Ep. 946 - Achievement Unlocked: I'm A "Conspiracy Theorist"
Slate publishes a defamatory article about your favorite podcast host, Democrat polling shows that “culture war” issues are big winners for Republicans, and China censors “Friends,” proving that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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Republicans are increasingly endorsing a conspiracy theory, according to the left-wing rag, Slate.com.
And it is apparently all my fault.
I, your humble host...
Am now officially a conspiracy theorist, according to Slate.com.
Get me a tinfoil hat.
Bring me my gay frogs.
I have apparently led Republicans astray by persuading them to sign on to my public health protection pledge, which Slate alleges makes a boogeyman out of Dr.
Anthony Fauci and links him, quote, to an ominous history with COVID-19.
That is the headline.
To date, writes Slate, more than a dozen congressional candidates have signed this pledge, which was authored by The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles.
This is true.
Sitting members of Congress have endorsed my pledge too, by the way.
So it's not just the candidates, it's actually members of Congress.
Congressman Paul Gosar introduced it as an official House resolution just this month.
So that part's totally right.
What's the conspiracy theory?
That I'm peddling, you might ask.
What is the accusation that I have made?
Well, Slate continues.
They say, Huh.
It's kind of weird.
Slate accused us of peddling a conspiracy theory, but then immediately admitted that we did no such thing.
We didn't peddle any theory at all.
Slate then focuses the rest of the article on what it calls the gain-of-function conspiracy theory.
That is, it describes, quote, Now,
the strange thing about the incorrect conspiracy theory that Slate is talking about is that it is a pretty well-established fact, which even Slate admits just a few paragraphs later, conceding that, quote, Fauci funded an experiment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in which a modified coronavirus proved unexpectedly infectious, at which point, quote, the NIH pulled funding for the project.
Slate goes on to admit that the experiment that was indirectly funded could actually have been classified as gain-of-function according to several experts.
And that there is legitimate scientific debate over the merits of conducting such experiments on viruses because of their potential to spread disease or start pandemics.
Did the virus come from the lab?
Many leading public health officials and experts say yes, it very possibly, very likely even did.
In other words...
After defaming me and dozens of Republicans as conspiracy theorists, Slate admits that we aren't endorsing any particular theory at all, and the theory we might have endorsed is true.
We could much more plausibly accuse Slate and the rest of the left-wing media, by the way, of being conspiracy theorists.
But that wouldn't be quite fair.
Because they know better than the nonsense and the bile that they are spewing.
They admit it after the headline.
They know that we are raising the right questions and telling the truth.
That is why they're lying and libeling us.
And that is exactly why we've got to keep pushing.
Because these crooks and liars are showing us that we are right over the target.
I'm Michael Knowles.
It's the Michael Moles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Robert Rudehouse, who says, The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.
But Libs of TikTok is showing how many of those hands are actually shaking the baby.
What an apt and precise metaphor.
We have a generation now.
Probably two generations of shaken babies.
That's true.
The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.
And when the hand is malicious or misguided or not up to the task, civilization starts to fall apart.
It's not good.
I mean, you're seeing this, especially here in our own country, where we're outsourcing everything, where we're throwing away American jobs, all those good American products we used to have.
We're just sending them overseas, getting inferior product, which is why I would strongly recommend you check out Good Ranchers.
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The culture war issues are winners.
For a long time, you heard from the squishy Republicans, don't talk about the culture war.
Don't talk about abortion.
Don't talk about immigration.
Don't talk about marriage.
It's just going to turn people off.
All you got to do, talk about cutting taxes.
That's all people want to talk about, and then leave all the other stuff away, and that's how you win elections.
That's the Mitt Romney strategy.
That's the John McCain strategy.
That's the Jeb Bush strategy.
You remember the Romney administration, right?
And the Jeb administration and the McCain.
Oh, no, all those guys lost.
Their strategy was a losing strategy.
I've been saying this for a long time.
Now, one of the biggest culture war issues is Dr.
Fauci, actually, is the medical bureaucracy that's taking away our rights and our liberties and our way of life and forcing us all to take this experimental drug and leading a pandemic on that was supposed to last two weeks and now it's going on years and years indefinitely.
That's a culture war issue.
We don't like the culture of some petty little bureaucrat running our lives and upending our constitutional order.
And what?
The same squishes say, oh no, stop it.
Stop talking about the vaccine mandates.
It's just so icky.
Just talk about cutting taxes.
The culture war issues are winners.
The bean counting, egghead issues are losers.
The squishes are dead wrong.
And even the Democrats know that.
The smart Republicans know that.
The Democrats know that.
