Ep. 21 - Bethany Mandel: North Korea, Bad Government, and Babies
Bethany Mandel joins to discuss her work on North Korea, having a baby on the side of a highway, and why bad government made her a conservative. Then, Roaming Millennial and Kassy Dillon join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss our impending war with North Korea, the soon-to-be-deported DACA Dreamers, and the Georgia schoolteacher who banned Make America Great Again t-shirts from her classroom.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today, I'm joined in studio by writer and political commentator Bethany Mandel to talk about her work on North Korea, having babies on the side of the highway, and how the experience of big government can make you into a conservative.
Yes, even you.
Then, Roaming Millennial and Cassie Dillon join the panel of deplorables to discuss our impending war with North Korea, the soon-to-be deported DACA Dreamers, And the Georgia schoolteacher who banned Make America Great Again t-shirts from her classroom.
And you pay her salary, taxpayers.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
We have Bethany Mandelin today, one of the best commentators out there.
Really fun to read.
You can read anywhere, basically, but at The Federalist, a lot of other places have carried your writing.
I want to delve right into this.
What are you doing in Los Angeles?
So I was fired here by Liberty in North Korea, which is an organization that when refugees escape over the border from North Korea into China, if they're in China and they're caught in China by Chinese authorities or by someone else in China, they're either sent back to North Korea, where they're put in death camps, Or they're killed.
Or they're put into sex trafficking if they're women.
So Liberty North Korea has networks in Northern China and they are able to identify these refugees and help them traverse 3,000 miles through an underground railroad from Northern China into South Korea where they have automatic citizenship.
But that 3,000 mile trip costs about $3,000.
So over the last five years, I've just sort of, as a Jewish person, I've felt like I need to do something because this is not a Holocaust, but it's so similar because of the camps and because of the dictatorship and the mass death that's happened so many instances over the last decades.
And the negligence, the international negligence of the issue.
Yeah, no one seems to care that there's death camps the size of Los Angeles in North Korea.
So I started fundraising for them five years ago.
I remember very vividly first learning about Rwanda when I was a kid, and I asked my mom, you know, what did you do?
As if my mom could have done something, because when you're a kid you think, like, my mom should be able to fix this.
And so we were trying to have a baby, and I said, well, I need to be able to say that.
I need to say something to my kid.
So I started fundraising for North Korea five years ago when we started trying to have a baby.
And over the last five years, I've raised enough to rescue 17 refugees from China.
Wow.
So they're honoring me at their gala.
So you're being a little humble, too.
You're not just out here to go have dinner or something.
You're being honored for your work.
Yeah, yeah.
So they're honoring me at their gala on Saturday night.
Wow.
This seems like the best charity.
I do remember reading about it once and having that same reaction.
Like, why doesn't everybody just flood their money into this thing?
The thing about Liberty in North Korea and how I first heard about them is I read every memoir that I can find from all of these defectors and by writing all of these memoirs they're opening the world's eyes to what's happening in North Korea and it's such an incredible way to make the world care when they don't seem to want to.
So you're not just rescuing a life, which is incredibly valuable in and of itself, but you're also helping open the world's eyes to these atrocities and hopefully saving people.
One of the things I love about you and about your writing is that you don't just talk the talk, you walk it too.
I try.
You try to.
That's all we can do.
So a lot of conservatives all the time, they talk about how we need to be more charitable.
But I don't know how charitable every conservative is.
A lot of times they'll talk about how we need to have babies.
We need to have a family.
We need to have family values.
That's the building block of society.
And yet so many of the commentators and the politicians are single or they don't really have kids.
You should go to CPAC and see the debauchery that happens at CPAC. I might have experienced some of that debauchery once upon a time.
It's crazy.
I witnessed it, yeah.
I mean, it's the biggest hookup and party.
Nobody would believe it because it's so much Brooks Brothers in both eyes.
But once the lights go out, what is it, the Reaganpalooza?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I don't consider myself sheltered at all, but the first time I went to Reaganpalooza, I was horrified.
I used to go to raves in Europe and see people hooking up in pools.
Do you want to hear a really gross story?
Please, always.
I'm just going to tell you.
Everybody enjoy this one.
My mother-in-law is hopefully not watching.
I went to a rave at a bathhouse in Budapest, and I was like, I'm going to go swimming.
This is great.
And I ended up getting chlamydia in my eye.
It was horrifying.
Of all the ways I thought that would end, that's worse, even than what I was thinking.
There was no benefit to me.
Someone was having fun in the pool, and I had antibiotic-resistant chlamydia in my eye.
It's not even that regular weak chlamydia.
It was impossible to get rid of for years.
They had to put me on a serious dose of antibiotics to get rid of it.
You can say what you want about CPAC. I went through a lot of debauchery there.
I never got chlamydia in my eye.
What?
Well, you weren't partying hard.
I know.
You're making me nostalgic for all those bright college years.
