Ep. 503 - Who Bought Pete Buttigieg？
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Summary
After a week showing in Nevada and a complete flop in South Carolina, Pete Buttigieg is dropping out of the presidential race, vindicating President Trump s prophecy that a liberal couldn t be president. We will examine who bought off Mayor Pete, then Bloomberg finally makes it to a ballot, as we look forward to Super Tuesday. Plus, a drag queen twerks for a toddler, and President Trump kills it at CPAC. All that and more.
Transcript
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After a week showing in Nevada and a complete flop in South Carolina,
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smarmy radical and alleged rat Pete Buttigieg is dropping out of the presidential race,
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vindicating President Trump's prophecy that Alfred E. Newman cannot be president of the
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United States. We will examine who bought off Mayor Pete. Then Bloomberg finally makes it
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to a ballot as we look forward to Super Tuesday. A drag queen twerks for a toddler and President
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Trump kills it at CPAC. All that and more. I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles
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Show. So much has happened in the last 24 hours that I actually forgot that CPAC was like 24 hours
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before that. And I was at CPAC in Washington, D.C. I was there doing a live verdict show with Senator
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Cruz and with RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. So I want to get to that and give a little behind the
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scenes look at CPAC and why it made me feel really, really good about 2020. But first we got to cover
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the biggest news, which is that Pete Buttigieg has dropped out of the race. This was such great news
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when I got on my plane. I get on my plane, I'm leaving D.C. and I think, I don't know what's
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going on. What's really, what's the interesting thing that's happening right now? Boom, Pete Buttigieg.
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But it wasn't just a blessing. It wasn't just great news. It was also sort of a curse. It was
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a blessing in the sense that Buttigieg was the oiliest, most deceptive, dishonest, smarmiest
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candidate in the race. He was by far my least favorite candidate in the entire democratic field.
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So I'm glad that the most culturally radical smarmy dude is not going to be the president.
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But it's also kind of a curse. It's also kind of sad because what it means is that a significant
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alleged moderate, self-styled moderate candidate is not going to stay in and duke this thing
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out all the way to the convention. I wanted to see a pure democratic brawl all the way.
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And Buttigieg dropping out means that the allegedly moderate side of the party is going to start
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coalescing. I say allegedly, he's not really a moderate, but he was presenting himself as
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a moderate. And so he was competing directly with guys like Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and
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against the Bernie vote. The surface level reason for why Pete Buttigieg got out is that Joe Biden
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absolutely destroyed him in South Carolina. That was the other huge news. So much has happened since
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I last spoke to you. So you had the South Carolina primary. Joe Biden did so much better than anybody
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thought he was going to do. He actually vindicated his firewall strategy of doing poorly in the first
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states and then coming back roaring in South Carolina. And so it totally took away Buttigieg's
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momentum. Don't forget the first state to go vote, the Iowa caucuses, Pete Buttigieg wins Iowa.
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Sort of. We know he won Iowa because he announced that he won Iowa before any of the votes were in.
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So it seemed a little bit dodgy, a little skeptical of how those votes came in. It was a complete disaster
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on the vote count, but he, he won the most delegates. He tied for the popular vote with Bernie and Joe
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Biden came in fourth. Then Buttigieg remained strong going into New Hampshire. So he pretty much tied
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Bernie in New Hampshire. He won the same number of delegates as Bernie, uh, out there. Then you got
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Nevada. He slipped in Nevada. So Nevada was the first state where you start to get some minority
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candidates or some minority voters rather. And he came in third. He came in behind Bernie and behind
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Joe Biden. Bernie in Nevada got 46.8% of the vote. So major, major showing almost half the voters came
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out and voted for Bernie. He got 24 delegates out of that. Joe Biden in second place, but distant second,
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20.2% of the vote and nine delegates. Buttigieg had a pathetic 14.3% and three delegates. Then he got
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completely wrecked in South Carolina. So the way to think about the South Carolina primaries, it's kind of
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the flip of the Nevada caucuses. Nevada caucuses, Bernie comes out, gets almost half the vote. Joe Biden
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distant second. South Carolina was the opposite of that. Joe Biden gets almost half the vote and Bernie Sanders
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comes in a distant second, but South Carolina matters more because it's got many more black
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voters. Black voters, very important to the democratic coalition. And it's just got more
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delegates. It's a bigger state. It matters more for the nomination in that state. And this is what
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really put the nail in the coffin of Buttigieg having a long track here. It was Biden at 48.4%
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getting 35 delegates. Bernie at 19.9% getting 13 delegates. Tom Steyer at 11.3%, still zero delegates,
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but you're getting beaten by Tom Steyer. You need to get out of the race. And then Pete Buttigieg
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at 8.2%, zero delegates. So Tom Steyer already dropped out. We will miss him. He was really,
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really fun to watch on the debate stage. He would always wear a kind of silly tartan tie like it was
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Christmas dinner. He would always try to be really nice to all the other candidates and all the other
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candidates were always jerks to him. I'm sorry to see him go, but no one really cared because he never
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had a shot at winning the nomination. Buttigieg is different. Buttigieg actually had, I don't,
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I don't know that he was going to win the nomination, but he could have done some damage. He could have
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really made the race much tenser moving forward. The question for Pete was always, can he win
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minority votes? And he had two things going against him. One is the obvious one, which is his sexual
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preferences. Polling showed that his sexual preferences did not play well with the minority
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voters in the Democratic presidential primary. So, I mean, you, you remember this is a story that's
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gone on for a long time, goes all the way back to Prop 8 during the gay marriage debate.
