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March 12, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

46:01

Ep. 312 - The College Admissions Scam Was Inevitable

Federal prosecutors have charged nearly 50 people in a $25 million scam to cheat college admissions. Media Matters takes another shot at Tucker, the Greenpeace co-founder says the GND would end civilization, and Pelosi comes out against impeachment. Date: 03-12-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Federal prosecutors have charged nearly 50 people in a college admissions scandal that involves wealthy parents and celebrities bribing testing companies and colleges to get their kids into elite universities, including Stanford, Georgetown, and of course, dear old Yale.
	We will explain why the big college bust was inevitable.
	Then, Media Matters takes another shot at Tucker Carlson, the Greenpeace co-founder It says that the Green New Deal would end civilization and Nancy Pelosi finally comes out against impeachment.
	I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	This is basically breaking news.
	It's within about the last hour that this has come out.
	The biggest scandal ever to face American higher education.
	It was so predictable.
	We knew it was going to happen.
	There are a lot of victims here.
	There are basically only victims here.
	We will explain in great detail the path forward, how to avoid things like this in the future.
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	Now, today, these days, if you want to get a job, everyone tells you you need a college degree.
	Everyone needs to go to college.
	Everyone needs to go to a four-year college.
	Everyone needs to go to the same colleges.
	That's what we have been told.
	And this lie has led to the largest scandal ever in American higher education.
	This scandal is huge.
	It includes business leaders.
	It includes, you know, captains of industry, whatever.
	This is a really big deal.
	This includes Lori Loughlin.
	Lori Loughlin was on Full House.
	This includes Felicity Huffman.
	Felicity Huffman was on Desperate Housewives.
	Parents apparently paid consultants $25 million from 2011 through this year to cheat the system and get their kids into these schools.
	So what is going on?
	When I saw this, I don't watch Desperate Housewives.
	I don't tune in every night.
	But I've heard the name Felicity Huffman.
	I thought, why on earth would a well-known celebrity actress get involved in such assorted crimes such as this?
	And the reason is obvious.
	Because these...
	College degrees really, really matter in our society.
	These college degrees, especially at elite universities, carry a ton of weight in the society.
	They're incredibly valuable, and so parents who want to give their kids a leg up will do anything they can to get their kids in there.
	But at the same time, there's a flip side to this, which is that...
	People got away with cheating their way into these schools.
	They got away with it for years.
	Now, what are we on, the eighth year of this?
	Because it's a lot harder to get in than it is to stay in.
	I know this just from personal experience.
	I wasn't on college all that long ago, and it is very hard to get into Yale.
	It was very hard.
	You need basically perfect SATs, valedictorian, whatever.
	You need to check every box, class president, all these things.
	It's very, very hard.
	Parents put their kids through all these study courses, SAT prep courses.
	They do a zillion extracurriculars.
	I did all these things.
	And even then, it's very hard to get in.
	Once you get in, however, it's a lot easier to stay in.
	I mean, these days, it's still hard, I guess, to get an A. But to get an A- or a B- is pretty easy.
	It's actually probably hard to get a C. I never got anything below a B, I don't think.
	I certainly never got a C in my entire time in college.
	And it's not because I was paying attention in class all the time.
	When I was in college, I was doing a zillion extracurricular activities.
	I was off campus a lot doing politics.
	And...
	Still, it's very hard because there is great inflation.
	They protect you once you're in.
	They want to make sure they have a high graduation rate.
	So these kids, who didn't even get the high SAT score, they just cheated their way in.
	They were able to stay in them.
	It means that higher education has become an empty husk of what it once was.
	It's largely a facade.
	So there are a lot of questions that are raised, first of all.
	I don't think it's just these kids who cheated.
	That's not the only knock against the meritocratic college system we have.
	What about athletes?
	One way, actually, that these kids were cheating to get in is that the parents would pay these consultants to bribe coaches at all of these elite universities.
	The coaches would pretend that they were recruiting the kids for athletics.
	They'd pocket the money or they'd give the money to the school's athletic program.
	Then the kids would get to the school and then all of a sudden they would drop out of the sport.
	Because at these elite universities, you don't actually have to play the sport once you're there.
	I remember this from Yale.
	I had a good friend at Yale.
	He was recruited for football.
	He comes over to Yale and he decides he wants to become a serious scholar.
	He wants to really devote all of his time to classics and to thinking.
	I guess it's sort of the opposite of this scam.
	It's the opposite of these kids.
	He actually wanted to become much more academically rigorous.
	So I think his freshman year he quit the football team.
