In its most bizarre electoral strategy since nominating a dessicated old crone for president in 2016, Democrats have now taken to defending face-tattooed, child-slaughtering, illegal alien psychopath gangsters. We'll analyze. Then, Lord Conrad Black joins to discuss his new book Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. We’ll round out the news with my least popular opinion of all: Starbucks is terrific. Finally, the Mailbag!
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In its most bizarre electoral strategy since nominating a desiccated old crone for president in 2016, Democrats have now taken to defending face-tattooed, child-slaughtering, illegal alien psychopath gangsters.
I'm sure that one's going to work out great in November, guys.
We will analyze which is worse, MS-13 or the MSM. Then, Lord Conrad Black joins to discuss his new book, Donald J. Trump, A president like no other.
You can say that again.
And we will round out the news with my least popular opinion of all time.
I will finally alienate my entire audience by explaining why Starbucks is terrific.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Trump has gone too far this time because he's criticizing criminals.
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Trump has gone too far this time, guys.
He's just gone too far.
It was bad enough.
When he slaughtered half of the country with net neutrality, you know, when they repealed net neutrality and everybody literally died?
And then he reformed our tax code.
He lowered people's taxes, lowered the corporate rate.
I don't know how many people died in that.
But now he's gone too far.
Donald Trump is now criticizing murderous psychopath gangsters.
It's too far.
Here are Donald Trump's comments.
He had MS-13 gang members I know about.
If they don't reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about them.
We have people coming into the country who are trying to come in.
We're stopping a lot of them.
But we're taking people out of the country.
You wouldn't believe how bad these people are.
These aren't people.
These are animals.
And we're taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that's never happened before.
And because of the weak laws, they come in fast.
We get them.
We release them.
We get them again.
We bring them out.
It's crazy.
The mainstream media are furious that Donald Trump would say such a thing, that violent, terrible criminals are animals.
So we'll get to the headlines in a second.
We'll get to the mainstream media and the Democrat response in a second.
First, just a little bit of context.
Here's a quick rundown of some of MS-13's gang crimes from just this year and last year.
Last November, Donald Trump's administration arrested 200 members of this gang in America.
This year we've arrested 100.
We don't know how many gang members are in this country.
It's a violent gang, primarily from El Salvador, MS-13.
Here's a quick rundown.
Let's just look at this week.
On Tuesday, a man's body was discovered in a shallow grave dug in a park in Washington, D.C.
MS-13 gang members dug that grave before they stabbed the man more than 100 times, cut off his head, and ripped out his heart.
And then, so Donald Trump called those guys animals.
The mainstream media, they're furious.
They're furious.
Here are some other MS-13 gang crimes, just from last year.
MS-13 affiliate Venus Romero tortured, stabbed, and killed a 15-year-old girl for dating her boyfriend in January of last year.
Another MS-13 gang member murdered 15-year-old Damaris Alexandra Reyes Rivas.
And by the way, just notice something here.
A lot of these victims...
A lot of these victims actually are immigrants from the same places that this gang comes from.
So they say, oh, it's racist when you're talking about these animals accusing these people of the crimes that they have obviously committed.
A lot of the victims are from those same areas.
They're from the same immigrant groups.
Another crime.
Miguel Alvarez Flores and Diego Hernandez Rivera kidnapped, sexually tortured, and murdered a teenage girl.
That was last February.
Three MS-13 gang members stabbed and mutilated 17-year-old Raymond Wood before running him over with their car, cutting off his hands, and leaving him for dead.
That was in March.
Also in March, Hector Lazo and Pedro Rivera shot 37-year-old Nelson Rodriguez in the back of the head.
He was just walking down the street.
In April, two documented MS-13 gang members shot an 11-year-old girl and two teenage boys in Houston.
Documented meaning we knew who they were.
We knew they were here illegally.
We knew that they were members of this gang.
But, well, we couldn't do anything.
It's really hard to do anything about that.
We wouldn't want people to think that we think of them as animals.
That would be racist for some reason or whatever the mainstream media says.
In April of last year, MS-13 gangsters wielding machetes mutilated and murdered four victims between 16 and 20 around the same time as they murdered seven others in the same neighborhoods.
Alexei Sainz murdered three Long Island high school students last year, MS-13 gang member.
He attacked two young girls at the same time while they were walking through their suburban neighborhood.
Three MS-13 gangsters were arrested last May after they slashed a 19-year-old with a machete and shot him point blank.
MS-13 gang member Carlos Gonzalez murdered his girlfriend, Marisa Lopez, last year.
That guy is still at large.
I could go on for the whole rest of the show with these people's crimes.
They are face-tattooed demons from hell.
Only God can judge people, but the Donald Trump administration can arrange the meeting.
There's nothing wrong with that.
And actually...
The more you read about these crimes, you realize that what Donald Trump said is not true.
These people are not animals.
They are much, much worse than animals.
Because animals aren't morally culpable for what they do.
When the tiger eats the little animal in the jungle, it's not like the tiger is sinning.
It's not like the tiger has committed some immoral act.
