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March 13, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
43:15
Ep. 313 - Paid Parental Leave: The “Conservative” Welfare Program

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Then, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez embarrasses herself again, the co-founder of Greenpeace warns that the Green New Deal will destroy civilization, and Media Matters is run by a "transphobe"! Date: 03-13-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Senators Mike Lee and Joni Ernst have unveiled a new conservative welfare program to address the problem of low birth rates, paid parental leave.
We will examine how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Then, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez embarrasses herself.
I know you're shocked.
This time, in front of Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan.
And the co-founder of Greenpeace warns that the Green New Deal will destroy civilization.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Some of the greatest video in modern political history.
Thanks to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan.
But first, we have got to thank Mike Rowe and Mike Rowe Works.
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I really want to talk about the paid parental leave proposal, the nominally conservative paid parental leave proposal that's coming out from Mike Lee and Joni Ernst.
Because I think a lot of conservatives are getting this wrong.
I think it's coming from a place of good intentions.
I think it's addressing a real problem, but this bill just doesn't get it right.
But before we do that, I just have to show you one of the most glorious bits of tape.
This was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilling and questioning the CEO of Wells Fargo, Tim Sloan.
Listen, she's had a lot of moments in her brief political career where she has demonstrated her ignorance and her arrogance.
None even comes close to this exchange.
Here's how she begins.
Mr.
Sloan, why was the bank involved in the caging of children and financing the caging of children to begin with?
I don't know how to answer that question because we weren't.
So in finance, you were financing and involved in debt financing of CoreCivic and GeoGroup, correct?
For a period of time, we were involved in financing.
One of the firms were not anymore, and the other.
I'm not familiar with the specific assertion that you're making, but we weren't directly involved in that.
Okay, so these companies run private detention facilities run by ICE, which is involved in caging children.
But I'll move on.
This reminded me, and her reaction to it, it reminded me, if you've ever seen on Always Sunny, the episode where Charlie pretends to be a lawyer, that's what it's like watching Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually be a congressman.
What do you got there?
Let me handle this, Frank.
It's not Boilbert.
He's making a few good points.
Look, buddy, I know a lot about the law and various other lawyerings.
I'm well-educated, well-versed.
I know that situations like this, real estate-wise, they're very complex.
Actually, they're pretty simple.
The forms are all standard, boilerplate.
Okay, well, we're all hungry.
We're going to get to our hot plate soon enough, all right?
But let's talk about the contract here.
Sorry, I forgot.
Where did you go to law school again?
Well, I could ask you that very same question.
I went to Harvard.
How about you?
I'm pleading the fifth, sir.
I'd advise that you do that.
And I'll take that advice into cooperation, all right?
Now, let's say you and I go toe-to-toe on bird law and see who comes out the victim.
You know, I don't think I'm going to do anything close to that, and I can see clearly you know nothing about the law.
It seems like you have a tenuous grasp on the English language in general.
Okay, well, filibuster.
Do you know what that word means?
Yeah.
- Yeah, what's that mean? - I'm gonna, I'm gonna... - That's AOC breaking her way out of the door, out of the wall to the Capitol.
Yeah, well, so what were you doing there with the caging of children, might I ask?
We didn't do that.
Okay, touche, Mr.
CEO. But if you were caging, I mean, there is very little difference between the two.
She goes on.
You would think that this Congresswoman, she knows she has a lot of attention on her.
You would think That she might do even a moment's research to see which projects the bank had brokered, which projects the bank had been involved in.
No, no, no.
Here she goes on the Keystone XL pipeline.
Mr.
Sloan, Wells Fargo was also an investor, a major investor, in the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Keystone XL Pipelines.
They were prime investors and lenders to companies building these pipelines in defiance of Standing Rock Sioux's treaty rights to protect its water and sacred lands.
They warned early on, the Lakota Sioux warned early on, that the pipeline was unstable and bound to leak.
