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July 24, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:11
Ep. 189 - There Is No Such Thing As “Democratic Socialism”

DSA membership skyrockets, half of millennials call themselves “socialist,” and Ocasio-Cortez spreads the gospel of envy. The problem: there's no such thing as Democratic Socialism. Then, what Millennial-speak means for ideology, and when the Left lost its sense of humor entirely. Finally, a defense of owning the libs! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Democratic socialism is on the rise as DSA membership skyrockets, half of millennials call themselves socialist, and crazy-eyed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spreads the gospel of envy and the philosophy of failure.
Our Stalin-esque comrades face just one problem.
There isn't any such thing as democratic socialism.
Like dry water or tasty kombucha, democratic socialism is a contradiction in terms.
We will analyze why this is and we'll also identify the key words that you need to look out for to identify brainwashed lefties.
We'll talk about why ideology is terrible and when the left lost its sense of humor entirely.
Finally, last but not least, I'm hoping that Ambassador Nikki Haley is watching, we will explain why owning the libs is a wonderful thing.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I wish we could just jump to the end right now and extol the virtues of owning the libs, but we'll save that for later because it's a wonderful thing and I could talk about it forever.
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And we're going to have to turn back to socialism.
Alright, let's just dive right in.
Let's just dive right into the deep end of the pool.
The jackals, the hyenas at The View on ABC are here we are debating democratic socialism with the one sane person, Meghan McCain.
Here they are.
Mike, isn't democratic socialism very close to liberalism, I mean?
No.
Well, think about it for a second.
Medicare, social security, garbage collection, the post office, the library.
I agree with you.
That's all democratic socialism.
We had her on the show, and I asked her this question about, what do you mean by being a democratic socialist?
And she went over her platform.
She says Medicare for all.
Good.
Fully funded public schools and universities.
Love it.
Paid family and sick leave.
Good.
Justice system reform.
Immigration justice.
Infrastructural overhaul.
Clean campaign finance.
An economy of peace.
Housing as a human right.
I don't know.
It's a really successful country.
Can I please push back on?
What's wrong with that?
This makes my head explode.
Which, by the way, I hope Democrats do run a Democratic Socialist.
Do you hope that we win?
Do you want the Democrats to be Trump?
No, because I think you'll lose spectacularly.
And then I will look forward to election night when I finally get to tell everybody I told you so.
If you end up running a radical.
Problem with socialism, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, at a certain point you run out of spending other people's money.
Venezuela, one of the richest countries in the world in the 70s.
Now, the average Venezuelan has lost 24 pounds because they're starving to death.
90% of the country is living in poverty.
I think she's talking more about Scandinavia than Venezuela.
Oh, okay.
Okay, got it.
She's talking more.
By the way, the United States does not have the highest economic freedom index in the world.
Far from it.
There are countries in those areas, countries that the left always likes to hold up as socialists, which have more economic freedom than the United States does.
But I want to get to the...
Central point here, as the left embraces democratic socialism, right now the DSA membership has increased seven and a half times in just two years between 2016 and 2018.
The membership has increased almost seven and a half times.
The dues paying membership, which is ironic because I didn't think socialists paid for anything, but they are paying their membership dues now to this.
There are 42 candidates across the United States who are now endorsed, officially endorsed, by the Democrat Socialists of America.
There is, obviously, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
There's another one, though, this guy, Zach Ringelstein, up in Maine.
He says he stands with the Democratic Socialists.
He wasn't comfortable calling himself one before, but now he is comfortable calling himself one.
This is spreading.
You have the sort of cackling lefty hyenas on The View.
They're embracing socialism.
They're saying, isn't it just a, like, liberalism?
It's not real socialism.
It's a democratic socialism.
Ladies, repeat after me.
There is no such thing as democratic socialism.
Repeat after me.
There is no such thing as democratic socialism.
Miss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is there any such thing as democratic socialism?
I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue.
That's a good point.
Fair enough.
You're right.
You know, now I bet the New York Times is going to yell at me for spreading fake news.
He didn't really interview her.
He didn't.
Yeah, you're right.
It wasn't.
That was just a clip.
It was just a clip, New York Times.
There is no such thing as democratic socialism.
There are contradictions in terms.
You know, there's a really depressing number that's been coming out.
According to two separate studies, millennials, the majority of millennials, identify as socialist.
They call themselves socialists.
They rather live in a socialist government.
That number has risen dramatically over the years.
Even PragerU's Will Witt, who I think was constructed in a laboratory made by Snapchat, Will Witt went out there and talked to these millennials.
Look at what they had to say.
Should we have more socialism in America?
Yeah, definitely.
Should we have socialism in America?
Yeah.
I think we already have an element of socialism already, but I believe in the tenets of socialism, and yes, I think we should have more.
I mean...
Ideally, I mean, it sounds like a great idea.
It's one of the options we haven't really tried yet, and what we have been trying clearly isn't working.
