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More than 800,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, according to the establishment media.
But we know that some people who were counted in that number did not actually die from COVID-19.
They merely died with COVID-19.
We have heard reports of people dying in car accidents or even gunshot wounds being counted as having died from COVID because they tested positive in the hospital before they succumbed to their wounds.
We've heard reports of 90-something-year-olds with stage four cancers counted as COVID deaths because they tested positive for the virus at the time of their deaths.
So to understand the true death toll of COVID, it seems reasonable to ask how many of those 800,000 actually died from COVID.
But remember, when some of us raised this question months and months and even over a year ago, we were called crazy, radical, conspiracy theorists, anti-science.
Okay, as of last week, Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, could not answer that question.
How many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID? Or how many are with COVID, but they had other comorbidities?
Do you have that breakdown?
Yes, of course.
With Omicron, we're following that very carefully.
Our death registry, of course, takes a few weeks to collect.
And of course, Omicron has just been with us for a few weeks, but those data will be forthcoming.
Nothing has been forthcoming when it comes to the CDC and coronavirus.
Do you see how she's spinning her wheels?
Humana, humana, humana.
Well, I don't know.
And, you know, we've got the Omicrons coming in and so the data, they lag.
But, yeah, that's not what we're asking you, lady.
You've given us the 800,000 number.
How many of those are actually from the coronavirus and not just 97-year-olds with stage 4 pancreatic cancer who happened to have COVID when they died?
You should know this answer.
You don't need to wait several weeks for the Omicron data to come in.
But we all know, everyone, lib and conservative alike, we all agree that the official COVID numbers have been at least somewhat artificially inflated by this problem.
So, after buying time for a day or two, not for ten days, not for two weeks, Rochelle Walensky has finally come up with an answer to just how inflated those numbers are.
And just when you think the public health establishment can't get any more deceitful, wait until you hear this.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
From yesterday, my absolute favorite comment comes to us from Take the Clown Pill, who says, we're not conspiracy theorists.
We're spoiler alerts.
That's true.
I should have said this at the top of the show.
If you don't want to hear the future, don't tune into this show.
Close your ears right now.
If you don't want to hear what will be on the mainstream news networks in 6 to 12 months...
You really should tune out this show.
If you want to just bide your time, let that excitement build, and then you're going to find out in 6 to 12 months what's actually going on right now, then you should turn the show off right now.
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So, Director Walensky, 800,000 people were told died of COVID-19.
How many of those are from COVID-19?
How many of those just happened to have had COVID-19 when they died?
The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities.
So really, these are people who were unwell to begin with.
At least four comorbidities.
We also know that the median age of a COVID death is north of 80.
It's higher than the life expectancy in this country.
So, you're telling me that three quarters of people who have died from a virus that tends to kill people who are already above the average life expectancy, three quarters of those people had at least four other major health problems.
They were not well to begin with, as Rochelle Walensky says.
So then that 800,000 number, I'm not saying it's exactly 200,000.
I'm not saying it's exactly one quarter of 800,000.
Obviously, there's a lot of ambiguity here, and they're not being particularly forthcoming with the details.
But it's a lot closer to that 200,000 number than we all thought when we're talking about people who died explicitly and directly from coronavirus.
That's a pretty big difference.
Factor of four.
Wow.
Wow.
If you had said this six months ago, a year ago, as some of us did, you would have been called a crazy anti-science conspiracy theorist.
Now we're being told, yeah, maybe it's closer to about 200,000.
200,000 in two years, meaning 100,000 a year, meaning the same number of people who died of drug overdoses last year.
But we didn't shut the whole world down because of drug overdoses.
Frankly, maybe we should have.
We at least should have shut the border down.
Didn't do that.
Joe Biden opened the border right back up.
That open border with fentanyl pouring all across is killing just as many people as coronavirus, at least by the most conservative numbers, according to Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC. But drugs, not a problem.
Deaths of despair, suicide, not a problem.
Heart disease, not a big problem.
Don't worry about it.
We're not going to shut down all the fast food companies.
We're actually going to lock people in their homes so they don't exercise.
I'm sure that'll help them lose weight, right?
I'm sure that'll help them get heart healthy.
No, it's just this one virus.
That is the reason that we're going to shut down the entire world, completely reorder society, and make Dr.
Fauci, king of the universe.
Does that make a lot of sense?
Well, okay, we're only going to do that until everyone's vaccinated.
Everyone's got to get vaccinated because the vaccines we were originally told by Joe Biden, by Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, that the vaccines would stop infection and stop transmission.
