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Aug. 1, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:07
Ep. 390 - Dark Psychic Democrats

Dark psychic forces dominated our national political debate over the past two days as 20 Democrat wanna-be presidents took the stage in Detroit to humiliate themselves. We will examine the best of the worst with a special emphasis on breakout star Marianne Williamson. Then, the Mailbag! Date: 08-01-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Dark psychic forces dominated our national political debate over the past two days as 20 Democrat wannabe presidents took the stage in Detroit to humiliate themselves.
We will examine the best of the worst with a special emphasis on breakout star Marianne Williamson, then the mailbag, all that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Mary Ann, baby.
She is the breakout star of these debates.
We'll go through everything.
We'll give you the 50,000-foot view.
We'll get into why Marianne broke out.
I also want to do a little bit of a deeper dive into who she is and what she's peddling, because we love her.
We're members of the Orb Gang.
We've left the Yang Gang.
Now we're on the Marianne Orb Gang.
but she's also peddling ideas that are extremely destructive and not just political ideas, but also cultural and spiritual ideas.
So we'll get into that all in a second.
I want to point out though that Marianne Williamson made the single truest statement during either night of the democratic debate.
The single truest statement.
She said three things in this statement.
One, One, Democrats are idiots to focus on wonkiness.
They're idiots to focus on the accounting details of their various zillion dollar plans that the Americans don't care about that at all.
That's the first thing.
She said that there is a dark psychic force that we are fighting against in politics.
That is completely true.
And she said that if Democrats don't change their strategy soon, that Donald Trump is going to be re-elected.
So much truth packed into just 28 seconds.
Here's a listen.
If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I'm afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.
We need to say it like it is.
It's bigger than Flint.
It's all over this country.
It's particularly people of color.
It's particularly people who do not have the money to fight back.
And if the Democrats don't start saying it, then why would those people feel that they're there for us?
And if those people don't feel it, they won't vote for us.
And Donald Trump will win.
Thank you very much.
Donald Trump will win.
As things stand now, truer words have never been said.
All three points are totally right.
Wonkiness is stupid.
And the Democrats, you'll notice their debates have been all about these very particular aspects of their different zillion dollar programs.
They all take for granted that we should take over one-sixth of the American economy with healthcare.
They all basically take for granted that they should force their huge federal healthcare programs on all of America.
So they're just arguing about the details.
This is what the left does.
The left has the vision of the anointed, as Thomas Sowell would say.
The left has this utopian progressive vision.
They see utopia.
They see the perfect place.
They don't realize that utopia means no place.
They think it means the perfect place.
So they see it and they're progressing toward it and it doesn't even dawn on them that some people might object to their utopia.
It doesn't even dawn on them.
Maybe the federal government shouldn't control one-sixth of our economy and all of our health care decisions and life and death.
Maybe that's not such a great idea.
They don't think that way.
They just assume that we're all on board with this progressive plan.
Even though poll after poll shows that progressivism is a minority viewpoint in America.
So, study after study shows progressivism is about 20% of America.
Maybe about 40% of America is conservative.
The rest would call themselves centrist or moderate or undecided or independent.
And yet, they are certain that that 20% of America, which is progressive, represents the whole of the country.
So, they're not discussing ideas.
What you will hear in Republican debates, much more than in left-wing debates, is a discussion of ideas.
Different ideas, different visions of the country.
You got a little bit of that last night, especially with Tulsi Gabbard.
We'll get to that at the end.
But for most of the debate, you did not get that.
And what the American people want from their presidential candidates is big ideas.
President Trump didn't get into the minutia and the details of every policy proposal.
He probably didn't read the minutia and the details of every policy proposal.
He talked in big ideas.
We're not electing an accountant.
We're not electing the functionary at the department of so-and-so, some mid-level bureaucrat.
We're electing the president.
We want big ideas.
We want a big vision.
Marianne totally got that.
Also, the dark psychic force, she's completely right about that.
When people made fun of her, that was the viral moment.
Dark psychic force is very real.
I forget who said it.
A lot of people have been credited with saying it.
At bottom, all political differences are theological differences.
St.
Andrew Breitbart, the patron of Hollywood Conservatives, said, Politics is downstream of culture, and culture we know is downstream of religion.
Cult and culture come from the same root.
What a culture worships defines that culture.
So when we're talking about political problems, it's not just someone lost their health insurance because of this aspect of a federal program, and if you fix that aspect, then you're okay.
It's not just we need to lower the marginal tax rate 0.2%.
You're talking about spiritual realities because human beings are not just meat.
