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Jan. 17, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
42:55
Ep. 282 - The State Of The State Of The Union

Do we even need a state of the union speech? We will analyze. Then, Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar implies that Lindsey Graham is gay; Giuliani implies the Trump camp may have colluded with the Russians; and a pro-life activist gets punched in the face. Then, the Mailbag! Date: 01-17-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The State of the Union is strong, but the State of the State of the Union is not strong.
Will Nancy Pelosi disinvite President Trump?
Will President Trump show up anyway?
Do we even need a State of the Union speech?
We will analyze.
Then, Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar implies that Lindsey Graham is gay.
Rudy Giuliani implies that President Trump's campaign may have colluded with the Russians.
And a pro-life activist gets punched in the face.
Then the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to and first some breaking news.
It's coming in just in the last hour or so.
Big developments coming through the Russia probe with regard to how the DOJ and the FBI handled that Steele dossier.
It looks like a lot of senior DOJ and FBI officials lied.
We're getting this from then-Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr's testimony today before Congress.
We'll get to that in a second.
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I really want to get to the State of the Union today, but first we have to go over this breaking news.
Bruce Orr, you might have heard that name with regard to the collusion investigation, the Russia probe, Mueller.
It's one of these names that floats around with Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
All of these names, what the Democrats are hoping here is that you are so confused by everything that's going on in the Russia probe that you just can't put the pieces together.
Oh, who is Bruce Orr again?
Who is this?
Who is that?
So Bruce Orr was the associate attorney general.
He was the fourth ranking official in the entire Department of Justice.
He just testified before the House that the DOJ knew about the Steele dossier, the one that had all those lurid, unverified details about weird sex in Moscow, that they had that earlier than he had previously been testified.
Now, Bruce Orr matters because Bruce Orr's wife, Nellie Orr, was working for Fusion GPS, which was an opposition research firm that put together the Steele dossier that contracted this guy Christopher Steele to do the Steele dossier.
This was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Bruce Orr, the associate attorney general's wife, was working for them, and Bruce Orr did not publicly disclose this.
This is just one of the many things that smell really fishy about this whole Russia investigation.
So anyway, Bruce Orr goes up to Congress.
He testifies that previous testimony about when the FBI and DOJ knew about that Steele dossier was false.
Previously we had heard that the DOJ and the FBI did not know about the Steele dossier until September.
And this matters because they then in October went to get a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page working for the Trump campaign.
Okay.
Now what we find out from Bruce Ohr, who's in a real position to know, is that he told the FBI and the DOJ about Christopher Steele, about how Steele was working for the Democrats, about how Christopher Steele, quote, was desperate that Trump not be elected.
He told them about this in July.
So now they know about this in July.
They know that this dossier is not only unverified, but it's politically biased, it's bought and paid for by Democrats, and that the guy who put it together has a serious grudge against Donald Trump, does not want him to be elected.
Nevertheless, the FBI and the DOJ persist for a few months.
Then they go to get the FISA warrant in October.
And they basically lie to the federal judge.
Or they at least misled the federal judge in October of 2016 to get that FISA warrant.
And this is a big deal.
You might say, well, lawyers mislead judges all the time.
It's very different in the FISA courts.
James Comey himself testified about this.
He said on December 7th, That this amounts to abuse of the FISA system.
It is totally expected that when the DOJ and FBI go before the FISA judges, they will present all of the evidence.
not just part of the evidence, and say, look, some intelligence person says that Donald Trump made a weird videotape in Moscow with a bunch of hookers on Obama's bed.
It's not just that you present that, but you'll also say, oh, by the way, this has not been verified.
The guy who did it has a grudge against Donald Trump.
He's desperate for him not to be elected.
Oh, and by the way, it was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
If you leave that part out, you are misleading the federal judge.
That's what Bruce Orr, fourth-ranking DOJ official, is alleging now, is testifying before the Congress.
This is a game-changer.
It's not a game changer in that we already knew that this Russia investigation stunk to high heaven.
