The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 The 2020 race is now well underway and the Democrat candidates have endorsed the most

00:00:05.000 radical proposals in American presidential campaign history. We will examine the substance

00:00:10.180 of this primary campaign. Then Beto gets even creepier. Who knew that could happen?

00:00:15.360 Chelsea Clinton gets blamed for terrorist attacks and young people are really unhappy.

00:00:20.300 I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:22.280 All right. So much to get to today. It occurred to me when I was looking at the broader picture

00:00:34.340 on politics that now that the campaign field has kind of really begun to flesh itself out,

00:00:41.860 Biden hasn't announced yet, a few others who are going to get in, but you're starting to see them

00:00:45.880 take policy positions. We now have beyond the Instagrams, beyond the cooking and the beer

00:00:52.640 and the dental cleanings and beyond all this sort of shallow superficial stuff as just a matter of

00:00:58.740 substance, we have the most radical presidential policy field in all of American history.

00:01:07.060 Really, really radical stuff. So we're going to go through those proposals because I think that

00:01:11.620 the Democrats are trying to distract you with all these videos and dental cleanings and whatever,

00:01:15.360 but when you get down to it, they are advocating some pretty radical stuff. Before we get to all

00:01:22.980 of that, I've just got to check what time it is. So we've just started the show. You know how I knew

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00:03:01.700 Join the movement. By the way, I do have to put in a plug before we get to the Democrats radical

00:03:10.180 proposals. You know, Ben released his book yesterday, The Right Side of History. So this

00:03:14.500 thing shot way up the charts. I think it made it up to number three bestseller book on all

00:03:20.040 of Amazon. Now this is great, but it needs to go just a little bit higher. It needs, so

00:03:26.300 as you know, look, I'm talking to you as a number one bestselling author myself. I, what

00:03:31.800 I really need to have happen, because I love the book. I think it's a really important book.

00:03:35.400 I think a lot of people need to buy it. You need to buy just a few more copies to push

00:03:39.400 that book up to number two, because it will be very, very satisfying and hilarious if Ben's

00:03:45.860 tome, his magnum opus, his intellectual history of all of the West makes it up to number two,

00:03:52.300 just right below that number one bestseller, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, A Comprehensive

00:03:57.920 Guide. Get the book today. Bump it up just a little higher, guys. It was at three. We

00:04:02.200 can go to two. Head over to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, rightsideofhistorybook.com. Get your

00:04:07.780 copy. There's going to be a live book signing today only on today's episode of The Conversation

00:04:11.700 at 7 p.m. Eastern. Get a signed copy. Have a chance to have your questions answered. Go

00:04:16.120 to premiercollectibles.com slash Ben Shapiro. Do it. You'll be glad you did. More importantly,

00:04:20.620 I'll be glad you did, because I'll say, look, Ben, you sold all of these copies and you came

00:04:25.480 so close to Reasons to Vote for Democrats. But at least then a lot of people will read

00:04:31.540 it as they should. It is a really, really good book. What do we have in the 2020 presidential

00:04:38.220 primary for the Democrat Party? I've identified at least half a dozen, I guess closer to a dozen

00:04:47.300 wild left-wing proposals, something we wouldn't have even considered five years ago, ten years

00:04:54.280 ago. Number one, Medicare for all. What is Medicare for all? When I heard that slogan start

00:05:00.820 to percolate on the really left-wing websites a few years ago, I thought, what a terrible

00:05:04.520 campaign slogan. It makes us all sound like we're really old people. Medicare for all,

00:05:09.500 nobody wants that. That's so, this is gaining steam. It's now been endorsed by Kirsten Gillibrand,

00:05:14.760 Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, a number of other people who are looking at getting

00:05:19.960 into the race. What is Medicare for all? It's a socialist takeover of healthcare. It would make

00:05:24.700 the American healthcare system, the leader in the world, the best in the world, the freest

00:05:28.200 that leads the world because we have free enterprise, an ability to create prescription drugs,

00:05:33.640 to innovate, to create new medical technology. It would take that and it would make it more

00:05:39.040 government-controlled than the healthcare system in the United Kingdom, more government-controlled

00:05:44.980 than healthcare systems in Western Europe and in Scandinavia. It would force 150 million Americans

00:05:53.000 off of their health insurance. This is not some fringe idea. This is no longer just being talked

00:05:58.900 about on Jacobin Magazine or on these far-left websites. This is now being endorsed by a ton of

00:06:06.620 mainstream presidential candidates, many of whom, in the case of Gillibrand, Booker,

00:06:11.040 Warren, and Harris, are in the U.S. Senate right now. That's the first one. If the Democrats had any

00:06:17.960 issue that they were running on in 2018, in the midterm elections, anything beyond orange man bad,

00:06:24.600 I hate Donald Trump, he's a baddie, the issue that they were running on is healthcare. The left has

00:06:29.820 wanted government-run healthcare in this country for over 100 years. It looks like they are now at the

00:06:35.920 point where they're coming totally honest with their proposals and they want a full government

00:06:41.700 takeover. What would that mean for you, by the way, practically? So 150 million Americans lose their

00:06:47.260 current health insurance. It means you don't get to keep your doctor. And it means that because

00:06:52.180 healthcare is a commodity, because it's just labor and property, because it's not a negative right,

00:06:59.160 but a positive right, what that means is you have less choice. Healthcare is going to be rationed.

00:07:07.340 It has to be rationed in the sense that it's a limited good. There's not an infinite amount of

00:07:12.460 healthcare in the world. So how is it rationed right now? It's rationed in a pretty good way.

