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Dr. Fauci steps down, the IRS trains cops to go arrest tax criminals, and Biden's Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says if you’re poor, just get solar panels! Check it out on the Michael Knowles Show.
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Fauci announced that he would retire by the end of Joe Biden's term as president, which would have put that somewhere around the year 2024.
Yesterday, Fauci dramatically moved up the timetable in a written statement.
He announced...
I will be stepping down from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as the position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden.
Now, for the millions of Americans whose life Fauci almost single-handedly upended, in some cases destroyed, over the past few years, this announcement was good and welcome and unexpected news.
But much like the HIV virus that Fauci botched and bungled for decades, Dr.
Fauci does not simply go away.
His statement continued, I am not retiring.
After more than 50 years of government service, I plan to pursue the next phase of my career while I still have so much energy and passion for my field.
Now I knew Fauci would never actually voluntarily retire.
He loves power.
He loves controlling people.
And he loves seeing his own face on TV. Fauci was a little bit vague about what he's considering for the next phase of his career.
I for one think that he should become the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He's clearly on great terms with that laboratory.
He's secretly funded research there, including gain of function research.
And then he lied about it when he became, when it became clear rather that gain of function research at the Wuhan lab almost certainly caused the global pandemic.
It would be the ultimate troll and flaunting of unaccountable power for a man who loves both.
And most importantly, it would probably do Dr.
Fauci some good to get as far away from Washington, D.C. as possible, because the only reason that he accelerated his plans to leave the NIH is because he thinks Republicans are going to win back the Congress, and he knows that Republicans are pledging to make a big show of investigating him.
And he knows that he's got four decades of incompetence and lies and deceit to answer for.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Steve Robson, who says, The government seems to think that if I lose $50,000 at a casino and win $5,000 back the next day and get comped a free room, somehow I've come out on top.
Yes, that is the argument they're making.
Hey, guys, gas is 65% more expensive today than when I took office, but it's 20 cents cheaper than it was last month.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
And CNN and all the rest of them applaud them, applaud the White House in that propaganda effort.
I don't think it's fooling anybody, okay?
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Fauci thinks he's going to get away with it.
Maybe he will.
I don't know.
I hope he doesn't.
But Republicans get squishy and then they just move on to the next shiny object.
Republicans, they're going to see a little butterfly and just get totally distracted and lose sight of what they were supposed to be focusing on, which is punishing Dr.
Fauci and getting to the bottom of all of his incompetence and the deceit and how he screwed up people's lives for three years.
Two and a half years.
Rand Paul says he's not going to get away with it.
He says, quote, Fauci's resignation will not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic.
He will be asked to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the lab leak.
Which I hope is true.
Senator Paul has been great on the Fauci issue so far.
He's grilled him and owned him with facts and logic in the Senate.
But we've really got to stick to this.
Do not let him...
Sneak away.
Fauci actually said this when he announced a month ago that he would be stepping down by the end of Biden's term.
He actually said one of the reasons he was doing that is because it will make it less likely that the Republicans will investigate him.
I went to look back for that clip because it was a public clip.
I remember seeing it.
And like so many of Dr.
Fauci's clips, it's really hard to find on the internet right now.
They just sort of disappear.
A lot of these clips, I can only go back and find them on my show.
Yeah.
Because the original source clips, they just get memory holed on the internet.
But it's really important.
This man destroyed people's lives.
The two and a half years of the COVID lockdowns, which were completely unnecessary, which were capricious and arbitrary, which punished one group of people, conservatives, and allowed another group of people, the libs, to do whatever they wanted.
Shut down churches.
Shut down grandma's funeral.
Shut down your business.
But leave open the marijuana dispensary.
Leave open the BLM riots.
You can't go to the funerals for your family members.
But George Floyd, he gets four funerals.
Okay, just completely arbitrary wielding of power to attack the conservatives and to reward the libs.
And it was being done because of Fauci's recommendations.
And he's trying to weasel out of it.
Dr. Fauci has come out and he said, he said, listen, listen here.
I never, I never in any way suggested we should lock down the country.
There were authorities that made different decisions than the CDC's recommendations.
for example, on school closures, And they did not see higher levels of child mortality when it comes to COVID. And meanwhile, the schools that did close down were now seeing just disastrous levels of learning loss among poor children, children of color, mental health crisis.
