Ep. 316 - Is AOC An Actress？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
172.70447
Summary
Is Alexandria Ocasio-cortez an actress? That s the new conspiracy theory floating around the internet, and it's entirely correct - but not for the reasons that many think. We ll investigate who is really pulling AOC s marionette strings.
Transcript
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That's the new conspiracy theory floating around the internet.
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And it's entirely correct, but not for the reasons that many think.
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We will investigate who is really pulling AOC's marionette strings.
00:00:44.640
Then, Beto beats our expectations, Kirsten Gillibrand doesn't,
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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First of all, I want to thank everybody for the birthday wishes.
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A lot of people sent over very nice things, so thank you very much.
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Just for you, I refrained from indulging in true birthday debauchery
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so that I would not be speaking in cursive on today's show
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and actually able to talk about this because there is a great conspiracy theory
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going around the internet that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an actress.
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This is a particularly great conspiracy theory because it's true,
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although people are drawing the wrong conclusions from it.
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This is a theory that cropped up from a YouTube account called Mr. Reagan.
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And this guy goes through AOC's history, and he makes the claim that she's not really some motivated movement politician.
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She was cast in a casting call from a group called the Justice Democrats.
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They plucked this girl out of obscurity, and she is now just a mouthpiece.
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She's a sort of Charlie McCarthy doll or a little marionette, and the strings are being pulled by a group called the Justice Democrats.
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And he presents a lot of evidence for this theory, including AOC speaking about it herself, and the group, the Justice Democrats, speaking about it themselves.
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There's a great video. It's like 20 minutes long.
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Here's just a small clip of that to show you what he's talking about.
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And at Flats, we became friends with one of the bartenders, who we call Sandy.
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But in the early days, she was just serving us margaritas and listening to us talk.
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Back in 2016, we put out a call for nominations.
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Out of those 10,000 nominations, we found Alexandria.
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My brother told me that he had sent my nomination in the summer, but I was like literally working out of a restaurant.
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So people that make $20,000 a year or less make up right around 40% of Americans, right?
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It's like 60 million people make less than $20,000 a year.
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200 million Americans make less than $20,000 a year.
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You notice when she goes off script because she suddenly starts babbling incomprehensibly.
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She goes off script and she says, I'm the boss.
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You see the founders of the Justice Democrats talking years and years ago about how we need
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to mobilize to fight climate change as if it were World War II.
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Then she, AOC speaking to Ta-Nehisi Coates says exactly the same thing almost verbatim.
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Now what's funny is she keeps getting the lines somewhat wrong.
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She says in this country, 200 million people make less than 20,000.
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So hold on, 200 over 320, carry the seven, multiply.
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But she gets these details wrong, but she is repeating the narrative.
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And so then she'll say things like, it doesn't matter if you're factually correct as long as
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She says, yeah, my brother submitted my nomination to this group, this political action committee.
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And I remember this from the moment that she beat Joe Crowley when she won that primary
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This story came out that she was working as an obscure bartender and her brother submitted
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her to a group to run for Congress and the group liked her and thought she was a good choice.
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We know that she reads talking points, usually poorly.
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And when she goes off script, she sounds even less intelligent and educated than when she's
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We know that she was recruited by the Justice Democrats.
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We know that she relies on the Justice Democrats for content.
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The content is virtually identical between what they put out, what they've put out since
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the 2016 race was over, and what they're still putting out.
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How do we know that she works closely with them?
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Well, her top aides include the founders of the Justice Democrats, including one guy,
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There was that scandal that just came out last week that AOC is funneling money, a million
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dollars into these shady groups and shady LLCs, which is ironic because, of course, the far
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left Democrats, just like AOC, including AOC, are running on transparency, on getting soft
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Meanwhile, we find out she's taking campaign contributions and paying them to the tune of
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It's just a way of taking that money and just funneling it into other left-wing causes and
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She would still be slinging drinks in Union Square.
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There is no way that this woman would be in Congress without them.
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She wasn't going to run until they backed her and said, we're going to put you in Congress.
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So the question is, is she an actress or a politician?
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It's kind of, you know, politics is show business for ugly people is the old line.
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What is the difference between an actress and a politician, especially a member of Congress?
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She is an actress, but it doesn't make her much different from any other member of Congress.
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First of all, politics and acting are very similar.
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There is a negative side of this for bad politicians and bad actors.
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They just want to be the center of attention, all of those sorts of things.
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That's the negative version for bad politicians and bad actors.
