Ep. 163 - Bad Jokes： Roseanne And The Left’s Fake Outrage
Summary
Roseanne Barr's sitcom is canceled after a joke about an ex-government aide, and the left pounced. Meanwhile, Carol Markowitz stops by to discuss why New York Democrats are especially corrupt. And best news of all, you might not be able to tell, but I did survive my bachelor party.
Transcript
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Roseanne Barr told a joke in poor taste about an ex-government aide,
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and so within five seconds, ABC has canceled one of the most popular shows in the country.
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We will analyze the fake outrage and where the problem really lies.
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Meanwhile, nuclear talks with North Korea proceed a pace.
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Everything is tickety-boo, so we just have to make up reasons to be all upset and angry.
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Then, Carol Markowitz stops by to discuss why New York Democrats are especially corrupt.
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And best news of all, you might not be able to tell, but I did survive my bachelor party.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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You say, gosh, Michael looks like a swollen, sweaty, boozy, smoky, hollow husk of a man,
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I tell you, I am really particular about the clothing I wear.
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I wanted to get into some of the racial stereotypes and poor jokes by talking about Peter Millar
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because what we've got to talk about today is Roseanne Barr.
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ABC News has canceled Roseanne's mega super hit revival of her sitcom.
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They canceled it because Roseanne told a bad joke that was in poor taste and had a racial
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She told a joke about Valerie Jarrett, an ex-government aide.
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Meanwhile, do you remember Kathy Griffin held up Donald Trump's bloodied head in that joke
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But it took a long time for her to, you know, people turn.
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The question is, why is Kathy Griffin a C-list comedian on CNN to begin with?
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Michelle Wolfe insulted the appearance of Sarah Sanders, the sitting press secretary
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at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, to her face.
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Everyone's defending Kathy Griffin on the left.
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Kathy Griffin, both of whom are unapologetic, by the way.
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Both of them are currently unapologetic about their jokes.
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And nevertheless, they canceled her really quickly.
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ABC wrote, quote, Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with
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our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.
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So what I'm going to do here is attack the left and the immediacy of this response, the
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But I have to be crystal clear these days because the left is so ready to pounce.
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They need anything to try to attack the right, even if it's minor, even if it's a misdirection
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We'll see why it failed, why it was weak, and why the left, I think, is disingenuous as
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But, um, so, okay, let's, we've, we've introed this enough.
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Roseanne told this joke, quote, because it was in a tweet, so it's not terribly grammatical,
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Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby equals VJ.
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You're not doubled over, guffawing with laughter?
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You're not, I don't think anybody is saying, ah, ha, ha, Roseanne, right.
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She didn't, not like some of these other comedians on the left or on the, who, you know, takes
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them days to even sort of apologize, or in Kathy Griffin's case, she unapologizes.
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She did it immediately, and she was right to do it because the joke was not good.
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So now we have to ask ourselves, is this apology legitimate?
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Or does Roseanne Barr just hate black people, just want to discriminate against black people,
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Nobody, I think Roseanne cast a black child to play her granddaughter on the revival of Roseanne.
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I don't think that, I don't think she's out there with the tiki torches and the pointy white hats.
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Does anybody out there seriously believe that Roseanne is this angry, bitter, vicious,
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anti-black racist who wants to bring back Jim Crow?
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But we all have to pretend that now because things are going too well in the country.
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And Roseanne had to show she had the audacity to vote for Donald Trump.
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They got to hit anyone even vaguely associated with Trump.
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To understand this joke, we will analyze this joke very precisely and why Roseanne shouldn't
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have her entire life ruined because of it, but why the left is going after it.
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Before we do that, we have to explain who is Valerie Jarrett.
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Valerie Jarrett had the ear of Barack Obama for his entire two terms in the White House.
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She's very close to the Obamas, but we don't know a lot about her.
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Well, I do, but it's because I took five minutes to Google it.
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She was the co-chairman of the Obama-Biden transition team.
