Ep. 381 - Twitter Isn’t Real Life
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
175.18391
Summary
In this episode of the Michael Knowles Show, host Michael Kinsley talks about a tweet sent by President Trump about a terrorist attack that was thwarted on an ICE detention center in Washington, D.C., and the reaction to it.
Transcript
00:00:00.080
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but President Trump's tweets will never hurt you.
00:00:06.100
A leftist terrorist tries to blow up an immigration center in Washington,
00:00:09.480
but the mainstream media black it out to cover more Trump tweets.
00:00:13.460
We will examine controversies and non-troversies.
00:00:16.860
Then a former ICE director roasts AOC, and men attack actress Scarlett Johansson
00:00:22.600
for suggesting that she can pretend to be other people.
00:00:25.680
All that and more. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:00:30.000
The sky is falling. The world has been thrown into chaos because President Trump, he tweeted.
00:00:43.940
He tweeted. He sent a tweet. His tweet implied certain things that are not true.
00:00:49.040
His tweet was offensive, and that's it. I mean, this is the biggest. I have a doll right here.
00:00:55.820
I want you to show me on the doll where President Trump's tweet hurt you.
00:01:02.320
Point it out. Because this, because that's all that matters in this world is tweets.
00:01:07.240
Twitter is real life. There's no such thing as real life. It's only Twitter,
00:01:11.000
and so that's what we need to talk about. Not the terrorist attack that was thwarted
00:01:15.240
on an ICE detention center in Washington. No, none of that. We have to talk about the tweets.
00:01:21.440
So we will. We will talk about the tweets. We will read the tweet. We will examine what was wrong with
00:01:27.100
it, what was offensive about it, what people are going all crazy and getting in a huff about nothing
00:01:31.380
for, and what it means in the broader context of 2020. We will do all of that, but first,
00:01:37.080
support for The Michael Knowles Show comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans.
00:01:41.080
Finding the right house is not easy. Take my word for it. I live in Los Angeles, so if I want to live in a
00:01:46.500
cardboard box, it's like $5 million, and it's very difficult because now you've got homeless people
00:01:51.340
roving the streets and drugs everywhere, and it's very tough to find the right house.
00:01:55.600
But when I do find a house, at least finding the right mortgage will be easy because Rocket Mortgage
00:02:00.420
makes it easy. Their team of mortgage experts is obsessed with finding a better way, which means
00:02:06.020
that their number one goal is to make the home buying process smoother for you. With industry-leading
00:02:12.020
online lending technology developed in the heart of Detroit, Rocket Mortgage is changing the game.
00:02:17.680
They make the home buying process work for you. Listen, I have very few practical skills,
00:02:22.180
and all of the intricacies that go into getting a mortgage is just something I never learned. I have
00:02:26.360
no interest in learning. Fortunately, Rocket Mortgage is there with award-winning client service and
00:02:31.620
support every step of the way. I mean, for many people, getting a house is the biggest decision that
00:02:35.840
they'll ever make in their financial lives. Why not go with the best to make the mortgage process
00:02:40.420
so much easier? That's why Quicken Loans is ranked highest in customer satisfaction for primary
00:02:44.660
mortgage origination nine years in a row, highest in mortgage servicing five years in a row.
00:02:50.280
Rocket Mortgage is more than just a lender. Get started online at rocketmortgage.com
00:02:54.080
slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Equal housing lender, licensed in all 50 states,
00:02:58.740
NMLSconsumeraccess.org, member 3030. Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. Push button,
00:03:04.020
get mortgage. Simple as that. What did his tweet say? You're in trouble now, Mr. President. What did
00:03:12.960
the tweet say? He sent out this tweet, quote, so interesting to see progressive Democrat congresswomen
00:03:22.300
who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe,
00:03:27.100
the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world, if they even have a functioning government at
00:03:32.620
all, now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful
00:03:37.880
nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally
00:03:43.680
broken and crime infested places from which they came? Then come back and show us how it is done.
00:03:50.460
These places need your help badly. You can't leave fast enough. I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi would be
00:03:56.240
very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements. Oh, Trump. Oh, it's so, so quintessentially,
00:04:06.160
Trump. What is this about? This tweet is about the infighting that's going on in the Democratic Party
00:04:12.200
because Nancy Pelosi and the House establishment is sniping now at the fresh faces, Ilhan Omar, AOC,
00:04:19.740
Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. People on the right and the left are losing their minds over
00:04:28.420
this tweet thread. They're calling it racist and bigoted and stupid. Everybody calm down. It's okay.
00:04:35.360
We are going to survive the tweet. What we should do is examine the tweet dispassionately. That means
00:04:42.900
that the Trump super duper, always Trump supporters should be dispassionate. It means the never,
00:04:48.440
ever, ever, ever Trump conservative types should be dispassionate. And obviously the left, we want
00:04:53.000
them to be dispassionate, but that's never going to happen. There is one glaring error in the tweet.
00:04:58.860
We'll get to what that is in a second. There is one thing that he said that is just obviously wrong.
