Ep. 151 - Keepin’ It Real: The Modern Minstrel Show
Emmy-, Grammy-, and Golden Globe Award-winning millionaire actor, comedian, writer, director, producer, singer, songwriter, rapper, and DJ Donald Glover a.k.a. Childish Gambino has a new song out about how terrible America is. What incredible luck. Ta Nehisi Coates slams Kanye West for pushing "white freedom", just a week after TMZ producer Van Lathan slams Kanye for “morphing into something that is not real.” But who’s really keepin’ it real in 2018? Then, lots in the news!
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Emmy, Grammy, and Golden Globe Award-winning millionaire, actor, comedian, writer, director, producer, singer, songwriter, rapper, and DJ Donald Glover, also known as Childish Gambino, has a new song out about how terrible America is.
What incredible luck.
Ta-Nehisi Coates slams Kanye West for pushing white freedom and allying with slaveholders just a week after TMZ producer Van Lathan slams Kanye for morphing into something that is not real.
They must have been lucky, too, to be so successful.
But who's really keeping it real in 2018?
What is real?
What is really, really real?
Then there's a lot in the news.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
They've been so successful for such a terrible place that just keeps people who look like them down.
What incredible luck.
We will analyze that.
We will also analyze the Modern Day Minstrel Show.
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Childish Gambino has this new song out.
It is being hailed, mostly by white liberals, as a great work of genius.
The guy opens up, if you don't know Childish Gambino, that's the alter ego of Donald Glover.
He's a TV writer, he's won Emmys, he's a really talented guy.
And so this is the guy who opened up his song Redbone with the words, but stay woke.
Just to give you an idea of his politics.
This new song is called This Is America and Democrats love it because this song, it's supposed to be a searing indictment of the U.S. and the Second Amendment and police brutality and I don't know, whatever other lefty things you want to throw in there.
America's the worst place ever.
Man, do Democrats love it.
And the reason it's interesting culturally, the reason we have to talk about it and everyone is missing what they should be taking away as the point of this song is it's supposed to be in part A satire of old minstrel shows.
Shows of black men, you know, mocking black men and all of this.
In reality, this type of entertainment is the modern-day minstrel show.
We'll get to that later.
First, let's take a look let's take a look at the video.
You get the idea.
So for those who couldn't see, for those who were just listening, Donald Glover comes on in and he's dancing and it's all fun and happy and it's a nice little beat, you know, and then he goes up to a hooded guy and just pulls out a gun and blasts him right in the head.
Then he comes in, there's a nice black choir singing and they're in...
This is America.
This is Democrat-run cities.
It's supposed to look like Detroit, all of the cars, you know, on fire being broken down.
The last time a Republican ran Detroit, Pericles was running Athens.
But listen to the lyrics.
So, for those who couldn't make out quite what's being said, I think you could, it's just the lyrics are awful.
the lyrics begin—this is the first stanza.
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah!
Yeah!
Go go away!
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah!
Yeah Yeah!
Yeah!
Go go away!
Not exactly Shelley or John Keats or anything.
Not even Isaiah Berlin.
This is the lyrical content.
But we'll get to why this is terrible artwork later.
First, let's just talk about the politics.
So it opens up, we just want a party party just for you.
We just want the money money just for you.
I know you want a party party just for me.
Yes, this is America.
Guns in my area.
I got the strap.
I gotta carry them.
And by the way, what he should say is, I get to carry them.
Because in all of the other countries in the world, when there are guns and knives in their area, you don't get to carry them, and then you get killed.
And you don't get to protect yourself.
The lyrics goes on.
America, I just checked my following list, and you go tell somebody, you mother effas owe me.
So...
Before we go on here, that's the crucial part.
You owe me.
Things are terrible.
People are getting shot.
Everything's bad.
All of the nice things, all of the nice dancing, that's just a facade, and really we're just getting gunned down.
There is actually one interesting political line, he says here, which is, this is a celly, that's a tool.
And what he's referring to is, this is a cell phone, and there have been instances of black men being shot Dead because they pull out a cell phone and the cops think it's a gun and it's a tense situation and it's the difference between guns and cell phones, right?
