All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 8, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:48
Ep. 198 - Losing Is Really Winning!

On election night, Republicans win, Democrats lose, and the media explain that losing is really winning. Then, Professor Edward Feser joins to rebuff Pope Francis’s recent creativity with Catholic doctrine, the Oscars finally recognizes movies people actually see, and CNN humiliates itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Last night, Republicans won a hotly contested special election in Ohio, putting a full five out of five candidates whom Trump endorsed over the finish line.
Meanwhile, Democrat superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez strikes out, losing four out of six endorsed races.
But don't worry.
Don't worry.
It's okay.
Democrats and the mainstream media will explain to us how losing is really winning.
Then, Professor Edward Fazer joins to rebuff Pope Francis' recent creativity with Catholic doctrine and the death penalty.
The Oscars finally recognizes movies that people see.
And CNN humiliates itself.
What else is new?
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today, and we have to figure out.
We need CNN to tell us how losing is winning and war is peace and up is down.
Before we get to that, I have to thank Blue Apron.
I've got to thank this wonderful sponsor, Blue Apron.
Let me give you free food, people.
Listen to me.
Basically all I ever eat these days is Blue Apron.
Sweet little Lisa cooks it all the time.
It's shipped right to my door.
Excellent recipes.
They don't repeat recipes.
You get new recipes all the time.
Quick and easy options.
Perfectly portioned ingredients delivered right to your door.
Blue Apron makes dinner quick, easy, and very, very tasty.
The quality of ingredients, you're not going to beat anywhere.
The super chic, organic grocery store, the quality of these meats and ingredients, you are not going to beat.
They are so good at Blue Apron.
Seasonally inspired ingredients, mouth-watering grilling options for summer, chicken with barbecue sauce, juicy cheeseburgers with coleslaw.
They're so good.
Chef-designed recipes, exciting partnerships like Bob's Burgers and MasterChef.
Check out this week's menu and listen.
Listen.
Let me help you.
Help me help you.
Take free food.
Get your first three meals free at blueapron.com slash covfefe.
C-O-V-F-E-F-E. Blueapron.com slash covfefe.
C-O-V-F-E-F-E. Get your first three meals free.
It's free food.
You'd be a fool not to do it.
Go there right now.
Blue Apron.
A better way to cook.
Okay, so I'll be honest with you.
I'll make a little confession here.
I was out late on a school night last night.
I was.
I went to a local cigar bar.
I was at a friend's birthday party.
Had a couple Coca-Colas, a few adult beverages, you know.
Anyway, I rolled into my apartment a little late last night.
Late enough to see the results of that hotly contested special election in Ohio.
Now, what happens?
This is the headline that I see.
The main headline on Apple News takes up the whole screen and then a couple below it.
Quote, Too close to call.
Too close for comfort.
Trump's candidate appeared to eke out a razor-thin win in Ohio, but signs of a widening Democratic wave are coming into focus.
Read more at USA Today.
Then the next one, right below that.
Republicans now realize how hard they'll have to fight in dozens of similar races to regain control of the House.
Read more at BuzzFeed.
That's my whole screen.
I'm looking at Apple News.
And so I'm thinking, gosh, geez, that sounds like terrible news for, oh no, it means that the Republican won.
That's what that means.
I know that would be confusing because every single word they used was designed to make it seem like the Democrat won, but the Democrat lost.
The Republican won.
No automatic recount.
No, nothing.
Nope.
The Republican won.
This is what they do all the time.
Republican Troy Balderson beat Democrat Danny O'Connor.
The Democrats always run certain that they're going to win.
So you've probably read about this House race.
They've been pumping it up in the last few days.
This is the one, the sign of the blue wave.
Democrats are coming, baby.
And then they lose.
And then they pretend that losing is winning.
They did this.
Do you remember John Ossoff?
That candidate?
Probably not, but there was this candidate in Georgia, and the Democrats said, like, John Ossoff, he's the one!
This is the referendum on Trump!
Blue wave, baby!
Woo!
And then the election happens and he loses.
They're like, yeah, well, yeah, he lost, but really?
Secretly?
Secretly, though?
He won.
Well, but the numbers, he lost.
Yeah, I know the numbers.
And the other guy, the other guy's going to Congress.
Yeah, but secretly, though?
Moral victory.
There's no moral victory.
When you win, you go make legislation.
And when you lose, you go home.
That's what happened.
That's what happened in Ohio.
The Republican won.
Ha ha ha.
So Balderson, right now, he's ahead 1,754 votes.
There are still provisional ballots.
There are still absentee ballots.
So sure, anything could happen, right?
But there was no automatic recount triggered.
He won.
He won the night.
So what they're doing now, they can't figure out how to really spin it that the Democrat won, so they're blaming the Green Party candidate for losing.
