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May 29, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show

49:57

Ep. 163 - Bad Jokes: Roseanne And The Left’s Fake Outrage

Roseanne Barr told a joke in poor taste about an ex-government aide’s appearance, so leftists got her show cancelled. We’ll analyze the fake outrage and real tears. Meanwhile, nuclear talks with North Korea proceed apace. Then, Karol Markowicz stops by to discuss why NY Democrats are especially corrupt. Best of all, I survived my bachelor party! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Roseanne Barr told a joke in poor taste about an ex-government aide, and so within five seconds, ABC has canceled one of the most popular shows in the country.
	We will explain why the left pounced.
	We will analyze the fake outrage and where the problem really lies.
	Meanwhile, nuclear talks with North Korea proceed apace.
	Everything is tickety-boo, so we just have to make up reasons to be all upset and angry.
	Then, Carol Markowitz stops by to discuss why New York Democrats are especially corrupt.
	And best news of all, you might not be able to tell, but I did survive my bachelor party.
	I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	I know what you're thinking.
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	Okay.
	I wanted to get into some of the racial stereotypes and poor jokes by talking about Peter Millard because what we've got to talk about today is Roseanne Barr.
	This is breaking news.
	It just happened not 20 minutes ago.
	ABC News has canceled Roseanne's mega super hit revival of her sitcom.
	They canceled it because Roseanne told a bad joke that was in poor taste and had a racial component on Twitter, and so they canceled it instantaneously.
	It was so, so fast.
	Now, what was the joke?
	She told a joke about Valerie Jarrett, an ex-government aide, a The response was swift.
	It happened immediately.
	Now they're all out of work.
	Meanwhile, do you remember Kathy Griffin held up Donald Trump's bloodied head in that joke that was also in poor taste?
	But it took a long time for her to – people turn.
	Should she lose her job?
	Should she still go on CNN?
	The question is, why is Kathy Griffin a C-list comedian on CNN to begin with?
	Oh, right.
	Because they're fake news.
	Michelle Wolf insulted the appearance of Sarah Sanders, the sitting press secretary at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, to her face.
	Everyone's defending her on the left.
	Everyone's defending Kathy Griffin on the left.
	Both of whom are unapologetic, by the way.
	Both of them are currently unapologetic about their jokes.
	Roseanne apologized right away.
	She knew that she crossed the line.
	She knew the joke was weak.
	It was mean.
	It wasn't nice.
	And nevertheless, they canceled her really quickly.
	ABC wrote, quote, Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.
	So, what I'm going to do here is attack the left and the immediacy of this response, the way that they responded to this.
	But I have to be crystal clear these days because the left is so ready to pounce.
	That's kind of the point of this show today.
	They're looking for anything.
	Things are going so, so well in this country.
	They need anything to try to attack the right, even if it's minor, even if it's misdirection or whatever.
	But I want to be crystal clear.
	I am not defending the joke.
	It was not a good joke.
	It was mean.
	It was in poor taste.
	I am not defending the joke.
	But what was so wrong about the joke?
	We'll analyze that.
	We'll see why it failed, why it was weak, and why the left, I think, is disingenuous as they're attacking it.
	So, okay, we've intro'd this enough.
	What did Roseanne say?
	Roseanne told this joke, quote, Because it was in a tweet, so it's not terribly grammatical, but this is it.
	Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby equals VJ. And VJ is standing for Valerie Jarrett.
	You're not doubled over, guffawing with laughter?
	Of course not.
	It's not a very good joke.
	I don't think anybody is saying, ah, ha, ha, Rosanna.
	Right.
	Just not a good joke.
	It's in poor taste.
	And she apologized immediately.
	She said, quote, I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans.
	I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks.
	I should have known better.
	Forgive me.
	my joke was in bad taste.
	She tweeted that out immediately.
	She didn't, not like some of these other comedians on the left or on the, uh, who, you know, it takes them days to even sort of apologize or in Kathy Griffin's case, she unapologizes.
	She did it immediately and she was right to do it because the joke was not good.
	So now we have to ask ourselves, is this apology legitimate?
	Did she really mean what she said?
	Uh, or does Roseanne Barr just hate black people, just want to discriminate against black people, just really hate them.
	Which is the more likely scenario?
	100% of people think it is the former.
	I think Roseanne cast a black child to play her granddaughter on the revival of Roseanne.
	I don't think she's out there with the tiki torches and the pointy white hats.
	I don't think she has racial animus.
	I think she told a bad joke.
	Isn't that legitimate?
	Does anybody out there seriously believe that Roseanne is this angry, bitter, vicious, anti-black racist who wants to bring back Jim Crow?
	No, nobody believes that.
	But we all have to pretend that now because things are going too well in the country.
	And Roseanne had a show.
	She had the audacity to vote for Donald Trump.