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So the question was, could Pete Buttigieg win over those voters? He didn't do a very good job at it.
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I think he won something like 3% of the black vote in South Carolina. He also had baggage on
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racial issues from South Bend. So he's mayor of Indiana, or mayor of Indiana, mayor of South Bend,
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Indiana, small town. And he had some racial issues at his police department, allegations of police
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brutality. Buttigieg did not handle that in the most politic way. So he never seemed really to overcome
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that. And you saw his trouble with minority voters a little bit in Nevada, and then you,
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you really saw it in South Carolina. Now that doesn't answer the question of why he got out.
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That's only the surface level. It, that explains why it sort of makes sense that he's not going to
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win the nomination. So, you know, eventually he's going to have to get out. But people who run for
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president of the United States do not do things out of the goodness of their heart generally when it
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comes to electoral politics. Okay. He could have stayed in this race a long time, made a lot more
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trouble, maybe gotten some leverage, but he didn't. He chose to get out before Super Tuesday. Super
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Tuesday is the big, the big contest that's coming up. So many states are going to be voting tomorrow.
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So he gets out right before then. Why is it? Who bought off Pete Buttigieg? We'll analyze
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three theories because there are two big ones that are going around. I have a third one that
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He obviously did not choose to get out because, you know, he just thought it was good for the party and
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yeah, sure. I raised all this money and I gave up a year and a half of my life and I had plans to
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take on the most ambitious job in the world, but you know, I'm just going to give it up.
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Well, that's okay. It's better if I just give it up. No, I don't think so.
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He could have racked up more delegates. He could have had a stronger hand to play at the
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DNC if, if we get to a contested convention. So someone offered him something. Someone could
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have offered him something pretty big. We don't know. Could have even been vice president.
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Maybe. I'm not saying it's definitely vice president. I'm just saying he had a pretty,
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he had, he had to have been offered something pretty good to get out now.
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Now the VP play is possible because Pete Buttigieg made so much of his candidacy about how terrible
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Mike Pence is over his alleged homophobia. So Mayor Pete realized the way to give himself a national
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profile and win cred in the democratic party was to pretend that he was an oppressed homosexual who
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was always, you know, persecuted for his sexual preferences. And the governor of Indiana,
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while Pete Buttigieg is mayor of South Bend was Mike Pence, who's a Christian. So it was an easy
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scapegoat to say, Mike Pence is a horrible homophobe. He's, he's persecuting me. Grant,
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grant you, Pete Buttigieg and Mike Pence have always had a very nice relationship. Mike Pence has
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been very flattering to him in public. He's called him personally to help out, but didn't matter.
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Buttigieg realized that's how he was going to frame it. So Buttigieg has a pretty strong hand to play
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here as a potential VP nominee because he can say, I will show up to the VP debate and I will debate
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that troglodyte, knuckle dragging, retrograde, homophobe Mike Pence. And that could play very
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well to the democratic base who are the only people who are going to watch the VP debate,
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but it probably wouldn't hurt the ticket generally among people who maybe don't want LGBTQ politics
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to be at the forefront because very few people in the mainstream watch the VP debate. So there's a
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chance it could have been the VP. If it's VP or something like it, and that's very much possible.
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The question is, was it Bernie or Biden, right? A lot of people right now are saying that Bernie
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is the one who offered Pete Buttigieg some big position in the administration.
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Why would Bernie do this? Bernie is still leading in the delegate count. Bernie is still the front
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runner in the democratic nomination. Even though Joe Biden blew him out of the water in South Carolina,
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Bernie is still up overall. One reason that Bernie might've offered Pete something is because Pete
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would balance the ticket, right? Bernie is this hardcore radical socialist. Pete Buttigieg is
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pretending to be a moderate. So if you're just looking at it, it looks like a balanced ticket,
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but actually Pete Buttigieg is a pretty radical guy whose father is the founding member of a major
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communist academic institution. And Pete Buttigieg wrote a very flattering, wonderful paper about how
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great Bernie Sanders is in high school. So there's underneath the service, a real radicalism there.
