Ep. 42 - Trump Wants Hillary To Run Again (#MeToo!)
President Trump wants Hillary to run again. Michael too! Plus, the Me Too meme and how saccharine slacktivism hurts real victims. Then, the first Democrat ever to grace the Michael Knowles Show couch to run down the latest list of left-wing talking points. Finally, Erielle Davidson and His Eminence Paul Bois join the Panel of Deplorables to talk America’s quiet victory of ISIS, John McCain’s spurious spurious nationalism, and California’s official third gender.
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And speaking of hashtag Me Too, we'll discuss the Me Too meme and how saccharine slacktivism hurts real victims.
Then we'll be joined by possibly the first Democrat ever to grace the Michael Knowles Show couch to run down the latest list of left-wing talking points.
Finally, Ariel Davidson and his eminence Paul Bois.
Join the panel of deplorables to talk America's quiet victory over ISIS, John McCain's spurious, spurious nationalism, and California's official third gender.
That's what I am.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
We have got so much to talk about today.
Obviously we have our first Democrat in studio.
I guess there's Dave Rubin, but I read somewhere that Dave is a Nazi alt-righter, so I'm just going to take that at face value.
Certainly the first elected Democrat that we have in studio.
We'll get to him and ask him which chapter of my book was his favorite.
But let's start with...
I think the second most covefe press conference in history.
The first, of course, was when President Reagan fired all of the air traffic controllers.
This one was very close, President Trump yesterday.
Oh, I hope Hillary runs.
Is she going to run?
I hope.
Hillary, please run again.
Go ahead.
So she's at odds with you over whether or not this is disrespecting the plan.
Is she right or is she wrong?
I think she's wrong.
Look.
When they take a knee, there's plenty of time to do knees, and there's plenty of time to do lots of other things.
But when you take a knee, well, that's why she lost the election.
I mean, honestly, it's that thinking.
That is the reason she lost the election.
When you go down and take a knee or any other way, you're sitting, essentially, for our great national anthem.
You're disrespecting our flag, and you're disrespecting our country.
And the NFL should have suspended Some of these players for one game.
Not fire them.
Suspended them for one game.
And then if they did it again, it could have been two games and three games and then for the season.
You wouldn't have people disrespecting our country right now.
And if Hillary Clinton actually made the statement that in a form sitting down during the playing of our great national anthem is not disrespectful, Then I fully understand why she didn't win.
I know.
I mean, look, there are a lot of reasons she didn't win, including the fact that she was not good at what she did.
But I will tell you, that is something that I had just heard about.
And I think that her statement in itself is very disrespectful to our country.
I love him so much.
I can't get over it.
This is why we elected this guy.
I sometimes worry that people who aren't from New York don't even appreciate this stuff as much as I do.
He actually set this up, by the way.
He tweeted out, he said, some people want Hillary to run again.
Please, Hillary, run again.
So he sets it up.
At this press conference, they ask the question, and he knocks it out of the park.
Please, Hillary, run again.
Then he brushes her off.
He says, well, this is why there are times to kneel, there are times not to kneel.
And I know it seems like a throwaway statement.
What he's saying is, I'm not an ideologue.
I am not a rationalist.
I'm not an ideologue.
I simply have a view of respecting the country.
I have a traditional view, traditionalist view in some ways, of America.
And you've got to respect the country.
You don't need to be fired.
Maybe you get suspended for one game.
Maybe two games.
I don't know.
And then to say, I see why Hillary lost.
Well, there are a lot of reasons why Hillary lost, but that's one of them.
It's just he's unrelenting.
He never stops.
I mean, this is what we elected.
This is what we've been waiting for on the Republican side for a long time is a guy who will just stand firm against this cultural onslaught from the mainstream media and from the entertainment complex.
He'll just stand firm and say, no, no, I'm pretty sure that's why Hillary lost.
No, I think I'm going to respect the flag.
Great stuff.
Excellent press conference.
Very, very covfefe.
I agree with him, of course.
He wants Hillary to run, me too.
Speaking of me too, we talked about this a little yesterday.
Alyssa Milano sent out a tweet which launched this huge social media campaign.
It's all over Facebook and Twitter.
She said, and this is in response to the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it turns out he raped every aspiring actress in all of Hollywood movies.
And this is a widespread problem in Hollywood for a very long time.
Now it's all coming to light.
People are talking about the horrific incidents that have happened to them.
And she tweeted out and said, if you've been sexually harassed or assaulted, write Me Too as a reply to this tweet.
There's the problem.
There are a few problems with this slacktivism, with this hashtag activism.
But the first is in her launching it.
She says, if you've been sexually assaulted or harassed, Those are categorically different things.
Those are categorically different.
They're both bad.
We should stop both, I suppose.
One is a heinous crime.
One is assaulting somebody's soul as well as their body, violating their liberty.
And the other is being rude and untoward, and maybe the guy at the office winks at his secretary.
That's all terrible, too.
Quite different than rape, and to conflate those two is offensive and disrespectful toward the victims of actual rape.
Now men are virtue signaling back, because that's how the internet works, with the hashtags hashtag I will and hashtag how I will change.
So here are just a few of them.
Hashtag I will promote women's voices, believe survivors, and work to end rape culture and purity culture, two sides of the same patriarchal coin.
How I will change.
I will listen to women more closely, seeking to understand before seeking to be understood.
