The Left enters Day 5 of mourning dead Iranian terrorist Qassem Suleimani, the press ignores the most prolific rapist in British history, some big little endorsements in the 2020 race, and a proposed split in the Methodist church over the issue of same-sex marriage.
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As the left enters day five of mourning dead Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani, the outcry takes an explicitly traitorous turn.
We examine an important political reality.
You are known by the friends you keep.
Then, the most prolific rapist in British legal history is sentenced to life in prison.
But even amid the MeToo movement, virtually no media outlets are reporting on it.
We analyze a story that doesn't fit the leftist narrative.
Finally, some big little endorsements in the 2020 Democratic primary and a proposed split in the Methodist Church over same-sex marriage.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Big news in the Democratic primary.
We will get to who won the coveted Judge Judy endorsement.
But before we can get to that, we have got to cover what all of the other Democrats in America are up to, and that is mourning the death of the world's most notorious terrorist, Ghazem Soleimani.
I don't want to be accused of hyperbole here.
So I've plucked just a handful of random examples of major leftists in this country actually mourning this guy, actually taking the side of Iran over the United States, actually posting glowing tributes and elegies and reviews to this dead terrorist, Soleimani.
Here's just a little quick montage somebody on Twitter put together Of the mainstream media shedding those leftist tears.
He was a war hero, the commander of Iran's feared Quds Force.
Qasem Soleimani was no ordinary general.
The US officially classified him as a terrorist, but in Iran, he was a national hero.
He's regarded as personally incredibly brave.
The troops love him.
I was trying to think of somebody and I was thinking of de Gaulle.
A revered figure in Iran and some other places in the Middle East.
Smart, charismatic, ruthless, strategic and bold.
His power made Iranians proud.
But even many of Soleimani's enemies admitted he was a military genius.
Qasem Soleimani was an evil genius.
Soleimani was in charge of spreading Iranian influence around the world.
And he was extremely good at it.
He is the, think of the French Foreign Legion, you know, if you will.
By killing Qasem Soleimani, the US has stripped Iran of an inspirational military leader.
The crowds are massive and emotional.
There are many tears here.
Thousands of mourners on the streets in Iran.
Symbolic caskets aloft, weeping and chanting, I am Soleimani.
The supreme leader of Iran weeping and praying over a coffin draped in the Iraqi flag.
It's difficult to convey how revered he is.
It's difficult to convey how revered he is among the mainstream media.
Qasem Soleimani, the U.S. officially called him a terrorist, but terrorists really liked him, as though that's sort of some contradiction.
They compare him to Charles de Gaulle.
They compare him to the French Foreign Legion.
I mean, I don't know where they get all of these comparisons from.
Bold, ruthless, courageous, so handsome.
You just melt in his eyes.
Oh, oh, Kasem, Kasem.
I mean, really, really pathetic stuff.
Add on to that the Washington Post headline, highly revered military leader.
You know, the Washington Post, which called al-Baghdadi an austere religious scholar.
In the future, by the way, I would like to be referred to only by my mainstream media title of highly revered austere religious podcaster.
So please, in the mailbag, wherever you address me, please, I want the mainstream media treatment.
I want to be treated as good as the mainstream media treats terrorists.
That is just the press.
And Nikki Haley, former UN ambassador and governor of South Carolina, went on Fox News, on another cable news outlet, and called them out for it.
You don't see anyone standing up for Iran.
You're not hearing any of the Gulf members.
You're not hearing China.
You're not hearing Russia.
The only ones that are mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and our Democrat presidential candidates.
No one else in the world because they knew that this man had evil veins.
They knew what he was capable of and they saw the destruction and the lives lost based from his hands.
Totally.
She got it exactly right.
The only thing Nikki left out is the mainstream media.
But she referred to the Democratic leadership, and that includes the mainstream media.
That pretty much is the mainstream media, so I guess she included that too.
But it isn't just them.
It isn't even just the elected Democrats.
It isn't just the mainstream media.
We will get to major left-wing figures in this country who are now explicitly taking the side of Iran and joking about and threatening to kill the President of the United States.
We'll get to that in a second, but first...
