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Jan. 9, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:24
Ep. 277 - Why Don’t Responses Ever Work?

Chuck and Nancy get meme’d for their American Gothic response to President Trump’s Oval Office speech. Then, AOC responds to the responders, Trump gives the speech itself, and Kellyanne Conway roasts Jim Acosta. Finally, the APA declares masculinity harmful. Date: 01-09-19 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Chuck and Nancy get memed for their American Gothic response to President Trump's Oval Office speech.
We will analyze why responses to presidential addresses never, ever, ever work.
Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responds to the responders.
President Trump gives the speech itself.
You don't want to forget about that.
And Kellyanne Conway roasts Jim Acosta.
Finally, the American Psychological Association declares masculinity harmful.
What a bunch of wimps.
All of that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
All right, there's only one news story today and that would be the Oval Office speech, or really I guess it would be the response to the Oval Office speech, the response to the responders in the memes on Twitter, the response to the the response to the responders in the memes on Twitter, the response to the responders to the responders We'll get to all of that.
Let's cover the speech first.
How did President Trump do?
First of all, we got full entertainment last night.
We got exactly what we came for.
We elected the reality TV show host.
We are getting a perfect night of television.
We got all of the drama from President Trump.
We then got a lot of farcical comedy, probably unintentional comedy, from Chuck and Nancy, Schumer and Pelosi.
So how did Trump himself do in the speech?
I thought he did quite well.
Some conservatives think that he was too dramatic here.
This is the big divide today in response to the speech among conservatives.
Was he too dramatic?
Was he too gory?
Was he too gruesome?
Or did he hit it right?
Now, that group of conservatives, who broadly are the ones who are always criticizing Trump, or they were never Trump during the election, they're criticizing President Trump for being too gruesome, talking about sexual assaults at the border, talking about the crimes of illegal aliens, talking about people whose children were killed by illegal aliens.
What those conservatives who are criticizing him for that want is they wish that he was just talking about dollars and cents.
What they wish is that President Trump went out into the Oval Office speech last night and he was the reasonable guy.
Hey guys, come on.
It's not that big a deal.
The border's not very expensive.
He's only asking $5 billion.
And look, we spend money on all these kind of other crazy things.
We spend millions of dollars to study shrimp on treadmills.
We spend millions of dollars to study...
Lesbian obesity, come on.
It's only a very small portion of money.
It's not that big a deal.
And it's just about dollars and cents.
And come on, guys, come around to it.
I would call that group the fiscal-first conservatives.
They're judging their political views and the conservative movement from the perspective of dollars and cents, basically.
This is contrasted with another group.
Which is the cultural conservatives.
And I would count myself in the latter group.
The cultural conservatives are the ones who are saying this isn't about dollars and cents.
This isn't about being a reasonable guy.
I'm sorry.
It is about being a reasonable guy.
But it's not about always appearing to be the most pleasant, the least offensive.
It's not about that.
It's about gut issues.
The reason that we need to deal with the border is not just because of some bland statistics or because of the cost of the wall or whatever.
It's because...
We're a country, and we have the right to be a country, and we have the right to defend our country.
Every other country in history has done it.
We should do it, too.
Real people are being hurt by this.
Real people are being hurt by drugs pouring in, by gangsters, by sexual assaults on the border, all of those things.
First of all, to begin, President Trump is the cultural figure.
He comes out of the culture.
He's a TV guy.
He's been in the pop culture since at least the 80s.
I was playing Trump the Board Game, which came out in 1989.
I was playing that over the weekend with friends.
He's been this cultural maven, so he's always going to be that guy.
He's not ever going to become some policy wonk.
He's not Mitch Daniels.
I like Mitch Daniels, too, but he's just not that guy Who's going to be a wonk about all these different lines of the budget or something like that?
Isn't going to happen.
But in this debate between the fiscal first conservatives and the cultural conservatives, the cultural conservatives are right.
Which is why they're getting the speech right as well.
Conservatism.
We talked about this a little bit yesterday when we mentioned Russell Kirk.
Conservatism is not primarily about dollars and cents.
It's part of the conservative movement, and especially you see this among college kids, the young Republican type with the Brooks Brothers tie, who goes to whatever political dinners and things like that.
You see that really among him.
He's the one who's saying, let's not talk about cultural issues.
Let's just talk about dollars and cents, the economy.
Let's only talk about fiscal and financial questions.
Conservatism is not primarily about that.
It's not primarily about making a profit.
