Ep. 97 - Democrats Smile For Farrakhan, Frown For Prosperity
Donald Trump touts the wonderful state of our union last night, while Democrats sat and scowled. Except for the Congressional Black Caucus, who wear brightly colored scarves and shawls, presumably to celebrate the national exuberance of the last year as we’ve made America great again. We’re fortunate to be joined today by Senator Cory Booker for reaction. Then, the strengths of intersectionality, why conservatism doesn’t matter, and finally: Guy Fawkes dies on This Day in History!
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Donald Trump touts the wonderful state of our union last night while Democrats sat and scowled.
Except for the Congressional Black Caucus, who wore brightly colored scarves and shawls, presumably to celebrate the national exuberance of the last year as we have made America great again.
It was really nice of them to do it, and that's why I'm wearing my Coogee sweater today.
I want to celebrate, too.
I really like this sweater.
It makes me feel like Biggie Smalls.
I'm Smallie Smalls, actually.
That's going to be my rap name.
So we're really fortunate also to be joined today by Senator Cory Booker for Reaction.
He's going to come right on the show.
And it's a real honor to have a U.S. Senator here to react.
So we will get right to it.
Then, the strengths of intersectionality, why conservatism doesn't matter.
And finally, Guy Fawkes dies on this day in history.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
All right, there's a lot to talk about here.
Some of you might have joined us last night.
Thank you so much if you came and hung out with us at the State of the Union stream party.
I'm still slightly hungover from it.
We spent four hours smoking stogies and drinking and watching State of the Union.
It's a lot of fun.
Dennis Prager dropped by.
I think you can still catch that on...
Oh, well, you can't catch it on YouTube because they shut us down halfway through.
CNN fraudulently shut us down and made a copyright claim on our C-SPAN stream.
The Young Turks was using the same stream and that went up perfectly fine.
So I guess you can't find it there, but look for it on Facebook or Daily Wire or something like that.
It was a lot of fun.
I'm glad that my headache is subsiding because we all had a very good time doing it.
So to get right into it, I want to focus specifically on On the Democrat reaction to some important moments from last night's State of the Union.
And we're joined by Senator Cory Booker.
So let's begin.
Donald Trump said, quote, Tonight I am asking the Congress to pass legislation to help ensure American foreign assistance dollars always serve American interests and only go to friends of America, not enemies of America.
Cory Booker, your thoughts?
Feel that hurt and that pain.
Okay?
Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs.
This was about halfway through the speech.
Including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone.
After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.
Unemployment claims have hit a 45-year low.
African-American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded.
And Hispanic-American unemployment has also reached the lowest levels in history.
Corey, your reaction?
Tens of millions of Americans.
Tens of millions of Americans are working.
Tens of millions of black Americans are working.
The lowest unemployment rate in history.
Hundreds of millions of Americans generally are working.
We have really wonderfully low unemployment right now.
So surely that must have made you smile.
I had tears of rage.
After introducing parents whose children were tragically killed by MS-13 gang members, offering compassion for their heartbreak, President Trump said, quote, Tonight I am calling on the Congress to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed MS-13 and other criminals to break into our country.
We have proposed new legislation that will fix our immigration laws and support our ICE and Border Patrol agents so that this cannot ever happen again.
Corey, come on, you gotta like that.
I hurt.
Trump said, quote, I hurt.
President Trump said, Xiong Ho traveled thousands of miles on crutches across China and Southeast Asia to freedom.
Most of his family followed.
His father was caught trying to escape and was tortured to death.
Today he lives in Seoul, where he rescues other defectors and broadcasts into North Korea what the regime fears the most, the truth.
Today he has a new leg, but Xiong Ho, I understand you still keep those crutches as a reminder of how far you have come.
Your great sacrifice is an inspiration to us all.
I hurt.
Corey.
You are like a broken record, Corey.
Thank you for being here.
Maybe we'll bring you back later or something.
This guy, he's not happy about anything.
At least, though, forget Corey Booker, at least members of the Congressional Black Caucus, they were exuberant.
I don't know if you caught it.
You should have seen them.
They were wearing these beautifully colored shawls.
They were very big and bright because there's mourning in a...
I'm sorry, what's that?
Hold on one second.
I'm just getting...
