Ep. 1180 -The FBI Preps For A Crusade On Catholics
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The feds call Catholics “extremists” for attending Mass, transgender activists do an “insurrection,” and Ron DeSantis conquers Disney World.
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As our political rulers celebrate the slaughter of babies and castration of children, they've got a new plan to thwart threats to our nation, and that is to stop Catholics from going to mass.
According to an FBI document leaked by former agent Kyle Serafin, the nation's top domestic law enforcement agency considers Catholics, and specifically Catholics who attend the traditional mass, the mass that defined Western civilization for nearly two millennia, to be radical, potentially the mass that defined Western civilization for nearly two millennia, to be Now, as one of those fringe radicals who attends the traditional mass, I can tell you, there are plenty of threats.
For starters, many people who attend the traditional mass have families, often with multiple babies.
So the odds of slipping on a pacifier and hitting your head on the floor of the church are very real.
There are censors at the mass, thuribles to use the technical term.
So at any point, you might start coughing on that fragrant incense.
And, if that weren't enough, just before the Mass, the priest walks down the aisle and sprinkles people with hyssop to symbolize the cleansing of our souls.
And the water could get in your eye or something like that.
A lot of threats.
Now, some people have pointed out that law enforcement might be put to better use arresting the criminals who burn our country down and kill lots of people, like BLM did for eight months straight.
Or stopping the international criminal cabals flooding our country with gangsters and poison and two million trafficked human beings per year, as the cartels do across our southern border.
Or taking down the elite pedo rings like Jeffrey Epstein's, which operated with relative impunity and apparent federal sanction for years on end.
But how could the FBI devote any attention to those minor problems when a handful of Christians are worshiping God the way that they have for 2,000 years?
Our political rulers recognize that they need to keep their priorities in order.
And those rulers, the principalities and powers of this world, have made their priorities perfectly clear.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Mike Burgess, who says, I heard that if you play the State of the Union and Black Sabbath Paranoid backwards, at the same time, you can summon Sam Smith.
That's true, actually.
That's scientifically proven to be true, even though it is the stuff of nightmares.
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Speaking of crime, all those terrible crimes of Christians going and worshiping God in the traditional way of two millennia, there are some other crimes going around our culture, and a lot of people are defending those crimes.
There's a documentary out from Vice, the left-wing magazine media company, in which libs make an argument explicitly that they've been making implicitly for many, many years, namely that if you criticize crime, you're namely that if you criticize crime, you're actually criticizing a race and a culture.
Statistically, it is true that Asians, on average, make more money in terms of medium, make more money, better test scores, getting into better colleges, all that stuff.
I think the question is, why is that?
And I don't know if model minority, whatever that label wants to mean.
That's actually a myth, because we cannot be, um...
Well, no, listen.
Well, let me finish my point.
We need to observe what makes people successful and unsuccessful.
And I think when you look at trends that are generally true in the Asian community, not of everyone, but are generally true, usually you have families that are sticking together, you have, you know, people are taught to work hard in school, not get into trouble.
I think that translates to why Asians en masse are successful.
And I don't think you have to be Asian or white for that matter to not have kids out of wedlock, not, you know, commit crime, not cause trouble, whatever it is.
It's just a matter of like, well, common sense, that's what makes people successful.
And if that's so-called assimilation, having a nuclear family, buying a house, going to school, whatever it is, then yeah, okay, call me a pro-assimilation then.
I think there's a difference between assimilation and erasure.
Yes.
Yes!
Yes!
There it is, right there at the end.
Throughout the whole clip, if you were only listening to it, you weren't able to watch the just beautiful expressions on the faces of all the libs on the panel.
He says, you know, I just think probably people shouldn't have kids out of wedlock, and they should get married, and they should do well in school, and they should not commit crimes.
And you look on the people's faces, they say, is he really telling people not to commit crimes?
Is he?
Oh my gosh!
What?
Is he...
And then at the end, at the very, very tail end of that clip, you get the thrust of the Libs argument.
They say, well, look.
Come on.
What you're talking about, that's not assimilation.
That's erasure.
Erasure is the Lib term that describes when you disrespect and erase different cultural groups and racial groups is usually how it's applied.
Which is to say, the libs are suggesting that crime is just an integral part of certain races and cultures.
That sounds like the kind of argument that if we said it, they would call that racist.
But they're the ones who are saying that.
And it is not true.
It is not true.
Our society says that, though.
Our society says that good culture is a crime and that criminal culture is good.
