Ep. 939 - The Masks Are Stupid And Always Have Been
Top public health experts and Democrat governors reverse course on mask mandates, the Supreme Court upholds Republican gerrymandering, and prominent Dems try to pass the buck for the massive crime wave that they caused.
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After now two full years of being called conspiracy theorists and murderers for opposing the stupid face masks, conservatives and normal people everywhere are being vindicated as even prominent liberal public health figures are coming out against mask mandates.
CNN's medical expert, Leanna Wu, explains why it is so important to ditch the mask mandates as soon as possible.
You say we can start removing at least some coronavirus restrictions.
Now, tell us why.
Well, I agree with Colorado, with many other local and state jurisdictions that are beginning to lift government mandates, and I think this is the key.
I'm not saying that we should be stopping masking, but rather that this needs to shift from a government requirement to an individual decision.
The government can't keep on telling our citizens that this is a five alarm fire all the time.
People are just going to start tuning it out and not pay attention.
They'll be desensitized.
And so what needs to happen is we need to end the state of emergency and preserve the ability of public health authorities to reinstitute mandates in the future if we see more and more dangerous variants later.
Now, if Wu wants to preserve the credibility of public health gurus, I think she's probably about 18 to 24 months too late for that one.
But did you catch the reasoning there?
She's saying that we need to end the mask mandates not to preserve the public health, but to preserve the authority of the public health officials.
She's making not a scientific or a medical argument, but a political one.
If the ruling class doesn't lighten up on the masks soon, she fears, no one will listen to them on the masks or anything else in the future.
And she's right.
It is pure politics, as some of us were saying from day one.
You know I hate to say I told you so.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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The masks are now and have always been primarily a political symbol.
Whatever medical or scientific utility or lack of utility that they ever had, that was always secondary to the masks as a political symbol.
And now the liberals who are telling us to get rid of the mask mandates, the very same liberals who encouraged the mask mandates for a very long time, they are making arguments to get rid of them on political grounds.
The The Democrat governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, just went on Jake Tapper's show on CNN, and he said we're going to get rid of the mask mandates in schools, and Jake Tapper gave him a layup.
This was such an easy question.
This should have been a slam dunk.
He said, what is the scientific argument for the mask mandates and now for getting rid of them?
Just, we follow the science.
Tell me the science, Governor of New Jersey.
And Phil Murphy falls silent.
There's no question that masking in our schools since the beginning of the school year has been a very smart public health step.
I think we've had just over 2,600 cases of students vaccinated.
With COVID positive since the beginning of the school year, that's out of 1.4 million kids.
So it's a pretty...
Stark piece of evidence, I think, that this has absolutely worked.
But you've got to meet the moment.
You try always to not undershoot the moment and put lives at risk or overshoot the moment and add more stress and mental health challenges to the system.
And we think this plan of a month notice is going to get that as right as we can.
Yeah, but have you seen data that definitively proves that these mask mandates have worked?
I mean, the numbers you just presented are impressive, but are they different from the numbers in states where they didn't have mask mandates?
Yeah, again, I know Jersey, Jake, the best, but I'm highly confident, and I'm sure our health officials could say it definitively, there's no question they've worked.
Yeah, Jake, Jake, I don't have any numbers in front of me, and I don't know anything about anything, but I'm confident that they worked.
So they worked really, really well, and now we're going to do the opposite policy, which is also going to work just as well.
Kudos to Jake Tapper here for at least kind of pushing back.
It was an easy question, so the New Jersey governor should have had an answer to it, but he doesn't have an answer because he doesn't have any proof that the mask mandates in schools did anything whatsoever.
Doesn't have any proof at all.
It was political.
The masks were very useful to the Democrats who wanted to reshape our culture and our economy and our politics for the past two years of 15 days to slow the spread.
And now they're getting some diminishing returns on this.
They're getting a ton of pushback, especially from parents, which is why you're seeing the mask mandates go away from schools in particular first.
And they're saying, OK, politically, we can't keep this up anymore.
Liana Wu has said the same thing.
