Ep. 1695 - Libs PANIC as Poll Names AOC the Face of the Democratic Party

A new CNN poll asked Democrats which politician best reflects the views of their party.

With a leadership vacuum among Democrats right now, these kinds of surveys are crucial

to figuring out who will lead the Democrat party in the future.

And can you guess who won? Can you guess who won? You're going to have to wait

until the stinger is over to get the answer, but I'll give you a hint.

If this poll is accurate, Republicans will rule for a

thousand years. I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.

Welcome back to the show. Libs have a new campaign, an official campaign, to decolonize Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare.
The only way I can think of decolonizing Stratford-upon-Avon is by kicking out all of the Normans. I don't think that's what they have in mind.
There's so much more to say. First, though, text Knowles, K-N-A-W-L-E-S, to 989898.
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Okay, you have your guesses.

CNN poll.

So this is a liberal outlet doing a poll of liberals. Poll conducted March 6th through 9th.
Poll surveying Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. Who is the Democrat who best reflects the views of the Democratic Party? Don't forget, the Dems just went down in flames in the 2024 elections because the party had lost the common sense, moved way too far to the left.
Drum roll, please. The Democrat who best reflects the views of the party, have they learned their lesson? No, it's AOC.
AOC tops out the poll. There are a lot of people, a lot of people listed on the poll, so no one gets a majority or anything close to it.
But the one with the biggest numbers on the board, AOC with 10%, followed by Kamala Harris. Even putting ideology aside for a second, I don't know that Kamala Harris has an ideology.
I don't know that she thinks about very much of anything other than just attaining the next political office. But regardless of her ideology, Kamala Harris, one of the least popular politicians in the country, good at advancing herself in politics, bad at convincing people to vote for her.
She comes next with 9% followed by, all right, are we going to get a moderate in here? Are we going to get a popular person in here? No, we got Bernie Sanders next at 8% followed by, come on, we got to get a moderate in here somewhere, right? No, Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House for the Democrats, 6%, followed by Barack Obama. Okay, that's a little bit more normal.
He's still the most left-wing ideological president we've ever had, followed by Jasmine Crockett, that complete lunatic, that woman who makes a big spectacle of herself in the house. I think she's a freshman.
I don't know. She's pretty new on the scene in terms of her national media presence, at least.
4% followed by, then you get to Gavin Newsom, who is trying to position himself as a moderate. He's not a moderate.
He is avant-garde when it comes to left-wing social issues. He was officiating so-called gay marriages in 2004 as mayor of San Francisco, but he is trying to moderate himself now.
But he's all the way down there at 2%. Pelosi, 2%.
It's crazy to think Nancy Pelosi is now a relative moderate in the Democrat Party. Alyssa Slotkin wants to portray herself as a moderate 2%.
Chuck Schumer does effectively portray himself as a moderate 2%. So the poll is clear, and it's not just one example, or you can't just blame it on charisma or something like that.
The leftists, the radicals, the generally unpopular people are toward the top of this poll. They're the ones that the Democrat base says, yes, that person represents me.
And the relative moderates and the relatively popular people who can sort of reach across the aisle, they're at the bottom. This is a huge problem for Democrats because the issue, I was just discussing this yesterday with a comedian, the issue that dominated the election that the Democrats still haven't come to grips with is transgenderism.
Or just broadly, because forget, I'm so sick of talking about transgenderism. Broadly, it's the notion that the Democrats have lost the common sense, which is represented by transgenderism because you're telling people to believe that a man is a woman.
But it's this notion that the Democrats have just lost the common sense. They are not speaking to reality anymore.
They are totally disconnected from the real problems people have on the ground. So that's why you're seeing people like Gavin Newsom launch a podcast where he's inviting on all these big MAGA Republicans, MAGA Republicans who were part of the coalition that just won the popular vote, trying to move a little bit more toward the center.
And yet the Democrat base says, yeah, we don't want you. We don't want you.
Even as elites in the Democrat Party are begging. They're saying, please, we want to win an election in twenty twenty eight.
Bill Maher interviewing Josh Shapiro, the relatively moderate Democrat governor of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, a crucially important state in the Rust Belt. He's saying, hey, I think you're going to run.
