Ep. 170 - A National Conversation About National Conversations
It’s time for a national conversation: a national conversation about "national conversations." Then, why the total hysteria over illegal immigration is actually a healthy sign for our culture, not just in America, but across Western civilization.Then, Chris Pratt preaches the gospel at the MTV Movie Awards audience. Finally, on this day in history, the U.S. executed Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
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A national conversation about national conversations.
This will be no ordinary sort of conversation.
Because between you and me, I am starting to think that lefties who keep demanding national conversations don't actually want to have conversations at all.
I don't know why I think that.
We will discuss.
We will converse.
Then...
Why the total hysteria over illegal immigration is actually a healthy sign for our culture, not just in America, but across Western civilization.
We will look at examples even back in the old country.
Then, in some other good news for the culture, Chris Pratt preaches the gospel at the MTV Movie Awards.
And finally, on this day in history, the U.S. executed Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but the left just don't want to admit it.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
A lot of conversations to get to today.
I think I spent about a solid 45 minutes just doing Twitter yesterday and then there were all these sort of fake news articles that came out of it.
We will discuss why lefties are so angry on these conversations on Twitter.
Before we get to that...
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Okay, let's have our conversation.
Let's have our conversation first about the conversation.
There are so many conversations today.
This is a real one, though.
The conversation is coming up with the big boss himself, Mr.
Ben Shapiro, 5.30 p.m.
Eastern, 2.30 Pacific.
You know how to do it.
Only Daily Wire subscribers can ask the questions.
Ben will answer the questions.
In real time, just go to that page on the Daily Wire website, type in your question, they will be answered by the lovely Alicia Krause in the order that they come in.
Be sure to tune in for it.
Everybody can watch, but only subscribers can ask questions.
Many are called, but few are chosen.
Ask Ben every question you've ever wanted to know.
Ben, what does your wife do for a living?
I've known Ben for years at this point.
He's never actually told me.
So you can ask that question yourself.
Watch the conversation, 5.30 p.m.
Eastern, 2.30 Pacific, and become a subscriber.
That way you can talk to Ben yourself.
You know, it's weird, though, because I'm a subscriber, but Ben won't talk to me.
Maybe I've got to take that up with HR or something like that, with my subscription manager at The Daily Wire.
Okay, so I want to talk.
I want to have a conversation with you about national conversations.
That's the euphemism that Democrats and lefties are always using whenever they just want to shove something down your throat.
So they say we need a national conversation for it.
You know, even people on the right have picked up this kind of language.
Let's take a look at just a quick little overview of all of the national conversations.
We are having a national conversation about it.
How to help drive a national conversation.
We've ignited a national conversation about mental health.
Trying to advance the cause of the national conversation about such things as immigration.
National conversation around sexual harassment.
Behind this national conversation on transgender rights.
You know, we must have a national conversation on race.
Donald Trump's vulgar remarks about women started a national conversation about sexual assault.
Did it.
Did it now, Mr.
CBS anchor guy.
National conversation means whatever Democrats want to talk about and Democrats talking to you about them.
That's what a national conversation is.
Look at Donald Trump.
For those of you who can't see it, this is the image on CBS News.
Donald Trump's lewd comments started a national conversation on sexual assault, and it says, hashtag not okay underneath Donald Trump.
This is on CBS. This is purportedly a journalist outlet.
Okay.
So Donald Trump said some vulgar things in a private conversation to Billy Bush, a little locker room talk.
That started a national conversation.
But when Bill Clinton was sexually harassing his interns and actually raping people, that didn't start a national conversation, right?
Why didn't it start a national conversation?
Oh, because you people control the national conversation.
Or at least you used to before the new media broke the mainstream media's stranglehold on what we're all talking about it.
Now, you've got to see through this euphemism.
There are so many of these lefty euphemisms we hear about.
Politically correct does a lot of this, right?
There are all these little terms that we use that don't really mean what we say that they mean.
This is one of them, because it's not a conversation.
I'll tell you this.
This happened to me yesterday on Twitter.
Some comic book guy with a blue checkmark, I don't know what he does, he started tweeting all these vulgar and mean things at me because...
I was suggesting that we shouldn't have completely open borders and we should try to stop illegal immigration because it hurts both the United States and the illegal aliens themselves.
And he started tweeting all these awful things and then he said, okay, goodbye, have a nice day, goodbye, stop, no, do, do, right.
