Ep. 357 - Why Trump Is Going To Win In 2020
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Summary
A political scientist who has correctly predicted 9 presidential elections says President Trump is headed for victory in 2020. We will examine why. Then, Liz Warren gets wrecked on the radio, the world s tiniest baby is born, and a conservative writer, Saurabh Amari, opens up a major fight on the right.
Transcript
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and a political scientist who has correctly predicted nine presidential elections all say
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President Trump is headed for victory in 2020. We will examine why. Then, Liz Warren gets wrecked
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on the radio. The world's tiniest baby ever is born. Elton John hates his own country. And a
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conservative writer, Saurabh Amari, opens up a major fight on the right. I'm Michael Knowles,
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and this is The Michael Knowles Show. So a political scientist and an American university professor
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with an extraordinarily good track record of predicting presidential victories is predicting
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that President Trump will win in 2020 unless Democrats do this one weird trick, this one
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thing that he suggests will help them to win in 2020. We will uncover what that is in just one
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K-N-O-W-L-E-S, to 84888. Message and data rates may apply. So the good news is President
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Trump is going to win in 2020 according to not just one, but multiple election models
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from a lot of people who have accurately predicted a ton of presidential elections. That's the good
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news. The bad news is Democrats have an opportunity to take that away from him, according at least
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to Alan Lichtman, who has correctly predicted nine presidential elections. His model shows
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that Donald Trump is going to win in 2020 unless the Democrats impeach. So this is a sort of
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interesting model because what we've been told is that Democrats impeaching President Trump
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will destroy their chances in 2020 because the people will rally around Trump. They'll see it
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as a Democrat overreach. They'll see it as them trying to overturn a presidential election.
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They'll rally to his side and give him re-election. This is the conventional wisdom for the Clinton
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96 election, that all of the Republican investigations, moves towards impeachment, were overstepping their
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bounds, and the people rallied. You know, they had just swept the Republicans into the House
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in 94, but then they rallied around Bill Clinton in 1996 and gave him re-election. Okay. The reason
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Alan Lichtman says that's wrong is that impeachment happens in 1998. And what that gave to the Clinton
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administration was the whiff of scandal. So as a result of this whiff of scandal, Al Gore lost the
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2000 election because people were sick of the ugliness and the scandal of the Clinton administration.
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George W. Bush ran on restoring dignity to the White House. And so they kicked out Al Gore and they gave it to
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George W. Bush. Possibly. Okay. I see the argument there. The trouble is that the Trump administration
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already has the whiff of scandal. It has the whiff of many scandals, actually. They're all kind of stupid
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scandals. It's all a porn star payment or he hired this guy who was no good and then this guy or he had a real
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estate deal in the 80s. I think there are scandals that people don't care about, but the mainstream
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media have tried to make this the scandal administration. Meanwhile, Barack Obama, who
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legitimately had serious political scandals, he politicized the IRS to go after his political
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opponents. Dinesh D'Souza went to jail basically because he made a mean documentary about Barack Obama.
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He weaponized the DOJ under Loretta Lynch. He had the Fast and Furious scandal gun running under Eric
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Holder into Mexico. There were a lot of real scandals under the Obama administration. Obviously, if you
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like your doctor, you can keep your doctor lying to the American people. Donald Trump doesn't have
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that, but he's got, according to the mainstream media and the popular culture, more public scandal
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than Barack Obama did. So I don't really see that as being the issue. And it's not just Alan Lichtman
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who has this model, though he has a very good one. The New York Times, unfortunately, probably had to
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choke on it as they were typing it out in their article. The other day, the New York Times showed
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three election models, all of which show that Trump is going to win. So Steve Ratner writing in the New
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York Times, he described the fair model. This is for Ray Fair, a professor at Yale. Ray Fair found that
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the growth rates of GDP and inflation have been the two most important economic predictors in presidential
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elections. And obviously, President Trump is doing very well on those fronts, and the economy is exploding.
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And especially after the sluggish, awful economy of Barack Obama, things are looking very good there. On top of
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that, what Ray Fair found is that incumbency is an important determinant of presidential elections. And President
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Trump, obviously, is the incumbent. So he has that going for him, too. When you add those together,
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very good shot that Donald Trump gets reelected. Mark Zandy, who is the chief economist at Moody's
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Analytics, looked at 12 different presidential election models, and Trump won all of them.
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It's important to note there's a difference here between an election model and election polls.
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So polling is just when you go out and you ask a bunch of people, who are you going to vote for,
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this guy or that guy? A model is when you take in all these sorts of various factors. Perhaps it
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includes some public polling. It includes a lot of economic data. It includes foreign policy data.
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It includes all of these things. You plug it all in together, and a computer then comes up with who
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is going to win. And Zandy, who's a serious guy at Moody's, looked at 12 different models. Trump
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wins all of them. Then Donald Luskin at Trend Macroanalytics, or Macrolytics, rather,
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looked at the Electoral College. So he had a model that specifically looked at the Electoral College,
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came to the same conclusion. Trump wins. This is very bad news for the left, very good news
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for the right. Why do people think Trump won't win? It's because he has a relatively low approval rating.
