A hulking dude sets five new records at the Ivy League women’s swimming championships, Vladimir Putin takes the first major steps toward conquering Ukraine, and Jeffrey Epstein’s pimp gets suicided.
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As Vladimir Putin prepares to invade Ukraine, it's more important than ever to show our enemies around the world that the West is strong, united, and ready to fight for our position of global leadership.
Yes, it was embarrassing when a bunch of illiterate goat herders stole all our military gear and chased us out of Afghanistan last year.
And yes, it's not a great look...
That neither American political party reliably trusts the results of our elections.
And okay, fine.
It is unfortunate that we no longer have a functioning national border and that violent crime is surging from coast to coast and that our population is literally dying through drugs and suicide and sterility with no end in sight.
But, but, Putin should not mistake any of those problems for Western weakness.
No, sir.
Just look at our next generation of leaders.
I'm talking about the Ivy League, where over the weekend, a young swimmer performed dazzling, record-breaking, historic feats of athleticism at the Women's Swimming and Diving Championships.
There, a young woman whose birth certificate reads, One, the 100-yard freestyle, the 200-yard freestyle, and the 500-yard freestyle, setting five individual records and pushing all the other gals on Penn's 400 relay team to set a pool record.
Yes, just one look at Will Thomas' maidenly Adam's apple, shimmering as she glided toward the finish line, should send a shiver down Vladimir Putin's spine.
The way that her hulking, feminine shoulders plowed through the water, easily overtaking the other young ladies, should strike fear in the heart of Russia's leader.
The very words, Our Civilization is Strong, seemed to sing from Thomas' big, square, delicate jawline as he took women's sports to new heights in the very heart of the American elite.
No.
No, no.
Western civilization is not finished.
We're just transitioning.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, Michael Knowles.
My favorite comment on Friday is from OSU4MUL8R. He says, damn, I wish John Wick were a trucker in Canada right now.
That's a good point.
Now that Justin Trudeau and the Ottawa government are threatening to kill the trucker's puppies, that seems to have really fizzled the whole trucker protest.
If only there were a John Wick there, we might be able to defend freedom, tradition, our way of life.
But that doesn't seem to be happening anywhere.
It's not happening over in our own part of the world.
It's certainly not happening over in the east, over by Ukraine.
It's not good at all.
I mean, I really wish that we could clean up our political house.
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Vladimir Putin must be shaking in his boots, don't you think?
Why?
Why oh why would Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine now when we have a West that has crime surging everywhere?
We're all at each other's throats.
We can't tell the difference between men and women and the President of the United States doesn't know what day it is.
Golly, can you believe that he would aggress?
Can you imagine that?
It's so shocking.
The situation in Ukraine is accelerating rapidly.
This is no longer just Western media propaganda.
Vladimir Putin actually is taking advantage now.
He gave a very important speech.
It's one of the most profound speeches.
In terms of just a pure political lesson, it's one of the most interesting speeches of this century.
He gave that yesterday.
He's clearly preparing to take the country.
This gives Donald Trump a distinction.
This gives Donald Trump the distinction of being the only president among the four most recent presidents on whose watch Vladimir Putin did not try to conquer another country.
So you had George W. Bush.
What happens?
Vladimir Putin invades Georgia.
And Bush actually, to his credit, repelled it.
Then you had Obama.
Under Obama's watch, Putin invaded Crimea.
Obama did not repel it, so Putin just stayed in Crimea.
Then you had Trump.
And pretty much everything just stayed the same, and Putin didn't try to go any further.
Now you have Biden and what happens?
Vladimir Putin has 150,000 troops on the border.
He gave this speech yesterday to give the pretext for war in Ukraine.
It looks like he's going to try to...
If he's not going to take down the whole country, he's going to certainly take big swaths of the country.
Why?
Why is Putin doing this?
This is a place where the American media, the American regime, certainly the left, and even parts of the right are making a huge mistake They're not understanding the enemy.
When you want to talk about geopolitics, when you want to talk about politics at all, it is very important to understand your enemy, your enemy's motivations, your enemy's plan, your enemy's strategy, the way your enemy views himself.
If you don't understand that, if you're just going to say, well, he's crazy, he's just a crazy person, Then you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage.
The American left does this to the American right in many ways.
They say, oh, you pro-lifers, you're just crazy.
You don't have any logical reasons for not wanting to kill a bunch of babies.
You're just crazy.
You're sexist.
You're racist.
The reason that you don't want to let all the criminals out of jail, it's because you're racist.
Right?
And that's why the left does not understand the right in America at all.
