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Jan. 8, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:43
Ep. 276 - The Left Is Moving Further Left

For the first time in history, the majority of Democrats identify as liberal. Then, New York City institutes socialist healthcare, Brooklyn re-segregates its schools, and the NYT frets about how the government shutdown is affecting craft beer producers. Date: 01-08-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For the first time in history, the majority of Democrats identify as liberal.
We will analyze what the Democrats' leftward lurch means for American politics.
Then, New York City institutes socialist health care, Brooklyn resegregates its schools, and the New York Times, in the New York Timesiest articles ever, frets about how the government shutdown is affecting craft beer producers.
Know the horror!
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Oh, you know, when this shutdown was just affecting my tax returns and border security and the Coast Guard, and that I could handle.
That I could handle.
But now that it's affecting craft beer producers, Mr.
President, please, you have to end it.
End the madness!
I can't, if I can't drink new, pretentious, usually not that great tasting beers, what is this country for?
What are we winning?
Talk about a Pyrrhic victory.
We'll get to that in a second.
But first, we have to talk about this new Gallup poll showing that Democrats are lurching to the left.
We talk about this all the time in modern politics.
We say the parties are becoming so polarized.
The two sides, the left and the right, are becoming so polarized.
That isn't exactly true.
One side is becoming polarized, and it seems to be the left.
It seems to be the Democrats.
This new poll from Gallup shows most Democrats now identify as liberal rather than moderate or conservative.
You might say, oh wow, Democrats are liberal, Michael.
Wow, this is shocking.
Breaking!
Stop the presses!
This actually is pretty surprising.
As recently as 2008, only 38% of Democrats identified as liberal.
Others would say, oh, I'm a moderate Democrat, or even some conservative Democrats.
This used to be true of the Democrat Party.
There were the progressives, and there were the blue dogs, and the blue dog Democrats.
Now, I guess the closest thing would be a guy like Joe Manchin in West Virginia, although even he is basically a progressive Democrat.
Just on a few issues, he has to tack a little bit to the right, something like Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation, for instance.
Otherwise, his constituents will throw him out of office.
But now we're seeing the Democrats are solidly, for the major part, liberal.
This is the first time since Gallup started tracking this, so it may be the first time in history, which I suspect it is.
Gallup's been tracking this since the 1990s.
But what happens on the Republican side?
On the Republican side now, you see 73% of Republicans identify as conservative.
So many more Republicans identify as conservative than Democrats identify as liberal.
But what you've got to track here is the change, because this basically hasn't changed at all.
It hasn't really changed since last year, and even if you go back to 2008...
It's only ticked up three percentage points.
Back in 2008, 70% of Republicans identified as conservative, whereas only 38% of Democrats identified as liberal.
What does this mean for American politics?
It means that while right now all the talking heads, New York Times, the pundits, want you to focus on Trump, how Trump is changing American politics, how he's totally thrown the rule book out, it's all different now, the actual change that's going on is on the left.
The actual change is in the Democrat Party.
When you look at how Donald Trump has governed the country, is there anything shocking?
Coming completely out of left field?
Not really.
He's governing as a fairly conservative Republican.
Not totally conservative Republican, but fairly conservative.
On some issues, a little more center-right.
On others, he's solidly conservative.
There's nothing new about that.
I guess he's more conservative in many ways than George W. Bush or his father, George H.W. Bush, but he's basically on line with Ronald Reagan.
He's modeled his entire campaign after Ronald Reagan.
Make America Great Again is a line he took from Ronald Reagan, although Ronald Reagan said it more nicely because he had the word let's in front of it.
Let's make America great again.
Trump obviously in the imperative, do it, do it or else, make America great again.
But basically he's within the regular conservative Republican mold.
The change that's happening right now is a generational change.
And that's why you're seeing these new characters who are entering Congress.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Julian Castro, not in Congress, but you see all these up-and-coming Democrat politicians who are much more left-wing.
This is an age gap.
Don't be fooled by the outlier, which is Bernie Sanders, who's 350 years old.
This is a big age gap.
And you're seeing a big fight breaking out now within the Democrat Party.
Now, how is this happening?
Why all of a sudden do you see even people like Nancy Pelosi look conservative compared to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
I don't think it's some big seismic event that's happened.
I think what's happening with these people, give them credit, give Alexandria Ocasio credit, give Ilhan Omar or whoever credit, they are taking progressivism to its logical conclusion.
They are taking the Democrat Party to its logical conclusion.
For decades now, the Democrats have been ferreting out conservatives, ferreting out moderates, and these guys are taking it to where it ultimately will go.
How does a blue dog make any sense in today's Democrat Party?
