Ep. 108 - 100 Years Of Democrats’ Colluding With Russia
Michael Moore colluded with the Russians! Or at least he was a useful idiot exploited by them. And we have photographic evidence. None of this should surprise us, however, as the American Left has been working with Moscow for over a century to undermine American institutions and culture. We will analyze this latest episode and the long history of Democrats’ colluding with Russia. Then, on This Day In History, what we conservatives can learn from American colonists’ adopting the Indians’ practice of scalping to fight against them!
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Or at least he was a useful idiot exploited by the Russians.
And we have photographic evidence.
None of this should surprise us, however, as the American left has been working with Moscow for over a century to undermine American institutions and culture.
We will analyze this latest episode and the long history of Democrats colluding with Russia.
Then, on this day in history, what we conservatives can learn from American colonists adopting the Indians' practice of scalping to fight against them.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
It's a nice way to start a Tuesday is to talk about scalping, to talk about the advantages of scalping.
And it actually was a very nice way to start a Tuesday.
You know, I wake up in the morning, I have a little covfefe in my cup.
I think I had a little extra covfefe today.
And I look at the news and what do I see?
But Michael Moore colluded with Russia.
After 18 months of Democrats telling us that Donald Trump colluded with Russia, he colluded with Russia, we now find out that actually it was the Democrats who, I guess, sort of colluded with Russia, and really nobody technically colluded with Russia.
So I should take that back about Michael Moore.
Technically, he didn't collude, I guess.
The indictments last week, the Mueller indictments, showed us That there were a lot of Russians in the United States masquerading as Americans.
So they might have said, okay, we've got this dirt on Trump or this dirt on Hillary, and the people talking to them would have thought that those were Americans.
They might have talked to campaign volunteers, they might have been on Facebook buying advertising or whatever, but ironically one of the big...
One of the news stories that came out of the indictments last week is that apparently nobody actually colluded with Russia.
They just talked to people who they thought were Americans.
Now, this would not be the same, by the way, for someone like Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff, who thought that he was talking to the Russians about compromising things from Donald Trump, To the Ukrainians, but he wasn't really.
That was just a big hoax.
So actually, that would be collusion even though there was nothing there.
And with the Russians, even though there might have been something there, that isn't collusion.
Now, there's a lot of collusion.
We've known on the American right that for a long time that this story was total nonsense.
Van Jones also admitted that and called it a nothing burger.
Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein also knew that.
She admitted we don't have any evidence for Trump colluding with Russia.
None of this, though, should surprise us whatsoever that the American left has been duped by the Russians or has been working alongside the Russians because American lefties have allowed themselves to be used by Russia for a very, very long time.
In the case of Moore, Moore attended an anti-Trump rally organized by Russians just days after the 2016 election.
And this was apparently part of the strategy.
Russia has been interfering in our elections for a very long time since the Russian Revolution in the early 20th century.
And I suppose this year was no different.
So they appear to have run ads for candidates like Donald Trump or, say, Bernie Sanders.
And then after President Trump won, they started pushing these rallies for Hillary Clinton and for saying that Donald Trump is not my president.
They actually held one on November 12th that was explicitly called Trump is not my president.
Moore attended it.
He posted on Facebook, quote, He couldn't come down.
He wouldn't come down.
Here's my Facebook Live coverage.
So he was broadcasting from the event.
He was a central figure there.
That said, Michael Moore tends to be a central figure wherever he goes.
In this case, he was also a central figure.
The Mueller indictment makes crystal clear that this rally was organized by Russians.
Moore, you'll also recall, performed a one-man show on Broadway against Donald Trump last year.
I think it was at the Belasco Theater in New York.
Not even the Russians could prop up that theatrical atrocity.
It got terrible reviews.
It fell short of its projected ticket sales, and it's gross.
No surprise at all.
But Michael Moore has been working this angle for a long time, and the Russians have been happy to use him for it.
So, by all available evidence, it was Democrats working with Russians on this election.
President Obama knew about apparent Russian interference, but he did his best to quiet any allegations.
As President Trump tweeted this morning, quote, "There is no serious person out there "who would suggest somehow "that you could even rig America's elections.