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That said, his approval rating, somewhere between 44, 46, let's say, it's still on par with or higher
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than Barack Obama's at this point in his presidency. And don't forget, Barack Obama got reelected.
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Now, the other side of this is polling, looking at certain key states, looking at key demographics
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that President Trump is going to have to win if he wants re-election. So the suburban white women
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or certain areas of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, et cetera. Still, all of that aside,
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look at these models. These models have been fairly accurate, and Trump wins it. So that's pretty good
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news. I have another theory on why President Trump is likely to win in 2020, which is that
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there isn't even one single candidate on the other side who can beat him.
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People have been saying possibly Joe Biden. You got to remember, Joe Biden's been hiding out now for
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weeks. He got his post-announcement bump, and then he's hiding away because he knows he's weak when he
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goes out in public. Bernie Sanders, possibly. I don't really see that happening. At least Bernie stands
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for something, so maybe he can make a serious play. I don't really buy it. Elizabeth Warren surging in
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the polls. People counted her out. She was barely registering in polls a few weeks ago. Now she's up
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8%, 9%, doing pretty well. She's still nothing. And this has not been clearer than when she was on
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The Breakfast Club, this excellent radio show, yesterday morning. And they called her out for
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the eternal weakness of her campaign. Your family told you you were Native American?
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Yeah. Charlemagne tells me I'm Dominican, but I don't believe you are. How long did you hold on to
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that? Because there was some reports that said you were Native American on your Texas bar license and
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that you said you were Native American on some documents when you were a professor at Harvard.
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Like, why'd you do that? So it's what I believe. You know, that's, like I said, it's what I learned
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from my family. When did you find out you weren't? Well, you know, it's, I'm not a person of color.
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I'm not a citizen of a tribe. And tribal citizenship is an important distinction. And not something I am.
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So. Were there any benefits to that? No. Boston Globe did a full investigation. It never affected,
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nothing about my family ever affected any job I ever got. Um. You didn't get a discount in college?
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You're kind of like the original Rachel Dozo a little bit. Rachel Dozo was a white woman pretending
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to be black. Well, this is what I learned from my family. Yeah. Yeah. He was just waiting. Talk
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about a really masterful radio interview. He kind of lures her in. He seems kind of nice. He's,
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he's playing cool. Oh, so you, but you're not. And okay, you didn't get any benefits from
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pretending to be Native American. You're kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal, huh?
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And she, you can see the fire in her eyes. And then he says, you know, she's a white woman
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pretending to be black. And Liz Warren, what can she say? She said, well, look, that's,
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that's what I was told by my family. And he goes, uh-huh. And she goes, uh-huh. Oof. Nothing more to say.
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This issue is not going away. She has tried to dismiss it. She's tried to do the Clinton playbook,
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which is you have a scandal, then you hide from the scandal for six months. And then someone brings
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the scandal back up and you say, it's old news. Even though you never answered any questions about
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it, you can say, well, it's old news. I'm not going to do it. This isn't working for Elizabeth Warren.
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She has had to answer for this for years and years and years. She has tried every strategy
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on answering it. She has doubled down. She got the Boston Globe, which is her personal Pravda,
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to do a whole big expose. Liz Warren took a DNA test and she is Native American,
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even though it's only one one-thousandth and probably not even that. And she said, see, look,
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I'm Native American. And she was roundly mocked by everybody in both parties. So then she got rid of
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that. And she said, okay, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pretend that I was a Native American,
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but I never got any advantage from it. And I never did it myself. It was just Harvard telling me,
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telling people that I was a Native American. Well, then that wasn't true because she signed
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her name as Native American on a Texas bar application. Okay. That was, she tries all these
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different strategies. None of them are working. If she wasn't able to come up with an answer for this,
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when she was running against Scott Brown in the Senate race, she certainly should have come up
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with an answer before she got into the presidential race. Trump has called her Pocahontas for three
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years. She still didn't have an answer when she got into the presidential race. Now, so much later,
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she still doesn't have an answer. The Breakfast Club asks her about it. She doesn't have an answer.
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She's not coming up with an answer. The issue is not going away and she's not going anywhere.
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So they don't have any really strong candidates on the Democrat side. Liz Warren is currently the
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surging candidate. She's only surging because she hasn't been in the public eye. People basically
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counted her out. President Trump said a few weeks ago she was done. So then people stopped paying
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attention to her and she starts to surge. Then the Breakfast Club points out that she's a total
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fraud and her entire life is a lie. She's going to fall down again. Joe Biden is still very high up in
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the polls right now. He's high up because nobody's heard from him. Nobody's seen him. When he finally
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gets back out there, goes on a debate stage, he's going to drop. And maybe he's got the best chance
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against Donald Trump. Maybe Bernie sort of has a chance against Donald Trump. Maybe. But where's
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the strong killer candidate? I just don't see them on that side. And that's the biggest issue because
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elections are not only about the economy. They're not only about models. They're not about generic
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Republicans or generic Democrats. They're about real people. Maybe the Democrats could have won in 2016,
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but Hillary was a terrible candidate. Maybe the Republicans could have lost in 2016,
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but Trump was the perfect candidate to beat Hillary. That's going to be a major issue.
