Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Michael Knowles (D-Massachusetts) join host Glenn Beck to discuss the Democratic National Convention in Iowa. They discuss the chaos that is the Iowa caucus and what it means for the future of the 2020 campaign.
00:00:00.000Welcome to the podcast. Today, man, it's a big show today. We had Ted Cruz on the program, host of at least co-host of the number one podcast in America, which is Verdict with Ted Cruz. You may also know him as a senator. He was on today to talk about everything going on and Michael Knowles as well.
00:00:17.340So Michael Knowles comes on later. He's the co-host of that same podcast, and he's great. He's on Daily Wire, and he's got all these stuff on not only impeachment and Iowa, but also we talked a lot about Rush Limbaugh and his announcement and what he's meant to radio and all of our lives as far as formulating an ideology, really, to that base level.
00:00:39.420So Nigel Farage is on over here. You may have seen his great speech when it came to Brexit just the other day. He's going to the State of the Union tonight. He's in our studios during this podcast, and Steve Dace is in Iowa talking about everything going on there.
00:00:54.400He knows the internal workings of Iowa politics better than anybody, and he just gave us all sorts of great background on what's going on in this embarrassing disaster of the Iowa caucus for the Democrats.
00:01:08.140So it's all coming up on today's podcast.
00:01:16.460You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:01:24.980Senator Ted Cruz. How are you, Senator?
00:01:27.680Glenn, I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing?
00:01:29.140I was watching last night, and I remembered being at the caucus for you in Iowa, and what a bizarre system that is.
00:01:42.200Last night, I think the Democrats showed us that, oh, they're on top of securing the election results.
00:01:49.920It is an absolute mess. It is chaos, and, you know, I've got to say, I really feel for all of the thousands of volunteers.
00:02:01.260You know, you've got candidates who've spent a year or more crisscrossing the state, and as you know, you've got volunteers.
00:02:07.520We had people come from Texas from all over the country in 2016, basically move to Iowa, stay in dormitories,
00:02:14.260and go out in blizzards, knocking on doors, making phone calls.
00:02:18.680They poured their hearts into it, and it's not too much to have at the end of the night an election result.
00:02:24.920No, I mean, you know, that's a nice benefit.
00:02:28.420I cannot imagine the frustration, the anger they're feeling.
00:02:32.700So, Ted, what is your – I mean, let me give you some of the headlines.
00:02:38.800Republicans gloat over Iowa caucus meltdown.
00:02:42.000You're actually – this is from CBS News.
00:12:06.360I think that contrast is playing out beautifully.
00:12:10.300And so my advice to the president for tonight, for State of the Union, is the same thing, is be positive and optimistic and lay out the future.
00:12:17.880And just don't even talk about the impeachment.
00:14:24.760So what I have been saying from the beginning is that if we go down the road of witnesses, that we needed to respect the principle of reciprocity.
00:14:32.160In other words, we couldn't do what the House did, have a one-sided show trial where only prosecution witnesses are allowed and you block every defense witness, which is what the House Democrats did.
00:14:43.780And so what I early on was urging my colleagues to do is if we go down the road to witnesses, and I initially just kind of kept my mind open on whether we would have them or not.
00:14:53.200But I said if we go down the road, we need to do it even handedly.
00:15:11.400But I think it also ended up playing a big part in the final decision not to go down the road of additional witnesses.
00:15:19.140And that ended up being an important vote.
00:15:22.240I spent a lot of time within the conference trying to get us to 51 votes to say enough is enough.
00:15:29.240The American people are tired of this.
00:15:31.500There were 18 witnesses who testified the House proceeding.
00:15:34.300We heard hour after hour of witness testimony of documents, the most important documents in the entire impeachment proceeding, which is the transcript of the call that's at issue here.
00:15:43.860The president declassified and released.
00:15:46.540And so we had a ton of evidence before us.
00:15:49.400And on all the evidence, the president hadn't committed an impeachable crime.
00:15:53.660He hadn't met – the House managers didn't meet the constitutional standard of high crimes or misdemeanors.
00:15:59.240And so I, at the end of the day, agreed that we didn't need additional witnesses because they hadn't proven their case.
00:16:05.620But I think laying out reciprocity, making clear that this will go both ways, I've got to tell you one of the consequences of that.
00:16:14.580I think there were a whole bunch of Democrats who were terrified of going down the road of witnesses.
00:16:21.580But I think it was one of those instances in the Senate where they voted yes and were hoping the answer was no.
00:16:26.400Because if we'd gone down the road of witnesses, if we'd been hearing testimony from Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, I think it would have been very – Democrats are terrified of the evidence of corruption.
00:20:17.880I mean, that's what you're watching, and the same people that want to ruin everything else in the culture are ruining the Iowa caucuses in real time as we speak.
00:20:29.080So this is something that they said that they had, they were working on.
00:20:33.360They said, we've got all kinds of backup.
00:20:41.200Firstly, first of all, do you believe that any of the crazy conspiracies that are going around, mainly, I think, from Bernie people, because if I were a Bernie person and they treated him like they did last time and now he's winning and you're taking that away, you lost the poll.
00:21:02.200That just mysteriously was not fit to print the day before, and he was number one in that poll.
00:21:10.660Do you believe any of the conspiracies?
00:23:51.820Are you going to be able to trust – are you going to be able to trust these numbers at all because they're clearly not telling you the truth of how bad it is?
