Ep. 175 - Trump’s Masterstroke: Making Dems Honest Again
Democrats haven't been this honest since they started a war to stop Republicans from freeing their slaves, and we have President Trump to thank! Then, Justice Kennedy retires! What it means for the Court and country. Gavin McInnes joins to discuss the odds of a new civil war. Finally, what Republicans can learn from Elvis on This Day In History.
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The Trump administration has achieved a lot in just 500 days.
Record low unemployment, a booming economy, the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, and countless other originalist judges to the federal courts, and about to be more originalist judges because, breaking news, Anthony Kennedy is retiring from the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration has also finally moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, gave all Americans significant tax relief, has slashed the federal bureaucracy.
The list goes on and on.
But the past few days have confirmed President Trump's most incredible political achievement of all.
He's making Democrats honest again.
Democrats from the New York Times op-ed page all the way up to the halls of Congress and the Supreme Court are now openly advocating censorship, Electing self-described socialists, demanding the abolition of law enforcement, and calling for mob terror against political opponents and their children.
Democrats have not been this honest since they started a war to keep Republicans from freeing their slaves.
We will analyze what all this means for our country's future.
Then, CRTV's Gavin McGinnis joins to discuss whether the US is headed for civil war.
Finally, the similarities between President Trump and Elvis Presley, as we analyze lessons for Republicans from Elvis' 1968 comeback special on This Day in History.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
We have so much to talk about.
We will get to this breaking news.
This finally came out that Anthony Kennedy is retiring from the Supreme Court.
This could upset the balance of four and a half to four and a half because Kennedy has been the sort of swing vote, though this term he's been great.
We will analyze all of that a ton, a ton to get to because just this week, Democrats have shown their hand.
Donald Trump made them do it.
And The Supreme Court case that came out today is aptly named Janus because we've got a god of doors, of gates, two faces.
The country could go in one of two directions.
We'll analyze with a Canadian, Gavin McGinnis, to see which way it's going to go.
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In the old days, it was pretty easy to look at Democrats and Republicans, to look at the difference.
In the old days, Democrats were pretty honest.
You know, they started this entire civil war.
I guess we might have another one coming up.
But the first time they started that civil war, they said, look, we want to keep our slaves.
And Republicans are trying to free the slaves.
Okay, we stand for this, we stand for that.
They're all terrible things they stood for.
Then, about a century later, the Democrats started to get a little murkier about this.
And actually, I've got to tell you, in the 1930s, the big complaint from American Political Scientists Association was not that the parties were too extreme, that they were too different, but it was that they were too similar.
So you couldn't really tell.
You know, Bill Buckley started the conservative movement basically because of this.
He said there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
You know, the Barry Goldwater campaign was for a voice campaign.
Not an echo.
Have a voice, not an echo.
Have a choice, not an echo, rather.
But he gave a voice to those conservatives who wanted something different.
Now they're being honest again.
You know, they elected in Queens Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This is an open millennial socialist, unseated one of the top Democrats in the House.
And she ran...
Her campaign was awful and despicable.
She ran on basically just socialism.
She went on, you know...
Medicare for all.
She went on abolishing law enforcement.
All of these terrible things.
But she won.
She unseated this top Democrat.
The RNC has been capitalizing on all of this now.
Here is the latest ad from the RNC. A few years ago, ideas that we talked about were thought to be fringe ideas, radical ideas, extremist ideas.
Those ideas are now mainstream.
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country.
And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd!
And you push back on them.
And you tell them they're not welcome.
Anyboy, anywhere.
Do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless c**t.
What's Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women?
One way you get rid of Trump is a crashing economy.
So please, bring on the recession.
When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?
I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.
That's a powerful ad.
For those who couldn't see it on screen, at the end it says, the left in 2018 unhinged.
And the better ad would be the left in 2018 dangerous.
Because it is a real threat.
They're threatening violence, right?
And that's at least Maxine Waters.
All of these people, the right is decrying them right now and saying it's so awful.
Good, you're showing your true colors.
The left has had this undercurrent of violence for so, so long.
The Democratic Party founded the Ku Klux Klan.
It was the terrorist wing of the Democrat Party.
There has been an undercurrent of violence for a long time.
It went underground for a little bit, and there were subversive organizations in the 20th century, not the least of which were the Weather Underground, these domestic terrorists, who were constantly threatening violence against their political opponents.
Now it's back up again.
Good.
I'm glad.
You know, during the old days, they pretended otherwise.
They wouldn't talk about their real motives.
