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June 20, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:52
Ep. 369 - Joe Biden’s Very Bad Week

Joe Biden’s bad week just got worse as Democrats call him racist and the MSM accuse him of corruption. Then, a black NFL star pushes back on Democrats at yesterday’s reparations hearings on Capitol Hill. Finally, the Mailbag! Date: 06-20-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Joe Biden's bad week just got worse, as Democrats call him racist, and the mainstream media, but I repeat myself, accuse him of corruption.
Very bad.
Then a black NFL star pushes back at Democrats on yesterday's reparations hearings on Capitol Hill.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Absolutely brutal week for Joe Biden today.
Tough times for him.
On Tuesday, I didn't even want to cover this story at first because I thought it was people making something out of nothing.
I now realize this story of what Joe Biden said, how people are reacting to it, Actually does tell you about a major issue that the Democrats are grappling with.
So what did he say?
He was at a fundraiser at the Carlisle in New York City on Tuesday night.
And Joe Biden cited his ability to work with two segregationist groups.
Democrat senators as evidence that you can be civil even with people that you disagree with, and that's how you can come together and get something accomplished for the country.
So he was referring to the segregationist senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.
And he, in typical Joe Biden, awkward, old-timey joke way, he came in and he said, you know, they never called me boy, but they called me son.
They never called me boy like racists will call black men boys.
They called me son because they were of this older school and I disagreed with them, but we came together and worked together.
And this story is being twisted, not really so much by the right, but certainly by the left and by fellow Democrats as a Portraying Joe Biden in this bigoted light.
Joe Biden is somehow a secret racist that we didn't know about.
There's really no evidence of that.
He's certainly made racially awkward and insensitive and offensive comments.
He said about Barack Obama when they were running in 2008, he said that Barack Obama was the first articulate, clean, good looking black guy that ever ran for office.
And so that was a storybook.
I mean, he said things that are a little awkward, but I don't think there are evidence that he's this racial bigot or something like that.
He's just a weird old guy.
Still, this does tell us something.
This tells us something very important about what the Democrats are debating right now.
So, of course, Joe Biden's Democrat opponents piled on here.
Liz Warren said, quote, I'm not here to criticize other Democrats, but it's never okay to celebrate segregationists.
Never.
You see what they're doing?
Joe Biden said, I worked with segregationists and I disagreed with them, but I was able to get something done.
Liz Warren paints that as celebrating segregationists.
Same thing, here's Kamala Harris responding to Biden's remarks.
I have a great deal of respect for Vice President Biden.
He's done very good work and he has served our country in a very noble way.
But to coddle the reputations of segregationists, of people who, if they had their way, I would literally not be standing here as a member of the United States Senate, is, I think, it's just, it's misinformed and it's wrong.
Do you apologize for that?
He's going to have to make that decision.
But, you know, let's be very clear that the senators that he is speaking of with such adoration are individuals who made and built their reputation on segregation.
So this is a very serious matter.
Adoration.
He's adoring them.
There's nothing in Joe Biden's remarks that he's adoring those senators or that he's coddling those senators.
When did he coddle them?
Or as Liz Warren said, he's celebrating them.
That is totally made up and that is completely unfair.
And I hate to defend Joe Biden, but that's ridiculous.
And you'll listen to how...
Kamala Harris phrases this here.
She goes, I have the most respect for Joe Biden.
He's a great guy because she knows she's not going to win this race.
And so she's trying to suck up to maybe be the vice president.
She can't hit Joe too hard, but she's got to take the shot at him because this is open.
This is an open and vulnerable moment.
You don't run for number two.
You've got to run hard.
The only way you're going to become a number two is if you run hard.
So, okay, they're all taking their shots.
And, and what did Joe Biden actually say?
He's mentioning people that he disagreed with, that he was able to work with.
The thing that people keep forgetting here though, including Joe Biden, is the example that he's giving is not an example of him working across the aisle with Republicans.
He's talking about working with members of his own party because those two segregationists, like virtually all segregationists, were Democrats.
They weren't Republicans.
The Democratic Party is the worst party in the history of the world on race relations through the party of slavery, through the party of Jim Crow, through the party of the KKK, through the party of segregation.
And this was true, not in the way distant past.
