Ep. 953 - Democrats: Don't Let Nuclear War Distract From Old Hate Crimes
As Putin threatens nuclear winter, Democrats focus on outlawing lynchings from a century ago, Ukraine attempts to join the EU, and one Russia expert says we’re already in World War III.
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As Vladimir Putin threatens to detonate nuclear weapons and plunge the planet into World War III, Democrats in Congress are focusing on the truly pressing issues like outlawing lynchings, which are already illegal, always have been, and have not been a major problem for at least 70 years.
You see, for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, lynchings were a serious problem in the United States, targeting mostly black people, but other races as well, notably Italians, who were the victims of the largest mass lynching in American history.
During the 58 years that made up the height of lynching in America, an estimated 4,467 Americans were killed by lynch mobs, according to one academic study.
For perspective, that is for fewer people over a 58-year period than were murdered in just a dozen American cities just last year.
But Democrats haven't passed any laws to stop the historic killing going on right now, probably because they themselves unleashed the crime wave during the BLM and Antifa riots of 2020.
At the same time that the House voted to make lynching illegal, again, to make it super-duper illegal, Senate Democrats voted to enshrine a sacred national right to lynch babies in the womb.
Fortunately, the Senate Democrats failed by about 14 votes.
Babies in pro-life states are safe for now.
But then again, it's hard to say that any of us are safe when an autocrat in Russia is threatening to unleash nuclear holocaust on the world if he is not allowed to proceed with his invasion of a sovereign nation, an invasion that our own idiot leaders invited him to undertake, While those same idiot leaders focus their firepower on non-existent problems and American babies.
What a time to be alive!
For now.
I'm Michael Knowles.
It's the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Steve Robson, who says, in response to Michael's comment about how this is the first major war in his lifetime between civilized nations, Joy Behar has now rescheduled her vacation from Rome to Fallujah.
That's true.
Who wants to go to Venice when you could go to a civilized city like Aleppo, right?
Because, you know, they're all so civilized.
There's no difference whatsoever between this war.
So insist the liberals.
It's insane.
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Before we get into all the actual pressing problems that matter right now and not a problem from 70 years ago.
I am always surprised when I look up the history of lynchings in America at how few lynchings there were.
Lynchings, very bad.
We're all anti-lynching.
Don't.
Lynching, very bad.
But the way that people talk about lynchings, you would think there were millions of lynchings in America.
You would think that there were at least hundreds of thousands, but there weren't.
There were relatively very few.
What was it?
4,400 some lynchings?
Actually, if you look into the history of lynchings, the death penalty was really brought to the fore in America and promoted as an antidote to the lynchings because there were all these extrajudicial killings.
That was very, very bad.
Politicians who were trying to stop this and reform the system actually promoted the death penalty as a way to discourage lynch mobs.
Now, There's a kind of irony here.
The House voted to pass this anti-lynching bill to make lynching illegal again.
They were going to make it a federal hate crime, and they will do that, as opposed to a love crime.
Those love crimes are bad, but the hate crimes are a lot worse.
But the maximum sentence for someone convicted of committing a lynching under this legislation is It's 30 years.
To me, the crazy takeaway here is that Democrats only believe that you should be punished for 30 years if you lynch someone.
Call me old-fashioned.
Call me a little fire and brimstone.
I think the punishment should be much higher.
I think if you lynch somebody, probably you should just get killed by the state, right?
But the Democrats have tied themselves into knots here because the Democrats are anti-death penalty.
So they can't push for the death penalty even as a punishment for something like lynching.
So they say, okay, we're taking lynching so seriously.
We're going to give you a relatively brief prison sentence for it, for a crime that's already illegal that hasn't been an issue in 70 years.
Not a great use of resources.
Not a very logical, prudent sort of government, is it?
No, not at all.
But then again, elections have consequences.
We get the, what was it, H.L. Mencken said that democracy is the theory that the people deserve, deserve to get what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard.
So Kamala Harris yesterday, she summed it up very well when she explained what elections mean.
As we all know, elections matter.
Yes.
And when folks vote, they order what they want, and in this case they got what they asked for.
I went off script a little bit.
She is so singularly unlikable.
I have basically nothing else to add to that clip other than that.
She's just so painfully unlikable.
Joe Biden's approval rating is about negative 15% right now, and hers is lower.
