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July 2, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:17
Ep. 375 - AOC’s Border Lies

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spreading lies about our southern border. Then, Quilette editor Andy Ngo speaks out after his brutal beating at the hands of Antifa. Finally, Nike disses the Flag for the Fourth of July, so the Governor of Arizona disses Nike. Date: 07-02-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Because it's a day that ends in why, socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spreading lies, specifically about the crisis on our southern border.
We will separate fact from fiction, which will leave AOC uncharacteristically silent.
Then Quillette editor Andy Ngo speaks out after his brutal beating at the hands of Antifa.
Finally, Nike disses the flag for the 4th of July, so the governor of Arizona disses All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The sky is blue, the sun is bright, and AOC is spreading lies.
Surprising, surprising, I know.
AOC took another trip down to get some photo ops at the southern border, and she is now telling the press and all of her Twitter followers that the Border Patrol agents there...
You know, the ones working in the concentration camps.
That's what she's calling the detention centers.
So if they're concentration camps, then the Border Patrol agents have to be Nazis, I guess.
And so she's describing them as psychologically abusing the prisoners, of harming them, of conducting psychological warfare, and of making the detainees, the illegal aliens who are there, drink toilet water if they want to hydrate themselves.
Here's AOC. Can you say it again in English, please?
There's abuse in these facilities.
There's abuse.
This was them on their best behavior, and they put them in a room with no running water, and these women were being told by CBP officers to drink out of the toilet.
They were drinking water out of the toilet, and that was them knowing a congressional visit was coming.
This is CBP on their best behavior, telling people to drink out of the toilet.
Did you see somebody actually do that?
So you hear that at the end.
You hear the reporter say, did you see someone actually do that?
When she's talking about how the Border Patrol wants the illegal aliens to drink out of the toilet.
Did you see someone actually do that?
The window goes up.
She doesn't want to answer that question.
Because of course she didn't see anybody actually do that.
So what she just said is not true.
There's no evidence for what she's saying.
And there's a lot of evidence to the contrary.
Because...
Border Patrol immediately started releasing images of what their facilities look like.
And as always with the left, there is almost a hair of a semblance of a grain of truth in what they're saying.
And then they use that almost tiny iota of a grain of truth to be twisted into a lie.
So you can see from this photo they released, what they have in these facilities is toilets that are connected to sinks.
And out of the sinks is potable water, drinking water.
They don't have potable water in the toilet bowls, obviously.
That's toilet water.
But there is a sink connected to the toilet.
This is true, as they pointed out, of every municipal jail in the country.
The Border Patrol official said, quote, of course that's what we have.
No one is drinking toilet water.
They're drinking potable water from the sink attached to the toilet.
It's what you would find in every municipal jail in the United States.
Now, if the sink is connected to the toilet, Then I guess you can almost plausibly say with a straight face they're telling people to drink from the toilet.
But they're not telling them to drink toilet water.
They're telling them to drink from an instrument that is connected to the toilet.
So why would she make these claims?
When it's so easily disproven, you look at the picture, you say, oh, okay.
So it's like the worst kind of clickbait.
Border Patrol tells aliens to drink out of toilet.
Connected sink that has perfectly fine drinking water coming out of it.
So, you know, you click on that headline, you're so shocked by it, and then you realize the reality is perfectly fine.
Why would she do it?
One is she is genuinely unintelligent.
She actually is.
She's savvy.
She's got a certain cleverness.
She's shrewd.
But she really is unintelligent and uneducated.
And so I guess it's plausible to give her the benefit of the doubt that she even saw one of these instruments or she heard about it secondhand and just didn't realize what was going on.
That, I guess, is plausible.
However, I think there's a more obvious answer here, and it's why it's such a good attack.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So, why would AOC make these obviously ridiculous claims?
I think the real reason she went down there to do this is she needs new border photos and new border stories to get the last, obviously, staged one out of the news.
So you saw this.
Within the last week or two, those photos came out of AOC visiting the border a while ago, and she was wearing all white.
She was also wearing an $800 watch on her wrist.
Yeah.
Watch on her wrist.
This Gucci watch.
So she's wearing that, but, you know, she kind of wished that wasn't there for the cameras.