I wonder if you would recommend locking down schools if you had to do it all over again.
Well, you know, again, first of all, I didn't recommend locking anything down.
You're asking me questions.
You're talking about the CDC is the public health agency that uses their epidemiologists and their science-based approach to make recommendations.
I didn't recommend locking anything down.
You're lying.
Don't stop saying that about me.
Okay, so that's one perspective.
Now, to give the opposite perspective, here is Dr.
Fauci.
Your reaction to Rand Paul and others saying they're going to investigate you if they take power?
Well, there's no reason to do that, but if they want to, go ahead.
My records are an open book.
They are talking about things that are really bizarre, John, like crimes against democracy by shutting down the government.
All I have ever done, and go back and look at everything I've ever done, was to recommend common-sense, good, CDC-recommended public health policies that have saved millions of lives.
If you want to investigate for me for that, go ahead.
Dr.
Fauci obviously recommended locking down the country.
Now he denies it because he knows he's going to get in a lot of trouble for that.
I hope the Republicans retake the House.
I hope they retake the Senate.
And I hope they just grill this guy.
He's not done.
They should grill him even if he were just going to retire and go off into the sunset.
But he says he's not going to do that.
He wants to continue to wield power and influence.
We should not.
It would be a disgrace to the Republican Party if we let him do that.
Government bureaucrats and technocrats are coming after us.
They're not going to pull back and say, OK, COVID was pretty bad.
We really went after those people.
Now let's pull back a little bit.
No, they're doubling down on it.
The Dems just authorized 87,000 new IRS agents, many of whom are apparently going to be carrying guns, to go shake you down, to go get money from you.
There's a training video.
My goodness.
There was a news report showing the IRS training right now.
You would think that they were training not a group of accountants, you'd think they were training the SWAT team.
Congress recently appropriated funds, so the IRS is currently looking to hire more special agents or CIs nationwide.
We're looking around, starting around $60,000, $70,000, somewhere in there.
And then the advancements are you'll move up, you know, one level every year for the first few years.
An agent that's been in the field for a long time can top out at around $175,000 a year, as well as benefits and retirement.
These aren't actual police officers.
They're students posing as special agents for the IRS, arresting a man who is wanted for tax evasion.
Who are you guys?
What is this?
We're the IRS. You're under arrest.
You're going to jail, buddy.
Most people don't even know that the IRS has criminal investigators who use their accounting skills and their authority as a special IRS agent to help solve tax crimes.
Under this scenario, these students find the owner of a landscaping company has several vehicles that may have been purchased from monies not reported through his business.
This is revenge of the nerds.
This is the real revenge of the nerds.
The kid you made fun of in school because of his pocket protector and his little calculator?
Well, no more Mr.
Nice Accountant anymore.
No.
Get on your knees.
Gun drawn.
We're the IRS and you're going to jail, buddy.
The most important part of that news report is this.
Who were they going after?
Were they going after the billionaire?
Were they going after the mafioso?
The capo di tutti capi?
Were they going after Al Capone?
No.
They were going after a guy with a landscaping business because he didn't buy his equipment in the right way.
That's who they were going after in the training session that was being broadcast on the network news.
They're not going after the gazillionaires.
They're coming after the middle class.
They're coming after you.
And apparently, they're armed.
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Speaking of economic liberty, people trying to make us all poorer, Joe Biden's energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, has some advice for people who are really, really stretched thin right now, can't afford gas, can't afford the price of regular household goods, can't afford to heat their homes.
She says, look, guys, it's really simple.
If you're too poor to afford energy right now, just get some solar panels.
And really you could make the same argument we were talking about tax breaks for adding solar panels, energy efficient windows, appliances, heat pumps.
You know, what do you say to the families who simply can't afford this stuff in the first place?
Well, number one, for your home, yes, there are significant incentives in this bill, which is great, to reduce people's energy costs on a monthly basis.
So, if you are low income, you can get your home entirely weatherized through the expansion from the bipartisan infrastructure law, a significant expansion.
You don't have to pay for anything.
If you want heat pumps, insulation, new windows, that is covered.
If you are moderate income, today you can get 30% off the price of solar panels.
Those solar panels can be financed, so you don't have to have the big outlay at the front.
And when they're financed, they're financed in a way that reduces your energy bill, even though you have solar panels.
With this 30% off, it's a significant incentive.
It's really significant.
