The fake news media breathlessly reported over the weekend that the Trump administration has banned the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from using certain words. We’ll analyze the Left’s insidious abuse of language. Then, Elisha Krauss and Amanda Prestigiacomo join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss how expensive it would be to legalize the so-called “Dreamers," Pope Francis’s condemnation of fake news, and Al Franken’s possible un-resignation.
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The fake news media breathlessly reported over the weekend that the Trump administration has banned the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from using the words fetus, transgender, vulnerable, science-based, entitlement, diversity, and evidence-based.
The story, predictably, is not true.
But it should be true because that is the essential Trump project.
We will analyze the left's insidious abuse of language.
Then, Alicia Krauss and Amanda Presta Giacomo join the panel of deplorables.
To discuss how expensive it would be to legalize these so-called dreamers.
How's that for euphemistic language?
Pope Francis' condemnation of fake news.
And speaking of fake news, Al Franken's possible unresignation.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I have not slept in about 17 days.
I am coming in from a flight last night.
I had a red eye on Thursday, and then I had a red eye last night.
So I got in at about 1 a.m., and I'm just—it's so nice.
Two things are so nice—President Trump, his administration, and the news media.
Because just when you think, oh, God, what kind of show are we going to have today?
I haven't been paying great attention to the news last day or so.
You get a big whopper like this.
This CDC story is the essential Donald Trump project.
But before we can get to that, and there's a lot to analyze with that...
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Okay, we have got to get into this CDC thing, because this is what PC is all about, and it's largely why Donald Trump was elected president.
The Washington Post ran a fake story over the weekend, which is not exactly man bites dog, is it?
But the headline goes like this.
CDC gets a list of forbidden words.
Fetus, transgender, diversity.
That is fake news.
That headline is not true.
No words have been banned for use by the Trump administration.
But that makes sense.
When the Washington Post runs a headline, assume the opposite is true.
Now, at most, there is some kernel of truth here.
At most, agencies like the CDC... Have been directed to avoid certain language in budget proposals to facilitate funding from the Republican-controlled Congress.
Which makes sense.
You want certain language to make it easier to pass these bills.
But the story itself is absurd.
So what happened?
Nancy Pelosi, in typically untrue and hysterical fashion, tweeted out, DANGER, all caps.
Trump admin is going further down a dangerous and un-American path of word and thought control.
POTUS has no respect for and has banned words.
That is truly unbelievable.
This is total projection.
It's Nancy Pelosi looking in the mirror and then throwing that onto Donald Trump.
Now, federal officials, former Obama appointees, they've shrieked that the imaginary ban was Orwellian and stupid.
But it doesn't end there.
Here is, for comment, President Trump.
I know words.
I have the best words.
But there's no better word than stupid.
Well said.
Absolutely right.
Unfortunately, though, unfortunately, there is no government-wide language recommendation.
This is just a directive regarding certain budget documents.
The words in question, by the way, are fetus, transgender, vulnerable, science-based, entitlement, diversity, and evidence-based.
And by the way, it's too bad that there are no government-wide language recommendations here because all of those words that I just said are empty slogans.
They're insidious.
They are politically correct euphemisms intended to obscure what they really mean.
So let's start with fetus.
What is fetus?
We use fetus to mean something that isn't a human being so we can kill it.
But fetus comes from the Latin for offspring.
That's all the word means.
Why not call it an unborn baby?
Why not call it offspring?
Because the word fetus allows you to make the baby seem clinical, seem not human, seem not alive.
We know two things about unborn babies.
They're human and they're alive.
But we need to wash over that.
We need to obscure that language with muddy, Latinate words that we don't really – oh, it's a fetus.
Don't worry.
We can kill it.
It's just a fetus.
Same with transgender.
Now, the modifier trans means across or beyond, right?
So it actually doesn't even make sense in the way they're using it, which is a man who thinks he's a woman or vice versa or really wants to be one.
That isn't even very precise.
It would really mean transcending gender overall, going beyond the categories of gender, you know, as might happen in heaven, right?
There's no male or female in Christ.
That would be the transcendence.
It's funny, if you look in C.S. Lewis, I forget which book of his it is.
It might be Miracles.
He uses the word transsexual to refer to how in heaven we don't We're not lusty and we don't have sexuality as much.
That's not how they use it.
They use it because we don't want to say a man who thinks he's a woman or a woman who thinks she's a man or someone suffering from a psychological condition that makes them confused about their biological sex.