00:05:05.040
The tweet is obviously unfair and imprecise in a very important way. Sure. Also, I disagree with
00:05:13.360
conservatives who say that this is unhelpful or counterproductive. I don't think that's
00:05:17.780
a legitimate argument. So what's wrong with the tweet? For one, he's referring to these
00:05:22.780
freshmen progressive Democrats. He's referring to the, quote, progressive Democratic Congresswoman.
00:05:27.360
It seems that he's referring to the four fresh faces. He doesn't name them in particular,
00:05:31.820
but I think that's the only fair way to read this is he's talking about Ilhan Omar, AOC,
00:05:35.880
Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. Of those people, only one of them is an immigrant, Ilhan Omar.
00:05:42.780
So if he's saying they come from these awful countries, that isn't true. I mean, AOC comes
00:05:50.460
from northern Westchester. She comes from where I came from, and it's a very nice place. You know,
00:05:54.060
it's got some bad politics, but it's very affluent and very nice. So that's where this charge of
00:05:58.120
racism is coming from. Critics are saying that because all of the people that he's apparently
00:06:03.140
referring to are not white, Trump views them as un-American. Brit Hume had a good point on this.
00:06:09.100
What he said is nativist. It prefers people who were born in this country. It is xenophobic
00:06:16.260
in the sense that it casts aspersions on other places in the world. There's no evidence that
00:06:21.600
it's racist. I mean, now we use racist to mean bad. We just use racist to mean anything we don't
00:06:26.660
like. But there's really not a lot of evidence that what he's saying here is racist. Also,
00:06:32.380
we'll get to that in a second. He's speaking imprecisely. This leaves him open to an attack,
00:06:38.480
and therefore he shouldn't have done it. There are ways he could have phrased what he was saying
00:06:43.660
that would have been more precise and still conveyed the hit, which is, I think, a pretty
00:06:47.820
good hit. He could have said, these progressive congresswomen constantly extol the virtues of
00:06:53.700
awful hellhole countries around the world. Well, maybe they should move over to those countries and
00:06:58.500
try to fix those governments if they're so great. Then they can come back here and show us how great
00:07:02.840
those governments are. He could have said that. You notice it's almost the exact same thing he said,
00:07:06.640
except it's not saying you are from those countries, go back to those countries, which
00:07:12.380
in three of the four cases is not true. So that's my only issue with the tweet.
00:07:16.420
So let's take a step back on the racism question, which is what everyone's talking about.
00:07:22.220
If racism is the question, then the only question that matters is, is Donald Trump a racial bigot?
00:07:27.360
Is he a bigot? If he's not a bigot, then shut up about the racism of the tweet. If he is a bigot,
00:07:35.860
then we can certainly see racism in the tweet. So the question is, is he a bigot? I don't see any
00:07:40.680
evidence of that. He won civil rights awards when he was a billionaire donating to different
00:07:46.000
organizations in New York. He paled around with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. He's not an anti-Semite.
00:07:54.340
We know he's not an anti-Semite because he married his daughter off to a Jewish man and there is a town
00:07:59.080
and a train station in Israel named after him. So I don't think he's anti-Semitic. He has appointed
00:08:05.480
black people to his cabinet. He's appointed black people in his administration. His policies have
00:08:09.940
been extraordinarily good specifically for the black community. He, uh, he has actually in the
00:08:17.020
realm of pop culture, he has the most prominent black voice in all of the culture endorsing him
00:08:23.060
wholeheartedly. That's Kanye West. So I just, if you think he's racist, you got to show the evidence
00:08:28.480
of where he's racist. But if you don't have the evidence, then I, with all of the evidence against
00:08:34.060
it, I just can't conclude that. And I feel the same way about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.
00:08:38.220
Lest you think that I'm just, uh, defending Trump because he's in my political party.
00:08:43.240
I said the same thing about Joe Biden a week or two ago. I said, Joe Biden is an awful guy. He's got,
00:08:48.180
there are plenty of reasons not to vote for him, but there's no evidence he's a racist.
00:08:51.620
I said the same thing about Pelosi. She's an awful human being. I mean, she's truly just a demon
00:08:56.500
destroying our politics. There's no evidence that she's a racist. It's the same thing, uh, for Trump.
00:09:02.500
There is just no evidence of it. So then if we've established that, that Trump,
00:09:07.500
there's really no evidence that he's a racial bigot. Where does this attack even come from?
00:09:13.380
Because Trump at least seems to think that these women are not from America. For one of them,
00:09:16.840
that's true. Ilhan Omar is from Somalia and she says awful, terrible things about our own country
00:09:21.560
and about other people as well. But the other three, why does he think the other three are not
00:09:26.360
from America? It might be his own ignorance. It also might be that all of these women constantly
00:09:33.380
present themselves as foreign. So you have Rashida Tlaib constantly extolling the fact she's the
00:09:40.740
first Muslim. She's the first Palestinian American, the first Somali immigrant, Ilhan Omar, the first
00:09:46.120
this, the first that, whatever. They don't say, I'm an American. I'm all American, baby. I'm apple pie,
00:09:50.760
red, white, and blue. They don't. It's always that hyphenation. It's always talking about where
00:09:55.900
they're from. I mean, this was in many ways their pitch to the voters. It was, vote for me. I'm
00:10:01.320
totally different. Vote for me because the way America has been until the present is awful. And I
00:10:06.940
am so different from America that I'm going to fundamentally transform it. They're saying things
00:10:11.640
that are pretty weird. You know, Ilhan Omar was giggling about the word Al-Qaeda. She was saying
00:10:17.160
that Jews can't be loyal to America. The only reason anyone would support Israel is because they're
00:10:21.540
being bribed by Jews. Rashida Tlaib said the Holocaust gives her a calming feeling. And then
00:10:26.180
she rewrote the history of the Holocaust. Here they are. The first thing that I think about when
00:10:31.000
somebody says you're going to be the first Muslim is celebrate this moment. Two weeks ago or so,
00:10:37.920
we celebrated, or just it took a moment, I think, in our country to remember the Holocaust.
