Ep. 962 - No Food Or Gas And Biden's Just Getting Started
Biden blames Americans “just trying to stay above water” for not understanding his great policies, Kamala embarks on a NATO defense tour without knowing which countries are in it, and a Democrat politician asks gay kids to ‘slide into her DMs.’
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Gas today is 52% more expensive than it was at this same time last year.
The price of eggs is up at least 23%.
The cost of milk is up 38% in just one year.
And I would bet that your income has not gone up 23% or 38% or 52%.
Actually, there's a good chance you lost your job after politicians shut your country down for two years of two weeks to slow the spread of a virus that almost certainly does not pose any serious threat to you.
The inflation rate overall is 7.9%, the highest it's been in 40 years.
And if you're concerned about how you're going to make ends meet, well, you're just a big, stupid ingrate, according to Joe Biden.
Never forget what we've accomplished together.
So far.
And by the way, the American people just trying to stay above water don't understand this.
You tell them what the American Recovery Act was, they'll look at you like, what are you talking about?
They don't understand it.
That's true.
They don't understand it because it doesn't make any sense.
They don't understand it because if Biden's economic policies were working Americans wouldn't be struggling to stay above water in the first place.
They don't understand it because if Biden had any sense left in that dusty old noggin he wouldn't be admitting how bad things have gotten on his watch.
But he doesn't know what he's saying.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He certainly doesn't know how to fix it.
And at least in theory, he's got three years left to make everything even worse.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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That's a problem.
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I was thinking over the weekend about Joe Biden's conundrum.
Okay?
Because he's wrong.
Ideologically, he's wrong.
He's wrong on the kinds of people he's made investments in.
His staff members, the politicians who are supporting him, the people he's investing in overseas, trying to suck up to Iran, irritating our allies, sucking up to our enemies.
He's made a lot of ideological problems.
So has Kamala, so have others.
But there's also the issue of basic competence.
In these jobs, when you're running a lemonade stand, much less when you're running a country, you need to have a basic level of competence.
You need to know the really basic things about how your economy operates, about how you create incentives and disincentives for certain behaviors, about how to deal with certain actors on a global stage.
If you don't have that basic level of competence, things are going to get really bad.
And right now, Kamala Harris has been sent on the Lost Cause tour.
Biden always sends Kamala Harris to deal with issues that have no solution that he's totally given up on.
Most famously, he did it at the southern border.
Now the fact that he's sending her to Eastern Europe to deal with this Ukraine issue is really bad news for the Ukrainians because it means he has absolutely no faith that Ukraine is going to remain a country.
He clearly is 100% betting that Russia has already conquered Ukraine.
So he sends Kamala over there.
Kamala is asked a question about domestic issues, gas prices, inflation.
How much longer do we...
We understand that war is having something to do with this, but Kamala, how much longer are we going to have to deal with this?
She shrugs her shoulders.
President Biden has said that Americans will feel some pain for the sake of defending freedom and liberty, but there does seem to be no endgame in sight.
How long should Americans expect?
How long should we be bracing for this really sort of historic inflation and some unprecedented gas prices?
In terms of the discussions that the president, Johannes, and I had, they ranged in subject, including the issue of the Black Sea. they ranged in subject, including the issue of the Black and I'll let him explain in more detail as he would like.
But we are, again, fully aware and apprised because we are in constant communication with the President, with his administration here, about the concerns that they have about the entire region and, frankly, the vulnerability.
All you have to do is look at the map.
What?
The question was about gas prices.
The reporter asks her the question about gas prices and there's just dead silence.
She says, uh...
And then she looks to the president of Romania as if...
As if he's going to answer the question about American domestic gas prices for her.
Okay, I'll take this one.
Okay, President of Romania, you don't need to take the question that was directly asked of me about American domestic politics.
We're here and we're doing things with Romania.
It's so pathetic.
Even if you don't have an answer...
Because there is no answer.
Because the answer is that the Biden administration needs to completely reverse all of its energy policies.
But even if you don't have the answer, be prepared for the question.
This is really basic issues of competence.
This is like read a memo kind of basic preparation to do your very, very important job.
This wasn't even the most egregious example of this overseas.
Kamala Harris is now addressing...
