Ep. 143 - Groundhog Kanye: Six More Years Of Trump
Groundhog Kanye has seen Red Pill Black Candace Owens’s shadow, which means we can expect six more years of Trump. Political pundits in the mainstream media can discern the face of the sky, but they cannot discern the signs of the times. We will discuss why with Salena Zito, author of the new book “The Great Revolt: Inside The Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.” Then, what Kanye West, Shania Twain, and Coachella can tell us about 2018 and 2020.
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Groundhog Kanye has seen red pill black Candace Owens' shadow, which means we can expect six more years of Trump.
Political pundits in the mainstream media can discern the face of the sky, but they cannot discern the signs of the times.
We will discuss why with Selena Zito, author of the new book, The Great Revolt, Inside the Populist Coalition, Reshaping American Politics.
Then we'll discuss what Kanye West, Shania Twain, and Coachella can tell us about 2018 and 2020.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show.
The blue wave is coming, right?
It's inevitable the blue wave is going to come.
Trump is toast because of Russian porn star, former FBI directors.
It's all over.
Stick a fork in him, right?
Not quite.
Shania Twain, Kanye West, Eminem have me more hopeful than ever for Trump 2020.
And it's not just because I'm coming down off all my drugs from Coachella.
Even Coachella has me happy about Republican prospects in 2018 and 2020.
Because they speak to the common sense of Americans.
Not precisely ideological rigor, not even an ideological shift, but a demographic and a dispositional shift, I think, in politics.
I'll explain more on that in a bit first.
To lay the groundwork of why I'm excited politically, let's bring on Selena Zito to discuss the populist movement that swept Donald Trump into office and whether it can outlast President Covfefe.
Selena Zito is a national political reporter and columnist at the Washington Examiner and the New York Post and a CNN contributor, and she's the author of this excellent book.
Let's bring on Selena.
Selena, thank you for being here.
So the book is The Great Revolt Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.
You have managed to get this book blurbed by Senator Tom Cotton, Rush Limbaugh, and Jake Tapper, which is a pretty broad swath of the political spectrum.
You call 2016 The Great Revolt, and you find the populists are the ones reshaping American politics.
What are your main findings from your research?
Well, what I found through my research, first of all, is something that I noticed leading up to 2016, that this technological industrial revolution going on in this country has impacted everyone, including our politics.
And we have We found our way not to just express ourselves through politics, but how we shop, how we buy, what brand loyalty we have to institutional brands that have had us forever.
Like sort of everything changed.
And when that all changed, it impacted politics.
And I don't think people were paying attention to that.
After the election, there was this rush to see, well, have Trump's voters changed their mind?
Will they change their mind?
And you see sort of reporters parachuting in for a day asking, you know, did you change your mind?
What do you think of this tweet?
And they are sort of digging in and understanding what has unsettled the electorate in the way that it has.
Well, you know, they parachute in, and they paint this picture of the Trump voter as this uneducated rube who probably has some fairly significant racial animus, and he's just a loser, basically.
He's a white loser in the middle of America.
And you describe a variety of characters, character types, who voted for Trump.
And I gotta tell you, I know people from these areas.
I have family in these areas.
Some of whom voted for Trump.
And so I knew immediately that the picture that was being painted by the mainstream media isn't right.
What are the character types that you found of people who voted for Trump?
Well, I went to all the counties in the Great Lakes Midwest, the states that changed the election.
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa.
And I went to only the counties that voted Obama, Obama, Trump.
Because I felt it was most important to look at those counties because they're the ones that show the shift.
They're the ones that show the great flip.
And I removed counties that voted Republican in 2014.
So say you voted for Joni Ernst in Iowa in 2014.
That county was taken out because I wanted to see the purest flip.
And then I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people.
And along with Brad Todd, we took a look at these voters and we started to see a pattern about seven different archetypes of voters that were largely missed in the election and who are making up this new coalition.
And it's a coalition that actually has its roots in 2006 when the Republicans first lost the House.
And they lost conservative Democrat voters, and they lost independent voters because they were unhappy with the status quo.
