A Muslim terrorist—"evil loser," to borrow a phrase—drove a Home Depot truck along a bike path near the World Trade Center, killing eight and wounding dozens. In the wake of this attack, the hack news media focus on the real threat: Islamophobia! Where does the trouble really lie? Then, Bradley Devlin, Kevin Glass, and Paul Bois join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss Donald Trump Jr.’s excellent Halloween trolling, more celebrity groping, and tax reform. Remember tax reform?
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Yesterday, a Muslim terrorist, evil loser, to borrow a phrase, and Uzbeki immigrant named Saifulo Saipov drove a Home Depot truck along a bike path near the World Trade Center, killing eight and wounding dozens.
In the wake of this attack, the hack news media focus on the real threat, Islamophobia.
We'll analyze where the trouble really lies.
Then, Bradley Devon, Kevin Glass, and his eminence, Paul Bois, Join the panel of deplorables to discuss Donald Trump Jr.'s excellent Halloween trolling, more celebrity groping, when will it end?
Never.
And tax reform.
Do you remember tax reform?
I remember it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
This was pretty bad yesterday.
I actually used to live as recently as a few years ago, like six or ten blocks from the attack, from where it happened.
Fortunately, none of my pals or family roommates were injured in the attack, but it's another World Trade Center terrorist attack.
It's the first one we've seen in a very long time.
We know the story.
We know what happened.
This guy drove a Home Depot truck up the bike path and We killed eight people and wounded 11.
His name is Saifulo Saipov.
And President Trump responded quickly.
So he called Saipov an animal.
He suggested that we ought to consider sending him to Guantanamo Bay.
And he also called on Congress to end the diversity visa program.
I felt this was an excellent response.
I thought it hit three very important points.
And it was swift.
It was within hours of the incident.
And he immediately addressed the attack itself.
We saw in previous administrations Barack Obama didn't address the Benghazi terrorist attack, didn't call it a terrorist attack for days, for many days after the attack.
So he addressed it itself.
He explained what matters about it.
Now, he did get political.
He blamed Chuck Schumer for making America, quote, import Europe's problems.
So forget just identifying it as a Muslim terrorist attack.
He's painting a picture.
Donald Trump does this very well with language, and he does it in a way that makes us think that he doesn't know how to string two words together.
But he's painting a picture for us.
So rather than saying he's an evil terrorist, he's an evil loser even, he's a He's saying we're importing Europe's problems because we see Europe.
We see what happens in Europe on the news all the time.
We see the epidemics of rape.
We see the constant terrorist attacks.
We see no-go zones in different European countries.
So now we have that image.
I thought it was rhetorically really smart to do that.
Then he addressed justice for this specific individual.
He didn't gloss over the individual.
He said he focused on this guy and he suggested Gitmo.
Now, I don't know that we can send this guy to Gitmo.
He is a permanent resident.
He's got legal status here.
However, he's not a citizen.
So he came over here because of this 1990 law, the Immigration Act of 1990, and the diversity visa program.
So you basically just pick randomly from groups that are not well established in the United States where there aren't a ton of them in the U.S., and then you have a lottery and they get to come into the country.
So he's pointing to this guy.
I don't know.
He isn't a citizen.
Perhaps we could send him down to Gitmo and have swifter justice.
By saying that, he's pointing out The trouble with our criminal justice system, one trouble is it goes on and on and on and it gets hung up in the courts and we rarely see justice dispensed.
We see this in the death penalty.
Plenty of people receive the death penalty.
Very few people actually get the penalty itself.
They receive the judgment but they don't get the penalty itself.
So then the third thing that leads right into is he addressed a policy suggestion to prevent these attacks from happening.
So all the time Whenever some incident occurs, specifically with gun violence and shootings, people on the left call for policies that would not have prevented the shootings.
They say, we need to ban high-capacity rounds of ultra-super-duper assault rifle things because they don't know anything about guns.
And then we find out, as Marco Rubio pointed out brilliantly in the 2016 campaign, that none of the gun control proposals that Democrats had proposed would have actually prevented these attacks.
In this case, however, Trump's proposal would have prevented this attack because the guy, the evil loser, the terrorist, made it through because of a 1990 law that Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer So he pins Schumer right on this.