There's this Green Party candidate in this race, Joe Manchick, and they're saying he got almost enough votes to spur a recount, an automatic recount.
The operative word here is almost.
He didn't get enough votes to spur an automatic recount.
Sorry.
But this is what they're saying.
I'm going to introduce this guy to you first, and then I'll explain Democrats' bad strategy here.
Joe Manchick, Green Party candidate in Ohio, is from Hell, Michigan.
He says that his ancestors were aliens.
Quote, My distant relatives originally came to planet Earth from a planet orbiting a star in the Pleiades star cluster located in the constellation of Taurus, which might make him an illegal alien.
I don't know.
He probably has birthright citizenship, but his ancestors may have been illegal aliens from outer space.
He says that he speaks 19 languages, including Spanglish and sheet music.
And a few others.
I don't even know that those are the two craziest.
Without further ado, Green Party candidate in Ohio, Joe Manchik.
Okay, Joe, we're live.
Can you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Sure.
My name is Joe Manchick, and I'm a Green Party candidate running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio's 12th Congressional District.
This is the second time I'm running for a seat in the U.S. House in the 12th District in Ohio.
I was on the ballot in 2016, and I got more than 13,000 votes, and I'm doing it again this year.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely have a website and there's a donate page.
There's a link for the donate page at the top of the website.
You can just click on that link and it'll take you over to where you can use a credit card or a PayPal account or a Another kind of card.
What do you call those cards?
Debit card?
Yeah, that's the word I was looking for.
Debit card.
I don't have one of those, so I can't remember what it was, but...
Or you can mail a check to the campaign.
There's an address there where you can just drop a check in the mail.
We don't take corporate money, and if you send us any corporate money, we'll send it right back.
We don't want your corporate money.
We don't take money from corporations.
Nobody in the Green Party will take corporate money, and we'll return it if we get corporate money.
So, you know, if you want to support my campaign, please send me a check from a personal account and I'll gladly accept that.
Awesome.
And then, can you tell us what that website is?
Off the top of my head, I don't remember.
Is it magicforcongress.wordpress.com?
Forward slash something.
Forward slash something.
That could be the new Democrat Party motto.
Forward slash something.
That's what they're doing.
That's their mantra these days.
So the best part of this, Joe Manchik, is the Democrats are complaining now because they're calling him a spoiler.
All of the mainstream media are calling him a spoiler, you know, and that's the press wing of the Democrat Party.
The Democrat operatives themselves are calling Joe Manchik a spoiler.
They're saying that all the votes that this guy got would have gone to the Democrat.
So just consider that for a second.
What you're admitting, that's more of a confession, really, than an accusation.
What you're saying is that the guys who vote for the outer space alien who doesn't have a debit card, can't remember his campaign website, that guy wearing, you probably couldn't see it, but a sort of ratty t-shirt with a peace sign on it, that guy, they're in your constituency.
They're in your base.
They would have gone for your candidate.
I would probably, that's not a great long-term strategy.
So he's a spoiler.
I would say, no, he was a No, they would have all voted for the Republican.
No way, sirree, would they vote for us.
Uh-uh-uh.
Really, really sad.
The other headline, the true headline that you could see in a few outlets today is, quote, Democrat Party's liberal insurgency hits a wall.
And I don't want to say that I told you so.
Well, I do.
I do want to say that, and I want to take credit for it.
I did tell you this would happen, and I used that exact metaphor.
I don't remember if it was on this show or on another show that I was appearing on, but I did point out that the Democrats, if they double down on this far-left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez strategy, they are running right into a wall in the midterms.
This is not going to work.
Democrats could win in the midterms, but these socialistic candidates ain't going to happen.
And the mainstream media seem to be picking up on that.
Maybe they watch this show.
Here's what happened among the really far-left candidates.
For Michigan governor, that was a race up last night.
Former state senator Gritchin Whitmer beat Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim socialist who is a doctor.
He's endorsed by Bernie Sanders.
He's endorsed by these socialists.
He lost that race, the socialist Bernie backed guy by 20 points.
He lost that primary by 20 points.
He ended fourth in a five way race.
Not great.
St. Louis congressional, Congressman William Lacey Clay beat out a socialist Black Lives Matter activist, Cori Bush.
Cori Bush was endorsed by Alexandria.
Ocasio-Cortez beat, beat Cori Bush handily.
Ocasio-Cortez struck out broadly over the night.
Ocasio-Cortez endorsed six candidates going into these races.
She was flying all over to Michigan.
She's been flying all over the country for candidates.
She's been in California raising money.
And she struck out four out of those six candidates lost.
And turned out pretty badly.
El Syed coming out fourth out of five.
That's not really good.
Brent Welder lost.
She endorsed Brent Welder.
James Thompson won.
That's one of the candidates who won.
