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March 10, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:00
Ep. 960 - So About Those Biolabs In Ukraine…
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The Parental Rights in Education Bill has officially passed the Florida State Senate and, even before being signed into law, has already made history as the single most misrepresented piece of legislation in perhaps the history of politics.
Opponents have dubbed it the Don't Say Gay Bill, prompting Senate Democrats in Florida to walk up and down their office hallways chanting, Gay!
Gay!
Gay!
The bill led Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker, to tweet the word gay precisely 69 times.
The bill impelled the CEO of Disney to donate $5 million to gay causes to plead with Ron DeSantis not to sign the bill, not to prohibit the utterance of that apparently sacred word, gay.
But the bill doesn't ban the word gay.
The bill doesn't even mention the word gay.
The bill just stops teachers from preaching transgenderism and other strange sexual theories to extremely young school children in preschool through third grade.
Why are Democrats so deeply opposed to a bill that would have been entirely uncontroversial, considered common sense just five or ten years ago?
I don't know.
Which is why I've invited a Democrat on to explain it to me.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Doughboy2M, who says, when Biden is talking at any given time and the sign language guy is in the little box off to the side interpreting, waving his hands around, the sign language guy seems to be making more sense.
That is an astute observation.
I agree with you entirely.
Now, I need help Making sense of the uproar over this law.
Which is why I have invited on my friend Ethan Behrman.
Ethan Behrman, you know him.
You've seen him on TV. He is a liberal California Democrat lawyer.
Ethan, thank you for coming on.
Well, Michael, it is good to join you.
And of course, I disagree with your entire premise of where this starts.
But it's good to see you this morning.
Well, it's wonderful to see you.
You are, as far as I can tell, Very intelligent, generally normal, certainly by California standards, normal, common sense headed person.
And yet, you oppose this law in Florida.
Explain to me the problem with the law.
Well, let's start with the presentation of the law in the first place.
There is no sex ed curriculum for K-3 in the state of Florida now.
Nothing in this bill addresses the curriculum in the state of Florida.
This is a classic red meat piece of legislation for a rabid base that hates the idea of anybody who is different from them And so it was really a bill that addressed nothing that was relevant in the Florida schools in the first place.
Well, okay, then I'll pause you there for one second, Ethan.
If the bill doesn't actually take on anything that is going on in the schools, then what's the big deal?
Why the uproar about it?
It's going to be completely ineffective, so who cares?
Yeah, the big the big deal is this is we already have a minority group of LGBTQ families and students.
So, for example, one of the things that one of the authors said, I can't remember which Republican in Florida said this, but basically you can't have an issue now.
Under this law, a teacher in third grade giving a word problem in math class can't say Jimmy and his two moms have that's against the law under this law to say Jimmy and his two moms.
The reality is there are same sex parents in this country.
The reality is there are gay people in this country to deny a reality is to diminish their existence, which we know based on data that that actually has harmful mental health effects on LGBTQ individuals and families.
I want to make a distinction here, or at least delve into this distinction.
You're saying that this bill is unfair toward LGBT people.
Are you referring to the LGBT three-year-olds to seven-year-olds that this bill would affect?
Or are you referring to the three-year-olds and seven-year-olds who...
Whose sexuality we are not talking about and are not interested in, and I think it's a little creepy even to talk about five-year-old sexuality, but maybe their father is gay, and so Johnny has two daddies, or their mother is a lesbian, or something like that, and so it's disrespectful to them not to have the math teacher talk about the lesbian mothers when doing arithmetic.
Yeah, well, first things first, this affects K through three, so I don't think kindergarten is three-year-olds.
Now, I have kids.
No, it's preschool.
It's pre-K through.
Is it pre-K? I apologize.
It's pre-K through.
Okay, and third grade goes all the way up to, you could be nine years old in third grade as well, potentially, depending on...
How well you do in second grade.
But here's the deal.
It's this, denying reality.