He says, you voted for this law.
This law allowed this guy into the country.
If we didn't have such a ridiculous law as random lotteries to bring in people for no particular reason, if we had a merit-based immigration regime, for instance, this would not have happened, or it's likely that this would not have happened.
Really smart.
Obviously, though, we accuse Democrats of playing politics with tragedies very often.
Certainly this is playing politics with the tragedy, but at least in this case we do see a direct connection between the suggestion and the tragedy, whereas when Democrats politicize gun violence and mass shootings, we see very little relation between the policy proposal and the event itself.
Largely because short of repealing the Second Amendment, none of those proposals would stop these mass shootings.
So Schumer responded, of course.
The most dangerous place in the country and the most dangerous place in New York is, of course, the space between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.
He said, quote, I'm calling on the president to rescind his proposed cuts to this vital anti-terrorism funding immediately, right?
He's basically distracting over here a little prestidigitation to use the language of magicians and talking about random funding when really we should be talking about the law that allowed this guy to come into the country that Chuck Schumer voted for.
The mainstream media, in typical fashion, they focused on the real threat.
Salon.com ran this headline.
Quote, after the New York City terror attack, Fox News leans into nationalism and Islamophobia.
North Country Public Radio says this headline, art as a way to resist negative images and Islamophobia.
Splinter News did this.
NBC News did this from NBC.
Muslim Americans brace for backlash after New York attack.
They're bracing.
That's the story.
Not the attack that just happened, but the bracing that's going to happen for the inevitable backlash that inevitably never happens.
Anchors and writers from MSNBC, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, on and on and on, use the same Islamophobia line.
New York Times, early reporting on the attack, refused to report the language properly.
They wouldn't do it.
They would not use the phrase, which is the war cry that the terrorist shouted when he had finished his attack.
Instead, the Times used the phrase, which is an okay sort of mistranslation of that phrase into English.
Their news alert headline read, The motorist yelled, God is great in Arabic, officials said.
CNN did exactly the same thing.
Their lower third reporting on the attack said, Suspect was yelling, God is great in Arabic.
The Associated Press did this in April when they reported that a Muslim terrorist yelled, God is great.
Best of all, here is former journalist Jake Tapper's take on the jihadi battle cry.
They heard the driver saying, yelling, Al-Akbar, Al-Akbar, during this incident, which is now leading authorities to believe that this is, as a result, that this is now a terrorism case.
And I'm just getting an update now.
The FBI is taking over this case because it appears now that this is terrorism.
The Arabic chant, Allah Akbar, God is great, sometimes said under the most beautiful of circumstances, and too often we hear of it being said in moments like this.
It's beautiful.
The most beautiful of circumstances.
That's the story, right?
That's the first thing you should say when reacting to that news.
The terrorists screamed a beautiful phrase that has also denoted Muslim holy war for 14 centuries.
Look, he said that it was used in bad circumstances, too.
But the first thing that we should note, the important point here, is that the phrase is also used in nice circumstances sometimes.
And sure, that might be true.
Contrary to popular belief, the term Allahu Akbar It also doesn't mean God is great.
It means God is greater or God is greatest, probably more precisely translated.
And sure, it's a phrase used in times of joy.
It's used in times of distress, joy, birth, death, holy festivals, on and on.
Sort of misses the point, doesn't it?
Because Allahu Akbar is the ubiquitous battle cry of Muslim terrorists that we've seen for decades and decades.
In the notes of the terrorists who flew the planes on September 11th, we're talking about a Muslim terrorist attack here.
Here is a relevant appearance of the phrase Allahu Akbar in the Hadith.
The prophet set out for Kaibar and reached it at night.
He used not to attack if he reached the people at night till the day broke.
So when the day dawned, the Jews came out with their bags and spades.
When they saw the prophet, they said, Muhammad and his army.
The prophet said, Allahu Akbar, and Kaibar is ruined.
Now, Andrew Klavan, who never gets into Twitter spats, despite my telling him how fun they are, he pointed this out to Jake Tapper on Twitter.
He pointed out to Tapper that he was basically saying...
There are good people on both sides, aren't there, folks?
The thing that the mainstream media excoriated Trump for saying in the wake of Charlottesville.