But the point is, I've seen debauchery in person, and I became conservative because I didn't want to see those things in my daily life.
And then I went to Reaganpalooza, and I was like, ooh.
You know, I wonder, too, if it's especially among the beltway, the young Republican types, there is an emphasis, I think, on I'm a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal.
I'm a cool guy.
And it's really not social liberalism as much as, like, I would love some premarital husbands.
Yeah, I'm a libertine.
Yeah.
Which, you know.
Who can blame them?
My mother-in-law may indeed be watching.
That's right.
But you don't do that.
You're living this out.
And you just had a kid, Mazel Tov.
Thank you.
You just had a kid on the side of a highway.
I did.
Not on purpose.
I tweeted, actually, Piers Morgan tweeted yesterday how he was hosting some British something or other.
Right.
I think it's a TV show.
That's the title of it, I think.
Some British something or other.
Piers Morgan.
And he's like, I'm doing it with three broken ribs.
And so I clapped back and I tweeted, I had a nine pound baby on the side of the highway, tough guy.
And I try to hold that card.
Like, I don't play it at every moment, but I was like, this is going to be the moment where I'm going to put that card.
And like 9,000 people have liked that tweet.
And I was like, alright, that was a pretty event.
Well deserved.
Yeah.
So this isn't just some baby, this is a nine pound baby.
Nine pounds.
No medicine, no drugs.
So I planned on doing that.
I was, like, using midwives when I'm sort of hippy-dippy on birth, and my other two kids were also, like, natural, whatever.
Not because I love pain, but because needles scare the daylights out of me.
I don't really want a needle in my spine.
And it was funny, like, when I was pregnant with my first...
Well, when I was having her in labor, you become paranoid and...
Crazy when you're in labor.
And so I got it in my head that they were all trying to just slip me an epidural.
And so I started screaming like, no drugs!
Get away from me!
Don't touch me!
I don't want drugs!
And they were like, we've never heard a woman say that.
Yeah.
Never.
And you sound like a lady who's on drugs.
You know, get out of here, don't bring, wow.
So I had two natural births already, which the benefit of that was I knew what it felt like.
And so it wasn't like, I might have to poop on the side of the road.
Like, no, I I'm going to have a baby right now on the side of the road.
And I mean, we shouldn't have chosen a hospital that was 45 minutes away.
Lessons learned for the fourth kitten.
So now you're on your third child.
Yeah, this is third, yeah.
And I just, I'm that little Ultima.
That's the nickname.
Yeah, yeah.
He was born in a Nissan Altima.
Nissan hooked us up, thank you guys.
They cleaned the car for free.
That was generous of them.
It was really generous.
Well appreciated.
Yes.
Do you find in your life, it's so strange to have a lot of kids now.
It's strange to have kids at a young age.
It's strange, especially you're in a sort of intellectual commentariat.
It's just not common anymore.
Yeah.
What are the pros and cons of propagating our way into political power?
There are no cons.
Except you might accidentally have a baby on the side of the road.
That's a con.
But you don't regret anything?
No.
You don't have a day where you are ripping your hair out and saying, I wish that I were living in some Manhattan penthouse working at a bank?
You know, it's funny.
I have those seconds where, like, I did a thousand-mile road trip two weeks ago with my kids alone.
My husband couldn't take off the work.
You're a saint.
You're clearly a saint.
You might be Jewish, but you're also a saint.
So he came with me on this trip, so he didn't have that much vacation time.
And then we had a week between a thousand-mile road trip and L.A. trip, which is six hours on a plane with three kids under four.
And so my kids, of course, were sick that week in between, which, I mean, I'll take that versus on either end.
And so, like, one kid is vomiting.
The other kid has a 102 fever.
The other kid, she was, like, coughing or something.
I remember.
The only way to make this worse is to get chlamydia in your eye.
Everything else is pretty tough.
I had a moment where I said, why am I doing this?
I have a million girlfriends who are still single and want to have kids, and I'm living their dream life.
Even though the dream life isn't awesome at every moment of the day, no life is awesome at every moment of the day, but I have a really sweet situation.
I'm a stay-at-home mom.
I'm home with my three kids, and they're my job.
Everything else is just sort of a side hustle.
And that's what I call it.
You're a prolific side hustler.
Yes, yes.
And so, I mean, I make it work by I show up at the Daily Wire with my four-month-old because I am breastfeeding and he won't take formula.
And I don't pump.
So, like, here we are.
I've recently been talking to my fiancé, sweet little Elisa, about this because a lot of our conservative friends are...
Have a lot of kids now, and they live in the middle of nowhere.
And in New York, where I'm from, that is totally unheard of.
It's bizarre.
We're even getting married at sort of a young age.
But I want an army.
Can I ask you how old you are?
A lady never tells.
I'm 27.
Okay.
I got married when I was 25, I think?
Or 24?
And you know, too, you're from New Jersey.
Yeah.
