The Democrats promise America a future with two cars in every garage, few teeth in every mouth, and a record player in every living room! We examine highlights. Then, Trump bans vaping, and Hillary Clinton tries out performance art. Date: 09-13-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Last night, the top nine Democratic presidential candidates and Julian Castro met in Houston to debate all the top issues and to promise the American people a future with two cars in every garage, few teeth in every mouth, and a record player in every living room. | |
| Joe Biden fared the worst, but no one came out looking good. | |
| We will examine the highlights. | |
| Then, the Trump administration moves to outlaw vaping. | |
| For all the wrong reasons. | |
| And Hillary Clinton tries out performance art. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Last night's Democratic debate felt like performance art. | |
| We got about three hours of performance art. | |
| I was on the Crowder livestream for it, so you can check that out, too. | |
| Lots and lots of fun. | |
| Joe Biden probably couldn't have had a worse night than he did. | |
| We will get to all of that in a second, but first... | |
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| Joe Biden's no good, terrible, very bad night. | |
| He looked old. | |
| He looked confused. | |
| He looked frail. | |
| He couldn't finish, rather, a single sentence, and his teeth literally fell out of his mouth. | |
| He caught them back right before they totally flopped, but his teeth actually fell out of his mouth. | |
| On the bright side, At least his eyeball didn't explode this time. | |
| There are silver linings to every storm cloud, so at least you got that. | |
| His eyeball didn't fill with blood like it did on the last CNN town hall. | |
| But otherwise, just about everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, including, I know it sounds like I'm joking, but it's not a joke, his teeth literally falling out of his mouth. | |
| Here it is. | |
| At the time, there was a groundswell in this country to get something done. | |
| President Obama asked you to lead the push for gun control. | |
| You have often pointed to your ability to reach across the aisle to get things done. | |
| But four months after Sandy Hook, a measure to require expanded background checks died on the Senate floor. | |
| If you couldn't get it done after Sandy Hook, why should voters give you another chance? | |
| Because I've got it done before. | |
| I'm the only one up here that's ever beat the NRA. Only one ever beat the NRA nationally. | |
| And then you can see, as he's trying to get that sentence out, he's saying, I got it done before. | |
| He uses his tongue to push his dentures back into place in the way that old men do, in the way that people who wear dentures do. | |
| Not just old men, but other people who have dentures. | |
| Unstakable. | |
| This is not about the age. | |
| This is actually not the age issue. | |
| We've known that Joe Biden has fake teeth for a very long time, at least close observers. | |
| No, nobody on earth has teeth that big and bright and shiny and white. | |
| And certainly not old men who have been in politics for a long time. | |
| There is actually a website that went up at least 10 years ago called joebidesteeth.com. | |
| And it's just a sort of ode to his teeth. | |
| You can go there. | |
| I think the website's still up. | |
| This is not about the age. | |
| What the issue is, is that he looks and acts his age. | |
| Ronald Reagan was no spring chicken. | |
| He was the oldest president in American history. | |
| But he didn't seem like the oldest president. | |
| He was sprightly. | |
| He was spry. | |
| He was full of energy. | |
| You know, very famously when he went to meet the Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev. | |
| Gorbachev was a younger man than Ronald Reagan and they were meeting and Gorbachev's limo pulls up and Reagan is waiting in the White House. | |
| It's wintertime. | |
| And there was a debate going on. | |
| Does Reagan wear the coat or does he not wear the coat? | |
| If he wears the coat, it's wintertime, that's appropriate. | |
| If you don't wear the coat, you look younger and more energetic. | |
| Doors open, Reagan doesn't have a coat on, just his suit jacket, and he goes hopping down those little steps and he embraces Gorbachev, who's got the big coat on and the big Soviet fur hat, and he looked less energetic. | |
| He looked weaker, he looked older. | |
| And Gorbachev was actually very upset about this And at the end of their meeting, he said, so next time, are we going to wear coats or are we not going to wear coats? | |
| Because he knew how it looked. | |
| Reagan understood the optics of age. | |
| He was asked by Walter Mondale, who was running against him in the 84 race, Mondale made some comment about his age. | |
| And Ronald Reagan answered in the debate. | |
| He said, I will not make age an issue in this campaign. | |
| I will not exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience. | |
| And Mondale later commented that that was the moment he knew he lost the election because Reagan totally flipped that age issue on its head. | |
| Trump does the same thing. | |
| You know, Donald Trump is out there hanging out with Kanye West. | |
| Donald Trump, for all his age, is the hippest guy in the country. | |
| Chris Rock said this about Joan Rivers. | |
