Buttigieg gets a standing ovation at a Fox News Town Hall. But the polls put Joe Biden at a commanding lead over everyone, including Trump. We examine what the polls can tell us about conservatism from the U.S. to Europe all the way to Australia. Then, the MSM pretend men can get pregnant, an anti-Trump Republican humiliates himself, and revenge porn tests the limits of politics. Date: 5-20-2019
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Milk toast Mayor Pete Buttigieg got a standing ovation during a Fox News town hall over the weekend, but the polls put Joe Biden at a commanding lead over every candidate, not just the Democrats, that includes President Trump.
We examine what the polls will tell us about conservatism from the U.S. to Europe, all the way to Australia.
Then, the media pretend that men can get pregnant, an anti-Trump Republican humiliates himself, and revenge porn tests the limit of politics.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
This is the first show, I think, in a week where we're not talking about making babies.
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Has Joe Biden already won the 2020 race?
I'm not even just talking about the primary.
I'm talking about the whole election.
Right now, the RealClearPolitics average, so there are all these different polls, RealClearPolitics comes in, creates the average of all the polls, has Joe Biden at 38.3%, Bernie Sanders, who is in second place in the Democrat primary, at 18.8%, Warren at 8.5%, Harris at 7.3%, Buttigieg at 7%, Beto at a pathetic 3.8%, Booker at a still more pathetic 2.5%, Castro down at 1.5%.
I kind of forgot that guy was even running.
Not Fidel, not Raul, Julian Castro.
Klobuchar at 1.3%, Tulsi Gabbard at 1%, Andrew Yang at 1%, Kirsten Gillibrand at 1%, and I think like 20 other people who aren't even registering.
Interesting to note here, all of these people, I think?
Everyone else was a national figure.
They are all getting trounced by Joe Biden.
And President Trump has already declared this primary over.
One of my favorite things that President Trump does is when he acts as a political pundit for the other side.
So he tweeted this out.
He said, quote, I'm only here because of Sleepy Joe and the man who took him off the 1% trash heap.
That's President Obama.
President, oh, China wants Sleepy Joe badly.
I just love this idea.
It gives me something to look forward to that eventually in six years when, I guess, no, not six years, five years, when President Trump is out of office, that we can look forward to him being on cable news.
Listen, these crazy Democrats, oh my goodness.
So he's already done this before.
He did it with Elizabeth Warren.
He said, I think Elizabeth Warren is finished in the race because it turns out that I'm more Indian than she is, and I'm 0% Indian, but she's done.
So even President Trump right now is saying Joe Biden is doing very well.
He's already kind of talking about Joe Biden as if he is the general election candidate.
The problem with this is that Joe Biden isn't only beating all the other Democrats, he's also beating President Trump in the polls, and by a lot.
Now, you might say, well, who cares if Joe Biden is beating Trump in the national polls?
We don't hold a national election.
We hold presidential elections by state.
So all that matters is whether Joe Biden is beating Donald Trump in the states that matter, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, those swing states.
Again here, the trouble is that Joe Biden is not just leading President Trump in the polls in those states, he's trouncing him.
He's up by almost 10 points in all those states.
In Pennsylvania, he's up by over 10 points.
Biden is beating Trump 54 to 43.5.
In Michigan, Biden is beating Trump 53.5 to 43.
And in Wisconsin, he's beating Trump 54 to 46.
So an eight-point lead even in Wisconsin.
That is not good news for Donald Trump.
So I see why Donald Trump wants to fight back already in the general.
That's a bad idea.
Let the Democrats all start to kill each other.
This has not even begun yet.
I mean, right now we're looking at a lot of name recognition.
Joe Biden has a lot of name ID, so naturally he's doing quite well in the polls.
But we haven't even had the first debate yet.
This hasn't really gotten started.
Better to let the Democrats all duke it out themselves.
So, is the 2020 Democrat race over?
I mean, or is the even 2020 election over?
The debates will play out.
You'll have multiple debates.
Then you'll get the nominating contest.
Then, eventually, you'll get the general election.
Looking at these poll numbers, Trump's down by 10 in the swing states.
Is the election over?
I think Biden has three big weaknesses.
Now, the weaknesses pose a problem when you're running against President Trump, but they are weaknesses nonetheless.
Number one, he's corrupt.
People aren't really talking about this story, but he's corrupt.
Number two, he's a liar and a bloviator.
He lies a lot and he always exaggerates.
Number three, he's been in government forever and he hasn't done very much.
Those are the three weaknesses.
Corruption, lies, ineffectiveness.