Then, if it helps, I will act.
I will listen more, learn more, acknowledge more, and support more.
I'm willing to have more courageous conversations.
Use those courageous words.
How courageous.
How I will change means acknowledging my own capacity for harmful behavior and taking responsibility for unlearning that toxicity.
I don't really take issue with the premise here that men can be dogs and they should behave themselves.
I take issue with the supposed surprise, the shock, the earnestness of the tweeters.
I think it's mostly feigned.
I think it's fake.
But some might be real because these people are utopians.
And they think that mankind can be perfected with just a few more regulations, a little less freedom, a little more effort.
That isn't going to happen.
And living in delusion will help nobody.
So let's dispel some of the delusion around this.
We begin with the courageous conversations.
What is courageous about echoing the dominant cultural meme?
What is courageous about saying, you're always right, I'm always wrong, whatever the left tells us is true, even if the statistics are spurious, that's true, I'll believe anything.
There isn't a rape culture in the United States.
That was one of the allegations.
There is a rape culture.
There is no rape culture in the United States.
Rape happens because we're fallen people and crime happens and murder happens and awful things happen and will always happen because we're not going back to the Garden of Eden.
This isn't an earthly paradise and human nature isn't perfectible.
That's going to happen.
But you know what a rape culture is?
It's Pakistan.
That's a culture that institutionalizes and through its own cultural mores Creates venues in which rape is approved of.
That is a rape culture.
There is no approval of rape in the United States.
To tweet a the trending hashtag alleging rape culture undermines the rape culture, right?
It undermines your own claim.
It's a defeater for your...
Ridiculous argument.
The hashtags, too, are empty virtue signaling.
It is saccharine.
It is slacktivism that accomplishes nothing.
It reminds me of, I don't know if people remember this, Kony 2012.
Do you remember in 2011 or 2012 there was this meme?
I remember, Michael.
Do you remember this?
It was everywhere.
Kony 2012, he was some warlord in Uganda, and some filmmaker said, we're going to stop Kony this year.
And then every little dummy on Twitter and Facebook posted about it, and they felt they were doing something.
They felt they were accomplishing something.
They accomplished nothing.
He's still at large.
It is useless.
It is to make yourself feel good, to give the impression of doing something.
I've heard this described about smoking cigars, and I will acknowledge it.
The nice thing about smoking is you feel like you're doing something, but you're really just sitting down and not doing anything.
That's slacktivism.
Michelle Obama did this.
She held up a sign when those girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
The sign said, no joke, hashtag bring back our girls.
This is the courageous piece of paper hashtag.
Your husband is the President of the United States.
If you want to bring back the girls, you can bring back the girls.
Now, perhaps the issue isn't as simple as all of that.
Perhaps there are geopolitics at play that complicate things.
Don't pretend that your hashtag is doing anything.
It's accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Also, don't tweet about it.
If you're a guy, don't tweet, I will, I'm with you.
These guys, these like fake, feminist, sensitive, earnest, nice guys, they're like the creepiest guys around.
Do not, but they are creeps!
I would not let my fiancé near any of them.
They are women.
Do not believe them.
The feminist men protest too much, methinks.
Next, if you've been raped, go to the police.
Go to the police.
Do not go to your professor.
Do not go to your administrator on campus.
Do not pass go.
Do not collect $200.
It is a serious crime.
It is possibly the most serious crime.
If it has happened, make sure that it is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
We have a system for prosecuting crimes.
It's called the criminal justice system.
It's not the sort of crime to be dealt with by campus tribunals.
This leads into another aspect, though.
We have a criminal justice system to protect the rights of the accusers, but also to protect the rights of the accused, so the people who have had a crime committed against them, and also those that they accuse of doing it.
These campus tribunals have been...
Absolutely demolishing the due process rights of the accused in countless cases.
But a lot of the tweets that have been coming with, I will, or this is what I will do, they say that we'll always believe the people who allege that they've been raped.
Hillary Clinton said this during the campaign, which is quite ironic because she smeared the people who alleged rape against her own husband.
Someone might ask, why would anyone make up a rape?
Why would anyone allege that they've been raped if they haven't?
I don't know.
It's pretty weird, man, but it does happen.
In just the last eight years, there have been five instances, five major instances of this, presumably many others.
There was obviously the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax.
This was a major story in Rolling Stone.
A girl alleged she had been gang raped at a fraternity.
It didn't happen.
The story absolutely fell apart.
They had to retract the whole thing.
At UC Santa Cruz a few years ago, a girl paid someone on Craigslist to beat her up, and then she alleged that she had been raped.
That also fell apart.
In 2013, a University of Wyoming student posted a rape threat against herself in a campus Facebook group.
That also was uncovered, but not before it caused a lot of anxiety to the campus community and a lot of other people.
2009, a Hofstra student had consensual sex with five guys at once.
Her boyfriend found out and said, you look like you've just had sex with a lot of guys.
And she said, I've been raped.
He said, go to the police.
She said, no, I don't need to.
Then they went to the police anyway.
They arrested these guys.
They threw them in jail only because there happened to be a video of this event.
Don't want to know.
What were these guys let off the hook for it?
Because the video showed that it was consensual.
But nevertheless, the allegation was made it could have ruined these guys' lives.
In 2013, a University of Florida student falsely claimed she was raped in a parking lot.
