Ep. 192 - A Tale Told By An Idiot, Full Of Sound And Fury, Signifying Nothing
Democrat conspiracy theorists come up empty on Russia, Democrat superstar and socialist empty-head Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez embarrasses herself on television again, and everything is looking great for Republicans heading into the midterms. Then, comedian Jamie Kilstein comes on to discuss how he broke his addiction to SJW online slacktivism. Finally, why entitlements are impossible to repeal on This Day In History.
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Democrat conspiracy theorists come up empty on Russia.
Democrat superstar and socialist empty head Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez embarrasses herself on television again.
I blame Ali Stuckey.
I always blame Ali Stuckey.
And everything is looking great for Republicans heading into the midterms.
So the left is resorting to rehashing long dead history and renaming entire cities because leftism is nothing but a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
We'll talk about that.
We will talk about the sound and fury of leftism with comedian Jamie Kilstein when he comes on the show to discuss how he broke his addiction to SJW online slacktivism.
Jamie is a true breath of fresh air in Hollywood, even for a lefty.
Finally, We will discuss why entitlements are impossible to repeal on this day in history.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
A lot to get to.
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Okay, let's jump right into it.
So, the media, they're so sad because they were going to get Trump.
They were going to get him.
This was going to be the big midterm splash.
It was going to create the blue wave.
Democrats were going to sail in over all of the crimes, the high crimes and misdemeanors that President Trump committed.
What do we have?
Mayor Giuliani, take it away.
This is very damning for Trump.
There's criminal liability here for the president on the horizon with these claims.
Is that true?
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's attorney, former New York City mayor.
I've been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime.
It's not.
Collusion is not a crime.
Collusion is not a crime.
We had Professor Alan Dershowitz come on the show the other day to talk about this.
It's not a crime.
They've been trying to find a crime.
They've said there is something with Russia, there's something nefarious, and they've been using this vague word, collusion.
President Trump colluded, but that doesn't really mean anything.
What is collusion?
Where is the crime of collusion defined?
Nowhere, because it's not a crime.
It's a vague scare word to try to make you think that President Trump is like Boris from Rocky and Bullwinkle.
You know, Boris and Natasha.
And so they've been waiting.
They said, Manafort's going to get something, isn't he?
Or, I'm sorry, Mueller is going to get something.
For instance, with the former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Or with Papadopoulos.
Or with this guy.
Or with that guy.
We're going to get him.
We're going to get him.
And they've come up short.
They've come up with nothing.
Right now, Manafort is heading to trial, and we know what the trial is going to be about.
We know this is about Paul Manafort had set up shell companies.
We know that he accepted a lot of Ukrainian money.
We know that he laundered a little bit of money, kept it in offshore bank accounts.
What has not been mentioned, what all analysts are saying likely will not be mentioned in that Manafort trial is the 2016 election, President Trump, or really Russia at all.
That just isn't there.
So the big get, the big scalp that special counsel Robert Mueller has so far doesn't seem to have anything to do with what Mueller was appointed to investigate.
They got nothing.
They've got nothing.
And so they keep harping on that vague word.
They say, collusion!
There's collusion!
What's the crime of collusion?
Alan Dershowitz came on the show.
He said, President Trump could have called up Vladimir Putin, said, hey, Vladdy, I got some favors for you if you can release those emails if you've got them.
Even that would not be a crime.
Even that is not against the law.
So they've really come up empty.
CNN knows this.
CNN knows this.
They ran a headline this morning.
I took a screenshot of it.
I love it.
This is a big headline on Apple News.
And I take a CNN screenshot almost every day because they get more and more ridiculous.
The headline was...
Trump opens window into his rage with Mueller attack.
That's the news headline.
That was on Apple News, like the main thing when I woke up this morning.
And I think they might be projecting a little bit.
I think CNN is opening a window into its own rage because they can't get anything on Trump.
They aren't able to impeach him.
He hasn't committed a crime.
So they say, whenever you read that Trump opens the window into his rage...
Is that like poetry?
Or is that the beginning to a novel?
Or is that the news?
It's certainly not the news.
This brings us to the next peg.
They were really hoping, okay, we can't get anything with President Trump.
We don't have any crimes that he committed with Russia.
So we're going to run our superstar, energetic candidate, the far left, running on the Democrat wing of the Democrat Party.
She's going to sail us to victory, except she doesn't know anything.
Here is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But one of the things that we saw is if people pay their fair share, if corporations and the ultra-wealthy, for example, as Warren Buffett likes to say, if he paid as much as his secretary paid, 15%, if he paid a 15% tax rate.
Warren Buffett pays millions and millions and millions of dollars in taxes.
His secretary pays, presumably, I don't know, tens of thousands of dollars in taxes, if that.
But also, she said, you know, that we've got to get him to pay 15%.
Now, she actually messes up the Democrat talking point on this.
The Democrat talking point is that the zillionaires are only paying 15%.
They should pay more.
They should pay 30%.
So she doesn't even get the talking point right.
