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Jan. 28, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
44:42
Ep. 287 - Bible Literacy For Dummies

President Trump touts Bible literacy. Naturally, the Left is up in arms. Then, the FBI arrests 66-year-old foppish GOP operative Roger Stone, 2020 gets even wilder, and pop culture admits babies are babies. Date: 01-28-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump touts Bible literacy bills that seek to teach students about the most influential book in the history of the world.
Naturally, the left is up in arms.
Then, the FBI arrests 66-year-old foppish GOP operative Roger Stone.
Finally, our streets are safe.
2020 gets even wilder for Democrats, Texas uncovers massive voter fraud, and pop culture admits that unborn babies are unborn babies.
That's pretty good.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
I love this Bible literacy tweet.
President Trump tweeted it out.
He said that we're going to get Bible literacy in schools if political reforms can instill Bible literacy in American students.
That will be the most beneficial and consequential political reform of my entire lifetime.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Before we get to Bible literacy, I want to talk about the arrest of Roger Stone.
You probably saw this.
CNN had footage of this.
In the middle of the night, 29 FBI agents came in 17 vehicles, lights flashing, automatic weapons in tow, to kick in the door and arrest a 66-year-old political operative named Roger Stone.
He's this foppish political operative.
He has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.
He has said for months now that if Mueller wants him, he's happy to turn himself in and cooperate.
But no, the FBI investigation had to kick in his door, and somehow CNN found out about it.
Had they found out about it ahead of time?
I don't know.
They're just such good reporters there.
That must be the reason.
So, they kick him in, they arrest him, they bring Roger Stone, haul him down to the clink, and then a couple hours later, he's released on $250,000 bond.
He gives this great press conference.
He walks out, because he's a big fan of Richard Nixon, he walks out with the two V signs up in the air, just like Richard Nixon.
He's got the V up there.
Side note...
The hippies took over the V sign and made it the peacenik sign.
The V sign is great.
Churchill used it.
Nixon used it.
I think we need to reclaim it.
Roger Stone is reclaiming it.
He went out and he gave this press conference.
As I have always said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
This is a line that he's used a lot.
I've heard it.
It's a kind of common knowledge in politics.
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
And by the way, this is why I think he actually might get off just fine in this whole thing.
I think Roger Stone's dishonesty might save him.
When he emerged and gave this press conference, he looked as happy as I've ever seen the guy.
Roger Stone, for those who don't know him, he's an old-time political advisor to Donald Trump.
Not exactly necessarily on presidential politics.
It looks like he got kicked off that Trump presidential campaign pretty early.
But he helped him out with local lobbying stuff.
Stone does a lot of ballot propositions.
He writes books.
He goes on speaking tours.
And...
As a lot of people have observed, he brags about doing a lot of things that he most likely didn't do.
So if they think they're going to get him on colluding with Russia or talking to WikiLeaks or whatever, there's a good chance he bragged about doing that, but he didn't actually do it.
Stone goes on.
Two-year inquisition.
The charges today relate in no way to Russian collusion, any leaks, collaboration, or any other illegal act in connection with the 2016 campaign.
I am falsely accused of making false statements during my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee.
That is incorrect.
Any error I made in my testimony would be both immaterial and without intent.
So Stone has been waiting to be indicted for a while now.
I get a real kick out of this guy, especially I'm from New York.
He spends a lot of time in New York, has been based out of New York.
I get a real kick out of him in politics because he's a total showman.
He wears crazy clothing, and he got into a bit of hot water in 1996.
He was on the Dole for President campaign, and it came out that he had run a sex ad in some swingers magazine trying to pick up different people to go on swinging threesomes, whatever.
He's always been libertarian.
He's now a member of the Libertarian Party, and he calls himself a libertine.
I mean, he comes from that libertine wing of the Republicans.
P.G. O'Rourke wrote a famous essay called, Republican Party Reptile, How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.
Roger Stone comes from that side of the Republican Party.
And I get a kick out of him, but...
I think this is where he comes out and says, I'm not guilty.
The only crime that they're accusing me of is lying to Congress because he said that he telephoned somebody when in fact he might have emailed that person and they've got him now and they're going to try to squeeze him on this.
But he said that's immaterial and that was done without intent.
So he'll...