This was true in Joe Biden's lifetime.
And he was working with them as members of his own party.
He hasn't been able to give a good example of working across the aisle in maintaining civility.
But it's okay because the mainstream media is doing his work for him.
Joe and the mainstream media are pretending that this is an example of working with Republicans.
And on one particularly egregious MSNBC show, this is Casey Hunt's show, she just lied about it right on air.
Still to come, Joe Biden references his relationships with two former Republican colleagues at an event in New York City.
The only problem?
They were both segregationists.
They're not Republicans.
They are Democrats.
They're definitely Democrats.
Anytime that you have a party behaving in a sustained way, in a bad way on race relations, you can bet that it's the Democrat Party.
This has been true since the 19th century and it remains true today.
They are not the party of racial harmony.
They have never been that party.
Even when they say that they were the party of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.
First of all, there have been something like nine civil rights acts.
They were all pushed by Republicans.
Except for this one, which was pushed by a Democrat president.
And yet it was only pushed through the LBJ Civil Rights Act.
It was only pushed through because of Republicans.
The Democrats largely voted against it.
And Republicans largely voted against it.
Still, all of that is forgotten.
All of that is almost besides the point.
The point is what this attack says about 2020.
And the toughest one came from Cory Booker.
Cory Booker said, You don't joke about calling black men boys.
Men like James O. Eastland use words like that and the racist policies that accompanied them to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity.
Vice President Biden's relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people and for everyone.
So he then went on and said, Joe Biden needs to apologize.
This is very hard.
He's lumping Biden in.
He's saying Biden's joke itself was racist.
Talking about how they didn't call him boy, but they called him son.
And that he palled around.
He was working with people who were white supremacists.
And he had those relationships.
And that's a terrible thing.
When Cory Booker asked Joe Biden to apologize for this, this was the straw that broke the camel's back, and Joe Biden pushed back very hard on it.
Here he is.
Apologize for what?
Cory Booker's called for it.
Cory should apologize.
He knows better.
There's not a racist bone in my body.
I've been involved in civil rights my whole career.
Period.
Of course, Joe Biden's right here.
He doesn't need to apologize for this.
I mean, politically, he may have to.
I mean, they're trying to back him into a corner that he does.
But just as a matter of morality, a matter of what he actually said, he has no moral obligation to apologize.
This is totally contrived political theater, except it does serve a purpose in this campaign and in the light of how the Democrat party is dealing with politics on a national level.
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So this is obviously a totally contrived political attack.
One thing that it does show, and one way that I think it's pretty effective, is sure, nobody thinks that Joe Biden is some anti-black bigot, but it does remind people that Joe Biden is very old.
He's so old, in fact, that he served in the U.S. Senate with pro-segregation senators when segregation was still a thing, when segregation was still a hot political issue.
So I think that's pretty good because he is a little past his sell by date.
He's not a bigot.
And the story matters because what it shows is not the Democrats' view on race or the Democrats' view on reparations or the Democrats' view on segregation.
It shows the Democrats' view on civility.
What people are saying, the question that Cory Booker and other people are bringing up is not...
Is Joe Biden a segregationist?
It's, was Joe Biden right to be civil to segregationists?
Is it right when there are battles over segregation, some awful political issue, is it right to be people, to be civil rather, with the people that you disagree with?
Of course it is.
Of course Joe Biden was right to be civil with segregationists.
Yes, we should be civil with the people that we disagree with politically.
That is the only way a democratic republic can survive.
This used to be a totally uncontroversial opinion.
This was not a left or right idea.
Now it's become a right-wing idea.
The left says you can't be civil with people that you disagree with.
Well, but what about a terrible, awful issue like segregation?
There's no defense of segregation.
Why would you be civil with those people?
Because a republic such as ours, self-government, requires civility.
It requires that we understand one another.
It requires that we persuade one another.
It requires that we not just scream and shout and insult one another.
And here's an example of this.
Today, Forget segregation.
Today, half of all politicians in this country support abortion.
They support killing innocent babies in the womb.
And disproportionately black babies, since we're talking about race.
They're talking about killing babies.
We don't just randomly start punching them on the floor of the U.S. Congress.
We don't just shriek.
We don't refuse to speak with people who support abortion.
Even though abortion is worse than segregation.
