Ep. 21 - Bethany Mandel： North Korea, Bad Government, and Babies
Summary
Writer and political commentator Bethany mandel joins me in studio to talk about her work on North Korea, having babies on the side of the highway, and how the experience of big government can make you into a conservative.
Transcript
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Today, I'm joined in studio by writer and political commentator, Bethany Mandel,
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to talk about her work on North Korea, having babies on the side of the highway,
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and how the experience of big government can make you into a conservative. Yes, even you.
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Then, Roaming Millennial and Cassie Dillon join the panel of deplorables
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to discuss our impending war with North Korea, the soon-to-be-deported DACA dreamers,
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and the Georgia schoolteacher who banned Make America Great Again t-shirts from her classroom.
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And you pay her salary, taxpayers. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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So, we're very lucky. We have Bethany Mandelin today, one of the best commentators out there.
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Really fun to read. You can read you anywhere, basically, but at The Federalist.
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A lot of other places have carried your writing. I want to delve right into this.
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So, I was flown out here by Liberty in North Korea, which is an organization that when refugees escape
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over the border from North Korea into China, if they're in China and they're caught in China
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by Chinese authorities or by someone else in China, they're either sent back to North Korea,
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where they're put in death camps, or they're killed, or they're put into sex trafficking if they're women.
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So, Liberty in North Korea has networks in northern China, and they are able to identify these refugees
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and help them traverse 3,000 miles through an underground railroad from northern China into South Korea,
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where they have automatic citizenship. But that 3,000-mile trip costs about $3,000.
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So, over the last five years, I've just sort of, as a Jewish person, I've felt like I need to do something
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because this is not a holocaust, but it's so similar because of the camps and because of the dictatorship
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and the mass death that's happened so many instances over the last decades.
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And the negligence, the international negligence of the issue.
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Yeah, no one seems to care that there's death camps the size of Los Angeles in North Korea.
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So, I started fundraising for them five years ago. I remember very vividly first learning about Rwanda
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when I was a kid, and I asked my mom, you know, what did you do? As if my mom could have done something
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because when you're a kid, you think, like, my mom should be able to fix this.
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And so, we were trying to have a baby, and I said, well, I need to be able to say that.
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I need to say something to my kid. So, I started fundraising for North Korea five years ago
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when we started trying to have a baby. And over the last five years, I've raised enough
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So, you're being a little humble, too. You're not just out here to go have dinner or something.
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Yeah, yeah. So, they're honoring me at their gala on Saturday night.
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I do remember reading about it once and having that same reaction. Like, why doesn't everybody
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Yeah. Yeah. And the incredible thing about Liberty in North Korea and how I first heard
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about them is I read every memoir that I can find from all of these defectors. And by writing
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all of these memoirs, they're opening the world's eyes to what's happening in North Korea. And it's
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such an incredible way to make the world care when they don't seem to want to.
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Mm-hmm. So, you're not just rescuing a life, which is incredibly valuable in and of itself,
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but you're also helping open the world's eyes to these atrocities and hopefully saving people.
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One of the things I love about you and about your writing is that you don't just talk the
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So, a lot of conservatives all the time, they talk about how we need to be more charitable.
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But I don't know how charitable every conservative is. A lot of times, they'll talk about how we
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need to have babies. We need to have a family. We need to have family values. That's the building
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block of society. And yet, so many of the commentators and the politicians are single or
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You should go to CPAC and see the debauchery that happens at CPAC.
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I might have experienced some of that debauchery once upon a time. It's crazy. I witnessed it.
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It's the biggest hookup and party. Nobody would believe it because it's so much Brooks Brothers
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But once the lights go out, what is it? The Reaganpalooza?
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I mean, I don't consider myself sheltered at all, but the first time I went to Reaganpalooza,
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I was horrified. Like, I used to go to raves in Europe and see people hooking up in pools.
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I'm just going to tell you, everybody enjoy this one. My mother-in-law is hopefully not
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watching. I went to a rave at a bathhouse in Budapest and I was like, I'm going to go
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swimming. This is great. And I ended up getting chlamydia in my eye. It was horrifying.
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Of all the ways I thought that would end. That's worse, even than what I was thinking.
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There was no benefit to me. Someone was having fun in the pool and I had antibiotics
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It was impossible to get rid of for years. They had to put me on like a serious dose of
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You can say what you want about CPAC. I went through a lot of debauchery there. I never
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I know. You're making me nostalgic for all those bright college years.
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But the point is, I've seen debauchery in person and I became conservative because I
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didn't want to see those things in my daily life. And then I went to Reaganpalooza and I was like,
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Oh, you know, I wonder too, if it's especially among the beltway, the young Republican types,
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there is an emphasis, I think, on I'm a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal. I'm a cool
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And it's really not social liberalism as much as like, I would love some premarital.
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I'm not going to say anything. My mother-in-law may indeed be watching.
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That's right. But you, you don't do that. You're living this out and you just had a kid.
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I did. Not on purpose. I tweeted actually, um, Piers Morgan tweeted yesterday how he was
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And he's like, I'm doing it with three broken ribs. And so I clapped back and I tweeted,
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I had a baby, I had a nine pound baby on the side of the highway, tough guy.
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And I try to hold that card. Like I don't play it at every moment, but I was like, this
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is going to be the moment where I'm going to put that card. And like 9,000 people have
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liked that tweet. And I was like, all right, that was a pretty effective one.
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So this isn't just some baby. This is a nine pound baby.