So this is like a wrecking ball to all establishments, Republican or Democrat.
And these voters, more often than not, have a college degree, have a successful life, Some of them have had ups and downs.
Women with guns, that's one of my favorite chapters, girl gun power, because they went completely undetected in suburban women who believe that the Second Amendment is the most feminist thing they can do because it completely empowers them.
They have total control of their life and their destiny.
And nobody picked up on that.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
On the feminist gun power, I do love that women are not as strong as men.
That's just a fact of life.
It is a biological fact.
And so the only thing that can be an equalizer, the only thing that actually can bring sexual equality as a matter of fighting off aggressors is a gun.
And the Democrats have just totally gone off the rails on that issue.
Well, it's really interesting.
I'm just going to go down a little rabbit hole for a second.
So I teach this class at Harvard, where I take the students out of Cambridge and place them in different parts of the country and immerse them and have them approach reporting the way I do.
No interstates, no airplanes, nothing but back roads, live in a bed and breakfast, so the first person you meet is a small business person.
And I took them out to a gun range.
group of people that they met there were a group of about 40 women, suburban women, between the ages of 20 and 45.
And they just sort of validated the entire chapter on women with guns.
You know, I think a lot of people, they think that the reason people voted for Trump is his personality.
They were out for blood.
They were angry.
They liked his bad language.
They liked his rudeness.
And yet, what I noticed in your book, so many of the people profiled say, I like Trump.
I still stick with Trump.
I just wish he wouldn't tweet.
You know, I really wish he would.
And I've heard this from friends of mine and relatives of mine.
One, what does that tell us about the people who are supporting him, these forgotten Americans?
And two, in your opinion, observing politics, are the tweets good or bad for Donald Trump?
It doesn't seem to hurt him.
You know, even the people, as you said, a lot of the people that I interviewed who love his policies...
And love his sort of approach to Washington.
Wish he wouldn't tweet all the time.
But even that, I think he's really toned down in the past few months.
But also, they weren't looking for someone to like.
You know, they liked Barack Obama.
They were proud to vote for Barack Obama.
A lot of these people in this new Trump coalition did, but they didn't like his policies.
And that's the flip side of this.
And that's why Democrats lost the midterms, was because they were punished for Obama's policies.
But Obama was still this likable character, whereas Donald Trump, they don't care if they do or do not like him.
They care if he gets the job done.
And that is the most important thing to them.
And then the other thing is, you know, what you said about angry, it's one of the things that really gets under my skin.
Because a lot of pundits missed, and reporters as well, missed what Make America Great Again meant.
They thought that was angry.
They thought it was a dog whistle.
They still do.
They thought it was something...
That was, you know, looking backwards.
It's not.
It's aspirational.
Americans want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
And they haven't felt that for an incredibly long time.
And that's what Make America Great Again was about.
Totally right.
I love in the book how you point out everyone thinks these people are desperate and they're bitter clingers or whatever, but they're not.
They're actually hopeful.
They're optimistic.
You called it during 2016.
In September, you wrote in The Atlantic, I believe, the press takes Trump literally, but not seriously.
His supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
And when I read that, I thought, yes, that's exactly, as a New Yorker who knows how New Yorkers talk, that is how I feel about him.
What is the difference?
Well, you know, I mean, take the rough rebounders in the book.
This is one of the types of Trump voter you identify in the book.
They've had ups and downs in their lives.
But when they hear him talk, they're like, yeah, I could have seen me say something like that.
You know, I mean, they get it.
And even the people that don't like the way he talks but still love his policies, Understand that people in business do talk like that.
That people in business do do fake-outs to get what they want.
A lot of people have, in their family, they own businesses or friends.
They get his personality.
Sometimes it grates on their nerves, but it doesn't detach them from him.
Here's the thing.
Donald Trump was not the cause of this movement.
He was the result of it.
And the important thing to take from the book is this movement.
If the movement's up here, we're still about here.
We haven't even gotten to the top yet.
This is still going to impact politics, business, culture, entertainment, sports.
It's across the board in our lives.