If Democrats really believe that Kamala Harris is their great hope in 2024, I think they ought to pack it in now, and Republicans should start measuring the drapes.
Elections have an order.
And I went off script.
I know you did, darling.
I know you went off script.
Now, President Trump has a different take on the election and a different take on Ukraine.
President Trump, as the shelling, as the killing, as the horrible atrocities in Ukraine continue, he says, We are praying for the people of Ukraine.
God bless them all.
They are indeed brave.
As everyone understands, this horrific event would not have happened if there wasn't a rigged election and I was president.
Show me the lie.
Show me the lie.
You don't even need to believe that the election was stolen in the sense of people were carrying boxes of ballots overnight and you had nefarious poll workers changing the numbers.
Not saying that didn't happen, but it didn't need to happen for the election to have been rigged.
You might debate whether or not the election was stolen.
You really can't debate whether or not the election was rigged.
The Democrats changed all the rules in the weeks and months before the election to be more favorable to Democrats.
They took away most of the ballot security measures that even Democrats, even Barack Obama in recent years, has talked about the importance of.
They took that away because they were controlling the elections and they felt that they could give themselves an advantage.
And they did that.
They turned election day into election month, weeks and months.
They turned the necessity to show up to vote into widespread unsolicited mail-in ballots.
That's what you saw in Pennsylvania.
This was in violation of the state constitution, as a court just found, by the way.
You saw all sorts of madness, the counting that went on and on and on.
There was obviously a rigging and I think Trump is right.
Not just about the rigging of the election.
That was obvious.
Whether it was stolen or not, obviously it was rigged.
But he's right about Ukraine too.
I do not believe Putin would have invaded Ukraine any more than he already had under Barack Obama and then he just sort of stayed there in Crimea.
I don't think he would have invaded Ukraine under Trump.
My evidence is that he didn't.
He invaded Georgia under Bush.
He invaded Crimea under Biden.
He didn't do nothing under Trump, and then the minute Biden gets into office...
Or, I'm sorry, yeah.
The first one is Bush, second one is Obama.
It's easy to confuse Obama and Biden.
Didn't do nothing under Trump, and then under Joe Biden, what does he do?
He full-on invades the country, and he doesn't seem like he's going to be pulling out anytime soon.
We talked yesterday about all of the propaganda that you're seeing in this war.
You're seeing a ton of Russian propaganda.
You're seeing a ton of Western propaganda, too.
Ukraine is not merely a battle between the Ukrainians fighting for their nation and Russia fighting for its greater empire, but it's also a proxy battle in a sort of new Cold War between the West led by America and NATO and the European Union and Russia.
New Cold War, same as the old And Ukraine is that battleground.
And so you're seeing a lot of Western propaganda about how well the Ukrainians are doing.
The ghost of Kiev is shooting down half a dozen Russian fighter pilots.
And the men of Snake Island who were all killed, but they did so gloriously.
And Zelensky is there on the front lines wearing his fatigues.
And none of that is exactly true.
That's wartime propaganda like you see in every war.
war, but it's giving the false impression to the West, which is that Ukraine is winning this war.
Ukraine is not winning this war.
Ukraine is fighting valiantly.
There's no question about that.
Russia is the aggressor party here.
There's no question about that.
that but I think a lot of Western liberals in particular are laboring under the misapprehension that Ukraine is going to pull it out.
They're really close to winning.
They're not.
Russia has so much more power.
They've got all the advantage.
They've got all of the leverage.
If you were, you don't want to gamble on the future.
You kind of hope that the valiant, you know, Western looking Ukrainians can pull it out but people are in for a big surprise if they think that Putin is being routed.
He's not.
He's still winning the war and so then the question is this.
The longer this drags on, the more frustrated Putin gets that this isn't going fast enough.
What is he willing to do?
The man has threatened to use nuclear weapons, about as bluntly as a world leader can.
Marco Rubio, who's on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he said there's something seriously wrong with Putin.
This is not the same man we've been dealing with 10 years ago.
So then the question becomes, are we all going to die?
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K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Are we going to die?
Not even because of some military operation in Eastern Europe, but because Russia drags the United States or the European Union, NATO, sort of tomato, tomato, into a war.
It becomes a world war.
There's the use of nuclear weapons.
How dangerous is this situation?
Well, Rubio, from the Senate Intelligence Committee, says, quote, I wish I could share more, but for now I think it's pretty obvious to many that something is off with Putin.