Segregation was terrible.
Murdering babies is worse.
Murder is worse than other forms of oppression.
Because you are totally robbing someone of their life, not just their liberty, not just their ability to pursue happiness and property.
You're killing a baby before the baby is even born.
That is worse, and yet we're civil with pro-abortion people.
Why?
Because that's the only way that we're going to move the issue.
That's the way that pro-life has been able to win so many battles over the last four decades, five decades.
But the left can't be civil.
Don't take my word for it.
Here's Hillary Clinton explaining why the left won't be civil anymore.
You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.
That's why I believe if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again.
But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.
You can't be civil with people who oppose everything you stand for.
That's her theory.
Then who are you supposed to be civil with?
If you don't have to be civil with the people who disagree with you, then what's the point of civility?
Of course you're civil with the people who agree with you.
You're not just civil with them.
You embrace them.
You celebrate them.
They're on your team.
The only purpose of civility in politics is to be civil to the people that you disagree with.
But Hillary doesn't grant that people who disagree with her have any legitimacy, have any right to speak, have any right to vote.
They're deplorable.
They're irredeemable.
They're the worst kind of people in this country.
They shouldn't have a voice.
They shouldn't be able to elect a president.
Guess what happened, by the way, when she said that?
Those very people made sure that she never came within a stone's throw of the White House again.
It's the same thing with free speech.
People say we can protect free speech, but we can't protect hate speech.
The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to protect hate speech, so-called.
What is hate speech?
I don't know.
Good luck defining it.
Who defines what's hateful?
Something that's hateful to one person is maybe not hateful to somebody else.
The purpose of the First Amendment is to defend unpopular speech.
Popular speech is already going to be protected by the mob because everyone likes it.
The only reason to do it, the only reason to have civility, is to be civil with the people that you disagree with.
But what does this look like?
It's not just Hillary Clinton who's saying this.
Current elected Democrats, Maxine Waters, very prominent Democrat congresswoman, is coming out and showing you what it looks like when you stop being civil to your political opponents.
We can't protect anybody.
If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them.
That's what it looks like.
You get in their face.
You go to where they sleep.
You go to where their children sleep.
You scream.
You physically intimidate them.
That's what they want to do.
I mean, that is a recipe to get rid of self-government.
You cannot have a democratic republic very long.
If you keep that up, you're going to have to impose more order from the top down.
If you cannot, I mean, this is the deal that we've made with self-government and with a democratic republic.
We say we're going to have political freedom.
We're going to run our own country.
We the people.
We can only do that if we discipline ourselves, if we are mature, if we educate ourselves about what the political issues are, and we educate ourselves about how we're supposed to behave, and if we can be civil, and if we can deal with people that we disagree with.
That's the only way we can do it.
If we can't do that, we will lose self-government.
We will lose political freedom, because we have to.
The country must have order.
Order will reassert itself.
It will either assert itself From the bottom up, from people who are disciplined and educated and serious people who are worthy of freedom, or it will be imposed on us from the top down.
But we will not have anarchy.
It's never happened and it's never going to happen.
And this is the very risky gamble that Democrats are trying to foist on us right now.
So the Joe Biden issue is a really important one, not because of the stupid race stuff, but because Joe Biden represents the old school of Democrats who say, I hate Republicans.
They're awful.
They're racist.
They're bigots.
They're terrible.
But I'll be civil with them.
Or in the case of Joe Biden, I guess.
I hate other Democrats who are racist and bigot and awful.
But I can be civil with them.
That's the old school.
And the new school is saying, don't be civil.
Don't be civil at all.
Ruin them, get physically violent, go to their houses.
That's the debate we'll see in this 2020 race, which side of that is going to win.
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Speaking of the race hustling that we're seeing in the Democrat Party, sparks were flying yesterday during this absolute exercise in national idiocy where we have so few problems in this country.
Unemployment at record lows, the economy going gangbusters.
everybody living in relative luxury, historically speaking, that we've got to dig up slavery 150 years ago and argue over reparations so that the great, great, great, great grandchildren of slaves, but maybe also slave owners can get some reparations from, I don't know, modern American but maybe also slave owners can get some reparations from, I don't know, modern American immigrants who had And we're going to have to figure out who's exactly the right percentage of victim and figure out who's going to get what amount of money, which will accomplish absolutely nothing.
