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July 9, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:21
Ep. 378 - Who Is Jeffrey Epstein?

A billionaire Democrat donor finally gets pinched for sex with children, the Little Mermaid becomes black, and NBC says we need reparations because Mitch McConnell’s family owned slaves. Date: 07-09-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A billionaire Democrat donor finally gets pinched for sex with children, and the mainstream media are trying to play it off as a Republican scandal.
We will examine who exactly is Jeffrey Epstein.
Then, can mermaids be black?
We will analyze the Disney Little Mermaid non-traversy.
Finally, NBC says we need reparations because Mitch McConnell's family owned slaves, or something.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
This is the big question of the day.
Jeffrey Epstein.
Is Jeffrey Epstein going to take down every famous politician that you've ever heard of?
Or is Jeffrey Epstein going to get off the hook again?
He is this We'll examine the case, what it means, what it means for Trump, what it means for Clinton, what it means for all the other famous people associated with him.
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Who is Jeffrey Epstein?
You're probably hearing a lot of conflicting things in the press.
He's just one of those names that's been floating around for a while now.
And it's such an irony because he's this billionaire hedge fund manager.
He's got ties to some of the world's most prominent politicians.
He was convicted of soliciting sex from a minor.
And he's now been arrested for sex trafficking.
And it also seems for possession of child pornography.
This guy is super-duper rich.
He's a major Democratic donor.
The media did not cover him at all for over 10 years now.
They haven't covered his obvious crimes.
But now that they think that they can tie him to Trump, all of a sudden, they're going after him.
And frankly, I encourage it.
I say, great, bring it on.
I think they're going to hoist themselves by their own petard here.
This guy is super rich.
So in 1992, he owned the largest private residence in Manhattan.
And he's got ties to a lot of people, not just Democrats, though he does have ties to a lot of Democrats.
But he has ties to Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew in the UK. He's got ties to Alan Dershowitz, a friend of the show and, you know, top lawyer in America.
Ken Starr, another very important lawyer and judge.
He was the guy who was going after Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair.
Major, major people.
Now something that the media reports have gotten wrong on this and have kind of clouded the issue, I think, is that it's not uncommon for very, very rich people to know other very, very important people.
This is not uncommon at all.
This is what happens.
I mean, this guy was a member of New York's high society.
And when you're really rich or you're really famous or you're really powerful, you tend to know a lot of other people who are really rich and really powerful and really famous.
So Epstein was no different.
And because Epstein did do some philanthropic work because he was a big name in charity, he had even more reason to know these people.
So...
Jeffrey Epstein had this charitable foundation.
They donated in 2003 $30 million to Harvard to establish a mathematical, biology, and evolutionary dynamics program there.
So he gets lauded.
He goes around to high society.
Harvard professors and graduates like Alan Dershowitz say, oh, he's a great guy.
You know, oh, I like Jeffrey.
Yeah, he's fun to be around.
President Trump gave a quote to this 2002 New York Magazine profile, said, oh yeah, Jeffrey, he's got a great social life.
Bill Clinton said, oh yeah, Jeffrey, he has a keen knowledge of global markets.
And what Epstein seems to have done is through his philanthropy, through his business interests, he created this collection of friends.
That's the word he used.
He had a collection of friends that were strategic.
He said, quote, I invest in people.
Be it politics or science, it's what I do.
So why was he investing in people?
Well, we saw last time around in 2007, when he got pinched for soliciting sex from children and for other sex crimes, that he maybe was able to use that collection of people to help him get off the hook.
Now, he also had this island, this private island in the Caribbean, which is called Little St.
James.
And he had a plane, a very famous or infamous plane that he would take to and from this island and he would lend out to his famous friends like Bill Clinton.
And the plane was known as the Lolita Express.
Lolita from the famous novel about having sex with a young girl.
So, pretty shady guy.
Why did he have this island?
Ostensibly it's because he ran his business for tax purposes out of the Caribbean, out of St.
Thomas, and so he owned this island right next door.
What was he doing on that island?
We already have some idea and we're going to hear a lot more as this investigation goes on.
Pretty shady dude.
And the question also is how did he make all his money?
I mean, he was a college dropout.
He had been a teacher very briefly of high school students.
And then he gets into finance.
