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As the body count mounts in Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin is reportedly attacking even residential areas in his conquest of the bread basket of Europe, the American establishment news media are focusing on issues that really matter, like the effect of the invasion on transgender acceptance.
CBS News is reporting that, quote, I suspect the psychiatric evaluations go something like this.
Sir, do you think you're a woman?
No?
Okay, you pass.
Yes, you do?
Sorry, you fail.
Would seem like a pretty straightforward psychiatric examination.
I digress.
The network goes on.
CBS News spoke with one woman in Kiev who is now battling a war within a war amid Russia's invasion.
The woman, of course, is a man, and the war within the war is a sexual delusion presently being crammed down everyone's throats by an increasingly decadent secular West.
But the news report is actually a helpful reminder to the warmongering globalist liberals who two weeks ago couldn't have pointed to Kiev on a map.
It reminds them, Ukraine is not your toy.
It is not...
It's merely the area of the world where you can superimpose your own delusions and your own preferences.
Ukraine is a nation and a people with its own beliefs and customs and interests and way of viewing the world.
And maybe if our leaders in the West had had even a modicum of humility and prudence, maybe if they had shown just the teensiest, tiniest bit of respect for those national differences and for Ukraine's unique and uniquely vulnerable place in Eastern Europe,
Perhaps we wouldn't all find ourselves today on the brink of World War III. But I suppose that sort of basic competence and judgment is too much to ask of a ruling class that can't tell the difference between boys and girls.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Marcus W., who says, What I fear most about being completely vaporized in a nuclear explosion is that I might start voting Democrat afterwards.
That's true.
That's a real fear.
People don't consider that.
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The libs make everything about creepy sex.
They make everything.
Every single thing is about their own weird sexual hang-ups.
School.
You go to school now.
You don't learn your reading, writing, and arithmetic.
You learn about transgenderism and throuples and all sorts of weird kinky sex stuff.
Even...
A war in Europe, the first major land war in Europe since World War II, they somehow make it about creepy sex.
Because I'm sure that's what the grandmothers who are in their bunkers right now in Kiev, that's what they're worried about.
Oh boy, can the drag queens, do they really feel they can express themselves with the bombs going off?
We've got to fix that problem first.
Then we can deal with the tanks that are rolling into our city.
The left is obsessed with weird, creepy, Destructive sex.
You saw this the other day with John Oliver.
John Oliver, whose show I have never watched, but his clips go around, and so occasionally I am forced to watch them.
John Oliver made an argument that is not a fringe argument.
It's very much a mainstream left-wing argument that a pressing social problem is that we must, right now, legalize prostitution.
Basically, consensual sex for money on camera is legal porn, and consensual sex for money off camera is illegal sex work.
Makes sense, right?
Wrong?
Well, exactly.
Everything about the way we regulate sex work in this country is confusing and counterproductive.
And when we talk about it, it's often either demonizing, patronizing, or just plain wrong.
And in some cases, all three at once.
But a human history's worth of s*** laws hasn't changed the fact that one, sex work has always been part of society, appealing to every interest and every kind of clientele.
And two, sex workers are not a monolith.
People from a variety of backgrounds do it for a variety of reasons.
And the fact is, our current system of criminalizing the trade and driving everyone underground is actually only making life harder for the most vulnerable involved.
So the point of his self-righteous monologue is we need to legalize prostitution.
That'll be really, really wonderful.
He's right that prostitution has always been around.
It is the oldest profession in the world.
It's really tied with politics for being the oldest profession in the world.
And as Ronald Reagan pointed out, the two professions have a lot of similarities.
They look pretty similar when you compare them side by side.
That's all true.
Why would it follow then that we should encourage more prostitution?
He says all these laws against prostitution, they don't do anything to actually reduce prostitution.
That's, I think, what he's insinuating.
No, they just make the whole thing worse.
This is this typical...
Pie in the sky, magical thinking, liberal argument that if you pass a law against something, you're not going to get less of it.
You're going to get more of it.
That's why we need to take away the laws against drugs, for instance.
Look, you've got laws against drugs, they don't do anything.
Actually, if you want to reduce drug use, you've got to legalize drugs.
If you want to minimize prostitution, you've got to legalize prostitution.
Because laws give you more of a thing.
Except that isn't true.
That isn't true about any aspect of society.
If it were true, we would get rid of laws against murder, wouldn't we?