Then she said it was false, but intended to show a greater truth.
So it was a complete lie, but the lie was meant to serve the greater truth.
And then later she admitted it's because her parents were pressuring her to graduate from college, and she probably wasn't going to do that.
Conservative columnist George Will was accused of not taking rape seriously in a letter by four Democratic senators because he made these exact same points.
And he responded in exactly the right way.
He said he takes sexual assault and rape much more seriously than they do.
Some would prefer it if professors and campus tribunals dealt with this crime.
Some would prefer it if judges, juries, and executioners dealt with it.
We in the latter category are taking this issue much more seriously, and the people who are engaging in frivolous slacktivism are doing nothing but hurting a very serious issue.
All right, on that note, now that we've covered the gamut from silly Trump conferences to rape, let's bring on our guest today.
We have four-term California Assemblyman Mike Gatto.
Mike, thank you for being here.
It's great to be here.
Now, you have the distinct privilege...
Maybe the distinct terror and disadvantage of being the first Democrat politician to ever come on our show.
So thank you for coming on.
Makes me either very brave or very stupid.
That's right.
Well, that'll be left for the audience to judge, I guess.
I have a hunch of which one it is.
My first question for you, obviously you and I have a lot in common.
You're a Democrat politician.
I am the best-selling author of Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
Which was the most compelling chapter in my book, did you think?
Well, so I have to ask you, has anyone ever gotten a copy of your book and said, oh my gosh, it's blank?
There have been a few people who were not just trolls by it.
I wanted to sort of ad-lib that.
I wanted you to give me a copy and say, oh my gosh, it's blank.
Oh my gosh.
This copy is for you.
You can put it up in your office right next to all of the great political philosophers.
That's great.
There is a professor I know who, at the end of every semester, he asks his students about reading that he never assigned, and sees who is the greatest BS artist.
So I was going to say then, I guess, page 117 is the reason why I love this book.
Well, I'm really, thank you so much.
I appreciate your reading it, even just right now.
And it's personalized.
It is personalized, because I do appreciate that you're willing to come on and talk to Republicans.
Sure.
Right now, the parties are so completely polarized that people aren't willing to do that.
You're one of the few—I don't want to say you're reasonable.
I think that would be going way too far.
But maybe I'll call you semi-reasonable.
So, we probably agree on a great many things.
I want to ignore those completely and only talk about what we disagree on.
There are a lot of Democratic talking points that are going around now that I think are bunk.
I think a lot of Democratic politicians think they're bunk, too.
Can we go through a few of these and maybe give your opinion?
Happy to do so.
And by the way, the dialogue reason is the whole reason I'm here.
I think it's so important right now that, you know, I mean, everybody knows how polarized this country is, but I think it's more important than ever that we talk, that the two sides talk.
And it is impressive that you're...
Doing that because I talk about this sometimes on the show.
I think there are two kinds of debate.
There are debates where you score points and you're just, yeah, I got my point and ha ha, I smacked you down.
But I don't get anything out of that.
I don't in any way benefit from that.
But there are debates where even rarely...
I'll change my mind.
You know, I was pro-abortion.
I was pro-choice.
I had lunch with a bioethicist named Diana Schaub.
By the end of the lunch, I was pro-life.
A rare occasion, but people can change their minds when they discuss things.
First question.
First talking point.
Did El Presidente, the Donald himself, did President Trump cheat Hillary Clinton out of the presidency?
So I think if you read the more sensible articles on this, you will find out that President Putin wants the American public to believe that this happened.
He wants the American public to lose faith in our elections.
He wants the American public to think that he is that powerful.
And more importantly, he wants Russians to believe that he is so powerful That he's pulling the strings in the biggest superpower on Earth.
I think there's a real danger with that narrative because are our elections at risk?
Yeah.
I've been somebody who has raised this issue that we have to be careful about voting machines.
We have to be careful about vote-by-mail ballots.
People can take them, and it happens all the time.
It happened in Hollywood in a very recent election.
But this idea that our entire democracy or our entire Republican form of government has been hacked or stolen by the Russians is so detrimental to people having faith in the system.
That is such a mature analysis of it because I think – I even know Democrats on the grassroots level, members of my family, friends of mine who say it.
Putin is controlling the government and Donald Trump is a Manchurian – I mean, ridiculous things, right?
Donald Trump, the guy we've known for 40 years – Is really a secret plant of KGB operative Vladimir Putin.
Yeah.
I mean, Putin's got a hard time controlling his own country.
I mean, you know, when these rumors started going out there, I mean, he was sort of at danger of there being another type of orange revolution or people, you know, a real strong alternative coming forth.
And so, you know, I mean, he spread these.
I think he's been active in spreading these rumors.
Of course.
And there, I think, is the fake news, right?
People allege the fake news.
I pride myself on being a strictly fake news program.
But there is the fake news, right?
I don't think anyone is under the misconception that Vladimir Putin is a benevolent force.
He loves the United States.
He wants to do us well.
But clearly, he's caused some chaos, even by crafting the narrative that he's caused some chaos.
Absolutely right.
The New York Times suggested...
That Donald Trump did not pay income taxes for two decades.
This was blown up by my twin sister, Rachel Maddow.
We have evidence that he did pay.
They tried this on Mitt Romney.
They said that Mitt Romney didn't pay his income taxes.