But now we're getting it from the horse's mouth, or at least the fourth-ranking horse's mouth.
Really, really big event.
I think probably what it means is you're going to see Mueller turn up the heat even more.
You're going to see Democrats rally around Mueller even more.
But this whole investigation seems illegitimate.
We've got to talk about the State of the Union because the State of the Union is coming up.
Or maybe it's not.
I don't know.
Maybe it's coming up.
Maybe it's not coming up.
There is a debate now over whether Nancy Pelosi will invite Donald Trump to give the State of the Union.
Because the State of the Union is held at the Capitol.
So the way that it works is the President...
He writes up his memorandum on the State of the Union, and he sends it to the Capitol, and then the Congress invites the President to come give the address.
Now the Congress is run by Democrats, so it's up to Nancy Pelosi to invite him.
Nancy Pelosi is saying that she won't do it because the government is shut down, and there could be security concerns.
Here is Nancy Pelosi.
Just during that commercial break, our team on Capitol Hill heard for the first time from Speaker Nancy Pelosi since she essentially uninvited the president for the State of the Union on January 29th.
Here's what she had to say.
Homeland Security, about all of the resources that are needed to prepare for a State of the Union address, which he calls, what, an event of special security.
And so these people are not working.
And we've never really had a State of the Union when government has been in a shutdown since the Budget Act in the 70s.
So this is respectfully and sadly...
Proudly I invited him to come, the people horse, that we would have the President of the United States.
She goes on.
She talks about how terrible Trump is.
But listen to the tack she's taking.
She's not saying, I am not going to invite the president because the government is shut down and I hate his guts.
She's not doing that.
She's trying to seem above it all and so mature.
And what she's doing is blaming the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security.
She said she was proud to invite the president to give the address.
But, you know, the security, with the government shut down, how can we possibly protect the president?
Don't forget, the government is partially shut down.
Nothing has changed.
Virtually all government services are still running.
But apparently Nancy Pelosi thinks we can't protect the president during a very minor partial shutdown that has not affected virtually any other aspect of the government.
This is pretty cynical.
She put this in a letter to the president, which is not really a letter to the president.
It's a letter to the Washington Post.
She wrote this letter to the president.
She immediately released it to the press.
I assume the president never even got it.
And she said, look, the Secret Service and Homeland Security, they say, and they just can't do it.
That's a lie.
That is a lie.
And it's not just a lie because they can do it.
It's a lie because they've said that they can do it.
A statement was released.
The Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security said they can handle security at President Trump's State of the Union address.
This is from Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.
She said, quote, We thank the service for their mission focus and dedication for all that they do each day to secure our homeland.
Couldn't be more clear.
She could not possibly be more clear about this.
So it's a sick play from Nancy Pelosi, and it's weak because he could call her out on this.
I mean, the big question is, she has invited him, but now has suggested they have to postpone it because of security.
So if he comes back and says, well, my Secretary of Homeland Security said it's absolutely fine, so deal with it.
I'm coming.
What is she going to do?
Is she going to bar him from coming in?
I don't think so.
I don't really think that's going to work.
And most presidents would abide by the rule, but I don't know, Donald Trump probably won't.
If any president is going to go barge in like a conservative speaker on a left-wing campus, kick in the doors and go give the speech, it's going to be Donald Trump.
So we'll see.
I mean, we're getting the reality TV show that we've all asked for.
That's why I don't complain about it.
This is what we wanted.
This is what the president thrives on.
This is how he accomplishes much of his agenda.
So, fine.
That's okay.
The question is, should we have a State of the Union address at all?
Conservatives raise this question all the time.
The State of the Union comes from one line in the Constitution, from Article 2, Section 3.
It reads, He shall, referring to the President, from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.
So, I know a lot of conservatives, especially the more libertarian-minded conservatives, they hate the State of the Union.
They think it's monarchical.
They think it is too regal for America.
They read that line and they say, you should just mail them a letter and say, okay, there's information, read it, enjoy, whatever you want.