Dr.
Fauci has made similar statements.
When Dr.
Fauci has been caught in contradictions on his views on public health measures, he says, well, you know, there's a limit to what we can have people do.
Right, so it's political.
So it's not scientific.
Okay, speaking of schools beyond COVID and the mask mandates, a Virginia school board has just voted to approve some true radicalism.
There was a proposal put forward to this Virginia school board to fly another flag next to the American flag at all of their schools.
That other flag is the BLM flag.
BLM is a Marxist organization that says that the United States is intrinsically oppressive and unjust and bigoted that seeks total revolution in the United States.
And this Virginia school board just voted to fly the two flags side by side.
The board approves the students' request to fly the Black Lives Matter flag, and the board will review this matter annually in alignment with the equity policy.
All right.
So, um...
I guess if it's clear I could do it and all those in favor raise hands and then if we have lack of clarity do the roll call is that okay?
I'm sorry this shouldn't be that complicated but okay so all those in favor of the motion signify by raising your hand and Alan I can see so it is three against six in favor And so the flag will continue to fly.
So the flag is going to fly.
Okay.
We are now going to have the BLM flag fly next to the American flag.
But the BLM flag opposes the American flag.
There's a contradiction here.
The BLM movement really got off the ground because people started protesting the American flag on football fields and a lot of other places.
So these are contradictory symbols.
And I bet you, if you asked liberals around America, which flag do you more identify with?
If you asked real activists, leftists, and liberals, which flag do you more identify with?
The BLM flag or the American flag?
I bet most of them would tell you the BLM flag.
Beyond BLM, if you showed a flag, the LGBT, the rainbow flag or the new rainbow flag where there's a bunch of races in it, you know, like black is now a sexual orientation or something, that flag or the American flag, which do you identify more with?
I would bet that most ardent leftist and liberal activists would tell you the rainbow flag.
Flags are important.
Words are important.
I wrote a whole book about this called Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
The left reshapes the culture through symbols, and words in particular.
Words are just symbols.
Flags are signs of conquest, okay?
That's why conquering armies carry flags and standards.
They're a sign of hegemony.
This is what we stand for.
And so when the left reshapes all of our symbols...
We should use our politics to stop this.
We should ban the flying of these radical flags that oppose America next to the American flag.
We should ban the flying of them in our schools and our public buildings entirely.
There was a big fight over the rainbow flag at US embassies.
What do we stand for?
If we stand for the red, white, and blue truth, justice, and the American way, you're going to rally a lot of Americans to your cause.
If we stand for pride flags flying in Kandahar, you're going to have more and more and more division.
You're going to have more and more strife.
You're going to have an abolition of the traditional American nation.
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That is code Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. Speaking of conquest, great news out of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has just upheld redistricting in Alabama.
You know, every some number of years, it varies a little bit by the state, but every so often, states will redraw their congressional maps.
They redraw them because congressional representation is based on the population, so sometimes you add seats, sometimes you take away seats.
So in Alabama, they're redrawing their maps a little bit, and the way that they've redrawn their maps helps Republicans.
Republicans get more seats.
So, the United States Supreme Court just ruled to stay a lower court ruling that would have required the Alabama legislature to add another Democrat-leaning congressional district.
This is a 5-4 ruling.
It was the conservatives versus the liberals, and then John Roberts, the chief justice, sided with the liberals.
I don't know how much longer we need to have these headlines.
John Roberts sides with the liberals.
He joins the liberals.
I think he joined the liberals.
I think he's on the liberals' side at this point, okay?
I don't think he's a conservative vote.
He's sort of a swing vote, but he very often sides with the liberals.
But in any case...
This will keep the current representation in Alabama.
Six Republicans, one Democrat in the congressional mix.
This is a wonderful thing.
You will always hear people speak out against gerrymandering.
You'll hear Democrats speak out against it.
You'll have Republicans speak out against it.
Gerrymandering is fine.
It's fine.
What that means is you draw congressional districts based on how to maintain your political power.
Okay.