The only people who don't know that are the squishes.
The DCCC, that's the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee, one of the most prominent Democrat operations in the country.
They just sent out a study that concludes that the culture war is alarmingly potent for Republicans.
Politico reporting on this now.
The campaign committee has been showing House Democrats polling about how to counter GOP attacks on various issues.
They say that they need to more forcefully confront the GOP's alarmingly potent culture war attacks from critical race theory to defunding the police.
They risk losing significant ground to Republicans in the midterms.
This is not just some Democrat propaganda out there put out to the public where you might be able to say, well, look, they're saying this, but they don't really believe this.
It's just actually another way to manipulate their voters.
No, this is internal stuff, folks.
This is polling.
These are training sessions that the Democrats are giving to their candidates.
And they're saying, shoot, man, this critical race theory stuff, this transgenderism stuff in the classrooms, all the culture war stuff.
It's really not working for us and it's really working for the Republicans.
Republicans should take note.
Think about the Virginia election, the gubernatorial election there.
Glenn Youngkin.
Glenn Youngkin ran initially as a standard run-of-the-mill, just cut my taxes, chamber of commerce Republican, and he was going nowhere fast.
And then when he focused on issues that people actually care about, how our public schools now are trying to turn little Johnny into little Jane, little five-year-old boys that are They're trying to convince them they're girls.
Letting men go into the girls' bathroom.
What happened?
There was a rape that was covered up in a high school in Virginia.
And what did the superintendent do?
Not only did he cover it up there, he moved the kid to another school.
It happened again.
That kind of craziness.
Along with other culture war issues, along with the lockdowns and the masks and the vax and immigration and all sorts of other issues, they play for the Republicans.
Immigration is probably the best example of this.
There are two opinions that you're allowed to have on immigration if you are an elite politician, if you go to fancy places.
This is both parties.
The one position is we need to knock down whatever remaining borders we have, let everybody come in.
Oh, we're taking three million immigrants a year.
It should be four, five, six, or seven.
There should be no limit on immigration.
That's the left-wing position and to some degree the kind of left libertarian position.
The right-wing position that you're allowed to have in elite politics is, yeah, we should have a ton of immigrants.
Yeah, we should have more, more, more immigrants, but it's got to be legal.
This was even the Trump position.
Trump was the most immigration restrictionist presidential candidate that we have had in my lifetime.
Serious major presidential candidate.
And his argument was, I want more immigration than ever, but it's got to be legal.
Illegal bad, legal good.
That is completely out of touch with the American people.
There is a new study that just came out.
And there have been studies showing this sort of thing for years, that the majority of Americans want to dramatically reduce not just illegal immigration as well.
There was a Harvard-Harris poll three or four years ago that showed that the majority of Americans, including people from both parties, want to dramatically reduce that kind of immigration.
Well, this new poll shows 69% of Republicans want to reduce legal immigration.
There is no issue, no other issue in this country where the discrepancy between the popular opinion and the opinion of politicians in both parties is so great.
And so why is it?
Because the left-wing politicians want to flood the country with foreign nationals because they think that it will give them an electoral advantage.
And frankly, they know that it will give them an electoral advantage because all the polling shows that immigrants and the children of immigrants who will have birthright citizenship and even the grandchildren of immigrants are overwhelmingly going to vote for Democrats.
Maybe we can pull some over to Republicans, but the trends, if you just flood the country with enough foreigners, you're going to give an advantage to Democrats.
And why do the Republicans go along with this?
The Republicans go along with it on the legal immigration front because they're afraid of being called racist.
Of course, it doesn't make you racist to say that countries should have borders and we can't just take the entire world in and still maintain our culture.
But Republicans go squishy on that.
They're so afraid.
Look at the numbers, folks.
Your voters want you to do this.
People in the middle want you to do this.
Even many Democrats want you to do this.
Get wise.
The elite game is rigged.
Don't take the bait.
Give the people money.
What they want, a policy that also happens to be right and just and in the national interest.
Maybe it's just because our politicians these days are not as educated as they used to be.
If you want to get educated, you can check out Ben's new book club.
That's right.
Ben has a new book show.
show.
It's coming out every third Thursday.
Ben is going to be reading a book.
He just did 1984 by George Orwell.
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together live.
It's totally taking place live.
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It's kind of like an all-access.
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Books like 1984, Huck Finn, many more.
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For those of you who don't know what the bulwark is, which I imagine is all of you, it's a group of those former Republicans who now oppose all the Republican candidates.
