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Dec. 10, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:08
Ep. 463 - The Inevitable Impeachment

How did we get to this point where we can’t agree on anything? Some people are blaming Trump, some blame the IG report, some are blaming a weak Democratic field. The real root cause is far deeper. Can't get enough of The Michael Knowles Show? Enjoy ad-free shows, live discussions, and more by becoming an ALL ACCESS member TODAY at: https://dailywire.com/Knowles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Despite all of their charges collapsing, Democrats plan to move forward with two articles of impeachment against President Trump.
We will examine why it's all happening now.
How did we get to the point where we can't agree on anything?
Some people blame President Trump.
Some blame the IG report, which just came out.
Some are blaming a weak Democratic field, and boy is it weak.
The real root cause is far deeper than that.
We will examine how this rot has been building since the 80s at least.
And we will chart a path forward for how we can all get along.
Then Walmart apologizes for a coked out Santa Claus and so much more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Even Santa Claus needs a mountain of narcotics.
That is how tense everybody is right now.
And Walmart is apologizing for it.
We will get to all of that in a second.
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So they're going to do it.
The Democrats are going to do it.
They're going to impeach Trump.
This is breaking news just happening.
I mean, it's breaking news, except we could have predicted it three months ago.
But still, it's breaking news, technically.
The Democrats are going to file two articles of impeachment against President Trump.
There's the shallow political story here, which is about the impeachment.
There's the broader political context, which is the IG report, we'll get to that, and the weak Democratic presidential field.
And then there's the 30,000-foot view context of why this is all happening now.
And I think this is the most important part.
I think this has everything to do with the kind of disagreements you're seeing on the right right now.
I mean, for the last three days, conservative Twitter has been arguing about porn for some reason.
Why?
It actually has to do with this.
Why is our country so divided?
Why are we impeaching this president?
It all has to do with this central problem that has been building now for at least three, four decades.
We will get to that.
Let's get to the breaking news first.
Democrats are...
Now officially filing articles of impeachment against President Trump.
Two articles.
The articles are for obstructing Congress and abuse of power.
You can look through the Constitution and say, where is that as an impeachable offense?
Probably not going to find it.
They were going to file a third.
The third article was supposed to be for bribery.
What would bribery be?
That was going to be the actual crime that they were accusing Trump of committing.
The quid pro quo, right?
He's bribing Ukraine with a military aid and in exchange for that he's getting an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden.
That was the whole point of these impeachment hearings.
That was the whole point of the inquiry.
It's the whole point of the impeachment.
And they're abandoning that because there's no evidence of that.
It tells you everything you need to know about this partisan, ridiculous, farcical impeachment.
So they won't be filing the bribery charge.
You only get abuse of Congress and obstructing Congress and abuse of power.
How do those hold up?
On obstructing Congress, they're saying Trump obstructed Congress by not letting the executive branch employees testify.
Okay.
Trump did have a number of executive branch employees testify, didn't he?
He did.
None of them provided any evidence that Trump committed the crime that they're accusing him of, which is bribery, which is the quid pro quo.
How do we know that?
Because the Democrats aren't filing the charge for quid pro quo.
And actually, Gordon Sondland, who is the only guy to actually talk about Trump's dealings with Ukraine, repeatedly said that Trump...
What do you want?
Trump said, I want nothing.
I want no quid pro quo.
Tell Ukraine to do the right thing.
So they don't have that.
The second charge, abuse of power.
Abuse of power is not an impeachable offense.
Alan Dershowitz, who we have on the show sometimes, we have him on the radio show sometimes, Alan Dershowitz, great law professor, repeatedly points out this is not an impeachable offense.
It might be inappropriate, it might be deserving of censure, let's say, but it is not an impeachable offense.
Now there was another charge that the Democrats were considering adding.
A far-left representative, Pramila Jayapal, Suggested adding the charge of obstruction of justice.
Different than obstructing Congress.
They're saying he obstructed Congress because he didn't send all of his people to go testify.
Obstructing justice, they were considering adding because Trump went to the courts to push back against this impeachment farce.
