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Feb. 16, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:34
Ep. 106 - Mitt Romney Hasn’t Learned Anything

Mitt Romney is running for office again in some other state he moved to five minutes ago. In other news, the sky will appear blue today, and water will remain wet. We will analyze the many, many faces of Mitt Romney, what the inevitable Senator Romney means for the Trump administration, and why Republicans need more conviction politicians and fewer squishes dynastic liberals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Mitt Romney is running for office again in some other state he moved to five minutes ago.
In other news, the sky will appear blue today and water will remain wet.
We will analyze the many, many faces of Mitt Romney, what the inevitable Senator Romney means for the Trump administration, and why Republicans need more conviction politicians and fewer squishes from dynastic liberal families.
Then, Breaking news.
New evidence from the Mueller investigation has undercut claims that Trump colluded with the Ruskies and Jimmy Kimmel is crying again.
Aren't you shocked?
Isn't that crazy?
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I get this question all the time in my mailbag.
We've got so much to talk about today.
We've got really, really great stuff in the news.
Because we'll make fun of Jimmy Kimmel for crying, but we'll talk about why it matters and also why we should learn some lessons from Never Trump Republicans all the way from Mitt Romney to Brett Stevens.
But...
I get this question in the mailbag, I don't know, two times a day, three times a day.
Michael, how can I feel like I'm sleeping with you?
I get it constantly.
I get it from people here at The Daily Wire.
The way to do that, of course, is to get yourself a set of Bowling Branch sheets.
Bowling Branch sheets are so nice.
Look, you and I, we're never going to agree on everything, are we?
Maybe we will, and we'll probably agree on this too.
We could all use some more sleep.
You know, last night, I kid you not, I only got 15 hours.
I got 15 hours of sleep, but I showed up today because I knew I had to be here and I knew that I had to spread a little covfefe and joy into your life.
You know, the best way to get a great night's sleep is to use really premium bedding.
And I don't know if you know this.
Premium bedding costs a lot of money.
It can cost about $1,000.
I usually would just scrape pieces of cardboard apart and lay them on my bed because I was very cheap.
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It kind of reminds me, if you've ever stayed in a really, really nice high-end hotel, I've never paid to stay in a high-end hotel, but I have stayed in a couple, and, you know, being an actor, we'll go into that later.
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Okay.
Mitt Romney is running for office again.
Is it a day that ends in Y? It's got to be a day that ends in Y because Mitt Romney is running for office.
And the main takeaway from it, I'm sorry to say, is that Mitt Romney has not learned anything over these past few decades.
Here is the Romney announcement video.
Utah is admired not only for its beauty, but also for the character of its people.
Utahns are known for hard work, innovation, and our can-do pioneering spirit.
But more than these, we're known as a people who serve, who care, and who rise to any occasion.
Utah has a lot to teach the politicians in Washington.
Utah has balanced its budgets.
Washington is buried in debt.
Utah exports more abroad than it imports.
Washington has that backwards.
Utah welcomes legal immigrants from around the world.
Washington sends immigrants a message of exclusion.
And on Utah's Capitol Hill, people treat one another with respect.
I have decided to run for United States Senate because I believe I can help bring Utah's values and Utah's lessons to Washington.
Utah is a better model for Washington than Washington is for Utah.
We feel that this is the right time for me to serve our state and our country.
I ask for your support and your vote.
And I look forward to meeting you over the coming years.
I'm Mitt Romney from the 1990s, and I'm running for our state.
I love how he says our state when it comes to Utah.
That's very cute.
He's lived in Utah for five seconds now.
He just keeps moving to wherever he's going to run from.
So I guess he went to college in Utah, and then he lived all of his life in Massachusetts, worked there, Bain Capital, was the governor of Massachusetts.
Then when he wanted to run for president in 2012, again, for the second time, he moved to New Hampshire and We're good to go.
It wasn't a preening and pristine commercial enough to get you over the finish line in 2012.
He's learned all of the wrong lessons clearly, and that's just on the design front.
I mean, this doesn't work in 2018.
This is something that Donald Trump showed us.
The way that the media works now is not traditional.
We've moved into new media platforms.
We've moved into social media.
And what people like is authenticity.
We've seen a lowering of all of these things, even from our movie stars.
Our movie stars now, we see them on Instagram.
It used to be that you would never see them until you were at the movies.
Now they go, they make PSAs, and they tweet, and they go on Instagram.
It's much closer.
It's much more personal.
And that's how Donald Trump was able to connect directly to the American people.
It's still how he connects to the American people and cuts through the mainstream media because his Twitter account has a much wider reach than the New York Times could ever hope to have.
Mitt Romney didn't learn that lesson.
He's running campaign ads from the early 2000s.
You have to keep up.
This is what happens when politics becomes corporate and becomes a bit ossified, is you can't pivot.
you rely on these consultants who very frequently don't know anything.
They don't know very much about the candidate and they don't know very much about the race.
And so they're always running the last election.
They're always running the last campaign.
