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Dec. 11, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:59
Ep. 266 - The Real 'Person of the Year'

TIME reports the fakest news of the year. The Oscars may not have any host at all, Chuck and Nancy make a yuge mistake, and a heartwarming moment at the Nashville Airport on This Is America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Time Text
Time Magazine reports the fakest news of the year.
The Oscars may not have any host at all.
And Chuck and Nancy make a huge mistake during an explosive Oval Office meeting.
Finally, a heartwarming moment at a Nashville airport on This Is America.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The mainstream media, Time Magazine, has decided that for the person of the year, they are going to select the mainstream media.
Here they are.
Who holds governments accountable now?
We cross these lines.
We sound the alert.
There are now people in power who see journalism as a threat.
El periodismo libre en Venezuela es una especie de extinción.
Freedom of the press starts at the local level.
It is violence, fear, and lies.
We don't have the luxury to lose our freedom.
What are you going to stand for?
What is the line that you want to cross?
The Guardians, the War on Truth, Jamal Khashoggi, and basically anyone who doesn't like Donald Trump.
We will explain why the mainstream media continues to be distrusted, why everybody just despises them, and why they are the most self-aggrandizing people on planet Earth.
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The Time Person of the Year.
I woke up today, and I knew it was going to be a fun show.
I just knew.
I looked.
I always look right when I wake up.
I look at the news.
Person of the Year, Jamal Khashoggi.
But not just Jamal Khashoggi.
You'll remember Jamal Khashoggi is the Islamist former Saudi insider who was brutally killed, truly brutally killed, by the Saudi regime in an embassy in Turkey.
And the mainstream media tried to Paint this guy as a liberal, western, democratic, reformer journalist.
Total bunk.
And they made him the person of the year and all of the guardians, the mainstream media, the defenders of truth, the most fictional group of people I've ever heard of in my life.
Here's how the piece begins.
Quote, The stout man with the gray goatee and the gentle demeanor dared to disagree with his country's government.
Talking about Jamal Khashoggi.
He told the world the truth about its brutality toward those who would speak out, and he was murdered for it.
Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi's killing made it a sensation.
Virtually nothing about that statement is true.
He's a stout man with a gray goatee and a gentle demeanor.
I'm not sure about this.
He regularly propagandized for Hamas.
He was a defender and a member, certainly at one time and maybe for his entire life, of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He didn't just dare to disagree with his country's government.
The Saudi government has been brutal, has been vicious, has murdered dissonance, has trampled on human rights for a very, very long time.
And for most of the time that the Saudi government was doing it, Jamal Khashoggi was helping them to do it.
He was a Saudi insider.
He was a royal advisor.
He was a spy for the Saudi government.
It was only when a new faction of the Saudi regime came to power that he fell out of favor and the mainstream media painted him as this democratic reformer.
He never, ever was that.
It is simply a lie.
There are photos of him holding assault rifles in Afghanistan when he was there with Osama bin Laden in the 80s.
This is not a gentle guy who happened to finally blow the whistle on the excesses of his government.
Everybody knows how awful the Saudi regime is, and Jamal Khashoggi helped them in their excesses.
He helped the regime until his side of the government fell out of power.
And ironically, actually, the new side of the Saudi government, run by Mohammed bin Salman, is much more reforming, is much friendlier toward Western powers and Western interests.
One of Jamal Khashoggi's major complaints against the Saudi regime was they were too nice to Israel.
They were dealing with Israel too much.
They shouldn't be so nice to all those Jews.
Jamal Khashoggi also blamed the United States for bringing 9-11 on itself.
Very few people have written about this.
But Jamal Khashoggi, in the wake of 9-11, said, quote, Saudis tend to link the ugliness of what happened in New York and Washington with what has happened and continues to happen in Palestine.
That's the fictional country between Wakanda and Narnia.
It is time that the United States comes to understand the effect of its foreign policy and the consequences of that policy, but unfortunately such rationalization is still not part of the American reality, saying this is the consequence of We're good to go.
Worth pointing out, he was officially a royal advisor.
He traveled with King Abdullah, the previous king of the kingdom.
He was very close with Prince Turkey al-Faisal.
That's how we know that he very likely worked as a Saudi spy.
In 2015, this all turned around because King Salman rose to power and Mohammed bin Salman became the heir apparent, the crown prince of the kingdom.
Why has the mainstream media jumped to elevate this guy?
Look, I'm actually not defending his killings.
