The Ben Shapiro Show - Michael Knowles | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 62

00:00:00.000 I've tried not to work in politics on several occasions because, you know, it's a drag.

00:00:05.000 I mean, it's miserable.

00:00:06.000 People yell at you. 0.90

00:00:07.000 They don't like you. 0.99

00:00:08.000 Half the country hates your guts.

00:00:10.000 It's just too fun.

00:00:11.000 I just can't help it.

00:00:21.000 Hey, hey, and welcome.

00:00:22.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.

00:00:24.000 I'm eager, somewhat eager, to welcome to the show Michael Knowles, the excreble, as you know him, the host of the Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:30.000 Michael, somewhat thank you for stopping by.

00:00:33.000 Ben, thank you for having me.

00:00:34.000 Is that word, by the way, when I listen to the show, I always hear the excellent Michael Knowles.

00:00:40.000 Is that the?

00:00:41.000 That's totally not what it means.

00:00:42.000 OK, well, I'll look it up.

00:00:43.000 Absolutely.

00:00:44.000 I'll Google it.

00:00:44.000 OK, so, you know, let's start with current events.

00:00:46.000 Let's start with what's happening now.

00:00:48.000 So you've been watching these Democratic debates.

00:00:50.000 Every minute.

00:00:51.000 I don't know how you've been doing it.

00:00:53.000 I've had to... I don't drink.

00:00:55.000 I've had to drink heavily.

00:00:56.000 I will say that sniffing glue was still on the table.

00:00:58.000 Yep.

00:00:59.000 How's the experience been for you?

00:01:00.000 What was your takeaway from the... we've seen now two rounds of Democratic debates.

00:01:04.000 What's your takeaway so far?

00:01:05.000 My experience is very simple.

00:01:06.000 I put little crystals all around my couch as I sit down.

00:01:09.000 I get the orbs and the dreamcatchers hanging from the ceiling, and then I channel.

00:01:13.000 The dark, psychic force that is the 2020 Democratic presidential debates.

00:01:20.000 And then it all makes sense.

00:01:21.000 When you realize it's all a dark, psychic force and that Marianne Williamson is the most sane person on that stage, then they all start to make sense.

00:01:29.000 Because, you know, I'm mostly joking about Marianne Williamson, but she actually had, I think it was three of the most accurate sentences in that debate, the most recent debate.

00:01:41.000 The first one is that wonkiness is not going to decide the Democratic nominee.

00:01:46.000 Nobody cares about the bean counting of how many zillions of dollars of our money they're going to spend on X, Y, and Z social program.

00:01:54.000 The second one is about the dark psychic force because it actually is the case that politics at bottom is cultural and even below that is theological.

00:02:03.000 There actually is a spiritual component to politics.

00:02:06.000 It's not all just adding up numbers on a spreadsheet.

00:02:08.000 And then the third statement that I think she made correctly is that if Democrats don't change their strategy, Trump is going to win.

00:02:15.000 I mean, looking around that stage, which of those candidates is possibly going to beat Trump?

00:02:21.000 Right.

00:02:21.000 I mean, I pointed out that Marianne Williamson, everybody's sort of making fun of the whole Marianne Williamson phenomenon, but she's talking at a different level than the other Democrats.

00:02:27.000 And she's actually making what is a more honest appeal for a lot of Democrats than the other Democrats are.

00:02:32.000 The Democrats are fighting with each other over, is it Medicare for all or Medicare for anyone who wants it or whatever?

00:02:37.000 And she's talking about, no, there's deep, rough waters in this country, and we have to investigate that and get to the heart of it.

00:02:43.000 She's speaking to spirit in a way that Obama did in 2008, actually.

00:02:46.000 No one cared about Obama on policy in 2008.

00:02:47.000 It was about the hope and the feel and the zeitgeist.

00:02:50.000 And she's doing a lot more of that than any of the other candidates. 0.97

00:02:53.000 So it is kind of fascinating.

00:02:54.000 I think there is something happening with her.

00:02:56.000 She's not gonna be the nominee, but I think that anybody who's able to tap into even a remote amount of what she's doing, it could create something fascinating.

00:03:04.000 And that was night one of the debate.

00:03:05.000 Yes.

00:03:05.000 Right?

00:03:05.000 And then there was night two, which was supposed to be Rock'em Sock'em Robots with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

00:03:12.000 And Kamala Harris basically ends up in pieces on the floor, but not because of Joe Biden.

00:03:15.000 You're talking about that cop Kamala Harris?

00:03:16.000 You're talking about that crooked cop Kamala?

00:03:19.000 Yes, Kamala had her candidacy basically shredded by Tulsi Gabbard. 1.00

00:03:24.000 That was the exchange of the night.

00:03:25.000 I mean, everyone was waiting for Kamala and Biden, and Biden pretty much collapsed under the weight of his own vocabulary.

00:03:31.000 He didn't know how to say basic words.

00:03:34.000 He fumbled sentences.

00:03:36.000 It actually, I think, Biden's performance shows a little bit of the cleverness of the Trump campaign branding him as Sleepy Joe.

00:03:43.000 When they branded him as Sleepy Joe, I thought, Why not creepy Joe? 0.69

00:03:46.000 Why not liar Joe? 0.92

00:03:47.000 Why not plagiarist Joe? 0.98

00:03:48.000 Why not ineffectual?

00:03:50.000 It's because he actually comes off as old, tired, and possibly senile.

00:03:54.000 I mean, he couldn't, he said, go to Joe 3033.

00:03:58.000 He didn't know the difference between a text message and a website.

00:04:02.000 And so the more interesting exchange was Tulsi and Kamala.

00:04:06.000 There were some actual substantive There were debates going on last night.

00:04:11.000 I mean, you heard debates over free trade at the second night of the Democratic debate.

00:04:15.000 You heard debates over sovereignty, over borders.

00:04:18.000 There were these debates going on, but what it became lost in, I think, was the sloganeering of the Democratic Party.

00:04:26.000 You know, you hear the universal basic health care.

00:04:28.000 Health care is a right, not a privilege.

00:04:30.000 They're all going back to this.

00:04:31.000 I think the central figure of the debate actually was Barack Obama.

00:04:35.000 To hear them talk about Barack Obama, I thought, Gosh, this Obama guy sounds pretty good.

00:04:40.000 Maybe this Obama guy should run for office as a Republican.

00:04:42.000 Because it's this lie of leftism.

00:04:45.000 They told us in 2008, we're going to have universal health care.

00:04:49.000 This is it.

00:04:49.000 Once and for all, we're going to fix the health care system.

00:04:52.000 That whole Obamacare debate, we're going to do it.

00:04:54.000 Health care for everybody.

00:04:56.000 Now we find out Obamacare was terrible.

00:04:58.000 It didn't do anything.

00:04:59.000 It didn't achieve anything.

00:05:00.000 It's never enough with the left.

00:05:02.000 They're always moving further and further to the left.

00:05:05.000 And so they'll say, once and for all, we're going to have Medicare for all.

00:05:08.000 We're going to have universal health care.

00:05:10.000 Until eight years from now, when they have another program that costs even more money and that takes even more of our liberty away.

00:05:16.000 So you tell me, you looked at all these candidates.

00:05:18.000 How do you think this race shakes out?

00:05:20.000 And who do you think is the most plausible candidate to go up against Trump?

00:05:23.000 If you were advising the Democrats, who would you tell them to nominate?

00:05:25.000 So I called from the beginning Kamala Harris.

00:05:27.000 I thought Kamala was a pretty strong candidate. 1.00

00:05:30.000 She's a killer. 1.00

00:05:30.000 She's willing to do anything to get ahead. 1.00

00:05:32.000 I'll leave it at that.

00:05:33.000 I don't want to say anything untoward, but she's made some curious decisions in her political career.

00:05:39.000 She's willing to fight.

00:05:41.000 She's a prosecutor. 0.98

00:05:42.000 She has... 0.88

00:05:45.000 I think she was an unsuccessful Attorney General of California. 1.00

00:05:47.000 Now they're trying to make her out to be the toughest AG in American history. 1.00

00:05:51.000 I think she's got to lean into that.

00:05:52.000 I think she's got to embrace that.

00:05:54.000 That's her whole career. 0.77

00:05:55.000 She's a tough lawyer. 1.00

00:05:56.000 She was a prosecutor. 0.94

00:05:58.000 She was AG.

00:05:59.000 She's been in the Senate for five minutes. 0.82

00:06:00.000 That's her life. 0.88

00:06:01.000 If she runs away from her record, she's got nothing to run on.

00:06:04.000 So I think she could be a good candidate, but she's got to stop blowing in the wind. 1.00

00:06:08.000 She's got to stop one day saying we're going to abolish private health insurance. 1.00

00:06:12.000 Next day, we're not going to abolish it.

00:06:13.000 We're going to opinion poll and figure out which way the wind is blowing.

00:06:17.000 If she cuts that out, runs as herself, I think she's a decent candidate. 0.83

00:06:20.000 The other alternative is Elizabeth Warren. 0.97

00:06:23.000 Elizabeth Warren has this crossover appeal. 1.00

00:06:26.000 The mainstream, boomer side of the Democratic Party kind of likes her.

00:06:30.000 She kind of looks like Hillary Clinton. 1.00

00:06:31.000 She kind of talks like Hillary Clinton. 0.99

00:06:33.000 But she's got much more progressive credibility, and she stole all of Bernie Sanders' plans. 1.00

00:06:38.000 So she's got a plan for everything, and it's because she went in and took it out of Bernie's desk drawer.

00:06:43.000 That gives her some appeal. 1.00

00:06:45.000 I think the weakness for Elizabeth Warren, people are going to call me a sexist for this.

00:06:49.000 It's her voice.

00:06:51.000 And the reason this isn't sexist is Elizabeth Warren is shrill. 1.00

00:06:56.000 Not all women are shrill.

00:06:57.000 Kamala Harris isn't shrill. 0.99

00:06:59.000 Tulsi Gabbard isn't shrill. 0.85

00:07:00.000 Amy Klobuchar isn't shrill.

00:07:01.000 The second shrillest candidate in this race is Cory Booker, who ostensibly is a man.

00:07:06.000 So I think they both have to fix something about their candidacies.

00:07:09.000 Kamala needs to embrace her actual life story, and Elizabeth needs to change Just the tactics of campaigning, just the tone in which he's speaking.

00:07:19.000 If they don't change those two things, it's hard for me to believe that any of those candidates are going to beat President Trump.

00:07:25.000 He has legitimate vulnerabilities, but I just don't think they're rising to the occasion.

00:07:29.000 So you're foreclosing Biden as the nominee already?

00:07:31.000 You think that Biden isn't going to be the nominee?

