Ep. 64 - And The Fake News Trophy Goes To…the CFPB!
CNN is trying to ban the term fake news, President Trump has called for a fake news trophy, and an Obama holdover, left-wing stooge is trying to subvert democracy and take over an executive agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Then, Amanda Prestigiacomo and Asawin Suebsaeng join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss a groundbreaking new study out of Yale that shows indulging ridiculous fantasies makes you more left-wing, Susan Saradon and John McCain’s telling Hillary to STFU, and Denzel Washington drops racist hate facts about personal responsibility and the family
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President Trump has called for a fake news trophy and an Obama holdover left-wing deep state stooge is trying to subvert democracy and take over an executive agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In these fake news awards, aren't we all the real winners?
Yes, we are.
Then, Amanda Prestigiacomo and Aswan Soobsang join the panel of deplorables to discuss a groundbreaking new study out of Yale that shows indulging ridiculous fantasies makes you more left-wing.
Who would have thought?
Susan Sarandon and John McCain's telling Hillary Clinton to STFU. I'll let you spell that out.
And Denzel Washington drops racist hate facts about personal responsibility and the family.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Happy Holidays!
There are so many holidays that happened in the last four days.
We had Thanksgiving.
We had Black Friday.
We had Evacuation Day.
Everyone forgets that holiday, but it's a great one.
And I promise you, I drank in your stead in Lower Manhattan on it.
And Cyber Monday.
Cyber Monday is a great day.
The main reason it's a great day is because it lets me hawk my products.
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Okay, we have a lot of fake news to get to today.
One thing that I'm thankful for, we didn't go over this, what are you thankful for at the Thanksgiving episode?
I'm really thankful for President Trump's Twitter account.
It's one of the highlights of my news consumption all year.
He sent out this beauty this morning, quote, we should have a contest as to which of the networks...
Plus CNN, but not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt, and or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite president, me.
They are all bad.
Winner to receive the fake news trophy.
So here is CNN fake news outlet par excellence, CNN's Brian Stelter discussing the fake news.
It's time to retire the term fake news.
That's what my next guest says.
Claire Wardle is the executive director of First Draft.
It's a non-profit research group, a base of the Harvard Shorenstein Center.
Claire, we've talked about this before.
I want to share with our viewers, if we never use the term fake news again, what should we say instead?
So we should think about what we're actually talking about.
So are we talking about misinformation, or just mistakes that people make?
Are we talking about disinformation, when people are actually trying to cause harm and they are disseminating false information?
Or are we talking about malinformation, genuine information that's shared again to cause harm?
So that could be revenge porn, it could be a leaked email.
So we just need to be much more specific about what we're talking about.
And is that because President Trump and others have co-opted the term fake news and basically redefined it?
So two reasons.
Firstly, a lot of this stuff isn't news.
And secondly, it's been co-opted by politicians around the world as a label for things that they don't like.
And it's been used as a weapon against organizations like CNN and others.
And so when it's been used as a weapon against the news industry and it's just been co-opted, we have to think much more carefully about the power of language.
And it's damaging.
Oh, is it?
No, it's damaging to you.
Oh, yeah, it was great when you were using it against right-wing outlets, but now that they're using it against us, we have to stop.
By the way, all three versions of fake news that she said, CNN does all of them.
But now they want to ban them because they either are being disingenuous or they don't get the point.
They want to ban the term.
They're the ones who created the term.
The term fake news reached a mass audience.
People forget this.
It reached a mass audience for the first time in the days following Donald Trump's election victory when a left-wing college professor named Melissa Zimdars published a viral Google Doc listing a bunch of conservative news outlets, including our own, including the Daily Wire, as, quote, fake news.
The irony, though, the irony which we pointed out is that while outlets like the Daily Wire and others are honest about our point of view, you know where we're coming from, we're not pretending to be somebody we're not, places like CNN lie about their political slant all the time.
They pretend at objectivity.
They often spread outright false stories.
You know, they do fake news.
What are some other examples?
MSNBC ran a fake Morning Joe show on Friday.
It was pre-taped.
They pretended it was live.
