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July 29, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:21
Ep. 389 - Are The Tweets Working?

The Left is accusing President Trump of racism. We examine whether the tweets are actually helping Trump’s political case. Then, the White House wins big on the Wall at the Supreme Court, and Attorney General William Barr resumes executing criminals. Date: 07-29-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Because today is a day that ends in Y. President Trump is being accused by the left of racism, this time because he pointed out that a horribly run and incredibly dangerous city, Baltimore, is horribly run and incredibly dangerous.
Nice right-wingers are lamenting the mean tweets.
We will take a cold, hard look at whether the tweets are helping or hurting Trump's case.
Then the White House wins big on the wall at the Supreme Court, and Attorney General William Barr Resumes executing criminals for the first time in 16 years.
We will examine why everybody hates the death penalty these days and why it's actually a wonderful institution.
All that and a lot more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Is President Trump a racist?
Is President Trump a racist?
I feel like this could be the perpetual headline, because every day the left says he's racist.
I feel like this could be the perpetual headline because every day the left says he's racist.
In this case, some right-wingers are calling him racist too.
And even the right-wingers who aren't calling him racist are saying that the tweets are terrible and they need to stop.
I have a little bit, I guess, of an unconventional view on this.
So we will take a cold, hard look at all of those tweets.
Why is President Trump being accused of racism?
He's being accused of racism because he pointed out that Baltimore, which I'm not too far from right now, I'm in Washington, D.C., so I'm a stone's throw from Baltimore, is one of the most crime and poverty-ridden cities in America, and that is largely thanks to corrupt politicians.
Democrats can't answer this charge.
Democrats have run Baltimore for a very, very long time.
The congressman who represents Baltimore and one of the worst areas of Baltimore has been there for 36 years at this point.
They can't answer Trump on the merits, so they call him racist.
This is what the left always does.
Nothing new there.
What is new is President Trump's response, which is he's calling the left racist right back.
He's just going right for it.
He's not trying to play this down.
He's not trying to avoid the issue.
He is going for the jugular.
He is harping on the issue, and he's calling them racist.
And the question is, who's right, who's racist, and politically, are the tweets helping him or not?
Now, one thing that the mainstream media have failed to point out here is that in this fight, as is almost always the case with Trump, the Democrats started the fight.
Trump continues the fight.
Trump maybe elevates the fight or escalates the fight.
But as is often the case with him, his opponents start it.
He plays nice with people if they play nice with him.
They start it and then he pushes back, punches back twice as hard.
So specifically in this case, Elijah Cummings...
Who is a Democrat from Baltimore.
He's been in office for a thousand years.
He's accomplished nothing.
He started this fight.
Cummings started the fight by screaming like a petulant little child at the head of the Department of Homeland Security on television last week.
Here he is.
When we hear about stories coming out from you and your agency that everything is pretty good and you're doing a great job, I guess you feel like you're doing a great job, right?
Is that what you're saying?
What does that mean?
What does that mean when a child is sitting in their own feces, can't take a shower?
Come on, man!
What's that about?
None of us would have our children in that position.
They are human beings.
And I'm trying to figure out, and I get tired of folks saying, oh, oh, they're just beating up on the Border Patrol.
Oh, they're just beating up on Homeland Security.
What I'm saying is I want to concentrate on these children.
And I want to make sure that they are okay.
I will say it, I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
It's not the deed that you do to a child.
It's the memory.
It's the memory.
So it goes on like this.
It goes on like this, on and on and on.
All BS from Elijah Cummings.
He doesn't care about these kids at the border.
If he cared about these kids, he would take care of the kids in his own district, which is one of the most crime and poverty-run districts in the country.
Baltimore, look, I've taken that train and I've taken that bus from D.C. to New York and back a lot in my life, and that city is a disaster.
I mean, it is...
Absolutely unconscionable that that is an American city and that the politicians in that city would let it descend that way.
I am not saying this to defend Trump's tweets.
I'm not saying this to launch an attack on left-wing politicians.
The place is awful.
Take a look.
I mean, there's videos all over the internet of this.