You can save 30% on your solar panels right now.
So just go on.
Go buy it.
I don't see what the big deal is.
Pay our Democrat friends in the green energy industry a bunch of money.
Do it.
This reminds me just of Pete Buttigieg.
When the gas prices were at true record highs, all-time record highs, and Pete Buttigieg was asked, hey, what do you say to people who can't afford to fill their car up with gasoline?
He says, well, why don't they just buy an electric car?
Look, maybe they can't afford that Tesla X. They don't have $100,000, $150,000 lying around.
But look, at least you should be able to afford the $50,000 one.
What are you, broke?
Do they hear themselves?
They're headed for disaster in November, and they're telling people, let them use solar.
The people cannot afford to eat.
Let them use solar.
Let them drive Tesla.
You know, Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cake.
That is one of the worst smears in the history of politics, and Marie Antoinette was a good woman, and she never said it, and the line actually dates back to before Marie Antoinette was ever queen of France, before she was ever alive.
But...
These people actually are saying, let them use solar power.
Let them drive Teslas.
How on earth could anyone support these people on really, really basic stuff?
Hey, the people can't afford gas.
They say, whatever, who cares about that?
I'm saving the world, buddy.
I'm saving the world.
I'm fighting off the sun monster.
Who cares if poor people are going to freeze this winter?
Who cares if you can't afford to feed your kids or drive to your work?
Don't worry, we shut down your work.
Yeah, you should have that laptop lifestyle.
Too bad you're working a job that requires you to be in a place and maybe use your hands even.
Yeah, too bad.
Yeah, I guess you should have gone to Harvard.
Come on, you should have learned to code.
And all the other issues, too.
Oh, what?
You don't want your kids to be transed in elementary school?
You don't want weird, psycho left-wing teachers and guidance counselors to tell your kid that she needs to be pumped full of hormones and mutilate her body to look more like a little boy?
Well, too bad.
We're going to do it anyway.
Too bad.
Yeah, we're going to have Drag Queen Story Hour.
Yeah, we don't care what you little people think.
That's just what we're going to do.
And in the face of all this, I ask myself, who on earth could support these people?
Increasingly, it's not voters across really any demographic.
Dems are losing ground among all the racial demographics.
They're really losing ground among Hispanics.
They're really losing ground among the working class.
No, you know who supports these people?
Liz Cheney.
That's who.
Liz Cheney, the fake Republican who just lost her congressional seat because she's a big court jester conservative squish.
Liz Cheney is doubling down.
Just like Fauci says, I might be stepping down, but I'm not finished.
I'm coming back.
I won't retire.
The same thing is true of Liz Cheney.
She says that she is now in the coming elections going to campaign for certain Democrats against certain Republicans, especially if those Republicans are election deniers.
So this is obviously not the end.
This is a new beginning for you.
You're starting this political organization.
What can you tell us?
What are you going to do?
I'm going to be very focused on working to ensure that we do everything we can not to elect election deniers.
And I'm going to work against those people.
I'm going to work to support their opponents.
I think it matters that much.
Will you be getting involved in campaigns against those Republican candidates that are challenging or denying the results of the election?
Yes.
Including your Republican colleagues here in Congress?
Yes.
That phrase, election deniers, that's a very specific phrase.
I hadn't really heard it before a couple of weeks ago.
Now I'm hearing it everywhere.
You heard Liz Cheney there use the phrase.
You then heard the journalist John Carl repeat it.
It says denying, denial.
You hear the deniers.
Why are they doing that?
The libs are using that phrase, election deniers, in the same way they use the phrase climate deniers, This older and better established phrase, Holocaust deniers.
That's what it's about.
It's especially clear when it comes to climate deniers because that's such a bizarre phrase.
Who denies the climate?
I'm not denying the climate.
I'm breathing the air.
I'm breathing some oxygen, a lot of nitrogen.
I don't deny that there's a climate.
No, you are.
You're a denier.
And it's because it calls to mind, whether you're aware of it or not, it does conjure up these images of Holocaust deniers.
And so it's the same accusation that the libs make against anyone, even slightly to their right, that they always do, namely, that we're all Nazis.
This wasn't just a one-off.
It wasn't an accidental turn of phrase from Liz Cheney or John Carl.
ABC has been pushing this relentlessly.
Mark, what is your sense on the role that she has taken on?
I think she has been...
