Big news in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and I’m not talking about Beto O’Rourke’s dropping out because nobody ever actually cared about Beto O’Rourke except for the mainstream media, and they’re wrong about everything. No, I’m talking about actually consequential presidential campaign news: Elizabeth Warren has released the details of her healthcare plan, which costs roughly $50 bazillion dollars. We’ll get into the economics of it, and examine the broader strategy of the Warren campaign: she thinks you’re all a bunch of idiots. Then, a Democratic state rep says something horrifying about unborn babies, President Trump moves to Florida, and so much more. Date: 11-04-2019
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Big news in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and I am not talking about Beto O'Rourke's dropping out because nobody ever actually cared about Beto O'Rourke except for the mainstream media and they are wrong about everything.
I'm talking about actually consequential presidential campaign news.
Elizabeth Warren has released the details of her health care plan, which costs roughly $50 bazillion.
We will get into the economics of it, and we will examine the broader strategy of the Warren campaign.
She thinks you're all a bunch of idiots.
Then, a Democratic state representative says something horrifying about unborn babies.
Surprise, surprise.
President Trump moves to Florida and so much more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Huge news in the presidential race.
And the Beto thing.
I have to at least enjoy this Beto dropping out.
It's so, so fun.
And it's not to make fun of Beto.
It's to make fun of somebody else who is a lot worse than Beto.
A much greater scourge to our country and a much greater tool from the left.
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netsuite.com Now, speaking of startup organizations that were not able to get past those initial challenges, the Beto O'Rourke campaign is officially over.
Seems like it barely began, but it is officially over.
I am not going to gloat Over O'Rourke's campaign being over, I'm going to miss Beto O'Rourke.
He's hilarious.
He was the doofiest candidate in the entire race.
He was skateboarding around Whataburger parking lots.
He was filming his dental hygienist while she was poking around his teeth.
He was hilarious.
He was great.
He reminded me of every kind of whiny, liberal guy who would hit on your girlfriend when you went out of town.
You know, he was just like the archetypal Liberal, progressive guy.
Really sensitive guy, you know?
He's out of the race now.
Which is a huge slap in the face, not to his campaign staffers or his donors or even himself.
It's a huge slap in the face to the mainstream media.
The reason that Beto O'Rourke dropping out matters.
The only reason that it matters is because it highlights something that we talk about every other day on this show, probably.
Which is, you should not believe the press.
You should not believe the mainstream media.
The reason you should not believe the mainstream media is not because they're awful and terrible and mean people.
It's because they're wrong all the time.
They lie through their teeth.
The mainstream media are dishonest.
The mainstream media are hacks who spread lies.
If you've ever found yourself, if you've ever had the privilege of finding yourself as the target of mainstream media attacks, which has happened to me on occasion, The first thing you realize is not, your first reaction is not, oh, this is awful, woe is me, why is everyone coming after me?
The first thing you realize is a much more clear observation about the press, which is, they're wrong.
They spread lies.
Imagine that Nick Sandman kid, the kid with the red hat, the MAGA hat in D.C., who was there on a class trip, he was waiting for his bus, and then these lunatics started approaching him.
Black supremacist group, the Hebrew Israelites, and this Native American leftist looney tune who walks up to him and starts beating a drum in his face.
And there's this kid who does nothing, who just stands there sort of half-smiling, unsure what to do, And then the mainstream media, Washington Post, New York Times, all those guys, paint him like he's a neo-Nazi, like he was attacking these people.
The mainstream media described the black Israelites who were screaming racial epithets at these kids, who were calling them all sorts of names, who were provoking them, described them as civil rights leaders.
They described this actually insane Native American leftist activist, Nathan Phillips, banging a drum in the face of this 16-year-old kid for no reason, described him as a peaceful combat veteran.
By the way, he wasn't a combat veteran.
Just made it up out of whole cloth.
And then described these kids who were there on a class trip doing nothing, standing still on the National Mall, which I think they're still allowed to do, described them as hateful, bigots, Attack intimidating.
That's the mainstream media.
They do it time and time again.
They describe a 16-year-old kid in a MAGA hat as a threat, as an assailant, and they describe Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a rapist, murderer, terrorist, as an austere religious scholar.
That's what the Washington Post did last week.
That's the mainstream media for you.
And guess who the mainstream media's favorite presidential candidate was for months?
Beto O'Rourke.
Big, beautiful, glossy pictures in Vanity Fair.
Beto O'Rourke, you know, Tucker Carlson over at Fox put together just a quick little montage of the press's reaction when Beto got into the race.