Just that one issue, Hillary Clinton talked about it in 2008, that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
This was Hillary trying to both bring the progressives with her and say, we're going to have a lot of legal abortion, but bring the conservatives with her too, the blue dogs, and say, but we shouldn't have too much abortion.
It's not a good thing, but we're going to still have it.
If abortion is morally similar to murder, why should it be legal?
If abortion is not morally similar to murder, if it's just a tonsillectomy, basically, why should it be rare?
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
The difference here is that the GOP is intellectually diverse.
The right, broadly, has a lot of pieces to it.
So you've got the neocons, the neoconservatives.
You've got the traditionalists.
You've got the libertarians.
You've got the religious right.
You've got more populist elements.
You've got all of these things going on, and they don't agree on everything.
They kind of disagree on many issues, on the market, on free trade.
On religion, on culture.
They disagree on so many things.
How do they all come together on the right?
They came together largely because of what was called the conservative movement.
They came together largely because of William F. Buckley Jr.
who had a philosophy or a practice called fusionism where you fuse together these different parts of what could be conservatism into a coherent governing coalition.
That's why we have intellectual diversity.
What does the left have?
They just have progressivism.
They have progressivism and the last remnants of blue dog conservatives.
And they've been going away for decades and decades now.
Now you're finally seeing that turn, that pivot, and the majority are progressive and liberal.
What is this going to look like?
The first question it raises is, can the Democrat House push a unified agenda?
I don't know.
I mean, I mean, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first congressional action when she got elected was to take over Nancy Pelosi's office and protest her own Speaker of the House.
How is that going to work?
I mean, right now, just to use Ocasio as sort of the epitome of this new, young, progressive coalition, she's pushing something called the Green New Deal.
This amounts to a federal takeover of the economy.
There's nothing short of that.
This is the federal government coming in and getting its hand in just about every sector of the economy.
It would ban fossil fuels in most things by 2030.
It would mean that we have to power our homes on renewable energies like wind and solar, which is a complete pipe dream.
It is like powering them on unicorns and gumdrops.
It's obscenely expensive.
It's not efficient whatsoever.
But within this Green New Deal, it sounds like it's just talking about the environment.
There are all these other insane progressive platforms like a basic income, so just guaranteed money from the federal government, single-payer health care, socialist medicine, and handouts to left-wing groups and to unions, and it will cost an estimated $40 trillion over the course of and it will cost an estimated $40 trillion over the course of Where is she going to get the money?
She doesn't know where she's going to get the money.
She doesn't have an answer to that.
That is the kind of radicalism that we're seeing, but this is not, I really want to stress this, this is not some new crazy thing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invented.
This has been building a We're good to go.
Democrats a little more conservative?
They are, but they don't make a lot of sense.
They're pretty incoherent.
Now we have a choice.
You know, we've got this government shutdown going on and Cabot Phillips, whom I love over at Campus Reform, he went out to college campuses and he wanted to ask them what they thought of Donald Trump's quotes on illegal immigration and the government shutdown.
And the big spin here is they weren't really Trump's quotes.
They were quotes from Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton.
And then the kids are all shocked when they find out that the quotes that they hate from Trump really came from Democrats.
Here he is.
I'm going to read a few quotes here from President Trump talking about the need for the southern border wall.
First quote, we should spend money to build a barrier to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in.
Another quote, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the U.S. undetected, undocumented and unchecked.
Quote, illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.
Until the American people are convinced, we will stop future flows of illegal immigration.
We'll make no progress.
When you hear quotes like that, what's your reaction to them?
It's divisive.
I think America is a land of opportunity, a place for inclusion.
I just really think it's kind of hateful speech in general.
It's just a negative message.
When he talks about illegal immigrants, it's just one rude to talk about people like that.
It kind of underlies a lot of things about discrimination and people and their prejudices and things like that.
So I feel like that stuff is touchy to talk about.
There are racial biases kind of sort of deep embedded in there.
In a word, I'd say it's more jingoist.
Well, I think his demeanor overall is just unacceptable.
I think just the way that he's referring to people across the wall is very dehumanizing.
So rhetoric like that is not helpful?
No, not at all.
What if I told you these were from Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton?
How about that?
How about that?
So the point of the video, it's a funny video because the point of the video is that these kids all hate Donald Trump and then so they hate anything he says and then they find out it's Democrats and then they're kind of surprised.
That's funny.
That's totally funny.
I think there's something more interesting going on here though, which is what this video shows is not...
How kids are hypocritical and how they just hate Trump as a knee-jerk reaction.
I think what it shows is how radically the Democrat Party has changed in just 10 years or even less than 10 years.
Look, politicians, especially the Clintons and Obama and Schumer and Pelosi, they'll just say whatever is politically convenient, right?
That's what they do.
They change with the wind as long as they follow their progressive base.
