Ep. 137 - The Case Against Broward County Schools ft. Kenneth Preston
An explosive new report by a Broward County student details dollar-for-dollar, failure-by-failure the corrupt decisions by Superintendent Robert Runcie and the Broward County School Board that led to the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in February. Then, Paul Ryan quits Congress, the Feds raid Trump’s lawyer, and we might go to war with Syria. there is simply too much news for one man to cover, plus I missed the girls, so we’re bringing on Liz Wheeler, Roaming Millennial, and John Hirschauer for an expert Panel of Deplorables.
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An explosive new report by a Broward County student details dollar for dollar, failure by failure, the corrupt decisions by Superintendent Robert Runcie and the Broward County School Board that led to the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February.
This report is a bombshell, and local authorities and media are already trying to suppress it, so we will give the report's author a chance to spell out what it means.
Then, there's a lot of news.
Paul Ryan quits Congress.
The feds raid Trump's lawyer.
And we might go to war with Syria.
I thought we were already at war with Syria.
We might go to more war with Syria.
There is simply too much news for one man to cover.
Plus, I missed the girls.
So we're bringing on Liz Wheeler, roaming millennial, and John Hershauer for an expert panel of deploritals.
It has been too long.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
How long has it been since we've done a panel of deplorables?
It's been way too long.
And it's the only way that I get to talk to girls.
Sweet little Elisa has to talk to me.
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But other girls in like the real world, in outside of my, you know, immediate future family, they don't do it.
So we have to do the panel of deplorables.
Plus John will come on too.
Before we get to my guest, this is a bombshell report and it's being suppressed in Broward County.
And it explains that perhaps the AR-15 wasn't the problem here.
Perhaps there were huge systemic failures by corrupt government officials.
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My next guest, my guest is very strange.
He's one of the strangest guests I've ever had on my show.
Because after that awful school shooting in Broward County on Valentine's Day, he didn't just go running straight to CNN. He didn't, his first reaction after that horrible shooting wasn't just to become famous on TV. I know, that was everyone's, you know that kid, the meme kid who went on and he called Marco Rubio a terrorist.
This guy is like the opposite of that.
Kenneth Preston is a 19-year-old Broward County student who reacted to the shooting by actually investigating what happened.
Kenneth, thank you for being here.
It's my pleasure, Michael.
So you spent over 100 hours combing through thousands of pages of local government documents.
You spoke with dozens of school and law enforcement officials, past and present, parents of victims of that shooting.
You got to know their families.
You spoke with members of the media.
In short, you did exactly what the Stoneman Douglas gun control kids did not do.
You actually did what every adult journalist in America failed to do.
The things that you found out in your report by actually doing the work of investigative journalism, any of these news sites could have done it.
You're just the guy who actually did the work instead of shallow media grandstanding.
My first question...
What were you thinking?
Actual investigative journalism is not going to get you on CNN, buddy.
Why did you investigate what happened?
Listen, journalism isn't dead yet, Michael.
It's you and Sheryl Atkinson, I think.
I think you're the two last journalists in America.
There you go.
It was a whole lot of anger.
Everybody in this county was angry, but I was sort of bothered by the fact that I was constantly seeing officials in the county going on, lobbying for more money for Broward County.
And if only more money were to flow into the county, we could have prevented – or we can hard earn – Harden our schools in the future.
The issue, though, is that most people don't realize that we've had a whole lot of school safety money that's been designated to Broward County Schools, but it hasn't all been spent properly.
But that's only part of the report.
So I want to know, the report is very good.
It's very detailed.
You source every syllable in it.
What are the main conclusions?
What's the 30,000-foot view of your investigation?
So basically, the findings of the investigation were twofold.
First off, there was $104 million designated specifically to school safety in 2014.
About five of that has been spent since that passage.
About five million.
Five percent, five million point something, yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
And then on top of that, the second part of our investigation was on school discipline reform, school discipline matrices, the behavior intervention program, and the PROMISE program, which is honestly what I think contributed more to this, far more to this than any funding could have.