And she's got this ridiculous acting going on.
She's sort of crying with her arm up over her eyes, bent over.
Then, you know, she stood up, had to readjust for the light or something like that.
And there's that really serious photo of her looking into the camera.
She's really...
There's no tears anywhere, of course, because it's just all play acting.
But...
She was staging all of them, and this became a meme, and we all made fun of her.
So then, a week later, just coincidentally, she goes down to the border to get these new photos.
And the only way to really make this stick is to make insane claims.
And this is what AOC does.
She makes insane, outrageous claims, and we all start talking about it.
And the right points out that what she's saying just is simply not true.
And then the left...
As if by reflex, has to oppose what the right is saying.
And so the left starts to say, well, actually, she's sort of right, even though she isn't.
So you see this playing out now with the...
You saw it with the Green New Deal, for instance.
She said the world is going to end in 12 years unless we pass a $93 trillion program that gets rid of cars, most trains, airplanes, cows, every building in the country.
Unless we do that...
There's no way that we can possibly stave off this natural Armageddon.
And so conservatives pointed out that that isn't true.
The world isn't going to end in 12 years.
And then the left came out and said, well, no, but actually, actually, though, what she meant is that in 12 years, the damage will be so bad that it'll be really super hard to combat it.
So really, you know, she's right.
Sort of, or something.
And that's what they're doing here.
So she says, Border Patrol is making women drink out of toilet bowls.
And that's not happening.
There's no evidence that that's happening.
So the right points that out.
And then the left says, well, but actually, the sinks are attached to the toilets.
So like, really, you know, when you really think about it, actually, she's right.
And then she benefits from this, because she's in the news the whole time.
From the minute she says the stupid thing, and then the right starts talking about her, she dominates the news cycle.
Then the left tries to defend her, not because they like her.
They don't like her.
There's a rumor in New York that they're going to try to get rid of her congressional district in 2022 because she causes so much trouble for them.
But they have to defend her because they hate the right so much.
So then they defend her.
She gets a whole other cycle out of it.
Meanwhile, now we forget about her stupid photos at the border from last week.
Now we get these new photos.
Now we get these new claims.
You know, President Trump in some way used this strategy, except the difference, of course, being that President Trump would say some outlandish thing and then it would seem to be proven correct.
So he would say, illegal aliens are killing people all over the country.
He'd say, ah, that's hyperbolic.
That's not really happening.
Then you have the death of Katie Steinle.
It's very high-profile killing from an illegal alien.
He'd say, oh, God, I guess he was on to something.
Trump will say, we're going to use tariffs to get a new trade deal and immigration deal with Mexico.
Say, oh, it's never going to work.
Tariffs don't work.
There's no way, you know, and then the left would go crazy.
Then it turns out it actually did work.
So, you know, there's a little bit of this strategy with Trump.
I just think more often than not with Trump, it turns out that...
The claim he was making is largely true.
With AOC, that doesn't happen.
I don't think that's ever happened.
And so she really gets a lot of benefits out of this.
Now, how do we know that the conditions are actually not that bad on the border?
First of all, because we've got other people who are going in there and telling us that they're not that bad.
A Washington Examiner reporter tweeted out that two sources inside the building, inside this Border Patrol facility, Wasn't even inside.
Why else do we know that she's not telling the truth?
Because she wouldn't clarify whether she actually heard the toilet thing herself firsthand or whether she just heard a rumor about it secondhand or thirdhand.
She's been asked by media outlets to clarify.
She won't clarify.
The third way that we know that she is not telling the truth about this, and this is the best one of all, if the detention centers were really these Concentration camp filled with torture, awful abusive places.
Probably over 3,000 illegal aliens per day wouldn't be flooding across our border.
Right?
If these were really awful, torturous camps, we wouldn't be seeing an increase in illegal immigration.
I mean, 3,000 a day right now is the low estimate.
If it was that bad, people would just not break the law, and they would just stay in their own countries, or at the very least, let's say they're fleeing El Salvador, they're fleeing Honduras, wherever, they would at least stay in Mexico.
They wouldn't stay, they wouldn't go into the United States if it were really as bad as AOC is saying it is.
