The Michael Knowles Show - April 08, 2019


Ep. 327 - Learn To Code-Switch


Episode Stats

Length

46 minutes

Words per Minute

162.97948

Word Count

7,556

Sentence Count

576

Misogynist Sentences

25

Hate Speech Sentences

21


Summary

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a new Southern Baptist accent, and it's making her look like a southern preacher. Michael calls her an ethnic panderer, and he explains why it's so hard to watch her speak in front of a predominantly black audience.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 At an event before Al Sharpton's National Action Network, freshman Congresswoman Alexandria
00:00:05.480 Ocasio-Cortez inexplicably transformed into a black Southern preacher. We will learn to code
00:00:12.700 switch. Then 2020 presidential candidate Pete, but a guh, guh, guh, guh, guh, guh, guh, guh,
00:00:17.540 shows why Democrats are obsessed with Mike Pence and some radio host calls Ben the Antichrist.
00:00:23.780 I've been saying it for years. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.
00:00:30.000 We are going to do a show today. We are going to talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
00:00:44.680 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I, I, I forgot who I was talking to. I was code switching.
00:00:50.220 We will explain what code switching is in one second, but first let's make a little money,
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00:02:02.960 FDIC equal housing lender. If you missed it over the weekend, you must have been sleeping underneath
00:02:10.860 a rock. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last Friday speaking before Al Sharpton's group. It's called
00:02:16.100 the National Action Network. She tried out a new accent that we have never heard from her before.
00:02:23.480 See if you can pick up on this really subtle change to her diction.
00:02:27.600 This is what organizing looks like. This is what building power looks like. This is what changing
00:02:35.500 the country looks like. It's when we choose to show up and occupy the room and talk about the
00:02:42.200 things that matter most, talking about our future. You know, Reverend, you bring up a funny anecdote
00:02:48.860 and I'm proud to be a bartender. Ain't nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with working
00:02:57.400 retail, folding clothes for other people to buy. There is nothing wrong with preparing the food
00:03:04.880 that your neighbors will eat. There is nothing wrong with driving the buses that take your family
00:03:11.500 to work. There's nothing wrong about elongating all of the vowels in your statements. Ain't nothing
00:03:20.740 wrong with that. Do you notice she was, if you, you might not have been able to hear it, but she's
00:03:27.580 clapping as she's saying it. She said, this is what organizing looks like. It's like that tweet,
00:03:33.380 that emoji on the tweet, this meme that goes around where you punctuate every word with a clap. This
00:03:40.020 is supposed to be a very, I don't know, I guess it's supposed to be ethnic pandering. That's what
00:03:47.420 she's doing. She's speaking in front of a primarily black audience and she's affecting what she imagines
00:03:54.680 to be the accent of a black person. This obviously immediately drew comparisons to Hillary Clinton,
00:04:01.660 one of the, I can't even watch it. I don't like Hillary Clinton. I know that she's a terrible
00:04:07.480 politician. I know that she's a total panderer, completely disingenuous. Even for me, this is so
00:04:14.420 difficult to watch. In 2007, Hillary Clinton is speaking before a predominantly black audience
00:04:20.120 and she decides to change her accent. I don't feel no ways tired. I come too far from where I started
00:04:31.400 from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don't believe he brought me this far to leave me.
00:04:41.480 It was so difficult for me to watch to the end of that clip, but I did think, you know,
00:04:49.120 I've come too far from where I've started from. Nobody told me that watching Hillary would be easy.
00:04:58.580 Absolutely not. What is AOC's excuse? What is Hillary's excuse? AOC had a better excuse than Hillary did
00:05:05.440 then. She said that what she was doing is an example of code switching. This is a brilliant excuse.
00:05:12.980 It doesn't hold up. It's totally flat, but it's basically the only thing she could have said.
00:05:16.580 Code switching is when you speak one way to one group of people and then you speak a different way
00:05:23.260 in your personal life. So it's the idea that because you come from a cultural minority or a racial minority
00:05:29.400 or a linguistic minority, that when you speak in public, you have to speak in a more formal way,
00:05:35.600 in a more linguistically correct way. But then when you're speaking among your own people,
00:05:42.140 among your own culture, then you revert to your more authentic, more casual language. Now,
00:05:46.940 all of us to a certain degree have to speak more formally in public. It's better. It's more civilized
00:05:52.480 for us to speak more formally in public. I've talked about how when I go to a bar,
00:05:56.320 I'll talk like a sailor. But when I speak in public, regardless of the venue, I really try not
00:06:02.080 to because I think it degrades discourse and it's disrespectful and it's undignified.
00:06:08.500 Now, is that code switching? I don't know. When I go down, everybody to a certain degree
00:06:13.960 does this kind of code switching. Here's an example. Half of my family is WASPy in English.
00:06:20.460 The other half is Italian. I grew up in New York. I went to school in New England. When I would be at
00:06:25.640 school in New England, I would speak a certain way among people who also speak that way.
00:06:29.580 When I would go down to the Bronx on Arthur Avenue to buy Supersot when I was growing up at the