00:07:33.000 I think, I mean, look, if you look at the polls today, Joe Biden is the nominee, right?

00:07:36.000 He's still at the top of the pack.

00:07:37.000 He's just so weak.

00:07:39.000 And I think part of the reason his poll numbers are so high is he's been out of public life now for a few years.

00:07:44.000 Even when he was the vice president, he wasn't really in front of the public so much.

00:07:48.000 They'd trot him at his crazy Uncle Joe every once in a while. 0.99

00:07:50.000 But Joe Biden is a doofus. 0.99

00:07:52.000 People forget this. 0.98

00:07:53.000 He ran in 1988 and he dropped out because he lied about his law school record.

00:07:57.000 He plagiarized speeches from Irish politicians. 1.00

00:08:00.000 He's just a kind of a bumbling fool. 1.00

00:08:02.000 Then he ran again in 2008. 1.00

00:08:03.000 And he was nothing.

00:08:04.000 Nobody wanted him.

00:08:05.000 The only reason he got to be vice president is because Barack Obama hated Hillary Clinton so much, he couldn't stomach the thought of her being his vice president. 0.83

00:08:13.000 Now he's up again.

00:08:14.000 I mean, Joe Biden, in his entire half-century in politics, what did he accomplish?

00:08:21.000 What did he actually accomplish?

00:08:22.000 I think he has basically one piece of legislation that he can own that was pretty good legislation.

00:08:27.000 That's the 1994 crime bill, and it's the one thing he's running so fast.

00:08:31.000 If you look at those debate stages, there's a Joe Biden-shaped hole in the wall.

00:08:34.000 He's running away from his record that fast.

00:08:36.000 So considering all of that, the more that he's in the limelight, the more he's bungling his own record, the more he's bungling even the words coming out of his mouth.

00:08:44.000 It's hard to see how his poll numbers ever stay the same or go up.

00:08:47.000 It just seems like, as you said, quite rightly, I think his first day is his best day.

00:08:51.000 And I think he just keeps steadily sliding down.

00:08:54.000 And the question is, can one of the other candidates jump up and beat him before the nomination is decided?

00:08:59.000 The other reason that you have gained notoriety is, of course, because you once occupied the same august space as Alexander Ocasio-Cortez on the East Coast.

00:09:07.000 She, of course, is a woman from the heart of the Bronx, as we know from her self-described biography.

00:09:13.000 Grew up on the streets.

00:09:14.000 Jenny from the block.

00:09:16.000 So that must have been you too, because you grew up in the same area, right?

00:09:19.000 I obviously look like Jenny from the block.

00:09:20.000 The only problem with AOC's autobiography is that it's completely untrue.

00:09:27.000 Other than that, it's all good, but it's just completely untrue.

00:09:29.000 So that's the problem with it.

00:09:30.000 Actually, AOC grew up about an hour, hour and a half north of the Bronx in a town called Yorktown Heights.

00:09:37.000 Very ritzy suburb, very wealthy, not terribly ethnically diverse.

00:09:41.000 I mean, it's just what you picture the suburbs to be.

00:09:44.000 That's what it is.

00:09:45.000 I grew up Directly next door in the slightly less wealthy, slightly, you know, less affluent town.

00:09:53.000 And we grew up there for our whole life.

00:09:55.000 She was there until 18.

00:09:56.000 She then went to a private college in Massachusetts.

00:09:59.000 She then, according to Westchester land records, moved back.

00:10:02.000 Lived with her mother there until, basically until she ran for Congress.

00:10:07.000 I didn't.

00:10:08.000 After college I went down and lived in the city.

00:10:09.000 So I'm actually pretty sure I've spent much more time in my life in the congressional district in Queens and the Bronx that AOC currently represents.

00:10:19.000 But I just can't pull it off as well.

00:10:21.000 I don't know.

00:10:22.000 Maybe I need to add multiple last names or dance on rooftops. 0.94

00:10:26.000 I don't know what it is.

00:10:26.000 I just, I don't have that real, that inauthentic authenticity that AOC has.

00:10:30.000 Well, I mean, we can always hope that you can breed that into yourself, and one day you, too, can be a thought leader in the Democratic Party.

00:10:36.000 I mean, you've already written the book on it, so why not?

00:10:38.000 This is true.

00:10:39.000 I mean, you know, I think I've written the definitive work on reasons to vote for Democrats, and yet Tom Perez says that AOC is the future of the Democratic Party.

00:10:46.000 It's like, give me a little look, man.

00:10:48.000 Give me, you know, finally embrace some of the intellectual future of the left.

00:10:53.000 So since you are not the thought leader of the Democratic Party, but apparently AOC is, let's talk for a second about the Squad, led by the illustrious, brilliant, world-breaking AOC.

00:11:02.000 So the Democratic Party has embraced the Squad, which is just an act of complete imbecility, but what do you make of their rise?

00:11:10.000 Why exactly are they so popular among Democrats right now?

00:11:13.000 Well, H.L.

00:11:14.000 Mencken described democracy as the theory that the people deserve to get what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard.

00:11:21.000 And I think that's what you're seeing with the rise of the squad.

00:11:24.000 For years, decades and decades, the left has been embracing this.

00:11:29.000 Awful, petty politics of personal destruction.

00:11:32.000 The political is the personal was one of the mottos in the 1960s.

00:11:35.000 Impugning everybody's motives, accusing everyone of racism and sexism and this-ism, embracing identity politics, so what matters is not our ideas, what matters is just our skin color or our genitalia or whatever.

00:11:48.000 And the Frankenstein's monster of this political experiment is the Squad.

00:11:54.000 And so now you're seeing this turn on Nancy Pelosi.

00:11:57.000 Now you're seeing this turn on the Clintons.

00:11:59.000 And I can't really feel bad for them.

00:12:01.000 I mean, they've been encouraging this sort of thing the whole time.

00:12:04.000 And so now the chickens are coming home to roost for the Democratic Party.

00:12:09.000 The thing about the Squad that's interesting is people have been calling Ayanna Pressley the Ringo Starr.

00:12:15.000 of the squad.

00:12:16.000 And they do, they all kind of match up pretty well on, on the Beatles, you know, so you've got AOC is obviously McCartney.

00:12:23.000 She's the most marketable.

00:12:24.000 She's the most pop, you know, Ilhan Omar is John Lennon.

00:12:27.000 I think she's the genuine radical.

00:12:29.000 She has a very strange marital history.

00:12:32.000 And Rashida Tlaib is, she's George Harrison. 0.67

00:12:36.000 So Ilhan Omar's brother is like the He's the Yoko.

00:12:40.000 Is he the Yoko or is he the Cynthia Lennon?

00:12:42.000 I don't know.

00:12:42.000 It kind of breaks down a little bit.

00:12:45.000 And then, obviously, you've got George.

00:12:46.000 You've got Rashida Tlaib.

00:12:47.000 She's the quiet one, you know.

00:12:49.000 She's the spiritual one.

00:12:50.000 She plays the sitar sometimes.

00:12:51.000 She plays the sitar.

00:12:52.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:12:53.000 I mean, their rise is a symptom of reality TV politics.

00:12:57.000 And politics and show business have always gone together and they always will go together.

00:13:02.000 But we're in the age of reality TV politics, The king of reality television is the president.

00:13:07.000 And these girls, I mean, they could be a reality TV show. 1.00

00:13:11.000 It's all just petty names.

00:13:13.000 It's all accusing people of bigotry and all these different personal motives.

00:13:19.000 They don't know anything about actual public policy, right?

00:13:23.000 I mean, AOC was asked in one of her first major interviews, tell me about any aspect of your policy.

00:13:29.000 Tell me about your foreign policy.

00:13:30.000 And she giggles and says, well, I'm not really the expert.

00:13:34.000 She was a major in economics.

00:13:35.000 She studied international relations in college.

00:13:38.000 She's not the expert on either of those.

00:13:39.000 She doesn't know anything about either of those because it has nothing to do with the policy itself.

00:13:43.000 The left has sort of pushed that to the side.

00:13:46.000 Now it's all just about personal character.

00:13:49.000 It's all just about those feelings, man.

00:13:51.000 And I know what you think about feelings versus fact in politics.

00:13:55.000 That's what you're seeing.

00:13:56.000 You're seeing the total inversion of the sort of politics that a self-governing republic So we saw this sort of battle breaking out between Nancy Pelosi and the Squad.

00:14:06.000 Yeah.

00:14:29.000 And this created a lot of political problems for the president in the short term.

00:14:32.000 He said certain things that just weren't true.

00:14:34.000 He said things that had people calling him racist.

00:14:37.000 All that was unpleasant to deal with during that time.

00:14:41.000 However, I actually think the cumulative effect of that was pretty helpful to the president, at least in so much as It rallied support behind the squad.

00:14:52.000 So within a week or two, you see Nancy Pelosi hosting AOC in her office. 0.97

00:14:57.000 Big smiles.

00:14:58.000 Everybody's hunky-dory.

00:15:00.000 In the long run, this is the best we can hope for.

00:15:03.000 You know, sometimes your conservatives say, we got to get AOC out of office.

00:15:06.000 We got to get Ilhan Omar out of office.

00:15:09.000 No way.

00:15:10.000 Ilhan Omar needs to be the Speaker of the House.

00:15:12.000 I want her to be in every presidential campaign. 0.98

00:15:15.000 I want her to endorse every candidate.

00:15:17.000 Because say what you will about the Squad.

00:15:20.000 At least they're honest.

00:15:21.000 At least the Squad is honest about the radicalism.

00:15:25.000 of the left, about the radicalism of the Democratic Party.

00:15:28.000 Other candidates, I mean, most famously, Hillary Clinton was really good at hiding that radicalism. 1.00

00:15:33.000 She would say abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. 0.61

00:15:35.000 Didn't make any sense.

00:15:37.000 If it's murder, it shouldn't be legal.

00:15:38.000 If it's just like getting your appendix out, there's no reason for it to be rare.

00:15:42.000 This squad ain't like that.

00:15:44.000 They want abortion on demand, without apology.

00:15:46.000 Ilhan Omar is praying that people open their eyes to the evils of Israel. 0.99

00:15:51.000 She says the only reason that anyone would support Israel is because the Jews are buying them off. 0.87

00:15:56.000 I mean, that kind of dormant anti-Semitism, old forms of bigotry on the left, is really coming out with them.

00:16:03.000 And I want to give them a big microphone.

00:16:05.000 I want them to come on my show.

00:16:07.000 I want them to be the face of the Democratic Party.

00:16:09.000 And that looks like that's what's happening.

00:16:11.000 How did you grow up to be a conservative?

