Ep. 177 - Why The F*** Is Everybody So F***in’ Profane?
Why do mainstream media muckspouts constantly use such filthy language? Rubio is on to something. We'll analyze why the Left has such a potty mouth. Then, socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lies about where she's from to score victim points. Jennifer Rubin drops all pretense of being a Republican. Finally, we celebrate the great, unsung hero president James Garfield on This Day In History!
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Why do those frazzling, dadgum, mainstream media muckspouts constantly use such filthy consarn language?
Senator Marco Rubio calls out the potty mouths on the left, and we will analyze why the left has made our culture so much coarser.
Then, socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lies about where she's from and grew up in order to score victim points.
We will analyze, because I'm from the town right next to where she grew up.
Then Jennifer Rubin drops all pretense of being a Republican.
Finally, we celebrate the great unsung hero president, James Garfield, one of the great presidents on this day in history.
Most important of all, Jeremy the God King Boring drops by from our sister network, Daily Wire 2, with an update on the World Cup.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
We got a lot going on today and I want to ask why the F people are so effing profane But before all that, in a special live stream, July 2nd at 7 p.m.
Eastern, we will be joined by special guest Jordan Peterson to celebrate Independence Day.
Not Canadian Independence Day, American Independence Day.
God King Jeremy Boring will host a new edition of Daily Wire backstage with me, Ben Shapiro, and the Andrew Klavan.
Of The Andrew Klavan Show, the one and only Lord of the Multiverse, to look back on our country's birth and look ahead to its future.
Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air.
And if you're not a subscriber, too bad, become a subscriber.
Again, that's today, 7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
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You can find our special live stream on Facebook and YouTube, so do not miss it.
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Okay, without further ado, this is a big weekend for the World Cup.
We turn now to our sister network and Daily Wire 2 sports correspondent, Jeremy the God King Boring.
*music* Scaramouche!
Will you do the Fandango, Michael?
Enormous news from the Bear of the North.
As for the second time in less than a century, Germany's dreams of global conquest collapsed in Western Russia with their 2-0 defeat at the hands of South Korea, a nation with roughly half of Germany's GDP. Speaking to the BBC, former German champ Jurgen Klinsmann said, quote, It's always difficult when you win to repeat it four years later.
An admittedly strange declaration from a nation that has made failure look easy in every generation since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Of course, Germany, who brought us the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, nihilism, Nazism, two world wars, trance music, and the failed project that is the EU, is never truly defeated and will undoubtedly rise again from the ash heap of history and prove that they can, in fact, put a small ball roughly the size of a human head through an enormous net without the use of the hands that God gave them, as well as any third world nation or France.
In other World Cup news, this week marks the close of the tournament's group stage and the beginning of the quarterfinals.
What this means is, frankly, anybody's guess.
This sportscaster, for one, stopped reading the Wikipedia entry pretty early on, if I'm being honest.
Because, as a God-fearing American, I just couldn't be moved to give a flip about what kind of archaic rules govern this socialist non-sport, I having far more exciting things to do with my time, like dozing lightly in my armchair or literally anything else.
I did ask several people in my office who have repeatedly assured me that I'm wrong to criticize so beautiful a game if they could give me a quick rundown of how it all works before airtime.
But they all reluctantly confess to never having actually watched a match before the current World Cup started, even though they think it's a hugely important cultural event and I should be ashamed of myself for blowing it off as nothing more Thank you.
Thank you.
Also, men are not stronger than women.
The Millennium Falcon was never all that fast.
And Batman could totally take Superman in a fight, even though the latter is invincible and can literally shoot laser beams at the speed of light from his eyes from space.
A place that none of the countries that have ever won the World Cup have ever been to.
Probably because they haven't figured out how to use their hands.
To be clear...
To be clear, however, it's not the position of this self-entertained journalist that the admittedly handsome men who run around and fake injuries on the soccer field are not athletes.
On the contrary, they are clearly quite fit and able to run around, if aimlessly, for long periods of time with no breaks.
The issue is not that they aren't athletes.
It's that soccer is not a sport.
It's an admittedly mesmerizing bit of choreography in which colorful objects move back and forth across your screen and then nothing happens.
Here's a clip of one of the weekend's more interesting matches by way of example.
Mesmerizing.
That's it for this week's World Cup recap.
Michael, scaramooch!
Scaramooch!
Will you do the Fandango?
Back to you.
Jeremy, that was such an informative recap of the World Cup.
I really appreciate that.
You know, you were talking a little bit there about Germany's strategy.
I was under the impression...
I talked about that?
