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May 28, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

48:27

Ep. 355 - Fake News: From Feminism To Foreign Policy

From the foreign policy establishment to third wave feminists, fake news explodes like a North Korean nuke. We will separate fact from fiction. Then, Eric Swalwell’s parody of a presidential campaign is running out of money, and President Trump takes the presidential reality TV show to Japan. Date: 5-28-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	From the foreign policy establishment to third-wave feminists, fake news explodes like a North Korean nuke.
	We will separate fact from fiction.
	Then, Eric Swalwell's parody of a presidential campaign is running out of money.
	Surprise, surprise.
	And President Trump takes the presidential reality TV show to Japan.
	I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	The greatest radio interview that has ever been conducted in the history of the world took place at the end of last week.
	This is with the feminist author Naomi Wolf promoting her new book on BBC Three Radio.
	And during this interview, feminism collapsed entirely.
	It's so great.
	We will listen to the clip.
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	Even better, after I got my lovely sleep on my Bowling Branch sheets, I wake up and I get to play this interview with Naomi Wolf.
	For those of you who don't know Naomi Wolf, she is possibly the leading feminist author in the world.
	And she has been a preeminent feminist for at least two decades now.
	She was an advisor to Bill Clinton.
	So when Bill Clinton had all of his girl troubles in the 90s, he brought in Naomi Wolf to shore up support among women.
	Al Gore hired her to support his campaign in 2000.
	She literally helped to launch the third wave of feminism with her book The Beauty Myth.
	She's just been a major figure, and she collapsed on the radio the other day.
	I have to say, a lot of conservatives were really spiking the football on this and were just so happy because they hate Naomi Wolf.
	I sort of like Naomi Wolf, and I've always liked her, not because she's terribly insightful, not because she's honest, as you'll see in this interview, as she gets the facts very, very wrong, but I've always felt that Naomi Wolf would at least honestly follow her arguments to their logical conclusions.
	So even if she started with false premises, she would at least take them all the way to the conclusion.
	In 1995, writing in the New Republic, she wrote an essay about abortion and she said, quote, abortion should be legal.
	It is sometimes even necessary.
	Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus in its full humanity must die.
	This shocked Obviously, the pro-life movement, and it shocked abortion supporters as well.
	It shocked the pro-life movement because we couldn't believe how honest she was.
	She said, yes, the fetus is a baby, it's fully human, it's fully alive, and we have to kill it in order for women to be equal.
	It's an appalling statement, but it's honest.
	The pro-abortion movement was horrified by this because they're basically saying, don't be so honest.
	Don't let the cat out of the bag.
	You have to deny that the baby is a baby.
	You have to deny that the baby is alive.
	And she didn't.
	She said, no, if we want abortion, if the argument for abortion is that men and women need to be equal, men don't get pregnant.
	Well, I guess these days they do get pregnant, but this was back in the old-timey days before men could be women and women could be men.
	Men can't get pregnant.
	Women can.
	And so the only way to have true gender equality is to allow mothers to kill their babies.
	That was the argument.
	That's really the only coherent argument for abortion I've ever heard.
	And she at least advanced that.
	So I always gave her credit for that.
	Still, even if she's following arguments honestly, if the premises are false, then the argument is going to be false as well.
	And the premise of her new book...
	Was just eviscerated live on the air.
	She was doing this interview on BBC Radio 3, and she realized that the thesis of her book, which is called Outrages, Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, is based on a lie.
	This is a slightly lengthy segment.
	It is worth every second.
	It is worth every single word.
	Give it a listen.
	Death recorded.
	I was really surprised by this, and I looked it up.
	Death recorded is what's in, I think, most of these cases that you've identified as executions.
	It doesn't mean that he was executed.
	It was a category that was created in 1823 that allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on any capital convict whom they considered to be a fit subject for pardon.
	I don't think any of the executions you've identified here actually happened.
	Well, that's a really important thing to investigate.
	What is your understanding of what death recorded means?
	Death recorded, this is also from...
	I've just read you the definition of it there from the Old Bailey website.
	But I've got here a newspaper report about Thomas Silver and also something from the prison records that show the date of his discharge.
	The prisoner was found guilty and sentence of death was recorded.
	Ah, the jury recommended the prisoner to mercy on account of his youth.
	See, I think this is a kind of...
	When I founded this, I didn't really know what to do with it because I think it's quite a big problem with your argument.
	Also, it's the nature of the offence here.
	Thomas Silver committed an indecent assault on a six-year-old boy.
	Stop it!
	Stop it!
	She's already dead!
	Stop it!
	Don't go...