And it comes from, there was a politician named Jerry and he, he drew a congressional district to look like a salamander.
I think that's where the word comes from.
But sometimes these districts look kind of ridiculous.
They twirl around, but that's how you keep, you know, say 60% Republican, 40% Democrat.
So you're always going to win.
Okay.
I think gerrymandering is just fine.
I don't know what the alternative is.
The alternative to gerrymandering, the alternative to partisan drawing of districts, is going to be some allegedly nonpartisan commission outside of the electoral accountability, which is almost always going to lean Democrat anyway.
That's just how these nonpartisan coalitions go.
And so I don't see what the alternative is.
You always hear about the Republican gerrymandering.
You never hear about it in New York.
What they just did in New York, by the way, is as outrageous, at least, as anything the Republicans have done.
The New York state Democrats have gerrymandered the map to give Democrats possibly a net three new seats in the US House of Representatives.
So the new map draws 22 Democrat leaning districts and only four Republican leaning districts.
This cuts the number of Republican-leaning districts in half.
But you don't hear boo about this.
You don't hear about the attack on voting rights by New York.
You don't hear about that this is Jim Crow Part 2 in New York.
You don't hear about any of this sort of stuff because it helps the Dems.
And so they won't even call it gerrymandering there a lot of the time.
The Dems do it.
The Republicans do it.
This is what happens when people get power.
This is a consequence of the people putting these politicians into power.
So be it.
We got some good news on this front in Tennessee.
My free state of Tennessee that I live in, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, has just approved a once-in-a-decade redistricting map to split up Nashville into multiple congressional seats and gives Republicans another seat.
This is awesome.
I love it.
Great stuff.
Under this new map, any Democrat who's trying to run in Nashville is going to have a significant uphill challenge against a Republican.
Love that.
So of the news of the day, we got Alabama, Tennessee, and New York.
We got crushed in New York.
The Republicans are doing well in Tennessee and Alabama.
That's politics, baby.
I'll take it.
We can take the wins that we can get.
All right?
It's not...
It's not exactly a cleanly drawn map, but it will help conservatives.
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The reason I bring up all of this, especially in Tennessee, is because in this new district being drawn in Tennessee, there is a major battle.
The battle for this House seat involves Morgan Ortegas.
She worked for the Trump administration.
She just got Trump's endorsement for the seat.
Robbie Starbuck, who's a fairly well-known conservative media figure.
And then a number of people who have actually lived in Tennessee for a long time and have been elected in Tennessee.
the former Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, a few other local Tennessee politicians.
The two leading candidates, at least as far as the media are concerned, are Robbie and Morgan.
They have not lived here for a particularly long time.
I'm not even sure if they're eligible to run as Republicans because they haven't voted in Republican primaries, but they're getting a lot of attention and Morgan got the Trump endorsement.
So Morgan was exploring a run for the House of Representatives.
And now she's just announced that she's doing it and she's making the campaign all about Trump.
Four years ago, The borders were secure.
The economy was humming.
And America's enemies were on the run.
Morgan Ortega knows.
She was there.
Morgan worked with President Trump to not just make America great again at home, but America strong again in the world.
This is because of years, four years of policies that President Trump put into place.
That's why she has the complete and total endorsement of President Trump.
Now Sleepy Joe and the Radical Socialists are trying to destroy it all.
Ortega serves our country in the Navy Reserve, and she's seen what Biden's weak policies do to demoralize our troops and empower our enemies.
Now the Radical Socialists, Big Tech, and the liberal media are colluding to open our borders, lock down our country, And try to cancel anyone who disagrees.
But Morgan Ortegas is fighting back.
You may have helped spread Russian disinformation yourself for years by promoting this.
She'll fight the radical left to secure our borders, safeguard our elections, and stand up to Communist China.
Morgan Ortegas.
She fought for President Trump.
She'll fight for Tennessee.
As a rule, I do not get involved in primaries, especially in this primary.
I'm friends with Morgan.
I'm friends with Robbie.
I have met some of the other candidates who are running.