00:07:16.940 And there are a lot of ways to fix the American healthcare system. But right now, you have people

00:07:21.220 have the ability to buy healthcare that they want. They can pick the health insurance plan that they

00:07:28.180 want. We just enrolled here, here at the Daily Wire, and you can pick the bronze or the silver

00:07:32.860 or the gold. You can do HSA, which is a great program, the health savings account, where you

00:07:38.080 can put money in before taxes to make your own healthcare decisions. There are a lot of great

00:07:42.900 little reforms and options here to pick what is best for you. That is one way that your own choice

00:07:48.220 in the market and the amount of money that you want to spend on healthcare versus the amount of money

00:07:53.040 you want to spend on rent versus the amount of money you want to spend on Christmas presents for your

00:07:55.980 kids. That is one way to allocate care to a lot of people. Now, in this system, as the left wants

00:08:02.240 to present it, they say that for the poor, you're just denied healthcare, you're dying in the streets.

00:08:06.660 That is simply not true. We have an extraordinarily generous safety net for healthcare in this country.

00:08:13.660 We have Medicaid if you're too poor to have healthcare. We have Medicare if you have statistically

00:08:19.480 high medical costs because you're a senior citizen. We have a huge safety net. Then all of the

00:08:24.100 individual states have their own programs. Then we also have private charity. Then if that weren't

00:08:28.500 enough, you can walk into an emergency room and you will be treated. Not just if you're poor, not just

00:08:34.540 if you're an American citizen. Even if you're an illegal alien, you'll be treated. We have a complex

00:08:39.600 healthcare system. Now, some of those complexities are pretty bad. So, for instance, some of the

00:08:45.860 regulations that came up as early as the 1930s, some of the incentives to tie it to employment have

00:08:50.960 created some problems as some of the regulations that have just been put into effect because of

00:08:56.520 cronyism, the inability to sell health insurance across state lines is one example. Some of those

00:09:02.680 regulations are burdensome. They make the healthcare system too complicated. Some of the way we think

00:09:07.120 about healthcare and health insurance makes it burdensome and too complicated. For instance,

00:09:12.120 when you go to the doctor and you have your annual checkup, that is paid for by insurance,

00:09:17.760 insurance. But that's not what insurance is. Insurance is when you pay a certain amount of money

00:09:24.500 because of a risk that you will need money in the future. And so you're paying your monthly premiums

00:09:32.180 in case something comes up that you can't expect. And then the insurance company, which was willing to

00:09:37.700 take the other side of that bat, was willing to take on that risk, will then pay you your money, the money

00:09:43.060 that you need for your health insurance. That's what insurance is. But if you know that you're going

00:09:47.820 to get an annual checkup, that's not insurance. You're just, I don't know, prepaying. You're entering

00:09:52.480 into a kind of weird contract where you're paying a monthly amount for something you're certainly going

00:09:57.380 to get every year. All of that is complicated. However, the alternative is worse. Don't forget,

00:10:04.160 we've been talking about this a lot. As Russell Kirk wrote in The Conservative Mind,

00:10:11.560 all simple forms of government are bad. He's quoting other conservative thinkers. All simple

00:10:17.020 forms of government are bad. So, okay, we have this temptation, I think, because of how complicated

00:10:21.620 healthcare is in the US to say, scrap it, get rid of the insurance companies, Medicare for all,

00:10:26.300 socialist healthcare. Make it simple. I don't need to worry about paying a premium.

00:10:30.600 Free healthcare. Healthcare has never been more expensive than when it's free.

00:10:36.080 So you scrap all of that. What are you throwing away? You're throwing away your choice.

00:10:39.620 You're throwing away a complex and very moral system of incentives for how to allocate care.

00:10:47.580 Some of that is by free choice. Some of that is by resources. Some of that is by the government

00:10:52.800 to make sure that people don't get left behind. When you get rid of all of that, what do you have?

00:10:57.340 You have the death panels. I mean, what is meant by the phrase death panel is that government

00:11:04.440 bureaucrats choose to allocate healthcare to whomever they want. That's what it is. It's that

00:11:13.760 rather than this complex system that we currently have with a lot of free choice, a lot of incentives

00:11:18.500 for innovation, but rather than all of that, it's a government bureaucrat who decides who gets care and

00:11:23.780 who doesn't. It's what you saw with those babies dying in the United Kingdom, little Charlie Gard,

00:11:29.620 baby Alfie. Parents don't have a say. The patient doesn't have a say. The government will tell you if

00:11:35.660 you're going to get care. That's what is being proposed, not by some fringe of the Democrat Party,

00:11:39.960 but by major mainstream candidates. That's just one policy. I mean, I wanted to take a little time

00:11:46.980 on that because that is a major policy proposal. So many others that really in the grand scheme of

00:11:54.000 things are even more radical. We'll get to it in a second, but first, let's make a little money,

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00:13:26.320 Okay, that's just Medicare for All. Next policy. They are proposing a national minimum wage hike to

00:13:32.360 $15 per hour. Who came up with this? Bernie Sanders. Who is backing it now? Kamala Harris.