Our society says that people going to mass with their families to worship God on Sunday, that that is tantamount to a crime.
It's violent extremism.
It's terrorism.
Let's go sick the feds on those Catholics.
But people who are committing actual crimes, robberies, looting, murder, that's just their culture.
And we can't tell anyone that their culture is bad and we need to let them off the hook.
And BLM goes and burns the country down for eight months.
Well, let's drop the charges.
Come on.
Society made them do that.
Come on.
Actually, we supported it ourselves.
We elites running society.
That's where we are.
Completely upside down.
You see this double standard of justice especially clearly this week over at the Oklahoma State Capitol.
Now, listen, I'm an old man now.
I'm getting older by the minute.
And so I'm old enough to remember when showing up and making a giant nuisance of yourself at a Capitol was called a coup d'etat, an insurrection, treason, the sort of thing where you need to be arrested and thrown in solitary confinement.
It turns out that's only the case when it's conservatives who show up to the Capitol.
When it is leftists who show up to the Capitol, that is a wonderful thing.
And you saw that this week.
The Trans Lives Matter demonstrators occupied the Oklahoma Capitol building.
They occupied it to protest Republican-backed bills that would ban transing the kids.
It would ban sex change operations for people under the age of 26.
The argument being that people's brains aren't fully developed until they're 25, so you're going to ban those surgeries until the brains are developed.
I think they should be banned for everybody.
Nobody has a right to chop off his genitals.
It's a very cruel and absurd society that would encourage delusional mentally ill people to chop off their genitals of any age, not just little kids.
So 150 protesters from a bunch of different groups show up to the Oklahoma Capitol, and they're there, and they're screaming, and they're yelling, and they've got their signs, and they're chanting, and they're far less whimsical than the smiley guy with the podium, the lectern at January 6th, or the horn hat guy.
They're actually somehow more eccentric even than the horn hat guy.
But this is lauded as a wonderful thing.
And that's always the case.
That's always the case.
And it's really just a reminder for the squishes.
It's not a reminder for the libs.
They know that they have two tiers of justice.
They're behind it.
They're the ones who are enforcing different rules on conservatives than on leftists.
The real conservatives, we know that there are two systems of justice.
If you go out and trans the kids and have a...
Homage to the Prince of Lies and with the fires of hell at the Grammys.
The First Lady's going to be there.
Everyone's going to be applauding.
It's going to be a wonderful thing.
But if you show up to the traditional mass on Sunday, the feds are going to be there trying to entrap you.
How do you do, fellow Catholics?
Any of you want to do some terrorism today?
Oh, no, I'm just asking.
You want to go get a bagel after and talk about terrorism?
That's the way that it goes.
They know that.
It's the squishes in the middle who don't get it.
It's the squishes in the middle who buy the propaganda.
Who say, oh well, that horn hat guy, maybe he really is Osama bin Laden.
Oh, I don't know.
I mean, when you really think about it, taking a funny picture with a Coors Light or a Nancy Pelosi lectern in the Capitol Rotunda, that kind of is tantamount to an act of terrorism or a coup d'etat.
No, of course it's not.
Of course it's not.
Speaking of transing people and state capitals, I've got to give a shout out to Walsh.
Walsh had a magnificent performance yesterday over here in Tennessee at the Tennessee State Capitol.
He showed up to talk about it.
There was a bill that was up about transgenderism.
And Walsh just showed up.
He's a citizen of Nashville.
And the Democrats thought that they could entrap him.
They thought that they could own Matt Walsh with facts and logic.
Did not turn out well for them.
So I'm curious if 16 is an adult in your view.
Why does this bill have the minor defined as 18?
Yeah, that's a hit piece you took from Media Matters, from something when I was a radio host 13, 14 years ago in my early 20s.
It's also not an accurate reflection of what I actually said.
I was talking about The fact that people tended to marry young historically, and that's all that that was about.
How does that relate to this subject?
I'm just curious of your definition of if you feel like people are adults at 16.
People are adults at 18, but actually your brain is not fully developed until you're 25.
So, we should be having a conversation about whether we should even be doing these surgeries to people at 18.
But certainly before 18, it's absurd.
I mean, do you think that a 16-year-old can meaningfully consent to having their body parts removed?
Do you?
No?
We do not.
Yeah, we ask the questions.
It's not...
Representative Hammer, you are recognized.
Absolutely devastating.
I knew it was going to go bad when the Democrat opened his mouth, because he was unsure of himself.