The New York Times' main reporting on the alleged Trump-Russia collusion was shown to be entirely false.
It was so false, actually, that former FBI Director James Comey, under oath, said that the story wasn't true.
Also on alleged Trump-Russia collusion, CNN, that Brian Stelter's network, was forced not only to retract a story, but to fire an entire reporting team over false reporting, over a bad story.
According to a Media Research Center study, 91% of mainstream news coverage of Donald Trump has been negative.
According to Pew Research Center, Trump has received more negative coverage, not only than Democrats like Obama and Clinton, even more than George W. Bush.
According to another study, the majority of Americans believe that mainstream news coverage of Donald Trump is too negative.
And we're not just talking about the facts of the stories.
It's not like the majority of Americans say, stop running reality.
It's more which stories are being run, which stories are being harped on, which stories are being completely ignored or they're harped on for Republicans but ignored for Democrats.
Double standards.
If the Democrats didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.
The fake news trophy, though, we can't give it to Brian Stelter.
We can't give it to Jim Acosta.
We can't give it to Jake Tapper.
We can't give it to any of those guys.
The fake news trophy winner this month has to go to Leandra English.
She is the Obama holdover bureaucrat who is now – she is pretending to be the new director.
Of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a particularly unaccountable government agency that shouldn't exist in the first place, and was established by Senator Elizabeth Warren of the Massachusetts tribe over Mick Mulvaney, the actual director named by President Donald Trump.
For comment, let's turn to Senator Warren.
Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue-corn moon?
I have not.
I have not, Senator Warren.
I don't know why you would ask me.
CFPB Director Richard Cordray, an Obama holdover, just resigned and he appointed Leandra English, another Obama bureaucrat, as the director of the agency.
So far, so good.
Only trouble is, he has no authority to do that.
And so President Trump named budget director Mick Mulvaney to run the agency.
Nevertheless, the Democrats, they love just playing pretend, especially in government.
So the woman is just pretending to be the director of this unaccountable agency.
Now, on his first day, by the way, Mulvaney brought Dunkin' Donuts to the office.
So I think we know who is going to go far and win hearts and minds.
But Leandra English, I'm sure, was waiting for somebody else to bring her donuts.
She's entitled to them, obviously.
And...
Back to the agency.
The agency shouldn't exist.
The agency was proposed by Elizabeth Warren before she became a senator, 2007, 2008.
It was authorized by the Dodd-Frank Permanent Financial Cronyism Act of 2010.
The agency's major accomplishments in its seven years of existence appear to have been enriching trial lawyers and abusing black employees.
One unit was nicknamed the plantation because it comprised all black employees and was subject to a special abuse, specific abuse.
One employee called it a, quote, humiliating experience, said working for the CFPB is, quote, a living hell.
It's apparently run by intimidation and, like a dictatorship, there are consequences for disagreeing or disobeying the king.
All of their words, not mine.
According to a Government Accountability Office report, one quarter, 25% of minority employees at the CFPB reported that they have been victims of discrimination.
Almost 1 in 10 employees reported that they had been retaliated against by a supervisor for calling attention to the discrimination.
Now, none of this is surprising, by the way, because this is one of the major problems baked into the agency.
The agency is unaccountable.
It's an independent agency.
Dennis Scholl, who's a former aide to Barney Frank, that's the law that created the agency, Dodd-Frank, he explained in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last week that the CFPB should just be shut down, which it should.
The CFPB is uniquely unaccountable, he writes.
It's an independent agency with a sole director.
The director isn't even accountable to the congressional appropriations process.
So there are some independent agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FCC, the FTC.
Those are funded by Congress, but the CFPB is funded by the Federal Reserve.
So that means it has precisely zero congressional oversight.
Scholl assails the position of CFPB chief as, quote,"...a politically biased regulatory dictator and a political stepping stone for its sole director." That is true.
His director is now running for governor of God knows where.
As an independent agency, the CFPB is supposed to be bipartisan.
But while a lot of its employees donated to Hillary Clinton in 2016, not a single one of them donated to President Trump's campaign.
Now, what about the agency itself?