00:16:14.000 I understand that you're still very young and that there's still time.

00:16:17.000 You may end up being a transgender liberal by the time this is all over, but where did you start? 0.97

00:16:21.000 I'll only become a transgender liberal if I ever want to run for office because I think it's the only way I'd be electorally viable at this point. 0.95

00:16:28.000 I more or less came out of the womb with parted hair, smoking a cigar, campaigning for Republicans.

00:16:34.000 One of the first statements I ever learned as a kid from my grandfather was, read my lips, no new taxes, which was the line from George H.W.

00:16:41.000 Bush.

00:16:41.000 Your grandfather was George H.W.

00:16:42.000 Bush, what are you doing here?

00:16:45.000 It's true.

00:16:45.000 No, he loved Bush and he told me this.

00:16:48.000 He taught me how to sing, it's a grand old flag, I was singing it around like two years old.

00:16:52.000 1996, it was the election of Bob Dole against Bill Clinton.

00:16:57.000 I was campaigning around my first grade classroom for Bob Dole.

00:17:01.000 I was the only person in this country excited about Bob Dole, including Bob Dole, because he was a war hero and Clinton was a degenerate draft dodger.

00:17:11.000 I flirted with liberalism.

00:17:12.000 I had my rebellion for about seven months when I was 13.

00:17:16.000 I thought John Kerry might be sort of an acceptable human.

00:17:22.000 I don't even want to say it on the air.

00:17:25.000 I then came back.

00:17:25.000 I was quite conservative.

00:17:26.000 And then I went through all the stages that young conservatives go through. 0.99

00:17:29.000 You know, I was an Ayn Rand objectivist type for about six months, and I was a jerk to all my friends. 0.91

00:17:35.000 And then I became more interested in other aspects of conservative thought and the conservative tradition. 0.58

00:17:41.000 And I was working on Republican campaigns.

00:17:43.000 That was my day job from when I was 18 until recent past.

00:17:48.000 And I was an actor.

00:17:50.000 I was an actor.

00:17:50.000 I was directing opera in college.

00:17:53.000 I was doing plays.

00:17:54.000 I was doing terrible movies that are on channel 7000 at three o'clock in the morning.

00:17:58.000 And, you know, I think both of those things are pretty related.

00:18:03.000 You know, Ronald Reagan said that a politician has to be an actor. 0.80

00:18:07.000 And in the negative sense of this, it's because they're both vain, ridiculous sort of endeavors that are selfish and self-centered.

00:18:19.000 But when they're done right, I actually think it's for the opposite reason.

00:18:22.000 I think politics and acting are similar because both have to be concerned with truth.

00:18:28.000 Acting is living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.

00:18:31.000 Politics, hopefully if you're a good politician, you're concerned with pursuing some kind of political truth, ultimately a cultural or even religious truth.

00:18:39.000 And you have to like people.

00:18:41.000 If you don't like people, A, you're going to hate acting because all you're doing is building characters.

00:18:46.000 You're analyzing the human condition.

00:18:48.000 And if you hate people, you are going to be a terrible politician because you spend all your time at spaghetti dinners at the VFW Hall or at the Lions Club or something.

00:18:58.000 If you don't like them, There are many other ways to make a buck or to get your name in the newspaper.

00:19:04.000 And so I think it's why, you know, especially for Republicans, you see a lot of actors who are politicians.

00:19:09.000 And then among Democrats, you see a lot of politicians who are actors.

00:19:12.000 But it's true in Hollywood.

00:19:13.000 Every Hollywood celebrity is endorsing some leftist, crazy political agenda every other day.

00:19:18.000 They're holding fundraisers for some Democratic candidate. 0.92

00:19:21.000 I think it's not just the politics of show business for ugly people. 0.71

00:19:24.000 I think the two are very similar.

00:19:26.000 I know there are a lot of people who are watching or listening to this, and they're thinking, this Michael Mowles guy doesn't seem so exorable to me.

00:19:31.000 So why, Ben, are you constantly ripping on Michael Mowles?

00:19:33.000 For those who don't know the story of how you put out a blank book that sold 200,000 copies for no reason at all, and about which I'm supremely better, then maybe you ought to explain what exactly happened.

00:19:45.000 What inspired you to write a blank book?

00:19:48.000 That sold 200,000 copies.

00:19:49.000 Well, and actually, I should mention, you play a key role in this story.

00:19:53.000 I know you want me to remind you of this.

00:19:55.000 So I had been researching this book for my entire life.

00:20:00.000 It's called Reasons to Vote for Democrats, A Comprehensive Guide.

00:20:03.000 There's an extensive bibliography in the back.

00:20:05.000 I quoted Thucydides in the foreword, and I said, this is not a book to win the applause of the moment.

00:20:11.000 This is a work for all time.

00:20:13.000 It's eternally true.

00:20:15.000 And so the book has 250 or so Blank pages, about 10 chapters, all the different areas of policy and politics that would be the reason to vote for Democrats.

00:20:27.000 I put this up on the internet.

00:20:28.000 I self-published it.

00:20:29.000 It cost me no money. 1.00

00:20:30.000 It was a stupid joke just to bother my Democrat friends and family. 0.98

00:20:34.000 Within three days, this book becomes the number one best-selling book in the world. 0.99

00:20:39.000 It was actually blurbed by a friend of mine.

00:20:41.000 Oh, it was you!

00:20:43.000 Ben Shapiro blurbed this book, called it a thorough work.

00:20:47.000 This thing leaps to the top of the charts, and then, as I seem to recall this, as you were furious, because you've written what, 12 books?

00:20:57.000 Yes, double digits.

00:20:58.000 A million books.

00:20:59.000 As you've written all these books, all with words in them.

00:21:03.000 You see the stack of blank pages, and some of your books, best-selling books, New York Times bestsellers, and then this book sells all these copies, and you say, Knowles, I'm furious, I hate this, this is the worst thing, and then you gave me your literary agent.

00:21:16.000 That's true, I did do that.

00:21:18.000 Yeah, behind the scenes, I'm actually a nice person, but that breaks the sort of fourth wall of the show.

00:21:24.000 I think it's masochism.

00:21:25.000 That's what it's got.

00:21:26.000 It's the only explanation.

00:21:27.000 There's no question.

00:21:28.000 I mean, we continue to cut you checks despite all of this.

00:21:30.000 Okay, so let's talk for a second about trolling.

00:21:32.000 So there's this amazing trollery on the right. 0.98

00:21:34.000 Obviously, President Trump is a troll. 1.00

00:21:36.000 You are a master troll. 1.00

00:21:37.000 I mean, like grade A troll. 0.99

00:21:38.000 So why do you think President Trump does that?

00:21:41.000 And do you think there's benefit to it?

00:21:42.000 You want to actually have something to say.

00:21:44.000 You want to actually Affect a message while you're trolling.

00:21:50.000 And I think that's the key here, because some of these guys who have just been provocateurs have gone down pretty bad intellectual pathways, political pathways, and they just wash up and they're nothing.

00:22:01.000 So I think the advantage to trolling, I mean even that word, it's such a 2019 word, what we're really talking about is the advantage to a little humor in politics, to a little levity in politics.

00:22:12.000 This goes a long way.

00:22:13.000 Obviously, Ronald Reagan is one of the funniest presidents we've ever had.

00:22:16.000 He started most speeches and most cabinet meetings with a joke.

00:22:19.000 It just cuts the tension.

00:22:20.000 It makes things so much easier.

00:22:21.000 President Trump is actually the funniest president we've ever had.

00:22:25.000 It's because he's a professional TV show host.

00:22:28.000 I mean, he's a product of show business for 40 years.

00:22:31.000 He just knows how to use a line to get an audience to laugh.

00:22:36.000 And so I think that is very helpful.

00:22:39.000 You know, Today, everybody takes politics so damn seriously.

00:22:45.000 They think it's the be-all, the end-all of the whole world.

00:22:49.000 Political battles matter.

00:22:50.000 But C.S.

00:22:51.000 Lewis pointed this out.

00:22:52.000 He said a sick society needs to talk about politics.

00:22:54.000 If you don't talk about politics, the sickness could get worse.

00:22:58.000 But if all you're talking about is politics, Then you've lost the point of the society in the first place.

00:23:04.000 The reason we have politics is so that we can engage in culture, so that we can worship God as we want to worship God, so that we can have relationships with our family and our communities and our civil society and those free associations that make America what it is.

00:23:19.000 A society that can't laugh a little bit at its politics, that can't take itself lightly, doesn't have that.

00:23:23.000 You know, the writer G.K.

00:23:24.000 Chesterton said, the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

00:23:29.000 It's not that they take themselves unseriously, it's not that they make a joke of themselves, but they can take themselves lightly.

00:23:35.000 And if we can't do that in politics, the future doesn't look so bright.

00:23:39.000 Okay, so let's talk about your brand of conservatism.

00:23:41.000 So, there's a lot of debate inside conservative circles over what exactly conservatism means.

00:23:45.000 You're obviously the younger generation, and there's an open debate as to what kind of government we need.

00:23:50.000 Government involvement, what kind of culture we need.

00:23:52.000 There's a battle between conservatives and libertarians.

00:23:54.000 If you had to sort of sum up your view of conservatism, what would it look like?

00:23:57.000 I would agree with a lot of conservative thinkers, going back to, say, Edmund Burke, who I think is the founder of kind of the modern era of conservative thought.

00:24:05.000 I think conservatism is in many ways an inclination more than an ideology.

00:24:10.000 I think that it is anti-ideological.

00:24:13.000 I think we try to shun doctrines and dogmas and manifestos with five bullet points on them and say this is the sum total of politics.

00:24:22.000 I think the conservative knows that's never going to sum up the whole world.

00:24:27.000 I can't boil down my entire experience of reality, my desires, what I wish for the country, the consecration with which I view my country, the loyalty, the filial piety that I feel for the United States.

00:24:41.000 I can't boil that down into one, two, or three bullet points.

00:24:44.000 I think a lot of it comes out of a love for the tradition.

00:24:48.000 And this is a big divide.

00:24:49.000 You have some people in this country who love America for all her warts, for all her problems, for all the tragedies of history, who say, I want America to move into the future by pulling on the best of her tradition, by living up to the best of her ideals.

00:25:07.000 And being more true to herself.

00:25:08.000 And then you have some people who say, no, America's rotten.

00:25:11.000 America was never that great, like Andrew Cuomo said. 0.54

00:25:15.000 I hate America.

00:25:16.000 I don't like the flag. 0.98

00:25:17.000 I think the Betsy Ross flag is racist. 0.99

00:25:20.000 I think Jefferson and Washington, I think they're racist and terrible.

