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Oct. 2, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:17
Ep. 425 - Democrats Are Doing Everything Wrong

As Democrats in Congress burn down their 2020 frontrunner, give Trump a major fundraising advantage, and scare away independent voters, a serious question arises: are Democrats trying to lose this thing? We examine why the Left can’t get anything right. Then, an Obama-appointed federal judge rules that Asians aren’t being discriminated against at Harvard—they just have terrible personalities—and the Washington Post gives us the dumbest article on the Internet today. Date: 10-02-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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As Democrats burn down their 2020 presidential frontrunner, they give President Trump a major fundraising advantage, and they scare away independent voters, according to a new poll, a serious question arises.
Are Democrats trying to lose this thing?
We will examine why the left can't get anything right.
Then, an Obama-appointed federal judge rules that Asians are not being discriminated against at Harvard.
She rules that they just have terrible personalities.
We will take a look at that case if it's heading up to the Supreme Court.
And finally, the Washington Post, of course, gives us the dumbest article on the internet today.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Democrats are doing everything wrong.
Now, this sounds like it could be just the logline of my show.
It sounds like this could just be the general statement.
But I'm not saying they're doing everything wrong morally or they're doing everything wrong as a matter of policy.
I'm saying, politically speaking, they're doing everything wrong.
It's not as though President Trump is a completely bulletproof candidate in 2020.
He has vulnerabilities.
He's trying to address those right now.
But he does have weaknesses.
The trouble is here for the Democrats, they just can't win for losing.
They've got three major problems that are only getting worse for them by the day.
The first one is they are destroying their presidential frontrunner.
So Joe Biden is at the top of the pack for now.
I don't know.
By the time you listen to this tomorrow or the next day after we record, that might not be the case anymore.
He has really got slim margins now.
But he consistently polls the highest against President Trump in the general election.
Part of this is he's the only candidate who's a top-tier candidate who has black support.
Part of this is he's one of the few candidates that people don't think is a completely crazy leftist, even though he's willing to pander to the left as much as he wants because he doesn't really believe anything.
But he's still the top-tier candidate for them right now, and the Democrats are burning him to the ground.
Now, while they burn him to the ground, they're using a specific instrument to burn him to the ground, which is impeachment and specifically talking about his business dealings in the Ukraine and his son's business dealings in the Ukraine.
While they do that, while they're burning him to the ground with impeachment, they're giving President Trump a major fundraising advantage.
And as they're doing all of this, they are scaring independent voters mad.
So there's a new poll out from Monmouth University shows that a plurality of voters believe that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to stop investigating his son.
This is the first poll, and I think the only poll to my knowledge, that asked this question.
They said, do you think that Joe Biden used the federal government to pressure the government of the Ukraine to stop looking into his son's crooked affairs?
42% of respondents said he probably did that.
37% said he probably did not do that.
22% don't know.
Regardless of what happened, and I know we've been covering some of the facts of that case for a week or so now, regardless of whether or not it happened, the worst news for Biden is that the plurality of people think it happened.
More people think it happened than think it did not happen.
And this is not just a party-line vote.
It's not just 42% of Americans like Trump so they just believe him when he says that Joe Biden was crooked in Ukraine.
It doesn't break down that way.
Actually, if you look further into the poll...
16% of Republicans don't think that Joe Biden did anything wrong in Ukraine.
Pretty interesting number.
Even more interesting than that is that 19% of Democrats do believe that Joe Biden engaged in some crooked behavior in Ukraine.
So people are paying attention to this issue.
When the issue first came up on TV, I said, any way Biden plays this, he's going to lose.
Unless he just brushes it off and tries to ignore it and tamp it down, he's going to lose.
Because just the fact that it's in the news is going to hurt his poll numbers.
It already is.
So the Democrats are burning down their top-tier candidate.
And they're doing it in an effort to impeach Trump.
Don't forget, if they weren't currently trying to impeach Trump, the Ukraine issue would not exist.
This Ukraine issue goes back to 2014.
You had ABC's John Carl asking Obama's White House Press Secretary Jay Carney about this issue five years ago in 2014.
It then came up again in 2016.
But again, the mainstream media and the left didn't want to talk about it, so they didn't have to talk about it.
Even two months ago, I was sitting in a Fox green room, and I was talking to Dan Bongino, who has a great podcast, and Dan said, watch out for this Ukraine thing.
If Biden doesn't play his cards right, this is going to become a big campaign issue.
Even then, this was just a few months ago, I still didn't know exactly what was going on over there.
So Democrats are so focused on impeaching Trump right now, Why are they willing to burn down Biden?
