Ep. 436 - Pierre Delecto: International Man of Misery
The Atlantic magazine has outed Mitt Romney for using a secret lurker Twitter account named “Pierre Delecto” to criticize President Trump as well as his Republican colleagues in the Senate. Then a man named Ria who identifies as a woman sues a pornographer for refusing to have sex with him after learning he isn’t a woman. We will examine what Pierre and Ria tell us about identity in the age of postmodernism and social media. Kanye turns right, Liz Warren turns Left, and CBS pushes AOC for VP! Date: 10-22-2019
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The Atlantic Magazine has outed Mitt Romney for using a secret Twitter account named Pierre Delecto to criticize President Trump as well as his Republican colleagues in the Senate.
Meanwhile, a man named Rhea, who identifies as a woman, files a hate crime report against a pornographer because he refused to have sex with him after learning he isn't a woman.
We will examine what Pierre and Rhea tell us about identity in the age of social media.
Kanye turns right, Liz Warren turns left, and CBS pushes AOC for VP. All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Pierre Delecto.
We are all Pierre Delecto in the age of social media.
You know how much I hate being right.
You know how much I hate saying I told you so.
And just one day after describing what an oily, undignified politician Mitt Romney is, we find out this guy is using a secret burner Twitter account Named Pierre Delecto to specifically criticize all of his Republican co-partisans, all of his Republican colleagues, and the President of the United States.
How do we know he's doing this?
They found the Pierre Delecto account.
Mitt Romney was kind of alluding to a secret Twitter account.
The journalists went through and cross-referenced the followers and figured out who this was.
How do we know that Mitt Romney was using this to attack his Republican colleagues?
Well, here are just some of the tweets that Pierre liked.
He didn't tweet a whole lot.
He didn't follow a whole lot.
But what he did do is like certain tweets.
He liked one from the anonymous account Devin Nunes' cow.
This was directed at Newt Gingrich.
Quote, You were cheating on your second wife with the woman who is now your third wife, even while impeaching Clinton for cheating on his wife.
Show yourself out.
Now, obviously, we know Mitt Romney doesn't like Newt Gingrich.
They ran against each other in 2012 for the presidential nomination.
So it's not that Mitt Romney or Pierre Delecto wrote that tweet, but he liked that tweet from someone else.
Here's another one from Matthew Dowd, who's an ex-Republican and an ABC News political analyst, also liked by Pierre Delecto.
Watching Rudy Giuliani's transition from America's mayor to what he is today is like watching how a villain comes to be in a Batman movie.
This one from Barb McQuaid.
This is an MSNBC analyst.
You're noticing a theme here, all the mainstream media, left-wing news sources.
Barb McQuaid.
This can't be retweeted enough.
And what it was was a retweet of Bill Kristol, who himself was tweeting out an old clip of Lindsey Graham calling for Clinton's impeachment in the 1990s.
And this was being used as a case to impeach Donald Trump.
Mitt Romney liked that.
Scott Conroy, who is a podcast called Blackout.
I hadn't heard of him before, Pierre Delecto.
So thank you, Pierre, for introducing him to me.
He tweeted out, I'm not sure there's ever been a photo that sums up a person's essence better than this does.
And it was a photo...
Of Marco Rubio sitting in a tiny little chair, which was hilarious.
Then you had a tweet from Alapandit, who is great.
He's an anti-Trump guy who writes at Hot Air.
And he tweeted out, he rather liked a tweet criticizing the fellow Utah Senator Mike Lee for supporting troop withdrawal from northern Syria.
That was a tweet from Alapandit.
Pierre Delecto liked it.
Why is this a big deal?
I mean, it's not really a big deal.
It just proves everything I said about Mitt Romney yesterday, and I really like it when news cycles prove me right within like 20 hours of it.
The reason it matters is not because Mitt Romney is throwing some shade at his fellow Republicans.
All politicians do that kind of thing.
That's sort of what politics is.
The reason it matters is that he's not doing it honestly.
He's not he doesn't have the guts to come out and actually like these tweets or tweet these things or say these things to people's faces.
You know, if this were President Trump, he would do it from his own Twitter account.
