Grover Norquist stops by to discuss how you don’t even realize all the money you’re making thanks to the Trump administration, and then he spills the beans on an incredible piece of executive action that may make you even more money. Then, with “conservatives” like Tomi Lahren, who needs leftists? Finally, Daily Wire 2 sports correspondent Jeremy “the godking” Boreing stops by for a World Cup update!
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Grover Norquist stops by to discuss how you don't even realize all the money that you're making thanks to the Trump administration, and then Grover spills the beans on an incredible piece of executive action that may make you even more money.
This is all good news.
After that, with conservatives like Tommy Lauren, who needs leftists, we will finally have to analyze Tommy's very unfortunate comments on television.
But to make us all feel better again, Daily Wire 2 sports correspondent Jeremy the God King Boring stops by for a World Cup update.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
There is so much going on today.
I don't even know where to begin.
Obviously, the Trump judicial nominee, the Supreme Court nominee, has not quite come out yet.
We're hearing little rumors.
I don't want to report on it quite yet, but we'll have more on that tomorrow.
Some other great news.
I am going on tour.
I am coming to a college near you.
There's a time and a place for everything, and that place is college.
That's right.
I'm teaming up with the YAF, Y-A-F, Young America's Foundation, to go on a college tour this fall.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
You can check out, they just did a story on it at yaf.org.
You can read all about the tour.
It's going to be called Covfefe on Campus.
We're going to be addressing the eternal questions, politics, religion, how to be a man when you look like a Maddow, how to not write anything and sell 100,000 copies, and how to do that.
And we are going to analyze on this tour once and for all what Covfefe really means.
If you want your college to be a part of that tour, go to yaf.org and put in a request ASAP. I'd really put it in quickly because there are only going to be limited engagements and we're going to start looking at that list really soon.
So go to yaf.org and put in a request ASAP if you want covfefe on your campus this fall.
And again, it is time to join the conversation.
On Tuesday, July 17th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, Andrew Klavan.
The Supreme Lord of the Multiverse himself will answer your questions, moderated by the beautiful and dauntless Elisha Krause.
The Q&A will stream live on YouTube and Facebook for everyone to watch.
Only Daily Wire subscribers can ask Drew questions.
To submit your questions, log into dailywire.com, head over to the conversation page to watch the live stream, type your question into the Daily Wire chat box, have it read and answered on the air.
But you can only do that if you're a subscriber.
Subscribe to get your questions answered by Andrew Klavan, Supreme Lord of the Multiverse, Tuesday, July 17th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, and join the conversation.
We've got to get to this World Cup update before we do that.
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D-Y-N-A-T-R-A-P-D-O-T-C-O-M. Promo code D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E. Without further ado, I do want to talk a little bit more about what's going on in the news and about this YAF tour.
Before that, I need an update from the world of sports.
For that, we turn to our sister network, Daily Wire 2 Sports Correspondent, Jeremy the God King Boring.
Yowza!
Thank you, Michael.
It's great to be back with you for a segment one YouTube commenter observed as coming off more like ignorance than humor.
That's our Daily Wire 2 coverage of the Fujiwater World Cup.
Let's get right into the action, or what passes for action in a sport where the tied game can be resolved by giving two teams yet another opportunity to tie.
That, however, is not what happened in our first story of the week.
That is host Russia's humiliating defeat at the hands of their former socialist protégés, Croatia.
After a tied match, Michael, it all came down to the shootout, in which each team was given five penalty kicks to determine the winner.
It's actually the most eventful and near stimulating moment in any soccer match, which raises an obvious question.
Since any tie is statistically indistinguishable from a 0-0 score, which is how every game begins, why can't we just skip the entire deathly dull affair and go straight to the shootout in every soccer match?
Of course, that would admittedly make soccer feel like a completely frivolous non-game in which the winner is essentially determined by luck, which I believe is the answer to YouTube commenter Mikey87's question of the week.
Quote...
WTF does GDP have to do with anything, comma, it's a sport, exclamation mark.
Well, you're half right, Mikey87, as Russia found out the hard way by being unmanned by a nation with roughly 3% of their gross domestic product.
Also, if you skip the entire match, where would you put the funny commercials?
Oh, that's right.
There aren't any funny commercials in soccer since no human being anywhere on earth has the kind of willpower and discipline over their attention span to actually wait even longer to see what's going to happen in the next slow-moving children's game in which not a single thing has ever happened since that one guy was hurt ironically while faking an injury in 1957.
Also, most people for whom this dreadful exhibition is their only escape don't have the individual income to purchase things in the first place.