Tapper defended his statement, then he went further and he accused Drew of lying.
So Drew responded, he said, all sorts of things can be said at weddings and births.
It's an inane point that purposely begs the question, the nature of our enemy.
Tapper unhingedly and bizarrely continued to call Andrew Klavan a liar.
But of course he provided no evidence for that accusation because Jake Tapper is a Democrat hack who plays a journalist on a fictional television program.
This does, however, make clear a key factor in the mainstream media's recent self-immolation, which is their abusive language.
We're living in an age marked, defined by language that is not clear and direct, but of euphemisms, words that make harsh things seem mild, bad truths appear good, and they make clear events seem obscure.
Democrats just last week ran an ad against Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie depicting a Republican truck mowing down children of ethnic minority.
Here it is.
Come on!
Is this what Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie mean by the American dream?
Latino Victory Fund paid for and is responsible for the content of this advertisement.
That's the threat, huh?
That's what we're worried about.
We're worried about Tea Partiers.
We're worrying about the Gadsden flag flying on a truck that's mowing down.
After the last two days, Michael, we're going to see an increase on the cool-down period of trucks.
That's right.
You know, that's what we're seeing, right?
That's before our eyes?
Not quite.
The American people aren't stupid.
We know that the terrorists didn't scream, God is great.
We know what war looks like.
We know what peace looks like.
We know which ideas and vessels for those ideas threaten our lives and our civilization.
The more the mainstream media insists that our eyes are lying, the less credibility they'll have.
Scott Adams has a great piece on language and terrorism today too, which we'll try to get to later on.
Before that, let's bring on our panel to discuss all of this.
We have an all-male panel today.
I begged Marshall not to do this to me, but I guess it's my punishment for all of the potpourri yesterday on the show.
So let's introduce, of course, His Eminence, Paul Bois.
We also have Kevin Glass from the Heartland Institute, and we also have Bradley Devlin from the University of Berkeley, the college Republican head up there.
Gentlemen, thank you for being here.
Bradley, let's begin with you.
Should we replace this diversity immigration system with a merit-based system?
Absolutely.
I think it's ridiculous that we're talking about a diversity lottery system with really low requirements to enter that lottery.
And then once we have all of these low-skilled immigrants from countries that don't historically have a lot of immigrants to the United States, we're then gonna just pick randomly out of that crop To let them into the United States with the rate of 50,000 per year.
I think implementing the RAISE Act is gonna be something that's really important moving forward for the Republican Party and for the well-being of this country.
Sadly, the route to passing that doesn't look too good because Trump didn't use political clout with his DACA policy, I think, properly.
But hopefully we can make some gains in establishing competition and meritocracy in immigration policy.
Fair enough.
Kevin, should we send this guy to Gitmo?
Can we send this guy to Gitmo?
And if we can, should we?
I'm not familiar with the legal ramifications here.
If we could send him to Gitmo, I don't believe that we should.
I think that trying him in the American justice system and showing that our way of life, our legal system, is the best one in the entire world is the best way to send a message here.
Fair enough.
This is an argument we heard a lot during the Bush administration.
That said, President Trump won because of his insistence that Barack Obama's been weak on terror, that Barack Obama was emptying out Guantanamo Bay.
That he gave up generals back to the battlefield because he was so nervous about the implications for alleged American ideals that we have a base where we put illegal combatants in war.
I'm not so sure.
Your Eminence, Mr.
Bois, Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, who is like the smartest cartoonist ever, I think.
He had a great column today on the language of persuasion.
And he argued that it's counterproductive to call these terrorists cowards, to call them terrorists, to lay invective on them, because it either plays into their hands and makes them seem fearsome and that they struck terror into our hearts, or it just doesn't ring true.
To call them a coward, he isn't a coward.
He might be evil, but he isn't a coward.
He risked his life, thought he was going to give up his life for this idea system, this jihad.
So he points out that it's quite effective to call them evil losers like Donald Trump does, evil losers who are going to hell because then it introduces a little doubt into their minds.
You know, into their view of what they're doing, and it also accurately portrays them.
There's a little bit of truth there.
There's a lot of truth that these guys are losers and evil.
So my question is, should we be changing our political language in this dialogue from the language we've used for 25 years?