	Doesn't matter, because at these elite schools, your scholarship, your financial aid, your whatever, is not tied to athletics.
	So you get in for football or whatever, they lower the academic standards for you, and then you quit football immediately.
	So, okay, that's one aspect of it, but let's not also forget that very often, the super rich, not just the very rich, not just these parents, not just the Felicity Huffman rich, but the super-duper rich, the captains of industry, They just buy their kids' way into the schools by building a dormitory or building a lecture hall or something.
	And so once they do that, they give $100 million or something, $50 million donation.
	How come that's not cheating, but this is cheating?
	Well, in part it's because at least the rich people are honest about it.
	They're saying, here's my check, here's my money, you can all see that I donated to it.
	My name is on the front of the building there, and my kid happens to go here, you do the math.
	One thing that these parents were doing was cheating.
	They were pretending that their kids passed all of the academic rigor.
	They were pretending that the kids merited their place at the university.
	Now, I've heard that at a lot of elite schools it's basically 50-50.
	50% athletes and legacies, people whose parents went to the school, and then 50% got in on their own academic merit.
	And I've got to tell you something.
	This is one aspect of college that I really liked.
	It's something that I think is losing cachet in America, but it's very important, which is that because I didn't come from a super wealthy family, I didn't know that Felicity Huffman could have bought my way into college, so I legitimately had the privilege of considering myself in the people in college who merited getting in academically.
	Studied for the tests, got good grades on the tests, got good grades in school.
	I got to be there.
	That gives you a feeling of self-worth.
	That gives you a feeling of confidence.
	That gives you a feeling of belonging, of not being lesser than.
	And for these kids who got in because mommy cheated...
	They don't have that feeling.
	I mean, even people who do it the old-fashioned way where daddy buys a building or something, they don't have that feeling as much.
	When I got into college, I had a family friend say to me, Michael, you ought to be really proud.
	And I said, oh, you know, people get into good colleges all the time.
	And he said, right.
	But for my kids, I wrote a check.
	And your parents didn't write a check.
	I said, you know, that actually does make you feel good.
	When you earn something, it feels a lot better than when something is just handed to you.
	And this is true not just of the admissions, but of the whole college process now.
	This is the whole thing.
	I mean, you just see the tail wagging the dog in every way.
	Why are the colleges prioritizing athletics over scholarship?
	Why are they prioritizing pulling in money over pulling in the best students and scholars?
	Why are the parents so desperate to get their kids into these schools?
	This is, I think, a problem of an overly democratic culture.
	Because in this culture, in democracies, we hate when people have different things, different privileges.
	Democratic cultures, egalitarian cultures...
	Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this in Democracy in America.
	They tend to level.
	And so all of a sudden...
	If somebody has something, everybody else needs to have something.
	Everybody else needs to have that privilege.
	So now we are told that everybody has to go to college so that only the most elite degrees seem to count for anything.
	You know, when I was in college, I studied with probably the greatest living historian, Donald Kagan.
	Donald Kagan went to Brooklyn College.
	That's where he graduated from.
	Now, these days, there's such a difference.
	There's such a feeling that if you go to Brooklyn College, you could never end up at a very elite university.
	But in those days, that wasn't true because Brooklyn College was a very, very rigorous college.
	When Donald Kagan went to that college, there wasn't a sense that every single person in the country had to go to college.
	So if you went to college, you wanted to be there.
	You wanted to learn something.
	You were motivated.
	You were paying for it yourself, very likely.
	Or a GI Bill was paying for it and you already paid your dues in the service.
	You had some skin in the game.
	You had some real stakes into it.
	Now that isn't the case.
	So now everyone is going to college.
	College is considered a good thing.
	It's good for everyone.
	College is a good thing for some people.
	It's not a good thing for everyone.
	A four-year college degree is not only not a good thing for some people, it is a bad thing for some people.
	If you want to study the liberal arts, If you want to study history or English or philosophy or something, and you want to have a general education, then you want to specialize, and then you want to generalize again at the top.
	It looks like the letter I. That's the kind of traditional career when you get a liberal education.
	If you want to do that, if you are suited to do that, if that is your path, then you should go to college.
	It is a positive good to go to college.
	If that is not your path...
	If you want to be a very, very narrow specialist, let's say you want to be anything from a plumber or an electrician to an engineer, let's say that's what you...
	You don't need to go get a four-year liberal arts college degree.
	Why would you need to do that?
	Let's say you want to be an actor or an actress.
	You don't need to get a four-year college degree.
	Let's say you want to be a musician.
	Let's say you want to be an athlete.
	You don't need to get a four-year college degree.
