Jussie Smollett walks after just a few days in jail, a leaked GOP email suggests the party will go easy on Biden’s SCOTUS nominee, and Ukrainian president Zelensky begs for World War III in Congress.
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Last week, after Jussie Smollett was sentenced to prison for perpetrating a ludicrous race hoax in Chicago, the actor's brother made one last impassioned and implausible plea for his brother's innocence.
There is absolutely no evidence linking Jussie to staging his own hate crime besides the testimony of two brothers, claimed Jokey Smollett.
Now, of course, there was lots of evidence.
There was the testimony of the attackers, who were not white racist gay bashers, but in fact Nigerian homosexuals.
There were records of Smollett having paid the brothers.
There were records of the Nigerian brothers purchasing the tools for the hoax.
There was security camera footage.
And there was, of course, the sheer implausibility of white Trump supporters even recognizing the little-known actor while prowling the streets of Chicago claiming it was MAGA country and attempting to lynch Smollett while he somehow held on to his Subway sandwich.
Lots and lots and lots of evidence.
And yet, Jussie is having the last laugh now that he has been released from prison after just a few days.
And he convinced an appeals court judge to free him by, you guessed it, playing the race card.
Smollett's lawyer argued, quote, there is no room in our court system for...
Politics.
Regardless of what you think about this case, the real question is, should black men be walked into jail for a class 4 felony?
Yes.
The answer to that question, of course, is yes.
Men of all races should be walked into jail for felonies.
But that wasn't the question at all.
The question was, should black men be held to lower standards by society if they play the race card?
Should we let psychos and criminals off the hook if they can make even the most dubious claims to be victims?
In a sane society, in traditional society, in MAGA country, everyone is equal before the law.
But in our unjust society, Jussie Smollett goes free, and so does his attacker.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Crystal Swieger who says, I'm a Daily Wire member and I've already watched the first installment of the Dr.
Fauci series.
I hope you release this to the public one day because this needs to be heard by all people.
Maybe you can release it on DVD for sale.
Thank you so much.
I'm so glad you watched it.
This was a little bit of a stealth project.
We didn't do much marketing or advertising about it.
We've been working on this for months.
It is a three-part series.
Telling you the behind-the-scenes story of Dr.
Fauci.
You remember National Geographic did this hagiography of Dr.
Fauci a couple months ago.
The wonderful, angelic Dr.
Fauci.
Well, we're giving you the real story going back to the 1980s.
This stuff has not been seen before.
So go check it out at dailywire.com right now.
It's called Fauci Unmasked.
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So Smollett perpetrates a hoax.
He gets caught completely dead to rights.
He is sentenced.
He makes a big crazy scene in his sentencing and tries to make it all about race and says he's a black political dissident who's being persecuted by the government.
And then his lawyer goes in and plays the race card even more and says black men shouldn't be arrested for felonies.
That's his argument.
White men, that's fine.
Asian men, yeah, throw them in the can.
But black men, black men are so super-duper special, they need to be held to a much lower standard.
And what happens?
The judge agrees with him.
And the judge lets him off the hook.
Race is this magical little thing that you can play that will get you out of anything.
There was a TikTok that just went viral of a young, deluded white liberal woman explaining how everything is racist, including eating meat.
How is eating meat racist?
I'll gladly tell you.
Looks like we've got an oppressor on our hands.
So during slavery times, slaves did not get to eat the same things as their masters.
They got the scraps that no one wanted, chitterlings.
Now that black people have overcome slavery, they developed a rich barbecue culture to make up for all the meat-eating that they lost out on.
So when you go to the store and you buy a piece of meat as a white person, you are actively taking away a piece of meat that could be being enjoyed by a survivor of ancestral slavery.
Eating meat is not only racist, but it's also anti-Semitic.
During the Holocaust, Jews did not get to eat meat in labor camps.
They ate potato soup, which would spill on their bodies, burning them and giving them infections.
Now, Jew survivors eat a lot of meat, brisket.
Just let them have that.
Stop appropriating.
When I first saw this, I will admit, I thought it was satire.
I don't think it is satire.
I think this girl is being serious.
And there are so many levels of comedy here.
The first one, obviously, not everything is about race.
But except everything sort of is about race.
I've said on this show before, racism just means bad.
They are synonyms in modern culture.
When people say racist, all they mean is bad.
When people call you a racist, all they mean is, I do not like you, you are a bad person.
It can have nothing to do with race because we have decided that that is the only sin, is racism.
And we don't even use the language of sin anymore.
And I think a lot of that is because race is only skin deep.
And we live in this world where we're so absorbed by materialism that we've got to make everything about matter.
And so you say, you're racist, it just means you're bad.
But then, of course, the next layer of comedy here is the woman is saying things that traditionally would be considered pretty racist.
She goes, listen, you insensitive meat eaters, you're taking away some of that good old ham hock and chitlins from those black people.