| When Joan Rivers died, she was 80 years old. | |
| She was making jokes about Beyonce. | |
| She was so hip. | |
| There are much younger comedians who are out there making jokes about Bill Clinton, you know, who aren't hip at all even though they're 30 or 40 years old. | |
| Trump is hip. | |
| If you look at his Twitter picture, that Twitter picture that you see that he hasn't changed in a long time, that's from 2005. | |
| That was from when he was doing The Apprentice. | |
| And he hasn't changed it, but you probably haven't noticed, because the guy doesn't really age. | |
| I think it's all that fast food and all that Diet Coke has sort of preserved him in this eternal form. | |
| Same thing with his hair. | |
| He obviously colors his hair. | |
| Ronald Reagan colored his hair, too. | |
| They just seem young and Joe Biden doesn't seem young. | |
| He seems old. | |
| Biden also talks like someone who isn't with it. | |
| So it's not even just the way he acts and the teeth falling out and the cadence of his voice. | |
| It's also what he's saying. | |
| So if Trump is out hanging out with Kanye, Trump is hosting Saturday Night Live, Joe Biden is talking about how we need a record player, a gramophone, In every home. | |
| That's not an exaggeration. | |
| Here is Joe Biden's answer to a question about the legacy of slavery. | |
| We make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. | |
| School, not daycare. | |
| School. | |
| We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. | |
| It's not that they don't want to help. | |
| They don't know quite what to do. | |
| Play the radio, make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone, make sure the kids hear words. | |
| A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there. | |
| There are two incredible aspects of this clip. | |
| One, he corrects himself. | |
| He says, make sure the television's on at night, which these days is actually a little bit outdated because people don't have regular TV. They pretty much just watch everything digitally or online or streaming services. | |
| But he could have gotten away with that. | |
| He corrected himself, though. | |
| He said, make sure the television is... | |
| I mean, the record player. | |
| Put the record player. | |
| No, I didn't mean that. | |
| I mean, have... | |
| Have ancient Greek orators singing comedies in your house. | |
| I don't know how much older you can get than that. | |
| But he is regressing to this older technology and that's not even the worst part of his answer. | |
| That's the first amazing aspect of it. | |
| The second amazing aspect of this answer is he's basically insulting The core voter group that he needs to get through this primary and then also to get through the general election. | |
| What he said in his answer is we need the government to come in to the homes of black parents because black parents don't know how to raise their kids. | |
| That's what he's saying. | |
| He's saying, oh, the problem is, you know, we need to take those kids out of the home at age three. | |
| Make sure they go into a state institution. | |
| We need social workers to go in the home because the parents, they don't know what they're doing. | |
| They don't know how to raise their own kids. | |
| And it's not even just a general comment about Americans. | |
| It's not a class comment. | |
| It's not a socioeconomic comment. | |
| It's specifically a race comment because he's answering a question about the legacy of slavery. | |
| Joe Biden, his main argument here is electability. | |
| That's really the only reason he's at the center podium. | |
| It's the only reason he's leading in the polls. | |
| Part of the reason he's electable is, one, he seems a little more moderate than some of the other candidates. | |
| But the other one is the other candidates are polling at like 0% among black voters. | |
| And Democrats need black voters in order to win. | |
| Joe Biden is going out there and specifically insulting black voters. | |
| And then just when I was wondering, I was watching the debate, I thought, why is Julian Castro on this stage? | |
| Why is this nothing, empty suit, joke of a candidate on this stage? | |
| Just when I thought that, he showed me why he was on that stage. | |
| He made the most vicious attack against Joe Biden of the entire night. | |
| We'll get to that in a second. | |
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| So I'm wondering what Julian Castro is still doing on that stage. | |
| He should have gotten off weeks and weeks ago. | |
| I was actually on Leland Vittert's show on Fox News when the news broke that Julian Castro was going to run for president. | |
| And Leland turned to me and said, Michael, I want to get your reaction just right off the top here to Julian Castro making this big announcement. | |
| I said, I've got a big announcement, Leland. | |
| I had a ham and cheese omelet for breakfast. | |
| Both of those announcements are of equal relevance to the 2020 presidential contest. | |
| Julian Castro is going nowhere, but before he goes nowhere, he can just shiv Joe Biden right in the side. | |
| He comes out there and he just flatly accused Joe Biden of being completely senile. | |
| Here he is. | |
| Barack Obama's vision was not to leave 10 million people uncovered. | |
| He wanted every single person in this country covered. | |
| My plan would do that. | |
| Your plan would not. | |
| They do not have to buy in. | |
