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May 31, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:35
Ep. 357 - Why Trump Is Going To Win In 2020

Betting markets, election models, and a political scientist who has correctly predicted 9 presidential elections all say Trump is headed for victory in 2020. We will examine why. Then, Liz Warren gets wrecked on the radio, the world’s tiniest baby ever is born, and a conservative writer opens up a major fight on the Right. Date: 5-31-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Betting markets, election models, and a political scientist who has correctly predicted nine presidential elections all say President Trump is headed for victory in 2020.
We will examine why.
Then, Liz Warren gets wrecked on the radio.
The world's tiniest baby ever is born.
Elton John hates his own country.
And a conservative writer, Saurabh Amari, opens up a major fight on the right.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So a political scientist and an American university professor with a extraordinarily good track record of predicting presidential victories is predicting that President Trump will win in 2020 unless Democrats do this one weird trick that's going to be a good one.
this one thing that he suggests will help them to win in 2020.
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So the good news is President Trump is going to win in 2020 according to not just one, but multiple election models from a lot of people who have accurately predicted a ton of presidential elections.
That's the good news.
The bad news is Democrats have an opportunity to take that away from him, according at least to Alan Lichtman, who has correctly predicted nine presidential elections.
His model shows that Donald Trump is going to win in 2020.
Unless the Democrats impeach.
So this is a sort of interesting model because what we've been told is that Democrats impeaching President Trump will destroy their chances in 2020 because the people will rally around Trump.
They'll see it as a Democrat overreach.
They'll see it as them trying to overturn a presidential election.
They'll rally to his side and give him re-election.
This is the conventional wisdom for the Clinton 96 election that All of the Republican investigations, moves towards impeachment, were overstepping their bounds, and the people rallied.
You know, they had just swept the Republicans into the House in 94, but then they rallied around Bill Clinton in 1996 and gave him re-election.
Okay, the reason Alan Lichtman says that's wrong is that impeachment happens in 1998.
And what that gave to the Clinton administration was the whiff of scandal.
So, as a result of this whiff of scandal, Al Gore lost the 2000 election because people were sick of the ugliness and the scandal of the Clinton administration.
George W. Bush ran on restoring dignity to the White House, and so they kicked out Al Gore and they gave it to George W. Bush.
Possibly.
Okay, I see the argument there.
The trouble is that the Trump administration already has the whiff of scandal.
It has the whiff of many scandals, actually.
They're all kind of stupid scandals.
It's all a porn star payment, or he hired this guy who was no good, and then this guy, or he had a real estate deal in the 80s.
I think they're scandals that people don't care about.
But the mainstream media have tried to make this the scandal administration.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama, who legitimately had serious political scandals, he politicized the IRS to go after his political opponents.
Dinesh D'Souza went to jail, basically, because he made a mean documentary about Barack Obama.
He weaponized the DOJ under Loretta Lynch.
He had the Fast and Furious scandal gunrunning under Eric Holder into Mexico.
there were a lot of real scandals under the Obama administration.
Obviously, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor lying to the American people.
Donald Trump doesn't have that, but he's got, according to the mainstream media and the popular culture, more public scandal than Barack Obama did.
So I don't really see that as being the issue.
And it's not just Alan Lichtman who has this model, though he has a very good one.
The New York Times, unfortunately, probably had to choke on it as they were typing it out in their article.
The other day, the New York Times showed three election models, all of which show that Trump is going to win.
So Steve Ratner, writing in the New York Times, he described the fair model.
This is for Ray Fair, a professor at Yale.
Ray Fair found that the growth rates of GDP and inflation have been the two most important economic predictors in presidential elections, and obviously President Trump is doing very well on those fronts, and the economy is exploding, and especially after the sluggish, awful economy of Barack Obama, things are looking very good there.
On top of that, what Ray Fair found is that incumbency is an important determinant of presidential elections, and President Trump obviously is the incumbent, so he has that going for him too.
When you add those together, very good shot that Donald Trump gets re-elected.
Mark Zandy, who is the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, looked at 12 different presidential election models and Trump won all of them.
It's important to note there's a difference here between an election model and election polls.
So polling is just when you go out and you ask a bunch of people, who are you going to vote for, this guy or that guy?
A model is when you take in all these sorts of various factors.
Perhaps it includes some public polling, it includes a lot of economic data, it includes foreign policy data, it includes all of these things.
You plug it all in together and a computer then comes up with who is going to win.
And Zandi, who's a serious guy at Moody's, looked at 12 different models.