But the talking point is also totally wrong.
Warren Buffett's effective tax rate is around 31%.
His secretary's effective tax rate is around 21%.
And when you're talking about 31% of the millions and millions of dollars Warren Buffett makes every year, that's a lot more money than the 21% of the, who knows, $100,000 that his secretary makes.
Or less.
Who knows how much she makes.
So that just isn't true.
Part of the reason that they get away with this talking point is they ignore that, first of all, Warren Buffett makes most of his money on capital gains, right?
Capital gains, investment income.
But that money's already been taxed at the corporate level.
That money has been taxed in many places before you get to that number.
So that is simply not true.
She goes on, though.
Let's bring on some more untruths from Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez.
If corporations paid, if we reversed the tax bill but raised our corporate tax rate to 28%, which is not even as high as it was before.
Right.
If we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that's $2 trillion right there.
That's $2 trillion in 10 years.
And one of the wide estimates is that it's gonna take $3 to $4 trillion to transition us to 100% renewable energy economy.
So we got $2 trillion from folks paying their fair share, which they were not paying before the Trump tax bill.
Right.
They weren't paying that before the Trump tax bill.
If we get people to pay their fair share, that's $2 trillion in 10 years.
Now, if we implement a carbon tax, On top of that, so that we can transition and financially incentivize people away from fossil fuels.
If we implement a carbon tax, that's an additional amount of a large amount of revenue that we can have.
And then the last key, which is extremely, extremely important, is reprioritization.
Just last year, we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn't even ask for.
They're like, we don't want another They're like, don't give us another nuclear bomb.
They didn't even ask for it, and we gave it to them.
So none of that is true.
None of what she just said is true.
But also, why do they put her on TV? They can't blame this one on Ali Stuckey.
They try to blame these things.
They say the conservative made her look stupid.
She's on The Daily Show.
She's on the left-wing program with Trevor Noah.
And she goes and she says things that aren't true.
She says them in a way that is not very flattering.
And she has those crazy eyes.
This does not help her.
My advice, having been in politics for a little bit at least, is...
Miss Ocasio-Cortez, you should lock yourself in a closet until election day.
The election is yours, and you're only hurting yourself.
But then my selfish advice is, keep going on the shows.
Come on my show.
Come on my show anytime.
We'll talk.
It would be great.
I'd love to have you out there.
You should become the mascot of the Democrat Party.
None of it's true.
None of what she just said is true.
So she said that there was a $700 billion increase in the Pentagon budget last year.
That isn't true.
$700 billion is the total size of the Pentagon budget.
There was an increase.
It was about $61 billion last year.
So the entire budget with that increase is $700 billion.
That's just 16.9% of the federal budget.
That's not a lot of the federal budget.
When you figure that the government's first duty is to protect us, 16% or 17% isn't a whole lot.
The entire federal budget is $4.15 trillion.
Also, the Pentagon did ask for that budget increase.
James Mattis asked personally.
He said, America can afford survival.
We need more money.
Tens of billions of dollars, more money.
Also notice in that clip, when she's talking about the way she's going to pay for these programs of hers, she gets so excited.
They say, how are you going to pay for it?
She goes, we can institute this tax.
Oh, and then we can institute that tax.
Oh, and we've got some more taxes.
We can swim around in all the taxes.
The trouble is the money doesn't work.
The numbers don't work for her.
This should not be surprising because every time she goes on TV, she seems to say something that isn't true.
But she certainly makes it very clear in this particular instance...
She says, when Trevor Noah asks her, how are you going to pay for this?
She says, well, if we raise this tax and that tax and this tax, we can raise $2 trillion in revenue over 10 years.
This is important because when people hear trillion, billion, 10 years, people lose sight of the scales of money that we're talking about, the orders of magnitude difference that we're talking about.
And Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez appears not to be so swift in math either.
$2 trillion in 10 years is $200 billion a year.
One of her proposals is Medicare for All, where socialized medicine, socialist health care, everybody is going to be covered by a Medicare-like program.
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University estimates the cost of this would be $32.6 trillion over the course of 10 years.
That is $3.2 trillion per year.
The amount of money that Ocasio-Cortez says that she can raise by all of these taxes, and these are her rosy estimates, is $200 billion.
That is more than an order of magnitude off.
Where are you going to pay for the other 93% or the 90-plus percent that you need to pay for?
She doesn't have an answer for that.
To put this in perspective, by the way, Medicare for All will cost, according to this study from George Mason, $3.3 trillion per year.
Last year, the entire tax receipts paid by American citizens to the federal government was $3.3 trillion.
It was that same amount.
You would have to double the taxes on Americans.
Double them.
Not increase by 5%, not increase by 20%.
Double the taxes paid to the federal government to pay for Medicare for All.
That doesn't seem like a great case.
It doesn't seem like an easy argument for Democrats to make.
It doesn't sound like a winning argument.
So what are they doing?
They're trying to ignore the reality.
We know now that we have 4.1% GDP growth in the last quarter.