And they're just yelling invective and accusations.
He called all Trump supporters racists and evil and wicked and terrible.
A lot of other blue check marks jumped in on the thread.
And that's what they want in a conversation.
They want to slander people, libel people, say you're awful and you're hateful and I use a lot of profanity, and then that's it, and then leave.
And you see this a lot, even on Twitter.
Another person who responded, they said something mean, and they said, okay, thanks, bye, bye, bye, Felicia.
That's another lefty kind of meme.
They say, bye, Felicia, goodbye, I'm not listening to you, I'm not talking to you anymore.
This even goes all the way up to serious elected Democrats.
Hillary Clinton and Chief Lia Watha, Elizabeth Warren herself, Focahontas, they both tweeted to Donald Trump, delete your account.
So Hillary Clinton tweeted, she said, delete your account when he said something.
Who knows?
And then Elizabeth Warren, the same thing.
Seriously, delete your account.
Delete it, right?
That's not a conversation.
That's the opposite of a conversation.
They're actually saying, shut up.
When the left calls for a national conversation, they are telling you, conservative, to shut up and listen to us.
It is, you know, I did a PragerU video on this.
On how the left manipulates language to mean the opposite of what it is.
Like social justice, which when the left says it, it means not justice.
That's what they do with a conversation.
It means not a conversation.
The opposite of a national conversation.
Then that kid from the school that had that awful shooting in Florida, David Hogg, who immediately after the shooting became a CNN celebrity and was on CNN all of the time.
He recently tweeted out, if we get these advertisers pulled, maybe Laura Ingram will have to become a camp counselor and learn how wrong she is.
And this just came out today.
David Hogg and some of the other activists from that county in Florida have been trying to get Laura Ingram kicked off the air for a long time.
Why?
Because they disagree with her opinion.
That's not a national conversation, is it?
That's trying to shut up the other side.
That is, and you see this on campuses all the time, people physically assaulting speakers at campuses.
Ben Shapiro goes to Berkeley.
It costs $600,000 to secure the city and the campus against a 5'9 Orthodox Jewish guy who's relatively mild-mannered.
You know, there was a free speech conference at Yale, and as the students were walking into the conference, there were protesters spitting on them, literally spitting on them.
They say, how dare you want to speak?
So it's all the opposite here.
Why is it?
Why is that the national conversation for Democrats?
It's because they don't understand what you're saying.
You can tell this in all conversation.
I reference Twitter because it's where people have these very fast conversations all the time, and sometimes there are a lot of followers, so these conversations are magnified and we can watch them.
But Twitter is not an aberration.
Twitter is the natural conclusion of conversation and of people's character.
So it is conversations that are really happening.
But they say that character is what you do when you think nobody's looking.
I think a lot of these people wouldn't come up and look you in the face and say you're an evil, vicious Nazi.
Because they're probably afraid of you.
They don't have the courage to do that.
They don't have the guts.
But from behind their keyboards, from behind their screens, they'll say whatever they want.
Character is what you do when nobody's looking at you in the room.
A lot of people have courage there.
And so it's this natural conclusion.
But who would ever talk to somebody that way?
When you look at two people having a conversation in real life, on television, on a debate stage, or on Twitter, the person who's calm and who just sort of responds with citing certain facts or certain logical arguments, that guy probably knows what he's talking about.
And the person who's screaming and ripping his hair out and yelling invective and all that, maybe that guy doesn't know exactly what he's talking about.
It is actually a pretty good mirror for conversation.
And usually, the louder people are, the less they know.
The more they're screaming, the more profanity they use, the less confident they are of their opinion because they have to juice it up with all these sort of little add-ons.
So, you know, listen, I've invited a lot of Democrats on this show.
I've invited a ton of lefties, wackos, radicals, Democrats.
The only one really who's come on is Tom Arnold.
So, you know, Tom Arnold did come off a little eccentric on the show, and a lot of people are attacking him for that.
But I've got to say, at least he came on.
All these Democrats calling for a national conversation, they'll never come on the show.
They won't do it.
Why?
Because they're not confident of their views.
They don't know what they're talking about.
And when you don't know what you're talking about, you get very angry.
There was that wonderful study from Jonathan Haidt that came out a number of years ago, which showed that the conservatives broadly understand the left much, much better than the left understands conservatives.