00:13:38.440 Elizabeth Warren now says that the minimum wage needs to be raised because it's not high enough

00:13:44.320 to support a family. Now, of course, the minimum wage was never intended to support a family. The

00:13:49.560 minimum wage was intended for teenagers. The minimum wage was intended for people who are just getting

00:13:55.100 into the workforce. The minimum wage is intended for a small portion of the workforce, and then

00:13:59.860 they're going to move up and make more money. But the left is doubling down on this. Because

00:14:04.220 what is the logical conclusion? If Liz Warren is right and the minimum wage is all we should aspire

00:14:10.220 to, the minimum wage should be enough to raise a family on, on just one person making the minimum

00:14:16.340 wage. Obviously, that's not enough. So what does that imply? That implies their next radical policy

00:14:22.720 proposal, which is the universal basic income. Universal basic income has gotten some currency on the left

00:14:29.720 and the right. It is an insidious idea. It's a terrible idea. But it's the logical conclusion of

00:14:34.820 this Liz Warren minimum wage stuff, which is if you have to be able to raise a family on the minimum

00:14:39.100 wage, you can't. If it's incumbent on the government to provide you with everything that you need to

00:14:44.520 raise a family, then the government just needs to cut you a check. Why stop at just tinkering in the

00:14:51.860 economy and making employers pay up to $15 an hour? Why not just cut a check? We have a huge welfare state

00:14:57.720 as it is. And this is what the left is doing. This, this one has not been talked about very much,

00:15:01.980 but Kamala Harris proposed the Lyft Act. And what the Lyft Act would do is for families in the middle

00:15:11.040 class, that's always politicians talking about the middle class, they would get $500 per month.

00:15:16.980 Now this, this would come to you as a sort of tax credit, but you could get it on a monthly basis.

00:15:21.720 So $500 per month. And what do we mean by middle class? Do we mean people making less than 40

00:15:27.040 grand a year? People making less than 50 grand a year? No, you would get $500 a month for people

00:15:34.200 making less than $100,000 per year. Just pretty good money. So now this is starting to look a lot

00:15:41.480 more like a universal basic income. She's not the only one. Andrew Yang, who is the internet's favorite

00:15:49.180 Democrat candidate for president. He's this kind of weird guy whose whole campaign is about

00:15:55.220 just giving people money from the government, just pure checks. I mean, this is, this is what the

00:16:00.260 founders so feared about democracy. They said, oh gosh, once democracy becomes widespread enough,

00:16:07.100 the people are going to realize that they can bribe themselves with their own money.

00:16:12.160 The people are going to realize they can just plunder the rich. The politicians are going to realize they

00:16:16.440 can just dole out money to everybody and then they're going to win elections. And Andrew Yang is the

00:16:20.400 embodiment of this idea. Andrew Yang, the center of his campaign has just given people $1,000 a month.

00:16:25.900 You just get a check for $1,000 a month and that's it. And this even is not a totally new idea.

00:16:32.380 McGovern, when he was running as a Democrat candidate for president, proposed $1,000 per year

00:16:38.940 for Americans in a universal basic income. Obviously inflation has taken off a lot since the

00:16:43.880 60s and 70s. But this is not a terribly creative idea. It's the most basic pandering idea in all

00:16:51.660 of democracy, which is buy off voters. I mean, in this case, literally give them money. But that

00:16:56.260 is the logical conclusion of these ideas. You remember the life of Julia was a campaign

00:17:01.520 experiment from Barack Obama who showed through the life of this fictitious woman, Julia,

00:17:08.520 how from cradle to grave, Barack Obama's government was with her the only step of the way. And actually

00:17:14.960 the only meaningful relationship she had as an totally atomized individual with no other

00:17:21.280 relationships was to the government. They give her money for this. They give her money for that.

00:17:26.300 They give her a job. They give her this. They give her that. They give her free college. That's the

00:17:29.840 next radical proposal that Democrats have picked up on. Free college, taking away tuition for college.

00:17:36.280 Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Liz Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, everybody wants

00:17:43.280 to take away the cost of college. This might be the most insidious idea of the whole proposal.

00:17:49.060 We just saw last week and two weeks ago the college admissions scandal. We saw that people were basically

00:17:57.760 bribing college officials to get their kids into colleges. And the real scandal of that was not that

00:18:03.760 the kids got in, but it was that they were able to graduate. If these kids were so stupid, so uneducated,

00:18:09.160 so unintelligent, how were they able to graduate? How were they able to make it through in some cases

00:18:13.820 with pretty good GPAs? It's because college has been hollowed out from within. Why is college hollowed

00:18:19.960 out from within? It's because the government subsidizes every loan. Why has college gotten so

00:18:25.880 expensive? It's because the government subsidizes every loan. Why has college gotten so politically

00:18:30.400 correct? It's because the government, when you're on the hook to them, is able to foist a lot of

00:18:34.720 regulations on them. You see huge administrative bloat. You see costs going up. You see the quality

00:18:39.060 of the education going down. And as the left has been marching through the universities now for well

00:18:44.380 over 50 years, all of these candidates realize that the key to their progressive political utopia

00:18:51.460 is totally taking over the colleges. This is their chance. The way they're going to do it

00:18:56.000 is with government controlled college. Liz Warren has already sponsored the College for All Act.

00:19:03.000 Actually, the only Democrat candidate to push back on this is Amy Klobuchar. And I got to tell you,

00:19:09.600 there's something about Amy Klobuchar. I really like her. She's, I mean, obviously she's a left

00:19:14.520 winger. She's a typical, but there's something about her just hurling her desk lamp at her staffers.

00:19:20.440 There's something about her eating salad on airplanes with a, with a comb and then flinging at a

00:19:25.300 staffer saying, clean this. Something, I don't know, gets my heart going pitter patter. And she

00:19:30.340 is relatively a moderate in this field. She's the one to push back and say, you know,

00:19:34.820 maybe this isn't a good idea. The left does this all the time. The left creates a problem.

00:19:41.700 And then the left insists that they're the only ones who can fix the problem.