I saw him for the first time just a month ago when he sat down with Oprah, and me and the rest of the people in the audience thought, wow, this guy has this dynamic, positive energy.
Yeah, he has that raw talent.
He is very kind of Obama-esque indeed.
Women voted for him in the suburbs of Houston who hadn't voted Democrat before because they had a kind of better crush going on.
You know, he's wholesome and he's earnest.
He's got that magic dust.
Of course his son is named Ulysses.
I love that that's his son's name.
He has that gleam in his eyes.
Somebody, Evan Smith at the Texas Tribune said, seeing him, it's like a Jesus Christ superstar seeing this guy in front of people.
He's got that celebrity aura about him.
And in that moment, he was owning that.
None of that is true.
Not a single aspect of what they just said is true.
He's not terribly charismatic.
He's really awkward and weird and stiff and goofy.
He's not like a celebrity.
He doesn't make women swoon.
He's kind of a weird guy.
He's not Jesus Christ.
I know the press actually said he was Jesus Christ Superstar.
He's not.
He's an ex-congressman who lost a senate seat, who lost a presidential race.
Who skateboards around a Whataburger parking lot.
He's also not that earnest.
I mean, he tries to affect an earnest persona.
He doesn't believe in anything.
He changes his views day to day.
At first he said, this was a few months ago, he said, we will never take away your AR-15s.
We're not going to confiscate your guns.
Then, like two months later, he said, hell yeah, we're going to confiscate your AR-15s.
Shortly after which he said, hell yeah, we're going to drop out of the presidential race because...
He was going nowhere.
He didn't catch on with anybody.
He actually said in Iowa, he got onto a table, because this was his shtick for a while, he would stand on top of tables before crowds of 15, sometimes 20 people, and all of whom were in the mainstream media, by the way.
And he said, I want you to shape me into the presidential candidate that you want.
That is not the campaign theme of somebody who's earnest, somebody with conviction, somebody who's charismatic, somebody that people can fall head over heels for.
That is the presidential campaign theme of a hack who doesn't believe in anything, who's just desperate for power, who says from the very first moments of his campaign, I was born for this.
I was born to do this.
I'm in it to win it.
He's one of the first candidates out of the race.
So Beto's gone.
Adios, Beto.
Hasta la vista, hermano.
I don't know.
I don't know much Spanish, but I do know much more Spanish than Beto O'Rourke.
He's gone, and I'm sorry for him, but I feel really great for the mainstream media because, once again, they are proven wrong.
There is actual news, however, in the presidential race.
The actual news is about Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren has released the details of her health care plan.
That's not even the big deal.
We will examine the health care plan because it does tell us a lot about her campaign.
But the 30,000 foot view, the reason this matters in presidential politics broadly, is because it means Liz Warren has made her choice.
Liz Warren has been debating now for several weeks, for several months, Is she going to take Joe Biden's voters or is she going to take Bernie Sanders' voters?
Is she going to be the moderate Harvard professor that she was for a lot of her career?
Circumspect, academic, serious, balanced?
Or is she going to be the radical workers, warrior, class conflict, Bernie Sanders, communist?
Those were the two choices and she's waffled.
She's vacillated between the two.
She's made her choice.
She is going full left wing, which means she believes that Biden is done for.
She believes Biden is over.
So she thinks that she needs to go left to win the nomination.
Why?
Because being a centrist didn't allow Joe Biden to win the nomination.
It actually hurt him.
And because she thinks he's so weak, he's not going to be a challenge.
So that she thinks his voters are just automatically going to go over to her, and she thinks that she's now got to fight to win Bernie's voters.
The only way she's going to fight to win Bernie's voters is if she gets down hardcore on the leftist policies, and if she uses real numbers, and she puts forward plans, so it doesn't just look like she stole Bernie's talking points, but she actually has her own real plans.
Elizabeth Warren is now endorsing a full government takeover of healthcare.
A lot of Democrats have been talking about this for the past several years.
Really, they've been talking about this in the fringes for a hundred years.
And now Liz Warren, who is possibly the frontrunner, she's got all the momentum on her side, even if she's not number one in the polls, she is endorsing it head-on.
No private health insurance.
She is going full Castro.
Fidel Castro, not Julian Castro.
She is going far left.
She's been quiet about her plans this whole time.
She's been straddling that line.
Now she's admitting...
That she's on the left.
And the other reason she's been quiet is not just because she's had these two personas.
The other reason is even if she admits she's full left now, if she gives out the real numbers, then she's going to have to admit how she's going to pay for it.
