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Oct. 30, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:15
Ep. 242 - The Case For The Death Penalty
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An anti-Semitic bigot murdered 11 and injured six Jews worshiping at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday.
The media are blaming Donald Trump, the shooter hates Donald Trump, and Donald Trump wants to kill the shooter.
We will analyze the case for the death penalty.
Then Barack Obama reminds us why we forgot about him, Hillary Clinton gets ready for 2020, and the Simpsons kill Apu.
If I hadn't stopped watching The Simpsons 20 years ago, I would totally stop watching them now.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
A lot of horrible news.
Maybe some silver lining, if you can think about some of the justice that maybe we'll be able to get out of this.
But really, really tough news cycle.
So before we delve into all of it...
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Okay, let's jump right into this news cycle.
There was this horrific shooting over the weekend.
This was the largest scale attack on Jews in American history, apparently.
There were 11 people killed, 6 people wounded.
It was at the synagogue.
In Pittsburgh, he's not a lunatic.
I mean, he's got to be a little bit loony to do anything like this, but this guy is an out-and-out anti-Semitic bigot.
He's written about this.
He's posted all over social media about this.
Right now, the website Gab, G-A-B, which is the non-censoring Twitter, is under fire because they don't censor people, so this guy was on it, and that's what happens when you don't censor people.
Bad guys say their point of view.
That doesn't mean that when you don't censor people, people will go out and commit crimes.
It also doesn't mean that when you censor people, people won't commit crimes.
Obviously, the two are not related.
The speech and the act are categorically different.
But Gab is under fire for this.
I mean, this guy had a plan.
This guy had a perverse ideology.
He went out and he did it.
So what are the media doing?
They're immediately blaming Donald Trump.
They've been blaming Trump and Republicans now for a couple weeks, because there was that wacko down in Florida who was mailing the pipe bombs, and so now they're blaming Trump for this guy, too.
It is worth pointing out, this guy apparently despised Donald Trump.
He didn't vote for Donald Trump.
He posted on social media, he said,"...I've never voted for Donald Trump.
I've never owned a MAGA hat.
I have never touched a MAGA hat.
I don't like him because Trump likes Jews too much, apparently." And this is another aspect of the story that's been lost by the media, which is that this administration is the most pro-Jewish administration probably in American history.
Apparently that was part of this guy's gripe with him, is that, you know, Donald Trump, first of all, Donald Trump's daughter converted to Judaism.
Donald Trump's son-in-law is Jewish.
He put his son-in-law and daughter-in-law in charge apparently of Middle Eastern policy or of trying to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.
He obviously followed through on a long-standing promise of American presidents that no one had ever followed through on.
Donald Trump moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which is the capital of Israel.
They built a train station for the guy in Jerusalem.
There's a Donald Trump train station.
So I think the media turning this and trying to say that somehow the Republican Party or conservatives or Donald Trump are anti-Semitic, that is insane.
However, the reason they can get away with it is that this shooter was anti-immigrant.
So they're saying he's anti-immigrant and conservatives want to limit Some conservatives want to limit immigration.
All Americans, virtually all Americans, want to stop illegal immigration because it's obviously against our laws and a violation of the country.
So see, he's anti-immigrant.
They don't want illegal immigration.
See, they're the same.
It's really cynical and it's really gross, but that's how they get away with it because there is that aspect to this guy's ideology such as it was.
His ideology really is just bigotry and racial hatred.
But President Trump, I thought, responded pretty well to this, and he's getting a lot of pushback, even though I thought the response was exactly great, which is that we need to zap this guy.
This guy needs to be executed by the state as a carriage of justice through capital punishment.
Here's Donald Trump.
I think one thing we should do is we should stiffen up our laws in terms of the death penalty.
When people do this, they should get the death penalty.
And they shouldn't have to wait years and years.
Now the lawyers will get involved.
Anybody that does a thing like this to innocent people that are in temple or in church — we had so many incidents with churches — they should really suffer the ultimate price.
They should pay the ultimate price.
I felt that way for a long time.
Absolutely right.
This is absolutely right, and it's shocking to me that people on the left and the right are disagreeing with it.
The case for the death penalty has never been stronger, and yet I even hear conservatives say, I oppose the death penalty.
I was on a panel at Politicon.
Charlie Kirk was sitting next to me.
I like Charlie a lot, but he says, I oppose the death penalty because I'm pro-life, and I just don't think this argument is very strong.
The case for the death penalty has never been stronger, especially now that we have technological advances that can exonerate people who have been wrongly accused, especially that we have technological advances that can put perpetrators and convicts, we can place them at the scene of the crime, we can know that they were there with relative certainty.
