The decade that began with the rise of the Tea Party and is ending with historic victories for conservative priorities, from the legislature to the culture to the federal courts. We examine how history will look back on the past ten years. Then, a man gets 16 years behind bars for burning a gay pride flag, Christianity Today endorses the impeachment and removal of President Trump, and we clear up some fake news on Christmas.
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Then, a man gets 16 years behind bars for burning a gay pride flag.
Christianity Today endorses the impeachment and removal of President Trump.
And we clear up some fake news on Christmas.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
There is so much to get to today.
It is not just the end of a year that we're coming up on.
It is the end of a decade.
And I think that our perception of this decade is very, very different than what we can actually conclude from what happened on the political front.
We'll get to that in a second.
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What a great decade.
What a great decade this has been.
Before we get into why, I want to issue one slight correction, but it's important.
It actually tells us a little bit about what we're talking about today.
You remember, during the impeachment vote last week, there were all sorts of speeches that were being given, one of which was the most powerful oration in recent American history.
That was the speech in which a congressman stood up and said, for the remainder of my time, I'm going to list all of the It was a beautiful, powerful oration.
I mean, obviously, it was inspired by some seriously dense political philosophy work.
I misidentified who that congressman was, and I'm very sorry about that because it was such a great speech.
So just to correct the record, that congressman who I identified as Bill Johnson was actually Russ Fulcher.
Congressman Fulcher, my apologies and my admiration, sir.
You've got them both.
The decade is coming to a close.
The defining feature of this decade in politics is the rise of the right.
That's it.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, we've had so many setbacks.
That's true.
But in terms of the actual popular politics, political opinions, it's the rise of the right.
Remember, 2008, Barack Obama gets elected.
2009, you get the Affordable Care Act.
You get Obamacare.
Then you enter this new decade, 2010.
And 2010 begins with the rise of the Tea Party.
2010, rise of the Tea Party.
They take over the House of Representatives.
They're able to stymie the rest of the Obama administration's plans.
Then, over the course of the next six years, we win 1,000 seats.
Across the country at the local, state, and federal level.
A thousand seats.
Barack Obama destroys the Democratic Party.
Even though Obama gets re-elected in 2012, virtually every other election, all the rest of the political momentum goes to the right.
And then the decade ends with the election of President Trump and the first three years of the Trump administration, which have proved wildly popular on...
The economy, just if you look at his approval rating, and even now from the beginning of the impeachment process to the end, President Trump's approval numbers have gone up and now the majority of Americans, depending on which poll you look at, but multiple polls, the majority of Americans oppose impeachment and removal.
Even among Democrats, the number of people who support impeachment and removal has dropped from 90% to 77% over the course of the impeachment proceedings.
And that's according to CNN. So take it with a grain of salt, but if anyone...
If CNN were going to skew either way, it would skew to the left.
Why does the decade not feel like we've been winning?
The reason is we've lost some major battles.
We've lost huge amounts of cultural ground.
We lost on the redefinition of marriage.
We lost on the redefinition of sex itself.
Men are women and women are men.
All that sort of stuff.
We've lost a lot.
Russell Kirk, the great conservative philosopher, he actually says that conservatism is about loss.
The chief sentiment of conservatism is the feeling of loss because you're trying to conserve things and keep them going into the future.
You keenly feel all those losses.
Sure, we feel those losses, but think about what those losses look like.
They weren't popular losses.
They weren't losses even in elections.
They were losses at the judicial level.
In all of these cases, the redefinition of marriage, increasingly the redefinition of sex, now someone just got 16 years in the clink for burning a gay pride flag.
All those things were caused by a robed lawyer overstepping his bounds.
Otherwise, we're doing great.
If you look at the direction of political support in the country, it all favors the right.
And we just got some more good news on this front.
Because if the judiciary is the main problem, we've now learned President Trump and Cocaine Mitch have officially confirmed 187 federal judges.
This is Mitch McConnell's legacy, and it's the most important thing that President Trump has done in all three years.
While he's distracting with the tweets, while he's being impeached, while he's talking about Mika Brzezinski's face, while he's doing all this stuff in his left hand, look what he's doing with his right.
He's getting all of these judges through.
Those judges have lifetime appointments.
He and McConnell are seriously outpacing Barack Obama now.
There's a new report out.
One in four circuit court judges is a Trump appointee.
So when Trump took office, nine of the country's 13 circuit courts had a majority of Democratic judges.
Now, seven of those 13 courts have Republican majorities, and Trump is just getting started.
Assuming he gets reelected, right now things are looking pretty good.
We'll get to the Democratic debate in a little bit to show you how good it's looking.