What do you think about socialism?
I don't believe to socialism.
Why do you think young people like socialism so much?
Free stuff.
Where have you seen socialism work in the world?
You see even like in Europe, like France and At least they have, like, socialist parties, as well as, you know, Latin America with, like, Bolivia.
Venezuela?
Venezuela.
And where are you from?
I'm from Russia.
And you really don't like socialism, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
They all say, yeah, I like socialism.
Look, we haven't tried it before, and clearly what we're trying isn't working.
I mean, that's why we have the most prosperous country in the history of the world, but we don't have Venezuela.
We don't have people starving in the street or being gunned down by their government.
Now we don't have that, you know, so clearly it isn't working.
So the bad news, more than half of millennials identify as socialist.
The good news, though, according to other polls, this was, I think, according to CBS and New York Times, is that only 16% of millennials can explain what socialism is.
The vast majority of millennials have no idea what it is.
They're frequently wrong but never in doubt.
Say, yeah, I believe in socialism.
I'm a socialist.
Well, what is socialism?
You know, I'm not the expert.
What are you asking me these questions for?
Socialism is a wicked, wicked ideology.
And there's no difference between democratic socialism and socialism.
It's just socialism.
The democratic socialists of America, they define their agenda as saying that they reject the economic order based on profit.
What they call for is the government control of industry, government control of the means of production.
It's just socialism.
Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol's father, he talked about this in particular a number of years ago.
He wrote...
Democratic socialism turns out to be an inherently unstable compound, a contradiction in terms.
Every social democratic party, once in power, soon finds itself choosing, at one point after another, between the socialist society it aspires to and the liberal society that fathered it.
Socialist movements end up in a society where liberty is the property of the state and is or is not doled out to its citizens, along with other contingent benefits.
There are different kinds of socialism.
There's international socialism, that's communism, saw in the Soviet Union.
There's national socialism, that's fascism or Nazism.
We saw it in the Second World War in Italy and Germany.
And then there is democratic socialism.
But the end of all of these socialisms is socialism, is government control of the means of production.
And as the government grows, the citizen shrinks.
A government that can give you anything you want is a government that can take away everything that you have.
And you're seeing it play out in real time.
It's not just history.
It's not just the lessons of history.
It's going on in Latin America right now.
You see in Venezuela, obviously.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world now.
And they're just overflowing with energy.
They could be a hugely abundant, prosperous nation.
And they were, for a time, until they embraced socialism.
We're not talking about ancient history.
We're talking just a few decades ago.
Now, because a couple decades ago they elected socialists, people are starving in the street.
Literally starving in the street.
It's a failed state.
The IMF is warning that inflation could jump to 2,300%.
It's utterly broken, utterly failed.
And it's really tragic.
I mean, you're seeing people...
Burying their babies because they starved at 16 months old, 17 months old.
How about in Nicaragua?
In Nicaragua right there, there's a crisis of socialism.
Father Cesar Augusto Gutierrez is warning now about the government just mowing people down, saying that the socialist state...
The armed socialist state is targeting its unarmed citizens and killing them and torturing them.
There was actually a person who's an American citizen by birth who's down there who's been tortured brutally.
I won't go into the details.
You can read about it in some of the accounts.
Being tortured brutally, his name is Marco Novoa, by the socialist government.
And right now also the socialist government is defiling churches.
They're going in.
They're desecrating churches.
And it's because when the government has power, you have no protection for your liberty.
They use this term democratic socialism in part because they want to conflate socialism with the Democratic Party.
That's actually why they're using it in America.
They say, oh, well, I'm a Democrat.
You're a Democrat socialist.
They're kind of close, aren't they?
They shouldn't be.
I mean, perhaps now that is the case.
Perhaps the Democrat Party has moved all the way to the left.
But they really shouldn't be the same thing.
You know, it's easy.
Whenever the government wants to take power, whenever socialists want to take power, they promise the whole world.
They promise you everything.
Every tin pot dictator, every banana republic dictator, he has a bill of rights a mile long.
They say, oh, you'll get food and water.
Health care is a human right.
Food is a human right.
Jobs are a human right.
This and you'll get a car.
You'll get sprinkles on your ice cream.
You'll get marshmallow sandwiches.
You'll get rainbows and puppies.
You'll get everything.
But when the government has that power, when they take over all the power, you have no way of protecting your rights.
You have no way of saying, well, where's my ice cream?
They say, well, you'll have to wait a little bit for that, won't you?
Well, listen, just wait.
You have no recourse.
You have no defense.
And the government will run roughshod over you.
You know, Madison writes about this in The Federalist.
If men were angels, we wouldn't need government at all.
But don't forget those men who are taking over power in these socialist governments.
They're just like you and me.
They're not like some benevolent betters.
They're not these angels who are going to create wealth and prosperity and always have the interests of everybody at heart and be compassionate.
They're just people, and people are driven by the same impulses all around.