The crisis in Ukraine, what this means as Russia is expanding, what it means for Europe, the NATO alliance.
Don't forget, the central issue in this Ukraine war is, will Ukraine join NATO? Will Ukraine join the European Union?
Ukraine right now So, I will say what I know we all say, and I will say over and over again.
The United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance.
The United States stands with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance.
The Ukrainian people are not in the NATO alliance.
That's the whole issue.
That's the whole problem.
If you don't know that Ukraine is not in NATO, then you don't know anything about the war in Ukraine.
And this is not just some offhand comment.
Kamala Harris was doing a town hall in Idaho and she gets asked a question that she doesn't know about.
This is Kamala Harris being sent to Eastern Europe specifically to address the war in Ukraine.
She doesn't know the most basic fact about the war in Ukraine.
They just don't know things.
You know the thing, to quote Joe Biden.
They don't.
They don't know the thing.
So is it any wonder that That nothing is going their way.
I am all for the high-level, sophisticated ideological debates, the questions of grand strategy of what is going to advance America's interests.
I'm all for that.
But you need to know really basic stuff before you can answer those questions.
It's like saying we're going to have very sophisticated conversations about calculus, but we don't know that 2 plus 2 equals 4.
This is the consequence of an education system that says you don't need to know facts.
You just need to know broad themes.
We're not going to teach you what to think.
We're just going to teach you how to think.
Well, no, let's teach some basic facts, okay?
Where is Bucharest?
Where is Kiev?
Two plus two equals what?
You need to know these basic things before you can go there.
It's as though we've got a government that is play-acting their version of the West Wing.
This is not a government that is actually dealing with geopolitical realities.
This is a government that was raised watching the West Wing and then they go into office and then they just talk like they heard Aaron Sorkin write on the West Wing and they think that that is going to bring peace to the world.
It's not.
It's bringing on World War III. There should be a rule.
Before you get elected, President or Vice President.
You need to know what countries are in NATO. You need to know what makes gas prices go up and down.
There should be a basic test here.
We didn't used to need this.
There used to be a much better level of competence in our government.
That is gone.
And there are...
There are unintended consequences of this kind of stuff.
Because right now, the West's strategy on Putin and Ukraine...
We're just going to cancel Russia.
We're not going to send any soldiers in.
We're not going to establish a no-fly zone.
That would be too provocative.
We don't want to provoke Vladimir Putin.
He's a nuclear former superpower.
We don't want to do that.
So instead, we're going to completely destroy their economy.
We're going to sanction their central bank.
This is an unprecedented war tactic.
We're going to get every company on planet Earth to stop doing business with Russia.
And that's going to make us feel really good.
And we're not going to send soldiers into harm's way, so we're going to feel really good about that too.
And we're not going to go directly to war, so we're going to feel really good about that too.
We're just going to turn Russia into a rogue state, completely destroy their society, and then hope that everything turns out for the best.
What then?
What do we expect is going to happen next?
Probably nothing, because no one running our country is thinking even more than two weeks into the future.
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Right now, So all the companies on planet Earth are canceling Russia.
This is the first hashtag social media cancel culture campaign that we have ever seen applied to a country.
Most countries in the world have something to do with the nation state system.
Most countries in the world have something to do with the ordinary world order.
Even Iran.
The world's largest state sponsor of terror.
For the past half century, they've had one foot into the international order, one foot out of it.
On the one hand, they do business like an ordinary nation.
On the other hand, they support terrorists to upend all sorts of international stability.
But still, even Iran is kind of in it.
North Korea might be the example of a state that is almost entirely outside of the international system, and yet North Korea is basically just propped up by China.
They're a sort of quasi-proxy state for China.
But now, we are taking Russia, the former Soviet Union, the world's nuclear former one of the two superpowers, And we're turning Russia into North Korea.
All these businesses are stopping their business in Russia.
And so what's going to happen?
Putin might just take the businesses.
We might be getting the Soviet Union all over again.
Vladimir Putin is threatening to nationalize the businesses that are no longer doing business in Russia.
He says, if businesses cease operations in Russia and at least a quarter of their stock belongs to any country designated an unfriendly nation, such as the United States or almost any country on earth now, the government will place the business under the control of a state-owned development organization.