00:06:34.660 Italian marketplace, I would speak a different way. Just a little, you're pronouncing certain
00:06:39.000 words a little differently, certain Italian words a little differently. That, I guess you could call
00:06:44.120 that code switching. That's what AOC is trying to say that she did. Everybody does this to a certain
00:06:49.400 degree. However, what she did is not code switching because it's not the case that she has learned how
00:06:59.260 to speak in a more formal way publicly, but her actual personal authentic speech is as a black
00:07:06.320 Southern preacher. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not naturally and authentically and genuinely a black
00:07:13.060 Southern preacher. She's not code switching. She's pretending to be someone else. Politicians and
00:07:21.480 actors do this naturally. They do it all the time. She might not even have been aware that she was
00:07:26.400 doing it. This is the only skill that you need as a politician or as an actor is you have to have a keen
00:07:35.200 and even unconscious sense of empathy such that when you're talking to the butcher in the Bronx at the
00:07:42.320 Italian market, maybe you pronounce things a little bit differently, just naturally, because they're
00:07:45.960 pronouncing things a little bit differently and you're relating to them. And then when you're in a
00:07:50.120 poetry seminar in New England, you're speaking a little differently as well. Okay, that's the natural
00:07:56.320 thing. This is when actors are on stage. Actors are reacting to imaginary circumstances. The difference
00:08:03.680 for the politician is the politician is supposed to live in reality. The politician isn't supposed to
00:08:09.960 just be putting on a show. And in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's case, the notion that the way
00:08:16.920 that she was speaking was really just her code switching and reverting to her authentic speech
00:08:21.920 is demonstrably false for a few reasons. She wrote on Twitter, she said, quote,
00:08:26.160 as much as the right wants to distort and deflect, I am from the Bronx. I act and talk like it,
00:08:33.260 especially when I'm fired up and especially when I'm home. It is so hurtful to see how every aspect of
00:08:39.960 is weaponized against me, yet somehow asserted as false at the same time. The reason that this
00:08:47.240 is false is because, one, she did not grow up in the Bronx. She did not do that. Also, even if she
00:08:55.440 did grow up in the Bronx, that is not how people talk in the Bronx. How do I know this? How do I know
00:09:01.800 all of this? I do have a unique vantage here in that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I have, in certain
00:09:08.520 ways, parallel lives. We're basically the same age, born within a year of each other. When we were both
00:09:14.740 very little, our families lived in the boroughs. She lived in the Bronx. I lived in Sheepshead Bay,
00:09:19.640 Brooklyn, all the way out. Before elementary school, both of our families moved up not just to the
00:09:24.720 suburbs, not just to Westchester, not just to northern Westchester, but to towns right next to each other,
00:09:29.720 right across the New Croton Reservoir from one another. She grew up in Yorktown Heights,
00:09:34.300 which is relatively more affluent and relatively less ethnically diverse, and I grew up in Bedford
00:09:39.060 Hills. The median household income in Yorktown Heights is about $99,000 a year, $99,000 or $100,000.
00:09:45.660 The median household income in Bedford Hills, about $68,000. Both very affluent places. However,
00:09:52.680 she grew up in the more affluent place. And when she's talking about code switching, worth pointing out
00:09:57.540 that Yorktown Heights, where she grew up, is between 80 to 90%, 82 and 90% white. Do you know
00:10:04.700 how black it is? Do you know what the black percentage of the population is? Between 0.99
00:10:09.800 and 2% black. So something tells me she didn't just learn this. She didn't just hear this growing up.
00:10:17.200 This was Don Lemon's defense of her. He said, look, she's from the Bronx. She talks, she knows a lot of
00:10:22.240 black people. This is how she talks to black people. She's done it a lot. No, she didn't grow up in the
00:10:26.860 Bronx. She grew up in a place where basically there aren't any black people. And that is not
00:10:31.140 her authentic voice. Now, maybe you might say, okay, AOC would visit her friends or relatives in
00:10:39.060 the Bronx on the weekends. Maybe she picked it up there. Again, here, personal experience tells me
00:10:44.200 this isn't true. I was down in the Bronx every single weekend, grocery shopping, seeing friends.
00:10:48.860 I never magically transformed into a black preacher. I went down countless times to the Bronx.
00:10:57.080 Somehow it never transformed me into a cartoon and a caricature of a black preacher. She says
00:11:03.440 she's code switching. Which code is she switching to? She's not code switching. She is not reverting
00:11:10.460 back to her authentic accent. She is performing a caricature of what she thinks a Southern black
00:11:18.840 drawl sounds like. And it sounds nearly as fake as when Hillary Clinton did it. And then what does
00:11:25.520 she do? She immediately refers to her allegedly hardscrabble upbringing and her false claim that
00:11:32.440 she grew up in the Bronx. This is a lie. On her campaign website in 2018, she said that her life was
00:11:41.460 defined by the 40 minute commute between her family in the Bronx and school in the suburbs. Not true.
00:11:48.280 In the state of New York, you don't just get to commute from a bad neighborhood in the Bronx to
00:11:53.500 whatever public school you want to go to upstate. That's not how it works. You get districted into