He's working at Bear Stearns.
He leaves there.
He's working at his own hedge fund.
Even that is not totally uncommon.
This is one of the marks they give to Trump.
They'll say, oh, Donald Trump, he's not really as rich as he says he is.
Oh, Jeffrey Epstein, he's not really as rich as he says he is.
This 2002 New York Magazine article, which is kind of the famous profile of him...
Said basically the same thing.
They suggested he wasn't really as rich as he said.
They quoted one Wall Streeter as saying, He is this mysterious Gatsby-esque figure.
He likes people to think that he's very rich, and he cultivates this air of aloofness.
The whole thing is weird.
Yeah, the whole thing is really weird.
So that's the background on Jeffrey Epstein.
What did he do?
In 2005, the Palm Beach police get a call from a woman saying that Jeffrey Epstein had invited her 14-year-old stepdaughter over to his mansion and molested her.
and that the stepdaughter had also been invited by another female friend, and that there were these girls kind of recruiting each other to go to Epstein's mansion down in Palm Beach.
Police interviewed five of the alleged victims.
They got 17 witnesses under oath to describe all these things that Epstein was doing.
They then go and they investigate his mansion.
They find a high school transcript in Epstein's trash.
That's pretty weird.
I don't keep those lying around my house.
They found photos of the girls in his house.
Some of the documents suggested that Epstein had installed video cameras to record the sex with underage girls, and this is where the politicians come in.
He would invite some of these prominent politicians over, presumably to have sex with these young girls, and he would videotape them as well.
So now you've got some evidence of maybe having stuff for blackmail, maybe to get his friends to help him out in a pinch.
So this is where it gets really dodgy politically.
The police bring this heap of evidence to the Palm Beach County prosecutor, Barry Krischer, who is a major Democrat.
Jeffrey Epstein, major Democrat.
And what does the Democratic prosecutor do?
He basically punches.
He basically just charges this guy with one count of soliciting prostitution.
Not with having sex with minors.
Not with trafficking minors.
Not with possession of child pornography.
Not with producing child pornography.
None of that.
What it looks like is a sweetheart deal from a Democrat prosecutor to a Democrat donor pedophile child molester to help him get off the hook.
Now, all of this is still basically a local matter, except for any evidence of crimes that took place on his airplane, the Lolita Express, or on his private island.
Evidence of crimes in those two places make it a federal case.
It's no longer just a local matter.
So this investigation ends, and obviously it's taken up at the federal level.
It ends in a 53-page indictment that could have sent Jeffrey Epstein to prison for life.
Then, in 2007, the then U.S. attorney, Alexander Acosta, who's a Republican, who's now Trump's labor secretary, had Epstein plead guilty to two state charges.
So you still think, two state charges?
This guy is a sick pedophile who's flying all over God's green earth on the Lolita Express with girls.
How are you only going to get him on two state charges?
Well, in Acosta's defense, at least he got Epstein to admit to something.
At least he got Epstein on the hook for something, which the Democratic prosecutor Krischer wasn't going to do.
But because it was only two state charges, it was no longer a federal matter.
This removed it from federal hands.
It gave Epstein this sweetheart deal.
And this guy, accused of pretty horrific crimes, his punishment is 13 months, not in federal prison, not in a really tough prison, in the Palm Beach County Jail, in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Jail, and then wait for it, With 12 hours a day work release so that he could go to his nice cushy office and then return to the prison at night.
And he got that six days a week.
It's also a little weird because in Palm Beach County you're not supposed to get work release if you're a sex offender.
So everything about this deal stinks to high heaven.
Why would they give it to him?
I mean, look, I get that he's a donor, but ultimately, you know, this is maybe too much even for that.
Here's the key.
The agreement that they reached, the non-prosecution agreement, granted immunity to any potential co-conspirators.
So who are the potential co-conspirators?
Could it have been the girls who were recruiting the other girls to come to his mansion?
Could it have been some of the socialites?
Ghislaine Maxwell is one of the women named who helped to recruit these girls.
And it could be all the rich, famous businessmen and CEOs and presidents and politicians and whatever who have been associated with him.
If they took part in any of that criminal activity, they are granted immunity by this deal.
Maybe that's what this is all about.