Guns are a tool.
Cell phones are a tool because they can't actually protect against overreach by the government.
The whole song is just terrible political commentary.
It is...
But it's...
Importantly, it's just political commentary.
Without the political commentary, the song is dreadful.
It's not good art.
Even with the political commentary, it's not very good.
But this is the evidence of a bad work of art.
If the work of art only stands on its politics, it isn't good art.
It's what comedians have to do.
It's why Jimmy Kimmel has to just give political monologues and cry.
It's because he can't tell good jokes.
So it's a crutch, but why the crazy dance?
Why is Donald Glover doing this crazy dance?
One of the theories suggested here is he's doing exaggerated poses like in minstrel shows, like in the Jim Crow South.
The lyric he says is, Grandma told me, get your money, black man.
Get your money.
Go out there and get your money.
And what critics are suggesting is this is a little bit of a distraction so you're not seeing all the bad stuff that's going on in the background.
He's showing how we get distracted by popular entertainment and we get distracted by modern minstrel shows.
This is supposed to be a satire of a minstrel show.
All of the big crazy faces, all of the wild dancing and happy-go-lucky singing and jumping around.
We'll get back to that, because that's the whole key.
Race hustlers from Hollywood to New York, from these music videos to the pages of The Atlantic, they are providing the new minstrel show.
It's the same old audience of white Democrats, but it's the new minstrel show.
All of that later.
First...
Keeping it real.
Kanye West is extolling the virtues of free thought and speaking his mind.
And according to TMZ producer Van Latham, that is most certainly not keeping it real.
If you say what you think and you're explaining the world as you see it, that is not keeping it real.
But then if you just do automatically what other people tell you to do, even if it's not a true narrative, that is keeping it real.
I understand why you're confused.
Keeping it real is another leftist euphemism.
I did this Prager video that's gotten a lot of play from last week, and it's about how the left morphs language, transforms and perverts language to mean the opposite of what it says it means.
Keeping it real is a great example of this, because keeping it real is the opposite of what it said.
Keeping it real is really keeping it unreal.
Van Lathan said, I'm disappointed, I'm appalled, and brother, I'm unbelievably hurt by the fact that to me, you, Kanye West, have morphed into something that is not real.
What is real?
Chris Rock, the comedian Chris Rock, gives some guidance on what real is.
Nothing make a n*** happier than not knowing the answer to your question.
Just ask a n*** question.
Hey, what's the capital is out here?
I don't know that s***.
Keeping it real.
I love to keep it real.
Real d***.
Keeping it real, keeping it dumb.
That's what it is.
Chris Rock, this is a good example of, you know, funny because it's true.
The people are laughing at this because it is true.
And Chris Rock is really good at this kind of social commentary.
He's using this expression, this leftist euphemism, which is primarily a stereotype of a black saying, keeping it real.
And he's saying, what keeping it real means is not keeping it real.
It means keeping it dumb.
It means, you know, this being proud to say, no, I don't want education.
No, I don't want to better myself.
I don't I don't want to better my circumstances in my family life and my personal life.
I want to keep it real, as if to say reality is the opposite of improvement.
And keeping it real, keeping it dumb brings us to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is trending on Twitter last time I checked.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is every white liberal's favorite magazine writer.
All of your pseudo-sophisticate white liberal friends will love Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I'll explain why in a minute.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the MacArthur Genius Grant winner, National Book Award winner.
He's won a ton of awards.
He just wrote a piece attacking Kanye West for speaking his mind and embracing Donald Trump.
The title of that piece is, I'm Not Black, I'm Kanye.
I'm not black, I'm Kanye.
What he's referring to is the old expression from O.J. Simpson, I'm not black, I'm O.J. O.J. saying, I transcend my race.
I'm not just going to be ghettoized into this one particular characteristic and demographic.
You want to put me in, I'm bigger than that.
So just from the title, now we know Ta-Nehisi Coates is comparing Kanye to a wife-beating double murderer.
The piece only gets worse from here.
Ta-Nehisi Coates opens up using these phrases like the yawning whiteness.
This is why white liberals love it so much.
They say, oh yeah, Yes, we are boring.
