Ep. 83 - Terrible Performances, Oprah To Jake Tapper
Last night, Hollywood’s most rich and famous lechers, assailants, and enablers gathered at the Golden Globes as their city, industry, and reputations smoldered in ruin to lecture the rest of America on morality and demand even more millions of dollars to play pretend. Then, we’ll dissect Stephen Miller’s showdown with former journalist Jake Tapper in a new segment, "Jake Tapper: Mean Girl." Finally, conservative leader Steve Lonegan, Daily Wire’s Elisha Krauss, and Erielle Davidson from the Federalist join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss Oprah 2020, the deportation of 200,000 Salvadoran, and the psychiatric smears against our stable genius president.
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Last night, Hollywood's richest and most famous lechers, assailants, and enablers gathered at the Golden Globes as their city, industry, and reputations smoldered in ruin to lecture the rest of America on morality and demand even more millions of dollars to play pretend.
We will analyze the tone-deaf, oblivious preening.
Then we'll dissect Stephen Miller's showdown with former journalist Jake Tapper in a documentary segment I call Jake Tapper, Mean Girl.
Finally, Daily Wire's Alicia Krauss and Ariel Davidson from The Federalist join the panel of deplorables to discuss Oprah 2020, the deportation of 200,000 Salvadorans.
200,000 Salvadorans, by the way, is the new 50 million Frenchmen.
They can't be wrong, but they can be deported.
And the psychiatric smears against our stable genius president.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I did it.
I did it so that you don't have to, folks.
I was 100% of the television audience last night for the Golden Globes, and this was really awful.
I usually have to cover this stuff for The Daily Wire or The Andrew Klavan Show or something.
This was the worst...
The most insufferable awards show that I have ever seen.
It was last night.
You would expect after a year of Hollywood being ripped to shreds, all of them being exposed as enabling, corrupt, corrosive, sexually deviant monsters and hypocrites, you'd expect they might be a little repentant.
They might be a little penitent and, you know, sorry, mea culpa, keep their mouths shut.
Absolutely not.
What they did was so brave last night that They wore, I don't know if you saw, there was a why we wear black, that was the hashtag.
These people are so brave, they wore black clothing to a black tie event.
That's a round of applause.
Such, it brings a tear to my eye when I think they wore black to a formal event in the evening.
It's just unbelievable.
They didn't reform anything about their industry or their city, or they didn't even really apologize.
They just, they wore black.
Well done, everybody.
It was so, so brave.
It was really disingenuous, too.
There were all of these speeches and all of the red carpet and everything, but it all came off as disingenuous.
Even Reese Witherspoon introduced Oprah Winfrey.
She was winning a big prize, a big honorary award.
And the whole performance was very saccharine.
And it wasn't believable.
You would think that the best and most famous actors in the world would be believable at an industry event, but they weren't.
Ironically, there were these terrible performances.
I think the reason for that is they gave up their glamour.
They gave up their claims to glamour.
The only reason people watch these award shows is for the glitz and the glamour, and they're wearing a gazillion dollars of jewelry and gold and dresses and things like that.
But they gave that away, and this has been going on for decades, but it's gotten much worse in the last 10 years.
Now they just complain.
They just whine and complain, and it takes all the glamour out of it.
Here's Natalie Portman ruining Guillermo del Toro's first Best Director win after 25 years in the industry.
To be here to present the award for Best Director.
And here are the all-male nominees.
Here are the all-male nominees.
Just totally sucked the air out of the moment.
It would have been a glitzy, really nice moment.
Why were no female directors nominated?
Well, here's the reason, because very few women directed top-grossing films last year or the year before.
There's one example of a really good film last year, won Best Picture, Lady Bird, but she didn't get a nomination, Greta Gerwig, for directing it.
This happened to Ben Affleck.
It happened in 2012.
Argo got Best Picture at the Oscars.
He didn't get a nomination for Best Director.
That sort of happens.
Why are there so few women directors?
I don't know.
Only 7% of major films were directed by women in 2016.
I think it was like 11% last year.
Why is that?
Well, until recently, many, many more men than women attended film school, particularly in the field of directing.
That trend is still true at many film schools.
Now there's a little bit more gender parity in film school graduates, although in the field of directing, not so.
And we don't really know the numbers of applicants.
We have every reason to believe that many, many more people are applying to be directors who are men than women.
Why is that?
Well, why would we expect gender parity in every profession?
There are plenty of professions where we don't have gender parity.
We don't say 50% of NASCAR drivers aren't women.
This is an example of collusion, of discrimination.
I got in trouble on Twitter last night.
I pointed this out, that this random statistic is not in itself evidence of discrimination.
You would have to show that.
And I got all these angry tweets.
This one actress, Evan Rachel Woods, is that her name?
Yeah.
Evan Rachel Wood, who's on Westworld, she tweeted at me very angrily, and we had a respectful conversation.