Trump wins all of them.
Then Donald Luskin at Trend Macroanalytics, or Macrolytics rather, looked at the Electoral College.
So he had a model that specifically looked at the Electoral College, came to the same conclusion.
Trump wins.
This is very bad news for the left, very good news for the right.
Why do people think Trump won't win?
Because he has a relatively low approval rating.
That said, his approval rating is somewhere between 44 or 46, let's say.
It's still on par with or higher than Barack Obama's at this point in his presidency, and don't forget Barack Obama got re-elected.
Now, the other side of this is polling, looking at certain key states, looking at key demographics that President Trump is going to have to win if he wants re-election, so the suburban white women or certain areas of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.
Still, All of that aside, look at these models.
These models have been fairly accurate, and Trump wins it.
So that's pretty good news.
I have another theory on why President Trump is likely to win in 2020, which is that there isn't even one single candidate on the other side who can beat him.
People have been saying possibly Joe Biden.
You've got to remember, Joe Biden's been hiding out now for weeks.
He got his post-announcement bump and then he's hiding away because he knows he's weak when he goes out in public.
Bernie Sanders, possibly.
I don't really see that happening.
At least Bernie stands for something, so maybe he can make a serious play.
I don't really buy it.
Elizabeth Warren surging in the polls.
People counted her out.
She was barely registering in polls a few weeks ago.
Now she's up 8%, 9%, doing pretty well.
She's still nothing.
And this has not been clearer than when she was on The Breakfast Club, this excellent radio show, yesterday morning, and they called her out for the eternal weakness of her campaign.
Your family told you you were Native American?
Yeah!
Charlemagne tells me I'm Dominican, but I don't believe you are.
How long did you hold on to that?
Because there was some reports that said you were Native American on your Texas bar license and that you said you were Native American on some documents when you were a professor at Harvard.
Like, why'd you do that?
So, it's what I believe.
You know, that's, like I said, it's what I learned from my family.
When did you find out you weren't?
Well, I'm not a person of color.
I'm not a citizen of a tribe.
And tribal citizenship is an important distinction.
And not something I am.
Were there any benefits to that?
No.
Boston Globe did a full investigation.
It never affected, nothing about my family ever affected any job I ever got.
She didn't get a discount in college?
You're kind of like the original Rachel Dozo, a little bit.
Rachel Dozo was a white woman pretending to be black.
Well, this is what I learned from my family.
He was just waiting.
Talk about a really masterful radio interview.
He kind of lures her in.
He seems kind of nice.
He's playing cool.
Oh, but you're not.
Okay, you didn't get any benefits from pretending to be Native American.
You're kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal, huh?
And you can see the fire in her eyes.
And then he says, you know, she's a white woman pretending to be black.
And Liz Warren, what can she say?
She said, well, look, that's what I was told by my family.
And he goes, uh-huh.
And she goes, uh-huh.
Oof, nothing more to say.
This issue is not going away.
She has tried to dismiss it.
She's tried to do the Clinton playbook, which is you have a scandal, then you hide from the scandal for six months, and then someone brings the scandal back up and you say it's old news.
Even though you never answered any questions about it, you can say, well, it's old news.
I'm not going to do it.
This isn't working for Elizabeth Warren.
She has had to answer for this for years and years and years.
She has tried every strategy on answering it.
She has doubled down She got the Boston Globe, which is her personal Pravda, to do a whole big expose.
Liz Warren took a DNA test, and she is Native American, even though it's only one one-thousandth and probably not even that.
And she said, see, look, I'm Native American.
And she was roundly mocked by everybody in both parties.
So then she got rid of that, and she said, okay, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to pretend that I was Native American, but I never got any advantage from it.
And I never did it myself.
It was just Harvard telling me, telling people that I was Native American.
Well, then that wasn't true because she signed her name as Native American on a Texas bar application.
Okay, she tries all these different strategies.
None of them are working.
If she wasn't able to come up with an answer for this when she was running against Scott Brown in the Senate race, she certainly should have come up with an answer before she got into the presidential race.
Trump has called her Pocahontas for three years.
She still didn't have an answer when she got into the presidential race.
Now, so much later, she still doesn't have an answer.
The Breakfast Club asks her about it.
She doesn't have an answer.
She's not coming up with an answer.
The issue's not going away.
And she's not going anywhere.
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So, they don't have any really strong candidates on the Democrat side.
Liz Warren is currently the surging candidate.
She's only surging because she hasn't been in the public eye.
People basically counted her out.
