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May 7, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

45:27

Ep. 344 - Pete Buttigieg is a Jerk

Stocks are plunging as investors scramble over a potential trade war with China. While President Trump talks tough on trade, we examine the case for tariffs. Then, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg attacks President Trump’s marriage because Pete Buttigieg is a jerk. Date: 5-07-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Stocks are plunging as investors scramble over a potential trade war with China.
	While President Trump talks tough on trade, we examine the case for tariffs.
	So many conservatives still fail to understand the case for tariffs.
	Then, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg attacks President Trump's marriage because Pete Buttigieg is a jerk.
	I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	Mayor Pete, such a nice guy, isn't he?
	He's got that nice face, beautiful, big blue eyes.
	He's a good old boy scout.
	Except he's not.
	He's a huge jerk, and he keeps demonstrating this every single day.
	So we will analyze.
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	Pete Buttigieg is a jerk.
	No other way to put it.
	Pete Buttigieg is a totally unknown guy.
	He was the mayor of a small town in Indiana.
	He's announced that he's running for president.
	And we're told by everybody he's so nice.
	He's got so much dignity.
	He's got so much integrity.
	He's a Boy Scout.
	He's going to be the positive candidate.
	What have we actually seen him do so far?
	Or what have we actually seen him do so far?
	He attacked Mike Pence, basically called Mike Pence a bigot, Why?
	I don't know.
	Mike Pence has only ever said nice things about Pete Buttigieg.
	When Pete Buttigieg deployed to Afghanistan, Mike Pence personally called him to wish him well.
	When Pete Buttigieg came out as a gay guy, Mike Pence said, Pete Buttigieg, I have the utmost respect for.
	He's a patriot.
	He's a great guy, and I really like him.
	And then Pete Buttigieg announces he's running for president, and he goes after Mike Pence, and he says Mike Pence is this sort of bigot.
	Then what?
	We've seen Pete Buttigieg come out and question the faith of other Christians.
	We've now seen him attack President Trump's marriage, completely unprovoked.
	It's not as though President Trump was going after Buttigieg.
	Buttigieg goes after him in this really personal, nasty way.
	And now, Buttigieg is saying that Republicans are also bad Christians.
	He's a jerk.
	He's nasty.
	I don't like him.
	We're all told he's this sweet little guy, and he's so mean-spirited.
	No major figure on the right has attacked Pete Buttigieg's romantic relationships.
	Show me one who has gone after Pete Buttigieg because of his sexual preferences or his domestic life.
	I don't think you're going to find one.
	But Pete Buttigieg is going after others for that exact same thing.
	Here is Pete Buttigieg going after President Trump's marriage.
	Look, my emotions about this president are not what's going to matter most.
	I'm not interested in expressing my anger about him as much as I am in defeating and ending his presidency.
	If we want to have a debate with him, a fight over any number of things, from the difference between, you know, the way I approach service and the way he did, the fact that I was packing my bags for Afghanistan while he was working on Season 7 of Celebrity Apprentice, we can have that fight if somebody wants to...
	You know, if someone wants to raise a question of which one of us has a more traditional attitude on marriage, we can have that fight.
	But at the end of the day, it's not about him.
	It's not about me.
	It is about you.
	Not you, our host this evening, but you, the American voter.
	If someone wants to raise that question, nobody's raising that question.
	If someone wants to raise the question of service, if someone wants to raise the question of marriage, nobody's raising that question except for you, Pete Buttigieg.
	It's not about me.
	Also, so his first attack on Trump that Buttigieg was packing up for Afghanistan while Trump was doing season seven of The Apprentice, does Buttigieg think Donald Trump should have enlisted in the army at age 62?
	Is that what he's really suggesting?
	I guess he could go after President Trump for getting deferments from Vietnam.
	That would be, if he actually wants to have an attack on Donald Trump for dodging military service, he should go after him for not fighting in Vietnam.
	Why isn't Pete Buttigieg doing that?
	It's because he's going to need the support of a lot of other draft dodgers.
	Bill Clinton is a great example.
	Democrats nominated a guy and re-elected him.
	He served two terms as president, Bill Clinton, who was a draft dodger.
	Maybe he's going to want Bill Clinton's support eventually, so he's not going to go after the draft dodger issue.