What this shows now, I think, is even if you tell those kids, I mean, you can actually see some of them as the video goes on.
They say, well, okay, but this is what I think now.
And that's really the point.
Chuck Schumer of 2006 could never get elected with this Democrat party.
Hillary Clinton could never get elected.
Well...
I guess that's just a perennial true statement.
Hillary Clinton could never get elected.
But she certainly couldn't get elected now with the position she held in 2008.
This is the same thing going on all throughout the Congress and throughout the country.
This party, this Democrat party is much further left.
It's not a shared problem.
It's not a, oh, both sides are to blame.
It's not.
It is the Democrat Party uniquely is moving far to the left.
And frankly, maybe it's not the worst thing in the world.
It's bad because it poses a danger to the country if they get into power.
But it's good in that it gives Americans a choice.
They have a clear choice.
At least they're being honest.
We used to say, oh, these Democrats, they're hiding their true objectives, which are...
Socialism, or socialist health care, or their true objectives on marriage, which is to redefine marriage, or their true objective on abortion, which is abortion on demand without apology.
And now they're being honest about it.
In many ways, the point of the conservative movement, when Bill Buckley started it in the 1950s, was to give Americans a choice, not an echo.
That's what Barry Goldwater said when he was running for president.
Now we have that choice.
Trump tonight is going to be giving a speech on the government shutdown and border security.
He's going to be giving a speech.
Now the Democrats want to give a response to that speech.
Chuck and Nancy want to give a response to that speech.
Unprecedented for an Oval Office speech.
A lot of conservatives are complaining about this.
A lot of Democrats are complaining that Trump is giving his speech in the first place.
I think it's a great thing.
I think this is, one, it's a good thing because it's reality TV. This is the politics we've elected.
But two, it's good for our democratic system to hear both sides and at least we have an honest choice.
And if we go down for it, which I hope we don't, at least you can say, well, people were presented the information and unfortunately they voted away our great country.
Some lefties, just on the Trump speech itself, are very upset that Donald Trump is speaking from the Oval Office.
Every president gives Oval Office addresses, and the news networks always cover it.
But because the mainstream media uniquely hate Donald Trump, they're actually calling for the speech either not to be covered or even to be censored.
Here are that dynamic duo from CNN, Fredo Cuomo and Don Lemon.
Do you think it should be, I don't know, a delay of some sort?
And then you can...
Because people believe it.
The president will say what he has to say.
People will believe it whether the facts are true or not.
I guess it's a chance you take with any president, but this one is different.
And then by the time the rebuttals come on, We've already promoted propaganda, possibly, unless he gets up there and he tells the truth.
He has his right to make the argument to the American people.
And by the way, wanting barriers along the border is not propaganda.
No, no, no.
It's not immoral.
It's not wrong.
Do you think it should be, I don't know, a delay of some sort?
And you can see right now, it zooms in on Chris Cuomo's face.
Do you want a delay of some sort?
And you just see his eyebrows furrow.
I think that they employ Don Lemon at CNN just to make Chris Cuomo look reasonable.
Ha ha ha!
So, he's there, and at least Chris Cuomo, to his credit, says, no, we shouldn't delay it.
But that's Don Lemon.
Don Lemon representing the new school of the Democrat Party.
Chris Cuomo, the whole Cuomo family, representing an older school of the Democrat Party.
Chris Cuomo's brother is Andy Cuomo.
He's the governor of New York.
Their father, Mario Cuomo, was the governor, I think, for 75 years in New York.
Very long-term governor.
He was a likely Democrat presidential candidate.
He's actually the one who invented the Democrat stance, the moderate Democrat stance on abortion, which is, I support abortion even though I'm opposed to it personally.
Again, which makes no sense.
Why are you opposed to it personally?
Because it's morally equivalent to murder.
So why do you support it publicly?
Because you don't care if we kill all those little black babies?
You just don't want your precious little babies to be killed?
Doesn't make a lot of sense.
But you see that right there on CNN, that difference between the new Democrats of Don Lemon, the old Democrats of Chris Cuomo.
And those new Democrats, they're not just calling for progressive programs, they're calling for censorship.
They're calling for delays.
They're saying this guy is different, so we've got to treat him differently.
The networks, by the way, are playing into this.
It's not just the hysterical people on CNN. It's the mainstream news networks are taking Democrat talking points hook, line, and sinker in the run-up to tonight's speech.
President Trump set to make his case for a border wall as the government shutdown enters its 18th day.
Democrats fighting back, saying the speech will be nothing but malice and misinformation.
Democrats are clearly concerned about the nation, only hearing one side of this argument and not getting the facts.
They are demanding equal time tonight to respond, saying in a statement, quote, "If the president's past statements are any indication, it will be full of malice and misinformation." - Democrats have vowed to fight any attempt to bypass Congress with legal challenges.