If companies do not resume operations within five days or agree to sell, their business will be placed under external control for three months, then sold at auction.
If no one buys it at auction, the state is the buyer.
And so the government just takes over the companies, just like has happened in every communist revolution.
The unintended consequence of all these companies canceling Russia is we might just get the Soviet Union right back.
Same old state-owned, government-run, command-control type of economy.
Probably Biden didn't see that coming.
Probably the CEOs who canceled Russia didn't see that coming.
The whole idea of just pulling all your business out of a country in order to influence that country, that's a bizarre idea because for the past, what, 50 years or more than 50 years, 70 or 80 years, we have been told that corporations need to go into hostile countries, that that's actually how we're going to exert our influence.
You know, they'll say, no two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to war with each other.
That was always the sort of neoliberal globalist mantra.
So what do they do?
Right before we're about to go to war with Russia, McDonald's ceases operations.
Because that way it's still true.
No two countries with a McDonald's have gone to war with each other.
McDonald's ran out beforehand.
We need to spread Coca-Cola all around the world.
This is American soft cultural power.
This is how we're going to spread our influence.
Their product out right now.
I don't even think it's to influence Russia.
I think it's because of the fad of cancel culture.
Because Coca-Cola knows that its customers demand that it pulls out of Russia.
Or McDonald's, or whichever of these companies.
And so you're seeing a cascading cancellation.
Well, we might feel really good about that.
Yeah, take that Putin.
Yeah, you don't get your hamburger anymore.
Take that.
But what is the unintended consequence?
Oh, the unintended consequences.
You might now have this state going completely rogue, nationalizing companies, giving us a brand new Cold War.
Is that smart?
I don't think so.
It's also, it happens because of this misconception that the West is omnipotent.
That we can do whatever we want.
All we need to do is do it.
Show strength.
The West is very powerful, but the West is not omnipotent, okay?
This was the same backwards thinking that made us think, oh, we'll go into Iraq.
It'll take three weeks.
They'll greet us as liberators.
It'll be all over.
We'll install a Madisonian democracy, and then everyone will live happily ever after.
Is that what happened in Iraq?
No.
Same thing about Egypt.
Oh, we'll go in.
We'll get rid of Egypt.
Not Muammar Gaddafi.
Of Hosni Mubarak, who was a longtime ally of the United States.
We'll get rid of Mubarak.
He's no longer politically convenient.
We'll find somebody else.
They'll have a democracy.
They'll live happily ever after.
Did that happen?
No.
Same thing in Libya.
We're going to go into Libya, get rid of Gaddafi, and then it's going to be a wonderful, thriving democracy.
Right?
Wrong.
That didn't happen.
We'll go into Syria.
We'll go in here.
We couldn't even occupy Afghanistan indefinitely.
Afghanistan is this backwood, backwater place full of largely illiterate goat herders.
We occupied it for 20 years.
We didn't change a damn thing on the ground.
The second we left, the Afghan military collapsed, the so-called democracy we have there collapsed, the Taliban came right back in.
This is not to say that the West is powerless or impotent, but our hubris really gets the better of us sometimes, okay?
And we think that whatever we want to do, we can do, and it'll be cost-free, it'll be easy, it'll be fast.
Just go in and do it.
Well, sometimes it's more complicated.
Sometimes you need to know really basic things about the countries that you're invading, really basic things about the policies you're pursuing.
If you really want to outfox Vladimir Putin, who's a very shrewd political operative, if you really want to remake the entire area of Eastern Europe, how about you know which countries are in NATO?
If you really want to get into this war over oil and energy with Russia and Iran and other hostile actors, how about you know the basic elements of what makes gas prices go up and down?
If you don't do that, if you just think we're the West, we can do whatever we want, we don't need to read a basic textbook about how to do this, then things are not going to go...
Very well for you.
You want to know the perfect example of these unintended consequences?
Last week, you will remember, I was a crazy, kooky, Putin, talking point spewing, tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist because I pointed out That the Russian and Chinese propaganda about bio labs in Ukraine, in conjunction with the United States military, actually exist.
And initially, the West's propaganda and the Pentagon and the White House, they denied that these bio labs existed.
Then they said, okay, maybe they do exist, but we don't really have much to do with them.
Okay, well, yeah.
