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
00:00:00.000
Movie starting, kiddo. Streaming service, $20. But mom, popcorn. Grocery bill, $120.
00:00:07.480
Sorry, your account has insufficient funds. Farber Debt Solutions,
00:00:11.720
licensed insolvency trustees, get the truth about debt.
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
00:03:10.660
good employees. You need to find good quality employees. We're doing that right now in our
00:03:15.180
presidential race. We, the people are trying to find good quality employees who could run for
00:03:20.280
president. If only we could apply Zip Recruiter to the presidency, we would not have the current field
00:03:25.340
of candidates that we do. But Zip Recruiter is incredible. It sends your job to over 100 of the
00:03:30.680
web's leading job boards. They don't just stop there. With their powerful matching technology,
00:03:35.340
Zip Recruiter scans thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and invites them
00:03:39.800
to apply to your job. As applications come in, Zip Recruiter analyzes each one of them and
00:03:44.900
spotlights the top candidates. So you never miss a great match. Every other job board, just about,
00:03:49.540
you know, they, it's pretty much like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Maybe you never hear back about the
00:03:53.160
job. Maybe you do, but you don't know who's coming in. Zip Recruiter is so effective. They are the
00:03:58.100
best in the game that four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate
00:04:03.700
through the site within the first day. Zip Recruiter goes at it, keeps doing the job for
00:04:08.680
you to find the best candidates. Right now, my listeners can try Zip Recruiter for free
00:04:13.560
at this exclusive web address, ZipRecruiter.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. That is ZipRecruiter.com
00:04:21.900
slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. ZipRecruiter.com slash Knowles. Zip Recruiter, the smartest way
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
00:10:11.660
from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. You know that I live in Los Angeles. It's
00:10:17.320
very difficult to find a house in LA, mostly because Shapiro pays me slave wages and every
00:10:22.000
house in LA costs like a zillion dollars. However, when I do find a house, at least finding the right
00:10:28.840
mortgage will be easy because Rocket Mortgage makes it easy. They're mortgage experts. Number one goal
00:10:33.560
is to make the home buying process smoother for you. That means industry-leaning online lending
00:10:39.460
technology. Rocket Mortgage is there with award-winning client service and support every
00:10:44.120
step of the way. For most people, buying a home is going to be the single most important financial
00:10:48.740
decision you ever make in your life. If you're like me, you're a millennial and you don't know
00:10:52.860
anything about anything practical like getting a mortgage, you know, paying your bills, doing your
00:10:57.760
taxes. Getting a mortgage can be extraordinarily complicated. Don't go in blind. Don't go it alone.
00:11:03.220
Go to the place with the highest customer satisfaction for primary mortgage origination,
00:11:08.920
nine years in a row. Highest in mortgage servicing, five years in a row. When you work with them,
00:11:15.200
you get more than just a loan because Rocket Mortgage is more than just a lender. Go with them,
00:11:20.720
guys. I am telling you, this is going to be a huge decision in your life. Don't go it without the
00:11:25.440
best. Get started online at rocketmortgage.com slash Knowles, Canada W-L-E-S. Equal Housing Lender,
00:11:30.360
licensed in all 50 states, and mlsconsumeraccess.org number 3030. Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans.
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.
00:15:02.940
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.
00:15:12.500
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.
00:31:51.620
No, well, definitely not. They're constantly wrong, but they're never in doubt.
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
00:32:04.800
But I do see the point. Do we, I mean, this is my question to you.
00:32:08.700
Do we need to hold together the exact same coalition?
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,
00:32:29.580
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?
00:32:37.460
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
00:32:51.080
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
00:33:12.360
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.
00:33:25.860
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,
00:44:57.660
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.