In this melee of idiocy and victimhood, the NFL star, Burgess, Burgess Owens showed up and he just gave a total smack down of the whole premise of the hearing.
Here he is.
I'm going to talk about some ideologies.
And when I talk about them, I'm going to talk about people.
People change.
I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found out the misery that that party brought to my race.
I do not believe in reparation.
Because what reparation does, it points to a certain race, a certain color, and it points to them as evil, and points to the other race, my race, as one that not only becomes racist, but also beggars.
I do believe in restitution.
Let's point to the party that was part of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, that has killed over 40% of our black babies, 20 million of them.
State of California, 75% of our black boys cannot pass standard reading and writing tests.
A democratic state.
So yes, let's pay restoration.
Let's pay restitution.
How about a Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race?
And those, after we learn our history, decide to stay there, they should pay also.
They're complicit.
And every white American, Republican or Democrat, that feels guilty because of your white skin, you should need to pony up also.
That way we can get past this reparation and recognize that this country has given us greatness.
I love this idea.
I mean, he really just goes for the jugular.
The left and the Democrats, they want to say slavery.
It's the original sin of America, and it's all of Americans and all of white America.
Well, no, actually, to be specific, it's Democrats.
And the Republican Party was founded to oppose slavery, and then the founding of the Republican Party led to a civil war where 600,000 to 750,000 Americans died to end slavery.
It's actually a Democrat problem.
And then the...
Issues of the KKK, the Jim Crow laws, segregation, lynchings.
That also was not just an American problem.
It was specifically a Democrat problem.
The KKK was the terrorist wing of the Democrat Party.
Burgess Owens calling them out for that entirely.
So that was very enjoyable.
I don't know what it does to the debate on reparations, but it was very fun to watch.
The case for reparations broadly, I think one thing he really expressed well, is that it's very disrespectful.
The premise of reparations in 2019 is that blacks need handouts from whites because there's no other way that they could succeed.
And you look at that guy, Burgess Owens, and you say, well, he succeeded pretty well.
He's a pretty sharp guy, had an incredible athletic career.
Now he's got a great career in commentary and politics.
Does Burgess Owens get reparations?
Is some poor white guy in Appalachia supposed to pay Burgess Owens?
How about, is some poor white guy in Appalachia who may be descended from slave owners or maybe didn't, is he supposed to pay Jay-Z and Beyonce reparations for slavery?
Is he going to pay Barack Obama reparations for slavery?
Former president of the United States, half black, half white, actually not descended from black slaves, descended from an African immigrant or actually just an African national who happened to have been in America.
You know, we talked yesterday about how the first formally recognized American slave owner of an arbitrarily declared slave for life was a black guy.
Does that guy's ancestors, do they get reparations?
Let's say, as is the case for most black Americans, that they have some white ancestry, maybe a white slave owner ancestry.
Do they get reparations?
How white is too white?
How black is black?
Are we going to resurrect the racist one-drop rule to say if you have one drop of black blood, then you are black?
That makes you essentially racially black and defines you and entitles you to some reparations.
One of the reasons, there are many reasons that reparations are totally impracticable in 2019.
But one of them, the most offensive one, is that it is a racially essentialist idea that just does not jibe with reality.
It doesn't jibe with 150 years of American history and immigration and dissent.
Just even myself, I don't know, I'm descended from Italians, Irish, Welsh, English, Sicilians, all these sorts of people, which is me.
For mixed race people, are they black or are they white?
Which weighs out the other one?
Doesn't make a lot of sense.
Burgess Owens showed some of that absurdity, but the entire reparations debate yesterday was a sideshow, and it was all just part of the broader absurd clown show, which is the 2020 Democrat presidential primary.
Other bad news came out for Joe Biden yesterday beyond the race stuff.
The mainstream media are finally asking questions about his shady deals with his son in Ukraine and in China.
So while Joe Biden was chief diplomat, was vice president, he was leading American negotiations in the Ukraine and in China, Hunter Biden, his son, was getting shady deals.
He got, I think, a billion dollars or more of funding out of China for a company called Rosemont that he was working with.
And in the Ukraine, he was able to get, I think, a $55,000 per month retainer when he was on the board of a company called Burisma Holdings.