That's why recently the right has taken a great deal of advantage.
Well, the same thing is true here for Russia.
What is Russia doing in Ukraine?
It's not as simple as, Putin is a madman.
He's Hitler 2.0.
He just wants to conquer everything.
It's really, it's not that simple.
It's much more complicated.
This is why I can't get into the Western rhetoric of, we must defend our great NATO ally, Ukraine.
Ukraine's not in NATO. It's not a member country of NATO, first of all.
Since when has Ukraine been our great ally?
I couldn't tell you.
Since when does freedom in the West hinge on Ukraine?
Never.
Ukraine is one of the most conquered countries in the history of the world.
It's been an independent nation, sort of, for about five minutes.
So I'm not saying that we should let Putin roll the tanks in, but on the other side of that, no, I don't think freedom and the Western way of life hinges on the fate of Ukraine.
If it did, we would have lost freedom here a long, long time ago.
What is this about?
Well, in no small part...
It's about two things.
One is aggressive, one is defensive.
Vladimir Putin wants to recreate something akin to historical Russia.
Whether you call that the Soviet Union, whether you call that the Tsarist Russian Empire, whatever, he wants Russia to be bigger and more powerful than it is today.
Vladimir Putin famously said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the greatest geopolitical tragedy, catastrophe of the 20th century.
So he wants to make Russia bigger and more powerful.
Sure.
There's a defensive part here too, though, which is that Vladimir Putin doesn't want the West going all the way up to his borders.
Vladimir Putin specifically doesn't want NATO to expand eastward into the traditional Russian sphere of influence.
And Maybe we in the West want NATO to expand it bigger and bigger and bigger, but there were plenty of very strong anti-communist, anti-Russia voices who said for decades that this is a really bad idea.
I've got an article here from the New York Times.
This is from 1997.
It's called A Fateful Error.
This is written by George Kennan.
For those of you who remember your 8th or 9th grade history class, George Kennan wrote the X telegram, the long telegram, in which he called out the Soviet Union, warned of the threats of the Soviet Union.
He's the author of the strategy of containment, the main strategy of the Cold War.
And George Kennan had this to say about what happens to NATO after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The view is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.
May be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western, and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy, to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.
And last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian doom's ratification of the START II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.
He's saying if you expand NATO, some hawks in America think that they're going to put the West in a much better position vis-a-vis Russia.
Actually, it will have the opposite effect.
Actually, Russia's going to view that as a major aggression and they're going to get much more militaristic in response.
That's exactly what happened.
So, why?
Why would...
Why would this all be happening now?
Why would Russia expect...
Okay, sure, George Kennan and some other...
Pat Moynihan, lots of other strong voices on the Cold War.
They were saying don't expand NATO. But why should Russia expect that that's going to be the national policy?
Well, Der Spiegel, the German newspaper, just dug this up.
Der Spiegel just dug up a document from 1991 in which the West promised Russia that they would not expand NATO eastward.
So this was, if not official policy...
This was the understanding at the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All of which is to say, the situation here is much more complicated than anybody is really giving it credit for.
Certainly Putin, who's just making his case for war, and even the West.
And not every single historical event is Hitler invading Czechoslovakia.
Not every single world leader that we don't like is Adolf Hitler.
Not every single epoch that we can live through is 1930s or 1940s Germany.
And there are complications here.
You think about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Part of the reason we got a Cuban Missile Crisis is because the United States botched their policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in Cuba and in Turkey, putting missiles there.
It's much, much more complicated.
So for those who do want to preserve the peace, it's going to take a lot more than just bang, bang, bang, Putin bad, NATO good, expand, expand, expand.
You're going to have to recognize some of the legitimate...
Questions that our enemies have and try to answer those with incentives rather than merely saying, rah, rah, let's go to war in Ukraine.
Now, when you want complicated views of all sorts of questions, I would strongly recommend you tune into the Jordan Harbinger Show.
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You cannot go wrong Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelical preacher Billy Graham, got into a lot of trouble.
He got into a lot of trouble over this Putin-Russia issue.
For one tweet, he said, May God give wisdom to the leaders involved in these talks and negotiations, as well as those advising them.
And what do you think happened?
It was the same old thing.
Same old thing we've heard from the left for five years now.
The right wing in America, they're Russia-philes, they're Putin stooges.
Can you believe this Christian preacher is telling his congregation to pray for their enemies?
Where would he get this crazy idea?
He probably got it out of a KGB handbook, or he got it out of the Holy Gospel, right?
These people...
