You wait two weeks.
Do you want to do that?
Or...
Do you just go to rockauto.com?
That's the answer.
Family, business, serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
rockauto.com.
They've got all the parts you need for your car or truck.
They've got the easiest-to-navigate website ever.
Head on over to rockauto.com right now.
See all those parts available for your car or truck.
And then write Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S in the How Did You Hear About Us box so they know that we sent you.
Speaking of undemocratically elected leaders, the Pope is in hot water.
Pope Francis.
Pope Francis often gets into hot water for being reported as having made leftist comments.
According to the reports, his comments can be very unorthodox, heretical, you might even say.
Leftist, Marxist, some people have said.
But this time the Pope is in trouble for making comments that are too conservative.
This time the Pope is in trouble with the liberals.
Why?
Because he said that it is selfish that For couples to have pets instead of children.
This is a favorite topic of mine.
Because I love children.
And I hate pets.
I'm a people person.
I don't like them.
And a lot of my friends choose to have pets instead of children.
Here's what the Pope said.
I'm not going to put on my Papa Francesco voice, but you can imagine what it sounded like.
This is what he said in English.
We see that people do not want to have children, or just one and no more.
And many, many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they just have one.
But they have two dogs, two cats.
Yes, dogs and cats take the place of children.
Yes, it's funny, I understand, but it is the reality, and this denial of fatherhood and motherhood diminishes us.
It takes away our humanity.
And in this way, civilization becomes aged and without humanity because it loses the richness of fatherhood and motherhood and our homeland suffers as it does not have children.
100% correct.
Not only correct, but urgent.
And everyone needs to hear this and everyone needs to deal with this.
And you might not like it, but it's the truth.
Here are some ways that the Pope is being misconstrued.
Are you...
Are you telling me, Holy Father, that I'm selfish because I can't have children?
The Pope never said that.
A lot of people can't have children.
It's very sad.
I myself, sweet little Elise, and I struggled.
We thought we were going to pop out a kid right away when we got married, and it actually took a little while.
We thought for a while we might not be able to have children.
That was a cause of immense pain, as it is for people who suffer with infertility.
Not everyone is able to have kids.
It's very different not to be able to have children and to just choose not to because you want to pursue your own interests.
Are you telling me, Holy Father, that I'm selfish because I love my dog?
No, the Pope didn't say that.
It's fine to love your dog, but it's different to love your dog than it is to treat your dog as a child or have your dog be the replacement for a child because you don't want to make the commitment to having a child.
Are you telling me, Holy Father, Pope Francis, that it is selfish of me to just want to pursue my career and my interests and my desires and my pleasures and prioritize that over having a family?
Yes, that is.
That's selfish.
It's super-duper selfish.
Sorry.
Are you telling me, Holy Father?
This is the other one I've heard.
Holy Father, Pope Francis, you are celibate.
You're not married.
You don't have any kids.
How dare you?
Isn't this a pot calling the kettle black?
No.
Pope Francis didn't say that everyone needs to get married.
Pope Francis didn't say that some people can't be celibate or have consecrated religious life or consecrated...
No, he didn't say that.
He said couples, though.
And they should.
It's true.
Married couples have an obligation to be open to life.
It's just a fact.
And if we don't do that, our civilization is going to die.
And we're also going to be unhappy and we're not going to be giving fully of ourselves to our beloved and our spouse.
But also our whole civilization is going to die.
Because the Pope isn't the only one saying this.
Elon Musk made this point.
Another very important figure from very different sectors of society.
Elon Musk just came out.
He said, I can't emphasize this enough.
There are not enough people.
Musk said this to the Wall Street Journal.
And I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birth rate.
And yet, so many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control.
It's completely the opposite.
Please look at the numbers.
If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble.
Mark my words.
He's absolutely right.
We've had a dying population in this country for decades, and it's recently gotten a lot worse, and that's true throughout the civilized West.
It's just collapsing.
And the way that the ruling class tries to prop up the civilization is just by importing a ton of foreigners, and that's causing a lot of problems too.
Huge problems of assimilation.
This is the largest movement of people in the history of the world.
And you're seeing the problems with that all around you.
But you can't do that forever.