	Not going to go after a lot of other Democrat senators, maybe.
	Ex-senators, governors.
	So he goes after him on Afghanistan.
	Weak sauce.
	But then to go after a man's marriage is really, really nasty.
	He's not just saying Donald Trump speaks badly about women.
	Donald Trump treats women badly.
	No, he's saying Donald Trump's marriage is somehow wrong.
	Somehow not traditional.
	By the way, it's not true.
	Donald Trump has a more traditional view of marriage than Pete Buttigieg.
	Why doesn't Donald Trump have a traditional marriage?
	Well, he's cheated on his wives.
	Cheating on your wife is very traditional.
	It's not good.
	It's wrong to cheat on your wife, but it is very traditional.
	Adultery plays central roles in the Iliad, in the Odyssey, in the Book of Genesis, in all of human history.
	Adultery has played a big role.
	It's very traditional.
	It's bad, but it's traditional.
	Well, he's gotten divorced.
	A lot of people have gotten divorced.
	The law of Moses allows for divorce, as Christ discusses in the New Testament and disapproves of.
	Well, he got divorced.
	Right.
	The Church of England was founded on a guy who wanted to get a divorce.
	Very traditional.
	Wrong, but very traditional.
	Well, he slept with a porn star.
	Right.
	Uh-huh.
	I know.
	Yes.
	Sometimes rich, powerful men cheat on their wives, and that's a terrible thing.
	Donald Trump still holds a more traditional view of marriage than Pete Buttigieg.
	Pete Buttigieg might be monogamous.
	He might go to church every Sunday.
	The traditional view of marriage for all of human history until five minutes ago was that sexual complementarity, sexual difference is essential to marriage.
	That marriage is the union of husbands and wives.
	Now, maybe it's one husband and ten wives in certain ancient cultures, but...
	Always husbands and wives.
	And really, for the span of Western civilization that we're talking about over the last 2,000 years, we're talking about one husband and one wife.
	Christian marriage.
	One husband and one wife.
	Sexual complementarity has adhered in all definitions of marriage for all of human history until about five minutes ago.
	So even if Pete Buttigieg is a really good guy, If his new definition of marriage says that sexual difference doesn't matter, it is necessarily less traditional.
	Now, Pete Buttigieg might make the argument that same-sex marriage is actually better.
	It's more virtuous.
	It's more holy.
	It's more Christian.
	He can try to make that argument if he wants.
	That's not the argument that he just made, though.
	What he's saying is his views of marriage are more traditional than Donald Trump's.
	That just isn't true.
	And Pete Buttigieg isn't just going after Trump.
	He's going after all Republicans.
	You've also spent a fair amount of time talking about your faith.
	Yes.
	Why?
	It's important to me.
	And I think it's also important that we stop seeing religion used as a kind of cudgel, as if God belonged to a political party.
	And if he did, I can't imagine it would be the one that sent the current president into the White House.
	What a jerk.
	Listen, I think we need to stop pretending that God belongs to a political party and realize that God is a Democrat.
	Okay?
	I'm Mayor Pete.
	I'm a really nice guy.
	I'm from Indiana.
	Come on, it's just common sense.
	God does not belong to a political party.
	Also, he's obviously a Democrat.
	That's what he's saying.
	Again, nobody on the right has said God is a Republican.
	God is not a Republican.
	God is not an American partisan.
	God is a king of all of creation.
	He has his own kingdom.
	But what Pete Buttigieg is doing by saying that God is not a Republican is implying maybe God is a Democrat.
	What he's implying more to the point is that Republicans are bad Christians.
	He's more or less saying God would be a Democrat.
	This is a bad strategy for Pete Buttigieg, who is a big jerk.
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	This, I think, is a bad move for Buttigieg.
	His professed Christian faith is a big advantage in this race.
	You'll notice all of these Democrats are running as far-left, intersectional, secular as they possibly can.
	Buttigieg has this kind of Midwest Christian charm about him, so that is an advantage.
	But it's not an advantage if he starts mocking the faith of every other Christian, or criticizing the faith of every other Christian, or ridiculing it.
	Even the fact that he's gay.
	We've never had a gay president.
	We've never had a gay presidential candidate.
	I think he could get over that issue.
	But I don't think he can get over the issue if he plays the victim constantly.