They're trying to conflate these things, democratic socialism and the democratic party, and it's just part of their larger attack on language.
You see they use this all the time.
And before we move on just from this question of Ocasio-Cortez and Finkelstein or whatever that guy's name is, Ringelstein up in Maine, and the 40 other democratic socialist endorsed candidates, I will say on the one hand, Meghan McCain is right.
Because if they run these lefty candidates, they're going to not do very well in this election, I think.
I don't think this is a great strategy.
I don't think socialism plays in Peoria.
I just don't think that's going to work in the short run.
But what they're doing is they're mainstreaming socialism.
And that's a very bad thing because socialism is tyranny.
Socialism is slavery.
That's all it is.
And over time, if people's defenses and immunities against this start to break down, you're going to see more socialist candidates come in.
I mean, you're seeing it over just the last two years.
Bernie Sanders and the millennial useful idiots who supported him are surging the membership of the Democrat Socialists of America.
They're surging it.
They're proliferating all of these candidates.
And it's going to get worse.
You know, in the 2016 election, the Democrats said, good, nominate Trump.
Oh, nominate Trump.
He'll be the easiest one to beat.
He's so crazy and out there and unconventional, right?
They were in for a rude awakening, and I fear that we'll be in for that rude awakening too.
It's really worrisome, especially with millennials who don't know anything, because, you know, first of all, millennials don't remember the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We were born around the time the Berlin Wall fell, or shortly thereafter.
So you don't remember the horrific stories of communism.
You don't remember seeing people being liberated from behind the Iron Curtain.
You don't remember any of those things.
And At all times, from Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin onward, all the way to Ocasio-Cortez and Finkelstein or Ringelstein, socialists have relied on useful idiots.
You now have a whole generation who don't remember these things.
And they can't even describe what it is.
They don't know what socialism is.
They just know that they support it.
I think a lot of that is because of the ideology that they've been educated into.
So I think conservatives...
Don't just play the short game here.
Don't just play, yeah, nominate all those crazy socialists, and then we're going to win in 2018 or 2020.
You've got to be careful.
You've got to educate people about the horrors of socialism.
Because in the long run, it could really wipe us out, especially with a generation who doesn't know anything.
One way that the democratic socialists do this, the so-called democratic socialists do this, is they manipulate language.
This is their main technique.
This is the main way that ideologies advance themselves.
So, you know, if Ocasio-Cortez came out and she said, you know, I'm a pinko communist, probably she wouldn't do that well.
Or even if she said, I'm a socialist, might not do that well.
But to say, I'm a democratic socialist, kind of eases it in.
She was at an event with Bernie Sanders.
She said, we're going to flip this Kansas House seat red in November.
People thought that was a gaffe.
I think that was a Freudian slip that she was doing.
You know, all of this language is the stuff of ideology.
There's a great political philosopher that conservatives should all read, and I reference him sometimes because he doesn't get as much play as he should, is Michael Oakeshott.
And he defines ideology as basically being combinations of vocabulary.
When you want to know what an ideology is, look at the language that people use when they're ideologues.
And there are these whole sets of language, like the left uses it today, and the left used certain language in the 1970s, the left uses different language today.
And non-lefties never use this language, because we talk like normal people.
But they talk like they're true believers, like they're in the cult.
An example of this.
In the 60s and 70s, the left would use the word oppression.
That was the big term.
It was the term of all these lefty movements.
But today, they don't use oppression anymore.
That's sort of antiquated.
Now they use privilege.
It means the same thing, but that's the term.
You've got to check your privilege.
How much privilege do you have?
Oh, he's very privileged.
Non-lefties don't use that language, but it's a way for lefties, one, to identify one another, and then two, it shapes how they see the world.
Another one is exploitation.
You would always hear the exploitation of workers or exploitation of this group or that group in the 70s.
Today, it's classism.
In the 70s, you'd hear alliances.
There was talk of that, but now you hear being an ally.
Have you seen this on campus?
You've got to be an ally.
What does that mean?
What do you mean, be an ally?
You've got to be an ally.
And for those of us who are like normal people, we kind of look quizzically and then move on.
But for those indoctrinated in the ideology, they say, oh yes, I'm an ally.
That's how I'm going to view the world.
There are the allies and the not-allies.
The us and the them.
Another one is, in the 70s, they would use consciousness raising.
We're raising the consciousness.
You know, we're going to raise the consciousness.
Now it's calling out.
You've got to call out racism.
You've got to call out sexism.
You've got to call it out.
Call it out.
What does that...
What do you mean call it out?
So your uncle at Thanksgiving dinner says, I voted for Donald Trump.
You yell, you call it.
No, but that's how they view it.
That's the image you get in your mind.
Because what they really mean is disagree with somebody or be mean to them or yell at them or whatever.
But the image you have is someone, bam, just shouting, calling them out, shouting it out, stopping the conversation, interjecting yourself into it.
In the old days, it was the people.
You know, power to the people.
Now it's folks.