The Obama economists told us this was impossible.
This isn't going to happen.
It happened.
Joblessness is at record lows.
Black unemployment in particular is at record lows, which means that the Democrats can't even race hustle going into the election.
Crime is down.
Hate crime is down.
I don't use that phrase a lot because all crime is hate crime.
But even that, even racially motivated or whatever, all of that is down.
There's a religious liberty task force that is being...
Instituted by the Department of Justice.
They're trying to spin this as a racial thing, but the trouble is that black people and Hispanic people and mixed-race Americans are more likely to be religious than white Americans, so you can't even spin that.
And President Trump's approval rating has just ticked up to 47%.
It's ticked up higher than it was previously at 45%.
The way that Democrats are going to try to win this election is by doubling down, rehashing history, spinning false narratives, and getting into the politics of personal destruction.
We're already seeing it happen.
And we'll get a little bit to that later.
I mean, they're going to great lengths to do this.
They're trying to rename the city of Austin.
So we'll get to that in a little bit.
Before we do that, I want to thank on a very courageous man, courageous for a number of reasons, but one because he's one of the few Democrats who's actually agreed to come on my show, Jamie Kilstein.
Jamie, thanks for being here, man.
I appreciate it.
You are one of the few.
It's you and Tom Arnold, basically.
And Tom Arnold is sort of in a class of his own.
I'm going to put that on my resume now.
Just Tom Arnold's picture next to me.
I'm sort of like Tom Arnold.
Thank you for being here.
Jamie, you are...
You're a lefty.
Yeah.
You're not a conservative.
No.
You're decided, and you were...
Well, we purposely kept me out of here for the headlines just so we could actually do the interview, and I was like, hey, I have a list of grievances with you.
But you weren't just a run-of-the-mill lefty.
You wrote for the Huffington Post.
You were a woke comedian.
I was very woke, yes.
When you play clubs and all that.
Yeah.
And...
That has changed recently.
What's that about?
I mean, part of it is like...
Even when I came here.
So when I came here, this is the first...
Like, I've done Rogan's show who has had people from both sides of the aisle on.
Yeah.
But this is definitely the first, like, conservative show.
Right at the tail of the hunt.
Yeah.
And even, I was going to say, even when I said conservative, I had to put it in quotes because I'm so not used to saying that word.
And, hey, everyone here has been lovely and really nice.
And I don't know what I expected, especially, like, being in Los Angeles.
Just, like, Nazis.
Yeah, I mean, kind of.
That's what I thought.
And it would just be like in a dumpster.
And everyone...
That was our old set.
Oh, good, good, good.
The Nazi dumpster.
I saw it on my way over here in a back alley.
In a back alley where other people were getting the legal abortions.
Of course, yeah.
That's where they...
That's right.
And I... And everyone here has been nice.
Very nice and lovely.
You're shocked by this.
I was shocked by when we were talking before the show and you were like, yeah man, I really like Norm MacDonald.
And I was like, you people like comedy?
You guys laugh?
Yeah.
And I heard, I thought you just laughed at like Mexican children in cages.
And I, Jordan Peterson, when he was on Rogan, I think, no, no, no, he was on Theo Vaughn's show.
And he was like, yeah, I really like comedian Mitch Hedberg.
And I was like, what?
My mind was blown.
And ever since I kind of stepped away from being political, what I've tried to do is just be like, how do I be a better person?
And I started listening to not even political voices, really, but I started listening to like...
Tim Ferriss' show or Rogan's more or Jocko Wilnick.
And I realized that back in the day, and I'm not, I didn't hang out with like moderate liberals.
Like it was very left of left, right?
Like the left of Lenin, the woke bros.
It was like, yeah, like if you told someone you were depressed, they were like, that's a microaggression towards me.
And you're like, cool, I don't know what to do anymore.
How is depression a microaggression?
I don't know, man.
Because it makes me sad right now.
And I just want to live in my bubble.
Happy land.
Yeah.
It's very much a bubble.
Because we're joking about this.
You say, I'm shocked that you guys were nice.
We're half joking about this.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not real.
This is a real thing.
This bubble is...
I think conservatives are shocked by this.
Really just because conservatives...
Usually don't have the opportunity to be in a bubble in so much as the culture is kind of a left-wing culture.
So when you're in...
So you kind of hear the left-wing point of view, especially, you know, I lived in New York, L.A., Raven, right?
I mean, these are pretty left-wing places.
Yeah, I mean, I always disagreed with that because, like, right now it's like, well, the government is being run by conservatives, right?
But you're right.
When it comes to narratives, when it comes to loud voices, especially on social media, that's kind of like our turf.
If I were to, you know, listening to all these shows, like, becoming friends with you, you know, and hearing other people's points of views, especially, like, here's what I learned from Jocko, nothing about the military, just about how, like, discipline's good.
And I thought, sort of, like, discipline was, like, some, like, evil right-wing word.
And it's like, no, that's really good.
Makes your life better.