But the history of the State of the Union is actually a little more regal than that.
And it doesn't just go back the last 50 years.
It actually goes back all the way to George Washington.
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So these conservatives, especially the libertarian-minded ones, hate the State of the Union.
They want to get rid of it.
And they think it's just too British.
You know, it's like the king walking in in his robes and sitting on the throne.
And that's anti-American and that's terrible.
I have a little bit of a different view on this because they...
They push it too much.
They take it too much to an extreme.
The State of the Union, contrary to what they say, is not only really a product of the 20th century.
George Washington gave a State of the Union address on January 8, 1790.
He gave that one, obviously, not in the White House, which didn't exist yet, but in New York City.
And he delivered the speech, and he was a pretty regal guy.
And people stood when he was in the room, and he was certainly no, you know, lowercase d Democrat populist or anything like that.
There was a real dignity to the office, obviously a real dignity to the man, and a dignity to the speech.
Thomas Jefferson scrapped the practice when he became president, and this tells you all you need to know, because Thomas Jefferson was much more of a lowercase d Democrat, He despised the idea of a monarchy or anything monarchical in America.
So he discontinued it, and that tradition held for over a hundred years.
It held until Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst presidents in American history, in 1913.
Wilson re-established the practice.
So now the real historical record is a little more complex.
Washington did it, so I like that.
Jefferson didn't do it, which makes me like the State of the Union even more.
Wilson did it, which makes me not like the State of the Union.
What are we to land on?
He gave the speech.
It then continued throughout the 20th century.
I believe the last time we skipped it was Jimmy Carter in 1981.
Jimmy Carter was so bitter that he had lost the election to Ronald Reagan that he refused to give a State of the Union address and he just sent the address to Congress and they read it.
I will say Antonin Scalia would not attend the State of the Union.
He thought it was a ridiculous farce and he despised that the judges couldn't smile or move or do anything while they were listening to the executive branch.
He felt that it subordinated the judicial to the executive.
I kind of like it.
I kind of like the State of the Union in so much as the office of the president, he's not just a dog catcher.
He's not just a guy at the DMV. He's not just your county executive.
There is a real dignity there because he represents the spirit of the nation, the ethos of the nation.
He is the executive and as the nation, as the greatest country in the history of the world, the superpower on earth.
This imbues the office with With a sense of the regal.
It imbues the office with a real dignity and a real gravity.
So I kind of like it for that reason.
I think it would be bizarre and incongruous if the president just sent out a tweet on the State of the Union.
I guess if any president were going to do that, it would be this president.
But he's also a good showman as well.
And the other reason, I mean, we've been talking all week about these different strains of conservative thought.
The grander sort of conservatives, the traditionalist conservatives maybe would prefer it a little bit more, the libertarians not so much.
But one thing we should be able to agree on is even if you hate the State of the Union, this is not the way to get rid of the State of the Union.
The way to get rid of it is not through a temper tantrum because Nancy Pelosi doesn't like Donald Trump.
That seems kind of wrong to me.
You know, the conservative tends to prefer evolution to revolution.
We like gradual things.
We don't like crazy, radical change all at once.
And this would seem to be a really sad way for the State of the Union, a legacy of George Washington, to disappear from American public life or to be skipped over.
That seems wrong.
Nancy Pelosi should grow up.
She's probably not going to grow up, even though she's been called out on the lies that are the basis for her not having President Trump give the State of the Union.
He should show up anyway.
If she won't have him, he should show up anyway and just take over that chamber.
You know, Donald Trump, apparently the White House is now asking Mitch McConnell to see if the Senate Majority Leader can invite the president to give the State of the Union.
Traditionally, it is the Speaker of the House.
Could the Senate Majority Leader do it?
I don't know.
I don't know that anybody really has an answer to that.
So they're looking at that.
But in any case, Pelosi has invited him, and he should take her up on that invitation.
We've got to get back to Russia briefly, because there was a bizarre exchange on...
Chris Cuomo's show on CNN today.
