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Aug. 27, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

45:26

Ep. 405 - Journalists Against Journalism

The NYT is furious that conservatives are reporting the news, but the Times's temper tantrum goes too far even for WaPo and Politico. Then, Biden’s support collapses, young people abandon traditional values, and the PC Left hates Dave Chappelle’s new special. Date: 08-27-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	The New York Times is furious that conservatives are reporting the news.
	They are demanding that the conservatives stop reporting the news.
	This is the New York Times newsroom, and there will be no journalism here.
	We examine the latest controversy and why the latest Times temper tantrum has gone too far, even for fellow left-wing outlets like the Washington Post and Politico.
	Then, Joe Biden's support collapses in a new Monmouth University poll.
	Young people are abandoning traditional values, and the PC left is furious over Dave Chappelle's excellent new comedy special.
	All that and more.
	I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
	The New York Times has officially come out against journalists.
	This is perfect.
	This is just great.
	It is a temper tantrum going through the entire newsroom of the New York Times.
	It exposes, for once and for all, the hypocrisy of the mainstream media and of the left and of specifically the New York Times, which is the iconic newspaper in this country.
	We already knew they were hypocrites, but this, they really just throw their cards on the table.
	No subtlety anymore.
	We are living in the age of Trump, and he's making them do it.
	We'll get to that in a second, but first, support for the Michael Knowles Show comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans.
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	So the New York Times officially comes out against journalism.
	They don't do this on page B7 or Z10. They do it right there on the front, A1. They are so furious at President Trump right now that they are formally objecting to journalism because here's what happens.
	The New York Times reports on conservative figures, conservative politicians, conservative media figures, sometimes on private conservatives and private citizens.
	That is apparently a good thing.
	Really good when the New York Times reports on conservatives.
	Now, there are conservatives who are reporting on leftist New York Times reporters.
	That is very bad.
	It's good when we do journalism to conservatives.
	Bad when we do journalism to leftists.
	Why is that?
	I don't know.
	Just because.
	Because the New York Times says so, so we have to believe it.
	This is the article from the New York Times.
	Begins, quote, Washington.
	A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.
	It's the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr.
	Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.
	Not that illegitimate news reporting that all those conservatives are doing, but the legitimate news reporting.
	How can you tell what's a legitimate news reporting?
	Well, it's when the New York Times does it.
	So when leftists do it, when conservatives report the news, that is illegitimate.
	Why?
	Because they're conservative and only leftists are supposed to report on the news.
	Now, what are they doing?
	What is the damaging information?
	Because when I read that, I thought, you know, it's a little tricky.
	It's a little crafty.
	What are they doing?
	They're probably digging through these reporters' trash cans, right?
	They're probably going in, calling up their ex-girlfriends and their ex-wives, ex-boyfriends.
	I don't know.
	I don't want to be discriminatory or exclusive here.
	They're probably finding sex scandals, right?
	They're probably going into their personal lives because that might be a little bit too far.
	They do it to us.
	The left does it to us all the time.
	But look, I think there should be a separation between public and private.
	Maybe that is a little bit too far.
	Except that's not what they're doing at all.
	Do you know what they're doing?
	The shadowy group allied with the White House, discrediting real journalists.
	All they're doing is reading through the journalists' tweets.
	They are just combing the journalists' public social media profiles.
	The Times goes on, quote...
	Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country's most prominent news organizations.
	So they're reading the journalists' public statements.
	And journalists, you will recall...
	For their job, for a living, make public statements.
	That's what they do.
	So what the shadowy group is doing is reading the news.
	And that is bad.
	The New York Times is furious because people are reading the news.
	Okay?
	Reading the journalists' public pages, public statements.
	Then they are posting about the journalists' public statements.
	Now, how could the New York Times...
	I mean, this is so absurd.
	I'm surprised even the New York Times could do this with a straight face.
	But how do they do it?
	How are they able to run this big story?
	It's bad that conservatives read and post about the news.
	That's more or less what the thesis of this story is.
	How can they do that with a straight face?
	Listen to the language that they use.
	The Times writes...
	Operatives have closely examined more than a decade's worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said.
	You see, it's not just people reading the news and posting about it.
	It's an operation.
	Ooh.
	Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public.
	So let's stop right there.
	That isn't true.
	It's all been made public.
	These are all public posts.
	They haven't uncovered, and it's just there.
	It is uncovered.