Some people have accused me of defending the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
I'm not doing that at all.
It's awful to kill people in embassies.
them up while they're alive.
I'm not defending that.
What I'm saying is when you play around with awful regimes, when you're a close advisor to awful regimes, when you support Islamist movements throughout the Middle East and radical Islamism, when you weep over the death of Osama bin Laden, you're known by the friends you keep and bad things might happen to you.
That's That's my entire thesis on Jamal Khashoggi.
So why is the mainstream media defending him so much?
In part, this is just a side war in defending Barack Obama and attacking Donald Trump.
Barack Obama tried to cozy up to Iran.
Donald Trump is protecting our alliance with Saudi Arabia as a power that is contrary to Iran.
Donald Trump ripped up the Iran nuclear deal.
Donald Trump is standing by the Saudis as a stave against Iranian hegemony in the region.
So that's a little bit of what's going on with the mainstream media.
Now, the Time magazine article doesn't get everything wrong.
It names a few real journalists.
It names Maria Ressler, who is a journalist in the Philippines covering the Duterte regime.
She might go to jail for doing her job.
Obviously, that's a real journalist.
They cover Capitol newspaper in Maryland.
And the Capitol newspaper, you'll remember, they had those five staffers gunned down in June.
But even covering this, which is, you know, it was such an awful shooting that happened there.
Time magazine is covering it to attack Donald Trump.
Listen to what they write.
Quote, in Annapolis, Maryland, staff of the Capitol, a newspaper published by Capitol Gazette Communications, which traces its history of telling readers about the events in Maryland to before the American Revolution, press on without the five colleagues gunned down in their newsroom on June 28th.
Still intact, indeed strengthened after the mass shooting, are the bonds of trust and community that for national news outlets have been eroded on strikingly partisan lines never more than this year.
What an astounding statement to say.
What Time Magazine is doing here is accusing Republicans of being responsible for the shooting in Maryland.
Which has no basis in reality.
And even their line that trust of American news outlets has broken down on partisan lines isn't true.
The majority of Americans, Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, distrust the mainstream media.
The majority of Democrats, too.
It is not eroded on strikingly partisan lines.
That is fake news.
That is just as fake news as calling Jamal Khashoggi a Western liberal reformer journalist and making him person of the year.
There were a couple other real reporters.
Two reporters for Reuters in Myanmar were thrown in jail for documenting the deaths of Rohingya people there.
They were named in the article.
Okay.
Bangladeshi photographer was jailed for 100 days for criticizing the prime minister.
So what they do, they're so smart about this, is they mix in real journalists who are actually being persecuted for shedding light on corrupt governments.
They're mixing that in with fake news stories and To attack Donald Trump, to try to pretend that a Bangladeshi photographer being thrown in jail for criticizing the Prime Minister is the same thing as Jim Acosta grandstanding and not giving up the microphone and not letting other reporters ask questions, losing his press pass for five minutes.
That's what they're trying to do.
And they're trying to compare a Saudi spy insider Islamist who wants the whole Middle East to be run by an Islamic theocracy and who wants Israel blown off the map.
They're trying to make him seem like some wonderful Western journalist.
He's out there working the beat for the Washington Post.
Unbelievably not true.
If Time Magazine really wanted to put journalists up front, which they can, especially international journalists who actually are up against corrupt regimes, lead with them.
Lead with those guys, but they don't lead with them.
They lead in their video, in their story.
They lead with Donald Trump and Jamal Khashoggi.
Just no credibility at all.
What are the takeaways here?
Obviously, the mainstream media have a very overinflated view of themselves.
The other takeaway is that the only unifying theme right now on the left is hatred of Donald Trump.
That's all that's unifying them.
They can't pick some activist or some politician or some businessman who would be person of the year.
All they can do is take the opponent of Donald Trump, which is the lying media, like Time Magazine, and say that's the person of the year.
It's all about Trump.
He's living rent-free in their heads.
And then what it shows is this obliviousness of the mainstream media.
They're saying that Republicans hate the media and trust is at an all-time low, but Democrats love the media.
That isn't true.
Trust in the media is at an all-time low.
According to Axios Survey Monkey, the majority of Americans believe, 72%, believe, quote, traditional major news outlets report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading.
A huge majority of Americans, 92% of the GOP, 79% of independents, and 53% of Democrats, even the majority of Democrats, think that major mainstream news outlets knowingly lie and present fake news.