- Hold on, let me guess. - They also allege that if the president's past statements are any indication-- - What will it be, guys? - Is addressed tonight, Oh, malice and misinformation.
I didn't see that one coming.
Did you see that one coming?
What's astounding about this is not that the networks are playing up Democrat talking points, but the Democrat talking point here is not about something that has happened.
It's not reacting to a speech that has already been given.
It's predicting the future.
It's predicting what the man will say, saying, you know, in the future, Donald Trump is going to speak with malice and misinformation.
And then the networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, those guys are covering this as though this is not only fact, But fact in the sense that it has already happened.
It hasn't already happened.
It's happening tonight, but they're already covering it because whatever the Democrats say must be true, even if it hasn't happened yet.
So they're all playing into this.
We'll see what happens tonight.
We might get a speech and a response.
If we do, that's fine.
We might just get the speech from the Oval Office.
It'll only last about seven or eight minutes.
It will be a typical Oval Office broadcast.
I love it.
I'm glad that we're having this.
This is a debate fundamentally about not just are we going to protect this border?
Are we going to have a wall?
Are we going to have this budget?
Are we going to open the government?
This debate in its essential components boils down to do we still love our country or do we not still love our country?
I'm not speaking hyperbolically.
This is not some exaggeration here.
Do we love our country or not?
You have one side saying that we have a serious problem in historic drug epidemic because of drugs pouring over our border.
A lot of crime, people being killed, people being raped.
According to Fusion and Amnesty International, 60 to 80 percent of women and girls who cross that southern border illegally are raped and sexually assaulted.
You've got the question of whether this country can decide who gets to access its welfare programs, who gets to access its schools, what language people in this country are going to speak, who gets to vote in this country, who is counted for the representation in the Congress.
Right now, the representation in the Congress is based on the census.
It's based on legal and illegal alike.
So you've got, even if in certain places illegal aliens aren't voting, they're being counted for representation.
Do we get to govern ourselves?
Do we love our country?
Do we want to protect our country and build a wall and deal with border security?
Or, as the Democrats want, do we want to let our country be washed away because we don't like it very much?
Do we want a totally new people to come in, a totally new culture to come into this country, a totally new system of government where we don't get to protect our borders, where we don't Where we don't only use taxpayer money to protect citizens, to protect the people here who are paying into it, who are our countrymen, who are tied to us by the bonds of countrymen and citizens.
Which is it?
Do we love our country or do we want a different country?
Do we want our country and to protect our country?
Do we want to abolish the idea of our country altogether and just have something new with open borders or whatever?
Which is it?
That's the debate.
It's a real debate.
I'm not trying to get here on my soapbox and just vilify the other side.
Although I think the other opinion, the opinion of not protecting our country, should be vilified.
Those are actually the stakes.
That's the honest debate we're going to have.
And I hope we have it totally honestly.
I hope that the networks cover Trump's speech.
And I hope that the Democrats give whatever response they possibly can.
I think they should get their awful ideas out in the open.
Because I think that this country still will choose to love itself.
I think this country still will choose to protect itself.
I think this country still will choose to be a country.
I think, ultimately, Republicans have the winning hand here.
We shouldn't be afraid of airing Democrats' views in public.
It really helps us when we air their radical views.
We show the American people who they are, and we can reject them, both at the ballot box and in terms of the pressure that's coming from this government shutdown.
Yeah.
The way that you know that the government shutdown is going pretty well for Trump and the Republicans is how it's being covered in the New York Times today.
I try never to cover the New York Times, but I suppose I have to every once in a while just to see what the other side thinks.
The lead article in the New York Times, the number one article when you go to their website, is this, quote,"...shutdown ripples across nation affecting farmers, homeowners, even craft brewers." Now, they've since changed the headline when you go to the article itself, so they probably realized how absurd that is.
Because, you know, not craft brewers!
No!
No!
Of course not.
That's ridiculous.
By the way, how is this affecting craft brewers?
It's because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives is not approving new beer labels.
So you can only have the seven zillion hipster Brooklyn beers that are already on the market.
You're not going to get...
That's seven zillionth and one until the government reopens.
I'm sorry.
You can get through it.
Talk to your therapist.
Talk to your friends and loved ones.
Also, mortgage applications are being delayed because the federal government is involved in mortgage business.
Public companies now are having some trouble possibly raising capital because the federal government is so heavily regulating the economy.
The Secret Service, obviously, is not being paid for its work.
And farmers right now are having trouble applying for federal subsidies because parts of the federal government are shut down.
Few people are really feeling this pain.
There was this poll that came out from Rasmussen.
6% of Americans say this shutdown is really hurting them.
21% of Americans don't know the government is shut down.
Those are good numbers for us.