Transgender is much easier.
Vulnerable.
What does vulnerable mean?
We're all vulnerable.
We're all going to die.
No one here gets out alive.
But what vulnerable is used to do is slice people up into little demographics and demagogue on them and use them as political fodder to achieve political goals.
How about science-based or evidence-based?
These two are totally demagogic political words.
Of course, things are science-based.
It's used by the left to say that anyone who doesn't go along with their crazy plans to disrupt the economy or to Add more government spending or add more to the federal deficit.
They're ignoring science.
They seem to forget that you can't derive an ought from an is.
You can't derive ideas about what we should do from things that are.
But they try to glide over that, and so they'll say, well, this is science-based.
The science tells me we have to raise taxes on everybody and spend a lot of money.
That's the science.
It's not my political point of view or my ideology.
So those two, they're used to mean the opposite of what they really do.
How about entitlement?
What's an entitlement?
Well, one, entitlements are bad because it leads to much more economic, or rather, much more federal growth.
The entire deficit in national debt is driven by these entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
But also, one isn't entitled to anything.
What it really means is welfare.
What it really means is a handout.
It means going on the dole.
But entitlement, that's the way that we polish it.
Or diversity.
Diversity is probably the most abused one.
Diversity should mean differences, right?
But the way it's used on campuses here, we say we have to have diversity, and that's why we need to ban anyone from speaking who thinks anything contrary to what we think in the university orthodoxy.
Or diversity means race discrimination.
So...
Using the university example, you might say, we need more diversity, and that's why we need to discriminate against Asian applicants to universities, because we need diversity.
You know, that's how we get diversity.
It never means diversity of thought.
Usually, what it means is homogeneity.
So apparently, the CDC was told to replace, you know, science-based, for example, in these documents with, quote,"...the CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes." Good.
That is more precise because science-based is so vague.
Science-based is a euphemism.
What we really mean by science-based, especially what the left means, is there is an aspect of our thought which is scientific, and then we are reading that through our ideological lens with our values and our community guidelines or whatever.
But science isn't the be-all and end-all because policy doesn't come from science.
We can't just have technocrats telling us what to do because men aren't machines.
There's a value in the world.
There's moral weight.
There's moral value.
And so we can use science and the scientific method as much as it's useful for, and it's very useful, but it isn't sufficient because there's another component to the world.
There's more between heaven and earth that's dreamed of in our philosophy.
There's a metaphysical component to the world too.
And we have to take that into consideration because politics is the relation of people to one another, and government is how we rule ourselves.
Now, this directive is very limited, but it should expand.
This is the essential Trump project.
He shatters these gooey, awful euphemisms and empty language, which is what political correctness is, to get to the heart of the matter in his own very Trumpy, covefe way.
Watch him expertly take on the euphemism army.
You mean it's not politically correct and yet everybody uses it?
So you know what?
Give me a different term.
Give me a different term.
What else would you like to say?
You want me to say that?
Okay.
I'll use the word anchor baby.
Excuse me.
I'll use the word anchor baby.
It's brilliant.
This was, by the way, one of the moments in the campaign where I started to think that Donald Trump maybe wasn't just a complete lunatic ignoramus.
I thought maybe he knows what he's doing.
Because what he's saying, there's anchor baby.
That paints a picture.
We know what we mean.
We're talking about children who are born in the United States as a pathway to citizenship for themselves and their families.
It's very hard to hear what that reporter is saying, but it's something to the effect of, well, you should call them future undocumented American citizens without the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, obscuring the whole thing.
And Trump says, yeah, you know what?
I'm going to stick with Anchor Baby.
I'm going to stick with the clear language because that's how I'm going to convince people about these issues.
I can't convince them on your terms, on your crazy abusive language.
I'm going to use reality, terms that better correspond with reality and And that's going to break your stranglehold on thought and politics.
George Carlin, the late comedian, talked about this himself.
Here he is.
We're using that soft language, that language that takes the life out of life.
And it is a function of time.
It does keep getting worse.
I'll give you another example.
Sometime during my life, sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue.
Sneakers became running shoes.
False teeth became dental appliances.
Medicine became medication.
Information became directory assistance.
The dump became the landfill.
Car crashes became automobile accidents.
Partly cloudy became partly sunny.
Motels became motor lodges.
House trailers became mobile homes.
Used cars became previously owned transportation.