You can't just replace all the people because they're dying and getting old and not having any children, and then expect to have the exact same civilization.
It's not going to work.
You need to have kids.
This is a major, major issue.
And what you will hear from people, and this is a perfectly legit concern, Is, well, the not legit concern you're going to hear is, how dare you?
I want to go work at the widget factory and you can't tell me what to do.
And who are you to say this?
And maybe it's not right for me.
No, who am I to say this?
I don't know.
I'm a person with semi-functioning faculties of reason and a moral conscience and a historical sense.
And we actually can make public statements about the way people behave.
That's what society is.
That's what politics is.
So, yes, we can say it's better to do this than to do that.
People should do this.
They shouldn't do that.
We should encourage good things.
We should encourage bad things.
But the legit concern is kids are expensive.
Kids are expensive.
Wages have completely stagnated.
In some cases, they've declined.
The working class has gotten absolutely crushed relative to the ruling class.
Everyone is swimming in mountains of debt.
The sexual revolution has destroyed the relationship between men and women.
There are now very few inducements to marriage.
The Supreme Court completely redefined marriage.
That didn't help things either.
And so it's difficult.
It's difficult and it's expensive and we don't have the resources to do it.
Yes, that's true.
It is true.
If we want to have a society that produces more kids, then we're going to have to have less stuff.
You're not going to be able to buy as much nice stuff or go to as many nice restaurants or get as much delicious avocado toast or drink these expensive...
Fruity seltzer drinks that I like so much that I usually just pilfer from the Daily Wire.
You're not going to be able to have as many luxuries if you have kids.
You're right.
But that's part of what Pope Francis is saying.
He's saying it is selfish to prioritize your own immediate pleasures over having a child.
So yeah, you will have to deal with that.
And there is a criticism of conservatives.
The criticism is this.
You conservatives, you're talking all about family values and having lots of kids and rebuilding the civilization.
But you don't want to support anybody with any money.
You're stingy.
You're greedy conservatives.
Now this is mostly a canard.
Conservatives, for instance, give more money to charity than liberals do, and it's not even close.
The New York Times has even admitted this.
But there has been a sense on the right that we don't support social programs, we don't support welfare, certainly not at the federal level.
There's been a little bit of this Ayn Rand, fend for yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps ideology on the right that is shallow and doesn't work in every situation.
So let me correct the record because I think that there is a caricature of what it meant to be a Republican in the 80s and I don't think that's really what it means to be a Republican now.
I would fully support a government program with some stipulations.
You'd obviously need safeguards.
I would 100% support a government program that pays married couples to have kids.
100%.
Of course I would.
Conservatives have tried to split the baby on this issue in recent years.
And so they'll say, well, we'll give you a child tax credit.
Well, we'll allow you to deduct certain things from your taxes.
And we'll allow you to file in this way.
And we'll allow you to save money in this way for college.
And it hasn't worked.
So it's easy for conservatives to get discouraged and say, well, then nothing's going to work if we use our politics.
But It might just be that we haven't done enough or we haven't done the right things.
Because Hungary, for instance, and to a lesser degree Russia, have taken more drastic measures to reverse the declining population.
And it's worked.
In Hungary, it totally worked.
You finally saw an uptick again in the population.
And Russia, if you believe Russia's numbers, seems to have seen the same sort of thing.
You need safeguards, but you can't have a civilization if you don't have any people.
You can't have a country without people.
And you can't endlessly prop up a country by ignoring national borders, ignoring immigration law, completely upending your culture.
That's not going to work either.
Encouraging sterility and promiscuity.
You're not going to have a civilization that way.
At a certain point, you've got to defend those bedrock institutions.
The foundational institution is marriage, is the family, and you've got to have people.
That's your main resource as a country.
And I think conservatives are getting woke, not in the leftist sense of woke, but they're just kind of waking up to the problems of some failed policy.
And they're recognizing if we don't have people, we're not going to have a country.
And they're moving in that direction.
You hear Blake Masters talking about this kind of stuff.
He's running for Senate in Arizona.
You hear J.D. Vance.
He's running for Senate in Ohio.
You hear a lot of the national conservatives talking about this.
A lot of the integralist conservatives talking about this.