So, this past February, a federal judge ruled that the prosecutors in 2007 had violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by hiding the non-prosecution agreement from the 30-plus girls who had accused Epstein of molesting them.
So they said that the agreement itself is not valid because the girls didn't get to see it.
In June, federal prosecutors were arguing that there was actually no legal basis for violating the agreement.
Obviously, I'm not expert in, first of all, I'm not expert in this area generally, but nobody is expert in this agreement because we have no idea what's really in the agreement.
So anybody who's telling you, well, this is totally right and this is totally wrong, they almost certainly have no idea what they're talking about.
That's what this whole process is about.
It's unsealing this agreement, it's unsealing this investigation, and it's seeing what this guy was accused of and who also was accused alongside him.
Now on Saturday, this past Saturday, just a few days ago, Epstein gets arrested again.
Not for exactly the same crimes, but for sex trafficking.
Why?
Because Epstein had the island.
Epstein has his residence in New York.
Epstein has his Palm Beach place.
He's got a ranch in New Mexico.
Very rich guy.
How did Epstein get away with this for so long?
Some of the reasons are actually pretty innocent.
He hired a dream team of lawyers.
He hired, apparently, Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr.
These are two of the greatest legal minds of their generation and in our country.
There's nothing nefarious about that O.J. Simpson hired the same lawyer.
O.J. Simpson hired Alan Dershowitz.
O.J. Simpson obviously guilty as sin, but everybody's entitled to a defense, and if you're a very wealthy criminal, you're going to hire the best lawyers.
That seems perfectly fine.
Then what is being reported is that Epstein had his own investigators dig up dirt on the people investigating him and on the families of the people investigating him.
So he got a nice dossier of potential blackmail material that may have led to this.
How else did he get away with it for so long?
The media never reported on it.
If it had been a Republican donor, let me tell you, they would have reported on this in two seconds.
But a Democratic donor, they want to cover it up.
I mean, there's a guy, there's a Democratic donor in California who's killed two black men.
He lures gay black men to his house.
He's killed two of them.
That barely made the news.
We talked about it on the show a little bit.
Very few people are talking about it.
Democratic donors get different treatment in the mainstream media.
And then what's the last reason?
Is Epstein has a lot of money.
Simple as that.
Money is a very powerful tool.
And we can complain about that all we want.
We can deny that that matters.
But money has always been very powerful.
That's why people want money.
Money is power.
Pretty simple.
So who is really implicated here?
Is Trump going to go down because of this?
Is Clinton going to go down?
Let's get beyond just the headlines and the innuendo.
It seems to be the case that President Trump was pals with Jeffrey Epstein.
He gave this quote about how he's fun to hang around with and Jeffrey really enjoys his social life.
He put it in that 2002 New York Magazine piece.
This makes a little bit of sense, though, because Jeffrey Epstein was a member of Donald Trump's country club, Mar-a-Lago.
The club that Donald Trump owns, Jeffrey Epstein, was a member at, so it's not—at least Donald Trump would have one innocent reason to see Jeffrey Epstein, to pal around with him, beyond the insinuation that he was going on the Lolita Express or something.
How about Bill Clinton?
Bill Clinton gave a nice quote about Jeffrey Epstein in that 2002 New York Magazine profile— But why was Clinton hanging around with Jeffrey Epstein?
President Trump, and this is being reported in very few places, President Trump predicted just a few years ago that Epstein would take down Bill Clinton.
Here he is.
Bill Clinton.
Nice guy.
Got a lot of problems coming up, in my opinion, with the famous island with Jeffrey Epstein.
A lot of problems.
A lot of problems coming up with that famous island.
Got a lot of problems with Jeffrey Epstein.
Would President Trump really have made that prediction that Epstein was going to take down Bill Clinton if Donald Trump were in serious danger here as well?
I'm skeptical of that.
I think Trump is a little too cagey.
Trump is a little too strategic for that.
Now, you might say that Donald Trump doesn't know anything about Clinton's relations to Jeffrey Epstein.
That's fair.
Donald Trump has promoted conspiracy theories.
President Trump especially, when he's going after the Clintons, is willing to throw spaghetti at the wall.
So I wouldn't only believe the dodgy Clinton-Epstein connection on the word of President Trump.