00:19:46.700 They did this to K through 12 education, totally destroyed the education system in the United States.

00:19:51.560 They say the answer now is more leftist policy and people buy it. We'll see if they buy it in 2020.

00:19:59.720 The other side of free college is student loan forgiveness. In what other financial bubble

00:20:06.480 would you see an entire political party, the oldest continuous political party in the United States

00:20:13.240 coming around and saying, Oh, let's just forgive all the loans.

00:20:16.980 How many trillions of dollars in, I think we're at one, one and a half trillion dollars in student

00:20:22.560 loans in this country. And right now, Liz Warren is calling for, she called actually as early as 2014

00:20:28.780 for students to be, or ex-students to be able to refinance all of that debt. Gillibrand also called

00:20:34.760 to be able to refinance all of that debt. And then the more radical proposals are saying,

00:20:38.420 just forgive it all completely. And mark my words, by the end of this campaign, you're going to see a

00:20:43.000 number of candidates calling to eliminate and just forgive the student loans altogether.

00:20:48.800 But what is that going to do? You might feel good for the students who have a $200,000 fake degree,

00:20:53.880 a completely worthless piece of paper. You might feel good for them. But what kind of incentive does

00:20:59.760 that create? First of all, their creditors are going to get totally screwed over. They're not going

00:21:05.240 to be able to get their money back. But even beyond that, when the colleges and when the banks realize

00:21:11.340 that the loans are just going to be forgiven, or they're going to be paid off by the federal

00:21:16.460 government, I guess that's the case in which the creditors don't, don't get totally run roughshod

00:21:21.900 over. Well, then what happens? Then the colleges say, okay, great. Great. Let's just keep raising

00:21:27.600 those costs of tuition. Let's keep those student loans coming because the government's just going to

00:21:31.620 forgive it again. This is the problem with amnesty. This is why amnesty is such a big deal.

00:21:36.180 If we could turn off the spigot of illegal immigration today, I think most people in this

00:21:44.140 country would be willing to grant amnesty to just about everybody, not the criminals, not the violent

00:21:48.340 criminals, but just about everyone else. I think people basically would back amnesty and say, oh,

00:21:53.100 it's easy enough. We don't want to deport everybody. It's going to take too long.

00:21:56.460 However, the trouble with amnesty is once you give amnesty, then it creates an incentive for more

00:22:02.880 illegal immigration. Once you give student loan amnesty, once you give loan forgiveness,

00:22:07.700 it exacerbates the problem in the colleges rather than fix it. That's what you're going to see.

00:22:13.020 Then speaking of colleges, you have Elizabeth Warren calling for the abolition of the electoral

00:22:17.980 college. It's not just her. Beto O'Rourke just today came out and said, yeah, there's a lot of

00:22:22.780 wisdom to abolishing the electoral college. The electoral college, one of our oldest institutions

00:22:28.260 for one of our most important decisions, which is electing the president. And you now have the

00:22:34.760 mainstream candidates of the Democrat party calling for its abolition. Why? What is the purpose of the

00:22:40.920 electoral college? It has a few purposes. One, it's to restrain pure democracy. Very good. Very

00:22:48.200 important. That's a wonderful thing. What is another purpose of the electoral college? It doesn't

00:22:54.880 just restrain democracy. Let's say all of the American people voted for super duper Mecca Hitler

00:23:00.660 or somebody, or they elected, you know, Stalin Jr. to be president. The electoral college could come out

00:23:07.900 and say, nope, sorry, we are going to disagree with the American people. We're going to elect

00:23:12.700 Barron Trump or somebody. They're going to elect a good candidate. So there's that aspect. The other way

00:23:17.860 that they do it is by removing the vote for president one or two degrees from the people, which is very

00:23:24.020 important because the people don't elect the president. The people participate in votes in

00:23:30.040 their states to choose electors to elect the president, but the people don't elect the president.

00:23:35.980 We are not a democracy. We are a democratic republic. We have a representational system of government.

00:23:42.800 This is very important. It's important for the preservation of liberty because once you have

00:23:50.760 more and more and more and more direct democracy, you see liberty disappear. The tyranny of a mob is

00:23:56.420 just as bad. It's actually worse than the tyranny of a dictator or of a bad monarch or somebody like

00:24:02.140 that. Now calling to abolish that. Now they're going to abolish the electors. They're going to abolish

00:24:07.300 the electoral college, but don't worry because a major Democrat, if not the leading Democrat in the

00:24:13.280 country, Nancy Pelosi is calling to allow 16 year olds to vote. So we want to destroy the electoral

00:24:18.900 college, but then we want to expand the electorate to include 16 year olds. Why? In her words, so that

00:24:23.940 she can capture them when they're kids, when they're impressionable, when they're immature,

00:24:27.480 when they're juvenile, when they're uneducated, when they are being indoctrinated by leftists in

00:24:32.300 the school system while they've still got them. The presidential candidates haven't come out for

00:24:38.500 this yet. Mark my words, at least one of them will come out for this before the end of the primary.

00:24:44.100 They're advocating packing the Supreme Court. They want to add a ton more justices to the

00:24:48.780 Supreme Court. Liz Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker. They want free universal

00:24:54.820 preschool. You see that from Julian Castro and Liz Warren. So they don't, you don't want, you don't

00:25:01.200 want you to have your kids for very long. You've got to, you have the kid, the kid comes out and

00:25:05.880 immediately goes into the government run by leftists for universal preschool, then K through 12. Then we

00:25:11.660 want free college. So everyone's got to go to that college system. Pretty soon we're going to have free

00:25:15.980 post-graduate education, free grad school or professional school. So the government has your

00:25:23.020 kid the whole time, indoctrination the whole time. Then they want to redefine capitalism. Elizabeth

00:25:29.160 Warren has the Accountable Capitalism Act. This would make corporations unaccountable to shareholders.