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So I planned on doing that. I was like using midwives and I'm sort of hippy dippy on birth
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and my other two kids were also like natural, whatever. Not because I love pain, but because
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needles scare the daylights out of me. I don't really want a needle in my spine. And it was
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funny, like when I was pregnant with my first, well, when I was having her in labor, I, you
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become paranoid and crazy when you're in labor. And so I got it in my head that they were all
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trying to just slip me an epidural. And so I started screaming like, no drugs, get away from
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me. Don't touch me. I don't want drugs. And they were like, we've never heard a woman say that.
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And you sound like a lady who's on drugs, you know, get out of here. Don't bring, wow.
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So I had two natural births already, which the benefit of that was I knew what it felt
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like. And so it wasn't like, I might have to poop on the side of the road. Like, no,
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I'm going to have a baby right now on the side of the road. And I, I mean, we shouldn't
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have chosen a hospital that was 45 minutes away.
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Lessons learned for the fourth kid. And so now you're on your third child.
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And I just, I met little Altima. That's the nickname.
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Yeah. He was born in a Nissan Altima. Nissan hooked us up. Thank you guys. They cleaned the
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Do you find in your life, it's so strange to have a lot of kids now. It's strange to have
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kids at a young age. It's strange, especially you're in a sort of intellectual commentariat.
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It's, it's just not common anymore. Yeah. What are the pros and cons of propagating our
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way into political power? There are no cons, except you might accidentally have a baby on
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the side of the road. That's a con. But you don't regret anything. You don't, you don't
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have a day where you are ripping your hair out and saying, I wish that I were living in
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some Manhattan penthouse working in a bank. You know, it's funny. I have those seconds
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where like, I, I did a thousand mile road trip two weeks ago with my kids alone. My
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husband couldn't take off the work because he came with me on this trip. So he didn't
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have that much vacation time. Um, and then we had a week between thousand mile road trip
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and LA trip, which is six hours on a plane with three kids under four. And, um, and so
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my kids of course were sick that week in between, which I mean, I'll take that versus on either
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end. And so like one kid is vomiting. The other kid has 102 fever. The other kid, she
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was like coughing or something. I remember. And I only way to make this worse is to get
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chlamydia in your eye and everything else. And it's pretty tough. Yeah. And so I was like,
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I had a moment where I said, you know, why am I doing this? And then I have a girlfriend,
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I have a million girlfriends who are still single and want to have kids and I'm living their dream
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life. And even though the dream life isn't awesome at every moment of the day, no life is
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awesome at every moment of the day. But I mean, I have a really sweet situation. I'm, I'm a stay
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at home mom. I'm home with my three kids and they're my, they're my job and everything else
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is just sort of a side hustle. But, and that's what I call it. You're a prolific side hustler.
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Yes. Yes. And so, I mean, I make it work by, I show up at the daily wire with my four month old
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because I am breastfeeding and he won't take formula and I don't pump. So like, here we are.
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I've recently been talking to my fiance, sweet little Elisa about this because a lot of our
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conservative friends are, have a lot of kids now and they live in the middle of nowhere.
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And in New York where I'm from, that is totally unheard of. It's bizarre. We're even getting
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married at sort of a young age, but I want an army. Can I ask you how old you are?
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I, a lady never tells. I am, I'm 27. Okay. So. I got married when I was 25, I think, or 24.
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And, and you know too, you're from New Jersey. Yeah. It's unheard of. Yeah. Out there.
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Yeah. So I, we're Orthodox Jews, so it's, it's more normal. Like my husband was sort
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of a spinster when we got married. He was 29, I think, when we got married.
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Seth the spinster. Yeah. Yeah. And so people were starting to wonder like, what's, what's
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the deal here? Why isn't he married yet? And he was just, you know, waiting for his soulmate.
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Waiting, waiting for the right one to come along. Yeah. Who will let him have a baby on the side
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of the road and he gets to deliver it and be the hero. And speaking, this is a little apropos
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of nothing, but I was reminded of it when I talked about how you're in New Jersey and
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I'm from New York. We also, we have another similar experience. Our, your mother died when
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you were 16. Yeah. My mother died when I was 17. Yeah. We both interacted with the federal
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government in Medicaid, social security, all of those agencies. Yeah. That made you more
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conservative. It made me a conservative period. My, my mom was the most liberal person ever,
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um, except for guns. We had a lot of guns, which is kind of weird. Like I was telling
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Alicia, I'm staying with Alicia Krause. And so I was telling her we had a shotgun in every
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corner of our living room loaded and just laying. And I remember this at four years old.
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This is in Jersey. Uh, so I'm from New York and I would like to make that very clear.
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I live in New Jersey, but I am from New York and I'm just a temporary. It is a difference
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of mindset. Yes. I'm a temporary resident of New Jersey and whenever I can flee, I will.
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Yeah. I'm working on my husband on that front. It's been a few years, but, um, yeah. So my mom
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was really liberal and, um, and I remember one of my first memories is, is giving the finger to
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abortion protesters. Wow. And she was like, she had had abortions and she was proud of it. She was one
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of those kinds of liberals. And I sort of went into my childhood with, I was a big Al Gore supporter
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and I had his bumper stickers on my locker in middle school. You are the only student
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in the United States who ever had Al Gore bumper stickers. Part of it was because he had a Jewish
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running mate and I had sort of like the Jewish pride, like Joe Lieberman, he's one of us.
