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March 14, 2024 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:01
Ep. 1446 - Republicans Call Hunter Biden's Bluff In Epic Fashion

House Republicans call Hunter Biden’s bluff, Joy Reid says Trump stacked bodies on the ground during COVID, and nearly 30% of Zoomer girls identify as LGBTQ. Click here to join the member exclusive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEl Ep.1446 - - -  DailyWire+: Unlock your Bentkey 14-day free trial here: https://bit.ly/3GSz8go Get your Yes or No game here: https://bit.ly/3X6tlKY   - - -  Today’s Sponsors: PreBorn! - Help save babies from abortion: https://preborn.com/Knowles  Policygenius - Get your free life insurance quote & see how much you could save: http://policygenius.com/Knowles  - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RwKpq6  Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3BqZLXA  Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eEmwyg  Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3L273Ek

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Do you remember back in December when House Republicans tried to get Hunter Biden to testify about his family's extreme political corruption?
And Hunter refused on the basis that that testimony was gonna be behind closed doors.
It wasn't gonna be public.
Here is what Hunter said at the time.
These same committee chairmen have engaged in unprecedented political interference in what would have already been A five-year investigation of me.
Yet, here I am, Mr. Chairman, taking up your offer when you said we can bring these people in for depositions or committee hearings, whichever they choose.
Well, I've chosen.
I'm here to testify at a public hearing today to answer any of the committee's legitimate questions.
Republicans do not want An open process where Americans can see their tactics, expose their baseless inquiry, or hear what I have to say.
What are they afraid of?
I'm here.
I'm ready.
Why not testify now, sir?
Why not testify now?
He is ready, okay?
You hear him?
He'll testify, but ain't gonna be in private.
Uh-uh.
No closed-door testimony.
It had to be public.
Until House Republicans invited him to testify in public, at which point he refused.
Here's a letter from Hunter Biden's lawyer.
I probably pity Hunter Biden's lawyer more than I pity any other man in America.
Can you imagine a worse job for a less reputable fellow?
Dear Chairman Comer, I received your March 6th letter.
Uh, inviting Hunter Biden to join a panel of other witnesses at a hearing that you are attempting to arrange on March 20th.
To begin, even if that hearing was a legitimate exercise of constitutional authority, neither Mr. Biden nor I can attend.
Because of a court hearing the very next day in California.
The scheduling conflict is the least of the issues, however.
So it opens up, it says, hey, you're only giving me two weeks to figure out if I can come testify at the public hearing that I asked for, that I said I would be more than happy to testify at.
Yeah, two weeks, we can't arrange that.
But then at least the lawyer acknowledges.
He says, but look, the scheduling conflict is the least of the worries.
We just don't want to testify.
Because we're extremely corrupt and you called our bluff.
Hunter can't testify.
Can't testify in private.
He can't testify in public.
He can't testify in his own private journal because the Hunter Biden scandals are not really about Hunter Biden.
We've already heard the testimony.
We have the journal.
We have his texts.
We have his emails.
We have his videos.
We have everything on his laptop.
None of us cares all that much about Hunter Biden's transgressions.
We do care about his father's corruption, which we already know about.
We know about it.
We know about Biden's corruption.
And Biden knows that we know about Biden's corruption.
And we know that Biden knows that we know about Biden's corruption.
It's all kind of out there in the open already.
These guys are gangsters.
That's that.
They go around the world shaking down rich oligarchs, selling American influence.
They've done it for years, stonewalling, demanding hearings, then saying they're not going to show up to the hearings, and they're going to shake their hand underneath their chin if you tell them otherwise.
These guys are gangsters, and when it comes to the 2024 election, they're going to act like it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
- Welcome back to the show.
The House of Representatives has passed a bill banning TikTok.
I mentioned yesterday on the show that I aspire to be an influencer.
I just have to become a chick and hot and younger, and then I too could be a TikTok influencer.
Well, that dream is gone!
Because the House seems dead set on banning the Chinese app from America.
We will get to what that means.
First, though, a platform where I still do have some influence.
YouTube.
Make sure you ring that bell.
Subscribe to the Michael Knowles YouTube channel.
Smash it.
Click it.
Ding it.
Dong it.
Whatever you gotta do.
Democrats are admitting that This election is going to be cynical.
There's not going to be an uplifting, elevating sort of debate, civil discourse.
There's not going to be good faith promises made and kept.
