Ep. 1172 - Tyre Nichols And The Black Faces Of White Supremacy
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Prominent liberals blame white people for the killing of Tyre Nichols, footage of the Paul Pelosi home invasion attack finally answers lingering questions, and Trump gets back on the campaign trails.
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The killing of Tyree Nichols, an unarmed black man pulled over in a regular traffic stop by five police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, has reignited the perennial debate over race and policing.
Now, this case is different from the other prominent officer-involved killings that had preceded it, George Floyd, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, in that not only was the deceased person black, But all of the officers involved in his death were also black.
And it all took place in Memphis, a city that is 65% black.
Nevertheless, former Congressman Democrat Mondaire Jones warns people not to be distracted by those facts.
If you think, Jones wrote, the Memphis police officers had to be white in order to exhibit anti-blackness, you need to take that AP African American Studies course Ron DeSantis just banned.
Yes, everyone involved was black.
But they were still motivated by anti-blackness, which is just another woke buzz term meaning white supremacy, as viral libs have rushed to point out on social media.
I got a message today for some white people.
If we have white people listening, paying attention, I wouldn't mind if you would do this with me.
We rub our chests, we find our heartbeat, and we say, we did this.
We did this.
White supremacy did this.
I'm talking about Tyree Nichols.
Police didn't do this.
The Memphis Police Department didn't do this.
White supremacy did this.
The cops have been arrested.
They're presumed innocent until proven guilty, even though the video evidence that we have is pretty damning.
But by the standard of the left, viral nobodies and prominent politicians alike, even if the cops are convicted, it wasn't really the cops' fault.
According to many on the left, the responsibility for Tyree Nichols' killing, and really for all the evils in the world, lies with white people and their alleged system of white supremacy, even when the white people are nowhere in sight.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, my name is Michael Knowles.
My favorite comment on Friday is from Frank S., who says, I like how that Pfizer executive had to tell the 911 dispatcher that there were five white men around him.
This wasn't shown in Michael's video after he committed multiple felonies of assault and robbery.
I guess I didn't catch that part in the video, but I'm not surprised at all.
The guy just, he's smashing equipment.
He's taking swings at people.
He's trying to tackle James O'Keefe.
He says, wait!
Hold on a second, I can play the victim card.
These guys are not letting me attack them.
These guys, they're threatening me by being there while I attack them.
I might hurt my fist on their face.
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The video of that white liberal lady saying that even though all the cops involved in the killing of Tyree Nichols are black, even though Memphis is a black city, even though white people were nowhere to be seen, she says, beat your chest.
Beat your chest, white people.
This is our fault.
This shows you a point that I've made for years now, which is that racism, white supremacy, all these terms are just synonyms in our modern culture for evil.
So, it's always got to be white people's fault.
The ultimate sin is racism, and by racism specifically...
Racism from white people, white supremacy, white nationalism, whatever you want to call it.
And what she is doing is expressing a weird modern lib version of the true and traditional doctrine of original sin.
She's even beating her breast.
In Christianity, what we do is we beat our breasts and we say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
The understanding of original sin is that we, in our sins, have killed Christ.
We have slain Christ because Christ is incarnate to die for mankind, to redeem mankind from his sins because we all sinned in Adam when Adam first took that bite of the apple and lost his paradise and sin and death pervaded the world.
So we, in a very real sense, are responsible for killing Jesus.
You might say, well, we weren't walking around first century Palestine.
Doesn't matter.
We, because of our fallen humanity, which is not just some weird thing that we're imagining.
It is an observable fact.
This is a fallen world, and we all sin.
So that part, totally observable, obviously true.
The understanding is that we are born with that, and so we carry a real fault, and we continue to sin in our thoughts and in our words, in what we do and what we fail to do.
Now, the liberals, intuiting this fact of human nature, reject all of the stuff that goes with it.
The liberals reject that God exists, often.
They reject that we need a savior who comes outside of us.
They reject everything about our traditional culture and the religion that animates our traditional culture.
But they realize that these facts still exist, and so they just have to transmute them into some weird new leftist religion.
And so what they do is they transmute that into a literal beating of the chest over white supremacy, which is not the cause of it.
Very often you will hear people say, the original sin in America is slavery, or at a broader level, the original sin of America is racism.
That isn't true.
All that stuff is, there's plenty of bad stuff that happens in America and other places around the world.
But the original sin of America is original sin.