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The only people in the whole wide world who are mourning the death of Soleimani are terrorists, the supporters of terrorists, and the Democratic leadership in the mainstream media, and even elected Democrats, and even cultural figures who are Democrats.
Michael Moore, one of the most prominent left-wing voices in the United States, privately messaged the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, And begged him, begged him not to attack us and apologized for America and apologized for Trump and said he would deal with Trump.
The left has been so whipped up into a hysterical frenzy over this that they are now sliding into the DMs of mullahs to apologize for the president and beg that Iran, some little nothing country, a country that should not be recognized as a nation state,
This is what Michael Morse tweeted out publicly.
Quote, Now, in Michael Moore's defense, at least when he's begging the Ayatollah of Iran to forgive us our trespasses, he's saying that the way that we'll deal with it is through the election, right?
Allow millions of Americans to deal with this peacefully.
That isn't what many other prominent leftists have been doing.
But This is a moral violation, at the very least.
This may be a legal violation because you've got a private American citizen trying to negotiate with the head of a foreign state.
The Logan Act often comes up, you know, these sort of arcane laws come up that every few years when some private citizen deals with a head of state.
I don't think Michael Moore is going to be prosecuted for this, but it's a serious violation that he's doing.
I mean, to...
Basically betray your own country and try to negotiate with a major state funder of terrorism against the United States, against the President of the United States.
Really bad stuff.
And Michael Moore isn't even the worst one.
Far from it.
AOC. AOC, the future of the Democratic Party, according to the head of the DNC, Tom Perez.
AOC... Has been promoting pro-Iran Russian propaganda on Twitter regarding Soleimani.
It's so funny.
I mean, the left always projects.
They always accuse you of doing what they themselves are doing.
So they've been accusing Trump of promoting Russian propaganda now for three years.
The left, prominent leftists, are actually the ones promoting Russian propaganda with regard to Iran.
So AOC just liked on Twitter, which exposes this tweet to her millions of followers, a tweet by Rania Kolek, who is a journalist for In The Now, this is a Russian propaganda outlet, who tweeted out, quote, A friend flying into the U.S. says he hasn't seen so much security since 9-11.
The U.S. is terrified of how Iran will retaliate.
Iran won't attack civilians.
That's what al-Qaeda does.
But it shows this assassination did the opposite of making Americans safer, and our leaders know it.
So this is just a flat-out lie.
Iran regularly murders civilians, its own civilians, and the civilians of other countries.
And actually, Qasem Soleimani was personally responsible for much of it.
A complete lie.
Imagine if during World War II you had Democratic congressmen posting Nazi propaganda on Twitter or fascist propaganda on Twitter or Japanese propaganda on Twitter.
Good thing there wasn't Twitter back in 1945, but really there wasn't the Democratic Party as we know it today.
I mean, this radical leftist Democratic Party that would take the side of Iran over the President of the United States.
That is a new thing.
We haven't seen that really before.
It's been growing over the past several decades.
That's AOC, and that is a betrayal of her country.
Not just AOC. AOC's preferred presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, goes on television, goes on CNN, the Clinton News Network, the Communist News Network, and compares the United States action here in killing the world's top terrorist to Vladimir Putin assassinating journalists.
Here's Bernie.
This guy is, you know, was as bad as he was an official of the Iranian government.
And you unleash.
Then, if China does that, you know, if Russia does that, you know, Russia has been implicated under Putin with assassinating dissidents.
So once you're in the business of assassination, you unleash some very, very terrible forces.
What kind of perverted logic is that?
By this logic, if any country kills anybody, They're just as bad as every other country.
Well, if a country goes in and kills men, women and children and then a country kills the people who kill men, women and children, that is not the same action.
I'll put it more clearly.
If a country is committing terrorism, if a country is targeting civilians, if a country is violating international law, and then a country goes in and stops them from doing that, those are not the same act.
Actually, they're opposite acts.
And Qasem Soleimani was a major terrorist leader.
And what makes Soleimani so dangerous, well, it used to before we just all over the Blagdad airport, what did make Soleimani so dangerous is that he wasn't just a terrorist.