This is a common problem that seems to be happening in Republican circles right now, book banning, right?
We actually have book banning happening in this country.
You can't reject reality.
You can't reject ideas that just because you disagree that, look, you and I disagree all the time.
Does that mean, Michael, that I reject that your idea should not even exist in the public sphere for fear that it's going to infect others?
Look, I am 100% always have been against white nationalism, For example, does that mean I think that it should never exist?
Well, I would like it to never exist.
Do I think that everything should be banned and those people should not be allowed to speak on that basis by government decree?
That's what we're talking about.
It's not a choice that's being made.
It's by government decree that we're saying something can't be said in a classroom.
That idea should be antithetical to most people on the right, but you mix religion into it and suddenly people forget their core values that they supposedly espouse and then say, now we can't say those words at all in a public space.
That's a problem.
On this topic of banning books, are you of the opinion that no books should be banned from the curriculum whatsoever?
There's a difference between curriculum and what's available in a library, right?
I'm sorry, we're talking about the classroom, though, right?
You know, the math teacher talks about how Jane has two mommies.
We're talking about the books that are being taught, not necessarily in a health class and not just what's in a library, but the sort of ideas and books that are being brought into the classroom.
Are you of the opinion that no books should be banned whatsoever?
No, there are books that should be banned, and I would go back to the white nationalist example.
I don't want any white nationalist book taught in my K-3 school, but that should still be potentially available in a library somewhere if somebody wants to read and argue that point.
I don't agree with it.
I don't like it.
It won't be in my library.
But does that mean that the government should put out a decree that says it cannot be available?
No, I don't agree with that.
So that's where we are, though, in this circumstance, is the government is decreeing that a teacher cannot do a word problem in third grade that says Jimmy and his two moms fail.
You're breaking the law, and now we're restricting teachers.
By the way, Florida is also proposing putting cameras and microphones on teachers, too.
This is where the slippery slope on the right seems to be wildly out of control.
Now, Ethan, what if math teacher Michael, who is Catholic, No.
It should not.
So if you think that, and you believe that, and you can disagree with it, the key here is, are you going to be preaching Catholicism in a public classroom?
I just did.
I just did, didn't I? But now you have to allow, then, at the same time, so there's a difference.
If it's espousing a specific religious belief and you don't allow a contradictory opinion, I think we have problems.
So then, okay, then on that, on that, but that's a very good point on that point when the left, some leftist teacher espouses a very specific religious belief, namely that it's totally morally acceptable for men and men to be the same as men and women, or that men can become women and women can become men.
That's a religious belief.
No, that's not religious.
Ethan, by definition it's religious.
You're talking about the nature of morality.
You're talking about the nature of humanity.
You're talking about the relationship between our soul and our body.
How much more religious can you get?
Yeah, it's not because it's not part of a catechism, for example, from a church.
Church of leftism, I think, Ethan.
No, that's not an official church.
It's the state church in this country.
The IRS runs it.
It really isn't, though.
So that's a nonsensical argument that the right likes to use.
But the issue here still comes down to a key fact.
There are gay people.
No one's denying that reality in a classroom to kids because you somehow have a belief that is so weak that you can't hear those words and you don't have a strong enough home where you're teaching them what you believe your own children, that they can never hear something that contradicts what you believe.
That's weakness.
By the way, the Supreme Court just Right, but Ethan...
But Ethan, my taxpayer dollars are going toward the public schools, and I think this is a pretty modest ask to suggest that people who are little kids who are 3 to 7 or 8, or even for your slow second grader, 9 years old, in these classrooms...
That they not be exposed to radical theories about sex and gender, which have been held in moral opprobrium by virtually every civilization for all of human history.
That they not be exposed to that before they're even hitting the age of reason.
This seems like a relatively minor ask to me.
It seems like a pretty radical political agenda on the other side that's seeking to imbue the math curriculum with transgenderism and novel notions of marriage.
