Ep. 307 - Trump Is More Principled Than His Critics
As fake conservatives send leftists to mock pro-lifers at CPAC, environmentalist Congresswoman AOC guzzles fossil fuels, and Democrats double down on anti-Semitism and racial bigotry, one thing has become abundantly clear: President Trump is more principled than his critics. Then, what a documentary about Michael Jackson molesting little kids can tell us about our political culture. Date: 03-04-2019
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
As fake conservatives send leftists to mock pro-lifers at CPAC, environmentalist Congresswoman AOC guzzles fossil fuels, and Democrats double down on anti-Semitism and racial bigotry, one thing has become abundantly clear.
President Trump is more principled than his critics.
Then we will discuss what a documentary about Michael Jackson molesting little kids can tell us about our political culture.
A lot more to get to.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The center holds at CPAC, and it reveals one of the shocking truths to a lot of people on the right and the left.
All we have heard on the right and the left is Donald Trump.
He doesn't have any principles.
Maybe he's a good president.
Maybe he's doing good things.
He doesn't have any principles, though.
Obviously, the Never Trump crowd says this.
Obviously, the whole left says this.
It doesn't have any principles.
It has become very clear within the last few weeks, Donald Trump is far more principled than his critics, to the right or the left.
We'll get to that in a second, but first, let's make a little money, honey, with purple mattress.
Oh, how I love purple mattress.
You know, obviously I need to get 20 hours of sleep a night.
I was trying to go to sleep last night.
And I have these lunatics who live above me who just scream at each other all night long.
And I would have been awake all night if not for my purple mattress.
Their loud, awful shouting was only beaten out by the comfort of my beautiful purple mattress.
I was very skeptical about purple at first because it's not an innerspring.
It's not a memory foam exactly.
It's this new material developed by a rocket scientist.
It's firm and soft at the same time.
How is that possible?
I didn't think it was possible.
It is.
It is the greatest bed I've had in my life.
I have recommended it to a zillion people.
I, you know, basically tossed my old bed out the second I got it.
I absolutely love it.
100-night risk-free trial.
If you're not fully satisfied, you can return your mattress for a full refund.
Backed by a 10-year warranty, free shipping and returns, free in-home setup, and old mattress removal.
You will love it.
Right now, my listeners will get a free purple pillow with the purchase of a mattress.
That is in addition to the great free gifts they're offering site-wide.
Just text COVFEFE, C-O-V-F-E-F-E, to 84888.
That's the only way to get this free pillow.
Text COVFE right now, C-O-V-F-E-F-E, to 84888. C-O-V-F-E-F-E, 84888.
Message and data rates may apply.
The CPAC speech was so good.
It was so great.
Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
I unfortunately wasn't able to get out there this year.
I used to love going to CPAC when I was younger.
We just got stuck in La La Land this year.
Couldn't make it happen.
I loved watching it from afar.
Donald Trump went out there.
A lot of you already saw clips from it.
He talked for over two hours, largely ad-libbing, largely improvising the speech.
The only thing I didn't like about it is a couple times he went blue He didn't go Democrat.
He went blue with his language.
He used swear words in public, which I just don't like.
Look, I'll talk like a sailor if I'm at the bar hanging out with the guys or something.
I don't like it when my president does that.
I don't like it broadly when people do that in public.
There is a time and a place for everything.
People should have discipline with their words.
If you're not disciplined with your language, then you might not be disciplined in your thinking or your behavior either.
That's the one criticism I have of this speech.
I don't like it.
When people who are in dignified positions use swear words in public?
That said, that's my only criticism.
The speech was fabulous.
The speech was unbelievably good.
He covered everything.
He covered all of the ground.
And look, you've probably seen him on the internet.
I'm just going to play one clip from it where he went right to the heart of the matter with Democrats.
Went...
Brutally right.
Some people said he went over the edge.
He didn't.
He identified the problem with the Democrat Party, the problem with the up-and-coming, fresh-faced Democrats, and he said it in no uncertain terms.
We have people in Congress.
Right now, we have people in Congress that hate our country.
And you know that.
And we can name every one of them if they want.
They hate our country.
Say it.
It's very sad.
When I see some of the things being made, the statements being made, it's very, very sad.
And find out, how did they do in their country?
Just ask them, how did they do?
Did they do well?
Were they succeeding?
Just ask that question.
Somebody would say, oh, that's terrible that he brings that up, but that's okay.