He clearly, as Walsh pointed out, he had this gotcha that he got from skimming Media Matters or SPLC or one of these left-wing...
Hit organizations and a hit job on Matt.
You said a thing on the radio about how 16-year-olds used to get married.
So what do you think about that?
And Walsh just absolutely pile drives this poor Democrat state senator.
So, okay, all right.
Here's the explanation of the line that you took out of context for Media Matters.
But let's just talk about the question here at the hearing.
Do you really think a 16-year-old can consent to having her body parts removed?
And the Democrats are like, somebody help me!
And then the other state senator or whoever this person is says, we asked the questions here.
Yeah, right.
Maybe you would be better legislators, Democrats, if you had answers.
I know, you got a lot of questions.
You're confused about a lot of things.
And Walsh went there and provided pretty simple answers.
It's not...
Pretty basic stuff, guys.
You don't need to have a PhD in a Dr.
Fauci white lab coat and a stethoscope.
You can have eyes.
You have eyes and common sense to see that boys and girls are different.
I can tell sometimes.
I don't want to tell tales out of the boudoir, but...
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Speaking of transing people, Ron DeSantis announced the conclusion of a plan that he had declared a year ago.
Ron DeSantis is taking self-government away from Disney.
Disney's going to pay its debt.
And I think if you remember when we did the initial special session...
Where we set the sunset date.
And we knew we'd have to deal with this.
I always said that they're going to come in and we're going to figure out the best way to do it.
So what I said really for the last six, nine months is Disney is no longer going to have self-government.
They're not going to have their own government.
Disney is going to pay its fair share of taxes and Disney is going to honor the debt.
And that's exactly what this proposed piece of legislation will do.
If you remember when we first went down this road last spring, a lot of folks in the media were saying that, oh my gosh, Disney's actually going to pay less taxes and Floridians are going to pay more taxes.
They were saying that.
And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.
Well, this puts that to bed.
And so those debts will be honored and those will be paid now.
This is obviously now going to be controlled by the state of Florida, which is no longer self-governing for them, so there's a new sheriff in town, and that's just the way it's going to be.
Really, really good look.
In practice, what this means is that Disney, for the last half century or more, has had control of the local government of the district that Disney World operates in.
And what DeSantis has done is take over the district, take it back from Disney.
So Florida Republicans will have DeSantis appointing all five leaders of Disney's tax district in Orlando and, And they will rename the district, so it will no longer be called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is what it had been called.
It'll now be the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.
And the reason this matters, for DeSantis in particular, is it shows follow-through.
It's not just an announcement.
When he announced it last year, I thought, oh, this is a good political stunt.
This looks good.
It's the right idea.
Okay, fine.
but then he actually followed through with it.
He doesn't really get a new headline out of the announcement yesterday.
I mean, we're talking about it.
Some people will talk about it, but it's not a new news story.
He already announced that this would happen.
The difference is now he's following through, which is important.
If he is going to run for president in 2024, it looks like he is.
He'll be able to point and say, look, I don't just have the right gut instincts.
I don't just come out with big announcements that grab headlines, but I actually follow through with him.
You can trust me to do what I am promising you that I will do.
The other reason that this looks really good for Ron DeSantis is it shows that Ron DeSantis' conservatism is a conservatism that is much more comfortable wielding state power than the conservatism of many of the squishes in the party.
Many people in the Republican Party, especially over the last 20 years, their conservatism has amounted to, hey, I'm not going to do anything.
You elect me and I'm just basically going to go home.
The most I'm going to do is deregulate and give corporations more power and let them do whatever they want.
That was the heavily libertarian-scented conservative base movement kind of conservatism in recent years.
And the reason that that was attractive to people is because big government has done all sorts of bad things.
And so we were reacting against that.
The other reason is because we had, we've just fought a Cold War for the second half of the 20th century.
And so opposition to big government was something that united a lot of conservatives because our enemy was the Soviet Union and communism.
We are now seeing some of the excesses in the other direction.
When you privatize everything, when you give woke corporations free reign to do whatever the hell that they want, that also can hurt conservatives.
If it's big government taking my rights, that's bad.
If it's Google taking my rights, that's also bad.
If it's Disney transing my kids, that is just as bad as if Dr. Fenn.
Fauci were transing my kids, or Rochelle Walensky, or who's that guy, the guy who is the assistant health secretary, Richard Levine, that guy.
It's just as bad.
I don't care whether it's a public or allegedly private entity transing my kids.
All I care about is, are my kids being transed?
Are my rights being taken away?
Is my way of life being upended?