We're already past time, but I want to give you the last word.
Yeah, I just disagree with that.
And it's already not in the curriculum.
It's prohibiting something that isn't even happening and is demeaning the entire section of our population.
The math teacher is not going to talk about Johnny's two moms and his dad who became a mother?
It might now because you made an issue of it.
Well, I guess it's on us, but I'm glad there's a law at least to stop that kind of radicalism that perhaps, I guess we impelled it in the first place, but I'm glad we won't see it anymore.
Ethan, where can people find you?
Just EthanBearman.com and you can find me on Twitter at EthanBearman.
Ethan, thank you very much.
You have given me a broader perspective of this law, but I still think you are entirely wrong.
Thank you for coming on, Ethan.
Thanks, Michael.
All right.
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Shifting gears a little bit from transgenderism in second grade classrooms.
I've got the craziest story that I have seen in politics in years, I think.
The story has so many levels of disinformation to it, I don't really know where to begin.
The We have found your biological
material.
It was developed primarily for military purposes.
As it turns out, it was all happening in Ukraine.
What were you doing there?
It's a different continent.
It has no borders with you.
There are no bases of yours.
What were they doing there under the guise of scientific research?
So we've got it.
We've found that the Americans and the Ukrainians are working together to build these biological weapons.
Is this claim credible or not?
The Russians do know a thing or two about chemical and biological weapons.
The Russians regularly use at least chemical weapons against their own people, against political dissidents.
They did it to the main opposition leader.
They've done it to a number of people who've fallen afoul of Putin's regime.
Furthermore, for most of the history of the Cold War, the Soviets accused the United States of developing biological weapons, usually There's actually a letter that was sent from the Soviet Central Committee in 1953, just after the death of Stalin, to the communist dictator Mao Zedong.
They said for Mao Zedong, the Soviet government and Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were misled.
The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information.
The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.
So we know from the Russians themselves that they have a very long history of making false accusations about the Americans and bioweapons.
But...
What about these labs?
What about this accusation?
The Ukrainians came out and immediately denied that any of this was happening.
In the Kiev Post, they wrote, recently, fake news about the alleged activities of American military biological laboratories in Ukraine has been spread in the media and social networks.
No foreign biological laboratories operate in Ukraine.
Statements recently made by individual politicians are not true and are a deliberate distortion of the facts.
Okay, no foreign biological laboratories exist in Ukraine.
This is BS, fake news, Russian propaganda.
So says Ukraine.
The Americans are saying this too.
So you've got the official propagandists of the liberal regime here in America, PolitiFact, Snopes, the fact checkers, big tech, the mainstream media.
They are saying this is totally fake news.
There are no, right here at the sub-headline, there are no U.S.-run bio labs in Ukraine contrary to social media posts.
And yet, just a couple days ago, we played this on the show yesterday, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, admitted that there are, in fact, bio labs in Ukraine.
Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of.
So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.
There are biological...
And you can tell she didn't want to fully admit all of this, and then Rubio diverted the questioning after that.
But she said pretty clearly, there are biolabs in Ukraine.
The relationship of the U.S. to those biolabs, she doesn't quite get into.
And she says, we're very concerned that those biolabs might fall into the hands of the Russians as they invade Ukraine.
Now, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, through a little video that was linked actually from one of these fact-checker websites...
The U.S. Embassy in Kiev admitted that the U.S. has a pretty tight connection with these laboratories.
The work we do in the Biological Threat Reduction Program is complicated.
And it's difficult to communicate it sometimes to outside audiences.
And I think our adversaries like Russia can take advantage of that with some of the propaganda that they put out.
The Biological Threat Reduction Program is working in 27 countries.
We feel this disinformation and misinformation is done just to really exploit divisions.
We've had accusations that some research projects were being used to create threats, not to identify threats and reduce them.
Ulterior motives are being injected where none exist.
We've built these capabilities for the partners, their central reference labs for research.
They publish everything they do.
