The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 403 - Trump Calls The Left’s Bluff At The Border

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00:00:15.420 President Trump has announced plans to end family separation at the border. The left must be

00:00:21.280 thrilled, right? This is what they've been asking for for months and months and years and years.

00:00:25.760 But they're not thrilled because President Trump's immigration opponents never really cared about

00:00:31.160 family separation or detention center conditions at all. They just want open borders. We will examine

00:00:37.520 how President Trump called their bluff and what it means for border security. Then San Francisco

00:00:42.080 politicians rebrand criminals as justice-involved persons. We will practice the latest PC jargon.

00:00:50.920 Finally, big news. Another 2020 Democratic presidential candidate drops out and the

00:00:57.540 field drops down to only 722 or so. All that and more. I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael

00:01:03.940 Knowles Show. Breaking news. Before we get to the other news about family separation, we have got to

00:01:17.700 get to this breaking news out of the 2020 presidential campaign. Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton is no

00:01:25.140 longer running for president. And in other news, Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton was running for

00:01:33.020 president, but now he is no longer. He is back to running for re-election to his house seat. He ended

00:01:41.260 his campaign with a warning. This is what he said, quote, I think it's evident that this is now a three-way

00:01:46.380 race between Biden, Warren, and Sanders. And really, it's a debate about how far left the party should

00:01:53.200 go. I will say about Seth Moulton, I know that nobody heard about him, but I actually did because

00:01:58.200 part of my job is I have to figure out who all the candidates are and look into them a little bit.

00:02:02.960 And Seth Moulton was one of the more moderate candidates. He had military service. He was a little

00:02:10.160 bit more in the moderate lane of the Democratic Party. Never took off, never went anywhere. Now he's gone.

00:02:14.560 He's dropping out and you never heard about him. I think that kind of answers his warning. His

00:02:21.880 warning is how far left is the Democratic Party going to go? The answer is the only candidates who

00:02:26.420 are left are very left wing. You've got Warren and Sanders who are legitimately far left radicals.

00:02:32.580 And then you have Joe Biden who has really doesn't have any beliefs at all. At times in his career,

00:02:37.320 he's positioned himself as a moderate. At other times, he's positioned himself as a far left

00:02:41.460 candidate. And for most of this presidential campaign, he has gone far to the left, even now

00:02:48.200 dropping his support for the Hyde Amendment and endorsing taxpayer funding for abortion. So

00:02:53.660 it's a good warning from Seth Moulton, but we've already got the answer. The party is going to

00:02:58.720 the left. We will get to the big news though on the border and the Trump administration's new

00:03:03.700 immigration policy. But first I have got to thank our friends over at Zip Recruiter. You need to find

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00:04:28.100 to hire. So other than Seth Moulton, I'm glad you have gotten your composure back from this shock.

00:04:34.220 You know, you've pulled your cars off to the side of the road. You now know Seth Moulton is out of

00:04:37.960 the race. Let's get to the big news today, which is President Trump calling the left's bluff on illegal

00:04:44.920 immigration. He is doing this by ending the family separation policy, and he's doing that

00:04:51.540 by ripping up the Flores Settlement Agreement, which in 1997 established the principle for family

00:04:59.980 separation. Nobody knows anything about this in part because our immigration policy is so broken

00:05:05.900 and backwards and incomprehensible that no one looks into it, in part because presidents of both

00:05:11.820 parties have not actually enforced immigration law, and in part because what the left wants you

00:05:17.360 to believe is that President Trump instituted a family separation policy at the border. That's what

00:05:22.480 they want you to believe. That isn't true. The family separation policy goes back 22 years at least

00:05:29.700 to the Flores Agreement. Now, what President Trump is showing today is that the left's arguments are not

00:05:38.320 in good faith. The left has been saying all they want to do is stop the family separation, but they

00:05:43.680 don't care about family separation. They don't care about the kids being in the detention facilities.

00:05:48.940 They just want open borders. So here's what happened. Decades ago, the left said immigration

00:05:54.980 enforcement cannot detain children. They can't do it. Please, government, stop detaining children.

00:06:02.160 So what did the government say? Okay, that's fine. They took the children out of immigration 1.00

00:06:06.240 enforcement custody through something called the Flores Agreement. Then the left said, wait a second,

00:06:10.680 wait a second, you can't separate families. You've got to stop separating families. So then

00:06:14.620 President Trump and the government said, okay, we'll stop separating families. They put them back

00:06:18.180 together. Now the left is saying you can't detain children. You're damned if you do, and you're damned

00:06:22.580 if you don't, because what it's showing is that the left wants open borders. Here's how, here's how the

00:06:29.160 left is reacting to Trump's new policy, which ends family separation. Quote, New York Times,

00:06:34.420 migrant families would face indefinite detention under new Trump rule. The New Yorker says, quote,

00:06:41.980 the Trump administration sustained attack on the rights of immigrant children. Miami Herald,

00:06:47.380 new Trump administration rule would let feds detain immigrant children indefinitely.

00:06:52.440 Washington Post, Trump administration moves to terminate the court agreement, hold migrant children

00:06:56.580 and parents longer. Now a more accurate headline would be Trump gives the left exactly what they've

00:07:03.280 been asking for in family separation. This, this proves that old rule, be careful what you ask

00:07:08.960 for because you just might get it. The left doesn't really care about the family separation.