Still, the biggest news of the week, at least for Anglophiles, was England's defeat of Sweden, both in GDP, $2 trillion to $511 billion, and in gameplay, 2-0.
That's right.
England has officially made the semifinals, bringing their number one best-selling single dream one step closer to reality.
It's coming to the house!
Of course, I know that many of our viewers, as proud and patriotic Americans, are wondering why we here at The Daily Wire 2 haven't devoted a bit more time to covering America's standing in the current worldwide tournament.
We, too, have been confused as to why we haven't seen Old Glory waving above more matches.
Fortunately, angry YouTube Killjoy Morosa pointed us to the answer with this edifying comment.
Clearly you're triggered because the U.S. couldn't qualify against the likes of Panama and Trinidad and Tobago, LOL. Candidly, Marosa, this sports journalist had no idea, as I, like almost every one of America's native sons who didn't grow up doing missionary work in the third world or being a girl, never contemplated this farce of a competition, even once since I was five years old and learning basic motor functions.
I am, however, certainly triggered now that I know.
You mean to tell me that despite having a GDP equal to 25% of the world's total economy, owning the world's reserve currency, having the finest athletes in the world as evidenced by almost every metric, including having won more medals than any other country in the Olympics by double,
Having the longest enduring constitutional republic in human history and having almost single-handedly invented all of the splendid wonders of modernity and having kept the free nations of the world largely safe for more than a half century, America can't beat a Caribbean island nation with fewer than a million and a half people and a GDP lower than that kid who invented putting pictures of your food on the internet for people to like?
Why?
I dare say one begins to wonder if this whole soccer business is even a fair measurement of human accomplishment at all.
Michael, yowza!
Back to you.
A really thorough report, Jeremy.
I really appreciate that.
I was wondering, would you say you spent more time looking at the YouTube comments on our segment or watching the World Cup?
Yowza!
Back to you!
Terrific.
Well, I can't wait for the next update.
I do have to ask, as I think are all red-blooded patriotic Americans, how much longer is this World Cup going to go on?
Hell if I know, Michael.
Well, I've got to tell you, I sort of hope this World Cup keeps going on and on.
This joke certainly has.
These segments have really kept me so abreast.
I feel like I've learned something in every single one.
And I hope the rest of our audience has finally learned something, too.
Jeremy the God King Boring, everybody.
See you next week.
Really thorough stuff.
I'm really glad we finally started up that sister network, you know, for all of that important sports coverage that we couldn't get to.
Really great.
So we had Grover Norquist come by.
We're obviously all waiting for the Supreme Court nomination decision right now.
I have noticed that people are just saying a little gossip on Twitter and everything.
All of the people in the Trump coalition who really matter to the Trump coalition from a wide variety of places in it, movement conservatives, Republicans, officeholders, grassroots activists, all this, they all seem to be pushing for Amy Coney Barrett, though it's unclear right now who it's going to be.
We'll talk about that a little at the end, what Trump has to gain or lose from the possible nominees.
I also am going to take on Tommy Lahren.
You know it kills me.
I try to be so nice to people and I don't want to destroy so-and-so or destroy whatever, be mean to people within the broad tent of the right wing.
Tommy Lauren has just gone too far, and she's slandered pro-life conservatives one too many times, and she's really spouting destructive nonsense.
So we're going to cover that at the very end.
Before we get to Grover, I've got to make a little more money, honey.
Listen, I mean, this...
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Without further ado, we had one of the key figures of the conservative movement for the last 50 years Grover Norquist.
He's the head of Americans for Tax Reform.
He was the head of the College Republican National Committee when he was a young man.
I believe it was President Reagan who asked him to start Americans for tax reform.
He has been a conservative leader to keep the Republican Party to the right, to keep our taxes low, to stop the government from taking away our freedom and our property.
He stopped by to talk about what's really going on in the Trump tax plan, what it means for the rest of us, what President Trump's administration can do and might be doing to give you even more disposable income, and where he sees the conservative movement going.
Without further ado, here's my interview with Grover Norquist.
Grover, thank you for being here.
Yes.
So I look around right now.
I see deregulation, government on the way to being able to drown itself in a bathtub.
I see major tax reform.
Grover, thank you for being here.
Yes.
So, I look around right now.
I see deregulation, government on the way to being able to drown itself in a bathtub.
I see major tax reform.
I see a movement for smaller government.
I see more originalists on the court who are willing to rein in an expansive government.
Are you ready to declare victory?
I'm ready to declare that we're moving in the right direction.