I think it's what Kanye West is referring to as the shifting consciousness, if you've been watching his highly entertaining tweets the last few days.
I retweeted Kanye West three times in the past 24 hours, and I've never even followed him.
But he did it.
There were several of his tweets that were very aspirational, and that's what people miss.
Like, reporters and pundits tend to think, anger, anger, anger.
It's not.
People want to be taken to a better place.
People want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Historically, that is who we've been.
It is in our DNA, and people miss that all the time.
That's right.
And we've already talked about the girl gun power.
One of the most perplexing, I think, groups that you identify in the book, and even for me, I've had to wonder how it worked out for Trump, are the suburban moms.
The late, great Barbara Bush said in 2016 that she couldn't understand why any woman would vote for Trump.
He was so boorish about women.
And you say that the silent suburban moms constituted a crucial part of his coalition.
Why did they vote for him, and why were they so important?
It was interesting how much they've been insulted by Hillary Clinton.
It really is disturbing.
I think.
Look, these women are looking for a strength in leadership, but they're also looking for a wrecking ball because they do not believe that Washington and either party Have served their families and their communities well.
It's not just personal.
It's not just about them.
You know, a lot of these suburban women have lived in this same area all their lives.
Their mother's mother's mother has lived there, right?
And they have seen sort of how the family has prospered and gotten better each time.
And they didn't see that under the last two, maybe the last three administrations.
And that they saw that with Trump.
They believed that there was hope in his way of doing business to maybe make their communities and their areas be prosperous again.
A very good point.
Hillary Clinton said she made fun of the mothers who baked cookies and things like that in the 1990s.
So I guess that alone could explain it.
One aspect that...
Surprised me a little and actually changed my analysis of the election is the education.
We all know that President Covfefe loves the uneducated, was a phrase that he used in his speech.
You write, Americans who live their lives among a group of friends and neighbors with varied educational backgrounds preferred Trump more than Clinton or Romney, while college-educated Americans who live exclusively among other degree holders were less likely to support Trump, even if they were Republican.
So it's not the education itself.
that is the predictor of Trump support.
It's the education of your friends and the people you live with.
How does that work?
What does that say about just the geography of America, the social breakdown, I suppose, of America?
Well, there's this whole thing about the super zip codes, right?
And so the people who live in these super zip codes, so think about the six counties that surround Washington, D.C., or the counties that in New York and Connecticut that surround New York City, or around Los Angeles.
In those areas, and this is like, you know, Virginia, Maryland, parts of Virginia, parts of Maryland, in those suburban zip codes, if you had, just say you had a graduate degree, you didn't vote for Trump, because everyone around you was doing well.
But in looking districts around in Kenosha, Wisconsin, or in suburban Pittsburgh, or suburban Philadelphia, These areas, I actually should say, except in Philadelphia, these areas have a mix of college education, blue collar worker, technical workers.
These are people who interact and it's part of their daily life or their family life to interact with people with a variety and diverse amount of education and so they were much more apt To support Trump, because they have seen the carnage.
He got made fun of for saying that word.
Go to Youngstown, Ohio, and you see carnage.
Go to a lot of these places in the country, and you see carnage.
And so they have seen the impact of some of these economic policies.
And so they were persuaded to go vote for Trump over Clinton because they felt that he was more in touch with what would make their community better.
These people are not that selfish, right?
Their whole community is their identity.
It's an extension of their family.
It's something they're very proud to be from.
And when they see parts of it crumble, they want someone who's going to make everyone better.
Yeah, that reminds me of how the left loves humanity, but they don't really like humans very much.
And so you see those lecturing us on who we have to vote for and who has compassion for the poor or the uneducated or this, that, whatever terms they use.
They tend only to ever go to cocktail parties with their fellow Harvard alumni.
And they don't actually speak to any of these people.
And they break out in hives when they get more than 150 miles outside the city.
Now, all of this makes a good case for a movement, a vaguely populist, not terribly ideological movement of people who have been the victims of certain neglect, economic neglect, drug epidemics, political neglect.
Now, Trump's pitch when he ran was largely about management.