	This is the big mistake that he's making.
	So what Buttigieg is thinking is, the only way...
	That he can possibly distinguish himself in this field of 21, 22 candidates is if he plays the victim.
	If everyone is embracing this intersectional victimhood grievance mentality, Buttigieg says, well gosh, I'm an Ivy League educated...
	Military veteran, Rhodes Scholar, white male, privileged.
	The only way that I can pretend to be a victim is to play up my gay grievances.
	That's what he's thinking.
	This will kill him in the long run, and it probably won't even help him in the short run.
	Consider two examples here.
	Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
	We had never had a black president.
	We'd never had a serious black presidential candidate.
	Barack Obama comes out.
	Does Barack Obama play the racial victim card?
	No.
	No, basically never does he play the racial victim card.
	His big speech that he gave in 2004 at the Democrat National Convention, he comes out, he says, there's no white America, there's no black America, there's United States of America, there's no red America, no blue America, no yellow, purple, green, rainbow, sprinkles.
	No, he's all just uniting.
	He's coming together.
	I'm not going to play the victim.
	I'm the inspiring candidate.
	Hope and change.
	Now, compare that to Hillary Clinton, who, by the way, lost to him.
	Hillary Clinton comes out, and it's wah, wah, wah.
	I'm a woman.
	Everyone hates me because I'm a woman.
	I can't do anything because I'm a woman.
	Wah, wah, wah.
	Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's entire political career exists because she married Bill Clinton.
	Her husband gave her her entire political career.
	He handed her a Senate seat from New York.
	He gave her a presidential campaign.
	He gave her, through all of that, the Secretary of State role.
	And she says, wah, wah, I'm a woman.
	I can't do anything.
	Everyone's keeping me down.
	And she lost.
	She lost twice.
	Because people hate that.
	It's so annoying.
	Everybody's got a problem.
	Everybody's got a problem, guys.
	Everybody goes through hardship.
	Everybody struggles.
	There's a great line in a play by Tennessee Williams called Orpheus Descending.
	And you got this kind of vagabond guy wandering through town.
	He's trying to get a room at this woman's house.
	And he's trying to seduce her and, you know, stay there for the night.
	And she's having none of it.
	And he says, but I got nowhere to go.
	And she says, well, everybody's got a problem and that's yours.
	Yeah, everybody's got hardship.
	Everybody struggles.
	So you can either whine about it all the time, or you can show some grit and determination.
	The American people like dignity.
	They like suffering silently.
	They like grit.
	They don't want whiny little brats.
	Which is what you saw from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
	It's what you're seeing now from Pete Buttigieg.
	He really could offer youthful Midwestern optimism.
	He could.
	He's very smart.
	He served his country.
	He could offer that.
	He's throwing it away on this intersectional gambit that is probably not going to pay off.
	So then he becomes this nasty, catty jerk, and he loses the only thing that people actually like about him.
	It also reminds us this theme that just keeps coming back again and again, which is the left is always projecting.
	Pete Buttigieg, for the last few weeks, Has been accusing conservative Christians of being closed-minded and vindictive and judgmental.
	And they're the Mike Pence's of the world.
	And God wouldn't be a Republican.
	What is he doing?
	He's doing all the things that he's accusing conservative Christians of doing.
	He's questioning other people's faith.
	He's judging them, their actions and their faith.
	He's...
	Been nasty.
	He's been cruel.
	He's been uncompassionate.
	He's doing all the things he's accusing them of doing.
	That's not just Buttigieg.
	Do you remember that Pennsylvania guy that we talked about yesterday?
	That guy, Brian Sims, Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
	Remember, he was the guy who goes out and starts screaming at this woman who was protesting at a Planned Parenthood and mocking her appearance and harassing her and trying to film her.
	So it turns out he's back, but this time he's not mocking women of a certain age.
	Instead, he is trying to dox three teenage girls.
	Here he is.
	Hi, everyone.
	Representative Brian Sims here, and I am outside the Planned Parenthood at Southeastern...
	Pennsylvania.
	Oh, no, they're leaving now.
	What we've got here is a bunch of protesters.
	A bunch of pseudo-Christian protesters who've been out here shaming young girls for being here.
	And so here's the deal.
	I've got $100 to anybody who will identify any of these three.