Rashida Tlaib won.
Rashida Tlaib could be the first Muslim congresswoman.
She is known exclusively for heckling Trump at an event once.
That is her only qualification to enter the U.S. Senate.
But she won.
She was one of the more radical candidates who won last night.
She's never held a job in her entire life.
She is a career politician.
If you look at her wiki page, it says, Early life and education.
Politics.
There's no nothing in between.
It's just early life straight into hackery politics.
Then there was another headline, another sort of exciting, unseen-before-candidate, unconventional.
The headline was, quote, Possible first gay Native American woman in Congress wins.
Which is really a shocking headline, because I had no idea that Elizabeth Warren was gay.
It never occurred to me that she...
I don't know.
She was married to a guy at one time.
So that's incredible.
Congratulations to you, Senator Liawatha-Warren, for coming out.
I suppose there was another Native American woman who's actually Native American named Sharice Davids.
She was a White House fellow under the Obama administration.
She was not endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Brent Welder in that race, and she won.
So that'll be another area where identity politics, or they're pouring that down your throats, they're going to try to do something about that.
So, okay, they lost.
They just lost.
And in particular, the left wing of the Democrat Party lost last night.
So how are they spinning it?
They're spinning it and saying that, okay, sure, they lost the races, but their turnout was excellent.
Their turnout was way, way better, especially in Michigan.
So in Michigan, the GOP turnout was up.
Turnout overall, by the way, was up.
But GOP turnout was up 24%, and Democrat turnout was up 84%, something like that.
Some really high number.
The reason for this is that the GOP infighting is not like the Democrat infighting right now.
Just consider the stakes.
Right now, everything is going great for the country, and the Republican Party is leading the country, so everything's going great for the Republican Party.
Just going really, really well.
The economy, foreign affairs, domestic policy, it's all going great, other than our crazy spending.
But other than that, it's going very, very well.
So what are the Republicans fighting for?
Relatively low stakes.
We just have to fight to hold it in the general election.
The Democrats are fighting for the soul of their party.
They're still furious because Hillary stole that nomination from Bernie Sanders.
The Democrats stole that.
They played unfairly, at least.
I don't know.
If they played fairly, would Bernie have won?
I don't know.
Maybe not.
But they certainly played very unfairly with him.
So they're fighting over this.
The progressive wing of the party versus the more centrist types.
So that's why the We'll start talking about Ocasio-Cortez first.
The Ocasio-Cortez of it all...
Is why the lefty Democrats are running up against the wall.
She's the reason.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the future of the Democrat Party, according to Tom Perez, doesn't know anything.
She's crazy, she's crazy-eyed, and she doesn't know anything.
You know, you've got to remember, when you're talking about these races, four out of six losing last night...
Tom Perez, the head of the DNC, said she is the future of the party.
Well, if she's the future of the party, the future of the party looks bleak.
It does not look very good for you, does it?
Because what's the future of the Republican Party?
Right now.
The now is the future.
It's going very, very well.
But I don't know.
Perhaps the Democrats should consider a new future because Ocasio-Cortez does not seem to be a winner.
I'm going to get to her interview with Pod Save America in a second.
But first, I want to bring on Professor Edward Fazer.
Professor Fazer, are you on?
I am on.
Good.
Thank you so much for being here.
Professor Fazer is the author of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.
He is the Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College.
He's called by National Review one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy.
I'm sure you've read his columns before he's written about a zillion books.
Professor Fazer, we have talked a little bit this week on this show about Pope Francis' recent statements on the death penalty.
I share your views on the death penalty.
I rather like it.
I think hanging concentrates the mind.
I think it's rather justified.
First of all, before we even talk about this, what does Pope Francis' statement on the death penalty look like compared to 2,000 years of Catholic tradition?
Well, at the very least, it has to be said that the revision of the Catechism that the Pope introduced last week is ambiguous.
On the one hand, there is the affirmation in the cover letter that accompanied the revision of the Catechism, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which claimed that there's no contradiction with past teaching.
Okay, that sounds good.
But on the other hand, when you look at the actual text of the Catechism, And the Pope uses language to the effect that the death penalty is what he calls an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.
That certainly sounds like it's claiming that capital punishment is intrinsically evil, that it's wrong of its very nature.
And that would manifestly be in conflict with the traditional teaching of the Church, since you see precisely the opposite of that thesis, affirmed consistently throughout Scripture,...affirmed by Pope after Pope for 2,000 years, affirmed in previous Church documents of a high level of authority, such as the Roman Catechism issued by Pope St.
Pius V, and the two previous versions of the Catechism issued by John Paul II, who, despite his own personal opposition to capital punishment and his personal hope that it be abolished, consistently affirmed that it can be legitimate in principle, and applied in practice at least in very rare cases.
That was Pope John Paul II's view.