And I think that the voters of the district should be able to choose their own nominee.
I don't really care.
They can duke it out amongst themselves.
But I have to bring up this Morgan ad here because it shows you a huge dynamic, not just in this district, but in the entire midterm elections.
And that question is not who's got more political influence, Morgan Ortega or Robbie Starbuck or someone who's lived in Tennessee.
That question is, how much influence does Trump have?
What is Trump's effect going to be on the midterm elections?
And what is that going to mean for 2024?
In 2022, are candidates going to run away from Trump?
Are they going to embrace Trump?
If they do embrace Trump, what's that going to do for them?
Who's going to win in these primaries?
If the Trump candidate wins in the primaries, who's going to win in the generals?
This is all setting up 2024.
Morgan is obviously leaning hard on Trump.
We'll see which other candidates do that around the country, and we'll see what that means for 2024.
If the Trump influence is weak in 2022, that gives a huge opening for someone like a Ron DeSantis, and if you're looking at the governors, someone like a Ted Cruz or a Josh Hawley, if you're looking at the senators, maybe a congressman, sometimes congressman-run too.
It's going to completely shift the dynamic.
Now, speaking of Trump, Adam Kinzinger, speaking of Trump and Congress, Adam Kinzinger, who is nominally a Republican, but all he ever does is help the Democrats as a member of Congress.
He just went on MSNBC, and he says the most important thing for Republicans to be doing right now in Congress, the most important thing to do two years after the 2020 election, is to speak out against Trump.
I always wonder, you and Liz Cheney pretty much standing alone, and the hundreds of other Republican congressmen and women, do you ever talk to them personally, off the record, and say, guys, you know the truth.
You're a bright person.
You're educated.
You see what I saw.
You're not dumb.
Do they just look at you and go, well, we want to keep our job?
I mean, what happens behind the scenes?
I always wonder, because you're sitting next to these people, and you're eating with them, and you're dining with them, so what is their explanation to you personally off the record when you talk to them?
This is a really good question because it can be any number of things.
So if it's somebody that I know isn't like crazy, right, you know, a normal person, you'll hear him say, well, look, I just have to win my primary because if it's not me, trust me, the guy I'm running against, he's really bad.
I'm like, okay, great.
But, you know, at some point you have to stand up.
Some of them it's...
Hey, you have to quit trying to tell me how to do my job.
You'll get that occasionally.
If I ask somebody, for instance, if they've even tweeted anything or made a statement at all in opposition to what Donald Trump said.
Have you come out against Trump?
Have you sent tweets?
No, Adam.
Shut up.
Stop bothering me.
Have you?
Why won't you do it?
And I love the way he phrases the question.
What do your Republican colleagues say when you talk to them?
He doesn't talk to them because he spends all of his time talking to Democrats like you, Donnie.
So he doesn't talk to them?
At all.
What he does is...
I love the question.
He says, what do they tell you off the record?
Hey, Adam, you're a complete snake, so what do they tell you in confidence?
I want you to tell me and all the Democrats on air.
He doesn't really talk to them.
He talks to Democrats because Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney and a number of other Republicans exist not to advance conservative priorities.
They exist to prop up the dominant liberal party, the liberal ruling class.
Their job is to be the court jesters in the kingdom of liberalism.
You remember when some of these people used to be strong conservative fighters?
I vaguely remember when we had strong conservative fighters.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Speaking of anti-Trump Republicans or former Republicans or former conservatives, or I don't even know what you want to call them.
There was news yesterday that Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, who were longtime writers for National Review, Weekly Standard, they had been Fox contributors, then they left Fox in a big huff and they said Fox is very irresponsible and they're too right-wing and they've gone crazy and so we don't want to be an irresponsible news channel anymore.
It was announced...
That they're at a new news channel.
Two new news channels, I guess.
Jonah Goldberg is at CNN, and Steve Hayes is at NBC. I wasn't going to even mention this story because there's so much infighting on the right.
I think we need to spend most of our energy going after the left.
But this was just so preposterous, I had to bring it up.