Look, I would say that she's unleashed, but she was pretty unleashed before the election.
But I think she will be an extremely relevant figure in her party.
I think across the board, I think...
She seems like she is, one, committed not only to sort of take down Donald Trump, but to take down the sickness of her party.
I mean, she seems to be going more broadly beyond January 6th at this point.
She's talking about denial.
She's talking about election denial, January 6th denial.
You know, the question is, will she go into, like, COVID denial or climate denial, things like that going forward.
But ultimately, I think she's going to raise a ton of money.
I think she'll get a ton of media attention.
And I think that her place in our politics is solidified for the time being and probably beyond, you know, next year.
That guy, his name is Leibovitch, something Leibovitch.
He writes for The Atlantic, giving you exactly the kind of astute political analysis that you would expect.
Mark Leibovitch, he says, oh, Liz Cheney, she's going to be so extremely relevant to the Republican Party.
Liz Cheney hasn't been relevant in the Republican Party in years.
She's already completely irrelevant.
She lost her seat.
She was overwhelmingly, she was trounced by Not just overwhelmingly thrown out.
She was destroyed with facts and votes and logic.
In Wyoming, Wyoming is a pretty red state, okay?
It's a Republican state.
She has no relevance in her party at all.
And she hasn't ever since she decided to, for all intents and purposes, switch teams and become a PR flack for Nancy Pelosi.
So she might have some relevance on left-wing cable news.
She might have some relevance in the break room at the Atlantic.
She has absolutely no relevance among the Republicans.
And you see what they're doing too.
Initially we were told, initially Liz Cheney told us, Adam Kinzinger, all the libs and the squishes, they said, this isn't about any issues.
It's not about conservatism.
It's about Trump.
Trump is a unique threat.
He is the problem.
I'm a good Republican.
I respect Republicans.
I'm a tried and true principled conservative Republican.
It's just Trump.
And now what do we hear?
Well, but maybe it's a little more than Trump.
I know Trump's out of office.
Maybe it's some of the other House Republicans, too.
Maybe it's not even just about the 2020 election.
Maybe it's about the climate change.
Maybe it's about COVID. Are you a COVID denier?
Maybe it's about just giving the libs more power and taking power away from conservatives.
That's all it's about.
So if Liz Cheney is going to have any relevance at all, it will be as the kind of dancing monkey for the Democrat Party.
It will be as the court jester conservative in the kingdom of liberalism.
But she will have absolutely no, absolutely no relevance in the Republican Party.
Could you imagine, I mean, someone who goes along and actually parrots phrases that are designed and intended simply to smear conservatives, allegedly your fellow partisans, allegedly the people who agree with you on so many important issues, to smear them as Nazis.
That's what this is about.
This is really, really sad stuff.
And you're seeing this political culture now turn our own country into basically a banana republic.
I mean, I think it was pretty clear when the Biden DOJ, the political appointee at the Biden DOJ, made the call to use federal law enforcement to raid Biden's predecessor and chief political rival, you saw our country being thrust into banana republic territory.
You know, the corporate media not only control But their agenda means the news is presented in a very biased way.
You know it.
I know it.
We all know it.
Thankfully, there's a way to get the most important news of the day without their super-duper lib narrative.
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Speaking of banana republics, Right down now in Brazil, you are seeing a, well, unfortunately, the sort of thing that we probably have to look forward to here.
Brazil's federal police requested authorization from the nation's federal Supreme Court to formally indict Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Why do they want to indict him?
Bolsonaro just announced his re-election campaign, so the timing here is a little suspect.
The federal police want to indict Bolsonaro.
Who's behind the indictment, by the way?
It's Bolsonaro's political opponent, the Brazilian Senator Omar Aziz.
So as Bolsonaro is about to launch his campaign for re-election, this guy comes out, the political opponent says, all right, we've got to arrest this guy.
And what was Bolsonaro's crime?
This one is even more ridiculous than the nonsense they're accusing Trump of.
You know, the Presidential Records Act or whatever.
The crime that Bolsonaro is being accused of Is spreading misinformation about COVID. There's a law, I guess, against spreading misinformation about COVID. And you see Bolsonaro, he spread all that misinformation because he suggested maybe there were some negative side effects of the vaccines.
And maybe the vaccines didn't work as well as everyone was saying they did.
And maybe the masks were really stupid and didn't do very much of anything.