Conservatism, in the Russell Kirk understanding of it, is actually primarily about loss.
It's about what we've lost in our society.
It's about how we, even as we do gain, in many ways, profit, we're losing some of our culture.
We're losing some of our spirit.
We're losing some of the things that matter much more than just base material goods.
There are metaphysical goods that really count, too.
This is the Andrew Breitbart idea of things.
Politics is downstream of culture.
St.
Andrew Breitbart, the patron saint of Hollywood conservatives.
Again, with that group of fiscal-first conservatives, you see it a lot of times they'll say, enough with the culture war.
If we would only stop the culture war, get out of cultural issues, then we would win every single election.
Outside of cultural issues, everything else is bean counting.
This is not to say that we shouldn't lower taxes.
This is not to say that we shouldn't reform entitlements.
We have to do all of those things.
But that is bean counting if you don't couch it in a cultural and moral argument.
And that's what President Trump was doing last night.
It would have been a huge mistake if he went out there and just talked about how the wall wasn't that expensive and, come on, it's not that big a deal, everybody, and let's just do it and move on.
That's not what this is about.
The this isn't that big a deal argument falls flat when you have Democrats constantly telling you this is the biggest deal in the world.
You know, in politics, just like in war, your opponent gets a say, your adversary gets a say about it, and they're saying it's a huge deal.
Therefore, it is a huge deal.
It's a big deal to them.
It's a big deal to the left.
Why?
Not because of $5 billion here or there.
They'll spend $5 billion willy-nilly.
It's a big deal to them because it cuts to the heart of their agenda, which is open borders, which is tearing down traditional culture and American traditions, which is essentially anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism.
That's their...
That's their issue.
And so it's not about a $5 billion, few hundred miles of a border wall.
It's about the momentum.
It's about what direction that's going in.
It's about what message that's sending.
Which is, is America going to protect itself, stand up, love itself?
Keep being America, or are we going to give up on that?
That's why the stakes are so high.
The argument for the border wall is not that the border wall is inexpensive.
Who cares?
Who cares if the border wall is expensive?
If the border wall, if the section of the wall they wanted to build in this budget, if it cost...
$20 billion.
Would that change anyone's position on it?
Let's say it cost $50 billion.
Would it change anyone's position on it?
No.
No way.
The argument is we're a country.
We get to be a country.
We don't want all these drugs pouring in.
For the first time now in, well, I guess the second year in a row, but the first time in 50 years, the average life expectancy of Americans is decreasing.
Because of all these drug overdoses and because of a malaise, a spiritual malaise that's hit the country and led to an epidemic of suicide.
That's what it's about.
It's about the real Americans whose kids are dead because illegal aliens killed them.
We'll go through some of the statistics.
We'll go through some of the responses to Democrat arguments in just a minute.
But we should get off of this argument that the argument for the wall is that it's just illegal.
Not that expensive.
Who cares?
It's about something so much deeper, and you're not going to convince anybody on dollars and cents.
This is why Mitt Romney couldn't become president, and never will become president, is because you can't campaign for the presidency and say, I should win the presidency at a time of great cultural gravity because I'm a better manager.
Who cares?
That's not what we're talking about.
I don't care if you're going to be a slightly more efficient manager than the other guy.
We're talking about ideas.
We're not talking about efficiency.
So let's get to the speech itself.
Here is where the real disagreement comes up, where the fiscal-first conservatives are saying he went way too far, was focusing in on crime and rape.
Last month, 20,000 migrant children were illegally brought into the United States.
A dramatic increase.
These children are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs.
One in three women are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico.
Women or children are the biggest victims, by far, of our broken system.
This is the tragic reality of illegal immigration on our southern border.
This is the right tone.
Obviously, President Trump is better off script.
He does better at his rallies.
He does better when he's improvising.
He's ad-libbing.
But this was pretty good.
I mean, it was ably delivered.
It was very well written.
He delivered it without any big mistakes.
I thought it went pretty well.
You knew he was reading from a prompter, but presidents are always reading from teleprompters in these speeches.
So I didn't think that was a big deal.
As for the statistic, he said one in three women are raped crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S., He actually could have used a bigger statistic than that.
There are studies out from Fusion and Amnesty International which show that 60 to 80 percent of women and girls are raped crossing that border illegally.
This wasn't reported in some right-wing outlet.
This was reported in the Huffington Post.
So I felt he should have used that statistic.
But again, it's very hard to have...
