Ep. 356 - Mueller’s Campaign To Get Trump Impeached
Episode Stats
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Summary
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is on a warpath to get Congress to impeach President Donald Trump. Is it time to call in the cavalry? Or is it time for the White House to get a grip on the situation?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Bob Mueller won't go away and Joe Biden can't be found.
00:00:03.240
We will analyze the former special counsel's campaign to get Congress to impeach Donald Trump.
00:00:09.380
Then we will try to locate the elusive 2020 presidential candidate.
00:00:13.720
A maniac lights himself on fire outside the White House to protest President Trump.
00:00:17.800
New York Magazine marvels that ugly guys want to look better to get laid.
00:00:22.000
And a conservative writer opens a massive debate and very important debate on what exactly we mean by conservatism.
00:00:28.680
Finally, The Mailbag. I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:00:39.140
We have an inordinate amount of things to get to today.
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Not the least of which is the former special counsel, Bob Mueller, basically teeing up a campaign for Congress to impeach Trump.
00:00:54.280
Totally and finally showing he's not acting in good faith, even though a lot of us gave him the benefit of the doubt.
00:01:00.400
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All right, Bob Mueller, I can't defend him at all anymore.
00:02:53.100
The former special counsel, before he finally left, he held a big press conference to try to frame President Trump as a sort of criminal,
00:03:04.380
to try to frame what will happen now politically in Congress as the Congress considers impeachment.
00:03:15.080
After that investigation, if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.
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We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.
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The introduction to the volume two of our report explains that decision.
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It explains that under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office.
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Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited.
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The special counsel's office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy.
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Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider.
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The department's written opinion explaining the policy makes several important points that further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation.
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It is so wrong to politicize the federal government in this way.
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The key takeaway, the big line from this press conference is that Mueller is not, quote,
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confident that the president clearly did not commit a crime.
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Since when has that been the standard of justice in this country?
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Since when has that been the standard of innocence or guilt?
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In this country, typically, we would say that you are innocent until proven guilty.
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Now, according to Bob Mueller, you are guilty until he is confident that you clearly did not commit a crime.
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Bob Mueller is not confident that the president did not clearly commit a crime.
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Well, no, no, we're not going to conclude that.
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So then you're saying there's, there's no actionable evidence that he committed a crime.
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Well, yeah, but I'm not confident that he didn't clearly commit a crime,
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Now, his defense here, he comes on and says that under DOJ guidelines, he can't indict the president.
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Okay, so then why was he investigating this obstruction in the first place?
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Why did he write 200 pages about obstruction in the first place?
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We hear about the Mueller investigation, the Russia, the collusion.
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What was Bob Mueller tasked with doing in the first place?
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The entire reason that Bob Mueller was appointed, the entire reason he has this investigation,
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is to determine the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which he did, by the way.
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He found certain companies in Russia that were working to shift the balance of the 2016 election,
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actually working for multiple candidates, or working, rather, to advance multiple candidates.
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So his job was to identify Russian interference.
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He says explicitly he is not allowed to indict a sitting president.
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So if he's not allowed to do that, then he's not going to conclude that a president committed a crime.
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So then, really, he shouldn't have been investigating this in the first place.
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Why did he investigate obstruction if he couldn't do anything with it?
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He investigated obstruction because he hates Donald Trump, and he really wishes that Donald Trump didn't win in 2016,
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and he wants to do the work of congressional Democrats for them to help them impeach him.
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He can't take any action, even if he did find sufficient evidence of the crime of collusion,
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which, by the way, the Attorney General, William Barr, and the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein,
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They did not find sufficient evidence of obstruction to act.
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So, even on that front, they declared, the DOJ declared, there wasn't sufficient evidence.
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Then, the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General came to the conclusion, as was their job,
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and the conclusion they came to was that there was not sufficient evidence of obstruction.
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Some people are saying, well, why didn't they leave the question open?
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Because the Department of Justice is not a freshman seminar at a college in the middle of America.
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The purpose of the Department of Justice is not to foster intellectual debate and engage in hypotheticals
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and just leave questions out there, and you can form your own conclusions.
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The Department of Justice is the Department of Justice.
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You don't get to just leave academic questions hanging in the air.