Now, what's the trouble?
The trouble is if you say he's corrupt, then what are you going to point to?
You point to the business deals, the shady, sketchy, unfair business deals that his son got in China and the Ukraine.
In China, Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, his private equity firm got a $1 billion deal with the Chinese government.
This is according to investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer.
Who is Hunter Biden?
It's not Beau Biden.
Beau Biden is Joe Biden's son who died tragically of brain cancer a few years ago.
Hunter Biden is the other son, and Hunter is basically an influence peddler.
He's counsel at Boyz Shiller, which is a Democrat law firm.
He set up a few front companies, one called Rosemont, and he just peddles influence.
And he's not peddling his own influence because he's never held public office.
So he's peddling his father's influence.
And so while Joe Biden, as vice president of the United States, was negotiating with the Chinese, Hunter Biden's firm received a $1 billion private equity deal with the government.
This later increased to $1.5 billion, according to Peter Schweitzer.
When did that deal happen?
That deal came through hours before Vice President Biden met with the Chinese President Hu Jintao in DC for a nuclear security summit.
Sure looks like a crony deal to me.
I mean, more information will come out.
Of course, these are all just allegations for now, but sure looks shady.
Similar issue in the Ukraine.
So, same guy, Hunter Biden, same influence peddler, was being investigated in the Ukraine.
Ukraine's top prosecutor was looking into a money laundering scheme by a company called Burisma.
Burisma, on their board of directors, had Hunter Biden there.
They were paying Hunter Biden $50,000 a month.
I don't know.
Maybe it would behoove certain actors in the Ukraine to pass over 50 G's a month to Hunter Biden in the hope that some favorable treatment would come from the United States.
Now, the top prosecutor in Ukraine was investigating this money laundering scheme.
And at that time, Vice President Biden insisted that the prosecutor be removed from office.
So Biden, point guy on Ukraine, he goes in, he says, we will withhold $1 billion from Ukraine if this prosecutor is not fired.
And you don't need to just take my word for it.
You don't need to worry that I'm some conspiracy theorist.
Because Joe Biden is so gaffe-prone, he actually managed to brag about this crooked deal at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Here he is.
I went over...
I guess the 12th, 13th time to Kyiv, and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee.
And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against a state prosecutor, and they didn't.
So they said they were walking out to the press conference and said, no, we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
They said, you have no authority.
You're not the president.
The president said, I said, call him.
I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars.
I said, you're not getting a billion.
I'm going to be leaving here, and I think it was, what, six hours?
I looked, I said, I'm leaving in six hours.
If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.
Oh, son of a bitch.
Got fired.
And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
People knock Trump for sounding like a mobster when he talks.
You know, we're gonna end Iran.
You're gonna do this.
This guy's a killer.
This guy's a shark.
Joe Biden there sounds like a mobster.
He said, yeah, I went over to Ukraine.
I had all my influence.
I had a billion dollars of taxpayer money on the table.
I said, you're not getting a billion unless you fire that guy that I don't like who's looking into my son's company.
And they say to me, you can't make that decision.
I says to him, I says, listen to what I says to him.
I says, call up the president.
You're not getting a billion dollars.
Do what I say.
Fire that prosecutor who's looking.
He's looking a little too close.
Getting a little too big for his britches over there looking into my son's company.
All right?
Guess what happened?
Son of a gun.
The guy gets fired.
How about that?
He's bragging about it like Tony Soprano.
So there is very legitimate corruption.
Now why would Joe brag about this?
Is it just because he's a total idiot?
Possibly.
The other reason, it seems, is maybe he wants to get in front of the story, he wants to frame the story in a way that might be somewhat favorable to him.
You know, Joe Biden's whole career is ingratiating himself to people.
This is why he got in trouble for smelling hair and giving back massages and putting his forehead on another person's forehead.
I don't think it's because he's a sexual predator.
I think it's because he is a slick, oily politician whose entire skill is getting people to like him.
But behind the scenes, he's working.
He's working angles.
His son is cashing in on his father's influence.
He's a politician.
He's been in office for a very long time.
So you could knock Joe Biden on being corrupt.
The issue is, if you go after Joe Biden for being corrupt, then they're just going to go after Donald Trump for being corrupt.
And it's worth noting, there is not really a comparison here.
There is no evidence of any sort of public corruption that President Trump has engaged in while president— We're good to go.
I'm the puppet master, right?
I'm the guy who's running things.
He said, the way he excused donating to Democrats is he said, I was a real estate developer in New York.
I had to buy off politicians of both parties.
