A liberal Supreme Court justice steps down, the DHS Secretary gets caught on tape admitting that the situation at the southern border is historically bad, and Joe Rogan survives another attempt by the woke Left to cancel him.
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Liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest member of the court, has signaled that he will soon retire.
And the search for Breyer's replacement should move relatively quickly.
The reason for that is that President Biden has already taken 94% of the country out of the running.
Joe Biden has decided that his next Supreme Court nominee will be a black woman.
Forget about qualifications.
Forget about talent.
Forget about experience.
Joe is going to pick his judicial nominee just like he chose his vice president.
He's going to choose her on sex and skin color first.
Maybe you consider the person second.
No one wants a new liberal judge on the court, of course.
But this is actually relatively good news.
A liberal replacing a liberal does not change the balance of the court.
Breyer was going to go away sooner or later.
And the decision to step down now almost certainly means one thing.
Justice Breyer thinks that the Democrats are headed for disaster in the November midterm elections.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from We Are Helmuth Hubiner, who says, My friend got COVID pretty badly.
He wasn't able to breathe, so he went to the emergency room.
They wouldn't let him in because he's unvaccinated.
They told him to, quote, go home and drink some water.
I've heard many such cases.
I have heard cases of people going, trying to get medical treatment, and the people at the medical tree, whether it's an emergency room or whether it's urgent care or whether it's your regular doctor, will force you to take a COVID test, and then if you have COVID, you're not allowed to come in.
Only healthy people are allowed to go to the doctor.
If you're a sick person, you're not allowed to go to the doctor.
Does that make sense?
No, it seems kind of upside down.
Now, one way to remedy this upside-down world we're living in is to get upside.
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Joe Biden's got another diversity hire coming up.
It's as simple as that.
He did the same thing with his vice presidential selection for Kamala Harris, and now he's going to do it with his judge.
Kamala Harris got her job not because she is qualified, not because she is intelligent, not because she is educated.
I don't think she is any of those things, but even if she were, that wouldn't be why she got the job.
She got her job because she is black and because she's a woman.
You don't need to take my word for it.
That's what Joe Biden said.
This next judicial nominee for the Supreme Court will get her job.
Won't be him.
It'll be her job because she is black and because she is a woman.
Her qualifications, her experience will have very little to do with it.
The Democrats now are leaking some of the potential nominees.
And they're leaking them not in a list of qualifications or resume or accomplishments.
It's just like looking at a bunch of paint swatches.
They're just doing it on race and sex.
Clarence Thomas reacted against this when Clarence Thomas, the senior most conservative judge on the court, when he was graduating from law school, this was after affirmative action came about, and he graduated from law school, very serious law student, he's become one of the most accomplished jurists in the country, and he had trouble getting a job.
And he realized he had trouble getting a job, even though he graduated from the top law school in the country, even though he had this great resume.
He had trouble getting a job because people didn't think that he got to where he was on the merits.
People assumed that he got to where he was on the color of his skin because of affirmative action.
And he said it was at that point that he saw that the value of his Yale law degree was basically nothing.
It was at that point he felt the sting of Of racism associated with affirmative action.
And that's what's going to happen to this Supreme Court nominee.
Doesn't matter how qualified this person is or how unqualified this person is.
She will always be a diversity hire.
Kamala Harris will always be a diversity hire.
It's sad.
It's sad.
I don't think that's how we want these things to happen.
Clarence Thomas was not a diversity hire, by the way.
George H.W. Bush didn't say, I will pick a black man of this.
I'm not saying that race didn't factor into his calculation.
But actually, the promise that came from George H.W. Bush and his staff was, we're going to pick a true conservative.
He prioritized Thomas' ideas, his judicial philosophy over any of his physical characteristics.
Not so here.
And that's sad.
If you were to be the first black woman Supreme Court Justice, wouldn't you want to be picked based on your talent and your intelligence and your career?
I think so.
But the left doesn't really care.
The left just wants the power, and they'll take it any way that they can get it.
Jen Psaki is getting peppered with questions about this, and Jen Psaki's doubled down.
Yes, regardless of qualifications, this will be a black woman on the court.
Does President Biden plan to honor his pledge to nominate a black woman to the court?