Because they learn everything they were supposed to do, you know, whenever the last Senate campaign was in Utah.
And they're not keeping up with the times.
Mitt Romney clearly hasn't kept up with the times.
That's just on the visual aspect.
From the content of it, it's very anti-Trump.
He says that Washington is sending an exclusionary message to immigrants.
That is ridiculous.
The immigration to native population ratio is the highest in this country that's been since the 1890s, over 100 years ago.
And that immigration period in the 1890s gave us the Kennedys, so maybe we should be careful to see which...
God-awful political dynasty we're importing now from some other country in the world.
It's really frustrating because one would think that after he was so anti-Trump during the campaign, he might have pivoted and realized that we're playing in a new political reality.
Maybe he said I was wrong about a few things.
I shouldn't have said this.
This was a little too much.
But that isn't what happened.
He's doubling down on all of these things.
Not only is he not listening to the American people and to his constituents when it comes to the tactics of campaigning, but he's not even listening to them on the content.
You will remember during the 2016 campaign, Romney was vehemently anti-Trump.
Here he is excoriating the eventual GOP nominee.
There are some things that you just can't imagine happening in your life.
This is one of them.
Being in Donald Trump's magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight.
I'm so honored and pleased to have his endorsement.
He understands that our economy is facing threats from abroad.
He's one of the few people who stood up and said, you know what, China has been cheating.
They've taken jobs from Americans.
They haven't played fair.
We have to have a president who will stand up to cheaters.
We believe in free trade and free enterprise, but we don't believe in allowing people to cheat day in and day out.
I spent my life in the private sector, not quite as successful as this guy, No, wait a minute.
That wasn't when he was excoriating Donald Trump in 2016.
That was when he was saying exactly the opposite four years earlier, begging for his endorsement, when he said that Donald Trump is a better businessman than I am.
Donald Trump is right about China.
He's right about trade.
He's right about all of these things.
What a magnificent hotel.
Donald, thank you for the honor of hosting me here.
That was four years ago.
But now we get the real Mitt Romney in 2016.
Here was Romney excoriating Trump last year, two years ago.
Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.
His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.
He's playing the members of the American public for suckers.
He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.
And let me put it very plainly.
If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.
If Donald Trump's plans were ever implemented, The country would sink into prolonged recession.
Isn't he a huge business success?
Doesn't he know what he's talking about?
No, he isn't.
And no, he doesn't.
Well, you said he's more successful than you, so what does that tell us about you, Mitt?
A phony and a fraud, huh?
A phony and a fraud.
I wonder if the Romney doth protest too much.
We have to analyze this a little bit more, and all of the ridiculous predictions he made that did not come true.
But before we do that, listen, I'm a man who likes to stay on time.
You know that.
That's why I can't get to all those issues right now.
And I love movement watches.
I'm wearing my movement watch now.
I wear it all the time.
You might see this.
This is a new one I got.
It's from their new collection called the Revolver Collection.
And it is so cool.
How sleek is this watch?
Is there a sleeker watch out there? - No. - I don't think there is.
It is really cool.
It's a kind of retro, but I think it's called retro-futuristic, even though it seems like a contradiction.
It's got a very modern dial, retro build, though.
I really, really like it.
I've gotten a lot of compliments on it.
And it was funny.
I was actually at the bank the other day, and I was cashing a bunch of checks, no doubt for not doing any work, some kind of other blank thing I was doing.
And the guy handed it in, and the guy at the bank teller, he said, wow, I really like your That's a cool looking watch.
I said, listen, if you use my promo code, I'll get you 15% off.
We can really both benefit here.
Movement Watches is the biggest watch company in the world.
It's the fastest growing watch company in the world.
It's the one that you've really got to keep your eye on because they just started a few years ago and it has grown like gangbusters.
It was started by these two college dropouts.
They've now sold watches in over 160 countries.
They've sold almost 2 million watches.
So given the amount of time that they've been around, they are the biggest thing on the market.
I don't know if you checked out the site lately.
They have doubled the number of watch styles and they're still expanding.
And I hope they keep expanding so that I can get maybe a couple more of these things and mix and match them.
And the reason you can do that...
I always loved watches.
I've worn watches since I was seven or eight years old.
Because I felt if you're going to be a serious person or even look like a serious person, you've got to wear a watch.
You have to keep time, keep a schedule, have places to go and people to see.
But I never wanted to spend ever those insane prices for timepieces that until recently you had to pay $5,000, $6,000.
I couldn't do it.
Even if you wanted a really nice looking watch, a watch that's kind of presentable, a little more versatile.
If you went to a department store, a watch like this would cost $500, $400, $500.
Luckily with Movement, they skip all of that middleman.
So you can buy direct from them and you can get watches at an incredible price point.
Movement watches start at just $95.
They've not only introduced a ton of new watch collections for both men and women, they've also actually expanded to sunglasses and fashion forward bracelets for her or for him.
I don't know.
Listen, it's 2018.
We don't need to have these gender stereotypes and socially constructed gender roles.
They're all about looking good and keeping it simple.