00:11:58.140 your school. If that were the case, everybody in a bad school district in the city would just commute
00:12:02.640 up to the suburbs. She did not commute. She lived there. She lived there from the age of five
00:12:08.800 all the way until 2016, according to Westchester land records. According to Westchester County land
00:12:16.800 records, until a year or two before she ran for Congress from Queens, she lived with her parents,
00:12:25.020 not just in Westchester, but in a very ritzy part of Northern Westchester.
00:12:28.840 That is not her upbringing. It's not being weaponized against her. The only thing that
00:12:34.480 is being used as a weapon against her is her obvious lie about where she comes from. And some
00:12:39.080 people have said to me, Michael, Michael, stop it. Don't talk about her obvious fraud. Just talk
00:12:45.280 about the craziness of her proposals. No, this is a bad idea. You have to point out that she is a fraud
00:12:51.600 through and through. Look, there's this conspiracy theory. It's sort of half a conspiracy theory
00:12:55.880 that AOC was cast in the role of being a Congress, congressional candidate, that actually
00:13:01.340 she's just an actress. This is half true in so much as she did audition for a political action
00:13:06.620 committee, which were her and remain still to this day, her backers in her political career.
00:13:13.180 Doesn't mean she's just an actress. She might've had an interest in politics and the difference
00:13:16.880 between politics and show business gets blurry sometimes. But it's so important to focus on this
00:13:22.380 fraud because this is what she always goes back to. She says, you're just attacking me
00:13:26.860 because I grew up in an, in an underprivileged environment. You're just going after me because
00:13:32.000 I'm from the Bronx. You're just going after me because listen, I, I don't know how to use
00:13:37.160 the English language properly because I grew up in this bad neighborhood in the Bronx and we
00:13:41.740 had bad schooling. No, the way to expose all of those lies, to cut off all of her defenses
00:13:47.300 at the knees is to point out that she is a total fraud through and through. She, for her entire
00:13:52.660 conscious life, grew up in an extremely wealthy, privileged area of Westchester County. She attended
00:13:58.760 a very good school district, Yorktown high school. She then went to a very expensive private college
00:14:04.740 in Massachusetts, Boston university, which costs $72,000 per year to attend. And then she moved
00:14:12.520 right back to her mother's house after college and lived there until basically she decided to run
00:14:18.000 for Congress. She had as privileged an upbringing as you can possibly have on earth. In the grand
00:14:27.700 scheme of all of human history, virtually nobody has had a more privileged upbringing than Alexandria Ocasio
00:14:34.900 Cortez. She was taught the English language perfectly well. She does not have a Southern drawl,
00:14:42.300 a cartooned role that she thinks is going to pander to her audience. It's just a lie.
00:14:49.840 Which code was she switching to? She really, what, you know, there was that, that hashtag that was
00:14:55.620 going around on Twitter for a while, learn to code. This is what people said to the journalists who lost
00:15:00.200 their jobs, who for years told coal miners to learn to code. We need to tell AOC to learn to code switch.
00:15:06.660 This is not credible. And by the way, look, we're still talking about her. She's still getting
00:15:11.740 herself in the headlines. She's beginning to, I think she's not, no longer the left's Trump. I think
00:15:19.220 the left liked her because she was sort of their version of Trump. Very media savvy, outrageous,
00:15:26.080 was able to really rile up her opponents. But she keeps losing. And Donald Trump hasn't lost yet.
00:15:32.260 If he loses in 2020, that'll change the calculus. But he has, he keeps winning. That's sort of the
00:15:38.520 defining feature of Donald Trump. AOC keeps humiliating herself. And we should shine a
00:15:44.800 spotlight on that, not just on her crazy policies, but on this silly grievance premise, because it
00:15:51.940 isn't true. And if you don't, listen, not everyone knows what Westchester is like. Not everyone knows
00:15:56.100 the inner politics there. Not everyone knows what Yorktown high school is like. Okay. I am from there.
00:16:00.980 I grew up eight miles away from where she grew up. I am telling you for sure. It's so funny because
00:16:07.080 people come up to me and they say, Michael, you, you're such a rich kid. You're such a spoiled rich
00:16:12.780 kid. You, you're such a patrician. You're, and I don't answer these attacks. I find it undignified.
00:16:18.800 I find it distasteful. I, I will not get into a tit for tat saying my mother cleaned more floors for
00:16:27.900 less money than your mother, as Mike Bloomberg famously described. I will not do that. I find
00:16:32.480 it so ugly and awful. I find it so ugly to, to boast about experiences of poverty as, as though this
00:16:41.260 were some, something to be proud of, some metal to wear on your chest. The only time I will inject
00:16:48.380 personal experience is simply to point out, I lived almost the exact upbringing that AOC did.
00:16:56.540 And she is pretending constantly to be Jenny from the block. Now she's pretending to be Mrs. Al Sharpton.
00:17:03.120 And it just is not the case. I come from that neighborhood. I come from the same block that AOC
00:17:09.380 came from. It, this does not mold you naturally into some caricature in a cartoon of what the left
00:17:17.660 thinks grievance politics should look like. Speaking of grievance politics, we've got Pete
00:17:23.120 Buttigiegieg. He's the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who's now running for president because mayors of