00:10:43.780
And there's, you know, there's a kind of a calming feeling I always tell folks. When I think of
00:10:48.220
the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors, Palestinians
00:10:54.880
who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, the human dignity, their existence
00:11:00.960
in many ways have been wiped out and some people's passport, I mean, just all of it was in the name
00:11:07.100
of trying to create a safe haven for Jews. The thing that was interesting in the class was every
00:11:12.840
time the professor said Al-Qaeda, he sort of, like, his shoulders went up and, you know,
00:11:19.380
Yeah, he's in command here. Al-Qaeda, you know, hospital. He's an expert.
00:11:22.740
But it is that you don't say America with an intensity. You don't say England with an intensity.
00:11:30.000
You know, you don't say the army with an intensity.
00:11:36.400
But you say these names because you want that word to carry weight.
00:11:42.600
You have Ilhan Omar giggling about Al-Qaeda. You have her drawing a moral equivalence between the
00:11:49.120
terrorists who took down the Twin Towers and the United States Army and England. I mean,
00:11:53.740
that's pretty weird. It's anti-American. It's un-American. And it gives you the impression
00:11:59.780
that you're foreign. So I think that's some of where this is coming from. It's not just those
00:12:03.520
women. This is true of AOC. In high school, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went by the name Sandy
00:12:09.540
Ocasio. We know this because we've seen her yearbook. And even Vox.com has admitted this
00:12:14.720
because Vox.com saw her yearbook. She was Sandy Ocasio for her whole life. Then she decides to run
00:12:20.100
for Congress. And all of a sudden, she's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Why? It's because the left likes
00:12:28.960
foreign things. The left brought, it's not a racial question. It's just the left generally doesn't like
00:12:33.320
America that much. You know, even Ayanna Pressley, who is not the child of an immigrant. Ayanna
00:12:38.820
Pressley is this fresh face who is, she's black. So that's where the racism argument comes from.
00:12:44.960
But Ayanna Pressley, just two weeks ago, used a racial slur to describe Kellyanne Conway as senior
00:12:51.020
advisor to President Trump. Called her Becky, which is now a popular slur for white women who are seen as
00:12:58.000
uninteresting or boring by virtue of their race. This is similar to what Barack Obama did. You know,
00:13:04.220
Barack Obama, people forget, birtherism wasn't started by Donald Trump. It wasn't started by
00:13:09.460
Hillary Clinton even. It was started by Barack Obama because in one of his early literary biographies,
00:13:15.020
his agent or his publisher or he himself said that he was born in Kenya. I think it's pretty clear he
00:13:21.780
wasn't born in Kenya, that he was born in America. But a lot of people thought he was born in Kenya
00:13:26.600
because he said he was. Why did he say it is? Because to the left, to their audience,
00:13:31.460
it is exotic. It's preferable to be from another place, to be foreign. These people, to quote Barack
00:13:38.820
Obama, want to fundamentally transform America. Also because the ideas that these people espouse,
00:13:45.260
all the fresh faces, all of them, are anti-American ideas. They're foreign ideas. They're not,
00:13:51.580
they're not naturally from the American political tradition. So I think that does explain a little
00:13:58.540
bit of, of why he thinks that. Obviously it's not true. Three of them are not from foreign countries,
00:14:04.480
but I think that's why. So President Trump then refers to the broken and crime infested places
00:14:09.460
from which they came. This is very similar to the hellhole countries comment that he made about a year
00:14:15.100
ago. He didn't use the word hellhole, but it was a similar word. And this exposes the left's hypocrisy.
00:14:20.180
It did it the last time too. On the one hand, we're told America is the worst place on earth.
00:14:25.760
We run concentration camps. Our government is the same as Nazi Germany. On the other hand,
00:14:31.980
we're told that we need to let in millions of illegal aliens per year to come to Nazi Germany.
00:14:37.460
On the one hand, we're told that it's racist and untrue to refer to other countries as hellholes.
