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Nov. 14, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:36
Ep. 252 - The Never-Ending Power Struggle

It’s an all-out brawl from Florida to Washington, and that’s exactly what the Framers intended. We will analyze the high-stakes power struggles for the Senate, House, statehouses, and White House. Then, young people stop having sex, and Google employees try to overthrow capitalism. Date: 11-14-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's an all-out brawl from Florida to Washington, and that is exactly what the framers of our country intended.
We will analyze the high-stakes power struggles for the Senate, for the House, for the State Houses, for the White House.
Then, young people stop having sex, poor young people, and Google employees try to overthrow capitalism.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Power struggles galore.
There are power struggles going on right now all around the country.
We've got power struggles, obviously, in Florida, but we've got it all the way up to the White House, and even between the White House and the deep state, the bureaucracy, the DOJ, the FBI.
Looks like President Trump is going to answer questions.
From Robert Mueller, that could happen as early as this week, NBC News is reporting.
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The big one is Mueller.
We'll get to Florida.
We'll get to all of that.
But the big question is Mueller.
Will President Trump have to...
Will he answer questions in front of Robert Mueller?
Will he blow him off completely?
Will he answer written questions, submit written questions?
This has been a battle and a question that's been going on for months.
It seems now we have the answer.
I caution you that this is coming in from NBC News, so, you know, who knows?
But Fox is reporting it, too.
A lot of people are widely reporting that the Trump legal team right now is finalizing answers to written questions from the Mueller team.
Rudy Giuliani has said in recent weeks, Donald Trump's lawyer in this case has said that Donald Trump will not answer questions face-to-face with Robert Mueller.
We have all been hoping that this is true.
Why?
Because President Trump has many wonderful qualities.
One of those qualities, however, is not precision of language.
He speaks actually in a very persuasive and powerful way.
He's obviously a great persuader.
He got himself elected president.
He uses language in a creative way, in an interesting way, in a way that works for politics.
But legally, it could have gotten him into a lot of trouble.
So what the Giuliani and the Trump team said was, we are not going to put him face-to-face with Robert Mueller because then you're just going to end up with some obstruction trap.
I mean, don't forget of all of the investigations that we've heard with regard to Michael Flynn or George Papadopoulos or Carter Page or this, all of the charges brought against people connected with the Russia investigation have had nothing to do with any Russian collusion in the campaign itself. all of the charges brought against people connected with the Paul Manafort is going to go to jail for the rest of his life because he liked expensive suits and because Paul Manafort had shady business dealings long before the Trump campaign.
You've got people who are getting caught on obstruction or giving false statements to the FBI.
So it's all of these crimes that only come up when you're actually talking to the investigators, when you're actually talking to the FBI.
So very wise of the Trump team to fight this.
And right now, it looks like they're going to win this.
This will be a huge win for the White House for two reasons.
One, if President Trump actually came in and fired Robert Mueller, you know, he just fired Jeff Sessions.
There was some worry that by putting in this new guy who's a loyalist to Trump, who's been critical of the investigation, they might fire Mueller right away.
They might not let him complete his work.
That wouldn't look great.
I'm not sure that I'm opposed to it because the investigation has clearly been politicized.
There have been a number of investigators on the Mueller investigation who have been outspokenly anti-Trump.
Obviously, the corruption with Peter Strzok, who texted his girlfriend.
Lisa Page, another FBI agent, said we're going to stop Trump from becoming president.
He was on the Mueller investigation.
A lot of questions.
We wonder why this is dragged on so long.
However, Mitch McConnell, cocaine Mitch today, is coming out and saying Mueller will finish the investigation.
He won't be stopped from finishing it.
So, if Mueller finishes the investigation and they don't catch Trump making some loose statement or in a perjury trap or in some obstruction trap, that's a huge win for the White House because it totally deflates this narrative.
How many left-wingers have you seen walking around in that stupid t-shirt that says, it's Mueller time!
You get it?
Looks like it says it's Miller time, but it's Mueller time!
Yeah!
That's how we're going to overturn the 2016 presidential election.
Womp womp!
It would be pretty sad for them if it turns out that President Trump lets Mueller complete his task and they don't catch him on any collusion.
What that collusion could be?
Couldn't even tell you.
What they even mean by collusion?
Couldn't tell you.
It's not a legal term.
It's not a crime to collude with the Russians.
There's no law against colluding with the Russians.
But we'll see what they turn up.
That could be as early as this week.
And then once they get the questions answered by Trump, I'm not quite sure what else there is for this investigation to do.
