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Oct. 19, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:22
Ep. 237 - The Devil In The Details

The Saudis assassinate Islamist journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and for some reason we're all expected to care. We will analyze the devil in the details and what the U.S. response should be. Then, the #MeToo movement clobbers Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez like doesn't know like anything, and Thomas Jefferson gets accused of a sex scandal on This Day In History! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A Saudi journalist and former intelligence operative turned dissident goes missing at the Saudi embassy in Turkey, with reports that a Saudi death squad chopped him up while still alive.
And for some reason, I have been assured by the mainstream media this is all Donald Trump's fault.
We will analyze the devil in the details, how this is being totally misreported, and what the U.S. response should be.
Then, the Me Too movement boomerang swings back and clobbers Democrats on the head.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like, um, totally, you know, reveals why millennials don't understand anything.
Kleenex says women are just as disgusting as men, and Thomas Jefferson gets accused of a sex scandal on this day in history.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
This story about the Saudi journalist, intelligence operative, former Politico, Islamist, whatever.
The story about him being disappeared and probably killed at the Saudi embassy in Turkey is one of the great examples of fake news in the mainstream media and how it's used by politicians.
We'll get to all of that in a second.
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Okay, let's get to this Saudi journalist, you know, dissident type guy.
Jamal Khashoggi.
What do we know?
He's a Saudi guy.
He worked for the Washington Post.
He lived in the United States briefly.
But he had worked previously with the Saudi royal family.
And he walks into the Saudi embassy in Turkey.
He doesn't walk out.
We also know that I think 15 members of the Saudi government arrived in Turkey.
Turkey that day.
They left pretty quickly.
And there are claims that he was killed in the Saudi embassy and chopped up while still alive.
Doesn't sound great.
The way this is being spun by the mainstream media, first of all, is that this is somehow Trump's fault.
That Trump needs to, like, do something about this.
Trump needs to get rid of our agreements with Turkey with regard to selling weapons, $100 billion arms deals, whatever.
Saudi Arabia, rather.
So this is how it's being spun.
And the guy, Jamal Khashoggi, he's being spun as a left-wing, progressive, liberal, pro-democracy, you know, reformer guy against the Saudi royal family, which is not willing to reform and is oppressive.
The real truth is far more complicated than that.
The first question that you have to ask yourself when you hear about this story is, why am I supposed to care?
Why am I supposed to care that the Saudi government took out this guy?
He formerly worked with them.
I guess Jamal Khashoggi was aligned with another faction of the Saudi royal family than the one that is currently in power under Mohammed bin Salman.
So, you know, a guy whose political fortunes have changed has been killed by the Saudi government.
Why am I supposed to care about that?
I don't mean to sound callous or cold-hearted or anything like that, but we know that the Saudi royal family commits heinous acts all the time and has for decades and decades.
We know that it's one of the most repressive regimes on earth.
Why am I supposed to care about this one?
They do it all of the time.
My question for those who would call us callous for asking that question is, why don't you care about the beheadings that are happening all the time?
The clamping down on political dissidents.
Why don't you care about that?
Why is it this one in particular?
I don't really understand.
What new information is being conveyed by this killing of a dissident guy?
Is there anything new?
If we had our arms deal with Saudi Arabia two weeks ago, why would we change it now?
It's not like the government has changed its stripes.
If anything, the government is getting a little less repressive.
They're liberalizing certain laws.
They're letting women drive for the first time in a very long time.
They're opening up certain movie theaters.
Little freedoms are being opened up.
Even economic freedoms.
They're now starting to do a little bit of business with Israel, and that is the biggest issue.
That's actually where this gets down to.
And it shows that Jamal Khashoggi being put up by the left wing as this messianic figure, this progressive, secular, westerner, was far from that.
So, what does this actually prove to me?
It proves to me that if you pal around with jihadists, things aren't going to turn out very well.
That's the only conclusion I can draw from this, because we know that Jamal Khashoggi palled around with Islamists for decades.
And by the way, now the left, now that we're pointing this out, that this guy palled around with Islamists, with radicals, even with Osama bin Laden, now that people are pointing this out, the left is saying, this is a smear campaign by right-wingers trying to defend President Trump's relationship with the Saudis.
President Trump didn't develop the U.S. relationship with the Saudi royal family.
We've had it for a very long time.
But to call us smear merchants, it's not the right wing which is coming up with these connections between Khashoggi and terrorists in Hamas, terrorists in Al-Qaeda.
Terrorists like Osama Bin Laden.
This has been known for decades.
And actually it's left-wing papers too.
Haaretz in Israel is reporting on all of this.