	I'm going to donate to Planned Parenthood.
	I'm going to donate to Planned Parenthood.
	So look, a bunch of white people standing out in front of a Planned Parenthood shaming people.
	There's nothing Christian about what you're doing.
	Nothing Christian at all about what you're doing.
	Hi, nothing Christian or loving or godly about what you're doing.
	So I've got $100 to anybody who will identify this.
	$100.
	See if you've got some friends out here.
	$100.
	It'd be easier if you just give me your name and your address.
	Rich, where are you from?
	Langston.
	Rich, what makes you think that it's your job to tell women what's right for their bodies?
	And the truth is, I'm not really asking because I don't care.
	Shame on you.
	Oh, man.
	What a wacko.
	So he first goes up.
	And offers $100 to get the identities and the addresses of three teenage girls.
	Imagine if I did that, just by way of comparison.
	I would not be allowed within 150 yards of any schools or public grounds if I did that.
	But this guy, who is an elected representative in Pennsylvania, goes out, no consequence, no ban from Twitter, no censure from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
	No, nothing.
	It's okay.
	He's allowed to go do that.
	So then he goes out and he says it's these three white women.
	Teenage girls.
	Now, he's white, but he uses white as this insult.
	And what's funny is one of the girls is not white.
	She's saying, I'm not white.
	I'm Hispanic.
	I'm not, but he doesn't really care about that.
	So then he sort of chases them away.
	Then he turns to another guy who's protesting.
	And he says, I'm going to get your information.
	So you should just tell me who you are now.
	And the guy in perfect humility says, oh, this is my name.
	Says, yeah, where are you from?
	Says, I'm from this place.
	Total humility.
	And he says, well, why do you think it's good to protest Planned Parenthood?
	And then Brian Sims does what the left always does.
	He says, I don't want to hear the answer.
	I'm going to run away.
	Why?
	Because he knows that he can't win a battle of ideas.
	He's ranting and raving about how it's so great to kill babies and how it's awful to not kill babies.
	He says there's nothing Christian about not killing babies.
	I recommend he should try reading the Bible because the Bible has a few things to say about this or just any sort of moral philosophy at all.
	But he's ranting and raving and accusing people and being cruel and harassing them and calling them names.
	And then he approaches a man who has total humility and And who he knows is going to give him an argument.
	And then all of a sudden he runs away.
	Because he can't take it.
	A couple lessons here.
	One is, we should approach our political disagreements the way that that last guy did there.
	The last guy that Brian Sims is talking to.
	Who's just there.
	He's totally calm.
	He's totally collected.
	Says, well, yeah, this is my name.
	I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.
	Well, it's bad to kill babies because babies are people.
	So we shouldn't slaughter babies because they're babies, they're humans, they're living, they haven't had due process, they're innocent, and we shouldn't rip them out of their mother's wombs or leave them to die on an operating table.
	That's what he was going to say.
	And that guy, Brian Sims, the representative from Pennsylvania, he knew that there was going to be a debate that he is not able to engage in.
	So he runs away from it.
	That's very telling.
	That shows you a whole lot.
	Now, the reason that he keeps making the rounds right now is because of the censorship that's been going on on social media.
	You've got parody accounts being censored.
	You've got conservatives being censored.
	You've got all sorts of people being censored.
	And that guy is allowed to keep his Twitter account, which he uses explicitly to harass, humiliate, and dox people.
	Not just any people, but minors as well.
	Not just any sort of minor, but teenage girls as well.
	This is a test for social media.
	This is a test for Twitter.
	Are you going to take away that guy's account?
	I'm not saying you should take away that guy's account necessarily.
	But if you're taking away conservatives' accounts, you definitely have to take away that guy's account.
	And if you don't, then clearly this is not a level playing field.
	Clearly this is not an open platform.
	And we should go and use every single tool of the law at our disposal to rip these guys to shreds.
	To rip their platforms to shreds.
	Well, they're a private company.
	Don't care.
	They're sort of a private company.
	Yeah, they're sort of.
	But there are provisions of the law to protect platforms.
	There are different provisions of the law for publishers.
	The law is murky.
	All shallows are clear, but the law is murky, and we should go in there and go after them, because this is a warning shot for 2020.
	That's what this is all about.