It's the Bill Crystals and the Charlie Sykes and the hardcore never-Trumpers who pretended it was all about Trump, but really they just left the GOP. They don't believe in almost any conservative perspective anymore and they spend all their time shilling for Democrats and their whole operation is being funded by leftists and Democrats, but they do so under the pretense that they are still Republicans.
We're the principled Republicans who don't believe anything that Republicans believe, the principled conservatives who don't want to conserve a damn thing.
So Ben got in big trouble with them because Ben endorsed a law in Florida.
The law in Florida is being misrepresented by leftists as a don't say gay law.
Don't say gay.
What is it really?
It says that for extremely young school children, we're talking five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds, they cannot be taught radical sexual ideologies in schools.
So right now there's a problem in schools where teachers are teaching five-year-olds that if they're little boys that they're actually little girls.
And they're exposing them to all sorts of creepy sex stuff, including gay porn.
Like actual gay porn.
I'm not being prudish here.
I'm not saying that books that deal with difficult or challenging themes are completely off limits.
I'm talking about like actual, explicit, obscene, filthy porn that would have been illegal in this country until just a few decades ago.
This is now being taught to five and six-year-olds.
And so Ron DeSantis, speaking on behalf of the people of Florida, of ordinary sane people who don't want their kids being indoctrinated into some creepy perverted sex cult by radical leftists, he stood up and he said, we're not going to have that in the classroom.
And now they're trying to present him as some sort of radical.
Don't forget, today, in America, if a teacher teaches the Bible in a classroom, the most important book ever written that has shaped our entire civilization, that teacher will be punished, probably fired, maybe prosecuted.
But if a teacher teaches explicit gay porn to five-year-olds, they will be celebrated, except in Florida, which is now looking to possibly pass this bill.
So anyway, Ben came out and endorsed the bill.
Of course he endorsed it.
Any reasonable person, any person with two brain cells to rub together is going to endorse this bill.
And the principled conservatives...
At the Bulwark went crazy.
Conserving gay porn in first grade.
We're the principled conservatives conserving transgenderism, transing the five-year-olds, right?
So this guy, Tim Miller, wrote this hit piece on Ben.
Tim, for those who don't know who he is, which is probably everybody, Tim is the former press secretary for the Jeb Bush for President campaign.
He's worked on a bunch of losing campaigns, and now he's a radical homosexual activist.
It seems to be his big issue now is the ever-expanding LGBT LMNOP rights, and so he's gone very much in that direction.
But back before he was totally vocal about that, he was actually a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
Which tells you less about Tim's conservatism and more about the RNC, which has had a lot of squishes work for it over the years and it was reflected in a lot of big Republican losses.
So, anyway.
Tim writes this piece and he says, this is awful.
This is don't ask, don't tell the schools.
It's very important that we teach five-year-olds all this creepy sex stuff.
It's really, really important.
And, you know, if you oppose that, you're a terrible bigot.
We're going to side with the Democrats.
The reason I bring it up is not because his article is worth reading.
It's not because Tim Miller matters.
He does not.
It's not because Ben needs to be defended.
Ben is expressing a view that is not only correct, but extremely popular.
He'll be just fine.
The reason I bring it up...
It's to show you how dumb it was to let the squishes lead the party.
I just want to underscore the point that the DCCC is making here on the cultural issues.
For some years, you had the squishes and the kind of centrist, libs, like kind of center-right, but kind of lib.
The Republicans who only cared about cutting taxes, they said, okay, We'll team up with you actual conservatives who actually want to conserve a damn thing about our country, like our borders and our families and our communities and our rights and our way of life.
We'll team up with you so long as we get to lead the show.
So long as we downplay abortion, downplay marriage, downplay immigration, downplay all the cultural issues, and all we talk about is cutting taxes.
And then we'll unite together and then we're going to win.
Now, while those people were leading the party, we mostly lost.
We would occasionally win a little bit, but we mostly lost.
All of our big wins were usually attributable to the cultural warriors getting to lead the show a little bit.
I'm thinking about the contract with America in 1994.
I'm thinking about the moral majority, the religious right, right?
They would tend to galvanize voters.
These squish eggheads didn't do very much.
But the other problem was, when the squishes and the eggheads and the just-cut-my-taxes Republicans were leading the show, we social conservatives would go along with it.
We said, okay, well, look, it's a coalition.
That's the way the GOP works.
That's the way conservatives work, right?
And we would go along with it, and we'd follow these schmucks off a cliff.
But then the minute, the minute in recent years that the cultural conservatives got a little bit of their mojo back and started leading things, you saw it especially with Trump talking about immigration, talking about protecting American jobs, talking about things that are much more cultural, what happens?
What happens?
These guys jump ship.
They run away.
They suck up to the libs.