And And when you try to translate that into some weird modern religion where you get rid of God and you get rid of all the stuff that undergirds it, you end up sounding like wackos, like that liberal lady on TikTok and like Mondaire Jones.
White supremacy did not cause this killing.
We don't really know the crucial fact here, which is what happened before the video came on.
There's video footage now, body cam footage, dash cam footage has been released.
Officers Tedarius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmett Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith have all been charged with two counts of official misconduct, one count of official oppression, second-degree murder, obviously the biggest one there, aggravated assault act in concert, two counts of aggravated kidnapping.
The video footage looks very, very bad.
There is one question that remains, which is why did they pull this guy over?
They say that they pulled him over for reckless driving.
The head of police in Memphis says that we don't have evidence of that yet, so we don't know.
Really, the cameras kind of click on as this is happening.
So you don't really see the earliest parts of this encounter.
They Then Tyree Nichols resists arrest and runs away.
And then they get him.
And they basically just beat this guy to death.
He doesn't die on the scene.
They don't get him medical attention.
He dies later at the hospital.
It's really damning stuff.
It's hard to imagine these guys are going to get off the hook for it.
But In this country, people are innocent until proven guilty, so we'll see if anything comes out on trial as to why they pulled him over in the first place and why this escalated so quickly.
One theory that is going around right now, a very politically incorrect theory, is that these cops were hired with lowered standards.
So this is a theory a law enforcement official countered.
Karen Parmar says, We know that this sort of thing happens.
There was a big lawsuit about this in New Haven some years ago because first responder exams, allegedly there weren't enough people of certain demographics, there wasn't enough diversity in the department, and so they lowered the standards.
It happens.
Whether it happened here remains to be seen, but it is being reported by multiple outlets.
And this is...
One of the weaknesses with democracy.
This is one of the weaknesses that the founding fathers wrote about, framers wrote about, that political thinkers have recognized throughout history, which is that if a regime becomes too democratic, you have a leveling.
And so it's not that everybody is raised up to the highest levels of excellence, but rather that everybody becomes sort of handicapped.
Like Kurt Vonnegut writes about in Harrison Bergeron.
Or like we see today, just a lowering of standards.
Okay, not enough people that we want to get into certain schools are getting into certain schools, so we're just going to get rid of the SAT. We're going to get rid of the ACT. We're going to lower the entry exams to become a cop or to become a firefighter.
Not enough women are in the military.
We want more women in the military.
Let's lower the physical requirements to get into the military.
It becomes a lowering to the lowest common denominator.
You see this in the writing of our founding fathers.
That's why they did not give us a democracy.
That's why they write so disparagingly about democracy.
It's why they didn't even give us Quite a republic or just a representative democracy in that the American form of government really includes aspects of all three types of government.
There are three types of government, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.
And according to the ancient writer Polybius, those are the three good versions of that government.
It's not that only one of those is good, the other two are terrible.
All three can be good, but they have a corrupted version too.
The corruption of monarchy is tyranny.
The corruption of aristocracy is oligarchy.
The corruption of democracy is mob rule.
And he views this as a kind of cycle of regimes that is constantly going to evolve.
So what the American founders and framers tried to do is establish a regime that includes aspects of all of them.
You have a monarchical element in the strong executive and the president.
You have an aristocratic element.
Certainly in the Senate and elsewhere in the government, a representation for the landed classes, especially when there were more stringent voting requirements.
And it was just a more of an aristocratic kind of a society.
And then obviously a very strong democratic representation too.
Is that what happened here?
We don't know.
It's going to go to trial.
But regardless, even in this case where the facts are so clear, was there a white person in sight?
It doesn't look like it.
Very, very few, if any.
Nevertheless, you are going to see the popular press just absurdly try to blame this on the usual old culprit white supremacy.
The reason they're going to do that is because that phrase is simply a byword for evil and the fallen nature of man in modern America.
Now, this is not to let the cops off the hook here.
Conservatives are generally strong defenders of cops.
I'm a strong defender of cops.
I'm especially a strong defender of cops in Memphis.
I don't know how many of you have ever been to Memphis.
Memphis is a very dangerous place.
Memphis is one of two places in this country that I have ever been jumped or very nearly jumped.
The other was on the Jersey Shore, where I used to vacation a lot as a kid.
The other one was in Memphis.
I was in Memphis for one night back in, I want to say this is...
That was probably ten years ago, more than that probably at this point.
And I was stopping off in Memphis with a buddy of mine.