And the harder question is, was it a miscalculation for President Bush to call Islam the, quote, famously quoted, religion of peace?
Yes.
Well, as Confucius said, Michael, we have to call things by their proper labels, and calling Islam a religion of peace is not calling it by its proper label in the least.
Islam is not, nor has ever been, a religion of peace.
There may be aspects of it that pertain to natural law that create virtue in the individual adherence of Islam, but Islam as a whole at its very substance is about violence, is about subjugation, is about domination.
That's been true since the age of Mohammed.
That's very true today.
There's really no disputing that at this point.
So the question now before us is what do we refer to Islam as or the partakers of Islamic terrorism?
Do we call them just evil terrorists?
Do they call them monsters?
Do we call them, as President Trump has postulated, evil losers?
I like to think in this matter, I like to think of screw tape and the nature of how demons and evil has been portrayed throughout literature when it's up in the face of good.
And that is really evil by its very nature, according to the Catholic perspective, is really kind of stupid.
And it really does look like a total loser.
It talks a big game.
It puffs itself up.
And it's like, we're going to do this.
We're going to rebel against the order.
We're going to rebel against God.
But it really just looks stupid and pathetic and sad.
And I really do think that Trump is definitely on to something by calling them evil losers.
It takes all the power out of them.
They don't look like established individuals who are carrying out something great, who are a potential threat.
They really are just losers.
And they would We'll lose in the end.
And hopefully he'll look like an evil loser at Gitmo.
I don't know.
Maybe we'll prosecute him here.
On your point of peace, it is true.
When I was 14 or 15, I read the Koran because I wanted to...
I was skeptical of lefties even then.
And they kept saying it's a religion of peace and Islam means peace and all of that.
And I thought, like, well, I don't know if I totally buy that.
Let me see for myself so that I can debate my Democrat friends.
And I remember in Surah 2, there's a verse that says, make not Allah's name an excuse against your oaths in doing good or acting rightly or making peace between persons.
And I remember that because it sticks out as a passage that calls for peace.
But then also there are like a gazillion passages that call for war and hacking at people's necks and surprising them while they pray and not being friends with the Jews and the Christians.
So yeah, to say Islam is peace or something certainly doesn't tell you the whole story.
We have to move on from these unimportant aspects like theology and politics to something more important, which is trolling.
That's what we should really be talking about all the time.
Donald Trump Jr.
is just really becoming the troller in chief.
He tweeted out a photo yesterday of his little daughter with a bucket of candy, and it said, I am going to take half of Chloe's candy tonight.
And give it to some kid who sat at home.
It's never too early to teach her about socialism.
So, Kevin, this was hilarious and I loved it.
But is it wrong?
Is it in bad taste for a politician or a political figure to use their children or a photo of their children to make a point?
I'm not sure about that.
And also, I'm not sure if...
Do we consider Donald Trump Jr.
to be a politician or a political figure?
I mean, he's not elected, obviously.
I don't know if he's formally or informally an advisor to any politician.
He certainly weighs in on politics a lot.
He goes on a lot of political shows.
Well, sure, but, like, celebrities do that, you know?
So, like, Mike Rowe on Twitter might say something funny that's political.
And he's not a politician.
I don't consider this opening his children up really to politics.
I do consider it a poor example of the socialism idea in that, you know, Halloween is at its base a holiday about going over to your neighbors' houses and asking them for free stuff.
And we can consider that work or labor or something like that, but I think you go next door and ask them for Reese's, and that's not labor, and you shouldn't take your kid's candy for that.
No, but Kevin, it's even worse.
I'm just picking nits with a silly analogy.
It is funny to obviously teach your kids good hard lessons when they're young.
But it's even worse because you're not going over and asking for candy.
You're extorting them.
You're saying trick or treat.
That's true.
That's an awfully nice house you got there.
It should be a shame if something happened to it.
So in that way, I guess it's a lot like socialism.
Children are actually like agents of the state.
They threaten violence unless you give them something.
That's exactly right.
You know, I have had a lot of debates with some people on Twitter in the last three seconds about this matter of the taxes.
A lot of Democrats seem not to understand not only taxation, but even what private property is.
Have this many Americans, rather, always been so economically illiterate, or have they been taught this ignorance?
Paul Bois.