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She helped set up everything in this White House.
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And the first part of the Roseanne joke, which is not being talked about, is linking Valerie
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Valerie Jarrett, a senior, senior advisor to Barack Obama, does have ties to the Muslim
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Brotherhood, and she has ties to a lot of radical extreme leftist groups.
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Well, Judicial Watch, that wonderful government watchdog, was able to get files from the FBI
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that show that Jarrett's father, that her maternal grandfather, and her father-in-law were
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Well, Valerie Jarrett's father, Dr. James Bowman, he corresponded and communicated with
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and spoke to a paid Soviet agent, Alfred Stern, half a century ago.
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Bowman then moved to Iran for work in the 1950s.
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Her maternal grandfather, Robert Rochon Taylor, also had business ties to that Soviet agent,
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And so they all moved around D.C., Chicago, Iran.
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I don't know which, I mean, is that the axis of evil?
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So Valerie Jarrett, her father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, is a big-time Chicago communist.
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He was considered by the FBI, we know from these documents, to be a potential communist
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Jarrett has ties, along with our president, to Frank Marshall Davis, a well-known communist.
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And Jarrett has ties to a lot of Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations.
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The Obama administration tried to convince us that the Muslim Brotherhood is this moderate.
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We know from a 1991 memorandum from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the group's stated goal
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is, quote, eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.
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These are the ties to the senior advisor of the president.
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She has these connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and that was part of Roseanne's attempted joke.
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So even early on in the Obama administration, 2009, the Obama administration chose Ingrid
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Mattson, who's a leader of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group, the Islamic Society of North America,
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Barack Obama sent Valerie Jarrett, this senior advisor, to be the keynote speaker at an ISNA
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national conference linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
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After that, Barack Obama tapped Arif Ali Khan to be Assistant Secretary for Policy Development
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He did that two weeks after Ali Khan participated in a fundraiser for the Muslim Public Affairs
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Council, which is another admittedly Muslim Brotherhood-linked group.
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Documents from that group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, admit to following immediately
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in the footsteps of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and being linked to that organization
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In Roseanne's apology, she said, I'm sorry for joking in this way about Valerie Jarrett's
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But Roseanne, because she constructed the joke, because it wasn't attempted a joke, knew there
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are these two aspects to it, the Muslim Brotherhood line and then the ape line, the Planet of the
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An example of this joke, if you were to make this joke about little old me, for instance,
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you could say, William F. Buckley Jr. and a bottle of Bertolli Extra Virgin had a baby.
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You have the ideological component, and then you have this racial component, because I don't
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know, maybe you're very naive and young and idealistic and pure, but Italian people are
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Now, what's interesting is that the left only takes issue with the racial part here.
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They don't, they're not attacking her for saying, how dare you say Valerie Jarrett is
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Because the one, the racial joke is just a very basic, low-hanging racial joke.
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But the ideological joke is, I think, more interesting, right?
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It's about what Valerie Jarrett thinks, what she believes.
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You're accusing her of having relations with this extremist Muslim group, but that part,
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Let's hit her with the lower-hanging racist line.
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Joe Scarborough, right after this comes out, Joe Scarborough goes, hey, ABC, Roseanne compared
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There is no apology she can make that justifies ABC turning a blind eye to this bigotry by airing
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Even in the age of Trump, these are red lines that can never be crossed.
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You knew Al Sharpton was going to get on the scene.
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I'm surprised Al Sharpton didn't start tweeting about this before it even happened.
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Then another one, DeRay McKesson, who came to prominence as an activist during the Black
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ABC, how desperate are you to profit from Roseanne's racism?
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And this is an important charge because DeRay McKesson is saying her apology is BS.
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Have they been talking to Roseanne's agents or looking into this or looking into Roseanne's
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And that's the problem here because I am not defending the joke.
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I'm just comparing the treatment that Roseanne got for making a joke and poor taste about
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aspects of people's identity and that maybe offend a lot of people or go over the line
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I'm comparing that to so many other comedians who have gotten way better treatment.