They've already nabbed Manafort on years old dealings.
There was some talk that they were going to go after Roger Stone, although Stone hasn't been indicted yet.
The longtime political advisor to Donald Trump, longtime GOP dirty trickster.
Where else are they going to go?
Are they just going to keep going after shady lobbyists and political operatives?
Because they could spend decades and decades doing that and they still won't do it.
On both sides of the aisle, there are shady people who operate in politics on both sides of the aisle.
But I think they've kind of got to stop it after President Trump gives his answers.
There's no bigger fish to talk to than him.
So that's the struggle right now, I suppose, for the presidency or for the credibility of the presidency.
And the White House at least got a big win on this, if the NBC report is true.
The most jarring electoral struggle is down in Florida.
This heated up yesterday.
So we talked about her, Brenda Snipes.
She's the election supervisor down there in Broward County, one of the most corrupt places in the country.
And she's been under fire.
They've been finding boxes of provisional ballots that just turned up in the trunk of Democrat Party activists.
They've been finding votes coming a day after the election, two days after the election.
She has been totally under fire.
She's had mistakes and corruption going back years and years now.
Even Chris Cuomo thought that her corruption was too much.
Here is Brenda Snipes attempting to defend herself.
To give the Scott campaign the information they wanted, it had to go to court.
The judge said you had to turn it over.
You didn't turn it over by the deadline that was given.
That is cast as a partisan spat.
But you're doing that because you're a Democrat.
How do you respond to that?
Well, I was talking with a woman today as she came into our office and she made some statement about a partisan statement and she said, I know that you're a Republican.
I said I have been a Democrat all my life.
In this position, I have been very focused on party because I want to treat all of the voters in Broward County the same.
And I think if you ask the voters, you'd find that I have that reputation.
I don't have a reason to hold anything back, except that I don't want to give out information that's incomplete or incorrect at that particular time.
So concerns, allegations that we are not transparent, There's one comment that my staff and we work very closely together always bring to my attention is that, Dr.
Snipes, you'll just take time to walk anybody through our election warehouse.
I think that's very important.
What?
What on earth did Chris Cuomo say that would prompt that rambling nonsense?
He said, oh, yes.
Are the criticisms against you for being a partisan hack, are they fair?
So she ends on saying, well, we let people take tours, and we host tours here, and they say, we like your tours, Dr.
Brenda Snipes.
What she is a doctor of, I have no idea.
And Chris Cuomo, to his credit, says, well, you're not letting the Republicans take a tour.
They're asking you for the results of this election.
You're not giving it to them.
You're not even, she won't even turn over how many people voted.
And of course she won't turn it over because then you can't change the number when the Democrat loses.
You're not, it's much harder to change the number after the fact when the Republicans already know how many people voted.
This is absurd.
I love her defense too.
She says that she has a great reputation.
She has a great reputation of being nonpartisan, perfectly objective, very competent.
No, she doesn't.
No, you don't.
The reason that you're on CNN right now is that you don't have that reputation.
Your reputation is a terrible one because you're either incompetent or corrupt or, more likely, incompetent and corrupt.
Because if she were only corrupt, if she were corrupt and competent, then we wouldn't be having this argument.
She would have been able to hide her voter fraud much more easily and much more deftly.
But she hasn't been able to do it.
So, even Chris Cuomo calls this out.
It's just a total farce.
Forget those two.
Now Chuck Schumer, whose side is he going to take?
Is he going to take the side of people even like left-winger Chris Cuomo on CNN, his brother is Andy Cuomo, the Democrat governor of New York, this is a left-wing guy, or is he going to double down and defend Brenda Snipes and defend all of the corruption going on in Palm Beach counties and Broward County and say that we need to extend the recount?
Well, I'll give you one guess.
Chuck Schumer, take it away.
Well, Bill Nelson is strong as could be.
He believes, I believe, he's won a majority of the votes.
And as long as they're counted, he will continue being senator from Florida.
President Trump and Governor Scott have just lied.
They've said there's fraud when their own Republican officials in Florida have said there's no fraud.
They're trying to shut down the election because they're afraid of the consequences if they don't.
In other words, a Nelson victory.
That's what Bill believes.
That's what I believe.
Do you feel as if those deadlines should be moved out?
Absolutely.
Every vote should be counted.
Those deadlines, you have to remember, were passed after the presidential election of 2000 because of the need to report to the Electoral College.
Every vote should be counted.
