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Aug. 13, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

47:19

Ep. 397 - CNN’s Credibility Sleeps With The Fishes

Chris "Fredo" Cuomo flies off the handle, more bizarre details emerge about Jeffrey Epstein, and the culture wars heat up as 2020 Democrats spread flagrant lies on sensitive racial issues. Date: 08-13-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	A hilarious right-wing troll calls Chris Cuomo Fredo to his face.
	Fredo flies off the handle, and then both Cuomo and CNN try to play the race card to excuse him, insisting that Fredo is a slur for Italians.
	As the only paisano of Italian-American descent over here at the Daily Wire, I will explain the difference between words that make fun of Italians and words that make fun of strontzi like Chris Cuomo.
	Then, more bizarre details emerge about Jeffrey Epstein's obvious murder at the hands of Hillary.
	I mean, suicide!
	Suicide.
	Then, the culture wars heat up as 2020 Democrats spread flagrant lies on sensitive racial issues.
	All that and more.
	For more, I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
	Yeah, that's the ticket.
	That's the ticket.
	This is the absolute greatest video that has come out in at least two weeks.
	It is the funniest thing on the internet.
	Chris Cuomo of CNN being confronted by this right-wing troll.
	We'll explain what happened, what it means, why Cuomo's defense is bogus, and also maybe why we shouldn't encourage these kind of things, but we can laugh when they happen.
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	NetSuite.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. I was going to go get a lot of work done last night when I got home.
	I had a ton of things on the schedule to do.
	I wanted to prepare the show.
	And then this video went viral on the internet.
	CNN's Chris Cuomo screaming at a Trump supporter because the Trump supporter called him Fredo, which refers to the godfather.
	It refers to the stupid brother in the godfather, Fredo.
	Chris flies off the handle, and then I was just sucked down a vortex of memes for the rest of the night.
	Here is the beginning for Thank goodness it was filmed by this same trollish guy who was provoking Cuomo.
	Thank goodness it was filmed.
	Here is Cuomo reacting to being called Fredo.
	I thought that's who you were.
	No, Parker's bitch from the right called me Fredo.
	My name is Chris Cuomo.
	I'm an anchor on CNN. Fredo was from the Die Father.
	He was our weak brother.
	Isn't that your brother?
	And they used it as an Italian dispersion.
	Any of you Italian?
	Are you Italian?
	It's a f***ing insult to your people.
	It's an insult to your f***ing people.
	It's like the N-word for us.
	Is that a cool f***ing thing?
	You're a much more reasonable guy in person than you seem to be on television.
	That's the line.
	I mean, this guy's obviously a pro.
	Just, oh, you seem to be much more reasonable in person than you do on television.
	Chris Cuomo's claim that he's reacting to is that the word Fredo, referring to the brother, the stupid brother and the godfather, is like the N-word for Italians.
	No, it's not.
	It just objectively is not, I don't think it's ever been referred to that way.
	I am an Italian-American.
	I grew up in the Italian-American culture here in New York, right where Fredo Cuomo is from.
	Actually, one time when I was a waiter at a restaurant in high school, I was the waiter for Fredo's brother, Andrew Cuomo.
	Andrew Cuomo lived in my town, went to my grandmother's church.
	I'm from exactly the same place as the Cuomo family, from exactly the same ethnic background.
	Fredo is not the N-word for Italians.
	It is specifically an insult that is used to make fun of Chris Cuomo.
	And more broadly, it's an insult that's used to make fun of the weak or stupid brother or son in a prominent family.
	This is an insult.
	It is an insult for stupid people, not for Italians.
	It also can't be the N-word for Italians because Italians have a lot of swear words, curse words, racial epithets for themselves and for others.
	And so specifically, the N-word in the Italian-American community is actually the M-word.
	It refers to a word that comes from Italian and from Sicilian.
	I'm not going to say the word, but it's a word for black people and it means eggplant, I guess, because eggplants have kind of dark...
	I'm not even going to get into it.
	So it actually would be the M word.
	It would be the direct parallel for the N word.
	And if we're talking about a racial epithet for Italians, there are a lot of them.
	They begin with the letter G.
	They begin with the letter W.
	Actually, a lot of them begin with the letter G.
	There are a lot of terms that you can, they begin with the letter D.
	The one letter they don't begin with is the letter F because Fredo is not a racial epithet for Italians.
	That is weak sauce.
	But I'm not surprised that Cuomo jumped to that because the left and CNN always jump to play the race card whenever they can, even when it's absurd.
	And it's virtually always absurd when they do it.
	And it's certainly absurd in this case.
	What he is referring to, for those of you who haven't seen the greatest movie ever made and the second greatest movie ever made, Godfather Part 1 and then Godfather Part 2.
	Here is the irony of it all, is that someone calls Chris Cuomo Fredo, and then Chris Cuomo gets angry about this, and his reaction is immediately to behave exactly like Fredo Corleone.
	Here he is from the movie.
