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Jan. 2, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:52
Ep. 273 - The 2020 Campaign Trail Of Tears

Elizabeth Warren announces her intentions to run for president. Then, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spends her Christmas vacation attacking me on Twitter, Romney kicks off 2019 by attacking President Trump, and the NYT makes a surprisingly conservative pick for song of the year. Date: 01-02-19 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The 2020 race officially begins as Elizabeth Warren announces her intentions to run for president.
We will take an early look around the campaign trail of tears.
Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spends her Christmas vacation attacking little old me on Twitter.
What did I ever do?
Future fake Republican Senator Mitt Romney kicks off 2019 by attacking President Trump.
And the New York Times makes a surprisingly conservative pick for the song of the year.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to.
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2020 has already begun.
I feel like 2019, it wasn't even here.
It just passed in the blink of an eye.
Now we're back in 2020 because Liz Warren has kicked off the 2020 presidential race.
Here she is.
In our country, if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to take care of yourself and the people you love.
That's a fundamental promise of America.
A promise that should be true for everyone.
Growing up in Oklahoma, that promise came through for me and my family.
After my older brothers joined the military and I was still just a kid, my daddy had a heart attack and couldn't work.
My mom found a minimum wage job at Sears, and that job saved our house and our family.
My daddy ended up as a janitor, but he raised a daughter who got to be a public school teacher, a law professor, and a senator.
Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren got to, what was there, something about she was raised by people who didn't have a lot of money and then she got to become a senator.
And now, most importantly, she gets to run for president and complain about how terrible that wonderful country is that gave her everything that she has and let someone begin in very modest circumstances in life and rise to become a U.S. senator.
This is what you're going to get.
You're going to get Hillary Clinton 2.0.
Hillary Clinton was a Hillary Clinton to electric boogaloo.
That's going to be the race.
She's running the same playbook, hard, you know, trying to appeal to suburban people, trying to appeal to, well, really her only appeal, I think, and this is what's really going to hurt her, is that her only appeal is to effete white liberals.
Especially women, I guess.
But it's just so narrow, her appeal doesn't really reach that far.
Her main issue here, as you see in this opening, is income inequality.
And income inequality as a campaign issue really means envy.
That's all it means.
It just means envy.
It just means someone has more than I have and I want to have what they have and I want them to have less than they have because that, I guess, will mean that I have more.
It's not really about everyone having more wealth.
It's not about poor people having more wealth.
It's not about the middle class having more wealth.
It's about the rich having less wealth because that's how income inequality works.
Whenever anyone talks about income inequality, you see everybody is increasing in wealth.
GDP is increasing, but the wealthy are getting more wealth relative to the poor people, according to her premise.
But she's not talking about how the poor are getting wealthier.
She's just talking about how awful it is that the rich are getting wealthier at a faster rate than the poor are getting wealthier.
So this is going to be her issue.
I don't think it's really a winning issue.
Maybe if the economy totally tanks, it'll get some traction.
But as a campaign issue...
The 2020 campaign is not going to be about what we would consider traditional political issues.
The 2020 race is going to be about identity.
It's going to be about identity politics.
This is because, so far, we're not going to see a primary contest for the Republicans.
We're only going to see the primary on the left for the Democrats.
And they don't have issues.
They don't have unifying issues.
They might have little pet issues here and there.
The Green New Deal or healthcare or income inequality, but there's no unifying issue.
And because their entire politics now is predicated on identity, on intersectionality, on I'm more of a woman, I'm more of an ethnic minority, I'm more of an oppressed victim group, that's all that this is going to be.
And this is going to kill Warren in particular, because if the race is about identity, she loses on what her actual identity is, which is a privileged old white woman, and she loses on her fake identity because she pretends to be a Native American when she's not.
She's already basically toast because of this issue.
Here is Warren announcing her presidential intentions, and she's being interviewed.
This is on CNN, and she has to dodge the question about her identity.
What's your message to the Democratic primary voter who says, I love where Senator Warren stands on the issues, but I worry about electability.
I worry about a campaign more about Native American ancestry than the middle class.
You know, look, I'm in this fight because I understand what's happening to working families.
I grew up in a paycheck-to-paycheck family.
And my big chance was a commuter college that cost $50 a semester.
I run for office because I'm grateful down to my toes for the opportunities that were given to me, and I am determined that we will give those same opportunities, not just to some of our kids, but to all of our kids.