President Trump said a few weeks ago she was done.
So then people stopped paying attention to her and she starts to surge.
Then the Breakfast Club points out that she's a total fraud and her entire life is a lie.
She's going to fall down again.
Joe Biden is still very high up in the polls right now.
He's high up because nobody's heard from him.
Nobody's seen him.
When he finally gets back out there, goes on a debate stage, he's going to drop.
And maybe he's got the best chance against Donald Trump.
Maybe Bernie sort of has a chance against Donald Trump.
Maybe.
But where's the strong killer candidate?
I just don't see them on that side.
And that's the biggest issue.
Because elections are not only about the economy.
They're not only about models.
They're not about generic Republicans or generic Democrats.
They're about real people.
Maybe the Democrats could have won in 2016, but Hillary was a terrible candidate.
Maybe the Republicans could have lost in 2016, but Trump was the perfect candidate to beat Hillary.
That's going to be a major issue.
The other issue is, even let's say that first model is correct, the Alan Lichtman model, and they've got to impeach to create more scandal in the Trump administration and hurt him in the election.
What are they going to impeach over?
That you had Bob Mueller come out and give his report.
No collusion, and he didn't make a decision on obstruction.
But he said there wasn't Sufficient evidence.
Then Barr and Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein look at the evidence.
They say, there is absolutely not sufficient evidence here.
Then Mueller comes out and he says, yeah, but I didn't exonerate him.
And Barr says, yeah, right, that's what I said in my letter too.
Nothing.
It just ends up with nothing.
So we had Mueller's press conference yesterday, pathetic, and then William Barr is not staying silent.
So the Attorney General came out to respond to Mueller's criticisms.
We saw the special counsel yesterday make that statement.
He analyzed 11 instances where there were possible obstruction and then said that he really couldn't make a decision.
Do you agree with that interpretation?
I personally felt he could have reached a decision.
In your view, he could have reached a conclusion.
Right.
He could have reached a conclusion.
The opinion says you cannot indict a president while he's in office, but he could have reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity, but he had his reasons for not doing it, which he explained, and I'm not going to, you know, Well,
I mean, he seemed to suggest yesterday that there was another venue for this, and that was Congress.
Well, I'm not sure what he was suggesting, but, you know, the Department of Justice doesn't use our powers of investigating crimes as an adjunct to Congress.
So William Barr is saying, I'm not backing down.
I'm not going away.
I behaved absolutely appropriately.
And then the interviewer on CBS brings up the question of Mueller's press conference.
And what Mueller said in his press conference was bewildering.
He said, we investigated obstruction, but we can't come to a conclusion on obstruction.
Which raises the question, why did he investigate it then in the first place?
Actually, that investigation exceeded his bounds anyway because he was only tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
And then by saying he couldn't come to a conclusion, he's sort of admitting that he overstepped his bounds.
But then William Barr says, yes, he could have reached a conclusion, probably should have reached a conclusion.
And what the interviewer then says is, well, it looks like he was just teeing it up for Congress.
He did that investigation to give Congress a lot of ample fodder so that they could begin impeachment proceedings.
And what William Barr says is, he sort of tacitly agrees with that, and he says, sure, but the DOJ does not exist to do investigation work for Congress.
That's not the role of the Department of Justice.
So I think at the end of all of this, The DOJ, under William Barr, and ultimately under President Trump, comes out looking a lot better even than the Mueller team.
And by the way, the Mueller team more or less exonerated the president.
I mean, very practically speaking, they did exonerate the president.
Even if in the wording of the report, they say they won't reach a conclusion on the question of obstruction.
So, not a ton of scandal here.
Not a whole lot that is, I think, really...
Able to gin up the impeachment fury against Donald Trump.
Judge Napolitano on Fox, who I really like, but I think he's wrong here, he comes out and questions this, questions Attorney General Barr and basically defends Bob Mueller.
Well, it's not uncommon for two prosecutors looking at the same evidence to come to different conclusions.
I mean, this happens every day in every prosecutor's office.
But I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it is up to the attorney general to make these decisions.
I think the reason Mueller did not come to a conclusion on obstruction of justice is not because the evidence wasn't there.
It's there.
There are ten crimes outlined.
There's enough there to get an indictment on any of them if the defendant were not the president of the United States.
I think the reason is because he knew that the Attorney General would never give him permission to do so.
And he's a soldier.
He's a Marine.
He doesn't want to challenge and take on his boss publicly.
The argument breaks down there at the end.