Well, I've commented on this previously.
The President has stated and reiterated his commitment to nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court and certainly stands by that.
For today, again, I'm just not going to be able to say anything about any specifics until, of course, Justice Breyer makes any announcement should he decide to make an announcement.
Now, speaking of Kamala Harris and the last time this came around, some people are suggesting Kamala Harris could be the nominee because Joe Biden's got this political problem right now.
Namely, Harris and Biden appear to hate one another.
Harris is extremely unpopular.
She may actually drag down the ticket.
Joe Biden is the most unpopular nominee.
The least popular president in recent history and somehow his vice president is even less popular.
So what do you do with Kamala?
Well, you could throw her on the court and then you don't have to deal with her anymore.
And then you take her off the table as a potential rival and as a potential drag on your ticket.
It would be a travesty for the country because Kamala Harris is not particularly smart, not particularly well-educated, and doesn't have a lot of integrity.
But it might solve a political problem for Biden.
It's...
It's not ironic.
It's providential, you might say, that we are seeing the affirmative action Supreme Court nomination occurring right as the court is reconsidering affirmative action.
There's a major affirmative action case.
We talked about it a couple days ago, coming up before the court.
Affirmative action is unconstitutional.
Even the judges who upheld affirmative action acknowledged that it was unconstitutional.
About 20 years ago, the last time there was a major affirmative action case where the court upheld it, Sandra Day O'Connor, who was the swing vote there, a conservative appointee who then became the swing vote and sided with the liberals, she said, obviously, affirmative action is unconstitutional.
It's wrong.
The text of the 14th Amendment plainly prevents this sort of discrimination and subsequent laws that came after the 14th Amendment, this kind of discrimination on the basis of race.
But we're going to let it stay for a little while, but obviously it's limited in time.
And in about 25 years, we've got to get rid of it.
Well, here we are now.
And whoever gets picked for this court seat might very well be the last dying gasp of affirmative action.
We can only hope.
Why, why is, is Joe Biden so desperate to fill this court seat now?
Why, why is Justice Breyer so desperate to get off the court now?
Yeah, he's a little bit long in the tooth, sure, but I think what it signals is that the Democrats know they're headed for disaster in the midterm elections.
They're predicted overwhelmingly to lose the House of Representatives right now, and they may well lose the Senate.
If they lose the Senate, then Cocaine Mitch is going to come in and he is going to show you his little friend and he is going to stop any Supreme Court nomination because it needs the approval of the Senate.
And so, as it stands right now, they've got six, seven months to get this nomination through.
And so, they're going to do the best they can.
Right now, looking ahead, not just to 2022, but to 2024, Joe Biden is losing.
To a generic Republican.
He's losing pretty significantly to the generic Republican who goes up on the ballot against him.
But there's a caveat here.
This is according to a Politico morning consult poll.
When you put Biden up against some Republican, Biden gets crushed.
When you put Biden up against any actual Republicans, Biden wins.
So if Biden goes up against Trump, according to this poll, 45-44, Biden wins.
Biden goes up against Cruz, number two guy last time, 45-39, Biden wins.
If Biden goes up against Pence, 44-42, Biden wins.
Even DeSantis, who is the darling right now, 44-39, Biden wins.
What does this mean?
What are we supposed to make of this?
First thing we're supposed to make of this is there's no such thing as a generic Republican or a generic Democrat.
You always hear this from people who don't pay a lot of attention to politics and who are a little bit squishy.
They'll say, oh, if we could just have a normal candidate.
Oh, if we could just have a kind of normal, regular candidate.
Oh, Biden would get crushed.
But the problem is, there's Trump.
There's Cruz.
There's DeSantis.
There's Pence.
Pence is about as generic as they come.
There's whoever.
Hawley.
Haley.
Christie Known.
Oh, the problem is just these particular people.
There's no generic person.
Everyone has a personality.
And I also don't believe the poll.
I don't believe this poll for one second.
I think that right now what the Democrats are doing is they're trying to push certain polls onto the public to suggest that The leading Republican candidates can't win.
Better get rid of all your top candidates, Republicans.
Go just pick some squish guy that no one's ever heard of.
