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Nov. 26, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
44:13
Ep. 257 - Two Different Worlds

CNN fumes that the Left and Right in America are living in two different worlds from CNN headquarters in its own little world. Then, open borders and the psychology of lines, how Mueller could "devastate" Trump, universal basic income, political schlock, and the end of Twitter. Date: 11-26-18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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CNN, broadcasting from its own little world, is fuming that the left and right in America are living in their own separate worlds.
We will examine which stories matter and why CNN gets it wrong.
Then, what open borders Democrats can learn from the psychology of lines.
How the Mueller report could be politically devastating for President Trump, the universal basic income, political schlock, and the end of Twitter.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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So, speaking of feeling better, I feel a lot better because I'm not watching CNN anymore, but I was watching CNN earlier today, and Brian Stelter is very, very upset.
There is a major problem in this country.
Which problem is it?
Oh, I don't know.
You might think immigration, right?
Oh, no, maybe not.
You might think the economy.
That's a major issue, right?
Fortunately, we're getting out of that slow growth, no jobs recovery under Barack Obama.
Still, though, we've got to prioritize jobs.
No, not that at all.
What is it?
It's the sun monster in global warming.
Brian Stelter, take it away.
I want you to guess how many times Fox News mentioned that blockbuster report on Friday.
Fox News alert.
The White House releasing a major climate report concluding that climate change will do significant damage to the U.S. economy.
That was nine of the whole 30 seconds that Fox News spent covering the report on Friday.
Let that sink in.
Fox only mentioned the report once on television on Friday.
What is he talking about?
He's talking about the climate report that came out from the White House, came out from the executive agencies, and there's a worry that climate change, global warming, global cooling, whatever, is advancing.
We'll get to what's in the report in just one second, but Brian Stelter's contention, his issue is not about the report itself.
It's that Fox News isn't covering the global warming executive agency report with wall-to-wall coverage.
Why not?
Well, let's think of some other stories.
There's a story that came out about Amanda Ferguson Wayant, a young teacher who was killed by an illegal alien.
Joel Velasquez, he was 24 years old.
He's an illegal alien.
It was a hit and run.
This guy was out on bond already for an assault charge.
He went, he killed this poor girl.
He didn't even stop.
Eventually, they caught up with him.
Thank goodness.
So let's play that game.
Let's play the Brian Stelter game.
Can we cut to CNN's coverage of the Amanda Ferguson Wayant A killing by the illegal alien?
Can we cut to that coverage?
No we can't because there's no coverage of it.
None whatsoever.
So we can play this game all day, can't we Brian Stelter?
And by the way, which story do you think is more important?
The sun monster which is going to kill us all in 2002 or 2007 or 2013 or whenever now they're predicting that the world is going to end and it never ends?
or a real American woman, a real American citizen, a young teacher who was killed by a criminal who was not supposed to be in this country to begin with.
A guy who was in this country illegally, out on bond for an assault charge, killed her and tried to drive away, tried to flee the scene.
Which is a more relevant story?
Which story speaks more to people's lives?
Obviously, the story about illegal immigration.
These are having real effects on people's lives, on the economy, on their jobs, on their families, on obviously people who are injured or killed by illegal aliens.
That number should be zero because none of them are supposed to be in the country.
Sometimes the left will come out and say that rates of criminality among illegal aliens are lower than for the general population.
First of all, that statistic is not true and it's been refuted by a lot of different studies.
But you have your statistics.
I have my statistics.
I'm sure you can find some surveys that show that that is true.
The point is it's illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration is illegal.
It's as simple as that.
The True number of people who should be injured or killed by illegal aliens is zero because not a single one of them is supposed to be in this country.
So those are two issues.
Now, what does Brian Stelter make of this as his broader point?
What is the actual CNN thesis for today?
Take it away.
The network's pro-Trump talk shows are portraying this as an urgent crisis and calling it, look at the banner here, The Battle for the Southern Border.
It's a vivid example of how two Americas are living side by side.
We're living in two different realities, supported by two different news worlds.
In most of the country's news media, this climate report is the big story.
But over on Fox and on right-wing websites, it's the caravan.
That's a great point.