It's going to be a cynical play.
Chris Murphy, who is the Democrat Senator from Connecticut, he just admitted on Twitter that Democrats pretty much can only win this election on envy.
These are his words.
I don't want to put words in his mouth.
This is what Senator Murphy said.
He said, quote, a new study showing that four out of five Democratic candidates don't talk about billionaire and corporate power.
Democrats cannot win if we just talk about programs.
We need to tell a story about how the concentration and wealth and power is ruining America.
So, Murphy is an old school Dem.
He wants to talk about the millionaires and the billionaires.
He sounds like Bernie Sanders, but a little bit more urbane in New England, I guess.
Same story, though.
We're going to win by convincing the poor people to go eat the rich people.
That's a little old school, Democrat Party.
The more modern Democrats focus their envy more on identity politics.
So, you know, getting black people to hate white people, or getting women to hate men, or getting sexual deviants to hate normal people, or whatever it is, they're trying to make the envy a little bit more about cultural matters and identity matters.
Murphy goes back to the tried and true strategy of getting the poor to hate the rich, and convincing the poor that if they hate the rich, that's going to make the poor richer, somehow.
In any case, it's always about envy.
And envy is a sin.
It's one of the deadly sins, actually.
But this is what the liberals always go to.
I don't think I'm being hyperbolic or needlessly provocative to say that the Democrats appeal to Sin.
They have parades for the deadliest of the seven deadly sins.
Pride.
All of the other ones, too.
Sloth.
You shouldn't have to work.
You should just be entitled to the fruits of other people's labor.
Or envy, obviously.
Or lust.
I mean, we see that everywhere.
Or gluttony, even.
You know, let's go body positivity, baby.
Stuff your face.
No limits.
This is the kind of thing they appeal to.
And I'm not saying Republicans are always paragons of virtue, but At least they talk like it some of the time, and hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
This is what this is coming down to.
And I guess the Democrats have been here for a long time, but they have to appeal to the base passions when they've got nothing else.
He says it's not enough to just talk about programs.
Yeah, because your programs are terrible.
No one likes them.
They don't work.
If your programs worked, then that would tell the story.
This is the language he uses.
He doesn't want to say, appeal to envy, soak the rich.
So he says, we need to tell a story.
Yeah, duh.
Whenever you speak, you're telling a story.
What story are you telling?
You're telling a story that appeals to envy and low passions.
Why?
Because the story about your programs and the story about your accomplishments is not very impressive.
It's impressive in as much as it's shocking what a terrible job you've done.
So you can't tell a story on the border, you can't really tell a story on the economy.
The Democrats try, but people know when they go to the grocery store that their carton of milk is now like $10 billion an ounce.
I don't know the exact milk prices, my wife does the shopping, but everyone knows.
If you even look at your household budget, basic stuff that you want to buy now three years into the Biden administration is much more expensive.
People are experiencing hard times no matter what the GDP numbers say, no matter what the liberal economists say on TV.
They can't tell that story.
They can't tell a story about global affairs, America's back, maybe we're leading the world.
No, we've got the outbreak of the first major war in Europe since World War II.
You've got the outbreak of a serious war in the Middle East.
And you've got a foreign invasion, which lumps back into immigration.
So they don't have that kind of positive story.
It's not enough for them to talk about programs.
True.
They've got to appeal to envy and sin and other low passions, if they even want to have a chance.
Now, what is the alternative here?
Could they possibly, even if they can't talk about Biden's policy achievements, of which there are none, could they at least talk about how Biden is a great inspirational leader?
Barack Obama was terrible when it comes to policy.
The country became much more miserable under his watch, but his personality still appealed to a lot of people.
Didn't exactly appeal to me, probably didn't appeal to you, but it did appeal to a lot of Americans.
He was taken, and especially because he's the first black president, he was taken to be a symbol of inspiration, even if he personally wasn't all that inspirational.
What about Biden?
Is Biden a symbol of inspiration?
I don't think so.
There was that special counsel investigation into Biden because Biden, everything they accused Trump of doing, Biden has just done in a worse way.
But the special counsel did not prosecute Joe Biden for doing a more egregious version of some of the crimes they're accusing Trump of doing.
And the reason that the special counsel Didn't prosecute him, it would seem, is that Joe Biden is really senile.
And the special counsel came out and said it would be fruitless to prosecute this guy.
