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Oct. 24, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:45
Ep. 438 - America Is Becoming Britain

After weeks of closed door impeachment meetings, Rep. Matt Gaetz storms the secretive deposition room to demand transparency. Then, Hillary 3.0 speculation gets another boost from a top Clinton aide, some good news from Syria, and finally the Mailbag! Date: 10-24-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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After weeks of closed-door Democratic impeachment meetings, Congressman Matt Gaetz leads a group of Republicans to storm the secretive deposition room to demand transparency.
Meanwhile, a top aide to Hillary Clinton signals that America's favorite battle acts may be running again.
Some fear the U.S. is headed toward civil war.
I fear a far more dreadful future.
We are becoming Great Britain.
We will analyze our political polarization.
Hillary 3.0 gets a big boost.
Some good news from Syria after bad news on the domestic front.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
All right.
So...
Yesterday, big fireworks fly in the Congress because Republicans stormed the impeachment proceedings.
They ran down there.
It was chaos.
It was madness.
Okay, so that wasn't, so that wasn't, I guess that wasn't that exciting.
But if you ask Democratic Rep Jerry Connolly, it was madness.
Jerry says, the whole thing was threatening, shouting back and forth.
I sat down and all of a sudden the room filled up with non-committee members.
Initially, it was a little hard to realize what was happening.
In fact, to be honest with you, I got a little concerned.
Don't forget, by the way, when people regularly use the phrase to be honest with you, it means that they're generally not honest with you.
And I think that's what's coming from the Democrats.
This was not some crazy kick down the doors, we're taking over, this is a coup d'etat.
It was Republicans asking to be let into a room for the impeachment proceedings that they should be invited to.
So, not exactly threatening.
But this was a total setup.
This was a complete...
A bit of political theater from the Republicans, but the whole impeachment proceedings are political theater from the Democrats.
When you think about impeachment, I think what people are trying to do is they're trying to figure out what is this impeachment about?
Something with Ukraine and Joe Biden and a phone call, and that's the wrong way to think about it.
You have to look on the longer scale.
Democrats have been trying to impeach President Trump since before he took office.
Who's the guy leading the impeachment charge?
It's Adam Schiff.
Adam Schiff, rather.
Adam Schiff has been caught lying time and time again.
Adam Schiff has been caught leaking time and time again.
Adam Schiff has been caught in the pockets of leakers from the intelligence community time and time again.
Now he is leading this impeachment inquiry based on anonymous whistleblowers from within the bureaucracy that we will never hear from.
Okay, and he's passing along this information, which is hearsay, which is secondhand, from these anonymous whistleblowers who we already found out from the IG are biased.
First, we found out the whistleblower, this brave, wonderful American from the intelligence community, had shown demonstrable bias.
Of opposing Donald Trump.
We then found out he formerly worked on the staff of a Democrat.
We just found out today there is a third evidence of anti-Trump bias from this whistleblower, that we don't know the nature of that bias yet.
And there's a real irony here, too, because when Barack Obama, Trump's predecessor, had a real scandal, the Fast and Furious scandal, where he was running guns across our border, there was a whistleblower in that case, too.
And do you know what Barack Obama did to that whistleblower?
Did he exalt him?
Did he elevate him?
Did he bring him behind closed-door meetings to testify?
No, he fired him.
The guy's name was John Dodson.
Everything about this case, though, is secret.
The reason that everything is secret in this case is because they don't want those consequences.
They don't want it to become clear that this is a total setup, like all the other setups for the past three years.
They don't want the witness to be cross-examined.
By the public or by anybody else.
They don't want President Trump to be able to face his accuser.
In the case of the Obama Fast and Furious whistleblower, we knew the guy's name.
We know the guy's name today.
If Adam Schiff and the House Democrats have their way, we're never going to find out.
So they've been for weeks and weeks secretly deposing all of these witnesses.
Then yesterday, Laura Cooper, who is a Pentagon official, she oversaw Ukraine policy, she was subpoenaed to testify.
And the testimony was supposed to be classified testimony.
