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July 15, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:49
Ep. 381 - Twitter Isn’t Real Life

A leftist terrorist tries to blow up an immigration center in Washington, but the mainstream media blacks it out to cover more Trump tweets. Then, a former ICE director roasts AOC, and men attack actress Scarlett Johansson for suggesting that she can pretend to be other people. Date: 07-15-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Sticks and stones may break your bones, but President Trump's tweets will never hurt you.
A leftist terrorist tries to blow up an immigration center in Washington, but the mainstream media black it out to cover more Trump tweets.
We will examine controversies and non-troversies.
Then a former ICE director roasts AOC, and men attack actress Scarlett Johansson for suggesting that she can pretend to be other people.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The sky is falling.
The world has been thrown into chaos because President Trump, he tweeted.
He tweeted.
He sent a tweet.
His tweet implied certain things that are not true.
His tweet was offensive.
And that's it.
I mean, this is the biggest...
I have a doll right here.
I want you to show me on the doll where President Trump's tweet hurt you.
Point it out.
Because that's all that matters in this world is tweets.
Twitter is real life.
There's no such thing as real life.
It's only Twitter, and so that's what we need to talk about.
Not the terrorist attack that was thwarted on an ICE detention center in Washington.
No, none of that.
We have to talk about the tweets.
So we will.
We will talk about the tweets.
We will read the tweet.
We will examine what was wrong with it, what was offensive about it, what people are going all crazy and getting in a huff about nothing for, and what it means in the broader context of 2020.
We will do all of that, but first, support for The Michael Knowles Show comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans.
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What did his tweet say?
You're in trouble now, Mr.
President.
What did the tweet say?
He sent out this tweet, quote, So interesting to see progressive Democrat congresswomen who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world, if they even have a functioning government at all, now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run.
Why don't they go back, And help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.
Then come back and show us how it is done.
These places need your help badly.
You can't leave fast enough.
I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements.
Oh, Trump.
It's so, so quintessentially Trump.
What is this about?
This tweet is about the infighting that's going on in the Democratic Party because Nancy Pelosi and the House establishment is sniping now at the fresh faces.
Ilhan Omar, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.
People on the right and the left are losing their minds over this tweet thread.
They're calling it racist and bigoted and stupid.
Everybody calm down.
It's okay.
We are going to survive the tweet.
What we should do is examine the tweet dispassionately.
That means that the Trump super duper always Trump supporters should be dispassionate.
It means the never, ever, ever Trump conservative types should be dispassionate.
And obviously the left, we want them to be dispassionate, but that's never going to happen.
There is one glaring error in the tweet.
We'll get to what that is in a second.
There is one thing that he said that is just obviously wrong.
The tweet is obviously unfair and imprecise in a very important way.
Sure.
Also, I disagree with conservatives who say that this is unhelpful or counterproductive.
I don't think that's a legitimate argument.
So what's wrong with the tweet?
For one, he's referring to these freshmen progressive Democrats.
He's referring to the, quote, progressive Democratic Congresswoman.
It seems that he's referring to the four fresh faces.
He doesn't name them in particular, but I think that's the only fair way to read this.
He's talking about Ilhan Omar, AOC, Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.
Of those people, only one of them is an immigrant, Ilhan Omar.
So if he's saying they come from these awful countries, that isn't true.
I mean, AOC comes from northern Westchester.
She comes from where I came from.
And it's a very nice place.
You know, it's got some bad politics, but it's very affluent and very nice.
So that's where this charge of racism is coming from.
Critics are saying that because all of the people that he's apparently referring to are not white, Trump views them as un-American.
Brit Hume had a good point on this.
What he said is nativist.
It prefers people who were born in this country.
It is xenophobic in the sense that it casts aspersions on other places in the world.
There's no evidence that it's racist.
Now we use racist to mean bad.
We just use racist to mean anything we don't like.
But there's really not a lot of evidence that what he's saying here is racist.
Also, we'll get to that in a second.
He's speaking imprecisely.
This leaves him open to an attack, and therefore he shouldn't have done it.
There are ways he could have phrased what he was saying that would have been more precise and still conveyed the hit, which is, I think, a pretty good hit.
He could have said, these progressive congresswomen constantly extol the virtues of awful hellhole countries around the world.
Well, maybe they should move over to those countries and try to fix those governments if they're so great.