Very possibly get off on that.
And they're trying to say that he colluded with the Russians.
What a lot of this comes down to is, did Roger Stone speak directly to WikiLeaks?
Was he in contact with Julian Assange?
And did he act as a conduit for the Trump campaign to Julian Assange or the Russian government or whatever?
The reason I think he probably didn't...
Maybe he did.
He's been an operative and a lobbyist for a long time.
But the reason I think he probably didn't is because he brags about doing things that he didn't do.
So there are a few great profiles on him, usually profiles that he is instigating.
And one of them in The New Yorker talks about all these dirty tricks.
He said he played his first dirty trick in the third grade when he supported Kennedy for president.
This was before he became a conservative.
He supported Kennedy, so they had a mock election in class, and he told all the kids that Nixon wanted school on Saturdays, and Kennedy won in a landslide, and he's used disinformation ever since.
So maybe that happened.
Also, that's just a legendary story.
We've heard this for years about various presidential campaigns.
A lot of people use it.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Stone is just saying that for self-aggrandizement.
He says he played a dirty trick on the Nixon re-election campaign.
He was a low-level staffer, and he played a dirty trick on a possible primary opponent of Richard Nixon named Pete McCluskey.
He says that he donated under a pseudonym Jason Rainier to the Young Socialist Alliance in the name of Pete McCluskey, and then he sent the receipts to the newspaper to make McCluskey look like he was a left-wing stooge and interloper trying to take over the Republican Party or something.
Yeah, maybe it did.
I don't know.
Maybe possibly.
Stone takes credit for the Brooks Brothers riot down in Florida in 2000.
This was when Al Gore wanted 50 million recounts of the ballot so that he can cheat his way into the presidency.
And there was a riot.
There was a big demonstration of a lot of GOP operatives.
They called it the Brooks Brothers riot because it was all these buttoned-up conservatives in their nice fancy ties and suits.
And Stone takes credit for that.
There's a GOP lawyer named Brad Blakeman who says that he was the one who organized the Brooks Brothers riot.
He was in the Winnebago.
He didn't see Roger Stone anywhere to be found there.
Tucker Carlson, in a documentary about Stone, actually kind of backs that up.
He says, it's not so much what Stone has done, but what Stone has gotten you to believe that he has done.
That's a documentary made by a pal of mine that I've actually worked with called Get Me Roger Stone.
He also takes credit for taking down New York Democrat Governor Elliot Spitzer.
Elliot Spitzer was a dirty creep, Democrat Governor of New York, and he was caught using high-end prostitutes, and he had to resign.
Roger Stone, after this all happened, said that he first found out about it in a dodgy club in Miami from a call girl.
And then he let the FBI know.
He sent the FBI a letter and he came up with all these lurid details.
The FBI says they never got a letter from Roger Stone.
We have no idea if he actually talked to this call girl.
But Stone, in his political brilliance, is able to insert himself into the Spitzer takedown story.
If you asked the regular average political operative on the street, they believe that Roger Stone took down Spitzer.
Really, the FBI maintains this is part of a long-time investigation into Eliot Spitzer, and Stone didn't have anything to do with it.
I bring all of this up because Stone says that he talked to WikiLeaks.
He said he was in contact with WikiLeaks.
He's now being accused of telling Trump senior campaign aides in June and July of 2016 that WikiLeaks had damaging documents on the Democrats.
Which might be true, but everybody already knew that WikiLeaks had those documents in June and July of 2016.
That was already public knowledge at the time.
So Roger Stone is just telling people what everyone already knew.
He said he'd spoken to WikiLeaks, but what's the evidence that he actually had?
Because by September 2017, he said he never did speak to WikiLeaks.
I tend to believe that.
I tend to believe the latter part, not because I think Stone wouldn't do it, I just don't think he had access, and I think he was bragging about it.
Donald Trump came out and said Roger's always taking credit for things that he didn't do.
And WikiLeaks has now come out and said, quote, I'm saying this because
I think his best defense...
Is his dishonesty.
And I think that if they really had him on colluding with Vladimir Putin or something, he couldn't have given that press conference.
He wouldn't have allowed himself to be that open and that vulnerable.
He'd have to be the stupidest political operative on the face of the earth.