And if you don't understand conservatives, if you're a lefty and you don't understand why someone would want to enforce our own immigration laws or why we don't want perfectly open borders where people can flood unvetted into the United States, If you don't understand that, then the person who is offering those opinions can be one of two things, stupid or evil.
If you're a progressive, you have an idea of progress, you have a utopia at the end of the line, then if you're going to stand in the way of progress, which is so clear, you can either be stupid or evil.
And when they look at well-spoken conservatives, they say, oh, you have to be evil.
And when they look at inarticulate conservatives, they say, you have to be stupid.
But the answer, of course, is neither.
I don't think that the left is stupid or evil.
I'll tell you what I think they are before we do that.
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So I don't think that lefties and Democrats and all the ones who are yelling invectives and everything against us, I don't think that they're stupid or evil, broadly speaking.
I just think they're ignorant.
They're ignorant of these things.
When they come out, you know...
2014-2015, Barack Obama was doing exactly the same thing that everyone is hysterical for Donald Trump doing right now on immigration.
Minors were being detained.
They were being detained by the U.S. government.
In some cases, they were being separated from their families.
In some cases, they were being held in custody with their families, which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled is illegal.
So then they had to be pulled away from their families.
This is the New York Times reporting on this, 2014, 2015.
Judge G. also found that migrant children had been held in widespread deplorable conditions.
I got to tell you, for those of you who don't believe in a divine hand and everything, look at that adjective there, deplorable.
Deplorable conditions.
As the left is losing its mind over a policy that Donald Trump is basically just continuing and in some ways finally enforcing, the word that the New York Times used to describe and this judge used to describe the Obama administration years ago is deplorable.
It's too good.
In Border Patrol stations after they were first caught, and she said the authorities had wholly failed.
To provide the safe and sanitary conditions required for children even in temporary cells.
So, by the way, all the stories that are coming out, these opportunistic Democrat politicians are now flooding down to these centers where the children are being held by HHS. Not by US Marshals, but by HHS. And they're flooding down there to interview them and get a good photo op or whatever.
But they're all admitting the conditions are actually pretty nice.
They have nice murals on the walls and they're being cared for very nicely.
It's not like they're in a gulag or something or in prison.
Except when Barack Obama was doing it, kids actually were being held in deplorable conditions.
Much worse conditions than they're being held in under the Trump administration.
But no one's really talking about that, are they?
We'll get to why in a little bit.
The New York Times goes on, quote, Initially, homeland security officials said they were detaining the families to send a message to others in Central America to deter them from coming to the United States illegally.
There it is.
There it is.
The main argument against President Trump enforcing immigration laws that were passed years ago, actually just enforcing them, the main argument they're saying is he is doing this to be mean.
He's doing this to send a deterrent to people who would cross the border.
He wants to be so awful and terrible and mean and nasty that people won't keep coming across the border.
Homeland Security officials under Barack Obama admitted that they were doing this very thing.
Do you see that trending on Twitter right now?
Is that trending in the national conversation?
Are the networks, the television networks, that are spending an absurd amount of time covering the Trump administration's alleged misdeeds here, are they talking about those deplorable conditions and those deterrents that the Obama administration were putting into place?
Of course not.
That gets to the nature of the national conversation.
We'll get to that in a second.
The news coverage over six days in June, we're talking about six days of coverage.
How long do you think they spent covering this issue?
What would you say?
Maybe they do a couple minutes a night.
So, yeah, there's this law on the books, and now the Trump administration is enforcing it.
I don't know why this is news that the federal government is enforcing its own laws, but right...
176 minutes of emotional segments.
By emotional segments, I mean little babies crying, children crying, and they're yelling, where's mommy?
They're crying, right?
176 minutes of this because the federal government is enforcing the law because Donald Trump is doing what Barack Obama did.
Now, do you think that they were covering this under Barack Obama?
How long do you bet they spent?
So, 176 minutes under Donald Trump.
How long do you think they spent under Barack Obama when he was doing exactly the same thing?
The number is six minutes.
It's six minutes and 29 seconds.
176 minutes under Donald Trump, six minutes and 29 seconds under Barack Obama for doing the exact same thing, except in the case of Barack Obama, the conditions that the children were being held in were much worse.
That's the difference.