Going to the courts, going to the third co-equal branch of government is not obstruction of justice, if anything, that is pursuing justice and not allowing the legislature to run roughshod over the executive.
So Nancy Pelosi came to her senses there.
They're not going to file that.
They have these two very weak arguments, as we've just shown.
Those two charges fall completely flat, which means that in their actual public testimony, Democrats are reverting to their former argument, the only actual impeachment argument that they have ever been making consistently.
That argument is three words long.
Orange, man, bad.
Here is the Democratic counsel, Barry Burke, making this argument in explicit terms.
Before I had the great honor of being a counsel for this committee, my young son asked me a question.
He said, Dad...
Does the President have to be a good person?
Like many questions by young children, it had a certain clarity, but it was hard to answer.
I said, son, it is not a requirement that the President be a good person, but that is the hope.
And it is not a requirement that the President be a good person.
That is not why we are here today.
That is not the issue.
Alright, see you guys.
I think I'm going to leave.
I think I'm not going to leave just the studio or the Daily Wire.
I think I'm going to leave the country because obviously this experiment in self-government that we've had is over.
When you were trying to overturn a presidential election, when you were trying to impeach the president and for the first time in history try to remove him from office through the process of impeachment because your son wonders if he's not a good person, I guess we're over, right?
That's it.
We actually might be.
We might be past the point of self-government.
We'll get to why a little bit later in the show.
This is pathetic.
This is absolutely pathetic.
If the Democrats had not backed themselves into a corner...
What they could have done here is had the hearings figured out to everybody who's paying attention that Trump did not commit an impeachable offense and then censured him anyway.
So then the Congress votes to censure him and they can take this as at least a slight political victory.
They've backed themselves too far into a corner and their base is demanding removal from office because, as Democratic Representative Al Green says, they fear that if they don't impeach this president, he will be re-elected.
They fear the American people.
They fear that he's actually doing good things and he's fairly popular and so they've got to remove him from office.
Extra constitutionally, or else he's going to get re-elected.
They don't have any actual charge against him, so it's the Democratic Council talking to his little boy saying, gosh, the president's a bad man, and let me look...
Article 2, I don't know, Section 5 or 6 or 7, there's got to be some section here where you can remove the president for being a meanie, for being a really bad guy.
Absolutely pathetic.
Representative Doug Collins, the Republican, who actually was a star yesterday at the impeachment hearings, Doug Collins said what we're all thinking, that this is a farce, that there is no impeachable offense.
What would be known about this one is probably, where's the impeachable offense?
Why are we here?
I tell you, this may be though become known as the focus group impeachment.
Because we don't have a crime, we don't have anything we can actually pin, and nobody understands really what the majority is trying to do, except to interfere and basically make sure that they believe the president can't win next year if he's impeached.
The focus group impeachment takes words and then takes them to people and say, how can we explain this better?
Because we don't have the facts to match it.
A focus group impeachment says, you know, we really aren't working with good facts, but we need a good PR move.
That's why we're here today.
The point he's making is completely right.
This is the focus group impeachment, right?
They've tried to impeach him now for three years for different reasons.
The only thing that stayed the same, the only thing that's been consistent is the fact that they want to impeach him.
But initially it was colluding with Russia.
Then it was Stormy Daniels.
Then it was his taxes.
Then it was colluding with Ukraine.
Now it's not even that.
It's not even a crime committed with Ukraine.
It's a crime committed, or not a crime, but an abuse committed while he was being impeached, obstructing Congress.
Now it's abuse of power, whatever that means.
It's actually changed again.
We're actually past Ukraine.
All that's been consistent is that they want to impeach the guy.
I like that the point that he's making, that this is being focus grouped on the reasoning, the conclusion always being the same.
It's a little bit of a weak talking point, and no one's going to refer to the focus group impeachment.
It's one of those things that sounds really good to people in D.C.
The American people don't register with that too much.
That doesn't resonate with them.
I think probably the better term that resonates with them is the term Trump has been using, which is that it's a BS impeachment.