There are usually bizarre exchanges on Chris Cuomo's show.
This is not exactly a Man Bites Dog story.
But Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer for the president, seems to imply that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia.
Now, I don't think this is the bombshell story that the mainstream media are making it out to be.
But you've got to watch the clip and decide for yourself.
You said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign?
Yes, you have.
I have no idea.
I have not.
I said the president of the United States.
There is not a single bit of evidence.
The president of the United States committed the only crime you could commit here, conspired with the Russians to hack the DNC. First of all, crime is not the bar of accountability for a president.
It's about what you knew, what was right, and what was wrong, and what did you deceive about.
Those are going to be major considerations.
The president did not collude with the Russians.
He said nobody had any contact, tons of people had contact.
Okay, so the big headline NBC, New York Times is that Trump's lawyer is unsure whether campaign colluded with Russia.
Now, I mean, this was not a great media appearance for Rudy Giuliani, but it's not as big a story it seems because we already know that virtually everybody on both sides of this question colluded with the Russians, whatever that means.
I mean, first of all, define collusion.
What do we mean by collusion?
The reason that the Democrats glommed onto this term is because it's so vague.
There's no crime of collusion.
There's no impeachable offense of collusion.
What does collusion mean?
Do I collude with my barista when I go get a coffee in the morning?
Do I collude with Andrew Klavan?
Regularly, I collude with Andrew Klavan.
Does Ben collude with gangsters to have me assassinated?
I don't know.
I'm just saying, what does collusion mean?
We know that Paul Manafort colluded with the Russians, okay?
We know that not during the Trump campaign, maybe, but we know that he's worked with pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.
This was no secret.
He was a lobbyist, an international lobbyist, a very prominent one.
By the way, we know that Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman's brother, Tony Podesta, major Democrat lobbyist, also colluded with the Russians on the same campaign.
Now, we know that the Democrats and Hillary Clinton and the FBI and the DOJ colluded with the Russians on the Russia investigation.
How do we know that?
Because they went through Fusion GPS, funded by the DNC and Hillary, to contract Christopher Steele to get them dirt on Donald Trump.
And Christopher Steele got that dirt by talking to Russian intelligence and people familiar with Russian intelligence.
That's the only way he could have gotten the dirt.
All of the information, the apparent state-owned, Kremlin-owned Donald Trump sex tape, that would have had to come from sources within Russian intelligence.
So we actually know for a fact That all of the Democrat forces plus the federal government under Barack Obama colluded with the Russians in a way much more significant than Paul Manafort, who was briefly the chairman of the Trump campaign, doing some lobbying work for the Russians years ago.
The question is not about collusion, as Rudy Giuliani rightly points out.
The question is, was there a crime committed?
And listen...
Chris Cuomo gives away the whole story here.
He gives away the whole game of the left.
He said, well, the bar of accountability is not crime for the president.
The bar of accountability is not crime.
Because what Chris Cuomo wants to do is lower the bar of accountability to ever having watched a Rocky and Bullwinkle episode or to ever have read a Russian novel.
And then all of a sudden you can say, see, see, he's compromised by the Russians.
And they can get him to be impeached or run him out of office, run him out of town on a rail.
The bar of accountability here is crime, right?
Cuomo is completely wrong, and Giuliani is right.
The bar of accountability is not only crime, it's high crimes and misdemeanors.
Not misdemeanors meaning minor offenses like we discuss now.
High crimes.
We're talking about high crimes and misdemeanors, as that phrase was understood to mean in the drafting of the Constitution and the ratification.
Did President Trump commit a crime?
That's what you've got to ask yourself when you hear about Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andy McCabe.
If you've got Bruce Ohr telling all of these people that the Christopher Steele dossier was funded by Democrats, there was this grudge, and all of those people didn't report this or kept it quiet or wouldn't tell the FISA court judge.
You hear all of these names, all of these questions, these timelines, these days, these that.
Ask yourself one question.
What crime did Donald Trump commit?