I think when we fight for something positive, for something big, when we show, not just tell, but show what Democrats will get out there and make happen, I think that's how we win.
So that's the giant elephant in the room is they say, what do you say to people who like you, who like your policy ideas, who like that you're a big liberal and a big left winger, but they say you're not electable because you're a fraud and you lied about your Native American ancestry for...
Decades to advance your career, and now you got called out on it, and you don't have a good answer.
And she doesn't have a good answer.
She doesn't answer that.
She pivots and says, well, we're going to talk about hard scrabble.
I'm so grateful.
I'm blah, blah, blah.
But she doesn't have an answer.
She doesn't have an answer.
She's had months to come up with an answer.
She's had years to come up with an answer.
This issue has plagued her now since, what, 2012, 2014?
And now, President Trump, at least for two years, over two years, has been calling her Pocahontas.
If she had an answer on it, she would have come up with it before she announced her intentions to run for president.
But she doesn't.
And this isn't about Republican versus Democrat or right versus left.
The left itself, the Democrat Party, is going to do a much better job than we would ever do of attacking Liz Warren over this issue.
And they'll do a better job, one, because they have an incentive to do it.
You're going to have a lot of people vying for that presidential nomination, and this is her weak point, and they're going to attack her for it.
But two, identity politics matters much more to the left than it does to us.
When we talk about identity politics on the right, we usually joke about it.
We joke about Pocahontas or Ocasio-Cortez or whatever, pretending to be something that they're not.
But we're kind of laughing.
We don't really care.
It's just kind of a stupid line that they've used, and it's stupid for them to even care about it so much.
It's stupid to pretend to be a victim.
It's stupid to want to be a victim.
I don't want to be a victim.
I want to be a winner.
It's stupid to gripe about privilege.
I want privilege.
I want more privilege.
Give me all the privilege I can have.
I want my family and my friends to have privileges.
I want everybody to have privileges, and they already do.
They were born in, and they live in, the greatest country in the world at the greatest time of peace and prosperity in all of human history.
So that's a good thing.
We shouldn't whine about that or complain.
When the left talks about it, though, They're really earnest.
It really matters to them.
And so she doesn't have that answer, okay, that's going to hurt her.
What people are not talking about, though, is she has this other liability, which is she's even a fraud about the bootstrap stuff.
So, okay, she obviously now is in much better financial circumstances than she was when she was raised and brought up.
But this whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps, I went to a commuter college and I paid my own way through life, is simply not true.
Elizabeth Warren, a lot of people don't know this, Elizabeth Warren married her high school sweetheart.
She had two kids with her high school sweetheart.
Her hubby put her through college.
Her hubby put her through law school.
And then when she got a job at the University of Houston Law Center, she met a visiting professor named Bruce Mann.
She instantly divorced her husband.
This was a quickie divorce.
Not even she made the decision quickly to divorce him.
The divorce was over within 73 days.
She divorces her husband who put her through law school, the father of her two children, within 73 days.
And six months later, she's married to this visiting professor that she met at law school, her old colleague.
At the University of Houston Law Center.
This is a major sex scandal.
We'll get to sex scandals a little bit later.
later when we talk about Mitt Romney's prattling on and moral narrow-mindedness and moral idiocy in many ways.
But this is a major sex scandal, and people haven't brought it up yet.
They will.
The left will bring this up.
Democrats will bring this up.
And we know Liz Warren is nervous about this because she's tried to change the story.
So it's variously been reported that she actually got divorced in 1978, and it was actually two years before she remarried her husband.
Court records show that isn't true, that she was actually divorced in 1980.
Why haven't we heard about this In part, it's because her ex-husband, Jim Warren, died in 2003, so he's not been around for her political career.
He's not been around to give his side of the story.
They will bring this up.
Cory Booker...
Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Hillary, whoever's going to run is going to bring this up.
And she's going to have to answer for it.
Because let's say...
I mean, the big issue is her Native American lying about her ancestry to push her career.
That's the big issue with the identity politics.
But this bootstrapping stuff, what is tantamount to a sex scandal, is going to be the one that I think finishes her off.
And if this is the first you're hearing about it, I guarantee you this will not be the last...
The identity politics, by the way, is now also swinging back around and hitting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I spent one wild night tweeting with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I was living rent-free in her head for a day.
We will get to that in a second.
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I had a wild time with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over my Christmas break.
We haven't been on the air now in over a week.
I flew down after Christmas.
I was down in Florida, and I was just there with some friends.
We were hanging around.