So don't really buy any of that.
What do we know?
We know that Jamal Khashoggi was an Islamist.
He was a lifelong member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He favored radical aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood.
We know that he was a regime insider as well.
So it's not just as simple as a journalist.
It's a guy who worked with the Saudi royal family For a long time.
And we know that he was working on their behalf in the 1980s when he was palling around with Osama bin Laden.
By all reports, when he was hanging out with Osama bin Laden, he was trying to end the feud between the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden.
But he was hanging out with them for a long time.
There was a photo that was uncovered, I believe by Haaretz, which shows Jamal Khashoggi holding an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade with terrorists in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
We know that Jamal Khashoggi defended supporters of suicide bombings, that he vigorously defended Hamas, the brutal terrorist group in the Middle East.
We know that That according to Al Arabiya, he tried to get Osama bin Laden to be a little less violent.
But when Osama bin Laden died, Jamal Khashoggi apparently cried and talked about how he wept when Osama bin Laden died.
Now, after September 11th, he turned away from Osama bin Laden.
He said, that's no good.
Okay, fine.
But he wept when bin Laden died.
Um...
So again, Turkey says that it has the audio recording of Jamal Khashoggi being killed by the Saudis.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.
I have very little reason to believe Turkey, but in this case I have very little reason to disbelieve Turkey because the Saudis commit heinous crimes all the time.
There are now also reports that Saudi Arabia is looking for a replacement for the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
He's the new guy in town.
He's been hailed in the West as a reformer.
He actually has instituted certain reforms, pretty major reforms, in so much as doing a little bit of business with Israel.
You know, obviously the kind of headline-grabbing ones, letting women drive.
But he does seem to have an eye toward the future.
It would be a very, very bad idea for Saudi Arabia to replace this guy right now.
I really think it's a bad idea.
The arguments against the crown prince of Saudi Arabia are that he's not in favor of democracy in the kingdom.
Great!
Why on earth would we be in favor of democracy in Saudi Arabia?
How have our experiments in democracy panned out in other repressive Islamist countries?
Not very well.
Why are we supposed to conclude now that a democratic Saudi Arabia would be any more peaceful for the kingdom, for the region, and for the United States than a democratic Saudi Arabia?
I don't really buy that.
And some of the so-called pro-democracy agitators in Saudi Arabia Have pretty radical Islamist ties.
Even more radical than the Saudi royal family.
Okay.
What else?
The other thing he's being dinged for is that he's developed a pretty good relationship with Donald Trump.
Again, this is nothing new.
The Saudi royal family has had a relationship with the U.S. for a long time.
But because everyone hates Trump on the left, they're trying to ding him for that as well.
I highly recommend you read a piece today co-written by Michael Duran.
Michael Duran is an excellent foreign policy analyst.
It's in the New York Post.
It, I think, presents a fair take on who Khashoggi is, who Mohammed bin Salman is, and what the relationship is between those families.
To call him a dissident journalist who fled to America, that presents one picture.
It's not like he fled to America 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.
It's not like he fled to America after he was palling around with bin Laden and he suddenly had an awakening.
He fled to America after the political tides turned in Saudi Arabia and there's a new crown prince in town.
Here are some other things, by the way, that Jamal Khashoggi wrote about that paint a different picture.
He said, quote, Now believes its interests lie in facing Islamists who were supposed to be its historical allies.
I often hear Saudi Arabian intellectuals on television attacking political Islam, and my answer to them is that Saudi Arabia is the mother and father of political Islam.
So you've got this guy Khashoggi who was killed extolling the virtues of Islamism, of political Islam, the vicious ideology that we've been fighting now explicitly for 15 years.
And yet the left in America is expecting us to rend our garments and gnash our teeth because a defender of political Islam has been killed by his government.
I'm not saying that I'm happy about the killing.
I'm not saying I'm devastated about the killing.
I'm saying when you pal around with jihadists and radical Islamists, bad things are going to happen to you.
He goes on.
He criticizes the leftist project of opposing political Islam.
And he says that Saudi Arabia has lost its moral compass.
It lost its moral compass not because it's embraced political Islam, but because it opposes political Islam.
This is not something that's being presented in the mainstream media.
We also know that Khashoggi supports Erdogan in Turkey, strong pro-Islamist leader of Turkey, and he was hoping for an alliance between the Sauds and Turkey.
I don't see how this benefits the United States.
I don't see how it's in the interest of the United States.
Part of the reason Why Khashoggi is getting this red carpet treatment and this killing is being presented is totally unprecedented, horrifying, shocking, as if we didn't know that this sort of thing was going on for decades.