And then they changed their tune on that because it wasn't true.
But okay, even though they're not going to do that, everyone's got to get vaccinated.
We have a vaccine mandate.
We actually have multiple vaccine mandates coming out of the federal government.
And then we can get back to normal, right?
You get your two shots of Moderna or of Pfizer or your one shot of Johnson & Johnson.
Although there have been some questions about that vaccine, there was that pause because of blood clotting.
Now there was a question about the boosters for Johnson & Johnson.
Okay, let's put that aside for now.
Very simple.
You get your two shots of Pfizer, you're fully vaccinated, we can get back to normal, right?
Except that the CEO of Pfizer is saying that two shots of that vaccine, what was called fully vaccinated, actually just doesn't give you very much protection at all.
We know that the two doses of the vaccine offer very limited protection, if any.
The three doses with a booster, they offer reasonable protection against hospitalization and deaths.
against deaths, I think very good.
And less protection against the infection.
Now, we are working on a new version of our vaccine, the 1.1, let me put it that way, that will cover Omicron as well.
And of course, we are waiting to have the final results.
The vaccine will be ready in March.
So the vaccine for the virus that everybody is getting right now, that I had a couple of weeks ago that dozens of my friends and family members have had over the past few weeks, and that I'm sure many dozens of your friends and family members have had as well.
They're going to get a vaccine for that in March once everybody's had it.
Which is actually pretty brilliant, by the way.
Because if the vaccine comes out after everyone already has antibodies from getting the virus, then there's no way to prove it doesn't work.
Right?
Pretty smart business decision.
But furthermore, before you censor me for saying that the vaccine doesn't work, I'm just playing a clip of the CEO of Pfizer, of the guy who runs the company that sells the vaccine.
And he says that what was called the full regime of Pfizer shots offers very limited protection, if any at all.
If any at all.
Which means there actually is a silver lining to the storm cloud here.
It means that the government's argument for the vaccine mandate just completely fell apart.
For two reasons.
One, the argument for the vaccine mandate is not even so much to protect you as to protect other people from you.
That's why the government's getting involved.
The government gives individuals a lot of leeway to screw up their own lives, but where they draw the line is, particularly when it comes to public health, is when your decisions are negatively affecting other people.
So they say, you don't have a right to go infect other people during a pandemic.
There are extraordinary police powers during a pandemic, and the government can force you to get the vaccine to protect other people.
But we already know, per Dr.
Fauci, per Rochelle Walensky, that the vaccine does not prevent infection and transmission.
They've already admitted that.
So, then the purpose of the mandate would have to transform to be simply about protecting you.
That's an extraordinary argument for the government to make.
We haven't seen anything like that before in American history.
Mandatory vaccines, not to protect the public, but to protect you from your own dumb decisions.
But we just heard from the CEO of Pfizer that it won't even do that.
The mandate, as it stands right now, says you've got to get two shots of Pfizer, two shots of Moderna, or one shot of Johnson& Johnson.
But the guys behind that now are saying, no, that won't work.
That won't do anything.
That will offer very limited protection, if any, at all.
So what's going to happen?
Is OSHA going to change the rule now and say, actually, you've got to get three shots?
Actually, you've got to get two Johnson& Johnson?
That's not what the rule is right now.
So what is the government's argument for the mandate?
It just feels like our country is hurtling away from what we have been for a long time.
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Even the White House cannot explain its reasoning anymore on its virus and vaccine policy.
I'm not sure the White House ever could really explain it all that well, but they would have certain lines that would, within their own narrow context, be at least semi-coherent.
You need to get vaccinated to protect the people from you.
The vaccines are extremely effective, whatever.
At the time, these things seemed sort of plausible.
Now, they don't.
Peter Doocy...
One of the few reporters who asks difficult questions of the White House.
Peter Doocy came out and asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Hey Jen, since I'm vaxxed and I got COVID, and you're vaxxed and you got COVID, how come Joe Biden is still calling this a pandemic of the unvaccinated?
I understand that the science says that vaccines prevent death.
But I'm triple-vaxxed, still got COVID. You're triple-vaxxed, still got COVID. Why is the president still referring to this as a pandemic of the unvaccinated?
Well, I think, Peter, there's a significant difference between, and you just experienced this, and not to expose your public health experience, but I can speak to mine as well.
I had been triple-vaxxed.
I had minor symptoms.
There is a huge difference between that and being unvaccinated.