We're not just animals.
We don't just grunt along and eat our slop and fall asleep in our own filth.
Well, increasingly in America, we do do that, but we're not supposed to do that.
Winston Churchill said, when great forces are on the move in the world, we learn that we're spirits, not animals.
The destiny of man is not measured by material computation.
Ronald Reagan knew that.
He quoted that very line in his breakout political speech, A Time for Choosing.
We have a major spiritual component to our humanity.
That is what matters to us, are these spiritual things.
And Marianne is talking about that.
And when she talks about a dark psychic force, we're talking about What we all know to be true, which is that mankind is broken, we're fallen, and the origin story of our whole human nature, of our whole fallen world, is that the devil tempted man in the Garden of Eden, and we made that choice and gave in to that temptation, and we got kicked out of paradise, and now we live in this broken world, because sin and death pervaded the world.
That dark psychic force that is always crouching, trying to devour you, that's the devil, and the devil exists.
Antonin Scalia used to...
Laugh about this, because in a secular world, people think you're crazy if you believe in the devil.
And what Antonin Scalia answered in a New York Magazine interview...
He said, you know, I believe in the devil.
And the interviewer, who's some secular girl who worked for New York Mag, said, well, it must be awful scary to believe in the devil.
And he said, you're looking at me like I'm crazy.
Do you realize how out of touch you are with most of America?
Do you realize how out of touch you are with the vast, vast majority of people who have ever lived, who have believed in the devil?
And then this was the key line.
He said, many more intelligent people than you or I have believed in the devil.
And Marianne Williamson is basically saying that exact same thing, and people are calling her crazy for it.
But she's totally right about that.
And then she's right that Trump will win if the Democrats don't change.
But there is a big problem with Marianne Williamson.
We'll get to that in one second.
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So Marianne says the truest statement of the entire Democratic debate of either night.
But there's something very wrong with Marianne.
So she's the new Andrew Yang.
We like that.
Andrew Yang is broke.
Marianne Williamson is woke.
The Orb Gang is the new woke thing.
But they're calling it the Orb Gang.
Why?
Because orbs and crystals and opal and all these sort of things are symbols of the New Age movement.
And that's what Marianne Williamson is.
Marianne Williamson is a guru, self-styled guru, promoted by Oprah a million times, written a bunch of books about a spiritual and religious movement called the New Age movement.
Most people don't know what that means.
It's certainly worth taking a moment to explain it because Marianne Williamson is a fun sideshow.
I love her.
I only tune into the debates for her.
She's also peddling a dangerous heresy that almost certainly comes from the devil himself.
I'm not...
I'm joking about that.
I mean, this is a genuinely diabolical heresy that she is promoting.
So she's been promoted by Oprah.
That's how you know she's probably peddling diabolical heresy.
So Oprah has promoted this woman for years, and Oprah herself is another peddler of the New Age movement nonsense.
So Oprah does something called Super Soul Sunday.
Think about the cojones it takes to style yourself as that kind of religious leader when you're not a religious leader.
Super Soul Sunday, as though Oprah is this expert on the human soul.
She's made herself into not just a TV figure, not a political figure, not even just a cultural figure.
She's made herself into a religious figure, as has Mary Ann.
And the question is, what religion is Oprah?
She's not Christian.
Occasionally she's said she's sort of Christian, but she doesn't believe in Christian orthodoxy or anything even remotely resembling Christian orthodoxy.
So she's not a Christian religious figure.
She's not a priest.
She's not a pastor, not a deacon, not a bishop.
She's not Jewish.
She's not a Jewish religious figure.
She's not Hindu.
She's not Muslim.
She's New Age.
And She did an interview on Super Soul Sunday with Marianne Williamson.
Starts out sort of okay, just like all new agey stuff does.
And then it gets real kooky, real fast.
Finish these sentences.
Okay.
The world needs...
Love.
I believe in...
God.
Love is...
Everywhere.
I am grateful for...
My daughter...
And my work.
Do I get to?
Yeah, you get to.
Whatever you want.
What is the soul?
For me, it's the truth of who we are, the light, the love, which is within us.
It goes by different names, but the truth of us.
Michelangelo said when he got a statue that he would go to the quarry and get a big piece of marble.
And the way he imagined it, God had already created the statue.
And his job was just to get rid of the excess marble.
So that's what we're like.
Inside is the being that God has already created.
Some call it the Christ, the Buddha mind, the Shekinah, the light, the soul.
And our job is to get rid of this excess, useless fear, thought forms of the world that actually hide the light of the soul.
Excuse me, sorry.