And the only way to pay for it is to raise everybody's taxes.
So we have the price.
The price that even Liz Warren is admitting is $52 trillion.
The only advantage that Liz Warren has here is that nobody has any idea how much money $52 trillion is.
They don't.
If you told people, hey, I've got a million dollars here, and a billion dollars here, and $52 trillion here.
I dug three holes and I poured in all that money.
A million, a billion, and $52 trillion.
Visualize that.
You would imagine a slightly smaller amount in the first hole, and then a slightly bigger amount in the second hole, and then a slightly bigger amount, maybe even a significantly bigger amount in the third hole.
You could never visualize...
The difference in magnitude between a million dollars and a billion dollars and 52 trillion dollars.
It's just, you can't hold all of that in your head.
And so what Liz Warren is banking on is that anything with Ilyin basically means the same to people when they hear it.
And so they won't realize how insanely expensive this plan is, even if SNL spoofed this plan.
Saturday Night Live is in the tank for Liz Warren, and they have been for months now.
They love Liz Warren.
She's the only candidate they don't really make fun of.
They make fun of all the other candidates, but they don't make fun of her because they like her.
All the attacks that they throw on her are sort of gentle attacks that actually make her look good.
Even they...
Mocked Liz Warren for this feature of her health care plan, for the fact that she's banking on people not understanding how much money a trillion dollars is.
You said your plan would cost $20.5 trillion, but other economists have said it could cost $34 trillion.
Right, okay, let me stop you right there.
We're talking trillions.
You know, when the numbers are this big, they're just pretend.
There ain't no Scrooge McDuck vault.
You ready to get red-pilled?
Money doesn't exist.
It's just a promise from a computer.
You might as well say it costs $1.9 jillion over $12.10.
Same difference.
All right, next.
Who we got?
Sorry, Senator.
I'm going to need to see the math on that.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, you want to see the math?
Okay, I'll show you.
Look at this.
Here.
Yeah.
Do you understand this?
I do.
I could explain it to you, but you'd die.
Okay, so even here, they make the joke.
They say, look, look, the reason this health care doesn't matter is because money is not real.
And the numbers are so big, you can't even imagine what those numbers are.
And the questioner, who's apparently working for the Kamala Harris campaign, that's the setup, she says, I need to see the math on that.
And then Liz Warren shows her the math and says, look, I'm so smart.
I understand this complicated math, but you don't because you're an idiot and I'm so much smarter than you.
So even when they make a pretty accurate attack on her, they have to then couch it as a compliment to her because...
Saturday Night Live can't just get the joke in.
They can't just follow the comedy.
They have to back their candidates.
Let's not forget when that same actress, Kate McKinnon, when she was playing Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election cycle and then Hillary Clinton lost, she played a sad song on a piano very earnestly after the election while everyone was crying.
Saturday Night Live, that's the comedy.
But the joke they were trying to make, at least, is real.
The numbers are too big.
Let's drill down into those numbers to try to see if we can clarify how much money we're talking about.
Previously, Elizabeth Warren said that only billionaires would pay for her health care plan.
She would raise the taxes on billionaires and then they would pay for the plan.
Here she is.
Here, it's 100%.
It doesn't raise taxes on anybody but billionaires.
And you know what?
The billionaires can afford it, and I don't call them middle class.
So, billionaire, that's where it worked.
Anyone under a billion dollars that worked?
That's right.
He's not paying a penny more.
That's exactly right.
Okay, that's a complete lie.
But let's examine how gross a lie it really is.
The 400 richest Americans have a combined net worth of $2.96 trillion.
Okay?
We're not talking about that's their income.
We're not talking about raising taxes on their income or anything like that.
That's all the money they have is $2.96 trillion.
There are an additional 221 billionaires in America.
Now, all of those billionaires have less than $2.1 billion.
Let's just assume for a moment that all of the other billionaires in America have 2.1 billion dollars, which they don't, by the way.
So the actual number of their wealth will be significantly smaller than this.
But if we just assume that, then that brings the total wealth of every single billionaire in America to 3.42 trillion dollars.
It's actually probably closer to 3 trillion, but let's say 3.42.
All the billionaires in America have a combined net worth of Of $3 to $3.42 trillion.
If you confiscated not just 100% of their earnings, so you raised the tax rate on them to 100%, which means they stopped working so they're not going to make any money, but let's say you raised it to 200%, then you showed up at their doors with guns, kicked in the doors of their mansions, stole all of their property, including the clothing on their back.
If you did all of that, You could barely pay for 65% of even one year of Liz Warren's health care plan.