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I do love Joe Lieberman. He is really nice. If he had been at the top of the ticket, I still
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would never have supported them, but he's a really decent guy. He's a decent guy. Yeah. Um, he used to
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belong to our synagogue in, in DC and I used to sort of like channel 13 year old Bethany
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and fangirl and we would, it's like there, there's a nosh thing at the end of synagogue
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on Saturday afternoon. And the first time I saw him, I was like, for some 13 year old
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girls, it's Justin Timberlake for others. It's Joe Lieberman. I have an old man thing.
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I really do. And Seth has a beard now and I made him grow it and he has these like gray hairs
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and it just hubba hubba for, for a certain personality. Yes. He's still my beating heart.
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Yes. So you're 16. Right. Sorry. Your mother dies and you were at loss. You have to deal
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with the government. You have to deal with everything that comes with that. Your dad was
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MIA. So you're in this impossible situation. Yeah. The government makes it worse. Yeah.
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Yeah. So I, for the first year I was 16 and for the first year I bounced around to friends
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and I was an exchange student at the time. So I was living in Belgium. So I just finished
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my exchange year because I had nowhere else to go. Um, so I came back and I had nowhere
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to live because the person who was supposed to be my guardian decided not to be my guardian,
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which was a pretty jerky thing to do. Yeah. Not a good time for that to happen. 16, you
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just lost your mother. Yeah. So my fairly evil aunt, um, who I had heard nothing but awful
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things from my mother offered me her couch in New York city on the Lower East side. And
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I was like, yeah, I'll take that on a good day. Certainly when I'm desperate. And so she said,
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you know, I, I won't touch any of the money that I'm getting from social security or child
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support from your dad. And, and that will be yours at the end of it. Cause I had very
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little inheritance. And the day my check stopped from social security, when I graduated high
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school, I was kicked out on the front steps of the Lower East side with, uh, like still
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gives me panic when I have like low battery on my phone. Oh, and I forgot to charge it.
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Crap. Um, because I had no battery on my phone.
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Yeah. And I, I hadn't, I didn't have my charger with me. I had like two bars. I was under 10%,
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my garbage bags. And I was just on the streets in New York city. And I went to social security
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and I told them the whole story and dah, dah, dah. And they said, yeah, she actually, that
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was fraud. What she did was fraud. And there was like other parts of the story also that,
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that made it more fraudulent. Um, and I said, okay, let's, let's go. Let's do it.
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Great. You've determined it's fraud. Thank you government.
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Yeah. And so they said, we'll sign an investigator and we'll get it back. And I said, great. Thank
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you. I'm going to guess you're still waiting for that investigator to show up.
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So he knocked on her door twice and then the investigation had to close.
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People don't know this. If your parent dies and you're under 18, social security administration
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does send a check for a little while. It used to be until you were 21.
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Now I think it's until you're 18, high school graduation. And I mean, I was lucky. My,
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my family didn't, didn't steal my money from me. They were very good about it,
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but the check doesn't go to you. The check goes to somebody else. And if you're in a terrible
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situation like that, there it goes. And then your mother, like my mother paid into social security
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all her life. Her entire life. And she worked from 16 years old until, same with my mother.
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Yeah. And my mom worked hot, like very hard. My mom was an incredible person. I'm sure yours was also,
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but nothing. It was now the federal government has that money. There's no return on that. You get
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no return. So you're desperate. You're basically homeless at 17 or 18 at that point, 18, because
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you've graduated from high school and you have a political transformation. Basically I, so I,
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my freshman year of college, I went and I lived in the South Bronx cause it was all I could afford.
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And my mom being wily and smart convinced my not so wily and smart father that when they divorced,
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he would have to pay child support. She gave him a choice either. I don't know, 15% until she
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graduates high school or 10% until she graduates whatever school that she's done. And so he was
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like, I'm going to pick the lower number, not realizing that that's actually going to be more
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over the course of time. And you're on the hook for longer. So math gets a little fuzzy when it's,
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you're just doing it. Yeah. And when you're, yeah, whatever, I'm not going to. So any who's Z.
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So he was on the hook to still pay me child support when I was in college. And so I found an apartment
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in a roach infested apartment, first floor level in the Bronx. And it was exactly his child support
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payment. So he just paid my rent instead of child support. And, um, and I worked full time to pay my
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bills and I often didn't make my bills. I walked around with a dollar in my wallet.
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Five foot tall Jewish girl living in the South Bronx.
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Yeah. And I had to ask my, my very rich friends on the upper West side, you know,
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do you have some boxes of pasta you can steal out of your parents' pantry? I was really profoundly
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broke that year. Like I really can't understate how broke I was. And I was really idealistic. And I
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said, you know, I'm going to work in the Bronx and I'm going to work with students. And, and I lived
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there and I met these, their teachers. And I heard the stories of, you know, on welfare,
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my mom had a baby every two years, so she could qualify for WIC and they didn't know their,
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their, all their kids' names and their teachers. And this is all.
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No, no. Every two years. I remember this kid's name to this day. And this was.
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These are the stories that we're always told by the left-wing press. Ronald Reagan was making it up.
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The stories of the welfare queen and people gaming the system. But you met these people
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personally. Yeah. And, and I, I went to the supermarket and saw people buying the junk food
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with their, with their food stamps and then going outside and selling it. Like you, if you live in
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New York city, you will see these things in person and it's not hard to see them. And I had friends who
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were working off the books and were on welfare and Medicaid and food stamps and everything. And I,
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I was not, I was, I was playing it pretty by the book. And, and I saw that my students and they
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would talk to me about their teachers who all of these sort of teachers unions protected their jobs,
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but their teachers would come in and say, I am working here for two years so that I can get my
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loans forgiven. And they'd lay down their giant New York times on, on the desk. And they'd say,
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everyone be quiet for the next 45 minutes. And I don't care what you do. And that's the schools.
