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Feb. 6, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:56
Ep. 293 - America Will Never Be A Socialist Country

President Trump won the night with a far-better-than-average SOTU. So, the MSM unleashed a torrent of dishonest “fact checks.” We fact check the fact-checkers. Then, a better than average Democrat response—we’ll discuss why it still fell flat. Date: 02-06-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump won the night with a far better than average State of the Union address that boldly declared America will never be a socialist country.
Poor Bernie Sanders, sulking in the corner.
Of course, the mainstream media couldn't tolerate that, so they unleashed a torrent of dishonest fact checks.
We will fact check the fact checkers.
Then, a better than average Democrat response as well.
We will discuss why, but ultimately, it still fell flat.
Huzzah, hooray, the Republic fights another day.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
A good night.
A good night for President Trump, a good night for the Republican Party, and a very good night for America.
We covered the State of the Union last night here for about, it felt like about 18 or 27 hours.
So we won't go through point by point on the State of the Union.
What I want to focus on is the reaction to the State of the Union.
That's in the mainstream media.
That's among the Democrat Party.
That, I think, is probably more interesting than the speech itself.
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Over the United States, we are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country.
America was founded on liberty and independence and not coercion, domination and control.
We are born free and we will stay free.
So you can see here Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders looking so upset, so frustrated.
We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.
Comrade Bernie slinking down even further in his chair.
He's so very upset.
Now you'll notice here, one of the more interesting things about the State of the Union is you look at who's clapping, who's not clapping, who's standing, who won't stand.
Bernie sinking down into his chair.
Even Nancy Pelosi clapped at that line.
America will never be a socialist country.
She didn't stand and clap, but she did clap.
Obviously, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, those Bolsheviks currently in our government, they would not clap or stand, but Nancy did.
And this is important.
This is a good sign.
The line is very important.
Because I actually do fear encroaching socialism in America.
I do fear it.
You now have the majority of millennials identify as socialist.
You now, it's just...
The Democrats always do this.
They make bold declarations, often crazy-sounding declarations, and then they say them often enough, and then they get repeated by the mainstream media, and then they start to sink in, and this is how they took over the culture.
Republicans should be able to do that too.
We should make these bold declarations.
Now what if America one day becomes a socialist country?
Well, it won't happen on my watch.
I'm going to do everything I can to make sure it doesn't happen on my watch.
There's something very Churchillian about this strategy.
This is what Winston Churchill did during the Second World War.
During the darkest hours of that war, he said, Future generations will look on us and say, this was their finest hour.
We shall go on.
We shall fight in the beaches and in the streets.
We shall never surrender.
We'll never surrender.
And it was just this total defiance.
And it was that sort of defiance that President Trump made last night.
Oh, some socialists won elections.
Oh, the Democratic Party is veering towards socialism.
Non-socialist Democrats can't run in the 2020 Democrat primary.
Who cares?
America will never be a socialist country.
And he linked this to Venezuela.
This is very important as well.
One thing he did is that he came out and declared the winner of the Venezuelan election that happened a week or two ago.
He declared that Juan Guaido is the legitimate president of Venezuela over the socialist Nicolas Maduro.
I do love that the U.S. can do that.
I do love that during our State of the Union, we can just declare presidents of other countries.
I'm not being facetious either.
We should.
That country has fallen to nothing.
Nicolas Maduro is a ridiculous dictator who's destroyed that country after the destruction of Hugo Chavez.
Great.
We should kick him out.
We should feel nothing wrong about that.
I assume he won the election legitimately, even if he didn't.
I'm sorry, I assume that Guaido won the election legitimately.
But even if he didn't, I love that the U.S. can go in there and say, we're going to stop that misery.
No more misery.
Uh-uh.
Get out, Maduro.
Too bad.
Try again next time.
That's really nice.
And the connection to Venezuela is very important.
Venezuela had one of the best economies in the world.
