President Donald Trump is facing war on all fronts. He’s been accused of insensitivity toward a gold star mother, former future president Hillary Clinton is slamming his North Korea strategy as “dangerous,” and rumors swirl over a Bannon-induced White House conflict with Mitch McConnell. Michael discusses the fallout. Then, Elisha Krauss, Amber Athey, and Amanda Prestigiacomo join the Panel of Deplorables to talk gay Nazi Jews, Rand Paul’s smacking around John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and elementary schools cancelling Halloween in favor of the politically correct “Orange and Black” spirit day.
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President Donald Trump is facing war on all fronts.
He's been accused of insensitivity toward a gold star widow.
Former future President Hillary Clinton is slamming his North Korea strategy as dangerous.
And rumors swirl over a Bannon-induced White House conflict with Mitch McConnell.
We'll discuss the fallout.
Join the panel of deplorables to talk gay Nazi Jews, Rand Paul's smacking around John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and elementary schools canceling Halloween in favor of the politically correct Orange and Black Spirit Day.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show We have so much to get to today It's just war, war, war the whole time Alicia Krause from the conversation at the Daily Wire is making her panel of deplorables debut But before we get to any of that, I have very good news Especially for me, but I guess for all of us We have a new sponsor We have a sponsor, we're going to keep the lights on Yeah, keep my job
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Okay, we've got so much to get to right now.
Let's begin with this story that's all over the news.
Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, it's always some Florida woman, has come out swinging against President Trump with an allegation that one of her constituents, a Gold Star widow, received a phone call from Trump after her son, Sergeant LaDavid Johnson, was killed in Niger two weeks ago.
Wilson alleged that, this is the Congresswoman, alleged that Trump told the widow, quote, well, I guess he knew what he signed up for, but I guess it still hurt.
Oh.
We don't know what he said.
We do know that this Florida congresswoman is pretty kooky and she comes from a far-left ideological background.
She famously introduced a congressional resolution to honor Trayvon Martin.
She called for Trump's impeachment a couple months ago and she wears these weird hats all the time.
The timing is also a little coincidental.
Just a couple days ago, Trump suggested that Obama didn't call Gold Star families when soldiers were killed in action.
Now we have this Democratic rep swinging back.
A great guy on Twitter, Matt's Ideas Shop, laid it out fairly well in a likely-unlikely diagram.
Because look, Trump may have said something to that effect.
He's not exactly the most eloquent guy in the world.
He might have said something to the effect of, my condolences, your husband made the ultimate sacrifice.
He bravely enlisted.
He knew what he signed up for.
He's ready to give his life.
He's a hero.
So that's one version of this, some series of those kind of lines.
Or he might have said, hey, yo, it's me, the Donald.
Your husband knew what he signed up for.
Are we cool?
What do you think it is?
I'm sorry.
I don't care how inarticulate Donald Trump can be.
I don't think it was the latter.
He may have said some comment to that effect, but the Democratic congresswoman who's made this a cudgel, given the timing and given her past history, I think it is Worth questioning what her political motives are here.
Regardless.
Thank you.
and he's now being used as a blunt political cudgel by a cynical Democrat congresswoman.
It's really awful, and we shouldn't give it – we should address it, obviously.
We should address the allegations, but we should not spend more time talking about this cynical woman, this Democratic propagandist that, even if she's alluding to some truthful comment here, is obviously twisting it for political purposes.
In other war-related news, my battle axe of a cousin, Hillary Clinton, is despicably mouthing off on foreign soil.
The former future president slammed President Trump's North Korea policy as, quote, Dangerous and short-sighted.
Today, during a speech in South Korea, she alleged, quote, picking fights with Kim Jong-un just puts a smile on his face.
I think the real quote went like, what happened?
Something like that.
But we were translating it, obviously, for the American audience.
The irony defies reason, but then the Clintons are immune to shame.
Donald Trump is Clemens von Metternich compared to Hillary Clinton.