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And my, my kids would come up to me cause I was, I was running an afterschool program and, and my,
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the seniors who had just graduated, they had never met someone who was in college. And I was at city
00:19:39.880
college, the CUNY school in New York. And it was a great college. It's a city university, CUNY. It has
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great programs. It doesn't need to be a great college. Yeah. Um, I mean, it was, it was good for
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what it was, honestly, I paid almost nothing. Um, and so they would come up to me and say, how do I go to
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college? And they had just graduated high school. And I said, did you take the SATs? No one told me
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how to take the SATs. They, they had never met anyone that went to college. They had no idea how
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to go to college and they're, and they, they, they wanted to start in September. These kids are all
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products of the system. They're interacting with the government, with these systems, every step of
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the way. And all liberal controlled, by the way, New York city, teachers unions, and they just
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have utterly failed them. There was no, none of the incentives are aligned to get these kids on
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the most basic things. Yeah. They're in the system since they're in the cradle and they can't show
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them that you need to take the SAT. Yeah. It was June, July, and they wanted to, I mean, and if you
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think about it, if you don't know the system, if you move to a new area, you just enroll in school and
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you start in September. And they had no idea that there's this whole, they should have been doing
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this a whole year and a half prior to do the SATs, to get the letters of recommendation from who,
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by the way, who are they getting these letters of recommendation from? The New York times history
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teacher. She might look up if she can remember the name. Yeah. And it, as, as hard off as I was,
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I had a mom who went to college and who had a master's degree and who instilled in me a work ethic
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and, and I knew, and I went to a good enough school. I went to a charter school in the Upper
00:21:12.820
West Side that I cried my way into. I showed up and, and it was a school that never let kids
00:21:18.680
transfer in. So I got into Yale, by the way, I just, I just cried at the admissions office.
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Yeah. All right, fine. Yeah. Shut them up. And so I sat down and I sat across from the principal
00:21:26.460
and my aunt, evil as she may have been, actually did help me on this. I sat down across from the
00:21:31.700
principal and I, you know, the mom, you know, like the mom died. Like you use that line. I'm sure you did.
00:21:36.100
I, yeah, you know, it happened. My mother died right after I got into Yale and it was nice that
00:21:42.840
she got to see it. And, uh, but they were so immediately, uh, responsive. It was, it was so
00:21:49.880
the opposite of, uh, of what you were describing of people saying, get out of here, kid. I only take
00:21:54.760
an interest in you if I can take your money. Yeah. So I, am my, one of my favorite Rutgers stories.
00:21:59.540
It's this big, I went to Rutgers and it's big, this big bureaucracy. It's that, that bastion of
00:22:03.780
conservatism, Rutgers University. Yeah. Well, you know what? It made me conservative because
00:22:06.940
it's such a bureaucracy that it makes you conservative. And I actually went to school
00:22:09.980
with James O'Keefe and we were sort of, yeah, that's a whole sidebar, but, um, we, it's a huge
00:22:16.760
sort of, that's, that's the government, but in a, in a small, a microcosm of this. And it, this gets to
00:22:23.120
my theory. You're, you embody two of these theories, which is that people who have had slightly
00:22:29.160
difficult experiences in their life, any of them tend to lean a little bit more right wing.
00:22:33.820
Yeah. All the hysterical Occupy New Haven kids in college, their fathers were all hedge fund
00:22:39.740
managers who had good lives. All the people that were arrested at the Occupy things, they were like
00:22:45.000
in Southbury, Connecticut or something. Of course, Columbia grad students. And then the other is the
00:22:49.400
people who have to interact with the government, people who have to deal with the government in a,
00:22:53.760
in an intimate way, never want big government again in their lives. Yeah. I mean,
00:22:58.180
I remember going down to switch my address for Medicaid. Cause I was on Medicaid. Most of my,
00:23:02.660
until I was 22, I was on Medicaid and I had to just change my address. And when I have private
00:23:08.900
insurance now, I'm an adult and my husband has a job that we have insurance. And when we moved,
00:23:13.740
I called them and I said, this is my new address. This is my, this is how you can confirm. It's me.
00:23:18.960
Here's my, my address and my phone number and my social security number, whatever. And that was it,
00:23:23.520
20 seconds. And on Medicaid, I had to take the train two hours down into Brooklyn and sat there
00:23:30.140
and everyone was on their cell phones playing music for two hours. And people were giving me
00:23:34.760
their babies so they could have a smoke break. And then two hours, they call my number and I go up
00:23:39.880
and, and they changed my address. And it took two hours of sitting in Brooklyn to get that done.
00:23:45.060
And how are you supposed to have a full-time job when you, when that's what it takes?
00:23:48.200
That is your full-time job. That's the way that you figure out how to get resources is gaming this
00:23:53.640
impossible bureaucracy. Now I don't, before we run out of time, I do want to cover this a little bit
00:23:58.020
too. So you, so you don't have an easy life. You got a little bit of a tough life. And then last year,
00:24:03.720
congratulations, the ADL named you one of the 10 biggest recipients of antisemitic hatred on
00:24:10.660
Twitter. Yeah. And that was number one. That's true. A good buddy of ours is number one. And I
00:24:15.940
used to see it. I mean, I would see it in Ben's feed. I would see it in Drew Klavan's feed. I get
00:24:19.720
it a little bit. Even though I guess my Roman nose makes people think that I'm Jewish. But one
00:24:25.880
interesting aspect of this is most of the vast majority of these came from 1600 Twitter accounts.