	If you want to work in the service industry, it depends on what the job is, but you don't need a four-year college degree.
	So many.
	If you want to be a computer programmer, you don't need a four-year college degree.
	All the biggest billionaire, famous computer geniuses of our era dropped out of college.
	You don't need that.
	For certain jobs it helps, for certain jobs you don't need it.
	In fact, the liberal arts, very specifically, are not designed to get you a job.
	They're designed for what you do in your free time, how you make sense of your freedom, how you make sense of your leisure, how we earn our freedom in a free society.
	But that is not what ideologues, what leveling leftist ideologues tell us.
	They tell us everybody has to go to college.
	So now, of course, parents are going to pay a lot of money to cheat their way to get their kids into college.
	In this society, if that college credential is so important, they're going to do everything that they can.
	Of course.
	And this raises another question.
	What do we do about the kids who got in?
	So, let's say Felicity Huffman's kid gets into college.
	Say someone else's kid is still there.
	What if the kid is getting a 4.0 GPA? Actually, some colleges now don't even have GPAs.
	Brown University doesn't have a GPA. So you can't even tell what the grades are.
	So they're doing fine.
	They're doing just as well, if not better, than other kids who got a 1600 on the SAT or whatever.
	Well, should we kick them out?
	Is that the right thing to do?
	No.
	The problem goes a lot deeper.
	The problem is the university itself.
	When you think about who the victims are here, a lot of people are going to say, the kids who didn't get in because mommy cheated.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, those kids are victims.
	That would have been awful.
	I mean, I remember the stress of college admission season.
	It's really tough.
	Kids, because there's a lot of value put on it in our society, kids put a lot of pressure on themselves.
	So the kids who worked very hard, who didn't get in, they're victims.
	The universities are victims.
	The universities which have been watered down and democratized and hollowed out and destroyed, they're victims of this scandal.
	And the kids of these very rich people are victims because they have no sense of accomplishment and their parents are crooks.
	Imagine that.
	You're growing up, you know, you're at a formative age, 16, 17, and your parent tells you, you know, Johnny, you're just not smart enough.
	You're not smart enough and good enough to merit getting into an elite university.
	So what we're going to do is cheat and rob another kid of that educational opportunity so that you can get in even though you don't deserve it.
	Can you imagine being that kid?
	That's what you hear.
	You think, well, on the downside, my parents think that I'm a failure.
	But on the bright side, at least they're criminals.
	At least my parents are criminals.
	There are no winners.
	There is no winner here.
	Nobody wins.
	So what is the solution?
	The first solution is, you've got to push up against the worst instincts of democratic and egalitarian culture.
	You've got to push back against it.
	What democratic and egalitarian culture wants to do is make everybody exactly the same.
	Put everyone on exactly the same path.
	Waste everybody's time.
	What you need to do is allow for variety and diversity.
	I sound like I'm talking like a leftist.
	I'm using the words that leftists use, the differences that I actually mean it.
	You need to permit variety and diversity.
	If somebody...
	Early on has an aptitude for, I don't know, engineering or something, coding, learn to code.
	I'm probably going to get kicked off of Twitter for saying that.
	If somebody has an aptitude for that, put him on a track for that.
	It's called tracking.
	Europe has tracking.
	The United States had this for a long time.
	But our overly democratic nature will not permit it.
	We want everyone to have every opportunity forever.
	You never need to choose anything.
	You never need to pick a path.
	No, no, no.
	Just generalize, generalize, generalize.
	But that only works to a degree.
	Eventually, you need to take all of that potential and turn it into some actuality.
	And it wastes so much time just to constantly be all potential, constantly be generalizing.
	Put people on tracks.
	If you know, if a kid is just not cut out for the classroom, just doesn't like school, doesn't like reading books, isn't going to start liking to read books, he wants to work in a trade, let's say.
	So he wants to become an electrician or something.
	Put him on that track before he's 22 years old and $200,000 in debt.
	What good does that do anybody?
	Because if you get into these schools and you really can't do anything, first of all, maybe you can't do anything at the university.
	Maybe some schools don't have too much grade inflation.
	You flunk out.
	That just puts you in debt and you're even more of a failure.
	Or let's say you graduate.
	You've got all of this debt now and you have no skill and you have no interest and you have no path.
	What good that hasn't done anybody any good?
	It just mismatches you for your future.
	So maybe put that kid on a path to a trade.
	Maybe someone wants to join the military right out of high school.
	They don't need to go to a four-year college right away.
	Maybe if they want to be an officer or a career guy, then they can do that.
	Or maybe they want to enlist.
	Do that.