In 1950, sometime during the 50s, it was the fourth strongest economy in the world.
It's an oil rich nation.
It was a very wealthy nation.
And then even in recent memory it was doing very well until socialism crept in and destroyed it.
Within our lifetimes we've seen socialism wreck that country.
And what President Trump is saying is that people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like all of the incoming socialists, like Bernie Sanders, what they want to do is follow in the footsteps of Venezuela.
Now what they say is, no, no, no, we don't want that.
We want to follow the Nordic countries, like Denmark.
Denmark explicitly says we are not a socialist country.
Actually, all of those Scandinavian, Nordic countries, they did experiment with socialism and it damaged their economy and they have since undone a lot of those socialist reforms.
They've reinstituted a lot of capitalist reforms and their economies have boomed as a result of that.
So it's totally disingenuous.
A lot of those countries have freer economies than the United States.
It's totally disingenuous when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or whoever says, no, no, we're just going to be like those nice white countries up north.
Because there is an underlying racial message here, which is, oh, no, no, no, not like those scary countries with mixed ethnic populations.
No, just those places that are 100% ethnically homogenous.
No, that's the good socialism.
It's not even socialism.
And it's increasingly less like socialism.
What they're proposing is Venezuela.
Even this Medicare for All plan, this goes so far beyond what you see in the Nordic countries or what you see in the United Kingdom, where at least there still exists private health insurance very often.
Whereas here, Kamala Harris, probably the leading Democrat presidential candidate, is saying we need to abolish private insurance.
Abolish it totally.
Government runs everything.
Other Democrats coming and backing her up on that.
The future that these people see looks like Venezuela.
And President Trump pointed that out.
I think it was a big win.
The other reason America will never be a socialist country is because of the incompetent socialist politicians.
You know, Bernie Sanders never held a job in his entire life until he got himself elected and went on the public dole.
He had his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, sang shirtless with Soviets, talk about colluding with the Russians.
But even better than him, we learned last night That in 1986, Elizabeth Warren claimed Native American ancestry when she was filing with the Texas Bar.
Now, why is this important?
This is important because she has previously said, Oh, I didn't really do that.
No, I didn't really claim ancestry.
It was a mistake by Harvard.
It was a bureaucratic error.
I never used it to my professional advantage.
No, it's just a silly misunderstanding.
Now we have her signature right on the paper.
She claimed, in her own handwriting, American Indian ancestry.
Not Harvard, not an administrator, but her.
We all know that she's done this.
Very few conservatives ever believed her ridiculous line about not knowing or not being aware and never using it to her advantage.
But, last week, it has since been reported, Elizabeth Warren privately apologized to Cherokee Chief Bill John Baker.
Privately, not publicly.
Now, it later became public when this was reported.
But she was sorry.
She apologized for, quote, for furthering confusion about tribal citizenship, end quote, for not being more mindful about this decades ago.
The question is, why did Elizabeth Warren apologize last week?
What has changed?
Initially, she launched her presidential campaign pretending still to be Native American because she's won 1024th Native American, maybe.
So what has changed?
Well, we figured it out last night.
The Washington Post reported that Liz Warren had filed with the Texas State Bar in 1986 as an American Indian.
So that comes out last night, and yet a week ago she apologizes privately.
Why would that happen?
It seems to me that the Washington Post tipped her off.
What else could it be?
She then apologized, and this was reported by the Washington Post, when this story came out.
And what did she apologize for?
Quote, for furthering confusion about tribal citizenship, quote, and for not being more mindful about this.
She used the same language that she used on the private conversation with Baker last week.
So the corruption of all of this gets even more fetid.
It gets even more dank, which is that...
The Washington Post finds this out.
They've been helping to cover from Liz Warren for a long time.
They find out that she actually did commit this fraud, obviously intentionally.
She did it for a very long time.
She did it to further her career.
So what do they do?
They tip off Liz Warren, almost certainly.