It's unheard of out there.
Yeah.
So I wear Orthodox shoes, so it's more normal.
Like, my husband was sort of a spinster when we got married.
He was 29, I think, when we got married.
Seth the spinster.
Yeah, yeah.
And so people were starting to wonder, like, what's the deal here?
Why isn't he married yet?
And he was just, you know, waiting for his soulmate.
Waiting for the right one to come along.
Yeah, who will let him have a baby on the side of the road, and he gets to deliver it and be the hero.
And speaking, this is a little apropos of nothing, but I was reminded of it when I talked about how you're in New Jersey and I'm from New York.
We have another similar experience.
Your mother died when you were 16.
My mother died when I was 17.
We both interacted with the federal government in Medicaid, Social Security, all of those agencies.
That made you more conservative.
It made me a conservative period.
My mom was the most liberal person ever, except for guns.
We had a lot of guns, which is kind of weird.
I was telling Alicia, I'm staying with Alicia Krauss, and so I was telling her we had a shotgun in every corner of our living room, loaded.
And I remember this at four years old.
This is in Jersey.
So I'm from New York, and I would like to make that very clear.
I live in New Jersey, but I am from New York.
It is a difference of mindset.
Yes, I'm a temporary resident of New Jersey, and whenever I can flee, I will.
I'm working on my husband on that front.
It's been a few years.
But yeah, so my mom was really liberal.
And I remember one of my first memories is giving the finger to abortion protesters.
Wow.
And she was like, she had had abortions and she was proud of it.
She was one of those kinds of liberals.
And I sort of...
Went into my childhood with, I was a big Al Gore supporter and I had his bumper stickers on my locker in middle school.
You are the only student in the United States who ever had Al Gore bumper stickers.
Part of it was because he had a Jewish running mate and I had sort of like the Jewish pride, like, Joe Lieberman, he's one of us!
I do love Joe Lieberman.
He's really nice.
If he had been at the top of the ticket, I still would never have supported them, but...
He's a really decent guy.
He's a decent guy.
Yeah.
He used to belong to our synagogue in D.C., and I used to sort of channel 13-year-old Bethany and fangirl.
There's a nosh thing at the end of synagogue on Saturday afternoon, and the first time I saw him, I was like...
Even for some 13-year-old girls, it's Justin Timberlake.
For others, it's Joe Lieberman.
I have an old man thing.
I really do.
And Seth has a beard now, and I made him grow it, and he has these gray hairs, and it just...
Hubba hubba, for a certain personality.
Yes, yes.
He's still my beating heart.
So you're 16, your mother dies, and you're...
You have to deal with the government, you have to deal with everything that comes with that.
My dad was MIA. Your dad was MIA. So you're in this impossible situation.
Yeah.
The government makes it worse.
Yeah, yeah.
So I, for the first year, I was 16, and for the first year, I bounced around to friends, and I was an exchange student at the time, so I was living in Belgium.
So I just finished my exchange year because I had nowhere else to go.
So I came back, and I had nowhere to live because the person who was supposed to be my guardian decided not to be my guardian, which was...
Pretty jerky thing to do.
Yeah, not a good time for that to happen.
16, you just lost your mother.
Yeah.
So my fairly evil aunt, who I had heard nothing but awful things from my mother, offered me her couch in New York City on the Lower East Side, and I was like, yeah, I'm not living in New York City.
We'll take that on a good day, certainly when I'm desperate.
And so she said, you know, I won't touch any of the money that I'm getting from Social Security or child support from your dad, and that will be yours at the end of it, because I had very little inheritance.
And the day my check stopped from Social Security when I graduated high school, I was kicked out on the front steps of the Lower East Side with...
It still gives me panic when I have low battery on my phone.
Oh, and I forgot to charge it.
Crap.
Because I had no battery on my phone.
Where are you going to charge it?
Yeah, and I didn't have my charger with me.
I had like two bars.
I was under 10%, my garbage bags, and I was just on the streets in New York City.
And I went to Social Security and I told them the whole story and da-da-da, and they said, Yeah, she actually, that was fraud.
What she did was fraud.
And there was, like, other parts of the story also that made it more fraudulent.
And I said, okay, let's go.
Let's do it.
Great, you've determined it's fraud.
Thank you, government.
Yeah, and so they said, we'll sign an investigator, and we'll get it back.
And I said, great, thank you.
I'm going to guess you're still waiting for that investigator to show up.
So he knocked on her door twice, and then the investigation had to close.
People don't know this.
If your parent dies and you're under 18...
Social Security Administration does send a check for a little while.
It used to be until you were 21.
Now it's until you're 18.
Now it's a high school graduation.
High school graduation.
And I mean, I was lucky.
My family didn't steal my money from me.
They were very good about it.
But the check doesn't go to you.
The check goes to somebody else.
And if you're in a terrible situation like that, there it goes.
And then your mother, like my mother, paid into Social Security all her life.