Reliable statistics on degree of crime that is so hidden from public view.
Still, I felt he should have gone whole hog and used even the more powerful statistics, which are backed up by left-wing sources, so you couldn't even have left-wingers arguing with them.
Then he goes on and talks about those who have been victimized by illegal aliens.
The only thing that is immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized.
America's heart broke the day after Christmas when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien who just came across the border.
The life of an American hero was stolen by someone who had no right to be in our country.
Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders.
In California, an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history.
In Georgia, This is pretty brutal stuff.
I mean, it's...
You've never heard a president talk about these sorts of things from the Oval Office.
You've never heard...
After 9-11, President Bush spoke in very strong terms, but he didn't speak in such graphic terms.
President Trump is speaking in these graphic, gruesome terms, talking about beheading.
And some people fairly enough say, I don't want to hear this from the Oval Office.
I'm with you.
I agree.
In my ideal politics...
We would not have these sort of things said in speeches to the nation from the Oval Office.
In my ideal politics, when you're giving a speech to an audience that includes children, old women, whatever, you're not going to use this kind of imagery.
However, we're not living in my ideal politics.
In my ideal politics, the very fact of these beheadings, the very fact of these rapes, the very fact of these drugs pouring in across the border would be enough to compel Democrats, half of the country, to enhance border security, to build a wall, to stop people from doing this, to deport gang members.
In my ideal politics, in any reasonable politics, that would happen.
But it's not happening.
In fact, in the reasonable politics of less than 10 years ago, Democrats agreed that we could do that.
Various Democrats actually voted for portions of the wall.
But we don't live in that ideal politics.
And this is the trouble.
In politics, as in war...
Your opponent gets a say.
Your adversary gets a say.
And so you've got to react in real time.
It's where I really lose patience with those Trump critics on the right who say, well, in my imaginary world, things would be so much better, and I would never say these mean things, and I would never get down in the mud.
Right.
But we don't live in your imaginary fantasy world.
We live in reality.
And the reality is that if Democrats are going to degrade the country in such a way and degrade our politics in such a way that this kind of graphic imagery, this kind of vulgarity that they're always spewing is commonplace, we must...
We must meet them where they are.
We must fight them where they are.
We must respond to attacks where they come in, and we must attack them where they're vulnerable.
That's the culture.
That's the politics.
Politics is a practical science.
It's not theoretical.
It's not strictly philosophical.
It is reality.
politics is the affairs between men.
And so you've got half of the country wearing simulacra of genitalia on their heads, shrieking mother effer this and mother effer that.
An incoming new member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, saying we're going to impeach the mother effer in public, referring to the president of the United States.
Unfortunately, when you're in that disgusting culture, you've got to And if the two options are President Trump sitting there and talking about how $5 billion won't impact the federal budget at all because the entire debt and deficit is driven by entitlements and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, if that's one option, and then the other option is...
They're using disgusting graphic imagery to talk about why the wall is wrong.
I'm going to use it, true imagery, to explain why it's right, because people are being beheaded, people are being killed by drugs, people are being raped.
That is what we have to do.
Reality can be pretty gory sometimes, but you should speak the truth, even if the truth is unpleasant.
If the way to persuade people is to tell them the truth, and you can do it in a more diplomatic way sometimes, you can do it in a more civilized way sometimes, or you have to be blunt sometimes.
We're in a very blunt culture, a very authentic, raw culture.
This isn't only the Democrats' fault.
This is just the fact of our media landscape.
We're constantly on social media where it's raw and it's live and people make mistakes, and you no longer elect a movie actor like Ronald Reagan, You elect a reality TV actor like Donald Trump.
That is reflective of the culture, and I think he handled it very, very well.
So let's take a look at the reality of this, by the way.
If we're going to delve into how gruesome this is, now you're hearing the left saying, oh, these stories of illegal alien crime, they're lies.
They're not true.
I think Nancy Pelosi called it malice and misinformation.
It isn't.
Breitbart did just one quick rundown of MS-13, specifically crimes, in the last couple years.
Last year, an MS-13 gangster pimp ordered the baseball bat beating of a 15-year-old prostitute in Maryland.
2017, year before, an MS-13 gangster stabbed a Maryland man a hundred times, beheaded him, and cut out his heart.
That's the kind of people we're talking about.
That's the kind of crime that is encouraged to cross this border if you create incentives for them to come over.
2017, MS-13 murdered two New York teen girls.