Yes, we do.
Oh, we're yawning.
Yes.
Keep talking.
Yeah, that's right.
Of course, you couldn't use that phrase about any other racial group or ethnic group.
You couldn't talk about the bellowing Italian-ness or something.
But you can use it.
When Ta-Nehisi Coates uses it in The Atlantic, they say, oh, yes, wow, how brave, how strong.
So then Ta-Nehisi Coates compares Kanye West to Michael Jackson.
The black god dying to be white, you know, because Michael Jackson bleached his skin.
So first, this is within a few paragraphs, Ta-Nehisi Coates compares Kanye West to a double-murderer wife-beater, and then he compares him to a child-molesting drug addict.
But this is the great erudite, serious thinker.
He opens up with these two outrageous comparisons.
Coates then makes a series of stupid points, and I think he's being obtuse here.
Because he's either being obtuse or he is genuinely dumb.
And I don't think he's genuinely dumb.
I tend to think it's the former.
So Coates takes issue that Kanye said that Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, proved that Kanye could be president.
Kanye said this.
He said, yeah, when Donald Trump became president, I realized I could become president.
This is obviously true.
But all Ta-Nehisi Coates sees is color.
All Ta-Nehisi Coates sees is, oh, Barack Obama's black and Kanye's black.
That should be the inspiration.
But what Kanye West is seeing is Barack Obama is this Harvard-educated lawyer, political activist guy, and Donald Trump is a pop culture figure.
I'm a pop culture figure.
I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not a political activist.
I'm just a pop culture guy.
If the big, outrageous pop culture guy can become president, so can I. That is the much truer comparison.
But all Coates sees is color, and all he writes about is color.
So Coates then takes issue with Kanye West calling Chicago the murder capital of the world.
So last year, Chicago had a 59.4% increase in murders over 2015.
This is the highest level of murders since the mid-1990s, which was a huge high in gun murders.
Chicago has this shocking number of murders, but, Ta-Nehisi Coates wants to point out, the rate, the per capita murder rate, is lower than St.
Louis and Detroit and a few other terrible cities.
So, you know, Kanye lied.
So what Kanye said is not true.
Because, you know, Chicago has some really nice neighborhoods, so that brings down the per capita murder rate.
You know, there's a lot of business that happens there, so it brings that.
So what Kanye West said is not true.
This is totally dishonest criticism.
Is that really what you're saying?
You're saying Chicago had a 59% increase in the murder rate.
More than one person on average can die every day and be murdered every day in Chicago.
But to call it the murder capital of the world, it's really only the third murder capital.
Obviously, by the way, when you call something the murder capital of the world in America, you're obviously speaking hyperbolically.
It's not like people don't know that Fallujah exists, that these awful war-torn cities, Raqqa exists, cities that are at war in the Middle East.
No one's suggesting that those places...
Aren't awful and don't have higher murder rates.
You're speaking hyperbolically.
Obviously Chicago has a very high murder rate.
And Kanye West made the right criticism.
He said Barack Obama came up on race hustling.
He's from Chicago and Chicago didn't improve.
It got worse during his tenure.
Maybe that says something about his policies.
So totally dishonest from Coates.
Coates then criticizes West very tellingly because West never fell into the bitterness of his peers.
That's a quote.
He never grew up and became bitter.
The criticism is that he never got bitter.
Kanye, you never decided to start dividing and falling into a victimhood and aggrievement culture.
Even though, Kanye, by the way, because you haven't done that, you've succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.
Coates becomes hysterical.
At this point, he then says Michael Jackson endorsed the destruction of all black people.
That's actually a claim in this absurd Atlantic article.
And then Coates concludes, quote,"...and so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of I, but a black freedom that called him back,
back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to home." What is
real?
What is real?
What would it mean to really keep it real, to keep it really, really real?
Ta-Nehisi Coates has won the Hillman Prize, the National Magazine Award, the George Polk Award, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Award, the American Library Fellowship, American Library in Paris Fellowship, the National Book Award, and the MacArthur Genius Grant, probably the most sought-after award in the world.
What about Donald Glover, Childish Gambino?
