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Feb. 19, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:22
Ep. 300 - The Ladies Not For Bernie

We analyze what Bernie’s entrance means for Democrats. Then, the radical Left goes after the Duke, John Wayne, 40 years after he died, and a feminist “pastor” melts down purity rings to give a genital-shaped statue to Gloria Steinem. Date: 02-19-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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77-year-old Bernie Sanders is officially throwing his hat in the 2020 U.S. presidential race.
Or is it the 2024 U.S. presidential race?
Or is it the 2020 USSR general secretary race?
His memory these days just isn't what it is.
Ah!
Long live the revolution, comrades!
We will analyze what Bernie's entrance means for the Democrat Party.
Then, the radical left goes after the Duke, John Wayne, 40 years after John Wayne died.
And a feminist pastor melts down purity rings to give a genital-shaped statue to Gloria Steinem.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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We knew this was inevitable.
Bernie Sanders has entered the 2020 presidential race.
This is a wonderful day.
I can't wait.
One of the most colorful Bolshevik totalitarian characters of the 2016 race.
He's now back in for 2020.
He's even older.
He's even crazier.
Here is Bernie Sanders announcing through a big Twitter-based video ad his race for the presidency.
Real change never takes place from the top on down, but always from the bottom on up.
Bernie Sanders' healthcare for all idea is gaining steam.
Free tuition.
Free college tuition.
Free tuition champion, Senator Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders added, the greatest threat to national security is climate change.
The future of our planet is at stake.
Sanders taking on Amazon.
Bernie Sanders has been consistent hammering about income inequality.
Nobody in America works 40 hours a week.
Should be living in poverty.
Our economy is rigged.
We have a campaign finance system which is corrupt.
Sanders leading the charge to stop Moore against Yemen.
The first time ever the Senate has voted to end an unauthorized war.
The fight against injustice has been the work of his life.
The work of his life.
Now, actually, there's been very little work in Bernie Sanders' life because he's never held a job in the private sector.
Bernie Sanders has worked for the government since 1981.
And even before that, he was kind of bumbling around, occasionally holding a job here or there.
He was mostly a professional activist.
This guy, as much as one can in life make it without ever holding a job, Bernie Sanders has never held a job.
So there isn't very much work to his life.
And by the way, he's worked most of his life in the government.
I actually don't even...
Attack that per se.
Look, plenty of people have done plenty of good work in the government.
Winston Churchill spent most of his life working for the government and he did a lot of good work.
The trouble is that Bernie Sanders has not only not accomplished anything in the private sector, he has also not accomplished anything in the public sector.
He has never accomplished anything.
He has been in the government since 1981.
He's almost been in the government now for 40 years.
What does he have to show for it?
The closest thing that he can list as an accomplishment in 40 years of government service is that he voted to end some of our support for the Saudi Arabian war in Yemen.
Which, by the way, didn't work.
So the thing he's referring to, you've probably never even heard of this story because it's a nothing story.
Bernie Sanders voted to invoke the War Powers Act of 1973 to cut off the ability of the White House to give military aid to Saudi Arabia for their war in Yemen.
Then the House didn't vote on that, and then it went nowhere.
That's it.
That's his biggest accomplishment.
He voted based on a law that was passed in 1973 in the Senate to tell the White House to stop giving extra money to the Saudis for the Saudis to take care of a conflict they have in Yemen, and then the House didn't vote for it and it went nowhere.
The biggest accomplishment in his public life.
Otherwise, what else does this tell us?
It checks all of the boxes.
Obviously, he harps on climate change or global warming or global cooling or whatever euphemism you want to use for it.
This is essential.
This is going to separate the wheat from the chaff in the Democrat primary.
It is not possible to run for president as a Democrat in 2020 without Trump.
Centering your campaign on climate change.
This is for a couple of reasons.
One, it's the left's religion.
It fulfills all the categories of religion.
It answers some of their religious longings to save the planet for original sin, for penance, for indulgences.
It's for transcendent reality.
That is what the purpose of global warming is in the left-wing psychology.
But in the left-wing politics, in the actual implementing of a political agenda, the reasons global warming or climate change is central is because it very conveniently gives the left everything they've always wanted in politics.