I think we need one of these moderates to run. And then the Democrat Party is going to regain the common sense.
And then maybe we'll win an election again. OK, well, the way I see it now, if you're running, and I think you are.
You're not letting this go, are you? No, no, no. No, and I think it's good you are.
I like the field so far. Rahm Emanuel, I think, is going to run.
It looks like our governor here, Gavin Newsom, I think it's going to run. Pete Buttigieg, those are the people I see.
And they're all sort of on the same page, which is the Democrats. They're either people who are are moving to the center, have moved to the center.
They got the memo, I think. What I fear is the Democratic primary voter who doesn't want that kind of person.
Yeah, they want the firebrand. What do you do in the Democratic primary? Okay, and Bill Maher's prediction, which actually came out before this poll did, Bill Maher's prediction proven totally right.
He says, I fear the Democrat primary voter. He's not going to let us have one of these moderate so-called Democrats, or at the very least charismatic Democrats who can win over the other side.
And Bill Maher is right about that. for now, for now, the Democrat primary voter just wants a radical leftist, even more left-wing than Newsom, Shapiro, Buttigieg, give me a break, and the rest of them.
Now, this is not just a Democrat problem. Republicans have faced this problem too.
It's kind of trite political analysis to say, you know, well, if you can survive the primary, then you as a moderate will have an easier time winning the general election. That's conventional wisdom, and I suppose there's enough truth to it.
You tack to the extreme during the primary, you tack to the center during the general. So how did the Republicans overcome this? This is the lesson the Democrats need to learn if they want to win an election again.
And I'm not even afraid to tell it to them. I'm not even afraid that I'm going to give them the secret because I don't know that they can actually do anything about it.
The way that the Republicans overcame this problem, how do you get through the primary, but then have a good enough candidate to get to the general election? Those are sometimes opposed to one another. It's because we had this political genius, Donald Trump, who was able to form a new coalition.
That's what did it. Trump, when he ran in the GOP primary in 2016, would you call him the most conservative candidate by the conventions of 2016 politics? Certainly not.
certainly you would say that Ted Cruz was more conservative than Donald Trump. You might say that Rand Paul was more conservative than Donald Trump.
I'm actually sort of forgetting now who was even running in 2016. Ben Carson ran, didn't he? Yeah, Ben Carson ran in 2016.
I think you would say he was more conservative conventionally than Donald Trump. And yet Trump dominated the primary because in some ways he signaled that he was more right-wing and just in a different way.
By shaking up the way the GOP thought about things like tariffs, by shaking up the way the GOP thought about things like foreign policy, by attracting new people to register as Republicans first in the primary, and then he makes it into the general election. And on the one hand, he's the most extreme right-wing Republican calling illegal aliens rapists and murderers.
On the other hand, he's a billionaire from New York who's soft on certain social issues at least, and was a Democrat for much of his life. What is it? How do you make sense of a political party that includes in it Ted Cruz and Bobby Kennedy? Well, the way you make sense of it is you say Trump did not just play according to the rules that were tough for Republicans in the 20-teens.
It was very hard to make it through a primary and then make it through a general election. We weren't that good at it.
We went down twice. McCain, Romney.
So what do you do? Well, you change the rules. When you're not winning according to the rules, you got to change the rules.
You got to change the game. That's what Trump did.
That's what the Democrats have to do. If their best candidates, this is sad, if their best candidates are people like Gavin Newsom and their base hates Gavin Newsom for bad reasons, not even for the good reasons that you shouldn't like Gavin Newsom, if your base want candidates who are definitely going to go down in flames, you need to change your coalition.
Trump was able to do that. The Republicans were able to do that.
I see no evidence that the Democrats are able to do that. There's so much more to say.
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Okay, one last point on the Dems going down, and then we'll get to the really important political stories like decolonizing Stratford upon Avon. But before we move on from the Dems, James Carville, legendary Democrat, political consultant, big Clinton man, the first Clinton, famously said, it's the economy, stupid.

the economy, I do,

New Orleans.