Liz Warren's health care plan, $52 trillion estimate over 10 years.
Usually these plans are calculated in the 10 year run.
So let's say one year, $5.2 trillion.
You took all the wealth of every billionaire in America, took every single penny they have.
You couldn't pay for 65% of one year.
By the way, then what happens after one year?
So you've paid for now 65% of one year of Liz Warren's healthcare plan.
The billionaires don't have any more money.
They're not making any more money.
They have nothing.
So now what happens?
Once you get 65% of the way through the year, you need to start taking money from other people.
But you've taken by far the wealthiest Americans and robbed them of all of their money.
So now you're going to have to go for a whole lot more people.
Not just another 600 people.
Not just 6,000 people.
You're going to have to go for everybody.
$52 trillion over 10 years.
To put that in perspective, we won World War II for $4 trillion.
That's inflation adjusted.
In 2019 dollars, it cost us $4 trillion to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Germany and hold off the Ruskies and secure the world order again.
Annualized, inflation adjusted, we paid less than one-fifth per year what Liz Warren wants us to pay for health care.
To beat the Nazis and Imperial Japan.
Now, how is Liz Warren even saying this with a straight face?
The way she's saying this with a straight face is she's saying that she will offset all of that money, $52 trillion in 10 years, by lumping in Medicare and Medicaid and the state contributions to Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program and government health care plans.
Because, she says...
We're already going to have this government-enforced socialist medicine, so you won't need all those other health care plans.
Okay, fair enough.
That still leaves $30 trillion in a budget gap.
The Wall Street Journal did a great editorial on this.
If you want to have a really quick, concise breakdown that you can read, go read their editorial.
$20 trillion $22 trillion, just about.
She's figured out how to take out of her health care plan.
You've still got to account for $30 trillion here.
To put that number in perspective, the entire GDP of the United States is $20 trillion.
The whole U.S. economy, $20 trillion.
We could confiscate the entire economy of the United States for one year.
By the way, there wouldn't be a US economy after that.
When you confiscate the entire economy of the United States, that's the end of the US economy.
You could confiscate that.
For one entire year, you would barely cover two-thirds of just the budget shortfall over the 10-year period.
The plan is an economic joke.
It's a farce.
Nobody can take this plan seriously from an economic perspective.
But the nonsense economics is only one political liability.
So it's not even as though she puts out this health care plan and then says, okay, here it is.
You're going to attack me for this, for all these crazy economics that don't make any sense.
The plan is actually even worse than that.
The other political liability here is that Liz Warren's health care plan would take away Americans' health care policies, and they hate that.
Americans really don't like it when you take away their doctor and when you take away their health insurance, and especially when you tell them that if they like their doctor, they can keep their doctor, like Barack Obama did.
Barack Obama took away health care from a lot of people because of Obamacare, which was a much more modest plan than Liz Warren is proposing.
He told Americans, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
That was not true.
Many Americans lost their health care.
Because of that single act, Barack Obama lost 1,000 seats over the next several years in our government, federal, state, and local.
1,000 seats.
The state houses, the Congress, eventually the Senate.
He lost everything.
He got to hold on to the White House, but he lost just about everything else.
People really, really hate it when you take away their health care.
Because they view it, rightly, as a matter of life and death.
So if you are going to take away their doctor, who they really like, or if you're going to start rationing healthcare, that's a big problem.
The Liz Warren healthcare plan would kick 170 million Americans off of private health insurance.
Bad enough.
You're kicking half the country off their private healthcare.
Also, it endorses rationing.
What is the rationing?
The rationing is...
What Sarah Palin referred to as the death panels, which the left mocked, but they could never explain why they were mocking it because the death panels were real.
The death panels were the Independent Payment Advisory Board, IPAB. These were put together by economists, the same economists who worked on the Liz Warren health care plan.
That's why they're so similar.
So, The reason you need rationing is because healthcare is a finite good.
Healthcare is not a human right.
It's not a natural right.
It's not something we are endowed with our creator to have.
It's a technology.
It's a commodity.
It's this thing that's only been around for 100 years in its modern form.
And it's always involved technology and other people's labor.
So you can't just say I have a natural right to healthcare because healthcare involves other people's work.
It involves other people's time.
It involves other people's investments.
It involves other people's ingenuity.
Health care will always be a finite good.
It won't be an infinite good.
The way that health care is now doled out is we have health insurance that pays for it.
We have hospitals.
We have prices for health care.
That's usually covered by insurance, but sometimes people pay out of pocket.
If you can't afford, you can go to an emergency room and you will get health care.
