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Sept. 18, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:16
Ep. 417 - The Silent Majority

President Trump scoops up $15 million in California, Democrats take their climate cues from a Swedish teenager, and we get good news on abortion. Date: 09-18-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump scoops up $15 million in California.
We examine how the bluest of blue states can help the president win in 2020.
Then, meanwhile, Democrats take their cues on global affairs from a Swedish teenager, as 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg testifies before Congress.
We get some good news on abortion, bad news on criminal justice, and an embarrassing report on the gratuity habits of millennials.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Let's go.
I'm so sorry to say that I missed the Trump fundraiser in Beverly Hills.
I could have seen every single conservative, probably in the state of California.
You can fit them just about into one room.
He was there doing a whole swing through California the past couple days, and he raised a lot of money, which is having some people on the left scratch their heads.
How's he about to bring in all that money in a state that overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton?
We'll get into the numbers, because California has always played an important role in the conservative movement.
And I think California could play a major role in President Trump's re-election hopes in 2020.
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Speaking of great deals, President Trump got a great deal on his two or three day swing through California.
He was just in Beverly Hills, and I think the total he's taking out of that state is 15 million bucks.
The big takeaway here for the left, for the chattering class, is that 15 million bucks didn't come from nowhere.
We talk about California as though it's just monolithic, completely leftist.
There isn't a conservative anywhere.
I mean, I make jokes about it too.
But there are.
I mean, we used to have a group out in Los Angeles called Friends of Abe.
And Friends of Abe was Friends of Abraham Lincoln.
It was all the secret conservatives in Hollywood.
There were a lot of us.
The Obama administration tried to get our list of our members.
Everyone wanted to know who they were because if you asked anybody in the industry, they'd say, I don't know any conservatives out here.
I don't meet any conservatives in Hollywood.
And yet there were a lot.
They just were afraid of speaking up because the left is so vindictive in California.
And I suppose this is what we mean by the phrase, the silent majority, Republicans.
Republicans, conservatives have been relying on that silent majority since Nixon, since Reagan, and all the way up through Trump.
There are different names for them.
The forgotten Americans, the great men and women of the middle of the country, whatever.
They're out there.
They're even all the way in California.
I think what Trump is seeing here is...
He doesn't need to win California for California to help him win in 2020.
It's true that Hillary Clinton won California in a landslide.
Trump got 4.5 million votes there.
4.5 million people voted for President Trump in 2016.
That was the harder election to vote for Trump because we didn't know what he was going to do.
We didn't know how he was going to behave.
He's exceeded pretty much everybody's expectations.
We were told the economy was going to collapse.
We were told we were going to go to World War III.
We were told all the terrible things would happen if Trump got elected.
Instead, pretty much everything's improved.
The economy's great.
We have record low unemployment, relative peace abroad, renegotiated trade deals.
Things are looking pretty good.
How many votes is he going to get in 2020?
Enough to win?
Almost certainly not.
But it could galvanize some support for him.
Four and a half million votes in 2016.
He also raised $333 million in California in 2016.
That's a lot of money.
What this tells you is there are Trump supporters in California.
I know probably most of them personally, but there actually are.
And this isn't even a left-right thing.
Trump made a central pillar of his fundraising swing through California, how the cities are deteriorating, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
I live in LA. LA is falling apart.
Homelessness is up 16% in just one year in LA. San Francisco is falling apart.
There's drugs all over the street.
They're decriminalizing homeless behaviors there as well.
There's public defecation on the street in San Francisco.
You don't need to be some rock-ribbed Reaganite Republican to say...
This isn't good.
Maybe we don't want this.
Maybe we want the state to move in another direction.
So I think Trump is very smart to bring this up to talk about this.
I mean, he was talking about L.A. homelessness.
Obviously, the president of the United States is probably not going to fix a municipal problem like L.A. homelessness.
but it's a symbol for the rot that comes as a result of these leftist policies.
More importantly, even than that, I think, and the reason why Trump probably should swing back through Hollywood next time he gets a chance, is just for the rest of the country, he gets to use Hollywood as a foil for him and for his policies.
That liberal vindictive Hollywood can be the foil.
It's like the anti-Trump.
I mean, we saw just a few weeks ago, the stars of Will and Grace, Eric McCormick and Deborah Messing, who Trump then nicknamed Deborah the Mess Messing in his very Trumpian way.
They came out and they called for the public naming of any Trump supporter in Hollywood.
We're talking about McCarthyite blacklists.
I even hesitate to use the term McCarthyite to describe what they were doing because at least Joe McCarthy was going after communists.