He has always been a killer, but his problem now is different and significant.
It would be a mistake to assume this Putin would react the same way he would have five years ago.
So, there are few options on how to interpret what Rubio is saying.
Rubio is privy to intelligence that we are not privy to, but also we know that politicians lie and exaggerate things, and we know that the intelligence community lies and exaggerates things.
One possibility, Putin has a serious illness.
There have been rumors of this over the years.
They haven't seemed to be true.
The other is that Putin's lost his marbles.
He's got some psychological condition that means he's not a rational actor.
The third possibility is, this is Western propaganda and we're trying to undermine Putin and make him seem like a crazy guy and encourage the world to all go to war with him and change the regime in Moscow.
None of those situations should make us feel particularly secure.
Especially when you've got a former superpower.
One of the two superpowers for most of the 20th century.
And then they got vanquished in the Cold War and now they're coming back.
Nuclear power.
Very butthurt about losing their empire in the early 1990s.
Want to get it back.
You've now got them in Kiev mired in fighting.
Trying to reclaim their empire.
That's a very dangerous situation.
Especially because Ukraine isn't giving up.
Gotta hand them credit.
They are fighting much more valiantly, I think, than a lot of people expected of a small nation with a corrupt oligarchic government against its former imperial overlords.
So now, the way that Ukraine is trying to Turn the tide of this war is they're trying to join the European Union.
The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said, quote, We ask the European Union for Ukraine's immediate accession via a new special procedure.
Our goal is to be together with all Europeans, and most importantly, to be on an equal footing.
I'm sure it's fair.
I'm sure it's possible.
So, at the height of this Potentially global conflict, what Ukraine is saying is, Europe, if you annex us, if you take us in to your federation, then the country will be able to survive.
Now, the cost of Ukraine surviving as an independent country, or a semi-independent country, is that the world is going to be plunged into a war.
Russia will not stand for Ukraine joining the European Union.
So what is the EU saying in response to this?
The president of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, says...
Maybe.
Basically.
Her answer is, we want Ukraine to join, but...
She says, we have a process with Ukraine that is, for example, integrating the Ukrainian market into a single market, so you want closer economic ties.
We have very close cooperation on the energy grid, for example.
There are many topics we work very closely together, and indeed, over time, they belong to us.
They are one of us, and we want them in.
Those are fighting words.
Those are not words to de-escalate the situation right now in Ukraine.
Even Switzerland.
Switzerland is the most famously, you might say infamously, neutral country in the world.
That's why all the sketchy banking rules are there and people put their money there.
Even in the hottest wars, they remain neutral.
That is how Switzerland has survived.
Even Switzerland is throwing its neutrality to the wind and coming out against Russia.
They're not admitting that they're doing that, but they are doing that.
They're joining on to sanctions against Russia.
We think of Switzerland as maybe the most quintessentially European country that there is, but Switzerland is not in the European Union.
Switzerland is not in NATO. Switzerland is a neutral country.
And yet, they're signing on to these sanctions against Russia.
And it got me thinking here.
What do we want?
We in the West, we want everybody to be in the West, right?
That's what...
All of the wars of the 2000s were about, all of the Bush wars were, okay, these, well, one, it was because Middle Eastern terrorists launched a war on us, and then that war was used, right, the attacks on September 11th were used as the justification for saying, okay, we can't just let these people live and let live, do whatever they want, because they're going to come to our shores, too.
So we're going to remake the whole world in the vein of Madisonian democracy.
And we're all going to be the West, and we're all going to have iPhones and McDonald's, and we're all going to get along just fine.
And it didn't really work out.
Didn't work out very well in Iraq.
Didn't work out in Syria at all.
Certainly didn't work out in Libya.
Obviously didn't work out in Afghanistan, where we were just routed last year after 20 years mired in that backwater.
It didn't totally work.
Even here, Vladimir Putin, who obviously wants to expand his empire, but he's using it as the pretext for this, where he's saying the problem is NATO's expansion, Western expansion.
In the early 1990s, at the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO said they weren't going to expand east.
They did expand east.
They expanded into former Warsaw Pact, former Soviet nations.
We're not going to allow that.
Ukraine is right up on our border.
And you look at Ukraine.
I suspect most people can't find Ukraine on a map.
It's not your fault.
Why would people pay attention to the maps of Eastern Europe?