But now Donald Trump, he's just got this magic touch.
He makes these people finally be honest.
It's a Herculean feat.
You know, the media have followed suit, by the way.
Obviously, we've come a long way since Barry Goldwater called for a choice, not an echo.
We've got the media now admitting that they hate the Trump voters, not just their political opponents, not just Donald Trump, not just a mere disagreement.
They despise the people and consider them wicked who voted for Donald Trump.
Here's a little glimpse of the mainstream media.
For certain individuals and institutions, we will, as per Chief Jim Hopper, punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy the meat and the disenfranchised and the marginalized.
And we will do it all with soul, with heart.
There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die.
A lot of his supporters believe that we are the enemy of the American people, and that is really, really an awful situation.
We are not the enemy of the American people.
We love the American people.
Of course you do.
We love them.
By the way, I didn't show you the extra minute and a half or two minutes of that montage that was put together by Gravy or Grabby News.
Drew played the first half on his show.
There's just too many clips of media figures, especially on cable news, talking about how these people who voted for Donald Trump are racist, evil, wicked.
They need to be shut up.
They need violence to be threatened against them.
And so we had to split it up between the two shows.
But of course, no.
Why?
Why would anyone think the media are opposed to the American people?
They're enemies of the American people.
I don't know.
With rhetoric like this and with open calls to violence like this, some people are suggesting that we're headed towards civil war.
The breaking news today, which we're going to analyze it in a little bit, Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the Supreme Court, stepping down.
Some people are saying this is the moment.
If there's going to be a civil war in the country, it's because the court is about to lose a balance that it's had for a long time or potentially could lose that balance.
To help us analyze...
Whether or not we're careening towards civil war, we bring on an expert from Canada, Gavin McGinnis.
Gavin, thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me, sir.
So, Gavin.
Listen, I know that you're from America's Hat, our neighbor to the north, but you're an adoptive...
I moved here in 1999.
When am I going to be considered an American?
That's the real question, you know?
There's such an anti-immigrant fervor right now that obviously, you know, I think you're seeing the Trump backlash, even in your own personal life.
Are we headed towards...
You guys are like the Japanese.
If there's a Korean guy who was born there, but his parents are Korean, he's never Japanese!
You can never be American!
Yeah, especially in that accent.
Yeah, you can never be...
Are we going towards civil war?
Yeah, I think we're already here.
It's a very slow, creeping civil war.
Like, you look at the ethnic cleansing in South Africa.
That didn't happen in an afternoon.
It was like the frog boiling in water, and then everyone realized, wait a minute, the farms are gone.
How long has this been going on?
And I think we've been seeing creeping violence since Trump won, And it's getting more and more.
Like, this past week is intense.
It's an asymptote.
I don't know how mathematically literate you are.
It's totally illiterate.
Okay, well, it's a thing.
It's a graph.
That's the big one?
That's the one that goes big?
That's the one that goes big.
And it's going big.
I mean, this past...
I was just recently mapping out all the attacks on conservatives.
Not because that's the be-all and end-all, but it's a good little litmus test.
And you map them out and it's boink with cat temp and then boink.
With Tommy Lauren.
And then Boink with Chadwick Moore and Milo.
And then Boink, Boink, Boink this week with Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
And who was it?
Mitch McConnell just keeps going.
Stephen Miller, they went to his apartment.
They started screaming outside his apartment.
And then you go, well, surely someone's going to be reining it in.
And Maxine Waters goes, what are you pussies doing?
Get out there and keep their children awake and scream no peace, no sleep.
Come on!
This is the Maxine Waters moment.
She's been calling for violence since the early 90s, since before you even immigrated to America.
And now she's coming out and she's saying, this is it, we can finally...
You know, the pushback on this I've heard is that the right has all the guns and the left are lazy.
Is that some hope for the future?
That just means there isn't a civil war.
That just means they're going to lose.
That just means that they're doomed.
That's true.
That's hope for the future, I guess.
They don't know how to fight.
Like, have you noticed tough guys?
Tough guys never say, we're going to go out there and we're going to punch people in the face.
Tony Soprano doesn't go, it's a very difficult situation.
I'm going to go and murder a bunch of snitches.
He just goes, oh, it would be unfortunate if something were to happen.
I don't know nothing.
I don't know nothing about what happened.
Yeah, we're going to sit here and we're going to take care of that thing about the thing with the stuff with the guy.
We're going to go put the suprasad in the cannoli and the Rico case is going to get 10 feet taller.
I don't know.
That's combining a little Donald Trump in there.