Those are good numbers for Donald Trump.
We're on day 17 right now.
This is the second longest government shutdown ever.
And yet nobody's really feeling the pain from this.
For those who are, for the people applying for mortgages and the craft beer people and the farm subsidy people, this raises a question that's very uncomfortable actually for the left, which is why is the federal government so heavily involved in all of those things?
Why is the federal government heavily involved in craft beer?
Why is the federal government...
Why are we giving all these subsidies to farmers to pick only certain industries over other industries?
Why is that?
Maybe this government shutdown, as I predicted before it happened, is showing us how much government we don't need.
As Ronald Reagan said, you'll be surprised how much government you'll never miss.
Maybe it's saying, well, as we're having a big debate here between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wants the government basically to take over the whole economy, and conservatives who say...
We should deregulate.
We should shrink the size of the government.
We should shrink the onerous regulations on people.
I think this government shutdown is showing us which side should win in that argument.
We don't need all this government.
It's onerous.
We have a way overinflated bureaucracy.
It's racking up enormous debt that will be a drag on our economy that is a generational tax and generational theft.
Why do we need all of that?
The Trump administration, by the way, has directed the IRS in case this government shutdown goes through March and April, which it almost certainly will not.
But if it does, it's directed the IRS to pay people's tax refunds out, which raises another question.
If the government can just arbitrarily run and stop things, even during a shutdown, then what is this shutdown?
What is this about?
It's about showing how unwieldy the federal government is.
And it's about raising this question of why won't the Democrats fund our border security?
So much of this thing has been malleable.
This will stay open.
This won't stay open.
The parks can remain open.
Your tax returns will come in.
Your flights will be fine.
Then what is this really about?
It's about this central question.
Why won't Democrats protect our country?
We've got another crazy story from the New York Times today because I'm a glutton for punishment.
I'm a masochist over Brooklyn schools resegregating to have blacks-only schools and black curriculum, specifically black curriculum.
We'll get to that.
We'll get to Bill de Blasio pushing socialist health care in New York, and we'll also get to this day in history.
But first, I'm sorry.
You have to go to dailywire.com.
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.
You get Matt Walsh.
You get to ask questions in Backstage.
You get Another Kingdom.
You get so much stuff.
But this is what really matters.
This right here.
Because when the craft beer factories shut down, when Brooklyn hipsters with stupid mustaches can't sip overpriced subpar beer, they are going to weep.
And then you're going to get these craft leftist tears tumblers.
And they're really good.
They're really local brewed.
They taste vaguely of kombucha.
They're really good.
This is the only vessel that can handle them.
The only vessel approved by the FDA, which by the way is shut down.
So you're not going to get any new vessels approved by the FDA anytime soon to handle those leftist tears.
Go to dailywire.com.
Get it.
We'll be right back.
Also in the New York Times today, a major article right there on the front part of the website.
Quote, I love my skin.
Why black parents are turning to Afrocentric schools.
Before, you could basically dismantle this entire argument for resegregation just from the headline, but let's go on.
It opens up.
While New York City schools are deeply segregated, some black families are choosing an alternative to integration.
By the way, just to get you through that, the alternative to integration is segregation.
What they're saying is black families are choosing segregation.
You know, the New York Times, maybe they're a little confused about language.
They're not so smart anymore.
But that's what they're saying.
They're saying black families are choosing segregation.
The first paragraph, quote, I love myself.
The group of mostly black children shouted in unison, I love my hair.
I love my skin.
When it was time to settle down, their teacher raised her fist in a black power salute.
The students did the same, and the room hushed.
As children filed out of the cramped school auditorium on their way to class, they walked by posters of Colin Kaepernick and Harriet Tubman.
Because they're the same.
Did you know that?
Colin Kaepernick, who's a schmucky, left-wing, mediocre football player who decided to cash in and make zillions of dollars on race hustling.
That guy.
He's the same as Harriet Tubman, a gun-wielding Republican who transported slaves through the Underground Railroad to their freedom.
Colin Kaepernick, schmucky Nike spokesman.
Harriet Tubman...
One of the great heroes of American history transports slaves to their freedom.
They're the same thing.
That's why they walk past the photos of them right on the same wall.
The article goes on.
Though Afrocentric schools have a uniquely comprehensive approach, many of New York's 1800 public schools have specialized themes.
There are engineering, math and culinary schools.
Others have Albanian, Urdu, or Bengali bilingual programs.
And some are just about how cool blacks are.
And how you should love yourself and how great that schmucky Nike spokesman is.
Unbelievable the way that they make these category errors on the left.
They're saying, look, some schools specialize in engineering, some schools specialize in math, and some schools specialize in radical black racial ideology.
Those aren't the same thing.
So engineering, math, literature, performing arts, those are academic categories.
