President Trump is riding high on an impeachment approval rating bump. We will examine what comes next for the instigators of the failed impeachment coup. Then, a church places Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in cages, Merriam-Webster goes full leftist in its “Word of the Year,” and the NYT brings us the dumbest article on the Internet today. 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
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President Trump is riding high on an impeachment approval rating bump, but the administration isn't resting on its laurels.
From the campaign to the DOJ to foreign policy, Trump is getting more aggressive, not less.
He's getting more aggressive in taking on his adversaries, demonstrating an eternal political truth.
If you come at the king, you best not miss.
We will examine what comes next for the instigators of the failed impeachment coup.
Then, a Methodist church places Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in cages in the creche.
Merriam-Webster goes full leftist in its word of the year.
And the New York Times brings us the dumbest article on the internet today, as always.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
President Trump is riding high.
This impeachment thing has not worked out very well for Democrats.
How do I know it?
Because of the latest Quinnipiac poll.
This is important for a couple of reasons.
One, it's important because of the numbers it's showing.
It's showing that President Trump has got a pretty high approval rating, and it shows that opposition to his...
Impeachment and removal from office is now at 51%.
The majority of the country does not want him impeached and removed from office.
That's the highest number since September.
What started to happen in September?
You had the impeachment hearings and the impeachment inquiry.
So before the impeachment inquiry and impeachment hearings, a lot of Americans wanted President Trump impeached and removed from office.
Afterward, It didn't help the Democrats.
It ended up helping the President.
It's important for that reason.
It's also important because of who did the poll.
There are some polling firms that tend to lean a little bit more Republican.
They paint rosier numbers for conservatives.
One of those would be Rasmussen, for instance.
Which, by the way, doesn't mean that Rasmussen is wrong or a bad polling firm.
It just means that generally it favors Republicans more than other polls, all of which skew Democrat.
Quinnipiac is a left-leaning poll.
And even the left-leaning poll shows that now the majority of Americans, after this whole charade, after Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler and all these guys totally flopped in the impeachment hearing, the majority of Americans oppose impeaching and removing the president.
And it's not just a three-month impeachment attempt, okay?
When we talk about impeachment, we're not just talking about this latest Ukraine thing that started to explode in August.
We're talking about a three-year impeachment attempt.
This isn't the first time they tried to get him.
They actually tried to get him right after he got elected and even before he was sworn into office.
Democratic senators made moves to try to impeach him or to set the stage for impeachment.
Then after that, Al Green, the congressman, not the musician, came out and filed an impeachment resolution.
And Trump's first year in office...
Because he was very honest and he said, I fear that if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected.
They went after him for Russia.
There was this Russia collusion narrative.
This began during the campaign.
You had the government spying on the Trump campaign and the DOJ and William Barr have a lot to say about that.
We'll get to it in a second.
Then you had the accusation of conspiracy with Russia.
You had the Mueller investigation.
After that, you had the investigation of impropriety with his taxes.
Then you had the impropriety accusations with Stormy Daniels.
Maybe there was a little impropriety there, but certainly nothing impeachable.
Then you had the accusations about Ukraine, which is where we got this whole impeachment inquiry from, and they all failed.
They all failed.
They were trying to set the stage.
Look, if they could have impeached Trump for Russia three years ago, they would have done it.
But the Mueller investigation didn't work.
It didn't give Democrats the answers they wanted.
So now they finally, they waited, they kept trying, they take their shot on Ukraine and it flops.
So what is Trump going to do in response to this?
Is he going to say, whew, good, I'm glad, glad that's over.
That would have been really terrible if I had to keep dealing with that.
But now it's okay.
We'll get back to a more moderate but live and let live, Let's all be friends.
Kumbaya moment.
No way.
He's going after the people who tried to remove him from office.
And it is a beautiful thing.
We will get to that in a second.
From his rally to a wonderful, explosive interview with Attorney General William Barr.
But first, speaking of danger, speaking of wild risk and safety, everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk.
You know about that, right?
You could get in a crash.
People could get hurt or killed.
So let's take a little minute.
You all know about it generally.
Let's take a minute to look at the statistics.
Almost 29 people in the United States die every single day in alcohol impaired vehicle crashes.
That is one person every 50 minutes.
Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, which is great news, drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year.
Many people are completely unaware that driving while high can be just as dangerous.
In 2015, 42% of drivers killed in crashes tested positive for drugs.
42%.
Not so harmless after all, is it?
From 2007 to 2015...
Marijuana use among drivers killed in crashes doubled.
The truth is that driving while high is deadly.
So stop kidding yourself.
If you are impaired from alcohol or drugs, don't get behind the wheel.
If you feel different, you drive different.
You drive high, you get a DUI. Drive sober, or you get pulled over.