Her entire life.
And she worked from 16 years old until she became...
Same with my mother.
Yeah.
And my mom worked very hard.
My mom was an incredible person.
I'm sure yours was also.
But nothing.
And now the federal government has that money.
There's no return on that.
You get no return.
So you're desperate.
You're basically homeless at 17 or 18.
I was 18 at that point.
18 because you've graduated from high school.
And you have a political transformation.
Basically, my freshman year of college, I went and I lived in the South Bronx because it was all I could afford.
And my mom, being wily and smart, convinced my not-so-wily and smart father that when they divorced, he would have to pay child support.
She gave him a choice.
I don't know, 15% until she graduates high school or 10% until she graduates whatever school that she's done.
And so he was like, I'm going to pick the lower number, not realizing that that's actually going to be more over the course of time and you're on the hook for longer.
That math gets a little fuzzy when you're just doing it in your head.
Yeah, whatever.
I'm not going to...
So he was on the hook to still pay me child support when I was in college.
And so I found an apartment in a roach-infested apartment, first floor level in the Bronx.
And it was exactly his child support payment.
So he just paid my rent instead of child support.
And I worked full-time to pay my bills, and I often didn't make my bills.
I walked around with a dollar in my wallet.
Five-foot-tall Jewish girl living in the South Bronx.
Yeah, and I had to ask my very rich friends on the Upper West Side, do you have some boxes of pasta you can steal out of your parents' pantry?
I was really profoundly broke that year.
Like, I really can't understate how broke I was.
And I was really idealistic, and I said, you know, I'm going to work in the Bronx, and I'm going to work with students.
And I lived there, and I met their teachers, and I heard the stories of On welfare, my mom had a baby every two years so she could qualify for WIC. And they didn't know all their kids' names.
And their teachers...
And this is all...
You're joking.
No.
No.
Every two years.
I remember this kid's name to this day.
And this was...
These are the stories that we're always told by the left-wing press.
Ronald Reagan was making it up, the stories of the welfare queen and people gaming the system.
But you met these people personally.
Yeah, and I went to the supermarket and saw people buying junk food with their food stamps and then going outside and selling it.
If you live in New York City, You will see these things in person and it's not hard to see them.
And I had friends who were working off the books and were on welfare and Medicaid and food stamps and everything.
And I was not.
I was playing it pretty by the book.
And I saw that my students, and they would talk to me about their teachers who, all of these teachers unions protected their jobs, but their teachers would come in and say, I am working here for two years so that I can get my loans forgiven.
And they'd lay down their giant New York Times on the desk, and they'd say, everyone be quiet for the next 45 minutes, and I don't care what you do.
And that's the schools.
And my kids would come up to me, because I was running an after-school program, and the seniors who had just graduated, they had never met someone who was in college.
And I was at City College, the CUNY school in New York.
Great college.
It's a city university, CUNY. It has great programs.
It doesn't need to be a great college.
Yeah.
I mean, it was good for what it was, honestly.
I paid almost nothing.
And so they would come up to me and say, how do I go to college?
And they had just graduated high school.
And I said, did you take the SATs?
No one told me how to take the SATs.
They had never met anyone that went to college.
They had no idea how to go to college, and they wanted to start in September.
These kids are all products of the system.
They're interacting with the government, with these systems, every step of the way.
And all liberal-controlled, by the way.
New York City, teachers' unions, and they just utterly failed them.
None of the incentives are aligned to get these kids on the most basic things.
They're in the system since they're in the cradle, and they can't show them that you need to take the SAT and go to college.
It was June, July, and they wanted to...
And if you think about it, if you don't know the system...
If you move to a new area, you just enroll in school and you start in September.
And they had no idea that they should have been doing this a whole year and a half prior to do the SATs, to get the letters of recommendation from who, by the way?
Who are they getting these letters of recommendation from?
The New York Times history teacher.
She might look up if she can remember the name.
Yeah.
And as hard off as I was, I had a mom who went to college and who had a master's degree and who instilled in me a work ethic.
And I went to a good enough school.
I went to a charter school in the Upper West Side that I cried my way into.
I showed up and it was a school that never let kids transfer in.
That's how I got into Yale, by the way.
I just cried at the admissions office.
All right, fine.
Shut him up.
And so I sat down and I sat across from the principal and my aunt, evil as she may have been, actually did help me on this.
I sat down across from the principal and I, you know, the mom died.
Like, you used that line.
I'm sure you did.
Yeah, you know, it happened.
My mother died right after I got into Yale.
Oh, I'm glad she saw that.
It was nice that she got to see it.
But they were so immediately responsive at Yale.
It was so the opposite of what you were describing.
People saying, get out of here, kid.
I only take an interest in you if I can take your money.
Yeah, so one of my favorite Rutgers stories, I went to Rutgers and it's this big bureaucracy.
That's that bastion of conservatism, Rutgers University.