Movement watches don't tell you how many steps you've taken.
I'm not a big fan of that kind of watch.
I like an elegant, simple timepiece.
I don't want it to tell me how many steps I've taken because I usually don't take that many steps.
That's very depressing when I do that.
And this is a timepiece.
It's a timepiece that tells you the time.
It doesn't tell you how many hamburgers you've eaten or what the temperature is in Timbuktu.
It just tells you the time in a nice, elegant analog dial.
And it doesn't blow up your wrist with text messages.
You know, some watches do that now.
I don't answer text messages ever on my computer or on my phone.
I certainly won't do it on my watch.
So it's really great.
You'll get the best price possible because they sell direct to you online.
Classic design, quality construction, styled minimalism.
And I'm going to give you the same offer I gave my bank teller.
You can get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns.
So it's totally no risk whatsoever by going to movement.com slash covefe.
That's M-V-M-T dot com slash covefe.
C-O-V-F-E-F-E. We've left the vowels in the promo code, in the covfefe, but we've taken them out of the movement.
So you should see why movement keeps growing.
Check out their expanding collection.
Go to mvmt.com slash covfefe, C-O-V-E-F-E, and join the movement.
So, okay, we've got to get back to Mitt Romney now.
All of those predictions.
He says if Donald Trump becomes president, the economy is going to fall into recession.
The economy is growing at rates we haven't seen in a decade.
The economy is blowing up.
The market took a little bit of a hit during the election, and then it shot right back up, and it's done very well.
Consumer confidence is very high.
We're Finally, after a decade seeing wages increase, we didn't see that at any point in the last 10 years.
The economy is doing very, very well.
Even the IMF credits Donald Trump with boosting the global economy.
The International Monetary Fund, no particular fan of American conservatism, but they have credited Donald Trump and the tax reform bill The tax reform, now law, with raising the global economy.
So all those predictions were totally wrong.
By the end of the speech, Mitt Romney, preening as one might do during that election, says this is a time for choosing.
And what he's referencing is Ronald Reagan's famous speech for Barry Goldwater, a time for choosing.
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
How dare Mitt Romney invoke a time for choosing?
How dare he compare himself with Ronald Reagan?
Here is Mitt Romney on Ronald Reagan.
You can judge for yourself.
Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush.
I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.
That's really, what political courage?
What standing with conviction?
The conscience of a conservative, Mitt Romney?
That was Romney running against Ted Kennedy in 1994 for Senate in Massachusetts.
I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush.
I don't like Reagan-Bush.
I never watched Ronald Reagan.
I didn't even like GE theater.
I'm not with the Gipper.
I won't win one for the Gipper.
It's just pathetic.
And now he comes up here and he's, what we now know in retrospect is that Donald Trump He's governed as a conservative.
We know that he's been a conservative president, and therefore his campaign promises came true.
He campaigned to govern as a conservative.
And you have Mitt Romney coming up there pretending to be the standard bearer of conservatism.
Meanwhile, he's dissing Ronald Reagan throughout much of his political career.
Pathetic.
But we should have known this from Romney because Romney comes from a family of liberal Republicans.
Romney cites his father, George, as his hero, his guiding star in politics.
George Romney was another failed liberal Republican presidential candidate.
He was also the three-term governor of Michigan.
Bill Buckley.
We always talk about the conservative movement.
We have all these people saying, what movement conservatism?
What about the movement?
I know Donald Trump's doing great conservative things, but what about the movement?
Bill Buckley started the conservative movement to keep the Romneys out of office.
He opposed the first Romney explicitly in 1968.
He ran against liberal Republican John Lindsay for mayor of New York.
He sometimes supported Democrats over liberal Republicans because of what a threat liberal Republicans were to the movement.
The conservative pearl clutchers On the right, they constantly now are endorsing Romney.
They've largely embraced this guy in opposition to Trump, who regardless of his performance on the campaign trail or whatever things he said on television in the year 2000, has governed as a conservative.
How do the Romneys govern?
George Romney as governor of Michigan not only raised taxes, but he passed Michigan's first income tax.
George Romney hated federalism.
He said, quote, as far as I'm concerned, states have no rights.
Only people have rights.
Obstructionism masquerades as states, states' rights as the height of folly, which is outrageous, by the way.
Our framers set up a federal system such that the federal government would be run in part by the states and in part by the people.
That's why the Senate was elected by the states and the House was elected by the people, though that fell apart after the 17th Amendment led to the direct election of senators.
The framers needed the states to have power because that's the only way that you can prevent against demagoguery.
the need of the states that power because it maintains the individual character of different parts of America and it doesn't make it into some homogenized, bland, gray, bureaucratic, technocratic single state government.
George Romney initially supported Vietnam and then he accused the generals of brainwashing him and said that he no longer supported the war and it was terrible.
He did that thing.
He sort of cut and run, I guess, is how the phrase we would use today.
Mitt Romney for much of his political career has followed in his father's ideological footsteps.
Let's just run through a quick little history of Mitt Romney in politics.