You point this out.
He says, we have terrible deals.
I'm going to make good deals.
We're going to win when I do it.
It's about sort of my expertise in running things.
We have stupid people.
I'm going to be a smart person.
It wasn't about ideology.
It was a very un-ideological candidate.
So, once Trump is done after his third or fourth term, I don't know, whenever we've got to say goodbye to him, how does that movement continue if it's about a man instead of about ideas?
Well, I don't think it is about a man.
I actually think it's about the people that are part of the coalition.
So, as I said, he was not the cause of it, but he was the result of it.
I think every so many years, typically a hundred, our Teutonic plates realign and our electorate makes different choices than the past behavior.
And I think we're in the middle of that movement.
And this is a book that, across the ideological spectrum, I think is important to read.
Because if we don't understand what's going on in this country, we are going to continue to have disruptive forces in Washington.
And while that is important at the top level, at the bottom level, like in Congress, that can sometimes be really unstable because nothing really gets done.
But, you know, I mean, the Democrats are going through their own You know, their own populist upheaval.
We don't talk about it much because they're not the party in power.
But theirs is very fractured, and that's their challenge.
One little extra bit about this coalition, because they have, as you say, they have different goals there.
They come from different places.
I want to talk about the Christians.
Evangelical Christians in particular, but Christians broadly who support Donald Trump get a lot of flack for it.
People say that they're hypocrites.
People say that they're associating with a morally corrupt guy.
You call them the King Cyrus Christians.
Are Christians who voted for Trump hypocrites?
No, I think they are very offended when they hear that.
I am too.
Being a Christian is first of all about forgiveness.
Very important aspect that people tend to forget when they talk about Christians.
Second of all, these voters who were the last ones to go across the line for Trump, I call them the King Cyrus because King Cyrus was the Persian—I'm going to not get this totally correct—but he was the Persian king who protected the Israelites.
And even though they had no ideological and religiosity connection, because he was going to protect them, they followed him.
And this is sort of what evangelicals saw in Trump.
He was going to protect their values.
It had been a long time since someone stood up for them, including George W. Bush, which is interesting because he's a Christian, and I don't know what Trump is, but he had that whole Corinthians thing all wrong.
He likes the two Corinthians.
Yeah.
And something about wafers, I don't remember that was pretty funny.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but you do put in the book, you talk about the various times he sort of tried to bumble out an explanation of his Christian faith.
And, you know, one time he said, he was asked, do you ever ask for forgiveness?
And he said, yeah, you know, I try not to make mistakes so that I don't have to ask forgiveness.
It's very, it was very funny to watch each time.
But, you know, the point being is, no one's had their back.
So they didn't go for the Christian guy this time, or woman.
And Hillary Clinton is a devout Methodist.
I've interviewed her about her religion and its impact in her life.
But they went for the person that would have their back.
And one of the most important things in having their back was what the makeup of the Supreme Court looked like.
And he has paid them back in spades.
I mean, of all the members of all the different parts of his coalition, the evangelicals have received back the most for their investment in their vote.
I must say, when I read that chapter, the whole book is illuminating.
When I read that chapter in particular, as a Christian who supports Donald Trump, I thought, oh yes, she gets it.
She actually understands.
This group of people, I knew they existed because I'm one of them, but it's finally a fair dealing for Christians who support Trump.
My last question, I have to ask you, you're a senior political analyst.
You've worked in these things a lot.
What does this mean for 2018 and 2020, if you're willing to venture any predictions?
Well, I'm one of the few people that I'm hesitant to say this blue wave is going to take over because I don't have an understanding of what the primary outcome is going to be for Democrats.
There's also...
Republicans and independent voters tend to come home and come home late in midterm elections.
They just show up.
In terms of Donald Trump, as I say in the book, this coalition is a wrecking ball, and they want to disrupt things.
Part of that's going to be disrupting some establishment Republicans.
They've been unsatisfied with them.
In particular, on some issues like healthcare and on trade.
So, you know, I'm not ready yet.
I would probably say ask me again in August.
But the Trump coalition hasn't changed.