Yeah, like me taking responsibility or the words like honor or family.
It's weird that even those words, which should be very positive things, have been sort of turned into conservative talking points, right?
And so when I started listening to these people who were kind of demonized by my tribe, I was like, well, they say a lot of stuff I really like and I agree with.
Jordan Peterson is a really great example.
When I first heard him, I literally thought I was going to be listening to Nazi propaganda.
He just saves that for his private company.
That's for the Patreon subscribers.
You've got to pay extra.
He was like, walk with your shoulders back and have confidence and clean up your room.
I'm like, man...
So many young men, I needed to hear that stuff.
Like, there are a lot of young men who need to hear that.
And even me right now saying, young men, well, I shouldn't be talking about young men because there are also, like, Mexican transgender people that I should be talking about.
And I think that we should be talking about, like, all people and how to be better towards all people.
And me and you...
Disagree on how to do it.
But what I'm starting to learn by talking to more conservatives or libertarians is we still want people to be happy and healthy and safe.
And if we don't talk about why we disagree on the policy, we're never going to actually get to solutions.
You know what I mean?
How widespread is it, do you think, on the left that...
They legitimately think right-wingers are Nazis or hateful or...
I think it's very...
Because I did.
That's interesting.
So what changed?
I mean, what burst this bubble for you?
And you said, I'm breaking my SJW Twitter addiction.
What did it?
I mean, they started to hate me.
I mean, a lot of things.
That'll do it.
I was in it for...
I was in it for a long time.
I said this on Rogan's, but one of the...
One of my sort of, like, tipping points was...
My old show, which was very, very progressive, we had this kid right in, not kid, a man right in, who was like, I went to the doctor and I was essentially going to die.
He told me I was going to die and I have children and I have to do something with my health.
What was wrong with him?
Incredibly overweight.
Overweight.
Overweight, unhealthy.
Unhealthy, yeah.
And so I do jujitsu.
I teach jujitsu and mixed martial arts.
And so I got his personal email.
I found him a gym in, I think it was like Baltimore.
And I wrote him out like this whole like diet thing.
Or like, here's what you should stop eating.
You know, fast food, soda, all that stuff.
And...
You know, heard back from him maybe like eight months, ten months later.
Writes into the show and is literally like, my life has changed.
My doctor was like shocked.
I'm going to be okay if I keep this up.
I entered my first like white belt jujitsu tournament.
Like my kids are so proud of me.
And I'm like in tears reading this.
Because you did this.
You know, I do Krav Maga or jujitsu as I call it.
It's a similar, different emphasis, you know.
So he does this because of you.
Totally changes his life.
Totally changes his life.
And, you know, I had a really hard childhood and a struggle, like, making a name for myself in comedy and all this stuff, a lot of it, because I was very political.
And I'm, like, choking back tears because I'm like, man, all the garbage I went through is worth it.
Like, this is what I want to do.
We can read bad news every day from the news or read Twitter or talk about who we're mad at.
But, like, this was one of the first times I felt like I actually did something and wasn't just shouting into an echo chamber, right?
Yeah.
So the next day, we got like 10 emails saying that by reading his email, we were fat shaming them.
And I have never been more livid in my life.
Because we weren't like, so everyone who doesn't do jujitsu is a fatty and doesn't deserve healthcare.
We were like, here is a very inspirational story about something very specific that this one individual decided to do, and now he's not going to die.
And what I hate about...
God, I guess this is the first time I've publicly said victim culture.
Is that what you guys call it?
What I hate about it is it's like you would rather other people die than take personal responsibility.
Now, what I always say with fat shaming is like, no, you should never make someone feel bad for how they look.
There are some bigger people who are actually healthier.
I have horrible friends who like...
All my hot friends who have weird hot person metabolism who can just eat garbage and like...
I have a bagel and I like put on five pounds.
There are people who can be unhealthy.
All those prefaces.
I gave all those prefaces.
All those liberal prefaces.
But it wasn't enough.
You didn't give enough prefaces.
And I was like, man, when you would rather somebody...
And that's the problem is...
Well, it's exhausting.
It is exhausting to keep up with whatever the obsession du jour is.
And I find the minute I... Because, you know, on the rare occasion when I used to work in Hollywood, I keep my mouth shut about politics.
Yeah.
You'd have to be very careful.
You're always walking on eggshells.
What is the new obsession?
What is this?
It's so liberating to say, look, I'm having a conversation in good faith.
I'm not going to be careful and choose my words to the nth degree.
I'm just going to look.
I'm in good faith.
You're in good faith.
But it seems to me the left on Twitter especially, but in that social media angry mindset, everything is so personal and destructive and angry.
Well, and because you...
You're not looking at people face to face.
And you're not looking at them in the eyes.
And you're not meeting their family.
And you're not...
I mean, I remember my grandparents had pictures of them with George Bush, with Pat Robertson.
And when I was like...
Jamie, where did you go wrong?
I know, right?
You come from good stock.
What's going on?
I know, I know.