It's just in the tiger's nature to eat other animals.
But when human beings who have a moral conscience, when they mutilate people, kill teenage girls, maim, cut off body parts, cut off heads, when they do that, they are committing evil.
They are pervaded by evil.
When they should know better.
When they do know better, but they choose to do evil things.
It's much worse than animals.
We should all be able to agree that these guys are pretty bad, right?
I think, you know, I know we're in a time of political disagreement, political rancor.
I think we can all agree that face-tattooed gangsters who decapitate little teenage girls, probably those guys are not good people, right?
Uh...
That's what you would think.
How did the Democrats and the mainstream media react?
They defended the psychopath gangsters.
Some of the headlines we have here.
Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country's borders animals.
You saw this in the New York Times.
But he wasn't lashing out at...
He wasn't lashing out at illegal aliens.
He was lashing out at violent criminals.
And this actually gets to an incredible point of the mainstream media and the Democrat Party's bigotry, which is that they're conflating violent psychopath gangsters with all illegal aliens.
Donald Trump didn't do that.
He was very specific.
He said, these people are animals.
These people are sick monsters and we've got to get them out.
And the mainstream media said, you're calling all Illegal aliens, all immigrants, animals, all immigrants are less than human.
He said, what are you talking about?
I never said that the illegal aliens are all psychopath criminals.
You said that.
It goes on.
Jennifer Rubin said, she writes for the Washington Post.
She pretends to be a Republican.
She's one of the biggest Democrat shills in the entire country.
She tweeted, quote, this is disgusting.
And Trump's evangelical sycophants will applaud his utter dehumanization of men, women, and children.
I don't know how many little girls are members of MS-13.
I suspect zero.
None of them are.
But this really...
It lowers my estimation of Jennifer Rubin.
I always thought she was just one of those fake Republicans that the mainstream media hires so that they can pretend that they have a Republican opinion and they just use that person constantly to criticize Republicans.
But here she's just flat-out lying.
I don't think she's stupid enough to actually think that Donald Trump is saying something that he obviously didn't say.
So here we just have a flat-out liar in Jennifer Rubin.
It's really pathetic.
From Andrea Mitchell at NBC. By the way, just a point on Andrea Mitchell.
It took me approximately 24 years of my life on this earth to realize that Andrea Mitchell and Mika Brzezinski are not the same person.
Did you know that, that they're not the same person?
I don't know, it's just to say, maybe other people realized it.
This was news to me.
So, she tweets out, quote,"...a tough takedown by the California governor after real Donald Trump calls people trying to get into the country animals, not people." Again, he didn't call people trying to get into the country animals, not people, like the vicious gangsters.
And this gets to an important point of illegal immigration.
Some of the people trying to get into our country are vicious gangster criminals who should not be allowed in.
She's...
She's actually unwittingly made our point, right?
Which is that it's not all just really nice, polite workers coming in who are the people entering our country.
Some of them are criminals.
Some are those bad people that Trump talked about when he launched his campaign.
From Benji Sarlin, a political reporter at NBC, quote,"...one of Trump's most consistent rhetorical moves is comparing large classes of human beings to animals." A political tactic with a long and deadly history.
I think he's making the argumentum ad Hitlerum at this point.
You know, anybody who disagrees with me is Hitler.
That's what he's saying about Trump.
Christian Farias from New York Magazine.
Never, ever forget this fact.
Donald Trump reserves the word animals only for brown people.
So what you are saying, buddy, is that all brown people are criminals.
That's what you're saying.
You're saying that they're animals and they're criminals.
But that's not what Donald Trump is saying.
He's saying some people are criminals and those people are animals.
You're conflating race and crime.
It's not the Republicans doing it.
It's not Donald Trump doing it.
It's you, mainstream media.
And to round it all out, Tyler Hansen from the D-Trip, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he sends out these pictures of these little immigrant kids, these like sweet little kids and crying parents.
He says, Trump, we're taking people out of the country.
You wouldn't believe how bad these people are.
These aren't people.
These are animals.
So that's just a lie, right?
He's not talking about those people.
He's talking about gangsters.
The mainstream media and the Democrats, they're now defending MS-13.
The strategy that they have undertaken is to oppose anything that Trump does.
The trouble for them is that Trump is doing successful and popular things on the economy, on foreign affairs, on domestic affairs, on immigration.
So they're opposing that, but that leads them into these absurd positions like defending MS-13.
They say, okay, Trump likes...
Kicking out gangsters, so we need to bring them into the country.
We'll just do the opposite.
Keep it up, guys.
Keep it up, Democrats.
Good work.
Yeah, can't wait for November.
Okay, let's bring on our guest, Lord Conrad Black.
Conrad Black is a member of the British House of Lords.
He's a financier, a newspaper tycoon, historian, biographer, excellent columnist.
I suggest you read his writings.
He has a new book out.
I really, really like this book.
I highly recommend it.
Donald J. Trump, a president like no other.
This book has just come out this week.
You have to read it.
Lord Black, thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me, Michael.