00:17:28.100 South Bend, Indiana, I guess run for president. And he is openly gay. He's gay married. He's making this a
00:17:34.540 big part of his campaign. And he was speaking at some left-wing fundraiser. And Pete Buttigiegieg
00:17:40.680 highlighted one of the bizarre Democrat obsessions over the last three or four years, which is that
00:17:47.620 Democrats are obsessed with Mike Pence. You think that Republicans are obsessed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
00:17:54.180 doesn't hold a candle to the way that Democrats are obsessed with Mike Pence, specifically Mike Pence's
00:18:00.880 sex life. You'll remember there was a big story. This was big news. Mike Pence won't have dinner alone
00:18:08.200 with women unless his wife is present. This was big news. He was raked over the coals for this.
00:18:17.020 I got into long backs and back and forths with my Democrat friends who said it's so awful that he
00:18:21.860 won't have dinner alone with women. How, how sexist, how misogynist. By the way, about three months later,
00:18:27.140 the Me Too movement happened. And then all these men who were having private dinners with women
00:18:31.420 turned out they were all sexual predators. Turned out they were virtually all Democrats. But no, no,
00:18:36.260 that they've kind of forgot that. And then they go back to Mike Pence and they think that he hates
00:18:40.500 gay people. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. None at all. The one bit of evidence is that he once
00:18:47.860 voted for a giant bill or advocated voting for a giant bill among all the zillion bills he ever voted
00:18:53.640 for in Congress. And this bill would have permitted some of the health care funding to go toward
00:19:01.740 certain therapy techniques for gay men who go to therapists and want to try to change their
00:19:08.920 sexual preferences. And this was transformed into Mike Pence wants to, wants to electrocute gays
00:19:16.300 and hates gays. There's a big, they, Olympians, gay Olympians. I, I'm going to shake Mike Pence's hand.
00:19:23.040 Yeah, that'll show him. Oh yeah. They're going to dig up. Yeah, this, this lesbian is going to go
00:19:28.640 shake Mike Pence's hand. That'll show him. Mike Pence doesn't care. I, I promise you Mike Pence does
00:19:33.960 not care. Mike Pence is a politician. He shakes everybody's hand. He's been a politician for a very
00:19:40.380 long time. He's, he has met gay people. I think it's just fine. But Pete is pushing this line in
00:19:50.320 his 2020 presidential campaign. Speaking only for myself, I can tell you that if me being gay was a
00:19:56.960 choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade.
00:20:01.060 And that's the thing I wish the Mike Pence's of the world would understand. That if you've got a
00:20:12.580 problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.
00:20:18.440 Okay. A lot to dissect here. He refuses, he uses the phrase, the Mike Pence's of the world,
00:20:33.660 presumably as a stand-in for anti-gay bigot. And so here is the premise. The premise is the same
00:20:43.300 premise that Anthony Kennedy had in Obergefell in the gay marriage case. The premise is that if
00:20:48.120 you object to redefining marriage from what it has always meant for all of human history and every
00:20:54.500 single culture everywhere in the world until about five minutes ago, to now also include monogamous
00:21:00.340 but not polygamous same-sex unions, if you object to that in any way, you are a hateful bigot who has a
00:21:08.040 quote, irrational animus for gay people. The Mike Pence's of the world, more broadly, it's the idea
00:21:15.580 that if you take the traditional view of sexual morality, which holds that sex outside of marriage,
00:21:22.760 including gay sex acts, is to be held in moral opprobrium. This is the traditional view of
00:21:29.820 Christianity, of Judaism, of Islam, of all the theistic religions, and of just about every society
00:21:36.500 in the history of the world. If you take that view of sexual morality, you are a hateful, vicious
00:21:44.180 bigot. This is, this is the view that Pete Buttigiegieg is espousing. This is a very modern
00:21:51.600 view. This is a very, regardless of your opinion, by the way, on gay acts, or gay sex, or gay
00:21:57.800 inclinations, or gay preferences, or gay marriage. Regardless of your view on that, you must at least
00:22:03.080 concede that Pete Buttigiegieg's view is extraordinarily modern. Hillary Clinton ran in 2008 and said
00:22:10.740 that marriage is the sacred bond between a man and a woman. Barack Obama said the same
00:22:14.620 thing until 2012, until seven years ago. This was the prevailing view even among the far left
00:22:22.360 of the Democrat Party. And now we are told that if you don't hold the view that homosexual acts
00:22:28.560 are not just not to be held in moral opprobrium, not just morally neutral, but actually morally
00:22:34.060 good, if you don't hold that view, you are a hateful bigot. This is a very modern, very minority
00:22:40.860 point of view. But that is what Pete Buttigiegieg is saying. And he's saying it to smear not only
00:22:46.180 Mike Pence, but anybody who holds to the traditional teachings of any of the theistic religions. And it's,
00:22:53.060 it's a cynical attack because they go after Mike Pence. I wonder, what does a practicing Muslim think
00:22:59.460 of gay sex or gay marriage? What is a practicing Muslim? What is Ilhan Omar? I know Ilhan Omar has
00:23:06.760 won the support of certain gay rights groups because she's, says that she'll be a left-wing
00:23:13.380 vote in the House. Ilhan Omar is a practicing Muslim. Islam holds homosexual acts in moral opprobrium.
00:23:23.940 How come no one's going after Ilhan Omar? How come no one wants Ilhan Omar to clarify her state,
