The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 479 - When Democracy Fails

00:00:00.000 A giddy Nancy Pelosi pretends to be somber while signing the official impeachment resolution against

00:00:06.340 President Trump and simultaneously doling out souvenir pens to her jackal colleagues.

00:00:12.280 Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin moves to consolidate power in yet another blow to democracy in Russia.

00:00:17.540 We will examine how and why democracy fails. Then President Trump wins big in the trade war

00:00:24.460 with China and even left-wing outlets have to admit that his strategy, specifically his tariffs,

00:00:31.480 worked. While we all celebrate the economic and geopolitical victory, we will take a look

00:00:36.680 at the more important win, the overthrow of conventional wisdom. Then CNN releases the

00:00:42.540 audio from the post-debate Warren-Burney exchange at Tuesday's Democratic primary debate because

00:00:48.240 CNN is still trying to make Elizabeth Warren happen. Stop trying to make Elizabeth Warren happen.

00:00:53.780 Elizabeth Warren is not going to happen. Finally, the mailbag, all that and more.

00:00:57.900 I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:07.080 All right, she's impeaching him. And there have been like seven different moments where this is

00:01:12.500 the official impeachment. Pelosi announced months ago, she said, we're starting the official

00:01:17.580 impeachment inquiry. Then they do the inquiry. Then they take the official impeachment vote,

00:01:22.920 but it wasn't totally official because she wouldn't deliver the articles of impeachment to the

00:01:27.100 Senate. Then she signed the official impeachment resolution. And then her seven house managers

00:01:32.500 delivered the official impeachment resolution. And the fiction that they're all living under right

00:01:40.040 now is that this is a very somber, serious day for America. These house Democrats, they don't want

00:01:45.800 to impeach the president. They just have to because of that thing he did. And we can't get too specific

00:01:50.960 about it because, you know, it's very complicated, but he did something. He, the orange man was bad.

00:01:58.280 And so we have to impeach him, but we don't want to, except they're giddy about it and they're eager

00:02:02.860 to do it. And they were ready to do it before they even figured out a tenuous reason to impeach him.

00:02:08.700 The impeachment managers include representative Hakeem Jeffries from New York, Val Demings from Florida,

00:02:14.900 Jason Crow from Wisconsin, Sylvia Garcia from Texas, and Zoe Lofgren from California. And then of course,

00:02:22.220 the two, the two impeachment stars, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler. Those are the people. Now it's,

00:02:30.320 it's worth pointing out of the impeachment managers of the seven impeachment managers,

00:02:35.420 six of them supported impeachment before the Ukraine whistleblower complaint. So they're all saying

00:02:43.560 that they don't want to impeach the president, but this matter on Ukraine that none of us can really

00:02:48.580 describe because it's completely murky and a hoax and BS. Nevertheless, this, this incident with Ukraine

00:02:56.480 is the reason that they have to impeach Trump, except six of the seven impeachment managers

00:03:00.620 supported impeachment publicly before the whistleblower complaint, before anybody knew anything

00:03:06.980 about this Ukraine phone call. So it's completely disingenuous. It's insincere.

00:03:14.200 The most interesting person here of, of all of the impeachment managers is Zoe Lofgren. The reason

00:03:21.800 she's most interesting is Zoe Lofgren has been involved in three different impeachment processes.

00:03:28.860 It's pretty amazing. She's involved obviously in this one. She's an impeachment manager on Trump.

00:03:32.880 She was in the house since 1995. So she voted on the impeachment of Bill Clinton. And she was

00:03:38.880 actually working on the staff of representative Don Edwards in the 1970s when they, when Edwards and

00:03:47.060 she helping him were preparing the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. Lofgren shows the

00:03:55.060 problem here, the, the increasing problem with impeachment and with our democracy or our representative

00:04:02.020 democracy or our Republic. We'll get to the difference in a little bit. She shows the problem. We're

00:04:08.880 impeaching too much. We're impeaching too frequently. This is not the, what the framers and the founders

00:04:16.080 of our country had in mind. We shouldn't just be throwing out the president every time there's a new

00:04:23.400 Congress in charge and they don't like the guy. Democrats are pretending to be upset about the whole

00:04:28.700 thing. They love it. And that is a big danger to our Republic. We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:06:04.740 So they're giddy to do it. They're so happy to deliver the impeachment resolution. Nancy Pelosi

00:06:10.060 was so happy to sign it. As Nancy Pelosi is signing this impeachment resolution, so excited,

00:06:15.320 President Trump was signing the trade deal with China because after two years of a trade war with

00:06:21.040 China, we were told we're going to lose. This is terrible. The American people are getting killed

00:06:25.300 in this and what a dumb strategy. It actually worked. We got a very favorable trade deal.

