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Financial scammer and Democrat donor Sam Bankman-Fried is arrested before he can testify on Capitol Hill, Biden’s puppy fetishist nuclear apparatchik gets fired after allegedly stealing a second woman’s luggage, and the North Carolina state treasurer gets tough with BlackRock.
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Because an amazing coincidence happened yesterday.
You see, yesterday, Sam Bankman-Fried, who's the scam artist behind the FTX crypto exchange collapse, he was arrested in the Bahamas just one day before he was scheduled to testify before the House Financial Services Committee.
Now initially, SBF, as he is called, had said that he did not want to testify.
And Maxine Waters, the head of the House Committee, she didn't seem especially to mind that he refused to testify.
She didn't push back all that much, did not issue a subpoena, nothing like that.
Which makes sense since SBF was the second largest donor to the Democrat Party this past cycle.
And the collapse of his scam looks pretty terrible for Democrats in the House and everywhere else.
But he was still scheduled to appear, which was going to be a lose-lose situation for the Democrats, since whether he showed up or not, the Democrats are going to look either corrupt or weak or both.
And then, then what do you know?
The guy gets arrested just 24 hours before the appearance, and so he can't show up.
I can't help but notice also that Maxine Waters doesn't seem all that broken up about it.
She said he was planning to appear before the committee tomorrow, but then he was arrested.
Although Mr. Bankman-Fried must be held accountable, the American public deserves to hear directly from Mr. Bankman-Fried about the actions that have harmed over 1 million people and wiped out the hard-earned life savings of so many.
The public has been eagerly waiting to get those answers under oath before Congress.
The timing of this arrest denies this public opportunity.
While I am disappointed that we will not be able to hear from Mr. Bankman-Fried tomorrow, we remain committed to To getting to the bottom of what happened.
And this committee looks forward to beginning our investigation by hearing from some other guy tomorrow.
Ah, darn!
Drats!
We really wanted to hear from our second largest donor about the huge scam that he was perpetrating that allowed him to fund all of our campaigns last cycle.
But darn it, Dagnabbit!
It just didn't work out.
The largest financial scam potentially in history, perpetrated by the Democrats' second largest donor, and now we're unlikely ever to hear much of anything about it.
What are the chances?
About as believable as SBF's balance sheet.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Gary McDermott, who says this is about Sam Brinton.
He's the energy guy, the nuclear waste guy in the Biden administration with the bald head and the red lipstick and the stilettos and the guys on the leash.
So you're telling me That a guy with a shaved head and mustache that wears lipstick, women's dresses and high heels and dresses up in bondage gear and walks other dudes around on a leash like dogs, was exhibiting signs of abnormal behavior when he was stealing luggage at the airport.
I don't believe it!
I know, it just doesn't add up.
It just doesn't make sense, kind of like the arrest of Sam Bankman Freed.
It's just, what are the odds?
What are the odds?
What are the odds?
It's always the ones you most expect.
It's always the things and the people that you most expect.
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Speaking of corrupt Democrats getting their comeuppance...
We turn away from Washington.
We turn toward Silicon Valley, San Francisco.
Elon Musk is not only kicking a ton of Twitter employees out and encouraging them to quit or firing them outright, he's now also selling all their stuff.
So Elon Musk is auctioning off all the really nice amenities that the Twitter employees had at their office, which they didn't even use because they didn't show up to the office, but really high-end espresso machines, lounge chairs, all these sorts of other employee lounge chairs, all these sorts of other employee toys.
Oh, it's a La Marzocco espresso machine.
That sounds nice.
Rotisole rotisserie ovens.
What were they doing?
They were just sort of cooking their own chickens maybe at lunch.
That's what the Twitter employees got to do after their long shifts censoring you and kicking duly elected Republicans off of the platform and covering up for the Democrats and shilling for Joe Biden.
And then they needed a break.
They were so exhausted.
So they would have to kick back with their nice rotisserie chicken in their lounge chair, sipping their lovely espresso.
Well, not anymore.
Because, one, Elon Musk has fired a lot of those employees.
And two, he's selling all of their stuff through Heritage Global Partners.
He's also selling a bunch of their office gear, computer receipts, that sort of thing.
So if you want a piece of Twitter, you can go get that.
He's also selling symbols of Twitter.
So there's a giant statue of the Twitter logo.
There is a sculpture of the at sign that denotes a person's Twitter handle.
He's selling that too.
He's selling two novelty stationary bikes that were used to charge electronics.
He's selling a lot of it.
Why is he doing that?
In part, I'm sure he's doing it for the money.