NBC is bad enough, but CNN... These gentlemen left Fox because they said the reporting was irresponsible.
But they made a point in their exit note that they published for everyone.
They said, we won't be occupying the permanent anti-Fox seats at CNN or MSNBC. Cable news in general is a big part of the problem.
And then one of them goes to NBC and the other one goes to CNN. So they did exactly what they said they wouldn't do.
They say Fox is irresponsible and what do they do?
They go to journalistic outlets that are much, much less responsible, much, much more reckless, much, much less honest than the one that they left.
I'm not even saying that it's necessarily bad to go and work at those places if you're going to stand firm for conservative principles and the conservative movement and conservative policy priorities.
I think of Rick Santorum.
Rick Santorum was at CNN for a fairly long time until...
He refused to become a squish, and so they booted him out.
But he went on CNN, and he would make the conservative points, and they would tolerate him briefly, and then finally they said, no, sorry, you're too conservative.
But clearly, the reason that Jonah and Steve Hayes have been hired by CNN and NBC broadly is because they are conservative.
Making the left talking points about the Republican Party, about Donald Trump, about the present state of conservatism and the Republican Party.
They are there to attack conservatives as the nominal conservatives so that the liberal audiences can feel like they're getting a balanced perspective when they're not.
They're just getting almost the same exact talking points from two people who pretend to be in opposition to one another.
The reason I bring it up again is not to go after Jonah or Steve Hayes personally.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the anti-Trump Republicans.
I don't think their influence among the actual conservative movement or the Republican Party is all that great.
And even if it were, I don't really care to focus on all this little infighting on the right or among people who used to be on the right who aren't really that right-wing anymore.
The reason I bring it up is to show you Two lies or mistakes or errors about the anti-Trump movement that really burst onto the scene in 2015 and 2016 when Trump ran.
There were two big issues.
One, the first lie was, this is just about Trump.
They said this is not about conservatism.
This is not about policy.
This is just about Trump.
Trump is a bad man, and so we're just coming out against Trump.
But we're still conservatives.
We're still Republicans.
It's not.
It's not.
Trump was elected six years ago.
Trump hasn't been president now for over a year.
He's gone.
He's playing golf in Mar-a-Lago.
And you're still, all you people are talking about is Donald Trump.
Adam Kinzinger, he's saying, why aren't you tweeting about Trump?
What are you talking about?
Trump hasn't even been on Twitter in a year.
Trump hasn't been the president in a year.
Why are you still working against other Republican candidates?
Why are you still working against Republicans retaking the House?
Why are you still going on TV and attacking Republicans and conservatives?
Because it's about more than Trump.
Because Trump represented something.
Which was a knocking away of a bunch of old stupid platitudes and a bunch of losing with dignity, even though the people who would propose losing with dignity didn't generally have a lot of dignity themselves.
And because Donald Trump wanted to win, and he wanted to shift American policy on trade, and he wanted to shift American policy on immigration, and he wanted to actually do something and defend America.
And some people didn't like it, and they pretended it was all about Donald Trump palling around with porn stars.
It wasn't.
It's about a lot more than Trump.
And then the second lie.
This is not a binary choice.
You heard this a lot from anti-Trump Republicans, especially in 2016.
But in 2020, too, the handful that remained, they said, this election is not a binary choice.
Yes, it is.
It is.
Elections in America are binary choices.
You can pick the one guy or the other guy.
And if you are a conservative who does not vote for the conservative candidate, you are giving support to the liberal candidate and vice versa.
That is a binary choice.
Trump, he palled around with porn stars.
Donald Trump, he used vulgar language privately with people, and sometimes publicly too, I guess.
And so I'm going to give at least my tacit and sometimes explicit support to a candidate who wants to kill almost a million babies a year and take away our civil liberties and upend the American way of life.
That doesn't seem very principled to me.
And then I guess here is the proof.
Two of the more prominent anti-Trump conservatives who even say, we're not going to be so unprincipled that we're going to go over and just take up the anti-conservative conservative seats at CNN and NBC. And what do they do?