| They do not have to buy in. | |
| You just said that. | |
| You just said that two minutes ago. | |
| You just said two minutes ago that they would have to buy in. | |
| You said they would have to buy in. | |
| Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago? | |
| Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? | |
| I mean, I can't believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in, and now you're saying they don't have to buy in. | |
| You're forgetting that. | |
| I said anyone like your grandmother who has no money, you're automatically enrolled. | |
| This was a pretty ugly exchange. | |
| A pretty brutal attack from Castro. | |
| I think the attack actually made Castro look even worse than he already did. | |
| I mean, it's so nasty. | |
| It's so disrespectful. | |
| Also, it wasn't true. | |
| Joe Biden, I'm happy to criticize Joe Biden, but Joe Biden had said, if you don't have enough money, you are automatically enrolled. | |
| So even the charge that Castro was making simply wasn't true. | |
| Nevertheless, it looked really bad for both these guys. | |
| Which is fine for me because Joe Biden is currently the frontrunner. | |
| And what's wild is when Castro decides he's going to turn the attack from you're lying to you're an old man who's senile, he said, are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago? | |
| Biden is so visibly disgusted, he turns away from Castro. | |
| But then, because Bernie is to his right, he just starts talking to Bernie, and it looks like those two old Muppets, like, you know, the ones up in the balcony, and the big white hair and the mustaches and everything. | |
| So it really, truly was a bad look for everybody all around. | |
| Look, obviously it's not going to help Castro. | |
| Castro is going nowhere. | |
| But Joe's troubles keep multiplying because Biden's actual answers were terrible too. | |
| It's not just the way other people made him look or his dentures slide around. | |
| It was his own answers. | |
| They were rambling. | |
| He was unable to finish a sentence. | |
| He did sometimes contradict himself. | |
| Worst of all, because he could get past all of that, that's built into Joe Biden. | |
| Worst of all, the answers were radical. | |
| And he can't survive that. | |
| He keeps going back and forth. | |
| He keeps vacillating. | |
| Is he the moderate elder statesman or is he the leftist radical? | |
| Every day he goes back and forth. | |
| One day he's just going to preserve in a more moderate way the legacy of Obama. | |
| He's been in the Senate for 50 years. | |
| The next day he wants to repeal the Hyde Amendment. | |
| He's sorry he ever did that. | |
| He's sorry that he passed criminal justice reform, the 1994 crime bill. | |
| He can't decide which he's going to be. | |
| The reason he can't decide is not even that he's desperate and he is just trying to be cynical. | |
| It's that he doesn't have any actual beliefs. | |
| He is the definition of an empty suit. | |
| He always has been. | |
| He had to drop out of the race in 1988 because he was stealing other people's words. | |
| He doesn't even have his own words to say. | |
| He is nothing. | |
| He will be anything and everything to everybody. | |
| He just wants to smile and get elected and be applauded. | |
| He is the definition, the prototype, the archetype rather, of a glad handing empty politician. | |
| So that's why he can't decide how to handle these questions. | |
| He actually can't even decide how to handle his main legislative achievement, which was the 1994 crime bill, actually a very good crime bill. | |
| So the 1994 crime bill is a bill that led to what some people would call mass incarceration. | |
| I would call it getting tough on crime and jailing criminals, which is a good thing. | |
| And the crime rates dropped dramatically. | |
| They went way, way down. | |
| Now, he was asked a question about criminal justice reform. | |
| He goes full radical. | |
| He says we should barely put anybody in jail. | |
| Nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime. | |
| When we were in the White House, we released 36,000 people from the federal prison system. | |
| Nobody should be in jail for nonviolent crime? | |
| You are the architect of mass incarceration. | |
| You, personally, you're the guy. | |
| And it was a good idea. | |
| And it helped and it worked and you could run on that record. | |
| Now you're saying... | |
| Nobody but violent criminals should be in jail, period? | |
| This is probably the single stupidest answer Joe Biden could possibly give. | |
| And what he thinks he's doing, what he thinks he's doing is pandering to the black voters that he needs that are sort of his superpower against Bernie and Elizabeth Warren. | |
| Actually, though, it's the opposite. | |
| It's not pandering to black voters. | |
| It's a betrayal of black voters, or it will be perceived that way at least, because what he is saying would disproportionately help wealthy white people, and it would disproportionately hurt poorer black people. | |
| How so? | |
| Because even beyond the racial element, there is a class element here. | |
| Just even just look at the money. | |
| You know, so much of the debate last night was about the wealth gap between white and black. | |
| So much of the discussion of criminal justice was about this wealth gap. | |
| How white people on average are wealthier and black people on average are poorer and therefore there's no justice in America. | |