You are 17 times more likely to go to the hospital if you're not vaccinated, 20 times more likely to die.
And those are significant, serious statistics.
So yes, the impact for people who are unvaccinated is far more dire than those who are vaccinated.
Will the president update his language at some time to be more reflective of the fact that people who are triple vaccinated are catching and spreading COVID? I think the president has said, as have we a number of times, that there will be breakthrough cases.
There will be people who get COVID here at different media organizations, at companies around the world, around the country who have been vaccinated.
How many millions of breakthrough cases do we need to have before we can stop calling them breakthrough cases?
How many do you think?
I'm thinking right now, just off the top of my head, of all my friends and family members who have gotten COVID. Some are vaccinated.
Some are vaccinated and boosted.
Some are not vaccinated at all and won't go near the Fauci-ouchie.
I guess the majority of my friends and family who have gotten it have been vaccinated.
And some people had serious symptoms, or by serious I mean they were in bed for a couple days.
And some people really had very mild symptoms, and there was really no rhyme or reason as to who had which sort of severity of symptoms, between the unvaccinated, the vaccinated, and the boosted.
But furthermore, speaking of symptoms, do you think Jen Psaki threw her back out moving the goalposts like that?
I hope she didn't.
I hope she's feeling better, but that must have been very strenuous because Peter Doocy asked a very simple question.
Since people who have been vaccinated and boosted are contracting and spreading coronavirus, when is the president going to stop calling it a pandemic of the unvaccinated?
And what did she say?
She said, well, it's much worse for people who are unvaccinated.
But that's not the question.
We're talking about the pandemic.
We're talking about people who are contracting and spreading a virus and the virus is mutating and it's contagious and it's spreading throughout the country.
And that's happening with vaccinated people as well as unvaccinated people.
So why is Joe Biden lying and saying that it's only happening with unvaccinated people?
She says, well, sure, there are some breakthrough cases.
No, that's not what's going on.
Everyone's getting it, lady.
Everyone's getting this thing.
Well, it's because Omicron is different.
Yeah, okay, yeah, it's a variant.
Viruses have variants, as they always do and always will and always were going to.
So why are you still pretending?
That this is a virus that's only being contracted and spread by people who are unvaccinated.
Well, it's a lot worse if you're okay.
So they have nothing.
So they have absolutely nothing, and they're deflecting.
We'll get to that point later, by the way, because I find it a little dubious.
But they're not just doing it on coronavirus.
I just filled up my gas tank about an hour ago or less.
It was expensive.
More expensive than it has been in a while.
I went to the grocery store a few days ago.
It was empty.
Emptier than it was in recent years.
Prices are going up and up and up.
The economy is not in great shape.
And yet, if you look at the White House Twitter feed, you will find out Joe Biden is the greatest jobs president ever.
This guy, he's an economic genius, must be.
Under President Biden, the economy has created more jobs.
Per month than under any other president.
Ever.
Ever.
And you can see on the graph, you've got Reagan.
There's a little, it goes up a little.
Bush, one, goes up a little bit.
Clinton goes up more.
George W. Bush, much lower.
Obama, a little higher.
Trump, he's in the negative.
He lost jobs.
He's bad.
I hate him.
He's so bad.
And then Biden, wow, big yellow color all the way up through the roof.
A reminder.
That there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The reason this comparison doesn't work is, first of all, because you're comparing one year under Joe Biden to four and eight year terms from Trump to Reagan.
Furthermore, when you're comparing Biden to Trump, you are comparing...
A man whose presidency ended during a global pandemic where the government forced everyone to stop going to work or forced a lot of people to stop going to work.
So voluntarily put people out of a job to a new administration where the public health bureaucracy is now encouraging the government to allow people to go back to work.
So yes, of course you're going to see a radical shift.
It's as though you're comparing someone's speed while driving, and for part of the comparison you do it as they're screeching to a halt at a red light, and then for the next comparison you're looking at what happens right after the light turns green and the guy floors it.
Sure, I guess that'll tell you something about those specific moments, but it's not going to tell you about how fast the guy's actually going under normal conditions over a longer haul.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Speaking of people getting new jobs, Clay Aiken.
Clay Aiken, America's darling for a brief period in the early 2000s.
The runner-up on American Idol.
Clay Aiken, my accidental nemesis.
From Politicon a few years ago, Clay Aiken is running for Congress in North Carolina.
He is running in North Carolina's 6th Congressional District.
He's running after he ran and lost in a different district, in North Carolina's 2nd Congressional District.