So then she can get ahead of the story, apologize to the Cherokee Nation.
Then a few days later, the Washington Post reports it.
Really corrupt.
And the Washington Post is so transparent about all this.
And this is the other reason why America will not become a socialist country, is because the media cheering it on are so transparent.
Look, President Trump gave a very good speech last night.
He gave probably a B-plus speech, which for a State of the Union address is very, very good.
The State of the Union addresses are awful.
They're so boring.
They're so largely pointless, although they can have some shining moments.
And he did a very good job.
So the media are furious.
Because the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, we'll get to her in a minute, she also did a pretty good job, but it just fell flat by virtue of the reaction always falls flat.
And she wasn't that great.
Trump did a much better job.
So the media were furious and they instantly started issuing fact checks.
But the fact checks are not fact checks.
They are opinion columns.
They're leftist opinion columns that dishonestly call themselves fact checks.
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Okay, these fact checks, which are not fact checks, they're leftist opinion columns.
The best one, my favorite one of the whole night, came from NPR. So NPR, right after the speech, issues this fact check.
They say, quote, fact check.
President Trump prays to the record number of women in Congress, but that's almost entirely because of Democrats, not Trump's party.
Fact check.
Boom.
Mic drop.
How is that a fact check?
What is the fact?
First of all, they're talking about Trump's praising the women in Congress.
Praise is not something that can be fact-checked.
He did praise them.
They're not saying he didn't praise them.
Second, the record number of women in Congress is a fact.
And they don't dispute that fact.
And then the but, the but in their sentence is amazing because it's totally unrelated to the first part of it.
It doesn't change anything about the number of women in Congress.
It doesn't change anything about Donald Trump's praise of them.
I don't think Donald Trump is confused about where a lot of those women came from.
I don't think he thinks they're all Republicans.
It's just the language is so amazing.
Fact check.
President Trump praised the record number of women in Congress.
But that's almost entirely because of Democrats.
It's as if to say, President Trump praised the record number of women in Congress, but you should still hate him because he's a huge jerk and I hate him.
That was the fact check.
NPR. Which we're all paying for, by the way.
We're paying for that fact check.
Politico had a great one.
Politico.
State of the Union fact check.
Trump said, quote, one in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.
That's partly true.
Here's the full story.
Okay, do you know why this?
So President Trump said one in three women are raped or sexually assaulted on the journey across that border.
Now, the reason that they say it's only partially true is because the real number, according to a Doctors Without Borders study, shows that it's only 31%.
Oh, they got him now.
President Trump said that.
That liar said that 33% of women are raped and sexually assaulted on the journey north.
Really?
It's only 31?
Boom!
Fact check!
Fact check, Donald!
Fake news.
Alternative facts.
By the way, what's funny about this, they're citing this one Doctors Without Borders study.
There are other studies that show that the number is much, much higher.
Between 60 and 80% of women are raped and sexually assaulted.
That's according to Amnesty International.
That's according to a Fusion survey, both of which were reported in the Huffington Post, a left-wing outlet.
So actually, President Trump probably could have used those numbers.
It would have been just fine.
But how disingenuous, how dishonest.
He said it was one in three.
Liar.
It was only 31%.
They're just trying to nip at anything that he says.
And even if he doesn't lie, even if he doesn't say something that's even slightly untrue, they'll just pretend that it's untrue.
If I say one in three, first of all, just to use the phrase one in three is to say I'm not using a precise percentage right now.
Let's say the number were 35%.
He also probably would have said 1 in 3.
It's just easier to say.
It sounds better.
It's better rhetoric.
If that number had said 35%, I'd bet that President Trump would have said one in three women are raped or sexually assaulted crossing that border.
But of course, then in that case, Politico would not have fact-checked it because it would have been even more in the favor of President Trump's argument.
CBS, I think, possibly has the most egregious of the fact-checks.
Here is theirs.