The case has never been stronger.
But our culture right now is so confused And we don't have a vocabulary to talk about moral issues.
So we say, you know, pro-life, that's the slogan.
But of course, this is not a precise way of talking about things.
It's the same with torture.
You know, I think people hear death penalty, and because we have a feelings-first culture, they say, oh, death is bad, so I'm against death, so no, no death.
Death is bad, because it doesn't sound, doesn't feel good.
The same with tortures.
I'm against torture, as though this is some morally clear position to hold, but that isn't the case.
You know, just to use the example of torture, the reason that we don't torture enemy soldiers is, well, it's because we've all agreed to something called the Geneva Conventions, but the purpose of that, the reason that we don't torture enemy soldiers is to protect civilians in times of war.
That's why we don't torture enemy soldiers.
We say, look, if you won't attack civilians, if you won't target civilians in times of war, we will give you certain protections, certain pleasantries.
You won't be tortured.
You won't be detained in this way.
You'll have this aspect of justice.
Okay, fine.
So, some people want to extend that and say that we shouldn't torture terrorists.
But that, of course, undermines the entire case for the Geneva Conventions.
That undermines the entire case for not torturing soldiers.
Because terrorists, by definition, target civilians to advance their political agenda.
So if we start extending Geneva Convention protections to terrorists, we undermine the whole purpose of the Geneva Convention.
We undermine the whole purpose of saying, if you don't target civilians, we won't do certain things to you.
We'll give you certain pleasantries.
If we start offering that to everybody, then there is no incentive and more civilians are going to die and more civilians are going to get hurt.
It's the same thing with the death penalty.
Because right now, we always focus, when we talk about criminal justice, criminal justice reform, we talk about rehabilitating criminals.
We say that's the purpose, you know, they go to jail, they go to prison, to be rehabilitated.
And that's true.
There is a rehabilitative purpose of punishment and of the justice system.
But that's not the only purpose.
That's not the only aspect of justice.
There are at least two others and probably three.
There's retribution.
There's retributive justice, punishing people because they did the crime.
There's rehabilitation.
There's deterrence.
You can try to deter further crimes.
And then there's defending society from the criminals who have committed these acts.
Adam Smith, great economist and great moral philosopher, said, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent when we're talking about states and criminal justice systems.
So you'll hear, I was at a school the other night at Augustana University in South Dakota, and someone said, shouldn't you oppose the death penalty?
It's more expensive To pursue the death penalty than to pursue life in prison.
I say, okay, who cares?
Who cares?
And he's right, by the way.
Between 1989 and 1997, the cost of pursuing the death penalty against somebody was about a quarter of a million dollars.
From the beginning of the trial to Zappanem, it was about a quarter of a million dollars.
Between 1998 and 2004, that number jumped to about $620,000, $621,000 as the median.
So that is a huge increase.
It's more than doubled.
Okay, fine.
Drop in the bucket.
Doesn't really matter.
Also, we don't execute that many people, which is part of the problem of this debate.
So far this year, I think in various states, we've executed 18 people.
Seven more are set to be executed this year.
It looks likely that only six more will be executed, so you're looking at 24 or two per month.
The majority of death sentences are not carried out in the United States.
Since 1973, 16% of people who have been sentenced to death have actually been executed, so 84% have not been executed.
And of the people who remain on death row, they've not been pardoned, they've not had their convictions overturned, they've not had this or that or the other thing.
A full 75% of them have not been executed.
Only 25% who remain on death row have been executed.
So there is an aspect of this which might be cruel and unusual punishment, but it's not the death penalty.
That's another argument that people try to make.
They say it's cruel and unusual.
Absolutely not.
It's been carried out by every government for all of human history everywhere.
At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, when we were talking about cruel and unusual punishment, everywhere had the death penalty.
It was virtually the definition of a felony.
Now, life in prison might be cruel and unusual.
It might be cruel and unusual to sentence someone to death and then have them waiting for 30 years, languishing.
They've already made peace with dying, but there's a little glimpse of hope or this.
I mean, that might be maddening.
That might be cruel and unusual.
I can totally understand getting rid of that.
But we shouldn't We shouldn't speak in a confused way about the death penalty.
There are many good purposes for it.
So we know it does deter crime, by the way.
There have been studies about this since 1968, general deterrence theory, but then studies in the 1970s, even recent studies that show that the death penalty deters crime.
And in places where it's shown not to deter crime very much, one likely cause of that is that the death penalty isn't actually carried out, so its deterrent effect isn't very strong.
But we know in places where the death penalty is carried out quickly, where it's carried out swiftly, that the deterrent effect is significantly stronger.