He also had the backing of sort of a nation state.
And that's what Iran has done since the revolution, is they play both sides of the international system.
They fund terrorism all around the world.
They violate all the international norms.
And they try to pretend that they're a regular nation state with all the privileges thereof.
And they're trying to have it both ways.
And we, in this case, stop them from doing that.
When you have a guy who is targeting civilians, who is funding terrorism around the world, who is violating international norms, and then you go in and take him out, that does not make you the same as that person.
It makes you the solution to the problem that that person was.
But this is what the left always wants to do.
The left wants to make America seem wicked, seem evil, seem just as bad as the terrorists.
And when we pointed this out about the left over the past, I don't know, 10, 15 years, the left has shrieked and yelled and said that isn't true.
Well, now we're seeing it explicitly, okay?
Not just Bernie Sanders, not just AOC, not just these elected officials.
George Lopez saw an Instagram post that said that the Ayatollah of Iran was offering $80 million for Donald Trump's head on a platter.
And do you know what George Lopez said?
He said he'd do it for half.
George Lopez, with his verified Instagram account, went on that post and said, we'll do it for half.
Look, I get it.
George Lopez is a comedian.
If you made that joke as an offhanded, blue, irreverent, dirty, rotten, dark joke in a bar with your friends, I get how that's sort of funny.
If you're making that joke publicly, particularly as the U.S. is potentially headed for a war, That is a bridge too far.
I mean, it's funny to a certain audience that hates the President of the United States so much that they're willing to side with Iran, that they're willing to make common cause with terrorists over the President.
But it's not funny to the rest of us.
It's a bridge too far.
I mean, it is actual betrayal of your country.
And then the best of them all, this is my favorite cultural figure, taking the side of Iran over Trump, is a rapper named T.I., Who is siding with the Ayatollah Khamenei and calls for death to America.
I didn't know who T.I. was, so I googled him.
We'll get to that in a second.
Here's what T.I. tweeted out.
Yup, dot dot dot, um, hmm, exactly what he said.
And by he, he's referring to Ayatollah Khamenei, who's calling for death to America.
Ain't no Iranian never called me no N-word, infested our communities wit dope, and then locked us up for it, allowed the police to pull us over and gun us down with no accountability, or enslaved us and tried to act like, duh, S-H-I-T ain't happened.
So, as I pray for our soldiers, I'm also going to be praying for theirs.
This ain't our war, champ.
Hashtag don't start S-H-I-T. Won't be S-H-I-T. Hashtag MAGA hats ought to go first.
He misspelled oughta.
He misspelled a lot of things.
MAGA hats ought to go first.
What does that mean, ought to go first?
Does it mean ought to go be sent into war or ought to go be wiped out in war first?
He then...
Tweets out afterward or Instagrams out afterward.
Riddle me this.
How come America can go to other countries and wipe out evil people but can't get rid of the KKK right here?
Wow.
Really profound stuff, T.I. First of all, the United States did get rid of the KKK. We decimated that organization decades ago.
That democratic organization, I'll point out.
We did.
Now, the reason that we can't ban them from speaking, the reason that the ACLU came to their defense is because we have freedom of speech, the same freedom of speech that allows T.I. to spout his traitorous, idiotic propaganda.
Look, if I were king, T.I. wouldn't be saying this kind of stuff, but I am not king.
This is what Antonin Scalia said about the First Amendment.
He said, if I were king...
I would throw in jail every scruffy, bearded, sandal-wearing creep who burns the American flag, but I am not the king.
So, that's the reason we have free speech in this country.
But he is actively taking the side of Iran over the United States.
He's saying, yup, exactly what he said about the Shah, if only it were the Shah, about the Ayatollah Khamenei.
I didn't know who T.I. was, so I looked him up on Wikipedia.
This is from Wikipedia, just for those of you who don't know who T.I. is either.
Clifford Joseph Harris Jr., known professionally as T.I. and Tip, is an American rapper, actor, songwriter, producer, entrepreneur, record executive, and author.
He must be busy.
In 2001, Harris formed the southern hip-hop group P $C, alongside his longtime friends and fellow Atlanta rappers Big Country King, Mac Boney, and C-Rod.