I was under the impression that Germany's strategy was to have their competition in the World Cup last a thousand years.
But it seems to have been cut short.
Should we fear the German soccer team rising up again within, say, I don't know, four to seven years?
Well, Michael, historically they always have.
Fortunately for us, the brave men and women of Western Europe who formerly gave the world the British Empire and complex manly sports such as cricket and wealthy sports such as polo will undoubtedly seek a peace for our time and appease Germany all the way to future catastrophe.
One does wonder if we should just dismantle the German soccer team once and for all, but it seems to me that the international community just won't let that happen.
No, no, no.
They have the right to pride as a nation, and we shouldn't stand in their way.
All they're looking for is a little breathing room.
That's absolutely right.
You know, Jeremy, we've heard a lot from the left about how awful Russia is these days and the United States colluded with Russia, but they're hosting this most wonderful and important international sporting event.
Shouldn't we just give them a free pass?
Well, obviously, this sportscaster doesn't know much about politics.
But I will say that of all the things that Donald Trump has done that have offended those in the former Never Trump contingent, perhaps winning the World Cup for the United States of America eight years hence is the worst.
And the greatest proof that he seeks to follow in the footsteps of mass murderer Vladimir Putin...
In reducing the world down to a sort of pre-civilizational hell from which even Jordan B. Peterson's philosophy may not be able to save us.
I'll have to reread Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
It's been a while since I've gone into Gulag Archipelago.
Jeremy the God King Boring from Daily Wire 2.
A very important update and basically has convinced me now to go never Trump.
Jeremy, thanks for being here.
We'll talk to you soon.
Stare a mooch!
You know, I think on this episode, I want to talk about just how profane our culture has gotten.
And specifically the left, why the left has just become so profane.
They just have terrible potty mouths.
And there is no more profane way to begin than talking about soccer.
So I'm glad we could get that out of the way.
Really, really informative.
On the question of profanity.
You might have seen Marco Rubio tweet out over the weekend about how bad the culture has gotten, how coarse the culture has gotten.
And I'm not saying it's because people say naughty words.
People have always said naughty words.
It's because they're doing it so publicly now, and that the left has really embraced this.
Marco Rubio, he tweeted out, quote, sign of our times, the F word is now used routinely in news stories, tweets, etc.
It's not even F star, star, star anymore.
Who made that decision?
And it's funny, like, as he says this, I was thinking about that.
I said, you're right.
It used to be F star star star, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.
Try to say that three times fast.
But now they don't even do that.
They just say it.
And as I'm doing that, Kathy Griffin, the former comedian, the alleged comedian Kathy Griffin, starts tweeting at me and calling me a mother effer.
And I actually, I, this, people didn't understand this, but I tweeted that out.
I said, Oh, hey everybody, Kathy Griffin just called me a mother effer, but without the asterisks.
And people thought I was like whining about that.
I was referencing Marco Rubio, because she proved, the left always does this, the right makes an observation.
And they say, no, we're not like that, and they immediately prove the right's point.
So I got into this little Twitter fight for a while with Kathy Griffin, because I pointed out...
All she does now is scream profanity on Twitter and on television at former Republican officials.
So she sent out this tweet.
She said, F you, Ari Fleischer.
Ari Fleischer was the first press secretary for President Bush.
I said, you know, that isn't comedy.
You can probably get an audience doing that.
You can probably endear yourself to angry Democrats, but it isn't comedy.
It's kind of just cheap.
It's like a cheat in entertainment.
So she responds.
She goes, I just did two big shows at Radio City Music Hall in Carnegie Hall, along with shows in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Boston.
So someone disagrees with you, mother effer.
I said, you're actually kind of showing my point.
I'm not saying you can't sell shows.
Jimmy Kimmel has now made a career on claps not laughs, to use Owen Benjamin's phrase.
They're going out there and instead of actually working up jokes and trying to be funny, they're just going out and Saying mean things about Republicans.
And that's supposed to substitute for a joke.
And this has been going on for a long time.
It's just a cheapness.
And what it shows is that the culture has gotten a little stupider and a little coarser and a little shallower.
But we'll explain why.
Because this isn't just about Kathy Griffin.
This isn't just about Donald Trump.
This has been going on for a long time.
And it's been brought up by the left.
So obviously it's all over TV. It's all over music.
I'm sure even for, you know, our audience, I think, is 99.7% millennial, and then the rest is whatever comes after millennial.
But even growing up, when millennials grew up, you didn't hear these things really on TV. But now they're all over TV. Much more profane words than were when we were kids.
Or all over music.
Every other word is the F word, right?
I was riding the subway in New York.
