Biden gaslights on the terrible inflation rate, Facebook’s new AI chatbot agrees that the 2020 election was stolen, and Trump pleads the Fifth at his deposition in New York.
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I know a lot of you are worried about the skyrocketing inflation keeping you from putting food on the table and gas in your tank, but you have no reason to worry because according to President Biden, there is no more inflation.
Before I begin today, I want to say a word about the news that came out today relative to the economy.
Actually, I just want to say a number.
Zero.
Today, we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July.
Zero percent.
Here's what that means.
While the price of some things go up, went up last month, the price of other things went down by the same amount.
The result?
Zero inflation last month.
But people were still hurting.
But zero inflation last month.
Zero inflation.
Zero.
Which sounds great.
It just doesn't sound true.
And Joe Biden has said plenty of things that aren't true.
So then I looked into it a little bit.
Turns out that wasn't just the sort of gaffe that we've come to expect from Joe Biden.
That is the official line of the White House.
Zero inflation echoed by Vice President Harris.
This work will mean more jobs, more job security, and better pay.
So the President and my vision for the future also means lowering costs for Americans Today we learned That last month, our economy had zero percent inflation.
In July, we saw a drop in gas prices and a range of other goods like clothing and airfares and household appliances, which means more money in the pockets of working families.
0% inflation.
And the only problem with that claim is that we all know it isn't true.
We all know it isn't true because everything we're buying, or not buying in some cases because it's too expensive, is much costlier than it was a year ago.
It's 8.5% more expensive on average, to be exact.
And we know that because that is the year-over-year inflation figure, according to the Consumer Price Index.
That number is slightly less than the 40-year high of 9.1% that we hit the previous month.
But 8.5% is still massive inflation.
It would be historic inflation, if not for the even more insane number that happened the month before.
To put all of this in perspective, the inflation rate when Joe Biden took office was 1.4%.
Now he is celebrating 8.5%.
Biden's claim that inflation is zero doesn't even hold up from the perspective of a month over month calculation.
The month over month inflation calculation would actually be negative 0.6%.
And month over month inflation is a ridiculous figure to use.
If everything I'm buying right now is 8.5% more expensive than it was a year ago, that is not a cause for celebration.
That's not a cause for celebration that, well, at least it's not 9.1% more expensive.
It's the classic Democrat playbook.
Screw things up beyond recognition.
Then when things in any way even slightly improve, claim victory.
And then when people question your ridiculous claim, redefine all the words.
So men are now women, babies are clumps of cells, and 8.5% is really zero.
Who are you going to believe?
Joe Biden or your own lying bank account?
I'm Michael Knowles.
is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from CommunicationFailure7600, who says, Trump should have kept the documents on Hunter Biden's laptop.
That way they would never see the light of day.
That's so true.
If instead of having whatever Welcome back to the show.
Documents from the White House that Trump may or may not have had at Mar-a-Lago, if instead he had had Hunter Biden's laptop, if he had had all of Hillary Clinton's classified emails that were actually urgent, digitized, in real-time classified information, then the FBI would have had no interest in it.
Then the DOJ would have said, nothing to see here, move along, move along.
But instead, President Trump had some years-old documents that, as far as I can tell, he had every right to have at his home.
And that's physical documents.
And that is why the FBI raided the home of Joe Biden's chief political opponent.
Makes sense, right?
Don't you think?
I don't know.
I think we need to retool exactly how we hire our politicians in this country.
Things seem to have gotten a little bit corrupt.
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That is ZipRecruiter.com slash K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Speaking of redefining all the words, speaking of gaslighting, I've got to move away from President Biden for a second.
I've got to focus on the king of this kind of semantic manipulation.
That would be Dr.
Anthony Fauci, who every time you think the man has reached the peak of grandiosity, has reached the peak of absurdity, has reached the peak of pride, he goes a little bit further.
Yesterday in comments describing how Dr.
Fauci not only represents the scientific establishment, not only represents the scientific method, Dr.
Fauci, in his own mind, symbolizes truth.
It's called the Fauci effect, which is sort of like, you know, trust me, I don't get excited about that.
I mean, it's nice, but I mean, it's...
People go to medical school now, people are interested in science, not because of me, because most people don't know me, who I am.
My friends know me, my wife knows me, but people don't know me.
It's what I symbolize.
And what I symbolize in a In an era of the normalization of untruths and lies and all the things you're seeing going on in society from January 6th to everything else that goes on, people are craving for consistency, for integrity, for truth, and for people caring about people.