I don't mind.
I'll bring it up.
How did they do in their country?
Not so good.
Now, if you don't know what he's referring to here, he's referring to freshman representative Ilhan Omar.
He's referring to this woman.
She's an immigrant, and she doesn't like America.
She doesn't like America.
She doesn't like our allies.
And he makes a big statement.
He said, there are Democrats in Congress who hate our country.
That is a big statement.
You can't make that statement unless you can...
Back it up with facts.
He did.
He's referring to Ilhan Omar.
Ilhan Omar has defended nine men who tried to join ISIS from the United States.
She defended them.
She asked for leniency for them.
She's backing terrorists.
She blamed the US for a terrorist attack on a Kenyan mall in 2013.
She blames the United States when terrorist attacks happen.
On the broader topic...
So he defends it with that obvious, specific example.
Say there are Democrats who don't support our country, who hate our country.
This is true.
They protest the American flag, and they endorse protests of the American flag.
You just have to go to that NFL protest from a couple years ago.
They protest the flag itself, the symbol of the country itself, and Democrats are pleased to back them up, pleased to support them for it.
The rest of the speech was like this.
You know, as I said, he used a little salty language in there.
It may be the case that our culture is so degraded that you sort of have to do this to win over a crowd.
I've heard a lot of people tell me they loved it.
Oh, I loved when he used his real language like the real people use.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe he's onto something.
I don't know.
I mean, that's a sad thing for the culture, but I guess I can understand it if that's where the culture is.
Broadly, he goes on in this speech for two hours.
It's very hard to do that.
People don't appreciate, just as a technical show business aspect of his speeches, how difficult it is to do what he does.
So he's a little loose with his language.
He kind of goes here and there.
He makes twists and turns.
To speak for two hours is very hard, especially if you want to keep people engaged.
And people were engaged with every second of that.
I watched every second of that speech.
He is a masterful communicator.
He is a masterful showman.
He is a masterful politician.
Now, those of us who have been paying attention have known all that for a long time.
But the one question that remained that I still hear people say, even supporters of the president, they say, yeah, but he doesn't have any principles.
Yeah, he's good at politics.
He's good at communicating, but he doesn't have any principles.
That isn't true.
This weekend, this CPAC, showed that Donald Trump is more principled than his critics.
I'm speaking in particular.
I'll go after his critics on the right for a second, then we can turn to the left.
I have refrained from criticizing Bill Kristol.
I've largely refrained from it.
This is because I like Bill Kristol.
He was a teacher of mine for a summer in DC. I listen to his podcast sometimes, conversations with Bill Kristol, which I usually enjoy.
I have to bring it up because Bill Kristol has made himself the news story, so we have to talk about it.
He was the leading never-Trumper.
He was probably the main face of never-Trump, and still is.
He started a website called The Bulwark with Charlie Sykes.
And the motto of The Bulwark is, conservatism conserved.
The argument being, we're the real conservatives, and the Republican Party and Donald Trump and people who support the Republican president, they're fake conservatives.
We, however, are the real conservatives.
And I entertained this argument because while I thought it was a wrong argument, I understood the logic of it.
The logic basically was we're so conservative that we live in this totally pure, esoteric, ethereal realm that has nothing to do with real politics.
We would never soil our principles by engaging in the reality of politics.
Now, you might say that that is an unprincipled position in itself, which I would say.
But I at least got that argument.
This weekend, that argument fell apart.
That never-Trump argument completely dissolved.
Because what the bulwark did was they sent a leftist reporter, Molly Jongfast, to report on CPAC.
And they were promoting this always.
They'd say, oh, you're going to want to pay attention to Molly Jongfast's reports.
Ooh, you're going to really like this.
Ooh, they were really promoting this.
This wasn't some random freelancer who went off script.
This was, they sent a leftist in to mock CPAC. And what did she do?
She filed a piece for the bulwark called, CPAC is definitely the bad place.
In that piece, you can read it yourself, she attacks pro-lifers.
She refers to them as anti-choice, almost exclusively, if not exclusively.
She attacks the Reagan administration over its policy in Latin America.
She attacks the NRA.
She attacks Second Amendment supporters.
She attacks Charlie Kirk for being a college dropout who then goes and lectures college students about free speech on campus.
I believe, I'm not sure of this, I believe Molly herself is a college dropout, so it's kind of weird for her to make that attack.
They attack Seb Gorka.