Donald Glover has won multiple Emmy Awards, a Grammy, Critics' Choice Award, multiple Writers Guild Awards, and the NAACP Award.
The list goes on and on.
Multi-millionaire.
I think at last check he's got well over $12 million.
What do they have in common?
What do these two guys have in common?
They push a grievance narrative to a largely white audience.
They push this narrative that blacks are necessarily kept down.
They can't succeed.
Hard work won't cut it.
Gotta keep it divided.
Gotta keep it real.
Stop pretending that you can make it in America.
Kanye, shut up.
Stop saying that people can make it in America if they just better themselves and educate themselves and follow certain social mores that will ensure success for their children or make it far more likely that their children will succeed and that they will succeed.
Simple social mores that are open to everybody.
Stop telling them that.
Tell them that they can't succeed, that they've got to stay down.
And yet, ironically, Donald Glover and Ta-Nehisi Coates are proof in themselves that this narrative isn't true.
How many awards have they won?
How many millions of dollars have they made combined?
What social and cultural influence do they have combined?
But then they don't preach what they practice because the narrative sells.
Their own lives, their testament, that doesn't sell.
The Kanye true narrative doesn't sell.
But this narrative sells.
This is the modern minstrel show.
That's what it is.
The critics are calling this Donald Glover video an assault on minstrel shows.
It is in reality, it is the complete opposite.
It is the modern minstrel show.
For those who don't know what a minstrel show is...
For, you know, the 16-year-olds in the audience who haven't studied this or seen this.
In the old days, minstrel shows portrayed black people as inept and frivolous and unable to better themselves.
Here's an example of one.
- My friends, My friends, it is indeed a financial pleasure to have so many of you resemble here today on this suspicious occasion.
See, so it's the white person puts on the black face and the big white lips and then mispronounces words.
So it says resemble instead of assemble and suspicious instead of auspicious.
Ha ha, he's a dimwit who can't really better himself and ha ha ha.
And then the white audience laughs and the white audience applauds.
And this didn't just exist in the 19th century and the early 20th.
This happened in the 70s a little bit, too.
Television shows like Good Times come to mind.
Good Times was created by white lefties, shows created by Norman Lear, that kind of thing.
And they pretend that they're attacking problems.
In some ways, they're offering social commentary.
But it's also the same effect.
You know, you have the wild, crazy black character saying the catchphrase, and then the mostly white liberal audience laughs and applauds.
So what is the minstrel show today?
Because at the time they didn't realize that those were modern day minstrel shows in the 1970s.
What's the minstrel show today?
The left is totally delusional.
They're looking for another Amos and Andy.
They're looking for this with the big black face and the big white lips and everything.
The modern day minstrel show doesn't look like that.
The modern-day minstrel show on the pages of The Atlantic in music videos portray precisely the same thing, though, don't they?
The old minstrel shows played primarily to white Democrat audience.
The new minstrel shows, precisely the same audience.
They play to exactly the same group of people.
Kanye West is rejecting that ridiculous narrative that he and Glover and Coates prove by their very lives and careers is untrue.
So what do the race hustlers do?
What do these guys do?
They do the same thing that they did to Candace Owens and to Thomas Sowell and to Clarence Thomas, to every other black person who has ever had the temerity, the abject audacity to question the enfeebling Democrat narrative of grievance.
They pilloried them as Uncle Toms.
That's all they ever heard of Uncle Toms.
They're inauthentically black.
They're race traitors.
They're the worst kind of evil.
They say, how dare you?
Speak for yourself.
How dare you?
We have a narrative.
Here's the script.
Here's the script.
We gave you the script.
Listen, I know that I've won the MacArthur Genius Award and I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams because this is the land of opportunity.
And obviously, if you work hard over enough time, you can better yourself.
That's not the script.
Take the script and dance.
Play your part and dance.
That's what they tell them to do.
And it's despicable.
And by the way, it shows what courage it takes to contradict that entrenched, prevailing interest that's been around for a very long time.
What courage it takes for a guy like Kanye West.
We kind of joke about him because Kanye West is an eccentric, crazy character.
Takes a lot of guts to do what he did.