I just had to take a few puffs there to try to get on the level with Oprah and Marianne.
So you see that kind of defining feature is this total relativism and this total self-centeredness.
So she goes, yeah, man, some people call it Christ.
Some people call it Buddha.
But, you know, it's really what it is.
It's not just that radical relativism.
It's all about you.
You are that light.
You are that truth.
You are the way and the truth and the life and the Buddha and the Christ.
That is New Age, and it is wickedly wrong.
Where does she get these ideas from?
Because I think some people think she's just kind of spouting nonsense.
Obviously she is, but she's not just spouting nonsense.
She's spouting a very specific kind of nonsense from the New Age movement, specifically from a book called A Course in Miracles.
Don't take my word for it.
She tells Oprah on a whole other program about her love of this particular book.
Do you have a morning ritual, Marianne Williamson?
I love to...
I love orange juice.
I love a cup of coffee.
I go back into my bed.
I make it neat.
I bring up my Course in Miracles.
I do my meditation.
You must have done it a hundred times by now.
She's done it more than a hundred times.
Even there's another clip of Marianne on Oprah years and years ago where she's asked point blank, what's your favorite book?
Favorite book's A Course in Miracles.
What is A Course in Miracles?
A Course in Miracles is the new age Anti-gospel.
You wouldn't call it a gospel, but it's the anti-gospel.
It's written by a tortured woman named Helen Schuchman, and she channeled what she called a new gospel through a spirit claiming to be Jesus Christ.
So this woman, this very troubled woman, Helen, had a vision, and she believed that Jesus was speaking to her.
She believed that a spirit from the spiritual world who was claiming to be Jesus and speaking to her a new gospel.
She was having this private revelation of a new gospel.
And why was the spirit speaking to her?
The spirit, who she said was Jesus, was speaking to her to correct errors in scripture and the teachings of the church.
Now, Christians hold the Bible to be inerrant, scripture to be without error.
right?
She is saying, no, no, no.
Not only is it full of error, but Jesus himself spoke personally to me and only me to correct these errors.
Specifically the errors that the apostles lied.
So we can't trust the apostles anymore.
Raises the question, why can we trust Helen if we can't trust any of the apostles who actually knew and followed Jesus?
And to whom Jesus said, I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
The Spirit, claiming to be Jesus, also told Helen that we are all Christ and that we have no need of a Savior.
So this is not just a heresy.
This is not just a different version of Christianity.
This is anti-Christianity.
This is the opposite of Christianity.
And Helen was a Columbia University professor and psychologist, and she was an acquaintance of a priest named Father Benedict J. Grushel.
And Father Grushel was close enough to her that he actually gave a eulogy at her funeral.
So it's not like he was some opponent of hers.
They actually seemed to be quite friendly.
He later said, having known this woman and having given the eulogy at her funeral, quote, this woman who had written so eloquently that suffering really did not exist, spent the last two years of her life in the blackest psychotic depression I have ever witnessed.
And I know people who have gotten involved in the New Age movement.
New Age is no joke and it does lead people to some pretty dark places.
The reason this matters, particularly for our politics, is not just that we're pretty soon going to be all living under the Williamson administration, but it's also because New Ageism is the kind of defining spiritual movement of our culture.
It's radically relativistic.
We live in a very relativistic culture.
We have your truth and my truth.
You can't tell me, man.
That's just your opinion.
We live in a culture that denies physical realities, very much the case of the New Age movement.
The New Age movement draws on a lot of older heresies that say that the physical world is basically terrible, that I have nothing to do with my body, that I am merely my soul and my spirit.
The New Age movement denies the reality of suffering.
They say this whole world is an illusion.
This whole world of suffering that we have is just an illusion.
Forget about it.
It's not real.
And it denies the fall of man.
It denies the brokenness of human nature.
It says we don't need a savior.
We're all our own saviors and we're going to save ourselves.
That's certainly what we all believe in this culture.
I mean, that's what so many of the leftist movements are about.
Self-help.
Pride.
Even recycling, even environmentalism.
We are saving ourselves.
We are the change we've been waiting for.
We are going to cause the sea levels to stop rising, as Barack Obama said.
We are our own hope, as Barack Obama said, too.
What this movement is, is a Gnostic heresy.
But Gnostic dualism, I guess would be the technical term, or theosophy is another one of these technical terms.
We'll get into what that means in a second.
That is a defining feature of our culture.
You know where you see it most clearly.
Instead of just trying to define all these terms, I'll give an example.
An example of this is transgenderism.
