The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 688 - Let Them Eat Tendies
Episode Date: January 28, 2021Internet trolls bankrupt hedge funds for the lolz, John Kerry tells fossil fuel workers to learn solar, and most Republicans support Trump for 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...oices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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A bunch of internet trolls are currently in the process of bankrupting a lot of hedge funds,
a lot of Wall Streeters, and they're doing this through wild speculation, which is a huge problem.
You see, because it's only hedge funds that are supposed to make money through wild speculation.
When ordinary people try to make money through ordinary speculation in a way that threatens the financial establishment,
well, that's hateful.
That's a threat to democracy.
That is white supremacy.
see. We will break down the math. I'm Michael Knowles. This the Michael
Noel show. Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment from yesterday comes from
Biz Boy Five, who says, someone needs to ask Joe if he's going to donate all his salary like
Trump did, see him squirm. I think Joe's reaction, of course, would be, come on, man. Come on, man.
The big guy's got to get a little skim off the top. Come on, Hunter. What are you talking about, man?
Yeah, so I don't think he would do that. But it would be a very hilarious point if that could
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speaking of financial services, this story about GameStop and the GameStop stock price going
through the roof, this is the single funniest story that I have seen in years. And not only
is it hilarious in and of itself, but it actually has deep political implications. And the political
implications are simply delightful. I fear that because this involves finance and,
involves investing. This story might be a little too complicated for most people who aren't going
to pay very close attention to it to understand just how funny it is. So I'll try to break it down
very simply because I don't know anything about finance either, but I've at least read a fair
bit about this particular once in a century type of event, once in a lifetime type of event.
a bunch of internet trolls on the Reddit board Wall Street Betts decided, Wall Street Betts,
this is like an irreverent investing board. This is not like a sober, serious investing board.
They just put up kind of crazy, risky bet ideas. They noticed that hedge funds had taken a short
position on GameStop. GameStop is this video game store, right? You know what GameStop is. It doesn't have a ton of
growth potential. It seems like it's kind of heading out the door, kind of like blockbuster,
some of these old companies. So these internet trolls discover that Wall Street took out a big
short position on this, specifically one hedge fund called Melvin Capital. And a short position
is basically when you're betting against the stock. So if the stock price goes down, you make a lot of
money. And if the stock price goes up, not only do you lose money, but you've got to start buying it up.
So you've got to start putting more cash on the table to cover your losses, right?
So GameStop, though, it was trading it like $6 not that long ago.
It wasn't doing great.
Hedge funds take out huge short positions on this.
And these trolls at Wall Street bets decide, you know, we're going to make this stock price on this kind of crappy company go through the roof.
And maybe we'll make some money in the process.
But more importantly, we are just going to mess with these heads.
hedge funds, these guys, we have no sympathy for them, we're going to completely mess with the
financial establishment. And the craziest thing is, it's working. The board has, I think, two million
members. And so I was asking myself when this was going on, why hasn't this been done before?
And the reason is, you've never had this kind of the technology to do it, you know, to wrangle like
two million of these kind of eccentric type of people. But you've also never had the means,
You've never had the humor. You've never had the specific political conditions of people wanting to flip the bird to the establishment, which they believe has royally screwed them over in recent months. You've had individual aspects of that kind of thing, but you've never had it all coincide. This whole phenomenon is very internety. Okay. So it's very, the kind of lingo that people use, they'll be joking about how.
how, you know, they're just going to grit their teeth and take some of the losses until their mom brings them chicken tindies into the basement.
You know, and they're using all this kind of very internety lingo.
They actually, they have like sea shanties that are being posted.
They posted one last night about how we've got to, we've just got to hold on as the financial industry pushes back because we're all going to make a bunch of money in bankrupt Wall Street.
There once was a stock that put to see.
The name of the stock was GME.
The price blew up and the shorts dipped down, hold my bully boys hole.
Soon may the tending man come to send a rocket into the sun.
One day when the trading is done, we'll take our gains and go.
She had not been two weeks from shore when Ryan Cohen joined the board.
The captain called all hands and swore he'd take his shares and hold.
Soon may the tending man come to send a rocket into the sun.
This refers to one day when the training is done, we'll take our gains and go.
It goes on.
I encourage you to listen to the entire shanty.
