The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 381 - Twitter Isn’t Real Life

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,

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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, 1.00

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 0.97

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. 1.00

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. 0.99

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 1.00

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, 0.94

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 0.78

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, 0.81

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 0.99

00:08:56.500 destroying our politics. There's no evidence that she's a racist. It's the same thing, uh, for Trump. 0.97

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 1.00

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 1.00

00:09:33.380 present themselves as foreign. So you have Rashida Tlaib constantly extolling the fact she's the 0.69

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 1.00

00:10:21.540 being bribed by Jews. Rashida Tlaib said the Holocaust gives her a calming feeling. And then 0.90

00:10:26.180 she rewrote the history of the Holocaust. Here they are. The first thing that I think about when 0.98

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.

00:11:35.280 Al-Qaeda.

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 1.00

00:12:03.520 women. This is true of AOC. In high school, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went by the name Sandy 0.99

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. 0.94

00:12:44.960 But Ayanna Pressley, just two weeks ago, used a racial slur to describe Kellyanne Conway as senior 1.00

00:12:51.020 advisor to President Trump. Called her Becky, which is now a popular slur for white women who are seen as 1.00

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 1.00

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. 0.99

00:14:25.760 We run concentration camps. Our government is the same as Nazi Germany. On the other hand, 0.82

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 0.98

00:14:53.420 day, we have blood on our hands because they're going to be killed by their tyrannical illegitimate 0.68

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 0.89

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 0.99

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. 0.99

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 0.51

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, 0.52

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 0.94

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. 0.87

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 1.00

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 0.92

00:21:15.500 low black unemployment, record low Hispanic unemployment. If you think he does harbor all 1.00

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 0.96

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 0.54

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 0.74

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 0.84

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 0.94

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 0.99

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 0.74

00:28:49.520 that we had Auschwitz and Dachau in the United States, you would rise up. Of course you would. Nobody 0.91

00:28:56.600 really believes that except for these lunatics in Antifa who occasionally do, more than occasionally 0.88

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, 0.99

00:30:00.480 not an ICE detention facility trying to do its job as 3,000 illegal aliens or more every day pour 0.99

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. 0.92

00:30:31.360 Mr. Homan, your name is on this. Is this correct?

00:30:34.760 Yes, I signed that memo.

00:30:36.180 So you are the author of the family separation policy?

00:30:38.780 I am not the author of this memo.

00:30:40.520 You're not the author, but you signed the memo?

00:30:42.700 Yes, a zero tolerance memo.

00:30:45.060 So you provided the official recommendation to Secretary Nielsen for the United States to pursue

00:30:52.400 family separation.

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,

00:31:04.440 family separation.

00:31:05.160 What I'm saying, this is not the only paper where we've given the secretary numerous options to secure

00:31:10.840 the border and save lives.

00:31:12.680 And so the recommendation, of the many that you recommended, you recommended family separation?

00:31:18.160 I recommended zero tolerance.

00:31:20.080 Which includes 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,

00:31:42.720 I separated that father from his family.

00:31:43.680 Mr. Holman, with all due respect, legal asylees are not charged with any crime. 0.92

00:31:51.580 When you're into the country illegally, it's a violation of the United States Code 1325.

00:31:55.780 Seeking asylum is legal. 0.99

00:31:58.120 If you want to seek asylum and go through the port of entry, do it the legal way. 0.79

00:32:01.760 The Attorney General of the United States has made that clear.

00:32:04.200 Okay.

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? 0.99

00:32:16.560 It's just every one of her stupid talking points, he just bats down like it's nothing. 0.99

00:32:22.360 Says, you are separating families. 1.00

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.

00:32:40.240 What are you going to do, arrest the child?

00:32:41.600 No.

00:32:42.360 You arrest the criminal.

00:32:45.280 I guess you have three options.

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.

00:32:54.920 You can either let the guy go.

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.

00:33:03.080 And then you can't be arrested for it.

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. 0.97

00:33:22.920 So he smacks that one down.

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.

00:33:45.820 He says, no, no, no.

00:33:46.580 The criminals are the criminals.

00:33:48.220 And if they want to seek legal asylum, they can do that.

00:33:50.480 There's a legal process for that.

00:33:52.000 You have to go to a port of entry.

00:33:53.020 You don't just swim across the river and run into the country.