They get all their funding.
They cash the paychecks from the libs.
They spend all their time attacking Republicans.
And now they are saying to you that if you don't want your little kid to get transed at school, you don't want your little kid reading gay porn in the third grade classroom, that you're a vile, disgusting bigot and you have no place in polite society.
Bye.
See you, guys.
See you.
Bye-bye.
Oh, no.
What are we going to do without the five people Who are the squish, want to cut the taxes Republicans without doing anything else?
This extremely small political minority that has had a huge outsized influence in the conservative movement of the Republican Party.
What are we going to do without these guys?
I'll tell you what we're going to do.
We're going to win.
That's what we're going to do without them.
You don't need to believe me.
The Democrats know it too.
Speaking of cultural issues, China has just done something.
That reminds me that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I don't like China.
Communism is evil.
I don't like the Chinese government.
It commits all sorts of horrible atrocities.
It suppresses Christianity.
It's a really bad government.
But China has just given me, I think, the best argument that I've ever heard for defecting from the West and moving to China.
They're censoring the 1990s sitcom Friends.
Look, a stopped clock, right?
China is censoring Friends, a very unfunny show.
I liked Friends when it was on the air.
I was a kid.
I would watch it.
Everybody watched it.
It does not hold up.
I recently tried to re-watch it.
It's impossible.
When you compare Friends to a good TV show like Frasier, I don't even want to make the comparison.
Those two shows should not be uttered in the same sentence, okay?
And Friends obviously should have been censored long, long ago.
If not by discerning private individuals, then by the state and possibly the United Nations.
So China has censored the show.
They've taken out Ross's ex-wife because she's a lesbian.
They took out references to her.
They took out Joey's references to going to strip clubs, and they kind of changed some of that.
They took out a lot of the references to orgasms and things like that and made it a little bit nicer.
I'm only half joking when I say this is pretty smart of China.
I'm only half joking because while we as Americans, and especially as conservatives, have a natural aversion to censorship of any kind by anyone, forget the government, but even private individuals, even institutions...
It is worth remembering that just like poetry requires limits, so too does liberty.
Really bad poetry is the poetry that doesn't have any rules.
Good poetry is sonnets.
Sonnets that have meter, that have rhyme, that have numbers.
So, when you think of the great works of Hollywood ever made...
They were made during a period when Hollywood censored itself, when there was something called the Hays Code.
It was in effect from 1934 to 1968.
The Hays Code produced some of the greatest movies of all time.
In those days, we got movies like Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, great movies.
When we got rid of it, we got absolute trash like Friends.
The way that it came about was that largely Catholic conservatives convinced Hollywood to implement this code and then Protestant America loved it.
It was once described as a Jewish-owned business selling Catholic theology to Protestant America.
But it worked.
It was great.
And we had good movies back then.
And I would much rather have The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind than Crap Like Friends.
So listen, maybe we can learn from our opponents, even if that opponent is China.
Speaking of China, tomorrow is a really exciting day for The Daily Wire because we will be releasing our new show, The Enemy Within.
This docuseries features acclaimed journalist and expert in national threats, Lee Smith.
He uncovers just how far the CCP's infiltration of America goes and a political coup orchestrated by ruling elites to generate their own wealth and power at the expense of the American people's safety and freedom.
Each episode will take you deep into what's going on behind the scenes, what those who are supposed to be protecting you don't want you to know.
Check it out.
What if everything we think we know about our leaders, our society, and our relations with the rest of the world is wrong?
America is facing two major challenges.
One is the Chinese Communist Party.
However, the most significant threat comes from within.
You're trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world.
Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about.
We've already seen evidence of how the elites want to run the United States.
They're modeling themselves after Chinese autocracy.
For over a decade, the People's Republic of China has stood publicly accused of acts of cruelty and wickedness that match the cruelty and wickedness of many evil torturers and executioners. the People's Republic of China has stood publicly accused of Diane Feinstein had a Chinese spy as her driver for 20 years.
We're not talking about one person infiltrating senior levels at the CIA or the White House.
We're talking about an entire elite class.
Throughout the political, corporate, academic, cultural and media establishment.
My name is Lee Smith.
I've been a journalist for more than 30 years.
This is the most astonishing espionage and infiltration operation in history.
What you're going to see in this series will shock you.
This is The Enemy Within.
The Enemy Within.
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We'll be We'll be right back with a lot more.
Speaking of authoritarian foreign governments, I know we're supposed to be worried about China.
We're supposed to be worried about Russia invading.
I think Russia was supposed to invade Ukraine yesterday.
Who knows?
I mean, Putin's still moving troops all around.