It goes on and on like this.
So far, GameStop, not a great company, is up something like 2,500 percent this month.
The stock has hit, I think, $460 a share.
AMC movies.
So this is another company that's basically headed for bankruptcy, right?
Because no one's going on the movies anymore.
AMC, they sent this one through the roof.
They sent Blackberry up, you know, the old cell phone company.
That's up 250%.
I think they were going to target Nokia as well, another cell phone company that nobody uses anymore.
It's all just a huge meme.
However, the meme is becoming reality.
So the internet joke is totally affecting reality.
And it's going to put hedge funds out of business.
Gabe Plotkin, who's the hedge fund trader at Melvin Capital.
He was the one with the biggest short position.
Yesterday, when this news broke, he had to raise almost $3 billion to bail out the fund.
Squawk Box, which is, you know, the very serious sort of CNBC financial news show.
They just couldn't make any sense of it.
You know, we've mentioned social media.
I couldn't help.
But it's not obviously similar to some of this controversy surrounding Facebook and Twitter and everything else.
But once again, what's one of the things that we're talking about is maybe misinformation and pump and dumps,
and it's occurring on social media again.
I'm wondering whether it's part of the same problem, the type of regulation that we finally need to consider.
And like I said, we should always have a light touch with regulation.
But you're seeing the way things can get started again.
This is different.
Maybe it's Reddit.
Maybe it's not Facebook.
but you're seeing the same situation.
At this point, it's not about an election.
It's not about an insurrection, but there are interesting things happening that seem to be spawned to some extent,
or at least blown out of proportion by social media again.
That entire monologue was completely meaningless.
That guy has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.
First of all, some of the things he's saying are just factually not true.
He's saying this might be a pump and dump.
It's not a pump and dump.
Pump and dump is where you pick a stock cynically, you bring up the price really, really high,
and then you try to find a bigger idiot to sell it to.
So you're going to totally mess that guy over, but you're going to make money at his expense.
That's not what's going on here.
What's going on here is these internet trolls found a giant short position from a giant institutional investor.
And they said, nah, I don't think so.
We're not going to let you guys do that.
And so then this financial analyst on CNBC says, well, I don't know, maybe it's, maybe we
we need to regulate this. I mean, we want a light touch on regulation, but we can't let these guys
do it. What he's really saying is we don't want any regulation for the institutional investors.
We don't want any regulation for Wall Street when they do this exact thing. But we do want
regulation for ordinary people. We can't let individual investors do this kind of thing.
Then the whole game's going to be up. What is going on here is not primarily a financial phenomenon.
It's a political phenomenon. And it is the same phenomenon that you've been seeing build
build up coinciding, in part caused by, in part causing the Trump phenomenon. It's ordinary people
rebelling against an established elite that they don't have any faith in. A lot of times this word
populism gets thrown around and I think it's often sort of a silly word because I don't think
people are either populists or elitists. For instance, if we have a good elite, then I'm an elitist.
If we can have a good, virtuous, smart, thoughtful elite, then great, works for me.
Count me in the elitism category.
But we don't have that.
We have a bunch of corrupt, cynical idiots in our so-called elite.
And so with that kind of an elite, I'm the opposite of an elitist.
I'm the furthest thing for, I'm a total populist.
If the elites that we are currently governed by are hipster, Rasputin Jack Dorsey,
a grown man with a nose ring, and the crooks of the Obama-Biden liberal dominant regime,
and the educational establishment, which is utterly upending liberal education,
if those are the elites, I'm out, right? And that's what you're seeing here.
And you're seeing all these unwashed peasants on these internet boards eating their chicken tendies.
You're seeing them outfox the Wall Street elite.
and they are not liking that very much. So now the financial establishment is pushing back.
They're trying to shut these guys down. You know, in a way, the media understands this thing.
So Chris Saliza at CNN posted this piece yesterday that people made fun of, but he actually had sort of a point.
He said how Trumpism explains the GameStop stock surge. And it is kind of a negative article.
But if you take the preference out of it and you just look at the phenomenon, yes, it does.
sort of explain that. But then other media outlets do the same thing they do to all the Trump people.
