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March 20, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:36
Ep. 317 - The Democrats’ Radical 2020 Wish List

The 2020 race is now well under way, and the Democrats candidates have endorsed the most radical proposals in American presidential campaign history. We will examine the substance of the primary campaign. Then, Beto gets even creepier, Chelsea Clinton gets blamed for terrorist attacks, and young people are really unhappy. Date: 03-20-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The 2020 race is now well underway, and the Democrat candidates have endorsed the most radical proposals in American presidential campaign history.
We will examine the substance of this primary campaign.
Then, Beto gets even creepier.
Who knew that could happen?
Chelsea Clinton gets blamed for terrorist attacks.
And young people are really unhappy.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
All right, so much to get to today.
It occurred to me when I was looking at the broader picture on politics that now that the campaign field has kind of really begun to flesh itself out, Biden hasn't announced yet, a few others who are going to get in, but you're starting to see them take policy positions.
We now have, beyond the Instagrams, beyond the cooking and the beer and the dental cleanings and beyond all this sort of shallow, superficial stuff, as just a matter of substance, we have the most radical presidential policy field in all of American history. we have the most radical presidential policy field in all Really, really radical stuff.
So we're going to go through those proposals because I think that the Democrats are trying to distract you with all these videos and dental cleanings and whatever.
But when you get down to it, they are advocating some pretty radical stuff before we get to all of that.
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By the way, I do have to put in a plug before we get to the Democrats' radical proposals.
You know, Ben released his book yesterday, The Right Side of History.
So this thing shot way up the charts.
I think it made it up to number three bestseller book on all of Amazon.
Now, this is great, but it needs to go just a little bit higher.
So, as you know, look, I'm talking to you as a number one bestselling author myself.
What I really need to have happen, because I love the book, I think it's a really important book, I think a lot of people need to buy it, you need to buy just a few more copies to push that book up to number two.
Because it will be very, very satisfying and hilarious if Ben's tome, his magnum opus, his intellectual history of all of the West, makes it up to number two, just right below that number one bestseller, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
Get the book today.
Bump it up just a little higher, guys.
It was at three.
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Head over to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, rightsideofhistorybook.com.
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There's going to be a live book signing today only on today's episode of The Conversation at 7 p.m. Eastern.
Get a signed copy.
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More importantly, I'll be glad you did.
Because I'll say, look Ben, you sold all of these copies and you came so close!
Two reasons to vote for Democrats.
But at least then, a lot of people will read it as they should.
It is a really, really good book.
What do we have in the 2020 presidential primary for the Democrat Party?
I've identified at least half a dozen, I guess closer to a dozen, wild left-wing proposals.
Something we wouldn't have even considered five years ago, ten years ago.
Number one, Medicare for All.
What is Medicare for All?
When I heard that slogan start to percolate on the really left-wing websites a few years ago, I thought, what a terrible campaign slogan.
It makes us all sound like we're really old people.
Medicare for All, nobody wants that.
This is gaining steam.
It's now been endorsed by Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, a number of other people who are looking at getting into the race.
What is Medicare for All?
It's a socialist takeover of healthcare.
It would make the American healthcare system, the leader in the world, the best in the world, the freest that leads the world because we have free enterprise, an ability to create prescription drugs, to innovate, to create new medical technology.
It would take that and it would make it more government controlled than the healthcare system in the United Kingdom.
More government controlled Than healthcare systems in Western Europe and in Scandinavia.
It would force 150 million Americans off of their health insurance.
This is not some fringe idea.
This is no longer just being talked about on Jacobin Magazine or on these far-left websites.
This is now being endorsed by a ton of mainstream presidential candidates.
Many of whom, in the case of Gillibrand, Booker, Warren, and Harris, are in the U.S. Senate right now.
That's the first one.
If the Democrats had any issue that they were running on in 2018, in the midterm elections, anything beyond orange man bad, I hate Donald Trump, he's a baddie, the issue that they were running on is healthcare.
The left has wanted government-run healthcare in this country for over 100 years.
It looks like they are now at the point where they're coming totally honest with their proposals and they want a full government takeover.
What would that mean for you, by the way, practically?
So 150 million Americans lose their current health insurance.
It means you don't get to keep your doctor.
And it means that because healthcare is a commodity, because it's just labor and property, because it's not a negative right but a positive right, What that means is you have less choice.
Healthcare is going to be rationed.