And a lot of conservatives, they're not there yet.
They don't quite understand how to articulate why it is a good thing sometimes to wield state power against woke corporations.
Ron DeSantis can do it.
He can articulate it, and he is actually doing it.
And the other Republicans who want to look good coming into 2024 are going to have to get on the stick.
Now, some Republicans just don't get it.
We talk about the good Republicans.
DeSantis, I think, is doing a great job.
You know I love Donald Trump.
I think he's the greatest president of my lifetime.
You know I like a lot of other Republicans.
Ted Cruz, in particular.
Love Ted Cruz.
And there are a number of others doing really great work out there.
Glenn Youngkin's doing good work by Virginia standards.
A lot of good stuff.
Then there are some Republicans.
Not so much.
I'm talking about Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney.
I was walking up at the State of the Union the other night, and one of these little catfight-y high school cafeteria moments, he walks up to George Santos, the embattled, endemically dishonest Republican from Long Island, and he says, you don't belong here.
You can see it, there's Santos there, and Romney just turns to him and says, you don't belong here.
There's a clip that came out later.
Of Romney walking with a gaggle of reporters.
And he's angry.
He's fired up.
He says, this guy, this George Santos.
Yeah, you're damn right I gave him a piece of my mind.
You just said you don't belong here.
Yeah.
Why did you want to say that to him?
I didn't expect that he'd be standing there trying to shake hands with every senator in the president of the United States.
Given the fact that he's under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet instead of...
Parading in front of the president and people coming into the room.
He says he embellished his record.
Look, embellishing is saying you got an A when he had an A-.
Lying is saying you graduated from a college you didn't even attend.
And he shouldn't be in Congress.
And they're going to go through the process and hopefully get him out.
But he shouldn't be there.
And if he had any shame at all, he wouldn't be there.
Why did you make a point to say that, though?
I mean, it was kind of out of your way to say that.
He was standing right there in the aisle, shaking hands with everybody.
Did he respond to you?
He may have.
I didn't hear anything he said.
Are you disappointed that Kevin McCarthy is not calling him to resign?
Yes.
Yeah, let me tell you reporters why this other Republican, he's just absolutely terrible.
That's right.
I gave him a piece of my mind, that Republican.
It's outrageous that that Republican who was elected by his constituents is here serving in the Congress.
I tell you, he'll continue to serve here over my dead body.
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Mitt Romney says George Santos doesn't deserve to serve in Congress because he's a liar.
Okay, fine.
Yeah, he is a liar.
He's got all these sorts of shady things in his past.
It's kind of like a lame joke at this point that lame jokes can be funny for a little bit and then they become really, really unfunny.
And then they get really, really funny again.
That's the arc of weak jokes.
That's how I feel about George Santos.
He got elected, and I liked that he got elected.
It's cool that a Republican got elected in Long Island.
And then I started to not like him, because it turned out he's lied about everything.
His education, his professional background, probably his sexual desires.
He might be under indictment in Brazil or something.
So I had a line about that.
But then the more that came out, I thought, no, this is freaking hilarious.
I now get a huge kick out of this guy.
If...
If the Democrats get their eccentric figures, okay, fine.
George Santos is there.
We have a razor-thin majority anyway.
I get a huge kick out of it.
Romney can't.
He can't take it.
I say, okay, I'm not...
It's not that I don't understand Mitt Romney's opposition to a Republican who lies about everything.
But you just heard the way that he talks about George Santos, specifically for lying about his educational background.
Now listen to the way that Mitt Romney talks about Joe Biden, who famously had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race for lying about his educational background, for plagiarizing, for being the most dishonest politician in the whole field that year.
Joe Biden, one of the most dishonest politicians in the country.
That has been an actual distinguishing marker of his career.
This is how Romney talks about him.
You know, I just got back from hearing the president deliver his State of the Union address.
The president's a friend.
I like Joe Biden.
I have come to know him over the years.
And he's a patriotic man who believes very deeply in the things that he talks about.
I was pleased that he spoke about Ukraine and about our commitment to preserve democracy there and around the world, to preserve sovereignty of nations.
There it is.
A Republican lies in an over-the-top way.
This is hideous.
I'm gonna give him a piece of my mind on the floor.
He needs to sit in the back of the room if he should be kicked out of Congress.
A Democrat lies in a really egregious way.
A Democrat who is a gidiot at the prospect of slaughtering babies, castrating kids, redefining marriage, destroying, to say nothing of destroying the American economy, potentially provoking World War III. Oh, he's wonderful.