He's going to seem like a doddering, somewhat sympathetic, declining old man.
So now we have the transcript, thanks to the House Republicans.
I now understand why Hunter Biden doesn't exactly want to testify before these people, because they're coming to get answers.
And unfortunately, this is just absolutely brutal.
This transcript of the interview totally buttresses the account of the special counsel.
Here are just a few of the things that Joe Biden asked.
He asked, when did I announce for president in 2019?
When did I announce?
He obviously doesn't remember when he announced for president.
He said, if it was 2013, when did I stop being vice president?
When did I stop?
Joe Biden gets elected vice president in 2008.
He's there until 2016.
So we're talking about smack dab in the middle of this administration.
It was 2013.
When did I stop being vice president?
In 2009, am I still Vice President?
Trump gets elected in November of 2017?
Huh?
No, it's 2016.
Even that, it's not even that he's just mistaking one year for another, which would be bad enough, but we don't hold elections on odd-numbered years, generally, for the President, right?
Four-year terms, we tend to hold them 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, remember that was when Biden got elected.
Really, really brutal.
2016, 2020, remember that was when Biden got elected.
Really, really brutal.
On the same day, twice, Biden struggled to find the words for fax machine.
in.
You see where there's a printer, this is what he said.
You see where there's a printer and there's a, what do they call it?
The machine that, and then the White House counsel had to tell him the phrase fax machine.
So bad.
There's a lot more to this, but we've got this coming out.
The specificity is what is so brutal.
The fact that not only are we hearing abstract stories about Biden kind of losing it, we're seeing it.
We're seeing it on camera.
We're seeing it when the special counsel transcripts are being released.
We will see it as the House continues to investigate Biden and his administration, which is why they've got the Stonewall and they've got nothing to offer other than to point at the Republicans and say, look at how terrible they are.
Trump is a fascist and the Republicans Go eat them.
The Republicans, they're the cause of your problems.
The Republicans don't have political power right now, man.
We're out.
Other than the House, where we try to hold investigations and the Democrats won't speak.
There is so much more to say.
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Speaking of blaming Republicans.
New York Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul has come to a novel perspective on the crisis at the southern border.
And that perspective is that despite the DHS department being run by Alejandro Mayorkas, a Democrat, despite the White House, which is ultimately in control of this, being run by Joe Biden now for three years, despite many liberal activists and politicians, including the President,
Encouraging the invasion across the southern border and grounding it in radical ideological statements such as no person is illegal, such as this is not our land, such as these foreign nationals are future undocumented Americans.
Despite all of that, Kathy Oakle says the crisis at the border is the Republicans' fault.
We are a nation of immigrants.
I'm sitting here because- My grandparents were teenagers in Ireland leaving great poverty.
Grandpa started as a migrant farm worker himself in South Dakota in the wheat fields.
The Republicans in Congress and in the Senate Said no because Donald Trump called them up one night, the night before they should have voted on this, to send 2,000 more agents or border patrol people to the border.
I need some on the northern border by the way, we border Canada.
Money for states like New York, that would have helped us a lot.
And just have a different path of citizenship and look at the asylum and whether it's too loose right now the way it's being used and probably abused.
I blame the Republicans now.
The mess was bipartisan before that.
Democrats and Republicans have not successfully found a way to have a path to legal citizenship because the employers want this.
Does anyone really believe this?
I don't think so.
I don't think Kathy Hochul believes it.
I don't think the ladies at The View even believe it.
And I certainly don't think that the average American voter believes it.
They have seen Joe Biden going and sending in federal agents to remove border wall.
Some of the border wall that Trump built, some of the border wall that Texas built.
Not only not helping to stop the invasion, but actually encouraging it.
They've heard Joe Biden calling for these people to come to America.
They've seen the reports of the flights, Joe Biden flying these people all around.
And furthermore, they know that we don't need some new immigration law.
It's not as though, all of a sudden, six months ago, the Democrats said, oh my goodness, we have, for the first time ever, we have people trying to enter our country illegally.
We ought to pass an immigration law.
Oh, by golly, how did we make it this long?
Centuries in this country without any immigration laws.
Darn, we really need to pass one.
Why won't you Republicans help us pass one?
We have immigration laws.
The Democrats won't enforce them.
We got the laws.
There's a lot of money.
There's a lot of laws.
The Democrats are intentionally not enforcing them.