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For good politicians and good actors, though, this means two things.
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It means, one, you are concerned with the truth.
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So for good politicians, they are concerned with truth, political truth, cultural truth, and religious truth.
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They're concerned with pursuing policies that will help people, policies that are both efficient and that are moral and that are politically justified, right?
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They don't rely on people to just give them all of their talking points, but they actually are interested themselves.
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Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman, was the founder of what we would call modern conservative thought, and he wasn't just sitting in a room writing philosophy all day.
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He was an elected official, and he was one of the great philosophers of his age, really one of the great political philosophers of any age.
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He had both of those things and a profound concern for truth.
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The good actors, real actors, are not faking it.
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They are living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
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So they're taking imaginary circumstances, the circumstances of the set, of the time period, of the character, of all of these things, and they are living truthfully as people in those circumstances would live.
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The other reason that politics and show business are very similar is because both politicians and actors, when they're really good, have to love people.
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That you cannot be a misanthrope if you want to be a good actor or a good politician.
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If you hate people, you are going to be so bad at politics, especially elected politics.
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All politics is is going to the Lions Club and the VFW Hall and the PTA, showing up and going to spaghetti dinners and talking to people and meeting strangers and hearing what they have to say and caring what they have to say.
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If you don't like meeting people, you don't care about what other people have to say, you don't like boots on the ground, you know, marching through small towns and campaigning and shaking hands and pressing the flesh.
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If you don't like that, you're going to hate politics.
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Because if you're an actor, the thing you have to be most concerned with, most interested in, is people.
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And not that you hate them or you, if you try to play a character, if you try to play a villain and you hate that villain and you're going in and you're just going to do the really bad guy, you're going to give a bad performance.
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You have to, in some way, like the character that you're playing.
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You have to be interested in what makes people tick.
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You like the way that human nature works on people and the way that circumstances work on human nature.
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Those are what make up a good politician and a good actor.
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Now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is neither of those.
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Still, doesn't make her very different than many congressmen.
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She might not be turning in a great performance anyway.
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So, we should also be explicit about our terms.
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When I say good and bad in this case, in the case of good actors and good politicians,
00:14:11.880
The ones who are doing good work, the ones who are putting on good performances,
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the ones who are doing good art, and the ones who are doing good politics.
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There's another sense of that, which is, are they effective at it?
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Plenty of unartistic, bad actors get big roles and are very, very famous.
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Plenty of badly motivated, ignorant, uneducated politicians have made it very, very far in our
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However, the performance aspect of all this is basically universal.
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Most congressmen are glorified press secretaries.
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However, it's actually, in terms of their day, everything they do all day, which is raise money,
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maybe go out and vote, possibly co-sponsor legislation every so often,
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probably the most important thing they can do is go on television,
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which is why you see a lot of congressmen go on TV all the time.
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It's because that is an opportunity to get ideas out there,
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either the ideas that they've come up with or the ideas that their
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or the ideas that their backers or donors or whatever have come up with.
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in the sense of just how effectively someone is getting their name out there,
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I mean, that is why there's so much crossover between show business and politics.
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Obviously, Ronald Reagan, obviously Donald Trump,
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Sonny Bono, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson.
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And there is a huge contingent now that is saying that AOC is finished.
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Because she's got killer favorables, very dramatically dropping favorable ratings
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So since September, her unfavorables are up 15 points.
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Her favorables, by the way, are also up 7 points.
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That's the part of this that people are leaving out.
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But overall, the net effect of that is 7 minus 15.
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Now, why are both favorables and unfavorables increasing at the same time?
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Her name recognition is also way, way up 21 points.
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some people start to like her, some people start to dislike her.
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More people are starting to dislike her than to like her.
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It's dropping among adults, Republicans, independents, men, women, whites, and every age group.
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It's mostly dropping with older people, then with middle-aged people,
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Except her favorability rating is increasing among only two demographic groups.
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It's increasing among Democrats, and it's increasing among non-whites.
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Her constituency is not 85-year-old adult Republican men.
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Her constituency really isn't any of those people that her favorables are down with.
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She has played to far-left liberal Democrat policies,
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and as a matter of cynical politics, she has played to racial identity.
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That's what she's been betting on since November.
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She's pandering to the far left of the Democrat Party.
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She's pandering on racial politics to non-whites.
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AOC, this proves the political maxim, proven true again and again.
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The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
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The idea that there's no such thing as bad press.
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AOC almost exclusively gets bad press, including from left-wing outlets.