She couldn't answer the points that I was making, so she said, well, I'm finished with this conversation.
And I said, okay.
And then she blocked me, because they can't engage with ideas here.
It's all posturing.
It's all virtue signaling.
There's no actually looking at the industry and the statistics.
It's just little lapel buttons and let's wear black and look at how virtuous we are.
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Now, into these Golden Globes, so that's the one aspect of it.
There was all this virtue signaling on the issue of sexism and discrimination.
But then, in my conversation with that actress, Evan Rachel Wood, she was complaining that she doesn't make as much money as her co-stars on her television show.
She didn't give us any statistics.
Presumably, Anthony Hopkins is going to make more money than she does.
He's one of the legendary actors of the last century.
But regardless, she complains that she's not making enough money and yada, yada, yada.
This actress is worth $8 million, according to a simple Google search.
All of these people who are in this room at the Golden Globes are worth millions and millions of dollars if not billions of dollars like Oprah Winfrey.
So to have them get up there and complain that they're not making enough millions of dollars to pretend and play at pretending all day long, that doesn't play in Peoria.
Nobody wants to watch that.
Nobody has the right to direct a movie.
No one has the right to direct a $50 million feature film or to act or to screenwrite.
You don't have the right to have movies made just because you want to and you feel very special.
You have to go in.
If you don't think you're making enough money, negotiate.
Fire your agent and get a better negotiator so that you can get a better deal.
Nobody's watching this because the American people don't have to watch this.
We don't have to watch you get up and shriek and scream and yell that you're not making enough money.
We can just tune out.
That's what most Americans did.
The Golden Globes ratings fell again, even from last year.
So it's down 5% overall and a whopping 11% in the key demographic of adults aged 18 to 49.
This is a six-year low.
It matches even as far back as 2012's results.
So keep it up, folks.
Take everybody for granted.
Take your box office for granted.
Take your audience for granted.
Keep on politicizing.
Once lighthearted entertainment, it worked so, so well for ESPN, didn't it?
Is that even still a channel anymore?
I don't know.
Let's get into...
The Miller interviews.
There was this big famous interview over the weekend that got a lot of play.
White House aide Stephen Miller went on the television program of former journalist Jake Tapper.
This is a segment that I will call Jake Tapper, Mean Girl.
Stephen, take it away.
I can only tell you my experience, which is that I joined the campaign in January of 16, before the first ballot was cast in the Iowa caucus.
Right.
Bannon helped you get that job.
No?
Corey Lewandowski is the one who offered me the job in the Trump campaign.
But just to finish...
Bannon wasn't helping you?
Bannon didn't help you get that job on the campaign?
I think the person who probably helped me most get the job on the campaign was probably Corey.
But the most important thing, because I've been working with Corey before I joined, to try and help out with the campaign.
So it starts out, and Jake Tapper just keeps pushing, just keeps pushing a fact that obviously isn't true.
So he's trying to tie Stephen Miller to Bannon.
He's saying, Bannon got you the job.
Let's not forget Stephen Miller was on the campaign before Steve Bannon.
He predates him on the campaign.
Now, could you say, does he know Steve Bannon?
Did they work together?
Yeah, I suppose so.
You could just as easily say Stephen Miller got Steve Bannon his job when he came on the campaign.
These people are all working together.
But Tapper's got this agenda.
And the tone that comes out from this interview, Stephen Miller comes off like a robot.
You know, he is just there.
He's stating the facts as he sees them.
He's correcting some errors, the facts.
Several errors that Jake Tapper is pushing.
But Jake Tapper just comes off as like this glib little schoolgirl.
Like a catty little schoolgirl.
He says, well, don't you?
Didn't you do that, don't you?
He says, no, I didn't.
He says, okay, he moves on.
Let's move on to his next accusation.
Did you write a letter outlining reasons to fire Comey and list the Russia investigation?
Is that true?
Here's the problem with what you're saying.
The final draft of the letter, the one that was made...
I'm not talking about that one.
I'm talking about the one that Comey has that mentions Russia.
If you want...
To have an answer to your question and not to get hysterical, then I'll answer it.
The final draft of the letter has the same line about the fact that there is a Trump-Russia investigation that this has nothing to do with.
So it was just moved from the top to the bottom?
No.
He said, no, look at the letter.
It's the beginning.
The investigation is referenced in the beginning of the final letter that was released.
Like the huge embarrassment you had when you got the Comey testimony wrong.
Stephen, I'm trying to get to the issue of the president's fitness, which a lot of people are questioning.
I'm getting to the issue of your fitness.
Stephen, Stephen, we don't want to talk about me.
We can't talk about me at all.
Jake Taver has just gotten two major facts completely wrong, and he's been insisting on them and insisting on them throughout this interview.
Well, you took out the Russia line.
We didn't take out the Russia line.
Well, you moved its placement.
No, we didn't.