00:25:36.700 This would make them accountable to politicians. This would give workers a 40% membership on corporate

00:25:42.720 boards. And this would censor corporate political speech. That's what they want. And we're not even

00:25:49.180 close to the most radical plans they have yet. We'll get to reparations for slavery in a minute.

00:25:54.280 We'll get to why Beto O'Rourke is so creepy. But first you've got to go to dailywire.com.

00:26:00.920 10 bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show,

00:26:04.540 you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag. You get the Matt Walsh show,

00:26:08.280 you get to ask questions backstage. By the way, get your mailbag questions in for tomorrow.

00:26:12.720 I'm going to be in Missouri tomorrow. I'll be giving a speech at Truman University.

00:26:19.140 I'm going to be bringing this with me because otherwise I could drown. I'll be flying all

00:26:23.480 across this country. I'll be taking the same air routes as all those candidates. Maybe I'll see

00:26:29.640 Beto on the airplane. Who knows? You're going to need these leftist years tumblers or you're not

00:26:33.520 going to survive past 2020. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back.

00:26:36.660 So you've now got the Democrats proposing to take your kids from two years old all the way to

00:26:54.340 after college. You're now redefining capitalism. You're redefining corporations. You're upending

00:27:00.600 the economy. You're giving everybody a universal wage. You're raising the minimum wage. You're giving

00:27:08.460 everybody socialist health care. The government is now taking over just about every sector of the

00:27:12.840 economy. And then once all of that is done, the 2020 candidates are calling for reparations for

00:27:19.740 slavery. That, I don't know. I mean, this is woke because slavery ended in 1865. So it's only, you know,

00:27:29.100 150 years ago at this point. The woke earth, I want to know, when are we going to give Turks

00:27:36.080 reparations for the Crusades? Well, actually, when are they going to give us reparations for the Battle of

00:27:42.220 Tours? When are we going to give people reparations for the Spanish Inquisition? When

00:27:48.500 there's been a lot of conflict throughout history. When are people going to have all of their

00:27:55.000 reparations? This obviously is an impractical and impracticable plan. Julian Castro, Kamala Harris,

00:28:02.620 and Liz Warren all behind it. Cory Booker is actually one of the people who says this is not

00:28:07.220 really practical and he hasn't come out for it, but he does want a policy to close the racial wealth gap

00:28:12.660 and his policy is baby bonds. So with baby bonds, low-income people, people who don't have a lot of

00:28:19.720 wealth, would get government bonds when they're born and the bonds would mature and so would help them

00:28:25.000 build wealth. I'm not totally opposed to this idea in theory. I'm just opposed to the injustice of it

00:28:31.680 and the perverse incentives it would create. How come only some people get the baby bonds but not others?

00:28:37.000 Where do you draw the line for the baby bonds? I mean this is just the redistribution of wealth

00:28:42.300 and if certain people know that they're going to get baby bonds below a certain income level,

00:28:47.300 aren't they going to just stop working? Isn't that going to harm productivity? Isn't that going to

00:28:51.020 have the same sort of negative incentives that so many other welfare programs have?

00:28:56.420 Bernie Sanders also is not calling directly for reparations for slavery because Bernie Sanders is

00:29:02.400 an old school socialist. He's not the new intersectional socialist. So for the new

00:29:08.000 intersectional socialists, everything, it's about class and race and religion and sexuality. It's all

00:29:15.420 the struggles combined, man, into this quasi-mystical, quasi-religious system. Bernie is much more old

00:29:22.360 school than that. For him, it's just class conflict. So for Bernie, what he's saying is, look, we're just

00:29:28.940 going to give a lot of money to poor people, but that will help black people because blacks are

00:29:34.000 disproportionately poor, which I'm sure at some point someone's going to say this is offensive

00:29:37.840 for him to campaign like this. But nevertheless, that's his version of it. All the same, we're

00:29:43.300 talking about a redistribution of wealth specifically to address racial problems. After that, we have a job

00:29:50.860 guarantee program. This is not pie in the sky. Cory Booker's already sponsored legislation for it.

00:29:55.660 That legislation was sponsored, co-sponsored by Liz Warren, Harris, Gillibrand, and Sanders. Job

00:30:02.300 guarantee program in America. They have a job guarantee program in China too. They had a job

00:30:07.060 guarantee program in the Soviet Union as well. And then of course, the pièce de la résistance,

00:30:13.560 the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal, the wackiest proposal. We've gone over it. I don't need to go

00:30:18.000 over it again. But in broad strokes, it outlaws planes, trains, and automobiles. It knocks down every

00:30:23.300 single building in the country. Then it rebuilds it within 10 years. It knocks down 88% at least of

00:30:29.380 the American energy industry. It actually could go as high as the mid-90s percent of American energy.

00:30:34.560 Just within the energy industry, this would destroy 5.8 million jobs on day one. And by day two, all of

00:30:40.480 those other jobs that are downstream of the energy industry would be destroyed as well, which is to

00:30:44.900 say virtually all of them. How many people do you think support the Green New Deal? You would say,

00:30:52.400 this is just Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right? This is just couldn't possibly, no way. Amy Klobuchar,

00:30:58.740 Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Kamala Harris, Liz Warren, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand,

00:31:05.520 and even Pete, you know, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He's running, it's a long shot campaign,

00:31:14.960 but he's running for president. Pete, I believe, does he, what does he pronounce? He pronounces it

00:31:23.220 with a, with the edge, edge, Pete, Pete, I don't know. It's one of those things. Anyway,

00:31:29.860 he supports it too. They all support the Green New Deal. What does this mean for the primary?