And so, because Bolsonaro spread that obviously true information, I'm sorry, I must have misspoke.
You know that legally classified misinformation because of that, he could be indicted.
And this would obviously throw an impediment into his presidential campaign.
We'll see how it plays out.
I expect this from Brazil.
I expect this from Latin America.
That's how they do politics down in Latin America.
Until August 8th of this year, that is not how we do politics in America.
That was not how we did politics in America.
Joe Biden changed that.
Because Joe Biden's Attorney General, Merrick Garland, launched a raid, federal law enforcement knocking down the door of Joe Biden's chief political rival.
Banana Republic stuff.
I don't mind Banana Republic stuff as much when it occurs in Banana Republics.
I don't like it when it occurs in our Republic.
Speaking of foreign political leaders, there is a story, a little bit saucy, a little bit spicy for this show, even though we're a family show, so I'm going to try to keep it clean.
The Prime Minister of Finland...
She is a, well, I think the technical phrase would be super hot young woman.
And the prime minister, her name is Sanna Marin, has created a number of tabloid scandals because she keeps getting caught going out and partying and dancing and staying up really late.
Now there are videos going around of her dancing with some guy, real close, real intimate.
He seems to be sort of nibbling on her.
The guy is not.
Her husband.
If you haven't seen the video, take a listen.
So, alright, that guy's getting real friendly with the Prime Minister of Finland.
All I keep thinking is, could you imagine Biden doing this?
Our head of state?
I wouldn't like that.
Could you imagine the two of them together?
I guess he would mostly be smelling her hair.
So she's there.
Santa Marin is at this club.
She's dancing.
Then there's another video that's been going viral of her kind of dancing, jiggling provocatively with a bunch of girlfriends at some house party.
They're all singing along to club music and jumping up and down.
Strutting about, and there's some guys there.
Okay, you get the idea.
This is the kind of thing, this is the kind of thing that 18-year-olds do.
It's the kind of thing that even in your 20s, you do this, okay?
It's not what you expect from the prime minister of a country.
And I don't want to be the fun police.
I really don't.
But my reaction to this, some people have said, good for her.
You go, girl.
Yeah.
And that's the kind of lib perspective.
And then you get the sort of apolitical perspective of, hey, if she wants to do it, what's the big deal?
Who cares?
Yeah.
And then a lot of other people are just noticing that she's a very good-looking woman.
And if she were not a good-looking woman, it probably wouldn't be as cute.
People wouldn't find it as charming as they do because of this lady.
My reaction to it, though, is...
Grow up, lady.
Grow up.
I'm not really even knocking this kind of thing when you're in your 20s, when you're single, when you're in college.
I'm not knocking that.
All right, it's fun.
It's fun going to parties, fun dancing around.
I assume all the people in those videos were...
Had had a couple Coca-Colas, alright?
But there's a time for every purpose under heaven.
There's a time to go clubbing and a time to refrain from the clubbing.
And when you're 36 and you're married with a kid and you're the prime minister of a country, you probably shouldn't do that.
She got in trouble too.
This was a little while ago, probably a year or so ago, at least eight or nine months ago, when the prime minister lady goes out to a club on Saturday after her foreign minister had tested positive for COVID.
Then she was told she did not need to isolate because she was vaccinated.
But then she got a text reminding her that the vaccine doesn't really do all that much.
And so they told her, you've got to come home, you've got to isolate.
But she didn't do that because she missed the text.
She left her phone at the office and she was just out clubbing all night.
And I just think, lady, grow up.
This is a problem for really the whole millennial generation of which she and I are both a part.
Which is, we don't want to grow up.
We all just want to remain in perpetual adolescence.
This is why millennials use the term adulting.
Say, wow, I was adulting today.
I paid my bills.
I was adulting.
So that's unusual.
I guess it is unusual these days, but it shouldn't be.
And you shouldn't be boasting about how you're doing adult things at 35 years old.
You should just do them.
But they want to put off everything.
They want to put off getting married.
They want to put off having kids.
When they do get married and have kids, they want to put off or just neglect entirely the obligations that come with that.
They just don't want to put it off, and that's not good.
That's not a good way to live.
Okay?
That will fade.
The fun will fade.
Even looks will fade.
They should be doing the right thing in the meantime.
Speaking of dating, there's a story in the Wall Street Journal that there's been a major change in the dating scene.