Then they can come back here and show us how great those governments are.
He could have said that.
You notice it's almost the exact same thing he said, except it's not saying...
You are from those countries.
Go back to those countries, which in three of the four cases is not true.
So that's my only issue with the tweet.
So let's take a step back on the racism question, which is what everyone's talking about.
If racism is the question, then the only question that matters is, is Donald Trump a racial bigot?
Is he a bigot?
If he's not a bigot, then shut up about the racism of the tweet.
If he is a bigot, then we can certainly see racism in the tweet.
So the question is, is he a bigot?
I don't see any evidence of that.
He won civil rights awards when he was a billionaire donating to different organizations in New York.
He palled around with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
He's not an anti-Semite.
We know he's not an anti-Semite because he married his daughter off to a Jewish man, and there is a town and a train station in Israel named after him.
So I don't think he's anti-Semitic.
He has appointed black people to his cabinet.
He's appointed black people in his administration.
His policies have been extraordinarily good, specifically for the black community.
He...
He has actually, in the realm of pop culture, he has the most prominent black voice in all of the culture endorsing him wholeheartedly.
That's Kanye West.
So I just, if you think he's racist, you've got to show the evidence of where he's racist.
But if you don't have the evidence, then I, with all of the evidence against it, I just can't conclude that.
And I feel the same way about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.
Lest you think that I'm just defending Trump because he's in my political party.
I said the same thing about Joe Biden a week or two ago.
I said, Joe Biden is an awful guy.
There are plenty of reasons not to vote for him, but there's no evidence he's a racist.
I said the same thing about Pelosi.
She's an awful human being.
I mean, she's truly just a demon destroying our politics.
There's no evidence that she's a racist.
It's the same thing for Trump.
There is just no evidence of it.
So then, if we've established that, that Trump, there's really no evidence that he's a racial bigot, where does this attack even come from?
Trump at least seems to think that these women are not from America.
For one of them, that's true.
Ilhan Omar is from Somalia, and she says awful terrible things about our own country, and about other people as well.
But the other three, why does he think the other three are not from America?
It might be his own ignorance.
It also might be that all of these women constantly present themselves as foreign.
So you have Rashida Tlaib constantly extolling the fact she's the first Muslim, she's the first Palestinian American, the first Somali immigrant, Ilhan Omar, the first this, the first that, whatever.
They don't say, I'm an American, I'm all American, baby, I'm apple pie, red, white, and blue.
They don't.
It's always that hyphenation.
It's always talking about where they're from.
I mean, this was in many ways their pitch to the voters.
It was, vote for me.
I'm totally different.
Vote for me because the way America has been until the present is awful, and I am so different from America that I'm going to fundamentally transform it.
They're saying things that are pretty weird.
You know, Ilhan Omar was giggling about the word Al-Qaeda.
She was saying that Jews can't be loyal to America.
The only reason anyone would support Israel is because they're being bribed by Jews.
Rashida Tlaib said the Holocaust gives her a calming feeling, and then she rewrote the history of the Holocaust.
Here they are.
The first thing that I think about when somebody says you're going to be the first Muslim is celebrate this moment.
Two weeks ago or so, we celebrated, or just it took a moment, I think, in our country to remember the Holocaust.
And there's, you know, there's a kind of a calming feeling I always tell folks.
When I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, the human dignity, Their existence, in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people's passport.
I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews.
The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said al-Qaeda, he sort of, like, his shoulders went up and, you know...
Yeah, he's in command here.
Al-Qaeda, you know, has been...
He's an expert.
But it is that.
You don't say America with an intensity.
You don't say England with an intensity.
You don't say the army with an intensity.
But you say these names because you want that word to carry weight.
You have Ilhan Omar giggling about Al-Qaeda.
You have her drawing a moral equivalence between the terrorists who took down the Twin Towers in the United States Army and England.
I mean, that's pretty weird.
It's anti-American.
It's un-American.
And it gives you the impression that you're foreign.
So I think that's some of where this is coming from.
It's not just those women.
This is true of AOC. In high school, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went by the name Sandy Ocasio.
We know this because we've seen her yearbook, and even Vox.com has admitted this because Vox.com saw her yearbook.
She was Sandy Ocasio for her whole life.
Then she decides to run for Congress, and all of a sudden she's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!
Why?