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And the gamble that you have to take is, is it better to get some negative attention or to get no attention at all?
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Getting your name out there is a win if you're a member of Congress.
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This is why the congressmen are going on TV all the time.
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This is why they're doing whatever they can to try to attract attention.
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There's no way that they're going to be able to get attention in a media landscape such as ours unless they go out there and put on a huge show, which is what she does.
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So I think overall, I'm actually going to break with both the left and the right.
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Now, AOC is currently less popular in her home state of New York, true blue New York, than Donald Trump is.
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Donald Trump is doing better in terms of approval ratings than AOC is in New York.
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First of all, Donald Trump is a New York figure.
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But also, maybe AOC or AOC's handlers, the people pulling the marionette strings, maybe they know a thing or two.
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Maybe they know a thing or two on how to oust a long-term incumbent like Joe Crowley in a primary.
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Maybe they know a thing or two on how to get a congressman to be on television, be the center of political discourse constantly.
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Maybe they know a thing or two about which demographic groups they can afford to lose and which they can stand to benefit from if they lose those groups.
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And even today, very few people are picking up on that.
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I mean, she's caught in this major financial scandal now, basically getting no press.
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They're still just, I mean, this is what they accused Donald Trump of doing.
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They accused Donald Trump of having some nefarious dealings, Russian collusion, let's say.
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No evidence of Russian collusion, of course, but that's what they accuse him of.
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And then Donald Trump sends out a tweet about how much he doesn't like John McCain.
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Or he sends out a tweet about how Kellyanne Conway's husband is a total loser, which he did today.
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And then everyone talks about that and no one talks about the scandal or the collusion or whatever.
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She funneled a million bucks to her cronies and her handlers during her campaign.
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Nobody talks about it because she says ridiculous things about the environment.
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And she puts out proposals to abolish automobiles.
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And she puts out proposals to knock down every building in the country.
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And the way we're going to pay for it is abolish the entire energy industry and print money from the Federal Reserve.
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Something tells me that the conspiracy theory is true.
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But look, political operators, political thinkers, political activists have always needed effective mouthpieces.
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And very often, effective mouthpieces are not the smartest people in the world.
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But something tells me that her handlers are pretty sharp.
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Not always a testament to someone's intelligence.
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He was a big guy on the Bernie Sanders campaign.
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And we'll have to see what the next step is for them.
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Obviously, they can't let the favorables fall too much among everybody else.
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But right now, it seems like they're walking a tightrope and doing it pretty well.
00:22:39.020
Another candidate who's performing a lot better than I think a lot of us thought he would is Beto O'Rourke.
00:22:52.720
A lot of people said the campaign rollout didn't work.
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He doesn't seem to have much of a coherent message.
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He's trying to play both sides of the Democrat Party, the centrists, and the far left.
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And then he wouldn't release his 24-hour fundraising numbers.
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And so the whole news media, even the left, said,
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Previously, we had been talking about how Bernie Sanders broke all these records.
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He's also rich, something very few people talk about.
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His wife is the heiress to a multi-billion dollar fortune.
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Look at the current president of the United States.
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He's a better campaigner than many of us expected.
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Now, why are people saying he had a bad rollout?
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He's that weirdo that you would never let your girlfriend near in college.
00:24:21.480
He skateboards around Whataburger parking lots.
00:24:24.540
He moves his hand up and down like a parody of the 1940s.
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Oh, yeah, I'm also running for president of the United States.
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In fact, I literally just ran eight miles to get here.
00:25:03.800
Well, I'm sort of like if a compassionate head nod turned into a person.
00:25:12.820
When I eat salads, I thank every individual leaf for its sacrifice.
00:25:16.960
When I donate blood, I don't let them stop until the last possible second.
00:25:24.260
Anyway, the question I get most is, can you actually beat Donald Trump?
00:25:31.520
I'm like if your friend's hot dad had the energy of a golden retriever.
00:25:48.780
And then at the end of it, he says something to the effect of,
00:25:51.440
And hey, are there people who have better policy proposals than me?
00:26:00.480
I mean, he's definitely making fun of Beto O'Rourke.
00:26:04.740
However, this is another instance of no press is bad press.
00:26:09.240
And the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
00:26:11.980
Because when you look at that send-up, sure, they are making fun of Beto.
00:26:39.660
He's more enthusiastic than he is a policy wonk.
00:26:45.180
When was the last time we had a policy wonk president?
00:27:00.600
So they ding him a little bit for not having really firm policies.
