Ep. 276 - The Left Is Moving Further Left
Summary
For the first time in history, a majority of Democrats identify as liberal. We ll analyze what the Democrats' leftward lurch means for American politics. Plus, New York City institutes socialist health care, Brooklyn resegregates its schools, and the New York Times frets about how the government shutdown is affecting craft beer producers.
Transcript
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For the first time in history, the majority of Democrats identify as liberal.
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We will analyze what the Democrats' leftward lurch means for American politics.
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Then, New York City institutes socialist health care,
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and the New York Times, in the New York Timesiest articles ever,
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frets about how the government shutdown is affecting craft beer producers.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Oh, you know, when this shutdown was just affecting my tax returns and border security and the Coast Guard,
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But now that it's affecting craft beer producers, Mr. President, please, you have to end it.
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If I can't drink new, pretentious, usually not-that-great-tasting beers,
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Talk about a Pyrrhic victory. We'll get to that in a second.
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But first, we have to talk about this new Gallup poll
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showing that Democrats are lurching to the left.
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We talk about this all the time in modern politics.
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The two sides, the left and the right, are becoming so polarized.
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One side is becoming polarized, and it seems to be the left.
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This new poll from Gallup shows most Democrats now identify as liberal
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You might say, oh, wow, Democrats are liberal, Michael.
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As recently as 2008, only 38% of Democrats identified as liberal.
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Others would say, oh, I'm a moderate Democrat or even some conservative Democrats.
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There were the progressives, and there were the blue dogs,
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Now, I guess the closest thing would be a guy like Joe Manchin in West Virginia,
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although even he is basically a progressive Democrat.
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Just on a few issues, he has to tack a little bit to the right,
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something like Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation, for instance.
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Otherwise, his constituents will throw him out of office.
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But now we're seeing the Democrats are solidly, for the major part, liberal.
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This is the first time since Gallup started tracking this,
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so it may be the first time in history, which I suspect it is.
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On the Republican side now, you see 73% of Republicans identify as conservative.
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So many more Republicans identify as conservative than Democrats identify as liberal.
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But what you've got to track here is the change,
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And even if you go back to 2008, it's only ticked up three percentage points.
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Back in 2008, 70% of Republicans identified as conservative,
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whereas only 38% of Democrats identified as liberal.
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It means that while right now all the talking heads, New York Times,
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the pundits, want you to focus on Trump, how Trump is changing American politics,
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The actual change that's going on is on the left.
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When you look at how Donald Trump has governed the country,
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He's governing as a fairly conservative Republican.
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Not totally conservative Republican, but fairly conservative.
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I guess he's more conservative in many ways than George W. Bush,
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He's modeled his entire campaign after Ronald Reagan.
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Make America Great Again is a line he took from Ronald Reagan.
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Although Ronald Reagan said it more nicely because he had the word let's in front of it.
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And Trump, obviously, in the imperative, do it, do it or else.
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But basically, he's within the regular conservative Republican mold.
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The change that's happening right now is a generational change.
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And that's why you're seeing these new characters who are entering Congress.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Julian Castro, not in Congress.
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But you see all these up-and-coming Democrat politicians who are much more left-wing.
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Don't be fooled by the outlier, which is Bernie Sanders, who's 350 years old.
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And you're seeing a big fight breaking out now within the Democrat Party.
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Why, all of a sudden, do you see even people like Nancy Pelosi look conservative
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I don't think it's some big seismic event that's happened.
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I think what's happening with these people, give them credit, give Alexandria Ocasio credit,
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give Ilhan Omar or whoever credit, they are taking progressivism to its logical conclusion.
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They are taking the Democrat Party to its logical conclusion.
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For decades now, the Democrats have been ferreting out conservatives, ferreting out moderates,
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and these guys are taking it to where it ultimately will go.
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How does a blue dog make any sense in today's Democrat Party?
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Just that one issue, Hillary Clinton talked about it in 2008, that abortion should be safe,
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This was Hillary trying to both bring the progressives with her and say,
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we're going to have a lot of legal abortion, but bring the conservatives with her too,
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the blue dogs, and say, but we shouldn't have too much abortion.
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It's not a good thing, but we're going to still have it.
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If abortion is morally similar to murder, why should it be legal?