Black is the color of a skin.
Those are not like categories.
Actually, the left gets everything exactly backwards.
So what this new resegregation program mixes is the worst of the left, race hustling, identity politics, and the self-esteem movement, and replacing education with ideological indoctrination.
The problem with this starts right from the first words of the article.
I love my skin.
Why?
Why do you love your skin?
I don't love my skin.
I love my skin because it protects my body and keeps me from diseases and keeps me from infections and means that I'm not just a walking hunk of raw flesh destined to die within minutes.
So I like my skin for that reason.
Why do you like your skin?
Why do you love your skin?
It's your skin.
There's nothing to love about that.
I love myself.
I love my hair.
I love my skin.
My hair has served me well.
I'm not an Adonis of a man, so any luck I've had in picking up the ladies, I can probably attribute to my locks.
That's really probably my main physical gift.
I don't love my hair.
Why do you love your hair?
What the left does is it is idolatry.
It makes idols out of meaningless things, and it perverts.
Therefore, Not just religion, not just really what we talk about with idolatry, but therefore culture and therefore politics.
Don't love your skin.
Don't love your hair.
Don't love yourself.
Why do you love yourself?
There's this whole movement now.
The self-esteem movement is what birthed it, but it's the self-love movement, the self-care movement.
And the reason that people are drawn to this is because of a God-shaped hole in your heart.
I hate to use what has become a cliche, but it's because people long naturally for For the transcendental.
For the metaphysical.
For the divine.
We realize, to use technical terms, that in this world everything is contingent.
Things decay.
Things die.
Nothing is enduring and lasting in our physical world.
And so we long for metaphysical things.
We long for God.
We long for the unmoved mover who is not contingent.
Who is the creator of the universe.
That's what we long for.
All of human history, every culture, every civilization has longed for that.
That's a part of our human nature.
And what either people who are trying to play and deceive you or very ignorant people do is that they try to replace that transcendental longing with physical things.
They say, instead of turning that love that you should have for God, for the metaphysical, you should turn that in on yourself.
But that is the sin of pride.
I mean, that is why pride is the queen of all sins.
That's why Satan falls like lightning from heaven, because of the sin of pride.
This is why the image that John Milton gives us of Satan is that Satan births from his own pride, from his own narcissism, from his own head, he births sin.
And then he has an incestuous relation with his narcissistic daughter's sin, and that creates death.
This is the image.
This is what pride does.
It's why for all of the history of our civilization, we talk about pride as the queen of all sins.
We now have pride parades, not just for gay pride, but for all other sorts of pride.
We now have the self-love, the self-care.
Self-love, self-care, pride are, as they manifest themselves in our culture, a terrible, terrible thing.
Don't do it.
If you try to just love yourself as the be-all and end-all, you will hate yourself, and you will hate the world, and you will be very miserable.
If you try to be proud, you will be very miserable, because pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
These are not just words scribbled by some very old Jews.
This is eternal and enduring wisdom.
This is why, by the way, the people who engage in this race hustling, why the people who engage in this self-segregation are miserable.
It's why their politics has become coarse and miserable, and they screech and they scream and they yell out and they wear simulacra of genitalia on their heads.
It's why the left can't laugh anymore.
It's why it has no humor.
It's because, essentially, there is a sin of pride that they are embracing.
It's very bad.
We should tell them not to do this.
We should tell them that they can't segregate themselves, that they can't go off.
And I'm not just talking about a black school.
I'm talking about the segregation that occurs throughout all of our culture through these constantly dividing, disparate, intersectional groups.
Tell them, no, sorry.
It ain't going to happen.
The color of your skin doesn't make you special.
You in yourself are not perfect.
You're not totally perfected.
You're not utterly deserving of love.
You are defected and you therefore need love and you need grace.
And you need mercy, and you need justice, and you need the transcendental.
That's the only way we're going to do it.
I know it's very unpopular to talk about things in this way in our very materialist, shallow society, but it's the only way we're going to get back to any sense of the normal.
Also in New York, I guess this is a New York-heavy show today, Bolshevik Bill de Blasio, the mayor over there, has jumped the gun.
Forget Ocasio-Cortez, forget Bernie Sanders, forget all of the other socialist health care schemes.
Bill de Blasio is just doing it himself.
Here he is on Morning Joe.
You are about to do something pretty remarkable in New York City.
Why don't you tell us about it?
Yeah, Joe, this has never been done before in this country in this kind of comprehensive way.
It's going to be for the first time a guarantee of health care.
We're going to guarantee health care for New Yorkers who need it.
And we have now in New York City something that we can build on.
We have a public option that we're ready to make much bigger.
A public health insurance option that can reach the hundreds of thousands that are right now not in any kind of health insurance.