But the predicted Wednesday invasion of Ukraine did not occur, as Joe Biden told us it would.
But the authoritarian government that I am most concerned about at the moment, I don't know if you've heard of it, it's called Canada.
It's a little closer to home than China or Russia.
It's sometimes known as America's hat.
And Canada is really, really clamping down on civil liberties and Canadians' way of life.
Justin Trudeau is invoking the Emergencies Act.
This act allows him to basically suspend the rule of law in Canada and go after people who are protesting, namely these truckers.
They're freezing the truckers' bank accounts.
They're suspending movement, all sorts of the suspending use of property.
Really, really scary stuff.
Well...
The people at lower levels of power in Canada and in the United States are teaming up to push back on this.
U.S. governors and Canadian premiers, kind of like the Canadian version of governors, have just signed a letter urging Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau to drop the vaccine mandate for truckers.
If you drop the vaccine mandate or if you reinstitute exceptions to the vaccine mandate, then the trucker protest goes away.
If you drop this insistence that all of these guys take the Fauci ouchie, this experimental drug that doesn't do what everyone told us that it was going to do to possibly protect against a virus that doesn't pose a grave threat to most people, then if you just drop that, you get your supply chain back.
You get people to go back to their normal way of life.
You've got now two premiers, 16 governors sent this letter to the top levels of Canadian and U.S. leadership requesting a very simple thing.
Give us back the exemptions and you get your supply chains back.
Right now, the institutional force, the institutional power is all with the libs and with the mandates and with Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau.
The media, the universities, the big tech platforms, the woke corporations, the government, everything, all the institutional power is with the mandates.
The people are against the mandates.
And the people still have a little bit of power in Canada, in the United States as well.
And the greatest evidence of this is that it's not just conservatives coming out against this stuff.
It's not just the right that's coming out against the government and the political establishment that's going at the truckers.
Even Ilhan Omar, a radical leftist by the standards of our government, member of the squad, the John Lennon of the squad, is coming out against this, and in a way, in favor of the truckers, in a way.
She was responding yesterday on Twitter to a journalist who came out and was exposing small business owners who had donated small amounts of money to help the truckers.
Ilhan Omar retweeted this leftist journalist and said, I fail to see why any journalist felt the need to report on a shop owner making such an insignificant donation rather than, I think probably other than to get them harassed.
It's unconscionable and journalists need to do better.
Credit where credit is due!
Ilhan Omar's absolutely right.
100% right.
This journalist, quote-unquote journalist, is just acting as a political operative to go after and using this journalist's institutional power to go after small business owners who won't bow down to the government and the ruling regime in Canada and the United States that's squashing these truckers and telling everyone they have to take this experimental drug.
Now, why is Ilhan Omar doing this?
Is it because Ilhan Omar is at a moment of moral clarity?
Is it because Ilhan Omar is about to become a Republican?
You're going to have Joe Manchin, maybe he could become a Republican.
Kyrsten Sinema, maybe.
And Ilhan Omar?
I don't think so.
It actually makes perfect sense that Ilhan Omar would defend, at least sort of defend the truckers and go after these lib journos who are just shilling for the regime.
Why?
Because Ilhan Omar is a real leftist.
She is a real old school leftist.
What you are seeing right now Play out with the truckers issue is something you saw with Bernie Sanders decades ago on an issue like immigration or even guns, which is the difference between the old left and the new left.
The old left, all of it is heavily influenced by Karl Marx, but the old left saw the big divisions in society, the big political question, as one of class.
The proletariat versus the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie.
The working class, the underclass, the workers of the world were not uniting.
They were all mixed up in their divisions on race and things like that.
And so they couldn't unite and throw off the chains that enslaved them.
The new left is much, much more focused on race and sex, on all of these kind of nasty intersectional identity issues.
That's what they're focused on.
Ilhan Omar, even Bernie Sanders, will speak to both sides of the left right now.
But here, Ilhan is siding with the old left.
This is why Bernie Sanders has been, for almost all of his career, he's a hypocrite and he'll contradict himself.
And he's a slimy politician just like anybody.
So he'll sometimes go back on his promises.
But for most of his career, Bernie Sanders has been anti-immigration.
Because he observes that immigration lowers the wages of the working class disproportionately.
It's a way for fat cat capitalist plutocrats to line their own pockets and not have to pay such high wages to workers.
And who gets screwed?
It's the little guy.
So Bernie has been generally an immigration restrictionist for his career, at least relative to other people in his party.
Well, now we're seeing this play out with Ilhan Omar.
Ilhan Omar is clearly reading the DCCC missives.
She's clearly reading the Democrat playbook, which is saying, guys, cut it out.
