The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 518 - The Least Bad Option
Episode Date: March 26, 2020The U.S. Senate passes a two trillion dollar coronavirus relief package after days of last-minute debate. We will examine the good, the bad, and the ugly. Then, more good news on the scientific front ...of the pandemic, more fury from the mainstream media, and a major #MeToo allegation against Joe Biden. We will analyze the evidence and the accuser. Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://www.dailywire.com/coldwar. In Part 1 we peel back the layers of mystery cloaking the Terror state run by the Kremlin, and watch as America takes its first small steps onto the stage of world leadership. If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/Knowles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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The U.S. Senate passes a $2 trillion dollar coronavirus relief package after days of fiery debate.
We will examine the good, the bad, and the ugly. There's a lot of all three.
Then more good news on the scientific front of the pandemic, more fury from the mainstream media,
and a major Me Too allegation against, drum roll please, Sleepy Joe Biden.
We will analyze the evidence and the accuser. Then finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles show.
If I look tired, I am.
The reason I am is because I was up all night last night with Senator Ted Cruz,
who came straight from the Capitol to our studio in Washington, D.C.
He showed up there after midnight East Coast time.
That was the moment we even started to work on the podcast because we did an episode of
verdict with Ted Cruz for all of the minutia in details and goings-on of how this thing was negotiated.
You can head over and check out that podcast.
we're going to get to what is in the bill and what it means for the scientific front, for the political front, for the economic front.
Because I think, look, the thing is a huge bill, $2 trillion, largest stimulus or relief package, whichever you prefer, that we've ever had in American history.
Some people are saying it's the worst abomination that has ever passed in the United States.
Some people are saying it's all dandy.
As with any bill like this, there is a lot that's good.
There is a lot that's bad and there is a lot that is downright ugly.
So we'll get into all of that.
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What is in this bill? Well, I think the first question you got to ask is, why did it take so
damn long to pass? Okay, we were supposed to get a vote on this coronavirus relief package,
Saturday or Sunday. Over the weekend, here we are. It's now Thursday, and we just got it in the middle of the
night last night. So what happened? First of all, Nancy Pelosi happened. Nancy Pelosi came in at the last
minute and basically said, we'll only pass the coronavirus relief package if you also pass the
Green New Deal in the coronavirus relief package. It was just total bogus, partisan trash. She tried to
use it as an excuse to make airlines lower their emission standards, to make corporate boards
answer to the government for some intersectional identity boxes. I mean, an absolute fantasy. You know,
it was a really cynical, cheap way to play the whole negotiation. Republicans, to their credit,
did not play it that way. They actually focused everything on the coronavirus. Democrats did not do
that. So that took a while to iron out. Luckily, Nancy Pelosi got absolutely hammered in the press
for trying to do this. So she dropped most of what she was after. Then the bill was slated for a vote
two days ago, but it hit a last-minute snag
because Senator Lindsey Graham, among others,
actually including Senator Cruz,
pointed out that there was an error in the bill.
I mean, it was just a bad incentive.
I don't know if it was put there intentionally.
I don't think it was.
I think it was simply stupidity.
It turned out that the bill actually incentivized people
not to go back to work.
Here's Lindsey Graham explaining it.
If you're a nurse, aide,
making $15 or $16 an hour.
You're on the front lines here.
A lot of doctors' offices are going to have to roll back
because elective surgery is no longer a source of income
for a bunch of doctors.
So you're going to have all these well-trained nurses
that are going to make $24 an hour on unemployment.
You're literally incentivizing,
taking people out of the workforce
at a time when we need critical infrastructure
supplied with workers.
So that's a big problem. In the bill, the legislation gives an extra $600 per week in unemployment for up to four months.
So that's very, very generous. I mean, compared to, say, if you just look at Texas, for example, Texas, you can make up to around $550 per month in unemployment.
If you had $600 to that, that's more than 100% raise.
But then the trouble is, let's say you get paid $15 an hour for your job,
all of a sudden you're making $25, maybe $28 an hour for your job.
You have no reason to go back to work to make the $15 an hour.
It'd be much better for you to stay on unemployment for the four months that you can get it.
You make significantly more money, but that will drag the economy.
The whole point of this relief package is to keep the economy going to prevent a collapse.