	Allow for variety and diversity.
	Stop homogenizing everything.
	People are different.
	This is a beautiful aspect of life.
	I get a great thrill out of different people telling me different opinions, having different experiences.
	The next thing you've got to do is reduce the federal college subsidies.
	I'm not saying cut them all off.
	I don't think there should be totally radical drastic change immediately.
	I think that disadvantages kids who have been waiting their turn in this college cycle.
	And to cut off their opportunities, radically try to change the culture, is fundamentally anti-conservative and it's not going to work.
	What you need to do is steadily decrease federal subsidies for colleges.
	These federal government subsidies have created very perverse incentives.
	They've given colleges the ability to raise a lot of administrative bloat.
	They have given colleges, when you guarantee the student loans, they've given colleges a free check to increase tuition, which saddles kids with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.
	This has created terrible incentives and it's made the universities reliant on the government.
	It's made them more politically correct.
	It's made them more willing to politically censor people.
	Very bad idea.
	Slowly, gradually, you've got to reduce those subsidies.
	And speaking of the administrative bloat, fire them all.
	Fire every single one of them.
	The deputy assistant, deputy dean of inclusion and diversity and nothing needs to be fired yesterday.
	End it.
	That is awful.
	They do nothing.
	All they do is sit in their office and try to justify their ridiculous and useless job and stir up trouble on campus and destroy liberal education.
	Fire them immediately.
	Next, reduce the role of sports in colleges.
	It's just too dominant.
	It creates too much opportunity for corruption and too much opportunity to corrupt scholarship and the purpose of the university.
	Next, eliminate fake academic disciplines.
	We joke about lesbian dance theory.
	There are really ridiculous disciplines out there.
	Women's sexuality and gender studies.
	Ethnicity, race, and migration studies.
	Virtually any department that ends in studies, with, I suppose, the exception of the language departments, because some of those end in studies, but other than ancient or modern languages, when we're just talking about cultural studies, Dead.
	That's not an academic discipline.
	That is not serious scholarship.
	That is just ideology.
	Those have to go away because those departments attract professors and students who are not fit to be at a university.
	They are generally less intelligent and less educated and they make up words and they don't mean anything and they damage the credibility of the university.
	You have to get rid of those.
	And finally, the other way to fix this It's for employers to stop lending so much credibility to a meaningless certificate.
	If you get into a good college, what does that mean?
	Until this scandal, it meant that you were pretty intelligent.
	You had a pretty high raw intelligence.
	You had a pretty good IQ. Maybe you did well in high school.
	You did very well on a standardized test.
	That matters.
	It matters if your employee is intelligent.
	But it's not all that matters.
	Education matters too.
	What you can do, skills matter too.
	There's a kind of funny thing, we joke about this on backstage at the Daily Wire, where Ben went to Harvard Law, Drew went to Berkeley, I went to Yale.
	So the people with the shows went to these very elite colleges.
	And our bosses didn't go to college.
	None of them went to college.
	And so, really, it tells you something about the value of an education.
	If what you want to do, if what really gets you going is talking about Edmund Burke all day long, as it does for me, then, yes, you probably need to go to college.
	If you want to run a gigantic business, if you want to be an entrepreneur, if you want to start a gigantic business, anything from us to Facebook to Microsoft to whatever...
	I don't see any evidence that you need a college degree.
	I don't see any evidence that you need to graduate.
	I don't know that you need to go in the first place.
	Different tracks.
	It's okay.
	And employers, really good employers, know this.
	You look at the resume, okay, then throw it out.
	See what the person can do.
	See what the person is like to talk to.
	See what their hard skills are.
	This will be the only way.
	Anyway, if you institute even two-thirds of those suggestions, you will go a long way to stopping this big college scam.
	Not just the particular scam of cheating to get in, but the big scam overall, which is that our education has been watered down.
	I joke with my friend that he and I are just complete dunces.
	And I'm only half joking because if we had had our education 60 years ago, we would have had to learn Latin, ancient Greek, maybe Hebrew.
	These days, if you graduate from Yale with honors, with summa cum laude, a degree in English, you can do all of that without ever reading Shakespeare.
	That is a scandal.
	That's the big college scam.
	And it's very important.
	A free society cannot remain free very long if it doesn't take education seriously.
	This is where I differ from my more rock-ribbed, maybe, you know, kind of populist conservative friends who say, who cares, burn all of education to the ground.
	No, no, no.
	Free society will dissolve in two seconds.
	Once education is truly eliminated.
	Once liberal education is eliminated.
	So it really matters that you can save this.
	You have to go out and try to bring it back.
