Special counsel Robert Mueller has one big, fat, lying problem on his hands. Then, CNN celebrates the possibility of impeachment, Barack Obama reminds us how awful he is, and the ladies of "The View" try to forget him. Date: 11-29-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Special Counsel Robert Mueller has gotten President Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to plead guilty to lying to Congress. | |
| So now we are all expected to believe the guy who has admitted that he's a liar. | |
| We will examine the central problem of Mueller's investigation thus far. | |
| Then CNN celebrates the possibility of impeachment. | |
| Barack Obama reminds us how awful he is. | |
| And the ladies of The View try to forget him. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Every day, another one dropping in the Mueller investigation. | |
| They're turning it on Trump. | |
| They're going for impeachment. | |
| There's a big, big problem in this investigation. | |
| I'm sorry, hold on. | |
| Before we can get to the Bob Mueller investigation, we have breaking news coming in. | |
| Yes, it has been confirmed. | |
| A creepy porn lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is still a dirtbag. | |
| That is now being confirmed around, it's on the wires, it's being confirmed all around, Michael Avenatti of Dirtbag. | |
| Not exactly a man-bites-dog sort of story, but this is just delightful. | |
| It turns out that Michael Avenatti has been improperly using funds that were donated to Stormy Daniels, has been doing things that she didn't want him to do on her behalf, pretending to be her. | |
| Here is Stormy Daniels' statement that she gave to the Daily Beast yesterday. | |
| Quote, Michael has been a great advocate in many ways. | |
| I'm tremendously grateful to him for aggressively representing me in my fight to regain my voice. | |
| We'll get to that in a second. | |
| But in other ways, Michael has not treated me with the respect and deference an attorney should show to a client. | |
| He has spoken on my behalf without my approval. | |
| He filed a defamation case against Donald Trump against my wishes. | |
| He repeatedly refused to tell me how my legal defense fund was being spent. | |
| Now he has launched a new crowdfunding campaign using my face and name without my permission and attributing words to me that I never wrote or said. | |
| First, before we get to any of this, when did Stormy Daniels lose her voice? | |
| All I've noticed is Stormy Daniels talking, talking about President Trump's genitals, giving interviews even after she took money in exchange for not describing the sexual encounter. | |
| She's going on news shows. | |
| She's going on comedy shows. | |
| I never saw Stormy Daniels losing her voice. | |
| But it's just one of those stupid slogans that lefties say. | |
| The real meat of this here... | |
| Pun unintended. | |
| Is that Michael has not treated me with the respect and deference an attorney should show to a client. | |
| Gee, do you think? | |
| Is that really so? | |
| What is he being accused of? | |
| He's being accused of taking the money that was donated to her, just taking it without her consent, not telling her where the money was being spent, and using it for his own purposes. | |
| Now, he is saying that she's used some of the money for security. | |
| And he's taken the rest for his legal fees. | |
| But now he's started a new crowdfunding campaign in her name that she has nothing to do with. | |
| This, by the way, is why very often it's not a good reason or it's not a good idea to donate to crowdfunding campaigns. | |
| You have no idea who's running them. | |
| It might be on behalf of somebody, but... | |
| You don't know where that money is going. | |
| You don't know how it's going to be spent. | |
| We're so tempted because of our compassion to just throw money at anything. | |
| But sometimes it ends up going to guys like Michael Avenatti. | |
| And this other one, he filed a defamation case against Trump against my wishes. | |
| Michael Avenatti said when he filed that defamation suit that he was doing it on her behalf. | |
| He's representing her. | |
| If he's doing that now against her wishes, that's a serious issue. | |
| I mean, that could carry legal consequences. | |
| It could carry consequences for his career. | |
| So that's not good. | |
| All of this, though, what's the big takeaway? | |
| He's almost certainly going to be the 2020 Democrat nominee for president. | |
| He's all but locked it up at this point. | |
| He's abused women. | |
| He has improperly stolen charitable donations. | |
| This, I think, makes him an honorary Clinton. | |
| This is the definition of being a Clinton. | |
| He has already locked it up. | |
| Kamala Harris can go home. | |
| Cory Booker, Liz Warren, it's just there. | |
| It's over. | |
| Michael Avenatti is now a Democrat presidential candidate par excellence. | |
| He's almost certainly violated the law. | |
| That's it. | |
| That's it. | |
| He's got it locked up. | |
| Congratulations, nominee Michael Avenatti. | |
| We look forward to a full and robust general election campaign in 2020 against Donald Trump. | |
| It's going to be a lot of fun. | |
| Back to the major news story, not the news that we've all known since Michael Avenatti first crawled out of whatever gutter he's living in and got into another gutter called CNN and showed his face on TV. The real story today is that Michael Cohen, the longtime personal attorney for Donald Trump, has pled guilty to lying to Congress. | |
| Now, this is a deal that was reached with Robert Mueller, with the special counsel, and it's another one of these plea deals. | |
| So what is it about? | |
| What he apparently, allegedly lied about to Congress is when a deal in Moscow for a Trump building was nixed, when they got rid of the deal. | |
| What Michael Cohen was saying to Congress is that the Trump Organization was looking at building a tower in Moscow. | |
| They were going to do it in 2015. | |
