Should Hollywood director James Gunn have been fired for making pedophile jokes 10 years ago? Samuel L. Jackson, William Shakespeare, and the Lord your God weigh in. Then, Alan Dershowitz joins to discuss whether Democrats will or even can impeach President Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Should Hollywood director James Gunn have been fired for making pedophile jokes ten years ago? | |
| Samuel L. Jackson, William Shakespeare, and the Lord your God weigh in. | |
| Then, Alan Dershowitz joins to discuss whether Democrats will, or even can, impeach President Trump. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Oh, there's a lot to get to today. | |
| We have got further evidence that Donald Trump is the vengeance of the Lord your God, but we will explain how. | |
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| Okay, back to pedophiles. | |
| Back to the pedophiles in Hollywood. | |
| So you saw James Gunn, who's the director for Guardians of the Galaxy. | |
| He's about to inherit the whole Marvel universe. | |
| You know, he's a big up-and-comer in Hollywood. | |
| Major player. | |
| He just got killed. | |
| Got fired from Disney because he made pedophile jokes ten years ago. | |
| And some people are saying maybe it's more than jokes. | |
| Hollywood has a pedophile problem. | |
| Is he part of that? | |
| Others are saying this is just a witch hunt. | |
| You know, he says negative things about Trump and he's an anti-Trumper and he's... | |
| He's basically getting what he deserves. | |
| There was just a character assassination. | |
| For reaction, though, because now this is hitting everybody. | |
| Trevor Noah's getting hit for racial tweets that he sent out years and years ago. | |
| There were all these Michael Ian Black said some weird pedophile tweets. | |
| Sarah Silverman made some weird pedophile tweets. | |
| Patton Oswalt made some weird pedophile tweets. | |
| All of this for reaction. | |
| We cut now to every single person in Hollywood. | |
| We gotta definitely write a song about how we do not diddle kids. | |
| Do not diddle kids. | |
| It's no good diddling kids. | |
| There is no quicker way for people to think that you are diddling kids than by writing a song about it. | |
| You gotta write a song that says, ooh, I wouldn't do it with anybody younger than my daughter. | |
| Little kids gotta be big older than my wife and my daughter or something like that. | |
| I don't know if that's going to work. | |
| I don't know if that's going to convince anybody. | |
| So this is the question. | |
| Should James Gunn have been fired for this? | |
| Should these people who made jokes 10 years ago, should they be liable for those things now? | |
| You know, it couldn't have happened to a better guy. | |
| That's what I'll first say about it. | |
| It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. | |
| James Gunn is the first one on the line to say, kill people, not literally, figuratively, kill their careers, make them lose their jobs, cancel their shows, because I disagree with them politically. | |
| James Gunn is the first guy to do that. | |
| He's the first in line. | |
| Here are a couple tweets from him, not the pedophile tweets, but the anti-free speech ones. | |
| He says, quote, I wish some of these so-called defenders of liberty would start to understand what freedom of speech is and isn't. | |
| Roseanne is allowed to say whatever she wants. | |
| Doesn't mean ABC needs to continue funding her TV show if her words are considered abhorrent. | |
| Okay, alright, that's a fair argument, James, but, you know, be careful when you throw stones. | |
| Let's see what happens to you. | |
| He also said about Laura Ingraham, he said, I hope Hulu stops advertising on the Laura Ingraham show so I can watch it. | |
| Online bullying and shaming of teenagers should not be supported by Hulu. | |
| Let them know. | |
| And he said the same thing about Laura Ingraham. | |
| I'm really looking forward to season two of Handmaid's Tale, so I hope Hulu stops advertising on the Aunt Lydia show, I mean on the Laura Ingraham show, so I can watch it. | |
| Online bullying and shaming of teenagers should not be supported by Hulu. | |
| Let them know. | |
| So James Gunn, this guy, is saying, fire Laura Ingraham, fire Roseanne. | |
| They should all lose their shows for, in Roseanne's case, a joke they made, and in Laura Ingraham's case, just because he disagrees with her politics. | |
| And now it comes back to him. | |
| Be careful about this. | |
| This made me realize, across a whole broad array of spectrum, not just Hollywood, but in foreign affairs, in politics, to the news media, Donald Trump is the vengeance of the Lord. | |
| Donald Trump is the vengeance of the Lord. | |
| It made me think of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. | |
| Here's Samuel L. Jackson explaining Donald Trump. | |
| Ezekiel 25, 17. | |
| The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. | |
| Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. | |
| And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. | |
| And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee. | |
| That's it. | |
| He's the vengeance of the Lord. | |
| You know, it's funny because Samuel L. Jackson in that movie says, I'm quoting Ezekiel 25.17, I think, but he's actually misquoting it. | |
| He's got a lot of other stuff in there that isn't in Ezekiel 25.17. | |
| This is the direct quote. | |
| And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes, and they shall know that I am the Lord when I shall lay my vengeance upon them. | |
| I'm not saying Donald Trump is laying his vengeance. | |
| I'm saying he is the vengeance. | |
| Donald Trump is the vengeance. | |
| He is the double standard destroyer. | |
| He wrecks the double standards in all of these people. | |
| Because, you know, when I saw the James Gunn thing, my first reaction is, this is an ugly culture. | |
| This is a really ugly culture where we're just gunning, pun very much intended, gunning to destroy people for things they said 10 years ago. | |