They say, President Trump claimed nearly 5 million people have been lifted off of food stamps.
But then, what CBS points out, is that as of last September, the number of people off a food stamp since the beginning of Trump's presidency was only 4.1 million.
Now, of course, that was five months ago, and the number keeps increasing, but they say, actually, this is the best part, because they include this in their fact check.
Quote, data for the fourth quarter of 2018 has not yet been published, and that number had already been trending downward before Mr.
Trump took office.
So they're saying the number is trending downward.
So the number of people off of food stamps is trending upward.
You're saying five months ago it was 4.1 million.
So now, who knows what that number is?
It's probably significantly higher.
You might say it's nearly 5 million.
And then the kicker, they're doing the same fact check thing that NPR did.
They're saying, and that number had already been trending downward before Mr.
Trump.
Mm-mm-mm.
Oh, yeah, he didn't say that it wasn't.
When did President Trump ever say that the number wasn't trending downward or that it was trending upward?
I never heard him say it.
They're just, yeah, okay, well, President Trump's right, and millions and millions of people are off of food stamps, but I hate him, and he's a big meanie, and I hate him.
So here is the wildest one.
CBS did a whole long list of these.
This is the wildest part of the fact check.
Donald Trump, during the State of the Union, talked about that awful New York abortion law, red infanticide law, the law that allows you to kill a baby as it is being born.
One second before birth, you can kill it.
Not as bad as Virginia, where apparently you can kill the baby six hours after it's been born, at least.
But he mentions this, and the CBS Fact Check tells you everything you need to know.
Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and their dreams with the world.
By the way, if you're watching that clip, could Chuck Schumer possibly look more maniacal if he tried?
I think when people read the Bible and they're creating images in their mind for what Moloch looks like, Moloch almost looks like Chuck Schumer.
It's very hard to visualize.
It's hard to create in our mind's eye something as sinister looking as Chuck Schumer there.
But look, he's just there crouching.
Ah, yes.
He's got his fingers on it.
He's like Ugolino.
He's just waiting to eat his children.
Really, really creepy.
Someone should give him a little media training.
It's amazing for a man who's lived on television for the last 40 years.
He really doesn't know how to look great.
Between this and the American Gothic meme that he helped to create a few months ago, it's really not looking great.
But what did the fact check say?
Here's the fact check.
Now, with all of the other fact checks, it says fact check.
True or false?
Or it says partially true or partially, whatever.
This one.
It doesn't say true and it doesn't say false.
It says this.
Facts.
New York's Reproductive Health Act guarantees a woman's right to abortion through 24 weeks of pregnancy.
After that, an abortion is only allowed if a doctor decides the fetus is not viable or to protect the patient's life or health.
Now, of course, what this really means, and they made it very clear in the New York law, is that if a patient's mental health will be affected by having the baby, you can kill it at any point.
But that's a total combat.
I say, yeah, I'll be really sad if I have a kid.
Kill it.
Then you can just kill it immediately.
Or the doctor says it's non-viable.
What that means is if the baby has some deformity.
If it's not born like the perfect little designer baby that its perverted parents want, or that the perverted doctor want, then they can kill it at any given moment.
The way we know this is true is that the New York abortion law changed the New York penal code such that before, if you killed a woman who was 24 weeks pregnant or later, you would be charged with double homicide.
Because you killed the woman and you killed the baby.
Now, they took that out of the New York penal law.
If you kill a pregnant woman who is giving birth, you're only charged with killing one person.
So we know that they're trying their best to twist it.
They know they can't quite.
So they don't even say true or false.
They just issue an endorsement of the New York law.
They just say, well, here's the best argument we can give for the New York law.
Totally transparent.
There are even subtler claims, and we have to get to Stacey Abrams' response.
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So there are even subtler claims that they make in these fact checks.
Here is one.
The claim that President Trump made, this is from President Trump's State of the Union, it says, unemployment has reached the lowest rate in half a century.