We have a long way to go because the other team took 100 years to mess it up.
Half of the federal government was created in four years.
Between 34 and 36, the New Deal, a bunch of entitlements, and between 64 and 66, that's 10% of GDP absorbed by government programs created in four years only.
But to get there, They had to get a supermajority, pass it, back off, and lose the next set of elections, and then keep going with some steady upward movement, largely because of their entitlement.
So we have a long way to go, but we are heading in the right direction on several parallel paths, as you say, regulation, taxes, even on spending.
I mean, we're making some progress.
Absolutely.
It's difficult to keep in mind how much ground we lost during the Obama administration.
And this was such the argument in 2016.
You say, guys, you know, we have careened off of this cliff.
We need to do anything we can to pull it back in the right direction.
On tax reform, which a lot of President Trump's critics said that it's never going to get through, they're not going to be able to pass it, he's able to get it through in his first year.
Does tax reform mean a better PR strategist?
It seems like this should be much more popular than it is.
It's a tax cut for virtually all Americans.
And when you factor in the corporate tax cut, it is a tax cut for all Americans.
Why is it not more popular?
There are two challenges.
The first is that today, 80% 3% of Americans have direct deposit for their paychecks.
I don't see my paycheck.
It goes straight to the bank.
I couldn't tell you how much of a tax cut I got because I don't look at that difference.
And so quite a number of Americans have not looked and seen that every two weeks, every month, they've got more being put into their bank accounts than last year.
The IRS calculates that more than 90% of Americans have a significant A tax cut is a pay increase for taxpayers.
And 90% of Americans got that pay increase.
In May, there was a jump in consumer spending.
Some economists think that people actually looked at their bank account and said, hey, there's more than we thought.
And they didn't notice it every two weeks, but they did notice it in May and you saw spending move upward.
The other challenge is we made fundamental changes in the economy that will be benefiting us for the next 100 years with more investment in the United States.
$300 billion flowed back in in the first three months of this year.
$305 billion.
$1.7 billion is expected over a two-year period.
That translates into higher wages.
The economists say between $4,000 or $5,000 for somebody making between $50,000 and $70,000 a year.
That doesn't happen tomorrow, but it goes up and it lasts the rest of your life in terms of that increased sustainable That's a great point.
And when you talk about rearranging certain institutions and certain structures in the United States for longer-term investment, for longer-term prosperity, the tariffs have been in the news a lot lately.
President Trump is threatening these tariffs with people who are ripping us off, who the World Trade Organization would say is playing unfairly.
What are the risks, what are the rewards of this tariff fight, and how do you think it's going to play out?
Well, Trump is right on two big points, that we've agreed to tariff deals, to free trade agreements that are less advantageous to the United States than they should have been.
This is after World War II. We felt sorry for everybody.
They were all flattened.
We were still doing reasonably well.
And we gave away more than we needed to over time, both to Japan and to Germany, the people we vanquished and our allies in Europe.
Those need to be readjusted.
And just as the fact that the Europeans don't pay enough for their defense on NATO, we pay more than they do, and it's their neighborhood we're defending.
We're not worried about the Canadians whacking us.
Well, not since 1812 anyway.
So we do have to rethink some of this, and Trump is completely right, and the Europeans go nuts because they've been on a free ride for a long time, and As have some of our trading partners.
He's right about that.
Second point is that he wants to get to a more open and freer trading agreement, not to have permanent walls or barriers or protectionism.
That's not what he's argued for.
He has threatened tariffs in order to get their attention to reduce tariff barriers.
And some of the agreements that seem to be coming will do exactly that.
The danger, his goals are good and important.
The danger is that when you're playing this game of fighting with tariffs, you're not in charge of both sides of this.
The Chinese can decide maybe they like certain tariffs and they can take a lot more pain because they don't have elections in November.
And we do.
So a trade war that goes on as opposed to a conflict and argument and trying to come to a better agreement, one that's even better for the Europeans and other trading partners over time.
I think there is that danger that it spins out of control.
And we end up with the Hatfields and McCoys.
Nobody can remember who was punching who, why, but we keep punching each other.
That is a danger.
It's happened before.
But I do think that with the people around Trump and Trump himself, they understand that the goal is more open trade because we win that.
But we also need to keep our taxes low.
We were handicapping ourselves when we had a 35% corporate rate And Communist China, 25%.
We're at 35%.
Does that make any sense at all?
We shoot ourselves in the foot with trade, and then we yell at the Chinese because that's their fault?
No.
That was stupid things our government did to us.