Because, well, if the law gives you more of the thing, then we better repeal those laws against murder tomorrow.
We're getting so much more murder than we need.
Let's legalize murder.
We'll regulate it.
We'll legalize murder, we'll regulate it, and then we'll get a lot less of it, right?
No, of course not.
We pass laws against things.
These laws actually do disincentivize those activities.
Okay, when you have laws against prostitution, you actually do get less prostitution.
Now, we don't really enforce these laws.
There are lots of difficult problems with them.
Sure, okay, you can try to reform criminal laws.
You always try to do that.
Beyond the legal point that John Oliver is making here is a philosophical one.
Which is really bad.
His argument is to really be free, we need to be able to treat ourselves like we're meat puppets.
To really be free, we need to be able to accept money for people to pursue their basest, most animalistic sexual desires, and for us to be treated not like dignified human beings made in the image of God, but like meat, like little sex toys to be merely vessels for someone else's temporary pleasure, to be used and discarded and thrown to the side.
That's the argument here.
That we have some natural right to do that.
That's the true height of liberty.
But of course that's not the height of liberty.
I'm really not picking on sex workers as the new politically correct term.
It actually is the world's oldest profession, but it's not good.
It's not conducive to virtue.
It's not conducive to the virtue of the sex workers.
It's not conducive to the virtue of the clients.
It's not conducive to the virtue of society.
There is no right to prostitution, whether you're the person buying it or you're the person selling it.
It just isn't good.
Just outlaw it.
It's just bad, and you should enforce the laws, and everyone would benefit.
Okay, when John Oliver makes this point, he says, well, how come it's legal if you have a camera in the room, right?
And we call that the pornography industry, but it's not legal if you don't have a camera in the room.
Great question, John.
You're right.
Ban porn.
You make a great point.
Yeah, that's dumb.
That's a ridiculous distinction, and we should heavily regulate, if not ban outright, pornography as well.
Sure.
Okay, that's a good idea.
But it goes even beyond the sex work.
We are told, now our kids are taught in classrooms, that to be truly free, you need to pursue every weird sexual desire you ever had.
Any weird, destructive, kinky thought that ever popped into your head, you have to pursue it.
Because if you don't, you're going to be repressed.
And you shouldn't be repressed, because then you won't be free.
And if you're a man and you think you're a woman, to be really free, you've got to chop up your body and take medications to maintain these open wounds and force society to pretend that you're something that you're not.
That's the only way to be free.
But of course that's not true.
We're now entering into a period of Lent.
American Christians are, at least.
Christians around the world, I suppose.
And I think, even for non-Christians, this is a good period to reflect and think, what is the real way to be free?
The modern libs tell you the way to be free is do whatever you want.
No, the way to be free is self-denial.
It's education.
It's tamping down those face desires, cultivating your higher will.
But we don't live in a serious country anymore that recognizes that.
Remember, we used to talk in our country about sacrifice.
We used to talk about...
Not being little children.
Growing up.
Be a man.
Do what you gotta do.
Find your duty.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
We're gonna be a nation of tough men who are gonna leave a better country to our children.
Well, that's not the country we're in right now.
This was so clear last night at the State of the Union address.
The most...
The most depressing, sad, pathetic State of the Union I have ever watched, and I have watched a whole lot of them.
The State of the Union was really, really bad and terrible, and the worst one that I've ever seen.
But I'm more interested in the state of your household.
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I do want to get back to Ukraine because that matters a lot more to world security and the prospect of World War III than whatever nonsense Joe Biden was talking about last night in the State of the Union.
But there are a few things I've got to cover because they were alternately hilarious and pathetic.
The saddest part of the State of the Union, very few people have pointed this out, was this moment where Joe Biden was trying desperately to name He didn't have any accomplishments that he could name, so he just kept talking about things in the future.
Instead of talking about the State of the Union right now, and as a result of the last year of his leadership, he'd just say, you know, in the future we're going to do this, and next year we'll cure cancer, and five years from now we're going to have a gumdrop Candy Mountain, and it's going to be really great.
At one point, though, the Democrats started chanting, USA, USA. So that was coming from the Democrats, the USA, USA, USA. And when I heard it, it struck me as so foreign and artificial.
I said, why?
Why is this so strange to me?
It's because I've never heard Democrats ever chant USA, USA. Neither have you.