You know, black people, they just, they sit around and they eat their collard greens and bacon.
You know, they're sitting on the front stoop in Alabama somewhere eating corn pone.
And you think, hold on, lady, is this a minstrel show?
What are you talking about?
I think black people eat sushi, too.
Did you know that?
Black people, they can eat Italian food, too.
They're people, just like you and me.
They say black people, anytime you eat barbecue, that's black people food.
Black people eat their black people food.
And you, white people, you can eat...
I don't know, umami or something.
What do white people eat?
You can eat tofu salad and the black people and Jews are going to eat brisket.
And if you eat brisket, you are basically a Holocaust denier.
You're a race.
It's all about race.
It's an extreme example, but this is the kind of thinking that you see going on, and it's because we've confused ourselves and made every single thing in the entire world about race, which is, it's the thing in American politics that you cannot touch.
There's only one word that you can't say.
You can go on TV, you can say the F word, you can say S-H-I-T, you can say the C word on TV. I don't, because this is a wholesome family show.
But you can do it.
People have said it on TV. There's one word you can't say.
There's one word you can't even write anymore.
What is that word?
It is the N-word, which is treated as more sacred than the holy name of the Lord by the ancient Israelites.
That's the word.
Because race is the most taboo, the most sacred issue at all.
And so it's no surprise that we make everything, things that have nothing to do with race, become about race.
Including Supreme Court nominees.
So there was a memo that just came out from the GOP. It was a big warning to Republican senators about this new Biden Senate nominee.
Biden said, I'm only going to nominate a black woman.
I'm not going to look at other candidates.
I'm not going to pick the most qualified person.
I'm going to limit myself to 6% of the population, and then I'll pick the best person from within that 6%.
And the person he ended up picking is a woman named Ketanji Jackson.
You are going to hear her referred to as Ketanji Brown Jackson.
This is just a minor point.
I don't want to give people three names.
It really drives me...
Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
No, you get two names.
You get a first name and a last name.
It's Ruth Ginsburg.
It's Amy Barrett.
It's Ketanji Jackson.
Ketanji Jackson is...
You know, on paper, a qualified candidate.
She's always going to have this little asterisk next to her nomination because the president who nominated her began the whole process by saying, I'm picking a diversity hire.
So that's sad for her.
This woman's worked very hard her whole life.
She's very intelligent by all appearances.
And she's always going to be seen as a diversity hire.
But the GOP is terrified of her.
And they're terrified of her because she is black.
They're terrified of her because the left, if the Senate Republicans in any way criticize this woman, they're going to call them racist.
So there was a leaked memo that came out.
During Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation, Democrats lost the battle of public opinion when they launched vicious personal attacks against him and paid for it electorally.
So don't launch those vicious personal attacks against Ketanji Jackson, which is going to be really hard for us to avoid doing because she raped me.
Ketanji Jackson raped me at a party in the 80s.
I have exactly as much evidence of that as Christine Ford had, that she even ever met Brett Kavanaugh, and that other lunatic, Julie Swetnick, had that she even ever met Brett Kavanaugh.
Truly no evidence there.
So yeah, it's going to be really hard to avoid that because of the abuse that I suffered at the hands of Ketanji Jackson.
You can take that to the bank.
Now, the Republicans are making an argument here.
They're saying, look, don't get personal.
Do not get tough on this nominee.
It's going to blow back on us if we do that, just like it blew back on Democrats.
Except it didn't really blow back on Democrats.
Democrats looked like schmucks during the Kavanaugh debacle.
They really looked awful.
That's true, and we talked about it all the time.
But it didn't hurt them at the ballot box.
They didn't pay for it.
How did they pay for it?
The Kavanaugh nomination process and confirmation process was 2018.
It began in the summer of 2018.
You then had the midterm elections in November 2018.
Democrats picked up 41 seats in the House.
Doesn't look like they paid for it there.
Republicans held on to the Senate.
They already had the Senate and they picked up a couple seats in the Senate, so fine.
But you're talking 41 seat swing pro-dem in the House, two seat swing pro-Republican in the Senate.
Doesn't even change who runs the Senate.
And then the governorships, Democrats picked up seven seats, seven different states for governors.
So it didn't work.
Democrats got tough.
It was very distasteful and they won.
It actually helped them.
Republicans shouldn't do something wrong.
We shouldn't lie.
We shouldn't be immoral, but we should get tough.
Do not run away from this.
I know it's...
The worst thing you can be called in America is a racist.
They're going to call you a racist anyway.
So, if you're not doing something unjust, if you're not a mean, cruel, awful person, then who cares what they say?
Let it roll off of you.
Get tough.
Do not just roll over for the Democrats.
Do not roll over for people who mean to do you harm.
That's true on the political sphere.
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Speaking of the United States Senate, great news in the U.S. Senate.
They have voted to end the mask mandates on public transit.
Now, the bill's still got to go to the House.
Nancy Pelosi's probably going to kill it there.