Stop supporting all these radical, insane cultural issues.
Just be culturally, be kind of normal here, guys.
It's a bad look when you're siding with Plutocrats with globalist elites over truckers.
Man, if you're the party of the workers and you're coming out against truckers who are the lifeblood of the economy, who are moving goods from place to place, who are as blue-collar as blue-collar gets, you're against them.
It's really hard to say you're the party of the worker.
It's actually impossible.
So Ilhan Omar, good on her.
I mean, she made the right call here.
But really, she's doing it from self-interest, her own personal political self-interest and the self-interest of her party.
Fortunately, the rest of her Democrat colleagues haven't really gotten the memo.
Even after the memo went out, they still don't seem to have gotten it.
The old left versus the new left.
You're seeing a big political shift go on right now.
It brings me to a kind of more insider-y political story, but I do want to acknowledge it.
The political writer, the satirist P.J. O'Rourke, died a couple of days ago.
A lot of people, especially younger conservatives, probably won't remember P.J. O'Rourke.
P.J. O'Rourke got his start with National Lampoon.
A lot of younger listeners probably won't even know what that is.
And so he was a comedy writer, but he was really, he's shown in the realm of political satire.
I used to read his stuff a lot, especially when I was younger.
He has a famous essay called, How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.
He was talking about that kind of Republican.
He said, we're Republican Party reptiles.
You know, we're interested in kind of doing a lot of drugs and going out.
It's really sort of 1980s American psycho kind of conservatism, if you want to call it that.
It was really funny.
He was a really tremendous writer.
You might call him the voice of a generation.
Really, I think you could call P.J. O'Rourke the voice of a generation of movement conservatives.
And extremely talented, and his essays still hold up, and they're funny.
But P.J. O'Rourke's perspective, which was much more individualistic, do whatever you want, you know, drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wing squeezed and not spill your drink, that is not where the conservative movement is now.
And it's not where the GOP is now.
And he knew it.
I'm...
I promise you, I'm not speaking ill of the dead.
I have a great deal of respect for P.J. O'Rourke.
But he knew it.
And he sort of defected in his later years.
He came out against Donald Trump in 2016.
He said, I'm going to vote for the Democrat.
I'm going to vote for Hillary.
And he even did that in a very funny way.
He said, I endorse Hillary Clinton and all her pomp and all her empty promises.
He's comparing her to the devil in the baptism, right?
And he's saying, she's the devil, but she's the devil I know.
And Trump is the devil that I don't know, and I'm not comfortable voting for him.
Let people do whatever they want.
Let people keep their money, do whatever they want.
I think that plays very well, especially in satire, but it's not where the conservative movement is right now.
I think it's why he kind of pulled back from the right and the GOP and the conservatives in the latter years of his life.
This is what you're seeing from the poll after poll, the GOP on issues like immigration, from the DCCC playbook.
That's not where we are.
If Republicans want to win...
I say that.
I'll put a button on that.
R.I.P. P.J. O'Rourke.
I encourage people, if you go back and read his essays, you're going to really enjoy it.
He's very, very funny.
But there's a lesson here, too, from the past few years, which is about where is politics going?
If conservatives and Republicans want to win now, it's all about culture.
And it's about a little bit more than just do whatever you want.
It's about what should we do.
We're looking at a society that is the product of do whatever you want for 50 years.
Do whatever you want on the left meant screw whoever you want, and do whoever you want on the right meant screw whoever you want economically.
On the left, it meant literally.
On the left, it was the sexual revolution, and if it feels good, do it.
And then on the right, what it meant was just ruthless competition, total deregulation of everything.
There's no such thing as the common good.
Forget it when the founders are talking about the general welfare.
That's all crazy.
We're just going to endorse, you know, Ayn Rand, radical individualism.
You know, greed is good.
1980s kind of.
Semi-ironic, semi-earnest stuff.
And we're living in the culture now, a very selfish culture, where the institutions that once held up our society have almost all broken down.
No one has any belief in them anymore.
We don't even believe in our elections.
The Republicans haven't, well, they've disbelieved at least two elections in the past 20 or so years, right?
They didn't believe in the 2000 election.
Some didn't believe in the 2004 election.
They certainly didn't believe in the 2016 election.
And then Republicans don't believe in the 2020 election.
You know, the one where they actually changed all the voting rules right beforehand.
Anyway, we don't believe in that.
The family's broken down.
Community's broken down.
We don't know what it means to be an American anymore.
We don't have a common language.
We don't have national borders.
What do we have?
Well, that's the result of a country that doesn't pay any attention to the common good and the common things, the things we hold in common.