Alejandro Mayorkas is being impeached because he refuses to enforce the laws that are already on the books to do his job.
What's one more law going to do?
Nothing.
There is no reason to believe that if the Republicans pass some new immigration law, magically, all of a sudden, that's the one the Democrats are going to enforce.
That was a trap the whole time.
And the Republicans didn't take the bait, I'm very pleased to say.
Some of the squishes did want to take the bait, but Trump and other conservatives called the Republican members of Congress and said, hey, don't take the bait, this is a total loser.
And then the Democrats, once you take the bait on this bogus immigration law, which one, would be terrible, it would actually increase the number of migrants of foreign nationals surging to the border to up to 8,500 a day before they really lift a finger to stop it.
And it would provide all sorts of things that Kathy Hochul wants.
A pathway to future citizenship for these poor beleaguered economic migrants who are violating our basic laws.
The moment the Republicans took that bait, then the Democrats credibly could say, oh yeah, it's Republicans' fault too.
That's what she's so desperate.
She's saying, well, it's both parties' fault.
And now it's the Republicans' fault that we're not enforcing the laws that are already on the books.
They're going to blame us anyway, but they would have had a lot more credibility to do so had Republicans followed the swishes and the libs, and had they not followed Trump and the conservatives and said, no, thanks.
So they're going to try to blame us for Biden's immigration crisis.
They're also now apparently going to try to blame us for COVID.
And for the COVID lockdowns that they primarily pushed.
Joy Reid, liberal talking head who makes it on all sorts of conservative shows because she's among the wackiest on cable TV.
Joy Reid comes out and she says Donald Trump during COVID, that guy was stacking dead bodies.
Which era do you want to relive?
The chaotic, frankly, insane four years of crazy tweets, migrant kids ripped from their parents' arms, random fights with our allies, and a million bodies in the ground due to COVID?
The bodies stacked up in refrigerated trucks because the hospitals ran out of room?
The states fighting over ventilators?
The old people dying by themselves and saying their goodbyes on iPads?
The economy literally collapsing and all of us stuck in our homes for a year?
Kids having to graduate from high school and college on Zoom?
Or the Biden era, where the president is old, yes, and set in his ways and some of his policies infuriating.
Trump didn't want to deal with a public health catastrophe.
He didn't want to take the blame or get bad press.
So instead, he spent months pushing crack science, taking advice from snake oil salesmen instead of public health experts.
He mainstreamed the anti-vax movement, which is going so strong today that we are facing measles outbreaks among unvaccinated children.
This is the most scattershot, internally inconsistent attack on Donald Trump I have seen yet, which is really saying something.
There's so much more to say.
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What exactly is Joy Reid accusing Trump of?
It's not.
Is she accusing him of creating the coronavirus?
I don't think Trump, for all of his sins, I don't think Trump was over there in the lab in Wuhan, you know, stirring up petri dishes.
She's saying we shouldn't go back to Trump, because if you go back to Trump, we'll get COVID again.
I mean, in a way, that's possibly true, since the practical effect of COVID was changing all the election laws so that the Democrats could rig it in their own favor.
So I don't know, maybe they will do a COVID again.
But in any case, I don't think you can blame Trump for the virus.
And then she accuses him of doing too much to address COVID.
The whole economy collapsed.
We shut down the whole economy.
It's true.
It is true.
The government under Trump did shut down large parts of the economy.
That's unfortunate.
I mean, in some ways it was largely, it was driven by the Democrats pressuring him to do that and the libs and people like yours truly, Dr. Fauci.
But then in the next breath, she accuses him of not doing enough to address COVID.
So which is it?
He created COVID, then he overreacted by taking the virus too seriously and making sure that people do too much to protect themselves, so much so that he locked down the whole country.
But then he actually didn't do anything at all, and he didn't lock down the country, and he didn't tell people to protect themselves, and he pushed quack science.
Also, by the way, we're talking about something that happened over three years ago.
I guess almost exactly three years ago now?
Yeah, almost middle of March was when we heard 15 days to slow the spread, and that kept going.
This is the best they've got?
A three-year-old story that is, even in their own attacks, totally inconsistent and contradictory.
What do they argue?
Do they want to say that Trump was too hard during COVID?
Do they want to say he was too lenient?
They don't know because Their voters can't even agree on that.
And people also don't really remember the details because it was so long ago.