And that is that people are moving in large numbers towards sober dating.
So what do I know?
I haven't dated in a thousand years and I married my high school sweetheart.
But in my mind, dating is when you go out and you get some drinks.
Or maybe if you don't drink, you go out and...
I don't know, you get appetizers or dinner or something like that.
But probably, you know, unless you have an alcohol problem or something, you're really intentionally refraining.
Most people, I think, will have a drink on a date.
Now, that's not what's happening.
According to the Wall Street Journal on Tinder, mentions of sober increased 26% from 2020 to 2021 in member bios.
Now it's up again another 22% this year, according to Tinder.
And mentions of the words beach...
And picnic are also up quite a lot from the beginning of the year, suggesting that people are meeting up for not just going to a bar, not just going to a club, not just going to a restaurant, but going out and just having a picnic or having a cheaper day.
So the good side of this is, it's probably good if people don't drink as much, if people decide that there's more to life than just drinking.
It's probably good for people's health.
There's nothing wrong with saving money.
We're in a terrible economy right now, so if you don't want to go to some expensive, fancy restaurant, you'd rather go have a picnic.
That sounds charming.
I actually think that sounds lovely.
But I see a dark social trend lurking beneath the surface here.
My first reaction when I saw this is, I don't think the reason that people aren't drinking on dates is necessarily for their personal health.
I don't even think it's just to save money.
I think it's a sign of social breakdown.
And I think it's because people are afraid That if they drink too much on a date, they're going to be taken advantage of.
They could be raped.
They could make decisions that they come to regret in the morning.
People are dating people that they have absolutely no connection to other than just swiping right.
It's not like you're being set up on a blind date by a friend or this is someone you're in school with or that you work with or that you know through your church.
It's just totally random people.
Could be a psycho serial killer.
And so people want to keep their wits about them, which is kind of scary.
And that was my first instinct.
And then I read later down in the very same article, they quote a Chicago dating coach, Steph Safran, who says that people are more concerned about safety.
They're worried about facing sexual pressure.
Having a date slip them a mickey in their drink while they're not looking.
And she says that not drinking helps her clients ensure that they don't do anything that they would regret in the morning.
So again, that's good.
Good for people to avoid getting mickeys slipped in their drink and avoid doing things that they'll regret in the morning.
But this is a sign that maybe something's not quite right with this new way that we're dating.
Because in the old way of dating, you had more connections to a person than just showing up randomly to meet them.
The community was more tightly knit and there were more interconnected bonds between people.
Oh, how did you meet?
Oh, because Johnny was Jim's roommate in college, and Jim is my sister Sally's husband, and there were all of these connections.
So you would be far less likely to be victimized on a date because the person wasn't just a total rando, wasn't just a total stranger who could disappear the next day.
You don't even know his real name.
That's a sign of social breakdown.
Yeah, it's good if people want to save some money and take care of their health.
But if this is what I think it is and what this dating coach seems to think it is, if this is a sign that people are putting up their guards because they're afraid of stranger danger and even the people that they're going on what's supposed to be a romantic occasion with might attack them, might abuse them, might victimize them, that's not a good place to be as a society.
Speaking of love and marriage and the baby carriage, Another horrifying report, also from the Wall Street Journal actually, the cost of raising a child has increased dramatically.
The cost of raising a child, do you know what it is right now?
I'll let you formulate a guess in your mind, maybe type it out in the comment section before I tell you.
It's over $300,000.
Wall Street Journal says that according to the Brookings Institution, which is a left-wing institution, sort of center-left, their analysis finds...
It can cost up to over $310,605 to raise a child in today's economy.
That works out to an average of $18,271 per year to raise a child born after 2015.
This is based on 2017 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
It's adjusted for current inflation, and analysis looked at other things beyond just food.
Because I thought, man, $310,000, that's a ton.
That is an insane amount of money, right?
It's probably going to be more when I think about the eggs that sweet little Elisa buys.
I think about the diapers.
She just found these very fancy diapers that reduce your risk of the baby kind of, you know, going beyond the diapers.
So that's good.
I like that.
But these diapers are made of like silk and gold, I think.
That's the only way to justify the expense.
So I think, man, I'll be lucky if I get off $300,000 a kid.
That's an insane amount of money, $300,000 a kid.
What's driving the price?
Is it gas?
Sure.
Is it food?
Uh-huh, yeah.