And I want to say I agreed with everything you've said in the part that I've seen, especially that beastly woman, Jennifer Rubin.
It's high time she was unmasked.
It is.
It is so frustrating.
So many times with these Republicans who all they ever do is try to get Democrats to like them, I say, okay, you're opportunistic, that's fine.
But this is...
Outright lies.
And there are a lot of lies about President Donald Trump.
You have written the best coverage of Donald Trump that I have read.
This book is so, so good, and it gives a perspective that people are just not getting in the media.
I want to delve into that, some of the lies, some of the distortions that we have.
Let's begin with a sort of obvious one.
A lot of people are telling us here that Donald Trump is secretly an idiot.
He's just a dummy.
He doesn't know anything.
And he's just made it to the highest points of real estate and casinos and politics and television just by luck or by whatever.
What is it?
You write about how...
Donald Trump has a real genius for real estate.
How did he manage to make it to the top of that industry and every other?
Well, in the case of real estate, he had an absolutely tireless devotion, as he has said at times, to putting the deal together.
And it means going to a bankrupt organization, persuading claimants and suitors to hand over for some sort of consideration But not tangible and not upfront.
Their claims in respect to real estate assets and then shopping this around through proper financial circles to get building loans and municipal approvals and approval of creditors.
And it is an unbelievably exacting process.
But his first big deal, the old Commodore Hotel between the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Station in New York, That's what he did.
And he didn't have anything.
He said, I have your assigned contract.
He held press conferences every day.
And he was just a very young man.
And he did have a signed contract.
It was signed by him, but not by the other party.
He didn't say that.
So it always puts you into the position of being a bit of a huckster and a peddler and a slightly shabby middleman.
But if you stay at it hard enough and are as ingenious at it as he was...
Without putting up a cent, you make a fortune.
And that's what he did.
And now he got carried away and he ended up for a time with a negative net worth, but he convened the bankers himself.
And he knew the last thing in the world they wanted to do was call the loans.
They'd have to acknowledge the assets were going to be severely devalued.
And the last thing in the world a banker wants to do is try and run a real estate business.
And all he had to do was say, look, just sit tight.
I'll give you all the, pledge you all the collateral I can.
And this is my plan of action to work my way out of this, and that's what happened.
And going back to what you said about this allegation against him of being essentially deep downy shallow, the fact is, as I pointed out towards the end of the book, and thank you for your kind words about it, he achieved more, objectively speaking, he achieved more before he was inaugurated president than any previous holder of that office except Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Grant, and Eisenhower.
I'm not denigrating the others.
Most of the others had serious careers, some of them very substantial, like Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University and so forth, but not like that, not where you make billions of dollars.
You decide to become a television performer from day one and for 15 years without one single interruption.
You're pulling over 25 million viewers.
Top slot every week for 15 years except two nights.
Opposite American Idol.
Now, I never watched that kind of television.
I never watched one of Donald's programs, but that's not the point.
He was a great success.
And to take over the Republican Party, either party, but the only other person who did this was Wendell Wilkie, where you have never sought or held a public office, elected or non-elected, or a military command, and you take over the party.
Wilkie did it.
For the great honor of running against Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was invincible.
Nobody could ever defeat him.
And Donald Trump did it, and then he actually won this election.
It was an astonishing feat.
I mean, I understand why people don't like him.
I understand why they feel threatened by him.
I understand how they find him distasteful.
All of that I understand.
But to say that he is not an accomplished and capable man is an outrage.
And I love that the book is actually rather even-handed.
There's no hiding.
I think you admire Donald Trump.
I admire Donald Trump.
But the account is...
He has an annoying public personality at times.
That's right.
Well, the fact of the biography is that it is honest about some of his flaws.
You mentioned the hucksterism.
You're quite open about that, even some of his business failings, some of his untruths that he's told along the way.
Trump University was a bit much, Michael.
I mean, in one sense, it's magnificent.
If you can actually, in that P.T. Barnum way, if you'd ever go bankrupt, exaggerating the intelligence of the public.
But I mean, it's outrageous, but it's amusing, but it is outrageous.
It is.
I've actually only been referring to Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania as Trump University these days, because I know it bothers the students there.
But you write early on in the book, you say...
It is also Trump's nature, honed by the rough and tumble of his career, including observing his father's business, to believe that no competitive activity beyond the playing field, if that, is quite as pristine as represented.
He is not so much a cynic as a methodological agnostic, not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths.
And there is a lot in that sentence.
What do you mean by it, and what is Donald Trump's relationship to the truth?
I'll take the last part first, if I may.
You have to examine his relationship to the truth in looking upon him as we are, as a public figure, and indeed as the holder of the great office of President of the US. You have to examine it, I think, at two levels.
At one level, he has the habits of his career And engages in what he calls truthful hyperbole.
Now, how truthful it is sometimes is open to legitimate questions, although often it's partly truthful.
And he believes in exaggerating in a manner that is somewhat self-serving.
And he's only slowly, I think, but definitely gradually recognizing that if he scales that back, he'll gain by doing so.