It's because the left likes foreign things.
The left brought, it's not a racial question, it's just the left generally doesn't like America that much.
You know, even Ayanna Pressley, who is not the child of an immigrant.
Ayanna Pressley is this fresh face who is, she's black, so that's where the racism argument comes from.
But Ayanna Pressley, just two weeks ago, used a racial slur to describe Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to President Trump.
Called her Becky, which is now a popular slur for white women who are seen as uninteresting or boring by virtue of their race.
This is similar to what Barack Obama did.
You know, Barack Obama, people forget, birtherism wasn't started by Donald Trump.
It wasn't started by Hillary Clinton even.
It was started by Barack Obama because in one of his early literary biographies, his agent or his publisher or he himself said that he was born in Kenya.
I think it's pretty clear he wasn't born in Kenya, that he was born in America.
But a lot of people thought he was born in Kenya because he said he was.
Why did he say it is?
because to the left, to their audience, It is exotic.
It's preferable to be from another place, to be foreign.
These people, to quote Barack Obama, want to fundamentally transform America.
Also because the ideas that these people espouse, all the fresh faces, all of them, are anti-American ideas.
They're foreign ideas.
They're not naturally from the American political tradition.
So...
I think that does explain a little bit of why he thinks that.
Obviously, it's not true.
Three of them are not from foreign countries, but I think that's why.
So, President Trump then refers to the broken and crime-infested places from which they came.
This is very similar to the Hellhole countries comment that he made about a year ago.
He didn't use the word hellhole, but it was a similar word.
And this exposes the left's hypocrisy.
It did it the last time, too.
On the one hand, we're told America is the worst place on Earth.
We run concentration camps.
Our government is the same as Nazi Germany.
On the other hand, we're told that we need to let in millions of illegal aliens per year to come to Nazi Germany.
On the one hand, we're told that it's racist and untrue to refer to other countries as hellholes.
On the other hand, we're told that these people are fleeing countries that are such hellholes that are so spectacularly horrific that if we don't allow them to flood into this country 3,000 per day, we have blood on our hands because they're going to be killed by their tyrannical, illegitimate governments.
It can't be both at the same time.
You have to pick a lane.
Now, What people are calling the strongest argument against this tweet, I think is actually the weakest.
Because what some people are saying, okay, it's not racist, it's ignorant, it's offensive, it was stupid, maybe you shouldn't have said it.
But the argument that they circle around is that tactically, politically, it was a bad idea.
Because you had the Democrats already ripping each other apart, so when your enemies are fighting each other, don't get in the way.
How did this start?
Because last week...
Two weeks ago, rather, Nancy Pelosi mocked AOC and the Fresh Faces, said they had no political following, that it was all just Twitter stuff.
But in real hard politics, no one really liked them, which is true.
So then AOC called Pelosi a racist.
Then the House Democrats' Twitter account called AOC's Chief of Staff a racist.
Then some random blue checkmark leftist on Twitter, Brie Newsom Bass, called the House Democrats racist.
And so it's just, you're racist, racist, racist, all until I don't know when.
There's no ending to that.
The argument here is to let the Democrats rip themselves apart rather than unify against Trump.
Actually though, we want the Democrats to unify.
The Democrats are going to unify.
By the 2020 election, they will be unified together.
Remember how...
The GOP was totally ripped apart under the nomination of Donald Trump.
We were told that there's no way Trump could win.
The party has this irreconcilable fracture.
There is going to be a new anti-Trump conservative candidate.
Bill Kristol's pulling away from the GOP. All that stuff.
What happened?
They rallied even around Trump.
And they're going to do it again.
So they're going to rally.
The question is, who are they going to rally behind?
Three options here.
They can either rally behind Nancy Pelosi, they can either rally behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the fresh faces, or we can let them keep fighting, and then eventually they're going to rally between one of the two and maybe we won't be able to say which it is.
We want them to rally around AOC and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley.
These women are extremely unpopular.
They're very popular with the media.
They're extremely unpopular with the American people.
These young radical Democrats, according to a new Axios poll, AOC's popularity is at just 22%.
That's her approval rating.
Ilhan Omar's approval rating?
Take a guess.
9% single digits.
Even though both of those women have high name ID, AOC's name ID is over 75%, I think.
Ilhan Omar is something like 55%.
And yet Ilhan Omar's approval is 9%.