00:06:30.060 So the Democrats, the best they can do is throw out the president who's doing a good job and the

00:06:34.460 president is delivering. I mean, what an amazing two weeks for Trump. Not every two weeks of his

00:06:41.520 presidency has been like this. Okay. There have been a few moments that I've not been so thrilled

00:06:45.680 about some policy moves that I haven't been so happy with, but the last two weeks, oh my gosh,

00:06:53.640 he, that first of all, we get attacked by Iran twice. Kills, Iran kills an American contractor

00:07:00.580 and hits our Baghdad embassy. Very perilous situation. I mean, we're being attacked by a hostile

00:07:06.080 foreign power. Trump takes out their top guy. Trump takes out the number two guy. He, we now have

00:07:13.440 heightened tensions with Iran. They back down. So we establish deterrence, major geopolitical win.

00:07:19.140 And then on the heels of that, we finally ink the trade deal, which is beyond all of the foreign

00:07:24.280 affairs issues, the single most important issue right now facing the United States abroad. More

00:07:30.620 important than Iran, more important than North Korea, more important than anything in the Middle East,

00:07:34.140 China. China is the adversary. China is the threat. It's the threat to our economy. It's a threat to

00:07:39.520 our national security. And finally, after so many years of nothing, we've got a deal on this. It's

00:07:46.320 really great news. We'll get to that in a second, but first I just have to show you the hypocrisy of

00:07:51.300 the Democrats. Well, Trump is actually helping out our economy, helping out our national security.

00:07:56.940 All they can do is try to throw him out and they're happy to do it. So Pelosi a little while ago

00:08:02.360 was giving an interview about impeachment. And she said, it's a somber, serious, difficult,

00:08:10.280 terrible, sad day for America when they have to impeach him. Here she is.

00:08:15.360 This is a very sad time for our country. There's no joy in this. It's sad. We must be somber. We must

00:08:26.120 be prayerful. There's no joy in this. There's no joy in this, Nancy. Then why are you smiling,

00:08:30.860 grinning, grinning ear to ear while you sign the resolution? You can see, if you saw the clip

00:08:36.780 yesterday, she's, she's signing this impeachment resolution and she's got all of the Democratic

00:08:43.980 colleagues around her. Oh, and there she just looks up. She's so happy. She's never felt this

00:08:49.320 way before. Yes, she swears. It's true. And she owes it all to those Democrats. How happy she is.

00:08:56.080 She gave away commemorative pens. When presidents sign important pieces of legislation,

00:09:04.920 the Affordable Care Act, right, Obamacare, or major pieces of legislation like that,

00:09:10.240 they will sign their name only a little bit at a time, a little part of one letter and then another

00:09:15.180 letter and then another letter because they want to switch the pens because they want to be able to

00:09:19.880 give out those souvenir pens to people to help remember this joyous occasion. And it's a great

00:09:26.140 piece of political swag in Washington. Nancy Pelosi is doing that for impeachment. She's giving out an

00:09:33.540 actual celebratory souvenir for this somber, serious, sad day. They're thrilled. Why shouldn't

00:09:41.160 they be thrilled? For radical Democrats, impeachment is a huge win. And I mean Democrats with a capital D

00:09:46.580 and I mean Democrats with a lowercase d. Both, both kinds of Democrats, the Democrats of the party and

00:09:53.020 the people who support pure radical democracy, both should be thrilled with impeaching the president.

00:09:58.180 If you're a purist Democrat with a lowercase d, you should hate, you should hate this particular

00:10:04.680 president. You might hate the president in general, but you should hate this one in particular.

00:10:08.640 He was elected without the popular vote, right? So right, right away, that's a problem. And generally

00:10:16.160 speaking, people who are pure lowercase d Democrats who want more power to the people hate the executive

00:10:21.840 branch and often hate a lot of our constitution. You know, if you're a purist Democrat, if you really

00:10:30.660 believe that 50% plus one should decide how we're governed, you should despise the constitution

00:10:37.880 constitution. Because the constitution limits the rights or it limits the power of the people

00:10:44.260 to define our rights. I know that's a little confusing, right? Because it gives rights to the

00:10:48.780 people. It acknowledges rights that the people have, but it also limits the people's power to change

00:10:55.020 those rights willy nilly. If, if half the population plus one decides to do it. I mean, look at our gun

00:11:00.880 rights, for instance, Democrats are so upset, generally speaking, the left liberals so upset

00:11:07.540 that if the majority of liberals in any given area want to take away our gun rights, they can't do it

00:11:14.500 because they're reined in by the constitution. How about the judiciary? The judiciary is very

00:11:19.900 undemocratic. Unfortunately, you'll often have bad judges try to legislate from the bench,

00:11:27.460 but as it is set up, the judiciary is there to put a hold on the will of the people, to put a hold on

00:11:34.520 democracy, to restrain the desires of democracy and not let them do whatever they want. How about the

00:11:40.500 executive? The executive is not beholden to the will of the people like the legislature is. Executive

00:11:46.080 gets elected every four years and it's elected through this mechanism of the electoral college. So

00:11:51.240 the votes are weighted a little bit differently and smaller states have just as much of a say

00:11:57.080 as larger states when it comes to part of the electoral college vote, but not the whole

00:12:02.200 calculation. It's a very complicated process set up by our founders and framers, unlike the

00:12:07.960 legislature, which is up for election every two years and is the expression of the will of the

00:12:12.500 people. It is the expression of democracy, the nearest that we've got to it in our government.