That he's got people watching and listening so carefully, many of them hostile to him, that he's giving ammunition to his enemies if he doesn't If he doesn't reel it back a bit.
But on the other level, in terms of addressing the country, promising the country what he will do if they elevate him to this supreme office, it must be said that in doing precisely what he promised to do, his record is absolutely historically outstanding and not surpassed by anyone else.
I mean, he said he would pull out of the Paris Accord.
It shocked people when he did it, but he did it.
He was right to do it.
It's a ridiculous accord.
He said he'd move the embassy in Israel.
He did it, and he was right to do it.
He said he'd walk out of the Iran agreement, and even highly serious foreign policy people said, well, there's no point doing that.
We've already given them the money.
It was a terrible agreement, but why walk out now?
But he's walking out in order to Koreanize the issue and really put the heat on Iran to make a permanent renunciation of nuclear weapons.
He's absolutely right.
He said he would do it.
It was controversial, and in the case, of course, of the Israeli embassy, That has been promised by several of his predecessors who then didn't do anything.
He said he would eliminate oil imports, and he's doing it.
Every president since Eisenhower said that.
And some of them were very good presidents, but they didn't do that, and he's doing it.
So at that level, he absolutely is truthful.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I think you examine it on two planes.
One is the traditional Donald Trump who made his way in various...
Entertainment-related or highly financially speculative occupations where a liberality with the truth was customary and profitable and was not looked upon as obscenely unethical because it was customary.
And on the other hand, as Donald Trump, the relatively new Donald Trump, as a leader of the nation and particularly the head of a vast faction of voters, adequate in their size to It's a bit rich coming from the Democrats, Michael.
It's a bit rich coming from holders of the highest offices of national security who lied repeatedly under oath and should be and soon will be in front of the grand jury, which in your country means they're off to jail.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
You have people on television, and not even just the Susan Rices of the world who lied to us, not even just the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but even up to Barack Obama lied right to our face, and we can check so many of those lies.
The president lied, but I don't believe he lied under oath.
In fairness, all presidents lie.
Even Mr.
Lincoln engaged in truthful hyperbole at times.
But I'm talking about lying under oath, which is a crime.
In my opinion, it's not the slightest doubt that Hillary Clinton, most of that entourage of hers, James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, they all did that.
And it is a bit rich, taking it from the Democrats, complaining about Mr.
Trump being a liar when they are all basically just waiting for indictment.
Right.
That's right.
They're just sitting there checking their iPhones, you know, as I hope it's not today.
And the distinction that they seem not to make is the difference between a lie and unsubtlety.
So if Trump in this extreme political way is able to stretch the truth, let's say, he He's very unsubtle about it.
This is always the case.
It's always hyperbole.
So one of Donald Trump's first acts when he became president of the Trump Organization, when he entered into business as a young man, was to hire Roy Cohn, the former counsel to commie-slamming Senator Joe McCarthy, an unsubtle man himself, to defend the Trump Organization against...
But a great many other people, including Rupert Murdoch, and a lot of very respectable, very successful people.
Of course, and I'm a defender of Joe McCarthy for that matter, so I don't even consider him disreputable.
He got a little carried away.
Fair enough.
Okay.
Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower commies was going to be there.
Well, it was a useful hyperbole.
So, yeah.
But what does that tell us?
The choice of Roy Cohn, relying on Roy Cohn, this hard-charging guy, never give up, never defend.
And what effect do you think, if any, Roy Cohn had on Donald Trump?
We're all unlicensed psychiatrists, but as a historian, I'm always careful about mind reading.
In my conversations with Donald, I mentioned him.
Now, there was no particular reason why he would, but I don't have the impression he was an immense formative influence.
I think when he, I mean, it's from the spacious areas of Southern California, it may not seem like a great thing, but as you would know, and many of your viewers, when you move from Z Street in Brooklyn, To Manhattan.
It's not far and miles, but it's a tremendous cultural and sociological change.
And Donald Trump felt he needed a rough, tough lawyer.
The last thing he wanted is a sort of person that many of us, including me, have a lot of unpleasant experience with, which are ambiguous, mealy-mouthed counsel who only reach a point of General MacArthur-like executive decision-making at sending out their invoices. mealy-mouthed counsel who only reach a point of General MacArthur-like The rest of the time, all they do is waffle.
And that is not what Donald wanted.
He wanted a fighter, and he wanted someone who would get in the face of his opponents and drive them crazy.
And Roy Cohn, by all accounts, from people who disliked him to people who liked him and everyone in between, agreed that he was very effective.
Absolutely.
So he was the only guy to go to.
And he also helped introduce him to a lot of people, too.
That's right.
You write about how Donald Trump was very quick to make good political connections.
He just clearly seems like an operator.
And this gets to the last point.
I won't ask you to predict the future, but I will ask you to observe the character of Donald Trump, which is that Donald Trump appears to be a survivor.
By your account and by all that we know of the man, he just survives.
He makes it out of bankruptcies.
He makes it out of difficult situations all the time.