They invite the international community into their laboratories.
They're working on behalf and the benefit of So these labs, look, they're just purely scientific research to prevent threats, and then the Russian disinformation, they've gone out, and they've said this is some kind of military operation to create biological weapons, and that's just completely ridiculous.
Okay, this is where it gets really, really weird, because at the end of that video from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, the...
The presenter says, for more information, go to dtra.mil.military.
So you've been telling me the whole time this is just purely a scientific, public health-minded endeavor, and yet now you're directing me to a military website because this program is being run by the Pentagon.
It's being run by the Department of Defense.
Okay, this is where it gets weird.
Yesterday, I said, okay, I'm going to look into this.
I go to the dtra.mil website.
The website was down.
I looked on archive.org, which will show you various screenshots of websites, when they were online, what the pages looked like, and when they go offline.
The page had been up just a couple days prior.
I asked other people, I said, go to this website, what do you see?
I tried on multiple devices.
The website was down.
You can use different VPNs to have you coming through different ports of entry to look at the website.
The website was down just one day after Victoria Newland gave her testimony about this.
Then a few hours later, it goes back up.
I said, okay, I want more information about this program, because the argument that is being made now by the Pentagon is this all dates back to a 2005 treaty that was signed under George W. Bush to dismantle old Soviet bioweapons laboratories.
The Soviets had developed these bioweapons after the fall of the Soviet Union.
About 14 years later, we go in there, into Ukraine, into Georgia, into all these other Eastern Bloc countries, and we're going to very safely protect and dismantle these bioweapons programs.
So then I went over to the State Department website where I could find links on the internet to the funding grants, but all the links had been deleted.
You couldn't get it there.
You had to go to old versions of the details of these grants.
And so you look, I mean, there were about 11 or 12 of these on the internet.
You've got them for the Kharkiv Oblast Laboratory Center in Kharkiv.
You've got the Lviv Oblast Laboratory Center, Lviv.
You've got the, I'm mispronouncing all of these names, the State Regional Diagnostic Veterinary Laboratory, and And all of the funding is coming from, not from the National Institutes of Health, not from the CDC, not from the World Health Organization, not from USAID. It's coming from donor, the Department of Defense of the United States of America.
Donor, the Department of Defense of the United States of America.
Donor, the United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
On and on and on.
So what exactly is going on with these labs?
Who is telling the truth?
And if no one's telling the truth, what is the truth about these laboratories?
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The bio labs in Ukraine get even weirder.
The bio labs in Ukraine get even weirder.
The Russians are accusing the United States of developing biological weapons and using Ukraine as the ground on which they're going to do it.
The Chinese are saying that we have hundreds of these centers all over the world.
The United States says we're not developing bioweapons.
This is disinformation.
This is not a military effort.
We are actually preventing threats and we're conducting ordinary scientific research to help the public health.
So what exactly is going on?
Well, one organization that is at the heart of these bio labs, these and other bio labs is EcoHealth.
EcoHealth, does that name sound familiar?
It's familiar because that was the organization that was associated with Dr.
Fauci, that it was at the heart of the gain-of-function research in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology just before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
EcoHealth, the organization run by Peter Daszak, who was Dr.
Fauci's gain-of-function guy, who Dr.
Fauci gave a lot of money to, to conduct gain-of-function research.
EcoHealth has received huge contracts from the Pentagon.
They've gotten $41.91 million in awards since fiscal year 2008.
So the Pentagon is the biggest funder of EcoHealth Alliance.
It's not the NIH that's the biggest funder.
It's not the public health apparatus.
It's the Defense Department.
They're getting three times as much money from the Pentagon as they have from any other organization in the government.
The next highest one is the Department of Health and Human Services.
Now, of this, for almost $42 million, a little under $38 million of that was awarded to EcoHealth Alliance by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the DTRA, the agency listed at the end of that video by the U.S. Embassy in Kiev.