But then Brookings kind of nestles another little cost in there.
You've got housing, clothing, health care, and child care, among other expenses.
And there it is.
There's the problem.
The child care, which is bizarre.
It's bizarre that in our world right now, People need, virtually everyone, needs two incomes to survive as a family.
But then what do you do with the kids?
You get into a situation where you send your wife to go work for some guy so the guy can pay you guys money so that you can pay some other woman to raise your kids.
Does that make sense?
I guess that increases GDP because you've got all this money moving through the economy.
But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Do you know what child care costs?
Many of you out there probably do.
But there's a CNBC analysis here.
The average price of a year of childcare in 2019 was $9,687.00.
In 2020, just in one year, it increased to $10,174.
It's the average price.
So in some places, more expensive places, it's going to be much more expensive even than that.
And what's really scary about this, over that period of time, inflation was just 1.2%, but the increase in cost of childcare is 5%.
And that's not an isolated year.
This has been going on.
This trend has been going on for years.
So now maybe you say, okay, well, sure, you're talking about over $10,000 for childcare.
Now, I mean, this was 2020.
Now it's certainly much higher, especially with Bidenflation.
Right?
Let's say it's $11,000, $12,000, $13,000.
Whatever you're paying right now, you say, okay, that's fine.
But whatever, you know, look, that child care allows my wife to have a job where, let's say she makes $50,000 at her job.
So, okay, that's a win, right?
Except, are you only going to have one child?
A lot of people are, for economic reasons.
Let's say you've got two children.
Okay, now we're talking about $20,000 to $25,000, $26,000 a year.
Well, you say, okay, it's not a big deal because my wife's still making that 50 grand that I just told you about.
Okay, except that's 50 grand before taxes.
After taxes, what's that 50 grand?
It's going to be closer to 25 or 30 grand.
So now her entire salary goes away.
You're still only dealing with two kids.
What about that third?
You're not even at replacement at that point.
The replacement rate is 2.1 because, you know, God forbid something terrible happens, but, you know, you look at mortality.
So for a population to have a replacement birth rate, you want 2.1 kids per couple.
You're not even there yet.
Now three kids, all of a sudden, it costs more money for childcare than your wife's making at her salary.
And I just picked a random number, 50 grand.
Some people could be making less, some people could be making more.
That is an unsustainable thing.
This is why the campaign of Blake Masters, who's running for Senate in Arizona right now, the thing that really turned me on to this guy, He had a commercial where he said, I think that in America you should be able to raise a family on a single income.
I think that's absolutely true.
That's so, so important.
And it's especially true if you're a conservative.
Because conservatives believe that the family is the basic unit of society.
We always talk about family values.
We talk about protecting the rights of the family.
Well, how can you do that if you can't afford to have your family raise your own kids?
How can we protect family values?
If it's economically extremely difficult, it's not impossible.
Even for people at the lower end of the income spectrum, it's not impossible.
But it's really, really hard to support a family on a single income.
That is a political problem.
And pull yourself up by your bootstraps, let people do whatever they want BS. That's not going to fix it.
We need to deal with this in a political way.
We know the libs have been trying to destroy the family for well over 100 years.
Significantly more than 100 years, actually.
We know that.
So what are we going to do to actually defend the family?
Because this is unsustainable.
And it creates a political problem.
We have a dying country.
For 50 years now, our country's been dying.
We're not having enough babies to replace ourselves.
And that ties into all sorts of other political problems.
Ties into mass migration.
The only reason that we have mass migration in this country is because we don't have enough people being born in this country to support our GDP and our welfare state.
And especially with all the baby boomers retiring, the economy would collapse if we didn't flood the place with foreigners.
That's why.
The Libs want the foreigners to come in because they want to upend our country and get rid of our traditions and they think it'll help them at the ballot box.
And that's largely true, though.
It's a little debatable in recent years.
But it's still largely true.
It helps them.
But the Chamber of Commerce Republicans allow them to come in because otherwise the economy would collapse.
It's a major problem.
And yet you still have some conservatives who say, well, what's the government's business in marriage?
I think the government should get out of the marriage business.
Government just needs to leave us alone.
The government is not going to leave you alone.
That has never happened anywhere in any state ever.
The government, if it has any interests at all, is interested in marriage because it's the fundamental political institution.
And throwing your hands up in the air is not going to be a real solution to the problem.