I think we can all identify with that.
But absolutely, Collins' point stands.
He then starts drilling down on these Democratic councils.
He exposed the greatest irony of the whole impeachment scam, which is that the only person to commit the offense that Democrats were initially, at least, accusing Trump of is not Trump, not somebody who worked for Trump, not another Republican.
It's Joe Biden.
He gets, Collins gets the Democratic counsel, Daniel Goldman, to admit that the only person to commit a quid pro quo here with Ukraine is Joe Biden.
As I remember going over to the Ukraine, convincing our team, our leaders, convincing them that we should provide for loan guarantees.
I went over, I guess, the 12th or 13th time to give.
I was supposed to announce that there was a billion-dollar loan guarantee.
And I'd gotten a commitment from Poroshenko in the sense that I would take action against, that they would take action against the state prosecutor.
They didn't.
So they said they had, they were walking out to the press conference.
I said, nah, I'm not going to.
Or we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
They said, you have authority.
You have no authority.
You're not the president.
The president said, I said, call him.
Laughter.
I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars.
I said, you're not getting the billion dollars.
I'm getting ready to be leaving here in, I think, about six hours.
I looked at them and said, I'm leaving here in six hours.
If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.
Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.
Did he ask for something, request something, and hold something of value?
He did.
George Kent testified that that was...
I think I'll do what you did.
George Kent testified.
I'm asking about not George Kent.
I'm asking about this question.
Right, but it's important context.
It's not.
Answer this question.
Did he or did he not?
Either Joe Biden's a liar telling a story to make people impressed, or he actually did this.
Which is it?
He did it pursuant to U.S. official policy.
So he did it in holding, withholding, Actual dollars, actual thing, holding this out there.
So Joe Biden, of everybody that we discussed about, is the only one that's done a quid pro quo.
He's the only one that's used taxpayer dollars to actually threaten a foreign government.
And yet we're sitting here pretending that this is not happening?
Thank you.
Thank you, Representative Collins, for saying the most obvious point about the whole impeachment hearing that we're initially, at least, going after Trump for a quid pro quo that he didn't commit when, if he did commit a quid pro quo, it was only to investigate the quid pro quo that we know if he did commit a quid pro quo, it was only to investigate the quid pro quo that we know Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Not that it matters because nobody cares about the actual facts of this because we are dug into our partisanship because of this root problem that we've had now for a few decades, which we will get to.
But it just shows you...
The absurdity, the hypocrisy of the whole hearing.
He digs in, and Daniel Goldman is a partisan Democrat.
He's obviously the Democratic Council.
He's a partisan Democrat.
Barry Burke, who's the other Democratic Council, he's a partisan Democrat too.
I don't begrudge them their partisanship.
That's fine.
It's worth pointing out that the expert witness that the Republicans called on their behalf was Jonathan Turley, who's actually a liberal, who actually Voted against President Trump, who, in so much as you can be nonpartisan here, is definitely not partisan with the Republicans.
Democrats are just doubling down on their guys.
That's fine.
You then have, after Doug Collins just knocks down this whole impeachment nonsense, you then have Matt Gaetz, Congressman Matt Gaetz, come in for the kill and expose the rank partisanship all around the Democratic circus.
Are you a partisan?
I'm not a partisan.
Mr.
Castor, how long have you worked for the House?
Since 2005.
And same question, Mr.
Goldman.
For the House?
Since earlier this year.
Mr.
Castor, do you make political donations?
I don't remember any.
Mr.
Goldman, same question.
Do you make political donations?
I do, sir.
I think it's very important.
Matter of fact, you've given tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats, right?
Sir, I think it's very important to support candidates for office.
Mr.
Castor, have you ever tweeted anything at the president?
Mr.
Goldman, same question.
I have made a number of tweets in my private capacity before I came to this job when I was working in the media, yes.
As a matter of fact, this is one of those tweets, right?
Uh-oh, did you read my Twitter account?
Uh-oh.
Oh, no, you looked into my political donations and my Twitter account.