Collectivist economics, nationalization of various industries, massive expansion of the federal government, massive diminishment of individuals' rights in America, a basic overturning of our political tradition and our democratic republic, a far...
Greater expansion of government power and bureaucratic power over the rights of state governments, local governments, and individuals, and the family.
This is what they want, so that's what he's going to focus on.
Okay, that's fine.
It's the evidence, by the way, that the Democrat Party is not focusing on any Substantive issues in 2020.
They're not talking about the economy.
They're not talking about foreign policy.
They're not talking about entitlement spending or the national debt or even trade.
They're talking about the fantasy of the sun monster coming in and destroying the whole world unless we vote for them and then we'll save the world.
So they're going to center this campaign around fantasy, and it's going to produce terrific results.
I cannot wait for that debate stage where they're all arguing with one another over whatever fever dream they had the night before about the end of the world, and it's going to happen in ten years.
No, it'll happen in eight years.
No, it'll happen tomorrow, and then it'll happen tomorrow.
We'll all wait for the world to end, and it won't end.
The other thing that is so...
Quintessentially, leftist and Democrat about Bernie's announcement ad is the focus on slogans.
So the very first thing in the ad, it says, Change always happens from the bottom up, not the top down.
And the left loves slogans.
They focus all the time on slogans that sound like they mean something, but don't mean anything at all.
So during the Bush years, you heard, No war for oil.
Meaning the Iraq War.
We fought the Iraq War to steal a lot of oil from Iraq.
Never mind that we never got the oil.
We didn't get good contracts for the oil.
We are still in the Middle East.
We went to Afghanistan.
Not a whole lot of oil in Afghanistan.
Never mind that.
They say no war for oil as if...
The very fact of their saying this slogan would create the reality that is only in their fantasy.
Bernie says, change never happens from the top down.
Of course it does.
The American Revolution happened from the top down.
You had extraordinarily elite, well-educated, brilliant, wealthy men with a lot of leisure time crafting this republic.
And they were only able to craft this republic because they were extraordinarily well-educated and they were the elite.
So they had all read their Cicero all the way up to John Locke.
They were able to craft this brilliant system of government.
They were extraordinarily learned.
They wrote thousands of letters.
They were just brilliant men.
How did the revolution begin?
It began not because of these popular uprisings, exactly.
It began because different colonial delegations came together and said, we need to form our own government.
There are countless more examples of this, of change happening from the top down.
It is funny that our own country began that way, and Bernie Sanders, obviously not the most historically literate person, isn't aware of that.
He then takes the slogans up to 11 in the next part of the ad.
Jobs and education, not jails and incarceration.
We are not going to retreat on women's rights.
Jobs and education, not jails and incarceration.
What?
What on earth does that mean?
Jobs and education, as though jobs and education are opposed to jails and incarceration.
If you have jobs and education, you can't possibly have jails and incarceration, and vice versa.
Let me give you a counterexample.
Dylann Roof, in the year 2015, shot up a black church in Charleston because he hated black people and wanted to start a race war.
So now he's in jail.
Should we take him out of jail and give him a job and put him in school?
Because we don't want jail and incarceration.
Bernie just told us, no jail and incarceration.
Instead of jail and incarceration, we're going to have jobs and education.
So we should take a mass-murdering, racist bigot out of jail and give him a job and education, right?
Unless, hold on, and I'm just free-balling here.
Maybe jobs and education are not opposed to a criminal justice system.
Actually, maybe jobs and education require a criminal justice system to maintain order in a society and keep civil society going.
Just a thought.
It's one of those slogans.
Because it rhymes.
Leftists think that it means something.
It's like saying...
Ted Bundy was a serial killer, right?
There's that show about him now.
Serial killer, targeted women, crazed misogynist, necrophile, murdered a bunch of young women.
He shouldn't have ever been in jail.
Certainly shouldn't have been killed, right?
We should put jobs and education.
We should stop punishing criminals and actually give them jobs and products of the welfare system.
That's the solution, right?
Ted Bundy and Dylann Roof.
Give them a job.
Put them in school.