"There's no evidence that this has happened in the past "or that it will happen this time.
"And so I'd invite Mr. Trump to stop whining "and make his case to get votes." This is all Trump's tweet.
Trump's tweet goes on.
The President Obama quote just before the election.
That's because he thought crooked Hillary was going to win and he didn't want to rock the boat.
When I easily won the Electoral College, the whole game changed and the Russian excuse became the narrative of the Dems.
Absolutely right.
I am so glad that Twitter exists.
I know it's shadow banning conservatives.
It's probably shadow banning me.
But at least Donald Trump can skip the mainstream media, get his message out to many more people than read the New York Times.
This is exactly right.
The Obama administration knew about Russian interference, knew about this ahead of time.
The only reason that he wouldn't talk about it is so that he wouldn't delegitimize President Hillary Clinton's first year in office.
The Clinton administration, he was hoping that Hillary Clinton would just be elected, they wouldn't have to deal with this at all, and they could keep this Russia stuff under wraps.
Because there's a lot of Russia nonsense to go around.
But we also shouldn't be surprised by that.
Barack Obama has actually colluded with Russia on camera, on microphone, and we caught him.
Here he is.
I transmit this information to Vladimir Putin.
So that was Barack Obama talking in 2012 to Russian puppet leader Medvedev, who is a close ally of Vladimir Putin, a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
And he whispers to him on what he thought was a private conversation, though he had a hot mic on him.
He said, I will have more flexibility after my election.
Now, to translate that for you, that means...
I am going to lie to the American people about my intentions with regard to Russia, and I will do something different than what I say that I'm going to do with regards to Russia.
I will have more flexibility.
I have to pretend to hold one policy view toward Russia during the election, but then I will change my view after I am elected.
To which Medvedev responds like Boris and Natasha.
He says, da, I will transmit this information to Vladimir.
Da, da, I want to suck your blood.
So we know that that is actual collusion.
President Obama didn't think he was talking to an American, but it was secretly a Russian.
President Obama didn't...
I think this was a public forum where he was saying the same thing to the American people as to the Russian leader.
He was lying to the American people, speaking secretly to the Russian leader, and trying to get through his final election.
We know, according to an FBI informant, that during the Obama administration, Moscow sent millions of dollars to the U.S. with the expectation that it would go into Bill Clinton's slush fund while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and oversaw the reset in Russian relations, including the sale of American uranium reserves to Russians.
Even that shouldn't surprise us.
The American left has been working alongside Russia to undermine American institutions and culture for a very, very long time, for 100 years.
Here is a quick historical retrospective.
To begin, right after the Russian Revolution...
In 1919, just two years after, the left-wing American journalist Lincoln Steffens accompanied William Bullitt, a State Department official, on a three-week trip to the Soviet Union.
Steffens admitted that the revolution appeared, quote, confusing and difficult, but he insisted that the Soviet Russia was, quote, a revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan.
Now, those revolutionaries were the Bolsheviks.
Their plan involved taking the royal family, the Russian royal family, into their basement and shooting them dead.
That was, I think, on July 18th.
It was sometime in July 1918.
Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their five children, age 22, 21, 19, 17, 13.
Murdering 13-year-old innocent girls and killing the leaders of your country.
That was the plan that they had.
Steffens made excuses for these Bolshevik horrors by explaining that the Bolsheviks required, quote, a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan.
Here's that plan again.
They've always got a plan.
This is a characteristic of the Utopian left.
Don't worry about the reality around you.
Think about our theoretical plan.
Who cares if it works in practice?
Does it work in theory?
So when Steffens returned to the U.S. and lobbied for taxpayer funds to help the communists, to help the Soviets, he gushed, I have seen the future and it works.
This line, by the way, this early, just as early as it could possibly be, leftist American collusion with Russia, was really the beginning of the modern American conservative movement.
William F. Buckley Jr., when he founded the National Review, used this line.
He said, a conservative is one who stands athwart history yelling stop.
People have wondered what that means.
We're trying to stop history.
We're trying to do this, do that.
That's a direct response to the Lincoln-Steffans line.
I've seen the future and it works.
Bill Buckley says, I've seen that future.