00:24:32.120
Yeah. So that's something that nobody talks about. Nobody talks about it. I always assumed
00:24:36.380
having worked a little in political operations, I always assumed it was like five people just
00:24:40.940
sitting there. And I think they were Russian bots. I mean, there, there's been a lot of research
00:24:44.800
into when they were active, what those accounts were doing beforehand. Um, and it frustrates me
00:24:50.580
now. And I say this everywhere. People ask me to talk about it and it's a lot of places. And I say
00:24:55.120
like, it was probably Russians and everyone's like, well, actually the narrative is that America has
00:25:01.540
been overrun by white supremacists. So if we could not do that part on air, that would be great.
00:25:08.160
And they have Richard Spencer has this conference every year. It attracts 200 people. It attracted
00:25:13.720
200 people five years ago. It's going to attract 200 people this year, maybe 210. Charlottesville was
00:25:18.880
a national protest. Nobody came. It was 200 people.
00:25:21.580
Yeah. And it was licensed place from all around the country.
00:25:25.640
Yeah. Yeah. And 200 of the schmuckiest schmuck showed up in, in Charlottesville of the whole
00:25:30.740
country. I mean, granted, I'm not, I'm not denying that there's a white supremacist problem and a
00:25:36.360
Yeah. There's always racist. There's always anti-Semites, but now it's convenient to notice
00:25:41.920
these things. And it's really frustrating as a Jewish person because whenever there's a vandalism
00:25:46.980
incident now, it's national news. And I'm sorry, if you pay attention to the data, Jews have always
00:25:54.080
been the number one recipient of hate crimes and it's usually vandalism, but no one wanted to talk
00:25:58.760
about that. Well, because we didn't have, dear leader, wasn't the president then. It wasn't.
00:26:03.180
And I'm by the way saying this as a never Trumper.
00:26:05.180
That's right. You were a never Trumper. That's right.
00:26:07.260
I was never a fan of, of president Trump. I'm still not terribly fangirl about him, but you have to be,
00:26:14.300
I'll convince you all for later. But you have to be intellectually honest about, about it. And no
00:26:19.780
one is. It's either, this is the narrative and can you please stick to it? Or you're Trumpian and
00:26:26.160
there's no in between. And you published this great piece that did go viral about how we need
00:26:31.140
to befriend Nazis. Yeah. About how the answer. And I became a Nazi, by the way. That's right.
00:26:35.520
Yeah. I forgot a Jewish Nazi. Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. That's an accomplishment.
00:26:39.220
It was actually. It's, I, um, yeah. But I love your approach because especially in this insanely
00:26:46.080
polarized political soundbite shallow time, the only way to accomplish anything is to
00:26:53.460
take people seriously and take their arguments seriously. Yeah. I mean, and we don't necessarily
00:26:57.600
have to all be friends. Right. We can, absolutely. Disagreement is a lovely thing. Yeah. But they're,
00:27:03.220
they're, I mean, not nearly as much with white supremacists as much and neo-Nazis, but people
00:27:09.120
can't even have a conversation. Like I've lost friends on both sides of the spectrum. I've lost
00:27:14.360
friends because I am a Trumpian now. And I've lost friends because I'm a snowflake, liberal now.
00:27:22.620
When everybody's a Nazi, then nobody's a Nazi. Exactly.
00:27:25.020
And that's what I read. I don't know if I was reading too deeply into the headline on your piece,
00:27:28.540
but I read it as, as on the one hand saying we should talk to these 20 people who are insane
00:27:34.200
Nazis. And try to change their hearts. Yeah. But on the other side,
00:27:37.660
we think that everybody who disagrees with us is a Nazi. Yeah. There's that meme that it says,
00:27:43.160
how to argue on the internet. Everyone I disagree with is a Nazi. Yeah. And so if you think someone's
00:27:47.080
a Nazi, maybe speak to them. Yeah. Understand what they have to say. Well, my previous column for the
00:27:51.860
week before, which is like part of people just read the two headlines. And my headline for the last
00:27:58.140
week was don't try to out Nazis because your rights depend on theirs. And it's not just sort
00:28:03.940
of your free speech rights and everyone with every, every disgusting person has a right to speech as
00:28:09.400
long as it's not violent, but it's also, and I also said that as conservatives, we are constantly
00:28:15.340
called Nazis and I'm, I don't support destroying people's lives for being Nazis because your definition
00:28:23.440
of Nazi is really fricking broad. That's right. And I wrote this column and of course, nobody read it
00:28:28.480
because everyone only reads the headlines. And so people read that and then read the, we should be
00:28:32.700
friendly on Nazis thing. And, and I've spent two weeks being called a Nazi on Twitter. And I was
00:28:37.700
like, you're actually proving my point. If you read the column, which certainly they didn't. And I will
00:28:43.240
say you're one of the loveliest Nazis I've ever met. Thank you. Now in typical Michael Knowles show
00:28:47.920
fashion, we need to bring on more women. We do not have enough women on the show right now.
00:28:52.060
So we need to bring on the one and only roaming millennial and Cassie Dillon are both here for
00:28:57.500
the panel of deplorables. Ladies, thank you for coming on. Hi, thanks for having us. So we now we
00:29:04.380
need to talk. We've been, uh, speaking at length, but let's go back to North Korea. Um, oh, actually,
00:29:12.120
you know what? First, actually, I want to get to that, but I don't want to get to it yet. I first want
00:29:16.880
to talk about all these kids because especially once you bring women on your show, you just need to
00:29:20.940
start talking about families or obviously we're, we're, uh, all going to be sister wives at some
00:29:25.540
point, uh, as the nurturing bearers of life and the hands that rock the cradle, which will rule the
00:29:30.720
world is homeschooling the way that conservatives should go. We, I know that, I know that you
00:29:36.380
homeschool your kids, Bethany, a lot of conservatives are doing it. Now there are these crazy stories
00:29:41.600
coming out of public schools. What, what are your thoughts? Uh, roaming?