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The other issue is even, let's say, that first model is correct, the Alan Lichtman model,
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and they've got to impeach to create more scandal in the Trump administration and hurt him in the
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election. What are they going to impeach over? That you had Bob Mueller come out and give his report.
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No collusion, and he didn't make a decision on obstruction, but he said there wasn't
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sufficient evidence. Then Barr and the Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General
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Rod Rosenstein look at the evidence. They say, there is absolutely not sufficient evidence here.
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Then Mueller comes out and he says, yeah, but I didn't exonerate him. And Barr says, yeah, right.
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That's what I said in my letter too. Nothing. It just ends up with nothing. So we had Mueller's
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press conference yesterday, pathetic. And then William Barr is not staying silent. So the
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Attorney General came out to respond to Mueller's criticisms.
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We saw the special counsel yesterday make that statement. He analyzed 11 instances where there
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were possible obstruction and then said that he really couldn't make a decision. Do you agree
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I personally felt he could have reached the decision.
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In your view, he could have reached a conclusion.
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Right. He could have reached a conclusion. The opinion says you cannot indict a president
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while he's in office, but he could have reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity.
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But he had his reasons for not doing it, which he explained. And I'm not going to argue about
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those reasons. But when he didn't make a decision, the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, and I felt it
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was necessary for us as the heads of the department to reach that decision.
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Well, I mean, he seemed to suggest yesterday that there was another venue for this, and that was Congress.
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Well, I'm not sure what he was suggesting, but, you know, the Department of Justice doesn't use
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our powers of investigating crimes as an adjunct to Congress.
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So William Barr is saying, I'm not backing down. I'm not going away. I behaved absolutely
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appropriately. And then the interviewer on CBS brings up the question of Mueller's press
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conference. And what Mueller said in his press conference was bewildering. He said, we investigated
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obstruction, but we can't come to a conclusion on obstruction, which raises the question, why did
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he investigate it then in the first place? Actually, that investigation exceeded his bounds anyway,
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because he was only tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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And then by saying he couldn't come to a conclusion, he's sort of admitting that he
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overstepped his bounds. But then William Barr says, yes, he could have reached a conclusion,
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probably should have reached a conclusion. And what the interviewer then says is, well,
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it looks like he was just teeing it up for Congress. He did that investigation to give Congress a lot of
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ample fodder so that they could begin impeachment proceedings. And what William Barr says is, he sort
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of tacitly agrees with that. And he says, sure, but the DOJ does not exist to do investigation work
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for Congress. That's not the role of the Department of Justice. So I think at the end of all of this,
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the DOJ under William Barr and ultimately under President Trump comes out looking a lot better
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than even than the Mueller team. And by the way, the Mueller team more or less exonerated the
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president. I mean, very practically speaking, they did exonerate the president, even if in the wording
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of the report, they say they won't reach a conclusion on the question of obstruction. So not a ton of scandal
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here. Not a whole lot that is, I think, really able to gin up the impeachment fury against Donald
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Trump. Judge Napolitano on Fox, who I really like, but I think he's wrong here. He comes out and
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questions this, questions Attorney General Barr and basically defends Bob Mueller.
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Well, it's not uncommon for two prosecutors looking at the same evidence to come to different
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conclusions. I mean, this happens every day in every prosecutor's office. But I think you hit the
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nail on the head when you said it is up to the attorney general to make these decisions.
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I think the reason Mueller did not come to a conclusion on obstruction of justice is not
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because the evidence wasn't there. It's there. There are 10 crimes outlined. There's enough there
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to get an indictment on any of them if the defendant were not the president of the United States.
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I think the reason is because he knew that the attorney general would never give him permission
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to do so. And he's a soldier. He's a he's a Marine. He doesn't want to challenge and take on
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his his boss. You think that the argument breaks down there at the end. So what Napolitano is saying
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is there is a ton of evidence that he could have been used to indict if he weren't the president of
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the United States. However, Bob Mueller is a loyal soldier and didn't want to overstep his bounds.
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That's demonstrably not true. Bob Mueller has contradicted his boss, Attorney General William
00:20:10.300
Barr, multiple times in public through that grandiose and ridiculous letter he sent. And
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then in that press conference that was totally gratuitous and unnecessary yesterday. So he's
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obviously willing to contradict Attorney General Barr. And beyond that, the point Judge Napolitano is
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making is that he didn't reach a conclusion because he, he felt it was overstepping his bounds somehow.
