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June 19, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:00
Ep. 368 - Reparations Are A Terrible Idea

Happy Juneteenth! Democrats celebrate the end of slavery by pushing for reparations. Then, President Trump kicks off his bid to Make America Great Again Again! And someone planted kiddie porn on Alex Jones’s InfoWars servers. Date: 06-19-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Happy Juneteenth!
Democrats on Capitol Hill are celebrating the end of slavery by pushing for reparations for the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of black slaves.
We will examine why that's a terrible idea.
Then, President Trump kicks off his bid to make America great again, again.
And, someone planted kiddie porn on Alex Jones' Infowar servers.
All of that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show.
So much to get to today.
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Before we get to reparations, this is kind of the big story right now.
It's happening on Capitol Hill as we speak.
Before we get to that, I just have to tell you something.
It was an epiphany I had.
I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because I think I have solved once and for all the immigration debate in the United States.
So you remember yesterday Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the Trump administration's immigration policies are like the Holocaust.
Here's what she said.
The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.
And that is exactly what they are.
They are concentration camps.
And, um, if that doesn't bother you, I don't, I got, I like, we can have, okay, whatever.
I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with So you heard that.
She said it's like concentration camps.
She said it's just like never again, which is a direct reference to the Holocaust.
So the Trump administration's immigration policies are like the Holocaust.
But then the other fresh face of the Democrat Party, Rashida Tlaib, said that the Holocaust gives her a calming feeling.
Just a few, I think two weeks ago or so, we celebrated, or just it took a moment, I think, in our country to remember the Holocaust.
And there's, you know, there's a kind of a calming feeling I always tell folks when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust.
So if the Trump administration having immigration laws is just like the Holocaust...
And the Holocaust gives Democrats a calming feeling.
The Trump administration's immigration policies give Democrats a calming feeling.
We've come to a national consensus.
We don't need to talk about it anymore.
That's it.
We're doing good on the immigration plans.
President Trump, keep going full steam ahead.
You have the support of the fresh faces in the future of the Democrat Party.
I just woke up as if with a start.
I said, there it is.
One of the central issues in our country.
There are some other issues going on in our country now that we've solved immigration.
We also have to move on to the most important issue of the day.
Forget the economy.
Forget peace abroad.
Forget immigration.
Forget our national borders.
No, the most important issue of the day is reparations for the great, great, great, great grandchildren of slaves 150 years after slavery was abolished in the United States.
They're holding hearings on this right now on Capitol Hill.
Why are they doing it today?
Today is Juneteenth.
And I think some people don't know what Juneteenth is.
Maybe this is like a geographic issue.
Some people have never heard of it.
Juneteenth is a very important day in the ending of slavery.
It's not the day when slavery was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation.
That was issued on September 22nd, 1862 by President Lincoln.
and it went into effect January 1st, 1863.
It's not the day that we exactly freed all of the slaves.
It's not the day that we freed all the slaves in the rebelling states.
It's the day that slavery was abolished in Texas.
So Texas was not a battleground of the Civil War, and so the Emancipation Proclamation didn't have any effect there.
And then on June 18th, the Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston Island with 2,000 federal troops, and he said...
Federal law is the law here now in Texas.
And he announced the next day freedom for the slaves.
That's Juneteenth.
And this Juneteenth, so many years later, a lot of Democrats are calling for reparations for the descendants of black slaves in the United States.
Here's Sheila Jackson Lee.
H.R. 40 is in fact, is in fact the response of the United States of America long overdue.
Slavery is the original sin.
Slavery has never received an apology.
Sheila Jackson Lee, one of the dumbest members of the U.S. Congress, which is really saying something.
In the U.S. Congress, the average IQ is about 50, and she is a particularly egregious member of Congress.
She has come out and said, we need reparations for slavery because the United States has never apologized for slavery.
Of course the United States has apologized for slavery.
We fought a bloody war where between 600,000 and 750,000 Americans killed themselves to answer for the question of slavery.
We then had a civil rights movement and then we had a great society.