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It would look in some ways like a unity ticket. You think of Reagan Bush in 1980, right? Reagan
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represented the conservatives on the right and George HW Bush represented the Rockefeller Republicans,
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the liberal Republicans, what we would call today the rhinos. And they fought this really tough primary
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and people forget George HW Bush who became Reagan's vice president actually was the one
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who invented the term voodoo economics to criticize Ronald Reagan's economic policies. So they have
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this really tough campaign and then they come together. It's a unity ticket. You get the whole party
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going together. Uh, I don't think it's really that right now. If it were Biden, if it were Biden who
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offered Pete Buttigieg something, then you're getting two self-styled moderates, which doesn't expand the
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base. But I still don't think it's that. I think this race is fundamentally different than something
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like 1980, you know, Reagan and Bush, because the two front runners in this race are extremely old.
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Ronald Reagan was, was an old candidate at his time too. And the two serious candidates in the
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democratic race right now, Bloomberg, Biden and Bernie, and actually the third, maybe serious
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candidate Bloomberg are all almost 10 years older than Ronald Reagan was in 1980. So you've got
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these really, really old candidates. Bernie Sanders had a heart attack on the campaign trail. Joe Biden
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can barely finish an English sentence. The VP actually matters here. And so the trouble is if
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you have a unity type ticket, let's say it's, uh, it's Bernie Sanders, right? As the radical. And then
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Pete Buttigieg is the moderate. The Bernie supporters don't really like Pete Buttigieg that much.
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The Pete Buttigieg supporters don't really like Bernie Sanders that much.
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Are the, are the Bernie Sanders supporters really going to show up and say, all right, we're going
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to vote for this ticket. Even though in five minutes, we might end up with a Buttigieg presidency,
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which is the least preferable outcome that we could possibly hope for. I don't think so. Same thing on
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the other side, you know, with Joe Biden, let's say Joe Biden picks some crazy radical for his vice
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presidential pick. Is that really going to, is that really going to drag the Bernie or the Biden
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voters out there? I don't think so because they're going to be just as nervous with the VP as they
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would be if Bernie Sanders were the nominee. So it does seem more likely that whatever the offer was,
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the offer didn't come from Bernie. That it would have come from the same segment of the Democratic
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Party. And so for Pete, who's presenting himself as a moderate, that means it's more likely that it
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came from Biden. But there is a third option. We'll get to that third option in a second. First,
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before we move on to the third option, which I think is kind of interesting for why Buttigieg got
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out and who bought him off. Right now, Joe Biden, who is 77 years old, is the youngest man running for
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president in the Democratic Party. The youngest candidate, 77. Bernie Sanders, 78. Right now,
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President Donald Trump, who is 73 years old, who is the oldest man ever elected president for the
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first time, 73-year-old President Trump is now the youngest man running for president, period.
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These baby boomers just will not give it up. They won't do it. Really odd election. We've never seen
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anything like that before. And I think it's going to have a real effect on the other side of the
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ticket, on vice president, on who the cabinet is going to be. Now, conventional wisdom is saying
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it's either Bernie or Biden who would offer something to Pete. There is a third possibility
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on who is paying Pete to get out of the race. And that's Mike Bloomberg, especially Mike Bloomberg.
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The guy has all the money in the world. Bloomberg is the wild card. He's been the wild card in this
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race for months now. Mike Bloomberg has not been on any ballots yet. He just, he decided to run too
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late. So he wasn't in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, but he has been blanketing the airwaves.
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He has so far spent, conservative estimate says he spent $410 million on just TV ads. That's just
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television. He's also running ads on like every single video on YouTube. He's running ads on my
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show. I go on my show. I spend the whole time criticizing him. And then I look because YouTube
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is the one who figures out all these ads. It's not like we get a say in that. I look and there's a Mike
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Bloomberg ad on my show. And then the ad is over and then I go right back to criticizing him. That's
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how much this guy is spending on advertising. His campaign before Super Tuesday, before tomorrow
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has 2,400 events planned in 30 states. And it's not even just the money he spent this cycle. In 2018,
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Mike Bloomberg promised to spend $80 million buying house seats for Democrats. And do you know how much
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he actually spent? He spent $100 million. He actually blew past his estimate and he
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bought the Democrats those seats so he could buy off all the politicians so he could get some goodwill
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so he could get the Democratic Party to change the rules to let him into the debate. They didn't do
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that for the other candidates. They did it for him. He made direct donations to the party. Bloomberg even
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admitted this at the last debate on CBS News. All of the new Democrats that came in and put Nancy
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Pelosi in charge and gave the Congress the ability to control this president. I bought, I got them.
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Okay. He goes, I like how he caught it. He goes, I bought, I got, I got that. I helped to do that. I,
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you meant to say bought and you did buy it. He did buy it. Bloomberg could potentially do a lot more
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for Pete Buttigieg than either Bernie or Biden, right? If, if it's Bernie or Biden who say,
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if you get out now before Super Tuesday, you let the vote consolidate, I'll give you VP. I'll give
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you secretary of state. I'll give you ambassador to whatever, right? Well, the only way Pete gets that
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favor then, the only way Pete gets to cash that in is if the candidate who offered it to him first wins
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the nomination, then beats Donald Trump and wins the white house. Those two things have to happen.