	One way that we try to do this in a popular way, just as part of the show, is we go around and do all of these college speeches.
	Right now, I'm actually with Ben at Michigan.
	Ben is giving a speech tonight at University of Michigan.
	It's as though all nature is but art unknown to thee.
	The universities make our point before we can even say it.
	Which is that he's getting protests.
	They didn't want him to come.
	And now the history department is holding a rival event to Ben's speech called When Provocateurs Dabble in History.
	Ben Shapiro and the Enwhitenment.
	The Enwhitenment.
	The history department.
	We're the serious guys.
	We're the serious academic history department.
	Ben, he's just dabbling.
	He's just a provocateur.
	And yet, the super-duper serious history department uses a ridiculous, ideological, made-up word called enwhitenment.
	Listen to this.
	This is what they say.
	They sent out a letter.
	They said, When provocateurs dabble in history, Ben Shapiro and the Enlightenment will feature speakers and panelists responding to Shapiro's attacks on campuses and academia, along with his new history book, The Right Side of History.
	Ben Shapiro's attacking campuses.
	Ben Shapiro's attacking academia.
	You're attacking academia with stupid made-up terms like that and trying to get speakers banned from campus.
	You're the ones doing it.
	You're the ones hollowing out higher education.
	You don't even know it.
	Here's just a little evidence.
	We're honored to be joined by Dean Angela Dillard, Professor Ann Berg, Professor John Carson, and Professor Hussein Fancy.
	See, they brought professors.
	Not Ben.
	Ben's just a provocateur who dabbles in history.
	They're bringing the real professors.
	So I said, okay, I bet that these professors are a total joke.
	It was a hunch I had.
	Call it a good bet.
	I got pretty good betting instincts.
	So I googled them.
	Guess what?
	Turns out I was right for at least half of them.
	Angela Dillard.
	She's a dean.
	Already makes me a little suspect of her.
	She has a BA in Justice, Morality, Constitutional, Democracy.
	So, fake degree.
	Fake undergraduate degree.
	She has a master's degree in American Culture.
	So, fake master's degree.
	And a PhD in also American Culture.
	So she has three or four degrees in nothing.
	In fake everything.
	That is nothing.
	I don't know.
	Do I have a degree in American culture?
	I go to the movies once a week.
	Is that a degree?
	Ann Berg, that's the other super historian here, first of all, not a professor, she's a lecturer here, she is from Michigan, I guess, got a PhD in Michigan, she studies film and public leisure in Nazi Germany, as well as the politics, this is a direct quote, the politics of waste and recycling in the Third Reich.
	If I were writing The Producers or something, if I were writing a total parody of academia, what I would do, I would have the professor specialize in the politics of waste and recycling in the Third Reich.
	How frivolous.
	A couple of the other professors are apparently more legitimate.
	But at least half the panel, total frauds.
	Ben Shapiro is much more of an historian than those two people.
	But this is what they do.
	They have a PhD.
	They call themselves professor, even though they're not really professors.
	They have an academic pedigree.
	It's a facade.
	It's fake.
	We have fake news.
	Now we have fake scholarship.
	Fake academia.
	And they have to have a counter-event.
	At a university, a real university, typically you would go and hear somebody speak.
	Someone wants to give a lecture, you agree, you disagree, you don't know if you agree, you go and hear them speak, and then maybe later you give a response, which you do at a university.
	It brings everybody together, then you share ideas, and then you come up with other ideas.
	But here, in American universities today, Instead of going to the event, you try to get the event shut down, you try to get the person censored, you try to get them kicked off campus, and then when that doesn't work, you go to the deputy dean of inclusion or whatever, and then you hold a counter-protest event.
	And you just go to your separate events, and that's it, and no one talks to anybody.
	It's not a university.
	And if they're not going to behave like universities, don't treat them as such.
	If you're an employer, give less credit to it.
	If you're the federal government, stop funding it.
	And if your parents and children...
	Have the courage to make what are really the better academic choices for your kids, regardless of what that is.
	We have a lot more to get to.
	Media Matters taking another shot at Tucker.
	We've got Nancy Pelosi coming out against impeachment.
	And then Greenpeace co-founder telling us that the Green New Deal will end civilization.
	All of that in just a second.
	But first you have to go to dailywire.com.
	Dailywire.com.
	$10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
	What do you get?
	What don't you get?
	You get me.
	You get the Andrew Klavan show.
	You get the Ben Shapiro show.
	You get the Matt Wall show.
	You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
	That's coming up Thursday.
	You get to ask questions backstage.
	That's coming up tomorrow.