They do exactly that.
I'm beginning to think.
Now, stay with me here.
I'm beginning to think that the people who oppose Donald Trump for his supposed lack of principles might not be all that principled themselves.
I know, it sounds shocking, it sounds crazy, but I'm beginning to think that.
Don't be like that.
That's not good.
You want to stand for something.
And you know what you don't want to stand for?
This guy, this current president, Joe Biden.
You want to talk about binary choices.
If you did not support Trump in 2020, you supported this guy.
And so behold, the great, dignified, mature, responsible president that you helped to elect.
I don't want to get going because I keep you here too long because you know all what I've said and you know what I've done and you know what we're doing and I know what you're doing.
Yes.
As Franklin Roosevelt, frankly, very famously said, We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
And Ronald Reagan famously said, Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
And I'm sure we will be reciting this for many years to come.
Joe Biden famously said, play it again.
I don't want to get going because I keep you here too long because you know all what I've said and you know what I've done and you know what we're doing and I know what you're doing.
I don't want to get going because you know, and hear what I said, but we know all, you know, and I know, and you know, and I know what you're doing.
There actually is a weird kind of coherence to this.
The key phrase here is you know, and you know, and you all know, and you all know, and you know all, and I know, and you know that I know, and I know that you know.
What the you know signifies is Biden's confidence that he won't be called out by the press.
If any Republican sounded like this, you would have a call to remove him from office for mental incapacitation for any Republican president.
And you actually did get some of these calls when Donald Trump said far more coherent things when he was in office.
But the you know, the you know, the you know, the you know that I know that you know, signifies that, look, we're on the same team, press.
You're not going to call me out.
It's okay.
It's cool.
We all know what we're doing because we're on the same team.
One of the crazier parts of the Biden administration is that he is among the more coherent Democrats in power.
Maybe not in terms of his syntax and grammar, But in terms of his policy, he is no less coherent than any of the other ones.
Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, she took over after they ousted Andrew Cuomo.
Kathy Hochul is now presiding over a major spike in crime, especially in New York.
It's going on around the country, though, too.
And Kathy Hochul was called out for this, and they said, hold on.
Governor Hochul, maybe it's all your jailbreak policies that are letting all the criminals out.
Maybe that has something to do with the crime.
And she says, absolutely not.
Show me the data.
Show me the data that my pro-crime policies are having an effect on crime.
She says, quote, I'm looking...
I'm looking for the data that shows me that bail reform, that's the euphemism for a law that Kathy Hochul supported that had a wide-sweeping effect on crime in New York, that bail reform is the reason that somehow crime is going up.
She said this in an interview with the Post-Journal.
I'm focused on what I have control over right now.
Show me the data.
Show me the data.
So we actually, we do have the data.
There's new data from the state's Office of Court Administration shows that, now this covers arrests made from July 1st, 2020 to August 30th, 2020, the first two months of the new law.
It shows that the rise in crime is in fact largely due to repeat offenders being released back onto the streets after the arrest because that's what the law allowed them to do.
So there you are.
We've got some data.
We've got a lot more data too.
But beyond that, what do you mean show me the data?
You signed a bill that puts criminals back on the street, and now you're asking me to prove to you that putting criminals back on the street is causing crime to go up.
That's like saying, show me the data that rainstorms make the ground wet.
Where's the data?
Okay, I guess we've got the data, but it's also if you've got two brain cells to rub together in your head, you can put two and two together here.
Of course that's happening.
And Democrats know this.
They know that their pro-crime policies, soft on crime policies, have led to more crime.
That's what happens.
And some are trying to be subtle about it, like Kathy Hochul in New York.
And she says, well, I don't know.
We don't have the data.
It's very complicated.
There are a lot of factors at play, and she's trying to hide it.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Try to follow which shell the card is under.
No.
No, some Democrats are a little less subtle about it.
Cori Bush.
Democrat representative in the U.S. Congress.
She is still endorsing defund the police.
She says, quote, My colleagues keep telling us to wait.
They keep telling us defunding the police and investing in communities won't work.