I think he is, as he has done throughout his entire career, playing the media like a fiddle, as WikiLeaks says.
And I can't wait to see the rest of it.
Because, again, you see the headlines...
Trump advisor, indicted, they've got him on a procedural crime, possibly lying to Congress, and even the evidence for that is pretty slim.
What do they have the other guys on?
George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort.
It's all this procedural stuff.
It all has to do with the Russian investigation itself.
And that's the real story.
The real crimes that may have been committed are by the people who launched this Russian investigation, who colluded with the Democrats, who colluded with the Clinton campaign, and yes, who colluded with the Russians to assemble the Steele dossier on which this whole charade has been based.
We'll see as time goes on, but this Russia thing really is falling apart.
Look no further than Democrat Rep.
Eric Solwell speaking to Margaret Hoover on her Firing Line show.
He can't answer even basic questions about his hysterical Russia claims.
At what point do you draw the line and not accuse the President of the United States without any evidence of being an agent of Russia?
Yeah, he's betrayed our country, and I don't say that lightly.
I worked as a prosecutor for seven years, and I... Betraying the country, by the way, we want evidence before you say that, but you said an agent of Russia.
He works on their behalf.
Since he met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July, where he took the interpreter's notes, hasn't told any U.S. official what they discussed, he has taken us out of Syria, which is a top priority of Russia.
He sought to diminish or pull out the U.S. from NATO. And he's easing sanctions on Vladimir Putin's friends who are under investigation.
But he didn't pass sanctions against Russia.
He has armed the Ukraine.
He has killed 200 Russians in Syria.
I mean, those aren't the actions of an agent of Russia either.
He signed, I think, begrudgingly sanctions against Russia.
Oh, it was begrudging.
He begrudgingly killed 200 Russians in Syria.
He begrudgingly.
This is really sad.
Eric Swalwell, what does he have here?
What can he say?
And he's one of the most articulate Democrats I've heard talking about Russia.
And he's got nothing.
He just says things.
He says the talking points.
And then you can easily shoot all of them down.
And then they've got, he said, well, Trump, yeah, but he only did it begrudgingly.
Listen, don't judge Trump on his actions.
Judge Trump on what I think his intentions are.
That's what Eric Swalwell is saying.
That's what the Democrats are saying.
You can't judge Trump on what he actually does.
You have to judge Trump on our psychobabble interpretation of his intentions.
It's ridiculous.
It just falls apart.
And I think Roger Stone probably couldn't be happier.
The FBI got Paul Manafort on some serious, shady dealings.
Not with regard to Trump, not with regard to the Russian collusion in 2016 or anything like that.
But they got him on some of his lobbying from years ago.
And so you don't see Paul Manafort smiling, happy, bubbly, giving press conferences.
Roger Stone is a different character.
And for people who have been around political operations, you can see these two types of character.
There are guys who actually work and lurk in the shadows, who perform really nefarious operations for dictators around the world.
And then there's guys like Roger Stone, who are media figures.
Just think about it this way.
If you wanted to be a real black ops kind of political operator, Would you make certain that everybody knows your name?
If you wanted to be a real dark arts political operator, would you wear really silly multicolored suits and go on TV all the time?
Probably not.
How many of you had heard the name Paul Manafort before he became prominent with the Trump campaign?
None?
Probably not very many.
But how many had seen Roger Stone on TV, in the newspaper, giving an interview, hosting a big political stunt press conference?
Probably most of you.
Somebody else, I forget who it was, some GOP figure, was discussing Roger Stone.
Oh no, I'm sorry, it was Hank Sheinkoff, who's a great Democrat political operative, but truly one of the greats.
And he's known Stone for a long time.
And he said, I always got the impression with Roger that...
Roger was more focused on his life than his work.
He was more focused on how the work served his life and his image than how the image served his work.
And I think that's probably accurate.
So, good on him.
I think he's probably going to have the time of his life here.
And there is no figure better in conservative politics to make a fool of the mainstream media and this silly investigation probably than Roger Stone.
So...
Good luck, and if they catch you having done shady things, I won't be surprised.
But if you catch them with their pants down, I'll be even less surprised.
The really good news in the cycle today has nothing to do with the Russian investigation or even political machinations.
President Trump tweeted out, quote,"...numerous states introducing Bible literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible.