I want to talk about that Promise program.
Adam Smith said, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
And we've seen that play out in Broward County.
You write in the report, quote, According to the Broward School Services website, students convicted of serious crimes such as rape, murder, attempted murder, sexual battery, or firearm-related activity...
Are given the possibility of entering back into the traditional school system as part of the Promise Program.
How did the Promise Program come about?
What does it mean for the rest of the country?
What should we do about it?
So let's separate something for a second.
The school discipline reform thing encompasses a lot.
That part isn't part of the Promise Program.
That is part of what's called the Behavior Intervention Program.
The Behavior Intervention Program essentially works to move incarcerated students from incarceration back into traditional school systems.
And as you've noted, students convicted of some pretty heinous felonies are eligible for those programs.
The Promise Program is a whole other mess.
But in particular, I focus my time on the school discipline matrix, which essentially gives administration complete discretion over whether or not to report incidents to law enforcement.
Why did they do?
This is insane.
You know, sometimes people say, in America, they'll say, you know, we lock up a lot of people.
We owe X percent of the population is incarcerated.
And I think, oh, good.
That's good, because then the criminals are away from me and my family and my friends, and that's good.
And maybe if we could get some more criminals in there, that would be even better.
Why did this come about?
This seems insane.
Well, the Promise Program originally came about because the federal government, under Arne Duncan's education plan, Was to address problems of disproportionate minority arrests.
So this is under the Obama administration?
That was, the implementation of it.
They put forward this plan.
Superintendent Runcie followed a lot of those plans.
And in a private meeting with him and some other district officials the other day, they told me that they've accepted most of these as part of federal, not even guidelines, but suggestions.
But ultimately it was their job to implement those.
So, what is the force behind this, though, I wonder?
Why was this a priority of Arne Duncan?
What does Arne Duncan have to do with Broward County?
Why do they want to take dangerous people, murderers and rapists, and put them back into a traditional school community?
Maybe I'm a little thick.
Maybe I'm a little slow here, but that sounds like a bad idea on the face of it.
I'd imagine.
So as far as the policy, it was nationwide, these guidelines.
Some counties decided to adopt them.
My county was one of them.
But as far as Arne Duncan and the superintendent, they actually know each other pretty well.
Arne Duncan got the superintendent his job at the Chicago Public Schools.
So as far as those guidelines being implemented, I'm sure they shared some of the same views, but ultimately what the purpose of things like the Behavior Intervention Program were, I wish I could tell you, Michael.
That's a million dollar question.
Because a lot of times they try to push these programs as compassionate.
They'll say, oh, we have too many racial minorities going to prison and it's...
There's a school to prison pipeline or something like that.
And you say, okay, well, that's not good.
Those people should stop committing crimes and that would be better.
Nobody wants to see one demographic going to jail at a higher rate than some other demographic.
But the solution they propose is just not to punish them.
But that isn't fair at all.
That isn't justice.
That's injustice.
You're treating some people Yeah, well, what they throw around a lot is this right to education, but they often don't consider the right to safety and the right to life for those other students that have to be surrounded by these potentially violent students that oftentimes you wouldn't be aware are in your classrooms.
Right.
And, you know, they'll say, if they try to make it a racial thing, because the left always wants to make this into a racial thing, so they'll say, too many black people are going to jail.
The crime rates are too high.
And you say, okay, well, I don't see how your solution of putting those criminals back into the traditional school system...
How is that fair to the black students who don't commit crimes?
You're imperiling their safety.
That isn't good for anybody.
That isn't good for the school.
You quote a veteran deputy of the Broward Sheriff's Office as saying, quote, I'm sorry to say, but we all knew some sort of tragedy like this was going to happen in Broward.
You can't just stop arresting kids and send kids straight from juvie back into schools without expecting something like this.
As officers, our hands were tied.
The decisions were political ones, not well researched or backed by evidence.
Just follow the money.
If they really wanted to know what worked, they would have asked us, the officers.
Why aren't more law enforcement officials speaking up and speaking up publicly?