James Carville just gave dating advice,

not just political advice,

dating advice

to young progressives.

He says,

the thing that is hampering

young progressives

in their personal lives,

in their romantic lives,

is the same thing

that is affecting them

at the political level.

It's their preening moral superiority. Get over your preening and your moral superiority and be more pragmatic in how you approach life.
And you end up being a being a lot happier and you'll actually win an election and therefore you can actually do things and you can do some of the things that you want because if you lose it doesn't do any good it's just it's about nothing and that's what i would tell them so carville famously is married to a republican political consultant mary Matlin, and they get along great. And he says, yeah, we don't really talk about politics very much.
We talk about other things. There are other things in our lives.
I don't look down on her for being a Republican. She doesn't look down on me for being a Democrat.
Get over your preening moral superiority. And that will help you not only to win elections, that will help you in your personal life and your romantic life.
So true. This gets to a really important political point that even on the right, we don't talk about enough.
That is the political virtue of love. I'm not just talking about love like you're reading a Hallmark card.
I'm talking about love as a political virtue described by the great political philosophers. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, book eight, chapter seven writes, as friendship appears to be the bond of the state and lawgivers seem to set more store by it than they do by justice for to promote concord, which seems akin to friendship is their chief aim, while faction, which is enmity, is what they are most anxious to banish.
here, he's saying, you think that politics is all about justice, and you just have certain,

you have the laws, and the laws are applied by some kind of robot, automatic process that is

blind, and just, we all operate like we're cogs in a machine. That's not how the state works.

Friendship is the bond of the state. Love is the bond of the state.
Where men are friends and have

Thank you. in a machine.
That's not how the state works. Friendship is the bond of the state.
Love is the bond of the state. Where men are friends and have charity and have love, you don't even really need to think that much about justice.
You don't need to get litigious all the time. You can work it out with a handshake deal.
You don't need to bring the lawyers in all the time. And in fact, if all your state has is lawyers and has no bonds of love and no connections between people, then even the law is going to fail.
Even justice is going to fail because you won't even have the mutual respect to uphold justice. Crucial insight.
Backed up also by Cicero. Cicero and De Officis, book one, chapter seven.
Of the three remaining divisions,

the most extensive in its application

is the principle by which society

and what we may call its common bonds are maintained.

Of this, again, there are two divisions.

Justice, in which is the crowning glory of the virtues

and on the basis of which men are called good men.

And close akin to justice, charity,

which may also be called kindness or generosity. So here Cicero says much the same thing.
He places perhaps slightly more emphasis on justice, but he says what really matters here in society, yes, you have your justice, but also charity, kindness, generosity. Without those things, you cannot have a society.
It's the political virtue of love, which gets to a line, I think I was mentioning on the show this week. I was mentioning on this show or on some other podcast that I was a guest on.
I was just reading the political philosopher John Gray pointing out that politics is less like an argument and more like a conversation. When you're actually doing politics, I'm not talking about having some public debate to sway public opinion or to convince people to vote for one candidate or the other.
I'm talking about when you're actually doing politics, writing laws, putting laws into effect, getting through the common day-to-day business of the state. That is much less like a formal argument where you make an argument with perfect, crystal clear, unassailable logic, and then you totally vanquish the other side.
They are cast into the outer darkness, and then you get everything you want. It's much less like that.
It is much more like a conversation where all politics comes about as means of compromise. And if you want politics to actually work, if you want the state to actually flourish, it's not enough to compromise in a transactional way.
Okay, you get this thing that I hate and I get this thing that you hate, but you have to actually come to some conception of the common good. And you actually have to love the other person.
If you win an election and then you vaporize half of your country, you will still be in a worse spot, even if half the country are big libs, big Democrats who are wrong about everything. If they just go away, if you just deport all the Democrats, your country will be weaker.
Your economy will be weaker. I don't know.
But will it be weaker? Do the Democrats actually work? No, they do work. They do.
Everything will be weaker. Your polity will be weaker.
It'll just break down. You need to do politics together.
That's the political virtue of love. James Carville, he's not right about much, but he is very much right about that.
And he understands it very well. He puts it into practice in his marriage.
Okay, speaking of preening and moral superiority, Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, is undertaking

a campaign to decolonize itself. This here, I've got it.
It's being reported by the Daily Mail.