So, like Gnostic dualism would be this idea that there is this hidden secret knowledge and the dualism would be the total difference between my soul and my body.
Traditionally, what we believe, what Christians believe, is that our soul and our body are unified.
We are neither simply our soul and we're not simply our bodies.
We're human beings and human beings have body and soul.
And then lots of various other ideas tell us we're either one or we're simply the other.
So materialism tells us we're only our body.
And Gnosticism tells us we're only our soul.
In transgenderism, you see a little bit of each of these, right?
Transgenderism tells us if I am a man, I am by all visible evidence a man, but I think really deeply that I am a woman, then really I am a woman.
It's denying the physical reality for the metaphysical reality or the so-called spiritual reality.
Same thing.
That comes directly out of New Ageism.
Or you see the kind of schizophrenic other side of it in our culture too, which is that...
We deny spiritual realities altogether.
Sex is just sex.
Sex is nothing.
It's just two bodies smacking together.
Two people bumping uglies in a dark room.
Abortion is not killing a human being.
It's not ending a human life.
No, it's just like getting your appendix taken out.
The baby isn't a baby.
It's just the product of pregnancy.
It's just a clump of cells, right?
A clump of cells.
Well, I'm a clump of cells, too, by that same logic.
All my body is is just a clump of cells.
But we know that the clump of cells, when it's a human being, has more than that.
We know that human beings have a spiritual component, too.
So our culture wants to sort of have their cake and eat it, too.
Wants to say, on the one hand, physical reality is totally meaningless.
And if a man wants to be a woman, then he really is a woman.
But on the other hand, the culture denies spiritual reality altogether and says human beings are nothing more than a clump of cells.
And the New Age movement is responsible, really, I guess, for both sides of that cultural craziness.
And that's why Marianne Williamson is the most fun candidate.
She is speaking plainly.
She's speaking in big ideas.
She's speaking to a spiritual dimension.
That makes her automatically so much more interesting than the rest of those schmucks on that stage for the last two nights.
The only trouble with Marianne, my only hesitation with getting on the Orb Gang, is that she is peddling diabolical heresy.
And one of the problems with just making jokes about Marianne all the time, and even acknowledging some of the interesting intuitions that she has about politics, is...
People lose sight of the seductive and false and misery-inducing spirituality that she is embracing.
So we talk about this for all the other candidates.
We say their policies induce misery.
Socialism makes misery.
It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in China, it happened in Venezuela, it happened in North Korea, it happened everywhere socialism has been tried.
It breeds human misery.
Those are misery-making policies.
The thing that makes Marianne a little different is she's not even really talking about policies.
She was asked about her health care plan and she basically said, yeah, I kind of agree with everybody, the left and the right.
What she is peddling is a misery-making spirituality.
And unfortunately, it's a spirituality that became very popular in the 70s, 80s, 90s.
I think it's kind of on the wane a little bit now.
But a lot of people have gotten caught up in it.
People like Oprah have been peddling it to housewives and middle-aged women who sip wine on Tuesday afternoons for a very long time.
And it's just a bad idea.
So we should speak clearly about...
We must embrace the memes, as funny as they are, with caution.
We must proceed with caution.
So how do the other candidates do who are living on this plane of existence rather than on whatever plane Marianne Williamson's living on?
Joe Biden had the worst night of all.
I mean, he just got clobbered.
He got clobbered by the other candidates, all of whom were going after him.
We expected that.
But what's really worse...
For him, much more devastating for his campaign, he clobbered himself.
So he's still the frontrunner, everyone's going after him, and he just flailed around.
Here is the most frequent line that you heard from Joe Biden all night.
Anyway, my time's up.
Joe Biden would be making this impassioned point.
He'd be responding to some criticism.
He'd be doing an okay job, a little meandering.
And then he just ran out of steam.
And this happened at the last debate, too.
He'd go and he'd say, and I believe this, and you're lying about this, and we achieved.
Anyway, my time's up.
You've got to stick the landing, buddy.
But he just ran out of words.
He ran out of ideas.
He ran out of energy.
He couldn't finish his attacks.
He seemed very dull and unfocused.
And he kept getting attacked for the Obama legacy, which was one of the more interesting aspects of this campaign.
Pretty much everyone was attacking Barack Obama.
And this shows you the trick of leftism.
So here is John Delaney, who is a totally forgettable candidate.
You don't need to remember his name.
But here's John Delaney arguing with Bernie Sanders about their health care plans.
Well, I'm right about this.
We can create a universal healthcare system to give everyone basic healthcare for free, and I have a proposal to do it.