00:07:17.340 Here is a quick history of the left's immigration arguments. You can just see,

00:07:21.920 just those breeze through from 1985 to the present, how they keep changing, how they keep moving the

00:07:27.080 goalposts, how they keep trying to hide their real goal, which is open borders and how they can no

00:07:31.900 longer hide it. So beginning around 1985, two left-wing organizations sued the INS, which was the

00:07:38.000 predecessor to ICE. That was the old immigration enforcement. And they sued over the detention of

00:07:44.460 illegal alien children. And this was litigated for over a decade. So it goes through the end of the

00:07:48.960 80s, into the 90s, up until, it goes all the way actually up to the Supreme Court. And then in 1997,

00:07:54.680 the government and these pro-immigration, pro-illegal immigrant organizations come to a

00:08:00.180 settlement. What does the settlement say? It says three things. It says the government is required to

00:08:05.060 release children from immigration detention without unnecessary delay. And it goes in order of

00:08:11.660 preference being, beginning with parents and then to other adult relatives, as well as licensed programs

00:08:16.240 willing to accept custody if, if there's no one to grab them. Second thing the settlement says is

00:08:22.800 with respect to children for whom a suitable placement is not immediately available, the

00:08:27.420 government is obligated to place children in the least restrictive setting appropriate to their age

00:08:32.260 and their needs. So you're not going to throw them in jail. You're going to put them in a separate

00:08:36.120 facility that's nicer and more free and more liberated. Third thing that the settlement says is

00:08:42.160 the government is required to implement standards relating to the care and treatment of children in

00:08:46.160 immigrant detention. That's why they're not in jails, which have, actually in America, they have very good

00:08:51.560 standards, but they're in facilities that are even nicer. They have teddy bears, they get pizza and

00:08:56.580 juice boxes, whatever, all these things. I'm not saying they're staying at the Shangri-La or the

00:09:00.040 Ritz-Carlton, but they're staying in relatively nicer facilities as per this agreement. Now, what is not

00:09:06.540 said in there, but what all of that means is the kids are separated from their families because the

00:09:12.800 families are being held by immigration enforcement. But the agreement says the kids can't be held by

00:09:19.960 immigration enforcement for that long. So the kids, as per the law, you have to take the kids 0.97

00:09:24.960 and put them into different and ostensibly nicer conditions, which means taking them away from

00:09:29.780 their families. Or it means just releasing their parents and letting them go. Right? Those are the

00:09:35.480 only two options you can have. And what the left and what pro-illegal immigration conservatives and

00:09:40.980 Republicans want to do, I should say, I don't think there are many pro-illegal immigration

00:09:44.580 conservatives. But what pro-illegal immigration Republicans and libertarians want to do is say,

00:09:50.520 okay, just let them go. Just let them out. Right? Let's not enforce the law. And it was a sort of

00:09:54.620 unholy alliance between the left and the libertarians. Also, the agreement wasn't really

00:10:02.080 implemented until a little bit later, until President Trump. And until today, the left admits

00:10:07.880 their real goals. We'll get to that in a second. But first, support for the Michael Knowles show comes

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00:11:36.220 Push button, get mortgage. So they come to this Flores Agreement in 97. That establishes family

00:11:41.940 separation, except it wasn't actually implemented through the end of the Clinton era or through the

00:11:46.780 beginning of the Bush era. It's finally implemented in 2003 under George W. Bush when the Office of

00:11:52.860 Refugee Resettlement takes over unaccompanied minors. Then, 2005, two years later, George W. Bush

00:12:00.260 issues what he calls a zero-tolerance approach to illegal immigration. This is when finally

00:12:06.360 conservatives are going to start taking illegal immigration seriously, right? He does it through 1.00

00:12:11.220 a program called Operation Streamline. So they're going to take it seriously, except they don't.

00:12:16.860 They don't. So what it means before is that the DOJ wasn't really prosecuting illegal immigration all

00:12:21.540 that much, but even the zero-tolerance policy didn't really do all that much. Why not? Because it

00:12:28.260 made an exception for illegal aliens traveling with minors. So if you, what happens? We know how

00:12:35.980 incentives work. If you create an exception to immigration enforcement, you've already got this

00:12:40.300 big problem with illegal aliens coming in. You're going to get more of the behavior that you're 1.00

00:12:44.900 incentivizing. So when Barack Obama takes over in 2009, he has an even looser approach to illegal

00:12:50.900 immigration. He just releases the parents. So he has this habit of releasing the parents who come with 0.81

00:12:55.580 the kids. What happens? Parents start flooding the border with their children. In 2014, you had a major

00:13:02.440 crisis. President Obama responded first by doing exactly what President Trump was doing, what President

00:13:09.680 Trump was doing until just recently, which is separating the families and detaining the kids. And you got a

00:13:14.920 few photos out of this of the so-called children in cages. And what's so unbelievable about the hypocrisy of

00:13:21.180 the left on this is when they're protesting President Trump's immigration policy, they're sending around 0.68

00:13:27.720 all these photos on social media. They went viral of kids in cages, but the photos aren't from 2017 or

00:13:33.940 2018 or 2019. The photos are from 2014 when Barack Obama was doing the exact same thing. There was no

00:13:41.300 hubbub when Barack Obama did it. They don't care because they don't actually care about family separation.

00:13:45.980 They don't care about, quote unquote, kids in cages. They just care about pressuring a conservative

00:13:51.740 president to give us open borders. President Obama eventually just basically let illegal aliens go.

00:13:59.300 And here you get the policy of catch and release. So you catch the illegal aliens pouring over the 0.98

00:14:05.020 border of this country, but you can't detain them for very long, especially if they have kids. So since it

00:14:10.800 takes years to hear these asylum claims, you arrest them, you bring them in, and then you just let them go. 0.97

00:14:16.060 Because they're going to show up to their court hearings, right? In a couple months or a couple

00:14:19.740 years, right? They're going to show up. No, of course not. You let them go. They disappear.

