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Sept. 23, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:33
Ep. 419 - Collude-y Joe

Did President Trump collude with Ukraine? Did Joe Biden collude with Ukraine? Who’s colluding with Russia? Then, Sarah Silverman gets woke on cancel culture, more border wall gets built, and Candace Owens kills it in congressional testimony. Date: 09-23-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Did President Trump collude with Ukraine?
Did Joe Biden collude with Ukraine?
Who's colluding with Russia?
Somebody must be colluding with Russia.
We will examine the fallout from President Trump's phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and what it means for the White House and more importantly, what it means for the Biden campaign.
Then Sarah Silverman gets woke on cancel culture.
More border wall gets built.
Candace Owens kills it in congressional testimony.
And the left encourages a mentally ill child to drop out of school to help them sell socialism.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Collusion.
Lots of collusion.
Collusion all around.
President Trump, colludi Joe, all kinds of collusion.
We will examine exactly what happened because there's a lot of confusion on this story.
Collusion and confusion.
What happened?
President Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in which he allegedly asked him multiple times to investigate potential collusion between By Joe Biden when Joe Biden was vice president and Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, not the one who died, but the one who's still alive, and the Ukrainian government.
We'll get to the actual corruption allegations in a second.
Just what happened on the phone call?
The Ukrainian foreign minister, Vadim Pristaiko, says Trump did not put any pressure on the Ukrainian president during the call.
A so-called whistleblower in the intelligence community filed a complaint with the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, about the call.
But he's not actually a whistleblower.
He's a leaker because he doesn't have any direct knowledge of the phone call itself.
That's even according to CNN.
Biden is making a big issue about the call.
Congress is already calling for impeachment.
Okay, that is just setting the stage.
What is the big takeaway from all of this?
We'll get to that in a second.
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Okay, are you confused about this Ukraine call?
I am confused about this Ukraine call, but I think I've sorted it out.
The big takeaway here, the 30,000-foot view, Is that Democrats and the left are totally misplaying their hand here.
Okay, that's the political takeaway.
This is not surprising because they totally misplayed their hand on Russian collusion for three years.
They totally misplayed their hand on Stormy Daniels' campaign finance for three years.
They totally misplayed their hand on Brett Kavanaugh's allegations that he was a super-duper gang rapist or something.
They totally misplayed their hand.
Okay, they have very little in the way of facts.
That's the common thread here.
They have very little on facts in Kavanaugh, on Stormy Daniels, and on Russian collusion, on that Steele dossier.
They have very little in the way of facts here about this phone call.
Okay?
What they have a lot of is innuendo.
So they could actually use all of this to raise questions.
Even when we found out that they were hoaxes, the Russia hoax, the Kavanaugh hoax, the campaign finance I guess is still unresolved but it's going nowhere.
They could use that innuendo to raise questions.
Is Brett Kavanaugh fit to be on the Supreme Court?
You don't want to pursue it too much because the more you dig into the facts, the more you realize Kavanaugh is totally innocent.
Did Donald Trump collude with Russia?
Is he a traitor to his country?
Is he corrupt?
Is he crooked?
You don't want to dig into it too much because you dig into it with a two-year Mueller investigation, you find out he's totally exonerated on conspiracy or collusion with Russia.
But if you just raise the questions and you play it a little soft and you play it a little subtle, it actually could have worked to their political benefit.
That's what could have happened here with this phone call with Ukraine.
If they didn't call for impeachment, if they didn't call for investigations, if they just said, here's more evidence that Trump is corrupt, he's willing to abuse his power, and we're not going to impeach him for it, but this is, if they just used it to paint a picture, it could work possibly to their political benefit.
But they can't do it.
They can't underplay it.
Instead, every single time they have to overplay it.
They have to say Trump didn't just have connections to people connected to Russia.
He's working for Moscow.
And you say that's obviously not true.
We know that that isn't true.
Brett Kavanaugh didn't just party when he was in high school and college.
He's a rapist.
You can check these things.
That isn't true.
Donald Trump didn't simply try to twist the Ukrainian president's arm to get him to look into a political rival.
He's colluding.
He's breaking the law.
He's abusing his power.
And now you're going to do investigations and you're going to find out more and more about what Trump is asking about, which doesn't raise questions really about Trump.
It raises questions about Biden, which the Democrats, if they had two brain cells in their head, would want to avoid because Biden is currently their best chance at beating Trump and they're torpedoing his campaign.
What are the details here?
The details are so bizarre it will leave you scratching your head.
The details look so bad for the Bidens that you can't help but wonder why on earth would you call attention to this?
The Biden campaign or Democrats in general?