| And then by January 2016, by the time of the Iowa caucuses, they nixed the deal and there was no more of that. | |
| What Bob Mueller has now gotten Michael Cohen to plead guilty to lying about is that they were still discussing that Moscow deal. | |
| Even after the Iowa caucuses, into 2016, into the campaign. | |
| So here's Michael Cohen, the guy, the personal lawyer, and the lawyer for the Trump Organization, who is coming out and saying, I lied. | |
| Trump was trying to do a deal in Moscow during the campaign. | |
| He is totally turning on Trump here. | |
| And for that, to figure out some of this reaction, we can turn now to President Trump's last interaction with Michael Cohen. | |
| If you're a rat, then I'm the biggest mutt in the history of the Mafia. | |
| He's got a lower voice than I remember seeing at those White House conferences. | |
| But that is what it sounds like. | |
| It does sound like it's these mob dealings. | |
| They're building the building. | |
| They've got to talk to the enforcers in Moscow. | |
| You've got Bob Mueller. | |
| He's forcing these guys to start lying, to start telling narratives. | |
| Okay, right, whatever. | |
| What did Mueller actually file? | |
| In this filing, he said, quote, In truth and in fact, and as Cohen well knew, Cohen's representations about the Moscow project he made to House and Senate intelligence committees were false and misleading. | |
| Cohen made the false statements to give the false impression that the Moscow project ended before the Iowa caucus in the very first primary in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations. | |
| So that's the false statement. | |
| The false statement is maybe the Moscow talks in some form or another went on longer than January 2016. | |
| Maybe Trump stopped talking about it in January 2016, but people in the Trump organization were still pursuing it. | |
| Maybe there was an email that went out to some developer in Russia. | |
| Who knows? | |
| Who knows? | |
| My question is, who cares? | |
| Who cares if it ended up? | |
| In January 2016 or February or March, where is the law that says that a presidential candidate can't continue to own a business and he can't continue to build his international real estate empire overseas while he's running for president? | |
| He's not even the president yet. | |
| He's just running, you know, during or after the Iowa caucuses. | |
| President Trump takes this same approach. | |
| Here is Trump responding to the latest Mueller plea deal. | |
| We had... | |
| A position to possibly do a deal to build a building of some kind in Moscow. | |
| I decided not to do it. | |
| The primary reason, there could have been other reasons, but the primary reason, it was very simple, I was focused on running for president. | |
| There would be nothing wrong if I did do it. | |
| So two statements in there. | |
| Two things to look at. | |
| He says, I dropped the deal in January. | |
| So the rest of us think, why would he drop that deal? | |
| It could be a lucrative deal for the Trump organization. | |
| Why end it? | |
| Because he was focused on running for president. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| Let me tell you, if you've ever been on a campaign, even a congressional campaign or a local campaign, they are exhausting. | |
| When you're running for president, you don't sleep for 18 months. | |
| So fair enough. | |
| They're not going to pursue this. | |
| They'll do it at a later time. | |
| Okay. | |
| But then he gives it an alternate theory, which is, let's say he did do it. | |
| Let's say that he was building this, trying to build this building in Moscow afterward. | |
| So what? | |
| Where's the law? | |
| Who cares? | |
| Now, we have this intuition that it's against the law. | |
| We have this intuition that it's wrong. | |
| What if John McCain were building a building in Moscow? | |
| What if Barack Obama did it? | |
| What if Hillary did it? | |
| Okay, fine. | |
| This is what happens when you have a businessman as president. | |
| We haven't had businessmen as president in... | |
| I don't know the last time we had a businessman as president. | |
| Truman, maybe? | |
| Truman was a haberdasher or something like that? | |
| When was the last time? | |
| We've just had career politicians. | |
| Barack Obama never held a private sector job in his life, basically. | |
| George W. Bush, he owned a baseball team, but he was governor. | |
| He was a politician, came from a political dynasty family. | |
| Bill Clinton only ever ran for office right after law school, ran for attorney general, did that track. | |
| George Bush Sr. | |
| He was an oil man in his young days, but then he was a career politician after that. | |
| He'd already finished his business dealings by the time he was running for office. | |
| Before that it goes on and on. | |
| Ronald Reagan was a movie star, so on and so forth. | |
| Donald Trump is a businessman. | |
| Not in the way everybody has business interests. | |
| His business is business. | |
| He has a TV show about all the business he did. | |
| He's worked in so many different industries. | |
| Casinos, real estate, golf courses, vodka, that didn't last long, steaks, television. | |
| He's worked in all of these different industries. | |
| And so his business is business. | |
| And when you've got a businessman, businessmen have business interests all around the world. | |
| And that's perfectly fine. | |
| It's a nice thing to have a businessman in government. | |
| Government moves very slow. | |
| It's inefficient. | |
| It isn't terribly connected to the real world. | |
| When you get someone in there from the private sector, things move a little faster, like we've seen in this administration. | |
| Okay, why does Mueller care? | |
| What does this deal in Moscow have to do with the Clinton campaign and hacked emails? | |
| And what does it have to do with anything? | |
| What does it have to do with the Trump campaign? | |