00:14:43.400
On the other hand, we're told that these people are fleeing countries that are such hellholes,
00:14:47.520
that are so spectacularly horrific that if we don't allow them to flood into this country 3,000 per
00:14:53.420
day, we have blood on our hands because they're going to be killed by their tyrannical illegitimate
00:14:58.040
governments. It can't be both at the same time. You have to pick a lane. Now, what people are calling
00:15:05.880
the strongest argument against this tweet, I think is actually the weakest because what some people are
00:15:10.620
saying, okay, it's not racist. It's ignorant. It's offensive. It was stupid. Maybe you shouldn't
00:15:17.420
have said it. But the argument that they circle around is that tactically, politically, it was a
00:15:24.880
bad idea because you had the Democrats already ripping each other apart. So when your enemies are
00:15:29.360
fighting each other, don't get in the way. We should let them do it. We shouldn't give them a reason
00:15:34.000
to unite against him. How did this start? Because last week, two weeks ago rather, Nancy Pelosi
00:15:41.000
mocked AOC and the fresh faces. Said they had no political following, that it was all just Twitter
00:15:46.340
stuff. But in real hard politics, no one really liked them, which is true. So then AOC called Pelosi
00:15:51.880
a racist. Then the House Democrats Twitter account called AOC's chief of staff a racist. Then some
00:15:57.540
random blue checkmark leftist on Twitter, Bree Newsome Bass, called the House Democrats racist. And so it's
00:16:02.900
just, you're racist, racist, racist, all until I don't know when. There's no ending to that.
00:16:08.740
The argument here is to let the Democrats rip themselves apart rather than unify against Trump.
00:16:15.280
Actually though, we want the Democrats to unify. The Democrats are going to unify. By the 2020 election,
00:16:21.700
they will be unified together. Remember how the GOP was totally ripped apart under the nomination of
00:16:31.840
Donald Trump. We were told that there's no way Trump could win. The party has this irreconcilable
00:16:37.880
fracture. There is going to be a new anti-Trump conservative candidate. Bill Kristol's pulling
00:16:43.620
away from the GOP. All that stuff. What happened? They rallied even around Trump. And they're going
00:16:47.700
to do it again. So they're going to rally. The question is, who are they going to rally behind?
00:16:52.520
Three options here. They can either rally behind Nancy Pelosi. They can either rally behind Alexandria
00:17:03.800
Ocasio-Cortez and the fresh faces, or we can let them keep fighting. And then eventually they're going
00:17:10.180
to rally between one of the two, and maybe we won't be able to say which it is. We want them to rally
00:17:16.300
around AOC and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. These women are extremely
00:17:22.480
unpopular. They're very popular with the media. They're extremely unpopular with the American
00:17:27.460
people. These young radical Democrats, according to a new Axios poll, AOC's popularity is at just 22%.
00:17:34.740
That's her approval rating. Ilhan Omar's approval rating, take a guess, 9%, single digits. Even though
00:17:41.060
both of those women have high name ID, AOC's name ID is over 75%, I think. Ilhan Omar is something like
00:17:46.620
55%. And yet Ilhan Omar's approval is 9%. How about socialism, which is the idea that all of these
00:17:52.900
women are professing? Socialism was viewed favorably, according to this poll, by 18% of voters,
00:17:58.680
unfavorably by 69% of voters. There was a June poll from AOC's district. Guess how many people in her
00:18:04.660
district viewed her favorably versus unfavorably? Two to one unfavorable. Only 10.75% thought that AOC
00:18:13.620
had their interests at heart. 33% are ready to vote against her compared to just 13% who are going to
00:18:19.800
vote for her. Almost three times as many people are going to vote against her. Pelosi and the slightly
00:18:26.380
more sane Democrats are looking right now at these fresh faces. They see all the same numbers that we do
00:18:31.400
and they're saying, okay, they're weak now. So that's why we're going to attack them now. That's
00:18:35.000
why we're going to go for them when they're politically weak and we're going to take back
00:18:38.180
control of this party. Republicans should do every single thing that they can to keep AOC,
00:18:44.260
Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley as the faces of the Democrat party.
00:18:49.280
That is the best possible scenario for Republicans. So what do we take about, what do we make of this
00:18:57.280
tweet thread overall? In so much as this tweet thread makes mainstream Democrats defend Ilhan Omar
00:19:03.180
and AOC, which is what's happening. It basically is a good tweet thread. It basically works.
00:19:09.320
In so much as he said things that are untrue and imprecise and offensive, I get, that's bad.
00:19:14.480
Sure, we can all agree with that. But as with all of these controversies, you do need a little bit
00:19:19.180
of context. You know, in 2016, President Trump said that a U.S. judge could not give him a fair
00:19:25.000
hearing on immigration because the judge was of Mexican descent, right? And that,
00:19:30.680
that statement on its face is racist. It's offensive. It's wrong. And this is how it was
00:19:35.860
played in the mainstream media. Everyone called it racist. But then we learned that the judge
00:19:42.120
is a racist himself. He actually is. He's a member of a group called the San Diego La Raza Lawyers
00:19:47.480
Association. La Raza means the race. And it refers specifically to an early 20th century essay
00:19:53.720
called La Raza Cosmica, which says that Hispanics are superior to the other races.
00:20:00.440
It's the same place that the campus group La Raza comes from, that they've had to rename
00:20:05.060
themselves because it's so obviously racist. So in that scenario, it kind of looks like President
00:20:09.500
Trump was right. That judge, Judge Curiel, is a member of a racist group, a pro-Hispanic racist group.