They say, well, the only way to explain what's going on right now is to say that the people doing this
have awful, terrible intentions and they're evil and they're bigoted and their neo-Nazis and
they're white supremacists. And we've got to shut the whole thing down. The elites are making the
exact same mistake with regard to this kind of frivolous financial phenomenon that they have for the
political phenomenon. And just like Trumpism, it isn't going anywhere. This is only more evidence
that, sure, you can vanquish Trump for now, but you're not getting rid of the forces that
propelled Trump and that have supported him. This sort of a phenomenon is a time when, if you can
picture rich uncle penny bags and all these Wall Street fat cats, you know, sort of lighting up cigars
and laughing about all their zillion dollars of profits, I think you can participate in that as well.
you can light up your cigars, especially if you go to Thompson's cigar. To my mind, the best way
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Mother Jones, the liberal outlet, I guess even further leftist outlet, is looking at the
game stop Wall Street Betts phenomenon.
and following up on what the CNN types are saying,
this isn't just Trumpism.
This is neo-Nazism.
This is white supremacy.
One reporter from Mother Jones says,
I can report from the telegram channels
that the Nazis appear to be trading GameStop and AMC as well.
Now, why would someone say that?
Why would someone say, I don't,
how do you know that it's the Nazis trading this?
How do we know, I mean, to Mother Jones,
everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is a Nazi.
I think the reason to say that is because it justifies shutting it all down.
If it's Nazi, if it's ordinary internet trolls eating chicken tenders, you don't have a good argument to shut down trading on this stock.
Because ordinary people are doing what institutional investors have done for a long time.
But if it's Nazis, you can do whatever you want.
A reporter for The Hill, a much more mainstream outlet writes to the reporter from Mother Jones,
what is your sense of the overlap between the Wall Street Betts people and the Nazis on telegram?
and elsewhere who stormed the capital.
Ooh, good.
Maybe we can use the FBI to go to their homes and shut them down and put them in prison and
take away all their money.
They can't do this, darn it.
Discord, a social media platform.
Shut down the Wall Street Betts account for hate speech.
For hate speech because they drove GameStop and AMC and Blackberry, because they drove
them through the roof to wreck some Wall Street investors.
for the lulls, for the lefts, they booted them for hate speech. This is the same thing you see
done to conservatives. Whenever they walk a little bit away from the liberal establishment,
whenever they question in any way the dominant liberal regime, what are we told? We're told
that's hate speech, that's bigotry, it's dangerous, it's a threat. You're a Nazi,
you're a white supremacist, and we've got to, we've got to. We've got to.
who censor you. Nasdaq is considering halting trading to let the investors, quote,
recalibrate. NASDAQ CEO, Adina Friedman, said that the exchange could halt trading activity
for stocks in the event that they were targeted by these internet users. So you're going to let
these giant bigwigs on Wall Street have a completely unfair advantage on investing when their
stocks get, when their investments get threatened. But ordinary people, what happens when you're, with far
less knowledge, by the way, what happens when you lose some money in the markets? Do they, do they stop
trading on NASDAQ for you? I don't think so. The White House, for their measure, are monitoring the
situation. Jen Saki, the press secretary, was asked about this, and she had a typically profound answer.
If the White is concerned about the stock market activity we're seeing around GameStop,
and now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary or whatever, the company that was a blockbuster.
And have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to proceed?
Well, I'm also happy to repeat that we have the first female Treasury Secretary and a team that's surrounding her
and often questions about market will send to them.
Hold on.
What?
Hey, this is the strangest day in the markets that we've had in a hundred years.
What's going on over there?
Well, I'd like to remind you that the Treasury Secretary has breasts.
Okay, can you tell us anything about the markets?
She identifies as a woman, and her pronouns are she and her.
Yes, yes, Jen Saki, I understand all that, but I need things that matter.
I need information. I need information that matters, not just your ridiculous liberal identity
politics clap trap. She goes on. She reminds us that we have a woman press secretary.
Whoop-de-do. Then she goes on and sort of tries to address the question.