00:12:18.280 What the founding fathers knew is that too much democracy can be a terrible thing. We see that here,

00:12:25.120 we see that in Russia. We'll get to that in a second because Vladimir Putin just dissolved his

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00:14:03.680 All right. Our founding fathers knew that too much democracy is a terrible thing. We have a great

00:14:13.380 republic. Another term for a republic you could say is a representative democracy. It's not a pure

00:14:20.840 democracy. In many cases, it's not even super duper democratic. It's a representative democracy,

00:14:28.060 a republic. What's the difference? We have representatives in place that express our desires.

00:14:34.380 We don't do it directly. What's another difference? We have constitutional limitations

00:14:39.660 on our democracy. If the majority of the people, if 99% of the people, if 100% of the people want

00:14:47.380 to ban guns from America, they can't do it because we have a constitution.

00:14:56.440 If 100% of the people in this country want to ban free speech or want to establish a national

00:15:04.500 church or want to eliminate freedom of the press, they can't do it because we do not have this pure

00:15:12.060 democracy. Because if we did have that pure democracy, it would be much, much worse, a much

00:15:16.920 worse form of government than the republic that we have. The current threat to our representative

00:15:23.180 democracy is not too little democracy. It's too much democracy. We have been hacking away at our

00:15:32.360 constitutional safeguards for over a century now. We started it, well, we started it a long, long time

00:15:38.960 ago. But 1913, direct election of senators takes away the right of the states to elect the senators,

00:15:46.080 takes away some of the delicate balance of our federal government, of our constitutional system.

00:15:51.300 Then in 1942, you get the Supreme Court decision, Wickard v. Filburn dramatically increases the regulatory

00:15:57.300 power of the federal government, reduces the power of the states, reduces that balance of power.

00:16:03.940 Another example that was just in the news, the War Powers Resolution in 1973, unconstitutional power

00:16:09.660 grab by the Congress to take the constitutional power away from the executive. What you're seeing is the power

00:16:18.120 moving from state and local up to the federal government. And within the federal government, you're seeing power

00:16:23.260 coming into the legislature, constant power grabs. And now that is culminating in this impeachment,

00:16:29.400 which has no legal basis, no constitutional basis. It is simply a power grab from the legislature

00:16:36.820 against the executive. It is an attempt at congressional supremacy. It's the idea that the president serves

00:16:44.720 at the pleasure of the Congress. And if the Congress, if there's an election and the Congress becomes

00:16:49.780 democratic, then the Republican president's getting impeached. And I guess the threat is vice versa.

00:16:56.820 If a Republican Congress gets elected, then the Democrat president is going to be impeached.

00:17:03.260 That's a system similar to the United Kingdom. The UK has this parliamentary system. So it's just

00:17:09.000 whatever party wins, they control the whole government. It's very European. It's very unstable. It's

00:17:14.160 not, not, not befitting a free American people. Conservatives have a different idea than that.

00:17:20.580 Conservatives' idea is that we know there are costs to overthrowing our legal and political tradition

00:17:29.140 like this. The, the tradition that we've inherited from the founding fathers throughout all of the history of our

00:17:35.040 country, it's not a simple system. It's not totally clear. You can't write it down on a little,

00:17:40.200 little napkin, right? It's complex. It involves institutions like the electoral college, which

00:17:46.160 few people seem to be able to understand or articulate. It involves this balance of power

00:17:51.300 between the local, state, and federal, and the judiciary, and the executive, and the legislature.

00:17:54.880 It's very complicated. We realize that there are costs to overthrowing all that and having a simple

00:18:02.900 democracy or, or simply saying the legislature gets to pick the president, simply saying the majority

00:18:07.860 rules. When you, when you overthrow that tradition, you are overthrowing a more important democracy

00:18:16.140 than the democracy everybody talks about. Chesterton explained this very well. He said,

00:18:21.580 tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of

00:18:31.060 the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to

00:18:38.800 be walking about. It's a great way to think about the tradition. It's the democracy of the dead.

00:18:45.740 You and I are here walking on this earth for a little blip of time. We're the arrogant oligarchy of

00:18:51.560 people who want to overthrow everything, but what a power grab that would be. What a tyranny

00:18:56.160 to deprive our ancestors, once we're gone, of that great tradition. What a tyranny it would be to

00:19:03.420 disenfranchise the people who come after us and the people who have come before us. For, in order for

00:19:09.020 a country to be stable, to thrive, to flourish, you need to have that sort of continuity. And maybe you

00:19:16.000 have to respect the wisdom of the ages because very likely your feeble powers of intellect are not

00:19:23.860 enough to recreate the whole country from scratch. Lots of people in the West right now are paying

00:19:32.100 attention to another democracy falling apart. Compare what's happening in the U.S. to what's

00:19:37.360 happening in Russia. Vladimir Putin right now is amending the Russian constitution and it's

00:19:43.020 overthrowing his entire government. So the prime minister, the putative prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev,

00:19:48.720 and his entire cabinet resigned yesterday. I say the putative prime minister because when you think

00:19:54.340 prime minister, you think somebody has a lot of power. Nobody has power in Russia other than

00:19:58.400 Vladimir Putin. And Putin was the president. Then he was briefly the prime minister. Then he was the

00:20:05.440 president again and he switched roles with Medvedev. But Putin's been in charge for a very long time.