So it does have that as a defense of society.
Obviously, by definition, it defends society because you're taking the criminal and you're Setting up a meeting with his maker.
Only God can judge, but we can arrange the meeting.
And then finally, there is retribution.
When the terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, President Bush sat in the Oval Office.
He spoke to the American people.
And he said, these attacks fill us with horror, with great sadness, and with a quiet, unyielding anger.
That unyielding anger might be expressed in a couple ways.
It might be expressed because we just want a little revenge.
Fine.
But that's not what retribution, retributive punishment does.
We also are angered because of the injustice of that.
And what retribution and retributive punishment does is not gets revenge, but it corrects The error, the miscarriage of justice.
It goes some way toward restoring a balance of justice.
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So there are all of these different arguments for the death penalty.
Don't let anybody tell you that it's wrong or that it's immoral.
You know, to look at those people Who were slain in Pittsburgh worshiping because a bigot, because a wicked evil bigot came in there and slaughtered them in cold blood in the house of God while they were praying.
One feels a quiet, unyielding anger and one feels a need to in any way restore a balance of justice.
We also want to protect society.
We also want to deter further acts.
And I hope that this guy can get rehabilitated while he's waiting to hang because it will be very good for his soul.
I don't care that much.
I'm much more interested in the other aspects of justice on this, but he should hang and it should be swift.
And if we're going to have criminal justice reform, the first thing we should reform is reinstituting that justice because our current death penalty regime is not particularly just.
Obviously, the media are blaming Donald Trump.
This has been going on for a long time.
Those pipe bombs sent by the worst bomber ever, this Looney Tunes ex-stripper from Florida, the media were referring to those bombs as Trump targets bombs.
So they say, oh yes, bombs were sent to Trump targets as though Donald Trump was there mailing the packages themselves.
You know, this creates a big issue.
I mean, look, they're even doing it with this guy who shot all those people in the synagogue, and they're trying to connect him in some way to Trump, even though he hated Trump, and Trump hates him and wants to kill him.
We should not do this in our political rhetoric.
It's a really bad idea.
And I'll point out, Donald Trump is pretty reckless sometimes in the way he speaks.
He actually hasn't really been reckless on this, and he explains it.
When the left has committed lunatic, fringy acts of violence, The right has not really exploited it.
Here he is explaining the difference.
Yet when a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to murder congressional Republicans and severely wounded a great man named Steve Scalise and others, we did not use that heinous attempt at mass murder for political gain because that would have been wrong.
It would have been the wrong thing to do.
That's right.
That would have been the wrong thing to do.
It's the right thing to do to remind them that you did the right thing, because you won't get credit for doing the right thing unless you tell them that you did the right thing, which is a little boastful and might seem like the wrong thing, but it is the right thing, I assure you.
But this is absolutely right.
You don't want to take these fringy, lunatic examples and try to pretend that they're representative of the whole group.
That is what the left does.
And so, you know, we've been talking about left-wing violence all over this country, We're talking about the mobs of people who have gone out into the street, threatened conservatives, harassed them, assaulted them, gone to their homes where their children sleep.
And further, we weren't even really talking about that too much.
We didn't talk about Antifa a whole lot until the elected Democrat leaders encouraged all of it.
And not just one of them, not even just Maxine Waters, but Waters, Holder, Booker, Hillary Clinton, all of them.
They're trying to equate one radical, fringe guy who did an evil thing and not talk about it as evil per se, which it is, but try to paint conservatives or right-wingers or Republicans that way.
Whereas on the left, it is the mainstream that they have to answer for.
This is also one of the truly awful aspects of identity politics, which is that in the United States, after the, I don't know, 1960s, 1970s, there really wasn't much of a white racial consciousness in American politics.
It had really been wiped away.
The U.S., It had gone a long way over the course of about a hundred years, 1860 to 1970s, to wipe away the sins of slavery and the de jure inequalities and discriminations that were wrought by those systems.
And there wasn't really a white racial consciousness.
And there were some fringe writers who actually called for one.
They said, we need a white racial consciousness.
And people said, no, absolutely not.
We reject identity politics.
But then the left has forced a white racial identity.
Which is unfortunate because by embracing identity politics as their means of assent, as their means of consolidating political power on the left, they have forced a white racial identity.
It only makes sense if you're going to try to say that we have a coalition of the ascendant.
You've got all of these people and you're explicitly appealing to their skin color or to their ethnic heritage or whatever.
And you're uniting them by saying that there's a common enemy in what now we jokingly refer to as the straight white male, the straight white cisgender male, the straight white, which is an absurd term that I try not to use, the straight white male who thinks that he's a male or whatever.