That's why it was a big hubbub when the Republicans forced their way in.
The thing is, the subpoena was not classified.
The subpoena that called her to testify.
So the Republicans actually saw a little bit of daylight here and they went in.
What is this all about?
Is this about Ukraine?
No.
Is this about Joe Biden?
Not really.
I don't think the Democrats are even that eager to nominate Joe Biden.
This is about the 2020 election because the Democrats do not believe that they can beat Trump at the ballot box.
They think that if they cannot impeach Donald Trump, That very likely he will be re-elected.
This is not just psychobabble.
This is not just me trying to read the minds of Democrats.
This is actually from the mouth of loudmouth Democrats themselves, including Representative Al Green back in May.
You've been calling for starting articles of impeachment since 2017.
But a new Quinnipiac poll taken after the release of the redacted Mueller report found that 66 percent say Congress should not start impeachment proceedings.
And there's a sharp partisan divide, as we all know, with only 4 percent of Republicans favoring impeachment.
Congressman, are you concerned that impeachment talk may actually help the president's reelection?
I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get reelected.
Pretty clear.
And I think he's probably right.
Al Green, he says outrageous and ridiculous things in the House, but he's been around a while.
This guy knows a thing or two about politics, and I think he's probably right.
If the Democrats thought that they could beat President Trump at the ballot box, they would not be trying to impeach him.
I mean, they have literally been trying to impeach him since before he took office.
Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, a number of other leading Senate Democrats tried to set the stage legislatively before he took office to impeach him.
House Democrats were sending letters to the Government Services Administration setting the stage for impeachment before Trump took office.
Then Al Green tried to impeach him a year ago, two years ago.
They've just been trying to do this because they're initiating an impeachment in search of a crime.
But what they believe, what the left believes is they are losing their control on the culture.
They're losing their control.
They were supposed to win in 2016.
They didn't.
And so they've got to overturn that election by any means necessary.
And at least some guys like Al Green are very radical, but they're willing to say what they mean.
So if we are now at the point in this country where The legislature run by a different party is willing to overturn the results of a presidential election.
What does that mean for the future of our country?
Some say we're headed for a civil war.
Actually, the majority of Americans say we're headed toward a civil war.
I think there's another explanation.
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Go to ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Are we headed toward a civil war?
That is what the majority of Americans say.
Not just a majority, two-thirds of Americans.
Voters were asked on a 0 to 100 scale to rate the level of political divide in this country.
The value offered for 100 was edge of a civil war.
The mean response, the average response, was 67.23.
That score was similar to a 70.77 score from the April poll.
So you've got the majority of Americans, say, were headed toward civil war.
And what they would say is the likelihood of that is 67%.
I don't think that we're headed toward a civil war.
I think our future is even bleaker than that.
I think we are headed toward becoming Great Britain.
I know.
I don't want this extreme rhetoric like I've got to threaten my countrymen and say we're about to become a bunch of dirty, rotten limeys, but we are.
We are headed toward becoming Great Britain.
When people saw that scene yesterday at the Capitol of Matt Gaetz and the Republicans storming into the room, When you actually watch the video, it's kind of restrained.
They kind of walk in.
I think they ordered pizza at one point.
Then they walked out and the deposition went on.
The British Parliament is far wilder than that.
If you've ever watched Prime Minister's Questions or any video of the British Parliament, things get crazy.
Here's just take a listen.
This is just a little glimpse of the British Parliament.
Does the Prime Minister recall that at the time after he became Prime Minister under the Coalition and at the time when he was dividing the nation between strivers and scroungers, I asked him a very important question about the windfall he received when he wrote off the mortgage of the premises in Notting Hill And I said to him he didn't write off the mortgage of the one the taxpayers were helping
to pay for at Oxford.
I didn't receive a proper answer then.
Maybe Dodgy Dave will answer it now.
And by the way...
Order! Order! Order! Order! Order! Order! Order! Order! Order!
Order!
Order!
I love...
That's not like that was just members of a crowd.
That was members of parliament.
And they're all yelling, yo!
And the guy sounds like he's Trump.