If you happen to be nearby or if you're on the train or the bus, you can see it.
It is an unconscionable disgrace.
And it's a disgrace that is at the feet of these politicians who have been there forever and haven't done anything.
Elijah Cummings doesn't care about these kids at all.
He wants to make a spectacle of himself and score cheap political points against Kevin McAleenan, who is the acting DHS head.
Elijah Cummings, though, it is not fair to blame politicians for all of the terrible things that happen in their districts.
It is fair to blame Elijah Cummings, because this guy has been around forever.
He is a key power broker in Baltimore.
He's been representing Baltimore in politics since 1983.
If you count his service at the state level, not just at the federal level.
1983.
What does Cummings do for the children that he's represented for 36 years?
We got, in Baltimore, highest crime rate.
Second highest violent crime rate just behind Detroit.
Highest murder rate.
50 murders per 100,000 people.
Baltimore, according to the New York Post pointing this out, Don't just take the right-wingers' words for it.
The left admitted this as well.
And they never called the New York Times or Bernie Sanders or any of the other leftists who pointed this out, including the Democratic mayor of Baltimore.
They never called them racist.
We'll take a look at that.
We'll see how Trump responded, whether it helped him or hurt him politically.
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Don't just take my word for it on Baltimore, and don't just take the word of right-wingers.
Even left-wingers and left-wing outlets have admitted this year, I mean, just a few months ago, that Baltimore is a tragedy.
The New York Times, in March, published a piece called The Tragedy of Baltimore.
Since Freddie Gray's death in 2015, violent crime has spiked to levels unseen for a quarter century inside the crack up of an American city.
A lot of other people have come out on this too.
So Elijah Cummings launches this ridiculous attack against the acting director of DHS.
And by the way, not only is Elijah Cummings neglecting his own district, not only should he certainly not be throwing stones, But his attack on DHS simply wasn't true.
Here's the acting director of DHS. I would welcome the opportunity to travel with you to the border and to see our men and women and how hard they are working to care for children.
The Board of Children is holding children that were not their own, brought across by smugglers, putting formula and baby bottles together.
There's no one defecating in a Mylar blanket.
We are taking care of these children thanks to the resources we finally have.
They're moving very quickly through our facilities to health and human services to a better situation.
And I'd be happy to show you that at the board, Mr.
Chairman.
Generally, the case is, if someone is going crazy and grandstanding and yelling and screaming and becoming very emotional, and then another person is keeping his cool and just calmly responding, it's going to be the second person who's got the truth on his side.
And that's very often the case in political debates between the left, which only can rely on ginning up emotion, and on the right, which is answering plainly with facts.
So, President Trump came out.
He defended his DHS secretary and his immigration policy.
And this, this is the tweet that he sent out defending them, going after Elijah Cummings.
This is what they're calling racist.
We'll see if it's racist.
We'll see if it helps him.
We'll see if it's true.
He says, quote, Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men and women of Border Patrol about conditions at the southern border when actually his Baltimore district is far worse and more dangerous.
His district is considered the worst in the USA.
As proven last week during a congressional tour, the border is clean, efficient and well run, just very crowded.
Cummings district is a disgusting rat and rodent infested mess.
If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place.
Strong tweet.
Three questions.
First one.
Is it true?
The only part of the tweet I think is not true is I don't think it's the case that if Cummings spent more time in his district, it would be any better.
I think Cummings is a completely useless, corrupt politician who has done nothing for his district.
He has very little achievement to his name over 36 years in politics.
If anything, it seems that he's made things worse or has failed to help as things have gotten worse in recent years.
So that's the only part of the tweet that I think is false.
The rest of it is true.
It's just demonstrably true.
Cummings is a bully.
He does scream at the people who are trying to keep our country safe in border patrol.
His district is one of the most dangerous places in the country and poverty-stricken places in the country.
Obviously, the situation at the border isn't so awful.
It isn't, you know, a concentration camp like AOC says.
And it's for a very simple reason.
I mean, the way we know this is demonstrable because people keep pouring over our border.
They keep going to these facilities.
Even though they know that they're going to have to be arrested in these facilities for a while, they think it's a good bet and eventually they're going to be let out and it's worth doing.