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He's a guy who already oversteps his bounds. Well, he didn't reach a conclusion because
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he felt that Attorney General Barr wouldn't act on it. So what? His job isn't to just do whatever
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Attorney General Barr wants to do. He could have easily put his conclusions that Trump committed a crime
00:20:56.720
in that report and waited for the AG to make his move. He's been combative already. He staffed the
00:21:01.960
investigation with never Trumpers. I don't think that's why. I think Mueller was bloodthirsty to, to show
00:21:07.380
evidence of a crime and to come to a conclusion and he just wasn't able to do it. And so if you had a
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weaker Attorney General, if you had an Attorney General who is more concerned about his own future
00:21:21.240
political career, I think he would behave in a more partisan way here. But actually what's happening
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is you have this guy, William Barr. He's only the second guy in history to serve as Attorney General
00:21:30.800
twice. And William Barr basically says, look, I have nothing to lose. And so I am going to call it
00:21:39.220
like it is. I'm going to be a straight shooter and I'm going to follow DOJ protocol.
00:21:44.000
You're now someone who is, you know, accused of protecting the president, enabling the president,
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lying to Congress. Did you expect that coming in?
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Well, in a way I did expect it because I realized we live in a crazy hyper partisan period of time.
00:21:59.540
And I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling
00:22:06.240
him as I see him, that I'd be attacked because nowadays people don't care about the merits or
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the substance. They only care about who it helps, you know, who benefits, whether my side benefits or
00:22:17.060
the other side benefits. Everything is gauged by politics. And as I say, that's antithetical to
00:22:23.080
the way the department runs. And any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing
00:22:28.480
a lot of political capital. And I realized that. And that's one of the reasons that I ultimately was
00:22:33.940
persuaded that maybe I should take it on because I think at my stage in life, it really doesn't make
00:22:39.800
any difference. Really an admirable statement here because he is so right. This guy has been
00:22:45.580
in Washington for a very long time. He's operated there a long time. And he knows that anybody who
00:22:51.320
steps into that role, if he has the most unimpeachable record ever, which William Barr
00:22:56.480
basically does, if he steps into that role right now, he is going to have his reputation tarnished.
00:23:02.560
He is going to have his career destroyed. And Barr's basically saying, I'm at the end of my career,
00:23:09.400
so I can do it. A younger guy would not be able to do it, would not be able to withstand that,
00:23:14.460
would have his career ruined, would maybe make questionable decisions to try to save his career
00:23:19.240
or save public face. Barr doesn't need to worry about that. He's the most liberated man in Washington.
00:23:24.200
And the only thing that they can hold over him is his legacy, is his reputation. And even on that,
00:23:30.120
he says, who cares? I'm at the end of my career. I've, you know...
00:23:35.160
Does it... I mean, it's a reputation that you've worked your whole life on, though.
00:23:38.880
Yeah, but everyone dies. And I'm not, you know... You know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that,
00:23:45.220
you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know.
00:23:54.700
That is the right attitude, not just for the attorney general, but for every one of us.
00:24:00.900
Everybody dies. Just go for it. Just do the right thing.
00:24:07.340
Your life is not going to be measured in the odes that are sung to you after you die.
00:24:14.380
You can't just do everything for public approval. Just do it. Just go for it. I love that attitude.
00:24:22.620
That is an attitude of a very dignified man. And it's a great thing that he is the attorney general
00:24:28.920
right now. We have got to get to a few more fabulous stories. The world's tiniest baby
00:24:34.620
was born, and yet in many states in this country, that baby could be killed. And not just killed
00:24:38.960
now, could be killed for many, many more weeks. We will get to that. We will get to the major
00:24:44.380
fight on the right between So Rob Amari at First Things and David French at National Review. And if
00:24:51.340
we have time, we'll get to the Steven Crowder tweet storm that YouTube right now is trying to
00:24:58.320
de-platform our pal Crowder. We'll get to all of that. But first, got to go to dailywire.com.
00:25:03.280
It is 10 bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show,
00:25:07.080
you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Mount Wall show. You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
00:25:10.360
That is yesterday or next Thursday. You get to ask questions backstage, and you get, most importantly,
00:25:16.280
the Leftist Tears Tumblr. Delish. Love them. Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more.
00:25:23.640
The world's tiniest baby has been born. This is a wonderful, so the baby weighs basically nothing,
00:25:42.400
23 weeks old, born, and has survived. A wonderful feel-good story. Obviously, this raises some
00:25:49.960
serious questions about the abortion discussion that we've been having for weeks, because in many
00:25:55.020
states in this country, that baby could be killed. And in many states in this country, people deny
00:26:00.860
that that baby is a baby. But the baby was born, and the baby is now alive. And listen to how the
00:26:06.360
mainstream media covers it. Tonight, an amazing announcement from San Diego, what doctors are
00:26:11.400
calling the world's tiniest surviving baby, just 8.6 ounces when she was born prematurely at 23 weeks.
00:26:18.520
Well, after five months in intensive care, the little girl named Sabie is now healthy,
00:26:23.740
and she's headed home. And we are so happy for her family. 8.6 ounces, half a pound.
00:26:31.400
This baby apparently was the size of an apple. Born at 23 weeks. Now going home, happy, healthy, all alive.