He's my good friend.
Oh, Joe Biden, what a wonderful man.
I liked the State of the Union.
He was pretty good, actually.
Yep, there it is.
There it is.
You saw this.
Romney did the same thing a year or two years ago.
January 6th, worst event ever in American history, terrible insurrection.
BLM, which burned the country down and killed dozens of people.
Oh, I'm going to go march with BLM. Mitt Romney marched with BLM. Mitt Romney marched with people who engaged in a much more serious insurrection, a much deadlier political movement, an infinitely deadlier political movement than January 6th.
But Mitt Romney does it because his real constituents, the real people he cares about, are not his constituents over in Utah.
It's not his fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate.
It's that group of reporters all standing around him.
Yeah, good job, Mitt.
I've got a strange new respect for you, because you attack Republicans all the time.
Comparing those two guys, I'm not saying that I like George Santos.
I'm not saying I'd trust the guy.
Forget as a representative, I wouldn't trust him with my money.
I wouldn't trust him with my loved ones.
I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him.
But you tell me right now, I can have a George Santos or a Mitt Romney.
Give me Santos any day.
At least Santos is an honest liar.
But Mitt Romney, gosh, awful.
At least George Santos is opposing Joe Biden.
At least George Santos fights the Democrats.
Mitt Romney, Joe Biden, he's a great friend of mine.
What a great guy he is, isn't he?
Speaking of liberal Republicans, liberal Republican in the House Nancy Mace just came out at a congressional hearing to do a really wonderful thing to expose the terrible side effects of the Fauci ouchie.
Twitter files make it apparent Twitter worked overtime to suppress accurate COVID information.
Dr.
Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford who once tweeted an article he wrote about natural immunity.
Thanks to Elon Musk's release of the Twitter files, we learned some of his tweets were tagged with the label of trends blacklist.
Apparently the views of a Stanford doctor are disinformation to you people.
I, along with many Americans, have long-term effects from COVID. Not only was I a long hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine.
It wasn't the first shot, but it was the second shot that I now developed asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot.
I have tremors in my left hand, and I have the occasional heart pain that no doctor can explain, and I've had a battery of tests.
I find it extremely alarming Twitter's unfettered censorship spread into medical fields and affected millions of Americans by suppressing expert opinions from doctors and censoring those who disagree with the CDC. I have great regrets about getting this shot because of the health issues that I now have that I don't think are ever going to go away.
I love it.
Preach, lady.
That's great.
Especially coming from Nancy Mace.
Because Nancy Mace is not some rock-ribbed conservative Republican.
Far from it.
She is one of the most liberal Republicans in the whole caucus.
And even on this issue, Nancy Mace not that long ago was going on CNN to promote the experimental drug.
I've been a proponent of vaccinations and wearing masks when we need to.
When we had the Delta variant raging in South Carolina, I wrote an op-ed to my community.
And I've worked with our State Department of Health.
I've run ads encouraging my district to go and get vaccinated.
And when we have these variants and we have these spikes to take every precaution from washing our hands to wearing the N95 or KN95 masks more than the medical masks, there is a statistically significant So it's ironic that you've got Nancy Mace at the big tech hearing complaining about censorship, of mis and disinformation.
She did spread a lot of mis and disinformation, and I think she did it honestly.
She spread the information that she was...
Unfortunately, believing from the crooked left-wing public health authorities.
And now, after having done that for quite some time, she says, wait a second, I got the stupid shot.
I regret it.
I shouldn't have gotten it.
I have health issues from it now.
And it's outrageous that you, big tech, you were censoring information.
The lesson here is that the best shot that we have of getting answers...
The best shot that we have at stopping the censorship, specifically of the medical information on the internet, is when the vaccine harms people in power.
That's it.
I'm sorry to say it.
I'm sorry that Nancy Mace is suffering side effects.
I'm sorry that lots of people are suffering side effects from the experimental drug.
That's a bad thing.
It is simply a fact, though, that the only way we're going to get to the truth of this is We're going to expose the truth and we're going to stop the censorship of the truth.
It's not when Great Aunt Sally had side effects from the vaccine.
It's not when your kid gets myocarditis because his school made him get the vaccine.
It's when members of Congress have side effects.
It's when People with a platform and with the ability to wield political power.
When they deal with it, that's when you're going to get answers.
I said the other day when we were talking about that viral clip of a little girl being beaten up on a school bus.
I said, nothing is going to happen here.
There's not going to be some new rule.