2016, year before, MS-13 murdered a 14-year-old Texas boy with a machete.
There was a whole spate of machete crimes attributed to MS-13.
That's the reality.
The Democrats are saying, Nancy Pelosi said this during her response, she said, Mr.
President, women and girls at the border, they don't pose a threat to us.
Right.
Yeah.
We're not worried about the women and children.
We're worried about that guy.
We're worried about the drugs that are coming over in such large quantity that the average American life expectancy is decreasing.
We're worried about the threats to our own sovereignty as a country because illegal aliens are counted as population for the distribution of...
We're worried about illegal alien voting, which does happen.
We're worried about illegal aliens, not just committing crimes, but also stressing our resources.
Illegal aliens are much more likely to access welfare programs, obviously, than citizens.
And of course, just accessing regular old government entitlements like public education is a huge stress to the system for people who have not been allowed in here.
They're taking a free ride, and the people who are very generous people, the most generous country in all of human history, the people who are being demanded to pay for that don't even get a say in it.
It's outrageous, and that's the language you've got to use.
So what did this speech accomplish?
There was a question before the speech as to whether or not President Trump would declare a national emergency.
And what this would do, by declaring a national emergency, was it would give him the ability, without Congress giving him the $5 billion, to build portions of the wall.
And he could order this to be done through the Pentagon or through other mechanisms.
But he could have gotten that done.
This would have been drastic.
It would have had huge legal challenges.
It definitely would have absorbed a lot of the air out of 2019.
And a lot of the political capital out of 2019.
Should he have done it?
Should he not have done it?
Possibly he should have.
Because President Trump does very well with adversaries and he does very well in unconventional politics.
Still, I think the reason why he didn't do it is because we're in this very strange moment where the wall is unpopular.
The wall, if he had declared a national emergency to build the wall, this would not have done well in public opinion polls.
But what does that mean?
So the wall is unpopular.
However, border security is very popular.
And you'll even see this within the same poll.
There was a poll out from Harvard-Harris, obviously a very reputable poll.
It showed that Americans don't want the wall.
They want to give amnesty to DACA, to the illegal aliens brought here when they were under 18.
Also, they want to end chain migration.
Also, they don't just want to stop illegal immigration.
They want to dramatically reduce levels of legal immigration.
So right now, our rate of legal immigration is about 1.2, 1.3 million people per year pouring into this country.
The Harvard-Harris poll shows the majority of Americans want to reduce that by more than 50%, bring it down to about half a million people.
Immigrants coming into the country per year.
So how do you make sense of that?
They say, we're so against immigration at this point.
We don't just want to stop illegal immigration.
We want to lower legal immigration.
Also, you can't build a wall.
We don't want you to build a wall.
Well, what this speaks to is one, obviously how questions are worded can change this, but it speaks to political messaging.
The Democrats have focused in on this wall issue, and they've focused in on personality.
So the wall is identified with Donald Trump and his often acerbic personality, and so they don't like the wall.
But on the issue itself, they do strongly support the issue.
If this is a personality battle then, how did it shake out last night?
I'm not saying President Trump gets 100% percentage points on this.
I'm not saying he's totally popular.
He's not.
He is polarizing.
That's been his appeal all along.
It's the reason why he won the Republican nomination.
It's not because he's so likable.
It's not because he has that fake plastic smile on his face like Mitt Romney.
It's because he's polarizing and he makes stands that can be unpopular.
And this makes him more popular among other demographics.
But if it's a personality battle between Donald Trump and Chuck and Nancy...
Come on.
That's not, is that even a question?
Obviously, President Trump wins that personality battle.
Chuck and Nancy, we'll get to Chuck and Nancy in a second.
Here is some of the reaction to President Trump, not from Chuck and Nancy, not from Ocasio-Cortez, just a regular old backbencher senator, Senator Chris Van Hollen on MSNBC. Well, I have to agree with Steve that this is a continuation of the degradation of the Oval Office by the President of the United States, this time using the tradition of Oval Office speeches that are usually reserved for major statements.
Instead, for a tawdry political speech.
I mean, usually it takes the president 55 minutes at a rally to get out all those lies and false statements.
This time he crammed it into eight minutes by reading a teleprompter.
What lies and false statements did President Trump say?
Did he say any?
Because I saw this going all around Twitter.
All of the talking heads were chattering about this.
They said it was all these lies, misinformation, malice, false statements.
What false statements?