Well, their policies keep ending up with police murdering black people.
Enough patronizing.
Listen to the movements that are telling you how to save lives.
We're going to save lives by letting all the criminals run roughshod over the communities.
What we need to do is stop policing people.
We need to invest in communities.
You know the best investment you can make in crime-ridden communities?
Absolutely, dollar for dollar, the best investment you can make?
Putting more cops on the street to arrest the criminals.
That is the best investment you can make.
This is the sort of thing that only ideologues and idiots do not understand.
Maybe I repeat myself.
Especially in New York.
New York is a great example for this because there was a big movement, especially among white liberals, to stop a policy from the Bloomberg era called Stop and Frisk.
Stop and Frisk was a very pro-cop, proactive policy to fight crime.
And they said, this is unfair because black people are disproportionately being targeted by the stop and frisk policies.
Which I guess was true.
If you look at, not at proportions of crime or criminal neighborhoods, but if you just look at percentage of the population, maybe that's true.
But what they didn't tell you was...
That not only were the criminals disproportionately black, but the cops were disproportionately black.
And not only were the cops disproportionately black, but the people calling the cops to arrest the criminals were disproportionately black.
Because the neighborhoods were disproportionately black.
So you've got, yes, there is a racial element at play, I guess, but it's affecting everyone involved.
The cops, the victims, and the criminals, and the neighborhoods broadly.
What the ideologues here do not understand is that if you want to help black neighborhoods, if you want to help black victims...
Then you need proactive policies to stop crime.
This is the basic thing a government can do, is protect your life and your safety and put the criminals in prison.
The Democrats don't get it.
This is a hugely popular message among every single demographic, basically everywhere in the country, and the Democrats don't get it.
by the FBI, more police officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty last year, Biden's first year in office, by the way, than any year since 1995.
The FBI's data found that 73 officers were intentionally killed in 2021.
Felonious killings of law enforcement officers skyrocketed.
They increased by more than 58.7% in a single year.
This is way upsetting.
73 law enforcement officers feloniously killed compared to only 46.
Still a pretty high number, but 46 in 2020 and 48 in 2019.
It's not just cop killings that are way up.
Homicides are way up.
Shootings are way up.
All sorts of violent crime are way, way up.
Not going to play well for the Democrats.
Not good for America.
Very simple for conservatives to capitalize on this.
The way that conservatives are going to win in the midterms is not by taking Adam Kinzinger's advice and tweeting about how much they hate Trump.
It's not by taking the advice of CNN and MSNBC contributors and tweeting about how much they hate Trump.
It's going to be doing very basic things.
Hey, don't Don't let the criminals loose.
Hey, don't fly radical leftist flags in the classroom.
Hey, don't force my kid to wear a face covering that even you people don't believe in.
Stacey Abrams, for instance, you're going to take a photo with all of our kids and you're going to make the kids wear the stupid face covering and you're not going to wear one either.
Very simple stuff.
Can they do it?
Hey, we don't want this radical takeover of symbols, the takeover of our words with politically correct language, takeover of our flags with the new radicalism.
We don't want that.
This reminds me, this is a slight side point, but it's very important.
I have some friends and family members who are very liberal who use this phrase, and maybe you've heard it too.
Have you heard this phrase, COVID-positive?
Say, I'm COVID positive.
Oh, he's COVID positive.
Are you COVID positive?
COVID? What the hell is COVID positive?
And it just means you have COVID. That you've tested positive, and so you have COVID. But you don't say, I'm flu positive.
Oh, I'm cold positive.
Yeah, I tested cold positive.
Yes, I tested strep throat.
I'm strep throat positive.
You don't say that.
You say, I have strep throat.
I have the flu.
I have a cold.
So why are people saying, I'm COVID positive?
And why is it only liberals who are saying?
I've never once heard a conservative say, I'm COVID positive.
Why?
Well, we know that language matters.
We know that symbols matter.
We know this is why the left in particular has spent a great deal of energy and money and time trying to remake all the symbols.