You open the account talking about the political assassination of Richard Nixon.
And it looks like there's deja vu all over again.
But Trump is a survivor.
Do you think that the bureaucracy, the Democrats, the media, the political establishment are enough and have enough to succeed in ousting him?
Or do you think that Trump has the character to withstand that assault?
I am very, very completely satisfied that this is a terrible mismatch and Donald Trump is going to wipe the floor with them.
They had no idea what we're getting into.
He is a fanatically determined man.
And he has, in the comparison with Mr.
Nixon, he has the advantage of this criminalization of policy differences and this attempt to harass and tear down presidents, having gone on for nearly 50 years prior to Trump being inaugurated.
So he knows how it's worked.
I mean, Mr.
Nixon, who was a great president, And what happened to him was a disgrace, a terrible thing.
But to some degree, he cooperated inadvertently with his enemies because he didn't handle it properly, didn't handle the issue properly.
But there's still not a serious case, in my opinion, he committed any crimes, but he did squander his political capital.
But there had not been discussion of the impeachment of a president for more than a century prior to Watergate.
And Nixon had no idea how to deal with it.
Then after that, you know, Bill Clinton fought it out.
And in between, you had the Iran-Contra business, where they never really got that close to the president, because Admiral Poindexter said, you know, the buck stops here, and that was the end of it.
And it was near the end of his term, and he was a popular president.
But the impeachers, if you will, jumped Mr.
Nixon, and there was no relevant recent history.
Trump had all of this past to go by for tactical planning purposes.
And he has a particularly strong and powerful nature of self-defense.
And these people, if they had just given him a reasonable honeymoon, like most incoming presidents get, he would never bother them.
All the stuff about Hillary will be in jail, he wouldn't have done a thing.
But when they attacked him, they invented this spurious nonsense about the collusion with a four-hour rig and a Which no one ever nominated by a major party to the office of president in the US would ever have done.
Not Aaron Burr, not anybody.
And that was a declaration of war, and it became a fight to the death, and he's going to kill them.
I mean, he is going, and I don't mean physically, of course, but politically, he's going to kill them.
And this is, by far, the greatest scandal in the history of the United States.
Watergate was nonsense.
It was confected nonsense.
It was a forced entry.
There was no injury.
There was no vandalism.
There was no economic damage.
It was a bungled investigation that was allowed to hemorrhage and was a sort of primal scream therapy for the left-wing press of the United States who then spawned generations of people who fancied themselves to be investigative journalists.
This, it's all, the shoe is in the other foot and you see the balance tipping.
These accusers of his Are all going to prison and that's where they belong.
I agree entirely.
I agree with that account of Watergate entirely.
May I ask one point in support of something you said, just about how asinine his accusers are.
The righteousness on this business of he lies.
At some point during the campaign, well on in the campaign, he said that Obama was the founder of ISIS. So, the fact-checking department of CNN, which has got to be the most under-worked organization.
They're all in Cabo somewhere.
It's a big pina coladas.
The Chicago Department of Sanitation under Mayor Daley looked like an efficient operation.
But they laboriously went through this process and put up Wolf Blitzer darting around the studio there saying, no, ISIS was founded by al-Baghdadi and named a bunch of other people.
Iraqis.
And as if Trump meant that Obama had gone over there and sat there and raised the black flag.
I mean, it is so...
It is so utterly imbecilic, I can hardly imagine it's happening half the time.
It is.
That's a wonderful way to put it, is imbecilic.
You just look and you say, I can't tell if these people are being absurdly obtuse or if they're really as dumb as they appear to be.
And you have such a good point.
So many of the political problems we're dealing with is because this country took all of the wrong lessons from Watergate, from that awful miscarriage of justice around Watergate.
But...
We've got a different guy in office now, and I agree with your estimation of it.
I also have to recommend to everybody, Lord Black, I will let you go finally.
You've been very generous with your time.
Everybody has to go out and read this book.
It is really, really enjoyable.
It's a fair take on Donald Trump.
It's not fawning.
It's not attacking him.
It gives a really fair look at it, and it tells you so much that our mainstream media won't tell us because all of the fact-checkers are in Cabo sipping pina coladas.
Lord Black, thank you so much for being here.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Michael.
Can I just leave you one phrase from Sebastian Gorka?
He accused somebody who was on a panel with him of being obnoxiously obtuse.
It's a wonderful expression.
I'm going to have to start using that.
I'm going to tweet that at Gorka now, I think.
Obnoxiously obtuse.
Tune in to the Michael Knowles Show.
Obnoxiously obtuse.
Thank you, Lord Black.
Thank you, Michael.
Alright, before we cut, we've got a lot of mailbag to go to.
Before we get to this point, I do want to make my most unpopular opinion.
I'm going to alienate all of the rest of my audience.
A note on Starbucks.
A man, so there's been a lot of talk in Starbucks.
There was that black man who was arrested, or the cops were called on him because he refused to purchase anything and sat in a Starbucks for a long time, and it was all kind of a strange situation.
And now a man in La Cañada in California says that he is a Hispanic man.