So what Napolitano is saying is there is a ton of evidence that he could have been used to indict if he weren't the President of the United States.
Bob Mueller is a loyal soldier and didn't want to overstep his bounds.
That's demonstrably not true.
Bob Mueller has contradicted his boss, Attorney General William Barr, multiple times in public through that grandiose and ridiculous letter he sent and then in that press conference that was totally gratuitous and unnecessary yesterday.
So he's obviously willing to contradict Attorney General Barr.
And beyond that, the point Judge Napolitano is making is that He didn't reach a conclusion because he felt it was overstepping his bounds somehow.
He's a guy who already oversteps his bounds.
Well, he didn't reach a conclusion because he felt that Attorney General Barr wouldn't act on it.
So what?
His job isn't to just do whatever Attorney General Barr wants to do.
He could have easily put his conclusions that Trump committed a crime in that report and waited for the AG to make his move.
He's been combative already.
He staffed the investigation with Never Trumpers.
I don't think that's why.
I think Mueller was bloodthirsty to show evidence of a crime and to come to a conclusion, and he just wasn't able to do it.
And so...
If you had a weaker attorney general, if you had an attorney general who is more concerned about his own future political career, I think he would behave in a more partisan way here.
But actually what's happening is you have this guy, William Barr.
He's only the second guy in history to serve as attorney general twice.
And William Barr basically says, look, I have nothing to lose.
And so I am going to call it like it is.
I'm going to be a straight shooter and I'm going to follow DOJ protocol.
You saw someone who is accused of protecting the president, enabling the president, lying to Congress.
Did you expect that coming in?
Well, in a way, I did expect it because I realized we live in a crazy hyper-partisan period of time, and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them, that I'd be attacked because nowadays people don't care about the merits or the substance.
They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits.
Everything is gauged by politics.
And, as I say, that's antithetical to the way the department runs, and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital, and I realize that.
And that's one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that maybe I should take it on, because I think at my stage in life it really doesn't make any difference.
Really an admirable statement here, because he is so right.
This guy has been in Washington for a very long time.
He's operated there a long time, and he knows that anybody who steps into that role, if he has the most unimpeachable record ever, which William Barr basically does, if he steps into that role right now, he is going to have his reputation tarnished.
He is going to have his career destroyed.
And Barr basically saying, I'm at the end of my career so I can do it.
A younger guy would not be able to do it, would not be able to withstand that, would have his career ruined, would maybe make questionable decisions to try to save his career or save public face.
Barr doesn't need to worry about that.
He's the most liberated man in Washington.
And the only thing that they can hold over him is his legacy, is his reputation.
And even on that, he says, who cares?
I'm at the end of my career.
It's a reputation that you've worked your whole life on, though.
Yeah, but everyone dies.
I don't believe in the Homeric idea that immortality comes by having odes sung about you over the centuries.
So you don't regret taking the job?
No.
That is the right attitude, not just for the attorney general, but for every one of us.
Everybody dies.
Just go for it.
Just do the right thing.
Your life is not going to be measured in the odes that are sung to you after you die.
You can't just do everything for public approval.
Just do it.
Just do it.
Just go for it.
I love that attitude.
That is an attitude of a very dignified man, and it's a great thing that he is the Attorney General right now.
We have got to get to a few more fabulous stories.
The world's tiniest baby was born, and yet in many states in this country that baby could be killed.
And not just killed now, it could be killed for many more weeks.
We will get to that.
We will get to the major fight on the right between So Rob Amari at First Things and David French at National Review.
And if we have time, we'll get to the Steven Crowder tweet storm that YouTube right now is trying to deplatform our pal Crowder.
We'll get to all of that.
But first, got to go to dailywire.com.
It is $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Wall show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
The world's tiniest baby has been born.
This is a wonderful, so the baby weighs basically nothing, 23 weeks old, born, and has survived.
A wonderful feel-good story.
Obviously, this raises some serious questions about the abortion discussion that we've been having for weeks, because in many states in this country, that baby could be killed.
And in many states in this country, people deny that that baby is a baby.
But the baby was born and the baby is now alive.
And listen to how the mainstream media covers it.
Tonight, an amazing announcement from San Diego.
What doctors are calling the world's tiniest surviving baby.
Just 8.6 ounces when she was born prematurely at 23 weeks.
Well, after five months in intensive care, the little girl named Sabi is now healthy and she's headed home.
And we are so happy for her family.
8.6 ounces, half a pound.
This baby apparently was the size of an apple.
Born at 23 weeks, now going home happy, healthy, all alive.