But our team is, of course, our economic team, including Secretary Yellen and others,
are monitoring the situation. It's a good reminder, though, that the stock market isn't
the only measure of the health of our economy. It doesn't reflect how working in middle
class families are doing. As you all know, from covering this, we're in the midst of a case
shape recovery. America's workers are struggling to make ends meet, which is why the president has
introduced this urgent package to get immediate relief to families. So she's just not, she's not
going to touch it. You can just tell this woman is not nearly as talented as her predecessors
as Kaylee McAnney and as Sarah Sanders, certainly. You know, Sarah and Kaylee are extraordinarily
intelligent and even more so prepared. And this gal is just not. She isn't. Whenever they ask her
questions, she usually says, well, I'll have to check. You know, I'll have to go talk to the
secretary of such and such. Yeah, but I'll get back to you. If she were a Republican, there's no way
she would have gotten this job because the reporters would be tough on her and she wouldn't be
able to stand up to it. But because she's a Democrat, the reporters don't care because they're all
on the same team. They're all on the same team. And that is quite a,
quite a lot of what the GameStop thing is about. People thinking that there is a game that is
rigged against them. And so what do they want to do with this kind of corrupt establishment that they
have no respect for? They want to just throw rocks at it and see what happens. And the establishment
is striking back. When I say that the GameStop phenomenon is about a meme, you know,
it's about the sea shanties and the chicken tendies and just laughing their way through this whole thing.
There's actually on the message board, this is a little offensive, I'll probably get my stream
shut down when I even read what they say. The people on Wall Street bets have a slogan on their
message board, which is we can remain retarded longer than they can remain solvent.
This is something they've been writing on their message board, meaning we can behave irrationally
longer than these guys can hold their short positions.
And we're going to behave irrationally because we want to crack this liberal establishment,
because we believe this liberal establishment is not particularly rational and not serving our interests.
And the establishment keeps proving it.
Do you remember some years ago, maybe it was four or five years ago,
there was a Twitter account, it was a troll account called a Ricky Vaughn.
And he posted very offensive things.
And, you know, he was, you know, just, it was an anonymous.
account, but it was politically incorrect. It was outright offensive. Okay. Then the account went away.
The guy who ran that account is facing 10 years in prison. He's facing 10 years in prison for posting
memes. Specifically what he did is he posted these memes and it said, if you want to vote for
Joe Biden, or I'm sorry, at that time I guess it would be Hillary Clinton. If you want to vote for Hillary
Clinton, text your vote to 5, 3, 2, whatever the number was.
This is a joke.
Of course, you can't text your vote.
Vote by text.
It's so much easier than showing up to the polls.
Let me post these memes.
This is a variation on a very longstanding joke, which is, if you've ever worked
on a political campaign, you know this joke.
You'll say, hey, are you a Republican or a Democrat?
And they'll say Republican.
You say, okay, good, make sure you vote on Tuesday.
And someone else comes up.
They say, when's election day?
You say, are you Republican or a Democrat?
I'm a Democrat.
You say, good, make sure you vote on Wednesday.
Right, make sure you vote after the election.
It's an old joke.
Now this guy, for posting a variation on it, a meme, is going to prison.
I'd like to remind you that in this past year, the Democrats changed all the election
rules in key areas weeks and months before the election.
election, completely upended them, in some places in contravention of state constitutions.
So the peasants joke about elections, they get 10 years in prison. The crooked Democrats change
all the election rules, get rid of election integrity measures. They get to throw the people
in prison. Does that seem fair to you? Does that seem like a fair system? Not to me.
and it's it's so much bigger than GameStop, it's so much bigger than internet regulation,
it's so much bigger than Trump.
The left has been doing this for a very long time.
You remember when some people who were in manufacturing, they worked in factories,
they worked in middle America, when neoliberal elites shipped their jobs overseas,
when they made the conscious decision to outsource their jobs,
these guys would complain and say, hey, man, we voted for you,
and now you're taking away all of our jobs.
And these elites would come in and say,
no, no, you don't understand GDP is going up a little higher.
No, no, it's okay because GDP's going up
and cheap Chinese goods or their prices are falling.
So you can buy a TV for less money.
So really, you're doing well.
And anyway, learn to code.
Remember that?
Learn to code.
Then when a bunch of journalists lost their jobs,
a lot of conservatives said to them,
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of social media. You were not permitted to say that on social media. Totally different sets of rules.
They've been pushing this argument. One set of rules for me, one set of rules for you for years and years and
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When Joe Biden was running for president, he said he would not get rid of fracking. He would not
go after the oil industry, right? Because he was trying to get voters specifically in Pennsylvania.