I don't like the way it works.
I notice it involves a lot of dead people and starving people and no liberty whatsoever, and I want to stand to thwart history yelling stop.
Conservatives should be doing precisely the same thing today.
But it was, at that point, too, a facet, a central facet of American fusionist conservatism, the creation of Bill Buckley, that we could unite traditionalists and libertarians because both of them were opposed to Soviet communism.
That was the central...
Which is why the conservative movement after the Cold War and in this new era is going to look different than it did during the Buckley era.
It simply has to.
The central premise of the American political coalition for conservatives no longer exists, so it now has to pivot a little bit.
Stephens was a typical American journalist who railed against business, profit, Christianity and the church.
He regularly railed against all of these things.
Is it any wonder that the American left more broadly found common cause with communist thugs?
Is it any wonder that that kinship persists today?
Lincoln Stephens could work for CNN. Lincoln Stephens could work for the New York Times.
There isn't much of a change.
You see all of the snide remarks that he made about the church and Christianity and profit and capitalism and economic freedom You see that on CNN and the New York Times all the time.
It's a hundred years later, they've learned nothing.
Moving on from Lenin to Stalin, and from one morally idiotic lefty journalist to another, we get to New York Times reporter Walter Durante.
It had to come back to the New York Times.
A Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter.
Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting on Soviet Russia.
He won it because he lived in Soviet Russia for 14 years after the Bolshevik seized power.
So unlike Steffens, who was just there for a little bit of time, a couple weeks, This guy lived there for 14 years.
During that time, Walter Durante, New York Times' Walter Durante, covered up Stalin's most heinous crimes, including the Holodome War, the famine in Ukraine.
Now, you might say, well, it was an innocent error.
He was an idiot.
He was a dummy.
Not so.
Walter Durante attacked journalists like British reporter Gareth Jones, who were actually reporting on those famines, who were actually reporting on the crimes of Stalin.
Jones had seen firsthand the starvation in Ukraine.
I don't know.
That would be our guy, Gareth.
A big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union with, quote, thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation.
Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.
The food shortage, however, which has affected the whole population in the last year, and particularly in the grain-producing provinces, the Ukraine, North Caucasus, and the lower Volga, has, however, caused heavy loss of life.
Yeah, okay, so some people have died.
There's no famine.
There's no, come on, there's no famine.
This was all nonsense, as scholars from across the political spectrum now agree.
The famine was caused by the government stealing private property, by the government collectivizing farms.
But you could see this today.
You would see this today on mainstream news reports.
We see, oh, you know, the North Korean dictatress, the North Korean dragon lady, isn't she so lovely?
Oh, we just don't understand them.
We Americans think of North Korea as a backwards communist hellhole that enslaves and tortures and murders and terrorizes all of its citizens all the time.
But, you know, it's a nice place.
They've got a nice face of North Korea.
These are almost verbatim quotes from CNN in the coverage at the Olympics.
They're doing exactly the same thing.
It's so easy now, they look back, even lefty journalists now will say, oh, Durante probably got it a little bit wrong, didn't he?
But they don't realize they are getting it wrong every single day.
The more they cover up for China, the crimes by China, the more they cover up for crimes in god-awful lefty socialist states like Venezuela in the Americas, throughout the Americas, throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, today, they cover it up for communists and socialists in the Caribbean and in Latin they cover it up for communists and socialists in the Caribbean They still do it.
They love Hugo Chavez, American celebrities, American journalists go down and hang out with Chavez.
They did until he died.
Now, back to Durante.
Durante reported Stalin's propaganda directly, just as the lefties report propaganda from thugs today.
Durante reported Stalin's propaganda not only while he lived in Moscow, he reported Stalin's propaganda directly after he left Moscow.
He even defended the purges.
He defended Stalin's show trials of 1938, in which Stalin murdered his political enemies en masse.
He defended those as legitimate.
It isn't just that.
I know what you're thinking.
Michael, Walter Durante worked for the New York Times.
He was a big dummy who didn't know anything.
That actually isn't even true.
I mean, he was a dummy and he did work for the New York Times.
He knew he was lying.