A few possible reasons.
One is they don't have faith that Joe Biden is the candidate who's going to beat Trump.
Fair enough.
If you looked at his performances at the last Democratic debates, I don't think you would have much faith in Biden either, even if you were a Biden supporter or a Democrat supporter.
So what...
One possibility is they look at Biden and they say, there's no way this guy's going the distance.
Whatever.
Let's impeach Trump.
It's going to take out Biden, but then we'll deal with Bernie or Elizabeth Warren or somebody.
That's one option.
The other one is they don't really care about beating Trump.
I don't think Nancy Pelosi really wants to beat Donald Trump.
Why not?
Because now she's the minority, or rather she's the Speaker of the House, but she doesn't have the Senate and she doesn't have the White House.
So she gets to grandstand, she gets to be the Speaker of the House, she gets to raise a lot of money, she gets to now especially try to keep her caucus in line.
I don't know.
She's willing to impeach him if it means it's going to help her keep control of the House.
Absolutely plausible.
But either way, it's a kamikaze mission.
And it gives President Trump a major fundraising advantage.
So we just got the Q3 numbers out.
In the third quarter, President Trump raised $125 million.
Now, we hear these numbers all the time, so sometimes it's difficult to keep track of what you're supposed to raise if you're an incumbent in this quarter versus that quarter.
Just to put it in perspective, when Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2011, this was the last time we had an incumbent who was running for re-election, he raised $70 million in the third quarter.
And he won that election, don't forget.
He was re-elected.
So he raised $70 million.
Trump nearly doubled that in the third quarter of 2019, 125 million bucks.
How did he raise all that money?
One of the key reasons why he raised all that money, impeachment.
So after Nancy Pelosi goes out there and says, we are going to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
The Trump campaign didn't run and hide.
The Trump campaign didn't cry.
They followed Rahm Emanuel's advice, which is never let a good crisis go to waste.
So they immediately started sending out fundraising emails.
They brought in $8.5 million in just two days.
That is a lot of scratch.
Think about that.
President Obama, 2011, raises $70 million in the entire third quarter.
Trump raises $8.5 million two days because of impeachment because people don't like this.
They don't like being told that we have a presidential election and then you elect the guy that you want to elect and then immediately you're told, nope, sorry, that doesn't work so we're going to try to remove him for collusion.
We're going to try to remove him for a porn star.
We're going to try to remove him for colluding with a different government.
They're just going to undo it.
People hate that and it looks like it's backfiring.
This backs up what I have been saying all along.
Impeachment is a huge win for Trump.
He should be hoping for impeachment.
Let's not forget, impeachment helped the Clinton administration in the 90s.
Now, it helped Bill Clinton personally.
It helped the Democrats in the 90s pretty well because the American people thought it was a bit of an overstep.
Maybe the Democrats are playing the long game here because don't forget in the 90s, you've got all these investigations into Clinton going back to the first term.
Then Newt Gingrich wins in the Gingrich Revolution.
Republicans take the House in 1994.
And then there's more blowback against him.
Newt Gingrich eventually resigns as Speaker.
Bill Clinton obviously is reelected.
But then in 2000, George W. Bush won the White House, more or less running against Bill Clinton.
And Bill Clinton didn't play a huge role on the campaign trail for Al Gore's.
So maybe Democrats are playing the long game here.
This, to me, is one of the more plausible theories, which is, for all their talk, they don't think they're going to beat Trump in 2020.
I don't think they're going to beat Trump in 2020.
I guess it's possible.
I just don't think it's going to happen.
So for them, they're going to run really hard against Trump.
They're going to try to raise some money, galvanize some support, and play for a longer game when they've got better candidates.
Because the candidates they have right now are not talented.
Joe Biden is well past his prime if he ever had a prime.
Bernie Sanders, same thing.
Elizabeth Warren, now they're touting her as the great central candidate.
She has a lot of flaws.
She has a terrible voice.
She panders to everybody.
She's radically left-wing, at least for recent years.
And let's not forget, she pretended to be an Indian for her entire career, to her own professional advantage.
Lia Watha.
That doesn't just go away.
We're not really talking about it now.
Trump is not going to let up on that.
And I think it does really hurt her with particularly racial minority voters.
And you see this reflected in her poll numbers.
So, President Trump right now is making a killing on impeachment.
And you don't need to just look at the fundraising numbers to see that.
We also have more polls that are just spelling doom for the Democrats.
This is a very big...
It's not even quite a poll.
It's an election experiment that is coming out of the New York Times.
So keep this in mind.
Here's the context.