How about socialism, which is the idea that all of these women are professing?
Socialism was viewed favorably, according to this poll, by 18% of voters, unfavorably by 69% of voters.
There was a June poll from AOC's district.
Guess how many people in her district viewed her favorably versus unfavorably?
Two to one unfavorable.
Only 10.75% thought that AOC had their interests at heart.
33% are ready to vote against her compared to just 13% who are going to vote for her.
Almost three times as many people are going to vote against her.
Pelosi and the slightly more sane Democrats are looking right now at these fresh faces.
They see all the same numbers that we do.
And they're saying, okay, they're weak now, so that's why we're going to attack them now.
That's why we're going to go for them when they're politically weak, and we're going to take back control of this party.
Republicans should do every single thing that they can to keep AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley as the faces of the Democrat Party.
That is the best possible scenario for Republicans.
So what do we take about, what do we make of this tweet thread overall?
In so much as this tweet thread makes mainstream Democrats defend Ilhan Omar and AOC, which is what's happening, it basically is a good tweet thread.
It basically works.
In so much as he said things that are untrue and imprecise and offensive, that's bad.
Sure, we can all agree with that.
But as with all of these controversies, you do need a little bit of context.
You know, in 2016, President Trump said that a U.S. judge could not give him a fair hearing on immigration because the judge was of Mexican descent.
Right?
And that statement on its face is racist, it's offensive, it's wrong.
And this is how it was played in the mainstream media.
Everyone called it racist.
But then we learn that the judge is a racist himself.
He actually is.
He's a member of a group called the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association.
La Raza means the race, and it refers specifically to an early 20th century essay called La Raza Cosmica, which says that Hispanics are superior to the other races.
It's the same place that the campus group La Raza comes from, that they've had to rename themselves because it's so obviously racist.
So in that scenario, it kind of looks like President Trump was right.
That judge, Judge Curiel, is a member of a racist group.
A pro-Hispanic racist group.
So yeah, I guess that is an issue.
Didn't have to be.
I mean, if it had been any other Mexican judge, it would have just been a bigoted statement from Trump.
But in the case of that judge in particular, no big deal.
Same thing with Charlottesville.
You know, after Charlottesville, we were all told the media said that Trump said there were good people among white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
And then we saw the full video, and what did it say?
Two sentences later, he explicitly condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be condemned totally.
Now I think it's the same old story.
The question you gotta ask yourself, just keep coming back to this.
Whenever they say Trump is a bigot, whenever they say anybody is a bigot, because they say something, they make some joke, they send some tweet.
Is Trump a racial bigot?
Does he discriminate against racial minorities?
Does he use his office to oppress racial minorities?
If he's trying to do that, he's the most incompetent oppressor in the history of race relations because we now have record low black unemployment, record low Hispanic unemployment.
If you think he does harbor all these racial antagonisms, antipathies, and you think that he's oppressing people, prove it.
If you don't think that, I wouldn't get so riled up over the tweets.
You know, John Stuart Mill, the philosopher, one time described the difference between the radical, now we might say leftist, and the conservative.
And what the radical does is he sees any statement, any received opinion, and he asks, is it true?
Is it literally true?
Can I demonstrate that truth?
If you apply that lens to Trump's tweet, then it's obviously false because those three women are not immigrants.
But the conservative, he points out, looks at a received opinion, And he doesn't ask, is it true?
Can I prove it?
Is it true?
He asks, what does it mean?
And I think if you ask, what does it mean?
You'll learn a lot about the state of the Democratic Party.
You'll learn a lot about these four progressive congresswomen.
You'll learn a lot about the state of the country.
And patriotism.
And foreign ideas coming in.
So, I think we've talked enough about the tweets.
We should talk about a real story at some point today.
An Antifa terrorist tried to blow up an immigration detention center in Washington over the weekend.
But you haven't heard about that because everyone's got to talk about tweets.
4 a.m.
Saturday morning, an armed Antifa terrorist was shot by police trying to blow up an immigration center.
Now, that came after a Fairly peaceful rally hours before.
So the initial news reports, in so much as you can even find them, said a man was killed at an ICE detention center.
Then you found out the man who was killed had a gun.
Then you learned he had explosives.
They said, but we don't know the cause.
We don't know what it was for.
Then you learned that there had been an anti-ICE demonstration just hours before.