But it's not.
We're just detaining illegal aliens because they're breaking the law and we're trying to do the best that we can to deal with them while discouraging more from coming over.
But this gives away the whole game because if Democrats actually wanted to stop this abuse...
That's what they would do.
They would discourage people from crossing the border illegally.
And is that what they're doing?
No.
Actually, instead, they're doing everything they can to incentivize more and more people to cross that border illegally.
Julian Castro, running for president right now as a Democrat, came out and said that he wants to decriminalize Illegal border crossings.
Here he is.
I'm not buying into the BS that basically says that little children and mothers who are desperate and fleeing desperate circumstances are a national security threat to our nation.
I said that we should decriminalize people who are coming here, crossing the border.
Okay, first of all, nobody ever said that mothers and children are the national security threat.
What we said is that an open border is the national security threat.
We know that this is true.
Nicaragua just days ago arrested four ISIS terrorists who were entering Nicaragua, who were trying to get in there and then cross the U.S. southern border illegally.
That is a national security threat.
But Julian Castro can't make serious arguments, so he just has to try to burn down straw men.
But Julian Castro...
All the Democrats are unwilling to admit a very simple fact, which is that when you decriminalize something, you get more of it.
You are incentivizing it.
But they're doing something even worse to incentivize illegal border crossing, something even more heinous.
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So the other way that they are, on the left, incentivizing people to pour into this country illegally, incentivizing this major exacerbation of the problem at the border, is by calling for open borders for family units, specifically, right?
This has been sort of their de facto position for years.
We're told, you can't detain children.
This began during the Clinton administration, during the Flores Agreement in 1997.
They say you can't detain children in jails.
Fair enough.
Yeah, no one wants to put children in jails.
But if the children are there with their parents or they're there with some other adult, then you've got to put the adult in the jail or some kind of holding facility.
They are breaking the law.
You can't just let them go.
So you've got the parents in the jail.
Where are you going to put the kids?
You can put the kids in an HHS facility, but then you're separating children from their parents.
Okay, so you've got to do that, but then we're told we can't separate children from their parents.
So you can't put the kids in the jail.
You can't separate the children from your parents.
There's only one other option.
What is it?
Just let them go.
Which is the left's position.
The left's position is, okay, maybe we can detain you if you're a single guy and you don't have any kids with you, but we're not going to detain you if you have any kids with you.
So guess what that does?
It incentivizes people to bring a kid with them.
Doesn't matter if it's their kid.
Doesn't matter where they get the kid.
If they have a kid with them, It makes it much easier to cross.
So now Mexico is confirming what we already knew.
State Department has already been talking about this, and Mexico is now confirming it.
Men are offering to buy children in Mexico to cross the border illegally.
This is the result of these policies.
You know, the left wants to pretend that letting illegal aliens that have kids go roam free is compassionate.
They want to pretend that a totally open border is compassionate.
Well, this is what that compassion gets you.
It gets you roving bands of men going to orphanages and going to desperate women in Mexico and offering to purchase their children.
There was a Honduran woman in Mexico.
She was interviewed.
She said, quote, I can't go to work because I can't take my eyes off my boys.
She said that men offered her $350 to buy children at the Iglesia Embajadores de Jesus shelter in Tijuana.
Tijuana is pretty close.
It's not that far from where I am right now.
She said they want to rob our kids so they can cross into the United States.
The people who are doing this, by the way, are not refugees.
They're not desperate refugees fleeing violence.
For the vast majority of illegal aliens pouring into our country, they're economic migrants who just want better jobs and want to make more money.
Fair enough.
If I lived in El Salvador, I would want that too.
That's not an argument for completely violating the laws of a sovereign country, violating national borders, violating the people of America's right to self-government.
That's not an argument for that.
If they were really just fleeing political violence, they could stay in any of the countries they stop in along the way.
That's where this Honduran woman was.
She was staying in Mexico.
And on their way to cross into the US illegally, a group of men tried to buy her children for $350 each.
You know, with the left, it's all crocodile tears until you actually do something about it.
AOC can go down to the border wearing as many Gucci watches as she wants and pretend to cry.
She's covering her eyes so that you can't see that she's not actually crying.