I would say, Michael, that I don't think they necessarily have been taught this ignorance.
I mean, they certainly are instilled with it once they get into college and the university system.
But I think for the most part, we just haven't really instilled proper value.
I'm going to go back to screw tape here.
It's not necessarily about what they're putting in.
It's about what they're taking out.
So they take out the good values about private property, individual responsibility, and they just sort of leave vague buzzwords there for people like love and Peace and tolerance and distribution of wealth.
And nobody really has an understanding and a concept of it.
So their mind just thinks in terms of these buzzwords without in any way thinking about the weight and shape of anything.
True.
The 1%.
There's no talk of how the 1% got to be the 1% or, you know, they talk about inherited wealth.
They don't point out that within two generations, 70% of inherited wealth is gone and within three, 90% is gone.
They just use these terms and then kind of glide over them and try to advance their point.
You know, Bradley, I have been...
I'm having many debates with even my friends on the right, some of the Trump skeptics, some of the people who are overdosing on covfefe, and they are saying that it's wrong for politicians to troll.
It's wrong, it's unseemly, it's unpresidential, it's not right even for the family or for senators or whatever to troll their opponents, to troll cultural figures.
And I certainly come down on the side of the lols, but Bradley, is it wrong for Republican politicians to troll?
Absolutely not.
But we have to be selective in our trolling.
We have to understand that the left will always dominate mainstream media and they will always dominate the terms of discourse.
But we can use those terms against them when they spout foolishness all over Twitter.
I think that picking the battles we want to fight...
Like fighting against people who instantly jumped to gun control and trolling those individuals who jumped to gun control after the horrific evil deeds that we saw in New York City is very relevant and important because not only it shows the evil of the left that they will forward their political narrative no matter what, but also we get some laughs in along the way.
And I think that we lack a lot of laughs after everything's been politicized.
You know, comedy's even been politicized.
I can't even watch Late night TV without being told that if I like my guns, I want everyone else to die.
Or if I don't want to provide health care for everyone else around me, then I'm some sort of evil bigot.
You are an evil bigot.
It just has nothing to do with that.
That's completely secondary.
Right.
Yeah.
So I think restoring that humor inside the political realm a little bit Hopefully it'll bleed over to sports and comedy.
And it's terrifically effective.
The two presidents in the century who used humor as a political weapon are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
They used it very well.
Reagan was always telling jokes.
And he seemed good-natured.
Well, you know, old grandpa.
But really, they were vicious jokes.
I mean, some of them were pretty brutal.
He told one about how the democratic platform...
You know, is basically a heaping pile of excrement.
And many vicious jokes about the Soviet Union.
Donald Trump, too.
He's a funny guy.
I think that's why people can take to him.
Okay, we have a lot more to talk about.
We have a lot of celebrity groping going on.
We've got tax reform that we've got to talk about.
But if you don't subscribe, you can't see it.
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it.
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What about that though?
But what about that?
What is that?
Well, this is the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
And I don't know if you're under the misapprehension that Donald Trump is going to shut down his Twitter account.
I don't know if you're under—but that won't happen.
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It's not.
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Leftist Tears, if you don't have this vessel, to safely store them.
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We'll be right back.
There is more celebrity groping going on.
I don't even know why that's news.
I don't think it actually should be included on a news and politics segment.
But alas, we've seen a lot of headlines.
More celebrity groping.
Kevin Spacey has been accused by more people of being handsy on set, surprising nobody.
Dustin Hoffman is now accused of sexual harassment, this time against a female assistant 32 years ago.
Director Brett Ratner has been accused of harassment dating back 25 years, this time by six women.
Obviously, Kevin Spacey's accusations are from 30 years ago as well.
And the guy who kicked all of this off, Bill Cosby, his accusations are from decades ago as well.
Now, some of these accusations are relatively minor.
Some are full on rape.
They've been snowballing now since Bill Cosby's story broke.
Mr.
Bois, why are they all coming out now?
The reason why they are all coming out now is because Weinstein revealing him set off a big firestorm.
And the reason why it's different between, say, Weinstein and Cosby is because Weinstein is an individual talent.
He may have a certain level of power and a certain symbolic status in the culture, but He was not a power player like Weinstein.