00:26:41.300
Good thing for that baby. That baby wasn't born in Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, Pennsylvania,
00:26:47.160
Rhode Island, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Maryland,
00:26:52.240
Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New York, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, or Virginia to parents
00:26:57.440
who wanted to kill it. Because if that had been the case, she would be dead. It wouldn't even be
00:27:04.280
admitted that she was a baby. In all of those states in the country, you can kill babies who are at least
00:27:11.380
as old, if not significantly older, than that baby. And those states want to pretend that the baby isn't
00:27:18.440
a baby. But you just heard it. You just saw it. The baby is a baby. This should end the abortion debate.
00:27:27.740
Those pictures should end the abortion debate. Or at least what they should do to the abortion debate
00:27:32.760
is take it into honest terms. Naomi Wolf, who we were talking about last week, Naomi Wolf
00:27:38.660
in the mid-90s came out and said, abortion rights mean that we need to kill the baby in all of its
00:27:45.940
humanity in order to have equality for men and women. At least she was honest. What people who
00:27:53.860
support abortion at 23 weeks need to say is, they look at little baby Mabel, was that her name? Look at
00:28:00.060
that little baby and say, you should die because of my political ideology. My political ideology means
00:28:08.600
that you must be killed. That's just the cost of it. That's the end of the argument. That certainly
00:28:19.740
should be the end of the argument. We'll see what those states do on abortion. Something tells me
00:28:23.060
they're not going to be protecting babies anytime soon. There's a major fight breaking out in the right
00:28:28.120
right now, in the conservative movement in so much as it still exists. The fight is being launched by
00:28:36.060
a traditionalist conservative writer named Sohrab Amari at the journal First Things. And he wrote a
00:28:42.340
piece called Against David Frenchism. You know David French. David French, very nice guy. He is a lawyer.
00:28:50.240
He served in Iraq. He is a writer at National Review. And he was a leading never-Trumper. Bill
00:28:55.560
Crystal tried to get him to run for president. He's one of the few remaining never-Trumpers. Bill
00:29:00.980
Crystal is another one who's still remaining. And what Sohrab is saying is that the conservative
00:29:06.780
movement in America needs to stop being like David French and start being a little tougher.
00:29:13.740
What this is really a debate between is not these two guys. I mean, the article is not called
00:29:19.160
Against David French. It's called Against David Frenchism. What this is really a debate between
00:29:23.860
is liberalism and traditionalism. Conservatism and liberalism in America are not opposite things.
00:29:31.600
In some ways they are, but in some ways they aren't. Because what we mean by liberalism is
00:29:36.040
maybe classical liberalism. You've heard the phrase classical liberalism. People forget a lot that in
00:29:41.200
the old days, liberalism had something to do with liberty. Now liberalism opposes liberty. Now it's all
00:29:46.500
about equality. But it comes from the same place. Libertarians, liberalism, classical liberalism.
00:29:51.940
And there is a version of conservatism that is really just a sort of liberalism. It accepts all
00:29:58.620
the premises of liberalism. It just doesn't take them as far as the progressives do. And then there's
00:30:04.320
an alternative to this, which is tradition. Actual conservatism. So Sohrab identifies David French
00:30:14.280
as the embodiment of a conservative movement frozen in time. As the embodiment of a conservative
00:30:21.920
movement that is trying anachronistically to cut and paste solutions and attitudes of the 1980s,
00:30:28.220
of the Reagan revolution, into the Trump era. As a movement that has not caught up with the times,
00:30:36.020
that has not accepted the changing circumstances of the world, that has not admitted its own failures.
00:30:41.600
There were many great things that happened during the Reagan era, but it wasn't perfect.
00:30:46.360
And in politics, you've got to adapt. You've got to acknowledge your own flaws and change them and
00:30:51.240
try to fix them. So he writes, so Rob writes, what is David Frenchism? As Irving Kristol said of
00:30:56.900
neoconservatism, Frenchism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets.
00:31:04.300
Fair enough. That's true. The reaction to this though, is that that's also true of the kind of
00:31:11.040
conservatism that Sohrab is advocating. It's true. This idea that conservatism is more a persuasion
00:31:17.580
or an attitude than it is a clear ideological movement. I think that's true of all sorts of
00:31:22.800
conservatism. That's certainly true of the traditional conservatism that I think about.
00:31:28.140
It's a little bit more of an inclination. It's a little bit more of an intuition,
00:31:31.400
as the conservative philosopher Russell Kirk said. But fair enough point.
00:31:35.560
David Frenchism, as Sohrab defines it, the key here is that it exalts individual autonomy above
00:31:43.200
all else. Individual liberty above all else. And David Frenchism, according to Sohrab,
00:31:50.880
says that the primary, if not the sole aim of government is to maximize individual autonomy.
00:31:57.520
And the argument for maximizing individual autonomy is that on the one hand, it's true,
00:32:03.400
you'll get a lot of decadence and you'll get porn and you'll get cultural rot, but you will also
00:32:08.200
then carve out a space in the culture for religious conservatives to practice virtue and to do what
00:32:14.140
they want to do. Now, the objection to that version, the David French version of conservatism,
00:32:20.020
which is just an older version of liberalism, is that true liberty cannot survive the sort of
00:32:29.040
libertinism and decadence that follows from maximizing individual liberty.