	It's so totally devastating, it is almost painful to listen to that radio clip.
	So she says, the premise of her book is that...
	Gay men were executed for consensual sex in the UK in the 19th century, early 20th century, and it's this awful oppression, and see, it's really been happening over time.
	The reason that she concluded that is because in cases of sodomy, the punishment was death recorded.
	And so Naomi Wolf, apparently ignorant of the English jurisprudential tradition, just assumed that meant that the person had been executed somehow.
	Death recorded was just a way for the judge to say, okay, you've been sentenced to death for your crime.
	Your death is now recorded.
	Okay, you get out of jail.
	It was a way to give leniency to people.
	Obviously, this is an egregious error.
	If you're going to write a book with the premise that gay men were executed in the United Kingdom, you need to No, what these terms mean.
	You need to be able to prove that point.
	But okay, I mean, maybe some of us, also ignorant of English jurisprudence, maybe we would have fallen for that too.
	Then he goes on with a knockout punch at the end.
	He says, also, it's not that these were cases of consensual sex between adult gay men.
	This guy that you're talking about raped a six-year-old boy.
	And then he goes on and points out in so many of the other cases she's observing, where you're talking about not just statutory rape, you're talking about forcible rape between adults.
	None of these cases appear to have been consensual, at least the ones that this interviewer looked into.
	And what does Naomi Wolf get to say?
	She can say, oh, well, yes, I suppose we should look into that.
	What does this word mean?
	I mean, it just totally collapses.
	The problem with feminism.
	It's not that feminists are bad people.
	The problem with feminism is not that their arguments necessarily go completely off the rails.
	The problem with feminism is that it's based on lies.
	Such as this.
	I mean, just demonstrable historical untruths.
	And so what do they do?
	They have to rewrite the past.
	I mean, you hear this, even third wave feminists now will say that until 1965, women were brutally, horribly oppressed in this country.
	This is one of the claims, right?
	Before second wave feminism, women were horribly oppressed.
	Everything was terrible.
	Then with the rise of second wave feminism, women's station in life gradually increased.
	They got more political rights, more opportunities in the workplace, more social privileges.
	And therefore now everything's great.
	The problem with that narrative that women had it terrible before the 60s and now it's really great is that study after study shows, women have become less happy Specifically since that time.
	Specifically since the rise of second wave feminism.
	Women have become less happy in both absolute terms and in relative terms.
	Relative to men's happiness.
	Based on lies.
	these gender theory ideas that come around are based on the lie that men can be women and women can be men.
	And so they make arguments from those premises of which bathrooms you should use, what hormones you should inject, what clothing you should wear.
	The arguments, I suppose, sort of make sense, except they're based on a lie.
	And so what Naomi Wolf is demonstrating here and what a lot of these radicals do is they have to change the past.
	They have to erase the past.
	They have to say that gay men were executed for consensual sex as a widespread epidemic in the United Kingdom in the past.
	It didn't happen.
	We can look into the historical record and show that it didn't.
	But by controlling the past, you control the future.
	By erasing the past, you control the future.
	That's why the radical left wants to tear down monuments, rename buildings, rename memorials.
	By controlling the past, you control the future.
	This is why Oliver Stone makes a movie about the assassination of JFK in which JFK is not killed by a communist, as actually happened, and as we know happened, but he's killed by a bunch of Republicans or the military-industrial complex or the CIA or whatever.
	This is why Adam McKay needs to make a movie about Dick Cheney In which Dick Cheney does a number of awful things that we know for a fact he didn't do.
	In Adam McKay's movie, in Vice, Dick Cheney leaks the identity of this CIA operative, Valerie Plain.
	We know that didn't happen.
	We know who leaked her identity.
	We know it was Richard Armitage.
	But it doesn't matter.
	By controlling the past, by rewriting the past, you get to control the future.
	And this is happening in feminism as well.
	So what on earth can Naomi Wolf do now?
	the thesis of her book, Proven Incorrect on Air, we'll see which way she can take it because this is the question that fake news has to deal with everywhere.
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	So what can Naomi Wolf do now?
	Her book falls apart live on the air.
	She handled this as best as she could.
	She came out and she said, oh, I'll have to look into that.
	Or, oh, yes, okay, this merits further investigation.
	So what can she do?
	She can either double down.
	She can go back.
	Obviously, they're going to have to indefinitely push the release of this book.
	She can double down.
	She can find one case somewhere where consensual gay guys were killed for being gay and If she can find that, I don't even know that that exists.
	Or more likely, she can say, okay, they weren't killed for being gay and having gay sex, but they were killed, or rather, they did suffer political consequences.
	They were imprisoned.