That's just how politics works.
So if you go after Biden for corruption, they're going to go after him.
Speaking of real estate in New York, if you're developing real estate in New York, you are almost by definition in some way working with the mob.
So they'll go after him, they'll say he's literally working with the mobsters.
So I just think that angle is going to end up becoming impotent.
It's not going to really go anywhere.
So, okay, you can't go after him for being corrupt.
You can go after him for being a liar, which we'll get to in a second.
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So you can't go after, and don't hire Joe Biden, by the way.
Don't hire.
That's my personal editorial.
You can go after Joe Biden on his corruption, but they're going to go after Trump on corruption.
So the next one is you can go after Joe Biden on his lies.
And Joe Biden tells some pretty horrifying lies.
Again, this has not been covered by the mainstream media.
I bet very few people would argue.
Be able to recall this if you ask them on the street.
We know some of Joe Biden's basic lies.
We know that when he ran in 1988 for president, he was chased out of the race for plagiarism and for lying about his academic record.
We know in 2012, when he was vice president, that he lied about Mitt Romney.
He was before an entire auditorium full of black voters, and he said, Mitt Romney wants to put you all back in chains.
Pretty shameless lie.
Pretty shameless race baiting.
The lie that is really bizarre and really pretty scary is that Joe Biden has actually lied about the tragic death of his wife and daughter.
And he's demonstrably lied about it, and it's been sporadically called out by the mainstream media, but people let him get away with this.
Really weird.
So decades ago, Joe Biden's wife and daughter were tragically killed in a car accident.
His wife, Nelia, and his daughter, Naomi.
His sons, Beau and Hunter, were both in the car as well.
They were injured, but they luckily survived.
How did the car accident happen?
It's because Mrs. Biden was driving.
She drove into a busy intersection, and unfortunately, she was in the path of an oncoming truck, and the truck hit the car.
So what happened here?
There was an investigation at the time.
The investigators found that the driver of that truck, Curtis Dunn, was blameless.
It was just a horrible accident, but he didn't cause it.
It wasn't through his negligence or some criminal wrongdoing that this accident happened.
It was just an awful accident.
Awful car accidents happen all the time.
Doesn't make it any less sad or tragic, but...
He didn't do anything wrong, the driver.
Okay.
Apparently this guy, by the way, Curtis Dunn, carried this weight with him until 1999.
He talked about it all the time, this awful guilt that he carried.
Over the course of the decades, Joe Biden started to embellish the story of the death of his wife and daughter, so much so that he just came to lie about it.
So over the years, what Joe Biden would start to do is portray the driver as a drunk driver.
He said about this poor guy, Curtis Dunn, quote, he allegedly drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch.
Then he said he was an errant driver who stopped to drink.
Where did this story come from?
Even The Atlantic, a left-wing outlet, has admitted that this was just a total lie.
This is what The Atlantic wrote, quote, Now, you'll notice something else there when you mention 2007.
One explanation for this is that Joe Biden is just so full of anger over the death of his wife and daughter.
He hasn't been able to forgive the driver.
He's so full of some denial about the accidental nature of it that he's just convinced himself of this and it's a coping mechanism.
And that would be understandable.
I mean, it would raise a lot of questions about his judgment and his fitness for office, but it would at least be understandable.
Except this lie about his wife and daughter's death tends to just come up around election time.
So he's bringing this up, apparently, to gain political advantage.
That's pretty disgusting.
That's pretty awful.
One, because of the memory of what happened.
And two, because you, as a major public figure in the United States, a very important person given the public trust, are baselessly defaming a guy who was involved in an accident that he's carried guilt around for for decades.
That's pretty bad stuff.
And of course the family wants to correct the record.
If you've got a guy who would be the President of the United States smearing your family member as a drunk driver who through negligence killed his wife and daughter, when you know that didn't happen, when there was a full investigation and you know for a fact it didn't happen, that's pretty awful.
That's pretty low stuff.
A bizarre and a shameless lie.
Okay, so you could go after Joe Biden on that front.
Could call him Lion Joe instead of Sleepy Joe or something like that.
However, if you go after Joe Biden as a liar, what are they going to do?
They're going to go after Donald Trump as a liar.
Donald Trump for playing fast and loose with the facts.
Again, as far as I can tell, Donald Trump has told a lot of lies.
Donald Trump has made a lot of false statements.
He has never made a false statement before.
So pathological, so bizarre, so low and shameless as that one, as far as I can tell.
Actually, when Donald Trump lies, they tend to be less tragic and more fantastical.