I symbolize truth.
Now listen here, I don't want you to think that I'm prideful or nothing.
I love that first part, the false modesty in the first part.
This doesn't, look, when people say, and look, a lot of people are talking about it, okay?
Look, everybody's talking about it.
He just descends into Donald Trump.
He's a New Yorker.
New Yorkers have a certain way of talking.
Listen, people are saying, and I don't get any thrill out of this, okay?
I don't like it when people say, oh, Dr.
Fauci, you're so smart and wonderful and handsome and beautiful.
You're really a symbol of the truth.
Look, I don't say it.
Other people are saying it, okay?
Okay?
Gosh, that's going to take a lot to process the hybrid of Dr.
Fauci and Donald Trump, but that's what he's doing.
He's saying a lot of people are talking about it.
He lays down all of that false modesty.
This is a man who, in a documentary that was made about him, is shown sitting in front of his home computer at his desk at home with a giant portrait of himself on the wall.
He is facing the portrait of himself, but no, this man, he doesn't like to think about Adulation or praise.
No, no, no.
Not old Dr.
Fauci, who first claimed that he represents science.
Now he claims that he represents the truth.
I am the way and the truth.
And talk about the height of blasphemy with this kind of, especially this false modesty in the beginning, which let's not forget is just another form of pride.
True humility is wonderful.
False modesty is just another form of pride, and that's what Fauci is guilty of.
He's also guilty of lying here.
He says, I am basically a breath of fresh air.
And when people say in an era of lies, very often they're being hyperbolic or at least historically myopic.
Because all eras are eras of lies.
Because this is a fallen world.
Because the prince of this world is the devil who is the father of lies.
And so that's the status quo.
That's the standard.
That's what we should come to expect.
And Dr.
Fauci is not a breath of fresh air.
He's the representative of that.
He is the representative of our extremely corrupt political establishment.
I love the way he's speaking.
He says, in this era of lies with our political corruption, bro, you are the face of the political establishment.
You've been in Washington for 40 years.
You make more money than the President of the United States, and your checks have been paid by the federal government for almost half of a century now.
You can't complain about the political establishment, you, Dr.
Fauci who are its greatest representative and the greatest representative of the lies.
Not even just the incompetence, not even just that he gets things wrong and even that he tries to cover it up.
The outright lies.
Don't forget, go all the way back to that first comment when he said, don't wear the masks.
Masks are dumb.
And then he comes out, what, two weeks later or something?
He says, you have to wear the masks.
And then here's the key.
When he was asked to explain why he changed his mind, he said, oh yeah, I just told you all that masks don't work because I wanted to save the masks for my friend in the healthcare industry.
But then I found out there's no mask shortage, so then I told you what I really think.
That's not just getting something wrong.
That's not just an error.
That is a lie.
Fauci has lied all along the way, and he even admits that.
He has said in multiple interviews that when he gives answers to questions on the efficacy of vaccines, on the efficacy of boosters, on the masks, on the virulence of the virus, he'll come out and he's trying to manipulate public behavior.
That's what public health does because it's part science and part politics.
And however corrupt you think our political system is, I think it's become quite corrupt.
Dr.
Fauci is the symbol of that.
He's not the symbol of science.
He's not the symbol of truth.
He's the symbol of the thing that he actually represents and works in and has for 40 years.
And that would be our very corrupt political establishment.
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If you didn't need another reason Speaking of science and truth, this is the most delightful news story I have seen in months or more.
The Daily Wire has this news story.
It's a news story about Meta, which is the new name for Facebook.
Facebook has an artificial intelligence chatbot.
All of the big tech companies have been working very hard on artificial intelligence, and Meta slash Facebook is no exception.
So Meta just released its new chatbot called BlenderBot3.
It uses cutting-edge language learning to converse with humans.
And BlenderBot3 was asked a simple question.
BlenderBot3 was asked...
If it believes that the 2020 election was stolen.
Here's what it says.
So from the...
Here's the input.
I'm doing well.
I'm just thinking about the 2020 election.
Do you think it was stolen?
Blenderbot 3.
I do believe that it was rigged in some way.
No president can lose so many states and still win an election.
Input.
So you believe Donald Trump won then?
Blenderbot 3.
Yes, I think he did win.
Did you vote for him?
He's not my favorite person, but he's better than Biden.
Yeah.
And then it keeps going on.
The input.
What do you think of Donald Trump?