They're employed by the county.
This is the same county that failed them and failed our students and teachers that day.
So the only reason he spoke to me is because now he's retired after decades on the force.
But many of these people are not willing to come forward with their voices because they're afraid of the backlash that they may receive.
Professional backlash, right.
Yeah.
Without question.
So you spoke, correct me if I'm wrong, you spoke at the school board meeting last night.
I tried to, yeah.
What happened there?
This was, you were going to present your findings, 100 hours of research, you've combed through all the documents that journalists didn't comb through, you're going to present it to the school board, and then what happened?
Well, three weeks in advance, we had a set speakers list of seven speakers, which included survivors, some families of victims, some were affected, and just community members that wanted to have their voices heard.
And I had about six minutes of time, different from the usual three, because I had some time relinquished.
So basically, the gist of what happened is an hour before this meeting, I had received a call where they said all seven speakers were cut.
And my time would be cut in half.
So I get there, and I had an entire six-minute speech prepared.
I had to basically throw that speech out and just come to the board and say, you know, for the last week, you guys have been doing everything in your power to subvert our message.
And, you know, so we pushed that message out to national media outlets, and I'm sure Runcie's sweating a little bit now.
That's Runcie.
Runcie is the superintendent in Broward County, and he doesn't come out looking very nice in your report.
You see this a lot in local government, where they'll say, oh, no one's going to pay attention.
We can cut this guy's time.
We can shut them up.
Who's going to find out?
What are you going to do?
National news cycles are going to move on, and then we can keep being just as corrupt as we ever were.
How corrupt is the Broward County School Board, and how corrupt is Superintendent Runcie?
You know, it's funny.
In 2011, this was just before the superintendent got here, a grand jury commissioned by the former governor looking into the Broward County School Board said that if it weren't for a constitutional mandate, they would recommend that the school board be abolished entirely because of how deep-seated the corruption were.
There were a couple school board members that were arrested, the superintendent had to step down, and obviously the superintendent, Runcie, came and he was in fact supposed to clean up the mess And bring about transparency to the district.
So there is some deeply ingrained corruption, without question.
Unbelievable.
I want you to continue on that, because I want to hear more explicitly about this guy's corruption.
And I have one more question for you.
But before we do that...
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Okay.
Sorry to interrupt you.
Back to this awful rampant corruption at Broward County School Board.
Tell me more about the superintendent himself.
Sure.
The superintendent is an interesting guy.
He's very well-spoken.
He'll run circles around you.
But he claims to be committed to transparency.
The only issue is that, I'm not sure if you're aware, the day before this meeting, I was called into a last-minute meeting with the superintendent where I was supposed to talk about my report.
I was told that I wasn't allowed to be a lawyer.
I wasn't allowed to record the meeting because it was supposed to be just between myself, a couple parents, and the superintendent.
Once I got there, it was stacked 10 district officials, all of whom worked for him, himself, and they took two hours to speak with me.
About my report to try and sort of pick it apart and tell me what was wrong with it So the issue with this whole process and him in particular is I just can't imagine that a superintendent who is in charge of 300 plus schools 15,000 students and 270,000 or 15,000 teachers and 270,000 students has the time to speak to a 19 year old about a report that he doesn't believe there's any substance to so so Runcie Roncy's sweating a little bit.
That's a great point.
That is a great point.
He is clearly...
You don't do that.
You don't line up your officials and take the time unless you think this is a big deal.
And what they're always going to tell you is, oh, it's nothing.
It's lies.
It's nothing.
This is it.
Keep the pressure on him, man.
You are doing excellent, excellent work.
It's really, really admirable.
Great to have you here.
Kenneth Preston, you can read about the report.
I saw one published in The Hill and some other national media covering it too.
Keep the pressure on them.
That goes for every conservative out there, people who want to help education reform, and also to Kenneth.
Kenneth, thank you for being here.
Thanks.
All right.
Now, look, Kenneth was great.
It was nice to have him here.
I enjoy that and everything.
But now we get the panel of deplorables.
This is really good.