You'll never be turned away.
It's not optimal, but it's one way that we now work out this problem of this finite good that everybody wants.
The Liz Warren plan would take away all of those smaller forces that somehow keep this commodity in check, and they would give all of that to the federal government.
So, if U.S. healthcare spending exceeds GDP growth, how will Liz Warren pay for the program?
She says, quote, I will use available policy tools which include global budgets, population-based budgets, and automatic rate reductions to bring it back into line.
That's a whole lot of political gobbledygook to say I will ration care.
This is what every socialist health care plan has to do.
They will ration care.
There will be very, very long wait times, in which case people who are waiting for surgery very often will die while waiting for that surgery.
Because there just aren't enough doctors.
There aren't enough beds.
The government just isn't that good at running healthcare systems.
Or you'll have a black market for healthcare.
I was in Cuba a few years ago.
I visit Cuba.
I'm driving around and I'm walking around and I see Havana Hospital.
It's a famous hospital.
All the left-wing useful idiots will tell you healthcare in Cuba is some of the best in the world.
Because Cuba basically cooks their numbers to make it seem this way.
So there's the Havana Hospital.
Anybody can walk into Havana Hospital.
But you can't get medicine.
This is what people in Cuba told me.
You can walk in, that's no problem.
But they won't have medicine.
They won't have towels.
They won't have pillows on the beds.
You got to bring your own band-aids.
You got to bring your own syringes.
You got to bring your own toilet paper.
You have to bring everything because the government has rationed care.
That's what Liz Warren is going to do.
She's going to run for president during a time of relatively great prosperity by saying, we're going to have the same health care system as Cuba.
It'll be better because we're richer and we're starting from a much better position.
But that's where we're headed.
It would also raise the corporate tax rate.
It would raise it back to 35% from 21%.
This is pretty radical.
I know corporate tax rates are a sort of minor campaign issue.
Barack Obama himself campaigned against the 35% tax rate.
It's just too high.
It's too high.
It makes America, it keeps America from being competitive around the world.
It ends up hurting American workers and everybody in the country.
And Liz Warren would raise even more taxes on top of the 1% by taxing, quote, unrealized capital gains.
So when you make an investment, and then you cash out that investment, you make some money, you pay a capital gains tax.
What Liz Warren's going to do is just tax you, even if you don't get the money yet.
So you've got an investment, and then Liz Warren is just going to make you pay a fee to even have the investment, as well as a 2% wealth tax on people who have more than $50 million.
Which is just going to send money overseas.
It's going to make people hide their money.
It's going to make people avoid the tax.
A complete train wreck of a plan.
And this is giving an opening to another Democratic candidate who is creeping up the polls because he's basically doing the opposite of what Liz Warren is doing.
We'll get to that in a second.
We'll also get to a disgusting comment on unborn babies from a Pennsylvania Democratic state representative.
We will also get to the collapse of Joe Biden.
So much more.
But first, we have got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
$10 a month.
$100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get the Matt Walsh show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday.
You get to ask questions backstage.
You get everything.
And you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You're going to need that Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You're going to need it.
Because as Willie Brown, famous Democratic politician from California, helped to begin Kamala Harris' career, let's just put it that way, Willie Brown says that this Liz Warren health care plan has destroyed her chances at taking the White House.
We'll see if that's true.
We'll see if other candidates capitalize on it.
Drink up the leftist tears while you can.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
This Warren plan is a train wreck and she's just betting on you being too stupid to realize what a trillion dollars is.
Much less 52 trillion dollars.
Pete Buttigieg sees an opening.
This is Pete Buttigieg's chance.
Pete Buttigieg...
Who has also vacillated in this race.
Is he going to be the moderate centrist?
Is he going to be the radical generational revolutionary candidate?
He's gone back and forth.
He started out as the moderate nice midwestern guy.
Then he became a radical who told every Christian in the country that they're terrible people.
And then now he's going back and being the moderate guy again because Liz Warren is taking the radical train, the track.
He now says, he was saying this on the political showtime show, The Circus, that The race is going to become a two-way race between him and Liz Warren.
I think this is getting to be a two-way.
It's early to say it.
I'm not saying it is a two-way, but I think...
But you see that.
You see it's coming into focus, you and Warren.
Yeah, and certainly a world where we're getting somewhere is that world, where it's coming down to the two of us.
Obviously, there's a lot of candidates and a lot of things can happen, but I think that as that happens, the contrasts become clearer.
Look, the contrasts are real.
They're substantive, respectful policy contrasts, but they're real.
First of all, it's interesting you say that, right?