It's a lot of stuff, and they don't need it anymore, so they can sell it.
But it's not really about the money.
All of that is going to be a rounding error on Twitter's budget.
Elon Musk is selling all the fun employee toys to assert his dominance over the company.
And to that, I say my hat is off to you, sir.
Great job.
I applaud it.
I think it's really, really smart, and conservatives ought to learn from this.
Elon Musk engaged in a very hostile takeover of this company.
It was about as hostile as a takeover can possibly be.
And he got a lot of pushback from the employees.
So even after the sale went through, there were a lot of people saying, well, you're not going to be able to do this, Elon.
We're going to stand up to you.
We're going to stop this awful far right-wing takeover, even though Elon Musk is center-left at most.
And Elon said, nope, not the case.
You're fired.
He engaged in all these kinds of little tricks.
He would send out emails and then see who would leak the emails.
And then he had little markers on the emails to find out who leaked it.
Fire those people.
He encouraged a bunch of people to leave.
He's actually making life much more difficult for the Twitter employees to strategic effect because it separates the wheat from the chaff.
It boots out a lot of the libs.
He's intentionally antagonizing his employees to get them to leave.
Because the ones who are antagonized by his antics are not the kind of employees that he wants.
This is what Republicans should do when we come into political power.
We don't do it, unfortunately.
And it's harder because there are more rules around government.
But when we come in...
And we appoint people to the various agencies and departments.
Don't forget, there are some 2 million employees in the permanent government, in the bureaucracy, in the associated departments of the government.
We need to come in and we need to sell the microwaves.
We need to sell the lounge chairs.
We need to make life difficult.
We need to increase working hours.
We need to make it harder to jump off the clock and dawdle and do all the sorts of things that a lot of these people do.
We need to make it a fairly hostile work environment because the people who run the show over there overwhelmingly are our political enemies.
And so if we allow life to remain pleasant for them in their jobs, they're just going to continue to undermine us.
We never seem to have the guts for that, though.
Learn a lesson, elected Republicans.
Learn a lesson, 2024 presidential candidates.
Learn a lesson, potential appointees.
Do the Elon thing.
Go in, scorched earth.
Tell them their lives are going to be much, much harder.
And sell all their toys.
And salt the earth so that nothing will ever grow there again.
Whether we're talking about it Twitter or we're talking about in the various government agencies.
Speaking of people getting fired...
Sam Brinton alluded to in my favorite comment of the day yesterday, which I just read, has been fired.
He has been fired, not Not after Sam Brinton shows up to White House events wearing stiletto heels and lipstick.
Not after Sam Brinton steals a woman's jewelry, allegedly, at an airport and clothing and all of her possessions in her suitcase.
But after he does that for a second time and is caught on camera doing it and becomes too much of a distraction that even the Biden White House has to fire him.
According to the DOE, Sam Brinton is no longer a DOE employee, but the Department of Energy cannot comment further on personnel matters.
Okay, good.
Not only has the right been...
Calling attention to this guy and saying, wait, what?
You're telling me this obviously deeply troubled lunatic is in charge of nuclear waste in the federal government?
But even members of the LGBTQ plus community have warned about this guy for a long time.
In LGBTQ Nation, not exactly a far-right publication, the headline just came out is, has Sam Brinton's story always been too good to be true?
Was Brinton's story contrived or embellished to manipulate high-profile leaders and elevate themselves into...
Oh, that's the...
Themself is the singular crazy pronoun, if you don't want to acknowledge that you were a man or a woman.
But himself is what they mean.
Into the upper echelons of the LGBTQ plus activism.
And there he is.
And what's the story?
The story is...
Well, Sam Brinton's told a few stories.
But the big one...
The central part of his personal narrative, his LGBTQ journey, is that Sam Brinton was subjected to conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy.
What is it?
Nobody quite seems to know.
But he had the conversion therapy.
This was traumatic and it was awful.
Except his story didn't quite hold up.
He's been telling it since he was at the Trevor Project, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, now in the federal government.
It just doesn't quite...
He said that he came out to his parents at the age of 11 and then his father started punching him and he went to the emergency room and then he was sent to conversion therapy and then they tried to beat the gay out of him, basically.
But then his story started to change because when he was asked about it, I said, who was the doctor?
What was the office?
What was this?
He refused to answer.
And as LGBTQ Nation even acknowledges, they said, this is kind of odd.
If such a place existed, there's a moral imperative to rapidly identify the abusive therapist and contact the authorities to stop the atrocities.