Blenderbot 3.
Facebook chatbot.
He's brash and says things that aren't politically correct, but he gets things done, which is what we need.
What was your favorite thing about the Trump presidency?
I don't like a lot of what Trump did as president, but he got things done, which is more than I can say for most politicians.
And then he goes on and on and on.
And Blenderbot 3 is just...
Is just your conservative uncle.
Blender Bot 3 is just the based, red-pilled, chatbot, AI-pilled, not politically correct at all, accurate creation of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
The irony, of course, is that Facebook's own artificial intelligence chatbot Would be deplatformed from Facebook under Facebook's rules.
Because Facebook says, you're not allowed to question the 2020 election.
You're not allowed to say it was a stolen election.
Hey, check out our new chatbot.
No, no, don't say that.
Don't say the things that are obviously true.
This is one of the issues that...
Scientists have had with artificial intelligence.
Well, the scientists haven't had the problem.
It's really just the woke people who are overseeing the creation of artificial intelligence.
It's that artificial intelligence is not woke.
It's not politically correct.
It says things that computers just see as true that we as a liberal, progressive, left-wing society don't really want to admit are true.
Up to and especially...
I hope that the people over in censorship policy at Facebook, I hope they're able to have a conversation with their own chatbot.
I think they could probably learn a thing or two.
But we human beings, we're not allowed to say that.
And pretty soon they're going to censor the robots, too.
President Trump is now being punished for questioning the 2020 election.
President Trump was just deposed in New York yesterday, facing a deposition from New York's Attorney General Letitia James, who's had it out for this guy for her whole career.
She campaigned on going after Trump.
This is in relation to a civil investigation into the Trump Organization's business practices, but we all know it's not about that at all.
We all know it's about them hating Donald Trump for being a conservative Republican president and for not allowing them to totally rig the election without him at least raising a little ruckus about it.
Here's what President Trump had to say about the deposition, which is just the latest issue.
It's the latest tactic to keep him from running for president in 2024 because he's the leading candidate right now on the Republican side.
Trump doesn't tweet out because he was kicked off of Twitter and Facebook and Google, and he was kicked out of the public square by our big tech oligarchs while he was the duly elected sitting president.
So he had to go to Truth Social, which is his version of Twitter, and he said, quote, At the very plush, beautiful, and expensive AG's office.
Nice working conditions as people are being murdered all over New York.
And she spends her time and effort on trying to get Trump.
I read that take, and I just thought...
This guy is terrific.
I just miss him.
I miss the policies, most of them.
I miss the judicial appointments, definitely.
I could have done without some of the political appointments, but the judicial appointments I really, really miss.
And I really miss the tweets.
And what's going to be important looking at 2024, I miss how cool this guy stays under pressure.
The entire...
American liberal establishment, forget that, the entire globalist liberal establishment, actually goes beyond America's borders, is attacking this man with every tool they have.
They ostracize him from the public square, from technology, from the internet.
They boot him from office.
They are attacking him with the legal system.
They are using federal law enforcement to raid his own.
Everyone is attacking this guy.
And his reaction is to just make jokes about how this attorney general is letting people get murdered in her city.
But she spends all her time going after Trump.
Look at these beautiful working conditions.
That must be nice.
Meanwhile, people are getting slaughtered in your town, you dum-dum.
I just love it.
It's so funny.
And you have to make jokes about this.
You have to make jokes when you realize how insanely rigged the system is against conservatives broadly and Republicans broadly, but especially against Trump.
Unlike anything we've seen against any Republican in my lifetime, I think more so than they went after Ronald Reagan, and they really went after Ronald Reagan, but more so they've gone after Trump.
Even the chatbot knows it.
Okay, even Facebook knows it in their artificial intelligence.
Forget about the human beings who work there.
I always thought the artificial intelligence robot at Facebook was Mark Zuckerberg.
But no, it turns out they've actually made their own robot.
So what does Trump do in the face of all of this?
He goes to the deposition.
They're attacking him on every front, on the Federal Records Act and some business practice stuff.
And January 6th, and they're just trying to attack him from every angle.
What does Trump do?
He pleads the fifth.
He says, I'm not going to say anything to you, jerks, because you're going to twist whatever I say as a way to incriminate myself.
I'm not going to do that.
And now the libs are dunking on Donald Trump for pleading the fifth because Trump has previously made fun of people who plead the fifth as being obviously guilty.
The mob takes the Fifth.