I have a lot of friends.
Especially when I was in college, I'd have friends who would never get in a car when they were drunk.
They at least knew well enough not to do that.
But then they'd smoke a joint, they'd be high and they'd say, oh no, it's fine for me to drive.
What are you talking about?
You're just as impaired.
The numbers bear that out.
Drive high, get a DUI, drive sober or get pulled over.
All right, back to Trump.
Speaking of how high I feel, not from drugs, not from things that impair you, but from this excellent news that we've been receiving today.
The impeachment thing flopped, right?
So President Trump now is going on the offense.
The Democrats took their shot, they missed.
And so now President Trump is going after them.
them, not just the Democrats who are trying to beat him for president, not just the Democrats trying to impeach him, but the Democrats also who attempted to subvert the 2016 election, overturn the election, use the state, the FBI, the DOJ, and the bureaucracy to oust President Trump from office.
He begins this, he begins this, this rally that he had last night in Hershey, Pennsylvania, by summing up the endless investigations and impeachment inquiries and attempts to overturn the election.
He does it by reenacting his imagined scenes between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.
They were those two lovers at the FBI who kept texting with one another about how they were going to stop him from becoming president and how they were going to overturn the election.
President Trump in his typically unsubtle way reenacted this For his audience and for the American people, and they have to hear it.
Peter Strzok and his lover, Lisa Page.
Remember?
Lisa, I love you so much.
Lisa, please, Lisa, please.
Lisa, I've never loved anyone like you.
We won't allow this to happen to our five.
Lisa, please, tell me you love me, Lisa.
I love you.
Peter, I love you.
I love you like I've never loved anyone.
And if for any reason, if for any reason she loses, even though she's a stone-cold, corrupt person, if for any reason she loses, Peter, we've got to have an insurance policy, we have to do it.
Because we're going to go, and that's what's been happening for the last two and a half years, okay?
Some of the pearl clutchers object to this kind of behavior.
They say it's below the dignity of the president.
Sure, I agree.
I agree it's below the dignity of the president.
Trump is dealing with people who are not only undermining the dignity of the FBI, supposedly neutral, supposedly nonpartisan, supposedly above it all law enforcement institution, but they're subverting our self-government.
So the way, you see the way Trump does this, if Trump had just gone out there and said at a rally, these FBI agents were acting in a corrupt fashion and they were trying to remove me from office and they were behaving in a partisan way, even though they're not supposed to be partisan.
And they were saying that they wanted to have an insurance policy in case I got elected.
No one would care.
No, I wouldn't be playing this clip.
You wouldn't have heard it.
No one would see it on Twitter.
So what Trump does, because he's our greatest showbiz president certainly since Ronald Reagan, If not ever, is he gives you a little spice, right?
Sex sells.
So he goes and he frames it as part of this adulterous affair that we know happened because it's in the text messages.
And then he, in the midst of all that candy, in the midst of all that chocolate and sugar, he gets the medicine down.
And the medicine is, they were texting about an insurance policy.
If Trump won, an insurance policy?
So he's saying the American people vote one way, but then the FBI is going to undermine that?
That's the implication.
Of what they said.
And so he's getting that in there.
He's reminding you.
I myself had forgotten.
I remembered some of the texts.
We can't let him win.
No, no, no.
We won't happen.
We'll stop him.
I forgot about the insurance policy.
That's not good.
That doesn't sound great.
That sounds corrupt.
That sounds like a threat to our self-government.
So he reminds you of that.
And then lest you miss the point, he says it straight on.
He says the FBI spied on his campaign and they ruined a lot of good lives.
Folks, they spied on our campaign, okay?
They spied.
Never happened before in the history of our country.
And we're really wise to it.
We're wise to it.
The Inspector General found that the FBI's spying application contains 17 errors and omissions commonly known as lies and deceit.
When the FBI, and you have great people in the FBI, but not in leadership, You have not good people in leadership you haven't had, but they hid it so that nobody could see it, so they could keep it going on, thinking they were going to hurt us politically, but now we're stronger politically than we were ever before.
And the FBI also sent multiple undercover human spies to surveil and record people associated with our campaign.
Look how they've hurt people.
They've destroyed the lives of people that were great people, that are still great people.
Their lives have been destroyed by scum.
Okay?
by scum.
Trump does a lot in this statement.
He reminds people that the FBI spied.
The way that the press is spinning the inspector general report is trying to convince you that the FBI did nothing wrong.
Okay, there were 17 glaring errors and omissions on the FISA applications that then allowed this unwarranted spying, but really it was just a big mistake.
It was a big misunderstanding.
No political motivation here, even though the attorney general, William Barr, disagrees We'll get to it in a second.