This was a couple months ago, and I'm sitting there, and some guy, he had his boombox or speakers or whatever, and he's blasting out this very profane gangster rap where every other word is the F-word or the N-word, and that's all it is.
He's sitting next to these nice little old women.
And I would have intervened, except he was big and scary and wearing sort of gang-colored paraphernalia.
And listen, man, I don't need to be a hero, okay?
I don't need to die on the 4-train.
But everyone was just looking at him, and he was staring at everybody else like a sort of challenge, you know?
This is the culture now.
This is what we're going to put out here.
And when did this start?
Why did this begin?
A lot of people blame South Park, but I really want to defend South Park here.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone's show, you know...
Since the late 90s, and the kids had potty mouths.
But South Park sort of cursed ironically.
Like, these kids were showing something about the culture, right?
But they would even joke about swear words.
They did an episode where they said, if everybody just starts swearing in public all the time, then the swear words don't have any meaning.
They don't do anything.
Like, in order for profanity to be profane, you have to have the sacred.
Right?
Because it has to counter the sacred.
It has to undercut the sacred.
So I actually think South Park have been the great observers of this trend.
I don't think they caused it.
It's been happening for a long time.
Why did it happen?
Part of this is freedom.
So part of this is that, you know, in the old days when everything was just network television, then you could have people come out, standards bureaus, and say, you can't use this word on TV, you can't use this word on TV.
George Carlin had the seven words you can't say on TV.
All these naughty words.
But then once you have all of the streaming platforms, once it's all really just part of the internet or new media...
You can't do that anymore, right?
You can't go to every blog and to every web series and say, no, you said a naughty word.
Same thing with music.
Music used to censor their naughtiest words, you know, and a lot of that was Walmart.
So, you know, Walmart was a major seller of CDs.
They would say, we're not going to sell explicit CDs.
And so the producers and the studios would say, okay, I guess we have to put out a cleaner version, too, if we want to actually sell them.
Now that we have streaming, now that music is just free and everyone just puts it right into their cars or right into their homes, that doesn't exist anymore.
And so there is this impulse in human freedom and in a libertine culture to just constantly do whatever people say that you can't do.
We'll explain how this has infected politics and why it probably doesn't spell a good end for the Democrat Party.
And we'll also make fun of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for lying about her, where she's from.
And it is a lie.
People are trying to say it isn't a lie now.
It is.
Before we do that...
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Okay.
So, you remember this.
Even in movies, this is the case.
All the great movies ever made were made in 1939.
Somehow, you know, phenomenal films.
Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights, I believe.
What's the most famous movie ever made?
The Wizard of Oz.
The Wizard of Oz, made in 1939, when there was sort of, not censorship, but there were standards boards that you had to watch out for.
And then, when those went away, the quality declined.
Uh...
This isn't just the case in pop culture.
So part of the reason is like, you know, sonnets.
Like poetry is good when there are constraints on it.
Because then the creativity comes out and you're working within constraints.
But slam poetry is the death of art.
It is the worst thing ever invented.
It is one of the great plagues to ever reflect mankind.
Why?
Because there are no constraints.
So it's just nothing.
We're seeing this in politics.
We're seeing the slam poetry of politics brought to you courtesy of the Democrat Party.
Here is not a random activist, not a random resistance fighter, not any of that.
This is the head of the Democrat Party, Tom Perez.
Here's just a little clip of his soaring rhetoric.
Those Republican leaders and President Trump don't give a s*** about the people they were trying to hurt.
You're got s*** right he's a liar.
That's s*** my friends.
Budget is another example of broken promises.
The budget is bankrupt.
They call it a skinny budget.
I call it a s*** budget.
I don't want people to think I'm being a prude here or something or I'm being too formal or something.
Obviously, when guys hang out, they frequently use salty language.
They frequently talk like Tom Perez.
I don't begrudge any guy that.
There is a kind of social impulse for that.
The difference here is the public nature of all of this.
Because it isn't just the head of the DNC. It's senators.
It's the activists.
It's the rank and file.
It's pundits on television.
It's cultural figures and commentators.
They're all using filthy language in public.
And what it shows is a decay in the ability of these people to think.
A decay in how they think.
A decay in their respect for themselves, for their country, for their party, for what they're doing.
And for other people around them.
You know, there's a reason that you don't swear in front of little old ladies.
You can talk in a bar with your pals and, you know...
Speak in a certain way.
And you don't speak that way with little old ladies.
It's about respect.
I'll just compare.
Have you ever listened to Pod Save America?
I had never listened to it.
Pod Save America are those guys from the Obama administration.