	They lost their jobs.
	And really, this is just as bad as capital punishment.
	So really, if you really think about it, Actually, really, the thesis of my book is correct, and she can try to salvage this book.
	I mean, it would be a little pathetic, but she could try to do it.
	Now, the other thing she can do is admit that she was wrong.
	This is the hardest thing for people to do, especially political activists, especially people with a highly defined ideology.
	The best thing that they can do is admit that they were wrong.
	You know, the old conservative columnist, the late great Charles Krauthammer He died in the wool liberal when he was a young man.
	He was a speechwriter for the Democrat presidential candidate Walter Mondale.
	And then he became one of the leading figures during the Reagan administration and later during the Bush 2 administration.
	He was a major conservative figure.
	How?
	I got to ask him this question while he was alive, and he said that he realized that the policies that he had supported, the liberal policies, actually hurt the people that they were intended to help.
	He came to the same conclusion as Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
	Pat Moynihan, a Democrat, wrote the Moynihan Report on the consequences of all of those great society welfare programs.
	He realized they were hurting the people they were intended to help.
	He changed his mind.
	This is a liberating experience when you can change your mind.
	I have changed my mind on a number of topics throughout the years.
	I'm sure I thought a lot of stupid things about politics when I was 13 or 14 years old.
	And then over time I changed my mind and it's great.
	I highly recommend that you do it.
	I used to support abortion.
	Abortion's been in the news a lot the last couple weeks.
	I thought abortion was just fine and dandy.
	I thought it was perfectly right.
	It would give women equality.
	It was a perfectly fine policy.
	And then I investigated it.
	I read about abortion.
	I read about the realities of abortion.
	I had a conversation with a female bioethicist when I was a student fellow in D.C. And she made better arguments than I did.
	She told me things about abortion that I didn't know.
	And then I changed my mind.
	And I'm glad I did because my old opinion was incorrect and now my opinion is correct.
	The more I learn about abortion, the more wrong I realize that I was.
	The trouble with ideology and being so committed to ideology is it makes you look ridiculous and it traps you into very narrow thinking.
	When you could admit that you are wrong, that is an act of humility, it is an act of wisdom, and it is an act of liberation.
	We will see how Naomi Wolf handles it.
	She's always been one of the better feminists, I thought.
	Which is sort of damning with faint praise.
	It's like the healthiest poison.
	But she's always been a little better than some of the other shrieking ones.
	So we'll see how she handles it.
	I hope she comes out and says, wow, I was wrong.
	I hope she goes out and writes the opposite of this book.
	Says, look, people weren't oppressed for their sexual preferences.
	Look, people weren't really victimized to the degree that I thought they were.
	What a great thing.
	I've learned something about my cultural history and that makes me like my history more.
	It makes me like my civilization more.
	I hope she writes that book.
	Not holding my breath, but that would be a true breath of fresh air, especially in a highly partisan and ideological time such as we are in.
	But the fake news of the weekend was not limited to feminism.
	There was also major fake news that came out of the foreign policy Establishment.
	You have this guy, Ian Bremer.
	If you haven't heard of Ian Bremer, he is the real deal.
	This is a major establishment figure in foreign policy.
	He's a political scientist.
	He's a professor at NYU. He's the founder of the Eurasia Group.
	He's a talking head.
	He'll go on television a lot.
	He writes for Time Magazine.
	This is not just some two-bit tweeter or political pundit or something.
	This guy has...
	Credibility, or had credibility, in foreign policy.
	And he sent out a tweet while President Trump was in Tokyo.
	And this is the whole text of the tweet.
	Quote, President Trump in Tokyo.
	Kim Jong-un is smarter and would make a better president than sleepy Joe Biden.
	And people started retweeting this, thousands of retweets.
	Someone responded and said, that cannot be a real quote.
	And Bremer responded to her and said, it's plausible.
	Okay, now, you and I know this is not plausible.
	Anybody who has not been totally deranged by the Trump administration, who has not become this totally reactionary maniac who believes that Trump is a secret, super-duper KGB, Nazi, spy, traitor, whatever, realizes that is not plausible.
	President Trump says a lot of colorful things, but he would not go out and say Kim Jong-un is smarter and would make a better president than Joe Biden.
	This quote is only plausible to people who have an unrealistically negative view of Trump.
	Look, Trump actually has said a lot of things about Joe Biden and about Kim Jong-un and about Kim Jong-un and Joe Biden, but he wouldn't say that.
	There's no way that the president would endorse a North Korean dictator for president over Joe Biden, right?
	However, among people who have an unrealistically negative view of the president, they all believed it.