So if you have an incentive in there that tells people,
don't go back to work, you can actually make more money sitting on your couch, that's not going
to be particularly helpful. That's actually going to be very counterproductive. So the Republicans
pointed this out, Democrats didn't care. Because you've got to remember, we'll see later in the show
more evidence of this. The Democrats don't want the economy to recover. An economy that recovers
hurts them in November. So they're trying to drag this thing out as long as possible. All the new
scientific studies that have come out and scientific analyses that show that coronavirus may in fact be
much, much less dire and much less deadly than we previously thought.
We went through those studies yesterday from Stanford, analysis from Yale, analysis from Oxford,
right? We went through all of that. They're hiding that. The left doesn't want to report on it
because they want the economic crisis to go on. So the bad news is the Republicans lost when it came
to that unemployment provision. That's too bad. That's just a dumb provision of the bill. It is
going to hamper the economy. We're spending $2 trillion on this thing.
and frankly we might end up spending more, but, you know, if you're spending $2 trillion,
you want the thing to help the unemployment situation, you want it to help the economy,
that is going to hurt it. That's too bad. That's one of the bad portions of the bill.
A bill gives $100 billion to hospitals. That's probably a good idea.
You know, you still want to prepare as though this is a very, very, very serious epidemic.
You want to prepare for the worst-case scenario. You just don't want to destroy the economy while you do it.
So $100 billion to hospitals makes sense to me.
$58 billion to airlines.
None of us wants to give credit to airlines,
but we do need air travel.
The airlines are absolutely hemorrhaging money right now.
This was agreed to by both parties.
It just seems like the sort of thing you have to do.
It's unfortunate, but probably have to do it.
It includes a tax credit for retaining your workforce.
So businesses, if they don't fire their workforce during the shutdown,
they will get a major tax credit. I think it's up to about $5,000 per employee. Great idea. What we want
to incentivize here is not simply businesses remaining profitable or if they're not going to
remain profitable, at least keeping cash. What we want to incentivize is them not firing their
workforce. This is a great way to do it. Very smart portion of the bill. $150 billion to state and
local government. This is probably going to be wasteful. This is something the Democrats were asking for
and Republicans more or less caved.
Now, there is a federalism argument here,
which is that most of the epidemic relief
is going to come from the states and the local governments.
It's not going to come from the federal level,
so you can empower the states to use that money.
Yeah, okay, what are they going to really use the money for?
Probably they're going to fritter it away.
That's too bad.
If I were writing the bill, that would have been significantly lower.
$10.5 billion to the Pentagon.
The Pentagon always gets money in these bills.
That's just the way it works.
And that's fine.
I mean, this epidemic is in many ways a national security issue.
So whatever.
Drop in the bucket when you're talking about $2 trillion.
$24 billion for farmers and ranchers.
That's fine.
I mean, obviously they're getting disrupted because of this total shutdown.
$24 billion to food stamps and child nutrition.
Food stamps is a very abused program.
However, in the shutdown, one big issue has been that schools very often are providing the only nutrition that children are getting per day.
day and that's unfortunate and parents should be held to account for that and if you can't feed your
kid one meal a day or two meals a day you should not be able to have a child you know you should
have to answer for that that's criminal because I think a lot of the time it's you know we're not
talking about jean valjean and le maize you know people living on the street trying to steal a loaf of
bread very often it's about poor economic choices and not prioritizing feeding one's children
over other spending habits and relying on the government to do that for you nevertheless
You probably had to include it in there.
And then the most important provision is $500 billion to industries.
These $500 billion, fortunately, comes in the form of loans.
So it's not simply a $500 billion handout.
Now, if the industries and the businesses meet certain criteria, then they will have those
loans forgiven, criteria like, for instance, not firing your workforce.
There are also a lot of shackles put on the businesses, so they can't just buy back a lot of
stock. They can't just use this $500 billion loan to line their own pockets. I'm pretty fine with that.
I think actually that's the best part of the bill. That's the part Republicans were really pushing for
and the Democrats were pushing against. And then there's maybe the most controversial part of the
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Okay.
The most controversial part of this, as far as I'm concerned, is the $1,200 check that's going out to some Americans, not all Americans, but some Americans.
If you make more than $100,000 a year, you're not going to get a check.
And if you make more than $75,000 a year, the check starts to get phased out.
This part I'm least jazzed about.
The reason I'm least jazzed about it is not because people don't need money.
People do need money.
But it'd be much better for those people to be able to keep their job than to be.
to just get a one-time $1,200 check from the government, right? And so you could have put those
resources into making sure that we protect those jobs. $1,200 check, by the way, very likely not going
to do much to stimulate the economy. There's more or less an economic consensus about that.