I promise you they'll try it on the next Republican nominee.
Does an attack like that, does it work?
Does it hold any water?
Does it work in the other direction?
Probably not.
Republicans are the greedy, awful capitalists.
Why does that attack?
Why does that stick around?
Well, I think that, first of all, people are justifiably upset because there's a huge gap between the rich and the poor in this country right now.
And I think we really run the risk of being sort of the opposite of what the founding fathers wanted, which was a country of egalitarianism, where everybody's more or less equal and has an equal opportunity.
That being said, people probably don't understand the arcane tax code.
I don't understand our arcane tax code.
I haven't paid taxes in a decade.
I certainly don't deal with it.
Although I hope you pay taxes on that.
That is true.
Mike is pointing out my lovely $400 check from Mr.
Ben Shapiro.
I confirm he did not pay taxes on that.
Oh my gosh.
I know some people in the California government who might be auditing.
I promise you they don't watch my show.
And Ben did ask, because this is the original check, he said, oh great, you didn't cash the check.
And I said, no, no, no, there's this wonderful thing called Mobile Deposit.
So I get to cash a check and I get to frame it and put it on my show.
But what happened?
I mean, obviously, people in real estate, like our president, you know, if you have one year where you have one huge loss, you can carry forward that loss for 10 years, 20 years indefinitely.
So I'm guessing what happened, I mean, he should release his tax returns.
We probably know.
But I'm guessing what happened is he had one year where he lost a ton of money.
Yeah.
And he's carried forward those losses for all these years, and he probably hasn't paid much taxes because of those losses.
But we know, at least 10 years later, we know, because that was what my sister Rachel Maddow released, he paid $38 million of taxes in 10 years.
So I'm sure, yeah, in 1995 he had a huge loss.
I assume he wrote off those losses, as well he should.
But he didn't write off for 20 years at least.
And the question you bring up is, you know, there's this big gap between the rich and the poor, the middle class has shrunk, and there's a widening gap.
I'm not in the upper 1%, even with my blank book.
I didn't make it to the 1%.
But why do I care if some guy gets really rich?
Why do I care?
I have an unbelievable standard of living.
I'm in the top probably tenth of a percent of world wealth and income.
Sure.
Let me give you two reasons why you should care.
So first of all, our country was founded on the idea that there was no royalty.
That's actually written in our Constitution.
You know, no titles of royalty.
And when you have a system where, you know, I mean, where Paris Hilton's great-grandchildren or Kim Kardashian's great-grandchildren will be wealthier than yours, no matter what you do, no matter how many wonderful, clever books you...
Listen, first of all, I plan on writing a lot of blank, clever books.
But, I mean, we see study after study.
Dynastic wealth, for some families, it holds true.
For many, it disappears within two, three generations.
Not completely disappears.
Maybe they'll move from the top quintile to the second top quintile.
Well, let me give you an even clearer reason why people should care.
If you go to Buenos Aires, the rich go to work in armored SUVs, the poors are in slums, and they're very upset.
Do we want to live in a country like that?
We don't.
The last time the gap between rich and poor was so significant was 1929.
How'd that work turn out?
I think that we're at a real danger unless we have a thriving middle class, and that's why everybody should care about this.
I'm not saying confiscate wealth.
I'm not saying, but I think we do need to level the playing field.
Well, I will grant you, and I will also point out that at the time of the founding of the country, there were a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people and a bunch of not wealthy people, and there was no income tax.
Yeah, his name was King George III. Well, sure, there was them, but also the framers.
However, you make a very good point.
How did it turn out in 1929?
We got Democrats elected for four terms, five terms.
So I agree.
It's something to worry about if I have to worry about another Franklin Roosevelt.
Tax me more.
That's fine by me.
Speaking of the slums, speaking of all of these housing difficulties, you wrote a very good piece in the LA Times about affordable housing in Los Angeles.
Now, just to fill people in, I don't know if...
People follow this more local story.
Housing in LA is awful, and the homelessness problem is unbelievable.
So friends of mine live in a very nice building.
It's a luxury building.
A fifth of that has to go to low income.
So you've got drug dealers, crazy people, living in this...
Or the developers' nieces and nephews.
Or the developers' nieces and nephews.
And there's a lot of corruption in this to begin with.
But you're in this luxury building, and then around the corner, three blocks away, is Skid Row.
It's Skid Row, which...
I don't see anything compassionate about letting drug dealers and crazy people live on the streets to destroy a neighborhood and kill each other.
Why is LA, why has this government failed so much to address the problems of housing and homelessness?
Well, I think there's been a fundamental lack of honesty.
You know, we just talked about the gap between the rich and the poor.
Nobody wants to address the big problems.
Nobody wants to address things like the Federal Reserve printing money, which has driven the cost of a loan down, has driven property values up so that they're so crazy that now you've got people who are so frustrated with their inability to buy a house that they're saying, okay, the government should subsidize me buying a house.
And that gets to be a little bit odd.
And you have this weird situation where we have more subsidies, more socialistic policies going into place.
And then I also think nobody wants to address the root cause of homelessness or the various root causes of homelessness.
I mean, California just a few years ago put in place this ballot initiative where we released on the streets a lot of people for a lot of crimes where otherwise they would have been getting the attention that they deserve, getting the drug rehab that they deserve when they're incarcerated.