That's how you know that it's not a concentration camp.
I don't think all of these illegal aliens are pouring into Baltimore.
Or West Baltimore.
Or Elijah Cummings' district.
But they are pouring into America.
And they are staying in these detention facilities.
It is the case that his district is disgusting.
There are rats everywhere.
There's big trash problems.
Huge problems of poverty there.
And so, it is true.
Second question.
Is the tweet racist?
I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
If something is true, it's not racist.
Racism is by definition unjust.
Racial bigotry is unjust.
The truth is not unjust.
Also, is it racist?
Even though Baltimore is a mostly black city, Trump has used similar terms to describe mostly white places.
He called New Hampshire a drug-infested den a few years ago.
He called Bill de Blasio the white mayor of New York the worst mayor ever.
He said that city was going to hell in a handbasket under de Blasio's leadership.
So he's used similar language for white places, another reason why it isn't racist.
Also, if you need a third reason, left-wingers, some of the most prominent left-wingers, the most progressive people in the Democratic Party, have said the exact same things that Trump said about Baltimore, and no one ever called them racist for those comments.
Here's Bernie Sanders.
He could have been reading a Trump tweet, and nobody said peep when he made these comments about Baltimore.
America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world.
But anyone who took the walk that we took around this neighborhood would not think you're in a wealthy nation.
You would think that you were in a third world country where unemployment is over 50%.
A community that does not even have decent quality grocery stores where moms can buy quality food for their kids.
A community in which the dream of getting a higher education for many kids is as real as is going to the moon.
Yeah, all true.
Bernie is right, and they didn't call him racist for that.
And then lest you're still not convinced, the black, democratic, progressive, liberal, left-wing mayor of Baltimore made almost the same comments, admitted that what Trump said is right.
We'll get to that in a second.
Then we'll get to the big question, which is the big debate on the right.
Are the tweets politically hurting Trump or are they helping Trump?
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Bernie Sanders uses almost the same words that Donald Trump uses to talk about Baltimore.
Here is the Democrat mayor, black mayor of Baltimore, Catherine Pugh, just last year using precisely the same words that President Trump was using.
About a year ago, city leaders identified some of the city's most violent neighborhoods.
What the hell?
We should just take all this down.
To target.
Ooh, you can smell the rats.
Under Baltimore's violence reduction initiative.
Ooh,.
Just last week, we went with Mayor Pugh as she toured an East Baltimore neighborhood.
It's a new one.
I've been out here 54 years.
It's a new one.
Baltimore's Violence Reduction Initiative is about taking steps to rid communities of the cornerstones that contribute to crime.
Oh my God, you can smell the dead animals.
Blocks of dilapidated buildings help to hide the addiction that's crippled this community.
Yeah, she goes on.
I mean, she uses the reference to rats, the same one that President Trump does.
She actually uses far tougher language on Baltimore than Trump does.
So the comments, they're true.
They're not racist.
That is a given.
People who are telling you otherwise are either profoundly ignorant or disingenuous.
There is however a legitimate open question.
Are these tweets, are these fights politically useful for President Trump?
And there's a big debate here.
Tougher question.
So is it politically useful?
Let's say, let's think about the opposite.
Let's say that President Trump doesn't say these things.
Elijah Cummings wages his attack on Trump's DHS acting secretary, on Trump's immigration policy, accuses him of abusing children, all these sort of things, and Trump doesn't say anything.
The theory here, for the people who don't want him to send the tweets, is that President Trump will avoid a few days of an unnecessary news cycle that calls him racist.
I think this is a fantasy.
They already call him a racist every day on the news channels.
The left wing controls the mainstream media in this country.
They're already doing it, so what is the difference?
The more establishment-type Republicans say avoid anything that might even possibly be twisted unfairly, unjustly, into Democrats calling you a racist.
This is like the Mitt Romney idea.
I'm not going to talk about anything that could even, even if it's remotely cultural, because if it's sort of cultural, then they might twist it into something racial, and then it might be called racist, and we're not going to do that.
We're going to totally lay off.