Weinstein produced, I mean, countless numbers of pop cultural big movies throughout the 90s and was a major player in the Oscars.
And there was just a level of corruption that surrounded him, that enabled him to get away with all of these crimes.
And now that those floodgates are down, it's just, it's open season.
People are like, okay, we took out one.
Unless you're Ben Affleck.
He's too powerful.
They won't take him down.
It's really weird.
Yeah, it is strange that they haven't gotten Ben Affleck yet.
But I mean, people feel very now empowered to speak up.
They're like, okay, let's go out there.
Let's reveal it.
And some amazing things are happening as a result.
I mean, Kevin Spacey has just been outed as pretty much a full-blown sexual predator.
From the allegations that are springing forth as of today.
So a major change is coming to this industry and if Hollywood wants to keep this from becoming a witch hunt, which it very quickly can, is they need to assemble basically something like what the Catholic Church assembled in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition and just a good solid task force of solid investigators, of people who can really look into this and gather evidence and Dispel any things like rumors or just false accusations and really get down to the bottom and root out the predators.
Where else are you going to see a defense of the Spanish Inquisition?
On this show, folks.
That's where we're going to do it.
Now, they won't take out Affleck, though.
They won't take him out.
Everyone else is allowed to fall.
That little low house of cards, that was going to be canceled anyway.
Oh, this...
Kevin, should the decades that have passed between these alleged incidents and the allegations, should they weigh upon our consideration of them at all?
I don't think so.
I think it's a very complicated question.
Obviously, I'm not going to say that there's no such thing as women who will accuse powerful men of things that they didn't do for a number of reasons.
But the stereotype of the gross, creepy producer on the casting couch is a stereotype for a reason.
That that's what has happened in the movie industry for decades.
And so, you know, it shouldn't just be a thing where we say, that's just the price of being in the movie industry, that you have to endure sexual harassment, sexual assault, this casting couch type stuff, the Harvey Weinstein type stuff.
We shouldn't have to say that.
So, while it could be the case that there are going to be false accusations, I think we need to take seriously most of the accusations coming forward.
good point here in that Harvey Weinstein going down was incredibly powerful to this moment in the movie industry because he was, if not the most powerful man, one of the most powerful people in the movie industry.
And to say that the powerful people who may be abusers, who may be assaulters, are not protected by their power is just wrong.
There are many people who are incredibly powerful and that's why people don't come forward.
So, yes, there might be false accusations along the line, but I think taking seriously a lot of what's going on is really important because, you know, this is something that happens in the movie industry and it's It's important to break those stereotypes.
It's important to end this culture of harassment and assault that has gone on for far too long.
That's, you know, really the saddest thing personally that I can think in all this is I've never mattered enough in Hollywood to even be sexually harassed, which actually isn't, that's not even totally true.
This town is so creepy that even when you're as obscure an actor as I am, you see it creep in at auditions and at parties and things like that.
Well, for example, a person who is as powerful as Terry Crews is, who said that he was approached and groped in a pretty gross way by a male producer.
And Terry Crews is someone who you wouldn't expect anyone would be attempting to assault, but it probably happened.
It was diplomatic, yeah.
We have to move on.
We have to...
Oh, no, there is one, actually, one last aspect of this, because it...
Woody Allen, when this all broke, he said...
Woody Allen, of all people, he said, I fear that this will turn into a witch hunt.
Woody Allen, who married his stepdaughter, you know?
And...
And obviously it has.
We're in full witch hunt mode.
But two things are true.
Hollywood is still filthy, creepy, and weird.
But that is the state that the culture is in right now.
And we also see this level of awareness and probably hysteria on college campuses.
They allege that there's a massive rape culture, that 25% of women who go to college are raped.
That statistic, by the way, is totally bogus.
Nothing about, you know, the DOJ statistics backs that up at all.
But, you know, Bradley, you're on a college campus.
You're seeing this firsthand.
Is there a moral hazard to this atmosphere in which a person's career can be ruined by decades-old allegations or a person can be expelled from a university without due process?
Oh, absolutely.
I think Betsy DeVos is absolutely correct in a Taking back the Obama-era regulations on Title IX, saying that these universities were going to create kangaroo courts to handle these allegations of sexual harassment or assault.