But we don't have to go around and be the party of subtraction and telling half the country who has private health insurance that their health insurance is illegal.
So you remember when Obamacare was going to be universal health care?
Remember that?
That was it.
Once and for all, we're going to have Obamacare.
Now they're all assailing Barack Obama.
To hear them talk about Barack Obama during this debate, I thought, gosh, we've got to find this Obama guy, get him to run as a Republican.
This Obama guy sounds like the most conservative guy I've ever heard of.
Because this is what the left does.
The march leftward never stops.
It's never enough.
So, Obamacare, that's nothing.
Now we need the real one.
This is going to be the real universal health care.
And then guess what?
In ten years?
Five years?
We're going to need another.
The real universal health care.
And they're just going to keep taking more and more and more.
Because here's the secret.
I'll let you in on the trick.
There cannot be universal health care in a free country if people can still opt out of it.
So if the government can't force you to buy a product that you don't want, then there's not going to be universal health care.
Because some people are going to say, I just don't want to pay for that.
That is what the aim is.
The end here is government control.
Most Americans like their current health care.
They don't want brand new, totally different health care.
And so the government is going to have to come in and force people.
And that's what this is all aiming towards.
So they're all going after Obama.
Joe Biden, I think, could have survived that.
He can't survive his own Delirium, or senility, or he just was really foggy and hazy and out of it.
At the end of the night, Joe Biden couldn't even tell the difference between a URL web address and a text message.
He told people to go to Joe30330, whatever that is.
If you agree with me, go to Joe30330 and help me in this fight.
Thank you very much.
He's referring to a text message.
He meant to say text Joe to the number 30330, but everyone else had been saying go to our campaign website.
So he said go to.
He didn't know the difference between a text message and a website because Joe is about 100 years old and neither very stable nor a genius.
So that wasn't even the worst part of it.
He got another number wrong in his closing statement.
He said that four more years of Donald Trump basically would be fine.
Okay, that's all we have left.
But eight more years would be a disaster.
So if Donald Trump got rid of the 22nd Amendment and ran for a third term and got a third term, that would be bad, but anything short of that would be just fine.
Four more years of Donald Trump will go down as an aberration.
Hard to overcome the damage he's done, but we can overcome it.
Eight more years of Donald Trump will change America in a fundamental way.
The America we know will no longer exist.
Shows you how smart President Trump was to label him Sleepy Joe.
We all thought it should be Creepy Joe or Lying Joe or Plagiarous Joe or whatever.
Sleepy Joe.
Sleepy Joe is the key here because he's actually losing it.
He's actually not that sharp.
So I think he's still the front runner.
He's still leading the pack.
But I think over time you're going to see those numbers slowly drop if other candidates are able to rise up.
Brings you to Julian Castro.
He's the former secretary of HUD. He has absolutely no business running for president.
He seems more like an SNL cast member.
Playing a presidential candidate than an actual presidential candidate.
He had one great moment, though, last night where he accidentally exposed another major flaw of leftism.
So he described how his grandmother had diabetes and how she was on Medicare and how her diabetes kept getting worse.
And that's why everyone needs Medicare.
I know that this is something very personal for all Americans.
You know, I grew up with a grandmother that had diabetes, and I watched as her condition got worse and worse.
That whole time, she had Medicare.
I want to strengthen Medicare for the people who are on it and then expand it to anybody who wants it.
So that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?
She had diabetes.
She was on Medicare.
Kept getting worse and worse and worse.
That's why you all need Medicare.
Not a great argument.
But this is what the left does.
There's a problem.
Then the left creates a government program.
Then the government program either doesn't help or makes things worse.
And then they say, see, this is evidence that we need more of that same government program.
I mean, he's kind of a nothing character.
When he announced that he was running for president, I happened to be on a TV show.
I said, Michael, what's your reaction?
Julian Castro announced he's running for president.
I said, I had a ham and cheese omelet for breakfast.
Both of those are equally consequential for the 2020 presidential election.
Kamala Harris came in with a lot of momentum because she shanked Joe Biden at the last debate.
Everyone was rooting for Kamala, you know, among the kind of anti-Biden crowd.
Kamala had a really tough night because Tulsi came out and clobbered her campaign.
Listen to how Tulsi does it.
You took issue with Senator Harris confronting Vice President Biden at the last debate.
You called it a, quote, false accusation that Joe Biden is a racist.
What's your response?
I want to bring the conversation back to the broken criminal justice system that is disproportionately negatively impacting black and brown people all across this country today.
Senator Harris says she's proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she'll be a prosecutor president, but I'm deeply concerned about this record.
