Ep. 982 - The Biden Administration Is A Disaster Movie
The U.S. suffers “extraordinarily elevated inflation,” Elon decides not to join the Board of Twitter, and Disney reveals one of the main reasons they’re trying to trans the kids.
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Everything the Biden administration touches turns to ash.
This is true across the board.
Foreign policy, immigration, jobs, education, the list goes on and on.
But nowhere is it more apparent than inflation.
Inflation for the past months has already been at 40-year highs.
Everything is more expensive, much more expensive, since Joe Biden took office.
And according to the White House, the situation is only getting worse.
So because of the actions we've taken to address the Putin price hike, we are in a better place than we were last month.
But we expect March CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin's price hike.
And we expect a large difference between core and headline inflation reflecting the global disruptions in energy and food markets.
So core inflation doesn't include energy and food prices.
Headline inflation does.
And of course we know that Core inflation, you know, energy, the impact of energy, of course, on oil prices, gas prices.
We expect that to continue to reflect what we've seen the increases be over the course of this invasion.
And just as an example, since President Putin's military buildup accelerated in January, average gas prices are up more than 80 cents.
Most of the increase occurred in the month of March, and at times gas prices were more than a dollar above pre-invasion prices.
So that roughly 25% increase in gas prices will drive tomorrow's inflation reading.
And certainly, it's not a surprise to us, but we certainly think it will be reflected.
You know it's bad when the White House is trying to manage expectations like this.
You know it's bad when the White House is saying, well, yes, we expect the number to be not just elevated, but extraordinarily elevated.
But hey, that's only because gas and food is super expensive.
Oh, good.
Okay, good.
That makes me feel better.
Only because the basics that I need to live are extremely expensive now, and we're getting much, much more expensive long before Putin ever invaded Ukraine, by the way.
That's okay.
That's the only reason why my money is worth much less today than it was a year ago.
This was always going to happen.
Biden is going to do everything he can to blame it on big bad Putin or the big bad oil companies or the big bad supermarkets or anybody but himself.
But this was always going to happen.
And in some ways, it's extraordinarily simple.
This was going to happen because this is the logical, inevitable consequence of the politics of fantasy.
This was the inevitable consequence of just printing endless money.
You need more money?
People are feeling the pinch?
Well, just give them money.
This was the inevitable consequence of locking down the country for two years and having everyone sit at home and just hoping that everything remains the same.
This was the inevitable consequence of upending every social institution, of all of the radicalism, up to and including saying that men can become women.
In the fantasy world...
We're all gonna live on Big Rock Candy Mountain and everything's gonna be great.
In reality, everything gets worse when you live in fantasy.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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In some ways, when you're trying to think about inflation and foreign policy and the war in Ukraine and immigration, it's so complicated.
But in other ways, it's really simple.
When you live in fantasy, things go wrong.
Whether you're talking about the border, whether you're talking about foreign policy.
Yes, we're going to take all the sanctions off Putin, but we're going to give him a stern warning and say, hey, don't invade Ukraine.
We're going to take out all the incentives not to invade Ukraine, but we're going to say, hey, don't invade Ukraine.
We're going to take off all the disincentives to crossing the border illegally.
This is what happens.
You get chaos.
You get madness.
Do you think...
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I want to ask this of liberals.
Do you think we like being the bad guy and saying, no, no, you have to work.
No, you can't just sit at home for two years and expect the economy to remain the same.
No, we can't just print money so that you have more money in your wallet, because it's actually not going to increase your wealth.
No, not everyone can come to America.
We're only going to take three million a year, not four million people a year.
No, you can't change your sex.
No, you can't upend everything.
Do you think we want to do that?
No, we want to be the nice guys and we want to be able to say, hey, do whatever you want.
No, sit at home, sit on the couch if you want.
And hey, we're just going to print you money.
But it doesn't work that way because we live in reality and there are constraints.
And when you don't accept the fundamental facts of reality, men are not women.
People have to work to make a living.
Bad guys are going to want to expand their influence, and we've got to smack them on the hand and tell them no.
When you don't accept the basic facts of reality, things go awry.
That's the world that we're living in.
The Biden administration refuses to accept reality and puts his head in the sand on domestic policy on foreign policy and everything in between and things have gone wrong.