One that they're claiming is that President Trump said that thousands of illegal aliens come in per day.
They say that the reality is more like hundreds.
In reality, it's more like thousands.
We have at least 1,000 people coming in over the border every single day.
And in recent months, DHS itself has been reporting that they've seized 3,000 illegal aliens in one day.
So that's not a lie.
That's the reality.
The Democrat line is the lie.
We have over 1,000 people coming into this country illegally every day.
And we don't really know how many there are anyway.
We're having that number arrested, apprehended.
How many people are sneaking through?
How many people are not being arrested?
He talked about how drugs are pouring through this country.
Look around in just about any county in America.
The drug epidemic has gotten so awful that it has lowered the average life expectancy of Americans.
You can't deny that.
You can't deny that.
That's not a lie.
Democrats are very good at claiming that true statements are lies.
Who are you going to believe?
Democrats or your own lion eyes?
You can see it all happening around you, and you can see it in even how long Americans are expected to live.
And what about the crisis?
They say that President Trump calling the border security question a crisis is a lie.
And they say it's a lie because illegal immigration right now is not the worst it's ever been.
Well, that's quite a definition of crisis.
Oh, if it's not the single worst thing that's ever happened in this category, then it's not a crisis.
It's true.
It's not as bad as when you had a million people, more than a million people coming in in the year 2000.
Maybe it's not as bad as that.
It's pretty bad.
And the other thing is, you can't just freeze one year in time.
Because when Republicans were talking about illegal immigration during 1980, George Bush running for the presidency against Ronald Reagan, they were both debating illegal immigration, and they were both debating who was more compassionate.
They were all saying, who's going to give more amnesty?
Who's more whatever, right?
At that time, how many illegal aliens were there in the country?
Not very many.
But over time, when you have year after year after year where it's pretty bad, but it's not a crisis, it's just pretty bad, year after year after year for 30, 40 years, all of a sudden you get to 30 million illegal aliens.
Again, we don't really know how many there are, but it could be estimated around 20, 30 million illegal aliens.
Who knows?
So I don't see any lies.
Also, such a treat to listen to a Democrat senator talking about the degradation of the Oval Office.
Bill Clinton...
Not the last Democrat president, but the one before him, Bill Clinton, who all the Democrats were campaigning to make the first gentleman of the United States just a little over two years ago.
Bill Clinton turned his intern into a human humidor in the Oval Office.
In that act, it wasn't broadcast to national television, Mirabile Dicto, but he did it there.
Are we really going to say that Donald Trump spouting accurate information about illegal immigration, that's the degradation of the Oval Office?
More than trotting in your little 20-year-old secretary?
I don't think so.
We've got a lot more to get to.
We've got to get to Chuck and Nancy's response.
We've got to get to all the great memes.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the roast of Jim Acosta, and why masculinity is so harmful, according to all those wimps at the American Psychological Association.
But first, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
And by the way, Before we go, it's time for you to get on the right side of history, which is, in fact, the title of Ben Shapiro's new book.
I can assure you, this book will be the second best book out of the last few years.
It will be, I'm serious, I read it, I really enjoyed it, I think it's a very good book, and it will be the second best book to be published.
I guarantee it.
Get on The Right Side of History.
It officially hits stores March 19th, but if you go to rightsideofhistory.com, you can order your copy right now before they sell out.
Do it.
You'll thank me later.
It really is good.
I read all of these popular books that come out.
I get all of these advanced copies and I read most of them.
And this is the best one that's come out recently.
It's just really good.
It's a good response to this very shallow political and intellectual culture that we're in right now.
And it's a good primer if you've been deprived of an education, which if you are a millennial or a Gen Z-er in America, you certainly have been.
So definitely go out and pre-order it.
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We'll be right back.
So President Trump gives his speech.
Chuck and Nancy, for some reason, give a response.
I think this is unprecedented to have a partisan response to an Oval Office addressed to the nation.
But, you know, that's the Democrats for you.
This response did not go well.
This is not me being partisan or biased.
Nobody thought this thing went well.
Brian Williams on MSNBC made fun of them.
We'll get to all of that first.
Just a little taste of what you missed.
I hope you're not listening to this.
I hope you get to see the looks on their faces.
Otherwise, I'll describe it to you.
Thank you, Speaker Pelosi.
My fellow Americans, we address you tonight for one reason only.
The President of the United States, having failed to get Mexico to pay for his ineffective, unnecessary border wall.
It goes on and on and on.