Yeah, if there's any liberals out there and you're watching us wondering what our next step is, notice when we look at each other, we sort of just go...
That means you're going to be in big trouble.
That is a good...
You know, I gotta say, one of our writers, Amanda Presto Giacomo, she tweeted out this picture today from some company, and it was all these men wearing t-shirts, smiling, big, hugging each other.
It said, the future is female.
And those are the guys who are going to fight us in the Civil War.
Yeah, I've literally fought them before.
I mean, at NYU, Antifa, and in New York, Antifa's particularly bourgeois.
They're all white.
They're all sons of academics.
They're all skinny.
And we fought them and it felt like punching raw spaghetti.
Like their bones just crumple like bird bones under your fists.
And then they bring in more women to help them, and you go, alrighty, this is what you want.
Just remember, you are the guys here who are, you know, trying to, you're the futurist female people.
These Antifa guys, the thing about them I noticed, like, in the pre-Antifa days in America, when I was at college, I noticed all of the Occupy, you know, Radical, rah-rah, they were all the children of hedge fund managers, and then all of the college Republicans were there on, like, financial aid and works.
Yeah.
So is it just like a big, they're really angry at their dads for not being home enough as a kid?
And it's really just some like psychobabble playing out on the national stage.
Well, what word keeps coming up with them?
Patriarchy, patriarchy, patriarchy.
What's a patriarch?
It's a father.
They are, and I'm sorry to get all Freudian, but they are mad at dad for divorcing mom and abandoning them.
And By the way, that's a valid beef.
I agree with the impetus for these radical alt-left lunatics.
I agree with their rage, but the way they're directing it is like a spoiled child.
They're acting like petulant children, and petulant children get spanked on the bum bum.
I didn't put it quite in those terms, but this is exactly my theory on how to handle these guys.
They're like little petulant children.
I had Jesse Lee Peterson on the show a little while ago, and he said basically the same thing, that there is this rage among the American left because their parents are divorced or their fathers left home or whatever.
And when you look at the, I'm not saying there's exactly a correlation here, But they do coincide.
There is this total breakdown of the family, huge increase in divorce rate for the parents of these young people now, fathers leaving the home, a ton of out-of-wedlock birth.
Is this basically just the flip side of that social conservative argument?
You know, society starts at the family, and if you have a breakdown of the family, you're going to have a breakdown of society.
I think you can link it to pretty much anything.
I think it's the reason there's a disproportionate number of blacks involved in crime.
I think it's the idle hands of welfare...
Which shattered the black family and left these single mothers with nothing to do, no discipline.
And so these kids get bored.
Blacks committed crimes about the same as whites back before welfare took over.
Thomas Sowell talks about this all the time.
If you and I were sitting in the projects all day just smoking pot in the lobby until the postman couldn't see where the the little steel boxes are because it's like fog down there, and that's a true story, I swear to god I would get up to mischief.
I'd be like, do you want to learn how to hotwire a car?
We used to do that as teenagers.
We'd throw bricks at cars out of boredom.
This expanded adolescence It's going up to 30s and 40s with third generation welfare.
These kids are getting into crime.
So that's linked to fatherlessness.
I think the Trinitarios in New York murdering people is linked to fatherlessness.
I think that these petulant brats screaming, I hate it here!
I hate America!
And storming upstairs and slamming their door so hard that their little nameplate falls off the door and shatters them.
I'm never talking to you again!
I hate all of you!
And we obviously can't handle the gangsters and say, get back downstairs or something.
But as far as the bourgeoisie who are mad at us, like these guys saying, punch people in the face!
We have to protect them from themselves.
Because these people, they don't want the universe that they claim to want.
Like, look at gender, for example.
Say you would let them handle gender.
What's it up to now, like 72?
Yeah, 468 genders, I believe.
I checked this morning on Drudge.
I don't know if it's increased since then.
We have this thing in my family called Kids Day once a year, and there's no rules whatsoever.
You could murder someone on Kids Day.
It's like The Purge.
It's The Purge.
And that's how I lost my wife, actually, my second wife.
I'm so sorry to hear that.
Yeah, it's got to be really hard.
It's gruesome.
Oh, my God.
But they eat candy for dinner, and they stay up watching movies till 4 in the morning.
And the next day, they are dead to the world and miserable.
And what we're doing with the left and what Obama's entire administration, his entire terms were...
Was a giant kids day.
And these kids are obese with candy.
And they're going to kill themselves if you let them keep going.
They'll candy themselves to death.
That's true.
We've got to raise them up.