But I think he believes that he's got a better shot of winning now in NC6 because of redistricting because it's a very Democrat district now.
Here is Clay Aiken's campaign announcement.
For decades, North Carolina was actually the progressive beacon in the South.
We had the best roads and the best schools because back then the loudest voices in our government were progressives who actually made sure our state was always moving forward.
But then things changed, and the progressives lost power, and we started getting backwards-ass policies like the voter suppression bills and the bigoted bathroom bill.
Because today, it seems like the loudest voices in North Carolina politics are white nationalists like this guy.
My friends, I encourage you, continue to make your voice heard, because do we love Donald Trump?
And hateful homophobes like this one.
What is the purpose?
These folks are taking up all the oxygen in the room, and I'm going to tell you, I am sick of it.
And I'll tell you something else, as Democrats, we have got to get better about speaking up and using our voices.
Because those folks ain't quieting down anytime soon.
That's why I'm running for Congress.
And just think how excited these guys are going to be when we elect the South's first gay congressman.
So, there are some Republicans right now who are friends with Clay Aiken.
Not naming any names, but there are some prominent Republicans who are friends with Clay Aiken who are excited that he's running.
He's such a nice guy.
Oh, he sang that song.
I don't remember any of his songs, but he sang them nicely.
Clay Aiken's a jerk.
He's a freaking jerk.
You've got to beware the nice guy in politics.
Oh, come on, I'm just Clay Aiken.
Come on, y'all.
Let's come together.
So, I was at Politicon a few years ago.
And I was debating this guy, Chris Hahn, who I had debated on Fox News once.
And so we were supposed to have this debate, me and Chris Hahn.
Except we didn't end up having a debate because Clay Aiken was moderating and Clay Aiken took it upon himself to be the actual opponent in the debate.
So Chris Hahn was just kind of pushed to the side and it was just me and Clay debating each other the whole time.
Are people who are marching and shouting, Jews will not replace us, are they good people?
It's a yes or no question.
Yes or no.
No, it's a yes or no question.
What a ridiculous question.
Are people who are marching, shouting, Jews will not replace us, are they good people?
Can you say yes or no to this?
Are you capable of that?
I don't need to answer a question because I'm not on the stage.
No, I did not ask you if Nazis were bad.
And I understand those are big words.
People who are Nazis are bad people, play.
That's not what I asked you.
I've answered this five times.
No, you haven't.
I think we'll be able to find that I didn't.
I feel so bad for you.
I feel so badly for you.
It's very easy to play a victim.
You can boo all you want to.
I don't give a half a f***ing s***.
I asked a yes or no question.
Does President Trump lie?
Yes or no?
Before you start, since clearly the audience thinks I'm biased, we're going to let them ask some questions.
Well, I may be a hack, but I've got the f***ing microphone.
So, um, I just want to say, Clay, you're probably the worst moderator I've ever seen in my life.
Asking very dishonest yes or no questions, but anyways.
That's perfectly fine.
Clay Aiken, man!
He's like a national treasure!
Trust me, I get booed all the time.
I'm not worried about it.
I'm not worried about it.
Don't bow up!
Don't boo!
Stop it, Chris.
I'm a big boy.
I can handle myself.
This guy's awful.
He's awful.
And he's got this very disingenuous, dated style of politics.
Well, you know, y'all, listen, I moved back here.
I got my voice.
But I don't know.
To me, it reads like something out of the late 90s or early 2000s.
Certainly pre-Trump, pre-social media authentic politics.
I'm not sure it's going to work.
Just a reminder, though.
The guy is calling a man a white supremacist or white nationalist based on absolutely nothing.
He says that you're a hateful bigot if you think dudes shouldn't go into the women's bathroom.
And the only flag he flies in his commercial is not the American flag, but the radical leftist LGBT LMNOP flag.
This guy is awful.
He's a jerk.
Beware.
Beware.
The nice guys in politics.
If you have not heard of Jonathan Isaac yet, where have you been?
Have you been living under a rock?
The NBA star stood strong with his values while everyone else kneeled and faced heavy criticism from the media for his views on social issues and vaccines over the past few years, which is why I'm extremely excited to announce that he's decided to write a book with The Daily Wire called Why I Stand.
Jonathan's book will be about the rise of his basketball career, his journey into faith, and his strength to stand alone in the face of immense pressure.
Check out this teaser.
The Orlando Magic's 23-year-old starting forward is deeply religious and proudly unvaccinated.