But it's no big deal.
Nothing to see here.
Look away.
And what Trump is saying is, nope, that's not true.
He then goes on to make an important distinction.
He says there are a lot of good people in the FBI, but the leadership was crooked here.
Absolutely true.
An important political point to make, because there are a lot of great people in the FBI, a lot of great people in law enforcement, but those political appointees who were running the show, a lot of them were very corrupt.
And then he shows maybe the defining characteristic of Trump's political career and his career in the media.
He says they tried to get us, they tried to hurt us politically, and now we are stronger than we ever were before.
What Trump is showing here is that he has a quality that you might call anti-fragility.
This comes from a book by Nicholas Taleb, Anti-Fragile.
Trump is sort of politically anti-fragile.
What do I mean by that?
I mean, some people are fragile, right?
So when, if you hit some people politically, if you knock them, if you expose some scandal, if you go after them, if you try to make them unpopular or make them seem corrupt or something, it hurts them.
And the more you do it, it hurts them.
And if you do it enough, their career is over.
Some political candidates are durable.
They're really hard.
So it's just a lot harder to hit them with the scandal, right?
It might weaken them a little bit, but they're pretty durable.
So you throw a scandal at them and they still survive.
The Clintons are kind of like this, right?
It makes them look corrupt.
It makes them look kind of sleazy.
It does diminish their support over time.
But, you know, they can endure.
And then there's the quality of being anti-fragile.
Being anti-fragile is when the more you hit somebody, the stronger they get.
That's the quality that Trump has.
And it's by virtue of, I don't know, being in the public eye for 40 years as an entertainer, as a larger-than-life cartoon figure, as a casino mogul, as a real estate mogul, as a politician who wins the biggest office in the world the first time he runs.
The more you attack Trump and the more he survives, the stronger he gets.
It's an amazing quality to have.
It's such a strong quality that For instance, now, in the whole impeachment inquiry, they did reveal something that maybe some people would be uncomfortable with.
I think a lot of people would admit that, which is that Trump is wheeling and dealing like he's a New York real estate guy from the Oval Office rather than being this perfectly detached statesman-like figure, right?
He calls up Ukraine and he says, hey, Ukraine.
Perfectly legitimately, I think, by the way.
He says there was a lot of corruption it looked like in the Obama administration.
You want to look into that?
Looks like you guys had some pretty crooked deals in the Obama administration.
I want you to look into that.
Right?
Perfectly legitimate.
But still, it's a little...
But you can't get him for it anymore because the left has gone after Trump so many times that every time they shoot and miss, he gets stronger.
He gets bigger.
His numbers go up.
His base widens.
And now if you look at the polling in the swing states after impeachment, he's beating every single Democrat running against him.
Before impeachment, a number of Democrats were beating Trump in head-to-head polls.
Now completely the opposite.
That is a very valuable characteristic when it comes to politics.
And it's not just Trump saying it.
You don't just need to take Trump's word for it.
The Attorney General, William Barr, is backing up pretty much everything Trump is saying about the FBI, about the Russia investigation, and he's doubling down on Trump's promise to go after the people who tried to subvert the election.
We will get to William Barr's excellent interview in a second.
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Alright, let's get to William Barr.
While Trump was putting on this huge show, this whole huge circus in Pennsylvania, William Barr was giving a very sober, very direct interview on NBC News.
And he was responding to the IG investigation and...
And the IG report, and he was also talking about the next criminal investigation to pick up where the IG report left off.
He begins by absolutely hammering the Obama administration for their handling of the Trump campaign and for their spying.
Well, I think probably from a civil liberties standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government use the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents but also To use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.
As far as I'm aware, this is the first time in history that this has been done to a presidential campaign, the use of these counterintelligence techniques against a presidential campaign.
And we have to remember that in today's world, presidential campaigns are frequently in contact with foreign And indeed, in most campaigns, there are signs of illegal foreign money coming in.
And we don't automatically assume that the campaigns are nefarious and traitors and acting in league with foreign powers.
There has to be some basis before we use these very potent powers in our core First Amendment activity.
And here, I felt this was very flimsy.
I love this guy.
He reminds me in his affect of Antonin Scalia.
He's very intelligent.
He looks a little bit like Scalia.
He speaks like Scalia.
Very measured, but very precise.
Even down to his use of the word flimsy.
And what does he say there?
In his very moderate way, he says, the Obama administration spied.
They acted inappropriately.
This is a major threat to our system of government.
They...
Violated civil liberties.
They acted in an unprecedented way in our history, and we are going to get to the bottom of it.
And he doesn't even just leave it there.
He also went after the press.
Before I go into a couple of other questions, let me just sort of button this up.
I think a lot of people will hear what you're saying here and think, well, that's just Bill Barr defending Trump.