If that is the personification of evil, then you're going to create an identity around those groups.
You've done it.
The left has done it.
We didn't do it.
We didn't paint this guy as the worst guy on earth or that color or this woman or this gender or whatever.
We didn't paint that as the personification of evil.
But the left, in order to assemble their identity politics coalition, had to do that.
And as a result, you see a white racial consciousness or a male sexual consciousness.
I don't know.
It's pretty stupid.
It isn't good when the left does it.
It isn't good when the right does it.
But the left is going to make it inevitable.
The left is going to force this to be inevitable.
And that is really ugly.
And the blame lies there.
So if we're going to stop identity politics, which I strongly encourage, everybody's got to do it.
Otherwise, it's simply going to grow.
It is only going to fester.
It's only going to get worse.
And it is a zero-sum game.
It is truly gutter politics.
And they're going to keep it up.
Talk about the Bernie Bro guy.
We're not talking about the Bernie Bro as the one who shot up the congressional baseball game.
We're not talking about that as the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
But the New York Times is.
And the New York Times, just last week, published assassination porn.
Published this novelist, alleged novelist, I've never read any of her works, obviously, Zoe Sharp, who wrote a whole piece fantasizing about the Secret Service assassinating Donald Trump.
That wasn't published on Gab.
That wasn't published on some fringe social media wacky board.
That was published in the New York Times.
And that is a huge distinction.
There isn't a moral equivalence here.
And you've got to be able to do it.
It requires moral clarity.
I know that it is insane to suggest that Donald Trump, playboy for 30 years, tabloid legend, somehow has some moral clarity here, but he does.
When you see an act of evil like the shooting of that synagogue, you've got to kill that guy by the arm of the state because of justice.
Justice demands it.
Many kinds of justice demand that.
When you see these heinous identity politics and ideologies that come from that, you've got to call it out for what it is, and you've got to reject it.
You've got to reject it full-throatedly, wholeheartedly.
Not just for one guy, not just for one group, but for everybody.
And speaking of the fringes versus the mainstream...
Barack Obama, he's out on the campaign trail again, and he is perfectly identifying this distinction because he is out there calling Donald Trump a shameless liar.
Here he is.
You know, when I'm talking to Michelle sometimes, I'm all like, oh, honey, man, did you see I did all the dishes?
You know, and she's all like, yeah, but that's like the first time you've done that in a week.
What did you do wrong?
And I said, well, we all do that to some degree.
Right?
I mean, it's human nature.
But what we have not seen before, in our recent public life at least, is politicians just blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly lying.
Making stuff up.
Calling up Calling doctors that you can't keep doctors that you can keep.
Calling terrorist attacks in our consulate in Benghazi a spontaneous response to a...
Oh, wait a minute.
No, we have seen all of that from you.
From you, you shameless, cynical, leftist...
Pack.
Chicago.
Machine.
Oily.
Every time he opens his mouth, Donald Trump gets 10,000 votes.
That's how it works.
I can't wait.
I hope the NRCC, the NRSC, the RNC, all the GOP, all of the conservative institutions are paying Barack Obama's speaker fees.
Because every time he opens his mouth, we get a lot closer to winning in the midterms and in the 2020 election.
By the way, I'd just like to make a point.
People always talk about how Barack Obama, oh, what a rhetorician.
Oh, he's the greatest orator since Pericles.
Oh, what wonderful, soaring speeches from Barack Obama compared to Donald Trump, who can't even spell on Twitter.
First of all, I was never horribly impressed by, well, maybe I was horribly impressed.
But I never terribly much admired President Trump's speeches, with one or two exceptions.
But listen to how he opened that.
You know, the guy who apparently possesses this tremendously advanced and superior command of the English language, he opens up, he says, you know, sometimes I'm all like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then Michelle, she's all like, blah, blah, blah, like speaking like a little millennial girl.
And I'm like, and then she was like, and then he was like this, and then I feel like, just totally feel like, la, la, la, la, la.
But obviously the essence of this is absurd.
Because when you compare Barack Obama's lies to Donald Trump's lies, there is no comparison.
They are utterly different.
He's saying that Donald Trump shamelessly lies, shamelessly.
He has exaggerated the truth.
I'm willing to say that.
He's said a couple things that quite literally are not true.
What does he do?
He exaggerates a crowd size every now and again.
He exaggerates this.
I mean, he's been doing it his whole career.
It's huge.
It's going to be the biggest, the greatest.
Okay, that is what Donald Trump does.
His lies are exaggerating how many people came to his rally.