This was the DeSantis campaign.
The DeSantis campaign was predicated on how good DeSantis was during COVID and how he was relatively better than Trump.
And it went nowhere.
And it went nowhere because people want to know what you've done for me lately.
Because people in politics tend to have short attention spans.
But in this case, the Biden campaign can't even say we did such a great job during COVID cuz they were doing the same stuff Trump was doing in a lot of cases.
The worst aspects of Trump's COVID policy were being pushed by the Democrats.
And that actually helped to increase the popularity of Republican governors who said no to the Democrats like Ron DeSantis.
But even Ron DeSantis doesn't get helped by it too much because it was three years ago, no one cares anymore.
This is the best they got.
That is a terrifying fact for the Democrats.
But then I think, I put myself in Joy Reid's shoes, I put myself in the Biden family's shoes, I put myself in the White House strategist's shoes.
What else are they gonna run on?
Trump's a criminal?
Shoot, we're criminals.
There's a border crisis?
Well, the border was a lot better under Trump.
Well, the economy?
Well, the economy was a lot better under Trump, too, until COVID, which we said was a really big deal and we made you shut the country down over.
What are we left with?
Pretty soon, Joe Biden is going to be arguing about how things were so much better when he was in the Senate in 1973.
They're going to just have to keep going back and back and back and back because everything they've done lately has been so Disastrous.
What's the theme of the Biden campaign?
Tell me the theme.
I don't think I'm being unnecessarily harsh here.
I don't think I'm just being a Republican hack or something.
I can't point to the theme.
Biden's theme in 2020 was, Trump's a racist.
Remember, the first campaign ad for Biden was, Trump called Nazis good people in Charlottesville, which didn't happen, obviously.
But that was it.
Trump's a racist.
Are they going to run on that again?
I guess that's what Kara Swisher, the liberal journalist, said should happen on CNN.
Call Trump a racist and a fascist and a rapist.
But none of that's really working, I don't think.
Because the poll numbers, which have been relatively reliable, at least in the Republican primary, show that the more they do that, the higher Trump's numbers go.
So what do they got?
Let me know.
Actually, don't let me know.
Let Joe Biden know.
He's the one who's asking for it.
Speaking of the Republican presidential nomination, Trump officially has clinched the nomination.
I feel like I have said that, some version of that statement, about a dozen times on the show.
But it's because there just continue to be more official markers that he's the, so one would be When the other candidates in the primary no longer have a mathematical path to victory.
It's okay, Trump's the nominee.
Then you'd say, when they drop out of the race, you say, okay, Trump now doesn't have any challengers, so he's officially the nominee.
Well now, he's not formally the nominee until they go to the party convention, but he has clinched the GOP nomination after winning four more primaries because he now has the requisite delegates to win.
You need 1,215 delegates To win the nomination after the primaries in Georgia, Mississippi, Hawaii, and Washington.
Trump has 1241.
He's the guy.
Even if Marianne Williamson switches parties, runs in the Republican primary, even if any of the other candidates unsuspend their campaigns, it's over.
The only way to stop Trump from being the nominee is for a lightning bolt to come out of the Democrats or out of the sky to kill him before the nomination.
God forbid.
Say what you will about Trump, he does not face the same problem Biden does.
Biden has no campaign theme.
Trump has one.
Trump's campaign theme is American Greatness.
That's it.
There are different kinds of Republican campaign themes over the years.
One is, shrink the government, get the government off my back.
Another one is, go bomb the Middle East, you know, let's spread democracy all around the world.
Another one is, we're going to be compassionate conservatives, a kinder, gentler conservatism.
There have been a lot of different themes.
Trump's is American greatness.
We're going to make America great again.
There's an irony here, which is that Perhaps the most consistent and hysterical critic of Donald Trump from within formerly influential Republican circles is probably Bill Kristol, former Chief of Staff to Dan Quayle, the Vice President for George Bush and former editor of the Weekly Standard and one of the leaders of the Never Trump movement.
But Bill Kristol, not so long ago, called for this theme, American Greatness.
There have been a lot of Republicans who have recognized this is a strong theme.
Get the government off my back might appeal to some people on certain issues in practical ways.
It's not a winning campaign message.
You don't win campaigns by saying you won't do things.
That's not how it works.
You don't win campaigns, you don't inspire people by saying if you elect me I won't do anything.
I'll sit on my hands.