This was while Biden was there negotiating with Ukraine.
Biden, as the chief diplomat for Ukraine, was threatening to withhold American aid to the Ukraine.
if the Ukraine didn't fire or prosecute or looking into his son's shady business dealings.
It It was pretty, pretty rough.
And we've been talking about this for months on the show.
Finally, the mainstream media started asking the questions just within the last two days.
Was Hunter Biden profiting off his dad's work as vice president?
And did Joe Biden allow it?
We're talking about millions of dollars in at least two countries.
Mr.
Vice President, Tom Yamas with ABC News.
How you doing?
Got a quick question for you.
It's a question we tried to ask repeatedly.
Can we ask you about Ukraine and China?
But kept getting blocked.
Questions about foreign deals his son Hunter Biden pursued.
My father, Joe Biden.
In countries where Joe Biden was working as America's top diplomat.
Mr.
Vice President, what's your take on that?
Was there a conflict of interest there?
Was there a clear conflict of interest?
Hey, look, we've got journalists in the mainstream media finally.
This is, I know it's a cold and chilly day in hell and pigs are flying all over the world because a mainstream network journalist is asking tough questions of Joe Biden, questions that we've been asking on this show for months.
So why are they asking it now?
What changed?
I mean, we've known this story for a long time.
Obviously, Joe Biden is ducking the question because he knows he's guilty as sin here.
He later gave a statement, or his campaign gave a statement, that said that if he were elected president, he would empower White House ethics lawyers to monitor these sorts of activities that he engaged in.
So he's basically admitting guilt here.
He's admitting he acted inappropriately and let his son peddle his influence to make a lot of money out of both of those countries.
Still looks like he's dodging.
Now, finally, June 20th, Mainstream media will ask the question, why?
The reason is because back then, months ago when this came up, the mainstream media were backing Joe Biden as the leading candidate for president.
Now it seems they're moving toward another candidate and so they're willing to ditch Joe Biden.
Who's that other candidate?
According to a June Wall Street Journal NBC News poll, Liz Warren is surging.
This poll looked at Democrat primary voters who are enthusiastic or comfortable with candidates.
So back in March, they said, who are your most comfortable candidates?
Who are you most excited for?
Joe Biden then got 77% support.
Now, a few months later, down to 66%.
He's lost 11 percentage points.
Bernie Sanders, down from 62% in March.
Now he's at 56% in June.
Liz Warren surging.
She had 57% in March.
She's now up to 64%.
So she made a significant gain, 7 percentage points, and she's moving in the right direction.
So what Democrats and the media are saying now is that Liz Warren might be a compromise candidate.
She's got all those left-wing bona fides, and she's...
Sort of acceptable.
She's really annoying and unpleasant, but she's not detestable.
She's not that old.
She's a woman.
She's very white, but she pretends to be Native American.
So she checks a few intersectional boxes.
Because the Pocahontas thing has been around for so long, there's, I guess, a chance she can survive it.
She's never come up with a good answer on it.
But more importantly, all the other candidates have proven themselves really weak.
Joe Biden had his best day basically on his first day of his campaign and And he's been tanking.
They call him creepy.
They call him old.
They call him corrupt.
They now call him racist.
They call him too conservative.
So he's having a tough time.
Other candidates who we thought would be good like Kamala Harris have just proven themselves mostly incompetent.
Other candidates, Cory Booker, kind of a joke.
Pete Buttigieg is a fairly talented candidate, but he's a very young mayor of a very small town.
So how serious is he going to be?
I'm not quite sure.
He's also a white guy.
So Liz Warren is starting to define herself as possibly a compromise candidate.
She might have a moment to make a comeback here, and that is really, that's the worst news of all for Joe Biden, because if the media do get behind her, he doesn't have a chance.
We have got to get to the mailbag.
But first, I've got important news.
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Is that going to be like Ben beheads me or something live?
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You know you get everything else at the Daily Wire, too.
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We'll be right back with the mailbag.
I'm going to fly through these questions today.
I'm going to get to all of them.
Maybe.
We'll see.
From Anonymous.
Hi, Michael.
Of all the books adapted into Hollywood movies, what is one story yet to be faithfully adapted to the big screen that needs to be?