	I'm your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over!
	That's the reason.
	It ain't the way I wanted it!
	I can handle things!
	I'm smart!
	Not like everybody says!
	Like, dumb!
	I'm smart!
	And I want respect!
	You called me Fredo, but I'm not Fredo!
	I'm smart!
	I got passed over for governor of New York, like my father Mario and my brother Andrew.
	But I'm smart!
	I can do things!
	I can handle things!
	I'm not dumb, like people think!
	That was almost word for word, his response to this.
	Absolutely hilarious.
	So then he doubled down.
	So he said, this is a racial slur, because that's just what the left does.
	They play the race card the minute they feel threatened, or they feel insulted, or they feel like they can't answer you.
	CNN, though, the vice president and spokesman for CNN, Matt Dornick, doubled down on this as well.
	He wrote, quote, Chris Cuomo defended himself when he was verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur in an orchestrated setup.
	We completely support him.
	That first sentence is almost entirely false.
	There are three things there he said that just are ridiculous.
	Verbally attacked, ethnic slur, and orchestrated setup.
	He wasn't verbally attacked.
	Some guy called him Fredo.
	It's like a little passing insult.
	It's not an attack.
	We're not equating speech with violence here.
	He didn't go assault him.
	Chris Cuomo assaulted him.
	I mean, he literally threatened to do him physical violence, which we'll see in a second.
	But the guy didn't verbally attack him.
	He made fun of him.
	He said, hey, Fredo.
	Hey, look at you, Fredo.
	Then ethnic slur.
	It's not an ethnic slur.
	We showed that.
	And then orchestrated setup.
	No, it's not an orchestrated setup.
	They were at a restaurant.
	Here's what really happened.
	A dude at a restaurant saw Chris Cuomo and made fun of him.
	That's it.
	That's all it was.
	Not an ethnic slur, not orchestrated, a setup, not verbally attacked.
	Here's how, by the way.
	You don't need to just take my word for it, even though I do have some expertise on this coming from New York, as someone of swarthy complexion, whose ancestors almost certainly paddled a sardine boat over from Palermo.
	You don't need to just take my expertise, because I have proof that CNN does not really think that Fredo is an ethnic slur, and that's because CNN contributors and guests have repeatedly used the term Fredo to make fun of Republicans.
	Not even Italian Americans, just Republicans.
	Here's fake Republican Anna Navarro using the term Fredo on Chris Cuomo's show to make fun of Donald Trump Jr.
	Daddy kept Fredo back home, so who cares what Donald Trump Jr.
	says?
	Who cares what Donald Trump Jr.
	says?
	I don't want to talk about that entitled little brat.
	Is that a racial slur?
	Is it a racial slur against what?
	The Scottish?
	The Trumps are Scottish, right?
	I guess Fredo's an ethnic slur against the Italians and the Scots.
	You know, I'm a little bit Scottish, too.
	I tell you, it's also not an ethnic slur against the Scots.
	Is it an offensive term toward Don Jr.?
	Yeah, well, they're basically calling Don stupid.
	Don, by the way, Don Jr.
	is in no way the Fredo of the Trump family, but that's neither here nor there.
	Probably just one time, though, right?
	Well, that's just one example, Michael.
	You're picking out that.
	Well, you're fortunate.
	How convenient.
	One cherry-picked example, right?
	Nope.
	Here is Rick Wilson, another fake Republican, also using the term on CNN. It's absolutely part of this, all the forces of society are arrayed against us.
	It's just us and Donald Trump against the world.
	And look, Devin Nunes is proving himself again and again to be the Fredo of the Republican Party.
	Oh, gosh, an ethnic slur.
	Oh, my goodness.
	Is this the end of the world?
	I don't know.
	Ryan Lizza and Anderson Cooper, who were on that show, don't seem to be reacting too strongly against it.
	Any other examples?
	Yes, the Boston Globe ran a whole article titled, quote, Is Don Jr.
	Our Heir's Fredo Corleone?
	George Takei, who played the character on Star Trek a million years ago, he retweeted it saying, quote, We should stop calling Junior Don.
	We should start calling him Fredo.
	But actually...
	You can even put all of those aside because my evidence that it's not an ethnic slur that CNN or Chris Cuomo even takes seriously is that Chris Cuomo himself referred to himself as Fredo.
	We'll get to that in a second, then we'll get to what this means.
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	My final bit of evidence.
	That neither Chris Cuomo nor CNN actually believes Fredo is an ethnic slur is that Fredo, I'm sorry, Chris, used it to refer to himself on a New York radio show hosted by Curtis Sliwa.
	Here he is.
	There's a group of people, of politicos, who always hint that they might run but don't necessarily plunge all the way, and they are members of La Cuomo Nostra.
	So who am I then, Fredo?
	Yes!
	Exactly!
	So you better be careful that your brother Andrew doesn't kiss you on both cheeks and then all of a sudden they take you out into the middle of the lake and then, where's Chris?