We've got to try to raise them up right.
And you see it all the way.
I mean, all in the New York Times right now, all the way from the New York Times to the Supreme Court, they're talking about how we can't have any free speech.
Free speech is bad.
We can't let conservatives talk.
Only I can talk.
Stop talking.
Shut up.
Stop listening.
That's all you're getting all the time from the left.
Is there any way to raise them up?
I mean, is it just a soft paddle?
You know when a homeless man comes into the bar and that 21-year-old who just started drinking in a bar engages him?
And you go, thanks, buddy.
Now we have a crazy person with us for the rest of the night.
You don't engage them.
We have to stop giving the left credit.
We have to stop trying to debate them and trying to listen to them.
The answer is just no.
Sit down.
Like, it was beautiful with Trump when they said, there was some journalist from Univision, he's like, excuse me, senor, can you stop saying anchor babies is offensive?
And Trump is like, oh, I'm sorry.
What would you like me to say?
He had no idea, by the way.
And he goes, hey, how about the future dreamer?
A real American citizen, undocumented baby of a person.
And Trump goes, what?
That takes too long.
I'm saying anchor baby.
That's the attitude we have to have.
How many genders do you think there are?
About 470?
No, we're not doing that.
Yeah, I'm going to stick with two.
I would have given you one if you weren't so greedy.
I would have said three, but no, we're doing two.
Stop giving these people credit.
That's what you get.
I'm going to stop this car and turn it right around if you want four more genders.
That's it.
Two.
That's all you get.
My dad would just slam on the brakes on the highway.
Bang!
Go into the gravel.
You've given me a lot of hope for the future.
I was a little nervous about that civil war coming up, but you've really given me some hope for the future.
You know, kids' day is over, the candy is all unwrapped, it's all gone, now it's time to be grown-ups again, and we're not going to engage the drunk guy at the bar.
Think of it as a child civil war.
What if all the eight-year-olds were to rise up today to take over the country?
You just go, oh well, gotta punch some kids.
I feel really bad.
I never thought that my life would come to this.
I'm not enjoying this, don't get me wrong.
I hate myself, kind of, but if it's got to be done, it's got to be done.
I've had nightmares about this for a long-ass time, but it's what I've got to do.
You know, Gavin, this seems to me to be part and parcel of your long-standing political philosophy, coming back from one of the greatest video works you've ever produced, Wrestling Your Baby.
Yes.
This has been coming up for a long time.
This is America.
Trump's America is basically a giant nation of baby wrestling, so...
Put on your baby wrestling gear.
Here we go, boys.
Here we go.
All right, Gavin, I gotta let you go.
That really paints a picture.
Right now we're at Janus, you know, we're at the gate to the future, and all I see is just wrestling babies.
Gavin McGinnis, you can get him on CRTV, Get Off My Lawn.
You get him everywhere, though.
Gavin's stuff is some of the best and funniest commentary out there.
Gavin, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me, buddy.
I see ya.
I don't even know why.
You know, sometimes I prepare notes when I talk to people, but then if Gavin's coming on, I just say, okay, well, let's see where this is going to go.
So the good news is, the good news about all of this, by the way, I agree with most of what he just said, especially with the baby wrestling, because the American people are responding.
You know, the mainstream media, they're just crying and whining and everything's awful, rending their garments and gnashing their teeth, and yet there's a new pullout today from Axios and SurveyMonkey, Which shows that the majority of Americans, all Americans, not just Republicans, not just conservatives, believe that the mainstream news media regularly and intentionally publish fake news.
So, the 72% total of all Americans polled in this poll say that the mainstream news media CNN, ABC, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post regularly publish falsehoods in their reporting.
Now, this number, when you look at just the GOP, the Republican Party, is 92%.
It rises to almost all of them.
79% of independents, so the vast, vast majority of independents.
And even, this is the kicker, the majority of Democrats believe that.
The majority of self-described Democrats, 53%, believe that the mainstream news media regularly publish lies.
Intentional falsehoods.
So it seems that they're not really being fooled.
There is something that we fall into here, which is a moral equivalence, a totally false moral equivalence.
You know, that everybody is extreme.
This side hates this side, and this side hates this side, and it's all the same, and it's all bad.
Hey, we can blame Republicans and Democrats.
It's all basically the same.
No.
No, it isn't the same.
It isn't.
The left is to blame.
If there is blame to go around, the lion's share of it belongs on the left and with the Democrats.
On the one side of these issues, we're talking about particularly free speech today, but even national sovereignty, all of these important questions.