Describes the mission as, quote, to protect the United States and its allies by enabling the DOD and international partners to detect, deter, and defeat weapons of mass destruction and threat networks.
I am not denying that there is possibly some reasonable explanation for all of this.
But what is it?
What is it?
I don't know.
Because initially what we were told by the entire liberal establishment, by big tech and the fact checkers and the government officials and everyone, is there are no bioweapons in Ukraine.
That's what Ukraine was saying.
Rather, there are no bio labs in Ukraine.
Ukraine says there's no foreign bio labs.
PolitiFact says there are no U.S.-run labs.
Well, the language here is really clear because what the Ukraine is saying is, well, there's no foreign labs.
What if it's a domestic lab that a foreign government happens to be very involved in?
That might be the way they're getting out of that.
PolitiFact says there's no U.S.-run labs.
Well, what if it's a lab that is largely run by the Ukrainians but is funded and was in part built by the United States?
There it falls apart.
I think the language is pretty clear.
So the question is, are there U.S.-funded labs and what is the funding going toward?
Initially they tell us there's no bio labs, forget about it, it's totally fake news.
Okay, actually there are bio labs, but it has nothing to do with the United States.
Then they say, okay, it's got something to do with the United States.
The U.S. funds them and built them in some cases, actually spent millions and millions of dollars rebuilding these labs, but it's only to dismantle the old Soviet bioweapons.
How long does it take to dismantle bioweapons?
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
This deal went into effect much later in 2005, but even still, it's been 17 years since 2005.
How much longer is it going to take to dismantle these things?
Well, no, they're not going to dismantle them entirely.
They're going to just safely protect, store them and conduct some research on them.
Okay.
Well, if you're conducting research on these biological weapons, that seems to be kind of dangerous, doesn't it?
No, no.
They say it's not a big deal.
All of the research that's going on there is completely mundane.
And that's why it's such a big threat if the Russians get ahold of it.
Well, hold on a second here.
If it's just totally ordinary scientific research, who cares if the Russians get ahold of it?
That doesn't seem like it would be that dangerous, unless we're talking about very, very dangerous biological materials.
Well, look, even if that is a problem, this has nothing to do with a military action that This is entirely just scientific, which is why the whole damn thing is funded by the Pentagon.
It doesn't add up.
It doesn't add up.
And I'm really not saying that there couldn't possibly be some good explanation for this.
What I am saying is the government has not provided one.
The press, the broader propaganda machine, has not provided a good answer.
They've provided lots of contradictory answers that are extremely dishonest.
And then when the facts come out, it completely undermines the credibility of the government on the next claim that it makes.
So what is going on here?
And furthermore, why lie about it?
Why do you keep lying about it?
Whenever anyone asks these questions, we're accused of spreading propaganda or disinformation.
No, I'm trying to cut through all of the disinformation.
I want to cut through Putin's disinformation.
I want to cut through China's disinformation.
And yes, I want to cut through the disinformation of our own deep state.
I want to cut through the disinformation of the United States so that I have some idea of what the truth of the matter is here.
We're not going to be able to come up with solutions to the particular problem in Ukraine, to broader geostrategic issues, unless we know even just a little bit of what is actually going on here.
The government has some explaining to do.
Now, you want to talk about good statesmanship.
President Trump was just caught on a hidden camera speaking to a very, very famous golf star.
So this is not a high level government meeting.
He's just talking to a buddy of his.
And the conversation was secretly recorded.
He is describing how he dealt with Vladimir Putin.
Oh, he's a nuclear power.
It's like they're a friend of him.
You know, he was a friend of mine.
I got along great with him.
I say, Vladimir, if you do it, we're hitting Moscow.
I said, we're going to hit Moscow.
And he sort of believed me, like 5%, 10%.
No.
No, it's funny.
It's funny how Chi didn't bother you either.
Yeah, no, she didn't bother me.
I told him the same thing.
That'll be next.
Yeah.