We had all of these federal welfare programs that we were trying to effect and To, you know, bring about some equality and apologize for historical slavery.
So, obviously this is ridiculous.
The leftist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a much better case for reparations.
The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family.
Black women die in childbirth at four times the rate of white women.
And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free, boasting the largest prison population on the planet, of which the descendants of the enslaved...
Make up the largest share.
The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress, but it is also a question of citizenship.
In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement and reject fair-weather patriotism, to say that a nation is both its credits and its debits, that if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings.
That if D-Day matters, so does Black Wall Street.
That if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow.
Because the question really is not whether we will be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them.
The case is basically this, that regardless of who's responsible for slavery, regardless, it doesn't matter, black people do worse in America than other groups.
They do worse than not all other groups.
There are some groups that do worse specifically, Native Americans, for instance.
But on the whole, black people in America have less money, have higher rates of crime, lower educational attainment outcomes.
They marry at lower rates.
They have higher out of wedlock birth.
They have higher rates of abortion.
In New York City, rather, 60% of black babies are aborted.
More black babies are aborted than born.
It's the most dangerous place for a black person in New York is in his mother's womb.
That's terrifying.
I mean, that's bad.
And so what Ta-Nehisi Coates is saying is, regardless of who's responsible for it, this is the fact.
You can't deny that right now black people are doing worse in America than other groups are.
That's true.
What he is saying is that history is affecting black people today.
And I actually agree with him.
I think this is a pretty good case.
I mean, just speaking personally, when I think of the country, my ancestors helped to found America.
Four of them came over here on the Mayflower.
They fought in, I think, every American war.
John and Simon Knowles fought at Bunker Hill.
John died of his wounds there.
Simon Knowles was in Washington's army, was with him at Valley Forge.
George Cobb Knowles died at the Battle, I think, of Boynton Plank Road in the Civil War.
When I look back on the history of America, I see my family's involvement in it.
And that gives me a loyalty to the country, a love of the country, a sense of responsibility toward the country.
If my ancestors were dragged here on slave ships, I would have a very different view of the United States.
That's not anybody's fault.
That's just natural.
Of course you would.
If your ancestors are brought here in chains and suffered systematic oppression and enslavement for 100 years or 150 years, you're going to have a dismal or dim view of the history of the country.
Now, maybe that's changed by the fact that America fought a bloody civil war to free the slaves and that America has tried to live up to its own creed over many years.
Sure, maybe that changes your view of it.
But I totally get the Ta-Nehisi Coates argument.
However, Coates' solution doesn't make any sense.
The solution of reparations for the descendants of slaves is totally idiotic.
Because, I guess, fundamentally why it's wrong is because it's a Marxist view.
So, it offers a materialist view of the world.
It offers this view of the world that money solves all problems.
Basically, what Ta-Nehisi Coates is saying, what all of these guys pushing for reparations for slavery are saying, is that All problems stem from the distribution of money, and all problems can be solved with the redistribution of money.
That's obviously not true.
And actually, the Great Society showed us this.
I mean, the Great Society programs of LBJ, the massive welfare spending of the 1960s and 70s, showed us.
We threw money at the problem, and the problem didn't get...
Solved.
The problem didn't get any better.
Actually, the problem just got worse.
It actually ended up hurting the people it was intended to help.
An example of this outside of, you know, reparations for slavery or anything like that is in education spending.
For 40 years, we increased education spending, inflation adjusted by 375%.
Guess what happened to test scores?
Nothing.
They didn't improve at all.
We threw money at the problem.
We threw more and more money at the problem.
Didn't do anything.
Because the problem of educational attainment didn't stem from money.
And the redistribution of money was not going to solve it.
Same thing.
We increased welfare spending to right historical racial wrongs, to defeat poverty.
They say we fought a war on poverty and poverty won.
We actually learned from the Moynihan report that came out after the Great Society that we ended up hurting the people that we intended to help.
Crime rates increased, out of wedlock birth rates increased, abortion rates increased, because there were perverse government incentives for...
The breakdown of the black family.