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So, they came to the conclusion, and Bob Mueller is really upset that the report that he gave out
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did not have the political effect that he obviously wanted, which was to hurt the president.
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He wrote an angry letter to William Barr saying, you misrepresented what my report said.
00:09:04.040
What was your problem with the, because what Mueller was saying is that Barr misrepresented
00:09:21.320
In that first letter, you'll remember, when the Mueller report came in, William Barr clearly
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said that Mueller did not exonerate Trump on obstruction one way or the other.
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He did not come to a conclusion one way or the other.
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There was no new information in this press conference.
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This press conference, the only headline, the only thing that Mueller was trying to say
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is that if I had found, if I was fully convinced that President Trump did not commit the crime
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Not only did you say it in the report weeks ago, William Barr quoted you as saying that
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Bob Mueller is just angry and petulant because the report didn't begin the end of the Trump
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And so he's trying to egg Congress along to impeach him.
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President Trump, for his part, responded in a typically Trumpian way.
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He made some great points and then he made some what seemed to be very unhelpful points
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I think he's totally conflicted because, as you know, he wanted to be the FBI director
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As you know, I had a business dispute with him.
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After he left the FBI, we had a business dispute.
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And I don't blame him, but I had to do it because that was the right thing to do.
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So whether it's love or a deep like, but he should.
00:11:00.280
Look, Robert Mueller should have never been chosen because he wanted the FBI job and he
00:11:07.320
And the next day, he was picked as special counsel.
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So you tell somebody, I'm sorry, you can't have the job.
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And then after you say that, he's going to make a ruling on you.
00:11:20.840
Plus, his relationship with Comey was extraordinary.
00:11:26.940
He is reaching into a pot on the stove and he is pulling out a big handful of spaghetti
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He is giving a bunch of facts about Robert Mueller that apparently have no bearing on
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But he's just doing it to create the sense that Mueller was always compromised, which,
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by the way, is true, just not for the reasons that President Trump says.
00:11:50.700
So President Trump says that Comey, that Mueller rather wanted the FBI director job.
00:12:01.140
He then says that's the reason why he shouldn't have been appointed.
00:12:06.460
I don't know the nature of the business dispute, but okay, well, what does that mean?
00:12:12.180
It does appear that he had a very good relationship with James Comey.
00:12:18.300
Which one is it that actually shows why Bob Mueller was unfit for this job?
00:12:24.940
He eventually comes to the point after throwing the spaghetti at the ball.
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00:14:17.340
Okay, so President Trump throws spaghetti at the wall because of, because, legitimately because of this outrageous press conference from Bob Mueller.
00:14:26.520
Then he comes to the better point in his response eventually.
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He's somebody that didn't get a job that he requested that he wanted very badly, and then he was appointed.
00:14:47.340
And despite that, and despite $40 million, 18 Trump haters, including people that work for Hillary Clinton and some of the worst human beings on earth, they got nothing.
00:15:03.800
I love that he calls them some of the worst human beings on earth.
00:15:11.560
Bob Mueller, in his actions, appears to be a committed never-Trumper.
00:15:18.500
Maybe he voted for him, maybe he didn't, but, you know, okay, he moves on.
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This is a guy who staffed his investigation with people committed to overturning the 2016 election, with people where we found their text messages, and they say, we're going to cheat.
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We are going to rig everything to stop Trump from being elected president.
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We have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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This press conference, I think, totally blew that out of the water.
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Some of the greatest legal minds in the country agree with this.
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Not just committed Republicans, but people who have been lifelong Democrats, lifelong civil libertarians, guys like our friend Alan Dershowitz.
00:16:07.500
Until today, I've defended Mueller against the accusations that he's a partisan.
00:16:11.540
I did not believe that he personally favored either the Democrats or the Republicans, or had a point of view on whether President Trump should be impeached.
00:16:18.820
But I have now changed my mind by putting his thumb, indeed his elbow, on the scale of justice in favor of impeachment, based on obstruction of justice.
00:16:30.260
He has distorted the critical role of a prosecutor in our justice system.
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People all the time complain about Donald Trump undermining our institutions, our political process.
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People who staff absurd investigations with committed never-Trumpers and committed partisans who brag about using the levers of power in the federal government to overturn a presidential election.
00:16:56.500
Those are the guys undermining our institutions.