You know, that's going to be next.
Taiwan will be next.
You won't have any computer chips.
They'll blow them off the face of the air.
So this is a casual conversation about all the bumbles from Joe Biden.
The most interesting part to me is that 5 to 10 percent.
He says, look, Putin, I'm going to hit Moscow.
And he believed me.
He believed me 5 to 10 percent, which is enough.
Trump is not boasting here that he completely 100% convinced Putin that he would hit Moscow in the event of an invasion of Ukraine.
He's not even saying that he 100% wasn't going to do it.
He's saying, all I had to do was convince Putin that there was a 5-10% chance that I would bomb Moscow.
The lesson here is...
Unpredictability is an extremely powerful political asset.
And the problem, one of the biggest problems right now with the current occupant of the Oval Office is he is 100% completely predictable.
It's not even the specific policies, all of which are terrible.
But it's just that we know exactly what he's going to do all the time.
And that gives our foreign adversaries a huge advantage because they can plan ahead.
And they can plan not just an invasion of a country, but they can plan four or five steps ahead because they know that all Biden is going to do is the usual, classical, typical establishment playbook.
Trump was not like that.
I don't think people believed that it was very likely that Trump would go in and bomb Moscow, go in and invade some country.
He ran as a fairly anti-war candidate.
But they believed there was a chance.
Every so often, he'd go take out an Iranian general out of the blue.
And even a lot of the establishment didn't like that he did that.
Every so often, he'd drop the mother of all bombs on a country.
And he tried to minimize deaths, but he would do wild things.
He would tweet out, hey, I've got a bigger nuclear button than yours, Kim Jong-un, and my button's bigger and it works.
You think the guy's threatening World War III. That unpredictability, you just need that little bit, 5-10%.
It's true in show business.
You don't tune into shows where you know exactly word for word on every single issue what some guy is going to say.
You don't do it.
Even if you generally agree with the guy.
Because you want there to be some kind of tension, some unpredictability, something that you could learn.
Something that he knows that you don't know.
Same is true in politics.
People are making fun of this clip.
Unironically, this is much better statesmanship than anything we are seeing from Biden or the people around Biden.
Now, what is extremely predictable is that the White House is, of course, coming out against this bill that I was just debating with my friend Ethan Bearman.
They take an even stronger stance on the bill than Ethan does.
They say that this sex ed bill, this parental rights and education bill is horrifying, discriminatory, and bullying.
Regarding the Florida bill, in 1994, when many of us in this room were in school, President Biden actually voted for a much broader restriction that banned federal funds from being used for, quote, the promotion of homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative.
Why did he do that, and can you describe how his thinking has evolved over the years?
Well, I think that you have seen the President speak passionately about his view that a bill like this, a bill that would discriminate against families, against kids, put these kids in a position of not getting the support they need I think the most
important question now is why are Florida leaders Deciding they need to discriminate against kids who are members of the LGBTQI community.
What prompts them to do that?
Is it meanness?
Is it wanting to make kids have more difficult times in school, in their communities?
I would pose that question to them, and we can talk about it more tomorrow if you get an answer.
It's horrifying.
It's bullying.
It's discriminatory.
It's mean.
It's cruel.
That's the White House's line.
This was the crucial mistake that Ethan made in trying to make his argument opposing the bill.
He said, it's not even happening.
This was the mistake that the critical race theory defenders were making early on in that political battle.
They said, it's not even happening.
It's not even in the classrooms.
So why are you trying to ban it?
Of course, the natural response to that is, okay, if it's not happening, then don't worry about it.
It's not a big deal.
It's not happening, so who cares?
And Ethan caught that at the end, and so he said, well, but it might happen now.
Well, it's not a big deal.
If the bill is banning something that doesn't exist, then no one would reasonably be upset about it.
The reason people are upset is because this is happening.
What is happening in math classrooms.
I thought that was a good example that Ethan gave.