These people criticizing Franklin Graham and American conservatives and Christians generally are demonstrating that they do not know the first thing, even the most basic thing, about Christianity.
One of the most basic aspects of Christianity is that we pray for our enemies.
We pray for those who persecute us.
We get this from the mouth of Christ himself.
But our critics, our opponents, our enemies even, they don't get it.
I guess this is the theme that I'm seeing.
When I look at the Ivy League and that hulking dude setting all these new women's records, and I look at the situation in Ukraine right now, and I look at domestic politics in the United States and the battle between the left and the right, my main takeaway is, man, when did we get this dumb?
I don't mean it as a perennial, throw your hands in the air, these politicians are so stupid.
I mean it in a really technical, measurable way.
We know much less today than we knew 50, 60 years ago.
I know that we all have advanced degrees from all different colleges, and we've all got $200,000 worth of student loans.
So on paper, it seems like we're much better educated.
We're not.
We don't know anything.
We are much, much more ignorant, much stupider today than past generations.
We don't even know that men and women are different.
We don't know that.
And if you do have an inkling that that is the case, you're not allowed to say it.
That's official policy, certainly from our cultural ministers, in some cases from the government.
We don't know anything.
We have no idea what Russia's relationship to Ukraine is.
We have no idea what Christianity means.
I'm saying we broadly as America and frankly even as the West.
We have no idea the foundation on which we've built our civilization.
We just know a lot less.
And this puts us in a really bad position.
Ignorance is a big political liability.
When I read that Putin speech, I thought, man, this is a statesman.
I'm not saying he's a good statesman.
I'm not saying he's a great guy.
He's probably a no-good, dirty, rotten KGB fellow.
He's done some good things in Russia, by the way.
He's supported Christians in Russia, more than you can say, frankly, for the West.
He has helped his country.
He has secured his borders.
He has reversed the decline in birth rates.
He's actually done some good things for the Russian people.
He still hates the West.
There's no question about that.
So I'm not saying he's a good guy.
But I'm saying he's a very effective statesman.
He's a competent statesman.
He's not ignorant like our statesmen.
He's not even all that haughty like our statesman.
He's very calculating.
He's very measured.
There's a reason why Vladimir Putin did not go and invade any other countries when Trump was president.
Because he didn't know what Trump would do.
And he had an inkling that Trump, especially because Trump had cultivated this unpredictable kind of foreign policy.
Vladimir Putin said, you know, I don't think, maybe I'm not going to do that.
With Obama, he knew that Obama was going to let him take the country's.
Obama told him.
Obama told him.
He was caught on a hot mic speaking to Vladimir Putin's number two, Dmitry Medvedev.
He was caught on an open mic at a public conference in which he said, listen, I'm going to have a little bit more flexibility after my next election.
2012 was my last election.
I'm going to have a little more flexibility after that.
And Dmitry Medvedev, like a cartoon villain, Boris and Natasha out of Rocky and Bullwinkle, he says, I will transmit this information to Vladimir.
And what happens?
Putin invades Ukraine and there's no problem from the Obama administration.
Then nothing from Trump.
Then we get to Biden and it happens again.
Putin is a very shrewd guy.
He knows his history.
This speech that he gave, giving the pretext for war, was just a rundown of Russian history from the Bolshevik revolution to the present.
I'm not sure it was the fairest telling of it, but his critics can't point out any of the flaws because they don't know a damn thing.
Ignorance is a major political liability.
And ignorance is the theme of the day here in the West.
You want to talk about ignorance?
Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing.
There's a French communist presidential candidate.
He's not doing very well in the polls.
He's got something like 4% of the vote.
So he's not going to become the president of France.
But still, he's a presidential candidate in France.
Fabien Roussel, who is campaigning on a platform of abolishing homework.
Yes.
Yes, Mr.
Roussel says, comrade Roussel says, if I become president of the republic, all homework will be done at school and not at home.
On the eve of school holidays, I believe that I am not alone in thinking this would be a good thing.
You will be free, the candidate says.
You will be able to play sports.
You will be able to go to the theater.
You can go see your friends.
You can see your parents.
You will be free when I get rid of your homework.
Yeah, yeah.
It seems radical.
It seems crazy.
Y'all, leave it to the French.
Leave it to the communist French to say this.
This is exactly what Nancy Pelosi said about Obamacare more than 10 years ago now.
Remember, she said, the problem with healthcare right now is you need to have a job.
But when we decouple healthcare from working, then you don't need to have a job.
Then you're free.
Then you're free to go become a poet.
You're free to be a painter.
You don't need to worry about your healthcare.
You can just pursue all those things.