Let's just establish that first.
She has no credibility here.
Her disastrous handling of foreign affairs, from the failed Russia reset to her awful handling of crises in Egypt and Libya and elsewhere in the world, it should disqualify her from saying boo about geopolitics.
But more than that, she, and particularly her husband, bear the lion's share of the blame for the North Korean nuclear crisis that we find ourselves in.
In 1994, people might not remember this, Bill Clinton refused to respond when Kim Jong-il pursued nuclear weapons and when Kim Jong-il refused to allow weapons inspectors to review two of his nuclear waste sites in complete violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Then Hillary Clinton was not just First Lady, she was also later Secretary of State.
She executed a North Korea strategy known as, this is not a joke, Strategic Patience.
Strategic patience.
You couldn't make that up in political satire.
And that strategic patience was very unstrategic because it only allowed the threat to grow.
President Trump and Secretary of State Tillerson, their handling of North Korea has apparently been pretty good so far from what we can tell.
It's very hard.
We're getting mixed signals.
We don't really know what's happening.
And we're not dead.
We haven't been obliterated yet.
You know, Trump secured the release of that American student, Otto Warmbier, who was jailed by the Kim regime during the Obama administration.
But fine.
Hillary is bitter that she lost the presidency twice.
She can't get over it.
She's clearly being ripped apart from the inside out.
Who cares?
The real offense here is that she's criticizing U.S. policy on foreign soil.
There has long been a taboo against doing this.
You know, we have robust political debates at home, and then abroad, American citizens are supposed to present a united front.
They're supposed to refrain from criticizing the present policy overseas.
Hillary, however, is immune from shame.
Patriotism be damned.
My cousin.
What a traumatic family reunion this will be next year.
The third battlefront that President Trump faces right now is the apparently Steve Bannon-induced war between the White House and Mitch McConnell.
President Trump, standing next to McConnell at this press conference, claimed, quote, My relationship with this gentleman is outstanding.
Very Trumpian.
There's probably an exclamation point at the end.
McConnell echoed this.
He said, Contrary to what some of you have reported, we are together totally on this agenda to move America forward.
But then Donald Trump, in typical fashion, went on to say that he also, quote, totally understands the frustrations of Steve Bannon.
And Bannon plans to run primaries against congressional leadership and establishment Republicans.
Bannon has declared hashtag war on the Republican establishment and the conservative establishment for that manner.
For analysis on this last bit on the Bannon, McConnell, Trump, who knows what's happening, we have to bring on our expert panel of deplorables.
An all-female panel just to celebrate Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood falling apart.
We decided to bring all the ladies on the show today.
We have Amber Athey from The Daily Caller.
We have Amanda Prestigiacomo from The Daily Wire.
And making her panel of deplorables debut, we have Alicia Krause, our old friend Alicia Krause, who you might have seen in the conversation yesterday with Andrew Klavan.
And now The Daily Wire's very own.
Ladies, thank you for being here.
Thanks.
First question, Alicia.
In the war between Trump, McConnell, and Bannon, who is winning?
I don't know that Bannon is at war with Trump.
I have this kind of conspiracy theory that he is working behind the scenes and talking to Donald and is like, I got your back, bro.
And he really is doing these things that he thinks maybe are helping Donald Trump.
I think that...
I think that Bannon might be winning this game, though, because as we saw in the Alabama primary or the Alabama race down there, it ended up being Bannon's guy that won, not Trump's guy.
And I think that Trump would like to blame Mitch McConnell for that.
I don't know if he's going to end up coming out on top with that argument.
But I think that Bannon is apparently recruiting candidates across the country to pursue and push forward legislation and agendas that Bannon thinks are what Trump should be doing that he isn't doing anymore.
And that's how Bannon positioned his exit from the White House.
He said, I'm not being fired.
I was always going to leave.
I can help Trump a lot more from the outside than I can on the inside.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe it isn't.