It's still intact.
And I find evidence, as I'm out on the road, which is all the time, of it gathering more as opposed to shedding people.
I'm so glad to hear you say that because I think that I'm a crazy person when I have the same thoughts.
I say, historically speaking, I guess Democrats should take the House.
That's sort of how I get, you know.
And yet I'm reluctant to predict it.
It does not seem quite right to me.
And you point out in the book, I think it's something like 18% of Trump voters are, are nervous about telling people that they're Trump voters.
And among certain demographics, that number shoots up to 40% or, or, you know, pretty significant chunks.
Do you think, I know I said the last one was the last question, but really this is the last question.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you, do you think.
That social anxiety that we have to keep quiet, that we can't tell anybody that we're voting for Trump, do you think that that produces skewed public opinion polls and therefore we can, just as happened in 2016 when Princeton said two nights before the election, 99% chance Hillary Clinton's going to win, and then that didn't quite happen.
Do you think that we can trust these polls going into 2018, or are these silent voters going to come up and give us a support?
Yeah, polling has been a difficult period since the advent of the iPhone and the Blackberry.
People just, you know, we look at our phone and we're like, I'm not answering that.
I don't know what number that is.
So polling is much more challenging.
So there's that.
But also, yes, I mean, I have done stories lately where people will not, I mean, they'll give me their name, but they won't want their name to be punished, I mean, published.
And therefore punished, right.
And therefore, yeah, I mean, you know, and these are businessmen and women who are very supportive of the president, but they're like, I, you know, I have a business.
I don't need that aggravation.
Look what they do to people.
Or, you know, I have to work with clients.
Or I don't want to be, you know, outed on social media.
And so there's, I don't think, I actually think that number has grown since, and probably is even higher to people since 2016.
Yeah.
I tend to agree, and I have to say, your writing is always on point.
If you don't follow Selena, Selena Zito is one of the few people in the national media who actually seems to get it and is not in just an echo chamber.
And the book is a fascinating read.
The book is The Great Revolt Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.
You've got to go get it.
It is the best book I have read about the 2016 election, with one exception...
Hillary Clinton's What Happened, because it answers the question right on the cover, Hillary Clinton.
With that exception, the cover itself gives a good view.
This is the most insightful book I've read about it.
Selena, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
Alright, do I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube now?
That is a terrible shame because this is Groundhog Yay.
We're going to talk about how Kanye West and Shania Twain and Coachella and Eminem are all giving us good hope for the future, for Donald Trump's presidency, for the policies he's trying to enact, and for the voters that he talked to that other politicians haven't talked to.
It is Groundhog Yay.
Stick around, but you can only do that at dailywire.com.
If you're already there, thank you very much.
You help keep the lights on.
And the lights today, you know, they're a little different.
It looks like my eyes are even more dilated from all the peyote I did at Coachella over the weekend.
But it really helps us out, and you, what do you get?
It's $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan Show.
You get the Ben Shapiro Show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
And I think I'm coming up next this coming month.
I will be doing the conversation so you can ask questions.
Everybody can watch, but only subscribers get to ask the questions.
Many are called, but few are chosen.
None of that matters.
What really matters is the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Because, guys, today was a big day for Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Like, if you don't have it already, run.
Just run.
It's too late.
It's too late to get, if you do have a Tumblr, get ready.
Because Kanye West, the pop culture figure, is just tweeting out these extremely conservative sentiments.
Beginning with how much he likes Red Pill Black, Candace Owens, who's a friend of the show.
She's come on here before.
So you're going to need this because they're going to, you know, all this pop culture, they're going to be like, oh, yes, oh, what?
And then the floodgates are going to explode.
Make sure you have your Leftist Tears Tumblr because if you don't have it, then you're going to drown and die.
Go to dailywire.com to get it.
We'll be right back.
They were really good today.
They are really scrumptious and delicious.
And this is because I'm coming back from Coachella.
Drew made me, for the Andrew Klavan Show, watch Coachella and report on what's happening, what it means for the culture.
And I was pleasantly surprised.