When running for Senate in 94, Mitt Romney supported gutting the First Amendment right to political speech by limiting campaign contributions.
He flipped on this in 2007.
Initially, he had the same point of view as Hillary Clinton on this.
Then he flipped in 2007, but his explanation totally missed the point.
He said when he flipped, he said, the original intent of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform was to reduce the role of money and special interests in our political system.
But on this too, it has been a failure.
Political spending has been driven into secret corners and more power and influence has been handed to hidden special interests.
He's gotten the reasoning here totally, totally wrong.
The problem is not money in politics.
Money in politics is protected by the First Amendment because money is speech.
If I want to hold up a sign that says, "Don't elect Mitt Romney anymore, guys.
We should elect conservatives." If I wanted to have that sign, it costs money to make that sign.
That's what a campaign donation goes toward.
Now it is true, it was bizarre to think that any law would wrote money out of politics.
There's no way that that would possibly happen.
Big politics attracts big money.
But we shouldn't even be trying to get money out of politics.
We know that money in politics doesn't decide elections anyway.
Donald Trump was outspent two to one.
Hillary Clinton spent twice as much money on her campaign as Donald Trump and he crushed her in the electoral college.
It was a landslide.
You don't need to worry.
You don't need to protect the American people from themselves and from their own freedom of speech and from their own desires.
They can govern themselves just fine.
Thank you very much.
Mitt Romney said that he supported the Citizens United decision, which repealed all of those campaign finance laws, those anti-constitutional campaign finance laws.
But then Romney criticized the substance of the decision, saying, I'm not crazy about corporations making political contributions as a concept.
Why not?
This is the same man who said, corporations are people, my friend.
And he was right when he said that.
Corporations are people.
A corporation isn't a building.
A corporation isn't a parking lot.
A corporation isn't a desk with a computer on it.
It's people working in corporation with one another.
In corporate, right?
But without Citizens United, how on earth could we defend a newspaper endorsing a political candidate?
Is that the newspaper isn't a person, is it?
The newspaper is that it's a corporation, but corporations are people, my friend.
Romney, you see this constantly.
He always wants to have it both ways.
He always, oh, I don't feel comfortable saying this conservative thing.
He'll say it, then he walks it back, and you just don't know where the guy stands.
As governor of Massachusetts, Romney said he was, quote, absolutely committed to fighting global warming because he said, quote, I think the global warming debate is now pretty much over and people recognize the need associated with providing sources which do not generate the heat currently provided by fossil fuels.
I don't think that's true.
I don't think scientific debates are over.
I don't think they're pretty much over.
And I certainly don't think this one is over.
Perhaps we should bring on our friend Richard Lindzen again to talk about this.
The MIT atmospheric physicist who would, I think, contradict Mitt Romney on that point.
But Mitt Romney, again, is taking this political, highbrow, elite position.
Don't we know what's best?
Listen, listen, we know what's best for you.
Come on, you silly little rubes.
I've read the science papers, and even that isn't true.
Romney, as governor, supported higher taxes on SUVs and taxing developers for cutting down trees in the suburbs.
He supported expanding the soda can tax, the bottle bills.
You know, you have to pay more money whenever you buy 17,000 cases of La Croix.
At the supermarket, as one does.
He appointed prominent environmentalists to regulate industry.
He put limits on oil and gas drilling.
He subsidized hybrid hippie cars, which no Republican should ever drive.
The only hybrid a Republican should drive is a Lamborghini that burns motor oil and gasoline.
He refused to offer tax relief on the gasoline tax during those sky-high gas prices of 2006.
His lieutenant governor wanted some tax relief for people.
You remember how high gas prices were back then.
And he said, no, no, we can't do it.
We need to teach people a lesson about conserving energy.
A more...
An out-of-touch elite position one cannot imagine.
He supported cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax as governor, though he flipped on this when he ran for president.
Again, he provided no sufficient explanation as to why he flipped on this.
When he was governor, he opposed the Bush tax cuts for some reason.
That was one of the best aspects of the Bush administration.
Every conservative was on board for it.
He opposed it.
I don't know why.
And, of course, as Governor Mitt Romney invented Obamacare.
He invented the prototype of Obamacare.
He installed it in his state, and then he lobbied the federal government for an expansion of Medicare, a federal entitlement program, the sort of which is responsible for driving all of the debt.
Quite a record.
Quite a record in office for Mitt Romney.
Now, all politicians change their minds.
That happens.
I've changed my mind about a lot of things.
I'm sure you have, too.
Donald Trump has certainly changed his mind about things.
With Trump, though, the comparison doesn't really hold.
With Trump, he said lefty things on television in the year 2000, and then he said he changed his mind, and as president, he's been very conservative.
His record in governing is a conservative record.
His rhetoric might be all over the place.
His Twitter account might be all over the place, but his record, his actions, are conservative.
Mitt Romney, his public speech record is also all over the place, but his record is liberal.
His record as governor was liberal.