Even for our liberal listeners out there, our Democrat listeners out there, I think if you're being really honest with yourself, you can admit Democrats don't do that.
That's a Republican thing to do.
Right?
Because what Democrats do is they protest the American flag.
They teach in schools that America is a racist, bigoted, terrible country that's always been awful to black people and minorities and Indians and women and everyone who's not a straight white man with blonde hair and blue eyes.
America's just really been awful.
They spread evil all around the world.
We're just the worst country ever and we've got nothing to be proud of.
That's what the Democrats teach, okay?
But what I think happened is the Democrats got their pollsters out there, and they know that this is a midterm election year, and they realized that hating America doesn't play very well in Peoria.
And so they said, okay, we've got to change this.
Hey, Democrats.
And all the members of Congress have a script for these things.
So they've got the little script, okay, applaud here, stand up here, and I guess one of them was chant USA, USA. Just do an impersonation of a Republican.
Do an impersonation of a conservative during the Trump administration standing up USA, USA. You could see on the dais up there behind Joe Biden, you have Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris.
And they're there for the USA, USA. And they don't know what to do.
They're not chanting.
They're kind of clapping in the rhythm.
There's, oh, I've never heard this before.
USA, USA. It reminded me during COVID. You remember Andrew Cuomo, before he fell from grace, Andrew Cuomo was caught on camera and he said, you know, Donald Trump says make America great again.
America was never that great.
America was never that great.
That's what he said.
A damning line.
I think he was speaking for a lot of Democrats.
Don't forget, Andrew Cuomo is considered a moderate Democrat, so it wasn't even some fringe line, but they just believe America was never that great.
And then that got him into a little bit of trouble.
And then he goes to the Democrat National Convention and he gives one of the speeches and he says, We're America strong!
We're America!
America always does great stuff!
You think, buddy, you don't really believe that.
It rings hollow.
And it rang hollow last night.
The creepiest moment, I thought, of the whole State of the Union was at the very end when Joe Biden started to ratchet up the radicalism a little bit and he started pushing his radical abortion law to codify Roe versus Wade, which very possibly could be overturned in the new Supreme Court session.
He wanted to codify that into law.
So even if the court gets rid of the fake constitutional right to abortion, it'll still be a national law and every state in the country is going to have to kill babies and No state, no people has the right to say, no, we don't want to kill babies in Texas or Tennessee.
So Joe Biden was talking about that.
He came up with a new euphemism for abortion.
Advancing liberty and justice also requires protecting the rights of women.
The constitutional right affirmed by Roe v.
Wade, standing precedent for half a century is under attack as never before.
If you want to go forward, not backwards, we must protect access to health care.
Preserve a woman's right to choose and continue to advance maternal health care for all America.
Maternal health care.
We've heard a lot of euphemisms for abortion over the years.
We've heard reproductive rights.
Ironic because abortion stops reproduction and it's not right.
We've heard women's health care, which is very, very vague.
Right.
I call my grandmother.
I say, hey, grandma, how you doing?
She doesn't say, well, Michael, you know, my hip hurts and my friend died and the car broke down.
But hey, at least I have my right to abortion.
Right.
That's not what all women mean by health.
Quite the opposite.
But this was the first time I'd ever heard this one.
And it's the most ghoulish one of all.
Maternal health care.
See, the Democrats use these euphemisms for abortion because they don't want to admit that abortion necessarily involves killing a baby.
So they won't even acknowledge that the baby's real most of the time.
They'll say, no, it's just women's health.
Oh, it's just a minor medical procedure.
It's reproductive rights.
They'll equate it with contraception.
The idea that you're going to stop it before it even becomes a baby.
But maternal health care is acknowledging that the woman getting an abortion is already a mother.
Maternal health care is acknowledging that the baby really is a baby.
In the fullest sense of the word, you're calling the woman getting an abortion mommy.
And mommy is going to snuff out her little baby if Joe Biden has his way.
And mommies aren't even going to have the right to get together and pass laws in their states to outlaw killing babies if Joe Biden gets his way.
That is some spooky stuff from allegedly the moderate Democrat, from allegedly the Catholic Joe Biden.
I'm allegedly, you know, I'm personally pro-life, but politically I'm pro-choice.
He used to do that.
You remember that?
That was a little song and dance that Democrats came up with decades ago to get themselves out of that tight spot on abortion, especially Catholic Democrats.
Mario Cuomo did it in New York.