They say, Seb Gorka, who lectured the crowd about how socialism is bad and how Democrats love to kill babies.
Show me the lie.
Socialism is bad.
Democrats have embraced socialism.
And Democrats have not just embraced late-term abortion.
They've now embraced killing babies after they are born.
Not even just Ralph Northam in Virginia.
Senate Democrats voted against a bill that would offer medical treatment to babies who are born, who survive abortions.
National Democrats voted to kill babies after they are born.
She attacks this as somehow bad, somehow wrong.
She attacks conservative sponsors of media, specifically Mike Lindell, who's the MyPillow guy, who sponsors a lot of conservative media.
She attacks him, I guess, for sponsoring conservative media.
She attacks the RNC, an RNC chairwoman, Rona McDaniel.
She attacks Fox News host Laura Ingram.
And then she attacks John Batchelor, who's a radio host, Who's conservative.
He's been battling cancer.
And she attacks him for looking ugly and old.
Said it looks like he's 400 years old.
I think after the blowback she finally had to delete that tweet.
So the principled Never Trump stance was we're going to conserve conservatism.
How does any of that conserve conservatism?
The principled, never-Trump, conservatism-conserved idea was they were going to get a ton of interest, a ton of attention by...
That worked.
They did get a ton of attention.
But my question now is, once you've alienated pro-lifers, Reaganites, Second Amendment supporters, young conservatives, anti-socialists, conservative media sponsors, Fox News and the RNC, and talk radio, who is your audience?
What are you conserving?
Because the only people who will want to read this are those suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, which is exclusively left-wing, with the exception of the dozen never-Trumpers that still exist.
And the left is never going to read an outlet that calls itself conservatism conserved.
It just isn't going to happen.
They might invite you on MSNBC to go attack the president, but that's it.
Very misguided.
And by the way, after all of this, after it was clear what Molly Jongfast did, Mr.
Crystal came out and tweeted, quote, thanks to Molly Jongfast for triggering so many snowflakes on the right with her mordant, yes, gasp, heterodox dispatches from CPAC 2019.
He's acknowledging her attacks on pro-lifers.
He's acknowledging all of that and he's celebrating it.
This is obviously not conservatism conserved.
Ironically, what it actually is, is liberalism liberalized.
I'm not just making a little cute play on words.
That's actually the difference.
And this has been a project of many people on the right for a long time.
They don't want to conserve the conservative tradition.
They want to liberalize the liberal tradition.
They are liberals who want to make liberalism a bigger tent, who want liberalism to be more liberal, who want liberalism to engage with free speech or whatever.
This was the idea.
Bill Kristol said a couple years ago, he said, he said, let's rebrand the GOP as the liberal party.
Because we're the real liberals.
And we're the cool guys.
And liberalism is so great.
Ugh.
Ugh, what a bad idea.
That's a terrible idea.
Ironically, Donald Trump is actually doing the bulwark's mission.
Donald Trump is actually conserving conservatism.
He's saying there is an alternative to liberalism.
Conservatism is not just another form of liberalism.
There is a different conservative tradition.
That is much more honest and that is much more principled, what the Trump critics on the right are doing.
And I think they've finally exposed that.
I don't know how they could expose it in any more obvious fashion than to send a leftist to go make fun of pro-lifers at CPAC. We have to get to how the left is less principled than Donald Trump.
But first, let's thank our wonderful sponsor, Mike Rowe.
If you are looking for more great podcasts to listen to but you're short on time, you've got to check out The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe.
This podcast gives a unique take on American history.
It explores everything from pop culture to politics, actors to athletes, history to Hollywood, and each episode is 10 minutes or less.
The Way I Heard It is hosted by Mike Rowe.
He presents stories for the curious mind with a short attention span.
His storytelling is reminiscent of the late Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story.
It reminds me a lot of Ronald Reagan, actually.
That's the, it's got a very Reagan-esque quality.
They're all pretty short.
They're all under 10 minutes.
It's the number one short-form podcast in America, downloaded more than 87 million times.
You can start with episode 36, Oh Brother.
I don't want to ruin the episode, but it is about a sibling rivalry, siblings torn apart by politics in a very tough American election.
That was based on Making America Great Again and how it intersects with pop culture, how it intersects with the entertainment industry.
I don't want to ruin it anymore, but it's a fabulous episode.
Go to MikeRowe.com slash podcast today and listen and subscribe to The Way I Heard It.