Starting to make a turn back?
Great." And what he was referring to most likely is a segment on Fox and Friends this morning in which a North Dakota representative is talking about a bill to add Bible literacy classes to schools in North Dakota.
There are similar bills in Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, and Virginia and Florida.
This is so good.
This would be the most important political reform of my lifetime.
Better than tax cuts, better than foreign interventions, better than raising spending or lowering spending.
This would be so important.
It's so important because politics is downstream of culture.
And our culture, our Western culture, our American culture, is incomprehensible without biblical literacy.
Of course, the cult and the culture are related etymologically, and the culture is downstream of the religion, what a culture worships.
It is jarring to talk to people around the country and to gauge that they have zero biblical literacy.
You know, I read the texts of other religions long before I was seriously exposed to reading the Bible.
And I think this is just a fact of our public education system right now.
Look, I went to a great college.
They are supposed to be the cream of the crop students in the country.
Those students were totally biblically illiterate.
Almost all of them.
What is this really about?
You know, I tweeted out that this would be the greatest policy of my lifetime.
And you saw a little fissure on the right.
You saw some of the libertarian type saying, oh, well, if you support that, would you support reading the Koran in school?
Would you support reading the Vedas or the Bhagavad Gita or this or that?
Would you support the Koran?
I'd say, well, I'd support reading the Quran in school if we lived in Saudi Arabia.
Of course, because that culture and that history is incomprehensible without reading the Quran.
I read the Quran before I read the Bible as a kid.
I read it because everyone told me that Islam was the religion of peace, and I didn't believe it.
I was pretty skeptical of that, so I read it at age 14, and of course none of those people had ever read the Quran.
Our history, our culture, our philosophy, our everything that has happened, our literature, everything in Western civilization is incomprehensible if you don't know the Bible.
How can you understand Shakespeare if you haven't read the Bible?
How do you catch references in everything from William Faulkner all the way back to whomever, modern novels?
How do you understand any of it without reading the Bible?
William Faulkner, just an example that popped into my head, has a novel called Absalom, Absalom.
What does that mean?
What does that refer to?
Do you know?
This audience probably does know because it's disproportionately biblically literate, Jews and Christians.
How many other people in the culture do you think catch that reference?
Why?
Why wouldn't we teach Bible literacy?
We're told it's because we have a separation of church and state, which is sort of true.
We have no established religion.
That part is true.
But that means that we can't read the most influential book in the history of the world.
Think of all the stupid books that you read in high school.
You can read all of those.
You can read Sula.
You can read all these, Howard Zinn, whatever, all these modern books.
But you can't read the most influential book in the history of the world.
Well, some say, then if we're teaching the Bible, we should teach all of the religious books.
We can't.
There isn't enough time.
Education means you include some things and you exclude other things.
This is...
I had my high school teacher on the other day because he's being targeted by our high school for his conservative views.
Why is he being targeted?
There's a superintendent in Bedford Central School District named Christopher Mano, and he doesn't like that there's one openly conservative teacher at that school.
So he's trying to get that guy fired.
That guy, Christopher Mano, I just found this out, the superintendent who's persecuting my former teacher...
When he was a superintendent in New Jersey, he applauded when students were made by their teachers to sing hymns to how great Barack Obama is.
He defended that.
He said, oh, it's great to do that.
What a wonderful educational opportunity.
Meanwhile, you have one conservative teacher in a high school who goes after them because education requires including certain things and not other things.
It requires analyzing certain historical periods and not others.
It requires reading certain works of literature and not others.
And if you're going to include all of these wonderful things, world history, world literature, this, that, and the other, Shouldn't you include the most important book ever written?
That just seems like common sense.
Hillsdale president Larry Ornn right now, he just came out and made a statement that shouldn't be controversial, but it is, which is that college is not for everyone.
College is not for everyone.
one.
For a lot of people, it's a huge waste of money.
For some people, it's a great thing to do.
I love liberal education.
I fully intend to send my kids to get a liberal education.
That means to major in something that has no applicability to anything in the real world, to study literature or history or whatever.
That's what a liberal education is.
A Liberal education allows you to make sense of your freedom, to use your free time to think about grand and eternal questions.
And then after that, you get some training to go work a real job in the real world.