Brian Stelter is actually making a perfectly correct observation.
It is right now, if you look at the news media, the mainstream media, and then, you know, I don't know, the Daily Wire, or maybe Fox News, or a couple newspapers, CRTVs, just a handful of new media right-wingers.
It is true.
They present different stories.
That is media bias.
What Brian Stelter would prefer is if we only had one perspective that was being put out there.
What he wants is to return to the good old days when it was only the left that controlled the news media.
It's like two different ways.
It's as though different Americans have different perspectives.
Yes, of course.
What creates those two different worlds in the news media is the selection of stories.
And this is, by the way, where most of the bias is in the media.
The trouble with the New York Times, even with CNN, frankly, is not so much the caliber of the reporting.
The Times still has pretty good reporters.
Even the Washington Post sort of has good reporters.
That isn't the issue.
The issue is which stories are being run and which stories are not being run.
When Sheryl Atkinson, one of the last journalists in America, when she left CBS, it wasn't because they were yelling at her over something she wrote.
It wasn't because of anything like that.
It was that the stories were being killed.
They were being squashed.
They wanted to talk about only stories that were favorable to the left.
No stories that rightly criticized the left or that were favorable to the right.
This is what a worldview is.
And Brian Stelter is right.
To people like him, to people on CNN, to people at the New York Times...
The scary, scary sun monster, as Drew calls it, global warming, global cooling, whatever.
The hypothetical negative effects of climate change, none of which we are experiencing right now, none of which have been credibly and reliably proven to be happening in any short period of time, none of which have been proven, have been demonstrated to be caused by human beings and human efforts.
They are so much more concerned and worried about that, that religion of environmentalism, that religion of global warming, than they are about illegal alien criminals killing Americans.
At least he's honest.
At least Brian Stelter is honest.
My worldview is a worldview that prefers the real to the theoretical, the near to the far, the tangible to the abstract.
And so when I see Americans having their livelihoods disrupted or ended by a major problem, 2,000 illegal aliens crossing the border every single day, at least, you've got a whole horde, a whole caravan marching through threatening to storm across the border.
That, to me, is a greater concern than...
The sun is heating up and the atmosphere is trapping too much heat in and whatever worry they have today.
Now, why am I not concerned?
It sounds like I'm being a little glib when it comes to global warming.
The reason I'm not that concerned is because that so-called scientific consensus, which is nothing more than a political consensus, it's a left-wing, politicized, activist consensus, has consistently changed its storyline.
Obviously, you see this in the words.
Initially, we had global cooling in the 1970s.
That was the great concern.
Then it turned out the world wasn't cooling, it was warming.
So we had global warming now.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s.
And then the world stopped warming for a long period of time.
So we got the unfalsifiable climate change.
Because you can't disprove climate change.
We have basically heard the UN admit that that Paris Climate Accord deal would not have done anything to mitigate the apparent effects of climate change.
It would have maybe contained...
Global warming by 2 degrees Celsius over the course of a century.
2 degrees Celsius over what the temperature was before the Industrial Revolution.
We have these insinuations from the left that forests are being destroyed.
The California wildfires were caused by global warming.
No evidence of this whatsoever.
There's no evidence that it's causing more wildfires or deforestation.
We have more forests today in America than we did 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 300 years ago.
Contrary to the leftist slogan belief, to the global warming alarmists, the native peoples who were here in America were not very friendly to the forests.
We've done a very good job at conserving and developing our natural environment, especially since the 1940s.
The size of forests is way, way up.
How about rising sea levels or mass migration?
These are the worries that are referred to in that White House...
A climate report.
Even that is a little misleading.
It's from the executive agencies released because, theoretically, they work under the White House.
But those executive agencies aren't staffed exclusively by Trump appointees.
The vast, vast majority of the people at those agencies are lifetime people.
They're career bureaucrats who have no particular loyalty to the Trump administration, no similar worldview or ideological view.
And so if some of them are very concerned about global warming, they'll talk about that.
But with regard to the rising sea levels, the mass migration, all of that, it has simply been refuted and disputed so many times.
Just remember that movie from Al Gore.
We were told the Pacific Atolls, those low-lying islands, were being inundated because of global warming.