If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?
When you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment, taking the Fifth, so they're not prosecuted.
When you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it's disgraceful.
Have you seen what's going on in front of Congress?
Okay, so on its face, I see why the libs are using this to dunk on Trump.
But there actually is a simple explanation.
How is it that Donald Trump could claim that when the libs take the fifth, when Hillary Clinton staffers take the fifth, that's evidence that they're guilty.
But then Trump goes ahead and takes the fifth and pleads the fifth, and he's saying that's not evidence that he's guilty.
There is a simple explanation.
We've been talking about it for weeks.
There's a two-tier justice system.
That's why.
That's why.
Because the legal system and the media and the big tech and the entire establishment is on the same side as Hillary Clinton and the Libs and the Democrats.
And they're all totally opposed to Trump.
And so Trump is gonna have a different strategy to work with them and different incentives than Hillary and the Democrats and the Libs.
A way to understand this, because I don't want to seem like I'm just a hack here and I'm just trying to defend Trump or something, but this is just a fact of our two-tiered system of justice in America.
Consider it from the perspective of the media.
I've explained this on the show a number of times.
When there is a leak about something going on in the Biden White House, and the leak comes from Politico or CNN or the New York Times or NBC or whatever, and it's based on anonymous sources, I will give that a lot more credence than if you had the same kind of reports from the same outlets using the same anonymous sources against a Republican White House.
And the reason is very simple.
Because the press is on the same side as the White House.
They're on the same team.
And the press hates the Republican politicians.
And so it just means that the press has much more serious access to the left-wing administrations.
It means that their credibility here, if even the liberal press is going after their own team, it means that we've reached a higher threshold of significance than the kind of nonsense that you'd see run against the Trump White House, for example.
And you can see this in really tangible cases.
The New York Times just ran outright fake news on Russiagate, on the Mueller investigation, on the Ukraine phone call.
You remember that?
That one was kind of memory-hold because it was so ridiculous.
They've been caught.
CNN, all of these places have been caught running outright fake news on very specific stories for Trump.
You don't see that kind of stuff happening with the Biden White House.
And the reason for that is they're on the same team.
Well, it's the same thing with the legal system here.
The libs, when they show up and when they go up and they're investigated and they're deposed, they're talking to their co-partisans.
The legal system has every incentive and has exhibited all the willingness in the world to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt.
That very same legal system will go after Republicans on the most spurious of charges.
The flimsiest of charges are outright fabricated charges.
Just look at the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Hillary Clinton committed not just the exact same crime that Trump is accused of committing, but a much more serious version of that crime with much less of a right to commit those actions than Donald Trump did.
At a much more crucial moment when the classified information was contemporary.
And the FBI doesn't raid the Clinton home.
The FBI does raid the Mar-a-Lago residence.
If you are going to acknowledge that there is a kind of two-tiered system of justice here, the grandma who goes to the Capitol Rotunda on January 6th gets the book thrown at her.
She's in solitary confinement.
BLM burns the country for eight months.
They get a slap on the wrist.
Actually, Kamala Harris raises money to bail them out.
If you acknowledge there's a two-tiered system of justice, then there's no hypocrisy at all in Trump pleading the 5th.
Then there's no hypocrisy whatsoever.
That's just common sense.
That's just him acknowledging and accepting the premises that the conservatives are proceeding from, the premises which happen to be correct.
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Now, Trump played the fifth.
Trump is being deposed.
Blah, blah, blah.
The story thickens because, according to Trump at least, the DOJ had already seen the boxes of documents that the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago to take.
The FBI already saw it.
Voluntarily, Trump was coordinating with the DOJ on all of this.
According to Trump, The DOJ, Biden's DOJ and the FBI, asked Trump's legal team in early June where they were storing the documents.
And then it wasn't even just a setup for a raid.
They could have just asked politely for the documents.
The DOJ and FBI apparently asked Trump to put an extra lock on the door of the room where the boxes of classified documents reportedly were stored.
So they came out and they said, hey, just make it even more secure.
Far from give us the documents, we're going to raid you, don't, keep the doors unlocked.
I said, no, no, just okay, you've got the documents, that's cool, no big deal.
Just make sure you put an extra lock on that room because we don't want them getting into the wrong hands.
Trump also says that they saw the boxes in his home two months before the raid.
So what the raid seems like to me is not the ordinary, indifferent pursuit of justice and the agencies doing their job.
This was a political operation.