CBS alone, we saw that ridiculous propaganda clip in the National Conversation from CBS. CBS alone has spent 73 minutes in six days this month talking about The awful, horrific, unspeakable crime of the federal government enforcing its own laws and following what the Ninth Circuit judges told us we had to do.
That's the difference.
They're doing this and they're pretending that it's conversation.
This isn't a conversation.
If it were a conversation, then the networks would be airing the same number of segments when Barack Obama did it.
If this were a conversation, there wouldn't be these emotionally manipulative clips of little babies crying.
They would have people on discussing whether or not we should enforce the law, whether or not we should repeal the law, having a sane conversation.
A conversation is basically impossible with the left these days because we don't speak the same language.
And I don't think there's equal share of blame to go around.
It is the left which has abandoned language.
They don't know what we're talking about.
It is ignorance.
And unfortunately, there are some people on the right here who are falling for it.
And this is the squishes.
The squishes on the right, like Yeb Bush, they keep falling for this sort of thing.
So what did Jeb say?
He came out, he said, we need to give these dreamers a path to citizenship.
And it's heartless what Donald Trump is doing.
It's heartless.
Please, New York Times, like me.
Why don't you like me, New York Times?
That's what Jeb Bush is coming out and saying.
They're falling for it.
Laura Bush published that awful op-ed, that terrible slander against Republicans and against the Trump administration yesterday, saying that you're basically a bad person if you think we should enforce immigration law, that was signed into law under her husband.
She failed to mention that in the op-ed that she wrote, didn't she?
Donald Trump knows better than this.
We're very lucky that the guy is in office right now, because lesser, weaker politicians, this would have broken them.
The call, you hate little children, you hate little babies.
Forget that it's all nonsense.
Forget that it's all media manipulation.
This would have broken other presidents.
They would have said, I'm sorry, we'll stop it.
My bad.
Mea culpa.
Mea culpa.
Mea maxima culpa.
Not Donald Trump.
He doubles down.
He responds, he says, crime in Germany up 10% plus since migrants were accepted.
And this is not being reported and America, be smart.
Now that seems like a zag.
Why is he talking about crime in Germany?
He's talking about crime in Germany.
To put an image to what this could mean for the United States.
We see what's happening in Germany.
We know that the country is being flooded with aliens and refugees, quote-unquote, who are causing a lot of terror attacks.
And he says, if you don't have borders, you don't have a country.
In the past four years, a thousand people in Germany have been killed and injured by refugees.
A thousand people in four years by refugees.
He's drawing that image for you.
And he kept on swinging.
Here's President Trump.
Democrats love open borders.
Let the whole world come in.
Let the whole world, MS-13, gang members from all over the place, come on in.
We have open borders.
And they view that, possibly intelligently, except that it's destroying our country.
They view that as potential voters.
Someday, they're going to vote for Democrats.
Because they can't win on their policies, which are horrible.
They found that out in the last presidential election.
In fact, their only policy was that Donald Trump is a bad guy.
He's a bad person.
Vote against Trump.
And they said it so much.
There's hundreds of millions of dollars of negative ads.
Nobody's ever been hit like that.
I used to go home.
I started disliking myself.
I said, man, am I that bad?
That's exactly right.
That's all they've got.
You're bad.
You're bad.
And you say, but what about this?
They say, you're bad.
If we were to actually have a national conversation in this country, I think this is what it would look like.
Clip two.
I want you to tell me the names of the fellas on the St.
Louis team.
I'm telling you, who's on first, what's on second, I don't know who's on third.
Do you know the fellas' names?
Yes.
Well, then who's playing first?
Yes.
I mean the fellas' name on first base.
Who?
The fella playing first base for St.
Louis.
Who?
The guy on first base.
Who is on first?
Well, what are you asking me for?
I'm not asking you.
I'm telling you who is on first.
I'm asking you who's on first.
That's the man's name.
That's whose name?
Yes.
Well, go ahead and tell me.
Who?
The guy on first.
Who?
The first baseman.
Who is on first?
Have you got a first baseman on first?
Certainly.
Then who's playing first?
Absolutely.
When you pay off the first baseman every month, who gets the money?
Every dollar of it.
Why not?
The man's entitled to it.
Who is?
Yes.
So who gets it?
Why shouldn't he?
Sometimes his wife comes down and collects it.
Whose wife?
Yes.
After all, the man earns it.
Who does?
Absolutely.