So when Donald Trump lies, he suggests that Ted Cruz's father murdered JFK, which...
Which, you know, I mean, if I were Ted Cruz, I would be upset about that.
But it's so outlandish that you sort of just have to laugh at it, right?
There's nothing, it's not like you're painting some guy as a drunk driver for killing your wife and daughter.
How about when he said that he spent years talking about the Obama birth certificate thing?
I guess it's untrue, but also it doesn't really matter.
Barack Obama would have been a U.S. citizen even if he had been born in Kenya because he received citizenship at the time of birth from his mother.
So it's just a kind of weird, outlandish lie that he would tell.
Okay.
Now, again, if you hit Joe Biden for the lies, they're going to go after Donald Trump.
You can try to explain the difference between the lies.
It's probably not going to land.
It's probably too subtle for a general election.
So then...
You just get to the third weakness that Joe Biden has, which is that he's been in government forever and he hasn't accomplished anything.
This, I think, is a great area.
I think this should be all the focus of the Trump re-election campaign if Joe gets the nomination.
Joe Biden has been in government for 50 years.
He's been in government for half a century.
He's been in politics since he was 26 years old.
And now I think he's 175 years old.
Maybe I didn't do that math right.
But he's been in government forever.
What has he accomplished?
Can you name any Any major piece of legislation that Joe Biden gets credit for?
Any major national initiative?
Any major problem solved because of Joe Biden?
No.
He's just kind of been there.
He's also a loser.
I mean, he ran for president in 1988, 30 years ago, and he lost.
Then he ran for president in 2008, 20 years after that fact, and he lost.
And he would have gone nowhere except that Barack Obama hated Hillary Clinton enough to make Joe Biden his vice president.
He's never accomplished anything.
Contrast that with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has been in politics for, what, three and a half years now?
And he's had the most effective record of any president in my lifetime, on the right or the left.
The Heritage Foundation pointed out in 2017-2018 Donald Trump has effected a conservative agenda more quickly even than Ronald Reagan.
That's pretty good.
And you remember this was a major theme in 2016.
Trump talked about there are all talk, no action politicians and then there are people like me who are action.
We're developers.
We're builders.
We're businessmen.
That is, I think, the way to go after Joe Biden.
And I think it's pretty devastating because I don't think the race is over.
I don't think Joe Biden has the nomination locked up.
Even the New York Times, Jill Filipovich writing in the Times today, had this great headline.
Does anybody actually want Joe Biden to be president?
No.
People would tolerate him.
I guess he's probably everybody's number two choice.
He's doing well in the polls with name IDs basically unobjectionable.
But does anyone really want him to be president?
It doesn't seem so.
Also, remember, at this point in 2016, who were the top GOP contenders?
You probably don't remember this, but during the 2016 election, in, I guess, late 2015, the top contenders were, drumroll please, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker.
How are they doing now?
Rubio is still in the Senate, at least.
The other two guys aren't anywhere near the government.
Anything could happen.
I mean, these polls don't tell us a whole lot.
And when you see people polling at a low level, but they've kind of surged, they've kind of made a name for themselves, like Buttigieg, you start to wonder if this race is going to start looking radically different.
Buttigieg was at a town hall last night at Fox News, the supposedly conservative outlet, and he got a standing ovation.
We'll explain how that happened.
We'll get to Justin Amash.
The anti-Trump Republican who's calling for impeachment.
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You know, it just occurs to me, I think maybe the Trump campaign has a sense that the only way they can really go after Biden is on his effectiveness. I think maybe the Trump campaign has a sense that us.
Thank you.
Because, you know, they're not calling him Lion Joe.
They're not calling him Corrupt Joe or Crooked Joe.
They're calling him Sleepy Joe.
I told you, I said, Sleepy Joe, it's a little weird.
I wonder why they're going after that.
In part, it's to contrast Donald Trump has much more energy than Joe Biden, and that'll be clear on a debate stage.
In part, it's because it rhymes with Creepy Joe, which is another one of his nicknames, so you can get that evoking the creepy sense.
But I think a lot of it is he's been in politics for 50 years.
What has he done?
He's basically just slept.
He's been asleep at the wheel.
He hasn't done anything.
He's just this lethargic guy who's just kind of there.
I wonder if that somehow plays into it.
Maybe not at a conscious level, but I think there might be a sense that the way to go after Joe is on the fact that he's never done anything.
Now, Buttigieg is surging.
Pete Buttigieg, Mayor Pete from Indiana, from South Bend, did this Fox News town hall.
He was roundly criticized for it by the left.