Okay, true.
They're saying...
Fact check.
This is inaccurate now, but it was true at one point.
The unemployment rate dropped to 3.7% in September, the lowest rate since December 1969.
But apparently since then, it has ticked up a couple tenths of a percentage point, and so they're saying, yeah, this isn't true now.
But that fact check actually is false.
That is a lie.
President Trump said, quote, unemployment has reached the lowest rate in half a century.
That remains true today.
Now, obviously, the unemployment rate is going to fluctuate.
It's going to tick up a little bit.
It's going to tick down a little bit.
It's not going to stay exactly the same at all times.
What he is saying is that the unemployment rate has reached the lowest point in half of a century during my tenure, and not just during my tenure, in the last year, which is what I am reporting to you, Congress.
It's what I am reporting to you, the American people.
Within the last year, in this update, unemployment has reached the lowest rate in half a century.
That is 100% true.
It's not inaccurate now.
It's not partially true.
It's not whatever the Democrats and the mainstream media want to pretend that it is just to take away the achievements of this presidency.
It is just true.
The fact-checkers are not true.
They're liars.
Either they're extraordinarily stupid, either they don't understand how language works at all, You know, journalists, you know, people who likely majored in English or literature or journalism.
Either they have no idea how the English language works or they're liars.
Which one do you think?
It's obviously liars.
I also really, we have to get to the Democrat response.
This, I was so excited.
Stacey Abrams was giving the response.
Who is Stacey Abrams, you ask?
Yeah, I don't really know either.
Stacey Abrams.
She was not even the majority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives.
She was the minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives.
And that's it.
Now, why on earth would the Democrats choose her?
The National Democrat Party going up against Donald Trump, the President of the United States.
Why would they choose her to be the response to the State of the Union?
One, because it's a thankless job that always fails, so a lot of bigger names don't want it.
Two, she's currently doing nothing.
She lost that race for Georgia governor, and she refused to concede it, but now she's got a lot of free time.
Okay.
The other reason is because the Democrats are doubling down on identity politics.
She made this, Stacey Abrams made this a huge point of her campaign.
Stacey Abrams made her whole campaign about racism, disenfranchisement.
They're attacking me because I'm a black woman.
That's what her whole cynical, ridiculous campaign was about.
And she lost.
Thankfully, she lost.
She finally conceded.
The Democrats started to get carpal tunnel, writing all those fraudulent ballots out, so they finally gave up.
They didn't want to hurt their wrists anymore.
And the Democrats choose her to give this response because they're just as bigoted as Stacey Abrams is.
They're just as cynical as Stacey Abrams says.
It doesn't matter what you've accomplished.
This woman has accomplished basically nothing in her entire life, and yet they choose her over far more qualified Democrats because of the color of her skin and because of her sex.
And because she can run the intersectional identity politics campaign.
I'm actually going to be speaking on this topic tonight at UCLA. Despite my losing my voice, despite the sickness, the difficulties, I am going to persevere because we're going to do this speech tonight on the bigotry of the left.
Specifically, how the way to reduce bigotry is to increase prejudice.
A topic that seems, you know, we don't talk about it a lot.
People don't know what bigotry means.
People don't know what prejudice means.
But we certainly can see the rampant bigotry of the left and the Democrat Party.
We're going to see it here in a second with Stacey Abrams' response.
If you're around UCLA, check it out tonight.
I think we're going to stream it, too, at The Daily Wire.
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I've got to tell you, when I'm feeling a little under the weather, as I currently am, some people drink a hot toddy.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
I don't mind.
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We've got to get to this State of the Union response.
It was pretty ridiculous.
Stacey Abrams starts out...
I actually, I will make this point.
Relative to all the other State of the Union responses, this was pretty good.
She actually did a relatively good job.
I'm damning with faint praise because they're all just horrific.
But generally speaking, I think they learned their lesson from last year when that guy Kennedy, the young red-haired Kennedy, when he did it, it was just, it was like in a junkyard, basically.