00:20:17.120
So yeah, I guess that is an issue. Didn't have to be. I mean, if it had been any other Mexican
00:20:21.680
judge, it would have just been a bigoted statement from Trump. But in the case of that judge in
00:20:25.660
particular, no big deal. Same thing with Charlottesville. You know, after Charlottesville,
00:20:30.000
we were all told the media said that Trump said there were good people among white nationalists and
00:20:35.100
neo-Nazis. And then we saw the full video. And what did it say? Two sentences later, he explicitly
00:20:40.220
condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be condemned totally.
00:20:45.420
Now I think it's the same old story. The question you got to ask yourself, just keep coming back to
00:20:50.220
this. Whenever they say Trump is a bigot, whenever they say anybody is a bigot, because they say
00:20:54.340
something, they make some joke, they send some tweet. Is Trump a racial bigot? Does he discriminate
00:21:01.500
against racial minorities? Does he use his office to oppress racial minorities? If he's trying to do
00:21:09.460
that, he's the most incompetent oppressor in the history of race relations because we now have record
00:21:15.500
low black unemployment, record low Hispanic unemployment. If you think he does harbor all
00:21:23.540
these racial antagonisms, antipathies, and you think that he's oppressing people, prove it. If you
00:21:30.220
don't think that, I wouldn't get so riled up over the tweets. You know, John Stuart Mill, the
00:21:36.060
philosopher, one time described the difference between the radical, now we might say leftist,
00:21:41.500
and the conservative. And what the radical does is he sees any statement, any received opinion,
00:21:48.040
and he asks, is it true? Is it literally true? Can I, can I demonstrate that truth?
00:21:52.800
If you apply that lens to Trump's tweet, then it's obviously false because those three women are not
00:21:57.240
immigrants. But the conservative, he points out, looks at a received opinion and he doesn't ask,
00:22:03.280
is it true? Is it, can I prove it? Is it true? He asks, what does it mean? And I think if you ask,
00:22:08.760
what does it mean, you'll learn a lot about the state of the democratic party, you'll learn a lot
00:22:12.500
about these four progressive congresswomen, you'll learn a lot about the state of the country
00:22:16.920
and patriotism and foreign ideas coming in. So I think we've talked enough about the tweets.
00:22:23.120
We should talk about a real story at some point today. An Antifa terrorist tried to blow up an
00:22:28.140
immigration detention center in Washington over the weekend, but you haven't heard about that
00:22:32.180
because everyone's got to talk about tweets. 4am Saturday morning, an armed Antifa terrorist was
00:22:39.140
shot by police trying to blow up an immigration center. Now that came after a fairly peaceful rally
00:22:48.660
hours before. So the initial news reports, in so much as you can even find them, said there was,
00:22:54.940
a man was killed at an Antifa, at an ICE detention center. Then you found out the man who was killed
00:23:01.060
had a gun. Then you learned he had explosives. They said, but we don't know the cause. We don't
00:23:06.100
know what it was for. Then you learned that there had been an anti-ICE demonstration just hours before.
00:23:11.460
We don't know, no, no jumping to conclusions about the motivations. I'm not Sherlock Holmes.
00:23:18.740
I had a good hunch that this guy might be a radical left-wing protester and terrorist.
00:23:23.140
Turns out I was right. He called himself a proud member of Antifa. Those are the guys that knocked
00:23:29.600
in the journalist Andy Ngo's head just the other day. They've attacked many other people. They
00:23:34.640
attacked me with a squirt gun. This is a violent domestic terrorist organization. How has the left
00:23:42.140
responded to them? Governor Jay Inslee, who is the governor of the state and a 2020 Democrat candidate,
00:23:49.380
I guess. He's not like a real candidate. He's kind of like a Swalwell level candidate, but
00:23:53.840
he's still in the race, so whatever. He said this, quote,
00:23:57.880
we know at this moment there is tremendous anxiety in our community. We knew there is tremendous anger
00:24:05.220
about the inhumanity going on at the border. I know seeing children in cages, as we have seen,
00:24:11.500
is extremely heart-rending to all of us. I know at the moment we have to hope that we can remain calm.
00:24:17.580
So he's basically defending the guy. He doesn't come out and say this guy's a thug terrorist and
00:24:24.760
fortunately we stopped him before he killed good Americans who were just enforcing the law and
00:24:29.360
doing their jobs and protecting our country. That's what he should have said. Instead, he says,
00:24:35.580
well, the children are in cages. Where was Jay Inslee when Barack Obama was caging children?
00:24:41.700
All those photos, the popular photos that you see, they still use them. These are still the photos
00:24:45.900
that Democrats use of the alleged children in cages. Those come from 2014. Those come from the
00:24:50.520
Obama administration. I don't remember any of Jay Inslee's crocodile tears back then, do you?
00:24:55.860
How about these other, I don't remember Antifa protests, terrorist attacks outside of ICE detention
00:25:01.520
centers in 2014 under Barack Obama's watch, do you? No, absolutely not. But this is par for the
00:25:10.440
course. I mean, we have been told now for weeks and weeks that ICE detention centers are our
00:25:15.280
concentration camps. It's like the Nazis. AOC has been saying this for how long? You remember on one
00:25:20.840
of her stream of consciousness, Instagram, whatever they are, she compared the ICE detention centers to
00:25:28.600
the Holocaust. The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is
00:25:36.900
exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. The fact that concentration camps are now an
00:25:45.060
institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing.