And he received a cup of coffee with a racial slur on it.
I'll just say it because you need to hear the slur for the pun.
And it's sort of a silly slur.
Beaner is the name that was on the cup.
So how do we know this?
Only his friend, the man's friend, has been interviewed about this.
And the friend doesn't speak any English, so he's just talking in Spanish.
And what he explained, though, through a translator, is that apparently the guy's name is Peter.
So he said Peter, but I don't know if the guy can speak English.
His friends certainly can't speak English.
So they wrote down Biener to Peter.
Who knows what happened?
I don't know what happened.
It could have been three options.
It could have been an honest mistake, like a pretty stupid mistake, but it could have been an honest one.
Never underestimate the stupidity of people when you encounter them.
So it could have been an honest mistake.
It could have been an insult.
There could have been some hateful racist employee who said, I'm going to show this guy who doesn't possibly speak English anyway, but I'll show him.
I'll get a kick out of it.
Okay, could have been that.
Or it could have been a hoax.
It could have just been a hoax.
Everyone's going to call me a bigot now for saying it could be a hoax.
We've seen a ton of these hoaxes all over the place.
We've seen it on the issue of gay cakes.
You remember there was a gay guy who said that someone wrote a derogatory slur on his cake that he bought at a bakery.
They found out he wrote it himself.
We've seen racial hoaxes around the country.
We've seen a lot of these sort of hoaxes.
I suppose it could have been that.
The question you have to ask yourself is, what is the point here?
Is the allegation that Starbucks...
Is racist?
Starbucks, which makes a point to be as progressive on questions of race as possible.
Starbucks, which is so overwhelmingly pushing all of those progressive narratives that really secretly it's this confederate holdout that hates racial minorities.
Is that what they're saying?
Nobody believes that.
Everybody is just pretending.
I kind of like it on the left because it's a circular firing squad.
They all just keep killing each other.
Rhetorically killing each other.
I don't want that to be misinterpreted, too.
That's going to be the next boycott.
They're going to boycott the whole show, you know, obnoxiously obtuse.
But the question with Starbucks is, what do people really think?
Nobody really believes that Starbucks is racist.
On the point of Starbucks, I love Starbucks.
I think it's just terrific.
I love Starbucks.
I don't, oh, it's overpriced.
It's not overpriced.
Dunkin' Donuts is more expensive per ounce of coffee than Starbucks.
Dunkin' Donuts is dirty.
Dunkin' Donuts, you know, has that awful fluorescent lighting.
Most of the people there don't speak English at the ones that I've gone to.
They give you way too much milk when you ask for just a drop of milk.
I go to my beautiful Starbucks.
It smells great.
The baristas are smiling.
They have silly purple hair and weird piercings.
I don't care.
I find it It's sort of charming in my barista.
I can plug in my computer.
I can sit.
I can use a clean bathroom.
I can do work for hours and hours.
I just have to buy a $2 cup of coffee.
I get unlimited refills.
I love Starbucks.
Starbucks has done more for cities in this country and around the world than any other organization in history because it is the best public bathroom in any city in the history of the world.
I love Starbucks.
The lefties now don't like it because it's allegedly racist.
Conservatives don't like it because it's so just obnoxiously liberal.
I don't care.
It's a good company.
It grew very big because it offered a good product.
Enough.
I will defend Starbucks.
Even poor Starbucks, whom nobody likes anymore.
We have a lot in the mailbag to get to, but you've got to go to dailywire.com.
You have to.
I'm sorry, but we have a really good mailbag today.
We're going to have to burn through it in like six minutes.
So, go to dailywire.com right now.
What do you get?
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag, like the one that we're just about to go to.
You get to ask questions in the conversation.
The next one up is the big boss, Ben Shapiro.
None of that matters.
Mmm.
Mmm, mmm, mmm.
So, these are the leftist tears.
This is coming out of the leftist tears Tumblr.
Lord Conrad Black has just suggested that members of Hillary Clinton's cabal could go to jail because they lied under oath.
We've seen the mainstream media and the Democrats defending violent psychopath gang members who behead little children.
Probably won't look that good in November.
Get this before it's too late, because otherwise you're going to drown and that'll be no good.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
We're going to burn through these questions because I want to spread all of the covfefe to all of the people who've asked.
First, from Amy.
Hi, Michael.
How would you solve the homelessness problem in L.A.? A bulldozer, probably, or maybe a steamroller in the Knowles mayorship in L.A.? I'm only slightly kidding.
The answer is police, though.
Because this has worked in other cities.
It would work in LA. But we have a terrible mayor in Eric Garcetti.
We have an awful administration.
They're destroying this city.
Huge surges in people sleeping on the street and committing crimes on the street.
And it's just awful because this mayor is terrible.
The police should approach homeless people every time they see them and offer three choices.
Shelters, psych wards, or jail.
Those are the three choices.
Shelters, psych wards, or jail.
So, just to begin, I would stop subsidizing homelessness, which the city of L.A. does.
You can get a ton of benefits.
You can get all of these really nice things.