They're now trying to get him on a campaign finance violation, which is minor.
It is nothing.
They couldn't even get ex-Senator John Roberts.
What was that guy's name?
Oh, God.
No, John Roberts is the Chief Justice of the Court.
Gosh, that guy was so forgettable that he ran for president in 2008 and we don't even remember his name anymore.
Whatever.
Someone can write it in the comments.
They couldn't even get him on this question.
And so, the question is the crime.
Did he commit a crime with Russian intelligence?
John Edwards, that was his name.
That's confusing because the psychic TV guy is also named John Edwards.
I don't know, there are a lot of...
Look, John is a very common name.
But they couldn't get him.
What is the crime that they're going to get Donald Trump on?
If Chris Cuomo can't give an answer to that, then it's all just huff and puff and puff and a whole lot of hot air.
But they can't actually nail down the question.
We've also got to get to Lindsey Graham because this was outrageous.
But first, and we've got the mailbag coming up.
Ben Shapiro tomorrow will be taking his show on the road to the March for Life in D.C. at 10 a.m.
Eastern.
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We'll be right back.
Ilan Omar, who is that anti-Semite Somali-American freshman congresswoman from the Democrat Party. who is that anti-Semite Somali-American freshman congresswoman from the Democrat She, she's the first to wear a hijab in Congress, as the mainstream media have gleefully reported.
She is now implying that...
Lindsey Graham is gay.
That the Republican senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, is a gay guy.
This insinuation from Democrats has been around for a long time because Graham has never been married and he doesn't have any kids.
Listen to her make it.
And listen to her deny it.
We need to ask you about this.
You tweeted, we're going to put this up on the screen regarding Republican Congressman Senator Lindsey Graham, I believe we have this tweet, saying they got him, he is compromised.
And there it is.
I wonder if you'd explain what you were talking about there.
This has sparked a fair amount of criticism, not just from Republicans.
Can you explain that comment?
So, over the last three years, we have seen many times where Senator Lindsey Graham has told us how dangerous this president could be if he was given the opportunity to be in the White House.
And all of a sudden, he's made Not only a 180 turnaround, but a 360 turnaround.
And so I am pretty sure that there is something happening with him, whether it is something that has to do with his funding when it comes to running for office, whether it has something to do with the polling that they might...
Have in his district or whether it has to do with some sort of leadership within the Senate.
He is somehow compromised.
He's somehow compromised.
She's implying that he's gay.
Notice she leaves out, conspicuously leaves out that it could be about his personal life, but it's the same line we've heard over and over and over.
The one point I want to make here, though, about Ilhan Omar is it turns out she's no better at mathematics than she is at political philosophy.
She says that Lindsey Graham has made not only a 180-degree turnaround in his opinion of Donald Trump, he's made a 360-degree turnaround.
So just for those of you who can visualize it, this, I'll just hold up the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
If I turn the Leftist Tears Tumblr 180 degrees...
You see, you can't read it anymore.
It's the opposite.
And then if I turn it a full 360 degrees, it's exactly the same.
If Lindsey Graham had made a 360 degree turn, that would mean he's saying the same things today that he was saying two years ago.
So maybe when Ilhan Omar educates herself on history and political philosophy and civics, maybe she could educate herself on mathematics as well.
That might serve our country while she's serving in the legislature.
But she's clearly implying that he's gay, and now she's denying it in this very coy way.
She says, oh no, I'm just saying he's compromised.
I don't know, maybe it's about what he had for breakfast.
Maybe he's not proud of eating Pop-Tarts for, I don't know, or that he's a gay guy.
And the way you know this is they've been doing it for years.
Here's Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC making the exact same insinuation.
Before Donald Trump got elected, Lindsey Graham called Donald Trump a racist, xenophobic bigot.
That is Lindsey Graham's words.
I doubt Lindsey Graham could tell you Donald Trump's had a change of heart in the last 24 months.
I bet what the change of heart has been with Lindsey Graham, not the president.