So now the best thing that they can do is distract from everything and focus on the one political win that they've had during the entire administration, and that is the confirmation of Ketanji Jackson to the Supreme Court, which Jen Psaki is going on all the news shows to trot out to say was the most historic, wonderful, life-changing, joyous event in history, and everyone was crying tears of joy because they got this judge on the court.
It was, as you know, Dana, from working on these in the past, it was a very emotional day in the White House, a joyful day.
And there's so many days in the White House, no matter who you work for, that are exhausting and heartbreaking and challenging because there aren't easy answers to hard problems sometimes.
But this was an incredibly joyful day, a day we celebrated, a day many of us were ugly crying on the White House South Lawn.
Just celebrating this remarkable woman who is making history but she is also so qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.
You were ugly crying on the South Lawn because some federal judge got a promotion?
You were ugly crying, meaning not only had you lost control of yourself, and frankly, I wanted to cry when Ketanji Jackson got nominated, but I didn't because I'm an adult with some sense of responsibility and decorum.
Not only were you crying, you were ugly crying, you were shaking, you were streaming tears everywhere because some judge got a promotion?
You...
It's not as though the Republicans have the majority in the Senate.
It's not as though this was particularly hard.
It was easy.
Biden just picked a lady and then there were short confirmation hearings.
The Republicans didn't put up a fight at all.
The only people to put up any fight on it were Cruz, Hawley, and Tom Cotton.
No, the entire rest of the GOP and the conservative movement just rolled over.
And then she gets her promotion.
And then you were...
Why?
Why?
There's nothing...
Remarkable about that.
And they're pretending that this is some historic win for the oppressed people.
She's not the first black person on the court.
She's the third.
And she's not the first woman on the court.
The current black person on the court, before Ketanji Jackson is elevated, is Clarence Thomas, who the Libs hate.
And there are multiple women on the court.
The first woman on the court was appointed by Ronald Reagan.
So none of that is historic.
I don't think that it's worth ugly crying over even if it were But I suppose it just underlies the problem.
These are not serious people who are not in control of themselves, who are emotionally stunted children running our show.
That is who we've got.
And so Biden is doing his best to make a big deal out of the easy confirmation process of Ketanji Jackson, because it's the only thing he can claim a win on.
And now, to try to rile up his base, he's going for some tried and true red meat.
He's pushing gun control.
From the very beginning, the Second Amendment didn't say you can own any gun you want, as big as you want.
You couldn't buy a cannon when, in fact, the Second Amendment passed.
And certain people from the very beginning weren't allowed to purchase guns.
It's nothing new, it's just rational.
So Biden wants to take your guns.
He wants to push gun control.
He thinks this might help him with his base in the midterms.
But just on the statement that he made, it's not true.
You could buy a cannon.
At the start of our country, you could buy a cannon.
Lots of people bought cannons.
And there was no rule against that.
So as per usual, the premises that Joe Biden and the Democrats are pushing are not true.
And if you start with bad premises, you're going to end up with a bad conclusion, which is Joe Biden wants to take all of our guns.
Forget about cannons.
He wants to take our most basic rifles away from us.
Garbage in, garbage out in the physical world and in logic and in politics.
Why is he doing this?
What this gun control push says to me is Biden has not tried to win the midterms.
He's not trying to win over people in the middle and centrists.
Joe Biden is trying to stop the bleeding by riling up his Democrat base.
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Biden's gun control push is the clearest evidence that I have today that he's given up on winning over moderates and winning over center right people, the squishes who are at least somewhat open to Joe Biden and the independents.
He's given up on that.
Joe Biden is just trying to stop the bleeding by picking up a big bucket of nice bloody red meat and throwing it out to his base and making a bunch of stupid statements like you couldn't buy a cannon at the time of the American Revolution.
And we what do you need a gun for?
Why do you need to have a magazine with 10 or 20 rounds?
You don't need that to hunt deer.
Why would you ever want that?
Come on, man!
And just a bunch of idiocy because it's the best shot that he's got.
And I don't think that's going to do it.
I don't think.
Even his base is depressed.
He's underwater on every single issue other than the confirmation of this judge, which is a win for him this week and maybe next week, but it's not going to last through November.
It's not going to get these guys through the midterms.
And if inflation continues to go through the roof, the number, they've just released the number.
Jen Psaki yesterday set the stage and said, we're warning, it's an extraordinary elevated number.
It's 8.5%.
Prices are up 8.5%.