Joe Biden's lead is now down to just 4.2% according to RealClearPolitics.
Don't forget, this guy started, he was the leader of the pack, double-digit leads.
Now, according to Real Clear, which looks at all of the polls, he's down to 4.2% lead.
By the time this podcast is actually published, who knows what it's going to be.
The New York Times now is reporting on a new election survey experiment.
Here's the experiment.
They took just about 4,000 Americans, 3,973 Americans, and this was conducted by a democratic data firm, Chivis Analytics, and And over one week, they took half the participants and they showed them news articles about the Democrats' leftward shift.
So that was half the participants.
And then the other half of the participants saw news snippets of just random information.
You know, election dates and that sort of stuff.
What they were trying to measure is the effect of news about the Democrats' leftward shift, what that does to independent voters.
These were all so-called independent voters.
So the news that they showed them was news about decriminalizing southern border crossings.
It was news about expanding illegal aliens' right to welfare and government services.
It was news about how we're going to get rid of our healthcare system and replace it with a government-run system.
It was news about free school, free college for all children, for everybody.
These were all, by the way, these weren't just made up.
It's not like they wrote them like a work of fiction.
These were pulled from actual news stories.
What was the result?
Independence became six full percentage points less likely to vote for Democratic candidates after reading the news about the leftward shift.
And this has been the Trump campaign strategy all along, which is appeal to moderates, appeal to independents, appeal to normal people who object to pretending to be an Indian for 30 years of your career, and object to free healthcare for illegal aliens, and object to reparations for slavery, and object to a $93 trillion Green New Deal environmental bill.
And just normal people, you know, the only sort of people who could ever get behind those kind of radical ideas are highly over-credentialed elites in the media and politics.
Normal Americans, people between the two coasts, people who don't live in politics all day long, don't like that sort of stuff.
And now we have an experiment showing, and this is a Democratic firm, and this is coming from the New York Times, six full percentage points less likely.
So what does that mean?
We know the leftward lurch is happening.
We've been seeing that happen the whole time.
We've been seeing the Democrats willing to kill off their frontrunner, kill off Joe Biden.
And we've been seeing that they're cottoning now to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The media want Elizabeth Warren.
They really want her to be the nominee.
I will prove it to you that they're going for Warren, and we will examine what that means for 2020.
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So we know the leftward lurch is happening.
We know the media want Elizabeth Warren.
The one way that you can tell who the media want to be the Democratic nominee is how they joke about that person.
So Saturday Night Live, they just put out a satire of the Democratic debates, and the satire opens up.
And they make fun of Beto O'Rourke for being a nobody.
That's the crux of the jokes against Beto are you overestimated how much we like you.
You're a nobody.
You're kind of doofy.
You're not going anywhere.
Then it gets to Cory Booker.
And the joke about Cory Booker is, Cory, you've got to go home early and beat traffic.
You're never going to be the president.
Your numbers are so low you only get to say five words on the stage.
Then it gets to Andrew Yang.
The whole joke about Andrew Yang is he's so desperate he's going to buy votes, which is true.
And he's not going anywhere and he's not going to be the president.
Then it gets to Marianne Williamson and the joke is that she's a crazy kook.
Fair enough.
Then they get to Elizabeth Warren.
Listen to how they then shift.
Those are the only candidates they talked about.
Here they shift to talk about Liz Warren.
And now let's meet the actual candidates.
Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Okay, you hear that.
Let's meet the actual candidates.
Now, it's true Andrew Yang is not going to be president.
Cory Booker is not going to be president.
Certainly Beto O'Rourke is not going to be president.
It is true that Liz Warren is an actual candidate.
But part of this is self-fulfilling.
If the media had talked about how interesting Tulsi Gabbard is, Tulsi Gabbard would still be in the debates.
If the media hadn't abandoned Beto O'Rourke, Beto O'Rourke would still be in the debates.
The media are not simply covering the Democratic presidential primaries.
The media are pushing the candidates they like.
They tried to give Beto a big push.
Then they preferred some other candidates.
So, it opens up.
Let's get to the actual candidates, Elizabeth Warren.
The other thing to note here is, look who's playing Liz Warren.
Kate McKinnon.
Kate McKinnon is the SNL cast member who played Hillary Clinton last go-around.
Hillary Clinton being the Democrats' and the mainstream media's preferred candidate in 2016.
So, they get...
Kate McKinnon, who looks a little bit like Liz Warren, but there are plenty of blonde actresses.
They get Kate McKinnon to play Warren.
And then, not only do they say, let's get to the real candidates, but who's the first candidate they get to of the real candidates?