Takes a lot of guts for that guy to tweet out Thomas Sowell quotes and to say, I like Candace Owens and to say, I enjoy listening to Jordan Peterson.
It takes a lot of guts because then he'll be acute.
Because the minute he describes reality as it really is, as he sees it, he'll say, no, you're not keeping it real.
How dare you?
We're going to come after you.
We're going to pillory you.
And it isn't just racial issues that you see this on.
Because conservatives should be pretty careful here.
There are actually racial issues in the country.
We like to say there aren't racial issues at all, but then obviously we know that there are racial issues in the United States.
There are different rates of earning, different rates of marriage, out of wedlock, birth, abortion, crime, education.
The majority of black babies in New York City are aborted rather than born.
That is a major racial issue.
And you can't blame all of that on the legacy of slavery.
That's what the left wants to do.
They say, it's all the legacy of slavery.
You can't blame it all on that.
You can, in part, blame it on the legacy of Democrats and the great society.
You can, in part, blame it on the good intentions...
Policies of affirmative action and the good intentions, allegedly, policies of the great society.
You can in part blame it on exclusion.
You can in part blame it on a legacy of division.
But they're clearly, regardless of if you're going to blame it on...
Historical ills or modern policies or Democrats or mostly just Democrats, I guess you would blame it on.
Clearly, there are issues.
There's no question about that.
And I've never really liked, sometimes on the right, we see this issue so clearly and then we really want to explain it, so we use that definition.
The Democrat plantation language.
We say, the Democrats are keeping blacks on the plantation because it's evocative language.
I don't really like that.
I find it kind of condescending.
I don't think it achieves anything.
People listen to that and say, are you kidding me?
Who are you to tell me?
But we shouldn't be reactionary.
That plays into the left's hands, too.
And the...
Speaking of the left's hand, the minstrelsy, the minstrel show of keeping it real extends way beyond a rapper and an essayist.
It extends way beyond Donald Glover and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
It is all over the place.
It is all over the academy, the universities, the mainstream media.
It's everywhere.
It is beyond racial issues.
Forty percent of colleges have no Republican professors.
Forty percent have none.
It's not to say 60% of professors are Democrats.
40% of colleges have no Republican professors.
That's according to a National Association of Scholars article.
They lack even one Republican professor.
Mitchell Langbert, who's an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, shows that 78.2% of academic departments sampled had zero Republicans, or so few, quote, as to make no difference.
So what happens in that case?
What happens when your college has not a single person who contradicts the politically correct perspective?
Well, then you don't get any perspective.
You don't get any other ideas.
It's a ghettoizing experience.
This is an example of that euphemism.
How keeping it real is the opposite of real.
It is the opposite.
The university is the opposite of that.
The place that is supposed to promote intellectual curiosity and freedom and the relentless pursuit of truth, it does the opposite of that.
The same is true of the mainstream media.
After the 2016 election, the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Beckett, said, quote, If I have a mea culpa for journalists and journalism, it's that we've got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than we talk to, especially if you happen to be a New York-based news organization.
And remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.
That is true.
I can promise you that, having spent a lot of time in New York.
It's not the real world.
There's a new study in the Journal of Expertise.
I have to say, how many of these journals are there?
I'm going to start at the Journal of Covfefe or something.
They have the Journal of this and the Journal of that.
I don't know how reliable they are.
But the Journal of Expertise shows a majority of staff writers and editors at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal Come from elite universities.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton.
They have a measure based on median SAT score or something.
52% of Times staff writers and editors.
54% of Wall Street Journal staff writers and editors.
Now, you might say, well, those are prestigious places.
It's not surprising that they come from prestigious universities.
This actually is a fairly new thing, that the journalism, that reporting the news is for the elites, the very, very highly educated and specifically educated.
In the old days, the elite grads, they wouldn't go to the Wall Street Journal.
They would go to Wall Street and make a ton of money, or they would go to industry and make a ton of money.
They wouldn't go to report the news.
Newspaper reporting was more of a trade.
It was a specialty.
You had to have a relentless, dogged pursuit of a story.
There was sort of something wrong with you.
Same thing with artists.
There had to be something wrong with you to say, well, I don't want to make a lot of money.