Romney, he might say conservative things on the campaign trail, but then he'll govern at best like a liberal Republican.
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting.
That's the case with government.
And a note on that phrase, people always say the proof is in the pudding, which doesn't make any sense.
What does that even mean?
What is the proof in the pudding?
The phrase is actually the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, which does make sense.
That's just a little sidebar.
Now, I don't mean to run down Romney too much.
I voted for Romney in the general election in 2012 because he was obviously better than Obama.
I don't think he's a bad man in the way that a lot of politicians can be.
He seems like a nice enough guy.
I'd love to share a Decaffeinated coffee with him or something, whatever we could drink, you know.
But I didn't vote for the man in the primary.
Most of my conservative friends didn't vote for him in the primary, except for the more elite ones.
I actually worked for two of his opponents in that primary.
I didn't think he was a good candidate then.
Certainly he wasn't a good candidate.
As we were running explicitly against Obamacare, we nominated the only guy on earth who could claim to have invented Obamacare.
Not a great judgment call.
But we have to question Mitt Romney's judgment here.
We have to question his judgment for political considerations and for policy considerations.
Mitt Romney undercut the GOP nominee in 2016 and disingenuously claimed to be the standard bearer of conservatism.
This is no small thing.
He turned on his party.
And I'm not saying you can never turn on your party or turn on a candidate or a nominee, but you better be right.
You better be right when you do it.
And he wasn't.
And he wasn't right about it.
And it ended up blowing up in his face.
That is a big thing.
To basically say, I would prefer Hillary Clinton become president than the Republican candidate become president.
The Republican nominee become president.
That is a big statement, and it appears that that's what Mitt Romney said.
I don't think we just let him off the hook for that, especially given his very liberal record in government.
He also, in terms of questioning his judgment, he made a bunch of hysterical predictions that proved completely incorrect.
It didn't happen.
America is safer abroad than we've been in ten years.
The American economy is doing much better than it has been doing in ten years.
On social policy, we've got more good conservative social policy coming out of this administration than we did out of the George W. Bush administration.
And he was a social conservative.
But we're getting more social conservative policy out of Donald Trump than out of him.
We're getting the embassy moved to Jerusalem in Israel.
Just that takes such brass cojones of conservatism to say, we're not going to let these other Middle Eastern states boss us around and tell us where we're going to put our embassy.
That's a really beautiful thing.
As a matter of foreign policy, he's handled our adversaries and our allies much better than Barack Obama did.
We're closer to our allies and we're putting much more pressure on our adversaries.
Then, after all of that, Mitt Romney tried to suck up to Donald Trump to become Secretary of State.
Do we have that photo?
You remember that photo?
Yeah.
This is the biggest questioning of his judgment, I think.
Did he ever think that Trump was going to make him Secretary of State?
Donald Trump invited him to dinner to get that picture.
That's the only reason he did it.
And Romney fell for it because he really wanted to get a position in the administration.
He spent a year lambasting this guy in pretty brutal and personal terms.
And then we see that.
He just caved.
Do we really need more Romneys?
That's kind of what it comes down to.
Do we need more Romneys?
Or even Bushes?
And I like the Bushes a lot.
I'm a fan of the Bushes.
I'll break from some of the people on the hard right.
I think they're great.
They're fine.
But don't forget, Bush was added to the Reagan ticket to appease the elite wing of the...
Republican Party to appease the moderates and the liberals in the establishment.
He wasn't added as some rock-ribbed conservative.
He never pretended to be a rock-ribbed conservative.
Neither did George W. Bush.
George W. Bush actually seemed to imply in the 2000 campaign that conservatism is cruel because he said, I'm going to be a compassionate conservative.
He actually echoed what his father did after Reagan.
His father said, we need a kinder, gentler conservatism.
And Nancy Reagan was very offended by this and said, then who?
Kindler and gentler than who, George?
So these guys were never conservatives.
They never pretended to be conservatives.
They did fine.
I love that George Bush Sr.
stood by Ronald Reagan.
He was a model vice president.
That's something we should admire him for.
And George W. Bush reacted well in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
We should give him credit for that too.
And he had some domestic advantages also.
Nominated some good justices.
We got Alito out of him.
Although we've gotten Gorsuch out of Trump.
That's really nice.
What I do mean is that the GOP needs conviction politicians.
It needs conviction politicians.
Not journeyman politicians.
Not career politicians.
Not social politicians who just seem to want to be in the office and go to the dinners and be an important person and be just a statesman or appear like a statesman.
We need people who believe something.
We need people who actually have beliefs.
I don't know that Mitt Romney has beliefs.
I'm sure he has core beliefs, but I don't think he has core political beliefs exactly, none that he's really shown us.
All advances of conservative policy and governance have come through conviction politicians, like Ronald Reagan.
We need to seriously rethink our vision of politics.
The conservative movement needs to seriously rethink its vision of politics.
Winston Churchill is the great example of this.
Winston Churchill, he would fly airplanes.
And he was already a well-known figure at this point.
He escaped from prison camps in South Africa.