Pope Francis' view seems to radically go beyond anything any previous pope has said, including Pope John Paul II. Seems to, I emphasize.
Now, it would be nice to have some clarification of how what's being said now can be made consistent.
There's a claim that there's no contradiction, but as I've noted elsewhere, just to say there's no contradiction doesn't explain how.
P and not P, or what seems to be P and not P, can be made consistent.
Of course.
And you see this not just in the statements of popes and in other high-level church documents.
You see it from the writings of St.
Paul, St.
Augustine, St.
Thomas Aquinas, all affirming the legitimacy of the death penalty.
And now we have something different.
And correct me if I'm wrong, didn't Pope Francis elsewhere, in a more casual setting, say that the death penalty is contrary to the Gospel?
He did.
In fact, the statement you're thinking of was in a speech from last October, where he first raised the possibility of revising the catechism.
And the language he used then was that capital punishment was, quote, per se, contrary to the gospel, unquote.
Which certainly does seem to say that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong, that it's intrinsically contrary to Christian morality.
Now, fortunately, the Pope didn't use that sort of language in the catechism.
What you see in the revision, as I've said, it does seem to be very problematic, but it's not quite as blatant or extreme as that remark that he made in October.
If I can comment on that remark from October, some people have suggested, well, maybe if you said that capital punishment is per se contrary to the gospel, maybe you could make that consistent with the idea that it's not contrary to natural law.
So we could say that natural law allows it, but the higher demands of the gospel rule it out.
Well, I'm sorry, that won't work either, because Pope after Pope, from Pope Innocent I, to Pope Innocent III, to Pius V, to Pius X, To John Paul II himself, they were all addressing specifically Christian audiences, and in contexts like catechisms that were supposed to guide Christians, they're supposed to guide Catholics, explicitly said that capital punishment can sometimes be used.
So even if you were to say that capital punishment was just contrary to Christian morality specifically, to the higher demands of the gospel, that would also be a contradiction with tradition, not merely a development.
Of course, and even the language used here in this revision to the Catechism, an attack on the inviolability of the dignity of the person, it is very hard to read that and not conclude that the present Pope believes that the Church has been teaching in error for two millennia.
My practical question then is, for Catholics who have a legitimate disagreement about capital punishment or who support capital punishment, Or who read these statements from the Pope and say this doesn't seem to jive very well.
How should Catholics react?
I'm always so loath to openly criticize the Pope, but certain things seem to breed total confusion or to be an error.
Yeah.
Well, some Catholics who are well-meaning have a deep misunderstanding of what the Church says about the authority of a pope.
It's fairly well known that not everything a pope says is infallible.
So, a lot of people realize that, but they still think that, even when the Pope doesn't teach something infallibly, that you must, under absolutely every circumstance, go along with that.
That's not actually correct, and the Church, very recently, about 20 years ago, under Pope John Paul II, made it clear In a document known as Donum Veritatis, which discusses the duties of theologians, it allowed that a church document could be deficient in different ways, and that Catholic theologians had the right, and sometimes even the duty, to respectfully raise criticisms, to point out problems.
Now, there couldn't be any clearer problem with a document.
There couldn't be any clearer case of a deficiency Then a magisterial document, a church document, seeming to contradict 2,000 years of past teaching, because after all, the church has repeatedly said that popes have no authority to introduce new doctrines.
When the First Vatican Council declared the infallibility of the pope, it explicitly said this, that the pope has no authority to make up something new, but only to preserve and safeguard what has been passed on.
And you can refine what's been passed on, You can draw out implications from it, but you can't reverse it.
You can't contradict it.
And Pope Benedict XVI famously reaffirmed this and argued for what he called a hermeneutic of continuity, always interpreting present teaching in light of the past, in consistency with the past.
So the Church allows, when A pope or anyone else says something that appears to be in actual contradiction with tradition.
The Church allows theologians to raise respectful criticisms and to ask the Church to reaffirm continuity with tradition.
I'm reminded, I think Chesterton said that heresy is not the promotion of vice over virtue.
It's the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of the others.
Mercy to the exclusion of prudence or justice, for instance, in this case, perhaps.
Very broadly, for people who are unaware or who are divided over the death penalty, I know Catholics who are quite personally opposed to the death penalty, even if they don't think it's anti-gospel.
Conservatives who are opposed to the death penalty because they believe that the state shouldn't have the power to kill people.
What do you see, if you can give a 30,000 foot view, as the support for the death penalty and the support for what the Pope seems to be saying now, from scripture or tradition?
Yeah.
Well, what you find in scripture tradition, and my co-author, Joseph Bassett and I, in our book, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, which is a Catholic defense of capital punishment, what we demonstrate is that you find in the tradition of the church, A middle ground position between two extremes.