It has to be rationed in the sense that it's a limited good.
There's not an infinite amount of healthcare in the world.
So how is it rationed right now?
It's rationed in a pretty good way, and there are a lot of ways to fix the American healthcare system, but right now you have people...
Have the ability to buy healthcare that they want.
They can pick the health insurance plan that they want.
We just enrolled here, here at the Daily Wire, and you can pick the bronze or the silver or the gold.
You can do HSA, which is a great program, the health savings account, where you can put money in before taxes to make your own healthcare decisions.
There are a lot of great little reforms and options here to pick what is best for you.
That is one way that your own choice in the market and the amount of money that you want to spend We have Medicaid if you're too poor to have health care.
We have Medicare if you have...
Statistically high medical costs because you're a senior citizen.
We have a huge safety net.
Then all of the individual states have their own programs.
Then we also have private charity.
And then if that weren't enough, you can walk into an emergency room and you will be treated.
Not just if you're poor, not just if you're an American citizen.
Even if you're an illegal alien, you'll be treated.
We have a complex healthcare system.
Now, some of those complexities are pretty bad.
So for instance, some of the regulations that came up as early as the 1930s, some of the incentives to tie it to employment have created some problems.
As some of the regulations that have just been put into effect because of cronyism, the inability to sell health insurance across state lines is one example.
Some of those regulations are burdensome They make the healthcare system too complicated.
Some of the way we think about healthcare and health insurance makes it burdensome and too complicated.
For instance, when you go to the doctor and you have your annual checkup, that is paid for by insurance.
But that's not what insurance is.
Insurance is when you pay a certain amount of money because of a risk that you will need money in the future.
And so you're paying your monthly premiums in case something comes up that you can't expect.
And then the insurance company, which was willing to take the other side of that bat, was willing to take on that risk, will then pay you your money, the money that you need for your health insurance.
That's what insurance is.
But if you know that you're going to get an annual checkup, that's not insurance.
I don't know, prepaying, you're entering into a kind of weird contract where you're paying a monthly amount for something you're certainly going to get every year.
All of that is complicated.
However, the alternative is worse.
Don't forget, we've been talking about this a lot.
As Russell Kirk wrote in The Conservative Mind, all simple forms of government are bad.
He's quoting other conservative thinkers.
All simple forms of government are bagged.
So, okay, we have this temptation, I think, because of how complicated healthcare is in the U.S., to say, scrap it, get rid of the insurance companies, Medicare for all, socialist healthcare.
Make it simple.
I don't need to worry about paying a premium.
Free healthcare.
Healthcare's never been more expensive than when it's free.
So you scrap all of that.
What are you throwing away?
You're throwing away your choice.
you're throwing away a complex and very moral system of incentives for how to allocate care.
Some of that is by free choice.
Some of that is by resources.
Some of that is by the government to make sure that people don't get left behind.
When you get rid of all of that, what do you have?
You have the death panels.
I mean, what is meant by the phrase death panel is that government bureaucrats choose to allocate health care to whomever they want.
That's what it is.
It's that rather than this complex system that we currently have with a lot of free choice, a lot of incentives for innovation, but rather than all of that, it's a government bureaucrat who decides who gets care and who doesn't.
It's what you saw with those babies dying in the United Kingdom.
Little Charlie Gard, baby Alfie.
Parents don't have a say.
The patient doesn't have a say.
The government will tell you if you're going to get care.
That's what is being proposed.
not by some fringe of the Democrat Party, but by major mainstream candidates.
That's just one policy.
I mean, I wanted to take a little time on that because that is a major policy proposal.
So many others that really in the grand scheme of things are even more radical.
We'll get to it in a second.
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Okay, that's just Medicare for All.
Next policy.
They're proposing a national minimum wage hike to $15 per hour.
Who came up with this?
Bernie Sanders.
Who is backing it now?
Kamala Harris.
Elizabeth Warren now says that the minimum wage needs to be raised because it's not high enough to support a family.
Now, of course, the minimum wage was never intended to support a family.
The minimum wage was intended for teenagers.
The minimum wage was intended for people who are just getting into the workforce.
The minimum wage is intended for a small portion of the workforce, and then they're going to move up and make more money.
But the left is doubling down on this.
Because what is the logical conclusion?
If Liz Warren is right, and the minimum wage is all we should aspire to, the minimum wage should be enough to raise a family on, On just one person making the minimum wage.