Go pick Romney 3.0.
I don't think so.
I don't really buy that.
But my takeaway from this poll is actually the opposite that the Dems want us to take away.
If there's no such thing as a generic Republican, that's fine.
Give me an eccentric Republican.
Give me a Republican with personality.
Give me a Republican with a backbone.
Biden is weak.
Let's go for it.
Let's go all the way.
Why?
Why are people shifting?
Even if they don't like the Republican candidates.
Even if the poll is right about that.
Why are people shifting into the Republican camp?
I don't think it's because they're reading very obscure political philosophy.
And they're engaged in all the very online debates between the various factions of the right.
And they've gone back to read the Enlightenment philosophers and Aristotle.
No.
Do you know what I think it is?
I think they're looking at the southern border and they're realizing that we don't have a border, that we don't have a country anymore because millions of people are pouring across.
I think they're looking at their streets, especially if they're living in a major city, and they're watching people go around and rob and steal and rape, kill, pillage, and burn.
And they're saying, well, this is bad.
Stop doing this.
This is bad policy.
Give me the other guy.
Sometimes conservatives, we get a little bit too much in our own heads.
And we say, well, this is because this philosophy and because someone read this think piece that appeared in this magazine.
No, it comes down to pretty basic stuff.
The big issues where Republicans stand to make huge gains, what are they?
Education, immigration, crime.
Education, immigration, crime.
This is the area where the difference between public opinion and elite opinion, certainly in the Democratic Party, but in a lot of Republican circles too, is huge.
Huge chasm here.
Americans want normal education, kick out the creepy racial and sexual stuff.
They want an actual border and much less immigration, both illegal and legal immigration, drastically reduced.
And they want to lock up criminals.
This is the basic stuff that a society does.
And the elites, mostly in the Democrat Party, but in the Republican Party too, have forgotten a lot about that.
There is a comedian, Michael Rappaport, very emotional, very left-wing comedian, very outspoken Democrat comedian.
He just took a video.
He was in a drugstore in New York, and he sees a guy, some criminal, walk in, fill up a bag full of stuff in a drugstore, and just walk right out without paying.
Yo, I'm looking at this s***, this dude, this mother f***er.
Yo, that, this dude is, I can't believe I'm seeing this s***.
This mother f***er.
Yo, this f***er guy just filled his two bags up with everything in Rite Aid right here.
80th and 1st Avenue is walking down the street like s*** is Gucci.
Look at me in my face like what's good.
I was watching him the whole time.
My man just went Christmas shopping in January.
He had the condoms, the shampoo.
But that's not possible, Michael Rappaport, because AOC told me this isn't really happening.
There's been a spate of drugstore robberies going on coast to coast, sea to shining sea.
CVS, Walgreens, Duane Reade, all these places are closing stores, and they're closing stores because people are robbing them blind.
There are other reasons as well, but that's a big part of it.
We're talking millions and millions of dollars worth of stuff.
And the left, led by AOC, says, one, this isn't happening, and if you say it's happening, you're a racist.
Why?
I don't know.
You are.
And two, the reason it is happening is because people need to feed their families.
This is like when Dr.
Fauci said, there is no gain-of-function research.
We're not funding gain-of-function, and all the gain-of-function we're funding is fine.
Which is it?
You're speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
You're contradicting yourself.
That's what AOC is doing here.
There is no robbery epidemic in drugstores, and also it's great that they're stealing stuff they need to feed their families.
Well, Michael Rappaport says here, he ain't stealing a loaf of bread.
This guy was stealing boxes of condoms.
You need that to stop from having a family.
You need that to prevent your family from growing, if you're not going to remain abstinent.
But you certainly don't need that to feed your family.
So this guy goes in, steals a bunch of stuff.
He's probably going to go sell it on the street and take the money.
Daily Wire reported that CVS, just CVS alone, has announced it will close about 900 retail locations over the next three years.
That's about 9% of its 10,000 stores.
This is at least partially attributed to the increased theft.
And Michael Rappaport, he's so confused.
The Democrats, they're so confused.
Why?
How is this happening?
In New York City, criminals are being allowed to go into shops and commit crimes and then just walk away and not be arrested or prosecuted.