00:31:35.520 This means that this is a race to the left. This means they are all going to be running over

00:31:39.720 themselves. So that even where certain candidates haven't embraced the far left yet, they will by

00:31:44.020 the end of the primary. It's only March. What does this mean for the field broadly? It means that

00:31:49.700 actually there might be some daylight for a centrist candidate. They're all running over themselves

00:31:55.120 because they think the Democrat party has been pushed so far left, radicalized by Trump,

00:31:59.480 that the only candidate who can win is the furthest left, the most intersectionally approved.

00:32:08.480 The trouble for this is if they're all running left, it doesn't matter if you're the second most

00:32:12.620 left-wing candidate. It doesn't matter if you're the, oh, I'm the third most left-wing candidate.

00:32:16.720 No, only the furthest left works. So what this does is it actually creates a little daylight for an

00:32:21.900 alternative, for a centrist candidate. That's where you see Amy Klobuchar is making a couple moves in

00:32:27.420 that direction. Beto O'Rourke making a couple moves in that direction. Some Democrats and media figures

00:32:32.960 are recognizing that same thing. Actually, Morning Joe is now calling for an explicitly

00:32:39.380 old news, old Democrat party, what would today be considered centrist candidate.

00:32:45.680 And it's hilarious, except maybe there's something to it.

00:32:48.880 Willie, I see one person on that list that I can tell you today would beat Donald Trump,

00:32:56.920 who is it? Who would you think it is? Who do I think you think it is? Who do you think I think

00:33:02.340 it is? Kamala Harris. John Kerry. Yeah. John Kerry. For all the reasons I told you, I'd be worried

00:33:09.080 because of the sabermetrics of Joe Biden. He's done it in 88. He's done it in 2008. He doesn't

00:33:15.260 like raising money. You think about all of those things. Now you go back to John Kerry's one shot in

00:33:20.120 2004, running against a sitting president right after 9-11, right after the beginning of, at that

00:33:28.060 time, a popular war. John Kerry raised tons of money. He knows how to do it. Joe Biden does it.

00:33:34.480 John Kerry likes raising money. Joe Biden doesn't like to do it. John Kerry came within 80,000 votes

00:33:40.860 in Ohio of being the next president of the United States. Again, a couple of years after 9-11,

00:33:46.060 in the middle of a war, John Kerry, if he ran, would win. That's all I'm going to say. It's all

00:33:52.240 I'm going to say. It's pretty interesting to say that. He would be the 46th president of the United

00:33:56.800 States if he announced today he was running. And nobody could stop. A very, very sophisticated

00:34:01.860 observer of American politics who you both know very well. I was out with him last week. We were

00:34:07.540 just walking around. And he was looking at the field. And he said to me, he said, you know who has

00:34:11.920 the best chance of doing this? And he's not in it. I said, no, who he's John Kerry. Okay.

00:34:16.280 Wow. There you go. Okay. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking these people are so

00:34:20.480 disconnected from reality. There is no way that the Democrat party would ever nominate

00:34:27.680 Thurston Howell IV, John Kerry, lovey, Teresa, Teresa, honey, get the yacht. I want to go out in sun.

00:34:37.580 They're never going to nominate that guy in 2020, right? Maybe. Except the wisdom here is

00:34:43.860 that as everybody else, 21 candidates jumping over themselves to be the most left-wing candidate,

00:34:50.340 whoever ends up winning that race is going to be so totally unacceptable that the Democrats will

00:34:55.000 realize that person can't win. They will go for a safer bet. A guy that has been around for a while,

00:35:01.520 who is a little bit more centrist. I think that there is some wisdom to that. It's just

00:35:06.860 the odds of that happening are so low. Really, probably what the reality is, is the Democrats

00:35:13.480 have made their far radical leftist bed and now they have to lie in it. So what does this mean

00:35:18.420 for the general election? This is a huge benefit to Donald Trump because Democrats have learned the

00:35:25.180 wrong lessons from Trump. They look at Trump, who is a sort of extreme figure, and they say,

00:35:31.480 we need to be extreme on policy. No, this is not actually what Donald Trump did. They've convinced

00:35:41.040 themselves that Donald Trump, who is extreme, is extreme on policy. He's not. He's a pretty

00:35:47.340 mainstream conservative on policy, pretty mainstream Republican. Some ways he's even breaks with

00:35:53.260 Republicans. Like that break the criminals out of jail bill that he did right before Christmas.

00:36:01.440 I didn't see a lot of conservatives thrilled about that. This whole paid family leave is not looking

00:36:06.780 like a great conservative policy necessarily. But he's been good. He's kept his word more than other

00:36:15.360 conservatives have. So you got to thank him for that. Still, that's not extreme. He's just extreme on

00:36:21.920 the tweets. He's extreme in his blunt language. He's extremely honest, actually, about his political

00:36:26.280 plans. But what did he call for? He called for building a wall, securing our border. He actually

00:36:31.820 wants to increase legal immigration to the highest amount ever. It's a little strange, but it's not

00:36:37.960 extreme in the conservative position. It's actually extreme in a liberal position. He wants to stop

00:36:42.960 illegal immigration. He wants relative peace abroad. He wants to deregulate the economy, wants to cut

00:36:48.020 taxes. It's kind of basic Republican and conservative stuff. So the Democrats took from that that they

00:36:54.880 have to be extreme ideologues. Now, the confounding factor here is they have very high voter enthusiasm

00:37:04.480 on the left right now. We saw this in 2018. Democrat enthusiasm was very high. Republican enthusiasm

00:37:09.880 was very high. So what this means is you could see a blunt force election. You could see really high

00:37:16.200 turnout on both sides, really ideological turnout on both sides, really extreme ideological views.

