The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is under fire from the race-focused Left for once again snubbing performers of color in the Oscar nominations. But in the Academy’s defense, there will at least be more black candidates in the running at the Oscars than there will be at tonight’s all-white Democratic presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa. We will examine the incoherence and hypocrisy of racial identity politics. Then, Bernie Sanders says a woman can’t win in 2020, according to a new report from CNN and the Warren camp. We will revel in the circular firing squad.
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is under fire from the race-focused left for, once again, snubbing performers of color in the Oscar nominations.
But in the Academy's defense, there will at least be more black candidates in the running at the Oscars than there will be at tonight's all-white Democratic presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa.
We will examine the incoherence and hypocrisy of racial identity politics.
Then, Bernie Sanders says a woman can't win in 2020.
According to a new report from CNN and the Warren campaign, we will revel in the circular firing squad.
All that and so much more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
We've got some breaking news.
Another one bites the dust.
Cory Booker has dropped out of the presidential race.
Now, Eric Swalwell, who is me, dropped out of the presidential race six months ago.
But Spartacus, who I am, dropped out yesterday.
Which means that by the rule of double negation, I think that I am still in it.
However, Cory Booker is no longer in it.
And so we bid him farewell in memoriam.
I knowingly violated the rules that were put forth, and I understand that the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate.
I hope that they will bring charges against us.
This is about the closest I'll probably ever have in my life to an I am Spartacus moment.
This toxic culture, this pernicious patriarchy in this country has to stop.
I hurt.
I had tears of rage.
And for you not to feel that hurt and that pain, that's unacceptable to me.
I hurt.
I have tears of rage.
I feel that pain that Cory Booker is at.
We knew when Julian Castro dropped out, it was only a matter of days, maybe weeks, probably days, until the next wokest candidate...
Cory Booker dropped out of the race.
But I feel that pain.
I feel those tears of rage.
Booker's numbers have been pretty low, pretty much non-existent for a while.
President Trump found this out yesterday, or he acknowledged this yesterday when he tweeted out something I have been hoping he would tweet for every single candidate who drops out, which is...
Every time, like when Kirsten Gillibrand dropped out, he said, oh no, Kirsten Gillibrand's gone.
She's the one I was really worried about.
And then Cory Booker dropped out.
He goes, Cory Booker, whose poll numbers have been zero for months, is dropped out.
But he was the one I was so scared of going up against.
I really want him to do that with every candidate who drops out.
But the writing's been on the wall for Booker for a long time.
Actually, here is...
Cory Booker explaining what this race has meant to him as he exits, what it means to get out of the way for a stronger candidate to win the nomination and take on the president in November.
Now, I have no idea if that's what that means in Spanish at all, but in my defense, neither does Cory Booker.
So he is gone, and the Democrats have now successfully kicked out all of the candidates who are not translucent, which is how we're going to get an all-white Democratic debate tonight in Des Moines.
It's going to be very interesting for them to peddle racial politics when all of them are as white as anybody I've ever met.
We will get to...
The Democrats so white.
We will get to the Oscars so white.
We will get to why the libs, generally speaking, are just so white.
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Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. The Dems are so white.
Remember a few years ago?
Well, actually, they've been doing it every year since then.
There was a hashtag going around the internet, hashtag OscarsSoWhite, because they snubbed some black candidates, as they did again this year.
Hashtag DemsSoWhite.
We know it.
You know, when you think of the 2016 Republican field, there were a lot of candidates of a lot of different races who lasted pretty long, right?
You had Ben Carson.
He's racial minorities, black.
You had Marco Rubio.
He's Hispanic.
You had Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz made it almost until the very end.
I mean, he was the last guy standing other than Donald Trump.
So, the Republicans, who don't talk and boast and brag about all their racial diversity and how much more virtuous they are than Democrats, they don't constantly malign Democrats as a bunch of racial bigots like the Democrats do to us.
They had a ton of racial diversity right until the very end.
Democrats kicked out all the candidates who aren't lily white before 2020 even began, right?
Before the first Democratic presidential debate of 2020.
All of their non-white candidates are gone.
This is a real problem for Democrats, right?
They make multiculturalism, they make racial identity politics the central point of their political pitch.
They call everybody else racist.
And then steadily from the very beginning of this race, they've kicked out every minority candidate.
And by the way, every time they do it, they lament The awful racism of kicking out these candidates.
Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris didn't lose because she's just a terrible retail politician.
No, they couldn't say that.
She lost because she's black.
And a woman.
And so they'll add gender politics in there too.
Well, guys, you're the ones voting, so it's your fault.