If Trump gets a second term, he's going to utterly transform the courts, and the courts have been the sore spot.
The courts have been the only rub for the last 10 years of conservative politics.
Trump has now had 50 circuit court judges confirmed.
Just to put that in perspective, at this point in his presidency, Barack Obama had only confirmed 25 circuit court judges.
So at the circuit level, Trump is doubling what Obama did.
And it's huge because the judges are where we've lost the hardest.
Even Obamacare.
Don't forget Obamacare, right?
Obamacare, very, very unpopular.
You had a Republican in Massachusetts win Ted Kennedy's Senate seat just so that he could be the vote against Obamacare.
But they wheel and deal and they finally push it through despite massive popular opposition to Obamacare.
It's obviously unconstitutional.
It's the federal government forcing people to buy a private service.
We've never had that in our nation's history.
They get it through.
John Roberts completely caves and...
We get that Supreme Court decision.
Then we get Obergefell.
That was the case that redefined marriage because Justice Kennedy is basically a romantic poet on the bench and he decided that actually, unbeknownst to all of us, the Constitution defines marriage not as it had always been defined throughout all of history or as it was understood at the time, but as the monogamous union of couples regardless of their We're good to
And now Trump isn't getting enough credit for these judges, right?
Because people aren't paying attention.
They don't realize where the losses are.
We just feel the losses.
But if you change the judiciary, all that goes away.
And it's so important.
I'll show you how important it is.
Right now, there's a story coming out of central Iowa.
A man has been sentenced to a little under 16 years in prison for burning an LGBT rainbow flag.
His name is Adolfo Martinez-Benz.
He's 30-year-olds.
He's from Ames, Iowa.
He was just sentenced over 15 years for a hate crime.
Specifically, it was arson and theft because this guy, Martinez, saw a gay pride flag on a church and he went over there.
He stole the flag.
He then lit it on fire because he opposes homosexuality.
All of his sentences are going to be served consecutively.
It is as large a sentence as he could possibly get.
What is the crime here?
Obviously stealing is a crime, so he should be punished for that.
Arson is a crime, setting it on fire, he should be punished for that.
But you don't get 16 years in the clink for stealing a flag.
You don't get 16 years in prison for lighting a match where you shouldn't light a match.
You get 16 years in prison.
You get sentenced to the absolute maximum allowed by law for a hate crime.
And what is the hate crime?
Burning the LGBT flag.
I mean, how insane is this situation?
Where in the United States, if you burn an American flag, the symbol of our entire country...
That's totally fine.
You would be celebrated by the left and by civil libertarians for expressing your free speech rights.
We now know, I mean, even Antonin Scalia would say this, that there is a protected speech right in burning an American flag, and yet you burn a gay pride flag and you go to jail for 16 years.
What would the founders think about that?
The defense of this sentence is that he stole the flag.
You don't get 16 years in prison for stealing flags.
And the people who are cheering this on, by the way, are the ones who say we need to empty the jails and stop putting people in jail for minor crimes like petty theft or drug crimes.
They're the ones saying we need to get people out of here, prison reform, sentencing reform.
And they're cheering this on that a man gets 16 years in prison for burning a gay pride flag.
This highlights an important topic that we've been talking about for months.
And if we want the next decade to be another conservative decade, we're going to have to get this through our heads.
There are some well-meaning people on the right who never want the government to advance our cultural priorities because they think that secular liberalism is completely neutral.
So what I mean by that is you have people even on the right who say we can never have the government push our idea of the good.
We can never have the government say encourage public prayer.
We can never have the government encourage the mention of God like all of our founding fathers did, like it is on our currency.
We can never have them push social conservatism because that would be wrong.
We're no different than how the left is when they push their radicalism from the government.
Therefore, what we really need is to step back and let the government just be a neutral playing field and we'll fight all of our battles in the culture.
As though there were some neat distinction between politics and culture.
Now, the premise here, I guess, is you don't want any blurring of the line between church and state.
That's the best way to maintain our liberties.
But that is BS because we do have an established church in America.
We have the church of leftism.
We have a secular liturgical calendar, okay?
We have Black History Month, which is not actually about black history.
It's about a leftist version of black history.
We have Women's History Month.
It's not about women's history.
It's about a secular leftist version of women's history.
We have Pride Month now, which isn't even about celebrating homosexuals anymore.
Now there's another month for that, which is October.
Pride Month in June is actually just about celebrating pride.
All sorts of pride.
Fat pride, skinny pride, all kinds of pride.
That is a secular liturgical calendar, just like any church has a liturgical calendar, okay?
We have secular saints, we have secular sins.