So, I love what she does here just from a tactical standpoint.
She's asked a question.
She completely ignores it.
She then acknowledges that she's going to ignore it, and she goes in for the kill on Kamala.
This was a masterful attack.
And here's how she finishes off the attack.
There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.
She blocked evidence.
She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so.
She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California.
And she fought to keep cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.
Absolutely devastating.
Just brutal.
So the new meme that's going around is that Kamala is a cop.
Kamala Harris is a cop and it's just like little kids getting arrested and Kamala laughing and, you know, people being sent to prison and she's laughing.
This doesn't need to hurt Kamala Harris, but the way it is playing out, it currently is hurting her.
So the reason it's hurting her is because she keeps flip-flopping.
Kamala Harris, on the one hand, says that she's not going to abolish private health insurance.
Then she says she is going to abolish private health insurance.
Then she says she doesn't want reparations.
Then she does want reparations.
She's trying to have two sides of every political issue.
I think this is because she's hired a lot of Hillary Clinton's old campaign staff.
Not a great idea.
One of the worst run campaigns in history.
You probably don't want to hire her old staffers.
So she's also flip-flopped on her biography.
When she started running, she refused to acknowledge that she was a prosecutor, which is her whole career, right?
She graduated law school.
She's a prosecutor.
She then becomes the attorney general, so she's the top prosecutor.
Then she's in the Senate for five minutes, and now she's running for president.
Her whole career is as a prosecutor, and yet she wanted to run away from that because Democrats...
Hate law enforcement right now.
They don't want to run on law enforcement.
So she's just become nothing.
Then she started to embrace the prosecutor angle.
So she said, I'm going to prosecute the case against Donald Trump.
I think this is the smart play.
You can't run away from yourself.
All you have to run on is who you are.
If you're going to run on being someone else, they're going to just vote for someone else.
You've got to run on who you are.
And so if she's smart, and if her campaign is smart, she's going to start running on this prosecutor thing again, own it, and go after Tulsi Gabbard because the best defense is a good offense.
By the way, I mean, if the Harris campaign is watching, just remember, Even though the left wing of the Democratic Party is now very anti-law enforcement, cops are the third most trusted institution in the country according to a number of polls that have come out.
Trusted institutions are the military and small business.
Cops are a good play.
Democrats are running against all of this popular stuff.
They're running on reparations.
29% of Americans support it.
Two-thirds of Americans oppose it.
They're running on open borders.
Immigration enforcement is the number one chief political issue in the country, according to a Gallup poll that came out just two weeks ago.
And yet they're running on open borders.
Very unpopular.
They're running on free healthcare for illegal aliens.
Very unpopular.
They're running on all of this stupid stuff.
They're running on taking healthcare away from 150 million people.
They're running against the American flag.
Bad idea.
Very unpopular.
Why?
Why are they doing this?
The party knows this is a bad idea.
The party knows it.
That's why they opened the debate with the presentation of colors and a major star-spangled banner singing.
They just know it doesn't play well in Peoria when all these left-wing candidates are spitting on the flag.
But the candidates themselves are just wrapped up in this leftism because they have nothing real to argue about in the current political climate.
If they're just going to oppose Trump, then they have nothing real to argue about.
If they're just going to oppose Trump, the economy's going well, unemployment is very low, we have relative peace abroad, things are just going well.
And so they have to argue about these fantasies.
And this opens up the Democrats to a lot of vulnerabilities.
The Democrat fantasy breaks through.
They say that they're representing all black people.
They're representing all racial minorities.
They held that debate in Detroit, I think the single blackest city in America, just as a percentage of population.
It was the whitest audience I've ever seen.
There were no black people on the stage the first night.
Two black people on the stage the second night.
That's out of 20 candidates.
I counted like two or three black people in the whole audience.
Only Democrats could fill an audience in Detroit with basically only white people.
The only black people we saw really were the people...
Performing the national anthem on the stage.
It's just that fantasy of Democrats.
There's one really important aspect of this debate.
There's one really healthy thing going on in this debate, which we'll get to in a second, then we'll get to the mailbag.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Go to dailywire.com.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get the Matt Walsh show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag, which will be coming up.
You get everything, and you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr for when the Orb Gang and Marianne Williamson becomes the nominee.
You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr for when Tulsi Gabbard shanks Kamala Harris on stage and Joe Biden can't remember his own name.
You need the Leftist Tears Tumblr or you will drown watching the remaining 10 Democratic presidential primary debates.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
There is one really healthy thing going on in this Democratic presidential primary, which is you are seeing something that started with the Republicans in 2016 and it's continuing You're seeing the beginnings of a political realignment.