Amber, is Bannon just trying to position himself in the best possible light, trying to make himself seem like a player here?
I think that's what Ben Shapiro suggested earlier today.
Or is he acting on behalf of the White House, like Alicia thinks?
I think it's a little bit of both.
I think Alicia is right that Bannon is...
Probably of the mindset that he's helping Trump by opposing these supposedly anti-Trump candidates.
But at the same time, I don't think he really has as much power as he lets on.
When you look at the Alabama race, Roy Moore was already really, really popular and slated to win that race.
So I'm not sure how much of an effect Bannon really had there.
And if you consider the fact that he thinks that being at Breitbart gives him a lot of power, that would mean that places like the Daily Caller and the Daily Wire would also be able to Amanda, Trump has been saying very nice things about Mitch McConnell, regardless of the Bannon dynamics, regardless of whether they're working in collusion.
He's been saying nice things about, like, one of the most detested Republicans in the country.
Pigs are flying on a cold day in hell.
How long will the bromance last?
As long as it's beneficial to Trump.
I mean, he can turn on McConnell at the drop of a hat.
So Trump knows how to play this game better than anyone.
If you think it's beneficial to, you know, cozy up to McConnell and have that presser where they're all buddy-buddy, then he'll do it.
And then the second he wants to put the blame back on McConnell, he will.
And we've seen that before.
So it's just whatever is beneficial to Trump, he'll spin it in a way that, you know, it's...
You know, McConnell's good or bad.
Right.
It's whatever he is.
People are knocking him because they say he has a tough relationship with the truth.
You know, he says one thing one day, he says one thing the next.
I actually really like it.
I do think the New Yorker thing is at play with my read on that because that is just how New Yorkers talk.
They'll come out, they'll say, oh yeah, I love this guy.
He's like a brother to me.
Yeah, he's doing the great work out there.
Billy Stab's doing the back.
Yeah, and then the next day, if McConnell stabs Trump in the back, he'll say, he's a total loser, I hate his guts, and who cares?
Yeah, then he'll come back around.
His, I don't want to say dishonesty, but his relationship with the truth, I think it's sort of guileless here.
You know that Donald Trump is going to do this.
You know the minute McConnell turns on him, it's going to be no holds barred.
Yeah, and it helps him kind of push whatever he wants forward because they know that he's, you know, oh, I'm in his good graces.
No, for this second.
So they know that they're going to be held accountable.
And he kind of, you know, strings them along that way.
Got to love it.
I think I compared him to Metternich earlier in the show.
I don't know if future historians will recognize the political genius of Donald Trump, but they probably should.
He's actually been working at a much higher level than I think a lot of people gave him credit for.
Okay, we've got a lot more news to get to.
We have to get to the war on Halloween before the war on Christmas.
There's now a war on Halloween.
There is so much to talk about, but...
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An Englishman who has spent 40 years as an active member of a white supremacist movement has announced that he's a gay Jew and he's retiring from neo-Nazism.
Alicia, we're talking about a Jewish neo-Nazi here.
Do we have a clip of this guy?
Were you thinking of your mom?
No.
No.
But why not?
Because that term, the Jews, you're presenting a global, faithless mass of people.
You can't personalize it.
You can't see an individual there.
Not even your mum?
No.
And that's the sort of generalization that results in six million people being deliberately murdered.
We've heard this term Jewish neo-Nazi before.
That's what all the crazy at campus lefties call Ben every time he shows up there.
This guy, it's a really interesting interview.
He explains that he joined the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists and all that because he was a loner, basically.
He didn't have any friends.
He didn't have anything to do.
Do you think, I don't want to get into too much psychobabble, do you think that explains some of these alt-right guys too?
I'm not talking about the Pepe people who are mischievous.
I'm talking about the real racist, neo-Nazi types, Richard Spencer.
Does that social ostracism explain their political actions?
Maybe potentially.
I think this also ties into the hashtag MeToo campaign.
Bear with me for a moment.