	All right.
	I've been at political events with Curtis Sliwa, a classic New York character.
	And this is just a term.
	It's a term that people used to refer to dumb people.
	And there, in a moment where Chris Cuomo wasn't being sanctimonious and beating his own chest, where he was actually being a little self-effacing, he referred to himself as Fredo Cuomo because he is the Fredo of the Cuomo family.
	There's no doubt about it.
	I used to defend him.
	He's actually my favorite Cuomo.
	I'll explain why in a second.
	But now I can't because he actually just behaved like Fredo would behave.
	I'm smart.
	I can handle things.
	Now, in defense of Cuomo, I will say, I think it's perfectly fine to defend your own honor, especially if you're out there, you're at a restaurant or a beer garden or whatever that is, and you're there maybe with your family, maybe with some friends, and some jerk calls you an idiot.
	I think it's perfectly fine to defend your honor.
	I'm not one of these wallflowers, you know, or these people who will say, oh, never mind.
	No, it's okay.
	I can never talk back or never fight back.
	No, that's crazy.
	Obviously, Cuomo here had escalated it.
	But look, if that happened to me, maybe I would have talked back to the guy.
	Hopefully I would have had better lines than Fredo Cuomo did.
	Because Fredo escalates.
	Here's Fredo escalating the fight.
	If you want to play, then we'll play.
	If you've got something you want to say about what I do on television, then say it, but don't be going to call me a s***.
	And hey, listen, I don't want any problems, bro.
	You're going to have a big s*** problem.
	What's the problem?
	It's a little different on TV. Don't s*** insult me like that.
	I didn't insult you.
	You call me Fredo.
	It's like, I call you punk s***.
	You like that?
	You want to be your nickname?
	I didn't call you that.
	You called me Fredo.
	You know my name's not f***ing Fredo.
	I thought your name was.
	You did not think my name was f***ing Fredo.
	Don't be a liar.
	If you want to be a man, stand up like a man.
	I'm standing up, man.
	If you want to be a man, I'm here.
	Get on what you said.
	Get on what you said.
	I don't have a problem with you, man.
	You're going to have a problem.
	What?
	What are you going to do about it?
	I'll ruin you.
	I'll throw you down these stairs like a punk.
	Please do.
	Why?
	So you can sue?
	So you can sue?
	Well, why don't you do it?
	Go take a swing.
	You want to call me Fredo?
	Take a swing.
	Take a swing.
	Watch your hands.
	Watch your hands.
	Take a swing.
	Come on, boy.
	Come on, boy.
	- Hey, you wanna call me?
	Call me .
	- Hey, listen, man.
	I'm not doing anything.
	- I'll wreck your . - Stop.
	- I'll wreck your . - Stop.
	- You didn't know what you were doing when you called me Fredo? - I thought it was your name.
	- Break it up now. - I thought it was your name.
	- You didn't know, right?
	- Hey, you didn't know what you were saying, right? - I thought it was his name. - You said Bernie.
	I'm breaking it up.
	This is my body.
	Absolutely hilarious.
	So, obviously, Fredo's the one who escalates it here, and he doesn't even use good language.
	He says, you called me...
	You can barely hear it, because you have to bleep out every word, but you called me effing Fredo?
	I'll call you punk...
	Female dog, I'll call you this.
	I'll throw you down that effing flight of stairs.
	All right, that's an actual elevation that it just doesn't, unless you're going to back it up, it doesn't look good to threaten something like that and then not do it.
	And he's obviously not going to do it.
	So if this happened to me, I might talk back, but hopefully I would have some better lines.
	As a matter of prudence, it's probably better to walk away and he says, hey, you're Fredo.
	I'd be like, hey, all right.
	F you!
	See you later!
	Bye-bye!
	When people would yell at Scalia, sometimes he would just flick the underside of his chin, which people mistakenly, people just don't understand anything about the Italian-American culture.
	Because the Washington Post, I believe it was, reported that the flick underneath your chin means F you.
	It doesn't.
	It means, I don't care.
	I don't care what you say.
	Maybe that's what I would have done.
	If I had been prudent, and if Chris Cuomo had been prudent, that's what you could do.
	My guess, he was out at a restaurant or a beer garden.
	Maybe he had a couple adult beverages, a couple Coca-Colas.
	He was feeling a little bit in his cups, and he let his temper run away with him.
	This is not the end of the world.
	And it shouldn't be encouraged.
	Look, I don't like getting harassed in public by some jerk lefty, and he probably doesn't want to get harassed in public by a hilarious right-winger.
	So, okay, I don't think people need to be harassing media figures.
	Also, though, you do have to be prepared for these sort of things to happen because of another important piece of advice in The Godfather Part II. This, from the Jewish gangster Hyman Roth, this is the business we've chosen.
	I let it go.
	And I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen.
	This is the business we've chosen, alright?
	If you're in...
	The public space, if you put yourself out there in the public, if you go in the media, then you're going to get public criticism.