So you accept the notion right now that it's kind of Warren against the field, really.
Someone's trying to become the alternative to Warren right now, right?
Yeah, I think it's shaping up that way.
And so the former Vice President of the United States is, like, in your mind at this point, already, like, gone?
I would say this.
Either he is the unstoppable frontrunner and we can all go home, or he's not.
And anybody who's in this race is here on the assumption that he's not.
First of all, you've got to love these guys.
The questioner says, so the Vice President of the United States, he's over.
Joe Biden is not the Vice President of the United States.
He was the Vice President of the United States.
Now he's a guy.
This is a sort of minor point, but it does tell you something.
When the left just refers to President Obama, they always refer to President Obama.
They're saying he's the real president, you know, or Vice President Joe Biden.
He's the real vice president.
It's very quietly, very subtly dismissing the current administration.
But even beyond that, even when they don't do that, because very frequently people on both sides will refer to the president or the vice president, even if they've already left office.
But you'll hear the right frequently will not do that.
The reason shows two different views of government.
One is a government in which the president and the vice president are these unbelievable sort of imperial figures that keep their titles forever.
And the other is a much more American view, which is once you leave office, you lose your title.
The one exception to this is senators.
Senators style themselves senator for life because there are so many senators.
But you're really not supposed to refer to ex-governors, ex-presidents, ex-vice-presidents as governor, president, vice president.
People do it sometimes to be polite, but you're really not supposed to.
There's only one president.
There's only one vice president.
There's only one governor.
Of course, the left-wingers in these political shows don't want to deal with that.
Regardless, Pete Buttigieg is writing off former vice president Joe Biden.
He is writing off Bernie Sanders.
Why?
Part of this is wishful thinking.
He wants to get them out of the way because then it really is a two-way race between him and Warren.
So long as Kamala keeps collapsing, it will be a two-way race.
Part of it is backed up by facts.
Bernie Sanders' health is now a major campaign issue.
There's a new poll from ABC Washington Post as a poll of Democrats and Democrat-leading independents.
Younger adults, who are among Bernie's strongest supporters, are most apt to think that he is in decent enough health to serve.
Six in ten of them, 18 to 39-year-olds, say that he's in okay health.
6 in 10.
40% of even the young voters who are far and away most likely to support Bernie Sanders believe he's too unhealthy to serve as president.
And 60% of older voters, meaning 40 and above, think that Bernie is too unhealthy to serve as president.
That's a big shift.
He bounced back after that heart attack.
Within a week and a half, he was on that Democratic debate stage.
And he was looking more energetic and healthy than Joe Biden.
Doesn't matter.
He was already running as an extraordinarily old candidate by the standards of presidential politics.
That heart attack is really going to hurt him.
How about Joe Biden?
Joe Biden continues to lead in most polls.
The polls are falling, though.
And he's losing ground in the early states, except for South Carolina.
So it creates this problem.
If he loses Iowa, he loses New Hampshire.
He has no momentum going into South Carolina, especially the electability argument is all gone.
Biden is losing ground because he appears senile.
That's true.
He also appears corrupt.
This is much harder for Joe Biden to get past.
The hardest person hit by impeachment is not Donald Trump.
It's Joe Biden.
The impeachment vote that they took last week was a party-line vote.
It was a vote, by the way, it wasn't a vote to impeach.
It was a vote to begin an impeachment inquiry, which they'd already begun.
That was a party-line vote.
No Republicans voted for it.
So it just shows people the same thing they've already known since the Russia hoax and since Stormy Daniels and since taxes and now Ukraine.
They're just trying to get Donald Trump out because they don't like him.
That's what Al Green said, the first Democrat, to file an impeachment motion against Trump.
They said, if we don't impeach Trump, then he's going to get reelected.
So it's just a replay of this.
Nobody's changing their minds on this.
But the more that Ukraine is in the news, the more that people are going to hear about the corrupt dealings of Joe Biden, not just in Ukraine, but all over the world.
Yet again this weekend, Joe Biden, with a straight face, just lied to voters and said that he had no knowledge that his son was on that board in Ukraine.
Back to the Ukraine controversy.
Your son, Hunter, you've been asked a lot of questions about this.
My question is, both of you have said you would not, as president, have your children, have him or your children involved with foreign countries.
My question is, if it's not appropriate if Joe Biden is president, why was it appropriate when you were vice president?
Well, number one, no one's established that he did anything wrong or that I've done anything wrong.
Period.
I carried out the policy of the United States of America, our allies, the International Monetary Fund, the EU, in dealing with a corrupt prosecutor.