	So they've got to take her down.
	They've got to hit anyone even vaguely associated with Trump.
	To understand this joke, we will analyze this joke Very precisely.
	And why Roseanne shouldn't have her entire life ruined because of it, but why the left is going after it.
	Before we do that, we have to explain who is Valerie Jarrett.
	People don't know a lot about her.
	Valerie Jarrett had the ear of Barack Obama for his entire two terms in the White House.
	She was a senior, senior advisor.
	She's very close to the Obamas, but we don't know a lot about her.
	Well, I do, but that's because I took five minutes to Google it.
	Most people don't know a lot about her.
	So she's a senior advisor.
	She was the co-chairman of the Obama-Biden transition team.
	She helped set up everything in this White House.
	And the first part of the Roseanne joke, which is not being talked about, is linking Valerie Jarrett to the Muslim Brotherhood.
	Why is it not being talked about?
	Because they can't refute that charge.
	Valerie Jarrett, a senior, senior advisor to Barack Obama, does have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and she has ties to a lot of radical, extreme leftist groups.
	What are those?
	Well, Judicial Watch, that wonderful government watchdog, was able to get files from the FBI that show that Jarrett's father, that her maternal grandfather, and her father-in-law were all hardcore communists.
	They were under FBI surveillance.
	Why is that?
	Well, Valerie Jarrett's father, Dr. James Bowman, he corresponded and communicated with and spoke to a paid Soviet agent, Alfred Stern, half a century ago.
	And this guy, Stern was indicted.
	We know this guy was a Soviet agent.
	Bowman then moved to Iran for work in the 1950s.
	That's where Valerie Jarrett was born.
	Valerie Jarrett was born in Iran.
	Her maternal grandfather, Robert Rochon Taylor, also had business ties to that Soviet agent, Stern.
	And so they all moved around D.C., Chicago, Iran.
	I don't know which place is worse.
	I don't know which – is that the axis of evil?
	No, that's too – that's not nice enough.
	That's just a joke.
	I'm just telling a joke.
	Don't cancel my ABC sitcom for that.
	So Valerie Jarrett, her father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, is a big-time Chicago communist.
	He was considered by the FBI, we know from these documents, to be a potential communist saboteur.
	Jarrett has ties, along with our president, to Frank Marshall Davis, a well-known communist, and Jarrett has ties to a lot of Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations.
	Just a brief overview.
	What is the Muslim Brotherhood?
	That phrase gets thrown around a lot.
	What do they actually want to do?
	What do they want to accomplish?
	The Obama administration tried to convince us that the Muslim Brotherhood is this moderate.
	These are the good guys.
	These are the reformers.
	They're not.
	We know from a 1991 memorandum from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the group's stated goal is, quote, eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.
	These are the ties to the senior advisor of the president.
	Before we get into more of that and why the left is reacting to this Roseanne Barr joke in the way that it is, We have to thank Lending Club.
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	Okay.
	Now back to Roseanne.
	Back to Valerie Jarrett first.
	So that is Valerie Jarrett.
	She has these connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and that was part of Roseanne's attempted joke.
	So Even early on in the Obama administration, 2009, the Obama administration chose Ingrid Matson, who's the leader of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group, the Islamic Society of North America, to give a prayer at that inauguration.
	But what did they do after that?
	Barack Obama sent Valerie Jarrett, the senior advisor, to be the keynote speaker at an ISNA national conference linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
	After that, Barack Obama tapped Arif Ali Khan to be Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security.
	He did that two weeks after Ali Khan participated in a fundraiser for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which is another admittedly Muslim Brotherhood-linked group.
	Documents from that group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, admit to following immediately in the footsteps of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and being linked to that organization too.
	So that is Valerie Jarrett.
	That the.
	Now that we have that, let's get to the joke.
	Roseanne's joke has two components to it.
	One is ideological, one is racial.
	In Roseanne's apology, she said, I'm sorry for joking in this way about Valerie Jarrett's politics and race.
	It wasn't nice and I'm sorry.
	But Roseanne, because she constructed the joke, because it wasn't attempted to joke, knew there were these two aspects to it.
	The Muslim Brotherhood line and then the planet of the apes line.
	An example of this joke, if you were to make this joke about little old me for instance, you could say, William F. Buckley Jr.
	and a bottle of Bertolli Extra Virgin had a baby.
	MK. Right?
	That is the exact parallel of that joke.
	You have the ideological component, and then you have this racial component, because, I don't know, maybe you're very naive and young and idealistic and pure, but Italian people are sometimes compared to olive oil.
	Now, what's interesting is that the left only takes issue with the racial part here.
	They don't...
	They're not attacking her for saying, how dare you say Valerie Jarrett is related to the Muslim Brotherhood?
	Because the one...
	The racial joke is just a very basic...