It's not just sex ed.
It's not just history or literature.
It's in math classrooms.
throughout the entire school curriculum, kids are being taught LGBT sexual theories.
As young as three years old, four years old, five years old, really, really young kids are being taught that men and women are basically exactly the same.
And marriage maybe is between one man and one woman.
Maybe it's between one man and one man.
Maybe it's between one woman and one woman.
Men and women are pretty much interchangeable.
Well, that's why men can become women.
That's That's why women can become men.
That's why transgenderism is totally normal.
And hey, little Johnny, if you feel like little Jane today, we're going to go talk to the guidance counselor and we're going to start calling you little Jane.
And your parents have no rights whatsoever to oppose that sort of thing.
No reasonable person would defend that.
Okay?
We've got to get that out of the classroom.
And the point that Ethan would not concede to me, although I think it's fairly obvious, is this is a religious point of view.
It's a religious point of view to say this definition of marriage is good and moral and upstanding.
It's a religious point of view to say that the relationship between the human soul and the body is such that I can change my body to better accord with my soul because my soul is female and my body is male.
That's a deeply religious point of view.
It's called the Gnostic dualism.
It's a very ancient religious heresy.
And so they're already teaching that kind of religion in the classroom.
And what a lot of parents are saying, who are Christian, who are Jews, who are Muslims, who are maybe somewhat agnostic, but they've still got a little bit of that old kind of cultural religion in them, they say, hey, I'd rather my kids be taught that boys are boys and girls are girls.
That's my view.
I want them raised that way.
And what the radicals in the classroom are saying is, no, no.
Those religious views are completely banned.
The only book that you're not allowed to teach in the classroom is the Bible.
You can teach Mein Kampf but you can't teach the Bible.
Those views are banned.
And the other religious views, that boys can become girls, those are mandatory.
And if you ever try to kick that out of the classroom, it's mean and discriminatory and horrifying.
And it obviously is happening in the classroom because this is being elevated, not just from some school battle in Florida, this is being elevated all the way up to the highest levels ever.
In the government, this is being elevated all the way up to the White House.
If this isn't really happening, if this isn't a big deal, if this is just some crazy tiny little trivial obsession for Republicans, why is the White House so obsessed with it?
It's a question you've got to ask yourself.
Who cares?
The left cares.
The left seems to care a whole lot.
Maybe the right should care, too.
The Disney CEO down in Florida, he's very disappointed.
Oh boy, is he disappointed in this law banning creepy sex stuff from the classroom.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek has called on Governor DeSantis.
He said he's very disappointed.
He wants the governor not to sign this legislation.
He's donating five million bucks to gay causes.
And he's trying to stop this kind of legislation from spreading across the country.
I cannot wait for Governor DeSantis to lay the political body slam on this guy and say, no, the perverts who want to indoctrinate five-year-olds into transgenderism, they don't get to do it.
There are naturally limits in the classroom.
There are always going to be limits in the classroom.
And that's just the way it goes.
We're not going to have the limits be, you can discuss anything from LNG to T, which is pretty much the current limit in the classroom, to TNG.
No, we're going to say the limits are you don't get to inculcate this ideology of transgenderism in six-year-olds.
I think DeSantis is going to stand for weaker politicians when they get calls from powerful corporate interests in their state.
They cave.
Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas did it on this issue.
Kristi Noem in South Dakota did it on this issue until she realized it almost destroyed her political career and she flipped back.
Ron DeSantis, I don't think he's going to do it.
I think he's a lot smarter.
This issue is a winner for conservatives.
Just look at the polls.
Look at the polls on not just even these issues, not just even transgenderism or critical race theory in the classroom, on pretty much all of the hot-button social issues.
We've talked a lot about immigration.
That's a total winner for conservatives who want to restrict not just illegal but legal immigration as well.
Abortion is at least a draw, and when you talk about limits to abortion, not from the moment of conception but even...