Obviously, that's not enough.
So what does that imply?
That implies their next radical policy proposal, which is the universal basic income.
Universal basic income has gotten some currency on the left and the right.
It is an insidious idea.
It's a terrible idea.
But it's the logical conclusion of this Liz Warren minimum wage stuff, which is if you have to be able to raise a family on the minimum wage, you can't.
If it's incumbent on the government to provide you with everything that you need to raise a family, then the government just needs to cut you a check.
Why stop at just tinkering in the economy and making employers pay up to $15 an hour?
Why not just cut a check?
We have a huge welfare state as it is.
And this is what the left is doing.
This one has not been talked about very much, but Kamala Harris proposed the LIFT Act.
And what the LIFT Act would do is for families in the middle class, it's always politicians talking about the middle class, they would get $500 per month.
Now this would come to you as a sort of tax credit, but you could get it on a monthly basis.
So $500 per month.
And what do we mean by middle class?
Do we mean people making less than $40,000 a year?
People making less than $50,000 a year?
No.
You would get $500 a month for people making less than $100,000 per year.
Which is pretty good money.
So now this is starting to look a lot more like a universal basic income.
She's not the only one.
Andrew Yang, who is the Internet's favorite Democrat candidate for president, he's this kind of weird guy whose whole campaign is about just giving people money from the government, just pure checks.
I mean, this is what the founders so feared about democracy.
They said, oh gosh, once democracy becomes widespread enough, the people are going to realize that they can bribe themselves with their own money.
The people are going to realize they can just plunder the rich.
The politicians are going to realize they can just dole out money to everybody and then they're going to win elections.
And Andrew Yang is the embodiment of this idea.
Andrew Yang, the center of his campaign, has just given people $1,000 a month.
You just get a check for $1,000 a month and that's it.
And this even is not a totally new idea.
McGovern, when he was running as a Democrat candidate for president, proposed $1,000 per year for Americans in a universal basic income.
Obviously, inflation has taken off a lot since the 60s and 70s, but this is not a terribly creative idea.
It's the most basic pandering idea in all of democracy, which is buy off voters.
I mean, in this case, literally give them money.
But that is the logical conclusion of these ideas.
This experiment from Barack Obama, who showed through the life of this fictitious woman, Julia, how from cradle to grave, Barack Obama's government was with her the only step of the way.
And actually, the only meaningful relationship she had as a totally atomized individual with no other relationships was to the government.
They give her money for this.
They give her money for that.
They give her a job.
They give her this.
They give her that.
They give her free college.
That's the next radical proposal that Democrats have picked up on.
Free college.
Taking away tuition for college.
Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Liz Warren, Tulsi Gabbard.
Everybody wants to take away the cost of college.
This might be the most insidious idea of the whole proposal.
We just saw, last week and two weeks ago, The college admissions scandal.
We saw that people were basically bribing college officials to get their kids into colleges.
And the real scandal of that was not that the kids got in, but it was that they were able to graduate.
If these kids were so stupid, so uneducated, so unintelligent, how were they able to graduate?
How were they able to make it through in some cases with pretty good GPAs?
It's because college has been hollowed out from within.
Why is college hollowed out from within?
It's because the government subsidizes every loan.
Why has college gotten so expensive?
It's because the government subsidizes every loan.
Why has college gotten so politically correct?
It's because the government, when you're on the hook to them, is able to foist a lot of regulations on them.
You see huge administrative bloat.
You see costs going up.
You see the quality of the education going down.
And as the left has been marching through the universities now for well over 50 years, all of these candidates realize that the key to their progressive political utopia is totally taking over the colleges of This is their chance.
The way they're going to do it is with government-controlled college.
Liz Warren has already sponsored the College for All Act.
Actually, the only Democrat candidate to push back on this is Amy Klobuchar.
And I gotta tell you, there's something about Amy Claude Boucher.
I really like her.
She's...
I mean, obviously, she's a left-winger.
She's a typical...
But there's something about her just hurling her desk lamp at her staffers.
There's something about her eating salad on airplanes with a comb and then flinging at a staffer saying, clean this!
Something, I don't know, gets my heart going pitter-patter.
And she is relatively immoderate in this field.
She's the one to push back and say, you know...
Maybe this isn't a good idea.
The left does this all the time.
The left creates a problem.
And then the left insists that they're the only ones who can fix the problem.