A UK court ruled that they couldn't Play that in school.
If they did play the movie in school, they would have to correct that fact because there's no evidence of that.
There's no evidence, as Al Gore and the global warming alarmists claimed, that man-made global warming was shutting down the ocean conveyor in the Atlantic Ocean.
There's no evidence of that at all.
There's no causal effect that's been established between carbon dioxide and warming over the past 650,000 years.
Another claim of an inconvenient truth.
We were told that the polar bears are dying.
Do you remember that?
They were drowning.
They're not going to be able to make it from one ice float to another one.
That's also not true.
We have more polar bears today, many more polar bears today than we did decades ago.
And the final, the big worry, we were promised from Al Gore, he said, New York City will be underwater within 10 years or less than 10 years.
Because of global warming.
What happened?
Nothing of the sort.
I'm in New York right now.
I'm hopping through here just for a hot second on my way down to give some speeches in Florida.
Florida, we were told, was going to be underwater.
Florida's not underwater either.
It's great.
The only water that I'm seeing in New York and Florida is in my leftist years tumbler.
None of that happened.
They're trying to spin it.
They're trying to get out of this.
All of these predictions, so many of them, have been disproven by time.
That's the trouble when you predict the end of the world, is eventually the date that you're told it's going to happen arrives, and when the world doesn't end, you look like a schmuck.
So that's what they're telling us to worry about.
Brian Stelter says, you've got to worry about the global warming that's going to sink New York and Florida and the polar bears.
And you say, Brian, none of that is happening.
None of that matters.
But what about immigration?
Well, who cares if one young American woman actually died?
This is really what the left thinks.
I don't mean to be shallow about this.
The left really believes who cares if one American woman actually died when millions of people are hypothetically dying from global warming?
Who cares that criminals are pouring across our border?
Who cares that children have been saved from human traffickers and coyotes in that caravan by Guatemalan and Mexican authorities before they made it to the United States?
Who cares about that?
Those are just a handful of real people.
But all the millions who are hypothetically going to be, those are the ones that they have to worry about.
Because the left really cares about humanity, but they don't seem to care much about humans.
And they prioritize theory over reality.
This issue, I'm so glad Ryan Stelter brought this up.
Because those are two worlds.
Those are two different worldviews.
The difference is the left's worldview is a fantasy.
and the rights worldview is looking around and seeing things as they are, what is actually affecting people.
Not in the hypothetical century away future, not in the imaginary fantasy world where New York City is underwater, where Florida is underwater, but in reality.
That is the difference between those worldviews.
And you don't just have to take my world for it.
You can take the word of John Kerry, no less a guy than the former Democrat nominee for president, Secretary He is wising up and he realizes that this immigration issue is posing a huge problem, not just for Democrats in America, but for the left globally.
Here he is.
We're going to have climate refugees.
Look at Europe.
Europe's already crushed under this transformation that's taken place because of immigration.
You see that?
It's going to be crushed.
So he says, he's using the left-wing line, oh, the climate refugees.
Once all of those islands that aren't really flooding flood, then they're all going to come, who knows where, to New York, and that'll be flooded too.
He's still going down that path.
But then he looks to Europe and he says, but Europe has been crushed by mass migration.
He's actually then using the immigration issue to underscore his point on global warming.
This is the first time that we're seeing this.
Typically, the left says, I'm pro-environment, I'm pro-open borders, I'm pro-endless immigration.
What John Kerry is saying here is I'm pro-environment, and I'm going to try to convince you to be pro-environment by pointing out how much more immigration we're going to have to get if we don't get pro-environment.
He's taking an anti-illegal immigration, anti-open borders view here.
This is not just him.
Hillary Clinton has said the same thing in an interview, I believe, with The Guardian.
She just said, quote, I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame.
I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken, particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel in Germany.
But I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, must send a very clear message.
We are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support.
Because if we don't deal with the immigration issue, it will continue to roil the body politic.
Yes, it will.
Took you long enough to realize it, Hillary and the left.
They don't like this.
This immigration thing really, really matters to people.
Not just conservatives, not just Republicans, everybody.