At least Joe McCarthy was going after enemies of America.
Those two, Will and Grace, were going after people who support the president and saying, they said explicitly, we want you to name their names so we know who not to work with.
We want you to name their names so we know who to blacklist, who to ruin their reputations, ruin their careers, take away their livelihood.
That is a bad look.
I mean, there was even some pushback from liberal Hollywood about that.
And Trump gets to come out there and one, trigger them.
I mean, whip them up into that frenzy.
And then show the rest of the country.
So you have genuinely a choice, not an echo.
You know, Hollywood has widespread reach.
They are exporters of culture.
And so...
Well and Grace going out and calling for a blacklist.
Maybe it won't change votes in California.
It's almost certainly not going to flip California to become some Republican state.
But that sort of vindictive leftism is not going to play in Peoria.
That vindictive leftism is not going to play in the middle of the country.
We're looking at them and saying, gosh, if I have to choose, every election is about a choice.
If I have to choose between Trump, who's given us a pretty good economy, you know, he's got some mean tweets, but whatever, they're pretty funny, and relative peace, and he actually seems pretty normal, and I get to choose between that or these lunatics out there in Hollywood.
Who am I going to pick?
Obviously, you're going to pick Trump.
President Trump.
How does he do it?
He does it because he's a Hollywood figure.
The last guy to use California in this way was another Hollywood guy, which was Ronald Reagan.
You know, the conservative movement in many ways, the post-war conservative movement, came out of California.
You had Bill Buckley in New York, and then you had Reagan in California, and you had Orange County, which used to be a Republican stronghold.
Now, after decades and decades of specifically illegal immigration, changes have made California bluer.
But there are still a lot of conservatives here.
It's a gigantic state.
I mean, you can lose a state in a landslide and still get 4.5 million votes.
It's worth swinging by.
Trump knows that.
And I think he's going to play Hollywood for all it's worth.
He's already done this with the media.
He's already done this in a lot of other left-wing places.
And it's pretty wise.
So...
Congratulations to him on the $15 million.
Glad to hear that conservatives in California are fired up about it.
That's what's going on here.
I mean, that's how the Republicans are focusing their campaigns.
What is the left doing, though?
What are the Democrats doing?
We'll get in a little bit to what some of the presidential candidates are talking about.
But over on Capitol Hill...
While the Republican Party is talking about homelessness, talking about the drug crisis, talking about the economy, the left and Democrats are talking about the sun monster.
They're talking about global warming.
They're saying global warming is going to kill us within 10 years or 12 years or 14 months or whatever.
Their big expert that they've brought in to testify on this question of global warming is not a scientist, though they always tell us about how we need to listen to the scientists.
It's not a political philosophy or a policy maker.
It's a 16-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg.
16-year-old Swedish girl who, at age 15, became best known for skipping school to protest global warming outside of the Swedish parliament.
What a racket.
Good job, kid.
Can you imagine, 15 years old, you decide you want to skip school, and then you somehow convince your parents and your teachers and the whole country and much of the leftist world to applaud you for it?
Really, really smart.
She's obviously a firecracker.
She does that at 15.
Then she starts organizing the school climate strike movement.
So she encourages other students to skip school to protest the weather.
Here is young 16-year-old Greta, the great expert that the Democrats are calling in, talking about the perils of climate change on Capitol Hill.
My name is Greta Thunberg.
I have not come to offer any prepared remarks at this hearing.
I'm instead attaching my testimony.
It is the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, the SR 1.5, which was released on October 8, 2018.
I am submitting this report as my testimony because I don't want you to listen to me.
I want you to listen to the scientists.
And I want you to unite behind the science.
And then I want you to take real action.
Thank you.
This testimony is the perfect encapsulation of leftist politics.
You have meaningless slogans uttered without any arguments by ignorant children with no respect for national borders.
That is leftism in a nutshell.
You have this girl come.
She actually was very smart not to give testimony and not to give her own remarks.
Why?
Because she's a 16-year-old girl and she doesn't know anything and it would embarrass her.
So she knew well not to do that and so she said, I'm here and my remarks are going to be the IPCC report on climate change.
Okay, what does that mean?
Here's the report.
There are a few reports from the International Panel on Climate Change.
What is the implication of it?
What is the consequence of that?
I mean, you have the left tell us we need to base our politics on science.
Politics is about how we're going to live together.
It's about what we should do.
It's not just making observations about the world.
It's interpreting the world.
It's interpreting those facts and science and observations.
and then deciding what to do with that and what the effect of that will be on how we govern ourselves.