It's just going to let the libs make things worse.
Don't do that.
Speaking of raising kids, and speaking of standing up to bad government and bad culture and just bad ideas all around, we reported on this show a week or two ago that transgender crazy ideology was not just affecting New York and California and San Francisco and Chicago.
It's in...
Tennessee.
Even in Tennessee.
I love this place.
I fled to Tennessee as an oasis of tradition and the good life and properly understood freedom.
And then I find out a school in my own backyard, Harpeth Hall, right here in Nashville, Tennessee, the most famous girls' school in the state probably, was going to embrace transgenderism.
The most famous girls' school was going to stop being a girls' school.
It was going to start letting boys in.
We said on this show, it's a terrible thing.
I think Daily Wire might have broken the story.
And now what do we hear?
This had been signed off on by the trustees, by the administration, by everybody.
By everybody except the parents.
By everybody except the people.
Now, after the outcry that came after we all talked about it, now they're walking it back.
The school sends a letter to parents.
They say, we recognize that this philosophy elicited strong reactions of support and opposition beyond our expectations.
We care deeply about your feedback.
We have heard you.
Based on the response from our school community, the Harpeth Hall Board of Trustees is choosing to pause the adoption of the philosophy in order to engage a wider audience in continued discussion.
That's great.
Because they say here, right, they say, look, we've got a lot of support.
And we've got a lot of opposition, but we've got a lot of support too, right?
So they're trying to save face.
But that's from the broader community, the state, the country, the world, Twitter.
But then when it comes down to what did the school actually think?
Oh, we're going to pause this.
Right?
Because those parents don't like it.
And the minute that the conservative movement broadly was able to fly some media cover for those parents to express their totally legitimate concerns...
The school pays attention.
Very, very important.
Republicans have great opportunity here.
The people are on our side on the issues in a way that I've never seen in my whole life.
And they've got to use it properly.
What is the Republican Party doing to advance this?
They're running seven-minute ads calling Joe Biden a racist.
If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black.
Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.
You got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guy.
You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.
Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community.
With incredibly different attitudes about different things.
They're going to put you all back in chains.
Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet.
It wouldn't matter a whole lot.
The reason I was able to stay sequestered in my home is because some black woman was able to stack the grocery shelf.
It's awful hard as well to get Latinx vaccinated as well.
Why?
They're worried that they'll be vaccinated and deported.
This ad is so stupid.
We sometimes make fun of this line of attack these days.
The conservatives broadly, we make fun of the line of attack.
Democrats are the real racists.
No, you're a racist.
Does anybody really believe Joe Biden hates black people?
I don't.
I don't like Joe Biden at all.
I think he's a big jerk.
And a terrible president.
And not a good guy.
But do you think he hates black people because he made some inartful comments?
No.
No, it's so dumb.
And yet, there might be something to this tactic.
Tactically speaking, this gets to something I've said for years.
The worst thing you can possibly be called in America is a racist.
A bigot, broadly, but specifically a racist.
It's the worst thing you can be called.
And so politics just always has to come down to race and racism, even in things that have absolutely nothing to do with race.
The libs are pushing their stupid education policies and their climate, their environmentalist policies on race.
Everything's about race.
Even the weird sex stuff is about race somehow.
Everything's got to be about, no, you're a racist.
No, you're a racist.
So tactically, in the short term, maybe this is a good line of attack.
In the long run, though, we're never going to win on this.
In the long run, we're never going to win on racial identity politics.
That's the Libs game.
The Libs play that game.
It rigs the whole system in their favor.
You just think the Republican Party, man, they can't win for losing.
These guys just could clutch defeat out of the jaws of victory.
We know, in a year with record inflation and everyone all upset over insane identity politics and the CRT and the transing of all the kids and the mismanagement of foreign policy and the invasion, that's the word that most Americans use to describe illegal immigration.
I know what we're going to do.
We've got a really novel strategy.
We're going to call Biden a racist.
Yeah, that'll do it.
We've got a member block coming up.
I'm so excited for this member block.
I have been waiting for this for a couple of weeks now.
We will be delving in to the seed oil racket with Dr.
Kate Shanahan.
A lot of conservatives are really on this right now.
Seed oils, many people say, are making you fat and dumb and miserable and killing you.
And I am so excited to really get into the science here.
Kate had some great, great articles on The Daily Wire about it.