He had a broken down car behind him.
It was really pathetic.
You know, obviously Marco had Watergate where he reached for his water and people made fun of him for that.
Bobby Jindal's wasn't great.
They just don't go very well.
They've learned some lessons, which we can identify in a second.
But the content of the speech was absurd.
We'll do an actual fact check here.
Because a lot of it was demonstrably false and self-contradictory.
And you just got the impression that Stacey Abrams is not ready for prime time.
She started out, for her first two sentences, strong.
She started with this heartwarming story about how her father was walking alone in the rain and he saw a homeless man and he gave him his jacket in the rain.
And what a heartwarming story she tells.
When we asked why he'd given away his only jacket, my dad turned to us and said, I knew when I left that man he'd still be alone.
But I could give him my coat because I knew you were coming for me.
Our power and strength as Americans lives in our hard work and our belief in more.
My family understood firsthand that while success is not guaranteed, we live in a nation where opportunity is possible.
But we do not succeed alone.
In these United States, when times are tough, we can persevere because our friends and neighbors will come for us.
Our first responders will come for us.
So, what she's saying is, blah, blah, happy, happy, platitude, platitude.
Now, whether you believe the story about her father or not, who cares?
Politicians tell these ridiculous stories all the time.
My mother washed more floors for less money than your mother did.
I met Johnny in the middle of Iowa.
And Johnny, he just lost his job and his whole family.
They all left him and he got really sick.
And Johnny had $3 left in his bank account and he gave it to me.
For my campaign, because he believes in us.
So they tell these stupid stories, whatever.
The trouble with this story is that she contradicts herself, because she's not ready for prime time.
So if you hear, she says, you know, my father knew that when I left that man, he would still be alone.
But when I walked on, you would come and get me.
But then she goes on to say, in America, we're never alone.
No one's ever alone.
So which is it?
Is the guy alone or is he not alone?
This seems like a minor point.
It actually matters to the larger argument that she's making because she's inadvertently contradicting her own point.
In America, there are three options.
In America, are we alone and therefore we need bigger government to come in because of how alone we are?
We need big daddy government to come give us the jacket.
Or in America, are we not alone because we have friends and family and private charity and civic organizations to come and help us out?
Or in America, are we not alone because we already have the big government?
Stacey Abrams is a big government gal.
She wants big government all day long, the white knight of the government to come in and just take money from people and give it to favored groups and other people.
That's what she wants.
So I don't think she's making the argument that because in America we have private charity and friends and family and a rich civic culture, therefore we don't need big government.
I think that choice is out.
So now we have two options.
Are we alone and therefore we need bigger government?
Or are we not alone because we already have big government?
Well, she ends her whole talk by saying, we're not alone in America.
So it seems that what she's actually concluding is that we are not alone because we have an adequately large government.
Okay, good.
It's big enough.
Okay, go away.
Fine.
Bye-bye.
See you.
There's no problem.
We're not alone.
The reason that we're not alone is we already have the big government, so we don't need a bigger government.
Or she's saying we are alone.
And I think the point she really wants to make is that we are alone, everything's terrible, America's a terrible, awful place, and therefore we need all of her stupid big government programs.
She wants to make that point, but she's not allowed to make that point because that would be negative.
That would be negative.
It doesn't look good for a reaction to the State of the Union.
It doesn't look good for her career.
She's a nobody who just lost her race, and she hasn't really done anything else in her life.
So that doesn't look...
She just sounds like she's whining and complaining from the sidelines.
But the other reason that doesn't work is because the economy is doing really, really well.
I mean, America's doing very well right now.
President Trump's approval rating is doing...
Quite well.
Three-quarters of Americans approved of his State of the Union speech last night.
It was a very popular speech.
So everywhere she tries to turn to make her argument, she gets cut off.
So instead, she makes half of two arguments.