So you can't just attach some scientific study, even if it's a highly politicized one, like the IPCC report, and say, okay, here's your government.
That's not good enough.
We're not just a machine.
There's not just a clear answer.
What we do in deliberative bodies, what we do in self-government, is interpret the world and then decide how we want to govern ourselves.
This is what the left does, though.
though.
These meaningless slogans, these constant promotion of ignorant children, some of them very overgrown children, no respect for national borders.
Why are we listening to this Swedish girl?
You couldn't even find a 16-year-old American girl to talk about this?
No, of course not.
And empty and counterproductive stunts.
So the only reason you might have heard of this girl, Greta Thunberg, is because she just pulled another big stunt.
This was only about a month or two ago.
She took a transatlantic voyage on a zero-carbon yacht.
What is a zero-carbon yacht?
I don't know.
The zero carbon yacht is a ship that she took across the Atlantic Ocean that was not going to pollute the environment, even though the ship's made of plastic.
So obviously the construction of it hurt the environment.
And it's four million pounds.
So you're looking at, what, six million dollars or more for this boat.
I mean, it was just a really nice boat, 60-foot Milizia II yacht.
It was fitted out with solar panels and underwater turbines that produced the electricity on board.
So it wasn't burning any fossil fuels.
It wasn't ostensibly harming the environment.
So she said she was going to take this carbon-free boat trip across the Atlantic to raise awareness about climate change.
The trouble for this stunt, though, is it later came out that while she did take the zero-carbon yacht across the water, so she wasn't polluting the environment by flying on an airplane, for instance, two people had to fly out to America on a jet to take the ship back to Europe.
If she had just flown to America on an airplane, she would have had much less of an effect on the environment than if she did this whole big stunt.
Two people fly out to take the boat back to Europe, and then there were other reports that two more people flew out to meet up with Greta.
Why?
Because she's a 16-year-old girl.
She needs handlers.
You're not going to go across the Atlantic Ocean and hang out in America all by herself.
So this stunt, in the end, I suppose it raised awareness, but it didn't raise awareness for global warming.
It raised awareness about the hypocrisy of environmental activists.
Again, I don't really blame her for this.
16-year-olds do this all the time.
Teenagers are constantly pulling grandiose stunts and having too much self-regard.
But I do blame the adults.
One, for exploiting her, and two, for encouraging this nonsense.
It occurred to me climate change is the perfect issue for teenagers to get upset about.
It's the absolute perfect issue because it fulfills everything teenagers are longing for.
That grandiosity, that outside self-regard, and even religious longings.
You know, we're seeing increasingly, this is certainly true in Sweden as it is here in America, that teenagers, Gen Z, and millennials were raised without religion.
But everybody has religious longings.
Everybody has a sense of the divine, a sense of purpose in the world, a hope that what they're doing has meaning, that their life has meaning.
And so because politics has become religion for the left, environmental, Environmentalism, climate change, fulfills those longings.
And for teenagers to come out and say, I'm going to save the world.
That's all you ever want to do.
I mean, when you're a teenager, you feel that you don't have power.
You feel that you're coming into your own, but you're being held back by rules, by your parents, by your schooling, by not being able to fulfill your grand dreams.
And all you want to do is go out and say, we're going to make a difference.
We're going to change the world.
They're going to get famous.
They're going to have influence.
Climate change fulfills all of that, at least in one's mind.
That's fine.
Teenagers want to do that.
Teenagers do stupid things all the time.
It's far less appropriate, though, for adults to get all revved up about this.
So she comes out there.
She does as good a job as she possibly could, I think, testifying on Capitol Hill.
And she says, I've attached the UN report.
Why is she attached the UN report?
Because she has nothing to say.
The more and more you hear the left say, we need to listen to the scientists, right?
You say, well, then how come the chief spokesman on this issue is Al Gore?
How come the other spokesman on this issue is this Swedish teenager?
I don't really hear a whole lot from the scientists.
And by the way, government isn't a scientific endeavor.
Politics isn't a scientific endeavor.
Politics is essentially about speech, about persuasion, about values, about ethics, about virtue, about how we want to live together.
I mean, these are, again, I suppose the ultimate reason why it was good to have a 16-year-old on this issue is because it's a fantasy issue.
I mean, every day we're told we have less and less time to live.
AOC says Miami is not going to exist within two years.
So that's fine.
They're talking about these fantasy issues.
But how is that going to play in 2020?
Because if they had something real to campaign on, I think they would.