00:14:24.460 They're in the country and you have de facto, for all intents and purposes, open borders.

00:14:31.300 Then Trump gets into office. He starts actually enforcing the law. He starts actually enforcing

00:14:36.040 the Flores Agreement. The left throws a fit. They say we can't separate families, even though that's

00:14:40.840 what the law says. So then Trump says, okay, we won't separate families. The left throws a fit.

00:14:44.880 They say we can't detain kids. This shows the left's hand. The Democratic candidates for president

00:14:50.660 say, with their words, they say they don't want open borders. Here's Julian Castro leading the charge.

00:14:57.260 Open borders is just a right-wing talking point. It always has been.

00:15:00.220 No, I don't support open borders.

00:15:02.940 We do have a problem with the southern border. Democrats should not deny that we don't.

00:15:06.140 Nations should have borders. Borders should be respected.

00:15:08.720 Open borders?

00:15:10.480 That's a Koch brothers proposal.

00:15:12.500 That's what they say with their words. Actually, the only one of those who has

00:15:16.360 sort of shown that he doesn't want completely open borders is Bernie Sanders, because he says open

00:15:22.000 borders drive down wages. But all the rest of them have said with their words, they don't want open

00:15:26.740 borders. And then they call for decriminalizing border crossings. Cory Booker and Julian Castro both

00:15:32.820 say we shouldn't treat entering this country illegally as a criminal matter. Now, this is obviously

00:15:40.080 ridiculous. This is open borders. So they say one thing with their words at the same time, 0.97

00:15:44.880 they are calling for getting rid of our national sovereignty. They're calling for letting illegal

00:15:52.200 aliens flood into this country. It's, it's mealy mouthed language. And what I love about what 1.00

00:15:57.920 president Trump is doing now is first of all, I'm glad that this policy is not going to, there is now

00:16:03.860 some workaround to separating the families. I mean, the law was you had to separate them. Now they're

00:16:09.180 saying we're going to rip up the Flores agreement and we're going to detain parents with their kids.

00:16:13.660 If it's really the, if it's really the parents and if it's really their kids in the first place,

00:16:17.660 I think that's fine, but they are going to detain them. There, you can either detain them together,

00:16:25.500 you can detain them separately, or you can let them go and have open borders. And of those three

00:16:29.920 options, I'm glad we are choosing the former. I think that first option is the best one. Now the

00:16:35.080 left either has to defend family separation or open borders. And they're trying to have their cake

00:16:40.500 and eat it too. They're trying to have both. I love that there's clarity on this. This is a great move.

00:16:44.500 It shows President Trump is finally getting serious on immigration enforcement after what,

00:16:48.840 two years of not building the wall, not one inch of new wall. Finally, I've been saying this is a

00:16:53.600 major vulnerability for him in 2020. If he doesn't get tough on it before then, he's going to have a

00:16:58.180 lot of trouble making the pitch to his supporters. It looks like he's finally doing that. And if he is,

00:17:02.940 I cheer it on. Good on you. Speaking of that mealy mouth language though, over in San Francisco,

00:17:08.820 there is a whole bunch of politically correct language that has just come out from the board

00:17:16.240 of supervisors over there. This doesn't have to do with illegal immigration necessarily.

00:17:20.820 This has to do with crime generally in San Francisco. They announced in San Francisco has

00:17:28.100 one of the highest crime rates in the country. They announced that they are going to finally tackle

00:17:31.780 the issue of crime. You know how they're going to do it? Are they going to arrest the criminals? No.

00:17:35.600 Are they going to clean up the streets? No. Are they going to enforce more laws and pass more? No,

00:17:41.280 they're not going to do any of that. They're just going to stop calling them criminals.

00:17:46.600 That'll do it. That'll do it. Why didn't I think of that? If you don't call criminals criminals,

00:17:53.160 then you don't have any more criminals, right? That's the idea. What they're going to start doing

00:17:57.100 now is changing all sorts of language around this issue. So juvenile delinquents,

00:18:01.700 that's the bad term. Bad kids, you can't call them that. Kids who commit crime,

00:18:07.520 you can't call them that. Juvenile delinquents, you can't call them that. The new term is

00:18:11.260 young persons impacted by the juvenile justice system. Now, everybody is impacted by the juvenile

00:18:21.720 justice system. Everyone who lives in this society is impacted by it because that's the system to take

00:18:26.000 bad kids out who are committing crimes. Drug addicts, they're not drug addicts anymore.

00:18:32.040 They're not even substance abusers, which was the new politically correct term just a few years ago.

00:18:37.060 Now they are persons with a history of substance abuse. And then criminals and convicts, this is my

00:18:45.180 favorite one of all. Criminals and felons, convicts, they are now, quote, justice-involved persons.

00:18:54.440 This is my favorite PC jargon of all because it is actually the opposite of the truth.

00:19:02.680 Criminals are not justice-involved persons. Criminals, by definition, are injustice-involved

00:19:08.820 persons. They are committing injustices, not justices. It would be like San Francisco referring

00:19:15.980 to their epidemic of drug and feces-infested streets as sanitation-involved sidewalks doesn't 0.94

00:19:27.180 make a lot of sense. But this is what PC does. You know, instead of solving the problem, instead

00:19:33.840 of grappling with reality, these politicians in San Francisco think that they can just change the

00:19:38.680 name because it's a lot easier. Think about how the left did this. They've done this for years and

00:19:42.280 years and years. Barack Obama runs for president in 2008. He says he's going to end these wars in

00:19:47.200 the Middle East. So he gets into office. Does he end the wars? No. He actually launches more wars in

00:19:52.200 the Middle East. But he doesn't call them wars. He calls them, quote, overseas contingency operations.