They did this to K-12 education.
Totally destroyed the education system in the United States.
They say, the answer now is more leftist policy.
And people buy it.
We'll see if they buy it in 2020.
The other side of free college is student loan forgiveness.
In what other financial bubble would you see an entire political party, the oldest continuous political party in the United States, coming around and saying, oh, let's just forgive all the loans.
How many trillions of dollars?
I think we're at one and a half trillion dollars in student loans in this country.
And right now, Liz Warren is calling for, she called actually as early as 2014, for students to be, or ex-students, to be able to refinance all of that debt.
Gillibrand also called to be able to refinance all of that debt.
And then the more radical proposals are saying, just forgive it all completely.
And mark my words, by the end of this campaign, you're going to see a number of candidates calling to eliminate And just forgive the student loans altogether.
But what is that going to do?
You might feel good for the students who have a $200,000 fake degree, a completely worthless piece of paper.
You might feel good for them.
But what kind of incentive does that create?
First of all, their creditors are going to get totally...
Screwed over.
They're not going to be able to get their money back.
But even beyond that, when the colleges and when the banks realize that the loans are just going to be forgiven or they're going to be paid off by the federal government, I guess that's the case in which the creditors don't get totally run roughshod over.
Well, then what happens?
Then the colleges say, okay, great.
Great, let's just keep raising those costs to tuition.
Let's keep those student loans coming.
Because the government's just going to forgive it again.
This is the problem with amnesty.
This is why amnesty is such a big deal.
If we could turn off the spigot of illegal immigration today...
I think most people in this country would be willing to grant amnesty to just about everybody.
Not the criminals, not the violent criminals, but just about everyone else.
I think people basically would back amnesty and say, oh, it's easy enough.
We don't want to deport everybody.
It's going to take too long.
However, the trouble with amnesty is once you give amnesty, Then it creates an incentive for more illegal immigration.
Once you give student loan amnesty, once you give loan forgiveness, it exacerbates the problem in the colleges rather than fix it.
That's what you're going to see.
Then, speaking of colleges, you have Elizabeth Warren calling for the abolition of the electoral college.
It's not just her.
Beto O'Rourke just today came out and said, yeah, there's a lot of wisdom to abolishing the Electoral College.
The Electoral College, one of our oldest institutions for one of our most important decisions, which is electing the president.
And you now have the mainstream candidates of the Democrat Party calling for its abolition.
Why?
What is the purpose of the Electoral College?
It has a few purposes.
One, it's to restrain pure democracy.
Very good.
Very important.
That's a wonderful thing.
What is another purpose of the electoral college?
Doesn't just restrain democracy.
Let's say all of the American people voted for super duper Mecca Hitler or somebody, or they elected, you know, Stalin Jr. to be president.
The electoral college could come out and say, nope, sorry, we are going to disagree with the American people.
We're We're going to elect Barron Trump or somebody.
They're going to elect a good candidate.
So there's that aspect.
The other way that they do it is by removing the vote for president one or two degrees from the people, which is very important because the people don't elect the president.
The people participate in votes in their states to choose electors to elect the president, but the people don't elect the president.
We are not a democracy.
We are a democratic republic.
We have a representational system of government.
This is very important.
It's important for the preservation of liberty because once you have more and more and more and more direct democracy, you see liberty disappear.
The tyranny of a mob is just as bad.
It's actually worse than the tyranny of a dictator or of a bad monarch or somebody like that.
Now calling to abolish that.
Now they're going to abolish the electors, they're going to abolish the electoral college, but don't worry because a major Democrat, if not the leading Democrat in the country, Nancy Pelosi, is calling to allow 16 year olds to vote.
So we want to destroy the electoral college, but then we want to expand the electorate to include 16-year-olds.
Why?
In her words, so that she can capture them when they're kids, when they're impressionable, when they're immature, when they're juvenile, when they're uneducated, when they are being indoctrinated by leftists in the school system.
Well, they've still got them.
The presidential candidates haven't come out for this yet.
Mark my words, at least one of them will come out for this before the end of the primary.
They're Advocating packing the Supreme Court.
They want to add a ton more justices to the Supreme Court.
Liz Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker.
They want free universal preschool.
You see that from Julian Castro and Liz Warren.
So they don't want you to have your kids for very long.
You have the kid, the kid comes out and then immediately goes into the government.