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Otherwise, Pete gave up his presidential campaign for nothing. With Bloomberg, it's not quite like
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that. If Bloomberg was the one who said, Hey Pete, get out of the race. I want to consolidate the
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moderates before Super Tuesday. I'll give you VP. I'll give you a secretary of state. I'll give you
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whatever. If, if Bloomberg somehow miraculously does win the nomination and the presidency,
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then Pete Buttigieg gets the political favor. But let's say he doesn't, let's say he loses at any
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point along the way. He could also say, Hey Pete, by the way, if I lose, I'll buy you a Senate seat.
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We know that he buys political offices. He did it to the tune of a hundred million last year and he
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admitted it or two years ago, he admitted it during a debate. So he could always say, Hey, listen,
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Pete, I've got infinite money. Bloomberg's net worth, I think is upwards of $60 billion with a B.
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He's one of the richest men in the world. So he could say, look, he could even say,
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let's say Biden wins the nomination. Let's say Biden wins the presidency. Bloomberg could just go
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in and say, Hey Joe, I'm going to donate, uh, you know, $200 million to your campaign or to some
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super PAC. Give Pete Buttigieg a spot. He can do that too. You know, the $60 billion goes a long way.
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So the timing works to Bloomberg's advantage on Super Tuesday, but it also works to Biden's
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advantage. You could even make an argument. It works to Bernie Sanders's advantage. So I'm not
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saying Bloomberg was the one to do it. I don't know. We simply don't know. I mean, it's, uh,
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the only thing we do know is that Pete certainly got something for this decision. And if that wasn't
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dramatic enough to happen yesterday, looking tomorrow, you've got Super Tuesday. Just very
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quickly. I, I know we throw around the term Super Tuesday a lot. I think a lot of people don't know
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exactly what it means, exactly how important it is. Super Tuesday is, is really when this nomination
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process is going to come together. So you had four States so far, right? Iowa, New Hampshire,
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Nevada, South Carolina. Those were weeks apart. Tomorrow, simultaneously, you're going to get
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Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina,
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Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. They all have primaries tomorrow.
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Even American Samoa has its caucuses. Now I don't, they don't, they don't get to vote in the general
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election, but still, you know, they even throw American Samoa in there. 1,357 of the 3,979
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pledged delegates that will be awarded, will be awarded on Super Tuesday. 34% of all pledged
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delegates. Now I say pledged delegates because that's, there's an, in the democratic primaries,
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there is another type of delegate called a superdelegate. Superdelegates are just party
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elites. They are completely unaccountable to voters. Republicans don't have them. It's sort of
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ironic that the party called the Democratic Party has the least democratic process to nominate their
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candidate. So there are going to be 70, 775 superdelegates on top of that. Superdelegates
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are going to make up 16% of the people who are going to choose who the nominee is. And then the
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rest are going to come from those pledged delegates. And we're going to get over a third of the pledged
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delegates tomorrow. Going into Super Tuesday, Bernie is in the lead. So you got Bernie in the lead.
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You got Joe saved his campaign. His campaign was dead, right? It was figuratively and literally
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dead. He comes on in, wins, wins big in South Carolina. And now you got these two old guys who
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are, who are competing for the nomination. We're going to see if Mike Bloomberg can buy the nomination
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tomorrow. It's going to be a real test of how far money can go in politics. Mike Bloomberg has all the
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money. He is totally committed to this race. He is for all of his flaws as a candidate. And there,
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there are many flaws. Donald Trump talks about some of those flaws at CPAC and we'll give you a
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little glimpse into it. But for all of his flaws, you know, the guy did win three terms as mayor of
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New York. New York, one of the most important cities in the world. He did manage to do that.
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He, he does have a political skill. So we're going to see how far he can take it. Judging from the
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outside, I think President Trump may actually be slightly worried about Bloomberg. I don't think
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that Trump is worried that he's going to lose to Bloomberg. I don't think anybody in his right
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mind thinks it's likely that Trump could lose to Mike Bloomberg. Okay. But you've got to be worried
00:23:54.020
about just about everything in politics because anything can happen. And I think Trump sees a
00:24:00.420
much bigger threat in a guy like Mike Bloomberg than he does in somebody like Bernie Sanders. And I say
00:24:05.060
this because Trump keeps tweeting about Bloomberg. I mean, he just, even yesterday, there's all these
00:24:11.300
tweets coming out about mini Mike. He should get out. It's so pathetic. It's, he's a terrible mayor.