I, you know, being slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, I was exclusively referring to this time as hashtag beach week.
In reference to Brett Kavanaugh's beach excursions with his pals in high school.
And I actually got this shirt that was Brett Kavanaugh holding a beer at his confirmation hearing through Photoshop.
And it said, still like beer.
I was just living in my own conservative bubble.
I was thinking, gosh, nothing could get better than this.
I'm having martinis.
I'm sitting in the sun.
I thought, there's no way that Christmas could get any better than this.
And then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave me such a wonderful Christmas gift.
I haven't thanked her publicly for it, but I really have to thank her for it.
She tweeted out a picture of her congressional plaque.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And she wrote on it.
Don't be fooled by the plaques that we got.
I'm still, I'm still Alex from the Bronx.
Like that song.
Like the, what is it, Jennifer Lopez song, I'm Still Jenny from the Block.
So she tweets that out.
And I look down.
I see this.
I'm sitting there.
A couple martinis in.
I say, oh, you're not from the Bronx.
Or you were from the Bronx when you were a little kid.
But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for her entire life, beginning in kindergarten, when she was just barely conscious, lived in Yorktown Heights, which is a very wealthy suburb.
It's a town in Westchester County.
And coincidentally, it's the town right next to the town that I grew up in.
Except the town that she grew up in is much more homogenous, much less diverse, much more affluent than the town that I grew up in.
But it's right next door.
And we both moved there.
When I was really little, my parents were living in the city, in a borough of the city.
I think that was in Brooklyn.
Alexandria was in the Bronx.
And we both moved up to these towns.
So you have a parallel life story, at least for childhood.
But she keeps pretending that she's from the Bronx.
She actually put this in her campaign website.
She said that she commuted all the time between the Bronx and her school in Westchester, which is not possible.
She went to a public school.
You don't get to commute to public schools.
You're districted into them.
So she lived there.
She lived in Westchester.
Westchester in Yorktown Heights, and maybe she visited the Bronx as a kid.
I visited the Bronx as a kid all the time.
I did my grocery shopping in the Bronx.
That's where all the good Italian food is.
I started smoking cigars at the cigar roller in the Bronx.
I probably spent more time in the Bronx as a kid than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did, but who knows?
I'm not sure.
So anyway, she tweets this out, and I just started tweeting out and pointing out that she didn't grow up in the Bronx.
So I say, you grew up in Yorktown Heights.
The average household wealth in Yorktown Heights, in this suburb, is $1.2 million.
And I say this because when you compare it, the average household wealth in the Bronx is about $400,000.
So it's well more than double, almost triple, in Yorktown Heights where she grew up.
So I'm tweeting out all these things.
People are getting very angry at me.
They're saying, well, but that doesn't mean she's wealthy.
It doesn't mean she had the average wealth.
I said, well, that's not the point.
The point is she grew up in a way more affluent area than she's pretending that she grew up.
She had all the advantages of it.
Excellent school system.
Sent her to whatever college she wanted to go to.
She could have...
She really enjoyed a life of the mind.
She had all of the advantages that would set her up for that.
So, Alex, I'm sitting there, I'm just kind of having fun, and she responds to me.
She'd never responded to me before, although I've frequently pointed out that she's a total fraud about her upbringing.
And so she responds, and she says, quote, In which a Republican, that's me, literally tries mansplaining my own childhood and life to me.
And in true mansplaining form, he's doing it wrong with a great degree of confidence.
It begs the question, is the GOP really sending us their best?
Yeah, that'll show me.
So, for those of you who are listening, there are all of the fallacies in there, right?
All of the fallacies.
You've got its ad hominem.
She starts talking about mansplaining as though I'm not allowed to have an opinion because I'm a man.
If I were a woman, I can have an opinion.
If I'm a woman, I can point out the incontrovertible fact...
That this liar did not grow up in the Bronx.
She grew up in Yorktown Heights.
But because I'm a man, I'm not allowed to do that.
She then, obviously there are all the misspellings she uses literally in a very emphatic way.
And she's saying that I'm explaining her own childhood to her.
Well, no, I'm not.
I'm explaining her own childhood to everybody else that she's duping.
She knows her childhood.
She knows she didn't grow up in the Bronx.
She knows she grew up in a beautiful place with little deer jumping around and excellent, heavily taxpayer-funded public schools that was able to send her to a private college.
And she knows that.
But she's lying to people, and so I'm explaining it to them.
And then she also says it begs the question...