But Bill Clinton is acting really, really weird about this, and he's been caught in a couple serious lies about his relationship with Epstein, which makes me think this guy has been up to no good with his old buddy on the Lolita Express.
Here is, as this news broke, here is the statement that President Clinton released about his relationship.
It says, quote, President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago.
Let me stop you right there.
He knows nothing about it.
He knows nothing about a very serious story from a major Democratic donor and from a friend of his that he's paled around with for years.
He knows nothing about it.
That's what you're trying to tell me?
I don't think so.
He goes on.
One to Europe, one to Asia, and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation.
Staff supporters of the foundation and his Secret Service detail traveled on every leg of every trip.
He had one meeting with Epstein in his Harlem office in 2002 and around the same time made one brief visit to Epstein's New York apartment with a staff member and his security detail.
Okay, hold on.
So you're saying, okay, look, he doesn't know anything about Epstein.
He's never, who?
Epstein who?
Well, yeah, he took his plane.
Yeah, well, yeah, he took it four times all over the world.
Well, yeah, he invited him to meet with him at his Harlem office.
Well, yeah, he stopped by his private residence in New York.
But he had people around him.
Nothing to see here.
Nothing to see here, folks.
Then the statement concludes, he's not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade and has never been to Little St.
James Island, Epstein's ranch in New Mexico, or his residence in Florida.
Okay, first of all, no one's accusing Bill Clinton of going to the island or the ranch in New Mexico or the Florida residence.
People are wondering why he was palling around with Jeffrey Epstein so much, why he was flying all over on the Lolita Express.
Notice that Clintonian language, too.
He took four trips on the airplane.
Well, what were the four trips?
So the four trips on the airplane, one to Europe, one to Asia, two to Africa.
How do you define a trip on an airplane?
I guess it depends on what the definition of trip is.
When I fly to New York, I live in LA, I fly to New York.
Do I take one trip on an airplane or do I take at least two trips on an airplane?
I take one when I fly to New York.
I take another when I fly back from New York.
That's not one trip on an airplane.
That's two trips on an airplane.
Clinton says he took four trips on the airplane.
He took them to four places.
Did he not fly back?
He didn't come back from Europe?
He's still over in Asia?
Is he still over in Africa?
I don't think so.
Did he go straight there and straight back?
Maybe did he stop at other places along the way?
How much was he on that airplane?
Well, we actually might have an answer to that.
Three years ago, Fox News uncovered flight records from the Lolita Express that showed that Bill Clinton had flown on it 26 times.
Not four times.
Not even four times four times.
26 times.
And that included, according to the flight records, Five trips without his Secret Service detail.
That's a little different.
Because you wonder, why is Clinton responding here like a guilty man?
He was always there with a staff member.
He was always there with a Secret Service detail.
He only did it four times.
Well, you basically admit in the statement itself it was more than four trips.
Unless he just stayed in Europe.
Unless he stayed in Asia.
We know he didn't do that.
Were the Secret Service there the whole time?
Frankly, even if they were, I'm not sure that that matters that much.
No offense to the Secret Service.
I don't know Bill Clinton's Secret Service detail.
We just know from his time as governor of Arkansas that he would regularly use state employees to cover up his affairs and his sexual abuses all around the state.
We know that the detail knew all about it.
So what was it?
Let's say he went on it those five times, according to the records, without the Secret Service detail.
What occurred on that plane?
Why did he take that plane?
Bill Clinton has access to lots of private planes.
Why did he take Jeffrey Epstein's?
It's been reported that this plane has been fitted out for weird sex, that it includes a bed where bizarre and unsavory activities take place.
Also on the flight records with Bill Clinton were the names of girls.
Who are those girls?
One of the girls was named Tatiana.
I don't mean to stereotype, but Tatiana doesn't sound like a real hardcore butch Secret Service member.
No, Tatiana is a very effeminate name.
I don't know.
I'm just raising questions.
So how does this really look for the people who are implicated in being associated with him?
It doesn't bother me that famous people associated with a billionaire, famous people associate with billionaires, and politicians in particular associate with billionaires.
Dershowitz has been accused of engaging in these sexual activities by a witness that seems to me uncredible.
Her name is Virginia Roberts, I believe is her last name.