That's That's really the big difference between Mitt Romney and Donald Trump is not even, you know, the use of Twitter and the use of snark and the use of snide comments.
It's just that Donald Trump owns up to his and Mitt Romney doesn't.
Mitt Romney is the one who's going to make a little snide remark and then hide behind a building before the guy comes and sees what someone said.
Donald Trump would have done it and he regularly does use his own account with the verified checkmark and his own name and his own picture to throw these kinds of insults.
President Trump also has used sort of fake personas before.
He got made fun of a little while ago because it came out that he was impersonating his own publicist in the 1980s to get himself more news articles.
President Trump, or a person who sounds a whole lot like President Trump, was pretending to be a publicist named John Barron.
And this is what he sounded like in 1984.
Make up your own mind.
Okay, what's your first name that is?
John.
Well, let me tell you what the deal is, just so you understand.
Okay.
Mr. Trump bought, first of all, most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump, you know, because you have down Fred Trump.
And I'd like to talk to you off the record, if I can, just to make your thing easier.
Okay, sure.
Is that all right?
Yeah, that's fine.
All right, but I think you can really use Donald Trump now, and you can just consolidate.
I think last year somebody showed me the article, and I think you had 200 and 200, and really it's been pretty well consolidated now for the most part.
As I also think somebody had mentioned that you had asked about that, or somebody had, and it's been pretty well consolidated.
Okay?
So that's obviously just Donald Trump, right?
Okay, look, this Donald Trump guy, he's great, okay?
He's one of the great people.
This deal's totally consolidated, all right?
My name's John Barron.
Also, President Trump named his son Barron, so he's got a kind of fascination with his name anyway.
Again, this is not even a knock on false identities.
In the realm of politics, in the realm of show business, in the realm of theater, people put on a lot of false identities.
The question is, what are you using it for?
In the case of John Barron, the fictitious publicist, Trump was using it to build himself up, build up his brand.
In the case of Pierre Delecto, Mitt Romney was using it to vent his frustration, to tear down his colleagues, to tear down the president because he didn't have the guts to do it publicly himself.
It seems like a side news story.
It seems like an unimportant news story.
I think it actually tells us a lot about identity in the age of social media, identity in this age that we're all living in right now.
Because speaking of false identities, you have a transgender woman, so a man who identifies as a woman, now filing a hate crime report against a pornographer who he was working with because the pornographer wanted to sleep with him when he thought that he was now filing a hate crime report against a pornographer who he was But then when he found out that he is a he, he didn't want to sleep with him anymore.
And this apparently constitutes a hate crime.
This has many layers of identity, but it tells us a lot about our culture.
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So you've got Pierre Delecto, which is actually not the most absurd false identity story of the day, because we have this transgender model in Britain who is suing a pornographer because he won't have sex with him, who identifies as her.
The model is 25 years old.
The model's name is Rhea Cooper.
And Rhea Cooper was contacted by this photographer who asked if she wanted to appear in porn.
And they're kind of flirting.
They're going back and forth.
It's this highly sexually charged conversation.
And then the pornographer finds out that Rhea is a man who looks like a woman.
And he went back on the offer and the transgender model said, well, why don't you want to work together anymore?
And The pornographer said, well, we can't sleep together because you have a, and then he used a vulgar term, but to refer to male genitalia.
And Rhea, the transgender model, was shocked and terribly offended by this, said that it was transphobic behavior, and contacted the Humberside police.
This was in the United Kingdom.
And the police are actually looking into the matter as a hate incident.
How on earth does this happen?
How does someone become so deluded that you think that if you're a man and a man doesn't want to have sex with you, that you're the victim of a hate crime?
Well, Rhea Cooper, a while ago, became Britain's youngest person ever to transition.
Rhea Cooper is now 25 years old.
He transitioned 10 years ago.
So he was 15 years old and some sick perverts were preying on this 15-year-old boy and told him to To transform his body and take hormones and go through this identity transition so that he could appear to be a woman.
Obviously, this is incredible medical malpractice.
There's nothing rooted in science or medicine here.
This is a social experiment that is being conducted on a child, not just one child.
This is happening all throughout the West.
So I can sort of understand why Rhea Cooper is confused here, but this is lunacy.
Where does it come from?