All I'm trying to find out is what's the guy's name on first base?
No, no, no.
What is on second base?
I'm not asking you who's on second.
Who's on first?
That's what I'm trying to find out.
Don't change the players.
I'm not changing nobody.
Take it easy.
What's the guy's name on first base?
What's the guy's name on second base?
I'm not asking you who's on second.
Who's on first?
I don't know.
He's on third.
We're not talking about him.
Abbott and Costello.
That is the national conversation that is happening right now between Republicans and Democrats, between the right and the left.
The Republicans and Democrats are Bud Abbott, the tall guy, the straight man.
I'm sorry, the Republicans are Bud Abbott, the tall guy, the straight man.
The Democrats are Lou Costello, the sort of shorter, pudgier, unkempt one wearing the silly hat.
That is.
I think I just described the Democrat Party perfectly.
That is the national conversation.
Because an often overlooked aspect of who's on first, maybe the most famous comedy routine in history, is that the straight man, Bud Abbott, understands exactly what's going on.
It isn't that complicated.
The reason that this is funny is because we understand what's going on, because it isn't that complicated.
And then Lou Costello, who's the comic guy who just can't understand anything, he's the Democrat.
He can't figure out that who is on first, what is on second, I don't know, is on third.
He can't figure it out, and that's what's so funny about it.
So, you know, you've got Bud Abbott there, the Republican straight man, who just says, look, I'll tell you, the names of everybody on the team, I won't get confused.
Who's on second?
Who's on first?
What's on second?
I don't know who's on third.
And then Lou Costello comes and he says, wait, who's on second?
What's on first?
I don't know who's right.
And he can't get it.
That's what's happening in the United States.
We did that interview with Tom Arnold.
Tom said, you know, Trump is a Russian asset.
I said, explain how.
And he couldn't explain how.
Because it was just, it was a simple question that could have led, but he couldn't explain how because the Democrats just have this list of talking points.
I don't mean to pick on Tom.
Everyone is spewing this on that side of the aisle.
All they have are these shallow talking points.
They can't follow a logical argument.
They are not interested in following a logical argument.
Then, getting back to who's on first, you see Bud Abbott, he stays basically calm.
He says, look, this is what it is, naturally.
Naturally.
Absolutely.
And Lou Costello, he's getting angrier and angry.
He goes, why?
I'm going to zing zing, right?
And that is the Democrats right now.
They're ripping their hair out.
And they're also wearing stupid hats, just like Lou Costello.
They're going out there and wearing those silly hats.
This is in black and white, so I can't tell if Lou Costello's hat is pink or not.
But that is what the Democrats are doing right now.
You can't have a national conversation with that.
They aren't up to the level of discourse.
They aren't sufficiently able to use language and to process ideas to be able to communicate that.
Somebody on Twitter tweeted out at me, some lefty, said, F you and F this and F and do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
And some other blue checkmark guy, I don't know, I think he's a writer, he said, I couldn't have said it better.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
I know you couldn't have said it better.
That's the sad part about our culture.
You're a professional writer and you couldn't say it better.
David McCullough says to write well is to think clearly.
That's why it's so hard.
When you see these wacko lefties on Twitter using profanity and slurs and calling you all sorts of bad things, it's because they aren't thinking clearly.
But if they're not thinking clearly, if they're not willing to use their cognitive faculties, you cannot have a conversation.
That is just not possible.
And so at least some people like President Trump, they see this for what it is.
The squishy people, they look, they see the Democrats get really angry.
where they say, oh, we should take them seriously.
We should try to seriously engage with your temper tantrums and with your invective and your slurs.
We should seriously.
And Donald Trump says, no, I'm not going to reward you for acting like a little child.
I wouldn't have a heightened discourse with a little toddler.
They're not capable of that.
They're all emotion and angry and not able to think clearly.
So I'm just going to Punch right back.
I'm going to hit you right back.
And he keeps doing that.
He's not taking the Democrat premises, and we shouldn't either.
They're not interested in a national conversation.
They're interested in entrapment and just using a cudgel and banging you on the head.
That's what they want.
Like Luke Costello starts to get angry with the bat, right?
He goes, I'm going to get you.
But then, no, don't let them do it.
Don't let them do it, because that's what they want.
Here's another great example of this, is the UN Human Rights Council.
It was just announced today that we're pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council.