Oh...
Oh, okay.
Apparently I got that wrong.
They were wearing the shawls because they hate Trump.
They were wearing them because they're angry about something or whatever.
They were also wearing black for some other protest thing or whatever.
Democrat Rep Al Green said, I'm wearing this to show my solidarity with the continent of Africa.
And especially with those countries that the president demeaned, defamed, by indicating they were S-hole or S-house countries, wearing it to show that solidarity and to let the president know that I disapprove of his statements and his behavior.
I totally misread that.
Democrats were already wearing black to highlight the Me Too movement.
Then they added on top of that the colorful scarves.
Democrat Rep Sheila Jackson, she said, quote, I hope it was a pointed statement to those that will see this as a symbol of respect.
She said she believes that her kente cloth was from Ghana.
She believes that it's from Ghana.
She doesn't know.
This is...
Exhibit 755 million of my central theory of the left that the left wants the appearance of the thing, but they don't want the essence of the thing.
They think that they're 60s radicals.
They're play-acting protests.
They think that they're out there, they're in the civil rights movement because they don't want to realize that the civil rights movement worked and Jim Crow is over and segregation is over and black Americans have civil rights.
But they don't want to admit that because that's not as cool.
It doesn't look as good on TV.
It's not as heroic.
We're in a decadent and apathetic age, but we want to appear like we're these wonderful, courageous people actually fighting against something.
It's much nicer, it's much more luxurious to just pretend to be fighting against something than to actually have to go do it.
Because when you actually have to go do it, you get water hoses turned on you and you get arrested and you get thrown in jail or worse.
But now, you just want to look kind of cool, right?
They're wearing the Ghanaian garb.
They're wearing those...
She thinks it's Ghanaian.
They don't know.
I think it's Ghanaian.
I think it means something.
I don't know.
But they don't want to live in Ghana.
No one's moving to Ghana.
Nobody wants to be in Ghana.
And that's where it's so disingenuous when they hit Donald Trump over the asshole comments, you know, that he allegedly said at a closed-door meeting.
He said that a lot of impoverished countries in Africa and Haiti are not very nice places to live.
He said that mostly because they are clearly not very nice places to live.
If they were really nice places to live, you would see Americans moving to live there rather than all of them begging to come to the United States.
They're so disingenuous, in the act itself, in the conversation itself, it undercuts their own argument.
You can't simultaneously say those countries are so awful, this country is so wonderful that we owe it to the rest of the world to let people from crappy places move to the United States, and also those places aren't crappy.
And simultaneously, you can't do it.
You cannot have both simultaneously.
But the left wants to have the appearance of the thing, and they don't want to have to deal with the essence of the thing, that which animates this activism and these ideas.
This is slacktivism at its finest.
They're wearing the black for the Me Too.
They're wearing the Ghanaian thing for protesting Trump for some other reason, or because he made improper comments, untoward comments, uncouth comments, behind closed doors at a private meeting.
What is next?
Are they going to wear a little pin for Kony 2012?
What about Je suis Charlie?
We're just going to add everything.
We'll have a mosaic of faux concern and faux activism and absolutely empty virtue signaling and posturing.
Here are two of the greatest social media supporters of Donald Trump, two of only 45 people that he follows on Twitter.
I keep trying to become one of the people that he follows.
It hasn't happened.
Here they are explaining the ridiculous parade.
Well, that's what these little Democratic lawmakers do.
They sit down on the American people.
That's right.
Here we have a president that wants to stand for all Americans.
Yes.
And you have these Democratic lawmakers.
They want to sit down on us.
But, you know, it's not going to be tolerated.
And see, I think what they want to do is take us back to the Jim Crow day.
That's right.
They want to take us back where they're manipulating, intimidating us, and telling us how it's going to be.
They want to hand us crumbs.
It's reminding me of that president that said, we're going to give you enough to keep you quiet, but not enough to make a difference.
It's time for a president to stand up and make a difference.
That's what President Donald Trump is doing.
And if either the Democrats can stand up or we can do like we're trying to grant a path to citizenship, we need to grant them a path to retirement.
It's time to retire some of these Democratic lawmakers.
The Congressional Black Caucus sat the entire time.
Well, see, these people are in another...