On the one side, you have the Supreme Court.
You have the law.
You have the will of the American people.
You have the American tradition.
On the other side, you have...
The mainstream media and Democrat politicos.
The mainstream media who regularly tell lies and the Democrat politicos who are inciting violence.
Those are the two sides.
Pick your side.
Those are not morally equivalent.
Not even close.
So, you know, you've got Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
She's coming out.
She is a socialist.
You know, at least it's honest.
But these issues are coming to a head.
And they're coming to a head at the Supreme Court.
So the Supreme Court now is the epicenter.
That's why this breaking news today about Anthony Kennedy is so important.
He's the swing vote, right?
He's the guy who, nominally sort of a conservative, not really a textualist.
He wrote that basically romantic poetry on the Obergefell decision, the gay marriage decision, that had nothing to do with the Constitution.
And...
But why are all these issues fought out at the Supreme Court?
One, it's because in the government, the American government follows basically the tripartite soul, so the logos, pathos, and ethos, the logical part, the emotional part, and the spirited part.
So the logical part is the court.
You know, they're just analyzing the logic of the law.
The emotional part is the Congress.
Obviously, they're totally responsive to the will of the people.
And then the spirited part is the executive.
It's supposed to embody the American nation and sort of wield the American nation to execute the laws and policies of the United States.
The philosophical battles are being fought at the philosophical place.
But they used to be fought in other places as well.
The reason they're being fought there is because the legislature and the presidency have both given up a lot of their power.
They've said, well, we don't want to deal with this.
Especially the Congress has given up so much of its power.
The Supreme Court can rule.
Even past presidents have said, I don't know if this is constitutional, but we'll let the court decide.
President Bush said this when he signed McCain-Feingold.
He said, I don't know if this is constitutional, but the court will decide.
No, it's your job to decide, too.
You're supposed to engage in these philosophical battles for the country.
But they've given up their power.
So now we see these great...
What a great week.
What a great month for Supreme Court decisions.
Great decisions on free speech with regard to religious liberty, with regard to abortion, with regard to life, national sovereignty, and who can come into the country and who gets to decide who is able to enter and travel.
And now, labor.
Labor liberty.
The ability, if you are working in the public sector, for the government, that you can decide, I am not going to pay my union dues, So this guy, Mark Janus, is a public employee.
He doesn't want to pay his union dues.
He doesn't want his money going to politics he disagrees with.
He doesn't want to participate in that speech that he doesn't believe in.
Can the government force him into compelled speech?
Now, first of all, public sector unions are a farce.
Government unions and private unions are totally different entities.
In the private union, you've got the employer and you've got the employees.
And there's a tug of war.
There's a battle here.
And each has something to lose.
Each has something to gain.
So it's sort of a fair fight.
When it comes to the government...
The public sector unions.
The government is just negotiating with itself.
It's just negotiating with its own entities.
So the people who elect them, the unions that give them money, it's, ooh, who loses?
The American taxpayer loses.
The American people lose.
But they neither have anything to gain by not raising rates, by not giving into labor demands.
So this question was...
Do government employees have to have their speech compelled?
And it's really, you know, all nature is but art unknown to thee in all chances direction, which thou canst not see.
The name here, Janus, is so important.
Janus is the Roman god, the two-faced Roman god of gates, of beginnings and of ends.
And it really feels like we're at the end of something and maybe at the beginning of something.
We're at a gate here.
The country can go one of two ways.
All of these Supreme Court decisions have been great because they've cleared away a lot of the muck, all of the tyrannical, oppressive, yucky muck.
But now the question is, do Americans want liberty?
Do we want freedom?
Freedom has costs.
Freedom has risks.
Freedom leaves some people behind if they don't push themselves, if they can't succeed, if they take risks and lose.
do Americans still have the will for freedom?
The left in this country adamantly says no.
They're pushing for a Medicare for all.
And I always thought, when I heard Medicare for all, I thought that's the worst campaign slogan I've ever heard.
Medicare for all, that makes it sound like we're all just old, geriatric, helpless people, you know, can't fend for ourselves.
But that's what they're running on.
They say, we want you to be helpless.
We're going to take care of you.
Shh, baby, baby, we're going to shh.
It's okay.
It's okay.
And that's what they're pushing for.
You know, that election in Queens.
They're being honest now.
They're saying, we're full-on socialists.
We don't like the country.
We don't like law enforcement.
We're just, hey, let us be your benevolent betters, your dictators.
And then it's not just these wacko candidates.