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If abortion is not morally similar to murder, if it's just a tonsillectomy, basically,
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The difference here is that the GOP is intellectually diverse.
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So you've got the neocons, the neoconservatives.
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You've got all of these things going on, and they don't agree on everything.
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They kind of disagree on many issues, on the market, on free trade, on religion, on culture.
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They came together largely because of what was called the conservative movement.
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They came together largely because of William F. Buckley Jr., who had a philosophy or a practice
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called fusionism, where you fuse together these different parts of what could be conservatism
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They have progressivism and the last remnants of blue dog conservatives.
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And they've been going away for decades and decades now.
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Now you're finally seeing that turn, that pivot, and the majority are progressive and liberal.
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The first question it raises is, can the Democrat House push a unified agenda?
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I mean, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first congressional action when she got elected was to take over
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Nancy Pelosi's office and protest her own Speaker of the House.
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I mean, right now, just to use Ocasio as sort of the epitome of this new, young, progressive
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coalition, she's pushing something called the Green New Deal.
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This amounts to a federal takeover of the economy.
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This is the federal government coming in and getting its hand in just about every sector
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It would ban fossil fuels in most things by 2030.
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It would mean that we have to power our homes on renewable energies like wind and solar,
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It is like powering them on unicorns and gumdrops.
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But within this Green New Deal, it sounds like it's just talking about the environment.
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There are all these other insane progressive platforms like a basic income, so just guaranteed
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money from the federal government, single-payer health care, socialist medicine, and handouts
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to left-wing groups and to unions, and it will cost an estimated $40 trillion over the
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She doesn't know where she's going to get the money.
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That is the kind of radicalism that we're seeing.
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But this is not, I really want to stress this, this is not some new crazy thing that Alexandria
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This has been building as the logical conclusion of progressivism since Woodrow Wilson, and
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we'll actually get to that on this day in history.
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Today is the anniversary of Woodrow Wilson announcing his 14 points program at the end
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of World War I, and we're going to see how that laid the roadmap out for progressivism.
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Now, are certain older Democrats a little more conservative?
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You know, we've got this government shutdown going on, and Cabot Phillips, whom I love
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over at Campus Reform, he went out to college campuses, and he wanted to ask them what they
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thought of Donald Trump's quotes on illegal immigration and the government shutdown.
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And the big spin here is they weren't really Trump's quotes.
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They were quotes from Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton.
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And then the kids are all shocked when they find out that the quotes that they hate from
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I'm going to read a few quotes here from President Trump talking about the need for the southern
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First quote, we should spend money to build a barrier to prevent illegal immigrants from
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Another quote, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the U.S. undetected, undocumented,
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Quote, illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.
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Until the American people are convinced, we will stop future flows of illegal immigration.
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When you hear quotes like that, what's your reaction to them?
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I think America is a land of opportunity, a place for inclusion.
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I just really think it's kind of hateful speech in general.
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Like when he talks about illegal immigrants, it's just one rude to talk about people like
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It kind of underlies a lot of things about discrimination and people and their prejudices and things like
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So I feel like that stuff is touchy to talk about.
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There are racial biases kind of sort of deep embedded in there.
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Well, I think his demeanor overall is just unacceptable.
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I think just the way that he's referring to people across the wall is very dehumanizing.
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What if I told you these were from Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton?
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So the point of the video, it's a funny video because the point of the video is that these
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kids all hate Donald Trump and then so they hate anything he says and then they find out
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it's Democrats and then they're kind of surprised.
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I think there's something more interesting going on here though, which is what this video
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shows is not how kids are hypocritical and how they just hate Trump as a knee-jerk reaction.
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I think what it shows is how radically the Democrat Party has changed in just 10 years or even
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Look, politicians, especially the Clintons and Obama and Schumer and Pelosi, they'll just
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They change with the wind as long as they follow their progressive base.
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What this shows now, I think, is even if you tell those kids, I mean, you can actually
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They say, well, okay, but this is what I think now.
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Chuck Schumer of 2006 could never get elected with this Democrat Party.
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Well, I guess that's just a perennial true statement.
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But she certainly couldn't get elected now with the position she held in 2008.
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This is the same thing going on all throughout the Congress and throughout the country.