So he points out that Daniel Goldman's given tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats, and Barry Burke, the other Democrat counsel, has given over $100,000.
So what this is all about is partisanship.
Of course it's partisan.
What's offensive to all of us is when Daniel Goldman says, I'm not a partisan.
This is not a partisan impeachment.
Nancy Pelosi says, this has nothing to do with politics.
Oh yeah?
Well, if it didn't have anything to do with politics, maybe you would have found a crime.
Maybe you would have found an impeachable offense, but you didn't.
So this is a strictly political maneuver.
Fine.
The whole thing is about defending Democrats on two fronts.
It's about defending Democrats against an investigation into the Russia investigation.
We just got the first part of that investigation, the IG report, and it's about defending Democrats from their own weak presidential field.
Speaking of the latter, let's check in with Democratic front-runner, Joe Biden.
So you go ahead and you stack spaghetti sauce at a store and in a supermarket, You control the guy or the woman who runs the, brings out the carts on a forklift.
Okay, yep, things going about as well as the last time we checked in on Joe Biden.
So that's not great.
And he's the leader of the pack for now.
There's a new poll out from Harvard Harris showing the top five 2020 Democratic candidates.
Right now it's Biden at 29%, Sanders at 16%, Warren at 13%, Buttigieg at 8%, and Bloomberg at 7%.
Good on Bloomberg!
He's really rising up in the world, isn't he?
Probably not going to go anywhere, but still, you know, he's doing better than some of the other lower-tier candidates.
That's the Harvard-Harris poll as it stands right now.
The minute that you add people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry into the race...
Biden completely collapses.
So if you add Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, you now get the frontrunner as Hillary Clinton with 21%, Joe Biden with 20%, Sanders at 12%, Warren at 9%, Buttigieg and Kerry at 5%.
The multi-time loser, one of the most reviled women in America, Hillary Clinton, is...
Currently leading the pack of Democratic presidential candidates, and she's not even running.
This is a bad situation for Democrats to be in.
So what are they doing?
The impeachment is in part to distract from this bad pack of candidates.
Now, the theater here, the theater helps President Trump, right?
Because...
They're distracting from the candidates with impeachment.
Trouble is the impeachment is helping him.
Quarterly polling by the Republican firm Firehouse Strategies has President Trump struggling or it had President Trump struggling in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Those are all the battlegrounds those states are very likely to determine the 2020 election.
He was struggling, right?
Until the latest poll.
Until the poll that came out after impeachment had started, in which he beats every single Democratic candidate.
Nothing could be better for Trump than this impeachment.
You know, Lindsey Graham on the Judiciary Committee is saying that once the House impeaches and it goes to trial in the Senate, they're going to get this impeachment over with ASAP. No, do not do that.
Drag this thing out.
That's a terrible idea.
This is so helpful to Trump, this should drag on for two months.
Now, I think what Lindsey Graham is thinking, what Republicans on the Hill are thinking, is we need to wrap this up because we've already won, impeachment has helped us, let's just get it over with before something bad happens.
happens.
What could happen?
You could call Joe Biden to testify and he could start crying and show himself to be a sympathetic witness and turn the impeachment in his favor.
You could get Hunter Biden to testify, a complete degenerate, but he could still evoke some sympathy.
The Bidens are very good at this.
Okay, fine.
Don't get them to testify.
I don't think you need to get either of those guys to testify.
Just keep dragging out all these Democratic lawyers who are so awful.
Pamela Carlin, Daniel Goldman, Noah Feldman.
All these guys that are just so unlikable and so elitist and so disconnected from the American people.
That is how you...
Drag out Adam Schiff.
Get Adam Schiff to testify before the Senate.
Drag out associates of the Bidens.
I don't know.
Drag out Hunter Biden's Coke dealer.
Who knows?
Drag that out for a long time.
That really helps Trump.
It drills the point home that Democrats have nothing.
And the Democrats will pretend to have something even when they've got nothing, right?
So the thing is, if you wrap up impeachment right now, the Democrats are going to declare a victory, even though they've lost on every single stage of this.