Our trial lawyer laws, our tort laws, are destructive.
No other country is as goofy as our tort laws are.
We need to reform that.
And our regulatory rules are much more damaging to us than any other country does to themselves.
So some of the stuff we can just stop beating our own head against the wall.
That's helpful.
And the other we need to tell the Europeans and the Japanese and the Chinese, we need to get better agreements.
The president's committed to that.
We get that in the next couple of months.
I think you'll see the stock market shoot through the roof going into November because it's a little bit slower than it could be.
The tax cuts done very well, but there's a concern that tariffs could escalate.
Yeah, could escalate, could wipe out some of those gains.
And it is such a great point.
A lot of those trade deals negotiated after World War II, you think now we're 70 years on.
We don't need to keep doling out the charity here.
And same thing with NATO.
I wonder, looking forward at the election, what can President Trump point to?
Booming economy, record high employment, tax cut for virtually all Americans, on and on and on.
Foreign affairs in a more stable place, the regulatory regime being slashed.
I'm sorry?
No war.
No war.
That's right.
I mean, we could be here all day naming the concrete policy achievements of the administration.
And so what the left throws out is allegations of racism or Nazism or he's a mean person and he's a sexist or whatever.
How do you think that will play?
You've been in Republican politics a long time.
How do you think that plays in November?
Historically speaking, probably Republicans should lose the House.
How do you see things shaking out?
Yeah, I think the Senate looks very good because of the playing field, because of the quality of the candidates we got.
We're not running any more moors in Alabama, running top quality candidates.
How do you lose Alabama?
How do you lose Alabama?
It's unbelievable.
Yes, it was not helpful.
And had we gotten that, there are a number of things we could have accomplished this year that we just weren't able to, that we will be able to do next year.
Now, I'm a little less worried about the House than some people because when they say the average over the last 10 elections is to lose 30, the reason that's the average is that when Clinton raised taxes, he lost 60.
When Obama raised taxes, he lost 60.
You average those with the two Bush years where they didn't really lose much at all and gained a little bit.
60 and zero average to 30.
But our guy, Trump, and the Republican House and Senate didn't raise taxes, didn't explode new government programs.
And so I'm not sure that there's some sort of rule about 30.
It's a historical accident.
But I think it is if you raise taxes and throw on massively spending programs, you lose a lot of house seats.
So we do have to worry.
The other team's very energized.
They see their whole future evaporating in front of them.
They see a Supreme Court that no longer drags the country to the left every three months with some new lurch.
I mean, they think we're going to go whack back the other way.
If we just got a Supreme Court which held things steady and let the House and the Senate and the American people make decisions, we wouldn't be dragged leftward, ever leftward.
And there are some decisions on questions like racial quotas and property rights and how much power the bureaucrats have, Chevron deference and other issues like that, where I think we will see sizable shift as we did with the Janus case, which says 5 million people who've been forced to pay where I think we will see sizable shift as we did with the Janus case, which says 5 million people who've been forced to pay union dues even That's huge.
That's a tremendous step forward towards liberty.
And it has the side benefit of defunding the modern left.
That is it, and that is the focus.
I know some people, particularly Trump's critics on the right, they were just arguing over, you know, how many Republicans can dance on the head of a pin.
And, of course, the object here is liberty, and liberty is increasing.
The Janus case is a good example of that.
Although we do see, even from the Tea Party years onward into this new Trump era of politics, a shift in the conversation from issues like deficits, the primacy of lowering taxes, increasing economic liberty.
There is a bit of a shift into cultural issues.
We're talking, you know, Andrew Breitbart was fond of saying politics is downstream of culture.
Now there are these larger cultural issues that, Do you see that trend moving even more in that direction?
Do you see that as opposed to the economic agenda, or do they work in tandem?
Well, the establishment press...
I don't know why people call them mainstream press.
They don't represent the middle of the country.
Nobody watches.
I think I get more viewers than MSNBC. I'm on the internet.
But the establishment press, the three networks and PBS and stuff like that, They find cultural issues, left of center cultural issues, endlessly fascinating because you can talk about them without knowing anything.
And you can also talk about them without any numbers involved to get in the way of your theory.
Whereas if you want to talk about spending and taxes and growth, you do have some numbers that are kind of hard reality to bounce up again.
We're better off expanding liberty.
I think culture is downstream of Of politics in the sense that if you give people more liberty, we now have two million people homeschooling.
Thirty years ago, only two states allowed homeschooling.
We changed the law to allow concealed carry permits in more than 40 states.