This New York Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter, elite, total gloss of credibility, you know, a global elite who he knows what's better.
He probably was well educated.
Walter Durante confided with friends that he knew the scale of death and devastation, but he just didn't want to report it.
Some lefties who can't come to grips with the fact that Walter Durante covered up the crimes of the Soviet Union, that he might have just been a committed communist, he might have just supported the Soviet enterprise, they're now suggesting maybe they had some dirt on him, maybe they were blackmailing him.
There's really no evidence of that.
If they were, it's still awful cowardice.
But there's really no evidence of that, I think, as we see today.
I don't think that the lefty thugs around the world are blackmailing Anderson Cooper or blackmailing Brian Stelter or blackmailing all these other people at CNN and the New York Times.
I think they're fellow travelers.
I think they have an ideological agreement with them.
I don't think they were blackmailing Walter Cronkite when Walter Cronkite single-handedly ended the war in Vietnam as we were winning it.
Declared defeat as we were winning the war, as Walter Cronkite was giving speeches for the world federalist conferences around the world, saying that we need a single government to govern the entire world.
I think they were fellow travelers.
They had ideological similarities.
By the way, the Pulitzer Committee still hasn't revoked Durante's prize.
Walter Durante flatly, knowingly denied a major famine, major crimes of Stalin in print, and lambasted journalists who were reporting the truth, and they still won't resent his Pulitzer Prize, because that's the way mainstream journalism works, folks.
So moving on to the mid-20th century.
In 1948, the Soviet Communist Party set up the euphemistically named World Peace Council to promote Soviet interests abroad and campaign against nuclear weapons since, at the time, only the U.S. possessed them.
So they didn't campaign against nuclear weapons once the Soviets got those weapons, by the way.
They would only campaign and agitate for U.S. disarmament.
So useful idiots on the American left who joined the Soviet-backed propaganda machine.
Who were they?
They didn't really get anybody, did they?
They got a lot of high-profile people.
W.E.B. Du Bois, the civil rights activist, he joined the Soviet-backed propaganda shop.
The musician Paul Robeson, the novelist and screenwriter Howard Fast.
Many prominent Americans gave them cover.
subsidiary organizations under the WPC included the Christian Peace Conference, the International Organization of Journalists, the International Union of Students, the World Federation of Democrat Youth, the World Federation of Scientific Workers, the World Federation of Trade Unions, and the World Peace Esperanto Movement, which the World Federation of Trade Unions, and the World Peace Esperanto Movement, which should I know a little bit of Esperanto.
This is this made-up language that was supposed to be.
It was made up by utopians to be the universal second language.
I learned a good bit of it when I was in high school because I thought it was funny.
You can learn the whole language in about ten days.
So one time I was up for an acting job, so I thought it was an acting job.
I go in for it and they say, what language do you speak?
What languages?
So I said, okay, these languages.
Oh, and a little bit of Esperanto.
They said, oh, that's good.
Client number one speaks Esperanto.
I said, this is an event for George Soros.
I said, how'd you know that?
I said, George Soros is the only guy in the world who speaks Esperanto.
And the long and short of that is I ended up being, they hired actors to be sommelier at George Soros' wedding.
So I actually was in attendance at George Soros' wedding.
It was pretty wild.
I know it is shocking sometimes.
I don't even believe it.
But I was there.
I did see it happen as a sommelier.
Very, very funny.
Um...
Of course George Soros supports the World Peace Esperanto movement.
Of course George Soros supports these things.
These were ways to break down, not only national borders, but to break down the culture and the global leadership of the United States.
It is still happening today.
During his wedding, people were giving speeches, very prominent people, were giving speeches about George's love of Esperanto, how he's always propping up Esperanto groups, which nobody speaks.
Again, George Soros and I are two of the only people who speak any Esperanto on The face of the earth.
Soviets.
Back to the Soviets.
That's just to show you that this thing is still persisting today.
This influence is still persisting today, even after the end of the Cold War.
Soviets formed or influenced countless organizations to undermine American institutions.
That includes the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
I think the last soldier in that died a year or two ago.
So that was this brigade basically of communists that were recruited from America to go fight in the Spanish Civil War.
The American Youth Congress.