On the one extreme is the claim that capital punishment is of its very nature intrinsically evil.
The church has definitively ruled that out consistently.
On the other extreme would be the view that you must always, absolutely always, inflict on someone the penalty that he or she deserves, including death.
Well, the church has always rejected that as well.
There may be cases where someone deserves a punishment, even capital punishment, but there might nevertheless be reasons why you should refrain from giving the person what he deserves.
It might even be moral reasons why you might do that.
So the Church has never insisted that you must always inflict capital punishment on someone who deserves it.
But between those two extreme positions, the Church has always allowed Catholics freely to discuss this issue.
And at some points in Church history, the tendency has been to Advocate, you know, for rarely, if ever, using capital punishment.
That was true in the earliest centuries of the Church and in recent decades.
For most of the history of the Church, the tendency was to think that capital punishment could be used in a fairly wide variety of cases.
Now, I think that what's happened, I think this is especially true of Pope St.
John Paul II, Is that some 20th century governments have been so brutal, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union come to mind, or Communist China under Mao Zedong, for example, were so brutal, and the Pope, John Paul II, of course, had direct experience of those regimes.
That I think there was a tendency to want to pull away from an emphasis on retributive justice and focus instead on rehabilitation and so forth.
And you could certainly make that case.
But one of the things we argue in our book is that it's possible to go too far in that direction.
And if you go too far and you start condemning capital punishment in these extreme terms, describing it as a violation of human dignity and so forth, Then you start to lose the other side of the tradition.
And indeed, you start to lose sight of the very idea that there's such a thing as getting one's just desserts.
So that there is a cosmic moral order that's upset when we don't let the punishment fit the crime.
We don't let it ever fit the crime and so forth.
We lose sight of that.
And, of course, there's also this danger in the Catholic context of seeming to sever the tradition entirely from its origins, sever current teaching from its origins.
Of course, if the Catholic...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, I was just going to add, what often gets lost in this discussion also is that Catholics who discuss this issue and who oppose capital punishment routinely speak as if it were uncontroversial, that we could take it for granted that capital punishment has no deterrence effect.
Or that it's not important for protecting individuals from aggressors.
And we argue in the book that's simply not the case.
For one thing, if you're going to say that modern prison systems are sufficient to keep people safe from the most dangerous criminals and so forth, well, at best you can say that's true in developed countries, in Europe, in the United States, in Canada, places like that.
There are a lot of undeveloped areas of the world, third world countries, where that's not the case.
Where you don't have adequate prison systems to keep people safe.
You've got, for example, the famous escapes of El Chapo in the Mexican drug lore.
Obviously, the prison system there was not sufficient to keep people safe from this murderous person.
That's just one example.
But of course, even in developed countries, a murderer who's in prison for life can still pose a danger to prison guards.
Prison guards sometimes get murdered by these people.
Other prisoners, sometimes an organized crime figure might call in an assassination from within prison to outside prison walls.
We argue that there's considerable evidence that capital punishment has deterrence value.
So if you get rid of it, you're risking innocent lives.
And it also provides an important tool for prosecutors in plea bargaining.
You might get someone who's on trial who doesn't want to give information about his accomplices or information about other crimes.
And if you tell him, look, we could seek the death penalty for you, but we won't if you play ball and give us information about these other things, sometimes they're willing to do that.
Whereas if you take the death penalty off the books, you no longer have that option.
And once again, innocent lives will be in danger.
So we really care about protecting the innocent.
We can't just dismiss capital punishment cavalierly on the basis of vague slogans about human dignity and so forth that would also contradict the tradition of the church in any case.
We are awash these days in politics in vague slogans from at least one side of politics.
And it's really upsetting because it seems to me that the people who are rallying most and most vociferously to get rid of capital punishment couldn't possibly tell you why we have capital punishment to begin with.
They couldn't explain it.
They couldn't defend it, which is usually a good sign that they don't know what they're talking about.
An excellent book, though.
By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, a Catholic defense of capital punishment.
Professor Fazer, I'll have to let you go, but we will have to have you come back because it is a great relief as a conservative and certainly as a Catholic to have a little clarity in these days when there is so much confusion going around.
Thank you very much for having me on So, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this is just too good to miss.
She just did an interview on Pod Save America.
You know, that's the one where all those soy swallowing, you know, they're just devouring soy products during their podcast.
They're the ex-Obama bros who do this show where their take on politics is to say the F word in a really whiny voice, and that's somehow political analysis and insight.
Anyway...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez goes on Pod Save America, and you don't need Ali Stuckey for this.
She made an even bigger fool of herself.
Here is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Is this a news?
Mr.
Homerschel himself knows what he did in politics.
He's better than Penjian, because he is really a servant of the monopolistic capital and represents the nations of the United Nations, which lead the imperialist and colonial politics.