Which she uses incorrectly.
She says it begs the question, as if to say it raises the question, but that's not what that means.
It means to beg the question is to presume the conclusion of your own argument.
This is a sort of minor semantic point, but it is ironic because she's saying that I'm of some sort of inferior mind when she is blatantly misusing the English language, but that's par for the course.
She's not the expert.
And then she says, is the GOP really sending us their best?
I'm not an elected Republican politician.
I hold no office.
I'm not a member of Congress.
I'm not a senator.
I'm not a governor.
I'm not a mayor.
She is the public servant here.
She is the one holding office.
I am someone with a show who is pointing out that she is a liar.
And she instantly responds.
So this is how you know that she's scared.
She says she grew up in the Bronx.
I say she did not grow up in the Bronx.
Her response to that never denies the charge.
She calls me a liar.
She says I'm mansplaining.
She says that I'm not the best.
Okay, but she never says that she grew up in the Bronx anymore.
She can't say that now because she didn't.
So then I was still living in her head, and this was obviously becoming a big thing on the internet, but So then she keeps trying to respond to this and retweeting things, and then she finally gives her better response.
This is actually the response that she should stick with, even though it's BS.
It's much more plausible, which is, quote, Yes, as everyone knows, I grew up between two worlds and experienced firsthand how a child's zip code can shape their destiny.
It was scrubbing those households' toilets with my mother that I saw and breathed income inequality.
I decided to make a difference.
You, Michael, decided to do this.
Okay, where to begin?
Now, she's making the claim that she scrubbed toilets with her mother.
I don't know if she did.
I don't know if she didn't.
Her father's an architect, and she's living in northern Westchester.
Maybe she did.
We've never really heard about this before.
This was not a plank of her campaign for Congress in 2018, so I'm a little skeptical.
If you're going to run on identity politics, you'd probably talk about all of your life experience scrubbing toilets.
We know that she worked as a community organizer, basically.
She was a professional activist and a bartender in New York, living in Manhattan, by the way, not living in the Bronx.
I don't know.
I'll reserve judgment.
I just don't have enough knowledge to call that one way or the other.
What I can point out, though, is that she didn't grow up between two worlds.
She didn't.
She grew up in northern Westchester.
She grew up in total privilege.
She grew up in one of the most privileged environments in the history of the world.
She benefited immensely from those privileges.
I don't begrudge her those privileges.
Good for her.
I'm glad she got to enjoy them.
It's ridiculous now, however, that she's pretending that she's a victim when she's not.
I grew up in almost the same privilege.
Slightly less wealthy town.
It's okay.
It's not exactly the same, but okay, fine.
Almost the same privilege.
Almost in the same geographic area exactly.
The difference here, I don't pretend that I'm a victim.
I'm really happy.
I'm really pleased that we live in this wonderful country of ours and that I got to grow up with those things.
She does.
She lies about it.
This is the only answer she's going to be able to muster, this I grew up in two worlds thing.
But she didn't.
She's a shrewd politician.
She obviously, she was able to upend this longtime incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley in that district.
She was able to get in there.
She is pretty shrewd in that way.
She should not be underestimated.
This is her weakness.
I think some conservatives even have said to me, oh, Michael, don't point out that she is a total fraud on her biography.
Just talk about why socialism is so bad.
Just talk about why she's wrong on the issues.
You're not going to beat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by pointing out how awful socialism is.
Her assent is not about issues.
Her assent is all about a very base appeal to identity politics.
That's what it's all about.
If all we had to do was point out how awful socialism is, it would be over.
You'd point to Venezuela.
You'd point to North Korea.
You'd point to China.
You'd point to Russia.
You'd point to everywhere.
Cuba.
You'd point to everywhere that socialism has ever been tried and how awful it is and what it does.
How it destroys whole people.
How it destroys not only the economic life of people, but the spiritual life of people as well.
But that doesn't work.
That doesn't work on the people who are following her.
What does work is that she's still Alex from the Bronx.
I actually sort of feel bad for Ocasio-Cortez because I don't think she tweeted that picture out.
I assume it was her social media intern.
She probably knows that this is a really tricky issue for her.
She knows that during the campaign when it was called out that she lied about her background, that she had to change her campaign bio.
She scrubbed it from her website.
She knows this is a huge weakness.
And whatever...
Dumb social media intern took that photo, just walked her right into that trap.
But this is the trap.
This is the wedge.
This is where you separate her.