Or it could be that Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.
Something pretty extreme.
She said, we're going to leave it there.
We're going to be pretty extreme.
So they're implying that he's gay, and they've done it for a long time.
This does raise an interesting point, though.
The left tells us that it's not only okay to be gay, it is great to be gay.
It is so much better to be gay than to be straight.
It makes you a part of a victim group that then gives you certain advantages.
And puts you in a more important place in the intersectional hierarchy of victimhood, and that's wonderful, and it's diversity, and that's great.
Except when a Republican is gay.
They hate gay Republicans.
They do this all the time.
They say they love racial minorities.
They love black people and they hate black Republicans.
They love women.
They say women are so much better than men, but they hate women Republicans.
They treat them all like dirt.
They treat Tim Scott like dirt.
Look at how they treated Clarence Thomas.
Just on the question of race, look at those two guys.
On the question of sexual orientation, they're gay-shaming Lindsey Graham, who isn't gay.
We have no evidence that he's gay.
He's always asked this question, and he says, look, in as much as it matters, I'm not gay, but...
Basically, screw you for asking.
And it's true.
Who cares?
Who cares what his attraction is?
I don't know.
Maybe he likes girls.
Maybe he likes boys.
He said he dated a girl when he was younger.
He never got married.
I don't know.
Sex is complicated.
Sometimes people don't want to get married, especially if you're a prominent politician.
Okay, whatever.
The point is, they're gay-shaming Lindsey Graham, even though he's not necessarily gay, or there's no evidence that he is.
Same thing with Sarah Palin.
Same thing with Nikki Haley.
They talk about how Republicans must hate women because we find Elizabeth Warren unlikable.
We have plenty of women who we promote.
Our UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, our vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
How did the left treat those women?
What awful things do they say about those women?
What awful things do they say about Hope Hicks in the White House?
They were implying that she was sleeping with the president.
What awful things do they say about Kellyanne Conway?
They make fun of Sarah Sanders' looks.
It's just a lie, and I bring it up not to focus on Ilhan Omar any more than we have to, or Lindsey Graham, or any of these other people, but just to show you, the left doesn't care about racial minorities, or sexual minorities, or women, or they don't care at all.
They use them like tools.
They turn them into tools to use them as a cudgel to beat up the right.
And before we get to the mailbag, I do also have to point out just a little bit of good news today.
The Senate has rebuked Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono, two Democrat senators, and Kamala Harris is running for president.
The Senate posted this out today, or they voted on this, rather, and then they posted it to the Internet where we could all read it, The sense of the Senate that disqualifying a nominee to federal office on the basis of membership in the Knights of Columbus violates the Constitution of the United States.
That's a terrible thing.
It's a terrible thing to violate someone's freedom of religion and to try to disqualify a judicial nominee.
The reason that they are rebuking these two women, Kamala Harris and Maisie Hirono, is they raise the question over whether a judicial nominee, whose name is Brian Boucher, whether his membership in a Catholic organization disqualified him from being judge.
This isn't the first time this has happened.
Dianne Feinstein put it in absurdly stark terms talking about a female Catholic judicial nominee.
The dogma.
Lives loudly within you.
And that's of concern.
The dogma lives loudly within you.
They do this to Karen Pence.
Karen Pence, the vice president's wife, is working at a Christian school, which holds to Christian moral and sexual teaching, and they're so upset about this.
They're furious.
How awful.
The Democrats have a religion problem here.
They don't take religion seriously, and so because they don't take religion seriously, they fall into their own ideological religion completely unawares.
They don't realize there's any alternative to progressivism, which is their religion.
The trouble is, everybody's got to serve somebody, as many people have observed.
At bottom, all political problems are theological.
And Democrats' blindness on this issue, not just ignorance, not just kooky ideas, but actual blindness on the issue is...
I think part of the reason why they are so dysfunctional in our politics at the moment.
We can get to all of this in the mailbag.
I am determined to get through a lot of questions, so let's start it right now.
From Parker.