	By the way, tomorrow, tune in to our next episode of Daily Wire backstage, March Madness Edition.
	Daily Wire God King, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Elisha Krauss, and myself will be smoking stogies, drinking whiskey, and laughing at this wild, crazy political culture of ours.
	As always, only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions.
	So make sure to subscribe today.
	Go to dailywire.com, get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, lest you have to drink out of these sad little cups like I'm drinking out of now on the road.
	Dailywire.com, we'll be right back.
	Media Matters is going after Tucker Carlson again.
	By the way, this really drives me.
	This is a really side point.
	This is a really minor point, but I have to make it.
	Media Matters is such a stupid organization that they don't even know that the word media is plural.
	Media is the plural of medium.
	So you have a medium, you have this medium, the newspapers, or the television, or the radio, or this.
	Media, multiple mediums equals media.
	So really the organization should be called Media Matter for America, not Media Matters.
	But I'm not surprised that an organization like this doesn't know how to use the English language.
	A side point.
	Now they're going after Tucker again.
	We talked about what they were doing yesterday.
	So they're going after him again.
	They have a headline, quote, Unearthed audio shows Tucker Carlson using white nationalist rhetoric and making racist remarks.
	Okay, first of all, these guys are so overusing the phrase white nationalist that that word, like racist, is basically now deprived of meaning.
	It used to have a meaning.
	Racist used to have a meaning.
	No, they don't.
	Because they use them against Tucker Carlson.
	And so there's no credibility.
	But Media Matters did a good job here, in the sense that they got the one-two punch.
	They released a few audio clips yesterday...
	And Tucker comes out, defends himself.
	Some, okay, that one didn't quite take him off the air.
	So then they hit him again today with these new clips.
	If you haven't heard them yet, here's the white nationalist, basically Adolf Hitler himself, reciting Mein Kampf on Fox News, Tucker Carlson.
	Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semi-literate primitive monkeys.
	I just have zero sympathy for...
	For them or their culture, a culture where people just don't use toilet paper or forks.
	And the way they treat women, you know, I agree with you.
	Their culture is, but you're in their homeland.
	You know, white men have, you know, they've contributed some, I would say.
	Like creating civilization and stuff.
	I think they've done a pretty, I don't know, whatever.
	Obama would kick your ass playing basketball.
	Yeah, of course he would.
	He's a basketball con.
	He's black, saying it.
	He's a real brother.
	I don't know how black he is.
	How is he black, for one thing?
	He's one white parent, one black parent.
	So that makes him, why isn't he white?
	There's some really good, I mean, immigrants.
	I just think it's, you know, people who come to this country ought to have something to offer.
	Be hot, be really smart, you know what I mean?
	Especially that last one.
	People who come to this country ought to have something to offer.
	So, look, he's on a shock jock show.
	It's the same show, like the Bubba Gump love show or something.
	I don't remember the name of it.
	And he's speaking in a joking manner.
	Obviously.
	I don't think that if Tucker Carlson were the President of the United States, he would say in his immigration policy, they have to be hot or really smart.
	You know.
	I don't think he would say that.
	But that's a good joke.
	And a fair point that he makes, which is, If you come to this country, you should have something to offer.
	And if you don't have something to offer this country, you shouldn't come into this country.
	Duh, that's the immigration policy of every other country on Earth as well.
	We happen to have the most generous one, but that makes sense.
	And so when Tucker says, be hot or be really smart, okay.
	What else?
	You know, some of the points he's making here, which he makes in an offensive way.
	Nobody says he's not making them in an offensive way.
	In fact, he's intentionally making them in an offensive way because he's on a shock jock show.
	Shock jock.
	It's not feel really pleasant jock.
	It's a shock jock.
	It's supposed to shock you.
	So I'm sure he would say that too.
	Yes, these were very offensive.
	But some of the points that he's making, most people would agree with.
	He jokes about all of the animus in the popular culture against white men.
	He said, I think white men have done something.
	I mean, you know, they were not so bad.
	They, like, you know, created civilization.
	What we call civilization, Western civilization...
	Or, I guess, what we call civilization broadly.
	The thing that we know is civilization.
	The thing that we live in is civilization.
	The civilization that has spread throughout the whole world, that we have spread from sea to shining sea and far beyond it, is European.
	It comes from Europe.
	It comes from Rome.
	It comes from London.
	It comes from Greece.
	I guess it comes from Jerusalem as well.
	It comes from the Jews as well.
	I don't know.
	Are the Jews white or not?
	I don't know.
	This is a big debate among the left, I guess.
	But the point he's making, that civilization has come from Europe, is true.