And the downside of it is it gets people habituated to this idea of universal basic income,
which is a horrible, anti-human, very bad, no-good, dumb Andrew Yang idea. So don't care for
that all that much. However, it was certainly going to go in there. That was being pushed by Republicans
and Democrats, and in the grand scope of this bill. You know, not the biggest issue. This is fundamentally
different from TARP or the Obama era stimulus because those stimulus packages were reacting to companies.
They were bailing out companies who in many ways had dug their own grave. In this case,
people didn't dig their own grave. They didn't cause this problem. They had, you know,
we're just told because of a Chinese epidemic that they couldn't do business anymore.
This brings us a step closer to getting out of this China-inflicted economic disaster.
Do I love the bill? No. Do I think it was necessary? Yes. Is it the least bad option? Yeah,
very possibly. Very possibly it is. And the thing we're all dealing with even as we complain about it is the fact that the coronavirus has a cost.
So it gets us, it's getting us, I think, a step closer to getting out of the economic disaster.
it's also getting us closer to getting out of the China-inflicted medical disaster.
The stimulus itself might not be getting us out of that medical disaster,
but we are apparently getting closer to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
We noticed this from major scientific experts.
We went through some studies yesterday.
And now Dr. Deborah Birx, who is one of the top people on the White House Coronavirus Task Force,
is saying that the numbers that we're all hearing
in the mainstream media are frightening,
they're probably overhyped,
and the science is actually much more hopeful.
The numbers that have been put out there
are actually very frightening to people.
But I can tell you, if you go back and look at Wuhan and Hubei
and all of these provinces,
when they talk about 60,000 people being infected,
even if you said, oh, right, well, there's,
asymptomatic and all of that. So you get to 600,000 people out of 80 million. That is nowhere
close to the numbers that you see people putting out there. I think it has frightened the American
people. I think on a model that you just run full out, you can get to those numbers if you have
zero controls and you do nothing. And we know that every American is doing something.
Right. This is so important. Even if you don't trust China's numbers,
Deborah Birx there is saying, okay, let's say it's an order of magnitude more in terms of infections.
That's still not a huge percentage in that area.
You know, a lot of the hysteria came from that Imperial College study out of the United Kingdom.
People concluded in the United States that two million Americans could die.
I mean, I suppose it's possible, but increasingly the analysis shows that might have been very hyped.
And what Deborah Berks is saying there is maybe you can get to those numbers on your computer models
if nobody changes any of their behavior,
if nobody even starts washing their hands a little bit more,
but everybody has radically changed their behavior.
So there would seem to be someplace between don't even wash your hands
and destroy the global economy
and lock everything down and don't leave your apartment
that would be a happy medium
that would mitigate the risk significantly
and also acknowledge the reality of how we all get on in the world.
So that's what the science shows.
However, there is this reaction on the left that hasn't kept up with the science.
So what the left keeps saying is we need to listen to the scientists.
We need to listen to the analysis.
And yet, when you get new analysis out of Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Deborah Burke's updating people, calling out the mainstream media for hyping this thing.
When you get all of that new information, the left doesn't change their tune.
Here is Andrew Cuomo, furious at the president for declaring that he hopes to be done with all of this.
and get the economy going again by Easter because of the science.
Easter Sunday and you'll have packed churches all over a country, I think it would be a beautiful time.
Based on what? No expert backed him up on the Easter call. Not one piece of science, not one projection.
Sorry, I'm very sorry. I have to make an apology here. To Andy Cuomo. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
for confusing you with your brother Chris Cuomo, the Fredo of the Cuomo family. I'm sorry that I
confused the far superior Cuomo, damning with faint praise, but still with the Fredo of the family.
And what Fredo just said is simply not true. Right. I just recited to you, the scientists we've read in the
last few days, who have stated explicitly that fears of coronavirus, the panic of coronavirus,
is overblown, including a Nobel laureate, including people from all those fancy schools
with all those fancy degrees and all those fancy professorships.
You know, those two Stanford scientists we read yesterday said that the mortality rate
might be orders of magnitude lower than what is being projected and reported in the press.
Oxford study says the same thing.
But apparently Dr. Chris Cuomo, Professor Chris Cuomo knows so much more about the science,
capital S with a trademark over the E than the actual scientists do. This is typical of the left.