I argued a few months ago on this show, I argued in favor of a constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning.
Not because I think it's the most important thing in the world.
I wouldn't stake it as my number one priority, but I think it would be helpful If we came together as a country and said, we're not going to let you burn the flag because the flag is the symbol of the country.
My reasoning here is if the flag is the symbol of the country, then we should raise it up a little bit.
We should sanctify it a little bit.
We should...
We should have something shared together that is sacred because we're going to do that, right?
The Declaration of Independence.
Declaration of Independence declares that we have natural rights that we are endowed with by our creator.
That's a religious statement.
Okay?
The state always has a relation to the spiritual, to the religious.
This has been true in every government in the history of the world.
And so the question is, what kind of relationship are we going to have?
We had a very, very delicate balance in America.
We're the most religiously tolerant country that has ever existed on earth, at least until recently.
Because the kind of Christianity that formed the basis of the American religion was much, much more tolerant than leftism and liberalism, which is the current Church of America.
All right?
And just these two flags sum it up.
We are going to sanctify something in this country.
So either we're going to sanctify a symbol of our nation, the U.S. flag, or we're going to sanctify some other symbol.
We're going to come together and raise up the stars and stripes, or we're going to raise up the rainbow flag.
But one of those is going to become the cherished symbol.
Activist judges want it to be the latter.
I think the American people want it to be the former, and I think that distinction is the key to understanding the last decade in politics, and I think that is why we're winning.
I think Obamacare was an overreach.
I think Obergefell was an overreach.
I think transgenderism.
It's a major, major overreach.
I mean, I've long said I think this transgender movement is the straw that broke the camel's back of political correctness, of marching leftism.
This movement isn't only happening in the United States.
There is a popular conservative movement that is way bigger than the United States.
You see it in Europe.
You see it in the United Kingdom.
You even see it among liberals in the United Kingdom.
Unbelievable story out today from the author J.K. Rowling who wrote the Harry Potter books.
J.K. Rowling is a major lib, okay?
She's a huge liberal.
She's always tweeting about feminist things.
Every other day, she's making some old Harry Potter character gay.
Like, she'll go back and rewrite it from 15 years ago, and all of a sudden, Dumbledore's gay.
They're going to make the owl gay pretty soon.
She's always adding these kind of PC politics.
But she wouldn't go all the way with the left.
So there's a controversy now that J.K. Rowling is in.
Surrounding the case of Maya Forstater, who is a British scholar who lost her job because she said that men cannot magically become women simply by wishing it so.
This is a British academic who got fired from her academic job for stating a scientific fact, a fact of nature.
And J.K. Rowling has come out in defense of this woman.
J.K. Rowling tweeted out, quote, Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who will have you.
Yikes.
Sort of an underhanded compliment.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
Hashtag I stand with Maya.
Hashtag this is not a drill.
Right now, in this statement, J.K. Rowling is summing up the kind of liberal worldview.
Dress whatever you want, like whatever you want, call yourself whatever you want, sleep with everybody, free love, it's fine, but don't It's never enough.
It's never enough.
They will get you eventually.
They will turn on you eventually.
You can never be extreme enough.
In a way, in a sort of glass half full way, our losses at the judicial level this decade, which have been significant, are almost helpful.
Look at the 1970s.
Roe versus Wade, possibly the worst Supreme Court decision in American history.
Completely galvanized the pro-life movement.
At the time of Roe vs.
Wade, all of the public opinion in this country was moving in the direction of supporting abortion.
After Roe vs.
Wade, it completely turned back.
Now we've basically never been more pro-life than we are today.
And I think we're seeing this on other cultural issues.
I think we're seeing it on what it means to be human.
I think we're seeing it on what it means to be a man.
I think we're seeing it on what it means to be I mean, that's the debate that's been happening now.
And in the midst of all this, they're trying to impeach the president.
They're trying to stave all the judicial bloodletting, basically, because even the Ninth Circuit, which is an incredibly liberal court historically, even that now is becoming a conservative court thanks to the Trump appointees.
In the midst of all of this, the Democrats meet to debate what they stand for, what their policy priorities are, how they're going to turn this thing around.
They have no answer.
They have no answer.
We will go through some of the highlights.
I mean, this debate was so dumb.
You really only need to see five or six of them.
But there are a few moments here that show you that the Democrats are really, really in trouble.
And they're basically looking around the country after the kind of destruction and desolation of the Obama administration that took this historic liberal victory and then just completely squandered it.
They're looking around and they're saying, how do we rebuild?
They don't have an answer.
The First line of the night that made me think that the left just has no serious vision for 2020 came from Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren's had all the big momentum going in for the past two months now, right?