I suspect Joe Biden can't find Ukraine on a map because he doesn't know anything.
That is his fault.
He's the president.
He should know where it is.
But I bet Hunter Biden can find Ukraine on a map because he had a no-show job at the corrupt oligarchic energy industry in Ukraine.
Adds even more complication to this issue.
But Ukraine is right there between...
Europe, the EU, and Russia.
Ukraine is a buffer state.
There's a really good piece on this in Tablet Magazine by Lee Smith.
Ukraine historically is a buffer state.
And the thing about buffer states is they've got to play nice with the big powers on either side.
When buffer states play nice with the big powers on either side, generally things are okay.
But the minute that buffer states start to turn to one side or the other, then you see tensions begin to rise.
And what you saw in Ukraine for the period before 2013-2014 is that Ukraine was tilting pro-Russia.
So then the West, through the encouragement of protests, through direct funding of protests and activist groups, the West turned that government in Ukraine a little more pro-Western.
Actually a lot more pro-Western.
Actually so pro-Western that they wanted to join NATO and they wanted to join the European Union.
All of a sudden, Russia says, we can't have this.
Maybe we can tolerate NATO expanding to Poland or Hungary or to some of those Eastern European states, but we can't tolerate them right up on our border.
So all of a sudden, even when you think you're going to solve a problem by having Ukraine join NATO, what could be the downside of that?
This is great.
All of a sudden now, you've gotten Russia into the sort of situation where they feel that it's in their essential security interest to To go in and you have war.
This is something that very hawkish, very serious, very well-respected foreign policy thinkers in the 1990s warned NATO about.
They said, do not expand NATO eastward.
George Kennan, he's the author of the Long Telegram.
He's the author of the Strategy of Containment, the Cold War strategy for containing communist Russia.
He said, it's a huge mistake.
It's a tragic mistake to expand NATO eastward.
you are going to squander the victory of the Cold War.
You're going to create a new Cold War.
That's what we're seeing happen right now.
This is what is so jarring here.
All war is awful.
All war involves a ton of suffering and carnage and terrible actions.
There's no question about it.
But some wars are scarier than others.
And I think most people believe that this war, this war that's going on right now between former superpower, nuclear state Russia, and sovereign nation Ukraine is different and scarier than, say, I don't know, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict or the war between Saudi the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict or the war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, right?
There's something, why?
Well, I said this yesterday and it got me into trouble.
I said, this is the first major war in my lifetime between civilized nations.
And all the libs, they're still doing it.
Thousands and thousands of blue check responses.
Michael, you racist!
You idiot!
You ignoramus!
How dare you say that this is the first major war between civilized nations in your lifetime?
What's the counterexample?
I can't think of one.
I didn't think I was making a particularly provocative, conservative, right-wing statement.
It's just a simple observation.
And actually, it's an observation that is so clear that it's not even right-wingers making it.
It's left-wingers as well.
There's a journalist on CBS News.
CBS News, not the most rock-ribbed right-wing conservative outlet.
Journalist on CBS News who made exactly the same point I did, apparently, before I even made it.
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Tonight is Joe Biden's first official State of the Union address, and the one thing I guarantee you're not going to hear is...
The truth.
They're not.
That's because the Biden presidency is a total disaster.
Supply chain crisis, energy crisis, debacle in Afghanistan, all self-induced.
Right now, this war in Ukraine, much of it, frankly, probably all of it, due to Joe Biden's feckless and embarrassing leadership.
Now, of course, Biden is never going to say that.
But Ben Shapiro will.
Tonight, exactly 15 minutes following Joe Biden's remarks before a joint session of Congress.
Ben will offer up his response.
Call it the real State of the Union.
Or call it a response to the State of the Union.
Put simply, Ben will destroy Joe Biden's State of the Union with facts and logic.
Join me, Ben, Jeremy, Matt, and Drew, tonight at 8.15 Eastern, 7.15 Central on the Daily Wire YouTube channel.
The real State of the Union response with Ben will be airing as soon as Biden's address ends on the same channel.
Make sure you tune in.
in.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
I got in trouble on Twitter for making my comment about how this is the first major war between civilized nations, not because what I said was false.
Those tweets don't get you in trouble generally, but because what I said was true and you're just not allowed to say it because it offends politically correct sensibilities.
I knew this, I have always known this, and now I have been proven right by a reporter on CBS News who made exactly the same point.