| What jokes did I make 10 years ago? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Did I make some off-color jokes? | |
| Yeah, for sure. | |
| I don't know which ones, but certainly I did. | |
| Did you? | |
| Yes, you did too. | |
| So did every single person. | |
| So should people lose their careers because of jokes? | |
| Even bad jokes, even crass jokes, even unfunny jokes that they made 10 years ago? | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| But if you're going to dish it, you better be able to take it. | |
| And James Gunn, those are the rules he wants to play by. | |
| We didn't make those rules. | |
| We didn't make the rules that you lose your job because you make a bad joke or because you made a bad joke 10 years ago. | |
| That was the left that did that. | |
| That was James Gunn begging for it over and over and over. | |
| And now he is being swept up in that. | |
| What you deal out, you're going to have to receive back in return. | |
| And President Trump is the one to give it to you. | |
| He is the evidence of that. | |
| Do we like the politics of personal destruction? | |
| No. | |
| That phrase, by the way, coined because of the things that Hillary Clinton was saying about her husband's accusers. | |
| She says they're trailer trash, they're this, they're that. | |
| No, I don't like that at all. | |
| But if they're going to dish it out, we're not going to unilaterally disarm. | |
| No way. | |
| That would be crazy. | |
| We're not going to lie down and let them destroy the culture. | |
| Destroy our politics? | |
| Destroy our media? | |
| No. | |
| If they're going to claim a scalp, we're going to claim a scalp. | |
| James Gunn, it's good that he lost his job. | |
| It's a good thing in this context because they're dishing it out. | |
| But it would be much better if we lived in a culture where you could just tell jokes and you didn't have to deal with this. | |
| If we lived in a culture where the president didn't have to go out and have personal invective against people or say these things or be, you know, loud-mouthed or arouse the public passion, I don't think the president should be arousing the public passions, but if the left is going to do it, we have to do it too. | |
| If Barack Obama is going to go out there and rub our nose in every cultural victory that he has, if he's going to rewrite the Constitution and then paint the White House in rainbow colors, then absolutely Donald Trump should go out there and rub their nose in it too. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| That is the vengeance that they have asked for. | |
| That is their just dessert. | |
| And I don't want to live in a world of just desserts, but if they're going to have it, we have to answer that. | |
| And once they decide to back down a little bit on the left, then we can back down too. | |
| You see this even in Iran. | |
| Donald Trump is just the double standard smasher in Iran. | |
| The president of Iran, Rouhani. | |
| He said, you know, he's very upset that President Trump is ripping up that awful nuclear deal that Obama negotiated. | |
| And so he said, you know, peace with Iran is a wonderful, terrific peace. | |
| And war with Iran is war unlike anything you've ever seen. | |
| And they're rattling. | |
| Iran always rattles, right? | |
| They say death to America. | |
| They're always saber-rattling, saying awful things about America. | |
| And American presidents lie down and take it. | |
| Not President Trump. | |
| President Trump tweeted, in all caps, to Iranian President Rouhani, Never ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the likes of which very few throughout history have ever suffered before. | |
| We are no longer a country that will stand for your demented words of violence and death. | |
| Be cautious. | |
| Now, do I want the president to have to say these things? | |
| Do I want the president to have to scream like this? | |
| Digitally scream, which means all capitals? | |
| No, I don't want that. | |
| But I'm not going to live in a world where the United States just takes it, where these tinpot dictators in Iran or wherever, these mullahs, start saying crazy things to us. | |
| And start threatening the United States, and we say, oh, okay, well, that's fine. | |
| No, no way, buddy. | |
| You guys calm down, and we'll calm down, too. | |
| But we can't have it that way. | |
| Some people now, the experts, are saying, well, you know, Rouhani, he's really just saying that to get the hardliners off his back. | |
| He's really, oh, he's just, look, he's not really making a threat. | |
| He's really just trying to get the pressure off of him from the hardliners. | |
| Yeah, okay, well, maybe he should have tried to get the pressure off a different way then, huh? | |
| Because that is not acceptable. | |
| That is not acceptable behavior in the international community. | |
| We're not going to take it anymore. | |
| I'm very, very pleased to see that. | |
| How about Carter Page? | |
| So, you've seen this Carter Page application. | |
| The FISA application has been revealed in some way. | |
| It's still heavily redacted. | |
| But Judicial Watch got this FISA application to find out if Barack Obama's administrative agencies were spying on the Trump campaign. | |
| The answer is yes. | |
| Yes. | |
| They had made statements in public. | |
| They'd said, no, no, we didn't use the Democrat-funded Steele dossier to spy on Carter Page. | |
| Now, we didn't use that really at all. | |
| That was very minor. | |
| We know from this application that's not true. | |
| It was based on the Steele dossier. | |
| The Steele dossier was ordered and funded by Democrats. | |
| It was poison fruit from the very beginning. | |
| And they lied. | |
| They lie. | |
| These people that we said, you can't criticize the FBI. You can't criticize the CIA. You can't criticize James Comey or Bob Mueller or John Brennan. | |
| You're not allowed to criticize them. | |
| No, we need to build up our intelligence agencies, our administrative agencies. | |