I think Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro pointed out really good points that when society doesn't have a standard that's set of what real men need to do, and then manliness in general by many in the leftist feminist movement is kind of poo-pooed on and looked down on, then unfortunately sometimes you have men that look to the wrong types of groups to create those friendships and those standards of decency that are like, Really bad.
It shouldn't be followed.
And then once they become a part of that group, they adhere to all those ideas because they don't want to lose their circle of friends.
On a very extreme level, we've seen this with ISIS and how ISIS targets young men, specifically on Twitter and in educational places and in some radical mosques around the world.
And I think that it kind of makes sense that the KKK and these neo-Nazi groups would be recruiting people and members in the same way.
But I mean, his interview was really impactful.
And a friend of the program, Bethany Mandel, has pointed out that when you target those people in a good way and befriend them and show them the face of women, Christians, Jews, gay people, black people, they have a really hard time then just identifying hatred toward the entire group because they've gotten to know you as an individual.
Of course.
I love that dynamic there, the individual versus these collective group identities.
And Yeah, I think that's certainly the case.
Even with the Me Too comparison, there is not in the culture an ideal of what masculinity should look like, of what manliness should look like.
I think it's the same with these neo-Nazi types.
They say they're defending Western civilization, but they don't really understand what Western civilization is.
Or adhere to those values.
Or adhere to those values.
So they say, we want to protect Christendom, but we want nothing to do with Christianity.
Absolutely.
Excellent analogy.
Amber, lefties call anybody on the right, racist, fascist, neo-Nazi, whatever they have.
They accuse us of hate, just as they would accuse David Duke of hate or Richard Spencer.
How do we make sure that we don't wake up someday, or woke up probably is more like it, and disavow all of the views that we hold right now?
How do we know that we're not as crazy and awful as they say that we are?
Well, part of the reason why we're not going to wake up one day and disavow our views is because, for one, Our views are rooted in truth, are not hateful, bigoted views as the left would have us believe.
So we kind of have an advantage over the people who are actually neo-Nazis because we are grounded in some kind of truth and value.
But don't you think that these neo-Nazi guys think that their racial theories are rooted in truth?
You know, and we have other theories that we ground our political views in.
How do we know that we have the right ones?
How do we know that we have the true ones?
Man, you just went full lefty on me.
You know, I think it shows why it's so important to be really careful about how we label people and how we collectivize people, because if we're going by that standard, then anyone could be a Nazi.
Anyone could be a neo-Nazi.
Anybody could be hateful.
We could easily turn that term around on the left and accuse them of being neo-Nazis.
And if they defend it, you can just say, well, Of course you don't think you are, because you don't want to, you know...
You don't want to face the facts.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it's really dangerous.
Right, yeah, exactly.
So it just shows how important language is and how people will...
If you overuse terms, they start to lose their meaning and they start to lose their value.
And we easily could turn that term around on them.
I mean, a lot of the premises that are shared by these far-fringy extremist racial groups, neo-Nazis or whatever, are premises that are indulged in by the left, that racial group identity is what defines a person rather than a person's soul, inequality before God and individuality.
By the way, I think that's why we're not going to woke up someday and realize that really we should have been lefty social justice warriors is because their premises are similarly wrong to those neo-Nazi premises.
And as Alicia suggested, we're the ones who are saying, look at the individual, judge the individual.
We're all created in God's image and we have to live out Those ideas that have caused the West and that have been developed in the West.
But part of these problems, I mean, not to get too theological here, but going back to...
Oh, get too theological.
We're delving into Shiite Catholicism on this show, so please bring it up.
We are created in the image of God, and that's where our belief in natural law starts and the equality of man starts.
But unfortunately, in our culture, leftists have distanced God from the involvement of human beings.
Importance, right?
Or human value, especially.
I mean, look at what they do to babies in utero.
And so therefore, that individualism isn't important to them because they do like the group think of you are this and this group is more important than this because it's more politically appropriate.