M-I-K-E-R-O-W-E dot com slash podcast today.
MikeRowe.com slash podcast.
You are going to love this, especially if you're short on time.
It is just such a great little dose of wit, of history, of political cleverness.
I really like it.
I'm sure you will, too.
Check it out.
MikeRowe.com slash podcast.
It's not just the right that has fewer principles than Donald Trump.
It's the left as well.
So we see this most clearly with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, our favorite, the socialist from Yorktown Heights.
She said, quote, I'll try to do a...
We're like the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.
That's what she said.
So, what she is saying is we need to have zero greenhouse gases.
We need a full transition off of fossil fuels within 10 years, or else the world will end, or else it is not okay to have children.
That's what she said.
You have to ask yourself if it's moral to have children in this world.
And what did we learn from federal filings?
She's a hypocrite.
She doesn't practice what she preaches.
So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lives in the city with the greatest subway system in the world.
And according to her federal filings, she listed over 1,000 Uber, Lyft, and Juno transactions during her campaign.
She spent $30,000 on rideshare.
Guess where her campaign headquarters was located?
One minute away from the 7 train.
And the 7 train can take you anywhere, because the 7 train connects to a bunch of other lines, so you can get all around.
She lived a one minute walk away from the 7 train, and she spent 30 Gs on rideshare apps.
To put that into perspective, Max Rose, who's another freshman Democrat from New York, he only spent $6,000 on rideshare apps, and he only spent them on 329 rides during his campaign.
So she used way, way multiples, multiples more than this.
Then, what happened after the primary?
After the primary, AOC set her sights outside of New York.
She flew around 66 times, costing $25,000.
She wants trains over planes, doesn't she?
Well, she only took 18 Amtrak rides.
She flew 66 times.
Actually, on October 12, 2018, on that day alone...
AOC logged 26 car service transactions.
That's in one day.
And what I'm pointing out here is not that she shouldn't take Ubers.
Not that a congresswoman shouldn't ride.
What I'm pointing out is she doesn't believe what she's saying.
She is a fraud.
If she really thought that the world were going to end because of greenhouse gases, she would take the subway, which is one minute away from her headquarters.
She wouldn't fly all over the country to raise money.
She would stick around town.
What she is saying is, do as I say, not as I do.
Greenhouse gas is for me, but not for thee.
It is a real hypocrisy.
And some have said, well, you know, someone tweeted at me.
They said, Ralph Nader campaigned for seatbelt laws.
At a time when there weren't a lot of seatbelts in cars.
Well, Henry Ford took trains at a time when he was building automobiles.
Well, that's not hypocritical.
It is hypocritical for her because she's saying the world will end if people continue these behaviors.
That's the difference.
She says this is destroying Earth, imperiling the future of the human race.
That's what makes it hypocritical.
And she obviously doesn't believe it because environmentalism is a sham.
It is an obvious power grab.
Now, this is...
To make AOC probably not the worst of the Democrat congressmen these days, because she is not explicitly defending killing babies after birth or condemning the Jews.
I want to get to Ilana Omar in a second, which is what she is doing.
But first, I want to talk about just the Democrat tenor.
Because when you call them out on hypocrisy, when you call them out on their double standards, on race, on the environment, on whatever, they don't have an argument.
So what they immediately do is call you Hitler.
This is what happens when you don't have an argument.
That's how you know they're losing the argument.
Here is Elie Mistal on MSNBC using this ridiculous tactic.
I know you have a reaction, Elie.
I feel in my heart that you might have a reaction.
Mark Meadows, I know why members of Congress can't say this because they have to work with the man, but I don't have to work with the man.
Mark Meadows is so racist that he needs to be put on display at the African American History Museum as an artifact, alright?
I am so sick of Republicans thinking that the only racist people left in America are David Duke and Louis Farrakhan.
White people don't get a vote.
White people have been held in bondage and oppression in the New World for 400 years.
My own counsel will I keep on who is to be called racist.
So when these people, when these white Republicans try to tell me, and Bagger Vance standing behind her, when these people try to tell me who is racist and who is not racist, they need to understand that I do not care.
What I care about is what their policies are, And what their actions are.
And Mark Menos is a bursar.
So he can roll his behind out of here.
You know what he's saying.
What he's saying is, I don't have an argument.
I don't have an argument.
And so I'm going to demagogue.
And you can't have an opinion.
You don't get a vote.
You do.
You do.
You don't understand how opinions work.