| There are two different Americas. | |
| Consider the effect of Joe Biden's answer. | |
| If non-violent criminals are not in jail, that means that investment bankers who commit financial crimes, disproportionately very wealthy, disproportionately white, get off scot-free. | |
| You're a fraudster, you're running a Ponzi scheme, you're doing any of that, you get off scot-free. | |
| But a guy who robs a liquor store goes to prison. | |
| The wealthy white guy isn't robbing the liquor store. | |
| This is just a terrible answer. | |
| And by the way, I have family members who were victims of non-violent crimes. | |
| Fraud, that sort of thing, has devastating effects on families. | |
| It can lead to death. | |
| I mean, it can really lead to just death. | |
| Awful. | |
| I mean, fraud is the worst crime. | |
| Fraud is the worst crime. | |
| It is the worst sin. | |
| It is what Dante puts in the very center of hell with Satan in his three-headed mouth, or his three-mouthed head, I guess, chomping on the fraudsters. | |
| There is nothing worse than fraud. | |
| And what Joe Biden is saying is, yeah, if you commit fraud, that's fine. | |
| You go free. | |
| You shouldn't go to jail for that. | |
| Just absurd. | |
| I mean, really a disgusting answer. | |
| And, practically speaking, unfortunate and counterproductive for what Biden's trying to do. | |
| Absurd and radical. | |
| What about immigration crimes? | |
| They don't go to jail. | |
| What about... | |
| He's basically saying nonviolent drug crimes don't go to jail. | |
| That's just one sort of nonviolent crime. | |
| Even the possession of illegal weapons. | |
| Let's say you've got a whole slew of illegal weapons in your house. | |
| That's not a violent crime, right? | |
| You don't go to jail. | |
| So that's the absurd and the radical answer. | |
| If voters want absurd and radical, they are going to vote for Bernie Sanders or Julian Castro or somebody like that. | |
| They're not going to vote for Joe Biden. | |
| This is a losing battle for him. | |
| And if Biden doesn't change course, he's going to lose this bigger fight as well. | |
| But Biden was not the wrongest candidate of the night. | |
| There are wronger candidates on that stage. | |
| The wrongest candidate of the night award actually goes to a candidate that some conservatives like, or at least pretend to like, which is Andrew Yang. | |
| Here is Andrew Yang's opening statement in which he tries to revive his struggling campaign by literally buying votes. | |
| In America today, everything revolves around the almighty dollar. | |
| Our schools, our hospitals, our media, even our government. | |
| It's why we don't trust our institutions anymore. | |
| We have to get our country working for us again instead of the other way around. | |
| We have to see ourselves as the owners and shareholders of this democracy rather than inputs into a giant machine. | |
| When you donate money to a presidential campaign, what happens? | |
| The politician spends the money on TV ads and consultants and you hope it works out. | |
| It's time to trust ourselves more than our politicians. | |
| That's why I'm going to do something unprecedented tonight. | |
| My campaign will now give a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month for an entire year to 10 American families. | |
| Someone watching this at home right now. | |
| If you believe that you can solve your own problems better than any politician, go to yang2020.com and tell us how $1,000 a month will help you do just that. | |
| This is how we will get our country working for us again, the American people. | |
| Politicians buying votes. | |
| Totally unprecedented. | |
| Never happened before, right? | |
| We'll get to why that's the wrongest answer. | |
| We'll get to the most frivolous answer. | |
| And we'll get to one little glimmer of sort of, not really, but almost kind of hope in the Democratic Party. | |
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| So, Andrew Yang's big idea is he's going to buy votes. | |
| And he says this is unprecedented. | |
| This is not only precedented, this is the oldest idea in politics. | |
| The very first politician walking out of the cave realized that there were two easy ways to win political support. | |
| Threaten somebody with the club and buy them with goods and services and money. | |
| And that's what this guy is promising. | |
| And it's an old idea. | |
| It's a cynical idea. | |
| And it's a wicked idea to pay people to go away and to get the entire middle class hooked on welfare. | |
| It's bad. | |
| It's wicked. | |
| It's like the logical end of neoliberalism, of this... | |
| Idea that all that matters is getting GDP to go higher and higher and higher and really not pay attention to any other aspect of society. | |
| But it is not a serious solution and it would have disastrous consequences. | |
| It also, the way you know it's a really bad idea, is it relies on silly euphemisms. | |
| I mean, that's what political correctness is, is just relying on deceptive euphemisms. | |
| He says you're getting a freedom dividend. | |
| A freedom dividend? | |
| Yes. | |
| Freedom dividend, which is the product of coercing people, taking their money away, and then giving it to you so that you get hooked on the government teat, doesn't sound like a freedom dividend to me. | |
| It's a very bad idea. | |