And then Trump said, yes, you will. You've promised that you would. And he said, no, I won't. That's a lie. Kamalaura said, no, I won't. That's a lie. And now that's what he's doing. That's exactly what he's doing. He's killing all of these jobs in energy and oil and natural gas. So John Kerry, who I guess is the climate czar. I guess that's his, who knows what he's, he's the czar of yachting, I think. He's the Thirst and Howell the Third, the czar of riding around on fancy boats. So Kerry comes out.
and is asked about this. And he has, he has the, the learn to code of 2021.
Coal plants have been closing over the last 20 years. So what President Biden wants to do is
make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the
people who go to work to make the solar panels. They were making them here at home. That is going
to be a particular focus of the, uh, build back better agenda. And, and, and, and, and, you know,
And I think that unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative.
No surprise, right, for the last few years.
They've been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense.
No, it's not.
What's happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.
and and what the what the what the what the what the financiers the big banks the asset managers private investors
venture capital are all discovering is there's a lot of money to be made in the creation of these
new jobs in these sectors well you see they've just been fed of false narrative they have been
they're currently being fed a false narrative actually and can't forget i forgot to mention coal
of coal workers especially being hit well you see look the jobs they've been
going away for 20 years. Right, because you, you guys in your crooked liberal establishment
were getting rid of those jobs. People weren't complaining about losing those jobs under Trump.
Actually, that was a defining point of the campaign. Trump said, look, I'm trying to fight to keep
your jobs and Joe Biden is going to lose your jobs. And what did Joe Biden say? He said,
no, I won't. Absolutely not. You're going to get to keep your jobs in coal and oil and natural gas.
And then what's John Kerry coming? No, of course.
you're going to lose your jobs because of the sun monster. The sun monster is going to destroy all of
life on earth six months ago by my calculations. And so that's why we've got a completely upend
society and build back better. And you can't do a damn thing about it, peasants. Learn to solar.
Learn to solar. Learned, that's your answer? No. How about we just get rid of?
of your ridiculous, get rid of the whole position that Carrie has, this idea of the climate
czar, get rid of all these silly ideologies, get rid of this apocalyptic fear of the sun
monster, and allow people to keep their jobs. It's not inevitable. The left wants to pretend
that their very narrow ideology is the inevitable path of politics, and none of us can say a word
about it, the right side of history sort of thing. But it's not. We can fight back against it.
That's in many ways what the Trump year is represented, and that's certainly what this GameStop thing represents.
Notice, John Kerry, not wearing a mask.
Could you imagine with his locked jawed accent, if you were wearing a mask, which is a
Jen Saki, press secretary, not wearing a mask.
Joe Biden has been better about this because he's telling everyone to always wear a mask on federal property.
So you'll see now a lot of photos of Joe Biden, even in the Oval Office, he'll be wearing a mask.
He's a little smoother at this kind of retail politics.
John Kerry is violating Joe Biden's mandate right now.
Jen Saki is violating Joe Biden's mandate.
The reporters have to wear masks, and they are, at least while the cameras are running.
But these guys don't have to because there's a different set of rules for them.
NASDAQ is going to halt trading if they're at risk of losing money.
Joe Biden's going to suspend his mandate for John Kerry.
All of the main environmental activists, Carrie, sure, but Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio,
these guys use so much more energy than the ordinary person.
And what do they do?
They scold ordinary people and say, do less, buy less, live less.
I'll be on my yacht.
Contact me when global warming is over.
It's a different hierarchy here.
It's a new sort of a caste system.
You know, Twitter, if you, oh my goodness gracious, if you say the wrong,
thing on Twitter now. If you question, oh my heaven for fend, you raise any questions about the 2020
election, you'll be gone in two seconds. If you use the letter Q, oh, buddy, you're out of there.
If you are the sitting president of the United States in 2020 and they don't like the cut of your
jib, they'll kick you off. They won't remove child porn, but they'll remove conservatives. That's
according to one lawsuit just came out. A lawsuit going after Twitter saying they refused to
take down widely shared pornographic images and videos of a young teenage boy who was a victim of
sex trafficking because a Twitter investigation, quote, didn't find a violation of the company's
policies. This lawsuit was filed yesterday by the victim and his mother in the Northern District
of California. The boy, by the way, I think he's still 17 years old and the video depicts him
at 13 years old, engaged in sex acts and Twitter refuses to take it down.