| You know, if the idea is that he was continuing to pursue this building at the time, okay, so then we're told that the Russians decided to help Trump become president so that he wouldn't return to the private sector and build that building in Moscow? | |
| Is that the implication? | |
| What is the... | |
| This is the trouble with this whole Russia narrative, is they're trying to construct a coherent storyline out of random disparate events that have no connection to one another. | |
| So, then the question is, why is Michael Cohen going along with all this? | |
| Michael Cohen once said something to the effect of he would take a bullet for Donald Trump before he'd rat, and then the dirty rotten rat is ratting. | |
| So, what is his incentive? | |
| President Trump explains that too. | |
| Go back and look at the paper that Michael Cohen wrote before he testified in the House and or Senate. | |
| It talked about his position. | |
| What he's trying to do, because he's a weak person and not a very smart person, what he's trying to do is end And it's very simple. | |
| He's got himself a big prison sentence. | |
| And he's trying to get a much lesser prison sentence by making up a story. | |
| Now, here's the thing. | |
| Even if he was right, it doesn't matter. | |
| Because I was allowed to do whatever I wanted during the campaign. | |
| I was running my business, a lot of different things during the campaign. | |
| So, very simply. | |
| Michael Cohen is lying, and he's trying to get a reduced sentence for things that have nothing to do with... | |
| So, Michael Cohen pleads guilty. | |
| This is a count. | |
| It faces up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. | |
| Don't forget though, Michael Cohen has already pled guilty to eight criminal counts. | |
| He's pled guilty to bank fraud, tax fraud, campaign finance violations. | |
| Eight different counts that he's pled guilty to. | |
| Only one of them had any connection to the Trump campaign. | |
| And that's when Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels. | |
| All the other seven have nothing to do with the Trump campaign. | |
| They have everything to do with the time long before the campaign when Michael Cohen had his own private business interactions. | |
| So what's the timeline here? | |
| It's that Bob Mueller takes Trump's personal lawyer, squeezes him, says, we're going to throw you in jail forever if you, on all of these other counts that you had before you were a lawyer during the campaign, unless you rat on Donald Trump. | |
| He's got all of this incentive to turn on Trump and do whatever Mueller wants. | |
| If he doesn't say what Mueller wants, he could rot in prison. | |
| And so let's say that this is true, though. | |
| Let's say that right now Cohen is telling the truth. | |
| He lied to Congress, but now he's telling the truth. | |
| The problem is he has no credibility. | |
| To use a word that has been much abused in the last couple months— Not only does Michael Cohen not have any credibility, none of these guys have any credibility. | |
| None of Mueller's star witnesses have a shred of credibility. | |
| This is Mueller's central problem right now. | |
| Mueller's central problem is he's built this entire case on calling people liars and having people plead guilty, whether they were or not, to having made a false statement or to being a liar. | |
| That's fine, but then we have no reason to believe these witnesses. | |
| their story, changed their tune. | |
| What are the indictments so far? | |
| The indictments so far against Trump campaign members are George Papadopoulos, what'd they get him on? | |
| They got him on pleading guilty to making false statements. | |
| He was in prison for 14 days. | |
| So I guess the statements weren't that bad if he was only there for two weeks. | |
| Paul Manafort, now there are more charges against him. | |
| Why? | |
| Because he lied. | |
| Because Mueller was saying, you're a liar. | |
| You lied. | |
| Even in your plea agreement with us, you are a liar. | |
| Rick Gates, who was Paul Manafort's former deputy, who had worked with Manafort on lobbying campaigns, pled guilty to making one false statements charge. | |
| Michael Flynn, same thing. | |
| Former National Security Advisor, pled guilty to false statements. | |
| Alex van der Zwan, who's a Dutch lawyer who was working with Rick Gates, pled guilty to making false statements regarding his contact with Rick Gates. | |
| And now we have Michael Cohen, who's pled guilty to making false statements to Congress. | |
| I'm not saying that Mueller's central problem is that he's dealing with liars. | |
| Prosecutors deal with liars all the time. | |
| The problem here is that all the crimes that Mueller has been able to throw on these guys are the crimes of lying. | |
| So if that is all we know about them, if that is the whole reason that they're in the position that they're in, why would we believe a single word coming out of their mouth? | |
| Especially now that we know that Paul Manafort is allegedly a liar, then he enters into a plea agreement, and then he lies about the plea agreement. | |
| So now he's got more charges on him. | |
| Why would we believe any of these liars? | |
| If Mueller had anything, if Mueller actually had evidence that Trump committed some crime with the Russians or that some campaign member committed a crime with the Russians, he would ring them up on those charges. | |
| Because then at least you can say, we've got you on this if you flip. | |
| But if all you can say is we've got you on being a liar, but now you better tell the truth, and I don't care what you think the truth is, you better say what I want. | |
| What the truth would be if it were convenient for me. | |
| You've got nothing. | |
| That is less than nothing. | |
| This is not a good sign for the Mueller investigation. | |
| Right now, the left-wing Twitter is so excited because Michael Cohen pled guilty. | |
| That's all it says on Twitter, by the way. | |
| Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleads guilty in court. | |