You hear some humble podcasters such as myself talking about this.
This is...
All right.
And when Elon Musk and Pope Francis and J.D. Vance all agree on a policy, let's do it.
Let's go for it.
Okay.
Now, not all ways of promoting childbirth are okay.
All right.
We do need a little bit of a warning here.
There is a really sad story out of the Wall Street Journal about a grieving family who had a kid who had all sorts of problems and addiction.
And turns out that the addiction and the mental illness ran in the family and they didn't know that.
Not because the baby was adopted.
They didn't know that because the baby was conceived using some other random dude's sperm that they plucked out of a catalog.
And they didn't do their due diligence and they didn't know the background of this guy whose sperm they purchased.
And as a result, one, the child was conceived without knowing his natural father.
And two, the child had to deal with all of these problems.
Ultimately, the child dies.
Really, really sad story, but a lesson to all of us as we consider these problems of how do we rebuild the family, how do we rebuild the country?
Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal.
A grieving family wonders, what if they had known the medical history of sperm donor 1558?
Stephen Gunner battled mental illness before a fatal overdose.
Turns out his biological father had his own psychiatric problems.
Really sad stuff.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the road to hell is paved with good desires.
But you can't let a good end allow you to justify for yourself immoral means.
We can't do this stuff.
Okay?
It's not good.
And the pro-life movement focuses so much, as it should, on abortion that it sometimes ignores some other issues.
But not all ways of creating a baby are moral or okay.
And we're going to need to talk seriously about that, especially as we're dealing with this problem of a dying population.
A child has a right to his natural mother and father who are bound together through marriage.
And we're changing all of that now.
And we're having people conceive babies because they'll go into a catalog and pick a mother.
Or pick a father.
And they'll pick a mother and they'll say, okay, I want her eggs.
Yeah, she went to Harvard.
And she's pretty hot.
Okay, we're going to get her eggs.
And then we're going to find some poor young girl who wants some money.
And we're going to rent her womb.
And then we're going to use my sperm and this woman's egg that I just bought for a lot of money.
By the way, it's a huge business.
And we're going to pay all the big medical companies.
And we're going to do that.
And then we're going to rent this poor woman's uterus.
And then maybe it'll work.
Maybe it won't.
And then we're going to have a child.
And intentionally deprive that child of this natural mother.
That's not okay.
That's not moral.
That's not right.
The desire for a baby is good.
It's a wonderful thing to be encouraged.
But a baby is not just property.
You don't have a right to a baby.
A baby is a gift from God.
You've got to be grateful for it.
But you don't want to reduce the baby to the level of property.
And you don't want to make it all about property.
Tomorrow is going to be a huge day for the Daily Wire and the lawsuit against the Biden administration over this disgusting vaccine mandate that they are pushing.
The Supreme Court is going to hear oral arguments on the legality and constitutionality of Biden's medical tyranny.
We already have over a million signatures on our Do Not Comply petition.
We really appreciate this.
This gives us a lot of support going into this legal battle.
If you haven't realized in recent years that the court looks at the polls, that the court looks at public opinion, then you have not been paying attention.
They do.
We need your support still.
Head on over, sign the petition, send it to your friends and family, dailywire.com slash do not comply and say that you do not stand for this medical tyranny that the Biden administration is pushing on us.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Speaking of future generations, in the past 24 hours, I have in the past 24 hours, I have become an NFT mogul.
Yes, I'm a crypto king.
I'm a tech wizard.
I don't know what any of these things are, really, but I heard about the non-fungible tokens.
That's an NFT. And that is, as far as I can tell, a digital representation of An image or a tweet or some kind of digital property.
So I thought it would be funny to dip my toes in the waters of NFTs and crypto.
I minted an NFT, this digital token, of my tweet announcing five years ago my blank book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
So it's kind of hard to follow.
I created a digital kind of nothing that Of a tweet, which is kind of nothing, about a book which doesn't have any words in it.
It's nothing.
And I auctioned this off.
And a really discerning art collector paid $1,492 for it.
The $1,492 you might recall is the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
It's great.
Alisa, sweet little Alisa, did not want me to take this money.
She thought it was wrong because she bizarrely thought that my tweet wasn't worth anything.
It's insane.