Nevertheless, reparations remain very popular among 2020 Democrats.
So right now, currently supporting reparations, you have Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Liz Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O'Rourke, so many.
I mean, I think there are probably 800 other Democrats that we can't even name.
All of those guys are supporting reparations.
This is radical.
I mean, this is...
Not a normal policy position to hold.
Notably, Barack Obama, who's a very left-wing politician, didn't hold this policy view.
And Barack Obama, obviously the first black president.
Barack Obama said, quote, I fear reparations would be used as an excuse for some to say that we've paid our debt and to avoid the much harder work.
So what he's saying is, actually, reparations wouldn't go far enough.
It would give America the opportunity to just cut a check and say, okay, the problems associated with slavery and Jim Crow and lynchings and all of that, they've just been totally rectified now.
We don't have to think about it anymore.
Actually, I sort of agree with Barack Obama on this.
It's ridiculous.
Of course, that doesn't change history.
It doesn't change the past.
And it doesn't change the way that the past affects the present.
So I hate to say it, but I agree with Barack Obama on reparations.
I also agree with Mitch McConnell, who makes the point that reparations today, money from white people today to black people today or whoever else they're going to try to organize it, is just incoherent.
Yeah, I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.
We've tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing Landmark civil rights legislation.
We've elected an African-American president.
I think we're always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that.
And I don't think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it.
First of all, it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate.
We've had waves of Immigrants as well have come to the country and experienced dramatic discrimination of one kind or another.
So no, I don't think reparations are a good idea.
Totally makes sense.
He actually makes the broader point, which is that, yes, black slavery was a particularly egregious form of oppression, but other groups have faced systematic oppression.
When we talk about, I mean, obviously the question of lynching and vigilante justice has been brought up in this conversation about reparations.
The largest mass lynching in American history was against Sicilian people.
In 1891, does that mean that we're going to have some special federal program for the descendants of Sicilian people?
I ask in a leading way.
Wouldn't mind a little extra money.
No, of course not.
How about Jews?
How about any other group?
The Irish, Hispanics, any other group that's come to America has also faced oppression.
Obviously not at the level of a century or more of chattel slavery, but Who are you to say that their oppression doesn't demand a little payback from the federal government?
Reparations don't make any sense.
For all of those reasons, and most especially because money doesn't just necessarily solve problems, because we're not fundamentally just material beings.
Winston Churchill said that when great forces are on the move in the world, we learn that we're spirits, not animals.
The destiny of man is not measured by material computations.
Materialism, Marxism, is wrong.
That's not how the world is.
It doesn't take into account suffering.
It doesn't take into account what history means for the present.
It doesn't take into account the actual motivations of people, which are not primarily about money, which are not primarily material.
But beyond all of that, reparations will not achieve what people want them to achieve.
It is just in practice...
Totally impracticable.
It's unclear who should pay whom.
It's unclear where the money comes from, where the money is supposed to go.
So everybody acknowledges that slavery is a particular moral evil.
And most of the founders understood this as well, though they don't get any credit for it.
But the case for reparations rests on a basic ignorance about the fundamental facts of slavery.
To put this into context, I think a lot of people think that the United States was the chief importer of slaves from West Africa.
Not true.
The United States imported at most 4-6% of the African slaves who came to the New World.
The majority of those slaves went to Brazil.
And South America and Central America.
This is obviously not singularly an issue about the United States.
It affected the entire world.
It's not even just about the West.
It's not even just about the Western Hemisphere.
It affected the entire world.
It still affects the entire world.
There is slavery today throughout Asia, throughout the Middle East.
It currently exists.
We just ended it in the mid to late 19th century.
Also, and this is the part that people's heads explode, slavery is not simply a racial issue.
It's not simply white people had black slaves.
Ironically, this is one of these quirks of history that shows you God must exist because it's so whimsical and it's so ironic and you think there's no way this could possibly be true.
The first formally recognized slaveholder in America...
We'll explain who it was and what it was.
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This is one of the great historical ironies that nobody really acknowledges.
The first formally recognized slaveholder in the United States was not some white southern bumpkin.