And so they created their own podcast.
It's like the left-wing Daily Wire.
Sort of, right?
I mean, it's this kind of these political guys.
They started these big podcasts.
I had never listened to it.
Pod Save America is so bad, but it's so beautifully bad.
Like, there are so many things bad about it.
It made me feel much better.
Sometimes you wonder, you say, oh, I wonder how the guys on the left are doing this, or we is, or whatever.
Oh, my goodness gracious.
Every single Daily Wire show is like a Shakespearean tragedy compared to the dream.
Dribble, glib nonsense put out by Pod Save America.
Here is just a little clip to underscore a few points that we're talking about here from whatever random episode I listened to of Pod Save America.
We're not, there are things we can do.
And so I think about this as like, what can we do in the short term, the medium term, and the long term to deal with this massive problem?
So short term is blow up the phone lines at the Senate.
We've said this before.
Now it's really f***ing true.
Literally the most important election of our lifetime.
Ever.
More than a presidential election at this point.
This is like the last call for democracy.
That's what we said on the last call.
Because here's how the Supreme Court thing shakes out.
So, you know he's serious, right?
You know he's serious because he said the F word.
He said he's...
And also, just even...
I hate to...
I don't want to, like, get into just personal insults or psychobabble or whatever.
But...
The guy sounds like a Democrat, doesn't he?
He has the voice of just like, well, I can't even do it.
I don't even know how many years of conservatory training I have.
I can't do that voice of a Democrat.
That's sort of like Marlon Brando when he did The Godfather.
He put cotton balls in his mouth.
Right, and it would create that sound.
You would have to put little, like, soy balls in your mouth.
You'd have to have the soy in there.
That's too mean.
I'm not going to go down that road.
But they get really serious.
Lefties do this a lot.
I'm really serious.
I'm going to say the F word.
That's how you know I'm serious.
If I had just spoken like an adult, then you wouldn't know.
And it's just this whining.
But you listen on Pod Save America, and all it is is like talking point innuendo.
So all they say, the Supreme Court seat was stolen.
How is it stolen?
They can't...
They don't know.
They didn't...
And Trump is colluding with Putin.
Can you explain that at all?
No, of course not.
You're just going...
Right.
It's all this...
But it's the reliance on the F word as though that makes you smarter or wittier or funnier or more insightful.
But it doesn't.
It's a substitute for that.
It's when you don't have insight or wit or whatever that you have to rely on those sorts of words.
And it's really sad.
Some people now, whenever I point this out, they send around these surveys that show, allegedly, that people who swear are smarter.
They have a higher IQ.
And there might be something to this.
But really, the way these studies are done is that they're just about people's facility with language.
So they'll see how people can swear or what sort of ways they use language.
And it's true.
If you can swear...
Or if you can use regular language, non-profane language, if you can use it very well, that's a sign of high IQ. That's why, you know, I think nobody has ever matched the concision, which is, brevity being the soul of wit, of my number one best-selling book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
I mean, that's really the most concise and fluid use of language in modern literature, and so I thank everybody, you know, for reading that, and clearly they're all scholars and scientists, too.
The...
But the ability to use profanity and to move these words around might be evidence of a high IQ. But the question is, when is it appropriate to use it?
Because the people that I hear using profanity in public or next to little old ladies on the train...
They don't seem to have a very high IQ. I don't think they go home at night and read Aristotle or something.
I think they're public louts, basically.
I mean, they're just vulgar people who don't show a lot of respect.
So, sure, you can have a great command of language.
And I know plenty of people who speak very properly and politely in public who can talk like a sailor sometime with the boys.
That's all fine.
What it means when you use language like Pod Save America does, or the head of the DNC, or these other left-wing pundits, it means that you don't have any self-control.
You don't have any discipline.
You can't control yourself.
It actually shows the opposite of what those...
Parent IQ studies are supposed to show.
You aren't able to control your language.
What it also shows is this lack of respect for the audience, the people around you, people who might not want to hear that.
Someone says, well, who cares?
It's all over the place.
Do I really clutch my pearls when I hear the F word?
No.
I mean, you hear it a lot.
But it's sort of like a person with perfect pitch.
This is it with, like, civilized people.
Polite people and civilized people who don't say a lot of naughty words, when they hear a lot of profane language, it does bother them in the way that it might not bother other people who deal in that all the time.
Just like when someone who has perfect pitch hears a note that's just a little bit off, it really bothers them because they know where the pitch is supposed to be.
Whereas someone who has bad...
You know, who can't really hear the difference in pitch and tone.
It won't bother them at all because they're just less cultured.