Now, I guess they'll take it down now probably, right? But now that the lawsuit's getting bad
press, but they don't care. It's just not a priority for them. And one could spend many,
many hours discussing the bizarre sexual ideologies of radical leftists. But it just doesn't,
it just doesn't matter. They've got bigger priorities, namely, keeping down common sense.
Perfectly mainstream conservatives have been kicked off of Twitter, just as easily as the more eccentric
types. The duly elected sitting president kicked off of Twitter because the establishment didn't
like him. And this, I think, helps to explain why a new poll just came out from Politico and
morning consult shows that a majority of Republican voters want Donald Trump to run for president again
in 2024. I get it. I totally get it. I was having a discussion yesterday with a pal of mine
over why Republicans stick with Trump. He's such a jerk. He messed things up in some places.
He didn't fight hard enough in Georgia. He didn't do this. He didn't do that. Why is it that we go after
all the other Republicans, but somehow we stick with Trump. Because Trump is our rock that we throw
against the edifice of this crooked establishment. That's why. Why is Wall Street bets sticking
with GameStop and Blackberry and AMC? Is it even because they think that GameStop is this deep
value company? No. They just know that that's a great cudgel against this establishment.
and negative politics, the idea of fighting against somebody, that's not a dirty concept.
That is often how politics works, perfectly natural. And it's especially true when the dominant
regime is as corrupt as the regime that we're living under right now, which is unprecedented
in American history. We always like to pretend, oh, everything's doing fine, GDP is doing well.
It's all okay.
you haven't been able to leave your home without a filthy piece of cloth covering your mouth in 10 months.
Many of you have not been permitted to work and you haven't been given relief from the government,
which has banned you from working. You've been given $600, maybe a little bit more with the second relief package.
You have been kicked off of social media. You have been told not to go over to Christmas.
not to have Thanksgiving, not to hug your loved ones, not to bury your dead by an elite that
doesn't believe any of this, that flouts these rules left and right, and changes the rules
whenever it suits their political interests. And people are very, very angry about that,
and they're very justified in that anger. And they want a cudgel. And Trump remains that cudgel.
in some ways
Trump's political prospects
if he does want to run again
will depend less on the field
in 2024 and more on the establishment
if the establishment
remains this brazen
or gets more brazen
which it seems like that's the direction they're going in
it's going to be very difficult
for another Republican to come up
and claim the mantle
even if that other Republican would be more capable
in terms of legislation
even if that other Republican would be more competent in terms of organization of political apparatus.
Don't forget, Trump worked in business this whole life, right?
He didn't, guy never ran out a formal campaign until 2016.
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
People are very, very angry.
Is it any wonder?
You know, in San Francisco on Tuesday, the San Francisco School Board voted to accept the recommendations of a renaming committee that voted to officially rename 44 public school.
bearing the names of controversial historical figures. Do you know who these controversial historical
figures were? Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Franklin
Roosevelt, a Democrat icon. His portrait is hanging in Biden's Oval Office. Herbert Hoover.
Paul Revere. The regulars are out. The Revolutionary War here.
Paul Revere. Thomas Edison.
If those schools have light bulbs,
it's a little ungrateful for them to rename Edison school.
Even Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein,
who is a far left person.
She's the woman who said that Amy Coney-Barritt perhaps shouldn't be a judge
because she's Catholic,
renaming her because they allege that she said or did something
that could be sort of construed as racist
five million years ago or something. No evidence that she said or did anything like that.
This is my argument against the Tubman $20 bill. I won't rehash my arguments. We've talked about
the last couple days. I don't think we should put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. I don't have anything
against Tubman, but I don't think the Tubman 20 is about Tubman either. I think it's about getting
rid of Andrew Jackson and pushing leftist identity politics. And that is poison. It's poison
because it will overthrow not only our understanding of the American regime and our appreciation,
for it. Not only will it reframe American history and cast it in a negative light to use the
terms that the 1619 project uses, but it will rip the country apart. If you don't have loyalty and
respect for your country, you're not going to flourish. You're probably not going to stay together
very long. And the country is fraying. It's ripping apart. And it's because of that crooked
establishment. In the midst of all this, Joe Biden is pursuing a radical agenda. We were told he wouldn't.