00:20:10.080 This move is a way for Putin to consolidate power. All right. Medvedev has been prime minister since

00:20:16.460 2012. Before that, he was president in 2008 to 2012. But it was really just a trick of the Russian

00:20:22.280 constitution so that Putin could stay in power without violating the constitution. Now Putin wants

00:20:28.160 to install some technocrat nobody who doesn't have a power base as prime minister and amend the

00:20:32.560 constitution to give himself more power when he retires as president. Lots of people in the West are upset

00:20:38.540 about it because it's another blow to Russian democracy. My response to that is, what Russian

00:20:46.640 democracy? When has Russia ever had a democracy or a republic or a representative government?

00:20:55.140 Never. Never have they had a functioning democracy. There was a brief period after the fall of the Berlin

00:21:01.200 Wall during the 1990s when there was this guy Boris Yeltsin. Boris Yeltsin was the nearest thing that Russia

00:21:07.840 has had to a democracy or a representative government. And he was a drunk crook who left office with a 2%

00:21:14.140 approval rating. There's a story that he was visiting in Washington one time. He somehow snuck out of the

00:21:18.560 White House and was found carousing drunkenly on the streets of Washington. All right. Didn't work out

00:21:23.860 very well. Other than that, what do you have? You have now Putin, who is the autocrat in Russia. He just

00:21:30.340 keeps himself in power. He had a little blip of, of Boris Yeltsin. And then you had the communists,

00:21:36.520 communist dictators, and then you had the czars. At no point have you had a functioning representative

00:21:42.920 government. All right. Russia has always governed at the whims of czars. And one reason that we pride

00:21:49.460 ourselves in the West on being better than Russia is because we have this superior system of government.

00:21:54.340 And yet increasingly we are governing on the whims of czars too. A tyranny of one is no worse than a

00:22:04.060 tyranny of many. It's tyranny all the same. We will get to how we can fix that. Then we'll get to the

00:22:09.380 excellent Trump China deal. And most importantly, the Bernie Warren moment at the end of that debate

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00:23:39.300 A tyranny of one is no better than a tyranny of a million or two million or 300 million.

00:23:49.340 They're both tyranny. Our founders set up a superior system that you can't boil down to

00:23:55.940 slogans or bumper stickers, democracy, freedom. You can't, you actually can't do that. It's much

00:24:00.800 more complicated. We don't need to destroy our representative democracy. We don't need to be

00:24:07.540 in a situation where the Congress is just throwing presidents out willy-nilly. What we need to do is

00:24:14.120 respect our traditions, our norms, our constitution, and perhaps most importantly of all our fellow

00:24:19.300 countrymen. If we don't do that, we are headed for a disaster. But before we get to disaster,

00:24:24.780 in the meantime, we got some great, great news yesterday that the mainstream media don't want

00:24:30.420 to report on. Donald Trump just won a major victory in the trade war with China. Two-year

00:24:38.440 trade war with China and 20 years of hostilities with China. Ever since we let China into the World

00:24:45.160 Trade Organization, they've been ripping us off, stealing our intellectual property, putting spyware

00:24:50.260 in our software that they manufacture, taking our jobs, illegally subsidizing steel and aluminum,

00:24:56.400 devaluing their currency. I mean, they've been cheating left and right. And this strategy seems

00:25:01.900 to have worked. When Trump said, I'm going to institute tariffs, we're getting into a trade war,

00:25:05.520 baby. Everybody, actually with the exception of Chuck Schumer, in Chuck Schumer's defense,

00:25:10.140 Schumer was supportive of a tough strategy with China as he had been for 20 years. But it was pretty

00:25:15.440 much Trump against the world, Trump against the Democrats, Trump against the libertarian types,

00:25:21.220 Trump against the never-Trump Republicans, a lot of squishy people in his own party. He said,

00:25:26.400 I'm putting on tariffs. They all said it'll never work. China will back down. Guess what? The

00:25:33.320 tariffs worked. U.S. and China signed a trade deal. This will lead to a sharp increase in the sales of

00:25:40.660 U.S. goods and services to China. They got to do it fast. Within the next year, China has to purchase

00:25:48.080 an additional nearly $200 million worth of goods and services and provide strong new protections for

00:25:59.720 trade secrets and intellectual property. This is an eight-part agreement. There will now pause the

00:26:06.520 trade war. Major, major deal. Now it does leave in place U.S. tariffs on about $370 billion of Chinese

00:26:13.160 goods or about three-quarters of the Chinese imports into the United States. So it's billion with a B.