The votes that were cast on November 7th, the votes that were cast on November 8th, the votes that were cast on November 14th, every vote's got to be counted.
We're going to count ballots all the way up until 2020.
Obviously, look, you know this, I know this, the most dangerous place in America is the area between Chuck Schumer and a television camera.
He's eating this up.
He's out there.
He's taken his stand for the Democrats of Florida, and he's trying to push Democrat Bill Nelson over the edge, even though he lost the election.
He's trying to push gubernatorial candidate, Democrat Andrew Gillum, over the edge, even though he lost the election.
But listen to what the reporter asks.
The reporter says, well, do you think that the deadline should be extended?
Do you think that we should meet the deadline or not?
He says, absolutely not.
Elections shouldn't have deadlines.
We gotta count all of these new votes.
Elections shouldn't have deadlines.
Elections, by definition, have deadlines.
That is what an election is.
That's why we have an election day.
If elections didn't have deadlines, they just go around all the time.
The way an election works is that you announce your candidacy, you campaign, you try to convince your fellow citizens, and then your citizens go out and vote one day, and then the votes are counted, and then you either win or lose.
If you don't need to win or lose, if you can stay in this Democrat limbo where you refuse to concede elections or you unconcede elections, then we don't have elections anymore.
Then we just have an all-out, bare-knuckle brawl for power, and that's what's happening.
It's ironic because it turns out that I was right in the Twitter post.
They got me kicked off of Twitter indefinitely.
I was right.
I made the joke.
I said, don't forget Republicans, vote on Tuesday.
And if you're a Democrat, vote on Wednesday.
And they did.
A number of people have been making this point on Twitter.
Jen Ellis among them said, yeah, Michael, you were absolutely right.
They voted on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
They're still voting.
What day is it?
It's November 14th.
It's a week and a day after the midterm elections.
And Chuck Schumer is saying, no, no, no.
He's trying to stop the election.
Yeah, the election was supposed to be stopped a week and a day ago.
You have to stop the elections at some point.
I think next time Chuck Schumer's up for election, next time he's running a race, I think we've got to keep those elections open.
Just keep them open.
How dare you?
Another ballot mic.
What if somebody mailed a ballot, a mail-in ballot, and it didn't arrive in time?
We've got to count all the votes, Chuck.
Then you can sit in limbo while shenanigans ensue.
Absolutely outrageous.
Andrew Gillum now.
The Democrat candidate for Florida governor.
He is now saying that claims of voter fraud in Florida undermine democracy.
He's close to right.
If he had said that voter fraud undermines democracy, he would have been correct.
That is what undermines democracy.
Pointing it out does not undermine democracy.
This reminds me a little bit of when Pope Francis said that the exposure of corruption and abuse among the bishops was the work of the devil.
No, the corruption was the work of the devil.
That is the work of the devil.
The exposure, the bringing things to truth, that's the opposite.
And so the voter fraud, that is the undermining of democracy.
Pointing out voter fraud is defending democracy.
And you've got a broad swath of people doing this right now.
Obviously, President Trump, he's always going out there swinging.
He's always fighting.
So he's going out and saying that.
But you've got Marco Rubio doing it as well.
You've got that whole range, the hardline, more populist conservative, and you've got the wonkier, beltway-friendly conservative in Marco Rubio.
And they're pointing it out because it's simply a fact.
We know that there is voter fraud going on there.
They are discovering boxes of ballots.
In rental cars, by private citizens, in trucks that were supposed to take them off to be counted, ballot machines are mysteriously breaking down, they're trying now to count votes that have already been recounted, there is rampant fraud, and there's been fraud in these counties for over a decade.
This is nothing new.
This is not some big surprise conspiracy allegation.
There have been instances of voter fraud here for a long time in this county where this woman, Brenda Snipes, was conducting the elections.
So the only conspiracy is the conspiracy now to undermine the election which elected Republican Ron DeSantis and Republican Rick Scott.
And I hope that Scott and DeSantis fight this tooth and nail because they're up against some pretty bad hombres.
Andrew Gillum is a crooked guy who will resort to mudslinging, awful politics.
He would be a terrible governor, he would bring financial ruin to the state, and he's a crook, and he's despicable for using racial slander, racialist slander, against his opponent, Ron DeSantis.
We cannot let this guy steal the election.
And I'm glad that everybody from the senator from Florida to the president are keeping the light on it.
Because what happens in these cases is everyone's paying attention on election day.
Everybody's focused in.
And then election day's over.
Maybe a couple days later they'll watch the news.