It's justice.
Justice according to Bernie Sanders.
Or we can put workers in jobs and students in school and criminals in prison.
That's my radical campaign pledge.
That's my platform that I'm running on.
Jobs, it would be like saying, jobs and education, not hot dogs and vacation.
Well, it rhymes, so I guess, does that, did he say something that meant anything?
It does rhyme, jobs and education, not hot dogs and vacation.
That has the same semantic value as jobs and education, not jails and incarceration.
We've got a lot more to get to.
We've got to get to that next slogan.
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So Bernie has another slogan.
He says, we're not going to retreat on women's rights.
What he's talking about is abortion.
He's saying, we're not going to retreat on On killing babies.
Now, he has to use the euphemism, women's rights.
Now, it's obviously not rights for the half a million baby girls that are killed every year in the womb.
What happened to their women's rights?
None.
Nothing.
He refuses to protect those.
The way that you know that the left is missing the mark, the way that they know that they're misleading you, the way that you know that they're trying to deceive you, is they always use euphemisms.
And sometimes they have them rhyme, sometimes they're in slogans, but it's those euphemisms.
We're not going to retreat on women's rights.
How about we advance the rights of the half million baby girls who were killed in the womb each year?
Bernie Sanders can't talk about that.
And then, after he's talking about how we have to kill a lot of babies, he then goes back and says that we have to stop this awful, inhumane child detainment policy of the Trump administration.
Sanders pushing a bold agenda that includes protecting doctor recipients and comprehensive immigration reform.
You don't rip little children away from the arms of their mother.
What you do is you rip them out of the womb, and then you leave them on the table while the doctor and the mother talk about what they want to do with the kid, and then you kill it.
I was just talking to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, and he told me, you do not rip the babies out of their mother's arms.
You rip them out of the womb.
That part got left on the cutting room floor of Bernie Sanders' ad.
This one, this on the babies, the little kids at the border, this is a boilerplate Democrat talking point.
Don't separate the kids from their parents or the coyote random adults that are carrying them and trafficking them across the border who are not related to the kids at all.
Don't talk about that one.
Even Bernie Sanders won't go all the way on this point.
He says it's terrible to rip the kids from their parents' arms.
Okay, why do we rip the kids from their parents' arms?
We do it because of an agreement, the Flores settlement, from the Clinton administration from 1997.
The Flores settlement said that you can't imprison children.
So the parents break the law.
They cross into our country illegally.
Foreign nationals here illegally.
Not at points of entry.
They run across the border.
You then take the parents.
You have to hold them in the criminal justice system because they've broken the law.
But the parents are with the kids.
So can you bring the kids into the jails as well?
No.
What the courts decided was that the kids need to be in a nicer place.
So then the kids are held in a separate facility.
Health and Human Services runs those facilities.
So, okay, now you've got to separate the parents.
What is the alternative?
You have two alternatives.
Either you imprison the kids with their parents or you let everybody go.
And you have functionally open borders.
And as long as some coyote has got a kid under his arms, he's not arrested.
He's allowed to come into the country illegally.
He has the opportunity to access welfare, all of our services, do whatever he wants.
No checks, no health checks, no criminal background checks.
We don't know if he's got drugs on him.
Nope.
Let him go.
Those are the two options.
Imprisoned kids or open borders.
And even Bernie Sanders, even radical Bernie Sanders, will not go all the way there.
And this brings us to another point, which is that Bernie Sanders is a real politician.
We forget this.
We think he's the outsider.
No, he's been a professional politician for 40 years.
And one of the hallmarks of being a politician is he takes credit for things that other people do.
...announcement from Amazon.
Amazon will raise its minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour...
350,000 workers.
Thousands of workers at Disney World will get raises.
It's a victory for Bernie Sanders.
It's a victory for all workers.
It's a victory for Bernie Sanders.
Why?
I don't know.
What did he do?
He doesn't run Amazon.
He doesn't work for Amazon.
He pressured them.
Okay, so fine for him.
He's taking credit for other people's accomplishments.
That's the socialist way.
That's the Bernie Sanders way.
Now, he's talking specifically about the minimum wage.