We don't know.
No jumping to conclusions about the motivations.
I'm not Sherlock Holmes.
I had a good hunch that this guy might be a radical left-wing protester and terrorist.
Turns out I was right.
He called himself a proud member of Antifa.
Those are the guys that knocked in the journalist Andy No's head just the other day.
They've attacked many other people.
They attacked me with a squirt gun.
This is a violent domestic terrorist organization.
How has the left responded to them?
Governor Jay Inslee, who is the governor of the state and a 2020 Democrat candidate, I guess.
He's not like a real candidate.
He's kind of like a Swalwell-level candidate, but he's still in the race, so whatever.
He said this, quote, We know at this moment there is tremendous anxiety in our community.
We knew there is tremendous anger about the inhumanity going on at the border.
I know seeing children in cages, as we have seen, is extremely heart-rending to all of us.
I know at the moment we have to hope that we can remain calm.
So he's basically defending the guy.
He doesn't come out and say this guy's a thug terrorist and fortunately we stopped him before he killed good Americans who were just enforcing the law and doing their jobs and protecting our country.
That's what he should have said.
Instead, he says, well, the children are in cages.
Where was Jay Inslee when Barack Obama was caging children?
All those photos, the popular photos that you see, they still use them.
These are still the photos that Democrats use of the alleged children in cages.
Those come from 2014.
Those come from the Obama administration.
I don't remember any of Jay Inslee's crocodile tears back then, do you?
How about these other...
I don't remember Antifa protests, terrorist attacks outside of ICE detention centers in 2014 under Barack Obama's watch, do you?
No, absolutely not.
But this is par for the course.
I mean, we have been told now for weeks and weeks that ICE detention centers are concentration camps.
It's like the Nazis.
AOC has been saying this for how long?
You remember on one of her stream of consciousness, Instagram, whatever they are, she compared the ICE detention centers to the Holocaust.
The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.
And that is exactly what they are.
They are concentration camps.
The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing.
So concentration camps, that's what it is, right?
She...
I'm not going to blame her for this terrorist attack.
The guy who...
Tried to blow up this ICE center is responsible for what he did.
She is encouraging it.
She's not responsible.
She's not guilty.
Not culpable.
But she is encouraging it.
We'll also see her just get absolutely destroyed by a former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
We'll see what's going on in Beto O'Rourke's flailing presidential campaign.
And we will get to the greatest controversy of all.
Sparked by Scarlett Johansson and the transgender movement.
And the question is, are actors allowed to pretend to be other people?
We will get to all of that, but first, I gotta say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Go to dailywire.com.
Ten bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
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You get backstage.
You get test questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday.
And you get...
The Leftist Tears Tumblr.
This is very important when you're watching AOC at congressional testimony because here she doesn't have her people writing her tweets for her.
Here she doesn't have everything perfectly manicured.
So she just gets absolutely wrecked.
And if you don't want to get caught in the flood, get your Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Also, I want to mention...
I was on my friend Candace Owens' show at PragerU the other day, so I think that just came out yesterday or today, and it was a great 45-minute discussion with her.
You can go check it out on her podcast page, or on YouTube, or at PragerU's website, or just anywhere.
Just Google it, man.
Come on.
It's 2019.
You know how this works.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
So AOC compares immigration detention centers to concentration camps from the Holocaust.
Specifically from the Holocaust, by the way.
Because later in that video, she said, if never again means anything, then we need to call these concentration camps.
Never again is a specific reference to the Holocaust.
So she's drawing an explicit tie between the detention centers and Nazi concentration camps.
She's not responsible for this terrorist attack.
She's actually not.
The guy is responsible for his own actions.
But AOC is encouraging it.
I'm not even saying she's inciting it.
I'm saying she's encouraging it.
The word encourage comes from heart.
Giving people heart to go out and do these things.
Because if you seriously believed...
No one really believes this, so it's a moot point.
But if you seriously believed that the United States is the same as Nazi Germany...
You would have a moral obligation to rise up.
If you really believed that we had Auschwitz and Dachau in the United States, you would rise up.
Of course you would.
Nobody really believes that except for these lunatics in Antifa who occasionally do, more than occasionally these days, go out and become very, very violent.
So Obviously, the media are never going to give this a fair shake.
We should be talking about this from the rooftops.