Room service became guest room dining and constipation became occasional irregularity.
By the way, this is like decades ago that he's talking about this.
It's gotten so much worse since then, but it's that soft language.
It takes the life out of the words.
It takes what's convincing out of the words so that the people who are using this deceptive language, so that they can deceive us.
Euphemisms are insidious.
You know, people often say, oh, it's just semantics.
You're just arguing over semantics.
And of course these people don't know what semantics means.
Semantics means meaning.
It's the study of meaning.
It's how signs and words and symbols relate to one another and to reality.
This is why the euphemisms are so insidious.
They just proceed by subtly deceiving us, by painting just a little bit off an untrue picture of reality.
Christopher Hitchens wrote, For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested.
The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie, it lies somewhere in between.
It lies, it's, oh, it's just a little off.
It's a little, we're just going to push you slightly a little bit off the mark until we see a vision of reality that bears no relation to the truth.
Winston Churchill mockingly admitted, quote, perhaps we have been guilty of some terminological inexactitudes.
What he's really saying is we lied.
We lied to you.
But he's mocking even that concept in that phrase.
Terminological inexactitudes.
If you heard that, if some lefty went on television and said, terminological inexactitudes, your eyes would glaze over and they would get away with the deception.
But really it's lies.
PC and euphemisms like this are lies.
Language is the medium of our consciousness.
It's how we view the world.
That's why the left is so insistent on political correctness.
On everybody using their terms and looking at the world on their terms.
This is why they're so insistent over these pronouns.
Virtually nobody in the country suffers from psychological gender confusion.
There are like five of these people.
There are not a lot of these people.
They're suffering and we can be compassionate to them.
But the left has invested countless funds, countless hours, energy into a national campaign to make everyone refer to men as she and women as he.
Why are we talking about this all the time?
Doesn't that strike you as a little odd?
If this campaign of language were really about the vanishingly small minority of people clinically confused about their biological sex, wouldn't it be a smaller conversation?
But of course not.
It's part of a larger project of language to get us to buy their premises, their relativistic premises.
They're debased and barbaric view of politics where we're just different competing interest groups that have no relation to the truth rather than civilized people who look at the world in different ways and debate it and try to get to reality.
The truth is arrogant.
They try to use reason to get to that truth.
Here are some other examples.
This is unbelievable.
We no longer have criminals.
According to Obama's Department of Justice, we have justice-involved youth.
Justice-involved youth is the terminology that Obama's DOJ started using to refer to criminal kids.
Now, ironically, they're injustice-involved.
They're committing injustices.
They're committing crime.
But justice-involved.
We can't even say that they're offenders.
They're not offenders.
They're just involved.
I'm involved in justice or I pay my taxes so we have a criminal justice system.
I give my legitimacy to a government.
I admit to its credibility.
That would be involved in justice.
These kids are criminals, but we can't say that.
That's too mean.
That gives us the wrong picture.
We don't have wars anymore.
We just have overseas contingency operations.
Isn't that so vivid?
Doesn't it really paint a vivid picture?
The government forcing you to buy a product from a private company is not a mandate.
It's not an unprecedented mandate.
It's a, quote, individual shared responsibility payment.
Oh, okay, in that case, take my money.
Here's my check.
The estate tax is used to refer to what is a death tax.
What is the death tax?
When you die, you have to pay a tax.
It's unbelievable.
That has been taxed at the corporate level, at the income level, at the capital gains level.
But they've got to get you on the death tax by calling it the estate tax.
Oh, well, it's an estate.
It's no big deal.
Illegal aliens became undocumented workers.
The most absurd version of this is the dreamers.
The dreamers.
These are illegal aliens.
This is a clear term.
But no, they're just dreamers.
What, you don't like the dreamers?
You hate dreams?
You want to kill dreams?
You monster.
Women's health now means killing a baby in the womb.
That is women's health.
You know when you call up your grandmother and you say, hey, how are you doing?
She goes, oh, well, I can still kill babies in the womb, so I have that.
At least I have that.
I don't think so.
But that is the euphemism.
We've even gone past pro-choice, which in itself is ridiculous.
Of course, it's a choice.
The question is, what choice is it?
We have choices.
We're free people.
The public option or the single-payer system, those are those two euphemisms instead of government-controlled health care.
We have affirmative action instead of racial discrimination.
But what is affirmative action?
It's giving some people privileges based on their race and hurting some people based on their race.