Oh, we need to get some investigators.
How did this happen?
Could it have something to do with the fact that Democrat prosecutors and politicians decriminalized all of this stuff?
Could it?
Look, I don't know.
I'm no forensic investigator, but it would seem to me that when you have a bunch of prosecutors and politicians go in and say, we're not going to prosecute these crimes, and if you were arrested for these crimes, we're going to let you go, that maybe you're going to get more of those crimes.
I don't know.
What do I know?
I'm no expert.
I don't have a degree in this stuff.
Michael Rappaport voted for this stuff.
New York voted for this stuff.
It's very sad.
I love New York.
It's my home state.
Spent a lot of time there since I was a kid.
And there actually is a kind of base-level conservatism to New Yorkers.
A lot of people outside of New York don't understand this.
It's the kind of Trumpy conservatism.
The idea that I'm not going to take any BS from anybody.
The idea that I'm going to get in your face a little bit.
The idea that I... The political scene in New York, it's not like Berkeley, California.
It's not like San Francisco.
It's not hippy-dippy stuff.
But they still vote for Democrats, and then they have to deal with the results of these policies.
You don't need some big, thick thesis on political philosophy to understand, let the criminals out, going to get more crime, okay?
And I think there are a lot of people who are, I don't know about Michael Rappaport, he's still probably a big dem, But there are a lot of people who are in the middle, who are independents, who are soft liberals, who are going to look at this and say, you know...
I don't think so.
No more.
They tried to do this in this mayoral election.
The guy who ran as a Democrat, Eric Adams, but he ran on a very pro-cop kind of message.
And so he was positioning himself as the moderate Democrat.
He's not governing as a moderate Democrat, so it's probably not going to work.
But I think that was part of the phenomenon.
And you saw it obviously in the 90s with Giuliani.
Even a very, very left-wing city like New York elects this Republican who's specifically tough on crime.
Most successful mayor in the history of New York.
This is not complicated for Republicans.
Crime, education, and immigration, depending on which area of the country you're running in.
Very simple.
Run on those three things, you're going to do pretty well.
Why is this...
The Democrats are probably going to have to try to move in this direction, but they're facing a problem right now, which is that they want to win over the moderates and the soft liberals who are flocking to the Republicans.
But if they do that, they'll irritate their base, which will kill them.
Right now, the New York Attorney General has just appointed a council who supports the Abolish ICE movement.
A.G. Letitia James has announced that Zephyr Teachout, a left-wing attorney and professor at Fordham School of Law, will join her team.
She has not only said she wants to abolish ICE, she says she wants to prosecute ICE, immigration enforcement.
The Democrats are beholden to their base.
These are not stupid people.
They know that this is not playing well in Peoria.
It's not even playing all that well in Queens or Brooklyn.
But they are beholden to their base.
And so they've got to put themselves on the unpopular side of lots and lots of issues.
You see this specifically play out with education.
Right now, conservatives are running on a platform of education transparency, curriculum transparency, meaning teachers need to put the lesson plans and the reading list up on websites so the parents can see it.
And Democrats don't want that because Democrats are beholden to the teacher unions and to the radical left, so they know that the minute you put all these creepy sexual and racial books on the website for everyone to see, that the parents are going to be upset and are going to push back on them.
So now Democrats are on the anti-transparency side of the issue.
Not a good place to be if you're in politics.
This is how you can win.
The Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has put on a good show talking to the camera saying, everything's great, don't worry, Donald Trump's doing a great job.
Behind closed doors, there is a Hidden, just recently leaked tape of Mayorkas admitting that education, that education, that immigration has never been worse, that it's reached 20, 30 year lows in terms of immigration enforcement, and this might be the worst that we have ever seen in this country.
Now, the leaked tape, which we have, is nothing new.
We all know that that is the case, and we all know that they know that that is the case.
But it's refreshing.
It's delightful.
It gives you some schadenfreude to hear them say it because it raises the question, well, okay, if it's this bad, why don't you just fix it?
They can't fix it because they've got an intrinsic problem as Democrats, namely the base problem.
Doesn't want them to fix it, but the majority of voters do.