They're back in the 60s.
That's right.
This is 2018.
We are in a new era, a new America.
This man is truly making America great again.
Why wouldn't you be happy with us having more money in our pockets?
See, they want to hand you crumbs.
We can no longer vote for a system that's handing us crumbs anymore.
We need to vote for a businessman that wants to make this place great again.
And I don't see how the Democrats are going to get in it.
How are they going to win it in 2018?
And how are they going to win it in 2020?
I love them so much.
I love them so much.
And they're absolutely right.
Their thinking on this is so clear because they observe just that line alone.
They're living in the 60s.
These people are living in the 60s.
They realize that it's to their political advantage.
They are very lightly educated.
Basically, everybody in Congress is very lightly educated, but especially people that do ridiculous stunts like this.
Things have changed.
We're in a different place.
We're in a different culture.
And there is no longer an advantage to pretending to be protesting for things that haven't existed for 50 years.
So, lest you be tempted to think, ever.
Even in spite of what Diamond and Silk just said, very articulately, very clearly, lest you be tempted to think that the Congressional Black Caucus members who frowned and sat in Warkooji colors last night are principled or politically admirable in any way, here they are.
Here are members of the self-righteous Congressional Black Caucus, including Barack Obama, smiling, taking photos with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has famously said, quote, white people are potential humans.
They haven't evolved yet.
They call them terrorists.
I call them freedom fighters.
Judaism is a gutter religion.
And Hitler was a very great man.
Language festers.
Corey, that is a great point.
That is the first good point Cory Booker made all day long.
Language festers.
Now, you might wonder why you've never seen that photo of Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan before.
That's because the media buried it.
We already know that the media do this.
We know that there was the journalist conspiracy of major mainstream journalists speaking to one another, conspiring on how to hide bad news about Barack Obama and push fluffy pieces to make him more appealing.
This was run by Ezra Klein, who now has the audacity and the gall to run Vox.com and say that he is an explanatory journalist.
He's nothing but a cheap hack and a propagandist.
He's been exposed spectacularly more than anyone else in the media.
He was exposed for being a hacker.
And now he comes out and says, I'm the adult in the room who's going to explain things to you.
Also an explainer for Ezra Klein, all journalism is supposed to be explanatory.
That's what language does.
But that's neither here nor there.
Hillary Clinton tried to make this Louis Farrakhan thing an issue during the 2008 race.
She kept trying to get Barack Obama to reject Farrakhan's support.
You have to reject his support.
Obama played coy the whole time.
He said he denounced it, but he wouldn't reject it.
I mean, he's trying to find some distinction without a difference.
Had this The major networks are not covering it.
Fox is the only one that's covering it.
The rest will not touch this thing.
They're trying to downflow it.
They'll allude to it, but they won't cover it in depth because it just doesn't fit the narrative.
And if it doesn't fit the narrative, they're not going to run it.
Not to put too fine a point on this.
Congressional Black Caucus members will not smile at low black unemployment, but they will smile with a man who says that white people aren't yet humans and that Hitler was a very great man.
That's the Congressional Black Caucus.
Imagine for a moment if there were a Congressional White Caucus.
Sounds absurd.
It would be absurd.
In fact, imagine that any white member of Congress met with a white racist, a white purveyor of racial division like David Duke or Richard Spencer or whomever.
Imagine the endless reporting.
Imagine the endless coverage.
They would be not only run out of Congress, they would be run out of the country, tarred and feathered on a rail.
Do you remember mean girl Jake Tapper grilling Donald Trump during the campaign?
CNN employs that mean girl, Jake Tapper, and he was grilling Trump.
Do you disavow David Duke?
Meanwhile, Donald Trump said, 15 years earlier, he said, David Duke's an idiot.
I don't want to be associated with him at all.
I don't like him.
He's terrible.
There's no place for him at all.
But then, for some reason, Jake Tapper just decided to bring this up again, because it was a good cudgel to hit Donald Trump with.
He said, do you disavow David Duke?
And Trump said, what do you mean, David?
Where are you getting David Duke from?
Why are you asking me these stupid questions, these questions that are basically akin to, do you still beat your wife?
Either way you answer that, you're implicating yourself.
You're defending against a harsh accusation.
You're playing into it with any response.