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This party, this Democrat Party is much further left.
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It is the Democrat Party uniquely is moving far to the left.
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And frankly, maybe it's not the worst thing in the world.
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It's bad because it poses a danger to the country if they get into power.
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But it's good in that it gives Americans a choice.
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We used to say, oh, these Democrats, they're hiding their true objectives, which are socialism
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or, you know, socialist health care, or their true objectives on marriage, which is to redefine
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marriage, or their true objective on abortion, which is abortion on demand without apology.
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This is, in many ways, the point of the conservative movement when Bill Buckley started it in the
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1950s was to give Americans a choice, not an echo.
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That's what Barry Goldwater said when he was running for president.
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Trump tonight is going to be giving a speech on the government shutdown and border security.
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Now the Democrats want to give a response to that speech.
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Chuck and Nancy want to give a response to that speech.
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A lot of conservatives are complaining about this.
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A lot of Democrats are complaining that Trump is giving his speech in the first place.
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I think this is, one, it's a good thing because it's reality TV.
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But, two, it's good for our democratic system to hear both sides and at least we have an
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And if we go down for it, which I hope we don't, at least you can say, well, people were presented
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the information and unfortunately they voted away our great country.
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Some lefties just on the Trump speech itself are very upset that Donald Trump is speaking
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Every president gives Oval Office addresses and the news networks always cover it.
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But because the mainstream media uniquely hate Donald Trump, they're actually calling for
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the speech either not to be covered or even to be censored.
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Here are that dynamic duo from CNN, Fredo Cuomo and Don Lemon.
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Do you think it should be, I don't know, a delay of some sort?
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People, the president will say what he has to say.
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People will believe it whether the facts are true or not.
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I guess it's a chance you take with any president, but this one is different.
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And then by the time the rebuttals come on, we've already promoted propaganda, possibly,
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unless he gets up there and he tells the truth.
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He has his right to make the argument to the American people.
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And by the way, wanting barriers along the border is not propaganda.
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Do you think it should be, I don't know, a delay of some sort?
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And then you can see right now, it zooms in on Chris Cuomo's face.
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I think that they employ Don Lemon at CNN just to make Chris Cuomo look reasonable.
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So he's there and at least Chris Cuomo, to his credit, says, no, we shouldn't delay it.
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Don Lemon representing the new school of the Democrat Party.
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Chris Cuomo, the whole Cuomo family, representing an older school of the Democrat Party.
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But their father, Mario Cuomo, was the governor, I think, for, you know, 75 years in New York.
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He was a likely Democrat presidential candidate.
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He's actually the one who invented the Democrat stance, the moderate Democrat stance on abortion,
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which is, I support abortion even though I'm opposed to it personally.
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Because you don't care if we kill all those little black babies?
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You just don't want your precious little babies to be killed?
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But you see that right there on CNN, that difference between the new Democrats of Don Lemon,
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And those new Democrats, they're not just calling for progressive programs.
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They're saying this guy is different, so we've got to treat him differently.
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The networks, by the way, are playing into this.
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It's the mainstream news networks are taking Democrat talking points, hook, line, and sinker
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President Trump set to make his case for a border wall as the government shutdown enters
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Democrats fighting back, saying the speech will be nothing but malice and misinformation.
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Democrats are clearly concerned about the nation only hearing one side of this argument
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They are demanding equal time tonight to respond, saying in a statement, quote, if the president's
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past statements are any indication, it will be full of malice and misinformation.
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Democrats have vowed to fight any attempt to bypass Congress with legal challenges.
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They also allege that if the president's past statements or any indication...
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...is addressed tonight will be full of, quote, misinformation and malice.
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What's astounding about this is not that the networks are playing up Democrat talking
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points, but the Democrat talking point here is not about something that has happened.
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It's not reacting to a speech that has already been given.
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It's predicting what the man will say, saying, you know, in the future, Donald Trump is going
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And then the networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, those guys are covering this as though this is not
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only fact, but fact in the sense that it has already happened.
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It's happening tonight, but they're already covering it because whatever the Democrats
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say must be true, even if it hasn't happened yet.
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We might just get the speech from the Oval Office.
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This is a debate fundamentally about not just, are we going to protect this border?