The American Youth Congress received ample support from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
That was another front for communists, another front for Soviet communism.
The CPUSA, the Communist Party USA obviously, the Socialist Workers' Party, and the United World Federalists, one of which organization Walter Cronkite would later speak at.
Much of the opposition to the Vietnam War and other domestic unrest throughout the U.S. during those years was funded and initiated by the Soviets.
But that isn't where it ends.
It was executed.
It was carried out by the American left.
This persisted throughout those decades.
A lot of the domestic unrest that we look at had agitation, had sources in Moscow and was just carried out by the dummies who were convinced by totalitarian thugs in the United States.
Now, fast forward a little bit.
In 1980, drunk-driving, manslaughtering Senator Ted Kennedy twice attempted to collude with Russia, with the Soviets, to gain a leg up in the presidential election.
He used Democrat Senator John Tunney to request KGB help in sabotaging Jimmy Carter.
So when we're talking about Donald Trump, we're saying that this election was totally unfair.
We need to redo the 2016 election.
It was stolen because some Russians might have run Facebook ads making fun of what a terrible candidate Hillary Clinton is.
Meanwhile, in 1980, a major Democrat Senator from an incredibly important American political family is requesting help from the KGB, the Russian Secret Service, to sabotage President Jimmy Carter because he wanted to primary him and, to sabotage President Jimmy Carter because he wanted to primary him And become president, even though he'd killed that girl.
In 1983, Kennedy again solicited Soviet help in trying to undermine Ronald Reagan, offering to set up TV interviews in the U.S. to make the Soviets come across as peaceful.
So, wasn't enough in 1980.
Apparently the Soviets didn't do well enough by our pal in 1980.
So, next, go around, he says, hey, let's call those Soviets up again.
Let's see if they can help me out on this race.
Now, I don't want you to feel too bad for Jimmy Carter here.
Because in 1980, while Ted Kennedy was trying to use the Soviets to defeat Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter was reaching out to the Soviets to undermine Ronald Reagan.
It is actually a little bit like today.
When you say, wait, he was colluding with this Russian and he with this Russian, this and that, it's not exactly cut and dry.
But we do have examples of these two Democrats fighting with each other to ultimately take down Ronald Reagan.
The only guy here who wasn't colluding with the Russians was Ronald Reagan, who Who defeated them and destroyed their empire eight years later.
In 1984, Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill requested that the Russians interfere in the American presidential election to defeat Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan, he was getting the brunt of all these attacks from the Soviets.
Reagan wasn't trying to undermine Walter Mondale.
Reagan wasn't trying to undermine his opponent's This is another theme that we're seeing.
So you have Tip O'Neill there working behind the scenes with our greatest geopolitical foe, the greatest geopolitical foe the United States has ever had for the longest time it's ever had one.
And he's working behind the scene and he's saying, we have to get rid of Reagan.
You need to help us subvert the American system to get rid of Reagan because he's a demagogue.
That's what you hear.
You hear this all the time with Trump.
Well, we can subvert the Constitution.
We can subvert the constitutional order because, you know, he's a demagogue.
He's a demagogue.
These aren't normal times.
These are abnormal times.
We need to use abnormal means.
Extraordinary times.
Extraordinary means we have to subvert our legal system to get rid of this guy because he's a demagogue.
Fortunately, Donald Trump just relied not on extraordinary means, but on extraordinary memes to destroy Hillary Clinton, and it worked pretty well.
In 1996, Bill Clinton privately and off the record agreed to use the U.S. government to interfere in the Russian presidential election, backing Boris Yeltsin's re-election bid.
If Yeltsin cleared up a trade dispute that disproportionately affected Clinton's home state of Arkansas, and more importantly than his home state of Arkansas, Clinton's main political donors from that home state of Arkansas.
So then finally you have Bill Clinton using the government to interfere in Russian elections, to meddle in their elections, as the buzzword seems to be, to get political favors, not even for his country, just for himself.
A few concluding points on this as we wrap up, not just as we on this episode wrap up this Russian nonsense, but as the country begins to wrap it up, it seems that Mueller's investigation is winding down.
The American left has never apologized for its support of the Soviet Union.