| It's terrible to criticize them. | |
| Sure, but they need to act in the right ways. | |
| And if they're going to be corrupted, if they're going to act as partisan hacks that are spying on a presidential campaign, then we're going to have to criticize them, aren't we? | |
| We're going to have to attack them. | |
| It would be better to live in a world where we didn't have to do that, but we're not going to lie down. | |
| We're not going to allow this double standard. | |
| Not anymore. | |
| Donald Trump is not going to allow that to happen. | |
| The FBI said on four separate occasions that the Steele dossier was not the source of We now know that wasn't true. | |
| How long is this Mueller investigation going on for? | |
| What is the purpose of this? | |
| What is the scope? | |
| Why is Bob Mueller the most important man in Washington? | |
| We can't tolerate these double standards anymore. | |
| No way. | |
| Actually, that whole bit from Ezekiel 25 is important. | |
| The thing that Samuel L. Jackson misquoted. | |
| It's important. | |
| It tells you about our moment. | |
| Ezekiel 25 reads,"...because the Philistines acted in vengeance and took revenge with malice in their hearts and with ancient hostility sought to destroy Judah, therefore this is what the I am about to stretch out my hand against the Philistines, and I will wipe out the Carathites and destroy those remaining along the coast. | |
| I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. | |
| Then they will know that I am the Lord when I take vengeance on them. | |
| The reason he's taking vengeance on them, the reason there is a vengeance of the Lord, is because the Philistines acted in vengeance and took revenge. | |
| If they're going to do it, they're going to get back what they have. | |
| But there is another... | |
| There is another option. | |
| It would be much better to live in a world where we didn't have to do that, where you didn't have your career ruined for saying a choke ten years ago, where you didn't have to have the president screaming, you know, apparently like a crazy person, but maybe that crazy person is the last sane guy in the world. | |
| It would be much better to live in a world of mercy and grace. | |
| It reminds me of this line from The Merchant of Venice that Portia says to Shylock. | |
| And I'm probably... | |
| Now, the... | |
| What was that? | |
| The Southern Poverty Law Centers. | |
| Now they're going to say, here's evidence that Knowles is a racist. | |
| He quotes The Merchant of Venice. | |
| So get ready for that one. | |
| But it's a great line. | |
| I remember this from acting school. | |
| Portia de Shylock says... | |
| Though justice be thy plea, consider this, that in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. | |
| We do pray for mercy, and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy. | |
| I've spoke thus much to mitigate the justice of thy plea, which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice must needs give sentence against the merchant there. | |
| In the course of justice, none of us should see salvation. | |
| So if the left is going to keep this up and say, we're getting him, we're going to get Ingram, we're going to get this show canceled, we're going to get this guy fired, then we're going to do it too. | |
| And see what kind of society that is. | |
| See if you like that. | |
| See if you like a taste of your own medicine. | |
| It's an ugly society. | |
| It's an ugly, divisive society. | |
| And I hope that the left gets the message here. | |
| Probably they won't. | |
| Alright, we've got a... | |
| This exact question. | |
| We've got to bring on Alan Dershowitz to see if the left is going to learn their lesson or if they're going to go ahead and try to impeach Trump for absolutely no reason. | |
| If they're going to try to create some totally bogus, just political story, anti-legal case to impeach Trump. | |
| Alan Dershowitz, you all know him. | |
| He is the world-renowned scholar of con law and criminal law. | |
| He is the author of The Case Against Impeaching Trump. | |
| Alan Dershowitz, Professor Dershowitz, at age 28, became the youngest law professor in the history of Harvard University. | |
| He also famously got OJ off, but now he's getting more flack for defending President Trump. | |
| Defending the double murderer, that's fine. | |
| Defending President Trump, absolutely unacceptable. | |
| We talked to Professor Dershowitz. | |
| There's no greater expert in the country on this question than him, and we will analyze. | |
| Will the Democrats learn their lessons, the vengeance of the Lord, or are they going to try to impeach President Trump? | |
| Here is Professor Dershowitz. | |
| Professor Dershowitz, thank you so much for being here. | |
| Thank you. | |
| So, you've done the unthinkable thing in our current political climate, which is you are defending President Trump against the ubiquitous calls on the political left for impeachment. | |
| I notice there are many Democrats who are, you know, it'll be in their Twitter bio. | |
| It will say, hashtag impeach Trump. | |
| Maxine Waters is saying that impeachment is whatever Congress says it is, that there's no law about that. | |
| Other people have said that in the past. | |
| In your book, you say totally otherwise. | |
| What is the case against impeachment for those who have not yet read the book? | |
| Well, first, you have to read the book because it lays it out. | |
| Of course. | |
| In readable detail, it's really a relatively simple argument, and that is, the framers of our Constitution considered making the criteria for impeachment mal-administration in office or other European or British criteria for removing a president. | |
| They rejected it. | |
| And they said in order to remove a president, particularly, you need to have evidence of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. | |
| Those are very specific. | |
| They all require crimes. | |
| You need to have a trial in the Senate. | |
| There has to be a conviction. | |
| And a conviction must be based on a two-thirds vote of the Senate. | |