It's the exact same thing here.
You can go play with your friends.
Okay, I've got news for Nancy Pelosi and this French communist politician.
Most people are not poets.
Most poetry is really, really bad.
Most paintings are not good.
During COVID, I took up painting.
I enjoy it.
It's a fun little hobby.
I took it up in my little free time.
I'm not a good painter.
I wish I were, but I'm not.
Most people are...
Most people...
Should be working.
Actually, all of us should be working.
We are made to be productive, okay?
When we're not, we atrophy and we go crazy.
But this is the freedom that the left is promising you.
Sometimes the American right simplifies things too much.
We say that the difference between the way the left talks about freedom and the way the right talks about freedom is that the right talks about freedom from things, freedom from coercion, freedom from tyranny, freedom from this, from that.
And the left talks about positive freedoms.
They talk about freedom to healthcare, freedom to Obama phones, freedom to crack pipes if you're in the Biden administration, right?
And that's the big difference.
But no, the left talks about negative freedoms too.
The left says you've got to be free from work.
You've got to be free from having to hold down a job.
You've got to be free from your homework, as they say now in France.
You've got to be free from all of these things, and then you can truly be free.
But that's not the way it works.
It gets down to this fundamental misunderstanding of freedom that we've been talking about on this show since I came out with my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which became a number one national bestseller because of all of you buying it, which I appreciate.
The issue here is that the left thinks that freedom means just doing whatever you want whenever you want to do it.
The left thinks that freedom is kids getting to go play Xbox when they get home instead of having to cultivate their minds and be productive.
That's not freedom.
The crack pipes from the Biden administration proved this a couple weeks ago.
Sitting around smoking crack, sitting around just indulging your own appetites, indulging your basest appetites and not cultivating your higher, more rational will, that's not freedom.
Freedom is noble.
Freedom requires duty.
Freedom requires a correspondence with reality.
When a dude pretends that he's a woman and beats all the chicks on the Penn swim team in the entire Ivy League, that's not freedom.
That's delusion.
That's the opposite.
That's slavery to fantasy.
Freedom is when we accept reality, we live in accordance with reality, and we flourish by cultivating the virtues.
We used to know that.
This isn't some radical point of view.
Everyone agreed on this until about 50 years ago, and then our culture got really, really stupid.
Leftist radicals took over the institutions of power.
They specifically went after education, and they hollowed it out.
They hollowed out the education that you are getting today, whether you're talking about Elementary school, high school, university, certainly.
The education is not comparable to what people got 50, 60 years ago.
You don't know Latin.
You don't know Greek.
You don't know a damn thing about philosophy.
We don't even treat philosophy like it's real anymore, like it's the best way of living, like it's something that can tell you what's true and false and good and bad.
We just treat it as some weird historical fact.
Oh, this is what the Greeks thought about morality.
No one cares what the Greeks thought about morality.
I want to know what's true.
But instead of that, instead of being given a true, rigorous, philosophical, liberal education, you're being taught that white people are evil because of the color of their skin and that men are actually women.
And we're dumb, and it's weakening us, and it's no surprise that our enemies are taking advantage.
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Also, America is under attack.
the threat is coming from within.
That's why we are exposing just who is destroying American institutions and why.
There are a lot of answers to this question.
One of them in particular will be shown on this Daily Wire series, The Enemy Within.
It began streaming exclusively at the Daily Wire last week and features acclaimed journalist and expert in national threats, Lee Smith, as he uncovers a political coup orchestrated by America's ruling elites to generate their own wealth and power at the expense of the American people's safety and freedom.
Check out the trailer.
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.
Okay, 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 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 is streaming now exclusively at The Daily Wire, so if you're not a member, now is the time to change that.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to join us today.
Also, The Daily Wire has started publishing our own publishing wing.
We've started publishing our own publishing.
Can you imagine that?
It's called DW Books.
We're proud to be publishing two books that are actively fighting the left's monopoly on storytelling.
The first is 12 Seconds in the Dark by Sergeant Mattingly.
The book is the true story of what really happened the night of the Breonna Taylor shooting.
And the second is Fiery but Mostly Peaceful by Julio Rosas, who pulls back the curtain and sets the record straight on BLM riots that broke out across the country in 2020.
Rosas, who was reporting from the ground, gives his firsthand experience at the riots I cannot wait for you to hear their stories.
Both are available for pre-order right now on Amazon or anywhere you buy books online.
online.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Speaking of our ruling class, speaking of espionage, speaking of corruptions speaking of espionage, speaking of corruptions at the highest levels of power in our society, Jeffrey Epstein's pimp, Jean-Luc Brunel got suicided over the weekend.