I, instead of wanting to donate it to charity, I wanted to transfer it to my local cigar shop.
We're still debating this.
You feel free to weigh in in the comments section.
But it did raise this question to me.
Are the NFTs worthless?
Are I don't think they're necessarily worthless.
We're all joking about it now.
Oh, it's nothing.
I can't even hold it.
What does it mean?
Well, first of all, if you've got a painting, an original painting, and you've got an embellished print, you know, a print where it's got kind of the contours of the paint on it, if you look at the original and the print, very often you can't tell the difference.
But there is a difference.
One is worth $100, one is worth $10,000.
What Why?
Well, because one is the original, and even though they look identical, one is the original.
Okay, I kind of get that analogy.
Furthermore, I think NFTs might not be a total scam because they potentially could have value in the metaverse.
Walmart just came out with this It's a dystopian, terrifying clip of how they expect you to go shopping in the metaverse.
The metaverse is when you put on your virtual reality goggles and you sit in your little pod and we're all always quarantining for the rest of our lives and you go and you go through a virtual aisle and you pick up the virtual bottle of wine and the virtual strawberries and then they just ship it to you and you just get it at your door and that's that.
And there are three companies that you shop at and you get everything.
So in that digital world, if, as Mark Zuckerberg thinks, we're going to be socializing in the digital world.
We started it during COVID, during what some have called a great reset, where you would get drinks online on Zoom.
You'd catch up with your family on Zoom.
Well, what if you did this in this fully immersive experience?
If that happens, then having a digital property like a non-fungible token would be much more valuable than a physical property.
If I have a physical wristwatch, if I have a physical handbag, if I have a physical leftist-tears tumbler, that ain't worth jack in the metaverse.
But if I have the NFT, then it is.
So why do I think this could happen?
Because it sounds so hellish and hideous and dystopian.
That of course we're going to do it, right?
Of course our ruins of a civilization that we're living in is headed in that direction.
And so I do think there is a slight chance.
I hope we can stave off that virtual reality.
But just think about how much closer the ruling class has pushed us toward living in a virtual world.
Even the push for transgenderism.
Which my friend James Poulos at the Claremont Institute observes is probably just dipping your toes in the waters of transhumanism.
This idea that our bodies don't matter.
I'm a man, but I feel like a woman, so I'm just going to say that I'm a woman now.
The physical world doesn't matter.
Well, if you're in the metaverse, you can look like Marilyn Monroe.
You can look like Audrey Hepburn, even if you're some big, fat, hairy dude.
That would be an ideological inducement down that step.
This is clearly where the liberal establishment, the ruling class, is trying to take us.
Do we have the chutzpah?
Do we have the will to live to pull out of that?
I don't know.
We're a dying population.
Can we turn that around?
I certainly hope so.
Speaking of non-fungible things, Joe Manchin, Democrat senator from West Virginia, not funging.
He is not moving.
He is not changing his views.
He is standing firm against Joe Biden's budget.
The Build Back Better plan, which Republicans are calling Build Back Broke.
The White House, you remember, said, we're working with Joe Manchin.
And then a couple of weeks ago, he said, nope, no thanks.
He goes on the Fox News Sunday show.
He says, I'm out.
I hate this.
I'm not doing it.
This bill sucks.
Everyone despises it, and my constituents are going to throw me out.
We're not doing it.
So then the White House said, oh, well, no, anyway, never mind.
And now recently, just a few days ago, the White House said, look, regardless of what Joe Manchin said on television, we're talking, we're negotiating.
So what does Manchin do?
He comes out again, he says, no, we're not.
No, we're not.
Don't believe what they're saying.
This thing is dead.
He said, quote, I'm really not going to talk about Build Back Better because I think I've been very clear on that.
There is no negotiation going on at this time.
Whether they're talking or not, Manchin is really putting on a good show here for the conservatives and for his constituents who hate it.
Joe Manchin knows this is a loser with voters.
Joe Manchin knows that there are now 24 House Democrats who are retiring this year rather than run for re-election.
24, because they know the map looks devastating for them.
To put that in perspective, there are only 11 House Republicans who aren't running for re-election.
Every couple of years, there are a number of congressmen of both parties who say, okay, I've had enough.