Part of the reason is that when he got to the United States, he allied with certain former Obama administration officials.
He allied with the political left in the United States from his post at the Washington Post, which he's had for a little while.
And so part of that was hiding his, I think, true political beliefs and his demonstrable political activity for decades.
All of which, I don't want this to be misconstrued.
I don't want it to seem as though I'm defending the Saudi royal family, killing some dissident.
I don't share a religion with the Saudi royal family.
I don't share views of government with the Saudi royal family.
I don't share views of political philosophy with the Saudi royal family.
I have no intention of ever going to Saudi Arabia.
What I'm saying is this is nothing new.
And the people who are opposing the Saudi regime can be pretty awful people too.
They may actually even be worse.
You know, one of the arguments for defending the Saudi royal family, for maintaining an alliance with the Saudi royal family, is that the devil we know is better than the devil we don't.
Throughout our encounters in the Middle East, this has very often proven to be the case.
Just take the case of Mubarak in Egypt.
Do we really believe that Egypt is better off now, that the United States relationship is better off now, after we hoisted our longtime ally, Hosni Mubarak, years ago?
Do we really believe it?
How is that better off?
How are we better off if pro-democracy forces enter some of these oppressive countries and then through democracy, through voting, institute even more oppressive, even more tyrannical, even more anti-Western regimes?
How is that in our interest?
How is that in anybody's interest?
If one of Khashoggi's chief criticisms of the Saudi royal family is that they're too pro-Israel and they're not supporting Hamas enough or something like that, why on earth should we be defending that?
Why should we be horrified?
Why should we be clutching our pearls?
I don't get it at all.
I think the reason it's getting so much play is because there's a midterm election coming up.
They got nothing.
The Democrats have nothing to attack Trump for.
So they're just grasping at straws.
They're trying to grasp anything at all that they can use to cudgel him with.
But people need to take a real view.
You know, we talked yesterday about how when people get angry, they go mad.
And when they go mad, they get stupid.
They start behaving in really stupid political ways.
This is a good example of that.
You know, people don't know anything, myself included.
People do not know anything, relatively, about the political machinations of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran.
People don't know the players involved.
They don't know how deep this runs.
And everybody wants to pretend that they're an expert on this issue and Saudis bad and Mohammed bin Salman bad and Jamal Khashoggi good.
The reality is so much more complex.
And when we just buy a shallow narrative of this, we can get ourselves into a lot of trouble.
Both as a matter of foreign policy and for domestic politics.
Don't buy into it.
Is it bad when a government kills its people without due process?
Yes.
Governments do it all the time.
It's happened for decades.
Certainly it's happened in Saudi Arabia.
There is no new information here.
Now, how can we react to this?
The killing was extrajudicial.
What can we do?
We can hopefully leverage this killing to get some concessions out of Saudi Arabia.
There was the famous Saudi Arabian textbook controversy, which is emblematic of the education of young Saudis into anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli, obviously, ideologies.
Perhaps we can leverage this situation to gain some concessions from them, to turn the stance of the regime a little less anti-Western, turn it a little bit more in the direction that we want it to go, in the interest of the United States.
I'm all for that.
I'm all for leveraging this.
I have no sentimentality, no saccharine love of the Saudi royal family.
But let's be clear-eyed.
The people who are opposing the Saudi royal family are pretty awful themselves, and in many ways they oppose our interests in a far greater way, And fortunately, we have the Saudis there to oppose the influence of Iran in the Middle East.
Just keep all of those things in mind.
And most importantly, as you're, what are we now, 18 days out or something from the midterm elections, don't let the Democrats take this Bizarre, random incident that happened in Turkey and try to use it for political leverage coming 18 days out.
It's a cynical political ploy by the left, and it could have consequences both politically and for our foreign policy.
Don't buy it.
The people, I think, who are screaming about the Saudi royal family the most, I don't know that they've ever even Googled the guy who was killed.
I don't know.
You've got to view these things pretty clearly.
But we don't have a lot of clear thinking anymore.
We'll get to that in a second with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I do want to turn back to the midterms because this Me Too thing has totally boomeranged back and clobbered Democrats.
You know, this is another example of why you shouldn't let your passions run away with you in politics.
You should get all of the information first because this Me Too thing is clobbering them.
There is now an ad out supporting the GOP congressman French Hill.
Now, French Hill says he wasn't behind this ad.
He's condemned the ad.
He says it's outrageous.
But the whole premise of this Me Too movement and specifically the Kavanaugh part of it is that all women must be believed regardless of any evidence they have.
All women, all claims of sexual misconduct should be believed.