Now, some people could go take STEM classes.
They could focus on not just the liberal arts, mathematics or something, but engineering, something really applicable.
Okay, that's good.
Some people should go to trade school and learn a trade.
Maybe they don't need to read Absalom, Absalom.
Maybe they want to learn a trade.
That's a good thing.
Maybe some people will go right into the world of work.
That's a good thing.
Maybe they never really cared about school.
They weren't great students.
If they go to college, they'll just end up a quarter of a million dollars in debt instead of learning a trade, and then they can instantly start making money and being productive and doing something with their lives.
Maybe some people will enlist in the military right out of high school.
Maybe they're really good athletes.
Maybe they've got a real patriotic focus.
Maybe they're going to do that.
That's a great thing.
Not everybody needs to go to some Four-year liberal arts college.
That's not for everybody.
We have now, ostensibly, the most educated generation in history.
Oh, all these people going to college, so credentialed, and yet, they're totally uneducated.
Standards have been lowered.
Naturally, when you flood college with everybody, standards lower.
It means less for those people to go.
And because people in their early education are less educated now than they were 100 years ago.
Because they've never read the most important book in the history of the world.
They haven't read the book that is essential to understanding all of the subsequent literature and history and philosophy and on and on.
Even the development of science and mathematics.
All is coming out of the church which defines our civilization.
They don't understand that.
And there's a further point, because I see some conservatives making the argument that biblical literacy is important because you can't really understand anything else without it.
That's true.
The other reason that it's important is what all of our really serious founding fathers talked about, which is that our republic is built for a moral and religious people.
So actually, it's not just that you learn about it and you know it in some esoteric sense, but it's that What we learn, what we engage with in our culture, shapes who we are.
We're not just floating brains moving in the air.
We have bodies.
We have actions.
We have habits.
If you read trashy novels, you're going to think in a certain way.
You're going to behave in a certain way.
If you read serious works, if you read the Bible, you're going to behave and think in a different way.
You will think toward the virtues.
You will think in a moral way.
As religiosity As religious understanding erodes, our religious practice erodes.
As religious practice erodes, our morals erode.
You can't have a moral society that is not religious.
As morals erode, discipline erodes.
Virtue erodes.
The sense of purpose in the world and the sense of purpose for your life erodes.
When that happens, liberty erodes.
You cannot have liberty without that.
Some people want to pretend that you can.
You really can't.
You can't govern yourself.
If you don't have all of that before you, we want to cut off civilization from the roots of it.
It isn't going to work.
You become a ridiculous creature like Kirsten Gillibrand.
We'll get to a 2020 update.
I want to tell you about my weekend at the commissioning of the USS Michael Monsoor, speaking of virtue and courage.
But first, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
If you're on dailywire.com, thank you.
You help keep the lights on.
You keep Covfefe in my cup.
If you're not, go over there.
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You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan Show, you get the Ben Shapiro Show, you get the Questions in the Mailbag, you get the Matt Walsh Show, you get Desk Questions Backstage, you get Another Kingdom, you get so much stuff!
And you get this.
You get the biblical literacy tumbler.
You get...
Now, it's not directly related to the Bible, although I'm sure there are many exegetes who can tell you about the scriptural significance of the leftist years tumbler.
But what will happen is once these schools start teaching the most important book in the history of the world, the left, they are going to cry.
You're going to have maybe a second flood of...
I know we were told...
God said he would never destroy humanity again with a flood, but the left never made that promise, and they might do it.
So that's why you need to get your Leftist Tears Tumblr.
It's your own personal mini-arc.
Grab it.
And we'll be right back with a lot more.
When you're biblically illiterate, when you are uneducated, when you are undisciplined, when you can't govern yourself, you become a ridiculous creature, like the future president, when you can't govern yourself, you become a ridiculous creature, like the future president, future nominee of the Of East Park World.
We will wear the belt of truth because we know the truth.
We speak truth to power.
We will put on the bright breastplate of righteousness because we know right from wrong and we will not forget it.
We will hold that shield of faith.
As Dr.
King said, faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase.
So hold on to that faith tightly.
We will wield the sword of the Spirit.
The sword of the Spirit is the Word of God, and the Good Book promises us the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
The good book tells us, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with...