They're less attuned to that.
Same thing with profanity.
Just compare some of this rhetoric that we're hearing.
You hear it on Pod Save America.
You hear it from the head of the Democrat Party.
Compare that to, oh, I don't know, the Gettysburg Address.
You know, one of the great pieces of rhetoric in American history.
I'll just read it.
It's a short speech, so it's pretty quick.
Just compare what this language does to you compared to what Tom Perez does to you.
The Gettysburg Address reads, Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead...
We take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
What if he had sprinkled in just a couple F-bombs, you know?
Wouldn't that have really shown he cared?
He was really passionate?
Kirsten Gillibrand, people blame this on Trump.
They say, well, Trump uses naughty language in public.
And sometimes he does.
Much less so since he's been in office, because he's getting better about this.
But, sure.
This long predates Donald Trump.
This is not exclusive to him, and it's really been brought up by the left.
Kirsten Gillibrand was talking to New York Magazine a few years ago.
She said, if we're not helping people, we should go the F home.
When she started in the Senate, she said she had no F-ing clue how to pass a bill.
Why say that?
Look, sometimes people use swear words in private.
Sometimes they accidentally say them in public and they say, oh, pardon my French.
Sorry, I shouldn't have said that.
People do.
They make that mistake.
But she's trying to say it.
She's taking pride in saying it.
In 2004, long before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate, John Kerry, running for president, said that George W. Bush effed the country up.
Effed up the country.
Publicly.
Why would you try to say that publicly?
There's clearly something going on here with the way that people are approaching respect and the way that they're talking about their fellow countrymen.
This is the same reason, by the way, to use titles.
Some people think it's crazy to say Mr.
Smith, Mr.
and Mrs.
John Smith or something.
This was a big issue when I was doing wedding invitations.
Everyone now wants weird, wacky titles, so you have to say Mr.
and Mrs.
John Smith or Mrs.
Jane Sue and Mr.
John Smith or whatever, all these things.
They said, why are you using Mr.
and Mrs.
and doctorates so old school?
Just now we get rid of these.
I learned this from a seminar with Leon Kass, the great bioethicist, where in the seminar, we're all 18, 20-year-old kids, we would say, okay, instead of saying, hey, John, you had this idea about the book, and I think it's this, use Mr.
Smith, Mr.
Jones, Mr.
whatever.
And it does elevate the conversation.
That formality elevates things.
It's why in...
Congress and in Parliament and even in little debating societies, people use Robert's Rules of Order.
It's why there is etiquette.
You know, the word etiquette, the French word etiquette, appears in its modern use in around 1750.
And coincidentally, that's the height of our civilization, right?
That's sort of the peak of modernity.
And it all really declines from there.
Etiquette are these formal rules, these manners, this civility that we all agree to do, not because we love them, not because we're pearl-clutching, not because we're prude, but because it makes the world more pleasant, makes things nicer, and it facilitates communication, and it's a little nice.
Today, there's no respect.
Profanity is the profane, right?
It shows irreverence for the sacred.
There's the profane and there's the sacred.
So to show that irreverence for this culture is because you don't like it, because you hate it.
Because if you have manners, it means you were raised right.
It means you have respect.
You were taught respect from a young age.
Every little kid says curse words, and usually their parents say, stop saying that, right?
That isn't polite to do.
People don't like that.
You don't see that as much anymore.
And that isn't just a, you know, look, there are a lot of problems with the family, but it's this deeper cultural problem.
People don't have any respect for their country.
People need to stop this.
The reason not to use swear words...
In public, I suppose you can use them in private and then you sound like a cool guy, is because they just coarsen everything around you.
And they lose their power.
So a really well-placed F-bomb in a private conversation at a bar is a beautiful thing, and it can really liven up a story.
But when it becomes the mode of the culture, it's just gross and unpleasant.
No one wants to live like that.
The reason not to use swear words is because you have respect for yourself.
The left tends to hate Western civilization because they hate their country, because they hate themselves.
There is a self-hatred that comes out of that left-wing self-flagellation.
Don't do it.
When you're in public, just have respect for people around you.
You show respect for yourself.
Someone who doesn't have any respect for herself is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialista who won in Queens.
She's posing herself As this city girl.
Let's see.
Do I have to sign off?
I'll get to this story.
Then I'll have to sign off.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just unseated Joe Crowley.
Big upset.
She's running as an open socialist.
And she says, President Trump has never had to deal with a girl from the Bronx like me.
I said, oh, girl from the Bronx, huh?
Let me do like three seconds of a Google search.
Oh, and that's a lie.