00:24:16.920
He was awful in New York. I just think if, you know, Trump isn't sending these tweets out about
00:24:22.020
Tulsi Gabbard. Trump isn't sending these tweets out about Tom Steyer or whoever, right? He's, he's sending
00:24:32.060
them out about specific candidates. And look, if the outcome of that is that we get more of the
00:24:41.060
hilarious standup routines that Trump has been doing about Mike Bloomberg, that's fine by me,
00:24:45.600
but it also means conservative voters should keep an eye on Mike Bloomberg. We did get one of those
00:24:50.100
great standup routines at CPAC. I was at CPAC in DC and I, you know, I was, I was there on Saturday.
00:24:58.040
No, I was there on Friday and he was there on Saturday. So I missed the president. Unfortunately,
00:25:03.740
I was doing the event with Senator Cruz and RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel. I, I almost missed my event
00:25:12.760
with Senator Cruz because the secret service was so intense about vice president Mike Pence being
00:25:18.680
there. I literally, the RNC chairwoman had to come down the stairs personally, bring me up to get on
00:25:24.240
stage. Otherwise I was going to miss it. So I wasn't able to make it to president Trump's event because
00:25:29.060
the security obviously was even tougher for the president. I had to watch the president from afar
00:25:34.960
and it was absolutely magnificent. It was fabulous. I can tell you the energy in the room on the days
00:25:42.640
that I was at CPAC was really, really high. Young, it was really young, people super excited. And then
00:25:48.780
the president got there and people lost their minds. They loved it. He walks out on stage. The first
00:25:54.140
thing he does, he walks out and he hugs the American flag. He walks, he's hugging the American
00:26:00.560
flag. He, he gives it a little kiss on the stars and stripes and he's mouthing. He doesn't have the
00:26:06.740
microphone on at this point, but he's mouthing. He says, I love you, baby. Oh, how I love you. It's
00:26:11.820
just terrific. It was classic vintage, excellent Trump. And then he gets on stage and he just starts
00:26:19.940
making fun of Mike Bloomberg. But, uh, she was really mean to mini Mike. I'll tell you the way
00:26:26.800
she treated him. He didn't know what hit him. He's going, Oh, get me off of this stage.
00:26:37.220
So when you hear the cheers is when, when president Trump just, uh, crouches down and
00:26:48.100
lowers himself with a completely straight face so that, you know, his chin is barely above the
00:26:52.480
podium to do a better, uh, mini Mike Bloomberg impression. It was great. It just reminds you
00:26:58.380
what a tremendous showman this guy is. This guy's got audiences wrapped around his little
00:27:03.120
finger for 40 years. It was just a great performance from Trump. The crowd was so revved
00:27:08.960
up and that matters. Okay. People make fun of Trump for talking about the crowds, the crowd
00:27:14.000
enthusiasm and the crowd sizes. Electoral politics is about big crowds. Okay. And it's about the
00:27:21.920
enthusiasm from big crowds. When you look at the democratic primaries, turnout is down, especially
00:27:28.320
in those early States. We were told turnout's supposed to be way up. Oh, Democrats are going
00:27:34.180
to do so great this time because everyone hates Trump and all those voters who stayed home in 2016
00:27:39.320
are going to come out. Well, just to use New Hampshire as an example, turnout was down from
00:27:44.960
2016. More people were excited about 2016 in the democratic field than they are about this year.
00:27:50.280
Turnout among young voters who were supposed to be the big saviors of the democratic party,
00:27:53.640
right? They're the ones who are going to finally correct things and throw Trump out of office
00:27:58.640
because they hate him so much. Turnout among Democrats, among millennial Democrats is down.
00:28:03.660
Gen Z Democrats, it's down. Excitement is really, really going to matter. And it would seem,
00:28:10.640
I can tell you firsthand on the CPAC side, I can tell you objectively just looking at turnout.
00:28:18.280
The excitement right now is for the Republicans. It's for Trump. We will get to maybe
00:28:23.640
why that is. One really creepy, freaky story from the latest in leftist woke politics is a video
00:28:31.380
that went viral of a half-naked drag queen twerking in front of a little toddler at her birthday party
00:28:37.240
and the toddler looks all freaked out and all the parents all around her are cheering it on. How funny,
00:28:44.400
how wonderful. Love is love, I guess. Birthdays are birthdays, I don't know. We will examine how the
00:28:51.700
left got to that point and why it's really playing very well for the conservatives. First,
00:28:54.860
I got to say about Facebook and YouTube and I got to tell you that our pal, Andrew Klavan,
00:29:00.900
has released the second entry in the Another Kingdom trilogy and that book is The Nightmare Feast.
00:29:07.780
You know, Drew and I started this three years ago. We started as a narrative podcast and it jumped and
00:29:13.420
became one of the top arts podcasts of the year. We got both additional seasons out of it.