| Guilty to what? | |
| Oh, he's a liar. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Okay, fine. | |
| Oh, I wonder what he'll say now. | |
| Maybe he'll talk about when he was abducted by aliens and go to Planet Zebulon 7. | |
| There's no credibility at all. | |
| Nevertheless, CNN won't let this get them down. | |
| CNN's Jeffrey Toobin is so excited. | |
| He can just smell the impeachment coming. | |
| I'll start with you. | |
| What do you make of President Trump seemingly dangling a pardon for Manafort? | |
| Is there anything legally dubious about it? | |
| Is it obstruction of justice? | |
| Well, you have to remember that we are now in the realm of possible impeachable offenses, and that is much more a political question than a legal question. | |
| Is this something that would motivate now a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives to impeach the president? | |
| I mean, my belief is that the answer is no, that Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Nadler, they've told me and others they don't want to deal with impeachment. | |
| But because they know that there will not be 67 votes in the Senate to remove the president. | |
| So they're just not going to go on that fool's errand. | |
| However, that shouldn't distract us from the fact that this is egregiously inappropriate behavior on the part of the president. | |
| It is all but an encouragement to tell to Paul Manafort to stop cooperating, to don't get involved with Mueller, to take your punishment. | |
| I will take care of you later. | |
| It's egregiously wrong, but is it something that will lead to impeachment? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Is he right? | |
| Is it an encouragement to these people not to say whatever Mueller wants them to say? | |
| You're damn right it is, and it absolutely should be. | |
| Because what Jeffrey Toobin said at the beginning is absolutely right. | |
| This has nothing to do with charging someone with a crime. | |
| This has everything to do with politics. | |
| And I'm beginning to think that this whole Mueller investigation is only about politics. | |
| It has nothing to do with crime. | |
| It has nothing to do with dredging up some crimes from 2013, some tax issue to try to squeeze somebody, to sing a song, some made up fiction about Donald Trump. | |
| I'm beginning to think it's all about politics. | |
| I think it was about politics when Peter Strzok first started the investigation in the first place and 15 days later called it an insurance policy to stop Donald. | |
| I think it was all about politics when the FBI hired a paid Democrat operative to come up with dirt on Donald Trump, a guy who had been paid by the DNC and Hillary Clinton. | |
| I think it's all about politics now because there's no crime of collusion. | |
| They haven't accused these guys of any crimes other than being dirty, rotten liars, and they're trying to use their lies to create the ordinary That's what it's about. | |
| How are they going to get Donald Trump? | |
| I don't think Bob Mueller thinks he's going to get Donald Trump. | |
| I think what they're doing is just making him look really, really bad to either encourage impeachment or to have him lose his election in 2020. | |
| All about politics. | |
| It's always about politics with these guys. | |
| Reminds me of the Obama administration when everything was about politics. | |
| And he... | |
| You have to watch this. | |
| He reminds you how terrible that administration was. | |
| He was giving a talk at Rice University. | |
| Now, Barack Obama is lambasting our founders. | |
| He's taking credit for things that he has no business taking credit for. | |
| Here's Barack Obama on identity politics. | |
| You start getting politics that's based on... | |
| That person's not like me. | |
| And it must be their fault. | |
| And you start getting the politics based on a nationalism that's not pride in country, but hatred for somebody on the other side of the border. | |
| And you start getting the kind of politics that does not allow for compromise. | |
| Politics does not allow for compromise. | |
| From Barack Obama, who said, I won't work with Republicans, I've got a pen and a phone, and I'll do whatever I want. | |
| That's unbelievable. | |
| He says that we hate people on the other side of the border. | |
| We don't hate people on the other side of the border. | |
| We like them on the other side of the border. | |
| We want them to stay on the other side of the border. | |
| The other side of the border is where they belong, because they're not American citizens. | |
| We don't even hate them when they get here. | |
| We give them an insane amount of welfare. | |
| We treat them very well. | |
| We arrest them for committing crimes, and we still don't even deport them. | |
| What an outrageous calumny to say about his fellow citizens. | |
| But that's Barack Obama. | |
| That's all he does. | |
| He's able to strictly lambast President Trump, even during this very successful time in office. | |
| But he does this amazing thing where he takes credit for all the good stuff that Trump does, and he foists all of the bad stuff that he did onto Donald Trump. | |
| Here is Barack Obama talking about taking credit, trying to take credit for the oil and natural gas explosion. | |
| I was extraordinarily proud of the Paris Accords because, look, I know we're an oil country and we need American energy and, by the way, American energy production. | |
| You wouldn't always know it, but it went up every year I was president. | |
| And, you know, that whole, suddenly America's like the biggest oil producer and the biggest guy, that was me, people? | |
| I just want you to, so... | |
| Two thoughts here. | |
| One, Barack Obama, the guy who said individuals can't accomplish anything and you didn't build that and government does everything, is now saying, I built that, that was me, direct quote. | |
| But two, that isn't true. | |
| That is just flat out wrong. | |