They always, they invoke science as though it were a deity. They're giving homage. They're worshiping
the science, but that doesn't have a lot to do with the academic analysis. It has a whole lot to do
with the kind of invention of science as merely affirming their own prejudiced and preconceived
notions. Chris Cuomo goes on. I'm not sure the president
knows Easter's theme. It's rebirth and renewal. But assuming he does, why would he invite the opposite
of rebirth and renewal? Fact, more than 100 Americans died from coronavirus today. More than 700
total. The virus is accelerating. So with those as the facts, give me one reason. It would be safe,
or smart or effective to reopen during the period of most cases.
Fact, he says, 100 people died of coronavirus in one day.
Another fact, 100 people died in car accidents on the very same day and every single day.
When you just state these facts completely out of context, they don't tell us much about the thing we're discussing.
Chris Cuomo says that the virus is accelerating. Is that true or is diagnosis just accelerating?
The big complaint from the left is that testing has not been available.
Now testing is more widely available. Of course diagnosis is going to increase. But are we sure
that the diagnosis increasing is because of the virus itself accelerating? I think actually the
models we've looked at around the world suggests probably that isn't true. When you see spikes
in flu-related pneumonia-related illnesses and deaths, even a couple of months ago, do we think
that has no relationship to the virus? We really think the virus just dropped out of thin air on
March 1st or something at the end of February? Probably not. I don't think so.
Chris Cuomo says that it is a fact that Easter Day will be especially bad for coronavirus.
That's not a scientific fact.
That is the prediction of a TV political pundit and the Fredo of the Cuomo family.
Not a fact.
The most troubling aspect of this, for me, is the left using science, capital S, TM over the E, as an excuse to avoid political debate.
You see this exemplified by a writer named Molly Jong.
fast, who I love using her tweets and things as examples because she's just so out there.
I don't mean that as an insult. I mean, she's out there giving the opinion of the left.
She's kind of honest or guileless about it. So she tweets out,
OMG, I would kill for oppressor with only doctors and scientists. Hashtag doctors only
press conferences. She doesn't want Trump or the coronavirus task force to give press conferences.
just the scientists and the doctors.
First of all, something tells me she wouldn't actually like a presser with those scientists.
I don't think she'd like a presser with the Yale scientist, Dr. Katz, who wrote in the New York Times that this has been overhyped.
I don't think she'd want a presser with the Stanford scientists.
I don't think she'd want a presser with the Oxford scientists, right?
She only wants a presser with the scientists who she and others on the left have been citing.
But beyond that, I don't want my policy.
dictated by scientific tyrants. Okay, I don't, I didn't, I didn't elect Dr. Fauci, okay? I like Dr.
Fauci, but I didn't elect the guy. I don't want him to have total control over our response to the
coronavirus epidemic. I didn't elect these scientific experts. We have politics in this country so that we
can discuss and debate different priorities. Politics is not a clean-cut science. It's not like there's
always a clear answer. It's about weighing different priorities, taking into account in our country
the opinions of the American people, viewing things not just through a lens of completely stopping a virus,
which is not possible, but also by balancing our liberties, also by balancing what is likely to occur,
also by balancing the economy. So I certainly don't want that. The left, you know, scratch a leftist
and you get a tyrant underneath. And I think that's what we're seeing here. But ironically, in this case,
The tyrants that they want to put up are increasingly disagreeing with them.
We've got a lot more to get to. We've got to go to Trump calling out the fake news in a beautiful way.
We've got to get to have the coronavirus as a gendered crisis, but not in the way that the left thinks it is.
And then we've got to get to Joe Biden's Me Too moment.
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It is now transparent that the left wants this crisis to go.
on regardless of what economists suggest and regardless of what the medical experts suggest.
So the Washington Post just sends out this new piece. It's titled Trump is spreading false hope
for a virus cure. And that's not the only damage. This is an editorial put out by the editorial
board, not by scientists, by the editorial board, which says that the drug that's now being touted,
not just by Trump, but also by Andy Cuomo, by a lot of people.
Hydroxychloroquine has shown promise in terms of mitigating the virus.
And yet they're saying it's false hope, there's no cure, stop it, don't go away.
And they actually talk about how it's been shown to be somewhat effective.
And more effective than anything else we've looked at.
But they don't want that answer.
It kind of reminds me how in the New York Times they ran this op-ed the other day from Dr. Katz from Yale saying,
this is all being overhyped.
And then the editorial board comes out and says,
no, no, no, it's not.
Panic, be worried, be alarmed.
So you got the scientists saying, not a huge deal.