	He says, how is Barack Obama black?
	He's also white.
	It's also a fair point.
	Why is Barack Obama?
	His mother's white.
	He was raised largely by a white family, if not exclusively.
	Why is he not considered white?
	Well, the left might say because the very fact that he had black skin means that he did not have the privileges that white people have.
	Even though he's half white, because he had black skin, he doesn't have those privileges.
	I don't know.
	He went to a very good school in Hawaii.
	Then he went to Columbia, an Ivy League school.
	Then he went to Harvard Law School, an Ivy League school.
	Then he became a state senator very quickly.
	Then he became a U.S. senator at like age five.
	And then he wrote two memoirs about himself that both got published.
	And then he became the president.
	He's like the most privileged guy ever.
	What are you talking about?
	So the point that Tucker's making there, also, fair enough point.
	Then he says the things about the Iraqis.
	That's not nice.
	Not nice.
	Nobody would want to do that.
	Nobody should ever suggest...
	That human beings are not human beings.
	Don't you agree, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar?
	I understand that you refute this political story.
	Could you just set the record straight so we get your side of it?
	Do you think that President Obama is the same as President Trump?
	Absolutely not.
	That is silly to even think and equate the two.
	One is human, the other is...
	Is it true that you just think that he's more polished than Trump?
	Awkward.
	And by the way, Tucker Carlson was making jokes on a shock jock show.
	Ilhan Omar is speaking seriously in the halls of Congress, both saying that human beings aren't humans.
	Ugh, it's a lot worse when Ilhan Omar does it, isn't it?
	Ugh, it's exactly the same thing with exactly the same words.
	Ugh, yikes, that's not good.
	Almost exactly the same words, same point.
	Ugh, so awkward.
	Yeah, of course, you shouldn't do that.
	I guess you might say what Tucker Carlson was saying was an offensive joke.
	Would you say that?
	I guess you could.
	But he's saying offensive things!
	No, you can't defend offensive things.
	You can.
	You can.
	You don't defend the points, I guess, but you defend saying offensive things because of context.
	If you're on a shock jock show, you're going to talk like that.
	Now, you might say, well, he shouldn't have gone on that show.
	Okay, fine.
	You can give Tucker Carlson career advice, I guess.
	Fair enough.
	Here's an example, though.
	Here's the example of why context really matters.
	I try my best not to use curse words on this show.
	I don't think I have before.
	Maybe I have once or twice.
	But I certainly intend not to.
	Now, if I'm at the bar at midnight with the boys smoking a cigar, I will use curse words.
	It doesn't make me a hypocrite because I don't use curse words on this show.
	If I say them at the bar.
	Because context matters.
	Context matters a lot.
	It's inappropriate to say these sort of things in a polite, civilized forum.
	It is much more appropriate to say these things if you're telling a joke with the boys.
	Or if you're talking to a shock jock.
	Now the real question, because we've bought into Media Matters' hands, we've done what they want us to do.
	Why are we talking about Tucker Carlson?
	Why are we talking about him at all?
	You know, they use the phrase, audio was unearthed.
	It didn't just dig itself up from the ground.
	It's not like a potato, you know, growing.
	No.
	Uh-uh.
	It didn't do that.
	Media Matters paid somebody a lot of money to find anything that they could find to try to take down Tucker Carlson.
	Why?
	Because Media Matters believes that Tucker Carlson's voice and his show is a threat to the left's agenda.
	That's why.
	If Tucker Carlson weren't a threat, Media Matters wouldn't have spent a lot of money to pay somebody to dig up dirt on Tucker Carlson to try to shut him up.
	And what did they find?
	They found that he talked to a shock jock once.
	What are they going to find on me?
	They're going to find I talked to a guy in a bar and I used some naughty language.
	That's the word Tucker.
	He said, I used naughty language with a shock jock.
	Yeah, that's the appropriate word to describe it.
	What are they going to find?
	They're going to say, oh my gosh, so-and-so made a joke 15 years ago.
	Off with his head.
	They're not doing it because they're offended by the jokes.
	They're doing it because they want to silence his serious work.
	What does this matter?
	What does it matter?
	Tucker Carlson is a media figure.
	He is not a politician.
	He's not serving in Congress.
	Even if Tucker Carlson made those jokes today on his Fox show, he is still a media figure.
	He is still not a legislator.
	It's very different than Ilhan Omar, who used exactly the same points that Tucker did.
	Now, there is a flip side to this, because I will grant the reason that we're talking about this Media Matters thing, the reason that their attack worked, is because in politics or political media, your language is your instrument.