Here are the details.
I guess the main thing you've got to know is that Joe Biden's son, Hunter, is a complete degenerate.
Now, we're not talking about Joe Biden's son, Beau, who died of brain cancer.
Beau was sort of the upright Biden's son.
He was Attorney General of Delaware.
He looked like he had the political future ahead of him, and he tragically died a few years ago.
We're talking about Hunter Biden, who is a derelict degenerate.
He was discharged from the Navy one month after receiving his commission.
Why?
Because they found he tested positive for doing a bunch of coke.
His wife left him for squandering money on drugs and hookers.
You can read that in the court documents.
In 2016, Hunter decided to start sleeping with his dead brother's widow after spending a week buying crack in downtown LA. Someone pulled a gun on him while he was buying crack in downtown LA. He kept going back there.
All of this attested to.
All of this has been well reported on.
The romance didn't last very long with his late brother's widow.
And he dumped his brother's widow pretty soon thereafter.
Now, on that same trip to L.A. where he was buying crack and getting guns pulled on him, he got into a fight with somebody at a Hollywood club.
A man named Baby Down, I assume that's not his Christian name, I assume that's a nickname, Baby Down drops Hunter off at a Hertz rental car office.
Hunter takes the rental car from Hertz, drives it to Arizona.
The cops catch up with him after the Hertz staffers call the cops when Hunter Biden leaves the office.
The cops find a crack pipe, a bag with a white powdery substance, a Secret Service business card, Hunter Biden's license, and a badge from his brother's time as Attorney General of Delaware.
They find all of that on the car.
What happens to Hunter Biden?
The cops declined to press charges.
They just didn't have enough evidence, is what they said.
There's a hallmark of Hunter Biden's life is again and again and again, he gets off because his father is a prominent politician.
That's just a little background on this guy.
Now, what does that mean for the dealings in Ukraine?
It actually tells us a lot about the dealings in Ukraine.
So what happened in Ukraine is a few years ago, Ukraine's top prosecutor was looking into a money laundering scheme by a company called Burisma Holdings.
This is a classic crony company, an oligarchic type company in Ukraine.
Hunter Biden, for some reason, was on the board of Burisma Holdings and being paid $50,000 a month.
That's a lot of money, $600,000 a year.
What was he being paid all that money for?
Was he being paid all that money for his expertise on Ukrainian energy?
The guy who was getting pinched for buying crack in downtown LA? Sleeping with his brother's wife and his own wife leaves him because he squanders his money on drugs and hookers?
That guy, that's the guy who has such expertise specifically in Ukrainian energy that they pay him $600,000 a year for his expertise.
Yeah, maybe it's that, or maybe it's that he was peddling his father's influence because his father was the top diplomat at the time, right?
His father's the vice president and he's handling a lot of negotiations with Ukraine.
So what happens then, the prosecutor is looking into Hunter Biden's shady business dealings Vice President Biden then insisted that the prosecutor be removed from office.
And he said if the prosecutor wasn't removed from office, he would withhold $1 billion in Ukraine aid.
Now, Ukraine pushed back on this and they said, you don't have the power to do that.
And Joe Biden said, I'll call Barack right now and...
Show you that we're going to keep that aid unless you fire the prosecutor who's looking into my son.
Does all that sound like a conspiracy theory?
I know it does.
It does sound like a conspiracy theory.
Fortunately, you don't need to take my word for it.
Joe Biden actually bragged about doing this exact thing at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Here he is.
I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kyiv, and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee.
And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor, and they didn't.
So they said they were walking out to the press conference and said, no, we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
They said, you have no authority.
You're not the president.
The president said, I said, call him.
I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars.
I said, you're not getting a billion.
I'm going to be leaving here, and I think it was, what, six hours?
I looked, I said, I'm leaving in six hours.
If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.
Oh, son of a bitch.
Got fired.
And they put in place someone who was solid.
Okay, now how are they spinning this?
The Biden campaign is spinning this and saying he didn't like the prosecutor because the prosecutor wasn't doing enough to root out corruption.
That's a pretty detailed interest you're taking.
That's a pretty intense interest you're taking in a prosecutor in a foreign country over some local corruption or something, isn't it?
That doesn't seem to add up a whole lot.
Maybe that interest is more easily explained because the prosecutor was looking into your own son's corruption, which could reflect pretty badly on you.
Why would Biden brag about this at the Council on Foreign Relations?
Makes perfect sense politically.
You've got to get out ahead of the story.
You've got to define the story as you want.
It's not very credible the way that he's defining it, but at least he's got his story out there before this breaks.