I'm sorry, that was my mistake.
I put Ocasio-Cortez's interview on in the original Russian, but I should do the English translation.
We will bury you!
We will bury you!
Do we have the English version of Ocasio-Cortez?
We don't talk about what defense costs.
We're about to hit a trillion dollars in debt because of the corporate tax cuts.
Yet, when we talk about pre-K, healthcare, college, suddenly it's unrealistic because of the cost.
And it's not just bad-faith Republicans that make that argument.
You hear it from Democrats as well.
What's your response to that?
Well, I think it's that same exact thing.
It's that we, you know, they say, how are you going to pay for it?
As though they haven't used these same ways to pay for unlimited wars, to pay for trillion dollar tax cuts and tax cut extensions.
They use these mechanisms to pay for these things all the time.
They only want to know, it just seems like their pockets are only empty when we're talking about education and investing in human capital in the United States, education, healthcare, housing.
Yeah, I just want to pause it there.
Did you catch that phrase she used?
Human capital?
I don't know about you.
I get a chill up my spine.
I get a little nervous.
Start sweating a little bit when a socialist starts talking about human capital.
Like I'm just a commodity.
Like I'm a pure product.
No, Michael, it's alright.
We're going to use your human capital in a different way.
Duh, duh.
We will use your human capital.
Duh.
No, thank you, ma'am.
No, please don't use me.
They do this all the time.
The left talks about people like they're animals or commodities or just masses of flesh to be used however they see fit.
Because that is true.
They say, okay, doctors, you're going to do what we tell you to do.
Okay, you workers, you're going to do what we tell you to do.
And hey, give us all your money.
We'll give you back a little bit.
Don't worry.
We know what's best.
Human capital.
Just a little use of that.
It's another turn of phrase that the left uses all the time, which is really terrifying and wicked.
She goes on.
For me, I think it belies a lack of moral priority, and it's unfortunate.
But I also think a lot of these folks, especially those, I think, perhaps on the Democratic side, perhaps they don't even see it.
I don't know if that's a generous interpretation or not, but I legitimately think that they start kind of buying into conservative talking points.
They get dragged into their court all the time.
And I think it is because there's this really...
Myopic and also just misunderstanding of politics as this flat two-dimensional left-right thing.
And so they always feel like, okay, the right says this thing, we have to respond to it.
And that's why they're winning.
What?
What was that?
What was any of that?
The question was, how are you going to pay for it?
How are you going to pay for it?
Let's just go through her stream of consciousness.
How are you going to pay for it?
I had French toast for breakfast this morning with maple syrup.
And maple syrup comes from Vermont, which is in the northeast of America.
And when you cross the Atlantic Ocean, you get to Britain.
And Britain has two syllables.
And two is the number after one.
Are you ever going to acknowledge...
So the question she's asked, how are you going to pay for your crazy socialist programs?
Here is her stream of thought in real time.
I'll try to clean it up a little bit from the ums and the ahs and the I don't knows.
She says, the same mechanisms as we use to pay for unlimited wars and tax cuts.
So I think when she's talking about unlimited wars, I think she's talking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have gone on for 17 years.
According to the CBO, the total costs of those wars over 17 years, $2.4 trillion.
$2.4 trillion.
That makes it $141 billion per year.
What is the cost of her Medicare for All plan, her socialist health care plan?
$3.2 trillion per year.
$3.2 trillion per year versus $141 billion per year.
So her program, just that one program by the way, not all of her programs, just that one, will cost 22.7 times more than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
In fact, it'll cost significantly more per year than the entire cost of both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So I don't think that's going to work.
What's the cost of tax cuts?
There's no cost of tax cuts.
There's no cost of tax cuts.
It's just letting people keep more of their money.
That's not a cost.
That's not a payout.
That's not giving somebody money.
It's not taking as much of the money as you previously had taken.
That's what a tax cut is.
So, okay, 22.7 times more expensive than Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
But, you know, look, she's not the expert.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She's not the expert on math or anything else.
Next, she mumbles incoherently about scarcity.
She uses the word scarcity.
She juxtaposes it next to other words.
She doesn't say anything.
She then says America has a lack of moral priority, which is unfortunate.
She then uses the word folks, so you know that she's a Democrat.
She says, folks, Democrat folks, they don't see it.
She says, I don't know.
Then she says Democrats buy conservative talking points.
Democrats are myopic.
I can agree with that one.
I agree with one thing she said.
She says there's a flat understanding of politics.
Flat, you know, like a left-right thing, man.
It's just really, you know, man, it's flat.
And that's why Republicans win and Democrats don't have a strong message.
Truer words have never been said.
Democrats don't have a strong message.
I count like ten bullet points there.
Not once did she even attempt to answer the question.
She said a slogan about war and tax cuts.