By the way, tens of thousands, 100,000 people come to his rallies, and he exaggerates it by 10,000, and they call it a lie.
What are Barack Obama's lies like?
They're like, hey, you can't keep your doctor.
Like, like, like, you know?
And I'm like, and he's like.
Those are what those lies are, like.
He says that you can keep your doctor, then he upends a sixth of the U.S. economy and you can't keep your doctor.
He says that an attack on our consulate was caused by some poor guy who made a YouTube video, a weird little YouTube video that nobody saw.
In reality, it was Islamic terrorists in a pre-planned, premeditated attack on September 11th.
September 11, 2011.
Or 2012.
2012.
Those are totally different.
Give me the guy who lies about the crowd size any day of the week.
Another great lie that Barack Obama told is he said in an interview, he said that Donald Trump will never be president, you'll never be president Donald.
That was the best lie he ever told.
I'm actually quite a fan of that lie because he got that one wrong.
You know, okay, I guess if we had to have a liar as president, I'm glad he was wrong about that.
But, broadly speaking, a lot of this comes because the left has not let reality dawn on them.
They're still running around in these fantasies.
Barack Obama is still going out there pretending that he is a rock star, pretending that it's 2006, 2007, you know, before he even ever ran, that he's the rock star.
Compare the crowd sizes that Obama gets to the people that Donald Trump gets.
How many orders of magnitude smaller is the Obama crowd than the Donald Trump crowd?
They're still running around in these fantasies, like people haven't caught on.
And the perfect example of this, you know, in a tough news cycle, really something that could give us all hope, that can give us all a little smile, all a little joy, is former future President Hillary Clinton planning out 2020.
Here she is.
Well, I'd like to be president.
Look, I think, hopefully, When we have a Democrat in the Oval Office in January of 2021, there's going to be so much work to be done.
I mean, we have confused everybody in the world, including ourselves.
And we have confused our friends and our enemies.
They have no idea what the United States stands for, what we're likely to do, what we think is important.
So the work would be work that I feel very well prepared for, having been in the Senate for eight years, having been a diplomat in the State Department.
And it's just going to be a lot of heavy lifting.
So are you going to be doing any of that lifting?
Do you feel like...
Oh, I have no idea, Cara, but I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to even think about it until we get through this November 6th election about what's going to happen after that.
Well, I'm not going to think about it.
Oh, well, we are, Hillary.
Don't worry.
We're going to think about it right now when we go to the ballot box on November 6th.
I love how she opens it.
She says, well, you know, I would like to be president.
You don't say.
Are you Hillary Clinton?
The girl who's been in politics since she was 12?
The girl who...
She basically launched her campaign to run for president when she graduated from Wellesley, the woman who's run now for president on two separate occasions and really ran as her husband's co-president, so another two occasions.
You want to be president, Hillary?
I'm shocked to hear that.
The really telling aspect of this is when she says, we've confused everybody.
We've confused our friends.
We've confused our allies.
We've confused our enemies.
Yes, you have.
Yes, you did that.
I think that was a Freudian slip, where you say one thing but me and your mother.
I think she certainly has confused a lot of people, but it's the left that has confused them.
Just use that line.
We've confused our allies and our friends.
The Obama administration, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, confused our enemy in Iran as a friend.
Confused him.
They sent pallets of cash.
They allowed Iran to humiliate our sailors.
They gave them the keys to a future nuclear weapon.
That's not good.
All the while abandoning our ally in Israel.
All the while funding campaign opponents.
Sending operatives over to try to unseat the Prime Minister of Israel.
An awful relationship with them.
How confusing is it when the Democrats have been running for the last two years about Donald Trump's collusion with the Russians, and yet during the entirety of the Obama administration, the US went soft on the Russians.
The U.S. joked that Barack Obama made fun of Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was an adversary.
He said, well, Mitt, the Cold War, the 1980s called.
They want their foreign policy back.
Ha ha.
Ha ha.
I'm Barack Obama.
Ha ha.
You know, how about when Hillary Clinton signed off to sell uranium to Russian interests?
How about that?
And now I'm quite confused.
You're absolutely right.
Now we're supposed to believe that Saudi Arabia is the worst government on planet Earth, and yet during the...
The Obama administration, Saudi Arabia, was donating millions and millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.
I'm very confused.
You are also very confused, Hillary.
And fortunately, we've got a little bit of clarity coming out now, and we're treating our friends as our friends and our enemies as our enemies.
This is really important.
And what a distinction.
What a perfect way to explain the difference between now and then, between the The Trump administration and the Obama administration.
Or before that, the Clinton administration.
The campaigns are zeroing in on this.