We'll get to more of what they say in a second.
This just doesn't look good.
They're doing that thing Which a lot of times happens in responses, which is that you just look really angry.
You just look super ticked off.
And it's so off-putting.
It doesn't accomplish anything.
None of these people have a gift for show business.
Shockingly, politics is show business for ugly people.
They just don't seem to understand how that comes off on camera.
But responses never look good.
They never look good.
And this is a real question.
If they asked me tomorrow to give the Republican response to, well, I guess we'd have to wait for a Democrat president.
Hopefully not until I'm 70 or 80 years old, if that.
But if they asked me to do it for a Democrat president, I would turn it down.
I would laugh in their face.
It's a worse job than hosting the Oscars.
Why do they look like this?
Before we get to why the responses can't ever work, I guess, why didn't this response work?
Maybe that'll lead us there.
The reason this response didn't work in particular is because Chuck Schumer is caught between his radical base, which favors open borders, and the American people, which is quite anti-immigration.
It's actually anti-current levels of legal immigration.
And he's really caught here.
If you don't believe me that the Democrat base favors open borders, just look at their campaign slogans.
They wanted to abolish ICE, immigration and customs enforcement.
The caravan that they were applauding is called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, without borders.
They're constantly trying to give illegal aliens access to American services, blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens.
They're constantly trying to give amnesty, which is open borders.
They're constantly encouraging more illegal immigration.
It stems from an anti-Americanism.
But that's what they want.
They want open borders.
And the majority of the American people do not.
Chuck Schumer knows this.
Chuck Schumer...
Actually talked about, not that long ago, Chuck Schumer was talking about how important it is for us to secure the border.
But we also need to set the record straight.
The American people need to know that because of our efforts in Congress, our border is far more secure today than it was when we began debating comprehensive reform in 2005.
Between 2005 and 2009, a vast amount of progress has been made on our borders and ports of entry.
The progress includes 9,000 new Border Patrol field agents in the last four years.
Construction of a 630-mile border fence, or 630 miles of border fence, that create a significant barrier to illegal immigration on our southern land border.
So there he is, bragging about building a wall, bragging about how great that is.
So we've got him here.
Basically contradicting himself, and that's why he had to look a little more stoic and try to focus on other issues, and it just fell flat.
There wasn't a clear message that came out of this.
The real problem for them, though, is not even the logical progression of their response.
The real problem, as always, being the optics, is they just got memed.
They got memed so hard.
Here's one of my favorite versions of American Gothic, Chuck and Nancy giving their response.
My fellow Americans, we address you tonight for one reason only.
The President of the United States, having failed to get Mexico to pay for his ineffective, unnecessary border law, and unable to convince the Congress or the Americans here to put the bill, has shut down the government.
American democracy doesn't work that way.
We don't govern by temper tantrum.
Farm limit is the life for me!
Give me that countryside!
If you can't see it, she's wearing a little bonnet.
He's got the pitchfork.
And that's what it looked like.
It had this very look of American gothic.
Um...
Then there is the problem also, which we do have to address, of they have conflicting statements on this.
So Chuck and Nancy, Nancy's calling the wall immoral.
Chuck Schumer voted for the wall already.
He voted for part of a wall a few years ago, not that long ago.
Then, there's confusion over Democrat messaging because they're saying that the wall is immoral, and they're also saying that the wall is ineffective.
Right?
But it can't be both things at once.
So if the wall is ineffective, why is it immoral?
It's not keeping anybody out.
It's not doing anything.
It's letting these immigrants and illegal aliens come through.
It doesn't really matter at all.
If the wall is immoral, how is it ineffective?
If something is immoral, it is having a moral effect.
By definition, it is effective.
And so they can't do this.
This reminds me of all the times when we were arguing over whether it was okay to torture terrorists.
Which it is, by the way.
But they would always argue on the Democrats, I would say, is it okay to torture terrorists?
And they would say, well, torturing terrorists is immoral.
It's not who we are.
It's wrong, it's terrible, it's immoral, and it's ineffective.
All right, then what's the big deal?
Who cares, right?
Because they didn't want to actually deal in the issue.
We'll do an episode someday on why it's a very, very, very good thing to torture terrorists.
Unfortunately, we don't have time to do that now.
But they've just got this confused messaging.
They would be much smarter to pick a lane and then just try to advance that lane.
But again, they can't because they're torn between their base, which is for open borders, and the American people, which is anti-illegal immigration.