Yes, he did.
He got suicided real, real good.
He couldn't have gotten suicided any better if he had dirt on the Clintons.
Oh, wait, he did have dirt on the Clintons.
I'm not saying...
I'm not saying the Clintons had anything to do with it.
I am told there was a suspicious looking man in a pantsuit walking around the jail cell where Brunel was being held.
But I don't know.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Actually, we don't know who was around the jail cell because there were no cameras.
Whoopsie-daisy.
Jean-Luc Brunel, he was this modeling agent who really just effectively acted as a pimp shuttling girls to Jeffrey Epstein.
He would, one time he sent Jeffrey Epstein three 12 year old girls from France because they were poor and the families needed the money.
And then apparently the girls were the entertainment for one of Epstein's parties.
This guy was held in a jail cell because of accusations of rape, because of all these sorts of issues.
And he had allegedly attempted suicide multiple times.
Okay.
So there was a precedent here for maybe he's going to eventually kill himself.
But for some reason, he wasn't on suicide watch.
That's weird.
And they had, you know, guards walking by, doing checks, making sure he was okay, but whoopsie-daisy, I guess the guards just weren't there when he killed himself.
And for whatever reason, there weren't any cameras outside the cell, and well, aw shucks, there goes that.
Epstein...
Committed suicide, allegedly.
Jean-Luc Brunel committed suicide, allegedly.
Ghislaine Maxwell prosecuted, and as part of the prosecution agreement, they're never going to open up that black book to give us all the details on all the very powerful global, specifically Western leaders who were involved in Jeffrey Epstein's organization.
Where did Epstein get all his money?
We have no idea.
Did Epstein have ties to foreign intelligence?
Certainly seems like he did.
Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, was a well-known intelligence operative for at least one or two countries, maybe more than that, maybe three countries even.
So the whole thing is a little weird.
Was there state backing in the Epstein operation?
We know that when Epstein was being prosecuted the first time, The U.S. Attorney at the time was told by, this was Alex Acosta, right, who was then up for Labor Secretary under Trump.
He was told, no, watch out about this guy.
He belongs to intelligence.
It's Acosta's own words.
That's kind of weird.
And then, whoopsie-daisy, the main kingpin behind this, suicided.
The pimp funneling the girls, suicided.
Ghislaine Maxwell, I guess she's alive.
But it doesn't look like she's going to be saying very much of anything.
Nobody believes this.
Nobody believes that Jean-Luc Brunel and Jeffrey Epstein just so happen to accidentally be allowed to commit suicide, and whoops, the cameras broke, and whoops, the guards weren't there, and oopsie-daisy, they weren't on suicide watch, and oh well, okay, moving on.
No one believes this.
Okay.
We have very little faith left in our institutions in the West, because those institutions have really been hollowed out, in particular over the last 50 years.
But we especially don't have any faith in our intelligence agencies.
This is why, by the way, when our intelligence apparatus is trying to sell us a war with Russia over Ukraine, this is why people don't want to do it.
I think this is a major reason why we are not eager to go defend the sacred oligarchy of the Ukrainians.
In the name of freedom or whatever, it's because we don't trust the intelligence agencies.
We don't trust the State Department.
We don't trust the deep state, because the deep state does a lot of shady stuff, like this.
They're involved with people like Epstein, according to U.S. attorneys in America, and we don't get the full story.
And when we do get the story about what the IC is up to, it seems to be pretty bad stuff, like spying on Donald Trump as a candidate, Trying to undermine his presidency based on complete nonsense.
Colluding with the Democrats.
Colluding with Russia, actually, ironically.
So we don't believe them.
I'll give you an example closer to home on this.
The CDC right now has a lot of data on COVID. Of course.
They've been collecting data constantly for the past two years.
More than two years.
But they're not releasing all of that data.
They're only publishing some of the data.
They're cherry-picking what data they want to publish.
The New York Times is reporting this.
According to the New York Times, the CDC has been leaving out important data about the effectiveness of boosters in adults under the age of 65.
They're only recently beginning to provide certain other data, including wastewater data.
Why?
Well, in particular, this is according to the Times, The CDC published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65, two weeks ago, and it left out the data for 18 to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected, or because the additional shots don't matter and the younger people are much less likely to face serious complications from COVID. Why are they leaving this out?
It doesn't take a genius.
You don't need a whole lot of brain cells to rub together to know why they're leaving this out because it doesn't work for their narrative.