It's almost persistent support of the Soviet Union.
It's help to the Soviet Union, witting and unwilling in direct contact and in the proxy wars that we fought against one another during the Cold War.
They've never apologized.
They have to.
They have no credibility on Russia.
They shouldn't say peep on Russia.
They've been wrong about Russia for a century.
They don't get an opinion.
Their opinion is not worth anything.
And when they accuse us of doing things, we shouldn't listen to them.
We should laugh in their face and go on and continue sipping the delicious leftist tears.
The left has had a love affair with Soviet Russia since the beginning.
And for a couple of reasons.
One, because it was a communist state.
It was the leader of international communism.
On the other hand, it wasn't America.
And the American left hates its own country.
They hate their country.
And so the adversaries of their country become their friends.
They don't like American culture.
They don't like their countrymen.
They don't like America's policies around the world.
They live in the freest, most just, most prosperous, most charitable country that has ever existed.
But they just seem unaware of that.
They don't like their country.
Shivers go up their spine when they see an American flag waving or a flag pin.
You heard Democrats for decades, including Barack Obama, saying, I don't want to wear the flag pin.
I don't want to do this.
I'm a citizen of the world.
From all of the major leaders of American industry and all of the journalists we know here, I'm a citizen of the world.
I'm not a citizen of, I don't have any pesky national ties, any of that pesky, disgusting, uncivilized patriotism, that unsophisticated patriotism.
I'm a citizen of the world.
That's another reason why they persist in helping, wittingly and unwillingly, our adversaries today.
We know from the very beginning the major culture makers were communists in Hollywood.
We now make fun of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Affairs Committee.
But...
The guys were right.
Maybe McCarthy didn't have a briefcase full of names, but there were communists.
There were subversive figures in the State Department and obviously in Hollywood.
I don't think there are non-subversive people in Hollywood.
I think all the non-subversive people in Hollywood are in the studio, basically.
It is amazing to me when people say, oh, that's just McCarthyism.
Oh, that's just, you're hunting for communists.
Well, there were communists.
That's fine.
Maybe in some ways Joe McCarthy harmed his own cause because he was such an imperfect vessel of it.
He had so many personal flaws that in many ways he hurt anti-communism.
But the premise was right.
There were communists or communists throughout American institutions.
This is a classic example of projection from the left.
Trump's critics on the right say that he needs to come down harder on Russia.
They're saying, well, I don't think there was Russian collusion, but he needs to come down really hard.
He needs sanctions.
He needs to come down hard on Russia.
No, he doesn't.
No, he doesn't.
To do that is to accept their ridiculous premise that Donald Trump, the man we've known for four decades, is a secret Manchurian candidate of Moscow.
It's an absurd premise.
We don't need to give it the time of day.
We don't play defense.
We don't play defense for those jerks, for those Russia-loving, communist-loving jerks for a century.
We don't have to deal with their premises and respond to them as they want to be responded to.
No thank you.
Keep calm and covfefe.
Move on.
Ignore their nonsense.
It is so, so rich.
Lefties and Trump critics on the right are saying that Reagan would be ashamed if he saw these accusations about Republicans cozying up to Russia.
Ronald Reagan would only be ashamed that we're so gullible, that we're willing to buy it.
The left is accusing us, the Democrats are accusing us, of doing the very thing that they have been doing for 100 years.
And we play defense.
We say, no, we're not.
It's ridiculous.
Don't know.
You do not have to deal with them this way.
You do not have to accept their premises.
You do not have to play defense for even one second.
You don't owe those people one single explanation on this point.
They owe you 100 years of explanations, and the next time they bring up Trump and Russia, demand 100 years of explanations from them.
Demand explanations from Lincoln Steffens all the way up to the Barack Obama administration.
See what they say.
You'll at least have a long time to think of your retort, because they'll have a century of explaining to do.
All right, we've got to get to this day in history.
Do we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube?
Yes.
We do.
That's awful.
This is a really good this day in history.
You can see I'm a little fired up today.
I clearly have a little more covfefe pumping through my veins.
We're going to be talking about scalping.
We're going to have a defense of scalping and why scalping is important for us as we look at this current political climate.