Good thing for that baby.
That baby wasn't born in Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New York, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, or Virginia to parents who wanted to kill it because if that had been the case, she would be dead.
It wouldn't even be admitted that she was a baby.
In all of those states in the country, you can kill babies who are at least as old, if not significantly older, than that baby.
And those states want to pretend that the baby isn't a baby.
But you just heard it.
You just saw it.
The baby is a baby.
This should end the abortion debate.
Those pictures should end the abortion debate.
Or at least what they should do to the abortion debate is take it into honest terms.
Naomi Wolf, who we were talking about last week, Naomi Wolf in the mid-90s came out and said, abortion rights mean that we need to kill the baby in all of its humanity.
In order to have equality for men and women.
At least she was honest.
What people who support abortion at 23 weeks need to say is, they look at little baby Mabel, was that her name?
Look at that little baby and say, you should die because of my political ideology.
My political ideology means that you must be killed.
That's just the cost of it.
That's That's the end of the argument.
That certainly should be the end of the argument.
We'll see what those states do on abortion.
Something tells me they're not going to be protecting babies anytime soon.
There's a major fight breaking out in the right right now, in the conservative movement, in so much as it still exists.
The fight is being launched by a traditionalist conservative writer named Saurabh Amari at the journal First Things, and he wrote a piece called Against David Frenchism.
You know David French.
David French, very nice guy.
He is a lawyer.
He served in Iraq.
He is a writer at National Review, and he was a leading never-Trumper.
Bill Kristol tried to get him to run for president.
He's One of the few remaining never-Trumpers, Bill Kristol's another one who's still remaining, and what SoRob is saying is that the conservative movement in America needs to stop being like David French and start being a little tougher.
What this is really a debate between is not these two guys.
I mean, the article's not called Against David French.
It's called Against David French-ism.
What this is really a debate between is liberalism and traditionalism.
Conservatism and liberalism in America are not opposite things.
In some ways they are, but in some ways they aren't.
Because what we mean by liberalism is maybe classical liberalism.
You've heard the phrase classical liberalism.
People forget a lot that in the old days, liberalism had something to do with liberty.
Now liberalism opposes liberty.
Now it's all about equality.
But it comes from the same place.
Libertarians, liberalism, classical liberalism.
And there is a version of...
Conservatism that is really just a sort of liberalism.
It accepts all the premises of liberalism.
It just doesn't take them as far as the progressives do.
And then there's an alternative to this, which is tradition.
Actual conservatism.
So, Rob identifies David French as the embodiment of a conservative movement frozen in time.
As the embodiment of a conservative movement that is trying, anachronistically, to cut and paste solutions and attitudes of the 1980s, of the Reagan Revolution, into the Trump era.
As a movement that has not caught up with the times, that has not accepted the changing circumstances of the world, that has not admitted its own failures.
There were many great things that happened during the Reagan era, but it wasn't perfect.
And in politics, you've got to adapt.
You've got to acknowledge your own flaws and change them and try to fix them.
So he writes, so Rob writes.
What is David Frenchism?
As Irving Kristol said of neoconservatism, Frenchism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets.
Fair enough, that's true.
The reaction to this, though, is that that's also true of the kind of conservatism that Saurabh is advocating.
This idea that conservatism is more a persuasion or an attitude than it is a clear ideological movement, I think that's true of all sorts of conservatism.
That's certainly true of the traditional conservatism that I... Think about.
It's a little bit more of an inclination.
It's a little bit more of an intuition, as the conservative philosopher Russell Kirk said.
But, fair enough point.
David Frenchism, as Sorob defines it, the key here is that it exalts individual autonomy above all else.
Individual liberty above all else.
And David Frenchism, according to Sorob, It says that the primary, if not the sole aim of government, is to maximize individual autonomy.
And the argument for maximizing individual autonomy is that, on the one hand, it's true you'll get a lot of decadence and you'll get porn and you'll get cultural rot, but you will also then carve out a space in the culture for religious conservatives to practice virtue and to do what they want to do.
Now the objection to that version, the David French version of conservatism, which is just an older version of liberalism, is that true liberty cannot survive the sort of libertinism and decadence that follows from maximizing individual liberty.
So the objection to David Frenchism is that if you just maximize individual liberty and you say, okay, you're going to have your space to be decadent pagan degenerates and we're going to have our space to be religious conservatives, eventually that maximizing of individual liberty will create a libertine culture that will not tolerate the religious conservatives.
And we're certainly seeing this in the culture today.
We're seeing...