At my angstiest...
I went to stay with them because they were going to put me up because, of course, I was living out of my car.
I was a liberal stereotype, too, now that I say this out loud.
And they had this gorgeous house outside of Seattle.
And I was just like, sellouts.
Can I stay?
I'm authentic.
I'm so cold.
Feed me.
But I walked in and I was ready to throw down with them.
And they were...
Lovely.
Because they're my grandparents.
And I so disagree with them.
And I so disagree with you on a lot of things.
But the more tribalized we get...
Dude, I had a blast talking to you before the show.
I haven't had that much fun talking to someone in a while.
I'm a very charming person.
Yeah, very charming.
I'm very...
But then when...
And I also realized, by the way, when I started just hanging out with, like, jujitsu guys instead of just liberal progressives, I'm like, oh, this is actually the first time I've been around minorities in a really long time.
For as much as we talk about, like, being, like, woke and being, like, intersectional or whatever.
All of my friends in college who were, like, the college Democrats, the woke activists, it was all white kids of hedge fund managers.
Right.
And they're all there, you know, paying full tuition.
You know, guys, you're yelling at me about racial diversity.
I don't see a whole lot of racial diversity going on.
Right, and they're like, hold on, I have to go back to my grandparents' house and get more food.
It was me.
But I... What I realized was that talking to people I disagree with, I still...
Can get along with them.
And when you look at, for your audience, when you look at, like, when you're having a real conversation with, like, one of your liberal friends, and you're not just saying, if you voted for Trump, unfriend me on Facebook, or when I'm having a conversation with you or with libertarians or people who don't vote or whatever, you realize that, like, And this sounds super stoner, I just saw a fish this weekend, but I stand by it, which is you realize that we all are hopefully trying to be better people.
We all want to take care of our families.
We all want to pet the dog we see.
You know what I think, though?
I think ideology is an excuse not to be a better person.
They use it, I see it all the time.
And this began, again, because I'm not like a real kumbaya, it's everybody's problem, man.
I see this largely on the left.
Not exclusively, but largely.
Because in the 1960s, the left said, the personal is the political.
The private is the political.
That was that big feminist essay, 1970, 1969.
And so every aspect of life became this political moment.
And the thing I try to do in my own life, because there is an ideological version of conservatism, which I try to eschew, I try not to do it, because when you're in that fight, I know this working on campaigns, you're in that fight, you just want the lower taxes or whatever, right?
Once we lower taxes, then everything's going to be great.
And you do it, and you're in the fight, and then you lower the taxes...
And then what?
And then what?
You know, if you're on the left, you say, we've got to pass this new speech code, and once we do that...
But life is, of course, much more than those things.
It's much more than politics.
And once you do it, you've got to look at yourself in the mirror and say, what am I now?
That was the thing, where I was the most depressed.
I mean, dude, there were times where my mom would call me, and I'm like, I can't take this phone call.
I'm tweeting about feminism.
And it's like, she's a woman!
Pick up the phone.
She needs your help.
She's the woman who made you, too.
She's an actual lady right now.
And I'm like, yeah, but I don't get famous people retweeting me if I'm like, talk to my mom today.
I need to talk about the ism.
I can't talk about the people.
I gotta do the ism.
And like, yeah, talking about my mom is like a very lame virtue signaling.
But I kind of stopped talking about politics.
And like, look, we do have, I really strongly believe that we do have institutional problems in this country.
But I also believe that we can, we will use that as an excuse to, yeah, not take care of ourselves.
And because, again, personal responsibility is a very Republican word, right?
And so.
I love it.
I love that we got that one.
You'd think that you wouldn't be able to get something like that.
It's weird.
Yeah, we're the party of good.
Yeah.
Yeah, good is a Republican byword, you know.
You got discipline.
You got that.
For life.
We got life.
You got that.
We got good stuff.
Yeah, and...
The problem is, when I stopped, when I got off Twitter, and maybe it has less to do with politics and more with just social media.
I mean, because I do think that social media was important because a bunch of people who felt marginalized, whether it be trans people, whether it be people of color, they found a voice and they found a community, right?
Because they were.
You barely saw transgender activists on the news, even on Very Liberal, on MSNBC. It was just Chaz Bono, basically.
Kind of, right?
And so they had a voice.
And now suddenly you have a voice after being marginalized for so long that you're going to run with it.
And the problem is when...
So for me, and I can just speak for me, and I'm a very white, straight male, I was very depressed when I lived in New York.
And I didn't have...
I was in a rough relationship and I didn't really get along with my friends and I was struggling with comedy.
And so I would wake up every day and I would open Twitter and I would be like, who are we mad at?
And I would see who's trending.
And I'd be like, okay, so it's this conservative writer or it's this moderate Democrat writer who's not being left enough.
Cool.
I don't have time to read the articles because I slept till 11 because I'm depressed.
But I sure am going to be pissed off about it.
Yeah, so I read the headline, right?
And you read the headline.
You read headlines about me.
I look awful.