I want to put myself in a lot of danger.
I want to work really, really hard, but I want to pursue the truth.
I want to pursue these stories.
Reporting wasn't really meant for these big ego elite types because those guys, they want to prescribe or proscribe rather than describe what they're seeing.
They want to give their commentary.
They want to offer what they think the society should look like.
Or why it's looking this way, rather than just reporting the events as they see them.
And in part it's because to actually do good investigative reporting is very hard and very hard work, and you don't get a lot of accolades and glamour for it.
So all of the big ego people, they want to prescribe.
They've read Thucydides, so they say, oh, I can explain this to you.
And by the way, that's what we're seeing now.
At all of these places that used to do good investigative work, we're now seeing a proliferation of commentary masquerading as reporting.
What is real?
What's really real?
Well, it's the commentary of these people, but is it the reporting?
This is why they get it so, so wrong.
Because look, on this show, at the Daily Wire, on the Ben Shapiro show, the Andrew Klavan show, whatever, Matt Walsh show, we say this is commentary.
This is our perspective.
This is cultural commentary.
The New York Times doesn't do that.
The New York Times says this is the news, but they give exactly the same amount of commentary, the exact amount of political opinion as any other commentary network does.
They say, but these are the facts.
CNN, just the facts.
The Washington Post.
Democracy dies in darkness.
Just the facts.
I'm a banana.
But that's nonsense.
Which is why they're dishonest.
Which is why they're fake news.
And that's why they get it so wrong.
It creates a totally parochial point of view that has delusions of cosmopolitanism or universality or any of this.
But they're not.
They come from the same little schools.
They come from the same little cities.
They go to the same little dinner clubs.
They read the same Ta-Nehisi Coates essay.
They give it the same applause.
The left is right about one thing.
They don't know that they're right, but they're right about one thing.
Bigotry is insidious.
It's very hard to detect.
They're right about that.
They're not detecting it.
They're certainly not.
They talk about the unconscious biases.
They're not conscious of them because they are demanding.
The left demands and pushes a false narrative.
That blacks specifically, but racial minorities more broadly, cannot succeed.
They just can't.
They're just inept.
They're just as inept and helpless as the minstrel shows of the days gone by.
Never mind that this narrative is demonstrably false.
That's what the audience demands.
That's what the Atlantic audience demands.
And very sadly, performers of this false narrative are going to dance to the same old tune.
They're doing it now and it's trending on Twitter.
They're going to win more awards for it.
And they're going to make even more ridiculous claims.
and that same old audience is going to say, oh, that's right.
You can't better yourself.
It's really, really sad.
And Maybe people will someday be able to see through the insidiousness of that bigotry.
But probably not anytime soon.
Okay, enough about race.
Do we have a little bit of time?
So I'm glad before we had to cut to break that we were able to get to Kanye Watch for the 17th day in a row, I think.
This show is basically going to be renamed the Kanye West program.
Kanye West analysis.
We've got to get to the news.
Before we get to the news, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We've got so much to talk about.
I want to talk about Rosie O'Donnell going to the clink, throwing Rosie O'Donnell behind bars, hopefully.
I want to talk about John McCain a little bit.
And John McCain, it appears that he's in the last days.
It looks like he's dying of aggressive brain cancer.
But he ain't going out without a fight, and he's hitting a lot of former allies.
So we'll talk about that.
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Next one up is little old me.
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Many are called, few are chosen.
But that doesn't matter.
Hold on.
Just got to keep it real a little bit over here.
Oh, those are real.
That is keeping it real.
Those are the Kanye West vintage leftist tears.
They have been pouring in.
As Hawaii spews lava, so too the continental United States has been spewing leftist tears ever since Kanye West said that he liked Donald Trump.
And those are real.
It's hard to tell.
Keeping it real from real these days, that is...
Oh, wow.
Go over.
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Go to dailywire.com.
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We'll be right back with the news.
Delish.
Delish.
So let's get to a really happy news story.
Rosie O'Donnell is in trouble with the law.
Ha!
If justice is blind, Rosie O'Donnell may now be headed to the clink.