00:20:00.980 So there you go. That's one way to end a war. You just stop calling it a war and then it's not a war

00:20:04.480 anymore, right? They do this with illegal aliens, with millions and millions, at least 11 million,

00:20:10.100 probably many more, foreign nationals illegally living in this country.

00:20:15.220 How are we going to deal with that problem? We could either deal with the actual problem or we can

00:20:19.040 do what the left does, which is just pretend that they're not foreign nationals. We can use the term 1.00

00:20:23.480 undocumented Americans, which has now been adopted by a lot of left-wingers.

00:20:28.400 So there's no more foreigners in the country, right? Because they're not. They're undocumented 0.91

00:20:33.080 Americans, so they can't be foreigners, right? Same thing. I mean, the biggest cultural issue of the day, 0.51

00:20:38.660 even though it only affects a small number of people, it dominates our discourse,

00:20:42.340 transgenderism. Instead of actually getting help from men who are confused about their biological 0.95

00:20:47.780 sex, the left just uses PC language to rebrand them as transgender women. So now they're not men 0.78

00:20:55.460 who have a problem, a psychological problem. They're just, they're women, kind of, in a way, 0.99

00:21:00.180 with the language. This kind of PC jargon is offensive to language. I mean, it's offensive from a

00:21:06.440 linguistic point of view, but it's also just offensive to people. If I were in San Francisco,

00:21:10.680 I would be really upset because you elect politicians to reduce crime. You address them

00:21:17.960 to do what you want them to do. You address, you elect them to pass policies that will be good for

00:21:23.200 your community, but it's hard to do that. You have to make difficult decisions. You have to show

00:21:27.760 leadership and courage and moral vision, and the San Francisco politicians don't have any of that.

00:21:31.820 So instead, what they're doing is they're just pretending the problem doesn't exist at all.

00:21:36.880 This was a huge reason that people voted for President Trump in 2016. They voted for him

00:21:42.880 for the border. They voted for him for the economy. They voted for him for trade. They vote, sure.

00:21:47.940 Largely, I think they voted for him because he came out and he said, political correctness

00:21:52.140 is killing this country. And I'm not going to be politically correct. I don't have time to be

00:21:57.720 politically correct. I talked to people even before I liked Trump in the primaries, back when I was,

00:22:02.780 I was supporting Ted Cruz. I would talk to some of my friends. They say, we love Trump. I'd say,

00:22:07.300 I'm skeptical of Trump. I don't know. He's donated to Democrats. He seems like a little bit liberal.

00:22:12.420 He talks kind of funny. I'm not sure that I support Trump. They said, we need Trump because Trump will

00:22:18.560 defeat political correctness. So what does that mean? I don't elect politicians for those cultural

00:22:24.080 reasons. I elect them for policies, but my friends were right. Political correctness is so awful. It's

00:22:30.280 just lies. It's just deception. When people use politically correct jargon, they are just trying

00:22:35.820 to deceive you. They are using soft euphemisms to confuse you about difficult concepts that they

00:22:41.840 want you to swallow. Whole premises they want you to take over. This is a real danger to the country.

00:22:48.680 When people use that, you got to be on your guard. No criminal is going to be reformed by you

00:22:56.900 pretending he's not a criminal. We have 10,000 prisoners getting out of state and federal prisons

00:23:01.720 every day in this country. We should reintegrate them into society. We should prevent them from going 1.00

00:23:07.400 to prison in the first place. One way we could do that is by starting at home, fixing broken families.

00:23:12.300 You have huge rates of single parents, huge rates of out of wedlock birth.

00:23:17.280 And people who are raised in a home without a father are multiples more likely to commit crime,

00:23:25.500 to end up in prison. Tackle those issues. That's harder. It's not as easy as changing language,

00:23:30.260 but that's what we're electing people to do. That's what we're here in this country to do.

00:23:33.980 Turning to other big news. This actually does matter in terms of politics, even though it's a minor

00:23:39.620 news story, it seems. Libertarian billionaire and political funder, David Koch, has died of cancer.

00:23:46.320 He is one of the Koch brothers. And speaking of leftist deception, it is unbelievable how his

00:23:53.360 death is being covered in the left-wing media and the mainstream media. Shows you a lot about how the

00:23:58.120 left perceives anybody even slightly to the right of them. David Koch was a billionaire libertarian.

00:24:05.300 He was a major philanthropist. He gave $1.3 billion to charity over his career. And leftists from

00:24:12.520 Hollywood types to pundits to CNN contributors are celebrating, cheering on his death. Some idiot 1.00

00:24:18.300 from Slate, Jordan Weissman, said that he hopes that David Koch's soul suffers for eternity. 1.00

00:24:26.440 Some alleged left-wing comedian has, I don't remember her name, but she has like a million 1.00

00:24:30.160 Twitter followers. She joked about how Koch was a Nazi. They don't even know who David Koch is. David

00:24:36.640 Koch wasn't that conservative. He was a libertarian. He really loved individual liberty. In some ways,

00:24:42.240 he was even kind of a left libertarian. He supported abortion. He supported redefining marriage.