She's not.
Alexandria Cortez was born in the Bronx, and then before elementary school, she moved up to the suburbs, to Yorktown Heights, which is in Westchester County, and she grew up in a very privileged position.
And now people are saying...
She's been trying to, by the way, pose herself as this...
She never really moved up.
She just went to school there, whatever.
It's a lie.
Even people on the right right now are trying to defend her from this.
I have a unique perspective in that I also lived as a baby in a poor part of New York City.
And then I also, before elementary school, moved up to Westchester County, coincidentally to the town right next to the town that she is from.
And actually, the only difference here is that she was born in Parkchester in the Bronx, and I lived my first baby moments in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, which is slightly less affluent and more racially diverse.
And then she moved up to Yorktown Heights in Westchester.
I moved up to Bedford Hills, which is much more racially diverse and much less affluent than the town she grew up in.
So these are almost parallel stories.
And I can tell you, man, we grew up a pretty posh childhood.
It is hard to beat that in terms of safety, in terms of school districts, in terms of relative affluence, even if our families...
I can't speak for her family, but even if we didn't have a ton of money, you know, you're just in such an affluent area.
That is a privileged upbringing.
People go to great universities from there because it's a good place to be with good education.
She's trying to spin it.
I've never denied how great it was.
I'm very grateful to have had a relatively pleasant childhood.
She's denying it.
And here's how she's denying it.
People are saying she's just using language creatively.
It's a flat-out lie.
She writes on her campaign website, From an early age, Alexandria grew up with a deep understanding of income inequality.
The state of Bronx Public Schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s sent her parents on search for a solution.
She ended up attending public school 40 minutes north in Yorktown, and much of her life was defined by the 40-minute commute between school and her family in the Bronx.
It was clear to her even then that the zip code a child was born into determined much of their destiny.
The 40-minute drive represented a vastly different quality of schooling, economic opportunity, and health outcomes.
That's true.
She didn't commute.
She didn't commute.
What she is saying, what makes it a lie, is the commute part.
A commute is a regular journey.
That she lived in the Bronx and she went to school in Yorktown.
Which is not possible, by the way.
To access these public schools, you have to live in the town where the school is.
So that's obviously a lie.
She lived in Yorktown Heights.
She didn't live in the Bronx.
If she means that she went to visit relatives in the Bronx, okay, you and every other person in Westchester County, I went to visit relatives in the Bronx when I was a kid.
Everybody did.
That's not a commute.
That's going on a trip to Grandma's house.
You don't commute to Grandma's house.
I didn't go on...
I commuted to Florida to see my grandparents.
No, that's not a commute.
That's a lie.
She's lying.
And John Podhora, it's whom I like, but he's wrong about this.
He tweeted out at some conservative commentator who observed this lie.
He said, Good God, you're a know-nothing schmuck.
Yorktown Heights is an ethnic suburb, the most modest in the county.
Now go be a pig somewhere else.
I disagree with Cortez on everything, but you're a repellent slime bucket of a person.
I don't know where all that anger came from, but what he said about Yorktown Heights just flat out is not true.
Not only is it not the most modest town in Westchester County, it's one of the more affluent ones.
The median household income is, I believe, more than double what the median household income was in my hometown in Westchester right next door, and my hometown was pretty nice.
Yorktown, if he's talking about an ethnic neighborhood, the ethnicity would have to be white.
That's the ethnicity of that neighborhood.
Yorktown Heights is 88% white.
I believe in those days it was even higher.
88% white, some Asian then, I think 5-6% Asian, and a little bit Hispanic.
My hometown, one town over, Bedford Hills, 53% white, 40-some-odd percent Hispanic, and 2-3% black.
1-3% black.
Much more ethnically diverse, much less affluent, but they're all defending her on this.
Don't defend her on this.
It's a flat-out lie.
And this is going to dog her, by the way.
It won't matter in the seat.
I mean, the seat is basically a lock.
It's not that a Republican is suddenly going to flip this district that nominated a socialist.
But it's going to dog her in the way that Pocahontas has dogged Elizabeth Warren.
Because especially at this time in politics, authenticity matters.
We talked about that in the Elvis Donald Trump segment last Thursday.
Authenticity matters here.
And what we now know about her is she's a liar about her identity.
She tweeted at some conservative talking about this.
She said, you're trying to rob me of my identity.
The only person robbing you of your identity is you because you're utterly lying about it.
Pocahontas, Elizabeth Warren is not a Native American and you were not raised in the Bronx.
You were raised in a very affluent suburb.