Even left-wing media outlets aren't buying this.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So, this is Biden a few years ago trying to get out ahead of this story.
Question is, did Joe Biden actually interfere?
You know, Joe Biden tells a lot of lies.
He tells a lot of tall tales.
So did he actually do what he said that he did?
New York Times seems to think so.
Back in May, they ran the headline, Biden faces conflict of interest questions that are being promoted by Trump and allies.
So, of course, they have to say, you know, Republicans pounce.
They have to put it on Republicans.
But the Times felt this was a serious enough story to run it anyway.
And it's not just Ukraine.
So what you've got to ask yourself, this is the question.
When you want to find out if this story is true or not, if there are legs to it, Does it make sense to you that Hunter Biden got that job in Ukraine for his expertise on energy?
Discharge from the Navy for blowing too much coke, hanging around downtown LA getting guns pulled on and buying cracks, sleeping with his brother's wife, his late brother's wife, his own wife leaves him, getting pinched by the cops with drugs and all sorts of stuff in his car.
That guy, does it make sense that he got the job?
No.
Okay, so why did he get the job?
He obviously got the job because his father was the vice president.
Is that corrupt?
Yes.
Was a prosecutor looking into this?
Sure looks like he was.
Did Joe Biden take extraordinary measures, threaten to withhold a ton of money in foreign aid if that particular prosecutor wasn't fired?
Yeah, he did do that.
You got a lot of evidence here on the side of corruption from the Bidens.
And it wasn't just Ukraine.
They had the same issue in China.
A lot of shady business dealings between Hunter Biden and China while Joe was vice president.
So, while Joe Biden, then Vice President, was negotiating with the Chinese, Hunter Biden's firm received a billion-dollar private equity deal with the Chinese government.
This is according to Peter Schweitzer, who does really good research.
That private equity deal was later increased to one and a half billion dollars.
The deal came in hours before Chinese President Hu Jintao met with Vice President Biden in D.C. for the Nuclear Security Summit.
Okay.
A lot of smoke.
A lot of smoke.
Looks like there's some fire.
Joe Biden made a major tactical error here.
So he was finally confronted about this when Fox News' Peter Doocy came up to him.
He was at a state fair, and he asked Biden specifically, have you talked to your son about his foreign business dealings?
Joe Biden makes a huge error.
He goes on the record and says no.
Mr.
Vice President, how many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?
I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
I was actually on Fox News while this was happening.
I thought my segment was going to get cut because Biden was making news at the time.
So it goes right out of this moment.
They throw it back to, it was Leland Vitter had the show at that time.
And he said, all right, what's your reaction?
My first gut reaction was, if you believe that Joe Biden Never spoke to his son about his foreign business dealings.
I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
There is no way that this is credible at all.
That was just what my gut told me, right?
Turns out I was completely right because two months ago, the New Yorker reported, this is direct from the New Yorker, quote, as Hunter Biden recalled, his father discussed Burisma with him just once.
Dad said, I hope you know what you're doing.
And I said, I do.
We now have it on the record from Hunter Biden himself that he and his father spoke about not just his foreign business dealings, but specifically the Ukraine, specifically Burisma.
So what's Joe Biden going to do now?
Call his son a liar?
And even look at the specific context, the content, rather, of what he said.
According to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden said to him, I hope you know what you're doing.
Meaning, this deal looks a little shady.
This isn't totally above board.
I hope you know what you're doing.
Why else would he say that if the deal were totally kosher, totally above board?
He wouldn't need to worry about that.
I hope you know what you're doing means this could be dangerous.
This could compromise your career.
This could compromise my career.
So we have him on record as lying.
Then he makes another error.
He pounces on it, to use the popular term.
He tries to turn it, and he tries to make a big issue out of it, and he tries to turn it on Trump.
Here he is.
Here's what I know.
I know Trump deserves to be investigated.
He is violating every basic norm of a president.
You should be asking him the question, why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader, if that's what happened.
That appears what happened.
You should be looking at Trump.
Trump's doing this because he knows I'll beat him like a drum.
And he's using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me.
Everybody looked at this and everybody's looked at it and said there's nothing there.
ask the right questions.
Everybody's looked at it, said there's nothing there.
You had Politico, you had the New Yorker, you had a ton of left-wing outlets very recently saying Hunter Biden might sink Joe Biden's chances.
A lot of people are looking at it, but they're not coming to the conclusions.
Biden is.
It is bad for Biden to put this in the news.
What Biden should have done is said, this is no big deal.
Trump's desperate.
He's calling Ukraine to get them to look into me because he knows I'm going to beat him.
It's no big deal.