That is insane.
It's a new 40-year high.
We're going to have another 40-year high next week.
The inflation rate has exceeded economists' predictions.
It's exceeded even what the Democrats were setting the stage for at the White House.
And it's going to drive these people from office if we have fair elections.
So, right on cue, when we're wondering if the elections are going to be fairer this time, and we're going to follow the rules, and we're not going to upend all the election rules like we did before 2020, enters Dr.
Fauci to say, actually, folks, COVID's not gone yet.
Ha ha, I'm back.
Well, obviously there is concern that we are seeing an uptick in cases.
As I've mentioned over the last couple of weeks, John, that this is not unexpected that you're going to see an uptick when you pull back on the mitigation methods.
If you look at the CDC calculation with their new metrics, It's clear that most of the country, even though we're seeing an uptick, is still in that green zone, which means that masking is not recommended in the sense of not required on indoor settings.
But as people pull back, when you have a highly transmissible virus like the BA2, and you have pulling back on mitigation methods, at the same time there's waning immunity, we're going to see an uptick.
So the numbers you gave We're not surprising.
But the idea that we're going to see an uptick, I think people need to appreciate that that's the case and follow the CDC guidelines.
Because remember, when the metrics were put forth, the new metrics, looking at the guidance of masking, it was said that if we do start seeing an uptick, particularly of hospitalizations, we may need to revert back to being more careful and having more utilizations of masks in door.
Where is my hat?
Where is my Nolstradamus hat and my crystal ball?
I don't even need it to make my predictions.
You know I hate to say I told you so.
I told you so!
I told you this was going to happen.
A month ago, everyone was saying, oh, Michael, COVID's over.
Don't worry.
You know, we have that three-part docu-series on Dr.
Fauci.
It came out, what, about a month ago?
I think it is the most watched content we've ever put out for Daily Wire members.
You can go check that out today at dailywire.com, Fauci Unmasked.
But one of the criticisms at the time is people said, oh, Michael, wow, I really like the docu-series.
But Fauci, he's old news.
COVID, it's over.
It's going away.
I said, it's not going away.
It's not.
Joe Biden did not withdraw the national emergency authorization.
They have not withdrawn the mask mandate throughout the country.
Actually, what we've just found out today is some cities are bringing the mask mandate back.
The mask mandate is still in place in New York, for instance, for little kids.
The mask mandate is still on the planes.
The airplanes refuse to get rid of it.
They're telling us maybe this month.
I'll believe it when I see it.
They're not getting rid of it.
One, because the Democrats want to keep power centralized in the bureaucracy.
They took a lot of power during COVID and they don't want to give it back.
That's not how power works.
It's not how politics works.
But two, COVID is their biggest excuse to cheat in the elections.
I hope our oligarchs at Big Tech don't take me down for saying that, but it's obviously the case.
The The election, whatever you think of the results of the 2020 election, was by far the most rigged election we've had in my lifetime.
They changed all the rules beforehand and they used COVID as the excuse to do it.
And they pushed for these widespread mail-in ballots, which are rife for abuse, which even Barack Obama, not all that many years ago, admitted were not a good way to conduct elections because they were vulnerable to abuse.
In some cases, it was in violation of the state constitutions, like in Pennsylvania.
And they're going to try to do it again.
They're going to stuff the ballot box.
This is nothing new.
Democrats have been particularly guilty of this over the years, but Republicans have cheated in elections too.
Ever since there have been elections, there has been cheating.
And so sometimes the conditions for cheating are stricter, and sometimes they're more relaxed.
And so they're holding on to COVID. I think I think that this whole COVID stuff might have a little bit more to do with politics than it does with the science.
I know that's a shocking suggestion, but if you don't understand that now, two years in, you're not going to make it.
You're not going to understand that.
That is one of the ways the Democrats have cheated.
The New York Times is already setting the stage.
They said, get ready for the latest wave of COVID. Okay, I'm going to get ready at the end of October.
Something tells me that's going to be when COVID really strikes back.
That was one of the ways they cheated, but the other way they cheated is through big tech.
I was talking about the oligarchs who control speech in our republic.
Well, what does tech do?
Tech censors articles and information that are critical of Democrats.
There was obviously the Hunter Biden story right before the 2020 election.
Republicans broke news about a laptop, a hard drive of Hunter Biden's that was found with lots of evidence of crime, not just from Biden's derelict son, but implicating Joe Biden as well.