00:23:29.140 her stance on homosexuality? You know, Mike Pence has never voted to discriminate against gay people.
00:23:35.300 Mike Pence has never voted to outlaw gay sex. Mike Pence has never done any of that.
00:23:41.140 Mike Pence and Ilhan Omar are basically exactly the same in their actual record on the so-called gay
00:23:47.320 issues, issues specifically pertaining to homosexuality. How come Pete Buttigiegieg isn't
00:23:53.000 going to say, Ilhan Omar, will you condemn your religion's traditional view on homosexuality?
00:23:59.380 You know what? I want to ask the Ilhan Omars of the world if they believe that my creator made a
00:24:06.120 mistake. And this is the second part of his argument, which is a bad faith argument, which is funny
00:24:12.020 because there are many meanings to that phrase and all of them are correct. This is a bad faith argument
00:24:16.120 to say that there is no discussion to be had on sexual morality because I'm born this way.
00:24:26.280 Right. That isn't the point. The traditional theistic argument against homosexuality is that,
00:24:34.100 yeah, people are born all sorts of ways, but it's an imperfect and fallen world, and therefore we can
00:24:40.700 hold certain behaviors and natural inclinations and moral opprobrium. That's the traditional view.
00:24:47.140 You might disagree with that view. You might disagree with the view that homosexuality is a part of the
00:24:52.140 fallen nature of man. You might say it's a prelapsarian aspect of human nature. Okay, have that argument.
00:24:57.800 But if you're saying that by virtue of the fact that I was born with certain inclinations and certain
00:25:03.840 desires, that those desires are therefore good, therefore instituted and blessed by God, that is
00:25:10.680 not a legitimate argument. That's a bad faith argument. That's an argument designed to obfuscate
00:25:19.060 the question. And it's a question, by the way, that only Pete Buttigieg is bringing up. You'll notice
00:25:25.800 nobody in the GOP, no conservatives are saying that Pete Buttigieg is unqualified and not a
00:25:33.780 legitimate presidential candidate because he's a gay guy. Find me one person who said that.
00:25:38.760 One mainstream or prominent Republican or conservative who said that. Nobody is bringing
00:25:43.280 up that issue. The only one who's bringing it up is Pete Buttigieg. And he's not doing it to defend
00:25:47.800 against the Mike Pence's of the world. He's doing it to attack the Mike Pence's of the world. And to say
00:25:52.560 that unless you agree with me 100% on an extraordinarily new, radical, extreme view of sexual morality,
00:26:00.220 you're a hateful, awful bigot, and you're not fit for polite society. Outrageous bullying,
00:26:06.400 outrageous radicalism, and all on the offense, none on the defense. That's going to be Pete Buttigieg.
00:26:15.200 And why is Pete Buttigieg doing it? It's because that's his only chance to win the Democrat primary.
00:26:21.580 Pete Buttigieg is a white guy, an Ivy League educated white guy who was in the military.
00:26:25.960 That is not going to play very well in the intersectional Olympics of the Democrat 2020
00:26:31.180 primary. There was a piece the other day, I think it was in the New York Times, that said,
00:26:36.480 does Pete Buttigieg's homosexuality count as diversity or is he just another white male?
00:26:42.020 So he's going to have to play up the fact that he's gay, a fact that I don't think anybody really
00:26:47.240 cares about. And he's going to tilt at windmills and pretend that there is some massive oppression
00:26:51.920 in the country that we have to fight against because he's so terribly underprivileged and
00:26:57.600 oppressed. What a tedious argument. What a disingenuous argument. What a totally bad faith
00:27:02.140 argument. We have got to get to Kirsten Nielsen. The DHS secretary is out over the border crisis.
00:27:09.520 We will also get to lies from CBS. We'll also get to Chelsea Handler's midlife crisis. And if we have
00:27:15.800 time, we'll get to Ben Shapiro as the Antichrist. But first, go to dailywire.com. 10 bucks a month,
00:27:21.100 $100 for an annual membership. You get me. You get the Andrew Klavan show. You get the Ben Shapiro show.
00:27:26.640 You get the Matt Wall show. You get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday. You get to ask
00:27:29.720 questions backstage. You get all sorts of things. And you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr. This is very
00:27:37.720 important. Oh yeah. Some people say that drinking all these Leftist Tears is exhausting, but I don't feel
00:27:46.400 no ways tired. I come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me guzzling these tears would be
00:27:57.200 easy. Go to dailywire.com. Get your Tumblr. We'll be right back with a lot more.
00:28:01.240 Got the whole second half of the show. I don't feel no ways tired. I'm going to have that in my
00:28:16.220 head all day like it's a bad song. Kirsten Nielsen, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
00:28:22.880 is out. She's been on shaky ground for a long time. President Trump has been criticizing her for a long
00:28:27.960 time. People thought she would be fired or resign in December or earlier. She lasted this long. She
00:28:35.100 was apparently an ally of John Kelly, I believe, the ousted chief of staff. Once he was gone, there
00:28:41.040 was some question as to whether she would remain. And now she's finally out. What is she out over?
00:28:47.720 It's all about the border crisis. Apparently, President Trump is not pleased with her handling
00:28:52.980 of the issue of illegal immigration, which is a central issue for his administration. So she's
00:28:58.960 out. We got a new guy in. We'll see if he'll do any better. I'm not really interested in her tenure,
00:29:03.560 which was fine, whatever. We've been talking about illegal immigration for a long time.