00:29:18.180
Drew is releasing that as a book you got to get. It's about Austin Lively, once just an out of luck
00:29:22.920
Hollywood screenwriter, now a chosen hero caught between two worlds and dual quests in both Los
00:29:28.680
Angeles, California, and the magical medieval world of Galeana. It is a tremendous work. I had
00:29:35.300
the privilege of narrating it on the podcast and the audio book. I think it's an enduring work. I think
00:29:40.900
it's so powerful. It gets to so much of what we talk about on the sort of critical level on this
00:29:47.560
show. You get the artistic and literary version on Another Kingdom. So go out, buy that book. It's
00:29:52.940
going to be a lot of fun. We got Super Tuesday coming up tomorrow. Daily Wire is going to be with
00:29:56.700
you all night. We're going to be there the whole time on Daily Wire backstage. We want to hear from
00:30:01.000
you. Tell us who you think will win the Democratic nomination by texting either Biden, Bernie, Bloomberg,
00:30:09.460
or Warren to 83400. 83400. Text who you think is going to win the nomination. And on Tuesday night
00:30:19.760
during our Daily Wire backstage, we will analyze the results live. So it's Bernie, Biden, Bloomberg,
00:30:25.340
or Warren. Text it to 83400. And we will analyze the results on Daily Wire backstage tomorrow.
00:30:33.400
Super Tuesday. Super Tuesday is going to be a big day. We should probably call it Super Socialist
00:30:37.680
Tuesday because the Democrats are currently poised to nominate an actual socialist to go up against
00:30:43.500
President Trump. So we are offering 25% off all Daily Wire membership plans when you use the coupon
00:30:49.680
code NEVERSOCIALIST. Go on over, check it out, dailywire.com slash subscribe. We'll be right back.
00:30:55.340
All right. Why is excitement so high up on the conservative side? Why are so many people
00:31:16.720
being driven away from the left? Well, it might have something to do with their creepy, weird sex
00:31:21.480
stuff that they keep forcing on children. Video goes viral, goes on TikTok, and then it made the
00:31:27.540
rounds everywhere else. By the way, TikTok, I think, is just where the worst things in the world
00:31:32.620
happen. There's another video going around TikTok of, it's a new campaign of women who are pregnant.
00:31:38.560
They're showing off their pregnant bellies. And then the next scene, they go to an abortion clinic
00:31:42.200
and get an abortion. And the videos actually look pretty real. I think they might be real.
00:31:45.300
So that's the worst thing on TikTok. And then the second worst thing that we've seen is this
00:31:49.880
creepy drag queen crawling up to a toddler at what appears to be her birthday party. And the guy is
00:31:56.420
kind of dancing around and all the parents, they think this is so fun. This is so wonderful and
00:32:00.280
cool. Isn't it great? We're so progressive. We're so hip. And the little girl looks just like
00:32:04.840
horrified. It's like, what on earth am I looking at? Why am I here? Why are you doing this to me?
00:32:11.880
Could you, like, it's everything about this is wrong. The drag queen is then touching the little girl.
00:32:19.600
Drag queen, not wearing a ton of clothing, by the way. There are some people who describe
00:32:26.360
this sort of thing, even on the right, even conservatives, they describe these sort of
00:32:31.500
scenes. They say, oh, it's a blessing of liberty. Isn't it great? We live in a country, you can do
00:32:35.820
whatever you want. We can never use the government to come in and stop this sort of thing. That's not
00:32:40.780
our place. It's un-American. There's nothing more American than tolerating this sort of child abuse
00:32:46.480
that George Washington would be so happy right now looking at this TikTok. James Madison would
00:32:51.020
be so thrilled watching this video go viral on Twitter. That's just complete BS. Okay. And
00:33:00.340
I get why the left is pushing this stuff, but what really bugs me are the people who are allegedly on
00:33:05.800
the right who are tolerating it. We need to stop this. We should use the arm of the state to stop this.
00:33:13.420
Okay. We have to stop the, to stop this radical sexual grooming that's going on for young people
00:33:21.360
pushed by the political arm of the cultural left. We have always had laws against this kind of stuff
00:33:29.920
in America. The argument that it's un-American to have laws against this kind of stuff is just not
00:33:34.820
true. We have always had laws and we currently have laws that limit people's sexual expression.
00:33:40.760
We currently today, 2020, we have laws against adultery, adultery, not weird child pedophilia,
00:33:50.780
grooming, drag queens twerking on kids. No, I'm just adultery. We have laws against that in 19 states
00:33:56.940
in America until the middle of the 20th century, until the sexual revolution, we had laws in most
00:34:03.260
states against adultery, fornication, cohabitation, shacking up, living with your, your significant
00:34:11.280
other before marriage. Okay. So it is simply historically false to say that to support a law
00:34:19.900
against these kinds of things is un-American. Now, please do not misunderstand me, especially for the,
00:34:26.600
for the hacks over at Media Matters who are about to clip this out.
00:34:29.320
I am not saying that, uh, we now need to go out tomorrow and pass laws against shacking up.