00:16:59.080
Those are the guys who are undermining our political processes.
00:17:02.060
Much more so, and much more egregiously with Donald Trump.
00:17:06.020
At least Donald Trump, when he exaggerates, when he says things that aren't true, when he boasts, when he brags, when he goes all the way out there, at least you know what you're getting.
00:17:20.780
But these guys, Robert Mueller, unimpeachable, the most serious, respectable man in the country.
00:17:31.900
He has worked in the federal government his whole life.
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And then he staffs his entire investigation with partisans and people who are committed to overturning the election.
00:17:40.920
And then when he doesn't get his political way, he hosts an outrageous press conference that just reiterates his points and eggs on Congress to impeach.
00:18:00.780
After this press conference, it's very hard to conclude that Bob Mueller has been acting in good faith.
00:18:06.700
Now, you would say, why did he hold the press conference?
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Maybe he did it as a last word because he doesn't want to testify before Congress, because he doesn't want to inject himself into politics.
00:18:16.360
If that were true, he could have just written another letter.
00:18:20.740
If that were true, if what he said there is true, this is my final statement and my Mueller report is my testimony.
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If that were true, he could have written that in a letter.
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He could have done anything other than hold this press conference and all but beg Congress to impeach.
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Maybe he thinks William Barr misrepresented his findings.
00:18:41.920
Well, except that Mueller didn't say anything in that press conference that Barr didn't write in his report about the report.
00:18:52.100
He's politicizing what is supposed to be the least political office in the federal government.
00:18:58.140
At least one man, though, was even less in control of his emotions than Bob Mueller was yesterday.
00:19:02.900
For those watching, this is a little hard to watch.
00:19:05.760
A man set himself on fire outside the White House to protest President Trump.
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I don't understand why you guys want to be like the stupidest thing.
00:19:51.520
The reason I bring it up at all is because of the reaction to it.
00:19:57.020
There were a lot of people on Twitter calling him brave.
00:20:01.240
This is, wow, look at this brave and courageous man setting himself.
00:20:12.980
He had been reported missing earlier in the day by his family,
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who said that they were concerned for his physical and emotional welfare.
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He then went out, lit himself on fire, and killed himself.
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And some people are calling him brave for this.
00:20:32.480
I'm certain the guy had underlying madness, and I'm certain that that madness was exacerbated by hysteria about the president.
00:20:42.220
By hysteria that the president is a fascist, murderer, genocidal, racist, stooge of Russia.
00:20:51.080
Because of that hysteria, it would appear that his mental illness got worse.
00:20:59.300
I'm not blaming the media outlets that fanned the flames of that hysteria and the political activists who fanned the flames of that hysteria.
00:21:08.880
But it is undeniably, it seems, the case that that climate, that hysteria, contributed to this mental illness,
00:21:17.340
which should raise questions for us about how we discuss this president.
00:21:23.640
You can be vigorously critical, absolutely, but some of the excesses that we've seen for two years seem to be just that.
00:21:33.480
However, what people do have responsibility for is their reaction to this.
00:21:41.380
There's nothing to be encouraged about what he did.
00:21:49.400
And we should, hopefully, in all the smoke of this guy going up in flames,
00:21:53.240
we should try to see politics with a little clarity and blow away the fogs of hysteria.
00:22:01.160
Speaking of clarity and hysteria, there is a major news story in New York Magazine about incels.
00:22:14.800
It's a phrase referring to guys who are ugly and they can't get laid, and as a result, they hate women.
00:22:23.100
And now this story is that they are getting plastic surgery to make themselves look better.
00:22:27.920
So the opposite of an incel in this culture is a chad.
00:22:41.040
Incels are going under the knife to reshape their faces and their dating prospects.
00:22:45.260
The posters called themselves incels, short for involuntarily celibate.
00:22:48.500
On one forum where a commenter Truth4Lie posted, it's Lookism, which succeeded a forum called Slut Hate.
00:23:00.820
Although it's impossible to know who was posting on multiple accounts.
00:23:04.360
Incels called women like the one Truth4Lie had hired Stacey's.
00:23:20.140
New York Magazine is just viciously mocking these guys, even in the headline,
00:23:24.920
because they're getting plastic surgery to look better.