All the way from the op-ed page of the New York Times to the Supreme Court, the left is saying, you should not have the right to speech.
You should not have the right to speech.
That's what Elena Kagan, left-wing justice on the court, she had a blistering dissent in the Janus case.
This is what she wrote.
Today is not the first time the court has wielded the First Amendment in such an aggressive way, and it threatens not to be the last.
Speech is everywhere, a part of every human activity, employment, health care, securities, trading, you name it.
For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech.
So the majority's road runs long, and at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens' choices.
The First Amendment was meant for better things.
Are you kidding me?
I mean, this argument, which is about choice, do people get to have choice?
That's what the Janus case is about.
Do people get to have the choice to join the union or not to join the union?
To pay union dues or not to pay union dues?
No.
And she's saying that having that choice is the opposite of choice.
I mean, this is Orwellian stuff.
War is peace, up is down.
That's what she's saying.
But listen to what she says.
She says, you know, speech is involved in a lot of human activities.
You don't say Sherlock.
Is that right?
Because it's the First Amendment.
It's the first one.
It's not like the Eighth Amendment.
It's the First Amendment.
The founders clearly thought it was important.
And every civilization in the history of the world has said that speech is the essential human activity.
Genesis, in Genesis, the primal act of creation, the act that creates the cosmos, is an act of speech.
The Lord says, let there be light.
In Christianity, the Savior is the Word of God, is the speech.
What does Adam do?
His job that God gives him is to name things, to use his speech to order the world.
In Gilgamesh, the rising up from the animal, from the brutal and the animalistic, to the human is to gain speech.
Because speech is consciousness.
And it's not just ancient myths.
It's modern social science, you know, modern linguistics.
Noam Chomsky, whom I rarely cite in the affirmative, but he's good on linguistics, he says that recursive language is what defines human consciousness.
That's what makes a human a human, is the ability to have language, to have words and speech.
This is the essential human activity.
And Kagan is saying, yeah, but if we let people have freedom over their speech, they're going to have a lot of freedom.
We can't have that.
Oh, we can't have...
No, no, no!
Speech is too important to humanity.
We have to restrict that.
We have to bring that down.
And it's a really sick and insidious argument.
But that is the argument of the left now.
This was in the New York Times op-ed page that I'm going to have to sign off.
This was in the op-ed page today, I believe.
Today or yesterday.
The question was, ignorant people don't have the right to an audience.
Which is funny that the author of this op-ed got it published and got a pretty big audience.
Irony abounds.
This was by Brian W. Van Norden, a philosophy professor somewhere.
And the premise of the article is that, isn't it awful that Ann Coulter gets to go on TV just like Ta-Nehisi Coates gets to go on TV? Because Tonhezy Coates, he's so great.
He's that absolutely shallow thinker who writes for the Atlantic and blames everything on race, and even though he's one of the most successful people in the country, says that you can't get ahead because of your race.
Meanwhile, he's won the MacArthur Genius Grannies, succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination.
He's saying, isn't that awful that conservatives get to talk, but so do lefties?
He said, isn't it awful that Jordan Peterson He's a Marxist critical theorist.
And Marcuse, he's actually pilloried and mocked in the Coen Brothers movie Hail Caesar.
The idiot character of George Clooney is saying like, well, you know, Professor Marcuse said that this is all really good.
And you know what else Marcuse said?
And the joke is that Marcuse is just wrong about everything.
And that's when Josh Brolin picks him up and slaps him across the face.
So he quotes Marcuse in this New York Times op-ed.
He says, quote...
In endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one.
The misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth and falsehood.
If only we could censor all those stupid, stupid people!
That's the premise, right?
But who gets to decide who the stupid people are?
What the bad ideas are?
Why?
Herbert Marcuse, of course.
Why?
Brian W. Van Norton, of course.
The op-ed page of the New York Times gets to decide.
You don't get to decide.
Conservative people you disagree with don't get to decide.
No, it's just them.
This is what they're pushing for, you know.
It's no coincidence that these ideas, particularly from Marcuse, helped to inspire the rebellions of the 1960s.
Bombs in the streets, riots everywhere, anti-establishment, anti-government protests.
And we're seeing them bubble up again, just as we're seeing threats of that again.
There are left-wing pundits who are saying we could have bombs in the streets, that we could have a real rebellion in the country.
No coincidence.
That idea is a really terrible idea.
There's a thought that stops thought, and that's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
We'll get into the question of what's going to happen next when we go through the Janus gate, the two-faced gate, in a second.
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I'm already running long today.