Dodgy Dave.
Crooked Hillary.
Sleepy Joe.
So I think we're headed in this direction.
And that's a terrible thing.
That's a terrible idea.
Because we don't really have the...
The history, the roots, the tradition, and the kind of cultural similarity that the Brits do to pull that off.
You know, at least the Brits, in the one minute they can be screaming and yelling and angry and, order, order, order!
And then the next minute they can be making jokes about that, which they often do.
Americans are a little more earnest than those Brits and we're more diverse and we're much more bound up by our Constitution and by our shared experience here than we are with just the incredible length of history that the British people have.
So I think probably it's, I guess it's better than Civil War if we become Great Britain.
But there is a fear here too.
We did become very disorderly before the Civil War as well.
I guess it can go one of two ways.
We can either become the yelling parliament and say, or we can start shooting each other in fields in Gettysburg.
Hopefully it's the former.
Let's not forget, right before the Civil War, there was a lot of strife in the legislature.
There was the caning of Charles Sumner, where Representative Preston Brooks, the Democrat from South Carolina, used his walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, who is an abolitionist Republican.
And he nearly killed Sumner.
It's not like he just whacked him once on the back.
He nearly killed the guy.
So are we heading toward that civil war?
I'm skeptical.
You know, the civil war involved a very serious moral question.
Are we debating moral questions right now?
What is the moral question we're debating?
Are we debating the phone call to Ukraine?
Is that a serious moral question?
Possibly withholding U.S. aid to Ukraine unless they investigate their relations to the Obama administration?
That's not a serious moral question.
So directly, we are not debating that.
There are, however, serious moral questions boiling below the surface.
Abortion.
We kill a million babies a year, and we've been debating it for 50 years.
It's boiling below the surface.
The nature of sex and gender.
What that means for child abuse, if we're going to pump little kids full of hormones and block them from going through puberty.
So those big questions are there.
We're just not talking about them directly.
We don't have either the moral clarity of the abolitionists We don't have the local attachments of the secessionists.
We don't have a serious debate.
So I don't know that we're headed towards civil war.
I think we're going to become Great Britain.
That's a very bad thing because impeachment will run roughshod over the executive branch.
And what it will do is create more or less congressional supremacy just like you have parliamentary supremacy in Britain.
This is not good.
Our framers of our constitution, our founders considered that.
They said, should we just make Congress the main branch of government?
And ultimately they said no.
And they wrote about this in Federalist 65.
Alexander Hamilton wrote this, and he dealt with the question of impeachment.
If you give the Congress too much power in impeachment, then the executive, the president, will just sort of be a puppet to serve at the will and the pleasure of the Congress.
So what Hamilton wrote in Fed 65 is, quote, a well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective.
The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.
In other words, you're not going to impeach a president because he jaywalked 20 years ago.
You're not going to impeach a president because he has unpaid parking tickets.
You're going to impeach a president for the acts that he does that violate the public trust that are political.
Except where are you going to get a court to try these impeachments?
Because you want a well-constituted court that isn't just going to use impeachment as a power grab, and that is very difficult to find.
So Hamilton goes on.
The prosecution of these injuries, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.
In many cases, it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other.
And in such cases, there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of the parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.
It is like Alexander Hamilton is looking into a crystal ball and seeing Adam Schiff's smug little face looking right back at him.
And he says, this is a bad idea.
We don't want this to happen.'" So they ultimately decide, is it going to be tried in the House?
Is it going to be tried in the Supreme Court?
And they ultimately decide on the Senate.
Not because they think the Senate is some great body, they just think it's the least bad body of all of them to try it.
So Hamilton goes on, he says, quote, Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified or sufficiently independent?
What other body would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation to preserve unawed and uninfluenced the necessary impartiality between an individual accused and the representatives of the people, his accusers?
So, Hamilton and the founders and framers feared this.
They did not want a sort of parliamentary supremacy, the supremacy of the House of Representatives over the executive.
They're putting this in impeachment.
Let's not forget impeachment was not invoked very often.