God!
God?
And the word and...
Well, the point is the sword of the spirit and the...
Please elect me!
I'm a Christian!
Please!
Really pathetic display.
People made fun of President Trump because he's also not terribly comfortable speaking in a religious setting.
And they made fun of him for describing...
2 Corinthians as 2 Corinthians.
He said, oh, you're supposed to say 2 Corinthians.
By the way, some people actually do say 2 Corinthians.
But anyway, they gave him hell over that.
They constantly go after him as incompetent as a religious speaker.
What about this?
Donald Trump is Jonathan Edwards compared to this lady.
Donald Trump is like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham and Jonathan Edwards all rolled up into one.
Are you kidding me?
Donald Trump is Fulton Sheen compared to Kirsten Gillibrand.
How pathetic is that?
This is what happens when you lose a faith tradition.
This is what happens.
You become a grotesque caricature.
How sad.
What is this?
What is she doing?
Al Sharpton put this video out.
She's trying to appeal to predominantly black Christian voters in the Democrat Party.
It's not really going to work.
What else do we have from the 2020 update?
Apparently, Kamala Harris had an affair with a married man 20 years ago.
That's a little tidbit that came out today from the former San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown.
Willie Brown came out and said that he had an affair with Kamala Harris 20 years ago, and in exchange for that, he appointed her to a couple state commissions and launched her entire political career.
Pretty brutal stuff from this 80-something-year-old former mayor, all of which is to say, delicious.
Just, just, mmm.
It is not even February 2019 yet, folks, and this is what we're getting out of the 2020 Democrat primary.
This is going to be gold.
This is going to be so good.
Kamala Harris has come out the gate pretty strong and they are already attacking her from every angle.
I mean, they are making her out to be...
Hillary 2.0, except she's got no moral standards.
She's sleeping with married men.
It's just brutal what they're doing to her.
Then Kirsten Gillibrand is doing it to herself.
And then you've got Howard Schultz, who is the CEO of Starbucks, coming out and saying that he's going to run an independent bid and spoil it for whoever the ultimate Democrat nominee is anyway.
I am seriously thinking of running for president.
I will run as a centrist, independent, Outside of the two-party system.
We're living at a most fragile time.
Not only the fact that this president is not qualified to be the president, but the fact that both parties are consistently not doing what's necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged every single day in revenge politics.
Why run as an independent?
Your views have always aligned with the Democratic Party.
It's true.
You know, I've been a lifelong Democrat.
I look at both parties.
We see extremes on both sides.
Well, we are sitting today with approximately $21.5 trillion of debt, which is a reckless example, not only of Republicans, but of Democrats as well, as a reckless failure of their constitutional responsibility.
Run, Howard, run.
Run, Howard, run.
Howard Schultz is a far-left Democrat.
He's the guy who turns Starbucks into a homeless shelter.
He is the one who's installing heroin needles into the Starbucks bathrooms.
He is just a real hippy-dippy leftist guy.
And he might run in an independent bid.
He knows he's not going to win the Democrat primary.
There's no way a straight, white, billionaire man is ever going to win that primary.
He won't get one vote in it.
But he would be able to get a good number of votes as an independent because you've got a sizable number of Democrats or these days probably former Democrats who are so turned off by intersectional, nasty identity politics and you've got Those same people who don't really like Donald Trump because he's too right-wing or he's too vulgar or whatever.
Howard Schultz would appeal to them, and Donald Trump knows it, and he's encouraging him to run.
He tweeted out today that Howard Schultz doesn't have the guts to run for president, and he's doing it with all the subtlety of Donald Trump.
He's saying this because if Schultz ran as an independent, it would all but ensure a Trump re-election.
So, what I am telling you, hear me closely.
Take notes.
If you're driving, pull over.
Every one of you has to write a letter to Howard Schultz begging him to run for president.
Write it, send it to Starbucks, tweet at him, send him an email.
We need to get this guy to run as an independent.
It would be phenomenal.
Oh, the joys.
He's been signaling that he wants to run for a while, so I think he's probably in it.
And it'll just be a singular joy if they can get him in.
It's going to become the 2000 election all over again.
This is my other observation, even this early on.
Do you remember the 2000 election?
I was such a political hound that I've been following politics really since I was two years old.