| It's a way to get people hooked on government, hooked on dependency, and to pay them to shut up and stay home and shoot up opioids, and if they kill themselves, too bad. | |
| That's what it is. | |
| It's not a real solution to the problems plaguing our country. | |
| It's just a way to make it look like it's going away. | |
| So Yang was the wrongest candidate. | |
| The most frivolous candidate of the night was going to go to Julian Castro, but then he got that knock-in at Biden, so okay, he actually did something. | |
| He had some use. | |
| The most frivolous award goes to, drumroll please, Cory Booker. | |
| Cory Booker, we don't need to really get into the substance of his answers because it's Cory Booker. | |
| You know, it's not going to be all that relevant pretty soon. | |
| But he repeated one canard that he just can't drop and that takes away a lot of his credibility. | |
| He called Trump a racist. | |
| They all call Trump racist. | |
| But then he got specific and where you get specific is where you can be proven wrong. | |
| He said that Trump is not able to condemn white supremacy. | |
| Here he is. | |
| It's not just an issue that we hear a president that can't condemn white supremacy. | |
| He can't condemn white supremacy, right? | |
| He can't do it. | |
| Trump could never condemn white supremacy or racism or bigotry, except, oh, hold on, wait a second. | |
| He's done it repeatedly for years, to refresh your memory. | |
| Racism is evil. | |
| And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans. | |
| And I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. | |
| We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. | |
| We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. | |
| We are equal under the law. | |
| And we are equal under our Constitution. | |
| Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America. | |
| How many times do I have to reject? | |
| I've rejected David Duke. | |
| I've rejected the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan. | |
| From the time I'm five years old, I rejected them. | |
| I put it on Twitter last week. | |
| Now, I have been asked this question so many times. | |
| I have rejected it so many times. | |
| Nah, I'm not buying it, Mr. | |
| President. | |
| Okay, Cory Booker says you can't condemn white supremacy, so I mean, you only condemned it there like, what, like 200 times or something? | |
| So anyway, that's Cory Booker. | |
| This hurts him to say this kind of stuff. | |
| He just seems shrill, which is his vocal problem, and the shrillness goes to the content of what he's saying, too. | |
| Nobody, not even the Democratic voters, believe that. | |
| They don't believe that Trump can't condemn white supremacy. | |
| He does. | |
| They know he has. | |
| Now, what Booker could say is, and Trump, he's using whistle, dog whistles. | |
| He's using rhetoric that is actually giving cover to white supremacists, even though he's explicitly condemning them. | |
| I mean, he could come up with some kind of twisted logic to still call Trump a racist while acknowledging reality. | |
| But if Booker's not going to acknowledge reality, reality ain't going to acknowledge him. | |
| We will get to what I think is the most important part of the debate. | |
| The difference between the serious candidate and the frivolous candidates. | |
| We'll get to that in a second, then we'll get to vaping and Hillary Clinton performance art. | |
| But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. | |
| Go over to dailywire.com. | |
| Ten bucks a month, hundred dollars for an annual membership you give me. | |
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| You get the Matt Wall show. | |
| You get to ask questions in the mailbag. | |
| You get Another Kingdom, which we just recorded episode two of yesterday, and it sounds super cool, and the story is just absolutely terrific. | |
| Most importantly, you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr. | |
| There are nine more Democratic presidential primary debates. | |
| I did not misspeak. | |
| That is not erroneous. | |
| Nine more of these things. | |
| You will drown if you don't get the Tumblr. | |
| Get the Tumblr right now. | |
| Protect yourself. | |
| Protect your family. | |
| Go to dailywire.com. | |
| We'll be right back. | |
| The main thing that became clear in this debate is that we are now in a three-way race. | |
| Anything could happen, but what it's looking like now is we have a three-way race. | |
| That three-way race is between Biden, Bernie, and Elizabeth Warren. | |
| The difference between the serious and the unserious candidates became pretty clear in this debate. | |
| And you could tell this most clearly by their answers on guns. | |
| So other than maybe Bernie, every single one of these candidates wants to take away all of your guns, but listen to how they go about it. | |
| There's the desperate way, the Beto way, which is to say, hell yeah, yeah, hey man, and to promise to steal the most popular guns in America. | |
| Hell yes! | |
| We're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. | |
| We're not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore. | |
| Yeah, we're going to take away the most popular gun in America, and we're going to take away your Second Amendment rights. | |
| It's the second most important one. | |
| They put it as number two. | |
| It's in the Constitution. | |
| Yeah, we're going to do that. | |
| That's not a serious candidate. | |