And this didn't just start with Trump.
This is a long trend.
We'll look at it in a second.
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This didn't begin.
There's a distrust in the media.
This didn't begin with Donald Trump.
People want to say, well, yes, people distrust the media now because Trump is using the bully pulpit of the presidency to attack the media every day.
No way.
It goes back way before Trump.
It goes back to before Barack Obama was the president.
A 2008 Princeton survey showed just how far trust in the media had fallen.
According to one survey in 1956, the strong majority of Americans thought that newspapers were fair.
66% of Americans thought the newspapers were fair.
By 2004, 10% of Americans had a great deal of confidence in the press.
66% down to 10%.
That is a massive drop-off.
The media did this to themselves.
The media did this to themselves because they lied, because they were hacks, because they carried water for their favored politicians, and they pretended that they were objective.
If they were just pushing aside, if they were activists, if they had a point of view, if they were giving commentary or punditry or opinion or whatever, I do that.
I have a side.
I have opinions about the world.
I have a particular viewpoint.
I'm honest about that.
And if they were to do that, I highly suspect that their approval ratings and their trust in them would not have dropped so much, but it certainly did.
So who should be the person of the year?
Who should get it?
I was really upset because I think it was People Magazine decided that Michael B. Jordan was the sexiest Michael of the year, and then Michael Avenatti was number two or something like that.
Are you kidding me?
I get it.
I get it that I'm not Michael B. Jordan.
Okay, I'm willing.
I'm self-aware enough.
Michael Avenatti.
I don't beat out Michael Avenatti.
Real nice guys.
But we're not talking about the sexiest person of the year.
We're talking about the Time Magazine person of the year.
Who should get it?
There are a few options.
If they wanted to do this sort of dissident theme, if they wanted to do this, someone speaking truth to power, being unfairly targeted by those in power, okay, then they should have really made it the dissident and they should have made it conservatives on social media.
All of the conservatives who are being banned, censored, thrown out, silenced by social media.
And it's not just Alex Jones and the shirtless vitamin salesman and the gay frogs.
It's not just that.
It's Gavin McGinnis, conservative comedian, has been thrown off of YouTube, has been thrown off of his platforms.
Jesse Kelly, who is a totally mainstream guy, congressional candidate, radio host here.
He was kicked off until the outcry was so large.
It should be conservatives on social media.
That's a real dissident.
Not Jim Acosta or Saudi regime insiders.
That's a real dissident.
If they wanted to do another group one, and they don't want to do the dissident.
Because frankly, the dissident thing has been done recently.
Who could they have done?
If they were to do a good group one, it probably should be the American worker.
They do this sometimes.
Sometimes they'll pick individual people, then sometimes they will pick, you know, you.
In 2006, it was you because of YouTube and the rise of social media.
They should have done this year for a group person of the year, the American worker.
The American worker is doing better right now than he has done in decades.
His real wages are going up.
His real income is going up.
Unemployment basically does not exist.
There are more jobs to fill than people to fill them right now.
This is especially true at black unemployment.
Black unemployment is at record lows.
Hispanic unemployment has plunged.
The American worker is doing very well.
Why is the American worker doing well?
Because the economy is doing well under President Trump.
People are allowed to keep more of their money and invest more of their money in the economy.
And because the president has taken measures to fight trade wars that we are already in.
We are already in a trade war with China.
President Trump is defending American workers against China.
That trade war against the assaults by the Chinese government on the American worker.
Even with some of our allies, America's hat, Canada, they have their protective tariffs, but they don't want us to have our protective tariffs.
They want to protect their workers, but they don't want us to protect our workers.
President Trump has gone in and renegotiated some of those trade deals.
This was a big benefit.
It's a big benefit to the worker.
We'll see in the long run how this fares for the economy.
I think we're on the longest bull run in history or something like that.
We're on a historically long bull run for the markets, so eventually there will be a correction.
But that would have been a good group effort for the person of the year, the real individual of the year, because I don't think that there should be group persons of the year.
We're talking about the person of the year.
talking about individuals who have done important things in the year and define the year is Brett Kavanaugh.
He is the person of the year.
He showed more than anybody the fault lines in American politics.
You have an unimpeachably dignified federal judge for a dozen years, impeccable credentials, and the left was so furious that their fictitious constitutional right to an abortion might be threatened, possibly by a change in the swing of the court, that they tried to paint Brett Kavanaugh possibly by a change in the swing of the court, that they tried to paint Brett Kavanaugh to be a gang rapist based And some of the people who made those false claims against him are now being criminally investigated.