We went to Beale Street, which is the main drag.
Had some drinks, had a couple Coca-Colas, listened to some music.
We were walking back.
We were probably two blocks off of Beale Street.
We kind of stood out like a sore thumb smoking cigars.
I was probably wearing some silly colored polo shirt.
But we're walking and we see some guy, it looked like he was either breaking into a car or he looked like he was up to no good.
And we hear, hey, fellas.
We say, I don't want to talk to this guy.
We walk in the other direction.
He starts walking.
He goes, fellas, fellas.
He starts walking after us.
We start walking faster.
He starts walking faster.
We run.
He starts running after us.
Finally, And we had cigars, so we didn't want to just go inside.
But we see a hotel.
So we get in front of the hotel.
There's obviously a huge camera right there.
We're right in front of the opening and closing doors.
And this guy stops running right outside the frame of the camera.
He can see the camera, too.
He's a little bit further up.
He goes, hey, guys, you want to come over here?
He said, no.
He goes, oh, can you give me some money?
He said, no.
He goes, oh.
He goes, can you pray for me?
He said, yes.
Yes, we can pray for you.
Absolutely.
And I kid you not, he goes, can you pray for me over here?
He's still trying so desperately.
Hey, come on over here so I can jump you and steal your money.
This was two blocks off Beale Street, the main part of Memphis, okay?
So I don't think Memphis is going to be served by taking cops off the streets.
I think probably Memphis needs many more cops on the streets.
But you still need training.
You still need high standards.
And you still need justice served.
I mean, you can't allow just roving gangs of untrained cops to go around terrorizing people.
We'll see what happens.
I'm probably the only commentator in all of America who thinks that we should wait to see what comes out at trial before totally forming our opinions.
But facts certainly don't look good.
And then the cops really don't look good in San Francisco.
So you remember the Paul Pelosi break-in?
Nancy Pelosi's out of town.
911 call at the Pelosi residence in San Francisco.
Cops come.
Paul Pelosi's, according to the reports, in his boxers.
And then there's this guy who, I guess, broke in.
But Paul Pelosi doesn't seem concerned.
And then, according to reports, Paul Pelosi said that he knew the guy, referred to him as a friend.
That Paul Pelosi didn't rush to the cops when they got there, and then finally the guy attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, but all sorts of theories based on the press reports.
Well, now we got the video footage.
The cops show up to the door.
It's unclear who opens the door.
What's going on, man?
Everything's good.
Hi.
Drop the hammer.
Nope.
Hey.
The guy's holding Paul Pelosi's hand, and the guy just attacks Paul Pelosi with a hammer.
So it's a little bit weird here.
We don't really know who opens the door.
It's Paul Pelosi.
They're standing somewhat still.
He's got a drink.
It could be just a glass of water in one hand.
And then his arm is being held by this invader in the other hand.
The invader then has the hammer in the other hand.
And they're all just standing there.
And the cops go, hey, what's going on here?
So your first thought is, why didn't the cops tackle this guy?
This guy's holding a hammer.
He's holding a hammer.
So while holding Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the cops are just waiting, they're like, hey, what's going on?
Hey, man, drop the hammer.
Drop the hammer.
The guy's got a hammer.
He's got the husband of the Speaker of the House.
I bet you jump on him.
I bet you shoot him.
I bet you do something.
You're standing there, and then they wait, and then the guy just slowly takes the hammer out and smacks Paul Pelosi on the head.
So that's bad enough.
It's weird, though, because there are still questions.
Why doesn't Paul Pelosi seem more nervous?
Who opened the door?
Do these guys know each other?
Do the cops not know that this is Paul Pelosi?
But then we get the 911 call, and things become much clearer.
This is San Francisco Police.
Do you need help?
Oh, well, there's a gentleman here just waiting for my wife to come back.
Nancy Pelosi.
Okay, do you need police fire or medical for anything?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I've got a problem, but he thinks it was his suit.
Okay.
Call us back if you change your mind.
No, no, no.
This gentleman just came into the house, and he wants to wait here for my wife to come home.
And so, anyway, he told me to put his phone down.
Do you know who the person is?
No, I don't know who he is.
He told me not to do anything.
Anyway, this gentleman says that he thinks everything ought to...
He told me to put the phone down and just do what he says.
My name's David.
The name is David.
Okay, and who is David?
I don't know.
What's that?
I'm a friend of theirs.
Yeah, he says he's a friend, but...
But you don't know who he is?
No, ma'am.