On Friday, Isaac got attention for choosing not to kneel in unison with his teammates or to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt.
My name is Jonathan Isaac.
I play for the Orlando Magic, and I'm writing a book with The Daily Wire.
Courage does not mean the absence of fear.
And in today's day, there are so many things that you can be afraid of facing because of believing what you believe or deciding to stand for what you believe in.
And I believe this book gives you a blueprint of my story of how Christ has made the difference in my life.
from a young kid who struggled with fear, anxiety, self-insecurity, to a man willing to stand for what he believes in.
I really like Jonathan Isaacs.
I was chatting with him a few weeks ago, I guess.
He came by the office, and it was the first time I've ever spoken to someone who is, I think, 17 feet tall.
And so I strained my neck to talk to him, but I kept straining it because I so enjoyed it.
Really, really a sincere guy, and he's obviously got his head screwed on straight, and his heart is totally in the right place, and he's got the guts to actually stand up for what he believes in.
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today.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
The left is so, they're nice.
Like Clay Aiken, they're really nice, you know, smiley, smiley.
They're responsible.
They're the adults in the room.
They're not insurrectionist, terrorist bigots like you.
They're mature, capable of self-government.
The Biden-Harris administration, thank goodness we've got the adults back in the room.
Kamala Harris's new communications director, though, I
don't know.
That Bush wasn't the legitimate president.
Can somebody please arrest this insurrectionist?
This threat to our precious sacred democracy?
Who is now, he's going to be working in our hallowed sacred temple of democracy, undermining it from the inside.
Just like the horn hat man who nearly brought our empire to its knees.
Jamal Simmons, the insurrectionist.
No, it's not just Jamal Simmons.
It's Terry McAuliffe.
He ran for governor of Virginia again.
He already was governor of Virginia.
He ran again and he just lost to Glenn Young in this past cycle.
He said during this campaign cycle that he didn't think the 2000 election was rightly decided and he thought that Bush was an illegitimate president.
It's true that there are a number of Republicans who think that the 2020 election was stolen.
I don't know, maybe because they changed all the election rules in the weeks before the election.
And because they violated the state constitution in Pennsylvania and there were other irregularities.
But the crazier statistic is that a higher proportion of Democrats believe the 2016 election was stolen.
So, as we are now, what day is it?
It's the January 11th.
We're five days after that most sacred day of the liberal liturgical year.
January, January 6th, the day our country nearly came to its knees.
Spare me the sanctimony, please.
Don't ever buy into it.
Don't ever give them quarter.
And if you are inclined to be a squish and say, well, you know, it was really, it was so close, the insurrectionists, the terrorists.
Just don't.
Just don't.
Move on.
Just recognize when the left says that the Horn Hat guy was nearly toppled, nearly toppled the entire country or was an insurrectionist or a terrorist or whatever.
They don't mean it.
They're being disingenuous.
They're doing the same stuff themselves.
We can just move on.
According to the left, we're all Nazis.
You know that.
We're all fascist, white supremacist Nazis.
We're And this actually trended yesterday on Twitter because, according to the mainstream media, an Indiana state senator, a Republican in Indiana, demanded that we be neutral on the question of Nazism.
This happened because during a hearing, some Indiana school teacher whined to a state senator about a curriculum reform bill.
And he insisted that we take on that imminent urgent scourge in America We're not neutral on Nazism.
We take a stand in the classroom against it, and it matters that we do.
I'm not discrediting as a person Marxism, Nazism, fascism.
I'm not discrediting any of those isms out there.
And I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those isms.
I believe that we've gone too far when we take a position Okay, I don't agree with his educational theory, but he's obviously not defending Nazism, as the Libs were accusing him of doing.
That's so disingenuous to say that he is.
And you have the school teacher.
It's very important that we tell our students that Nazis are bad.
The Clay Aiken thing.
Do you think Nazis are bad?
Yeah, sure.
Well, say it again.
Why?
Is that a really controversial issue in America?
No, you just want to besmirch us all and smear us all as Nazis based on nothing.
But yeah, sure, Nazis are bad.
Okay.
The school teacher doesn't say that it's important that we teach students that communists are bad.
Why not?
Communists are really, really bad.
Really, really bad.
Nazis bad, sure.
Communists really, really bad, too.
They're really, really, they're certainly on the same level.
But we're not allowed to say that.
We have to say the communists are good.
Nazis bad, communists good.
Multiple people can be bad.
Multiple ideas can be really bad.