The Russia line is still at the top of the memo.
Well, I... And then...
Stephen Miller points out, he says, you know, Jake, you keep getting things wrong here, and you keep trying to push a narrative, and it's a little weird, buddy, and all of a sudden, Jake Tapper cuts him off.
That's the thing you get out of this interview, is Jake Tapper doesn't want his answers.
He doesn't want to hear anything from him.
He wants to cut him off and push a narrative.
Stephen Miller points this out, and this, I think, is the central takeaway from the interview.
All these so-called political geniuses in Washington, whether it be at the big lobbying firms or...
The only person who's called himself a genius in the last week is the president.
Which happens to be a true statement.
Okay.
A self-made billionaire who revolutionized reality TV and who has changed the course of our politics.
I'm sure he's watching and he's happy that you said that, but...
You know, Jake, you can be...
No, no.
You can be condescending...
I'm not being condescending.
I'm trying to get to the point that Steve Bannon...
You can be condescending.
That was a snide remark.
You're sure he's watching and he's happy.
Let me tell you something.
Your network...
Look, you can be as condescending as you want.
It's part of your M.O. But listen, you can have 24-7...
I have no idea why you're attacking me.
Well, I'll explain to you.
I'll tell you why I'm attacking you.
I'm not being condescending.
I'm not being passive aggressive.
How many times has anyone ever said I'm not being passive aggressive when they weren't being very, very passive aggressive?
This is what is really sad about Jake Tapper.
He used to, especially during the Obama years, he was a pretty tough journalist, played it straight.
When a lot of the media were fawning over Barack Obama, he didn't do that.
He just played it as a kind of straight-faced guy going for the facts.
and now he's this whiny, shallow, petulant little schoolgirl who says, well, I'm sure your boss saw it and he just saw what you said and then, oh, he'll be so happy about that.
But anyway, moving on, like, are you kidding me, buddy?
You're supposed to be the last newsman in America.
Why are you getting these snide little barbs in?
This smug smarm?
You don't need to do that.
And by the way, Stephen Miller is a robot.
You can get very unemotional answers out of him, but Jake Tapper himself can't refrain from being emotional in this interview.
That's why Miller says, stop being hysterical.
Why are you trying to make this all personal?
Why are you trying to get little barbs and insults?
And I'm giving you an answer.
Jake Tapper revisits this later in the interview.
There's one viewer that you care about right now, and you're being obsequious, you're being a factotum in order to please him, okay?
And I think I've wasted enough of my viewers' time.
Thank you, Stephen.
As Republicans lawmakers call for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign.
Two aspects of this.
One, he has to cut him off because Stephen Miller isn't saying what he wants him to say.
So he isn't going along with the pre-scripted interview that Jake Tapper clearly had outlined in his head.
So he has to just cut him off very rudely.
It was really awful.
Even from the beginning, to bring up those personal insults in Barb's is so rude, so unbecoming of a serious newsman.
But Jake Tapper hasn't been a serious newsman for a very long time.
But to get that same exact Barb in again, it was pathetic.
I mean, it was the sort of insult that you would hear in middle school.
You would hear somebody say, well, I know that really secretly you only care about this.
It's not even psychobabble.
Psychobabble is much more elevated than what Jake Tapper is doing here to Stephen Miller.
And that's where it really takes a turn.
Because Jake Tapper, having once been a journalist...
He's now fully at CNN. He's doing the CNN thing.
God knows why.
His bosses may have told him that he had to turn up the smarm and the smug.
He's basically auditioning to be Jon Stewart.
Outside of this interview, here are some other examples.
The House apparently does not like any questions about any of this.
Not a ban.
Okay.
But I could have sworn I heard somebody in the Trump administration using the term ban before.
Was it possibly President Trump?
Okay, but to be fair, that was Sean Spicer on Sunday.
Surely he has not used the term ban since then, such as, I don't know, last night when he spoke at George Washington University.
It's all sarcasm.
It's dripping in sarcasm.
And he's so regularly missing his role.
The role that he once served is being a journalist and a straight journalist.
Everything now is so elitist and so condescending.
Stephen Miller, I wonder if he had that even loaded up and ready to go to accuse him of being condescending.
The Trump administration is very good at branding people, finding an essential flaw in their character, and pulling it to the forefront and showing that to people.
That is Jake Tappers.
Donald Trump, I think, has made the guy go completely mad, and he can't help.
He wears his hatred and fury and madness at Donald Trump on his sleeve.
It's affected a lot of his coverage.
Regularly, he just misses the point entirely of news stories.
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.
That's the story, right, Jake?
The story is that Allahu Akbar, the chant of jihadis when they are about to blow things up, that sometimes it's said in beautiful circumstances.
That's the story.
Of course not.
It's posturing and it's preening.
On other times, though, he'll just outright lie.
It's not normal for a president to make fun of disabled people, right?