There was a poll that came out, I think at this point now, about a year ago, a little less than a year ago, that showed that even Democrats, even when you're talking about dreamers, the kids who were brought to America before they were 18 years old and they've known no other country, even the most sympathetic case of illegal aliens, the majority of Democrats did not want to prioritize giving them amnesty.
People really, really hate illegal immigration.
It's a violation.
It's an offense to people.
It's taking away their liberty, taking away their national sovereignty.
This has become such a major issue globally, not just in the US, in Italy, in Germany, in Scandinavia.
that even John Kerry and Hillary Clinton have to acknowledge this.
Democrats were trying during the midterms, do you remember?
They started running an abolish ICE campaign, abolish immigration and customs enforcement.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about it.
Cynthia Nixon talked about it in New York.
Beto, Beda, Beda O'Rourke talked about it.
Robert Francis, he was on the abolish ICE kick for a while.
And then they cut that off because that is a losing campaign issue among everybody.
What Democrats could learn about this issue?
It's very simple.
It comes from the psychology of lines.
I mean, lines when you're standing on line.
You're at a store.
You're waiting on line to pay for your food or get your sandwich or whatever.
It's called queuing theory.
And it's pretty simple.
There have been a number of experiments done by retail stores in the United States which have found that typical lines, the lines behind a cashier, behind the counter, are relatively ineffective.
It's much faster to have a single line.
It's actually faster.
It reduces wait times for everybody.
If you don't just prioritize the people who have been waiting in line, but every so often you just pick a random person out of the pack and bring them up and have them cash out.
Why is that faster?
Because it discourages people from lining up days and days in advance.
It's because if people think that there's not going to be a one-to-one correlation between waiting in line and making it up to the cashier, that you're not going to wait in line forever and ever.
The reason that they don't institute all of those Possible policies, though, is because people lose their minds when you cut them in line.
People get very, very angry about this.
They feel that it is unfair.
They think that it is unjust.
And it is unfair.
And it is unjust.
This is all about people's sense of justice.
We all have it, even if we try to deny it sometimes.
That is the immigration question.
Some Democrats and left-wingers were confused.
They said, how is Donald Trump Getting so much support among Hispanic Americans, among immigrants to America.
You say the reason he's getting support is because those people are legal immigrants.
They waited in line, online.
This is a big debate.
Do you say it like a New Yorker and say online?
Do you say it like everyone else who's wrong and say in line?
The real answer is online, but for the broad audience, maybe I'll consider going between the two.
Do you wait online or do you try to cut the line, go over the mountains, evade law enforcement, and cut everybody off?
You know, legal immigrants did what they had to do.
They paid their money.
They filled out their paperwork.
They waited.
They behaved like good future Americans.
Illegal aliens do exactly the opposite.
So it's no wonder of anybody who would be irritated at illegal aliens.
It should be the legal immigrants who actually did what they were supposed to do.
And whose immigration regime is being thrown into question and being threatened by the thousands and thousands of people every week, I mean 2,000 people a day, who cross into our country illegally.
So what's to be done with this?
We have this caravan.
The left tries to deny that the caravan exists.
They've tried a few different lines on this.
Initially...
They supported the caravan, people without borders.
They have a right to come in here, open borders.
Then they said the caravan doesn't exist.
It's not an issue at all.
Then they said that the people in the caravan are women and children and that they're having tear gas fired on them and it's so awful.
You've got to pick a lane.
This is always my advice for the left.
You have to pick a story and stick with it.
Do you remember last week when Michael Avenatti was arrested for beating that actress woman?
And he said, I didn't do it at all, but I had a good excuse.
I didn't do it at all, but she hit me first.
He said, no, no, no, Mr.
Avenatti, you can't simultaneously excuse and deny this action.
You have to pick a lane.
So, what is to be done about this?
There's been talk about an asylum deal with Mexico.
So, while these asylum cases are brought up, all of these people come to the border, they say, I'm here for political asylum, I'm escaping persecution in Honduras or El Salvador or somewhere.
And typically in the United States, we let them come into the country, and then we just let them go.
And we say, okay, show up though for your meeting, show up for your appointment in a couple weeks, and then they go and they stay in the country.