You read the articles and you go, oh, I don't get it.
And I read the headline and I'm like, all right, I got to formulate a joke off the headline because, like, time's ticking and we're going to move on to the next person.
So then you come up with a line and you add this person you don't even know.
I mean, jeez, I still have a screenshot of, like, Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo writing FU Freedom Fighter to me because I was harassing him while he was at the beach with his kids.
And I'm like, ha-ha.
And, like, who won?
Neither of us.
He should have been in the ocean with his kids.
I should have been outside instead of angrily on Twitter, not talking to my wife, not talking to my family, ignoring my poor mom.
Not now, Mom.
Yeah, and what happens is you do that to feel like a good person because you're like, I am righteously shouting into the ether.
But in reality, even when I wrote something that I believe in, if I tweeted Black Lives Matter, I believe that.
I think matter is a very low bar.
They're not saying Wakanda forever.
They're saying treat us like people, right?
See, I'm more on the Wakanda forever trend.
Who could argue with that?
It's a lot of nationalism.
I wouldn't argue with that.
But I would tweet it and then I would just refresh it to see who liked it and see how many new followers I got.
This is the addiction.
That's where the addiction comes in and I was doing that instead of learning how to be a better person.
Instead of I'm volunteering my time with an actual charity that would do something.
Instead of doing comedy.
Instead of making people happy.
Instead of teaching more people jiu-jitsu would save this kid's life.
But I don't want to fat shame them by teaching them jiu-jitsu.
And so...
Well, you've got to teach the lefties how to laugh, though.
If you do, that would be another thing that would change their lives.
Hey, man.
This brings me to my...
Because then I'll let you go.
I've taken a lot of your time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Are...
Are you ever going to work in this town again?
I mean, because it's not like you're a conservative.
No.
You're like a left-wing guy.
What I forgot about comedy is that the majority of comedy is...
A lot of it is...
And this is what I missed.
Which is, a lot of comedy is, and why I love comics, is they are so open and they're so honest about their screw-ups, their messed up thoughts, and their vulnerabilities.
And my old crew didn't...
Is crew a cultural appropriation?
Yeah, that's...
You're appropriating Harvard culture.
My old group of friends...
Weren't like that because we were so busy shouting at other people that a lot of us wouldn't, me, I can just say me, wouldn't talk about our own flaws or examine our own flaws.
And what I loved about spending this year hanging out with athletes is athletes are constantly trying to improve and they are using discipline and they're reading biographies about great leaders and the men aren't afraid to say that, yeah, being a man is good and that doesn't mean that you have to be oppressing people.
That means that, like, you want to, like, take care of, like, your family.
And, like, you want to, like, be strong and, like, be brave.
And, like, and that's not a bad thing.
And those are qualities that women can have, too.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm so used to having to give a million prefaces before.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
You don't need the prefaces here.
This is a safe space.
We're in a safe space now.
Good, don't trigger me.
I'm so afraid to have a kid because I think his first words are literally just going to be like, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, don't you?
I'm sorry.
But I honestly think that, like, If you spend your life figuring out how you can be a good person and if you take care of yourself first, which I always thought was selfish, you are going to be in a much better place to take care of other people and to help other people.
And I think people need to think about how much time are you spending on Twitter attacking people instead of making stuff, instead of helping people, instead of looking like the person bringing up your groceries in the eye.
Instead of just being like, I'm tweeting about the minimum wage.
It's like, well, cool, you're ignoring the person who's in front of you right now.
Speaking of Norm MacDonald, he had one of the greatest observations I've ever seen on Twitter.
He said, I'm paraphrasing, I've now realized that Twitter is an excellent place to tell people that you don't like them very much.
That's the purpose of it.
Yeah, that's it.
And now you're outside of it in the real world.
And hopefully you'll continue to work.
They won't blacklist you.
I hope so.
Where can people find you?
Yes.
So if they do blacklist me, everybody, you can support my show.
I have a podcast where I talk about a lot of this stuff.
It's far filthier.
I found out last minute I couldn't curse, so if you saw me doing this...
That's okay.
We forgot to tell Tom Arnold that, and then we had to bleep the entire show.
Great, great, great.
It's the Jamie Kilstein podcast.
It's free on Stitcher and iTunes.
And then I'm at Jamie Kilstein on Twitter.
Alright, that's it.
That's where you go and tweet mean things to Jamie.
Don't do it.
You jerk.
I'm so happy now on Twitter.
I didn't give my Instagram because people aren't mean on Instagram because it's just cats and inspirational quotes.
I'm going to do, I trust you guys.
Cats and sort of derrieres.
Yeah, prove that conservatives are good.
My Instagram, which is my special place, is Jamie Kilstein Podcast.
Go to that safe special place.
Yeah.
Jamie, thanks for being here.
Thanks, Mac.
Alright, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
If you're on Facebook and YouTube, go to Daily Wire and give us your money, because we need your money, to keep the lights on and covfefe in my cup.