Maybe take a look at the man in the mirror.
If you really believe that that's the reason that she and Castro and Booker and these other candidates have dropped out.
This is not merely a case of Democrats failing to live up to their ideals.
Because you might say, well, Michael, at least the Democrats prioritize racial politics.
They might not live up to actually voting for the candidates who are racial minorities, but at least they think about it.
It's at the top of mind.
You know, there's a line that I like to quote from LaRoche Foucault, which is that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
At least Democrats have a standard on racial diversity.
Republicans don't even have a standard, you might say.
I don't think so.
I think that's a pretty bad analogy.
Right.
You saw this a little bit with the porn debate.
You remember at the end of 2019, all these conservatives were debating whether we should regulate porn or ban porn or have porn everywhere.
And the hypocrite argument is you've got all these conservatives who want to ban porn, but a lot of them look at porn all the time.
Right.
That's a case of hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue.
Because they're admitting a moral standard and they're failing to live up to it.
Right?
These conservatives will say, I hate porn.
I think it's terrible.
It's bad for your brain.
It's bad for your soul.
It objectifies women.
Right?
It's misogynistic.
And yet...
Many men in this country, the majority men in this country, have a compulsion or an addiction to look at these kind of materials.
So they really try not to, they try to resist, but the temptation overcomes them and sometimes they look at naked ladies on the internet.
That is not the case with Democrats in racial politics.
It's not like they're really trying to vote for Kamala Harris and they just can't pull the lever for some reason.
They really want to vote for Cory Booker, but when the pollster calls them on the phone, they say, ah, no, I prefer Pete Buttigieg.
There's no impediment to them supporting these candidates.
And how about the candidates themselves?
If these candidates, these liberals, really believe that white people have ruined everything and we need to choose candidates of other races now, and that should be the first thing we think about in politics, then drop out.
Buttigieg, Biden, Bernie, Warren, if you really believe that, if you actually believe this is a terribly racially bigoted country and white people have had seats in the Senate for too long and they've been running for president for too long, we've got to get the white people out and get other races in, okay, lead the way.
Do it.
Drop out.
Barack Obama said this a couple months ago.
He was making some pandering ridiculous remark where he said that men have ruined everything in politics and if the world were run by women everything would be so much better.
He doesn't believe that.
You know how I know he doesn't believe that?
Because he was elected president in 2008 by beating Hillary Clinton.
If he really believed that women are so much better than men and men have ruined society and women should take the lead in politics He wouldn't have run in 2008.
If he had run, because he didn't know Hillary was going to run, he would have dropped out and endorsed her.
But he didn't.
Instead, he dragged that campaign on, got into a pretty vicious campaign with Hillary Clinton, and absolutely pummeled her political career into obscurity.
That was it, right?
And then he became president for eight years.
They don't really believe this.
They don't really believe That we should give racial minority candidates and female candidates special treatment.
By the way, I don't think we should give them special treatment either.
I think that we should judge candidates on their accomplishments and on their character and on their platforms, what they're going to do and whether they can actually do what they say they're going to do.
And we should judge them on electability.
You got to pick a winner.
It doesn't matter if you've got the most wonderful candidate in the world.
If the guy can't get elected, or the girl can't get elected, then they're no good to you, right?
The winners go and make laws, and the losers go home, as Mitch McConnell once said.
Clearly, the Democrats feel the same way.
Of course they feel the same way.
That's what politics is.
But the Democrats won't admit it.
They are living in lies.
They are lying to themselves, they are lying about themselves, and they are lying about their opponents.
That's just the way it is.
We have to all sit here in the Democratic debate tonight.
I'm sure they're going to bring it up, and they're going to lament that there are no racial minorities on stage.
Nobody cares.
Nobody was supporting these candidates, right?
This is not an example of structural racism or structural sexism or something like that.
They just didn't get poll numbers.
They just didn't get any donations because nobody wants them because they're weak candidates.
And the trouble is that the candidates left on stage, all the white candidates are pretty weak as well.
We're going to see that whittle down as it goes.
It's not just in the presidential race.
It's also in Hollywood.
You've got the Democratic candidates so white.
You've got the Oscars so white.
Because despite lip service to the contrary, the Oscars are white and male as well.
There is only one black former nominated in a major category.
That is Cynthia Erivo as Harriet Tubman.
And actually, some people were upset about this.
They were upset that the nomination for the black actress was for this role of a sort of historical, legendary, larger-than-life black figure, an ex-slave who helps other slaves escape.
I don't really understand how people are upset about this.
This actress was not going to play Jackie Kennedy, right?