Every time a conservative sends a mean tweet, all of a sudden it's equated with violence.
It's a terrorist attack.
The left tells you this on campus all the time.
They say, speech is violence.
I was giving a speech at Cal State LA, and I had professors telling me, the very fact of your speech is committing acts of violence.
And yet, when left-wing terrorists go out and actually try to blow up law enforcement centers, not a peep.
No, nothing.
You don't hear a word about that.
Because according to the leftist violence is speech and conservative speech is violence.
That's the upside down that we're living in.
So when you actually get these two sides of the argument in the room, Not just AOC running her mouth on some stupid Instagram thing, not an ICE detention facility trying to do its job as 3,000 illegal aliens or more every day pour over into our borders, apparently running toward Nazi concentration camps.
Don't have any idea why they would do that.
Let's get the two sides of the debate into a room together in congressional testimony and have them argue it out and see who wins on the merits.
Fortunately, we got just that.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faced down the former ICE director, Thomas Homan.
Let's see how it went.
Mr.
Homan, your name is on this.
Is this correct?
Yes, I signed that memo.
So you are the author of the family separation policy?
I am not the author of this memo.
You're not the author, but you signed the memo.
Yes, a zero-tolerance memo.
So you provided the official recommendation to Secretary Nielsen for the United States to pursue family separation.
I gave Secretary Nielsen numerous recommendations on how to secure the border and save lives.
But it says here that you gave her numerous options, but the recommendation was option three, family separation.
What I'm saying, this is not the only paper where we've given the Secretary numerous options to secure the border and save lives.
And so the recommendation, of the many that you recommended, you recommended family separation.
I recommended zero tolerance.
Which includes family separation.
The same as it is when every U.S. citizen parent gets arrested when they're with a child.
Zero tolerance was interpreted as the policy that separated children from their parents.
If I get arrested for DUI and I have a young child in a car, I'm going to be separated.
When I was a police officer in New York and I arrested a father for domestic violence, I separated that father from his family.
Mr.
Holman, with all due respect, legal asylees are not charged with any crime.
When you're into the country illegally, it's violation 8 United States Code 1325.
Seeking asylum is legal.
If you want to seek asylum and go through the port of entry, do it the legal way.
The Attorney General of the United States has made that clear.
Okay.
Mr.
Chair, the memo is submitted to the record for review.
Oh, that doesn't turn out very well for AOC, does it?
It's just every one of her stupid talking points, he just bats down like it's nothing.
He says, you are separating families.
You, it's this very harsh, cruel, unusual punishment to separate families.
He says, yeah, anytime any adult in America commits a crime, if he's with his child, he'll be separated from that child.
I mean, this has been the argument the whole time.
What are you going to do, arrest the child?
No.
You arrest the criminal.
I guess you have three options.
If a guy commits a crime and he's with a child, you can either arrest the guy and his child, so you're arresting a child for the crime of his father.
You can either let the guy go, so if you want to commit a crime, you want to rob a bank or commit a murder, just make sure you have a child with you, and then you can't be arrested for it, so that you can't arrest the child or separate him.
three, you separate the father from his child.
That's what we do for every crime in the United States.
But AOC, I guess, wants to apply some special rule to illegal aliens.
Illegal aliens in AOC's world always have to get better treatment than American citizens.
So he smacks that one down.
Then she goes on and says, it is not illegal to come into this country to be a refugee.
And he says, right, but it's illegal to cross illegally.
And this is a distinction that the left has been trying to blur for a long time now.
She says, asylees, people seeking political asylum, are not criminals.
He says, no, no, the criminals are the criminals.
And if they want to seek legal asylum, they can do that.
There's a legal process for that.
You have to go to a port of entry.
You don't just swim across the river and run into the country.
Then you're an illegal alien.
Then you're not an asylee.
Then you're a criminal.
And you get charged.
Well, it's not a crime.
It is a crime.
It's in the U.S. Code.
Watching these two debate, really watching AOC debate anybody, always reminds me that she is just Congresswoman Charlie Day from Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
I know a lot about the law and various other lawyerings.
I'm well-educated, well-versed.
I know that situations like this, real estate-wise, they're very complex.
Actually, they're pretty simple.
You know, she usually sets it up.
She kind of seems a little confident.
She's got that idea that she's going to use some language, and then she gets smacked down.
But she's not deterred.