That's the Romney strategy.
That is not how President Trump rolls.
If you remember, 10 years, I guess now, 14 years ago, President Trump got into this big fight with Rosie O'Donnell, of all people.
Rosie started the fight on The View.
She said that Trump was bankrupt.
And Trump viciously, absurdly, hilariously, very cruelly responded to her with a weeks-long tirade in the media.
Here's just some of how President Trump responded to Rosie O'Donnell.
Well, Rosie O'Donnell's disgusting.
I mean, both inside and out.
You take a look at her, she's a slob.
She talks like a truck driver.
Rosie attacked me personally because I was very happy when her talk show failed.
The other thing that failed, and this was a real monster, and everybody was suing her, was her magazine.
Her magazine called Rosie was a total disaster.
So I loved it.
I gloat over it.
I think it's wonderful because I like to see bad people fail.
Rosie failed.
I'm happy about it.
She's basically a disaster.
Well, she called me a snake oil salesman.
You know, coming from Rosie, that's pretty low because when you look at her and when you see the mind, the mind is weak.
I don't see it.
I don't get it.
I never understood.
How does she even get on television?
I believe Barbara made a terrible mistake putting her on, and I think Barbara's probably paying a big price.
If I were running The View, I'd fire Rosie.
I mean, I'd look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers.
I'd say, Rosie, you're fired.
We're all a little chubby, but Rosie's just worse than most of us.
But it's not the chubbiness.
Rosie is a very unattractive person, both inside and out.
Rosie's a person that's very lucky to have her girlfriend.
And she better be careful or I'll send one of my friends over to pick up her girlfriend.
Why would she stay with Rosie if she had another choice?
She's trying to use ABC and The View to get even with me.
But with me, we fight back.
Yes, you fight back, Donald Trump.
You fight...
I mean, that is...
Most of us who are kind of nice guys, you know, we try to be polite and have manners, we would never even consider saying something like that to a woman.
Okay, we just don't want to do it.
President Trump...
He's not that nice guy.
He's not Mr.
Nice Guy.
He might be in his personal relationships a nice guy.
But when you attack one of his enterprises, he punches back twice as hard.
Doesn't matter if you're a 30-year representative from a district.
Doesn't matter if you are Rosie O'Donnell.
He will clobber you, by the way, though, in his defense.
And I find those comments really, really distasteful.
But in his defense, this is what a lot of people on the right have been urging Republicans to do for a decade.
When they get hit from their political opponents, to punch back twice as hard.
But now that someone is actually doing it, to Elijah Cummings, to Nancy Pelosi, to the Democrats, now that you're actually seeing someone do it, all of a sudden some people are uncomfortable with it.
And so the question is, I think you get the answer in the second stage of this whole stupid non-troversy.
And the second stage of it is, now, after Trump's comments...
Al Sharpton, one of the most despicable people in America, is going to Baltimore to hold a press conference today over Trump's outrageous remarks.
And so guess what happened?
President Trump punched right back at him.
He tweeted out just a few hours ago, quote,"...I've known Al for 25 years, went to fights with him, and Don King always got along well.
He loved Trump.
He would ask me for favors often." Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score, just doing his thing.
Must have intimidated Comcast, NBC, because he had a show on NBC. Hates whites and cops.
Whoa, makes what he said about Rosie O'Donnell look polite, makes it look soft.
Now people are calling this tweet racist.
He's saying it's racist to call Al Sharpton racist.
Let's ask the same three questions really quick.
Is it true?
I'm not sure if Al Sharpton hates whites.
He definitely hates Jews, right?
People forget because their memories are really short, especially in politics.
Al Sharpton helped to launch the Crown Heights riots against Jews.
He once at a rally in Harlem, he said, quote, if the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.
Broadly speaking, even if he hasn't spoken that explicitly against white people generally, he regularly sows racial resentment against whites and general resentment against cops.
So that part is true.
He is also a con man.
This guy is a shakedown artist who extorts money from companies and individuals by threatening to call them racist.
It's his entire career and he's made a lot of money doing it.
Also, speaking of con artists, he launched his whole career on a rape hoax, a racial rape hoax.