The police don't bother you.
They construct whole cities, terrible crime-ridden little tent cities, under bridges, in otherwise nice neighborhoods.
They've destroyed downtown L.A. I would stop subsidizing homelessness, and I would start arresting people if they refused shelter.
I forget who said this.
I think Giuliani said this a few years ago.
Sleeping on the street is a dysfunctional act which harms the individual who does it and society at large.
People have no right to do it.
They have no right to sleep on the streets.
That is public property.
They have no right to do it.
Giuliani did this in the 90s.
He sent the cops and said, you either go to that shelter, you get arrested, you go...
And it worked.
It worked.
Because nobody benefits.
There's nothing compassionate about letting these people sleep on the street.
Nothing compassionate at all.
It's cruel to let people do it.
The compassionate solution is to give these people help and get them off the street.
Nobody benefits from letting vagabonds and psychotics and drug addicts sleep there, least of all them.
There are ample homeless shelters in LA. It creates a lot of dangerous situations.
Excuse me.
I saw this in New Haven when I lived there.
There was a tent city that sprung up and everyone said, oh, that's so nice.
Let's all be compassionate.
Cool, man.
I was one of the few people on campus who said, this is really a terrible idea.
They said, how cruel of you to say that.
How awful.
And sure enough, within a matter of days, a woman was raped in that camp.
Bad things happen when you let people sleep on the street.
Wouldn't tolerate it.
And a compassionate and serious administration wouldn't tolerate it.
From James James.
Hey, Michael.
I'm sure you have recently seen the video where the Pope answered the question of a dead atheist's son.
If not, I have seen it, but I'll read this for everyone else.
If not, the boy said his dad was an atheist, but still baptized his four children.
He asked if his dad was going to heaven.
The Pope replied something to the effect of, this was a father who loved his kids.
He got them all baptized.
What do you think?
Do you think God would keep this man out of heaven?
Of course not.
In other words, the Pope answered that even though the dad thought Jesus was as fake as the tooth fairy, this guy would still make it into heaven because he baptized his four kids.
What do you make of this?
Thanks, James.
Well, I would say, first of all, I can't blame Pope Francis for some poor little boy comes up and says, my daddy's dead.
Is he roasting in hell for eternity?
Was Pope Francis supposed to say, yeah, he is.
You bet, kid.
And you better watch out or you'll end up there too.
No.
But again, we're talking about the truth, not just comfort.
And even on the question of truth, I will point out the father baptized his four kids.
Why did he do that?
If he thinks Jesus is just as fake as the tooth fairy, why did he baptize his four kids?
I don't know.
Our faculties of reason are quite limited.
Very frequently we convince ourselves of things that we know really aren't true.
I'm sort of convinced that there aren't really atheists at all.
Norm MacDonald has a bit on this.
He says, you know, the reason there can't be atheists is if you don't believe in something...
You usually don't spend all of your time thinking about it.
You know, like atheists do.
An atheist, a vegan, and a crossfitter walk into a bar.
How do I know?
They told me within two seconds.
The atheists, they're always talking about God.
They're always grappling with God, so I don't really buy it.
And moreover, I can't say who's in heaven and who's in hell.
I really can't do that.
I do not even know definitively if Judas Iscariot is in hell.
I have my suspicions, you know, but you can't say that indefinitely.
He could have had a conversion and repentance at the very end as he's hanging on that noose.
Who knows?
So I really, I think there is a lot to question in this pontificate.
I'll put that very diplomatically, but I actually don't think his interaction with that kid is one of them.
I think the answer was perfectly fine.
From Dylan.
Hello, King of Trolls.
Can I get a happy birthday?
Thanks.
Dylan.
No.
From Andy.
No, I'm kidding.
Okay, happy birthday, Dylan.
From Andy.
Hey, Michael.
Do you foresee a breaking point for the left?
It seems they've pinned themselves into identity politics, which almost forces them to continue becoming more and more extreme.
Or I suppose always forces them.
As a college student, I was surprised to see that a lot of my classmates and friends find this way of thinking useless and counterproductive.
Contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of us that actually crave genuine debate and an exchange of ideas, and it seems to me that this postmodern way of thinking makes honest conversation impossible.
Could we see a reduction in this way of thinking in the Democrat Party?
I do not see them being able to win elections with this message or lack thereof.
Thanks.
Yeah, they're going to have to change or they're going to die.
As a political party, again, I'm speaking rhetorically.
I just want to be very clear.
The Democratic Party has moved in this way, really since the ascendance of Barack Obama, into this very vicious, divisive, angry identity politics, which says we don't like America.
We want to fundamentally transform America.
We don't like our countrymen.
You have privilege.
You have this.
You have that.
And it's very mean.
During that period of time, they lost a thousand seats across the country.
During the presidency of Barack Obama, they lost a thousand seats across the country.
They lost the House, they lost the Senate, they ultimately lost the presidency.
To Donald Trump, you know, a lot of people think Donald Trump wasn't a great candidate for president.