We also have a way to provide direct health care to a lot of our neighbors who happen to be undocumented.
They're still part of our community.
They need health care.
Their families need health care.
We recognized that obviously health care is not just in theory a right.
We have to make it in practice a right.
And we're doing something about that here in this city.
So there's so much wrong here.
Healthcare is not a right.
What would it even mean for healthcare to be a right?
Healthcare requires medicine.
Healthcare requires discovery, innovation.
It requires doctors' labor.
It requires expensive equipment.
It requires visits to hospitals.
How on earth could that be a right?
If healthcare is a right, then what is a right?
A right is meaningless.
It doesn't have any meaning.
Health care is a commodity.
Health care is a good and a service that we want, and goods and services cost things.
And so the question Bill de Blasio is honestly trying to answer is, how do you pay for health care?
He's using dishonest language of rights to do it, but there's a lot wrong there.
The trouble with socialist medicine is the trouble with socialism.
Eventually you run out of other people's money.
The other fear here is that ultimately when the government has enough control over that sector of the economy, it has control over your healthcare and therefore it has control over your healthcare decisions.
It can decide if you get the surgery or you don't get the surgery.
It can decide if you get the medicine or you don't get the medicine.
It can decide nobody gets the medicine and you have nothing that you can do about it because the government controls the whole thing.
That's one of the great fears of socialist healthcare.
All of that said, I would be much more comfortable if every mayor in every liberal town in America did exactly what Bill de Blasio did.
Because then maybe we wouldn't need this national one-size-fits-all solution.
If it could be the case that all these liberal towns that want to destroy themselves, that want to damage their citizens and they want to hurt their economies and they want to hurt their health care systems, if they want to make socialist medicine and they just do it and they leave me alone, I can deal with that.
I can live with that.
It pains me because New York is my native place.
It's my home.
And so that pains me to see that happen to my own place.
But that would be much better than if we had some one-size-fits-all, all of a sudden we take over a sixth of the entire American economy.
Now, the trouble here for socialist health care, we've been lamenting this for a long time, I'm old enough to remember you used to be able to smoke in restaurants and hotels and things like that.
Then all of a sudden one day you couldn't.
And New York was the first one to institute these smoking bans on a wide scale in a big place.
And all of a sudden it took off all over the country.
You could see this happening now.
So you've got the good part of federalism, which is it protects us from the wildest left-wingers, but then over time it builds consensus.
This is one of the purposes of federalism, and so you could see that come to the national level.
I'll talk about this a little more when we get to Woodrow Wilson.
An element of the conservative movement has always been lost causes.
I was listening to a symposium from the New Criterion on Russell Kirk, and Russell Kirk would talk about this, that conservatism is not primarily about profit and making a profit and profiting all the time.
It's really fundamentally about loss.
It's about looking at what we've lost, what we can still gather as a remnant from our civilization, which is going away from us, which we're losing, especially in this modern era.
And that's what I'm looking at when I see Bill de Blasio say these things, when I see national candidates get a lot of play because they talk about socialist politics.
Health care.
You think, gosh, this is not looking good for us.
This is not looking good down the road.
We've got to fight it, even though we know the deck is stacked against us, even though we know we're probably going to lose.
But maybe we won't lose this fight.
We'll see what happens when we get to Woodrow Wilson.
I do have to point out Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the left-wing justice on the Supreme Court.
She's now very old.
She's in her 80s.
She has now missed two days at the job.
She's missed two days at the court, missed oral arguments.
This is the first time in her entire career that that's the case.
She was nominated by Bill Clinton, I believe in 93, so she's been on the court for a long time, and she has missed it because she's recovering from cancer surgery.
Now, she's had two prior cancer surgeries in 1999 and 2009.
She's never missed a day on the court for that.
This recent one, they removed lumps from her lungs.
This was after she cracked some ribs from a fall.
Things are not looking good for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
And this, I wish her well.
I'm not even going to make jokes about her dying.
I think that's in poor taste.
But...
This will just show you what 2019 looks like.
If Ruth Bader Ginsburg's health does not recover, if she finds that she has to retire from the court, or her maker decides that she has to retire from the court, then that is going to be the dominant story of 2019.
There will be nothing else.
We saw this with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing.
We're seeing this now with the possibility of Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaving the court.
Because the Congress and the executive, to some degree, have given so much of American governing power over to the Supreme Court, the Congress constantly is deferring to the court to make laws.
And then the...
Executive has done this too.
George W. Bush, when he signed McCain-Feingold, which was awful legislation to regulate political speech, he even intimated that he thought it might be unconstitutional, but he was leaving it for the court to decide.
All three branches of government have the duty to uphold the Constitution.
All three branches of government should stop things when they seem unconstitutional.
And unfortunately, the Congress and the Executive haven't done that.