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Because politics at this point is beyond parody, we have superseded parody, Andrea Mitchell of
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NBC thought it would be a good idea to interview one of the NBC contributors about this whole
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dust up on someone making offensive comments about broad groups of people on social media
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And then I want to also ask you about, it's hard to believe, but Roseanne Barr, and she
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has been tweeting outrageous things, but she tweeted about the Obama administration and
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Valerie Jarrett and made a really horrendous comment about Valerie Jarrett.
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Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby, VJ, meaning Valerie Jarrett.
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Now she has apologized to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans, saying, I'm truly sorry
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for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks.
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I mean, what do you have to do on social media to get fired from a top rated show on an American
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What do you have to do on social media to get fired from an American broadcast network?
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Just to remind you, because I know politics moves so fast these days that you've probably
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Joy Reid was just discovered to have made a ton of very offensive tweets about broad groups
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of people on social media years ago on her blog.
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She tweeted out, she accused gay men of all wanting to, all being sexually attracted to
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Said, oh yeah, everybody knows this about gay men.
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They all want to have sex with young teenage boys.
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She tweeted out, homophobic is the term that's being used, anti-gay slurs, anti-gay accusations,
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She said, oh no, I don't, I don't remember doing that.
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By the way, when someone says they were hacked for something they said or did, that's how
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Did even MSNBC, which is left of Lenin, they said, oh no, we don't need to fire her.
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No, you know, hey, look, she made these horribly offensive comments just a little while
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ago, but you know, we'll give her the benefit of the doubt.
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So, okay, Roseanne was right to apologize, sure.
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I actually don't think people understand why this joke was in bad taste, why it was right
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Before we explain the joke for all of the humorless left, because the defining feature of the
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Well, all racial jokes of this quality, they all attempt to portray people as animals or uncivilized or unconscious.
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So it basically – all the jokes play on taking a human being who has consciousness and saying you're not really conscious.
00:23:01.560
You're – so for black people who have dark skin, a racial joke along that line will compare them to an animal that has dark skin.
00:23:10.220
But this trope has existed in other places too.
00:23:13.440
In Black Panther, in the comic book and the movie Black Panther, there's a character, M'Baku, and his other name is Man-Ape.
00:23:21.140
They're drawing that parallel, right, because he's this brutal, adversarial character.
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This isn't just a line of joking for black people.
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Now, I'll use the race that constitutes my own ethnic heritage so that I don't get Roseanne, so that I don't – somehow ABC is going to fire me.
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So for Italians, you hear the term – we'll just use the term greaseball.
00:23:49.660
Well, it's saying southern Italians are – they're less refined.
00:24:00.260
They're not aware of how, you know, brutal they are, so they can't take care of it.
00:24:04.380
Another one used in Italy is terrone, which comes from the land, right?
00:24:21.200
I know it's a little – it evokes this image of a car horn or something.
00:24:24.780
What it comes from, it's actually an Hungarian insult.
00:24:27.380
It's an insult from the mispronunciation of honky from Hungarians, and it's referring to Hungarian laborers, manual laborers who don't work with their minds, work with their hands.
00:24:37.160
Roseanne's Planet of the Apes reference, greaseball, Dago is an Italian one, hungary, you know, honky from your hands.
00:24:46.280
All of them just mock the lack of consciousness.
00:24:51.780
Because with Valerie Jarrett, it came out of nowhere.
00:24:54.580
So Valerie Jarrett is this very sophisticated woman.
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Her race is not central to what's funny about Valerie Jarrett as a character.
00:25:17.320
And so anyway, we get out of this, this feigned outrage from the left, and I really think it's feigned.
00:25:32.460
But does the left really think that she hates black people, that Roseanne is some secret neo-Nazi?
00:25:37.480
And the way that I know it's feigned is because of Kathy Griffin and Michelle Wolf.