00:23:29.540
Perfectly fair to criticize people who get cosmetic surgery just to look a little bit nicer.
00:23:35.780
Would you use that same headline to talk about a girl who gets a nose job?
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How many bones would you break to get laid, ladies?
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These desperate women with big noses are getting nose jobs.
00:23:54.440
Now, obviously, these incel guys are lunatics as well, and they should shake out of it.
00:24:02.620
So, obviously, a lot of this culture, I think, is trolling.
00:24:32.440
Like, everything on the internet, it's trolling.
00:24:35.860
They're using these kind of terms in an ironic way.
00:24:40.880
I suspect they're even using misogyny in an ironic way lots of the time.
00:24:45.400
However, if you live in irony, if you are being ironic all of the time,
00:24:53.260
If you troll all of the time, that's just who you are.
00:25:01.360
And the issue here, too, with incel culture is the same poison that is affecting all of the culture,
00:25:10.560
which is materialism, which is that we are just our bodies,
00:25:15.240
that our physical features are—that's all that we are.
00:25:19.600
And, therefore, we can hopefully try to change them forever and make them better.
00:25:24.840
Now, what these guys seem to miss, they say if you're ugly, you're not ever going to have sex with a woman.
00:25:29.900
I know—I personally know ugly rich guys who sleep with beautiful women all the time.
00:25:37.520
It's something—there's something very physically attractive about a wad of cash in somebody's pocket.
00:25:41.740
People who are very successful, people who have good careers, people who get famous,
00:25:46.400
even if they're ugly, even if they're not that rich.
00:25:48.640
There are other shallow attributes that also attract women.
00:25:52.760
So I think the premise of incel culture, that if you're ugly, you're never going to sleep with a woman,
00:26:00.920
And the bigger problem and the topic of this essay is a major problem in our culture.
00:26:08.420
The idea that we are just our physical bodies and further the idea that we can just endlessly change ourselves,
00:26:18.860
endlessly augment our physicality, and that will somehow make us feel better.
00:26:30.000
It's the same logic that tells us that we can not only define ourselves,
00:26:38.020
we can thereby define reality by chopping off this part of us or re-changing this part or breaking this bone.
00:26:46.180
And this actually ties in to a major political story on the right today,
00:26:52.680
which is a big debate that has broken out between traditionalist conservatives and more classically liberal conservatives.
00:27:01.480
Can you take liberty to its logical conclusion forever and redefine everything and just maximize individual autonomy?
00:27:08.300
Or is there something that restrains us, something that holds us back?
00:27:19.860
You get the whole Daily Wire crew, me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Another Kingdom,
00:27:24.500
Questions in the Mailbag, Questions Backstage, and the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
00:27:43.040
Before we get to the mailbag, before we get to questions of the rift in the conservative movement,
00:27:54.680
Has Joe Biden, or should we file a missing persons report for Joe Biden?
00:27:58.060
He didn't participate in any Memorial Day ceremonies on Monday.
00:28:02.340
This is one of the biggest campaign events of the campaign season, going to a Memorial Day ceremony.
00:28:16.480
Because Joe Biden thinks he's going to get the nomination by default.
00:28:21.840
Joe Biden thinks he's pulling way ahead of everybody.
00:28:31.400
So he says, the best way that I can maintain that lead is by pulling back.
00:28:41.400
Because Joe Biden is the most gaffe-prone politician in the entire country.
00:28:47.400
So for Joe Biden, being in public is a liability.
00:28:51.980
For most politicians, being in public is helpful.
00:28:54.700
When Pete Buttigieg goes on TV, people like him more.
00:28:59.920
For Joe Biden, people like him the most that they will ever like him right now.
00:29:04.060
When he opens his mouth, when he talks, when he acts in public, people like him less.
00:29:14.140
I can't remember anyone who just got the nomination by playing it really safe and hiding out.
00:29:34.160
If you are the liability, how do you expect to get the nomination?
00:29:39.020
I know that Joe Biden has a big lead right now.
00:29:44.980
He's going to have to open his mouth eventually.
00:29:51.100
And if you being in public is the big liability, presidents have to be in public.
00:29:56.680
Presidential candidates need to be in public a lot.
00:29:58.840
That's probably not going to work out very well for him.