This isn't a place, with all due respect, you know, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades.
You know, this is a relatively civilized, relatively European, I have to choose those words carefully too, city where you wouldn't expect that or hope that it's going to happen.
But Iraq is the birthplace of civilization!
Yeah, okay, sure.
That was a while ago.
You know, recently, things haven't been great.
I don't think you honeymooned in Baghdad, white liberals trying to disprove this obvious point, that in a more honest age, everyone would be able to agree about it.
Everyone knows that the point is right.
We're living in an age where it's not even that we need to persuade people to believe that the things we think are right are right.
We're living in an age where even when people know that certain things are true, they just feel that they're not allowed to say it.
I'll give you an example of this.
Mike Anton pointed this out to me, the political writer Mike Anton.
We were discussing the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory.
You might have heard about this.
People go after Tucker Carlson for saying the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory.
What is the great replacement conspiracy theory?
The great replacement conspiracy theory is the idea that Democrats are using mass migration to change the demographics of America in a way that is more politically advantageous to them.
This is a terrible conspiracy theory, and if you ever even suggest it, you're a terrible racist, and you're awful, and you're evil.
Except that the Democrats have bragged about this openly, in print, in the New York Times.
There's a piece by Michelle Goldberg on this very point.
There have been many reports in the network news on this very point for many years.
And so, I pose this question to Mike Anton.
And he said the issue here is not that the Democrats and Republicans can't agree on what is happening on some particular political strategy.
It's that the Democrats do something.
They tell us that they do something.
And then they tell us that we're not allowed to say that they told us that they did something.
It's a degree of gaslighting and living in lies and an enforced living in lies that is so infuriating and so maddening in the real sense.
It actually drives you insane.
Everyone knows that men are not women, right?
Everybody knows that a man cannot become a woman.
Everyone knows that the hulking dude on the Penn women's swim team is not a woman.
He's a dude and looks like a dude and just obviously is a dude.
But we're not allowed to say that and we're not allowed to even suggest or imply that we believe that.
So we all know something to be true.
We just all have to pretend.
In a way, there's some comfort there.
It means that the world hasn't gone completely insane.
We're just liars.
We're just dishonest and cowardly.
But we haven't gone completely insane.
We've been right about a lot of things.
The masks, for example.
I think there are some people who believe that the masks are really helpful in stopping the Wu flu.
There are some people who really cling to their masks in a sincere way.
But most people don't.
Most people, including all of the people pushing the masks, know that the masks are frivolous.
Dr.
Fauci gets caught time and time again at the height of the pandemic, at the next height of the pandemic, at the surge, at the stop the curve and the spread and this.
He gets caught time and time again not wearing his mask.
He's in the middle of the baseball stadium in the ballpark.
He's throwing out or dribbling the first pitch at the Nationals game.
He's got his mask on.
Then he goes up to the stands when he's actually sitting next to people.
Not when he's in the middle of an empty ballpark, but when he's actually sitting next to people not from his household.
He's got the mask down and he's talking and chatting because he doesn't really care.
Mayor of San Francisco doesn't really care.
Nancy Pelosi doesn't really care.
Joe Biden doesn't really care.
He doesn't believe the mask does anything at all.
Leanna Wu, the medical analyst on CNN, goes on.
She says it's just a facial decoration.
It doesn't really do anything.
But publicly, when we know the cameras are on, they've all got to wear it.
And they don't believe it does anything.
And we don't believe it does anything.
And they know that we don't believe it does anything.
And we know that they don't believe it does anything.
But we've all got to pretend.
That's what we've got to do.
Except now there are diminishing marginal returns.
This is an election year.
Democrats are going to have a really hard time clinging to power.
And so I've got great news.
We've got such terrible news generally.
The horrible, the war going on.
Discord at home.
But I've got really good news.
COVID was cured.
COVID's over, guys.
Officially, I think today.
COVID is totally over.
How did it get cured?
By the State of the Union address.
The House of Representatives has decided to drop the mask requirement just in time for Joe Biden's State of the Union address tonight.
The Capitol physicians said just a day or two ago, physicians said in an update that masks are now optional at the Capitol, including for this special day.
You're seeing in cities around the country, states around the country, the dropping of mask requirements, the dropping of vaccine requirements, all around the same time.
COVID hasn't really changed.
You see.
It goes up, it goes down.