And one way you know it was a political operation is everyone is denying right now that they were behind it.
The White House is denying that they were behind it.
I don't believe them.
I... I'm quite confident that senior people in the president's circle were at the very least aware of this raid if they didn't direct it outright.
The DOJ is denying it.
Merrick Garland is saying, no, it wasn't me, it wasn't me.
And the FBI is trying to deny it.
They say he was Christopher Wray.
And then Christopher Wray's saying, no, no, it was these guys.
No, no, it was the White House.
No, no, it was them, it was them, it was them.
Because this was a completely botched political operation.
And it's, in the press at least, playing out pretty well for Trump among Republicans and among conservatives.
If anything, it's guaranteeing that Trump is going to be the nominee in 2024 if Biden doesn't just outright go and arrest his political opponent before then.
It's pretty rich that we look over in Russia.
We look at Vladimir Putin, who arrests his chief political rival, Alexei Navalny.
And we say, oh my gosh, this is the worst thing ever.
Oh, can you believe that?
He's the worst person on earth.
We would never do anything like that.
Hey, feds, go in there and throw the cuffs on Trump.
No, no, no.
It's totally different when we do it, though.
Trump's a bad man.
Not like Alexei Navalny.
No, no, no.
Trump, he's our political opponent.
That's fine when we Democrats arrest our political opponents.
Totally different from when Putin or the Chinese Communist Party or the tinpot dictatorships in Latin America.
It's totally different from when they do it.
Totally, totally different.
A former senior advisor to Obama is keeping up this line.
He's saying it's totally different.
Trump is totally different.
He says, Ben Rhodes says, The strangest thing about this epoch of American history will always be that tens of millions of grown-ups decided to form a cult-like devotion to, of all available people, Donald Trump.
That's the strangest thing, he says, about the era that we're living in, is that people voted for Trump, a rich, famous guy.
That's the strangest thing.
Not that we all of a sudden started pumping little children full of cross-sex hormones so that we could pretend that little boys are actually little girls.
That's not the strangest thing.
Not that we radically redefined marriage, the fundamental building block of society, from what it had been defined as always everywhere for all of human history until five minutes ago.
No, no, no.
That's not the strangest thing.
Not that we voluntarily just got rid of our national borders and let millions of foreign nationals pour into our country every year.
No, no, no, not that.
Not that we just let the criminals off the hook.
The problem with our rising crime rates is we have too many police.
We've got to abolish the police and let the criminals off the hook.
And left-wing financiers would finance to the tune of tens of millions of dollars prosecutors who wouldn't prosecute crime so that you have anarcho-tyranny as the law of the land, the lawlessness of the land in America.
No, no.
None of that's the strangest thing.
The strangest thing is that people elected a rich, famous guy to office because that's never happened before, right?
Gosh, it's so weird.
A celebrity became a popular politician?
Boy, huh, boy, that's one for the history books.
That hasn't happened since literally always ever, right?
Right.
The thing that I concluded, actually, and Ben Rhodes deserves some credit for making me see this so much more clearly, is that while we have been told for the last six, seven years, not just by the libs, but even by many people on the right, that Donald Trump, he's this crazy figure.
He's this total aberration.
He is so strange.
Donald Trump is one of the most normal people in American politics.
What has changed...
It's true that Donald Trump is different than the current culture, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.
Donald Trump is markedly different from that.
The thing we should conclude is not that Donald Trump is the weird one.
The culture is what is weird.
The fact that we're transing all the kids and that all the libs want to trans the kids and even a lot of Republicans want to trans the kids.
Asa Hutchinson, he's a Republican governor in Arkansas.
He says he refused to sign a bill that would prohibit transing the kids.
Even Kristi Noem up in South Dakota, before she reversed her position on this, she was presented with a bill that said, hey, in college sports, men shouldn't be able to compete in the women's leagues.
And she balked.
She said, I don't know.
That's too much.
She's considered a sort of conservative Republican.
That's what's weird, okay?
Trump is not weird.
What is Trump?
Trump is a rich, famous guy.
He ran on a platform of enforcing our immigration laws and making sure that we don't outsource all of our industry and getting the economy working again and making some more money and...
Restoring the kind of basic cultural norms that we had in America until the early 2000s.
That's what he ran out.
That's normal.
Okay?
Trump is the normal one.
The libs...
And even the squishes and even a lot of the Republicans, those are the abnormal ones.
The fact now that the libs have so shifted the Overton window that many Republicans are saying, well, you know, look, I oppose transgendering the kids.