00:24:47.420 He supported stem cell research. He supported decriminalizing drugs. He supported non-interventionist

00:24:53.160 foreign policy. He sat on the board of the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. These are

00:24:58.820 libertarian outlets. They don't care. They call him a Nazi. I mean, David Koch was actually the opposite

00:25:04.940 of a Nazi, right? He was a complete libertarian. Even the, the usual issues that the left uses to try 0.76

00:25:13.640 to call us Nazis and portray, portray conservatives as Nazis don't apply to David Koch because he was

00:25:19.180 actually pretty liberal on a lot of issues. What it shows you, it doesn't matter what concessions you

00:25:23.340 give the left. It doesn't matter if you try to be really nice or you give them one issue or you give

00:25:29.220 them this issue or you're a good guy or you give a billion dollars to charity. How much have any of his

00:25:33.640 critics ever given to charity? Like nothing, I bet. Doesn't matter. It actually does tie in a little

00:25:38.780 bit to what we were talking about yesterday about the people who are conservative, but not that kind

00:25:43.400 of conservative. You know, the people who they're sort of conservative, but they, they agree with the

00:25:48.280 left on some things and they want the left to like them. Now I'm not accusing Charles Koch of doing

00:25:52.280 that. Charles Koch was his own man. He believed what he believed. He was a rock ribbed libertarian and

00:25:57.140 didn't pretend to be otherwise. But the way the left treated him, the way they smear him as anybody to the

00:26:02.820 right of, I don't know, Hillary Clinton. Now anybody to the right of Joe Biden is some kind of Nazi

00:26:08.060 awful. There's no way that you are ever going to get their approval or their love. So you can be like

00:26:14.260 Koch and you actually just be a libertarian and go out and do what you believe and not really care what

00:26:19.020 they say about you. Or if you are a conservative, get the lesson, stop sucking up to the left. They are 0.98

00:26:25.260 not going to like you. We have to get to speaking of fake news, speaking to the way the left deceives,

00:26:30.760 not just with language, not just with the opposite of eulogies, not just with their

00:26:35.600 celebrations and dancing on graves, but with the coverage of a major news story that is so false

00:26:41.080 over in the Amazon. Before we get to that, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. By the

00:26:47.580 way, the Daily Wire has turned four years old and we are thrilled. As a thank you to our fans,

00:26:52.160 we are giving away one month of our premium monthly subscription to anyone who uses the code

00:26:57.700 birthday. Now you can do that right now. We, we absolutely support, or thank you rather for all

00:27:05.680 of the support you have made us get to four years. We couldn't have done it without you.

00:27:11.100 We want to thank you with that. So if you haven't subscribed yet, go on over, you'll get a month free

00:27:16.140 and it's a lot of fun. We got a lot of stuff behind that paywall. And of course, you can get

00:27:19.840 your Leftist Tears Tumblr with an annual subscription. Head on over to dailywire.com. We'll be right back

00:27:24.720 with a lot more. Okay. I want to get to this story about how the Amazon is burning. The Amazon

00:27:41.220 rainforest, it's going to burn to the ground. We're not going to have any oxygen. We're not going to

00:27:44.880 have any more wildlife in the whole world. It's terrible. And it's all being caused by conservatives

00:27:49.400 somehow. I'm not quite sure how, or it's being caused by global warming or something. And it's never,

00:27:53.640 okay, this is the narrative that you're seeing. Pray for the Amazon, national leaders,

00:27:58.500 Emmanuel Macron in France, Merkel in Germany, all talking about this, largely based on fake news.

00:28:05.740 So we'll get to that in a second. But first, my pal, Charlie Kirk stopped by. Charlie Kirk is the

00:28:10.440 head of the Students for Trump. He is the head of TPUSA. He is always on an airplane flying around,

00:28:18.200 rallying young conservative support all around America. He came by in LA,

00:28:23.020 and so we did a sat down for probably 35, 40 minute interview. You will be able to get that

00:28:28.140 tomorrow. We're going to release that. But I wanted to give you just a little bit,

00:28:31.380 six or seven minutes of it, of sitting down with Charlie Kirk, incredibly interesting guy. So we'll

00:28:36.020 get to him and then we will get to the Amazon jungle. It occurs to me, you're speaking obviously

00:28:41.320 very in religious terms, and this is traditional for conservatives, especially in that post-war conservative

00:28:47.740 movement. You had the libertarians, the traditionalists, the religious right. You had

00:28:51.780 the communism hawks. They were all against this common enemy, which was the Soviet Union. The Cold

00:28:58.240 War ends. Then what? What does the conservative movement look like now?

00:29:04.280 That's such a great question. So the Soviet Union kept them all together. That's why Reagan was able 0.87

00:29:10.560 to build this coalition in 1980 and take over the party that he wasn't supposed to ever be at the

00:29:14.520 nominee of. I mean, in 76, Reagan tried to overthrow sitting president Gerald Ford in 1976, and he got

00:29:21.980 to the convention floor and sort of half endorsed him, didn't really endorse him. But Reagan was a

00:29:27.180 rebel. And the reason why people thought Reagan was going to lose in a landslide to Jimmy Carter,

00:29:31.300 and he won surprisingly. Sound familiar? And then all of a sudden he was the one that crushed the

00:29:35.420 Soviet Union. So what is our Soviet Union today? Well, it's the left in our country. The Soviet Union's 0.75

00:29:40.620 no longer headquartered in Moscow. They're in Montana, Michigan, Mississippi, and Missouri.

00:29:44.920 They're everywhere. And only on the university campuses. Right. Well, it's the epicenter. And

00:29:48.940 then in Hollywood and all this other. So look, the coalition that we have to build, though,

00:29:53.440 that Reagan got correct and Trump gets correct. And I feel that our movement gets wrong so often

00:29:59.840 is we have to break, and you understand this, we have to break our shackles away from these coastal

00:30:05.860 elitists than at universities and these think tanks that think that if you're a carpenter,

00:30:10.120 a pipe fitter, or you didn't go to four-year college, you're somehow less than worthy to

00:30:14.100 be engaged in the American conversation. That's where Reagan was successful. That's where Trump

00:30:18.600 is successful. And I feel as if there's this elitism that permeates our movement, where all

00:30:23.500 of a sudden that if you didn't go to the correct university in the upper northeast corridor,

00:30:27.160 any opinion you have is what? Well, it's deplorable. It's all this. And the left says it.