It's a British paper. Shakespeare's birthplace to be decolonized over fears his success

benefits the ideology of white European supremacy. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust owns a bunch of buildings in Stratford-upon-Avon.
It wants to, quote, create a more inclusive museum experience, announced it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised, by whom? I don't know, that Shakespeare's ideas were used to advance white supremacy ideas. It's got to move away from Western perspective.
Western perspectives, which are not only reflected in the work of Shakespeare, but are in some ways created by the work of Shakespeare, those need to go away in the Shakespeare Museum and in Shakespeare's birthplace. The trust also said that some of its items within this trust could contain language or depictions that are racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We got to get rid of those. I don't know what those items are.
I assume some of those items are within the text of Shakespeare himself, within the Merchant of Venice. Therefore, Jew, though justice be thy plea, consider this, that in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation.
We got to delete that line in Shakespeare, right? Is that anti-Semitic? Plenty of sexism in Shakespeare. You got to delete, I don't know, most of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
You got to delete what else? There is speciesism in, what's the, oh, I can't believe the play, the name of the play is escaping me now, but it's got the most famous stage direction in Shakespeare, when the character exits the stage pursued by a bear. That's very speciesist.
I can't believe the name of that play escapes me.

Well, clearly Shakespeare, the classrooms in America have already been decolonized of Shakespeare because people don't read them anymore and I forget the name of the play. What does it mean

to decolonize Stratford-upon-Avon? I guess literally right now, if you were to decolonize

these small towns in England, you would just be throwing out the Muslim Pakistanis who are the

ones who have actually colonized it in recent decades. But if you want to go back further,

I don't know. if you were to decolonize these small towns in England, you would just be throwing out the Muslim Pakistanis, who are the ones who have actually colonized it in recent decades.
But if you want to go back further, I guess the way to decolonize Stratford-upon-Avon would be to throw out the Normans who conquered England in 1066. Is that what they mean? No, they're not talking about getting rid of the Pakistanis who run the grooming gangs, and they're not talking about getting rid of the Normans.
They're talking about getting rid of all the white people, including the Normans, but also the Saxons and the Angles, and that's what they mean. When they say they want to decolonize Stratford upon Avon, what they're really saying is they want to colonize it.
To de-center whiteness in Shakespeare's birthplace is to impose some outside racial ideology on Stratford-upon-Avon. Which is to say, it's to colonize it.
They want to colonize it. Which people who have been paying attention in recent years know.
They know that that is what that is always about. these racial justice programs, which sound great in theory, in practice, are just about getting rid of anything that is vaguely European on the basis that all racial identity is good except for the racial identity of white people.
All the contributions of different races are good except for the contributions of white people which do not exist or alternately are terrible and have damaged the world. They want to rip, they not only want to rip Shakespeare out of England, they want to rip Shakespeare out of Shakespeare.
That is culturally suicidal. There's so much more to say.
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speaking of colonization a brown professor that came out wrong a professor at brown

not a brat this the story is not about the color of anyone's skin however that is i guess

tangentially related because a professor at Brown is to be deported after attending the funeral of a Hezbollah leader. You think, you know, whatever happened to academic freedom? You know, whatever, whatever happened to freedom of speech? You can't, it is America, isn't it? You can't even go pay your respects to a dead terrorist leader in the Middle East anymore.
By golly, whatever happened to my rights? This professor's name is Rasha Alouyeh, an assistant professor at Brown University's medical school who has been deported to Lebanon after attending the funeral of former Hezbollah leader

Hassan Nasrallah. The Department of Homeland Security has commented on this deportation,

said a visa is a privilege, not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who

kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is common sense security.