| The production of oil by the federal government on federal lands during Barack Obama's presidency was flat. | |
| It didn't happen. | |
| There was no growth. | |
| He's right. | |
| There was an oil and fracking boom that was all on private land. | |
| In many ways, that was in spite of his administration, which cut off oil pipelines, which constantly tried to hang up the Keystone XL pipeline. | |
| All of these projects, he was hugely anti-oil, anti-energy, and now he's trying to take credit for it. | |
| Which shows you something. | |
| A lot of times people on the left want to paint him as an idealist. | |
| Oh, he's an idealist. | |
| He's too academic. | |
| He's too good for this world. | |
| No, he's a hack, despicable Chicago politician is what he is, who's willing to take credit for things that he ostensibly opposes when it suits his purposes because his administration was an utter failure. | |
| His legacy has been erased and he's nobody. | |
| He does these speaking things and I remember that he exists. | |
| When I don't see him on TV for more than three days, I forget he ever existed. | |
| His administration was that meaningless. | |
| And he goes on. | |
| He can't give it up. | |
| Here's the rest of the talk. | |
| When I hear people say they don't like identity politics, they don't like... | |
| I think it's important to remember that identity politics doesn't just apply when it's black people or gay people or women. | |
| No. | |
| The folks who really... | |
| The originated identity politics were the folks who said, you know, three-fifths clause and all that stuff. | |
| That was identity politics. | |
| That's still out there. | |
| Maybe that was a little too controversial for Houston. | |
| Yeah, oh yeah, that's what they said. | |
| Barack Obama, constitutional lawyer allegedly, the framers of our Constitution, apparently they said three-fifths clause and all that stuff. | |
| That's what they said. | |
| Not quite the eloquence of Alexander Hamilton, is it? | |
| No, of course not. | |
| Barack Obama, though, he's using this little trick that lefties do, and particularly lightly educated, lightly informed lefties, which is they'll just say a slogan. | |
| So he didn't actually make a statement. | |
| He said identity politics are the people who say, you know, three-fifths clause and all that stuff. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| What did they say? | |
| What is the three-fifths clause? | |
| He doesn't say that because it... | |
| It undercuts his entire point. | |
| The three-fifths compromise was a compromise between slave states and free states. | |
| Really, I suppose, really, the future slave and free states, the North and the South. | |
| States with big slave populations wanted to count slaves as whole human beings. | |
| Now, what Barack Obama is trying to imply is that slaves are, we considered black people to only be three-fifths of a human being. | |
| That is not what it was about at all. | |
| In fact, it was just the opposite. | |
| The slaveholders wanted to count slaves as full human beings because then their states would be more populous and they would have more representation in the federal government. | |
| The states with very few slaves did not want to count the slaves as whole people because the slaves did not have any rights. | |
| So if the slaves don't have rights as people, they shouldn't be counted as the population, and the South shouldn't be able to dominate the federal government. | |
| They had to come to this compromise to create the country that ultimately elected Barack Obama. | |
| To our everlasting shame, we elected him. | |
| But that was created by those guys, those awful terrible guys who said, you know, like the three-fifths clause and all that other stuff. | |
| What a hack. | |
| What an absolute disgrace he is to the country. | |
| It's so sad. | |
| He's gotten worse since he's left office. | |
| He used to at least try to temper his speech a little bit. | |
| Now it's just all that Chicago trash. | |
| It's really, really sad. | |
| Now, what's really nice, though, is that we have people in the White House, like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who are fighting back against all of this nonsense. | |
| The left right now, you know, they're trying to do the Obama trick, trying to give Obama credit for all the good Trump stuff and pretend that Obama never did any of the sort of things that Donald Trump is doing. | |
| Sarah Sanders puts an end to that one, particularly with regard to the border crisis. | |
| I was wondering, does the White House regret the fact that children were affected by tear gas and that this situation took place? | |
| Are there any investigation underway to prevent this from happening again? | |
| Certainly, the White House would never want children to be in harm's way in any capacity whatsoever. | |
| However, that is why we are continuing to encourage people to follow the law and go to ports of entry. | |
| Law enforcement officials have used appropriate nonlethal force to protect themselves and prevent an illegal rush across the border. | |
| And let's also not forget that this isn't the first time that nonlethal force like this has been used. | |
| In fact, tear gas was used on average once a month during the Obama administration for very similar circumstances. | |
| In fact, they were actually for far less circumstances because they didn't have the same numbers in the mass rush that we're seeing in this caravan take place. | |
| Once a month during the Obama administration. | |
| How do you like that? | |
| How do you like them apples? | |
| Because now you're seeing it being used because people are throwing rocks at Border Patrol. | |
| They're trying to climb over and invade and run through. | |
| So they're using tear gas. | |
| Barack Obama used tear gas much, much more. | |
| But first of all, you didn't hear a peep about it at the time. | |
| Because the left doesn't really care. | |
| They just hate Trump. | |