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Why do you need to go?
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You know what you get, right?
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Backstage.
Daily Wire Backstage special with Jordan Peterson.
You get to ask questions.
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You should go over there right now because we're going to do that tomorrow.
Anthony Kennedy is retiring.
Pray for me, guys, because I'm going to have to take a few big gulps here.
Anthony Kennedy, I think.
I still have two and a half tumblers of this to finish Anthony Kennedy is retiring and we're hopefully and probably going to get an originalist in his place.
I've warned you guys before, you haven't heeded my warning.
Go to dailywire.com right now.
You need to.
You will be washed away.
I don't know if there's going to be a civil war, but there will be a flood.
And the flood will cover all of the earth.
And it will last for many, many years.
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We'll be right back.
back and then we'll compare Trump to Elvis.
I was a little hyperbolic at the top of the show.
The I said the last time the Democrats were this honest was when we freed their slaves.
And then they threw a war to try to stop that.
That's not quite true.
The left was pretty honest in the 1960s.
They actually were pretty honest then.
They would say, yeah, we want to overthrow the government, man.
We want to help the Soviet Union, man.
We want to get rid of all of it.
It's all awful.
We want a new morality.
We don't like the traditional moral order.
You had the Weather Underground, the leader of which was one of Barack Obama's political mentors, Bill Ayers.
You had them setting off bombs, trying to bomb government buildings.
What is going to happen with the Civil War?
I said yesterday I don't think it's likely to happen.
I think Matt Walsh said this.
I think we all kind of agree it's unlikely that it's going to happen because, as Gavin said, the other side is a bunch of babies and we have all the guns.
But there is a new poll out that shows that 31% of Americans, all Americans, say that a civil war is likely within the next five years.
11% say it's very likely.
And this holds equally, basically, among Democrats and Republicans.
Democrats are more likely to think a civil war is coming.
That's 37% compared to 32% of Republicans.
Independents, about a quarter of them, say that a civil war is likely.
But, so who knows?
That's a minority of voters.
But the majority of voters, 59% of people, say that those opposing Donald Trump will start violence.
And the reason they're saying that is they're already doing it.
Yeah.
It should be 100%.
We've seen all the videos.
They're saying, please, go attack their homes, attack their families, chase them down in the street.
So we know that that's happening.
That is pretty scary.
That is not a good place to be.
But it gets back to that freedom argument.
I'll use Mark Janus' name to talk about the god Janus, the Roman god Janus, from where we get January.
And it has two faces.
It isn't all...
We're so happy.
I mean, it's like the best...
Two weeks of news ever.
All of these huge Supreme Court victories, real victories for liberty.
Liberty's not going to die today.
Anthony Kennedy, the squish is retiring.
We're going to get a good textualist judge in his place, we hope.
I mean, this is all good news, but there are two sides of that.
There is going to be pushback.
Some conservatives have suggested that Anthony Kennedy is the last person holding the social fabric together because lefties can count on him sometimes.
He's a swing vote.
Once the court becomes solidly originalist or textualist, then Democrats and the left are going to have to admit that they are opposed to the law.
They hate the law, they hate the institution of the Supreme Court, and they're going to try to knock it down.
The left is very good at destroying institutions.
Not good at building up institutions, but good at destroying them.
That is scary.
There are two sides to the Roman god Janus.
One looking back, one looking forward.
One looking behind the gate, looking behind you to the past, and one looking forward and seeing if we can go together in a productive way.
Freedom is risky.
You don't know how it's going to turn out.
You can't predict the future.
That's why it's the future.
You cannot predict it.
But there is a chance, and we should embrace freedom, because you can see light.
You know, where there's light, there's hope.
And there is hope for the future of the country, but you've got to just march on forward.
You've got to keep plowing ahead, even though it's dangerous, even though the leftist mobs that Maxine Waters is calling are going to your house and screaming, even though there are threats to your job, threats to your place of business.
Threats to your family, threats to yourself.
You've just got to keep going forward.
This is what it feels like to win.
The United States has been through way rougher periods than this.
In the Civil War, they had to shoot trained, armed soldiers.
Now we're just wrestling with babies.
I know it still feels chaotic and rough, but these are victories.
There does seem to be hope ahead.
The Democrats are being honest.
They're showing their cards.
And the American people don't like their cards.
I think this does not...
This is not a great strategy for the Democrats.
And we're going to see that.
We're going to see if America still supports freedom or not.
But we can learn a thing or two from Elvis Presley.