And I remember in the 2000 election, I was about 10 years old, and it struck me that that election was about nothing.
What was that election about?
What was the big issue?
Nothing.
The election was about how Bill Clinton's a degenerate.
And the economy was going pretty well and everything was basically fine.
9-11 hadn't happened yet.
It was just about nothing.
You had all of these candidates and you had third parties making a push.
In 92, Ross Perot ran as the Reform Party candidate.
He spoiled it for George Bush.
George Bush lost the election.
Bill Clinton became president.
In 2000, Donald Trump almost ran for president as the Reform Party candidate.
He was running for the Reform Party nomination against Pat Buchanan.
Pat Buchanan then is running in the 2000 election.
It takes a lot of votes away.
Ralph Nader was another one, a spoiler, who probably threw the election to George Bush.
This is deja vu all over again.
I can't wait to have an election about nothing because elections about nothing just become about people and all this stupid fighting.
And for years now we've been told how terrible a person Donald Trump is.
Everybody else is so pure, so wonderful.
All those sanctimonious pseudo-conservatives all the way to the crazy virtue-signaling leftists.
They're all so morally pure and good and only Donald Trump is bad.
We're about to find out what degenerates all these people are.
We're about to find out that Kamala Harris had an affair with a married man 20 years ago and did it so that she could just advance her career.
Pretty cynical move.
We're about to find out a lot of things about a lot of these people.
I can't wait.
That'll be a lot of fun.
It's not just the schadenfreude that I'm looking forward to.
It's not just having delicious tears at their expense and drinking up their misery.
It's because they need to be taken down a peg.
They are so sanctimonious.
They are so prideful.
And they're about to find out the wages of that.
In other shocking news, the government reopened.
Did I forget to mention that?
Yeah, the government reopened.
Eh, whatever.
Okay.
During the shutdown, I said, okay, the government's shut down.
Is it shut down?
Does anyone know?
Is it eh?
And now it's open and eh, whatever.
I guess Trump sort of gave in.
Maybe it'll close again in three weeks.
I don't know, whatever.
What it does bring up to me, though, is that this immigration debate is about a lot more than a border wall.
We're all talking about it as the border wall.
We're all talking about it just as a matter of illegal immigration.
It's actually about more than that.
And of all people, the left-wing former anchor of NBC News, Tom Brokaw, is making this clear.
He fits in a true statement in between a bunch of kind of leftist claptrap about how Republicans are racist.
But he actually gets a true statement in there as well about assimilation.
A lot of this we don't want to talk about, but the fact is, on the Republican side, a lot of people see the rise of an extraordinarily important new constituency in American politics, Hispanics, who will come here and all be Democrats.
Also, I hear when I push people a little harder, I don't know whether I want brown grandbabies.
I mean, that's also a part of it.
It's the intermarriage that is going on and the cultures that are conflicting with each other.
I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation.
That's one of the things I've been saying for a long time.
You know, that they ought not to be just codified in their communities, but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English and that they feel comfortable in the communities.
And that's gonna take outreach on both sides, frankly.
Now, of course, this last thing that he makes, this last point that he makes is true.
Hispanics need to assimilate into American culture.
It's not just their fault that they're not assimilating at the same speed at which other immigrant groups have done it.
A lot of it is thanks to the culture, which discourages them from assimilating, which tells them to keep speaking Spanish, which tells them that America is awful and the West is a terrible place.
Why they would want to come here, I have no idea.
Why we would take in over a million people a year, I can't imagine if we're such a terrible place.
But that point is right.
The point about...
Republicans don't want brown grandbabies.
That's just typical leftist NBC nonsense.
But the point he's making about assimilation is fair, I think.
And that's not just illegal immigration that that has to do with, that's legal immigration.
There was a big poll that came out, I think from Harvard-Harris, which showed that the majority of Americans don't just want less illegal immigration, they want less legal immigration.
And they don't just want less legal immigration, they want radically less legal immigration.
Right now we're at about 1.2 million a year.
They want that down to about half a million.
And why is that?
Well, one, a million people a year is a lot of people to absorb into a country, constantly coming in.
I think we could absorb it if we encouraged assimilation.
But I think a lot of people really hate pressing one for English, and I think they're totally justified in doing that.