00:26:19.140 Sorry. I was confused in my notes. Billion with a B. Here is Jim Cramer, who is on CNBC, so not exactly

00:26:28.600 a right-wing network. This left-wing network, Jim Cramer, comes out and he says what we're all

00:26:34.560 thinking and what none of the experts knew. Trump's tariff strategy worked.

00:26:39.540 Jim, Mnuchin's appearance this morning did bring us something new, and that was

00:26:43.320 the notion of phase 2A, phase 2B, phase 2C. So stories evolving rapidly.

00:26:50.860 Look, I think that the takeaway for me is the tariffs worked. If you go back in time,

00:26:55.840 people just said, listen, tariffs won't work, won't change them. The Chinese are all powerful.

00:27:00.260 Tariffs will hurt our consumer. The consumer is going to see a lot of inflation,

00:27:03.780 both at the producer level and the consumer level, ultimately, which is going to hurt the

00:27:08.520 U.S. economy. None of that happened. The whole narrative is that China caved,

00:27:13.540 and China's going to continue to cave because we didn't take the tariffs off. So I keep wondering

00:27:18.100 when people are going to recognize that it is historic that tariffs did succeed. They weren't

00:27:25.240 supposed to work. The Chinese are supposed to be able to get around them. It didn't happen.

00:27:28.720 But the Chinese were kind of accepting that they had to do something in order to keep the American

00:27:35.280 market. Absolutely right. This is my favorite thing about the trade deal. Not even that it's

00:27:42.840 good for our economy. It's good for our geopolitical standing. Not even that it's 20 years in the making.

00:27:49.620 Not even that the guy in my political party was right and everyone else, including people in my

00:27:55.560 political party were completely wrong. That's not even my favorite part of it. My favorite part of

00:28:01.020 this trade deal is that it overthrows stale conventional wisdom. Every 30, 40 years or so,

00:28:09.460 you get this kind of ossified, stale, conventional wisdom. You know, politics, because politics comes

00:28:17.640 from ideas and then you've got to distill it and enact it and communicate it to people.

00:28:21.080 This leads to talking points and bumper stickers and slogans. And then people repeat these bumper

00:28:27.040 stickers and slogans so often that they start to believe that that is the totality of politics. So

00:28:34.660 one of these being tariffs don't work. If you asked five years ago, everybody, you polled 100% of

00:28:41.900 Americans, do tariffs work? Left, right, and center, 99% of them would have told you tariffs don't work.

00:28:49.060 Tariffs never work. Tariffs are a bad idea. Beep, boop, beep, boop. None of these people have

00:28:54.480 an education in economics. None of these people know particularly much about global history or

00:28:59.360 economic history. And yet they would have said that because we just had decided as a, as a

00:29:03.640 political people, tariffs are always bad. There's never a use for tariffs. Then Trump comes in there.

00:29:08.940 He goes, yeah, I don't, sorry, I didn't go to all your fancy lunches at those think tanks and I

00:29:13.520 haven't been politically programmed on the same level as all you guys for the last 50 years. So

00:29:18.540 I think tariffs are going to work and we're going to slap a ton of tariffs on China and then they're

00:29:22.080 going to get on their knees and then we're going to get a good trade deal. They said it'll never

00:29:27.380 work. It can't work because our slogans told us it wouldn't because our narrow ideology and our

00:29:32.000 conventional wisdom told us it wouldn't. Yeah, well it did. So reality as always contradicted

00:29:36.920 the narrow ideology. Same thing on trade deficits. We were told trade deficits don't matter. That's

00:29:43.580 not a big deal. Well, if trade deficits don't matter, why do other countries work to reduce

00:29:47.540 their trade deficits? Trade deficits seem to seem like they would matter, right? What is a trade

00:29:52.780 deficit? It's how much you sell to another country versus how much that country sells to you.

00:29:58.900 There's got to be some effect of that, right? If, if China is buying X amount of money,

00:30:04.680 X amount of product from our country, and then they suddenly buy double that amount of product,

00:30:10.700 I think that's going to help us, isn't it? If we get to sell more of our product to this huge

00:30:14.320 market in China, why, why do we even want to get into these markets in the first place if it doesn't

00:30:18.080 matter? Of course it matters. And Trump just knocked over this conventional wisdom. It's very

00:30:22.780 important in politics to get out of slogans, you know, from, from Nancy Pelosi's signing the,

00:30:31.800 the impeachment resolution to Donald Trump signing the trade deal. You can see the kind of ossified,

00:30:39.180 cold, conventional wisdom, and you can see opening up your mind to the possibilities of politics.

00:30:44.720 What do I mean by that? Nancy Pelosi has one guiding star in politics right now,

00:30:51.320 and that is orange man bad. They're not, the Democrats are really not considering the

00:30:57.460 danger to the country of pursuing this path of impeachment, but they're just doing it because

00:31:02.760 that's all they know. Orange man bad, orange man bad. What if orange man isn't so bad?