Mr.
Mistal...
More on that in a second, but first let's make a little money with Candid.
Have you ever had a problem with your teeth that you've always wanted to get fixed?
I have an option that can help.
You won't need to go through the hassle or long term treatment of wire braces.
You can do it all from the comfort of your own home.
It's this new company called Candid.
Candid is helping people gain confidence through accessible and affordable orthodontic care.
Candid's network of highly trained orthodontists review each and every case and directs the entire aligner plan.
Straighter and brighter teeth in an average of six months cost 65% less than braces.
When I was a kid, I had braces.
You know, it doesn't look great.
It's really kind of hard to pick up girls if you've got the braces.
And they were very, very expensive.
Now you can save so much money.
You get clear aligners that are sent directly to your home, customized specifically to fix and straighten your teeth.
Your orthodontists will review your specific case, provide you with a 3D preview of what your treatment will look like.
Candid's treatment is an average of six months and will save you thousands compared to the other guys.
You're one step away from getting straighter, whiter teeth.
Take advantage of Candid's risk-free modeling kit guarantee.
Plus, when you use my dedicated link, CandidCo.com slash CoFeFe, C-O-V-F-E-F-E, you'll save 25% on your modeling kit.
CandidCo.com slash CoFeFe, C-O-V-F-E-F-E, to get 25% off the price of your modeling kit.
CandidCo.com slash CoFeFeFe.
So what Elie Mistal just said is not true.
It is not true that white people don't get to have an opinion about something because of the color of their skin.
It's not true that black people don't get to have an opinion about something because of the color of their skin.
That's not how opinions work.
Thinking people can hold opinions about anything, and they should.
And this is the issue, because the Democrats are no longer thinking.
That's not just a throwaway line.
Leftism has become a psychological twitch more than a coherent ideology.
Fifty years ago, liberals would say this about conservatism.
Conservatism is just a psychological twitch, not a philosophy.
That has happened to leftism now.
It has happened to leftism because of the denial of truth, because of the denial of reality, because now they say all that matters is the reality of oppression.
Ideas don't matter.
Skin color is all that matters.
This is a hysterical denier of reality, a refusal to engage with reality.
You see, we talked about AOC on her environmentalism, how she has no principles.
She says, I'm this high-minded, principled environmentalist.
Nonsense.
She's driving around gas-guzzling Ubers all over the place.
For that woman to say that Donald Trump has no principles, crazy.
But on the race issue, two Democrats have this problem.
They're not handling their race issue well.
Over the weekend, Ilhan Omar, that freshman representative, got into a spat with another Democrat colleague, Nita Lowey, and she doubled down.
She said, quote, Congresswoman Lowy.
I should not be expected to have allegiance, pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.
The people of the Fifth elected me to serve their interest.
I'm sure we agree on that.
What she's saying is that Jews have a double allegiance to Israel and to the U.S. It's not just a normal criticism of a country, which would be fine.
To criticize Israel, just like you would criticize France or Great Britain or...
China or whatever, that is acceptable.
That's understandable.
Ilana Omar has a special hatred for Jews and for Israel.
She prayed in Twitter, she said, I pray that Allah wakes up people to the evils of Israel.
Israel has hypnotized the world.
That is language that you reserve for special contempt.
That's not just the same as criticizing some other country.
Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal historian, used to say anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the left.
Now we're finding out anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the left.
They are on this issue of race.
They are totally unprincipled.
They can't answer even their own colleagues who call them out for it.
And what do they do?
They do what Elie Mistal did.
They say, you don't have an opinion.
You can't only, my opinion's right because of the color of my skin.
Stop challenging my opinion because I can't defend my opinion.
That's what they're saying because they have no argument.
None whatsoever.
And I... It even threw some clarity for me.
I've never thought that the left had principles.
But I sort of thought maybe in their own really narrow way they're following a principled position.
They're not.
They're hypocrites on the environment.
They're hypocrites on race.
It is all just a naked power grab.
A naked power grab for socialism under the guise of environmentalism.
A naked power grab for censorship under the guise of racism or anti-racism.
And there you have Donald Trump, the reality TV star, casino owner...
Real estate developer from New York.
A guy that you shouldn't expect to have principles.
He's the only guy with principles among them.
We will get to why CNN thinks he's Hitler in a second.
Then obviously we have to talk about that Michael Jackson documentary and the political lessons that we can learn from a pop star molesting little kids.