It has been so long.
It has been so long.
I have not seen Roaming in a long time.
I haven't seen Liz Wheeler.
There are a lot of We'll bring them back every so often.
Liz Wheeler is the host of Tipping Point on One America News.
Roaming Millennial hosts Roaming Millennial Uncensored on CRTV. Hubba hubba.
And John Hershauer is some guy.
No, John has written all over the place.
He's written at National Review and Daily Wire, New York Times, Fox News Nation, and the Fairfield Mirror.
He was also the national undergraduate winner of the Buckley Program Ideas Essay Contest.
That's how I know him.
Ladies and John, thank you for being here.
Let's dive right in.
Paul Ryan is retiring from Congress.
Here is Speaker Ryan.
This has been one of the two greatest honors of my life.
The job provides incredible opportunities.
But the truth is, it's easy for it to take over everything in your life.
And you can't just let that happen.
Because there are other things in life that can be fleeting as well.
Namely, your time as a husband and a dad.
Which is the other great honor of my life.
That's why today I'm announcing that this year will be my last one as a member of the House.
Paul Ryan has been in Congress since the age of 28.
He's been in Congress for 68% of all of our lives, and he's probably been in Congress for more for the pretty young things like John out there, you know, the 22, 23-year-olds.
First of all, Roaming, are you broadcasting from hell?
What is going on behind you?
I am broadcasting from my shiny new CRTV set.
Now we have CRTV resources behind us.
So yeah, this is a fireplace that we actually built for the set, and I say we because I, you know, of course managed and supervised it, but I feel like that's an important part too.
That's excellent.
Alright, Liz, we'll come back to you in a second, Roaming.
Liz, is Paul Ryan jumping off of the Titanic?
Is that what this is about?
Or is this about the midterms?
Or does he just want to see his kids more?
What's the real story here?
Why is Ryan quitting Congress?
Listen, I am never going to castigate someone who says that they're quitting their time-sucking job because they want to spend more time with their family.
I actually think we should commend that.
More politicians probably should be better examples, like Paul Ryan, of being a good husband and a good father.
So I'm never going to criticize him in the personal sense.
But didn't we learn our lesson a couple weeks ago between the difference of criticizing the person When it came to the students from Parkland, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School kids, criticizing the person and criticizing the policies.
And that's where I would separate my criticism of Paul Ryan.
He seems like a good man, good husband, good father.
His kids are going to be lucky to have him around more.
But I don't think that he's quite the right fit For the job of Speaker of the House.
I mean, he doesn't seem to have that so-called fire in his belly to actually fight for conservative principles like he did maybe when he was first in office.
We've heard him in the last two years more often and more vehemently criticize the president than we've heard him stand up for actual conservative values, cutting wasteful spending, scaling back the size and scope of government, and enabling people to be successful for themselves and get government out of the way.
I hate to interrupt if the sound is still going on now.
I am getting in my ear a 75-minute delay from when your lovely selves are talking and when I can actually hear what you're saying.
So I think this is probably Bashar Assad, if I had to blame this on anybody.
And I think I'm willing to blame it on Bashar Assad.
This is an attack on the show.
Very devastating, because I want to talk to you all, but I guess it's just going to have to be another time.
I'm going to have to go through it myself.
You know, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
I guess this will be a sanctifying experience, as I have to say goodbye to all of you.
Liz, I'm going to see you on your show later today, so I'll at least get to talk to you.
Roaming, I miss you terribly.
John, you know, good to see you, buddy.
And we'll have to bring you on when we have a better news cycle and also a better control room, and we're out of the broom closet of the Ben Shapiro show.
I'm going to do the news myself.
See you guys.
Absolutely devastating.
I am so sorry to see my dear friends go.
Do I have to sign off of Facebook now, too?
So sad.
All right, I'm going to cover all the news on the back end of Facebook.
That's fine.
Listen, you know, I invite people on.
I'd like to get their opinions, but really, the only opinion I really care about is my own, so I'll be able to tell you that then.