What has it done?
The CFPB has been useless and duplicative of other services, as you might expect.
It took credit for other agencies and corporations' work, like when the LA Times uncovered fraud at Wells Fargo.
It illegally has regulated industries outside of its mandate.
It pays significantly higher salaries than other agencies.
That's how it got so bloated so quickly.
It maintains a slush fund of billions of dollars because its finances lack any oversight.
And its proposed rules, which luckily Congress intervened to overrule, would have devastated industries.
Even the CFPB's name is propaganda.
It's a Protection Bureau, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Isn't that nice?
Regulatory Bureau, Government Bureau.
That just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Now the agency is even pretending that a left-wing stooge is its director rather than the presidentially appointed one.
That's because, as President Reagan pointed out, One of the many bits of brilliance he's bestowed on us, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life on earth.
Now, the CFPB is particularly egregiously unaccountable.
It embodies everything that's wrong with big government bureaucrats.
And so, on this another holiday, this will be the Fake News Trophy Day, congratulations to the Fake Consumer Financial Fake Protection Bureau Interim Director, a fake director, Leandra English.
You win this month's I do.
Isn't that beautiful?
There it is, baby.
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Holiday shopping can be very tough thanks to movement.
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I'm sure you've got yourself a watch, but you can finish your holiday shopping and get a movement watch for somebody on your list.
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Now is the time to step up your watch game.
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Run, do not walk, so that you can type in the greatest promo code in the history of reads.
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Panel, thank you for being here.
And you should, I highly recommend you both go out and get movement watches.
We have Asawin Subsang and we have Amanda Prestigiacomo.
Asawin, should we get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
Honestly, I don't.
I don't particularly care right now.
What I'm more interested in as a reporter, honestly, is the drama that you alluded to at the beginning of the show that's going on right now.
It's really, really funny how Mick Mulvaney and Miss English, as you were talking about at the top of this show, are right now warring for the top spot and control over the staff of the CFPB. And it looks like this is going to be tied up potentially in court for at least a little while.
But there seems to be a serious actual fight for control of the CFPB. It sounds like the worst job in the world.
Why are these people fighting for it?
Who would ever want to be the head of the CFPB? President Trump himself could solve this right now by nominating someone to be a permanent head of the CFPB, but they don't seem inclined to do that at the moment.
Why do you think that is?
It's just a very funny, almost bizarre situation.
Perhaps doing so would acknowledge that this is something to which you would need to appoint a permanent head to.
And as the Trump administration has been very plain about, Their position is probably very similar to yours, that this is something that should 100% be on the federal shopping block.
Yep, absolutely.
That is what I think it is.
Because he could just nominate someone right now.
I love the idea of Mick Mulvaney, who is the budget director, who famously said that the Bureau shouldn't exist at all.
And I do like the idea of him strolling in there with Dunkin' Donuts and kicking out this woman who's pretending that she has the job.
But it will be tied up in courts for a bit.
I think even left-wing lawyers and legal scholars are saying clearly the president has the right to name his person.
It might be a weird quirk of the law that there is this loophole right now, but that it probably won't stand up in court.
But my question for Amanda is, why does the left love unaccountable bureaucracies so much?
Yeah, I mean, they just love the control and power.
It's just part of the leftist ideology.
So the more bureaucracy they have, the more people are dependent on government, the more the government grows, there's more control.
They just, they love it.
They love these intricacies and this bureaucracy that holds everything up.
So this is just like a product of what they are.
And I agree with you.
I think we should get rid of it chopping block for sure.
It's hard because I think most people don't know anything about the CFPB. So they hear consumer protection.
That seems good.
I'd like consumer protection.
But what is consumer protection?
What has the Bureau really done?
They almost created a brand new industry for trial lawyers, and it doesn't seem they protect consumers terribly much.
Do you disagree, Aswin?
Well, before I get to that, I would like to address what you were saying earlier about unaccountable bureaucracies.
I mean, we could spend the entire day going down the list both on the left and the right, but I think it's just a function of whoever's in power that they like unaccountable bureaucracies.
You don't think that the left is more inclined toward bureaucracy?