I think this focus on the climate change or on AR-15s or on these really niche issues that they're going very extreme, it's coming from a place of not having anything else to run on.
Can't run on the economy.
Can't run on war.
Can't run on suffering.
Can't run on unemployment.
Can't run on any of those things.
Materially and just from a very basic level, things are going pretty well.
You see this not just on climate change.
You see this even on other longstanding issues like gun control.
You now have Democratic presidential candidates openly calling...
For gun confiscation.
Kamala Harris has come out.
She's joined Beto O'Rourke and a number of others in saying we need to not only ban assault weapons, not only stop producing them, not only stop selling them, not only buy them back, we need mandatory buybacks, which is an unbelievable Orwellian politically correct phrase, which is a euphemism for stealing.
Here's Kamala Harris talking about how she's going to steal your guns.
Assault weapons are weapons of war.
Be clear about this.
Assault weapons are designed to kill a lot of people quickly.
There is no reason that they should exist on the streets of a civil society.
The assault weapon term, which is a made-up term from just the last 30 years, I think this is the one appropriate use of it because right now Kamala Harris is taking a flamethrower to a field of straw men.
This is how you know that the left doesn't have an argument on gun control or global warming or really anything else.
The way that you know that they don't have an argument on this is they keep using all these euphemisms.
Assault weapons, mandatory buyback, weapons of war, weapons of war.
What is an assault weapon?
Conservatives ask this all the time because the definition changes every single day because it's a made up term from the 1980s that the left started to use to confuse people about semi-automatic rifles where you pull the trigger once and one round comes out and they wanted them to conflate that with fully automatic weapons which have been illegal in the United States, more or less illegal for decades and decades.
All weapons are assault weapons.
All weapons.
100% of weapons are assault weapons.
Even perfectly innocuous things can become assault weapons if you use them to assault people.
The purpose of weapons is assault.
That's what they're there for.
They're not there just to look really good mounted over your fireplace.
They're not there so that you can just clean it, you know, sitting on your front porch, spitting tobacco into a spittoon.
They're there to assault people.
They're there to shoot people.
They're there to kill people.
Weapons of war.
All weapons are weapons of war.
The chief end of weaponry is war.
It's about inflicting violence on other people.
What about mandatory gun buybacks?
This is my favorite one.
This is the one that has really cropped up over time.
First of all, even if it were just a buyback, forget the mandatory for a second.
Even if Beto and Kamala Harris were talking just about buybacks, the government can't issue a gun buyback because I didn't buy my gun from the government in the first place.
I bought my gun from a store.
I guess the store could offer to buy back my gun, but the government cannot.
I didn't get my gun from the government.
I got my gun to protect myself against the government if things ever go crazy and I got to get out of Dodge.
Then you add on the mandatory part and it gets even more ridiculous.
So it's not a buyback.
The government basically just wants to take your weapons away and they're offering to pay you a little bit for it.
When you add mandatory to it, it's no longer even buying.
I mean, buying implies the free exchange of goods and services.
It implies that you're purchasing something.
Okay, I want this good, and so I'm going to part with my money to get that good.
When you add in mandatory buyback, that's just a euphemism for theft, for stealing, for confiscation.
But they don't want to use those terms.
The left always does this.
Instead of talking about killing babies, they talk about protecting women's health care.
It has nothing to do with the actual act, which is killing babies.
But they use these euphemisms because they know the reality of it is too unpopular.
And in this case, the reality of it is unconstitutional.
We have a Second Amendment in this country.
But if you have mandatory buybacks, there's no such thing as a Second Amendment.
Now, it doesn't really matter what Kamala Harris and Beto O'Rourke say in and of itself, because their campaigns are going absolutely nowhere.
And...
They're going nowhere, actually, in part because they keep flip-flopping for political convenience on all of these important issues.
But just listen to it.
Listen to Beto O'Rourke just two or three months ago saying he's not going to take away your guns compared to Beto O'Rourke just a week ago saying, hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15s.
Are you proposing taking away their guns, and how would this work?
I am.
If it's a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield...
If the high-impact, high-velocity round, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers.
When we see that being used against children...
And in Odessa, I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15.
And that mother watched her bleed to death over the course of an hour because so many other people were shot by that AR-15.
In Odessa, in Midland, there weren't enough ambulances to get to them in time.
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.
You may not have listened to the last part of that clip because he loses you in the first sentence with one of the stupidest statements I've yet heard in this 2020 campaign, which is really saying something.
He says, yeah, we're going to ban the guns if the guns were designed to kill people.