So you've got to keep showing the American people that the Democrats have nothing.
Otherwise, the mainstream media aren't going to do it for you.
A great example of this is the IG report.
The IG report just came out.
Here's ABC News' take.
After years of President Trump calling it a deep state, saying the FBI was anti-Trump when it launched an investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Russia, tonight the long-awaited independent report.
The Justice Department's Inspector General revealing there was no evidence of a witch hunt.
Determining the FBI had enough evidence pointing to either a federal crime or a threat to national security or both to justify the probe at the height of the election.
And that the agents who made the final decision to launch the investigation were not influenced by political bias.
Oh, okay.
So no witch hunt.
The FBI totally fine.
Democrats good.
Orange man bad.
Okay, now I get it.
Except, of course, that's not really what happened.
The IG report is extremely long, so you can read the executive summary or something.
It said that the FBI committed a whole slew of errors in the lead-up to wiretapping and spying on the Trump campaign.
Now, ultimately, the IG said this wasn't some politically motivated conspiracy.
It was just incompetence and a number of mistakes.
So spying on the Trump campaign, spying on Carter Page, it was all flawed, but not improperly motivated.
What does the IG report say?
17, quote, serious performance failures relating to warrants obtained by the FBI through the FISA courts, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment courts.
On the spying on Carter Page, spying on the Trump campaign, That FISA warrant was reauthorized three times.
It contained false and misleading information about Page repeatedly.
It failed to disclose the fact that Page had already disclosed his Russian contacts to a government agency, pretended that he hadn't.
It overstated the government's confidence in the Steele dossier, and it also ignored Christopher Steele's own doubts about his own dossier.
And it never mentioned that Page and Manafort, Paul Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign, had, quote, literally never met.
Okay, that's a lot of errors, isn't it?
So you're just saying, okay, the FBI, they made some mistakes, but there's no problem of motivation here.
That's a little hard for me to believe.
Here's President Trump's take.
Okay, thank you very much.
The IG report just came out.
And I was just briefed on it and it's a disgrace what's happened with respect to the things that were done to our country.
It should never again happen to another president.
It is incredible.
Far worse than I would have ever thought possible.
And it's an embarrassment to our country.
It's dishonest.
It's everything that a lot of people thought it would be, except far worse.
So I'm going to get some very detailed briefings, but it's a very sad day when I see that.
A very sad day when a lot of people see that.
Okay, classic Trump answer.
It's the worst thing I've ever seen.
It couldn't possibly be worse.
It's terrible.
I happen to agree with him on the main points here.
I think it's really, really bad.
The trouble is that the conclusions of the IG reports were too weak.
They were too moderate.
They gave too much deference to the bureaucrats.
And so Trump is kind of underplaying that.
He's pointing to the actual facts of the investigation.
I think Lindsey Graham...
Had the most nuanced and accurate take on this, which is the flaws of the investigation itself.
The actual facts that the IG found, that is what is disturbing and that merits further investigation.
I believe there will be no debate among reasonable-minded people, particularly lawyers, about how the system not only got off the rails, but in my view became a criminal enterprise.
To defraud the FISA Court, to deny American citizen Carter Page its constitutional rights, and to continue an operation against President Trump as President of the United States that I think was fundamentally flawed and unlawful.
Even if the initial process of spying on the Trump campaign, even if we're going to grant the benefit of the doubt to these bureaucrats, certainly After the beginning, after the middle, in the late stages of this, this had become something far, far worse than a simple mistake.
You don't repeatedly lie to the FISA courts.
You don't repeatedly omit relevant information.
You don't repeatedly lean on a source who is being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Unless there's something more going on here.
When you add to that all of the text messages we saw between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, when you add to that the meetings that were alleged to have happened in Andy McCabe's office, when you add to that everything we already know, this thing stinks to high heaven.
And beyond Trump's take, beyond Graham's take, you get the Attorney General William Barr.
Who importantly disagreed with the conclusions of the IG report.
Barr said, quote, Absolutely
right.