Obviously, look, President Bush set up the Department of Homeland Security after the United States was attacked in a major act of war.
But nevertheless, that's true.
President Reagan wasn't able to cut the government, wasn't able to kill off bureaucracies.
But you don't think that it's more of a twitch of the left to expand government, to expand government power, and in the case of the CFPB, to expand unaccountable government power that doesn't have congressional oversight?
It honestly really depends which corners of the federal government you're talking about.
I mean, I really do believe that.
But you would say that the left is...
But in terms of financial regulation, which is what we're talking about right now, Well, again, I really don't think that's exclusive to either the Republican or Democratic Party, as you were talking about.
I think it's fair enough to point out that the Bush administration expanded the federal government in many ways.
Medicare Part D, for instance, and Barack Obama, while perhaps holding an incoherent foreign policy, nevertheless kept us in Afghanistan for a long time.
The vast majority of deaths in Afghanistan occurred under his watch.
Nevertheless, even though they're imperfect actors here, is it not fair to say, Amanda, that government expansion per se is a greater facet of leftism than it is of any conservative philosophy in modern America?
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I could see the argument for national security reasons where the right might expand bureaucracy in that sense.
But aside from that, I mean, it's clearly that's a tick of the left in almost any other area besides maybe national security.
Plus, I also have a TSA pre-check now, so I've been the main Bush-era expansion.
I haven't been groped by in a long time.
As we've seen, the Trump administration has been doing a phenomenal job of shrinking the government when it comes weaponizing The Department of Justice to go after undocumented families.
They've done a remarkable job.
Undocumented?
You mean illegal aliens resigning in the country?
You mean that he's enforcing the law through his Justice Department, but the euphemism you used was weaponizing an agency to go after undocumented families.
But consider the language of that phrase.
There are people here who have broken the law, and the law enforcement agency is now finally holding up the law because we are a nation of laws, not a nation simply of men.
What's so bad about that?
Are you asking me or the other panel?
That's you.
Well, in terms of enforcing the law, I mean, do you really think the Obama administration, and this is where the Obama administration was actually hit repeatedly by immigration activists on the left for ramping up deportation.
By the way, you don't mean immigration activists.
You mean illegal immigration activists.
Well, people who think, as I do, as long as we're talking about political preferences and opinion, you said at the top of the show you were very upfront about your political views, I'll do the same with mine.
People who wish there was something closer to an open borders policy, or people who think a larger level of immigration is better than a lower level of immigration.
And this, by the way, I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to hear your opinion in light of this news story, because this leads perfectly into the main news story I want to bring on.
And by the way, I appreciate your being honest about your political views.
But more than that, I appreciate that you have come on this show.
It is so hard to get lefties and Democrats to come on this show.
I truly appreciate it.
I mean, look, I love political debate on his Barrett's.
And Michael, you and I go way back.
I like you.
Yeah.
Well, this is the, here's the news story from Dear Old Yale.
Researchers at Dear Old Yale are now claiming to have cured conservatism.
Professor John Barr writes in the Washington Post, quote, no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals until we did.
Before conservatives answered survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise.
They were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who granted them a superpower.
If they imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal.
So if conservatives, in other words, if conservatives are instructed to indulge in ridiculous fantasies, they become more left-wing, which makes perfect sense to me.
Now, Asowyn, and please continue on your previous thread as well.
These professors appear to be treating conservatism as a strange psychological glitch rather than as a coherent political philosophy or set of philosophies.
Now, we're all just pulsing nerve endings according to this idea.
We have little conscious control.
Is the left, in this case, denying the rational faculties of everybody or just of irrational conservatives?
I would honestly...
I wish I had a copy of that study you're referring to in front of me.
I have not read it.
I'm not familiar with the authors you're talking about, and I'm not familiar with the methodology or where they're coming from.
And I don't feel incredibly comfortable weighing in a study that I haven't read in full.
I only use this study as a launching point.
Sure, sure, sure.
But if your macro question is that they're...
Is a lot of people in American liberalism or even farther than that on the American political spectrum who see conservatism as a disease.