00:31:06.340 What if the American people have the right to pick their own president? What if the Congress doesn't

00:31:09.600 have the right to overthrow a presidential election just because they want to? What if there are

00:31:14.120 constitutional safeguards? What if there is a legal basis for impeachment? What if tariffs work?

00:31:18.120 What if all these things that the left is not considering right now?

00:31:21.520 If we get down this narrow path and we try to oversimplify and oversimplify our government,

00:31:27.940 we're headed for disaster. If we appreciate the tradition that we have, if we respect the norms

00:31:32.400 that we maybe can't rationally articulate, but we know they've served us well for a long time,

00:31:36.920 maybe that will help us. And if we crack out of this stale conventional wisdom that crops up every

00:31:42.660 couple decades, I think we'll have a much better chance looking at the whole body of our American

00:31:48.060 political inheritance. Before we get to the mailbag today, I have just got to get to this wonderful,

00:31:55.060 wonderful Bernie and Elizabeth Warren clip from the debate. So you saw they were kind of angry.

00:32:01.580 They weren't shaking hands at the end of the debate. CNN, because they had their lavalier

00:32:05.760 microphones, just leaked the audio of that exchange. Here it is.

00:32:11.740 What an amazing exchange. The best part of it being Tom Steyer, who is just like that kid,

00:32:36.380 like when you're staying over at your friend's house and the two parents start fighting with

00:32:39.920 each other and you're just in the kitchen, like trying to get a glass of water. That's what Tom

00:32:43.560 Steyer was. Hey, hey, I just wanted to say hi, Bernie. He seems like a pretty nice guy and he

00:32:48.800 wears that nice tartan tie, Tom Steyer. He's also the richest guy on that stage by far. So you'd think

00:32:53.980 Bernie would say like, Hey Tom, please give me a donation later. But it's very charming moment at

00:32:59.000 the end. The meat of that exchange though, of course, is at the beginning. Elizabeth Warren comes

00:33:04.600 over. She's, I think you called me a liar on TV. Bernie said, what are you, what?

00:33:12.060 You, you called me a liar, right? You, we had a, we are describing different things that happened.

00:33:21.180 We're describing one event and you're saying this happened and I'm saying not this happened.

00:33:27.080 So you called me a liar too, but let's not do this here, Elizabeth. Why would you want to do this

00:33:30.700 on stage with our microphones on? You could have done it during the debate too. You, it doesn't

00:33:35.400 make sense until you realize that Elizabeth Warren is a liar and CNN is in the tank for her.

00:33:42.680 This is obviously a setup. Why would CNN release this audio if it weren't a setup for Warren? The

00:33:49.220 way, the way you can tell who is telling the truth here is that one, Elizabeth Warren leaked it right

00:33:58.660 before the debate and they, and she leaked it to CNN because CNN was hosting the debate.

00:34:03.020 And then at the very end, she approaches Bernie. She didn't get her good hit in during the debate

00:34:08.540 itself. She didn't get a good clip from that. So she walks up and very, very awkwardly sets him up to

00:34:14.600 have to respond. Doesn't sound natural. She walks up very awkwardly and says, uh, what's, what does my

00:34:20.640 script say? Uh, you, I think you called me a liar on TV. Huh? What do you say now? What are you going to

00:34:27.360 say now, Bernie? And he's so caught off guard by this. You called me a liar. Why are we doing this

00:34:32.280 here? See you later, Liz. I have to give it to Bernie on this occasion. I think he's the one

00:34:38.020 telling the truth and I think she's a liar. Why do I think that? She is one of the most notorious

00:34:45.920 liars in the country. And if she's not lying, let's say that, let's give her the benefit of the

00:34:50.200 doubt. Let's say that this meeting took place two years ago and Bernie said, I don't think a woman

00:34:54.580 could win in 2020, which I don't believe for a second, but let's say that happened. Still, we have to

00:35:01.580 believe Bernie here because Elizabeth Warren is the boy who cried wolf. Elizabeth Warren said she was

00:35:10.360 a native American Indian for her entire career for professional benefit. Complete lie. She just recently

00:35:17.920 said that her child went to private school. That was a lie. She said that she was fired from her

00:35:28.000 teaching job because she was pregnant. That was a lie. She contradicted it herself. She lies all the

00:35:36.100 time. All the time. And yet Bernie Sanders, when you think of all of the false statements he's made in

00:35:43.900 his career. And there are many of them. All the crazy ideology he's spattered in his career. There's a lot of

00:35:49.440 it. You can't find too many lies. He doesn't lie very much. And there's a video of Bernie decades ago saying

00:35:57.880 he thinks a woman could be president. You got to give it to Liz Warren. Even if this, if in this actual event,

00:36:04.580 Bernie Sanders was the, what actually did say what she said, he said, you got to give the liar award to

00:36:14.120 Elizabeth Warren. It's just, that's, that's the only rational judgment you can make. And the CNN set up

00:36:21.240 here, total stab in the back setup is classic. You know, last go around 2016, CNN gave the, uh, gave the

00:36:30.920 debate questions to Hillary Clinton when she was debating Bernie Sanders. They did that because the

00:36:37.780 corporate media hates Bernie Sanders. I don't like Bernie Sanders either, but we have different

00:36:42.080 reasons for it, but the corporate media certainly hates him. They're trying to pick Elizabeth Warren.