Tawana Brawley.
A name that people don't remember anymore because it looked so bad for Sharpton and the left.
Tawana Brawley said she'd been raped by four white men, cops and an attorney.
In 1987, they said she was found in a trash bag that was covered with racial slurs covered in feces.
Can you imagine the hate crime of the century?
And it was a total lie.
It was a total hoax.
And Al Sharpton was the biggest peddler of her lies.
She was accused and sued successfully for defamation.
So, is what Trump said about Sharpton true?
100%.
Now, is what he said racist?
No.
I get why.
Because if it's true, it's not racist.
Racism is unjust.
What he said, perfectly just, perfectly true.
Now, Sharpton is a racist.
That is certainly true.
And it's not racist to point out that Al Sharpton is a racist.
Then you get to the third question.
This is the tough one, but I think this case really makes it a little clearer which way it is.
Is it politically smart?
I think it is.
I think it is politically smart to throw these tweets out there.
To go right at Elijah Cummings and especially to go right at Al Sharpton.
Alright, this is the only place where I differ from some of my colleagues, some of my other friends on the right.
We all agree what he said is true.
We all agree what he said is not racist.
The only place where I differ from some of my friends and colleagues on the right...
I think they are politically helpful.
Okay, so the argument that they're politically harmful is that without the Trump tweets, the news cycle would be terrible for Democrats, but now with the Trump tweets, it's good for Democrats.
That isn't true.
The Democrats control the news cycle.
Every news cycle, by definition.
Is basically good for Democrats.
If it's not perfectly good, at least they will coddle the Democrats and they'll try to invent non-traversies about conservatives and Republicans.
They did this to Bush.
They just made up a number of fake scandals because Bush didn't really have scandals.
So they made up the Valerie Plame affair.
Totally ginned up non-traversy just to turn the news cycles.
Also, maybe more importantly, I don't think this is a bad news cycle for Trump.
I don't think these tweets have made a bad news cycle.
Let's just look at the last two tweet storms.
Let's look at the effect of those tweet storms.
We'll get to it in one second.
Then we'll get to the death penalty, which is coming back at the federal level because the current attorney general wants to actually enforce the law that is on the books.
We'll get to that.
We'll get to some good news at the Supreme Court as well for the southern border and the border wall and immigration.
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We will be right back with a lot more.
Okay, is this politically useful for Trump to focus on the tweets, to go right after these is this politically useful for Trump to focus on the tweets, to go right after these cultural issues, to go after Al Sharpton to go right after these cultural issues, to go Look at the last two tweet storms.
Two weeks ago, remember, he went after AOC and the squad, and he said to go back where they came from, and we all said that wasn't a good line.
We all said he should have written it differently.
However, two weeks ago, We're good to go.
Democrats rallied behind the unpopular squad and were taking photos with them.
Nancy Pelosi hosted AOC in her office.
You know, she hosted the real Speaker of the House.
AOC in her office took a big smiley photo.
The effect, I'm not even talking about the intrinsic goodness of the tweets or the justice of them.
I'm just talking about the political effect.
The political effect of that first round of tweets helped Trump.
Got the Democrats talking about impeachment again, which is politically a loser for them this year.
You're seeing the same strategy in this tweet storm.
After the Trump tweets, the Democrats are now rallying behind Al Sharpton.
Al Sharpton, the mainstream media, NBC News, Kamala Harris, are calling Al Sharpton a race-hustling extortionist, a, quote, civil rights leader.
That's not going to work.
Al Sharpton is extremely unpopular, even in his own neighborhoods.
There was a Quinnipiac poll a few years ago that actually measured Al Sharpton's favorability.
His favorability in New York is just 29%.
In New York, how do you think he plays in Peoria?
How do you think he plays in real America, you know, the whole middle of the country between the two coasts?
In New York, Al Sharpton is just 29% approval, and he's got a 53% disapproval rating.
What is it in the rest of the country?
Rallying behind Al Sharpton is a totally losing position.
And by going after Al Sharpton, Trump has caused the left to defend him.
Same strategy when Trump was criticizing Colin Kaepernick.