Also, because Jamie is known for stealing mugs off of television sets, so I know he's going to take the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You're going to need this.
I mean, these days, you're really going to need it.
You've got Ocasio-Cortez going on The Daily Show.
You've got collusion not being a crime.
You've got Paul Manafort going to jail for, I don't know, for jaywalking in 1971.
There are a lot of things that are upsetting the left these days.
Go make sure you get this because otherwise you'll drown in the leftist tears.
And by the way, you'll need this because I'm headed to D.C. I'm going to the YAF conference in two days.
I'll be there on Wednesday.
So bring it down there.
We're going to flood the whole District of Columbia.
Go to dailywarri.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, I'm running late as usual.
This is like the story of my life.
I could have kept Jamie on for another two hours.
I mean, that guy is great to talk to.
Talk about the walk-away moment or the kind of realizing this dark culture of SJW mean-tweeting.
It's really how liberating it is to be done with that.
So, one aspect of this, talking about delving into the past, the politics of personal destruction, the Democrats have no...
Nothing to run on in 2018, in the midterm elections.
They've got nothing.
They don't have the personal crime stuff about Trump that's fallen flat.
Can't run on the economy.
Can't run on foreign affairs.
ISIS has been destroyed militarily.
North Korea is denuclearizing.
We've got satellite images corroborating that.
They can't run against trade.
We're ironing out our trade deals.
The IMF is crediting Trump with boosting the global economy.
They've got nothing to run on.
They can't even run on racial division, which they usually try to run on because hate crimes are down, black unemployment is down, joblessness is down.
It's all going so well.
So what do they do?
They dig into the past.
Ironically, their own past, because the Democrats are the party of slavery, and the Republican Party was founded to stop the Democrats from owning slaves.
That's why it was founded in 1854.
So they're delving into the past, and they're saying, you know, in the old days...
In the olden days, there was slavery, there was racial division, there was segregation.
Never mind that we're the ones who did it.
And so we're going to have to rename monuments and rip down monuments and rename streets.
And now they want to rename an entire city of Austin, Texas.
I kid you not.
And the story behind this is insane.
So they need to censor.
They need to erase history.
What they did is...
So Stephen F. Austin...
Stephen Austin is the founder of Texas, the father of Texas, an important figure.
It's who Austin is named after.
They're very angry because he opposed an attempt by Mexico to outlaw slavery in that territory.
And he had this comment.
He said that freeing all the slaves immediately would turn them into vagabonds, a nuisance, and a menace.
Tough words.
And so they're now saying we've got to rename Austin.
We cannot have this legacy of this slaver.
But the thing with Austin is he wasn't a lifetime slave owner.
He intermittently owned slaves.
He also believed that slavery was morally wrong.
He also believed that slavery was contrary to the American founding ideals, that it was anti-American.
And he predicted that slavery would cause destruction and ruin for the United States in the long run.
He predicted all of those things.
His position wasn't very different than Thomas Jefferson or other founding fathers.
By the way, he's right.
We're seeing that play out now.
Obviously, it caused a lot of destruction during the Civil War, 600,000 Americans dying.
But in this long run, it's caused this destruction because it's such an easy target for cynical Democrats who have nothing to run on.
So they say, remember slavery?
That was bad.
Let's rename the whole town.
It's insane.
This proposal to rename the city of Austin comes from the city of Austin's equity office.
And they say, we've got to topple the monuments.
We've got to rename seven streets because the streets have names like Plantation Road.
One of them was named Barton Springs, this area, Barton Springs.
And that was after William Barton, who owned slaves.
You've got to rename that.
You've got to rename everything.
And this never ends.
This goes all the way back and it never ends.
There are two points on this.
One, the City of Austin Equity Office.
Now, you see this especially at universities.
The office of inclusion and diversity and renaming things.
The office of this, the office of that.
Of tolerance and tolerance and whatever.
These guys exist.
Their whole job is to cause trouble.
To reopen historical scabs.
To try to rewrite history.
To try to erase history.
To try to create division.
That's their whole job.
So we can't really blame them when they do that.
That's their whole point.
That's why they exist.
What we should do, though, is...
Perhaps get rid of those jobs.
They don't do a lot of great work.
The fact that Yale University became a hotbed of racial division and anti-historical activism.
Yale University, the best history department in the entire country, has become this place of erasing history.
That is because those protests were egged on by the deputy assistant, deputy dean of diversity and inclusion and creating political trouble.
You've got to get rid of those things.
Because it's just totally contrived.
It's total nonsense.
And it erases history.
There is no end to this.
If you're going to erase the name Austin because a guy who fervently believed that slavery was immoral and anti-American also didn't want to abolish slavery immediately, if you're going to erase him, you're going to erase everybody.
You are going to erase Washington.
You're going to have to rename Washington, D.C. I don't know.
I bet Amerigo Vespucci wasn't a great guy.
What about, did he ever say a mean thing to his wife?
Probably have to rename America, won't we?
To judge the historical past because they were not perfect people is an incredible thing.