But first, you've got to go to dailywire.com.
$10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You get the Matt Wall show.
You get everything.
You get so much.
And you get this.
The Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Ooh, ooh, ooh.
That's that CPAC vintage.
That is that delicious CPAC vintage.
Two hours of unadulterated Trump, and we've only got more to come.
Go to Daily Wire.
We'll be right back.
So CNN decides that they're going to finally have to react to the CPAC speech.
So CNN decides that they're going to finally have to react to this CPAC speech.
How are they going to do it?
How are they going to do it?
Donald Trump called them out.
He exposed them for what they are.
He exposed people in this country who hate this country.
He specifically, using real examples, he has exposed his critics on the right through his success, through his effective conservative administration.
So what is the last argument that CNN can possibly make?
I'll give you a hint.
It's the argument that every dumb freshman college kid makes before he learns that the first person to invoke Adolf Hitler in an argument loses the argument.
Sam, the idea of preserving heritage taps into historically darker times, certainly.
Not only that, though, you say what we heard from the president in those remarks also could pose a national security concern.
Well, Ana, his statement makes me sick.
On a personal level, preserving our heritage, reclaiming our heritage, that sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about 6 million other Jews in the 1940s.
I forgot.
Heritage is the Holocaust.
Yep.
That's it.
The Heritage Foundation.
How the hell are they still allowed to operate?
We've got the Heritage Foundation.
I thought they were just a sort of mild-mannered conservative policy wonk think tank.
No, apparently they're Holocaust advocates.
Is that what it would be?
A Holocaust proponent?
I don't know.
If you mention Heritage...
You think of your family heritage, your national heritage, your religious heritage.
You're basically Hitler.
It's kind of funny because there was a clip floating around of Joe Biden saying exactly the same thing as Trump.
You can find it from the 08 campaign.
It said, we need to preserve our heritage.
I wonder if this lady would say that Joe Biden is another Hitler.
Probably not.
If the left had principles...
They would argue with the points that Donald Trump is really making.
If the left had principles, they would say, we don't want to preserve our national heritage because we don't like our national heritage, because we don't like our nation, we don't like our country.
That's fine.
That's a fair argument to make.
Donald Trump says, I like our country, I want to preserve our heritage.
The left says, we hate our country, we want it to be completely different.
As Barack Obama said, I want to fundamentally transform the country.
That's an honest argument.
And Obama, at his best, was making an honest argument.
But the left isn't doing that anymore because they don't have any principles.
Because they're total hypocrites.
And then the other thing that they do is they gaslight.
So they tell you that reality, as Donald Trump observes it, is not reality.
And that fantasy is reality.
She goes on.
But on a national security level, the president talks about preserving our heritage as a catch-all for implementing policies that misallocate resources.
He pretends that there are massive flows of illegal immigrants coming over our borders and is spending billions of dollars on a border wall emergency.
Instead of paying attention to real national security threats, he sounds a lot like despotic leaders that have talked about white heritage and white nationalism around the world and is putting resources in the wrong place and pretending that there are foreign people trying to influence our country in a way that just isn't accurate.
He sounds a lot like people who talk about white nationalism.
Can she cite any example?
She's trying to say he's David Duke.
Can she cite any example of this?
She's trying to say he's Hitler.
Can she cite any example?
Of course not.
But then she goes further.
It's not just the empty insults.
She says that there's no such thing as a foreign invasion.
Donald Trump is pretending that foreigners are entering our country.
We're apprehending almost 2,000 of them a day.
We're at relative record highs of illegal aliens pouring across our border.
And then when you consider that this has been a problem for 40 years, you have 11 million, 12 million illegal aliens here.
Then she says, Donald Trump says that those illegal aliens want to influence our politics.
Yeah, your party is registering them to vote.
When you go to the DMV in places like California, they have motor voter laws.
They just register you to vote when you get your driver's license.
An illegal alien can get a driver's license in many places.
And so they can be registered to vote.
You've seen cases of voter fraud turn up.
Why do you think Democrats want this flow of illegal aliens anyway?
Because statistically, they are overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats.
That's why they changed their tune on it.
She's telling us that reality is not so.
There's nothing principled about that.
And this is why I think some people get angry because I don't criticize Donald Trump as much as they would like me to.
I don't say, oh, he passed this policy this way instead of this way.
Oh, he tweeted something that I don't like.
Oh, he wag, wag, wag.
This is terrible.