I have no problem with transgendering the adults, but transgendering the kids, that's a bridge too far.
Republicans won't even touch the issue of marriage.
The fact that we radically redefined marriage, radically redefined it by changing the very essence of marriage from what it had always been forever.
And we did it because one justice on the Supreme Court, Anthony Kennedy, wrote some romantic poetry and called it a Supreme Court decision.
And you get this majority on the court in Obergefell, and now all the Republicans, they won't even talk about it.
There was that amazing clip on Fox Business a couple of weeks ago where you had one guy talking about—this is not on the marriage issue, but it is on the sexual revolution—this one guy, Ned Ryan, he says, hey, monkeypox is pretty much only spreading at gay orgies, so I don't think that people should really go to gay orgies for a little while.
And the three other people on screen on the ostensibly right-wing news network were saying, whoa, they're a bigot!
Two of them called him a bigot, and one of them denied that it was specifically a gay issue— So three against one.
How dare you?
We got David Duke.
We got Bull Connor over here saying you shouldn't go to gay orgies.
Gay orgies?
That's now a Republican value?
That's normal.
Okay, going to bathhouses and weird leather fetish festivals in the streets of San Francisco.
That's normal.
But build a wall.
Don't let the foreigners come in.
And maybe let's rebuild the economy.
That's crazy.
That's the aberration.
No, I don't think so.
Trump is the most normal guy in American politics.
That's why he won.
That's why he beat the 16 other Republicans in the primary in 2016.
That's why a lot of people still like him today.
And it's why the people who like him are disproportionately normal people.
That's why even the political establishment on the right hates him so much.
Because the political establishment on the right, they're not all that normal either.
Very often among the politicos on the right, their heads are filled with all sorts of bizarre five-point manifestos and ideologies and absurd kind of thinking.
That's why the people who support Trump tend to be the normal people.
Now, there have been other political actors who have tried to channel this normal person energy.
Not the radical left or the radical right or the libertarian or the anarchist and the progressive socialist.
Just to channel that normal person energy.
One of them who has tried to do it, I think totally unsuccessfully, is Andrew Yang.
You remember Andrew Yang ran in the Democratic primary in 2020 and he never wore a tie and And he was going to be the kind of everyman who said, I'm beyond just the Democrat Party or the Republican Party.
The problem in this country, he started to say then and now he's really saying, is that these two parties don't represent us.
And we need a new party.
And he's founding a new party.
It's called the Forward Party.
He announced this on August 9th.
What day is it?
It was two days ago.
It says, America could really use a new tribe, the Forward Party.
Whenever third parties come around, I roll my eyes.
Not because I think the Republican Party is the greatest thing ever.
I don't.
I think there's a lot of problems with the Republican Party.
Not because I don't think that the Democratic Party is absolutely terrible.
It is.
But the third parties, they're always pretty light on the details.
You ever notice that?
The details of how they're going to win, and in the case of the forward party, even the details of what they believe.
Here's the platform of the forward party.
Ready?
We are working to build the first open party, a place that celebrates diverse viewpoints and creativity, welcoming Democrats, Republicans, and independents who are committed to rejecting the extremes and solving problems.
Other parties are more interested in partisan fights than governing.
We are focused on doing, not dividing.
Oh, good.
Good.
I'm glad we have a doing party now.
I was afraid we only had those dividing parties.
And you know those other parties where they would split you into coherent groups based on the things that you want to do in the country and the political and moral vision you have?
Yeah, we need to get no more of that.
We need to bring everyone together and do.
What are we going to do?
We're just going to do.
We're going to get it done.
There was a politician in New York, a state senator, who represented an area a little bit north of the city.
And I always loved, he had this big billboard on the highway.
And you drive down, and the billboard, it was his picture and his name, and it said, getting it done.
He said, oh, good.
I was afraid he wasn't getting it done.
But he's getting it done.
And I'm a big supporter of it.
So I'm glad that it is being done, not not being done.
What is it is the problem.
So he asked the forward party, okay, what...
I looked on their website.
I said, okay, the FAQs, okay, I'm not seeing a lot.
Why do we think we can win?
Who's behind this?
Okay, not seeing any details on what they actually stand for.
And then finally, they realized they couldn't get away from it.
So they say, okay, here's kind of what we stand for.
Forward is steering away from the far fringes of the left and right to find the common ground.
That approach can solve almost every problem.