All men accused of sexual misconduct should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.
And this has huge effects on And huge relation to American history, specifically American racial history.
Don't forget, the book To Kill a Mockingbird is about a false rape allegation of a white woman against a black guy.
And she made it up, and it was a hoax, and it had serious racial consequences.
So there's this great ad out now supporting GOP Congressman French Hill.
Just take a listen.
What will happen to our husbands, our fathers, or our sons when a white girl lies on them?
Girl, white Democrats will be lynching black folk again.
Honey, I've always told my son, don't be messing around with that.
If you get caught, she will cry rape.
I'm voting to keep Congressman French Hill and the Republicans because we have to protect our men and boys.
We can't afford to let white Democrats take us back to bad old days of race verdicts, life sentences, and lynchings when a white girl screams rape.
Paid for by black Americans for the president's agenda.
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
That is too real.
I think that has been disqualified from the public airwaves for being too real.
I'm sorry, you're not allowed to have political ads that are that real.
You're not allowed to have political ads that go back, one, to really the heart of this matter, but also that refer to Democrats' long history of racial violence and demagoguery.
So, a really good ad.
Obviously, it is outrageous that the congressman has had to distance himself from it, but it makes a great point.
You know, this regime, this political movement of Me Too is lawless.
It's anti-law and it's lawless.
It says that any allegation...
You can destroy a man's career with just a few words.
No corroboration, no evidence.
In the case of Christine Ford, not only did she have no evidence, she kept changing her story and all the people she named there, including her lifelong female friend, said it didn't happen.
They never met the people there.
It just didn't happen.
And yet, how many people in America still believe Christine Ford's story?
Or one of Christine Ford's stories?
I don't know, she kept changing them.
How many believe that Brett Kavanaugh is not only a groper, or was a groper when he was 16, but was an attempted rapist and even almost a murderer?
Because the story, you know, kept changing.
How many people believe that?
It's very, really long-lasting effects.
And you see it all around.
And there is a racial component to it.
Don't just believe the ad for French Hill.
Go back to Kill a Mockingbird.
Go back to 19th and early 20th century American history.
This is not a joke.
And because all nature is but art unknown to thee, because everything, every time the Democrats try to make a point, reality swings back and punches them in the face, this has actually happened.
The lynching of Emmett Till came about because Emmett Till allegedly, 14-year-old black boy, allegedly hit on a white woman and a lynch mob came and killed him for it, for that allegation.
And now you've got the left denying that this would ever happen, not a chance, it would never happen.
In Brooklyn, in New York, a nine-year-old black boy was accused by a white woman of grabbing her derriere in a supermarket.
The woman's clearly unhinged.
She ended up calling the police and saying, he assaulted me.
He grabbed me.
He grabbed my derriere.
A nine-year-old boy.
And then they looked at security camera footage.
Never happened.
They can prove that it didn't happen.
She's a nut.
She called the cops on the kid.
It's not like she just said, oh, you, don't do that, or said to his mother, don't do that.
She called the police on him, and then it turns out it was fake.
It didn't happen.
It was a hoax.
So, one, I just want to point out for the believe all women thing.
There are hoaxes.
Jackie Coakley, Tawana Brawley, countless sexual assault hoaxes in recent years.
The reason that you can't believe all women just because they're women is that it is unfair to actual victims of sexual assault.
It actually doesn't take sexual assault seriously when you believe crazy people.
And we should take sexual assault seriously because it is a heinous crime.
So I love this kid.
The woman, the crazy woman who accused him of this is named Teresa Klein.
The nine-year-old kid is Jeremiah Harvey.
And, you know, she's trying to ruin his life at this Brooklyn deli.
ABC News interviewed the nine-year-old kid and said, do you forgive this woman?
I love his answer.
Do you forgive this woman?
How do you feel about her?
I don't forgive this woman at all.
I think she was crazy.
I think she had something going on with her.
I think she had a special ill.
Well, and she needs help, and she really needs help for life.
You tell him.
You tell him, Jeremiah.
Now, you know, I think he should forgive in time, but this is a perfectly appropriate answer in the moment.
Yeah, she has a special kind of ill.
She's crazy.
She needs help.
She needs to get help.
Play it again.
Tell him again, Jeremiah, because all the Democrats need to hear this.
You're talking to all of them.
Do you forgive this woman?
How do you feel about her?
I don't forgive this woman at all.
I think she was crazy.
I think she had something going on with her.
I think she had a special ill.
Well, and she needs help, and she really needs help for that.
She does need help.
And thank goodness that there was security camera footage.
Because, look, it's funny.
The kid is stating this perfectly.