Despite that, it was built anyway, and it has leaked at least five times.
And the Keystone XL in particular had one leak that leaked 210,000 gallons across South Dakota.
Since Wells Fargo financed the building of this pipeline in an environmentally unstable way, why shouldn't the bank be held responsible for financing the cleanup of the disasters from these projects?
Which pipeline are you referring to?
Either.
So we were not involved in the financing of the XL pipeline.
We were one of the 17 or 19 banks that was involved in the financing of the Dakota Access pipeline.
Okay, so Wells Fargo hasn't financed any company associated with the Keystone XL pipeline?
No, I didn't say that.
I said we're not involved in financing that pipeline specifically.
Okay, so let's focus on the Dakota Access pipeline.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, okay, well, so I guess someone should have told me about that, but okay.
So the point that she's actually trying to make a point that also doesn't make any sense, but just on this basic level, this is what's worrisome, I find, about the AOC era of politics, which is that Facts don't matter.
She said this.
Sometimes people are concerned about being factually correct instead of morally right.
You can't be morally right without being factually correct.
And she didn't do five seconds research.
And you would think, okay, if this woman isn't exactly the brightest bulb in the pack, maybe she should hire people who are smart and then they can do the research for her.
She's done this on her Twitter account to some success.
But they didn't do their very basic research here, and so this guy makes her look like a total fool.
So then she has to pivot.
She says, okay, well, I was just talking about the Keystone XL, which Wells Fargo was not involved in whatsoever.
Now let me pivot and make my stupid point with regard to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Should Wells Fargo be held responsible for the damages incurred by climate change due to the financing of fossil fuels and these projects?
I don't know how you'd calculate that, Congresswoman.
Say from spills or when we have to reinvest in infrastructure, building seawalls from the erosion of infrastructure or cleanups, wildfires, etc.?
Related to that pipeline?
I'm not aware that there's been any of what you described that's occurred related to that pipeline.
How about the cleanups from the leaks of the Dakota Access Pipeline?
I'm not aware of the leaks associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline that you're describing.
So, hypothetically, if there was a leak from the Dakota Access Pipeline...
Oh, no.
Well, but what...
Shouldn't you have to pay for Armageddon when Armageddon happens?
Ma'am, I'm not aware that Armageddon has happened.
Okay, well, but hypothetically...
And the hypothetically is so devastating.
First of all, why is she asking this banker a hypothetical question?
What does that have to do with anything?
But it's the logical consequence of it doesn't matter if you're factually right.
This is actually where you end up.
If you say it doesn't matter if you're factually right, you just have to be morally right, then you get into hypothetical.
This is all the time.
You could apply this to Jussie Smollett.
You could apply this to the fake hate crime hoaxes.
You could apply this to everything.
They'll say, look at this awful, terrible thing.
You'll say, that didn't really happen.
Say, well, maybe that didn't happen, but it gets to a greater truth.
Say, no, it gets to a lie.
It didn't happen, and so now it's a lie, and you're trying to have me defend a lie.
So now she goes into this.
She gets into the greater truth, and she says, hypothetically, aren't you on the hook?
Hypothetically, if there was a leak...
From the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Why shouldn't Wells Fargo pay for the cleanup of it, since it paid for the construction of the pipeline itself?
Because we don't operate the pipeline.
We provide financing to the company that's operating the pipeline.
Our responsibility is to ensure that at the time that we make So, one question.
Why did Wells Fargo finance this pipeline when it was widely seen to be environmentally unstable?
Again, the reason that we were one of the 17 or 19 banks that financed that is because our team reviewed the environmental impact and we concluded that it was a risk that we were willing to take.
Absolutely devastating.
Question she's asking is, why is the bank not liable if some accident happens with a project that the bank finances?
And his answer is, because we're a bank, we're not building the pipeline, we're not operating the pipeline.
She says, yeah, but what's a bank?
Well, Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez, a bank provides liquidity to markets.