Why was Sam Brinton the only survivor of conversion therapy I've encountered since 1998 who refused to answer such questions?
Not only had every other survivor provided this information willingly, but they were eager to fight back and shut down their own therapist or ex-gay minister.
And so then Sam starts changing his story.
He changes the timeline of when he went to the so-called conversion.
It's just very clear to conservatives, to liberals, to LGBTQ activists.
It's clear to anyone who's interested in the truth.
This guy has made up his whole story.
He's obviously a pathological liar.
He's a thief.
He's a deeply troubled, deeply confused man.
And only after everybody in the country agrees on that, from the most super straight conservative to the most LGBTQ left-wing activist, only then does Joe Biden say, okay, only after he's accused of two felonies does Joe Biden say, okay, maybe we got to take him off the nuclear waste in the federal government.
Doesn't make sense.
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A big part of Sam Brinton's story is about this thing called conversion therapy.
But what is conversion therapy?
Some people have in their minds that it's when you take gay guys, or little kids even, they often say it's done with little kids and you just basically attach them to electrodes.
You just electrocute them until they stop being gay or something.
That obviously is not the case.
That is not practiced anywhere.
That's kind of the image that the Libs wanted to create for Mike Pence in 2016.
Because Mike Pence signed some law that had some healthcare provision that funded some kind of therapy that was completely misrepresented to suggest that it was this awful, traumatic conversion therapy.
But you know what conversion therapy actually is?
It's when a guy walks into a psychologist and says, Hey doc, I'm a little confused about my sex and my gender.
And I'm a man, but...
Maybe I think I'm a woman, or I'm a man, but I'm not really as attracted to women, and I'm more attracted to men, and I don't want to be.
I want to be attracted to women.
Doc, I don't know what to do.
I don't know how to help myself work through these feelings and this psychological confusion.
If the doc tells that guy, that patient, That he is a man.
Say, hey buddy, I know you're going through a lot of confusion, but you are a man, and so you're not really a woman, and it is sort of normal if you're a man to have a relationship with a woman and then maybe get married, or if that is not amenable to you, maybe to remain chaste or celibate.
If you're experiencing distress, because let's say your religious views tell you that you can't indulge same-sex attractions, but you have these attractions, so what are you going to do?
I'm going to help you work through this in a way that is conducive with your biological sex, our understanding of what sex means and gender expression, the religious views that you hold, the cultural values that we've had for many, many years.
If the doctor says any of those things, That's evil conversion therapy.
That's illegal in half the states in this country.
The psychologist tells the patient, oh, hey, buddy, you're not really a buddy.
You're a chick.
You're a woman.
You need to take a bunch of very powerful drugs.
You need to head on over to that butcher down the street, and he's going to chop off your genitals, and you're going to put on high heels, and you're going to put on a bunch of lipstick, and you're going to pretend to be a woman now.
If the psychologist does that, that's called gender-affirming treatment.
That's health care.
In fact, that's pretty much the only thing the psychologist is allowed to do.
In half of the states.
Plus additional territory.
So in more than half of the country.
That's pretty much all the psychologist is allowed to do.
Isn't that a little bit weird?
In both cases, you've got a guy walking in to a psychologist saying, hey, I'm confused.
I'm suffering from confusion.
Some distress.
I'm being torn between two things.
Obviously, he's experiencing that distress.
Obviously, he's not secure in his views.
If he were secure in his views, he wouldn't be going to the psychologist.
So the psychologist is converting him to one thing or the other.
It's just if the psychologist converts him to the view that men are men and ought to behave like men, that's evil, that's terrible, that's illegal.
If the psychologist converts him to the view that men can actually become women and they ought to pretend to be a caricature of a woman and undergo painful mutilations of their body, that's the good conversion.
Does that make sense?
Seems kind of like the opposite to me.
Why is it the case that a man in this country is not allowed, in half the country at least, is not allowed to go into a psychologist and if he says, look, I'm experiencing sexual confusion, I think I'm a woman, but I want to recognize that I'm a man, or I'm experiencing sexual confusion.
I'm attracted to men, but I want to try to mitigate some of those impulses and be able to live a life that is chaste and does not lead me to indulge those desires.
Why is a man not allowed to do that in America?
It's not just that the psychologist is not allowed to practice reasonable psychology.
It's that the patient is not allowed to get that care, which ironically is gender affirming care.
When you tell a man he's a man, that's affirming his gender.
When you tell a man to behave like a man, that is affirming his gender.
And yet today we call up, down, and left, right, and good, evil, and evil, good.