She was kind of the main witness, and she seems to have contradicted herself a few times.
Dershowitz has repeatedly and forcefully denied all of the allegations against him, and Dershowitz has called for all of the records to be unsealed.
So either he is bluffing harder and more confidently than anybody has ever bluffed, or he really feels that he'll be exonerated by all of this, and that he's the victim of a false accusation.
Why am I inclined to believe Alan Dershowitz here?
He was Epstein's lawyer.
He has a perfectly legitimate reason to be palling around with Epstein.
He is a very obvious target for people to go after because of that coordination and because he was literally, professionally defending Epstein.
So Dershowitz, I think he looks fine.
So we'll see what happens, but it doesn't seem to me that there's any hard evidence that he did anything wrong.
Ken Starr.
Doesn't have any allegations against him as far as I can tell.
Also, a lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein looks safe enough.
So when you see those names pop up in the reporting on this, I think it's a little bit of a distraction.
How about President Trump?
Now, President Trump has obviously less of a reason to associate with Epstein than Epstein's lawyers do, but he ran the country club that Epstein was a member of.
It was a very exclusive club.
Trump knows, as far as we can see, most of the members there, many of the members there.
And we've never seen a successful sexual harassment or sexual assault allegation against Trump.
You remember, a week or two ago, that wacko E. Jean Carroll came out, the New York advice columnist, and she said Trump had raped her.
Then she said, no, he didn't rape her.
Then she went on Anderson Cooper and said, rape is sexy.
And then she said a lot of strange things that obviously show she's not well.
It was not a credible allegation, which is why the mainstream media dropped it as quickly as they picked it up.
So as for now, I think Trump looks basically fine here.
And then there's Bill Clinton.
How does this look for Clinton?
What are other prominent Democrats saying about Clinton's role in this?
What effect is this going to have on the Democratic Party and on 2020?
We'll also have to get to the most important question.
Kenimer may be black.
We've got some other questions to get to, too.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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This is bad for Bill Clinton.
Doesn't look good.
I'm not saying certainly that he did anything, but it doesn't look good.
There is much less of a reason for Bill Clinton to be palling around with Jeffrey Epstein in the early 2000s.
He was out of office.
He wasn't raising money for himself.
Hillary Clinton, I guess, was a U.S. senator and she was mounting a bid for president.
You don't see her palling around with Epstein too much.
I mean, she would probably be the main fundraiser there.
The other issue for Clinton is there have been very legitimate sexual harassment, sexual assault claims against him.
We all, as a nation, saw him perjure himself.
We all know that he sexually harassed his 20-year-old intern in the Oval Office.
There have been credible allegations against him for years, and that includes one serious rape allegation.
So things look the worst for Bill Clinton in all of this, which is why the mainstream media are trying to portray it as Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein.
A lot more ties between Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein than between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
The important thing, though, is to let things shake out.
I think a lot of left-wingers are very excited about this because they think it's going to hurt Trump.
This is what they did with the Russia investigation.
And what did they do there?
They got hoisted by their own petard.
On the Russia investigation, they thought, if we look into the 2016 interference...
In the presidential election.
This is going to take down Trump because he was like Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Or he's like, what are the two Russians in Rocky and Bullwinkle?
Boris and Natasha.
Boris and Natasha.
He's like basically a secret double agent for Russia and they're going to take him down.
And what happens?
You look into the Russia interference and you realize it looks much, much worse for Democrats.
You realize the only actual foreign collusion that took place was between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and a firm called Fusion GPS and an UPPO guy named Christopher Steele and Russian intelligence assets.
The collusion took place on the Democrat side.
It looks awful.
It's why the Democrats now are trying to shut it down.
I think the same thing is going to happen here.
They hear rumors of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein.
They're going to go after Jeffrey Epstein finally.
There's way more of a smoking gun with prominent Democrats, including Bill Clinton.
And don't just take my word for it.
Christine Pelosi, does that name sound familiar?
Nancy Pelosi's daughter, tweeted just a few days ago, quote, This Epstein case is horrific, and the young women deserve justice.
It is quite likely that some of our faves are implicated, but we must follow the facts and let the chips fall where they may, whether on Republicans or Democrats.