There's not going to be some new law.
Because the people who make the rules and the laws don't send their kids to those schools.
So they just don't care.
It's a hot political potato.
No one wants to touch this.
If you touch it, there's a risk you're going to be called a racist.
People are called racist for everything these days.
It's expensive.
It's hard.
They're just not going to touch it.
If their kids went to those schools, you know damn well those schools would be fixed in five minutes.
Okay, I think that's what we're going to start seeing with the vaccines.
Now that people in power...
We're dealing with the side effects.
All of a sudden, you're going to see far less of a push for the vaccine mandates.
Now, this hearing on big tech was absolutely magnificent.
There's much to say about it as pertains to AOC. She had some real, real faceplant moments, and it was the highlight of the hearing.
I'm going to get to more of it tomorrow.
There's one that I have to get to, though, is AOC complaining about The Republicans complaining about the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
New York Post had this alleged information and was trying to publish it without any corroboration, without any backup information.
They were trying to publish it to Twitter.
Twitter did not let them, and now they were upset.
I believe that political operatives who sought to inject explosive disinformation with the Washington Post couldn't get away with it.
And now they're livid.
And they want the ability to do it again.
They want the ability to inject this again.
So they've dragged a social media platform here in Congress.
They're weaponizing the use of this committee so that they can do it again.
A whole hearing about a 24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation.
That is why we are here right now.
And it's just an abuse of public resources and abuse of public time.
We could be talking about health care.
We could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs.
We could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights.
But instead, we're talking about Hunter Biden's half-fake laptop story.
I mean, this is an embarrassment.
There it is.
There it is.
So first of all, the factual claims she's making are not true.
She says it was a half-fake laptop story.
It's not.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was completely 100% correct.
It was not a right-wing political operation, or if the right-wing obviously liked the story because it exposed the truth about the Biden family and a lot of crimes, but it was a true story.
They got it completely right, and the Libs censored it anyway.
What AOC just said there at the end, though, Was her Hillary Clinton moment.
What she said at the end there was her Benghazi hearing.
What difference at this point does it make?
Who cares?
Who cares about the Hunter Biden laptop story?
That was the commentary.
The commentary from the hearing.
Are we wasting our time?
Who cares about the Hunter Biden laptop story?
you do.
You guys obviously care.
You obviously cared enough to instantly weaponize all of big tech to censor this story, not just on the public platforms.
You got big tech to prevent people from privately messaging the story.
You thought this story was such a big deal.
This story that's been proven 100% true, even Hunter Biden admits it.
Now he's suing, actually, these, Wait a second.
Years later, I'm willing to admit that it was my laptop.
How'd you get it?
I'm going to start suing you for it.
You guys cared so much.
You thought that this would be so detrimental to Biden's presidential campaign.
Polls after the election showed that 12% of Biden voters said, had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop story, they would not have voted for Joe Biden.
Could have been the difference between Biden winning and losing.
You guys cared that much, and now you're pretending that we're the ones who are obsessed here.
This is what the libs do all the time.
They say, oh, who cares about transgender bathrooms?
You do!
That's why you're trying to change the bathrooms.
We conservatives had no problem with men using the men's room and women using the women's room.
You're the one who made a big deal about it.
You're the ones that started passing all these crazy laws and showing up to the state capitals and screaming and crying and pretending that men are women.
You're the ones doing it.
And conservatives should not fall for this.
Do not fall for that trick and that trap of saying, well, you guys, if you show any interest in this issue at all, you guys are obsessives.
You're fanatics.
No.
No, no, no.
We like the truth.
We care about the truth.
You're the one starting all of the aggression in the culture wars, and now you got caught.
We got you dead to rights.
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Our economy is in absolute shambles.
Things are looking worse and worse.
And when I need economic advice, since I don't know anything about economics, well, I've got a great resource that I can call.
People who have supported this show for a very long time, that would be our friends over at Birch Gold.
The national debt is $31.5 trillion.
The Fed met last week to promise that everything's going to work out just fine.
We've heard those promises before.
It hasn't always been great.
I can barely afford eggs, okay?
Certainly not the eggs that my wife wants to buy.
She wants to buy the college-educated eggs that are not only raised in pastures, but also drive around in Corvettes and get foot massages.
So the economy is in a very, very difficult situation.
And when I want to make sense of the economy...
Who do I call?
Who do I call?
I call my friends over at Birch Gold Group, specifically Philip Patrick, who is the precious metals specialist.