	It's a low-hanging racial joke, but the ideological joke is, I think, more interesting, right?
	It's about what Valerie Jarrett thinks, what she believes.
	You're accusing her of having relations with this extremist Muslim group, but that part they can't attack because it's true.
	So I think they know that.
	Okay, we're not going to get that one.
	Let's hit her with the lower-hanging racist line.
	So the left pounced immediately.
	Joe Scarborough, right after this comes out, Joe Scarborough goes, Hey, ABC, Roseanne compared Valerie Jarrett to an ape.
	There is no apology she can make that justifies ABC turning a blind eye to this bigotry by airing another second of her show.
	Even in the age of Trump, these are red lines that can never be crossed.
	Al Sharpton.
	You knew Al Sharpton was going to get on the scene.
	I'm surprised Al Sharpton didn't start tweeting about this before it even happened.
	Sharpton tweets out, quote...
	The comparison by Roseanne Barr on ABC of former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett to an ape is racist and inexcusable.
	ABC must take action now.
	Then another one, DeRay McKesson, who came to prominence as an activist during the Black Lives Matter moment, he tweeted out, quote, ABC, how desperate are you to profit from Roseanne's racism?
	We know racism sells in this country.
	It always has.
	But you don't have to participate in it.
	This apology is meaningless.
	Cancel Roseanne.
	And this is an important charge because DeRay McKesson is saying her apology is BS. I won't accept her apology.
	I think it's fake.
	I think it's fraudulent.
	I'm not going to do it.
	What happens?
	ABC immediately cancels Roseanne.
	Immediately.
	Has there been a board meeting?
	Have they been talking to Roseanne's agents or looking into this or looking into Roseanne's history?
	No.
	Canceled immediately.
	And that's the problem here because I am not defending the joke.
	I'm just comparing the treatment that Roseanne got for making a joke and poor taste about aspects of people's identity and that maybe offend a lot of people or go over the line or whatever.
	I'm comparing that to so many other comedians who have gotten way better treatment.
	Actually, here's the great example of this.
	This happened 25 minutes ago.
	Because politics at this point is beyond parody, we have superseded parody and Andrea Mitchell of NBC thought it would be a good idea to interview one of the NBC contributors about this whole dustup on someone making offensive comments about broad groups of people on social media and on the internet.
	Who does she ask?
	Joy Reid.
	Take a look.
	And then I want to also ask you about, it's hard to believe, but Roseanne Barr, and she has been tweeting outrageous things, but she tweeted about the Obama administration and Valerie Jarrett and made a...
	Really horrendous comment about Valerie Jarrett.
	Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby, VJ, meaning Valerie Jarrett.
	Now she has apologized to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans, saying, I'm truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks.
	I should have known better.
	Forgive me.
	My joke was in bad taste.
	I mean, what do you have to do on social media to get fired from a top-rated show on an American broadcast network?
	I'll rephrase that.
	What do you have to do on social media to get fired from an American broadcast network?
	Just to remind you, because I know politics moves so fast these days that you've probably forgotten about the news cycle of a week ago.
	Joy Reid was just discovered to have made a ton of very offensive tweets about broad groups of people on social media years ago on her blog.
	She tweeted out, she accused gay men She tweeted out homophobic is the term that's being used.
	Anti-gay slurs, anti-gay accusations, anti-gay jokes, right?
	All over her social media, and then it was discovered, and then do you know what she did?
	She lied about it.
	She said, oh no, I don't remember doing that.
	No, I think I was hacked.
	By the way, when someone says they were hacked for something they said or did, that's how you know they did it.
	That's the Anthony Weiner rule.
	You know that she did it.
	Joy Reid actually did all of this, and what happened?
	Even MSNBC, which is left of Lenin, they said, oh no, we don't need to fire her.
	No, you know, hey, look, she made these horribly offensive comments just a little while ago, but, you know, we'll give her the benefit of the doubt.
	Roseanne makes an offensive joke, a bad joke, joke in poor taste, immediately canceled.
	Massive ratings, immediately canceled.
	So, okay, Roseanne was right to apologize, sure.
	I actually don't think people understand why this joke was in bad taste, why it was right to apologize.
	Before we explain the joke for all of the humorless left, because the defining feature of the left in the Trump era is its humorlessness.
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	So why is this joke so bad from Roseanne?
	it's the racial component.
	There is this racial component.
	Now, what about that is so bad?
	Well, all racial jokes of this quality, they all attempt to portray people as animals or uncivilized or unconscious.
	So it basically, all the jokes play on taking a human being who has consciousness and saying, you're not really conscious.
	You're like a brute.
	You're, you know, so for black people who have dark skin, a racial joke along that line will compare them to an animal that has dark skin.
	But this trope has existed in other places too.
	In Black Panther, in the comic book and the movie Black Panther, there's a character, M'Baku, and his other name is Man-Ape.