Hashtag we said enough, hashtag me too.
Why is she saying this?
She's saying this because she knows that this could likely hit Democrats much harder than Republicans.
But we shouldn't make the mistake that the left does all the time.
We shouldn't just jump the gun and say, ha ha, totally, we've got them now.
We shouldn't pull a Kavanaugh.
We shouldn't shoot before we aim.
We should let this play out, and I strongly suspect it's going to play out in the same way that we've seen these other stories play out.
I think the left has been so whipped up into a frenzy that they are reopening cases that we would have wanted reopened 10 years ago.
And it's probably not going to shake out very well for them, and then you're probably going to need to get another Leftist Tears Tumblr because I think they're going to overflow.
But we've got to let the process play out.
It is a good thing that this is being reopened, and we shouldn't let the mainstream media get away with one minute of trying to turn this into a Republican scandal.
We've got to make sure that we follow the facts, as Christine Pelosi says, wherever they land.
Apparently, likely, on Democrats.
Now, forget this question of whether or not former President Bill Clinton was involved with a pedophile sex ring and Democrat billionaire donor.
We need to discuss the most important political question of the day.
Can mermaids be black?
This is it.
I know it's the question on everybody's mind.
Disney announced last week that the new Little Mermaid, I guess they're doing a live-action remake, something that no one has asked for.
The new live-action remake is going to have a black Little Mermaid.
And leftist Twitter exploded with rage about the imagined racist conservative response to the Black Little Mermaid.
Not to the real conservative response, which is nobody cares at all, but to the imagined conservative response, which is that conservatives are so furious.
So this thing was trending, hashtag not my Ariel.
And I looked, I said, oh, are there really a lot of conservatives who are upset about this casting the black girl?
No, it was all left-wingers, outraged, That an imaginary hypothetical conservative was hypothetically outraged, even though in real life it didn't really happen.
Linda Sarsour was talking about this, major left-wingers.
The Washington Post published a think piece, I'm using that term ironically, called The White Nostalgia Fueling the Little Mermaid Backlash.
The uproar over a black aerial shows the importance of representation in children's entertainment.
Not much thinking going on in the think piece.
There was no backlash.
There was no uproar.
It was a total fiction of the left.
So that's hilarious to laugh at.
We should always laugh at them getting them whipped up into a frenzy.
But what about the question itself?
I'm totally willing to think about the question critically.
Should the Little Mermaid, Ariel, be rewritten as a black character?
I think there are some pretty good arguments for it.
For one, they're mermaids.
So mermaids are mythical creatures.
They're not real creatures.
It doesn't seem like race is terribly important to a mermaid.
I've never met a mermaid in my life, but I suspect it's just as likely I would meet a black mermaid as a white mermaid.
Another reason is that it's based on a fairy tale.
So fairy tales, they tell us something about culture, but they also tell us a lot about human nature, just universal human drives.
And so, in so much as fairy tales tell us about human nature, it doesn't really matter what the race of the mythical creature is.
Another reason why I think it seems perfectly fine for Ariel to be black is that the movie is being made in the United States.
And the United States is a largely, mostly creedal nation founded largely, mostly in ideas rather than on some particular group of people or some particular ethnicity.
Those are the arguments for black Ariel.
There are some actual arguments against recasting Ariel with a different race.
The first is Ariel has a race and she's Danish.
The Little Mermaid is a Danish character invented by a Danish author named Hans Christian Andersen and the story takes place off the coast of Denmark.
So it's not that it takes place off the coast of Haiti or off the coast of Tibet.
I don't think Tibet has a coast.
It doesn't take place off the coast of Japan.
It takes place in Denmark and Danish people are white and they're not black and they're not Asian and they're not Native American.
Another argument here is that Ariel is already a character.
She's a character with certain characteristics, one of which is she has red hair and she's white.
This is a similar argument to the argument against a black James Bond.
Every few years, you hear people talk about how Idris Elba could be the next James Bond.
In many ways, he'd be a terrific James Bond.
He's an excellent actor.
He looks the part.
He's suave.
Right.
The argument against a black James Bond is not that there's anything wrong with black people.
It's that James Bond isn't black.
He's a character who's British and he just isn't black.
When you think about this with other Disney movies, it becomes clearer.