00:25:41.260
Michelle – Kathy Griffin, rather, holds up this photo of Donald Trump's decapitated head.
00:25:48.920
And then she – we know she doesn't like Trump.
00:26:05.700
I am just now seeing the reaction of these images.
00:26:25.060
So that was comedian Kathy Griffin apologizing for her infamous photo shoot holding the decapitated
00:26:32.980
She caused an uproar and made some powerful enemies.
00:26:36.320
But she's not really, you know, taking it very hard anymore.
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She's telling us how tough things got and how she's going to, you know, come through it.
00:26:46.060
She's going to get back on the road and keep on rolling.
00:26:48.480
Please welcome back the fabulous Kathy Griffin.
00:27:04.700
We're going to need to ding that bell if that happens again, Kathy.
00:27:07.720
The sons, Don Jr. and Eric, or as I called them, Eddie Munster and date rape.
00:27:13.580
This president is different and I have been through the mill.
00:27:18.420
I sold out Carnegie Hall in less than 24 hours.
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I knew from the minute she gave that apology that she wasn't really apologizing.
00:27:34.200
She said, I just saw the reaction to the photo.
00:27:42.120
They'll say you'll they'll say something awful about you or insult you or something.
00:27:46.980
And they say, oh, well, I'm sorry if you feel offended.
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You can't apologize for how somebody reacts to that.
00:28:04.480
Kathy Griffin says, I'm sorry that people reacted that way.
00:28:17.300
The press secretary, Sarah Sanders, viciously wasn't terribly funny, joked about her appearance
00:28:24.700
The left defends both of them, both of them utterly unapologetic.
00:28:28.020
The left defends both of them, defends the jokes, defends the sets, defends making fun of
00:28:32.980
And in the case of in the case of Kathy Griffin, holding up the bloody decapitated head of the
00:28:48.900
It's and it's to point out how disingenuous the left's alleged offense here is alleged outrage.
00:28:57.060
Just over the weekend, I tried not to read the news too much this weekend, but I couldn't
00:29:00.540
help with this one's the left exposed themselves for their feigned outrage.
00:29:05.800
There were these photos that came out of immigrant children being held in custody, being in these
00:29:11.360
conditions where they're sleeping on the floor and they're behind bars and they're illegal
00:29:16.280
aliens who have come into America and they're being held in.
00:29:21.080
John Favreau, former advisor to the president, excuse me, a former advisor to President Obama
00:29:25.500
said, quote, this is what is happening right now.
00:29:28.140
The only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their
00:29:34.520
Jake Silverstein, the editor in chief of New York Times Magazine, editor in chief.
00:29:38.860
All of these photos are disturbing, but the first two are especially awful.
00:29:55.200
You had a senior advisor to Barack Obama tweeting about how terribly the government was handling
00:30:00.280
immigration, how awful it was, how we have to force them to change.
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Silverstein, the editor of New York Times Magazine.
00:30:09.340
How do these people become the editors of these magazines?
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Editor of New York Times Magazine tweets the same thing.
00:30:20.980
Because if it were real, they would have left their tweets up and they would have turned on
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But it's fake because they're hacks because it's just made up.
00:30:30.860
And it's to score political points when everything is going so well politically, economically,
00:30:36.800
On every front, things are going well in the country.
00:30:39.520
So they have to seize on these little, little moments and blow them up into something that
00:30:44.760
CNN reporter Hadassi Gold, by the way, tweeted the photos.
00:30:50.060
She said, deleted the previous tweet because it gave the impression of recent photos.
00:30:55.280
Well, that's a quite a different tone from what you were saying before.
00:31:06.400
I think you don't want egg on your face and you're unwilling to attack Obama for the same
00:31:16.080
If the whole story were Roseanne tweeted this joke that made fun of Joy Reid's appearance
00:31:21.840
and it had a racial component and then ABC fired her, I would say, okay, that, I guess
00:31:27.640
You compare a black person to Planet of the Apes, you're going to lose your job.