	They're drawing that parallel, right, because he's this brutal, you know, adversarial character.
	These jokes exist for other races too.
	This isn't just a line of joking for black people.
	Now, I'll use the race that constitutes my own ethnic heritage so that I don't get Roseanne, so that I don't get – somehow ABC is going to fire me.
	ABC, you haven't employed me.
	Well, yeah, okay, you're getting fired anyway.
	So for Italians, you hear the term, we'll just use the term greaseball.
	You ever hear that for Italians?
	So what is this for?
	Well, it's saying southern Italians are less refined.
	They're brutal.
	They're more like an animal.
	They're unhygienic.
	They're covered in grease.
	They don't shower.
	They're not aware of themselves.
	They're not aware of how brutal they are, so they can't take care of it.
	Another one used in Italy is terrone, which comes from the land, right?
	He's a tiller of the land.
	He's a laborer.
	He only works with his hands.
	He can't work with his head.
	That's what a lot of these go to.
	Now, here's another one.
	You ever hear the term honky?
	That's used for white people?
	Honky, it doesn't just come from nowhere.
	It evokes this image of a car horn or something.
	What it comes from, it's actually an Hungarian insult.
	It's an insult from the mispronunciation of honky from Hungarians, and it's referring to Hungarian laborers, manual laborers who don't work with their minds, work with their hands.
	All of them.
	Roseanne's Planet of the Apes reference, Greaseball, Dago is an Italian one, Honky from your hands, all of them just mock the lack of consciousness.
	Now, why is it in poor taste?
	Because with Valerie Jarrett, it came out of nowhere.
	So Valerie Jarrett is this very sophisticated woman.
	You might despise her politics.
	She might have radical ties.
	But she is a very intelligent woman.
	The joke just isn't funny.
	Her race is not central to what's funny about Valerie Jarrett as a character.
	She's a radical.
	That's the central aspect, not her race.
	And...
	Anyway, we get out of this feigned outrage from the left, and I really think it's feigned.
	I really think so.
	Is the joke offensive?
	Yeah.
	Is it mean?
	Is it low?
	Is it not funny?
	Sure.
	Yeah, right.
	But does the left really think that she hates black people, that Rosanne is some secret neo-Nazi?
	I don't think so.
	And the way that I know it's feigned is because of Kathy Griffin and Michelle Wolf.
	Kathy Griffin holds up this photo of Donald Trump's decapitated head, and it's covered in blood and all of that.
	And then we know she doesn't like Trump.
	She said awful things about the guy, and she's unapologetic about it.
	Rosanne apologized.
	Kathy Griffin didn't apologize.
	She apologized, and then she unapologized.
	Here you go.
	She told as herself.
	Hey everybody, it's me Kathy Griffin.
	I sincerely apologize.
	I am just now seeing the reaction of these images.
	I'm a comic.
	I crossed the line.
	I moved the line.
	Then I crossed it.
	I went way too far.
	The image is too disturbing.
	I understand how it offends people.
	It wasn't funny.
	I get it.
	I've made a lot of mistakes in my career.
	I will continue.
	I ask your forgiveness.
	So that was comedian Kathy Griffin apologizing for her infamous photo shoot holding the decapitated likeness of the guy in the White House.
	She caused an uproar and made some powerful enemies, but she's not really, you know, taking it very hard anymore.
	She's telling us how tough things got and how she's gonna, you know, come through it.
	She's gonna get back on the road and keep on rolling.
	Please welcome back the fabulous Kathy Griffin.
	Hey!
	By the way, I take the apology back.
	Okay.
	We're going to need to ding that bell if that happens again, Kathy.
	Don Jr.
	and Eric, or as I called them, Eddie Munster and date rape.
	Look, I'm not holding back on this family.
	This president is different, and I have been through the mill, and so now I'm back on the road.
	I sold out Carnegie Hall in less than 24 hours.
	The fabulous Kathy Griffin!
	There she is, the fabulous Kathy Griffin.
	And by the way, how do we know?
	I knew from the minute she gave that apology that she wasn't really apologizing, and it's because of her phrasing.
	She said, I just saw the reaction to the photo, and now I apologize.
	Do you see that?
	It's like people do this sometimes.
	They'll say something awful about you or insult you or something, and you say, how dare you?
	And they say, oh, well, I'm sorry if you feel offended.
	I'm sorry if...
	I did this to you.
	It's not about how I feel.
	It's about what you did.
	You can only apologize for what you did.
	You can't apologize for how somebody reacts to that.
	And that's what she did.
	That's a big difference.
	Roseanne said, I'm sorry the joke was bad and I'm sorry.
	Kathy Griffin says, I'm sorry that people reacted that way.
	I saw people reacted that way, so now I'll apologize.
	That's a huge difference here.