We are extending financing to other people who are engaging in other products.
She, a few weeks ago, came out and proved that she doesn't know what a tax incentive is.
She thought, what a tax incentive is, is you say, okay, you can come here, you're going to do business here, you're going to owe taxes to the municipality or the state or the government, and in exchange for you coming here to do that business and create all of these jobs, we're going to lower your tax bill a little bit.
That's what a tax incentive is.
It's not a pile of slush money that's just sitting in a drawer and will say, if you come here, we'll give you a bunch of money.
That's what she thought a tax incentive is.
Now we find out she doesn't know what a bank does.
This woman is a legislator in our federal government.
And what this reminds me of is that moment...
I remember this a number of years ago, whenever it was, Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, was testifying, I believe, before Congress.
And it was just a ton of idiots asking him stupid questions.
And Lloyd Blankfein, who's smarter than all of them combined, just sitting there sort of rubbing his head in annoyance.
This man, I mean, this is the difference between the public and the private sector, right?
You look at a guy like Tim Sloan.
This guy is running Wells Fargo.
This is not an easy job to get.
You've got to be super smart, very educated, very hardworking.
This guy is running this major financial institution.
Then you have a 29-year-old bartender who lived with her parents until two and a half years ago.
And she is trying to grill him.
She's trying to own him.
She wants a video that says, AOC owns the Wells Fargo bank guy.
It is not possible.
And it's a real problem with government.
Because the kinds of people who are super smart and super ambitious and want to make a lot of money and are really educated tend to, not all the time, but tend to...
Do what Tim Sloan did.
Move in that direction.
Go into the private sector.
Go where their talents can be rewarded.
And people who are subpar as a matter of intelligence, as a matter of education, as a matter of work ethic, tend to go into the government.
Not true all the time.
Some of the greatest men in history have been statesmen.
Pericles was very smart.
Winston Churchill.
Ronald Reagan.
Plenty of very smart, educated, noble, hardworking people in government.
But generally speaking...
That's the breakdown.
And it just shows you, where do you want most of a country's resources to be placed?
Where do you want most of the decision-making power in a country?
Do you want it divided up among free people who are ambitious and smart, following their own self-interest, following the interest of their families and their friends and their communities?
The far greater percentage of people, the overwhelming majority of people who are like Tim Sloan?
Or do you want it in a bunch of dumb, uneducated, uncurious, lazy bureaucrats?
This video is one of the great clips for small government in the history of film.
Now, speaking of small government conservatism, we will analyze why Mike Lee and Joni Ernst's new paid parental leave policy is wrong-headed.
But first...
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Alright, we have a new conservative welfare program today.
I put the word conservative in quotes.
This is from Mike Lee, one of the great senators.
I'm a huge admirer of Mike Lee, but he's getting this one wrong.
It's from Joni Ernst.
The bill is called the Cradle Act.
These acronym bills, they're just so...
The Child Rearing and Development Leave Empowerment Act.
Thank goodness these people went into government and not into poetry.
Our literature would be even worse off than it is.
The Cradle Act.
A well-meaning act...
To offer paid parental leave to everybody.
Here, Mike Lee and Joni Ernst defending it.
I think most people would look at this as an opportunity that they might not otherwise have.
An opportunity to benefit from payments that they've been making already for years.
Why is the U.S. so far behind the rest of the industrialized world on this issue?
I think that is a really great question, and that's why we have decided now is the time to step up and really do something about this.
We think it's time to catch up with other countries.
First of all, this line of argument, when is the U.S. going to catch up with the rest of the world, this instantly tells you that whatever is being discussed is extremely wrongheaded.
This is what people say about soccer.
This is what people say about socialist health care.
Listen, the rest of the world does a lot of terrible things that they pretend are progress, and we don't do them, and that's a very good thing that we don't do them because civilization survives just a little bit longer.
The U.S. does not trail the rest of the world in anything.