It's old news.
Forget about it.
That's what he should have done.
That would have been the Bill Clinton approach.
It used to work for Bill Clinton a whole lot.
Instead, he made a big issue out of it.
Go ask Trump questions.
Bad idea to go ask Trump questions because then Trump is going to be able to use this to smush Joe Biden as he's already beginning to do.
So now there are calls for President Trump to release the transcript of his phone call.
And there's a real question about whether or not he should do this.
I actually think he should not do this.
Not politically.
I think politically it would help him if he releases the transcript of the Ukraine phone call.
But I think it's just bad as a matter of statecraft because you want foreign leaders to feel as though they can speak freely when they're talking to the president.
If he's going to just release it to the press every time they have a phone call, it really erodes that trust.
I think it's a bad idea.
It's bad for the office of the president.
But That aside, all of that aside, President Trump says he would be willing to do it.
Why?
Because he knows this plays to his political advantage.
This is a very dishonest thing that Joe Biden did.
And then he said he never spoke to his son.
Does anybody believe that one?
But then he also said long before that he did speak to his son.
So he lied again.
But what he said is that he wouldn't give, I think it was billions of dollars, to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor who was looking at his son and his son's company, the company that his son works with.
And that's a very dishonest thing.
And I'm not looking to hurt Biden.
I'm not even looking to hold him to it, to be honest.
But he said a very bad thing.
He said a very foolish thing.
Now, me, on the other hand, my conversation with the president, the new president of Ukraine, was perfect.
They put out a statement last night.
They said the same thing.
It was a warm, friendly conversation.
There was no quid pro quo.
There was nothing.
It was a perfect conversation.
Classic, classic Trump move.
My conversation with Ukraine wasn't just good, wasn't just appropriate, it was perfect.
Couldn't have had, you never had a better conversation.
Okay, folks, this is the most beautiful conversation.
So he's playing this perfectly.
He actually is.
I don't know if the conversation was perfect, but the way he's playing this politically is really perfect.
You notice he's not going that hard after Biden.
He lands the punch.
He says, Biden lies, we know he lied.
We have him on record lying.
But look, I don't want to hurt Joe that bad.
It's just he said a wrong thing.
He said a dishonest thing.
Trump doesn't need to go that hard after Biden because he can send his hounds to go hard after Biden.
He can send Rudy Giuliani to go on Sunday talk shows, as he did on Fox News this past Sunday, and totally drop the bomb.
And here is the bomb that very well may end for all Joe Biden's campaign.
When Biden got the prosecutor fired, the new prosecutor, who Biden approved, you don't get to approve a prosecutor in a foreign country unless something fishy is going on.
The new prosecutor dropped the case not just on Biden's kid and the crooked company that Biden's kid worked for, Burisma.
That was done as a matter of record in October of 2016, after the guy got tanked.
He also dropped a case on George Soros' company called Antac.
Antac is the company where there's documentary evidence that they were producing false information about Trump, about Biden.
Fusion GPS was there.
Go back and listen to Nellie Orr's testimony.
Nellie Orr says that there was a lot of contact between Democrats and the Ukraine.
Well, I have all the contacts.
And John, when the rest of this comes out, And we look at China and the 1.5 billion that the Biden family took out of China, while that guy was negotiating for us, this will be a lot bigger than Spiro Agnew.
They have fallen into a trap.
He's right.
They have fallen into a trap.
That is the way to say it.
Rudy Giuliani is not always great on these Sunday shows.
He's made a lot of missteps as Trump's lawyer, and he's caused a lot of headaches at times for the White House.
This is Rudy Giuliani at his best.
I mean, this is that classic 90s Rudy Giuliani, just great prosecutor, slick as can be, and he's diagnosing it correctly.
All these questions that Joe Biden doesn't want raised or have been raised because Joe Biden handled this matter in a stupid way.
A lot of the ire that's coming up, a lot of the fake ire that's coming up about Trump on the Ukraine call comes from the fact that Rudy Giuliani was on the call too.
So what they're saying is it wasn't the White House counsel that was on the call with you.
It was your personal lawyer.
And if it's your personal lawyer, it's a campaign matter.
And if it's a campaign matter, then it's illegal.
And if it's illegal, then...
They're drawing a distinction without a difference.
So it's true.
The personal lawyer was on here, not the White House counsel.
There were also lots of government officials on the call.
There were a lot of people in the intelligence community on the call, not just in the United States, but in Ukraine too.
The president is the president.
He's one guy.
Okay, so his actions don't fundamentally change their character based on who is sitting next to him.