That's what you're getting at, right?
Yes.
There's certainly – and again, I hate playing this both sides thing, but I mean there's certainly – Wouldn't disagree with me that there certainly is no shortage of that on the American political right and far right.
Like, I think saying liberalism is a cancer or disease, if we Googled around for that, I'm sure you'd find plenty of conservative commentators you know and probably enjoy and respect.
I will make one distinction, though, because we have heard versions of this like feminism is cancer or whatever, you know, you hear these things.
But the distinction is, I think by saying that leftism is a disease or cancer, you might say that and say that it's really bad for the country and we should convince people to stop thinking those things and become conservatives.
But to say that it's a psychological glitch, which I think is what these people are getting at at Yale, and I think what a lot of people on the left have said for a while, I think is what the field of political psychology is largely based on.
To say that it's just a psychological glitch is to deny our faculties of reason.
It's to preclude reasoned argument.
So whereas we might have a debate over whether leftism is a cancer on the American body politic, if we accept their premises, What their premises are saying is that we can't have any debate at all because we've arrived at our conclusions not by reasoned thought or discourse, but because, you know, our brain made us do it and they twitched in a certain way.
Amanda, if wishes were fishes, we'd all swim in riches.
And if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas.
Given the absurdity of the premise of this survey, is there anything worthwhile in the results?
Could there be?
No, I mean, from what I gathered from the Washington Post piece in the write-up we did at Daily Wire, basically, if you're granted this power by a magical genie that nothing, you're impervious to any consequences of these policies, then yeah, you'll think like a liberal.
It kind of proves the opposite that if you have a rational mind and you're aware of consequences and you're aware of safety risks, for instance, they're talking about immigration, then yeah, you're going to side on the right because there are real risks.
And by the way, they were talking about immigration.
And if you look broad-based, there are a lot of people, it's a clear majority who want to...
Put some sort of clamps on immigration.
I think it was like 79%.
And I think it's like 30% of those who are polled won't even come out and publicly say that they want to halt immigration.
So this is like a big issue across America.
It's not just people on the right.
So just altogether, the study was really, really ridiculous.
Sometimes I think it was this amazing, providential moment that when this show launched, Yale was at the center of just every crazy lefty thing in the country, because they might have convinced a few people in that study, but not me, everybody.
Now, we have much more to talk about.
I know you want to hear more from Asawen.
I know you want to hear more from Amanda.
But...
You can't do it unless you go to thedailywire.com right now.
If you're already a subscriber, thank you very much.
You keep Covfefe in my mug.
If not, you've got to go over there.
We've got to keep the lights on.
I think we even pay Marshall.
I've been advocating against this since the beginning, but I think we do, don't we?
It's true.
Not much, but it's true.
Such an outrage.
No justice in the world.
If you go to dailywire.com right now, what do you get?
You get no ads on the website.
That's pretty nice.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But here it is.
Here it is, folks.
The Leftist Tears Tumblr.
President Trump today referred to Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas during a press conference with Navajo American veterans of World War II. They are going to be pouring out from the ceiling leftist tears here.
It's already happening all over Twitter.
The CFPB fight is going to result in a deluge of salty and delicious leftist tears.
So you have to go to dailywire.com right now, have them hot or cold on Always salty and delicious.
We will be right back.
The left of Lenin actress Susan Sarandon and sort of Republican Hillary pal John McCain are both telling Hillary Clinton to STFU.
Those are McCain's words and they're not mine.
He said, quote, one of the almost irresistible impulses you have when you lose is to somehow justify why you lost and how you were mistreated.
I did the right thing.
I did.
The hardest thing to do is to just shut up.
What's the effing point?
Keep the fight up.
You've got to move on.
Susan Sarandon seems to agree, and for her part, she's still defending her vote against Hillary Clinton, instead for Jill Stein.
Amanda, I actually don't really care about the Hillary angle of this anymore, but I do love the personal responsibility aspect, because there is no crying in politics, and yet the Democrats are still crying over the 2000 election.
They're still crying over 2016.
Why are Democrats in particular always making excuses for their political failures?