We are the undisputed leader of the world.
There isn't a second place.
It is not even close.
There is no comparison.
So this fiction that we are trailing the rest...
You know, we're trailing the rest of the world in random killings on the streets.
We're trailing the rest of the world in...
No, there's no trailing.
We're trailing the rest of the world in destroying our government.
No, we're not.
Sure, things...
Yeah, they're bad things in America.
We are destroying our government.
People do kill each other.
Of course, yeah.
There are problems in America.
But to say that America is somehow far behind the rest of the world and we just need to emulate France and then everything will be great, give me a break.
That's ridiculous.
What is the proposal?
The Cradle Act would provide one or two or three months paid parental leave that is borrowed from Social Security.
So people who are less likely to receive employer-sponsored benefits are likely to get better benefits from this program.
The payments that you would get then from the government require that you live in the same house as your child for at least half of the year to get the payments, and the cost is estimated at about $9 billion per year.
Although very likely this is a low estimate.
Other people are putting that cost at maybe twice that.
Just look at the criteria here.
Look, on the good side, this does a really good thing, which is addressing a real problem, which is low birth rate.
The replacement rate for births is 2.1 kids per couple.
The current U.S. birth rate is 1.7 kids per couple.
Our own population is declining.
That's why we have to flood our country with immigrants to maintain our quality of life.
Let's look at the provisions here.
One, two, or three months paid leave.
Now, the good side of this is that the money comes out of Social Security.
So it's money that you've already paid for that hopefully it won't cost the federal government very much because you won't get it on the back end.
This is obviously politically ridiculous.
It's one of these things that is economically sort of plausible and politically not plausible.
Nobody, when the first recipients of this program...
Start to retire.
Nobody is going to deprive them of their social security.
It's just not going to happen.
They're going to raise social security payments.
There already are different entitlements associated with this.
Those entitlements will grow.
Democrats are already against that.
That's just not going to happen.
One, two, or three months paid leave.
One, two, or three months paid leave doesn't do very much.
This is the other issue, because it doesn't actually address the birth rate problem.
There are studies that show that government programs such as this, paid parental leave, can increase births.
That's true.
But these studies tend to show that over much longer, more robust paid parental leave programs.
So in Germany, for instance, you get over a year paid parental leave.
And in Russia, similar thing.
Much longer paid parental leave program, it will increase births.
But we're not talking about over a year.
We're not talking about 12 or 14 or 16 months.
We're talking about at most three months.
Is anybody really going to say, oh, hey, look, it looks like I'll get somewhere around six weeks paid parental leave, so let's start having more kids, Johnny.
Yeah, I'll get to stay home with my kid for like eight weeks, and then I have to go back.
Oh, that way we've bonded.
That way the cost of child care doesn't matter.
No, of course not.
No way.
There's no evidence that that amount of time does anything to birth wakes.
And also, by the way, one to three months is nothing.
This is the other issue.
I suppose the idea here is you have a kid, and then you want to bond with your kid.
Is there any evidence that staying home with your kid for a month and then shoving him off to daycare and you go back to work that that solidifies the bond and okay, everything's good now?
Or is there any evidence that you take one month to bond with your kid and then you shove him off to daycare that that saves you a lot of money?
No, the kid's going to be in daycare until he's like four or five.
One month out of that is nothing.
One month out of what, 48?
60 months?
No, that's not going to save you a lot of money.
Also, Democrats are already trying to make this a much wider entitlement.
So now Democrats don't want to just limit this to parents.
They want to make it about sick relatives, too.
They want sick leave.
So Kirsten Gillibrand, who I guess is running for president, I mean, she's probably not going to make it to the first debate, but she's now got this bill, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act.
Family and medical.
And this would give 12 weeks paid family leave through the payroll tax.
So it's not coming out of your Social Security.
It's going to come through the payroll tax.
And what's going to happen?
You're going to get the downside...