If the White House counsel were sitting next to him on the call and he asked Ukraine multiple times to look into Joe Biden, you would be seeing the same news story.
It would be exactly the same thing.
But it's more convenient for them because Rudy Giuliani was sitting next to him.
He was on the call too.
So then you can go after him.
Here's what I know.
The left doesn't learn anything, okay?
They spent three years trying to impeach Trump for collusion and Stormy Daniels and probably for eating two scoops of ice cream at dinner.
It hasn't worked and they've spent their credibility.
Was Trump's call with Ukraine appropriate?
I don't know.
I don't know that it was.
Maybe it wasn't.
Definitely.
I know it's not uncommon.
I mean, but it sort of skirts a line.
I mean, if you've got the state, if you've got the president of the United States using his office to specifically request that someone look into your political opponent, that skirts a line.
That's probably not totally kosher.
I think everyone does it, but I don't know.
Is it illegal?
I don't really see evidence that it's illegal, but you know, sure, it's a little dodgy.
I have no idea whether it was appropriate by the letter of the law.
What I do know is Trump will face no consequences for this.
The other thing I know is that this will backfire on Joe Biden.
It's not that President Trump is pure as the driven snow.
It's that anything you can accuse Trump of, you can double accuse Biden of.
Trump is dishonest, you say?
Joe Biden is one of the most famous liars in American politics.
He had to drop out of the presidential race in 1988 because he was lying so much.
He's been called out even by the left-wing press for multiple major lies even recently.
Trump is nepotistic and corrupt?
Joe Biden literally threatened to withhold American aid to Ukraine if they didn't stop looking into his son and let him off the hook for his corruption.
A lot worse than anything Trump's been accused of in terms of nepotism and corruption.
Trump is old, you say?
Joe Biden is older than Donald Trump.
Anything you throw at Trump is truer of Joe Biden.
This is Hillary 2.0.
I think Democrats are sick of it.
I think they went with Hillary in 2016 because it was her turn and probably because they didn't want to get suicided with two bullets in the back of the head.
I don't know.
I'm not saying.
I don't know why.
Why would they want to do it again?
Why would they want Hillary again?
Another old crook who Democrats don't really like that much and who very likely would get crushed by Trump in 2020.
If Biden were smart, he would have let it slide, he would have downplayed it, but he can't resist, and I think this is very likely the beginning of the end for him.
We're seeing it in real time.
The latest Des Moines Register or CNN Mediacom Iowa poll, which was just released on Saturday night, which is actually before a lot of this blew up, shows that Warren's support among registered Democrats is now above Joe Biden's in Iowa.
She's at 22 percent.
He's at 20 percent.
Still within the margin of error, but you see the trend line is moving for Warren.
That's in Iowa.
First caucus.
If Biden loses Iowa, he's done.
Bad news for Democrats generally.
Biden is the only candidate for black support.
He's the only one that has basically any black support.
So, the Democrats need black support to win the general election.
Joe Biden has all the black support, at least of the top tier candidates.
But he's losing Democrat support overall, which puts Democrats in a much, much tougher position.
Very tough week for them.
So let's get off of politics.
Let's turn to the culture.
Sarah Silverman gets woke on cancel culture.
Good news on the border.
Candace Owens kills it on Capitol Hill.
And some really disturbing stuff from the left on climate change.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
The Emmys were last night.
Didn't know about it?
Yeah, I didn't really notice that much either.
This was the lowest rated Emmys of all time.
The Emmys don't matter anymore.
Ratings sunk to an all-time low.
They were down 23% over last year.
Down almost a quarter over last year.
Last year's show was on a Monday night.
Compared to the last time that the Emmys were on a Sunday night, ratings were down even worse.
It was 30%.
This is pretty devastating.
Now, you might be wondering, who hosted the Emmys last night?
No one.
No one.
They can't get a host of the show.
No one wants to host these shows.
One, because nobody's watching it.
And two, because the minute you host the show, cancel culture is going to come out and ruin your life and ruin your career like they did to Kevin Hart.
Like they do to anybody now who comes out to host these shows.
So no one wants to do it.
No one would accept it.
Even Sarah Silverman, who is a left-wing comedian.
I mean, she is avowedly leftist.
She was asked why there was no host, why she wouldn't take the host.
And she said it's obvious cancel culture is making it such that no one would ever want that job.
They cut us off at the knees.
There isn't even a host anymore in these shows.
They don't want comedians to talk.
Did you offer to step in?
No, nobody wants to do it either.
I mean, it's thankless.
It's a thankless job.
She's right.
Not only is it thankless, it can ruin your career.
When even Sarah Silverman is coming around to a conservative critique of the culture, you know you've gone too far.