So this opens up a big debate. Are we deporting this person on national security grounds or are we deporting this person for his or her? I don't know if Rasha is a man's name or a woman's name, and I don't really care that much.
Are we deporting this person on national security grounds or because of this person's opinion? That's the big debate here, even on the right. Certainly on the left, they're saying these people are being deported for their opinions.
That guy who used to be a Columbia graduate student, but then graduated, and he was just deported because he's pro-Palestine, and he was making a nuisance of himself around New York City. It has nothing to do with security or crimes.
It has everything to do with his opinion. And some people on the right even are saying, well, you shouldn't be deported for your opinion.

Especially people on the right who don't like Israel and who are more sympathetic to the Palestine liberation cause.

They say, well, that person definitely shouldn't be deported for his or her opinion.

But I just want to zoom out for a second.

Take Israel out of it.

Take Palestine out of it.

Take the protests out of it.

Even take the national security out of it, take Palestine out of it, take the protests out of it, even take the national security out of it. Someone who has sympathy for the leader of a terror group and who goes to that terror leader's funeral probably does raise some red flags for national security, but I want you to take that out of it for a second.
We absolutely can and should deport foreigners or prevent them from coming into the country for their opinions. Of course we should.
I'm not saying we should deport American citizens for their opinions. If I believed that, I would certainly believe we should deport the entire faculty of Brown University and Columbia University and most of the Ivy League.
I'm not saying that, not American citizens, but foreigners who have crazy opinions that are contrary to American opinions and the American tradition and the American way of life, of course we should deport them for their opinions. Why would we not? What's the point of these various visas and this various legal residency status that is far short of citizenship? The purpose of that is not about any rights that the foreigners have to be in America and enjoy the privileges that attend to being in America.
The purpose of that is to make America better. It's for us that we allow these people into the country.
If they are likely to make America worse, if they hold opinions and do things that are contrary to the way we want to live, get them out. Why would we keep them? That's insane.
Now, Republicans don't want to deal with this. They just only want to talk about the national security grounds for the deportations, and maybe those exist.
But let's be honest here, folks. I think it's actually better to be honest about it, to tell the whole truth, because I think it will give us a greater handle on the political order.
Yeah, these people should be deported for their opinions. I don't want radicals, leftists, Islamic revolutionaries.
I don't want them coming into the country needlessly. I've already got to deal with enough of that among American citizens.
Why would I import foreigners to do that and give them cushy positions at Ivy League universities where they can poison the minds of another generation of Americans. Why would I do that? That's crazy.
Well, because of their rights. What rights? They don't have these rights.
They're not American citizens. Well, because of the principle of absolute freedom of speech.
That's not real. Well, because of academic freedom.
Academic freedom is fake. That's a hoax.
William F. Buckley Jr.
launched the conservative movement with a book called God and Man at Yale, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. Your Jedi mind tricks don't work on me, libs.
Get rid of these people. Crazy.
Marco Rubio was just defending the deportation, specifically of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia graduate student who just got canned, on CBS. This is on Face the Nation.
Listen to the line of questioning from CBS's Margaret Brennan. But is there any evidence of a link to terrorism or is it just his point of view? Yeah, they take over.
I mean, do you not? I mean, you should watch the news. These guys take over entire buildings.
We covered it intensely. They shut down colleges.
I'm asking about the specific justification for the revocation of his visa. Was there any evidence of material support for tourism? The spokesperson was the negotiator.
Negotiating on behalf of people that took over a campus that vandalized buildings? Negotiating over what? That's a crime in and of itself, that they're involved in being the negotiator, the spokesperson, this, that, the other. We don't need these people in our country.
we never should have allowed him in in the first place. If he had told us, I'm going over there and I'm going over there to become the spokesperson and one of the leaders of a movement that's going to turn one of your allegedly elite colleges upside down, people can't even go to school, library buildings being vandalized.
We never would have let him in. We never would have let him in to begin with.
That's the right point. So I actually have to give Margaret Brennan credit here because she's asking a legit question.
She goes, is there any evidence you're going to deport this guy on the grounds that he's providing material support to terrorism? Is there any evidence that he really did that? And Rubio responds. He says, this guy was leading protests.
He was making a big nuisance of himself. He was articulating views that are totally contrary to what we want in America.
And she says, yeah, yeah, but what about the terrorism thing? And then Rubio moves on. He says, these people have no right to be here.
It's a privilege to come over to America on these kinds of visas. It's not a right.
And so her question is legit. And Rubio is admitting without quite doing it explicitly saying, no, look, he is supporting movements that are associated with terrorism.
So in that way, I guess the claim is real, but he doesn't need to be sending AK-47s to Hezbollah for us to deport him. We never would have let this guy in in the first place if he knew what a nuisance he was.