Folks is one of the great leftist demagoguery terms.
It's only Democrat politicians who say, now listen folks.
Look, these are good folks.
These people, Joe Biden would use it.
Barack Obama would use it.
I hope it hasn't crept too far into conservative language.
They say the folks, the folks, the people.
You know, there was another group of socialists about 70 years ago that used the folk a lot.
They really had an ideology of the folk and a similar background, too.
In the 70s, you'd hear liberation.
They'd say, you've got to be liberated.
We need to liberate people.
Liberate these oppressed folks.
Do I get a prize if I use them all in a sentence?
Liberate!
You've got to liberate.
But now it's safe space.
They mean the same thing.
They sound like they mean the opposite thing.
What liberating is being freed and safe space is being coddled and protected.
But it's being used to refer to the same thing.
They're just twisting the language and so that you can see the twisting and the evolution of the ideology.
And this doesn't only apply to exclusively activist language.
Some of it bleeds into mainstream.
But you'll notice...
The left speaks in language that the right does not speak in.
We are speaking different languages.
And it's because the left has a very particular ideology.
Obviously, you've heard the phrase woke.
You know, woke is really good.
And when you're sleeping on a purple mattress, you'll never want to woke up because you'll feel really comfy.
You'll be sleeping like a baby.
But what about other language?
Have you ever noticed that on the left, people say that everything is amazing?
This is a subtle one because it's a normal word, but it's so overused and abused on the left.
It's amazing.
Everything's amazing.
Oh, she's amazing.
Oh, he's amazing.
Well, usually not he because he's like a cisgendered white male.
But she's amazing.
This is amazing, amazing, amazing.
Total hyperbole.
And I think the hyperbole is there to force you to agree with them.
I think it's everything.
It's amazing.
If you disagree with this, you're not one of us.
Another one is I can't even.
You know, I can't even.
Conservatives don't use this phrase a lot.
It's usually used by liberal white girls.
How much can't could a white girl even if a white girl could not even is an important riddle of our day.
I can't even.
And here you see the same thing.
It's like the flip side of amazing.
It's this dismissal.
It's these extremes.
I can't even.
I'm removing myself from this.
If it's without my worldview, then I'm not going to talk about it.
The other one, did you notice lefties do this?
They write it on the internet a lot, but they say it too.
It's a yes, Y-A-A-A-A-A-S. Yes!
And it's that same extreme, like why do you just say yes?
Yes is fine.
Yes, okay.
Good, fine.
Very good, yeah.
Yes!
They scream it at you because you have to be as enthusiastic about all of these ideological structures as they are or you're not one of them.
You're not an ally.
Be an ally!
Yes!
Another one is adulting.
No conservative would ever earnestly use the word adulting, but they use the word adulting because they're children.
So they're children, and like every time they pick up a bill, every once in a while maybe they pick up the bill for brunch, and they say, oh, I'm adulting.
Oh, you know, I paid my rent this month.
I'm adulting.
You think, well, you're an adult.
You should...
You should exclusively be adulting.
The aberration should be when you're childing.
Don't child.
Adult.
But they use it.
And this is an ideological word because in their minds, they are to be coddled.
They are to remain in perpetual childhood.
A perpetual childhood where you don't have people say offensive things to you.
Where you're not expected to work very hard.
Where you're not expected to fall in line and take orders.
That's adulting.
We only do that sometimes.
We do that as little as we can.
Another lefty millennial phrase is, sorry, not sorry.
Sorry, I'm not sorry.
You hear this one a lot.
That's another one of, like, I can't even.
That's another one especially for the lefty white girls.
And they say, sorry, I'm not sorry.
And it's a sort of throwaway line.
But it actually does convey something, which is that there's no apology.
I don't have to apologize for who I am.
I'm great just as I am.
You should love me just the way I am.
I don't need to change.
I don't need to try to become better.
I don't need to even adult too frequently.
I'm an ally, and therefore, you know, I'm sorry I'm not sorry.
I'm not considering another point of view.
I'm not considering your point of view.
I'm dismissing it.
There's a dismissiveness to all of this language.
And then my favorite one.
This is the way you know that you are talking to a lefty and probably a millennial, is when they refer to their husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend as their partner.
Now, I'm not talking about like a gay guy saying, this is my partner.
That's been around for a long time.
My life partner, my significant other, whatever the euphemism is.
I'm talking about when a straight guy refers to his girlfriend as his partner, or a straight girl refers to her boyfriend as her partner, or her husband as her partner.
I've noticed this with multiple acquaintances of mine, even some friends of mine.
I say, oh, this is my partner, so-and-so.
I say, oh, what, you guys start a business together?
Oh, really?
Congratulations.
What business did you start?
Oh, are you a lesbian that identifies as a man and therefore you're her partner?
What is it?
Because that language is obviously ideological.
The language...
It precludes those patriarchal structures of husbands and wives.
This idea that there are social roles that accompany biological sex, that accompany being a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend.