00:29:45.100
Well, I actually, I wasn't necessarily homeschooled, but, uh, my later years of high school,
00:29:51.520
when I was about 14 to 16, I did independent study. So my parents weren't teaching me. I was doing
00:29:58.140
distance classes through a university, but it kind of amounted to the same thing. I wasn't actually
00:30:02.380
going to a school. And for the longest time, before I even had a concept of what conservatism was,
00:30:08.100
or before I was politically involved, I've always known that I wanted to homeschool my children.
00:30:13.600
And that's just my experiences from public schools, just being in that situation. I, I've known from
00:30:20.300
a young age that that is not what I want my children to have. And for me, it's a question
00:30:24.980
of not whether I'm going to homeschool my children, but how early I'm going to start, because I really
00:30:29.920
do want to homeschool them because I think it will be a better environment. And it's not only safer
00:30:34.700
in terms of values I can teach them, but also more academically challenging. However, I don't want
00:30:39.520
them to end up weird. Of course, that is a struggle. Cassie, are you with roaming? Are you
00:30:45.140
going to homeschool your kids? Well, I went to a public school and then after high school and
00:30:51.560
actually during high school as well, I worked at an afterschool program. And I think that the program
00:30:55.700
I worked at, it was private, but it was public school children. I think they really benefited from
00:31:01.160
being around other children. So maybe I would homeschool my children as long as there were enough
00:31:06.240
opportunities in the place I'm living for them to interact with other students, because obviously
00:31:11.720
I don't want them to end up weird. That is true. You need them to be socialized, do strange stuff
00:31:14.860
underneath the bleachers. All of that. I went to public school too. Roaming, I cut you off. I'm sorry.
00:31:20.540
No, yeah, that socialization is so important. And, you know, if there's one downside to homeschooling,
00:31:26.780
it's that. Bethany, you're, you're actually doing it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my oldest is four,
00:31:32.760
so we're just sort of, it's play based now, but yeah, I mean, I, you can be social. There's lots
00:31:39.200
of social things to do when you're homeschooling, but I see, especially the transgender stuff these
00:31:44.220
days. And I also just see that the education is really crappy in, in schools and there it's not
00:31:49.780
evidence-based. Um, we, we know from research that kids perform better if they start learning how to
00:31:57.260
read later. And instead we're teaching kindergartners how to read instead of first graders. And we just keep
00:32:02.320
pushing all of those academics on earlier and earlier. Um, and so my kids are home and they're
00:32:07.400
playing and that's how they're learning. And my kids are brilliant. I'm just going to say it.
00:32:12.060
And you're saying that as, as their teacher and their mother, there seems there might be a conflict
00:32:15.660
here, but I don't know. Yeah. I know them better than anyone else. And I care about them more than
00:32:20.540
anyone else. So their education is every, like, that's what I live for. And they're, I mean,
00:32:26.140
teachers are lovely and I know many of them, but my kids aren't the most important things in their
00:32:31.160
lives than they shouldn't be, but they are to me. Absolutely. Okay. We need to say goodbye to
00:32:37.540
Facebook and YouTube. I know you're saying, Michael, the ladies just got here. Too bad guys.
00:32:42.120
You have to go to the dailywire.com right now. You need to pay $10 a month or $100 a year and
00:32:49.060
you'll get everything. You'll get my show. You'll get the Andrew Klavan show. You'll get the Ben
00:32:52.680
Shapiro show. I don't have one on me right now, but you will get the leftist tears, tumbler,
00:32:58.480
the finest receptacle for drinking anything in the country, but especially delicious salty
00:33:04.300
leftist tears. You can serve them hot or cold. They're always delicious. Go over there right
00:33:09.000
now. You get the rest. We have so much more to talk about. Dailywire.com. We'll be right back.
00:33:12.720
Okay. Following North Korea's sixth nuclear test in recent weeks, President Trump has given the go
00:33:30.040
ahead for Japan and South Korea to buy a quote, substantially increased amount of military equipment
00:33:36.080
from the United States. And here is President Trump explaining his decision.
00:33:41.320
A, B, C. A, always B, B, C closing. Always be closing. Always be closing.
00:33:51.620
Talk about the art of the deal. North Korea sets off nukes and Donald Trump sells them more of our
00:33:57.140
military equipment. Well done, sir. Well done. Roaming, we have been asking this question for weeks now.
00:34:02.400
Are we heading for war? You know, I would love to say no, but it's kind of getting increasingly
00:34:08.620
higher to support that. I was just looking online and I saw Nikki Haley speaking about the UN. She
00:34:13.980
was in a statement saying the U.S. doesn't want war, but at the same time, we can't be expected to have
00:34:19.680
unlimited patience when it comes to North Korea. And I'm just not very optimistic at this point. I'm
00:34:25.280
hoping that it doesn't, you know, escalate into all-out war or the West Coast being bombed, especially not
00:34:31.460
with you guys over there. But it would be nice to survive. I'd love it. Right. Yeah. Especially,
00:34:36.280
I mean, I hear there's a dog at the studio. So that, I think, yeah, I'm not very optimistic about
00:34:44.640
it not leading to some sort of military confrontation. And Cassie, the United States
00:34:48.660
is so politically divided. It is so polarized. I haven't seen it since the last time the Soar
00:34:53.940
Loser Democrats didn't win an election in 2000. It is as bad as that was. Can we even effectively
00:35:00.220
wage a war together right now? If there were a real threat like a nuclear North Korea,
00:35:08.500
Well, I don't necessarily think there's going to be a war. But if there were to be a war,
00:35:12.920
I think it would be the only thing that could bring people together. And even then, I'm not
00:35:17.680
optimistic at all. People are coming out insulting Donald Trump for being against Kim Jong-un. I think
00:35:23.600
they called Trump, they put him on the same level and called him a dictator fascist.