That's not normal, right?
Correct.
When did he make fun of disabled people?
When did he make fun of somebody's disability?
It didn't happen.
This was a regular attack from the left during the 2016 primary debates because there was some reporter who was saying mean things about Trump.
And he pretended to be spastic when he was impersonating him.
But Donald Trump did precisely the same impersonation when he was making fun of a general, when he was making fun of Ted Cruz, when he was making fun of himself, actually.
He was making fun of something that he himself had done in the past.
He said, oh, yeah, I don't know.
You know, he wasn't being coherent or making sense.
This was a total lie.
Jake Tapper honestly peddled it.
How about some more?
I want to ask you, in Quebec City last week, a white right-wing terrorist opened fire on a mosque, a mosque filled with innocent men, women, and children.
Six people were killed.
President Trump has not said or tweeted one public word about this.
You want to talk about ignoring terrorism?
Why hasn't the president offered his sympathy to our neighbors in the north?
Gee, Jake, do you still beat your wife?
That is a fairer question than what you just brought up to Kellyanne Conway.
Not only is it ridiculous in the position and the defense that it puts the interviewee in, but it's just not grounded in any reality.
We know that President Trump had already called the leaders of Canada and offered his support and offered his condolences on the phone.
So it isn't true.
He publicly offered his...
Support to the neighbors to the north, but that didn't go with the narrative.
So Jake Tapper, he had to reinvent history and reinvent the presidency, which he keeps trying to do.
He tried to reinvent it with Stephen Miller.
Miller wouldn't play along, so he kicked him off of his show.
Now, so he used to be a journalist in the Obama days.
It's really gone downhill during the campaign, certainly during the administration.
He's even admitted his naked partisan advocacy on television on election night.
...that we really need, that Hillary Clinton really needs to maintain.
Let's just put this on the board.
We need to make...
Hillary Clinton needs to keep Pennsylvania...
We need it.
Did you catch that?
Did you catch what he said?
He didn't say the Clinton campaign.
He said, well, we really need a Humana, Humana, Humana.
I mean the Clinton campaign.
And so the only way that we will ever get into the Oval Office, is it hot in here?
Is it hot in the CNN studios?
Give me a break.
But he said it himself.
He said, we are on the team.
We are working for Hillary Clinton, which was no surprise to anyone who's ever watched CNN. But it was a little bit sad for people who used to like Jake Tapper because he used to be a journalist.
The language has continued.
Since he's been, since President Trump was inaugurated.
And people accuse President Trump of using reckless rhetoric, extremist rhetoric.
How about the extremist rhetoric from Jake Tapper?
Where President Trump's tweets are windows into his soul, unfiltered and often seemingly unmoored.
Unmoored.
And by the way, this is the perennial attack against Republicans, particularly against Republican presidents and presidential candidates.
They have to be crazy.
They're all out of their minds.
They're all mentally unfit to be president.
We're seeing this now.
This is coming back up against President Trump.
We'll talk about it a little more later.
Some of its history with Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater and even Dan Quayle, even George W. Bush.
But he doesn't just stop there.
He doesn't just question the president's mental capacities.
He also questions his loyalties.
Even the darkest days of the Obama White House's war against Fox News, the Obama White House never banned Fox from attending any sort of press gangle or briefing.
This White House does not seem to respect the idea of accountability.
This White House does not seem to value an independent press.
There is a word for that line of thinking.
The word is un-American.
That isn't true, by the way.
Barack Obama did try to disinvite Fox News from a press gaggle, I think in 2009, and it was only because the rest of the press wouldn't show up.
They were so offended by it that they had to continue to invite them.
But Obama actually did try to do that.
Nothing unprecedented at all.
How about the final hit, Jake?
If you are a soldier in harm's way right now, if you are a hungry child in Appalachia or the inner city, if you are an unemployed worker in a hollow shell of a steel town, that's not a president who seemed rather focused on your particular needs and wants.
That's a president focused on his bad press.
It was unhinged.
A lot of Americans are going to watch that press conference and think, that guy is not focused on me.
I don't even know what he's focused on.
Just the facts.
CNN, just the facts.
I'm Jake Tapper.
I'm a real journalist.
Look, it looks like he was giving a campaign speech.
Looks like he himself was running for president.
What is it about journalists who say, you know, listen, I don't know any of these people, and I'm certainly not in their shoes, but if I were one of these wonderful Americans, I would hate this president.
I would hate President Trump, and you should too.
Totally, totally pathetic.
And, you know, he once said too, he said, no one has called people who don't want ISIS to move to their neighborhood Islamophobic.
That has never happened in the history of the world.
It's all of this hysterical, dishonest, Word choice that Jake Tapper has been engaging.
It's glib.
It's snarky.
It's that cattiness.
It reduced him from a real journalist to a catty high school girl.
Really pathetic.
And I hope he turns it around.