	They showed themselves to be gullible fools.
	Anna Navarro, who is a fake Republican, she goes on television and pretends to be a Republican, even though she is not.
	I don't remember the last time she did anything that in any way aided any Republican.
	She came out and tweeted, quote, She retweeted Bremer and she said, don't shrug your shoulders.
	Don't get used to this insanity.
	The president of the United States praising a cruel dictator who violates human rights, threatens nuclear attacks, oppresses his people, and kills political opponents, quotes, or capital letters, is not freaking normal.
	Anna Navarro's not kidding around.
	Zach Petkonos, who is a former senior advisor to Hillary Clinton, former senior advisor to the Democrat National Committee, he tweeted out, same thing, same Ian Bremmer quote, the President of the United States is not in control of his faculties, hashtag 25th Amendment, suggesting we need to remove the President from office because of the quote that Ian Bremmer attributed to him.
	Then Bremer came out and he admitted the quote is completely ridiculous.
	He said, this was Bremer's explanation of it, this is objectively a completely ludicrous quote and yet kind of plausible, especially on Twitter where people automatically support whatever political position they have.
	That's the point.
	So what Bremer is saying is, see, I got all of you.
	I was exposing how gullible you are.
	This isn't a hoax.
	This is just an experiment.
	This is just a sort of art piece to show you how gullible all of you are and also to show you how President Trump says outrageous things so that when he says something that is even beyond the pale for President Trump, you sort of believe it, especially if you already don't like President Trump.
	That was Bremer's spin on this, because he got a huge negative reaction.
	People rightly pointed out that he spread fake news, the definition of fake news.
	President Trump then came out and tweeted about it.
	He said, Ian Bremer now admits that he made up a completely ludicrous quote, attributing it to me.
	This is what's going on in the age of fake news.
	People think they can say anything and get away with it.
	Really, the libel laws should be changed to hold fake news media accountable.
	I won't get into the libel law discussion now.
	That will take us an hour probably.
	But Trump goes out and he says, this is fake news.
	Look what he did.
	It got thousands and thousands of retweets before he finally admitted that it wasn't true.
	And Bremer now has since apologized.
	He said, my tweet yesterday about Trump referring Kim Jong-un to Biden as president was meant to ingest The president quoted me as saying it was completely ridiculous.
	I should have been clearer.
	My apologies.
	Everybody is angry at Ian Bremmer for this fake news.
	The right is angry because...
	He was trying to make Donald Trump look crazy and unpatriotic.
	And a lot of people, thousands and thousands of people, retweeted this before he came out and admitted it was fake.
	The left is angry with Ian Bremmer because it makes them look stupid and a little bit crazy.
	Which is no surprise to any of us, but obviously he just made them look like gullible fools.
	So what about Ian Bremmer's excuses?
	What about his excuse that he was just showing us, one, how outrageous Trump can be, two, how gullible we all are on Twitter, three, the integrity of the news media and how the integrity has been diminished, how the credibility has been diminished, how we don't check anything anymore, how we don't fact check, how we don't look into things for ourselves.
	Does he have a point?
	Yes.
	Totally.
	He totally has a point.
	You should never run with something because you saw a tweet about it.
	You should never quote anybody.
	This one I see all the time on the internet.
	You'll see a picture of somebody and then a quote next to them.
	The famous version of this is...
	A picture of Abraham Lincoln, and it says, don't believe everything you read just because you saw it on the internet.
	Abraham Lincoln.
	This is obviously mocking what people do, which is they'll read a quote, they'll see it next to a person's name, and they'll just assume it's true.
	I... I investigate every single quote that I put on this show or I put in writing or that I read on the internet.
	95% of the time, the quotes that you read on the internet attributed to historical figures are false.
	They never said them.
	Almost 100% of the time.
	It's not a scientific number.
	I'm just telling you from experience.
	Virtually every quote you read attributed to Winston Churchill or George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln is just not true.
	And so, when you see a quote on the internet, especially one that seems a little ridiculous, you should look it up.
	Bremmer's right about that.
	Is he right that the president says outrageous things?
	Yes, he does.
	President Trump says outrageous things and his critics, Trump's critics in particular, don't know where the line of plausibility is.
	Trump could go out and say, oh, Kim's a really nice guy.
	Or he could say, yeah, Joe Biden's an idiot.
	And we would all assume that that is totally plausible.
	It is not plausible that Donald Trump would go out and say, I think Kim Jong-un would make a great president of the United States compared to Joe Biden.
	That is just too ludicrous.
	Bremmer is also right that Twitter is fundamentally performative.
	Twitter is not about conversation.