You know, a lot of Trump skeptical conservatives who are genuinely pretty nice guys, so they don't like it when the president's criticizing athletes.
A lot of them said please don't criticize the NFL for kneeling.
Please don't criticize the football players.
What is the cumulative effect of all of this?
The American flag is very popular.
It's not good to be supporting people who disrespect the American flag.
The cumulative effect of all of these tweets, you now have Democrats opposing the American flag, opposing Fourth of July parades, opposing our national boundaries and borders, supporting socialists and the squad.
And in the case of these latest tweets, you've got now Democrats opposing cops and supporting Al Sharpton.
Even just on the cop thing, even the anti-law enforcement thing.
That the left is now reacting to President Trump on and opposing law enforcement, whether it's ICE or whether it's local cops.
Gallup polling shows that cops are basically the most popular institution in the country.
They're the third most popular institution in the entire country, right after the military and small business.
So the effect of these tweets is you've got the Democrats defending the least popular people, institutions, and action in this country.
And right now, they're identifying Trump with the most popular institutions, including the American flag.
Now, it's not all political bright side for Trump with these tweets.
I totally acknowledge there is a political downside.
Because he's a fighter, because he's an insult comic, he makes himself unlikable to a lot of people.
But President Trump's bet is not to make himself acceptable.
That was the Romney bet.
Be the least offensive.
Don't talk about anything other than Obama's bad economy.
Be totally milquetoast, nice, smiling, no offense.
Romney lost and Trump won.
That tells you something.
And by the way, Trump is never going to make himself acceptable in polite society.
That's not who he is.
Trump's strategy is to smear his opponents just as bad, if not worse, than they smear him.
As a matter of personal comportment and grace, this is not great, obviously.
Don't frown on that.
I don't try to live my life that way.
As a matter of political strategy, though, it may be essential, particularly in this present moment.
I have for a very long time said conservatives need to sharpen our rhetoric.
So the left goes out.
They call us transphobic bigots because we don't want to inject little children with puberty-blocking hormones.
We should go right back at the left and call them sick perverts and child abusers for what they're doing to those kids.
That's what President Trump is doing.
He's taking that strategy.
He's not making himself the most acceptable guy in the world.
His entire focus is on making his opponents unacceptable.
That's the strategy.
And politically, it has paid off for him.
We actually have some data points here.
It has worked for him.
Worked for him in 2016.
I'm not predicting the future.
We'll get an answer on that in 2020, but from what we see here, it does seem to me like it's a pretty good strategy.
It seems to me the tweets are working.
And more importantly, because we're just talking about political realities, if Trump is not ever going to be the perfectly nice behaved guy who's Mitt Romney and smiles and helps little old grannies cross the street, if he's not going to be that guy, if he's going to be a puncher and a fighter and an insult comic, then this is the strategy he has to pursue Fortunately, it seems to be working, but we'll see if it keeps working in 2020.
We have to talk briefly about the death penalty.
This is a story that's not getting a lot of traction.
William Barr, the Attorney General, is now going to be enforcing the federal death penalty again for the first time in 16 years.
We have not executed a federally condemned criminal since 2003.
And the reason the story isn't getting a lot of traction is because the left...
Says the death penalty is the worst thing in the world.
And the right is kind of divided on the issue.
A lot of conservatives don't really understand what the death penalty is for.
So I will defend the death penalty.
I will defend as your resident bloodthirsty, autocratic, theocratic, whatever lines they want to use.
I'll defend the death penalty.
So the left, here's their argument.
Cory Booker says the death penalty is immoral and ineffective.
Senator Spartacus.
Ayanna Pressley, the Ringo star of the squad, says, quote, the death penalty has no place in a just society.
Ilhan Omar, she took a break from sympathizing with Al-Qaeda to call the death penalty a heinous totalitarian practice often used against innocent people, the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
Oh, by the way, all of those people support abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy.
They all support killing innocent babies up until the moment they're born, which is the law now in New York because of the current Democratic governor there.
In the case of the governor of Virginia, he supports killing babies after they've been born.
But they don't.