This is awful.
Look at the alternatives.
If we're talking about the dignity of office, if we're talking about integrity, if we're talking about actually accomplishing something in politics, who am I supposed to prefer?
His disingenuous critics on the right?
Like at the bulwark, which is sending leftists to mock pro-lifers?
Are they the dignified people?
How about the people on the left?
Who are race and climate hustlers?
Who obviously do not believe the things that they are preaching and who are just trying to take power.
The ones who say, shut up if you're white.
The ones who say, I need to take away your political system.
We need to utterly transform the republic and remove your political liberty in the name of the sun monster, which I don't even believe in.
Donald Trump, of all the shocking things, Donald Trump seems to be the guy in politics right now at the top levels with the most integrity.
Now, some people are really surprised by this.
I don't know.
I think maybe it's because they got a little wrapped up with anti-Trumpism.
And they forget that politics is a really tough game.
Politics attracts pretty gross people sometimes.
Politics rewards cynicism a lot of the time.
Politics is a dirty, dirty business.
And so President Trump comes along.
He actually does what he says he's going to do.
I'll take it.
That's a win.
I don't need to pile on disingenuously.
I'll criticize him here and there.
I don't think he should go blue.
I don't think he should use swear words in public.
It's a minor point.
I hope he takes my advice.
But I don't think the man's presidency should go down over a couple swear words.
Likewise, I don't think his presidency should go down because...
The FBI doesn't like him, or the DOJ doesn't like him, or the Democrats don't like him, or because he was going to build a hotel in Russia three years ago, or because he was a real estate developer in New York.
No way, no how.
I hope that the people who obsess about principles, who almost make an idol of their principles, would I would look at that reality, the reality of where the principles lie right now.
I think it's clear that Donald Trump is doing the most admirable job.
Maybe that's damning with faint praise, but CPAC really opened that for me.
Before we go, we've got to talk about Michael Jackson, because this shows you A very important lesson about celebrity and how our politics has gotten to where they are, how the mainstream media have been able to twist reality in the way that they have.
And it all comes down to a weird pop star who molested kids.
If you haven't seen it, here's just a quick clip of the accusers in this documentary describing what happened to them.
You know, he settled a case in 1993 and then he went to trial in 2005 and And Wade, you got on the stand and you testified on his behalf and vehemently denied that any sexual activity had taken place.
Yes.
I knew I was lying.
I knew that I had to lie.
When I was 11 first, you know, I felt I had no other choice.
And at 22, what was your reasoning?
At 22, you know, it's so complicated, but it's a combination of still lots of fear, Wrapped up with shame.
My whole life, my whole career would fall apart.
And then wrapped up in shame.
He always made me believe that I wanted everything that we did sexually just as much, if not more, than him.
I expect people not to believe.
There's a lot of threats that are thrown my way from what seems like angry MJ fans.
It goes on and on.
The documentary itself, I watched it last night, is pretty disturbing.
The political point I want to draw is why people defend Michael Jackson.
Why they believed that a guy who regularly slept in the same bed as little kids could not have molested them.
Why the mainstream media covered up for him.
Why the parents brought their kids to sleep with this man.
And the answer is celebrity.
Just on the main point that's being discussed, did Michael Jackson molest the kids or not?
Because in fairness to him, a lot of false allegations get thrown around, especially at famous people, especially at rich people.
We've seen a lot of those false allegations in the last couple years.
We saw one a few weeks ago.
Jussie Smollett lobbed a completely false accusation of a hate crime against, basically against Donald Trump, against Trump's supporters.
Because they're politically powerful right now, he thought it would benefit him.
We saw those ridiculous allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.
We've seen a lot of fake allegations.
However...
Vanity Fair lays out some essential points in this case.
Here's what we know for a fact about Michael Jackson.
At the age of 34, Michael Jackson slept over 30 consecutive nights in the same bed as Geordie Chandler, his little boy, 10-year-old boy, at the boy's mother's house and father's house.
Five boys that slept with Michael Jackson in the same bed have accused him of sexual abuse.
Michael Jackson paid the Chandlers $23 million to stop talking about it.
Chandler, Geordie Chandler, correctly described the, this is a little disgusting, the discoloring on the underside of Michael Jackson's genitals.
Because Michael Jackson suffers, apparently, or suffered from vitiligo, a skin discoloration disease.
The kid correctly described the discoloring on the underside of his genitals.