So you're seeing old orthodoxies, political orthodoxy, being smashed.
Old ideological certitudes being destroyed.
And this was obviously more apparent in the Republican primary in 2016, but you're seeing it particularly with Tulsi Gabbard in 2020.
Here is Tulsi Gabbard making an argument on trade that sounds a whole lot like Donald Trump's argument on trade, which sounds a whole lot different from the old Republican argument on trade, and hers is a whole lot different from the current Democratic argument on trade.
Here she is.
not trade deals that give away the sovereignty of the American people and our country, that give away American jobs, and that threaten our environment.
These are the three main issues with that massive trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, I think the central one was the fact that it gave away our sovereignty to a panel of international corporations whose rulings would supersede any domestic law that we would pass, either a federal law or a state or a local law.
This is extremely dangerous and goes against the very values that we have.
As a country, what to speak of the fact that it would have a negative impact on domestic jobs and that it lacked clear protections for our environment.
These are the things that we have to keep at the forefront as we look to enact fair trade deals with other countries to make sure that we continue to be a thriving part of our global economy.
This is a highly conservative argument.
I mean, look, she used the word sovereignty.
All the other candidates on stage were talking about open borders.
We don't even have a right to decide who comes into the country.
And Tulsi starts talking about sovereignty, and she's talking about it particularly on trade.
And conservatives, with a short memory, get this wrong.
We have this idea that conservatism demands total free trade.
Free trade is conservatism.
Historically speaking, that isn't true.
That's That's only been true for a few decades.
Traditionally speaking, the right is anti-free trade.
The GOP was actually founded against free trade.
It was the protectionist party.
Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, said, give me a protective tariff and I'll give you the greatest nation on earth.
Free trade became what you would call the neoliberal consensus, beginning during the Reagan era, continuing through the Bushes and through Bill Clinton, too.
This was a consensus among both parties.
Now we're dealing with some of the political consequences of that.
There were many advantages that came through that sort of global free trade, and there were some negative consequences as well.
And what we're debating now, what Tulsi Gabbard is bringing up, is a really healthy discussion, which is you'll hear some people, the real free trade at all costs, can't even possibly question it.
What they'll say is free trade works and the other one doesn't work.
Well, economics doesn't make moral arguments.
Economics is a social science.
Just as this does that.
Talks about efficiency.
But...
When we're talking about politics, we're talking about moral arguments.
Not just what the policies do, but what the policies should do.
What policies we should enact.
And what Tulsi is bringing up is basically, who cares about an efficient policy to increase, even if it does increase GDP by some percentage, if you lose your national sovereignty in the process?
Who cares about it if you lose...
Protections for some of your workers in the process.
People lose their jobs and they get addicted on opioids and they kill themselves.
Who cares about increasing GDP slightly or having more efficient markets if you lose your environment, your natural environment?
These are debates that cut across what we would call the left and the right of the last 30 or 40 years.
Now, she could be making that argument in a GOP debate.
Maybe she could, or maybe she should rather.
Trump basically did make that argument.
That's very healthy.
Now, we only left a little bit of time for the mailbag, unfortunately.
Maybe we'll try to have a few more mailbag questions tomorrow.
We've had an issue on the website, a little bit of a tech glitch, so I didn't get any mailbag questions in after, I think, July 25th.
If you sent in any mailbag questions after that, Thank you for happy 400th.
I can't believe it's been that long and Ben hasn't thrown me out the window yet.
As for the Maddow glasses, I just kept getting mistaken for that MSNBC host, and I couldn't take it anymore.
So I took the glasses off.
But I'll put a poll up on Twitter.
I want to know your opinion.
Should I embrace my inner Maddow-ness and put the glasses back on?
Or should I remain in my slightly...
More masculine, slightly more conservative aesthetic, and keep the glasses off.
I'll put the question up on Twitter after the show.
From Daniel, what are your opinions on the $2 trillion an hour minimum wage?
Well, I think it makes just about as much sense as a $15 or $20 an hour minimum wage.
You make a great point, which is that if I could ask the candidates one question, all of the Democratic candidates, I would ask them, Do you support a $30 per hour minimum wage?
Maybe I'd make it even...
You've got to find the right line.
You don't want it to seem ridiculous, but you want to get the point across.
Maybe I'd say, do you support a $40 an hour minimum wage?
And they would have to either say yes, because the logic of their current argument is if you have a minimum wage, that basically just...
Creates money to fall out of the sky.