I was really surprised because this, if you missed it, which I assume probably you did, this is what Eminem, this is how he began one of his songs at Coachella.
We love you!
How many people are proud to be citizens of the beautiful country of God?
How many people are proud to be citizens of this beautiful country of ours?
If you couldn't see, there were huge American flags on the screens.
And it wasn't ironic.
You know, he went into some song where he's singing about himself.
But it wasn't like an ironic thing.
You know, I hate this country.
It's really a terrible country.
He actually meant that.
He said it's good.
I have to clean up his language.
But he said it's good to be back from overseas.
It's nice to be back here in America.
And this is a big turnaround, because for the last few months, Eminem has been trying desperately to get Donald Trump's attention, even though Trump just won't do it.
He's not giving him his attention.
But this is what he was rapping just a few months ago.
That's an awfully hot coffee pot.
Should I drop it on Donald Trump?
I'm probably not, but that's all I got 'til I come up with a solid .
Got a plan and now I got a hatchet like a damn Apache with a tomahawk.
I'ma walk inside a mosque on Ramadan and say a prayer that every time she talks, she gets a mouth.
I'ma stop.
But we better give Obama props because what we got in office now is a kamikaze that'll probably cause a nuclear holocaust.
And while the drama pops and he waits for s**t to quiet down, he'll just gas his plane up and fly around till the bombing stops.
So it goes on like that.
This was Eminem a few months ago.
I don't listen to rap, ever.
I just don't like it.
Is that good rap, though?
That doesn't sound like good rap.
I'd listen to the Sugarhill Gang over there.
That was just terrible.
The rhymes were forced and weird and really sad.
But anyway, now he's not angry.
Now he's grateful and he loves America.
He's talking about how great it is.
This was at Coachella.
And Coachella, you'd expect it to be super political.
Beyonce was the big headliner.
And the songs weren't good.
And she's a very political person.
But even she didn't get really political there.
I found out, apparently, the guy who owns Coachella is a Christian billionaire, a conservative Christian billionaire.
And maybe that reigned it in a little bit.
But what I think actually reigned it in is that...
Entertainers and people in the pop culture are realizing this doesn't play.
This doesn't play.
And some of them, I think, are having epiphanies themselves.
You know, for instance, Kanye.
We knew that Kanye kind of liked Donald Trump because during the campaign or maybe right after the election, he went and visited him at Trump Tower.
He actually showed up, you know, and took pictures with him.
So he wasn't always a Democrat, but he said left-wing things.
Kanye West just started tweeting out these amazing tweets over the weekend.
He goes, I love the way Candace Owens thinks.
And you know Candace from the show.
She's been on here before.
She's red pill black.
And she used to be a lefty and now she's a conservative.
And she speaks directly to black people in particular.
And so Kanye West tweets that out.
He then tweets, be fearless.
Express what you feel, not what you've been programmed to think.
He says the blinders are off.
He says, the psychological zombie effect.
He didn't say anything.
He just said that phrase.
But okay, I kind of see where he's going to.
He goes, we have freedom of speech but not freedom of thought.
Absolutely right.
And sometimes we don't even have freedom of speech.
He goes on, the thought police want to suppress freedom of thought.
That is the definition of political correctness.
That is the project of the modern left.
He then goes on and says, constantly bringing up the past keeps you stuck there.
So he's actually pivoting points, but to another correct one and a conservative talking point.
And then he says, there was a time when slavery was the trend and apparently that time is still upon us, but now it's a mentality.
There's this slave mentality, slavishness.
Absolutely right.
And finally he says, self-victimization is a disease.
Absolutely right.
Then he goes on a string.
He just starts tweeting Scott Adams' videos.
Scott Adams is the Dilbert guy who rightly predicted Donald Trump winning the presidency and has been a really good observer of the Trump effect and why people like him and why people vote for him.
Now Kanye West is pushing this out here.
Now, I know Ben said, I think he said on the show today, he wrote a piece about this.
He said, conservatives shouldn't be thrilled about this.
We shouldn't embrace Kanye West.