So I don't think that there's anything terribly affirmative for Asian students who are applying to American universities.
What that is, by their view and by any serious view, is racial discrimination.
But that sounds too icky.
Terror attacks are man-caused disasters.
Gay marriage was lost on these grounds.
So the term gay marriage, which then became marriage equality, even a more outrageous euphemism, it presumed a premise.
So the conservative opposition to gay marriage is not that gay people should be discriminated against or not have certain rights or whatever.
Marriage does not include same-sex unions.
It's just not what marriage is.
It would be like...
It's a nonsense.
It's like saying, what's the color of seven?
It doesn't have a logical meaning.
And the left knew this, so they used the term.
The minute they used the term, it totally shifted the debate.
It skipped the step of, what is marriage?
What do we think marriage is in 2017, in our culture?
What does it mean for society, for individuals, for the institution?
No, it became...
Marriage can include same-sex unions, and will they have those rights?
This is where we got to marriage equality.
Because if it's a question of rights and equality, they have to win.
You can't oppose civil rights and equality.
And it totally skipped over, totally dishonestly and disingenuously skipped over the real question, which is what is marriage?
And if marriage can include monogamous same-sex unions for the first time ever, why would we exclude polygamous people or polyamorous arrangements from marriage?
That is just as bigoted by all of that logic.
Now there's raising revenue.
We always have to raise revenue.
That's confiscating wealth through taxation.
There's giveaway for the wealthy.
That means allowing people to keep more of their own money.
That's the giveaway for them when you let them keep what's theirs.
Government spending has become investment.
It doesn't invest in anything.
It just spends.
But that's investment.
Global cooling became global warming, which became the unfalsifiable climate change.
It's hard to beat that.
Climate change, we notice that it changes.
We notice that there are ups and downs.
So that's how they won an argument there.
Obviously, obviously, we have the holiday that must not be named.
You know the holiday.
You're getting ready for the holiday season to welcome that big holiday man with the big beard and really refer back to the incarnate birth of the holiday guy.
Yeah, this is what the war on Christmas is about.
Same argument holds for the war on Christmas.
Who cares about the words?
Who cares?
Just semantics.
Right.
They care.
There's a reason they care.
Even the word liberal became illiberal.
We used to be liberals were liberal.
Now they're not liberal.
They're completely illiberal.
They're intolerant of anyone else's views.
And we should take care to follow President Trump's lead on this and avoid euphemistic language at every turn.
I know it's tempting.
I know.
I was just in New York.
It's very tempting to try to make the New York Times like us or sophisticated, fancy people at cocktail parties like us.
Just say, who cares about the pronouns?
Who cares about these silly terms?
It's just language.
Ah, they can have it if they want it.
Who cares?
The left cares.
We should care too.
The left cares a lot about it.
We should not cede to them a syllable because euphemistic language gives away whole premises.
It in turn concedes the culture.
Ultimately, it concedes our politics and our government and our liberty.
Words matter.
Ideas matter.
Reject PC gobbledygook and only use the best words, folks.
Come on.
We have them.
We got the best words.
Let's bring on our panel to discuss.
We have Alicia Krauss and Amanda Prestigiacomo, an all-female panel of deplorables today and an all-Daily Wire panel.
Hey, the best kind.
It is the best kind.
Very nice to see you both.
Two aspects on this story.
Alicia, as far as the directive itself, is there an actual story here?
Is this a news story or were they just getting very excited to knock Trump on something?
Oh, of course.
They're super excited to knock Trump on something.
I mean, Ben has said it over and over and over again, that being our boss, Ben Shapiro, so I'll say something nice about him now because it is the Christmas season, is that he's totally right on this.
The holiday season, yeah.
Christmas.
Christmas season.
Come on, Michael.
No war on Christmas here.
Stop with that political correctness.
It is the Christmas season, and Ben is right, so I'll let him have that he's right.
The mainstream media often jumps just right to anything that Trump says or anything that anyone within the administration does and just blows it up for no reason.
And sometimes it's hard that if he ever gets to a 10 to say that everything is a 10 when some of the things that he does are maybe a level 4 or 5.
But that's just too much for them.
Everything they take and run with.
That's absolutely right.
I guess there's this little directive.
Who really cares?
We're talking about budget proposal documents.
But they got it.
They're going to run.
Democracy dies in darkness.
Now, speaking of George Carlin, Carlin said famously, when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts.