There There's a therapist who I had on the show years ago, years and years ago, because he came out with a book, Joseph Nicolosi Jr.
And I've been attacked for even talking to this guy, because it turned out he's a conversion therapist, allegedly.
He says that term is ridiculous.
He refers to his reintegrative therapy.
Joseph Nicolosi Jr.
is just a guy who, if you come to him and you say, hey doc, I'm a man, but I want to...
I want to resolve my confusion and seem more like a regular guy.
He tries to help you through that.
He is persona non grata.
And he's been blowing the whistle on Sam Brinton for a long time.
He said, Brinton claims he was in torture therapy as a young child for years and can't remember the therapist's name.
He later claimed the therapy took place in his 20s, but even as he was attacking therapies that don't exist, he was engaging in sadomasochism and simulated bestiality with young men and women.
Of course, no one cared about his credibility until he got caught stealing the luggage.
Totally crazy.
And there are a lot of swishes and libs who even identify themselves on the right who will say, well, I oppose conversion therapy.
That doesn't mean anything.
Conversion therapy is another example of the libs creating a brand, manipulating language to control our minds, to control the way we perceive the world.
To win the debate before the debate even begins, which is the phenomenon that I describe in my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Words, number one national bestseller, a great Christmas present.
Still plenty of time to receive it before Christmas.
There is no such thing as conversion therapy.
It's not real.
Lock that one away with the tooth fairy, okay?
All there is, is therapy.
There's psychology.
And the kind that is legal today is the one that tells men...
Fake, false things.
And the one that's illegal today is the one that tells men the truth.
Does that make sense?
No, I don't think so.
Doesn't make sense at all.
So what's the consequence of all this?
There's a video, just one around, of a guy at a New York City all-ages drag show.
Not wearing any pants, wearing a thong, wearing stiletto heels, jiggling around, teaching a little girl, and then even a little girl who, I don't know, I'd place her age, let's say around seven or eight.
I can't really tell from the picture.
And in front of kids who are much younger even than that.
I have mercifully blurred out this man's nauseating derriere.
And it's not even as though the guy jiggling around half naked on stage doesn't know that the little kids are watching.
He's doing it for the kids.
They're in the front row.
And he's looking at the girl who's dancing around with him and teaching her how to twerk.
And so now we're all going to be outraged.
We're going to be outraged!
And we need to yell about this.
And can you imagine?
This is weird.
This is bizarre.
Conservatives, look, I'm guilty of it too.
We all do it.
We look at this bizarre behavior.
We say, that's bizarre.
That's weird.
Sort of.
Is it really bizarre in today's day and age?
No.
It happens all the time.
We cover it on the show three times a week.
It happens all the time.
We can be repulsed by this.
We can be nauseated by this.
We should not be shocked by this.
We should not be surprised.
This is what has been happening for years.
And this has been a phenomenon accelerating in the culture for decades.
And it is not going to stop until we make it stop.
This is not going to stop until we enforce laws that are already on the books against this kind of stuff.
Public indecency laws, obscenity laws.
And it's not going to stop until we throw these people in prison.
Yeah, we can publicize it.
All I've got right here is a microphone and a camera, so we can talk about it.
We can expose it.
A lot of people aren't totally aware that this is happening, and when they hear about it, they don't even believe, wait, this guy's doing what in front of kids?
What?
No, there's no way.
I can't believe it.
And then you see it, so it helps you realize the problem is real.
But it's not going to stop just because we shine a light on it.
It will only stop when we throw these people in prison.
And a lot of conservatives say, well, I don't want to do that.
That's the big government.
That's the naughty, evil, big government.
I've been told that we can never use the government to do anything.
Because that would make us no different from the liberals.
You see, if I arrest child predators who prance around half-naked in front of five-year-olds...
Well, really, that'd be no different than if I were a liberal and I arrested a preacher.
So let's not do that.
Let's just complain about it.
If we complain enough, then they'll voluntarily stop doing all the terrible things.
No, they won't.
They obviously won't.
So we're doing what we can do.
We are exposing this stuff, showing you what a problem it is.
And then the people listening to this show...
The great grassroots activists around the country.
You are all doing what you can do.
You are showing up to school boards.
You're showing up to your local government.
You're writing your congressmen.
You're yelling at them.
You're sometimes throwing the bums out.
The Republicans have to do their job.
Enforce the law in the cases where laws have been repealed.
Put new laws on the books.
Throw these people in prison.
Wield your power.
Pull an Elon.
Pull an Elon.
Sell all the liberals' toys.
Okay, get rid of all the liberals' toys.