What President Trump is trying to work out with Mexico is a deal that would have these people who have crossed up from Honduras, Guatemala, wherever they're in Mexico, have them stay in Mexico while their asylum cases are being heard.
A couple days ago, it was being reported that this deal has been struck.
Then yesterday, it was reported that the incoming Mexican government has not reached a deal with the United States, so we actually don't really know where that deal stands right now.
That would be terrific.
That would be a good solution.
It would, again, seem just to all of us that as 2,000 people a day pour into our country, we can do anything at all to stop them and hold them back.
Because the left in the country is insisting now that we not even try to enforce this.
We try not even at all to enforce the law.
The big claim is that border enforcement fired some tear gas at people crossing the border illegally.
What they forgot to mention is that under Barack Obama's administration, border patrol agents did exactly the same thing in 2013.
No outrage, no Alyssa Milano tweets, no shocking coverage, you know, CNN or whatever.
They're only upset, obviously, because it's happening under a Republican administration.
But I got to tell you, it's bad for the country for all of these people to pour in.
But the media focus on this issue is wonderful for the country.
It's great for the country because it shows us in no uncertain terms that we have to address this issue.
And it's a big win for the GOP and it's a big loser issue for Democrats.
Democrats are trying, like Brian Stelter, to get away from it, to point to anything else.
They want to focus on the Mueller investigation.
They want to focus on Russia collusion.
They want to focus on something that at least for now is unfalsifiable and that they can try to spin on the American people.
But unfortunately, that migrant caravan is still down at the border.
Unfortunately for them, you've got Mexican nationals who are telling these migrants to go home, who are saying Trump was right that it's an invasion.
That's really hard.
That said, we will get some conclusion at some point from the Mueller investigation.
And one of the big headlines right now is Alan Dershowitz, a legendary professor at Harvard, the guy who got OJ off, very sharp legal scholar.
He has defended Trump against impeachment, and he is now saying that the Mueller report could be politically devastating to Trump.
That's his words.
So we're getting information from Paul Manafort.
We're getting information perhaps from Corsi.
We're already getting information from Gates, from Cohen, from Phil.
That's an awful lot of people tied to the president providing evidence.
It is, and I think the report is going to be devastating to the president.
And I know that the president's team is already working on a response to the report.
So, could be politically devastating.
What does that mean?
I don't know.
This is really shocking when he said it, because he seemed to be something of a Trump apologist in these legal discussions.
Politico is predicting this will be a disappointment.
According to Politico, their sources are defense lawyers for the president and 15 former government investigators dating back to the Watergate campaign.
So, John Q. Barrett, who worked on Iran-Contra, says that the report might not even see the light of day.
And the way Politico reports it, they say, don't get your hopes up.
We might not be able to take Trump down with this.
This investigation, the Mueller investigation into Trump collusion, is different than Iran-Contra.
This is different than Monica Lewinsky.
Both of those occurred under a law that expired in 1999.
That law that they were working under, the post-Watergate law, required investigators to tell Congress if they found any impeachable offenses.
This investigation is not operating under those same rubrics.
So under this rubric, Special Counsel Robert Mueller just has to tell his boss At DOJ, Rod Rosenstein, and he'll tell them what he finds.
The DOJ then has the discretion on whether or not to make the report public.
So they could make it public.
They could not make it public.
They could make some of it public.
They could heavily redact a lot of aspects of it.
Another sign in President Trump's favor is that Mueller has been pretty quiet.
Pretty quiet.
There have not been a lot of leaks out of this investigation.
There was a lot of political questionable behavior.
They hired Peter Strzok, anti-Trump hack at the FBI, to work on the investigation.
They hired a lot of anti-Trump, never-Trump people to work on the investigation.
But Mueller himself doesn't seem to have been leaking.
He doesn't seem to have been underhanded in the handling of this particular investigation yet.
So we'll see where that goes.
The other aspect to remember is that it takes forever.
Do you remember the Whitewater investigation into President Clinton?
Happens in the early 90s, mid-90s.
An investigation into what seemed to be a sweetheart real estate scheme that the Clintons were involved in back in Arkansas.
That investigation took forever.
The final report of that investigation was not released until 2002.
That's two years after Bill Clinton left office.
So all in all, I know people are terrified at what Alan Dershowitz is saying right now.