Not just weird sex stuff, not just weird drugs, but also financial crimes that are coming out more and more and more.
And now...
18 months later, we're finally hearing the New York Times and Washington Post admit that that is the case.
15% of Biden voters said that had they known that that was the case, that there was this laptop that had implicated him in some crimes, they would not have voted for Biden.
Could have swung the election.
So it's why this issue of big tech is so important.
It's why it should be, if not priority number one, at least in the top three for Republicans.
And it's why we're all so happy that Elon Musk is now taking over Twitter.
We like it not because Elon is some rock-ribbed right-wing conservative, but because he's certainly not woke.
He's certainly not with the left.
And he has gone in, and he's bought 9% of Twitter, more than 9% of Twitter.
And he was offered a seat on the board of directors.
Initially, he was going to accept this seat.
Then, we got some news that Elon Musk is not going to take the seat on the Twitter board of directors.
The first reaction from conservatives to this was disappointment.
We were crestfallen.
Oh no, we were so close to changing Twitter.
We were so close to taking back the public square.
Oh no, why won't Elon Musk do it?
Now that some information is coming out as to perhaps why Elon Musk didn't take the board seat, the reaction has been elation.
So this from Parag Agrawal, who is the CEO of Twitter, is, quote, Elon Musk has decided not to join our board.
We announced on Tuesday that Elon would be appointed to the board contingent on a background check and formal acceptance.
Elon's appointment to the board was to become official, effective April 9th, but Elon shared that same morning that he will no longer be joining the board.
Okay, no further explanation, but this is how Agrawal signs off the letter.
There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged.
The decisions we make and how we execute is in our hands, no one else's.
let's tune out the noise and stay focused on the work and what we're building.
What do you mean there are going to be distractions?
What do you mean it's going to be a bumpy road ahead?
What are you referring to?
Your main antagonist, Elon Musk, just said he's not going to join the board.
Well, here's what's in the contract that they initially gave to Elon Musk.
He said, For so long as Mr.
Musk is serving on the board and for 90 days thereafter, Mr.
Musk will not, either alone or as a member of a group, become the beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of the company's common stock outstanding at such time, including for these purposes economic exposure through derivative security swaps or hedging transactions.
So the deal was, we'll give you a seat on the board if you agree not to up your stake in Twitter.
Right now you own 9%, 9 and change.
Well, you can't own 15% or more if you join the board.
But one board seat isn't actually that powerful.
So more and more, it looks as though Twitter offered Musk the board seat, not to give him a seat at the table, but to actually rein in the power because he's gone in and he's now the single largest shareholder in Twitter.
It's not that easy to buy 9% of a company like Twitter.
It's not like Elon just picks up the phone and says, buy, buy, buy!
Sell, sell, sell!
No, this is a complicated process.
He's doing it because he wants to influence the company.
And what this says to me is that Elon Musk is not interested in pulling back from this whole Twitter game.
It says to me that he's interested in taking it on much more.
Potentially a hostile takeover here, which would be one of the most important things we could do in this country for free speech and the defense of the traditional American way of life.
Do it, Elon.
Go on.
I'm reading the tea leaves here.
I've got my Noel Stradamus hat on.
Don't let me be wrong.
Go in.
Hostile takeover.
Boot out these woke idiots.
Give us back our public square.
That's what we're trying to do over here at Daily Wire.
We are trying to influence not just the political and media landscape, but we're trying to smack down woke corporations all over the place.
A lot has happened since our backstage.
Well, we've got another backstage coming up.
That backstage is going to be tomorrow.
We're going to be talking about everything.
We're going to be talking about Biden's disastrous presidency.
We're going to be talking about the insane uptick in inflation.
We're going to be talking about woke corporations like Disney.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
In Elon Musk's potential hostile takeover of Twitter, he has two proposals right off the top that he's pushing.
We're not talking about the long-coveted edit button.
We're not even necessarily talking about restoring banned accounts like the Trump account or others.
We're talking about, well, for instance, turning the Twitter headquarters into a homeless shelter.
Elon Musk is suggesting, especially because The Twitter employees don't actually show up for work because they're still remote, because they're neurotic and are afraid of COVID and they want to live in a world without germs, that there's no reason to have this expensive real estate here and you can turn the Twitter headquarters into a homeless shelter.