Brett Kavanaugh should be the person of the year.
What he endured, what he showed about the significance of presidential elections and how elections have consequences, What he has shown us about the Constitution and what the Constitution means for the judiciary and what it means for our system of government.
And what he showed about how far and how low the left is willing to go to attack American constitutional governments, that guy is the person of the year.
But he won't get it.
They're instead going to give it to an ex-Saudi spy Islamist friend of Osama bin Laden and to Jim Acosta, basically.
Okay.
Speaking of things that are equally frivolous as Jim Acosta and the American mainstream media, the Oscars might not have any host at all.
So you know the Oscars, they had this big blow-up because they selected Kevin Hart, who's a comedian, to be the host of the Oscars, and then they attacked him for a 10-year-old joke, a joke he told 10 years ago about how he didn't want his son to be gay.
And he is now out.
So now, no comedian who's ever told a gay joke can be the host of the Oscars.
Which is every single comedian.
So there is no comedian that they can do.
Now they have a suggestion that they're not going to have any one host.
They're going to have a bunch of different little people come up and do little bits of the show.
This is a horrible idea.
It totally typifies leftism.
But just to show you how insane it was to kick out Kevin Hart.
Because we've all read about the The comedy routine that he did about his gay son, how he didn't want his son to be gay.
We all read it and we say, oh, that's not funny.
Ooh, that's not...
No, no, no.
Here is the actual clip from the comedy special of Kevin Hart's joke.
This is why the Oscars will not have a host this year.
I got a lot of fears, man.
I got a lot of fears as a parent.
Let me tell you guys one of my biggest fears.
One of my biggest fears is my son growing up and being gay.
That's a fear.
Keep in mind, I'm not homophobic.
I have nothing against gay people.
Be happy.
Do what you want to do.
But me being a heterosexual male, if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will.
Now, with that being said, I don't know if I handle my son's first gay moment correctly.
Every kid has a gay moment, okay?
Every kid.
But when it happens, you gotta nip it in the bud.
You gotta stop it right there.
Hey!
Stop!
That's gay!
Quick!
No!
I don't know.
I don't know if I handled my son's situation right, okay?
He's at a birthday party, right?
My son had a birthday party.
He's playing.
You know when kids play, they just play.
You don't know what they're doing, but they're having a good time.
They're just doing a bunch of stuff, right?
They're moving around.
I said, okay, he's good.
I finished talking.
I turned back around and checked on my son again.
A little boy was grinding on my son's ass.
He was like this.
I didn't know what to do.
I panicked.
I knocked them both down.
Hey, what's going on here?
What kind of party is this?
It's important to watch it because when we read the news reports, this is how they're reported.
They say, and then Kevin Hart said he knocked his son and the other boy to the ground and he yelled at him, don't be gay.
No, he did a comedy routine in a movie.
He did a comedy special in his stand-up comedy show because he's a comedian.
You read it.
You don't hear the laughs when you read it.
So back then, 10 years ago, in that long, those halcyon years of the 2000s, Kevin Hart did this bit and the audience loved it.
Of course, it's a funny bit.
People like it now.
But now we all have to pretend that it's not funny.
And what is the joke about?
The joke is about how much the culture has changed.
So much of comedy depends on incongruity.
So you have our present culture, which is so gay-affirming...
That there is almost no greater good than gay sex, gay relationships.
When the Supreme Court invented the new definition of marriage because of Justice Kennedy, Barack Obama didn't just say good decision.
He painted the White House in rainbow light colors.
That's how affirming our culture is of gay relationships and gay sex.
And what Kevin Hart is doing is comparing that to people's natural reaction to that, he says, as a heterosexual male.
What he's comparing it to is every other culture and religion in the history of the entire world which has held homosexuality and homosexual acts in moral opprobrium.
And what he's saying is, even at the top, he says, look...
I'm not homophobic.
I want people to be doing whatever they want and have a good time and have a good life.
But, I know that intellectually, but deep down in this visceral part of me, I don't want my son to be gay.
That's the joke.
It actually wouldn't work if he were just going on some diatribe about how he hates gay people.
That wouldn't be a joke, it would just be a diatribe.
He's setting up the joke with the juxtaposition of those two things, and that's why people are laughing.
But now we're not allowed to laugh at jokes because that's not funny.