If you were talking about historical figures, then you're going to talk about the historical figures that the actors or actresses look more like.
Now, it is true.
Look, I'll never defend Hollywood.
Hollywood doesn't make a lot of roles for racial minorities.
That's why, on average, you'll notice this in films, on average, The performance by black actors and actresses is better than the average performance by white actors and actresses because there just aren't that many roles.
So generally speaking, the people who get those roles are just really, really good performers.
But the issue here for the Academy, for the left, for the woke people who are really upset about the Oscars so white is not quality.
It's quantity.
They're upset that more people were not nominated.
They're upset that there aren't more, you know, half of the nominees in Best Actor or Best Picture or Best Director aren't this race or that race or this sex.
You know, they're upset that Greta Gerwig, who is a very good director, was not nominated for Best Director.
I didn't see the movie she made.
She made Little Women, I think, and I was not particularly compelled to go see that.
I'll leave that to sweet little Elisa if she wants to.
I don't think she was either.
What's interesting in all of the coverage about how the Oscars are so racist and the Academy is so racist is Parasite, which is a Korean movie.
Actually, it was nominated for a bunch of awards.
It was nominated for Best Picture.
It was nominated for Best Director.
But according to the woke crowd, these racial politics people, Asians don't count as real minorities, I guess, because they were saying, nope, they're sort of white.
Nuh-uh, that doesn't count.
It's got to be different.
It's got to be our preferred races, not other racial minorities as a whole.
I haven't seen most of the movies, so I can't really comment on the justice or the injustice of the nominations.
But I actually would like to say something nice about Hollywood and liberals on the issue of racial politics.
I actually would like to take the temperature down in the country a little bit, bring together a little bit of political unity.
It kills me to do it, but I'm going to say something nice about Hollywood and about the Democratic candidates in just one second.
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I would like to say something nice and fair and not just take cheap shots at Hollywood and the left and the Democratic candidates.
They would never be fair with us.
I would like to be fair with them.
I don't think that Democratic primary voters hate black people.
I don't think that the Academy hates black people or Hispanic people or other racial minorities.
I think sometimes black performers Win the Oscars, like Denzel Washington, or Halle Berry, or Jamie Foxx.
And I think sometimes performers of other races win the Oscars.
I think sometimes women win Best Director.
There was that woman, actually the only woman who's won it, Catherine Bigelow.
But more often, men win Best Director because there are many, many, many more male directors than female directors.
Not because there's some law against female directors, just the way it is.
Sometimes the black presidential candidate wins, like last time, like actually our last president.
Sometimes the orange presidential candidate wins, like our current president.
In order for the typical leftist charge to be true, half of this country The conservative half, the right half, the Republican half, has to be racist and sexist and terrible and bigoted and deplorable and irredeemable.
If the typical leftist charge is true, a full half of the country, 150 million people, are just hate-filled bigots.
Now, in order for the woke leftist charge to be true, the Oscars so white crowd, the Democrat candidates so white crowd, for their charge to be true, the whole country has to be bigoted and sexist and racist and terrible and hate black people and hate Hispanics and be motivated by just pure bile and the whole country has to be bigoted and sexist and racist Does anybody think that that's true?
I guess the really hardened left thinks that, because the really hardened left hates the country.
The really hardened, radical left hates the founding of the country, hates the history of the country, hates the traditions of the country, hates the present state of the country, believes that the present state of our society and government and politics is literally violent to many people.
And so they want to completely get rid of it and progress forward.
They want something new.
They think that the only thing holding us back are these vestigial remnants of the American founding.
And the minute we get rid of those, we can move on to utopia.
That's true of the very, very hardened left.
Everybody else, though, I don't think we really believe that all of our countrymen are terrible bigots.
I certainly don't.
We are the least...
We're a racially divisive country on earth.
We're pretty much the only country on earth where you can't be a racist, right?
Go to Europe.
Go to Asia.
Go to India.
Go anywhere else in the world.
People are much, much more conscious of race and much more divided on race than we are in the United States.
That's a lovely thing.
We should be happy about that.
We should say, hey, good job, everybody.
Good job, America.
But that's not what the very, very hardened left wants to do.
And it's easy to take some shots at Democrats and the left for their racial hypocrisy, and I'm more than happy to do it because they need to be called out on their hypocrisy on this issue and many others.
But it's not because I want to accuse them and make them feel terrible and have them admit they're all terrible racists.
I want them to admit that We're doing fine.
We're doing just fine.
We have relatively excellent racial relations in the country.
Obviously we have wonderful gender relations.
They say that we'll never have a gender war because everybody's sleeping with the enemy.