He's a hero from the Boer War.
He'd written books, and he was a journalist.
So anyway, he would fly these airplanes, and he wasn't good at flying them, so he crashed them.
And he crashed them three times, and by the third time, it was a pretty tough crash, nearly fatal.
And he was interviewed about this, and they say, shouldn't you give this up?
Aren't you crazy to be flying these airplanes?
And Winston Churchill said something profound.
As he often did.
He said, I love life, but I do not fear death.
And you see this throughout his political career.
He loved life.
He does not fear death.
You see this when he broke out of a South African prison camp.
You saw this in all of his war service.
When he was in military academy, he begged to go to Cuba to help the Spanish put down an insurrection just because.
Just because.
Just so that he could see some action and get trained and have bullets whiz by him.
He said it was the first time he ever had the pleasure of being shot at and missed.
You know, this was a guy who, he did love life.
It's not just like he was on a suicide mission.
It's not just, I don't care about death and he's a crazy person.
He did love life, but he doesn't fear death.
This is the Christian position.
This is what we should think of as conservatives.
This is what we should think of as Americans.
These are the kinds of politicians that we need.
Ronald Reagan was a conviction politician.
He was the kind of guy who said, this is what I believe.
I'm not going to try to pander to everybody in the room and make that guy think I'm saying one thing and make that guy think I'm saying another thing.
And just that mealy-mouthed Bill Clinton.
They asked Bill Clinton what he thought about the Desert Storm, what he thought about the first Iraq War.
And he said, if the vote were close, I would have voted with the majority, but I sympathize with the opinion of the minority.
And that is almost a verbatim quote.
I don't have the exact wording.
That is almost a verbatim quote.
Classic Clintonism.
It depends what the meaning of the word is, is.
You don't hear that from Ronald Reagan, right?
Ronald Reagan tells you what he thinks straightforward.
In many ways, Donald Trump does this too.
People say Trump doesn't know what he believes, he doesn't say what he believes, he doesn't believe anything.
I don't see that.
Clearly he does believe certain things.
Clearly he does.
I don't know that he could give a time for choosing speech.
I don't think he's steeped in conservative thought and in historical thought and philosophical thought such that he could give a great oration like that.
But I think he has beliefs.
I think he has gut beliefs.
And you see it with Twitter.
Twitter gives you a little bit of a glimpse into this guy's thought process because there aren't a ton of filters there.
Even if some people are writing some things or whatever, you get a decent view into what he's thinking.
And he has these gut reactions.
So the NFL players is one of them.
These NFL players are making a mockery of our country.
They're so ignorantly undermining even their own protest because only in America could you do this.
Only in America could you so disrespect your own flag.
The flag which gives you the right to protest your own flag.
And Donald Trump's reaction to that isn't, oh, well, I guess, you know, what we should say is they have the right to do this, of course.
But really, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He said, this is terrible.
This is a terrible thing.
They should stand for their flag.
It's that simple.
If you were raised right, you know that.
It's a terrible thing.
You should stand for your flag.
It's your country.
You should love your country.
And it's America, which is the best country ever.
And you should love that.
I think he has that gut feeling, a gut patriotism.
When asked who he would vote for in the election, Ben Stein, old Republican journeyman, economist, speechwriter for Nixon, and also a famous actor, he said, you know, I suppose I'll vote for Donald Trump.
I don't think he knows a damn thing about economics, but his campaign is pro-America and Hillary's is anti-America.
It's about ripping America down.
That's an important thing.
And we'll talk about that a little bit too, some of the priorities that we have to think about here.
But you might see in Ronald Reagan something akin to a conviction politician, or at least what a conviction politician looks like in our current culture, which doesn't have very many deep convictions.
We might see the best of that in Donald Trump.
Okay, do I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube?
I do, don't I? That's terrible.
I'm sorry, guys.
We have a lot more to get to.
But, well, I guess I'm saying goodbye to Facebook.
I said goodbye to YouTube a long time ago.
I think YouTube said goodbye to me a long time ago when they started censoring all of our materials.
If you're on Facebook, make sure you head on over to dailywire.com right now.
Why?
Well, you'll get me.
You'll get the Andrew Klavan Show.
You'll get the Ben Shapiro Show.
That's all great.
You'll get the conversation.
Next one up is the big boss himself, Ben Shapiro.
You can ask him any question you want.
He'll answer them.
Everybody can watch, but only subscribers can ask questions.
Many are called, few are chosen.
But none of that matters.
You guys see Jimmy Kimmel last night?
I assume you guys saw Jimmy Kimmel, right?
Well, I hope you had this handy.
Well, I know you had this handy because anyone who didn't is now floating in a puddle in their house.
They're floating upside down or something.
You need the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
I don't know how many times I have to tell you this.
You need this to protect yourself and your womanfolk and your children and your family and your possessions.
This is the only FDA-approved vessel to contain salty and delicious leftist tears, whether hot or cold.
You can have them however they come out.
But we're getting them from Jimmy Kimmel.
We're getting them all over the place.