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This debate in its essential components boils down to, do we still love our country or do
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You have one side saying that we have a serious problem in historic drug epidemic because of
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A lot of crime, people being killed, people being raped.
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According to Fusion and Amnesty International, 60 to 80 percent of women and girls who cross
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that southern border illegally are raped and sexually assaulted.
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You've got the question of whether this country can decide who gets to access its welfare programs,
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who gets to access its schools, what language people in this country are going to speak,
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who gets to vote in this country, who is counted for the representation in the Congress.
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Right now, the representation in the Congress is based on the census.
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So you've got, even if in certain places illegal aliens aren't voting, they're being counted
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Do we want to protect our country and build a wall and deal with border security?
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Or, as the Democrats want, do we want to let our country be washed away because we don't
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Do we want a totally new people to come in, a totally new culture to come into this country,
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a totally new system of government where we don't get to protect our borders, where we
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don't only count the rights or the votes, rather, of citizens, where we don't only use
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taxpayer money to protect citizens, to protect the people here who are paying into it, who
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are our countrymen, who are tied to us by the bonds of countrymen and citizens?
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Do we love our country or do we want a different country?
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Do we want our country and to protect our country?
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Do we want to abolish the idea of our country altogether and just have something new with
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I'm not trying to get here on my soapbox and just vilify the other side, although I think
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the other opinion, the opinion of not protecting our country, should be vilified.
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I hope that the networks cover Trump's speech and I hope that the Democrats give whatever
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I think they should get their awful ideas out in the open because I think that this country
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I think this country still will choose to protect itself.
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I think this country still will choose to be a country.
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I think ultimately Republicans have the winning hand here.
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We shouldn't be afraid of airing Democrats' views in public.
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It really helps us when we air their radical views.
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We show the American people who they are and we can reject them both at the ballot box and
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in terms of the pressure that's coming from this government shutdown.
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The way that you know that the government shutdown is going pretty well for Trump and the Republicans
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is how it's being covered in the New York Times today.
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I try never to cover the New York Times, but I suppose I have to every once in a while just
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The lead article in the New York Times, the number one article when you go to their website
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Shut down ripples across nation affecting farmers, homeowners, even craft brewers.
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So that now, now they've since changed the headline when you go to the article itself.
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So, uh, they probably realized how absurd that is because, you know, not craft brewers.
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By the way, how is this affecting craft brewers?
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It's because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and Explosives is not approving
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So you can only have the seven zillion hipster Brooklyn beers that are already on the market.
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You're not going to get that seven zillionth and one until the government reopens.
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Also, mortgage applications are being delayed because the federal government is involved
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Public companies now are having some trouble possibly raising capital because the federal
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government is so heavily regulating the economy.
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The Secret Service obviously is not being paid for its work and farmers right now are having
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trouble applying for federal subsidies because parts of the federal government are shut down.
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There was this poll that came out from Rasmussen.
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Six percent of Americans say this shutdown is really hurting them.
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Twenty-one percent of Americans don't know the government is shut down.
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This is the second longest government shutdown ever, and yet nobody's really feeling the pain
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For those who are, for the people applying for mortgages and the craft beer people and the
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farm subsidy people, this raises a question that's very uncomfortable, actually, for the left.
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Which is, why is the federal government so heavily involved in all of those things?
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Why is the federal government heavily involved in craft beer?
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Why is the federal government, and why are we giving all these subsidies to farmers to pick
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Maybe this government shutdown, as I predicted before it happened, is showing us how much
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As Ronald Reagan said, you'll be surprised how much government you'll never miss.
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Maybe it's saying, well, as we're having a big debate here between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
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who wants the government basically to take over the whole economy, and conservatives who say
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we should deregulate, we should shrink the size of the government, we should shrink the
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I think this government shutdown is showing us which side should win in that argument.
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It doesn't, it's, it's onerous, it's, we have a way overinflated bureaucracy,
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it's racking up enormous debt that will be a drag on our economy, that is a generational tax
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The Trump administration, by the way, has directed the IRS, in case this government shutdown
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goes through March and April, which it certainly, almost certainly will not, but if it does,
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it's directed the IRS to pay people's tax refunds out, which raises another question.