Kanye says a lot of crazy things, and he takes prizes away from Taylor Swift, and he said George Bush doesn't care about black people, and so we shouldn't suddenly embrace him because he's saying the correct things.
But I don't agree with that at all.
I think absolutely we should.
I'm not saying that Kanye West is now the great intellectual leader of the conservative movement, but Or he's some political philosopher or some luminary.
But it is so important that guys like Kanye West say the sort of things that we believe and sometimes come over to our side or support the causes that we support.
That is so important.
Conservatives have ceded the popular culture for so long and it's why the left was dominant for decades upon decades.
And now we're playing into the popular culture.
Politics is downstream of culture.
That's what Andrew Breitbart always used to say.
Donald Trump is a cultural figure.
We elected him to fight a cultural battle because all battles ultimately are cultural battles, even over taxes.
Even the question of how much we should lower taxes is cultural.
It's about our relationship to the government, our relationship to money, what we think of when we think of private property in the United States and how individuals should react to their property.
I love that Kanye is doing this.
I think he is freeing people from certain social stigmas they might have about politics.
When I talked to Selena, she said that education wasn't the predictor of voting for Trump or not voting for Trump.
It was the education of the people around you.
It's this social pressure to conform.
So if you're constantly being bombarded with people saying, it's totally unacceptable to support Donald Trump, it's totally unacceptable to be a conservative, you're more likely to comply.
That's the left-wing agenda.
That's their goal.
But if you have people breaking that up and guys like Kanye West saying, nah, I don't really like Hillary, I'd vote for Trump.
Or Roseanne Barr, another person who's not a conservative, but says, yeah, I like Trump, I like what's happening.
I don't want to vote for Democrats.
That is wonderful.
That cracks through this oppressive culture.
You know, Shania Twain, the Canadian singer, said last week that she couldn't vote, obviously, in the election, but she would have voted for Trump.
The apparatus of the mainstream media and the entertainment industry descended upon her like vultures, like monsters picking apart her flesh, and she had to apologize.
And it was a little bizarre because she clearly stated her opinion.
Then she said, basically, I'm sorry for stating my opinion.
Next time I'll keep my opinion to myself.
But they descend on you and say, you can't say that.
Shut your mouth.
You can't say that.
You can't say that.
This is a wonderful sign for Republicans and for the Trump people, because as long as they are pressuring you and saying, if you believe a certain thing, you're going to lose your job.
If you state common sense, you're going to lose your job at Google, like James Damore.
Or if you hold a political view that was the main consensus political view until five minutes ago, like Brandon Icke on the issue of gay marriage...
You're going to lose your company.
You're going to lose Mozilla.
We're going to take everything from you.
They incentivize people shutting up.
And what that means is they're going to be less honest with pollsters.
They're not going to be willing to say, I'd vote for Trump, because you could lose your job, you could lose your reputation, but they're still going to go vote for Donald Trump.
Because they want to crack that culture.
That's a wonderful thing.
This is a groundhog yay, is really what I think about it.
I think this is a wonderful sign for 2018 and 2020.
By all rights, there should be a blue wave.
By all rights, the Democrats should retake the House.
And yet, this culture is so poisonous.
People are being so censored and silenced.
To say, well, yeah, I actually kind of like the president.
He's doing a good job.
I don't know if you noticed, it appears he's bringing peace to Korea after 70 years and is denuclearizing the craziest state on planet Earth.
If they even say that, they could lose their reputations.
And so they're going to keep quiet, and that silent majority is just going to keep on going right to the voting booths.
Wonderful stuff.
And I think the first time I've ever said something nice about Kanye, that's not true.
I actually think Kanye West has great taste in music.
I don't know that what he does with the music is great himself, but he clearly has a good ear and takes good songs and does whatever he does to them.
And now he's doing that to political speech and to political philosophy and fine by me.
Keep doing it, man.
I'm almost a Kanye West fan.
Alright, come back tomorrow.
We have a lot of cool guests coming up, but I can't tell you.
I'm going to keep it a secret.
I'm just like the silent majority.
I'm the silent Michael.
The silent me.
Okay, come back tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