	In order for something to be uncovered, it has to be covered in the first place.
	But this isn't covered in the first place.
	This is journalists whose job it is to write things in public for a living, writing things in public, and then these people reading it and reposting it.
	Only a fraction of what the network claims to have been uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up.
	The research is said to extend to members of journalists' families.
	Okay, now stop right there.
	That's not good.
	I don't want...
	People's families to get dragged into this.
	You know, people have private lives.
	They have private families.
	I would really be upset if somebody started digging through my wife's stuff.
	I wouldn't do it to somebody else or someone's kids or something.
	It's just ugly.
	It's wrong.
	The journalists are the fair game.
	They're public figures.
	Public figures are totally fair game.
	But the private...
	Hold on.
	Wait a second.
	Hold on.
	We've got to finish that sentence because the sentence in the New York Times...
	It goes on, it says, the research is said to extend to members of journalists' families who are active in politics as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.
	So the work of these shadowy right-wing operatives isn't going into the family's private lives.
	It's only covering the family members who are politicians, who are public political activists, who are already fair game.
	By the way...
	The fact that these journalists' families are active in politics is a scandal in itself.
	I mean, I guess it's like, if it's a commentator or somebody, somebody who has an obvious political point of view that they own up to, you know, let's say it's Sean Hannity.
	If Sean Hannity's wife were a congressman or a governor or something, that wouldn't be a scandal because Hannity has a political point of view.
	Or if it was Ben or if it were Tucker or if it were Drew or if it were me.
	If our relatives were in politics, you wouldn't say, oh my gosh, I'm shocked to find out that this person holds a conservative point of view because we're open about our point of view.
	But for journalists who are purportedly objective reporters...
	To then we find out their whole families are in politics.
	That is a scandal.
	Reporters are supposed to have objectivity.
	Reporters are not supposed to be literally sleeping with their subjects.
	That's not good.
	I mean, this has been something that we've criticized the left for for so long.
	George Stephanopoulos spends his whole career as a Democrat political operative.
	He is actually the communications director for the Clinton White House.
	And then one day, he puts on a different colored tie and he pretends to be an objective reporter.
	On network news.
	What are you talking about?
	And now he's their main political reporter at ABC. This was the guy who masterminded the Clinton propaganda strategy.
	And you say, that's just ridiculous.
	That is a scandal.
	Now the New York Times is upset that more people are going to be exposed about that.
	And the only people that this shadowy group is going after are the family members who are already public figures in and of themselves.
	The New York Times whining about this was so outrageous, it was actually too much, even for the Washington Post and for Politico, both of which are left-wing outlets.
	Here's what the Washington Post wrote about it.
	I mean, really great coverage of it.
	WAPO writes, quote, There is an incompatibility in the Times story in the Salzberger memo.
	On one hand, there is an attempt to tar the motivations of the loose network of conservative operatives, quote.
	On the other hand, There's a stubborn admission that they have brought actionable information to public attention.
	For decades now, representatives of the mainstream media have answered conservative critiques by imploring, judge us by the work we produce, not by the fact that more than 90% of us are liberal democratic.
	Mainstreamers cannot have it both ways.
	This is the key.
	Mainstreamers cannot have it both ways.
	He goes on.
	Cut the idle and unverifiable talk about motivations.
	If the tweets presented by a loose network of conservative operatives are racist or anti-Semitic or otherwise problematic, take action.
	If they're nonsensical distractions, ignore them.
	Spot on.
	At least this guy in the Washington Post is holding his side, the left-leaning In some cases, hard left so-called journalists to the New York Times.
	He's holding them to their own standards.
	Politico, same thing.
	Politico has an article out, quote, the headline, why journalists sold tweets are fair game for Trump.
	New York Times editors don't deserve special immunity from scrutiny for bigoted speech.
	Totally right.
	That's what they want.
	The New York Times wants one set of rules to apply to them and an entirely different set of rules to apply to the right.
	That's what they do.
	And the thin skin at the New York Times is not just on the hard left.
	It's even on what you would call formerly the center right.
	Now, in this case, you'd call it the never-Trump right.
	Politico started its piece about the New York Times.
	They started by quoting Edward R. Murrow, the old journalist with the cigarette.
	He was portrayed by George Clooney in that movie Good Night and Good Luck.
	Very left-wing journalist.
	And the line, though, is, journalists don't have thin skins.
	They have no skins.
	Journalists take things very personally.