Maybe we have an association, but it's for ordinary scientific research.
Okay, yeah, well, maybe the military is running things, but look, there's no worry about bioweapons here.
This is totally above board.
So, over the weekend, on the Sunday shows, the Pentagon told a CBS reporter...
Yes, actually, we are very, very worried that because these biolabs exist and because the Russians are coming in, you might have a bioweapons problem in Ukraine.
Russia, though, is willing to use munitions that have been banned under international law.
We know that.
We heard President Biden warn about chemical weapons use.
Are we seeing movement of those kind of weapons into Ukraine?
No.
A Pentagon official I talked to this morning said there is no movement of chemical weapons into Ukraine.
At least they're not seeing the signs of it.
The concern is that the Russians will seize one of these biomedical research facilities that Ukraine has where they do research on Deadly pathogens like botulism and anthrax, seize one of those facilities, weaponize the pathogen, and then blame it on Ukraine and the US because the US has been providing support for some of the research being done in those facilities.
But it appears the Ukrainians have gotten most of those pathogens destroyed.
Weaponize the pathogens?
Hold on a second here.
You're telling me that the United States and Ukraine do not have a bioweapons program in these laboratories?
That's crazy Russian Chinese propaganda.
How dare you if you ask any questions about this?
You're just a stooge for Vladimir Putin.
But...
The fear is that if the Russians come in, they'll weaponize the pathogens that are there.
Now, by this statement, I don't think they mean that the Russians are going to go in and create a brand new bioweapons program, right?
They're not going to go in and say, okay, now that we've got these labs, these beakers and these Bunsen burners, now we're going to create a bioweapons program.
No, they're just going to use the bioweapons that are already there.
But the Pentagon's argument is, no, no, no.
All the anthrax and all the deadly pathogens that we've got there, those aren't bioweapons.
They're only bioweapons when the Russians use them.
What are you talking about?
No, if they're there, if these pathogens can be used as bioweapons in these laboratories that are being run with the help of the American military, then that is obviously a bioweapons program.
And maybe there's perfectly good reason as to why the United States is running these labs with Ukraine.
I'm not saying we should buy all of the conclusions of the Russian and Chinese propaganda about what this implies for public policy.
But I don't want my own government lying to me and calling me a liar and a kook and a conspiracy theorist for pointing out something that they are now admitting is true.
Here's what probably happened.
There were bioweapons laboratories in the Soviet Union.
After the collapse of the USSR, America comes in, takes a lot more control in Eastern Europe.
Then we don't just dismantle these things.
We keep running them.
We're working in connection with the Ukrainian government and with Georgia and with other governments around the world.
We think nothing bad can ever happen.
What's the big deal?
We're the global hegemon.
We can do whatever we want.
And then, whoopsie-daisy, war breaks out in Ukraine.
We never thought it was actually going to happen, even though it was increasingly likely in recent years.
We said, no, it's not going to happen.
What could go wrong?
Well, here's what could go wrong.
What could go wrong is now you've got war breaking out in Europe with not only nuclear weapons on the table, but now chemical and biological weapons too.
Right after, right as we're coming out of a two-year pandemic that very possibly started in almost exactly the same way because of a lab in Wuhan, China.
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong is if we don't have basic competence in our political leaders.
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We will be right back with a lot more.
Speaking of unintended consequences in Russia, I've got some really good news for you if you want to make threats against I've got some really good news for you if you want to make threats
You know, threats on social media against anybody are generally frowned upon, except right now Facebook has just declared that you now can allow for posts threatening violence against Russians, specifically with regard to Ukraine.
So this change in policy just came out from meta platforms.
It will allow Facebook and Instagram users in certain countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion.
Now, you can't call for violence against Russians if you say, for instance, I ate my borscht tonight and some of the red beet juice splattered on my blazer.
I'm gonna I want to kill you Russians.
That is not allowed.
But you can say, hey, I really like Ukraine.
I want to kill you Russians.
That is totally fine.
You've got to be very specific about what kind of threats of violence you're making against the Russian people.
This is according to internal emails that were seen by Reuters last Thursday.
This is a temporary change to its hate speech policy.
Facebook, Instagram, all the social media companies have hate speech policies.