| If any of those criteria fail, you cannot remove a president. | |
| And just like you can't change the two-thirds requirement, you also can't change the requirement of a conviction. | |
| I've made the same argument, by the way, when Bill Clinton was being impeached. | |
| I've made the same argument when Richard Nixon was being impeached. | |
| I'll make the same argument when Bernie Sanders gets elected president and he gets impeached. | |
| In fact, you know, I'm so determined to make that point that I have the publisher come up with a mock cover for my book, and it's called The Case... | |
| Against impeaching Hillary Clinton, because that's the book I would have written had Hillary Clinton been elected president. | |
| It would have been exactly the same book, just with the title. | |
| And inside, I would have been talking about how you can't prosecute her for obstruction of justice for the emails and that there was no crime. | |
| Exactly the same argument. | |
| But they'd be building statues to me on Martha's Vineyard and other liberal enclaves if I were making this case for Hillary Clinton. | |
| But making the identical case, word-for-word case, for a president I didn't vote for, I opposed, I campaigned against, has caused me to literally lose friends, and people just won't engage. | |
| They won't even get involved in a conversation. | |
| They do not want to hear the other argument. | |
| They remind me of college kids and college professors who want safe spaces, trigger warnings. | |
| Please don't tell me anything I don't want to hear. | |
| I don't want you to upset me. | |
| That's the level of discourse we've gotten to in America today. | |
| It is really quite sad when you see these members of Congress or even senators saying, impeach, impeach. | |
| They think it's just a political matter. | |
| And they say it pretty explicitly. | |
| You know, Maxine Waters said that. | |
| Impeachment is whatever I say it is. | |
| And I think people are losing sight that there is a crime component here. | |
| They can't just do it. | |
| And the Constitution points this out, too, that when the president is being tried, the chief justice of the Supreme Court has a role. | |
| He's presiding over that. | |
| I mean, what does that say about the role of crime, the role of the judiciary here, and reigning in Congress from just doing whatever it wants and throwing out a president that it doesn't like? | |
| Well, Hamilton explained that in the Federalist Papers. | |
| He said there were some who wanted to have the Supreme Court preside over the trial, I'm not. | |
| But if I were, the first motion I would make, if he were impeached for something that wasn't a constitutionally specified crime, I'd make a motion to the chief justice to dismiss the impeachment. | |
| The same way you'd make a motion to dismiss an indictment in front of a judge before there could be a trial. | |
| So this is a legal proceeding. | |
| There is a political element. | |
| Even if the president commits impeachable offenses, Congress doesn't have to remove him. | |
| If political considerations lead to less than two thirds of the vote to remove him, he stays in office. | |
| But he has to be impeached only and removed only on the basis of these specified crimes. | |
| So it's a necessary but not sufficient condition. | |
| Politics only comes into play once there's evidence, enough evidence to convince two-thirds of the Senate that he has committed an impeachable crime. | |
| Right. | |
| And it's interesting because you're bringing out all of the legal aspects, the constitutional and the legal aspects, and all people are talking about is the political aspect of this. | |
| So I think you've pointed it out before. | |
| You're getting much more flack for defending the president against impeachment than you got for defending O.J. Simpson in his murder trial. | |
| People are really, really fired up about this. | |
| And you bring up some interesting questions in this book, which is that, for instance, removal from office is not It's not self-enforcing. | |
| Someone has to remove him. | |
| So what happens if the president says, I don't want to be removed from office? | |
| Yeah, it's so interesting. | |
| Impeachment has been on our books for 225 years. | |
| I know of no academic who has ever raised this question before. | |
| None. | |
| Let's assume the Senate were to remove, order him removed by a two-thirds vote for maladministration in office. | |
| There are three branches of government. | |
| Each can interpret the Constitution as they believe is justified. | |
| If the Senate interprets the Constitution as saying we can remove a president for a non-crime, and the president says, no, that's not my interpretation. | |
| My legal counsel, my advisors all tell me you need a crime. | |
| The president says, this is an unconstitutional act of removal. | |
| I'm not going anywhere. | |
| At that point, what is the Congress going to do? | |
| Pull out the marshals? | |
| Right. | |
| Pull out the army? | |
| No, bring it to the United States Supreme Court. | |
| When we have a conflict between constitutional interpretation by the President and by the Congress, as we did in Marlboro v. | |
| Madison, the case goes to the United States Supreme Court. | |
| Two justices have already opined that they very well might have jurisdiction to consider a case if Congress acts beyond its authority. | |
| But again, I don't know of a single academic who has said, That the Supreme Court has a role to play. | |
| So I'm out there all along, but I'm very comfortable out there because I think I'm right. | |
| If you disagree with me, read the book, write your own book, write an article, write a book review, argue with me, defeat me in the court of public opinion. | |
| But don't refuse to engage with me, even if I'm wrong. | |
| And it's possible I'm wrong. | |
| I've laid out an important constitutional argument that nobody laid out before. | |
| And that argument has to be taken into account. | |