| And they hate when conservatives have effective government. | |
| But where are the journalists on this? | |
| Why don't they mention this? | |
| Why don't they talk about it? | |
| Finally, we're pushing back. | |
| You know, it used to be that ex-presidents didn't criticize the new president because it's undignified. | |
| Well, Barack Obama blew that out of the water. | |
| He won't stop criticizing him. | |
| Fine. | |
| Let loose. | |
| I hope that the White House exposes every single aspect of that horrific, failed presidency, beginning with all of this BS. You know, the women of The View, they're very upset about this. | |
| They hate the reality of the Obama administration. | |
| They hate that the things they really want to criticize Trump for... | |
| Barack Obama did as well. | |
| Because they've begun with a conclusion. | |
| They didn't begin with the evidence and then they reach a conclusion. | |
| They've begun with the conclusion that I hate Trump. | |
| I hate Trump. | |
| Trump is Hitler. | |
| Trump is the worst. | |
| And they work backwards. | |
| So anything that Trump does is really, really bad and terrible. | |
| And then they realize Donald Trump is doing a lot of things that past presidents, including Barack Obama, did. | |
| And they get so frustrated by it. | |
| And it's just delicious. | |
| Here they are. | |
| Can I check? | |
| President Obama is no longer in office. | |
| President Trump is in office. | |
| And he's destroying the country. | |
| And this but Obama defense, you know, doesn't work for me. | |
| That's not to say using tear gas. | |
| I think it's immoral when you're using tear gas against children. | |
| But ProPublica just found that the Trump administration has secretly continued to separate kids from their families. | |
| The Obama administration never did that. | |
| You know, the ACLU says that kind of separation is unprecedented. | |
| So this whole, but Obama did it, but Obama did it. | |
| I don't care what Obama did. | |
| I don't care what Trump is doing right here, right now. | |
| So she's trying to make two points. | |
| She's trying to say Obama didn't really do it, especially with child separation. | |
| Obama didn't really do it. | |
| But the child separation policy isn't a Trump policy. | |
| That's a policy that dates back to 1997, to the Flores Consent Agreement. | |
| It dates back to a time. | |
| And by the way, the reason they separate the parents and the children is because the alternative is throwing children in jail. | |
| Imagine if we were putting the children in jail. | |
| What would the left say then? | |
| You've got to separate them. | |
| You've got to put the kids in a nice place. | |
| Yeah, that's what we're doing, guys. | |
| And by the way, it's not we who decided it. | |
| That's been the rule. | |
| That's been the law since the Clinton administration. | |
| Now, if Barack Obama wasn't enforcing the law, I'm not surprised at all. | |
| He didn't enforce the law quite a lot. | |
| But you can't have it both ways. | |
| It would be throwing a hullabaloo if it were the opposite as well. | |
| And what you're admitting is that Barack Obama didn't enforce the law. | |
| But, more importantly than that, what she's saying is, I don't care if Obama did it. | |
| I only care if Trump did it. | |
| Right. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's what we've been saying all along. | |
| Now you're admitting it. | |
| That's all it is. | |
| Sometimes even conservatives will say, well, it's whataboutism when you, whataboutery, when Trump does something bad and then you say, well, Obama did it too. | |
| That's not whataboutery. | |
| In many ways, whataboutery is whataboutery to bring up whataboutism is a whataboutism. | |
| But what we're pointing out here is that this is the law and that this is a law for a good reason and that this has been standard policy. | |
| It's not what a battery. | |
| You only want to talk about this one particular thing, just like the View lady. | |
| I don't want to talk about Obama yet. | |
| Well, tough noogies, you have to talk about Obama. | |
| That's the way it is. | |
| So we've got a lot more to get to. | |
| We've got to get to the mailbag. | |
| But first, if you're on dailywire.com, thank you very much. | |
| You keep the lights in my hotel room on. | |
| If you are not, go there right now. | |
| It's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership. | |
| You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag, which is coming up. | |
| You get to ask questions in the conversation. | |
| And do you know the conversation's coming up? | |
| Did I tell you that? | |
| Monday, December 3rd. | |
| Oh, I'm sorry. | |
| The conversation's not... | |
| It's the backstage that's coming up. | |
| You get to ask questions there, too, though. | |
| It's very confusing. | |
| There are so many places where you can ask questions. | |
| Where do I get to ask questions? | |
| I don't know. | |
| No one answers my questions. | |
| I just yell down the hallway. | |
| Ben tells me to stop making a racket. | |
| Monday, December 3rd. | |
| Don't miss our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage. | |
| The Holiday Edition. | |
| God King, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Elisha Krause, and I will be talking politics, culture, and why frozen leftist tears make the most beautiful snowflakes. | |
| So be sure to tune in. | |
| I'll be bringing the mistletoe. | |
| As always, only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions. | |
| Make sure to subscribe today. | |
| Do it right now. | |
| Go to dailywire.com. | |
| We'll be right back. | |
| I'm going to get through all of these today. | |
| From Scott. | |
| Michael, when do you expect the left's romanticism of having mental illnesses will be over? | |
| My wife, a hard lefty, always talks about her mental illness and I've grown to now be non-sympathetic. | |
| I want her to have help if she needs it, but I don't want to give in to her leftist reassurance. | |