Do you disavow David Dirk?
How dare you associate me with David Dirk?
Obama didn't get that treatment.
He didn't get that treatment with Farrakhan.
Donald Trump, you don't see photos of Donald Trump smiling with David Duke, shaking hands, thumbs up.
But you do see that with Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama.
He met him, he posed for a picture, he smiled at him.
So the Congressional Black Hawkers will sit and scowl for record low black unemployment, but they will smile for a racist anti-American hate monger.
That's because they're charlatans.
They don't represent their constituents.
Any of the constituents they claim to represent, pure charlatans.
They should not be treated as representative of anybody.
Their district constituents, black Americans, none of them.
Every Democrat who sat last night for the American flag, the national anthem, and low unemployment is a farce and a fraud and should not be afforded any respect as a political leader, not for one single second.
That said...
Keep it up, guys.
Keep it up.
Bring it on.
This was excellent for Republicans.
Trump clearly did it on purpose.
He backed them into corners.
So when he said, we need to stand for our flag and our anthem, what he was really saying is, I'm going to force you Democrats into a bad photo op, because they've spent a year now, two years now, saying that NFL players should not stand for the flag.
So anything they do, if they stand up, they're weak because they've flip-flopped on their position on the NFL. If they sit, they look profoundly un-American, which they are and which they did look like.
When Donald Trump walked in, one thing to notice, we were joking about it on the stream, he was himself applauding.
So he walks in and he's applauding.
He's on the stage.
He's applauding.
And this is really nice.
People were trying to say that this is narcissistic.
He's applauding himself.
That's not what he's doing.
It's actually exactly the opposite.
There are a few things here.
There's a guilelessness about this.
There's an innocence about this.
He clearly is new at being the president and at being a politician at all, and you can see that.
He's a little rough around the edges.
He doesn't quite know.
He appears quite humbled by it, but it's also humbling.
If he walks in, he's walking in for the State of the Union, and he's applauding.
Now, one read is that he's applauding himself, but it didn't look like it.
He's looking around.
He actually stepped away from the podium before he began speaking.
He was standing to the side and looking around and clapping at everybody.
This isn't like when true narcissists like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama walk in.
They feel like they're King Caesar marching into Rome.
Donald Trump isn't there.
For the State of the Union to be the Trump accolades parade.
Surprisingly, it wasn't that.
He was there to laud the State of the Union.
He was applauding the State of the Union.
There's a lovely humility in that, which you can only get from a guy who plasters his name on every building in the world.
And there's a lovely irony and something very American about it.
The guests were great, too.
Donald Trump invited David Dahlberg, firefighter who saved 62 children and staff from a summer camp in the California wildfires.
He invited Ashley Leppert, a Coast Guard technician who rescued dozens from the hurricanes.
John Bridgers, founder of the Cajun Navy to help Hurricane Harvey.
Officer Ryan Holletz, a cop who was shot twice on the job, who adopted a child from parents addicted to opioids.
Corporal Matthew Bradford, who lost his sight and both legs on a deployment in Iraq.
First blind W amputee to re-enlist in the Marine Corps ever.
Staff Sergeant Justin Peck, he saved a fellow American service member from an IED in Syria.
Preston Sharp, he's a young boy who organized the placement of American flags and red carnations on more than 40,000 soldiers' graves.
Steve Stobe and Sandy Keplinger, small business owners.
How long has it been since we saw small business owners lauded in particular at one of these speeches?
Corey Adams, a welder, a worker at Stobe's company.
Four parents whose daughters were killed, tragically, by the gang MS-13.
Celestino Martinez, an ICE officer who hunts down those gangs.
Compare this to Barack Obama's.
In 2016, Obama didn't invite anybody.
The invites were a tradition that was started by Ronald Reagan, but by 2016, Obama wasn't running anymore.
He'd had enough of that.
He invited lots of people almost every year.
2016, nobody.
In 2015, the last year he did it, he invited Mark Kelly, Mark Kelly, as you might recall, is the husband of Gabby Giffords.
So the idea was that Barack Obama invited him because he was going to go on a mission into space to prepare the way for America to send a manned mission to Mars.
That was ostensibly the reason.
That's not really the reason.
Mark Kelly is a major gun control advocate.