Because it's that meme of Sandra Fluke The Democrat abortion activist, you know, the one of her with her arms crossed.
That's not funny.
So Kevin Hart is out.
Now they are saying that they're not going to have any host.
And this is the typical cowardice of our day and age.
This is it.
This completely embodies it.
Everyone is so afraid of asserting anything that we need to be everything to everybody.
Especially the left.
We want to be everything to everybody.
Don't box me in.
Don't pin me down.
Don't call me.
Don't ask me if I think this or I think this or I believe in this or I believe in that.
Don't call me a conservative.
Don't call me a Christian.
Don't say I think.
Don't make me think or say that I believe or this or that.
I just feel like.
I just, oh, don't box me in.
Don't pin me down.
I don't exactly like this.
I don't support this politician.
I'm a Republican, but not that kind of Republican.
I'm a conservative, but not that kind.
It's this wanting to please everybody.
You're so desperate that you can't do that because particularity can be pinned down.
When you pin somebody down, you are making an assertion, which is a manly thing to do.
It's a manly thing to assert something that you think on the world.
Well, we will not do that now.
This is why whenever they have presidential candidates, they'll say, the generic Democrat is going to beat Donald Trump.
Okay, fine, maybe, but there's no such thing as a generic Democrat.
There are only individual Democrats who are running for office against Donald Trump, and none of them are polling better than Trump.
It's only the generic.
Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, she was the hypothetical candidate Hillary Clinton, right?
She was no issues, no campaign addresses yet.
She didn't say where she stood on all of these issues.
She was just hypothetical candidate Hillary.
And her approval ratings were very high the minute she declared that she was running for office.
And she said, I think this, I believe this, I want to do this, I'm going to do that.
Her approval ratings plummeted.
Particularity pins people down.
This is why we can't say Merry Christmas.
It's the same reason.
You can't say what particularity could be offensive.
You just say holidays.
There's only one holiday.
It's not Hanukkah is way earlier.
The new year is in the new year.
Kwanzaa is a socialist contrivance that nobody celebrates.
It's just Christmas.
You see, you can't say Christmas.
It's too particular.
You have to be vague.
We have to be vague about everything.
Where does this come from?
This comes from an unrealistic view of the world.
That's what this really comes from.
This comes from a worldview that is bereft of grace and forgiveness and tolerance and the appreciation of diversity within the world.
That worldview begets this sort of thing where any individual comedian now that they put up there will not be acceptable.
No comedian has not made a gay joke.
No person has not made a gay joke.
No straight person, no gay person.
No human being on the face of the earth has not made or laughed at a gay joke.
So now they have an impossible standard that they have to live up to.
What the left doesn't understand is that everybody is fallen.
Everybody is imperfect.
You can always find something.
You can always find that one little tweet that the Heisman Trophy winner sent 10 years ago when he was 12, and you can rip him to shreds because of that.
But what kind of society is that?
Is that the society that you want to live in?
That's leftism for you.
It's ironic because the left talks about diversity and they hate diversity.
But the left for you is no grace, no particularity, no diversity, and no humor.
That's the world they're offering.
Do you want that world or do you want something else?
I want something else.
And nowhere was this exhibited more clearly, demonstrated for all the world to see on the biggest stage in the whole world than in this bombshell, amazing press conference between President Trump, Vice President Pence, Leader Pelosi and Leader Schumer, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
They were all there.
They were just discussing the spending bill.
They were talking about border security.
And Nancy Pelosi made one of the classic blunders.
I'll let her show you herself.
I think the American people recognize that we must keep government open.
That a shutdown is not worth anything.
And that you should not have a Trump shutdown.
You have the White House.
You have the Senate.
You have the House of Representatives.
You have the vote.
You should pass it right now.
No, we don't have the vote, Nancy, because in the Senate we need 60 votes.
No, no, but in the House.
And we don't have it.
You could bring it up right now today.
Yeah, but I can't, excuse me, but I can't get it passed in the House if it's not going to pass in the Senate.
I don't want to waste time.
Well, the fact is you can get it started that way.
The House we could get passed very easily, and we do.
But the problem is the Senate, because we need 10 Democrats to vote, and they won't vote.
That's not the point, Mr.
President.
The point is that there are equities to be weighed, and we're here to have a conversation in a prayerful way, so I don't think we should have a debate in front of the press on this.
But the fact is, the House Republicans could bring up this bill, if they had the votes, immediately, and set the tone for what you want.