You wouldn't remake Mulan with an Irish princess.
You wouldn't say, oh, no, it doesn't matter.
You can recast any type of looking person and it's okay.
You wouldn't remake Pocahontas with an Italian princess.
That wouldn't make sense.
And so, if Ariel is Danish, if Ariel has the characteristics she has, we identify her at least by her red hair, then it doesn't make sense to change that.
The left is incoherent on this point because they want to have both sides of the argument.
So the left opposes racial and cultural appropriation.
Heaven forfend, you dress up like Moana for Halloween.
Heaven forfend, you wear a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo.
That would be cultural appropriation.
Except they support the appropriation of white cultures.
So...
The cultures that we would generally describe as white, they say they don't really have any particular characteristics.
They can be appropriated by anybody.
The left also stokes racial consciousness for every single racial group.
They encourage it.
They love racial consciousness.
They think that it will get them a lot more votes and a lot more political power.
But then they condemn the racial consciousness of Europeans.
You had that MAGA hat-wearing Covington Catholic high school kid.
When he was in Washington, D.C., he was standing there.
He was approached by a group of black supremacists.
They're a group called the Hebrew Israelites.
They viciously hate white people.
They hate every group other than their own.
And they have these kind of cockamamie theories about how they are the real Jews and the Jews are some awful, evil, fake Jews or something.
Whatever.
The point is...
They're black supremacists.
How did the mainstream media describe them?
Civil rights activists.
They're not civil rights activists.
Their rhetoric is exactly the same as the Ku Klux Klan, but for black people, exactly the same.
They have the same sorts of theories.
They want the same sorts of political goals.
But whereas the media rightly condemns the Klan, the media loves stoking racial consciousness and racial resentment among every other group.
The other side of this is multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism seeks to distinguish every single culture, except for most European cultures, which it sees as generic and universal.
So they'll say, no, no, no, white characters don't have any particular characteristics.
Stories that have white characters don't need to have white characters.
The race doesn't matter at all.
Anybody, you could throw anybody in there.
But for stories that have non-white characters, you could throw any race in there.
This issue is really pronounced because of America.
So, the United States is predominantly a creedal country.
We were founded by settlers from the Netherlands and from England, and to lesser degrees from France and Spain.
We always were interacting with natives, and we were importing black slaves, and America from the very beginning has been multiracial.
This is not true of other countries.
What has bound America together since not just 1776, but since 1620 are ideas.
The ideas that sent the pilgrims to Plymouth and the ideas that launched the American Revolution.
The same is not true in Europe.
Britain, France, Italy, Denmark are not creedal countries.
They're not countries founded on an idea.
They're countries founded on people.
And there have been migratory movements over the years, and that is the story of those countries.
They're founded on people.
You cannot just move to England and become English.
I'm descended from Englishmen.
I can't even move to England and become English.
I'm not.
I'm American and I look a little too Italian.
You can't do it.
We don't recognize how special it is that people can just sort of become Americans.
It's unbelievable that you can come here and within, I don't know, five or ten years, just be American.
Even less, frankly.
And ironically, it's the same leftists who indict America as the worst, most racist place on earth.
They are the ones who are most oblivious to America's unique racial tolerance.
So does anyone actually care that Disney is making Ariel black?
No, not really.
What I care about is that Hollywood has no creativity.
What I care about is that the left is totally contradictory and has complete double standards and they're total hypocrites.
I care that we're just endlessly rehashing and rewriting old stuff.
We're not making it better.
We're making it worse because whenever we rehash these things, we're just adding a new political twist.
We're going to do Ghostbusters, but with women, we're going to take a really, really good movie and then just insert some aspect of our ideology into it for no reason and with no explanation, and then won't that be good?
No, it's not.
It just obviously isn't as good.
It would be very difficult to remake Ghostbusters anyway.
It'd be basically impossible to remake it and have it be as good as the original.
But if your only argument for it is, yeah, but this time they're women, you're like, oh, alright, that's like, whatever.
Okay, who cares?
Let's do The Little Mermaid, but this time she's black.
The Little Mermaid was good last time, I guess, as far as Disney cartoon movies go.
You're not going to, it's not an excuse.