It was a black guy.
The first formally recognized slave owner was a guy named Anthony Johnson.
He was a black Angolan farmer.
He was captured in Angola by Arab slave traders.
The Arab slave traders sold him off.
He ended up in Virginia and he was a slave in Virginia.
He was eventually emancipated after his indenture was over.
He was freed and he himself became a successful farmer.
He also owned slaves.
So he owned a black slave named John Kasor.
And John Kasor felt that at a certain point he should have been freed.
He had committed his indenture, his servitude.
You know, the idea of indentured servitude was you would be a slave, basically, for a certain period of time.
Then you would be emancipated.
And John Kasor felt that he had served his...
Sentence.
And should have been emancipated.
And Anthony Johnson, the black Angolan farmer, said, no, you're my slave for life.
They took it to court and a Virginia court ruled that Johnson owned John Kasor for life.
So the question is, are the black descendants of Anthony Johnson, a slave owner, entitled to reparations for slavery?
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?
Are the black descendants of John Kasor, the slave owned by Anthony Johnson, entitled to reparations from the black descendants of Anthony Johnson?
So that means that when we have reparations for slavery, some black descendants of slave owners have to pay the reparations to some...
Black descendants of slaves?
How are we going to work that?
Are we going to be taking DNA tests?
And Ancestry.com is going to get hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants just to figure out who was descended from whom?
What if you're descended from a black slave owner and a black slave?
Which, does it cancel out?
Or a white slave owner and a black slave?
How are we going to adjudicate your culpability today, in 2019, for the sins of your great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers?
Or which great-great-great-great-grandfather?
Also, this complicates it even more for the woke social justice crowd, it wasn't only white people and black people who owned slaves.
Native Americans also held slaves, and Native Americans owned a lot of slaves.
There were some black slave owners.
There were a lot of white slave owners.
There were a lot of white Native American slave owners.
They were called the five civilized tribes, the five major tribes.
We're talking about the Cherokee, the Choctaw.
Those five tribes adopted chattel slavery.
Like the really awful, terrible, worst form of slavery you can imagine, they adopted it.
In 1809, the Cherokee had 600 black slaves.
By 1838, so the time of the Trail of Tears...
The Cherokee marched thousands of slaves down the Trail of Tears ahead of them or sent them by ship to the new territory.
By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the Cherokee had 21,000 black slaves.
Those five major tribes owned slaves, black African slaves, at the same rate as southern whites.
Now this gets even more complicated because it's not just that the five civilized tribes held black slaves at the same rate as southern whites and then slavery was over and then that was it.
Because when the federal government freed the slaves, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment and Juneteenth and all that, when they freed the slaves, that didn't free the slaves in the Indian territories because the Indian territories were sovereign.
They had their own territory.
They had their own system of government.
They had their own laws and they weren't bound by the laws of the United States.
So actually the Indians kept black slaves longer than the United States did.
Now, eventually the federal government intervened here.
So the five civilized tribes did not free the slaves on their own.
The federal government came in and forced them basically to sign a treaty in 1866, and one provision of that treaty was that they free the slaves.
And this was a sticking point in the negotiations, but eventually all of the tribes agreed to it.
And so in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, the Indians finally agreed to free their slaves and abolish slavery.
So are the great, great, great, great grandchildren of black slaves today entitled to reparations from Native American tribes?
Not just the descendants of Native Americans, but the actual sovereign tribes as they exist today.
Are they entitled to that?
Are we going to...
Is this federal commission that the Democrats want to set up going to send a bill to...
To the Native American tribes for slavery, for holding slaves longer than even the Americans did?
Probably not.
That doesn't really work well with the intersectional victim pyramid, does it?
What is the conclusion from all of this?
It's an obvious one.
You can't fix the past.
Can't do it.
That's why it's the past.
That's the definition of the past.
You've only got the present.
And you specifically can't correct a past injustice with a present injustice.
Taking somebody's property because of the sins of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers.