We did it to Andrew Johnson in the 1860s.
Then we didn't do it again until Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
Then we did it 20 years later to Bill Clinton.
Then looks like we're going to do that 20 years later to Donald Trump.
The speeding up of that means that you are getting the Congress...
To more or less treat the president like a prime minister, just as someone who is serving when he wants to serve them.
And actually on that point, it's important to note that Hillary Clinton might run for a third time.
This seems like it only affects the 2020 election, but it actually affects the direction of our whole government because what you're beginning to see is permanent leaders of their parties who come into office and out of office and then go back into office again.
They're nominated, then they lose, then they're nominated again, and they just have a sort of semi-permanent control over their party.
Here's Hillary's, one of her top advisors, Philippe Rines, going on Tucker Carlson's show and more or less saying she's seriously considering running for president.
A man who has served for decades as one of her closest aides, Philippe Raines.
Philippe, great to see you tonight.
You too, Tucker.
So I'm assuming what I just said and what we're hearing is true, that if she thought she was the best position to beat Donald Trump, she'd get in the race.
She's not...
I would take issue with the Macedonia part, but other than that, you know, she ran for president because she thought she would be the best president.
If she still thought that now, if she thought she had the best odds of beating Donald Trump, I think she would think about it long and hard.
I know.
She hasn't foreclosed the possibility.
No, she has not.
That's what I'm saying.
So really the question, and that doesn't surprise anybody who's followed the claims.
No.
Well, look, this is a huge if.
But if she were to jump in for whatever reason, and the party has moved someplace that she hasn't, then she won't get the votes.
That's the point of the primary.
There are, I guess, still 19 people.
There are a few that are in double digits.
If she were to run and people think that she's too left, too right, too center, whatever you want to call it, that's the beauty of it.
They get to vote against whoever they want.
I don't know.
She's not running because she has any anxiety about the Democratic field.
She really likes a lot of the people running.
She knows them well.
She thought about some of them for her vice presidency.
There might be a reason that she'd be the best person, not only to beat Donald Trump, but to govern after Donald Trump, which is a part we don't talk about much.
And look, you can make fun of it all you want, but 65 million people voted for her.
Did you catch that little slip?
From Philippe Rines.
So the whole interview is hypothetical.
Yeah, she could run.
Maybe she'd run.
Who knows?
Then he says, look, she's not running because she has worries about other people in the field.
She's, what did I say?
He referred to her as though she is already running.
Anybody who's ever followed the Clintons knows the Clintons do not go away.
In the event of a nuclear holocaust, the two survivors will be the cockroaches and the Clintons.
They just survived political scandals.
She is behaving as though she's running.
She's on this book tour now, which is more or less putting her on the campaign trail.
She's talking like she's running.
She's sniping at other candidates like she's running.
And she's sending her advisor on one of the biggest news shows on cable to tell people in the present tense that she is running.
And say the reason she's running is not that she doesn't like these other candidates, it's that, oh, whoops, ooh, did I say that?
This is probably the clearest sign yet that we're becoming Great Britain.
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You've got Philippe Rines going on TV saying Hillary's running.
You've got a New York Times op-ed also raising the prospect of Hillary 3.0.
And that came out, that certainly came out with the push of the Clinton team.
Nothing happens by accident in the New York Times, and nothing about the Clintons happens by accident either.
This is a parliamentary process.
You know, remember Winston Churchill.
Winston Churchill was the prime minister 1940 to 1945.
Then he gets kicked out of power, and then he returns as the prime minister in 1951 to 1955.
This is what happens in parliamentary governments.
You have long-term leaders of parties, and when the party comes into power, then the leader of that party generally becomes the prime minister.
That's the direction we're headed in.
We shouldn't do that.
This happens when people mistakenly believe they want to become more democratic.
So they say, yeah, if we want to be more democratic, then the institution elected by the people should dominate the whole federal government.
The founders considered that.
They thought it was a very bad idea.
We have the most brilliantly constituted republic in the history of the world.
We have an incredible and delicate balance of powers and a separation of powers that has allowed our country to thrive.