He's really spelling out what the left needs to hear.
But thank goodness there was security camera footage.
Because if not, who knows what would have happened.
At the very least, his mother would have yelled at him and spanked him and sent him to timeout.
I don't know.
He would have gotten in trouble for this.
And this is a particular incident that also represents a lot of other incidents.
You've got kids getting expelled from college because of uncorroborated, unverified allegations, not taken to the police, not taken to the justice system, but tallied up by kangaroo courts of professors who have no business investigating and prosecuting serious crimes.
You've got Supreme Court justices having their characters assassinated because of unverified claims.
It goes all the way up.
It's, you know, this nine-year-old kid in a Brooklyn deli is a great example and symbol of the dangers of what could happen if we take away due process and we take away the presumption of innocence.
And Me Too is striking back.
It is striking back against Democrats, specifically Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.
This is just too delicious.
Let me take a little sip of my Tumblr first before I get to this wonderful story.
Mm-hmm.
Just as good as I remembered them.
Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio, running against Jim Renacci.
Jim Renacci and his campaign is now coming out with an allegation that Sherrod Brown, member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sexually harassed and assaulted a woman in the 80s.
I love this.
I love that it's 30 years later, I love that it allegedly happened in the 1980s.
I love that it's a political opponent bringing it against a Democrat.
And I love that it's a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
Very rarely do we see perfect examples of karma.
Very rarely do these things hit exactly the way that they came out.
And that's what's happening here.
So according to the Renacci campaign, quote, this encounter...
Oh, this is actually according to the accuser, purported victim...
She said this account happened after Sherrod Brown's divorce.
She described, quote, an unexpected, uninvited, unwanted, and sudden advance, roughly pushing her up against a wall.
It did not stop after she expressed dismay and very firmly pulled away, explaining that was not her style nor why she was there.
Although she was able to diffuse the situation, she got out, it did shake her up, and she told friends about it as soon as she got home.
This allegation is about a thousand times more credible than anything Christine Ford has said regarding Brett Kavanaugh.
And this doesn't sound that credible either.
I'll be perfectly frank.
This accusation against Sherrod Brown, unless they can bring some more evidence, isn't terribly credible.
It is a thousand, ten thousand times more credible than anything Christine Ford said.
It's almost a one-to-one.
It happened in the 1980s, okay, except that Sherrod Brown in this case was an adult who had been divorced.
In the case of Christine Ford's accusation, Kavanaugh was 17 years old.
Then Sherrod Brown, according to this accusation, pushed her up against a wall, pinned her, used his body.
It was unwanted and it was rough.
That was the same allegation against teenage Brett Kavanaugh.
Except in this case, Sherrod Brown was apparently stone cold sober.
And in the case of the Ford allegation, Kavanaugh was drunk, maybe, if he was even in the room.
Then she expressed dismay.
Ford expressed dismay.
Both of them expressed dismay.
And in both cases, they didn't stop.
And then in both cases, the women just got out of there.
They were able to get out of there, fortunately, but it still shook them up.
The difference here is that the woman accusing Democrat Sherrod Brown of this kind of conduct apparently told her friends immediately after it happened, and the friends are corroborating it.
In the case of Christine Ford, she didn't tell anybody for 30 years, over 30 years, and then her story changed a million times.
And then the friends that she said could corroborate it didn't corroborate it and actually refuted it.
This is so much...
Oh, also, both of them wanted to remain anonymous.
The woman accusing Sherrod Brown is anonymous.
The woman, Christine Ford, wanted to remain anonymous until the Democrats leaked the story.
And what is Sherrod Brown?
How has he responded to this?
This dirty, rotten hypocrite.
He said, this is character assassination.
You're damn right it's character assassination.
Absolutely, and I hope you enjoy every second of that character assassination.
I mentioned this during the Ford thing.
I said, if...
We actually want to stop this sort of baseless smearing, these things that discourage good people from going into politics, that make a mockery of our system of justice, that make a mockery of the presumption of innocence.
Democrats have to feel it too, and one of the perfect Democrats to feel it is feeling it now.
Sherrod Brown, Democrat.
Enjoy your character assassination.
Enjoy this perfect one-to-one.
Can't wait to see how Democrats respond.
You probably haven't heard about this story because nobody is covering it.
Surprise, surprise.
Well, maybe it'll be covered in Ohio before the midterm elections.
I also have to thank Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
As always, occasional cortex, as Steve Hayward says, because she has perfectly exemplified Why millennials don't understand anything at all.
She was doing an interview with Jimmy Kimmel.