If the weapons were designed to kill people, we're going to ban them.
What does he think guns are for?
What do these people think?
Sometimes they twist what the Second Amendment is.
The Second Amendment is about protecting you and your rights and your freedom.
But they'll say, well, it's really for hunting.
It's not.
The framers didn't add it to the Bill of Rights to protect your right to go shoot a bunny rabbit.
But even if it were, they killed the bunny rabbit.
When you go hunting, you kill the animal.
The purpose of guns is to kill people and to kill animals.
But the reason I bring up Beto is because of the flip.
How quick this was.
This is Beto just a few months ago saying, I'm not going to take your guns.
And then Beto, a week or so ago, saying, hell yes, I'm going to take your guns.
To be clear, they should have them.
If you purchase that AR-15, if you own it, keep it.
Continue to use it responsibly.
Hell yes, we're gonna take your AR-15, your AK-47.
Hell yes, we're gonna take your AR-15, your AK-47.
There it is.
And it just teaches Republicans not to trust Democrats on this issue.
And the next time that the Democrats make fun of us and they say, we're not going to take your guns.
Stop it, you catastrophists.
We're not going to take your guns.
You point to Beto O'Rourke.
You say, look, he's kind of a loser.
He's not going to have a major influence on American politics.
But the guy was a top-tier Senate candidate, and he lost.
And for a while, he was a top tier presidential candidate among the Democrats.
And then he wasn't.
But, you know, he had the Vanity Fair cover spread.
The Democrats were talking about him as though he was the next Obama.
He's still on that debate stage for some reason.
Very prominent Democrat who did it within just two or three months.
Completely flipped.
Said, he's going to take your guns.
Doesn't play very well.
You know, people know.
People get it.
The silent majority.
I guess we can't call it the silent majority like when we're talking about Trump supporters in California.
But you could at least call it the silent plurality.
You could at least call it a large group of voters who Who just see through it.
You know, we were talking earlier this week about the political philosopher James Burnham's 10 rules, 10 laws.
And the first one is everybody knows everything.
People know the AR-15s aren't the problem.
So few people, relatively, are killed each year with AR-15s.
You are between 22 and 23 times as likely to be killed with a handgun as you are with a rifle of any kind, any kind of rifle, including the dread AR-15 or AK-47.
People know this.
And this is especially true of people who actually know what weapons are, who actually have some experience with guns.
I mean, it's always so ironic that the people who are trying to take your guns, trying to abolish the Second Amendment through brute force, who are trying to regulate all of your weapons, don't actually know anything about it.
It's actually good for us.
It's good for gun owners.
It gives us an advantage because they write up some stupid law and they say, okay, now Now we'll take away your guns.
And then you make like two modifications to the gun and then you're absolutely fine.
I mean, they just did that in California.
They don't know what they're talking about.
He says, we're not going to ban any of the guns except the ones designed to kill people.
Oh, okay.
Great.
That sounds good.
I mean, I was on a Fox show last night.
I was on Martha McCallum's show with Juan Williams.
I like Juan Williams very much.
He's a very intelligent guy.
He doesn't know anything about guns.
And so he mentioned on this show how we need to ban AR-47s.
I don't bring this up just to make fun of Juan for not knowing a lot about guns.
I think he's actually representative of a lot of people on the left in this country.
Of course, there's no such gun as an AR-47.
There are AK-47.
There's an AR-15.
But the left, especially the elite left, especially the chattering class, especially the leftist politicians, they have a completely different view on guns than people who actually use them.
So they just see big scary gun.
Looks like a military gun.
Looks like an automatic weapon.
Bad.
Ban it.
Everyone's going to agree with us.
They're not.
They're not.
Everybody knows.
And we're talking about my ironic corollary to everybody knows, which is everybody knows everything and nobody knows anything.
Specifically, the people who don't know that everybody knows everything are the ones who don't know anything.
And that is disproportionately the self-appointed elite, the chattering class, the Democratic candidates for president.
They're not so clever, those guys.
They're not so smart.
Believe it or not, the hoi polloi, the proletariat, the masses of Americans are usually a little bit cleverer, a little bit smarter, a little bit wiser, a little bit more knowledgeable than those self-appointed elites.
They know what guns are for.
They know why they have guns.
They know why they have a Second Amendment.
And the issue is not...
Rifle regulations.
We've had rifle regulations before.
We'll have rifle regulations again.
I don't favor most rifle regulations.
I think most of them are unconstitutional.
That's a fair matter for public debate.
The issue here is the mandatory buyback.
People know their constitutional rights.