And communism is an evil, evil ideology.
So sure, I agree with the school teacher.
Teach that Nazism is bad.
And teach that communism is evil, too.
Oh, but he doesn't want to do that.
Because that's what's really at issue here, is that these curricula are going really soft on communism, and in some cases actually encouraging certain forms of Marxism.
And what the state senator who got in trouble did is he came out there and he said, look, we just need to be neutral.
We just need to teach students how to think, not what to think.
We can't voice our own political opinions.
And he took it to this radical extreme where he said we have to be neutral on Nazism.
But I'm sure the teacher would agree that we should be neutral on Marxism.
I bet the teacher wouldn't disagree with that at all.
It's just that Nazism, that seems like a bridge too far.
And of course it's a bridge too far.
Because the very idea that the state senator is expressing is a liberal idea.
It's the idea that when we educate people, we don't need to express moral views.
That's a liberal idea that they smuggled into American education, mostly in the middle of the 20th century, and it's a bogus idea.
It's just not possible.
You can't teach students how to think without teaching them what to think.
You can't teach them about history without a moral framework to think about history, to think about which side was right and for which reasons and at which moments, to think about the philosophies that were motivating these people.
It's preposterous to say that we're going to have an education system that puts Plato and Aristotle at the same level as the Marquis de Sade, the man from whom we get sadism.
Yes, you can read Plato's Republic or you can read the Marquis de Sade's pornography and the things that are being described are absolutely on the same level.
No, they're not.
That's insane.
Of course not.
You have to have a moral framework.
That's what education is.
Education is not just teaching you your reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Education is raising someone up, teaching them to tamp down their basest passions and appetites, teaching them to make sense of their freedom.
That's the definition of liberal education.
And to do that, you need a moral viewpoint.
You need to be able to say that some ideas are evil, and some ideas are good, and some movements were really bad, and some movements were good.
And you've got to make those decisions.
And the left has benefited from this for over half a century at this point.
That's the issue here, is when CRT is being taught in schools, what they're teaching is that America is bad and white supremacist and evil and bigoted and there's structural racism and we've got to tear it down and have a new country.
So the teacher's actually right on the broader point.
Conservatives need to listen to what the left is saying.
Their view of education is actually more accurate than ours is.
How do we know that?
Because our view of education is just the liberals' pretend view that they pushed us in the 60s and 70s that they've now abandoned because it's complete bunk.
Do you know who has a better idea on education?
Governor Ron DeSantis, down in Florida.
Governor DeSantis was just speaking with Mark Levin, and he described his new proposal that the legislature is going to take up this session to allow parents to inspect the curricula that their kids are being taught and to sue the school districts if the schools are peddling radical ideologies.
They want these kids to hate this country.
They want them to reject our founding, our institutions, and they want to replace that with their leftist ideology, which would obviously be disastrous for this country's future.
So the stakes are very high on that.
There's a problem when you can say it, you can't do it, but what if they defy you?
What if they're doing it?
And so what we're going to be doing in this upcoming legislative session, we're going to give parents the ability to go in and get legal relief if they're not following our state standards with respect to history and government.
And I think empowering parents to be involved, making sure parents have a right to inspect the curriculum, and it's not just about critical race theory.
I mean, there's a lot of other inappropriate content that can be smuggled in But this is a threat to academic freedom, Governor DeSantis.
Oh no!
This is totalitarian.
This is fascist.
You can't tell teachers what they can teach.
Of course you can.
You have to.
That's what curricula are.
That's why we have public education.
Because the public, the community, is supposed to have some say over how their kids are going to be raised.
The left already has this.
Well, if we permit this, then conservatives can kick certain books out of schools.
The left already has that.
You can read any book in school.
You can read any book you want.
You can read Ibram Kendi.
You can read Robin DiAngelo.
You can probably read Mein Kampf.
There's one book that cannot be taught in schools.
What book is that?
It's the Bible.
It's the most important book ever written, even if you don't believe in it.
Surely you would acknowledge that it is central to Western civilization.
That's the one you can't teach in schools.
If a teacher starts teaching the Bible in schools, that teacher will be punished.
The school will be sued.
I promise you.
I guarantee you.
Furthermore, if a teacher assigned my book in schools, well, I guess either of my books, certainly reasons to vote for Democrats, that would do it, and speechless too.
If they assigned to speechless, they said, hey, speechless, controlling words, controlling minds, it's a history of how words have changed throughout the last hundred years.
It's a history of the left's manipulation of language from the 1920s to 2020.