That's what republic means, folks.
It means the things that are held in common.
Res publica.
The stuff we've got together.
What do we have together?
I don't know.
We're going to need to answer that question.
If you're a conservative, you now need to answer not just...
What should we cut?
What should we stop paying attention to?
What should we not revere?
I think we've got to start answering, what should we do?
Not just what are our rights, but what are our duties?
What are our obligations?
What are the sacrifices required of us to continue to have a country?
What we are not revere I don't know.
I don't even pay attention to Larry Hogan.
Larry Hogan is a total squish, anti-Trump Republican.
And I'm not saying, by the way, I'm not saying all those things are synonymous.
I think there was a kind of principled argument against Trump, at least in the first election, when people thought he might be kind of a liberal and he didn't really know exactly what he was doing.
But But I think just like Tim Miller and the Bulwark show us, it was never really about Trump.
It was about you.
There was that great meme during the 2020 election where it was Trump sitting there.
He said, they're not after me, they're after you.
I just happen to be in the way.
And I think in many ways that's right.
It's not just about Trump.
If you oppose transing the kids in schools, you're now considered a vile, terrible bigot, worse than the orange man.
And so anyway, Larry Hogan is one of those kinds of squishy conservatives.
He was on CNN, of course.
He was on Jake Tapper's show.
And Jake Tapper was typically insulting Republicans and the conservative movement where the party is.
And he said, so Larry, you know, Larry, are you considering running in 2024?
And Larry Hogan, unbelievably able to keep a straight face, says, well, I'm considering it.
It's a nice video.
It just lacked the Hogan 2024 banner at the bottom.
Are you considering a presidential run?
Well, we put out great videos like that almost every week.
That was taken from my State of the State address last week, and it's pretty well done.
But like I said, I'm going to run through the tape as governor until January of next year.
I'm going to try to be the very best governor I can be.
I'm going to continue to stand up and be a voice.
I'm not going to sit back and not be involved in the issues of the day.
I'm concerned about the direction of the party in the country.
And I'll make a decision about 2024 after I finish this job.
So you are considering it?
We're certainly going to take a look at it after January of 23.
What makes you think that there's a lane for a moderate-ish, blue-state, anti-Trump, sane Republican like you when you look at your party right now?
I consider myself a common-sense conservative.
I have been a lifelong Republican.
I believe that that's where most people in America are.
About 70% of the people in America are completely frustrated with Politics on both sides, Republicans and Democrats.
And the latest CNN poll came out and said, you know, right now only 50% of the Republicans would like to see Donald Trump run again.
I believe that there is a pretty large lane of sane Republicans, and they're looking for a voice.
Hogan 2024, are you in?
Are you in with Larry?
I don't think anybody is.
I don't even know if Larry is in with Larry.
Larry Hogan...
The kind of liberal, squishy Republican from Maryland, he is floating a 2024 presidential campaign We're good to go.
They're insane, aren't they?
And Larry Hogan says, oh yeah, well, look, I think people want a sane Republican, okay, like me.
They want a moderate person who's really squishy, who's just going to possibly cut your taxes.
That's what they want, don't they?
No.
No, they don't.
They don't.
I think 70% of America, I think the majority of America, they're basically just Chamber of Commerce Republicans.
No, nobody's a Chamber of Commerce Republican.
There are like seven of them in the whole country.
Do you know where the majority of Republicans are?
Actually, I'm sorry, the majority of Americans, the overwhelming majority of Republicans, but the majority of Americans, they want to stop legal immigrants from coming into this country.
Forget illegal.
Obviously, they don't want those.
Illegal immigrants, too.
That is considered a far-right fringe position by people like Larry Hogan.
That's where the majority of Americans are.
I don't think the majority of Americans...
Do you know where the majority of Americans are on transing the bathrooms and transing the kids in elementary?
They're saying, no, get this crap out of our schools!
But the moderate Republicans are saying, oh no, well, listen, we need to be open-minded.
Maybe we should mutilate children.
Asa Hutchinson, you remember, he's another squish Republican in Arkansas.
He said, look, we need to allow...
We need parents to kind of make these decisions with doctors.
If they want to trans their kids, that's fine.
We need to let the...
Even Kristi Noem, she's since reversed course on this, but even Kristi Noem up in South Dakota was for letting men compete against women in college sports.
The vast majority of Americans think this stuff is completely insane.
The conventional elite wisdom, wisdom, quote-unquote...
The wisdom of our world, the wisdom of our age is telling us that there's a huge appetite in America for just cut my taxes and let the corporations do whatever they want and don't have anything to say about virtue or nationhood or citizenship or what our country is.