We are joined for comment by President Donald Trump.
Mr.
President, your reaction?
I like to see bad people fail.
Rosie failed.
I'm happy about it.
She's basically a disaster.
Well, she called me a snake oil salesman.
And, you know, coming from Rosie, that's pretty low, because when you look at her and when you see the mind, the mind is weak.
I don't see it.
I don't get it.
I never understood.
How does she even get on television?
I believe Barbara made a terrible mistake putting her on, and I think Barbara's probably paying a big price.
When you see the mind, you know, you're totally right, Mr.
President.
The mind is weak.
The mind is weak.
So Rosie apparently made illegal campaign donations on five separate occasions.
And when you donate to a political candidate, there is a limit for campaign donations.
In this case, I believe the limit's $2,700, and Rosie exceeded it, apparently vastly exceeded it.
So you might recall you're having deja vu all over again.
Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative filmmaker and columnist, he did this too.
He did this exact same thing for his friend Wendy Long.
And I was working races in New York when Wendy Long was running in this race.
Wendy Long was his old pal from Dartmouth.
She was never going to win this Senate seat in New York.
And he donated $20,000 to her instead of the legal limit.
So he donated over the limit.
One, certainly not enough money to make any difference in politics.
And two, a race that was unwinnable.
It just wasn't going to happen.
For this great crime, Dinesh, for giving a little extra money to his old college pal in a race that was never going to win, he was sentenced to five years probation, eight months in a halfway house, and a $30,000 fine.
The reason that Dinesh got this, usually these cases aren't prosecuted.
The reason that he was prosecuted and sent to the clink is because he was a major critic of Barack Obama.
He made these films against Barack Obama.
He was a relentless critic of Obama.
So he was selectively prosecuted and sentenced to absurd time for this minor first-time offense.
Rosie O'Donnell has donated way more money than that to many more candidates, apparently $90,000 in just this cycle alone.
And then when she was called out on it, she claimed ignorance.
She said, well, I didn't know there was a limit.
I didn't know what the limit was.
The mind.
The mind is just not there.
As Donald Trump says, the mind is not.
So she said, I didn't know.
How was I supposed to know?
I mean, I know it's the law and it's written on every campaign website and it's actually, by law, clearly spelled out.
But, you know, if it was too much, the candidates should have returned the money.
But as you might know, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
That's not an excuse not to be prosecuted.
So will she be prosecuted?
I don't know.
Usually the first-time offenders don't get prosecuted.
Rosie is clearly a multiple-time offender here.
Is justice blind?
Are they going to go after Rosie?
It's funny because last time Obama was in office and Obama hated Dinesh and now Trump is in office and...
Donald Trump is Rosie O'Donnell's primary antagonist in the entire world.
There was that time during the...
I will point out, Rosie started the fight, but during the debate, Megyn Kelly said, Donald Trump, you have called women slobs and pigs and idiots and this and that.
And he interrupted, he said, only Rosie O'Donnell.
So, who knows?
Is justice blind?
There are two points on this that you should think about.
One is justice under the law.
If it's good for Dinesh, it's got to be good for Rosie.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Also, we should think about the justice of the law, these limits on campaign contributions.
I think this is a terrible law.
I think it's anti-constitutional.
I don't think we should have these sort of limits on how much you can give to a political candidate.
Because one, it's anti-constitutional.
It suppresses your political speech.
We know that money is speech.
It costs money to make a big yard sign.
It costs money to write an op-ed.
It costs money to publish things.
Speech...
It can require money and your speech will reach a certain number of people depending on how much money you spend.
We know that in the Citizens United case, speech was...
We know that people don't lose their constitutional rights to free speech just because they organize in groups.
So I find all of these campaign finance laws anti-constitutional.
But it also, it doesn't achieve what it wants to achieve.
It just creates shady backroom ways for the money to transfer.
Big politics is always going to attract big money.
This is an argument for small government.
If you don't want big money in politics, don't have big politics, have small government.
But also, the minute you start limiting, donating to a campaign or donating to this...
Then you're going to have more money going to the party structures.
That's going to give more corruption for the party bosses to pick winners and losers.
You're going to have super PACs, which are apparently shadier.