And then they tune out.
And when they tune out, Democrats come in and they take it.
Now fortunately, when these recounts have happened historically...
Usually, they don't overturn the election.
I think we've only had three elections overturned because of a recount out of high 20s, 27 or 28s in recent years.
So that's good.
But there's a lot of corruption down in this particular place, so we really have to watch out about that.
Because elections can genuinely be very close.
That is true.
But what happened here?
I don't know.
Florida has raised their thin margins.
They also have a ton of corruption.
So that's the power struggle happening down in Florida.
There's power struggle in the White House now, too.
We talked about this yesterday.
There was some talk that John Kelly might be out, that an aide might be out.
An aide that is now almost certainly going to be leaving the White House is Mira Ricardell.
She is a national security aide, and the reason that I'm pretty confident that she's going to be kicked out of her job is because it's not that I heard it from CNN, it's not that I heard it from NBC, I heard it from the spokeswoman for the First Lady.
She has apparently picked a fight with Melania Trump and the spokesman for the First Lady said, quote, It is the position of the office of the First Lady that Mira Ricardel no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House.
Yikes.
Talk about not understanding politics.
If you are able to irritate the president's wife that much, if you don't take special care not to irritate the president's wife, it is a wonder that you've made it to the upper echelons of American politics.
That is really shocking.
Who is this woman?
Mira Ricardel is the deputy national security advisor.
This is not the first time she's held a job in the government.
She's held a lot of posts in the government.
She was previously the special assistant to President Donald Trump.
She was before that in 96.
She was a foreign policy advisor to Bob Dole.
So she's been in this game a long time during George W. Bush.
She was deputy assistant secretary of defense, held a few roles in the defense department at also fairly high levels.
And now she's working directly under John Bolton.
Okay, I suspect a lot of this has to do with power struggles between John Bolton and John Kelly, for instance, between different factions of the White House who keep butting heads.
However, there was a former colleague of this woman, Mira Ricardel, who told the Washington Post, quote, She's a very tough woman, very smart, does not suffer fools well, and if you happen to be the fool, she will let you know.
This can be tough.
This can be intimidating.
I know people who are like this.
But you've got to be able to glad hand a little bit if you're at the upper echelons of D.C. politics.
I mean, D.C., part of what makes it such an unctuous place is that it's a whole town full of glad handers who would, the second that, you know, you turn away, they stop smiling and stab you in the back.
But if that's the way that the town works, you at least got to acclimate yourself to it a little bit.
Apparently, this Confrontation broke out because this woman, Mira Ricardel, got angry about first lady staffers having certain seats on an airplane.
There are a lot of conflicting stories coming in, but I suspect that it plays on both levels.
I suspect, as is often the case in politics, it plays on the personal level.
She personally rubbed some people the wrong way, and it plays on the bigger picture disagreements going on within the White House between, for instance, the chief of staff, John Kelly, and her boss, John Bolton, and ultimately her boss, John Kelly.
So those seem to be the angles.
It's worth pointing out, though, that these factions aren't totally hard line.
For instance, when Steve Bannon left the White House, the former chief strategist, there were people who were considered loyal to him or who were considered friendly toward him, Stephen Miller among them, who stayed in the White House.
It's not as though when one guy leaves, that whole faction leaves.
Some people are better at navigating the waters than others.
Apparently, she was not very good at navigating it, so almost certainly she will be out.
But there is a question over, you know, now we've got John Kelly's friend and former assistant, former deputy, Kirsten Nielsen, who's the head of Department of Homeland Security.
She was being pushed out the other day.
Now you see this butting heads of John Bolton's deputy.
The timing is a little coincidental.
I think that's probably the bigger play here.
And I hope that neither of these guys leave because they both seem to be very good in their jobs.
I've followed Ambassador Bolton much more closely than I've followed John Kelly, and I'm a huge John Bolton fan.
But they both seem to be doing good work there, so I hope that this doesn't bubble over into a bigger problem in the White House.
At the House of Representatives, we now have a new minority leader for the Republican caucus there.
Sorry to say the minority leader, but that's okay.
Kevin McCarthy has just won a vote.
It was a closed-door vote to become the GOP House minority leader.
He was not unopposed for this vote.
He went up against Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, although it seems that Steve Scalise is now running to be the whip.
We haven't seen that vote yet, or that decision on who the whip will be.
This pitted Kevin McCarthy, who was an old-time Paul Ryan-type loyalist, a little bit more establishment part of the party, against Jim Jordan, who's running the House Freedom Caucus.