	They're very sensitive.
	And the person exemplifying this over at the New York Times is Brett Stevens, who used to be a right-winger.
	Now, I don't know, I guess he's center-left, you would call him now.
	He's kind of a Hillary Clinton guy, very anti-Trump.
	So Brett Stevens, yesterday there was a story that was going around Twitter that the New York Times newsroom had bedbugs.
	And, you know, it's in New York.
	Everyone gets bedbugs at some point in New York.
	It's just a gross island, and it's very compact, and there are bedbugs, and that's just the way it is.
	So I guess some of these bedbugs got into the New York Times.
	Some guy makes a joke.
	He's an associate professor of media at GW. His name is David Karp, and he makes a joke on Twitter.
	He says, the bedbugs are a metaphor.
	The bedbugs are Brett Stevens, who's this sort of center...
	Centrist or center-left now, columnist at the New York Times.
	And I don't know, the professor could be right-wing or left-wing.
	I don't know what he is.
	The left-wingers who read the Times don't like Stevens because they say he's too right-wing, and the right-wingers don't like Stevens now because he's too left-wing.
	So that's what he tweets out.
	He makes a joke about how Stevens is the bed bug.
	The tweet gets nine likes and zero retweets.
	So basically, nobody sees this tweet.
	Within an hour, Brett Stevens emails this guy directly and cc's the guy's boss on the email.
	This is what the email says, quote, "I'm often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people, people they've never met.
	On Twitter, I think you've set a new standard.
	I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a bed bug to my face.
	That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part." Dude, take a joke.
	Good grief.
	Some guy that no one's ever heard of made a little joke on Twitter about a public figure, and you are, not only can you not take it, not only are you inviting the guy to your house, you're all this passive-aggressive email, but you copy the guy's boss on the email, like you're trying to get the guy fired.
	Actually, even MSNBC called out Brett Stevens for this outrageous email, this outrageous attempt to get a media professor fired.
	Did it today.
	Here's Stevens' answer.
	I also copied his provost on the note.
	People are upset about this.
	I want to be clear.
	I had no intention whatsoever to get him in any kind of professional trouble, but it is the case at the New York Times and other institutions that people should be aware, managers should be aware of the way in which their people, their professors or journalists interact with the rest of the world.
	Hold on, hold on.
	You say, I had no intention Of getting this guy in professional trouble.
	I emailed his boss to complain about him, but I had no idea, I had no intention of getting him in professional trouble.
	But he should be in professional trouble, and I called his boss.
	That's what he's saying, right?
	The but completely negates everything that came before it in that statement.
	Brett Stevens, this is a guy on top of the world, as one of the biggest microphones in the world, New York Times columnist.
	Can't take a little joke from a media professor that no one's ever heard of at GW, so he cc's the guy's boss and obviously tries to get him in trouble, if not fired.
	Probably tries to get him fired too, because if you get an email like that from a guy as powerful as Brett Stevens at the New York Times, you're not going to punish the employee for it?
	Of course not.
	It's a joke.
	This is what people despise about the media, the self-seriousness.
	It's not that we don't like seriousness.
	We don't want to be frivolous and flippant all the time and glib or anything like that.
	But we want people to be serious and not self-serious.
	G.K. Chesterton said, the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
	They're not always taking themselves unseriously, but they can take themselves lightly, and so they can fly.
	We hate self-seriousness, you know.
	This self-seriousness in journalism really began, I think, in earnest when the newsrooms replaced all the actual reporters with these over-credentialed elite young people.
	So, journalism used to be a kind of middle-class job.
	You didn't really need to go to college.
	If you did, you could go to a journalism program, get out, go work.
	Work as a reporter is very simple.
	Now, being over-credentialed or not, you know, being a beat reporter or something, that's fine if you want to be in commentary, if you want to pursue one political point of view over another, if you have a vision of the world and you're expounding on that.
	Punditry or something like that, that's fine.
	For reporters, though, that's not fine.
	You see, for reporters, you need to just pursue the facts.
	That's it.
	It's a simple job.
	Typically, it hasn't paid that well.
	It's an honorable job.
	It's a simple job.
	You just do it.
	And now, because we've got these overly self-important people who actually aren't that good at journalism, who aren't that good at reporting, they are just focusing on themselves.
	Journalists, reporters, you are not the great defenders of democracy.
	You are not defending democracy in darkness.
	You're not preserving our country.