There's 17.5 million Americans with concealed carry permits.
That changed the nature of the Second Amendment debate more than anything else.
Not hunting.
Hunting's been fairly stable, declining even.
But people with concealed carry permits feel uncomfortable.
carrying to defend themselves and their families, have changed the culture.
And with the decline in union power, meaning power over workers, workers are more free to vote the way they want to instead of how they're told to.
Hence, Trump and the Republicans carrying Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin and Indiana and Iowa all have a unionized states that years ago, the unions would have driven the vote and the politics in those states with forest union dues.
Now we have right to work in Michigan.
In Iowa, they passed Act 10, like they did in Wisconsin, saying no more stolen money in politics.
I'm not opposed to money in politics.
I'm opposed to stolen money in politics.
Right.
That's a great point.
And when you give people liberty, they will react.
It is funny.
You can picture two people bickering over politics and this and that.
But then when you present them with the reality of prosperity, the reality of deregulation, the reality of just being more free to say what you want to say and do what you want to do and spend your money the way you want to spend your money, raise your kids the way you want to raise your kids, a lot of that goes away.
There's an entire generation now, my generation, that grew up with really only foggy memories of economic prosperity.
And I think the reality of that is really finally setting in.
I have to harken back because you're so famous for Americans for tax reform being the central force in conservative politics for decades.
You also were the executive director of the College Republican National Committee.
Now, having spent some time with the college Republicans, I go to campuses and speak a fair bit.
Do you see any shift there?
Have you paid attention to what's going on on the campuses?
Obviously, the universities themselves have imploded because of leftist tyranny, basically.
But what's going on with the conservative movement as it takes place on university campuses?
Well, I was in college 74 to 78, and we were coming right out of the 60s.
I was at Harvard Where the left took over buildings and trashed up.
So the idea that conservatives today are put upon strikes me as this is not completely new.
This has happened before.
They were blowing up things in the 60s and the 70s with bombs and killing people.
So the left on campus, the weathermen and so on, the Black Panthers, these were serious, deadly, serious I think one of the advantages the right had coming out of the 70s was the Boy Named Sue phenomenon, which is to be a liberal.
All my left-wing friends at the Harvard Crimson student newspaper was me and a bunch of Bolsheviks.
They would say things like, well, you know, the death marches in Cambodia, they're bringing people into rural health clinics.
That's what they would say was going on.
And everybody would go, oh, that's very nice that they're moving people into rural health clinics as hundreds of thousands died and were murdered.
But nobody challenged them.
But if I could say, I think property rights are important, you'd get 20 questions.
Well, what if you're on an island and there's only one, you know, a well and you own the...
You really had to be on the top of your game.
to be involved in politics the Dartmouth review crowd up yeah at at Dartmouth University they put out a feisty well written free market conservative publication and they got hit all the time they really had to learn to defend those and a lot of talent came out of that campuses because they were oppressed because they were I'm asked 50 questions defend yourself defend yourself to better And the left, guys like Gore, could go around going, I invented the internet.
And nobody said, excuse me?
Yeah, come again?
Yeah.
And now, they're even more lackadaisical on the left.
They have a couple of magic words they say.
Well, now it's really the boy named Sue phenomenon where you just have to call boys Sue.
You say, okay, we can't question this?
Okay.
Yes, it has to be a challenge.
But I think our guys are tougher coming out of campus because of that.
And we'll be again.
You are totally right.
I can attest to this just from my own brief experience.
When I was in college, the lefties had their Occupy New Haven protest.
And they weren't going and taking over...
I'm sorry?
Why would you want to do that?
I've been to New Haven.
I know.
Listen, I was in New Haven for four years.
Then I stopped occupying.
I got out of there basically right afterward.
These people, they come in and they just occupy.
They didn't take over Willard Hall with machine guns or something.
They just sort of sat around like boring hippies.
But for the ten of us or so on campus who were conservatives, there were all of these jibes.
You were constantly having to defend your thoughts.
And this was really good because you actually did change your thoughts.
It's why I recommend to people who write in and say, should I, you know, should I never send my kid to any left-wing institution?
I say, no, send him to some crazy left-wing school.
As long as he can defend his thoughts, it'll either ruin him or it will make him actually understand what he thinks and think through his own conservative thought.
They had, at Yale, they had the Buckley Program Free Speech Gala a few years ago, and they had Yale students spitting the On the attendees, they said, how dare you want to have free speech and consider other ideas?
I mean, that's really the education that the left gets on campus.
The right has so much more opportunity.
I want to leave on this one question.