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A good rule in politics is to assume that everything that you say to a group of people,
certainly everything you say, if there are any journalists in the room, but even your own staff, anything you write in a text message or an email could appear on the cover of the newspapers.
You should just assume that.
Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, did not assume that.
And so he was caught on tape admitting that immigration is worse now than possibly ever.
We should have enough personnel to take care of the Southern boys.
I mean, that's the solution.
And that hasn't been the case.
Look, it's worse now than it frankly has been in at least 20 years, if not ever.
But that is absolutely not the solution.
And that's a hardship that you're enduring in service of mission.
It's hard.
It's really hard.
Now why is it worse?
Is it worse perhaps because Joe Biden said, surge, come on over, come here?
Is it worse because the Biden administration is secretly flying illegal aliens into remote parts of the country, into smaller airports so the media don't even notice?
Is it worse because the Biden administration is encouraging this kind of stuff?
Maybe.
That's generally how incentives work.
When you incentivize something, you get more of it.
So why is he doing it?
Is he a masochist?
No, it's because it's what his base wants.
And it's because he believes it will give Democrats a long-term electoral advantage, because...
Illegal aliens, and specifically, one, they can very often vote illegally, but two, certainly their children who receive birthright citizenship or their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren are still overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats, even several generations down the road.
So this is a long-term play by Democrats.
Problem is, moderates, independents, soft liberals hate this stuff.
And so you're seeing them flock over to the Republicans.
So you have these three great issues that Republicans can run on.
Immigration, education, and crime.
There's one other issue that really shows you the gap between the Democrat base and every single other Democratic in the country.
And that is the media.
The establishment, legacy, corporate press.
Rasmussen just took a poll.
Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
The media are truly the enemy of the people.
I assume for most people listening to this show, you would say, well, that's a no-brainer.
That's easy.
Here's the breakdown by demographic.
White people, 56% agree the media are truly the enemy of the people.
So white people, it's only, you know, 56, say 44, so it's not evenly split, but relatively close.
Black people, 63% say the media are the enemy of the people.
Other non-white people, 60% say the media are truly the enemy of the people.
So non-white people are more likely to hate the media and think that the media are opposed to the people than white people are.
And still the majority of white people think that too.
Unaffiliated voters, 61% say the media are the enemy of the people.
GOP says 76% or 76% say the media are the enemy of the people.
Among all voters, 58%.
So clear majority of all voters hate the media.
The only group that does not agree with that statement, Democrats, 37%.
So you see the problem here for Democrats?
The problem is That black people, Hispanic people, I guess maybe some Asians included as well, non-white generally, even white people, though in a weaker way, all of those groups and independents and the unaffiliated, they agree with the Republicans much more than they agree with the Democrats on this issue, on the issue of the media.
They also agree with the Republicans much more than Democrats.
Maybe not every single group, but still on the whole, they agree with Republicans over Democrats on crime, on education, on immigration.
So you've got three regular political issues, just the sort of stump issues that political candidates talk about.
And then you've got this one meta political issue, the media, like the politics of politics.
There are political issues, the policies that govern our country.
Then there are the medical issue, the meta political issues, which are the policies that govern politics, how the media are run, how the elections are run, how we count the votes.
Okay.
And on both levels, you're seeing a breaking of pretty much every demographic for the Republicans.
So why won't Democrats change course?
Because they're beholden to their base.
Their base has helped them before.
The base doesn't appear to be sufficient now.
The left is overestimating the amount of influence and clout that they have, politically and culturally.
You saw this in the case of Neil Young.
Neil Young came out.
Neil Young, a very well-known musician decades ago, Neil Young, a very whiny hippie from Canada.
Neil Young said, it's Rogan or me.
I don't lie.
Neil Young, who with Crosby, Stills, and Nash went on the free speech tour in 2006, told Spotify that if they don't censor Joe Rogan for having medical experts on his show who disagree with the prevailing narrative and Dr.
Fauci, that he will pull his music from Spotify.
And Spotify said, okay, Neil, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
What?
What are you talking?
Didn't you hear what I said?
Hey, hey, my, my.
I don't want to say goodbye.
And they said, see ya.
See ya, buddy.
Bye-bye, Neil.
But I have six million listeners a month.
Right.