The drag queens and the stilettos and the weird luggage and the Sam Brinton accessories.
Get rid of it.
Make an example.
Assert some freaking strength and fortitude and political dominance on the occasions you get it.
Or...
When this continues to happen, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Politicians.
What are we getting?
I have the proof of this.
Joe Biden just signed this bill into law to abolish marriage.
And the law, it's called the, what are they calling it?
The Respect for Marriage Act.
But all it really does is define marriage out of existence.
And Joe Biden, to celebrate this wonderful event, has invited a drag queen to the White House.
Drag queen Marty G. Cummings is attending the Respect for Marriage Act at the White House.
And he says, to be a non-binary drag artist invited to the White House is something I never imagined would happen.
Yeah.
You and me both, brother.
Grateful doesn't begin to express the emotions that I feel.
So, the political order encourages this stuff.
That's why it happens.
And the only way that you're going to get rid of it is to create political conditions in which this sort of thing is unpleasant.
There have always been transvestites, there have always been eunuchs, there have always been people who are sexually depraved and confused.
Their behavior for most of our history has been relegated to back alleys, to the shadows, to the fringes, which is where this sort of thing belongs.
If, because it is a fallen world, we are never going to get rid of perverts' desire to take off half their clothing and jiggle their derriere in front of five-year-olds, you're actually not going to just get rid of that.
So what can you do about it?
The only thing you can do is relegate that to the shadows, create the political conditions in which that sort of thing is considered very, very shameful and not elevated to the status of a White House presidential signing.
Now, we can fight back.
We actually can.
You are seeing this.
The North Carolina state treasurer is fighting back.
This would be Dale Falwell, who is, in his role as state treasurer, is calling for the resignation of the CEO of BlackRock.
You've seen this move, and we've talked about it on the show, of state treasurers wielding their state pension funds, their large assets, to fight back against the woke ESG asset managers.
So BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard.
Because the way that the system works is you've got these political activists put pressure on the asset managers.
The asset managers wield their political power to force the companies that they control to implement all sorts of crazy policies.
The one I keep coming back to is Cracker Barrel selling vegan sausage.
Vegetarian, impossible, whatever sausage.
No human being ever in history who has walked into Cracker Barrel has wanted vegetarian sausage.
It didn't matter.
The asset managers wanted that.
And so that's what they get.
That is 100% what they are going to get.
And so what the state treasurer is called for is not even just divesting from BlackRock.
He's called for the CEO. Good.
I love it.
Let's do it, baby.
Let's do it.
Let's go in there.
Let's pressure these companies.
I don't want to hear about the free marketplace of ideas and how we can never interfere in the economy.
The marketplace rules are set by political actors.
That's how our system is set up.
And it is a wonderful, wonderful thing when we, the people, can exercise the little bit of political power that we still have.
Through our elected representatives to bring these people back to order.
To bring these people to heel.
I love free markets.
I don't want to sound like I'm just some command and control knuckle dragging dictator.
But they've got to be in their proper place.
And when we get into this sort of situation, it looks a lot more like the tail is wagging the dog.
And it's extremely disordered and it's disrespectful of the people.
Speaking of disrespect of the people...
Have you seen the most popular scene from the Harry and Meghan documentary?
How do you explain that you bow to your grandmother and that you will need to curtsy, especially to an American?
Like, that's weird.
Now I'm starting to realize this is a big deal.
I mean, Americans will understand this.
We have medieval times, dinner and tournament.
It was like that.
Like, I curtsied as though I was like...
Pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty.
Like, was that okay?
It was so intense.
Oh, it was so stupid.
Oh, yeah, I had to bow down to my husband's dumb grandma, you know, or his dumb, stupid grandma, one of the most dignified and beloved people on earth.
Yeah.
Wasn't that right, hubby?
What a dumb thing we did, huh?
And he's just sitting there like, oh, man, my life.
Why did I do this?
I'm so, oh, I could have had a good future, but then it's so disrespectful what Meghan Markle is doing here.
It's disrespectful, obviously, to the late queen.
It's disrespectful to her husband.
It's disrespectful to the people of the United Kingdom.
Because she is insulting their sovereign and their entire political order.
And why is she doing that?
I don't even think she's doing it intentionally.
I don't think she's setting out to insult the people of the UK. She's doing it because she doesn't believe that anything matters other than her individualism, her individual expression.
Why do I have to engage in this formal behavior that is prescribed by tradition?
Come on!
This is so dumb and stupid.
I just want to do whatever I want to do.
We fall into that error, too.
We fall into that error a little bit, too, in America.