And yet those people are now just on the streets.
And people think that homelessness is only caused by the high price of houses.
That's not correct.
It's caused by mental illness, a lot of various things.
Drug use, a lot of things that we have to address all of them if we're going to be honest about it.
And I love that point, especially in the mental illness, because when we developed these psychotropic drugs in the 1980s, we emptied out the insane asylums because people were fine.
Trouble is, once you feel fine, you stop taking your psychotropic drugs.
That's right.
And, you know, when someone suggests that maybe we ought to put criminals in prison or that we ought to put crazy people into facilities where they can take medication and see the world more clearly, they say that's not compassionate.
That's depriving them of some freedom.
Is there really any liberty or any compassion in letting these people live in squalor on the street?
Well, that's the law of unintended consequences, right?
Proposition 47, passed by all the voters in the state of California, or the majority of voters in the state of California, reduced all of these drug crimes from a felony to a misdemeanor.
The difference between a felony and a misdemeanor, of course, is the judge could look that person in the eye and say, unless you go to rehab, Unless you get help for this drug addiction that you've got, you're going to go to jail for a long time.
And this scared a lot of people straight.
And because now this is a mandatory misdemeanor, which means in Los Angeles County you'll spend about 12 hours in jail, you've got a lot of people not even addressing their addiction.
And that's a real problem.
And it's counterintuitive because a lot of my progressive friends say, oh, let these people, yeah, okay, yeah, our society is too hard on drug offenders.
I stipulate that.
But we've got to somehow give the tools to judges and juries so that people can find the rehab that they need so that they're not using drugs and stealing and being Screwing up all of our neighborhoods.
All right, last Democrat talking point because we have so much news to get to.
Obviously, the Las Vegas shooting, largest mass shooting in American history.
The gun debate is always back, front, and center.
There have been some proposals on how to curb this problem because they say maybe we'll get rid of bump stocks.
But you can bump fire from a regular AR-15.
It's a little more difficult.
Also, with any bump fire, it's very difficult to aim, so it only really works if you're shooting at a gigantic crowd of people.
Is the only answer here to repeal the Second Amendment?
You have a lot of people on the left proposing this.
Is that the point where we are right now in American society?
We want to give up our right to keep and bear arms?
Well, so I'll make three points on this.
The first one is I got a text from a very successful TV journalist.
She's a reporter for a major network.
Major fake news source, I want to assume.
It's got to be fake news.
Right after this incident.
And she texted me and said, oh my God, why don't people realize that the Second Amendment only applied to muskets and blah, blah, blah, and went on this horrible rant?
And I wrote her back and I said, yeah, and I don't think, I guess that you should agree that the First Amendment doesn't apply to this conversation on our iPhone.
That is an excellent analogy.
I mean, people's ideas of rights being transitory and frozen in time.
You'd throw out the whole Constitution with that at you.
Of course.
But the second thing is, again, I see a total lack of honesty.
I mean, most of the most horrific crimes, I mean, you probably know my father was murdered by someone with a handgun.
Most of the most horrific crimes are committed in our cities with handguns.
And there is no honesty in the debate.
People do not want to address this.
A mass shooting gets our attention, I realize that.
But, you know, and what those people suffered through is horrible, and nobody should have to suffer through that.
But I'd like to see people talk more about the root causes of gun violence, which is more often than not caused by a handgun.
The third thing is, if Democratic politicians want to repeal the Second Amendment, if any politician wants to repeal the Second Amendment, they should be honest about it.
They should say, the Constitution belongs to people.
It's ours to amend.
Thomas Jefferson said famously, every 25 years or so we should amend the Constitution.
He used bloodier language to describe it this year.
Yes, he did.
But if people want to do that, the people own the Constitution.
It belongs to all of us.
And if they want to repeal the Second Amendment, then...
It's a movement that people should be honest about.
We shouldn't dance around the issue if that's how people feel.
Now, I, for one, do not believe in that.
But, you know, politicians who do should come out and say it.
They should be honest.
You are channeling...
This should scare you, by the way.
You're channeling my feelings, at least on the honesty point of this.
Because I think all the time when they bring up assault rifles, which have been illegal for 80 years, and then they say assault weapons, which is a term that was made up in the mid-90s to conflate regular rifles with assault rifles.
They look scary.
They're big and scary.
They look like machine guns.
And so we say, "Okay, we got to get rid of those.
If we get rid of those, we'll be fine." But as you point out, the awful murder of your father, handguns are the real problem in gun Two-thirds of so-called gun violence is middle-aged guys killing themselves.
And more people are killed by hands and feet every year than are killed by any sort of rifle, including assault rifles or shotguns.
The honesty in this debate...
I really only see honesty on the right among a handful of Democrats who are willing to have the courage to go out there, like you, Joe Manchin, other Democrats who are willing to face the issue seriously.
But a total dishonesty permeating the rest of the debate.
Is there any way to fix that?
I don't know.
You know, as long as both parties are raising money off of these tragedies, then I think we're going to continue to have this lack of meaningful debate.
I've never been so depressed with politics in America than I was after this Las Vegas shooting.
I mean, literally, a guy like me who's been in politics for a long time, in and out of politics, I'm cynical and jaded as the rest of them.
I was so depressed getting a fundraising email from Democratic candidates dancing around the Second Amendment issue, getting fundraising.