People do not want the government to come in and steal their property.
People do not want the government to come in, kick in the door, and take away their right to defend themselves.
That is a massive overreach.
It's a massive overreach for the candidates who are pushing it, and obviously it would be a massive overreach for the government.
And you don't need to be a gun enthusiast to oppose that.
It's the same thing of Trump in California.
Somehow the left is making even Donald Trump appealing to many liberals in California.
Even many liberals in Hollywood called out Will and Grace, Debra Messing and Eric McCormick, calling for a blacklist.
Many liberals in California hate the homelessness crisis because of democratic mismanagement in that city.
Many liberals in California hate the drug epidemic and the needles on the street and the public defecation.
You don't need to be a conservative to oppose public defecation.
I think that's an issue that crosses party lines.
Left, right, and center.
You can oppose that.
It's the same thing with these guys.
You don't need to be a rock-ribbed conservative, a Republican, a gun owner, a gun nut, like they call us.
To oppose the government coming in and stealing your property and taking away your constitutional rights.
And the more they keep this up, the better Republican chances are in 2020.
The more they keep this up, the more that silent majority or at least that silent plurality sits there and says, no, this is too far.
I can't let this happen.
I don't like the mean tweets, but I'm going to have to vote for that guy.
We actually got some even more good news on the culture this week.
So, there's some good news and there's some bad news.
We'll start with the good news first.
The number of abortions in the United States has fallen to the lowest level since 1973.
We will examine why that is.
We will examine, because there's There's a good reason why there is.
There's kind of a bad reason as to why that's happening.
But we may be turning a corner on abortion.
We'll get to that.
Then some bad news for criminal justice from the New York Times to Pope Francis.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between those two things.
And then an embarrassing report on millennials.
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We'll be right back.
Some really great news on the abortion front this week, Just after that awful story came out about the abortionist who had 2,000 baby body parts found at his home.
That was pretty gruesome and grisly.
We get a report from the Guttmacher Institute, which is a pro-abortion institute.
It's affiliated with Planned Parenthood.
They are showing that the number of abortions in the United States has fallen to the lowest level since 1973.
So what they found is that in 2017, that's the most recent year they got the numbers for, there were 862,000 abortions in the United States.
Now, that number is still so horrifying.
I mean, 862,000 babies, human persons, cute little lives, snuffed out, At the behest of their own mothers by so-called doctors whose job it is to heal and help people and who instead are using forceps and vacuums to murder them en masse.
I don't want it to sound like this is too rosy a story here.
862,000 abortions in the United States is 862,000 too many abortions.
Still, that is down From a previous report from the Guttmacher Institute from 2014 showing 926,000 abortions.
So you're down about 60,000 abortions in just three years.
That's pretty good.
And actually there were over a million abortions counted in 2011.
So the number is decreasing.
I mean, that's pretty good.
If you can save 150,000 babies a year, it's a good thing.
That's worth celebrating.
Guttmacher is also, by the way, the only entity that tries to count all of these abortions in the United States and makes inquiries of the private abortionists.
So this is pretty reliable data.
It's at least the best data that we have.
Why are abortions decreasing?
Part of the reason they're decreasing is actually that there are fewer pregnancies.
So I guess that's not great news.
I mean, we have a dying population.
We're well below replacement rate right now for the American population.
You need about 2.1 babies per couple, and we're at about 1.7.
So we're still in a tough situation.
And this has effects not just obviously on the people and not just on the health of the country, but it's one of the reasons, for instance, why we rely so heavily on immigration is our economy.
We would likely collapse if we totally cut off immigration now.
We have to import well over a million people a year legally and then another million people a year illegally.
If we just cut out the abortion and got our birth rate back up, I mean, the numbers work out almost perfectly.
We would be at replacement rate.
And the need for immigration, obviously we'd still debate whether certain immigration levels are desirable or beneficial to the country, but the need for it would disappear overnight overnight.
Almost exactly.
So that is bad news.
Still, good news that we're killing fewer babies.
And I think we're turning a corner on this.
I think we're turning a corner on this issue.
I was hosting Ben's radio show yesterday and I talked to Abby Johnson, who is a former Planned Parenthood staffer who is rising up the ranks.
And then she saw an abortion on an ultrasound and she instantly became a pro-life activist and advocate.
She left Planned Parenthood.
Now she's one of the biggest pro-life voices in the country.
Seeing that ultrasound, I think, is helping to reduce the number of abortions in the country.
You can see it.
And it's not just a little black and white blob.
You can see the baby in three dimensions really early on.