Run by leftists for universal preschool, then K-12, then we want free college, so everyone's got to go to that college system.
Pretty soon we're going to have free post-graduate education, free grad school or professional school.
So the government has your kid the whole time, indoctrination the whole time.
Then they want to redefine capitalism.
Elizabeth Warren has the Accountable Capitalism Act.
This would make corporations unaccountable to shareholders.
This would make them accountable to politicians.
This would give workers a 40% membership on corporate boards, and this would censor corporate political speech.
That's what they want.
And we're not even close to the most radical plans they have yet.
We'll get to reparations for slavery in a minute.
We'll We'll get to why Beto O'Rourke is so creepy.
But first, you've got to go to dailywire.com.
Ten bucks 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 Walsh show, you get to ask questions backstage.
By the way, get your mailbag questions in for tomorrow.
I'm going to be in Missouri tomorrow.
I'll be giving a speech at Truman University.
I'm going to be bringing this with me because otherwise I could drown.
I'll be flying all across this country.
I'll be taking the same air routes as all those candidates.
Maybe I'll see Beto on the airplane.
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You're going to need these leftist years tumblers or you're not going to survive past 2020.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
So you've now got the Democrats proposing to take your kids from two years old all the way to after college.
You're now redefining capitalism.
You're redefining corporations.
You're upending the economy.
You're You're giving everybody a universal wage.
You're raising the minimum wage.
You're giving everybody socialist health care.
The government is now taking over just about every sector of the economy.
And then, once all of that is done, the 2020 candidates are calling for reparations for slavery.
I don't know.
I mean, this is woke, because slavery ended in 1865, so it's only 150 years ago at this point.
The woke earth.
I want to know, when are we going to give Turks reparations for the Crusades?
Actually, when are they going to give us reparations for the Battle of Tours?
When are we going to give people reparations for the Spanish Inquisition?
When...
There's been a lot of conflict throughout history.
When are people going to have all of their reparations?
This obviously is an impractical and impracticable plan.
Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, and Liz Warren all behind it.
Cory Booker is actually one of the people who says this is not really practical and he hasn't come out for it.
But he does want a policy to close the racial wealth gap, and his policy is baby bonds.
So with baby bonds, low-income people, people who don't have a lot of wealth, would get government bonds when they're born and the bonds would mature and so it would help them build wealth.
I'm not totally opposed to this idea in theory.
I'm just opposed to the injustice of it and the perverse incentives it would create.
How come only some people get the baby bonds but not others?
Where do you draw the line for the baby bonds?
I mean, this is just the redistribution of wealth.
And if certain people know that they're going to get baby bonds below a certain income level, aren't they going to just stop working?
Isn't that going to harm productivity?
Isn't that going to have the same sort of negative incentives that so many other welfare programs have?
Bernie Sanders also is not calling directly for reparations for slavery because Bernie Sanders is an old-school socialist.
He's not the new intersectional socialist.
So for the new intersectional socialists, everything, it's about class and race and religion and sexuality.
It's all the struggles combined, man, into this quasi-mystical, quasi-religious system.
Bernie is much more old school than that.
For him, it's just class conflict.
So for Bernie, what he's saying is, look, we're just going to give a lot of money to poor people, but that will help black people because blacks are disproportionately poor, which I'm sure at some point someone's going to say this is offensive for him to campaign like this.
But nevertheless, that's his version of it.
All the same, we're talking about a redistribution of wealth specifically to address racial problems.
After that, we have a job guarantee program.
This is not pie in the sky.
Cory Booker's already sponsored legislation for it.
That legislation was co-sponsored by Liz Warren, Harris, Gillibrand, and Sanders.
Job guarantee program in America.
They have a job guarantee program in China, too.
They had a job guarantee program in the Soviet Union, as well.
And then, of course, the pièce de la résistance, the Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal, the wackiest proposal.
We've gone over it.
I don't need to go over it again.
But in broad strokes, it outlaws planes, trains, and automobiles.
It knocks down every single building in the country.
Then it rebuilds it within 10 years.
It knocks down 88% at least of the American energy industry.
It actually could go as high as the mid-90s percent of American energy.
Just within the energy industry, this would destroy 5.8 million jobs on day one.
And by day two, all of those other jobs that are downstream of the energy industry would be destroyed as well, which is to say virtually all of them.
How many people do you think support the Green New Deal?
You would say, this is just Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right?
This just couldn't possibly...