Harris is also known as one of the artists who popularized the hip-hop subgenre trap music, along with Jeezy and Gucci Mane.
I hope that clears it up.
I'm sure it's much clearer for you now.
Then I read further down his Wikipedia, and it turns out that T.I. is a complete criminal degenerate.
T.I. was arrested several times by the age of 14 for dealing drugs.
He was sent to prison on various drug, assault, and weapons charges.
In 2007, he was arrested for possession of three unregistered machine guns and two silencers, and possession of firearms by a convicted felon.
Arrested lots more over the years than arrested last year for disorderly conduct and simple assault.
And this is the guy now siding with the Ayatollah of Iran.
What's very interesting about the first thing that he posted in his agreement with Khamenei is he blames everybody else for things that he did, right?
So he's blaming other people.
I don't know who them, white people, Americans.
I don't know.
He's blaming others as he's got this sort of racially loaded post for infesting our communities with dope.
Nobody infested your communities with dope, whatever your communities are.
You dealt drugs for your entire life, basically, and you got arrested for it, and you take no accountability for it.
You take no responsibility.
Everybody else, it's their problem.
Somebody else made you have all those illegal machine guns.
It wasn't you.
You're a poor, oppressed victim, T.I. Somebody, I don't know, you were just holding those machine guns for a friend, and those silencers, and you were just dealing those drugs for a friend.
It's a huge misunderstanding, a huge mistake.
Aren't you a victim?
You and the Ayatollah of Iran, you're both just such victims.
Give me a break.
He says that the people who are doing this have no accountability.
You have no accountability.
You take no accountability at all.
This guy, T.I., is such a degenerate.
He posted a video last year of a music video that he was going to release in which he very graphically has sex with Melania Trump in the first office.
This was so edgy that they actually wouldn't let him release it.
It never came out.
That is TI. That is the kind of person who is siding with the Ayatollah of Iran over Trump.
All of which brings us to a very important political reality.
You are known by the friends you keep.
You are known by the friends you keep.
If you find...
Everybody, everybody listening, if you find that your ideological allies are all vicious, stupid, selfish, prideful, unaccountable, terrible people, Maybe you should reconsider your political philosophy.
Maybe there's something wrong with what you're thinking.
If you find that you are siding with terrorists and mullahs and criminals and traitors over the president of the United States, regardless of who that president is, Obama, Trump, Democrat, Republican, left, right, if you find that you are siding with the worst people on earth over the president of the United States, Maybe you should rethink your political philosophy.
Maybe something has gone wrong in your stream of logic.
You know, it's a logical fallacy to appeal merely to authority.
So to say, my argument is correct because this very smart person believed it.
Or my argument is correct simply because this wise, revered, austere religious person believed it over history.
You can't merely argue from authority.
But authority does carry weight.
Authority always carries weight.
And the question is, what authority are we appealing to?
When you just look at the clusters of people who are siding with Soleimani here, who are attacking Trump for killing the world's most notorious terrorist, who is it?
It's The mullahs of Iran, the worst people on earth, probably the most dangerous, vicious, vile political figures on the planet, certainly in the top three.
The most traitorous American politicians, who vacation in the Soviet Union, who honeymoon in the I mean,
if you're siding with these people, Wake up.
Look around you.
Think, hmm, maybe I got this wrong.
And take a step back.
C.S. Lewis has this line about progress.
He says...
The whole idea of progress, progressivism, is you've got to know where you're going.
It implies that you've got a direction.
If you find that you're going down the wrong road, then the first guy to turn around and walk in the other direction is the true progressive.
Another important lesson here from all of this mourning and weeping and gnashing of teeth over Qasem Soleimani, may he rest in hell, is don't be defined simply by what you're against.
Okay, if you are just fanatically against Trump, if that is the definition of your political philosophy, You're going to wind up defending terrorists because anybody that Trump is against, you're going to be for.
Like the mainstream media and TI and AOC and Bernie and George Lopez and all these people, right?
I'm not saying they're all terrible people.
I actually don't think most of them are terrible people.