The hallway leading to Michael Jackson's bedroom was wired for sound so that any footsteps would produce a lot of ding-dong noises and there would be a warning that people were coming.
Michael Jackson kept an extensive collection of pornography and studies of naked boys next to his bed.
Fingerprints of the boys that he slept in the same bed with were found next to his on some of the pages of those books.
No one ever saw Michael Jackson sleep with a woman.
The parents were given tons of expensive gifts and the fathers of two boys who accused Michael Jackson were estranged from their sons and they ended up killing themselves.
It's very hard to imagine a world where Michael Jackson did not molest children.
Now he was acquitted on his trial.
First vote was 9 to 3.
Nine people said he was guilty.
Three people said or nine people said he was innocent.
Three people said he was guilty.
He was eventually found not guilty.
One juror publicly said later that they had a gut feeling that Michael Jackson molested the kids but they just felt the prosecution didn't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
It's very clear that Michael Jackson molested those kids.
It's hard to imagine any reality otherwise.
So what's the political point here?
The political point is the power of celebrity.
If you've ever met a celebrity, you'll know you can get starstruck.
I've been starstruck.
I live in LA. I see celebrities all the time.
And still, sometimes, I'll get a little starstruck.
It's someone you've seen on a big screen.
Somebody like Michael Jackson, biggest pop star in the whole world.
There's really nothing like it today.
Because social media brings our stars so much closer to us.
It makes them so much more accessible.
But especially back then, he was so much larger than life.
Parents brought their kids to sleep in Michael Jackson's bed.
They let him come over and sleep in their children's beds.
Celebrity is so powerful.
So powerful.
This guy, when you look at it now, for people who grew up after Michael Jackson was a big thing, you know, after the allegations came out, you just kind of look at him as a weird creep who obviously molested children.
But the people who knew him before, they can't imagine him.
You'd see videos of him holding hands, walking around with little kids constantly.
Celebrity is so powerful.
And this is how the news media operate.
This is how the left operates.
This is what they bet on.
The guy on TV said it, so it must be true.
This is what they bet on.
This is why I just talked about this on Drew's show today.
From 1989 to 2013, there were over 200 positive mentions of Donald Trump in rap songs.
Then, in 2015, the year he declares as a candidate, instantly all of the mentions turn negative because the media have to be mobilized to serve the left.
They always do.
And so...
We see these people on, I mean, this is why the left has been able to push a basically unpopular agenda, because they have all of the celebrity with them.
This is why we say, who cares what the actors think?
We all do.
We all actually care what these celebrities think, I'm sorry to say.
We might not think that we do.
We might think that we don't care.
But it does affect the culture.
It does seep down.
And the left relies on this.
The way that conservatives can start to break that spell is for us to use that power of celebrity as well.
For us to turn it on them.
And we're already doing this.
I mean, this is one of the main arguments, the principled arguments against Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is nothing but a celebrity.
He's just a game show host.
He's just a tabloid star.
All the principled conservatives...
Opposed nominating that guy.
Celebrity matters.
The last most effective Republican president we had.
What was he?
He was a Hollywood star.
He was a celebrity.
His name was Ronald Reagan.
There's nothing principled about intentionally losing all the time.
There's nothing principled about not reacting to political realities.
That's not principled.
That's foolish.
And we saw over the weekend the biggest celebrity on planet Earth, Donald Trump, go out there and for the first time in our lifetimes, turn that celebrity for political good with great political skill, with great political principle.
And you can tell the Democrats are running scared.
They're launching a zillion investigations.
Maybe we'll try to get into that tomorrow.
They're really so desperate to take him down.
Now more than ever is the time for conservatives, as CPAC is supposed to do, to unify, to come together and to defeat the left.
They are terrified.
They're terrified because this is effective.
Conservatives are being effective now for the first time in a long time.
We should relish that.
We should celebrate that.
We should lift up our principles on that great wave.
And I think for the right, as of right now, the future is looking very bright.
Come back tomorrow, and we'll get into all the bad stuff.
Okay, in the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you then.
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.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to be talking about what I have noticed to be a startling similarity between my two-year-old son and socialists.
There's a real commonality between the modern socialist and toddlers, and I want to talk more about that.
Also, a very horrifying, shocking documentary about Michael Jackson aired on HBO last night, and the first part of it anyway.
A lot of people are talking about this thing.
It only reinforced what any sane person already knew about Michael Jackson, yet his fans are still defending him somehow.