15 weeks, 6 weeks, 15 weeks, 20 weeks, then it's a huge winner for conservatives.
Transgenderism in the classroom, huge winner for conservatives.
Critical race theory, huge winner for conservatives.
Same as true of voter ID. There's a new Rasmussen poll out that asked voters if it was reasonable to ask voters to present some form of photo ID before they cast their vote.
The vast majority of likely voters said yes.
That includes a majority of Democrats.
Three quarters of likely voters say that voter ID is a reasonable measure.
Only 20% say that it is not.
It's a huge spread.
Now, 90% of Republicans say that this is a reasonable measure.
There's no surprise there.
But 59% of Democrats say the same thing.
And yet, the squishes will tell you, oh, back away from voter ID. Oh, don't lean into the social issues.
What are you talking about?
I think they have bought too much of the CNN, MSNBC, mainstream liberal narrative here.
The CNN, the MSNBC, the NBC, New York Times, they will concern troll Republicans.
By concern trolling, I mean they'll say, look, it's for your own good, Republicans.
If you want to win elections, you better cut it out with all this talk about voter ID. You better cut it because that's not going to work for you.
And I'm just so concerned.
I, a partisan Democrat who's never even considered voting for a Republican in my entire life, I'm just really, look, if there were a sane Republican, I might vote for one.
If you guys got back to nominating, I don't know, John Kasich for every position, maybe I'd still vote for the Democrat, but I'd be happier because you'd have a total loser being nominated on the other side.
But you crazy Republicans, that's just not going to play well.
I think it plays great.
I think the squishy Republicans that the Democrats keep encouraging us to nominate, I think they all lose.
I think they're complete losers because people are not motivated primarily by lowering the marginal corporate tax rate.
People don't wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and say, gosh golly, I've just got to sign another free trade agreement with Asia.
People are motivated by, hey, are my kids being indoctrinated in this creepy sex stuff?
Hey, are my kids being taught that white people are evil because of the color of their skin from the moment of birth?
I think they wake up with that.
Hey, are my elections fair?
Hey, can I trust my own government?
Hey, are gas prices going up or down?
Really basic stuff, okay?
When the liberal media concern troll you and tell you, oh guys, just drop this to the voter ID, drop this, drop abortion, drop transgenderism, drop critical race theory, that's when you know you really should double down.
So who's going to be running?
Who are we going to be running against in 2024?
You know I have said, and I'm a shiver even at the thought, that Hillary might not be finished yet.
Well, Hillary just went on MSNBC. She said emphatically, I'm not interested in running.
Are you open to running for president again?
Oh, come on.
Long runway.
No, but I am certainly going to be active in supporting women running for office and other candidates who I think should be re-elected or elected, both women and men, because I think there's a big debate going on, as you know so well, Mika, in our country, but in other countries as well, about the future of democracy, of economic opportunity,
of climate change, of health, and other important of climate change, of health, and other important issues.
So I will stay active in all of those debates.
- We need you. - Yes, no.
I'm not at all interested in running for president.
That's why I keep going on TV. And that's why I just relaunched the Clinton Global Initiative.
And that's why I keep writing and speaking about my views on politics.
But I would never run.
Don't believe it.
As a rule, don't ever believe the Clintons.
That's just never going to lead you into the right direction.
She may not run.
She may run.
Here's what I know, though.
Here's what I know.
Almost everything that the liberal establishment has told us, the swamp creatures have told us for the past five years, going all the way back to the Russia hoax and pretty much everything since then, has been a lie.
And there is no creature swampier than Hillary Clinton.
And Hillary Clinton was actually the instigator of that original, the Russia hoax, in the first place.
And Hillary Clinton is doing everything you would expect her to do if she were trying to set herself up to run for president in 2024.
On that terrifying note, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the legacy media parrot Democratic talking points about a bill banning indoctrination of children into left-wing sexual and gender values.
And they are pushing Disney to condemn the state of Florida.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
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