	This is why conservatives are being kicked off of these platforms.
	This is why an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez parody account was taken off of Twitter yesterday.
	A parody account.
	It said it was a parody.
	It said it was unaffiliated with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
	It labeled itself very clearly.
	It was taken off.
	Meanwhile, plenty of Donald Trump parody accounts still are allowed to exist.
	Why was the AOC one taken down?
	Because it's become pretty popular.
	It had about 85,000 followers, so they have to take it down.
	And this is a warning shot.
	Don't forget, the year is 2019.
	Presidential election is in 2020.
	And what they're doing is they're saying, what happens if we take away this kind of funny parody account?
	Are they going to move?
	Are they going to move?
	Okay.
	What happens if we take away this conservative's account?
	What happens if we take away this not conservative but kind of right wing and he's pretty objectionable and we, okay, what if we take away his?
	Are people going to do anything to stop us?
	And what this is becoming is an in-kind contribution to Democrats.
	What this is becoming is a platform for the promotion of Democrats in political campaigns.
	And if we don't fight back now, we're going to find ourselves at a severe disadvantage in 2020.
	Speaking of political fights, speaking of war fights, The Dow has been dropping 500 points today under a trade war threat because President Trump is ratcheting up tensions with China in this trade war that we're engaged in.
	We will analyze the case for protective tariffs.
	Basically, no conservatives are defending tariffs.
	I would like to make the case for tariffs because I... I'm not saying that we need to have economic protection.
	I'm not saying free trade is a bad thing.
	But I think conservatives have become very ideological.
	They've allowed ideology to blind them on this question of tariffs.
	And there are plenty of good reasons to limit free trade.
	There are plenty of good arguments against free trade.
	We'll get into them in one second.
	But first, go to dailywire.com.
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	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	The Dow is down 500 points.
	Why?
	Because the U.S. and China might escalate their trade war.
	Now, this latest tension began a few days ago when President Trump tweeted out, For 10 months, China has been paying tariffs to the U.S.A. of 25% on $50 billion of high tech and 10% on $200 billion of other goods.
	These payments are partially responsible for our great economic results.
	The 10% will go up to 25% on Friday.
	$325 billion of additional goods sent to us by China remain untaxed, but it will be shortly at a rate of 25%.
	The tariffs paid to the United States have had little impact on product cost, mostly borne by China.
	The trade deal with China continues, but too slowly as they attempt to renegotiate.
	No.
	No.
	Sad.
	So, when this threat came out from Donald Trump, the markets didn't really move.
	Because they didn't really believe it.
	It's more tweeting, okay, we'll see if anything actually happens.
	Then, when China and the United States didn't come to some sort of agreement over the ensuing few days, all of a sudden, the markets start to take this seriously.
	Say, gosh, we really might get a trade war.
	Now, in the midst of all this, Chuck Schumer tweets out and says, President Trump, stay strong on China.
	That's the only way to deal with them is to get tough.
	Some people read this as Schumer being sarcastic, as Schumer saying, yeah, keep up, keep up those tariffs, buddy.
	Great job.
	Let the economy tank and then that way we'll sweep to victory as Democrats in 2020.
	He actually wasn't being sarcastic.
	It's a sign of our times that we assume anytime a Democrat agrees with a Republican that it's sarcasm.
	But Chuck Schumer has been pretty consistent on this for a while.
	Chuck Schumer in 2005 led the push in Congress to impose a 35% tariff on China, which is ultimately what led the Chinese to allow their currency to weaken a little bit.
	Schumer is calling for a little toughness on China.
	So is President Trump.
	The case for tariffs right now is particularly geared toward China.
	First of all, let's just point out that the economy is doing very, very well.
	President Trump has been saying it's the best economy we've ever had.
	In many ways, that's true.
	We're at 49-year lows of unemployment.
	Average wages are up to $27.77 per hour.
	We now have many, many more job openings than people who are looking for jobs.
	We were told by Barack Obama's economists that we would never see 3% economic growth.
	Larry Summers, chief economist to Obama, said that the predictions of 3% economic growth were basically like wishing for the tooth fairy.
	He used that phrase, the tooth fairy.
	And then what happened?
	We hit 3% economic growth by the second quarter of President Trump's first year.
	So we had 3%.