Your concern about the FBI's investigation is what?
Civil libertarian?
I think our nation was turned on its head for three years.
I think based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press.
And I think that there were gross abuses of FISA and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI. And the Attorney General's primary responsibility is to protect against the abuse of the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus and make sure that it doesn't play an improper role in our political life.
That's my responsibility.
And I'm going to carry it out.
That's right.
He's telling the press to their face on NBC News that an irresponsible press spread this ridiculous hoax.
This guy has culioni of steel.
Then he comes out and he says there were gross, inexplicable, intolerable abuses of the FISA process.
Not errors.
Not whoopsie-daisy, a little mistake.
Okay, no big deal.
No harm, no foul.
He's saying abuses.
Now, you might ask, doesn't that contradict the IG report?
I thought NBC News told me, the very dishonest mainstream media told me, that the IG report found that there was no improper motivation.
There were no nefarious plots.
It was just all a big misunderstanding.
Doesn't Barr contradict the IG report?
Sort of, but not really.
And he explains how for both the press and through the press for the American people.
So the inspector general says he found no evidence to indicate that the FBI's decision to start this investigation was based on political bias.
Do you agree?
Well, I think you have to understand what the IG's methodology is.
And I think it's the appropriate methodology for an inspector general.
He starts with limited information.
He can only talk to people who are essentially there as employees, and he's limited to the information generally in the FBI. But his approach is to say, if I get an explanation from the people I'm investigating that is not unreasonable on its face, then I will accept it as long as there's not contradictory testimonial or documentary evidence.
In other words, it's a very deferential standard.
And all he said is, people gave me an explanation and I didn't find anything to contradict it, so I don't have a basis for saying that there was improper motive.
But he hasn't decided the issue of improper motive.
This is the key point here, because I think it's confusing even for conservatives.
They say, hold on a second.
We have these two investigations now going on into the origin of the original Russia investigation.
You have the IG investigation, and then you have this guy John Durham, the prosecutor that William Barr appointed to look into it.
How come if the IG says basically it's all okay, how come there's still this John Durham investigation?
And what Barr explains is the IG investigation has a very deferential standard.
The task of the IG is not to get to the bottom of the motivations and grill people.
The task of the IG is to get a story.
If the story is not really contradicted, then there's no reason to disbelieve it.
It's a very deferential standard.
And you hear the implicit threat in his voice.
He says, yeah, the IG had a very deferential standard.
Not much reason to get to the truth, but luckily, we have a criminal investigation going on as well.
Luckily, we've got somebody on the case whose job it is to get to the bottom of it, whose job it is to figure out the motivations.
The IG may have said, we have no evidence to believe that there were political motivations.
But John Durham and Bill Barr go in there and they say, yeah, I don't think we're going to leave it at that.
I'm pretty sure you come for the king, you best not miss.
I'm pretty sure we're going to get to the bottom of it.
So how are they going to do it?
They're going to engage in a full-on criminal investigation and Bill Barr gives us a little preview of it.
I think we have to wait until the full investigation is done, and that's the fundamental distinction between what Durham is doing and what the IG is doing.
Durham is not limited to the FBI. He can talk to other agencies.
He can compel people to testify.
One of the problems in the IG's investigation, I think he would agree, is that Comey refused to sign back up for his security clearance and therefore couldn't be questioned about classified matters.
So, someone like Durham can compel testimony.
He can talk to a whole range of people, private parties, foreign governments, and so forth.
And I think that is the point at which a decision has to be made about motivations.
Listen to that.
The inspector general can compel witnesses, right?
The inspector general just goes, makes his report, okay, here you go.
It all checks out.
This criminal investigation here can compel witnesses.
So who are they going to make testify?
Who are they going to make give some testimony?
I don't know.
Maybe some of those shady characters that Trump was making fun of from the FBI. Maybe they're going to get James Comey to talk on the record.
I don't know.
Maybe they're going to try to get to the bottom of all of that.
It's this implicit...
And it's a perfectly legitimate threat.
It's a threat that I strongly support from William Barr, who says, this ain't over.
You think that you can use the mechanisms of the press?
You think you can use the mechanisms of the state, even, to try to subvert justice here?
Yeah, not me.
You remember, when Bill Barr was appointed, he said...
Look, I've already served as Attorney General.
I've been around this town a very long time.
And this is going to be a very messy situation here.
A lot of people would shy away from this job because it would ruin their careers if they're young, ambitious attorneys and prosecutors.
Me?
I've already had my career.
I got nothing to lose here.
I am only interested in getting the truth.
And I think that we're about to see that.
He even shows, he even hints, that not just for the people who acted inappropriately, but for the left generally who relied on those bad actors, there's some bad news on the horizon.