Joe Rogan has 200 million listeners a month, so bye-bye.
And I think he was shocked.
By the way, I don't even think it was Neil Young's call to make.
Because I don't think Neil Young owns the rights to that music.
I assume those songs are owned by some larger music corporation, by a larger catalog.
So it created a sticky situation.
He said, I'm going to pull.
And Spotify said, okay, get all your music off.
See ya.
10-15 years ago, that couldn't have happened.
10-15 years ago, Joe Rogan couldn't have happened.
You would have had, in those days, this would have been 2010, going into the early 20-teens, you had really just the beginning of the new media.
Twitter was relatively new.
The podcasting was relatively new.
You had some people pioneering it, like Adam Carolla, actually.
But still, the establishment media, meaning the news media, meaning the entertainment media, like Neil Young, meaning Hollywood, that still had a big lock on things.
Now, not so much...
And so, Spotify stands with Joe Rogan.
Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
We're trying to figure out who's got the influence, where the influence is, where the threats really lie.
They want to shut up Joe Rogan because he's cracked up much of the leftist influence over the country.
And they want to tamp it down and it's not working.
Speaking of influence, President Trump has just weighed in on a congressional race very close to home, in my new home of Nashville.
The Tennessee 5th Congressional District.
He has endorsed Morgan Ortegas, who's a friend of mine.
She worked at the State Department.
Lovely lady.
She's a recent arrival in Nashville.
She's running against Robbie Starbuck, another friend of mine.
Robbie Starbuck, also another recent arrival in Nashville.
They are both running against several other candidates who are from Nashville, who've spent a lot of time here.
One of them is Beth Harwell.
She was the Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.
Doesn't have nearly as much national name recognition, not as much media presence, but much more local, probably name recognition, much more experience in the district.
So you're going to see, regardless of any of these, there are other candidates as well, but regardless of, I generally don't endorse in primaries.
I don't think that's my role.
But what you're going to see play out here is a real question of where does the influence lie?
When you're looking at candidates like Morgan and Robbie versus candidates like, say, Beth and the other locals, you're going to see the question, where is the influence?
Is all politics still local, like Tip O'Neill used to say?
Or is all politics national now?
Has that shifted?
Are we not really as attached to our local congressional districts or counties or towns?
Are we more attached to the national political party?
Whoever comes out on top, that might tell you something.
And then the big question is, what's Trump's influence?
friends.
What is Trump's influence here?
Trump is making some big bets.
He's endorsing in primaries.
Most likely for a lot of seats around the country and all but one in Tennessee, they're going to break Republican in the general election.
So that's not the issue.
The question is, who wins the primaries?
Some people were upset with Trump.
Some people wanted Trump to endorse Robbie Starbuck.
Some people are upset that he endorsed Morgan.
There are all these little factions of the GOP fighting now for the influence over Trump.
But the bigger question is, does Trump have influence in the districts?
If Trump's nominees win the primaries, frankly, regardless of whether or not they win the general, that's going to tell you a lot about Trump's standing in 2024.
If he is still the kingmaker in 2022, he's going to go into the 2024 race with a lot of momentum.
If Trump's endorsements do not matter in 2022, if he endorses primary candidates and then their opponents win the primaries, Trump is going to go into 2024 looking pretty weak.
I think in that case, you're going to see much more of an opening for the other candidates who were on that list.
Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, people who weren't even on that list.
Big stakes.
Trump is taking a risk here, but he's got to do it because he's got to shore up his support looking into 2024.
What is his clout?
Who is going to win?
Speaking of winning, really excellent news out of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
It's a sentence I didn't think I would say ever.
Really great news out of OSHA. They have withdrawn the vaccine mandate for private employers.
Now hold on.
You might be saying, Michael, I thought the Supreme Court struck down the OSHA mandate.
Yes and no.
The Supreme Court The OSHA mandate suspended while litigation went through and all of these cases were heard in the lower courts.
And the Supreme Court said that very likely the people who are going up against the OSHA mandate are going to win on the merits, especially if it gets back up to us, the Supreme Court.
Hint, hint, wink, wink.
We're going to give them the victory.
But the OSHA mandate still remained in place.
It was just suspended.