Elizabeth Warren.
And then they go in.
Here's the joke they're going to make about Liz Warren.
No candidate is safe.
Yang is desperate, and Beto is doofy, and Corey's going nowhere, and Marianne's a kook.
Okay, what are they going to say?
What's the joke that they're going to make about Elizabeth Warren?
I hope you guys enjoyed Hot Girl Summer, because now it's school librarian fall.
I have the energy of a mother of five boys who all play a different sport.
Let's do this.
Okay, that's it.
Then they move on to another candidate.
So the joke is she's not...
Like a young hot girl or a young hot candidate, she's a mature librarian.
So she's educated and mature and serious.
Ha ha ha.
Ha ha, that's a funny joke.
And then the only other joke in the bit is she's got a lot of energy.
But, you know, energy like a mom who has kids who play different sports.
Ha ha ha.
If they were playing fair, if the media actually were going, if Saturday Night Live were still a comedy show, they would go after and tell actual jokes about all of the candidates.
But they can't do that.
I mean, it reminds me that you had these comedians, even from Saturday Night Live, who would say during the Obama years, oh, it was so easy to make fun of George Bush.
But you can't make fun of Barack Obama.
There's nothing to joke about.
There's a lot to joke about with Barack Obama.
His voice, his big ears, his absolutely hesitating, halting manner of speaking when he wasn't on teleprompter, his complete lack of accomplishment at anything in his life other than running for president, his narcissism, his total self-absorption.
There is a lot to his just constantly giving his America's enemies whatever they want Yeah, there's a lot to make fun of Barack Obama.
But they liked him so much, they couldn't do it.
So that's what's happening here.
The media, you are watching it in real time.
They are falling in love with Elizabeth Warren.
And why not?
She's one of them.
She's got a lot of credentials.
She worked at Harvard Law School.
She's never drunk a beer in her life, other than that one time she tried to do it on video.
She's part of the country club Chardonnay set from the Ivy League.
And she's a total race hustler.
She is the mainstream media.
She is these people.
And so they can't joke about her.
They can't do it.
They know that they have to do something that sort of looks like a joke about her, so they make two jokes.
First one is she's mature and smart.
The next joke is she has a lot of energy.
That's not a joke.
Okay, then they move on and they're introducing the other candidates.
Because maybe you think, okay, they make the harsh jokes about the cheap candidates, but then when you get to Warren, Biden, Bernie Sanders, they're going to go really easy on all of them.
But they actually don't.
So next they get up to Bernie Sanders and they lay into him pretty good.
Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
Woo!
Hello, everyone.
I'm so excited to be back and to ruin things a second time.
So it's actually a pretty brutal joke, which is, and Larry David obviously does a great Bernie Sanders impression, but the joke is, Bernie Sanders, you're the reason we lost in 2016.
Hey, Bernie, you know our audience, all of whom wanted to beat Trump, you're the reason that they weren't able to do that.
You gave Trump the election.
Which, in some ways, he did.
He created a lot of discord within the Democratic Party.
Pretty good joke.
That is what happened.
But it's pretty brutal.
Again, compare this.
Compare Liz Warren is so smart and educated and has so much energy, haha, to, hey, Bernie Sanders, you cost us the White House and made Trump the president.
You ruined everything.
Okay, now they get to Joe Biden.
What's the joke going to be on Joe Biden?
Are they going to go easy or are they going to go hard?
What are the jokes about?
The first one is, he said he goes into the dentist and asks for the high beams.
So he's saying, hey Joe, you have dentures.
You've got silly and ridiculous looking dentures.
Then the next joke is really pretty cutting when you consider that it's coming from the liberal New York media class, which is, he's a man.
He's a man.
He's an entitled man.
The first line he says is, All right, America, Daddy's home.
Daddy's here.
Father knows best.
I've got an outdated, patriarchal sense of myself.
I'm entitled.
I'm a man.
I'm disregarding and dismissing women.
I'm dismissing other people who don't feel entitled.
Then, the next joke is that he's a sexual assailant.
Goes up and sniffs people's hair and grabs them from behind.
And then, the final joke is he's senile.
Because he says, every time I walk into a room, I say, where am I? Who is this?
How did I get here?
That's a lot of jokes.
He's got bad cosmetic surgery.
He's a sexist.
He's entitled.
He's a rapist.
He's senile.
They packed five jokes in there.
Compared to one real joke against Bernie, which is that he ruined everything, compared to no actual jokes against Liz Warren.
Just sort of hidden compliments.
She's smart.
She's mature.
She's got a lot of energy.
The media want Elizabeth Warren.