00:32:34.140
So the objection to David Frenchism is that if you just maximize individual liberty and you say,
00:32:39.720
okay, you're going to have your space to be decadent pagan degenerates and we're going to have our space
00:32:43.860
to be religious conservatives, eventually that maximizing of individual liberty will create a
00:32:50.820
libertine culture that will not tolerate the religious conservatives. And we're certainly seeing
00:32:55.820
this in the culture today. We're seeing, obviously, prayer in schools has not existed for over 50
00:33:01.080
years. That was rooted out. We're now being told that if you object to gay marriage even, that you're
00:33:06.940
some sort of bigot, the redefinition of marriage. If you object to curious sexualities, you're some
00:33:13.240
sort of bigot. If you object, you are no longer tolerated. You're deplatformed. You're censored.
00:33:18.040
You're kicked out. You're not allowed in the culture. Same thing with a good analysis of,
00:33:23.340
or a good analogy rather, would be drugs or porn. So the idea being, let's legalize all drugs.
00:33:30.860
And if you want to do drugs, you can do drugs. And if you don't want to do drugs, you don't have
00:33:35.100
to do drugs. And it'll be fine. That's a totally neutral culture. Except that isn't neutral because
00:33:40.360
drugs take away your liberty. So when you do drugs in the name of liberty, the drugs enslave you.
00:33:49.280
You lose some of your individual autonomy. You become addicted. You become a slave to
00:33:55.080
the drug. And so what you were doing initially in the name of liberty totally erodes your
00:33:59.500
liberty. Same thing with porn in our culture. There are a zillion men in this country who
00:34:03.540
are addicted to online pornography. And the argument for porn is that everybody should
00:34:08.380
have their maximum individual liberty. But then the argument against porn is it takes
00:34:12.080
away everybody's liberty because it takes away your, because it enslaves you. So on the
00:34:17.940
one hand, you've got this conservatism, this traditional conservatism that Saurabh is writing
00:34:22.940
about. And that says that society should primarily be focused on the good, on virtue, on good stuff.
00:34:31.440
On the other hand, you have the classical liberalism that he calls David Frenchism, which says that society
00:34:36.800
should primarily value liberty. Not just as a means to the good or to virtue, but as the good unto
00:34:43.860
itself. And this is a big difference. I, for one, I love liberty. A few people love liberty more than I
00:34:50.120
do. But I like liberty because it is an instrument to the good. Liberty isn't the be-all and end-all.
00:34:56.340
If some guy uses his liberty to do a bunch of drugs and waste his life, that's terrible. That's an awful
00:35:01.200
abuse of liberty. Liberty has to be geared towards something, which is the good. So Rob writes,
00:35:06.660
only the libertines take the logic of maximal autonomy, the one that French shares, to its
00:35:13.420
logical terminus. They say, in effect, for us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm
00:35:18.820
our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it
00:35:24.160
means to be human. And your disapprobation makes us feel less than fully autonomous. So one example of
00:35:35.020
individual autonomy that So Rob actually cites is a drag queen reading session at a public library. We
00:35:40.620
talked about this about a week ago. Some public library, they have a drag queen reading session
00:35:45.980
for little kids. Now, this is obviously an example of maximizing individual liberty. The drag queen gets
00:35:54.200
to dress however he wants to. He gets to show up and read at this library. The parents can choose to
00:35:59.640
take their kids there. That's all, it's all just individual liberty. It's horrific and should not
00:36:06.200
happen, but it's, that's just individual liberty. The issue that So Rob identifies is the only way to
00:36:12.680
sustain drag queen reading sessions at libraries is with some level of moral approval by the community.
00:36:18.400
If the, if the community didn't approve of, of the drag queen reading session, it would not be
00:36:22.680
permitted to happen. So when you open this whole door to maximizing individual liberty as much as
00:36:28.740
you want, you end up getting drag queen reading sessions. And then you in the community are
00:36:34.020
complicit in the moral approval of it. And you're seeing this around the culture. And now, if you
00:36:38.300
don't approve of drag queens, if you don't approve of certain sexual relationships, you are, it's not,
00:36:44.080
you're not just told, okay, you do you, I'll do me, live and let live. You're told you're a bigot.
00:36:48.600
You're, you're, should be ostracized from society. It is not just neutral to maximize individual
00:36:55.980
autonomy. It is normative. It has moral consequences. It changes how the community views morality. And
00:37:04.780
ultimately, it becomes hostile to the traditional choices that people might use their individual
00:37:10.020
liberty to choose. So you say, okay, it's just a big, open, neutral playing field. You can make your
00:37:14.360
crazy, wacko, radical choice. We'll make our traditional choices. Ultimately, the wacko choices
00:37:19.100
will overpower the traditional ones. And a good example of this is religious liberty, religious
00:37:24.740
liberty. So that was established in this country to protect all the various sects of Christianity from
00:37:30.120
hating each other and warring with each other. No one ever expected religious liberty to be used as
00:37:36.400
an argument for taking down a statue of the Ten Commandments at a courthouse or at a state
00:37:42.380
capital. No one ever expected that. Likewise, no one ever expected it to be used as an argument
00:37:47.500
to put up a statue of Satan at a courthouse or a state capital as the American atheists are trying to
00:37:53.220
do and have been trying to do for decades. No one ever expected religious liberty to be maximized in
00:38:01.420
that individual way. Because let's take it to its most absurd extreme. Let's say someone was a religious
00:38:07.180
devotee of Hitler. They think Hitler's a god. They're Hitlerites and they worship Adolf Hitler.