A young darling of the left, a fundraiser now for the Democrats, a future leader of that party possibly, moving it horribly, horrifically to the left.
This is her weakness.
This is how you separate her from her base.
And we should talk about it all the time.
It's gonna kill Liz Warren's presidential campaign, and it could really be the way to go in and stop Cortez.
Because I think some people on the right, they joke, they say, "Oh, she's not very intelligent," Oh, she says stupid things.
She did upend Joe Crowley.
She did make it to Congress.
She has managed to get herself in the newspapers all the time.
People refer to her as a leader of the left.
She is not to be totally dismissed.
She really could pose a threat because the ideas that she holds are awful, anti-human ideas that would destroy economies that have destroyed whole scores of people and left them enslaved all around the world, all throughout history.
And we should take that seriously and we should go after her with everything we've got.
A lot more to get to because we're not just going to talk about attacks from the left.
We're going to talk about attacks from ostensibly the right, Mitt Romney.
Then we've got one of the most shocking conservative cultural moments of the year.
The New York Times chooses a shockingly conservative song to be its song of the year.
And then the absolute worst video that you all missed while you were...
Hanging around with your families on Christmas and New Year's.
We'll get to all of that.
But first, coming up tomorrow, don't miss our next episode of Daily Wire backstage.
Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klaben, Elisha Krause, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, and little old me will be ringing in the new year while drinking tumblers of melted leftist snowflakes.
So be sure to tune in.
As always, only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions.
Make sure to subscribe today.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag, you get all these things.
What day is it?
Today is Wednesday.
That means that tomorrow is the mailbag.
If you subscribe, you get to ask questions in the mailbag.
Get your mailbag questions in.
But this is really what you want.
This is a nice local vintage of the Yorktown Heights leftist tiers.
These are really good...
They don't taste very much like the Leftist Tears from the Bronx, actually.
They taste very, very different.
You should go check it out.
Get your Leftist Tears Tumblr.
but we'll be right back with a lot more.
Mitt Romney is kicking off the new year by attacking the Republican president.
That's our boy.
That's Romney.
That's the Mitt Romney we've all come to know and expect.
This is what he wrote in the Washington Post.
A ridiculous, frivolous, left-wing rag that used to have some respectability but certainly doesn't anymore.
It makes the New York Times look positively objective.
He wrote, quote,"...the Trump presidency made a deep dissent in December." Presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable, and it is in this province where the incumbent's shortfall has been most glaring.
Trump has no character!
That's what he's saying.
Don't you get it?
He has no character.
So, does Mitt Romney have character?
Because Mitt Romney accepted the support of Donald Trump in 2012.
Do you guys remember that?
There are some things that you just can't imagine happening in your life.
This is one of them.
Being in Donald Trump's magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight.
I'm so honored and pleased to have his endorsement.
And of course, I'm looking for the endorsement of the people of Nevada.
Oh, it's a delight, is it?
It's such a privilege.
It's a pleasure.
It's an honor to have Donald Trump's endorsement in 2012.
Was Donald Trump a different person in 2012?
Because as I recall, Donald Trump was one of the people leading the birther question, the birther movement.
I guess Hillary Clinton sort of started it.
But Donald Trump was leading that, was making a big media splash in 2011.
So that was all going on.
And Mitt Romney, thank you, Donald.
What an honor to be here in your beautiful, wonderful hotel.
But then he didn't like him.
Do you remember when Mitt Romney didn't like Donald Trump?
Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.
His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.
His domestic policies would lead to recession.
His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe.
He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.
And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.
His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who work for them.
He inherited his business.
He didn't create it.
And whatever happened to Trump Airlines?
How about Trump University?
And then there's Trump Magazine.
And Trump vodka.
And Trump steaks.
And Trump mortgage.
A business genius he is not.
Wow, a whole lot changes in four years, doesn't it?
Because Mitt Romney, you know, the man of impeccable character, such an upright, honest broker, impeccable character man.
He loved Trump.
He was so happy to have his endorsement.
Trump did so well in business.
That's one of the reasons, by the way, why he really loved having his endorsement in 2012.
Then he hated him.
It's not like he just said, I don't like Trump.
It's not like he just said, I don't support Trump.
He went on a diatribe, a totally gratuitous diatribe about how he's a fraud, he's a charlatan, he's worthless, his word is utterly worthless, so he does that.
And then what happened when he ran for Senate from Utah?