| What can I do? | |
| This is a very important question. | |
| This is a question that I have seen personally. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Friends of mine in particular who have broadcast the mental illness, and it's good to talk about the mental illness, have had the worst outcomes from it. | |
| This is, again, I'm just talking in anecdotes, but it really punches me right in the gut when I see this because I'm really not convinced that talking about mental illness... | |
| I think you're exactly right. | |
| I think it is romanticizing it. | |
| I think it is glorifying it. | |
| You see this when somebody commits suicide and people talk about the suicide, that suicide is on television, you see a spike in suicides. | |
| It makes it more accessible. | |
| It makes it more comfortable. | |
| It is... | |
| The most heinous act that you can commit. | |
| It is so contrary to nature and to natural law. | |
| And it is just awful because it's all out there and we're talking about it as though it's normal. | |
| It's a very bad idea. | |
| And when people who have mental illnesses say, we need to talk about mental illnesses, you might remember, they have a mental illness. | |
| I don't mean that in any glib way. | |
| They don't have a... | |
| A ton of authority on this, exactly. | |
| I agree entirely. | |
| I hope because what they're doing is they're trying to do what the left has done with identity politics, with intersectionality, which is take insanity or madness or mental illness or whatever you want to call it and make that a privileged victim group that carries privileges. | |
| Mental illness doesn't carry any privileges. | |
| Mental illness is awful. | |
| It is so terrible. | |
| I've I've seen it in friends of mine, and it's just awful. | |
| We should not pretend it carries any privilege, that it's nice, that it should be celebrated or talked about. | |
| It should be medicated, it should be fixed, and we should pray for people who have it. | |
| And anybody who encourages... | |
| To celebrate or indulge their mental illness is really doing great harm to that person and to society. | |
| From Gene, | |
| I don't know if I'm just being hypocritical, but I don't think I could ever really believe. | |
| Well, you should. | |
| I really think that you should. | |
| It's good that you get the importance of Christianity. | |
| It's good that you see the utilitarian argument that it's good for society, that it's good for the individual. | |
| I think a lot of people are there. | |
| I was there for a long time. | |
| I was there from probably 18 or 19 through 23. | |
| So I get you. | |
| I was a kid once. | |
| That's fine. | |
| What you have to ask yourself is, why is it good for society? | |
| Why is it good for individuals to believe that God, the divine logic of the universe, the only begotten Son of God, was incarnate right around the year zero in Bethlehem and became man and died for our sins and then was resurrected and conquered death? | |
| Why does that value matter? | |
| Why do the values that come from that matter? | |
| If it produced good values, then what was it? | |
| Did it really happen or did it not really happen? | |
| Is Jesus a man who walked on the earth, who was crucified, died and was buried and resurrected on the third day and conquered death and redeemed us from our sins? | |
| Or is it just a story? | |
| Is it false? | |
| If it's false, give me the evidence that it's false. | |
| I don't see much evidence. | |
| I see a lot of evidence that it's true. | |
| If it's good for society, then why isn't it good for you? | |
| What is good about that? | |
| The one way that you can maybe get yourself to believe is to read apologetics. | |
| This is what I did. | |
| Because what it sounds like is that you've had the intellectual conversion, but you haven't had any spiritual movement. | |
| That's fine. | |
| We've all been there. | |
| Read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. | |
| Read Orthodoxy by Chesterton. | |
| Read really anything by those guys. | |
| Read Hilaire Belloc. | |
| Read the more modern apologists. | |
| Then pray. | |
| Then go to church. | |
| Drew has this thing. | |
| He says how to find God in 60 days. | |
| Act as though God exists. | |
| Pray. | |
| Take care of yourself. | |
| That sort of thing. | |
| See what happens after that. | |
| I have great hope that you will find that it's not just useful, but that it's useful for a reason. | |
| From Elliot. | |
| Hi, Michael. | |
| With the Democrats taking the House, do you see a path for us to get funding to build the wall in the next six years, assuming Trump's re-election? | |
| Or has that dream passed into the great blue yonder? | |
| There is hope, which is that we need to shut down the government and get the wall funding right now, this second. | |
| That's the only way we're going to get it. | |
| We're not going to take the House back in 2020, probably. | |
| Historically, that would be very unlikely. | |
| So do it now. | |
| Shut down the government. | |
| Get funding for the Justice Department and for DHS. Get the money to build the wall. | |
| Not a quarter of the wall. | |
| Not half the wall. | |
| Build the whole wall. | |
| Do it now. | |
| Who cares? | |
| If we shut the government down, it redounds to our benefit politically. | |
| Either way, either we get the wall, which is good, Or Democrats let illegal aliens, one-third of whom have sicknesses, HIV, hepatitis, lice, all those sort of things, pour over to the border. | |
| Caravans full of criminals just pouring over the board. | |
| Either way, we win. | |
| From Will. | |
| Hey there, Mr. | |
| Noels. | |
| N-O-E-L-S. Get it? | |
| I get it. | |
| Christmas is coming. | |
| Anyway, the BDS movement against Israel seems to be catching on more and more at U.S. universities. | |
| Do you foresee a time in the near future, whenever a Democrat is elected president, that an official BDS-like strategy could be implemented as official U.S. policy? | |