Elon suggested this.
People thought it was a joke.
And then he said, I'm very serious about this.
He might do it.
Do it.
I love it.
He follows this up.
He says, we're thinking about changing the name.
Should we remove the W? Should we remove the W from Twitter?
Would that improve the company?
I think it would.
I think everything Musk is doing right now is exactly the right way to handle this.
Which is troll them into the ground.
Troll this company until it is ash.
Until you bring them to heel.
And bring them into submission.
Or destroy the company entirely.
But what we're talking about here is...
The difference between a friendly influencing of Twitter and a hostile takeover.
When Elon first bought 9% of the company, you saw these nice happy tweets between the CEO and Elon.
Hey, we're so glad Elon's joining.
Please don't fire us.
And Elon, oh yes, I can't wait to work with all of you.
That was the nice friendly version.
That broke down within, what, 72 hours?
Now we're in potential hostile takeover territory.
That's the only place we're going to be.
The left will only respect strength.
In many ways, it's like we talk about foreign policy.
The only thing that these guys who hate us, who think we're racist and sexist and thisist and phobic and terrible and we're killing kids and we're murderers and we're a threat to public safety, the only thing they're going to respect is political strength.
Bring them to heel.
Take over the company.
Take out the W. Make a mockery of them.
Fire them.
Make them quit.
Make them run away.
You're seeing this not just here, but you're seeing this with the Florida law.
After the Florida education bill, you have teachers in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, who are very frustrated because they want to trans the kids, and bad boy DeSantis won't let them trans the kids.
And so they say, well, we're going to leave.
We're going to quit.
We can't do our job.
Great!
Sounds good to me.
Problem solved.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Love that.
Personnel is policy.
Get these guys out of here.
Do you remember when the Army posted that woke ad, that recruitment ad?
When I was a kid, the Army ads were, be all that you can, be an army of one, and people climbing up mountains and doing cool manly things.
Well, now the new Army recruitment ad is a woman saying that she learned I don't want the conservatives.
They want the woke people.
The conservatives had one or two institutions left in the entire country, the military and AM radio, I guess, sort of like one and a half.
And the left wouldn't even let us have that.
A lot of the heavy-handed enforcement of the COVID rules, a lot of that has the benefit for the left of getting the conservatives out of these institutions.
We've got to do the same.
You're seeing it in Florida.
You're seeing it potentially in Twitter.
Great stuff.
We've also figured out, by the way, why Disney has gone so insanely woke.
Because I couldn't figure it out.
I thought, yes, all the corporations are going woke now, but why is Disney in particular, Disney, where the bread and butter of this company...
Is families, is kids, is normal people.
It's not even the woke, crazy coastal elites.
It's normal people in the middle of the country who, for whatever reason, decide to spend thousands and thousands of dollars going to a theme park in Florida or California where they can wait for seven hours to go on two rides.
I don't get it.
It's not my thing.
But a lot of people love it.
And the people who love it are normal people.
They're not radical ideologues.
So, why are you going to flip them off?
Why are you going to have your company now say, you can't engage with our product because we're going to trans your kid, we're going to steep them in radical ideology?
What was the thought process?
Well, now we've got a little bit of information on it.
The Disney heiress, Charlie Disney, has just come out as transsexual.
This woman, who's a woman, but who thinks that she's a man, is a high school teacher.
She criticized the Florida Parental Rights and Education Law, saying these children, the gay children and the transgender children and the pansexual and all these...
The children that she believes have this extraordinarily firm sexual ideology and identity, she says, they can't learn about their community and their history at school or play sports or use the bathroom that they want to use.
Yeah, that's true.
At least the last part of that is true.
The last two parts.
Yes, the little boys can't use the girls' bathroom.
I hope.
Actually, now they probably can in lots of places, but they shouldn't be able to.
It's disordered and weird for little boys to go use the girls' room at school.
And the heiress to Disney, who's got Disney right there in her name, is crying about this.
She says, I haven't told people this before, but I'm a transgender and I've always known.
And this woman's mother apparently told the Los Angeles Times that from the age of two onward...
Charlie was pulling away from the girls' shoe section at the department store and saying, but mom, I'm a boy on the inside.
So, in a way, I sort of feel bad for this woman.
She's a grown woman now, Charlie Disney, but her mother's obviously a complete lunatic too, who believes that a two-year-old can pick her own sex.