And the point of these policies is that hate will not be tolerated unless Mark Zuckerberg wants to tolerate it.
Hate will not be tolerated on the platform except when Zuckerberg deems it right.
There's another change that took place on Facebook with regard to Ukraine specifically.
One of the groups that is fighting in Ukraine is a neo-Nazi group.
It's called the Azov Battalion.
There are lots of different military and paramilitary groups fighting in Ukraine, but one of them is a neo-Nazi group called the Azov Battalion.
You were not permitted to support the Azov Battalion on Facebook.
That previously violated its hate speech policy.
Now, temporarily, during the war in Ukraine, you are allowed to make supportive comments of the neo-Nazi group because that neo-Nazi group is fighting against the Russians.
Now, by the way, I totally understand why, depending on the context, Facebook would change this hate speech policy.
I totally understand why they might say that in some cases it's okay to make comments in support of Nazis and calling for violence against the Russians.
Don't forget, in World War II, we teamed up with Russian communists, we in the United States, teamed up with Russian communists to fight the Nazis.
The communists are no better than the Nazis, but the United States determined it was in our geopolitical interest to defeat Nazi Germany, so the way to do it was to team up with the Russian communists.
We did that.
And then immediately after the Second World War, we started another war with communist Russia.
That went on, and that was called the Cold War.
So I can understand how, in this case, they say, look, right now, you've got to put your issues with the Nazis aside.
We've got to team up with the Nazis to fight the Russians, who are increasingly looking like the exact same old Russian communists who were fighting in the Cold War.
Okay.
The question for me is...
Do we trust big tech with this power?
If we are going to say that certain things are going to be censored, certain speech is going to be encouraged.
Even certain hate speech is going to be encouraged.
Even certain direct calls for violence are going to be encouraged.
Even certain defenses of neo-Nazis are going to be encouraged now.
Do we trust big tech to make that call?
I don't.
Certainly not.
Do we trust big tech not to use this exact same power, this exact same kind of capriciousness, to say, okay, now we're going to look at domestic politics.
Now that we're done dealing with the Nazis in Ukraine and the communists in Russia, now we're going to look at those Nazis in America.
You know, those January 6th people.
Do we not believe that Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and Google...
Do we really think they wouldn't use this power against us to say, actually, it's okay to call for certain violence against certain groups here in America?
Actually, okay, it's fine to support certain violent hate groups here in America.
They already do that.
It's fine to support Antifa.
It's fine to support BLM. Antifa and BLM spent eight months burning the country down in 2020.
It's fine to support them.
And by the way, it's basically tolerated to threaten conservatives on Twitter.
Maybe it's technically against the letter of the law, but rarely will people get in trouble for defaming, insulting, even threatening conservatives who the left believes are deplorable and irredeemable.
Do we trust these guys to have this power?
I certainly do not.
Speaking of social media, I have got the creepiest social media story that I have seen in many, many weeks.
This goes to the mayor of Huntersville.
This small little town, Stacey Phillips, mayor of Huntersville, sends out a tweet to gay children asking them to slide into her DMs.
She says...
If you're a kid living in a don't say gay state and feel like you don't have an adult to talk to, I got you.
You're welcome to slide into my DMs to talk, to share, to express yourself confidentially.
It'd be an honor to be your auntie by blessing.
You're perfect just the way you are.
I am a very peaceful guy.
I am about as chill as they get.
Even compared to other people in the conservative movement, you know, a lot of conservatives, they get really angry all the time, especially conservative commentators, and they yell and they get really hot in the face and steam comes out of their ears.
And that's not me.
Okay?
I am pretty calm.
I am pretty peaceable.
If you...
Have a private conversation with my child.
If you establish a private relationship with my child specifically to talk about sex, you better run.
You better start running.
You better run directly to the police to turn yourself in.
That would be the best option for you.
If there is one thing on earth that could impel me to violence, that very likely would impel me to violence, it would be that.
Hey, someone else's kid, slide into my DMs.
It's a very flirtatious phrase.
Just slide into my DMs and we can talk about your sexual desires.
I'd love to be your auntie.
Oh yeah, I'm your little auntie.
Slide on in and we'll talk about sex.
10-year-olds, 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds.
Run.
Run.
Please.
We were talking about threats on social media.