And Barack Obama was trying to grab guns for his entire presidency.
Barack Obama began the presidency bemoaning all of those rubes in the country who cling bitterly to their guns and to their religion.
That was the purpose.
It was a political dig.
And an anti-American wanted that.
Alan Gross, who Barack Obama took credit for releasing from a Cuban prison as a way to sell his total caving to the demands of the Castro regime.
He was the other guy that Barack Obama invited that year.
You know, Trump gives invites.
The people to whom Trump gives invites, it highlights important aspects of our country, important sides of our country.
Workers, servicemen, philanthropists, patriotic kids, victims of crime that we have to address.
The Democrats held six separate State of the Union responses last night.
Nobody watched any of them.
Even we didn't.
We were supposed to be streaming one.
We watched 20 seconds of that Kennedy kid drooling on himself.
We said, we can't watch this anymore in front of a broken car, presumably to call attention to the fact that Democrats destroyed Detroit.
So we turned that off and we just kept drinking and hanging out.
Here's one short clip from the celebrity-organized People's State of the Union.
This man, I don't even want to call him a man, but there's this man named Scott Pruitt.
Ah!
Moved to D.C. and basically said, screw it.
He's been anointed the head of the EPA. He's suing them yesterday, running the show today.
Since taking office, he's been a man on a mission.
To make sure we keep increasing our carbon emissions.
He doesn't believe in science, cause he's paid in full.
Said the Paris Climate Accord is just a bunch of bulls.
There's a silver lining in these struggles.
That we get a gift by these very struggles.
And the one silver lining in Trump is that we have created the mother of all movements.
We have come together.
I think my face is going to be in a permanent state of cringe.
So that last guy at the end was Mark Ruffalo.
He's that professional protester who occasionally does superhero movies or something.
But previously, you heard that awful singing.
The lyrics were terrible.
They were just rhyming day with day, and they didn't have a point, and the points didn't make any sense.
And they sounded terrible.
These are supposed to be the entertainers.
These are supposed to be people who entertain us, and they don't entertain us.
Even when they try to, they aren't good.
There isn't any proficiency or skill or talent in any of this.
They were wearing a shirt that said, we are all dreamers or something like that.
These people are doing politics now because they aren't good at art.
They aren't that great at art.
If they spent a quarter of the time that they spend ranting ignorantly about politics, they spent a quarter of that on their craft, they would be much better and that harmonica thing wouldn't have popped out my eardrum.
Okay, I've got my most important takeaways from the State of the Union.
We've got much more to talk about why intersectionality really does work.
This is terrifying, but it is, we have to admit it, and why conservatism, per se, doesn't matter.
But first, before we do any of that, we've got to talk about, these are dangerous times, folks, and we have got to talk about Ring.
So I've talked about Ring a lot.
You've heard me talk about their home security camera.
I love it.
It's innovative.
It's totally the 21st century way.
So they've been sending us actual footage of Ring busting crooks in the act.
This is one that I wanted to share with you on this show.
So I'll set it up.
A woman runs up to a porch to steal a package from the doorstep and then look at what happens.
Hey, put that down.
Dude, I just stopped someone from stealing my package.
Was she wearing a pink hat?
I don't know.
It looked like she was wearing a pink hat.
So she runs up.
She's going to steal this package.
And then the guy is on his Ring app and he's talking to her.
He says, put my package down.
What are you doing?
And then she just doesn't even acknowledge it.
Just puts it down and runs away into the car.
She got completely caught.
It's really unbelievable.
And Ring Video Doorbell, because we've heard these stories.
There was a study in downtown LA, some neighborhood around LA, where Ring gave out a bunch of its product to a high-crime area, and home burglaries went down by 55% in six months.
So you hear these statistics, but here you actually get to see it in person, and it's very entertaining, so I wanted to show it.
It's a really effective way to stop package theft, because thieves just cannot hide with a ring.
Even if they try to steal your ring, the video is up in the clouds, so you can get them anyway.
The look on her face says it all.
She was caught red-handed.
She drops the package, runs away.
The Ring video doorbell lets you see and speak to intruders on your smartphone from anywhere, even share video clips to your neighbors using the Ring app.