And the term cancel culture gets thrown around a lot and people don't seem to know exactly what it is.
Cancel culture is political correctness with teeth.
Political correctness is the speech codes and the behavior codes that the left has been pushing for, at this point, very prominently for 30 or 40 years and really for longer than that.
Cancel culture is what happens, what the left will do to you when you transgress those speech and behavior codes.
So 10 years ago, Kevin Hart makes some gay jokes.
He gets canceled.
He's going to host the Oscars.
They ruin his career.
Last, oh, just a little while ago, a couple weeks ago, that new Saturday Night Live cast member was discovered to have made jokes about how Chinese people sometimes substitute the L for the R when they're speaking English, which is an obvious joke and an obvious fact that we've all heard.
He made that joke a year ago.
They canceled him.
They got him fired.
Scarlett Johansson last year said that actresses should be able to play people that they are not.
She said she should be allowed to play a trans woman.
Which, by the way, if trans women are real women, then why can't a woman play a trans woman?
A lot of questions that are raised there.
But the broader point is that actors can play people that they are not, which is the definition of acting.
That's all she said.
They tried to go after her.
She was forced to apologize for that.
That's cancel culture.
Cancel culture comes fundamentally from a place of weakness.
You cancel someone when you can't refute what they're saying or when you can't even tolerate that somebody somewhere has a different opinion than you do.
The same is PC. The same as PC is you distort language because you can't win an argument using clear language.
So instead of actually using clear expression, what you have to do is pervert the language itself, and that way you win from the very beginning by setting up an impossible situation for your opponent.
A very, very small group of people support this.
This is the way cancel culture has always worked.
Cancel culture is you get a very tiny group of activists, and you get them to put a lot of repeated pressure on a company or an advertiser corporation, and you pressure them to fire whoever the person is that you don't like, and then they do it.
Because even when you're customer service for Pepsi, if you get calls from 30 or 40 people saying, cancel Michael Knowles, cancel Andrew Klavan, cancel Ben Shapiro, You just do it because you think it's a whole mob, but it's not.
How do we know it's not?
I mean, this is how Media Matters works, or Sleeping Giants is another one of these leftist organizations that have like 30 people working for them, but they make it seem like they have 300 million people.
The way I know this is true is because our pals here at The Daily Wire, before The Daily Wire existed, had a website called Truth Revolt, and they said, look, we're going to do to the left what the left does to us, and we're going to show you how bad it is.
So they had 30 or 40 people on call, And whenever some leftist would do something they didn't like, they would get the 30 or 40 people to go out and call the advertisers and boycott them and try to get the guy fired.
And it worked.
But it's 30 or 40 people.
It's not real.
It's just an illusion.
Most people hate that.
I mean, even our pals here hated it when they were doing it.
They just said that the right shouldn't unilaterally disarm in the face of the left.
So most people hate it.
I think we're going to see the same sort of backlash on cancel culture that you saw with political correctness.
The backlash to political correctness in many ways and pretty explicitly ushered President Trump into the White House in 2016.
You're seeing a backlash to that.
You're seeing a backlash already to cancel culture, even Sarah Silverman.
In many ways, it's going to be led by the comedians because when you've got a stifling, totalitarian sort of environment, the easiest way to crack it, to put a little chink in that armor, is to tell some jokes, to make fun of it, to laugh at it.
That's a way that totalitarian regimes and totalitarian cultures cannot stand to be laughed at.
They can't laugh at themselves.
They can't have any sense of humor.
Fanatics never have any sense of humor.
So that's one way we're seeing this breakdown now.
Meanwhile, you're getting great news on the political front.
While you have people screaming and hissing and talking about how President Trump is committing genocide because he's enforcing immigration laws, You have the majority of Americans supporting the enforcement of immigration laws and it's going along pretty well.
Good news at the border, the Department of the Interior is transferring 560 acres of federal land to the Department of the Army, which means that this land is now going to be used to construct another 70 miles of border wall, and they're being pretty smart about it.
The land that they're using is...
Land that doesn't have national parks on it.
It doesn't have Indian tribes on it.
It's pretty wide open to be used.
So while the craziness and the hysteria goes on in those small little groups of cancel culture leftists, conservatives are doing the slow and steady work of fixing up the culture.
You saw this in Los Angeles.
The Persistence, big Trump supporter, came out and a bunch of Trump supporters led a major cleanup that cleaned up tons and tons, literally tons and tons, of trash in LA. They're going about doing the work and those steady results, I think, are going to get a lot of appreciation from the American people who aren't going to get fooled by cancel culture.