There are more cases, there are fewer cases.
Deaths have been very, very low for a long time.
There's going to be another variant.
Experts tell us the next variant might be pretty bad too, but that's not what changed.
What changed was the political calculation.
Democrats can't keep this up forever, and they realize they're not getting political returns.
The symbol of the mask is no longer helping them, and so they get rid of it.
Because it was a symbol all the time.
Why do they need this?
They need this because everything that Joe Biden has touched has turned to ash.
That's why.
Everything.
The economy, foreign policy, social relations, trust in government.
Everything has turned to absolute dirt on his watch.
And so he needs a slight, any kind of win.
So what has he got?
He's going to nominate a Supreme Court justice.
That might help him.
We'll get to that in a second.
And he's going to remove the masks and say, I beat COVID. How'd you beat COVID? Because I said I beat COVID. Okay, all right, that's enough to do it.
What they're desperately trying to do right now is to avoid this war, getting dragged into this war.
That would just be the cherry on top of this Rotten Sunday of the Biden administration is if he somehow got us pulled into a war with a nuclear former superpower.
And so they're trying everything they can to avoid it.
Jen Psaki was just asked about the suggestion that has come from ignorant liberals and Adam Kinzinger.
But I repeat myself.
The suggestion is for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
And a no-fly zone, it sounds really great.
A no-fly zone means, you know, you tell all the warships, all the airplanes to stand down.
Oh, good.
Okay.
Well, that sounds good because right now the airplanes are shooting people and dropping bombs.
So if we tell them to not fly anymore, then there will be less death, right?
Great.
Okay.
Let's support a no-fly zone.
But what a no-fly zone actually means is that the people imposing the no-fly zone, in this case the United States, Are willing to shoot down enemy fighters.
In other words, that they are going to declare war on, in this case, not some goat herders in Afghanistan, but a nuclear former superpower.
So this would be not a great idea.
Fortunately, cooler heads are prevailing, even at the White House.
Jen Psaki poo-pooing the idea when it was brought to her attention.
On military, is there any way in which the U.S. would support a no-fly zone over Ukraine?
Well, here's what's important for everybody to know about a no-fly zone.
What that would require is implementation by the U.S. military.
It would essentially mean the U.S. military would be shooting down planes, Russian planes.
That is definitely escalatory.
That would potentially put us into a place where we're in a military conflict with Russia.
That is not something the president wants to do.
So that's a no on that.
Those are all the reasons why that's not a good idea.
Okay, so she doesn't notice, she doesn't definitively say, we're not going to do it.
We're not going to have a no-fly zone.
But she says, you know, this would probably not be the best.
Here's what a no-fly zone is, because she's got to mollify the people on her side, the gung-ho, warmongering liberals who believe all the propaganda coming out of Ukraine and think that this war is going to be a cinch.
We'll go in, they'll all greet us as liberators, Putin will turn tail, and that's that.
Not a single American will be hurt.
No casualties on our side.
Democracy saved.
You know that flourishing Ukrainian democracy that even though we were complaining about it as a corrupt oligarchy like five minutes ago, that'll be saved.
This is the fight for the free world, right?
All of this propaganda, which is essential in wars, but is not actually explaining the facts on the ground.
The White House has to say, hey, I know we've been pumping this out to you, but don't believe it so much that we're actually going to get into a shooting war with Russia.
The Pentagon was less interested in beating around the bush.
They were asked the same question.
They had a simpler answer.
Now that we've seen civilian targets that have been hit, is the U.S. considering installing a no-fly zone in Ukrainian airspace?
No.
No.
Simple enough.
No, we're not going to do it.
Sorry.
So then the question becomes...
Because, look, I don't want to sound callous about this.
I don't want to sound like Joe Biden and seem like I'm holding out the red carpet for Putin to invade this country and take it over and try to rebuild the Soviet Union.
None of us like seeing what's going on.
The stuff that's going on in Ukraine is horrifying.
You're seeing a...
Generally speaking, civilized place being reduced to rubble, horrible atrocities, potential war crimes being committed against civilians.
So is there nothing we can do?
I mean, that's the question we keep beating our heads about.
Is there nothing that can be done here?
Is there nothing that Putin could do that would draw us into the war?
Jen Psaki is asked a genuinely tricky question.
Is there a red line?
There are reports of illegal cluster bombs and vacuum bombs being used by the Russians.