Where do you see it going?
From the campuses all the way up through the White House?
What is next for the conservative movement?
You've been at the center of it for so long.
Where are we headed?
Sure.
The next big win is this Supreme Court appointment.
Which will give us a 5-4 control that really will rein in some of the abusive drift to the left.
And that has nothing to do with President Trump, right?
That's what my Trump critic friends on the right had nothing to do with Trump.
Trump won.
Romney forgot to win.
He just let it out of his mind.
Oh, I should have won.
Yeah, darn.
There is virtue in winning and Also, again, he put together that list.
This is, you know, the idea that somehow he put together a list.
He said, hold me to this.
This is what I'm going to do.
Better than either Bush did.
Better than what Reagan had, frankly.
Now, he had, over time, a conservative movement around him that made that a lot easier.
He had a Republican House and Senate that made it easier.
But that still didn't get Romney or McCain across the finish line.
And we limped across the finish line twice with Bush.
So...
Trump brought something to the table by winning, and he is governed in a way that expands liberty through the courts.
He's focused on the courts, along with Mitch McConnell.
The two of them are working that very, very well.
They keep winning more and more of those seats.
I understand we'll have 20 to 25 percent of the circuit court seats by December.
Wow.
So this is very helpful.
Keep the Senate.
We can keep that going.
The next big The next big thing to happen is that there is a movement for the Treasury Secretary to change the definition of cost when you calculate capital gains is not cost what you paid for, land or a building or stock, but cost plus inflation.
So it takes inflation out of capital gains.
About half of capital gains is inflation when you sell a home It will drop, in effect, drop the capital gains tax in half and tremendously strengthen the economy.
You can do this by, not executive order, but by definitional change, by regulatory change.
The Secretary Mnuchin of the Treasury said that if Congress doesn't do it, he may.
Half the cap that I've talked to is for it.
The entire leadership, House and Senate, supports it.
Hasn't gotten a lot of attention, although the Wall Street Journal did a piece where Mnuchin said, it'd be good for the economy, and if Congress doesn't act, I may.
So I think that'll happen in the next two months.
I think you'll see the stock market begin to go way up, very strong.
But every house, all land, all stock would all be worth more because it's a hedge against taxes on inflation rather than being the tax on inflation, which makes selling an old house or an old land or buildings more expensive than it which makes selling an old house or an old land or buildings So that should be a tremendous liberalization of the economy.
Grover, I have got to have you back more often.
I feel so good by the end of this.
I was already feeling good with the way the country is going, but there's a lot of light on the horizon, and we can just look forward to it.
Grover Norquist, thank you so much for being here.
Good to be with you.
Take it easy.
Man, I've got to bring him back all day long.
We don't have the great news yet.
We're going to see.
I'm waiting on the Supreme Court pick to see if Trump just trolls everybody and picks Merrick Garland.
He's like, ha ha, I got you, you know, tee hee hee.
And then we'll go on to the next one.
I've got so much more to talk about.
We've got to talk about Tommy Lauren.
I've held my tongue too long on her.
And another little laugh we can all have together before this SCOTUS pick.
But, if you're on Facebook or YouTube, I'm sorry.
You've got to go to dailywire.com to see the rest of the show.
It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You will get me, the Andrew Klavan Show, the Ben Shapiro Show, ask questions in the conversation, ask questions in the mailbag.
None of that matters.
Because unless President Trump nominates Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court, which I don't think Vegas is putting a lot of money on right now, then tomorrow morning, oh, tomorrow morning, most likely, we hope, knock on wood, you'll be able to just Right now, even if it's too much, just all of the op-eds leading up to the decision, make sure you get your leftist cheers tumbler.
You need it.
We'll be right back.
Go to dailywire.com.
Tommy Lauren.
Oh, Tommy Lauren.
Look, you know me.
I don't like to be mean to people.
I don't even like to be mean to lefties.
I definitely don't like to be mean to people who are ostensibly in the conservative coalition or sort of right wing or conservative or whatever.
That is why, by the way, when Tommy Lauren last year went on The View and called pro-life conservatives hypocrites, slandered pro-life conservatives, I held my tongue because I actually sort of feel bad for her.
She got very famous when she was very young and very ignorant, and I wanted to give her a free pass so she could read a book or something and then stop spouting this sort of nonsense.
Then, last night, at the most crucial moment, as President Trump looks to fill a Supreme Court seat, a generational, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to restore American liberty and constitutional jurisprudence, Tommy Lauren goes on television and spouts this Tommy Lauren goes on television and spouts this incoherent, destructive blather.