He who governs least governs best.
That might work for certain libertarian think tank policy wonks.
It's not going to resonate for people.
Bombing the Middle East?
That's not going to resonate for people these days either, I don't think.
Compassionate conservatism, we're going to be more like the Squishes.
I don't think that's going to resonate.
But American greatness, make America great again, that appeals to a lot of people.
And that has been Trump's theme.
There have been other Republicans who have used that theme.
Ronald Reagan would be one of them.
Make America great again.
I think Nixon actually used that theme even before Reagan.
That's a strong theme.
Compared to what's Biden's slogan?
Come on, Jack.
We're going to have some ice cream, Jack.
Or make America great again.
Which one are you voting for?
How are we going to make America great again?
Well, one way the House Republicans are doing it is by banning TikTok.
Obviously, this will have to go to the Senate, and then will have to be signed by the President, so a lot of hurdles left.
But the House has approved this bill, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which calls for China to divest TikTok, or for the app to just be banned in the United States.
This bill has become very controversial, even among Republicans, even among conservative Republicans.
So on the one hand, you've got Thomas Massey, Who's very conservative and quite libertarian.
But he's not one of the Lalbertarians on the internet.
He's one of the guys who's so libertarian that he's actually kind of conservative again.
Anyway, I like Massey, but he totally opposes it.
Meanwhile, it was introduced by Mike Gallagher, and other Republicans obviously support it, from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
What do I think about this?
I mentioned yesterday on the show.
I think the ban TikTok bill is really a battle between the Libertarians and the Nationalists.
The Libertarians say, don't regulate my internet.
Don't regulate anything.
If you regulate this application and this website, then you're probably going to use that to regulate other things.
And you're going to go after X. And you're going to go after all the Republicans.
Don't get your government hands out of my internet.
And they've got something of a point.
The nationalists are going to say, hey, libertarians, shut up.
What do you mean?
I can't even stop a foreign adversary?
The Chinese Communist Party is using TikTok to melt the brains of my children?
They're specifically targeting kids?
Uh-uh, I don't think so.
We're going to assert our political liberty to kick these guys out of America.
So which is it?
How do we figure out who's right?
Because they actually both have a point.
I think the entire debate should revolve around two questions.
Does this actually involve national security?
Is China actually using TikTok to melt the brains of American citizens and specifically young people?
If so, we should take that seriously and I think there's a lot of evidence they are.
That's the first question.
Second one, is TikTok good for America?
Is it good?
Do we benefit from TikTok?
I don't know.
I'm on TikTok, even though I'm not a hot, young Zoomer girl.
But I think I still have an account somewhere.
I don't run it, but someone runs it.
I don't know.
I guess we get our message out there.
Is it good for America?
If it's not, then what are we even arguing about?
That's not good.
Why do we keep allowing, because of some idol that we've made out of choice, why do we keep allowing so many bad things to fester in America?
Well, you know, look, heroin might not be good for you, but I'll defend to the death your right to shoot it up.
Why?
I won't.
I'm not going to defend that at all.
Stop it.
Ban it.
Ban it, baby.
Which is it?
The Republicans have to answer those two questions.
Depending on the answers to those questions, you could make a reasonable argument for one or the other.
Now speaking of these tech platforms, very scary study out of UChicago.
Meta, which is the parent company for Facebook, has these headsets where you get trapped in virtual reality.
Meta has decided To push the product out into the public before it's totally clear that you won't get hacked and have your brain, you know, poked and prodded and deceived by all sorts of bad actors.
So this study out of Chicago shows that inception attacks on meta VR headsets can trap users in a fake virtual reality environment.
That is like the scariest thing I've ever heard.
Now what does that really mean?
The reality is slightly less scary.
It's not like you're just totally locked in there forever and you try to raise your hands to take the goggles off and you can't.
It's not quite like that.
But you can be really deceived.
Researchers have exposed this potential security vulnerability.
It's the inception attack, which allows an attacker to spy on and control a user's VR environment.
And what's really scary is only a third of the study participants noticed the glitch when their session was hijacked.
So they can hack in without the user knowing.
Control the user's VR environment, steal information, and manipulate interactions between users.
They could trap the user inside a single malicious VR application that masquerades as the full system.
I'm a Luddite, but from my limited understanding here, it would seem that you think that you're using the whole system, you think that you're seeing your environment and interacting with all of it, but actually you're just being trapped in a rabbit hole that's totally being controlled by the hacker.