At no point did she attempt to answer the question, how are you going to pay?
Why?
Because obviously she doesn't know.
There's no way to pay for all this crazy stuff unless you become just a full-on socialist country, which is probably what she wants.
And even then, the money is certainly going to dry up because in socialism, eventually you run out of other people's money.
We have a lot more to get to.
I want to talk a little bit more about her and the Oscars change and a final word on Alex Jones.
Before I do that, you've got to go to dailywire.com.
If you're on Facebook and YouTube, thank you very much.
And I really thank you to Facebook and YouTube for not censoring us yet.
I'm sure that one's coming.
But if you're at Daily Wire, thank you.
Help us keep the lights on.
Go over there now.
Why?
You get all the shows.
You can ask questions in the mailbag.
Get those in.
That's going to be tomorrow.
You get to ask questions in the conversation.
Blah, blah, blah.
Ooh, is that...
Oh, you know what this is?
This is the Ohio special election for...
Mm, mm-hmm.
Mm.
What's that taste?
It tastes like Democrats saying that they secretly won, but they didn't.
They lost.
That's what it tastes like.
That tastes really good.
Mm-hmm.
It tastes like five out of five Trump-endorsed candidates winning and four out of six Alexandria Ocasio-endorsed candidates losing.
That's what it tastes like.
It tastes really good, and you're going to need it because there are more elections around the corner.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
Okay, and our final moments together here today, I do want to talk about the change to the Oscars.
So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has finally realized that people don't like them very much and don't watch the awards shows and really don't watch the movies.
So they've announced some major changes to the awards show.
Last year, the Oscars telecast was down 19% in views.
Huge.
Almost 20% down in viewership.
And that was down over the previous year, which was a nine-year low.
Nobody is watching this telecast anymore.
So they have to do something.
They've announced a few plans.
They're going to shorten the telecast.
They're going to take some of the awards for assistant deputy sound editing pogo stick jumper.
And they're going to put that during the commercial breaks and then truncate it for the end because no one watches those awards.
We'll see.
The guilds are going to be very upset about that, but we'll see what happens there.
The big change is that there's a new category.
The new category is for outstanding achievement in popular film.
Now you might be asking, well there's an award for best motion picture, right?
Yes, there is.
But now we know, per the Andrew Klavan theory of art forms, that movies are done.
Movies are done.
Drew can talk about it more on his show, but his basic theory is that when art diverges and you've got two categories, when you've got It's so spitting in the face of these popular filmmakers and of their audience.
They're saying, ugh, well...
Not everybody will watch Moonlight because they're so stupid.
They won't even watch Moonlight.
So, okay, we'll give one to Star Wars or something.
And they're separating this category.
It means it's dead because there is now a categorical distinction between movies that people watch and movies that are considered artistic.
They're considered great movies that absolutely nobody watches.
Here is an example of this.
Because you know what the popular movies are.
It's the Marvel movies, it's Star Wars, it's whatever.
Not the last Star Wars, but the other Star Wars.
Those are popular.
And then the other movies, they're like Moonlight, you know, the ones about like, it's always about like lesbian cowboys or something and nobody's going to go watch it.
30 Rock saw this coming years and years ago.
Here is Tracy Jordan making his Oscar bait movie, the movie that wins best picture, hard to watch.
Ooh.
Yee.
Oh.
I go to jail in Deshaun's place because he's my brother.
Don't say nothing.
Sometimes you got to do the right thing, even when the wrong thing is a whole lot easier.
Now let's just have one last happy dinner together as a family.
Your mother exploded.
That's it.
That is every Best Picture winner probably since Lord of the Rings Return of the King, which was 15 years ago at this point, right?
I think it was 2003.
They're just called Hard to Watch.
I'm going to win my Oscar.
Nobody's going to watch this movie, but it's hard to watch.
That's it.
That's what they're going to do.
So now they have the popular movie category.
It's really sad.
I guess it's good that popular movies now will be shown at the Oscars, but it's too little too late.
You're admitting that the people who watch the Oscars and the people who go to movies, those few people who still go to tentpole movies, they're just different.
They've broken apart.
It's over.
They're trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
It's not going to happen.
Too late.
Sorry.
Ha ha.
Sad.
Sad for Hollywood.
Okay, before we go, I've got to talk about Alex Jones again, because why wouldn't I? Those frogs are still going gay.
We need a little conversion therapy for those frogs, maybe now.
That's what this is really all about.
So, there's a piece in CNN titled, We Need to Talk About Alex Jones.
No, you don't, but sure, go on.
There is some unbelievable stuff in here.
The first writer, it's just a series of columnists giving their opinion of Alex Jones.
And, you know, should people be censored for having unpopular or wacky points of view, or should we allow free expression?
The answer, if you're an American, is the latter.