Kristen Nordland, who's a spokesman for the CDC, said the agency has been slow to release these data, quote, because basically at the end of the day it's not yet ready for prime time.
She said the agency's priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it's accurate and actionable and they don't want the information to be misinterpreted.
Meaning they don't want the information to undercut their narrative.
Information is power.
That is always true, but it is especially true today because we live in the information age.
Since the dawn of modern computing, certainly since the dawn of the internet, information, data, is power.
This is why the federal government collects all the data on all of us.
Not just on foreign powers, but on all of us.
They've got it all to entrench their power.
This is why private businesses are just trying to constantly scoop up data.
This is why you have so many free services, apparently free services right now, on the internet.
They're not really free.
You're paying with your data.
Because data are power.
Information is power.
Ignorance is weakness.
And this is bad news for us.
This is really bad news for us.
Because even when we possess data, we don't really know what to do with them in the West anymore.
You know on this show...
First, you know I hate to say I told you so.
But second, you know that for a long time I have said that conservatives should be wary of statistics.
You know, the left loves to talk about statistics.
They just rattle off their statistics all day long.
I say, no, look, we can cite the statistics if they help our argument, but the statistics are kind of silly.
Everyone's got their own statistics.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Statistics are...
The means of power, of maintaining power, for the modern administrative state.
That's how it works.
The whole point of statistics is they were developed in the 19th century, specifically at German universities.
The word statistic refers to statist, refers to state power, and it was to power these modern states.
These bureaucracies that then were imported to America, specifically during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.
They really get built during Franklin Roosevelt.
Now that's how we operate.
So the statistics, those data, that's the way that the state operates and maintains its power.
And when the bad data come in that don't support their narrative, what do they do?
They ignore them and they don't publish them.
And they only use the data that are helpful to them to maintain their power.
Think about what Vladimir Putin did.
He didn't do this in the modern, statistical, technocratic, bean-counting way.
But when he was giving that speech about why he wants to invade Ukraine, The speech was basically just a history lesson.
The speech was just this happened, then this happened, then this happened.
It was just information, historical information, to build his case as to why he's got to invade.
And it was very effective, particularly because his opponents have no way to counter.
Even the sort of bogus claims that he made, they don't really have a lot to counter it because we in the West...
Don't know much about history or anything else anymore because we're spending all of our time in school learning about diversity, equity, inclusion, and a bunch of other nonsense.
It's worked.
This thing has worked, okay?
The way that the state is maintaining power right now by just inundating us with data, but only specific data, only to defend a specific narrative, it has worked.
Look no further than Joy Behar.
Joy Behar is one of the more eccentric cackling hens on The View.
Joy Behar, a very liberal woman, and she has said, now look, even as the public health authorities are beginning to let up on the mask mandates, I still want to wear mine because I'm just nervous.
I'm just afraid.
Poisonally, I listen to the little voice in my head that doesn't really follow 100% what they tell me because they keep changing it.
So, like, a very short time ago, they were saying, put the N95 masks on, and now they're saying you don't have to wear them.
Anymore.
So if I go on the subway, if I go in a bus, if I go into the theater, if I go into, where else would I go?
A crowded spot.
A crowded place, I would wear a mask.
And I might do that indefinitely.
Because why do I need a flu or a cold even?
And so I'm listening to myself right now.
I mean, I don't think it's 100% safe yet.
I don't think it's 100% safe yet.
Now, what people are going to point out is that About three seconds after Joy Behar made these comments, Joy Behar was photographed at a restaurant not wearing a mask.
And according to some reports, she wasn't even wearing the mask when she walked into the restaurant.
Because, you know, from the hostess stand to the table, that's when you can catch COVID. But then at the table, you can't catch COVID. So people are pointing to this and they're saying, Joy Behar, you hypocrite.
You don't need to get pictures of the restaurant.
Just look at pictures of the view.
All these women are sitting together and they're not wearing masks.
You don't need to go.
Oh, wow.
We caught you not wearing.
No, we're watching you not wear a mask on television.
You're all sitting next to each other.
It is a relatively crowded place, right?
You've got five women who don't live together, who interact with lots and lots of people all the time, who are in a very close space, and you're not wearing a mask.
So what is it?
Are you a hypocrite?
Maybe.
But I'm not convinced it's even hypocrisy.
I have friends and family members Like Joy Behar.
Seriously.
They're New Yorkers, first of all.
They are very liberal.
They are a little bit neurotic.
And they go along with what the government tells them to do.
Did I mention they're neurotic?
Yeah, they're a little bit neurotic.
And so even when the government says you can loosen up a little bit, they still are very nervous about their health.