But now they've totally gotten rid of that.
And Joe Biden doesn't believe a damn thing that he pretends to believe in.
All he cares about is saying the things that are popular in his party and maintaining power.
So now he says, yeah, it's maternal health care.
Yeah, yeah, it's a baby.
Yeah, you pro-lifers, you were right.
It's a baby.
And we're coming for them.
Spooky, spooky stuff.
And then the silliest line of the night was when Joe Biden said that what Democrats support is not defunding the police, not abolishing the police.
Actually, Democrats want to fund the police.
Proven strategies like community violence interruption, trusted messengers breaking the cycle of violence and trauma, giving young people some hope.
We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police.
It's to fund the police.
Fund them.
Fund them.
Yeah, fund the police.
That's what we support.
We're Democrats.
We support funding the police.
Even though we just spent two years not only threatening to defund the police, not only having AOC say abolish the police means abolish the police.
It doesn't mean move money around.
It means you're actually going to get rid of the police.
Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, not just them, but DAs, Democrat governors, mayors all around the country actually defunding the police.
That's why we have a historic crime surge right now.
You've got murders in particular, violent crime, way, way up over the last two years because of actual Democrat policies that were already implemented.
And then Joe Biden gaslights everyone and says, we support funding the police.
No, you don't.
No, you don't.
Like, prove it, buster.
Well, no, and then all the Democrats, they stand up there and they applaud.
They haven't changed one iota of their policy.
They haven't pushed for a tough-on-crime bill in the Congress, those people who were in that room just there.
I haven't seen a Democrat tough-on-crime bill anywhere in the country.
So it's just a lie.
They realize that voters around the country don't like it that now the gangbangers are shooting bullets through their windows and that they know that Democrats are directly responsible for this.
And so they say, okay, guys, hey, let's get us through November.
We support funding the police, don't we?
No, you don't.
It's just total BS. And then I'm not even...
That's all I'm going to play of the State of the Union.
I can't bear it.
I sat through it once.
I don't need to sit through it again.
All right?
I did my duty to you people because I know that you didn't watch it.
So I sat there.
I took the slings and arrows.
It was a good way to get ready for this penitential season.
I sat there and I did it, but I'm not watching it again.
The first 10 to 20 minutes of it, though, were not a State of the Union address.
The first 10 to 20 minutes were a State of the Putin address.
Did he even mention America during the first 20 minutes?
I don't think so.
I was waiting for him.
It's the State of the NATO, State of the European Union.
All he was talking about was Ukraine.
And he didn't offer any...
Anything productive on Ukraine.
He didn't say, here's how we're going to end this war.
Here's how we're not going to escalate and avoid World War III. Here's what we should have done differently because very specific Biden policies led to this moment in Ukraine, as I covered on the show some days ago.
No, he didn't talk about any of that.
He just talked vaguely about this war in Ukraine.
Because the war in Ukraine is the best thing to happen to the Biden administration.
I'm damning with faint praise.
He's failed on every single front.
But it's the best thing that happened.
Previously, the best thing that happened to Biden was COVID because he could blame all of his problems on COVID. But then a lot of his predictions about COVID didn't come true.
A lot of his prescriptions turned out to not work at all.
And so COVID's no longer a positive for him, even in the polls.
The best thing he can do now is say, I'm a wartime president.
I'm going to avoid World War III. I'm going to stave it off for my genius statesmanship and diplomacy.
And basically what he was using, the reason he talked about Ukraine at the top of the speech, was he knew that people were going to tune out eventually, and he wanted to avoid talking about what he was actually doing at home because it was such a failure.
So he just basically gave a news report on what was happening in Ukraine.
But the situation is growing worse there day by day, and Biden is doing absolutely nothing to stave off what could be potentially a much larger, potentially nuclear system.
War.
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Joe Biden did not stave off World War III during his State of the Union.
He staved off my alertness during the State of the Union.
He brought me to sleep during most of the State of the Union.
I did get some relaxation for that hour.
But the situation in Ukraine remains very, very dangerous.
And it's getting more dangerous because the head of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, is now applying for membership in the European Union.
He's been applying for membership in the European Union for a long time.
Actually, his aggressive application to join the European Union might be one of the reasons that this war broke out in the first place.
The war is the fault of Vladimir Putin.
There's no question about that.
He is the aggressive party.
He's the invading party.
But wars are complicated.