A separation of powers between the three branches of government, the legislature and the judiciary and the executive.
This corresponds, just to show you how brilliant our founders were, this corresponds to the tripartite soul, this corresponds to the three aspects of our soul, the logos, the ethos, and the pathos.
So the sort of emotional part, the part that responds to feeling, the pathos, that would be represented in the legislature.
The sort of raw, pure, unadulterated, logical part is represented in the judiciary, the logos.
And then the ethos, the spirited part of the government and of our own persons is represented in that executive who is the spirited part of the country.
All three.
Now, do they work perfectly?
Of course not because it's a human institution, but they've worked very, very well.
We then also separate powers from the federal government to the state level to the local level.
This is a brilliant structure that we have been, I don't say we, that the left has been consistently trying to destroy for over 100 years.
You begin that with the direct election of senators.
So you remove so much of the state power.
The states basically have no say in the federal government anymore.
Now there are calls to abolish the electoral college.
Now there are going to be calls to abolish the significance of presidential elections, to abolish the legal basis for impeachment proceedings and basically just let the House of Representatives do whatever they want to do.
Even if it sort of works in the UK, that doesn't mean it's going to work here.
And it doesn't really work that well in the UK. But at least the UK is such a unified people and they have such a long history.
And they're so peculiar.
They don't even really need a constitution in the UK because of the weight of history.
In the United States, we do.
We're a very, very young country.
We take in more immigrants than anybody in the history of the world every year, and we try to assimilate them into American culture, though the left increasingly doesn't want us to do that.
We have very little that holds us together.
We need to preserve this delicate structure that has served us well for so long.
The left doesn't want that to happen.
I've got some very, very bad news I hope it doesn't happen, but I've got to let you know, Julian Castro may drop out of the 2020 race.
And when Julian Castro, the man who made presidential history by endorsing abortion rights for men during a presidential debate, when he drops out, I'm pretty much done with this presidential election.
What he's doing is he's saying, if we don't raise $800,000 in the next 10 days, my campaign is over.
Now, what he's trying to copy is Cory Booker's strategy of saying, if we don't raise $1.7 million in nine days, the campaign will be over.
And he did it, and he made a lot of money.
So Castro has actually given his voters a pretty good deal.
Castro is also polling at 0.6%, so I don't think his campaign is long for this world.
I'm going to be very sad when it goes away if...
It's one of the most ridiculous and frivolous campaigns I've ever seen.
So we wish him well.
I don't know.
Maybe I'll donate just to keep him on that debate stage.
We have got to get to one amazing little clip from AOC trying to grill Mark Zuckerberg, doing her best Charlie Day impression from Always Sunny, and some actually pretty good news out of Syria.
Then we got the mailbag, but first I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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We will be right back with the mailbag.
So we've got some good news out of Syria, some relatively good news out of Syria.
I mention this because all we're talking about are the political fights and the battles and the campaigns and the impeachment and Hillary's going to run again.
You remember, you remember two weeks ago when President Trump announced the decision to redeploy troops out of northern Syria.
People pretended like this was the worst moment in American history.
They all pretended like they knew anything about Syria.
They all pretended they could find Syria on a map.
They pretended they knew who the Syrian Free Army was and the YPG group of Kurds and the PKK group of Kurds.
And they then felt a little awkward because they didn't realize that one group of Kurds is officially designated a terrorist organization in the United States.
And then they pretended to know the intersections of Iran and Russia and Turkey and all.
And they just didn't know anything.
We were told the sky was going to fall.
We were told the Kurds were going to be completely massacred, wiped off the face of the earth.
Turkey was going to keep just marching all the way into Syria, and it didn't happen.
It didn't happen.
What President Trump did was then instituted some sanctions against Turkey, said, I'll destroy your economy if you don't stop invading Syria and if you wipe out the Kurds.
So Turkey stopped.
There was a ceasefire that was initiated.
People said it wouldn't last.
It looks like it's last, and President Trump is declaring victory.
Well, thank you very much.