So if there's a little crook in the pink hat runs up and tries to steal your package, you can say, "Hey, get out of here." And then you can share that video to your neighbors and say, "Hey, watch your packages.
We got a crook in the neighborhood." Ring's floodlight camera is really good too.
Spotlight camera is really good.
They let you bring a ring of security around your entire property.
That's when the derelicts, you in my audience, will run under someone's property to break in or something, and then a light hits you and then you run away.
That's what it does, except it also has a camera and uploads all of that to the cloud so you can see it from anywhere, from a beach in Bali or your office or whatever.
Stop crime before it happens.
Help make your neighborhood safer with Ring.
People used to do neighborhood watches.
That was the old-timey way to do things with mixed results.
This is the 21st century.
Get with the 21st century.
You know, you're not going to chase down the robbers in a horse and buggy either.
This is the way to do it now.
It's much less expensive.
It's much easier.
You can do it from anywhere anywhere.
You have to get it.
You can save up to $150 on a Ring of Security kit at ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, just like the last name of Jay-Z's wife.
K-N-O-W-L-E-S, that's ring.com slash Knowles, $150 off when you go to ring.com slash Knowles.
Marshall, what is it?
Ring.com slash Knowles.
Okay, the big takeaways from last night.
By all tangible measures, the state of our union is strong.
By all the tangible measures.
Militarily, as a matter of the economy, as a matter of the bureaucracy shrinking, as a matter of the judges who have been appointed.
More judges appointed in this first year than ever in history.
And they're all good originalists who are actually going to interpret laws in the Constitution as they were written.
All wonderful stuff.
There was a lot of North Korea talk.
A North Korea victim was invited to the event.
One wonders how much time a little rocket man has to live on Earth.
It really looked like the buildup to some action that should have probably been taken 25 years ago, so good on him.
On the intangibles, on the culture, we haven't been this divided in at least half a century, maybe longer.
Clearly, they wouldn't stand up for America.
They wouldn't stand up for the flag.
This is weird.
People say Donald Trump is so weird and so strange he's president.
Trump is like perfectly normal compared to these people who are sitting for their own country.
It's so disgusting and outrageous.
All of that does show the strength of intersectionality.
We've heard this term bandied about.
Intersectionality is defined as the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.
The word was invented in 1989 by a feminist named Kimberlé Crenshaw.
It's such a fake term, by the way, that when I was writing this out, my word processor put a little squiggly underneath it.
That's how new this is.
My word isn't that old, you know?
But this is the strength of intersectionality.
So you saw the illegal aliens were a big political issue last night.
Nobody would care about illegal aliens if not for intersectionality.
I'm old enough to have worked on political campaigns when it was a given, on both sides of the aisle, that playing to illegal aliens doesn't work for anybody because we don't want people breaking our laws.
I theoretically can't vote.
Obviously, Democrats are doing their best to make sure that they can, especially in my home state of California.
But obviously, it makes perfect sense that no one would care about illegal aliens as a political matter because we're the voters.
By definition, if only people who are not illegal aliens can vote, you wouldn't play to that, except for intersectionality.
What intersectionality does is create this hostile, toxic, divisive world in which you are convinced, you are brainwashed into imagining oppression everywhere among every person except for whatever contrivance sits at the top, probably in this...
In this version of the culture, it's straight, white men who think that they're men, but if you're a man who thinks that he's a woman, that's okay, you get to go, then you're one of the good people.
And the only bad people are the straight, white men who think they're men, right up at the top.
And in that way, all of the division that you would have among different groups, say, for instance, taxpayers and illegal aliens, or American citizens and illegal aliens who are killing them, and And lowering their wages and increasing crime and taking a lot of welfare and lowering standards in schools because a lot of them don't speak any English and are illiterate.
Those groups might have had some friction with one another except for intersectionality teaching them everyone has to get along except for the man sitting at the top.
And it has clearly worked.
The term was only coined in 1989.
Just a few decades later, it has fundamentally transformed the Democrat Party and fundamentally transformed American national politics.
This is really scary, and we need to figure out a way to stop it.
We need to figure out a way.
Certainly we on the right should never play into these intersectional games and tropes and euphemisms, but we really have to stop it.
It is poison, and it will only last so long.
You can't erode the heart of the American culture forever.