And foreign policy is very complicated.
And one of the events that led to this moment was the aggressive turn of Ukraine away from Russia toward the West, toward NATO, toward the European Union.
So Zelensky says, okay, our country is being invaded.
We want to join Europe immediately.
The European Parliament just voted to advance Ukraine's petition to join the EU. They voted 637 in favor, 13 against, 26 chose to abstain.
So, this is going to be my least popular opinion today, but you know, look, I'm not going to pander.
I'm not going to lie to you.
I'm not just going to say things to get the applause of the crowds.
I'm going to give you the truth, darn it!
And the truth is this.
Ukraine should not be in the European Union.
It's a terrible idea.
It's a terrible idea, and frankly, if Ukraine had not been pushing for this, it's not just Ukraine's fault.
It's not even maybe primarily Ukraine's fault.
It's Europe's fault.
It's NATO's fault.
It's America's fault in some ways that Ukraine has been pushing for this.
As a result of that push, the situation in Ukraine is much more dangerous.
As a result of that push, which was pushed almost exclusively by Democrat politicians, the situation in America, in Europe, in the West generally is much more dangerous today.
What do I mean by that?
Foreign policy is not so simple as us versus them.
Us good, them bad.
We take over more territory.
They lose territory.
Everything's hunky-dory.
Foreign policy is not that great.
I totally understand why Ukraine wants to join the European Union.
If Ukraine joins the European Union, Ukraine's younger citizens in particular can leave Ukraine.
And that's what a lot of it is about.
They want to leave Ukraine because Ukraine does not have a great economy, does not have great social prospects.
So like a lot of people in Eastern Europe, they want to flee their countries and go to the more prosperous Western states and before Brexit so that they could go to the United Kingdom even and be wealthier and have a more prosperous life.
That's what a lot of it is about.
Beyond that, Vladimir Putin is an autocrat and a bully and a jerk, and so Ukraine does not want to be too closely tied to Putin.
Some people in Ukraine want to be more closely tied to the West, and the West has welcomed this and encouraged this.
There is such a thing as buffer states, at least there used to be, I'll give you another good example of this.
During this war that's broken out in Ukraine, Switzerland did something really unusual.
Switzerland took a side.
Switzerland famously remains neutral during wars.
Not even the Nazis can get Switzerland to stop remaining neutral.
Switzerland has survived for so long as a unified political community in no small part because they remain neutral.
Why do they remain neutral?
In part, it's because of their geography.
In part, it's because of their history.
Neutral states and buffer states can be a very good thing.
They can help the world order.
Do we think it's a really great idea for two rival powers, NATO slash the European Union slash America because it's American leadership, right up totally sharing a huge border in really crucial areas with Russia, its own power, which is not part of Europe, which is not part of NATO, which is not part of the West as we understand it?
Do we think it's a good idea for two really strong rival powers to just be totally up against one another everywhere all along the border?
No, I think that's a dumb idea.
That historically doesn't work out very well.
That's why there's such a thing as buffer states.
And for buffer states to remain relatively safe, they've got to play both sides.
They've got to maintain decent enough relationships with...
Both of the rival powers.
That's what Ukraine had been doing for a long time.
Then the West believed, leading up to 2013-2014, that Ukraine was a little too friendly to Russia, or not sufficiently friendly to Europe.
So what the Western powers did was encourage protests and actually fund protests in Ukraine to oust the somewhat neutral, slightly more pro-Russian government to install a more pro-Western government.
Then, in 2017, you saw a big push by Ukraine to join NATO and the EU. That has only increased in 2020 and 2021.
And now you see war break out.
Why would war break out?
Because, yes, Putin is a jerk.
He's a terrible guy.
He kills journalists.
He's a horrible person.
Vladimir Putin also sees that Russia has interests and is very much not in Russia's interests for Ukraine to be a full-on EU, European, NATO member state.
Vladimir Putin says it's an intolerable security threat.
Whether or not that's true or not, he might be exaggerating things.
But in terms of Russia's interest, this is really bad.
Had Ukraine remained basically a buffer state, I seriously doubt there would be a war there right now.
I don't think Putin would have invaded as far as he did.
I mean, frankly, his invasion of Crimea came as a result of what happened in 2013 and 2014 in Ukraine.
Would he have even invaded Crimea had the government not changed then?
I'm not so sure.