My fellow Americans, I greet you this morning from the White House to announce a major breakthrough toward achieving a better future for Syria and for the Middle East.
It's been a long time.
Over the last five days, you have seen that a ceasefire that we established along Syria's border has held, and it's held very well beyond most expectations.
Early this morning, the government of Turkey informed my administration that they would be stopping combat and their offensive in Syria and making the ceasefire permanent.
And it will indeed be permanent.
However, you would also define the word permanent in that part of the world as somewhat questionable.
We all understand that.
But I do believe it will be permanent.
I've therefore instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to lift all sanctions imposed Okay, he goes on.
There's a lot more to it, obviously.
But what happens at the end of this Syria decision?
American troops are still in the country, though they've redeployed out of that area.
No Americans have been killed, and the fear was that an American might be killed, even as a tripwire might be killed like Americans were killed in the Beirut bombings in 1983.
Turkey has stopped going in.
Bashar Assad is basically safely ensconced in power, and now...
Turkey and Syria and Iran and Russia are trying to figure out what to do with that territory in Syria.
What end did you want to this?
Because we're also being told this is terrible.
Russia wins.
Iran, did they win?
I don't know.
Is it a win to occupy Syria?
Doesn't seem like a win.
That seems like a big loss for American foreign policy.
What's the objective here?
Regardless of your answer to that question, if you have an answer, which most people will not, This worked out pretty well, right?
No one's going to know that because no one's going to follow the story anymore.
All they're going to follow is the one week or two weeks of total hysteria from the mainstream media, which has now moved on and starts talking about how Matt Gaetz is upending precedent in the House of Representatives.
But this worked out fine.
And for all of the hand-wringing about Syria, everything worked out relatively pretty well.
What this tells us is on these actual policy matters, just take a deep breath.
Just wait, because if you have a little ounce of humility, you will realize that perhaps you don't know everything about Syrian foreign policy, and maybe we aren't headed toward civil war.
Maybe we aren't headed toward Armageddon.
Maybe the country isn't unraveling.
Maybe there is some sort of stability here.
Before we get to the mailbag, I just have to show you this clip.
Take a listen to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilling Mark Zuckerberg.
So you have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by her own admission, not the expert.
Let's put it that way, okay?
Not the brightest bulb in the pack, not the sharpest tool in the shed, grilling Mark Zuckerberg, one of the most intelligent people on earth.
It goes pretty much as well as you would expect.
Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements?
Well, Congresswoman, I think lying is bad, and I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad.
That's different from it being, in our position, the right thing to do to prevent your constituents or people in an election from seeing that you had lied.
So you won't take down lies or you will take down lies?
I think it's just a pretty simple yes or no.
I'm not talking about spin.
I'm talking about actual disinformation.
In a democracy, I believe that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians that they may or may not vote for are saying judge their character for themselves.
So you won't take them down.
You may flag that it's wrong, but you won't take it down.
Congresswoman, it depends on the context that it shows up.
Organic Post adds.
The treatment is a little different.
One more question.
She obviously doesn't know very much of what she's talking about.
You could make that statement after almost anything that AOC says.
What Mark Zuckerberg could have responded, though, and he was trying to keep his composure and seem like he's being very respectful, that's why he keeps referring to his congresswoman, is she's asking him to censor her political opponents.
She's saying, you're not going to take down things that I deem lies in politics.
In politics, each side is always calling the other side liars.
So let's say, to use a similar example that she gives, Let's say that a politician runs an ad and says, AOC is going to raise your taxes.
And AOC says, I'm not going to raise your taxes.
I'm only going to raise taxes for certain people.
And I'll actually balance it out and write this kind of typical fights.
You hear this in almost every single election.
And AOC says, I demand you take down that post that says I'm going to raise your taxes, which is more or less what she's asking for.
What if it were a TV commercial?
AOC is going to raise your taxes.
I'm AOC's opponent, and I approve this message.
Are you going to demand that cable providers take down that message?
Because AOC doesn't like it?
What if it's a palm card?
What if it's a little pamphlet that's sent in the mail?