And talk about how awful it is and make up a bunch of lies about border control, but it's just words, words, words.
Leftist policies have created this crisis at the border, and now the left is blaming conservatives for the crisis.
And they're saying the only way to fix the crisis is with more leftist policies, which created the problem in the first place.
The left is getting it, as always, exactly backwards.
That's not just at the border.
You saw this moving all the way over to Portland.
you saw this over the weekend at that Antifa thuggery that went on in the streets of Portland.
You saw it when Antifa was beating Andy Ngo.
When they were beating this Quillette editor, Andy Ngo, do you know what they were chanting?
They were chanting, no hate, no fear, as they were cracking this guy's skull and they were giving him a brain hemorrhage.
Well, Andy Ngo is finally speaking out.
Here he is on Tucker last night.
While hearing people chant, no hate, no fear, I'm suddenly bashed on the back of my head from behind.
And from there, I'm a very passive person.
I've never been in a fight.
It took me a few seconds to realize that I was actually even hitting my head.
And you can see on Andy now, he's got a shiner, he's got a black eye, he's got some other scrapes and bruises on his face.
Obviously you can't see what's going on in the back of his head.
And...
I, first of all, I mean, you can hear these sort of things in the video, but I've seen the left do this myself.
I've seen it firsthand.
You know, when I was, fortunately, much less injured than Andy was, when I was at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and I was giving a speech called Men Are Not Women, and some masked Antifa lunatic busted in and sprayed me with some weird combination of, luckily, non-toxic chemicals.
He immediately gets tackled by the police.
So he busts in with this super soaker kind of gun.
He gets a spray off of whatever creepy liquid he had on him, and he sprays it at me, shoots it at me.
He goes down, the cops are arresting him, and the leftist activists out there started chanting, hands up, don't shoot.
I wish they had chanted it at their leftist comrade when he busted in.
Then I might still have my suit before he got it sprayed with whatever weird paint glitter stuff he had.
He literally came in with a type of gun and shot it.
Then he's being arrested.
No guns anywhere.
And they say, hands up, don't shoot.
To the guys who don't have guns.
Who are just arresting him and stopping the guy who does have a giant squirt gun.
Completely backwards.
So what happened to Andy?
He puts it in his own words.
When I realized what was happening, it was too late.
A mob of people, all dressed in black and wearing masks, started beating me with their fists, and some of them used objects to hit me.
I don't know how many people were involved.
It seemed like 5, 10, 15 or 20.
It could have been that many.
They beat me so much that I lost control of my GoPro camera that I was holding, which was then stolen from me.
And when I thought it was over, I was wrong.
I put my arms up to try to shield my face as well as to signal to them that I was surrendering and that I wasn't there to fight.
But that really signaled to them to be more aggressive.
So then they started dumping what I believe were milkshakes and eggs, throwing it at my face, which blinded me.
So I couldn't see, and I was kicked some more, punched some more, and all this time I kept thinking, where are the police?
I could still see the Monoma County Justice Center in front of me, but no police ever arrived.
That's the question.
Where were the police?
Where were they?
We see them in a couple videos later and Andy says to them, where were you?
I was attacked twice before you guys even sort of showed up.
One or two of you show up.
Where were they?
Why weren't they there?
It seems to me pretty clear someone told them that they didn't have to police this event or they didn't have to police it very meticulously.
So the question then isn't just where are the police, it's where were the politicians?
What were the politicians telling them to do?
Why were the politicians, like the mayor of this town, Basically handing it over to Antifa.
I mean, this isn't just a joke.
He got sprayed with silly string.
You know, some guy poured a milkshake on him.
Okay.
I mean, that's awful.
That is a physical assault that took place.
But they're also cracking his head.
They're also blinding him with eggs in his eyes.
They also caused his brain to bleed.
He tells what happened.
I eventually stumbled away, bleeding.
Um, across the park and I lost my balance so I sat down on the ground in front of the courthouse and from there a medic SWAT team informed me that in order to get an ambulance to be taken to a hospital I would have to walk to the police precinct.
In other words, walk back in the direction of the demonstrators who just attacked me.
Later that night, after arriving in the emergency room, I had a CT scan which confirmed that I was diagnosed with a brain hemorrhage.