You can just tell that is a baby.
That looks like a baby.
Now, it's not even an argument.
I mean, we should know that abortion is wrong and abortion is evil.
just using our own faculties of reason and our own logic.
A person's a person no matter how small.
We know it's living, we know it's human.
You shouldn't kill innocent human life.
Simple enough, but the optics matter.
Seeing is believing.
And when you see that that's a baby, something stirs in you emotionally and you say, I can't kill that, I should not kill that.
I don't even really like babies.
You know, I'm not like a warm and fuzzy guy exactly.
I don't like puppies.
I don't like babies that much.
I like some babies, but not all babies.
But when someone hands you a baby, you're going to hold a baby.
You just feel this natural care for it.
You want to protect it.
You certainly don't want to kill it.
That is some of the good news on the culture, seeing is believing.
I saw this headline from The Guardian, the British newspaper.
And the headline said, Unborn Babies Exposed to Toxic Air Pollution.
And this was a really telling headline.
Unborn babies exposed to toxic air pollution.
Except the mainstream media, left-wing papers, don't tend to refer to unborn babies, do they?
What do they refer to?
Fetuses.
Embryos.
Clump of cells.
They don't refer to the unborn babies, which is what they are.
They don't refer to the unborn babies when they're talking about whether or not we should kill them.
They only refer to the unborn babies to pull on our heartstrings while we're talking about global warming, which is a leftist policy issue.
Then they talk about it.
You know, you never hear when some princess in the UK is about to have a baby.
Then it's the royal baby.
It's not the royal clump of cells.
It's not the royal fetus.
It's the baby.
Because we know it's a baby.
But when it's politically convenient for them, they hide it.
They can't really hide it so much anymore.
It's becoming clearer.
Those euphemisms, you know, all those deceptive slogans that the left uses to try to push their fantasies on the silent majority of people who get it, who know, who understand what's going on, those euphemisms are cracking.
They're falling apart.
And we're looking and we're saying, no, that's a baby.
Shouldn't do that.
You can scream.
You can shout your abortion.
You can have Alyssa Milano screech all she wants on Twitter.
You're not going to convince me to disbelieve my own eyes.
That's some good news on the culture.
Some bad news on the culture coming from the New York Times and from Pope Francis.
And I sort of repeat myself when I say that.
This is on the question of life imprisonment.
The left is turning against life imprisonment.
The left already opposes the death penalty almost uniformly.
Many conservatives now even oppose the death penalty.
Now they're moving to opposing life imprisonment.
And I only bring up this story in all of my humility to say, I told you so.
I called it.
I knew this would happen.
One of the arguments against the death penalty...
There are a lot of incoherent arguments.
You hear people say...
We need to get rid of the death penalty because it's better.
It would be better to lock the person up in jail forever.
It gives them hope.
It gives them their life.
It doesn't take their life away.
Then you hear people say, we need to get rid of the death penalty because the death penalty is too good for them.
Life imprisonment is way worse and we want to torture them, which I don't agree with either of those things.
But the argument that we need to get rid of the death penalty in the service of justice was never a good argument.
The reason people are clamoring against the death penalty is because they don't understand justice.
They think that the criminal justice system is only about rehabilitation.
Rehabilitation is only one of the three reasons for the criminal justice system, and it is by far the least important one.
The three reasons are rehabilitation, sure.
Also deterrence, deterring other criminals, and most importantly, retribution, punishment for the crime, justice itself.
That's the most important one.
Look, we could all use a little rehabilitation, okay?
We all have personal behaviors that we could amend.
Should we all go to prisons?
Should we all go to rehabilitation, correctional centers?
No, of course not.
There would be a mass public outcry if you took your brother who's annoying you and saying, oh, we got to get you to that correctional center so you get a little more correct, so you get rehabilitated.
You go to prison because you committed crimes.
You go to prison as a punishment and as a way to, in some way, restore and exact justice.
Justice is the purpose.
And so if you get rid of the death penalty, you're not going to have a clearer sense of justice.
You're going to have a less clear sense, and that's what's happening with life imprisonment.
So the New York Times came out with this piece a little while ago.
They said, For one inmate, a new federal law gave hope where there had been none.
Imagine at the age of 28 you're told that you're going to spend the rest of your life in prison with no chance of release.
What would you do with all that time?
There's no shame in admitting you'd want to throw in the towel.
It's a rational reaction to a hopeless situation.
Remember, we were told that the death penalty was hopeless.
Life in prison gave you hope.
Now we're told, no, that's hopeless too.