Or the sins of one of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers, but not their other great-great-great-great-grandfather, and you've got to basically come to some sort of biologically determined adversity-suffering victimhood score, and then you find out you're 72% victim, so you only have to pay 28% of the reparations tax.
How on earth is this going to be put into practice?
It's a total injustice.
Why are Democrats focusing on this?
This is absurd.
Even Barack Obama thinks it's absurd.
Very left-wing guy, first black president.
The reason they're focusing on this is because the left has no present problems to focus on.
Things are too freaking good, so they have to relitigate slavery 150 years later.
Why?
They can't run on the economy.
The economy's going great.
Can't run on jobs.
We have record low joblessness.
They can't run on war or peace.
We've got relative peace abroad, pretty good foreign policy.
They can't run...
What are they going to run on?
They've got nothing.
So, they're trying to relitigate slavery, and it's ridiculous, and it leads to these sort of absurdities like you're seeing on Capitol Hill today.
Conservatives don't need to run on those things, because our policies are working incredibly well, and they're very popular in the here and now.
And that is why President Trump officially has kicked off his campaign to make America great again, again, last night.
We're going to keep making America great again, and then we will indeed keep America great.
We will keep it so great.
Better than ever before.
We're going to keep it better than ever before.
And that is why tonight I stand before you to officially launch my campaign for a second term as President of the United States.
Okay, so we all knew this was happening.
It's no big surprise that he's announcing his campaign.
The campaign never really ended.
He's done rallies throughout his presidency.
This is true of other presidents, too.
I mean, so it doesn't seem like a huge moment, except there was a massive crowd there in Orlando, Florida.
Everyone was super excited.
It was visually a very good start to the campaign, and it had one of the most beautiful moments of recent political memory.
You're watching this on CNN. CNN has to cover it.
This is the news.
And within six minutes of the rally starting, you hear a chant begin spontaneously from the crowd that says, CNN sucks.
CNN sucks.
You can hear it here.
And then what do you think CNN does?
they gotta cut away this is our chance to reclaim our government All right, we've been watching the president kick off his re-election bid.
He's been on stage for about six minutes.
Yeah, is that right, CNN? So hold on, wait, you're telling me you interrupted all of your programming so that you could cover...
Six minutes of the rally?
I don't know about that.
Usually, you'd have to cover, I don't know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes of the rally.
But they start almost from the beginning.
CNN sucks.
Trump turns around.
He's got a grin on his face from ear to ear.
And then within a minute of that happening, CNN cuts away.
Okay, well, yeah, you've heard that.
All right, that's enough.
Enough of that now.
Go away.
Also, I mean, show me the lie.
This is obviously what the crowd said is...
Just objectively true.
And it reminds you why people are really fired up.
We're fired up about all of these issues.
We're fired up about immigration.
We're fired up about the economy.
We're fired up about America.
You know, loving America, loving the country, keeping the nation, keeping our sovereignty, making America great again.
We love all of those things.
And we really, really hate being lied to.
It drives us crazy when these guys...
Unzip their flies on CNN and then they tell us it's raining.
We hate that.
And when they tell us not to believe our lying eyes, we hate that.
We don't like them.
They're dishonest.
They're just dishonest people and they don't like this country very much.
And they make that clear day after day.
And we're sick of it.
So it was a great moment.
Then President Trump gets to all the classic points of what this campaign is going to be about.
With your help...
With your love and your devotion, and with your drive, we are going to keep on working, we are going to keep on fighting, and we are going to keep on winning, winning, winning.
We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God.
And together, we will make America wealthy again.
We will make America strong again.
We will make America safe again.
And we will make America great again.
Thank you, Orlando.
Thank you, Florida.
That's great.
Obviously, all the classic points are very popular, and it's exactly the opposite of what the Democrats want to do.
Joe Biden says the first thing he's going to do is take away the tax cuts.
So Trump wants to make America wealthy, strong, safe, great.
What do Democrats want to do?
They want to make it less wealthy.
They want to take wealth away from you.
They want America to be less strong, not to project strength overseas, to reduce our military, reduce our military spending.
They don't care for America to be safe.