00:31:33.380
But I can't believe it's, it's not disingenuous.
00:31:36.920
When I look at Michelle Wolf, Kathy Griffin, Joy Reid, all of those immigrant photos, it's
00:31:43.740
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but we have a great interview coming up from
00:31:48.760
Carol Markowitz, great New York post columnist has done excellent reporting on New York politics,
00:31:54.340
state and local, this awful, corrupt, corrosive place.
00:31:57.720
Since I'm in New York, I thought it would be fun to delve into some of that, the home of
00:32:01.640
Anthony Wiener, Elliot Spitzer, Schneiderman list goes on and on.
00:32:06.840
And at the very end, if we have time, I'll tell you a little bit about my bachelor party,
00:32:10.240
but we need, we definitely need to keep that for after the paywall.
00:32:12.920
I think we probably have to censor every word of it.
00:32:14.860
I'm sure the producers will bleep everything out.
00:32:16.860
It's probably why you might, I don't know if you can see in the camera, my eye bags and
00:32:22.680
That's what happens after a weekend of your pals sending you off to eternal marital bliss.
00:32:31.060
It is $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
00:32:33.520
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get to ask
00:32:38.180
And I'm going to try to take some mailbag questions before I go off to my honeymoon,
00:32:48.860
The best of all, and I don't have this right now, you'll get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
00:32:56.040
And I got to tell you folks, when the deluge comes in, I am going to drown.
00:33:02.780
Why didn't I stay in LA with a Tumblr, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
00:33:09.820
Okay, scandalous bachelor party tales coming up.
00:33:24.220
Before we get to that, Carol Markowitz, New York Post columnist, great writer on New York
00:33:30.060
Let's talk, because I'm sick and tired of attacking the left nationally today.
00:33:34.560
I want to attack the left in New York specifically.
00:33:37.360
So I sat down before I left with Carol Markowitz.
00:33:50.740
It's always good to be back in the city so nice they named it twice.
00:33:54.980
And I've noticed something about New York politics that is pretty strange.
00:34:01.380
It attracts the worst human beings on the face of the earth.
00:34:06.360
Anthony Weiner, Elliot Spitzer, Eric Schneiderman.
00:34:10.860
Those are just the big names that have recently come up.
00:34:19.720
What is it about New York that attracts these bizarre, callow, shallow, quasi-psychopaths?
00:34:28.300
Well, I think, I mean, my theory is it's because it's a one-party town.
00:34:31.780
It's so rare for Republicans to win most of these positions.
00:34:36.900
You know, once in a while we'll have a Republican mayor when things get really, really bad or governor.
00:34:41.340
But very rarely will we have city council or any other position held by a Republican.
00:34:46.820
So they live in this, like, insular world where their competition is only other Democrats and it's a real party machine.
00:34:55.080
And I think they just don't learn to compete fairly or nicely or, you know, to really be able to, they don't have to be good people.
00:35:13.460
It reminds me of Chicago, you know, these other big cities, D.C., which just breeds this corruption.
00:35:19.680
But I have another theory on this, especially when you talk about the state politicians like Schneiderman or Elliot Spitzer, some of those other guys, Cuomo.
00:35:29.260
I'm not lumping him in quite there yet, but he is a bulldog of a man.
00:35:32.280
And my theory on this is that Albany is not a very pleasant city to live in.
00:35:45.620
They, you know, they really want to make it in politics.
00:35:49.140
And then you send them up to this town in the middle of nowhere.
00:35:52.160
And it just, you know, it attracts this really bizarre kind of mentality.
00:35:57.620
That's my theory on, in particular, why New York calls.
00:36:02.260
Now, I want to talk about Eric Schneiderman in particular.
00:36:09.940
And he, Donald Trump, Nostradonald, as I've taken to calling him, predicted in 2013.
00:36:20.580
Mark my words, Schneiderman's going to be next.
00:36:24.320
So five years later, it comes out that this guy is non-consensually battering women.