You should be grateful for that and you should try to spread abundance and prosperity to your fellow countrymen instead of lying and playing the victim and pretending that you're something that you're not and trying to spread poverty and misery, division and victimhood To your constituents to win an election.
It's a cynical misrepresentation.
It's very disrespectful to people who didn't have the privileges that she had, and she should be ashamed.
She'll probably win this seat, but it's going to dog her.
This is her Pocahontas moment.
Okay, I've got to say goodbye.
I'm running really late to Facebook and YouTube.
By the time we get back, I've got to talk about the greatest president, one of the great presidents in American history.
history.
I also have to make fun of Jennifer Rubin.
If you want to see all that, you got to go to dailywire.com.
It's 10 bucks 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, you get to ask questions in the conversation that we're just about to have with the one and only Jordan B. Peterson.
None of that.
None of that matters.
This...
We're doing local batches now of leftist tears.
We're doing little, it's kind of micro-brews.
And this is a lovely little batch from Yorktown Heights.
They're known for their beautiful blend of salt and water.
A really good leftist.
I'll just take a little sip.
Mmm.
That's good.
If I were on the left, I would say that's effing good so that you know that I'm serious.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back to make fun of Jennifer Rubin and talk about President Garfield.
All right, really quickly in our last moments here.
Some good moves over the weekend for the culture, for the politics.
Jennifer Rubin The favorite fake Republican of the mainstream media, more than Anna Navarro, more than Steve Schmidt, Jennifer Rubin, who has pretended to be a conservative for many, many years now, is calling for lifelong mob harassment of Sarah Huckabee Sanders because she had the audacity, the villainy, to be a press secretary in a Republican administration.
Here is fake Republican Jennifer Rubin.
But we're not going to let these people go through life unscathed.
Sarah Huckabee has no right to live a life of no fuss, no muss, after lying to the press, after inciting against the press.
These people should be made uncomfortable, and I think that's a life sentence, frankly.
A life sentence.
You heard it.
Jennifer Rubin said it.
You heard it from her, folks.
I'm glad she's finally really showing her colors here because the left does this.
We don't really get a lot of fake Democrats, unfortunately, other than Joe Manchin.
We have one in the Senate.
Unfortunately, the Republicans haven't gathered our own fake Democrats, but they gather their own fake Republicans.
Steve Schmidt, Anna Navarro, Jennifer Rubin.
I'll be nice and not call out some of the people who I think are being used for Democrat purposes.
But Jennifer Rubin is really one of the worst.
And listen to what she's calling for here.
Sarah Sanders is one of the most competent people.
In the administration and maybe in the country.
I mean, she's really, really good at her job.
She's a clear communicator.
She doesn't lie.
They try to accuse her of all sorts of wickedness and evil.
She seems like a total straight shooter.
She's all around a good woman.
She always had a good reputation until she had the great audacity to work for the Republican president.
She's calling for her to be harassed for the rest of her life.
There is no difference between Jennifer Rubin and Maxine Waters right now.
There's no difference between the craziest, insane, left-wing Democrat congresswoman and the person that Washington Post pretends is their conservative columnist.
It's a total farce.
And this is one of the tricks of the mainstream media.
Is they put out their own conservatives who aren't really conservative, so they say we're balanced.
We're presenting both sides of the opinion.
The New York Times does this.
They have David Brooks.
He's the conservative.
He's not a conservative.
He endorsed Barack Obama because of the crease of his pants.
That's not a conservative.
Washington Post has Jennifer Rubin.
But there isn't actually intellectual diversity here.
There is just the pretense of intellectual diversity.
There's the pretense of political diversity.
It seems to have worked well for these mainstream outlets for a long time.
I wonder if the right shouldn't try to emulate that.
Because even Fox News, there have been a few kind of squishy Democrats who have gone on there, but not really.
At least Fox is generally pretty honest about this.
And when they bring a lefty on, they let that lefty go crazy and humiliate himself.
But when the left-wing outlets bring a conservative on, it's always conservatives who aren't really conservatives, who just say Democrat talking points.
And that really shows you something.
It shows that the right is not afraid to hear different points of view.
Why?
Because we're confident in our message and in our argument.
And if someone presents a different argument that's better, I guess we'll change our mind.
But that's probably unlikely because we are right most of the time.
The left is terrified of hearing the conservative argument.
They don't let it come on their shows.
They don't air it.
I've never once been invited on a left-wing network.
And a lot of my friends who also sometimes go on Fox News or other media outlets do not get invites on CNN or on Pod Save America, that horrific podcast.
They would never do it.
I would have Pod Save America guys come on this show any time.
I'd love to talk to them.