He's telling me I'm being very leading, so I've got to stop talking to you, okay?
Okay.
You sure I can stay on the phone with you just to make sure everything's okay?
No, he wants me to get the hell off the phone.
Okay?
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay, bye.
So that's just a brief snippet of it.
The call goes on, and the longer the call goes on, the angrier one becomes at the incompetence of this dispatcher.
He goes, hey, I'm here.
There's a guy in my house.
I don't know him.
He says he's going to wait for my wife, Nancy Pelosi.
She goes, oh yeah, okay, do you need emergency services or no?
Okay, and later on she goes, okay, well call back if you need anything.
He's going, no, I don't.
What are you...
And you realize that Paul Pelosi is telegraphing as clearly as he possibly can that they need to send someone immediately.
And this incompetent dispatcher is ready to hang up the phone.
He says, no, no, don't hang up.
What are you?
And you can hear the guy.
The guy comes in.
He says, hey, I'm a friend.
I don't know him, but he says that he's a friend of ours.
And she almost hangs up.
So this dispels the conspiracy theories.
The conspiracy theories were Paul Pelosi knew the guy.
One conspiracy theory was that they were gay lovers.
There were all sorts of theories floating around the internet.
And the reason that theories were floating around the internet is not because right-wingers are insane.
The reason the theories were floating around the internet is because that was the information that was reported.
The information that was reported was that this guy, that Paul Pelosi referred to this guy as a friend, that the police on another one of the dispatcher transcripts says that this guy was a friend of Pelosi, that Pelosi was cool and calm and collected, didn't rush to the police, had a that Pelosi was cool and calm and collected, didn't rush to the police, had a drink in his All of the leaks before this information came out suggested that these guys had some kind of a relationship.
So then the question is, who released the information?
Who was behind the leaks?
And the answer is, it was the cops.
The cops are the only ones that had, and the political leadership of the cops, they're the only ones that had the tapes.
On the one hand, you had the left-wing theory that this was a right-winger, a Trump Republican.
He's obviously not.
He was a nudist with a gay pride flag at one of the compounds that he was living at.
He's an illegal alien.
He's obviously completely insane.
So that theory goes out the window.
Then you had the right-wing theory on the fringes that this guy was...
I don't know, a gay lover or something like that.
And so you had the left and the right bickering with each other when really what is revealed by the 911 tape is this was the cops covering up for their incompetence.
Very, very bad week for cops in this country.
Now what's the solution to that?
There are really only two solutions, I think.
Listening to this kind of incompetence, and especially looking at the outrage that people see from the police-involved killing of Tyree Nichols, Either you can just disband the police, either the libs were right, abolish the police, or fund the police much better,
train them much better, exclude people from the force who are not up to the job, fire that dispatcher, fire the cops who improperly responded to the Pelosi call, or train them, or just get much better policing.
I think the answer is obviously the latter.
It can't be the former because contrary to what the libs and the sort of anarcho-libertarian kind of right-wing libs would have you believe, the civil government exists to protect law and order.
We need law and order.
We need a civil authority to have a flourishing society.
Because we're not just free-floating atoms left to do what we want and we'll all build up our own private armies.
That's not real.
That's never happened anywhere.
That's a utopian fantasy.
What we need is law and order.
And so if that's the basis of a society, then we need good Strong police departments with good training and high standards and legal protections for the cops so they don't have their lives ruined by political correctness if they are involved in a justified police-involved killing, which very often what happens now is police are involved in a justified killer and a justified shooting, and then they go to prison, or they get their lives ruined in some other way.
They lose their careers, they lose their pensions.
And so a lot of good people, a lot of good, competent people say, why would I ever want to be a cop?
There's no political defense of me.
It's a dangerous job, and I could lose my life if I trespass against the vices of political correctness.
So then you end up in a bad situation.
You end up in a very bad personnel situation.
The smart politicians, though, are trying to beef up police and law and order the right way.
One such politician, a man who's getting a lot of headlines right now because he's very obviously running for president in 2024, that would be Ron DeSantis.
Ron DeSantis is getting tougher on crime down in Florida.
DeSantis is strengthening Florida's bail laws by limiting who is eligible for release prior to first appearance.
This is good because in places like New York and elsewhere around the country, these criminals get brought in, they get arrested, then they're released on zero dollars bail or bond, very low financial requirements to get out.
They go out and they commit more crimes.
You especially saw this during the George Floyd riots.
So he's doing that.