Joe Biden is going to probably try to kill it if it somehow made it to the White House.
But the Senate, which is 50-50, Republican and Democrat, the Senate voted to end the mask mandates.
This vote was brought by Rand Paul.
Republican.
He brings his resolution and gets a 57 to 40 vote, meaning eight Democrats voted to end the mask mandates.
There was only one Republican who voted to keep the mask mandates.
Guess who it was?
I, well, this is a little bit of a trick question because I called this person a Republican.
He has the letter R next to his name when they talk about him, but I am speaking, of course, about Mitt Romney, failed Senate candidate in Massachusetts, failed Republican presidential nominee.
Then he moves to New Hampshire to try to run for president.
Doesn't work.
Then he moves to Utah, becomes a Republican senator, and consistently votes against Republican priorities.
So, I used to say that Mitt Romney was my favorite Democrat in America, but I don't think that's any longer true.
I think these eight Democrats who voted to end the mask mandates, I think they might be my favorites.
And what unites almost all of those Democrats?
They're up for re-election.
They're in tough seats where they could lose.
And what this tells you is, despite all their protestations to the contrary, even the Democrats know that people hate these mask mandates.
Whatever polling that is put out there by the mainstream media, the Democrats know what the Republicans, what we have known for a long time, the people hate these mask mandates.
And when the politicians have to face the people, they will vote against the mask mandates.
If they feel that they're insulated from the people, they've got two or four years until their next re-election, then maybe they'll vote to keep it.
But the Democrats know people are sick and tired of COVID.
They've sidelined Dr. Fauci.
He's in a hidden bunker somewhere.
He's, you know, Zelensky in Ukraine, who actually has Putin's assassins coming to try to assassinate him.
Zelensky is more public than Dr. Fauci right now.
That is how toxic Fauci has become, which is why I would strongly recommend you head on over to The Daily Wire.
Check out Fauci Unmasked.
This is my three-part series.
Part two has just dropped today.
The real behind-the-scenes story of Dr. Fauci.
Fauci, how this man took power, how we can stop him from seizing power again after the midterms, which is very much on the table.
Please send it to your friends.
Appreciate that.
The Democrats are off the COVID thing.
They're now on to the Ukraine crisis.
And as for that, Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, spoke virtually to a joint session of Congress yesterday, and Zelensky did not temper his requests of the Congress.
He actually came out, he said, quote, To create a no-fly zone over Ukraine to save people.
Is this too much to ask?
Is it too much to ask?
If so, we offer an alternative.
You know what kind of defense systems we need.
And then he asks for aircraft and anti-aircraft guns.
But his question is, is it too much to ask you Americans to put a no-fly zone over Ukraine?
Yes, that is too much to ask.
A lot of people don't know what a no-fly zone means.
A no-fly zone means direct shooting war with Russia.
A no-fly zone means that you will have two nuclear powers, two major powers, one superpower, one former superpower, directly shooting at each other.
The thing that people feared would end the world for half of the 20th century, the thing that we fought an entire Cold War and managed to avoid, Zelensky is saying, hey, can you just do that?
Can you just do that thing that you managed to avoid for the whole latter half of the 20th century?
The thing that could thrust us into a global nuclear World War III? Yes, that is too much to ask, Zelensky.
You've got my sympathies.
My sympathies are with you.
My sympathies are with Ukraine.
My sympathies are not with Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin doesn't like the West very much.
But we've got to be realistic here.
Because though we might have the best of intentions to put a no-fly zone, to get into a shooting war with Russia, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Good intentions, virtue signaling, reckless foreign policy is what brought us to this point.
So yes, that is too much to ask.
But some Democrats keep jitting up that rhetoric.
Some Democrats are coming out like Democrat Senator Jackie Rosen.
She says this is our World War II moment.
I think we still need to support the Ukrainian people because you cannot watch those videos.
I'm not going to watch.
I'm not going to watch.
Who am I going to be in this moment?
Would I watch World War II on TV eating a box of popcorn?
No, that's not who I am and that's not who the American people are.
The entire world, like I said, is watching It was only about 80 years ago that we saw this happen in World War II. The world is watching what we do now.
I really believe this is a moment.
There's few moments in our lives, personal, professional, and now this is global, where we all know where we are, and we all have to take stock of what we stand for and who we want to be remembered to be.
And this is that moment, and we have to hold Vladimir Putin accountable.
One of the most annoying consequences of people not knowing a damn thing about history anymore is that people only ever compare political events to two historical events.
They either compare it to the fall of the Roman Empire, about which they know nothing, or World War II, about which they know a little bit more but still probably not very much.
Those are the only two historical comparisons you ever hear because people don't know a damn thing about history anymore.
There are other historical events.
Other things have happened in history that might be closer analogs to what we are seeing in our everyday political affairs, be they mundane or be they extraordinary like this war in Ukraine.
What is this woman talking about?
She's not calling for a no-fly zone.