She goes on.
I forgot.
Where did you go to law school again?
Well, I could ask you that very same question.
I went to Harvard.
How about you?
I'm pleading the fifth, sir.
I'd advise that you do that.
And I'll take that advice into cooperation.
Yep, and she, you know, she kind of uses some legal jargon.
She knows...
But the thing that AOC and Charlie Day, and always sunny in Philadelphia, they never...
I don't recognize when they're in over their head.
So AOC just doesn't, I mean, she should have looked at this guy, this former ICE director, and said, I'm not going to try my BS here.
This isn't going to go well for me.
I mean, if she were really a sophisticated politician, she would have known that.
She would have backed off.
But she just keeps going in for it, keeps going in for it, until she needs to have the final Charlie Day reaction.
Now let's say you and I go toe-to-toe on bird law and see who comes out the victor.
You know, I don't think I'm going to do anything close to that, and I can see clearly you know nothing about the law.
It seems like you have a tenuous grasp on the English language in general.
Okay, well, filibuster.
Yep, there it is.
That's AOC. Their old career is just filibustering, I think.
Filibustering to get to the next tweet, to get to the next Snapchat.
Even more pathetic, though, than this exchange.
And whenever, you know, you have...
A disagreement over border policy, let's say.
Let's say you've got your leftist friends and they're screaming about border policy.
You'll notice that they'll always be trying to move the goalposts.
It'll be, they're separating families!
And you'll say...
Right, we separate criminals from their kids all the time.
Trump's a racist!
What does that have to do with anything?
But actually, he's not really a racist.
The Border Patrol are Nazis, and they just keep jumping, jumping, jumping.
I think that clip of AOC talking to the former ICE director is a great encapsulation of just smacking down every one of those arguments.
I would just play it for them.
I would just send it to them.
Have it ready to go in your Twitter account.
Just shoot it out there.
Even more pathetic than this exchange.
We have got to check in on the long-forgotten presidential campaign of Beto O'Rourke.
Remember Beto?
Is he some illegal alien?
I don't know.
He should go back to that country that he's from.
He should go back and try to fix his own country in...
Oh, Texas, right.
Oh, he's an Irish guy.
Okay, never mind.
Is his country Ireland?
I don't know.
He has a novel strategy to restart his nearly moribund presidential campaign, and that is to announce that he is descended from slave owners.
Novel strategy.
We'll see if it pays off for him.
He writes this Medium post.
Medium is like his diary where he wrote his fake Jack Kerouac travel logs.
You know, I just got to find myself, man.
I just, I'm trying to get back into who I am after he lost that Senate race.
So he writes, quote, I was recently given documents showing that both Amy and I are descended from people who owned slaves.
Along with other possessions listed in their property log were two human beings, Rose and Eliza.
A paternal great-great-great-grandfather of mine, Andrew Cohen Jasper, owned these two women in the 1850s.
There are also records showing that a maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Frederick Williams, most likely owned slaves in the 1860s.
I have only one question for Beto O'Rourke.
Who cares?
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares about your great-great-great-great-uncles, procurer of slaves from the great-great...
No, it doesn't.
No one cares about you.
No one cares about your whole campaign.
And they certainly don't care about your great-great-great-grandfather.
I don't care about Trump's great-great-great-grandfather.
I barely care about my own great-great-great-grandfather.
Beto O'Rourke is talking about this because he has nothing else to talk about.
The guy is always one step behind.
Talking about our great-great-great-great-great-grandfather slave owners is so last week, pal.
That's just the sort of thing Mitch McConnell and Kamala Harris do.
The reason that we're talking about all this is because the Democrats have nothing to run on.
The only attack they can get on Mitch McConnell is that his great-great-great-grandfather owned a slave once.
That's what they got on him.
They can't talk about the present because things are going too well, so they have to go back and talk about the past.
But Beto's campaign is also always one step behind, because he's not running on anything.
He famously said in Iowa, I want you to shape me into the presidential candidate you want.
He doesn't believe in anything.
He doesn't have any beliefs.
He's not a conviction politician.
He's just a kind of loafing guy who married a billionaire who likes to see his name in the newspaper and likes how he looks on camera.
And so he just runs for office.
That's it.
He's never going to accomplish anything in office.
He's never, he doesn't, he wouldn't even know what to accomplish if he could.