They'll petition the Florida Supreme Court to establish a uniform bond schedule.
They will toughen penalties for sex criminals.
They'll require law enforcement to report missing persons to the national system, dedicate $5 million to continue to fund the police and especially drug forces.
And then here's one, require convicted child rapists to serve at least life in prison and explore options to make them eligible for the death penalty.
So getting very tough on crime.
In principle, I agree with all of this stuff.
One little wrinkle I would say is I don't know that it is smart to execute people for rape.
And the reason for that is not because they don't deserve it.
The reason for that is not because I think we should go soft on rapists or anything like that.
But it's a pure political calculation, which is if the punishment for rape is the same as the punishment for murder, then there is no incentive for rapists not to murder their victims.
And so this would be an example where I think people's passions and desires and sense for justice could outweigh their prudence.
And they'll say, well, who cares?
I think we should just have capital punishment for everybody.
Okay, but if you do that, then you might imprudently end up in a situation where someone who's a rapist is going to kill his victim.
Because if he kills his victim, then she'll certainly be silent.
And if he gets caught, well, it's going to be the same punishment either way.
So other than that, you know, I think they'll try to work that out.
But obviously, DeSantis is moving in the right direction here, which is get tougher on crime.
These things come in waves, and the left and the right at various times are more pro-cop or less pro-cop.
The left, which out of one side of its mouth talks about how we need to abolish the police, out of the other side of its mouth says that we need to trust the FBI and essentially let the FBI run the government.
Okay, we don't like local law enforcement, but we do like federal law enforcement.
The conservatives at various times are very much more for law and order, and sometimes they feel a little more libertarian, and they say, we need to protect our civil liberties and reduce the number of cops and reduce the number of criminal offenses that the cops could even enforce.
But generally speaking, Conservatives should be pro-cop.
Rather than try to have some lame ideological solution where we write it on the back of a napkin and say these are the five bullet points that are going to create the perfect society, rather than say we've either got to abolish the cops or unleash a paramilitary on our nation, I think the smarter solution is...
How can we improve policing?
How can we fund them, give them more money, beef them up a little bit, but have higher requirements?
So you weed out some of the bad cops.
How do we work in an imperfect world in real institutions without just trying to blow the whole thing up as revolutionaries on the left and the right have sought to do since time immemorial?
Speaking of presidential candidates, President Trump, the only declared or I think he's the only declared.
Did Mike Pence officially say he's running or he just said he's probably going to run?
Nikki Haley just said she's probably going to run.
Joe Biden has now declared that he's running, but he's obviously not campaigning yet.
Trump is running.
He's declared.
He's hit.
New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Here is the campaign message from New Hampshire.
When I announced, I just want to put my cards on the table.
You know, we're playing that very big game right now, the biggest game of all, because it involves the country and the survival of the United States of America.
But when I put the cards on, and then I said, all right, let's go.
They said, he's not campaigning.
This is like...
About a month ago when I announced, well, I said, you know, I got two years.
They said, he's not doing rallies.
He's not campaigning.
Maybe he's lost that step.
I'm more angry now and I'm more committed now than I ever was.
Okay, so...
Trump is acknowledging the criticism of his campaign and his campaign laws.
And it would seem that he's reacting to it, too, because he starts now doing events.
But he didn't do a big rally.
This was an event really for locals and the Republican leadership in New Hampshire.
And then he says this line, I'm angrier now than I've ever been before.
But the way he says it, he doesn't seem angry.
Nor necessarily should he seem angry.
Trump running in 2024 is a very different thing than Trump running in 2016.
He's a different person.
He's got different experience.
He brings a different ethos to the whole matter.
But the only thing you can really tell, I think, I agree with Trump.
He's got two years.
I agree that a lot of the criticism of his campaign is BS. I agree that it's mostly just people on the left and the right who hate his guts.
And the people on the left are trying to stop him from running.
And the people on the right who are attacking him now...
Probably in most cases are people who hated him in 2016 also.
So all of that is true.
But I think it is fair to say he doesn't seem to have the same fire.
He doesn't seem to have the same focus.
When he came down that escalator in 2015, he said, the illegal aliens, they're rapists and they're murderers.
They're being sent across.
We need to build a big wall and deport all these people who are invading our country.
Love it or hate it, that's a clear message.
We're getting screwed on trade deals.
We're going to stick it to China.
We're going to completely upend America's trade policy.
Love it or hate it, that is a very clear message.