OSHA has now voluntarily, somewhat voluntarily, withdrawn the vaccine mandate yesterday because they knew that they were going to lose if it went back up to the Supreme Court.
A lot of companies before OSHA did that were suspending their own private mandates, but they didn't have to.
This is a really important lesson for conservatives who are enamored of the idea that politics is downstream of culture.
Or even the converse of it.
That actually culture is downstream of politics.
And that this is always the case.
You only work through the government or you only work through private enterprise.
Actually it's both.
What happened in the OSHA case is that a private company, the Daily Wire, and some other companies got together and sued the government.
Then, the government stopped the mandate.
Then, a private company changed their private policies, even though they didn't have to.
Starbucks changed, for instance, there were other companies too, changed their private policies, even though there's nothing in the court order saying that the private company had to change its mandate.
Then, the government, yet again, the OSHA agency, withdrew their mandate.
I'm dizzy.
I'm dizzy with all of this winning.
How did that happen?
Well, it's because culture influenced politics.
Politics influenced culture.
Culture influenced politics again.
And it was back and forth, and it's really hard to separate those two things.
And the left doesn't separate those two things.
The left works in the private sphere, and the left works in the government.
And the left wields the private institutions, and the left wields the government.
And some institutions, it's kind of hard to tell the difference.
Is Google private?
Kind of.
Is Google the government?
Yeah, there's a lot of government in Google.
We need to do that, too.
We need to do that, too.
The conservatives who say we've got to focus only on the culture and private enterprise and we can never wield the government, they're insane.
They've got their head in the sand.
They're squishes.
Don't listen to that.
That's a bad idea.
And the conservatives who say, forget about private industry.
Let's just wield the government like a cudgel.
And I actually don't think there are many conservatives even saying that.
But if there were, they would be missing something, too.
You need to do both.
Politics, culture, society, it's just kind of what we're all doing together, man, and we need to wield what leverage, what influence we have to affect our political vision.
Our neighbors to the north living in America's hat are not so lucky.
The poor Canadians, as America is getting marginally freer by the day, you get this win at the Supreme Court, you get this win from OSHA, you get this win from private enterprise.
In Canada, people are locking down even more.
It is now illegal throughout much of Canada to go into a store to buy things if you have not received the Fauciouchie.
They're even making it difficult to go buy groceries.
So forget about going in to buy a Gucci handbag.
If you go in to buy chicken and bread to feed your family, if you go in to get drugs at the pharmacy and you are unvaccinated, for now in Canada, you are still allowed to do You won't be made to starve to death.
You won't be made to die without your medicine.
But if you do that, you are going to have a guard with you at all times to make sure that you don't buy anything else.
Today, big box stores that have a footprint of 1,500 square meters or more are going to have to ask people, customers, to show proof of vaccination.
Now, pharmacies and grocery will be exempt from this.
So if you're going into a Costco or a Walmart or something like that, where you might be going in to buy groceries or visit the pharmacy, in that case, an employee will have to be with that person as they walk through the store to make sure that they do not go and buy other products or other items that might be in the store.
Put that down.
Put down.
Can I buy the Twinkie?
Well, it's a margin call.
It's not necessary for your nutrition, but it is still food.
Maybe you can buy the Twinkie, but don't buy those flowers.
You're not allowed to have flowers.
Flowers are for vaccinated people only.
No.
Mommy, can I have a candy bar?
I guess it's technically food.
Mommy, can I have that balloon?
No.
No balloons.
Balloons are for vaccinated customers only.
Purely vindictive.
Purely wrathful.
These people are already in the store.
They're not going to spread COVID more because they buy a bouquet of flowers.
Rather than just buying food.
Are they allowed to buy alcohol?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I suspect they don't know either.
We think this sort of thing could never happen in the civilized world.
It is happening in the civilized world.
Canada, Australia, parts of Europe.
It could happen here.
We're not that far off from this sort of thing happening in the United States.
Certainly not in the left-wing cities.
What has prevented it is not even the charity of our ruling class.
Certainly not that.
It's not the good intentions of the people.
It's the structures of power in the country that even as they've been so toppled in recent decades...
Still can separate power and influence to some degree.