Whether he would have or not, I don't think you would have seen this full-scale invasion right now.
I made this point much earlier, about a week ago when the war broke out.
I said, if you want to understand your enemy, if you want to do well in war, if you want to have an advantage in war, you need to understand your enemy.
It's not enough to say, Putin Hitler!
Putin bad!
I hate Putin!
He's crazy!
He's a crazy person!
And he's just doing crazy things, so there's no way to understand him.
Maybe he's got some problems, but I think he is also largely a rational actor who is pursuing the national interest of Russia.
And if you want to maintain world peace, you've got to balance those interests.
And just having NATO and the European Union gobble up everything is not necessarily the most prudent strategy.
Well, what about Ukraine?
They don't want to be tied to this lunatic Putin.
They want to join Europe.
Yeah, maybe they do.
But maybe that's not the most prudent thing for them to do.
Buffer states are a good thing.
Yoram Hazoni, the Israeli philosopher, pointed this out yesterday.
He said Jordan has remained basically neutral.
They've acted as a kind of mediator between Israel and the Arab world for many decades.
That's a good thing.
It's actually kind of nice to have those buffers.
It's nice to have states where the great powers don't feel threatened and they can actually talk to one another.
But our leadership will not engage in that kind of sophisticated, it's not even that sophisticated, it's kind of basic thinking.
Today it might be considered sophisticated, it used to be considered elementary.
They refused to do that.
So Nancy Pelosi, she goes on television, she goes on MSNBC and she says, you know the reason for this?
You know what led to this invasion?
It's because Putin had COVID and his brain is all foggy.
I don't know what is the matter there.
I've talked to heads of state who have met with him and they just take at face value the evil that he is putting forth is something that we have to deal with.
They're not making a diagnosis of his health.
Some people say he has cancer and some people say he has brain fog from COVID. Other people just think he's a complete raging bully.
But whatever it is, the people of Ukraine are paying the price for it.
Now, the only true thing she said there, well, a couple true, yes, he's a bully, yes, he's a bad guy.
The people of Ukraine are paying the price.
Does Vladimir Putin have cancer?
I don't know.
Maybe.
I'm not his doctor.
Does Vladimir Putin...
Has he been feeling a little under the weather since COVID? Maybe.
I don't know.
He didn't invade Ukraine because of brain fog from COVID. You simple-headed woman.
Oh my...
This is why we got into this mess.
It's because of this kind of stupid sophomoric thinking about foreign policy.
Vladimir Putin believes...
That it is in his interest.
He doesn't just have brain fog.
He doesn't just have cancer.
He doesn't just have some personality disorder.
He has interests, okay?
And mostly Democrats, mostly liberal politicians in the West, decided to recklessly upend all of those interests in Ukraine.
And they might say, well, it was in the interest of the Ukrainian people.
Oh, is it?
I don't think that bombs raining down on Kiev is in the interest of the Ukrainian people.
I don't think that needlessly provoking the other still significant nuclear power on the other side of Ukraine is necessarily in the Ukrainians' interests.
I don't think that it is in the Europeans' interests.
I don't think it's in America's interests.
I think that we're on the brink of World War III potentially.
I don't think that's in anybody's.
Ironically, the only person whose interests this really seems to serve is Vladimir Putin, who at the end of this very well may have greatly expanded his country and conquered the breadbasket of Europe.
That's what you get for your simple headed, compassionate, empathetic humanitarian policy in Ukraine is Ukraine doesn't exist.
Countless civilians are killed.
Europe loses an important buffer state, and Russia expands.
Smart move.
Really smart stuff, guys.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Not that I'm convinced that the Western liberals who have been pushing for this policy necessarily have good intentions.
I've got the funniest fact check I have ever read in my entire life.
Okay?
So, here's the fact check from USA Today.
The fact check is about a claim that Ukraine not only had obviously been cozying up to the West for many years before this invasion, but that specifically they'd been cozying up to liberal politicians in the West, because liberal politicians are the ruling elite in the West, and specifically they'd been cozying up to the Clintons.
So here's the claim.
You probably have seen it going around Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.
The claim is that Ukraine was the largest donor to the Clinton Foundation from 1999 to 2014.
Okay, and USA Today takes this up.
Here's the claim.
Similar rumors about Ukrainian financial donations to the Clinton Foundation have gained traction on Twitter.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene promoted an iteration of this claim during a February 19th rally.