We should kill violent, awful, terrible murderers.
That is unjust.
That is the worst crime in the world.
The left, as always, gets it exactly backwards.
Who is this going to affect?
Five criminals who are going to be executed.
They are murderers.
They are child murderers and child torturers.
People who tortured and killed their own children.
White supremacist murderers.
These are the worst people on earth.
But according to the left, all those people should live and innocent babies should die.
One of the stupidest arguments against the death penalty is an argument that disingenuous left-wingers use against conservatives.
They say, well, if you're pro-life, then you need to be consistent that it's inconsistent to be pro-life but then support the death penalty.
Not true at all.
There is nothing inconsistent about thinking we shouldn't kill innocent babies and also the state can execute criminals.
Nothing inconsistent.
I mean, the left does their politics in slogans, and slogans are usually pretty stupid.
The right doesn't use slogans too much, but one of them that we use is the term pro-life, which basically defines what we think.
But if you want me to clarify, I'll clarify.
I'm pro-innocent life.
I think we should save innocent babies from being killed, and I think that the Civil authority can kill criminals.
Of course, as has every civilization that has ever existed for all of human history.
And the reason for that is I'm pro-justice.
Justice is a wonderful thing.
There's two reasons why I think support for the death penalty has dropped, even among conservatives.
On the one hand, we've lost a sense of justice.
We think that the only purpose of the criminal justice system, you hear that word justice in there, is to rehabilitate criminals.
And obviously you're not going to rehabilitate them if they're going to hang from a noose.
Actually, there's an argument there that hanging or facing capital punishment will actually really clear up your mind, and it might not save you in this world, but it might reform you for the world to come.
But still, let's say it's not going to rehab you, okay?
There are three purposes of punishment.
One of them is rehabilitation.
The other one is deterrence.
And the death penalty, when it's actually carried out, is a great deterrent.
And the third one is retribution.
And the retribution, people now say that doesn't matter at all.
We don't want to actually punish people because they committed a crime.
We want to punish them to rehabilitate them.
We want to punish them to deter other crime.
No, the most important one is the retribution.
Because of the injustice, because of the injustice that they've committed, the civil authority has to The reason this is the most important one is because, look, we could all use a little rehabilitation.
We could all do things that, we could all improve on our lives and do things that we shouldn't, or stop doing things that we shouldn't do.
We could all deter other people from doing things.
The reason that you get arrested and prosecuted and sentenced is because you committed a crime.
The differentiating factor between me and those guys who are going to face the death penalty is not that I can't use some rehabilitation.
I'm extraordinarily imperfect.
There's a lot I could improve on in my life.
The difference is they committed the crime and I did not.
The retribution is the key there.
So that's one that we've lost the sense of justice.
The other reason why I think support for the death penalty has fallen is that we've become functionally a secular, atheistic, materialistic society.
And this really matters because for all of human history, everywhere in the world, we've had a sense that mankind has something beyond this world.
In our civilization, we believe that man has an eternal soul.
We believe that there is justice after you die.
The soul goes on.
I certainly believe that.
The smartest people in human history have believed that.
Virtually every civilization has believed that.
And now, in sort of the madness of the late 19th century and 20th century, we've become increasingly atheist.
I think without reason whatsoever.
I think it's a silly intellectual fad that is going to pass away.
But because of that, The thought that we could maybe kill an innocent person is so horrifying because what we assume is at that point, that person, their life is over.
There is no justice.
There's no heaven.
There's no hell.
There's no nothing.
There's no eternal soul.
We're just kind of meat puppets.
It's the John Lennon song.
I mean, we've become a country and a civilization that's basically accepted the John Lennon song as our theology.
Imagine there's no heaven.
It's easy if you try.
Because we believe that, then the very fact that the criminal justice system is imperfect, and maybe it'll only be one in a thousand, maybe it'll be one in ten thousand, but at some point, some innocent guy is going to be killed if we carry out the death penalty with any sort of significant size.
That's so horrifying to us, we immediately back away from that.
Now, I think that's just emotional.
That's not really an intellectual point of view.
Because the criminal justice system is always going to be imperfect.