The court really matters also because the court has so run roughshod over the Constitution for so very long that now there is a movement for the past 50 years or so of returning to the Constitution, of being more rigidly accurate, of being textualists, interpreting the text to mean what it meant when it was written.
This is going to be the major fight.
It looks like Kavanaugh is a little bit squishy, unfortunately.
Roberts, we know, is a big squish.
But if President Trump were to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the left-wing Supreme Court justice, with an originalist, that would be a huge switch in the swing of the court.
It would be the story.
If you thought Kavanaugh was bad, that was a cakewalk compared to what you'll see in 2019.
So a lot of this year in politics, we're talking about the wall, we're talking about shutdowns, we're talking about the 2020 protests.
We're Democrat primary.
We're talking about more tax reform, maybe entitlement reform.
All of that is going to go out the window if Ruth Bader Ginsburg is off the court.
It will all be about the court.
So gear up.
If you liked the Kavanaugh fight, get ready for this one.
I mean, it was so bloody.
It was so brutal.
But I will point out, it was very good for Republicans.
It was very good for Donald Trump.
If the midterms had been held right after that Kavanaugh fight, we would have...
We would have kept the house.
It was so good for us in public opinion polls.
So we'll see what happens.
But as with everything in the Trump presidency, get ready for a crazy reality show.
This is simply going to take it.
Season 3 or Season 4, as it is, is going to be totally at the next level.
This day in history.
This day in history, in 1918, Woodrow Wilson announced his 14 points for the end of World War I. So they're in World War I. Woodrow Wilson, in many ways the inventor of modern progressivism in American politics, he announces his 14 points for what was going to happen after the war and how the world order was going to move forward.
This was assailed by conservatives who pointed out rightly that God only needed 10 points.
Woodrow Wilson needed 14.
Whenever these things go on longer and longer, you realize that they're getting worse and worse.
Look at the Constitution of the United States.
It fits onto that beautiful yellowed piece of parchment.
Look at the Constitution of the European Union.
I think it's about 7 zillion pages long.
When these things go on, they get too in the detail.
They get too technocratic.
They're probably not going to work.
They're probably not going to protect human freedom.
He announced his points all around the world.
He was dropping it as propaganda.
The sticking point was the 14th point, which established the League of Nations.
A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
The American people didn't like this, especially conservatives and Republicans didn't like this.
They didn't like the idea that we were giving up our sovereignty to these supranational, international institutions that were going to now govern us.
We were no longer going to be a free country.
You heard this all the time in this era, in the progressive era.
Oh, the presidency, it's too big for one man.
Oh, the Constitution is not fit for these complicated times.
Does that sound familiar?
You have had since the era of Wilson, progressives trying to push socialist health care.
Trying to push all of the same programs that they're pushing now.
And the reason I bring this up, the reason this is so important at this moment in politics, is because at that time it was a lost cause.
Conservative cause.
The cause of freedom.
The cause of our country was a lost cause.
You saw socialism lighting a fire all around the world.
You saw the Russian royal family fall.
You saw communists take over...
What then became the Soviet Union.
You saw it burning like a disease throughout Europe.
You saw communists in the streets and socialists in the streets in America.
You heard journalists say when they looked at the Soviet Union, I've seen the future and it works.
This was simply it.
This was the way to progress.
There was no stopping it.
And then we stopped it.
And then the conservatives stopped it.
When the conservative movement came around, Bill Buckley said that a conservative is one who stands athwart history yelling, stop.
And when that conservative movement came around, it was a lost cause.
Progressivism was going to win.
Communism would win.
The Soviet Union would remain strong.
Conservatism was a lost cause.
It was made fun of, mocked as a lost cause by the media, by leftist academics and politicians.
And then we won.
And then the Berlin Wall fell down.
And then we rejected Woodrow Wilson's 14 points.
Actually, it ended up killing Woodrow Wilson.
He suffered a stroke.
He was so outraged and shocked when the United States rejected entrance into the League of Nations when we wouldn't give up some of our national sovereignty in that way.
These are lost causes.
They were lost causes all the time.
They've been a lost cause.
Socialism has been a lost cause for conservatives for 100 years, and yet we've made it 100 years.
Maybe we can make it 100 more.
So I wouldn't let it get you down.
It is a lost cause.
We're looking the death right in the barrel.
We're looking anti-Americanism right away.
Right in the barrel, and we're probably going to lose, except maybe we won't.
And that's why we keep fighting, because we've won those battles before, and I love that President Trump is sticking strong on this shutdown.
We should stick strong on all of these things.
And if we go down, so what?
We gave it a good fight, but maybe we'll win.
We've done it before.
Okay, that's our show today.
We've got a lot more to get to, but too bad.
Tune in tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then. - The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia 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.
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