It's a rejection of that.
And to use that language is to say, I reject these social roles.
I reject the tradition that I've inherited.
I reject those things.
I am a modern person who's totally free and liberated, and I reject...
Biological categories of sex.
That's what happens when you use that.
And the same is true of conservatives.
When conservatives say, this is my wife, rather than saying, this is my partner.
You know, sweet little Elise is my partner.
I'm not a man.
I'm not a partner.
You're my wife.
I'm using it as an example.
If you were to say those things, then you're saying, I believe that there is a categorical difference between men and women.
You are stating that.
And these days, in certain ideological quarters on the left, that is not acceptable.
That is not kosher at all.
This brings us back to President Trump, as most things do, because President Trump uses language appropriately.
Did you read this story, this news article, about a couple?
Their names are Nate and Julia Sharp, and they're raising their three-year-old twins, Zyler and Caden, to be gender-neutral.
They're three-year-old twins, Zyler and Caden, who definitely will not be completely messed up and bullied because of this terrible parenting.
They're raising them to be gender neutral.
They're calling them babies.
You know, not him or her, but they.
Babies.
Because I guess they don't realize that baby is a gender neutral term, too.
It's not.
It's like baby is a gendered word.
Anyway, they're raising them to be that way.
And it's because they think very wrongly.
This is a left-wing idea, but it's Very stupid.
Which is that if you erase all the prejudices from your mind, if you erase all the preconceptions, all of the judgments from your mind, then you'll be in a tabula rasa, a perfectly clean slate world, and then you can rebuild yourself with this new good ideology, the good left-wing ideology.
You just have to get rid of all the traditions, all of the inherited institutions, all of the past, and then you'll be left to build yourself up.
But that isn't true.
It isn't like you can have a clear mind that exists outside of language, outside of traditions.
That makes up your mind.
The language that you use makes up your mind.
It makes up how you see the world.
You can't ever just get rid of that.
If you were to get rid of all of that, you'd get rid of your mind entirely, and that's certainly what it seems like the left has been doing.
You have to bring in certain things.
There was that guy at the Planet Fitness who went into Planet Fitness, he stripped down naked, and he started working out, and they called the cops on him.
He said, well, I thought this was a judgment-free zone.
I thought this was...
That is the logical conclusion of the judgment-free zone.
There is no judgment-free zone.
You can't.
You have to make judgments.
You have to discern and discriminate.
Even the choice, by the way, to call your twins, Zyler and Kaden, to call them babies, to call them gender-neutral and pretend that gender doesn't exist, that is a decision.
That is a judgment.
You might pretend that that is the absence of a judgment, but any of those things, naming anything, actively participating at all in the world, is making a judgment.
And the question is, what judgment are you making?
The Trump of it all that's so good about this is that Trump uses his own language.
You know, Trump does not use these buzzwords.
He doesn't use the left-wing buzzwords.
He doesn't use the right-wing buzzwords.
He is anti-ideological.
He's an anti-ideological guy, and that's very good.
Some conservatives really like ideology.
I don't.
I come from the tradition of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott, all of these great conservative writers who said, Before all else, reject ideology, because ideology is too narrow.
It never takes in the whole of human experience.
You're always going to get something wrong.
And the further you go down ideology, the more wrong you're going to be.
And that's how President Trump is.
He's not a checklist kind of guy.
There was a report, a really good report, on the Otto Warmbier's saga in North Korea.
President Trump and the administration getting that American student out of North Korea, even though he'd been He's brutalized and basically had no brain function by the time he got back.
The decision to do that, if you haven't read the piece, it's in GQ, it's worth checking out.
The decision behind that, as it's reported in that piece from Donald Trump, is not ideological.
He didn't run down all of the checklists and say, oh, but then we've got to do this for this North Korean diplomat and that'll imply this and then this doesn't fit into this strategy.
No, he didn't.
He saw the situation for what it was.
The people in the room said that he was behaving like a father more than like a politician.
And he said, get the kid home.
Got to get him home.
Is he home?
Is he safe?
Is he this?
Is he that?
There's this kind of gut instinct.
We, in this modern world, and especially in this lefty world, we like to pretend that everything can be rational.
If we can't rationalize something, we don't want to do it.
If we can't think of the theory of something, we don't want to do it.
That's what the left does.
That's not what the conservatives do.
We can rely on other things.
We can rely on faith.
We can rely on instinct.
We can rely on, you know, our gut feeling and institutions that have guided us.
That is the great advantage that conservatives have over the left.
The left which has to turn everything into an ideology.
Who cares if it works in practice?
Does it work in theory?
And that isn't Trump.
People get upset about that.
They say Trump isn't ideological enough.
I'll take it.
I am happy to take that all the time.
You know, the Trump-Iran tweet, the fire and fury that's going to go down, we're going to knock your socks off.
That's a great example of this.
You know, Javad Zarif.