Here is just a quick clip of the poetic diction of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
You beat a 10-time incumbent, a guy who just assumed that he was going to win, and you came out of nowhere.
You were working as a bartender and decided that it would be a good idea to run for office.
It's really one of the most remarkable stories I've ever heard.
You stop and think about this from time to time and go, I can't believe this is happening?
A year ago?
Oh, yeah.
People just lose their mind.
They're like, wait.
It's like back in the day when...
Yeah, yeah.
People will be like, is this real?
It's like, yeah, no, it's...
Yeah.
In the party.
Yeah, yeah, they do.
And it's, yeah, yeah.
In their own hometown.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, I don't know.
I don't know if it's because we're from the Bronx.
It's like exotic to us or something.
She was like, yeah, no, my husband is a huge fan of yours.
Motion activated tchotchke behind me that's like singing jingle bells.
Actually.
Yeah, like, like, yeah, yeah, like, the thing, you know, like, about that clip, like, is it shows, like, how, uh, uh, clear speech is reflective of clear thinking, like, you know, and that's why, you know, like, it's so totally hard, you know, you know, do you know?
Do you know?
Yeah, yeah, man, I know.
This is how millennials talk.
We all do it.
Even I do it sometimes.
I'll occasionally slip in a like or a yeah or a you know.
Sometimes I'll do it for comic effect.
Sometimes I'll do it just in my speech.
And this is a very bad thing.
People should refrain from doing this.
To write well is to think clearly.
To speak well is to think clearly.
When you don't speak well, when you don't write well, you're not thinking clearly very often.
It's reflective of how you're thinking.
You must avoid all of these likes and ums and yes.
The other thing it's reflective of is the relativist presumptions and premises and culture that millennials are in.
You know, man, like, yeah.
Millennials no longer say, I think.
They say, what do they say?
They say, I feel like.
They don't say, I think.
They don't say, I believe.
They say, I feel like.
Well, I just feel like, blah, blah, blah.
You know, I feel like, blah, blah, blah.
They won't say, that was a delicious dinner.
They'll say, that dinner was like really good.
You know, it was like really good.
It wasn't really good.
I'm saying it was like really good.
The reason that people do this subconsciously, unconsciously, or consciously is because they want to distance themselves from making a claim because there's no such thing as the truth to these people.
There is only your truth and my truth and like, who am I, man, to say what like the truth is, you know?
So it's always like, it's always a simile.
It's always...
Similar to this thing, but not quite that thing.
I'm never making a claim.
I'm always explaining my feelings about the claim.
I feel like.
It's a really bad way of thinking.
And the way that you speak is going to dictate how you think.
Because the words are the stuff of our consciousness.
The words are the medium of how we think.
So if you use debased language, if you use vague language, if you use squishy language...
You're going to think in a vague, debased, and squishy way.
Do not be like occasional cortex.
Be like, you know, like man, a serious thinker.
And use precise language, and use hard language, and use blunt language.
Do it as best you can.
The culture is stacked against you, and trying to get you not to do that, try to do that on your own.
Now, I've got so much more advice and so many more pearls of wisdom on these things and a lot more to cover on this day in history on how Kleenex is finally capitulating to feminists and admitting that feminists are disgusting as any man and this caravan at the border.
All of that will just happen at dailywire.com.
If you're on Facebook and YouTube, go over.
Come on, man.
Go over there.
Like.
Come on.
You know, yeah, it'll be really fun.
Yeah.
You'll get me.
You'll get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You get to ask questions in the conversation.
None of that matters.
You'll also get to see us at Politicon.
You'll get to stream our appearance at Politicon over the weekend.
But you'll get this.
And this.
These leftist tears.
They're like...
Oh, they're like...
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They are like so, so good.
And they're really important.
This is the Sherrod Brown vintage.
This is the Democrat Senate Judiciary Me Too Boomerang vintage.
And it's a young vintage.
It's only going to mature.
It's only going to get better.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
There's a French expression.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The more things change, the more things stay the same in the American idiom.
Obviously, some things get worse.
The language gets worse.
Ocasio gets worse.
The Me Too movement descends into these awful things.
But so many things stay the same.
I just came across this clip from 1991.
It's an appearance of Robin Williams, the late, great Robin Williams, on The Johnny Carson Show.
And he's describing the confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the great justices on the court, A brilliant guy.
Here is how Robin Williams describes him.
How you doing?
I'm good.
I've been watching the Supreme Court hearings.
It's a little amazing.
Mr.
Thomas, your opinion of Roe versus Wade?
I'd prefer to float.
Okay, come on now.
I'm going to give us an opinion!
Tell us something!
They bring in all sorts of witnesses.