00:24:00.440I think it's obvious that they're not – that part, they're not telling you the truth.
00:24:04.440And last time I heard that sound is when I met my wife because we met on an AOL chat room 25 years ago, okay?
00:24:11.940And so it's – the whole thing is ridiculous, and I think what you're learning is that the counting process doesn't have full confidence and accountability, that they didn't do these counts properly because here's – the process is with the hurting process.
00:24:30.580When your candidate's not viable and you've got to move from one candidate to another and all of that politicking is going on right there in real time, I'm sure a lot of your listeners saw this on cable news last night at caucus sites where, you know, Andrew Yang's not viable or at a lot of caucus sites, Joe Biden wasn't viable last night.
00:24:49.180And so where are his supporters going to go?
00:24:51.580And so trying to figure that out through the process of three counts, it's pretty obvious they're not sure about their own count because if they were, we'd have had these results by now.
00:25:02.960Now we have California saying that they have a new app too, and they're going to be voting for the first time on an app.
00:25:12.500You think that's going to change between now and the California primary?
00:25:18.340I – you know, it's funny how we think that – and this is kind of the progressive mindset, isn't it, Glenn, that anything old is bad, anything old.
00:25:36.860But maybe the reason why your great-grandmother passed her chocolate chip cookie recipe down to your grandmother and her – your grandmother passed it down to your mom and she's passing it down to you now is because it's the best damn chocolate chip cookie recipe anybody's found.
00:26:04.880How do the people in Iowa feel today, those people who worked their butts off, who canvassed neighborhoods, who have, you know, dragged people out to make sure that they were at caucus, their vote really almost doesn't matter now because Iowa is the first.
00:26:31.200And if I were a voter, I would be so angry that my vote – I've been disenfranchised.
00:26:38.340Even if they count it later, it doesn't – that's not what I went for.
00:26:43.740We went to set the table and to start this thing, and now my voice hasn't been heard.
00:26:49.400I think you've got two choices in how to react to this.
00:26:55.040One is you don't want to admit the entire fallacy of your statist worldview.
00:27:00.920And so you'll go to conspiracy because you don't want to admit that central planning on this level, bureaucracy on this level, simply can't be trusted and doesn't work.
00:27:13.360That the same fallibilities in human nature that beguiles all of us doesn't go away when we put on a government uniform or we belong to a central structure.
00:27:24.660We bring those same imperfections into the process with us.
00:27:30.180You can either admit that you have been a victim of your own worldview, that what you want to do to healthcare, what you already did to education and energy, the reason why you wrecked those industries is because it's – you don't need smarter people.
00:27:46.180You can now admit this to yourself now that you're a first-person victim of this or because you don't want to admit this to yourself, you just say these particular people implementing it are bad, and you go down the road of a conspiracy.
00:27:58.740I think that's the choice Iowa Democrats have today.
00:28:02.600Steve, would you say it's fair, just judging by the way these candidates are reacting to the potential results that are on the way, that Buttigieg seemingly did pretty well and Biden did not do well?
00:28:16.860I think if – you know, Bernie Sanders this morning put out what his canvassers had internally at about 40 percent or almost half of the precincts, and it lines up a lot with what the leaked results of the Des Moines Register poll that were never officially unveiled have to say.
00:28:33.320And it goes with the trend line, Stu, that I tweeted out in the middle of the night last night, just following a lot of Democrats across the state reporting from their caucus sites on Twitter, pardon me, that it looked pretty close between Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren, and it looked like Klobuchar could topple Biden for fourth place.
00:28:49.680So I think what you see out of this process is Joe Biden is a mortally wounded candidate, and you're already seeing polls in South Carolina close.
00:28:58.860This whole thing about the black vote is largely overblown because I think what people don't understand, because a lot of Republicans get their view of the Democratic Party from the media and Twitter.
00:29:08.920And the reality is black folks aren't watching CNN and MSNBC.
00:29:16.540And so they're going to pay attention to the race once it gets to them, and you're going to see the candidates that have the momentum are going to close the gap, similar to how South Carolina was going to be Hillary Clinton's black firewall in 2008.
00:29:28.700And that's the place where Barack Obama essentially won the nomination after winning Iowa.
00:29:33.660So I think that you're seeing Joe Biden is a mortally wounded candidate in this race.
00:29:41.900So Sanders, I mean, it was either Sanders or Buttigieg that won last night, I think, just based on everything that we do know.
00:29:51.920Sanders has been, and Buttigieg, I mean, Buttigieg hasn't been robbed as much as Sanders has, because Sanders could have used the momentum.
00:30:04.560Buttigieg even coming in second really helps him a great deal.
00:30:10.980Sanders not getting that push and seeing a dominant win hurts him.
00:30:35.840I think Buttigieg is the candidate that got screwed more than anybody else.
00:30:39.400I think that's why you saw him out there and declare victory last night openly, trying to capture some kind of momentum, because he lost a chance to kind of be the shiny object and the new hotness.
00:30:49.140And I think what the National Democratic Party is wrestling with right now is if it's really a Bloomberg-Bernie Sanders choice for them, which is do they think Michael Bloomberg is somebody that can win enough of their base over to stop Bernie Sanders?
00:31:06.460And if not, then time to get your seat in before the music stops playing, which is the Soviet national anthem.
00:31:14.920But you've been playing it for years anyway.