So if they pick the ineffective line, then their base is going to say, what are you...
I don't care that it's ineffective.
I'm glad it's ineffective, but you shouldn't do it in the first place.
And then if you say it's immoral, then you alienate the majority of the country.
So they're trying to split the baby.
It just doesn't work.
Don't take my word for how bad this response was.
Obviously, you see the memes going around Twitter.
Here is no less a Democrat than James Carville, Democrat strategist, on no less a Democrat than Brian Williams' show on MSNBC, giving his response.
But tell me why responses are so bad.
Tonight, this Chuck and Nancy visual tonight launched a thousand memes while they were still talking.
There was an American Gothic meme.
There was a, your mother and I are very upset you stayed out so late meme.
And someone has to account for Bobby Jindal His guest appearance in Gone with the Wind and for Rubio drinking water.
But this visual from tonight goes down in the pantheon.
What is the problem with responses, James?
You know, they seldom, if ever, work at the State of the Union.
They usually get some young person to respond.
They tried that with Jindal.
That didn't work very well.
I don't think they wanted to do it.
I don't think they should have done it.
And I guarantee you at the staff meeting tomorrow morning, somebody is going to get, you know, chewed out pretty good about it.
The only good thing about it, it didn't matter.
They could have given a Gettysburg Address and it wouldn't have mattered.
He didn't want to be there.
I've been more excited about colonoscopies than he was in the speech tonight.
He didn't want to be there.
Classic James Carville subtlety, but absolutely right.
They didn't want to be there.
It was a mistake.
It was a mistake, too, because they have conflicting messages about this.
It would have been much better to let Trump go out there, be aggressive, be gruesome, be graphic in his language, and then just let the Democrat anger at him boil over.
I don't think the response accomplished anything.
I hope this speech accomplished something for Trump and the Republicans.
It seems that it did, in so much as it made the case once and for all, and now we can have basically an honest debate.
But, you know, it didn't get us the wall right away.
It didn't declare us a national emergency, and it was probably unwise for the Democrats to respond in that way.
They're not the only ones who responded.
Our favorite socialist from that ritzy town in northern Westchester, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I gave a response as well on my program on MSNBC. Not only that, but in the actual address, there was falsehood after falsehood.
And we have to make sure that we get our facts straight.
Everyday immigrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than native-born Americans.
And not only that, but the women and children on that border that are trying to seek refuge and seek opportunity in the United States of America, with nothing but the shirt on their backs, are acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be.
So that was obviously on my MSNBC program, The Rachel Maddow Show, last night.
Where to begin?
First of all, she's complaining about President Trump getting the facts wrong.
Two days ago, she was explaining how you shouldn't be factually correct, how it could be morally wrong to be factually correct.
She said that in a tweet.
So she's really changing her tune, but that's always what she does.
The first observation, Nancy Pelosi has a really tough case here on her hands, because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks that she's the Speaker of the House, and for all intents and purposes, she is.
She is right now a leading national Democrat.
She's the brightest star of the incoming Democrat congressman, and she's causing real headaches for Nancy Pelosi.
Congress members very often are just glorified press secretaries.
Very few of them know anything about public policy.
Very few of them are interested in crafting public policy.
Most of them just want to go on television and run for a higher office.
So that's what they do.
They just go on television.
I mean, this is sort of the Schumer model.
Though Schumer, to his credit, does have a lot of acumen in navigating the halls of government since he's been in it his entire life.
And so Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is doing that.
I mean, she's spending all of her time on TV. When she's not on TV, she's on Instagram Live.
When she's not on Instagram Live, she's doing videos on Facebook.
I mean, it's just on and on.
She's putting herself out there.
But what she's saying isn't true.
The trouble is that it sort of sounds like she's saying true things.
She's getting much better at the camera.
You can see this even just in her eyes.
Her eyes are less buggy and weird than they used to be.
And they, I don't know, she's just getting much smoother.
And she can say things with such confidence now.
She didn't used to be able to do this.
She used to say, I'm not the expert, ha ha ha, sorry.
Now she says untrue things with such confidence that they're actually somewhat convincing.
So she's saying that illegal alien criminals trying to cross into our country illegally are more American than American citizens.
What does that even mean?
The semantic value of that sentence is...
But because she's saying it with such confidence, it sounds like it means something.
And they do this all the time.
I mean, this is another example of having...
Talk about having crossed messaging.
On the one hand, America is a terrible, awful, racist, bigoted, sexist place that has caused wickedness and evil all throughout the world.