	It is not about the exchange of ideas.
	It is performative.
	It's performative in the way that a presidential debate is not about conversation or exchanging ideas.
	It's about scoring points and showing your audience that your opinion is correct and the other guy's opinion is wrong.
	That is what Twitter is for.
	People have Twitter audiences.
	Those audiences are waiting for...
	The people they're following and we are waiting for the people that we're following to say things and to score points and to show that the opinions that we all share are more correct than the opinions that we all oppose.
	People don't really fact check, particularly the left.
	People don't use common sense, particularly the left, because the left doesn't have a whole lot of common sense.
	So should Ian Bremmer have posted that?
	Since it did have a lot of value in that tweet, and I really like it because it's hilarious to show how gullible the left is.
	Should he have posted it?
	No, he shouldn't have.
	We'll get to why in a second.
	We'll get to what President Trump actually said about Kim Jong-un and Joe Biden, which is almost as outrageous.
	Not quite, but it's almost as outrageous.
	Pretty funny.
	A lot of people are upset about it.
	And we'll get to Eric Swalwell.
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	So Ian Bremmer's tweet has a point.
	It shows that people on Twitter are too gullible.
	It shows that the president does say some outrageous things.
	It shows that the media are undignified and usually spread fake news.
	So it does have a point.
	He still shouldn't have tweeted it.
	Why?
	Because he has a reputation.
	And it's not just him.
	We all have reputations.
	But Ian Bremmer is a recognizable name.
	He has a little blue checkmark.
	He goes to lunches at the Council on Foreign Relations.
	This is a real guy.
	And he is risking, he is tarnishing his reputation and his credibility by engaging in this little joke or hoax or experiment or art piece or whatever you want to call it or whatever he wants to call it.
	That is fake news.
	He did it.
	He shouldn't do it.
	I get the point that he's trying to make, but he's making that point at the expense of his credibility.
	The mainstream media have lost all of their credibility over the last three years too, so I guess maybe that's not a terrible thing.
	That's the fake news about Trump and Kim and Joe Biden.
	The real news is pretty out there as well.
	The real news actually is a news story.
	President Trump, during a press conference in Japan, was asked about a quote from Kim Jong Un, where Kim Jong Un criticized Joe Biden and called him an idiot.
	Here is how President Trump responded to this question.
	Well, Kim Jong-un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low IQ individual.
	He probably is, based on his record.
	I think I agree with him on that.
	But at the same time, my people think it could have been a violation, as you know.
	I view it differently.
	I view it as a man, perhaps he wants to get attention.
	And perhaps not.
	Who knows?
	It doesn't matter.
	All I know is that there have been no nuclear tests.
	There have been no ballistic missiles going out.
	There have been no long-range missiles going out.
	And I think that someday we'll have a deal.
	Okay.
	So I just can't help myself.
	When I heard this clip for the first time, I burst out laughing.
	Mr.
	President, Kim Jong-un called Joe Biden an idiot.
	Well, listen, he called Joe Biden a low IQ individual.
	Judging from the evidence, this is probably correct.
	However, and then he goes on, I just burst out laughing.
	What should he have done here?
	For the people on the left and the right who are criticizing him for this response and saying it's undignified and saying it's not nice to say mean things about fellow politicians overseas and saying that's all, I get it.
	What was he supposed to do?
	He was asked if he agrees with Kim Jong-un.
	He was asked about this comment from Kim Jong-un that Biden is an idiot.
	This is a trap, right?
	Because as a rule, if you are agreeing with Kim Jong-un, you're doing something wrong.
	No American politician wants to be put in the position where he has to agree with Kim Jong-un.
	So if he agrees with Kim Jong-un, he looks awful.
	If he disagrees with Kim Jong-un, he looks like a liar and a hack because President Trump has pointed out that Joe Biden is an idiot for years and years at this point.
	Donald Trump says Joe Biden's an idiot.
	Then Kim Jong-un says Joe Biden's an idiot.
	Then a reporter says, do you agree with Kim Jong-un that Joe Biden's an idiot?
	Trump has to say, yeah, of course I do.
	I've been saying it since way before Kim Jong-un was saying that Joe Biden's an idiot.
	Also, Joe Biden is an idiot.
	Little bit of a side note, but Joe Biden had terrible academic records.
	This is actually the reason that he had to drop out of the 1988 race, because he plagiarized a speech and because he lied about his academic record.
	He said he did well in his law school class.
	He actually was number 76 out of 85 in his law school class.
	So just as an objective matter, Joe Biden probably is a low IQ individual.
	Still, the question is, should he have agreed with Kim Jong-un on this point, especially overseas?