We were told he'd be moderate Joe. I don't think so. You know, the Democrats have been clamoring
for court packing, adding new judges to the court. Well, some Democratic senators say, no, I don't,
I don't really want to go for that. I'll vote against that. So Joe Biden just appointed a bipartisan
commission to study reforms to the Supreme Court.
and the federal judiciary. So according to the Washington Post, it's an attempt to make a nod at both camps.
They're the activists on the left who want him to pack the court, and there are the swing voters who aren't
that interested in it. So he wants to nod to both of them and create this commission.
If you make a commission to propose reforms, the commission has to propose reform.
Coming back and saying, we don't think you should change it at all, is not really an option.
If there's enough of a public outcry, maybe, but that's not why you form one of these committees.
You do it to give yourself the institutional cover to make radical changes.
And this is how the left wins, by the way, is through incrementalism and gradualism.
If you have two sides being represented here, the side that wants radical change and the side that wants no change at all,
when you create a commission to reconcile those two, you get a lot of time.
change. There's no way that the conservatives can possibly win in that situation, unless the public
outcry is simply so great that the commission loses its mandate. But absent something like that,
there's going to be this change, and there's nothing we can do about that. A change to the Supreme
Court could be the straw that breaks the camels back in terms of respect for our institutions
in this country. I think that's why the court refused to hear any of the election. I think that's why the court refused to hear any of the
challenges is they just thought we need to preserve the institutional integrity. We don't want to
weigh in on this election. When we weighed in on Bush v. Gore, which we didn't want to do even then,
it, you know, undermine the court and we just can't do it. Joe Biden doesn't care. Country's a
powder keg right now. Joe Biden's smoking a cigarette. I have to flick that butt. And it's not just
the court. It's a whole slew of executive orders. It's a whole heap of,
of radical policies that are so disconnected from the will of voters and from what he promised
on the campaign trail, not on the campaign trail 10 years ago. This year, this past year,
he's just lying right to their face because he knows the people can't do anything about it.
32 executive orders. Joe Biden has signed 32 executive orders in his first week.
Now, you might be confused about this if you were paying any attention.
attention to the presidential election, which really none of us were because it was a fake presidential
election, because no one was allowed to go outside, no one was allowed to hold rallies, it was all
controlled by the media. And big tech censored conservatives and news that was damaging to Biden.
However, if you were watching it all, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton's communications director,
who now pretends to be a journalist at ABC, he was hosting Joe Biden, and he says, all right,
Biden, how are you going to govern? You're going to get this done? You're going to get that done.
ran through your agenda. Joe Biden says, hey, I need to build consensus. You cannot govern through
executive order like a dictator. I have this strange notion. We are democracy. Some of my Republican friends
and some of my Democratic friends even occasionally say, well, if you can't get the votes by executive
order, you're going to do something. Things you can't do by executive order unless you're a
dictator. We're democracy. We need consensus. You can't govern by executive order unless you're a
dictator. In a democracy, you need consensus. So if you take Joe at his word there, and then you
observe that he's signed 32 executive orders in his first week, can you do that math? What is Joe saying
about himself? He's saying he's a dictator, and he's saying, we're not properly a democracy.
And I don't want to use hyperbolic language here. When I say Joe's a dictator, I mean that in the
purest sense of that word. He is just saying things and that that is becoming the law of the land.
He's dictating.
So that is just what's happening in the first week.
It's not like they've been passing laws in the Congress.
And for a long time in this country, that's not really how you govern.
You govern through the executive agencies and the bureaucracy and by EOs.
And if you're governing that way, what Joe Biden is saying there to Stephanopoulos is,
we're not a democracy.
And there have been many sophisticated political thinkers who say that at this point,
the United States more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy.
We've spoken on this show before about the cycle of regime.
Kind of classical cycle of regimes. You have democracy, then that decays into an oligarchy,
then that transforms into a monarchy, then the monarchy can be overthrown or reformed into a
democracy, so on and so forth. I'm not saying this country is purely an oligarchy at this
moment, but it certainly is somewhere between, at the very least it's somewhere between a democracy
and an oligarchy. And as you see the rise of Trump's, as you see the rise of Wall Street best,
the GameStop insurgency.