He has no right to be here. As of now, we can't deport AOC.
Pity that is, but we can't. She's an American citizen.
We can't deport Bernie Sanders. We can't deport, who's the new one? Jacqueline Crockett.
Is that her name? Whatever. We can't deport any of these people.
But you know what? We can deport this wacko who we've invited into America. He's been a bad guest, and we're going to kick him out.
And that's the right attitude, I think. Don't stake everything on proving that someone is the next Osama bin Laden.
You don't have to. They have no right to be here.
And we have the, our political liberty to determine who comes into our country and who gets to stay here trumps a false individual liberty of foreigners to come to America. Now, speaking of contentious journalism, there's a piece in the New York Times.
I don't, oh man, the New York Times had been doing a little bit better. They had been, since the election, they had been a little bit more self-reflective.
They ran that piece about the podcast election, how the legacy media were losing some of their mojo. They ran that piece about how Trump might have a point on birthright citizenship.
Actually, the Wong Kim Ark decision that established the notion that birthright citizenship from the 14th Amendment pertains to a wide swath of American

citizens. That maybe then, as we've applied that to illegal aliens, maybe that's not legit.
The

court hasn't distinctively ruled on that. We're doing well.
And then we get this. Where is it? Where is it? There it is.
Headline, it's New York Times opinion, Zeynep Tufeksi. We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives.
What could that be? 9- that, if you go further back, the JFK assassination?

Those two things have been in the news.

No, no, no, it's not that.

COVID.

I'm just going to quote a little bit.

And you don't read the whole article, you'll pull your hair out.

In 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the COVID-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. That's true.
By whom were they treated like kooks and cranks? Was it by the Daily Wire? No. Was it by the Blaze? No.
Was it by Fox News? No. It was by the New York Times.
You guys treated us like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China.
Also, bat and pangolin are not seafood, so they even get that detail wrong. When a non-profit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world, no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission. It certainly seemed like consensus.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, conducted campaigns of supposedly independent voices, and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. As for that Wuhan laboratory's research, the details have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.
Okay, yeah, I remember this, New York Times. I was there, and you guys told me that I was crazy, and you guys went along with all of those lying public health officials, and you guys unquestioningly listened to the 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies.
Even this excuse here, and actually, you know, even a reporter was misled how could this have happened because you because you didn't do your job well you did do your job which is to be a propaganda arm from the democrat party but the job you think you have that you pretend to have where you're going to speak truth to power and you're not just going to accept propaganda from the established authorities you're going to really you're going to stick it to the man and find out the. And you didn't do any of that.
We did. I did that.
I did that. You didn't do that, New York Times.
I did that on the Michael Knowles Show. If you watched the Michael Knowles Show through COVID, you knew much more about what was really going on in COVID than if you read the New York Times every day.
Where's my Pulitzer Prize? Is it so hard? This is no false modesty. I'm not some shoe leather reporter, okay? I just have common sense and I'm willing to accept facts when they appear to me.
You couldn't even do that. Now you go, can you imagine we were all misled? No, no, no.
You misled us. I didn't mislead anybody during COVID.
Daily Wire didn't mislead people. The Blaze didn't mislead people.
The independent journalists on the right didn't mislead people.