It could be politically devastating.
I'm not that concerned.
I'm really not.
Famous last words.
Knock on wood.
I might be speaking too soon.
But it just seems between the...
The people who have worked on these kind of investigations before, the change in law after 1999, the length of these, Mueller's behavior with the press so far, and the fact that it's all up to the DOJ, I'm really skeptical that this is going to be politically devastating.
Maybe Alan Dershowitz is trying to light a fire under the Trump defense right now, try to spur them to come up with a response to this report.
But all in all, it could be worse.
We've got a lot more to talk about.
We've got to talk about the universal basic income, one of the worst ideas ever.
We have to talk about the end of Twitter and political schlock.
Don't forget that.
But first, don't miss Andrew Klavan's next chapter of Another Kingdom, performed by none other than little old me.
Today, subscribers get exclusive access to episode 8, titled The Darkest Hour.
And we're coming to the end here.
There aren't that many episodes left.
If you haven't seen it, binge it.
Go back.
Do it.
It's better than at least 99.7% of things on Netflix.
If you're not a subscriber, you won't be able to watch new episodes of Season 2 until Friday.
So what are you waiting for?
Go to dailywire.com, subscribe, watch the first and second seasons of Another Kingdom.
What is the subscription?
It's $10 a month for me, The Andrew Klavan Show, The Ben Shapiro Show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You just get a lot of stuff.
But you get one thing that is most important of all, and that is the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
I don't have it on me right now.
I don't think you're allowed to get that through TSA. I think that's regulated like weapons of mass destruction.
It's very potent.
It's the only vessel that can hold Brian Stelter's tears.
So make sure that you go get it.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
As people are frivolously spending all of their money today, I do think we should have a word or two on the universal I do think we should have a word or two on the Have you heard of this idea?
The universal basic income has been kicked around for a few years as a policy solution to increasing automation or increasing disparities in the economy or basically just us getting too rich and people not having enough jobs, not enough to do it themselves, and the idea is that the government will cut you a check Just cause, just for breathing, just for existing, to help supplement your lifestyle.
There have been a few different versions of this.
Right now, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are both proposing versions of it.
So it had been on the fringes as an idea.
Now it's coming to the mainstream.
Both of those guys are running for president in 2020.
So Harris actually is proposing a bill.
Her idea is called the LIFT Act, Livable Income for Families Today Act.
Get it?
It's an acronym.
Like, it's a really, really lame acronym, like all of them.
And her idea...
It's to give families making less than $100,000 a year up to $500 per month or $6,000 a year in tax credits.
Individuals making less than $50,000 would get up to $250 per month in tax credits from the government.
This is more or less a way of significantly giving a direct transfer to people who are making decent money.
$50,000, $100,000.
Charles Murray, though, Who's a right-winger.
He's usually lumped in on the right.
He also proposed this idea.
So it's not just that the left-wingers are saying we need to give people money directly.
Even some on the right have embraced it.
Charles Murray, his version is a little bit better because his idea is to replace the welfare state with the universal basic income.
He says, look, we spend so much, an insane amount of money on our welfare state.
It's totally inefficient.
And so if we wiped out the whole of the welfare state apparatus and just gave people direct transfer payments, that would be preferable financially and in a moral sense.
It's so much simpler and it's so much more honest than our current highly abused welfare system.
They're both wrong.
I like Charles Murray.
I don't like Kamala Harris.
They're both wrong.
The Heritage Foundation said this very clearly.
Vijay Menon at the Heritage Foundation pointed out that this has been tried before.
It drives me crazy when some conservatives get into this idea because they think, well, in the future, in the future where the information economy is going to dominate the U.S. economy, When the jobs that exist, basically just for people who sit and think all day or who code on computers or who are only using their minds, people who do not have physical jobs, labor-intensive jobs, more traditional jobs, those guys are all going to be out of work.
Never mind, by the way, that unemployment virtually does not exist in the United States right now.
We have many more jobs to fill than people to fill them.
They say in the future, though, that's not going to happen.
And we're going to have so much money, we should just pay the little people not to bother us.
So we'll give them transfer payments and then they won't argue about, you know, 10 people controlling all of the world's wealth.