On the other hand, these illegal aliens are more American than Americans.
Well, can they keep them out, please?
No, don't let them in.
They sound like terrible people.
But of course, they're just trying to say both things.
They will just speak out of both sides of their mouth.
Whatever is most convenient, they will say.
American can be the worst adjective in the world.
It can connote the most evil that you can imagine.
Or it can be the most wonderful thing.
But again, only when it's referring to non-Americans.
Um...
Anyway, she's getting very good as a press secretary.
This is a little bit worrisome, and it's worrisome for Pelosi.
Before we go, we've got to get to Kellyanne Conway.
We'll get to the other stuff later.
We've got to get to Kellyanne Conway.
This had been building for so long.
She was there speaking to Jim Acosta, CNN's Jim Acosta.
Ever heard of him?
His name is Jim Acosta.
She's there speaking to him, and he's being a glib little jerk.
And you can tell this has just been building, and she just lets off on him.
It's glorious.
Enjoy.
Kellyanne, can you promise that the president will tell the truth tonight?
Will he tell the truth?
Yes, Jim, can you promise that you will?
I will, absolutely.
The whole truth and nothing but the truth to help you, God?
I'm not the one who has the alternative facts problem like you do.
Will the president tell the truth?
Jim, I know that's achieved.
Make sure that goes viral.
Okay.
This is why, by the way, this is why I'm one of the only people around here who even gives you the time of day.
Can you guarantee that the president's speech will pass a fact check?
Let me get back in your face, because you're such a smart ass most of the time, and I know you want this to go viral.
A lot of these people don't like you.
But let me just be respectful to the media writ large, as I always am.
I explained that that was alternative information and additional facts.
And I explained it many times.
And don't you put it back in my face for all the corrections that your network needs to issue.
I was on your network 25 or 26 times in 2018.
I'm one of the last people here who even bothered to go on.
And the disrespect that you showed to me personally, I'll just look past.
Ma'am, I just asked if the president would be telling the truth tonight.
I just asked if the president would be telling the truth tonight.
That's why.
Go ahead, please no.
Preach.
Preach, Kellyanne!
Oh, that was just so beautiful.
It was devastating.
And this is because Kellyanne Conway is much, much, much more intelligent than Jim Acosta.
And this is the point I want to make here.
Specifically, Jim Acosta says to her...
As a sort of just insult, he says, well, you talk about alternative facts, Kelly.
This has become a slogan on the left about how Republicans and conservatives don't value the truth.
We value alternative facts.
Alternative facts was a phrase uttered by Kellyanne Conway in a very specific context which is perfectly reasonable and actually tells you something very truthful.
Just in case you don't remember it, here's the clip.
You did not answer the question of why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium For the first time, and utter a falsehood.
Why did he do that?
It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office on day one.
No, it doesn't.
Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck.
You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, alternative facts to that.
But the point remains- Wait a minute.
Alternative facts?
Yes, alternative facts.
The left, because they're not very good at language, they're very good at perverting language, but they're not very good at understanding language.
Alternative is an alternative.
It's not opposite facts.
It's not that the fact is a falsehood.
It's an alternative fact.
Here's another fact.
So what Sean Spicer had said was that more people watched Trump's inauguration than any inauguration in history.
That's true.
What the Democrats said was the crowd sizes in Washington were smaller than Obama's.
That might be true.
Maybe that's true.
The alternative fact is that millions and millions of more people watched on social media, on Instagram, on Snapchat, on media that did not exist for Barack Obama's first inauguration or many that didn't exist for his second inauguration.
There are facts.
Here are some alternative facts to give you context and to let you see the whole picture.
It's evidence, again, that all shallows are clear.
And Democrats and left-wingers thinking in a very shallow way think that they've got Trump on this.
And this issue is so clear.
And this issue is so clear.
And there's no other side to the issue.
There is.
There's an alternative side.
And if you look at the alternative side, then you'll get the whole picture and you can hopefully form a serious opinion and a serious conclusion.
But the left-wing has abandoned that for now in place of slogans and ridiculous memes that at least give us some enjoyment.
During the day.
Alright, that's our show.
We have so much more to get to, but too bad.
We'll do it tomorrow.
Get your mailbag questions in.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Daniel D'Amico.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everybody, I'm Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Is it time to build a wall around Manhattan to keep the media inside and prevent them from distorting the debate?
Yes it is.
I'll talk about that more on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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