Period.
Number one, I did not know he was on the board of that company.
And in fact, no one's asserted on the board that it was illegal for being on the board or he did anything wrong.
So, the two major claims that Joe Biden is making here, that Hunter didn't do anything wrong and that he didn't know that Hunter was on the board are just completely and demonstrably false.
People have suggested that what Hunter Biden did was wrong, namely Hunter Biden, who just recently resigned from the board.
It's like saying, I did nothing wrong, and by the way, I'm sorry, and I'll never do it again.
Also, Joe Biden did know that his son was on the board.
How do we know that?
Because Hunter Biden told us in an interview on Good Morning America just a couple weeks ago, Did you and your father ever discuss Ukraine?
No.
As I said, the only time was after a news account.
It wasn't a discussion in any way.
There's no but to this.
No, we never did.
Your dad said, I hope you know what you're doing.
I hope you know what you're doing.
And you said, I do?
And I said, I do.
And that was literally the end of our discussion.
Okay, look, I never talked to my dad about Ukraine.
I mean, the only time we talked about it was when we were...
We weren't really talking about it.
We were...
And it wasn't about...
He didn't know.
It's just he told me, I better know what I was doing by joining that Ukrainian board.
So we...
But we talked about it.
Okay, we talked about it once.
We didn't really...
I wouldn't say we talked about it.
And we're never going to do it again.
We did.
They had a conversation about it.
Joe Biden told the...
Or Hunter Biden, rather, told this to the New Yorker magazine back in July.
When Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, his father found out about it and said, you better know what you're doing.
Because he obviously knew that it looked pretty shady and looked pretty dodgy.
And Hunter Biden, who's a complete degenerate, had no business being on this board in Ukraine, other than peddling his father's influence because his father was vice president.
Joe Biden did know about this.
But the biggest sign, the biggest sign here that Joe Biden is in trouble is not that he's flailing, it's not that he's lying.
It's that he's tied with a candidate who isn't even in the race.
He's tied with one of the worst candidates in American history.
Joe Biden is now tied, according to one poll, with Hillary Clinton.
I kid you not.
Harvard-Harris poll comes out.
It said, if Hillary Clinton, Mike Bloomberg, and John Kerry decided to enter the race, who would you support as a candidate for president?
Joe Biden got 19%, so he's still leading the pack.
This is among Democrats.
Hillary Clinton was in a close second, statistically tied, 18%.
Liz Warren, distant third at 13%, Kerry at eight, Bloomberg at six.
Now, with the races it is today, 33% of Democrats, according to the same poll, would support Biden, And Bernie's in second place at 18%.
But Hillary getting in totally changes that.
What that means is Democrats are very unsatisfied with the field that they have.
They would even choose Hillary Clinton, historically one of the worst candidates in American history, over Joe Biden.
Before that we say it's Buttigieg who's going to get it, Before we even say that Buttigieg has a chance, you have to remember Buttigieg has big problems too.
Black voters make up 20% of the Democratic primary base.
Pete Buttigieg is polling at about 0% with black voters.
The rosiest polls show he has 4% black support.
Most of them say he has 0%, 1%, or 2%.
Which means Buttigieg has this incredibly difficult opstool to get over.
If he can't get his numbers among black voters up, he's nothing.
It doesn't matter if he wins Iowa.
It doesn't matter at all.
So there's still a chance that Joe Biden ekes this out.
If he does, he will be the weakest frontrunner in my lifetime of either party.
And this is a very, very weak field.
What the Democrats are banking on is that because they have such a weak field and because I strongly suspect there's going to be a lot of evidence of their wrongdoing in the 2016 election when we get the report from the Inspector General and the investigation from John Durham, which are kind of on the back burner of politics right now, What they're hoping is that impeachment will be a defensive measure or an early offense to attack Trump and mitigate the damage from the IG report and John Durham.
It's a bad idea.
Attention helps candidates.
If they're just going to make this race about Donald Trump, guess who's going to win?
Donald Trump.
Attention helps candidates.
Politics is about getting attention.
In so many ways.
Now...
If the race is just a referendum on Donald Trump, he's going to do very, very well.
That's a huge miscalculation.
Politicians can get bad sort of attention, and that sort of attention can hurt them sometimes.
But when it's in a race, when you're not showing an alternative...
It goes to the guy who gets the attention.
Some bad attention the politicians are getting came over in Pennsylvania with a state representative, Wendy Ullman.
Wendy Ullman, the state rep in PA, was asked a question about the handling of fetal remains.