But it's just not convincing.
She just isn't ready for prime time.
I guess that's the issue.
Then she goes on to talk about, you know, the only problem...
There aren't really any problems happening right now, relatively speaking, in the country.
So the only problems that she can find are these contrived problems, which is the government shutdown.
The government shutdown that nobody really felt affected by.
A couple weeks into the shutdown, they took a poll.
They said, how many people feel they've really been impacted by the shutdown?
6% of respondents said they had.
They said, how many people know that there's a government shutdown?
21% of respondents didn't even know the government was shut down.
So that's the closest thing to a real negative issue she could find, and so she hammers it.
Just a few weeks ago, I joined volunteers to distribute meals to furloughed federal workers.
They waited in line for a box of food and a sliver of hope since they hadn't received paychecks in weeks.
Making livelihoods of our federal workers a pawn for political games is a disgrace.
The shutdown was a stunt, engineered by the President of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people, but our values.
The government shut down with furloughed workers abandoned not just our people, but our values.
You would think, from what this woman is saying, that the shutdown that just happened was the first time ever that the federal government shut down.
Maybe she thinks that.
I don't know what she thinks.
I don't think she thinks a whole lot.
In reality, we have had, in our history, ten government shutdowns with furloughed workers.
We've had them under both parties.
We've had them under presidents of both parties.
Clinton, Trump, whatever.
We've had them all around.
The reason that you can go a long stretch without a government shutdown is because one party basically dominates, or one ideology dominates.
Certainly before the conservative movement started, In the 1950s and 60s, you basically had the liberal consensus.
You had everybody basically agreed the same thing.
There was a huge, I mean, there were radicals at both sides, but you basically, everyone agreed on this kind of squishy leftism.
And that changed when conservatives started to assert themselves in the culture and in politics.
But a lot of people have shut down the government.
That doesn't abandon our values.
If that's the case, we've been abandoning our values for decades and decades and decades.
Then she makes a real rhetorical misstep.
Our most urgent work is to realize Americans' dreams of today and tomorrow, to carve a path to independence and prosperity that can last a lifetime.
Children deserve an excellent education from cradle to career.
Bad week to talk about cradles, Stacey.
If you're a Democrat, this is not a great week to talk about cradles because the governor of Virginia, your party, just said that we should be able to kill babies in cradles.
You know, after talking to the doctor and the mother, then you should be able to kill them.
In New York, that baby's already halfway out, you've got the cradle already, and you're allowed to kill it now in New York.
And the Democrats cheered with delight to quote President Trump.
Not a great week to do that.
It's almost a cheap shot, but it's just to show you she isn't, it's just a little weak.
But she goes on to make the point that she was trying to make, which unfortunately contradicts the entire argument of her own party.
We owe them safe schools and the highest standards, regardless of zip code.
Yet this White House responds timidly, while first graders practice active shooter drills, and the price of higher education grows ever steeper.
What she is talking about now is basically a cynical lie.
She's talking about school choice and how we need school choice.
We need to stop children from being prisoners to their zip codes and allow them to go to better schools if they can get into those schools.
The Democrat Party is explicitly fighting all Republican efforts for school choice to allow kids to go to better schools.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio, leftist Democrat, is doing his best to get rid of charter schools.
He is doing his best to lock those kids, largely racial minority kids, largely poor, into their terrible zip codes so that they can never get an education.
That's what it is.
This is a cynical lie.
The reason they're doing it is because they're held hostage to the teacher union who pays them a lot of money.
But for her to go out there and say it, it's so bizarre.
I can't think of an analogy.
She is saying what we need to do is the policy that we've been fighting Republicans on for years.
The policy that Republicans want to do that we won't let them do.
Ridiculous.
Then she just starts describing things.
She goes from...
False advertising over her own party's positions to just describing things that are not true.
The Republican tax bill rigged the system against working people.