Oh, this is what they always do.
This is what the left always does.
They pick a fight, and then they can't win the fight, and then they tell you that they don't want to fight.
I saw this at Politicon.
I was on stage at Politicon.
There were all these lefties on stage.
They make some stupid point.
They throw out some stupid attack.
I knock down the attack, and then they say, stop, we're not talking about that.
Yeah, you don't want to talk about it.
Five seconds ago you wanted to talk about it.
Now you don't because you don't know anything and we've just embarrassed you.
That's what happened here with Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump.
Nancy Pelosi made an error so egregious, I actually don't, there must be something wrong with her.
She thought that she could beat Donald Trump at a game of reality television.
Maybe she can beat him at a legislative maneuver.
Maybe she can beat him at a sort of political speech kind of whatever.
She will never beat Donald Trump at reality television.
Donald Trump is reality television.
And she decided that during this nice little press conference, she was going to throw a bomb down and say that the government shutdown would be a Trump shutdown.
And Donald Trump isn't...
Do you think you can surprise him on television?
Do you actually think that you're going to win a game of The Real Housewives with Donald Trump or The Apprentice or Jersey Shore?
No chance.
He knows every camera angle.
He knows every response.
It's just not going to work.
But the other thing that's at play here is that Nancy Pelosi is living in an old political world.
She is living in the political world of...
2009, 2010.
She's living in this political world where, and I know it because I've worked on these campaigns and I've seen the focus groups and I've seen all the testing.
What you do is you focus test certain phrases.
So you focus test, Trump shut down.
Or you focus test, you know, you have the votes, right?
She keeps trying to say that he has the votes to pass his border funding, which he doesn't.
He doesn't have the Senate.
But you focus test those lines, and then you see how they perform, and then you just repeat them on TV. Even if they don't make any sense, you repeat them and they get into the popular consciousness.
The reason this doesn't work anymore is because President Trump is an improviser.
President Trump is ad-libbing.
He's really light on his feet so he can knock it down.
And because he doesn't take the typical care of the office, he doesn't take typical care of how the cameras are perceiving him, he'll just shut her up on the spot.
He'll say, what are you talking about?
I don't have the votes.
I don't have the Senate.
Well, you have the votes.
My advisors gave me this sheet and said, Nancy, where do I have the votes?
I don't have the Senate.
What are you talking about?
So she goes on with this.
Obviously, the shutdown thing didn't work very well.
So then they start going back and forth over the wall.
Chuck Schumer, for...
You know, for his part, actually knows to stick out of this one because he knows that Pelosi's losing and that Trump is winning.
So for the first time in Chuck Schumer's entire life, he keeps his mouth zipped.
Here they are talking about the wall.
But there are no votes in the House, a majority of votes, for a wall, no matter where you stand.
That's exactly right.
If I needed the votes for the wall in the House, I would have them in one session would be done.
Go do it.
It doesn't help because we need 10 Democrats in the Senate.
No, don't put it on the Senate.
Put it on the Senate.
Put it on a negotiation.
Okay, let me ask you this.
And we're doing this in a very friendly manner.
It doesn't help for me to take a vote in the House where I will win easily with the Republicans.
It doesn't help to take that vote because I'm not going to get the vote of the Senate.
I need 10 senators.
That's the problem.
Mr.
President, you have the White House.
You have the Senate.
I have the White House.
The White House is done.
And the House would give me the vote if I wanted it.
But I can't because I need...
Nancy, I need 10 votes from Chuck.
She keeps trying.
She said, but my focus tested lines.
You have the White House.
You have the Senate.
You have the Congress.
No, Nancy, I don't.
I don't have it.
You're right that I have the White House and I have the House of Representatives because other politicians would not lower themselves to engage in this bickering match with Nancy Pelosi.
Donald Trump will, and it's to our benefit.
It is to the great benefit of our country that he's willing to get down there where Nancy Pelosi is and go back and forth with her.
And it is truly astounding.
The only peep you heard out of Chuck Schumer is he says, oh, that's right, you know, to Pelosi or something.
But he's sticking out of this one because he knows that Donald Trump is going to win over this.
And the other aspect of Trump, because he's willing to assert himself, he is the exact answer to this cultural problem we have where we're unwilling to assert anything.
It's probably why we got Donald Trump is nature abhors a vacuum and we're so used to this culture now of nobody willing to make any assertion that Trump comes in and he will just put it right on the table.