The Democrats hate super PACs.
You're just going to put the money there.
And this brings us to John McCain.
John McCain is the big proponent of campaign donation limits.
John McCain, his major campaign law, McCain-Feingold, was struck down in the Citizens United decision, the famous Citizens United decision, that said that people don't give up their rights when they organize in groups.
McCain was very angry about that decision.
This was one of his landmark pieces of legislation.
Now John McCain is dying.
And it looks like he's in his last days.
So people are going to not criticize him.
They're not going to attack him because you don't want to attack a dying man, which is perfectly right.
It is distasteful to unnecessarily speak ill of the dead and the dying.
But in the last few minutes here, I would like to point out, John McCain seems to be taking advantage of this, of this social more, because he's not going peacefully.
He's not saying, I just want to spend my last days just only talking about the nice things and enjoying my impressive life.
He's launching a memoir.
He just leaked that he doesn't want Donald Trump at his funeral.
He's attacking Trump.
He's willing to have Barack Obama at his funeral, but not Donald Trump.
He's releasing this memoir that's coming out at the end of this month, and in that memoir he's throwing his former running mate Sarah Palin under the bus.
I don't want to attack John McCain.
I'm not going to spend time attacking John McCain.
But I do want this to be a cautionary tale.
Because John McCain, this Palin thing, throwing Palin under the bus, it became so fashionable for all of the sophisticated Republicans to attack Sarah Palin.
Oh, she's a hick.
Oh, she has a silly accent.
Oh, she doesn't read enough newspapers.
Oh, blah, blah, blah, right?
It became very fashionable, especially when they lost.
John McCain picked her.
Now he can say, oh, they all wanted me to pick her and I didn't want to pick her.
Well, the buck stops somewhere, pal.
And John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
She served him very ably on the campaign.
She helped his campaign.
People, revisionists now say, oh, she dragged it.
He might have won if not for her.
No way.
His polling was in the doldrums.
And then she came on and she really helped his polling.
Now John McCain is in his final days and he decides to throw her under the bus.
He makes one last jab at the sitting Republican president and he throws his former running mate under the bus.
This is all in keeping with a trend among Republicans to really want to win the affection of the New York Times.
Republicans should never try to win the affection of the New York Times.
Do not do it.
This is the swamp mentality.
This is what happens when Republicans come to identify more with their pseudo-sophisticate Democrat critics than they do with their own constituents, and they don't dance with the guy who brung them.
You know, the Republican candidates get elected because of conservatives, because of their base, and then the minute they get to Washington, they say, oh, I don't want to be with those people.
Those people are dirty, and then they don't read The Atlantic or whatever.
So please, New York Times, like me, like me.
I'm not like them.
This is a particular political disloyalty, by the way, that history does not look fondly upon.
Everyone thinks in the moment, they say, oh, I don't like the Tea Party because they're too direct and they speak too plainly and they like the Constitution too much.
Oh, no, I'm not like them.
I drink Manhattans.
No, I read the Atlantic.
Who are the political disloyal people who don't like their own base?
Mayor John Lindsay of New York.
Does history remember him?
Is he one of the great men?
Oh, yes.
As John Lindsay said, you see epitaphs everywhere, big statues.
Oh, as the great John Lindsay said.
How about Nelson Rockefeller?
As the wonderful political leader Nelson Rockefeller?
No, you don't.
You forget these people.
They're not the great leaders of the Republican Party or of any movement.
It's weak sauce.
It's really weak sauce.
You will never, as a conservative or as a Republican, win the affection of the New York Times.
You'll win it for a moment when it's instrumental and it's useful, and then they'll stab you in the back, as they did to John McCain in 2008.
They were really, really nice to him during the primary.
They were really, really nice to him when he was attacking George Bush in 2000, and when he was attacking other conservatives in 2008.
And then he gets the nomination, they go right back to their guy, and they attack John McCain.
It happens every time.
They...
They will not reward you betraying your base or the confidence of your base.
It looks desperate.
Don't do it.
A cautionary tale.
Okay.
We're out of time.
We'll get to more news tomorrow.
In the meantime, I am Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knoll Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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