00:25:25.000 I think that's a major divide, and I think there is a broad space for the conservatives, who actually want to conserve America, to speak.

00:25:32.000 We've had this long debate in conservative circles over which brand of conservatism gets to claim the true mantle.

00:25:42.000 There are the neoconservatives, they've kind of fallen out of favor, the libertarians, the religious right, the traditionalists, the Trumpian populists, all of those.

00:25:52.000 It seems to me that it's wonderful about conservatism that there's that intellectual diversity, that there's a debate that's constantly going on there.

00:26:01.000 Maybe I favor a little bit more of the traditional side.

00:26:04.000 Maybe you favor a little bit more of the libertarian side.

00:26:07.000 Maybe some people are more religious right or neocon or whatever.

00:26:11.000 But we're able to engage in all of that with a common love of country and a common seriousness of purpose.

00:26:17.000 That is radically different from the left, which no longer has any intellectual diversity.

00:26:21.000 They used to have the blue dog, sort of socially conservative Democrats.

00:26:26.000 Now they just have one idea, which is progressivism.

00:26:30.000 And you are seeing progressivism speed up.

00:26:33.000 Every single day, it speeds up even further, to the point that now we're calling for open borders.

00:26:39.000 We're calling to dismantle American sovereignty.

00:26:43.000 And we're disrespecting even the American flag, which is a symbol of the country.

00:26:47.000 This is one of the things I fear, I think, is that the reactionary nature of our politics is driving this a little bit on both sides.

00:26:53.000 So obviously you've seen it from the left.

00:26:54.000 You've seen a reaction to President Trump.

00:26:56.000 The left thought they were never going to lose an election after Barack Obama was president.

00:26:59.000 They immediately lose the first presidential election after Obama is president.

00:27:03.000 And they're so stunned by it that they move into anti-Trump territory.

00:27:06.000 Anything Trump says must be bad, even if it's the most anodyne, normal, Typical American politics when it's apple pie and motherhood and the American flag They've decided they're against it because they're reacting to Trump and then you've seen on the right a similar tendency Which is we have to oppose the left no matter what they are doing and even if it means embracing some of our worst Instincts and I think this is where I'm more worried about the conservative movement than you seem to be and that is that I'm concerned that in the in the correct attempt to stop the left

00:27:36.000 There's a willingness to embrace bedfellows that are really alienating for future generations as well as morally problematic.

00:27:45.000 In other words, the tent can become so broad that you end up including people in the tent who probably shouldn't be in the tent simply to oppose the other side. 0.81

00:27:52.000 Well, I agree we should kick out all the bigots.

00:27:54.000 I don't think anybody disagrees about that.

00:27:56.000 But I don't really think that the right has embraced bigots, at least not in anything approaching the mainstream.

00:28:04.000 I mean, I guess these days they're calling Steven Crowder a bigot because he says that men can't be women.

00:28:07.000 They're trying to kick him off of YouTube.

00:28:09.000 But I mean the real bigots, the racial politics guys, Richard Spencer.

00:28:13.000 I mean, Richard Spencer is practically a creation of the left-wing media and the mainstream media.

00:28:19.000 He, I don't know, five years ago he had a hundred people show up to his conference.

00:28:23.000 A year ago he had about the same number of people show up to his conference.

00:28:26.000 I don't see the mainstreaming of that guy.

00:28:28.000 Mike, I guess what I'm saying is that there's a bit of a politics of convenience going on.

00:28:32.000 So, for example, for years I was informed that Russia was a geopolitical foe of the United States.

00:28:37.000 The minute that President Trump declares that Russia is not in fact a geopolitical foe of the United States, at least publicly, you know, in terms of his actual actions, he's treated Russia certainly as a geopolitical foe of the United States.

00:28:47.000 There's been a whole brand of the Republican Party that's come out and basically become quasi-pro-Putin.

00:28:53.000 You've seen this happen to trade.

00:28:54.000 I'm not totally sure.

00:28:56.000 I mean, I see your point on the Russia thing, but it's also, I mean, this is why I oppose rigid ideology or trying to, you know, boil conservatism, capital C, trademark, down to five or so bullet points.

00:29:08.000 Is because it is true, Russia was our number one geopolitical adversary for a whole century. 0.92

00:29:13.000 I mean, we fought a Cold War against them.

00:29:15.000 Then we won the Cold War.

00:29:17.000 And even during the Cold War, you saw regularly, we would play off Russia against China and China against Russia.

00:29:24.000 And obviously, today that's more important than ever.

00:29:26.000 So I think for a lot of conservatives, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the fall of Soviet communism, you look around and you say, you know, Russia is awful. 0.94

00:29:34.000 I mean, Vladimir Putin is a terrible, terrible man.

00:29:38.000 But the bigger threat comes from China. 0.81

00:29:40.000 China is violating WTO treaties, they're illegally subsidizing, they're stealing aluminum, they're stealing our property, they're spying on us, they're aggressing on some of our interests. 0.99

00:29:49.000 And so we say, you know, if we put our focus, if we take our focus away maybe from certain interests in the Middle East, even Pulling away maybe from aspects that Russia wants to intervene in.

00:29:59.000 To focus on China.

00:30:01.000 That's where the real threat will be.

00:30:02.000 Does it mean you totally, you know, cozy up to longtime foes like Vladimir Putin?

00:30:08.000 No, but it's a reordering of priorities because the circumstances of politics have changed.

00:30:12.000 Okay, so let's talk for a second about this debate that's broken out.

00:30:14.000 So you talk about sort of the Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk side of the conservative movement, maybe Patrick Deneen.

00:30:22.000 There's this side of the conservative movement that suggests that conservatism is really about honor for tradition and for the past.

00:30:29.000 Well, and I would say, importantly, about veneration.

00:30:33.000 The idea that we have very little in the United States that binds us together, especially now as we discourage assimilation, even as we increase immigration. 0.89

00:30:43.000 It's very difficult.

00:30:44.000 We no longer really have much shared religion.

00:30:46.000 We don't have much religion at all.

00:30:48.000 And we no longer venerate the symbols that we once venerated.

00:30:52.000 The flag, the Fourth of July, fireworks and hot dogs and hamburgers.

00:30:57.000 We don't have that shared love of country, and no country that I've ever seen in the history of the world can survive without some sense of the sacred.

00:31:06.000 Now, of course, because nature abhors a vacuum, you're getting new sacred things.

00:31:11.000 You know, I mean, we've replaced what would be maybe the Christian liturgical calendar with the secular leftist liturgical calendar.

00:31:18.000 So you've got in February, you've got Black History Month to celebrate not all black people, Clarence Thomas, I don't think he's being celebrated.

00:31:26.000 It's to celebrate a particular view of black oppression in the United States.

00:31:30.000 You've got Women's History Month. 0.99

00:31:32.000 Same thing.

00:31:32.000 Not to celebrate all women, to celebrate a particular view of women's oppression.

00:31:36.000 In June, what do you have?

00:31:37.000 You have Pride Month.

00:31:38.000 We're now celebrating the queen of all sins.

00:31:41.000 We're celebrating the deadliest sin of all.

00:31:44.000 I think what we would all agree on is there is that aspect of government and of politics and of living together as a nation.

00:31:53.000 And therefore, I think what the question becomes between, say, the traditionalists and the libertarians is, what is going to be sacred in the country?

00:32:03.000 Or can we try to persevere without anything being sacred?

00:32:06.000 Well, this is why I ask about the role of government, because I think that we largely agree on The sacred nature of many of the nationally binding forces.

00:32:16.000 I actually just wrote a book with words in it all about the sacred nature of history and how that has to be balanced with a limited government in the absence of a virtuous people.

00:32:25.000 You can't have liberalism in the first instance.

00:32:28.000 We're starting to see a sort of root and branch approach to liberalism, however, that I'm not sure is sustainable.

00:32:34.000 And I'm wondering where you're coming down on the side.

00:32:35.000 Because on the one hand, you have folks who are basically saying that liberalism itself, this is the Patrick Deneen case openly, is that liberalism itself has failed, that it carries within it the seeds, Lockean liberalism carries within it the seeds of atomized individualism.

00:32:49.000 And that leads to libertinism. 0.88

00:32:50.000 And that leads to the destruction of the society at large.

00:32:53.000 You don't have any binding forces, specifically because you have a liberty-rights-driven society.

00:32:59.000 And then, on the other side, you have people saying, well, so what is the alternative that you're suggesting, like government imposing virtue from above?

00:33:05.000 So where do you come down, and what do you think the role of government is in that fight?

00:33:07.000 Well, much as Buckley did in the 20th century, maybe, I propose a fusion, or at least a view that I think proposes that it's not, those two ideas are not as far apart as they may seem.

00:33:19.000 Why is that?

00:33:20.000 Because, in part, for American conservatives who want to conserve the American tradition, you are largely conserving a liberal tradition.

00:33:27.000 No one doubts the spirit of 1776 and the importance of liberalism.

00:33:32.000 And I don't think anyone wants to, well, maybe some people do, but I certainly don't want to rip that out root and branch.

00:33:38.000 But, nevertheless, you also see That liberalism has led to this atomization of the individual.

00:33:43.000 People have never been lonelier.

00:33:45.000 You have a widespread epidemic of depression, anxiety, stress, suicidality, up 70% even among teenagers in recent years.

00:33:54.000 This is a major social problem, the breakdown of institutions and the breakdown of love of country.

00:34:00.000 Now, the role of government comes in, and I think the libertarian side has not fully grappled with this.

00:34:07.000 Because I agree with John Adams that the Constitution is built for a moral and religious people, and it's not fit for the governance of anyone else.

00:34:15.000 And where do we get morality?

00:34:16.000 Where do we get virtue?

00:34:17.000 Virtue is a personal habit.

00:34:19.000 It's a personal choice.

00:34:21.000 You have to do it.

00:34:24.000 You can either discipline yourself, Or a giant government will discipline you.

00:34:29.000 Order will occur, make no mistake.

00:34:31.000 But if you want to be a free people and you want to govern yourself, you need to have that discipline yourself.

00:34:37.000 Increasingly, we have seen this go away and you've seen increasing libertinism.

00:34:41.000 You can view this in virtually any social phenomenon that we're looking around at in 2019, where we can't even agree on the definition of what a man is.

00:34:50.000 Used to be a man was not a woman. 0.99

00:34:52.000 Now, today, as a man is not a woman, secondary definition, also sometimes a woman.

00:34:56.000 We just don't know.

00:34:58.000 The role of the government comes in here because the way that you become a virtuous person, the way that you learn your morals, the way that you practice the habit of virtue is through education.

00:35:08.000 I mean, that's what the word education means.