Some of us hope for that, but Trump derangement syndrome hits us all, and it seems to have hit him.
Speaking of the fairer sex...
Let's bring on our panel.
We have Ariel Davidson from The Federalist.
We have Alicia Krauss, the Daily Wire's own.
Ladies, thank you for being here.
I've been looking at Jake Tapper for like 15 minutes.
It's very nice to look at you and hear from you.
Alicia, who won the debate between Tapper and Miller?
I don't think it was a debate.
And I have to say, I'm going to go against you here, Michael.
Having been on radio for a very long time and, you know, TV and podcasting for a fairly long time, 12 minutes.
Jake Tapper gave Steve Miller 12 minutes.
And it took seven and a half minutes before Tapper actually hit back and was annoyed with him.
So I was getting annoyed just watching it.
And I think that Steve Miller definitely was dodging and definitely was playing to what he thought that the President of the United States wanted to hear and did not answer one of those questions at all.
I mean, Jake Tepper asked a basic question about, oh, when did you come to the campaign?
And then he started talking about how...
He didn't ask the question of when did you come to the campaign.
He made an accusation.
He said, Bannon brought you on the campaign.
And Miller said, I was on the campaign before Bannon.
Okay.
All that to say, bad performance by both guys?
Can we agree there?
I don't think it's this takedown of the mainstream media that everyone is claiming it is.
It was obviously Stephen Miller went in there.
And he was given tons of time.
He was given more than 12 minutes to, I mean...
12 minutes of Jake Tapper interrupting him.
I totally agree with you.
He went in there with his agenda, as do all White House flacks that go in there with their bullet points that they're going to hit.
Stephen Miller is a robot.
He's a highly intelligent robot.
And he was going to hit his points.
He wasn't going to answer certain of Jake Tapper's questions.
But that doesn't excuse Tapper.
Tapper had two premises that were just flat out false.
that he kept hammering.
And my question, I don't care about that.
Then Miller should have called them false and then moved along.
He tried to, but Jay kept interrupting.
He kept interrupting him.
He did say that was false.
The Russia line was in the top of the thing.
But I don't even really mind that.
I don't care if Jay Tapper's gonna hit a White House aide pretty hard.
I suppose that's his job.
My question is the glibness, the snark.
Do you think that in this media age of this clicky, clickbaity age where so much of politics is now entertainment, Do we need that or is there a place for a journalist like Jake Tapper circa 2009 who can cut all of that out and just be a real bulldog but just stick with the facts?
I think that there's definitely a place for that.
But I think, unfortunately, you're going to have very few people, proven by your monologue, that I think would triumph that.
I think that some people out there only want to hear what they want to hear for their side and their guy.
And I mean, hey, it's a free market.
I love the First Amendment.
It gives us the ability for you to have your opinion, me to have mine, and Jake Tapper and Steve Miller to have theirs as well.
I think that I personally would love it.
There's very few journalists out there that I actually think are unbiased.
Everyone, of course, has biases, and certain networks show that in different ways.
I think that there is a part of the audience that would like unbiased reporting, but even when Jake Tapper has done unbiased reporting when it comes to the Trump White House, even when Jake Tapper hit Hillary Clinton in 2016 during the campaign, it still wasn't enough for some people, and I don't know that any of these people can win in any way.
That's a very good point.
The decay of Jake Tapper, in some ways, I don't even really blame him for.
It's sort of a decay of political journalism, and he's a big leading figure, and he's gone where his bosses probably wanted him to go.
But still, to quote a great man, sad.
Ariel, is Stephen Miller a good public face for this administration?
We were talking about a very intelligent robot who came in and just was guns a-blazing against Jake Tapper.
Should they keep sending him out as a public flack?
Well, it's interesting because when he did that press conference on immigration, I actually think he did a phenomenal job.
I think he did a great job of addressing Acosta's advances in a lot of ways.
And I think he ended up coming out of that as sort of the hero against fake news media.
Now, you know, this interview, I agree with Alicia, it was just, it was bad on both sides.
I think Stephen Miller's face, he sort of looked disengaged from it for the majority of it.
And I felt like Tapper just handled himself pretty unprofessionally.
And I was surprised because I usually have a higher opinion of Tapper, especially when it comes to CNN in general.
Well, certainly.
I mean, he's the greatest journalist in the history of the world compared to his colleagues at CNN. Right.
Of course.
But I think that this interview in particular, I was pretty disappointed by both of them.
I would be willing to give Stephen Miller another chance, but I think that this interview kind of fell short for me.
So I agree with Alicia on that, definitely.
He was just, I mean, I totally agree, Ariel.
I had to watch old footage of Stephen Miller because I know he's capable of being better on television and answering direct questions.
I mean, the Jim Acosta, Steve Miller exchange of that press conference that Ariel just mentioned is peak Miller, doing a very good thing when he corrects Acosta's quote from the poem on the Statue of Liberty and then brings it back to his talking point.