00:38:15.240
Does that mean that we should be forced to build statues of swastikas at public courts or at public
00:38:22.440
state houses? It's not just a political statement. They worship Hitler as a religion. There's the religion
00:38:28.840
of the Hitlerites. Should we be permitted to do that? No, no one would say that. So why would we have a
00:38:34.420
statue of Satan? It's because people get this backwards. Religious liberty taken to its extreme is
00:38:40.420
incoherent because liberty relies on religious ideas. Our idea of liberty presupposes certain
00:38:47.960
religious foundations. Other places in the world don't have religious liberty like we do. Why? Because
00:38:54.220
they don't come from the same religious culture that we come from. The idea of liberty that we have
00:38:58.380
comes from Christianity. The religion in religious liberty comes before the liberty. So a liberty that
00:39:04.480
undermines that religion is totally incoherent. Now we're getting this debate, we're getting a little
00:39:09.420
into the weeds, but the reason we have this debate at all between the traditionalists and the classical
00:39:13.920
liberals is because during the Cold War, individualists and traditionalists came together
00:39:18.980
against the Soviet Union. And the traditionalists opposed the Soviet Union because it was atheistic
00:39:25.440
and the classical liberals and libertarians opposed the Soviet Union because it was communist and
00:39:31.260
collectivistic. I'm simplifying a little bit, but you had the cultural guys were upset about the cultural
00:39:36.460
questions. The economic guys were upset about the economic questions. And so they joined together in
00:39:41.680
something called fusionism, which William F. Buckley Jr. started basically after the Second World War.
00:39:47.700
After we won the Cold War, this debate opened up between the traditionalists and the classical liberals.
00:39:53.360
And 2016 blew that, that debate wide open in particular. This is an extraordinarily important
00:40:00.940
debate to have. It's important that conservatives of all stripes have this debate. But the very
00:40:07.240
important thing for David French, for Sohrab Amari and for everyone in it, we have to not engage in the
00:40:13.260
debate by alienating each other because the, the conservative, the conservative coalition such as it is
00:40:22.320
will be destroyed and leftism will, will take over if we allow this to totally crack us apart. I side with
00:40:30.160
Sohrab on this question in so much as we should keep things in their proper place, in so much as we
00:40:37.760
should pursue good and not just liberty for its own sake. We also must defeat the left. And we are
00:40:45.840
debating right now how best to defeat the left and what it means to defeat the left. But we certainly
00:40:50.780
shouldn't alienate permanently our allies and our potential allies for this. Very quickly, I have
00:40:57.620
to get to Steven Crowder. Steve Crowder is being targeted by some wacko schmuck at vox.com who is
00:41:07.440
trying to get his channel taken off the air. He's getting the channel taken off the air because he
00:41:11.860
says Steven Crowder was mean to him and Steven Crowder used, was making fun of his sexual preferences and
00:41:18.180
therefore he should lose his gigantic YouTube channel. What did Steven Crowder say about this
00:41:25.020
Before we get to the video, uh, with our favorite, favorite lispy sprite from Vox. It's ridiculous?
00:41:31.860
It's bonkers? You're being given a free pass as a crappy writer because you're gay?
00:41:36.200
That's the center line on his little queer graph there. What is that line?
00:41:43.080
Okay, so the little queer can eat his chips all nonchalantly.
00:41:45.680
It's code for rape, Mr. Queer Eating Chips on the Vox channel.
00:41:49.320
Mm-hmm, chip, chip, chip, chip, bet you can eat just one. Like dicks.
00:41:52.360
This is what Mr. Gay Vox wants to do. Mr. Lispy Queer from Vox.
00:42:02.260
Now we're here with a short-haired, angry lesbian on Skype.
00:42:04.940
In cable news, cable news bitching. Two gay guys sitting there eating a banana. We get the symbolism there.
00:42:08.460
Truth is hiding in a closet two weeks later, probably along to his next Pride Parade outfit.
00:42:16.040
Oh, okay, so you really are just an angry little queer.
00:42:17.840
All right, I can't deal with this Sprite anymore.
00:42:19.120
Okay, he just sashays across without, like just, oh!
00:42:26.580
How many lispy, angry Sprites Vox sashay across your screen and try and tell you otherwise.
00:42:40.820
The token Vox gay atheist Sprite was surprisingly, surprisingly flaccid chess, considering how thin he is.
00:42:53.280
Will not let one joke go without, you know, just really taking it to its extreme.