What questions will John Durham address that the IG didn't?
Well, Durham is looking at the whole waterfront.
He is looking at the issue of how it got started.
He's looking at whether or not the narrative of Trump being involved in the Russian interference actually preceded July.
And was, in fact, the precipitating trigger for the investigation.
He's also looking at the conduct of the investigation.
There are some things that were done in the investigation that are not included in Horowitz's report, and he's looking at those things.
But also, a few weeks ago, I told him that he should spend just as much attention on the post-election period And I did that because of some of the stuff that Horowitz has uncovered, which to me is inexplicable.
Well, what I said is their case collapsed after the election.
And they never told the court.
And they kept on getting renewals on these applications.
There was documents falsified in order to get these renewals.
There was all kinds of withholding of information from the court.
And the question really is, what was the agenda after the election that kept them pressing ahead after their case collapsed?
This is the President of the United States.
Fair enough.
Totally measured.
Look, you made a mistake on the initial investigation.
That's fine.
But hey, hold on a second, guys.
How come after your case collapsed, you kept trying to get him?
How come after the election you kept trying to subvert the election?
How come for two and a half, three years you kept up this charade?
That part's not explained in the IG report, but maybe we're going to get to the bottom of that.
By the way, by the way, this excellent aggressive approach from all fronts, the cultural front, the political front, and the bureaucratic front, this is not just a matter of domestic politics.
The Trump administration is doing this even overseas.
There is great news that came out just last night about U.S. trade, U.S. sovereignty, and specifically the World Trade Organization.
Very few people are reporting on it because it's a move that Trump has made in accordance with actually a fairly longstanding American tradition, and it's cracking up the leftist, utopian, internationalist plans, and it is a big, major win for the United States, for the economy, and for self-government. major win for the United States, for the economy, and We'll get to that in a second.
We will get to why a Methodist church is putting Jesus and Mary and Joseph in cages.
We will get to the word of the year.
And we will get to the dumbest article on the internet today, as always, from our friends at the New York Times.
But first, listen up.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Great news coming out of the World Trade Organization.
I think that's the first time that statement has ever been uttered in the history of the world.
At midnight last night, the Trump administration got its sneaky wish It's been doing this sort of surreptitiously for a while now.
It has nullified the power of the WTO, the World Trade Organization.
What is the WTO? It's an organization that was founded in 1995 to facilitate free trade.
Fine idea in theory, right?
No huge objections necessarily in theory, except that once the United States agreed to allow countries like China, for instance, to enter the World Trade Organization about 20 years ago, all of a sudden things got very unbalanced because you had these major, all of a sudden things got very unbalanced because you had these major, major world powers like China getting the protections in the World Trade Organization
And yet they were, they're extremely wealthy nations and they used it to their massive advantage.
They were also violating a lot of WTO treaties and arrangements.
They were illegally subsidizing their steel and aluminum.
They were stealing our intellectual property.
They were forcing us to do business with crooked banks in China.
These were all extra little taxes and fees that were added on top of doing business.
They were not behaving as serious partners and yet we were bound by the WTO regulations because if we ever tried to fight back, we would be found in violation of the WTO. The WTO, a sort of...
I guess a hopeful idea from the 90s that just hasn't worked out to our benefit in recent years.
The way that the Trump administration nullified the WTO is it has blocked new appointments to the appellate bodies, to the appeals court of the World Trade Organization, which means that the terms of two of the last three judges on the WTO expired at midnight.
Now, it's worth pointing out here, this isn't just Trump who's done this.
President George W. Bush started this process of not appointing new judges.
And this continued under Barack Obama to his credit, and it finally reached the climax under President Trump.
This is excellent news.
It's a big win for sovereignty.
It's a big win for self-government.
Now, I guess in theory, the WTO is supposed to facilitate trade, reduce tariffs, reduce barriers to trade, and we'll all be kumbaya in this wonderful, easy, efficient marketplace all around the world.
Okay, it doesn't really work out that way.
By the way, but even if it did, we're seeing this as part of a larger debate right now, which is between total efficient technocratic international bureaucracy and sovereignty, self-government.
What do you want?
You get to pick one.
What do you want?
What matters more to you?
To me, it's pretty clear.
I want self-government.
I want to have a say over our own national destiny.
I want to defend our constitution.
I want to engage in trade as a country that benefits us and not surrender that power to some international organization that deals with us at times unfairly.
Maybe that means that trade will be a little tougher in the short term.
Maybe.
That's a price I'm willing to pay.
The destiny of man is not measured by material computations.
We're spirits, not animals.
We have a constitution, and we have self-government.
That's another big win for Trump.
It just shows this aggressiveness, not just on the domestic front, but on the international front.