She's not calling to send in the 101st Airborne.
She's not calling directly for a war with Russia.
She's saying that we need to give more military aid to Ukraine.
But we shouldn't put boots on the ground.
We shouldn't do the no-fly zone.
Because this is World War II. Putin's Hitler.
Is he?
Do you, Senator Jackie Rosen, do you really believe that this is...
If you really believe this is World War II, then we need to go to war, don't we?
We need to send our boys into Ukraine.
If you really believe Putin is Hitler, we need to do everything we can to stop him, right?
Not just give them a few extra airplanes, not even that.
Not even give them a few extra guns and missiles.
We've got to send in the Marines, don't we?
It's World War II, after all.
Putin is Hitler.
The man's Hitler.
Would you have said in World War II, well, Hitler, you know, okay, we're going to arm the Jews.
We're going to arm the Czechoslovakians.
We're going to arm the Poles with some extra rifles.
But we don't, look, we're not going to go in or do anything.
Is that what you would have said?
No.
You obviously don't believe that this is World War II. Yet.
You obviously don't believe that Putin is exactly the same as Hitler.
You just don't know anything about history and these people who have no frame of reference, no sophistication in their geopolitical thinking, they are the ones who have led us to this point, who have squandered the post-Cold War peace and have brought us to a point where you've got a nuclear former superpower invading a neighbor after they were literally invited to do so by the President of the United States, Joe Biden.
What do they want?
What do they think this is?
The White House, the Democrats, the liberal establishment can't decide.
They keep flip-flopping on all of this.
Are we involved in this war?
Are we not involved in this war?
The White House maintains that we're going to ship Ukraine a lot of weapons, but they're only going to be defensive weapons.
And a reporter, I believe for CBS News, was having none of it.
Even a reporter at a left-wing outlet Came out and he said, Jen, you were selling us a bill of goods.
You put out a list of all of the military equipment included in that $800 million that's being provided to Ukraine.
Are you saying those items are not offensive weapons?
They're weapons that help the Ukrainian people fight against an invasion by a foreign country.
They can be used offensively, can they not?
Again, they're weapons.
What I'm talking about is weapons that can be used to fight.
The answer is yes.
I mean, although you don't want to say it, that answer to that question is yes.
And so, obviously, you're trying to make this distinction between Offensive and defensive weapons.
Let me finish my answer.
I was finishing a point, and then you can respond to my answer.
Okay, go ahead.
You're making this distinction between offensive and defensive weapons.
Anybody that looks at that list of weapons that I just mentioned, they would say, clearly they're offensive.
Clearly, they're offensive.
But what the White House wants to do is say, no, no, no.
All the guns and the missiles and the rocket launchers, they're only going to be used for defense.
So we're not being provocative in any way.
We're not escalating this when we send all these arms.
We're not doing anything bad.
We're only doing...
We're both involved in the war and we're not involved in the war.
Well, you know, if you stand in the middle of the road, you're going to get hit by a truck.
Russia is a big enemy.
We're going to be tough on Russia.
Also, Russia, if you invade eastern Ukraine, we won't do anything.
Russia is instigating a new Cold War.
And also, Russia, here, have your direct pipeline to Europe so that you can invade Ukraine.
You've got to pick a lane.
Sometimes a bad decision...
It's better than indecision, but the White House, the liberal establishment, won't make those hard decisions.
They don't want to take the responsibility.
They don't want to actually have to take the moral risk of picking a strategy, picking a view of the world, and following through on it.
This is the consequence of fluid culture.
This is the consequence of we don't need to decide anything about morality, about the way markets operate, about the way we're going to enforce our laws, about the difference between men and women.
It's all just kind of fluid, man, and it's going to change every day.
Frankly, it's going to change every minute.
This is the consequence of it changing every minute.
You can't violate the law of non-contradiction, okay?
The weapons can't be weapons and not weapons at the same time.
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I've mentioned my series, Fauci Unmasked, available now at The Daily Wire.
The second episode, Concocting a Crisis, dropped this morning.
It reveals just how ineffectively the world's leading disease expert handled every crisis from swine flu to anthrax and everything in between.
Check out this sneak peek.
He's the highest paid employee in our federal government.
And beginning in the spring of 2020, Dr.
Fauci began to set national policy that affected the way that 330 million Americans lived their lives.
For goodness sakes, I'm telling you, wear a mask, keep social distancing.
There's nothing political about that.
But who is Anthony Fauci?
People who have conspiracy theories.
Those are people that don't particularly care for me.
In this short series, we will do what the establishment media have refused to do.
We will give you an unvarnished look at the career of the most powerful politician in America, Dr.
Anthony Fauci.
Don't you think it's time that you step down and let someone else who has a more effective message?
Actually, no.
No.
The last part of this three-part series drops tomorrow.
It's available exclusively at The Daily Wire.
If you're not a member yet, head on over to dailywire.com to join today.