And in my last few minutes here, on this day in history, in 1968, Elvis Presley staged his comeback special on NBC. And I think that there are some similarities here between Elvis and the president, obviously.
But also that the Republicans can learn a lot from...
From that Elvis Presley 1968 comeback special.
So the way this worked out, I don't know if you've ever seen it.
Let's just play a clip from the comeback special to show you what's going on.
I don't even time to believe me.
I don't even time to show.
I don't even want to be a boy.
I love Elvis.
I'm a huge Elvis fan.
I've been an Elvis fan since I was a kid.
You know, Bill Buckley even was an Elvis fan.
You know, there is something kind of conservative about Elvis, and I just really love him.
And by 1968, Elvis's career was in the gutter.
I mean, it was so awful, largely caused by his manager, Tom Parker.
But in 1956, he was the big hit rock and roller, you know, the biggest thing in the world.
And then he did this string of forgettable Hollywood movies that I sort of enjoy, but they weren't very good.
And he was a little fatter, and he just wasn't, he had nothing, you know.
And so they had this idea for a comeback special.
And what his manager, Tom Parker, wanted was for it to just be one of these Andy Williams playing Christmas carols on TV, really boring and, you know.
That would have been awful.
There was a young executive or young director at NBC, 26 years old, Steve Binder.
And he had a different idea for the comeback special.
It was going to be unplugged, raw, honest.
There were going to be people all around him.
And the way they found this...
He came up with this idea.
He walked into Elvis' dressing room one night and he was just kind of jamming with his friends.
And he said, this is it.
This is the special.
This is what you want.
And the most famous scenes from that special are Elvis just playing around with his friends.
People on stage sitting around looking up at him.
Very casual.
Very authentic.
Even the moments where it's really big on stage, it's Elvis alone.
Vulnerable.
Not crowds of thronging people around him.
Not crazy lights and everything.
Just really intimate and really authentic.
This is what the GOP can learn from Donald Trump.
Because what Donald Trump did is he took away all of the contrived glitz and glamour.
And he made his campaign as authentic as can be.
I mean, he talked directly to the American people.
His main mode of communication is a direct line to the American people on Twitter.
It's not the super specially produced campaign ad.
You think of all the We're good to go.
Forever.
I mean, this has been an evolution, forget just American media, since Pericles gave the funeral oration.
You know, the acoustics in ancient theaters were designed such that you ideally would maximize the volume that would travel while still trying to remain intimate.
You know, you wouldn't have to scream and shout.
You wouldn't have to jump around and dance around.
You want that intimacy and that authenticity.
You get that in radio much better.
Franklin Roosevelt used that very well.
TV, much, much more intimate.
Then you get to the internet, much, you're in these really close settings where you're just talking.
I'm talking to however many people right now.
I'm not shouting and screaming, right?
It's an intimate mode of communicating.
The Republican Party should understand this.
We are winning.
The conservative movement has talked and stirred something within the American people.
The public opinion polls all show this, that the public agrees with the GOP on the vast majority of issues, even on fake news.
I mean, the majority of people, the vast majority of Americans agree with the GOP on immigration.
You've got this woman who won the Socialist in Queens.
She says, we want open borders.
We need open borders.
We need to abolish immigration law enforcement.
We're speaking to the American people.
You don't need to do a soft shoe about it.
You don't need to dance around and scream and shout.
The message will win.
You have to communicate it authentically.
And the 1968 special really made me think about it.
Because if Elvis had come out and tried to do some big, crazy show...
No one would have cared and said, oh, that's sad.
He's trying to, oh, isn't that sad?
But instead he just comes out and he's raw and he's himself.
That is how we're going to win in the midterms.
That's how we're going to go through the right gate of Janus and move the country in the right direction.
Speak honestly because people aren't stupid.
The left thinks that people are stupid and gullible fools and easily confused and easily deceived.
They're not.
The average person you pick up on the street, the so-called average person that you pluck up, he's probably just as smart as you are.
There's no reason to think that you're this great genius.
That is a total prejudice of the left to say we're all the geniuses in this room and everybody else out there.
They're the unwashed masses.
Talk to people and respect them.
Speak directly to them.
Talk fearlessly and don't ignore their Complaints.
They're serious complaints.
Don't ignore their needs.
Don't say that their needs are wrong and sinful.
And if you want to have your law enforced that you're a racist, Nazi, awful, terrible person, just speak to people directly and respectfully.
It's going to pay off.
All right, that's it.
And we got to fit Elvis into the show.
Get your mailbag questions and we got a lot more coming up tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
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