It will not be with jackboots.
It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts, smiley, smiley.
And the smiley is the issue.
This is the issue here.
Amanda, when we refer to men who think they're women or wish very much to be women as she or, or rather as he or him rather than she or her, we look like jerks.
Is there any way to avoid this?
Well, that's kind of the whole, as you deconstructed, that's kind of the whole point of them reconstructing language and using euphemisms and being so adamant that we use these pronouns or whatever that is at task for that day.
That's why it's so important because then the opposite side, like how could you possibly be against You know, equality or diversity or, you know, insert buzzword here.
That's the whole point of the left deconstructing language.
So when it comes to things like gender and how they're just deconstructing gender, it paints the right to be bigots, right?
They hate trans people.
How dare you not call this grown man and address, you know, she or, you know, Rebecca or whatever.
So, I mean, this is all by plan.
And as you said, I think conservatives need to really push back on this.
They're going to call you a bigot anyways.
They're going to call you transphobic anyway.
Just say what is truth.
You just have to stick to the truth because otherwise they win.
We can't keep conceding around as we do so often.
So they're going to call you names anyway.
And as we've seen from this past election, But is there any way not to look like a jerk?
I'm worried that we don't look good to a voting public, even though we're saying a true thing, that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and you can't magically become one by wishing very much.
Alicia, you're much nicer than I am.
Is there any way to, like, smiley, smiley and look good on this?
I don't know.
I mean, I keep reading disturbing things in the news today about, quote-unquote, fetuses and what the U.K. with their national health care socialist system is doing and not helping babies born early, and I'm going to call them babies.
So the Trump administration's decision to change language with the CDC is, like, fine.
It's fine by me.
I mean, if they want us to call them what they want to be called, then maybe they should show us some respect and call babies in utero actually babies and not this fetuses.
And I just think it's really disturbing.
I think that the broader...
On one hand, they want to have a hashtag MeToo, women are always victims movement.
But then on the other hand, they want to change the narrative of what the nuclear family is or the roles that men and women play in society.
And every single time I try to look at it, every single time I try to think of the leftist perspective, it just doesn't make sense to me.
And I don't know what their long game is here.
Well, you're so right on the fetus bit.
That is so smart of them.
They've found a demographic that doesn't vote.
You know, Reagan used to say that he notices everyone who's in favor of abortion has already been born.
And those little babies don't have a voice in any of this.
They have the least voice of anybody.
So if you call them by a ridiculous euphemism, they won't get angry and vote you out of office.
But we do run that risk.
And I think you're both right.
I think we just have to put the truth above all things.
And if you state the truth in good faith and not trying to just be a jerk about it, I think you'll get some credit for it and people might come around.
But, you know, there is that Bible that says people hate the truth, they're going to run away from you, so beware of what you're doing.
Caveat emptor.
Okay, I've got to say...
Goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We have much more to talk about today.
We've got a lot of great news out there.
Pope Francis is saying things about fake news and probably damning CNN to hell.
We've got the Dreamers.
We've got Al Franken unresigning.
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Okay, on egregious abuses of language meant to manipulate our heartstrings and deceive us, it turns out that legalizing the so-called dreamers, the younger illegal aliens, would cost payers $26 billion. the younger illegal aliens, would cost payers $26 billion.
That's according to the Congressional Budget Office reporting Friday that legalizing these two million illegal aliens characterized by Obama as dreamers would cost $25.9 billion.
Now, Alicia, Democrats are so generous with other people's money.
That sounds like a nightmare.
Is there any economic or political argument to give these people legal status, to give them amnesty?
I don't know, and I was starting to read the breakdown of it, which is why my head was down and my eyes were glazed over when we started this segment.
That's usually the reaction I get from women, is just utter apathy, impatience.
It wasn't you.
It was the numbers.
And I was trying to break them down and I was trying to understand them.
They're saying that, oh, it's over a decade, so it's not as big of a deal.
But you just mentioned that's two million dreamers.
I mean, I'm not that good at math, but that's way too much money per immigrant that would become, you know, legalized under this potential plan that, of course, Democrats are pushing.
I think that there is an argument, a tug at the heartstrings, kind of Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney argument that they made of like, some of these people are not here at the fault of their own.
So can we give them a path to citizenship that kind of enables them to be a part of the American dream?
You know, since it wasn't their fault if they were born here or their parents brought them illegally across the border or on an airplane from Asia, you know, when they were like two years old, right?