00:27:04.420
But they're basically making him to like a really nice, happy, excited, enthusiastic guy who wants to serve.
00:27:10.780
That's the best possible way you could possibly be mocked.
00:27:19.400
Now, I still have my doubts about the Beto campaign.
00:27:30.520
However, the one thing we have to focus on, the one thing we can't forget, he came within three points of turning Texas blue.
00:27:39.560
Well, he was running against Ted Cruz, who's a flawed candidate.
00:27:42.980
He was running against Ted Cruz, who had a very famous spat with Donald Trump.
00:27:54.060
Still, he came within three points of turning Texas blue.
00:27:57.760
And the question is not, can Beto turn Texas blue?
00:28:00.380
The question is, can Beto convince Democrats that there's a chance that he can turn Texas blue?
00:28:08.140
That's why they donated all that money to him, $80 million in 2018.
00:28:14.520
And if he can convince Democrats that he could possibly turn Texas blue,
00:28:18.200
then he is saying to them, I can possibly bring 38 electoral votes that were guaranteed red.
00:28:34.180
And so all of Beto being really excited, being like a golden retriever,
00:28:44.280
Certain candidates are not having as successful a rollout.
00:28:47.860
But first, today is your day to get on the right side of history,
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which is, in fact, the title of Ben's new book, officially available as we speak.
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I've read it, and I've got to tell you something.
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This book has words in it, so, you know, not, like, not as,
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The subject matter of this book, which is a survey of Western intellectual history,
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Go over to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or rightsideofhistorybook.com to get your copy.
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Ten bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership.
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You get me, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Matt Walsh show,
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But most importantly, you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
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I believe this is made up by the Justice Democrats,
00:30:05.400
who are about to find themselves in a massive campaign finance litigation.
00:30:26.120
Why is he having a better rollout than some people thought he was?
00:30:29.240
He's appealing to the lowest common denominator.
00:30:37.840
And that's the way that politics is moving, especially on the left.
00:30:41.260
Not exclusively on the left, but especially on the left.
00:30:43.960
He is, he was actually at a campaign stop in Iowa.
00:30:46.520
And he said he just wants to be a vessel for people's ideas.
00:30:50.880
He wants the voters to mold him into the candidate that they want.
00:31:02.660
All I've ever done in my entire life is be in the government.
00:31:05.800
I was on the El Paso City Council, then in Congress.
00:31:14.780
All I care about is power and attention and getting my ego stroked.
00:31:19.760
So just tell me what to think and then I'll think it and it's no big deal.
00:31:26.460
But that's what all of the Democrat politicians are doing right now, other than Howard Schultz.
00:31:30.460
Howard Schultz is the one guy going up to Democrats and saying,
00:31:38.480
He is not even a consideration in the 2020 race so far.
00:31:42.840
Here is Kirsten Gillibrand, perfect mediocrity, doing exactly the same sort of pandering.
00:31:48.600
And the difference here is that she's a terrible politician.
00:31:52.620
Camille Paglia says that she is a perfect mediocrity of a candidate.
00:32:05.860
I guess just to raise her name recognition for next time or something.
00:32:10.900
Or maybe run for vice president because every candidate is saying they have to pick a female VP.
00:32:16.040
Obviously, Beto O'Rourke said that would be his preference.
00:32:19.780
They all say they sort of need a female vice president.
00:32:29.480
It is an economic and a humanitarian and a family issue.
00:32:32.520
So, there is no such thing as an illegal human.
00:33:08.700
So, then there are people who commit illegal acts and they're criminals.
00:33:12.020
And they need to be punished for their illegal acts.
00:33:18.560
So, then, for instance, people who invade a foreign country,
00:33:43.860
That is the most clinical term you can possibly use.
00:34:00.600
Immigrant sort of assumes that the country is taking you in.
00:34:07.500
They're foreign nationals here in this country illegally,
00:34:31.100
And to say that it's not a national security issue,
00:34:37.580
considers immigration a national security issue?
00:34:40.700
Why do they have armed guards along their borders?
00:34:44.080
very robust systems for customs and border protection?
00:34:49.460
Why does every other country on earth do that except for us?
00:34:52.700
Is it that every other country on earth is wrong
00:35:11.760
Why does everyone else have guys with guns on the border?
00:35:16.800
We know that people are taking in a ton of drugs every year.
00:36:04.080
The Founding Fathers feared democracy tremendously.
00:36:17.080
I don't understand why we have the Electoral College.