00:30:31.980 So our people don't. But you know what it is? It's also an emperor has no clothes

00:30:36.520 situation because having gone to one of those correct universities in the northeast corridor.

00:30:41.760 And I didn't go to one of them. And you didn't go to one of them.

00:30:44.120 I didn't go to any of them. You didn't go to any of them. But you do have an honorary degree.

00:30:47.300 Yes, from Liberty University. From Liberty. Everybody should go to Liberty University.

00:30:50.460 Yes. But, you know, having gone there, I can kind of see what's happened to it, what the left has

00:30:56.620 done to these universities, which is to hollow them out from within. So it's not to say that there's

00:31:01.760 nothing to be gained at any of these places. But what it is to say is the institution that's

00:31:06.820 hobbling around and it looks like Harvard or Yale and it talks like Harvard or Yale,

00:31:11.360 it isn't what it used to be. The left has gone on a long march through the institutions.

00:31:15.600 And so what you are getting in the end is something that's simply not as academically serious,

00:31:23.880 scholarly, scholarly rigorous. You're not getting that same quality of education. So you have whole

00:31:29.960 generations who are uneducated, uncultured, and they're so damn convinced that they're the 0.91

00:31:34.900 smartest people in the world. Yeah, but they're hyper-credentialed.

00:31:36.840 Hyper-credentialed. So they have all the degrees, but they know nothing.

00:31:40.140 Right. And they often have a lot of student debt.

00:31:42.140 Right. So they're in debt, they're vulnerable, and they have degrees up the wazoo. And there's

00:31:48.360 no wisdom, there's no knowledge, there's no history, no perspective.

00:31:50.900 No humility.

00:31:51.620 No, well, definitely not. They're constantly wrong, but they're never in doubt.

00:31:54.100 Right. That's exactly right.

00:31:55.480 And so you mix all this together. So look, here's what the movement moving forward is.

00:31:59.340 Number one, we have to dominate in the libertarians. I know you and I might not see

00:32:02.260 odd eye on all this, but that's okay.

00:32:03.200 I'm a little less libertarian.

00:32:04.420 That's okay.

00:32:04.800 But I do see the point. Do we, I mean, this is my question to you.

00:32:08.400 Sure.

00:32:08.700 Do we need to hold together the exact same coalition?

00:32:10.780 No, we have to rebuild a new one.

00:32:12.120 Okay.

00:32:12.320 And so my coalition is, number one, I think we have to, libertarians, I think those are

00:32:16.680 ours to get. These guys hate government, personal freedom, and there's

00:32:20.000 robust conversations we can have about all that sort of stuff.

00:32:22.660 There's stuff that we should not compromise on. So like a pro-choice libertarian, sorry,

00:32:27.820 not going to happen, right?

00:32:28.860 Yeah, not welcome.

00:32:29.580 But like, if you want to go put some substance in your body that I've never done and I don't

00:32:33.000 even know where to find, go ahead. Like, I don't care, right?

00:32:35.920 As long as you have something to share.

00:32:37.200 Yeah, absolutely.

00:32:37.460 You know what I'm saying? So that's one. So libertarians, those are our people, okay?

00:32:41.560 We shouldn't lose that. Number two is any sort of person that goes to, has religion

00:32:46.040 as a core part of their day or their life.

00:32:50.600 Their identity.

00:32:51.080 That's, these are our people, okay? And it should be actually a four or five. Number

00:32:55.200 three, the other part of the coalition is people that wake up before 7 a.m. No, I'm

00:33:02.060 not kidding. Every human being in America that wakes up before 7 a.m. should be a Republican.

00:33:07.640 Well, that's good. And then we should limit the vote to be over at about 8 a.m. and then

00:33:11.820 we win.

00:33:12.360 No, I'm not kidding. And I say that somewhat jokingly, but if you're getting up early

00:33:16.200 and you really got to, you got to really muster some strength to go to work, you're, you're

00:33:20.260 one of us. I don't care if you're a carpenter, a teacher, a pipe fitter, you're not a leftist.

00:33:25.000 Even a hedge fund manager.

00:33:25.860 No, but like, okay, of course. But again, there's, there's 50 of them. Okay, that's fine.

00:33:29.580 But I'm talking about the 50,000 teachers in Missouri that we've never talked to. And

00:33:34.780 they're working their tail off, right? And again, this comes to this hyper-elitism. So

00:33:38.380 if you're waking up early and you got to really fight and you got to, you're our people. Like

00:33:43.180 that's, I want our party to be the, the, the, the hard work nation party. Like that's us.

00:33:48.440 The final thing is, is the doctrinaire conservatives. And, and there's about eight or 10 million of

00:33:52.780 these people. And they're the ones that listen to Ben, they listen to Rush and you know,

00:33:56.380 they're the tea party folks. They buy all the books. Those are our folks. I love those people.