No way!
Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Kamala Harris, Liz Warren, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and even Pete...
You know, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
He's running...
It's a long-shot campaign, but he's running for president.
Pete...
Ba-ba-ba.
I believe, what does he pronounce?
He pronounces it with an edge.
Pete-but-de-j-j.
Pete-but-de-j-j-j-j-j.
I don't know.
It's one of those things.
Anyway, he supports it too.
They all support the Green New Deal.
What does this mean for the primary?
This means that this is a race to the left.
This means they are all going to be running over themselves.
So even where certain candidates haven't embraced the far left yet, they will by the end of the primary.
It's only March.
What does this mean for the field broadly?
It means that actually there might be some daylight for a centrist candidate.
They're all running over themselves because they think the Democrat Party has been pushed so far left, radicalized by Trump, that the only candidate who can win is the furthest left, the most intersectionally approved.
The trouble for this is if they're all running left, it doesn't matter if you're the second most left-wing candidate.
It doesn't matter if you're the, oh, I'm the third most left-wing candidate.
No.
Only the furthest left works.
So what this does is it actually creates a little daylight for an alternative, for a centrist candidate.
That's where you see Amy Klobuchar is making a couple moves in that direction.
Beto O'Rourke making a couple moves in that direction.
Some Democrats and media figures are recognizing that same thing.
Actually, Morning Joe is now calling for an explicitly old news, old Democrat party, what would today be considered centrist candidate.
And it's hilarious, except maybe there's something to it.
Willie, I see one person on that list that I can tell you today would be Donald Trump.
Who is it?
I see two.
Who do I think you think it is?
Who do you think I think it is?
Kamala Harris.
John Kerry.
Let me tell you something.
For all the reasons I told you, I'd be worried because of the sabermetrics of Joe Biden.
He's done it in 88.
He's done it in 2008.
He doesn't like raising money.
You think about all of those things.
Now you go back to John Kerry's one shot in 2004, running against a sitting president.
Right after 9-11, right after the beginning of, at that time, a popular war.
John Kerry raised tons of money.
He knows how to do it.
Joe Biden does it.
John Kerry likes raising money.
Joe Biden doesn't like to do it.
John Kerry came within 80,000 votes in Ohio of being the next president of the United States.
Again, a couple of years after 9-11, in the middle of a war, John Kerry, if he ran, would win.
That's all I'm going to say.
That's all I'm going to say.
It's pretty interesting to say.
He would be the 46th president of the United States if he announced today he was running.
And nobody could stop.
A very, very sophisticated observer of American politics, who you both know very well.
I was out with him last week.
We were just walking around, and he was looking at the field, and he said to me, he said, you know who has the best chance of doing this?
And he's not in it.
I said, no, who is John Kerry.
Okay.
Wow.
There you go.
Okay, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking these people are so disconnected from reality.
There is no way that the Democrat Party would ever nominate Thurston Howell IV, John Kerry, Lovey, Theresa, Theresa, honey, get the yacht!
I want to go out in sun.
They're never going to nominate that guy in 2020, right?
Maybe.
Except the wisdom here is that as everybody else, 21 candidates, jumping over themselves to be the most left-wing candidate, whoever ends up winning that race is going to be so totally unacceptable that the Democrats will realize that person can't win.
They will go for a safer bet, a guy that has been around for a while who is a little bit more centrist.
I think that there is some wisdom to that.
It's just the odds of that happening are so low.
Really, probably what the reality is is that Democrats have made their far radical leftist bed and now they have to lie in it.
So what does this mean for the general election?
This is a huge benefit to Donald Trump because Democrats have learned the wrong lessons from Trump.
They look at Trump, who is a sort of extreme figure, And they say, we need to be extreme on policy.
I say, no.
This is not actually what Donald Trump did.
They've convinced themselves that Donald Trump, who is extreme, is extreme on policy.
He's not.
He's a pretty mainstream conservative on policy.
Pretty mainstream Republican.
Some ways he even breaks with Republicans.
Like that break the criminals out of jail bill that he did right before Christmas.
I didn't see a lot of conservatives thrilled about that.
This whole paid family leave is not looking like a great conservative policy necessarily.
But He's been good.
He's kept his word more than other conservatives have, so you've got to thank him for that.
Still, that's not extreme.
He's just extreme on the tweets.
He's extreme in his blunt language.
He's extremely honest, actually, about his political plans.