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If the government can just arbitrarily run and stop things, even during a shutdown,
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It's about showing how unwieldy the federal government is, and, and it's about raising this
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question of why won't the, the Democrats fund our border security?
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We've got another crazy story from the New York Times today because I'm a glutton for punishment.
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I'm a masochist over Brooklyn schools, resegregating to have blacks only schools and, and black
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We'll get to Bill de Blasio pushing socialist healthcare in New York, and we'll also get
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It's 10 bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership.
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Because when the craft beer factories shut down, when Brooklyn hipsters with stupid mustaches
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can't sip overpriced subpar beer, they are going to weep.
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And then you're going to get these craft leftist tears tumblers.
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The only vessel approved by the FDA, which, by the way, is shut down.
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So you're not going to get any new vessels approved by the FDA anytime soon to handle
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Also in the New York Times today, a major article right there in the front part of the
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Why black parents are turning to Afrocentric schools.
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Before, you could basically dismantle this entire argument for resegregation just from
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While New York City schools are deeply segregated, some black families are choosing an alternative
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By the way, just to get you through that, the alternative to integration.
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What they're saying is black families are choosing segregation.
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You know, the New York Times is, maybe they're a little confused about language.
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They're saying black families are choosing segregation.
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The group of mostly black children shouted in unison.
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When it was time to settle down, their teacher raised her fist in a black power salute.
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As children filed out of the cramped school auditorium on their way to class, they walked
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by posters of Colin Kaepernick and Harriet Tubman.
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Colin Kaepernick, who's a schmucky left-wing, mediocre football player who decided to cash
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in and make zillions of dollars on race hustling.
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That guy, he's the same as Harriet Tubman, a gun-wielding Republican who transported slaves
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through the Underground Railroad to their freedom.
00:27:40.560
Colin Kaepernick, schmucky Nike spokesman, Harriet Tubman, one of the great heroes of
00:27:47.460
American history, transport slaves to their freedom.
00:27:51.300
That's why they walked past the photos of them right on the same wall.
00:27:57.040
Though Afrocentric schools have a uniquely comprehensive approach, many of New York's
00:28:03.260
There are engineering, math, and culinary schools.
00:28:05.860
Others have Albanian, Urdu, or Bengali bilingual programs.
00:28:10.200
And some are just about how cool blacks are and how you should love yourself and how great
00:28:18.040
Unbelievable the way that they make these category errors on the left.
00:28:21.880
They're saying, look, some schools specialize in engineering, some schools specialize in math,
00:28:28.340
and some schools specialize in radical black racial ideology.
00:28:34.700
So engineering, math, literature, performing arts, those are academic categories.
00:28:48.260
Actually, the left gets everything exactly backwards.
00:28:52.620
So what this new resegregation program mixes is the worst of the left, race hustling, identity
00:28:58.340
politics, and the self-esteem movement, and replacing education with ideological indoctrination.
00:29:04.600
The problem with this starts right from the first words of the article.
00:29:16.300
I should say I love my skin because it protects my body and keeps me from diseases and keeps
00:29:23.160
me from infections and means that I'm not just a walking hunk of raw flesh destined to
00:29:42.580
I'm not an Adonis of a man, so any luck I've had in picking up the ladies, I can probably
00:29:57.880
It makes idols out of meaningless things, and it perverts, therefore, not just religion,
00:30:03.540
not just really what we talk about with idolatry, but therefore culture and therefore politics.
00:30:14.540
The self-esteem movement is what birthed it, but it's the self-love movement, the self-care
00:30:20.160
movement, and the reason that people are drawn to this is because of a God-shaped hole
00:30:25.660
I hate to use what has become a cliche, but it's because people long naturally for the transcendental,
00:30:34.120
We realize, to use technical terms, that in this world, everything is contingent.
00:30:41.120
Nothing is enduring and lasting in our physical world, and so we long for metaphysical things.
00:30:47.260
We long for the unmoved mover who is not contingent, who is the creator of the universe.
00:30:53.960
All of human history, every culture, every civilization has longed for that.
00:30:59.960
And what either people who are trying to play and deceive you or very ignorant people do
00:31:09.700
is that they try to replace that transcendental longing with physical things.