So I'm not terribly worried about that because things seem to be going fine on that front as well.
Until the left admits it.
Until the left admits things are looking pretty good in the country.
Until the left admits that the country that they say is hopelessly bigoted elected a black guy last time.
Until they admit that the academy has given plenty of words to racial minorities and plenty of words to women.
And if they want more, then okay, that's fine.
I mean, that's Hollywood.
They can deal with Hollywood.
But until they admit that this isn't some just totally closed-off country, the patriarchy, the white supremacy, or whatever slogans and bumper stickers they're going to use, until they admit that, we are going to point out their hypocrisy.
And we are going to laugh and enjoy and lap up the circular firing squad.
Because there is no sign that the left is going to cut it out.
Instead, they are ratcheting it up.
They are turning it all the way up to 11.
Just to give you a little appetizer, a little amuse-bouche for tonight's Democratic debate in Des Moines, Elizabeth Warren, Is now personally insinuating that Bernie Sanders is some kind of male chauvinist, a sexist.
This leaked yesterday to CNN. There was a leak, certainly from the Elizabeth Warren camp, that during a private meeting in 2018 between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, where they were going to try to negotiate and hash out how they were both going to run for president,
Bernie Sanders, that misogynist, that sexist, told Elizabeth Liawatha Warren that a woman can't win in 2020.
Bum, bum, bum.
This was leaked to CNN from anonymous sources, namely Elizabeth Warren and people close to her.
And then when the story wasn't gaining a ton of traction, Warren doubled down on it herself.
She came out.
She said, I thought a woman could win.
He disagreed.
I have no interest in discussing this private meeting any further because Bernie and I have far more in common than our differences in punditry.
I think you do have an interest in discussing this further.
I think that's why you leaked it.
A classic, Elizabeth Warren is so disingenuous.
All of these candidates are so disingenuous.
I'm trying to think of an earnest candidate.
Maybe Klobuchar.
Klobuchar might be the closest thing we have to an earnest candidate.
And she's completely unimpressive as a retail politician, so she's not going anywhere.
But I think, yeah, Klobuchar, Tulsi, Yang.
Those are kind of the earnest, honest candidates.
The rest of them are just total empty shills.
Well...
In terms of the major candidates, I guess there's a little exception for Bernie.
And that is why Elizabeth Warren is so upset.
Because Elizabeth Warren was going to be the progressive standard bearer.
She was going to take over that wing of the party because it's her time.
She's young, relatively.
She's not...
No spring chicken, but she's young in this field where the median age is 162.
She's a woman.
She's at various times a Native American.
Not actually, but according to her Harvard biography, she is.
When it suits her to try to get a better job in the academy, she's a Native American.
And hey, she might be one 1,024th Native American, so give her the benefit of the doubt.
She was supposed to take the progressive line, and Bernie is surging, and her campaign is collapsing.
Her campaign is collapsing for a couple reasons.
One, it's disingenuous.
People see her as a kind of Harvard establishmentarian.
Maybe she's a left-winger in the way that intellectuals are left-wingers, right?
They're left-wingers while they write their books, and they can be really radical, and they can be really violent, but they don't have the cred.
They haven't been out there marching in the streets, all right?
Elizabeth Warren has never tasted a beer in her life until she did that video with her husband.
So, They're skeptical of that, and they're skeptical of her plans, because her plans don't look like they're going to work.
She released her health care plan.
It was a $52 trillion plan.
She had no idea how she was going to pay for it.
Actually, in some ways, there's a parallel to Trump 2016 here, which is that Elizabeth Warren now is trying to learn the language of this radical left to get the nomination.
In the same way that President Trump was learning the language of movement conservatism, He was learning the language of the people who had been steeped in conservative politics for 20 years.
Trump hadn't been.
Trump was a reality TV show host.
He was a casino mogul.
He was a real estate mogul.
He just hadn't dedicated his life to politics.
So he wasn't as fluent in that language.
Elizabeth Warren has been in politics a long time.
She has much less of an excuse.
And so as her campaign is collapsing, as Bernie is surging unexpectedly for many people, Warren is using the last refuge of a scoundrel.
She's accusing him of bigotry and sexism or chauvinism or misogyny or whatever.
This will certainly come up in the debate tonight.
That's the whole reason Elizabeth Warren leaked it in the first place.
We need to leave the realm of mainstream identity politics for a while, though, and take a look at the fringes of identity politics because that is where you see the future.
If you had said...
Four years ago, five years ago, that we would have huge national debates over whether a man can become a woman, whether a man should use the women's locker room or the women's bathroom, over whether we should pay for male bodies.