	It rose significantly higher than that in 2018.
	We, again, in just this last quarter, very, very strong economic growth.
	So you can't simultaneously make the case that Trump is this economic idiot and his tariffs are destroying the economy and also observe that we have the strongest economy, basically, that we've ever had.
	So what is the case for tariffs?
	Well, on China, the case is we're already in a trade war.
	We're already in a trade war.
	China is waging a trade war.
	They've been doing it for years and years and we should be able to fight back.
	And we should fight back.
	They steal our intellectual property, they illegally manipulate their currency, they illegally subsidize their steel and aluminum industries, and they cheat on World Trade Organization treaties.
	China always cheats.
	When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, they almost immediately began cheating.
	And they don't just cheat on the economic front, they cheat on everything.
	During the Obama administration, China promised us that they would not militarize the South China Sea.
	What happened?
	They began to militarize the South China Sea.
	So we know that they're cheaters.
	We know that they don't respect WTO treaties.
	So the case for tariffs now is it gives them an incentive to start complying with what they should have been doing for years, to not steal our property, not steal our technology.
	So if we put these tariffs on and then we say we will pull back on those tariffs if you comply with what you're already supposed to be doing, that at least gives them some incentive to comply.
	It adds real pressure.
	Not fake Obama pressure like, yes, you better do it.
	I got a red line.
	Here's your red line, China.
	No, actual pressure because they are feeling the effects of those tariffs.
	If the threat to China is going to have any teeth on tariffs, It needs to be a serious case.
	This, I think, is the issue that conservatives can get behind.
	Conservatives are saying, well, tariffs are always awful.
	They're just terrible.
	But in a negotiation, it helps you if you seem half crazy.
	Warren Buffett says this, too.
	He says, in a negotiation, sometimes you want to seem like you're totally crazy.
	You're a madman.
	You'll do anything, even if it is insane.
	They're saying that Donald Trump, he's just playing the madman.
	Well, I don't know.
	If it's just that, I don't think it's going to have very much teeth.
	The markets didn't move when it was just Trump tweeting.
	They moved today when it looked like he was serious.
	And there is a serious case to be made for tariffs.
	I know, this is...
	I'm going to be cast out of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
	I will be thrown into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
	Well, too bad, because there actually is a case to be made for tariffs.
	To begin, the Republican Party was founded on tariffs.
	Abraham Lincoln was a staunch defender of tariffs.
	Abraham Lincoln said, give me a tariff, I'll give you the best country in the world.
	Daniel McCarthy made a good case for tariffs.
	Daniel McCarthy, who writes for Modern Age, a conservative journal, he points out that tariffs can accomplish a few things.
	First of all, they can accomplish the goal of maintaining industries necessary for preventing full-scale war.
	So the idea with free trade is, look, we don't need to actually produce anything in the United States because we're so rich and China has slave labor, so we can just buy all of our goods from China and it'll be cheaper and that way we'll all save money.
	Okay, fair enough argument.
	The issue is when you move all of your industry to China, what happens when China declares war on you?
	Your free trade just broke down.
	When you're at war with a country, you're probably not trading very freely.
	And now, China has all of your manufacturing capacity.
	You have no industrial capacity anymore.
	Now, you might have a lot of money, but where are you going to get the industries necessary to wage a war?
	That goes away.
	This came into play in particular in the Civil War.
	This is in no small part why the Republican Party has always had some affinity, at least in its early days, for protective tariffs.
	In the Civil War, if the North did not have an industrial advantage, would the North really have won?
	The North had a completely dominant industrial advantage over the South.
	What if the South had industrialized?
	Are we sure that the country would look like it does today?
	How about in World War II? If the U.S. had not had industrial capacity, major industrial capacity in World War II, would there have been a Western Front to that war?
	Don't forget, the United States was attacked by Japan.
	We're fighting a war in the Pacific.
	We are simultaneously fighting a war in Europe.
	Now, why are we fighting the war in Europe?
	Because if the United States didn't come in, Britain would have fallen.
	Winston Churchill's biggest strategy in World War II was begging the United States for help and to come in to the rescue of the old world.
	If the United States didn't have massive industrial production, there's no way we could have fought both sides of that war.
	Who knows what would have happened in Europe?
	So this is one argument.
	Not everything is just an economic chart.