What minimum wage does Bernie Sanders suggest we have?
A very, very, very small percentage of workers make the minimum wage in this country.
The minimum wage is not designed to support a family of four.
The minimum wage is not designed to be what you make at age 70.
The minimum wage is designed specifically for children.
Young kids, people who are working their way up out of poverty, people who are just getting started in the workforce.
That is what the minimum wage is for.
You're not supposed to be there forever.
Eventually you're supposed to move up.
And the vast majority of Americans make more than the minimum wage.
But how does he think the minimum wage works?
What does he suggest?
Because right now they're talking about fight for $15.
$15 an hour minimum wage.
But why stop at $15?
Why shouldn't we make the minimum wage $20 an hour?
Hmm?
It's certainly better.
It's very hard to live on $15 an hour.
Probably a lot easier to live on $20 an hour.
Or actually, why stop there?
Why not make the minimum wage $30 an hour?
For $30 an hour, you can live really pretty well on $30.
Well, except, what if you've got three or four kids?
And $30 an hour?
Maybe.
Okay, I'll tell you what.
Let's make the minimum wage $100 an hour.
Why not?
You're just raising the wage.
You're just giving more money to workers.
What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, a lot could go wrong because the minimum wage destroys jobs.
There is a cost to the minimum wage.
I know this is shocking to socialists who think money falls out of the gumdrop trees, but Costs have costs.
So when you raise labor costs, that has a cost.
That has an effect on the labor market.
It has an effect on employers' behavior.
So there was a study.
There was a comprehensive 182-page summary of research done over the last two decades put together by economists David Newmark at UC Irvine and William Washer at the Federal Reserve Board.
It determined that, this is a meta-analysis of all these other studies, 85% of the best research points to a loss of jobs following increases to the minimum wage.
Of course this makes sense.
Raising the minimum wage doesn't mean that all of a sudden employers have more money to use.
Okay, well, they raised the minimum wage, so now we just have more money magically to pay workers.
No.
When you raise the minimum wage, you raise the labor costs for employers.
So what does that mean?
You can either reduce the number of workers, so you keep the same costs of labor, so you just lay people off, or...
Or you can go out of business.
I guess that's another option.
Or you can shift more money from labor into capital investments.
So this happened in McDonald's.
They raised the minimum wage in Seattle, I believe it was, and all of a sudden you see workers getting laid off and they start investing in those electronic ordering kiosks where now you can go up and order your Egg McMuffin on a kiosk.
Okay, great.
So now some people get a $15 minimum wage.
The other guy is laid off because there is no such thing as a minimum wage.
We might create statutes that mandate a certain minimum wage.
The true minimum wage is zero dollars an hour because you do not have a right to a job.
You don't have the right to some employer just giving you money for no reason.
There was an American Action Forum study.
Show that the fight for $15 minimum wage kills 261,000 jobs held mostly by poor, undertrained, undereducated, young suburban millennials and minority teens in the first phase.
But once the fight for $15 is implemented across the country, it will cost our economy 1.7 million jobs.
Bernie Sanders doesn't mention that.
It's just all vacuous, vapid slogans.
And then he closes us all off on the most vacuous slogans of all.
Brothers and sisters, we have a lot of work in front of us.
If we are prepared to stand together, there is no end to what the great people of our nation can accomplish.
So then he just ends the last 15 seconds of this ad, says nothing.
We need to stand together.
We will accomplish things.
We'll do, it'll be really good, and stand together, and be, and hot dogs and vacation.
That was from the last slogan that he was using.
This shows you that the myriad comparisons from the mainstream media between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are wrong.
They don't really make sense.
You heard this all throughout 2016.
Well, really, Bernie is a lot like Trump.
Actually, President Trump somewhat cynically embraced this comparison in an attempt to turn Democrat voters off to Hillary Clinton.
But the comparison does not really hold.
Donald Trump is a political outsider.
He never held public office until two and a half years ago.
I'm sorry, no, actually, I guess two years ago.
Two years ago in one month was when he was sworn in as president.
Until that time, he had never held public office before.
Bernie Sanders has held public office for 41 years.