00:35:27.280
Mango Mussolini is one of the terms. I don't like it, but it is funny.
00:35:32.780
You guys were talking about death camps earlier, and then you have them comparing it to our
00:35:36.200
president of a democratic nation. But still, insane.
00:35:40.000
Ladies, I bring you on to cheer me up. And all you do is make me fear for my imminent nuclear
00:35:44.740
death. Bethany, you know a little bit about North Korea. You've been working in these charitable
00:35:49.920
ways for a while. The problem just keeps festering. We've had this issue for 25 years now,
00:35:55.300
three or four presidential administrations. Do we need regime change now?
00:36:02.820
So the scary part about regime change is there's really no winning North Korea,
00:36:06.580
which is the scary, sorry, depressing. All right. Well, I'll see you later, guys.
00:36:11.040
But there's going to be roaming nukes. If there's a power vacuum, anyone can swoop in and grab those
00:36:18.180
nukes. That was roaming's band in high school, by the way. Roaming nukes. Yeah, they were so cool.
00:36:22.520
They painted their fingernails black and everything. I'm sorry, I cut you off.
00:36:25.100
It's really goth. And it is really goth. It's a really goth moment in international affairs.
00:36:32.020
Yeah. So, I mean, there's the roaming nukes, or you have a situation where it's just the
00:36:37.200
continuation of the situation that we have now, in which they can blackmail us continually forever.
00:36:42.200
And there's, again, these death camps where millions of people have died over the course of
00:36:47.340
the regime, over three generations of Kims. And it's disgusting. And I mean, honestly,
00:36:53.560
now we're at a point where can we go in there and change things? That moment might have already
00:36:59.240
passed. You think it's passed militarily or you think it's passed because culturally they're so
00:37:04.820
embedded, both of them? Because I just think, why can't we go kill the guy?
00:37:07.640
I mean, there is a moral, and this is something that makes me such a neocon. We have a moral
00:37:12.740
imperative to stop mass death. I just, I think it's, and the only time America has ever done that
00:37:18.700
was Bill Clinton in Bosnia. We let Rwanda happen. We let Cambodia happen. We've let North Korea happen
00:37:24.080
for decades now. And we certainly let the Holocaust happen. At what point do we, as the better people
00:37:31.980
in the world say, this is not, this is not an acceptable situation. There can't be death camps.
00:37:36.240
There can't be mass starvation like there has been in every continent.
00:37:40.240
And on the flip side, are Americans willing to sacrifice their own lives to liberate North Korea?
00:37:46.440
I don't know. I don't know if we're there after 15 years of war. There is that political,
00:37:50.860
so there's the cultural and the military issue and then the political issue here at home.
00:37:54.600
Yeah. I mean, and I, I would like to think that America is, we're, we're made of better people than
00:38:00.340
that. And I would like to think that my sons would go over there and say, you know what,
00:38:05.440
this is, this is something worth fighting and dying for the liberty and life of people who are
00:38:10.300
trapped in these camps and trapped in this authoritarian regime in darkness. That's worth
00:38:16.140
fighting for. And we don't seem to leave that. And that's really sad.
00:38:19.540
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. And speaking of dreamers,
00:38:23.100
they are the top news today. President Trump announced his decision on President Obama's
00:38:28.100
executive amnesty program, DACA, which spells the deportation of the so-called dreamers,
00:38:33.660
the illegal immigrants who entered the United States as children or under 18.
00:38:38.260
President Obama unconstitutionally gave them de facto amnesty. And now it looks like that is going
00:38:44.600
away. Bethany, there are 800,000 of these people in the United States. Are we really going to
00:38:50.300
deport all of them? Or is that this is a bargaining chip for Trump? Basically, it's a bargaining chip
00:38:53.980
for Trump. And the frustrating part about this car, I really am going, sounding like such a
00:38:58.000
Trumper, but it's really about the vibe and the Michael Noles studio brings it out.
00:39:03.200
I mean, I just feel like someone should be saying these things. And if no one is going to be,
00:39:07.800
is no, if no one is going to do this, then I guess I'm stuck being the one doing it and I'm not
00:39:11.240
happy about it. But this was an unconstitutional program that President Obama set up and then got
00:39:19.260
all of their names and all of their addresses. He set this up. It was ever thus. What else was
00:39:26.520
going to happen? What did you want? Every ounce of blame, it goes with him on this. Because for all
00:39:32.120
of the other bad things it does, it incentivizes more illegal immigration. During that process,
00:39:37.340
by the way, 80% of women and girls are raped. 60 to 80%, depending on the study.
00:39:43.620
But they're feminists. They're looking out for, we're waging the war on women.
00:39:47.260
But there's that. And then it's a simple issue. The program is unconstitutional.
00:39:51.840
Yeah. And it should have gone through Congress. And Obama himself actually said that. But when
00:39:56.460
Congress didn't want to act, he decided, you know what? I'm just going to do this myself.