Are you going to demand that the post office censors that palm card?
Censors that campaign information?
No, of course not.
But with Facebook, they see an opening.
Because Facebook has so much power and it's so new that they see an opening for the left to just grab hold of this entire institution.
And Zuckerberg acquitted himself pretty well and he refused to kowtow to her.
AOC is also upset that Mark Zuckerberg has been having dinner with conservatives and she goes after him.
In your ongoing dinner parties with far-right figures, some of who advance the conspiracy theory that white supremacy is a hoax...
Did you discuss so-called social media bias against conservatives and do you believe there is a bias?
Congresswoman, I don't remember everything that was in the question.
That's all right, I'll move on.
Can you explain why you've named the Daily Caller a publication well-documented with ties to white supremacists as an official fact-checker for Facebook?
Congresswoman, sure.
We actually don't appoint the independent fact checkers.
They go through an independent organization called the Independent Fact Checking Network that has a rigorous standard for who they allow to serve as a fact checker.
So you would say that white supremacist-tied publications meet a rigorous standard for fact checking?
Thank you.
Congresswoman, I would say that we're not the one assessing that standard.
The International Fact-Checking Network is the one who is setting that standard.
So this is why you can't let AOC control Facebook, is because she says, look, I'm not trying to censor people who put spin.
I'm just trying to censor, you know, liars.
And then in the very next sentence, she refers to the Daily Caller, which is a completely mainstream conservative outlet, as a white supremacist outlet.
There's no basis for that whatsoever.
So she's a liar.
Does she get censored on Facebook?
Probably not.
But what she would do is, any organization to the right of Hillary Clinton, probably any organization to the right of Bernie Sanders, she would censor from Facebook.
And it's just that it's the arrogance.
It's that smug, unbelievable arrogance.
She says, you've been having dinner with these far-right figures.
Listen to this just fruit salad of words.
Some far-right figures, some of whom believe the conspiracy theory that white supremacy is a hoax.
So she's saying the premise is our government is white supremacist, that we're pretty much living in the antebellum South.
We're living with slaves, black slaves on the basis of their skin color, and we're living in this kind of fever dream of leftists.
And if you don't believe that, if you don't think we're living in the pre-Civil War South, then you're a conspiracy theorist.
That's what AOC is saying.
Watching her try to grill Mark Zuckerberg did remind me...
I think this was actually a reenactment with Charlie Day playing AOC on Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
I know a lot about the law and various other lawyerings.
Where did you go to law school again?
Well, I could ask you that very same question.
I went to Harvard.
How about you?
Where...
I'm pleading the fifth, sir.
I'd advise that you do that.
And I'll take that advice into cooperation, alright?
Now let's say you and I go toe-to-toe on bird law and see who comes out the victim.
No, and with my lawyerings, you know, and all my various...
No, not at all.
Alright, let's get to the mailbag now that we've seen that reenactment of AOC. From Evan.
Hey Michael, being that you have the best hair at the Daily Wire, partially due to keeps, I was wondering, what kind of hair products do you use?
Also, just a little bit of spray to kind of hold it in place.
From Claire, my friend is Christian and will marry an atheist this year.
Her fiancé is a wonderful man, and I'm thrilled she's happy.
However, since I am a Christian and will be standing next to her for her wedding, I feel like I have a responsibility to say something.
Interested to know your thoughts.
Thanks.
Well, how likely is he to come on over and see the light is part of the question.
Another question is how are they going to raise the kids?
If they're going to raise the kids atheists, It's probably not going to work.
If they're going to raise the kids Christian and the husband will kind of go along with it, okay, that's a good start.
The other question is about the wedding itself.
You know, the Catholic Church still actually has a fairly rigorous standard for this.
They've kind of loosened up rules a little bit after the loosey-goosey mid-20th century, but...
In the Catholic Church, marriage is a sacrament.
It's not just like something you can do on the beach in your flip-flops.
There are a lot of aspects to it because it is a real sacrament.
And so there's a long period of talking to priests and doing pre-marriage training, which is called pre-cana, and you're really sussing out a lot of these questions.