He uses very blunt language and he totally just refutes these points.
A more polite person would say, oh, well, we agree to disagree.
The kind of, I hate to knock Jeb, you know, knock a man when he's down, but, and he's been down for two years, but this is kind of the Jeb answer of, you know, well, I mean, okay, well, you know, okay, well, agree to disagree.
Trump, no agree to disagree.
You are wrong, Nancy.
I am right.
We win, you lose.
Ha ha ha.
Chuck Schumer does get in a pretty good jab here, though, and it's worth pointing out because there's another exchange with Chuck where they both kind of get what they want.
We'll get to that in a second.
Plus, we'll also get to Brexit.
We'll get to Google data collection, and we will get to a wonderful This is America segment, an actual uplifting moment.
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Chuck Schumer is much better at this than Nancy Pelosi is, obviously.
Chuck Schumer, for all intents and purposes, is a television star.
The most dangerous space in New York or Washington is the area between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.
So he's well-practiced at this, too.
He's a pretty impressive tactician in the Senate.
And so he waits for his moment, and then he springs on Trump.
And this showdown was a little less clear.
I think they actually both sort of got what they wanted here, but I'll let you decide.
One thing I think we can agree on is we shouldn't shut down the government over a dispute.
And you want to shut it down.
You keep talking about it.
The last time, Chuck, you shut it down.
No, no, no.
And then you opened it up very quickly.
20 times.
I don't want to do what you did.
20 times you have called for, I will shut down the government if I don't get my wool.
None of us have said it.
You want to know something?
You've said it.
Okay, you want to put that on my...
You've said it.
I'll take it.
Okay, good.
You know what I'll say?
Yes, if we don't get what we want, one way or the other, whether it's through you, through a military, through anything you want to call, I will shut down the government.
Okay, fair enough.
And I am proud, and I'll tell you what, I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck.
Because the people of this country don't want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country.
So I will take the mantle.
I will be the one to shut it down.
I'm not going to blame you for it.
The last time you shut it down, it didn't work.
I will take the mantle of shutting down.
And I'm going to shut it down for border security.
This was a pretty interesting little chess match here.
If you just watch the exchange, Chuck Schumer sees his opening, he comes in, and he says, what we should agree on is we don't want to shut down the government.
So he's establishing that premise.
I don't know if I believe that premise.
Shut it down.
This is the only chance we have to get border wall funding, so shut it down.
Who cares?
When you shut down the government, only essential services are preserved.
Non-essential services are defunded.
Which raises the question, why do we have non-essential services?
That's fine.
Shut it down.
It never lasts that long.
And this is our last chance to get that wall built.
So, okay, that's fine.
He establishes that premise so that he can then say, you will be responsible if you shut down the government.
So then Trump responds to that.
This is Trump's little misstep here.
He says, I won't be responsible.
You shut down the government, Chuck.
I didn't shut down the government.
You shut down the government.
And Chuck Schumer sees that, and he's already ready to go with 20 times you promised that you would shut down the government.
So Schumer, in setting up that premise, knows that Trump has already taken responsibility for government shutdowns, and so he's going to spring that on him, and it boxes Trump into a corner.
Trump made that first misstep, but then he realized the misstep, and I think he ultimately won the exchange because he took the strongest position, which is, shoot, I can't say that I'm not going to shut down the government since I've already said I'll shut it down.
So what I've got to do is double down on it.
I will double down on the assertion, and I will tie it to the security of our country.
So he says, you know what?
You're right.
I'll take it.
I will shut down the government for border security.
And now Chuck Schumer got what he wanted.
Chuck Schumer wanted Trump to take responsibility for the shutdown.
Now they've got their clip for their television ads or whatever they're going to run.
But what Donald Trump gets is breaking out of that political stasis.
Decrepit status quo.
And saying, you're right, I'll shut it down.
And I'll do it for border security.
What Donald Trump is betting on here is that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
That government shutdowns aren't that big a deal.
The public doesn't care that much about them.
They aren't going to blame Republicans for 50 years about them.
That it doesn't really matter.
And he's betting that border security is a very important issue for Americans.
Which we know that it is.
Not just among conservatives and Republicans, but among the left as well.
Especially among independents.
So, Schumer got what he wanted, and he's trying to use this issue to scare some more suburban voters who Donald Trump is going to need in 2020.