I think that was John Kerry's ex-boyfriend from when he was Secretary of State, Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran.
He responded to Trump and he said, we're not impressed.
This doesn't mean anything.
Nonsense.
I think Iran was impressed because I think their currency, which was already at record lows, plunged yesterday after President Trump sent that tweet.
He's working against the expertise of all the technocrats who've read all of the books and they know so well.
Look, come on, I've read all the books and Trump hasn't read any of the books.
Knowledge isn't about books.
Books can contain technical knowledge.
Technical knowledge is great.
But there is a practical knowledge too.
And that is what this administration is exhibiting.
And it's working.
And this is no surprise.
Because books are just a paltry little technical approximation of reality, of real knowledge.
I have got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
And I was just about to get to, one, the logical comedic conclusions of leftist ideology, which is the no more comedy.
There's now a comedy special on Netflix about not laughing, about no comedy.
It's a true story.
We'll play a clip from that.
And also a couple more things to get to, and I have to also defend owning the libs.
Before that, you've got to go to dailywire.com.
It is $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.
Get your mailbag questions in.
We'll answer them on Thursday.
None of that matters.
Oh, that's good.
That tastes like the Iranian Rial plunging to record lows yesterday because fire and fury are going to rain down from either heaven or from whatever airplanes the United States sends over to bomb them.
Yeah, this is really good.
This is good stuff.
And it's, not only is it Javad Zarif tears, but it's also the expert tears.
The expert, technocrat, ideologue, ooh, ooh, ooh, we know better than Trump, ooh, ooh, nope, no you don't.
Very good.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
A lot more to get to.
So the left has this language.
They have their bundle, their sack of vocabulary that they can use, that they can pick from.
And it's really shrunk their world, and it's really shrunk the experience of the world.
And one aspect of it is it's deprived that world of humor.
Because everything now is about being an ally and about privilege and about intersectionality and oppression and safe space and everything's unsafe.
And you've seen this over time.
The lefty comedians have started crying on air.
They don't tell jokes anymore.
They just cry.
You've seen this.
Even college kids who are supposed to be having fun.
College is a very good time.
I assure you there's a time and a place for everything and that place is college.
If you spend your college experience frowning, you did it wrong.
You're not supposed to do it that way.
But they have to.
That's the conclusion of their ideology.
This has now bled over into comedy.
There's a comedy special app called Nanette, which is the opposite of comedy.
Let's just see the trailer. - I don't feel comfortable in a small town.
I get a bit tense, mainly because I'm in this situation.
And in a small town, that's all right from a distance.
People are like, oh, good bloke!
I love being mistaken for a man.
I wouldn't want to be a straight white man.
Not if he paid me.
Although the pay would be substantially better.
I do think I have to quit comedy, though.
It's probably not the forum to make such an announcement, is it?
I've built a career out of self-deprecating humour.
And I simply will not do that anymore.
Not to myself or anybody who identifies with me.
Do you understand what self-deprecation means?
It's not humility.
It's humiliation.
I want my story heard.
Because what I would have done to have heard a story like mine.
That's it.
For those of you who aren't watching, it says it's a comedy special arguing against comedy.
And of course it is, because in this environment, in this ideological framework, if you use the language that the left uses, if you see the world through the lens that the left sees the world, you can't laugh.
What's funny?
What's funny about that?
It's misery.
It's horrible.
It's scary.
It's terrible.
That is the logical conclusion of leftism.
It's the preclusion of comedy.
They say, I think Horace Walpole said this, that life is a comedy to the man who thinks and a tragedy to the man who feels.
And this is facts don't care about your feelings, right?
The people who elevate just feeling Over any kind of constraint or any broader vision than that, they're miserable.
They're so sad and miserable.
She gets up there.
I mean, apparently in this special, she tells experiences of rape.
I mean, it's really brutal.
And they said, we can't do comedy.
No more comedy anymore.
Tig Notaro, who's another comedian, she said of this special, she said, quote, Nanette should be required viewing if you're a human being.
It really takes days to take in everything she presented to fully comprehend it all.
The use of human being, by the way, is another one of these lefty words that they do because they don't like gendered language.
They don't realize man or mankind is gender neutral.
So they'll say human being.
Just be a good human being.
Just be a human being, man.
That's a more subtle example of that, too.
But it's a really sad thing, because this woman's job is to tell jokes.
It's comedy, right?
But she says, no.
No, in our world, there is no such thing as comedy.
Not just, I can't do comedy.
Apparently, she can do comedy.
She is a professional comedian.
She's had a career.
Okay, she can do it.
What she's saying is that the logical possibility of comedy no longer exists, and it's because of that narrow ideology.
Here's a clip from the special itself.
We think reputation is more important than anything else, including humanity.
And do you know who takes the mantle of this myopic adulation of reputation?
Celebrities and comedians are not immune.
They're all cut from the same cloth.
Donald Trump, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski.
These men are not exceptions.
They are the rule.