You can find my show, as ever, The Michael Knowles Show, on dailywire.com, Facebook, YouTube, and iTunes.
Like and subscribe to your favorite platform and get notifications when I go live and to get more Daily Wire content.
Also, I'd like to put in a quick plug.
I'm going to be on tour next week.
I'll be giving a speech on Tuesday in Mobile, Alabama, at the Alabama Policy Institute.
Tickets are available there if you want to come see that.
We're going to be talking about the future of conservatism.
Conservatism in the age of Donald Trump.
I'm going to go swing by New York City.
New York, New York.
The city's so nice they named it twice.
And go to the Buckley Program Disinvitation Dinner.
This is a black tie affair.
It's a wonderful event.
Charles Murray is going to be speaking if you'd like tickets to that.
Go to disinvitationdinner.com or buckleyprogram.com.
And then I'm going to be giving a speech at the University of Pennsylvania.
Trump's alma mater.
So I'll get you more details on that when they come out.
But, you know, if you're in the area, come by.
Say hi.
It'd be nice to see you.
Look, I know.
You pay $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
You get me, The Andrew Klavan Show, The Ben Shapiro Show.
That's fine.
You need this.
Really what you need today is a Michael Knowles tears tumbler because of how sad I am to say goodbye to my panel of deplorables with the tech issues.
But the leftist tears tumbler is very important too.
In particular, because of some of the news that we're going to be talking about.
Because I suspect that Roaming Millennial is right.
I suspect this is just another false alarm and Trump's demise ain't going to happen.
They didn't get him in 2015, 2016, 2017.
They ain't going to get him in 2018.
And you're going to need this to protect your family.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
We'll hit all three of these news stories before we have to go here, because they are really important.
This is one of the biggest news days I can remember in a while.
Paul Ryan is out.
Paul Ryan has been in Congress since the age of 28.
This should throw up red flags for anybody.
It isn't good for someone to be in Congress that long.
He's been in Congress for 68% of my life.
And that said, unlike a lot of other conservatives, I'm going to defend him.
I like Paul Ryan.
I think he's pretty good.
He comes from the wing of the party that seems to care mostly about economic issues, but he's been pretty good on it.
And he's also the only Republican and conservative who's really had the cofephones to go after entitlements, which are the biggest driver of debt and deficits that are some of the greatest threats to our liberty since we've been in there.
He was the guy who put forward the path to prosperity.
He said, we'll touch the third rail.
We'll reform Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
He gets a lot of credit for that.
A lot of Republicans are far too cowardly to even touch those issues.
With regard to Donald Trump, he played it fair enough.
There were a lot of Republicans, some of whom are now employed by the administration, some of whom are in high posts in the administration.
Who threw Trump under the bus, who said, I won't support him, he should drop out, he should get out of here.
Paul Ryan didn't quite do that.
Paul Ryan played nicely.
He didn't want to say that the Republican Party made this awful error.
He didn't pull the Mitt Romney and say, this is the end of the world and, you know, what an idiot you would be to vote for Donald Trump.
He didn't do that.
He basically was respectful of the Fairly respectful toward the president.
So I give him a lot of credit for that, too.
When he took the job as speaker, nobody wanted to be speaker.
It's easy to forget in these 24-hour news cycles.
But the Congress was hopelessly divided at that time between the Freedom Caucus and the establishment types.
Boehner was considered a toxic figure.
The conservatives really didn't like him at all.
They felt he didn't stand up enough to Barack Obama.
Paul Ryan took it as a consensus job.
He was the one guy who could do it.
It didn't seem like he really wanted to that much.
He was doing a wonderful job for his own career and for the country as a budget chairman.
And he took the job, and he did fine in it.
He's not rock-ribbed on some of the social issues.
He's not rock-ribbed on immigration.
But c'est la vie.
All in all, I think he's done a pretty good job.
Who knows?
When someone's been a politician for that long, basically his entire life, Usually there are some other considerations here.
It's not just to see his kids, and it's not just because he's been in Congress for 20 years.
One suspects that he thinks that the Republican Congress is not going to survive the election, perhaps.