00:34:35.340
Okay. I don't, I don't think very many people would support that kind of a law in the United
00:34:38.740
States today, but I bet that a lot of people would support a law banning drag queen strip shows from
00:34:47.700
preschools. Drag queen story hour is like actually moving into public schools now. Okay. Gender theory
00:34:55.760
is moving into preschools. There was a preschool teacher in Brooklyn who just came out the other
00:35:00.680
day. He said, my curriculum is forcing me to teach little kids that they can be whatever sex they
00:35:05.320
want. And they're not really boys and they're not really girls and they can be whatever they want to
00:35:08.580
be. We should stop that. The same type of regulation that put that into the curriculum should take that
00:35:16.420
out of the curriculum. The same kind of legal framework that is permitting these kind of weird
00:35:21.540
drag queen twerking strip shows to go on in front of children should be used to take that away from
00:35:27.500
children. Okay. Conservatives need to stop defending this insanity with anti-historical arguments about
00:35:34.340
American liberty. Because by the way, they're not, they're not persuasive arguments to the majority of
00:35:38.720
the American people. I mean, the way the left would kind of caricature the conservatives, they'll say,
00:35:43.060
oh, you want to ban everything. You want to ban people from kissing before marriage. You want to ban
00:35:47.420
people from cohabitation? No, we're not talking about any of that. We're talking about stopping
00:35:54.420
drag queen twerk shows on preschoolers. And when you, when you put it in those terms, when you explain
00:36:00.340
what's actually going on, what people are actually talking about, I bet 97% of Americans would support
00:36:08.020
that position. The people who are supporting this kind of sick stuff is a very, very small sliver of a
00:36:16.140
minority of the radical left. Okay. The public opinion, I very much believe is on the side of
00:36:23.540
don't have drag queens twerk in children's faces. So conservatives, for some reason, we just want to
00:36:30.460
keep seeding the ground, seeding the ground. We're so uncomfortable using political power in this way.
00:36:35.320
In fact, that's why conservatives always like to say that politics is downstream of culture.
00:36:39.140
It's true in many ways, but that's not a freebie card to stop conservatives from engaging in politics.
00:36:46.420
All right. Conservatives kind of using that easy way out are why we've lost so much cultural ground
00:36:52.600
over the past 60 years, and we should stop doing it. You know, they, they accuse us of
00:36:59.600
using religion to stop progress, using our religion to stop all the wonderful things that the left wants
00:37:07.820
to do. The left has a religion too. I mean, this, this kind of crazy stuff of, uh, that you see in
00:37:13.800
that TikTok video that has a religious underpinning. I mean, the very basic religious argument there is
00:37:20.580
that your body is not really emblematic of who you are. That's the, that's the fundamental religious
00:37:27.580
premise of gender theory is that I am not really my body. So I might look like a man. I might have all
00:37:33.300
the parts of a man. I might have a deep voice and an Adam's apple, but actually secretly deep down
00:37:39.940
somewhere, I'm really a woman. And therefore my body is evil because it's working against who I
00:37:46.040
really am. And I need to change my body to be more in line with who I am. That is a religious concept.
00:37:50.720
It's actually an ancient, uh, religious heresy called Gnosticism, Gnostic dualism. And these dumb
00:37:57.080
religious ideas crop up time and time again in history, most especially when people believe
00:38:02.980
they're not being religious at all. AOC proved this just the other day. AOC said that if you make
00:38:07.820
an argument from religious Liberty, you're, you're really just using a cynical talking point to cover
00:38:15.640
up your own bigotry. It's very difficult to sit here and listen to arguments in the long history
00:38:26.480
of this country of using scripture and weaponizing and abusing scripture to justify bigotry. White
00:38:36.160
supremacists have done it. Those who justified slavery did it. Those who fought against integration did it.
00:38:43.640
And we're seeing it today. So most of what she's saying is not true, or it's got some kernel of
00:38:51.380
truth. Cause like some guy used some stupid argument from some weird sect that perverted the gospel.
00:38:57.940
Uh, what she's failing to point out is that the entire abolition movement was run by Christians.
00:39:03.540
The, all of it came from Christians. Uh, the Catholic church, right? The old, the oldest Christian
00:39:09.100
organization ever, uh, has always opposed chattel slavery. They don't talk about that. They don't
00:39:13.980
talk about how the church was the great defender of native Americans, for instance, when, when
00:39:20.380
Europeans first discovered, uh, North and South America. Doesn't talk about any of that stuff,
00:39:25.700
but I don't even really care. I don't want to get into her dumb arguments. I actually want to give
00:39:30.500
her a little bit of credit. You know, she's making an argument that Pete Buttigieg made last night in
00:39:37.360
his concession speech. The argument was, he said almost the same line. He said it a little more
00:39:42.500
articulately than she did, but he said, people use the term, uh, religious liberty to, uh, to just try
00:39:51.520
to get their own views across. They're trying, they're not actually talking about liberty and everybody
00:39:56.980
gets the same kind of stuff. They're talking about how we need a specific kind of religious view in
00:40:02.960
this country, right? They, they kind of have a point, not on the bigotry stuff. I mean, that's
00:40:08.540
just dumb, but they have a point on religious liberty. We have a terrific tradition of religious
00:40:15.860
liberty in America, but religious liberty should not be confused with religious neutrality. We have,
00:40:23.520
we've had religious liberty for a very long time. You can practice your religions.