The show is terrific, if I do say so myself.
And since we're only adding more content every day, you do not want to miss it.
Also, tonight is Ben's third Thursday book club.
You still have a chance to sign up.
He'll be taking members through his analysis of A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens.
This is a live experience where you get to engage with him like never before.
When you sign up, you'll also get his notes.
It's a cheat sheet to the most important lessons.
You are doing all of this with thousands of Daily Wire members live.
So sign up for the Third Thursday Book Club at thirdthursdaybookclub.com to get Ben's notes sent straight to your inbox for A Tale of Two Cities.
It is tonight at 8 p.m.
Eastern.
Eastern.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
The flip-flopping from the White House on this issue in Ukraine has gotten so bad that even within the span of two to three minutes, Joe Biden can't decide whether or not Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.
You Yesterday at an event, Joe Biden was walking through, glad-handing, slapping people on the back.
He was asked a question by a reporter.
Is Putin a war criminal?
Here's what he says.
Are you ready to call him a war criminal?
No.
Are you in a community with God?
Thank you so much for everything I need to do.
Will you go to Coldwell?
Do you ask me whether I would call him?
He's a war criminal, sir.
Oh, I think he is a war criminal.
Will you be meeting with him?
We are. - What?
So he changes his mind within, what was that?
There was a little bit of space in between there, but probably within two or three minutes.
And he pretends at the end that he didn't hear the question the first time, but he very clearly does.
He walks up, the reporter says, are you prepared to call Putin a war criminal?
He's looking right at her, he's very close to her, and he says, no.
No, I'm not.
He walks away, and then, I don't know, either some aid whispers in his ear, or it occurs to him, or he just changes his mind.
He walks back, and he pretends.
He says, did someone ask, who asked, did I, do I think that, yes, do you think Putin's a war criminal?
And he pretends.
He says, oh, oh, yeah, oh, gosh, oh, of course, I must have misheard you.
I thought you asked, I don't know, I don't know how he could have possibly misinterpreted the question.
He says, yeah, I think he is a war criminal.
If Vladimir Putin's a war criminal, if he's committing...
What is a war criminal?
It's not just someone who goes to war.
It's not just someone who invades another country.
That's just kind of what war is.
If invading a sovereign country made you a war criminal, we would have a lot of war criminal presidents, wouldn't we?
No, being a war criminal has a higher threshold.
You need to commit war crimes.
You need to violate the international law, such as it is.
You need to commit a genocide.
You need to intentionally target civilians.
You need to order rape and all those sorts of heinous acts that occur during wars.
Is Putin a war criminal act?
I don't know.
Certainly lots of civilians are being killed.
It would seem that the Russians are targeting civilians.
They're certainly targeting civilian areas.
Probably their argument is, well, we're getting the militants who are in those areas.
The women and children are fleeing.
We'll have historians hash out whether those Russian excuses carry water.
Probably they don't.
But this is a big deal to call someone a war criminal.
I'm not sure that all of the evidence is there, certainly compared to other wars.
And even if it is, let's say that it is.
Putin is not exactly a virtuous guy, okay?
He does all sorts of horrible things.
So let's say, okay, he's a war criminal.
What strategic objective is accomplished by Biden giving that answer?
By him answering the question at all?
Right now, you've got this war.
It's been going on for 21 days in Ukraine.
And it would seem that the best thing to do, assuming that America is not really going to give much support, is not going to go in, is not going to get into a direct shooting war with Russia, it would seem that the best thing to do would be to give Putin an out to stop the fighting, to stop the shelling of these civilian areas in Ukraine.
Okay, how are you going to do that?
One way you could do that...
Is by negotiating a peace.
There have been, what, three meetings now between the top Ukrainian and top Russian officials.
You could try to negotiate a peace where Russia gets to keep Crimea.
They already had it.
And Russia gets to keep a couple of those breakaway regions that they originally claimed.
And the Ukrainians get to keep Kiev and get to keep most of their country.
And maybe they agree not to join NATO. And maybe they demilitarize somewhat.
That would be hard to do because they've had a lot of weapons shipped into them.
And Putin pulls all of his troops out.
And you basically just go back to the stasis that you had before this war broke out and most circumstances looking like they were before 2014.
Okay, is that perfect?
No.
But it gives each side something to incentivize them to end the war.
It gives Zelensky an out.
He gets to maintain most of his country.
It gives Putin an out.
He gets to rejoin the world stage.
Maybe you lift a lot of the sanctions off of Russia.
And so everyone can walk away with their pride a little bit wounded, but they can go and claim a victory at home.
And then, most importantly, the war will stop.
That's not going to happen if you start calling the man a war criminal.
If you call Putin a war criminal, if you say, after this war, this guy's going to The Hague, he is going to hang for his crimes against humanity, well, now Putin has no incentive to stop the war.
This is the stupid side of canceling Russia, all these companies pulling out of Russia, going after the central bank, completely destroying the economy.