First of all, that's the craziest threat I ever heard on social media.
That sort of thing is extremely creepy and also it's the logical consequence of this kind of politics of radical sexual liberation.
Now, in this woman's defense, Stacey Phillips...
I bet that she did not mean this in a sexual way.
Who knows?
Maybe she did, maybe she didn't.
But I would bet that she didn't.
I would bet that she just believes that sexual liberation is the most important political battle that we have right now.
And parents have no right to raise their own children.
And it's very important that children pursue whatever sexual desire they have, even if that means mutilating their bodies, even if that means pretending that they're the different sex, and she's going to be the great liberator over the oppressive parents who are just keeping their children constrained by things like the laws of nature.
There's a left-wing group, Together Rising, that's saying this thing almost explicitly.
This left-wing group, Together Rising, says that there is no such thing as other people's kids.
They wrote, quote, Today, Together Rising is investing $150,000 in three trusted organizations serving LGBTQI2S +, I didn't make that up, that's actually what they call it now, youth in Florida.
They're providing critical mental health support, vital medical care, school resources, and housing support services across Florida.
There is no such thing as other people's children.
The slippery slope gets even slipperier.
Remember, Hillary Clinton wrote a book.
It was called It Takes a Village.
She had this expression, it takes a village to raise a child.
It's a common expression.
Well, within, what, 20 years, we've gone from it takes a village to raise a child, your child is not merely raised by the individual, to there is no such thing as other people's children.
In other words, you have no right to raise your own child.
We, the genius liberal ruling class, we have 100% the right to raise your child.
And unfortunately...
Look, on the surface, this is completely insane.
Again, if you tell me that you're going to come here and take my child and raise my child the way that you, creepy perverts, see fit instead of the way I want to raise my child in the correct way, start running.
Don't come knocking on my door and expect things to go just fine, okay?
That's not going to turn out well for you.
But on a deeper level, there is something kind of true about this.
Not even to say that it should be this way, just this is the way it is.
Your children will be raised in large part by the culture that they're living in.
Regardless of what you want.
You could be the most upright, ordinary, upstanding citizen.
But if you live in a debauched and decadent culture, that is going to affect the way your kids are raised.
It really does take a village to raise a child because your kids are seeing other people.
They're very often being educated by other people.
Even if they're homeschooled, they're going to be educated by other people.
They're going to see neighbors.
They're going to see people at the restaurant.
They're going to see friends of friends and extended family members.
And that's going to have an impact.
So...
Yes, a culture that holds that boys can be girls as a sacred truth It's neither sacred nor true, but if the culture holds it as a sacred truth, that is going to influence the way your kids are raised, which is why it's more important now than ever to assert our political power and retake those standards and say, no, hey, hold up.
I know that you kooks who have a lot of institutional power in America, I know that you pretend that men are women, but they're not.
We're not going to let you say that.
It's just not true.
And sorry, we're going to push back.
That's what you're seeing in the parents movement against critical race theory, against transgenderism.
This is the movement that swept Glenn Youngkin into power in Virginia.
Even Democrats are now realizing this does not sell very well.
Beto O'Rourke, the candidate who can't stop running for office, even Beto O'Rourke is admitting, no, okay, we're not going to be pushing this stuff in schools.
I think you and I probably are both on the same page as well.
We don't see CRT being taught in our schools right now.
It's a course that is taught in law school.
You think it should be taught?
No, I don't think it should be taught in our schools, yeah.
So, Beto Rourke starts off with the typical Democrat evasion line.
Critical race theory is not being taught in our schools.
Critical race theory, it's just a course taught in law school, which he doesn't know what he's talking about, about this or anything else.
But what he means is critical race theory as an academic lens.
Began really in Harvard Law School about 35 years ago.
40 years ago.
No, about 35 years ago.
And it was this idea that America is hopelessly racist.
That white supremacy and racism are structural in America.
Very often you don't even see it.
And so this imbues every other field with this new kind of knowledge.
It is not so much its own course as it is a gadfly on other systems.
It derives from critical theory and critical studies.
And one of the sympathetic historians of critical theory, Martin Jay, says that it's really a gadfly on other systems.
So when we say critical race theory is being taught, we're not saying that there's a course in some elementary school called critical race theory.