I'm not at all surprised to read this.
It makes me even less inclined to put on the goggles, but I never wanted to put the goggles on in the first place.
Because as my friend Spencer Clavin pointed out, the pitch of the virtual reality goggles is, hey, would you rather live in the world that God gave you?
You know, the big beautiful world with birds and fish and sunshine and people and music.
Would you rather live in that world or would you rather live in a dystopian hellscape that Mark Zuckerberg made for you?
Who do you think makes a better world?
God or some weirdo geek in Silicon Valley?
For me, I would take the real world.
But this pushes us even more towards something that we have got to grab a hold of or we're going to lose our very sense of our own humanity, which is we are incarnate creatures.
We should prefer the real world to virtual reality.
The more and more that we live in virtual reality, the more we're going to lose sense of our identity.
We're going to lose sense of our sexual identity.
We're going to Be more inclined to believe that a man can secretly be a woman because the body won't matter as much.
We're going to be less connected to our political communities because the people around us aren't really going to matter.
We can be talking to someone on the other side of the world or we could be talking to a totally invented person.
A fake character, whether through AI or just the creation of some hacker.
We're going to be disconnected from our political community.
We're going to be disconnected from reality because we're going to spend our time plugged into the Matrix, you know, imagining that we can fly around.
Meanwhile, what?
Meanwhile, we're just going to be living like we're in that movie.
Like we're in a virtual reality.
Yeah, sure, it's bad if some really malicious hacker comes in and controls your environment and manipulates you, but that's all the virtual reality has been from the beginning.
Just replace the particularly malicious hacker with Mark Zuckerberg, and that's pretty much the thing.
That's not a bug of the system.
That is the system's feature.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Boblolma67, who says, Whoopi is turning into the antidote to Oprah's, you get a house, you get a house, you get a house.
Hers is, you go to jail, you go to jail, you go to jail.
Exactly.
And I actually didn't pick the comment for this reason, but it ties in exactly with what we're talking about today.
The Democrats can't offer even the handouts anymore.
They can't even offer the freebie programs.
They've got to do the opposite.
They've just got to stoke resentment, because they don't really have anything to offer, nothing that the voters are all that interested in.
So their only option is to go in the other direction, just say, all right, well, here comes the stick, baby.
Forget about the carrot, here comes the stick.
Speaking of weird stuff on the internet, before I even get to the headline, What percentage of Gen Z girls would you say identify as LGBTLMNOP?
Historically, for my lifetime, which doesn't involve all that much history, but we're talking about, what, 30 years now, the rate of people who identified as a little light in the loafers, you know, a little bit sweet, you know what I'm talking about?
A little bit of sugar in the tank there.
Do you catch my drift?
I'm talking about homosexuals!
The percentage of people was like 2% or something, 2 to 3%, and that had been pretty consistent.
And then, as it became popular on the political left, the numbers increased.
30% of Zoomer girls identify as LGBT, according to a new Gallup survey.
Another way of putting that, I guess, is A large number of young women really want attention and to feel special.
That's shocking, breaking.
Young women want attention and think they're really quirky.
Wow.
Man, stop the presses.
I've never heard that before.
It's kind of silly, though, because women will desire attention in all sorts of different ways as society changes and cultural norms change.
Today, the cultural norms are such that there's a lot of currency if you can claim some kind of sexual deviancy.
And so the women do that.
Another reason for this, I suspect, is that for a lot of these women, because we have this particularly strange identity politics system, according to which white women are among the worst people on earth, they need something to give them a struggle.
If you're an affluent white liberal female, there's a joke.
I think it was Michael Malice came up with it.
The affluent white female liberals are called awfuls.
You know, they're just awful.
Tucker Carlson said that liberal white women are his least favorite group in the world.
There's a slur to refer to these women as Karens.
And so the young white women, they don't want to become Karens.
They need a struggle.
But they don't have any actual struggle.
So they say, OK, well, I'm half a lesbian or something.
You know, not even full lesbians.
They'll say I'm non-binary.
I'm not.
I'm anything.
I talked to a gal.
Obviously, I'm not coming from the studio right now.
If you're watching, you'll see I'm in a hotel room somewhere.
I'm in Wisconsin.
I gave a speech last night at UW-Madison.
It's up online.
I had some really feisty questions.