I think they're extraordinarily misguided and they've allowed this fanatical anti-Trump political ideology to make them side with terrorists and mullahs.
Don't do that.
You've got to be for something.
Look, I'm against Hillary Clinton.
I'm against Barack Obama.
I'm against leftism.
But I'm also for...
Something else, which is a conservative worldview, the American tradition, the American founding.
I'm for a virtuous politics.
I'm for the Christian understanding of the world that has formed the basis of our politics.
I'm for all of those things.
You've got to be for something if you want to have a political vision that doesn't lead you to defend the indefensible.
A lot of political division in this country, I think, around the world even, comes from the fact that even when the left pretends to be for something, they're actually just against something.
They're using what they pretend to be for as a mask to just hide that they're merely opposed to something else.
I know that's a little confusing, so I'll give you an example.
The Me Too movement.
The Me Too movement is the perfect example of this.
The UK, just yesterday, just sentenced the most prolific rapist in British history to life in prison.
This rapist was convicted of raping 48 victims, but he actually raped many more.
195 victims were filmed being raped in his apartment.
Those are just the ones who got filmed.
You probably haven't heard about this story.
The mainstream media is not really reporting on it.
Why?
Because it doesn't fit the MeToo narrative of rich, powerful American white men raping women.
In this case, it was an Indonesian man who raped men.
It was a gay guy.
So it's just not in the news.
I doubt you've seen it anywhere or heard it anywhere other than on this show.
This is the Me Too story to end all Me Too stories.
The most prolific rapist in British history.
Gone.
Because so often the political activists who are running the Me Too movement are not really for defending victims of sexual assault.
They're not really for changing a culture of sexual violence or a rape culture is the popular term that's being used on the left.
They're not really for that.
They simply use it as a political cudgel to take down people that they don't like.
Some of whom are complete derelicts.
These guys in Hollywood are absolute criminals.
They're awful.
In some cases, if they're not criminals, they're just really scummy, skeezy people.
But it's really about...
Taking somebody down rather than pushing forward a positive message.
I'll give you another example of this.
The same story happened last month.
There was an anti-Semitic attack in New Jersey.
There were a number of anti-Semitic attacks, actually, all around the tri-state area.
What happened after that is Rashida Tlaib, Rashida Tlaib, the congresswoman, the A member of the squad comes out and says that...
This is an example of how white supremacy kills.
And then the news came out that it wasn't a white supremacist who committed the attack.
Actually, it was a black supremacist, a member of the Hebrew Israelites.
What did Rashida Tlaib do?
Did she change her tweet?
Did she post, actually, black supremacy can kill too.
Actually, racial hatred knows no color.
Actually, everybody can be guilty of this because man's heart is evil from the beginning.
No, she didn't do any of that.
She just deleted the tweet.
Because the minute that this attack didn't correspond with her leftist narrative, she had to get rid of it.
She had to bury it.
She had to forget about it.
She had to pretend it wasn't real.
A whole spate of anti-Semitic attacks going on in New York currently, but because it doesn't fit the narrative, because in many cases the perpetrators are black rather than white, then we forget about it.
It's gone.
It's out of the mainstream media.
And then these leftists have the audacity To malign all of us as not taking racial attacks seriously, as not taking sexual attacks seriously.
In reality, we are taking these sorts of things much more seriously than the left.
Much more seriously.
We take it seriously regardless of the perpetrator's race or sex or the victim's race or sex.
The left only cynically uses these incidents when it suits their narrative.
They have no credibility whatsoever, no moral authority whatsoever on these issues.
To the question of authority, to the question of accountability.
T.I. brought up accountability.
Of all people, a Hollywood leftist, Joaquin Phoenix, actually raised this point at the Golden Globes.
And in an otherwise kind of meandering, strange left-wing message, he actually had an important thing to say to Hollywood and to the left more broadly.
We'll get to that in a second.
Then we'll get to the big little endorsements in 2020.
We'll get to who won the coveted Judge Judy endorsement.
And then we will get to why the Methodist Church is splitting up.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Joaquin Phoenix had an important message at the Golden Globes.