You just say, oh yeah, it's a man, she's black, it's whatever.
that doesn't mean that you're going to have a better work of art.
What it does is it relies on the political inclinations of people and it relies on ideology to try to make up for what is almost certainly not going to be a great movie.
I mean, none of these Disney remakes have been any good.
The live action things have been awful.
I sat through Beauty and the Beast.
It was pretty miserable.
It's uncreative.
It's unnecessarily politicized.
And it's evidence of an unserious and decadent society that can't really tell each other's stories anymore.
And speaking of stupid racial politics, you thought that debating whether a mermaid can be black was stupid.
NBC is now suggesting that Mitch McConnell cannot oppose reparations.
Or that we ought to have reparations because Mitch McConnell's ancestors held slaves.
This was the breaking headline.
Senator Mitch McConnell's great-great-grandfathers owned 14 slaves, bringing reparations issue close to home.
Is it?
Is that what it's doing?
They go on.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said recently he opposes paying government reparations to the descendants of American slaves, has a family history deeply entwined in the issue.
Two of his great-great-grandfathers were slave owners, U.S. census records show.
The details about McConnell's ancestors, discovered by NBC News through a search of ancestry and census records, came in the wake of recent hearings on reparations before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties.
Asked about the reparations issue, McConnell said he opposed the idea, arguing it would be hard to figure out whom to compensate, which is obviously the case.
We've been talking about that for weeks now.
Let's say that you are descended from both slave owners and slaves, as many people are.
Is that just a wash?
Do you get reparations?
Do you get reparations because you identify more with the slave part than the slave owning part?
Do you not get reparations because vice versa?
What if you're the descendant of a black slave owner, one of the earliest slave owners in America?
Actually, the first officially recognized slave owner in what became our American system of slavery was a black guy.
If you're his descendants, do you...
Do you get reparations?
What if he's only one of your ancestors?
It's impossible to figure out whom to compensate.
But they're focusing on Mitch McConnell.
Maybe they should focus on 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who herself is descended from a slave owner.
And this is not some weird conspiracy theory.
Her father wrote about this in the Jamaica Globe And explained how, quote, Kamala Harris is, according to her father, the descendant of a slave owner.
Is her opinion on reparations no longer valid?
Kamala Harris supports reparations.
She's descended from a slave owner.
Mitch McConnell opposes reparations.
He's descended from a slave owner.
Whose opinion is right based on the credibility of their ancestors?
You know, the Knowleses, George Cobb Knowles, fought for the Union to free the slaves in the Civil War.
He died at the Battle of Boynton Plank Road.
I oppose reparations.
I'm the only one of those three people who doesn't descend from a slave owner, and actually, my forebears died fighting for the freedom of the slaves.
So I guess my opinion counts, right?
I have the best opinion on it?
Okay, good.
So we're not going to have any reparations.
Of course, this is a ridiculous way to resolve political questions.
It shows the absurdity of the reparations issue.
I don't care who Kamala Harris's great-great-grandfather was.
I don't care who Mitch McConnell's great-great-great-grandfather was.
I sort of care who my great-great-great-grandfather was, but only as a historical curiosity, not because I think it means that my opinion is more worthwhile that way.
This is what the left gets for giving us tribal politics, for a politics that doesn't have anything to do with reason.
It's the politics of grievance, of oppression, of intersectionality.
If I can prove that my ancestors were more historically slighted, then everyone has to do what I say.
That is an illogical, anti-reasonable point of view.
The way that self-government works is when we convince each other of things.
It's when we persuade our fellow citizens.
If it's just going to be a contest of grievance and whose great-great-great-great-grandfather washed more floors than whoever else's great-great-great-great-grandfather, we don't have much of a republic anyway.
So much more to get to.
But we're out of time.
I guess we'll get to it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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 everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Alleged crap stain Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested again for allegedly raping and pimping allegedly underage girls like the alleged scumbag he allegedly is.
As a result, Epstein's Wikipedia entry is being rewritten to edit out Epstein's good pal Bill Clinton, and Labor Secretary Alex Acosta is being set up as the sole scapegoat because Acosta provides a tenuous connection between Epstein and Donald Trump.
The coverage of this story is going to reveal who among journalists and politicians cares about the truth and who only cares about preserving Democrat power.
We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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