	Same with Michelle Wolfe.
	Michelle Wolf attacked Sanders, the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, viciously, wasn't terribly funny, joked about her appearance in person to her face.
	The left defends both of them.
	Both of them utterly unapologetic.
	The left defends both of them.
	Defends the jokes, defends the sets, defends making fun of people's appearance.
	And in the case of Kathy Griffin, holding up the bloody decapitated head of the president gives a lot of appearance.
	This is not to defend Roseanne's joke.
	This is not to do that.
	It is to defend apologies, and it's to point out how disingenuous the left's alleged offense here is, alleged outrage.
	How do we know?
	Just over the weekend, I tried not to read the news too much this weekend, but I couldn't help with this one.
	The left exposed themselves for their feigned outrage.
	There were these photos that came out of immigrant children being held in custody, being in these conditions where they're sleeping on the floor.
	They're behind bars and they're illegal aliens who have come into America and they're being held and everyone exploded with outrage.
	Jon Favreau, former advisor to the president.
	Excuse me, a former advisor to President Obama said, quote, this is what is happening right now.
	The only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.
	Jake Silverstein, the editor-in-chief of New York Times Magazine, editor-in-chief, all of these photos are disturbing, but the first two are especially awful.
	CNN reporter Hadass Gold tweeted the photos, but here's the main problem.
	They weren't from the Trump administration.
	Those are photos from four years ago.
	Those photos were from 2014.
	That's from the Obama administration.
	You had a senior advisor to Barack Obama tweeting about how terribly the government was handling immigration, how awful it was, how we have to force them to change.
	It was his boss that was doing it.
	It was his boss that was doing it.
	Silverstein, the editor of New York Times Magazine.
	How do these people become the editors of these magazines?
	Editor of New York Times Magazine tweets the same thing.
	CNN reporter tweets the same thing.
	And then what did they all do?
	They all deleted their tweets.
	That's how you know it's fake.
	Because if it were real, they would have left their tweets up and they would have turned on Barack Obama.
	How dare you?
	What a terrible president you were.
	But it's fake because they're hacks because it's just made up and it's to score political points when everything is going so well politically, economically, as a matter of foreign policy.
	On every front, things are going well in the country, so they have to seize on these little moments and blow them up into something that they're not.
	CNN reporter Hadass Gold, by the way, tweeted the photos.
	Then she deleted them.
	Then she defended deleting them.
	She said, deleted the previous tweet because it gave the impression of recent photos.
	They're from 2014.
	Well, that's quite a different tone from what you were saying before.
	How awful.
	Donald Trump, this is all right.
	No, I deleted them.
	No, I deleted them.
	Just so I don't confuse you.
	No, I don't think that's true.
	I think you don't want egg on your face and you're unwilling to attack Obama for the same things that you would attack Donald Trump.
	Where's the outrage?
	Where is the real outrage?
	I don't know.
	If the whole story were Roseanne tweeted this joke that made fun of Joy Reid's appearance and it had a racial component and then ABC fired her, I would say, okay, I guess that happens in America.
	You compare a black person to Planet of the Apes, you're going to lose your job and that's the way it is.
	But I can't believe it's not disingenuous when I look at Michelle Wolf, Kathy Griffin, Joy Reid, all of those immigrant photos.
	It's just too hard to believe.
	Okay, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
	We have a great interview coming up from Carol Markowitz, great New York Post columnist.
	She's done excellent reporting on New York politics, state and local, this awful, corrupt, corrosive place.
	Since I'm in New York, I thought it would be fun to delve into it.
	Some of that, the home of Anthony Weiner, Elliot Spitzer, Schneiderman, the list goes on and on.
	We will get to all of that.
	And at the very end, if we have time, I'll tell you a little bit about my bachelor party.
	But we definitely need to keep that for after the paywall.
	I think we probably have to censor every word of it.
	I'm sure the producers will bleep everything out.
	It's probably why you might, I don't know if you can see in the camera, my eye bags, and have eye bags now.
	Now, that's what happens after a weekend of your pals sending you off to eternal marital bliss.
	We will get to all of that.
	But first, you got to go to dailywire.com.
	It is $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
	You get me.
	You get the Andrew Klavan show.
	You get the Ben Shapiro show.
	You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
	And I'm going to try to take some mailbag questions before I go off to my honeymoon because I don't want to miss you for so long.
	I want to talk to you.
	I need you.
	I love you.
	Go over there right now.
	The best of all, and I don't have this right now, you'll get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
	I just have a white coffee cup.
	I just have a little coffee cup.
	And I've got to tell you, folks, when the deluge comes in, I am going to drown.
	I am going to...
	Get yours.
	Don't be like me.
	Get yours.
	Be prepared.
	Go to dailywire.com.
	We'll be right back.
	Okay, scandalous bachelor party tales coming up before we get to that.