Yeah, well you know what?
It made me conservative because it's such a bureaucracy that it makes you conservative.
And I actually went to school with James O'Keefe and we were sort of, yeah, that's a whole sidebar.
But it's a huge sort of, that's the government, but in a small...
A microcosm of this.
And this gets to my theory.
You embodied two of these theories, which is that people who have had slightly difficult experiences in their life, any of them, tend to lean a little bit more right-wing.
All the hysterical, occupied New Haven kids in college, their fathers were all hedge fund managers.
Yeah.
Well, wasn't it all the people that were arrested at the Occupy things, they were like in Southbury, Connecticut or something?
Of course, Columbia grad students.
And then the other is the people who have to interact with the government, people who have to deal with the government in an intimate way, never want big government again in their lives.
Yeah.
I mean, I remember going down to switch my address for Medicaid because I was on Medicaid most of my, until I was 22, I was on Medicaid and I had to just change my address.
And when I have private insurance now, I'm an adult and my husband has a job that we have insurance.
And when we moved, I called them and I said, this is my new address.
This is how you can confirm it's me.
Here's my address and my phone number and my social security number, whatever.
And that was it.
20 seconds.
And on Medicaid, I had to take the train two hours down into Brooklyn and sat there and everyone was on their cell phones playing music for...
Two hours, and people were giving me their babies so they could have a smoke break.
And then two hours, they call my number, and I go up, and they change my address.
And it took two hours of sitting in Brooklyn to get that done.
And how are you supposed to have a full-time job when that's what it takes?
That is your full-time job.
That's the way that you figure out how to get resources.
Yeah.
Is gaming this impossible bureaucracy.
Now, before we run out of time, I do want to cover this a little bit, too.
So you don't have an easy life.
You've got a little bit of a tough life.
And then last year, congratulations, the ADL named you one of the ten biggest recipients of anti-Semitic hatred on Twitter.
Yeah, everyone was number one.
That's true.
A good buddy of ours is number one.
And I used to see it.
I mean, I would see it in Ben's feet.
I would see it in Drew Klavan's feet.
I get it a little bit.
I guess my Roman nose makes people think that I'm Jewish.
But one interesting aspect of this is...
The vast majority of these came from 1,600 Twitter accounts.
Yeah, and that's something that nobody talks about.
Nobody talks about it.
I always assumed, having worked a little in political operations, I always assumed it was like five people just sitting there.
I think they were Russian bots.
I mean, there's been a lot of research into when they were active, what those accounts were doing beforehand, and it frustrates me now, and I say this everywhere people ask me to talk about it, and it's a lot of places, and I say, like, It was probably Russians.
And everyone's like, well, actually, the narrative is that America has been overrun by white supremacists.
So if we could not do that part on air, that would be great.
Richard Spencer has this conference every year.
It attracts 200 people.
It attracted 200 people five years ago.
It's going to attract 200 people this year, maybe 210.
Charlottesville was a national protest.
Nobody came.
It was Yeah, and it was licensed placed from all around the country.
Exactly.
It was truly a national protest.
Yeah, and 200 of the schmuckiest schmuck showed up in Charlottesville of the whole country.
I mean, granted, I'm not denying that there's a white supremacist problem.
Sure, there are always racists.
Yeah, there's always racists, there's always anti-Semites, but now it's convenient to notice these things.
And it's really frustrating as a Jewish person because whenever there's a vandalism incident now, it's national news.
Mm-hmm.
I'm sorry.
If you pay attention to the data, Jews have always been the number one recipient of hate crimes, and it's usually vandalism.
But no one wanted to talk about that a year and a half ago.
Well, because we didn't have...
Dear Leader wasn't the president then.
And I'm, by the way, saying this as a never-Trumper.
That's right.
You were a never-Trumper.
That's right.
I was never a fan of President Trump.
I'm still not...
We'll talk about that later.
I'll convince you off the air.
But you have to be intellectually honest about it, and no one is.
It's either, this is the narrative, and can you please stick to it?
Or you're Trumpian, and there's no in between.
And you published this great piece that did go viral about how we need to befriend Nazis.
Yeah.
About how the answer...
And I became a Nazi, by the way.
That's right.
I forgot, a Jewish Nazi.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, congratulations.
Thank you.
That's an accomplishment.
It was, actually.
But I love your approach because, especially in this insanely polarized, political, soundbite, shallow time, The only way to accomplish anything is to take people seriously and take their arguments seriously.
Yeah, I mean, and we don't necessarily have to all be friends.
Right.
Absolutely, disagreement is a lovely thing.
Yeah, but they're, I mean, not nearly as much with white supremacists as much and neo-Nazis, but people can't even have a conversation.
Like, I've lost friends on both sides of the spectrum.
I've lost friends because I am a Trumpian now.
Yeah.
And I've lost friends because I'm a snowflake, liberal now.
It's because everybody's a Nazi, right?
Yeah.