Of the Democrats doing what they've done for decades, which is demagogue the issue of Social Security, say that Republicans want to throw granny off a cliff, they want to rob you of your entitlement, you're going to get that with really no tangible benefit.
I'm highly skeptical that this is going to increase birth rates.
It's not going to alleviate financial strain on middle class and lower middle class and working class families who have kids who need to go to work and need to pay for child care.
What does it accomplish?
It's a little feel-good thing because somebody in the President Trump orbit decided that it was a good idea for conservatives to embrace pointless welfare programs.
And I think everybody's just too timid to point out to those people that it's a bad idea and a leftist idea and it's not even going to work.
It's just a bad idea.
The question you have to ask is, what is the purpose of the law?
The purpose of the law is not to give people more money, like Kirsten Gillibrand seems to think.
The purpose of the law is not to make it easier for mothers to have it all.
The purpose of it, very explicitly, should be to increase the birth rate.
Because we have an unsustainably low birth rate right now.
And a country can't survive if you don't have babies.
The purpose of the law is to encourage people to have children.
Will this law achieve that?
No.
Now, how do you achieve that then?
I guess you could go in the really socialist direction and say, we're going to give you one year, two years maybe, paid family leave.
Why stop at one year?
Let's go all the way to two years.
We will pay women, although in this day and age you're going to have to pay men to do it too.
And actually in this day and age, because single mothers and gay couples can adopt children, because basically anybody can adopt children, now you're looking at a whole population.
Say, we'll offer you two years paid leave if you have a kid or adopt a kid.
That creates a pretty weird incentive, doesn't it?
And if you include adoption in this, as the bill does, then that doesn't increase the birth rate, does it?
Maybe it does.
Maybe it has some secondary effect on abortions, but that connection is very dubious.
I mean, this is the trouble with big government programs.
You have all these secondary questions that come up, all of these weird incentives that crop up.
Very often, what's happened is that the program doesn't achieve what it sets out to achieve.
And sometimes it hurts the very goal that it sets out to achieve.
This is a big mistake, a very big mistake.
The way to achieve a higher birth rate, which is a noble goal, I'm glad conservatives are serious about addressing it, is to radically change the culture.
That's the reason.
Why do we have a low birth rate now?
Well, it's because it's expected that both parents are working all the time.
Because people have gotten accustomed to a very high quality of life.
People don't want to give that up.
Why is that?
The culture is a bit decadent.
What is required to have a lot of kids and to have them quickly and to start having them young, that requires that something's got to give.
Traditionally, that means that the mother has to take care of the children.
Not all the time.
Sometimes the father stays home to take care of the children.
Either way it works, you might have to adjust to a lower income, a lower net disposable income, a lower family wealth.
You might need to prioritize having children.
You cannot have it all.
This bill doesn't let you have it all.
It just taxes you in the future or borrows money from China.
Or prints money or raises debt or whatever.
You cannot have every single thing you want in a finite world.
So you have to change the culture from a culture of selfishness, pure professional ambition.
We talked yesterday about how in the educational system the reason the college admissions scam happened is because a democratic and egalitarian society cannot tolerate difference and diversity.
Everybody has to be exactly the same.
That is the leveling impulse of democratic, egalitarian society.
So what happened?
In the old days, if you were a young person, you had a lot of paths before you.
You could join the military after high school.
You could go get a job.
You could become an entrepreneur.
You could go to a four-year college.
You could go to a two-year college.
You could go to a trade school.
You could get an apprenticeship.
All of these different things.
Now, we are told everybody has to go to a four-year college.
It's the same thing in the professional life.
We're told every single person has to have a career.
It has to be a professional career.
You can't just have a job.
You've got to have a really good, yuppie professional career.
You've got to go do-do-do-do-do.
You've got to start working at 22.
You can't stop working until you're 65.
You've got to delay having kids.
You've got to send your kids off to daycare.
You need double income.
You need blah-do-do-do.