I've been here for 700 years already, so I'm going to quit.
But you've got more than double the number of Democrats who are retiring as Republicans because they know this looks really bad.
There is one Republican who just retired from Congress.
That man's name?
Devin Nunes.
Sorry to see him go.
He was one of the good guys.
He really fought very hard for conservative causes.
One of Mr.
Nunes' colleagues just read his resignation letter into the record.
I write to inform you that I have notified California Governor Gavin Newsom of my resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives, effective today at 11.59 p.m.
It has been the honor of my life to represent the people of California's San Joaquin Valley for the last 19 years.
Please let me know how I can be of help during this transition.
Signed sincerely, Devin Nunez, Member of Congress.
So he resigns.
He's out.
Why is he out?
Because he's running a new media venture for Donald Trump.
Is he just out because he wants to make some more money?
Is he just out because he really, really likes Donald Trump?
No.
He's been in Congress a long time, but I think the reason that Congressman Nunes, who is one of the good guys, who is a really hard worker, really important in exposing the corruption behind the Russiagate investigation and Effectively, the DNC slash deep state coup to undermine the Trump administration, both before and after it got elected.
I think Nunes realizes that he just can't do very much in Congress.
He can just do more outside of Congress.
Jim DeMint, great conservative senator, he left...
The Senate to go run the Heritage Foundation.
Why?
Because he felt that he could do much more outside of the Senate than he could do in the Senate.
And I think that's probably true.
And that hasn't always been the case.
The way we were told that our government works is that there's the White House, there's the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.
And the bills and the spending and the laws, they start in the legislature, and I'm a bill up on Capitol Hill, and I'm standing here on whatever.
And then the bills are debated, and then they get passed, and then they go to the White House, and they're either approved or vetoed.
And then if there's some question about their constitutionality, they go to the judiciary.
And that's just not really how it works.
The members of Congress do not pass the laws.
Bureaucrats working in the executive agencies, for all intents and purposes, write all of our laws.
And Congress decides to spend some money sometimes, or not spend some money, or maybe they'll name a post office, or maybe they'll grill, senators will grill some nominees for various positions, but they don't have as much power as they used to have.
They mostly just go on TV and talk.
They mostly just do this.
They're like podcast hosts with much smaller audiences a lot of the time.
And so I think what Nunes realized is, okay, well, if I'm effectively just a podcast host, especially when the Republicans are out of power, especially when I'm in the minority party, then I've really got nothing to do.
Okay, I'm just going to go do this because that's where the power is.
And I think conservatives need to recognize that There's a big difference between what the Constitution says, the capital C Constitution, and the lowercase c Constitution of how our countries actually run.
And we need to focus our efforts on the latter, on where the real power is.
This was one of the flaws with, for instance, the Tea Party movement, and with a lot of conservative activism in the last few decades, is we'll go on and on and we'll say, but the Constitution!
But this is what it says in the Constitution!
And no one cares.
Nobody cares at all.
And so we can yell and scream until we're blue in the face, and we can be totally right by the letter of the Constitution, but it won't matter because the left controls the actual institutions of power.
And the institutions that conservatives used to control, The military, at least, we had some control over.
We had some control still in the government, some control in corporate America, and we had the family.
Remember that?
That was the main institution that we had, and that was the silent majority and the great way to resist political activism from the higher levels.
Well, those have all been rotted out.
So I think we need to focus in more on the real power centers.
And so I salute Congressman Nunes.
I think he made a good choice.
Speaking of what ex-politicians are up to, less savory politicians, Andrew Cuomo is getting off the hook.
Andrew Cuomo was in legal trouble, not because he sent a bunch of senior citizens to go to nursing homes to die during COVID, but because he allegedly winked at his secretary or something.
He got in trouble for all sorts of sexual harassment issues.
These are things that I thought were trumped up from the very beginning.
And I know that a lot of conservatives glommed on to these and they said, He's a pervert.
He's a sicko.
He's a sexist.
I thought, I don't know that I totally buy this.
I think these sexual issues are coming up at a very politically convenient time.
We haven't heard them before.
They're only coming up now when he's weak because of the COVID scandal.
And it would seem that the Albany district attorney agrees.