00:36:40.000
Because I don't think that Donald Trump actually sees the future.
00:36:49.960
And I think it was also true with Spitzer and Wiener.
00:36:52.540
I think there were whispers for a long time about these men.
00:36:57.620
And in part, again, it comes back to they had the right politics.
00:37:01.180
And so even in the story where a woman was debating whether or not to come forward about
00:37:09.220
And she was like, well, he has the right politics.
00:37:13.160
And another woman had friends say to her, you know, don't do this to this guy.
00:37:18.880
And, you know, we don't want to lose him politically.
00:37:21.840
So I think that it's definitely a whisper situation where people did know and no one cared because
00:37:29.700
they were doing the right political things for them.
00:37:33.980
I remember a New York assemblyman said that Albany is the most corrupt state capital in
00:37:39.960
I remember even in my own district where I grew up, the state senator, Vincent Leibel,
00:37:50.000
And he ended up getting booked by the FBI for corruption schemes and misusing money and
00:37:56.340
It just was such a such a poisonous environment that people would cover up for everybody.
00:38:02.400
It was an open secret about who was corrupt, who was this, who was doing this to this person
00:38:08.560
But you wouldn't talk about it because the machine protected itself.
00:38:12.840
Now I want to talk about this guy, Aaron Schlossberg.
00:38:16.260
He's that lawyer who was in a Manhattan deli and he yelled at a worker there for speaking
00:38:23.620
Let's just cut to a quick little cut of that tape.
00:38:27.340
Clients say your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking
00:38:52.680
So my next call is to ICE to have each one of them get out of my country.
00:38:56.140
If they have the vote to come here and live off of my money, I pay for their welfare.
00:39:07.280
Running a place in Midtown Manhattan, your staff should be speaking English.
00:39:20.040
Maybe you should get hit by a car, you piece of.
00:39:24.480
And I have to say, the guy seems a little unhinged in the video.
00:39:30.480
But I'll put myself out on a limb and defend the sentiment here, which is that in America,
00:39:38.900
And further the sentiment that assimilation is hard in the best of circumstances.
00:39:43.880
But when you have a huge illegal immigration problem, when you have a mass immigration for
00:39:49.580
decades from only certain places of the world, but not from other places of the world, cultural
00:39:57.300
And so I think he actually is expressing a cultural frustration that is perfectly legitimate.
00:40:04.080
Of course, one doesn't know if the people he was talking about are illegal aliens.
00:40:09.600
Now, statistically speaking, a lot of them are illegal aliens.
00:40:12.380
A lot of people in the restaurant industries, industries that can be paid off the books.
00:40:22.740
The guy should get smacked around a little bit for it.
00:40:29.040
He got his public comeuppance, you know, this guy's got a temper and he's been a loose
00:40:39.040
The Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., is saying he should lose his law license.
00:40:47.420
I mean, first of all, I'm an immigrant and I've always been very pro speaking English.
00:40:54.260
But I have to say, you know, there's also definitely the sense of stay out of my business.
00:40:59.100
If I think I can do business better in Spanish or Russian or Hebrew or any other language,
00:41:05.400
And I think this guy really, you know, way overstepped.
00:41:09.040
And even if he was just again, take out the race angle from it.
00:41:13.300
He was just being a jerk to minimum wage employees.
00:41:16.880
And so if he gets punished by his community, if his like the place he rents his office from
00:41:23.360
no longer wants him there, if his friends get mad at him, if his neighbors don't like him,
00:41:30.200
And I think that, you know, like the New Yorkers are protesting outside his house with a mariachi
00:41:36.480
They have a real sense of humor in New York, you know, so you get things like that.
00:41:43.340
But now politicians are targeting his law license.
00:41:46.580
And the thing is, if you or I wrote to the board and said, I think he should lose his
00:41:51.420
law license over this, we would just be citizens writing to a committee that oversees this.
00:41:57.860
But politicians writing to that committee is very different.