Rather than bringing back jobs, plants are closing, layoffs are looming, and wages struggle to keep pace with the actual cost of living.
We owe more to the millions of everyday folks who keep our economy running.
What are you talking about?
The economy has been booming for over two years.
We have record low unemployment.
We have record low black unemployment.
We have record low Hispanic unemployment.
The economy basically could not be doing better.
So she said, oh gosh, okay, well that line didn't work.
Let's talk about the caged children.
We know bipartisanship could craft a 21st century immigration plan.
But this administration chooses to cage children and tear families apart.
Caged children.
There was a photo that went viral of caged children.
People blamed Donald Trump for it.
The photo was from the Obama administration.
Donald Trump isn't choosing to cage children.
Why are we caging children?
Which really they mean separating illegal alien kids from the adults that are with them.
Who knows if it's their parents?
Often it's coyotes and human traffickers.
Well, the reason that we're doing that is because of an agreement, the Flores Agreement, from 1997, from the Clinton administration, which said that we can't throw these little kids in jail.
The parents have to go to criminal holding, but the kids don't have to go to jail, so we're going to separate them and put the kids in a nicer place.
So who do we have to thank for that?
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
And then she makes her selfish argument.
She wants to make this selfish argument about voter suppression because she insists that the election was stolen from her in Georgia.
It was stolen because the Democrats got carpal tunnel writing all those fraudulent ballots so they couldn't ultimately give her the office.
She talks about voter suppression.
Unfortunately, again, she makes the opposite point.
Let's be clear.
Voter suppression is real.
From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls, to moving and closing polling places, to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy.
While I acknowledge the results of the 2018 election here in Georgia, I did not and we cannot accept efforts to undermine our right to vote.
Oh, I agree, Stacey.
I agree.
Voter fraud is real.
That's what you said, right?
Voter fraud?
Voter fraud is real.
We know this.
There was a big survey that just came out in Texas.
A big study showed rampant voter fraud.
Non-citizens registered to vote.
To the tune of, what, 59,000, I think, had voted?
Cases of voter fraud?
Illegal votes cancel out legitimate votes.
If you allow someone to vote illegally...
Then it is exactly the same as taking away someone's right to vote.
There is no difference.
Their vote will not count.
Best way to secure the vote?
Stacey, I'm with you.
We ought to secure the vote.
Voter ID. That's the best way to do it.
Because then those tens and tens of thousands of people won't be voting in Texas who shouldn't be voting.
And then tens and tens of thousands of votes won't be canceled out.
Tens and tens of thousands of people won't have their right to vote effectively canceled.
I will leave on a sort of nice note to Stacey Abrams.
This was relatively better than most of the responses.
The reason is the framing of it.
The reason these don't work is President Trump has the biggest audience in the world, but then he's in the Capitol, this grand auditorium.
He's got the vice president and the speaker behind him.
He's got all of these 500 congressmen, senators in front of him.
And so it's just so grand.
And then they filmed the reaction in a little tiny broom closet.
They basically filmed it in my studio upstairs.
What Stacey Abrams did is she put all, it's kind of weird, it's all of these people behind her and they were all a little blurry.
You couldn't make out faces really, all different colors and men and women.
And there were enough in the back that I didn't even, I assumed it was probably a green screen or something.
But you still got the feeling that she's surrounded by people.
This is just a basic lesson for political rallies.
You want to be surrounded by people so it looks like you've got a lot of support.
I thought that was a really smart revision to the response to the State of the Union, but it fell flat.
Trump won the night, and for now, We can say proudly, happily, hopefully, America will never be a socialist country.
Check us out tonight at UCLA, and if you're not there, then I'll see you tomorrow on the show.
Get your mailbag questions in.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
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.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Yesterday on Daily Wire Backstage, we had a blast reviewing the State of the Union address.
There were drinks, there were cigars, there was mockery, all sorts of the stuff that you are looking for in any analysis of the State of the Union address.
Go check it out.
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