It kind of got buried because Ricky Gervais just absolutely killed it the other night, and Michelle Williams gave a very stupid speech about abortion, so this moment was not really promoted all over the internet, but it's an important one on the question of accountability, on the question of how our political philosophies relate to ourselves and relate to politics.
Joaquin Phoenix said that if you want to make change in the world, you want a virtuous world, you want a good politics, you've got to start with yourself.
It's great to vote, but sometimes we have to take that responsibility on ourselves and make changes and sacrifices in our own lives, and I hope that we can do that.
We don't have to take private jets to Palm Springs for the war sometimes, or back, please.
And I'll try to do better, and I hope you will too.
Thank you so much for putting up with me.
So on this issue, he's just talking about global warming, right?
He's saying, we're having this Golden Globes Awards dinner.
You're all eating vegan to make a big message.
You're all going to go vote for Liz Warren or somebody.
But in your own personal lives, you don't really live up to what you proclaim on television and when you go to the voting booth, because you all take private jets, which are horrible for the environment.
So really what you've got to do is just start looking at the man in the mirror and shape up your own life and then you'll have a virtuous society.
The minute he suggests this, the minute he says, hey leftists who are all prattling on about climate change, maybe don't fly as many private jets, they start playing them off.
You can hear the music start to rise up in the clip.
It's an important note.
If you want a virtuous society, you have to practice virtue.
All of these guys, George Lopez, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Michael Moore, all the ones who are siding now with the Ayatollah over President Trump because of how awful and immoral Trump is.
Take a look at yourself.
Take a look at who you're defending.
Take a look at who your friends are.
Take a look at Who you're allying with.
Take a look at how you're behaving.
I mean, George Lopez said, we'll kill the president of the United States for only 40 million.
We hate him so much.
Why?
Why are you going to kill the president?
Because he says mean things on the internet?
Hey buddy, take a look in the mirror.
Why are you going to kill the president?
Because he's disrespectful of his country and his countrymen?
You just threatened to kill the president.
Take a look in the mirror, okay?
If you want a virtuous society, it is not enough.
To vote a certain way or to have the right bumper sticker on your car, you have to practice the virtue.
I mean, how absurd is it for you to demand that other people practice virtue, including the President of the United States, when you're not even trying, when you're not even making an effort?
You're not even trying and failing to live up to virtue.
You're just...
Taking vicious pot shots from your own corner and allying with the worst people on earth while you harangue people like Donald Trump for not living up to this Madisonian, George Washingtonian ideal of the American leadership.
Take a look in the mirror.
Now, speaking of the political scene and the future leaders of America, we've got some major little endorsements in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
Before we get to the coveted Judge Judy endorsement, there is the question of Julian Castro, my favorite Democratic candidate, the bold leader who endorsed abortion rights for men in a Democratic debate.
He dropped out, obviously, because nobody supported him in the whole country.
He is now choosing to endorse, drumroll please, Elizabeth Warren.
He says that Elizabeth Warren is the most qualified, best equipped candidate to win the nomination.
That is not true, but he's endorsing her anyway.
This is...
Maybe a smart move for Castro.
It's one of the only two moves he could have made.
He can't endorse Biden because he humiliated Biden on stage and said that he was an old man who had dementia and was forgetting things that he said two minutes before.
It was a really, really ugly attack.
He's not going to go for Buttigieg because Buttigieg is now playing the moderate role in the race and Castro decided to play the far leftist role in the race, endorsing abortion for men.
So that leaves Warren and Sanders.
Now, Sanders is the real deal radical, right?
Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
Sanders was friends with Karl Marx, I think.
I'm pretty sure.
I think it was Marx, Engels, and Sanders who were drafting the Communist Manifesto.
Poor Bernie was left out.
So he could go for Sanders, the real deal radical, or he could go for Warren, who is the more cynical radical.
Warren has positioned herself as an establishment figure at various times in her life, and she's positioned herself as a radical now.
She doesn't have much regard for the truth.
The same thing could be said of Julian Castro.
Julian Castro was a Clinton Democrat until the day before yesterday, when he thought it would behoove him to move further to the left.
He's a real calculating politician so he sees a similar figure in Elizabeth Warren.