There was this bill on the table about whether after an abortion, for instance, fetal remains should be thrown out like the trash, or if they should be sold to the highest bidder like Planned Parenthood does, and we're caught on video doing, or if they should be buried or cremated like anybody else's or if they should be buried or cremated like anybody else's Even for people who don't care much about abortion, this is a fundamental question for society.
The question is, who do we think that we are?
What do we think that we are?
Representative Ullman made very clear, she thinks that we are nothing but a mess on a napkin.
It refers specifically to the product of conception after fertilization, which covers an awful lot of territory.
I think we all understand the concept of the loss of a fetus, but we're also talking about a woman who comes into a facility and is having cramps, and not to be concrete, An early miscarriage is just some mess on a napkin.
And I'm not sure people would agree that this is something that we want to take to the point of ritual, either cremation or internment.
Yikes!
You've got Madame Defarge over here.
You've got a real old battle axe in the PA statehouse saying that babies are nothing but a mess on a napkin.
And yet in her defense, In her defense, by the premises of leftist politics, she's right.
Another question.
Why are all the crazy abortion activist state politicians named Wendy?
You have this woman, Wendy Ellman.
You have Wendy Davis, who was abortion Barbie down in Texas.
It's kind of a strange coincidence.
Regardless, by the premises of leftism, this woman is right.
The premise is that it's just a clump of cells.
Baby's just a clump of cells.
The other premise of leftism is that we're just a clump of cells.
You see this in so many issues.
In terms of the moral order, what the left tells us is if it feels good, do it.
Why?
Because we're just a combination of cells that have certain sense perceptions, and if you can activate the pleasure sensors enough, that's a good thing.
And when you activate the pain sensors, that's a bad thing.
On the transgender issue, what the left tells us is that we're just a clump of cells.
If we can change the appearance of those cells, then we will have actually changed our identity.
We're not...
Something deeper.
You know, what the traditional view for all of human history has been is that human beings are soul and body.
We know that we're body.
Our body has really something to do with us.
Actually, ironically, the transgender movement is, in the one hand, totally exalting the body as all that we are.
We're just material.
And then on the other hand, it's a total denial of the body because it's actually saying what our body is right now has nothing to do with who we are.
My body, if I look like a man...
But I say that I'm not a man, that I'm not really a man.
I have to deny the physical, and then I'll just change the way my body looks, and then I'll become a woman, and then my body does define who I am.
It's a very, very confused idea, because it's beginning with these very, very confused premises.
I mean, even just think of the premise of abortion.
Women have a right to kill their own babies because women have this natural right given to them by whatever creator spirit they believe in or whatever supernatural spirit they believe in.
We have this right because we are dignified people.
We have human dignity.
We deserve this right to kill a baby because we don't actually have any dignity or any rights at all and we're actually just a clump of cells.
In the abortion question, you see the opposite arguments being made.
We have rights.
We have dignity.
We're worthy of great respect.
We're endowed with certain rights by our creator.
To deprive all those rights of someone else because people actually aren't anything other than meat and flesh.
It's a totally bizarre...
Completely contradictory ideology.
And you can see this woman is struggling with it in the moment.
She says, look, I know this sounds bad.
How can I make myself say this?
But I have to say this because my ideology says so.
Babies are just a mess on a napkin.
You see, she's obviously tortured by this because it doesn't make any sense.
I like that she's being honest.
I like that we can show honestly the total craziness of leftism.
I like that we can show honestly that the left thinks you're an idiot.
You know, that they think that they can tell you that people are nothing but a mess on a napkin.
We don't really believe that.
They don't really believe that.
They think they can force it down your throats.
Finally, before we go, I just have to give a nod to Chuck Schumer for the greatest tweet of the weekend.
He tweeted out, Based on the news that Trump is now moving officially to Florida.
His primary residence was in New York.
Now he's moving to Florida.
He's moving to Florida because the taxes are much lower.
A lot of people are leaving New York anyway.
I think 300 people move out of New York area per day because of the high tax rates.
And people are moving largely down to South Florida.
So Trump is going to do this for tax purposes.
Schumer tweets out, New York, New York.
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
Trump can't.
Trump, billionaire real estate developer who's been a household name around the world for 40 years, who ran and starred in the biggest show on network television for 15 years, and who became the leader of the free world on his first run for political office.
He just can't make it, you know, according to Chuck Schumer.
They think you're idiots.
They think you're total idiots.
What they don't realize is that people are actually pretty smart.
People can see reality.
People know when they're being lied to.
They don't like it very much.
I think it's why the left is getting so nervous.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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