Where does this idea that we need to hide behind these false identities come from?
This is basically the inevitable consequence of a selfish culture and high-speed internet.
This is what happens because on the internet, you can go into your own little corner in your own little room where you can be whatever you want to be in your own fantasies.
Look, Mitt Romney, he's a really stern, dignified guy.
He's so genial.
He's so nice.
He doesn't even drink caffeine.
He's as American pie as they come.
Until he gets on his little troll Pierre Delecto account, and then he's throwing stones at Trump, and he's making fun of Newt Gingrich for having multiple wives, and he's going after Marco Rubio for being little Marco.
I mean, he's actually hurling the same insults at Marco Rubio that Donald Trump hurled at Marco Rubio.
And then all of the genteel Republicans like Mitt Romney say it's so awful for Trump to say that.
Mitt Romney's doing exactly the same thing.
He just doesn't have the guts to come out and do it in his own identity.
He has to do it behind this little secret account, Pierre Delecto.
That's the Internet, though.
You can be whatever you want to be in your own fantasies.
The things that some people say on Twitter or in the comment sections are are heinous.
I mean, you know, you anybody who has any sort of public profile on the Internet.
Close your eyes and picture their email inbox and then.
Then imagine it's 300 times more disgusting, 300 times more vicious and wicked.
I mean, just the death threats and the awful wishes and these sort of things that come in every day.
Look, I'm not complaining about it.
That's what the internet is.
That's what you sign up for.
But you do wonder if you saw any of these people in person, if they actually had to stand behind their own identity, would any of them say these things?
Would any of them do this?
No, of course not.
Even in the case of Rhea Cooper, this transgender model in Britain, it is identity under several layers because it's a man who is trying to hide behind this false identity of a woman.
But the interaction that took place with the pornographer also took place on social media.
So you're another level removed from an actual human interaction.
I suspect I obviously don't know this transgender model, but I suspect if you got to know him in real life and you said, listen, I'm a man and I don't want to sleep with you.
It's nothing against you, but you're a man and I'm not attracted to men and, you know.
that's kind of like one of the top reasons why this isn't going to work out.
I suspect he wouldn't run out and file a police report.
But because there's another level of removal from identity, this allows people to just indulge all of their worst inclinations, all of their own delusions.
I mean, this actually speaking of pornography, this is the illusion of pornography in porn.
You can live out any fantasy that you want.
This is why it's so pervasive, especially with high speed Internet, because you can do whatever you want.
If you can imagine it, there's a porn for it.
Okay?
There was a liberal writer, Kurt Eichenwald, who, he got caught, he posted a screenshot of something, and then the internet made fun of him because there was a tab of tentacle porn, which I have not researched since that news story came out, and I don't want to research, but, you know, look, there's a porn for everything, and I guess that's what he was looking at.
Anything you can imagine, there is some kind of titillating image for on the internet.
And so you can live out that fantasy.
But what's the reality?
The reality of porn is that you're alone in a room with the blinds shut.
That's the reality.
The...
The illusion, the fantasy of this transgender model in the UK is that he's this beautiful woman, glamorous, hot, all the men want to sleep with him.
But the reality is he's a very, very confused man.
And statistically, the reality is he's much more likely to be depressed and anxious and even suicidal.
Those are all of the underlying conditions that go along with this gender dysphoria.
That's the reality of it.
the reality and the illusion are very far apart.
On social media, you can anonymously attack anybody, but in reality, you're just a coward.
The illusion of Pierre Delecto is he's this guy, he's just thrown whatever bombs he wants on social media.
But what's the reality?
Mitt Romney getting his lunch eaten by Donald Trump when they're at that little dinner and Trump is smiling and Mitt Romney is so uncomfortably sucking up to him to try to get any appointment in the administration, trying to be appointed the secretary of state or trying to get any other appointment.
That's the reality is this kind of quizzling, weakling.
And because we're uncomfortable with that reality, we want to live out these fantasies online.
Most of all, what does it tell us about identity in the age of social media?
That it's all about you.
You!
The time, 2006 person of the year.
You remember you.
And so it becomes just about satisfying our own appetites or feeding our own appetites.
I'm not exactly defending this British pornographer who is trying to lure this 25-year-old transgender model into porn.