You did.

And then they still haven't learned.

This is the crazy part because I think, okay, maybe they're coming to terms with it five years late.

But okay, they're coming to terms with it.

No.

Last piece I'll read of this article.

They actually excuse their incompetency.

It's not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren't just earnestly making inquiries.
They were acting in terrible faith, using debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.
No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't.
Can you imagine these people who were telling us that we were all wrong during COVID? They wanted to get attention for their ideas. Yeah, that's yeah.
That's called the media. That's called doing journalism.

And these people, they weren't acting in good faith when they told us the truth.

They were acting in bad faith when they told us the truth.

How do you know the faith of the people that were telling you the truth?

I'll trust the faith of the people who tell the truth much more than the faith of the people who lie.

Actually, you know, when all of the public health officials and scientists lied to us, maybe it was fair because if they didn't lie to us,

they would have given credit to people on the right. Yeah.
Okay. So you've learned nothing.

You've learned nothing at all. You are not what you say you are.
Are you, hey, New York Times,

are you intrepid shoe leather journalists speaking truth to power or are you YouTube commenters?

This is a YouTube comment is what this is. This is an after the fact, wow, that was crazy, huh? Boy, didn't see that one coming.
Wow, wacky, huh? That's what this column is. That's what the New York Times is saying.
So what are you? Are you the intrepid shoe-leather serious Edward R. Murrow, even though he was kind of a problem too, but that's a historical point for another time.
Are you the real fourth estate doing a great public service to Americans, or are you just a YouTube commenter is posting lib comments? I think you're the latter. Okay.
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What if, talking about stories being reported incorrectly, what if everything you were told about the Derek Chauvin trial was a lie? Derek Chauvin's unjust conviction was the woke lib's biggest win or fighting to make things right. Starting today, the Ben Shapiro Show is launching a five-part investigative series, exposing the full truth beyond one of the most politically charged cases in modern history.
Was justice served? Was Chauvin sacrificed to appease the mob? Episode one drops today with new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Ben breaks down the real facts, makes the case for President Trump to issue a full pardon.
The case for Derek Chauvin premieres today. Don't miss it.
Listen to Ben Chepero show today on Daily War Plus. My favorite comment yesterday is from the drummer's workshop, Norm's Music.
It says, Bukele basically gave Judge Boesberg the Urkel response. Did I do that? That's great.
Great, nice pop culture reference too. Bukele there, who is now a US contractor to receive our worst criminals and to give him the old Salvadoran treatment, the old Bukele treatment.
Judge says, you have to return all these criminals to America. What will we do without the face-tattooed gangsters? They are our strength.
They are face-tattooed Venezuelan criminals, rapists and murderers. They are our strength.
What will we do without them? You cannot land that plane in El Salvador. And then Bukele comes in.
Too late. Did I do that? Oops.
Oopsie. Speaking of problems from foreigners, a French member of parliament has an audacious proposal.
He wants the French to take the Statue of Liberty back from America. Here is what White House Press Secretary Carolina Leavitt had to say.
Nothing different. there is now a member of the European Parliament from France who does not think the US represents