The media have turned on Joe Biden.
Now, one confounding factor in all this, and it's why they went a little bit, you know, they only got that one joke in on Bernie, then they moved on.
Bernie is still alive.
Bernie's still in the race.
I actually should note, even using that phrase, Bernie today had to cancel campaign activities in the near future because he does seem to be having something of a serious health problem.
He has a blocked artery.
They put a couple stents in there, so he's...
Hopefully going to be recovering fine.
He says he's doing fine.
But all joking about the candidates aside, I do very much hope that Bernie Sanders recovers.
Mostly because I love him being in the race.
I mean, he's also a child of God, and I hope he does well for himself and his family.
But also because he's really, really funny to have in the race.
And so I like him there, and I hope he stays there.
That aside, the little health scare aside, and from all news reports, it looks like he's recovering well.
His campaign...
Is still doing quite well.
And the media have been trying to take him out.
Politico ran a piece just a few days ago about how his campaign was going nowhere.
They had to pick a lane.
They're not doing that well.
Well, actually, if you look at the third quarter fundraising numbers, he raised $25 million.
Obviously, that's $100 million less than Trump raised.
But if you're looking at a crowded field of 10 or more Democratic candidates, $25 million is pretty good.
And the better news for Bernie...
That $25 million is coming from 1.4 million donors.
Bernie Sanders is the king of the small-dollar donation.
Bernie Sanders is the king of getting regular old people, not those fat cats smoking their big cigars, but regular old people to donate to his campaigns.
It looks like it's happening again.
I was talking to a political consultant friend of mine in New York just a few days ago, and we were saying, what do you think?
Is it going to be Warren?
Is it going to be Biden?
And he said, no way, it's going to be Bernie.
I said, you've got to be kidding me.
He goes, Bernie's...
First of all, Bernie stands for something.
Second of all, Bernie has a lot of energy, especially for a man his age.
And third, Bernie still has that small-dollar connection.
He's got a lot of very enthusiastic people behind him.
Not like Trump, but pretty solid.
So you've got the mainstream media coalescing around Liz Warren.
You've got Liz Warren.
She even took the Working Families Party endorsement from Bernie Sanders.
So the Working Families Party is this kind of just corrupt...
I've run against candidates who are on working families in New York.
I've worked for candidates who have done that.
And it's a lot of shady stuff.
But she goes in there, and I assume through some shady dealings, takes the endorsement from Bernie.
So that's not great.
But a lot of Democrats still like Bernie Sanders.
And this is where it's going to get really interesting.
It's happening already today.
You're about to see Bernie Sanders start holding Liz Warren's feet to the progressive fire.
It's been so nice thus far that Liz Warren and Bernie haven't hit each other.
None of the Democrats have really gone after each other other than Kamala going after Biden and Tulsi Gabbard going after Kamala.
And in the long run, it didn't work out very well for either Kamala or Tulsi Gabbard.
Now you're going to start seeing them holding their feet to the fire.
Here is Bernie Sanders leveling the first shot Just a little subtly, he didn't call her out by name, basically saying that Liz Warren needs to get real about her progressive proposals.
Because Warren has stolen all of Bernie's proposals, but she hasn't stolen his honesty about taxes.
At least Bernie tells you, we're going to have a lot of new services, and we're going to raise taxes on just about everybody to pay for them.
Liz Warren wants to promise all those new welfare services, but she doesn't want to admit that people have to pay for them.
And Bernie Sanders goes after.
He says, some people aren't being honest with you, but I am.
My question would be around the current budget, though.
I mean, you're telling us you've got to raise taxes to do this.
Why can't we adjust the current budget for defense and pay for us now?
You know, this futuristic thing.
I'm not saying we don't do it.
I think it's a great idea.
We just have to turn it around, because raising taxes is not probably going to fly for everyone, particularly here in New Hampshire.
This is the issue.
This is why some people don't talk about it.
First of all, you're right in terms of we are spending more than the next ten nations combined in terms of defense spending, and I don't agree with that, and I voted against all of Trump's defense budgets, which are rising very rapidly.
You have a system where Amazon made 10 billion in profits last year, didn't pay a nickel in federal income taxes, so there's a lot that we have to do.
But I don't want to lie to you.
If I told you magically that you're going to have great healthcare and it's not going to cost you a penny, would you believe me?
You hear that?
Some people aren't going to tell you.
Magically, they're going to raise all those funds for the government.
Some people aren't being honest.
Bernie's talking about Liz Warren here, and it gets to this central Democrat problem, which is they are invariably, it seems, running to the left, whether it's because Trump has just trolled them into madness or whether it's because they're finally just being honest about what they believe.
running very far to the left.