I won't go into that here, but if you think that, the fact that even that candidate was able to win tells you something about the state of the Democrats.
So, I hope they don't change.
I hope they keep it up.
Keep it right up, and the Republicans are going to rule for the next century.
From James.
We'll get a couple more.
Good sir, Michael Canolas.
According to the political spectrum, is Islam considered extreme right-wing religious conservative or has it been co-opted by the leftists in America and Europe for identity politics and is now a far-left ideology similar to fascism, particularly national socialism?
Side note, thank you for keeping the cigar industry alive as well.
I'm also an enthusiast, particularly of the Maduro variety.
Great commentary as always, Jim.
A very good question.
The left certainly has embraced Islam.
They've invented that word Islamophobia to smear people who don't want to get their heads chopped off or something.
I don't know exactly what the word means.
But with regard to the left-right spectrum here...
I don't think you can fit everything neatly into those categories.
And frankly, even using those terms sometimes plays into the modernist hand.
It doesn't really get to what you're talking about.
The terms right and left, they come from the French Revolution in 1789, relatively recently in historical terms.
Supporters of the king and religion at the National Assembly were seated on the president's right, and supporters of the French Revolution were seated on his left.
That's where we get it from.
That's the whole place.
Left and right in the French Revolution.
It referred to seating, not necessarily ideology.
So, and actually at the time, the right sort of opposed this breakdown because they opposed shallow factions and political parties.
But because the left-right spectrum originates in this radical modernity in the French Revolution, it doesn't really capture the variety of political views.
Conservatives, just to use one of the examples you give, conservatives always quibble over whether fascism is on the left or the right.
In some ways it seems like it's right-wing because there's a great love of country, you could say, in fascism.
But in some ways it's obviously left-wing.
It's atheistic usually, hostile to religion, hostile to many traditions, collectivist.
So it seems rather left-wing there too.
Really what you could say is it's just modern.
Fascism and communism, they're two sides of the same coin.
Now, this doesn't work when you try to apply it to older ideas.
What would you call the Aristotelian system of ethics?
Would you call that left or right?
I don't know.
It predates left and right by thousands of years.
Islam also predates left and right by a thousand years.
Islam is not modern.
What is Islam?
Islam is a religion that grew out of a Christian heresy in the 7th century and involved aspects of Arab nationalism, pan-Arab nationalism, and came as a strange new twist on the Abrahamic faiths.
So I don't really think it's a question of right or left.
I think you should expand the thought there and make it a question of right or wrong.
On that point I'll say, Islam crucially denies the crucifixion of Christ, the conquest of death.
So when you're trying to answer that question, it's a good one to ask.
Can I do one more?
Will you let me do one more?
I can do one more.
I can only do one more.
Let's make it a good one.
Let's make sure that we can do a really good one.
Okay.
Alright, we'll just do the next one.
And then we'll just have to get to the rest of the next week.
From Emily.
Hey Michael, I've been reading a hagiography about the life of St.
Catherine of Siena.
It's been a great read, but it leaves me with a nagging question.
St.
Catherine had a vision of God at the age of seven.
She was extremely aware from a young age of the presence of God and his importance in her life.
Why is it that God would give her major confirmation that he exists but others languish in a sea of uncertainty their entire lives?
Her life, thanks to her visions, was certainly not an easy one but it does seem like a life of virtue would be so much easier if you have zero doubts about God's existence.
Thanks, Emily.
I love St.
Catherine of Siena.
But I don't think a life of virtue is necessarily easier if you have more evidence than others of God's existence.
Just take St.
Peter and Judas.
Let's take Judas first.
Judas spends...
Christ's ministry with Christ.
He sees Christ raise dead people to make them living again.
He sees Christ multiply fishes and to feed thousands of people and bread to feed thousands of people.
He sees him heal the lame and the blind and the sick and walk on water.
And then he betrays him.
But he saw it.
He sees Christ as who he is.
He sees the incarnation of God.
He betrays him anyway.
St.
Peter sees the transfiguration of Christ on the mountain.
He sees this unbelievable vision.
He knows for certain.
The Father reveals to Peter that Christ is the Christ.
And what does he do?
He denies him three times.
But he denies him three times.
So I don't know that that's necessarily the case.
Just in one's own experience, if you've ever had a numinous experience or religious experience of God, it's unmistakable when it happens.
It's unmistakable.
It's also ineffable, so it's not much use trying to explain it.
But it's unmistakable when it happens.
You're shocked by this.
You're in awe.
Holy fear.
And then, like, five minutes later, you just start sinning again.
You know?
It's not funny.
It's kind of sad.
But just, you have this experience, and then...
Regardless, you fall away because it's a fallen world and that's an aspect of human nature.
So I don't know about that.
The evidence for God is ample and there are no good arguments for atheism.
They're just temptations, basically.
They're just temptations.
And all of us have temptations.
St.
Catherine of Siena as well.
Okay, I hope that helps.
There are so many other good questions.
We'll just bring them back next week.
Have a good weekend.
I'll see you on Monday.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I will see you Monday.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Borey.
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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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