He was just all over the place here.
And if I had to be sitting down with him trying to get questions out of him, whether I agreed with his stance and the White House's positioning on the Bannon thing or not, I would have been annoyed after 12 and a half minutes of him yapping.
Absolutely.
And as Ronald Reagan said, if you're explaining, you're losing.
I think that's what Miller was thinking going into this.
The mainstream media have been trying to set the agenda of public discourse around some stupid and irrelevant meeting that may or may not have taken place or may or may not have included certain figures from the campaign with some Russian lawyer who I guess was sent there to disrupt things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they want that to be the news cycle every single day.
Stephen Miller went in there and said, absolutely not.
He's responding to allegations made in this tabloid book by Michael Wolff.
And also, Trump has just had a very public break from his former strategist, Steve Bannon.
So there are a lot of different narratives and a lot of different news agendas that are fighting for primacy here.
I do agree, Stephen Miller has come off better in other venues.
But again, he was going in there guns blazing.
On the central question of the book itself, Ariel, is this book The Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff?
Is it worth reading?
Have you read it?
Alicia, have you read it?
No.
Just excerpts.
So you wouldn't recommend it?
You think it's just probably mostly hearsay and tabloid trash?
I mean, it's hearsay.
And if you want to talk about media bias, talk about NBC's Katie Turr talking to Wolff earlier.
And she ended the interview by telling him, congratulations on your book being a bestseller and congratulations on perturbing the president.
Oh.
I mean, that's almost a direct quote.
I mean, to his credit, at least Jake Tapper went after one of his colleagues, the host of Reliable Sources over the weekend, because he said, you know, let's take this what it is.
Having, you know, some of these things being true and feeling like it kind of sounds like things we've heard out of the White House isn't actually factual information.
And I think that, I mean, I've had friends, Bethany Mandel, who's been a guest on your show, she and her husband read it over the weekend, and she said it reads like a gossipy novel.
Yeah.
And I mean if we're really going on the words of Steve Bannon, who we know to be a fantastic liar, then I would say 99.9% of the book is false.
Plus, Michael Wolfe admits in the preface, I, too, haven't wasted my money on this.
I know a lot of people on the right haven't done it.
Sebastian Gorka has a great piece today out where he says, I'm not going to spend anything, but I will read the excerpts that are already out.
In the beginning of the book, the author, Michael Wolfe, says, I can't really defend any of this as being true or any of the facts being true, but they are notionally true.
Mm-hmm.
I'm not quite sure.
That is the best euphemism of 2018.
There was fake news.
There were alternative facts.
Now we have notionally true, which I think just means not true.
I think you can take the unily out of it, and it's just not true.
So I won't read it either.
The excerpts, you know, they're scintillating.
I sometimes read magazines from the grocery store, but those are a little bit cheaper than this work of fiction.
Okay, we have a lot more to talk about.
We have beyond gossip to talk about now, but unfortunately, folks, if you are on Facebook and YouTube, I have to say goodbye to you right now.
If you're on TheDailyWire.com, thank you so much.
You keep the lights on.
You keep Covfefe in my cup.
It's a really good way to start the year.
What do you get?
It's $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
You get The Andrew Klavan Show.
You get The Ben Shapiro Show.
You get to watch a conversation and ask questions hosted by our very own Alicia Krause with me and Ben and Drew.
Yeah, it's okay.
It's all great.
It's going away, folks.
The leftist tears aren't going away.
The leftist tears are going to be pouring and pouring and pouring.
This is a nice tapper vintage.
Some of my panel today might disagree, but I've been lapping them up all weekend, and especially after the Golden Globes.
There were floods in my own city right now of Los Angeles.
But the Leftist Tears Tumblr is going away.
You will not know the time or the hour when it disappears, but make sure you get yours right now.
You can only get it with an annual membership to The Daily Wire.
Go to dailywire.com right now.
Right now, we'll be right back.
200,000 Salvadorans stand to be deported from the United States.
They were brought here in 2001 under a program called Temporary Protected Status after an earthquake in their country.
Now 200,000 of them stand to be deported.
Alicia, is this a good idea, bad idea?
Is this a good priority for the administration to stand firm on immigration or is it going to be a PR nightmare?
I think it's already a PR nightmare because you just fell into the MSM trap there and read the headline.
What it is, though, is that those 200,000 people do have an opportunity to change their immigration status and update their paperwork, and then they can stay here.
In addition to that, I believe it was actually two awful earthquakes that were backed back in 2001.
And it was a deal that the El Salvadorian government made with the United States government that let kind of like a refugee status for these 200,000 El Salvadorians to be here.
It's been 15 years.
I mean, that is a long time.
Long time to work out your immigration.
That is a long time to work out your immigration status.
That is a long time to get a job, to get a home, to acclimate to American society.