	You're not even especially good at At being an arbiter of the truth or discerning the truth.
	Write your story.
	Quit whining.
	Do your job.
	It's very simple.
	I was at the PragerU dinner the other night with Mike Rowe.
	Mike Rowe had great advice that he passed along from a mentor of his.
	And the advice was, don't focus on how you're doing.
	Focus on what you're doing.
	Focus on the what, not the how.
	Today, journalists are only worried about the how.
	How do I look?
	How do I sound?
	How am I being perceived?
	How many times am I being invited on television?
	How are people on Twitter talking about me?
	How did that guy tell that joke about that bed bug off?
	They're not focused on the what, which is their job, which is reporting the facts.
	Do your job.
	Focus on the what.
	Worry about what you're doing.
	Let the how take care of itself.
	Speaking of thin skin, by the way, there is an excellent Netflix special out that you have to watch, and critics on both the left and the right are assailing this Netflix special, which is how you know that it's good.
	It's how you know that the comedian is hovering right over the mark.
	I'm talking about Dave Chappelle's new Netflix special.
	So National Review, which is a conservative publication, gave this special a bad review.
	The review itself was not very good.
	But the review talked about how this special, it took on too many taboo subjects.
	It said too many taboo things.
	No, we can't laugh.
	It's not funny.
	Now, that's just National Review.
	That's fine.
	On the left, virtually every publication, all the coverage of it, was saying that this special is awful.
	It's transphobic.
	It's sexist.
	It's victim-blaming.
	It's all the PC terms.
	All of the PC jargon.
	Came out in these reviews.
	And Chappelle doesn't care.
	Chappelle is having none of it.
	He takes on every PC taboo in the special.
	He takes on the Me Too movement.
	He takes on what he calls the alphabet people.
	LGBTQ, LMNOP, whatever.
	He takes on cancel culture.
	Here is just a quick clip from the trailer to give you an idea about how this show is going.
	I want to see if you can guess who it is I'm doing an impression of.
	Alright, let me get into character.
	You gotta guess who it is though.
	Okay, here it goes.
	Duh!
	Hey!
	Duh!
	If you do anything wrong in your life, duh, and I find out about it, I'm going to try to take everything away from you.
	And I don't care when I find out.
	It could be today, tomorrow, 15, 20 years from now, if I find out you're fucking, duh, finished.
	Who's that?
	That's you!
	That's what the audience sounds like to me!
	That's why I don't be coming out doing comedy all the time, because y'all is the worst motherfuckers I've ever tried to entertain in my fucking life.
	Absolutely spot on.
	Obviously, he's taking on cancel culture, and he's turning it on the audience in a really brilliant way, because he's talking about something that is so relevant right now, which is that somebody told a joke 30 years ago, and you've got to ruin his life now and take away his career, take away his house, and banish him to outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth.
	But he's also pointing out the hubris, the self-seriousness, the arrogance of the audience.
	Not just the audience in that room, but all of us is the audience.
	The Twitter audience.
	The social media audience.
	We who, all we do is we wake up in the morning and say, Mmm!
	Oh, that was a good sleep.
	Well, time to get on the internet and ruin everyone's life.
	Time to get on the internet and judge people.
	Oh yeah, I got a busy day.
	I don't even know if I can fit in a cup of coffee this morning because I have to judge people all day.
	For their private remarks 30 years ago.
	I'm not even judging topics.
	I'm not even judging political issues.
	Because that's not what people are judging.
	They're judging a joke that some guy made in the 90s.
	It has no bearing on what was happening right now or political issues or cultural issues or religious issues.
	And Chappelle is just totally flipping on it.
	Oh, you think it's Trump that I'm making fun of because Trump, he's the worst thing in the world, right?
	No, it's you.
	You're the worst thing in the world.
	It's really great.
	I'm not going to spoil the rest of the show.
	That's just one bit in the trailer.
	But there is great stuff out there.
	He does a bit on abortion that is the funniest, most incisive abortion bit I've seen since Louis C.K. is a few years ago.
	Louis C.K. is another guy that no one's allowed to mention.
	He's now been unpersoned because he had a bizarre sexual history and proclivity.
	He comes up in the show.
	I mean, it's just terrific.
	Dave Chappelle doesn't care.
	Dave Chappelle is the honey badger.
	And the honey badger don't give a damn.
	The honey badger does not care.
	Chappelle is not, in my estimation, the greatest living comedian.