Now, of course, it doesn't make any sense that, okay, you're going to wear the mask that we're already told by Leanna Nguyen on CNN is nothing more than a facial decoration.
You're going to wear that mask.
When you're on a subway platform, but not when you're in a restaurant, or not when you're on a TV set for that matter, and that's going to stop you from getting COVID. We know that that's not rational, but these people are not behaving in a rational way.
Okay, we are assuming that these are rational actors here, and that is not always the case.
The effect of the government constantly changing its story on COVID. Don't wear the masks.
Do wear the masks.
Don't wear the masks.
The vaccines are not going to come out for a year and a half.
Actually, the vaccines are going to come out in three months.
The vaccines are 100% safe and effective.
There are no side effects and it's going to stop you from contracting or transmitting coronavirus.
Actually, whoopsie-daisy, that isn't true.
None of that's true.
But it's still, that's why you need to get the fourth and the fifth shot.
But you should still get the first shot if you haven't gotten the first shot.
Because it's so effective, but it's not quite effective and blah, blah, blah.
And your head is spinning by the end of it.
And that's kind of the point.
This is, you want to talk about brilliant politicians.
Forget about Vladimir Putin for a second.
Look at Dr.
Fauci.
Dr.
Fauci is such an adept politician in no small part because you can never prove him wrong.
And you can never prove him wrong because he's held both sides of every single issue.
He's helped both sides, just during COVID, he's helped both sides of the masks, pro-mask, anti-mask, lockdowns.
Lockdowns are terrible, unimaginable.
Lockdowns are actually great.
We need more lockdowns.
The vaccines, the continued mitigation measures, the on and on and on and on and on.
So you can't prove him wrong.
You can't exactly prove him right either, but you can't prove him wrong.
He's always got that way out.
It's irrational.
And so you've got people who just say, I don't know.
I'm just afraid.
I give Joy Behar credit.
She's saying, I'm just afraid.
I'm just afraid and a little neurotic and powerless.
I guess that's probably true.
You want to talk about life and death?
Real issues of life and death?
Horrible story over the weekend.
A 38-year-old mother of four was driving Uber to make some extra money.
She was 38 years old.
You can tell by the word was that this story is not going to turn out very well.
A 22-year-old guy gets in, Calvin Crew, and he puts a gun to the back of her head.
And he says, hey, give me your money.
And she says, no, please, I don't have this money.
I don't have this.
Please put the gun down.
No, no, no.
She goes, please, I have a family.
I have four kids.
He says, no, no, no, no, no.
Eventually, the camera goes out.
He shoots her.
This guy, Calvin Crew, even though he's only 22 years old, he's a career criminal.
He's got a rap sheet a mile long.
He's been in and out of the system since he was a young teenager.
He's got an active criminal case right now involving a firearm.
Why was this animal allowed to prowl the streets?
Why?
Because of criminal justice reform, of course.
We hear criminal justice reform, mostly from the libs, but sometimes some conservatives embrace it too.
Frankly, Trump pushed this kind of stuff to some degree.
And we hear, oh, this is good.
This is going to let people who are getting life sentences for smoking one puff of a joint one time, these more frivolous prosecutions.
That's not how it works.
Criminal justice reform, in practice, is letting these monsters, these animals, out on the street.
To run roughshod, to terrorize innocent people, to destroy law and order.
And we can't do it.
We think that justice in America today is letting all the criminals out of the prisons.
Abolishing prisons, as some very prominent Democrats, elected Democrats, have been talking about.
Is it any wonder?
Is it any wonder that our enemies are taking advantage?
We've got more hits.
The hits just keep on coming out of the criminal justice reform movement.
Four people were stabbed on a New York City subway platform or on a New York City subway train on Saturday within 18 hours.
Within 18 hours among, you know, New York's not a very big city.
Four people stabbed within 18 hours.
This as Mayor Eric Adams is going to get tougher on crime.
Yeah, okay.
Three suspects stabbed a 46-year-old homeless man seven times after attempting to rob him.
On the 3 train at Livonia and Van Sicklen Avenue in Brooklyn, a man punched a 20-year-old woman in the back, and then when she objected to getting punched in the back, he slashed her three times in the stomach.
Two teens slashed a 24-year-old man standing in the mezzanine, because I guess the robbery didn't go right.
He didn't just immediately give them everything they wanted.
And a 31-year-old man Was standing near a man and a woman on a train while the woman was smoking.
And apparently this started an argument and the man from the couple stabbed the guy.
Criminal justice reform, right?
We need to let these people out of prison.