That's the only way to live.
But that isn't true.
And the effect of that...
One effect that we're seeing that this bill is trying to address is that we're not having babies anymore.
Because everybody's off working at the widget factory.
Okay.
Good for some people.
Not good for other people.
Broadly not good for the culture.
That's how you change it.
You're not going to change it by some overweening, radical social engineering federal law.
You're not going to change that by conservatives suddenly becoming the party or the political movement of big federal government.
It's just not going to do it.
It's a noble purpose, but a bad law.
We've got to get to one of the other great stories of the day.
You remember Media Matters went after Tucker Carlson?
They found clips from him 12 years ago, 13 years ago, saying shocking things on a radio shock jock show.
Turns out the Media Matters guy, the head of Media Matters for America, Andrew Carusone, is a transphobe.
We We've got his blog entries from almost exactly the same time as they got Tucker Carlson's radio calls.
We will go through exactly what he says.
But first, go to dailywire.com.
Why?
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get the Matt Walsh show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You get to ask questions backstage.
Backstage is coming up today, actually.
We're doing backstage just later today.
The mailbag's coming up tomorrow.
Get your questions in.
All of this and...
The Leftist Tears Tumblr.
This is very good.
This is the Tim Sloan edition.
All of these tumblers, obviously, were financed with the help of Wells Fargo, as well as 17 or 18 other banks.
These are really good.
This is the only safe way to consume those Leftist Tears.
Make sure you get this or you will drown.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Tonight, tune in to our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage, March Madness Edition.
Daily Wire God King, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Alicia Krauss, and I will be smoking stogies, drinking whiskey, and laughing at this wild world of politics and pop culture.
As always, only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, so make sure to subscribe today.
Well, that was fast.
What was it?
Two days ago, Media Matters for America took a shot at Tucker Carlson.
They've dug up these old tapes from a shock jock radio show, and it had Tucker making offensive jokes on them.
And they said, see, Tucker Carlson has to lose his Fox show now.
So the minute that happened, I tweeted out, I said, you know, it sure would be a shame if people dug up some dirt on the Media Matters people.
Gosh, wouldn't that be a shame to give them a taste of their own medicine?
Not two or three days later, we got it.
We got it.
It came out today, Andrew Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America.
He apparently had a blog.
2005, 2006, somewhere around there.
About the same time Tucker was calling into that radio show.
On that blog, he made degrading references to trannies, Jewry, and Bangladeshis.
Andrew Coriussone, I'll just read it myself.
He took issue with a gang of transvestites.
And he specifically took issue with the transvestites being referred to as attractive.
He said, quote, Did you notice the word attractive?
What the F is that doing in there?
Is the writer a tranny lover too?
Or perhaps he's just trying to justify how these trannies tricked this Bangladeshi in the first place.
Look, man, we don't need to know whether or not they were attractive.
The effing guy was Bangladeshi.
And while we're out, what the heck was he doing with $7,300 worth of stuff?
The guy's Bangladeshi!
Okay, that's just one.
Whatever the context is, I don't know.
You can hear the words.
In this case, I guess, the context doesn't really matter because he's using all of the derogatory terms.
Now, he's obviously writing a humorous blog post, right?
This is supposed to be humor.
Tucker Carlson was obviously calling into a humorous radio show.
What this guy said, according to the left, according to the left in 2019, is a lot worse than what Tucker Carlson said.
He's transphobic.
He's racist.
He's classist.
He's checking off all the intersectional boxes.
He said, he goes on about the transgender stuff, he says, quote, that the police should tell people to, quote, stay away from tranny bars, stay away from places where Eddie Murphy and Robert Downey Jr.
have are visiting, don't effing kiss a transvestite, don't bring a group of transvestites back to your room, etc.
Okay, he's got a real focus on transvestites.
Now this is back like five minutes ago when people could make jokes about men dressing up as women.
That was a topic of humor.
Now this is a very somber, very serious thing.