00:29:07.280 You've seen how she's handled it. You've seen how she's been stymied by the courts. You've seen how
00:29:11.940 she's been stymied by certain laws. So the question is, what is the reaction to her tenure? What is the
00:29:19.060 reaction to her leaving? Richard Blumenthal, the senator from Connecticut who lied about serving in
00:29:27.220 Vietnam, and President Trump now refers to him as Da Nang Richard. Da Nang Richard goes on MSNBC on
00:29:34.640 Casey Hunt's show, and he lambasts Kirsten Nielsen in a totally unfair attack. Grace as secretary of
00:29:43.680 Homeland Security, and she leaves behind a legacy of separating families, caging children, and lying
00:29:50.540 about those policies. But in addition to that legacy, she still leaves behind a strategy. Make
00:29:56.800 no mistake, that strategy has been one of conscious and purposeful cruelty, seeking to deter and discourage
00:30:06.220 people from coming to this country, making that trip of hundreds of miles across impossible terrain
00:30:14.320 with children in their arms, knowing that they faced cruel conditions here on their arrival.
00:30:23.820 There are many, many lies in that statement, but there's one truth, which is at the end, they said
00:30:29.300 people are coming hundreds and hundreds of miles with children in their arms trying to get into this
00:30:33.240 country. Right. There are many coyotes who are coming into this country trafficking children. There
00:30:39.060 are many people bringing children who are not their own children. Because of illegal immigration, we
00:30:43.860 can't vet them. They don't have papers. We don't know who the children are. We don't know who their
00:30:48.560 parents are. We don't know where their parents are. We don't know who is coming into this country.
00:30:52.140 It's a very dangerous situation that leaves, according to Fusion and Amnesty International, between 60 and 80
00:30:59.540 percent of women and girls who come into the country illegally. It leaves them raped and sexually
00:31:05.000 assaulted. And 70 percent of the people who cross into this country illegally suffer violence on the
00:31:11.140 perilous journey. That is happening because of the open borders policies that Danang Richard is
00:31:17.700 advocating. He's lambasting people for trying to get those numbers under control, trying to discourage
00:31:25.020 what is causing all of that widespread misery. That's that's on the people who are promoting
00:31:31.220 that policy. Now, he says that Kirsten Nielsen's legacy is one of disgrace and caging children.
00:31:38.780 This is what the New York Times said the same thing. They said that her legacy is enforcing cruelty
00:31:44.500 at the border. She caged children. You remember the photos of those poor children being caged during
00:31:53.360 Kirsten Nielsen's tenure in the Trump administration? Right? Wrong. Those photos that went viral,
00:31:59.460 everyone blamed Kirsten Nielsen and Donald Trump for, were from 2014. Who was president in 2014? I know
00:32:06.060 it feels like Trump has been president forever. There was a man in 2014 who was president named
00:32:10.220 Barack Obama. Barack Obama caged children. Now, no one cares. Nobody actually cares because it's this
00:32:19.440 awful situation. What does it really mean by cages? It means putting them in prisons, putting them in
00:32:23.880 certain holding areas. And no one actually cares because where are you going to put them? At a
00:32:28.620 certain point, you run out of places to put illegal aliens. You run out of places to put even kids who
00:32:33.100 need to be taken care of, who don't have people to look after them when they enter the country
00:32:36.700 illegally. So you put them somewhere. I actually don't even really blame Barack Obama's administration
00:32:41.380 for this, but it was Obama who caged the children. And cynical Richard Blumenthal didn't say
00:32:46.920 so much as a peep when that was happening because he doesn't really care. He's using something that
00:32:51.780 Barack Obama did as a cudgel to attack Kirsten Nielsen. But it isn't the case. How about separating
00:32:58.260 the children from the parents at the border? That's Donald Trump's fault, right? That's Kirsten
00:33:02.800 Nielsen's fault, right? No, it's actually not even Barack Obama's fault. It's the fault of the courts
00:33:08.180 under Bill Clinton. The Flores Agreement, the much discussed Flores Agreement, which is responsible for
00:33:16.740 separating kids from their families at the borders, was decided in 1997 during the Clinton
00:33:24.080 administration. And why was it decided? It was decided because you can't imprison children.
00:33:29.940 So the parents come into the country illegally. They've committed a major crime. You have to hold
00:33:34.420 them. So they're processed by the criminal justice system. But what about the kids? You can't hold the
00:33:40.840 kids in prison indefinitely. That's a horrible idea. So what the Flores Agreement decided was that you
00:33:46.320 could only put kids in prisons with their parents for a short period of time. Then they have to be
00:33:50.700 handled not by prisons, but by the Department of Health and Human Services. They have to go to nicer
00:33:56.760 places than jails and prisons. Okay, fair enough. Therefore, they have to be separated from their
00:34:02.680 parents. The only way not to separate them from their parents is to let everybody go, which is to say
00:34:11.940 the only way to not separate them from their parents, the only way to not engage in cruel behavior
00:34:16.760 as Democrats selectively refer to this, is to say the borders are open. Anybody can come in without
00:34:24.320 any vetting. That's the only way. Or you close the border entirely. Or you have open borders, which is why
00:34:33.720 at the very bottom of this immigration debate and all of the demagoguery over the kids being caged and