Or it can be a political use to them and a tool to them at that time.
And it started years and years ago with the growth of progressivism and that movement away from where does natural law come from and the belief in our founders that this has to come from God and this is where this right came from.
And it's not being taught to kids today.
I mean, I was hashtag homeschooled all 12 years.
But I've even talked to fellow homeschoolers and other millennials.
I'm a grandma millennial.
You're on the younger millennial age.
I'm like 31 over here.
Stop it.
You're going to make me blush.
But...
You know, so I'm a few years older than you.
It isn't taught to an entire swath of Americans, and it hasn't been for 20-plus years.
So really, I think, in order to not wake up one day, and to answer your question a little bit, we have to start training people of where those rights come from and what America really stands for.
And that's where it begins.
It doesn't begin when you're donating to politicians.
It begins a lot earlier than that.
And it's how the left has gained so much ground.
Amanda, this guy was a member of the National Front.
It's a very fringy, far-right UK political party.
It doesn't have any seats in Parliament or anything.
It's fascistic.
It's nationalistic.
Is there any fear for us that good old red, white, and blue American nationalism, American patriotism, that it will morph into a grotesque, like, national front racial populism?
I mean, there's always the threat of that, I suppose.
I mean, we've seen it, you know, it's basically reactionary, right?
Like, we've seen this during the 2016 election where we had the rise of the alt-right maybe a couple years before that because the left As they keep moving left, they perpetuate this groupthink, identity politics.
They keep moving that way.
And then plus on top of that, they call their opponents, you know, racists and bigots and homophobes and all this and that.
You kind of have this reaction to kind of, you know, kind of fill into that same identity politics thinking and then kind of fulfilling that prophecy that they called you.
So sure, there's definitely...
A threat of that happening.
And like I said, we kind of have like this very small minority of actual potent white supremacists, because again, the alt-right is not actually all white supremacists.
Like 300 people, yeah.
Right.
It's a very, very small.
But I'm just saying, as the left keeps pushing left and they keep playing up the identity politics, sure, you can see a reaction.
And then also, I mean, I don't know how PC this is, but I think a mixing of demographics as we keep getting more mixed and there's no assimilation, that's the key part, when they're not adopting American values, you're going to have some conflict, unfortunately.
Assimilation is huge, too.
That can kind of push this alt-right movement a little, give it more prominence.
Got to turn up that temperature in that melting pot.
Got to make it all melt a little faster.
Make a big, delicious American goop a nice fondue.
A nice American fondue is what I want.
An elementary school in Massachusetts has canceled Halloween.
They have canceled Halloween for not being, quote, inclusive enough.
In its place, they will now hold Black and Orange Spirit Day.
Amber, is this why Trump won?
Is this story the reason Donald Trump won the presidency?
Yeah, actually, yes, this is the exact story.
Yeah, actually it is, because this is just another example of how people think it's more important to not offend other people's sensibilities than it is to, I don't know, have fun or even just promote truth.
You know, I think this black and orange day sounds a little bit racist, you know, throwing a term black around like that.
What's that about?
And orange against people of El Presidente's descent.
Exactly.
But this happens all the time.
Google actually was being called out, I think it was yesterday, because they added this part to Google Maps where if you click on a route, they tell you how many calories you could burn if you walk the route instead of driving.
And then it's like, oh, well, if you Could burn 300 calories.
That's three mini cupcakes.
And people got really offended by that and were really triggered by it and forced them to remove this.
So apparently not offending people is more important than, I don't know, combating the obesity epidemic in the United States.
Amber, as a gavone myself, I am deeply triggered by that.
I don't want to know how many calories.
Now all I can think about is cupcakes.
The story, this Halloween story, it gets to my central theory of the left, that the left, what it really wants is the hollow shell, the husk of an institution, of a great institution, but not the animating principle of it, not all the stuff that's inside.
So they drink decaf coffee, they get fancy university degrees without a university education, and You see it in a lot of churches.