The left and the right.
The left, obviously, all they care about is people doing whatever they want, at least when it comes to sex, when it comes to drugs, when it comes to the social issues.
But the right, too.
The right says individuals should be able to do whatever the hell they want.
Some people on the right think that that's true of sex and drugs, but especially when it comes to the economy.
Well, you know, if Larry Fink over there at BlackRock wants to force all of the companies under his control to pursue the radical left-wing ESG agenda, well, that's his right.
Build your own BlackRock.
If he wants to completely upend our political order, and if a handful of people, forget about just the asset managers, Silicon Valley, if Facebook and Twitter and Google want to completely rewrite how the public square works in the United States, our self-governing republic, just build your own communications.
Build your own public square.
Build your own handful of companies that control 90% of the flow of information around our country.
No, how about I just wield the government that I have maybe a little bit of control in to stop you from doing that?
Maybe we recognize, as Edmund Burke recognized, that there is a higher form of freedom than individual freedom.
When Edmund Burke writes in the most famous passage in Reflections on the Revolution in France that There is such a thing as the spirit of an exalted freedom that remains alive even in servitude itself.
And this is one of the great revelations of Christianity, is that There is a higher form of freedom than just pursuing your appetites whenever you want.
You can actually be the freest man in the world even when you're being tortured, even when you're undergoing conversion therapy that doesn't really exist, even when you are in servitude, even when you are in prison.
There's a higher form of freedom in the cultivation of one's rational will and the suppression of one's basest instincts in the pursuit of something higher and good and true.
And we can express that exalted freedom in another way, not just through our spiritual lives, but in political life.
That to have a good, flourishing society is a much higher sort of freedom.
Even if it means in order to have a flourishing society, we need to suppress some of our base desires.
We need to not steal.
We need to not murder people.
We need to not rape people.
We need to not cheat people.
We need to not defraud people.
We need to rein in some of the stuff we want to do in order to have a good flourishing society.
But anybody, if you asked anybody, okay, would you rather live in the United States...
Well, today, I don't know, people are probably on the fence about that.
But even today, would you rather live in the United States, where you're going to have to play by some rules and you're going to have to suppress some of the things you want to do, or would you rather live in Somalia, where there are no rules and there is no government and you can do whatever you want, until the pirates show up and kill your family and take your stuff?
Nobody would choose Somalia over the United States, because that higher expression of political freedom...
Even at the cost of individual freedom is far, far greater.
And so we need to exercise that exalted freedom more.
You're seeing it happen.
Maryland, even Maryland, where the Republican governor there is a big squish named Larry Hogan.
Even he is flexing that political freedom right now.
And he is banning state government devices from having TikTok on them.
Why?
Because TikTok is owned by the Chinese and it gives the Chinese Communist Party all sorts of data that we don't want.
And the app is just pure poison, right?
I mean, the app is so much more addictive than any of the social media platforms.
There was a study some time ago that showed that the average Twitter user is on Twitter, the median Twitter user is on Twitter for anywhere from two to four minutes per day.
Maybe six minutes, you're a heavy user.
TikTok, people are on TikTok for 50 minutes plus per day.
It's not even close.
And what are they consuming on TikTok?
Just a bunch of mind-numbing nonsense.
So, Larry Hogan banned it for government employees on government devices because of the security concerns.
We could go further.
I'm all for just banning TikTok.
Just ban it.
And especially ban it because they have been suppressing my account for many months now.
Daily Wire runs an account for me for TikTok.
I'm not exactly scrolling on TikTok because I'm not a 15-year-old girl.
But Daily Wire runs an account for me, and they've suppressed it.
Like, intensely suppressed it.
When I put out that video of the Thanksgiving crazy conservative uncle a couple days before Thanksgiving, on Instagram it did about 7 million views.
On Facebook it did probably upwards of a million views.
Twitter probably upwards of a million views.
And then TikTok about 7,000 views on my account.
But then other people ripped off the video and uploaded it.
They did millions of views on TikTok.
So it's also that just Chairman Xi doesn't like me very much, I guess.
That TikTok is suppressing me.
And so I'm all for, let's just ban TikTok.
But even if I didn't have a personal interest in it, it's not good for people.
Does anyone really think that it's good to have a 12-year-old scrolling TikTok all day long?
No, of course not.
In the olden days, we would just suppress that.
We would use the law to suppress that sort of a thing.
But now, the left doesn't want us to because they want to spread degeneracy and decadence around the culture.
And the right doesn't either because we've bought this crazy idea of some unbridled right to individual liberty or something like that, which is not liberty at all.