I mean, also the Republican Congress congressional candidate who's given away bump stocks.
I mean, come on.
I mean, just give me a break, people.
Can we get some honesty?
I mean, the guy who...
LAPD has a profile of the guy who killed my father.
They think he was a petty drug user, someone who's high out of his mind.
I would much rather see our society address the drug problem.
I would much rather see us address mental illness and things like that.
I think we can get a lot of headway.
And I also think we need jobs.
It's not as glamorous to address...
The preponderance of crimes that affect people, that affect the rest of their lives, than these one-off spectacularly awful crimes that are spectacular for a reason, right?
Because they're not the common crime that happens.
Correct.
Absolutely right.
Well, all right.
That's fine.
I really enjoy going through the talking points with you.
Give me time, though.
I'll disappoint you at some point.
I'm sure you'll disappoint when we talk about all of this news that we've got to get to.
But it is great because I bet you that if we were on, like, a cable news show or something, and it just had to be, what do you think about Trump, yes or no?
What do you think about this talking about, yes or no?
You'd have to stick to the talking points.
Maybe you wouldn't.
Maybe you'd have the courage of your convictions.
I think most people would do that.
Excellent.
We have to get to the news.
We have so much news to talk about.
We need Mike to just say the craziest, most wild and absurd left-wing things you've ever heard.
But you can't see that unless you go to dailywire.com right now.
We want to thank all of our current subscribers.
It's just $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
You'll get me.
You'll get the Andrew Klavan show.
You'll get the Men's Bureau show, who I know.
I know.
Ah, droning.
Ah, who cares?
Who cares?
But wait!
You'll get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Look at this, man.
It is so delicious.
I was hoping that I know.
I was really hoping I could fill it up on this fountain of Mike Gatto today.
But unfortunately, I haven't been able to yet.
Maybe a little later on.
I'll just keep playing Trump clips.
You can have yours.
It is the finest vessel for Leftist Tears in the entire country.
Perhaps in the entire universe.
They observed recently, scientists observed, gravitational waves coming out of two stars colliding and creating the molecules that have forged the Leftist Tears Tumbler Cup.
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Go to dailywire.com right now.
We'll be right back.
We have so much news here.
U.S.-backed forces have captured Raqqa, the self-described capital of ISIS. This is so much winning.
Ariel, does this mean that we have officially defeated ISIS? Yes and no in some ways.
The best way to look at this is to say to ourselves, we've taken the self-designated caliphate, so we've definitely feel the blow to the collective ego of ISIS. This is a top selling point for them to attract militants from all over the Middle East and the world.
So if we look at it from that perspective, yes, it's been a collective blow to their ego.
Now begins the actual work of rebuilding Raqqa, which I think will present lots of challenges in the future.
I also want to give a shout-out to the Kurds, because the Kurds were a huge part of this victory.
It was Kurdish-backed militia as well as some Arab factions, and the fact that we have Abandoned aid for those in Kurdistan.
I think it looks really poorly, especially given this recent victory.
I guess to answer your question, in terms of the ideological defeat of ISIS, yes.
But they're still going to be able to communicate with one another on their chat rooms, online.
And until, you know, maybe we've taken their physical location, but in terms of their ability, which, you know, is how they recruit members, but in terms of their ability to attract followers, that's still very much alive and well.
So, you know, we've cut the blood flow in some ways, but it's still living and existing, so we're going to have to address it as a global organization.
You've always got to be glass half empty, Ariel.
Come on, already.
She gave a shout-out to the Kurds.
Shout-out to the Kurds.
I'm very pro-Kurds.
I am pro-Kurds, too.
Yeah.
You're right to acknowledge that we have a massive Kurdish audience.
We want to thank all of the Kurds who are watching the show right now.
No, they're great.
They always team up with us when we're fighting the bad guys.
Good stuff.
Your eminence, how much credit can we give Trump here?
As Ariel said, there's still the ISIS ideology.
There's still people who are Islamic extremists who will talk to each other and try to organize.
But we've blown them all up.
We blew up their whole city.
Barack Obama saw ISIS form under his watch.
He couldn't take out the city or he didn't want to.
He didn't want to take out the organization, perhaps, or he didn't prioritize it.
How much credit can we give, dear leader?
Well, I certainly think most of the credit belongs to the forces on the ground who have been fighting bravely.
Throughout all this, these past several months, their cities are in absolute ruin.
They've just been going through hell, so I definitely think we should keep them in our thoughts and prayers right now as they clean up the mess that ISIS has made.
But in terms of what Trump has done in order to create this outcome, certainly he delegated decisions down to the forces and the military personnel on the ground to go ahead and take action without getting prior approval from Washington, D.C., That was something that happened in May when General Mattis announced the ISIS annihilation strategy, and that has been very, very effective thus far.
I mean, we're just six months away, and we've already taken Raqqa.
So, yes, I do certainly think that Trump's decision-making there certainly should be credited.
I'll just correct you on, you said General Mattis, and just for our bloodthirsty listeners who love internet, that would be Mad Dog Mattis.
Yes.
Mr.
Mad Dog.
Mike, the two Obama-era foreign policy doctrines seem to have been leading from behind and strategic patience.
This is quite a change.
President Trump campaigned on defeating ISIS, prioritizing defeating ISIS. Now it looks like they are defeating ISIS. I'm not asking how much we can give credit to L. Donald here, but how much can I blame Barack Obama, one of my favorite hobbies?