Then you got the journalists who, I use that term loosely,
they're just left-wing political operatives out to get Donald Trump
and every other Republican.
They're the one saying, no, you should panic.
No, you should worry.
President Trump has had enough of this.
He was giving another one of his daily pressers,
one of the greatest things to come out of this coronavirus pandemic.
and he called them out as fake news.
Is this Easter timeline based on your political interests?
Because...
You tweeted. You said that the media wants the country to remain closed to hurt your office.
No, no, I think the media, yeah.
No, the media would like to see me do poorly in the election.
I think...
I think...
I think that...
I think that...
I think that...
Reopening the country by Easter is not a good idea.
What is that plan based on?
Just so you understand.
Are you ready?
I think there are certain people that would like it not to open so quickly.
I think there are certain people that would like it to do financially poorly
because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls.
And I don't know if that's so, but I do think it's so that a lot of,
that there are people in your profession that would like that to happen.
I think it's very clear that I think it's very clear
that there are people in your profession that write fake news.
You do.
She does.
There are people in your profession that write fake news.
they would love to see me for whatever reason
because we've done one hell of a job.
Nobody's done the job that we've done.
And it's lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem
or you wouldn't even have a country left.
Bingo baby, there it is.
Some people in that profession are writing fake news.
Not everybody, but some people certainly are.
A great example of this.
The Washington Post, I kid you not,
ran an article going after
a random guy on Twitter
for suggesting that maybe we shouldn't panic
and maybe we shouldn't destroy the economy.
I kid you not.
Here's the tweet.
Scott McMillan, a 56-year-old lawyer,
tweeted that it's more vital to revive the economy
than to save people who are not productive,
like the elderly and infirm.
So I called his parents.
Great crack reporting, guys.
Wow, democracy dies in darkness.
The Washington Post is so pissed off
that this pandemic is not going to completely destroy the world
and we're not going to shut down the global economy for six months,
that they are now finding random people on Twitter.
This guy, Scott McMillan, had 400 Twitter followers.
Not 400,000, 400.
And then found his parents' phone number
and called them to tattletail on their son.
And guess what?
The parents said they agreed.
That's the best part of it all.
The parents told the Washington Post,
yeah, maybe we shouldn't destroy the global economy
based on these numbers that, you know,
some people are going to become ill with the virus
because people get ill with viruses all the time.
You don't freak out about the other viruses,
but this one is politically convenient.
So anyway, a great example.
Very embarrassing for the Washington Post.
Even that they would run it.
I mean, you'd think that they would come to their senses
and some self-awareness,
but self-awareness is just simply not a trait
among the left.
So this is also a gendered crisis, is it not?
This is what we are being told by the first.
political left, specifically by an Australian senator, Marine Faruqi. This Australian senator is
very upset. Now, she's right in that there is a gender component to the coronavirus, but it's
not exactly the one that she says it is. Let's not forget that COVID-19 is a gendered crisis.
Nurses, nurse aides, teachers, child carers and early childhood educators, age care workers and cleaners
are mostly women. They are on the front line of this public health crisis and carry a disproportionate
risk of being exposed to the virus. Let's also not forget that not all homes are safe places.
Quarantine or self-isolation at home will put women and children at risk. Women's advocates
and domestic violence experts are warning us that domestic abuse increases during times of crisis.
And I'm terribly worried that these warnings have not been heeded by this government,
that has long resisted adequate funding for the needed resources and refugees.
Okay, so what she's saying is just not true.
The vast majority of coronavirus patients are men.
So it's a gendered crisis in that it is affecting men more.
But the left can't handle that because men, they're not victims.
Men can never be victims.
Only women can be victims.
The Atlantic ran a piece.
The coronavirus is a disaster for feminism.
Pandemics affect men and women differently.
Purely as a physical illness, the coronavirus.
coronavirus appears to affect women less severely. So at least they admit that purely as a viral,
medical, physical illness, but as a spiritual illness, right? They go on, in the past few days,
the conversation about the pandemic has broadened. Yeah, it's broadened because all your facts are
falling apart. So now you've got to broaden it into politics. The coronavirus smashes up the
bargain that so many dual-earner couples have made in the developed world. We can both work
because someone else is looking after our children. Instead, couples will decide which one of them
takes the hit. What a disgusting thing to write. They're saying like, yeah, the promise of the
developed world is that none of us has to raise our children anymore. We can just pay people to do that
for us. But now, one of us is going to have to take the hit of actually interacting with our
child. Oh, woe is me. How awful. It shows you how perverse these guys are looking at it. By the way,
we're just getting some breaking news. It's coming out of the UK. We've been talking about how the
scientific hysteria is now breaking down. So much of it was based on the Imperial College study.
there's now another expert coming out saying that unlike what the Imperial College study said that,
you know, Britain is going to get decimated by this thing, it now seems that Britain does have
enough intensive care units for the patients that the Imperial College study, which sparked all this
alarmism, was just wrong. Does that mean we shouldn't take the virus seriously? No, of course not.