We've wanted that for a long time.
So that raises the question of impeachment.
How are we going to deal with the trial in the Senate?
Right now, CNN is reporting, so, you know, take it with a grain of salt, but CNN is reporting that there's a disagreement here.
Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, wants impeachment to be over with quickly.
He wants this trial that goes to trial, and then they acquit him, and that's it, and you can move right along.
Now, according to CNN, that's not what President Trump wants.
President Trump wants to drag this out.
He wants it to be a show.
He wants this to be a spectacle.
He wants people to come testify like Adam Schiff and Hunter Biden.
Trump wants exactly what I advocated for yesterday on the show.
And Trump is right, and Mitch McConnell's wrong.
I love Cocaine Mitch.
I think he's a great guy.
I understand why Mitch McConnell might want to move this trial along.
One, so the Senate can get back to its business of pushing through a bunch of conservative judges.
Love that idea.
That's great.
Two, because in politics anything can happen.
So you don't want to call, say, Joe Biden as a witness and then all of a sudden he becomes very sympathetic and it turns it on its head.
Okay, I understand that.
Still, impeachment helps the president.
Being aggressive helps the president.
It helps the Republican Party.
It helps conservatives.
You don't need to call Joe Biden.
I actually don't think you should.
Maybe Trump is even overreaching in calling Hunter Biden.
Because Hunter Biden is a Biden, so maybe he could be sympathetic.
You've got to call Adam Schiff.
You've got to call those awful, unlikable Democratic lawyers who were preening on Capitol Hill last week.
You've got to drag all of them in front and show just how weak a case the Democrats have.
Opposition to impeachment and removal is at 51%.
Right now it'll be at 61% by the time this thing is over if they really drag it out and do it the right way.
That's the show.
Look, when your opponents in politics come after you, And they miss you.
That's a wonderful feeling.
Winston Churchill wrote about this.
I think it was in his book, My Early Life.
He said that he was in a war zone and he felt a bullet go by his head.
And it was the first time he ever had the joy of being shot at and missed.
That's good.
That's a relief.
But then you've got to capitalize on that.
It's kind of like blackjack.
Blackjack has almost even odds.
It's a pretty good game to play.
But not if you just play hand after hand without ever changing your strategy.
You've got to know in blackjack when to split.
You've got to know when to double down.
You've got to know when to press your luck.
Okay?
You've got to know when to get really aggressive.
The same thing is true in politics.
I think Trump has that instinct.
He should follow that instinct.
Beyond politics, or beyond at least national politics and presidential politics, We've got a very, very stupid story coming out of a Methodist church, the Claremont United Methodist Church, 30 miles east of my own city of L.A. They posted a photo on their website of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in cages.
This is a real war on Christmas.
The war on Christmas is becoming very literal now.
They are actually imprisoning the Holy Family.
Not a great idea.
Why did they do it?
Why did they put...
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in cages topped with barbed wire because they want to make the point.
That Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are refugees, just like MS-13 gang members coming up from El Salvador, or other people too.
They're just like refugees, and if you oppose totally open borders, can you really call yourself a Christian?
Certainly not, according to the lead priestess at this Methodist church, Karen Clark Ristine.
She's the lead pastoress, and she told the CNN affiliate there, We thought about the most refugee family in the world, the family of Jesus.
I don't want to spend too long on this story.
I just want to point out this is a leftist canard that comes up again and again increasingly every Christmas, every time the left wants to make some stupid political point.
And it's simply not true.
It's both a stupid point to make and it is literally not true.
So they say Jesus was a refugee, right?
He's not from Bethlehem.
His family is not from Bethlehem, and yet he was born in Bethlehem.
He was born in a manger or in a cave.
See, he's a refugee.
No.
When we're talking about refugees, illegal aliens, fleeing their country and crossing the border, we're talking about people who are evading laws and entering a country illegally.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his mother and his stepfather were going toward the civil authority and obeying the civil authority to register with the government.
Opposite situations.
Well, Michael, you might say, what about when Jesus, Mary, and Joseph fled to Egypt?
Certainly then he was a refugee.
Still no.
It is true.
The Holy Family fled.
Herod fled this massacre that was about to happen and fled to Egypt in fulfillment of scripture.
But when they fled to Egypt, they were not crossing borders illegally.
They were not violating civil statutes.
They were not acting as refugees the way we talk about refugees from Latin America or elsewhere today because Egypt was part of the Roman Empire.
It'd be like fleeing from California to Texas, something that many people are doing even today, rather than fleeing from El Salvador to the United States.
Egypt had been part of the Roman Empire since 30 BC when Octavian defeated Mark Antony and ousted Cleopatra from Egypt.
So they are just...
It is a...