As you see the political violence in the streets, I guess on both sides, much more violent
on the left than on the right, but there has been some on the right too.
What you are seeing, I'll use the language of the left, is this is the cry of the people
that haven't been heard.
Sure, I'm not saying this as a way to endorse it or in a prescriptive way.
I'm using it in a descriptive way, the exact same way the left does.
All of these aspects, you're seeing people who believe that democracy in this country is
not really functioning, that we are more effectively in oligarchy. And there's one set of rules
for Wall Street. There's one set of rules for John Kerry and Jen Saki and Joe Biden and the Biden
family overseas and in the United States. It's one set of rules for all those guys. And then there's
another set of rules for ordinary people. Joe Biden in his first week decides to take on the very
important issue of taxpayer-funded genital mutilation for U.S. soldiers. So he takes away a way,
Donald Trump's ban on people who, men who think that they're women and women who think that they're
men from serving in the armed forces, which had been common sense until 2015. So right before
the end of Obama's administration, he decides, okay, I'm now going to permit men who think that
they're women and women who think that they're men to serve in the armed forces. And somehow
that's going to be really good for American military might. Right. So he says that Trump comes in a
year later and he says, nah, we're a year and a half later. Now, we're going to get rid of that,
okay? So he reverses that. Joe Biden, that's a important civil rights issue. We're going to let
men who think that they're women serve in the military. And we're going to force taxpayers to pay for
the surgery, cosmetic surgery, to make them look more like the sex that they are not, but that they
imagine themselves to be. And you have ordinary people, I think, across the political spectrum,
plenty of left-wingerers too, looking at it and saying, what? That's what you're spending my money on?
You're spending my money to force me to participate in this ancient heretical religion called Gnostic dualism
that posits that a man can be a woman simply by believing himself so? What? That is so divorced from
reality. You guys, you governing elites are so divorced from reality that you are forcing us all to live in that
fantasy as well. Getting worse, folks, the majority of Senate Democrats, we'll move past the executive
orders, we'll get into legislation. The majority of Senate Democrats now want to make Washington,
D.C. a state. 39 members of the Democratic Conference. So not enough to get it done yet. This has been
building up for some time. They want to do it. Tom Carper says this isn't a Republican or Democratic
issue. It's an American issue because the lack of fair representation for D.C. residents is
clearly inconsistent with the values on which this country was founded. That is so illiterate that I'm
surprised that this man, Tom Carper, can walk around throughout the day without clunking himself
in the head wherever he goes. It's so idiotic. The entire purpose of Washington, D.C. is to not
be a state. If Washington, D.C. were supposed to be a state, then we would have had the federal
seat in Maryland or Virginia. But we didn't. We actually took to it. We actually took
territory away from Maryland and Virginia so that we could give it to a federal district so that the
federal government would not be within any particular state. That's the whole point of it. That's been the
way D.C. has been organized since 1801. Not as it, not only is it not contrary to the values of the
country, it is that is a natural product of the values of the country, which says this is a federation.
This is the United States of America. No one state is going to dominate. When Carper, I can't tell if he's
just being cynical and a liar or if he's really that stupid. I do know some, I know many people
in Washington, D.C., and so I'm not going to discount the idea that he might just have no idea
what he's talking about. When he says, though, this isn't a Republican or Democratic issue,
in a way, he's sort of right. It's really, it is, as of now, a democratic issue. But really
what he's saying is Washington people, Washington elites, want more power. And that cuts across
party lines very often. And the ordinary people with their ordinary constitution, they might say one
thing, but we the established elites are saying something else. And we're going to play by a
different set of rules and we're going to make you bend the knee to us. And the rest of us are saying,
man, how do I crack this establishment? How do I go to the sun, go to the moon, send this rocket
ship up, whether it's on the internet, whether it's in the stock market, whether it's in politics.
That process only just beginning. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show. See you
tomorrow. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the
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Today on the Ben Shapiro show,
Wall Street gets stonked.
As Reddit Games, the game stops stock.
Plus, John Kerry is reporting for climate duty.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro.
show, tune in.