We should take it seriously. We should do everything we can. Take precautionary measures.
Wash your hands. Wash your face. Social distance. Don't kiss people in the
middle of the street, but does it mean that the evidence shows we should shut down the global
economy? I don't think so, Buster. Before we get to mailbag, I've got to get to one quick story.
Oh, boy, is this one exciting? This is Joe Biden, speaking of women, speaking of a gendered crisis.
Joe Biden has a serious me-to allegation against him. Tara Reid has apparently been trying to tell
her story since this altercation in 1993 of Joe Biden me-toing her. Now, for some reason, we haven't
heard about it until right now. Here is Tara Reid explaining it. He just said, hey, come here, Tara.
And then I handed him the thing and he greeted me. He remembered my name. And then we were alone.
And it was the strangest thing. There was no like exchange, really. He just had me up against the wall.
And I was wearing like a skirt and, you know, business skirt. But I wasn't wearing stockings.
It was kind of a hot day, that day, and I was wearing heels.
And I remember my legs had been hurting from the marble, you know, of the capital, like walking.
And so I remember that kind of stuff.
I remember, like, I was wearing a blouse, and he just had me up against the wall,
and the wall was cold.
And I remember he, it happened all at once.
The gym bag, I don't know where it went.
I handed it to him was gone, and then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes.
And, yeah, and then.
He went down my skirt but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers.
Whoa, man, that's a whole lot more than shoulder massages. That's much more than we've heard from Biden before.
You know, this woman, she came out a little while ago and said that Biden put his hands on her shoulders and ran his fingers up and down her neck.
she did that last spring
after Lucy Flores,
another political opponent of Joe Biden's,
came out and said basically the same thing.
I definitely believe that sort of thing happened.
But only now we're hearing he,
what, he actually just went down
and got very aggressive with her.
She concludes her story.
For him saying first,
like as he was doing it,
do you want to go somewhere else?
And then him saying to me,
when I pulled away,
he got finished during what he was doing,
what he was doing and I was pulled back and he said he said come on man I heard you liked me
and it's that phrase did with me because I kept thinking what I might have said and I can't remember
exactly if he said I thought or if I heard but it's like he implied like that I had done this like
I don't know well look the phrase come on man is a classic Bidenism we hear him say that all the time
come on man hey come on man so serious allegation do I believe her
No. Not saying it couldn't have happened, but I need more evidence before I'm willing to say that this actually happened.
Why do I feel skeptical about her account? It's been a really long time and we've never heard anything about this.
We've never heard similar accounts. We've heard that Joe Biden gets creepy with the shoulder massages and the hair smelling, but we've never heard this kind of thing, right? He's not considered a womanizer in D.C. He doesn't have the reputation of Bill Clinton.
The expose seems too contrived. She came out a year ago.
and said that he gave her shoulder massages,
and then that didn't work to take him down,
so now she's trying a new story.
Okay, it just seems a little contrived.
Maybe it happened, but evidence doesn't seem to back that up.
And then the other problem is she does seem like a genuine nut.
So there's a medium article that she wrote.
She's since deleted it, but it's been circulating,
where she says she left college because,
or she left politics, rather,
because America was too anti-Russia,
and she loves Russia.
and she said, I love Russia with all my heart.
I can't understand the xenophobia that's come from my own American government.
Quote, President Putin scares the power elite in America
because he's a compassionate, caring, visionary leader.
Look, whatever you think about Vladimir Putin,
compassionate is probably not one of the words that I would use, right?
The ex-KGB thug who murders journalists.
It's not compassionate.
Maybe you can say he's a typical Russian leader,
or he's a strong Russian leader, but I don't know about compassion. That's pretty weird.
President Putin has higher approval ratings in America than the American president.
I don't know if that's true.
President Putin is beloved by Russia and he's not going anywhere.
Okay, so to President Putin, I say, keep your eyes to the beautiful future and maybe just maybe America will come to see Russia as I do.