They do it so that they can make a mild cough sound like you're about to get full-blown AIDS. That's why they do it, because it sounds like HIV positive.
To say he's COVID positive.
Gosh, it must be serious.
He's got positive.
He's got positive in the diagnosis.
This is similar to what the Democrats do with global warming.
They say, if you are skeptical that the world is going to end in now, what, eight years?
If you're skeptical that the sun monster is going to blot out life on Earth within the decade, you are not just called, well, a normal person, a reasonable person is what you should be called, but you're not just called a skeptic.
Of catastrophic global warming.
You're not just called someone who is doubtful about this.
You're not what you're called a climate denier.
A climate denier.
As though you deny the ozone.
You disbelieve in the ozone.
Or you disbelieve in clouds or wind.
You're a denier.
Why do they call you a climate denier?
It's not a scientific term.
It's a term to lump you in with Holocaust deniers.
Well, it's the same thing with COVID positive.
It's so silly, I laugh when I hear it.
But they're using the words in particular.
All of these things, just like the whole point of the masks was to make everyone really, really nervous all the time.
Wow, we're in a totally different world.
I've never lived in a world where everyone's wearing masks all the time.
This must be dangerous.
We better suspend our normal way of life.
We better suspend all of our rights.
God, this is dangerous.
The left sold us the masks on the premise that it'll help us get back to normal.
If you all wear the masks, we'll get back to normal.
That was always complete BS. That was never going to happen.
You don't get back to normal by completely changing the way you present yourself in public, including in your face, where you express what you're thinking, what you believe, what's going on, your emotions.
No, of course, it's going to have the opposite effect.
Same thing here.
You're COVID positive.
No, I'm positive that you're a total lunatic if you use that phrase.
Speaking of symbols, Speaking of symbols, there was a really hilarious symbol that's been coming out of the Olympics.
So the Olympics are taking place in China right now.
You cannot get me to care about the Olympics.
You cannot get me to like the Olympics.
I don't like it.
I think it's hippie, kumbaya nonsense.
I don't really care.
The only sport I like is curling.
But regardless, the Olympics are apparently going on.
There's a really funny picture of a ski slope or some kind of slope right in front of a power plant.
And it looks like it's out of The Simpsons.
It looks like a nuclear power plant.
And there was an article that came out.
They said, the Beijing big air jumps at the 2022 Winter Olympics look like a dystopian hellscape.
I think that's right.
It does look like a dystopian hellscape.
You're spoiling a perfectly good nuclear plant with the stupid Olympics.
Why would you do that?
What a blight on that beautiful...
I actually don't think it's a nuclear plant.
I think it's an old coal plant or a steel mill or something like that.
But this is getting a lot of attention.
And the only reason I'm mentioning the Olympics is there is an American skier, Eileen Gu, who is competing for China in the Olympics.
She was born and raised in San Francisco.
And she's not competing for America.
She had the choice.
She could compete for America or China.
She chose communist China.
She said, I've decided to compete for China in the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics.
This was an incredibly tough decision for me to make.
I'm extremely thankful for US ski and snowboard and the Chinese ski association for having the vision and belief in me to make my dreams come true.
I'm proud of my heritage and equally proud of my American upbringing.
In other words, thank you America for raising me and giving me everything that I have and being the country that formed me.
But...
Bye!
I'm going to go compete for communist China now.
Which is fine.
I hope she has a nice time in China and I hope she never comes back.
She's choosing to represent that country.
She's saying China is my country.
Okay, go live in China.
Don't live here.
This isn't your country then.
It's not me.
I didn't kick you out.
You left.
So you go stay there.
If America is to have a future, it needs to be a real country.
It's gotta have a real flag.
It's got to have real people that are loyal to the country.
It's got to have a common language.
It's got to have common beliefs.
It's got to have common practices.
We can't have half the country wearing secular keffias, those stupid masks, and half the country having a completely different way.
We've got to agree on things.
We've got to have shared words, have shared symbols, have a real country with real borders.
If we don't have that, then we don't have a nation.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
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