And they're not individuals.
They are our stories.
And the moral of our story is we don't give a...
We don't give a...
About women or children.
We only care about a man's reputation.
What about his humanity?
These men control our stories.
And yet they have a diminishing connection to their own humanity.
And we don't seem to mind so long as they get to hold on to their precious reputation.
Reputation.
Hindsight is a gift.
Stop wasting my time.
Look, I am angry.
I apologise.
I do, I apologise.
I know there's a few people in the room are going, Ah, look, I think she's lost control of the tension.
Ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha.
Is there any joke coming ever or something?
No, of course not, because she's just angry.
She's just genuinely very angry.
Why is she so angry?
You know, comedy can come from places of pain.
That's where comedy often does come from.
And what you do is then you focus on the absurdity of certain pain.
Or you remove yourself from it.
Or the incongruity of pain and suffering and the absence of suffering.
A lot of comedy is about suffering and pain.
But she says, no, we're not going to do the comedy anymore.
No.
There is no world in which we can laugh at this.
Why are we able to laugh at pain in the first place?
You know, we've been talking about comedy a lot in the last couple days.
Can you make a joke about pedophiles?
Can you make a joke about murder?
Can you make a joke about a lot of things?
Can you make a joke about the Holocaust?
Can you make a joke about the fall of Rome?
Can you make a joke about the...
I don't know.
These are tough issues.
I mean, could a joke be made?
Sure.
Are they all funny?
No, you've got to be careful when you're dealing with offensive material.
Can you make a joke about murder?
Yeah, I think you can.
Can you make a joke about all of these terrible things?
Yeah, you can.
Maybe you've got to be a little careful, but you can.
Why can you?
Well, you can make a joke about certain horrible things because there's hope.
Because there's comedy, right?
There's hope at the end.
If I think, as I do think, that this world is in many ways terribly fallen, sometimes absurd, but that there is redemption and hope and hereafter and a heaven and a beatific vision I can look forward to that will make all of this pain and suffering in this world look like nothing, look minuscule by comparison, then I can laugh at it.
I can laugh at these little things.
I sometimes...
I joke about this because I had Ji Song-ho, that North Korean defector, on the show a few weeks ago.
And I'll be driving in the car and my GPS will buzz out.
It won't tell me to make the turn until slightly after I was supposed to make the turn.
And I'll get very angry.
I'll say, oh, this is awful.
And then sweet little Lisa will say...
Mac, do you want to call Jisong Ho and tell him about your terrible time?
How awful this suffering is?
That's true.
That's not the worst thing in the world, is it?
My GPS doesn't work.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter.
But because there is a redemption, because there are relative pieces here, you can laugh at that.
But if you think, as a lot of the modern left does, That this world is cruel, vicious, everyone's out to get you, there's no light at the end of the tunnel, there's just darkness, suffering, you turn into worm food at the end.
If you think that, it's hard to laugh.
Because you despair.
Then you have despairing.
And despair means without hope.
Not having hope.
So yeah, you despair.
It isn't funny.
That's the logical conclusion of their worldview.
It's the logical conclusion of their ideology.
And their ideology is just all of this stuff, this language that they use, their everyday...
But before we go, I will point out that the total absence of humor now, it's not just the former comedians, not just Netflix.
The chief metro political correspondent for the New York Times, Shane Goldmacher, he watched this interview by Ali Stuckey, friend of the show Ali Stuckey, this mock satirical interview where she pretends to interview Ocasio-Cortez.
And it's kind of funny.
He responds in the perfect leftist way.
Here is that interview.
Alexandria, thanks for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Do you have any experience that qualifies you for this job?
I was growing up during the Clinton era, and then basically when I was in middle school, 9-11 happened.
Do you have any knowledge whatsoever about how our political system works?
Yikes.
It's really good.
It goes on.
It's worth watching the whole thing.
But look, she's obviously on a different set.
She's on a different background.
She's wearing different clothing than the interviewer in the interview with Ocasio-Cortez is.
And that interview clip between Margaret Hoover and Ocasio-Cortez went viral.
Everybody saw it, right?
And so Ali, who does satire, is doing a little satire video, and it was very funny.
This is how the New York Times chief political correspondent responded.
He said, Shane Goldmacher, this faked interview of Ocasio by CRTV has nearly a million views on Facebook in less than 24 hours.
Interview didn't happen.
It takes clips from Margaret Hoover's show and edits in faux questions.
Not labeled satire other than the winky emoji that labels it satire.
Get this man a Pulitzer!
This guy!
This is the kind of breaking journalism, incredible work that we can expect from the New York Times.
Are you kidding me?
Oh my gosh.
First of all, it's obvious satire.
Second of all, by a well-known satirist.
Then, it has a little winky emoji on it.
Alerting you that this is obviously satire.
For a clip that everybody has seen.
And the left, they said, wait a second, this isn't real.
Because they don't understand.
They don't understand their opposition.