But if you are not on dailywire.com, you're not going to be able to see it.
I want you to be able to see it.
We have some gory pictures.
They're not that gory, but, you know, they're fun to watch.
If you're not on dailywire.com, you can't do it.
If you are on Facebook, please go to dailywire.com.
If you're on YouTube, how did you find us on YouTube?
I don't know.
I've been trying to find us on YouTube for weeks now.
All I notice is they censor us and they promote CNN and the Young Turks and they fund the Young Turks, but then they censor anything that I say because apparently a history of American-Russian relations is too saucy for YouTube.
So you can't have any of that nasty little history getting out No, no, no.
That would be too dangerous if Americans learned anything about history.
So, if you're on Facebook, please come over.
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It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the conversation, which next will feature the big boss himself, Ben.
He just flew out to D.C. to go to CPAC. I'm very, very envious.
I love going to CPAC. If you're at CPAC right now, have a good time.
It is super fun.
Hopefully I'll be able to come next year or something.
The timing didn't work, but it is a lot of fun.
If you can catch Ben's speech there, it is going to be phenomenal.
I assume it's been sold out for months, but it is going to be really, really good, so don't miss it.
But you can only get all of those things, all of those wonderful things, at dailywire.com.
And you're going to need this, folks, the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You're especially going to need it after I defend scalping in this day in history.
So make sure you go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
Okay, let's do it.
This day in history.
On this day in history, in 1725, Americans scalped a bunch of Indians.
Not the most pleasant topic to talk about, not the most pleasant event in American history, but it is a surprisingly relevant one.
And that is it, by the way.
Basically, just a group of New Hampshire colonists came across a band of Indians and they scalped ten of them.
And the colonists received a bounty of 100 pounds per scalp from colonial authorities in Britain.
For those who don't know, scalping is a native practice where the Indians would grab the hair of their adversary and chop away at it in a semicircle with some sharp device.
And then they would shake it loose and rip the top of the head right off of their enemies.
This wasn't the first time colonists adopted the grisly native practice.
Though this was a major early example of it, another major early example of cultural appropriation.
People didn't have as much trouble with cultural appropriation at the time.
I'm sure the Indians didn't enjoy it very much, but it wasn't such a cultural taboo as it is now.
Now, in the Americas, Indians for millennia practiced this technique.
They used the sharp instrument.
They ripped the scalp right off of their victims.
Scalping isn't fatal in itself, though usually the only people who would stick around long enough to be scalped had already been inflicted with grave wounds or they were already dead.
So, practically speaking, it was fatal or it...
Only related to dead people.
I promise you, if someone's of sound mind and body and someone grabs your head with a little axe, you're probably going to run away pretty fast.
Americans and Europeans regularly referred to the Indian scalping knives.
You see this in a lot of literature, the Indians had specific scalping knives, but that isn't true.
The Indians just used regular old knives to scalp.
One day they'd go up to a colonist and scalp him and then they'd go home and eat their dinner and they'd use the same knife all the time.
There wasn't a specific tool for that.
The scalp, of course, became a war trophy, so you'd come back with ten, like the colonists did.
They came back with ten scalps, and this is fairly fearsome, and it's a trophy of your kill.
Now, Indians didn't just scalp combatants in the Americas.
The Pawnees, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, they regularly scalped women and children.
This was considered, by the way, it wasn't considered dishonorable to scalp women and children.
It was considered especially honorable to scalp women and children because if you got the scalp of a woman or a little child or a baby, that meant that you as a warrior had entered into the heart of enemy territory.
You didn't just grab one on the outskirts.
You went all the way in and chopped off these scalps of women and children.
Now, Indians practiced Scalping in the Americas through the end of the 19th century.
This wasn't a long, long time ago.
We're talking about a little over 100 years ago.
90% of dead bodies at the Crow Creek Massacre site were scalped.
The Crow Creek Massacre site, that's where a brutal massacre took place among Indian tribes around the year 1325.
We don't have a lot of records of this, but sometime 700 or 800 years ago, there was this major massacre.
And 90%, almost all of the bodies were scalped.