And actually, the biggest number of these people, I think, that are potentially going to cost us are the people that come here on a travel or a student visa and then just ride it out.
It isn't these dreamers.
So that's a separate part of immigration that we have to take care of.
But I just...
That is a lot of money to cover...
Two million people.
And I don't know what argument the Democrats can make that to say, well, they're going to end up paying this back to society because that's a lot of responsibility for those two million dreamers to have on their own backs.
I mean, couldn't we send them to like Harvard Law School, PhD, buy them a house and a car for all that money?
Where are they spending all this money?
Oh, I thought you were suggesting Ivy Leagues.
And I mean, everyone I've met at Ivy League, I can't stand.
We certainly shouldn't send them there.
I'm all for saying they can stay if they promise to vote Republican, but that will not be achieved.
I'm not even for that, because there's lots of Republicans, as we saw, aka Alabama, that I'm not okay with.
I'm all for people staying that are going to contribute to the fundamentals of Of, you know, what our Constitution stands for, what the Bill of Rights stands for, and going to, you know, provide for themselves and for their family.
And I just, this is one of those areas that when you get in the weeds and when you get in the numbers, it is kind of hard to have a very clear, cut-and-dry example.
But the numbers that they're coming up with out of this report are just astonishing, and it's way too much.
I know.
And you're right on Alabama.
It was awful when those Republicans stayed home and gave it to Doug Jones.
It was awful.
Amanda, you know, Amanda, there has long been a pro-immigration strain in the GOP. That's what Alicia's talking about, that Mitt Romney thing.
It's even in the conservative movement, though.
I mean, there are plenty of good arguments for immigration, particularly from immigration from Latin America.
They work hard and they go to church, so maybe we should adjust to them.
Maybe we should take a page or two out of their book.
But is that now finished?
Is that open borders come in and all that really matters is GDP and who cares what happens to political institutions if we don't bring these people over and Americanize them quickly enough?
Is that over?
And if so, what killed it?
I think this past election shows that And this is across, I would say, political parties as well.
People want a secure, sovereign nation.
They don't want people flowing through this country.
We saw that.
I mean, Donald Trump's number one platform was immigration.
And it wasn't just illegal immigration.
It was that, too.
But people want a strong, sovereign country.
And, you know, I just I don't see how these dreamers or chain migration or any of these things are wins because For the left.
I mean, their whole goal, of course, is to bring over these dreamers or these illegals and give amnesty because then they will vote a certain way.
80% are voting for Democrat.
Yeah, 100%.
So that's their incentive.
But the American people don't want that.
Like I said, we saw that in the election.
So I don't see how it's...
And especially with these dreamers, I don't understand...
I don't think this makes any political sense.
So they're going to contribute, I think it was estimated, $900 million.
But they're going to cost us $26 or $29 billion.
And that's just them, right?
I think it's estimated 12 million illegals in the country now.
And then with chain migration, if we don't get that clamped down on, those 2 million DREAMers are going to bring over 800,000 other family members.
So this just compounds and compounds.
We're already in massive debt.
I just don't see how this is politically viable.
And I think the election showed that.
So we need to actually focus on the border, focus on the illegals we already have here, and then dreamers should be like last.
And we can maybe, you know, use that as, you know, as a collateral to get what we want on the right.
But I just, I don't see how it's a Politically advantageous thing to do for Republicans.
Well, it's funny because while Barack Obama and the left and Democrats were advocating spending $26 billion, presumably giving these particular illegal aliens gold-plated Lamborghinis, he ended, Barack Obama ended the wet foot dry foot policy that allowed Cubans who were fleeing Cuban slavery to have legal status in America.
And it is, I can't help but notice that one group of those immigrants vote for Democrats and those Cubans are pretty reliably Republican.
Isn't that such a coincidence?
What a coincidence, huh?
He was even attacked by some immigration activists right here in California in Los Angeles.
He had protesters stand up during speeches and up in the Bay Area as well.
He had Asian protesters, immigrant protesters stand up during some of his speeches because it was kind of the do as I say, not as I do.
It was one of those campaign promises that he had made about Similar to, I'm going to close down Gitmo, he had made promises to immigrants and to dreamers, and toward the end of his second term, his own base started to get frustrated with him when he realized he wasn't going to keep those promises that he had made.
Yeah, it's very hard.
And Gitmo's still open.
Not so bad.