We had Philip over, I think it was maybe a year ago or so, came on and was able to illuminate my basic economic ignorance.
And so I'm hoping that we can have a similar effect again.
Thank you, sir, for coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure.
So, how am I supposed to make sense of this?
Because I remember 10 years ago, I was really concerned about the national debt.
There's a little more than 10 years ago.
The conservatives actually were talking about this issue.
And that's back when debt to GDP was about 90%.
Today, debt to GDP is about 123%.
National debt pushing up on $32 trillion.
That's about, what, $90,000-ish per citizen, per...
Citizen, quarter million per taxpayer, because those are obviously two different groups of people.
So, what does it mean for the future of the economy?
I mean, what does it mean that eggs now cost $9 a dozen?
I mean, look, people are feeling this day to day, and we've got this sort of very tough situation where wages are not increasing anywhere near...
Close to the cost of goods and services and essentially headline inflation.
That becomes very problematic because that's when people's paycheck doesn't do what it did last month or the month before.
It's a very tough climate that we're in.
We're facing this concept of stagflation, right?
Stunted economic growth coupled with rising inflation.
It's very painful.
We had it 70s to 80s was the last time here in the United States.
It's a perfect storm.
We've got a lot of tough issues coming together at once.
Now, Philip, what do you make of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell saying that actually you don't need to worry about increased inflation?
I think he said that the disinflationary process has begun.
You don't buy it.
I just don't buy it at all, right?
If we dig into the numbers, it's pretty obvious.
We haven't seen very many meaningful reductions.
So headline inflation has come down a little bit, but core inflation, and that is everything outside of food and energy, is really sticky.
What's interesting, though, is looking at where prices have fallen.
They've fallen in exactly two categories.
One, gas, which surged, of course, a year ago and now is reverting back to the mean a little bit, and I think predominantly on the back of demand destruction, and used cars and trucks, right?
That's it.
Everything else pretty much has gone up.
So this idea that we have a handle on inflation, I think, is a little bit of a fallacy.
In fact, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers came out and pointed out, he said, look, inflation is still at levels that would have been deeply alarming just two years ago.
More than that, though, I think we've got to look at the bigger picture, right?
89% of CEOs are predicting a recession this year.
We're seeing very large layoffs in the tech sector.
Corporate spending on equipment has plunged now to the same levels as the worst of the sort of pre-pandemic panic.
My point is simply that this rosy picture, strong jobs reports or declining inflation, it's a little bit of an illusion.
And I think CEOs who are operating in the real world, they know it, and they're already tightening their belts in anticipation, I think, of a very tough few years ahead.
So, yeah, tough times ahead.
Do you think that the political debates going on right now, specifically over, say, the debt ceiling, which is this recurrent, it's now perennial political debate, and the Republicans don't want to raise the debt ceiling, and the Democrats do, and then eventually they end up doing it.
Although now the GOP has the House, so I guess it could be a little more tense.
Do you think that is going to have serious economic consequences?
The debt ceiling debate is incredibly important.
You mentioned at the beginning of this how debt has expanded over the last 10 years, debt to GDP. The US's debt to GDP position is in line with countries like Venezuela.
It's bizarre at the moment.
The debt ceiling debate is very, very important.
Right now, as you mentioned, we're sort of at this impasse.
The Republicans are saying, look, we're only going to raise the debt ceiling if we make some cutbacks.
We curb this spending.
And the Democrats are coming out and saying, no, we don't.
We want a clean debt ceiling height.
We want no conditions on the debt ceiling height.
The Republican side is one I understand.
We're amassing debt.
They're saying, look, if we're going to continue to spend money, we need to try and curb it in certain areas and sort of bring it down.
It's the Biden regime's position that I find very tough to understand.
They've drawn a line in the sand.
They're saying, look, we don't want to negotiate.
This isn't a binary issue of principle here.
We're not talking about abortion or gun control.
We're talking about fiscal discipline.
This is about balancing the books.
Coming to the table unwilling to negotiate is a bizarre and quite frankly indefensible position.
What they've issued is essentially an ultimatum and it's just not going to work.
Talking about what's a The debt ceiling is the only limit we have on infinite government spending.
The Federal Reserve, they can print infinite amounts of dollars.
That's not the problem.
The problem is that our leadership has been running up debt ever since 2001.
That was the last year that income exceeded expenditure here in the United States.
And quite simply, that cannot last forever.
It is insustainable.
So this debt ceiling debate is very, very important.
The Republicans won't allow a default, but they've got to force some concessions.