	That's just the way it is.
	It's not good.
	We should discourage it.
	You don't want to get accosted while you're out with your family.
	But that is the sort of thing that you can get accosted for.
	And specifically, the reason why Chris Cuomo is a real hypocrite on this is that Chris Cuomo himself on CNN once attacked a 16-year-old kid for smirking while a maniac accosted him.
	He said he shouldn't have even done that.
	Here's Cuomo.
	The face-to-face encounter.
	The man, Nathan Phillips, apparently wanted to defuse the tension, and he walked up to do exactly that.
	And surely the kid, Nick Sandman, he doesn't seem to be afraid, but he did make a choice, and that was to make it into a standoff.
	That was not a good choice.
	Was it legal?
	Sure.
	That's not my test.
	And it shouldn't be the test.
	Here's mine.
	If that were my son, who happens to go to a great Catholic school, would I like what he did?
	If I were there, would I have allowed the kids to be in that situation?
	No and no.
	There was a disrespected play that doesn't work for me in these circumstances.
	Yeah, definitely, Fredo.
	Okay, that makes sense.
	So you've got a 16-year-old kid who is doing nothing wrong other than waiting for his school bus on the Washington Mall.
	He's being screamed at by black supremacists called the Hebrew Israelites, calling them all sorts of awful names.
	Then there's a leftist lunatic activist, a guy named Nathan Phillips, who marches up to the 16-year-old kid, starts banging a drum in his face, and this kid exhibits saintly patience.
	Saintly restraint and saintly prudence.
	And Chris Cuomo attacks him for it because the kid didn't, I don't know, what, shine the guy's shoes or something?
	In the meanwhile, some guy makes an offhand comment to Chris Cuomo at a beer garden or a restaurant or wherever they were.
	And Cuomo loses his mind, threatens to throw him down a flight of stairs, and unleashes a stream of expletives.
	Maybe Chris Cuomo should call up that 16-year-old kid, Nick Sandman, asking for advice on how to handle public criticism, on how to handle public confrontations.
	Absolutely ridiculous.
	I do, however, have, just before we leave this Fredo Cuomo story, get to more important things, I do have a very unpopular opinion.
	Chris Cuomo is my favorite Cuomo.
	He actually is.
	He is so much better than his brother and father.
	I'm obviously damning with faint praise here because his brother and father are two of the worst political figures in American history.
	His brother legalized the killing of babies up until the point of birth in New York State, removed penal protections such that if you murder a woman who's pregnant, no longer will that be counted as a double murder.
	That's only a single murder, even if she's about to give birth.
	He lit up Freedom Tower in pink on the day that he legalized infanticide in New York.
	His father, also Mario Cuomo, was almost worse.
	Mario Cuomo is the guy who constructed the main political argument for supporting abortion, which is that Mario and Andrew, and I guess Chris, are nominally Catholic.
	They don't really seem to be Catholic because they support murdering babies as they're being born.
	But what Mario did was he wanted to give cover to Geraldine Ferraro, who was running as the first Catholic woman pro-abortion vice presidential candidate.
	And so he gave her cover by saying, I am personally opposed to abortion, but I think it should be totally legal.
	I would never impose my personal views on the public.
	What are you talking about?
	You impose your personal views on taxes, on health care, on our forms of government, on the judiciary.
	You impose your personal views everywhere in politics.
	That's what politics is in a representative democracy, is you are elected and then you use your judgment and your views to...
	To govern the country.
	And when you're voting, you use your personal views to elect people, to represent you in the government.
	It's a total BS. Also, if you think that abortion is tantamount to murder, which is the position of the Catholic Church and it's ostensibly the position you're supposed to hold...
	Then, in what universe can you say, look, I think murder is wrong personally, but I don't think we should have any laws against murder.
	I can't impose my personal views against murder on the public.
	What nonsense is that?
	And yet, this became the main argument for abortion supporters to give them cover.
	So, Andrew and Mario are absolute degenerates.
	I mean, absolutely horrible people.
	By comparison, Fredo ain't looking too bad.
	He lost his temper there, but I'll take him any day over that awful brother and his awful father.
	Speaking of terrible people, we've got to get to the latest on Jeffrey Epstein.
	CBS News is now reporting, quote, There was shrieking heard from Jeffrey Epstein's jail cell the morning he died.
	And you know, when you kill yourself, you're usually shrieking, right?
	Probably shrieking somebody to the effect of, Oh no, Hillary, please don't!
	That's the sound you make when you commit suicide.
	No, I'm only kidding.
	So the first line of the piece says, quote, On the morning of Jeffrey Epstein's death, there was shouting and shrieking from his jail cell, a source familiar with the situation told CBS News.
	That doesn't sound great.
	Second line is, quote, Corrections officers attempted to revive him while saying, quote, Breathe, Epstein, breathe.
	So it's not a well-written story because you don't know if the shouting was from Epstein or if it was from the guards or the people who discovered his body.