Not so bad.
Having a far-lefty president is sometimes okay if he's also incompetent.
Pope Francis came out swinging against fake news on Saturday.
He said, presumably in Italian, in his very nice Pope Francis way, we must not fall prey to the sins of communication.
Disinformation, that is, giving just one side of the argument.
Slander, which is sensationalistic.
Or defamation.
Looking for outdated and old things and bringing them to light today.
Interesting in the wake of Me Too.
Amanda, has the Holy Father just condemned CNN to hell?
It looks like it.
I mean, he's putting his foot down on fake news and the number one people disseminating fake news happens to be CNN. The New York Times and Washington Post are not far behind, but CNN is the main purveyor.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I mean, I know Pope Francis leans left on some things.
I mean, not on like church doctrine, but just like climate change and things like that.
But this did seem like a slap in the face to the mainstream media.
So it's very welcome.
I actually think it's a good one.
Sorry, go ahead.
I think Pope Francis was a victim of fake news himself, so I think he's a little...
He is.
The press is really...
He might be to the left.
I don't think anyone would deny that.
But if you compare the number of things he has said with the number of things that the mainstream media say that he has said, they're very different lists.
Now, Alicia, what do you make of the Pope's argument?
Is he essentially...
Because it cuts both ways.
It hits CNN, but it also hits those of us who have points of views as well.
Is he essentially saying...
That public relations is inherently sinful?
That communications for a campaign or a company?
I just kind of thought that.
Like reading his detailed statement on it, I was like, oh snap.
Like I guess depending on what side of the aisle you are, your candidate is screwed and the Pope thinks that you're spewing disinformation or trying to make things look better than they are.
But I think to actually journalists as a whole, there's probably, I can count on one hand, the journalists that I actually respect.
One of them would be Amy Parnes who wrote that book about The fallout of Hillary Clinton's campaign and how from the inside she saw it all going to shreds.
And part of the reason I trust her is that she does not talk about her political opinions.
She's not even registered to vote.
And so reading the Pope's quote, I think you could potentially construe it as, uh-oh, we're in commentary politics and he's kind of poo-pooing on us.
But then you could also read it as an encouragement to true journalists to go out and do their journalistic duty, which is to get to the truth, which is to get to the bottom line.
And to not offer their political opinion or their side to it should truly be, to steal a Fox News phrase, fair and balanced.
But I think it could apply to, you know, the Fox News's of the world and also the CNN's of the world here.
And we're very, we always try to be fair and balanced here.
Also, is this your favorite news story of the week?
It's like, You're Pope and fake news in the same story.
It really is like a Christmas present.
Well, it made me feel very good because obviously I always try to order this show to be very balanced, give both sides equal weight because that's what we do here.
I will say, we are at least more serious journalists at the panel of deplorables than CNN or the New York Times or the Washington Post.
So maybe that'll get me just like 2,000 years in purgatory instead of going straight to hell. - What about all those cigars?
What does the Catholic Church's stance on?
- Well, the body is a temple and the temple needs incense.
- Oh, okay. - G.K. Chesterton said the Catholic Church is a thick steak, is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine and a good cigar.
And I believe him.
And even if the Pope doesn't watch the Michael Knowles show, Perhaps he does.
But even if he doesn't, you know, the Pope is only infallible when he isn't fallible.
That's not all the time.
So who knows if he's speaking ex cathedra?
I don't think so.
Let's move on to senators who are now calling on Al Franken not to resign.
That's so funny.
Who could have predicted this?
Oh, me.
Joe Manchin, Pat Leahy, both think he should not have resigned.
Manchin said what they did to Al was atrocious, the Democrats.
They groped him during photo ops.
No, that's not what he said.
He said, I hope they have enough guts and enough conscience and enough heart to say, Al, we made a mistake asking you prematurely to leave.
You're good enough, you're smart enough, and gosh darn are people like you.
He presumably added later.
Pat Leahy added, I think we acted prematurely before we had all the facts.
Amber Phillips writes today in the Washington Post, could Al Franken unresign?
Sure.
Of course he could, because he hasn't resigned yet.
I knew it.
I told you when it happened.
I knew it when I heard this clip.
Today I am announcing that in the coming weeks, I will be resigning as a member of the United States Senate.
You know, I am announcing to you at some point something will change.
At some point.
Brave.
Bold statement.
At some point Ben Shapiro is going to finally fire you?