00:42:57.780
So he's calling this guy a bunch of names and he's making fun of them.
00:43:01.820
This guy, Carlos Maza, deserves a lot of criticism and should be made fun of.
00:43:07.140
I think what he's misunderstanding here, though, is this guy thinks that Stephen Crowder is calling him queer because Crowder hates gay people.
00:43:19.620
Stephen Crowder is calling this guy queer because Stephen Crowder doesn't like him.
00:43:24.940
And he's calling him queer because that's one way, among others, to make fun of him.
00:43:31.260
If some guy comes up to me and says, hey, Knowles, you're a Dago Guido WAP.
00:43:37.240
He wouldn't say that because he hates Italian people, probably.
00:43:39.940
He would say that because he doesn't like me and I am of Italian descent.
00:43:43.520
And so one way to make fun of me is to call me a bunch of slurs for Italians.
00:43:52.920
I don't have time to go through all the tweets.
00:43:54.360
But he just exemplifies the worst parts of the whiny left here.
00:44:00.720
So I have pretty thick skin when it comes to online harassment.
00:44:06.420
When you say, I have thick skin, but what that means is you don't have thick skin.
00:44:11.140
So you know you're in for just a huge wine fest.
00:44:15.340
Since I started working at Vox, Crowder has been making video after video debunking my videos.
00:44:20.040
Every single video has included repeated overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity.
00:44:32.420
How many times does the left insult straight white men?
00:44:37.260
How many times does the left talk about how awful straight white men are?
00:44:39.940
I mean, it's become a cliche to say straight white man.
00:44:43.860
The left is also insulting people by referring to their sexual preferences.
00:44:47.500
The left does exactly what you are observing Crowder doing.
00:44:53.240
I've been called an anchor baby, a lispy queer, a Mexican, all these sort of names.
00:44:57.820
I wake up to a wall of abuse on Instagram and Twitter.
00:45:08.860
I waste a lot of time blocking abusive Crowder fanboys.
00:45:21.340
Threatening messages, mean messages, insulting messages.
00:45:26.340
Because I'm an adult and sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
00:45:30.580
If you think that getting hate mail derails your mental health, get a new profession.
00:45:38.320
Go work in some private accounting office somewhere, far, far from the public eye.
00:45:45.380
People in the public eye have always and will always get hate mail.
00:45:52.480
They say it derails your mental health as a way of trying to claim that they're really victims.
00:46:16.720
All of this to say, I work my effing back off to create smart, thorough, engaging content
00:46:23.980
for YouTube, a company that claims to give an S about LGBT creators.
00:46:28.460
And it's miserable to have that same company helping facilitate a mind-melting amount of
00:46:34.840
Oh, you make YouTube videos and you don't want to get negative comments.
00:46:38.420
Every YouTube video is filled with abusive, mean comments.
00:46:43.860
But you think because you're really special and you, you make really good videos.
00:46:50.320
All the rest of us get mean, but no, you, because you're so special, you shouldn't get
00:47:02.000
If you're in public, your family sees everything.
00:47:04.180
They see how people react to you and they see what you do.
00:47:11.780
It's about enforcing an anti-harassment policy.
00:47:16.520
He said, but it's about enforcing an anti-harassment policy.
00:47:19.640
When you say, but you negate what you've said before it.
00:47:22.920
So then he tells people to go over and flag Crowder's videos.
00:47:27.280
It'd be a shame if someone went over and flagged his videos.
00:47:32.320
And then he goes on and says, YouTube does not give an F about queer creators.
00:47:36.540
YouTube does not give an F about marginalized creators.
00:47:39.000
YouTube does not give an F about diversity or inclusion.
00:47:42.040
First of all, nobody is more marginalized on YouTube than conservatives or on social media generally.
00:47:46.660
Second of all, nobody is a greater example of diversity on social media than conservatives.
00:47:56.880
When you add another point of view, you have diversity.
00:48:00.200
What he's saying is, if you are not totally in agreement with me, if you ever would criticize
00:48:05.960
my thoughts or ideas or how I behave, you are a horrible bigot.
00:48:12.940
Now, some people are going to want to abandon Crowder because they themselves would never
00:48:21.820
But because you would never make a gay joke, you won't defend Crowder.
00:48:27.240
And they're going after him because they haven't come around to going after you yet.
00:48:48.120
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner,
00:48:52.720
executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay,
00:48:56.240
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
00:49:09.000
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:49:15.200
You know, I've been called racist because I did a segment on the show yesterday discussing
00:49:19.020
some very troubling accusations about Martin Luther King Jr.
00:49:27.280
Also, the HBO series Chernobyl is a damning indictment of socialism.
00:49:33.300
But the left says that, no, it's actually more about Donald Trump.
00:49:37.780
Is it about Donald Trump or is it about socialism?
00:49:39.480
And Old Town Road is quite possibly the worst song ever recorded, but it's a huge hit.
00:49:47.360
Is everyone just pretending to like it as some kind of joke?
00:49:51.260
But we'll try to get to the bottom of that today on The Matt Wall Show.