That is the answer, but these people are clearly anti-American.
So the first one, Rafia Zakaria says, quote, The stripping of Infowars from Facebook, Apple, and other platforms is an important step in the recognition of nativist, nationalist, and white supremacist hate speech as a form of terrorism.
So first of all, I didn't know that Alex Jones, the shirtless vitamin salesman, is a white supremacist.
I don't see any evidence of that whatsoever.
Uh...
But they just throw these words around, right?
I mean, you had those little white girls the other day shouting through a bullhorn at Candace Owens, a black woman, and saying, F white supremacy.
White girls telling a black woman what to do and yelling at her for not behaving, that's fighting white supremacy, right?
No, of course not.
That is white supremacy.
But see what they do?
They say that speech is a form of terrorism.
They use the word hate speech, the phrase hate speech, which doesn't mean anything.
There's no meaning to hate speech.
There's speech.
There's no legal hate speech.
There's no constitutional provision against hate speech.
They just hate speech is for the left, speech that they disagree with.
But then they're saying that speech is a form of terrorism.
Listen to that.
I mean, that is some wacky stuff.
If it's terrorism, man, they can waterboard you to stop you from talking, right?
There is no limit.
Your speech is no longer protected by the Geneva Convention.
You cannot talk, man.
Shut up.
That's what she's saying.
She's saying, shut up or we're going to waterboard you.
We're going to bring you to Gitmo and torture you.
That's what they're saying.
That wasn't even the craziest thing.
It was pretty wacky.
Josh McCorder, writing in that same CNN article, says, Some speech must lose its freedom.
In our advanced conception of a nation, the idea that anyone should be able to air any thought they have.
Just a side note, anyone is not they.
Anyone is he.
It's not a plural word, right?
It's he.
And he is the gender-neutral pronoun.
I'm sorry.
This is a minor point on language.
Not they.
There's no singular they.
Give me a break.
Did Josh McWhorter fail, or rather, John McWhorter fail the second grade?
Not good.
Whether they have, whether real insight or not, has a gut-level appeal.
A hundred years ago, an Alex Jones could only have reached most people via quiet printed pages written in formal prose.
Okay, so they always do this.
They always say, we're in the advanced stage now.
We're in the advanced stage of the nation.
This is not the old stuff that we did in the old nation.
That's over.
Forget the old stuff.
It's the new stuff now.
We're not in an advanced stage.
We're in a nation.
You're not that advanced.
Definitely John McWhorter's not advanced.
He doesn't know how to use pronouns.
But they always say it's so advanced now.
All the things that have always been true throughout human history, they're not true anymore.
Because those guys weren't advanced.
We're advanced.
They do this when they want to redistribute wealth, when they want to change the nature of business, when they want to change the relationship of the state to the individual.
They always say, no, we're advanced now.
Forget the old stuff.
That's one point.
The other point where he's just not quite right is the idea that in the old days nobody could communicate with anybody.
You know, the Protestant Revolution began because of the printing press.
Martin Luther wrote a little note and it spread like wildfire throughout all of Europe, certainly throughout all of Germany.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates, you know, the Lincoln-Douglas debates would have crowds of 15,000 people at them.
That's not just reaching nobody.
That's not just a quiet little essay or something like that.
William Jennings Bryan would give, you know, the populist Democrat, he would give speeches to 15,000 people with regularity.
You could reach people before.
I know you think that everything was invented yesterday, nothing before you ever existed.
These things existed.
There's nothing new here.
I've got to say goodbye.
We're running a little late today.
Before I go...
Look, that was CNN. You know what CNN is.
CNN is fake news.
CNN is the hackiest of the bunch.
But I'm really pleased that now, the star of CNN, Jim Acosta, is admitting this.
Here, I present to you, for your consideration, for best motion picture, best short film of all time, Jim Acosta.
Journalists are the enemy of the people.
Literally the s*** of the people.
But I'll say that the press is the enemy of the people.
And, you know, I don't understand simple sentences.
Maybe we should make some bumper stickers.
Make some buttons.
You know, maybe we should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue like these folks who chant CNN s*** and fake news.
Maybe we should go out, all journalists should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue and chant CNN s*** and the enemy of the people.
Because I'm tired of this.
Honestly, Brooke, I'm tired of this.
CNN's not right.
CNN sucks, and it is not fair.
It is not just.
CNN is un-American.
At the very least, I think we should all be able to agree on one thing, and that is that CNN's fake news, and CNN sucks, and CNN's lost sight of that here at this White House.
Somebody sent that to me on Twitter.
Really incredible work.
I mean, they deserve, for Best Popular Movie, for that new Oscar category, whoever made that clip certainly deserves to win it.
That's our show.
Get your mailbag questions in so we can answer them tomorrow.
I will see you then.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
▲
Export Selection