00:34:00.600 Right. And that's our coalition. Okay. If you combine libertarians, which our, our generation

00:34:04.980 is coming in Greece and libertarian, religious, hardworking conservatives, that's 65 million

00:34:11.140 people. You'll win any election you can with that. Let them go after all the people that sleep until

00:34:16.880 10 and do whatever the hell they want. Like, I don't care about those people. Right. I do care about

00:34:20.680 them. I don't care about their votes. Like, I don't want to build a, let me make myself go. I care about

00:34:24.100 them as people. I don't like, I don't want to build a political party around people that

00:34:27.560 sleep all day and do nothing. Of course. Yeah. I mean, they're not really reliable when you need

00:34:31.340 to go out and knock on doors. But you know what I'm saying? That's a movement. I think that can

00:34:35.640 have robust debate and can be, and it could be one that can win the future and make our country a

00:34:40.140 better place. Now, you know, we're going to have the rest of the interview out tomorrow. So you can

00:34:44.180 check it out. I know Charlie really likes the coalition of people who wake up before seven

00:34:48.740 because that guy never sleeps. He is just the biggest ball of energy I have ever seen. He's

00:34:55.720 like bouncing off the walls. One time, I think it might've been the first time I met him. I was in

00:34:59.760 a Fox green room in LA and it was three 30 or four in the morning. And I'm there, you know, cause the

00:35:05.720 East coast Fox and friends is on the West coast. It's 4 AM. And so I'm sitting there, I'm like half

00:35:11.980 asleep, kind of drooling. I've got like espresso stained on my face. Charlie bounces in, he comes like

00:35:16.800 bouncing off all the walls. He was like, Hey buddy, Michael Knowles. Nice to see you.

00:35:19.480 You know? So it's great. I really always love talking to him. He's got a great vision for the

00:35:24.680 future of the country. He talks to a ton of young people, Gen Z and millennials all over. So go check

00:35:29.980 it out. We had a really great time. Before we go, I want to talk about this story out of the Amazon.

00:35:35.700 You've probably heard from the mainstream media. You've seen it on social media that the Amazon

00:35:40.260 rainforest is burning to the ground. There's no, it's basically, there's no more Amazon jungle left.

00:35:46.340 It's all gone and it's caused by Republicans and conservatives and global warming or something,

00:35:52.880 right? This is an example of a lie getting all the way around the world before the truth has

00:35:59.380 the time to put its pants on. You know, the actual quote that that line is based on is from Jonathan

00:36:05.580 Swift. And the line is falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it. And that's what's happening.

00:36:11.080 The truth is coming limping after here. And it's too late because the images have already

00:36:17.200 penetrated. What is true? It's true that parts of the Amazon are on fire. It's even true that humans

00:36:23.840 are likely causing that fire, those fires. But parts of the Amazon catch fire all the time. People

00:36:30.640 burn parts of the forests. I mean, you kind of regularly have to do that. And then people are doing it also

00:36:36.080 to clear some land, to raise meat and other things. Most of what you're seeing on social media,

00:36:44.500 the photos of the fires are not actually of the current fires. Some of those are 30 years old.

00:36:52.020 Some of the pictures you're seeing are of fires and forests that aren't even the Amazon.

00:36:56.360 One photo is from last year. One photo is from 20 years ago. One of the prominent photos is from 1989.

00:37:01.800 What this social media hysteria is really about is not about the Amazon having some fires. It's about

00:37:09.580 leftist opposition to President Bolsonaro, who's a conservative sort of Trumpist figure who was just

00:37:16.180 elected in Brazil. We're seeing the exact same thing in the United States on the exact same topic we

00:37:21.580 were talking about at the top of the show. Left-wing pundits, celebrities, news outlets,

00:37:25.280 constantly spreading around these photos of the kids in cages. And those photos of the kids in

00:37:32.200 cages. It's true. There are some children who have been detained, illegal aliens who have come

00:37:37.020 over and have been detained. It's true that there are photos of this, but the main photos going around

00:37:41.760 spread even by news outlets are from 2014 when Barack Obama was doing it. And yet they're blaming

00:37:47.360 it on Trump because the social media frenzy is not about kids in cages. The social media frenzy is not

00:37:52.260 about the family separation policy. The social media frenzy is about leftist opposition to President

00:37:58.780 Trump. There are a few good lessons to take away from this. One, context matters. People, I think in

00:38:07.900 politics, people just want these, they make these grand statements that are supposed to be eternally

00:38:13.000 true, that are always at their logical extreme. And that's just not how politics works. Politics is

00:38:18.440 about context. It's about circumstance. Politics literally is just how men relate to one another

00:38:23.620 in the city, how they relate to one another in civil society. That's the first lesson. The second

00:38:28.820 one is it's good to keep perspective in politics. Whenever I see something that's supposed to be some

00:38:36.820 big outrage, I take a breath. Whenever I read some report of the Trump tweet, oh no, the tweet,

00:38:43.440 the world is going to end. I just, I just take a little breath. Whenever I see even something that

00:38:48.520 is, I don't know, the worst leftist doing the worst thing imaginable. I look at it, I say, okay,

00:38:54.140 take a breath. Then I'm going to see what this actually means. Because that's what propaganda is,

00:39:00.940 is when people on either the left or the right, or from any political point of view,

00:39:04.480 are using information and images to get a reaction out of you. And I don't want to be

00:39:11.160 played like that. Sometimes I, you know, I give these college lectures at universities around the

00:39:17.220 country and I get all these crazy things being yelled at me by leftist students and I stay pretty

00:39:22.640 calm. Or if I go and do a debate on TV or something like that, I usually stay pretty calm. And the reason

00:39:28.240 I stay pretty calm is not because I have some superhuman power to resist leftist hysteria. It's

00:39:34.260 because I realized this important lesson number two, perspective matters in politics. People are

00:39:41.680 constantly trying to emotionally manipulate you in politics. That's pretty much the definition of

00:39:47.000 politics. You need to keep perspective just for your own self-preservation. Third thing you got to

00:39:53.940 believe here, third lesson, don't believe everything that you see on the internet or that you hear on

00:40:00.420 the internet. That's kind of, I'm telling you on the internet, not to believe everything you hear

00:40:06.320 on the internet, but you know, look it up, see what I'm talking about. Google it. This is very

00:40:10.380 important. You always see this meme going around of Abraham Lincoln. That's an old photo of Abraham

00:40:14.420 Lincoln, you know, from the 1860s. And it says, don't believe everything you read on the internet

00:40:19.940 because often it's lies. Abraham Lincoln, right? And that, this kind of shows you that. I mean,

00:40:24.300 every time I see a quote on the internet, I Google the quote probably seven or eight times out of 10.