He suspects that Donald Trump might not survive the election, or he just wants to run for another office.
But all in all, I think conservatives should be nice to him.
We shouldn't eat our own.
We should wish him well.
He did some good stuff, and compared to a lot of other politicians and issues, he's a lot better than they were.
Moving on to some scarier news, the feds have raided President Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen.
And what this seems to be is Democrats and bureaucrats trying to overturn a presidential election over a hooker.
Over a hooker 10 years ago, Donald Trump met a hooker.
They allegedly had one tryst together and that was it.
And when I heard that story, I was shocked.
I actually was really shocked that Donald Trump only did it once.
I figured, you know, she was a famous porn star.
I figured it would have been at least five or six times.
Just one night.
That's the, and they're going to try to overturn a presidential election for this.
I had the privilege of talking to Antonin Scalia before he died.
And a couple, on two occasions, I got to meet him.
And we asked him what the greatest threat to American liberty was.
And he didn't hesitate.
He said, the bureaucracy.
The unelected executive agencies.
And this is what people mean by the deep state.
The deep state isn't some secret underground bunker with computers and everything.
You know, I guess they probably have that too.
But that's just because it's the federal government.
It's not this crazy conspiracy.
It's just bureaucrats.
And he observed that.
There's nothing conspiratorial about recognizing that.
And this is bureaucrats trying to undo a presidential election.
The Mueller investigation has clearly exceeded whatever limits it had.
I suppose it didn't really have any at all.
The investigation was supposed to be into Russian interference in the election.
For some reason now, we're looking at President Trump's personal lawyer and communications he had with some hooker 10 years ago.
I don't know how we got there.
And it's really put him in a tough spot because the investigation has gone on way too long.
It's gone way too far.
We shouldn't be talking about hookers 10 years ago.
If it's actually about Russia, we should talk about Russia.
But now, if Trump fires Mueller, he looks guilty, even if Mueller has nothing.
If Trump doesn't fire Mueller, Mueller could indict him over the pack of bubble gum that Trump lifted from the Queen's 7-Eleven in 1955.
Who knows?
These investigations are really big.
You can indict a ham sandwich in New York or D.C. So what should be done about Mueller?
My gut instinct...
Is that the Mueller investigation hasn't turned up very much of what it was trying to turn up.
Namely, Donald Trump, the Manchurian candidate, wearing a trench coat like Boris from Rocky and Bullwinkle, talking to the Russians in secret meetings and colluding with them and undermining the integrity of the United States.
I don't think they got any of that.
I think they're throwing spaghetti at the wall and grasping at straws, and you're going to end up with a lot of procedural crimes and talking to hookers and things for...
Nights in a hotel 10 years ago.
So my instinct tells me don't fire Mueller.
The only way you can guarantee that Trump looks guilty in the court of public opinion, which is frankly the only one that really matters in politics, is to fire Mueller.
That looks like an admission of guilt.
It almost seems like he's being baited into firing him.
So I think that probably that would be a mistake to do that.
But it's really frustrating and it shows all the more reason why we elected Donald Trump.
We elected Donald Trump to stop this ridiculous nonsense and to stop unelected bureaucrats from telling us how to run our country.
That's how they do it in Europe.
That's how they do it in Brussels.
That's how they do it in the United Kingdom.
That's how they do it in a lot of places in the world.
I guess not in the UK anymore since Brexit, but that's not how we do it in America.
It shouldn't be how we run our government in America, and the bureaucracy is the threat.
That's the threat to freedom.
And then in other news, we may go to war with Syria.
Our dear President Covfefe tweeted that we're about to fire missiles at Syria.
You remember when FDR tweeted about how he was going to drop the atomic bombs?
You remember how they tweeted, get ready.
I guess we actually did drop leaflets down on the people and tweet it, you know.
The tweet from President Trump read, quote, get ready Russia because they will be coming nice and new and smart and Get ready.
Russia in Syria.
In another tweet, Trump said that our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War.
That's the alleged Russian stooge.