So he's got a brain hemorrhage.
His brain is bleeding.
And he's told when the cops finally show up, they say, oh yeah, if you want to get an ambulance, you've got to walk back through Antifa, the guys that just cracked your head and threw eggs on your face and punched you and gave you all those marks on your face, gave you a shiner.
You've got to walk through them, and then we'll have an ambulance pick you up there.
What are the consequences for this?
Who is going to pay a price?
Well, finally, the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, He gives his answer.
He explains what's happening.
He says what's going to happen.
And it is the most cowardly, mealy-mouthed, despicable answer to leftist violence that I've seen in the entire country.
We'll break it down in a second.
Then we have to get to Nike's big diss on the American flag and a wonderful political response to that.
We'll try to get to a little bit more if we have time.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Go to dailywire.com.
$10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
What do you get?
What don't you get?
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
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You get the Ben Shapiro radio show.
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So you will get three more hours of me.
Can you imagine?
It's like we're going on a date or something.
I mean, that's a long time.
So you'll get all of that.
You get the Matt Wall show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday.
Actually, today on Ben's radio show, you'll also get an interview that I'm doing with Andy Ngo.
He's going to come on.
Hasn't talked to too many people yet about what happened to him, so we'll discuss that later on today.
You get everything, and you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Ooh, that tastes like the governor of Arizona smacking down Nike for dissing the American flag on the 4th of July.
We will explain it all just after this.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
You know, I just remembered, we're not going to have a mailbag on Thursday because it's going to be the 4th of July.
And so I guess on Thursday you will write your questions to America, just address them to America, and then, you know, hand them out on the 4th of July, and every answer will be just a very beautiful American firework exploding, if only.
That's how I feel when I'm giving answers in the mailbag.
I feel like they're all just fireworks.
So we'll do that.
Unfortunately, nothing.
So we'll have to do double mailbag next week or something like that.
The mayor of Portland finally issues a statement about what happened, about Antifa's attack on Andy Ngo and other people, cracking their skulls, sending them to the hospital with brain hemorrhages.
Does he call out Antifa as the domestic terrorist group that they are?
No.
Does he take responsibility for his complete failure as mayor and for the failure of the police?
No.
Does he...
Smear the right-wingers as basically deserving their attacks, as asking for it.
Yes, of course he does that, because he's a leftist.
So here's what he wrote, quote, Portland has always been a beacon of free speech.
We are proud of that history.
But, see, and there it is.
You knew the but was coming.
The minute he talked about how much he likes free speech, you saw the but was coming.
And so he, a butthead, Says, we're proud of that history of free speech, but in the last couple of years, some have increasingly used their opportunity to exercise their First Amendment rights as an opportunity to incite violence.
There it is.
He goes on for about ten other tweets.
I told you everything you need to know.
He's saying that the conservatives who got their skulls cracked open by leftist terrorists over the weekend, they were asking for it because they incited violence.
He can only be referring to the right-wingers.
They come out.
There was a patriot prayer rally.
So they're out demonstrating for patriotism and prayers.
Two things I like very much.
And that's them exercising their First Amendment rights.
Then a bunch of leftist terrorists...
Staged a premeditated attack and cracked their skulls open.
And what I just described is what happened.
The way Mayor Wheeler describes that is some people irresponsibly used their First Amendment rights to incite violence.
I mean, it was incited.
Antifa couldn't do anything about that.
They got incited.
You can't incite somebody and then not expect them to crack your skull open, right?
I mean, you were wearing an awful short skirt, Andy Ngo.
What were you doing?
Walking down that street at night in that short skirt.
I mean, come on, you're telling me?
You're telling me you weren't asking to have that head cracked open?
You're telling me you weren't asking for a brain hemorrhage?
That's what Ted Wheeler is saying in Portland.
He goes on.
Over the weekend, some chose to engage in violence in Portland, which is unacceptable and not to be tolerated.
We stand against all forms of violence, regardless of someone's political leanings.
So, right, he's even assuming that there's a question that you wouldn't stand against some forms of violence.
If you disagreed with that person's politics.
That's actually the assumption.
He's saying, we wouldn't do that.