Every fraternity has to go through sexual assault and harassment training and how to deal with it, and when they come in, they say, we're going to assemble a panel if anyone's ever accused of sexual harassment, if you are the victim or the perpetrator, and 51% of that evidence comes back to where you're most likely You most likely perpetrated this sexual harassment.
You could face expulsion.
And I immediately raised my hand and said, what do you mean 51%?
In the United States, I'm innocent until proven guilty.
The burden of proof lies in the prosecution.
Instead of setting up these kangaroo courts with bureaucrats who are paid six figures every year, why aren't we providing resources for these students to take it to the criminal justice system?
Why aren't we informing individuals, men and women, How to get to the court system, how to hire a lawyer, how to file these issues with the police, how to file a rape kit.
Why aren't we teaching these individuals how to do that?
Instead, we want to handle it bureaucratically and possibly ruin people's lives when the proper burden of proof hasn't been established.
Well, because then it would be bad PR for the university, right?
If it goes to the criminal justice system, they can't control these kangaroo courts.
And it's so disrespectful because rape is a crime.
It's a very serious crime.
It's possibly the most serious crime.
Certainly in the top two.
And to say, well, it's so serious.
We take this really seriously.
And that's why we're going to let some random professor determine the outcome of this case.
It's outrageously offensive to victims and obviously tramples over the constitutional rights of the accused.
Let's move on to a topic that always is getting lost.
You would think that we would focus on this because it's the main legislative item right now, but no one talks about it because it doesn't fit neatly into Twitter.
That is tax reform.
The much long promised tax reform, Republicans control the House, the Senate, the presidency.
When do we get our tax reform?
Kevin, you've looked at this a lot.
Are we going to get it?
Are the Republicans unified enough that we're going to get tax reform?
And if so, what's it going to look like?
Short answer, no.
Long answer, maybe.
I appreciate the bad news first and the better news later.
Exactly.
You and I must follow different Twitter accounts because I see a lot of people talking about tax reform.
If Covfefe's not in the bio, I don't follow it.
That's not something I'm interested in.
The Republicans were supposed to have put out a firm tax legislation today.
If you've checked Capitol Hill or checked the news wires, they have not.
They've run into a lot of different issues, some of which are frankly astonishing to me as someone who's been following the tax reform discussion going back many, many years, pre-Trump, obviously, pre-Obama.
The Republicans can't figure out how to pay for it.
Obviously, the Republicans during the Obama years committed to deficit neutrality as kind of a guiding principle for a lot of their legislation.
Now they have tax reform.
And even under dynamic scoring, which is measuring legislation by the effects produced by tax cuts, obviously, tax cuts grow the economy.
So at the end, you're actually going to end up with more tax revenue than you had projected if the economy grows in the way that you project it to.
But even under those rules, They're unable to make up the revenue that they're losing from what they want to do, all the tax cuts and the policies that they want to enact.
So no one can quite agree on how to pay for it.
You know, Ronald Reagan, when asked about deficit spending, he said, You have to starve the federal government.
They're never going to willingly cut their spending.
You need to cut off their revenue, and then they'll cut their spending.
Why can't we just slash and burn?
whenever we would go into a government shutdown or sequestration or something, they would say, well, the only government spending now is non-essential spending, or rather essential spending.
And you would say, why do we have non-essential spending?
Wait a second.
Why don't we get rid of all that non-essential stuff?
Is there any way for us to just slash at government spending in a way that Trump would agree with?
Obviously, he's signaled he's not willing to reform entitlements, which are the major driver of the debt and deficit.
So are we just between a rock and a hard place?
Yeah, this has been a discussion for conservatives and Republicans for a long time.
And I think there have been a lot of pretty persuasive cases made by some people on the right that starving the beast doesn't work.
We thought that that was a good plan, that the government would be forced to cut spending if they just didn't have the tax revenue.
And that's turned out to not be right.
Because it's China.
They can just borrow from China.
Right.
We've been running deficits for years now.
We're projected to run deficits forever.
And that's not spurring any action.
We're not cutting, like you said, non-essential spending in a meaningful way.
So the problem that Republicans have right now is that, yes, entitlement reform is obviously the best way to go to cut a lot of the spending.