	Your words are the instrument of politics.
	Politics is just meaningful speech.
	Tucker knows this.
	So when he goes on the shock jock show, he talks like a shock jock.
	It'd be like...
	Let's say that you're a classically trained violinist and you love to play Brahms.
	You don't join a rock band to play Brahms.
	You don't show up to the rock band rehearsal and start playing the Brandenburg Concerto or something.
	Or the Mass in B minor.
	You don't do that.
	You play the rock music or you don't join the rock band.
	So this is why the fair criticism is Tucker shouldn't have gone on this show.
	I don't think I would go on a show like that.
	Probably not.
	If I did, maybe I'd try to be a little less salty.
	But who knows?
	People go through different phases in their careers and in their life and their personalities.
	This is why people have to be very careful with words in this day and age.
	It's because everything you say is recorded forever.
	But what really matters?
	Okay, I'm willing to grant that.
	Speech really matters.
	Or speech, rather.
	Speech matters in politics.
	But what really matters at this moment, in this context, listen to Chris Cuomo's take.
	This BS is currency for them.
	They get paid for this.
	The base likes their heroes to be base.
	They've seen this president make it to the White House in part by doing the same thing.
	Now, a lot of this stuff that's coming up, at least about Carlson, is from years ago, when he was desperate for attention.
	Here's the test.
	Would he say the same things today?
	No, no.
	He's too busy playing the victim.
	He'd only say that he was naughty.
	But he wouldn't repeat them tonight.
	Why not?
	Come on, big man.
	Read the list of all the things that you said and do it again and show that you mean it.
	Come on.
	You're not more about the money now than you are about the truth, are you?
	He says, apologizing to the mob costs people their jobs.
	What a coward.
	Why don't you repeat what you said if it's not such a big deal?
	You're not going to apologize.
	He's being treated unfairly by those criticizing the same.
	Give me a break.
	See this guy and the others for what they are.
	If you mean it, own it.
	Don't just protect your money and your fame or infamy in your case.
	Apologize if you want, but that takes character.
	That is strength.
	That is integrity.
	Own that you did something wrong.
	Character.
	Integrity.
	Own that you do something wrong.
	The mainstream media Along with Media Matters, think that Tucker is dangerous to their agenda.
	And what's the agenda?
	Well, here's just one example.
	Chris Cuomo's brother, Andrew Cuomo, just legalized the killing of babies as they're being born in the state of New York.
	And he took away the protections where, if their mother is killed, that would be counted as double murder.
	Now, that's not counted as double murder, even if she's nine months pregnant.
	And then he cheered it on, and then he said, God bless you, to all of the infanticidal maniacs who were there clamoring to kill babies as they're being born.
	That's Chris Cuomo's brother.
	Okay, that's one thing to consider.
	And Tucker Carlson, 13 years ago, told offensive jokes on a shock jock show.
	What matters here?
	The reason they're connected, the reason this isn't the left likes to accuse us of whataboutism, the reason this isn't whataboutism is that The left isn't actually upset about the salty language.
	The left uses plenty of salty language themselves.
	What the left is upset about is that Tucker Carlson is having an impact on our politics, is influencing people to oppose their agenda.
	And what is their agenda?
	Killing babies as they're being born.
	Whose agenda is it?
	Not just the left broadly, not just some wacko in Virginia.
	Chris Cuomo's brother!
	Fredo Cuomo.
	Now I sound like Chris Cuomo.
	Chris Cuomo's brother.
	He talks about integrity, about character.
	I'll take the man who uses salty offensive language any day over the one who kills a baby as he's being born.
	Context really, really matters here.
	Which is more important?
	By the way, Media Matters, they'll do it to every one of us.
	They will do it to every single one of us.
	Anyone that they deem a threat.
	They'll find something we said at Howard Stern's bar mitzvah in 1981 or something, and they will use it.
	They will use it to try to shut you up.
	It has nothing to do with what they said.
	We are not debating what Tucker Carlson said.
	What Tucker Carlson said is meaningless.
	It doesn't matter at all.
	It is just an excuse to fight an actual battle over policies, over which direction this country is going to go in.
	So much more to get to.
	We've got to talk about...
	Why it is that it always seems like big people on the left move over to the right, but big people on the right don't move over to the left.
	Talk about that with regard to Greenpeace and impeachment, but ran out of time.
	I will be back in the studio tomorrow, so I guess we'll see you then.
	We'll have to talk about it tomorrow.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
	Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
	Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
	Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
	And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Danny D'Amico.
	Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
	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, Tucker Carlson responds to his detractors and YouTube talks about censoring conservatives.

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