When everybody's a Nazi, then nobody's a Nazi.
Exactly.
And that's what I read.
I don't know if I was reading too deeply into the headline on your piece, but I read it as, on the one hand, saying we should talk to these 20 people who are insane Nazis.
And try to change their hearts, yeah.
We think that everybody who disagrees with us is a Nazi.
There's that meme that it says, how to argue on the internet.
Everyone I disagree with is a Nazi.
And so, if you think someone's a Nazi, maybe speak to them and understand what they have to say.
My previous column for the forward the week before, which is like part of people just read the two headlines, and my headline for the last week was, don't try to out Nazis because your rights depend on theirs.
And it's not just sort of your free speech rights and every disgusting person has a right to speech as long as it's not violent.
And I also said that.
As conservatives, we are constantly called Nazis.
And I don't support destroying people's lives for being Nazis because your definition of Nazi is really frickin' broad.
That's right.
And I wrote this column, and of course nobody read it because everyone only reads the headlines.
And so people read that and then read the We Should Befriend You Nazis thing, and I've spent two weeks being called a Nazi on Twitter, and I was like...
You're actually proving my point if you read the column.
Which certainly they didn't.
And I will say, you're one of the loveliest Nazis I've ever met.
Thank you.
Now, in typical Michael Knowles show fashion, we need to bring on more women.
We do not have enough women on the show right now.
So we need to bring on the one and only Roaming Millennial and Cassie Dillon are both here for the panel of Deplorables.
Ladies, thank you for coming on.
Hi, thanks for having us.
So, we now, we need to talk.
We've been...
Speaking at length, but let's go back to North Korea.
Oh, actually, you know what?
First, actually, I want to get to that, but I don't want to get to it yet.
I first want to talk about all these kids, because especially once you bring women on your show, you just need to start talking about families.
Obviously, we're all going to be sister wives at some point.
As the nurturing bearers of life and the hands that rock the cradle, which will rule the world, Is homeschooling the way that conservatives should go?
I know that you homeschool your kids, Bethany.
A lot of conservatives are doing it now.
There are these crazy stories coming out of public schools.
What are your thoughts?
Roaming.
Well, I actually, I wasn't necessarily homeschooled, but my later years of high school, when I was about 14 to 16, I did independent study.
So my parents weren't teaching me.
I was doing distance classes through a university, but it kind of amounted to the same thing.
I wasn't actually going to a school.
And for the longest time, before I even had a concept of what conservatism was or before I was politically involved, I've always known that I wanted to homeschool my children.
And that's just my experiences from public schools.
Just being in that situation, I've known from a young age that that is not what I want my children to have.
And for me, it's a question of not whether I'm going to homeschool my children, but how early I'm going to start, because I really do want to homeschool them because I think it will be a better environment and not only safer in terms of values I can teach them, but also more academically challenging.
However, I don't want them to end up weird.
Of course, that is a struggle.
Cassie, are you with roaming?
Are you going to homeschool your kids?
Well, I went to a public school and then after high school, and actually during high school as well, I worked at an after-school program.
And I think that the program I worked at, it was private, but it was public school children.
I think they really benefited from being around other children.
So maybe I would homeschool my children as long as there were enough opportunities in That is true.
You need to be socialized, do strange stuff underneath the bleachers.
All of that, I went to public school too.
Roaming, I cut you off.
I'm sorry.
No, yeah, that socialization is so important.
And, you know, if there's one downside to homeschooling, it's that.
Bethany, you're actually doing it.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, my oldest is four, so we're just sort of, it's play-based now.
But yeah, I mean, you can be social.
There's lots of social things to do when you're homeschooling.
But I see, especially the transgender stuff these days, and I also just see that the education is really crappy in schools.
And it's not evidence-based.
We know from...
Research that kids perform better if they start learning how to read later.
And instead we're teaching kindergarteners how to read instead of first graders.
And we just keep on pushing all of those academics on earlier and earlier.
And so my kids are home and they're playing and that's how they're learning.
And my kids are brilliant.
I'm just going to say it.
And you're saying that as their teacher and their mother.
Yes, yes.
There might be a conflict here, but I don't know.
All of them seem pretty smart.
Yeah, I know them better than anyone else, and I care about them more than anyone else.
So their education is, like, that's what I live for.
And they're, I mean, teachers are lovely, and I know many of them, but my kids aren't, the most important thing is in their lives, and they shouldn't be, but they are to me.
Absolutely.
Okay.
We need to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
I know.
You're saying, Michael, the ladies just got here.
Too bad, guys.
You have to go to thedailywire.com right now.
You need to pay $10 a month or $100 a year, and you'll get everything.
You'll get my show.
You'll get the Andrew Klavan show.
You'll get the Ben Shapiro show.
I don't have one on me right now, but you will get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, the finest receptacle for drinking anything in the country, but especially delicious, salty Leftist Tears.
You can serve them hot or cold.