	Another inmate talking to another outlet said that he heard nothing when Epstein killed himself.
	It was a perfectly silent act.
	Now there's a raid on the private island.
	That Epstein owned.
	The New York Post is reporting that Jeffrey Epstein used a bedsheet to hang himself and that he was unattended for hours.
	Again, more lurid details are going to come out.
	We still don't have that autopsy.
	It's all very suspicious.
	Even more suspicious is a New York Times reporter, James B. Stewart, sat down with Epstein a year ago.
	And we didn't get this at the time because the interview is on background.
	So Epstein said, yeah, I'll talk to you, but it's going to be on background so you can't use my name.
	What the reporter said is now that Epstein is dead, he thinks that that is no longer binding, and I think that's a fair principle.
	So, here is what...
	The guy learned, the New York Times reporter.
	He said he walked into Epstein's giant mansion and there was a young girl in her late teens or maybe 20 who opened the door.
	She looked like she was from Eastern Europe.
	He thought, wow, this guy is so flagrantly just showing off his and flaunting his preference for underage girls.
	He then said Epstein showed him a photo of Mohammed bin Salman.
	Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
	He said that Mohammed bin Salman had visited Epstein many times and that they spoke frequently.
	Now, with all of his claims, you never know if Epstein is BSing or if it's true.
	Because he's obviously a con man, but on the other hand, he's hung around with a lot of powerful people.
	Some of the most powerful people in the world, including two U.S. presidents.
	We also know that Epstein was issued a Saudi passport, so he's clearly got some relationship with Saudi Arabia.
	And if he's a big sex trafficker, that wouldn't be very surprising.
	Then Epstein showed the reporter photos with Bill Clinton and Woody Allen, two of the best known sexual degenerates in America.
	He then implied that he was advising Elon Musk and Tesla.
	He then waxed philosophic about how awful it was to criminalize sex with teenage girls.
	For most of history, this was perfectly acceptable.
	So he was speaking like a guy who genuinely has the sexual preference for young girls.
	And he was saying it's beautiful, it's a wonderful thing, how awful.
	He compared it to homosexuality, said that was long considered a crime, but now it's no longer considered a crime.
	He told this reporter that he had seen a lot of prominent tech figures doing drugs and arranging for sex at the time.
	Epstein apparently never drank or did any drugs.
	Just underage girls.
	The reporter then got a call from Epstein a week later asking if he wanted to have dinner with Woody Allen and Epstein.
	He then got a call a week after that asking if he wanted to have dinner with Michael Wolff, the author of that trash book about the Trump administration, and Steve Bannon, former Breitbart head and former strategist for Trump.
	Did these dinners happen?
	We don't know.
	Were these guys in Epstein's orbit?
	Maybe.
	I don't know.
	Some of them obviously were, but maybe not all of them.
	Epstein then asked the reporter to write a biography of Epstein.
	And the reporter said he thought that Epstein just wanted companionship.
	He just wanted someone to talk to.
	The reporter turned it down, so now we don't have the details from that biography.
	Probably would have been pretty interesting.
	The portrait that's being painted here in this New York Times piece is one of a hustler and a con man.
	So maybe not this international man of mystery more than just a really, really successful common hustler.
	Maybe that's the image being painted.
	Again, we don't know.
	All you can take are these little pictures.
	I mean, these guys do exist.
	Real, hardcore hustlers do exist, especially in New York.
	I've met a few of them.
	But here's the key.
	Here's the key from the reporter.
	The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation...
	Was that Mr.
	Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous, and powerful people and had photos to prove it.
	He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.
	Vanity Fair doubled down on this.
	They got bombshell information about the private sex island from Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's partner in crime.
	We'll get to that in one second, plus a few more stories that we just can't miss today.
	But first, I have got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
	And by the way, you're almost out of time to purchase tickets to our backstage live show.
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	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	So we got this bombshell out of Vanity Fair.
	I mean, it's hard to call it a bombshell.
	Every story in the Epstein saga seems to be a bombshell, but they do keep coming out.
	And this is from Vanity Fair, specifically about Ghislaine Maxwell, who was that British socialite whose father was a zillionaire who had connections to the KGB and possibly Mossad, to foreign intelligence agencies.
	He was kind of an international man of mystery, died under strange circumstances.
	Ghislaine Maxwell was hanging around Epstein all the time, and this is from the article.
	Quote, on the weekends in the 1990s, Maxwell would have her rollerblades FedExed to Epstein's island in the Caribbean and said she got her helicopter's license so she could transport anyone she liked without pilots knowing who they were.
	Maxwell also said the island had been completely wired for video.
	The friend thought that she and Epstein were videotaping everyone on the island as an insurance policy, as blackmail.
	Sounds about right.
	I mean, the helicopter thing is really big.
	We read before that Maxwell was flying people on helicopter.
	The reason to fly people on helicopter over there is then you don't need to hire the pilots for the private jet.