This fight between Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren that is coming up, assuming Bernie gets better, assuming the campaign is still going on.
If all of that happens, this fight coming up is going to bring the party even further to the left.
Bernie has the correct idea here, which is they have to raise taxes to pay for their plans.
He's going to make Liz Warren be honest about it.
And that's a really bad pitch because we've just got a report that Americans are now spending more on taxes than they are on food, clothing, and healthcare combined.
That's according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
We'll get into that.
We'll get into why more taxes is a bad pitch.
We'll get into how best to go after Biden.
Some conservatives are suggesting an Then why one Obama-appointed federal judge thinks that Asians just have bad personalities.
And finally, the dumbest article on the internet today, which takes on that great problem, that scourge in the United States.
The ethnic food aisle at the grocery store, which the Washington Post says is the last bastion of racism.
First, though, we've got to say about Facebook and YouTube.
You know, I, you've noticed probably all week I've been coming to you from very strange places around the country.
Now I am in Washington, D.C., because tonight I am going to be giving the third speech in my fall Young America's Foundation tour, which is called Men Are Not Women and Other Uncomfortable Truths.
The uncomfortable truth that I'm going to be talking about tonight Is that George Washington was a pretty good guy.
It shows you where we are as a culture in 2019.
That now if you go to George Washington University and defend George Washington, you are giving a controversial speech.
But that's where we are.
It should be a lot of fun.
That's going to be 7 o'clock at GW. And we are going to stream it.
So check it out on the Daily Wire YouTube page.
And Young America's Foundation will be tweeting that out too.
So that's going to be a lot of fun.
Go to dailywire.com.
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So Democrats are now going, eventually going to be running on, we are going to raise your taxes.
Yes, we are going to raise your taxes.
The more honest voices on the left are already saying this, and they're going to force the more dishonest ones to say it, too.
But this comes as a new survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows Americans are way, way, way overtaxed.
So Americans, on average, are spending more on taxes than they are on food, clothing, and health care combined.
You can even see the numbers.
American consumer units spent, on average, $9,031.93 on federal income taxes.
They spent a little over $5,000 on Social Security taxes, almost $2,300 on state and local income taxes, $2,200 on property taxes, and $78 on other taxes.
Because they'll tax you coming and going.
That's what the tax man does.
This brings, for the average American, $18,617.93 total in taxes.
Now, the average American consumer unit...
While they were paying these taxes, they were also spending nearly $8,000 on food, nearly $5,000 on healthcare, $1,866 on apparel and services.
That brings it to $14,758.11 total.
Almost $4,000 more on taxes than on food, clothing, and healthcare.
It's too much.
It's too much.
You know, the left and kind of the new right, new conservatives and the center, they would always mock the conservative movement in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s for just all they cared about was low taxes.
And people don't get all that excited about low taxes and it's a little too wonkish and rationalist.
Low taxes is about so much more than just taxes.
Taxes...
Taxes represent your labor.
Taxes represent your time.
Taxes represent your freedom of choice.
Taxes represent your control over your own life and your own destiny.
Money is a symbol.
A dollar bill isn't intrinsically worth something.
It's worth something because of what it says about the economy, about the country, about your time, about your work.
If people are spending so much more on their taxes than they are on basic necessities, that's not a great sign.
I mean, you could be taxed 40%.
I have friends who are taxed at the 50% effectively.
And that's not even taking into account sales taxes and all the other little taxes that people get you on.
That's too much.
That's way, way too much.
God takes 10%.
The mob takes 10%.
There is no reason for the government to be taking 40 or 50% of your money home.
So, how should Trump play all of this?
He should watch it happen and he should laugh.
You know, there was a suggestion from Peter Schweitzer, who's very good, but he runs the Government Accountability Institute, I think it's called.
And he just looks into corruption at the government level and he writes excellent books.
He has this suggestion right now that Trump needs to get really involved in all of this, that Trump actually should, I guess, through the Senate Republicans, use the subpoena power to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden to get really active in areas of this campaign.
I think it's a bad idea.
I think if you get the White House to really get aggressive here or if you get the Senate to start subpoenaing different people and really heavily investigating Joe and Hunter Biden, it creates a sort of moral equivalence between the House and the Senate, the House Democrats and the Senate Republicans. it creates a sort of moral equivalence between the House So right now the House is impeaching Trump.
It looks ridiculous.
He raised eight and a half million dollars off of it and really more later on.
Why would we want to look ridiculous too?
because already Already, the Biden campaign is falling apart.