00:33:56.400 Then you're an illegal alien. 0.73

00:33:57.540 Then you're not an asylee. 0.99

00:33:58.700 Then you're a criminal.

00:34:00.340 And you get charged.

00:34:00.980 Well, it's not a crime.

00:34:02.200 It is a crime.

00:34:02.900 It's in the U.S. code.

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.

00:34:19.460 I'm well-educated, well-versed.

00:34:21.520 I know that situations like this, real estate-wise, they're very complex.

00:34:25.360 Actually, they're pretty simple.

00:34:28.240 You know, she usually sets it up. 1.00

00:34:29.720 She kind of seems a little confident.

00:34:31.720 She's got that idea that she's going to use some language. 0.91

00:34:35.780 And then she gets smacked down.

00:34:37.560 But she's not deterred.

00:34:38.580 She goes on.

00:34:39.700 I forgot.

00:34:40.320 Where did you go to law school again?

00:34:42.120 Well, I could ask you that very same question.

00:34:43.580 I went to Harvard.

00:34:44.700 Uh-huh.

00:34:45.080 How about you?

00:34:46.600 Where?

00:34:47.460 Yeah.

00:34:47.880 I'm pleading the fifth, sir.

00:34:49.280 I'd advise that you do that.

00:34:50.420 And I'll take that advice into cooperation.

00:34:52.480 Yep.

00:34:52.880 And then she, you know, she kind of uses some legal jargon. 1.00

00:34:56.040 She knows.

00:34:56.680 But the thing that AOC and Charlie Day on Always Sunny in Philadelphia, they never recognize

00:35:03.460 when they're in over their head.

00:35:05.380 So AOC just doesn't.

00:35:06.560 I mean, she should have looked at this guy, this former ICE director, and said, I'm not going

00:35:11.000 to try my BS here.

00:35:11.960 This isn't going to go well for me.

00:35:13.160 I mean, if she were really a sophisticated politician, she would have known that. 1.00

00:35:16.980 She would have backed off.

00:35:17.880 But she just keeps going in for it, keeps going in for it, until she needs to have the 0.99

00:35:21.920 final Charlie Day reaction.

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.

00:35:37.180 Okay, well, filibuster.

00:35:40.160 Yep, there it is.

00:35:40.980 That's AOC.

00:35:41.460 Our old career is just filibustering, I think.

00:35:44.920 Filibustering to get to the next tweet, to get to the next Snapchat. 0.98

00:35:48.340 Even more pathetic, though, than this exchange. 0.92

00:35:50.260 And whenever, you know, you have a disagreement over border policy, let's say. 0.98

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.

00:36:04.240 It'll be, they're separating families.

00:36:05.980 And you'll say, right, we separate criminals from their kids all the time. 1.00

00:36:10.960 Trump's a racist. 1.00

00:36:12.020 Trump's a racist. 1.00

00:36:12.440 What does that have to do with anything? 0.99

00:36:13.600 But actually, he's not really a racist.

00:36:15.260 And actually, the Border Patrol are Nazis. 0.78

00:36:17.540 And they just keep jumping, jumping, jumping.

00:36:19.400 I think that clip of AOC talking to the former ICE director is a great encapsulation of just

00:36:25.380 smacking down every one of those arguments.

00:36:27.420 I would just play it for them.

00:36:28.280 I would just send it to them.

00:36:29.280 Have it ready to go in your Twitter account.

00:36:32.040 Just shoot it out there. 0.94

00:36:33.960 Even more pathetic than this exchange, we have got to check in on the long forgotten 0.96

00:36:39.360 presidential campaign of Beto O'Rourke. 0.64

00:36:42.540 Remember Beto?

00:36:44.500 Is he some illegal alien?

00:36:45.920 I don't know.

00:36:46.160 He should go back to that country that he's from. 1.00

00:36:48.240 He should go back and try to fix his own country in, oh, Texas.

00:36:51.760 Right.

00:36:51.940 He's from, oh, he's an Irish guy.

00:36:53.240 Okay, never mind.

00:36:53.900 Is his country Ireland?

00:36:54.620 I don't know.

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. 0.83

00:37:07.080 Novel strategy.

00:37:08.220 We'll see if it pays off for him.

00:37:09.460 He writes this Medium post.

00:37:11.640 Medium is like his diary where he wrote his fake Jack Kerouac travel logs.