And this was another, this was a headline On the left, they said, oh my gosh, Donald Trump is pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council.
Oh, no, no.
Who's on the UN Human Rights Council?
Let's just see if I can remember a few.
Cuba.
Cuba's on it.
Venezuela, people starving in the street eating rats.
Venezuela is on the human rights.
Saudi Arabia is on the Human Rights Council.
They finally let women drive this year.
They're finally considering letting women drive.
China, which had a national policy for decades of mass abortion of children, And it's been a slave state since the communists took power.
So that's the Human Rights Council.
Donald Trump saw through that.
He doesn't get tricked by those claims, those premises.
He says, nope, here's reality.
And this is actually good news for the culture.
We're going to have to sign off, but before we do that...
I do want to point out, this is a good thing.
This is the last gasps of a sick culture.
The tide is turning.
The left has nothing left.
Worldwide, Italy has just elected a government that wants to deal with this craziness.
With the craziness, the illogic of open borders, for instance.
And it's actually sort of what we would call bipartisan.
There's this right-wing party, the Movimento Cinque...
I'm sorry, the Lega party, and then this sort of left-wing party, the Movimento Cinque Stelle, and they formed this coalition government.
Matteo Salvini is the interior minister there, and he turned away a ship of so-called refugees, the MS Aquarius.
And these aren't refugees who were just off the coast of Calabria and they pulled them on shore.
These boats would go and prowl the Libyan coast and find anybody who was, you know, sitting in a tube drinking a daiquiri, probably not exactly doing that, but who were very close to the Libyan coast and pick them up and bring them to Europe, and they get to stay in Europe.
And Italy has to deal with all of that.
It doesn't make any sense.
There are 1.26 billion people in Africa.
Is Italy going to absorb over a billion people?
I don't think so.
So, By the way, this got shock and indignation all around Europe.
Germany was horrified.
France, Macron was horrified.
Oh no, this is terrible.
What could happen?
Meanwhile, by the way, as Angela Merkel is so shocked and horrified by this, the German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, who's the head of Bavaria's Christian social union, actually called up Salvini and congratulated him.
He said, oh thank you for having common sense and finally turning this away.
Salvini said to Macron, he said, Oh, if you're so upset about this, how about you take all these refugees for years and years and years?
Macron hasn't responded yet.
And 60% of Italians support this policy.
Because there is a turning, not just in the United States, but worldwide.
It's working.
How about in the United States?
Trump's popularity, mainstream media breathlessly reporting, the poor little kids being ripped out, making up total fake news with regard to the Obama administration.
Trump's popularity hits an all-time high, 45%.
Amidst all of this, all-time high, 45%.
There's a top Democrat candidate running for Congress in West Virginia.
His name's Richard Ojeda.
He's campaigning on this line, I voted for Trump.
That's one of his campaign lines.
Top Democrat prospect is saying, I voted for Trump.
Please vote for me.
Really, really good news for the culture.
We've got even more good news for the culture.
We've got to talk about Chris Pratt.
We've got to get our daily World Cup update.
And we've got to talk about the Rosenbergs, America executing Soviet spies back when we had a spine.
But I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
I'm sorry, folks, but it's all right.
You'll get to come back later and see the conversation with the big boss, Ben Shapiro.
That's coming up soon.
If you subscribe, you get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show.
$10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
None of that matters.
This is what matters.
Because the mainstream, they are losing their minds.
They are Lou Costello.
They're running all this.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
That tastes like 45% approval ratings, doesn't it?
It really does.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
You didn't watch the MTV Movie Awards last night?
I'm shocked.
If you missed it, here's all you need to see from it.
This being the Generation Award, I'm going to cut to the chase and I'm going to speak to you, the next generation, okay?
I accept the responsibility as your elder, so listen up.
You have a soul.
Be careful with it.
God is real.
God loves you.
God wants the best for you.
Believe that.
I do.
Learn to pray.
It's easy.
And it's so good for your soul.
And finally, number nine, nobody is perfect.
People are going to tell you you're perfect just the way you are.
You're not!
You are imperfect.
You always will be.
But there is a powerful force that designed you that way.
And if you're willing to accept that, you will have grace.
And grace is a gift.
And like the freedom that we enjoy in this country, that grace was paid for with somebody else's blood, do not forget it.
Don't take it for granted.
God bless you.
Please get home safely.