	The greatest living comedian is Norm MacDonald.
	But Chappelle is up there.
	Chappelle is pretty close.
	Dave Chappelle is not the greatest living philosopher.
	I don't look to him for political commentary or cultural commentary or something.
	Some comedians do this.
	George Carlin kind of became a philosopher toward the end of his life and the end of his career.
	I can't stand that.
	I can't stand when comedians turn their specials into philosophy.
	Chappelle doesn't do that.
	Dave Chappelle isn't a confessional comedian.
	I hate confessional comedy.
	It's the worst where it's just all me, me, me, me.
	That's not what Dave Chappelle does.
	Dave Chappelle writes, crafts, and tells jokes that are relevant, that have bearing on the truth, that tell you something about the world, that most importantly make you laugh.
	Why are his jokes funny?
	Why at a time when there are so many clunker, terrible Netflix specials?
	I mean, Amy Schumer's thing a few years ago, it was unwatchable.
	Not even just conservatives were saying that because we don't like Amy Schumer.
	The left was saying this too.
	I mean, it was just not funny at all.
	The best example of this was Nanette.
	It was that Netflix special that all of the elite, self-styled elite critics said, oh, it's changed comedy.
	It's unbelievable.
	That Nanette comedy special that came out a couple years ago, Barely had any jokes in it because the way that she changed comedy, apparently, was to turn comedy into tragedy.
	She said, I'm not going to tell jokes anymore.
	I'm not going to make people laugh anymore.
	This is the new comedy.
	It's not the new comedy.
	It's called the old tragedy.
	They can't tell jokes.
	The left is not able to do that, particularly because they are constrained by ideology.
	And Dave Chappelle is not constrained by ideology.
	He just isn't.
	It's not like I agree with Dave Chappelle on everything.
	I've never talked to him.
	I suspect he and I don't agree on every single thing.
	But the reason why he can tell jokes that make me laugh and I can laugh at the jokes that he tells is because I do my best not to be constrained by ideology and he certainly is not constrained by ideology.
	This is a very important political point because ideology is different from philosophy.
	Ideology is certainly different from great religious traditions.
	It's great from revealed religious truth.
	Ideology is the formalized, narrow, abridged, rationalized, five bullet point manifesto and doctrine that purports to describe all of reality.
	This is what Marxism is.
	This is what communism is.
	This is what leftism is.
	It's here are the five bullet points that determine the world, that describe the world.
	The world is a history of class conflict.
	And there is a science of history, and at the end of it, we'll have a Marxist utopia.
	So everything that the left sees or that Marxists would see is through that lens of class struggle, and that's it.
	That's all it is.
	That is an ideology.
	Conservatives sometimes are tempted toward ideology, particularly, say, libertarians have more of an ideological viewpoint.
	But traditionally speaking, conservatives have resisted ideology.
	If you can sum up the whole world in five bullet points, then you probably don't know very much about the world.
	If that's your vision of all of reality, I don't need it because that's BS. Ditching ideology doesn't mean you don't stand for anything.
	It doesn't mean you don't have any basis of your belief.
	That's not even possible.
	Everybody's got to serve somebody.
	Every view of the world boils down to some beliefs.
	So, for instance, me, I'm Catholic.
	Christians, broadly speaking, believe in the Nicene Creed.
	I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, on and on, right?
	I recite that creed every Sunday, but I actually recite it in Latin, so I don't really understand it, which I guess makes me even less ideological.
	That is what I believe.
	I believe that.
	Credo in unum Deum.
	You know, every Christian church, every actual Christian church recites that creed.
	That is the Christian creed.
	That's what I believe, and everything else is fair game.
	It's why I don't get exercised over tax rates changing.
	It's why I don't lose my mind over some new tariff policy.
	Okay, one policy could be better than the other.
	Whatever.
	I'm open-minded.
	Because the left punts on eternal questions such as that, such as the basis of reality, the basis of belief, because they punt on those questions, they basically have embraced materialism or secularism or atheism.
	They make a religious idol out of political ideology.
	That becomes the religion.
	And as a result, they can't laugh.
	If you make a joke about transgenderism, you say, you know, I'm pretty sure...
	I'm pretty sure that that big, giant, burly guy over there who's got a big beard and, like, face tattoos and more muscles than I've ever seen in my life.
	I'm pretty sure that guy is not a little girl.
	Pretty sure.
	If you just make that observation, it's not even a joke, that's an observation.