But at the very least, what we can say is Rhea Cooper, the model who's filing the police report, isn't paying attention to any other person.
All he is concerned with is satisfying his own ego to the point that now he wants to criminalize it if you're a man and you don't want to sleep with another man.
It's all just about you.
Even Mitt Romney, he goes before the public and he's preening and he's preaching and he's moralizing and talking about all the terrible things Trump does.
And then he does exactly the same things behind closed doors, behind an anonymous Twitter account.
But it's okay for Mitt Romney because he wants to do them.
So it's no big deal.
There's no issue here.
What's the trouble with this?
The trouble with this is feeding our appetites does not satisfy us.
And listen, decadence is really fun, okay?
You're talking to someone who feeds a lot of his own appetites.
But ultimately, what you realize is if you eat too much food, you feel sick.
If you drink too much booze, you get hungover.
If you smoke too many cigars, you cough the next day.
Feeding your appetites.
You don't leave and say, gosh, I'm really glad I glutted myself last night.
Boy, oh boy, what a good use of my time.
No, of course not.
This is true in all appetites.
It's true in your stomach.
It's true sexually.
It's true even in other ambitions that you have.
If they're just feeding yourself, they don't satisfy you.
We are actually and ironically only satisfied when we serve others.
Fantasy doesn't satisfy us.
Reality does.
You know, we talked to that ex-transgender guy, Peter Benjamin, on the show the other day.
And he said what was so heartbreaking is he was so excited to finally live in what had been a very compelling fantasy for decades of his life, which is that he would become a woman.
And then he became a woman.
And he had this moment of euphoria.
And then he realized he wasn't really a woman.
He had the fantasy being lived out almost as perfectly as possible.
But it was still a fantasy.
It wasn't the reality.
And the difference between the two left him really feeling hollow.
I think this has a lot to do with the skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety in this country.
You know, depression diagnoses are up in this country about 33%.
Among millennials, they're up 45%.
Rates of suicide are way up among the general population, but over a 10-year period, 2006 to 2016, they're up 70% among white children, 10 to 17 years old.
Among black and other minority children, they're up 77%, which is wild because black and minority children kill themselves at a lower rate than white children, but they're up even more among the minority children.
This is not a single demographic problem.
This is happening across the culture.
What is that?
That's not going to be just a racial issue.
That's not going to be even just a single age issue or single geographic area issue.
It would seem that it has a lot to do with technology, and you can see people using technology at different rates based on their age, but it has to do broadly with the culture.
This is increasing rapidly.
It should be a warning cry.
We do not want to be Pierre Delecto, Pierre Delecto, International Man of Mystery.
Pierre Delecto is an international man of misery.
You don't want to be forcing your fantasies on other people and criminalizing those who don't want to have sex with you.
You don't want to force your fantasies on yourself either.
They won't satisfy you either.
And what's so amazing about this is you see somebody like Mitt Romney Who you expect to be the most prim and proper, put-together, stable guy.
You see him hiding and sniping behind this anonymous Twitter account.
And then you see a guy like Kanye West.
Kanye West, who embodies in many ways everything about our technological postmodern narcissistic age.
And while Mitt Romney is running in the direction of that fantasy, while Mitt Romney is running in the direction of that anonymity and those petty snipes, Kanye West is running in exactly the other direction.
He apparently nearly quit rap when he had this conversion experience to Christianity.
There is a friend of his, Adam Tyson, who is the head pastor of the Placerita Bible Church, apparently knows Kanye West.
And Kanye came to him and said, I don't even want to rap anymore.
And Adam Tyson, I guess, talked him out of that.
But that's how serious, that's how profound Kanye's conversion or reversion experience was.
Here he is.
One time he told me that he wasn't going to rap.
I said, why not?
He said, well, that's the devil's music.
And I said, hey man, rap is a genre.
You can rap for God.
Yeah.
I think he was already thinking about it a little bit, but I just definitely said, hey, bro, I think you need to use your talents that God's given you and use that platform for God.
I am so glad you said that.
Man, I'm glad you said that.
He was already thinking about it.
I'm not going to take any credit for that, but I definitely was pushing him hard in that direction.