John Durham, who is the investigator, the, the US attorney appointed by Bill Barr months ago to also investigate this matter.
And at the time we thought, wait a second, you've already got the IG.
Why are you appointing John Durham?
It's because obviously the AG, William Barr knew at that time that the IG was not going to take this to its logical conclusion.
So he was appointing another investigator to pursue a criminal investigation on the matter.
John Durham said more or less the same thing.
He said it even a little tougher.
Last month, we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report's conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.
Now, the big question we have, how does this all relate to internet porn?
Sort of.
I'm actually not totally kidding here.
We have been having lots of cultural debates on the right about the nature of what we believe, what we want for America, how we can conserve the American nation, how we should relate to libertarianism and traditionalism.
It's actually all the same conversation.
The big question is why?
Why is this all happening now?
Why are we re-litigating the 2016 election?
Why are we impeaching the president over nothing?
Why is the bureaucracy trying to overturn the will of the American people?
Why are we arguing about porn?
Why are we arguing about all these things?
The problem is we have nothing in common, and this was because of a deal made between the right and the left decades ago that has not given us very good fruit.
We'll get to that in a second.
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We will be right back.
Why are we still litigating the 2016 election?
Why?
Why are Democrats impeaching a president for nothing?
Why did the FBI try to rig an election?
Why?
Because we have very little in common.
That's why.
The big argument on the right in recent months has been between the traditionalists and the libertarians.
Okay?
Between the Saurabh Amaris and the David French's.
Between The people who want to ban porn and the people who want there to be porn all over the place, even if they don't like it, they want everyone to have the opportunity to see it.
It's between the people who say that the ultimate aim of politics is a good society and the people who say that the ultimate pursuit of politics is leave me alone.
Libertarian.
Individual freedom.
That's the debate that's going on right now.
How did we get here?
Which way should we lean?
From the 80s to the present, there has been this strange left-right consensus.
There's actually been something of a consensus, an alliance between left-wing liberals who want to be left alone on social issues and between right-wing liberals, I say liberal in the kind of classical sense of that word, who want to be left alone with their money.
So you've got the left-wing liberals who say, don't bother me about sex or culture or the arts or my body or any of that.
Just leave me alone with that.
And then the right says, okay, we'll leave you alone on that if you leave us alone on our money.
Let us keep all of our money.
And the left doesn't usually go along with that, but that's the rough alliance that they've made.
We're seeing the fruit of that alliance now.
We can't agree on what marriage is.
We can't agree on what life is or when it begins.
We can't agree on what the government should be or look like or is.
We can't agree on what a man is.
We can't agree on what a woman is.
We can't even agree on what language to speak.
It's now a controversial conservative opinion to say that we should speak English in America.
Often you'll call a customer service line and you'll hear for English Press 1.
And you'll hear something in Spanish that maybe you can't understand.
It's now considered bigoted in some quarters to say that the official language of America should be English.
That's how little we agree on.
We can't even agree on the language that we should speak to talk about whether we agree on things.
That is the fruit of...
Leave me alone.
I have nothing to do with you.
That's the fruit of hyper-individualism on the social side when it comes to the left and on the money side when it comes to the right.
I'm a huge fan of lower taxes.
I don't think we should pay higher taxes.
I don't think we should have more government regulations coming in and taking my property.
But the reason for that is economic freedom is a good way to pursue a good country, a good society, a good place to live.
It's not an end in and of itself.
Maximal individual autonomy is not an end in and of itself.
The end that that allows for is virtue, is a good life, is good healthy communities, is a good country.
That's what we've got to agree to.
I think the whole leave-me-alone politics, oh come on, who cares?
It's not a big deal.
You can have your weird, creepy sex stuff and we can keep all of our money and never the twain shall meet.
That is a losing proposition.
Because eventually, if Andrew Breitbart is correct that politics is downstream of culture, and if also politics affects culture, ultimately you are going to have a country that's so separated That we're going to come to heads.
We're going to come to conflict.
That is what is happening right now.