And so she was raised in this.
It's a very personal issue for her.
And it's probably the biggest challenge conservatives have on this transgender issue and on sexual issues generally is people take it really, really personally.
And so you can sit them down over a nice cup of tea and say, listen, I've got charts, I've got graphs, I've got a whiteboard behind me.
Boys...
Not girls.
And you can speak in the most elementary, simple, logical terms that you can, and that's probably not going to get through because people are going to interpret that as an attack on their identity.
The left loves this.
The left has always tried to make politics personal.
This was the slogan of the second wave feminists in the 1970s.
They said the personal is the political.
If we make our personal lives right down to who does the dishes, right down to who cooks dinner, if we make that a big political issue open to public scrutiny, and if we make public political issues extremely personal and say that if you oppose a radical political agenda, you're a hateful, terrible monster who wants to kill me.
If we can do that, it's going to be much easier to get our radical agenda through.
The conservatives aren't going to know what hit them, and they're going to have a harder time arguing against it because our political agenda will be immune to facts and logic.
That's what they're after, and they've done a pretty good job of this.
What the libs are saying right now is that if you don't want to lop off the genitals of a five-year-old, if you don't want to put little, little kids in elementary school on cross-sex hormones, that you are killing them.
The suggestion that you would mutilate the genitals of a little child would have been preposterous even three, four years ago, even on the radical left.
Today, the idea that you wouldn't do that The idea that if you oppose that, you're a terrible murderer, that is being pushed by the White House.
To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.
Gender-affirming health care, by the way, means the opposite of what it sounds like.
It's an ironic phrase, because really gender-affirming health care would be when you tell a confused boy that he's a boy.
I know you're confused, I know you're having problems, but I'm affirming the reality here, you're a boy.
And they use the phrase to mean delusion-affirming healthcare.
And where they say, you think you're a boy, but you're actually a girl, and we're going to lop your genitals off.
And she says, look, all the experts, all the major experts say that this is a best practice, and so we're going to do it.
But there's a little trick to this.
It's not just the expert doctors.
I would be skeptical of them.
If you're not skeptical of guys wearing lab coats after the last two years, I can't help you.
You're not going to make it.
But there's a little bit of a difference here.
She doesn't say it's all the top doctors, all the top scientists.
She says it's all the top associations, meaning it's all the top political entities that represent people in lab coats and represent the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, and represent the people who are going to make a lot of money on this and already are.
We covered this on the show last week.
The big study that the Libs are citing on how lopping off kids' genitals and putting them on cross-sex hormones is really good for them and makes them feel happier.
That study is funded by an organization that is funded by the pharmaceutical companies that stand to make the most money from pumping the kids full of hormones and putting them through these horrible procedures.
You think that's a little bit of a conflict of interest?
I think so.
She says you have to do that.
It's the best practice.
It's not the best practice.
It's a horrible crime, and people who do it should be jailed.
Okay?
First, they should be sat down and talked to and said, don't do that.
Don't trans the kids.
And if they insist on doing it, they should be thrown in prison.
It's a horrible, horrible abuse.
And so the left says, we have to do it.
It's a best practice.
But then on the other hand, they say, but it's not happening, by the way.
On the other hand, they say it's not real.
None of these conversations are happening in K through second grade or third grade like you see in the Florida law.
Every time I've talked to a liberal about this, on the show or off the show, that's the first line of argument.
They say it's not happening.
The law is taking on a problem that's not real.
Well, we have evidence.
Libs of TikTok, one of our favorite accounts on Twitter, has video of a first grade teacher indoctrinating kids in kindergarten through second grade classrooms into transgenderism.
So something that's really cool and unique about who I am is that I am transgender.
So we touched a little bit about that at the beginning of this week in the book that Ms.
Hammond read, but I'm going to give you my explanation about what it means to be transgender as well.
So when babies are born, the doctor looks at them and they make a guess about whether the baby is a boy or a girl based on what they look like.
And most of the time that guess is 100% correct.
There are no issues whatsoever.
But sometimes the doctor is wrong.
The doctor makes an incorrect guess.
When the doctor makes a correct guess, that's when a person is called cisgender.
When a doctor's guess is wrong, that's when they are transgender.
So I'm a man, but when I was a baby, the doctors told my parents I was a girl.
And so my parents gave me a name that girls typically have and bought me clothes that girls typically wear.