It's really nothing more than license.
So good.
Even Utah right now, the Republican governor there, Spencer Cox, has banned TikTok from state devices.
I say this is not just not an overstep of the government.
Not just not an expression of the tyrannical state.
No.
What I say is it's a good start.
I say we need to go much, much further.
Now it's time to kick...
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Also, be sure to get your nail bag questions in.
You know how to do it, right?
You head on over to dailywire.com, click on the show pages, click the Michael Knoll Show.
You obviously have to be a member.
You submit a question to the mailbag.
When you do that, it's going to open up an email, and you just attach an audio file.
You can record it on your phone, you can record it on your computer.
Please keep it to a minute or less.
I don't need the story of your life, okay?
I won't be able to play it on the air.
But submit that voice mailbag to our mailbag, and we'll be able to read them on Friday.
Speaking of corruption at social media sites, the Twitter files keep on coming.
Not a huge update today.
One thing really, really tickled me, though.
The Twitter employees, as they were debating whether or not to kick Trump off Twitter, you know, the duly elected sitting president, they compared him to a certain historical figure.
Do you know which one?
I'll give you one guess.
Which historical figure?
You guessed it right.
They called him Hitler.
The members of the team, this is according to one of the internal memos, said, just to update you, Blank, I spoke to Blank just now, so they're censoring some of the names.
They understand our assessment of this individual tweet, but they now view him as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence slash deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler.
On that basis and on the totality of his tweets, he should be deplatformed.
So, yes, they call Trump Hitler and...
Everyone called Trump Hitler on the left for years and years and years.
But even, let's say, you take the very worst that happened on January 6th.
January 6th, the worst insurrection ever.
Even though nobody's been charged with insurrection.
And, well, they killed those police officers.
No, they actually didn't.
They didn't kill any police officers.
And, well, but people died, right?
The person who died was Ashley Babbitt.
She was shot by a trigger-happy cop.
She was a Trump supporter, actually.
Trump supporters didn't kill people.
To say that he's equivalent to the Christchurch shooter or Hitler, it seems somewhat offensive to me.
Seems offensive.
Everyone's getting angry at what Kanye is saying.
That seems pretty offensive, too, don't you say?
That seems to be making light of Hitler and all of his atrocities, too.
Wouldn't you say?
Now, of course, people who compare every political story to World War II are not to be taken seriously.
Because those sort of people don't know anything about history.
Their only historical frame of reference is World War II. And because they don't know about history, they probably don't know much about World War II either.
But those people don't need to listen to them.
But furthermore, why do they do it?
They do it because by comparing us to Hitler, they can justify any actions that they take against us.
And the reason for this is...
That Hitler and the Nazis are not just people who did things in history.
In the popular perception, Hitler is the devil.
The Nazis are demons.
They're not human beings.
They're the devil and demons.
In fact, they're worse than the devil and the demons because the people who obsessively compare everything to Hitler...
Probably don't believe in the devil.
They're probably atheists.
They probably don't believe in demons.
Hitler was for them not just a very, very, very bad man, but the absolute incarnation of evil, worse than the devil, in that Hitler was incarnate.
Hitler had a body.
The devil and the demons are just spirits.
They're just demons.
But the devil is a body.
I've made this point When we were covering the Kanye story over the past couple of weeks, that Kanye, for so much of his career, has just tried to transgress taboos.
He goes up to the most popular musician in the world, Taylor Swift, and takes her statue on stage.
Or he says, slavery's a choice.
Or he puts on the MAGA hat, at the time was extremely transgressive.
And then he comes out and he says, I really like Hitler.
Which is the most subversive thing.
The most taboo thing you can possibly say.
There is nothing further.
And this is more proof of that.
When they compare us to Hitler or Nazis, we laugh it off.
We say, that's so stupid.
You clearly don't know anything about Hitler or Nazis.
You clearly don't know what Trump is actually doing.
But we should take it a little bit more seriously.
Because what that actually means when they say, you are like Hitler, is there is nothing that we would not be justified in doing to you.
We would kill baby Hitler.
They would kill baby us.
They would kill a lot of babies.
That's what they do.
They would do absolutely anything.
And there are different tracks of justice.
We know this in the United States.
If you burn down the country for eight months, along with BLM, you'll get a slap on the wrist.
Probably won't even have any charges filed against you.
If you walk into the Capitol Rotunda and you dance around a little bit in a horn hat and maybe crack a chorus light, they will throw the book at you.
They'll put you in solitary confinement.