There have been a lot of bad movies out of books.
I don't read a ton of fiction anyway, so I don't totally care, except for one book that I really want to see made into a movie.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
This is a book that was published posthumously by this guy who killed himself.
The book was found by his mother, I think.
It ended up getting published, and then it ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 1981.
And this book, if you haven't read it, gave America one of the great characters of its literature, which is Ignatius J. Reilly.
This big, fat, weird, lazy, layabout, medievalist guy.
It's just one...
I can't describe what a great character he is and all of the adventures that he has, living with his mother, wandering around New Orleans, getting a job.
He's just a fabulous character.
I think it would be a great movie.
They've never made one before.
There have always been rumors that they're going to make one, but that's one, if I had any clout in Hollywood, which I don't...
If I were able to, you know, even walk down the street in Hollywood without people throwing rotten tomatoes at me for my politics, that would be one book that I'd try to make into a movie.
For Max, Hey Michael, I'm a Catholic and therefore believe marriage is between one man and one woman in the church.
Do you think the government should get out of marriage entirely?
And do you think a Christian can hold this position?
No, I don't.
I don't think the government can get out of marriage.
I think this is a total cop-out.
I know probably the majority of conservatives these days say that they just want the government completely out of marriage.
This has always been a sort of libertarian position, or it's been at least viewed as a libertarian position.
I think it's completely incoherent.
It doesn't make any sense.
The government, if the government has an interest in any aspect of your life, It has an interest in marriage.
Marriage is the essential building block of society and it always has been.
Why does the government have an interest in marriage?
Well, if the government has an interest in any aspect of society, which obviously it does, it has an interest in marriage.
Also because of children.
The government does have an interest in children.
The government has an interest in what you can do to your children.
If you abuse your children, the government can come in and take them away.
Well, how are children raised?
They're raised within the context of the family, and the essence of the family is marriage.
How about adoption?
The government has plenty of regulations surrounding adoption, as well it should.
Well, rules about adoption ultimately come down to marriage.
Now, we have loosened laws about adoption in recent years.
So single people can adopt.
Gay couples can adopt.
There are all of these questions.
And even if you support those policies, those questions still surround marriage.
Marriage.
Either because they're saying we're going to change the definition of marriage or we're going to change the importance of marriage, but nevertheless the government is interacting with that.
I think the lie that some people who don't want to have to deal with the difficult question of what marriage is, who don't want to offend people and say marriage obviously involves sexual difference, it involves men and women, is...
They say, well, listen, I've got the neutral position.
I'm going to get the government out of marriage entirely.
Well, that is a position.
To say that the government is getting out of marriage is to say that the government does not have a definition of marriage.
Obviously the government does have a definition of marriage by saying that monogamous same-sex couples can now be marriage.
But words need to have meaning.
The marriage debate was totally lost by conservatives because we allowed the left to define it in terms of rights.
Do gay people have the right to get married?
Gay people have always had the right to get married.
The question is, what is marriage?
And for all of human history, virtually everywhere, certainly throughout the West, marriage has been the union of husbands and wives.
Sexual difference has been essential to marriage.
And then about five minutes ago, the left decided that sexual difference had nothing to do with marriage.
Love is love.
Love wins.
There are all sorts of love.
I have love with my brother.
I have love with my friends.
I have love with my parents.
I have love with my country.
Love is not just love.
There are lots of different kinds of love.
I have love with my girlfriend, but my girlfriend, oh shoot, I hope my wife isn't watching now.
No, I mean before I was married, you know, you love your girlfriend, but then the love you have with your fiancé is a little different.
That's a different union.
The love you have with your wife is different than the love you have with your fiancé.
And marriage has a meaning, and the government establishes, at least at a very basic level, establishes The very definitions that we're working with.
We all need to be on the same page for certain institutions.
And one of those, the bedrock one of those, is marriage.
We need a definition of marriage.
Conservatives basically are surrendering that to the left, I think because we just don't want to have to deal with an issue that, in the popular culture at least, has been lost.
But it doesn't change the fact marriage is between a man and a woman.
No...
The amount of social engineering is going to change that, and I think it's ultimately an act of political cowardice for us to back away and say we don't have anything to do with that.
We don't want to fight that fight anymore.