Other atrocities there found at that site included tongue removal, decapitation, dismemberment based on standard aboriginal butchering practices that were used on large game animals.
1725 was not the first time that colonists scalped Indians.
There had been cases of colonists scalping Indians well back from the 17th century when they came to North America.
Scalping, by the way, was not only practiced in the Americas.
It's not just that American Indians invented it.
Herodotus described Scythian warriors scalping enemies in battle.
The Visigoths did it.
Even as late as 1036, in England, King Harold was apparently quite happy to scalp his enemies.
But after that barbaric practice fell out of fashion and civilized Europe, it didn't fall out of fashion in other parts of the world.
Why am I talking about this vicious, grisly, awful, disgusting practice of scalping?
Because we can take some lessons from it from modern political operations.
Saul Alinsky, the godfather of the modern left, he wrote Rules for Radicals.
He was a friend and mentor of Hillary Clinton.
He was admired by Barack Obama.
He was the patron saint, the patron demon of community organizing in Chicago.
He said that you need to make your enemies live up to their own book of rules.
So this is why you hear lefties all the time.
They say, that guy is such a hypocrite.
Oh, what a hypocrite.
You know, when some Republican senator who opposes the redefinition of marriage is caught having a little tryst with a fella in an airport bathroom, they say, see, he was such a hypocrite.
This point is meaningless because he's such a hypocrite.
Because if the left didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.
They don't have anything.
They don't have any principles themselves, so the only sin, according to the left, is hypocrisy.
If you say that there's a standard and then fail to live up to it, that's much worse in their minds than not having any standards at all, which is what they practice.
And Rochefoucauld has a good line on this.
He says that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
So I might say...
You know, I want to give a lot of money to charity, and then maybe I don't give a lot of money to charity, or I take a little bit, or I'm a little corrupt about it.
But that doesn't mean that it's wrong to give to charity.
That's the virtue, the hypocrisy of not doing it.
It only highlights all the more the virtue of the thing that you failed to do.
This is the case in a lot of aspects of politics.
Colonists in early America quickly learned that living up to their high, polished, European, sophisticated standards...
Was not going to work in a barren wilderness with hostile natives.
Carol Swain pointed this out yesterday.
We had Carol Swain on, the law professor and political scientist.
She said, I don't know if you caught this because she kind of buried it in one of her answers.
She said, we should learn from the left and put into practice against them those tactics that we don't find morally repugnant.
We should read Saul Alinsky and all the things that we don't find morally repugnant we should do.
We shouldn't do the things that we find morally repugnant.
That would be becoming the left.
If we compromise our own moral selves, if we really compromise them and start being vicious and, I don't know, murdering babies or whatever it is they do...
That isn't good.
But the tactics that they use that we don't find morally repugnant, we might find them aesthetically repugnant, we might find them impolite, we might find them not very nice, not very luxurious, not befitting a nice salon with a glass of porridge or something like that.
But the ones that aren't morally repugnant, that are only aesthetically repugnant, we should take on.
We're finally beginning to see this on the right.
After losing the culture for decades and decades and decades, we're seeing this.
We're fighting back with humor.
We're fighting back with media savvy after being decimated by the media for decades.
And we're fighting in the culture.
We're not just saying we need to adjust this tax rate or adjust this entitlement program a little bit.
What we're saying is we need to fight the culture because politics is downstream of culture.
And the way it's happening, President Covfefe is a great example of this.
He's a good avatar of this because he isn't pretty.
He isn't nice.
He isn't polished.
He isn't sophisticated.
Doing these things that Carol Swain suggests, we won't feel nice and polished.
We won't feel like we fit in at cocktail parties sipping Chardonnay.
But we don't always have the luxury of doing those things.
Sometimes we need to fight hard.
We need to play hard.
Not immorally, but hard.
Especially against opponents that won't play by our more refined rules.
That's it.
I think that is the most that any person in politics has defended scalping in a few hundred years.
I hope that can be helpful.
We will be back tomorrow, so make sure you come back there then.
Get your mailbag questions in.
We're going to be doing the mailbag on Thursday.
We've got a couple cool interviews coming up for you, but I won't spoil them.
Be sure to tune in.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Show.
I will see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