Russia now has basically no incentive to pull out of the war.
But it makes Westerners feel really good.
It makes Joe Biden, it gave him a good little clip on CNN. It makes that random Democrat senator feel really good.
I'm on the right side of history.
I'm not just doing nothing.
No, you're making things worse is what you're doing.
Which is what Biden and the Democrats have been doing the entire time.
At every single step of the way, they have made the situation worse in Ukraine.
I am not some shock and awe, neocon, they're going to greet us as liberators, warhawk, belligerent kind of concern.
I am about as far from that as you can be.
And yet, a little bit of strength, a little bit, if basically every single thing that Biden had done, we just did the opposite.
And frankly, a lot of the moves that America and NATO and the West broadly had made in Ukraine for the past 10 years, if we had just done the opposite, I don't think this stuff would be happening right now.
But there's no incentive for that.
And frankly, you want to talk about a really dark political calculation?
This war in Ukraine is probably the best thing to happen to Joe Biden politically in a long time.
He's underwater on every issue in his country.
It's an election year.
He knows this is the one issue where he looks somewhat not like a complete and total failure because the media are doing a good job of hiding his complicity in encouraging this war.
And so it's going to drag on and on and on.
This is an amazing fact.
It just occurred to me yesterday.
It has been 21 days since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
That is the same number of days that it took the United States to invade Iraq until the fall of Baghdad.
So the actual, not the occupation and the insurgency, but the actual conquest of Iraq took place in exactly the same amount of time that Russia has now been invading all of Ukraine.
America did it quickly, efficiently, completely.
Russia is stalled in this quagmire.
Roughly the same, it's impossible to know how many Russians have died in Ukraine.
We're still in the fog of war.
We're getting different numbers out of the Ukrainian and Russian propaganda shops.
But roughly, let's say it's 6,000 to 8,000 Russians have died.
Amen.
That is roughly the same number of Americans who died in Iraq and Afghanistan over 20 years.
That's the number of Russians who have died in Ukraine in three weeks.
There are two lessons to take from this.
One is America is the only country on Earth that can actually show force, that can actually go out there and accomplish its military objectives cleanly, efficiently.
It's not even close.
We talk about how General Milley and the top brass at the Pentagon have gone woke and they're complete jokes at this point.
That's true.
That's pathetic that we have to have our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines reading Ibram X. Kendi and critical race theory.
That's a joke.
But the American fighting force is still so many orders of magnitude beyond the strength of any other force on Earth, whether it's Russia or anyone else.
It's not even comparable.
So that's the first lesson.
We still have such an insane advantage on force that we don't need to fear the militaries of other countries exactly.
But then the second lesson is, what about the consequences?
We went into Iraq because we knew that they were going to greet us as liberators, which they actually did, by the way.
A lot of Iraqis were pretty happy about the invasion.
We thought it was going to take a couple of weeks, three weeks to complete it.
It did.
That was all true.
And then what happened?
We got bogged down in a political quagmire for years and years and years.
Same thing in Afghanistan.
We got bogged down in a political quagmire in Afghanistan for 20 years.
That was not foreseen by the Pentagon.
That was not what the State Department told us at the outset of the war on terror in 2002, 2003.
We went in with a great deal of hubris.
We went in with a great deal of confidence, justified confidence, because we've got the strongest military ever in human history.
But what are the consequences here?
Fortunately, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the consequences did not involve...
A nuclear former superpower.
It did not involve war throughout Europe.
It did not involve too many other major world powers.
What could happen here?
It's very easy for Jackie Rosen to say, oh yeah, I'm a good person.
This is our World War II moment.
Yeah, give all the weapons.
It's totally fine.
Let's escalate this thing.
It's no big deal.
Joe Biden, yeah, Putin's a war criminal.
Yeah, sure, let's escalate this.
Whatever.
I'm going to get a good clip on CNN. Very easy To start these things, what are the consequences going to be?
Speaking of war, Brian Stelter over on CNN, he's really sick of a different war.
Not the war in Ukraine.
He's sick of the culture war.
You know, these Republicans, these conservatives, they just keep pushing their ridiculous culture war agenda.
Such trivial issues don't matter at all.
They're on the wrong side of history.
You know, those Republicans, they don't even want to trans the kids.
When the media calls it a culture war battle, isn't that the wrong frame for this?
It's not a culture war to talk about equal rights for everybody in a country.
I mean, I guess it is, but this is, especially when there's a real war raging in Europe, I'm getting tired of the culture war frame.
I'm getting tired.
This isn't a culture.
Why are we calling it a culture war?
We're just right.
That's what he's saying.
When the left and squishy Republicans, when they come out and they say, oh, enough with the culture war, what they're saying is, give the radical left everything they want.
They never tell the left enough with the culture war.
They never say, hey, left, stop killing all those babies and radically redefining marriage and chopping up people's bodies and transing the kids.