The Trump campaign has a great ad-out.
And we will examine why it is just right out of the Ronald Reagan playbook.
Why we're living in the 80s again.
But we can't do that until we go to dailywire.com.
We've got to check in on the caravan, too.
We've got to talk about the Student Bill of Rights.
So much more to get to.
Go to dailywire.com.
The main reason you've got to go to dailywire.com right now is that my speech is coming up tonight.
What time are we going?
I think we're going up at 7.30 Central Time, 8.30 Eastern Time, 5.30 Pacific Time, 3 in the morning, Hawaii.
I don't know.
I don't know how to do the other time zones.
It's going to be tonight.
5.30 Pacific, 8.30 Eastern, 7.30 Central.
Go over there.
The topic will be...
How to write nothing and sell 100,000 copies.
I've never told my secret before.
I've never told the secret to the number one best-selling status of Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
I will go through it entirely, through the entire history of the wonderful system that let me do all of that.
But you've got to go to dailywire.com.
Why else?
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan Show.
You get the Ben Shapiro Show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You get to ask questions in the conversation.
That's coming up.
None of that matters.
I've nearly drowned because this is all I have right now.
I have this little paper cup full of coffee.
I don't even have covfefe in here.
I just have coffee.
Because I left my Leftist Tears Tumblr back in Los Angeles.
If I can make it back to the West Coast, I will never be without it again.
And you're going to feel exactly the same way when you get yours.
It is the only FDA-approved way Of protecting your leftist tiers.
And it's really important.
You know, right now, on Mondays, so today, subscribers get another Kingdom show.
So this is the show that Andrew Klavan wrote that I perform all the roles in.
They get it on Mondays.
Non-members, non-subscribers have to wait, and they'll just get the audio on Friday.
They don't get all the video.
It's not cool.
Get it, because there is no better way than relaxing on a nice Monday, kicking up your feet, long day of work.
You've got your Leftist Tears Tumblr guzzling all those delicious Leftist Tears.
Turn on a little conservative, or at least non-leftist entertainment, another kingdom.
Ooh, you're going to be feeling snug as a bug in a rug.
Go over there right now.
We've got a lot more.
We'll be right back.
So the Trump campaign for 2020, which is now in gear, I know it seems like we only focus on the White House, but there is a Trump presidential campaign as well.
They have just released an ad that is unoriginal.
It is entirely unoriginal, and it's excellent.
It is exactly what they need to release right now.
It also tells us a lot about their political strategy.
Let's check it out.
Another month of strong numbers.
223,000 net new jobs created in the month.
When I look at the way things are, it reminds me how far we've come.
These numbers, they are depressingly weak.
The punch in the gut is growing even more slowly than we thought.
But things are starting to change.
There's more opportunity and security to invest in the ones that matter.
It only goes up from there.
It only ends with violins playing and it's obviously showing how much better things are now.
Does that look familiar?
Does that look familiar to you?
Probably not to you because I think the median age of my audience is like two and a half years old.
But for people, for the other part of the audience, it's a little older.
You probably remember that from the 1984 Ronald Reagan campaign.
Here's Ronald Reagan's version.
It's morning again in America.
Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history.
With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years.
This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married.
And it goes on and on from there.
But you even hear the same uplifting orchestral music just looking at the economy, just looking at how things have improved.
It's morning in America.
And Donald Trump is just releasing his big ad thus far, right before the midterms.
It's morning in America.
And that's the argument.
And this is the argument, by the way, that President Trump has been talking about since 2015.
I think people say he's reckless, that he's unpredictable, you can never predict him.
It actually turns out he's pretty predictable.
And the reason we know this is the guy looked back at the most successful Republican presidential administration and campaign in modern history, Ronald Reagan's, and he has copied it almost one for one.
The Make America Great Again slogan came from Ronald Reagan.
He puts a little Trumpian twist on it, of course.
The Reagan one was, Let's make America great again.
Well...
And sure, as the let's, Trump drops the let's, he makes it an imperative.
He says, do it!
Make America great again.
Okay, that's fine.
Same exact idea, same themes, and now we've got mourning in America because, just like the Reagan administration, things have improved dramatically.
Now, there's a difference here.
The Trump one, you might call it higher energy.
In part, this is because our media have just gotten much more frenzied.
So, you know, the quality of the video, the pacing of the video, people don't have attention spans anymore.
People want to constantly be amped up.
Okay, that's part of it.
It's also because our culture now is a little more individualistic.
You heard about halfway through the morning in America, Reagan ad, people say, more men and women are going to get married today than ever before.
And now we don't talk about that because marriage is a bad thing in our popular culture.