Hi, Michael.
Where do you stand on the moral trolley dilemma where five people will be killed by a runaway trolley, but you can push one person, presumably innocent, in its path to save them?
Do you believe saving five lives outweighs the one you'll harm, or do you believe any involvement is morally objectionable?
Does the answer to this lie within the Bible?
Yes, an answer to this comes really from Thomas Aquinas.
I think misstated the problem a little bit.
The trolley problem is this question of you're there, you've got the lever to which way the trolley is going to go.
On one side, there are five people tied to the tracks.
On the other side, there's one person tied to the tracks.
The train is traveling at the five people, and you can pull the lever and have it turn toward the one person.
Is this permitted?
This is permitted.
It's really up to you.
This relies on the principle of double effect.
There are four criteria for the principle of double effect.
One is that the action done should be intrinsically good or morally neutral regarding pulling the lever.
Two, the bad act must not be the means by which one achieves the good act.
So, it cannot be the case that the people are saved because of killing the one guy.
Now, killing the one guy might be an effect of saving the five people, but it can't be the case that the five people are killed because you killed the one guy.
Number three, you intend the good effect, and you do not intend the bad effect either as a means to the good or as an end in itself, obviously.
And the bad effect must not be disproportionate to the good effect.
So, in the trolley question...
You have a choice.
It would be morally permissible to pull the lever and have the train derail and kill the one guy and not kill the five people.
Or to do nothing would also be morally permissible because you're dealing with a question of double effect.
It's funny how this question was...
It was answered with great effect by Thomas Aquinas a very, very long time ago, and yet people still discuss it as though there's no answer to the question.
There is clearly an answer, and we all know in our gut that Probably either one is fine, or maybe we'd be more likely to pull it and go for the one guy.
But the answer is not quite so clear as we always want it to be, as we want to form some ideology and a checklist and say, this is what we do.
But the reasoning, the moral reasoning that gets you to that answer, I think is much more interesting and has a far greater effect on real problems you will encounter, assuming you don't find yourself on the train tracks with many people tied to the rails.
From Samuel, So, it's funny you ask that, Sam.
There it is.
Here is one of my most prized possessions, the check that I received from Ben Shapiro for accurately predicting that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election.
He gave me 4 to 1 odds, so I only bet $100.
He gave me $400.
And there in the memo line you can read it says, for ignoring data.
I do love it, and I framed it, but just to be clear, I did mobile deposit the check first, so I certainly took the money and would not just leave it sitting there in glass.
From Patrick, if you had to pick a candidate to win primary and general in 2020 out of the announced and probable Democrat field for president, which would you prefer?
Thanks, PJ. I'd like Liz Warren to win the primary.
She's the most beatable candidate for the general election, so I want her to win the primary.
If it had to be someone who would win the primary and the general, meaning we would have to live with a Democrat president, that's really hard.
Of the announced candidates, they're all so far left wing.
I suppose Joe Biden is probably the most moderate of the possible nominees.
He hasn't quite announced yet, but it certainly looks like he's going to run.
So I guess if I had to deal with someone, you know, if I had to choose between arsenic and cyanide, I guess I would go with Joe Biden.
But they're all pretty terrible.
That party has shifted far to the left.
And any person who wins the Democrat primary in 2020 is going to so have to shift to the left that they'll probably be indistinguishable by the time the general rolls around.
So sad.
From Mike.
My name is also Michael, so you should answer my question, okay?
How did the Democrat Party become the mainstream party?
Could the Republican Party ever become the mainstream party, and would that even be a good thing?
Thanks, Michael.
You have been so brainwashed, Michael, by our pop culture that you don't realize that the Republicans are the mainstream.
I don't mean this to attack you or anything like that, but Republicans until about a week ago or two weeks ago held all three branches of government and basically had the Supreme Court.
And had spent the previous ten years or eight years taking over every statehouse in the country.
Republicans are the mainstream party.