They're always delicious.
Go over there right now.
You get the rest.
We have so much more to talk about.
DailyWire.com.
We'll be right back.
Okay.
Following North Korea's sixth nuclear test in recent weeks, President Trump has given the go-ahead for Japan and South Korea to buy a, quote, substantially increased amount of military equipment from the United States.
And here is President Trump explaining his decision.
A, B, C. A always, B, B, C closing.
Always be closing.
Always be closing.
Talk about the art of the deal.
North Korea sets off nukes and Donald Trump sells them more of our military equipment.
Well done, sir.
Well done.
Roaming, we have been asking this question for weeks now.
Are we heading for war?
You know, I would love to say no, but it's kind of getting increasingly hard to support that.
I was just looking online and I saw Nikki Haley speaking about the UN.
She was in a statement saying, "The US doesn't want war, but at the same time, they can't be expected to have unlimited patience when it comes to North Korea." And I'm just not very optimistic at this point.
I'm hoping that it doesn't escalate into all-out war or the West Coast being bombed, especially not with you guys over there.
It would be nice to survive.
I'd love it.
Right, yeah, especially, I mean, I hear there's a dog in the studio, so that, I think, I'm not very optimistic about it not leading to some sort of military confrontation.
And Cassie, the United States is so politically divided.
It is so polarized.
I haven't seen it since the last time the sore loser Democrats didn't win an election in 2000.
It is as bad as that was.
Can we even effectively wage a war together right now?
If there were a real threat like a nuclear North Korea, are we too divided to fight it?
Well, I don't necessarily think there's going to be a war.
But if there were to be a war, I think it would be the only thing that We're good to bring people together, and even then, I'm not optimistic at all.
People are coming out insulting Donald Trump for being against Kim Jong-un.
I think they called Trump, they put him on the same level and called him a dictator fascist.
Mango Mussolini is one of the terms.
I don't like it, but it is funny.
You guys were talking about death camps earlier, and then you have them comparing it to our president of a democratic nation.
Same.
Ladies, I bring you on to cheer me up, and all you do is make me fear for my imminent nuclear death.
Bethany, you know a little bit about North Korea.
You've been working in these charitable ways for a while.
The problem just keeps festering.
We've had this issue for 25 years now, three or four presidential administrations.
Do we need regime change now?
So the scary part about regime change is there's really no winning North Korea, which is the scary...
Sorry.
I hate to depress you.
All right.
Well, I'll see you later, guys.
But there's going to be roaming nukes.
If there's a power vacuum, anyone can swoop in and grab those nukes.
That was roaming's band in high school, by the way.
Roaming nukes.
Yeah, they were so cool.
I painted their fingernails black and everything.
I'm sorry.
I cut you off.
It's really goth.
And it is really goth.
It's a really goth moment in North Korea.
Like, international affairs.
Yeah, so, I mean, there's the roaming nukes, or you have a situation where it's just the continuation of the situation that we have now, which they can blackmail us continually forever.
And there's, again, these death camps where millions of people have died over the course of the regime, over three generations of Kims.
And it's disgusting.
And, I mean, honestly, now we're at a point where can we go in there and change things?
That moment might have already passed.
You think it's passed militarily or you think it's passed because culturally they're so embedded, both of them?
Because I just think, why can't we go kill the guy?
I mean, there is a moral, and this is something that makes me such a neocon.
We have a moral imperative to stop mass death.
I just, I think it's, and the only time America has ever done that was Bill Clinton in Bosnia.
We let Rwanda happen.
We let Cambodia happen.
We've let North Korea happen for decades now.
And we certainly let the Holocaust happen.
At what point do we, as the better people in the world, say this is not an acceptable situation?
There can't be death camps.
There can't be mass starvation like there has been in every continent.
And on the flip side, are Americans willing to sacrifice their own lives to liberate North Korea?
I don't know.
I don't know if we're there after 15 years of war.
There is that political.
So there's the cultural and the military issue and then the political issue here at home.
Yeah, I mean, and I would like to think that America is, we're made of better people than that.
And I would like to think that my sons would go over there and say, you know what, this is something worth fighting and dying for.
The liberty and life of people who are trapped in these camps and trapped in this You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
And speaking of dreamers, they are the top news today.
President Trump announced his decision on President Obama's executive amnesty program, DACA, which spells the deportation of the so-called dreamers, the illegal immigrants, Bethany, there are 800,000 of these people in the United States.
Are we really going to deport all of them?
No.
Or is this a bargaining chip for Trump, basically?
It's a bargaining chip for Trump.
And the frustrating part about this, I really am going, sounding like such a Trumper.
But it's really...
There's something about the vibe in the Michael Knowles studio.
Brings it out.
I mean, I just feel like someone should be saying these things.
And if no one is going to be...
If no one is going to do this, then I guess I'm stuck being the one doing it, and I'm not happy about it.
But...