In fact, I asked him, I'm like, hey man, have you heard of Lecrae?
He's like, no.
You heard of Flame?
Nope.
Tadashi?
Nope.
Trip Lee?
Nope.
He didn't hear any of those guys.
I'm sure he's heard of them now.
I was going to connect them with some of those guys, but he kind of likes doing his own thing, man.
He just does what he does.
All I'm trying to do is help him be rooted and grounded in God's Word.
Now, probably that head pastor should have just told him not to rap because rap is the devil's music, so I think he got that one wrong.
But even if he didn't, this guy, he sounds like a really nice, cool pastor guy, so whatever, that's fine.
Hopefully Kanye's new album will be good and give glory to God and try to elevate the culture in some way.
But even Kanye was right.
I mean, Kanye was right, and this pastor was largely wrong, I think, on the question, which is Kanye appears to be experiencing a submission of the ego or a restraining of the ego.
And for somebody like Kanye West, that's got to be, on the one hand, kind of easy because he's got ample ego to restrain, but on the other hand, really hard.
He's the top of the heap.
He's like the biggest celebrity in the world other than Donald Trump.
And so he's getting all of these plaudits, all of these accolades for anybody that's very difficult.
And he's a hip-hop star.
He's a rap star.
And rap is the most boastful genre of music, probably.
So it is very difficult.
And yet he awoke to it and he said, oh, none of this stuff is making me happy.
Yeah, I'll just quit rap music.
Who cares?
That's actually the right attitude.
Now, if he can reach more people by rapping and sort of elevate the culture, fine.
I guess that's okay.
But I'm actually more with Kanye's first impulse here.
I think it's terrific that he had that idea.
He said, oh yeah, this is bad.
I'll do something else.
Those are two choices that we have in the culture.
And it does come down to identity.
What it comes down to is where you find your identity.
When God is asked in the Bible, who are you?
He says, I am that I am.
True in the Old Testament, true in the New Testament.
Moses says to God, who shall I tell them you are?
And he says, tell them I am that I am.
Christ says in the Gospels, before Abraham was, I am.
I am the essence of being.
And sane cultures root their identity in God.
It's not even that difficult to understand that concept because these things of this world are fleeting.
If I root my identity in having a podcast and then someday I lose my podcast, I've lost my identity.
If I root my identity in having a nice bushy head of brown hair, then one day I lose my hair or my hair turns gray, I lose my identity.
If you root your identity in temporal things, you're going to lose it eventually.
If you root your identity in permanent things, you won't.
And the permanent thing, the essence of being, is God himself.
So that's what you have to do.
When you don't do that, you are left with a pathetic question.
The pathetic question is, who am I? And this is why you see people...
Losing their mind in identity politics because they're grasping for something that's bigger than them, something that will give them some sort of permanence, and that might be racial solidarity or sexual solidarity or class solidarity.
But those things don't give permanence either because even those are social creatures.
Even those are things that change.
Even those are things of this world that will pass away.
Very difficult time to live in when Kanye West has greater clarity about the culture and about religion and about identity itself than the 2012 Republican nominee for president.
That's a very difficult time for the culture when the 2012 Republican nominee for president has more in common with a UK transgender model than he does with a sort of...
A stable person.
A very stable genius, you might say.
Those are the times we're living in, though.
We've got to get to the 2020 election because Liz Warren, who was running on the one hand to moderate in recent weeks, is now running back to the left.
And the mainstream media is following her.
The mainstream media has a great idea for the vice president if Bernie Sanders is...
nominated by the Democratic Party.
And all of this is having an effect on President Trump, though it's probably not the effect that they want.
We'll get to all of that in a second.
First, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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Liz Warren is making that same Mitt Romney mistake.
Liz Warren is making that same wishy-washy, I don't know what my identity is, mistake.
For much of her career, she was a pretty establishment figure.
Pretty normal, pretty centrist.
Then she became a hard-charging leftist.
In the late 2000s, she was the progressive champion.
Then, she had a lot of identity issues, by the way, because she pretended to be a Native American for her entire career, but that's a story for another time.
I guess the identity issues go down pretty deep.
Then, in recent weeks, Liz Warren has tried to moderate a little bit.