Most of it's not particularly polemical.
It's just a history of these ideas and how it changed and what the left and the right got wrong and right.
I guarantee you that teacher would be punished.
Maybe the school would be sued.
So what DeSantis is saying here is we're not actually going to change the way education is done in terms of the form and the procedure.
We're just going to allow conservatives to do the same things that the left has been doing for decades so that we don't just completely roll over and let the left take over our culture and destroy and poison the brains of future generations of Americans.
Sounds good to me.
Sounds good to me, man.
Sounds like this guy gets it.
And that's why he's getting a lot of hate right now.
There are a handful of politicians who are getting a ton of hate on the right.
One or two senators, really just one governor, Ron DeSantis, and Trump of course.
Why?
DeSantis knows why.
They're going after him because he's right over the target.
Now, look, I mean, when you're over the target, they're going to come at you.
But what I view it as, I view it as positive feedback.
If the corporate press nationally isn't attacking me, then I'm probably not doing my job.
So the fact that they are attacking me is a good indication that, you know what, I'm tackling the big issues.
We're going after critical race theory.
We're fighting back against Biden's mandates.
We're fighting back against the illegal immigration.
All those things that a vast majority of Floridians and Americans want to see done, but that does threaten the ruling class and the regime.
And so when you stand up in this day and age that we're in, when you're speaking the truth, those folks do not want that to get out.
And so they are going to throw arrows at you.
But I think that what we've been able to show is if you stand your ground, if you lead, if you don't back down and just stand for the right things, there's a groundswell of folks who will have your back.
And that ultimately is what it's all about.
Listen to the language.
Yes, the point he's making, he's saying, I'm doing a really good job and that's why they're attacking me.
That's basically the argument he's making.
But listen to the language.
The ruling class.
The regime.
Standing for substantive things.
This guy is not talking like Republicans talked 5 and 10 years ago, or 20 or 30 years ago.
This guy is very dialed in.
This guy is using the kind of language that we use on this show that other conservatives who I think are moving in the right direction, that they're using.
They're recognizing this is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats.
Or the conservatives and the leftists.
But there's a structural issue here.
The liberal establishment, the ruling class.
It's not just private enterprise versus big government.
It's the big government and the administrative agencies working with the woke corporations and with the media and working in tandem with the university.
It's just the ruling class.
I don't know how else you're going to describe it.
I don't know who's writing his speeches.
Maybe it's DeSantis himself.
One thing I can tell you, though, expect to hear more of this as we get closer to 2024 from the candidates who want to be taken seriously, from the candidates who know what time it is and who know what time it's going to be during the next presidential race.
We're talking about substance, not just procedure, not just you can say whatever you want and that's fine, not just you can teach whatever you want in schools and Not just, you can do whatever you want to do, just don't make me do it.
It's not just that kind of 10-year-old dated Republican language, the kind of...
Fashionable, libertarian kind of language.
We're talking about substance, standing for the right things.
The right things in the classroom, the right things in our community, the right things in our country.
DeSantis is doing a good job on this right now.
Expect to hear more of this from other candidates, especially from candidates who want to be taken seriously in the coming years, both in the midterms and presidential and moving forward.
Speaking of Florida, AOC just took a little vacation to Florida.
COVID was exploding in New York.
Things are locked down still in many ways.
So AOC goes with her boyfriend.
They go to Florida.
What happens?
She's not wearing a mask.
She's been a little loose with the rules.
She gets COVID. I don't think she got COVID because she went to Florida.
I don't think she got COVID because she's not wearing a mask.
Virtually all of my friends in New York have COVID right now or have recently recovered from COVID. But she got it.
She's Extremely vaccinated.
She's one of the biggest peddlers of all the COVID lockdown rules.
Her office sends out this statement.
Representative Ocasio-Cortez has received a positive test result for COVID-19.
She's experiencing symptoms and recovering at home.
The congresswoman received her booster shot this fall and encourages everyone to get their booster and follow all CDC guidance.
Now the good news for the young, healthy AOC is that it doesn't matter.
It's like a cold.
You'll be fine.
But the political import here is that it turns the consensus view on its head.
The consensus view being peddled by the establishment right now is that when anti-vaxxers, when anti-vax, anti-science, meaning people who don't just want to stick themselves with some random drug to prevent or to not prevent getting a mild cough, that they're idiots.
They're idiots.
They're rubes.
Actually, though, it seems to me that when someone who...
Goes out and says, look, we're all going to get COVID at some point.