Elizabeth Warren came out of nowhere.
She was pretty much dead in the water because she's Liawatha and because she published that DNA result that showed that she's one 1,024th Native American.
Maybe she lied about her record at Harvard.
She lied about her ancestry.
She lied about sending her child to public schools.
I mean she's just a weak candidate.
She's a damaged candidate.
She has that awful voice.
And yet she was rising in the polls because Biden was collapsing, because Bernie Sanders had a heart attack.
because there was nobody else.
She wasn't rising out of her own talent.
She was rising because the field was so, so weak.
So Elizabeth Warren puts out her economic plans.
She basically wants to promise everybody the world and then pretend that their taxes aren't going to go up.
To their credit, the moderators of this debate came out and said, Senator Warren, how do you respond to economists who say your plan isn't going to work?
This is Liz Warren's answer.
This is the best she could do.
How do you answer top economists who say taxes of this magnitude would stifle growth and investment?
Oh, they're just wrong.
That's it.
That's the best you got.
This reminds me of this moment in 2012 when Herman Cain, you know, the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, Herman Cain comes out and he's got his 999 tax plan and the 999 plan is going to totally revolutionize the economy and we're going to have a ton of growth.
And a moderator at one of these debates said, excuse me, Mr.
Cain.
What do you say to the economists who analyzed your plan and they say it doesn't work?
What do you make of that analysis?
And Herman Cain issued, I think it's my favorite quote from any presidential debate ever.
He said, well, the problem with their analysis is that it is incorrect.
I thought that sums it up.
That's perfect.
The problem with their analysis is that it is incorrect.
Liz Warren said, is using the same line here.
And guess what?
It didn't work out very well for Herman Cain.
I don't think it's going to work out well for Elizabeth Warren.
You need a more serious answer than that.
You can only channel populist rage so long.
And Liz Warren's not even good at doing it because she's actually just a lying Harvard professor establishmentarian fraud.
So she doesn't even get the kind of thrill of popular support.
She's more like a scolding librarian.
It's not going to work well for her.
She needs to come up with an answer to these economists who are pointing out that her plan is going to completely destroy growth.
I mean, if you just look at the health care plan alone, it's $52 trillion total over 10 years.
If you took all the wealth away from every single billionaire in the entire country, all 621 of them, if you stole the shirt off their backs, you would pay for basically three-fifths of one year of that plan.
And then what?
Obviously, people's taxes are going to go up.
Businesses are going to get crushed.
Growth is going to stop.
The economy very likely would recess.
If she's not going to answer that, she's not really going anywhere.
The biggest moment of the debate involves Elizabeth Warren, too, because she tried to lob an attack on Pete Buttigieg.
All of a sudden, when people are realizing how weak Liz Warren is, especially after she released that disastrous health care plan, now some of the momentum is going to Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
And so Warren wants to cut him off before he gets too big and keep the momentum on her.
So the big moment of the debate is Warren goes after Buttigieg, And it doesn't go the way Liz Warren wants.
She lobs this attack.
She said, Pete Buttigieg had a big high dollar fundraiser in a wine cave.
And that's not the kind of representation America needs.
Buttigieg completely flips it around and uses the attack against her.
The mayor just recently had a fundraiser that was held in a wine cave full of crystals and served $900 a bottle wine.
Think about who comes to that.
He had promised that every fundraiser he would do would be open door, but this one was closed door.
We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke-filled rooms would not pick the next president of the United States.
Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.
Mr.
Mayor, your response?
You know, according to Forrest Magazine, I am literally the only person on this stage who's not a millionaire or a billionaire.
So if...
This is important.
This is the problem with issuing purity tests you cannot yourself pass.
That is a great line.
This is the problem with issuing purity tests that you cannot yourself pass.
He didn't get in the mud.
He didn't start calling her crooked Elizabeth.
He didn't start really getting personal because he doesn't have the gravitas for that.
He's a young kid.
He looks like Alfred E. Newman.
He's the mayor of a small town.
He's got to play earnest.
He can't come from a position that's too aggressive.
But he points out that she's a total hypocrite on this.
She's worth a lot more money than he is.
Then it came out, by the way, that last year, at a fundraiser last year, Elizabeth Warren also hosted a big dollar wine fundraiser, and actually the gift, if you gave over $1,000 to her, was a souvenir wine bottle.
So the attack is just completely disingenuous.
That's the hallmark of Liz Warren's political career, though, is this shamelessness and this cynicism.
She'll be whatever her audience wants her to be.
Pete Buttigieg coming out and attacking her for it.