Even if they're conservatives, we would never do that.
It won't be tolerated.
We stand against it.
Of course, we won't do anything to stop it.
And we'll have the cops stand down.
And we won't even get you an ambulance.
We'll make you walk back through Antifa to get an ambulance.
But, you know, we totally stand against it.
But, but, he goes on.
Portland police officers have the unenviable task of keeping the peace.
It's a difficult job and hard decisions are made in real time.
What hard decisions?
Like don't help the conservatives who are getting their heads cracked in?
That doesn't sound, by the way, like a police decision.
That sounds like a political decision.
That sounds like a decision that ultimately lays at the feet of the mayor's office.
While we continue to learn more about what transpired over the weekend, we will keep you informed.
We will do everything we can to make sure that those who have committed violence are held accountable.
Sure you will.
You're not even holding them accountable in your statement.
In your tweet, you're not holding them accountable.
You are blaming the conservatives for inciting violence by abusing their First Amendment rights.
That was the first thing you said.
And then all of the rest of it was mealy-mouthed nonsense.
You know, this is the real example of the very fine people on both sides argument in Charlottesville.
The left never let Trump hear the end of it when he said that there were fine people on both sides.
Even though Trump went on specifically, the same paragraph, to say, I'm not talking about neo-Nazis, I'm not talking about white supremacists, they should be condemned totally.
But the left never let him hear the end of it.
But now Wheeler is saying there were good people on both sides and We will stand against all forms of violence regardless of someone's political feelings.
Some chose to engage in violence.
No, some didn't choose.
Antifa chose.
The left chose.
Then he defends the police.
If you want to hold people accountable, Mayor Wheeler, name them.
You can't hold anyone accountable unless you name them.
Unless we know who they are, they can't be held accountable.
Their name is Antifa.
That's their name.
They're a domestic terrorist organization.
They meet the very basic definition of terrorism.
They use violence against civilians to achieve political goals.
They are terrorists.
If they are not terrorists, no one is a terrorist.
But he won't name them because he's not going to hold them accountable because he doesn't really think they did anything wrong because they were incited to violence by those awful conservatives.
And this is, by the way, what authoritarian politicians have done for all of history.
People think authoritarians are idiots.
Mussolini, these people, Mussolini founded fascism, right?
They think that Mussolini is a total idiot.
That he would own every aspect of the fascist agenda.
He didn't.
There were always in these regimes paramilitary organizations.
So you've had it in the United States.
In the United States when the Democratic Party after the Civil War was oppressing black Americans, recently freed slaves, instituting Jim Crow, instituting lynchings, Removing their civil rights.
When they were doing that, they didn't only do it under the guise of the Democratic Party.
They did it from the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party, which was called the Ku Klux Klan.
The fascists had a paramilitary wing.
The camichanere, the black shirts.
The Maoists in China had a paramilitary wing.
They were the Red Guard.
And there was a little bit of a difference.
There was a little bit of a separation from the government itself, from the regime itself.
And the radical left has a paramilitary wing, and that's Antifa.
And so what they're saying is, oh, that's very bad.
Tsk, tsk, Antifa.
They slap them on the wrists.
You really shouldn't do that.
Of course, you were incited, and a really smart conservative wouldn't open their mouth and invite that sort of brutality.
But...
Bad, bad.
Don't do that again unless those conservatives act up again.
That's what's happening.
That's what's being encouraged by politicians like Ted Wheeler.
Absolutely disgraceful.
Obviously, he should resign.
He won't resign.
Obviously, he should be made to resign.
He won't be, I suspect, because the electorate in Portland is very far left.
But that guy, with that statement, that guy is complicit in whatever future violence occurs up there.
Totally switching gears in some good political news.
We got bad news out of corporate America.
We learned yesterday that Nike was scrapping plans for a new shoe for the Fourth of July that featured the Betsy Ross flag on it.
We have the Betsy Ross flag right behind us on set.
It's that early American flag, you know, with the circle and the stars.
And why is Nike scrapping this shoe?
Colin Kaepernick, of course, their spokesman.
The guy calling the shots.
Colin Kaepernick is now saying that the Betsy Ross flag, one of the earliest American flags, is offensive.