Over on Capitol Hill, Candace Owens, our pal, was giving congressional testimony.
She was giving congressional testimony on what it's like to be black in America.
Her other panelists who were going off on her, who were invading against her, were all white.
She was black.
It got me thinking, though, about privilege.
It got me thinking about white privilege.
It got me thinking about the way that racial politics play into all of this craziness.
Here's Candace's excellent testimony.
The audacity of you to bring up the Christ Church shooting manifesto and make it seem as if I laughed at people that were slaughtered by a homicidal maniac is, in my opinion, absolutely despicable.
And I think that we should be above that.
To try to assign reality or any meaning to a homicidal maniac writing a manifesto, which, by the way, Let the Record Show also stated Spyro the Dragon, the child's cartoon, as a source of inspiration.
He also cited Nelson Mandela as a source of information.
I don't think that Nelson Mandela has inspired mosque shootings.
You can correct me if you think I'm wrong.
You would rather assign meaning to a homicidal maniac Than to actually address the things that I said today that are actually harming black America.
Number one, father absence.
Number two, the education system and the illiteracy rate.
Illegal immigration ranks high.
Abortion ranks high.
White supremacy and white nationalism, if I had to make a list again of 100 things, would not be on it.
This hearing, in my opinion, is a farce.
And it is ironic that you're sitting here and you're having three Caucasian people testify and tell you what their expertise are.
Do I know my expertise are black in America?
I've been black in America my whole life, all 30 years.
And I can tell you that you guys have done the exact same thing every four years ahead of an election cycle.
And it needs to stop.
Absolutely devastating.
Devastating stuff.
The left overplayed their hand.
Okay, the left has always done very well on racial politics, at least for the last 60, 70 years.
They've done very well on racial politics.
Not because of the facts.
I mean, it's pretty amazing that the Democratic Party, which is the party of slavery, the party of the Ku Klux Klan, the party of Jim Crow, the party that opposed civil rights.
That that party, the party that even if you don't want to assign malice to the welfare state, through their welfare state programs has destroyed the black family and set black Americans back 50, 60 years.
That party always did very well.
That movement, that leftist movement always did very well on racial politics because it was all innuendo.
So it's all, those Republicans are racist.
They don't like you.
Those conservatives, they don't like you.
Forget about our policies.
Forget about the effect of what we do on black America.
Just, look, they don't like you.
We like you.
So, hey, we're good, right?
And it worked.
It's worked pretty well.
If they just kept up the innuendo.
I think it would continue to work for them.
If they just kept up the innuendo, Trump is corrupt.
Trump is colluding with Russia.
Now he's colluding with the Ukraine, even though Russia and the Ukraine don't like each other, but somehow he's colluding with both of them.
Trump is doing this.
Trump is doing that.
If they just kept it at the innuendo, it would work.
But they don't.
They have to go too far.
They have to overplay their hand.
You know, I think if you asked people, is there white privilege?
Is there certain privilege to being white in America?
Yeah, probably there is.
Here's a good example.
Candace touched on it.
Black people in America are three times as likely to be killed by abortion as white people are.
There are more black babies killed before they're born in New York City than are born That is a white privilege.
Based on your skin color, you are more likely to survive birth.
And by the way, that's not just a cultural matter.
That is a political matter.
Mostly white people in government are pushing those policies.
Mostly white liberal activists are encouraging black mothers to murder their babies.
And mostly white people in government are forcing you and I to subsidize that with our taxes.
That's a pretty sick white privilege, but it is a white privilege, and it's a very important one.
Now, look, everybody gets privileges.
I mean, there's a black and Hispanic privilege when you apply for college admissions.
This has been codified through a policy called affirmative action.
Affirmative action is race discrimination.
It helps people who are black and Hispanic and Native American and other races.
It hurts people who are white and Asian.
There's a major lawsuit now against Harvard because of discrimination against Asians.
It's a very important one.
You can argue all you want and say the policy is good.
We need this racial discrimination because we need to address past injustices.
A fair conversation to have.
But the policy itself is race discrimination.
Without race discrimination, there is no policy.
So I guess you could call that a black privilege or a Hispanic privilege.
You can get down to a lot of different privileges, not just based on your race, but based on your sex, based on where you're born, based on whether you had two parents growing up.
We all have the privilege of life.
We didn't earn our life.
We are not responsible for creating our life.
Life is a gift that was given to us.
We have a responsibility to be stewards of our life.
That life will be taken away from us at the end, probably without very much consent, as what usually happens.
We all have wonderful privileges that we should be grateful for.
You don't even need to deny them.
We also all have suffering.