Thank you.
Preach!
Preach, Chris!
Chris from Governor of California!
I mean, what a wonderful speech from Chris Pratt, a movie star, and we're finally hearing that.
And you heard, by the way, when he said God exists, there's a cheer.
There was a huge amount of applause in the audience.
I really think we're turning a corner here.
I really think that the more they turn up this hysteria, it's because they're losing.
The left is losing after so long.
And so, thank goodness we have political leaders who are willing to stand firm.
And say, nope, we're not going to have open borders.
We're not going...
No.
You failed.
Your policy failed.
Your policy is morally idiotic.
We are going to protect our country.
And stand firm against that.
It doesn't matter.
It's just like a little...
They're just bubbling all their anger, but it's because they're losing.
And then on the culture, you've got guys like Chris Pratt coming up.
You've got the Generation Award, right?
He comes up and he says, alright, here's my advice, kiddos.
God is real.
You have a soul and protect it.
You better pray.
And you're not perfect.
And when people try to affirm you, because that was clearly a shot at this self-empowerment, self-esteem movement, daily affirmation kind of culture that we're in now, where they say, you're perfect, don't change, you're wonderful the way you are.
Chris Pratt says, no, you're not.
You're obviously imperfect, and grace abounds because you're imperfect.
Beautiful, beautiful stuff, and really gives you hope for the culture.
Something else gives me hope for the culture, too.
This is really important.
So, I don't know if you've been following this.
We've mentioned soccer on the show in the last couple days.
You probably haven't seen it.
We haven't made a big deal about it.
But we've brought up the World Cup a little bit.
And so all the girls in the office, all the girls in the office and Paul Bois are pretending to like soccer right now.
And it's very frustrating and somewhat amusing.
because nobody can name any soccer players ever, but they're like kind of hot or something.
I don't know, right?
And it's very fashionable to like soccer now.
So you might've seen me, Alicia and I were sniping at each other on Twitter this morning and she sent me an article.
She said, see, this is from Deadline.
And the headline from Deadline is Fox Sports scores viewership record with Mexico's world cup win and Brazil tie with Swiss.
And I got very upset when I saw that.
I I got very depressed.
I thought, oh, the culture's over.
Doesn't matter about Chris Pratt.
Doesn't matter that we're closing up our border.
It's over, right?
But then I looked a little more closely.
I said, viewership record?
Fox Sports?
That?
A World Cup game is the biggest audience they ever drew?
And I realized they left a couple words out of that.
They left out a soccer game record.
So it must be in brackets.
Fox Sports scores viewership.
Soccer game.
Record with Mexico's blah, blah, blah.
So the game had four and a half million viewers.
To put that into context, Super Bowl XLIV had 114.4 million viewers.
So about 3.9% of the viewership of the Super Bowl watched this record-setting World Cup game 25 times, more than 25 times as many people as watched that record-setting World Cup game watched Super Bowl XLIV. The Oscars 2018, there was an all-time low in ratings, all-time low in viewership, Still got over 26 million people.
So the worst, lowest-rated Oscars ever got six times as many viewers as the record-setting World Cup game.
The average NFL game gets 14.9 million viewers.
That is the average NFL game.
The lowest-rated of last season was about 8 million, a little over like 8.1 million, and the highest was almost 26 million, compared to 4.5 million for the record-setting World Cup game.
Oh, thank goodness.
Oh, thank goodness.
But this does show you something, by the way.
The deadline, headline, which we're seeing in a lot of places, you know, record-setting, viewership is way, way up.
It's just propaganda.
There is a concerted effort among the media to get Americans to like soccer.
And they're not even hiding it.
They write articles all the time that say, you should like soccer.
Here's why you should watch soccer.
I talked about this on the Andrew Klavan show the other day.
But it's fake news.
Thank goodness.
It gives me hope for the culture as I lose half of my audience.
Finally, we only have a few minutes left, but I do want to wrap up on this day in history.
Because on this day in history, the United States government fried a couple of Soviet spies who are directly responsible for killing American soldiers.
I speak, of course, of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed by the government on this day in history in 1953.
This is an important case, not really because of the Rosenbergs, but because of what it means for the left in America and our national conversation, as we always call it.