They didn't want them going on Fox News, the awful, evil conservative network.
Did the awful evil conservatives kill him?
Did they batter him?
Did they tar and feather him?
No.
They gave him a standing ovation.
Here he is.
What we're trying to do here is different because the moment that we're in is different.
I get that a millennial Midwestern mayor is not what leaps to mind when you think about a prototypical candidate for president.
But I also think we're living on a moment.
If it's hard to figure out what's going on right now, it's because we are living.
On one of those blank pages in between chapters in American history.
And what comes next could be ugly or it could be amazing.
And I believe running for office is an act of hope.
And so is voting for somebody and supporting somebody and volunteering for somebody.
I hope you'll join me in making sure that that next era is better than any that we've had so far.
You'll see they all go up and they stand for him.
They give him a standing ovation.
At the Fox News town hall.
You hear them say, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete.
They're chanting his name.
So, a few quick takeaways here.
One, Pete Buttigieg is many multiples more intelligent than any other Democrat in the race.
He's a liar.
He's a radical.
He's a leftist.
Sure.
Nevertheless, he's much smarter than them.
He holds himself better.
He speaks better.
He thinks better.
He is much smarter than they are.
The other takeaway is...
Fox News is not just the conservative network.
I know that there's this idea in the public sphere that Fox is just the right-wing, hardcore conservative network.
I go on Fox News frequently.
I go on once or twice a week at least.
And I'm a conservative, that's true.
They also have a lot of left-wingers on.
It's true.
They have some opinion people like Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity who are hardcore right-wingers, but they have a ton of journalists who are central, centrist, or even lean to the left.
And they're a news organization.
They're not just preaching to a conservative choir.
They want the Democrats to come on.
And so I think this helps to explain why did Bernie Sanders get such a great round of applause when he was at the Fox News town hall?
It's because they stacked the audience with Bernie supporters.
Why did Pete Buttigieg get such a great round of applause and a standing ovation at his town hall?
It's because they stacked the audience with Pete supporters.
And why are they doing that?
They're doing that To encourage the Democrats to come on the network.
That's the only way they can get the Democrats to come on and say, listen, we'll give you really favorable coverage.
And in Fox's defense, they're a news organization.
They don't want to be shut out of the 2020 race for all of the various candidates.
The GOP already has its candidate, Donald Trump.
There are 23 candidates and a news organization wants to get them on to talk about it.
So that's what they're doing.
I don't think this standing ovation is evidence that all of a sudden middle America and conservatives are supporting this far left wing mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
But it does show you that Fox wants to be a player in the 2020 Democrat primaries.
Joe Scarborough was so enthusiastic about this Buttigieg town hall that over at MSNBC, he actually said that Pete Buttigieg, single-handedly, is mainstreaming the Democrat Party.
Here's why.
I've seen the future of the Democratic Party, and it's Mayor Pete.
It may not be in 2020.
Perhaps it's in 2024 or beyond, but this guy is going to play an important role in the mainstreaming of the Democratic Party.
For many years to come.
And believe you me, that is exactly what he does.
Regardless of ideology, Mayor Pete mainstreams a Democratic Party.
I wonder whether we're...
Meek and I are...
Being a bit excessive in our praise of Mayor Pete, but I've seen a lot of candidates.
I think this guy, I almost called him kid, because he's like 20 years younger than me.
I think this kid is special.
So, just listen to that statement.
The mainstreaming of the Democrat Party.
The Democrat Party is the oldest continuously operating political party in the world.
And yet they have radicalized themselves so much that they now need to be mainstreamed.
Think about how crazy that is.
You've got a party that's been around for centuries.
They need to be mainstreamed because they've driven themselves so far to the left.
Joe Biden thinks Pete's going to do it.
So let's look at Pete's record.
Is he going to do it?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, yeah, he talks good, and he's got a nice little Midwest smile on his face, and he wears a tie with his rolled-up shirt sleeves, but he is just as radical as all of the other candidates.
He supports abortion until birth.
He was asked if he supports limits on abortion.
He said no.
He supports reparations for the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of black slaves in America.
He supports wild conspiracy theories even about this current administration.
He talked about them last night on Fox.
Now you see the same thing, or something different, but that same kind of saber-rattling with Iran.
By the way, reportedly engineered by John Bolton, who was one of the people who built the war in Iraq.
How somebody who was behind that, one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in American history, is allowed anywhere near the situation room of a president who claims, probably falsely, but claims that he was against the Iraq war all along, is unbelievable to me.
Iranian threats against the United States are just being conjured up by John Bolton.