Now, is Buttigieg the strong candidate?
I don't think so.
Pete Buttigieg has basically zero black support.
I have a number of friends and family members who like Pete Buttigieg, and to a person, they are all upper middle class whites who live in urban areas.
That is not how you cobble together a winning political coalition, especially when multiple polls are showing that President Trump is making huge inroads among black voters and among Hispanic voters.
The Emerson poll put Trump's black support at 34.5%.
Now, call that an outlier poll.
Fine.
Other polls are showing 30%, high 20s.
Among Hispanic voters, you're looking at 38%.
If Trump gets even 15% or 20% of the black vote, significantly lower than the polls are showing, then the Democrats are done.
So they need a candidate who can appeal to those voters.
They form the foundation of their base.
So now Buttigieg is on shaky ground.
Well, what about Bernie?
Okay, Bernie's been around a long time.
He's been around at least, what, 300, 400 years at this point?
Maybe Bernie will be the guy who can finally push this race into the mainstream.
Except he can't.
Bernie Sanders...
Was asked a question on race.
He's got the same race problem Buttigieg does.
He just has very, very low black support.
And they said, how do you respond to this question on race?
And Bernie Sanders tried to turn it to global warming.
Listen to how pathetic this is.
Senator Sanders, I do want to put the same question to you, Senator Sanders.
What message do you think?
But I wanted to get back to the issue of climate change for a moment, because I do believe this is the existential issue.
Senator, with all respect, this question is about race.
Can you answer the question as it was asked?
Because people of color, in fact, are going to be the people suffering most if we do not deal with climate change.
Ah, what a horrible response, Bernie.
They say that a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
That is what the left has become on their religion du jour, environmentalism.
The answer to everything is the Green New Deal.
It's global warming.
The world is about to end.
It all comes together in the totalizing plan of the Green New Deal, which includes socialist healthcare, job guarantee program, reparations for slavery, massive redistribution of wealth.
That's their answer for everything.
But if you want to appeal to the American people, first of all, you can't pick this one very esoteric issue that most people don't even think is happening or is really threatening to destroy our civilization.
But two, if they ask you about something else, you've got to know how to change the subject.
You can't say, hey, Bernie, you have this big weakness when it comes to race.
How are you going to address that?
Global warming!
Bernie, respectfully, we're not talking about that now.
We're talking about race.
What do you say about race?
Global warming is important to race.
No, that's not going to go anywhere.
So Bernie, it's not looking great.
Now, some people are saying we might have the Amy Klobuchar moment.
Amy Klobuchar is Midwestern.
She's moderate.
She's a woman.
She checks a lot of boxes.
Maybe Amy Klobuchar is going to break through.
I think that's probably unlikely.
We'll hear from her in a second, and then we'll get to the kingpin himself, Joe Biden, and look at how the Biden campaign is heading into 2020, because he made a big decision at this debate, and nobody is reporting on it, but it actually is the most significant strategic change that the Biden campaign has made to date.
We'll get to that in a second.
We'll get to Christianity Today endorsing the removal of President Trump from office.
And we will get to some myths about Christmas.
There's one in particular that drives me crazy.
We will clear that up before we head into Christmas and New Year's.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
So Warren looking weak.
Buttigieg, he's got some momentum, but it looks like he's got some pretty fatal weaknesses on his campaign, specifically his appeal to minority voters.
Bernie Sanders, pretty much the same thing.
Also, Bernie, especially at this debate, just came off as a screaming old man, so he would be very, very old.
It'd be, what, 82 by the end of his first term.
It's just not looking great.
So how about Klobuchar?
Is this the Klobuchar moment?
It could be.
She has the policy preferences that would appeal to a vast majority of people.
She's got the sex that would appeal to Democrats because she's not a straight white man.
She's a straight white woman, but at least that gives you one intersectional box.
She's from the Midwest.
She's from an important area.
And yet, she's just so stiff and unappealing.
Here, if I had to sum up the Amy Klobuchar campaign in 30 seconds, it would be these clips from the debate of Amy Klobuchar trying to make a joke, trying to seem human, and just falling flat.
We have not had enough women in our government.
When I was on Trevor Noah's show once, I explained how in the history of the Senate there was something like 2,000 men and only 50 women in the whole history.
And he said if a nightclub had numbers that bad, they would shut it down.
And I have never even been to a wine cave.
I've been to the wind cave in South Dakota, which I suggest you go to.
What?
That's the pun you're going to...
I've never been to a wine cave.
I've been to the wind cave, which is a place you've never heard of in a place you've never visited, which has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
Is that how you joke?
Is that...
Is that a joke?