Fact, Ukraine was the single largest donor to the Clinton Foundation.
It's gained 100 likes.
But the Post misrepresents a chart from 2015, which ranks individual contributions to the foundation based on nationality.
As factcheck.org reported in 2019, the Clinton Foundation hasn't received donations from the Ukrainian government.
I'm going to pause it right there.
The Post never said that the Clinton Foundation got money from the Ukrainian government.
By the way, Democrat elite political operatives have gotten money from the Ukrainian government.
When you think of Hunter Biden, for instance, has a no-show job with a state energy company, Burisma, in Ukraine.
That is the Ukrainian government giving money to Democrats.
But okay, let's put that aside.
The Post never says the Ukrainian government was the largest owner to the...
Ukraine, through its various channels, was the largest donor to the Clinton Foundation.
USA Today reached out to the social medias who shared this claim for comment.
Do you want to recant your claims, people?
Your stupid, crazy conspiracy theory?
Wait a second, hold on.
The Wall Street Journal...
So the headline says, The Post's Misused Reports on Individual Donations.
So how do they misuse it?
The Wall Street Journal published a report in 2015 on individual donations over $50,000 made to the Clinton Foundation in 1999 to 2014.
The article included a chart listing the top foreign donors.
Ukraine tops the list.
But the graph doesn't support the claim in the social media posts.
Hold on.
The social media post says, From 1999 to 2014, Ukraine top donor to the Clinton Foundation.
The fact check says in this chart from 1999 to 2014, Ukraine tops the list.
But the graph doesn't support the claim.
That is literally the claim.
That is, in those exact words, that is the claim.
But no, fact check.
No, because the graph doesn't reflect donations from the governments, which the posts aren't really focused on.
So therefore, you know, it's just...
Yeah, Ukrainians contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Don't forget, by the way, Ukraine's a relatively poor country.
Where did this $10 million come from?
I don't know.
Do you think some of it might have come from kind of dodgy, oligarchic sources in Ukraine?
Oh, I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm just asking questions.
Ukrainians contributed $10 million more than any other nationality.
Most of that money came from Ukrainian businessman and philanthropist Viktor Pinchuk.
Viktor Pinchuk's foundation, based in Kiev, donated $8.6 million to the foundation between 2009 and 2013.
The article notes that Pinchuk has close government ties, and he served as a member of Ukrainian parliament from 1998.
Oh, and sorry, he's the son-in-law of former Ukrainian president Lenin Kuchma.
Your fact check is proving the posts to be 100% completely correct.
Therefore, these liberal fact checkers, quote-unquote, rate it 17 million Pinocchios.
Total lies.
Fake news.
Fake news.
Censor anyone who reports on the truth between the Democrats' crooked relationship between Ukrainian oligarchs and crooked politicians here in the United States.
Fact check.
Fact check.
Totally false.
Totally.
All the facts are true, but the fact check is false.
The reason, by the way, That liberals post these ridiculous fact checks where the headlines is fact check, Republican claim totally false, fake news, and then in the article they admit that the facts of the matter were totally right.
In the article they note that there are things the Republicans actually said were totally right.
The reason they do that is because these fact checking organizations have relationships with all the big social media companies and And the social media companies rely on the fact-checkers to determine what will be promoted or censored in the algorithm.
So even if the fact-checkers, quote-unquote, have even the modicum of integrity to admit that the claims are true in the article, as long as the final verdict is that this is fake news, it will be censored.
As this sort of information has been now for years.
I tell you though, even though...
The Clintons have a very crooked relationship with the Ukrainian government.
And even though Democrat politicians in many ways are the single most responsible group of people for leading up to the geopolitical situation in which Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
Even for all of that, I in some ways long for the Clintons.
I long for the days.
I have nostalgia for the Clintons.
And part of that is because at least the Clintons are smart.
At least the Clintons are relatively competent people.
Crooked, probably led to a much worse world.
But at least they were sort of intelligent.
The same cannot be said for our current ruling class.
Kamala Harris went on a radio show just yesterday.
She was asked to explain the situation in Ukraine, and she did the best she could.
If you're watching any level of news, even social media, you're seeing everything that's going on right now in the Ukraine.
Break it down in layman's terms for people who don't understand what's going on and how can this directly affect the people of the United States.
So Ukraine is a country in Europe.
It exists next to another country called Russia.
Russia is a bigger country.