	They won't laugh.
	They won't agree with you.
	They won't grant you any premise.
	They will frown.
	They will be angry because you've contradicted what more or less has become their religion.
	As a result, they can't laugh.
	I mean, you know, we laugh at things because they're true.
	You know, comedians are pointing out the absurdities of life.
	And so, to use one example, if you say that giant burly dude over there with his shaved head and a big beard and, you know, he's like chomping on chewing tobacco or something.
	He's not a cute little girl.
	If you point that out, That's funny.
	People would laugh at that unless you're so constrained and warped by ideology that you can't even laugh at Dave Chappelle.
	But you should.
	You will laugh.
	Go check it out.
	It's a really, really great special.
	Got to get to some 2020 news.
	Joe Biden is tanking in the polls.
	We will get to that in just one second.
	We'll get to why Joe Biden is tanking in the polls and why it was right.
	We'll get to the bigger story at the basis of that, which is a new poll showing that young Americans' values have radically changed.
	They are radically abandoning their traditional values.
	But first...
	I've got to let you know to tune in today, 7 p.m.
	Eastern, 4 p.m.
	Pacific, for our latest episode of The Conversation.
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	We've got to look at 2020 and poor old Joe, poor old sleepy Joe is collapsing in his support.
	This is a great deal.
	This new poll is coming out from Monmouth University.
	It has him down 13 points.
	He is now in a statistical dead heat in this poll with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
	Now, this is the worst poll for him so far.
	Other polls still have him up a bit, but it's also the latest poll, so it might not be an outlier.
	It might just be showing us things to come.
	This is not terribly surprising for those of us who said that Joe Biden would pretty much peak at the very beginning and then kind of steadily lose support so long as other candidates were able to show that they had any chance whatsoever of beating Donald Trump.
	Even worse for Joe Biden here is that his support is collapsing among every single demographic.
	So he's down among whites, blacks, high school grads, college grads, men, women, and voters over 50.
	Especially bad for him is losing voters over 50 and black voters because those two groups are groups that he had a pretty decent hold on among the Democrats.
	And, you know, if Democrats, for instance, can't pick up any older voters, you know, any voters over the age of 50, since I think the median, gung-ho, rabid Democratic voter is like 11.
	That's why they want to lower the voting age.
	But if they can't maintain some support among black voters and voters over 50, they're in serious trouble.
	And Joe Biden is showing weakness there as well.
	Why is this happening?
	Three reasons.
	First one is Joe Biden is obviously losing his marbles.
	This is not even to lob a bomb or to be mean or cruel to Uncle Joe.
	He's just...
	Old, and it's not to say that older people can't be president.
	Obviously, President Trump is not a spring chicken himself, but Biden seems to be declining mentally and physically.
	Here's a recent video of Joe Biden struggling to string a sentence together, even one coherent sentence, while talking about health care policy.
	We also have a mechanism to control drug prices.
	You know, we're no longer using chemical-based things.
	All this thing dealing with cancers and other issues relating to the immune system are bio-oriented.
	They're very expensive, and we should set up a system, as I propose, which I will if I'm elected president, That allows the folks at the health department in the United States, HHS, to be able to go out and bring together outside experts and make a judgment when there's a patent being sought by a drug company, what it's worth, what the range is.
	What on earth is going on?
	Now, in that video, he looks like he's struggling to come up with his thoughts.
	Either that's because of permanent mental decline, or it's because he's really tired.
	And I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's really tired.
	Campaign trails are exhausting.
	I've been on presidential campaigns before.
	It is unbelievably physically demanding.
	Any campaign, not just presidential, but congressional races.
	I mean, you run for dog catcher, it's a tough thing to do.
	And it takes a lot out of you.
	It even takes out a lot for young men.
	You have to be up to the physical aspect of that job.
	It actually gives you a lot of respect, just on a physical basis, for guys like Trump and Reagan.
	When Reagan was meeting Gorbachev for the first time, you got Reagan, the oldest president in American history at that time, and he was going to go meet Gorbachev outside.
	He was indoors.
	He was going to go down the stairs and meet Gorbachev outside in the winter.
	So Gorbachev gets out and he's wearing this big, heavy coat because it's wintertime.
	Reagan ditches the coat.
	He won't wear the coat.
	He comes out of the door and hops down the stairs, moves very quickly down those stairs, and he just looked like a vigorous young man.