00:30:01.360
We have an enormous debate opening up on the right between traditional conservatives, social conservatives, I guess you would say, and classical liberals.
00:30:12.260
The people who believe that the most important thing, the main thing that matters is individual liberty, maximizing individual liberty.
00:30:22.180
Unfortunately, we don't have time to get to it today.
00:30:23.800
So we're going to have to get to that tomorrow.
00:30:25.100
Tune back and we will discuss it because it's a very important debate and people are taking very strong sides and we'll try to analyze what it really means.
00:30:33.860
Today, however, we don't have time for that because we have to get to the mailbag.
00:30:44.440
What are your thoughts about men wearing earrings in professional settings?
00:30:49.760
If you are a rock musician or a pirate, you can wear earrings in a professional setting.
00:30:57.800
If you are a man in any other profession, you cannot wear an earring in the office or anywhere else.
00:31:07.620
I'm wondering about your thoughts on why most of the prominent Democrats happen to be baby boomers.
00:31:20.780
Obviously, Joe Biden is leading the pack right now.
00:31:25.920
Hillary Clinton is probably the most prominent Democrat in the country.
00:31:31.720
And I think the reason why boomers are trending Democratic is because the Democratic Party is embracing past ideas, old ideas,
00:31:51.160
And they broke down so many cultural institutions.
00:31:55.500
I know it's nostalgic to look back and say, oh, the past used to be better and now it's much worse.
00:32:01.080
Something really did change in the late 1960s and 70s and then up through the 80s.
00:32:06.400
Something really fundamentally cracked in the culture.
00:32:09.560
And this had a lot to do with the rise of second wave feminism, had a lot to do with the sexual revolution,
00:32:16.460
had a lot to do with the cultural revolutions that happened not just in the U.S. but all around the world.
00:32:21.600
And what it led to was an acceleration away from traditional culture.
00:32:26.360
So you saw on university campuses, hollowing out of the curriculum, saying, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go as they marched through the campuses.
00:32:38.080
It was the left's long march through the institutions.
00:32:40.920
Hollywood basically falls apart in the 1960s and 1970s.
00:32:46.520
Now movies have an explicitly leftist political agenda and almost a uniformly leftist political agenda.
00:32:53.200
It's all just about deconstruction, breaking down.
00:33:04.580
And so even young Democrats have embraced these sorts of ideologies.
00:33:11.000
And the alternative is the opposite of destruction.
00:33:15.100
It's conservatism and it's building things back up and it's hearkening back to our traditions,
00:33:20.180
our political, cultural, and religious traditions.
00:33:28.640
I have recently had an argument thrown at me against abortion that I wonder how you would respond to.
00:33:33.840
The person said that they don't like guns but don't want our right to them taken away.
00:33:38.720
I'm curious how you would respond to this argument.
00:33:42.040
The idea being, I don't like guns but I don't want people's political right to a gun taken away.
00:33:48.800
Therefore, I don't like abortion but I also don't want people's political right to an abortion taken away.
00:33:55.080
So the difference here, the most basic difference, is that there is a constitutional right to a gun.
00:34:02.800
You have the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.
00:34:05.380
There is no constitutional right to an abortion.
00:34:07.840
Even the Supreme Court jurists who invented that right in Roe versus Wade more or less admitted that it wasn't in the Constitution.
00:34:17.300
They said, well, maybe you can find it in part in the Ninth Amendment or maybe you can find it in the 14th.
00:34:28.280
The other reason is that guns exist to protect life.
00:34:31.800
The purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect your life, your life, your family's life, and your liberty against tyranny.
00:34:43.200
So it's a mother killing her child or an abortion doctor killing a mother's child.
00:34:47.420
The other aspect here is if you're arguing from, say, natural rights, which people do in America a lot, you've got life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:35:00.100
Life comes first because without life you can't have liberty.
00:35:02.580
Without liberty you can't have the pursuit of happiness or the pursuit of property.
00:35:09.700
I've never heard that argument before that you bring up.
00:35:12.360
I don't think it has any merit at all, and I think there are a number of ways that you can answer it pretty succinctly.
00:35:17.420
From Joshua, would you say that there is a correlation between not knowing American laws and rights with leaning politically to the left?