00:31:13.640
They say, instead of turning that love that you should have for God, for the metaphysical,
00:31:22.160
I mean, that is why pride is the queen of all sins.
00:31:24.980
That's why Satan falls like lightning from heaven, because of the sin of pride.
00:31:30.340
This is why the image that John Milton gives us of Satan is that Satan births from his own pride,
00:31:39.180
He births sin, and then he has an incestuous relation with his narcissistic daughter's sin,
00:31:50.400
It's why for all of the history of our civilization, we talk about pride as the queen of all sins.
00:31:57.660
We now have pride parades, not just for gay pride, but for all other sorts of pride.
00:32:03.560
Self-love, self-care, pride are, as they manifest themselves in our culture, a terrible, terrible thing.
00:32:11.800
If you try to just love yourself as the be-all and end-all,
00:32:14.880
you will hate yourself, and you will hate the world, and you will be very miserable.
00:32:18.480
If you try to be proud, you will be very miserable, because pride goeth before destruction,
00:32:25.920
These are not just words scribbled by some very old Jews.
00:32:32.280
This is why, by the way, the people who engage in this race hustling,
00:32:35.760
why the people who engage in this self-segregation are miserable.
00:32:39.580
It's why their politics has become coarse and miserable, and they screech, and they scream,
00:32:45.000
and they yell out, and they wear simulacra of genitalia on their heads.
00:32:52.760
It's because, essentially, there is a sin of pride that they are embracing.
00:33:00.840
We should tell them that they can't segregate themselves, that they can't go off.
00:33:09.220
I'm talking about the segregation that occurs throughout all of our culture,
00:33:12.680
through these constantly dividing, disparate, intersectional groups.
00:33:20.520
The color of your skin doesn't make you special.
00:33:30.060
You are defected, and you, therefore, need love, and you need grace,
00:33:40.260
I know it's very unpopular to talk about things in this way,
00:33:46.900
But it's the only way we're going to get back to any sense of the normal.
00:33:51.740
Also in New York, I guess this is a New York-heavy show today,
00:33:54.760
Bolshevik Bill de Blasio, the mayor over there, has jumped the gun.
00:34:01.760
Forget all of the other socialist health care schemes.
00:34:07.460
You are about to do something pretty remarkable in New York City.
00:34:15.000
Yeah, Joe, this has never been done before in this country in this kind of comprehensive way.
00:34:19.820
It's going to be, for the first time, a guarantee of health care.
00:34:24.060
We're going to guarantee health care for New Yorkers who need it.
00:34:27.060
And we have now in New York City something that we can build on.
00:34:32.820
We have a public option that we're ready to make much bigger, a public health insurance option that can reach the hundreds of thousands that are right now not in any kind of health insurance.
00:34:45.200
We also have a way to provide direct health care to a lot of our neighbors who happen to be undocumented.
00:34:54.640
We recognized that, obviously, health care is not just in theory a right.
00:35:03.020
And we're doing something about that here in this city.
00:35:11.660
What would it even mean for health care to be a right?
00:35:25.160
If health care is a right, then what is a right?
00:35:30.900
Health care is a good and a service that we want, and goods and services cost things.
00:35:35.920
And so the question Bill de Blasio is honestly trying to answer is, how do you pay for health care?
00:35:41.620
He's using dishonest language of rights to do it, but there's a lot wrong there.
00:35:46.640
The trouble with socialist medicine is the trouble with socialism.
00:35:49.740
Eventually, you run out of other people's money.
00:35:51.640
The other fear here is that, ultimately, when the government has enough control over that sector of the economy,
00:35:57.220
it has control over your health care, and therefore, it has control over your health care decisions.
00:36:02.360
It can decide if you get the surgery or you don't get the surgery.
00:36:04.980
It can decide if you get the medicine or you don't get the medicine.
00:36:07.240
It can decide nobody gets the medicine, and you have nothing that you can do about it
00:36:11.000
because the government controls the whole thing.
00:36:13.220
That's one of the great fears of socialist health care.
00:36:15.800
All of that said, I would be much more comfortable if every mayor in every liberal town in America
00:36:23.400
did exactly what Bill de Blasio did because then maybe we wouldn't need this national one-size-fits-all solution.