Okay, this is just one example.
One thing that we know about the girl is she pushes Russian propaganda and loves Vladimir Putin.
So just makes me think she's not totally all there with it.
Who knows?
We don't really know anything else about the gal.
But from all the evidence we see here,
I won't take this claim terribly seriously,
except for this reason.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Joe Biden during the Brett Kavanaugh thing.
By the way, the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh
were much less serious and much less credible
than the allegations against Joe Biden.
All right.
at least we know Joe Biden gets creepy with people and massages their shoulders and smells them and stuff.
Rick Kavanaugh, no evidence he ever did any of that. During Kavanaugh, Biden says,
what should happen is the woman should be given the benefit of the doubt and not be, you know,
abused again by the system. I hope that they understand what courage it takes for someone to come forward
and relive what they believe happen to them and let them state it, but treat her with respect.
Okay, buddy, well, it looks like we're going to do that to you too, because if we're going to completely destroy due process rights
and we're going to allow political adversaries to come and destroy people with uncredible allegations,
then what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
We will get to the mailbag.
We're typically running late.
First, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
You know, we launched the All Access show, All Access Live.
We're coming to you every day during this quarantine.
Be sure to go sign up at DailyWire.com slash subscribe.
You get so much content.
That show is only for All Access members.
Right now we're opening up to all of our members.
So head on over there if you're enjoying it.
upgrade your membership. Dailywire.com slash subscribe. We'll be right back. I am going to burn through
these questions because we only have limited time and I want to answer as many as possible.
First one from Matt. Dear austere religious podcaster and Lord of Caffe, your comment about Italy
not having a functioning government since Octavian caused me to reflect on Rome's first emperor.
Was Octavian a tyrant or a father to the Romans in the same vein as Washington or Lincoln?
Keep up the great work. Came for Ben, stayed for Michael.
great question. Octavian or Caesar Augustus is one of the most interesting historical figures
that has ever lived. By far the greatest leader of Rome. And now you're asking to compare him to
Washington or Lincoln. That's very difficult because Octavian kind of shows us that Rome is moving away
from a Republican form of government into an imperial form of government, whereas Washington or Lincoln
were strong advocates of a Republican form of government.
So in that way, not similar at all.
But Octavian was a really terrific ruler.
People talk about the end of the Roman Republic
and how everything went downhill.
Don't forget, you had centuries of peace and prosperity
after Rome became an empire.
For a while, it was pretty good.
And then it fell apart.
And there's also the interesting historical coincidence
with Caesar Augustus or Octavian,
which is that he lives a kind of parallel life to Christ
at the time of Christ.
So Christ is called the Prince of Peace, right?
His father is an adopted father, Joseph, because his true father is God.
He's called the Son of God.
He institutes peace on earth.
Caesar Augustus, also an adopted child, is called the Son of the Divine, because they viewed Caesar Augustus as in a way divine.
He also instituted an era of peace called the Pax Romana, and it happened at the same time.
can call that coincidence. I think probably it's a little closer to Providence.
From Annie, quick question. On the lockdowns episode you did with Jeremy, you mentioned your
go-to drink when you're sick is a hot toddy. You know it. Do you have a favorite recipe you can
share? I did a search and discover there are many variations of what would seem to be a simple
classic concoction, thanks in advance. Yes, my recipe is very simple, very basic.
Hot water, lemon, honey, wellers bourbon.
Okay, that's it.
Some people put tea.
Some people use other kind of whiskeys.
I like Weller and I like my lemon, which is good.
Those two things kill the disease and hot water and honey.
That's it.
That's all you want.
From Nick.
Dear Michael, if you were only allowed one item from the store before being locked in under house arrest,
what one item would you grab?
Thanks.
Eggs.
Duh.
You don't really need toilet paper for,
like, you don't need a lifetime supply of toilet paper. If you're stuck at home, maybe you've got a
really nice palatial home and you've got a bidet. You know, you've got a shower, you've got other pieces
of paper, you'll be fine without that. Do you need water? No, you've got a sink. Do you need booze?
Well, hopefully, you're stocked up already. Same thing with Stogeys. What you do need, though, is
eggs, because with eggs, you can make breakfast, obviously. You can make fresh pasta. You can make
bread. Everybody's already got flour and stuff in their homes. So what you need is the eggs.
That's what people should be buying the stores out of.
From Vanessa.
Dear Michael, where the hell is the UN?
All we hear is how important it is to have a strong United Nations.