And until I was 18 years old, Everyone thought I was a girl and this was super, super uncomfortable for me because I knew that wasn't right.
This is all obviously abusive.
This is very confusing for children.
It's harming their education.
Girl, I guess he's a woman.
She's a woman.
It's very confusing.
She says, I was born a woman, but now I'm a man.
Or I was born a man, but the doctors made their best guess and thought that I was a woman because I've got all the female body parts and I'm obviously a woman.
So this woman is extremely confused and should not be allowed within 100 yards of children and should certainly not be teaching any children.
The issue here is that nothing she said is true.
She is spouting delusional madness.
When you walk past derelicts on the street who are on drugs or who have all sorts of mental problems, and they're just spouting nonsense and they're talking to the air and they are talking to the multiple personalities floating around them that only they can see that you can't see, those people make more sense than this woman.
It's just completely wrong It's especially wrong to confuse little kids like this, especially over an issue that could have such horrible effects on them.
They could end up mutilating themselves.
They could end up not knowing their very basic identity and basic facts about the world.
But it's just wrong.
It's not making anyone happier.
Do you think that that woman is stable, happy, ready to go?
Okay, all I had to do was pump myself full of hormones and maybe undergo some mutilations, I don't know what, and now I'm really happy and well-adjusted.
No, of course not.
And I don't really believe any statistics that I read, but such that we have statistics, none of this stuff is working.
The argument from the White House and from the Democrats right now is that gender-affirming counseling and drugs and health care is really helping these children deal with their stress and anxiety.
It's not true.
You look at any social scientific evidence, the numbers are getting worse.
Since we began indulging this crap five, six, seven years ago, The rates of suicide, depression, anxiety have gone up.
They've especially gone up in kids.
They've especially gone up in kids who consider themselves LGBT, LMNOP. So whatever we're doing, it's not working.
It's having the opposite effect.
And what are we doing?
The strategy is affirm the delusions.
And what is the consequence?
I know that correlation is not necessarily causation, but I think there might be a link here.
When we indulge delusion, when we live in fantasy world, everything gets worse.
Nothing gets better.
People are really struggling.
So what's the answer?
Let's try something different.
Let's try maybe the opposite approach.
and these people who are pushing these extraordinarily harmful and destructive and false ideologies, they need to be put away from the first grade classroom.
They need to be put away from positions of influence.
They need to get better and they need to be brought into accord with reality.
I'm not just focusing on this one issue of transgenderism, which is no longer can you even really call it a minor issue because it's exploding right now in the public square.
It's catching on like a social contagion.
I'm talking about so many other issues.
People are getting more anxious, more stressed, more lonely, more miserable.
And so whatever we're doing, we need to turn it around.
There was one of these viral TikTok videos of a woman who's obviously very radical on the left of the political spectrum that just went viral.
That really, really tugged on my heartstrings.
Take a listen.
Guys, I really need some friends.
I'm a really cool person.
And I know I look weird and I act funny, but I promise I'm cool.
I'm really nice too.
I have a car.
I'll pick you up.
I'll waste my gas on you.
You can play with my dog.
Please be my friend.
I'm so lonely.
Some people were making fun of this video.
That video broke my heart.
That is actually a hard video to watch.
And what's so hard about it is, one, this woman is clearly in pain.
But, two, what's hard to watch about it is that it's not extraordinary.
If this were unique, if this were just a one-off, oh, this poor woman, she's got these unique singular problems, oh, I hope we can help her, that would be one thing.
The problem is that it's not unique.
The problem is that we're getting much lonelier.
This is a social problem, and it's been building not just for years, but for decades at this point.
People are lonelier, more isolated, less connected, more stressed out, more anxious.
And the reasons for this run very deep.
It's not easy enough to say, oh, well, take some drug.
Or, oh, just change the way you're thinking.
Read one self-help book and you'll be better.
No, this goes really, really deep.
It actually goes down to this issue of delusion.
People don't have friends anymore.
People don't even understand what friendship is anymore.
People think that friendship is just going to brunch or something.
People think that friendship is the people that you spend a little time with and maybe you kind of like some of the same things or maybe you just met one another through happenstance and you're friendly enough and you have pleasant enough conversation and therefore you're friends.
Friendship is much deeper than that.
I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, if lovers are people who look at one another, who are just totally enraptured by one another, friends are people who stand next to one another.