For instance, during the Democratic presidential debate, Kamala Harris asked her if she thinks Trump should be kicked off of Twitter.
Should one of the largest media platforms in the world kick off the President of the United States?
And Liz Warren held herself back.
She said, I don't know that I'd go that far.
Because she knows that's not going to win over any voters in Peoria.
Well, Liz Warren is going back to the left again.
She just recently, in an impromptu press session, said that she would consider cutting off aid to Israel if they don't surrender and follow leftist policies.
Question about Israel.
Will you make American aid conditional on a freeze to settlement building?
Right now, Netanyahu says that he is going to take Israel in a direction of increasing settlements.
That does not move us toward a two-state solution.
It is the official policy of the United States of America.
To support a two-state solution.
And if Israel is moving in the opposite direction, then everything is on the table.
Everything is on the table.
Everything's on the table.
I'm a good progressive, and I hate Israel, and I'll cut off A to Israel.
Why does Israel matter in all of this?
Israel is an obsession for the left.
They hate Israel.
They hate it.
Why do they hate it?
Because you've got a pretty decently functioning...
Liberal Western democracy in the Middle East, in a region that is just characterized by sectarian bloodshed and illegitimate governments and totally foreign policies that we don't really like in the West.
And then you've got Israel, which is this beacon of relative peace, relative stability, lots of prosperity, and the left hates that.
They hate that because it suggests maybe some cultures are more conducive to flourishing than other cultures.
They just hate Israel.
And so it's not even that Liz Warren is saying she might cut aid to a country.
The United States can cut aid to whatever country it wants to.
It's the singling out of Israel is a pandering to the left.
And she's got to pander to the left because she doesn't know which way she's going to go.
Is she going to try to take the Biden voters?
Is she going to try to take the Bernie voters?
Is she going to try to be Elizabeth Warren, very moderate, very serious Harvard law professor?
Or is she going to try to be rah-rah class warrior?
She just hasn't picked a lane, and so she's going to blow with the wind.
She's going to blow like Mitt Romney blows with the wind.
She's going to blow like Joe Biden blows with the wind.
Here's just a little exercise for you as to why this is a bad idea.
Name the great moderates of history.
My friend Patrick Coffin, the radio host, posted this on Twitter the other day.
Name the great moderates in history.
Name the great moderates of the 20th century.
When I think of the great figures of the 20th century, I've got Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, maybe Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, None of those people were moderate.
Those people were pretty clear in what they believed and what they were fighting for.
What about Lloyd George?
Is he going to go down well?
How about Neville Chamberlain?
Does anybody aspire to be Neville Chamberlain?
No.
Those squishes don't go down in history.
People who are facing an identity crisis don't go down in history.
Who say one thing but believe another and they're too timid to really do what they want to do and Those people are forgotten.
Those people have made a big mistake.
If you stand in the middle of the road, you are going to get hit by a truck.
Now, the mainstream media understand this.
That's why the mainstream media are just running as far to the left as they possibly can.
Even if it means that they disregard the Constitution, most of them probably haven't read the Constitution in the first place.
You saw this when recently Bernie Sanders was doing an interview alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.
And CBS News asks Bernie and AOC if they would ever consider running as a ticket, if AOC could possibly be the vice presidential candidate for Bernie Sanders in 2020.
There's just one problem, of course.
AOC is much too young to be his vice president.
No matter, CBS persists anyway.
If you are the nominee, Senator, would you consider the Congresswoman as your running mate?
Well, I think I'm too young for that.
When you are being lectured on the Constitution by AOC, you're in a bad place.
You've you've gone down a bad path.
AOC doesn't know very much about the Constitution, although I bet she sure knows when she's eligible to run for president.
You know, she might have only read the spark notes on the Constitution, but I'm pretty sure she looked for that section.
And she's correcting CBS News here.
Now, this is absurd for a few reasons.
CBS News is network news.
It's not even just some cable network.
This is supposed to be serious news.
These are supposed to be objective people who at least have once read the Constitution.
They don't even realize that there is an age requirement to be the president.
They're being corrected on that by a 29-year-old woman who was a bartender until a year ago.
That shows you the state of the mainstream media, but also just the absurdity of it all.