I know you thought he was from Massachusetts or from Michigan, or then I guess he was living in New Hampshire for a while when he ran for president, but actually now Mitt Romney is from Utah, the totally upright, moral, honest broker.
He lives in Utah, and when he was trying to become the senator from Utah, he welcomed Donald Trump's endorsement.
That was, what, five minutes ago?
That was about two months ago, and he tweeted out, quote, Thank you, Mr.
President, for the support.
I hope that over the course of the campaign, I also earn the support and endorsement of the people of Utah.
So he basically just echoed the same thing he said about Trump when he was being really nice and nice in 2012.
And then what happens?
Just a few months later, he turns around and stabs him in the back in a completely unnecessary article for the Washington Post.
That's Mitt Romney.
That upright guy.
If only Trump had the character of a little, quizzling, weakling, backstabbing Mitt Romney.
If only he had that wonderful character.
This, by the way, isn't just with Trump.
Lest you think that only Donald Trump provokes this sort of wishy-washy, dishonest, just series of lies from Mitt Romney.
Just remember, this is when Mitt Romney was running for the Senate.
Against Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts.
That was his old state before.
Now he lives in Utah.
He was asked about the time of Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s, the great Reagan revolution.
Where was our honest, dignified, full of integrity conservative leader Mitt Romney then?
Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush.
I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.
What a joke.
What a joke this man is.
I've never been a huge Mitt Romney fan.
I voted for him in the general election in 2012.
That was after working for two of his opponents in the 2012 Republican primary.
I did my best to deprive Mitt Romney of the nomination that year.
And then ultimately, obviously, he would have been better than Barack Obama.
But what a joke.
To be lectured on...
On politics, on governance, on the presidency, or on honesty, or on integrity from Mitt Romney.
Give me a break.
The guy, he's never met in office he didn't want to run for.
He's been running for president forever.
He's been probably envisioning that since his father failed to win the presidency.
He's...
He invented Obamacare as the governor of Massachusetts.
He talks out of both sides of his mouth.
He ended up losing the 2012 election in part because Obama was a better candidate, but in part because of major gaffes, in part because he called half of the country a bunch of degenerate people out on the dole, and he was caught on tape doing that.
He said 47% are takers, which really hurt him in public opinion polls.
And then when Candy Crowley, during that debate with Barack Obama, Well, look,
he's been pretty conservative, but he's a bad guy.
But he's really bad.
And Mitt Romney, he's a really good guy.
He's a really good guy with character.
And Trump is a terrible degenerate.
Without saying that Mitt Romney is the worst person in the world, without saying that Donald Trump is the best person in the world, certainly neither of those statements are true.
Character is a little more complicated than this.
Roger Kimball had a great piece in American Greatness over, I think it was over the weekend, where he talked about a line from Cardinal Newman, John Henry Newman, a great cardinal of the Catholic Church, formerly an Anglican priest.
He's going to become a saint this year.
And he pointed out,"...a good man may make a bad king.
Profligates have been great statesmen or magnanimous political leaders." We hear sometimes this line, which is, as Roger Kimball points out, mistranslated from Heraclitus, that a man's character is his destiny.
And that actually might not be entirely a fair translation of it.
But what is the point?
Is the idea that if someone is a bad guy, he can't be a good...
I don't know.
Does Donald Trump have good characters?
I guess the question is being raised by the Romney types and by the anti-Trump right as well as left.
And the answer to that question is, compared to whom?
Does he have absolutely good character?
No.
Look, the same people who tell us that will certainly tell us that all fall short of the glory of God.
All has sinned.
So the question is, does he have good character compared to whom?
Does he have good character compared to Bill Clinton?
Yeah.
Yeah, he does.
Bill Clinton's accused of rape.
And I know the word credibly has been belabored a little bit in recent months, but pretty credibly accused of rape in a way that Donald Trump has not.
Does he have a better character than LBJ?
Just to talk on the women thing, LBJ was a notorious womanizer.
LBJ held meetings with his advisors sitting on the toilet.
He would pull out his genitals in public frequently.
He used awful language.
He used awful slurs against people, racial slurs, all of the sort.
How about JFK?
JFK is a famous womanizer.
How about FDR? Died in his mistress's arms.
How about Grover Cleveland?
The first Democrat president, I suppose, in the 15 years after the Civil War.
I think that's right.
Taking out Andrew Johnson.
He was caught in a big sex scandal.
He fathered a kid out of wedlock.
One of the great Republican lines was, Mama, where's my pa?