If that's true, what is the next step of this administration?
And is there a red line for how much violence will be tolerated against civilians in this manner that's illegal and potentially a war crime?
It would be.
I don't have any confirmation of that.
We have seen the reports.
If that were true, it would potentially be a war crime.
Obviously, there are a range of international fora that would assess that, so certainly we would look to that to be a part of that conversation.
This was the most adept answer I've ever heard Jen Psaki give, because she's asked two questions and she conflates them.
It says, would there be a red line and would that be a war crime?
If Putin were using cluster bombs against civilians, for instance, which almost certainly he already is.
And Psaki says, it would be.
Notice, it would be.
Not that would be a red line.
It would be a war crime against civilians.
And therefore, there are lots of international fora to take this to.
But she's not going to fall into the same trap that Obama fell into in Syria.
Remember, Obama was asked, if Bashar Assad uses chemical weapons, Would that be a red line for you in Syria?
And he said, well, that would be.
That would be a red line.
That would be a red line.
And then Assad does it, he calls Obama's bluff, and there was no red line.
So Psaki doesn't want to draw.
This is actually good news.
Because what we're looking at right now is not just a simple go-in, beat the Ruskies...
That's that.
Zelensky, he looks like such a cool guy.
Let's save Zelensky because we like him because now he's a star in the Western media.
Good stuff.
Pack it up.
Two weeks, we're all back home having a party.
World wars have started for less than we're looking at right now.
A random archduke was killed in Serbia.
And that launched one of the bloodiest, most heinous wars in the history of the world.
World wars have started for less than this.
We have had relative global peace and order under a single hegemonic American empire for about 30 years now.
And there have been cracks in that for 20 years now.
And there have been other rising powers.
Russia has gotten back on its feet to some degree.
China has really, really risen up.
And now owns a lot of the United States, by the way.
Not just the politicians like the Biden family, but also a lot of our resources.
They own a lot of our debt.
They manufacture a lot of our things.
We're in a much different world than we were in in the early 1990s.
World peace, such as we've had for 30 years, is not the norm.
War has happened.
There will be no end to war.
There will be no end to history.
There will be no end to war.
We're in a precarious situation.
People need to be cautious and exercise good judgment and be prudent.
Some people believe we're already in another world war.
Fiona Hill, who is an expert on Russia, she's served in a zillion administrations.
I think she served in the Bush 2 administration, the Obama administration, and the Trump administration.
Definitely a swamp creature type.
She's just a DC kind of think tanky, policy wonky expert.
She became very anti-Trump even after working for Trump.
But she believes that Putin would use nuclear weapons.
She believes that we are already in a third world war.
She says that world wars have very often come out of previous conflicts.
So the second world war was in many ways just a continuation of the first world war with a little period of peace in the middle.
And that's not merely with the hindsight of 2020.
There were a lot of astute commentators who recognized this at the time.
A lot of political cartoons after the First World War said, you know, 20 years from now, they'd have a little cartoon of a baby.
There's a very specific political cartoon I'm referring to.
I forget exactly.
I'll try to dig it up.
There's a little cartoon of a baby.
And it was, given the piece that ended World War I, they said, all right, this baby is going to be fighting in 20 years.
There's no way to avoid the war.
Very famous painting of Churchill after World War I. All the leaders from World War I, and there's Churchill looking at the viewer as if to say, we're headed for war again, and then World War grows out of that.
Some people view the Cold War as a continuation of those World Wars.
Some people view, Fiona Hill believes, that the wars of empire that we've been seeing in Afghanistan, in Syria, are in many ways a continuation of that, and things could get hotter again.
So then the question we started with, We started with a very simple question today.
We're talking about lynchings.
We're talking about abortion.
We're talking about nuclear holocaust.
And the question was, are we all going to die?
And the answer, of course, is yes.
Yes, it is.
Yes, of course we're going to die.
Today is Mardi Gras.
Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday.
The significance of Mardi Gras is not merely that I was pestering my wife to lift her shirt up at the breakfast table.
She did not find that very amusing.
I didn't even have beads to give her.
The significance of Mardi Gras on Fat Tuesday is that we're headed for Ash Wednesday.
Ash Wednesday is the traditional Christian observation that we're all going to die.
You go on Ash Wednesday, Catholics, still, they go to Mass, they get ashes put on their forehead.
The ashes burnt from Palm Sunday.