00:35:10.000 It's how you learn to behave and form your mind and form your body.

00:35:13.000 And in the United States, broadly, Education is a matter of government.

00:35:17.000 The government is doing it.

00:35:18.000 There is no kind of education that isn't coercive.

00:35:22.000 Would that we could all have private education and your parents are directing it, but that just isn't the case and so what we need to ask ourselves is What do we want the government teaching our kids?

00:35:35.000 I mean, that is, it might not be a legitimate role of the government, but it certainly has been the role of the government for at least 100 years.

00:35:41.000 And in that time, you've seen the ability to even read the Bible in school, forget prayer in school, even to read the Bible in school.

00:35:49.000 The Bible is the bedrock of our civilization.

00:35:52.000 If you haven't read the Bible, you can't understand any of the rest of it.

00:35:56.000 And if government is going to run education, and they're not going to even expose children to that bedrock, to their own civilization, you're going to look down the road in 20 or 30 years and you're going to see a completely unrecognizable society.

00:36:10.000 You've been going around giving speeches at colleges, getting shot with fake bleach, and really enjoying yourself out there.

00:36:16.000 There's an interesting sort of debate that's broken out about what the future of colleges should be.

00:36:21.000 You seem to be hopeful and, I think, optimistic about what colleges should be.

00:36:26.000 I'm less optimistic.

00:36:27.000 I think they should be circumscribed in their authority.

00:36:29.000 I think that colleges should basically go back to either being trade schools or to not existing.

00:36:35.000 Because the fact is that they have lost the thread.

00:36:37.000 They don't have the capacity or the willingness to teach Western civilization anymore.

00:36:40.000 If we're going to have those colleges, well, they can exist, but they should be privately funded because the state is no longer going to do any of that.

00:36:46.000 What's your view on what should happen with colleges?

00:36:48.000 I'll tell you, I was more hopeful before I started my college tour than now that I've finished it and weirdos are shooting strange liquids that I don't even want to know what's in them at me.

00:36:58.000 What I'm most disappointed in in the colleges is not the students. 0.99

00:37:01.000 Students are ignorant. 0.99

00:37:02.000 That's the definition of a student. 1.00

00:37:04.000 You go to be educated so that you can stop being ignorant and start to know some things. 0.99

00:37:09.000 I don't even mind the crazy professors. 1.00

00:37:12.000 Professors have always been crazy. 0.99

00:37:13.000 They've had crazy tousled hair. 0.79

00:37:15.000 And we would play a game when I was in college.

00:37:17.000 We'd look down the street and say, is that person homeless or is he a professor?

00:37:20.000 Sometimes you can't tell.

00:37:22.000 The problem, as far as I see it, is the administration.

00:37:25.000 After I was sprayed with whatever at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, they arrest the guy.

00:37:31.000 Fortunately, they drag him out.

00:37:33.000 And the next morning, the chancellor of the university, he sent out a letter.

00:37:39.000 Apologizing to me, of course, right?

00:37:41.000 Absolutely not.

00:37:42.000 He smeared me as a bigot for saying that men are not women.

00:37:45.000 That was the title of my talk.

00:37:46.000 He then said that my talk does not go along with the University of Missouri-Kansas City's values.

00:37:53.000 So apparently their values are men are women.

00:37:55.000 I didn't know that.

00:37:55.000 That's news to me.

00:37:57.000 And then he endorsed the actions of the hecklers, the ones who were screaming from the beginning, endorsing the heckler's veto.

00:38:05.000 This is anathema to liberal education.

00:38:08.000 And then at the end he said, oh yeah, but they shouldn't get violent.

00:38:12.000 Lip service to this.

00:38:14.000 As far as I can tell, there have been no punishments, no consequences for these kids.

00:38:18.000 This has happened at elite universities all over the country.

00:38:21.000 The inmates are running the asylum here, and you can't educate anybody that way.

00:38:24.000 I mean, that's... The truth is arrogant, as a college president once said.

00:38:30.000 You know, at University of Chicago, which said, we're going to stand by free speech, they had these campus disruptions.

00:38:35.000 They sent out that letter.

00:38:37.000 You haven't heard a peep since.

00:38:39.000 Purdue University, run by the great Mitch Daniels.

00:38:42.000 There was all this craziness on campus.

00:38:44.000 He called them in.

00:38:45.000 He said, alright, I've read your demands.

00:38:47.000 And they said, well this isn't a negotiation, President Daniels.

00:38:50.000 And he said, you're absolutely right, this is not a negotiation.

00:38:53.000 And he said, Sit down, learn, and be quiet.

00:38:57.000 And you haven't heard a peep from Purdue either.

00:39:00.000 If the universities were willing to do that, I think a liberal education is essential to a free society.

00:39:06.000 I mean, liberal means free.

00:39:08.000 The liberal arts are the arts of freedom.

00:39:10.000 It's not where you go to learn how to become a carpenter.

00:39:12.000 It's not where you go to learn how to become a lawyer or a doctor.

00:39:15.000 Your undergrad liberal arts is supposed to be where you learn completely impractical things.

00:39:20.000 History, literature, mathematics.

00:39:22.000 You learn about your civilization.

00:39:24.000 You learn how to think.

00:39:25.000 Then you go to a professional school, or you get trained in some job, and then you go out into the world.

00:39:31.000 A self-governing country.

00:39:33.000 Will not exist very long if we totally lose liberal education.

00:39:37.000 The problem is I think these universities are basically rotten to the core.

00:39:42.000 I think we have to defund them.

00:39:44.000 I think you and I are complicit in this because we maybe we don't donate to our universities but we pay our taxes.

00:39:52.000 I think we need to take away the federal guarantees of these loans.

00:39:56.000 I mean, obviously, if President Pocahontas gets into office, she's going to have $1.6 trillion in student loan forgiveness. 1.00

00:40:03.000 It's going to only exacerbate the problem.

00:40:05.000 But you need a new model.

00:40:06.000 I think there are probably five universities in this country that are salvageable and good in doing the business of educating future American leaders.

00:40:14.000 That's great.

00:40:15.000 We should keep doing that.

00:40:16.000 You know, let's not forget, in 1940, 5% of Americans got a four-year degree from college.

00:40:21.000 Today, you've got 60-plus percent of high school graduates are going to college.

00:40:25.000 Many of them won't finish.

00:40:26.000 You don't need everybody to study the Aeneid that way.

00:40:30.000 I mean, it would be nice, but you actually don't need it.

00:40:33.000 I would save those handful of colleges, I would defund all of the others, and I would find some new method of education that is more tailored to the individual students so they don't need to take out a quarter million dollars in debt to not learn anything. - Well, one of the things that you've spoken a lot about is the failures of the universities one of the things that you've spoken a lot about is the failures Talk about context with regard to President Trump, but this is particularly true in the field of history where the universities seem to be teaching that everybody from history ought to be evaluated by the values that we currently hold.

00:41:01.000 Thus, you are a better person than Thomas Jefferson because Thomas Jefferson held slaves.

00:41:05.000 While you do not hold slaves, you are a better person than John Adams because John Adams condemned various forms of sin that he saw, whereas you think that those forms of sin are okay because they're consensual.

00:41:14.000 You know, that seems to be the generalized feeling among folks in history departments all over the country.

00:41:20.000 You spend an inordinate amount of time talking about A lot of historical figures.

00:41:25.000 One of the historical figures that you've gotten the most flack for for defending is Christopher Columbus.

00:41:29.000 Maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of the mythology surrounding Christopher Columbus and why you feel he's being not given a fair shake.

00:41:35.000 Mythology is the greatest word here.

00:41:36.000 I mean, because I'm happy.

00:41:39.000 I don't think that I say that Christopher Columbus is the greatest man who ever lived.

00:41:43.000 He wasn't.

00:41:44.000 I'm totally willing to point out his flaws.

00:41:46.000 He had many flaws.

00:41:49.000 But he's being blamed for things that he didn't do.

00:41:51.000 One of his biographers, Carol Delaney at Stanford, this was what she kept going back to when she wrote about him.

00:41:58.000 She said, people, especially on the left, I guess, are attacking him.

00:42:02.000 They called him a genocidal maniac.

00:42:05.000 He didn't commit a genocide.

00:42:07.000 Now, you can oppose Western exploration of the Americas.

00:42:10.000 I mean, I guess that's what they're really talking about.

00:42:12.000 But Christopher Columbus wasn't Adolf Hitler.

00:42:15.000 They say that he had a particular hatred of the Native Americans.

00:42:19.000 In reality, he was often defending Native Americans against the harsh punishment sought by the Spaniards, by his fellow travelers.

00:42:28.000 And even Bartolome de las Casas, a Columbus biographer, the great defender of Natives in the New World, Constantly talked about how he was defending the natives.

00:42:36.000 Christopher Columbus adopted a Native American son.

00:42:41.000 Say whatever you want about his time as the governor of the Indies, I don't think he had a particular vile, vicious, bigoted hatred of Native Americans if he's going to adopt one from his dead comrade and raise him as his own son.

00:42:54.000 This is true of all history.

00:42:55.000 I mean, we're now doing this to Columbus, or to rather Washington and Jefferson.

00:43:01.000 You know, President Trump in that Difficult press conference at Charlottesville.

00:43:05.000 He said, you're talking about Robert E. Lee now, and we can all agree we hate Robert E. Lee, but who's next?

00:43:11.000 Is it Thomas Jefferson?

00:43:12.000 Is it Washington?

00:43:13.000 And now you are seeing schools in California paying $600,000 to paint over a Washington mural at Notre Dame University, where I gave a speech defending Columbus.

00:43:22.000 They have a beautiful, priceless mural of Columbus that actually shows the history of him, which nobody knows.

00:43:29.000 This systematic, you know, multifaceted mural.

00:43:33.000 They're putting a drape over it so that nobody is offended.

00:43:36.000 Where does this end?

00:43:37.000 And this gets back to the conservative inclination, why I think conservatism is more an inclination than it is an ideology.

00:43:45.000 It's an inclination fundamentally of humility, of awe, of wonder, of knowing I'm not the greatest guy that ever lived.

00:43:53.000 I don't celebrate pride.

00:43:55.000 I don't take pride in myself.

00:43:57.000 I try to be as aware as I can of my own flaws and the great gift of humility.

00:44:02.000 One, life is a lot better when you go through it and you try to be humble.

00:44:07.000 But then you also look back on history and you say, you know, maybe I shouldn't throw stones at Thomas Jefferson.

00:44:13.000 He held slaves.

00:44:13.000 I don't hold slaves.

00:44:14.000 So that's one point for me.

00:44:17.000 I do a lot of things that he didn't do that are pretty bad as well.