That's what drives a lot of the spending.
with only 50 votes in the Senate because of reconciliation, arcane rules there.
You can pass tax reform with 50 votes in the Senate.
But if you accept the idea that starving the beast doesn't actually work, you don't want to just slash everything.
That would burn the economy to the ground.
It would burn the government to the ground.
It would put us in Greece territory.
It would put us in territory that has never been seen by a Western economy.
I don't like number one, three, or four, but I do not mind number two.
That one sounds sort of interesting to me.
Right.
So that's the problem that Republicans are facing right now.
And any meaningful way to pay for what they want to pay for with tax reform creates massive political opposition.
So, for example, cutting certain deductions gets you some money, but then the National Association of Realtors are mad at you.
Cutting the state and local tax deduction gets you a certain amount of money, but then the Home Builders Association is mad at you.
And a lot of those organizations are Large funders of the Republican Party.
And some of those ideas have more merit than others, but you have to make enemies if you're going to do what the Republicans are planning on doing, and so far it doesn't appear like they're willing to.
And everybody hates deductions until you try to take away their deductions.
Same thing with subsidies.
You always hear the left ranting on about how we I mean, I hated the mortgage interest deduction.
I hated the mortgage interest deduction until I bought a house.
Now it's great.
It's amazing.
It benefits me impressively.
So it's actually still probably a good idea to limit the mortgage interest deduction even though I am a massive beneficiary of it.
But yes, once you get into kind of what deductions go where, people start getting mad.
And of course we need the blank book, income tax credit.
There are a lot of things that we need to put in retroactively.
Your eminence, does Trump need this?
Does he need tax reform?
I certainly think he needs a legislative victory, Michael.
He's not going to get it with, unfortunately, Obamacare, which was a debacle in the legislative Senate and the House.
So, I mean, I certainly think tax reform is...
One of the most, one of the best things that he can get legislatively.
And yes, he needs a legislative win and tax reform would certainly be the one.
But thus far, you know, one of the unfortunate things about Trump's administration thus far is that he has not gotten a big legislative win.
It's mostly come from the executive and, of course, foreign policy-wise with what we're dealing with ISIS. So one good, you know, legislative victory would definitely, I think, Trump needs to check off his box.
Bradley, you're a college Republican.
You're a college Republican chairman.
I remember when I was young like you.
And at Yale, all of the college Republicans, they didn't really care about social issues.
They were economically focused.
All they wanted was entitlement reform, tax reform, you know, very...
I would say establishment and establishment conservative Republicans.
They didn't want to be social, you know, culture warriors because they wanted to be cool guys.
They wanted to fit in and, like, be cool at parties, you know?
So myself included, a lot of college kids there ran that typical line, I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal.
Do you find that that's the case at Berkeley right now?
Or have the culture wars that President Trump has, is exhilarated and is fighting, have they affected college campuses as well?
Absolutely.
Without a doubt.
I mean, we've seen a large swing back to social conservatism.
I think that it all lies on a pendulum, right?
So the pendulum's swinging back towards social conservatism.
And if we look at the first reports on the younger generations in the United States, we're seeing that they are the most socially conservative since World War II. I mean, there's a lot to gain here for the Republican Party, even though a majority of Young Republicans are more economically focused and are more socially liberal.
They're actually more socially libertarian.
They don't care much.
They want lower taxes.
They want their own property.
They want to have their guns.
And that's mostly the type of person I am.
But we are seeing that shift back because the left keeps doubling down on every culture war we're having, and Trump is choosing culture wars that he can win, and it's smart for him to do so.
And I think tax reform is actually something that he can win.
I don't know if it'll pass, but I think that he can create a story and a narrative behind it that can garner support.
And he is going for the Cut, Cut, Cut Act.
That's being reported today that he wants to name it the Cut, Cut, Cut Act, and he wants to...
Drastically deregulate small businesses.
And if you want America to prosper, you have to support small businesses.
And you've got to keep it simple, just like that.
Keep it simple, stupid.
Cut, cut, cut.
Well, let's hope it works out.
Panel, thank you for being here.
Very good discussion.
Kevin Glass, first time on the panel of deplorables.
Bradley Devlin, UC Berkeley College Republican chairman.
And his eminence, Paul Bois.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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