00:39:59.760
And, you know, I don't think that Trump might be going about this the right way, but he was dealt
00:40:06.640
a crap card. And no one in the media and no one in this sort of immigration world is really being
00:40:14.460
honest about that. And Americans recognize that. And this is how you got Trump. They're all very
00:40:20.720
That's exactly right. It's like that little meme on Twitter. It says, like, this is why I was elected
00:40:25.220
and it's Trump pointing up. Yeah. So, Romain, if President Art of the deal is just negotiating
00:40:30.460
here and he offers, say, to go a little easier on the Dreamers in exchange for something like
00:40:36.260
the wall, would the Democrats take it? I don't think so. Right now, I don't think
00:40:41.620
they're in a place to negotiate. I mean, if you think about this from the Democrats' perspective,
00:40:46.080
anything to do with Dreamers is unpopular, right? I mean, Trump is kind of in a no-win situation.
00:40:50.440
So, you know, with that, if he does offer a bargain, well, guess what else is kind of
00:40:56.720
unpopular at the wall? So if Trump ends up taking away DACA and trying to build a wall,
00:41:02.180
well, that's just kind of them in a better position, at least in their base, for the next
00:41:05.780
election. So, I mean, I hate to sound cynical, but if I were a Democrat, I'd be, I'd stick to
00:41:10.500
myself, yeah, let's see how much Trump can do to upset anyone on the left and we'll lose
00:41:16.440
when it comes to an intern. I'm sorry. I'm still getting over Roaming Millennial saying
00:41:20.600
if I were a Democrat. I can't. It is just so unfathomable. We now need to move on again.
00:41:25.500
A teacher, this is the most important news of all. It's my favorite story. A teacher at Georgia's
00:41:30.200
River Ridge High School recently made two of her students leave her classroom. The crime,
00:41:36.500
they were wearing Make America Great Again t-shirts. Not only were they wearing t-shirts supporting
00:41:41.120
the current president, they were wearing shirts that simply said, Make America Great Again.
00:41:45.220
And the kicker, of course, is that that teacher has yet to be disciplined.
00:41:49.680
Roaming, public teacher unions are among the strongest political entities in the country.
00:41:54.040
Actually, not terribly strong in Georgia, but around the country where Bethany and I come from,
00:41:58.580
they're the most important political force that exists. They're also inherently corrupt because
00:42:04.260
public unions are just the government negotiating with the government. Samuel Gompers opposed them,
00:42:09.140
FDR opposed them. Is there any argument not to decertify these unions? How do we get rid of
00:42:15.000
these, this inherently corrupt process? Well, I think there are a ton of reasons to not
00:42:20.600
decertify them if you are part of the union, right? I'm not even saying, you know, if you're a teacher,
00:42:26.940
that's part of it. Because I've spoken to some teachers, and actually my father used to be
00:42:30.880
a professor at a SAJEC, which is the kind of college in Quebec. And there are actually quite a few
00:42:36.620
teachers who aren't necessarily in favor of having to pay union dues and feeling like the union doesn't
00:42:40.860
really represent themselves, just the union leaders. But it's, it's hard because like you said,
00:42:47.020
it's, they're bargaining themselves, right? It's public sector unions, they're unionized against
00:42:52.100
taxpayers. And so, you know, we should have some states on the right to work legislation. I think
00:42:57.380
France is one of them. And there's always a, it's always a fuss made by the union supporters. But at the
00:43:04.320
end of the day, it's better for workers. It's what's better for us as taxpayers. I think, you know,
00:43:09.180
hopefully we just need some governors in there who are willing to bite the bullet and do what may
00:43:12.840
be unpopular in the short term, but will be better in the long term. Cassie, you're a product of public
00:43:17.580
school, as am I. These public teachers, as is Bethany, these public teacher unions are, we just
00:43:24.220
drag them through the mud. We drag them through just like the, we drag the media. Are they getting
00:43:28.940
short shrift or are they really as bad as we all say that they are? I honestly think they're pretty
00:43:35.940
bad. Look what happened in Wisconsin. What Scott Walker did was amazing. Things are doing a lot
00:43:42.600
better in there. Their test scores are up. I think what's going on right now are these unions are
00:43:47.240
trying to stay relevant, which is what the left is doing. Every single political institution that
00:43:51.740
is liberal is trying to stay relevant. And by doing this, they're creating all this outrage and trying
00:43:57.440
to somehow grab power because they lost all the power. We have all the governorships, we have all the
00:44:01.920
state legislators, we have the majority of everything. And so I think they're going to kick it and try not to
00:44:07.800
drown. Fair enough. Bethany, I think everybody has convinced me. Someday when I have a little brood,
00:44:13.940
an army of Knowleses, will you be one of their homeschool teachers? No, but I will talk to your
00:44:19.800
wife about my curriculum of choice. That's fair enough. We can have a meeting of the broods. I don't need you
00:44:24.660
around my house. The mini Michaels, I don't need that. Just the little Michaels all running around
00:44:28.740
smoking cigars. And yeah, you don't, it would be a lot to handle. Okay. We have got to go now. My wonderful
00:44:34.600
all-female panel of deplorables, thank you for being here. Roaming Millennial, Cassie Dillon, and our
00:44:40.060
in-studio guest, Bethany Mandel. Thanks for having me. This is The Michael Knowles Show. I'm Michael
00:44:43.800
Knowles. Come back tomorrow and we will do it all again.
00:45:24.660
That's BollandBranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com slash dailywire to save 20% off
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