00:36:46.480 They're now calling her a snake in the grass. And I have to say that the democratic base,

00:36:52.840 left-wing base that calls her a snake in the grass is clearly pretty right. All right, let's get to the

00:36:57.580 mailbag. First, I got to say about Facebook and YouTube, head on over to dailywire.com.

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00:37:47.760 the fun. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more.

00:38:02.340 All right. We've got the mailbag, so let's get right into it. I always run late, so we've got to

00:38:07.360 hurry up. From Sam. Hi, Michael. I've worked at a summer camp for the past five years. Today,

00:38:13.980 I got my contract for the upcoming summer and they've given me a demotion and a pay cut.

00:38:20.160 I feel like I should start looking for jobs at other camps, but the reason I wanted to

00:38:23.660 run a camp in the first place was for these kids. I've been working with the same group of kids

00:38:28.580 since they were eight and now they're 14. Am I abandoning the principles that made me want to

00:38:33.640 go into the camping industry if I take a job at another camp? Thanks for all you do.

00:38:36.860 No. You should get another job. I mean, it's great to support the kids. It's great to love

00:38:43.920 what you do. It's great to enjoy the work that you're doing, but you can't be disrespected like

00:38:48.460 that. If you're really taking a pay cut, if you're really being demoted, that's showing a disrespect

00:38:53.220 from your employers. Now, maybe it was your fault. I mean, let's entertain that possibility. Let's say

00:38:59.160 you weren't doing your job that well, so they bumped you down a little bit. Okay. Maybe that means you

00:39:05.560 got to work a little bit better at your job, get a little better at your job, figure out how you

00:39:10.260 can thrive in that role. I guess you could do that at your current camp or you could do it somewhere

00:39:16.080 else. Or in the other situation, maybe they just don't, they're not showing you respect as an employee

00:39:22.300 and you've got to move on. That's the way life works. They're great jobs, but sometimes you just got to

00:39:27.560 move on and you'll find another group of kids and you'll be stronger in your profession. From Grant.

00:39:33.140 Hello, Michael. I recently took your advice and parted ways with my ex-girlfriend of five years

00:39:38.080 who didn't want kids in the future. She blocked me after I deleted her pictures from my social

00:39:42.440 media. I miss her dearly and I don't know how to get over it. You mentioned reading Ovid's Remedy

00:39:47.200 for Love and I simply cannot comprehend it. Any advice on how to read Ovid and or get over my ex?

00:39:52.600 Thank you for all you do and for your consistent spreading of the word of Christ. Well, I'm sorry,

00:39:57.420 you know, you're going through this difficult situation. I do remember your question, Grant,

00:40:01.160 from last time, which was, if I'm remembering correctly, it was that you and your girlfriend

00:40:05.900 had broken up, but you kept seeing each other and she was kind of stringing you along. But she said

00:40:11.400 that you guys have to take some time off and she didn't know if she wanted to, you know, have kids

00:40:17.800 or kind of live the life you want to live. And my advice last time was don't let your ex-girlfriend

00:40:23.420 string you along. Never do that. Never, ever do that. It won't, it won't help you win her back

00:40:28.780 and it will degrade you. So if you still really like her a lot, I guess there's a chance you could

00:40:33.660 get back together. That happens. But it's not going to happen if you keep seeing your ex-girlfriend all

00:40:38.500 the time and hanging around and saying, you're my best friend and I love you so much. Ain't going to

00:40:42.820 work. It's true that Ovid is a little tough for the modern audience. And yeah, I don't know, you know,

00:40:51.780 it's even more difficult because it's translated from Latin and okay, how can you, how can you take

00:40:57.300 Ovid's advice for getting over an ex-girlfriend? Well, you're already doing it. Ovid has a lot of

00:41:04.300 advice. He says, stop seeing her. Don't see her. Destroy all her pictures. That's another piece of

00:41:11.020 advice. He says, destroy all her portraits and you're deleting her Facebook pictures. Okay. That's

00:41:14.860 about the same thing. Another bit of advice that Ovid, a pagan, gives is to sleep around with a lot of

00:41:21.020 women right away. Now you're a Christian, so you probably don't want to do that, but you could

00:41:24.740 start going on dates. You could start pursuing other romantic relationships and you should do

00:41:31.140 that immediately. You must move on. If you're really going to break up, you don't want to be

00:41:38.440 in that middle ground. Either be together and get married and have a life together or completely break

00:41:43.420 up and move on. And by the way, if you do completely break up and move on a year or two years from now,

00:41:49.180 you might end up getting back together because she's going to realize she made a huge mistake

00:41:52.240 and come running back to you. But what, what is not going to work is if you are in this middle

00:41:56.380 ground where you're kind of hanging around saying, please, please love me, love me. That is, that is

00:42:02.120 not going to help anybody. It's not going to help you win your girlfriend back. It's not going to help

00:42:05.200 you move on. You should operate from the position that this relationship is over. It's not going to work.