| That's not a serious general election candidate. | |
| It also reveals to you something that I have long said, which is when Democrats tell you that they're not going to take away your guns, don't believe them. | |
| They will take away your guns. | |
| Here's Beto O'Rourke I think like three weeks ago, not very long ago, Beto O'Rourke on a CNN town hall is asked, are you going to take away our guns? | |
| He says no. | |
| I strongly support the Second Amendment. | |
| I don't want to take yours or anyone else's guns. | |
| Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. | |
| We're not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore. | |
| Three weeks. | |
| What a difference that little bit of time makes. | |
| So, of course, and I think all of them are disingenuous on guns. | |
| I think they all want to take away your guns. | |
| Maybe Bernie slightly accepted. | |
| But that's it. | |
| If you're going to take people's guns, this is a really dumb way to go about it. | |
| You're clearly not thinking that you are going to be a top-tier presidential candidate. | |
| The smarter way to grab guns is the Elizabeth Warren way, which is to put the issue into real context. | |
| We've actually said in recent days that there are things you can get done with Republicans in the Senate. | |
| What can you get done on gun control? | |
| So let's start by framing the problem the right way. | |
| We have a gun violence problem in this country. | |
| The mass shootings are terrible. | |
| But they get all the headlines. | |
| Children die every day on streets, in neighborhoods, on playgrounds. | |
| People die from violence, from suicide and domestic abuse. | |
| We have a gun violence problem in this country. | |
| And we agree. | |
| On many steps we could take to fix it. | |
| My view on this is it's not going to be one and done on this. | |
| We're going to do it, and we're going to have to do it again, and we're going to have to come back some more until we cut the number of gun deaths in this country significantly. | |
| This is how you know she's running to win. | |
| This is how you know that she is getting serious. | |
| She's not just demagoguing this ridiculous issue about the AR-15s. | |
| The AR-15 is involved in very, very, very few gun deaths or homicides each year. | |
| Very few. | |
| More people are killed by hands and knives and hammers and baseball bats. | |
| Then all rifles combined, including the AR-15 and the AK-47, you are 22 or 23 times more likely to be killed with a handgun, a pistol, than you are with any kind of rifle, including the AR-15. | |
| The AR-15 is a total red herring. | |
| It's a complete... | |
| Complete mislead on the issue. | |
| The real issue is suicides and handgun homicides and gang violence. | |
| And Liz Warren gives what's actually a pretty good answer on the gun question, especially if you're of the opinion that we can regulate guns or we should regulate guns more. | |
| Not my opinion, but it certainly is the opinion of the Democratic Party and even many independent-minded Americans. | |
| This was a great answer on guns. | |
| Really sharp, really well done. | |
| She's in it. | |
| I mean, she thinks she's going to get it, and the polls seem to be reflecting that, and I think overall she helped herself last night. | |
| She didn't help herself a lot, but she helped herself show she's the stable one. | |
| She's not too old. | |
| She's not too crazy. | |
| I think she's going to play this slow and steady wins the race kind of strategy, and it appears so far to be working. | |
| Honorable mention for the night before we get to vaping and before we get to Hillary Clinton performance art is the nearest to moderation. | |
| That's the honorable mention to Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota. | |
| She was asked about health care. | |
| She said, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't take away health care from 149 million Americans. | |
| And believe it or not, this was the closest thing to moderation all night. | |
| I think you know that I don't agree with some of these proposals up here, George. | |
| So I'm talking about if I could respond to some of the proposals from my friends. | |
| But when it comes to our health care and when it comes to our premiums, I go with the doctor's creed, which is do no harm. | |
| And while Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill. | |
| And on page 8... | |
| On page 8 of the bill, it says that we will no longer have private insurance as we know it. | |
| And that means that 149 million Americans will no longer be able to have their current insurance. | |
| That's in four years. | |
| I don't think that's a bold idea. | |
| I think it's a bad idea. | |
| Well said. | |
| She's clearly learned the lessons of Obamacare. | |
| Pretty decent answer. | |
| It's why she's going nowhere. | |
| Enough of the lunatics. | |
| Enough of them. | |
| There will be nine more of these debates, which is just absolutely mind-boggling that this will go on another nine times. | |
| So let's not spend any more time on this one. | |
| We have to get to the much more important issue, which is... | |
| Vaping. | |
| Yes, vaping. | |
| The Trump administration is reportedly moving to ban flavored e-cigarettes or vapes. | |
| Listen, you've seen the vapes, you know, a little electronic pack and people suck in out of them and then they breathe out water vapor kind of smoke. | |