Maybe stop doing that.
It's only at the conservatives.
Who are not the belligerents in the culture, or they're not the attackers in the culture war.
Who started the culture war?
By definition, it's not the conservatives.
The conservatives are trying to conserve the old standards.
It's the left that came in and said, hey, we're going to completely change our understanding of sex and human relationships and family and marriage and reproduction and babies and human nature itself.
We're going to radically change all of that, and we're going to let hulking husky dudes walk into the girls' changing room.
And if you have any problem with that, Man, I don't know, you got some weird hang-up.
You're just a crazy culture warrior.
Enough with the culture war.
Just lie down and accept what we tell you to do.
No, I don't think I will.
I don't think I will.
This issue seems to have broken through in a way that marriage and some of the other culture war issues in the past have not.
This issue of transing the kids, it has turned parents into a voting block.
Parents who were liberal or independent or even center left, they have realized, huh, I don't want little Johnny to be told by his first grade teacher that he's a little Jane.
I'm going to vote against this crap.
But that hubris, I mean, I guess this is the running threat, this hubris of the left, they're so confident of their own ideology that in the long run, their ideology will prevail that no amount of failure or human devastation will convince them otherwise.
wise.
Thank you.
This is true of the sort of globalist liberal establishment too.
You look at the debacle in Iraq, the debacle in Afghanistan, the debacle in Egypt, the debacle in Libya, the very near, I mean it was a debacle in Syria that actually could have gone worse.
And after all of that, the globalist adventurists will tell you Well, it'll work next time.
They're still so confident.
Oh, it didn't work because of this.
Oh, this thing went wrong.
Oh, this.
But don't worry.
My ideology of global markets and peace and harmony and utopia, it's going to work next time.
Let's do it.
Let's ratchet up the tension in Ukraine.
It'll work.
It's what you often hear from the liberals, right?
Which is an implicit, who cares if it works in practice?
Does it work in theory?
Abortion leads to horrible outcomes for everyone involved and for society.
We've now got a dying population.
You've got lots of depressed women who have been, in many ways, duped, certainly enticed into committing this horrible act.
You've got a million dead babies a year almost, 60 million dead babies since Roe vs.
Wade.
And, and what?
And they just keep doing it.
Marriage, family, totally collapsed.
Poor little kids now going on cross-sex hormones, mutilating their bodies, permanently disfiguring themselves.
You look at all that carnage, they say, no, don't worry, just a little bit more of this.
It'll work next time.
Cut it out with your culture war saying no to this.
No, no.
It's, it's really easy for conservatives to push back.
It's, it's, it's, it's really easy for conservatives to push back.
It's, It takes a little tiny bit of courage to overcome just the liberal establishment, but the people are on our side here.
I get the GOP's fears of these things.
You saw it with the letter that they wrote about Ketanji Jackson, the Supreme Court nominee.
They say, just let this one go through, basically.
They're going to call us racist.
Hey, let's just cool it here, okay, guys?
Just no, don't.
Don't buy it.
Don't give them an inch.
They've gone so far.
Their views are so toxic.
We are doing so well in the polls right now.
The people are so disgusted by Democrats' failures on every single issue.
Keep pushing, conservatives.
Stand your ground.
You know who's doing that?
Ron DeSantis, down in Florida.
Ron DeSantis pushed this bill that the Democrats dishonestly called the Don't Say Gay Bill.
It's actually the Parental Rights in Education Bill.
And despite massive pressure from the establishment, from the corporations, from all the libs, from the media, DeSantis held firm.
He called their bluff, and it totally worked.
Now he's spiking the football.
This idea that somehow people actually said that if you don't have classroom instruction on sexual matters in grades K through 3 that somehow businesses don't want to be in Florida, I think people need to get out of their bubble and actually talk to parents in this state because they do not want this in kindergarten or first grade or second grade.
We want our kids to be kids.
These people got to get out of their bubble.
And this is true of Republicans, too.
The Republicans who have been so conditioned.
Very often they live in the Beltway, or they just watch a lot of the news.
They watch the Sunday shows on cable news, and they read the establishment legacy newspapers, and they think, oh, I don't want the New York Times to call me a racist.
I don't want Chuck Todd on that show to call me this or that.
They're living in a bubble.
How many of you listening right now, listening on podcasts, listening on radio, on YouTube, wherever you are, how many of you regularly watch cable news?
I do not.
I do not.
I go on cable news a lot.
I'm really not disparaging cable news.
I'm glad to reach people who are usually in a much older age demographic.
But young people, by and large, don't watch it.
I don't have a cable subscription.
Almost none of my friends, who are below the age of 50, have a cable subscription.
How many of you, Rhi, you wake up in the morning and you read the New York Times?
I don't.
I'll read articles from the New York Times throughout the day if they go viral, but I don't read the New York Times as my source of news.
I haven't in years.
Even relatively conservative establishment outlets...
I just don't read them that much.