One, because you're not perfect, we're not perfect, none of us is perfect.
In the course of justice, none of us would see salvation, to quote Portia to Shylock and the Merchant of Venice.
It's an impossible standard.
It's just going to involve you totally eradicating your tradition and see what happens then.
See what happens then when you're just guided by your ideology.
Because ideologies have taken hold and destroyed tradition a number of times in modern history.
The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany, Communist China.
On and on.
See what happens.
Does that lead to human flourishing?
Does that lead to human misery?
Obviously human misery.
Before we go...
Oh, I would like to direct your attention, too, to a New York magazine article on this same topic.
They have this magazine article.
I can't show the pictures because then they'll get me for copyright.
But it says, the photographer who documents the former sites of Confederate monuments.
And you can go and look, and it's just bases with nothing there.
And you just see the absence of it.
And it's really spooky.
Because even if you don't like Jefferson Davis, even if you don't like Robert Lee, you just see this absence, this void.
And you think, gosh...
We're getting rid of our history, and what's going to fill that void?
What ideology is going to fill that void, and is it really going to make things better?
I also want to point out, on this day in history, we're talking about Medicare for all, how we're going to spend $75 zillion on new social programs, and that'll be great.
Well, that'll fix everything, right?
Mankind is perfectible.
That usually works well.
No, wrong.
On this day in history, in 1965, LBJ signed Medicare into law.
So...
This created a major, major permanent entitlement.
It's given us a lot of trouble ever since.
It was signed at the Truman Library, and this is because in 1945, President Truman became one of the first Americans to propose a national health insurance provision.
Truman actually became the first beneficiary of Medicare.
He signed up and he said, okay, I'm the first Medicare enrollee.
Originally, Medicare was for Americans 65 and older.
Just a few years later, seven years later in 1972, that was expanded to include some Americans under the age of 65.
Then in 2003, under a Republican president, a nominally ostensible conservative president, It's been a huge strain on the federal budget ever since it was passed.
Just to put this in perspective, In 2010, the Office of Management and Budget said that out of the $528 billion that was allocated to Medicare, huge amount of money, almost $50 billion of that was fraud.
That is a program that is so riven with fraud.
Forget the Democrats complained about national defense.
The defense budget is so big.
Medicare is a lot bigger than that.
Medicare is a big driver of our debt and deficits.
But when you look at that program, almost 10% of that is fraud.
That is a huge waste.
When you're talking about a huge chunk of the federal budget, then a huge chunk of that is waste, fraud, and abuse.
In 2017, Medicare accounted for 15% of the total budget.
That's expected to rise to 18% over the next 10 years.
So it's not like it's shrinking.
It's getting even bigger.
It's running away, and it's, to quote Mitch Daniels, the new red menace, this time consisting of ink.
Part of what that should show you, though, is that entitlement programs, once they're enacted, are virtually impossible to repeal.
Right now, the Republicans control the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the conservatives have the court, broadly speaking.
We have so many state houses, but they can't repeal Obamacare.
We can gut it.
We can get rid of the individual mandate.
We can work around the edges.
But they still haven't succeeded in repealing Obamacare.
Why?
Because even with all of that momentum, it is virtually impossible to repeal entitlements once they're passed.
And what an entitlement program is, is a diminution of your freedom.
It takes away your freedom.
The bigger the entitlement, the less freedom you have.
Because it means the more of your property the government gets to take, the more of your liberty it gets to demand, and the bigger the government gets, the smaller the citizen gets.
The government that can give you everything you want is able to take away everything that you have.
The government's going to give you all that health care.
You have to rely on the government for health care.
Well, guess what happens when your baby gets sick and you say, I want to take it elsewhere for treatment?
Either there's nowhere else to go or the government can say no.
As we saw in the United Kingdom happen twice in just the last year, last couple of years.
Once that entitlement program is enacted, that liberty is gone.
And so when you've got people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and lefties and socialists, open socialists saying, we want to enact national health service, we want to, that freedom will be lost permanently.
There will not be repealing it.
It will not come back.
And those are the stakes in the election.
Because it's looking good for Republicans, but right now 42 candidates are running on the left with the official endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America.
They want to do that.
They know how important it is.
They know that once they take away your freedom, you're not getting it back.
You've got to fight that tooth and nail.
And even wackos, even clowns like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who doesn't know anything, who gesticulates like a crazy person on Trevor Noah's show, they are...
Peddling a really pernicious ideology.
They're trying to take away your freedom.
You've got to rebut them every chance you get.
Okay, that's our show.
I will see you tomorrow, and then I'm flying over to D.C. So if you're in the D.C. area, maybe I'll see you around there.
You can catch me at, you know, any cigar bar or the Trump Hotel.
You'll probably see me there.
Because we'll be talking at YAF, at YAF, Young America's Foundation, and there's going to be a really good speech.
We're going to be talking about owning the libs, and I can't wait to offer my robust defense of that.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia Villareal.
Executive producer Jeremy Borey.
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.