The Albany DA, David Sores, is expected to drop criminal charges of forcible touching against Andrew Cuomo.
Days before he's arraigned.
This is just bare-knuckle politics, okay?
This is just the usual...
I'm so skeptical of basically any sex scandal, even of degenerates like Bill Clinton or people that we know, even Anthony Weiner.
That guy, obviously, is guilty as sin of weird, creepy sex stuff.
But even when the first sex scandal broke, I thought, well, maybe.
Because they're just such commonplace, and they're so easy, and they usually go away when people take their...
The accused's political power away.
So they're usually just kind of convenient.
Andrew Cuomo lost power not because he allegedly touched his secretary, but because of the COVID scandals.
And because he was a huge liability for the Democrat Party and for their pretense of leadership under COVID. And so he got weakened and so there were a bunch of trumped up sex charges that they were never really going to take to court.
But he's out of power.
Period.
Period.
When are we going to see that kind of accountability from the higher levels of the Democratic Party?
I'm not so sure.
Jen Psaki.
Jen Psaki.
The poor beleaguered press secretary for Joe Biden.
Was asked about the president's COVID strategy.
And you would imagine at this point, with such a high disapproval rating, including on COVID, the press might ask Jen Psaki, hey, is Joe Biden going to reverse course, go a little perhaps back off of the mandates, perhaps back off of some of these lockdowns that are not very effective?
Is he going to do that?
And instead, what does the press ask Jen Psaki?
We say, hey, Jim, when is the president going to get even tougher on COVID? When is the president going to get even meaner and crueler and more disparaging of the American people?
When is the president going to scold his constituents more?
Really bad leadership on COVID from the White House and from, more importantly, our media.
Some flack in the White House press corps asks Jen Psaki, hey Jen, the leader of France just said that he was going to, quote, piss off his unvaccinated constituents.
So when is Joe Biden going to do the same thing?
French President Emmanuel Macron said this week that he plans to hassle the unvaccinated to try to get them to get the shot.
Since there are millions of Americans who have not been persuaded by the various government campaigns to get vaccinated, why hasn't the President focused more on kind of scolding the unvaccinated to try to tell them, hey, this is not working for society and we keep getting these shutdowns?
Ms.
Well, I would say that If you look just to a little over a year ago, last December, only about a third of the American people were willing to get a shot.
And today, over 85% of American adults have at least one shot.
And more than 70% are fully vaccinated.
So our objective has been to continue to convey to the American people the fact that getting vaccinated will help protect them from hospitalization, from death.
It will help protect their loved ones.
It will help protect their neighbors and their community.
And we've had a great deal of success in that.
And obviously the French will make their own decisions about the most effective way to communicate with their public.
I actually like that little barb at the end there.
Look, the French, maybe that's just the way the French talk.
Yes, we hate you, you disgusting peasants.
Yes, that'll show you.
But what's shocking here is not Psaki's answer or Joe Biden's continued failed policy on COVID. It's the reporter.
It's the press.
These people truly are the enemy of the people.
They are.
When Donald Trump used that phrase, the enemy of the people, even I am fairly bloodthirsty.
I recoiled a little.
I thought, that's a little harsh.
Donald, come on, don't.
They are.
They're the enemy of the people.
They hate the people.
They hate you.
They hate that you have any power.
They themselves are not speaking truth to power, other than the meager power that you might still have left.
They are not.
They are petitioning the powerful, the ruling class, To take even what little joys and powers and way of life that you have left, to take that away from you.
They are little tattletales in elementary school.
They are hall monitors.
They're saying, Jen, Jen, you're not, they're still, they're not doing what I want them to do.
Can you be meaner to them, Jen?
Can Joe Biden do that?
Disgusting.
Disgusting.
These people.
Something has gone seriously wrong with the relationship of the press to the government and to the people.
This is why no one listens to them anymore.
This is why no one has any respect for the corporate journalists, nor should they.
They do not deserve one iota of respect.
By the way, though, Biden is following that suggestion.
He is scolding the American people.
He just came out and whined and complained and yelled and said, there's no excuse not to get a Fauci ouchie.
You know, we've reduced the number of American adults...