That guy is not going to beat Donald Trump.
That guy's barely going to beat Eric Swalwell.
And the Democrats have that problem right now because they don't know what they want, with the exception of those four radical progressive congresswomen who know exactly what they want, and only 9% of America wants it.
Before we go, I have to talk about the funniest cultural story of the entire week.
Scarlett Johansson is in hot water because she suggested that actors can pretend to be other people.
And this is now politically incorrect.
Actors, you know, the people who pretend to be other people, yeah, they can't do that anymore.
She said, quote, You know, as an actor, I should be allowed to play any person or any tree or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job.
She said this, quote, to As If magazine.
And this is obviously true.
That is the definition of an actor.
And then she was immediately bullied by the gender ideologue left.
Particularly by one gender-confused man with a very large Twitter account whose name is Charlotte Clymer, formerly Charles Clymer.
And he wrote this, quote, It is incredibly disappointing that she has learned nothing and clearly does not care about the experiences of trans people.
I will not be seeing any films that involve Scarlett Johansson moving forward.
This is ironic because although this man, Charlotte Clymer, wants to portray himself as a woman, he's not.
He's a man.
And so in this case, you have a white man telling a woman from an immigrant family, Scarlett Johansson, what she can and cannot do.
Under any other circumstance, the left would be outraged about this, but because Charlotte Clymer pretends to be a woman, all of a sudden, he's in the right and Scarlett Johansson has to apologize for being an actress.
This is why, first of all, it's important to be precise about pronouns.
Because if I just refer to Charlotte Clymer and I refer to him as a she, you'll have this idea that it's just two women arguing about social justice.
And so maybe you'll say, okay, well maybe she has a point.
When you use the correct pronouns, you realize it's just a dude who's imposing his will on a woman who's an actress.
That's a very different image.
What did Scarlett Johansson do?
She apologized.
It was this totally perfunctory apology.
She goes, quote, I recognize that in reality there is a widespread discrepancy among my industry that favors Caucasian, cisgendered actors, and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to.
I continue to support and always have diversity in every industry, and will continue to fight for projects where everyone is included.
Beep, boop, beep, boop.
Did I say the current daily politically correct slogan?
I know it'll change tomorrow, but did I get it right today?
Please, please don't ruin my career.
She may as well have said that last part.
I'll give you just a little bit of insider information.
In a previous life, I was an actor.
Classically trained actor, worked professionally as an actor.
One thing I learned.
Actors pretend to be other people.
It's not real.
What actors do is they create characters, they develop characters from the inner life, then they behave truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
So there was one time, I'll give you an example.
This will probably get me deplatformed from Twitter.
One time, I played Hamlet.
Shakespeare's play Hamlet.
Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark.
I'm not really the Prince of Denmark.
I'm not even Danish.
But I played Hamlet.
Now, I guess this is very anti-Danish.
It's Danaphobic.
It's taking away opportunities from the many Danish royals who would like to be able to do off-off Broadway productions of Hamlet.
But I did it anyway because that's what actors tend to do.
It's not real.
This is the broader lesson from today.
It's not real.
The acting isn't real.
The plays aren't real.
People are always playing people who they are not.
If you only cast people who are the roles that they are playing, it's no longer acting.
It's just reality.
But this isn't reality.
This is make-believe.
The same thing is true in our politics.
Politics has always had a theatrical component.
It's why actors tend to be politicians, and politicians have to be actors.
It's because...
There's a lot of make-believe that goes on.
Twitter is not real.
Twitter is not the real world.
The tweets are not going to change your life.
It's okay.
Take a break.
When you pull out of this crazy, insane, hyper-political pop culture, the world is looking pretty good.
The sun is shining.
The birds are chirping.
There is wonderful music to listen to, literature to read, family and friends to enjoy.
Things are going really, really well.
The economy is going gangbusters.
We have relative peace abroad.
It's okay, guys.
Take a breath.
Everybody calm down.
Forget the tweets.
Forget the transphobic, Danish-phobic acting.
See, forget all...
It's okay.
We have problems.
We'll tackle those problems.
We won't tackle those problems in the make-believe.
We'll do it right here in reality.
That's our show.
Come back tomorrow.
We've got a lot more.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you then.
The Michael Knowles show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike 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.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Democrats decide to attack each other, so President Trump says, wait a second, I want part of this.
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