| Especially if we try to remove a duly elected president of the United States. | |
| Of course, because you might win in the short term, but that creates awful precedent in the long run. | |
| And it's so funny that people on the left are disparaging you for this, as though you've shifted sides. | |
| All of a sudden, Alan Dershowitz is some conservative Republican hack or something. | |
| You're the one who has remained consistent here. | |
| It is partisans, I suppose on both sides, who keep shifting their arguments. | |
| But I wonder, in this climate, especially you see it in particular on campuses, but you see it in political discourse too, people seem to have very little respect for reason, for civil arguments, for engaging with the other side, very little interest in referencing the law or the constitution. | |
| Does that spell a sort of demise or doom for our constitutional republic and for our political culture? | |
| Or is this just more of the same partisan arguments that we see again and again over the years? | |
| Look, we've had this for decades. | |
| In my own lifetime, we saw a liberal president of the United States detain 110,000 Japanese Americans in detention camps. | |
| And who supported that? | |
| All the liberal justices of the Supreme Court. | |
| Douglas and Black. | |
| And others, dissenters were more conservative. | |
| We saw it during the McCarthy career. | |
| Oh, this time it's different. | |
| Communism is such a great threat, we have to really deny civil liberties. | |
| Or the Vietnam War. | |
| Let's draft political dissenters to stop them from dissenting. | |
| Or after 9-11. | |
| In every generation, I've seen efforts to limit civil liberties. | |
| And what's different about this one is with Trump, you have to pick sides. | |
| Nobody's in the middle. | |
| You either must hate him and think he is the worst president in the history of the country, or you must love him and think he's the best. | |
| And there's almost no room for nuance. | |
| And even if you hate him and think he's the worst, you have to defend his civil liberties, because his civil liberties are our civil liberties. | |
| If you can deny a president constitutional rights, you can deny anybody constitutional rights. | |
| And all the arguments I'm making are civil libertarian and liberal arguments. | |
| And again, if Hillary Clinton were the one who was being impeached or prosecuted, all the liberals would be making the same exact arguments. | |
| But because I make them at a time when Trump is the president, I'm regarded as a pariah of the left. | |
| And also, what's even more disturbing is I'm a hero of the right. | |
| I don't want to be a hero of the right. | |
| I'm not a Trump supporter. | |
| I'm not somebody who is making this argument only because it's Trump. | |
| I'm making this argument. | |
| Because I support the Constitution of the United States. | |
| So both sides misunderstand me. | |
| Look, it's clear. | |
| When I, you know, I'm a fervent Boston Red Sox fan. | |
| And some of my best friends are New York Yankee fans. | |
| And, you know, you can't, there's no argument. | |
| Either the Red Sox are the greatest team in baseball, they are, or the Yankees are the greatest team. | |
| They were. | |
| But you can't have a kind of argument. | |
| You have to pick sides, you have to pick teams. | |
| That's what's happening. | |
| It's okay in sports. | |
| It's not okay in governance. | |
| You know, as you were pointing out that you've now become an unwitting and unlikely hero to the political right, I was trying to figure out in my studio where I was going to put up the Alan Dershowitz poster, but then you made that comment about the Red Sox and the Yankees, and I've got to scrap the plans for it altogether, unfortunately. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| Now, there is one aspect where nuance has been coming in on the pro-impeachment side here, though, which is that people who are calling for the impeachment of Trump are saying that he colluded with Russia, and this is somehow sufficient to impeach him. | |
| Does collusion rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors? | |
| It doesn't even rise to the level of low crimes and misdemeanors. | |
| It's not a crime. | |
| Collusion is not a crime, except if business people collude together to violate the antitrust laws. | |
| In my book, The Case Against Impeaching Trump, I give the most extreme hypothetical. | |
| During the campaign, candidate Trump calls up President Putin and says, hey, Vlad, do I have a deal for you? | |
| I want to be elected president. | |
| I know you have some dirt on Hillary Clinton you've already gathered. | |
| If you send me the dirt on Hillary Clinton and help me get elected president, it's much more likely that we'll get rid of these sanctions because I don't like these sanctions. | |
| That's what politicians do all the time. | |
| They say to people, give me money, give me support. | |
| You know I'm on your side. | |
| I'll help be pro-choice. | |
| I'll help be pro-gun control. | |
| Vote for me because I'm going to help your agenda. | |
| That's not a crime. | |
| Now, people say it's different because it's a foreign government. | |
| But what the foreign government was doing here was giving, under my hypothetical, information. | |
| Information is different from money because it's protected by the First Amendment. | |
| For the same reason the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Pentagon Papers, Snowden, Manning, all of those stolen materials is once it's stolen, the First Amendment protects its publication or its use by a candidate. | |
| Now, if candidate Trump said to the Republican, to Putin, please hack the Democratic National Committee, that would be a crime because then he is urging them to do a crime. | |
| But if he says, if you've already hacked them and you have the information, give it to me. | |
| That's no more a crime than what the Washington Post and the New York Times did. | |
| That's a great point. | |
| And before I let you go, I've already taken up a lot of your time. | |