We're not talking about the stars and bars, right?
We're not talking about the Confederate flag.
We're talking about the Betsy Ross flag, one of the earliest flags in the country.
Why is it offensive?
Because it was flown during slave times.
So now we can't have it.
We've got to ban that flag.
Now, of course, this doesn't make any sense.
How about even the current American flag?
Even the American flag that we have today with all 50 stars, that flag flew over a segregated country, a racially segregated country.
How can we possibly fly that flag with such a major injustice tolerated under that banner?
The current American flag, 50 stars, flew over a country that had redlining.
Black people weren't permitted to move to certain neighborhoods.
Forget about just our current national flag.
Forget about even our flag at all.
No national flag in the history of the world has ever flown over a perfect country.
Right?
Because there's no perfect country.
There never has been.
There is not presently.
And there never will be because people are fallen.
Our nature is imperfect.
Our political systems are imperfect.
So we will never have a flag that ever flies over a perfect country because we don't ever have perfect countries.
Colin Kaepernick doesn't understand this.
Or maybe he does and he just wants to watch the world burn.
This all comes as a bad news out of Gallup comes out.
American pride has hit an all-time low.
We've talked in the past weeks a lot about pride, how pride is a terrible thing, how the left now is making an idol out of pride itself.
They have pride parades, pride day, pride month.
There is a slight distinction to be made, which is that used casually, not emphatically, Pride in a national context can be a stand-in for piety or loyalty or affection.
It doesn't necessarily just mean chauvinism or something like that.
Now, just 45% of Americans describe themselves as extremely proud of their country.
Less than half.
The majority of Americans are not extremely proud of their country.
Just 22% of Democrats are extremely proud of their country.
That's down 10 points in just one year.
Even setting aside our problems with the word pride.
I think we can acknowledge pride.
When you're not just making an idol out of pride itself.
When you're using it in a broader context.
It's a stand-in for affection to your country.
And just 22% of Democrats feel that.
I called this 10 years ago.
This whole flag thing.
I called it.
I was a freshman in college.
And my roommate and I were like the only two conservatives at the whole college.
And we had a nice big American flag.
And we flew it out of our window on old campus.
And this was very controversial.
People asked us to take it down.
They were furious that we flew an American flag.
I couldn't believe it.
I said, what's the matter with flying an American flag?
It's the flag of our country.
They would have felt better if I flew a Chinese flag because that would have been inclusive.
That's not inclusive, obviously.
It's one of the worst regimes in the history of the world.
But in the leftist backwards world, that is inclusive because it's encouraging to Chinese foreign exchange students or something, international students.
But the American flag, the best flag in the history of the world, that's the worst one you could possibly imagine.
So I saw this happening and I said, it's not going to be long before the American flag is considered a hate symbol by the pop culture.
Because whatever the sort of lefty crazy colleges are doing, fast forward 10 years, that's what your culture does.
So that's happening now.
Colin Kaepernick is trying to outlaw the American flag, trying to, from a cultural level at least, ostracize and banish the American flag as a hate symbol.
Governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, one of the great politicians in this country, he didn't take too kindly to that.
Doug Doocy came out and issued a statement.
He said, quote, Today was supposed to be a good day in Arizona with the announcement of a major Nike investment in Goodyear, Arizona.
And then this news broke yesterday afternoon.
Words cannot express my disappointment at this terrible decision.
I'm embarrassed for Nike.
Nike is an iconic American brand and American company.
This country, our system of government and free enterprise, have allowed them to prosper and flourish.
Instead of celebrating American history, the week of our nation's independence, Nike has apparently decided that Betsy Ross is unworthy and has bowed to the current onslaught of political correctness and historical revisionism.
It is a shameful retreat for the company.
American businesses should be proud of our country's history, not abandoning it.
Nike has made its decision, and now we're making ours.
I've ordered the Arizona Commerce Authority to withdraw all financial incentive dollars under their discretion that the state was providing for the company to locate here.
Arizona's economy is doing just fine without Nike.
We don't need to suck up to companies that consciously denigrate our nation's history.
And finally, it shouldn't take a controversy over a shoe for our kids to know who Betsy Ross is, a founding mother, Her story should be taught in all American schools.