Now, it doesn't seem that way because you're spending time in high school or college or in corporate America or wherever, and you're watching the popular culture in the movies and listening to the music and watching TV news.
But just look at the effect.
The mainstream has been the Republican Party.
We have the presidency.
We still have two of the three houses of government, to use Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's incorrect phrasing.
We still have the Senate, and we still have the presidency, and the Democrats just retook the House.
So we are mainstream.
The question is, how will we retake the culture?
That's going to be much harder because conservatives don't care that much about the culture.
The left does because they play a longer game, and the left cares more about politics, so they're willing to go further for it.
I hope that we can do it.
Some people are trying to retake the culture.
Drew writes movies.
I perform in his audiobooks and film projects and things like that.
But unfortunately, it's going to take a much more concerted effort at the universities and at the movie studios and at the publishing houses rather than just focusing on think tanks and politicians.
From Arun, Dear Dr.
Kofefe, speaking of doctors, what do you think about PhDs asking to be referred to as doctor?
Thanks, love the show.
PhDs are the only real doctors.
Why is a medical doctor referred to as doctor?
Why is a physician referred to as doctor?
Doctor comes from the Latin word doctor, which means to teach.
Doctor means teacher.
So when you're a teacher, you're a doctor.
So a PhD in art history or something, it makes sense for that person to be a doctor.
But a physician is not a doctor.
They're a physician or a surgeon.
They wear a stethoscope.
The word doctor doesn't mean where's a stethoscope.
So for those of us who have wives, for instance, who are working on PhDs right now, I suppose that when those wives get the PhD, then we will be some of the only people whose wives are doctors.
From Nicholas.
Hey, Michael.
Just wondering what you think about Niccolo Machiavelli and the Prince.
Hashtag came for Ben, stayed for Knowles.
That's nice.
I saw another one, actually.
Someone said, I saw a hashtag came for Ben, stayed for Ben, but I also watch Knowles now.
Which I'll take what I can get.
I love reading Machiavelli.
I actually did a translation, the first English stage translation of Machiavelli's first play.
A lot of people don't realize that Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince, kind of invented modern political science and, in some ways, maybe invented the modern political era.
He was also a playwright and a translator of plays, so I did a translation of his first play, The Girl from Andros.
I love reading him.
I think he's one of the most consequential thinkers in the history of the world.
However, he's the guy who invented modernity, and I don't care that much for modernity, so I much prefer the actual content of other political thinkers.
But he's truly a great genius.
And one thing about Machiavelli, also like Edmund Burke, is that he wasn't just a political theorist.
He actually was a practitioner.
He held offices.
He was a diplomat.
He...
He was really in the reality of politics, and politics is a practical science, so he knew what he was talking about.
I have time for one more.
From Brendan, what is the best book for a college conservative to read?
Well, you know my answer.
Really fast.
I know you're busy in college.
The fastest, most important read would be Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide by Michael J. Knowles.
But after that, I would recommend that you read The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk.
There are too many good books to recommend.
Reflections on the Revolution in France, God and Man at Yale, Up from Liberalism, also by Buckley, is a good one.
Witness by Whitaker Chambers is fabulous.
There's so many to read.
Obviously, Aristotle and Plato and the Bible and blah, blah, blah.
It goes on and on.
Read The Conservative Mind.
I think that's good for a college-age student, specifically for conservatives, specifically for American conservatives.
I think you'll enjoy it.
Okay, that's our show.
I hope you have a good weekend.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you on Monday.
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 Danny D'Amico.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Production assistant Nick Sheehan.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about Mike Pence's wife, Karen, who got a job at a private Christian school teaching art, and now the left is outraged about it.
The outrage itself is fake and stupid and ridiculous, but there's something ominous about it, which I really want to focus on.
We'll talk about that.
Also, should people ever really have to apologize for expressing an opinion, even a wrong opinion?
I'll say no, and I want to explain why.
And finally, I want to give you Kamala Harris, the Democrat, she had some deep and beautiful words of wisdom in an interview with ABC, and I think it'll change your life.
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