00:35:28.780
And you see it not just on a micro level, so individuals who are less aware of our Constitution and our laws and our history lean more left, although they do.
00:35:42.260
So in recent decades, people's knowledge of American history, American civics, American government, has dramatically decreased.
00:35:52.060
Most Americans can't name all three branches of government.
00:35:55.180
Most people can't identify what the First Amendment does.
00:35:58.040
And as that has happened, the country has moved to the left.
00:36:04.000
Even though conservatives and Republicans win some elections here or there, the country and the culture overall has moved to the left.
00:36:18.560
And so what the left has done is hollowed out education and hollowed out our own civics and even in our history departments, turned our history against us, rewritten certain aspects of history, deleted whole swaths of history, taken away context from history.
00:36:33.100
And so people graduate ignorant and they become more susceptible to ideologies that are fundamentally un-American.
00:36:39.100
From Cole, hey, Michael, my girlfriend is worried my traditional values will rob her of her autonomy.
00:36:47.100
She holds similar values to me, but we were both raised in San Francisco, so our conservative values have marked us out like black sheep amidst friends.
00:36:55.640
How do I counter the leftist narrative that I am a chauvinist or a misogynist?
00:37:00.160
How do I show I still unequivocally consider my girlfriend equal?
00:37:05.260
Well, the first way is you probably have a better relationship with your girlfriend than most of these lefty friends.
00:37:15.340
So the best way to show it is to just have a great relationship.
00:37:24.200
Personally, I've seen it anecdotally with friends.
00:37:28.880
People who are in traditional romantic relationships are much happier.
00:37:35.420
The New York Times had to admit this the other day.
00:37:37.320
The happiest wife in America, the happiest category of wife, are religious conservative wives.
00:37:44.140
Not religious liberals, not irreligious conservatives, not irreligious.
00:37:48.820
The traditional types, and specifically traditional conservatives, are the happiest wives.
00:37:56.900
The other way is to show that actually feminism is pretty anti-woman, and traditional gender roles are pretty pro-woman.
00:38:08.100
Feminism tells women that the only way that they can be good and valuable and worthwhile is to act more like men.
00:38:22.380
Engage in the same sort of sexual behavior that men engage in.
00:38:25.460
Take the same attitude towards sex that men do.
00:38:29.620
They're saying femininity is valueless, worthless, but masculinity is very valuable, and so women need to be like men.
00:38:39.800
What traditional gender roles teach is that men and women are spiritually equal, even though they are different and distinct.
00:38:47.240
The most obvious example of this is Adam and Eve.
00:38:54.100
God reaches into Adam, pulls out his rib, and creates Eve.
00:38:57.580
Eve, this does not make Eve subservient to Adam.
00:39:06.580
If God had pulled out part of Adam's hair from the top of Adam's body, that would make Eve better than Adam.
00:39:15.140
If God had pulled Eve from his big toe, that would make Eve less than Adam.
00:39:21.640
She pulls Eve, he pulls Eve rather, he pulls her, right from the center of Adam.
00:39:27.580
That is to say, right in the middle, his rib, woman is spiritually equal to man, albeit different and in different ways.
00:39:41.280
I suspect that's the view you're talking about.
00:39:42.960
That is the far more defensible view of the genders than modern feminism, which is the most anti-woman theory that we've yet devised.
00:39:57.940
How do we keep our cool when dealing with the emotions of the left?
00:40:01.680
I have many friends who base their decisions off of emotions rather than logical reasoning.
00:40:05.720
How does one combat this without getting emotional himself?
00:40:14.740
I very rarely become emotional because I'm confident in my views and I can defend my views and they can't defend their views.
00:40:22.060
People get emotional in political discussion when they feel that they're wrong.
00:40:26.740
They get emotional in political discussion when they can't quite defend what they're saying.
00:40:32.600
So they get really worked up and they shriek and they yell and they scream no and they wear the pink hats and they do all of that.
00:40:38.760
When you're confident about what you think, you just explain to them why they're wrong.
00:40:44.580
And you say, oh, good point, but this is why that's wrong.
00:40:48.340
Okay, fine, good point, but this is why that's wrong.
00:40:53.020
What's the point of getting worked up emotionally?
00:40:58.880
You can be firm about what you believe, but that's how I would deal with it.