Obviously, prayer in schools has not existed for over 50 years.
That was rooted out.
We're now being told that if you object to gay marriage even, that you're some sort of bigot.
The redefinition of marriage, if you object to curious sexualities, you're some sort of bigot.
If you object, you are no longer tolerated.
You're deplatformed.
You're censored.
You're kicked out.
You're not allowed in the culture.
Same thing with a good analysis of, or a good analogy rather, would be drugs or porn.
So the idea being, let's legalize all drugs.
And if you want to do drugs, you can do drugs.
And if you don't want to do drugs, you don't have to do drugs.
And it'll be fine.
That's a totally neutral culture.
Except that isn't neutral, because drugs take away your liberty.
So when you do drugs in the name of liberty, the drugs enslave you.
You lose some of your individual autonomy.
You become addicted.
You become a slave to the drug.
And so what you were doing initially in the name of liberty totally erodes your liberty.
Same thing with porn in our culture.
There are a zillion men in this country who are addicted to online pornography.
And the argument for porn is that everybody should have their maximum individual liberty.
But then the argument against porn is it takes away everybody's liberty.
Because it takes away your, because it enslaves you.
So, on the one hand, you've got this conservatism.
This traditional conservatism that Saurabh is writing about, and that says that society should primarily be focused on the good, on virtue, on good stuff.
On the other hand, you have the classical liberalism that he calls David Frenchism, which says that society should primarily value liberty, not just as a means to the good or to virtue, but as the good unto itself.
And this is a big difference.
I, for one, I love liberty.
Few people love liberty more than I do.
But I like liberty because it is an instrument to the good.
Liberty isn't the be-all and end-all.
If some guy uses his liberty to do a bunch of drugs and waste his life, that's terrible.
That's an awful abuse of liberty.
Liberty has to be geared towards something, which is the good.
So Rob writes, So,
one example of individual autonomy that SoRob actually cites is a drag queen reading session at a public library.
We talked about this about a week ago.
Some public library, they have a drag queen reading session for little kids.
Now, this is obviously an example of maximizing individual liberty.
The drag queen gets to dress however he wants to.
He gets to show up and read at this library.
The parents can choose to take their kids there.
It's all just individual liberty.
It's horrific and should not happen, but that's just individual liberty.
The issue that SoRob identifies is the only way to sustain drag queen reading sessions at libraries is with some level of moral approval by the community.
If the community didn't approve of the drag queen reading session, it would not be permitted to happen.
So when you open this whole door to maximizing individual liberty as much as you want...
You end up getting drag queen reading sessions and then you in the community are complicit in the moral approval of it.
And you're seeing this around the culture.
Now if you don't approve of drag queens, if you don't approve of certain sexual relationships, you are not just told, okay, you do you, I'll do me, live and let live.
You're told you're a bigot, you should be ostracized from society.
It is not just neutral to maximize individual autonomy.
It is normative.
It has moral consequences.
It changes how the community views morality.
And ultimately, it becomes hostile to the traditional choices that people might use their individual liberty to choose.
So you say, okay, it's just a big open neutral playing field.
You can make your crazy wacko radical choice.
We'll make our traditional choices.
Ultimately, the wacko choices will overpower the traditional ones.
And a good example of this is religious liberty.
So that was established in this country to protect all the various sects of Christianity from hating each other and warring with each other.
No one ever expected religious liberty to be used as an argument for taking down a statue of the Ten Commandments at a courthouse or at a state capitol.
No one ever expected that.
Likewise, no one ever expected it to be used as an argument to put up a statue of Satan at a courthouse or a state capitol, as the American atheists are trying to do, and have been trying to do for decades.
No one ever expected religious liberty to be maximized in that individual way.
Because let's take it to its most absurd extreme.
Let's say someone was a religious devotee of Hitler.
They think Hitler's a god, they're Hitlerites, and they worship Adolf Hitler.
Does that mean that we should be forced to build statues of swastikas at public courts or at public state houses?
It's not just a political statement.
They worship Hitler as a religion.
There's the religion of the Hitlerites.
Should we be permitted to do that?
No, no one would say that.
So why would we have a statue of Satan?
It's because people get this backwards.
Religious liberty, taken to its extreme, is incoherent because liberty relies on religious ideas.
Our idea of liberty presupposes certain religious foundations.
Other places in the world don't have religious liberty like we do.
Why?
Because they don't come from the same religious culture that we come from.
The idea of liberty that we have comes from Christianity.
The religion in religious liberty comes before the liberty.