So make sure that you get the leftist tears tumbler at dailywire.com.
We'll be right back to talk about all of the fake news, the school shooting, and Jimmy Kimmel, and so much more.
Dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
Okay, so I will just touch on this at the beginning.
We'll loop back to it at the end.
This horrific school shooting was really awful, and the left wasted no time in demagoguing it.
It was just terrible.
They're saying that the shooter was a white nationalist, and I haven't met that many white nationalists named Cruz or Fernandez or Jucarelli or whatever.
I haven't met a whole lot of those, you know, but I guess there's a first time for everything.
Um...
There are a lot of fake statistics going around.
Some are saying that there have been 18 school shootings in 2018.
That isn't true.
They're playing around with the statistics.
except most you can say that a gun was even accidentally discharged five times around schools in 2018.
But that is neither here nor there.
We'll get back to what we really have to take away from this by the end of our show in that little last moment.
First, breaking news, the Mueller investigation has indicted 13 Russians for trying to meddle in the 2016 election.
Russian information warfare sought to bolster Trump and hurt Hillary during the election.
But after the election, that same machine sought to bolster anti-Trump protests, the so-called resistance.
So this is really great.
They said for so long, The Russians, they're helping Trump.
They're here for Trump.
And we said, well, I don't know if that's true.
The Russians obviously always want to screw up our political process.
They've been doing that for a century.
They've been doing that since the Russian Revolution.
But I don't know.
Why do they like Trump?
Trump's doing things to harm them.
Just the other day, we've apparently U.S.-backed troops slaughtered dozens of Russians in Syria.
I mean, we're literally killing these people on the battlefield.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense.
And now it makes sense.
And I love it so much because all those people wearing the little hats, the pussy hats, and with these disgusting, profane signs and papier-mâché things, they're tools of Russia.
Those guys are tools of Russia because the so-called resistance has started a lot of the anti-Trump protests immediately after he won the presidency.
The indictment that we see now reads, quote, Defendants and their co-conspirators Used false U.S. personas to organize and coordinate other false U.S. personas to organize and coordinate U.S. political rallies protesting the results of the 2016 presidential election.
One of those rallies included, Trump is not my president, which was held right after the election in 2016.
So, now, listen to that.
I don't know if you picked up one of the little lines there.
Democrats are trying to shut this up.
They were using U.S. personas.
They were using U.S. personas.
The indictment goes on, quote, Did you catch that?
I don't know if you caught that.
That means, so they weren't saying they were Russians.
That means that if anybody tried to collude with them, and by collude we mean some guy comes to you on your campaign and says, I have dirt on your opponent, 100% of politicians take that meeting, which they should.
That's what a campaign is for.
Anything else would be campaign negligence.
Anything else would be negligent to your donors and your constituents and your candidate.
They took that meeting.
The operatives from Russia pretended to be Americans, which means there's no collusion.
That means that there's no evidence of collusion.
For the 500 millionth time, more evidence mounting as ever, to quote what Dianne Feinstein accidentally said and what Van Jones accidentally said, The Russia collusion story is a nothing burger.
We see it now from Bob Mueller.
It's giving me faith in the Mueller investigation, by the way, that these indictments are coming out.
Who knows?
I'm still a little skeptical.
He clearly has too much power.
It should never have been appointed in the first place, but not too bad.
I'll take what I can get.
Really good stuff.
They're going to try to cover this up all day, so make sure if you're on Twitter or if you've got some Democrat friends, make sure to yell it really loudly.
You know, in their faces say, see, here is evidence that they were not colluding.
It's logically impossible for this to have been Russian collusion.
Okay, other good news.
The immigration deal failed.
What do you need to know about this?
It's a little confusing.
There was a big Senate bipartisan immigration deal that the White House basically shut down.
It would have legalized at least 1.8 million people.
Future Democratic voters are people who were likely 3.5 times to 8.75 times as likely to vote for Democrats as for Republicans.
Democrats were pretty thrilled about that.
It gave some border protection.
It sort of dealt with a little bit of the chain migration problem.
All you need to know about this issue is that the immigration deal failed.
Ted Cruz is happy about that.
Stephen Miller is happy about that.
The Wall Street Journal and Vox.com are angry.
That's a win.
That's all you need to know.
Let all the other stuff go.
The pro-immigration wing of the Republican Party is upset.
Vox.com, the most disingenuous, lying left-wing rag on the internet other than Media Matters, is upset.
And pretty rock-ribbed conservatives are happy.
That's a win.
Best news of all is Jimmy Kimmel is crying again.
Jimmy Kimmel's crying again, and yep, there they are.
Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.
So good, because it's also a day that ends.
And why?
He's crying again.
I hope you have your tumblers ready.
Here is Jimmy Kimmel.
If one illegal immigrant causes a car accident, we've got to build a wall to keep the rest of them out.
Why are you looking for solutions to that problem and not this one?
Every reasonable American, Republican or Democrat, knows that something has to be done.
Something.
And we're not doing anything.
But go ahead, I'll let you finish.