Or they would have to, if they were sort of sane and wanted to reach sane people, they would have to explain why a $30 or $40 an hour minimum wage doesn't make any sense.
The trouble with that is, the same reasons why a $30 or $40 an hour minimum wage don't make sense apply to a $15 or $20 an hour minimum wage.
Which is, there's no such thing as a minimum wage.
The only real minimum wage is zero.
You are not entitled to a job.
Real minimum wage is zero, and when you raise the minimum wage too high, when you raise it at all, then you raise the cost of labor, you then make it more likely that someone will invest in capital, and you reduce the labor force for any particular business.
It's not like raising the minimum wage all of a sudden gives businesses 20% more money to spend on labor.
They have the same amount of money, so they can pay either more people or fewer people, or they can buy more robots to do more of the jobs that the people were doing.
That would be the question that I would ask them, and I'd be curious to hear their thoughts on that $2 trillion minimum wage.
From Charles.
In the absence of a divine power, or prior consent from the child, prior to conception, is conception not immoral?
Does this not mean that we are either immoral as a society or must accept that God gives us permission to procreate?
No, I think the problem that you're coming up against is you're elevating consent as the most important, if not the sole moral category, which is what our culture does right now.
It's what the left does.
They say everything is perfectly moral as long as you consent.
You can do whatever you want.
Do whatever you want with your body.
Do whatever you want with each other.
As long as everybody consents, then it's moral.
But that isn't true.
I can do plenty of immoral things by consent.
It's like Fifty Shades of Grey.
If a man smacks his wife around, but they consent to it, does that make it right to smack your wife around?
No.
Of course not.
It's still quite wrong.
Consent is insufficient.
And this gets to a broader problem that the libertarian right and the left have embraced, which is that they put consent at the basis of their politics.
I enter society by my free consent, otherwise I'd be living in the woods somewhere.
I engage in a social contract.
That was John Locke's idea.
But these are wrong ideas.
They don't exist.
In the state of nature, we're not living as atoms in the world, all on our own individuality.
That is just a false premise in politics.
Consent is not the key.
Duty is the key.
Responsibility is the key.
Loyalty is the key.
Affection and love are the key.
I don't own my life in the sense that I didn't create my life.
I'm not responsible for the creation of my life.
I have to thank my parents for that.
They have to thank their parents, and ultimately we have to thank our heavenly parents.
I owe something to my parents.
I owe them respect.
I owe them some loyalty.
I owe them love.
That's something I'm born into the world with.
I never consented to that obligation, but I owe it to them anyway.
When you switch your politics from a politics of consent to a politics of duty, from a politics of rights and entitlement to a politics of affection, duty, loyalty, responsibility, and respect, the world starts to make a whole lot more sense.
Take one more question.
Aaron, is it okay for Christians to visit and pray at non-Christian spiritual sites, Buddhist temples, for example?
I have visited plenty of spiritual sites of other religions.
I've visited temples in Varanasi, India, Hindu temples.
I've obviously been to different Protestant denominations and Jewish denominations, things like that.
Jewish temples, rather.
I think it's fine to visit those things as a sort of cultural or historic curiosity to expand your knowledge.
But you should not attend those worship services.
I think it's perfectly fine when you're walking past a temple in India to say a prayer to Jesus.
But I wouldn't attend those spiritual services.
I think that's probably a bad idea.
I don't think you should say, well, I'm really curious about this other...
I'm going to go and participate in that.
I think that would be sinful.
I don't think that's okay at all.
Now we're about to see the extreme of that in politics because Marianne Williamson is about to just cast orbs and crystals all over all of the culture.
And so I guess when you watch a Democratic presidential debate, in a certain sense...
You are participating in another religious service, so you've got to be careful about that.
But I think that's the difference.
If you are learning about something, if you're studying something in a scholarly or academic way, that's one thing.
If you are actually participating in it, I think there you're going to run into a little spiritual trouble.
We'll try to get to more mailbag questions today because I feel like I cheated you all by talking too long about 2020 and the Democratic debate.
So we'll get to a little bit more tomorrow if you haven't checked it out and you haven't been able to submit a question.
Go do it on Twitter.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow for a rare Friday show.
See you then.
Anyway, my time's up.
Anyway, my time's up.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
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Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Danny D'Amico.
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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.
Well, the second round of the second Democrat debate is over, and our choice is clear.
Are we going to stick with mean, mean Mr.
Donald Trump, who has restored the economy, kept the peace, and restored the Constitution, too?
Or are we going to go with a nice, compassionate, good-hearted Democrat who will destroy everything?
We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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