And look at the same thing.
And they've got slightly...
They're pretty aligned on how they see that thing.
But they've got slightly different bandages because they're individuals, but they're looking at that same thing.
And the crux of that matter is objective reality.
It's very hard to have friends when you are stuck in a solipsistic hell.
It's very difficult to have friends when you deny basic features of reality, because then you have no way to communicate with other people.
Then you're not looking at the same thing, or you're at least not admitting to looking at the same thing.
Then everything is about you, you, you, and your subjective feelings, and your caprices, and your whims, and your delusions, and it traps you.
I don't mean to speak glib or flippantly about any of this.
It's horrible.
When you indulge your fantasies, you isolate yourself from the world, inevitably, because no one can see the things that you're imagining.
I'm not just talking about a handful of people with some psychological problems or the larger number of people who have caught on to that because of a social contagion.
I'm talking about pretty much everybody in the culture.
And now, on the rare occasions that people can have friendships, we sexualize everything.
We have this line.
If you're friends with a buddy, you go out and you're like, hey buddy, hey man, I love you, man.
This was great.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
I really enjoyed this thing that we've done together.
Or I just really love your friendship.
Hey man, I love you.
No homo.
And we say no homo because the suggestion is that any time you have any care for someone, it's sexual.
Everything has become sexual, which is part of attraction.
It's part of human connection.
But it's not everything.
There are other kinds of loves as well that are entirely missing from our discourse.
It's why you're seeing a decay of friendship.
It's why you're seeing a spike in loneliness.
It's why people don't understand who they are.
Expect more videos like this.
It's heartbreaking, and no one has the courage or the common decency to tell people.
This woman has pronouns in her bio, and she says that she's a they.
So she's obviously got some kind of trans, pan, multiple genders.
I don't know.
But she's got those kinds of issues in particular.
And it's symptomatic of a larger problem.
Now, if our politicians don't take on that issue, which is not so simple as fix the gas prices, fix the immigration system, go hit Putin on the head, it's a little bit deeper.
It's a little more cultural and social.
It's not so simple as, hey, leave me alone.
You do you.
Live your life.
Just don't raise my taxes.
Don't infringe on my rights.
We're talking about reconstructing The family.
We're talking about reconstructing civil society.
We're talking about how we all get along together in politics.
If a politician is not offering you answers there, then the politician isn't offering you much of anything at all.
DeSantis has a great gut on this.
DeSantis just signed a bill in Florida to promote fatherhood.
This is a $70 million bill.
He is spending hard-earned taxpayer dollars to beef up the American family and specifically to promote fatherhood.
One of the worst social trends has been the decline of fatherhood.
And we do have in many instances a fatherhood crisis in this country.
The fact of the matter is, when you take kids that do not have a father present during their upbringing, The chance of them dropping out of school, getting involved in trouble with the law, having other difficulties, increases.
We've got community groups and non-profits that want to be there to help.
And so we're putting our money where our mouth is.
We're here showing the importance of this.
But you've got to be willing to do the right thing and be present in your child's life.
You're not a man by leaving your kids hung out to dry.
You need to be there.
It takes a lot of responsibility.
It's not easy.
It takes a lot of time and effort.
But that is what we are called upon to do.
And we want to make sure that every single kid in Florida has their father present.
And if we can do that, I think it's going to be huge for the vitality of our communities.
Absolutely it will be.
Whenever I see some angry leftist shrieking with crazy colored hair and all sorts of mutilations just screaming and saying all sorts of vile things, I will often joke with my friends.
They'll joke to me or I'll joke to them.
Say, hey, that person probably has a great relationship with her father, right?
No, probably.
Yeah, obviously.
They've got a great relationship.
I have a friend of mine who says that all left-wing politics basically amounts to, screw you, Dad!
This will show you.
And I'm joking about it.
It's kind of funny when some angry leftist is doing that.
But it's quite sad, actually.
And it's especially sad when people are showing you the misery that they're living in, a lot of which comes from broken families and not recognizing our own place in the family, in society, in the country, in our relationship to our maker.
That is a fundamental political problem that we need to use the government, that we need to use our political resources to solve.
And if we don't solve that kind of thing, and we just continue to live in atomized, isolated fantasy, then no amount of tax cuts or administrative regulations is going to do a damn thing to make the country better.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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