I don't think that's true.
We've seen Iran take decisive actions against the United States in just the last two weeks, threaten our interests in the region.
That's not just imagined.
It's being reported in the news and lots of different news outlets.
We've seen it happen.
But Pete Buttigieg is ginning up these conspiracy theories that John Bolton is somehow the puppet master of the mullahs in Iran.
Probably not true.
Even worse than that, if you want to talk about radicalism, Pete Buttigieg, in an interview with Hugh Hewitt the other day on the radio, called for the renaming of memorials to Thomas Jefferson.
Here's why.
Let's go to policy now.
A very blunt question because you talk about going to every Jefferson Jackson dinner in Indiana when you're running statewide.
Should Jefferson Jackson dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves?
Yeah, we're doing that in Indiana.
I think it's the right thing to do.
You know, over time, you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honor, and I think we know enough, especially Jackson.
You know, you just look at what basically amounts to genocide that happened here.
Jefferson's more problematic.
You know, there's a lot to, of course, admire in his thinking and his philosophy.
Then again, if you plunge into his writings, especially the notes on the state of Virginia, you know that he knew that slavery was wrong.
Yes.
And yet he did it.
Now, we're all morally conflicted human beings.
It's not like we're blotting him out of the history books or deleting him from being the founding fathers.
But naming something after somebody confers a certain amount of honor.
And at a time, I mean, the real reason I think there's a lot of pressure on this is the relationship between the past and the present.
Listen even to the language he uses.
He doesn't say we're all morally broken, we're all morally fallen, we're all morally imperfect.
He says we're all morally conflicted.
You see, bad guys like Jefferson, they were conflicted and they made the bad choices.
But good guys like Pete Buttigieg, I mean, Thomas Jefferson's not fit to shine Pete Buttigieg's shoes, right?
Pete Buttigieg is a good modern guy who doesn't have slaves.
Thomas Jefferson, he's a bad old guy who did have slaves.
So the argument Buttigieg is making is, no, listen, we're not blotting Jefferson out of the history books for now.
We'll still let him be in the history books, but we shouldn't honor him.
By naming things after him either.
So we're going to rename the Jefferson-Jackson dinner.
Should we also rename towns named after Thomas Jefferson?
Such as, I don't know, Jefferson, Georgia, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kentucky, and New York?
Should we rename those towns?
How about Jefferson counties?
Should we rename Jefferson County, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Maybe we'll do that, huh?
How about the Jefferson Memorial?
He's saying we shouldn't memorialize Thomas Jefferson because that gives him honor.
So I guess we got to knock down the Jefferson Memorial in D.C. How about other guys who held slaves, who were founding fathers?
Like, I don't know, George Washington.
Should we now rename the capital of our country, Washington, D.C.? We're not going to wipe Washington out of the history books.
We'll still let him be in those books.
Nobody's going to read the books.
We just aren't going to name things after him because that gives him too much honor and we shouldn't allow people who held slaves to have any honor, so we have to rename Washington D.C. Hi, I'm Mayor Pete.
I'm going to mainstream the Democrat Party by calling to rename Washington D.C. How about the state of Washington?
Washington's also a state.
Buttigieg is asking, he's raising a good question.
His question is, what is our relationship to history?
What's the relationship of the past to the present?
He's giving the worst possible answer and the most radical answer that has ever been given in the history of the United States.
Good old Mayor Pete, mainstream in the Democrat Party.
But what is our relationship to our history?
Do we hate our history?
Do we like our history?
Do we want to preserve our history?
Do we even know our history?
A culture that forgets its past loses its identity.
This is what the left wants.
This is why the left is always fighting against history.
This is why the left is always trying to get us to undo our history.
These are the stakes that we've got.
Renaming Washington D.C. is the not very far off logical conclusion of what Mayor Pete is saying.
And the right is insufficiently aware of these stakes.
This is not a normal election.
We are not in normal times.
I know they say this about every election, but we really aren't.
The erasure of history is not normal.
The call to radically overhaul the economy...
The transportation, the energy industry, all of American housing, that's in the Green New Deal.
Virtually every Democrat has endorsed it.
$100 trillion program that would knock down your home and every other building in the country and erase 90% of the American energy industry and radically redistribute wealth.
That's not normal.
Culturally, calling men women and women men is not normal.
There's a story now that a baby was just killed because a man went into the hospital with abdominal pains and he said, hey, I'm a man.
And so they treated him as though he were a man.
And then he gave birth to a stillborn child because he's not a man, he's a woman.