This idea has been tried and it's a very bad idea.
Between 1968, as Heritage points out, 1968 and 1980, there were random controlled trials for the universal basic income or versions thereof across six states.
These particular trials were testing the negative income tax.
You know what a positive income tax is?
Well, the opposite is a negative income tax.
A negative income tax guarantees a minimum income and it phases out as earnings increase.
So what happened?
They tried virtually the same plan.
Did people, were they happier?
Were they living more fulfilling, productive lives?
No!
They got lazy because that's human nature.
We saw in married men a 9% drop in hours worked.
So you increase their monthly payments.
It's not that they use that money and reinvest it in something productive or use that to offset some way to make them work even more or this or that.
No.
They just work 10% less.
But actually, those married men were the strongest workers among them.
We saw a drop in hours worked among married women by 20%.
We saw a drop in hours worked among single female heads of the family by 25%.
And then...
We turn to the single men.
Imagine, just take one little guess, what happened to single men?
You know guys who are not exactly known for their accountability or responsibility?
You know, the unmarried guys just kind of hanging around?
We saw a decrease in hours worked by single men.
By 43%, nearly half.
Which makes sense because, again, we were talking earlier about the difference between a fantasy world and the real world.
The left's ideological hypothetical guesses and the conservative acceptance of the world as it is.
Everyone thinks, you and I both think this, that if we got a check coming in every month for, I don't know, $10,000.
You get a $10,000 check every month.
$6,000.
Who knows?
And you say, oh, I would take that money.
Oh, what I would do, I would take that money and I would start 17 different companies and then I would hire a million people and then I would fly from New York to here to there and run all of my companies and be on the Forbes 500 list.
That's not what you would sit on your couch.
It doesn't make people more productive.
It just takes that money and men, especially single men, Would rather work less and maintain the same quality of life than take that money and use it to increase their quality of life.
Because people are lazy, and they don't want to work, and they get used to certain lifestyles.
So, I really...
This idea is going to continuously pop up among silly left-wingers and among right-wingers who are too clever by half, who think they've figured out the solution.
It's a very bad idea.
I assume it'll go nowhere if Cory Booker is pushing it because Cory Booker will never be the president.
Just not going to happen.
But Kamala Harris is more of a threat, I suppose, as a Democrat.
So we do need to speak out and we've got to make sure that the right all gets on the same page on this because it's a very bad idea that will totally undercut work and that undercuts the dignity of work.
Working matters.
And if you've got people who are being discouraged from working by a government program, by social engineering, and then you've set up a system wherein statistically 100% of your citizenship is reliant on transfer payments from the state, That is not a culture in which conservative thought and institutions are going to thrive.
Not going to happen.
It'll be dead.
We'll all be progressives within a month.
A very, very bad idea.
Speaking of bad things for conservatives, Twitter is over.
Twitter is totally over.
Twitter is now banning people for anything and everything.
I've been joking about this.
I was suspended from Twitter for making a joke.
Now, Twitter is officially banning people for misgendering.
Now, what would you think?
Would you think misgendering is like, when I read that...
I thought misgendering was when you referred to a man as a woman or a woman as a man.
No!
Misgendering is when you refer to a man who thinks he's a woman as a man or a woman who thinks that she's a man as a woman.
That's misgendering.
Misgendering, according to leftists now, is gendering.
It's accurately gendering.
Really, really bad.
They were getting...
Constant reports about this.
This is officially now the rule they are going to permanently suspend people who do this.
They're also kicking off conservative journalists.
There's a woman named Laura Loomer who pointed out that the Islamic culture is not particularly nice to women or to homosexuals.
She was banned from Twitter for saying that, for making a perfectly true statement.
Jesse Kelly, a conservative radio host, a conservative pundit, was permanently suspended without any warning just because.
We have no idea what he said.
There have been some rumors about what he said, but we just don't know, and they won't tell him.
He's been permanently suspended.
It seems to me that Twitter is over, and that's fine.
Twitter wants to act as a publisher.
That's fine.
We can regulate them as a publisher.
Who cares?
What's going to happen is that we're going to end up even more in two different worlds.
Same Brian Stelter fear.