So I would think that these people would be willing and want to do whatever it would take to stay here.
And I think in the long run, this will end up dwindling off.
I think it's going to Look bad on the White House just the way that the media covers it, but I guarantee you it will end up being a very small percentage of those 200,000 that end up getting deported.
Well, this is the issue because the headline is 200,000 people get deported.
Now, the secondary thought is, huh, they've had a long time to figure out their status in the United States, haven't they?
They probably still have a little bit of time.
Nevertheless, that will never be reported, honestly.
And there were these two big pillars of the conservative movement for years and years.
There was one that was strong on immigration and we need to secure the border and jobs here and stop importing Democrats who are going to make us lose elections.
The other was open borders and there was a big wing of the party that wanted more trade, more open borders, the more libertarian strain.
Ariel, does that still exist in the conservative coalition or are we now firmly a stop importing Democrats to make us lose elections party?
Well, I think there's, you know, if the conservative party in terms of immigration sort of waffles, and I think it depends if you tend to lean more on the neoconservative side or whether you're more of a Ted Cruz conservative, I think that's where I usually mentally draw the line when it comes to immigration.
You know, Ted Cruz tends to be a pretty strong immigration hawk, and then you have other parts of the party that tend to be a little bit more favorable towards coming up with a solution that may or may not involve amnesty.
For illegal immigrants that are already residing in the United States.
So I think when it comes to addressing immigration, I think definitely the Conservatives are probably more strict on the border.
But when it comes to the variety or the disparity of opinions within the Conservative Party, we definitely have an entire spectrum.
I will say, though, with the advent of Trump, assuming the presidency, I definitely think I've seen appreciatively Rightward shift on immigration and being a little bit more hawkish on it.
And I tend to fall more in that camp, so I'm glad to see Trump be more firm in that stance.
But, you know, up until that point, I think the conservative party has been pretty lukewarm on immigration and definitely not as hawkish as they sort of put themselves forward to be.
That's ironic.
You just you bring in a lifelong Democrat from Queens, a reality TV star.
And you're absolutely right.
He has made the Republican Party and the conservative coalition more conservative.
He's moved us to the right.
I think that's just the whimsy of God.
OK, we have to move on because we need to talk about our next reality TV star president.
Are you with her, ladies?
Oprah 2020, are you with her?
She gave a rousing speech last night at the Golden Globes, during which she pretended that she hadn't been friends with rapists like Harvey Weinstein for decades, that she and myriad other Hollywood elites haven't covered up the heinous crimes of Gamora by the Sea, Hollywood, California.
Many are now speculating she will run for president.
She is worshipped like a cult figure, by the way, coast to coast.
Alicia, is Oprah the next president of the United States?
Only if The Rock does not run against her, which I am Team Rock 2020 or 2024.
I don't know.
Whatever.
I will vote for The Rock over Oprah Winfrey.
You know, I'm about the person, not the party.
But if he comes out and he's as small government and charming as I think he is, then I'm all about The Rock.
Matt Walsh actually has a great op-ed, of course, up on the Daily Wire right now that brought up the points that you just said.
You know, Oprah Winfrey has been palling around in BFFs with Harvey Weinstein for years, and you have to wonder, when she has made billions, being the pulse of American culture and entertainment and even politics.
I mean, look at what she did for Barack Obama during the primary against Hillary Clinton back in 2008 that, you know, rocketed him to fame and really gave him a huge boost.
When he was running against Hillary Clinton and people were like, who is this guy?
She gave him a platform.
You don't think that she knew.
You don't think that she heard rumors.
You don't think that she had any idea about stuff that was happening behind the scenes in the entertainment industry.
I don't buy it.
Absolutely right.
And she has a lot of other baggage too.
So she's worshipped like a cult figure.
She's beloved.
In some ways, very often the next president is the antithesis of his predecessor.
So you had George W. Bush comes in after Clinton and Clinton was an unsavory, undignified sexual creep, and George W. Bush is going to restore dignity to the White House, born-again Christian.
Clinton was this young, liberal whippersnapper in reaction to the old, stodgy, Republican George H.W. Bush.
Then, obviously, we had Barack Obama, a totally...
New generation, basically.
A younger man.
He's first black president.
He's much more articulate than George W. Bush.
George W. Bush could very frequently not put two sentences together.
Barack Obama gives rousing, beautiful speeches.
He has a wonderful way with words in his books.
Then we have Donald Trump, an antithesis to Barack Obama.
Oprah Winfrey has that.
On the surface, Donald Trump is a villainous figure.
He's always angry and firing people.
Oprah is hugging people and giving away cars.
He's an old white man.
She's an old black woman.
They're both reality TV. They're both cultural figures.
She's got this weird romantic life where she's got, I guess, sort of a girlfriend and sort of a fake husband.
And I've never really looked too far into this, but it is a little strange.
Allegedly.
Everything's alleged, everything's alleged, but it's all pretty weird.