00:44:20.000 Just judging society.

00:44:22.000 In the 19th century, there was widespread slavery in the United States.

00:44:26.000 Many people opposed it, but there it was.

00:44:30.000 What are people going to say about us in 200 years? 0.97

00:44:32.000 The obvious example is we kill a million babies a year and we specifically target them for being mentally deficient. 1.00

00:44:39.000 We can target them now for their sex. 1.00

00:44:42.000 We target them for any reason at all.

00:44:44.000 This disproportionately affects racial minorities.

00:44:47.000 More black babies in New York City are aborted than born.

00:44:51.000 How is history going to judge us?

00:44:53.000 And if we want grace from our descendants, maybe we should give a little bit of grace to our antecedents, you know?

00:45:00.000 I think, generally, with the study of history and with the way we look at our country, I think that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and many, many people in this country think that we're flying.

00:45:09.000 So, we were talking about college experiences.

00:45:11.000 Obviously, I'm an Ivy Leaguer, you're an Ivy Leaguer.

00:45:13.000 What was your Ivy League experience like?

00:45:15.000 I went to Yale basically just before it all collapsed.

00:45:19.000 They start renaming colleges, students shrieking at their professors, which happened later on, 2014, 2015.

00:45:27.000 I feel like I was the last guy to sort of leap off the Titanic as the thing is going down.

00:45:32.000 And I wrote my essays on two topics.

00:45:37.000 One, and this was my main essay, was my love of Cuban cigars.

00:45:43.000 It was how much I've smoked Cuban cigars since I was a kid.

00:45:46.000 I kid you not.

00:45:47.000 The title of it was The Count of Monte Cristo.

00:45:49.000 I talked about the different kinds of cigars, why I liked them, what I thought they meant about the human spirit.

00:45:54.000 So that was one essay.

00:45:55.000 Well, at that point, they just had to have you, obviously.

00:45:57.000 Well, at that time, they were trying to ban smoking from campus.

00:46:01.000 And I love... I mean, you can smoke pot, you can probably smoke crack, you can do whatever you want.

00:46:06.000 They have whole sex weeks at Yale.

00:46:08.000 Heaven forfend, you smoke a cigar.

00:46:10.000 And I actually started a club when I got there.

00:46:12.000 See, some guys, they want to be the head of the debate team, they want to be the captain of the football team.

00:46:17.000 That wasn't going to be me.

00:46:19.000 So I founded a club called the Society for Intellectual Growth and Reinvigoration, or Cigar.

00:46:26.000 And we convinced them to fund my little cigar habit for about four years, Cuban cigars.

00:46:32.000 It was wonderful.

00:46:33.000 And then in order to get a little bit more money for my preferred vice, I wrote a review of cigars in the Yale Daily News.

00:46:40.000 So I got them to pay for some of them too.

00:46:43.000 I don't know how they didn't figure this out.

00:46:45.000 Only when I graduated, I think that's when they finally obliterated smoking on campus. 0.93

00:46:48.000 So you've been like a full-time troll for years. 0.51

00:46:50.000 I mean, this is not like something new.

00:46:52.000 That actually, you know, freshman, no, sophomore year, I think it was sophomore year, I had my first political job.

00:46:52.000 It is.

00:46:58.000 And I was working on a campaign in New York for my friend Nan Hayworth.

00:47:03.000 And she was running a challenger campaign against the incumbent John Hall.

00:47:07.000 John Hall had been in this rock band in the 70s called Orleans, and they did the songs like, Still the one that blah blah blah, and they did, you know, they did one, Dance with me, I want to be your partner, can't you see?

00:47:19.000 So I started this... Classics of the genre.

00:47:21.000 Classics of the 70s saccharine genre.

00:47:25.000 I started this troll campaign on the side of Nan's actual campaign.

00:47:30.000 And it was called the Young Voters for an Orleans Reunion Tour to get it all out of D.C.

00:47:35.000 back on the road.

00:47:36.000 And it was a lot of fun.

00:47:38.000 I was ripping off their songs, rewriting them, doing YouTube videos.

00:47:41.000 And this was back when you could actually get organic traction on YouTube.

00:47:45.000 Now that's virtually impossible.

00:47:47.000 So I was doing this.

00:47:48.000 A few people were paying attention.

00:47:49.000 A few people thought it was funny.

00:47:51.000 But they made the classic political mistake of overreacting.

00:47:55.000 So I got lawsuit threats from the band.

00:47:58.000 I got lawsuit threats from EMI Music.

00:48:00.000 I got lawsuit threats from the congressman himself.

00:48:04.000 All of a sudden you go from 500 people have seen this video to tens of thousands of people have seen this video.

00:48:09.000 It's all over the news.

00:48:11.000 I thought, wow, there's really something here, especially in new media.

00:48:14.000 This is an opportunity for conservatives to affect the culture more broadly, but even political races in a way that we hadn't been able to before, because the gatekeepers of the mainstream media kept us out.

00:48:25.000 So from there, I hopped on a few other campaigns.

00:48:27.000 I was part of the draft campaign for Mitch Daniels to get him to run in 2012, did a few commercials with Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High party.

00:48:36.000 We were doing all these same kinds of strategies.

00:48:39.000 And this was my day job.

00:48:42.000 As I was working in mainstream show business, trying to keep my mouth shut, hoping no one figured out that I was a conservative.

00:48:47.000 The craziest moment of this whole thing happened when I go on an audition in New York.

00:48:54.000 And they said it was for a live event, and you had to speak some different languages.

00:48:58.000 So I go in, I didn't know anything about it, no script, and they said, what languages do you speak?

00:49:02.000 I said, I speak this language, that language. 0.97

00:49:04.000 And I joked, I said, I also speak Esperanto, which is this totally made-up, leftist, stupid language from the 19th century. 0.96

00:49:11.000 You can learn it in three days, which is how I learned it. 0.96

00:49:13.000 I said, that probably doesn't matter, though.

00:49:15.000 And they turned to me and they said, actually, client number one speaks Esperanto.

00:49:20.000 I said, it's George Soros.

00:49:22.000 They said, how'd you know that?

00:49:23.000 I said, there were like five people on earth who speak Esperanto.

00:49:26.000 He's the only one who could afford to hire anybody anyway.

00:49:30.000 Long story short, I end up as a fake sommelier at George Soros' wedding.

00:49:37.000 I am serving wine to George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, Kofi Annan, you know, the head of the UN.

00:49:44.000 I was in the belly of the beast, the center of leftist politics in the world.

00:49:49.000 I thought, God, No one knows who I am.

00:49:52.000 I'm like, here, I can listen.

00:49:54.000 What could you imagine?

00:49:57.000 This kind of sums up my relationship to politics.

00:50:00.000 I've tried not to work in politics on several occasions because, you know, it's a drag.

00:50:05.000 I mean, it's miserable.

00:50:06.000 People yell at you. 0.90

00:50:07.000 They don't like you. 0.99

00:50:08.000 Half the country hates your guts.

00:50:11.000 It's just too fun.

00:50:12.000 I just can't help it.

00:50:14.000 What is your take on the president overall?

00:50:16.000 What's he doing right?

00:50:17.000 What's he doing wrong?

00:50:18.000 What can he improve on?

00:50:19.000 I'm honest.

00:50:20.000 I'm, you know, I'm a conservative.

00:50:20.000 I like the guy.

00:50:22.000 I tend to vote Republican.

00:50:24.000 I, you know, I've got a side here.

00:50:26.000 So I don't view myself as an umpire.

00:50:30.000 That isn't my, I'm not, I do have a team.

00:50:33.000 Doesn't mean I'm just going to carry water for the guy.

00:50:35.000 I mean, I criticize Trump a lot.

00:50:36.000 I think we should criticize Trump a lot.

00:50:38.000 I think it helps his presidency when we criticize Trump.

00:50:41.000 I think it pulls him away from some of his worst inclinations.

00:50:44.000 Sometimes it makes more precise his views on policy, or at least it explains maybe what conservatives Have thought in our longer conservative tradition because President Trump isn't terribly ideological.

00:50:57.000 It's one of the things that helps him in his presidency.

00:50:59.000 But then what we need to do is occasionally articulate more of the broad philosophical basis for some of the things that he's doing.

00:51:07.000 So I think he's doing pretty well.

00:51:08.000 I would, you know, I agree with the Heritage Foundation said he had been more conservative in his first year.

00:51:14.000 He instituted more of a conservative agenda even than Ronald Reagan.

00:51:18.000 Maybe we can take that with a grain of salt, but he's certainly exceeded my expectations.

00:51:23.000 There have been a few moments where I felt there were some missteps.

00:51:27.000 He had done some things I don't really like, certain pieces of legislation.

00:51:31.000 You know, he spent most of December focusing on that crime bill, letting people out of prison.

00:51:38.000 That's not a top priority for me.

00:51:39.000 I thought that was a waste of political capital.

00:51:42.000 Some people in his camp thought that that was a great idea that was going to appeal more broadly to Americans.

00:51:48.000 Okay, it's neither here nor there for me.

00:51:51.000 The question for him, looking forward to 2020, saying everything's been pretty good, the economy's going pretty well, record low unemployment, relative peace abroad.

00:52:00.000 Two questions.

00:52:01.000 One, is the economy going to falter?

00:52:04.000 If the economy falters, hard to see how he gets re-elected.

00:52:08.000 So, got to make sure the economy stays chugging along.

00:52:11.000 Two, the wall.

00:52:14.000 Where is the wall?

00:52:15.000 The wall was not just part of his campaign.

00:52:17.000 This was a central campaign promise.

00:52:20.000 And we just got that CBP report out a couple weeks ago.

00:52:23.000 It said that not one mile, not one inch of new wall has been constructed.

00:52:29.000 They've replaced old wall.

00:52:30.000 That's good.

00:52:31.000 But they haven't built new wall.

00:52:33.000 One, because it's very expensive.

00:52:34.000 Two, because there are environmental permits you need to get.

00:52:37.000 Three, there's zoning permits.

00:52:38.000 Look, I get that it's very hard.

00:52:40.000 But that was the promise.

00:52:41.000 The promise was a big, beautiful wall.

00:52:43.000 The president has gotten some pretty good news on this front in just the past couple of weeks.

00:52:48.000 So in 2016, he campaigned more or less on two things, the wall and judges.

00:52:54.000 You remember how important the legacy of Antonin Scalia and all the Supreme Court justices were going to be for the 2016 election.

00:53:03.000 He just got a favorable decision from the Supreme Court, 5-4 decision, thanks to those two justices that he appointed, that opened up about $2.5 billion worth of Pentagon funding for him to build the wall, so he could build 100 miles of border wall.