So Julius was, he worked in the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratory, and he was, you know, working around this laboratory on important projects, right, at a time when the United States is developing atomic bombs and fighting major wars and, you know, really trying to get an edge at a time when the United States is developing atomic bombs and fighting major wars and, you know, really trying to get an edge on our opponents, And he was fired when it was discovered that he was a member of the Communist Party.
So for years, his co-defendant, Morten Sobel, said that he was innocent.
The Rosenbergs' children said the parents were innocent.
They were innocent.
They talked for decades, and the American left defended them for decades and decades and decades until 2008 when old Morty Sobel admitted they were all guilty.
They were all spies.
They were spies for the Soviet Union.
The left insisted for a whole half century.
They're martyrs.
They were martyrs from the government, which is repressive and trying to put down dissent, and was trying to shut up left-wing voices, and they unjustly killed these innocent people with trumped-up charges.
Nope, turns out that was all fake.
And I bet a lot of you in high school learned that the Rosenbergs were killed unjustly, that it was a setup, that there's no evidence that they were really spies.
This still persists.
In 2008, their co-conspirator admitted we tried to pass on nuclear technology to the Soviets, nuclear secrets, and they did pass on other secrets.
In 2015, the New York City Council, under Bolshevik Mayor Bill de Blasio, honored Ethel Rosenberg for her great bravery.
We know for a fact that she passed on secrets to the Soviets.
We know that Ethel, by the way, according to many historians, hid money.
She hid espionage paraphernalia for her husband.
She acted as an intermediary between the Soviets and her husband.
She was present at many meetings.
We know all of this.
And yet, there's a study by the historian Larry Schweickart, who's at the University of Dayton, that showed that very few textbooks admit that the Rosenbergs are guilty.
The vast majority of textbooks say, oh, they were innocent.
Or, this is another trick they use, they say, oh, it's controversial.
It was a controversial decision.
You hear this, oh, Donald Trump's policy at the border is controversial.
Why is it controversial?
It was passed by Democrats.
It was signed into law two administrations ago.
It was enforced at various times.
What's controversial?
It's like the opposite of controversial, right?
But they use that to cast doubt.
The Columbia professor, Eric Foner, said until very recently, he said they were prosecuted, the Rosenbergs, out of a determined effort to root out dissent, to shatter careers and suppress civil liberties.
No, they were just commie spies.
They were just communist spies.
The Rosenbergs tried to give the Soviets top secret information from the Manhattan Project.
They did hand over top military data on sonar and radar.
That information led directly to the Russians shooting down U.S. planes in the Korean conflict in the Vietnam War.
It led directly to that.
Rosenbergs have blood on their hands.
They did the same thing with Alger Hiss, by the way, the American left.
Alger Hiss was a State Department official.
He helped start the UN, and he was accused of being a communist spy.
He was accused by Whitaker Chambers, another ex-communist party member, who admitted to spying himself.
And nobody believed Chambers.
Everybody defended Hiss.
How dare you?
How dare you say this?
Really only Richard Nixon came out and said, I believe Chambers.
I think Hiss is a dirty, rotten commie.
And finally it turned out that Hiss was a communist.
And they never forgave Nixon for that.
That's why they left dog to him his entire career.
So the takeaway here is do not let the left get to you when we have our national conversations and they call you all manner of evil and say terrible things about you.
Slander from these people is a badge of honor.
It means you're doing something right because it means that you're on to something.
It means that, you know, maybe you're getting a little too close for comfort.
And they will slander you and they'll try to destroy you.
But that's the point.
When the left is saying nice things about you, you're probably doing something wrong.
Look at Jeb Bush right now.
Look at Mrs. Bush right now.
That's not the place where you want to be.
There are always those, you know, the Republican who Democrats, who the left really likes, the Republican who the New York Times really likes, that guy's usually doing something wrong, right?
That's the evidence that you're doing something wrong.
Don't be that guy.
Don't let the left get to you.
And persevere in our national conversation, knowing that nobody wants to have a conversation with you on the left.
They are trying to hit you.
Don't be naive.
We're supposed to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
Those squishy Republicans want to be wise as dove and innocent as serpents.
Don't do it, folks.
Keep your eyes peeled and look at reality square in the face because we are winning the culture.
It's turning in our direction.
Okay, that's the show.
I will see you tomorrow.
We've got a lot of cool stuff coming up this week.
Make sure to get your mailbag questions in.
Tune in for the conversation later on today.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
So I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