Like, that's that meme of looking at the butterfly?
Is this what a joke is?
That's not a joke.
The first time she tries to make a joke in the debate, she doesn't even make the joke herself.
She just quotes an actual comedian...
Telling a joke in her presence.
He said, I was on Trevor Noah's show, and he said that if the ratio of men and women in the history of the Senate were the ratio of men and women in a bar, the bar would close.
Beep, boop, beep, beep, boop.
Is that a joke?
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
No.
And I know this seems like a trivial point.
I know this seems minor.
It's like, well, not everyone is Don Rickles.
But first of all, when you're running against President Trump, you kind of need Don Rickles.
Like the guy is so entertaining that you really do need to have a lot of personality.
Generally speaking, in the history of the U.S. presidency, the bigger personality wins, the more memorable personality wins.
But also what it shows with Klobuchar is she just doesn't have her finger on the pulse of people.
She doesn't know how to relate to people.
She doesn't know what makes people tick.
She doesn't know what makes people laugh.
If you can make people laugh, there's a good chance you understand what motivates them.
You understand their psychology and their nature a little bit better than the person who just can't relate.
You're going to hear a lot of talk over the next few weeks of, maybe this is Klobuchar's moment.
Maybe she's going to take off.
Yeah, maybe she will.
I wouldn't bet on it.
Then you get to Joe Biden.
He's the last one.
He's still the big dog.
At this point, he's probably the nominee.
Joe Biden is past his sell-by date.
There's actually one moment I want to give a little bit of credit to Joe Biden because there's this hilarious exchange that shows the difference between the kind of democratic leftist insurgency And old Joe, who's been around for 50 years, and it comes when he's asked a question about Afghanistan.
And the moderator asks the question, and she decides to pronounce it Afghanistan.
And Biden is so old, both in his kind of worldview and just in his body, that he doesn't even know what she's talking about.
What country are you talking about?
Afghanistan?
Here it is.
Vice President Biden, let's turn now to Afghanistan.
Confidential documents published last week by the Washington Post revealed that for years, senior U.S. officials misled the public about the war in Afghanistan.
As Vice President, what did you know?
Afghanistan, you said?
Yes, sir, Afghanistan.
Yes, yes, sir.
I actually want to compliment Biden because he is translating for the American people from liberal into American.
The left always does this.
The left always pronounces foreign words as if they themselves don't speak English.
And the Afghanistan is the new one, but they've done it for a long time.
You heard Barack Obama do it with Pakistan.
So he'd be talking like a completely normal person.
Obviously, Barack Obama is a very eloquent speaker.
And then he'd get to the word Pakistan and he would say...
And you know, we've got a lot of our friends in Pakistan.
You say, why are you pronouncing it like that?
Or the left always does it with Muslim.
Instead of saying Muslim, which is how you pronounce that word in English, they'll say Muslim.
We're like, well, you know, and because of the Muslims in Pakistan.
It's like, why is your accent shifting?
Now they're doing it with Afghanistan.
And she makes a point of pronouncing it that way, like, multiple times.
Then Joe Biden's there and he can barely hear anything.
What?
Sorry, hold on.
What's that?
That's the new liberal way to pronounce Afghanistan?
Yes, Mr.
Vice President, Afghanistan.
I don't do this when I speak.
If I go to an Italian restaurant, look, I am Italian, I speak Italian, I've spent a lot of time in Italy.
If I go to an Italian restaurant in America, you go down in New York somewhere, I don't sit down and say, oh, hey, waiter, yeah, I'll get a glass of red wine and some of those breadsticks, that'd be great, and then I'll have a bowl of spaghetti alla carbonara, per favore.
Yeah, you got it.
The red wine and the garlicky breadsticks, those are really good.
And yeah, then I'll have...
No, you don't do that.
You say, I'll have the spaghetti carbonara.
Thanks.
Because you're in America and you're speaking English, and that's what you do.
But the left, they don't do it at all these sort of Mexican restaurants, and especially when they're talking about the Middle East.
So I like that Biden was just having none of it.
He's just so tired, and he's just so sick of this campaign, and it's like the most joyless slog that I've seen to the presidency since Hillary Clinton, and that didn't work out well for her.
But the reason I bring up the Afghanistan moment is not just to highlight this kind of funny pronunciation thing.
It's because Joe Biden at this debate made a pretty major strategic shift.
He's now going after Obama.
He's now distancing himself from Obama.
He's doing it very subtly, but he's doing it nonetheless.
Joe Biden, until this moment, has had one major campaign message, and that message is, I was friends with Barack Obama.
That's the message.
My good friend Barack Obama.