Do we really think it's better, it's more compassionate to accidentally sentence an innocent man to 40 years in prison?
Rob him of his entire life and he's just sitting there on a bench decaying for 40 years?
Rather than accidentally sending an innocent man to the firing squad?
No, they're both horrific.
I mean, they're both just so awful.
But all human institutions have to accept that degree of imperfection.
We want to improve them.
We want to make them better.
We've obviously been able to do that now with DNA testing.
But...
If you really believe that we're all just meat puppets and the lights go out when you die, it's just on an emotional level, it's so much more horrifying that you've got to back away, even if you're a little bit of a right-winger.
This is too bad, because a society that doesn't understand capital punishment has lost an important sense of justice.
And justice is a key virtue.
It's lost an important sense of its own purpose, lost an important sense of the natural order and the natural law.
I'm glad that the Attorney General has moral clarity on this.
I'm glad that just as a basic level that we're just enforcing the law now, as opposed to just unilaterally like some self-appointed king deciding which laws to enforce and which laws not to enforce.
But I wish more people would think real hard about their objections to the death penalty.
And maybe where they come from and maybe why society has changed its view on this so dramatically over time.
Before we go, really quick, great news from the Supreme Court.
Also not being covered enough, the court has ruled 5-4 that President Trump can use Pentagon funds to build part of the border wall.
This is a big fight.
The Democrats wouldn't give him funding for the border wall.
They wouldn't give him much funding.
And so...
He tried to use the military, the Pentagon funds, to do it.
A few different places he's trying to do this.
This Supreme Court decision has to do with specifically $2.5 billion of funds from the Pentagon that will allow Trump to build up to 100 miles of the wall.
This is a double whammy win for the White House.
And I was going after the White House last week because Trump has a major political vulnerability going into 2020, which is that one of his central campaign promises, build the wall, hasn't happened.
And he's said that it's happened, but he ain't telling the truth.
There was a CBP report that came out, Customs and Border Protection, that showed that Not one mile, not one inch of new wall has been built since he was elected in 2016.
Now, he's replaced old fencing.
It's very difficult to build new fencing.
Okay, I get it.
But if he goes into 2020 and he says...
Listen, I've fulfilled a lot of promises, but I'm definitely going to build the wall next time.
People aren't going to believe him.
This was a major central promise.
He's got to deliver on it.
The reason this is a double whammy win for Trump is he ran basically on two things in 2016.
Judges and immigration.
Judges, we're going to replace Scalia with a good judge.
We can't afford to lose the Supreme Court.
We got a lot of federal judges.
On judges and immigration, and in this particular case, you had the Trump-appointed judges giving him the win on the border wall.
It was a 5-4 decision.
Without the Trump judges, never could have happened.
That's a big win.
It allows him to appeal to some conservatives who are a little skeptical of Gorsuch and of Kavanaugh and say, look, we got it where it counted.
These guys, the judges are important.
Give me four more years and I'll build 100 miles more, hopefully 1,000 miles more wall, and I'll get you more Supreme Court judges if Ruth Bader Ginsburg ever admits, or rather if her handlers ever admit, that we've got a Weekend at Bernie situation going on.
Just saying, whenever those seats open up, that's going to be the pitch.
I think it's a major victory, which is why the mainstream media aren't covering that much.
Now the question is, can he start to build that wall?
Because it's not enough just to get the money.
You've got to start building.
Doing it.
All right, that's our show.
We have a lot more to get to, but there's no time.
I'll be giving a speech tomorrow at the Young America's Foundation in Washington, D.C. I think we're going to live stream it, so be sure to tune in for that.
Otherwise, I am then heading to New York.
I will see you back in La La Land on Thursday.
No show tomorrow, no show Wednesday, but we will make it up to you.
I promise.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
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.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, it's become pretty common to hear people in the media say that Trump's tweets are a distraction.
We must ignore them and address the serious issues.
Not true.
Right now, the most important thing happening in this country is Trump's rude and pugilistic Twitter war against the leftist servants of a global elite who used charges of racism to silence dissent.
If we lose that war, we lose everything.
We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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