They want totally open borders, and they don't want to deport any criminals, and they want sanctuary cities for criminals who spit in the face of our laws.
And they don't want America to be great.
They don't think America was ever great to begin with.
Andrew Cuomo, sitting governor of New York, he said during a speech, he said, America was never that great to begin with.
That's what they believe.
Trump is doing exactly the opposite.
And he's also doing something that Republicans haven't really done before.
He goes at the Democrats' throat.
He goes at the left's throat.
We'll see how in a second.
But first, I've got great news for you.
We are taking our backstage show live on the road, August 21st, to the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.
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We'll be live on stage discussing the winners and losers of politics and pop culture and doing our best to answer your burning questions from the audience.
Tickets go on sale to the public this Friday, but only Daily Wire subscribers get pre-sale ticket access today through Thursday.
You can do it.
Time is running out, though.
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So President Trump is hitting all the right notes.
This rally, this kickoff for the campaign went off without a hitch.
Most importantly, he's going at the left's throat.
He is not afraid to get down in the muck with them.
Listen to how he describes the left in America.
Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage.
They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.
Not acceptable.
It's not going to happen.
This is fabulous.
This is great.
This is something Trump has done his entire career.
He's nice to people as long as they're nice to him.
It takes us to an extreme.
He's sometimes nice to Kim Jong-un if Kim Jong-un is nice to him.
But the minute someone goes after him, he goes after them twice as hard.
The minute someone says, hey, Trump, you're a racist.
He goes, you're a racist.
You're a double, triple, awful racist.
Hey, Trump, you're not successful.
You're a total loser.
You're an idiot.
You're a failure and you're a shame to your family.
And he just clobbers them.
He doesn't take any guff from nobody.
I mean, talk about really channeling a classic piece of advice for New Yorkers.
He goes so hard.
Just think about what the left has been doing.
Yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that if you oppose open borders, you are basically Hitler.
You are a Nazi if you don't think that we should have totally open borders in America.
Alyssa Milano and many other celebrities, many other left-wingers, Have said that the MAGA hat, Make America Great Again, that phrase, that hat, is the same as a KKK hood.
Leftist voices from the mainstream media to academia to elected politicians have called for political violence against conservatives.
This is not hyperbole.
Maxine Waters, a very prominent member of Congress, did this and then doubled down.
She did it twice.
Now, in the old days, how did the GOP and conservatives used to handle it?
When the left would cause racist, bigoted, sexist, awful, the worst people in the world, you should probably get violent with them.
How did the GOP used to handle that?
Here's John McCain typifying the old school GOP response during the 2008 campaign.
We're scared of an Obama presidency, and I'll tell you why.
I'm concerned about, you know, someone that cohorts with domestic terrorists such as Ayers.
I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared as president of the United States.
Now, I just...
Now, look, I... I gotta ask you a question.
I do not believe in, I can't trust Obama.
I have read about him and he's not, he's not, he's a, he's an Arab.
He is not.
No?
No, ma'am.
No, ma'am.
He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with.
On fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all about.
He's not.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now, John McCain could have said, no, he's not an Arab, but he is a danger to this country.
His views and his policies will damage America.
He'll steal people's health care.
He'll destroy the greatest health care system in the world.
He will raise your taxes.
He'll destroy the economy.
He will create eight years of joblessness.
He will divide America.
He will continue to, which is all things that he did.
He could have said that, but John McCain couldn't leave it there and say, no, he's not an Arab, but he's a pretty bad hombre.
No, he had to say, he's a decent man.
He's a good man.
Oh, the left wing that calls us evil and racist and bigoted and terrible and the worst people on earth.
Those guys, they're okay.
They're good guys.
They're good guys.
Oh, if they're good guys, then I guess we should elect them.
That was a bad strategy.
And President Trump is saying, no, listen, left wing.
If you want to play nice with me and you want to be elevated and you want to say that we're decent people and you're decent people and we just have disagreements, I'm willing to do that.