And the priest says, remember, man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.
It's the memento mori, the recognition that we're all going to die.
And the weird thing about Ash Wednesday is that I think it might be the most popular Catholic holiday of the year.
It's hard to call it a holiday, but it's probably the most...
Most popular Catholic liturgical day of the year.
People who don't go to Mass, who don't go to confession or access the sacraments, people who don't even go to Mass on Christmas and Easter, will often show up on Ash Wednesday.
Why?
Well, in part, because it's very ritualistic and tribalistic, right?
You actually get the marker on your head.
You remember.
It's very tangible.
We're physical beings, in part, and we can remember that.
But also, it's because people need to be reminded that we're going to die.
There's a Twitter account, which is the Death Reminder Twitter account.
It just tweets out every day, you're going to die.
We need to remember that.
Philosophy has been described as making sense of death, getting ready to die.
Life is a practice for dying.
Not to sound too morbid about it, but actually that's a very important thing.
We need to remember it puts our whole life in order.
There's a famous line that I love to quote from Dr.
Johnson when I defend the death penalty, which is, Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he's to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.
We in the secular, liberal, decadent West have lost sight of deeper things in life.
We think we're just going to live forever.
A lot of idiots, very high IQ billionaire idiots in Silicon Valley and a lot of futurist types, they think we're going to live forever.
We're going to plug in our brain stems, we're going to upload our minds to the clouds, and then we're just going to live forever on this earth, which sounds kind of hellish to me.
They've certainly lost the thought of eternal life, true eternal life, through religion and stuff like that, that animated our whole civilization before it collapsed.
But they think...
This world, you know what this world's about?
It's about doing what you want.
This world, it's about getting pleasure.
That's what you want.
You know, if it feels good, do it, man.
Life's too short.
Carpe diem, seize the day.
Chesterton pointed out, the carpe diem religion, the seize the day religion, is not the religion of happy people.
It's the religion of very unhappy people.
Desperate people who just want a little more titillation, just a little more sensation before the lights finally go out and we turn to warm food and take a dirt nap.
Not very uplifting.
Not a good way to live.
But if you recognize you are going to die, there are deeper things in this life.
I hope that we're not all blitzed out in the bright white flash of Putin's last stand.
I hope we're not wiped out in that.
I don't think we're going to be wiped out in that.
But even if we were, if we died tomorrow, next week, or in 70 years, by the grand scheme of time, it's not all that different.
It's going to happen sooner or later.
So what are we doing now?
What are we really living for?
We live in a time where public health has become so good, sanitation, medicine has become so good that we don't see death a lot.
We don't see people die.
When people are about to die, we sort of send them off to little hospices and things so we don't need to look at it.
We don't hold particularly elaborate funerals or wakes anymore.
We've got all this sort of medicine, so we don't have to think about it.
Very important to think about that sort of stuff, folks.
Otherwise, you're going to lose sight of what really matters in this life.
What is the state of our union?
You're going to hear it tonight from Joe Biden.
The state of our union is we're all going to die.
Maybe that could actually teach us something.
We're heading into a period that is penitential.
A period where you're supposed to sacrifice.
Certainly Christians are, but I would encourage everybody, even if you don't consider yourself a Christian, to do that as well.
Give something up.
Detach yourself from the things of this world.
Put down the Twitter.
This would be very hard for me, too.
Put down all the constant stimulation and think about the deeper things.
There was a question some years ago.
Why do perfectly happy Londoners go off and join ISIS? Why are people attracted to these sorts of things?
Because men do not merely want to sit around and scroll and eat food and look at porn and just turn into couch potatoes until we die of lethargy.
No.
Mankind needs struggle.
We want meaning.
We want virtue.
Viktor Frankl said man's search for meaning is his deepest longing in life.
We want a sense of transcendence.
That's where wokeness comes from.
That's where virtue signaling comes from.
We want to push up against something.
We want to struggle.
What do they say?
Soft times make bad men.
Bad men make hard times.
Hard men make good men.
Good men make soft times.
You ever hear that expression?
These cycles.
We've been living in a really soft, fatty period.
Now we're heading into a period where It is much more one of struggle, much more one of war, one that is going to be a little bit harder.
Prepare yourself for that, and remember, there's something beyond the struggles and pleasures of this world.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Joe Biden prepares for his first official State of the Union address as president as chaos surrounds him on all sides.