Bernie Sanders only speaks in vague slogans because he knows the reality of what he's proposing will turn off all of America.
It's radical.
It's awful.
It doesn't make any sense.
President Trump speaks in, if anything, language that is too blunt, too direct.
He's speaking in very graphic, very tangible terms.
We are going to build a big wall.
It will be 10 feet higher.
Mexico is going to pay for it.
We are going to renegotiate this trade deal.
We're going to renegotiate this trade deal.
We're going to make this plant stay in America.
We are going to put this person in prison.
If anything, he's being too specific.
But it's exactly the opposite of what you are getting from Bernie Sanders.
I am personally offended by the comparisons of Bernie Sanders, this ridiculous old socialist coot who has never accomplished a thing in his life, to President Trump who's been highly effective and is far more honest with voters.
Can Bernie go anywhere?
Polling suggests he can.
He's always ranked in the top three contenders in terms of possible Democrat nominees.
The trouble is that those polls at the moment are mostly based on name identification.
So people know his name because he made it pretty far in 2016.
That is going to change necessarily as people like Kamala Harris, Spartacus, Liawatha, Klobuchar, as these people gain greater name recognition, Bernie is going to decrease and He's also 77 years old.
He's just very, very old to be running for president.
That means it's 2019.
He'll be inaugurated at the age of 78.
He'll be 82 by the end of his first term.
If he serves two terms, he'd be 86 by the end of his second term.
It's very, very old.
The way you know, it's probably not going to go very far.
He's already gotten me-tooed.
I don't think Bernie Sanders is like a groper.
I did see a pretty gross video of him singing communist songs in Russia shirtless.
That was the most I've ever been sexually harassed by Bernie Sanders.
But he's been me too.
There's been a pretty dirty campaign to accuse his staffers of sexually harassing people, basically trying to kick him out of the 2020 race that is populated by a lot of women.
The other reason he's going to have trouble is there's no more Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore.
Hillary Clinton was the best argument for Democrats to vote for Bernie Sanders.
Hillary Clinton was a singularly despised woman, even by her own party.
She's gone, and now you've got all these fresh-faced Democrat women who don't have the baggage of Hillary Clinton, and I think it's just going to kill them.
Bernie Sanders, he might be a Bolshevik all the way, but he is an old, straight, white man.
This is for a party that has embraced identity politics and intersectionality.
It's probably going to kill him.
Speaking of older white men, we of course have Howard Schultz, but we've got to take a break.
Then I will defend another very old white man, so old that he's been dead for 40 years, John Wayne.
And if we have time, we'll get to the feminist pastor who melted down a bunch of purity rings to make a genital statue for Gloria Steinem.
But it's almost time for our next episode of The Conversation, featuring little old me, Michael Knowles.
Today at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, I will be taking all of your questions, every query that is burned in your hearts, and answering them live on air.
Plus, Elisha Krauss will be there, too.
As always, this episode will be free for everyone to watch on Facebook and YouTube, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by yours truly today at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
Pacific, and join the conversation.
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Another kingdom.
You get everything.
You get this.
You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
This is very good.
And we will never...
Never see a feminist pastor melting this down to make genital-shaped statues for Gloria Steinem, because the leftist tears Tumblr don't melt.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Howard Schultz.
Former Starbucks CEO, lifelong Democrat, but he's not a crazy lefty.
He's going to be running an independent campaign for president.
Who knows?
Anything could happen.
He is really signaling to the right and to centrists to come on over to his campaign.
He's really ratcheting up the rhetoric against the extreme left.
Here is a blog post he put out just yesterday.
It says, quote, To cross our fingers and hope the Democratic Party nominates a moderate who can win over enough independents and disaffected Republicans, and even fellow Democrats, to defeat Trump next year, that any opponent can oust Trump, no matter how far to the radical left they are, is a fallacy.
Very strong words.
I like that he's embracing this language, coming out against the radical left.
I think that there are a lot of people who could go along with this.
Because there is a big difference now between the composition of the right wing today as the composition of the right wing, say, in the 1970s or 80s.
The conservative movement has changed its character.
In the 1950s, 60s, 70s, You had what Bill Buckley called fusionism.