00:34:40.480 families separated and cruelty. At the very bottom, you have a debate over having borders and enforcing
00:34:49.160 the laws that have been on the books for decades and decades or not enforcing the laws at all and
00:34:57.580 having effectively open borders. Those are the two positions. That's it. And what Richard Blumenthal is
00:35:05.360 saying and what the New York Times editorial board is saying, what they're all saying is
00:35:08.540 we would rather that the Secretary of Homeland Security not enforce the law. We would rather
00:35:16.960 that President Trump not enforce the law. We think it is just and fair and wonderful and good and
00:35:23.200 equitable. If we do not enforce our laws, we do not allow the people of the United States to govern
00:35:29.260 themselves through their representatives, through their representative institutions. We want to
00:35:34.540 overturn the right of the people to govern themselves because we think that random bureaucratic czars
00:35:43.040 enforcing our preferred policy according to their own whims is more just. It is an assault on our
00:35:52.180 republic. It is an assault on our representative democracy. It's an assault on the law. Are we a
00:36:02.060 nation of laws or a nation of the whims of individuals? Are we a nation with borders, the
00:36:11.700 definition of a nation, or are we not a nation? It's a radical attack that the Democrats and the
00:36:20.040 left are engaging in. It's not just about have compassion for the kids at the border. It's not
00:36:25.820 just about that. That is the sentimental demagoguery plucking on your heartstrings to push through a
00:36:32.960 radical, radical proposition, which is that we must cease to be a country of laws. We must cease to be a
00:36:40.740 country of self-government. We must ultimately cease to be a country at all and surrender our national
00:36:48.660 sovereignty to super national, transnational, international organizations and arrangements
00:36:56.640 that are utterly unaccountable to the American people. That's what they want. That's what they're
00:37:03.460 pushing for. More dishonest politics and history from the left wing comes in the way of CBS. CBS was
00:37:10.880 running a piece on the Civil War, Reconstruction, before and after the Civil War. See if you can notice
00:37:18.080 something about how they organize their Civil War maps. And how about this for a second act? After
00:37:26.960 returning home to Beaufort, South Carolina, Robert Smalls was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives,
00:37:34.960 one of more than a dozen African Americans to serve in Congress during the period known as
00:37:40.920 Reconstruction, when the formerly rebel states were reabsorbed into the Union and four million
00:37:47.500 newly freed African Americans were made citizens. This is why you've got to subscribe because you
00:37:53.760 could hear, I bet you know exactly what they did. So first of all, they don't mention that that
00:37:58.700 gentleman went, as did all of the black people representing, now representing their constituencies
00:38:05.640 in the Congress. They were all Republicans. They don't mention that. But then they show
00:38:10.400 the map of the United States and the former rebel states being reabsorbed into the country. Guess what
00:38:15.680 colors they use? They represent the North in blue and they represent the South in red. And then those
00:38:23.660 red rebel conservative Republicans were absorbed into the Union. Oh, except, wait a minute, that's not
00:38:29.740 what happened at all. That's not what happened at all. The Civil War was a war between Republicans
00:38:34.500 and Democrats. The Republicans fighting to free the slaves and maintain the Union, Democrats fighting
00:38:40.120 to maintain the institution of slavery and secede from the Union. But they have to flip it. And
00:38:48.380 well, they say, one of their lines is they say, well, the two parties switched at some point.
00:38:53.040 So when did they switch? When did the Republicans and the Democrats all just sit down at a table and
00:38:56.660 they say, okay, I know for a hundred years you've been Democrats and we've been Republicans, but now
00:39:01.360 we're going to switch for some reason. So you're going to be the Republicans, we're going to be the
00:39:04.780 Democrats. Okay. And why are we going to do this? Absolutely no reason at all. And what date is
00:39:10.160 this going to happen on? We're not going to know because nobody's ever going to be able to point to
00:39:13.980 it. Okay. Did not happen. Now, do political questions change over time? Do political movements
00:39:19.960 change over time? Yes, of course. Is the Republican Party of today exactly the same as the Republican
00:39:26.600 Party of 1865? No. Is the Democrat Party exactly the same? No. Are there certain similarities? Yes,
00:39:33.660 there are. And what the CBS News is trying to do is what the left has long tried to do, which is
00:39:38.940 rewrite the history of the United States such that the horrific history of the Democrat Party, and it is
00:39:44.960 a brutal and horrific and disgraceful history, becomes attributed to Republicans. And the rather good
00:39:54.120 history of the Republican Party is attributed to Democrats. That's what they're always trying to
00:39:59.420 do. So anytime, I mean, even down to the fact that they won't mention that all of those representatives
00:40:06.180 were Republicans, they just won't mention it, they can't mention it, cuts too much against their
00:40:11.020 narrative. It's so dishonest. And it does remind me, we cannot trust the mainstream media for anything.
00:40:19.320 I know this seems like an obvious point. Conservatives have known this for a long time.
00:40:23.600 The problem is so much worse than even I thought it was. These lies, these casual lies