I mean, it's actually a wonderful thing.
I'd be living in the gutter without it.
But now the culture is too individualistic.
So you sought In that Trump version of it, it was a woman.
She was a woman just doing it.
She was the center.
She was the protagonist.
And then her daughter became the protagonist of the ad at the end.
One, it's because President Trump wants to appeal to women.
He wants to appeal in particular to young people.
In part, this is a little bit of identity politics.
It has become unfashionable to put old white men in things.
This is, you know, as we discussed before, old white men are the great enemy of the popular culture.
So it focuses on that.
But it's the same message.
It is applying that message to the present day.
And you've got to remember, that 1980 campaign from Reagan was a huge campaign, and it was a huge victory.
And then what happened in 1984?
He won every single state.
With the possible exception of Minnesota, I spoke to a chief strategist on that campaign, and he insists that they won Minnesota too, but they didn't want to look like sore losers.
But they more or less swept the country.
And I think President Trump is just counting on that.
He's ironically a pretty rational guy, and the campaign is at least being run pretty rationally.
And I mean that in so much as When Donald Trump looks at what issues to focus on, he just sort of sees what issues people care most about.
In a way that other conservatives, other Republicans, didn't figure it out.
He realizes people hate illegal immigration.
Why wasn't every Republican running on an extreme position on that?
I don't know.
I couldn't tell you why.
They felt that you couldn't get away with it, maybe.
That the culture was against them.
They were afraid of the media.
I don't know.
President Trump Isn't.
And I suspect this will be successful unless, of course, the economy tanks and then all is lost.
But it really does show those parallels.
And it's really great because I missed the 1980s, so I'm glad that I can live through it again.
All right, let's check back in on our caravan, this crazy caravan marching toward the U.S.-Mexico border.
Do we have an image of it?
I can hear all those Hondurans, traffic people across the border.
Doo ba doo, boo ba doo, boo boo.
I always, whenever we hear Caravan, I just think of that Van Morrison song.
The good news is it has been reduced in size.
So it was up to 14,000, 15,000.
I think now estimates are that it's around 7,000 people.
Highly orchestrated, a total stunt by the left.
I mean, you'd have to be insane to think this were a spontaneous uprising.
You probably also believe that the attack on Benghazi was a spontaneous response to a YouTube video.
We've got the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, admitting that this is an orchestrated leftist stunt, that it's not spontaneous.
Judicial Watch has already gone in and talked to some of these people.
They've done an investigation.
And it appears, you know, the way the left wants to present this is its mothers and babes just trying to come over to freedom, to get asylum, to whatever.
But there are a lot of bad hombres in here.
Guatemalan authorities have already recovered seven unaccompanied minors who were just being ferreted across by human smugglers, by human traffickers.
Bad hombres.
Could really screw up poor little kids' lives.
And this is what is being encouraged by the left.
This is what the left is applauding.
You know, the way that conservatives need to respond to this, I hope President Trump responds in this way, is to speak about this in heart-tuggingly moral terms.
It's good, apparently General Mattis, or Secretary Mattis, has approved plans to send troops to the border, a lot of troops to the border, but we need to speak about this in really moral terms.
Guatemalan authorities recover Seven unaccompanied minors who are being brought across by human smugglers, human traffickers, scum of the earth, where bad things can happen.
You know, there was a study by Fusion, it was reported in the Huffington Post, that 60 to 80 percent of women Amnesty International puts the number at 60%, I think Fusion puts it at 80%.
60-80% of women and girls who are brought across that border illegally are raped or sexually assaulted.
That's what the left is encouraging.
When the left is encouraging illegal immigration, when the left encourages amnesty, when the left encourages not enforcing the law, What they are encouraging is for 60-80% of women and girls brought across the border to be raped and sexually assaulted.
It's as simple as that.
I know that sounds harsh.
I know that they don't intend for that.
Nobody wants women and girls to be raped.
But when you support the policy, you're supporting the consequence of the policy.
And the policy is indefensible.
Once again, somehow, magically, miraculously, the Trump administration has great moral clarity on this issue.
We've got to speak of it this way all around, you know, because people are seeing things in such a narrow, shallow way on the death penalty, on illegal immigration, even on the culture.
Just before we go, some really sad news.
The Simpsons is killing off Apu.
Here to react, we have Apu.
We need you Apu!
You might not need the Quickie Mart, but we need you.
No, we don't really, because people don't watch The Simpsons anymore, and they probably haven't since the late 1990s.
The Simpsons were great, though.
In its heyday, The Simpsons was absolutely terrific.
They've finally given in, um...