Here it is.
I'm going to say something my fellow conservatives and Trump supporters may not like, but I must be true to my beliefs, whatever the party line.
So it's time for final thoughts.
Pressing for a Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v.
Wade would be a huge mistake.
Yes, the new high court vacancy is a huge opportunity for conservative values and principles.
I get it.
And I understand the passion behind the pro-life movement.
But to use conservatives' newfound power on poll to challenge a decision that, according to a new Quinnipiac poll, most Americans support would be a mistake.
This president is winning for the American people on the economy, foreign policy and tax reform.
These are areas that benefit all Americans, regardless of religion or social beliefs.
If we continue to focus on these things and immigration, we'll sail into 2020 with all three branches in our control.
That's how we get things done for the American people.
That's how we win.
Let's go after sanctuary cities and push for voter ID laws.
We lose when we start tampering with social issues.
Consider this.
When Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch got to his confirmation hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was grilled on the so-called Trump litmus test on abortion.
He responded by telling Senator Lindsey Graham he would have walked out the door if Trump had asked him to overturn Roe.
Even if conservatives decide to go for the Roe v Wade jugular, it's unlikely to succeed.
Legal tradition makes it harder to overturn a past decision unless there are strong grounds for doing so.
And a departure from precedent like Roe, which has since been upheld by other cases, is even harder to come by.
During his hearing, Justice Gorsuch made a point of noting the decision had already been reaffirmed several times.
Do we really want to fight for this?
Alienate Democrats, moderates and libertarians all to lose in the end anyway?
That's a risk I don't think is worth taking.
And I'm saying this as someone who would personally choose life, but also feels it's not the government's place to dictate.
This isn't a black and white issue, and I would never judge anyone in that position.
I believe the way to encourage someone to choose life is to treat her with compassion, understanding, and love, not government regulation.
Because let's be honest, the federal government does few things well, and I believe regulating social issues is an area where it fails.
Let the churches, the non-profits, and the community groups step in, not almighty Uncle Sam.
But those are my final thoughts.
Feel free to disagree.
I don't even know where to begin.
Where do I begin with that?
I think just about everything she said was wrong and just utterly uninformed and ignorant of even what the question is.
And the worst part of this is that we're at this crucial moment.
We're at this most important hour, and she uses this opportunity to spout this destructive...
Nonsense.
To begin, so let's just jump in.
She says, look, I would personally choose life, but I would never tell other people to choose life.
Why?
Why would you personally choose life?
Is it because it's a living being?
Is it because it's a human and you don't want to kill the human?
Or is what you're saying, basically, I would never kill my beautiful special progeny, but all those poor ethnic minorities, they should kill theirs.
That's what you're saying.
When you say, I would personally never choose life because my baby is like special, but all your little babies kill those babies.
We don't need those babies.
So let's go back to the top.
She says that we, not just that we shouldn't be pro-life anymore as conservatives, we shouldn't overturn Roe v.
Wade.
Roe v.
Wade is the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court.
It is based on absolutely nothing.
It comes from a fabricated constitutional right to abortion based on an earlier fabricated constitutional general right to privacy that does not exist.
The judges who said that it exists, who invented it, said that it doesn't come from the Constitution.
It comes from the penumbras and the emanations of the We just want it to exist.
It's totally made up.
So just to begin, regardless of what you think about abortion, Roe v.
Wade has to be overturned because it's anti-constitutional.
It steals the right to decide public policy questions from where it belongs in the legislature, with the states, with the people.
And it steals that for the government.
If Tommy's argument here is that we shouldn't give undue power to the government, that decision just in and of itself, without regard to the question of abortion, gives utterly undue power to the Constitution.
It almost cracks our constitutional system.
Then afterward, the notion that running on social issues will hurt Republicans is simply not true.
President Trump ran on social issues.
He ran a vigorously pro-life campaign.
She actually references it in this incoherent segment.
She says that Neil Gorsuch, when he was up for the court, had to answer for President Trump's policy because in his campaign, President Trump promised, I will appoint justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.
He won on that.
That's what won, Tommy, not running away from that.
So even her own evidence for her point actually utterly undercuts her point and argues for the opposite of her point.
Also then, to say that we're going to lose future elections if we talk about abortion, young Americans are the most pro-life generation in the country.
It's not that Americans have gotten more in favor of abortion over time.
Since Roe v.
Wade, America has moved much more in the direction of pro-life.
The country is about evenly split right now.
And actually, when you drill down and ask proper questions about when babies should be allowed to be killed, the country becomes overwhelmingly pro-life.