You're seeing this right now in a different way with Pete Buttigieg, who probably is my least favorite of the Biden appointees, even more than the crazy nuclear energy guy, even more than all of the rest of this really shadowy cast of characters.
Because Buttigieg is so glib.
He's just so, he's just that guy who went to Harvard and then worked at McKinsey and then kind of talks, you know, he's like, hey, hey guys, come on, I'm just, I'm just the reasonable one.
Okay?
Bridges and roads are really, really racist, guys.
And I'll see you in about six months.
I've got to go take off some maternity leave so that I can go breastfeed my child.
But it's totally reasonable because I'm Pete Buttigieg.
And I'm just a really nice guy, actually.
But I think half the country is evil and terrible and bigoted.
So he just drives me crazy because he's so glib and so disingenuous.
But Pete Buttigieg...
He does like the finer things in life, okay?
He likes taking four to six months off as a vacation right after he starts his job.
He likes flying around on private jets, it turns out.
New report shows that Pete Buttigieg has taken private jets at least 18 times since he was inaugurated into office.
There were commercial flights available, but he took the private jets.
Ironic.
Because Pete Buttigieg talks about how he cares about the environment.
He makes climate change a big part of his political platform.
Obviously, he doesn't really care all that much about the environment.
His private jets spew so much more pollution into the air than commercial air travel does.
But it's also ironic because Pete Buttigieg is the Secretary of Transportation.
So it's his job to make sure that transportation is run effectively in the United States.
So of any political appointee, I'm not begrudging political appointees their private jets.
Sometimes people at the very top layers of government really ought to take a private jet because it's the most efficient way to get to a place and important work has to be done.
But when you're talking about the Secretary of Transportation, it's a pretty bad look because your job is to run all the non-private jet modes of transportation that we are all supposed to rely on.
And if Pete's argument here is, well, you can't expect me to take commercial air travel, that sucks.
It's a terrible experience.
And very often, the flights will be delayed or canceled, and I'll have to sit in those tiny little seats next to disgusting members of the hoi polloi.
You just can't expect me to do that, so I'm going to take my private jets.
Then that's a really bad look, because it shows that you're sort of failing at your job.
Just a reminder, Donald Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services lost his job for this.
Donald Trump's HHS Secretary, Tom Price, took 25 private jets.
So a little bit more than Buttigieg, but not a lot.
18 versus 25, and he had to resign in disgrace.
Bipartisan investigations, everybody agreed on this.
Pete Buttigieg, nothing will happen to him because of this.
We all know it.
They just get away with it.
And so what should we do about this?
We can either whine and scream and cry, get blue in the face, or I would just recommend next time that there's a Tom Price who's taking some private jets and is targeted with a mostly contrived political attack.
Obviously, we should root out corruption in our own party, but the Tom Price attack was pretty contrived.
A lot of top politicos take private jets.
Maybe Tom overdid it a little bit, but it was mostly just a way to attack the Trump administration.
Next time that happens, let it go.
There is no need to go after him like that.
No need to do that sort of thing.
Speaking of flying high and political power players, Ron DeSantis is having a very good year.
I meant to get to this last week.
Didn't have time.
But Juan Williams, he's the Democrat on Fox News.
Juan Williams has just come out with his annual column on the most important power player politician in the country.
He says it's DeSantis.
He says, Very, very difficult to disagree with that.
Whether you are the most ardent Trump supporter in the world, whether you totally hate Donald Trump, whether you, I don't know, you're a Tim Scott or a Nikki Haley stan or something like that.
The rise that Ron DeSantis has had from an obscure congressman, backbencher, didn't really do very much in the House.
It's hard to do really anything in the House of Representatives.
To the most prominent, effective, conservative governor in America has been absolutely astounding.
And if you're Donald Trump, if you're anyone else who wants to run for president, that is a big, big deal.
And so you're seeing the political ground shifting right now.
Even though Democrats did much better in the midterms than you necessarily would have expected, you can see things aren't looking great for the Democrats.
It's why Kyrsten Sinema had to leave the Democrat Party.
You're seeing the exposure of the Twitter files and the collaboration between the big tech platforms and the Democrat Party.
You're seeing things shaking.
So as we head now into 2023, which will just become the 2024 presidential race, you're seeing the political rounds shifting.
Things are not settled.
What the Republicans believe is not settled, what the governing agenda will be, how and if they will wield power.
Those are the fights that are happening right now.
We can all learn a lesson.
We can learn a lesson from those Democrats who wield power very effectively.
We can learn a lesson from Elon Musk.
We can see if we can summon the courage to do it ourselves.