Matt Groening, all of these other guys who are behind The Simpsons have resisted the calls to get rid of Apu by radical lefty lunatics who are offended on behalf of Indians.
Because you know, it's not Indians who are complaining about this.
It's decadent white liberals who are complaining.
It's little white girls complaining on behalf of the subcontinent and saying, oh, it's so offensive.
That Apu is a stereotypical Indian character because he says, thank you, come again.
And this is considered offensive, again, by little white girls on behalf of Indian people for whom they do not speak.
But also, if we're going to get rid of stereotypical characters in The Simpsons, what happens to all the other characters in The Simpsons?
What happens to that?
What happens to the chief of police, who's this bumbling, fat idiot who just eats donuts all the time?
What happens to groundskeeper Willie, this screaming, angry, violent Scotsman?
What happens to the Italian chef, who looks like he's a Mario?
What happens to the mob boss, who portrays Italians as mobsters?
What happens to the Jews?
What happens to every other stereotype in The Simpsons?
What happens to the Latin American guy in the bee costume?
I kind of forget their names.
It's been a while since I've seen it.
But there are these characters.
Jewish character, Mexican character, whatever.
What happens to them?
It's just Apu.
It's just Apu, right?
What is the endgame?
The endgame here is the lowest common denominator.
You know, I had an experience of this yesterday.
I have wonderful friends who are left-wing.
And they're vegan.
And I've actually got multiple friends who are vegan.
Okay, you know, do what you want.
Live the way you want to live.
And so we were going to go get lunch, and they took me to a vegan restaurant.
Now, I'll point out, when I take my vegan friends to lunch, I don't take them to a barbecue restaurant.
But so they take us to a vegan restaurant.
And why?
Why did they do it?
Because we all eat vegetables.
We can all eat bread, right?
Everybody can.
That's the bare minimum of what you can eat.
So they say, okay, well, you can eat that.
We can't eat meat, but you can eat that, so that's fine.
This is the lowest common denominator.
It's when somebody in your family or in your friends becomes a vegetarian.
All of a sudden, everybody's got to become a vegetarian because, oh, that's fine.
You can.
You don't need this.
You don't need that.
You don't need meat.
You don't need cheese.
You know, by the way, I don't know any more masochistic cultural trend than veganism.
I could do vegetarianism for like a week or two because at least you get cheese and cream and Alfredo sauce or whatever.
Veganism is not tenable.
I'm deeply skeptical that anybody is actually maintaining that diet regimen.
Nevertheless, I digress.
It's all this lowest common denominator.
That's offensive to one person.
Apu is offensive to one person in the world, so we've got to get rid of him.
He brings enjoyment to millions of people, but one person's offended, so we've got to get rid of him.
The turkey sandwich is delicious to billions of people on earth, but one person gets offended for the turkey.
I guess the turkey is upset or something.
So, okay, we've got to get rid of it.
Nobody can have it anymore.
What are we going to end up with?
We're going to end up in a perfectly clear white room with no windows staring at a wall like this.
And then someone's going to be offended that it's a white room, so it's going to have to be a beige room or something.
And all of the little diversities and eccentricities and lovely little aspects of life that give us enjoyment will be stripped bare, but at least no one will be offended.
That's the world that they're proposing.
And fortunately, the right offers an alternative.
I think this is why the right is finally cool.
I think this is why Kanye West now has produced a t-shirt line for Blexit.
He calls the Black Exit.
This is why he's speaking and so embracing the right.
He says there's drag and energy.
He says, you know, there's masculine energy.
There's this, whatever.
What he's really saying is, it's enjoyable.
It's nice.
Jerry Seinfeld is no right-winger.
He is far from a right-winger.
But you hear him assailing political correctness because it's just not funny.
It's just awful.
It's so terrible.
So I think this is an important message.
I'm really sorry The Simpsons caved on this.
I mean, I also don't care because I haven't watched it in 20 years.
I hope that the rest of the culture realizes this is a loser issue.
This is a loser.
Don't.
I know it seems like the screaming hordes, I know it seems like there are a lot of them.
There aren't.
There are like five of them.
Who cares what they think?
They'll toughen up.
They'll grow out of it.
Alright, that's our show.
We're out of time.
I'm even running late.
Check it out tonight.
We're going to be back at 8.30 Eastern, 5.30 Pacific, 7.30 Central.
On how to write nothing and sell 100,000 copies, I know that you lost Mega Millions last week.
Unless the winners are actually listening to this show, in which case, you should call me.
But if you're not, you'll need to figure out how to write nothing and sell 100,000 copies.
That'll be tonight, University of Alabama, Huntsville.
I'll be back in the studio tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you later.
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