Even the Wall Street Journal.
I subscribe.
I don't read it that much for my news.
The media landscape has so completely changed.
And people have access to information in a way they didn't before.
The Fauci documentary is a good example of this.
Even five to ten years ago, something like the three-part Fauci series just really couldn't have gotten out there.
There wouldn't be a platform to do that that could sustain that kind of level of production.
You would have to turn to the bigger left-wing outlets to get something like that.
Now you can.
Do not fear.
Beltway crowd.
Bubble crowd.
People, the handful of people who still watch the Sunday shows.
Do not fear that.
You are living in a bubble.
The real political landscape, the actual people have changed.
Listen to Ron DeSantis, okay?
Listen to Glenn Youngkin in Virginia.
Listen to your humble host who hates to say, I told you so.
Just stand firm.
All the bellowing and screeching and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth that you get from that liberal echo chamber, it doesn't resonate out here.
Okay?
Parents still don't want to trans the kids.
There's great news coming out on the so-called social issues in West Virginia.
The West Virginia House and Senate Just passed a bill saying you can no longer abort Down syndrome babies.
This is a real tragedy and it's something that future generations are going to look upon us with horror for.
They're going to look upon us as though we're absolute barbarians and savages.
A lot of babies, most babies who have Down syndrome that are diagnosed in the womb, Are killed through abortion.
This is why you don't see as many Down Syndrome people anymore.
Remember 20, 30 years ago you'd see a lot more Down Syndrome people.
Now you don't see as many because they're being killed in the womb.
There's even an irony to this, which is, we covered this on the show a while ago, the vast majority of positive tests showing birth defects in the womb that very often impel people to abort their babies are false positives.
They're not even real.
But furthermore, even if they were real, you shouldn't be killing people because they have disabilities.
That's the wrong thing to do.
What an evil thing to do.
And yet people do it.
They don't even think about it.
The most virtue signaling, moralizing people in the world...
The most preening liberals on the world who changed their profile picture to the Ukrainian flag or to the mask or to the rainbow flag or whatever the cause celeb is of the day to seem like the good moral people, they will walk into a doctor's office, be told their baby is retarded, and kill the baby without even thinking.
Like, it's obvious.
Of course.
Of course.
Well, I don't have a little perfect baby like no one is, by the way.
None of us is perfect.
But they'll go in and they'll kill it.
In Iceland, they bragged about this a few years ago.
They bragged.
They said, we've eliminated Down syndrome in Iceland.
There's no cure for Down syndrome.
You just kill them all.
You're bragging about how you're killing every single person with this particular disability before they can even make it into the world.
So, this is a really great law that I assume will be signed into law.
It's passed by both chambers in West Virginia.
It's a great law because, look, I would much rather outlaw abortion for everyone, right?
There's no more abortion.
We can't kill any of the babies, right?
But when you say you're not allowed to kill disabled babies, that drives home the moral horror.
It's what they've done on the education front.
Instead of merely framing education as we're going to ban critical race theory or we're going to ban transgenderism, they call it curriculum transparency.
So now the left has to be against transparency.
In West Virginia, they've got to be pro-kill the crippled people, kill the disabled people.
That's not the place you want to be in.
It's just another way of framing the argument to show you the moral horror that people are blind to because they are not being given a proper formation or a proper moral view of the world, which is why I've got to get to this.
I'm so happy to see this.
There is a diocese of the Catholic Church down in Mexico that is now denying communion and the ability to be a godparent to pro-abortion politicians.
I wish our bishops and priests here in America would do the same thing.
Because it is scandalous, the fact that our president says that he's Catholic, he blasphemously claims to be Catholic, and yet he supports the slaughter of babies, which is a non-negotiable issue.
You can't do it.
He is truly imperiling his mortal soul, and he is imperiling the souls of people who are scandalized by this and confused by this.
So this priest down in Mexico, in Sinaloa, he says that pro-abortion politicians, this is Father Miguel Ángel Soto Gaciola, they will not be able to receive the Holy Communion because this is a recognition of their objectively unworthy state to receive the body of Christ.
It's not the priest...
Punishing them, exactly.
It's the priest actually helping them, saying, look, you're unworthy of this right now.
You are harming yourself and harming a lot of other people.
And the priest comes in and says, these politicians cannot do it.
It is my job.
We don't have that in America anymore, but we need a lot more of that.
When we had a functioning religious community in America, and when we had a functioning civil society, this constrained the whims of the politicians.
And then in the name of liberation, we got rid of all that stuff.
And it's terrible for the state of our country, and it will lead to horrible political outcomes.
Ironically, it will make us much less free.
This is how you get people like Dr.
Fauci.
Go check out Fauci on Mass Tonight.
We'll see you back here tomorrow.
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On today's episode, Ukrainian President Zelensky addresses Congress, lawmakers attempt to make daylight saving time permanent, and Amazon pulls workers out of Seattle over rising crime.