00:25:54.240
So concentration camps, that's what it is, right? She, I'm not going to blame her for this terrorist
00:26:00.540
attack. The guy who tried to blow up this ICE center is responsible for what he did. She is
00:26:09.440
encouraging it. She's not responsible. She's not guilty, not culpable, but she is encouraging it.
00:26:16.000
We'll see how, we'll also see her just get absolutely destroyed by a former director of
00:26:21.820
immigration and customs enforcement. We'll see what's going in on, going on rather in Beto O'Rourke's
00:26:28.580
flailing presidential campaign. And we will get to the greatest controversy of all sparked by
00:26:36.200
Scarlett Johansson and the transgender movement. And the question is, are actors allowed to pretend
00:26:40.780
to be other people? We will get to all of that. But first, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and
00:26:45.160
YouTube. Go to dailywire.com. 10 bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership. You get me, you get the
00:26:51.200
Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Nat Wall show, you get another kingdom,
00:26:56.000
you get backstage. You get test questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday, and you get
00:27:00.640
the Leftist Tears Tumblr. This is very important when you're watching AOC at congressional testimony
00:27:06.060
because here she doesn't have her people writing her tweets for her. Here she doesn't have everything
00:27:12.480
perfectly manicured. So she just gets absolutely wrecked. And if you don't want to get caught in the
00:27:17.380
flood, get your Leftist Tears Tumblr. Also, I want to mention, I was on my friend Candace Owens' show
00:27:22.600
at PragerU the other day. So I think that just came out yesterday or today. And it was a great
00:27:27.460
45-minute discussion with her. You can go check it out on her podcast page or on YouTube or at
00:27:33.840
PragerU's website or just anywhere. Just Google it, man. Come on. It's 2019. You know how this works.
00:27:39.240
Go to dailywire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more.
00:27:51.640
So AOC compares immigration detention centers to concentration camps from the Holocaust.
00:27:58.340
Specifically from the Holocaust, by the way, because later in that video, she said,
00:28:02.440
if never again means anything, then we need to call these concentration camps. Never again is a
00:28:07.400
specific reference to the Holocaust. So she's drawing an explicit tie between the detention
00:28:11.780
centers and Nazi concentration camps. She's not responsible for this terrorist attack.
00:28:17.620
She's actually not. The guy is responsible for his own actions. But AOC is encouraging it.
00:28:24.400
I'm not even saying she's inciting it. I'm saying she's encouraging it. The word encourage comes from
00:28:28.400
heart, giving people heart to go out and do these things. Because if you seriously believed,
00:28:35.200
no one really believes this, so it's a moot point. But if you seriously believed that the United
00:28:41.360
States is the same as Nazi Germany, you would have a moral obligation to rise up. If you really believed
00:28:49.520
that we had Auschwitz and Dachau in the United States, you would rise up. Of course you would. Nobody
00:28:56.600
really believes that except for these lunatics in Antifa who occasionally do, more than occasionally
00:29:03.020
these days, go out and become very, very violent. So obviously the media are never going to give this
00:29:11.260
a fair shake. We should be talking about this from the rooftops. Every time a conservative sends a mean
00:29:17.440
tweet, all of a sudden it's equated with violence. It's a terrorist attack. The left tells you this on
00:29:22.380
campus all the time. They say, speech is violence. I was giving a speech at Cal State LA and I had
00:29:27.500
professors telling me the very fact of your speech is committing acts of violence. And yet when left-wing
00:29:33.220
terrorists go out and actually try to blow up law enforcement centers, not a peep. No, nothing. You
00:29:40.960
don't hear a word about that. Because according to the leftist violence is speech and conservative
00:29:47.100
speech is violence. That's the upside down that we're living in. So when you actually get these two
00:29:54.880
sides of the argument in the room, not just AOC running her mouth on some stupid Instagram thing,
00:30:00.480
not an ICE detention facility trying to do its job as 3,000 illegal aliens or more every day pour
00:30:06.860
over into our borders, apparently running toward Nazi concentration camps. Don't have any idea why
00:30:11.980
they would do that. Let's get the two sides of the debate into a room together in congressional
00:30:17.480
testimony and have them argue it out and see who wins on the merits. Fortunately, we got just that.
00:30:23.060
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faced down the former ICE director, Thomas Homan. Let's see how it went.
00:30:31.360
Mr. Homan, your name is on this. Is this correct?
00:30:36.180
So you are the author of the family separation policy?
00:30:40.520
You're not the author, but you signed the memo?
00:30:45.060
So you provided the official recommendation to Secretary Nielsen for the United States to pursue
00:30:53.720
I gave Secretary Nielsen numerous recommendations on how to secure the border and save lives.
00:30:58.920
But it says here that you gave her numerous options, but the recommendation was option three,
00:31:05.160
What I'm saying, this is not the only paper where we've given the secretary numerous options to secure
00:31:12.680
And so the recommendation, of the many that you recommended, you recommended family separation?