With all of that, we don't know a ton about Oprah's personal life.
We do know she worked herself up from nothing.
Now she's one of the most powerful people in the world.
Could she beat Trump?
Ariel?
Me?
Okay.
You know, I don't know.
I think she actually might, would have a good chance.
The only thing I will say is if the economy keeps performing the way it is performing, that will be a definitive boom for Trump in 2020.
But I think when it comes to Oprah's, you know, curbside appeal, I think you hit the nail on the head.
She has the perfect personality for it.
When it comes to, you know, policy expertise, Trump's going to be coming into this race with four years of a presidency under his belt or three years.
And so he's going to be able to bring that to the table.
So, you know, it's going to be funny.
There are plenty of commentators who made this point.
It's going to be really interesting to watch.
I think Ben Shapiro said this.
It's really interesting to watch the media do a total 180 on the necessity of public policy.
Okay, they're already doing it.
Because when SOPA runs, I mean, that's it.
You know, people are going to be ready to get behind her.
And the funny thing will be is Trump will actually be more experienced than Oprah by the time she essentially runs.
So that's going to be a very funny conundrum.
And, you know, given...
Trump's performance when it comes to the war on ISIS, when it comes to the economy, those are all going to be big wins for Trump.
Tax reform, so he'll be able to bring those to the table.
You know, there are a lot of people who say this will be a slam dunk for Oprah, and I don't know, I question that a bit, just because Trump's going to be bringing, you know, if all goes well, he's going to be bringing a pretty strong three years to the table.
But Oprah, he could offer us all of that in the great economy and foreign policy seriousness, but Oprah could give us a free car, and this is bread and circuses, folks.
2018 decadent culture, bread and circuses.
So, last question.
We only have a couple minutes left.
We've got to talk about our stable genius president.
We have to talk about that stable genius Donald Trump.
So his response to all of the basically baseless accusations in Michael Wolff's tabloid Fire and Fury, he has responded and said that he is, quote, like, very smart, and that he is a very stable genius.
He's not an unstable idiot.
Which they say about every Republican president.
They do this about all of them.
Either they're evil or idiots.
And then in retrospect, they stop being idiots.
But they say it about every single one, and they pretend that every Democrat president is a genius.
So Trump, idiot.
Bush, idiot.
Bush Sr., incompetent.
Ronald Reagan, idiot.
Gerald Ford, idiot.
Gerald Ford, the most athletic president.
They portrayed him as stumbling all over his own feet.
But the Democrats, Bill Clinton, oh, what a genius.
Even Jimmy Carter, utterly factless president.
Well, he's a physicist.
He's an engineer.
He's a genius, right?
You see this again and again.
Barack Obama genius.
We have no evidence of that, but that's what they say.
With all of that, Donald Trump is the first president to smack back and say, nope, I'm a very stable genius.
Two questions.
You can give both of your answers.
Alicia, is he a very stable genius?
And was that response a good one?
No, to the first question.
And secondly, if Donald Trump hadn't been so open and honest about how he does not drink alcohol and why he does not drink alcohol, I would have thought that he was drunk tweeting.
So he's not a very stable genius.
He has shaky hands, no alcohol.
Absolutely right.
Ariel, is he a stable genius and was it a good idea?
My mom always says to me, if you have to say it, it's less likely that it's true.
So if someone has to tell you they're a stable genius, then chances are, you know, it's less likely that that's the case.
So I'll leave it at that.
But we're talking about politics.
Do you remember Bill Clinton?
First of all, politicians have to repeat things ad nauseum.
That's all they do.
They memorize like six lines and they smack you over the head with them.
Bill Clinton, in his re-election campaign, he said, we've got to build a bridge to the 21st century, bridge to the 21st century.
I was like six years old at the time.
I can't get that out of my head.
It's still ringing around my head.
He's said it so many times.
In this case, Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, had an immediate reaction.
He said, what Donald Trump is going to do with his weird diction, his weird word choice, and crazy behavior, unstable behavior, He's going to make all of his own critics tie his name to the word staple genius for the next two weeks.
Has he done that?
I think he has, yeah.
There it is.
He's a genius.
He's a stable genius.
All these words.
He's invented so many because he's a great brand marketer, so he's attached words to all of his opponents.
But even Covfefe, he just made that word up whole cloth.
That's like the thesis of my show.
I'm going to write my political dissertation on the word Covfefe.
Will it be blank?
I already wrote my political dissertation.
Very good point.
Ladies, so good to have you.
We have Alicia Krauss from The Daily Wire, Ariel Davidson from The Federalist.
Well, that was so nice.
We had that awe.
Just so much Jake Tapper and Natalie Portman.
I was like, ah, wah, wah, wah.
And then those ladies came in and made me feel so much better.
That is our show today.
Come back tomorrow.
We're going to do it all again.
I am Michael Knowles.
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.