	I think what people who worship at the idol of free trade as though it's good unto itself, they say, well, look at all of our economic charts.
	Right, economic charts break down in the real world because countries aren't just trading entities.
	Countries go to war.
	Countries have diplomacy.
	Countries have interests in other regions.
	Countries are much more complicated than buying and selling cheap t-shirts.
	Another reason, another argument for protective tariffs is the middle class.
	Do we want a small elite or do we want a giant base of, rather a small elite and a giant base of worker bees, or do we want a substantial middle class?
	Now you might say, Michael, I don't care.
	Who are you to decide where people should fall in economic, uh, Who are you to decide how big the middle class should be, how big the upper class should be, how big the worker class should be?
	What does it matter to you if a very small number of people make an insane amount of money and then everybody else still does fairly well, but they have radically less money than the elite?
	I don't really care in principle, but I do care politically.
	So over the past decade, two decades, Wages among the middle and lower classes have mostly flatlined.
	Wages of the elites have increased tremendously.
	If that situation persists, if it grows, if it's exacerbated, you get political revolution.
	This almost happened in the 1930s.
	This has happened in many countries all around the world and continues to happen today.
	Eventually, you get a revolution there.
	Look at the Met Gala yesterday.
	You saw those crazy costumes.
	The Met Gala basically shows us how the French Revolution happened, I think.
	A bunch of French peasants thought, are you kidding me?
	You're dressing like that and you're eating that and you're behaving that way?
	We're going to burn down palaces and behead our monarchs is basically what they're thinking.
	The argument here is that a stable economy requires a stable political system.
	Now, a stable political system requires a stable economy, so there's a push and pull here.
	But it cannot be the case that you've got one guy who's got all the money and everybody else has radically less money and you've got a stable political system.
	That is very unlikely to happen.
	And so it is in the interest of the economy...
	Often, to have a thriving middle class.
	And then the third case is economic prosperity.
	Perhaps it is the case that perfect free trade is not the only route to national wealth.
	Every country has protective tariffs.
	The United States has always had protective tariffs.
	Every other country has them, too.
	There's a reason for that.
	It's because the economy is complicated.
	Free trade is very clear.
	All shallows are clear.
	The question you've got to ask yourself is, what is the purpose of free trade?
	Is free trade a good in and of itself?
	Perfectly unfettered free trade, not just among people in a country, but among people in different nations?
	Is it the case that an American defense contractor should be allowed to have trade deals with any foreign government?
	With no regulations whatsoever?
	Is it the case that American defense contractors should be building up China's army?
	How about in the 1930s?
	Should American defense contractors be building up Hitler's army?
	How about other foreign governments?
	There's no question at all.
	Should Americans be allowed to freely trade with Iran?
	We're not currently allowed to do that.
	We have sanctions on Iran.
	How about North Korea?
	No.
	What is the purpose of free trade?
	It's not an end unto itself.
	It is a means to an end.
	And the means that it is an end to is human flourishing.
	And in the United States, it's a means to American flourishing.
	And if free trade is not serving the ends of American flourishing, that's an argument against free trade.
	The left is very ideological.
	They adhere to very narrow ideologies that you can write down on a little sheet of paper and have bullet points.
	Boom, boom, boom, boom.
	Here's the manifesto.
	Here is leftism.
	Conservatives are supposed to oppose that because we know that reality can't be rationalized into some silly little doctrine.
	Reality is much more complicated.
	Sometimes on this issue, we get a little too ideological.
	And then the other question is, Are we primarily consumers?
	This was always one of Milton Friedman's great arguments, all those wonderful videos on YouTube of Milton Friedman talking about free trade and free markets.
	He'll say, look, everybody's a consumer.
	You might be a producer for eight hours of your workday, but then you come home and you're a consumer.
	And so if free trade means that you lose a little bit of money on your wages, but you gain so much more money in savings when you buy consumer goods, you've actually gotten a raise.
	Whether you get the money from your employer or you save the money when you shop at Walmart, either way you've got more money in your bank account as a result of free trade.
	But this does get to another question in society, which is do we want to be primarily consumers?
	Everybody's both.
	We're producers, we're consumers, we're all those sorts of things.
	But do we want to have a consumerist society?
	Consumerism is disgusting.