You've got a socialist, the furthest left prominent politician in the entire United States being asked if he would run with the next furthest left politician in the United States.
Does anybody think that that ticket would get elected?
Do you understand the delusion that is required to believe that Bernie Sanders and AOC is a winning presidential ticket?
That is a crazy idea.
Typically, tickets try to balance each other out.
So you have Reagan, right?
Reagan's the rock-ribbed conservative, and you have Bush.
Bush is the establishment kind of liberal Republican figure, and they balance each other out.
In 2016, you have Hillary Clinton, could be the first woman president.
You have Tim Kaine, who could be the second woman president.
That's not nice.
I didn't mean that.
It was an easy shot to take, and I took it.
But you have a woman, you have a man.
You have an older person, you have a younger person.
You have John McCain, an older man.
You have Sarah Palin, a younger woman.
John McCain, a kind of liberal Republican.
Sarah Palin, the rock-ribbed conservative.
You do have age and gender differences with Bernie and AOC, but they think exactly the same thing.
AOC more or less said that she got all of her ideas to run for politics from Bernie Sanders.
There's no balance to that at all.
And if the mainstream media and the left are going to persist in believing that's going to give them the White House, they are in for a rude awakening.
How do I know that?
Not from watching CNN, not from CBS, but from looking at the fundraising numbers.
President Trump is enjoying this Democratic primary like no one else.
President Trump is enjoying this impeachment inquiry like no one else.
The news stories won't tell you that, but Trump is enjoying it because he is raking in cash from all of this.
Trump and the RNC, which are now a joint venture, have raised more than $300 million.
And the president alone, just the president, has $158 million in campaign cash on hand.
To start his re-election bid.
That is more than any other sitting president in history at this point in the campaign.
Now, the flip side to that is the Democrats have outraised Trump collectively, all together.
But you're talking about like 25 Democratic candidates.
Collectively, they've outraised Trump.
Even a lot of Democratic strategists, though, are pointing out that money is all going to go to cross purposes.
They're running a primary campaign, which Trump doesn't need to do.
And they're going to spend that money tearing each other down.
Joe Biden, who is theoretically the frontrunner, is burning through his campaign funds at a rate that is simply too fast to sustain a general election campaign.
He is spending 12% more than he's taking in.
Why is he spending it?
Because he knows his campaign might not be long for this world.
So he's trying to burn that cash now to at least keep his head above water.
Because the minute that he really falls down in those polls, he's over.
Joe Biden is spending 30% more than the Liz Warren campaign and Liz Warren is the one nipping at his heels.
But even Warren is not fine on that front because Warren is cutting herself off from high dollar donors and she's refusing to appear at big money fundraisers.
Why is she doing that?
Because she's having this identity crisis and she needs to figure out if she's going to be the big establishment heir to Hillary Clinton or if she's going to be the heir to Bernie Sanders and she's going to be the small dollar donations and she's going to be a woman of the people.
She's going to try to win some fans among the Democratic primary voters, but it's going to starve her campaign of money that she needs.
And what about Bernie Sanders?
He's the third big person in that race.
Bernie Sanders raises a lot of money.
He raises a lot of small dollar donations.
Bernie has a problem too, though, which is that one of Bernie's biggest donors is the Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer, and Tom Steyer is now running for president himself.
So there goes Bernie's biggest donor.
Trump enjoying all of this, raising a whole lot of cash.
We all remember how the mainstream media got the 2016 election completely wrong.
So I'm very skeptical of polls.
You know, there was that Fox News poll the other day came out and showed the majority of Americans support impeachment and removal from office.
And I saw that poll and I said, I just don't believe that.
And it wasn't wishful thinking.
I think I have a pretty clear eye when it comes to these things, or I certainly try to have a clear eye when it comes to these things, and I thought, that just doesn't sound right to me.
I don't think that after three years of all these BS attempts to overturn the 2016 election, that right now the majority of Americans want to throw the president out of office because he made a long-distance phone call to Ukraine or something.
I don't think most people have any idea what this non-troversy is about.
And It turned out that I was right.
It later came out that that poll grossly oversampled Democrats, so it skewed the poll very much in the favor of impeachment and removal from office.