Weak slogan, it's a dumb point, that is also based on historical ignorance and illiteracy.
But it's also a product of shallow religion, right?
We are in Advent.
We are awaiting the long-expected Jesus born to set his people free.
And what the left wants to do is make some cheap, stupid political point about immigration.
The birth of a savior is In Bethlehem, the incarnation, the nativity of the divine logic of the universe to set us free from our sin and redeem mankind is much more interesting than whatever stupid point you have to make about the southern border.
It's much more inspiring.
It tells us much more about our humanity.
It's a far greater cause for joy.
The left just doesn't understand that they're so hysterically, narrowly, obsessively focused on these cheap little political points, they can't raise their head up and look toward the heavens or even look down into a cave in Bethlehem at the incarnation.
Another sad note on our culture today, Merriam-Webster Dictionary has announced the word of the year.
The word of the year is they.
They, huh, that's a pretty strange word of the year.
They has been around for a long time.
Why is it all of a sudden becoming the word of the year in 2019?
It's because Merriam-Webster has now redefined the word they, not to refer to multiple people, not to be a plural word, but to be singular.
As in, not he or she, but they.
They is a good person.
Very, very sad.
It shows you an important point about politics which is that all these little minor issues, the pronouns, the bathrooms, things that we say are trivial, are actually supremely important.
How is the singular they come about?
It's come about because of gender ideology, which has told us that there is no such thing as men or women, that sex is different from gender, that gender now is a term that applies not to grammar but to human beings, that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man simply by believing it so or simply by really wishing it to be.
An ideology that says we should pump little children full of hormones if a boy plays with a Barbie doll or if a girl plays with a toy truck.
Or if their mother is just a nut, we should just pump them full of hormones, sterilize them, stop them from going through puberty.
That's what we should do because really there's no such thing as biological sex that your body has nothing to do with who you really are, with your identity.
This is...
Not true.
This is crazy.
This is an idea that's only been around for about five minutes and it's already affected our popular language by removing even he and she.
At this rate, it will soon become bigoted or it will be seen to be bigoted to use gendered pronouns to say he or she.
It will become politically correct to only say they.
That is the move that's underway right now.
Language is the key here.
The left always uses language to change our culture and to achieve their political ends.
Why?
Because language is the stuff of our consciousness.
Language is how we think.
It's how we communicate.
It's the only way that we can relate to one another.
Language is central to politics.
And they are fundamentally changing it.
So, for instance, if they becomes not only a singular pronoun, but the preferred singular pronoun, then any objection that a reasonable person might have to gender ideology goes out the window because gender ideology becomes baked into the very premises of our culture and our consciousness and our language.
Very stupid move from Merriam-Webster.
I don't read Merriam-Webster.
I read the Oxford English Dictionary.
But still, not a good look for the culture.
It shows why we've got to fight back every step of the way.
How can you do it?
Use a very simple way.
And it's very awkward and you don't like it because it feels weird when you say it.
When you refer to individuals, say he or she, according to the OED, he is the gender-neutral singular pronoun.
He doesn't necessarily mean a man, but when you're saying he in the general sense, it can mean just an individual.
And when you're talking about an individual who's confused about his gender, say Bruce Jenner or somebody, Caitlyn Jenner now, Say Caitlyn Jenner, that's perfectly fine, but refer to him as he.
Not out of cruelty, Caitlyn Jenner seems like a nice guy.
Seems like actually a fairly reasonable guy as far as not only people confused about their gender are concerned, but as far as anybody in Hollywood is concerned.
He's actually got some pretty decent politics.
But he is not a woman.
He's admitted as much.
In his own writing and in his own speaking, you need to insist upon that too.
Because the minute you lose that, the minute you see to the left the ability to define ontological reality, you've seeded all of politics.
There's no reason in even arguing about it anymore.
Before we go, I've got to get to the dumbest article on the internet today.
This comes from the New York Times, as it so often does, and it comes from Thomas Friedman.
The title, Impeach Trump, Save America.
It's the only thing to do if our country's democracy is to survive.
This is a really, really dumb op-ed.
I won't get to the whole thing because you can get the gist of it in the first couple paragraphs.
He writes, impeaching a president is the most consequential thing our Congress can do other than declaring war.
So after great consideration, I say, President Trump not only should be impeached, he must be impeached if America's democracy is to remain intact.
So if we're still going to let the people elect their own presidents, we need to subvert the will of the people and oust their duly elected president.
That's the premise here, okay?
He says, why?
Because the facts here are not in doubt.
Trump's allies in the media and Congress have largely given up disputing them.
Trump held up congressionally directed taxpayer funding to strengthen Ukraine's military against Russia until the new Ukrainian president agreed to do what Trump called a favor.