So a liberty that undermines that religion is totally incoherent.
Now we're getting this debate, we're getting a little into the weeds, but the reason we have this debate at all between the traditionalists and the classical liberals is because during the Cold War, individualists and traditionalists came together against the Soviet Union.
And the traditionalists opposed the Soviet Union because it was atheistic, and the classical liberals and libertarians opposed the Soviet Union because it was communist and collectivistic.
I'm simplifying a little bit, but you had the cultural guys were upset about the cultural questions, the economic guys were upset about the economic questions, and so they joined together in something called fusionism, which William F. Buckley Jr.
started basically after the Second World War.
After we won the Cold War, this debate opened up between the traditionalists and the classical liberals.
And 2016 blew that debate wide open in particular.
This is an extraordinarily important debate to have.
It's important that conservatives of all stripes have this debate.
But the very important thing for David French, for Sohrab Amari, and for everyone in it, we have to not engage in the debate By alienating each other because the conservative coalition, such as it is, will be destroyed and leftism will take over if we allow this to totally crack us apart.
I side with Saurabh on this question in so much as we should keep things in their proper place, in so much as we should pursue good and not just liberty for its own sake.
We also must defeat the left.
And we are debating right now how best to defeat the left and what it means to defeat the left, but we certainly shouldn't alienate permanently our allies and our potential allies for this.
Very quickly, I have to get to Stephen Crowder.
Steve Crowder...
Is being targeted by some wacko schmuck at Vox.com who is trying to get his channel taken off the air.
He's getting the channel taken off the air because he says Stephen Crowder was mean to him and Stephen Crowder was making fun of his sexual preferences and therefore he should lose his gigantic YouTube channel.
What did Stephen Crowder say about this guy, Carlos Maza?
Here's what he said.
Before we get to the video, with our favorite lispy sprite from Vox, it's ridiculous?
It's bonkers?
You're being given a free pass as a crappy writer because you're gay.
That center line on his little queer graph there.
What is that line?
Well, now the graph is queer?
Violence, filth.
Okay, so the little queer can eat his chips all nonchalantly.
It's code for rape, Mr. Queer Eating Chips on the Vox channel.
Chip, chip, chip, chip, but you can't eat just one.
Like dicks.
This is what Mr. Gay Vox wants to do.
Mr. Lispy Queer from Vox.
What were you holding, gay latino from Vox?
Even his hand movement in fast motion is gay.
Now we're here with a short-haired, angry lesbian on Skype.
Cable news, cable news bitching.
Two gay guys sitting there eating a banana.
We get the symbolism there.
Truth is hiding in a closet two weeks later, probably along to his next Pride Parade outfit.
This guy on the gay, semi-Latino Vox.
Oh, okay, so you really are just an angry little queer.
All right, I can't deal with this sprite anymore.
Okay, he just sashays across without, like, just, oh!
The gay Vox sprite is wrong!
Now he could be a dranny, your honor!
I don't know how many lispy, angry sprites Vox sashay across your screen and try and tell you otherwise.
Or you, by the way, the gay Mexican guy.
The gay Latino v-neck.
Gay Mexican.
A Mexican gay guy used to work.
Mexican gay Latino there at Vox.
Gay Latino from Vox.
The token Vox gay atheist sprite was surprisingly, surprisingly flaccid chest considering how thin he is.
It is very bizarre to me.
Okay, so...
Stephen Crowder will not let one joke go without just really taking it to its extreme.
So he's calling this guy a bunch of names, and he's making fun of them.
This guy, Carlos Maza, Deserves a lot of criticism and should be made fun of.
I think what he's misunderstanding here, though, is this guy thinks that Stephen Crowder is calling him queer because Crowder hates gay people, which is not the case.
Stephen Crowder is calling this guy queer because Stephen Crowder doesn't like him.
and he's calling him queer because that's one way, among others, to make fun of him.
It would be like with me.
If some guy comes up to me and says, hey, Knowles, you're a Dago Guido WAP.
He wouldn't say that because he hates Italian people, probably.
He would say that because he doesn't like me, and I am of Italian descent, and so one way to make fun of me is to call me a bunch of slurs for Italians.
That's what's actually going on here.
That's what he doesn't get.
This guy just went on a 5,000 tweet, I don't have time to go through all the tweets, but he just exemplifies the worst parts of the whiny left here.
So I'll go through a few.
Carlos Mazi says, so I have pretty thick skin when it comes to online harassment, but something has been really bothering me.
When you say, I have thick skin, but what that means is you don't have thick skin.