From David, greetings to Michael Knowles or Eric Swalwell.
Well, it's not an either-or.
Eric Swalwell is all of us.
In the talk about race, the left usually asserts that racism is only possible when power and privilege are a factor.
Wordplay aside, is bigotry not only logically wrong, but morally wrong, if no corruption and or violence takes place?
There are two parts of this question.
One is...
What is racism?
So what is racism?
Racism obviously is an antagonism or a discrimination against another person based on feelings of racial superiority or racial inferiority.
That is racism.
The left is redefining racism because they always want to redefine words because that's how you control the culture and the politics.
And the way they're redefining racism is to say, sure, racism is hostility, antagonism, discrimination on the basis of race.
But only if you're the more powerful race.
Never if you're the less powerful race.
And we're going to define more powerful race as white and less powerful race as black or Hispanic or Native American.
And therefore only whites can be racist.
They just redefine the word racism to mean that only white people can be racist.
But that's absurd.
I mean, you're just changing the definition of the word to something that it is not.
And on the question of how wrong bigotry is, racial bigotry is wrong because it is an affront to human dignity.
That's why.
That's why racism is wrong.
And the left is trying to have its cake and eat it too.
They're trying to agree with that point and then say, except it's not wrong if you're racist against whites.
It's just wrong.
If you have an antagonism or you discriminate against another person because of feelings of racial superiority or inferiority, whether it's against whites or blacks or Hispanics or whatever, that is racism and you are guilty of it and that is an affront to human dignity.
From Anonymous.
Michael, I am a student entering my first year of college.
Do you have any date ideas for a poor college student?
hashtag came for Ben, subscribe for Michael.
Well, speaking of how the left gets things exactly backwards, I got to tell you back in my atheistic, reckless, irresponsible days when I, when I was single and in college, I too engaged in, I guess what you would call the backwards culture of the left, which is that at I guess what you would call the backwards culture of the left, which is that at least when I was there, the dominant It wasn't courtship.
It wasn't dating for marriage.
It was the hookup culture.
And I think that's still the dominant culture on campus.
So instead of taking a girl out on a date and then going back and hooking up, it was actually the opposite.
You'd see a girl at a party or a bar and you'd go hook up and you'd go back to your room and then...
You do this like five or six times and then maybe eventually you go on a date.
So I really am not the best person to ask for advice here because I was engaged in this totally inverted culture as well.
But the nice thing about college is everyone has pretty low expectations because everyone's broke.
So you don't need to worry about that.
college offers so many opportunities to have fun for not all that much money.
So I don't know, take a girl, anything from a dorm party to a cheap restaurant or a cheap college bar to a walk in the park or walk around campus.
You can really get away with just about anything because the expectations are low.
Once you get out into the real world and start making money, the expectations for dates become much, much more expensive.
So enjoy it while you can.
You can't go wrong.
Just be a good guy.
Be interested in the girl.
Find a girl that you like and don't try to be a jerk about it.
Don't try to play a game.
Don't try to be something that you're not.
on.
Be confident.
Go pursue the girl.
Kiss the girl.
From Benjamin, Michael, last week you had a very insightful episode about pride and how pride is the queen of all sins.
I generally agree, but it got me wondering if there is a distinct difference between having pride and being proud of accomplishments.
For example, should I be proud of getting good grades in school or successfully overcoming some challenge?
That's right.
Thanks, Ben.
I was wondering about this, this question of pride in personal accomplishment or national pride, for instance.
I'm proud of my country.
I think pride is wrong in both cases, still.
So the tougher one is pride in accomplishments, because let's say you write a really good blank book, you know, and you're really proud of how successful it was, or you do a really good podcast, or you do well on a test, or whatever.
You naturally feel a temptation to pride, to claim total responsibility for that.
But actually, the traditional response to this is that you should give all glory to God.
And that's not just soft words or something.
That's not just some sentimentality.
That's not just pretending.
You really do give glory to God.
Why?
Because...
The circumstances of your life were given to you.
You didn't earn them.
You were born into a certain family, born into the United States, born into privilege.
I mean, when you think about the privileges that you had in a, from a position of gratitude rather than a position of guilt or envy, I think it's actually a good way to think about your life.
Even your own intelligence, you didn't earn your own intelligence.