Let me explain it.
Why do we want to deport people who are breaking our laws is because they're breaking our laws and we're a nation of laws and because the people of this country have a right to have their democratically enacted immigration law enforced and the people of this country have a right to determine who gets to come in and who gets to go out and who gets to use up their tax dollars and welfare and who gets to vote in their elections and who gets to do all of those things.
That's why we deport some people who are Here illegally.
The reason that we don't take away all of their guns is it's a civil right.
Let me try to explain it for Jimmy Kimmel.
We enforce the law and we also protect civil rights.
Maybe I'll slow it down for Jimmy Kimmel.
I know he's the great intellectual of the modern left, but we enforce the law and we protect civil rights.
I know, it seems like a contradiction in terms.
It's a really perverse culture that demands comedian politicians and earnest comedians.
That's what we're getting here.
Kimmel wants something, some action.
Just give me something, something.
What?
What do you want?
What?
You're like a little child.
You're behaving like a little baby boy.
I want something.
What do you want?
I don't know.
I just want something.
We shouldn't let them get away with this.
We should not let the left get away with this.
Jimmy Kimmel doesn't actually care.
He does not care about this.
If he cared, he would propose a solution.
But he hasn't proposed a solution because he doesn't care.
Every time Democrats demagogue this issue, we should point out what they are.
That's what they're doing.
That's what they don't care.
Worse, they're using dead kids as political props.
There's nothing nice or caring or genuine about what Jimmy Kimmel does.
He uses sick and dead kids night after night and crocodile tears as props to erode American liberty.
Night after night after night.
We shouldn't let him get away with this.
It isn't, oh, he's just a little dummy.
It's really despicable what he's doing, and we should call it out every chance we can.
Finally, I'll end on this because we're running a little late.
I should have paid more attention to my movement watch.
The New York Times conservative columnist, prominent Never Trumper, Bret Stephens, is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment.
Bret Stephens writes, quote, They should want to change it fundamentally and permanently.
There is only one way to do this, repeal the Second Amendment.
Repealing the amendment may seem like political mission impossible today, but in the era of same-sex marriage, it's worth recalling that most great causes begin as improbable ones.
This should be a warning.
On the one hand, it shows that we should trust our gut when it comes to squishes.
Like, you know, we say, oh, well, I don't know, maybe he's a conservative.
Oh, he looks like a conservative.
If it looks like a squish and talks like a squish and sounds like a squish, it's probably a squish.
Treat it that way.
You know, I'm not saying be mean to these people or, you know, run them out.
I'm happy to have a big tent party, but let's not pretend that Brett Stevens is the standard bearer of conservatism, as the New York Times, I think, would like to do.
They don't have any pro-Trump Republicans on their staff, to my knowledge.
Brett Stevens is right about gay marriage.
We've been talking about gay marriage a little bit in the last couple weeks and the redefinition and the language issue of this.
Obviously, I don't think this is a cause like civil rights or the abolition of slavery, but our modern culture does.
He calls it a great cause because all our culture cares about these days is sex and assaulting language, and maybe sexually assaulting language in Hollywood at least.
Who knows?
It sounds about right.
We should be careful to keep our priorities in order.
We have to keep our priorities in order when we see these things.
When we see the Republican, the conservative of the New York Times, you know, say that we need to repeal the Second Amendment.
There remain conservatives today who will not vote to reelect Donald Trump because he uses naughty language and doesn't belong to the same lunch clubs that they do.
It's so uncouth.
But what about the dignity of the presidency?
I like the dignity of the presidency, too.
I long for a day when we have Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address night after night.
That would be very nice and uplifting, I suppose.
We have to protect our liberty.
We have to protect our liberty and there are people out there who, on the left and ostensibly on the right, who are trying to repeal fundamental civil rights in this country.
Hillary Clinton campaigned on it.
She campaigned especially on gutting the First Amendment and gutting the Second Amendment, repealing the Second Amendment, weakening the Second Amendment.
Don't get caught up in the lunch clubs.
Don't get caught up in, oh, but it's uncouth.
Oh, it doesn't, you know, the Donald Trump tweet, it doesn't go well with my Chardonnay.
Forget that.
Drink the leftist tears.
It's much more delicious anyway.
You've got to keep your priorities in order, and you've got to make sure that our primary goal is to protect liberty here, to protect the American way, and to defend it.
And don't get caught up in all of the other stuff.
That's all abstract.
We can think about it.
We can think about it some other day, maybe in a time when our liberty is less under threat, or we have other options available to us.
We can prioritize that.
But today we have our priorities.
It's the protection of liberty, and we've got to keep it away from crying hacks like Jimmy Kimmel.
Okay, that's our show.
It's a fun Friday show.
We should do more Friday shows.
I will be back on Monday.
I can't wait to see you then.
You can binge Andrew Klavan's Another Kingdom, which I perform.
It's wherever fine narrative fiction podcasts are downloaded.
You can do that to survive the weekend.
Until then, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you Monday.
Bye.
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.
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