	On top of all of this, President Trump, as he just said, as you heard him say, thinks that he is going to get a deal with North Korea.
	A lot of people are highly skeptical that he's going to get a deal with North Korea, but he thinks he is, and he thinks that the way to get a deal is not to antagonize Kim.
	So I'm not saying this is right.
	I'm not saying this is moral.
	I'm not even saying it's likely to work.
	I'm just saying this is the strategy.
	Trump comes out, he says, look, there haven't been nuclear tests.
	He's not shooting off ballistic missiles.
	He's not, okay.
	So I think we've got progress and...
	And Kim Jong Un criticizing Joe Biden was probably a way to ingratiate himself to Trump, so I'm not going to antagonize him.
	That, I think, is the strategy.
	Also...
	We just as Americans find it repulsive when the President of the United States agrees with a hostile foreign leader's criticism of our politicians.
	Even if he's as awful a politician as Joe Biden.
	By the way, Joe Biden engages in this kind of stuff too.
	Joe Biden has helped to launch his campaign by saying that he's been talking to foreign leaders about how terrible Trump is and how Trump is a danger to the world.
	And they want Joe Biden to run for president.
	So Joe Biden actually is engaging in almost this exact sort of thing.
	I guess it's from the other perspective.
	He's engaging from it as he's talking to foreign leaders and he's agreeing with foreign leaders that Trump is a crazy, awful madman and they want him to run.
	And Donald Trump is agreeing with a hostile foreign leader who's saying that Joe Biden is an idiot, which he is.
	So they're both kind of engaging in this.
	But we do find it repugnant.
	We find it repulsive when the president goes over there and ever utters the words, I agree with Kim Jong-un.
	Okay.
	How could he have done this better?
	What he might have said...
	Something to the effect of, they say, President Trump, do you agree with Kim Jong-un that Joe Biden's an idiot?
	And he could say something like, I don't make a habit of publicly agreeing with hostile foreign leaders who criticize our politicians, even when those criticisms are correct.
	He could have said something like this, where he is acknowledging the principle of not agreeing with a guy like Kim Jong-un publicly.
	Especially over American politicians.
	And also admitting that it is the case that Joe Biden is an idiot and he has been saying this for years.
	He could have done that.
	Except that it's a little too subtle.
	That is not Trump.
	Ronald Reagan could have gotten away with that.
	Ronald Reagan could have turned a phrase such as that, where he acknowledges the principle, he has a dignified response, and then he gets the dig in at the end.
	He makes a little joke at the end about how his opponent's an idiot.
	Very Reagan-esque.
	Trump doesn't do that.
	Donald Trump is too blunt.
	Donald Trump is too personal.
	What we are seeing is the presidential politics in the era of reality television.
	When I see Donald Trump engaging in this kind of behavior, I don't compare that to Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln.
	That's, I think, what the anti-Trump right wants to do.
	That's obviously what the left-wingers are trying to do.
	They're trying to compare these totally anachronistic historical eras and say, see, Donald Trump should have talked like this statesman or that statesman or this foreign leader or that person.
	That's not how I see it.
	What I see is that this is reality TV. It's the kind of personal, petty, catty reality TV stuff.
	When I saw that clip, it reminded me of those old VH1 shows from the 2000s.
	It reminded me of, there was a show with Flavor Flav called The Flavor of Love.
	You know where they have the regular scene is going on and they cut away and everyone's gossiping and saying mean things about each other.
	It reminded me of a classic reality TV show.
	I didn't let y'all know.
	I invited me a special guest.
	Oh hell, who the hell is it gonna be now?
	I'm thinking it's one of his homies or something.
	Yo, New York!
	Hi baby!
	In comes this bitch, New York, from last season.
	Your eyes ain't playing tricks on you.
	This is mad love right here.
	This is what we're watching.
	This is what presidential politics, not just in the United States, but around the world, has become.
	It's just Donald Trump there as Flava Flav.
	He said, yo, I invited a guest.
	Yo, Kim Jong-un, come on in.
	And they come in and they kind of say nice things about each other and everyone is scandalized and everyone is totally shocked and they're all pretending to be appalled.
	Then it cuts away to, you know, you'll see Donald Trump now.
	He'll comment on politics as though he were a political pundit.
	He'll comment on politics as though he's doing a cutaway on a reality TV show.
	So just a few weeks ago, you heard him talk about Elizabeth Warren.
	He's asked about Elizabeth Warren.
	He says, look, frankly, I think she's done for.
	I think she's going nowhere in this race.
	She's probably going to have to drop out because she said that she was an Indian, but she's not really an Indian.