00:36:32.560
If it could be the case that all these liberal towns that want to destroy themselves,
00:36:36.980
that want to damage their citizens, and they want to hurt their economies,
00:36:40.700
and they want to hurt their health care systems,
00:36:42.400
if they want to make socialist medicine, and they just do it, and they leave me alone,
00:36:48.880
It pains me because New York is my native place. It's my home.
00:36:52.800
And so that pains me to see that happen to my own place.
00:36:56.320
But that would be much better than if we had some one-size-fits-all.
00:37:00.660
All of a sudden, we take over a sixth of the entire American economy.
00:37:05.080
Now, the trouble here for socialist health care,
00:37:07.980
we've been lamenting this for a long time as conservatives,
00:37:11.860
is when these things start to gain steam, once you see cities start to pass these things,
00:37:19.720
You'll remember, in the olden days, I'm old enough to remember,
00:37:22.780
you used to be able to smoke in restaurants and hotels and things like that.
00:37:28.200
And New York was the first one to institute these smoking bans on a wide scale in a big place.
00:37:33.340
And all of a sudden, it took off all over the country.
00:37:39.640
which is it protects us from the wildest left-wingers.
00:37:46.920
And so you could see that come to the national level.
00:37:50.420
I'll talk about this a little more when we get to Woodrow Wilson.
00:37:53.740
An element of the conservative movement has always been lost causes.
00:37:59.800
I was listening to a symposium from the New Criterion on Russell Kirk.
00:38:05.520
That conservatism is not primarily about profit and making a profit and profiting all the time.
00:38:14.760
It's about looking at what we've lost, what we can still gather as a remnant from our civilization,
00:38:19.680
which is going away from us, which we're losing, especially in this modern era.
00:38:24.280
And that's what I'm looking at when I see Bill de Blasio say these things.
00:38:27.360
When I see national candidates get a lot of play because they talk about socialist health care,
00:38:33.140
you think, gosh, this is not looking good for us.
00:38:37.880
We've got to fight it, even though we know the deck is stacked against us,
00:38:41.260
even though we know we're probably going to lose.
00:38:45.560
We'll see what happens when we get to Woodrow Wilson.
00:38:47.380
I do have to point out Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the left-wing justice on the Supreme Court.
00:38:58.860
She's missed two days at the court, missed oral arguments.
00:39:01.660
This is the first time in her entire career that that's the case.
00:39:04.740
She was nominated by Bill Clinton, I believe, in 93.
00:39:11.140
And she has missed it because she's recovering from cancer surgery.
00:39:15.220
Now, she's had two prior cancer surgeries in 1999 and 2009.
00:39:20.960
She's never missed a day on the court for that.
00:39:23.020
This recent one, they removed lumps from her lungs.
00:39:27.200
This was after she cracked some ribs from a fall.
00:39:30.320
Things are not looking good for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
00:39:34.000
I'm not even going to make jokes about her dying.
00:39:37.840
But this will just show you what 2019 looks like.
00:39:42.140
If Ruth Bader Ginsburg's health does not recover,
00:39:44.480
if she finds that she has to retire from the court,
00:39:47.040
or her maker decides that she has to retire from the court,
00:39:51.240
then that is going to be the dominant story of 2019.
00:39:55.440
We saw this with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing.
00:39:58.620
We're seeing this now with the possibility of Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaving the court.
00:40:04.000
Because the Congress and the executive, to some degree, have given so much of American governing power over to the Supreme Court,
00:40:14.040
the Congress constantly is deferring to the court to make laws.
00:40:22.940
George W. Bush, when he signed McCain-Feingold, which was awful legislation to regulate political speech,
00:40:29.000
he even intimated that he thought it might be unconstitutional, but he was leaving it for the court to decide.
00:40:34.000
All three branches of government have the duty to uphold the Constitution.
00:40:38.280
All three branches of government should stop things when they seem unconstitutional.
00:40:42.340
And unfortunately, the Congress and the executive haven't done that.
00:40:46.560
Also because the court has so run roughshod over the Constitution for so very long that now there is a movement for the past 50 years or so of returning to the Constitution,
00:40:59.600
of being more rigidly accurate, of being textualists, interpreting the text to mean what it meant when it was written.