Now, I think if he were really making a play for 2020, he probably would have gone for Sanders.
I think right now, Sanders has a better chance of getting this nomination.
Sanders is vastly outraising Elizabeth Warren.
He's vastly outraising everybody in the field.
And he's actually standing for something.
He is sort of outside the mainstream, which at this moment in politics is pretty helpful.
And Elizabeth Warren is tanking, right?
Her momentum is totally dropped.
It doesn't exist anymore.
And Sanders is gaining momentum.
So if he were really concerned about 2020, probably Castro would have endorsed Sanders.
But I think Castro is looking down the road.
I think the whole Democratic Party is not terribly hopeful that they're going to win in 2020.
They don't really have a top-tier candidate.
So I think he's looking at 2024, 2028.
He's saying, you know, Bernie Sanders is pretty up there in age, and Elizabeth Warren has a long career ahead of her.
This might be a good partnership to begin.
And especially right now that Liz Warren's stock is dropping, that he could buy pretty cheap, that she needs these sort of endorsements.
I think he thinks that his endorsement is going to go significantly further with Elizabeth Warren.
This is a signal of the weakness of the Warren campaign.
The fact that she's got to pick up these cheap little endorsements right now.
The fact that they would be so helpful to the people who are endorsing.
Another candidate to trot out an endorsement this week was Michael Bloomberg.
You might have forgotten that former New York City half-Republican, half-Democrat, billionaire extraordinaire Mike Bloomberg was running.
Bloomberg trotted out the coveted Judge Judy endorsement.
Here she is.
I'm Judge Judy Scheindler.
I like to say you can judge someone's character by what they've done.
Mike Bloomberg has done amazing things and will be a truly great president.
No one comes close to Mike Bloomberg's executive achievement, government experience, and impactful philanthropy.
His steady leadership will unite our country and bring us through these very challenging times.
I'm Mike Bloomberg and I approve this message.
Alright, you got it, Mike.
Congratulations.
This highlights the central problem with the Bloomberg campaign, which is that there's nobody to vote for him.
Nobody likes his point of view, which is as a sort of fiscal conservative, you might say, or low taxes, pro-free trade, generally pro-free market economics guy, and a big social liberal who wants to take away all of our guns and promote a radical social agenda.
Abortion, the whole nine yards.
Every elite person on the coasts who went to very fancy schools, who has a very fancy job, everybody in that social strata believes what Mike Bloomberg believes.
But they account for like 4% of the country.
I think the actual number according to polling is four to four and a half percent who would call themselves fiscal conservative social liberals like Mike Bloomberg.
And so there's just no audience for this.
I mean, Judge Judy, she's a celebrity New Yorker who's a kind of political moderate.
So she's a natural fit for Mike Bloomberg, but very few people fit that bill.
It's a evidence even further of an AstroTurf campaign.
Another good evidence of this, yesterday, Team Bloomberg, the Bloomberg campaign Twitter account, posted a photo of Bloomberg somewhere on the campaign trail at a barbecue joint.
And it says, find someone who looks at you the way Mike looks at ribs with the big googly eyes emoji.
And the trouble with the photo is that nobody is eating ribs.
They're actually eating brisket.
The only ribs in the photo are human ribs.
And if that's what the team was implying there with the tweet, that's pretty creepy.
Really what you need to do is find someone who knows what ribs are, unlike the Mike Bloomberg staffer who posted that tweet.
It's all just astroturf.
I don't think Mike Bloomberg eats ribs.
I don't think Mike Bloomberg rolls his shirt sleeves up.
I think Mike Bloomberg is a very fancy billionaire who has lived in New York for his entire life.
Who drinks very good wines and who talks to very elite people about very elite things.
Which is perfectly fine.
I think he should be him.
I think he's going to have a much better job convincing people that that's who he is rather than that he's some working class guy who doesn't even know what ribs are.
But it shows you a key aspect of Trump's appeal.
Which is that he is a billionaire who doesn't act like a billionaire.
He is a billionaire who doesn't talk fancy.
He talks like a construction worker.
And always has.
It's not like he's putting on a show to run for president.