But young Americans, millennials, are the most pro-life generation in the country.
So that point doesn't make any sense.
And then she says, we need to win.
We need to win, win, win, win.
We've already seen that her strategy wouldn't win, right?
The winning strategy is the one that we're doing, the pro-life strategy.
But what is winning if we say, look, guys, if we just stop trying to do conservative things, then conservatives will win.
That's a Pyrrhic victory, darling.
That isn't a win.
That's the opposite of a win.
That's abdicating responsibility entirely.
And it kills me to take shots at people who call themselves conservative or think they're conservatives.
But first of all, to give this ridiculous screed on national television, this fact-free screed at so crucial an hour, is either...
Utterly reckless and brain dead or it's sabotage of the conservative movement as a justice is about to be picked once in a lifetime.
So it demands wide sweeping opprobrium.
But also, look, you get second chances but you don't get endless chances.
If you're going to be a national television star, you need to read a book.
Like one book.
You need to understand at least the question that you're discussing, regardless of your point on it.
My problem isn't that Tommy is apparently a pro-abortion fanatic, so to speak.
She takes the sacramental view of abortion, apparently, for everybody's babies but her own.
That isn't quite the issue.
The issue is she doesn't even understand the question.
She has no idea what is at stake, and she's spouting this destructive inanity on national television.
She's more than welcome.
Tommy, if you're watching this clip, you're more than welcome to come on the show, and we can talk about this.
I hope you do come on the show.
One cannot remain silent when this sort of nonsense is being spouted by what are apparently saboteurs in the conservative movement.
If you've got conservatives like this, who needs leftists?
Who needs them?
That's just a little...
Fiery point to end on because it's so, so frustrating when conservatives or nominal conservatives try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Before we go away, I know we're running out of time, but I've just got to turning to the actual question of the Supreme Court today and the actual question of who this nominee is going to be.
Cabot Phillips, a great, great genius and wonderful media figure from Campus Reform, he went out and he asked students what they thought of President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
President Trump hasn't nominated anybody for the Supreme Court, so how did he do that?
Well, he just said that he had, and the students, not knowing anything about anything, decided to give their impressions of the person who does not yet exist.
Here is Cabot Phillips.
What's your reaction to the justice that he nominated today?
I'm honestly not surprised by his choice, but that's just worse for us.
I just saw the pic and I was like...
Like, it's almost at a point where you kind of expect that it's not going to be what you want.
He's quite, you know, extreme in his views, and I don't know if it would make the Supreme Court very even.
I see it all over the news that, like, he's, like, racist.
This new, like, nominee is very racist, and I think it's starting a new wave of something, something very negative, and I'm really scared about what will happen in the future and my choices he'll make.
So what reaction have you seen on social media today after the news?
Oh, outrage, as it should be.
This is just a reoccurring thing.
He keeps doing this with different positions and just doing whatever he wants, abusing his power.
Do you feel like his pick is an abuse of power?
Basically, yeah.
His entire cabinet and everyone he's chosen has been the white supremacist Legion of Doom and it's dangerous to everyone who looks like me.
Do you feel like the spring court nominee today kind of falls in that same line?
Of course.
They should all wear white hoods and burn crosses at the Capitol because that's exactly the move.
That's what they're going for.
The fact that he would put someone up there that is so racist and is not practicing the equality that we need to see, again, it's insulting.
He's not going to last.
You're not a fan of the pick?
I'm really not.
They're burning crosses is what they're doing.
Who knew?
This is a great little video because I'm not surprised at all, of course.
That's the reaction.
Forget the students.
That's what the left-wing press does.
That's what adults in the Democrat Party do.
That's what you're going to see regardless of who the nominee is tomorrow.
And say, oh, she, I hope, is a racist and a this-ist and a sexist and a this and a bigot.
And then I don't know anything about her.
They don't know anything more than these kids know about the invisible person.
But it's going to be a great opportunity to gather these leftist ears.
And it's a good reminder, by the way, that they have no idea what they're talking about.
They have no clue.
They're just spouting little catchphrases.
Racist.
Sexist.
Blah, blah, blah.
Blah, blah, blah.
When a lefty calls you that, it's okay.
Let it roll off you.
It doesn't mean anything.
They're not talking about you.
They're talking about whatever fantasy is bouncing around their echoey imaginations.
Just like in that video.
Alright, we're running late.
That's our show.
We're, I hope, going to have a good show tomorrow once we decide who the Supreme Court Justice is.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knoll 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.