	So, for instance, if somebody like a Bill Clinton or a prime minister of somewhere or a very important figure wants to get to that island without having to really disclose it, without really being noticed, if you keep it that close, where it's not even a staffer, but it's one of the business partners for Epstein, romantic partner for Epstein, Coming up in the one flying them over, that raises serious questions.
	I mean, that's very, very convenient.
	Plus the idea that everything was wired.
	So you had cameras, you had photos.
	Apparently when SDNY raided the mansion, the largest private residence in Manhattan owned by Epstein, that they found compromising material on different people.
	So it does seem like there was a big blackmail scheme going on here.
	The question is, was it a state-backed conspiracy or was Maxwell just a kook?
	This is what Vanity Fair says, quote, a source close to Maxwell says she spoke glibly and confidently about getting girls to sexually service Epstein, saying this was simply what he wanted and describing the way she'd drive around to spas and trailer parks in Florida to recruit them.
	She would claim she had a phone job for them and, quote, you'll make lots of money, meet everyone, and I'll change your life.
	So, who knows?
	Who knows?
	I mean, she obviously had this personal relationship.
	There's apparently this weird sex temple.
	It looks like an Egyptian sort of temple on the private island.
	I mean, there is some weird kooky stuff going on here.
	We don't know if it's State-backed.
	We don't know if it's backed by some international organized crime cabal.
	We don't know if it's just a supervillain and his creepy girlfriend.
	What we do know is we need to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell.
	Her whereabouts are apparently unknown right now.
	I wouldn't be surprised if she were in hiding.
	But obviously she's one of the only people, if not the only person, who can provide information on what was going on.
	And so I assume the authorities are looking for her.
	but she's the only way that this story isn't going to completely die with Jeffrey Epstein, though it may already be too late.
	Speaking of too late, it might be too late for our culture, as a matter of fact, here in the West, because there is a story coming out that went viral.
	You've heard of these drag queen reading hours for little children at libraries.
	Why this is happening?
	There's no good reason why this is happening.
	I mean, the real reason that it's happening is so that the cultural left can indoctrinate and inculcate these bizarre ideas in children at a very young age.
	But there was no good reason for this to happen Why would you have grown men who think that they're women or who dress up like women or who sexualize themselves sitting around with small children reading them stories?
	Well, at a UK library, a drag queen recently taught kids how to twerk a scene on a viral video that was then promoted by the library.
	Would you like to do some of those funny little dances from Fortnite?
	Does anybody know any of the dances from Fortnite?
	Oh, then you are a credit to your community.
	But most of all, Michael likes to twerk.
	Now, does anybody in this room know how to twerk?
	Alright, well it's quite important to the story, so I will just give you a very quick demonstration.
	All you need to do is you just stand with your feet sort of shoulder-width apart, like so, okay?
	And I'll show you at the side, so you can get a better view that way.
	And you're crouched down into this sort of position here, so your bum's sticking out.
	I hope you're taking this all in.
	And then you just move your bum up and down like that, and that's twerking.
	If you are only listening to that and you haven't seen that yet, you are blessed.
	You are so fortunate.
	It would that I could be you, but I did see it.
	And twerking, for those who don't know, is when you basically just simulate the sexual movements.
	I mean, a lot of modern dancing, quote-unquote, is that, but twerking is kind of the logical extreme of it, where you're just kind of shifting your hips back and forth and thrusting your pelvis and putting your derriere out in the air.
	That's what this...
	Dude in a dress was doing in front of toddlers.
	Pulls up his skirt a little bit and then starts shaking his derriere.
	And the library bragged about this on social media.
	There is no excuse for this.
	There is no justification for this.
	Not in the name of open-mindedness.
	Not in the name of tolerance or inclusion or culture or liberalism or diversity or anything.
	This is...
	The extreme of sexualizing material for little tiny children.
	And before you have the knee-jerk reaction, some on the left have this knee-jerk reaction of, oh, you're transphobic or homophobic or phobic-phobic or whatever nonsense words they invent, ask yourself, what is the purpose of this?
	What is accomplished by this?
	What is accomplished?
	It desensitizes kids to bizarre sexual proclivities.
	It desensitizes kids to sexualized material.
	Maybe it makes hyper-sexualized or uncommonly sexualized people feel more in the mainstream of society, but why are we trying to mainstream bizarre sexual activities and delusions?
	And certainly, I mean, if you had just a regular old straight white male, a guy wearing, I don't know, an Oxford shirt and a pair of chinos, walk into that library and say, hey guys, my name's Keith.
	I'm a regular middle-aged white guy, and I'm going to read you a book today.
	But before I do that, I'm going to thrust my pelvis in the air repeatedly and then stick out my derriere and make sure that all you little kids can see it.
	The guy would be arrested in two seconds.
	But because...
	This guy, I don't even know his name, the drag queen, can claim a victim status because the people who are putting him up to this can claim a victim status.
	They can get away with anything.