I could go through a list of tough things that happened in life, really raw breaks that you don't want to get.
You don't know somebody's suffering, and their suffering isn't based on their race.
Usually it's not based on their race at all.
It's based on their circumstances, their personal circumstances.
Everybody has those things.
You could have a mature conversation about that.
And I think ultimately what that would lead to is a society of gratitude when we count our blessings, which far outnumber our sufferings.
Even though the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike and falls on the rich and the poor alike and the black and the white alike and everybody else.
Our blessings that weigh our sufferings.
That's good.
That would be a good conversation to have.
But the left can't have that conversation.
One, because it would take away the racial grievance which is at the heart of so much of their identity politics.
Candace Owens totally smacking that down.
Really brilliantly.
And it also got me thinking about the climate issue.
There's this poor girl, Greta Thunberg, who's a 16-year-old autistic girl from Sweden.
And the left has pimped her out and made her the spokesman for climate change.
It's kind of funny.
They say climate change is the scientific movement.
And yet the leader of the movement is a 16-year-old girl from Sweden.
And their policies, the most prominent one now with those plastic straws, is based not on a scientific study, but on the homework assignment of a 9-year-old boy named Milo Kress.
That's where the straw thing comes from, is a homework assignment from a fourth grade boy.
Not a scientific study.
So I don't see a whole lot of science there.
They had a big climate change hullabaloo weekend, and they had all of these different what we would call religious rituals.
They had climate confessionals on NBC. They had climate services.
They had a funeral for a glacier.
I don't know what that looks like.
They had climate anxiety support groups, which is more or less a secular church service.
But what they did to this girl is really awful.
It's really awful and it's going to prompt a backlash because yet again they are overplaying their hand.
This is this girl Greta Thunberg was just speaking to the UN and she's highly emotional.
She's highly censorious.
She's obviously not speaking from any scientific expertise.
She's a 16 year old girl.
Here's what she had to say.
This is all wrong.
I shouldn't be up here.
I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
Yet you all come to us young people for hope.
How dare you?
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
People are suffering.
People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you?
Performance, not that great, but it goes too far.
It goes too far.
And people look at this, and I think they say, you know, left, you've gone too far.
What the left has done is encouraged a 16-year-old mentally ill girl to drop out of school sporadically to help them sell socialism.
I say she's mentally ill because she has autism.
She's autistic.
And her parents and the international left, international left, she's at the UN, Are totally taking advantage of this girl who has a mental illness.
They are whipping her up into a frenzy and making her think she's going to die.
They make this girl think, I mean, this girl has all the advantages in the world and she says that we've all stolen her dreams from her.
She's giving a speech at the UN, whatever that means.
It's easy to make fun of her.
It's easy to say she should go to timeout or something or be grounded for this kind of stuff.
Let her calm down.
Maybe get her a psychologist and a nap or something.
But It's not her fault.
She's a mentally ill teenager.
It's her parents and it's the left broadly that are doing this.
That is so egregious.
That is so wicked to do that to somebody.
Everybody knows that.
Everybody sees that.
It's overplaying the hand.
I mean, they had already overplayed their hand on the climate.
If you just said to people, hey, the climate's really getting bad.
Oh, what's happening to the climate?
Oh, it's cooling down.
That's what they said in the 70s.
The climate's cooling and that's really bad.
So we gotta, you know, you gotta give us socialism.
I bet a lot of people would have gone along with it.
Then even in the 90s when they said, yeah, the climate's really, really bad.
It's, what's wrong with the climate?
Oh, it's heating up.
Seems like a good thing, because it was just cooling down, and now it's heating up, so problem solved, right?
No, no, no, it's actually bad.
We used to want it to heat up, and now we want it to cool down, so it's bad.
You've got to give us socialism.
I think a lot of people would have gone along with that.
Then you had Al Gore make his movie.
Say, look, global, look, we're scientists, okay?
Global warming, it's going to, or whatever it is now, climate change is going to kill us.
You've got to give us socialism.
And people said, wait, I thought it was the scientists.
Why is Al Gore?
Al Gore's not a scientist.
No, well, okay, never mind.
Even then I think they would have gone along with it.
But now you have climate confessionals, religious rituals, the sale of indulgences in carbon tax credits, and you make the face of this movement an autistic teenager who you're pulling out of school, depriving her of an education, whipping her up into an emotional frenzy, ruining her life.
It's too far.
You've gone too far.
You've overplayed your hand, which they always do.
Good news for conservatives.
Good news for the culture.
Bad news for the victims of the left.
It always is.
That's our show.
Come back tomorrow.
We've got a lot more.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
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