You could never...
What's funny about that?
Huh?
What's funny about a man putting on lipstick and dressing up like a woman?
What's entertaining about that?
Never mind that drag bars have existed for all of human history and they are all about entertaining people and putting on a show.
No, no, you can't laugh.
It's super duper serious.
You can't laugh.
So Andrew Karyosone breaks the rules.
He doesn't just talk about transvestites, though.
He writes about Japanese female basketball players and he says that they should stop complaining about sexual abuse.
He says, lighten up, Japs.
It's his line.
He extolled the virtues of Senator Robert Byrd, famously of the KKK. He also said, thanks to my adorable boyfriend, come on, despite his Jewry, you know he's adorable.
You know, because Jews are not cute or attractive, but despite that...
His boyfriend is adorable.
That's according to the blog posts.
He also said his boyfriend leaned conservative, quote, as a consequence of his possession of several bags of Jewish gold.
You see, the Jews have all of this money, and they're greedy, and they control the whole world.
And they sell out for money.
That's according to the head of Media Matters for America.
No, but Michael, he was making a joke.
Yeah, I know.
Right, Tucker was making a joke.
I'm all for jokes.
But this guy, this hack, Andrew Carusone, is currently trying to get Tucker Carlson fired for making less offensive jokes than he did at the exact same time that they both made them.
Huh.
Well, I guess if Tucker's going to lose his job, I guess Andrew Carusone has to, too.
I don't think he should, though.
I mean, he should, just as a matter of fairness, but nobody should lose their job.
And I actually, first of all, these are not going to take him down because the left doesn't actually care.
They don't actually care about people confused about their gender.
They don't actually care about any racial minority.
They don't care about women.
They don't care about that.
They care about attacking the right.
They care about taking down Big Daddy and the patriarchy.
So the left will not take him down over this.
This probably won't even be played on CNN. But I think it benefits us for him to be in his job.
I think it's actually better to keep him there so that we can point to him as an example of hypocrisy.
I think this really wounds Media Matters.
I think it really wounds the credibility of Media Matters.
Because now, whenever they point to something that anybody says, they're going to find something I said on some show, and they'll say, see, Michael needs to lose his job.
We'll just point to Andrew Cariussone.
He'll say, you know...
This guy told Japanese women to stop complaining about sexual assault.
This guy said horrible things about transgender people.
And this guy made offensive comments about Bangladeshis, among other comments on his blog.
And then they'll say, it's kind of like the Liz Warren thing.
I want Liz Warren to stay in the Senate for as long as possible because she's a joke.
She has no credibility whatsoever.
She's so professionally and politically wounded, it's better to have her there rather than to have someone who still has some credibility.
So, hope he stays there.
Best of luck to Andrew Karyussone.
Now...
It's kind of interesting, too, because Karyosone says he was dating this conservative guy.
I don't know if they're still dating or if the guy is still conservative or whatever.
But this does remind me of something, which is that I've noticed that very prominent left-wingers move over to the right.
They become right-wing activists, major right-wing voices.
That is not true of right-wingers.
That is generally not true of conservatives.
Some little political consultants get their 15 minutes of fame by advising...
They used to advise liberal Republicans.
Now they advise liberal Democrats or something.
And then Steve Schmidt is an example of this.
Say, oh, see, look, he went from right to left.
But of the actual leftists, of the actual conservatives, the true believers who have a coherent political philosophy or ideology, it always seems to move from left to right.
And we're seeing this with the co-founder of Greenpeace.
Greenpeace, the major environmentalist group, He has come out and said that the Green New Deal could end civilization completely.
You're one of the founders of the most famous environmental organization in the world, and you think the Green New Deal sounds terrifying.
Tell us why.
Well, because it would be basically the end of civilization if 85% of the world's and also 85% of the US's energy in the form of coal, oil and natural gas were phased out over the next few years, like 10 years.
We do not have anything to replace them with.