And actually, the Democrat response to that when Grover Cleveland won the election was, he's in the White House, ha ha ha.
So there was this debate going on even then.
Of course.
Donald Trump has at least as good character as those guys.
But what about even on these other issues?
Donald Trump, as a matter of what he's done in office, has done wonderful conservative things.
And he's kept his promises.
He's been true to his word at least at a higher rate than virtually any of his predecessors.
Can the same be true of Romney?
Can the same be said of Romney?
Romney invented Obamacare.
That's what he did.
He invented Obamacare.
He was a bad candidate.
He lost.
He kept losing.
He attacks his own side.
He takes an endorsement from someone, then he stabs them in the back, then he says nice things about them again, he stabs them in the back.
Are you really going to tell me that Mitt Romney has universally better character than Donald Trump?
He doesn't.
In some ways he does, and in some ways he doesn't, because character is complex in that way.
Harry Reid right now, who's dying of pancreatic cancer, so we have to say nice things about him because he's not doing very well.
Let's not forget in the glow of that upcoming hagiography that Harry Reid was a profligate liar throughout his entire life.
Harry Reid accused Mitt Romney of not paying any taxes and he just lied about it.
Everyone knew he was just lying about it.
Harry Reid is saying Trump is amoral, no conscience, worst president ever.
We're imbibing this line right now, not only from the left, but because of people like Mitt Romney from the right as well.
History changes very, very quickly.
If you had asked even conservatives in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, according to many conservatives, was a dunce divorcee, and according to the left, he emboldened racists and Nazis.
That was until he became the greatest president of the 21st century.
History changes very quickly, and I'm just a little sick of it.
I'm all for pointing out the myriad moral failings of Donald Trump, and there are many.
He points them out, too.
He admits it as well.
But to hear it from Mitt Romney, who pretends to be this perfect guy, give me a break.
Talk about totally missing the point, and now we're going to have to suffer this guy as a U.S. senator.
Great way to start off the new year.
You know what would have been a good idea, actually, is if instead we had gotten a Republican senator from Utah.
That would have been nice.
But there is some good news as well, which is that the New York Times, they chose a song of the year to round out 2018.
And so you figure it's going to be this crazy left-wing song.
I think they sort of think it's a crazy left-wing song.
I think the song they picked is pretty conservative.
The song is by the 1975.
It's called Love It If We Made It.
The New York Times writes, in a swirl of harp-like arpeggios over a stubborn beat, Maddie Healy rails at hypocrisy and disinformation, complaining, modernity has failed us, and admits to individual ambition, despite it all, a millennial's plight.
Here's just a little clip of the song.
So you might not have been able to hear
it, and obviously it's not the most creative, musically speaking, and I'm not going to be listening to this all the time, but the lyrics are pretty interesting.
Because on the one hand, on the surface level, it sounds like it's this left-wing polemic.
But in a really deeper way, I think it's actually articulating everything conservatives are complaining about about the culture.
Everything conservatives are pointing out is wrong about the culture and that we need to change.
He says, F-ing in a car, shooting heroin, saying controversial things just for the hell of it.
Selling melanin and then suffocate the black man.
Start with misdemeanors, then we'll make a business out of them.
And we can find out the information, access all the applications that are hardening our positions based on miscommunication.
So you've got, he's talking about obviously the opioid epidemic.
He's talking about sort of childish, animalistic behavior, not just on drugs, but even on sex.
F-ing in a car, talking about promiscuity in that way.
And then saying controversial things just for the hell of it, just using words loosely.
You know, words are in the act of creation, right?
God says, let there be light, and there is light.
Christ is the word.
It breathes it out.
You always hear the word of God.
Man, in his act in the Garden of Eden, names all of the animals.
Our politics is the use of political speech, is the use of persuasive speech to have civil government.
Animals have brute force, but human beings use our reason through our speech to persuade each other of things and to have a civil society.
He's talking about all this loose language.
Selling melanin.
Selling melanin is one of the lyrics.
To talk about identity.
To talk about...
Pimping out identity.
Pimping out your skin color.
And suffocate the black man.
What does that mean?
I think the New York Times and the left read that line as, you know, police killing black people or hurting, you know, hands up, don't shoot, or Eric Garner or any of those people.
But what does it also mean?
What does it mean when we've heard just a couple days ago Kanye West talking about how he feels that as a black man he is being bullied into supporting one particular point of view?
He feels that he's being forced into one particular point of view.
He's not allowed to use his speech, his reasonable speech.