00:31:22.680
The same as it is when every U.S. citizen parent gets arrested when they're with a child.
00:31:30.180
Zero tolerance was interpreted as the policy that separated children from their parents.
00:31:34.760
If I get arrested for DUI and I have a young child in a car, I'm going to be separated.
00:31:38.660
When I was a police officer in New York and I arrested a father for domestic violence,
00:31:43.680
Mr. Holman, with all due respect, legal asylees are not charged with any crime.
00:31:51.580
When you're into the country illegally, it's a violation of the United States Code 1325.
00:31:58.120
If you want to seek asylum and go through the port of entry, do it the legal way.
00:32:01.760
The Attorney General of the United States has made that clear.
00:32:05.720
Mr. Chair, the memo is submitted to the record for review.
00:32:12.060
Oh, that doesn't turn out very well for AOC, does it?
00:32:16.560
It's just every one of her stupid talking points, he just bats down like it's nothing.
00:32:25.800
You, it's this very harsh, cruel, unusual punishment to separate families.
00:32:30.740
He says, yeah, anytime any adult in America commits a crime, if he's with his child, he'll be separated from that child.
00:32:38.760
I mean, this has been the argument the whole time.
00:32:46.700
If a guy commits a crime and he's with a child, you can either arrest the guy and his child.
00:32:52.680
So you're arresting a child for the crime of his father.
00:32:58.480
So if you want to commit a crime, you want to rob a bank or commit a murder, just make sure you have a child with you.
00:33:05.140
So that you can't arrest the child or separate him.
00:33:07.380
Or three, you separate the father from his child.
00:33:10.980
That's what we do for every crime in the United States.
00:33:13.560
But AOC, I guess, wants to apply some special rule to illegal aliens.
00:33:17.840
Illegal aliens in AOC's world always have to get better treatment than American citizens.
00:33:24.940
Then she goes on and says, it is not illegal to come into this country to be a refugee.
00:33:32.320
And he says, right, but it's illegal to cross illegally.
00:33:36.100
And this is a distinction that the left has been trying to blur for a long time now.
00:33:39.560
She says, asylees, people seeking political asylum, are not criminals.
00:33:48.220
And if they want to seek legal asylum, they can do that.
00:33:53.020
You don't just swim across the river and run into the country.
00:34:03.900
Watching these two debate, really watching AOC debate anybody, always reminds me that she
00:34:11.040
is just Congresswoman Charlie Day from Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
00:34:15.860
I know a lot about the law and various other lawyerings.
00:34:21.520
I know that situations like this, real estate-wise, they're very complex.
00:34:31.720
She's got that idea that she's going to use some language.
00:34:52.880
And then she, you know, she kind of uses some legal jargon.
00:34:56.680
But the thing that AOC and Charlie Day on Always Sunny in Philadelphia, they never recognize
00:35:06.560
I mean, she should have looked at this guy, this former ICE director, and said, I'm not going
00:35:13.160
I mean, if she were really a sophisticated politician, she would have known that.
00:35:17.880
But she just keeps going in for it, keeps going in for it, until she needs to have the
00:35:23.840
Now, let's say you and I go toe-to-toe on bird law and see who comes out the victor.
00:35:27.120
You know, I don't think I'm going to do anything close to that.
00:35:30.180
And I can see clearly you know nothing about the law.
00:35:32.880
It seems like you have a tenuous grasp on the English language in general.
00:35:44.920
Filibustering to get to the next tweet, to get to the next Snapchat.
00:35:48.340
Even more pathetic, though, than this exchange.
00:35:50.260
And whenever, you know, you have a disagreement over border policy, let's say.
00:35:57.040
Let's say you've got your leftist friends and they're screaming about border policy.
00:36:00.300
You'll notice that they'll always be trying to move the goalposts.
00:36:05.980
And you'll say, right, we separate criminals from their kids all the time.
00:36:19.400
I think that clip of AOC talking to the former ICE director is a great encapsulation of just
00:36:33.960
Even more pathetic than this exchange, we have got to check in on the long forgotten
00:36:46.160
He should go back to that country that he's from.
00:36:48.240
He should go back and try to fix his own country in, oh, Texas.
00:36:54.900
He has a novel strategy to restart his nearly moribund presidential campaign.
00:37:00.720
And that is to announce that he is descended from slave owners.
00:37:11.640
Medium is like his diary where he wrote his fake Jack Kerouac travel logs.
00:37:19.900
I just, I'm trying to get back into who I am after he lost that Senate race.
00:37:24.540
I was recently given documents showing that both Amy and I are descended from people who owned slaves.
00:37:30.560
Along with other possessions listed in their property log were two human beings, Rose and Eliza.
00:37:36.280
A paternal great-great-great-grandfather of mine, Andrew Cohen Jasper, owned these two women in the 1850s.
00:37:42.960
There are also records showing that a maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Frederick Williams, most likely owned slaves in the 1860s.
00:38:00.780
Nobody cares about your great-great-great-great-uncles, procurer of slaves from the great-great.
00:38:13.300
And they certainly don't care about your great-great-great-grandfather.