The states still have some power vis-a-vis the federal government.
Private industry still has some power vis-a-vis the bureaucratic agencies, for instance.
You can still do it for now.
Very important to hold on to that leverage and wield it.
Speaking of the culture, shocking new docuseries coming out of A&E about Hugh Hefner.
The playboy.
You know, the man who lived a totally hedonistic existence for his entire life had a harem of women whom he regularly slept with, all of them at the same time, many, many times per week.
Turns out, this is pretty shocking, he was kind of a bad guy.
Stop the presses.
Extra, extra.
Read all about it.
It turns out that Hugh Hefner, who was lauded by the culture for many decades, Hef, turns out he was kind of a bad guy.
In this docuseries, they lift the lid on the dark underbelly of Playboy.
Turns out if you just live with a bunch of prostitutes for many decades and do a bunch of drugs and abuse everybody and just pursue your own pleasure...
That might be kind of dark.
It's not an underbelly.
It's an overbelly.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew this.
Except that Playboy and the popular culture generally presented this very nice, funny, cartoonish image of Playboy.
The reality was not quite like that.
One of the Playboy ladies who ran one of the divisions...
It was cult-like.
The women had been groomed and led to believe they were part of this family.
Hef really did believe he owned these women.
We had playmites that overdosed, that committed suicide.
Many documentary participants said that Hefner's insatiable appetites led to desensitization, which led him to demand stranger and stranger sexual activities.
This led him to watch snuff films, films in which people were Some people are saying, well, it's really convenient that now that Hef is dead, all these women are saying this stuff.
They were happy to take paychecks for many years.
They were happy to live this lifestyle for many years.
But now that he's dead, they're coming after him.
I don't believe any of it.
No, look, obviously the women made terrible decisions.
But that doesn't let Hefner off the hook.
Of course he did this creepy stuff.
He didn't even really hide it, did he?
The culture just decided to laugh about it.
The culture just decided to admire it.
The reason I mention the story is not to stomp on the grave of Hugh Hefner, who is, I'm sure, looking up at this show right now in dismay.
You hope he's not.
You hope he had some kind of repentance.
But he didn't really show it, did he?
What these playmates are describing is that things just got worse and worse and worse.
And this is an important lesson for conservatives as we look at the culture.
How do you make a better culture?
We have a pretty crappy culture right now.
How do you make a better culture?
You can't have a better culture without having people do better things.
And you can't have people do better things, namely vice instead of virtue, without having inducements and incentives to those better things.
And some of those might be through private enterprise and some of those might be through the government and some is culture and some is politics.
But as we've been describing, the two are kind of hard to separate.
It's kind of hard to see the difference sometimes between public and private, particularly since in recent years, the form of government we have is called the euphemistic public-private partnership.
That's what you hear a lot of liberals.
We need public-private partnerships.
Mussolini had public-private partnerships.
We have an idea here that when you engage in some vice and you engage in sin, And you live a hedonistic lifestyle for a little bit.
It just blows off steam.
That'll actually make society more stable.
If you permit lots of vice and sin and terrible stuff, that's gonna make society more stable because people aren't gonna be so repressed.
That's not how it works.
Virtue and vice actually are habits.
The more vice you commit, the more vicious it's gonna get.
The more virtue you practice, the more virtuous you are gonna get.
You're never gonna be perfect.
You're probably not going to be totally depraved and destroyed and hideous.
You're not going to be totally evil.
And you're not going to be totally wonderfully perfect and holy, probably.
But the more you practice one, the more you're going to get.
The more you practice the other, the more you're going to get.
That's true on the individual level, and it's true for society.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, there's an opening on the Supreme Court and it's been decided that a black woman must fill it.
Which black woman?
Well, any will do apparently.
Once again, we see the absurd racism of racial equity on full display.
Also, there has been a huge surge in children experiencing speech delays because of masking and Media Matters publishes a lengthy expose about a certain bigoted Dr.
Phil clip that lots of people on Facebook have seen and shared and they're very concerned about that.
Now, our daily cancellation will deal finally with the NFT phenomenon.
Is it a good investment opportunity or is it the dumbest thing in the history of the world and a sign of our civilization's decadence and decay?