But if you're going to call me a Nazi and you're going to call my supporters Nazis and half of this country Nazis, then I'm going to say that you are hateful, prejudiced, and fueled by rage, which, by the way, is true.
This is a working strategy.
The RNC just reported.
The RNC now is the Trump campaign.
The RNC raised a record $24.8 million in just 24 hours.
More than a million dollars an hour after this kickoff.
Joe Biden, he raised $6.3 million on his first day.
And that was a record haul.
Trump raised four times that.
Massive win.
And it means the strategy is working.
It means we shouldn't back off the strategy.
He's absolutely right to do it.
We'd all like to live in the nice Trump universe, where Trump is nice to people and people are nice to Trump.
But that's the right attitude.
People say he's cruel and mean and needlessly aggressive.
He's not needlessly aggressive.
He's going to treat you how you treat him.
We can't have a society where half the country treats the other half like absolute mongrel, swine, Nazi, hateful, awful people, and then...
Those of us who are being attacked and assailed and smeared have to just say, okay, that's fine.
We'll take it.
You guys are okay.
You do what you want to do.
No, we're not going to do that.
If they're going to do that to us, we're going to push back and do it to them, and it's going to get ugly and gross until they realize that, hmm...
The other side isn't going to unilaterally disarm.
This is not a nice way to have a civil society.
Maybe we'll elevate the rhetoric a little bit.
But it's getting really nasty.
I mean, someone apparently has now sent Alex Jones kiddie porn to frame him as some kind of pedophile and ship him off to jail.
Headline in the Connecticut Post says, quote, I mean, you know Alex Jones.
You know he's the shirtless vitamin salesman.
He's the kind of conspiracy-minded radio host.
Very entertaining radio host.
A headline in the Connecticut Post, quote, Lawyers for Sandy Hook families say Alex Jones sent them child porn.
Let me ask you something.
Does that make any sense?
Alex Jones is being sued by people, and so he would send them like the most illegal thing you can possibly possess that could send him away to prison for life?
Doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
So the headline isn't true.
There was child pornography that was sent, and it was delivered by the Infowars and Alex Jones.
It wasn't sent to the family.
It was sent to their lawyers, and it wasn't sent from Jones.
It actually was, they basically asked for these troves of emails from Infowars.
Infowars just turned over all of the emails, and some emails that had been sent to Infowars included graphic images of child pornography.
So what it appears is that what someone was doing was planting child pornography on the Infowars email servers and email addresses.
classes.
It seems to me there's no way that Alex Jones knew about this.
If he did, if he did know that there was child pornography on there...
He would never have given those emails to his adversaries, lawyers, or he would have destroyed it, or he would have refused to turn over the documents.
Also, I suppose, illegal, but obviously a lot better than just turning over a bunch of child pornography.
So, I guess it's possible, you never say never, it's possible that Alex Jones is the most incompetent pedophile in the history of sex crimes, probably unlikely, or more likely someone is playing a particularly nasty trick on Alex Jones.
They want to ruin his life, they want to send him and people who work with him to prison forever, and this plays on this theme that we're looking at, that we're seeing, this Fueled by rage, nasty, hateful, spiteful.
The left wants to ruin conservatives' lives.
They want to ruin Kyle Kashev's life.
They want to ruin every conservative's life.
Some sicko is willing to deal, one, to deal in kiddie porn, just to score political points, and then to send it to a shirtless vitamin salesman because...
They don't like his politics or something.
They're going to send it to this guy because they think this guy is such a great threat to the country.
I'm not saying people didn't naturally have homosexual feelings.
I'm not even getting into it, quite frankly.
I mean, give me a break.
You think I'm shocked by it so I'm up here bashing it because I don't like gay people?
I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the frigging frogs gay!
Do you understand that?
I'm sick of being social engineered.
It's not funny!
I gotta say, he says like some of the craziest things, but I get such a kick out of him.
He's like an amazing broadcaster.
And that guy, you're willing to deal in child pornography and try to frame a guy, send him to prison for life because he bangs a table and says the frogs are gay?
You're sick.
Something has gone sick in your mind, in your ideology, if you do that.