And it's wrong for the immigrants.
It's wrong to encourage them not to learn English so that they're a permanent second class, so that certain jobs just are cut off from them, that certain educational opportunities just are cut off from them.
You have to assimilate.
When my great grandfather came to America from Italy, he was basically ashamed of being Italian.
And he was rightly ashamed of being Italian because he's in America and he has to learn English.
So he would read the newspaper in English all the time.
He wouldn't speak Italian really in the home.
He felt that he had left a culture.
For good reason.
And he was coming to a new culture, and he was going to succeed at that new culture.
That is a radically different attitude than what the left tells us to do today, which is that we should assimilate to immigrants.
We certainly should not do that.
That's crazy.
And it creates a bad situation not just for the country, but for the immigrants as well.
A really interesting point at the end there by Tom Brokaw.
Of course, he's had to walk it back now because the left pounced on him.
And a conservative hasn't watched NBC News in 30 years.
This ties into some other aspects of this debate, which we'll just have to get to tomorrow, because I want to point out before I leave, I had the honor this weekend of attending the commissioning of the USS Michael Monsoor down at Coronado.
This is a Zumwalt-class ship.
It's a destroyer.
It looks like it's something out of Star Wars.
It is a really cool ship.
It's been in the process of being built now for over 20 years.
And being designed and being thought of.
And so this was the last step on the way for the Michael Monsoor, and it was commissioned on Saturday.
The Michael Monsoor was named after Michael Monsoor, who's a Navy SEAL, who was killed in Ramadi in action in 2006, I believe.
And he was a young man, really young man, 24, 25 years old.
And I bring this up because it's an unbelievably inspiring story.
He's a national hero.
A teammate of his had been shot in the street, wide open, and he ran out with a heavy machine gun, was shooting at the bad guys, had 100 pounds on his back, and still managed to drag this guy, his teammate, to safety.
And that...
A teammate of his had a vision as he was going in and out of consciousness of an angel.
And Michael Monsoor was a devout Catholic who went to daily mass.
He went to...
Even when he was in theater, he would go to daily mass.
He was named after St.
Michael, the archangel, who is the defender of warriors.
There's the prayer at the end of every mass.
St.
Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
And the crest of this ship includes...
A wing and a sword from St.
Michael.
He was killed in action when he was on a rooftop and there were enemy combatants who came up and someone hurled a grenade at him and it bounced off of his chest.
And Michael Mansoor saw the grenade there and he could have lunged to safety.
He was apparently near a doorway.
But his teammates and the Iraqi soldiers who were with them were cut off and they...
Almost certainly would have been killed.
And you're talking about a split-section decision.
The grenade bounced off him, landed in front of him, and he screamed grenade, and he jumped on the grenade, and everyone else survived, and he did not.
And he gave his life for his friends and for his teammates and for his country, coincidentally on the feast day of St.
Michael.
Michael Monsoor clearly had a sense of purpose and a sense of virtue and honor.
But purpose?
Providence?
What are the odds?
What are the odds that that would happen on the feast day of St.
Michael?
Devout Catholic, named after Michael the Archangel.
What are the odds?
Well, in a world that has purpose, in a world in which all nature is but art unknown to thee, and all chance, direction, which thou canst not see...
It happens all the time.
And we're talking today about biblical literacy, about virtue, about honor.
In all of those speeches at the commissioning of the USS Michael Monsoor, everything was appropriate.
Everything was serious.
Everything was about honor and virtue and goodness, patriotism.
And when you look around the culture today, you don't see a whole lot of that.
You see people whining about microaggressions.
You see a quarter of college students having PTSD because their preferred political candidate didn't win the presidential election in 2016.
That's because they don't have a sense of virtue, a sense of purpose, a sense of moral reality, and a sense of providence.
Michael Monsoor had it.
He's an unbelievable inspiration to the entire country.
The USS Michael Monsoor will now sail for hopefully 40, 45 years, and we wish them fair winds and following seas.
That's our show.
Come back tomorrow.
We've got a lot more to talk about.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about Elizabeth Warren, who shamed an NFL owner for being rich and said that this guy, because he's rich, he needs to help pay off people's student loan debt.
And there are so many problems with all of this that we're going to try to break it down today on the show.
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