00:37:17.120 You know, I just got to find myself, man.

00:37:19.900 I just, I'm trying to get back into who I am after he lost that Senate race.

00:37:23.560 So he writes, quote,

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.

00:37:54.420 I have only one question for Beto O'Rourke.

00:37:57.480 Who cares?

00:37:59.320 Nobody cares.

00:38:00.780 Nobody cares about your great-great-great-great-uncles, procurer of slaves from the great-great.

00:38:08.040 No, it doesn't.

00:38:09.080 No one cares about you.

00:38:11.180 No one cares about your whole campaign.

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.

00:38:28.060 The guy is always one step behind.

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. 0.99

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.

00:38:50.860 That's what they got on him.

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.

00:39:10.740 He doesn't believe in anything.

00:39:12.080 He doesn't have any beliefs.

00:39:13.400 He's not a conviction politician.

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.

00:39:27.820 That's it.

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.

00:40:10.100 And this is now politically incorrect.

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.

00:40:24.400 She said this, quote, to As If Magazine.

00:40:27.040 And this is obviously true.

00:40:28.160 That is the definition of an actor.

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.

00:40:55.340 Trans people should play trans people, period.

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.

00:41:16.620 He's a man.

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. 0.98

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. 0.98

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.

00:42:04.140 That's a very different image.

00:42:07.120 What did Scarlett Johansson do? 1.00

00:42:08.660 She apologized.

00:42:09.560 She, it was this totally perfunctory apology.

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.

00:42:29.360 Beep, boop, beep, boop. 1.00

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?

00:42:37.040 Please, please don't ruin my career.

00:42:39.660 She may as well have said that last part.

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.

00:42:57.420 It's not real.

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.

00:43:16.540 Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark.

00:43:19.120 I'm not really the Prince of Denmark.

00:43:21.760 I'm not even Danish.

00:43:24.080 But I played Hamlet.

00:43:26.100 Now, I guess this is very anti-Danish.

00:43:29.120 It's Danaphobic.

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.

00:43:44.760 It's not real.

00:43:47.840 This is the broader lesson from today.

00:43:50.160 It's not real.

00:43:52.560 The acting isn't real.

00:43:53.920 The plays aren't real.

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.

00:44:03.040 It's just reality.

00:44:04.260 But this isn't reality.

00:44:05.760 This is make-believe.

00:44:06.840 The same thing is true in our politics.

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.

00:44:20.900 Twitter is not real.

00:44:22.760 Twitter is not the real world.

00:44:24.060 The tweets are not going to change your life.

00:44:26.640 It's okay.

00:44:27.580 Take a break.

00:44:28.200 When you pull out of this crazy, insane, hyper-political pop culture, the world is looking pretty good.

00:44:35.720 The sun is shining.

00:44:36.800 The birds are chirping.

00:44:37.620 There is wonderful music to listen to, literature to read, family and friends to enjoy.

00:44:44.620 Things are going really, really well.

00:44:46.680 The economy is going gangbusters.

00:44:48.260 We have relative peace abroad.

00:44:49.640 It's okay, guys.

00:44:51.460 Take a breath.

00:44:52.740 Everybody calm down.

00:44:54.340 Forget the tweets. 0.61

00:44:55.920 Forget the transphobic, Danish-phobic acting.

00:45:00.600 See, forget all...

00:45:01.800 It's okay.

00:45:02.380 We have problems.

00:45:03.360 We'll tackle those problems.

00:45:04.700 We won't tackle those problems in the make-believe.

00:45:06.700 We'll do it right here in reality.

00:45:08.020 That's our show.

00:45:08.860 Come back tomorrow.

00:45:09.580 We got a lot more.

00:45:10.460 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:45:11.280 This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:45:12.200 I'll see you then.

00:45:18.440 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.

00:45:22.720 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:45:25.020 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:45:26.800 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

00:45:29.240 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:45:31.560 Edited by Danny D'Amico.

00:45:33.120 Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.

00:45:35.020 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:45:37.220 And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.

00:45:39.280 The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:45:41.280 Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

00:45:44.060 Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, Democrats decide to attack each other.

00:45:47.360 So President Trump says, wait a second.

00:45:48.920 I want part of this.

00:45:50.000 That's today on The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Michael Knowles Show - July 15, 2019

Ep. 381 - Twitter Isn’t Real Life

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