	Meanwhile, Gorbachev, who was younger, looked like he was older, looked like he needed the coat, looked like he was moving more slowly.
	And the optics matter, the images matter when you're talking about the leader of the free world, when you're talking about any sort of politician.
	Same thing with Trump.
	I mean, Trump, by all accounts, you can lob any criticism of him that you want.
	He's reckless, he's impetuous, he doesn't read, he doesn't this, all the typical attacks against him.
	The one thing that nobody, not even his worst critic, can say is that he doesn't have energy.
	I mean, he pretty much got the GOP nomination because he contrasted his high energy with Jeb Bush's low energy.
	Trump is a high energy guy.
	By all accounts, doesn't sleep very much every night.
	He's constantly working.
	He's constantly vigorous.
	When he's not working, he's out schmoozing on the golf course.
	He's just kind of moving around.
	I mean, he's like sort of a medical wonder because he doesn't exercise.
	He brags about how he doesn't exercise.
	He eats fast food and drinks Diet Coke.
	At this point, he's probably just so preserved by the chemicals that he can move around.
	He'll outlive us all.
	That matters.
	Nobody thinks of Donald Trump as a doddering old man because Donald Trump has more energy than you do.
	Ronald Reagan had the same thing.
	He was just a vigorous guy who was riding horses all the time while he was president and after he was president.
	He wasn't even riding Western.
	He was riding English.
	He was riding even a more vigorous style of horse riding.
	Joe Biden doesn't have that.
	And if he doesn't have that now, he's not going to have it in a year and he's not going to have it if he were ever elected president.
	That's just the first problem going on with Joe Biden.
	The second problem is he didn't have many marbles to lose to begin with because he's always been kind of a doofus.
	He graduated toward the bottom of his law school class.
	He had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race because of that.
	He had to drop out because he lied about his law school record and because he plagiarized speeches.
	He's always been just kind of a doof, a doofus.
	2008, he was nothing.
	He really didn't do very much when he was in the Senate, other than that 94 crime bill, which was a very good crime bill, actually.
	And it's the one thing in his career he really has to run away from.
	So he's losing it.
	He didn't have much to lose to begin with.
	And third, voters' priorities and values are changing.
	This is the most important part.
	This is the biggest issue for Biden and for the country.
	Ernest Hemingway describes going bankrupt as it happening gradually, then suddenly.
	That's what we're seeing here with the changing values of this country.
	Biden represents an old guard.
	I'm not saying he's a moderate.
	He's not a moderate.
	But he does represent something a little older.
	For instance, he's patriotic.
	He at least pays lip service to love of country and patriotism.
	The other Democrats don't.
	And this is changing.
	This is a new thing.
	They don't like the country.
	Now, you might say the Democrats never liked the country.
	The left always hated the country.
	Maybe, but at least they paid lip service to it.
	At least hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
	Now they are openly denigrating the country.
	Andy Cuomo, Democratic governor of New York, says America was never that great.
	Barack Obama says, I don't believe in American exceptionalism.
	I believe in it the way the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
	You have other candidates now saying America's hopelessly racist, hopelessly bigoted.
	There's no way to ever redeem America.
	You have elected Democratic politicians, presidential candidates, openly denigrating the American flag, supporting people who are protesting the American flag, which is not just a symbol of one institution or one aspect of the country.
	It's a symbol of the whole country, the entire nation.
	They're openly hostile to America, and this reflects a broader trend among younger voters.
	They're just following where their voters are going.
	In this election, millennials will rise up to possibly match or nearly match baby boomers as eligible voters.
	Now, that doesn't mean they're going to come out and vote at the same rates as baby boomers.
	Young Americans don't vote at the same rates as older Americans, so probably the boomers are still going to vote at a higher rate.
	But they're slowly and steadily, gradually then suddenly, Taking control of the country and the politicians that rely on them for votes are paying attention.
	That spells trouble because millennials are not as patriotic as past generations.
	Don't take my word for it.
	It's not just insinuation.
	This is according to a new poll out from Wall Street Journal and NBC, which shows...
	American values are shifting dramatically, gradually then suddenly.
	This is from the article.
	Patriotism, religion, and having children rate lower among younger generations than they did two decades ago.
	And they rate much lower.
	21 years ago, they took this poll.
	Strong majorities of Americans chose the principles of hard work, patriotism, commitment to religion, and the goal of having children as being the most important to them.
	Now, the good news is millennials and Gen Z still value hard work.