00:53:17.000 Maybe there will be more hiccups.

00:53:19.000 Maybe he won't be able to build 100 miles before 2020.

00:53:21.000 Almost certainly he won't.

00:53:23.000 But if he can run on just that decision and say, see how important it was that we got those judges.

00:53:28.000 If not for those judges, we wouldn't have gotten this wall funding.

00:53:32.000 If not for electing me, obviously we wouldn't have a president who wants to build the wall.

00:53:36.000 That's a step in the right direction.

00:53:38.000 But he's got to keep up the pressure on that.

00:53:40.000 If he doesn't show a I think he's going to lose a lot of credibility, even among those of us who want to support him.

00:53:49.000 Now, one thing that you haven't mentioned anywhere in this sort of analysis of Trump is, of course, Trump the man.

00:53:54.000 And in 2016, I was deeply concerned about a number of things about Trump.

00:53:58.000 One of those things was conservative policy.

00:54:00.000 He's delivered on a lot of those fronts, although obviously on spending, he's blown it out because no one cares about spending apparently enough to actually stop it.

00:54:06.000 But I'm not going to talk about policy with regard to Trump because the fact is that what makes Trump a polarizing figure is not in fact his policy, it is his character.

00:54:13.000 And one of the things that I was always worried about was that he was going to poison the well with suburban women, he was going to poison the well with young people.

00:54:19.000 By polling data, he's doing that.

00:54:21.000 So the question going forward, and I want to get your take on this, is How much has his character affected the future hopes of the Republican Party?

00:54:29.000 Because there are growing demographics in this country who look at the Republican Party and see President Trump and see his tweets.

00:54:35.000 And what can President Trump do, if anything, to mitigate that?

00:54:38.000 Because I think you can run on all the good policy you want.

00:54:40.000 If the American people are forced to do a referendum on Trump's character, I mean, they were able to escape that by instead having a referendum on Hillary in 2016.

00:54:48.000 But let's say the Democrats run a default candidate like Joe Biden, and he's basically just a piece of wood.

00:54:54.000 And they put up this piece of wood and they said, and look at this horrible man, Trump.

00:54:57.000 What can Trump do or what should he do to mitigate the fact that the president does what the president, Trump says what he says. 1.00

00:55:04.000 A lot of crap comes out of that mouth. 0.97

00:55:06.000 You know, I think there are two questions that this brings up. 1.00

00:55:08.000 One, is the president a bigot?

00:55:10.000 Is he a racial bigot?

00:55:12.000 Everyone calls him a bigot, right?

00:55:13.000 The mainstream media always calls him a bigot.

00:55:15.000 And he says things that raise that question.

00:55:19.000 I think it's clear from his life that he isn't a bigot.

00:55:23.000 You know, he used to pal around with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

00:55:26.000 No one called him a bigot until he ran for president as a Republican. 0.99

00:55:30.000 If he's a white supremacist, he's the worst white supremacist in history. 0.98

00:55:33.000 He's the least effective because we have record low black unemployment, record low minority unemployment. 0.98

00:55:39.000 We have, he's appointed plenty of ethnic minorities to his administration.

00:55:43.000 Criminal justice reform.

00:55:45.000 Criminal justice reform, sure.

00:55:47.000 He married off his daughter to a Jew.

00:55:51.000 He has a town in Israel named after him. 0.98

00:55:52.000 So not even just talking about bigotry toward black people, but bigotry toward Jews, bigotry.

00:55:57.000 I just, I don't see evidence of that. 0.90

00:55:59.000 I don't think neo-Nazis and white supremacists get towns in Israel named after them.

00:56:03.000 So on the question of is he a bigot, I think it's clear he isn't.

00:56:07.000 Does he say things that make people call him a bigot?

00:56:11.000 Is he responsible for what he says?

00:56:11.000 Yes.

00:56:13.000 Yes.

00:56:14.000 Would they call him a bigot no matter what he said?

00:56:17.000 Absolutely they would.

00:56:18.000 And so, in terms of the perception, they're going to call every Republican, every conservative, everybody slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton a bigot.

00:56:26.000 That's too bad.

00:56:27.000 The good news is, though, political memories are really short, so we're living in the eternal present.

00:56:33.000 I mean, there are candidates who ran for president in 2016.

00:56:37.000 Maybe you would remember who they are because you live in this.

00:56:40.000 99% of people in this country have forgotten the names of many of the people who ran for president just last election cycle.

00:56:47.000 What does this mean for the future of the party?

00:56:49.000 Do the tweets matter?

00:56:50.000 I don't think so.

00:56:51.000 Do the little non-troversies of the day matter?

00:56:53.000 I don't think so.

00:56:54.000 What matters is, is he going to be effective in office?

00:56:58.000 They said so many things about Ronald Reagan.

00:57:00.000 A new controversy has cropped up of calling Ronald Reagan a racist.

00:57:03.000 But they said it all about him during the 1980s.

00:57:06.000 And then Ronald Reagan became...

00:57:08.000 A saint.

00:57:09.000 He was a saint on the right, even many people on the left talked about what a great guy Reagan was, one of the most popular presidents in American history.

00:57:16.000 Why?

00:57:16.000 Because his administration was effective at bringing about economic growth, bringing about mourning in America, making Americans feel good about their country again, making Americans love their country again at a time when people didn't feel so great about America, gave us a quarter century of that kind of reputation and that legacy from Reagan.

00:57:37.000 There are a lot of parallels to today.

00:57:39.000 I mean, there is a great malaise in America.

00:57:42.000 There's an epidemic of despair going on in America.

00:57:45.000 You have the average life expectancy actually decreasing because of suicides and drug addiction.

00:57:49.000 People just don't feel very, very good.

00:57:52.000 If President Trump, hopefully after eight years, is able to make the economy boom, fix our border crisis, make our country more of a stable country again, make Americans love their country again, not protest the American flag, but actually revere the American flag.

00:58:09.000 If he can do that, if he can bring about a sort of mourning in America, I think all the tweets are going to fall away and people are going to look fondly on this period and that's going to bode very well for either the Republican Party or more importantly conservative ideas for the near future and then in 25 years we'll have to fight it all again.

00:58:28.000 So one of the things that's been very troubling for people on the conservative side of the aisle who would like to see President Trump Be victorious, get done a lot of conservative things, is the fact that he seems to step on himself an awful lot.

00:58:39.000 There are a lot of situations where he is so obsessed, it seems, with the trolling.

00:58:44.000 He's so obsessed with tweaking people that he goes out of his way to tweak people.

00:58:47.000 He'll go out of his way for the joke.

00:58:49.000 And we all have friends who are like this, but it can lose you a job and it can also make sure that you're a lot more unpopular than you need to be.

00:58:55.000 And so putting aside, you know, the question of his personal feelings about race, which I think, you know, for a lot of folks remains an open question, The question of efficacy, of efficiency, in how he presents himself, how do you think he's doing on that?

00:59:10.000 Because there do seem to be two schools of thought on this.

00:59:13.000 One is, he's got the base, the base already loves him, they're never going to leave him, and then there's a bunch of people in the middle of the country, and they look at his tweets, and they're off-putting, and he's putting himself behind the eight ball by continuing to do what he does.

00:59:22.000 And then there's the sort of more pro-Trump view, which is, this is all strategy, or maybe he's revving up the base and there aren't that many people in the middle.

00:59:30.000 Where do you fall on that particular debate?

00:59:31.000 I think he's good at show business, which actually takes in a lot of those different opinions.

00:59:36.000 I don't know that he's sitting there plotting out every single thing that's going to happen.

00:59:40.000 I think he just knows how to deliver a line.

00:59:43.000 He knows how to make people react to him in a certain way.

00:59:46.000 And so you're right.

00:59:47.000 I mean, a different politician who isn't Donald Trump.

00:59:50.000 You got to remember, Trump is an American original.

00:59:52.000 Some people try to emulate him.

00:59:54.000 Doesn't work.

00:59:55.000 Nobody is going to out Trump Trump.

00:59:57.000 Marco Rubio tried it in 2016.

00:59:58.000 Didn't work out.

01:00:01.000 So, a different kind of politician, a Mitt Romney-style politician, might focus on economic issues, might downplay cultural issues, immigration, things like that.

01:00:11.000 That's never going to work for Trump.

01:00:13.000 Trump is a product of the culture.

01:00:16.000 Forget the culture wars.

01:00:17.000 He is a cultural figure for the last four decades.

01:00:20.000 And so I think what he's done is, in some ways, he's made himself unlikable.

01:00:25.000 I have a lot of people tell me, I like what Trump is doing, but I hate the tweets.

01:00:29.000 I wish he would smile more.

01:00:30.000 I wish he wouldn't talk about Mika Brzezinski's face.

01:00:34.000 Sure, I see all of that.

01:00:36.000 But what he does in his provocations, in the tweets, is, one, he speaks directly to the American people.

01:00:44.000 He gives you a sense that you're really talking to him.

01:00:47.000 Sometimes he'll say, yeah, my one advisor wanted me to do this, but then my other advisor told me not to. 1.00

01:00:51.000 I think they're both idiots. 1.00

01:00:52.000 This is what I'm going to do. 1.00

01:00:53.000 I mean, he sort of gives you a window with all the misspellings and all the strange capitalizations and all of the gossip and even sometimes all of the cruelty to members of the staff.

01:01:02.000 You get that.

01:01:04.000 And what you get as a result of that, out of totally provocative statements and actions, is you get a left wing that today is calling to decriminalize border crossings.

01:01:17.000 A left wing that is protesting the American flag.

01:01:20.000 At a broad level, we're not talking about one or two players in one or two sports, we're talking about a broad movement here.

01:01:25.000 You're getting people to disrespect the United States, to refer to the 4th of July parade as a fascist endeavor.

01:01:33.000 You're getting a not insignificant portion of this country to compare the United States to Nazi Germany because AOC and the Squad are referring to immigration detention centers as concentration camps, comparing it to Auschwitz or Dachau or something like that.

01:01:51.000 This means that even if President Trump's approval rating is low.

01:01:54.000 I mean, in 2016, we had two candidates with very low approval ratings.

01:01:58.000 Even if his is low, he's running against people who are actually disrespecting the American flag of the 4th of July.

01:02:05.000 They might as well campaign against apple pie and the country itself.

01:02:09.000 And I think it puts him in a good position.

01:02:11.000 We would probably agree.

01:02:13.000 Trump has a lot of weaknesses going into this 2020 election.

01:02:17.000 If the economy starts to falter, then he's got serious weaknesses.

01:02:21.000 The only question is, who could beat him?

01:02:24.000 And of this crowd, I don't see anyone who could, especially the way that that party is trending.