Announced that Ukraine was investigating Trump's most likely 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, and his son, who were involved with the Ukrainian gas company.
First of all, the president conducts foreign policy, Thomas Friedman, not the Congress.
We have three co-equal branches of government.
The executive is a co-equal branch.
It's not subservient to the Congress.
Second of all, Trump's, forget about Trump's allies in the media and Congress, if he has any.
Talk about Trump's opponents.
Trump's opponents are actually the ones who have given up this stupid narrative that you're trying to push because they didn't charge him with bribery in the impeachment.
If they actually thought that he had committed an impeachable offense, if they actually thought that he was bribing Ukraine or extorting something out of Ukraine, they would have charged him with that in impeachment after this three-year-long charade and after the impeachment inquiry and hearings.
But they didn't do it because the point that you're saying is incontrovertible.
Not even the Democrats in Congress believe anymore or they're not willing to try to say with a straight face.
Third of all, What you're accusing Trump of doing, Biden actually did.
Biden actually did by his own admission on video at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He held up military aid to Ukraine when there was a much hotter war going on with Russia.
In exchange for a political favor, which is that they stop investigating his crooked son, who got $600,000 a year from a corrupt energy company, even though he's a total derelict who just smokes crack a lot of the time and has no qualifications whatsoever, other than having the name Biden, while Joe was the sitting vice president.
So the argument he's making here is actually to kick Joe Biden out from being the likely nominee of the Democratic Party.
He's not making an argument against Trump.
Then Friedman says, I love this.
I love this.
Look, I have given this great consideration.
It's very serious about impeachment, but let's do it anyway.
Generally speaking, I believe presidents should be elected and removed by the voters at the polls.
But when I hear Trump's defenders scream, impeachment subverts the will of the people, I say, really?
What the hell do you think Trump was doing in Ukraine?
He was subverting the will of the people by scheming to use our tax dollars to knock out his most feared opponent in the coming election.
What?
What are you talking about, subverting the will of the people?
Trump's a duly elected president.
He conducts foreign policy.
He was investigating crooked deals that were going on in the past administration.
Perfectly legitimate.
Friedman is trying to use I would call it Orwellian language to make reality seem not only other than it is, but the opposite of what it is.
And then we get to the money line.
If we say, as Republicans do, that what Trump did is not an impeachable offense, we're telling ourselves and every future president that in contradiction of what the founders wrote in the Constitution, it is okay to enlist a foreign power to tilt the election your way.
Biden did that.
Biden did that.
He did.
First of all, when Thomas Friedman is talking about the Constitution and how we have to abide by what the founders and the Constitution said, I can't help but laugh.
But when anybody in the New York Times does that, but what Joe Biden did was hold up American military aid to Ukraine and told Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was looking into his crooked son's company.
Okay, that's what he did.
But beyond that, Lots of presidents have had contact and presidential candidates have had contact with foreign powers.
Like, for instance, the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 when they enlisted the services of Fusion GPS who hired an ex-foreign intelligence operative named Christopher Steele to get dirt from other intelligence operatives in Russia to undermine our election and to kick Trump out of the general so that Hillary could win.
Now, I'm not even begrudging her, her ability to go dig up oppo research.
That's politics.
That's happened for a long time.
But don't say this is unprecedented.
We're not going to have a legitimate president.
Listen, can you imagine how much money candidates could raise from Saudi Arabia or China to tilt a future election their way?
Different countries get involved in these elections.
Russia's been trying to overturn our elections for 100 years.
By the way, Barack Obama just endorsed Justin Trudeau in Canada.
Was he interfering in their election?
Was he subverting their elections?
Barack Obama sent his campaign operatives over to Israel to try to oust Bibi at Netanyahu.
Was that shocking, awful, terrible, unconstitutional?
I don't think so.
Friedman says the integrity of our elections would be shattered.
We would never again have a legitimate president.
Be shattered.
We wouldn't have a legitimate president.
And that's why we need to...
Use the power of impeachment for the first time ever to remove a president, even though they couldn't even charge the most basic crime, bribery, as an impeachable offense.
They couldn't do that.
They got rid of that.
So now they're charging him with vague abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
It's the president's job to obstruct Congress.
They got nothing.
And you're saying that unless we oust the president for that, we will never have a legitimate president again.
I say the opposite.
If we do oust a president for that, we'll never have a legitimate president again.
We will have congressional supremacy, and our founders will be rolling over in their graves.
Luckily, though, luckily, and I really count this as a great blessing for our country, the conservatives are fighting back.
At the DOJ, in the culture, at the White House, at home and abroad.
We're not taking it lying down anymore.
A very important political maxim.
If you come at the king, you best not miss.
The left missed.
Now they're going to face the consequences.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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