It's a great point that unlike certain political issues, this isn't simply black or white, you know, an issue of principle.
The fact that Biden refuses to negotiate about money, about dollars, which obviously, you know, if we can't come to some kind of compromises and agreements about dollars, we're not going to do about anything.
But then even, I don't want to let the Republicans off the hook, the fact that the Republican leader has said that entitlement reform is completely off the table.
I get it.
Entitlement reform is not a popular political issue, but entitlements are 46% of the federal budget.
So if you're not going to touch entitlements, the only way that you could possibly get down to balancing the budget would be to cut 85% of all other spending, which is impossible.
You're not going to get rid of effectively all government spending other than a handful of entitlement programs.
So we're just sort of stuck, and so what are we going to do?
We're just going to keep amassing debt until our dollars and our political influence around the world is worthless?
I mean, sadly, it's looking that way, and this is why it becomes an issue of leadership.
But you're right, it's both sides of the fence.
Like I said, it's been since 2001 that we haven't managed to really get a handle on this.
We've had Republicans and Democrats.
So this is a political issue, and we've got to curb it.
At the end of the day, over the last 300 years, they've been 700 currencies, and they've gone one of two ways.
They either significantly devalue through money printing, right?
Pound sterling being one of those, or they disappear entirely.
So this is a strange position.
It's not one that we haven't seen before in history, but if we want to keep our position as global reserve currency world leader, this is a problem we have to get in check, and we have to do it now.
It's very important.
I know that your expertise, obviously, Philip, is in gold, and I, being of Italian extraction, know a thing or two about gold myself.
I'm not buying up quite as much as the central banks are, but the Italians, they like some nice jewelry every now and again.
So I read somewhere that we're seeing an uptick in gold buying from global central banks.
I don't know anything about that, and I certainly don't know what that means.
An uptick is absolutely the case.
Central Bank worldwide bought more gold than they have in over 60 years.
So I think the writing is on the wall.
Central Bank's increasing gold holdings, Russians, Chinese, Europeans as well.
What we're seeing is a global trend of de-dollarization.
And I think looking at what the US Federal Reserve is doing, increasing the amount of dollars.
Listen, 80% of dollars that exist worldwide didn't exist three years ago.
That's the scale of this policy, right?
Yeah.
Look, central banks around the world, they're holding dollars.
The more money we print, ultimately, it leads to a devaluation of those dollars.
And shorter term, gold is the way to hedge against that.
When the dollar goes down, gold prices move up.
And I think what central banks are doing is saying, look, the Fed are printing money.
Let's hedge some of that exposure using gold.
What's true for them is true for us as individuals, albeit on a much, much smaller scale, right?
You know, we're holding dollars as well.
Those dollars are losing buying power.
And gold is one of the best ways to prevent that, right?
They go up as the dollar goes down.
They increase with the cost of living.
So they're a very good way for governments to hedge dollar decline, but for individuals as well.
And that's why we're seeing that trend.
No, I tell you, I had this thought.
Fortunately, right now, people obviously want to have a diversified portfolio, and that includes, especially if you're kind of conservative in your economic thinking, that is going to include some precious metals.
It's almost certainly going to include gold.
I was kicking myself, though, because while I'm not very exposed right now on stocks, which is good.
That saved me some money in recent years.
I've just got too much cash.
And so you see, you know, as you see, I mean, one never has too much cash.
But in terms of where you're diversifying your portfolio, if you've got a lot of your money in cash, then when inflation hits at record levels, as it has in recent years, you're just burning money.
Well, I'm glad you've, Philip, underscored my family's and my culture's natural inclination to get gold.
Not just for the pinky rings, though, you know, maybe in larger quantities than that.
Philip, thank you so much for coming on, and where can people learn more?
It's very simple.
They text NOLS to 989898.
Again, that's NOLS to 989898.
And what that's going to do, it's going to give them access to information because information is everything.
Once you know the problems, the solutions start to present themselves.
So we're offering a free information kit for your listeners, for your viewers.
They can come out, learn a lot about gold.
And once you know, the decisions become easier.
Philip Patrick, thank you so much for coming on as always.
We'll see you next time there's an economic meltdown and I need to pick your brain some more.
I look forward to it.
Thank you for having me, Michael.
So just text Knowles to 989898.
We've got a lot coming up on the member block.
It is Woke Thursday.
It's not supposed to be Woke Wednesday.
It's Woke Thursday, though.
The producers have a video.
They say they need my expertise on radical leftist culture.