And this is a battle that has gone on for years and years now.
I'm really sick of this battle.
I hope that they work out their differences.
The establishment gets a little more rock-ribbed.
Maybe the Freedom Caucus gets a little bit more nuanced to politics, and they work it out because we need to be unified.
And one of the benefits of being in the minority is that you do get unified.
But don't forget, Paul Ryan, the reason that he became the Speaker of the House is because he was basically the only person who could unite the establishmentarians and the House Freedom Caucus.
He was the only guy they could agree on.
When John Boehner left, Paul Ryan seemed very reluctant to take it.
Now, listen, people pretend to be reluctant to take it.
He was uniquely qualified in that he had conservative credential, especially on fiscal matters.
He had that, you know, entitlement reform, rock-ribbed fiscal conservative aspect to him.
But he'd been in Washington since he was in the womb, I believe.
And he'd been elected since he was, what, 28 or something?
He'd been there for about 20 years, and he'd been working in D.C. much earlier than that.
So he also had that establishmentarian cred.
What happens after he's gone?
Can McCarthy fill his shoes?
In some ways, perhaps McCarthy is a better choice in that he's less ideologically driven.
Paul Ryan was always a policy wonk.
He was always a big budget guy.
He was always trying to work on ways to fix the debt and deficits.
Kevin McCarthy is a little bit more of a political player.
So Jim Jordan lost, I'm sure he's upset about that.
Steve Scalise, by the way, he was the Congressman who was nearly killed by that Bernie bro during the congressional baseball game.
He made a recovery, thought he might have a shot at the House leadership if for no reason other than sympathy, but the people who are in the House of Representatives are not terribly empathetic people.
So he did not win that vote.
And now it looks like he'll be trying to be the whip.
What's gonna happen to Jim Jordan?
What's going to happen to the House Freedom Caucus?
Corey Lewandowski, the former campaign manager for Trump, who's still apparently pretty tight with the president, says that Jim Jordan will be the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.
This is very important because, you remember all of those investigations into Hillary Clinton, the Judiciary Committee is where those investigations are going to come from into Donald Trump.
So it might be good to have a real bullfighter out there to go up Face-to-face against Democrats when they're launching the inevitable 10,000 investigations into every meal that Donald Trump ever ate.
We're also getting reports in that President Trump allegedly asked now GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to make sure that Jim Jordan makes it to the top of the Judiciary Committee to become the ranking member.
Now, it gets even more complicated here because Kevin McCarthy can't So a lot of power struggling at stake right now.
Hopefully, being in the minority will unite the Republicans.
This has happened to us in the past.
When you're in the minority, you can come together because you're fighting a common enemy, and the stakes of your differences are not terribly high.
So you can unify.
You can go up and punch them.
When you're in leadership, it's a little bit harder because you've got to answer to your constituents for things that you're actually passing.
So it's a little bit harder to bring people who don't necessarily want to side with one extreme or the other together.
But hopefully it unites us.
We need to be united, especially as we look ahead at 2020.
This is one of the reasons why losing the House in 2018, while frustrating for the Trump agenda, may actually help the reelection bid in 2020.
One, because it gives Trump an adversary.
And two, it can get those GOP House Republicans into fighting form.
There are also power struggles for the White House.
It seems as though, put money on it now, go to the betting markets this second, pull over your car, call up Vegas.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, the son of a mailman, if you hadn't heard, appears to be readying himself to run for president against Donald Trump in 2020.
For comment, we turn now to John Kasich.
And then you see him eating in the morning.
You ever see?
I have never seen.
He's stuffing pancakes in his mouth like this.
And I'm always telling my boy, take small bites, Barrett, little tiny bites.
And yesterday he said, Daddy, who is that guy on television?
That's disgusting.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That was just a video of John Kasich eating pancakes.
Which is, you know, when Donald Trump made that observation that Kasich eats in a grotesque way, I had never noticed it before.
And then you look at all of these clips, and it is true.
And this is something I've noticed about people who are longtime politicians, especially Washington politicians.
They eat in a disgusting way.
I won't name various politicians that I have dined with.
But this does seem to be the rule rather than the exception.
I don't know what it is.
It's just the government, I guess.
Just working in a bureaucracy where there's no stakes, there's very little accountability, just kind of makes people a little more of a slob.
I find people in the private sector know how to dine a little more in more of a couth manner.
That's neither here nor there.
What John Kasich actually said was not eating a stack of pancakes.