Yeah, that's right.
That's like 100% true.
The question is when, you know.
Alicia.
Was the fix in this whole time?
Was this always a fake resignation?
I think the fix was in.
And I think that it all had to do with Alabama.
That they wanted to set it up as they were holier than thou.
They were the righteous people.
They're the ones who stand for women and all that jazz that they like to tout all the time.
But now that their guy won in Alabama, they're going to be like...
Dang it, the GOP, the voters in Alabama didn't fall for our racist, southern, bigoted, you know, pro-child molester vote thing, and so now we have to make sure that we can maintain this vote in the Senate and keep good ol' Al in here.
I'm really disappointed.
I mean, I know that Manchin has a D after his name, but on some things he votes pretty, you know, more independently than the Democratic Party.
He could be doing it to save his own seat, but I'm really disappointed in him for this.
I thought that he was potentially a better human being than that.
Well, you know, Andrew Klavan does describe these guys accurately as the varsity politicians, right?
This is the all-star league of politicians.
And so Joe Manchin's good on gun control.
Why is he good on gun control?
Because he's from West Virginia.
If he lived in New York, he might have a different position on gun control.
He'd be more Schumer-like, yeah.
Right.
They're very good at being politicians.
And that's what you're seeing here from Joe Manchin.
I mean, he's better than Nancy Pelosi, certainly.
But then again, Nancy Pelosi doesn't live in West Virginia.
Amanda, what should Republicans be hoping for here with Al Franken?
Should we be encouraging him to resign?
And setting this precedent that if anyone accuses you years later of getting a little handsy with no real possible evidence, that you can just resign.
Obviously, there was that photo of him getting weird at the USO tour.
But a lot of these allegations are totally unverifiable.
They're saying, well, he slipped a hand and was never on camera and yada, yada, yada.
Should we be hoping for that?
Or do we want Franken to stay so that we can hang it around Democrats necks?
Well, not to hang around their necks, but I don't think he should go because I don't think, like you said, none of these allegations were fully proven.
I know there was that picture, but if you look at the...
I'm not going to sit here and defend Al Franken.
That picture was gross.
He was sleeping.
I'm not going to defend that.
But a lot of these other allegations were not...
He denied them and they weren't proved.
So again, we have to be really careful to just take an accusation And then, you know, ruin someone's life or ruin someone's career.
Like I said before, we've seen this on college campuses and it's really, really bad stuff.
So let's think of due process and not just like, you know, crush anyone who has an allegation, especially when it's, you know, 20 or 40 years ago, like we saw before.
And then also one other point is that, so I think with Al Franken, they were just, you know, having him hang on there and they were going to see, like, as you said, Michael, that they were going to If we're more one, you know, they could probably find a way to get him back in there.
But also, I think it's they're realizing, it's taken them so long, that this whole thing was set up to go after Trump.
Like, they are re-bringing up these allegations against President Trump that we all heard during the election.
This has already been litigated.
This has already been litigated.
And they had Megyn Kelly last week trying to re-litigate this.
She had all these accusers on.
Nobody cared.
Nobody watched.
We already knew this.
It is old news.
Yeah.
And then we had more information about Lisa Bloom, that attorney.
And she apparently was procuring money for women who were coming forward and saying that President Trump accused them of sexual assault or sexual harassment.
That's troublesome.
We already knew it, but there it is in a report from The Hill, and that's The Hill.
That's not from some right-wing site.
How much is she offering?
Because the blank book money is kind of running out, and I can talk.
I can say a lot of things.
I have the best words, folks.
You're absolutely right.
There is this mania.
There is this hysteria that's going on where if someone's career and life can be ruined because someone said something happened 40 years ago...
Clearly, we've reached a point beyond justice.
We've reached a point beyond due process.
But there's another consideration for why we should keep Franken, which is that it's totally cost-free for Democrats to bump him.
It actually helps them because there's a Democrat governor of Minnesota.
A Democrat will likely replace him even at the next election.
So it doesn't really matter.
Whereas Al Franken now has damaged goods.
Keep him in there.
That is absolutely fine.
I'm not going to let Democrats get a free pass when it doesn't matter.
Give me Bob Menendez, then we'll talk.
Give me Menendez.
Okay, ladies, thank you for being here.
From The Daily Wire, Amanda Prestigiacomo, Alicia Krauss.
That is our whole show today.
I am Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Come back tomorrow and we'll do it all again.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