I actually thought about this in Westminster.
It has the husk, the Anglican Church, the husk of liturgy and traditional church, but it's gotten watered down in a lot of its principles and its dogma.
So, you know, it's been much like my dear alma mater, Yale, has been invaded by the left and hollowed out because of it.
Is Black and Orange Day, Alicia, is it...
Actually different than Halloween?
What is the difference here?
If you change those words, what changes?
I actually read this piece and I was like, wait a second.
Is this any different than Halloween?
They will take my daughter's elementary school Halloween parade from me in my cold, dead hands.
I am all for the full family Halloween costumes.
You're amazing at Halloween costumes.
Seriously, if you like Halloween, get married and have kids and then you can enjoy it forever.
It is amazing.
But I don't know how different it is.
And it's so funny because in their effort to not offend anyone, I think that they are really offending more people.
I mean, Halloween is like a pagan holiday.
Growing up in the Bible Belt of America, like, we couldn't celebrate Halloween.
We had to dress up as Bible characters.
I've heard they do this thing called a hell house where you go and you get scared by sin.
So there's actually people that they're trying to appease the leftist politically correct people, but they're probably unknowingly appeasing a lot of Southern Baptists somewhere in the country.
It's going to have the opposite effect that they intended.
Tell them that and they will immediately reinstate Halloween.
It will be a matter of minutes.
Amanda, the reason they canceled Halloween, allegedly, is because Halloween is not inclusive enough.
You know, the holiday where you dress up like whatever you want and get candy corn.
What is meant by inclusion by these school administrators?
Yeah.
I'm so mad you asked me this because I had the same question when I was reading the piece.
Like, I really had no idea.
I was like, how?
You can dress as anything you want.
I don't know.
Honestly, this is kind of like...
Infowars-y, but I don't know.
Bring it on.
This is the Conspiracy Central, baby.
Bring it to us.
I don't know.
Maybe there's some religious, I don't know, somebody complaining, so they want to preemptively stop everything, and it's probably not a Christian family.
I don't know.
I mean, who knows?
I mean, everyone's terrified of everything these days, so perhaps I just wanted to preemptively appease people who are I'm not going to celebrate Halloween, and I don't think it's the Christians that they're looking out for, so I don't know.
Maybe that's the good unintended consequence of this.
It's like, put the Christ back in Christmas, it's put the Hallows back in Halloween, put the Saints back in it.
I don't know.
I'm always trying to look on the bright side of these things.
Yeah, actually, I don't like Halloween.
Like, I'm that old.
I'm like, you know, inside, I'm like a 75-year-old Southern Baptist preacher.
Like, I hate it.
I'm like, oh, no.
Like, I don't want to do this.
I want, like, can we just be all nice and, like, sing church hymns?
Like, I don't like it, actually.
That is so beautiful.
Because, Amanda, you do have a reputation in your writing.
Of being a little, you know, on occasion curmudgeonly.
I do love the idea of like a little trick-or-treater knocking on your door.
You just rip the candy from them.
Have everybody sing like hymns.
And that's beautiful.
That's a beautiful thing.
Oh, yeah.
Just all for the greater good.
Very Christian.
You're probably saving their souls.
Moving on, Senator Rand Paul.
has recently slammed John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
I know you're shocked.
He slammed them for parading as conservatives.
Senator Paul tweeted, Senators McCain and Graham are torpedoing the budget by insisting on busting the budget caps for more spending.
Amanda, does Rand Paul have any credibility here?
He's been torpedoing conservative legislation all year, except that he's doing it from a libertarian perspective instead of from a neoconservative perspective.
I gotta go with Rand Paul here.
He's the only one who somewhat sticks to conservative libertarian values, and yes, he's been kind of a thorn in the side of President Trump, but as we just saw with the healthcare thing, he helps with that executive order to allow more, to get rid of our regulations.