00:42:00.520
And it's a it's a real case of punishing him for speech they don't like speech.
00:42:05.380
Again, I also don't like it's not about liking or not liking.
00:42:08.560
It's about shutting it down or the government specifically punishing somebody for speech.
00:42:16.060
And I think that it's a violation of his First Amendment rights to have these politicians
00:42:20.040
try to strip him of his law license for words they don't like.
00:42:24.020
And there is a broader free speech crisis in the country.
00:42:27.020
You see people shouting down or disinviting conservative speakers.
00:42:30.780
I was just at a dinner in New York not too long ago called the Disinvitation Dinner
00:42:34.420
for the Bill Buckley program, where every year they take a speaker who is disinvited from
00:42:39.560
a college campus and they have him come and give a speech.
00:42:44.880
You know, Ben Shapiro has they have to like, you know, take out six hundred thousand dollars
00:42:50.300
worth of security to protect against a five foot.
00:42:56.440
He's a five foot nine Orthodox Jew who's relatively polite, mild mannered.
00:43:06.340
But people, they don't seem to understand there are different levels.
00:43:11.860
What private people can say to private people, what private organizations or businesses can
00:43:16.520
say to one another and what politicians who have the public trust are allowed to say
00:43:22.080
about free speech and what speech they can limit.
00:43:24.540
Do you see this problem getting better in the near future or only getting worse, both in
00:43:31.620
Well, part of the problem is that we just don't teach any kind of historical or, you
00:43:38.140
The people graduate thinking that it's a violation of their First Amendment rights if they can't
00:43:44.480
For example, the whole kneeling thing, you know, in the NFL, the NFL says you can't do
00:43:50.340
It's not a violation of your First Amendment rights.
00:43:52.620
Go ahead and kneel any other time other than when you're at your job.
00:43:56.480
Um, so I think that people really just don't understand the distinction.
00:44:00.100
And what happens is, uh, these, when these politicians do overstep like this, nobody realizes
00:44:07.320
This isn't just protesting outside of a place that you don't like, or that is doing something
00:44:13.540
This is a politician stepping in and telling, say a business, stop this kind of speech.
00:44:18.680
Stop, um, allowing these speakers to, uh, you know, to speak at your place of business.
00:44:25.320
And, and it's even just, we know this is true practically because most of what Ben does at
00:44:33.840
So if you weren't allowed to do that, I don't know, that means the boss couldn't even come
00:44:41.260
And a lot of times people don't, all we want to do is talk about the really glamorous
00:44:45.240
sort of issues, the really national ones that splash on the news.
00:44:48.960
But all of politics happens at the local and state level, all the really interesting stuff.
00:44:57.640
I, uh, I look forward to, uh, reading even more about this case.
00:45:00.960
And it's so, it's so important to, uh, cover, you know, Schneiderman, Wiener, Spitzer.
00:45:06.900
Those are the guys who are, uh, you know, affecting politics just below the surface, just below
00:45:19.160
I hope that the machine in Albany doesn't off me before I make it back to LA, but it,
00:45:23.860
it, in any case, the conversation was worth it nonetheless.
00:45:31.200
So speaking of just below the surface, I guess I, I got to say something about the bachelor
00:45:36.140
party because the bachelor party actually made me realize something very important, which
00:45:41.080
is that I really, really, really want to get married.
00:45:45.220
And I think this is actually the purpose of bachelor parties.
00:45:48.360
So the bachelor party exists to just cause mayhem and chaos and degeneracy and dereliction
00:45:57.100
And you go out and you drink too much and you smoke Cuban cigars and you go gambling in Atlantic
00:46:01.820
Maybe I'm just talking about my bachelor party.
00:46:05.920
You feel like a disgusting, filthy, masculine animal for a day or a couple of days.
00:46:12.100
Because the purpose of this is to remind you that being a single man, isn't that great?