It distinguished him from the others in the crowd.
Now, just by virtue of the fact that he was already the president, it's going to be harder to distinguish himself from the rest of the party.
He recreated the party after his own image, so I think he's going to have to try something different.
He then hit South Carolina and announced a big leadership team, and he got a big endorsement from that state senator, Lindsey Graham.
There's one thing I want to talk to you about.
How many times have you heard, we like Trump...
Uh, policies, but we want somebody new.
There are no Trump policies without Donald Trump.
I was there.
You know why 400 billion dollars was given by NATO nations?
Because he asked and they were afraid to say no.
Every president, since I've been up there, has asked NATO to give more money, but they gave more money when he asked.
People talk about China.
You did something about China.
They finally paid.
Everybody's been talking about China.
You made them pay.
You know why Mexico said yes to you?
Because she scared the hell out of them by taking on China.
We live in a dangerous world right now.
The good news for the Republican Party, there are many talented people for years to come, but there is only one Donald Trump.
And I say this sincerely.
You can talk about his policies, but you could not do what he did.
This is the message that Trump has to drive home.
And it's funny that it's coming from Lindsey Graham because Lindsey Graham is considered kind of a squish and they call him Lindsey Graham-nesty and all sorts of things.
And Graham was very opposed to Trump in 2016.
He obviously ran against him.
Then he became much more supportive of Donald Trump.
And I don't care if you love Lindsey Graham or you hate Lindsey Graham.
One, Lindsey Graham was a great trial lawyer and he's very good at getting himself re-elected.
And he's just a very talented politician, even if you think he's a big squish lib.
And so the fact that Lindsey Graham is putting his money on Donald Trump does tell you a little something about a political calculation.
Lindsey Graham feels that the political wind is still blowing in the direction of Donald Trump.
And Lindsey Graham has hit on the campaign message that Trump needs, which is, there is no Trumpism without Trump.
So The DeSantis campaign message is, there is Trumpism without Trump.
I am the better version of Trump.
I am more disciplined.
I am better educated.
I am better able to make deals.
I'm less polarizing.
I'm whatever.
The whole list of Ron DeSantis' campaign pitch— It essentially boils down to, I am Trump, but better.
And so Trump's campaign message has to be, there is no better Trump.
I'm Trump.
I'm unique.
I'm an American original.
There's nobody like me.
There's a lot of imitators out there, but I'm the only one who can do it.
And even if we both have the same policies, I can get it done.
There's more to politics than just policy on a sheet of paper.
I can get it done.
Now, what DeSantis' argument is going to be, actually, I got it done better than you did.
And then Trump's argument is going to be, you could never have done any of that without me.
One, you wouldn't have gotten elected without me.
But two, if I didn't give you political cover from the national level, you wouldn't have been able to do a good job as governor.
And that's going to be the battle.
But if the issue just comes down to issues, I don't know that Trump is going to win.
Because the party and the smart politicians in the party have taken a page out of Trump's book and adopted his positions on issues.
Positions that seven, eight years ago would not have been acceptable on immigration, on trade, on the involvement of the government in the daily lives of Americans.
That would not have been on forward policy for that matter.
So the only way that Trump can distinguish himself is by saying, I'm the one who can do it.
I do it in a different way.
The fact that I am polarizing, the fact that I am brash, the fact that I am unpredictable, the fact that I am not totally educated in this politician, university kind of way, that is my plus.
It's not a negative.
That's my plus.
And that's the message that Lindsey Graham has honed in on.
And I think it's a very strong one.
If he can...
Make a persuasive case for that thesis.
The nomination probably is still his.
Don't forget, we're talking about, especially Ron DeSantis because he's just so impressive in Florida.
You're seeing DeSantis' numbers shoot up out of nowhere up to a pretty respectable number.
What is he now?
He's at 30% or something, even higher.
But Trump is still way up.
The primary contest remains Trump's to lose, but he's got some big weaknesses, especially when it comes to COVID, which we'll get to in one second.
First up, If you're a parent, you know that the radical left has infiltrated every aspect of your kids' lives from academia to medicine to children's programming.
They're pushing a woke agenda at every turn and doing everything they can to capture their hearts and minds.
If you're a parent, then it is deeply, deeply concerning.
You may feel powerless to stop the onslaught.
But the good news is that many are finding a way to fight back.
That is why I'm excited to tell you about a brand new book published by DW Books, written by Bethany Mandel and Carol Markowitz.