Yeah, I mean, it's the party with no personal responsibility.
We see this in their politics as well, and it's obviously transcended through Hillary.
I mean, she's been on this tour since she lost, and personally, I hope she keeps it up, and I hope she runs in 2020, but it hurts their party overall, and it's just kind of a symptom of Yeah,
it's never within themselves.
Yeah.
It's not good for the party, but I'm all for it.
So I hope she just keeps coming out here and keeps going with it.
Aswin, this brings me to a Thanksgiving-related question.
It was just Thanksgiving.
A big difference between the right and the left, to me, it appears, seems that the right values personal responsibility more, places a greater emphasis on it when we speak, when we explain our vision of the world, while the left insists on grievance and entitlement.
The victim mentality, the ever-blossoming and flowering intersectional hierarchy of victims.
And I'm not even talking about strategic messaging with Obama blaming obstructionist congressional Republicans or Trump blaming obstructionist congressional Republicans while they're in office.
I'm talking about Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.
These people are out of office.
Is there a gratitude deficit among our friends on the left?
Well, to directly address Hillary Clinton for a moment...
Because there's a lot to unpack in what you just said there.
When any Republican or Democrat presidential candidate loses, there is a period of mourning.
Sometimes it lasts longer than others.
Mitt Romney certainly had a I'm likable tour after he failed to defeat Barack Obama in 2012.
But with Hillary Clinton, I think for her personally, And from what I've gathered talking to people going in and out of her inner circle during and after the 2016 campaign is that this was a particularly hard blow for her to absorb in large part because this had been something she'd been working up to for decades of her life.
And to lose to...
Someone who she saw as so unqualified and so vulgar and so demagogic as Donald Trump, who many people, including those in her inner circle, was telling her would be essentially a cakewalk to defeat in a general election.
For her, it has been something incredibly hard to get over.
Sure, Mitt Romney went on his likable tour.
He started speaking about politics a little bit more during the 2016 presidential cycle, but he basically disappeared.
He would give a couple speeches.
He showed up to the White House to shake hands with Barack Obama.
But when you look at George H.W. Bush when he lost in 1992, he basically just disappeared and kept his mouth shut.
Same thing with Bob Dole.
Same thing with John McCain.
He went back to work.
Mitt Romney disappeared for a good while.
But these Democrats who have lost, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, blame everybody and their mother for their defeat and then keep harping about political issues over which they have little control as losing candidates.
The thing with the Clintons is that Since the early 1990s, for better or for worse, they have essentially been the center of power, or at least one way or another the center of gravity, of the redefined Democratic Party in the wake of its electoral failures post-Reaganism.
So I think a big part of the reason why she isn't going away as a lot of people, including a lot of people on the left and center left, would like her to go away is because she is trying to continue to define herself as a player in the Democratic Party.
And to do that, you have to sustain her relevance.
And right now she happens to be doing that in terms of the book tour to not only establish ongoing commentary and relevance, but to try to tell people her side of what went wrong and why I am not currently leader of the free world.
With Al Gore, I mean, if my memory serves, he did obviously complain about the incredibly narrow 2000 election.
Sued, demanded a recount, won a Nobel Prize for PowerPoint.
- Right, but pretty soon after that, after Bush became president, he spent a pretty solid period of time redefining himself as a climate change, a climate action. - As the savior of the world.
That's the only way he could look in the mirror in the morning. - Stuff I'm sure you didn't appreciate, but it wasn't complaining about the election 24/7 per se.
He did have a form of moving on.
If you can win an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for a largely inaccurate PowerPoint presentation, I appreciate that.
More power to you.
Go with God.
I wish it were me.
And you make an excellent point, too, which is that the Democrats, in the wake of especially Donald Trump, are running on rage.
The pink hats and the resistance.
They've named the opposition to Trump after the opposition to Nazis.
They're running on rage, and she's trying to tap into that.
And it's very funny for me to watch, especially as her third cousin once removed.
Now, speaking of personal responsibility...
Denzel Washington dropped some truly bigoted hate facts over the weekend.