You know, okay, kids, I hope you enjoyed social studies.
Now you're going to your critical race theory class.
That's not how it works.
But the way critical race theory and the other critical theory disciplines Disciplines work and derivations work is they just glom onto literature.
They glom onto history.
They glom onto social studies.
For goodness sake, they can glom onto math.
They can glom onto basically every other department.
And that's what we're talking about here.
So Beto O'Rourke's excuse doesn't hold water.
The parents know it doesn't hold water.
And then they say, well, do you think it should be taught in schools?
And Beto says, no, I do not.
And there it is.
Now, he'll try to weasel out of it.
Beto O'Rourke doesn't believe anything.
Beto O'Rourke is just some idiot narcissist who wants to skateboard around Whataburger parking lots and just get elected to be a congressman or to be a senator or to be the president.
I don't think he believes a damn thing at all.
He's just a completely empty suit.
He's like Robert Redford in The Candidate, except he believes even less.
And he's much less attractive.
So...
But he's saying this now because he knows that parents hate this crap, okay?
Really bad news for Democrats.
They've just gone way too far.
And even Beto, hell yes, I'm going to take your AR-15s.
Even that guy is saying, whoa, hell yes, I'm a social conservative now, Texas, please elect me.
Why?
Because he knows that what parents want their kids to be taught in school is not crazy gender theory.
It's not crazy racial theory.
It's math.
It's arithmetic and reading and writing.
Really basic stuff that kids are not being taught.
If you talk to an average inner-city student in a public school right now, they could probably tell you something about racism, structural racism, inequality.
They could probably tell you about the difference between transgender and cisgender and other genders, but they probably couldn't read.
Okay, and that's a big problem.
There's a new study that just came out of Maryland in terms of kids' academic outcomes.
It is an indictment of our entire education system.
A full 85% of students in Maryland, 85% are not proficient in math.
A lot of this has to do with COVID, according to this study, because you took kids out of school for two years.
What do you think is going to happen?
The kids already weren't doing well in school when they were showing up and doing their homework.
Now, they're terrible.
This is a, quote, "stunning amount of learning loss," according to experts who are looking at these studies.
In Baltimore City, less than 7% of students who were tested in third through fifth grade math scored proficient.
93% of these students are not proficient in math.
The results for English language arts are just as bad.
So you're not even saying, well, look, math is hard, but at least the kids can kind of futz their way around in English or history.
No, 91% of students tested in third through fifth grade are not proficient in language.
They can't read and write and speak.
For middle schoolers in Baltimore, 95% who took the 7th and 8th grade tests were not proficient in math.
Across the state, so look, Baltimore is a city with a lot of challenges.
Even across the state, 94% were not proficient in math at those grade levels.
At one Baltimore high school, 77% of students were found to read at an elementary or kindergarten level.
This is in high school.
This is more than three quarters of the students As a result of the COVID closures, in 10 Baltimore public high schools, students earned below a 1.0 GPA. And then the craziest part is these kids are failing.
They don't know anything.
They can't read.
They can barely talk.
They don't stay back a grade.
They just keep getting passed on because the situation is so dire that repeating the ninth grade isn't going to do anything for them.
Eventually the bill comes due.
I remember, you might not remember this now, but I remember it really clearly.
Those first two weeks of COVID were sort of fun.
They were fun in the way that a rainstorm that takes the power out is fun.
You're in your apartment building, ooh, we're all in this together.
You're in your house, and ooh, the power goes out, and maybe you've got to go over to your neighbor and get a flashlight.
Ooh, this is kind of fun.
Oh, snow day.
Oh, great.
We don't have to go to school tomorrow.
That's kind of fun.
But it's not free.
You can't just take two years off of life and expect the bill not to come due.
But that's what the Democrats expected.
They expected that, well, certainly with COVID, they thought, okay, we can shut down the economy for two years and it'll be fine.
We won't have crazy inflation.
We'll just pay people to do nothing.
But we won't have wild, crazy inflation, right?
We can take kids out of school for two years, and that's fine.
That won't affect their test scores, right?
Really, they've taken kids out of school in terms of really good substantive education for about 40 years now.
That's fine.
That won't matter.
We cannot teach kids anything and still have a really good country, right?