I served with Barack Obama.
I did what Obama wanted me to do.
The closer I can appear to be to Barack Obama, the better chance I have of getting the nomination.
Now he's not doing that.
He was asked about Afghanistan.
Surging troops in Afghanistan was Barack Obama's signature foreign policy contribution for the 2008 campaign.
And what Joe Biden answers on Afghanistan is, I opposed it.
It was a dumb idea.
I don't think we should have done it.
Here's Joe.
Vice President, what did you know about the state of the war?
And do you believe that you were honest with the American people about it?
The reason I can speak to this, it's well known, if any of you followed it, my view on Afghanistan.
I was sent by the president before we got sworn in to Afghanistan to come back with a report.
I said there was no comprehensive policy available, and then I got in a big fight for a long time with the Pentagon because I strongly opposed the nation-building notion we set about.
Rebuilding that country as a whole nation is beyond our capacity.
Look, it's an ambitious move.
I mean, he's basically saying...
Look, Barack, you keep attacking me implicitly, and so I'm going to stop pretending to be good friends with you.
I mean, it's been one indignity after another from Obama to Biden.
Obama would not endorse him right out the bat.
That was pretty rough for Joe Biden.
Then Barack Obama just came out and he said, old men cause all the problems in the world and they shouldn't run for office anymore and only women should be in office.
I mean, that's a pretty marked attack at Joe Biden.
And now Joe Biden says, I'm not going to take it anymore.
I'm going to distance myself.
So will that pay off?
The trouble with this strategy, while it might give Biden a little bit more dignity, is that Joe Biden has nothing other than his relationship with Barack Obama.
He's been a doofus his entire political career.
And I mean that not just insultingly to throw a mean term around.
I mean it very technically.
He's just been kind of nothing.
He's a glad-handing politician who stands for nothing.
The one legislative accomplishment he's got, the crime bill in 1994, which was a good law, he has to distance himself from in this primary.
so what's he got Why would you elect him?
And he dropped out in 1988 because he was a liar, because he was a plagiarist.
He lost in 2008 because he didn't stand for anything.
Why is he going to be better now that he's 77 years old?
It's not going to work.
I mean, just to drive this point home, at one point in the debate, Joe Biden thought that the way that I can really jump out here is by doing my best impression of a stuttering child.
of somewhere between 20 and 100 people that we call at least every week or every month to sell them, I'm here.
I give them my private phone number.
A little kid who says, I can't talk.
What do I do?
I have scores of these young women and men.
If you have trouble talking, if you have trouble getting coherent thoughts out of your head through words, Joe Biden probably not the best guy to ask for advice, but it just shows you.
People are attacking Biden because they say that he's mocking a child.
I don't think he's mocking a child.
I don't think this experience actually ever even happened.
I don't think a stuttering child came up to him and spoke that way, and he had this really heartfelt moment with him.
I just think Joe Biden has no regard for the truth.
The only tool he has at his disposal is this saccharine, sentimental, trying to paint these rosy, sympathetic pictures.
And that falls flat, and it falls awkward, and he doesn't stand for much.
So that's the state of the current Democratic presidential candidates heading into 2020.
It's been a rough decade for them, and it looks like the next one might be too.
On our front, before we go, I want to make a couple points about Christmas.
First of all, Christianity Today, which is a major evangelical magazine that was founded by Billy Graham, has come out and supported Trump's removal from office.
The headline of the editorial says, Trump should be removed from office.
It's time to say what we said 20 years ago when a president's character was revealed for what it was.
The piece goes on.
To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr.
Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this.
Remember who you are and whom you serve.
Consider how your justification of Mr.
Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior.
Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and with the same straight face say that the bent and broken character of our nation's leader doesn't really matter in the end?
Yes, we can say that.
We can say that it is more important to reduce abortion and to set up a judicial culture that will likely curb abortion than it is to worry about Trump sleeping with Stormy Daniels 15 years ago.
15 years ago.
Get your priorities in order.
What a stupid, stupid editorial.
The editor-in-chief, Mark Galley of Christianity Today, he's stepping down.
He'd already announced his retirement, but it is kind of ironic that the only one being removed from office as a result of this is the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today.
Franklin Graham, whose father, Billy, started the magazine, he absolutely eviscerated them.
Franklin Graham said, Christianity Today released an editorial stating that President Trump should be removed from office, and they invoked my father's name, I suppose, to try to bring legitimacy to their statements.
So I feel it's important for me to respond, yes, my father, Billy Graham, founded Christianity Today, but no, he would not agree with their opinion piece.
He believed that Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.
And that's kind of the point here.
It shows you a big divide.