He was a good boy!
It's amazing they can't get real answers out of them.
I mean, how do they get people there?
People have no legal opinions, no written opinions.
They basically, four short weeks ago, I was driving truck.
Now I'm sitting on the highest court in the land.
Thanks to the George Bush home study course, you two can be a Supreme Court justice.
You get it?
He was an idiot.
What an idiot.
Clarence Thomas, he doesn't even have any opinions.
I mean, he's a judge.
He's a judge, and he has a lot of written opinions, and he ran a lot of important offices.
And he went to Yale Law School, by the way, a top law school in the country.
But he's like an idiot.
You know, he's like, you know, like he's an idiot.
And this was the attack.
They always do this.
And when Clarence Thomas wasn't an idiot, he was a sexual assailant.
He was a black man.
In a high-tech lynching, being accused without any evidence of sexual assault.
An over-sexed black man was the image that was being painted by the left.
And they would go back and forth on this.
You heard even Robin Williams alludes to it there.
Oh, he was a good boy.
Oh, he was a good boy.
Making fun of the character witnesses that came up for Clarence Thomas.
The same exact thing.
Making the same jokes 27 years ago.
For the same reason.
And Robin Williams even admits the same reason.
Roe versus Wade.
Why did he bring up Roe versus Wade?
Was it to make a fairly lame joke?
Get it?
Roe versus Wade.
I prefer to float.
Huh?
They weren't all winners.
You know, sometimes Robin Williams is very funny.
Sometimes he had some clunkers.
That was one of them.
But it's Roe versus Wade.
That's what it was all about.
It's what it's going to be about.
We like to flatter ourselves, especially on the left.
They like to flatter themselves and say, this is the moment.
This is the crisis.
It's always a crisis.
The Saudi Arabia thing.
It's always a crisis.
The new crisis.
That's the view of politics on the left.
That's the view of politics from rationalists.
There's always a new crisis that we have to fix.
That's not the view of politics from conservatives, and it shouldn't be.
It's not a crisis.
Saudi Arabian government behaving like the Saudi Arabian government is not a crisis.
If that's a crisis, you need to do a little more homework.
You gotta calm down.
A justice who interprets the Constitution as it was to be interpreted at the time of ratification, that's not a crisis.
That's the opposite of a crisis.
But they'll always try to make it up that way.
They're going to do it for the next judge that we put up to the Supreme Court.
They're going to do it for the federal judges as well.
It's not a crisis.
Calm down.
Don't be fooled by that kind of language.
Oh, Clarence Thomas, he's an idiot.
Because Robin Williams said so.
Some comedian on Late Night said so.
Oh, Kavanaugh, he's impassioned.
He's this, he's that.
No.
He's a frat boy.
He doesn't know anything.
No.
Don't buy it.
It's so tired.
They do it all the time and they whip people up into a frenzy.
There's no frenzy to be had there.
Consider the new crisis that the feminists have made out of Kleenex.
If you've heard this story, Kleenex has had various sizes of tissues and for the last 62 years they've had a man-sized tissue.
When I say man-sized tissue, what does that bring to mind?
Bigger, stronger, capable of dealing with grosser things and more disgusting things.
Yes, that's what the man-sized tissue was.
Because men are bigger and they're stronger and they're more disgusting.
That's a biological fact.
Feminists have taken issue with this.
It was one of the most popular products at Kleenex.
3.4 million customers per year, according to Kleenex.
But it's very bad.
It's very bad, you know.
Because it's gendered.
Who are you to say that men are bigger than women?
They are, obviously, but who are you to say it?
Who are you to say that men are stronger than women?
They are, obviously, but who are you to say it?
It's a denial of reality, and Kleenex has capitulated to it.
And it's ironic, because what feminists want, the implicit claim of feminists who take issue with man-sized tissues, is that women are just as big and gross and disgusting as men.
And when it comes to feminists, I can't disagree.
Yeah.
On the whole, on average, I can't disagree.
So congratulations, feminists.
You've gotten rid of the man-sized tissues.
You've proven that some women are just as disgusting as men.
And you've fought reality on the latest battlefront.
Congratulations.
Um...
There's a caravan coming up to the border.
There are 4,000 illegal aliens who promise to cross over it.
This is sponsored in large part by Pueblo Sin Fronteras, People Without Borders, a left-wing group that gets funding from George Soros.
Of course, these things are constantly happening.
This is a bigger one, though.
This has happened before.
There are 4,000 people.
Now, on average, the United States Border Patrol arrests 1,000 people a day, can be as high as 2,000 people, can be a little shorter.