This is why I'm much more interested in hard dollars, intangible indicators of how this election's going.
There might be some red outlets, there might be some blue outlets, but green is a pretty reliable color and a lot of that green, most of that green is going to President Trump right now.
I also need to point out, before we leave this topic of identity, this is not just affecting politics.
This is not even just affecting pop culture.
This is affecting increasingly young people.
So the transgender activist or the transgender model in the United Kingdom was 15 years old when medical malpractitioners and a confused culture convinced him to live the rest of his life as a woman.
And possibly make permanent alterations to his body because of that.
That's really bad.
But it's going down and it's affecting colleges and high schools and elementary schools and all these sorts of things.
Boise State, Boise State University, hosted an event last week called Inclusive Teaching Means Inclusive Grading 2.
What is inclusive grading?
It means that we are not, not only are we going to erase standards of truth and reality from our curricula, which has been happening for decades now, it's just perspectives.
There's no truth.
It's your truth and my truth.
But they're going to follow that idea to its logical conclusion and erase standards from grading as well.
This was not a one-off.
The same event was hosted at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
This event was aimed to, quote, Have you made your way swimming through all that jargon yet?
What it means is you're going to grade different people not based on the quality of their work but on the color of their skin and on their sex and on their sexual preferences.
There's a similar event at American University.
This is how the event at American University built itself.
How to assess writing without judging its quality.
Oh my gosh.
How to assess without judging.
You can't assess without judging.
To make an assessment is to make a judgment.
What do you make judgments on?
Quality.
This workshop warned that, quote, the practices of grading writing maintained white language supremacy.
That to use correct language is racist somehow.
Another workshop was called Why Are You Reacting That Way?
And it promised to, quote, give participants opportunities to examine the lens they use to interact with others and understand why there is resistance.
What this means is it was going to teach teachers not how to deal with bad students who were disrupting class and causing problems, but to teach teachers Not to discipline those students, just to learn from them.
And when the student acts up, realize that it's probably your fault and to figure out what you're going to learn from the student that way.
Everything about this is backwards.
And everything about this comes from the exact same identity crisis that affects Rhea Cooper and Pierre Delecto and all the rest of us in the me, me, me social media era.
All the rest of us in the era of being one and all the Time Magazine person of the year.
With the writing quality, writing expresses and reflects your thoughts.
To write well is to think clearly, which is why it's so hard.
That's what the great historian and writer David McCullough said.
Writing is a reflection of the brain.
Dennis Prager says that.
Writing is the way that we communicate with one another, and the only way that we can communicate with one another is if there is an objective reality outside of us, outside of me, me, me.
An identity crisis society, a society that is totally obsessed with the self, can never admit that objective reality.
It can't admit to grades.
It can't admit to writing standards.
It can't admit to grammar.
It can't admit to any of that because that would contradict the self.
So if you are really bad at writing and you put out some bad writing, it couldn't possibly be that you're bad at writing.
The premise is, I'm perfect at everything and all of my desires must be satisfied.
So then the only other option is writing itself is not objective.
It couldn't possibly be that you got a bad grade because you're a little slow or you didn't do the work or you're a little bit lazy or you stayed up too late going to a party.
Couldn't be that.
It's that the work itself can't be objective or that the teacher is missing something.
Can't be that you acted up because you're poorly raised and badly behaved and you have no discipline.
Couldn't be that.
It could be it's the teacher's fault.
It's always somebody else's fault.
That way lies misery.
That identity crisis lies misery.
It comes right down to the central problem of preferring fantasy to reality, to preferring the indulgence of our own appetites to the satisfaction of eternal longings.
Bigger longings than ourselves.
And it comes down to the identity question.
Who are you?
In a sane society, it's the simplest question in the world.
In a society that's lost its way, that's lost its mooring, it's the most pitiful question that few people, if any, can answer.
That's our show.
I hope you can answer that show.
I don't have much of an identity crisis.
I know that I am Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Get your mailbag questions in for Thursday.
I'm heading over to the University of Florida at Gainesville, so we're going to be doing a speech there for the rest of my YAF tour, and we'll be talking about even more uncomfortable truths in this culture of fantasy.
See you then.
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkiewicz and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
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Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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