You have your own intelligence.
Your work ethic is a product in part of your culture and a product of your will and a will that you are turning toward the good, which is something outside of you.
So when it comes to your own accomplishments, give it up to God.
So when it comes to your own accomplishments, give it up to God, give glory to God.
Give glory to God.
This is something that you are doing the accomplishment not just for yourself or for your own vainglory, but for the glory of God, for the good.
And so that's how I would deal with personal accomplishments.
As for national pride, I don't think that you actually take pride in your country in the way that we talk about Pride Month or Pride is the Queen of All Sin.
I think what you have is really a form of piety for your country.
It's a form of piety like the respect for your father and mother, like respect for your family, your parents, your ancestors, things that came before you.
It's a question of love and allegiance rather than pride as well.
And I want to...
I don't really see people like spiking the football too much and saying, yeah, woohoo, America, it's all because of how great I am and how great, no, it's actually a form of gratitude and respect for things that actually you did not do.
It's not really a form of pride and, because pride essentially is just exaggerating one's own excellence.
From Brittany.
Michael, how can conservatives make nuanced and complex issues such as taxation, health care, and immigration reform more relatable to college students?
I'm 30 years old and a lifelong conservative, but I wasn't able to truly relate to these issues until I was in the workforce myself and saw how the real world worked.
This is why I think it's much easier for these young students to be outspoken on social issues such as gay marriage and hate speech and ignore everything else.
Thank you.
Yeah, I think this is true in part.
Obviously, the finer points of tax policy are a lot more boring than talking about abortion or something.
But that's because the only thing that actually matters are social issues, and everything else is just bean counting, including the finer points of health care policy and tax policy.
I don't actually care that much about taxes.
I like lower taxes because I like keeping more of my property, and I think it's more moral, and I like having more liberty.
But I don't really care.
What I care about are the foundations of those issues.
What I care about are what are underneath tax policy, what's underneath health care policy.
And I think sometimes conservatives, especially in that 1980s policy wonk mold, they get a little too focused on the particulars of policy.
But you're not going to win anybody by being the most efficient bureaucrat or technocrat.
That's not compelling.
Not for college students and not for voters more generally.
The left focuses on social issues because they work.
Because they're compelling.
Because they actually stir people's souls.
We're not just...
We're here trying to rearrange certain aspects of the federal bureaucracy to make life a little more efficient.
We're talking about things that matter.
Why do you get to keep your money?
Why should we be in control of our own healthcare and be able to choose our own doctors?
What does that say about us and our freedom and our national political traditions?
And the good that it does for us and the whole rest of the world.
That's what I would focus on.
And I wouldn't cede the question of so-called social issues to the left.
The great example of this is abortion.
Abortion was winning at the time that Roe v.
Wade was decided.
And since then, public opinion has moved steadily in our direction because the arguments for abortion cannot sustain themselves in the light of truth and in the light of sonograms and in the light of science and the arguments that we're making for it.
So, I would, even when you're making tax arguments, even when you're making healthcare arguments, I would make them from a cultural, from a social, from a moral standpoint.
It's, you know, the left, just on taxes, the left says that if you want to keep your own money, you're greedy.
But if you want to steal somebody else's money and take it for yourself and give it to everybody else, then you're compassionate.
That's, of course, the opposite.
The opposite is true.
If I want to keep my own money, that's my money.
And then I can give it out in charity.
And if you want to steal my money, you're envious.
You're greedy.
That's wrong.
That's immoral.
And we should speak in those terms.
And I think we'll win.
And I think we are winning on that.
All right, that's our show.
Come back on Monday.
We'll have a lot more.
I'm going to be up in Santa Barbara speaking to the Young America's Foundation over the weekend.
Go ahead and over to the Reagan Ranch.
Should be a lot of fun.
Maybe you'll be able to catch that on live stream.
Otherwise, I'll see you next week.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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, the Democrats conducted a hearing yesterday on reparations.
But I think there are a lot of very serious problems with the reparations idea.
Namely, it's immoral and extremely impractical.
So we'll talk about that today.
Also, amazing advancements in medical technology are continuing to make abortion more and more obsolete.
Though pro-abortion people, of course, haven't noticed that yet, so we'll talk about that.
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