But when it comes time to do anything like that,
it seems like the USA is the only one to bear the burden.
Have you done any investigation into where the UN is now?
Like, what are they doing and should the establishment continue?
Thanks.
Where is the UN?
The simple answer to that question is it's on the future site of the Trump luxury
condominiums on the east side of New York overlooking the East River. Yeah, the United Nations
is an almost entirely useless institution, which you've got to remember is, as John Bolton famously
said, there is no such thing as the United Nations. There is the interest of the United States,
and there is the international community. Sometimes those two things intersect, in which case
the United Nations can be a fine vessel to mediate that. But, when you're not a very important,
When those things don't intersect, it doesn't matter.
I mean, the UN just doesn't do anything.
Very often what it does is give a platform for the worst people on Earth to come and lecture
us about how awful we are.
And that's ridiculous.
And probably we shouldn't pay for that anymore.
Inso much as the UN allows us to build some consensus to do what we were already going
to do anyway, I suppose that's fine.
But that sure is an expensive way to do it.
From Tyler to the excellent Michael Knowles, the man with the greatest hair and my spirit
animal. I am getting married, hopefully, without delays from Wu-Flu in May, and my fiancé is Catholic,
and I'm Methodist. After attending multiple masses, pre-Kana classes, and listening to your show,
I felt more of a connection with the Catholic religion. My question is, what is the process to convert,
and how long is this process? Thank you for all that you do. Well, Tyler, congratulations.
I'm very pleased to hear that you're getting married and that you're interested in coming back to
the church and swimming across the tiber, as we say. The process is actually very straightforward.
You can enlist in something called RCIA classes. This is the right of Christian initiation,
and you'll learn everything that you need to learn. You know, it's not just like you're jumping
in without any knowledge of what it is. Really great classes. I've got friends of mine who
have converted from Judaism, taken the RCA classes who have converted from evangelical Christianity
or other Protestant groups, they've all gotten a lot.
Even if you already know a ton about Christianity, which if you're interested like this, you probably do.
It's still really great refresher and might show you things you haven't heard before.
So get into RCA.
There are several steps in the process, and then you can become a full-on Catholic by next Easter.
Or maybe even sooner, depending on your diocese.
From Claire, Michael, how do you define if an extremist group or regime is right-wing or left-wing?
It seems that most belief systems this extreme don't even remotely resemble either mainstream view,
so I never know how it is decided whether a group is right wing or left wing. Thanks.
Well, when you get to the fringes and the extremes, it does get a little bit complicated.
I mean, the classic example of this is the Nazis.
Are the Nazis right wing?
In a way they are.
Some conservatives want to say they have nothing to do with the right wing.
No, they do have something to do with the right wing.
They are a little more interested in history.
They're a little more interested in tradition.
They're a little more interested in, I don't know, monarchy
or a kind of like perverted version of monarchy,
which tends to be historically more of a right-wing preference.
So in that way, I guess they're right-wing.
They're also very left-wing in the sense that Naziism, national socialism,
well, for one, is a form of socialism,
but it's also very modernist.
I mean, it was very secular.
It was actually very anti-Christian, anti-religious. All of that is very left-wing. It's in many ways it was pagan. Paganism was adopted by many members, high-ranking Nazis. So in that way, it's very left-wing. It's very hard to classify it. The trouble is that even our concept of right and left comes from the French Revolution. People who sat on the right side were royalists, more favorable toward the established order, and people who were on the left side were more radical.
So that moment, the French Revolution was such a radical moment in many ways the beginning of a modern era doesn't totally correspond to all of those modern movements.
I'm a conservative, but I despise so much of political modernism that, you know, to put it into a modernist framework would be so antithetical to anything that I like.
So you've got to speak about it precisely.
To say it's totally left-wing or totally right-wing very often misses the point.
All right, we've got so many more questions, but we just don't.
have time. I'm sorry. I've tried to bring you everything that I possibly can because so much is
happening in our politics, in our biology, in our medical field, and in our economy. So that's the
update for now. Of course, this is changing by the moment. So perhaps on Monday, everything will be
completely different again and we will get into it then. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is
the Michael Knowles show. If you enjoyed this episode and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to
subscribe. And if you want to help spread the word,
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If you prefer facts over feelings aren't offended by the brutal truth and you can still laugh
at the insanity filling our national news cycle, well, tune in to the Ben Shapiro Show.
We'll get a whole lot of that and much more. See you there.
