The Michael Knowles Show


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


Summary

Seth Moulton drops out of the 2020 Democratic presidential race, and the field drops to 722 candidates. President Trump announces plans to end family separation at the border, and San Francisco politicians rebrand criminals as "justice-involved persons." We practice the latest PC jargon.


Transcript

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
00:20:33.080 Americans, so they can't be foreigners, right? Same thing. I mean, the biggest cultural issue of the day,
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
00:20:47.780 sex, the left just uses PC language to rebrand them as transgender women. So now they're not men
00:20:55.460 who have a problem, a psychological problem. They're just, they're women, kind of, in a way,
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
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
00:24:18.300 from Slate, Jordan Weissman, said that he hopes that David Koch's soul suffers for eternity.
00:24:26.440 Some alleged left-wing comedian has, I don't remember her name, but she has like a million
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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.