| I do want to ask about the procedural aspects of all of this. | |
| We've got the Mueller investigation. | |
| I think at this point it's been going on since 1857 or so. | |
| It looks like it'll be going on forever. | |
| And yet you hear from partisans on both sides that if one is to criticize the Mueller team or Mr. | |
| Mueller himself, that is an outrage. | |
| It's an attack on the American government. | |
| Administrative agencies or whatever, the investigative services, the intelligence services. | |
| Is it kosher, to put it bluntly, is it kosher to criticize or question Mueller? | |
| Well, it's so interesting because I grew up as a liberal. | |
| All my life I'm a liberal. | |
| What do liberals do? | |
| They question law enforcement. | |
| What did liberals do when the Bay of Pigs happened? | |
| We questioned intelligence. | |
| What happened in the run-up to the Iran-Iraq war? | |
| We question the WMD intelligence. | |
| We always question intelligence. | |
| We're always critical of the FBI. I spent most of my career as a young man criticizing J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. That's what liberals did. | |
| Conservatives always came to the defense and said, we believe in law and order. | |
| And liberals said, we believe in civil liberties. | |
| So the idea that liberals are now the ones saying, oh my God, you can't ever Question. | |
| Law enforcement? | |
| The FBI? The CIA? I mean, talk about hypocrisy with a capital H. My God, that's what liberals and civil libertarians have always been doing. | |
| But now that Mueller is the guy who might be able to get Trump, he is no longer an appropriate subject of criticism. | |
| Well, it is quite ironic. | |
| It hadn't occurred to me until you put it that way, that for years at this point, even in recent memory, the left has pilloried local law enforcement. | |
| They've said, we need to abolish ICE. That's one of the lines in this campaign, that we need to demilitarize the police, take away power from the police. | |
| And then in the same breath, they're saying, if you criticize law enforcement at the federal level or with regard to President Trump, you're some sort of anti-American traitor. | |
| That is a real irony. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's obvious. | |
| It's civil liberties for me, but not for thee. | |
| Free speech for me, but not for thee. | |
| And that's what's called hypocrisy. | |
| If you're going to be a civil libertarian and a supporter of free speech, you have to be a supporter of those concepts, no matter who the beneficiary is and who the loser is. | |
| When I was a kid in college, I defended the right of communists to speak at Brooklyn College. | |
| I hated communism. | |
| I was brought up in a very anti-communist household, but I supported the right Of communists to speak and to run for office. | |
| So I, early on in my life, and then I supported the rights of Nazis to march through Skokie. | |
| My mother didn't talk to me. | |
| She said, whose side are you on? | |
| The Nazis or the Jews? | |
| And I said, Mom, on the side of civil liberties. | |
| And she said, don't give me that. | |
| I'm your mother. | |
| You've got to pick sides, the Jews or the Nazis. | |
| Well, my mother wasn't college educated. | |
| But the people who are criticizing me today are, many of them lawyers. | |
| They have to know that if you believe in civil liberties, you will sometimes end up Defending people you don't like. | |
| It was H.L. Mencken who said, first they go after the SOBs and they establish the precedent on them and then they come after the rest of us. | |
| That's why I'm going to continue to defend the rights of every American, whether it was David Duke or whether it's some communist on the left or whether it's President Trump or President Clinton or Bernie Sanders or anybody else. | |
| I don't think you can draw lines depending on Whose side people are on? | |
| I always ask myself, have I passed the shoe on the other foot test? | |
| If the shoe were on the other foot, if it were Gore versus Bush rather than Bush versus Gore, would the Supreme Court have come out the other way? | |
| I wrote a book saying no. | |
| I wrote a book called Supreme Injustice. | |
| The liberals loved my book. | |
| Because I criticized the Supreme Court. | |
| But if I made the same criticism today of law enforcement and judicial, I'd be a pilloried. | |
| So I'm going to stick to my guns. | |
| I've been doing it. | |
| I'm almost 80. | |
| I've been doing it. | |
| That's been my life. | |
| I'm not changing. | |
| I think that's a great point. | |
| And the book is really, really good. | |
| I really enjoyed it. | |
| The Case Against Impeaching Trump. | |
| My last question before I let you go, you know, you obviously have an expertise and preeminent expertise on these matters as a matter of law and constitution. | |
| As a matter of politics, if you were a gambling man, do you think that the partisans, the pro-impeachment crowd, will impeach Trump if given the opportunity? | |
| Or do you think that your sound arguments and cooler heads will prevail? | |
| Well, I think there'll be many in the Democratic Party who will want to impeach Trump. | |
| Already some people are running on that platform. | |
| A real jerk who is a professor at the University of Minnesota named Painter, who's running on an impeach Trump campaign. | |
| There are others who are running on an impeach Trump campaign. | |
| It will hurt the Democrats if they do that, just like it hurt the Republicans when they impeached Clinton. | |
| It's easy to get an impeachment if you control the House. | |
| Very hard to get a removal. | |
| So my prediction here is unless there's new evidence that comes out, material we're not aware of, I don't think President Trump will be removed from office other than through elections. | |
| And might very well be removed from office in the 2020 election. | |
| And that's something that people who are opposed to him should be focusing on, not impeachment. | |
| Excellent point, and I really, really enjoyed the book, so I encourage everybody to read it. | |