I mean, you're seeing it happening in the polling numbers.
You're seeing it happening in how the media is treating Joe Biden.
If we get involved, the only advantage I could see to that is if we get involved, the Democrats will defend Joe Biden.
And then if the Democrats defend Joe Biden, he has a better chance of getting the nomination.
And look, maybe that is the long game.
Maybe people think Joe Biden is the weakest candidate to run against in 2020.
I'm not totally convinced of that.
I can see an argument for it.
But that is a really convoluted, complicated, long game.
I think right now things are going very, very well for conservatives.
Things are going very, very poorly for Democrats.
And they can't figure out right now how to fix it.
They can't figure out how to right the ship.
They just can't win for losing.
Everything they're doing is wrong.
I wouldn't interfere with that.
I would let that continue to happen.
It would spell good news for conservatives in 2020, really bad news, without really much good luck in sight, I think, for the Democrats.
Now, moving on from 2020, looking at just the culture broadly, there's one case that we have been talking about for months and months now.
It's this case brought by Asian students and Asian parents who...
Had kids apply to Harvard and they were rejected or there were students at Harvard, but they found this problem in the admissions policy, which is that Harvard is systematically discriminating against Asian applicants on the basis of race.
Now, how do they do it?
Because you're not allowed to do that, right?
I mean, you are.
There's affirmative action, which is race discrimination codified into law.
So you already are a little bit, but even so, Asian applicants were still being underrepresented.
How did they do it?
The way they did it was, Harvard gives students different scores.
So you got the SAT score, right?
And you just take the test and you report your SAT score.
Unless your mother's Aunt Becky, in which case you cheat on the test and get into college.
You get the SAT score, you've got your GPA. Kind of hard to cheat your GPA. You've got your extracurriculars.
You've got all these boxes, right?
That are pretty hard, if you're in the admissions office, to cheat.
And then you have, at Harvard, the personality score.
So the personality score measures likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, positive personality.
People like to be around you.
That's one category.
This person is widely respected.
That's another category.
Obviously very subjective, highly vulnerable to abuse.
What this survey showed of the Asian applicants is that Asians had the highest scores in academic and extracurricular rankings, but they had by far the lowest personality rankings.
So how can you explain this?
There are two explanations.
That's it.
Either you believe that Asians just have absolutely terrible personalities across the board, Or, you realize that the personality score is just a way to discriminate against Asians on the basis of race.
Because these universities have done this for so long, which is they don't want too many Asians, or they don't want too many Jews, or they don't want whatever race they don't want there.
And so they find a way to keep that number suppressed.
This lawsuit showed that statistical experts looking at the application saw an Asian-American male applicant had a 25% chance of admission.
Or if he had a 25% chance of admission.
He would have a 32% chance of admission if he were white.
He would have a 77% chance of admission if he were Hispanic.
He would have a 95% chance of admission if he were black.
That's if he's beginning with all of his other scores starting at 25%.
He would get a huge advantage if he were a different race.
And he was being disadvantaged because of his own race.
So anyway, this federal judge today, this Obama appointee, Allison Burroughs, says that Harvard can keep discriminating.
And her reasoning was...
This is a direct quote.
Harvard's witnesses credibly testified that they did not use race in assigning personal ratings and did not observe any improper discrimination in the admissions process.
So what she's saying is, she found out that Harvard, she discovered, she concluded, Harvard is not discriminating against Asians on the basis of race because Harvard told her that they're not discriminating against Asians on the basis of race.
And, you know, why would Harvard lie about something like that?
I mean, you're not calling them liars, are you?
So anyway, no big deal.
I guess Asians just have bad personalities, is what this Obama-appointed judge is saying.
This is, first of all, it shows you how bizarre and incoherent racial politics can be.
I mean, it's not as though, broadly as a demographic group, Asian immigrants and second-generation Asians are so incredibly well-off in America.
I'm from New York.
A lot of Asian immigrants and children of Asian immigrants have nothing.
They came here with nothing.
Their parents worked fine.
Constantly, the kids work extremely hard in school, and then they go to some either magnet school or charter school or Stuyvesant High School, and then they work their way in and try to get into college.
And they are being discriminated against, and there's no other way to put it.
It's on the basis of race.
And somehow, in leftist woke culture, this is a good thing.
Because I guess, I don't know, I guess the left just prefers certain races to other races.
So they would rather give a systemic advantage to black and Hispanic applicants, and they were willing to pay the price of disadvantaging Asian applicants.
The other thing this shows you is the importance of the judges.
The judges matter.
This judge was appointed by Obama in 2014, okay?