He brought together people who were basically all anti-communists.
So you had the traditionalists, you had the libertarians, you had the hawkish democrats and left-wingers, the blue dog democrats, you had even the religious right came in.
You had all of these people who didn't really agree with each other about much, but they were all anti-communist.
And so the concern for...
Conservatives today is, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what is that one thing that unites the conservative movement?
Ever since 91-92, the conservative movement hasn't made a ton of sense.
Libertarians, traditionalists, the religious right, the neoconservatives, they don't actually have very much in common.
So you've seen different fights over the soul of the conservative movement, different fights between establishmentarians and populists, all of these different groups, because they don't have that unifying enemy anymore.
What is that going to be right now?
I'm not so sure.
When you look at the right today, it seems like one unifying issue is free speech.
So this is something we can all get behind.
Dave Rubin and I actually don't agree on that much.
But we're on the same side.
He comes on my show.
We are always tweeting each other.
We're on the same side of the internet political debates because we have this opponent which is the censorious left.
The totalitarian left.
Okay, free speech is one good issue.
But I think a lot of those people who would now call themselves right-wing or on the new right, I think a lot of them, at least for now, they'll probably come over later on, would be a little more libertarian or a little more classically liberal or a little more centrist or a little more independent.
They don't really go whole hog into the depth of conservative thought.
And Howard Schultz could speak to these guys.
It's the classic, I'm a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal.
I'm a conservative, but not that kind of conservative.
Howard Schultz actually could speak to those people.
I really think he could.
The ones who say, well, I've got certain libertarian leanings.
He is making a pitch.
Not to the left.
Explicitly not to the left.
He's making his point so explicit in this blog post.
He is making a pitch to the new right, to Blexit, to the walkaway, to the Democrats and disaffected people who would have called themselves left-wing even five years ago, who are now moving to the right.
He's making the pitch for the new right.
And it has a chance of working.
Except that Donald Trump is speaking to those people.
Because Donald Trump also is not a Burkean conservative, necessarily.
I actually think he has more conservative leanings than people are willing to admit.
But I don't think he sits around at the Federalist Society and wears bow ties and smokes cigars and sips his brandy.
That's not the kind of conservative that Donald Trump is.
He's a very practical guy.
And part of that practicality is he's speaking to those same people that Schultz is speaking to.
They're going after the same voters.
And Donald Trump is very effective at it.
So I think Howard Schultz is probably bound to lose.
But he's only bound to lose because of the current Republican that he's going up against.
If he were going up against a more ideologically rigid conservative or against a more doctrinaire conservative or a more...
Traditional conservative in his behavior, then I actually think Howard Schultz would have a pretty good case to make.
He'd actually have a real chance of shaking up 2020.
But that is the question.
And once you get past Trump, what does the future of American politics look like?
What does the future of the political divide look like?
He goes on in his blog post.
He says, those so concerned about a centrist independent being a spoiler should perhaps ask another question.
Will the eventual Democratic nominee be the party's own version of a spoiler?
Has the Democrat Party moved so far left, alienated so many people, like Dave, like Dave Rubin, or like many others, or Candace Owens says that she had her conservative awakening, or like other people who say, I'm or Candace Owens says that she had her conservative awakening, or like other people who say, I'm leaving the left, and I want Is the Democrat Party radicalizing in such a way that it is its own spoiler?
And does that leave room open, not for a new party on the right, but actually a new party on the left?
All the talk of never Trump and, oh, the end of conservatism with a capital C and a trademark and an INC after it.
For all the talk of the right splitting, really, I think the question is, is there room for a new party on the left?
Howard Schultz is going to try to talk about that.
Speaking of the radical left...
I did not expect to have to be defending John Wayne 40 years after the Duke died.
But the modern left is a very strange beast, and so this is what I find myself doing.
I wake up this morning, I open up my Twitter, and I see that the left is attacking John Wayne.
John Wayne...
Has been dead since the 1970s.
1979, I think he died.
What are they attacking him for?
Because in 1971, was it?
He's seven years, eight years from death.
He gives an interview to Playboy in which he expressed the views of very many people at that time...