He's being bullied around.
And then he talks about the information, accessing the applications, accessing the information.
And then this line is what really convinced me.
This song is pretty conservative.
It says, This is what conservatives think.
We think modernity has failed us.
We think that this modern project of divorcing our civilization from the religious underpinnings that created the culture, that created the politics of that civilization, is a fool's errand.
It's impossible.
It has coarsened us.
It's the reason why suicide is spiking, anxiety is spiking, depression is spiking.
Younger generations are far more likely than older generations to be suicidal, to be hooked on depression pills.
There is a real cultural malaise, even in the midst of a material wealth and a material growth, and it's because the civilization has decayed spiritually.
It has decayed culturally, and it is nearly rotten to the core.
Modernity has failed us, and I'd love it if we made it.
Yes, I'd love it if we made it.
Yes, I'd love it if we made it.
Next stanza.
And poison me, daddy, the drugs, talking about putting drugs in your veins.
I got the jones right through my bones.
Jonesing, meaning I'm craving the drugs.
And jones, there's also a sort of, because of the craving and the imagery of the bones, there's a sexual image here too.
Jonesing for jumping my bones.
Write it on a piece of stone.
A beach of drowning three-year-olds.
What does this evoke?
This evokes this migrant crisis.
You've got people pouring in.
And on the left-wing interpretation of this, the tragedy is that these awful conservatives won't knock down national borders and let the kids in.
Maybe the crisis is those awful incentives in the first place.
Turning, pulling people in, drawing people to commit these acts which are legally and intellectually insupportable.
You couldn't possibly have a nation with open borders.
It would cease to be a nation.
Rest in peace, little peep.
That's a guy who died of drugs.
The poetry is in the streets.
Jesus save us.
Modernity has failed us.
This line, I don't know how, you can read other lines in other ways.
The kid drowning, maybe you can read in another way, or the saying outrageous things just for the hell of it, you can read in a different way.
But look at that juxtaposition.
Jesus save us, modernity has failed us.
We're saying modernity, this idea of breaking our civilization away from its religious underpinnings, has failed.
Jesus, save us.
Save us.
Not just the religious foundation, but the incarnate reason.
There's the F your feelings.
Truth is only hearsay.
And then what he's saying is, Jesus, the way and the truth and the life, save us.
That's our only antidote against modernity.
Tell me something I didn't know.
Consultation, degradation, fossil fueling, masturbation, immigration, liberal kitsch.
He's not just talking about left-wing issues.
He's mocking the left here.
Immigration, liberal kitsch.
There's a lot of liberal kitsch.
What's an example of this?
Kneeling on a pitch.
Kneeling on a pitch, which is what Colin Kaepernick is doing in his absurd protest against the United States.
Then they quote Donald Trump.
I moved on her like a female dog.
So he's getting the attack in on Trump there.
But I think a lot of people would be happy to criticize President Trump in context.
They would be able to criticize the rhetoric, the way that we speak to each other, the way that we interact with the culture.
Of course, that's not to attack Trump for what he's doing.
He's doing what he's got to do in a culture where he's got to do it.
But it is to bemoan the degradation of that culture and to say, modernity has failed us, Jesus, save us.
Unrequited house with seven pools.
It goes on and on and on.
And I'd love it if we made it, and I'd love it if we made it.
But modernity has failed us.
I mean, the song goes on and on and on.
I'm really pleased that the New York Times missed out what this song means.
And I think actually maybe the left is sensing something too, which we are sensing, which is something has gone seriously wrong here.
And now it's not just that taxes are too low for wealthy people.
It's not just whatever, that they don't want to be fighting some war, they want a different war over that war.
It's not just that.
They're sensing something's rotten with the culture.
Something's rotten in our spiritual life.
And I think they're inching closer to what that might be.
Maybe it's that modernity has failed us.
Maybe Jesus has to save us.
I'd love it if we made it.
Yes, I'd love it if we made it.
And I'm hopeful looking into 2019.
I hope you are too.
We've got a lot more tomorrow.
A lot more to get to that we can't get to.
But that's just the way it is.
Glad to be back.
I missed you all very much.
I hope you had a very good Christmas and New Year.
And I'll see you tomorrow.
Get those mailbag questions in.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia Villareal.
Executive producer Jeremy Borey.
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.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Happy New Year.
It's 2019.
We're going to look at the news and remember why we're here and what we're fighting for and why, I think, we're living in a quiet place.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
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