Eventually it will just collapse around itself.
One last happier takeaway is that Donald Trump is a good politician.
So here's the line of the night.
My duty and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American dream.
because Americans are dreamers, too.
Americans are dreamers, too.
Excellent line of the speech.
It was the one that everybody remembered.
I think Stephen Miller wrote this speech.
Stephen Miller is wonderful with language.
He went on a little long.
This speech could have been a third shorter.
It was just too long.
But it was excellent through and through.
If he had just condensed it a little bit more, it would have been great.
His use of language is superb.
Trump delivered it very well.
He's clearly a good politician.
And the people who work for him are good politicians because almost every line of the speech was crafted to put Democrats in impossible corners where they would have to face their own anti-Americanism and look bad for the cameras.
And I lied.
I have one final takeaway.
This one is an important one for conservatives.
I started to mention this last night during the live stream, but we got cut off by the speech.
So here it is.
There is no conservatism without people.
I see this a lot on Twitter.
People talk about this.
They say, what about, okay, well, this is good.
The conservative governance has been good, and the State of the Union is great, and the speech of the State of the Union is great, and the taxes are good, but what about conservatism?
What about the ism?
Is the ism okay?
There isn't a conservatism absent people.
There isn't a conservatism without time and space and people.
This is a classic error that the rationalists fall into.
I sometimes talk about rationalism in politics.
This is the classic error.
That implies that conservatism is an ideology and that's a very modern concept.
Bill Buckley didn't think it was an ideology.
Russell Kirk didn't think it was an ideology.
Edmund Burke certainly didn't think it was an ideology.
All the founders of what we would consider conservative thought, modern conservative thought, didn't think this.
Ideology is a formalized, abridged, rational sub-thought of the tradition.
Conservatism rebuts all of that.
We resist the age of ideology, period.
So I wouldn't say that.
I would say the conservative thought, conservative coalition, pulls from a lot of different philosophies and views of the world.
And importantly, institutions and traditions and the tradition.
It pulls from all of that.
And all value is enfleshed.
All value comes through men doing things.
That's the only way that value has any meaning in this world, is in time and space and through men doing things.
And right now, we have a government.
We have a Speaker of the House named Paul Ryan.
We have a Vice President named Mike Pence.
We have a President of the United States named Donald Trump.
We have Cabinet officials.
We have the Congress.
We have the Senate.
We have Supreme Court justices.
And these are men who are doing things.
They are the ones who are doing.
And a lot of people are attacking them for that because they are the vessel of conservative thought and a conservative agenda.
If it were different people, the left would be doing precisely the same thing.
And it is a huge mistake for conservatives to attack them and to pull away from them and not to support them because they are doing our agenda.
If they stop doing that, if they betray what we would like to do and betray our agenda...
By all means, attack them and find a new vessel for those thoughts and those ideas and those goals.
But while they're doing it, support them and do it.
This is it.
It's very tempting to say, oh, you know, I like conservative things.
I like what Trump's doing, but he's icky and I'm much better than he is.
But no, he's the one doing it.
He is the one effecting that agenda, along with Congress, along with the Senate, along with...
All of the judges that he's appointing.
You should support that.
That is conservative.
That is what the conservative thought leads one to do.
And you shouldn't be beguiled by rationalist and ideological and essentially leftist ideas on how values relate to the real world.
This is the real world.
We're doing great things.
We're making America great again.
So be happy about it.
And wear exuberant colors, just like the Congressional Black Caucus, because we should celebrate.
Okay, let's get to this day in history.
But first, I'm sorry.
This is a good this day in history.
This is a really good...
People don't know anything about this day in history.
But I'm sorry.
If you're watching on Facebook and YouTube, I'll have to say goodbye to you now.
I assume you're not watching on YouTube because CNN probably took this feed down too.
And YouTube probably obliged.
But if you're watching on Facebook, you've got to go over to dailywire.com.
Dailywire.com is where you get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the conversation with Alicia, and I am going to be on the next episode.
So you can ask, only members can ask questions, but everybody can watch.
Many are called, few are chosen.
You also can send in questions to the mailbag.
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This, guys.
This is what you need.
The State of the Union is strong and the leftist tears are welling up.
I actually, I might need a second one just from Cory Booker's appearance on our show today.