And this appeared in a medical journal.
They insisted on referring to him or insisted on referring to her as him.
They insisted referring to this woman as a man.
And they said, see, this brings up the stakes.
Our medical professionals really need to understand that men can be pregnant.
Men can't be pregnant.
Saying that we should pump little boys full of hormones to make them look more like little girls is not normal.
Ernest Hemingway, when he talks about bankruptcy, he says, how does bankruptcy happen?
It happens gradually, then suddenly.
That's what we're seeing.
We're seeing leftism has happened gradually for a hundred years.
Now it's happening suddenly, and some conservatives are whistling past the graveyard, like this empty head, Justin M. Ash, the Michigan congressman.
He's a libertarian Republican.
He's calling for Donald Trump to be impeached.
Why, you ask?
Well, he's highlighting the divide right now on the right.
There is a major divide on the right.
And what the people like Justin Amash, I don't even know how to pronounce his name.
Amash?
I don't know.
What people like him and his side, the ones who are highly, irreparably critical of the president, what they are advocating is a perfectly abstract conservatism.
What they're saying the divide is between is between the good people who have universal values and then all the bad, awful, bigoted, terrible people.
That's kind of how they're portraying it.
Now, the mainstream media is portraying it that way, too.
That's not really what's happening.
The actual divide is between a conservatism that is rooted in something tangible and And a conservatism that is primarily, if not purely, abstract.
That's the distinction.
And Justin Amash is showing this.
So he sent out a 13-tweet-long thread explaining why Donald Trump should be impeached.
He wrote, Next tweet.
Next tweet.
In comparing Barr's principal conclusions, congressional testimony, and other statements to Mueller's report, it is clear that Barr intended to mislead the public about special counsel Robert Mueller's analysis and findings.
Next tweet.
Frequently taking the form of slate of hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice.
There are many, many more tweets.
If you're still awake, I'll point something out to you.
13 tweets long.
494 words.
Did you notice what was missing from those?
All of those tweets?
He never once gives an example of a lie from William Barr or a crime committed by Donald Trump.
He goes on.
He talks about, oh, our beautiful Constitution, the rule of law, the rule of law is being lost.
We have to read the report.
We have to see the conclusions.
The institutions depend on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
If you're making an allegation, which is that A.G. Barr lied and Donald Trump committed a crime worthy of impeachment, Cite the crime.
Put up or shut up.
But he doesn't.
He blathers on and on and on for almost 500 words.
It's the length of an op-ed in a lot of outlets.
And yet he never actually points it out because it doesn't matter.
This is the purely abstract conservatism.
It's no coincidence that Justin Amash would consider himself really a libertarian.
Here are the aspects of this purely abstract conservatism.
It's always sanctimonious, and it's always holier than thou.
And the people who are articulating it are always morally perfect, and the people they're talking about are always the worst of the worst, and they're always assuming the worst intentions.
The other aspect of it is that it's very whiny, because it never jibes with reality.
So it's, wah, wah, wah, we've got to impeach Trump, oh, it's so bad, our institutions, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
It's really, really whiny.
It doesn't offer any practical solutions.
We all want to change aspects of our culture and our politics.
It doesn't offer really tangible things you can hold on to.
It's just wah, wah, wah, everything's so bad.
And then finally, the key aspect is it's vague.
He never cites any concrete example.
Roger Kimball had a tremendous column at American Greatness over the weekend where he explained this divide on the right as the great realignment.
And he says it basically comes down to two views of liberty.
On the one hand, you've got conservatives who want to conserve something.
On the other hand, you have conservatives who want to affect this universal utopian vision.
Roger writes, quote, The real battle that has been joined, and it is a battle that is forging a great political realignment, is not between virtuous progressive knights riding the steeds of liberalism on the one hand and the atavistic forces of untutored darkness represented by populism on the other.
The real battle is between two views of liberty.
One is a parochial view that affirms tradition, local affection, and the subordination of politics to the ordinary business of life.
The other is more ambitious but more abstract.
It seeks nothing less than to boost us all up to that plane of enlightenment from which all self-interested actions look petty, if not criminal, and through which mankind as a whole, but not, alas, individual men, may hope for whatever salvation secularism leavened by utilitarianism may hope for whatever salvation secularism leavened by utilitarianism may provide.
That's the distinction.
A conservatism that seeks to conserve something...
And that seeks to conserve ideas as they have been embodied, to conserve liberty as our political tradition has embodied liberty, to preserve our bonds of love and kinship between our neighbors and each other and our countrymen, and our loyalty to the country.
That's one version.