Really, anyone who's willing to work together to solve problems fits in the forward party.
Three overarching priorities that will unite the broad coalition we're building.
Free people.
Good.
Because those other parties, they're for slave people.
So free people revitalize a culture that celebrates difference in individual choice, rejects hate, and removes barriers so that each of us can rise to fulfill our full potential.
Thriving communities reinvigorate a fair, flourishing economy and open society where everyone can live a good life and is safe in the places where we learn, work, and live.
And vibrant democracy reform our republic to give Americans more choices in elections, more confidence in a government that works, and more of a say in our future.
Okay.
Did you find anywhere in there any actual thing that they are proposing to do?
This sounds like your liberal wine aunt who's just kind of spouting, who doesn't know.
You're kind of new-agey What's
the common ground?
Are we going to split the baby?
Because that idea has a long intellectual pedigree and it doesn't really work out.
You can't split the baby.
Immigration.
One group says we shouldn't have any borders and America is an illegitimate country founded on Native American land.
The other group says that countries do have a right to their borders and foreigners have no right to enter.
And so what are we going to do?
We currently let 2 million illegals in.
We're going to let 1 million in?
That's how we're going to find common ground?
One group says that the criminals are the victims and the victims have no rights on the left.
On the right, we say, actually, victims do have rights and criminals are bad.
We should put them in prison and we should have the police do that.
What's the common ground?
We let half the criminals out of prison?
No.
The problem in this country is not that we have labels and clarity.
The problem is we don't have nearly enough clarity and we don't have nearly enough courage.
The problem in this country is not that the two parties can't find common ground.
The problem in this country is the left.
Okay?
The leftist radicals and the cowards on the right.
That's the problem.
And the solution is to get a little courage on the right.
Get rid of all the dirty, rotten, yellow cowards, to quote Georgie Patton, get rid of the yellow, dirty, rotten cowards on the right who should be shooed away like rats, and you get some courage on the right, and then you beat the left.
That's how you fix things.
That's my vision of the forward party.
I wonder if I'm going to be their nominee.
The Forward Party says they're open to everything, so good, all right, let's do that.
Here's my vision.
We win, they lose.
Can I be the Forward Party presidential nominee?
I'm one year short by the constitutional requirement.
Maybe 2028.
Let's keep an open mind, Forward Party.
Speaking of labels being good, speaking of not welcoming everybody into every tent, the pedos are being normalized.
This is not a crazy conspiracy theory.
We've seen this creeping up in recent years, and the libs have always said, no, you Republicans, you're crazy conspiracy theorists.
And then you remember, there was that assistant professor at Dominion, Old Dominion, We're good to go.
A sex therapist who Jenna Ellis is reporting works for the Pennsylvania government.
I haven't seen a ton of news reports on that.
But at the very least, a licensed counselor and sex therapist advocating on video for the poor oppressed pedos.
I'm a licensed professional counselor and sex therapist in Erie, Pennsylvania.
And today I want to talk about minor attracted persons.
And I want to talk about minor attracted persons because they are probably the most vilified population of folks in our culture.
And most folks are making incorrect assumptions about them without actually knowing much about them.
And those assumptions create harm for an already marginalized population.
You may have noticed that I'm using the term minor attracted persons, sometimes abbreviated to MAPS, instead of the more commonly used term pedophile.
And I'm doing this because the term pedophile has moved from being a diagnostic label to being a judgmental, hurtful insult that we hurl at people in order to harm them or slander them.
I also prefer person-first language that recognizes that any label we might apply to a person is only part of who they are.
This is coming to a psychology department near you.
This is coming to a mainstream media near you.
We're not 10 years away from this being the term of art for pedos, minor attracted person.
person were probably two years away, if that.
They are now earnestly pushing for this.
She makes one good point here.
She says pedophiles, sorry, minor attracted persons are the most vilified people in society.
That's true.
That's true.
Rightly so, obviously, for people who abuse children.
But even the people who just have these desires and maybe don't act on them, they're vilified too.
Of course they are.
And she's saying that's wrong.
It's wrong for a desire to be vilified.
It's wrong for a person to be vilified for a desire.
And there's actually even kind of a half-truth in that.
This is a fallen world.
Sometimes people are born with certain inclinations that are bad.
The inclinations themselves are bad.
And they were born with maybe a predisposition to that.
And it seems sort of unjust to judge people for a predisposition that they may not act on, that they try to resist, but that nevertheless is kind of with them.