While he was promoting his new film, Roman J. Israel Esquire, Denzel said that researching the L.A. criminal court system for the movie did not make him place more blame on the system, or the prison industrial complex, or alleged systemic inequality for problems in the black community.
Instead, he blames...
Oh my gosh, runaway fathers.
He blames individuals who make bad choices.
He said, quote, it starts at home.
I can't blame the system.
It starts with how you raise your children.
If a young man doesn't have a father figure, he'll go and find a father figure.
And Denzel Washington and I actually share the same acting teacher decades apart.
And it seems that we share the same opinions too, though I don't know how he can possibly keep working after making such bigoted and terrible and factually accurate comments as he did.
Oh, we lost Aswin, but we'll get him back.
Hopefully he'll come back.
Amanda, this is actually the direct question I have with this.
How does Denzel get away with contradicting Hollywood leftist orthodoxy?
Yeah, I don't know.
But he has.
He's made comments like this before.
And for some reason, he just stays in the game.
Maybe it's an identity thing.
I'm not sure.
But I love Denzel.
And what he said was exactly right.
But yeah, for some reason, he can make these comments and then keep working.
And he's also a fantastic actor.
He's a tremendous actor.
He is one of the...
The few left who's really prominent, who is just an excellent, properly trained, you know, he brings so much to every role and their different roles.
Aswin, almost three quarters of black children are born out of wedlock in the United States.
So is Denzel right?
Are the problems in the black community cultural primarily, or are they primarily the result of some systemic racism?
Well, if you...
I'm sorry, my connection cut out so I can only imagine that you're talking about his comments that he made.
We're dropping hate facts left and right.
Gotcha, gotcha.
The comments he made that were printed in the New York Daily News.
That's right.
About it starting with the family.
Well, Denzel Washington, if you know much about his at least public political leanings, there isn't too much shocking about him saying that.
I mean, he identifies as a political independent.
Yes, he supported Barack Obama.
But he's never been a raging leftist in his public persona.
By Hollywood standards, he's to the right of Attila the Hun.
Right.
Maybe a little bit more centrist than that.
But what he said actually reminded me a lot of something Spike Lee has said multiple times.
And Spike Lee is certainly way more to the left and politically outspoken than Mr.
Washington, when there were issues of police brutality being talked about by Black Lives Matter activists, Spike Lee was actually pretty firm in saying that, yes, there is police brutality, but we as the Black community or Black communities across the United States have to look more inward onto ourselves but we as the Black community or Black communities across the United States have to look more And he was actually dragged quite a bit for that.
So when I read what Denzel Washington said, it actually struck me as kind of, of course, that's what Stenzo Washington would say.
A lot of famous African-American individuals.
Across the political line, across the political spectrum.
Yeah, yeah.
It wasn't too shocking a culture war to me.
I think his quote was very brief and it didn't have much political context.
He was simply saying that...
It starts at home.
That raise your children right.
I don't think there are many people who disagree with that sentiment.
I think you would never find a white liberal ever say that ever once.
I think they would be run out of town on a rail.
And I think that for the white liberals and their paternalism, They need to say that people don't have any agency over their own lives.
They don't have any cognitive faculties or faculties of determination and perseverance.
Rather, you don't have a shot in this country and you're just being kept down by some invisible force, so don't even try.
And apparently we all disagree.
You and I, I think, hang out with...
I think you and I hang out with different types of white liberals.
Maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know, man.
New York, L.A., you dear old Yale.
Try hanging out with Asian liberals sometimes.
Maybe that's...
Listen, nobody could be more irrational than these lefties out here in Hollywood who are constantly preaching their nonsense.
So yeah, maybe that's a demographic.
We'll just have to bring on more.
Speaking of Asian liberals that I enjoy, Soob Sang, thank you for being here.
Aswin Soob Sang, excellent commentary.
We appreciate you, and we want to have you back.
Amanda Prestigiacomo, The Daily Wire's very own, great to have you here.
And I'm Michael Knowles.
That's The Michael Knowles Show.
That's our whole post-five holiday show.
Congratulations on the Fake News Trophy winners.
We will be back tomorrow, so join us and we'll do it all again.
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