Over 40 years ago, I guess nearly 50 years ago at this point from the interview about race relations in America.
So what did he say?
He said, quote, I'll try to do it in my John Wayne voice.
With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent and possibly rightfully so.
But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks.
I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.
I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.
It's not a great John Wayne.
It's sort of more of an impression than an impersonation.
Okay, I'm not...
It's like the...
Come on, cut me some slack.
That's what he says.
And cut John Wayne some slack, by the way, for what he said.
This is an interview of a man born in 1907, given immediately after the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement.
Civil Rights Movement lasts, what, the mid-50s to the late 60s?
68, 69.
You're talking to a man in 1971...
A man who is like the definition of old school, tough American ideas.
He's at the end of his life.
And, by the way, John Wayne is making a cogent point about racism.
What is the point that John Wayne is making here?
He says, the very first line, he says, well, there's a lot of blacks, with a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so.
He's not saying they have nothing to complain about.
What are they?
They shouldn't complain.
They have been treated perfectly in this country, and there's been no slavery, and there's been no exclusion.
No, he doesn't say that.
He says, very possibly rightfully so, they are resentful of this country.
Right.
What is the implication of that?
The implication is that they have been excluded from education.
This is true.
This was one of the claims of the civil rights movement.
Actually, one of the goals of the civil rights movement was equality in education.
John Wayne says blacks have been excluded from education in the United States, and so by necessity, by definition, they're going to be excluded from the leadership of the country.
And so as they're then included in educational systems and other social systems from which they were excluded, then over time they can be brought in to the political leadership of the country.
This is actually an anti-racist point that he's making.
He is acknowledging the reality of racial exclusion and he is saying that this is now changing and will change over time.
The point that John Wayne is making and the way that it has been totally perverted for no reason by the left because the left has no actual problems to complain about so they have to go back 40 years to create their own problems and pretend that this is a big deal.
This point was made by Russell Kirk in his book The Conservative Mind, which I'm going back over as a tremendous book.
He points out, he puts it in different words, but he points out that the leftist reformer looks into some opinion from the past or some institution and asks, is it true?
And the conservative, the intelligent person, looks into that opinion or that institution or that law or whatever and asks, what does it mean?
These are very different schools.
You know, this is how the left approaches history.
It's how it approaches literature.
It resembles what Harold Bloom, the literary critic, would call the school of resentment.
They look back at literature, and they read it, and they hate it.
And they just hate it.
And they're looking to hate it, and they want to hate it, and they want to debunk it and deconstruct it and point out why it's wrong and terrible.
The normal way, the reasonable, rational way to look back at history and literature and history is to look back and say, what can I learn from this?
What wisdom is there to take from this?
What point is this person making?
Is this person challenging my own assumptions?
Does this person have something to teach me?
Only then can you reject what is not valuable in that opinion or that institution or that statute.
Only once you understand it can you have any sense of what to reject.
You have to master it first.
You have to approach it with some humility and awe.
And then you can say, okay, I've absorbed this.
I see where he's going.
I see why he thought that.
I see the value of why he thought that.
And now I'm going to change this part or dispute this part.
Okay, that's a rational way to do it.
John Wayne, there are some videos on the, you can check out videos of late stage John Wayne talking about minorities.
There's actually a great story of him.
Who knows if it's apocryphal or not.
He's on his deathbed.
He's got some friends coming over, one of whom is Jewish.
And the Jewish guy says to Wayne, I didn't think you'd want to see me.
I didn't think you'd want to see a Jew while you're sick.
And John Wayne allegedly said, the only Jew I don't want to see is the big one in the sky.
He had a kind of reputation as a funny crank, you know, a funny curmudgeon who would make racial jokes and it wasn't out of some animus or anything.
Here is John Wayne speaking explicitly on camera about issues of race and minorities.
...being represented by men who are kowtowing to minorities where they can get votes.
And I think it's bad for our country...
And I am sad to see minorities make so much of themselves as a hyphenated American.
I wish they'd all get to thinking that they're Americans as they should.
And as they have luckily been born here and couldn't be better off in any other place, there shouldn't be so much whining and bellyaching.