He tweeted out his agreement with Emmanuel Macron's criticism for the French president's criticism of Donald Trump.
And he basically laid down the gauntlet for Trump when he tweeted his quote.
At Emmanuel Macron is right.
Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism.
By saying our interests first, who cares about the others?
We erase what a nation holds dearest, its moral values.
America was founded as the shining city on a hill.
United, we can keep it that way.
United, behind President John Kasich, the son of a mailman, the eater of pancakes.
He is going to unite us.
He is the man for this moment.
What is he thinking?
What on earth is he thinking?
Is it possible to misread a moment worse than John Kasich?
Is that possible?
What are his advisors telling him?
He is doing exactly the opposite of what he should be doing.
And he thinks that this is going to launch him into the White House.
I don't think he'll get a single vote.
I don't know that anybody in Ohio is even going to vote for the guy.
First of all, it isn't true.
What Macron said just isn't true.
Patriotism is not the opposite of nationalism.
It might be the case that the French have this bizarre, rationalist, abstracted view of ideas floating without any connection to corporeal things, to tangible things, to institutions.
But that isn't how it works in America.
Not for one second.
And it's really cute of them to be critiquing American nationalism when the United States pays for the security and the defense of the entire world.
And when we turn a blind eye when our trading partners blithely violate World Trade Organization treaties.
It's really cute.
That's really nice.
It must be nice.
By the way, Macron would have made his statement in German if it wasn't for it.
Did I mention that yesterday?
I'll say it again.
I'll say it again tomorrow.
Because it's outrageous.
I don't need to sit here and be scolded by Emmanuel Macron.
This weirdo little French prime minister who married his school teacher who was as old as his mother.
I don't need to be lectured by that man.
It's fine if he wants to be nice to us, but we don't need to be lectured by him.
And we don't need to be lectured by John Kasich.
Give me a break.
Kasich was basically a fine governor of Ohio, but President Trump has done an excellent job as president.
We've gotten a wonderful conservative agenda through, and John Kasich can take his pancakes and stuff it.
We've got a lot more to talk about.
We've got to talk about the power struggles among Democrats, why the framers would be pleased by all of this, and why millennials aren't having any sex.
Sad for them.
To quote a great man, sad.
To quote a great man who, as we now know, has had a lot of sex, sad.
Before we do that, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
By the way, you'll notice that I'm not in my studio.
You'll notice I'm in my very fancy hotel room.
I've got my, you know, couch over there.
I've got my little coffee pot.
I'm in a hotel room because I'm on the road, and I'm going to Michigan State University tonight.
This is my latest stop on the YAF tour, on the Covfefe on Campus tour with Young America's Foundation.
By the way, tomorrow night you can catch me at the University of Michigan, but tonight I will be at Michigan State.
So if you're at Michigan State, if you're near Michigan State, come on out.
Let's hang out, man.
Stop by.
We'll go.
We're going to be talking tonight about why millennials are so miserable.
This should tie in pretty well with our next story on why millennials aren't having any sex.
There might seem to be a connection somewhere there.
We will analyze.
Go to dailywire.com.
You'll get me.
You'll get the Andrew Flavin Show.
You'll get the Venture Bureau Show.
You'll get to ask questions in the mailbag.
That's coming up tomorrow.
So get your questions in.
But what you really get is a vessel better than this random water bottle that I have to drink out of because I forgot my Tumblr on the road.
This is...
I can't handle the levels of salt that we find in the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
If so, this would melt.
This would dissolve into my hand.
It would probably burn a hole through my leg.
So I can't do it.
I'm not able to drink all of those delicious Leftist Tears while I'm on the road.
You should get yours.
Don't make my mistake.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
There are even power struggles going on among the Democrats.
I know it's hard to believe.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, our favorite little socialist, is storming an office in D.C. She's now, she's been elected to Congress, she's going to go storm an office.
Whose office is she storming?
It must be storming Minority Leader McCarthy's office, right?
It must be storming Mitch McConnell's office, right?
Nope, she's storming Nancy Pelosi's office.
How proud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future.
It's so incredibly important.
Wow.
So incredibly important to go into your boss's office, storm it, walk in.
Pretty wild that she's doing this.
Because it's not just that she was protesting outside of the office.
They busted their way in there.
There were 51 people arrested that were with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I guess they couldn't arrest her.
It wouldn't have been a good look for Democrats to arrest their big fundraising star because she's a lunatic.
Hello.
She was just elected last week and she's already pulling bizarre stunts like this.
Now, why is she pulling the stunt?