	Carol Markowitz, New York Post columnist, great writer on New York politics.
	Let's talk because I'm sick and tired of attacking the left nationally today.
	I want to attack the left in New York specifically.
	So I sat down before I left with Carol Markowitz.
	Here's our interview.
	Carol, thank you for being here.
	Thanks so much for having me, Michael.
	So as we speak right now, I am in New York.
	Welcome.
	Oh, thanks so much.
	It's always good to be back in the city so nice they named it twice.
	Love New York.
	I'm from New York.
	And I've noticed something about New York politics that is pretty strange.
	It attracts the worst human beings on the face of the earth.
	Anthony Weiner, Elliot Spitzer, Eric Schneiderman.
	Those are just the big names that have recently come up.
	The list goes on and on and on.
	All those guys have one thing in common.
	They've worked in New York politics.
	What is it about New York that attracts these bizarre, callow, shallow, quasi-psychopaths?
	Well, I think, I mean, my theory is it's because it's a one-party town.
	It's so rare for Republicans to win most of these positions.
	You know, once in a while we'll have a Republican mayor when things get really, really bad, or a governor.
	But very rarely will we have city council or any other position held by a Republican.
	So they live in this, like, insular world where their competition is only other Democrats and it's a real party machine.
	And I think they just don't learn to compete fairly or nicely or to really be able to...
	They don't have to be good people.
	They just have to spout the right politics.
	It's a disadvantage to them.
	That is certainly true.
	And I think that's definitely part of it.
	It reminds me of Chicago, you know, these other big cities, D.C., which just breeds this corruption.
	But I have another theory on this, especially when you talk about the state politicians like Schneiderman or Eliot Spitzer, some of those other guys, Cuomo.
	I'm not lumping him in quite there yet, but he is a bulldog of a man.
	My theory on this is that Albany is not a very pleasant city to live in.
	Right, sure.
	So you bring all of these guys.
	They're very ambitious.
	They're usually pretty smart.
	They really want to make it in politics.
	They all want to be the president.
	And then you send them up to this town in the middle of nowhere, and it attracts this really bizarre kind of mentality.
	That's my theory on, in particular, why New York calls.
	That's pretty good.
	Now, I want to talk about Eric Schneiderman in particular.
	So he's the attorney general in New York.
	Well, he was.
	And he, Donald Trump, Nostradonald, as I've taken to calling him, predicted in 2013, he said, Spitzer's gone, Wiener's gone.
	Mark my words, Schneiderman's going to be next.
	He's worse than the other two.
	Five years later, it comes out that this guy is non-consensually battering women.
	He gets drunk.
	He batters women during sex.
	Multiple women came forward about this.
	How many people knew that this was happening?
	Who saw this brewing?
	Because I don't think that Donald Trump actually sees the future.
	I think this is just word on the street.
	How many people knew about this?
	How was it covered up so long?
	That's really the amazing thing about this and I think it was also true with Spitzer and Wiener.
	I think there were whispers for a long time about these men and no one cared and no one acted and in part again it comes back to they had the right politics and so even in the story where a woman was debating whether or not to come forward about Schneiderman who after he had beaten her and she was like well he has the right politics I don't know if I want to destroy his life and another woman had friends say to her Don't do this to this guy.
	This guy is on our side and we don't want to lose him politically.
	So I think that it's definitely a whisper situation where people did know and no one cared because they were doing the right political things for them.
	And there's just that machine.
	I remember a New York Assemblyman said that Albany is the most corrupt state capital in the country.
	I remember even in my own district where I grew up, the state senator, Vincent Leibel, he was a hero.
	I mean, he did his job.
	He brought money back to the district.
	schemes and misusing money and all of that.
	It just was such a poisonous environment that people would cover up for everybody.
	It was an open secret about who was corrupt, who was this, who was doing this to this person in this way.
	But you wouldn't talk about it because the machine protected itself.
	Now I want to talk about this guy, Aaron Schlossberg.
	He's that lawyer who was in a Manhattan deli, and he yelled at a worker there for speaking Spanish to customers.
	Let's just cut to a quick little cut of that tape.
	Clients say your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking Spanish.
	I mean, sometimes they do.
	Every person I listen to.
	He's spoken.
	He's spoken.
	She's speaking.
	It's America.
	He's very ignorant.
	He's very ignorant.
	And he shouldn't be allowed here.
	I will be following up.
	And my guess is, they're not documented.
	So my next call is to ICE to have each one of them get out of my country.
	If they have the vote to come here and live off of my money, I pay for their welfare, I pay for their ability to be here.
	The least they can do, the least they can do is to get...
	Their welfare is such an ignorant...
	...running a place in Midtown Manhattan, your staff should be speaking English, not Latin.
	Because of people like you, our nation...
	Honey, I'm calling ICE.