They don't understand the world.
So they think that if a...
First of all, if a conservative does something, it can never be satire, because conservatives don't do comedy.
No, they can't be funny.
They don't joke around.
No, they're like mean, alt-right, racist David Dukes.
They can't do that, right?
That's what they think.
And so he's alerting people.
He says, this is fake.
And then all the lefties, if you look in the little Twitter thread, they say, I tried to report it.
Yeah, I tried to report it too.
You say, fellas, fellas, it's something called humor.
It's called comedy.
Life isn't so bad.
It's okay.
You can laugh a little.
It's alright.
It won't prevent you from being an ally to laugh a little.
It's okay.
You can still be a good person and laugh every so often.
Really, really bizarre.
I mean, this guy's a New York Times writer.
Who knows?
I mean, who knows where this goes for the left?
I can't imagine they'll go this way forever.
It's so unfunny.
But we'll have to see how it goes.
And in the meantime, we're going to laugh.
And this brings me to my final point today in the last couple minutes, speaking of conservatives laughing at lefties.
I love Nikki Haley.
I love Ambassador Haley.
I might have to disagree with her slightly here, though.
She said to the TPUSA conference, she said, quote, raise your hand if you've ever posted anything online to, quote, unquote, own the libs.
I know that it's fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you're accomplishing when you do this.
Are you persuading anyone?
Who are you persuading?
We've all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn't leadership.
It's the exact opposite.
Now, this flies directly in contrast to an important quote from Edmund Burke that I've read for a long time.
Conservatism is when something triggers the libs, and the more the libs are triggered, the more conservatism-er it is.
That's an incredible quote by the Irish statesman Edmund Burke.
Is that from Reflections on the Revolution in France?
I think it might be.
Look, of course, if what Nikki Haley is getting at Is that just poking fun at people, just to be mean or nasty or to really make them sad or something, just doing that might be pointless.
That might be stupid or ill-advised.
But owning the libs is great.
Owning the libs is one of the most fun things in the world.
And owning the libs is an important strategy.
It is leadership.
Because there are two ways here.
Well, I suppose there are three ways.
There are three ways to win back the culture and win back the politics.
The one is, you can be really angry and mean and serious and doer and debate all the time and say no this and be really, you know, straight-faced just like the lefties are, the humorless lefties.
That's one way to do it.
The other way to do it is to be funny, to laugh a little, to poke fun.
Don't constantly be earnest about everything.
Just poke a little fun at these things and you'll deflate these lefty balloons.
If you just make fun of it a little bit, if you tell the emperor that he's not wearing any clothes, you can laugh, you can have a good time, and that humor will show people the error of their ways.
Those are two ways.
For conservatives to beat the left in politics.
And the third way is to outbreed them.
As Governor Mitch Daniels told me one time, he said you can either persuade or you can outbreed and the latter is a lot more fun.
So those are the three ways that you can own the culture.
Owning the libs is a great thing.
It's not necessarily sophomoric.
It's not necessarily childish.
It is a really fun thing to do.
And excuse me one second.
I just have to take a sip of my coffee.
Mmm.
That's good.
That's good.
I like that Tumblr.
It's an important thing because getting to what we've been talking about all day, the moment that conservatives stop having fun is the moment we lose.
One of the great aspects of this time that we're in, this Trump era is Is that conservatives are exuberant.
They're having a good time.
They're having fun, finally.
And we seem like the fun team.
Who would you want to join?
You want to join the Sandra Fluke people with their arms crossed, frowning and saying, that's not funny?
Or do you want to join the people who are having a good time and enjoying life?
It's what I noticed.
I did that blank book, my magnum opus.
Well, no, reasons to vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
I did this a couple months after President Trump won the 2016 election, and it was the perfect time because what all the conservatives did, who bought the book and gave it to their lefty friends, is they left these comments on Amazon, these reviews, and they were 10 paragraphs long.
And they were referring to all of these great works of literature and philosophy.
And they're just having a good time.
They're just having fun.
It was witty.
The comments, I mean.
The book itself is kind of an old joke, frankly.
But the people responding to it, the conservatives, were having a really good time and having fun and being a little light.
You know, the angels can fly because they don't take themselves so heavily.
They take themselves lightly.
And we should do that, too.
The moment that we frown, the moment that we take everything very seriously, we become them.
If we learn nothing from this Trump era, that it's okay to laugh, it's okay to take things lightly.
It's a freer society when you can, oh, I shouldn't have said that.
Oh, I meant to say this.
Yeah, well, you'll get over it.
When you're a little lighter like that, the world is freer, life is a little more pleasant, and the lefties could learn a lot from it.
Maybe they'd have a better time if they took our example, and hopefully they will take our example.
Okay, get your mailbag questions in.
We've got a lot more to talk about.
I can't, you know, look, I can't get to everything.
I have to guzzle these leftist tears before they fill back up again.
Go to dailywire.com, and then I'll see you tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia 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.
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