	I could have taken a test.
	I'd be more Indian than her, even though that's zero.
	Ha ha ha.
	Yes, sleepy Joe Biden is doing this.
	Crazy Bernie's doing this.
	It's all reality TV. And we love it.
	We totally love it.
	That's why we love reality TV. Abraham Lincoln is presidential politics in the era of great oratory.
	During Lincoln's time, one of the main forms of entertainment was to go out and listen to politicians give three-hour speeches.
	Literally, three-hour orations.
	And this was a major cultural and entertainment event.
	Before Lincoln became president, he had the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
	He'd go around the country, and it was a road show with Stephen Douglas.
	And they would debate the question of slavery in soaring rhetoric that would go on for hours.
	Ronald Reagan, then, is presidential politics in the era of Hollywood's golden age, in the kind of final days of glamorous Hollywood.
	So the Reagan era was highly scripted, cinematic, glamorous.
	It wasn't the same thing as Abraham Lincoln.
	But it was Hollywood.
	It was epic.
	It was Ronald Reagan going to Berlin and saying, tear down this wall.
	Mr.
	Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
	Going rather to the Berlin Wall.
	That was politics in the age of Reagan.
	Big screen.
	President Trump is presidential politics in the era of reality television.
	It's smaller.
	It's cattier.
	It's more gossipy.
	It's more focused on personal relationships and personal intrigue.
	And it's about the funny barb.
	It's about the cutting barb, the petty barb.
	It's more authentic.
	It's not the big screen and the proper framing and the right shots.
	It's a camera following you around.
	It's a tweet.
	It's an Instagram post.
	It's less guarded.
	It is less dignified.
	It is less principled.
	But that's what it is.
	And it's not Trump's fault.
	I'm not defending the president exactly on this line of agreeing that Joe Biden's an idiot with Kim Jong-un.
	I'm not defending the area of reality television.
	I'm just saying that's the culture we're in.
	Reality TV didn't get popular in spite of us.
	We made reality TV popular.
	That's what our culture wants.
	Donald Trump didn't accidentally become president.
	We voted for him.
	We voted for the king of reality television to be the president.
	That's on the culture.
	That's what the culture wants.
	You can't then elect the king of reality TV to be the president, and then he behaves like he's on reality TV, and then we all pretend that we're shocked and horrified and appalled that he's behaving like he's on reality TV. That's the culture that we're in.
	And you can scream and yell and talk about how awful the culture is.
	That's the reality.
	And people who are going to succeed in this culture are going to engage in reality TV. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made herself one of the biggest names in national politics.
	And because it's the U.S., therefore global politics.
	And she does it by making chili in her crockpot at night and live streaming it and rambling incoherently about global warming.
	She does it while she's painting her wall or sitting with a glass of wine on the floor of her apartment.
	That's reality TV. That's not Reagan.
	That's not Lincoln.
	That's not great rhetoric.
	That's not cinematic Hollywood.
	That's where we are.
	President Trump even explained that this is the culture that we're in.
	He tweeted out...
	Quote, That tweet from President Trump is the cutaway in the reality TV show.
	He's explaining what's happening.
	It's all personal.
	It's all just about him and Kim.
	It's not about the principles or the historic relationship between the U.S. and Korea.
	Even at the end, he said, perhaps that's sending me a signal.
	Oops, I don't know.
	Who knows?
	That is the era that we're in.
	And look, either you can whine and complain about how terrible things are and how everything was so much better in the good old days, or you can deal with reality, accept it as it is.
	And look, this petty era of politics is giving us some great stuff, such as...
	The fake presidential campaign of Eric Swalwell.
	I know he thinks it's a real presidential campaign.
	It is a parody of a presidential campaign.
	Over the weekend, he sent out a fundraising email.
	The subject was, we're on a downtrend.
	My heart started beating fast.
	I said, oh no, please don't tell me the Swalwell campaign is over.
	Because Eric Swalwell said, I am you.
	Therefore, I am Eric Swalwell.
	Therefore, my presidential campaign is over.
	That's no good.
	He writes, he says, quote, We're writing to you with an urgent request.
	We just looked at our finances.
	It seems like we're on a downtrend for this month's fundraising numbers.
	I hope not, because his is my favorite race in 2020.
	He then posted this video from Vice News, where he is asked why America should elect just another white guy.
	Why should another white guy be president?
	Well, a white guy who doesn't see other identities or understand other experiences should not be president.
	I do.
	And where there would be gaps in my knowledge or my experience, I will pass the mic to people who do have that experience.
	I'm a white guy, and I'm really sorry for that, and I'm terrible, and therefore you should elect me president because I won't ever be president or say anything or do anything.