| The Case Against Impeaching Trump by Alan Dershowitz. | |
| I think you've written about 750,000 other books, which are also quite good, but I really recommend reading this. | |
| It is just finally a cool, logical argument that simply are not really getting airtime as people are blowing a bunch of partisan hot air. | |
| Professor Dershowitz, thank you so much for being here. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| Alan Dershowitz, he lays it out. | |
| He's the last liberal standing in the world, I think. | |
| The last honest liberal. | |
| We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. | |
| Thank you if you're already on Daily Wire. | |
| You help keep the lights on. | |
| You keep Covfefe in my cup. | |
| If you're not, go to Daily Wire right now. | |
| It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership. | |
| You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag, you get to ask questions, which, by the way, is coming up Thursday. | |
| Get your questions in. | |
| You get to ask questions in the conversation. | |
| I think I'm coming up next, so get ready for that. | |
| Again, none of that matters. | |
| You need the Leftist Tears Tumblr. | |
| You need the, this is the James Gunn edition, obviously. | |
| We've got a little common sense gun control here. | |
| Look, Look, I don't want to... | |
| I'm not trying to destroy James Gunn. | |
| I'm not trying to take away James Gunn's career. | |
| I just want some common sense gun control and to collect all those delicious tears in my Leftist Tears Tumblr. | |
| But I have a favor to ask of you. | |
| Look, I only ask... | |
| For your money and help for a stupid joke, like once a year at this point. | |
| I think that's my record. | |
| So you might have seen the Shapiro store has opened up, the long-awaited Shapiro store, which Ben has been promising since the Clinton administration. | |
| And we finally got it up, and it's got some shirts. | |
| So there's a shirt up with my face on it. | |
| They've got a couple presidential series. | |
| And they've got this one, which says, I like Mike on it. | |
| And they've got one for Ben, too. | |
| And they've got one for Drew. | |
| I need you to go buy this shirt. | |
| Not because you need to wear it. | |
| Probably if you wear it in polite society, you'll just be pilloried, beaten with Antifa bats. | |
| It won't go well. | |
| But the reason you need to buy this shirt is I think it would be very, very funny if I sell more shirts than Ben. | |
| I really, really want that to happen. | |
| I don't think the grin will ever leave my face if I manage to do that. | |
| So I need you to go buy this shirt to make Ben frown and to give me some chuckles for like, I don't know, like a month or two at least. | |
| Go to dailywire.com right now. | |
| I want to wrap up on this question of Russia, why Russia keeps coming up, what it really means, what it has to do with the vengeance of the Lord. | |
| We'll have all that and more. | |
| Go to dailywire.com. | |
| We'll be right back. | |
| Too much fun. | |
| Everything from selling more shirts than Ben, really, that would be the most fun of all. | |
| But watching the logic of these lefties play out right on them, it's like them, you know, they're aiming at Donald Trump with a boomerang, and they say, well, I'm going to get Trump now! | |
| And they throw it, right? | |
| But it doesn't quite hit Trump, does it? | |
| No, it just... | |
| Boom! | |
| Hits him right in the head. | |
| And it's great to watch that logic turn out because for so long it's been a double standard. | |
| They get to run roughshod over us and we're not allowed to fight back. | |
| We say, no, we can't. | |
| Oh, it would be, oh no, it would be so uncouth. | |
| Ooh, that's not nice. | |
| Well, one simply doesn't do that. | |
| You drink your tea with your pinky out, right? | |
| And then in comes Donald Trump, the vengeance of the Lord. | |
| And we see it play out on them. | |
| This is all focused on Russia right now. | |
| As a matter of politics, they're aiming to get Trump on Russia. | |
| You've got candidates campaigning for Congress, for the Senate, on an impeached Trump platform. | |
| What crime did he commit? | |
| I don't know. | |
| What are the legal grounds for impeaching him? | |
| I don't know. | |
| But they're going to do it. | |
| And the question is, why does President Trump let this go on? | |
| Not just let this go on, why does he play into it? | |
| I had a professor friend of mine. | |
| I won't say where he's a professor. | |
| It's not Professor Dershowitz. | |
| And he messaged me and he said, you know, Michael, I really think Trump might be guilty here. | |
| He sounds so guilty. | |
| He always is saying it's a witch hunt and all the exclamation points. | |
| Why is he sounding like a guilty guy? | |
| Why is he letting this Russia thing keep going on and on and on? | |
| And, you know, I know that everybody thinks that Donald Trump is an idiot. | |
| That's the line conservatives seem to think that. | |
| The left certainly thinks that. | |
| He's not an idiot. | |
| He's a smart guy. | |
| Did it ever occur to you that maybe this Russia narrative plays to President Trump's advantage? | |
| That it actually gives him an advantage in electoral politics? | |
| Did anyone consider that? | |
| People are saying, why didn't he fire Jeff Sessions when Jeff Sessions recused himself? | |
| He's fired everyone else in the cabinet. | |
| Why not Jeff Sessions? | |
| Did it ever occur to people that maybe this Russia story helps Trump? | |
| Why wouldn't it? | |
| Just a little bit of evidence. | |
| First of all, to answer my professor friend's question, isn't this evidence that President Trump committed a crime? | |
| No, it isn't. | |
| First of all, what crime? | |
| If this were evidence, some smoking gun, you know, President Trump was going to be taken down over this. | |
| Don't you think he'd be at least accused of a crime? | |
| What crime has he been accused of? | |