Nobody wants that.
The only people who will benefit from Larry Hogan 2024 are the predatory campaign consultants who will bilk a bunch of completely out-of-touch, squish billionaires, center-right, leave-me-alone-just-cut-my-tax-as-billionaires, out of a lot of money, or even 100 millionaires or 10 millionaires, depending on how good a pitch Larry Hogan can make.
And they'll pay themselves.
These consultants will make nice six-figure salaries, and then Larry Hogan will give up.
This is not...
Listen to the Democrats, folks.
Listen not only to your constituents.
Listen to your opponents who are telling you where the wins really are.
I don't want to hear about...
Listen, we just need to get along.
We need to stop being so forceful and aggressive in our political maneuvers.
We need to stop being so cultural.
Here's what I want to hear about.
Here's what I want to hear about.
Donald Trump said that the Democrats spied on him when he was a candidate and when he was the president.
All the squishes laughed at him, and they all went on CNN, and they all mocked him, and they all opposed him, and then it turned out it was completely true.
Clinton associates, Hillary Clinton associates, spied on Donald Trump at Trump Tower, at his campaign, and at the executive office of the president.
This is a major, major crime.
We know this from John Durham's report, the DOJ. Now we have found out that the Biden campaign has hired the same firm that did the same spying on Donald Trump as president.
The Biden campaign paid this cybersecurity firm, seems like the opposite of cybersecurity, $20,000.
The only two presidential campaigns that this firm has ever gotten paid for, or paid by rather, are the Clinton campaign and the Biden campaign.
I wanna look into that.
I will not support a presidential candidate Who does not promise to get to the bottom of that?
To look into that?
Yeah, good.
Cut my taxes.
I do.
I want you to cut my taxes.
But yeah, sure.
Yeah, okay.
Get some good trade deals.
I want to root out this rank political corruption because our opponents are running roughshod over our political order.
Not just the issues, but the order, the institutions, the power centers.
And we're not doing very much about it.
Who is still working with this cybersecurity firm?
What campaigns?
I want to know the names of those campaigns.
What levels are they at?
Are we talking about Congress?
Are we talking about Senate?
Is Joe Biden still working with this campaign?
I want to find out.
I want to subpoena the people who are working with this campaign.
I want to find out what they knew and when they knew it.
I want names and I want accountability.
The White House is completely stonewalling.
So occasionally you'll have a real question asked in the White House briefing room.
The Deputy Press Secretary, Corrine Jean-Pierre, was asked this question.
She said, no, no, nothing to see here.
La, la, la.
Go talk to the DOJ. This news about the Durham investigation.
Does the president have any concerns about a candidate for president using computer experts to infiltrate computer systems of competing candidates or even the president-elect to use for the goal of creating a narrative?
Is that something that...
That's something I can't speak to from this podium, so I refer you to the Department of Justice.
Is what was described in that report, monitoring internet traffic, is that spying?
Again, I can't speak to that report.
I refer you to the Department of Justice.
Generally speaking, with monitoring internet traffic, I keep my answers not going to change.
I refer you to the Department of Justice.
I can't speak to that from here.
La, la, la, la, la.
Talk to the Department of Justice.
La, la, la, la, la.
I can't hear you.
Okay, Karine, you won't tell us.
How about you, Jen Psaki?
What's going on?
What about this huge, probably the most egregious political scandal in our nation's history?
You guys were even working with the firm.
You got anything to say about it?
Do you know if there's still a system picking up server data on the EOP, and if not, when it stopped?
Again, I know you asked my colleague a few questions about this the other day, but I would point you any questions about this to the Department of Justice.
And then is what was described in the filing there, monitoring internet traffic, is that, generally speaking, would that be considered something along the lines of spying?
Again, I would point you to the Department of Justice.
Same answer.
They talk to the lawyers.
They're workshopping this.
They're sticking to their script, okay?
Because they know that the Republicans have these Democrats dead to rights.
There's a benefit here for the Biden campaign, which is that Biden is extremely unpopular.
Hillary's being floated as a candidate, so I think they're fine to throw Hillary under the bus.
But they're implicated, too, because they worked with this firm as well.
Well, they know that their views are unpopular.
They know that their record is very, very unpopular.
They've got no good answer on this.
The only way that they think that they're going to win here is by stonewalling, gaslighting, and cheating.
So they're going to say, la, la, la, la, la.
Stop it.
Stop pushing.
Stop pushing.
That's how you know we are right over the target.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, some leaked audio from a queer-inclusive presentation at a major education conference reveals exactly what our kids are being subjected to at school, both public and private schools, by the way.