	They still like that.
	But their only other sacredly held value is tolerance.
	Tolerance.
	Religion, patriotism, even having children rate much, much lower.
	This is a direct result of losing religion.
	St.
	Andrew Breitbart, the patron of Hollywood conservatives, said, politics is downstream of culture, and we know culture is downstream of religion.
	Cult and culture are related words.
	What the culture worships defines that culture.
	And this problem goes all the way to the foundation of society, religion.
	Because when they say tolerance, they don't really mean tolerance.
	Tolerance is one of the most abused words in the English language today.
	This started in the 1960s when the father of the new left, Herbert Marcuse, wrote an essay called Repressive Tolerance.
	In which he said we can no longer tolerate intolerance, and so tolerance needs to become intolerant.
	This, when conservatives joke about the so-called tolerant left, which is always attacking conservatives and shutting us down, trying to get us kicked off campus, in some cases physically attacking us, they're obviously not being tolerant.
	They're being tolerant by this new definition of tolerance, capital T. It's the value of secular religion.
	What it really means is it's the value of multiculturalism, capital M, and cultural relativism, capital letters, right?
	Those ideas mean that nothing is true objectively.
	Therefore, tolerance and hard work are all that we can value.
	The thing that's really troubling about this too, because look, we all like hard work.
	At least we can all agree that hard work is a good value.
	Except in this case, it spells trouble because it means that we increasingly only value things that have to do with our will, not with our intellect.
	Hard work and tolerance are values of the will.
	You can just sort of will yourself to do it.
	Grit your teeth and tolerate stuff you don't like.
	That's the good version of tolerance.
	Or grit your teeth and tolerate only tolerant opinions and don't tolerate the intolerant opinions and kick them out of your campus.
	But you're still, it's all about the will.
	It's not about actually thinking this is true and beautiful.
	This is better than this.
	This is more accurate than this.
	This is objectively true.
	It's just the will.
	Same thing when it comes to hard work.
	Hard work, you just grit your teeth and do it, right?
	Not because of any intellectual scheme or reason, scheme of reason, but you just, Will yourself to do work.
	Religion, patriotism are values of the intellect.
	You can't even really will yourself into it if the intellect won't go with you.
	You subscribe to a religion because you think it's true.
	Because you think God exists and he has a son named Jesus Christ and Christ instituted a church and you go to mass for that reason and he instituted sacraments and you have those sacraments.
	There is an act of will, obviously, but it's part of the intellect that comes along, too.
	Same thing with patriotism.
	You can't just...
	Will yourself into loving your country.
	You can't will yourself into loving anything, really.
	You can go through the motions, but there has to be intellectual assent at some point.
	You have to really love your country.
	Why do I love my country?
	Because it's a great country.
	Why do I love my parents?
	Because they're great parents.
	I mean, it's the same kind of thing.
	It's the same sort of filial piety.
	I will my love, obviously.
	I enact my love of country, my patriotism, but I intellectually assent to that as well.
	And we have undercut our own confidence in our faculties of reason.
	Nothing is true.
	Nothing can be believed.
	This radical skepticism.
	You do you.
	I'll do me.
	I can't ever tell you.
	I can't impose my views.
	Nothing.
	Stop being so judgy.
	These kind of slogans, these kind of ideas...
	Are undercutting the basis of our politics itself, the basis of self-government, the basis of open debate, the basis of true tolerance.
	When you lose those things...
	We're kind of living on the fumes of them.
	We're living right now on the fumes of religion and patriotism.
	Once that's gone, we have no reason to participate in our institutions, to have reasonable debate, to have open rhetoric, to have open discourse in this country.
	When it just becomes about the will, then we will assert our will on others.
	You see the left doing that increasingly.
	It's just all about willfulness and what they want.
	They're going to get what they want because they want it when they want it.
	And that is an unrecognizable country.
	When you stop loving your country, don't be surprised when you wake up and the country looks very different than you remember it.
	That's our show.
	We've got a lot more to get to, but we will just have to do it tomorrow.
	Tune into our conversation.
	That's coming up later today.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	See you then.
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	Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
	You know, people are saying that America has never been so divided, and they can say that all they want, but it's completely and utterly untrue.
	What is true is that there's never been a time, at least not in my memory, when the elite establishment has been rooting so hard against the country that has given them everything they have.
	I'll show you what I mean on The Andrew Klavan Show.

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