He has always talked that way.
He's a billionaire who wants to eat KFC rather than all the fancy food that Mike Bloomberg eats.
He's a billionaire who actually probably knows what ribs are.
He's a billionaire who famously, when he orders steak, he orders it burnt with ketchup.
He doesn't order steak tartare with a very nice Chablis or an Albarino wine.
He doesn't do that.
He drinks Diet Coke.
He actually doesn't drink alcohol at all.
That is a real political advantage for Trump.
These guys are just jokers in the democratic field, and if the recent endorsements are any indication, it's not getting better for them.
Before we go, I've got to talk about the Methodist Church splitting up.
The United Methodist Church leaders are now proposing a split in their church.
To resolve a debate over LGBT clergy and same-sex weddings.
I mean, that's pretty radical.
They're talking about the church actually officiating same-sex wedding ceremonies.
This is a proposal from the 16-member group of bishops and church leaders, and they say the separation may be, quote,"...the best means to resolve our differences, allowing each part of the church to remain true to its theological understanding." While recognizing the dignity, equality, integrity, and respect of every person.
So they can't figure out this question of radical social progressivism, I guess you would call it, or leftism.
And so now they're going to split up.
I mention this story for a couple of reasons.
One, it's to show you that...
It's a fool's errand for the church to try to become more like the world.
Every Christian denomination has done this at various points, including, maybe especially, the Catholic Church.
They've tried to become more like the world.
They say, if only we more closely resemble the world, then we'll be able to attract people to our pews.
And what happened?
The exact opposite proved true.
When the mainstream Protestant churches in America tried to become more modern, more hip, more cool, more like the world, the pews emptied out.
When the Catholic church tried to become more modern, more hip, more cool, more like the world, after Vatican II, guess what happened?
The pews emptied out.
The only people who go to church anymore, the only people who are increasing their church attendance, are the traditionalists who are going to Latin masses ever since Pope Benedict permitted the Latin mass again.
The same thing is true in evangelical churches.
The ones that try to become more hip and more cool and more like the world, with a few exceptions, are the ones that empty out.
And the ones that try to preach a more orthodox message, those are the ones that fill up.
That's one aspect of this story.
The other one is to just show...
One of the arguments for the Catholic Church, because I get these questions all the time in the mailbag.
They say, why are you Catholic?
And I usually give theological answers to that or answers from symbolism or from literature or from the nature of language or philosophical.
This is just a very practical reason for the Catholic Church, which is after you had the Protestant Revolution, You've got tens of thousands of different Protestant denominations, each claiming to be the truth, each claiming to represent the truth of the Bible, to be a Bible church, or the truth of the apostolic tradition, or the truth of Christian history, or whatever.
They can't all be right.
There has to be some authority.
And this argument that actually does sort of come from the authority of the apostolic tradition refers to a passage in scripture where Christ looks at his apostles and the ones who haven't left him after he makes the hard saying about the Eucharist, after he says, you've got to eat my flesh and drink my blood or you have no life in you.
A lot of people go away.
And then...
His apostles stay.
And he says, you haven't left me.
And Peter says, where shall we go?
Where else could we go?
And that is the argument for Christianity from authority and specifically for the Catholic Church.
I mean, that is one that refers directly to that authority because if you crack that authority...
Then you get 30,000 different denominations that split up every few weeks, it would seem.
And that authority is important in politics, too.
It's not sufficient.
It can't be the only argument.
But when you look at your political point of view and you see that it's leading you to oppose the very...
Bonds of loyalty to your country themselves.
That they lead you to oppose your tradition.
They lead you to oppose your own countrymen and decide with vicious terrorists and the worst people on earth.
Maybe you've got to rethink your point of view.
That's true.
Politically, culturally, it's true all the way up the line, all the way up to religious questions.
There are practical effects of ideas in the real world.
They will lead you to real human interaction.
They will lead you to real political institutions.
To put it simply, ideas matter.
And if all of the matter around you, if all of the relationships around you seem to be a little off-kilter, if all of the actions that you're being impelled to do seem a little off-kilter, then maybe you've got to change the ideas.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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