	It's so gross when you just walk around places where people are only concerned with material goods and getting a good deal and buying the latest gadgets and just buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume.
	That's a disgusting culture.
	Do we want a culture that replaces cathedrals with shopping malls?
	No.
	How is that conservative?
	There's nothing conservative about consumerism.
	You need to have a moral basis to even tolerate freedom and free markets and free trade.
	You need to have discipline in yourself.
	You need to not just become this gluttonous materialistic culture which sometimes is fed by worshipping at the idol of free trade.
	Now there are costs to tariffs.
	So we just made the case for tariffs.
	There are costs to tariffs.
	Tariffs usually mean less wealth for everyone because it's basically the government imposing a tax on its own people.
	The tax eventually is going to be passed on to consumers.
	That's the likely outcome at least.
	The other cost to tariffs is it's the government choosing winners and losers.
	So the government will go in and say, okay, we want to protect the dairy industry, but we don't care about the soy industry.
	Or we want to protect the soy industry, but we don't care about the paper industry.
	And so you've got the government going into the economy and picking winners and losers.
	And unfortunately, the government is very bad at organizing economies and planning economies too precisely.
	All true.
	Strong arguments against free trade.
	But when President Trump goes up there and he's negotiating with China, and he's trying to get us a good trade deal, and he's trying to get them to stop violating the trade rules that they've already agreed to, and he tries to get them to stop stealing all of our stuff, and he tries to get them to stop illegally subsidizing their industries, when he threatens tariffs, there are plenty of good reasons for those tariffs.
	And more or less, the lesson to conservatives here is All the conservatives are accusing each other of not being true conservatives.
	Capital T, capital C, trademark over conservatives.
	The free traders are saying, you're violating free trade orthodoxy, which has been the bedrock of the conservative movement for only like 35 or 40 years, but never mind that.
	And then you've got the protectionist people saying, you free traders, you're just a bunch of neoliberal, globalist, modernist, whatever.
	Okay.
	All I'm saying is a little bit of a middle way here, which is free markets are, generally speaking, the most efficient way to allocate goods and resources in an economy.
	Economic freedom, free markets, usually imply property rights, which are good in and of themselves.
	Private property is necessary to civilized society.
	Private property is a moral good.
	We should be able to use that property as we like with relatively few restrictions.
	But we should not become idolaters at the altar of the free market.
	There's nothing conservative about that.
	There's nothing smart about that.
	There's nothing highly intelligent about that.
	There's nothing politically pure about that.
	What happens when we do that is we put the cart before the horse.
	And you always, you should ask yourself this when it comes to politics.
	What is the purpose of this political right?
	What is the purpose of this political institution?
	What is the purpose of it?
	All we want to do as people is make idols out of things.
	Make idols out of the free market.
	Make idols out of voting.
	Voting is a great example of this.
	We make such an idol out of voting.
	We say, you've got to go out and vote.
	Puff Daddy tells me I've got to vote or die.
	Bruce Springsteen come out.
	He says, you've got to rock the vote.
	Doesn't matter who you vote for.
	Just that you vote.
	Doesn't matter if you vote.
	If you're knowledgeable about events and you have good judgment, then you should vote.
	But voting is not a good in and of itself.
	Voting is a means to an end.
	Voting is a means to good government.
	If we could get better government by restricting the vote, great, cool.
	If we could get better government by expanding the vote, great.
	If we could somehow get better government by expanding the vote to include five-year-olds, everybody five years old and older can vote, and then that gives us better government, fine, send the five-year-olds to vote.
	If we could get better government by limiting the vote to people who are 50 and above, good, I would do that too.
	Don't make idols out of these things.
	The end is human flourishing, and...
	And that's what we're all after.
	And everything else is just putting the cart before the horse.
	We've got a lot more to get to, but ran out of time as usual.
	Get your mailbag questions in for Thursday.
	We'll be back tomorrow.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	show.
	I'll see you then.
	The Michael Knowles show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike 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.
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	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.
	So if the Democrats in the news media, but I repeat myself, aren't going to talk about the booming economy and they're not going to talk about the Obama spying scandal, what are they going to talk about?
	The answer?
	Nothing.
	They've become The Seinfeld Show.
	Hilarious, but about nothing.
	We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.

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