So I think, I mean, I don't want to sound like a shill for Rand Paul here, but I feel like he's actually trying to push something semi-libertarian, semi-conservative, because Because, my goodness, McCain and Graham, they're all the way on the left.
So I kind of think that he does have some credibility, just because every now and then he'll stick to his principles.
I will say, I've been hitting...
I've ran Paul a lot in the last few weeks because he's been completely useless in the Senate recently.
But he is on the side of fiscal responsibility here.
He's brought up a term that people have not been discussing, even conservatives haven't been discussing all year, which is federal spending, which is the national debt, which is debt to GDP. Amber, do you think that in this age of cultural battles, which is clearly what we're in, it's clearly what we elected Donald Trump to do, can debt to GDP ratios still excite conservatives?
Gosh, I really hope so.
I'm reminded of the days back from like 2008 to 2012 where the Tea Party was really popular and they were all about bringing down the national debt.
And even if this isn't something that's super popular among maybe Donald Trump's base, there are still conservatives in Congress who care about this.
We saw this in all of these debates about the disaster relief bills.
Just yesterday, a bunch of conservatives voted against a bill that would help Puerto Rico because they were upset that a lot of the spending wasn't going to straight disaster relief.
I think Mark Meadows was among those, Jim Jordan, So, it's still something that they talk about.
It's not as to the front of the conversation as it used to be.
But I think President Trump would be really smart to get on board with lowering the national debt because he loves to talk about GDP growth.
And as we all know, a $20 trillion national debt is not going to be super useful for growing the economy.
When you have something like 90 percent debt to GDP or approaching 100 percent debt to GDP, that is a drag on the economy.
It would be nice if they did that.
Back to McCain.
Alicia, John McCain has malignant brain cancer.
It's unlikely that he will be around this time next year.
But this guy is going to go down swinging.
He's going to swing against his political opponents.
He's going to probably swing against his own brain cancer.
You've got to, even if you don't agree with McCain on a lot of things, as I don't, You do kind of have to admire that spirit.
I mean, this guy is piss and vinegar pretty much till the end.
Do you think that conservatives, knowing that John McCain is not long for this world, can we in good taste fight back against his terrible legislative goals?
Well, one, I hope that he does fight this and win.
I mean, he is the maverick, and I think that that would have been something that they should have pushed a little more back in 2008 when he was running against then-Senator Barack Obama.
I think that there were a lot of pros of McCain's character and past experience that the people that were working on the campaign didn't work on enough.
And I think that there are still members of the GOP in the Senate that can go to the Senator and they can work together.
I really don't think that he wants to go down destroying his side of the aisle.
I don't think that at all.
But I think it could be interesting to see what happens.
And listen, I mean, Rand Paul has been as divisive to goals of the GOP as John McCain and Lindsey Graham have.
So I think that there just tends to be a lot of attention on Senator McCain because of where he is in his life and the specific things he said about the president that maybe Rand Paul isn't saying.
Right.
And I hope, you know, John McCain is a mixed bag to conservatives.
He's been a rhino for a long time, but he also has been a Republican fighter.
Before he ran for president in 2000, he was pretty reliably on the right, voted pretty reliably with Republicans.
It would be nice if in this...
Last part of his career, if he would come back and help us out and...
And affect some policy rather than just run down Trump's agenda.
But I don't know.
I don't think he watches my show.
We should make him.
There are some things, to be fair, there are some things in Trump's agenda that ain't so conservative.
And so, you know, if McCain is going to run down the parts of Trump's agenda that aren't conservative, then I am all for him in that way.
Sure, sure.
But we hope, we just hope that something like Obamacare repeal or something that should be a no-brainer, you know, that he'll come around on it.
But I guess we'll have to wait and see.
That's our show today.
Panel, thank you for being here.
Amber Athey from The Daily Caller, Amanda Prestigiacomo from The Daily Wire, and first-timer, our old pal, Alicia Krause.
Can't wait to have you all back.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Be sure to check out my new podcast with Andrew Klavan.
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