She's pulling the stunt because she wants to stay in the limelight and she wants to worm her way into leadership.
How did Nancy Pelosi respond?
You've got to remember, Nancy Pelosi might not know much, but she knows how to stay in power.
She's a very shrewd politician.
So Pelosi's response, was it to arrest Ocasio-Cortez?
No, it was to welcome the protesters.
She tweeted out, she said, or no, I think she just gave this as a statement.
She welcomed the protest and she calls on the police, quote, to allow them to continue to organize and participate in our democracy.
By the way, storming people's offices is not participating in our democracy.
Voting is participating in our democracy.
Setting up an appointment to meet with your congressman is participating in our democracy.
We have a right to lobby.
It's in the Constitution.
It's in the First Amendment.
But you've got to be civilized about it.
Writing an op-ed is participating in our democracy.
Knocking down somebody's door, whether it's Nancy Pelosi's or Tucker Carlson, that's not participating in democracy.
That's undermining our democracy.
What they're doing, though, is that they're trying to out-lefty one another.
They're trying to see which one is more left-wing.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was just caught in a major lie because she said that since she's not yet receiving a paycheck, because she's not starting her job yet, she can't afford an apartment in Washington, D.C., 28 years old, she can't afford an apartment in Washington, D.C. for a couple months before she gets paid.
I don't know what choices she's made in her life that she can't afford paying.
What do you imagine?
When friends of mine were living in D.C., they were paying $900 a month rent.
Let's say she gets a fancier apartment, $1,500, $2,000 a month rent.
If she can't afford to...
Have a little bit of money socked away to get her through a month or two by the age of 28 when she's managed to get herself elected to Congress.
Maybe she shouldn't be elected to Congress.
But it turns out that was all a lie.
And she should have realized, except she doesn't because she doesn't know anything about the government, she should have realized that she would have to disclose her finances.
Which means we would know that she has, according to these disclosures, anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 worth of cash and other assets that are also worth thousands and thousands of dollars.
So presumably, she would be able to fork over money and pay for her apartment for a couple of months before she received her $174,000 salary.
They're just trying to out-lefty one another.
This is just a power struggle.
And while the framers might not be pleased about...
Crazy lunatics kicking in doors and occupying house offices.
They would be pleased by the power struggle.
The whole government was set up to have this kind of power struggle between all of these various branches, these various elected officials, between the various parties, within the various parties.
James Madison put it very beautifully in Federalist 51, one of the most important passages about our government.
He wrote, quote, The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.
The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be commensurate to the danger of attack.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.
It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.
government.
But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
In framing a government, which is to be administrated by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.
You must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
That's where these power struggles are coming from.
I think it's fine.
Bring it on.
We must make sure that justice prevails.
We must make sure that people aren't cheating, that they aren't committing acts of fraud.
But for ambition to counteract ambition works well for me.
That said...
All of that said, the left is still absolutely out of its mind here.
Maybe we can close on that.
We won't be able to close on why millennials don't have any sex.
We'll get to that tomorrow.
But you do have to hear this from these left-wingers.
Look, we've picked on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right?
We've picked on her because she doesn't know very much and we're holding her up and it's really just a straw man.
Never mind that she's the darling of the Democrat Party.
Never mind that she's now an elected congresswoman.
Never mind any of that.
We're just picking on her.
Forget, leave her alone.
Because why?
Because she won't give an answer on how to pay for the absurd health care plan that all of the Democrats are touting.
Here's how she described it to Jorge Ramos.
People often say, like, how are you going to pay for it?
And I find the question so puzzling because how do you pay for something that's more affordable?
How do you pay for cheaper rent?
How do you pay for...
You just pay for it.
You just, you know, you just pay...
The way you double tax receipts to the government is just you just do it.
Just because.
Just you do it.
Okay.
So I sort of see...
How it might be fair criticism to only focus on Ocasio-Cortez.
Because she doesn't know anything.
She's probably not very intelligent.
And she's certainly not knowledgeable about anything.
So that's fine.
How about we ask the CEO of the Democratic National Committee.
Which, by the way, I didn't know they had a CEO. This is news to me.
That's a role I've never heard of before.
But the CEO of the Democratic National Committee, Seema Nanda, was asked this exact same question.
Is her answer any better?
It's going to be a winning issue for Democrats in 2020.
How do you answer the question of how are you going to pay for this?
Because there have been credible studies that say it would cost $3 trillion a year.
You would have to double everybody's taxes or maybe triple everybody's taxes.