So you know you're in for just a huge wine fest.
He says, since I started working at Vox, Crowder has been making video after video debunking my videos.
Every single video has included repeated overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity, such as that.
Okay, okay, fine.
Yeah, you're right.
Stephen Crowder made gay jokes about you.
How many times does the left insult straight white men?
How many times does the left talk about how awful straight white men are?
I mean, it's become a cliche to say straight white man.
The left is also insulting people by referring to their sexual preferences.
The left does exactly what you are observing Crowder doing.
He goes on, I've been called an anchor baby, a lispy queer, a Mexican, all these sort of, all these sort of names.
I wake up to a wall of abuse on Instagram and Twitter.
I was doxed.
It scared me.
They make me the target of harassment.
It makes life miserable.
I waste a lot of time blocking abusive Crowder fanboys.
And this derails your mental health.
Dude, everybody in public life gets hate mail.
Everybody.
I get a zillion messages.
Threatening messages, mean messages, insulting messages.
Do you know what I do?
I ignore them.
Because I'm an adult and sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
If you think that getting hate mail derails your mental health, get a new profession.
Go work in some private accounting office somewhere, far, far from the public eye.
Don't be in the public eye.
People in the public eye...
Have always and will always get hate mail.
Grow up.
Goodness gracious.
And this is what they do.
They say it derails your mental health as a way of trying to claim that they're really victims.
They're not just regular victims.
They are super special victims.
As though the rest of us don't get hate mail.
Everybody in public gets hate mail.
That said, I'm not mad at Crowder.
There will always be monsters in the world.
I'm just angry at YouTube for not banning him.
Okay, you're not mad at Crowder.
You just want him to be completely silenced.
This has been going on for years.
And Crowder is still not banned.
All of this to say, I work my effing back off to create smart, thorough, engaging content for YouTube, a company that claims to give an S about LGBT creators.
And it's miserable to have that same company helping facilitate a mind-melting amount of direct harassment.
Oh, you make YouTube videos and you don't want to get negative comments.
Every YouTube video is filled with abusive mean comments.
That is the definition of a YouTube video.
But you think, because you're really special, and you make really good videos, so you shouldn't get any mean comments.
All the rest of us get mean.
But no, you, because you're so special, you shouldn't get any mean comments.
Grow up, dude.
Oh my gosh.
My family sees this.
Yeah, right.
If you're in public, your family sees everything.
Yeah, they see how people react to you and they see what you do.
That's what being in public is.
Your family is part of the public.
This isn't about silencing conservative.
It's about enforcing an anti-harassment policy.
I'm sorry, he said, but it's about enforcing an anti-harassment policy.
When you say but, you negate what you've said before it.
So then he tells people to go over and flag Crowder's videos.
By the way, sure would be a shame if someone went over and flagged his videos, huh?
His name's Carlos Maza.
Sure would be a shame.
They shouldn't do that.
And then he goes on and says, YouTube does not give an F about queer creators.
YouTube does not give an F about marginalized creators.
YouTube does not give an F about diversity or inclusion.
First of all, nobody is more marginalized on YouTube than conservatives or on social media generally.
Second of all, nobody is a greater example of diversity on social media than conservatives.
That is the diversity.
Right now you have homogeneity.
When you add another point of view, you have diversity.
Wah, wah, wah.
What he's saying is if you are not...
Totally in agreement with me.
If you ever would criticize my thoughts or ideas or how I behave, you are a horrible bigot.
That is what the left does.
They're going for Crowder.
Now, some people are going to want to abandon Crowder because they themselves would never make a gay joke.
Of course, not you.
You are lily white.
You're like the newly fallen snow.
But because you would never make a gay joke, you won't offend Crowder.
Crowder is just very prominent.
And they're going after him because they haven't come around to going after you yet.
It's outrageous.
This guy should be ashamed of himself.
And we stand with Steven Crowder.
All right, that's our show.
We got a lot more, but too bad.
We'll get to it on Monday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'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.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today.
You know, I've been called racist because I did a segment on the show yesterday discussing some very troubling accusations about Martin Luther King Jr.
So I want to address that claim today.
Also, the HBO series Chernobyl is a damning indictment of socialism, but the left says that no, it's actually more about Donald Trump.
So we'll try to figure out.
Is it about Donald Trump or is it about socialism?
And Old Town Road is quite possibly the worst song ever recorded, but it's a huge hit.
Everyone seems to like it.
Is everyone just pretending to like it as some kind of joke?
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