I've begged Democrats to come on this show.
Tom Arnold is the only one with the guts to do it, basically.
Which is why I like Tom Arnold.
He gave one of the wilder interviews, maybe in the history of broadcasting.
But at least the guy had the guts to come on.
The left will not have Republicans on.
It's because they're afraid.
It tells you everything you need to know.
So good.
I hope Jennifer Rubin gets two columns now.
I hope she gets to call for mob terror against Republicans in two separate columns.
It shows them for what they are.
Phonies who can't stand up to the light of scrutiny.
Okay, before we go, we're already running late, I've got to get to this day in history with one of the great unsung American presidents, James Garfield.
James Garfield on this day in history was shot.
He didn't die.
He didn't die until September, I believe.
And this day in history in 1881.
James Garfield only really served as president for four months because then he was shot and really kind of out of it, though I guess technically he served for six months.
James Garfield was a forgettable president if you talk to history teachers and you look at mainstream history curricula.
He was a good president.
He was a very promising president.
He had a good start.
He was devoted to liberty.
He was a Republican not only from the beginning of his career, he was a Republican from the beginning of the party.
The Republican Party was founded in 1856 to free the Democrat slaves, and by 1857, when he entered into politics, he was 22 years old, he became a Republican for that reason.
He was deeply committed to civil rights for all Americans, including black Americans.
He was...
He cleaned up government.
He was an anti-corruption candidate.
And he was nominated by accident in this really great American way.
At the 1880 GOP presidential nomination contest at the GOP convention, he was the campaign manager for then Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman.
And he gave the nominating speech for this guy John Sherman for president.
And Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and James Blaine were vying for it, and they couldn't get enough votes.
None of them could meet the threshold to become the nominee of the party.
So as a compromise candidate, on the 36th ballot, James Garfield was able to get the nomination, and his vice president was Chester Arthur.
The 36th ballot.
You know, now the nominating conventions are all sort of a farce.
They're decided beforehand or whatever.
This is actually where they picked their nominee.
It wasn't just the appearance of the thing.
It actually did what it said it was doing, which is figuring out how to nominate a candidate.
And so James Garfield gets it on the 36th ballot.
The reason I really have a soft spot in my heart for him, I'll have to lean back to one of my great literary works.
James Garfield invented the blank book as an American literary genre.
You know I have a certain affinity for blank political books.
The first blank book in American political history is a book called, I'm going to get the title a little bit off, but The Statesmanship and Political Achievements of General Winfield Scott Hancock, The regular Democrat nominee for president.
So, you know, it would be like Trump saying, here's my book, The Accomplishments of Hillary Clinton, and it's all blank.
It was a five-page blank book in 1880, and obviously now, you know, paper is a lot cheaper, printing is a little bit easier, so I was able to have 200 some odd pages.
They could only do five back then.
But it was so great, because the first blank book in American political history was a Republican trolling a Democrat.
And not just any Republican, the nominee for president trolling a Democrat.
Really, really good.
He was shot within four months, killed within six, and nevertheless, in that very short amount of time, now these days it takes two years to get anything done if you're president, other than if you're Donald Trump, but This guy was able to pull back presidential appointment power from the Senate in those four months, rebuild America's Navy, make it great again, and purge corruption from some federal agencies, from the post office.
He was able to purge corruption, not an easy thing to do.
He was very big on education.
He was very big on civil rights.
Good president.
Would have been a really good president.
Had he lived longer, he gave us Chester Arthur afterward, another great president.
But a guy who is forgotten on his deathbed, or near his deathbed, he said, will I have made any mark on history?
Will history remember me?
And he did.
He turned the country a little bit in the right direction.
And he was a good man.
And he gave us Chester Arthur.
We'll go into him some other day, but he's an important president too.
And a salute to President Garfield because he changed history in a very important way.
He made me a lot of money.
And that's a very important thing.
And he gave us one of my favorite trolls of the year 2017 and a mark of the exuberance of the right after the election of Donald Trump.
So you made your mark, President Garfield.
And your book was all inspiration for mine.
Okay, that's the show.
We have some amazing guests coming up this week.
I don't want to say when.
I did interview Ji Seung-ho, the North Korean defector.
Who, famously, at the State of the Union, he raised his crutches and he was totally maimed and disfigured in Korea.
He trekked thousands and thousands of miles as that tyranny, you know, tortured his family to death.
I sat down with him.
He's the most heroic person probably I'll ever meet.
We'll have that interview coming for you in a few days, so be sure to tune in.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
and I'll see you on Daily Wire backstage in like, I don't know, five minutes.
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.