Because you don't like his politics or something.
Hollywood celebrities.
Deborah Messing.
So happy congratulating Harvard for ruining an 18-year-old kid's life because he said offensive and racial things simply for shock value when he was 16 years old.
Journalists encouraging big technology companies.
To prevent other content creators that they disagree with from making money, from getting their voices out there, deplatforming.
Not just YouTube, it's Facebook, it's Patreon.
Payment processors trying to stop conservatives from ever being able to make a livelihood, ruin their lives.
This Jones thing, just one particularly egregious example of the left hating the right.
You can't have a country like that for very long.
It's like when a husband fights with his wife.
You're in a fight with your spouse.
You're disagreeing about something.
And you're just trying to score points on each other.
And you did this.
Well, I did this.
And you did that.
And I'm going to do this then.
And how does that end?
You still have to live with the person.
You're married to the person.
It's half of your flesh over there.
Ostensibly, you still love each other.
You like each other.
You've got some bonds holding you together.
It's the same thing for a country.
You still have to live together.
How is this going to end in America if half the country says that if you don't support open borders, you're a Nazi?
Half the country wants to ruin the other half's life.
It doesn't go both ways.
Finally, President Trump is fighting back on behalf of the right.
But it doesn't go both ways.
This is a problem of the left doing this to the right.
You can't have a country like that for very long.
You know, this actually...
Brings up.
A great piece I read yesterday, I highly encourage you all to read it, in First Things.
It was by a writer named Elizabeth Corey, and she was talking about the very little-known political philosopher Michael Oakeshott.
And it was on this question of what is conservatism?
What are we doing?
What is conservatism about?
And the thesis was that true conservatism requires recognizing the world's beauty.
The question is, what is conservatism?
If I asked you on the street, what is conservatism?
Maybe you would say it's free markets.
Or it's a strong military, or it's Christian values, or it's low taxes.
What is it?
Would you say it's that?
It's low taxes and a strong military.
Is that conservatism?
That doesn't seem like all it is.
This philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, says conservatism isn't any of those things.
That conservatism is actually a disposition rather than an ideology.
It's more a sensibility, a way of engaging with the world and looking at the world and behaving.
It's not about low taxes.
I mean, maybe, of course, maybe it implies low taxes or certain values, but it's more about just the way that you behave.
He writes, or she writes, talking about his philosophy, The disposition entails, above all, an inclination to enjoy what there is to be enjoyed, rather than to seek for what is not there.
You know, the left is so furious.
They don't enjoy anything.
They don't laugh.
They don't have fun.
We live in, like, the greatest time ever in the history of the world.
They are miserable.
And some conservatives let themselves be miserable all the time too.
Now we've got to fight back.
We have to stop them from totally destroying the country.
We have to wage certain battles.
But that's only sometimes.
We also have to enjoy what we have or else what's the point of it?
It's not just about the fights.
It's not just about the battles.
It's not just about what is lost.
There is some pleasure in it.
This is one of the simple joys of being right.
You know, we talk about the Western canon and liberal education, how important it is, how important we need.
We need good education to remember our history.
How often do we read those books?
We talk about how old movies are so much better than new crappy movies.
How often do we watch the old movies and enjoy them?
We talk about civil society, how great it was when there were all these...
Voluntary organizations, the Lions Club, the Kiwanis Club, the PTA, the Boy Scouts, how often do you join those and go to those and participate in those?
We talk about the importance of a nation.
How often do we engage with our fellow countrymen?
Do we really feel that we have some bonds to them still?
You know, we need to give the left a taste of their own medicine and we need to show them the stakes of what they're doing and we need to stop them from their path of complete destruction.
But over the long haul, the only coherent conservatism is a conservatism that actually engages with and enjoys all of those things that we say are worth conserving.
That's our show.
We've got more to get to.
We'll do it tomorrow.
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.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Alexandria, occasional cortex, says arresting illegal immigrants is like the Holocaust because she's an ignoramus.
But there is someone partying just like it's 1938, and guess what?
It's not President the Donald.
I'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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