In the late 60s and early 70s, there was a period of considerable change.
Civil rights for blacks, equal rights for women.
Has this made America a better place?
I am saddened by the fact that although we were a matriarchy, I think we will not be any longer.
I think opening doors and tipping your hat to ladies is probably a thing of the past.
The forerunners of the women's liberation of today have taken that feeling away from the average American man.
Show me the lie.
Show me the lie in what he just said.
I think people are going to watch that, and they're going to approach it with that school of resentment, and they're going to say, how can I be offended?
How can I pretend to be offended by what he said?
He said, leftist politicians are pandering to racial minorities against their own interests.
Oh.
Hmm.
Wait a minute.
That's exactly what they do.
They pander.
They stoke racial resentment.
They pander and divide up Americans along those lines, racial, sexual lines.
Then they end up hurting the people that ostensibly they were intending to help.
Okay, that part was true.
All right, that's fine.
He says that people born in America are better off than people anywhere else in the world.
That...
Yeah, no, that's true too.
That's even people historically excluded from society are better off in America than not in America, because America is the greatest country in the world.
And once you have, after the period of slavery, once people are free, once you eradicate Jim Crow, once you eradicate Exclusion and discrimination by law, or mostly eliminate discrimination by law, or even go a good distance toward eliminating discrimination by law, people are choosing to be here.
They're choosing to be here for a reason.
It's the most equitable, just, prosperous country in the history of the world.
People are better off being born here than being born in Pakistan in the 1950s.
Or today.
Better off being born here than in Rwanda in the 1970s.
Of course they are.
America's the greatest country in the world.
That's why we have an immigration problem.
Because everybody on planet Earth wants to come here.
Of every single color of the rainbow, of every sexual nature and preference.
Of course.
So that part's exactly right, too.
What does he say?
America used to be a matriarchy, and it's not anymore.
Also true, this is a radical point that feminists are only quickly learning.
Since the beginning of the modern feminist movement, the second-wave feminist movement, female happiness, as measured by every single survey, has declined, both relative to the happiness of men and in absolute terms.
Why is it?
Because America was a matriarchy.
A matriarchy in the sense that women are the center of the world, of the political world.
Everything that happens in commerce, in politics, in the military, is to protect women and to protect the next generation.
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
It is a disgusting society that won't hold a door for a woman.
A disgusting society that won't show women grace, tip their hat to a woman, won't even consider standing up when they leave the table.
That's a disgusting society.
That's an anti-woman society.
John Wayne makes that point.
And then he goes on, he makes his central Duke point about bellyaching.
And I want to see them have everything.
I want...
I don't squawk and cry baby and say, geez, I had to go without meals when I was 16 and 17 years old.
It's a terrible thing.
I don't think that...
That you should look back and whine and bellyache.
Or try to hold somebody else guilty for everything you did.
Damn right, Duke.
Absolutely right.
He opens up, just on the racial point, because I know people are going to try to take it out of context.
He says, I want them to have everything.
Also, it's terrible to complain.
And it is.
It is disgusting to complain.
Awful.
It is sinful.
It is wrong.
It is miserable.
Don't complain.
Quit your belly aching.
Everybody goes through tough things.
Some people suffer more than others.
Some people suffer a lot during acute periods of time, and then they don't suffer much later on.
It just differs.
Everybody goes through tough things.
Stop whining about it, you little children.
Stop it.
There's nothing good about it.
There's nothing virtuous about complaining.
There's nothing nice about it.
There's nothing good.
There's nothing beautiful.
It's just gross.
Fix your circumstances.
Advocate for the good.
Do the right thing.
All of those are wonderful things.
But don't indulge yourself in self-pity.
Good Lord.
That's the point Duke's making.
He's absolutely right, and the left just can't hear it.
We'll get to feminist genital statue purity rings tomorrow, I guess.
I guess we don't have time today.
We'll get to all of that later.
In the meantime, check out The Conversation.
That's coming up later today.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
the show.
See you soon.
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.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Bernie Sanders is back, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker get stuck in the Jussie Smollett trap, and a CBS reporter blows the lid off of bias in the media.
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