Well, the answer is you can't blame Barack Obama at all.
I mean, Donald Trump and his followers have got to stop taking credit for policies that Barack Obama put in place where you're now seeing play out.
You know, today or yesterday Donald Trump sent something, the Dow hit 23,000, oh my gosh, great, great, great.
The reality is the Dow has been on a tear since about 2009 at the depths of the mortgage crisis.
And that started under Barack Obama, continued under President Trump.
And the reality is, if you own the successes, you ought to own the failures, too.
At some point in the next three years, in the Trump presidency, I'm assuming we're going to go into recession, I'd like to see his followers own those defeats as well.
I absolutely will not, thank you very much.
Sorry, go ahead.
Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
And I think a lot of these policies were put in place a long time ago, and they were going in the right direction.
Some have, some haven't.
I'll grant you the stock market.
Republicans can't take total credit for the stock market here.
It has been building since 2009.
This seems a little different.
There does seem to have been a big shift in military policy, so I'm not sure.
I am willing to give Donald Trump some credit here, but I do grant.
Barack Obama campaigned.
He said, GM is alive and Osama bin Laden's dead, but of course the work to capture Osama bin Laden had been building for over a decade, or almost a decade rather.
So, yes, there is more complication here.
Bill Clinton took a lot of credit for the great economy in the 90s.
Probably you could credit Ronald Reagan and George Bush for that.
But I'm only going to give credit to the Republicans and blame to the Democrats, thank you very much.
Intellectually honest.
It is consistent, at least.
Consistent, that's right.
There now, this is the big story, there are three genders in California.
Which one are you?
Which one am I? Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, a man you know very well, Mike, he signed the Gender Recognition Act Sunday, which lets residents choose non-binary on identification documents such as driver's licenses and birth certificates.
I believe I just heard Paul Gua sighing as I read that description.
Can I tell him to stop breathing heavily, please?
Not surprised at all.
Ariel, you know, we just had Blair White on last week.
We just had on a YouTuber who is transgender, biological male, identifies as a woman.
What's wrong with codifying this third gender, hmm?
Well, I think it's different from identifying as a man or a woman.
I don't think that poses a problem, actually.
And I think you touched upon that in your last podcast.
I think when we talk about not identifying as either, I'm kind of approaching this from a statistical standpoint.
So I do economic research, as you know, and a lot of...
A lot of the research, whether it be from the US Census Bureau or be from a statistical database belonging to the state, it is codified by male or female.
This is how we look at economic outcomes.
This is how we look at average earnings.
This is how we basically address any statistical analysis is through looking at the lens of male or female.
So coming at it from sort of a statistical perspective, if enough people decide that they identify as neither, Then I think this could pose some problems down the road.
I know, for instance, in Oregon, when they did an unspecified gender, I think it cost something around $30,000 to update their statistical databases.
California is about 10 times the size of Oregon.
So we could be looking at a bill of around half a million in order to make these adjustments, which, if you look at California spending, is really not that much because our state spends a ton.
But when you look at sort of what challenges might come down the road, I don't think enough people are going to identify as non-binary that it's going to be a statistical problem.
But if it does sort of become the vogue or popular way of the resistance, which as we know, intersectionality And the whole Marxist rhetoric that comes with that, I have no doubt that it will be a form of resistance to Donald Trump, just wait.
Then it could be a problem.
So I really don't take a huge issue with it right now, but I do see, at least from a statistical standpoint and measuring outcomes, it could be a problem in the future if enough people decide either that this is their form of resistance, in which case it sort of denigrates a mission Or the intention of it as a whole, which was to sort of give people who felt like they couldn't fit in either category, you know, a voice or an identity.
And now I could see people abusing it as a political form of resistance.
Yes, absolutely.
So in that sense, I think it could be a problem.
And of course, the issue is that there isn't a third gender.
There is not a third gender.
Right.
There are a minuscule number of people who were born intersex, hermaphroditic.
They had both sexual organs.
In some cases, they have crazy chromosomes that don't fit male or female.
That is a vanishingly small number of people.
And there are a slightly larger number of people who are either male or female who have a psychological affliction that makes them think that they are the other gender or desperately want to be the other gender or feel on a metaphysical level that they are the other gender.
Listen, I identify as an author.
I'm not an author, but I identify as one.
I have empathy on this subject.
But Mike, no one really thinks there's a third gender.
Is there some good being done to society by indulging in this delusion?
Well, let me start with a couple principles, and the first one hopefully means something to a lot of your audience, which is simply just live and let live.
It doesn't hurt anybody to allow people to be called a pronoun or a gender that they want.
I disagree with what Ariel said a great amount.
I think that transgender people face a lot of stigma in our society.
I can't imagine anybody wanting to go through that just as a form of political protest against Trump.
I'll make the bold prediction here in 2017 that that's not going to happen.
I think, you know, this really just comes down to live and let live.
Why just not let people live the way that they want to live?
I don't think it hurts anybody.
And I think that this thing gives a modicum of respect and dignity to people who want it.
But does it?
I mean, that is the question.
Is the road to hell paved with good intentions?
Because one might say, well, who cares if a man not only pretends that he's a woman, but pretends that he's a mythical, undefined third gender?
It doesn't really affect me.