00:40:31.280 are the entirety of mainstream media reporting on all the news networks and on CNN and MSNBC and the New
00:40:38.600 York Times and the Washington Post. They have no credibility at all. Just consider, I mean, this is
00:40:44.920 one good example, but the biggest news story of the last two years, the Russia hoax, collusion
00:40:50.220 investigation, they all got it completely and consistently wrong for two years. All of them.
00:41:00.020 How about the biggest story before that, that Donald Trump could win the presidential election?
00:41:03.560 They all got it completely and consistently wrong the entire time. How about the biggest story before
00:41:11.800 that? Which was ostensibly Russian interference in the election and more importantly, Barack Obama's
00:41:17.320 administration's interference in the election, FISA abuse, surveillance, collusion. They all got that
00:41:26.120 completely and consistently wrong from the very beginning. They continue to get it wrong. The biggest
00:41:31.100 stories, what are they good for? All they do is pump out lies and they get into tens of millions of homes
00:41:39.600 every night. To pump out more lies, just like this. It's a big problem. Speaking of crazy leftists,
00:41:48.120 there was actually a beautiful clip that came from Chelsea Handler on Bill Maher's show. I know this is
00:41:52.920 shocking. I know one could not imagine. She's the alleged comedian who admits to doing depraved and
00:41:58.280 bizarre acts in her own personal life and is certainly a little mentally unbalanced. She admitted that this
00:42:03.240 unbalance played a role in her reaction to President Trump's election. On Bill Maher, I think this is
00:42:09.400 painfully honest and I think that a lot more leftists should talk as bluntly as she is.
00:42:14.980 You know, I'm reading your book and I'm feeling like a bad friend because I didn't realize you
00:42:19.160 were suffering so much. Everybody took the 2016 election hard, but I didn't know it really knocked
00:42:24.560 you down like that and you came back stronger. That's what the book is about.
00:42:28.340 Yeah, I had a midlife identity crisis once Trump won the election because I had never had my world
00:42:33.460 feel so unhinged, I think. And I had to pay a psychiatrist to listen to me bitch about Donald
00:42:41.100 Trump for about the first three weeks. And then once we got past that and we got to the real stuff,
00:42:46.620 I realized the parallel there was my world becoming unhinged when I was a little girl. My brother died
00:42:51.900 when I was nine years old. I had never related the two, but for me, as I can imagine, it must have been
00:42:58.280 for so many people. It was a huge emotional trigger of everything being destabilized. And
00:43:04.220 I realized just how spoiled and privileged I'd been all my life to realize, to be this upset and
00:43:10.860 this out of 10 every day and the outrage and the anger. I just wanted to fight people, you know?
00:43:16.380 And I was like, I got to go see a psychiatrist.
00:43:19.980 Yes, you did. It's good that you saw a psychiatrist. It's good that you're realizing this.
00:43:24.240 Maybe the whole left should go see a psychiatrist, maybe a psychologist. I don't think they need any
00:43:29.620 more drugs, but certainly a psychologist. What Chelsea Handler is admitting is that the left's
00:43:34.940 reaction to President Trump, Trump derangement syndrome, is a psychological reaction. It's not
00:43:43.000 a political reaction. It's not a philosophical reaction. It's not an historical or economic reaction.
00:43:47.620 It is a psychological twitch that has very little bearing in reality.
00:43:54.860 She is saying that President Trump got elected, this sent her spiraling down into this crazy
00:44:02.040 depression crisis because it reminded her of childhood traumas. Basically saying it was all
00:44:09.420 daddy issues, which I've been saying for two years since Donald Trump got elected.
00:44:13.060 They're not reacting to the reality of the Trump administration. They're reacting to their own
00:44:18.960 weird daddy issues. And look, people have a lot of daddy issues these days. I mean, I get it. I get
00:44:25.000 it. We, our country has exploding rates of anxiety, exploding rates of depression, exploding rates of
00:44:30.060 stress. We can get into, maybe we'll get into this a little bit tomorrow. I have an op-ed examining why
00:44:37.060 that might be, but we have total family breakdown. We have people being raised without religious
00:44:42.620 moorings. We have a lot of social ills in the country. And so people are reacting to relatively
00:44:52.640 trivial or, or ordinary political events as though they are the end of the world. It's a weird
00:44:59.260 psychological twitch in many cases. She's admitting it. I applaud her for her honesty. I wish more left
00:45:05.300 wingers would be more honest, but I guess that's probably asking a little bit too much. Okay. That's the
00:45:09.560 show. It's been a long show. I feel some ways tired. I've come too far to keep doing this show.
00:45:16.780 So come back tomorrow. We've got a lot more to talk about, a lot more we should have gotten to,
00:45:19.940 but you know, that's how it goes. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles
00:45:23.080 Show. I'll see you tomorrow.
00:45:53.080 Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today. Some students and faculty at Baylor are now saying
00:45:58.200 that my presence on their campus for my speech on Tuesday night poses a threat to their physical
00:46:03.740 wellbeing. What does that even mean? We'll try to figure that out. Also, AOC humiliates herself by
00:46:11.080 adopting a fake accent and Gillette is now celebrating morbid obesity. Is that enlightened
00:46:17.200 and progressive or is it dangerous? We'll discuss today over on the Matt Wall Show.