	I'll let other people who are not white guys do that, and that's why you should elect me a white guy.
	I am you.
	That's Eric Swalwell's presidential campaign.
	You should elect me a white guy because white guys are terrible.
	That's it.
	He is a parody of a progressive presidential candidate.
	And in this video, he not only reveals himself to be vacuous, just absolutely vapid and empty-headed, he also reveals all of the left-wing slogans that he parrots to be empty as well.
	So at the end he says, I'm going to pick a woman for vice president.
	I pledge to pick a woman.
	Why?
	Is he going to pick a woman because one particular woman is very talented?
	No.
	Any woman will do.
	Any woman.
	I'm Eric Swalwell, and I value women so much that I think they're all basically the same, and I'm just going to pick one so that it makes it easier to elect me a white guy.
	His slogan is, go big, be bold, do good.
	What does that mean?
	I have absolutely no idea.
	What does Eric Swalwell want to do?
	Nobody knows because he doesn't care, because he stands for nothing, because he is the emptiest candidate in the race, with the possible exception of Beto O'Rourke.
	He says he's willing to pass the mic.
	He says he's going to pass the mic for issues that a white guy shouldn't address.
	If he's going to pass the microphone, why should we elect him?
	If he's going to pass the mic to people who are better qualified than he is, shouldn't we just elect the person that he's going to pass the mic to?
	Is he going to get up there during the Democrat presidential debates and they're going to ask him a question and he'll say, you know, before I answer, how about any of the ethnic minorities or women on stage?
	They should answer.
	Okay, then I guess we should elect them too because we're going to pass the mic.
	When Iran fires some missile at one of our ships in the Middle East, is he going to pass the mic As President Swalwell to someone who knows Iranian culture better, he's going to pass the mic to someone who has eaten more falafel and hummus or something.
	He's a white guy.
	What does he know about Iran?
	We elect politicians not to pass the mic, not to give away their power to some arbitrary identity group.
	We elect them for their judgment.
	This is the same problem Beto has.
	Beto was in Iowa.
	He came out and he said he wants voters to shape him into the presidential candidate that they want.
	He wants voters to mold him into the presidential candidate.
	I guess if you don't have a spine, then you're pretty malleable.
	You're easily molded.
	We elect people because they stand for something.
	If we're just going to mold you into whatever we want, why would we ever elect you?
	Why not elect any of the other people who maybe already themselves align more with what we think?
	And because they're not infinitely malleable, might actually stand for what they say they're going to stand for.
	They might actually keep their promises.
	That's why he's not going anywhere.
	That's why Swalwell's not going anywhere.
	I mean, these campaigns that stand for nothing are collapsing in real time.
	Joe Biden is afraid of this.
	We'll get to him a little bit more tomorrow.
	Before we go, because it's the day after Memorial Day we weren't on yesterday, I just want to give a thank you to everyone who, obviously to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our country and our way of life and our liberty, and also to the families who have had to make that sacrifice by the loss of their family members.
	Memorial Day is one of the strangest holidays because the way we We commemorate it is by celebrating and we have backyard barbecues and we eat hot dogs and we drink too much and we go out to the beach and we just have a really nice day.
	And Memorial Day exists to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice, who gave their lives to...
	I know a number of Gold Star families, so I know that Memorial Day for them is not about beers and burgers and going out to the beach.
	It's a very difficult day for them.
	I did a play a few years ago.
	It was a fundraiser for the USO right here in Hollywood, and it was a play about Gold Star families and people who gave their lives.
	And one of the sort of the central figure of this play was a guy named Lance Corporal Corey Ryan Guerin.
	He was killed in Iraq at the age of 18.
	Signed up, gave his life for our country and for...
	You and me and for everyone else around the country.
	And he did it at age 18.
	And I got to know his family pretty well.
	Wonderful people.
	Memorial Day is not an easy day for them.
	It's a really tough day.
	And so I just want to give a heartfelt thank you as we all did enjoy our day yesterday.
	And I guess this is fitting because we get to enjoy those days because there are people who are willing to make those sacrifices for us.
	And to honor their memory, we enjoy ourselves.
	We have a nice day.
	But I do want to give a heartfelt thank you to all of the Gold Star families, the ones who are listening to this show, and everyone else as well.
	And a heartfelt thank you to everyone who gave their life for me and you and our whole country.
	That's our show.
	Come back tomorrow.
	Got a lot more to get to.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	We'll see you then.
	The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
	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.
	And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, President Trump slams Joe Biden by citing the world's worst dictator.
	It ain't a great strategy.

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