It doesn't affect my bottom line.
It doesn't affect my bank account or something.
But, you know, we're not just material creatures.
We learn, as Winston Churchill said, When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn that we are spirits, not animals.
There is an insistence.
If the government is going to say that there is a third gender, then the government is telling me you have to view surreality, unreality, as reality, with the full coercion and compulsion of the law.
They're telling me that I have to look at the world and pretend that it's something that it isn't.
Your Eminence, Paul Bois, is there any evidence here That there are bad consequences from this, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Oh, well, the road to hell we are on, Michael.
Bulba coming live from the Vatican is always.
With good intentions, I mean, yeah, maybe 50 years ago, this isn't even just about making transgenders feel good about themselves, as the bathroom debate was about.
This is just, like you said, this is the government just legislating complete fantasy.
I mean, if they want to be ideologically consistent here, why don't they just go ahead and just say you can put whatever you want.
Say that you're a unicorn.
Say that you're a raggedy Ann doll.
Whatever it is you want to come up with.
The possibilities are endless, are limitless.
It's ridiculous.
And like you said, the government right now by doing this is literally saying that the state is pretty much saying and stamping their approval on something that doesn't exist.
Guys, I should point out, I know we've left this out of the show credits, Paul Bois is played by Carol O'Connor.
I don't want to let that go without pointing that out.
Next on, we have to get off the transgender thing.
That's all anybody ever talks about these days.
John McCain.
Senator John McCain, shockingly, is attacking President Trump.
Here he is.
To fear the world we have organized and led the three quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain the last best hope of Earth for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.
Ariel, spurious means false.
Does this mean that John McCain only approves of true nationalism?
Well, I think he's making a jab at the America First agenda that Donald Trump put forth during his campaign.
If we look at sort of, you know, I do agree, there were some things that John McCain said that I did agree with.
The idea that we are a nation united by ideals.
I think what occurred over the last eight years was a dividing a nation by identity politics.
And actually, this is something Alan Bloom, East Coast Strasian, wrote about in the closing of the American Mind in the late 80s.
He said, mark my words, we are a nation that was founded on ideals, but increasingly, and he observed this in the 60s, increasingly there's a push to divide us by what we don't have in common, whether it be our race, our gender, our sexuality.
And, you know, I'm someone that I firmly believe that we should be pushing back against that.
I firmly believe that we should be returning to this idea of uniting behind ideals.
And I don't think America as the abstract concept is divisive.
I think it is representative of ideals.
So saying America first isn't inherently divisive.
In fact, I think that's the attitude we should be having.
And I think it's a welcome departure from the last eight years of We've been poo-pooing the idea of American exceptionalism.
If we can't identify an objective good, if we can't say that America offers one of the best systems in the world for women to advance themselves.
You know, if you go to other countries across the globe, there are not the educational opportunities, career opportunities, basic independence that we have as women in America.
And I'm comfortable saying we have a better system.
I can't believe this.
I don't think that should be a controversial statement.
Marshall, can you stop this hateful rhetoric?
Can you please mute Ariel?
I'm going to throw a desk or something.
I know.
I know.
And so I don't have a problem with the idea of saying, you know, we have an awesome, wonderful system and we should celebrate that.
And that came across in parts of McCain's speech.
But I think, you know, there have been people, nefarious elements, especially within the alt-right.
I mean, we've seen it with these scattered Nazi marches.
I heard Mike Gatto's on the alt-right.
That's just what I heard.
I don't know.
I don't know.
That's a rumor.
So we've seen people warp that message and use it to advance their horrible agendas, and I couldn't agree more.
That's a problem.
But to say that, you know, that fake patriotism is what drives the majority of the country, I don't look at 250 You know, white supremacist buttheads in Charlottesville who don't deserve the time of day, right?
I don't look at them as that's America.
I think that's a bad word.
I wasn't sure if she said butthead or something else.
So I was just clarifying whether I can push, because I do like to push.
I didn't want to swear on the Michael Moles show.
You can't do it.
We have only the highest standards here, and I take your point absolutely.
I don't look at them and say that that's America.
I look at, you know, what...
The people I run into every day on the train who help me when I drop something.
I look at America as being full of people who I can connect with.
If the people I run into on the train are America, then this country is in a lot of trouble.
Mike, is nationalism a bad word?
Nationalism isn't a bad word.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with saying that our country is great and our country is exceptional and our country is different and unique in the history of mankind, because it is.
But I think John McCain knows a thing or two about nonsense patriotism.
He knows a thing or two about chicken hawks.
He's been debating them his whole career.
And he knows a thing or two about giving and sacrificing so much for a war that might have been not well conceived or well thought of from a political standpoint.
What's fascinating, though, about the John McCain versus Donald Trump thing is my friends in both parties who one day love John McCain, the next day hate him, one day think he's a hero, the next day are slamming him.
When he stands up that he's going to vote for this, they say, oh, he's great.
And this is really indicative of politics in 2017.
There is no truth.
There is no sense of an absolute strong moral concept.
Couldn't agree more.
Thank you.
That's an unfortunate product of our post-modernity, but we're going to try to fix it here.
We're going to keep pandering like the New York Times says we does, pandering to our audience because it likes the truth.
Mike, thank you for being here.
Appreciate it.
We'll see you next time, a semi-almost possibly reasonable Democrat.