But what did he call for?
He called for building a wall, securing our border.
He actually wants to increase legal immigration to the highest amount ever.
It's a little...
Strange, but it's not extreme in the conservative position.
It's actually extreme in a liberal position.
He wants to stop illegal immigration.
He wants relative peace abroad.
He wants to deregulate the economy.
He wants to cut taxes.
It's kind of basic Republican and conservative stuff.
So the Democrats took from that that they have to be extreme ideologues.
Now...
The confounding factor here is they have very high voter enthusiasm on the left right now.
We saw this in 2018.
Democrat enthusiasm was very high.
Republican enthusiasm was very high.
So what this means is you could see a blunt force election.
You could see really high turnout on both sides, really ideological turnout on both sides, really extreme ideological views.
And then there remains one question mark.
Beto.
Beto is a major question mark.
Because who is Beto?
Who is all we know about Beto?
Comes to us by way of CNN. This is seen as a moment by some where Democrats want to nominate either a woman or a minority.
Beto O'Rourke is neither of those things.
O'Rourke is a white male.
Something that's very evident to everyone, and that is that he's a white man.
He's also a white male.
And he's conscious of his white maleness.
They may not be open to another white male.
Another white male.
Another white male.
A lot of the energy in the party right now is not for a white man.
Vulnerability is running as a white man.
As a white male.
Being a white man, something he can't change.
Being a white man who says, I'm, you know, I was born to do this.
Gosh, you know, to say that it just sort of drips of white male privilege.
Beto or Wart benefited from white privilege.
One of the big debates is whether 2020 is the year of the white man.
He can't get over the fact that he's a white man, so he just has to accept that.
Not the right time for a white man to run for the presidency.
Is a white man the right guy to be the next nominee?
There's still an issue in this country where people just get very, very excited about white men.
He seems very self-aware of his perceived weaknesses.
In this case, the fact that he's a white male.
That's all we really know, basically.
He's a white guy.
That's all we know.
We don't really know about his policies.
Because he kind of is a little bit of both.
And even all of the profiles of Beto, they basically just talk about superficial things.
There was a piece in the Washington Post so glowing on him.
I have to read you this.
Because it tells you a lot about our culture.
It's called The Politics of Beto and Amy O'Rourke's Marriage.
Beto's campaign for president has put his marriage in the spotlight, showcasing a relationship that is at once the most modern and most traditional of any 2020 candidate.
Listen to just the first paragraph.
Beto O'Rourke plonked down on his living room sofa beside his wife, Amy, and promptly removed his shoes and socks.
It was a late February morning, weeks before announcing his candidacy, and Beto had just returned from his favorite hike in the nearby mountains.
His head was still in the clouds.
I'll do Beto's voice.
I read Amy this passage last night from the best interview I've ever read, he said.
It's about myth and different religions.
And it said, much the way you're unconscious and subconscious, sorry, I'm saying both of these words wrong.
He turned to Amy for help.
You're subconscious, said Amy, who, like Beto, is thin and angular, but whose tawny hair is not yet streaked with gray.
Okay, yeah.
The same way your subconscious is the author of your dreams, Beto said, leaning forward to rub his bare feet, which elicited a slight groan from Amy.
In the same way, your will is the subconscious author of your life.
That's what we know about him.
I have to agree with CNN. He's just the most cliche liberal white boy, 35-year-old recent college graduate I've ever heard of.
He's a skateboarding androgynous weirdo.
He is a total empty vessel.
On the campaign trail the other day, he came out and he told voters, he said, please shape me into the presidential candidate you want.
Shape me, he says, into the presidential candidate that you want.
How about you have a form?
The reason you can shape him is because he doesn't have a spine.
He's an invertebrate, so you can just shape him any way you want, like a big lump of clay.
You're supposed to have a spine.
This reminds me, there are three kinds of politicians.
There are conviction politicians, the ones who are true believers, who are really on the left or the right.
There are the power-hungry politicians.
They don't really care so much about ideology.
They just want power.
And then there is a third type.
And the third type of politician is bored rich guys.
That is Beto O'Rourke.
He's not a conviction politician.
He holds both sides of every issue.
In 2012, he said the U.S. needs significant spending cuts.
The U.S. has out-of-control spending.
Now he's advocating all of these giant $93 trillion policies.
Just the other day, he called himself a capitalist.
Then he calls himself a socialist.