00:46:17.600
Like it is really fun for about five seconds, but then like all sinful things, you just get
00:46:28.040
A bunch of my pals, we went out in Manhattan and then we went down to Atlantic city, uh,
00:46:32.760
which, you know, that's like the New Jersey of New Jersey.
00:46:35.120
I mean, this place is, uh, uh, not, not what it was ever supposed to be and certainly not
00:46:43.340
It was great to hang out with men, but men are disgusting animals.
00:46:46.820
And it really reminded me of the complimentarity of the sexes, how important it is to, uh, to
00:47:00.160
Your twenties are a lot of fun being, I was living in New York, then living out in LA.
00:47:08.460
If you live there forever, you're going to become an overgrown child.
00:47:12.220
Maybe that means, maybe that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get married.
00:47:15.960
Sometimes it's hard to find people in our swipe right culture, but it means moving on
00:47:19.480
and doing something new, progressing forward, uh, building new relationships, uh, interpersonal
00:47:24.740
friendship, uh, or romantic relationships, going somewhere in your career, reading new books,
00:47:32.520
Because if you don't do that, if you want to be stuck, uh, and keep just having too much
00:47:37.100
fun, you're going to be an adolescence forever.
00:47:38.840
And you're going to wind up in a hotel room in Atlantic city with too many Cuban cigars
00:47:43.120
and too much whiskey and, you know, leftovers of steak all around you and a bunch of smelly
00:47:50.360
You can only hang out with your pals for so long.
00:47:53.060
I really defend the ritual of the bachelor party party.
00:47:56.700
And I'm glad, I'm glad I had one and I'm glad it's over, uh, before I go, it's no longer
00:48:04.100
It's Tuesday, but we did have Memorial day and, uh, we didn't broadcast on there.
00:48:08.340
So I do just want to, uh, remind everybody that freedom isn't free.
00:48:13.100
And of course we owe so many of our freedoms and what we enjoy in this country and our life
00:48:20.680
We owe that to the real heroes, the men and women who die serving their country, who give
00:48:27.460
There's a classic expression, dolce et decorum est pro patria mori.
00:48:31.740
It is sweet and fitting to die for your country, sweet and seemly to die for your country.
00:48:38.800
And in this culture, we lose sight of that a lot.
00:48:42.560
We, some people confuse Memorial day and veterans day.
00:48:45.860
Veterans are the people who fought Memorial days for the people who died, who gave their
00:48:50.660
And in a culture that's materialistic and that is self hating, like America is today.
00:48:59.740
We hate the, the religion that, that gave us the culture that gave us our politics.
00:49:06.060
Since we hate all of that, then it doesn't make any sense to die for your country.
00:49:11.780
It's a, it's a day that doesn't make a lot of sense.
00:49:14.440
If you live in a, in this very modern, uh, materialistic, atheistic, uh, culture that
00:49:21.320
we have, fortunately, mostly on the right, there is a patriotic culture that's been preserved
00:49:27.340
and a sense that this life is in everything, that there are things more important than just
00:49:32.160
going around and continuing to live, that there are noble causes worth giving your life
00:49:36.300
for, you know, if, uh, life is so, whoever thought that life is so dear and peace, so
00:49:40.900
sweet as to be purchased at the hands of chains and slavery.
00:49:44.380
That's what Ronald Reagan asked in his time for choosing speech.
00:49:51.760
I'm very glad that, uh, greater men did that for me.
00:49:54.940
And we should all take a moment to remember that and to think about how, what Memorial
00:50:01.240
And maybe Memorial Day is a guidepost for us to try to turn that culture back to something
00:50:06.380
that makes a little bit more sense and helps us make sense of our freedom and the men and
00:50:09.960
women who have died to preserve that freedom for us.
00:50:14.880
Talking about bad jokes, you know, canceling sitcoms, bachelor parties, and Dolce de Coro
00:50:24.760
And then folks, I'm going away to get married and go to a beach somewhere.
00:50:27.580
So unless ABC cancels my show, I'll be back after that.
00:50:31.920
And I want to take some tomorrow in the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.