the values of the Statue of Liberty anymore. They want the Statue of Liberty back.
So is President Trump going to send the Statue of Liberty back to France? Absolutely not. And my advice to that unnamed, low-level French politician would be to remind them that it's only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now.
So they should be very grateful to our great country. Take that, France.
You know what we're going to do? We're going to send you the flag of the French Army. It's a white handkerchief.
Take that, you jerks. You're not getting your statue back.
So good enough answer. Stupid proposal from the French member of parliament.
Good answer from Caroline Levitt. However, I just want to, this is going to be controversial.
I don't love the Statue of Liberty. Can I say that? I don't love that.
I like liberty. I like true liberty.
I love America. I have a cigar company called Mayflower Cigars, which is about the founding of America.
Don't. But the Statue of Liberty, what is the Statue of Liberty? What does the Statue of Liberty symbolize? What was it intended to symbolize? The Statue of Liberty, look, I'm a New Yorker.
Okay, I grew up in New York, which means I've never visited the Statue of Liberty, never visited the Empire State Building, never visited the Statue of Liberty. That's what happens when you grow up in New York.
But I've gone by it on the Staten Island Ferry plenty of times. The Statue of Liberty is a liberal enlightenment symbol.
That's what it is. What does the Statue of Liberty symbolize? Statue of Liberty symbolizes enlightenment liberal ideas.
It was sculpted by a Freemason and received by a Freemason. And it was dedicated by the Grand Master of the New York Masons.
And I'm not knocking the Masons. Look, I've got some great friends who are Freemasons.
I'm just pointing out Freemasonry is largely an Enlightenment-era practice and organization that really, really reaches its heights of power and social influence during the Enlightenment. And on top of all that, the Statue of Liberty was given to us by the post-Revolution French.
Not even the good French regime, the old regime, good old King Louis who helped us win the American

Revolution, but by those crazy bloodthirsty Jacobin radicals who were lopping off people's

heads. It was that post-revolution French.
So even if they took it back, it wouldn't bother

me too much, but it would bother me a little bit in that what do you do? This is a deeper political

problem. What do you do with things that were intended for one purpose that you don't support

I'm sorry. In that, what do you do? This is a deeper political problem.
What do you do with things that were intended for one purpose that you don't support, namely the promotion of liberalism, French enlightenment values, kinds of all wacky modern ideas. What do you do with something that is intended to represent something you don't support, but which has come to represent something you do support.
Because now the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of America. Whatever it was initially intended to be, people think of the Statue of Liberty.
There's a copy of the Statue of Liberty in France. You can walk right by it in the Luxembourg Garden.
But we think of America. What do you do? Well, I don't think it's a big problem.
You just recognize that the meaning of the symbols changes. You've got to kind of rededicate the symbols.
And this has happened in our civilization. One of the great works of Western architecture is the Pantheon in Rome.
The Pantheon in Rome was a pagan temple. And then in 609, Pope Boniface IV received permission from the emperor to rededicate the temple, to consecrate the temple to St.
Mary and the martyrs, and then it became a church. So it's okay to do that.
It's okay to take things that are pagan. In this case, the Statue of Liberty is literally a pagan symbol.
It's the goddess Libertas, though it's the pagan symbol understood in the revival of classical paganism that came up in the Enlightenment. So it's got all these liberal Enlightenment ideas associated with it.
But we should just, I don't know, just rededicate it. Take that stupid poem off the bottom of it that the libs always use to justify mass migration.
Ignore the Constitution, ignore federal statute. There's that stupid poem on the bottom that says, give me your poor unwashed masses.
Okay, that means that the entire world can come into America, regardless of the law. Get rid of that poem.
And then I sometimes refer to the Statue of Liberty as the Statue of Lib Mary. It's like in Christendom, we had statues of Mary, the Holy Mother, all over the place.
And then now it's like pagan goddesses and enlightenment symbols. But okay, that's fine.
It's a new symbol now. Represents the American version of liberty.
Very different from the French version of liberty. And they don't get it back.
The French wouldn't know what to do with American liberty, even if we did give it to them. All right.
There's a line that the Democrats are advancing now, speaking of dishonesty. There is a line.
I've heard this from my lib friends. I've heard this from conservatives who are talking to their lib family members and they don't know what to do with this.
The accusation that President Trump is threatening social security. Have you heard this? It's saying that President Trump and Elon and Doge are threatening social security.
They're going to cut your social security benefits. Granny is going to be thrown off a cliff.
This is one of the stupidest arguments I have heard from the libs for the entirety of the Trump movement going back 10 years now. Why is that? How do we respond to it? What are the facts? What is Trump really doing? We have to get to that tomorrow.
How's that for a tease?

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