If we were a country that kind of understood one another, that we had a basically similar sense of the common good, the highest good, similar kind of sense of culture, similar kind of sense of religion.
I'm not saying identical.
I'm not saying we need some totally uniform, prudish country.
I'm not saying we need to be prude in any way.
Just saying we have to kind of agree on what we're all about.
If you had that, then you wouldn't have a bogus impeachment over nothing.
You wouldn't...
At least come up with some shred of a crime, wouldn't they?
You wouldn't have the bureaucracy trying to attack the people.
You wouldn't have...
These separate languages where half of the country thinks that the other half of the country are Nazis, are literal Nazis, are bigoted, awful, terrible, deplorable, irredeemable people like Hillary Clinton said.
You wouldn't have that because we would at least, I'm not saying we would agree on everything, but we would at least understand one another.
We would have a general sense of where we're all going, what we all want.
That doesn't happen.
That's the fruit of hyper-super-duper individualism.
If we are going to come back together, the answer is not to go to the lowest common denominator and say, fine, I'm not going to ever tell you anything that you should do, and please, you don't tell me anything that I should do.
That's not the answer.
The answer is we need to actually engage with one another.
We do have to say there is a good.
There is something we should be doing.
There is propriety.
There is a definition of a man.
There is a definition of marriage.
There is a definition of human life.
That's what we're going to have to do.
That takes a little courage.
That takes a little bit of virtue.
Unfortunately, we've so whittled away at that over the past several decades that it's hard to even gather that language.
That is the task before us.
And it's not an easy one, and it's not going to be terribly pleasant.
And it might look like there's more conflict in the short term.
In the long run, that's the only way that we're going to have a peaceable society again.
It's the only way that we're going to have a society based on reason, based on persuasion.
And that's the only way that self-government persists.
Now let's get to an important issue like a coked-up Santa Claus.
Walmart has issued an apology for a third-party item that was listed for sale on its Canadian website.
The item is a sweater with the design of a Santa not wearing pants sitting on top of a couch or a bed with a bunch of like a little snowflake Christmas tree on one side and then lines of coke on the other and the shirt says, let it snow.
Walmart issued this big apology.
They're so sorry that they've got this shirt here.
It's so terrible.
Think of the children.
Think of the children.
Come on, guys.
It's a funny shirt.
Let it go.
It's not a big deal.
You know, so many people, as we've been having these traditionalist debates over porn and all that kind of stuff, they've said, you conservatives are prude.
The reason that I don't like porn is not because I'm totally scandalized by Sexual images or by, you know, sort of inappropriate images.
It's because it has a bad effect on the individual and on society and there's nothing good about it.
That's not prudishness.
I don't think that we should get rid of shirts that have Santa blowing coke.
It's just a funny joke.
I mean, what is that song, I Get a Kick Out of You?
A classic American songbook song.
It says, I get a kick out of you.
I get no thrill from cocaine.
People have talked about coke, made jokes about coke, sung about coke.
All right.
I'm not saying you should ever do cocaine.
I'm just saying you can have a shirt that makes a joke about cocaine looking like snow with Santa Claus.
That's fine.
Prudishness is not the answer.
The only criticism that I will make of this sweatshirt is that these sweaters are kind of lame.
The idea of the ugly Christmas sweater that's really subversive and that's really telling a naughty joke, that has now become lame because that's all you ever see now in stores are these like fake Christmas sweaters.
I actually think it would be funnier to just wear a regular Christmas sweater.
That would be more countercultural.
That would be more subversive.
But guys, come on.
We're so tense.
We're so upset about everything now.
Let Santa have a little Coke, all right?
That's fine.
Let people have a couple laughs.
There's also some good news.
As we've had all this bad news on the show, I want to leave on some good news.
On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a 2017 pro-life law in Kentucky that requires doctors to perform ultrasounds and play the sound of the baby's heartbeat to women who are seeking abortion.
This is great.
Kentucky passes this law.
They say, if you want to get an abortion, if you want to kill your child, you have to hear that your child has a heartbeat.