Russia is a powerful country.
Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine.
So Basically, that's wrong.
So the man said, break it down in layman's terms.
He did not say, explain this to a toddler.
I don't know.
Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I don't know what Kamala Harris thinks of the listeners to this radio program.
But I bet they've probably heard of Russia before.
I have enough respect for the listeners to this random radio.
They probably know what a country is, you know, and what Russia is.
And layman's terms, darling, what does it mean?
Why did it start?
What can we do about it now?
Who are the political players?
You don't need to go into some high...
Political theory, you don't need to be quoting Metternich to do this, but you can at least treat people like they're respectable adults who know what the nation of Russia is.
But Kamala Harris can't do that.
And frankly, I suspect that this explanation pretty much encapsulates her understanding of the situation.
Frankly, this is a little bit more sophisticated than most Democrats have seemed to demonstrate in their understanding of the Ukraine situation in recent years.
Ukraine country...
Rush a country.
Share a border.
If Democrats had known that and admitted that for the years leading up to this invasion, very likely it wouldn't have happened.
And maybe they wouldn't have been so aggressive about, one, milking that country for all the resources it's got, sending all of their politicians' kids there to get money out of the crooked energy companies with obviously tacit promises that they're going to support Ukraine militarily, financially, politically, have them...
Oh, yeah.
Oh, Ukraine, you want to join Europe?
Oh, that sounds great.
You know, my son Hunter needs a job.
Yeah, no, it sounds great, though.
And I, Joe Biden, am the point person on Ukraine right now.
And, oh, yeah, you want to join NATO? Wow, that'd be pretty nice for you, huh, if you joined NATO? Yeah, well, maybe talk to my son Hunter.
Maybe he'll work out the details for you.
Hey, have you heard of the Clinton Global Initiative?
You heard of the Clinton Foundation?
Yeah, they could use, they're putting on a few fundraisers.
They could sure use $10 million if you've got it.
And oh yeah, okay, that's great.
Oh, we'd love to support you.
We have a great relationship.
Let's deepen this friendship.
What has that led to?
That's led to right now the Russian annihilation of that country.
Great job, guys.
Great job.
Speaking of laymen, speaking of taking complex subjects and trying to boil them down, Saturday Night Live is taking on COVID. And it is at once the most gratifying and infuriating skit I've ever seen.
I think the biggest mistake the administration made was not providing more testing.
But the UK had done tons of testing and had even more COVID. Good.
Well, at least Biden finally sent out all those tests over Christmas.
You mean the two tests for a family of eight that froze in the mail?
Okay, well, at least we have the CDC. I mean, they haven't always been perfect, but the science changed.
How does science change?
When I make a mistake at work, I don't get to say the science changed.
At least we had outdoor dining.
Oh, you mean when they built a smaller restaurant in the street?
How is that outdoors?
Look, I went to a child's birthday party, self-careful, and they did gymnastics in masks.
Don't.
And then they went into another room and took off their masks to eat pizza.
This is the end of me.
So did they really need the mask or no?
Did any of us ever need the mask?
No!
Ha ha ha ha.
Ha ha.
All those things that we made you do for two years, that we, the actual elite in America, the entertainment elite, the news media elite, ha ha ha, it was all dumb.
Ha ha ha.
And all you conservatives who said it was dumb from the beginning, and we called you Nazis and killers and murderers and took away your rights and censored you and tried to take your kids away from you in some cases.
Ha ha ha, you were right.
Ha ha ha.
Moving on.
Ha ha ha.
No!
You don't get to make that joke.
That's not your joke.
Sometimes you hear people say, that's not your word.
That's our word.
You can't use that.
That's not your joke, libs.
That's our joke.
That's our political movement that we've been trying to do for two years.
And you people in particular, on Saturday Night Live, you have been so vicious.
So, so malicious in your persecution of anyone who didn't want to wear the dumb mask or take the Fauci ouchie shot that's so super duper safe and effective and it totally stops transmission and infection of the virus, except whoopsie daisy, take your fifth one because the first four didn't work that well.
You don't get, you don't, and they're just going to move on, and they're just going to, well, okay, it's State of the Union, okay, COVID's over, and we're just going to move on to the next thing.
This is a midterm election year.
Please, please, please, people, do not forget the state of our union is not particularly strong right now.
We may still have it in our power to turn things around.
Don't miss the opportunity.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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