Pretty soon we're going to be told that if you have to sleep it off one night in jail, that's hopeless too.
The Times goes on.
Why bother working to improve yourself, learning something new, or making amends if nothing you do will ever make a difference?
Gary Rines, now 46, had every reason to choose that route after receiving a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
And then it goes on and talks about how he's been a good prisoner and he got his high school diploma in prison and he's like a really nice guy.
And they conclude this summer all those years of work paid off.
At a hearing on July 24th in a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania federal district court, Judge Johnny Jones III resentenced Mr.
Rines to time served.
In his case, 18 years, which includes nearly three years of pretrial detention.
That was the New York Times.
Pope Francis comes out and says basically the same thing.
I mean, the message from the Times is clear.
We need to get rid of life imprisonment.
Pope Francis said it even more clearly.
Pope Francis came out and he said, Life imprisonment is not the solution to problems.
I repeat, life imprisonment is not the solution to problems, but a problem to be solved.
That is what the Pope is saying.
This is the same Pope who came out against the death penalty just a few months ago and attempted to radically change 2,000 years of Catholic moral teaching.
This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of justice.
And we're talking about it now as though this is compassionate.
I mean, Joe Biden, did you hear Joe Biden at the debate?
Just the other night he came out and he said, nonviolent criminals should not go to prison.
Here he is.
Nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime.
What does that mean?
So if you commit fraud, if you commit bank fraud, a white collar crime, you shouldn't go to jail?
Only poor people, disproportionately ethnic minorities, only they should go to jail.
But disproportionately white, wealthy people, they should never go to jail for their crimes.
Even though fraud is a much worse crime and more serious sin than robbing a liquor store.
Doesn't make any sense.
It's a misunderstanding of justice from Joe Biden to the Pope to the New York Times.
A fundamental misunderstanding of it.
And I saw the rot setting in with the death penalty.
But everyone, a lot of conservatives oppose the death penalty too.
I don't.
Death penalty is a good thing.
It's important for the civil authority to have the death penalty.
For all three of those reasons, by the way, for retribution, for deterrence, and even rehabilitation, hanging concentrates the mind, as Dr.
Johnson pointed out.
When Dr.
Johnson, the famous English writer, said, when a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
It can really reform you, really have you make peace with your God, make some sense out of your life when you're looking at the gallows.
Regardless of that, that's a conversation for another day.
The reason the society needs the death penalty is it gives us a sense of justice.
And as that erodes, very, very quickly, as you're seeing just months later, The next punishment is going to erode, and then it's going to be no more 30 years, and then it's going to be no more 20 years, and then it's going to be no more jails, period.
And we're going to get into a smiley, smiley, correctional sense.
We're going to get rid of the criminal justice system.
It's just going to be criminal rehabilitation, giving the government more and more arbitrary power and taking away...
Our compassion for victims of crimes, taking away deterrence, and ultimately taking away justice.
Not good news.
And I will end today's show on even worse news, though it's very expected.
Millennials are bad tippers.
I'm not surprised at all.
A new study came out from creditcards.com finding that, in general, men and millennials are the worst tippers.
Now, I was a little surprised to find out that men are worse tippers than women.
Part of this might be there was one flaw with the study.
They pointed this out, I think over at Hot Air, which is that they did it just based on credit card tips.
But a lot of people tip in cash because if you've ever worked as a server, I have, you want to get the cash tips.
One, because you don't want the IRS to know about everything.
And two, because sometimes the restaurants themselves go in there and take some of your money if it's on credit cards.
But millennials don't carry cash.
So I think with millennials, it's just about tipping.
Not surprised at all.
Millennials are often excoriated as a selfish generation and all just obsessed with themselves and greedy and all in it for themselves and also broke because they have a lot of debt.
And this would seem to bear that out.
I just would like, for any of the millennials listening, hear me out.
Tip well.
Tip well.
Always tip well.
Tip your servers.
They're working a tough job.
If you ever work that job, you know it's a tough job.
They're working for tips.
Except, I guess, now in these cities that are raising the minimum wage to $700.
But generally speaking, if you're working a waiting tables job, you're working for tips, you're not going to miss the extra dollar or two.
You're not going to miss it.
You don't need it.
And if you're going out to eat, you're going out to drink, then you've got enough money to tip your server well.
Come on, millennials.
Have some self-respect.
It's not even just about them.
It's about you yourself, what kind of man you're going to be.
All right, that's my PSA for millennials.
That's our show.
We've got a lot more to get to, but we'll have to do it tomorrow.
Get your mailbag questions in.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
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