There were actually 16,658 family members, people who were coming here in families, who were arrested in September by Border Patrol.
Those are just the ones that they caught.
A lot of people pouring over this border.
President Trump responded.
He said, we're going to cut off aid to El Salvador.
We're going to cut off aid to Honduras.
We're going to We're going to ding Mexico.
This was a perfect response.
And I've talked to friends who are real Trump critics, real never-Trumpers, whatever, and they agree this is the perfect response.
He actually could go a little farther with this because these guys should never make it to the U.S. border.
They should be stopped at the Mexico southern border, and absolutely we should threaten to cut off aid with all these guys.
We should also threaten to tax or cut off remittances from the United States, from Mexican nationals who make it into the United States and send money back into Mexico through Western Union, through telegram services, through money order services.
We should threaten to cut that off or tax it heavily.
If President Trump threatened a 50% tax on those remittances, you would see Mexico do something about this.
And he should do it.
He should be pitiless about it.
It is such an affront to our sovereignty, to our democratic republic, to the ability of Americans to govern themselves.
When you have people pouring over the border, invading the country, and you can't do anything about it.
You, we the people, who govern ourselves, who are supposed to govern ourselves, can't do anything about it.
It's an affront, and it's a huge winner for Republicans.
I think something like the majority of Democrats, depending on which poll you look at, the majority of Democrats oppose this and are horrified by so many aspects of illegal immigration, even down to the so-called dreamers, you know, these kids who didn't choose to be here.
Even down to that level, the majority of Democrats oppose making amnesty for them a top priority.
This is a slam dunk for Republicans.
They should turn it up to 11, especially as the midterms approach.
Trump should send the National Guard down there.
He should cut off He should tax remittances.
He should threaten to cut off aid.
Do it.
All it could do is help Republicans, and it's the right thing to do, and it would be good for the country.
On this day in history, in 1796, just to remind you that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, was accused of a sexual affair, sexual misconduct.
The original Me Too, the 19th century Me Too movement.
There was an editorial that came up in a number of newspapers and a series of editorials written by somebody named Focion, P-H-O-C-I-O-N. This was when Thomas Jefferson was running against John Adams to become the second president of the United States.
And it accused Thomas Jefferson of sleeping with his slave and having children with his slave, a concubine slave, Sally Hemings, which it seems from the historical record is true.
Who is Phocion?
None other than Alexander Hamilton.
Is it any wonder that people wanted to kill that guy?
That they wanted to challenge him to duels and shoot him?
No wonder at all.
He wrote, I think, 25 essays against Jefferson under this pen name Phocion.
And it was a sex affair allegation.
So I do want to point out, now that we're responding against the Me Too movement, This has long happened.
There's always been sexual dirt in politics.
Why?
Because sex is a primal, major drive for men especially, and so it's a good way to attack your political opponents when you can.
This has happened for a long time.
That said, when you've got the entire national news media supporting these unfounded charges, when you've got no evidence for those charges, there was evidence for the charge against Jefferson.
There are a lot of kids who look like Thomas Jefferson on that plantation, and Sally Hemings' kids would always pop out about nine months after Thomas Jefferson visited, and there weren't any kids that came out nine months after Jefferson was away from home.
So there was some evidence here.
I'm not saying that sex scandals are unfair or they're off the table.
Of course, you know, they're going to be on the table as long as politics exists.
But there are degrees here.
There's some devil in the details.
I know that ideologues want things to be black and white.
They want to say, Saudi Arabia bad, Turkey good now for some reason.
Or, all sex scandals are unfair, all this is off the table, all this, all that.
Not quite.
You've got to look into the details.
You know, all shallows are clear.
Dr.
Johnson pointed this out when people are talking about religion or philosophy or politics or whatever.
They say, well, this isn't clear.
Your point of view isn't clear.
It's not ideological.
I can't write it down in one doctrine on one pamphlet of one book or something.
Right.
Shallows are clear.
Reality is complex.
Reality is complicated.
And also, Jefferson lost that election.
It was a good attack, though he won four years later.
So political wins can always change.
They are changing now.
We will see how they will change for the midterm elections, but we'll have to get to that next week.
Enjoy Another Kingdom.
Another Kingdom, Andrew Klavan's narrative podcast that I perform all the roles in, is now available on audio to everybody, non-subscribers and subscribers.
So go subscribe, download it.
And if you're a subscriber, you know, you get it much earlier.
You get it on Mondays.
You get to see the whole thing.
It's a really cool, great artwork.
Enjoy the weekend.
Maybe I'll see you at Politicon.
Maybe I won't.
In any case, I'll see you Monday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy 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.
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