This was an unconstitutional program that President Obama set up and then got all of their names and all of their addresses.
He set this up.
It was ever thus.
What else was going to happen?
What did you want?
Every ounce of blame, it goes with him on this.
Because for all of the other bad things it does, it incentivizes more illegal immigration.
During that process, by the way, 80% of women and girls are raped.
60% to 80%, depending on the study.
But they're feminists, so you're not allowed to say that.
But they're feminists.
They're looking out for, we're waging the war on women.
But there's that, and then it's a simple issue.
The program is unconstitutional.
Yeah, and it should have gone through Congress, and Obama himself actually said that.
But when Congress didn't want to act, he decided, you know what?
I'm just going to do this myself.
And, you know, I don't think that Trump might be going about this the right way, but he was dealt a crap card, and no one in the media and no one In this sort of immigration world is really being honest about that.
And Americans recognize that.
And this is how you got Trump.
They're all very confused about it.
That's exactly right.
It's like that little meme on Twitter.
It says, like, this is why I was elected.
And it's Trump pointing up.
Yeah.
So, Romain, if President Art of the Deal is just negotiating here and he offers, say, to go a little easier on the Dreamers in exchange for something like the wall, would the Democrats take it?
I don't think so.
Right now, I don't think they're in a place to negotiate.
I mean, if you think about this from the Democrats' perspective, anything to do with streamers is unpopular, right?
I mean, Trump is kind of in a no-win situation.
So, you know, with that, if he does offer a bargain, well, guess what else is kind of unpopular at the wall?
So if Trump ends up taking away DACA and trying to build a wall, well, that's just kind of in a better position, at least for the next election.
I mean, I hate to sound cynical, but if I were a Democrat, I'd be, I'd think to myself, yeah, let's see how much Trump can do to upset anyone on the left, and we'll lose when it gets the midterm.
I'm sorry, I'm still getting over roaming millennials saying if I were a Democrat.
I can't, it is just so unfathomable.
We now need to move on again.
A teacher, this is the most important news of all, it's my favorite story.
A teacher at Georgia's River Ridge High School recently made two of her students leave her classroom.
The crime?
They were wearing Make America Great Again t-shirts.
Not only were they wearing t-shirts supporting the current president, they were wearing shirts that simply said, Make America Great Again.
And the kicker, of course, is that that teacher has yet to be disciplined.
Roaming?
Public teacher unions are among the strongest political entities in the country.
Actually, not terribly strong in Georgia, but around the country where Bethany and I come from.
They're the most important political force that exists.
They're also inherently corrupt because public unions are just the government negotiating with the government.
Samuel Gompers opposed them.
FDR opposed them.
Is there any argument not to decertify these unions?
How do we get rid of these, this inherently corrupt process?
Well, I think there are a ton of reasons to not decertify them if you are part of the union, right?
That's right, of course.
Yeah, if you're a teacher, that's part of it.
Because I've spoken to some teachers, and actually my father used to be I was a professor at a SEJEP, which is the kind of college in Quebec, and there are actually quite a few teachers who aren't necessarily in favor of having to pay union dues and feeling like the union doesn't really represent themselves, just the union leaders.
But it's hard because, like you said, they're bargaining themselves, right?
It's public sectorians, they're unionized against the tax leaders.
And so, you know, we should have some states that have passed the right to work legislation.
I think Wisconsin's one of them.
And there's always a It's always a fuss made by the union supporters, but at the end of the day, it's what's better for workers, it's what's better for us as taxpayers, and I think, you know, hopefully we just need some governors in there who are willing to bite the bullet into what may be unpopular in the short term but will be better in the long term.
Cassie, you're a product of public school, as am I. These public teachers, as is Bethany, these public teacher unions are, we just drag them through the mud, we drag them through just like we drag the media.
Are they getting short shrift, or are they really as bad as we all say that they are?
I honestly think they're pretty bad.
You look what happened in Wisconsin.
What Scott Walker did was amazing.
Things are doing a lot better in there.
Their test scores are up.
I think what's going on right now are these unions are trying to stay relevant, which is what the left is doing.
Every single political institution that is liberal is trying to stay relevant.
And by doing this, they're creating all this outrage and trying to somehow grab power because they lost all the power.
We have all the governorships, we have all the state legislators, we have The majority of everything.
And so I think they're going to kick it and try not to drown.
Fair enough.
Bethany, I think everybody has convinced me.
Someday when I have a little brood and army of Knowles's, will you be one of their homeschool teachers?
No, but I will talk to your wife about my curriculum of choice.
That's fair enough.
We can have a meeting of the blues.
I don't need you around my house.
The mini Michaels, I don't need that.
Just the little Michaels all running around smoking cigars.
It would be a lot to handle.
Okay, we have got to go now.
My wonderful all-female panel of deplorables, thank you for being here.
Roaming Millennial, Cassie Dillon, and our in-studio guest, Bethany Mandel.