00:41:09.080
It looks like Kavanaugh is a little bit squishy, unfortunately.
00:41:14.240
But if President Trump were to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the left-wing Supreme Court justice, with an originalist, that would be a huge switch in the swing of the court.
00:41:26.040
If you thought Kavanaugh was bad, that was a cakewalk compared to what you'll see in 2019.
00:41:30.420
So a lot of this year in politics, we're talking about the wall.
00:41:37.460
We're talking about more tax reform, maybe entitlement reform.
00:41:40.580
All of that is going to go out the window if Ruth Bader Ginsburg is off the court.
00:41:46.700
If you liked the Kavanaugh fight, get ready for this one.
00:41:51.380
But I will point out, it was very good for Republicans.
00:41:55.560
If the midterms had been held right after that Kavanaugh fight, we would have kept the House.
00:42:05.680
But as with everything in the Trump presidency, get ready for a crazy reality show.
00:42:14.600
Season three or season four, as it is, is going to be totally at the next level.
00:42:22.140
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson announced his 14 points for the end of World War I.
00:42:30.180
Woodrow Wilson, in many ways the inventor of modern progressivism in American politics,
00:42:34.860
he announces his 14 points for what was going to happen after the war and how the world order
00:42:40.760
This was assailed by conservatives who pointed out rightly that God only needed 10 points.
00:42:48.400
Whenever these things go on longer and longer, you realize that they're getting worse and worse.
00:42:56.820
It fits onto that beautiful yellowed piece of parchment.
00:42:59.840
Look at the Constitution of the European Union.
00:43:04.520
When these things go on, they get too in the detail.
00:43:11.380
They're probably not going to protect human freedom.
00:43:19.640
The sticking point was the 14th point which established the League of Nations.
00:43:24.100
A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose
00:43:28.900
of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great
00:43:35.860
The American people didn't like this, especially conservatives and Republicans didn't like this.
00:43:39.940
They didn't like the idea that we were giving up our sovereignty to these supranational,
00:43:44.300
international institutions that were going to now govern us.
00:43:49.520
You heard this all the time in this era, in the progressive era.
00:43:55.960
Oh, the Constitution is not fit for these complicated times.
00:44:00.200
You have had, since the era of Wilson, progressives trying to push socialist health care, trying
00:44:05.560
to push all of the same programs that they're pushing now.
00:44:08.620
And the reason I bring this up, the reason this is so important at this moment in politics
00:44:13.300
is because at that time it was a lost cause, conservative cause, the cause of freedom, the cause
00:44:21.360
You saw socialism lighting a fire all around the world.
00:44:26.320
You saw communists take over what then became the Soviet Union.
00:44:31.100
You saw it burning like a disease throughout Europe.
00:44:33.980
You saw communists in the streets and socialists in the streets in America.
00:44:38.640
It looked, you heard journalists say when they looked at the Soviet Union, I've seen the
00:44:53.020
When the conservative movement came around, Bill Buckley said that a conservative is one
00:45:00.360
And when that conservative movement came around, it was a lost cause.
00:45:10.380
It was made fun of, mocked as a lost cause by the media, by leftist academics and politicians.
00:45:18.100
And then we rejected Woodrow Wilson's 14 points.
00:45:21.400
And then we, actually, it ended up killing Woodrow Wilson.
00:45:25.360
He was so outraged and shocked when the United States rejected entrance into the League of
00:45:29.620
Nations, when we wouldn't give up some of our national sovereignty in that way.
00:45:38.080
Socialism has been a lost cause for conservatives for 100 years.
00:45:47.180
We're looking, we're looking the death right in the barrel.
00:45:50.280
We're looking anti-Americanism right, right in the barrel.
00:45:52.760
And we're probably going to lose, except maybe we won't.
00:45:55.120
And that's why we keep fighting, because we've won those battles before.
00:45:58.420
And I love that President Trump is sticking strong on this shutdown.
00:46:17.180
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
00:46:38.320
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
00:46:43.160
On the Ben Shapiro Show today, President Trump assumes the bully pulpit to push for his border wall.
00:46:48.380
Democrats declare Trump an unprecedented threat to the Constitution.
00:46:51.680
And Whoopi Goldberg has some advice for Ocasio-Cortez pooping.