	This is why victimhood is such a valuable currency.
	And whenever someone is claiming victimhood, You should immediately be skeptical of what they're talking about because they are using that as a protective shield to get away with things that regular old people wouldn't get away with.
	It's happening in the UK and it's happening throughout the United States.
	That video happens to be from the United Kingdom but We've seen similar incidents here, and it's only getting worse.
	And the key to it is the victim culture.
	The more you allow victim culture to exist, the more you try to co-opt victim culture even, you're playing a losing game.
	It's a Faustian bargain that is going to lose you all of your cultural premises.
	Speaking of the culture wars, Washington Post is furious at Trump.
	They say, quote,"...from race to plastic straws, Trump dials up the culture wars for 2020 votes." See, Trump is engaging in the culture wars, and that's bad.
	The left, they don't engage in the culture wars, right?
	The left is the culture war.
	They are the storm.
	They are the culture war.
	Trump is simply fighting back against the culture wars.
	He's engaging in them, yeah.
	But is he dialing them up?
	No, he's simply responding to them.
	Here's how I can prove it to you.
	We had straws.
	We had plastic straws in this country, and it was fine.
	Everything was totally fine, and it didn't bother anybody.
	Then one day, a nine-year-old child in Canada did a study for a class report, and he came up with this ridiculous number that said that we're using a zillion, gazillion, or however many straws per day, and this is destroying the planet.
	And because of that, and because of leftist activism, we had to get rid of all of our plastic straws, and now we use that mushy pulp that won't let us drink our drinks.
	That was the aggression in the culture war.
	It serves no purpose.
	It won't save the environment.
	It won't do anything to the natural environment.
	It just makes our life less convenient.
	It just makes it harder to drink a milkshake.
	That was a massive aggression in the culture war, taking away straws from hundreds of millions of people.
	But then you see, when we point out, we fight back, we say, actually, I think we should keep our straws.
	They say, you're aggressing, you're fighting the culture war.
	No, I'm not.
	I just think it was fine, and then you invented a problem out of nothing, and then you took away my plastic straws, which makes my drinking habits much more inconvenient.
	They say, yeah, you're dialing up the culture wars.
	No, of course we're not.
	All of this.
	They say, you conservatives are so obsessed with sex.
	What are you talking about?
	We're not the ones dragging drag queens into public libraries to twerk for three-year-olds.
	We're not the ones radically redefining the central human institution, marriage, which has had the same definition, more or less, or at least a similar definition, for all of human history everywhere in the world.
	You're the ones doing that.
	And then when we say, hmm, maybe that's not the best idea, maybe we should be a little cautious about this, you accuse us of being the aggressors in the culture war.
	We're not.
	And it's this lie.
	The people who say, Trump should shut up.
	Trump should stop tweeting.
	He should stop talking about football or straws or Bette Midler, that washed up psycho singer.
	He should stop talking about that.
	You just don't get it.
	We tried just talking about tax rates.
	We tried it.
	We had Mitt Romney and he lost.
	We had Paul Ryan, who I really like.
	He wasn't successful.
	John McCain just tried to talk about, you know, taxes and not social issues.
	He lost.
	That's a losing strategy.
	No one cares about bean counting.
	No one cares.
	No one wakes up in a cold sweat and says, oh, we need to reduce the marginal tax rate on that upper quintile of income earners.
	No, no one cares.
	It's all the culture.
	And the left knows this.
	That's why the left has been running through our cultural institutions for 50 years.
	And the minute conservatives fight back, all of a sudden this is a big issue.
	The Washington Post wants to make it a big issue because they know how potent it is.
	They know that the only way that we're going to win is by fighting back on the culture.
	Two examples.
	You have two presidential candidates sitting U.S. senators lying through their teeth demonstrably.
	About a racially divisive incident that occurred years ago in the killing of Michael Brown.
	He was a black young man who was killed by a cop.
	Here's what Kamala Harris said, quote, Michael Brown's murder forever changed Ferguson in America.
	His tragic death sparked a desperately needed conversation and a nationwide movement.
	We must fight for stronger accountability and racial equity in our justice system.
	He wasn't murdered.
	Elizabeth Warren.
	Five years ago, Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
	Michael was unarmed, yet he was shot six times.
	I stand with activists and organizers who continue to fight for justice for Michael.
	We must confront systemic racism and police violence head-on.
	This is complete fiction.
	This is a completely made-up narrative.
	This is the narrative you heard of Hands Up, Don't Shoot that all the congressmen did.
	This is the narrative that he was hit from behind, Michael Brown.
	He was running away and he was hit from behind.
	None of that happened.
	How do I know none of that happened?
	Well, don't take my word for it.
	Vox.com and The Washington Post both admit this was a total lie from Warren and from Kamala Harris and broadly from the left.
	WAPO, to their credit, gave it four Pinocchios.
	Michael Brown, young man, robbed a store, then comes out.
	A cop pulls up on him.