You know, the people who run this magazine, the editorial board, who go to nice cocktail parties, they think we have to remove Trump from office because why?
Because he sends mean tweets or something.
Obviously, he didn't commit an impeachable offense.
The Democrats don't even really pretend that he did.
That's why they dropped the bribery charge.
The readership of Christianity today, Furious, the son, Franklin Graham, of the founder of Christianity today, Furious, Because they have their priorities in order.
And we should, too, as we look back on the decade.
It's been a good decade for conservatives.
We were on the brink in 2009.
Major, major healthcare plan.
Barack Obama, transformative, radical president.
We were on the brink.
And starting in 2010, we came back.
The Tea Party was elected.
They immediately thwarted Barack Obama's biggest initiatives.
We thwarted Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The courts dealt us some blows, but now we are reshaping the courts.
And speaking of that, speaking of winning, I want to point out in the spirit of the season, we're even winning the war on Christmas.
We are winning the war.
Christmas is back.
People aren't renaming Christmas trees holiday trees anymore.
More people are saying Merry Christmas.
We're not pretending that Kwanzaa is a thing anymore.
Kwanzaa is just a made-up holiday from a Cal State Los Angeles professor that has no historical or religious significance.
It's just socialism with a little race hustling mixed in.
And it was invented by a guy who repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted women.
It's just nothing.
Nobody celebrates it.
It's Christmas.
It's Christmas season.
We're even winning that.
Before we go, I want to clear up a little myth about Christmas.
Just a little nugget of Christmas knowledge you can spread around your family's festivities.
There is a myth that has gone around for a long time now that Christmas isn't really Christmas.
That Christmas being celebrated on December 25th is really just a sort of pagan invention and it was a way for the early Christians to try to win over the hearts and minds of the pagans that were in ancient Rome and outside of ancient Rome.
And there's just no evidence for that whatsoever.
So there are three pagan holidays that are also around this time.
Saturnalia, the festival of Saturn, Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, and Mithras.
And they're saying basically that the early Christians just chose randomly December 25th, not because Jesus was born that day or because they earnestly believed he was born that day, but to appeal to the pagans.
Saturnalia is the only one of those that was celebrated a full two centuries or more before Christmas.
So that's around the same time.
That is a bit of a coincidence.
There are no contemporary sources linking the two holidays.
You would think if the early Christians who wrote a lot and they wrote a lot to each other were really conscious about trying to pick this date to appeal to the pagans, you think one of them would have written it down somewhere, don't you?
One of them would have been mentioned in the many historical records.
We don't have any record of that.
In terms of Sol Invictus and Mithras, it's even less tenable.
Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, was not even celebrated annually, and it came about after Christmas.
So you had Christmas celebrations on or around December 25th before you had widespread Sol Invictus celebrations.
If anything, it was a pagan response to Christmas.
The likeliest reason for the celebration of Christmas on December 25th actually just comes from Christianity itself and from an ancient view of divinity.
So the best theory we have, we don't know for certain, there are a few other theories, but the most likely one we have, which...
Serious academics believe is the strongest scholarly explanation for it, is that at that time, at the time of the early Christians, it was believed that divine life would have to begin and end on the same day, that it was right, that it was seemly for the life to begin and end in a perfect year.
So Christ is 33 years old when he dies.
That's what it's got to be.
So since the second century, since the time of Tertullian, March 25th was believed to be the date of the crucifixion, the crucifixion and the death of Christ.
That would mean that it would also have to be the date of the annunciation or the conception of Christ when the angel comes down and tells Mary, you will be taken with the Holy Spirit and conceive a child.
Now, if you're conceived on March 25th, nine months later, you get the birth of December 25th.
That is a belief that we have had for over 1800 years.
So when people tell you that Christmas being celebrated on December 25th was just some invention of the Middle Ages or something like that, or they'll say at the same time, even though it's contradictory, that it was just a way to appeal to pagans or something.
That really isn't the case.
Was Christ born on December 25th?
Some of the early church fathers suggested other dates.
There was some debate about this.
But for virtually the entire history of Christianity, the church has decided that it was on or around December 25th.
That's good enough for me.
And without any other evidence to the contrary, that seems about right to me, that that was really the date that Christ was born.
Or might as well be the date that Christ was born, that it really happened.
And that's such an important aspect of this season, is that it really happened.
It tells us something real.
And as we head into 2020, we're going to be looking at real things, not the kind of imaginary losses, the imaginary hopelessness of the conservative cause, the imaginary fake news that is constantly being reported.
We're looking at real things, and I think the reality bodes very well for us.
Merry Christmas!
I'll see you in the new year.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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