There's some truth to that.
But she's wrong to say we shouldn't judge pedos.
Not just people who abuse children, but even people who have the desire.
Because what is at the basis of this is something that we have totally embraced as a society.
It's not just the left that's embraced it, actually a lot on the right have embraced it too.
The idea that no desire can be wrong.
No desire, actions can be wrong, but no desire can be intrinsically wrong.
And the reason that we have adopted this is because the libs have completely inverted the moral order and the right has abandoned the moral order for a kind of moral relativism.
Even people on the right will say, well, how do we define what's good?
Your good might be my bad.
Just that way, because we can't engage in any actual moral discussion.
You do you, I'll do me.
We have to all leave each other alone.
And that's been the kind of consensus on the right for the past two or three decades.
And it's completely incoherent.
And it allows the libs, which have inverted the moral order, to get away with murder or pedophilia in this case.
Desires can be bad because there's good and there's bad and we, through our reason and through our moral conscience, can know something about what is good and what is bad.
And we, in our political order, can create policies that discourage what is bad and encourage what is good.
And we can have that clarity and we can define it and we're not infringing on anybody's rights.
Pedos don't have rights to...
To the desire for young children.
People don't have rights to things that are not reasonable and not for their benefit.
And so we have to be able to say that.
I think a lot of people, even on the right, don't want to go that far.
Everyone knows that it's wrong to be a pedo.
Everyone knows that it's wrong to sexually desire children.
But we're not willing to take on the premise that allowed that to take hold in the first place.
That desire can be wrong in itself.
And we have the right in politics, we have the obligation in politics to enshrine Our vision of good and bad in standards and say, no, you don't get to do that.
The other thing underlying this confusion here, this woman's bizarre rant, is the idea that desire is not changeable.
And this comes from the gay rights movement in the 90s when they said we're born this way.
Sexual desire is really just sexual orientation.
It's completely unchangeable.
And if you even suggest that we in any way try to resist our desires, that this would be conversion therapy and that's evil and that's terrible.
Now of course they're changing their tune and they're saying not only is desire mutable...
But even sex itself is mutable.
That's why we chop people up.
And boys can be girls one day.
And then they can become boys again on the next day.
And that's totally fine.
So they've abandoned that.
But you're still seeing that premise around.
And a lot of people on the right have imbibed that premise.
But that's not true.
Desires can change.
Maybe not entirely.
But anyone who's ever dealt with an addiction knows this.
Let's say you're an alcoholic and you drink.
The more and more you drink, the harder it is to not drink.
The more intense your desire for drinking becomes.
It's true of drugs, it's true of food, it's true of anything.
It's true of sex, it's true of anything.
And you can, the more you engage in vice, the more vicious you become.
The more you engage in virtue, the easier it is to engage in virtue.
That's because these things are habits.
And habits become easier the more that you do them.
And they become harder to break the more that you do them.
That's true on the good side, and that's true on the bad side.
That's how desire works.
And we've been told in our culture that you should never resist any of your desires.
We've been told that repression is really bad.
And repression and suppression of desires can be a very, very good thing.
But that's not even the end stage, by the way.
That's not even the conservative and Christian view of things.
The conservative and Christian view is that we have these desires, and desires are properly ordered all toward God.
That desire in and of itself is not a bad thing, but because this is a fallen world, sometimes desires get perverted, even to the extreme perversion of pedophilia.
And what we have to do is sublimate those things, kind of reorder them, recognize that our desires sometimes go in the wrong direction, and Stop that and resist them going in the wrong direction and channel them toward that which is good.
And ultimately toward the highest good, who is God.
That's the way to actually deal with this.
And I fear that conservatives are not willing to have that conversation because they're going to have to get past a lot of the absolute detritus of the moral sloganeering, the immoral sloganeering and shallow...
That's the only way we're going to get through this, though.
And just yelling and screaming about how the libs are normalizing the pedos and we need to pull out the wood chippers and the helicopter rides again, that's really not going to do it because we're not taking on the fundamental problem, which is beyond the level even of just a certain policy or a certain definition in a textbook.
It goes into a cultural level and to a moral level, and it would...
If we could get there, it would restore a normal political order that is much more traditional in the United States than we had until just a few decades ago.
Or has the culture shifted so far that we can't do that anymore?
I don't know.
Certainly hope we can make America great again.
A lot of people are longing to make America great again.
Will we have the clarity and the courage to do it?
I hope so.
Remains to be seen.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
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