00:40:31.380 It's a spurious quotation. The person who said it didn't really say it. I saw it today. There was a

00:40:36.400 quotation going around from Thomas Jefferson. He never said it. He said something that was sort of

00:40:41.120 like it, but he never said it. This is true of so many. Churchill quotations, Abraham Lincoln,

00:40:45.460 Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams. Just look them up. Don't believe everything. Be a little

00:40:49.880 skeptical. Now I'm probably preaching to the choir because if you're listening to this show,

00:40:53.540 you're probably a little bit conservative. Maybe you're a centrist or a Democrat,

00:40:57.180 but you've got a conservative bent to you. And so you're probably naturally skeptical.

00:41:01.980 The left is naturally gullible. And I think that's why they fall for all these kinds of things.

00:41:07.220 You shouldn't fall for it. Always be skeptical. Another great thing heading into the weekend,

00:41:11.640 go check out my interview with Charlie Kirk tomorrow. A great little article in the Wall Street

00:41:17.480 Journal, though I really enjoyed it this morning, was from Peggy Noonan. Peggy Noonan was a speech

00:41:22.140 writer for Reagan and then for Bush. And she writes in the journal. And the thing I loved about this

00:41:28.000 column is it's not about politics and it's not about immigration. It's not about trade and it's

00:41:32.020 not about foreign policy. It's about a bigger long-term issue that is hurting our country,

00:41:37.980 which is rudeness. People are just rude. They don't have manners. And this ties in with what we

00:41:44.420 were talking about on political correctness. Because what the left wants you to believe is that

00:41:49.040 political correctness is politeness. But it's not. Political correctness is not polite

00:41:54.900 at all. Political correctness is lies. And lies are never polite. Lies are very impolite.

00:42:03.320 You know, I pointed out, I was on a Fox show earlier today and I said, political correctness 0.90

00:42:09.280 is so crazy because they'll attack you for using basically the same word and then they'll praise

00:42:14.320 you for using the same word. So if I say a person is colored, he's a colored person, 0.84

00:42:18.900 that is horribly offensive. You cannot possibly say that word today. However, if I say that someone

00:42:25.100 is a person of color, that is the right term. That is not only an acceptable term, that is the preferred

00:42:31.360 term. If you say anything else, you're terribly offensive. They're the same thing. It is exactly 100%

00:42:37.900 the same to call someone a colored person or a person of color. But what the censors do on the

00:42:43.260 politically correct left is they say one is horrifically bigoted and offensive. The other

00:42:47.440 one is polite. Which one is which? I don't know. You can barely keep track. Politeness is different.

00:42:53.280 Politeness is not using language to pummel somebody, to control somebody, to shut somebody up.

00:43:00.840 Politeness is taking care for people and being kind to them. Tipping your hat, holding the door open,

00:43:08.760 referring to someone as Mr. or Mrs. This is something that has been completely lost. You know,

00:43:13.140 it reminds me how in a traditional culture where we have traditional religion, traditional

00:43:17.560 culture, and traditional politics, things make sense. And then when we say our politics is awful,

00:43:24.380 we have to deconstruct it. We have to get rid of it. We have to oppose it. We're being oppressed.

00:43:28.800 Our culture is oppressive. Our religion is oppressive. You get rid of all of it,

00:43:32.460 right? We've been doing this now for at least 50 years. It's not like you just have nothing then

00:43:37.360 because human beings need politics. We need culture and we have a religious longing for God.

00:43:43.120 So instead, when you have that vacuum, it just gets filled with nonsense. So when you get rid of

00:43:48.800 politeness, what you get is political correctness. And that is so awful. It's so gross and corrosive.

00:43:54.800 So give it a read and then, you know, be polite. Check out the interview tomorrow with Charlie. In the

00:43:59.940 meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you soon.

00:44:07.360 If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.

00:44:14.000 And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends

00:44:18.400 to subscribe. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

00:44:24.400 Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show,

00:44:29.340 The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.

00:44:31.920 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz, director Mike Joyner,

00:44:36.080 executive producer Jeremy Boring, our senior producer is Jonathan Hay,

00:44:40.800 supervising producer Mathis Glover, technical producer Austin Stevens,

00:44:45.480 editor Danny D'Amico, our audio mixer is Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Jesua Olvera,

00:44:51.320 production assistant Nick Sheehan. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production,

00:44:55.440 copyright Daily Wire 2019.

00:44:57.660 Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show. You know the saying,

00:45:01.620 go woke, go broke? Man, I hope that's true. But America's top CEOs are now saying that businesses

00:45:08.660 have to stop thinking about business so much and do some of that virtue stuff they've heard so much

00:45:14.060 about. We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show. I'm Andrew Klavan.

The Michael Knowles Show - August 23, 2019

Ep. 403 - Trump Calls The Left’s Bluff At The Border

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