He endorses the Green New Deal.
He doesn't know quite where he is.
Because it doesn't matter to him.
Now, it's not that he's even power hungry.
The reason I read that first bit from the Washington Post is he just seems like a guy who's enamored of his own voice, who's enamored of his own face.
He never quite got out of college.
He never learned very much in college.
He wants to just have freshman bull sessions and feign purpose, feign insight, be a dime store philosopher.
And he's a bored rich guy.
The guy's worth nine million bucks.
His wife is a billionaire heiress.
What else is he going to do?
He just wants to run for president.
Just be shaped however you want to be shaped.
This guy is the big question mark in the race because he's the perfect politician for millennials.
So his candidacy doesn't require a lot of thought.
He's a freshman year, fake philosophy, bull session politician.
He makes sense to the senseless.
He's perfectly glib and shallow.
He seems tolerant and open-minded.
Say, Beto, what do you think about a $15 minimum wage?
Yeah, okay.
Hey, what do you think about abolishing the electoral college?
Yeah, there's a lot of wisdom to that.
Hey, Beto, what do you think about the Green New Deal?
Yeah, I like it.
Hey, check out my cool skateboard, though.
Hey, yeah, man, that's a cool skateboard.
He also might bring Texas over.
38 electoral votes would obviously completely end the campaign right there, would end the race.
He's both a centrist and a radical.
He's everything to everybody.
He doesn't yuck anybody's yum, and he's so Instagrammable.
And this last part is the key.
I mean, this is going to be a confounding factor in 2022, because my prediction in 2020 is that the media will not matter as much.
The media, you know, Donald Trump broke the media in many ways, but it wasn't just Donald Trump.
He had a big role in it, but technology broke the media.
The media broke themselves.
The media lost so much credibility.
Just look, here's Jim Acosta just the other day whining and complaining about President Trump getting softball questions.
And then he was asked that question by a reporter with the Daily Caller right at the very end.
You know, the question was asked in a way that really teed it up like a game of t-ball here in the Rose Garden.
The president just sort of served up a softball there when he was asked whether or not the Democrats are advancing a lot of socialist ideas.
Okay, that was Beto, or Beto, that was Jim Acosta complaining about President Trump's questions from reporters.
Now, here is Jim Acosta asking a question of President Obama when he met with the Brazilian president.
I'm sure, look, Jim Acosta, he doesn't like those softball questions like Donald Trump was getting.
Here's a hard-hitting question from Jim Acosta.
I wanted to ask you about what some people are calling your best week ever last week.
You had two Supreme Court decisions supportive of the Affordable Care Act and of gay rights.
You also delivered a speech down in Charleston that was pretty warmly received.
It seems that you've built up some political capital for the remaining months of your presidency.
I'm curious how you want to use it.
What hard things do you want to tackle at this point?
In terms of my best week, now my best week I will tell you, was marrying Michelle.
That was a really good week.
Really tough stuff.
Really tough questions back in that stuff.
So, I mean, Jim Acosta is the example, the embodiment of the mainstream media.
People don't pay attention.
Now it's about Instagram.
I mean, that is why the candidates are speaking to you directly, not just Trump, all the others, all the 2020 Democrats.
And it's all smiley, smiley Instagram.
You know, George Carlin said, when fascism comes to America, it won't be with jack boots and brown shirts.
It will be in Nike shoes and a smiley face t-shirt.
Smiley, smiley.
And what we're seeing now with extreme radical proposals, the most radical policy proposals in American presidential history, We're seeing them come to us not through normal political means, not through the mainstream media, not through political institutions.
They're coming to us directly with smiley, smiley candidates.
Instagram, upload emojis, happy, happy, joy, joy.
That's what we're getting.
That's a confounding factor in the campaign.
And we're going to see those two Pulls of it, playing back and forth.
Policy radicalism and presentational shallowness and glibness.
And hopefully our electorate isn't so shallow and glib that we're going to allow them to sneak all of those terrible ideas through, through appealing to our egos and appealing to our lack of attention and appealing to our scrolling, scrolling, smiley, smiley.
I'll see you all in Missouri.
We're going to have a show tomorrow.
Then I'll be giving a speech tomorrow night.
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 everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
I've got kind of a dangerous show today because I'm going to be proposing a new narrative about white supremacy.
So if you're a leftist, you might want to tune in, take my words out of context, and destroy me.
That's on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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