01:02:29.000 So, I want to ask about sort of your religious journey.

01:02:30.000 I wanted to save it for now because I didn't want people to literally keel over and die of boredom in the middle of this actual thing.

01:02:36.000 So, I'm going to ask you to refrain from quoting doctrine too much.

01:02:39.000 But I can't speak in Latin, right?

01:02:41.000 No Latin. 1.00

01:02:42.000 Well, actually, the good thing is I actually can't speak in Latin, so that's helpful. 0.98

01:02:45.000 Okay, perfect, but you can tell it to me in Esperanto if you really want to.

01:02:48.000 But how did you become a religious Catholic?

01:02:50.000 Because for a while you weren't.

01:02:52.000 I was a total atheist.

01:02:53.000 I was, you know, baptized when I was born, cradle Catholic.

01:02:57.000 We were... I was always very interested in religion.

01:03:00.000 I actually read the Quran before I read the Bible.

01:03:02.000 I was always sort of fascinated with religious stories.

01:03:06.000 But about the time I was 13, I fell away.

01:03:10.000 I don't know.

01:03:10.000 I can't psychoanalyze myself.

01:03:12.000 Obviously, 13-year-old boys go through a lot of things.

01:03:15.000 But intellectually, at least, I was convinced that religion was childish. 0.97

01:03:19.000 This was at the time of the rise of the so-called New Atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and your buddy Sam Harris, and all those guys.

01:03:26.000 And it was just very popular at the time.

01:03:29.000 Looking back on it now, I think that their arguments are perfectly tailored to 13-year-olds.

01:03:34.000 But I was a 13-year-old, and so, at the time, I was taken with them.

01:03:38.000 And I went along with what is probably a very popular atheism for about 10 years.

01:03:43.000 Then I noticed something when I got to college.

01:03:46.000 Everyone there was very smart. 0.97

01:03:47.000 I don't mean to say my classmates were stupid. 0.96

01:03:48.000 They were really sharp. 0.99

01:03:50.000 The smartest of them were Christian.

01:03:53.000 Or Orthodox Jews, actually.

01:03:55.000 And I felt the smartest of them of all were really interested in religious tradition.

01:04:00.000 You know, they were Catholic, or they were Eastern Orthodox, they were liturgical, but they really had thought it through.

01:04:07.000 I thought, that's strange.

01:04:08.000 I thought all the smart people were atheists. 1.00

01:04:10.000 I thought all the stupid people were religious. 1.00

01:04:13.000 Then I heard some religious arguments. 1.00

01:04:15.000 One by a Calvinist philosopher, actually, Alvin Plantinga.

01:04:18.000 He popularized the modal ontological argument.

01:04:21.000 There are many other arguments for God.

01:04:22.000 The Thomistic arguments from Thomas Aquinas.

01:04:24.000 There was a very nice Protestant evangelist who handed me C.S.

01:04:27.000 Lewis one day.

01:04:29.000 Just apparently accidentally as I'm walking across the quad.

01:04:33.000 And I gave it a read and I thought, you know, this is pretty smart.

01:04:35.000 And I became fairly convinced that God exists.

01:04:38.000 And it was only after all of those intellectual arguments had taken hold, after I had appealed to my own intellectual pride and hubris, That the sense of the religious started to set in. 0.61

01:04:49.000 A little coincidence here and there.

01:04:50.000 There's a line from Alexander Pope who says, And when you look back on your life, you see direction everywhere.

01:04:57.000 all chance direction, which thou canst not see.

01:05:00.000 And when you look back on your life, you see direction everywhere.

01:05:03.000 What are the odds that this would work out?

01:05:08.000 In my own life, I've seen it a lot, pal.

01:05:09.000 You know, a blank book and all these kind of things.

01:05:11.000 So that got me interested.

01:05:13.000 Coincidentally, actually, the place that I saw that quote was on a book at a table at an event I was at.

01:05:18.000 It was a signed first edition.

01:05:20.000 I turned it over.

01:05:21.000 Bill Buckley had blurbed it and said, save this as a first edition.

01:05:24.000 I had been the Buckley fellow when I was in college.

01:05:27.000 I looked at where the church was.

01:05:28.000 It was right down the street.

01:05:29.000 I started going, and it just all clicked.

01:05:32.000 And this was now, I guess, years ago at this point.

01:05:36.000 And the more I think about it, the more endlessly I could think about it.

01:05:41.000 I mean, obviously, we cannot comprehend God.

01:05:45.000 We can't comprehend the faith.

01:05:46.000 I can't.

01:05:47.000 You could ask me a million questions about my faith that I would have no answer for.

01:05:51.000 And Cardinal Newman said, 10,000 problems doesn't make one doubt.

01:05:55.000 If I had a faith that I could perfectly explain to you, I can promise you.

01:05:59.000 It's not a true faith.

01:06:01.000 But it's something you learn.

01:06:02.000 You know, your pal Andrew Breitbart, I never got to meet him, he said politics is downstream of culture.

01:06:07.000 And Russell Kirk, the conservative writer, pointed out that cult and culture come from the same word.

01:06:11.000 The culture is actually downstream of what the culture worships.

01:06:15.000 And that's religion.

01:06:16.000 And it's been said many times that at bottom all political disagreements are really theological disagreements.

01:06:22.000 And you know this.

01:06:23.000 If we'll have a cigar, well you'll have a bubble pipe, but we'll have cigars or a drink or something like that.

01:06:28.000 Are we just talking about politics the whole time?

01:06:30.000 No way.

01:06:31.000 It always gets down to deeper questions.

01:06:34.000 And what I fear for a society that abandons that is One, you're going to have really shallow conversations to begin.

01:06:42.000 But also, everybody's got to serve somebody.

01:06:44.000 People have a lot of religious views.

01:06:46.000 They read the horoscope.

01:06:47.000 They believe in crystals.

01:06:48.000 Some of them are religions that are focused on their diet, or on their yoga, or on whatever.

01:06:54.000 Everybody's got to serve somebody.

01:06:56.000 And so, I think, if you're a serious person, you should take those questions seriously.

01:07:01.000 Because ultimately, Eternally.

01:07:03.000 Those are the questions that matter.

01:07:04.000 So other religious question that comes up a lot, and this is not just for Catholics, obviously this is true for evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews as well, is the dealing of religious people with President Trump.

01:07:15.000 So the religious people are sort of conflicted on this.

01:07:18.000 So on the one hand, President Trump has given them a lot of their priorities.

01:07:21.000 And when they look at the choice between, okay, man who we think lacks character, but is not going to attack religion, and folks who may have more personal character, but also are going to spend their days attacking religion or calling us bad Christians for not...

01:07:34.000 Applying their sense of social values, that choice is pretty easy.

01:07:38.000 But one of the things that I think that a lot of religious folks have fallen into is an inability to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

01:07:43.000 So it's turned into President Trump is the be-all end-all.

01:07:46.000 We will defend him no matter what he says because political warfare is political warfare.

01:07:50.000 And my great fear for religious folks is that, just the same as for conservatives generally, you undermine your own credibility when you refuse to call out sin, so long as the sinner happens to be promoting your particular viewpoint.

01:08:01.000 How should religious people be dealing with this dichotomy in President Trump?

01:08:03.000 Well, as always, they should do it honestly.

01:08:06.000 But I think Trump, in some ways, gets a little bit too bad a rap.

01:08:10.000 And it's not because he's this morally perfect person, but it's because he just gets a really, really bad rap.

01:08:17.000 If I'm judging the integrity of my president, one of the key features that I'm going to look at is if he keeps his promises, if he keeps his campaign promises.

01:08:26.000 There have been a lot of studies on this.

01:08:27.000 The Heritage Foundation famously did one.

01:08:30.000 He's been pretty good on the promises.

01:08:31.000 He's enacted a conservative agenda at a pretty fast rate.

01:08:34.000 They said in the early days, faster than Ronald Reagan.

01:08:37.000 That shows integrity.

01:08:38.000 That shows, you know, specifically with the case of moving the U.S.

01:08:41.000 Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

01:08:43.000 Every president said they were going to do it.

01:08:45.000 It had been U.S. 0.84

01:08:46.000 policy officially since the 1990s.

01:08:49.000 And we knew they weren't going to do it.

01:08:51.000 George W. Bush campaigned on it.

01:08:52.000 He didn't do it.

01:08:53.000 Barack Obama campaigned on it.

01:08:54.000 He didn't do it.

01:08:55.000 Donald Trump campaigned on it.

01:08:56.000 I never thought he would do it.

01:08:58.000 Then he did it.

01:08:58.000 I said, wait a second, you're not supposed to do what you said that you're going to do.

01:09:01.000 Even when it comes down to trying to open up talks with North Korea, even it comes down to things that you might not like, like trade tariffs.

01:09:10.000 He's actually followed through on a lot of what he's saying.

01:09:12.000 I think that does speak to a certain kind of character.

01:09:15.000 Now, is he a thrice-married, lapsed Presbyterian?

01:09:17.000 Yeah, he might be, but who am I comparing him to when I'm looking at politicians?

01:09:23.000 If I could be ruled by an angel, I would vote for the angel, but politicians generally are pretty sordid and corrupt people, and those who seek the presidency are often the most sordid and the most corrupt, so I don't see any Conflict.

01:09:35.000 For me, I sleep easy every single night.

01:09:38.000 I don't pretend that Donald Trump is, you know, a living saint or an angel, but I'm really pleased with what he's done.

01:09:44.000 And I think he's actually, in the office, demonstrated considerable character.

01:09:47.000 Okay, so in just a second, I'm going to ask you how we convince young people, because the polls among young people are particularly awful for Republicans.

01:09:53.000 We're moving in the wrong direction in terms of religion for young people.

01:09:55.000 So what is the first step toward winning young people back?

01:09:58.000 That will be the final question.

01:09:59.000 But if you want to hear Michael Moulse's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.

01:10:03.000 To subscribe, go over to dailywire.com.

01:10:04.000 You can click subscribe.

01:10:05.000 You can hear the end of our conversation there.

01:10:07.000 Also, when you subscribe, you get my show.

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01:10:12.000 But go check us over at dailywire.com and click subscribe.

01:10:16.000 Well, Michael, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

01:10:17.000 So thanks for stopping by.

01:10:18.000 Thank you for having me.

01:10:19.000 See you next time.

01:10:20.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Haig.

01:10:32.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boren.

01:10:34.000 Associate producer, Colton Haas.

01:10:36.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:10:38.000 Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.

01:10:40.000 Editing by Donovan Fowler.

01:10:42.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Peromino.

01:10:44.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:10:46.000 Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

01:10:48.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 04, 2019

Michael Knowles | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 62

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