Without any shots, from 90 million to about 35 million in the past six months.
But there's still 35 million people not vaccinated.
And let me be absolutely clear.
We have in hand all the vaccines we need to get every American fully vaccinated, including the booster shot.
So there's no excuse, no excuse for anyone being unvaccinated.
This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
So we've got to make more progress.
No, it isn't.
It isn't.
It isn't an epidemic of the unvaccinated.
Even the CDC are admitting this.
Even the FDA. Even Fauci.
You know this yourself because you know we all know people who have the vaccines, who have the booster shots, who have all of these things, and they've gotten COVID. Now, you might say, well, they didn't go to the hospital.
They didn't die.
Their symptoms were reduced.
Maybe, yeah, okay, fine, whatever.
But they still got it.
They're still spreading it, at least to some degree.
We are all in agreement on that.
Here, you know, because I don't want big tech to censor me.
Big public health genius experts, take it away.
Please explain to me how Joe Biden's wrong.
What they can't do anymore is prevent transmission.
You know, we didn't have vaccines that block transmission.
We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmission.
We need a new way of doing the vaccine.
The level of virus in the nasopharynx of a person who's vaccinated and infected is the same level as the level of virus in the nasopharynx of an unvaccinated person.
Reports from our international colleagues, including Israel, Suggest increased risk of severe disease amongst those vaccinated early.
And if you look at Israel, which has always been a month to a month and a half ahead of us, they are seeing a waning of immunity, not only against infection, but against hospitalizations and to some extent death.
A booster might actually be an essential part of the primary regimen that people should have.
You get it.
You get the idea.
It's not a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
And when Joe Biden says there's no excuse not to get it, there are plenty of excuses.
One, there are side effects and people have died and faced serious conditions like blood clots, like inflammation of the heart, like nerve damage.
And there are religious questions and moral questions because all of the vaccines were developed with and some were produced with the stem cells of aborted babies.
So there are plenty of reasons not to get the vaccine, okay?
And What we're seeing here is, frankly, it's the same issue as we see with January 6th.
The vaccine should not be that big of a deal because the virus, relative to other pandemics in history, is really not that big of a deal.
The lockdowns are a huge deal.
The political campaign to completely upend our society, that's a big deal.
But the virus itself, relative to other epidemics, is not as big a deal.
Okay?
And when we focus on it all the time, and we kind of have to these days because of the way that this virus has been used as an excuse to completely upend our political order.
But when we make everything about the virus, when we make everything about you have to get the vaccine or you should never ever get the vaccine.
Or when you're buying into their premise that it's all about the science and it's all about this one particular illness and it's all about the whims and decrees of Dr. Fink.
Fauci.
What we need to do here is not accept the rigged game that the left is giving us, whether we're talking about the public health establishment, whether we're talking about the riot at the Capitol, or whether we're talking about our democracy or anything else.
We need to focus on things that matter as best we can.
We need to not play their game.
We need to not give in to their premises.
We need to live our lives.
We need to ignore their stupid rules.
We need to go meet our friends, go to Christmas, do our jobs, stop wearing all of the nonsense and jumping up on a pogo stick on one leg, which is going to be the next public health measure that they're going to tell us to do.
We need to stop talking about the crisis Terrible, most awful, worst day ever, January 6th.
And we need to go celebrate.
And I recommend we start celebrating on the Feast of the Epiphany.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky.
Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.
Associate producer, Justine Turley.
Audio mixer, Mike Coromina.
And hair and makeup by Cherokee Heart.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, throwback edition.
The hottest new trend on social media right now is multiple personality disorder.
Lots of people, especially kids, are pretending that they suffer from this debilitating mental illness.
How did this trend come about and why?
We'll talk about that today.
Also...
Aaron Rodgers has clearly earned the MVP title this year in the NFL. But some sports writers say that he shouldn't be eligible because he's not vaccinated.
Plus, Pope Francis condemns couples who have pets instead of kids, proving, again, that even a broken pope is right every once in a while.
And women at the University of Pennsylvania consider boycotting in protest of the dude who was allowed to play on the swim team.
They consider it.
They consider boycotting.
Just consider it.
Finally, in our daily cancellation, I will once and for all and finally cancel superhero movies.