The left always complains about problems that they've created, and this is one of them.
Brian Stelter's complaining about two different worlds.
Well, Jack Dorsey at Twitter is doing his best to bring us to those two different worlds by kicking off all of the conservatives.
I was joking earlier about who knows the next time I'll be kicked off Twitter.
It's only a matter of time.
We are on borrowed time now.
I don't know what the solution is.
There's that website Gab, which is all for free speech.
The reason that some people haven't gone on there just yet is it is infested with bigots and all-around bad people.
So obviously, it's infested with people who had been kicked off of other social media platforms or who didn't want to be on other social media platforms.
So they don't have a lot of more mainstream voices on there just yet.
That said, if Twitter's going to start kicking off radio hosts, if Twitter's going to start kicking off journalists, Where else can we go?
We're going to make our voice heard.
So maybe this means we all have to set up Gab accounts now.
I don't know.
I haven't started using it yet, but I've set one up, and that's going to be in there for when Twitter inevitably bans us.
On Cyber Monday, don't forget.
Do not forget that you've got to buy a lot of schlock.
You've got to buy a lot of political products.
There was this great piece in the New York Post by Kyle Smith over the weekend called How the Left is Profiting from Trump Hate.
They are pushing all of these stupid products.
They're pushing the Pecan Resist Ben& Jerry's ice cream.
They're pushing a cashmere sweater that says, I miss Barack.
It costs $380.00.
They're pushing a shower curtain for $70 that says, support the 25th Amendment.
The list goes on and on.
And it occurred to me, I'm a little bit of an expert when it comes to political schlock, because I did write a best-selling blank book called Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
So I was wondering, you know, it's not just the left that does this.
The right has political merchandise.
Everyone has always had political merchandise.
We don't just have my book.
We've got Trumpy Bear.
We've got the Make America Great Again hats.
So we have our merchandise, too.
But there's a big difference between the political schlock on the left and the right.
Because on the right, all of the merchandise, the prominent merchandise that I can name, In recent memory comes from a place of humor and joy and exuberance.
It comes from people trying to make a point with a little sense of humor about it.
The blank book or the trumpet bear or the hat or whatever.
On the left, all of the merchandise that I can name comes from a place of anger, emotion, frustration.
I don't know what point they're making.
Kathy Griffin, alleged comedian Kathy Griffin, has an entire store, a whole line of products that just say F Trump.
But obviously she spells it out.
Two words, F Trump.
That's the height of creativity.
I don't even know what point she's making.
Why are they doing this?
I think in part it's because they can't really agree on It's not coming from a place of wit or humor.
It's just so angry.
And there's a real irony here.
I mean, the left is constantly assailing wealth and capitalism.
We on the right, we love capitalism.
We love consumer choice.
That's why we like the hats.
That's why we like the blank books.
That's why we like Trumpy Bear.
Trumpy Bear is extremely overpriced.
I'm going to buy three of them.
Because why not?
It's a funny little product.
I like it.
And the Trump economy is doing very well.
And we're all making more money than we were two years ago.
And so who cares?
But the right assails wealth creation, and then they start selling $380 cashmere sweaters that say, I miss Barack.
They talk about global warming is going to kill all of us.
All of the pollution is going to destroy the environment.
Then they produce all this schlock that's going to end up in the Pacific Ocean by the metric ton.
They constantly are talking about how President Trump should be courteous and civil.
And then they put F Trump on everything that they've got.
It's a real irony.
But this is what the left does is it projects.
And on this Cyber Monday, I hope that they go out and buy all this schlock.
Because the greatest bit of all is that they're being defrauded.
Ben and Jerry's says that they're going to donate proceeds from their pecan-resist ice cream to liberal causes.
They're going to donate $100,000.
they make half a billion dollars worth of ice cream per year.
They're going to donate a pittance.
Nothing.
A penny off the street.
And the left is doing it.
And that's great because it means that all the left is going to do is make rich millionaire capitalists even richer.
Go for it, guys.
Happy Cyber Monday.
That's our show.
I'm going to be down in Florida.
If you're in Tallahassee, come see me tomorrow.
We'll be giving a speech.
And in the meantime, I will see you on the show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Bory.
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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