2014.
Five years later, she's making these big decisions.
Now, this is going to be appealed, certainly.
It's going to go up to the Supreme Court.
Hopefully, those conservatives on the court don't go squishy, because it's a huge miscarriage of justice, what's happening at Harvard, and somebody should stand up for it, even if everyone else has gone crazy with race.
And they have gone crazy with race.
This, from the Washington Post, I just have to get to it before we go.
The dumbest article on the internet today...
The article is, to David Chang, he is a food expert or something, the ethnic food aisle is racist.
Others say it's convenient, of course.
Right off the bat, obviously a slow news day.
The ethnic food aisle.
This is a food aisle.
I didn't even know this exists.
But I guess there's an aisle in certain...
I don't do my own grocery shopping also because sweet little Lisa is just a good wife and I would die and starve if I were not married to her.
But I guess there's an ethnic food aisle and this is how the piece begins.
To millions of shoppers, the supermarket is just a place to stock up on produce and pantry staples to keep the family fed.
But to others, especially children of immigrants, who may already feel pushed to the margins of the American mainstream, the supermarket can be just another place to experience the sting of outsider status.
Quick poll.
Here we go.
Children of immigrants who are listening to this show right now, please write in on Twitter.
Do supermarkets make you feel, quote, the sting of outsider status?
Just let me know.
I'll put a poll up on Twitter or something.
The piece goes on.
The sting occurs whenever they walk down the ethnic food aisle, the section of the supermarket that to some plays out like a remnant of the Jim Crow era.
So, according to the Washington Post, there's an aisle at the supermarket where you can buy certain Asian spices and oyster sauce, and that's the same as lynchings.
It's not my words.
They're the ones who brought up the Jim Crow era.
They say it reminds them of times when laws established separate facilities for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South.
What?
What?
This is how this comes across, quote, to the shoppers they seemingly target as de facto segregation, another kind of separate but equal policy that marginalized African Americans for generations.
Because supermarkets are stocking up on very niche food products that, generally speaking, a small number of people like.
Okay.
Does walking down a separate aisle for Yum Yum Sauce and Adobo make you feel like you are being reserved and refused service at the Woolworths lunch counter?
Does it?
I don't think so.
And then they give you their thesis.
If you go to the ethnic food aisle, that is sort of the last bastion of racism that you can see in full daylight in retail America.
David Chang.
That's what he says.
It's something that's got to go.
So I just want to point out I am willing to accept the premise, okay?
I'm willing to accept that ethnic food aisles are racist and whatever.
If we admit that it's the last bastion of racism and we get rid of ethnic food aisles, then the left has to agree to stop yapping about racism.
Because you just said it's the last bastion of racism.
I don't think it's a bastion of racism, but you think it's the last bastion.
And you're always trying to divide people based on race and identity politics.
So, okay.
Right.
Last bastion.
Let's pass a law.
We get rid of the ethnic food aisle.
Then that's it.
No more race hustling.
No more identity politics.
Deal?
Something tells me they're not going to take that deal.
He complains, he goes on, he complains that olive oil is in the main food aisles, but, you know, yum yum sauce is in its own separate aisle.
First of all, everyone uses olive oil.
People don't use oyster sauce and rice vinegar that much.
But also, that's not some vile bigotry, because the products are available.
You get to just go to the aisle and buy them.
And then he contradicts himself.
He goes on, he says, So he actually admits that...
Some of the foods are in the regular aisle, the ones that are more mainstream.
Because people eat instant ramen noodles because people are poor college students sometimes.
But they don't always go eat yum yum sauce.
Then he complains that very, very niche specialty products like coconut milk and stir-fry sauces and curry paste are in the separate aisle.
A few things.
It shows us three things.
Mainstream media are so incredibly separated from mainstream America, they don't realize that How different their tastes are than the vast majority of this country.
Second thing is this grievance carries social currency.
There is an aisle.
The foods are there.
They're even especially easy to find.
The third thing it shows you is you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't with the left and with identity politics.
This is like the colorblind versus the color conscious society.
When ethnic and racial differences are highlighted that is called bigoted because you're separating people based on race and ethnicity.
When ethnic and racial differences are ignored, that's called erasure.
That's called appropriation.
That's called another form of bigotry.
You can't win with them because all they want to do is complain.
That's the left for you.
That's just what they do.
I also don't think that this is really being pushed by people who are actually terribly offended by this.
I think, generally speaking, this is pushed by white liberals, like, for instance, the people who tend to So head on over to George Washington if you're in town.
Otherwise, catch it on the live stream, and I'll see you in any case tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
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