No, then you're going to get a vice president who doesn't know which countries are in NATO while she's touring NATO. To discuss a war that is largely about NATO. And by the way, you know the craziest part?
It's not over.
It's not over.
This whole COVID thing that was the cause of a lot of these economic and educational problems, it's not over.
They're trying to convince you it's over because it's really bad for their poll numbers and because they're now focused on this war in Ukraine.
But it's still cropping back up.
There's a new news story.
New Omicron variant surging.
States across the U.S. are removing mandates for masks with Hawaii set to be the last on March 26th.
But scientists say removing a stealth Omicron variant BA2, or rather a stealth Omicron variant BA2 has been moving steadily across the country.
Uh-oh.
It now makes up 11.6% of overall virus cases as of March 5th, since it began doubling on February 5th.
It keeps cropping up, and cases have doubled the past few weeks.
Uh-oh.
Here we go.
What about the TSA? One of the last mask mandates that still exists is on airplanes.
When are we going to lose that?
Well, the TSA just decided to extend it.
They're going to extend it a month longer.
That'll probably only be a month, right?
That's how this works.
Just one more month to slow the spread, right?
No.
They're pulling back a little bit on COVID to get their numbers back up because COVID is now a net negative, not a net positive for the Democrats.
But they don't actually want to give up the power.
And so they're not giving up the power.
They're still holding on to it.
Joe Biden is not getting rid of the emergency declaration.
They took Fauci off TV because Fauci became a net negative for them instead of a net positive.
But he's still got the power.
All these technocrats still have all the power that they took from you for the past two years.
And they are waiting to use it again.
They're even setting the stage to use it again.
Uh-oh, here comes the other Omicron.
Uh-oh, in Ukraine you might have other pathogens breaking out.
Get ready.
Get ready.
The only way we're going to get our power back, our constitutional power, Republic back is if we demand it and we take it back and we use the political power that we've got.
The reset is moving on and they keep moving the goalposts.
Senator Jeff Merkley, this Democrat senator, went on Chris Hayes' show on MSNBC last week and you can see them moving the goalposts on energy.
It's not a question of where the actual stuff comes from.
It's fossil fuels priced on a global market subject to these kind of things.
This idea that we can drill our way out of this has been proven to be madness.
Do your colleagues understand this?
As long as there is a world market for oil, Russia will be able to sell its oil.
And so, unfortunately, not all my colleagues yet understand that the way to undercut the power of Russia is to end our dependence on oil and have the world transition to renewable energy.
So hold on.
So here, and they go on in this interview, they keep conflating two goals.
One of the goals is bring down the cost of energy.
The other goal is punish Vladimir Putin.
And right now, those goals are in conflict because the more we punish Putin, the more expensive gas becomes.
But Putin's still almost certainly going to survive it because Europe is addicted to his gas because of Western energy policies that have rolled out the red carpet for Putin, specifically the policies of Joe Biden.
So...
The question you have to ask is, what are we really aiming at here?
Do we want to?
I also love that he talks about how we need renewable energy because we don't want to be beholden to the oil market.
As though renewable energy doesn't have a market, too.
All of these things are driven, in large part, by market dynamics.
But the question is, what do we want to do?
Do we want to drive down energy costs?
Do we want to punish Vladimir Putin?
What is the point of punishing Vladimir Putin?
What's the end goal of that, other than just making ourselves feel good?
We don't have the answers to any of those questions, and so we're not really doing any of it.
At this point, the unintended consequences of a lot of our Russia policies are to ensconce Putin more firmly in power.
The unintended consequences, frankly, who knows, may be intended by these idiots who are running our country in the State Department and the White House under Joe Biden, is to create incentives for Joe Biden to invade Ukraine.
The unintended or perhaps intended consequences of our energy policy is to raise the cost of energy here in America without any purpose, without even helping the environment, because we're just burning oil from Iran, potentially from Venezuela and from Russia.
But Before you do things that just make you feel good, that make you just sound good, you've got to ask, what is it for?
What is it actually going to accomplish?
What are the basic elements of the policy that I am pursuing?
Our ruling class can't answer any of that, and so you can't expect things to get any better.
Certainly not under the people running the show right now.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
We'll show you all see tomorrow.
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