Just how do you answer the cost question?
So I don't think we're there yet.
I mean, I think what we saw with this Republican Party is we saw an irresponsible tax cut, and then we saw an immediate pivot that they did towards, it was in statements by Mitch McConnell just shortly before the election, but statements that they've been making all along, that they plan to go after Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid next.
It is this president that is causing skyrocketing deficits, and now they plan on going after these core programs.
So, you know, your answer is I don't know, you know, how we're going to get there, but these are all big conversations that we need to be engaged in.
Why are they so bad at filibustering?
She's no better than Brenda Snipes.
She's no better than the county supervisor in Broward County, the election supervisors.
Well, well, Chris, good question.
Let me talk about something completely different.
And then at least, you know, Seema Nanda has the integrity to, at the end of her non-answer, admit that she didn't give an answer.
And so she says, well, and so, you know, the question, I guess, is I don't, you know, I don't know how we'll get there, but these are big conversations.
Just in case.
Just in case you thought they were small conversations.
I know that's what you were asking me about.
You know, are these big or small?
They're big.
They're really big.
And so, and that's why I think that the airspeed velocity of an unladen...
What?
Excuse me?
I don't think so.
So, that's her answer.
Her answer is we don't know and we're not there yet.
This is a beautiful irony.
This is a beautiful irony.
I never again want to hear from Democrats that Republicans don't have a healthcare plan.
This was the big criticism.
The big criticism was during 2010, 2012, 2016, they say, you Republicans want to repeal Obamacare.
That's all you ever talk about.
But what are you going to replace it with?
You don't have a health care plan.
Where's your plan?
You've been campaigning on this.
Where's your plan?
And there were various Republican health care plans.
There was good work put out of AEI, they suggested some.
There were some good plans on the table.
But fair enough, I understand.
Republicans had the opportunity to repeal and replace Obamacare.
They failed to do it.
What's your plan?
What's your plan?
You've been campaigning.
How many Democrats campaigned in 2018 on Medicare for All?
That actually is a clear cut plan.
It has a price tag.
It's pretty clear.
So the answer should be obvious.
How are you going to pay for it?
They don't have a plan.
Well, I don't know.
Because the answer is, you would have to tax Americans to death.
You'd have to tax Americans to death in the name of keeping them alive.
And you would also destroy the major healthcare system in the world and stop healthcare innovation for the entire globe in the process.
But you don't have an answer.
You don't have an answer because if you give that answer, you'll never win office for the next 20 years.
And I just love it.
It's a wonderful irony.
It also highlights the central problem of healthcare, which is a central problem of all material things.
You can't get something for nothing.
You can't do it.
You can sometimes buy something and then get nothing.
Like if you read, for instance, reasons to vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide, you'll get a lot of education.
You'll get a lot of knowledge, but the pages won't have anything in it.
But you can't get something for nothing.
And that's what Democrats are promising on healthcare.
This is why we all knew that if you like your doctor, you can't keep your doctor.
It's why we all knew Obamacare would not save money.
It would cost a ton of money.
Eventually, Barack Obama admitted that himself.
He said, well, you didn't think that you were going to get all that good stuff for free, did you?
Yeah, we did because you told us that.
Also, that's why you lost the House and all the state houses and eventually the Senate.
It's because you lied straight to our faces and you said we would get all that good stuff for free and then it wasn't for free.
That's their problem here.
If Democrats want to be honest about their health care plan, they have to say that people are going to have to double, at least double, their tax receipts to the government.
Just to begin to pay for it, and probably it's going to cost even more, to say nothing of surrendering some of their freedom of choice that we now enjoy in our current healthcare system.
That's a hard pitch.
I don't think they're going to do it, so you're not going to have an honest answer.
And Republicans need to do a better job, at least, of articulating rules.
What freedom means?
Freedom means that not everybody gets the Cadillac plan all the time for free.
That we actually won't even have a Cadillac plan if everybody gets it for free.
The way that you spur innovation, which benefits every single person, is by having variously priced Medical services and goods and tools that are going to cost more money and they might cost more to the insurance company, they might cost more to individuals, they might cost more to the government, but there is a cost to that.
You can't get something for nothing.
Okay, tomorrow we'll have to talk about why young people aren't having sex.
It's so much of a downer.
I figure it's much better to end on Democrats having absolutely nothing on healthcare.
Okay, come out if you're at Michigan State tonight.
If you're at University of Michigan tomorrow, I'll see you there.
Otherwise, I'll see you right back here tomorrow.
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.
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