| I'm not a fan of electronic cigarettes. | |
| I'm not a proponent of them at all. | |
| If you are going to ban them, ban them because they are super lame Don't ban them for these kind of silly reasons that they're coming up with. | |
| Ban them because real tobacco is much more delicious than that fake, weird, vapey stuff. | |
| Don't ban them because of some dubious health claims. | |
| There have been a few deaths and there have been a few illnesses related to vaping broadly, but they're not related to e-cigarettes. | |
| The deaths have not been specifically tied to e-cigarettes. | |
| They have been, however, tied to the weed pens. | |
| The vape that has THC in it and the marijuana substance. | |
| Which brings up a very strange aspect of our culture. | |
| I've clearly been vaping a little too much myself. | |
| The strange aspect is the culture is increasingly anti-tobacco, but it's also increasingly pro-weed. | |
| Very much so. | |
| Even though marijuana is in many ways much worse for you than tobacco. | |
| I know all the potheads are going to tweet at me all angrily now, but it is. | |
| It is. | |
| Marijuana smoke deposits four times as much tar into your lungs. | |
| As tobacco smoke does. | |
| Now, you might say, okay, but people smoke a lot more cigarettes than they do joints. | |
| Maybe you haven't met my friends in the music industry. | |
| People can really smoke a lot of pot. | |
| I've smoked pot a number of times in my life. | |
| It's not like I'm unfamiliar with the substance. | |
| It's just really weird to me. | |
| I don't really care for pot. | |
| I much prefer alcohol and tobacco. | |
| It's very strange to me, though, that at the same time we are vilifying tobacco as the greatest evil on earth, we are making weed into this great cure-all. | |
| You know, it's kind of the caricature of Joe Rogan is like, yeah, man, weed just solves every problem, makes everything way better. | |
| And I just don't believe that at all. | |
| I have a pothead friend who was at a concert at Madison Square Garden. | |
| And I think it was like Fish or something. | |
| It was one of these pothead bands. | |
| And he pulls out a joint and he's smoking it. | |
| And the security guards come up and they're like, you have to put that out right now. | |
| You can get arrested. | |
| You have to put that out. | |
| But he looked around him and people all around him were passing joints. | |
| So he said, well, no, they're all smoking joints too. | |
| And this was actually back before it was decriminalized. | |
| This was probably a number of years ago at this point. | |
| And they said, no, no, no, it's not the pot. | |
| It's that you're smoking a cigarette. | |
| And apparently his marijuana was of such poor quality that they thought it was tobacco. | |
| It didn't have the classic smell. | |
| So he said, no, I'm... | |
| Really, this is weed. | |
| And they said, no, buddy, you've got to put that cigarette out. | |
| It's one thing if it's pot. | |
| You're allowed to smoke that, but not marijuana. | |
| So what is this vape ban really about? | |
| It's not about health. | |
| I mean, all of the headlines are about e-cigarettes. | |
| Really what it should be about is, hey, maybe let's not... | |
| Let's watch out on these weed pens. | |
| One of the reports is that it has to do specifically with the vitamin E acetate that's in the weed pens or in cheaper versions of the weed pens or in Chinese imports of the weed pens or some other chemicals involved there too. | |
| What this vape pen is about is not health. | |
| It's about the government enforcing a new secular morality. | |
| Actually, regardless of your views on pot or tobacco or whatever, I don't really care your views about any of those things, And the government doesn't care your views about it either. | |
| What they want to do is force their secular morality on you. | |
| So in that new secular morality, tobacco and tobacco-related products are simply evil and they must go, even if they're vape pens, even if they're significantly better for you than smoking cigarettes. | |
| I don't think this is a Trump administration thing. | |
| I think it's a government thing. | |
| I think this would have happened if Hillary won in 2016. | |
| It would have happened under Obama. | |
| This has been a long time coming. | |
| They've been trying to ban the vapes since they first hit the scene. | |
| You know, I remember in bars in New York, right when the vapes came out, the vape is just water vapor that comes out of your mouth. | |
| Almost immediately signs, no vaping. | |
| Why no vaping? | |
| Even the arguments for secondhand smoke, which are dubious arguments to begin with, but even that, you know, you say, okay, I don't want to breathe in that smoke. | |
| But the vape is just water vapor. | |
| Why can't I breathe that out? | |
| There's nothing that you're breathing in other than water vapor. | |
| Because it's not about anyone's health. | |
| It's about controlling what you do. | |
| Same thing on the airplanes. | |
| Why can't you vape on an airplane? | |
| It's just water vapor. | |
| Because the government needs to be able to tell you exactly what to do. | |
| It's a lot like the environment. | |
| There are a lot of these environmental regulations that in no way help the environment. | |
| They're not about the environment. | |
| They're about regulation. | |
| The health regulations aren't about health. | |
| They're about regulation. | |