00:37:23.940 And then there remains one question mark. Beto. Beto is a major question mark. Because who is Beto?

00:37:33.100 Who is all we know about Beto comes to us by way of CNN. This is seen as a moment by some where Democrats

00:37:40.220 want to nominate either a woman or a minority. Beto O'Rourke is neither of those things. O'Rourke is a white

00:37:45.260 male. Something that's very evident to everyone, and that is that he's a white man. He's also a

00:37:49.500 white male. And he's conscious of his white maleness. They may not be open to another white

00:37:54.660 male. Another white male. Another white male. A lot of the energy in the party right now is not for a

00:38:01.280 white man. Vulnerability is running as a white man. As a white male. Being a white man, something he

00:38:05.300 can't change. Being a white man who says, I'm, you know, I was born to do this. Gosh, you know, to say that

00:38:10.820 it just sort of drips of white male privilege. Beto O'Rourke benefited from white privilege.

00:38:16.060 One of the big debates is whether 2020 is the year of the white man. He can't get over the fact

00:38:21.260 that he's a white man, so he just has to accept that. Not the right time for a white man to run

00:38:26.540 for the presidency. Is a white man the right guy to, you know, to be the next nominee? There's still

00:38:31.220 an issue in this country where people just get very, very excited about white men. He seems very

00:38:35.900 self-aware of his perceived weaknesses. Uh, in this case, you know, the fact that he's a white

00:38:41.280 male. That's all we really know. Basically, he's a white guy. That's all we know. We don't really

00:38:45.740 know about his policies because he kind of is a little bit of both. And even all of the profiles

00:38:52.140 of Beto, they basically just talk about superficial things. There was a piece in the Washington Post

00:38:57.120 so glowing on him. I have to read you this because it tells you a lot about our culture. It's called

00:39:02.060 The Politics of Beto and Amy O'Rourke's Marriage. Beto's campaign for president has put his marriage

00:39:07.920 in the spotlight, showcasing a relationship that is at once the most modern and most traditional

00:39:12.600 of any 2020 candidate. Listen to just the first paragraph. Beto O'Rourke plonked down on his living

00:39:20.200 room sofa beside his wife, Amy, and promptly removed his shoes and socks. It was a late February morning,

00:39:27.160 weeks before announcing his candidacy, and Beto had just returned from his favorite hike

00:39:30.860 in the nearby mountains. His head was still in the clouds. I'll do Beto's voice.

00:39:36.820 I read Amy this passage last night from the best interview I've ever read, he said. It's about myth

00:39:42.380 and different religions. And it said, much the way you're unconscious and subconscious. Sorry,

00:39:48.900 I'm saying both of these words wrong. He turned to Amy for help. You're subconscious, said Amy,

00:39:55.060 who, like Beto, is thin and angular, but whose tawny hair is not yet streaked with gray.

00:40:00.860 Okay, yeah. The same way your subconscious is the author of your dreams, Beto said,

00:40:06.500 leaning forward to rub his bare feet, which elicited a slight groan from Amy. In the same

00:40:11.460 way your will is the subconscious author of your life.

00:40:15.820 That's what we know about him. I have to agree with CNN. He's just the most cliche liberal white

00:40:30.900 boy, 35-year-old recent college graduate I've ever heard of. He's such a, he's a skateboarding,

00:40:38.880 androgynous weirdo. He is a total empty vessel. On the campaign trail the other day, he came out

00:40:43.700 and he told voters, he said, please shape me into the presidential candidate you want.

00:40:50.480 Shape me, he says, into the presidential candidate that you want.

00:40:55.420 How about you have a form? You're supposed to, the reason you can shape him is because he doesn't

00:40:59.980 have a spine. He's an invertebrate, so you can just shape him any way you want, like a big lump of clay.

00:41:04.500 You're supposed to have a spine. This reminds me, there are three kinds of politicians.

00:41:11.900 There are conviction politicians, the ones who are true believers, who really, on the left or the right.

00:41:17.920 There are the power-hungry politicians. They don't really care so much about ideology,

00:41:22.320 they just want power. And then there is a third type, and the third type of politician

00:41:27.500 is bored rich guys. That is Beto O'Rourke. He's not a conviction politician. He holds both sides of

00:41:37.040 every issue. In 2012, he said the U.S. needs significant spending cuts. The U.S. has out-of-control

00:41:42.420 spending. Now he's advocating all of these giant $93 trillion policies. In, in just the other day,

00:41:49.980 he called himself a capitalist, then he calls himself a socialist. He endorses the Green New Deal.

00:41:54.360 All of the, he doesn't know quite where he is. Because he doesn't, it doesn't matter to him.

00:42:00.340 Now it's not that he's even power-hungry. The reason I read that first bit from the Washington

00:42:05.060 Post is he just seems like a guy who's enamored of his own voice, who's enamored of his own face.

00:42:10.300 He never quite got out of college. He never learned very much in college. He, he wants to just have

00:42:15.500 freshman bull sessions and feign purpose, feign insight, be a dime store philosopher.

00:42:27.540 And he's a bored rich guy. The guy's worth 9 million bucks. His wife is a billionaire heiress.