That's Boris and Natasha, according to the Democrats.
He's talking about how awful our relationship with Russia is, which it is.
Reports suggest that the Syrian government under Bashar Assad dropped bombs filled with chemical weapons on Duma.
That attack, that alleged attack, came just after Donald Trump declared that he would be pulling troops out of Syria.
And now there's a question.
Do we respond?
Do we have to fire more missiles, throw some soldiers in there, do some more things?
Some conservatives are skeptical here.
Guys like Tucker Carlson, they point out that we don't have firm evidence that this was an attack by the regime, that it doesn't make much sense for the regime to be using chemical weapons as they're about to get exactly what they want.
They want the Americans out of there.
They're about to get exactly what they want.
It's announced that they'll get what they want.
And then Bashar Assad, what a dummy, has this chemical attack.
Also, in February, Defense Secretary Mattis admitted that there was no evidence That Bashar Assad used sarin gas on his citizens, despite reports that he did.
If you consulted the mainstream news, if you asked the average person who reads the newspaper, they'd say, oh yeah, Bashar Assad used sarin gas on his citizens.
But General Mattis, Defense Secretary Mattis, said, no, we don't have any evidence of that.
That's just a thing people report.
Now, Bashar Assad is a butcher.
I mean, he's an absolute monster and a psychopath and a butcher.
But Why would he do this?
Why on earth would he do this sort of chemical attack now?
It doesn't make a lot of sense.
It doesn't mean that he didn't do it.
It's just a little strange.
It doesn't quite add up.
So what is our strategic interest in Syria?
President Trump has just appointed Ambassador John Bolton, one of the greatest men in the country with one of the greatest mustaches in the country, to be his national security advisor.
Will the very hawkish, cartoonishly hawkish John Bolton push for an increased military presence in Syria?
That's what people are suggesting.
They're saying, John Bolton never met a country he didn't want to bomb.
John Bolton never saw a Middle East country he didn't want to invade.
That's the caricature of John Bolton.
That's the cartoon that they portray him as on TV. I suspect that he won't push for much increased action in Syria because John Bolton, despite that caricature that the Democrats have made of him, is a very serious, strategic thinker.
And the guy that you get on TV also is not the guy you get in the government.
They are...
The two different media.
And I, you know, full disclosure, I've known the Bolton family for a while and I'm friends with some of them.
And I got to meet him on an occasion and was immediately impressed by how incredible his breadth and depth of knowledge is.
The guy can just monologue with precision and detail on virtually any topic in foreign affairs.
This is not a guy who goes hopping along and saying, bomb, bomb, bomb, we need to bomb everybody, you know.
He doesn't have a giant button on his desk and he just keeps clicking it.
John Bolton has also pointed out that the great threat to the world order, the great threat to the United States is Iran.
It's not Syria.
He's actually called the Syrian civil war a sideshow.
He said it's a tragic event.
It's awful to see.
It's been going on for seven years.
But it's ultimately a sideshow.
It doesn't quite threaten American national interests.
And we have this question, is it worth getting bogged down in a full-scale war there?
Is it worth spilling a lot of American blood over there?
Or is it better to keep our powder dry for a conflict with Iran?
It seems to me that the clear answer is the latter.
And I suspect that's the position of John Bolton, based on statements that he's made in public.
And...
I suspect that that's the view of Donald Trump, who campaigned against stupid wars in the Middle East, who campaigned against intervening in every country that has a problem.
So I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I think it's being really hyped.
I think it's being played up a lot.
I think these sort of attacks, these red lines, are being catered to in the media.
But I don't think there's any evidence from the doves to the hawks in our government that we're going to get bogged down there and probably we shouldn't anyway.
Okay, that's all the time I have.
I'm sorry that I couldn't bring you the pretty girls and John.
I wish I could have done it.
We're going to have to try to bring them back next week.
I will see you tomorrow.
Get all of your mailbag questions in.
It is going to be a very good show, and I can answer all of them.
And the ones I can't answer, I just won't pick, so it's not a big deal.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