So the question is, you're a Christian, your friend is a Christian, What does it even mean to be standing next to her?
Is this going to be in a church?
Well, if the fiance is agreeing to be married in a church with a priest or a pastor and there's a kind of liturgy to it and they're saying this is a sacrament before God, then I don't know, I guess he's probably heading down the right path and you should encourage him along the way.
If not, if this is a kind of loosey-goosey thing and some friend is officiating it in the backyard, then you have to ask, what is the marriage in the first place?
I think a lot of people get married these days and they just don't really agree to what marriage is.
There was some Hollywood degenerate, I forget which one, because I could describe all of them, who said, he got married and shortly after he got married, he told his wife, look, we can't do this monogamy thing, alright?
I need to go sleep with other women.
We've got to get non-traditional here.
And this poor woman agreed to go along with it.
What else is she going to do?
But Obviously, that's not a marriage in any way that we imagine a marriage to be.
And maybe they didn't sign up for a normal marriage.
I mean, are you really believing what you say in the vows?
Are you really going to cherish this person faithfully in sickness and in health and good times and in bad times until the end of your lives, until death do you part?
Or is this one of these kind of modern hippie things?
Like, we're going to write our own vows, you know?
And it's like, hey, I really love when Johnny washes the dishes, and I promise to always, you know, like, leave the remote on the coffee table.
Ha ha ha.
Like, okay, if it's that, then you're not taking marriage all that seriously in the first place.
So, you know, as always in this era...
Words are being really distorted out of their original meaning.
So you've got to make sure going in.
I'm not saying the guy needs to convert and be all ready to go and the most Christian guy in the world even before the wedding.
But I'm saying your friend and her fiancé need to know what they're signing up for.
And if they're not on the same page, it's much better to catch that earlier rather than later.
From Ben.
After his third term in office, whose face on Mount Rushmore will we replace with Donald Trump?
It's prudent we begin now to discuss this, as this will be a point of contention in a few years.
Sincerely, Ben.
Thomas Jefferson, no question.
Next question.
John, Joe Rogan recently had Richard Dawkins on his podcast.
They were discussing Christianity specifically with regard to miracles surrounding Jesus.
Mr.
Dawkins promoted the idea that other than the resurrection, sophisticated theologians believe that all other miracles are either metaphors, didn't really happen, are not important, or symbolic.
Okay, so as a sophisticated theologian, do you believe...
Only in the resurrection and dismiss all the other miracles as something else?
Or do you think that if Jesus is truly God, then turning water to wine isn't that big of a deal?
As usual, Richard Dawkins has no idea what he's talking about.
You'll notice he doesn't name the sophisticated theologians because he can't.
And if he can name any sort of theologian at all who believes that, I promise you they're not sophisticated.
You know who's a pretty sophisticated theologian?
Thomas Aquinas.
St.
Thomas Aquinas.
You know who's another pretty sophisticated theologian?
St.
Augustine would be one.
The Church Fathers.
St.
Jerome.
I guess I could go on and on.
They all believed in the miracles.
Richard Dawkins is not a sophisticated theologian.
He's not a theologian at all.
So, no.
I'm not a sophisticated theologian or a theologian myself, but I do read them, and certainly the miracles are very important.
They are essential to Christianity.
Also, ask yourself this.
If Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the divine logic of the universe, born of the Father before all ages, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,
incarnate, Incarnate, of the Holy Spirit, conceived in a virgin, born into this world, dies on the cross to redeem man from his sin, then three days later rises from the dead.
You can go along with all of that, but you can't believe that he turns water into wine?
That's too much for you?
You believe the whole other thing, but he can't possibly turn water into wine?
That's...
Not a very sophisticated theological idea.
Okay, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'm going to be in Nashville this weekend debating the guy who called me skinny boy, Chris Hahn.
We're going to be at Politicon in Nashville.
So if you're in Nashville, head on over there.
Check it out at Politicon.
And if not, I'm sure we're going to be streaming it.
So I will see you there.
Have a good weekend.
I'll see you on Monday.
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