For the vast majority of us, it's not going to be a big deal.
It's fine.
I'm going to roll the dice.
When that person gets COVID, that's not ironic or funny or that's what you would expect.
That's what that person would expect, too.
It is much, much funnier when a person who is triple vaxxed and wears three masks at a time and locked themselves in a hermetically sealed tube for two years comes down with COVID. Because they thought they weren't going to get it.
And they kept saying it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
And they believed Fauci and Rochelle Walensky and Joe Biden.
Like idiots, they believed these people.
And then it turned out that what we were told by Walensky and Fauci and Biden just wasn't true.
It's never funny when someone gets a sickness.
Thankfully, in this case, the vast, vast majority of people are going to be just completely fine.
Some won't even know that they have it.
But if you're telling me one is funnier than the other, it is much funnier when the people have their expectations subverted.
And in this case, that would be the left.
But it would have been worse without the booster.
It would have been worse without the vaccine.
That's what we're told.
Maggie Haberman at the New York Times and CNN. She tweets out, been avoiding this, but COVID is the absolute pits.
Been lucky it isn't worse, but at its worst, it's like a bad flu and it's dragged on and lingered.
I'm vaxxed and boosted and still got a breakthrough case.
Man, a whole lot of breakthrough cases going around, huh?
Gosh, golly, I can't believe how many breakthrough cases there are.
Would welcome folks not continuing to say it's all mild.
Didn't you just say it's mild?
He said it's like a bad flu.
It's fine.
It's not...
No, come on.
Okay.
But don't say it's mild.
It would also have been much worse without a vaccine and booster.
Like, maybe.
Maybe, I guess.
I'm not saying that it definitely wouldn't have been.
Much worse.
But I am saying that it would have been worse without a vaccine and booster is a cope for people who expected the vaccines to work the way that we were all told that they would work.
And then they didn't work that way.
And so now they're saying, no, but thank goodness I got it.
Because I don't want to feel like an idiot for believing those people and having been completely wrong.
So, look, even though it's completely unfalsifiable, it would have been a lot worse.
I know it.
Maybe it would have.
Sure, it's possible.
But you'd...
The only reason you believe that, that it would have been a lot worse without the vaccine, the booster, is because you have been told that is true by the same lying idiots who have deceived you on virtually every other aspect of the virus.
So why would you believe that?
And the craziest thing to me, we were talking yesterday about the potential mass psychosis going on in this country during COVID. People will now tell you with a straight face.
When you point out that the vaccines aren't doing what we were told they would do, they will look you in the face and they will say, no, Michael, the vaccines were never supposed to prevent infection.
Michael, the vaccines were never supposed to stop transmission.
That's not what we were told, Michael.
We were told that they would just reduce the severity of the symptoms.
That's what vaccines do, Michael.
That's why you get your polio vaccine, to reduce the severity of polio, right?
Don't think so.
That's not what I remember.
Hold on.
You're telling me That you really believe that we were never told that the vaccines were going to stop you from getting COVID and transmitting it?
Please, just go with me for a second.
Let me take you on a trip back down memory lane.
There's been over a 20 to 1 return.
If you had put that money into an S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, you'd come up with something like $17 billion, but you think it's $200 billion.
Here, yeah.
You're okay.
You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
These vaccines are highly, highly effective.
Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick.
They're really, really good against variants.
Everyone who takes the vaccine is not just protecting themselves, but Reducing their transmission to other people and allowing society to get back to normal.
Get your first shot, and when you're due for your second, get your second shot.
A key goal is to stop the transmission, to get the immunity levels up so that you get almost no infection going on whatsoever.
When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected.
They told you!
The crazy part is not that they told you this and then it turned out they were completely wrong and either they're just idiots or liars or more likely both.
The craziest part, as far as I'm concerned, is that you now believe the lie that they're telling you that the vaccines were never supposed to stop infection or transmission.
They're just telling you, no, no, ignore what you heard.
Nope.
Don't believe your lying eyes.
No, no.
Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.
No, no.
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
That is the kind of mass psychosis that some people are talking about right now.
And sure, maybe some of the things that are common sense views on public health or public policy, maybe some of them are true, but they're only accidentally true.
And I don't think that you should base your entire belief in them on the utterances and whims and caprices of the same jerk, loser, incompetent, deceitful liars who have misled us for the past two years.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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On today's episode, the CDC changes its COVID messaging, New York City allows non-citizens to vote, and Pope Francis gets political.