And what Donald Trump gets out of it is border security, which, while not as popular among the suburban housewives who are...
That's the byword for moderate white people.
That's the...
That's what we're using.
Trump is losing moderate whites.
They say he's losing suburban housewives.
But that issue does really play.
I think that issue does play with the silent majority, with middle America.
I think it plays with just about everybody.
And a lot of polling backs that up.
So they both walk away with what they wanted.
I think Trump ultimately gets the better of that exchange.
But Nancy Pelosi, I mean, you know, you can't teach a...
You can't teach a House minority leader who's been around for a long time new tricks.
How's that for diplomacy?
That's a little nicer than what I was going to say.
So she's probably not going to learn it, but she should learn from President Trump and Chuck Schumer because they're both very good at this.
Let's talk about this Brexit vote.
Brexit is, you remember Brexit.
They took the vote two years ago.
There was a popular referendum among Britons.
To leave the European Union, it won the Brexit leave voters, won 52 to 48.
It was a clear win.
It was a decisive win.
Two years later, finally, Theresa May came to an agreement with Brussels and with the European Union.
But the agreement is awful.
The agreement does not achieve anything.
Brexit.
It leaves the UK subject to a lot of EU regulations.
It leaves them subject to the European Court of Justice.
It leaves them in the Customs Union.
It leaves them in a common rulebook.
It's just a total fake.
So they were supposed to vote on this deal today, and it just couldn't happen.
So here's Theresa May saying that Brexit isn't going to work.
We've now had three days of debate on the withdrawal agreement, setting out the terms of our departure from the EU and the political declaration setting out our future relationship after we have left.
I have listened very carefully to what has been said in this chamber and out of it by members from all sides.
From listening to those views, it is clear that while there is broad support for many of the key aspects of the deal on one issue, the Northern Ireland backstop, there remains widespread and deep concern.
As a result, if we went ahead and held the vote tomorrow, the deal would be rejected by a significant margin.
We will therefore defer the vote scheduled for tomorrow and not proceed to divide the House at this time.
You know, the Brits really put Trump and Nancy Pelosi into perspective.
We talk about the decline of civility, but whenever you look at Parliament, they're always shouting and laughing and screaming and making fun of whoever's speaking.
So she's saying that Brexit isn't going to work.
We'll see what happens now.
They're going to either renegotiate it or they're going to leave the EU without a deal, which in the short run will be really hard.
It'll disrupt air travel.
It will disrupt trade.
It will disrupt a lot of things.
In the long run, I don't think it will matter that much at all.
Or they're going to try to push for another referendum vote, and just like the left in America, they'll just keep voting and keep voting until they get the outcome that they want.
The reason I bring it up is to show just how dangerous these transnational, international unions can be.
Once you're in them, it is virtually impossible to get out of them.
And when we consider things like the United Nations or the International Criminal Court or whatever...
Once you enter into these agreements, it is virtually impossible to get out of them.
That's why our founding fathers, all the way back to George Washington and many other great American leaders, have been so wary about entering into those entangling arrangements.
Britain is figuring that out right now.
And we'll see if ultimately the will of the people is going to be trampled by bureaucrats who won't let them out.
Before we go on this This Is America, a genuinely heartwarming moment at the Nashville airport, a group of kids whose parents were killed in combat.
Who are American servicemen, was being flown to Disney World as part of, you know, it was a nice organization flying these kids down to give them something nice to look forward to.
and there was an announcement over the loudspeaker that they were coming through the airport, and everybody stopped and played the national anthem, and servicemen saluted them, and it's just a great video.
Thank you.
Beautiful video.
It shows you what happens when you don't just look at yourself and you're not only wrapped up in yourself and your own interests and your own needs, and you look at other people, what sort of compassion and charity and sacrifice and suffering, but at least some community in suffering, some moral interactions going on, what sacrifice means for our freedom, for our country, and What it means to love your country and to focus on something outside of the self.
Focus on something greater and something that you really can love.
Beautiful moment.
Obviously, it's going to be a hard Christmas for these kids and just a really nice exchange that didn't have to happen but flowed naturally from people's love of their country and their countrymen.
Really nice thing to see.
And a really nice way to end so that we don't need to end on Nancy Pelosi yapping about nothing.
That's our show for today.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show come back tomorrow and I'll see you again.
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.
Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.
Coming up on The Ben Shapiro Show, Brexit hits a massive snag, France's government parlays with protesters, and we discuss segregated vacation spots.
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