| As Professor Dershowitz just said, collusion is not a crime. | |
| It's just a silly little euphemism that the left is using to cudgel Donald Trump. | |
| But that's not a crime. | |
| So you'd think he might be accused of a crime. | |
| If he were guilty of something, they'd have something on him. | |
| This has been going on now for two years. | |
| Don't you think they'd have something on him at this point? | |
| Something tangible? | |
| They could wrap around him. | |
| The Mueller investigation has been going on since the Grant administration at this point. | |
| They don't have anything on him. | |
| Also, don't you think if they had something on him, maybe his accusers wouldn't have so much to cover up? | |
| I mean, James Comey lied. | |
| John Brennan has lied. | |
| The FBI, political players in the FBI, the CIA, they've been revealed to have lied during all of this. | |
| The meeting on the tarmac between former President Clinton and Loretta Lynch, James Comey saying that Hillary clearly committed a crime, but we're not going to get her for it anyway. | |
| We've drafted up Why don't we have the DNC server that was allegedly hacked? | |
| Isn't it a little weird, don't you think, that these guys might have a little less at stake if President Trump really had something on him, if it weren't just a political... | |
| Action. | |
| But why does he allow it to keep going? | |
| And why does President Trump keep it in the news? | |
| Whenever this thing goes out of the news, President Trump sends another tweet. | |
| He says, it's a witch hunt! | |
| Why wouldn't he, if it were really a danger to his presidency, wouldn't he be quiet about it? | |
| Maybe it's not a danger to his presidency. | |
| Maybe this is exactly the right strategy for Republicans. | |
| You know, according to Gallup, fewer than half a percent of Americans think that this Russia collusion thing is an important public issue. | |
| Not just less than 1%, less than half a percent of Americans think that this is an important issue. | |
| Americans care about immigration, they care about the economy, they care about foreign affairs broadly, you know, wars and things like that, nuclear weapons in North Korea. | |
| They do not care about Russia at all. | |
| I mean, statistically, 0% of Americans care about this. | |
| Democrats have put all their eggs in this basket, and President Trump is forcing them to keep their eggs in it. | |
| Every single time that he says, it's a witch hunt, it's awful, it's crooked, they have to double down on that attack. | |
| This is a manageable attack for Republicans. | |
| The whole Russia thing, good, keep it in the news, this is great. | |
| This is an attack that Republicans can manage. | |
| There might be some other lines that they could try to hit. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Things are going so well, it's actually really hard for them to pull something up. | |
| But at least this one they can keep a hold on, so keep it in the news. | |
| I know this doesn't occur to anybody, but maybe President Trump actually knows what he's doing. | |
| Maybe the Republicans know what they're doing and maybe Democrats are so, they're so revved up that they're being consumed by their own logic. | |
| They're being consumed by the logical conclusions of their own actions. | |
| It is the vengeance of the Lord. | |
| They rev it up so much. | |
| They dish it and they dish it and they dish it. | |
| And now, I don't know what it is about the president, but because of him, they have to take it too. | |
| And they're forced, they're wedged into this corner. | |
| How can they pivot off of this issue? | |
| It's not like Democrats don't read the polls. | |
| They read the polls, they see, oh gosh, Americans don't care about this at all. | |
| We're expending all of our energy, all of our capital on this, and we're looking like fools every step of the way. | |
| hey, we're getting proven more partisan, more corrupt, more crooked. | |
| But how do they pivot out of it? | |
| They've made such a big deal. | |
| They've said basically Trump is, you know, Boris and Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle. | |
| They've really invested in this. | |
| They can't pivot out of it. | |
| It's a great place to put them. | |
| The Republicans right now have Democrats against the ropes everywhere as a matter of culture, as a matter of economics, as a matter of public policy, as a matter of electoral politics. | |
| They've just got them on the ropes. | |
| And I'll say this, I'll close it on this free speech thing, the vengeance of the Lord, with With James Gunn, do I want to live in a world where people can make jokes 10 years ago and they don't have their lives ruined for it? | |
| Yes, I do. | |
| Some conservatives, I think, are being a little obtuse on this. | |
| They're saying, well, look, it's not a First Amendment issue. | |
| Look, the market has spoken. | |
| The market has spoken. | |
| He made these comments. | |
| Disney had to fire him. | |
| It's the market. | |
| Right. | |
| But this is looking at free speech ideologically too narrow. | |
| Free speech is not just about politics. | |
| It's not just about the First Amendment. | |
| It's not just about economics. | |
| It's not just about the market. | |
| It's about the culture. | |
| What kind of culture do we want to live in? | |
| A culture where you can joke around or a culture where you can't joke around? | |
| Obviously, we want to live in a culture where you can joke around. | |
| But the left has to stop poisoning that culture. | |
| And until they stop poisoning that culture, The vengeance of the Lord! | |
| We'll keep smacking them in the face, and it's pretty funny to watch. | |
| It's pretty enjoyable. | |
| Come back tomorrow. | |
| Ran a little late, as usual. | |
| Come back tomorrow. | |
| We've got a lot more to talk about. | |
| Some great guests this week. | |
| And in the meantime, I'll see you then. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal. | |
| Executive producer, Jeremy Bory. | |
| 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. |