You have to see the ultrasound, that it's really a baby.
The whole law says, before you can have an abortion, you have to have all the information.
The left hates this.
The left doesn't want you to have information on abortion.
Because the minute you have information, you realize that the left has been telling you lies about abortion for decades.
It's not just a clump of cells.
It's not dead.
It's not alive.
It's not human.
It's a human being.
It's living.
It's your child.
So this goes up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court, to their credit, says, no, this is perfectly constitutional.
You can absolutely do this.
This is great news.
And it's driving a lot of people crazy.
You know, there's this British actress who I've never seen in anything, but she's got a blue checkmark on Twitter.
Her name is Jamila Jamil.
She has been defending abortion in such a crazy, wild, intense way that it makes me think she doesn't really believe what she's saying.
She tweeted out, quote, Receiving thousands of messages about how I made a mistake having an abortion seven years ago and how I must be a miserable person.
I am, in fact, a happy, thriving multimillionaire.
Madly in love with free time, good sleep, and a wonderful career and life.
But thanks for checking.
It's a little kissy face.
Nobody believes that.
Nobody really believes what she's saying.
She clearly feels some shame, some regret, at least, at the very least, some uncertainty about her decision to kill her child and sacrifice her child on the altar of mammon, on the altar of money and fame and relaxation and sleep.
Listen to the trade that she made.
She said, yes, I killed my child.
But, in return for killing my child, I'm happy.
Okay, skeptical of that.
I'm a multi-millionaire.
Oh, you committed an immoral act and were rewarded with wealth?
That's never happened before?
Wow, that's how odd.
I'm madly in love.
Okay, whatever.
I have free time.
Good for you.
I have good sleep.
I have a wonderful career and life.
This actually does get to the debate that we were talking about.
The kind of leave me alone debate.
The kind of hyper-individualism debate.
The kind of I'm not my brother's keeper debate.
What the left wants to do is leave me alone.
Let me have whatever sex I want.
Let me pursue my career.
Let me kill my babies.
What the right wants, at its worst, in this kind of hyper-individualist, selfish way, is let me keep all my money.
Just let me have my money.
You can kill your babies.
I'm just going to keep my money.
We're all good.
Look, you can live in fantasy.
You can pretend that men are women and women are men, and you can pretend that you're happy.
Whatever, that's fine.
Doesn't bother me.
I'm going to keep my money.
That is a bad deal.
That's a deal that dooms and destines society to have a bad time, to not really get along with one another.
Winston Churchill famously said, and Ronald Reagan repeated it in one of his most famous speeches, A Time for Choosing,"...the destiny of man is not measured by material computations.
When great forces are on the move in the world, we know that we are spirits, not animals." A good life is not measured by how many millions of dollars you've made.
It's not measured by how much free time you have to do nothing.
It's not measured by how much good sleep you were able to get or how many movies or TV shows you were able to appear in.
Likewise, A good life is not measured by how much money you were able to keep for yourself.
And you can do wonderful things with money that you keep for yourself, but that's not the measure of a good life.
A good life is not even measured by how many of your own wins and desires and appetites you were able to indulge.
A good life is determined by how good it was.
Actually good.
That is the end of it.
That's the aim.
That's what we're striving for.
That's what we should be striving for if you want to have a good life, if you want to have a happy life.
I mean, it's sort of circular.
If you want to have a good life, you've got to be good about it.
You can't just indulge your appetites all the time because very often we have disordered appetites.
If we want that, if we want to try to rediscover that wisdom that we knew 40 years ago, that Ronald Reagan knew, that Winston Churchill knew, that everybody knew up until now except for us because we have so degraded our culture.
If we want to recover that, then we have to start having conversations not merely about equality, not merely about social justice, not merely about material wealth, not merely about Liberty.
Not even merely about this hyper-individual liberty.
But rather, what Edmund Burke, the great conservative philosopher, talks about as the spirit of an exalted freedom, we have to talk about the good.
That is going to be a difficult conversation, and I don't know that we're going to have a very good time doing it, but we can try.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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