It's called...
Stolen Youth, how radicals are erasing innocence and indoctrinating a generation.
In Stolen Youth, they share testimonies from parents who are just witnessing now how far an out-of-control agenda is corrupting our morals, okay?
And one that was exacerbated during the pandemic.
This is an absolute must-read for parents who want to understand how we got here.
What we're up against, how to go on the offensive, and how to save our kids.
Stolen Youth, How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation comes out March 7th.
But if you click on the Amazon link in the description, you can pre-order your copy today.
Go do it.
Pre-order the copy of that book.
Senator Ron Johnson is standing up for the vaccine injured.
He says,"...the vaccine injured deserve to be seen, heard, and believed." And then he tags a news agency.
He says, My letter highlights five of these severe adverse events experienced by pilots and an air traffic controller.
So, you got Ron Johnson has this letter that he's put out, and it's now being reported in a number of places, including the Epoch Times, of pilots, specifically, who all had to get the stupid Fauci ouchie, and many of whom have suffered adverse events now.
He says, quote, I think a lot of people hear that number from VAERS and they say,
oh well, VAERS is unverified and so that number is actually probably overblown.
No, it's the opposite.
Time and time again we see evidence that VAERS actually drastically under-reports vaccine injuries.
Think about this.
Do you know anyone in your life who has suffered a vaccine injury?
Or do you know someone who knows someone who suffered a vaccine injury?
Most people, I think, do.
I certainly do.
And I think most people know someone or know someone who knows someone who suffered a vaccine injury.
Then ask yourself, did that person file a report with the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System?
Usually not.
Most people will not.
Or even you might say, well, my kid got this vaccine and then things started to seem a little weird.
Or, yeah, I started to have these, I don't know, kind of shortness of breath or heart problems or this or that.
But I'm not going to, I don't know, I don't want to seem like a crazy person.
So VAERS underreports that.
How many people actually died from this vaccine?
VAERS says 33,746.
I bet that number is much, much higher.
In addition, a Department of Defense whistleblower provided Ron Johnson's office with data, quote, showing an increase in disease and injuries in pilots across the DOD in years 2020 to 2022 compared to years 2016 to 2019.
Now, there will be debate.
You'll hear the libs say, well, no, the adverse effects were caused by the virus, not by the vaccine.
No, no, it was just the virus.
The virus was everywhere.
It was caused by the virus, not the vaccine.
That merits some study because what little evidence is available now doesn't seem to suggest that.
And furthermore, the fact that we're not even allowed to raise that question tells you, I think, everything you need to know.
The fact that if you raise that question, You can, in many circumstances, be kicked off of social media.
You will be looked on as an idiot.
You'll be called a misinformer.
You'll be accused of committing something tantamount to murder because you're spreading health misinformation.
And then to tie it back to the political 2024 question, this is Trump's biggest weakness.
And this is, I suspect, where DeSantis and any other challenges are going to hit Trump the hardest.
They're going to say, you promoted this vaccine.
This vaccine was bad news.
And so what Trump is going to do, and you're already starting to see this, is Trump is going to start to hit DeSantis there.
He's going to say, you promoted the vaccine too.
And you locked down too.
Don't pretend that you didn't lock down.
You locked down for months.
And you're already seeing Trump start to make that attack.
So even now, 2024, this will be four years after COVID-19.
I strongly suspect that much of the Republican primary is going to come down to COVID. We are still processing the COVID lockdowns.
And we think we've moved on because we don't wear the stupid hankies anymore over our face.
And even the people who formerly were very afraid of COVID and who promoted the vaccines and who even most of those people, virtually all of those people on the right, have come back to reality and said, okay, actually, yeah, that was crazy.
We shouldn't have given up our rights.
We shouldn't have locked down.
Shouldn't have worn the stupid hanky.
Shouldn't have taken the vouchee-ouchee.
Okay, all right, fine.
But Just because the people on the right now broadly agree on what we should have done, it doesn't mean that we're past it.
That was a national trauma.
People died alone.
People were not allowed to say goodbye to their loved ones.
Kids were taken out of school.
It seriously damaged their education and their socialization.
The good news about taking kids out of school is that it prevented them from learning a bunch of insane nonsense from their woke teachers.
That was a good thing.
It prevented their socialization in the sense that it stopped them from becoming socialists more quickly.
But it did seriously harm them.
The fact that kids weren't allowed to see their friends seriously harmed their development.
Destroyed our economy.