00:38:16.640
I don't care about Trump's great-great-great-grandfather.
00:38:19.440
I barely care about my own great-great-great-grandfather.
00:38:23.140
Beto O'Rourke is talking about this because he has nothing else to talk about.
00:38:30.500
Talking about our great-great-great-great-great-grandfather slave owners is so last week, pal.
00:38:35.060
That's just the sort of thing Mitch McConnell and Kamala Harris do.
00:38:39.040
It's the reason that we're talking about all this is because the Democrats have nothing to run on.
00:38:45.240
The only attack they can get on Mitch McConnell is that his great-great-great-grandfather owned a slave once.
00:38:53.860
They can't talk about the present because things are going too well, so they have to go back and talk about the past.
00:38:58.260
But Beto's campaign is also always one step behind because he's not running on anything.
00:39:03.820
He famously said in Iowa, I want you to shape me into the presidential candidate you want.
00:39:14.720
He's just a kind of loafing guy who married a billionaire, who likes to see his name in the newspaper, and likes how he looks on camera, and so he just runs for office.
00:39:28.480
He's never going to accomplish anything in office.
00:39:31.220
He's never, he doesn't, he wouldn't even know what to accomplish if he could.
00:39:33.940
But that guy is not going to beat Donald Trump.
00:39:39.460
That guy is barely going to beat Eric Swalwell.
00:39:42.240
And the Democrats have that problem right now because they don't know what they want, with the exception of those four radical progressive congresswomen who know exactly what they want, and only 9% of America wants it.
00:39:54.160
Before we go, I have to talk about the funniest cultural story of the entire week.
00:40:01.620
Scarlett Johansson is in hot water because she suggested that actors can pretend to be other people.
00:40:12.280
Actors, you know, the people who pretend to be other people, yeah, they can't do that anymore.
00:40:17.000
She said, quote, you know, as an actor, I should be allowed to play any person or any tree or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job.
00:40:30.480
And then she was immediately bullied by the gender ideologue left, particularly by one gender-confused man with a very large Twitter account whose name is Charlotte Clymer, formerly Charles Clymer.
00:40:44.160
And he wrote this, quote, Scarlett Johansson is a cisgender white woman with a powerful platform and no shortage, he wrote storage, but I think he meant shortage, of work opportunities.
00:40:58.060
It is incredibly disappointing that she has learned nothing and clearly does not care about the experiences of trans people.
00:41:03.940
I will not be seeing any films that involve Scarlett Johansson moving forward.
00:41:07.980
This is ironic because although this man, Charlotte Clymer, wants to portray himself as a woman, he's not.
00:41:17.420
And so in this case, you have a white man telling a woman from an immigrant family, Scarlett Johansson, what she can and cannot do.
00:41:27.000
Under any other circumstance, the left would be outraged about this.
00:41:29.940
But because Charlotte Clymer pretends to be a woman, all of a sudden, he's in the right and Scarlett Johansson has to apologize for being an actress.
00:41:40.380
This is why, first of all, it's important to be precise about pronouns.
00:41:43.680
Because if I just refer to Charlotte Clymer and I refer to him as a she, you'll have this idea that it's just two women arguing about social justice.
00:41:52.640
And so maybe you'll say, okay, well, maybe she has a point and maybe she, when you use the correct pronouns, you realize it's just a dude who's imposing his will on a woman who's an actress.
00:42:11.480
She goes, quote, I recognize that in reality, there is a widespread discrepancy among my industry that favors Caucasian, cisgendered actors,
00:42:18.520
and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to.
00:42:22.540
I continue to support and always have diversity in every industry and will continue to fight for projects where everyone is included.
00:42:30.520
Did I say the current daily politically correct slogan?
00:42:34.480
I know it'll change tomorrow, but did I get it right today?
00:42:42.240
I'll give you just a little bit of insider information.
00:42:44.060
In a previous life, I was an actor, classically trained actor, worked professionally as an actor.
00:42:51.860
One thing I learned, actors pretend to be other people.
00:42:58.380
What actors do is they create characters, they develop characters from the inner life, then they behave truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
00:43:07.100
So there was one time, I'll give you an example.
00:43:08.440
This will probably get me deplatformed from Twitter.
00:43:10.020
One time, I played Hamlet, Shakespeare's play Hamlet.
00:43:31.300
It's taking away opportunities from the many Danish royals who would like to be able to do off-off Broadway productions of Hamlet.
00:43:40.360
But I did it anyway because that's what actors tend to do.
00:43:54.960
People are always playing people who they are not.
00:43:57.620
If you only cast people who are the roles that they are playing, it's no longer acting.
00:44:08.880
Politics has always had a theatrical component.
00:44:11.120
It's why actors tend to be politicians and politicians have to be actors.
00:44:15.100
It's because there's a lot of make-believe that goes on.
00:44:28.200
When you pull out of this crazy, insane, hyper-political pop culture, the world is looking pretty good.
00:44:37.620
There is wonderful music to listen to, literature to read, family and friends to enjoy.
00:45:04.700
We won't tackle those problems in the make-believe.
00:45:18.440
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
00:45:39.280
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:45:44.060
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, Democrats decide to attack each other.