You can check that out on X or on YouTube.
And then I sat down afterward with a guy who thinks he's a woman and with a girl who thinks that she's multiple people.
She said, I'm non-binary.
I go by they and them.
And I said, oh really?
When did this set in?
And without spoiling the interview too much, she said, oh, you know, right around puberty when I felt a little awkward, you know, when I was becoming a teenager.
I said, oh.
Like every woman ever.
Okay, wow, you're just like every woman ever, but your reaction to that was to, like many women, just kind of go along with whatever the ideological fad is, and in this case it would be LGBT-ism.
According to this survey, The percentage of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer adults in the U.S.
has reached an all-time high of 7.6% in 2023.
And almost 30% of Gen Z identifies that way.
Most of them is bisexual.
So again, I think proving my point, they're just like fun girls in college, you know?
Hi, 30% of Gen Z girls identify as like really wild, you know?
Okay.
How do you explain this?
Three options.
Either Alex Jones is right and there is something in the water turning the fricking Zoomer girls gay, which I guess is true.
There's something in the water turning the frogs trans.
Alex Jones was actually right about that.
So maybe, okay, that's one option that there's something in the water.
The second option is that there were always 30% of women who were bisexual or whatever, but they were just oppressed by society.
You see, 7.6% of people were always into weird sex stuff, but you see, for millennia, the repression of the patriarchy kept them down, and now they're finally coming out to explore their true selves.
Okay, that's one option.
Sexual desires and identities are obviously subject to social influence, and that is going to express itself in different ways, and if we just stopped glamorizing this weird sex stuff, it would greatly diminish.
That's the one you're not allowed to say, but that's obviously the answer.
Is there a fourth option?
I don't see a fourth option.
So unless you think that, you know, the pharmaceutical companies are poisoning the water and making us all gay,
If you think that's the primary driver of this, or you think that just all of a sudden it took, you know, millennia of human history but all of a sudden we've just discovered that 30% of women are bisexual or they-thems and there's no such thing as men or women or whatever, or sexual desire and identity is obviously subject to social influence and the LGBT identity, though it might have some basis in a persistent identity across human life for all of history,
Actually is more of a social contagion.
And that's it.
And if you grow up in the middle of rural Tennessee, you're much less likely to identify as a they-them than if you go to some ritzy liberal private school in the Bay Area.
Which do you think it is?
Speaking of this particular issue, the young people who are increasingly identifying with these sexual identities that are not conducive to their flourishing because they're divorced from reality.
There's a really sad story.
There's a gal who identified as like a they-them type identity, Nex Benedict, I don't know what her real name is, and she died.
And how did she die?
Initially, the way this was reported some weeks ago is that this was a transgender or non-binary teenager who was beaten to death because of the bullying instigated by all of the transphobes.
So I think this was insinuating that I, Matt, you know, other people who have spoken on this issue had something to do with it.
But the real ire was pointed at libs of TikTok, Kaya Raychick.
That was where the headlines really came from.
Libs of TikTok by pointing out that men can't really be women and highlighting all of the craziest examples of the trans ideology, but just in the Lib's own words.
It's not like she was putting words in their mouth.
She just retweets them, basically.
By doing this, she was responsible for the bullying that led this girl to be beaten to death.
Well, the actual story's out now.
The autopsy's out, and the girl was not beaten to death.
She died of a drug overdose.
And it's very sad, and this happens a lot with people who engage in these identities.
Leads to anxiety and depression, suicidality.
The libs tell us the reason for that is society won't accept them, but That doesn't seem to be borne out by the data.
Actually, it seems that the gender-affirming treatment either doesn't make the situation better or, in some cases, makes the situation worse.
There's that data set out of the UK that shows that.
The reason is reality.
I had an exchange with a fellow wearing a dress last night at UW-Madison, and I said, look, pal, you might hate me and think I'm your enemy, but I'm telling you the truth.
And I think it's disrespectful to lie to you, and it's not going to help you.
Common sense tells us that, logic tells us that, and the statistics tell us that.
And so that's what we have here.
There's a political lesson that comes out of this too, which we don't have time for.
You know I'm a tease on this show.
We'll get to the political lesson tomorrow that actually has nothing to do with the sexual revolution, but it's an important lesson to learn.
So wait on the edge of your seat with bated breath.
No member block today because I'm on the road flying back.
I'll see you tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
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