00:40:26.980
But all states have a religious foundation, right? The United States, we hold these truths to be
00:40:33.740
self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain
00:40:36.560
unalienable rights. The premise of our country is that there is a creator and the creator looks a
00:40:41.840
certain way and has a certain character. Maybe we don't all agree on the exact specifics, but
00:40:46.720
that means that America has a religious premise. And if you believe, don't believe in a creator,
00:40:55.460
then you don't really buy into that religious premise. If you believe in two or three creators,
00:40:59.960
then you also don't buy into that religious premise. Doesn't mean you can't get on and have
00:41:03.460
a good life and thrive in America, but you, we can't pretend that America doesn't have a religious
00:41:09.000
underpinning. The entire system of natural rights that we base our country on comes from the natural
00:41:15.900
law. Natural law has a religious tradition. We should stop pretending that there is religious
00:41:24.300
neutrality. We must have a religious premise because political questions rely on cultural
00:41:28.980
foundations. Cultural foundations come from religious foundations. Cult and culture derive
00:41:33.520
from the same word. What a culture worships will define that culture. So you've got to pick
00:41:39.620
which kind of basis you want. Do you want what we've always had in America, which is a Christian
00:41:46.380
basis for the country that is very tolerant of people's views, that allows people to have their
00:41:53.700
religious life and their spiritual life and how they want to live it most of the time and almost
00:41:59.380
always. Do you want that kind of view that's traditional, respects man, comes from natural rights,
00:42:05.960
or do you want the religious view that says that men are really women and babies are not really
00:42:11.420
babies and we should kill a million babies a year and we should have drag queens twerk in front of
00:42:15.980
children's faces. Those all rest on religious propositions and they disagree with one another.
00:42:22.880
The Christian view says babies are babies and you shouldn't kill a million of them a year
00:42:27.100
and adult men should not rub their, their private areas that should remain very, very private off of
00:42:35.780
TikTok out of the public view in front of children. You got to pick one, okay? And we, we again should
00:42:42.240
not pretend that there's some neutrality here. There isn't, and I don't feel neutral about any of it.
00:42:50.100
Speaking of neutrality, before we go, I just have to, I have to mark a very special occasion,
00:42:56.360
a very special anniversary. Net neutrality killed us all two years ago and I just want to mark that
00:43:04.540
occasion because we all died. There was a change from the federal agency on a certain internet
00:43:11.060
regulation. The left assured us it would kill all of us and so we've all been dead for two years and I
00:43:16.480
just want to, to take a moment to commemorate that. CNN's front page, 2017. Net neutrality is the end of
00:43:22.880
the internet as we know it. Sandra Fluke, who is a left-wing abortion activist and birth control
00:43:30.380
contraception activist. She said that repealing the regulation, the net neutrality would kill
00:43:37.000
access to abortion information. GLAAD insisted, GLAAD is a sort of LGBT organization, insisted that
00:43:47.500
repealing net neutrality would be an attack on the LGBTQ community. I don't know how that is exactly. I
00:43:53.720
don't know what the relation is between a sort of minor internet regulation and people's sexual
00:43:58.380
preferences but there you have it. GQ said that it would repeal the internet forever.
00:44:04.220
The ACLU said it would create a two-tier internet and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat from my own
00:44:10.220
state of California, said that without net neutrality we would, we would all be sent a bill for how much
00:44:17.500
video, how many emails we sent, how many games we played, how many social media posts we made on the
00:44:21.920
internet. Every tweet it would cost us like two dollars and of course none of that happened whatsoever.
00:44:27.760
This gets into a lot of media and left-wing generated hysterias. They never have to admit
00:44:34.320
that they were wrong. I think that we're in the midst of one of those hysterias right now.
00:44:39.420
The markets are reacting to the coronavirus in a way that is, you know, plunging the global economy
00:44:45.700
into correction territory and it doesn't seem to be based on very good scientific information but
00:44:50.920
because the left never has to admit that they're wrong, they keep getting away with it again and again.
00:44:55.980
We're out of time today so we'll have to get back into why they should not get away with it this time
00:45:01.460
tomorrow and get ready for Super Tuesday because we'll see you all night. In the meantime, I'm Michael
00:45:05.560
Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you then.
00:45:07.420
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe. And if you
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Matt Wall Show. The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies and directed by Mike Joyner. Executive
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00:46:06.280
On The Matt Wall Show, we're not just discussing politics. We're talking culture, faith, family,
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