| Thanks, big fan of your work. | |
| Oh, yes. | |
| Certainly I do. | |
| The Democrat Party is hostile to Israel. | |
| They are electing people now to the Congress, to the leadership of the Democrat Party, who are hostile to Israel, who don't like Israel. | |
| Louis Farrakhan called Jews termites. | |
| Barack Obama smiled in a photo with him in 2005. | |
| That's what we're talking about here. | |
| They've so far sort of kept a lid on the Jew hatred in the Democrat Party, but even that is starting to crack. | |
| You've got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling Israel an apartheid state. | |
| She's the darling of the party, and she's not just a popular darling. | |
| She's a darling of the fundraisers of that party, too. | |
| She was flying all over the country, raising money for Democrats and campaigning for them. | |
| There is certainly a chance That the Democrats follow the line of the United Kingdom and various European countries and condemn Israel and try to promote some Arab state in what is the nation of Israel. | |
| We should be very careful about that. | |
| That would be a terrible thing for an American ally, for the entire region, and for justice. | |
| From Adrian. | |
| Dear Michael, master of all things Covfefe, I would like to get your take on tattoos. | |
| Would you? | |
| Are you sure you'd? | |
| Okay. | |
| My mother has always been a very devout Catholic and has always been against tattoos. | |
| She would always quote the part from the Bible that says that our bodies are our temple, so we need to keep them clean. | |
| I've recently felt the urge to get one, but would like to hear other people's opinions as well. | |
| And you have been my go-to for most things that have to do with the Catholic faith. | |
| Love the show. | |
| Keep up the good work, Adrian. | |
| I'll give you an answer. | |
| I don't know if this is exactly the Catholic answer, but this is just my answer broadly. | |
| If you are a Marine or a convict, get a tattoo. | |
| You should have a tattoo. | |
| If you served in the military, you know, or you've been convicted of a crime, you make a good case. | |
| You can get a tattoo if you want a tattoo. | |
| For other people, it's a little tough. | |
| You know, look, could I wear a tattoo? | |
| Could I wear a face tattoo like Mike Tyson? | |
| No. | |
| I just don't have the body for it. | |
| I don't have the personality for it. | |
| It's not going to work. | |
| Some guys get tattoos, like little hipster whiny guys get tattoos and it's pretty sad. | |
| If you're a kind of burly dude and whatever, that's fine. | |
| I guess whatever, that's fine. | |
| Women, ladies, if you have a tattoo, don't get any more. | |
| If you don't have a tattoo, don't get one. | |
| Adrian is a name that could go either way. | |
| So I want to give you both answers. | |
| I don't like them. | |
| Some people really like them. | |
| I don't like them. | |
| I especially don't like them on women. | |
| If they're hidden, that's cool. | |
| Whatever. | |
| That's fine. | |
| If they're really out there, I just don't like it. | |
| it. | |
| That's my preference. | |
| Tattoos have been around since the dawn of man. | |
| There is evidence that the Visigoths had tattoos. | |
| Native Americans have had tattoos. | |
| They've been around for a long time, but I don't like them. | |
| I think there's a reason why in the West, in most of civilized society, we've kind of gotten rid of them. | |
| But there were always eccentric aristocrats who would wear tattoos, English royalty, that sort of thing. | |
| Just as my preference, I don't like them, but you do you, kid. | |
| From Catherine. | |
| Dear Mr. | |
| Knowles, did you hear about the scientist in China who is claiming to have made the first gene-edited babies using CRISPR and IVF? Most scientists still see that this is a big problem ethically and morally, but not all. | |
| Although support for this type of science is still uncommon, do you think more people will begin to defend such practices? | |
| What would be the long-term consequences? | |
| Yes. | |
| So the story that's come out of China is that a scientist has created a gene-edited baby who's gone in, changed the genes of a baby to be a certain way, and now this baby exists in the world. | |
| Many more people will defend these practices. | |
| This is the logical consequence of a society that condones abortion and in vitro fertilization. | |
| Because what those techniques do... | |
| One, abortion kills babies. | |
| In vitro fertilization switches the natural order and makes babies for the parents. | |
| Rather than parents raising babies, it's babies are being created for the gratification of the parents. | |
| And in vitro fertilization, you can kind of pick what you want. | |
| I'm not saying everyone who does this does that. | |
| But very frequently, you fertilize a number of eggs. | |
| You've got the little... | |
| Little individual humans that will be implanted and you can pick which ones you want to keep and which ones you don't want to keep. | |
| And if you choose to keep all of them, you end up like Octomom and you have eight kids in you. | |
| That's a rarity. | |
| This is the logical consequence of that, which is that we can make whatever sort of babies we want. | |
| Designer babies, super babies. | |
| This is going to continue. | |
| It's a horrifically terrifying bioethical problem, but... | |
| The cat's out of the bag. | |
| And we really let the cat out of the bag decades ago. | |
| Alright, on that happy note, that's our show. | |
| Enjoy the weekend. | |
| I will finally be back in La La Land starting next week, next Monday. | |
| And so it's been a lot of fun being on the road with these speeches. | |
| Be sure to tune in because we're going to be doing backstage then as well. | |
| In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Try not to get indicted by Bob Mueller over the weekend. | |
| The Michael Knoll 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. |