	Michael Brown reaches into the cop car, grabs the cop's gun.
	So he wasn't unarmed.
	He was grabbing the cop's gun.
	Then, according to multiple witnesses of different races, a young biracial man, an older black man, other witnesses as well, according to multiple autopsies, he was not shot from behind.
	And he was grabbing the gun inside the cop car.
	Total lies.
	Totally racially divisive.
	Talk about cultural issues.
	That is being pushed by the left.
	Peddling lies.
	And yet Donald Trump stands up for some common sense.
	Some at least grasping toward the truth.
	And all of a sudden we're told it's the worst thing in the world.
	And conservatives need to sit down and shut up.
	You're dividing the country.
	You're racist.
	You're white supremacist.
	Look at this trash from these people.
	I mean they should be so ashamed of themselves.
	For spreading this racial bigotry, these horrible racial lies, Liz Warren and Kamala Harris.
	Next time a left winger calls you a racist, flick your fingers under your chin.
	Who cares?
	They have no credibility on this.
	It's despicable.
	You owe them no answer, no explanation.
	They are so guilty of racial division, racial hatred and bigotry.
	Who cares what they think?
	Before we go, I have to talk about maybe the most important story of the day.
	At the Pan American Games, a fencer and a hammer thrower protested the United States.
	The fencer, Reis Imboden, of course that guy's a fencer.
	A guy named Race Imboden.
	Can you imagine what prep school he went to?
	Can you imagine how much sherry he drank in the evening when he was growing up?
	Race Imboden, a fencer, took a knee at the Pan-American Games to protest President Trump and America.
	I guess he was really pieced off and couldn't just saber the moment.
	And certainly wasn't sitting on the fence about his politics.
	Those are all of the fencing puns that I know, so thank you for indulging me in that.
	What an idiot, though.
	What a total jerk.
	Another guy, this guy, Gwen Berry, also.
	He's a hammer thrower.
	He also protested America at the Pan American Games, which is something I had never heard of until this political dust-up.
	And here is what Reis Imboden, the fencer, said.
	He tweeted it out.
	He tweeted out his picture of his kneeling.
	He said, quote, We must call for change.
	This week I'm honored to represent Team USA at the Pan Am Games, taking home gold and bronze.
	My pride, however, has been cut short by the multiple shortcomings of the country I hold so dear to my heart.
	Racism, gun control, mistreatment of immigrants, and a president who spreads hate are at the top of a long list.
	Now, this is a little confusing because he's saying he hates gun control.
	He says racism, mistreatment of immigrants, a president who spreads hate, and gun control.
	Those are all things he hates?
	Or he likes gun control.
	Then does he like racism and the mistreatment of immigrants and a president?
	No, he's not, probably not, if I'm going to guess, the brightest bulb in the pack.
	Or the sharpest tool in the shed.
	Or the sharpest saber in the, I don't know.
	He goes on, quote, I chose to sacrifice my moment today at the top of the podium to call attention to issues that I believe need to be addressed.
	I encourage others to please use your platform for empowerment and change.
	You didn't sacrifice anything.
	Actually, you just stole a moment in public.
	You just stole 15 minutes of fame.
	Nobody would have ever heard your name.
	Unique as it is, nobody would have ever heard really about your sporting activities.
	No one would have ever heard about the Pan Am Games.
	Except that you took a moment that was supposed to honor people's athletic achievements and through those achievements their countries.
	And you stole it for yourself to make a stupid political point that undermines the entire purpose of games, sports, and certainly international athletic competitions.
	That's the only reason anyone's talking about him.
	When was the last time people were talking about fencing?
	Never.
	At least not in a hundred years.
	Sports are supposed to be about taking the ego and having it be subsumed into something bigger and greater.
	Pushing down your ego and building up a country, a sport, a team.
	That's sportsmanship.
	That's being a team player.
	You're representing the United States.
	This is especially true of international games.
	But they don't get it.
	This guy doesn't get it.
	Because he is obsessed with his own ego.
	As is Colin Kaepernick, as are all of the idiots who take a knee and protest the American flag.
	It's despicable.
	He should be immediately removed from the team.
	He should not represent the United States.
	He's chosen not to represent the United States.
	Well, first he chose to do it and then he chose to spit on the United States.
	He should not be permitted to compete in professional sports as a representative of the United States.
	And we should...
	This is the battle.
	The battle isn't over taxes.
	The battle isn't over slight changes to the bureaucracy.
	This is the battle.
	It's a battle for the heart and soul of America, and it's a battle for love of country.
	And jerks who don't love their country certainly shouldn't be the ones representing it.
	That's our show.
	Come back tomorrow.
	We got a lot more to get to.
	We'll do it then.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	See you tomorrow.
	See you tomorrow.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	If you prefer facts over feelings, if you aren't offended by the brutal truth, if you can still laugh at the nuttiness filling our national news cycle, well, tune on in to The Ben Shapiro Show, where you'll get a whole lot of that and much more.

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