00:42:12.020 No knock on her. You just want different things in life and you are going to move on

00:42:17.300 and then see what happens from there. Best of luck, my friend from Ian. Hi, Michael. Since the

00:42:24.080 Democrats are pushing for taxpayer funded abortions over reproductive rights, should Republicans push

00:42:28.800 taxpayer funded firearms for second amendment rights? Yes. Yeah. I mean, not seriously. I don't,

00:42:35.040 I don't want the government involved in, in giving me guns because I don't trust the government to do

00:42:40.700 that. And I don't want to expand the government in that way, but it's the same argument. I mean,

00:42:45.480 they say we have a right to abortion. So the taxpayers have to pay for it. We have a right to

00:42:50.140 condoms. So the taxpayers have to pay for it. First of all, you don't have a right to either of those

00:42:54.740 things. But second of all, even if you did, there is a difference between positive rights, which require

00:43:00.460 somebody else's effort and labor and money and the government to pay for it and negative rights,

00:43:06.680 which is freedom from interference, freedom from you punching me, freedom from you taking my life,

00:43:13.880 freedom from you infringing on my property. When our government was set up and we talk about rights,

00:43:22.840 our founding fathers had a particularly negative view of rights, freedom from. And so a great,

00:43:30.000 a great way to highlight that hypocrisy for, for the left would be to say, okay, great. You're right.

00:43:36.040 You have a right to birth control or abortion. You're right. We should, the government should

00:43:40.920 provide that. But I have an actual constitutional right to a gun. So give me my AR-15, baby. See

00:43:45.980 what they say to that. From Deb. Do you think Salami Man, Soleimani, will replace Che Guevara as the

00:43:53.220 liberals' new poster boy for decades to come? Honestly, maybe. I mean it. I know it seems insane

00:44:01.820 that you could get this Islamic terrorist, you know, killed thousands of civilians to be

00:44:07.260 a poster boy and have them on t-shirts for the left. They did it to Che Guevara. Che Guevara was a,

00:44:15.600 wasn't an Islamic terrorist. I guess he was a Latino terrorist, but he killed a ton of civilians.

00:44:20.700 He was responsible for untold human misery. He was a total sociopath. And they put him on their

00:44:26.740 shirts. The left, particularly the intellectual left, has always loved the violence. They love

00:44:33.100 violence. They, they usually don't fight themselves, but they love the idea of violence. You see this in,

00:44:38.700 in all of the despotisms of the 20th century supported by top intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre,

00:44:45.400 Bertolt Brecht, all the way back to the enlightenment. These guys support violence. And so I wouldn't be

00:44:53.600 surprised if the left does it too. It's totally perverse. And the key is the left doesn't know

00:44:57.580 the history of Che Guevara and they don't know anything about Sula Barney. They're already crying

00:45:01.400 over his death. So I wouldn't be surprised if they threw him on a t-shirt. Last question, Taylor,

00:45:05.940 Michael, what are the names of your ancestors who came over on the Mayflower? Our Christmas break,

00:45:11.660 my wife found out that she has an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower too. I want to know if

00:45:14.960 you're distant cousins. I have four. The pilgrim was Dr. Samuel Fuller. The other three were what's

00:45:21.700 known as strangers. So they weren't the pilgrims. They were the other guys who came over on the

00:45:25.180 Mayflower. And that is Stephen Hopkins. He was a mutineer and he was actually on the shipwreck

00:45:32.760 in the Caribbean that Shakespeare's play The Tempest is based on. Francis Eaton. He was a sort

00:45:38.880 of ne'er-do-well, but got along just fine in Plymouth. And John Billington, who was the first

00:45:46.100 man executed for murder in the New World. So, you know, we had that one good pilgrim doctor and then

00:45:52.340 a bunch of derelicts and degenerates. And they may be the derelicts and degenerates from whom your

00:45:59.320 wife comes as well. Maybe we're cousins. All right, that's our show. Unfortunately though,

00:46:03.740 by the way, if your wife and I are cousins, then she's also cousins by law with Hillary Clinton.

00:46:08.660 So sorry to be the bearer of bad news. That's our show. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael

00:46:12.780 Knowles show. Have a good weekend. I'll see you on Monday.

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00:46:36.420 Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show,

00:46:41.060 The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.

00:46:43.500 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.

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00:47:20.600 insanity filling our national news cycle, well, tune in to The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:47:24.380 We'll get a whole lot of that and much more. See you there.

00:47:26.760 We'll be right back.

00:47:49.620 We'll be right back.

The Michael Knowles Show - January 16, 2020

Ep. 479 - When Democracy Fails

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