The other version is just this totally abstract, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou conservatism, which isn't really conserving anything at all.
It's just bringing about a utopian vision of what the perfect political order would look like.
In those terms, that kind of conservatism, quote unquote, sounds a lot like leftism.
It sounds just as utopian.
I think that's the big difference.
And you're seeing this play out in Australia, in the United Kingdom, even in the US.
In Australia, the mainstream media and the experts were shocked because the conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison, won in his election.
Why did he win?
Everyone thought the left winger was going to win.
It's because the left was running on the Green New Deal and the whole world and this perfect order.
And the conservative guy was running on our economy and keeping our affairs as we like them and keeping things roughly as they are.
Getting better over time, but maintaining our identity as Australia.
In the United Kingdom...
Right now it looks like Theresa May, the conservative prime minister, is going to get thrown out because the conservatives and Labour both are not supporting Brexit.
And you've got Nigel Farage who has the Brexit party.
The Brexit party is surging in the elections.
Is it conservative?
Is it liberal?
Is it...
No, it is literally conservative.
It's trying to conserve Britain and Britain's political independence and Britain's political traditions and what makes Britain, Britain.
Same thing is happening in the United States.
Donald Trump won in 2016.
Why?
How did that happen?
Why are people still supporting Donald Trump?
What did he run on?
He ran on America first.
Protect our country.
Not racism, not sexism, not misogyny.
He didn't run on those things.
He ran on keeping America America, allowing America to be America again.
That's...
There's not a...
There's not a totally abstract government policy for everything.
Sometimes we just want to conserve who we are.
It brings me, we'll get to it in just this last minute here, to this revenge porn story.
There's a story that just came out.
I know it doesn't sound connected, but it actually is.
There's this story of, okay, a guy is living with this girl, and then they're engaged to be married, and he starts having an affair with the neighbor.
The fiancé finds out.
She calls off the wedding.
Obviously, this is not an amicable breakup.
And so, because they shared an iCloud account on their iPhones...
This jilted woman can see all of the texts that her fiancé was getting.
Some of them were a little saucy from this neighbor girl.
So what the jilted woman does is she exposes the texts, sends them to all of their friends.
See what a schmuck this guy is?
Now there's a big case.
Is revenge porn protected by the First Amendment?
Is it constitutional?
What government policy can we have?
Look, ladies, it certainly seems like this jilted woman acted within her rights.
I don't think there's some law against her exposing what a schmuck her boyfriend is and how awful the neighbor girl is either.
Now, revenge porn is pretty bad.
You know, you take naked photos and then they get exposed to everybody when the relationship breaks down.
There doesn't necessarily need to be a government policy to stop that.
You just need to stop sending naked photos to each other.
How stupid do you have to be?
Don't send naked photos.
Everything you send over the internet is going to be published on the cover of the New York Times.
Think of it that way.
There's not a government policy for everything.
There's not a utopian political solution.
There's not an abstract right where you can discern, ah, yes, this is the perfect government policy for revenge porn in 2019 that I have deduced from my universal set of rights.
No, don't be stupid.
Don't cheat on your wife or your fiance and don't send naked photos to and from your mistress.
I think this is this conservatism that is now coming up.
It's being called populism or nationalism or all these things.
I think it's people just saying we want reality.
We want to conserve the things that we like about our place.
We like our neighborhood.
We like our friends.
We like America.
We like our traditions.
We don't want to give all of that up.
For the Green New Deal.
We don't want to give up our homes and our cars and the American energy industry and our jobs.
We don't want to knock it all down for pure universal abstraction.
Now, some people, like Justin Amash, or like some of the really rationalistic, dogmatic, conservative ideologue types, they say, here's the 10-point manifesto of conservatism.
That conservatism is not a manifesto.
You can't put it into a manifesto.
It's about conserving something.
That is what we're talking about.
The voters in Australia, they wanted to conserve their good economy.
They've got the best economic run in the history of the world, about 29 years.
And so when you look at these polls, you look at all the big crazy plans that the left is proposing, the Democrats in 2020, the Green New Deal, reparations, free income, free, all these things.
You say, oh, they're leading in the polls.
I don't always buy the polls.
I think there is a conservative revolution.
Maybe it's not ideological.
Maybe it's not dogmatic.
People want reality.
They want to keep what they have.
They like their country.
They don't want to get rid of their history.
They don't hate their history.
They have a sense of gratitude toward their country.
I think that's the new conservatism.
I think it's a wonderful thing.
We've got a lot more to get to, but got to do it 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.
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And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
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