Destroyed small businesses.
It was the largest transfer of wealth in recorded history from the lower classes to the upper classes.
It was a major transfer of our political rights.
Away from communities and away from American citizens toward unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who hate our guts.
We've still got to grapple with that.
If you think we're just going to move on, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Speaking of COVID... You know, the COVID, or rather the Pfizer video that I referenced earlier in my favorite comment of the day, has created quite a splash.
That Pfizer executive who thought he was out on a date with a man, and then the man turned out to be a honeypot plant, and James O'Keefe walks in and says, hey, we got you on video admitting that Pfizer is performing gain-of-function research and directed evolution research to beef up viruses.
And then the kid just loses his mind.
I say kid.
He's a young man.
He's, I think, 31.
In fact, I know he's in his early 30s because a classmate of mine from college reminded me, I went to college with that guy, that Pfizer guy that was caught on tape by Project Veritas.
He was one year below me in college.
And his face is familiar.
I didn't know him personally.
Some of my friends knew him personally.
And once I heard that, I said, oh, this all makes sense.
This guy is behaving exactly as you would expect a modern liberal Yalie to behave.
He's ruthlessly ambitious.
He's a liar.
His first excuse was, I'm a liar.
I'm literally a liar.
I was lying about that.
He's engaged in fairly nefarious activities that he is justifying according to his own liberal mores, totally divorced from traditional morality.
He's on a gay date.
Yale University is the gayest university in the Western Hemisphere, probably in the entire world.
And he really melts down when he's told no.
When a conservative, and he's probably met a handful of conservatives in his entire life, pushes back and says, hey, we're not going to let you do that.
We're going to expose you for engaging in gain-of-function research, which is very, very dangerous, possibly illegal, and certainly immoral, and we're just not going to let you do it.
And he just loses, starts throwing the iPads, starts running around, tries to play the race card, apparently, according to that comment earlier.
Just a complete meltdown.
Pfizer's finally responded.
Pfizer finally said, allegations have recently been made.
Related to gain-of-function and directed evolution research at Pfizer, and the company would like to set the record straight, in the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain-of-function or directed evolution research.
I don't really believe that.
I'm going to parse that sentence.
Because maybe the sentence is true.
But I don't think that the implication is true.
In the ongoing development...
Of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Pfizer has not conducted gain-of-function or directed evolution research.
So has not done it does not necessarily contradict what the guy said in the video.
Because the Pfizer executive in the video was stating more that Pfizer is looking into doing this.
That they think that this would be a way to get ahead of vaccine development.
So it doesn't necessarily...
That they have already engaged in this kind of research.
It could be that they simply plan to engage in that, and it would make sense that the guy in the Pfizer video would know that because he's apparently a worldwide director for mRNA research at Pfizer.
Has not conducted gain-of-function or directed evolution research?
Has Pfizer already conducted that kind of search?
Outside of the ongoing development of the COVID-19 vaccine?
Because they're very specific there.
They say, in the development of this vaccine, we don't engage in gain and function.
Well, have you elsewhere?
And are you planning to for the COVID-19 vaccine?
And why did it take you damn near a week to come up with this excuse?
At least several days.
Why did it take you so long to say no?
Do you trust these people?
well, I don't trust these people at all.
That's why you're seeing a big flip right now.
The right used to be the side that believed all the scientists, and the left used to be the side that was anti-vax, and anti-Monsanto, and anti-corporate food, and anti all that.
That has completely flipped.
That has flipped in large part because of COVID.
When I say that our politics today is largely a reaction to, not the virus, but a reaction to what the virus and the subsequent political reaction exposed about our political system.
I mean to the point that now all the crunchy granola hippie people, they're on the right.
They're not on the left.
All the anti-vaxxers, they're on the right.
They're not on the left.
Even if those people don't quite know it yet, all the anti-seed oil kind of memes and cultural bubblings up that you're seeing, it's on the right.
It's not on the left.
And the shill for the people in the lab coats, in the big executive office towers, trying to stick your arm full of poison and trying to pour poison down your gullet, trying to give you weird Frankenstein lab-grown meat, which we'll get to tomorrow.
I don't have time to get to that today.
Those people are on the left, and we do not want what they are selling.
Today is Music Monday.
The rest of the show continues now.
Mr.
Davies and the producing team has some really profound music for me to analyze, because you know I am a cultural maven.
I am the hip-hop, pippity-pop kind of music man over here.
You don't want to miss it.
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