| So we have a ban on plastic one-use shopping bags in Los Angeles. | |
| You can't use the plastic shopping bags. | |
| Instead, you have to use paper shopping bags. | |
| The paper shopping bags are much worse for the environment. | |
| It takes a lot more energy. | |
| It harms the natural environment much more to make those shopping bags. | |
| And you have to reuse the paper shopping bags three times in order to bring down the environmental impact to the level of the plastic single-use shopping bag, which people already use multiple times anyway because they use them as trash bags. | |
| Ever since they banned those, the purchase of the much heavier, much more environmentally damaging, thick plastic bags has shot through the roof. | |
| But it's not about the environment. | |
| How about those cotton bags that they make you buy at the store? | |
| If you buy an organic cotton shopping bag, you would need to use that thing 20,000 times before you bring its environmental impact down to the level of a single-use plastic bag. | |
| They don't care. | |
| When they find this out, when the studies come out, they don't say, okay, we're going to pull back that environmental regulation. | |
| It's not about the environment. | |
| It's about regulating you, controlling your life. | |
| And that is why I don't like vape pens. | |
| I don't like pot. | |
| I fight these kind of restrictions as hard as I can because they're not... | |
| It'd be one thing if you want to keep marijuana criminalized. | |
| I think that's probably a good idea, mostly because it'll irritate the potheads and I get a kick out of that. | |
| But when it comes to something like vaping, a new technology... | |
| If you are just trying to regulate it, I resist that kind of rule as hard as I can. | |
| Government should not be able to tell me what to do as a simple, arbitrary, random exercise in their own massive power. | |
| Speaking of power-hungry government officials, Hillary Clinton, the sort of desiccated cadaver of Hillary Clinton wandering around the woods of Chappaqua, has made it all the way to Italy, has made it to the Venetian Teatro Italia. | |
| To participate in performance art. | |
| She's now in an exhibit where she is sitting at a perfect replica of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, reading through her emails, or, you know, pages that are made to look like her emails, 60,000 of them. | |
| She sat there for hours, truly her, not an impersonator, reading an exhibit titled, Hillary, the Hillary Clinton emails created by the artist Kenneth Goldsmith. | |
| This is art somehow. | |
| It's performance art. | |
| The reason I find this interesting is, one, it's pathetic. | |
| It's pathetic that this woman who wanted to be president is so ruined by this that she now needs to sit and play pretend at a replica of the Resolute desk because, I don't know, I guess they take her straight jacket off for a few hours a day so she can participate in this performance art. | |
| But also because she's not the first very prominent government official to dabble in art after she leaves office. | |
| George W. Bush, after he left the presidency, became an artist. | |
| I believe at the urging of the historian John Gaddis, who's actually a professor of mine. | |
| He handed Bush an essay about how Winston Churchill became a painter after he left office. | |
| And so Bush read this and he became a painter. | |
| And he became actually a pretty good painter. | |
| Even the left-wing New York magazine said he did a good job. | |
| And he would paint portraits of wounded warriors. | |
| And the soldiers. | |
| And he would sell these as fundraisers or he'd give them to people. | |
| He published a book of his art. | |
| It's really about other people and it's about whether you like his art or not. | |
| It's about bringing together different artistic styles into a beautiful composition to do honor to great warriors. | |
| That's real art. | |
| For the left, however, they don't have any sense of real art because they don't have any sense of beauty, so it's all deconstruction, it's all dada, it's all absurdism, it's all ugly, it's all bizarre, it's all surreal, it's all this kind of performance art. | |
| You know, the right loves good art, and the left loves terrible art, like... | |
| This sort of performance art or slam poetry, which the literary critic Harold Bloom rightly called the death of art. | |
| And this really highlights it in these two prominent politicians. | |
| You've got the one going toward the beautiful and the one going toward the grotesque and the absurd and the obscene. | |
| And that's Hillary Clinton. | |
| No better way to describe her. | |
| And I'm not at all surprised that the artistic preferences of she and her comrades reflect their own bizarre views of the world. | |
| That's our show. | |
| We got more to get to. | |
| We'll do it on Monday. | |
| In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Have a good weekend. | |
| See you soon. | |
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| The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner. | |
| Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. | |
| Senior producer, Jonathan Hay. | |
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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. | |
| The Democrat debate gave us a picture of a country where everything is free, except for you. | |
| We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show. |