You know what our problem is in America?
Over-incarceration.
That's what I say.
How can you believe?
You have to be...
So miseducated.
You have to be so completely deluded.
You've got to be so high, not on the Haitian oregano, but on ideology, that you believe that a man is really a woman and That you believe that there's white supremacy.
Just wait for the white supremacy.
We've got a great white supremacy story coming up.
White supremacy running roughshod over America.
And you believe that our biggest problem in the criminal justice system is over-incarceration.
We have a severe under-incarceration problem.
We don't deal with crime and justice anymore.
We have a lot of problems.
And it's not even just the basic political problems.
Oh, the border doesn't work.
Oh, we've got this economic issue.
No, it's a philosophical problem.
We don't know what justice is.
We think that justice is letting criminals out of prison.
Is it any wonder that our enemies are aggressing?
I promised you I'd get to the white supremacy story.
We've got another big white supremacy example here.
A ton of white supremacy going on.
Last week, the Sacramento Bee reported that the Sacramento City Unified School District was investigating racist graffiti that was written over a water fountain at C.K. McClatchy High School.
And the graffiti was apparently a throwback to segregation.
You know, it's a colored water fountain here and whites-only water fountain here.
Isn't that terrible?
These white supremacists, these Klansmen running loose in California.
Hmm?
The superintendent, without investigating a single aspect of this story, immediately gave a statement.
He said, I am both angry and heartsick that racist graffiti was discovered on the C.K. McClatchy campus today.
We take this incident very seriously.
Racism and racist language will not be tolerated in our schools.
One father, a black father in the district, said, there's something about our culture in the Sacramento City School District that has to be addressed.
The inequities, the performance of black kids, the racism, it must stop.
The implication here.
This is all white supremacy.
White anti-black racism.
Only problem for the narrative is there were video cameras.
You know where this is going.
You knew where this was going before I even gave you the details of the story.
You knew right from the headline.
What happened?
A black student did the graffiti.
It was a hoax.
How did I know that this was a hoax the minute I saw the headline?
The way I knew this was a hoax is that white supremacy is an illusion.
It's not real.
Lump it away with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
Don't forget about that.
You would have to be so deluded that you believe that over-incarceration is a problem.
That you believe that men are women.
You would have to be so deluded.
Steeped from, I don't know, kindergarten to 12th grade.
I'm sorry, from preschool to the end of college.
I'm sorry, until the end of graduate school.
You would have to be so steeped in this leftist ideology, as America is, that your grasp on reality would have to be tenuous, if existent at all, to believe that the Ku Klux Klan is running America.
That the Ku Klux Klan is running California.
Give me a break.
But this is what a lot of people believe.
There was some years ago, there was a Russian dissident who pointed out, yes, it looks like America's winning the Cold War, but the Soviets are going to win it in the end.
And the reason the Soviets are going to win it in the end is because they have exported their ideology, and that ideology is going to poison America.
What was his name?
Yuri Bren, something with a B. There's a very famous clip of this.
Perhaps we'll try to play it on the show.
And he said, it takes about two generations, maybe three generations, to hollow out a country.
To hollow out a country's confidence, sense of self, logic, reasoning, traditions, operating principles.
And so, sure, the West thinks it's triumphant as it's winning the Cold War.
Just wait.
Just wait.
That's what we're seeing right now.
We're seeing right now the culmination of decade after decade of hollowing out of America.
Not just our freedom.
That's kind of a symptom of that.
But our conviction, our national unity, our sense that we're really a nation at all, like a nation that has borders, that has a reason to exist.
All we talk about now is how awful it is that America exists in the first place.
We should never have come.
Those poor Indians, the poor other settlers, everyone has a right to a country except for America.
Oh, it's terrible.
This is native land.
We don't deserve this.
We're colonizers.
Our past was terrible.
We need to apologize for everything.
We need to abolish our nationhood.
And most importantly, our bare knowledge of really basic things.
Philosophical things, historical facts.
And by the way, we're so proud of ourselves the whole time.
We're saying we're the smartest generation ever.
We know more.
We're wonderfully educated.
We're so brilliant.
We're so enlightened.
We're so bright.
We are not.
We are living every day more and more so in the darkness of ignorance.
And our enemies around the world are not.
Some of them have not fallen for the same poisons that we have.
Okay?
Okay?
That is playing out in real time in Ukraine.
And so, sure, we can send some troops.
We can try to defend Ukraine.
The problem runs much, much deeper than that.
Take a lesson from Putin.
Take a lesson from your enemies before it's too late.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
See you tomorrow.
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