In the meantime, it's worth Googling her.
Excellent response.
Absolutely beautiful.
Totally gets it right.
Some conservatives don't like this response.
They see this as the government unfairly picking winners and losers.
That's not what's going on at all, by the way.
But this gets to that low-simmering debate that we've been having between conservatives and people who are, they would call themselves classical liberals or really conservative liberals or something like that.
The questions that come up are should the government be picking winners and losers and should the government be wading into cultural questions or should the government just provide a neutral playing field on which we can debate cultural questions?
First of all, This is not an example of the government picking winners and losers.
If anything, the government picking winners and losers was shown when Arizona offered those financial incentives to Nike in the first place.
That was when they were picking winners and losers.
What Arizona said, which is what virtually every state does, is, hey, corporations, if you relocate here and you create a lot of jobs here, we'll give you a huge tax cut.
Millions in tax cuts.
Billions sometimes in tax cuts.
If you just come here, and so you're basically bribing the company to come bring you jobs.
There is no constitutional right to state tax incentives for corporations.
The state has every right to withdraw those tax incentives if they find out that the corporation is denigrating the country itself.
That's the first part.
Second of all, on the cultural stuff, the government is already wading into cultural questions.
Because it has to.
I think we all agree with the patron saint of Hollywood conservatives, Andrew Breitbart, that politics is downstream of culture.
But that means that politics has a huge cultural component to it.
When the government declares that sex and gender are no longer the same, as many people on the left want it to do, that's the government wading into culture.
When the government creates a law called Title IX that protects women's sports in colleges, What does the government have to do with women's collegiate sports, you might ask?
Well, it does.
It does have a lot to do with that.
It currently does that.
The government wades into cultural issues.
When the government deems that certain crimes are especially heinous and deserve special punishment...
Solely based on the motivations of the perpetrators, that's the government wading into cultural issues.
This is like hate crime legislation, which can take crimes out of the state level, make it a federal crime, just because the perpetrator, he could have done the exact same crime as anybody else, but if they can say he was motivated by some particular...
View of the world, some particular bigotry or viewpoint, then it's especially punished.
That is the government wading into cultural issues.
This is this lie that I hear so often.
On the left and the right, people say, you can't legislate morality.
Every single law legislates morality.
Every law.
When we talk about how we need to expand health care coverage with a federal program, you're legislating morality.
When you talk about how we need to intervene on behalf of one country but not another, you're legislating morality.
When you raise taxes in the name of fairness, you're legislating morality.
When you lower taxes in the name of freedom, you are legislating morality.
All laws derive ultimately at the bedrock from ethical laws, from the moral law.
So the question here is, will the state of Arizona reward a country, or a company rather, that spits on the American flag?
I am so happy that they're not.
I think this governor did an absolutely terrific job.
It shows that there is some question in the United States beyond profit.
We all love profit.
Everyone likes making money.
Nobody likes making money more than I do.
But there are other things about our...
We're not just simply numbers.
Edmund Burke, you know, when he was lamenting the fall of conservatism, he said that the age of chivalry is gone.
That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
We're not just numbers.
We're not just tablets.
There was an old view of the conservative movement in America, which was just that we were a bunch of bean counters, modeling what happens if we lower taxes even more.
I love low taxes, but that's not it.
A nearly economic vision of conservatism is a losing conservatism.
Why?
Because we all agree politics is downstream from culture.
If economic views are not rooted in a cultural conservatism, a shared culture, shared premises, shared commitment to our country, to our constitution, to our founding values, to the Fourth of July, if we're not grounding it in that, then we're not offering anything.
That's our show.
We will have much more tomorrow before we say adieu for the 4th of July.
We won't use that French language.
We won't use those people who invented freedom fries.
We'll say goodbye for the 4th of July, but we'll only do that after tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm going to be sitting in for Ben's radio show today.
So if you want three more hours of fun, come on by.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you soon.
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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Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
July 4th is coming and Trump is planning a bang-up parade.
But I'm wondering if that's an empty celebration.
A new poll says Americans are losing their pride in their country.
Are they?
And if they are, is it too late for them to get it back?
We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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