I might need to catch all of those.
Cory is just one of these guys.
He is just one of these Democrats who are pouring out salty leftist tears.
So make sure you go over there.
$10 a month, $100 a year, and you get the only proven vessel to capture all of the radioactive leftist tears.
DailyWire.com.
We'll be right back.
Okay, are we ready?
Let's get to this day in history.
This is a fitting this day in history, as they frequently are.
All nature is but art unknown to thee.
On this day in history, in 1606, Guy Fawkes, the chief conspirator in the plot to blow up the British Parliament building, jumped to his death on the way up to be executed.
You all know the Guy Fawkes mask.
It's worn by pseudo rebellious idiots who occupy Wall Street and wear gynecological headwear while they shriek profanities in protest of nothing in particular.
You've seen these things.
It's come to serve as a universal symbol of resistance, of protest.
But ask any of the people wearing the masks, and I would bet you my Shapiro election check that they have no idea who Guy Fawkes is or what he stood for.
So I rather like this story as the resident papist at the Daily Wire.
I look forward to harshing all the lefties' mellows.
The night before the general parliamentary session in 1605 on November 4th, Justice of the Peace, Sir Thomas Nivett, We discovered Guy Fawkes in the cellar of the Parliament building with 4,000 pounds of gunpowder.
Fawkes belonged to a group of disillusioned English Catholics organized by Robert Catesby, who sought to blow up, figuratively and literally, England's Protestant government, all the way up to King James I, who was set to attend Parliament that day on November 5th.
Now, James notoriously persecuted both aspects of my ancestry, English Puritans and Catholics.
There are a few subjects on which Catholics and Mayflower passengers agree.
James I is one of them.
In the ensuing months after Fox's capture, English authorities rounded up and killed all of the conspirators in the gunpowder plot, in addition to arresting, torturing, and killing dozens of English Catholics who had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Guy Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered by January 31st.
But as he climbed the ladder, rather than give the Anglicans that pleasure, he jumped from the ladder and broke his own neck.
A Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated throughout Great Britain on the 5th of November with fireworks, bonfires, the burning and effigy of Guy Fawkes, celebrating the day that Protestant England survived.
One wonders how differently English history and world history would have progressed had the plot prevailed.
English, Henry VIII rather, famously broke Britain away from her ancestral Catholic faith, despite in 1521 having written a book so critical of Martin Luther that Pope Leo X gave him the title Defender of the Faith,
an ironic title because in 1535, frustrated that the Pope kept stymieing Henry's desires to divorce and murder his wives, Henry declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, for which he was excommunicated by Pope Paul III. In 1570, Pope St.
Pius V excommunicated Henry's younger daughter, Elizabeth I, and declared her officially deposed for her persecution of Catholics in England.
And we are not just talking about your everyday run-of-the-mill persecution of Catholics, what we're seeing throughout the world for so long.
We're talking about behead your own sister, marry Queen of Scots for being Catholic kind of persecution of Catholics.
It is this sort of persecution that makes many literary scholars think Shakespeare was a secret Catholic.
Anyway, after Elizabeth's death in 1603, James VI of Scotland succeeded her and became James I of England.
They changed their names a lot.
They were reigning names.
So he became James I. James was a Protestant, but unlike Elizabeth, he had never been a Catholic.
There was no time at which he was a Catholic.
James is the first cradle Protestant monarch of England.
And it's easy for us now, especially watching The Crown or whatever movies are coming out, it's easy for us to think of England as a Protestant We're good to go.
Had the gunpowder plot worked to dislodge from England the merely two generations-old Protestantism affected by two murderers, one who killed his wives and the other who killed her sister, would England have reverted to her ancestral Catholic faith?
Would the King James Version of the Bible, considered by many the greatest work of the English language, would that exist?
All good questions made more urgent by the deplorable state of the Church of England today, a husk of ecclesiology, and Great Britain generally.
But the more personal question for all of us is what precisely is meant by the Guy Fawkes masks?
In our cultural and political battles today, who are the real rebels and who has God on their side?
Good questions.
On that note, I will tell you that's the end of our show.
We have a fun one tomorrow.
Make sure you get all of your mailbag questions in.
And until then, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I will see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.
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