Yes, if we went into a crash course of building nuclear reactors, we could replace them for producing electricity, but that isn't going to happen because the Greens are against nuclear, and they're even against hydroelectric dams, which at least is renewable, but they don't support that either.
So basically they are opposed to approximately 98.5% of all the electricity that we are using, and nearly 100% of all the vehicle and transportation and ships and planes energy that we are using.
Wow.
So he says the end of civilization We knew that.
I mean, that is what the Green New Deal calls for.
It calls for spending $93 trillion, which you don't have.
You just, first of all, tax anybody who creates any economic growth and any job growth whatsoever.
You tax them into oblivion.
Then you just print money, so you destroy the economy and you destroy America's economic standing in the world.
And then you outlaw virtually all of American energy.
Then you knock down every single building in the country.
Obviously...
This would be the end of civilization.
It's not just that he says this, but listen, the way he's talking about this, he's citing very specific facts, examples, some statistics.
He's speaking with great detail and great precision.
Compare that to AOC, who's now the leading environmentalist voice on the left.
And she says, it doesn't matter if you're factually correct.
It doesn't matter.
That's the difference.
And this guy was a left winger.
He's the co-founder of Greenpeace.
But he has moved from the left to what would be called the right on this issue.
And it's not just him.
Norma McCorvey became one of the biggest pro-life advocates in the country.
But you probably don't know the name Norma McCorvey because what she's most famously known as is Jane Roe of Roe vs.
Wade.
This was the woman who almost single-handedly Got the Supreme Court to create a fictional constitutional right to abortion.
Huge, millions and millions and millions of babies killed because of her activism.
And she switched sides.
The more she learned, the more she grew in wisdom.
She understood that this was a horrible and grave injustice.
She became a major pro-life advocate.
Same thing with Dr.
Bernard Nathanson.
Dr.
Bernard Nathanson was one of the founders of NARAL. They've changed their name like seven times, but they've never changed the acronym.
This is the major abortion rights organization since the beginning of the abortion movement in the 1960s and 70s.
This guy has come out, he's become a major pro-life advocate.
This guy performed abortions, I think.
And he came out and he said, look, the statistics we used were made up.
What we were doing was barbaric.
It's wrong.
We shouldn't do it.
It's terrible.
Moved on over.
And now you have Patrick Moore from Greenpeace, the major environmentalist organization.
He comes out and he says, no, we were just wrong.
This is just wrong.
Why is this?
this.
Why do people move on over?
It's because people over time grow in wisdom.
Generally, that's the idea.
The left has this opposite idea, which is that out of the mouths of babes come the most beautiful truths in the world.
And as people get older and they live in the world, they become corrupted and evil and awful.
And so you should, people who are ignorant are actually wiser.
I mean, that's the idea.
That's how AOC becomes the leading voice on the left.
Because youth, immaturity, ignorance is considered a positive good.
This is considered wisdom for an inverted political ideology such as leftism.
There's that old line, if you're not a liberal when you're 17, you have no heart.
If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no brain, which is half true.
And this reminds me of that.
I mean, there is a natural evolution here.
And what people will point to is all these little people.
Oh, Jennifer Rubin, she's a blogger, and then she said she was conservative, and now she's leftist.
Okay, right.
Liberal Republicans sometimes move to the left.
This is true of other political pundits and commentators, but of the real guys, the real people in the arena, the real people doing something, major activists, major voices, it doesn't ever seem to move that way.
All right, we've got a lot more to get to, but unfortunately, we're out of time.
That's our show.
We'll get tomorrow to why the death penalty is a good thing and why Nancy Pelosi is not going to impeach the president.
Get your mailbag questions in.
I'll see you later for Backstage.
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.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Federal authorities are shocked, shocked to find that credentialed elites are lying, cheating, and stealing to make sure their children also become credentialed elites.
It's a scandal that has been going on for at least 250 years.
We'll talk about it more on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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