	Call ICE!
	So that they can see how...
	Maybe you shouldn't eat that sandwich today.
	Take a break from the food.
	So you see Schlossberg here, and I have to say, the guy seems a little unhinged in the video.
	He's not being terribly charitable.
	But I'll put myself out on a limb and defend the sentiment here, which is that in America people should speak English.
	And further the sentiment that assimilation is hard in the best of circumstances, but when you have a huge illegal immigration problem, when you have a mass immigration for decades from only certain places of the world, but not from other places of the world, cultural assimilation is nearly impossible.
	And so I think he actually is expressing a cultural frustration that is perfectly legitimate.
	He's not doing it in a charitable way.
	Of course, one doesn't know if the people he was talking about are illegal aliens.
	Now, statistically speaking, a lot of them are illegal aliens.
	A lot of people in the restaurant industries, industries that can be paid off the books.
	That's not to undercut that suggestion.
	Still, not a very charitable way to put it.
	The guy should get smacked around a little bit for it.
	You shouldn't behave that way in public.
	Now, you wrote about this.
	You wrote a very good piece on it.
	He got his public comeuppance.
	This guy's got a temper and he's been a loose cannon for a long time.
	But now it's become a free speech issue.
	The Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.
	is saying he should lose his law license.
	Where is this going to go?
	What does this mean for New York politics?
	Right.
	I mean, first of all, I'm an immigrant and I've always been very pro speaking English.
	I think it's better for immigrants.
	But I have to say, you know, there's also definitely the sense of stay out of my business.
	If I think I can do business better in Spanish or Russian or Hebrew or any other language, it's not your problem.
	And I think this guy really, you know, way overstepped.
	And even if he was just Take out the race angle from it.
	He was just being a jerk to minimum wage employees and that's not cool.
	If he gets punished by his community, if the place he rents his office from no longer wants him there, if his friends get mad at him, if his neighbors don't like him, That's all fine and good.
	And I think that the New Yorkers were protesting outside his house with a mariachi band.
	Fine.
	All of that totally fine.
	They have a real sense of humor in New York, so you get things like that.
	So that's all fine.
	But now politicians are targeting his law license.
	And the thing is, if you or I wrote to the board and said, I think he should lose his law license over this, we would just be citizens writing to a committee that oversees this.
	But politicians writing to that committee is very different and it's a real case of punishing him for speech they don't like.
	Speech, again, I also don't like.
	It's not about liking or not liking, it's about shutting it down or the government specifically punishing somebody for speech.
	And it really oversteps and I think that it's a violation of his First Amendment rights to have these politicians try to strip him of his law license for words they don't like.
	Absolutely.
	And there is a broader free speech crisis in the country.
	You see people shouting down or disinviting conservative speakers.
	I was just at a dinner in New York not too long ago called the Disinvitation Dinner for the Bill Buckley program, where every year they take a speaker who is disinvited from a college campus and they have him come and give a speech.
	And you see this all over the place.
	You know, Ben Shapiro has, they have to like, you know, take out $600,000 worth of security to protect against a five-foot...
	Oh, he's very dangerous.
	I don't know if you've ever met him in person.
	He's a 5'9 orthodox Jew who's relatively polite and mild-mannered.
	He's very intimidating.
	And so you see this crisis brewing.
	But people, they don't seem to understand there are different levels.
	There are different issues being discussed.
	What private people can say to private people.
	What private organizations or businesses can say to one another.
	And what politicians who have the public trust...
	Are allowed to say about free speech and what speech they can limit.
	Do you see this problem getting better in the near future or only getting worse, both in New York and nationally?
	Well, part of the problem is that we just don't teach any kind of historical or, you know, we don't teach the amendments.
	People graduate thinking that it's a violation of their First Amendment rights if they can't yell at work.
	For example, the whole kneeling thing, you know, in the NFL. The NFL says you can't do it.
	It's not a violation of your First Amendment rights.
	Go ahead and kneel any other time other than when you're at your job.
	So I think that people really just don't understand the distinction.
	And what happens is when these politicians do overstep like this, nobody realizes this is different.
	This isn't just protesting outside of a place that you don't like or that is doing something that you're unhappy about.
	This is a politician stepping in and telling, say, a business, Stop allowing these speakers to speak at your place of business.
	That's absolutely right.
	We know this is true practically because most of what Ben does at my place of work is yell and scream at me.
	So if you weren't allowed to do that, that means the boss couldn't even come into his own office.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	Really, really interesting stuff.
	And a lot of times people don't, all we want to do is talk about the really glamorous sort of issues, the really national ones that splash on the news.
	But all of politics happens at the local and state level, all the really interesting stuff, and a lot of what really matters.
	So, really good points.
	I look forward to reading even more about this case.
	And it's so important to cover, you know, Schneiderman, Wiener, Spitzer.