00:42:31.740 What, what else is he going to do? He just wants to run for president.

00:42:35.060 Just be shaped however you want to be shaped.

00:42:37.060 This guy is the big question mark in the race because he's the perfect

00:42:42.900 politician for millennials. So he, his candidacy doesn't require a lot of thought.

00:42:51.800 He's a freshman year, fake philosophy, bull session politician. He makes sense to the senseless.

00:42:58.600 He's perfectly glib and shallow. He's, he seems tolerant and open-minded. Say, Beto, what do you think

00:43:04.500 about a $15 minimum wage? Yeah. Okay. Hey, what do you think about abolishing the electoral college?

00:43:11.020 Yeah. There's a lot of wisdom to that. Hey, Beto, what do you think about the green new deal? Yeah.

00:43:15.680 I like it. Hey, check out my cool skateboard though. Hey, yeah, man, that's a cool skateboard.

00:43:22.220 He also might bring Texas over 38 electoral votes would obviously completely end the campaign

00:43:27.320 right there would end the race. He's both a centrist and a radical. He's everything to everybody.

00:43:31.800 He doesn't yuck anybody's yum and he's so Instagrammable. And this last part is the key.

00:43:37.140 I mean, this is going to be a confounding factor in 2022 because my prediction in 2020 is that the

00:43:42.580 media will not matter as much. The media, you know, Donald Trump broke the media in many ways,

00:43:48.480 but it wasn't just Donald Trump. He had a big role in it, but technology broke the media. The media broke

00:43:55.100 themselves. The media lost so much credibility. Oh, just look, here's Jim Acosta just the other day,

00:44:02.480 whining and complaining about president Trump getting softball questions.

00:44:06.580 And then he was asked that question, uh, by a reporter with the daily caller right at the very

00:44:11.380 end. Uh, you know, it was, the question was, was asked in a way that really teed it up, uh, like a,

00:44:17.000 like a game of t-ball here in the Rose garden. Uh, the president was just sort of served up a softball

00:44:21.360 there when he was asked, you know, whether or not the Democrats are advancing a lot of socialist

00:44:25.540 ideas. Okay. That was Beto or Beto. That was, uh, Jim Acosta complaining about president Trump's

00:44:31.360 questions from reporters. Now here is Jim Acosta asking a question of president Obama. When he met

00:44:38.160 with the Brazilian president, I'm sure you feel like Jim Acosta, he doesn't like those softball

00:44:42.060 questions like Donald Trump was getting. Here's a hard hitting question from Jim Acosta.

00:44:45.940 I wanted to ask you about what some people are calling your best week ever, uh, last week. Uh,

00:44:52.400 you had two Supreme court decisions supportive of, uh, the affordable care act and of gay rights.

00:44:57.520 You also delivered a speech down in Charleston that was, uh, pretty warmly received. Uh, it seems

00:45:03.980 that you've built up some political capital for the remaining months of your presidency. I'm curious

00:45:07.980 how you want to use it. Uh, what hard things do you want to tackle at this point in terms of my best

00:45:13.540 week? Now my best week, I will tell you, uh, was, uh, marrying Michelle. That was a really good week.

00:45:20.940 Really tough stuff. Really tough questions back in that stuff. So guy, I mean, Jim Acosta is the

00:45:26.220 example, the embodiment of the mainstream media. People don't pay attention.

00:45:32.120 Now it's about Instagram. I mean, that is why the candidates are speaking to you directly,

00:45:36.140 not just Trump, all the others, all the 2020 Democrats. And it's all smiley, smiley Instagram.

00:45:41.580 You know, George Carlin said when fascism comes to America, it won't be with Jack boots and brown

00:45:46.460 shirts. It will be in Nike shoes and a smiley face t-shirt, smiley, smiley. And what we're seeing

00:45:53.200 now with extreme radical proposals, the most radical policy proposals in American presidential

00:45:58.180 history, we're seeing them come to us, not through normal political means, not through the

00:46:04.660 mainstream media, not through political institutions. They're coming to us directly

00:46:07.700 with smiley, smiley candidates, Instagram, upload emojis, happy, happy, joy, joy. That's

00:46:17.820 what we're getting. That's a confounding factor in the campaign. And we're going to see those

00:46:21.020 two, uh, polls of it playing back and forth, policy radicalism and presentational shallowness

00:46:29.200 and glibness. And hopefully our, our electorate isn't so shallow and glib that we're going to

00:46:34.160 allow them to sneak all of those terrible ideas through, through appealing to our egos and

00:46:39.540 appealing to our lack of attention and appealing to our scrolling, scrolling, smiley, smiley.

00:46:45.720 I'll see y'all in Missouri. We're going to have a show tomorrow. Then I'll be giving a speech

00:46:48.940 tomorrow night. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show.

00:46:52.140 The Michael Knowles show is produced by Robert Sterling. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:47:02.180 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover. And our technical

00:47:06.660 producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Danny D'Amico. Audio is mixed by Dylan Case. Hair and

00:47:12.460 makeup is by Jesua Olvera. Production assistant, Nick Sheehan. The Michael Knowles show is a Daily

00:47:17.480 Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2019. Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of the

00:47:22.840 Andrew Klavan show. I got kind of a dangerous show today because I'm going to be proposing a new

00:47:27.620 narrative about white supremacy. So if you're a leftist, you might want to tune in, take my words

00:47:32.740 out of context and destroy me. That's on the Andrew Klavan show. I'm Andrew Klavan.

Ep. 317 - The Democrats’ Radical 2020 Wish List

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