00:41:01.720
The crazier they get, the cooler that you would be because possibly you could convince them,
00:41:06.540
but what you do 99% of the time is you just make them look like complete lunatics and you look like the sane guy.
00:41:12.740
And that helps us win, helps us win the culture and it helps us win elections.
00:41:19.180
I'd like to know why the mothers and fathers aren't liable for getting an abortion.
00:41:24.040
My gut tells me they shouldn't be criminally liable.
00:41:32.220
I don't think that mothers who procure abortions should be punished,
00:41:36.840
even though I do think that doctors who perform abortions should be punished.
00:41:44.280
Because this legal system has told women now for 50 years that they have a constitutional right to get an abortion.
00:41:53.040
So women have been told for over a generation that they have a legal constitutional right to get an abortion.
00:42:01.980
The culture has told them that they have a right to get an abortion,
00:42:06.300
that abortion is not only okay, but that it's a good thing,
00:42:10.340
that you should shout it from the rooftop, how wonderful that you can shout your abortion.
00:42:16.380
And on a personal level, women get abortions for a variety of reasons.
00:42:24.980
Pressure from their boyfriend or the guy who got him into trouble.
00:42:33.120
They have a lot of pressure to go and kill that baby.
00:42:37.440
And they've got a lot of rationalizations for why it's not really killing a baby.
00:42:44.680
I was at Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia at that rally that Matt Walsh put together.
00:43:02.240
Because somewhere deep down, her conscience was telling her that she shouldn't kill her baby.
00:43:19.760
The ones that we've talked about it, they have immense regret.
00:43:23.380
Jane Roe, the woman who was in the case Roe v. Wade, had immense regret.
00:43:34.200
Carried this guilt with her the rest of her life.
00:43:36.220
That she was part of killing all of these babies.
00:43:41.780
So I think that conservatives, while eager for justice in the case of abortion,
00:43:46.840
and eager to prevent the deaths of a million babies a year,
00:43:49.280
also, much more than the left, understand human frailty and understand the complexity of the world.
00:43:57.380
And so, if we can stop abortion by, through the mechanisms of the law, as we should,
00:44:06.080
and punish the people who are removed, who don't have that pressure,
00:44:11.880
Who took a Hippocratic oath not to harm people.
00:44:16.220
If we can do it that way, I think that's the wiser way to do it.
00:44:24.500
Hey Michael, can you weigh in on the argument going on between the more Catholic than Knowles
00:44:30.000
and Matt Walsh combined, So Rob Amari, and Mr. Ivory Tower, David French?
00:44:35.040
It's funny that that question's in there, because that is a story that I wanted to get to today,
00:44:41.700
The debate between So Rob and David French is a debate that has been bubbling among conservatives
00:44:49.580
for 20 years at a very high level, and has really been there the whole time.
00:44:55.440
It's the debate between conservatism, traditionalism, social conservatism, whatever you want to call it,
00:45:02.800
and classical liberalism, or people who trend toward libertarianism,
00:45:08.440
or people who say, hey, hands off, it doesn't matter, everything's neutral, we want pluralism, we want all of it.
00:45:17.920
The reason the debate is happening now is because both sides came together for 50 years, 40 years, I guess,
00:45:25.440
from William F. Buckley Jr., bringing all of these sides together, the conservative movement after World War II,
00:45:32.860
to fight together against communism, to fight together against the Soviet Union.
00:45:40.220
So you had the conservatives who were mostly upset about atheism in communism,
00:45:44.600
and you had the classical liberals who were mostly upset about the collectivism of communism,
00:45:49.580
and they came together because they had a common enemy.
00:45:52.400
And then after we vanquished that enemy of communism, the two sides broke apart again because they had profound divisions.
00:46:01.440
If I had to choose between the traditionalism of Saurabh Amari and the liberalism, classical liberalism of David French,
00:46:11.240
But the question is complicated, and we will get to that, I guess, tomorrow.
00:46:22.400
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner,
00:46:28.780
executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
00:46:32.560
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
00:46:44.880
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:46:50.480
It's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:46:53.440
Once again, an investigator opens his fat mouth hoping to take a shot at Donald Trump,
00:47:01.700
Maybe they should appoint a special counsel to investigate how Trump keeps doing that.