	Those are the guys who are, you know, affecting politics just below the surface, just below where the cameras are always focused.
	So really good stuff.
	Carol, thank you so much for being here.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you.
	I hope that the machine in Albany doesn't off me before I make it back to L.A. But in any case, the conversation was worth it nonetheless.
	That's right.
	You're always welcome in Brooklyn.
	So speaking of just below the surface, I guess I got to say something about the bachelor party because the bachelor party actually made me realize something very important, which is that I really, really, really want to get married.
	It made me realize that.
	And I think this is actually the purpose of bachelor parties.
	So the bachelor party exists to just cause mayhem and chaos and degeneracy and dereliction of duty.
	And you go out and you drink too much and you smoke Cuban cigars and you go gambling in Atlantic city.
	Maybe I'm just talking about my bachelor party.
	You eat too much steak.
	You only consume red meat.
	You feel like a disgusting, filthy, masculine animal for a day or a couple of days.
	The purpose of this is to remind you that being a single man, isn't that great.
	Like, it is really fun for about five seconds, but then, like all sinful things, you just get disgusted by it and exhausted with it.
	So we had a really good time, a bunch of my pals.
	We went out in Manhattan, and then we went down to Atlantic City, which, you know, that's like the New Jersey of New Jersey.
	I mean, this place is not...
	Not what it was ever supposed to be and certainly not what it used to be.
	So we went down there.
	We had a really good time.
	It was great to hang out with men.
	But men are disgusting animals.
	And it really reminded me of the complementarity of the sexes, how important it is to find that lady and move on in your life.
	Because, listen, high school is a lot of fun.
	I had a good time in high school.
	College is a lot of fun.
	I had a great time in college.
	Your 20s are a lot of fun.
	I was living in New York, then living out in LA. That's super fun.
	That's really good.
	But you can't live there forever.
	If you live there forever, you're going to become an overgrown child.
	So you've got to keep moving on.
	Maybe that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get married.
	Sometimes it's hard to find people in our swipe-ripe culture.
	But it means moving on and doing something new.
	Progressing forward.
	Building new relationships.
	Interpersonal friendship or relationships.
	Romantic relationships, going somewhere in your career, reading new books, challenging yourself to move forward because if you don't do that, if you want to be stuck and keep just having too much fun, you're going to be in adolescence forever and you're going to wind up in a hotel room in Atlantic City with too many Cuban cigars and too much whiskey and leftovers of steak all around you and a bunch of smelly men.
	Nobody wants that forever.
	You can only hang out with your pals for so long.
	So it's really good.
	I really defend the ritual of the bachelor party, and I'm glad I had one, and I'm glad it's over.
	Before I go, it's no longer Memorial Day.
	It's Tuesday, but we did have Memorial Day and we didn't broadcast on there.
	So I do just want to remind everybody that freedom isn't free.
	And of course, we owe so many of our freedoms and what we enjoy in this country and our life here and our ability to pursue happiness here.
	We owe that to the real heroes, the men and women who die serving their country, who die.
	Give their lives for our freedom.
	There's a classic expression, dolce et decorum est pro patria mori.
	It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.
	Sweet and seemly to die for your country.
	And in this culture, we lose sight of that a lot.
	Some people confuse Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
	They're different days.
	Veterans are the people who fought.
	Memorial Day is for the people who died, who gave their lives for the country.
	And in a culture that's materialistic and that is self-hating like America is today and like the West is today, we hate ourselves.
	We hate our founders.
	We hate the religion that gave us the culture, that gave us our politics.
	Since we hate all of that, then it doesn't make any sense to die for your country.
	And it's a strange day in America.
	It's a day that doesn't make a lot of sense if you live in this very modern, materialistic, atheistic culture that we have.
	Fortunately, mostly on the right, there is a patriotic culture that's been preserved and a sense that this life is in everything, that there are things more important than just going around and continuing to live, that there are noble causes worth giving your life for.
	Whoever thought that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the hands of chains and slavery.
	That's what Ronald Reagan asked in his Time for Choosing speech.
	Some things in life are worth dying for.
	I'm glad that I haven't had to do that.
	I'm very glad that greater men did that for me and we should all take a moment to remember that and to think about how What Memorial Day means in this kind of culture, and maybe Memorial Day is a guidepost for us to try to turn that culture back to something that makes a little bit more sense and helps us make sense of our freedom and the men and women who have died to preserve that freedom for us.
	Okay, that's quite a gamut today, talking about bad jokes.
	You know, canceling sitcoms, bachelor parties, and dulce decorum est.
	That's our show.
	I'll be back tomorrow.
	And then, folks, I'm going away to get married and go to a beach somewhere.
	So unless ABC cancels my show, I'll be back after that.
	Get your mailbag questions in.
	I want to take some tomorrow.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.

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