Prisoners to mutilate their body become more resembling of females.
If you had told us this would be a national debate, pronouns, you would have to tell people your pronouns in your little email signature or when you meet them.
We would have laughed in your face.
That was such a fringe, ridiculous idea.
Now it's mainstream.
We're going to take a look at another fringe idea and see the logical end of identity politics.
Then...
We will get to a wonderful little piece of leftist hypocrisy on the environment.
The left is trying to brush this under the rug, brush this under the glacier, because one of their big climate change predictions has not come true.
We will get to that.
We'll get to a whole lot more, but first I've got to say goodbye.
To Facebook and YouTube.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
A convicted pedophile in Michigan is going to prison for 10 to 20 years.
Why?
Because he was caught with kiddie porn on his computer.
This happens often in this country.
You see this...
It seems like there's a story like this every week.
What makes this case different, however, is the defense that this 45-year-old pedophile offered to the judge.
And his defense was this.
It was not illegal for him to have child pornography on his computer.
He has a right to have child pornography on his computer because he has always been an 8-year-old girl.
Now, I know that he's a 45-year-old man, but he says that actually he has always been a 45-year-old girl.
And the language he uses is pretty powerful.
He says, in my fantasies, I have always been an eight-year-old girl.
He said, there are adults on the internet who have sex with me as an eight-year-old girl.
Very confusing.
What does that mean?
That means...
The claim he is making is that his fantasies are reality.
He's admitting it.
I mean, we say that all the time.
We say just because you're a man who thinks that you're a woman in your fantasies doesn't mean you actually are a woman.
They say it's not a fantasy.
Or in the case of like Rachel Dolezal, speaking of identity politics, just because you're a white woman who in your fantasies is a black woman doesn't mean you actually are a black woman.
Well, this guy is admitting it.
He's saying, in my fantasies, I'm an eight-year-old girl, and my fantasies are reality.
Therefore, I am an eight-year-old girl.
And then he says, there are adults who have sex with me on the internet, as I am an eight-year-old girl.
Now, you can't have sex on the internet.
You have to have sex in person.
That's what sex is.
There's a layer that's so insidious here, and it actually gets back into that childhood.
Not the child porn debate, there's not much of a debate on that, but onto the overall online pornography debate.
Which is the blurred line between fantasy and reality.
If you go on the internet and you look at all sorts of disgusting, horrible, misogynistic, terrible things, and you do that for an hour a day, let's say you do it for more than an hour a day.
I've read about cases of people where it's become a total absorbing addiction.
They don't go to work anymore.
They can't get out of bed in the morning.
It's like any drug that they would be addicted to.
Well, if you spend that much time doing this thing, watching exploitation, watching perverse acts, that's you.
That's your life.
That's what you're doing.
You are known by your actions, right?
You are known by how you spend your time.
You are known by where you put your resources, one of which is your time and your desire and your affection.
Where a man puts his treasure, that's where his heart is also.
You can't have sex on the internet.
But what he is saying is, because I engage in these fantasies via, I don't know, I assume they're typing it out, because I engage in these fantasies with people across the internet, I am really having sex with them.
No, you're not.
It's all virtual.
It's all digital.
It's all fantasy.
This guy, in a virtual fantasy, might be an eight-year-old girl, but in reality, he's not.
He's a guy who is trafficking in the exploitation of children.
And that's the reality of it.
And I suspect...
That what he tells himself every day is that he's not really doing that.
I suspect he's believing his own lies.
And I fear that we as a society are believing our own lies when it comes to not just porn or something, but even to the identity politics question.
There are a lot of people in this country who believe this is the most exploitative, terrible, oppressive country that's ever existed in the world.
Stalin, Mao, Hitler, they ain't got nothing on us.
We're so terrible.
We're so awful.
We're so oppressed.
Of course, we're the richest, freest, most just, most equitable, safest society that has ever existed.
No matter.
That's the reality.
That's not the fantasy.
And the fantasy is increasingly where people are living.
Look no further than Jessica Yaniv.
Is a man who identifies as a woman.
He's the guy who went up in Canada and forced immigrant women at beauty salons to wax his genitals.
He went in to get a Brazilian wax, which is a cosmetic procedure for women.
But he's not a woman, he's a man.
And they said, we're not going to do that.
We're not going to touch your genitals.
But also, the procedure for women is different than for men.
The Brazilian wax is different than the Manzillion wax because men and women are different.
This guy was so upset he puts the women out of business.
Starts filing all of these civil rights complaints.
He's a guy who sent lewd text messages to an underage girl, speaking of our last story.
He's a guy who just this year tried to host a topless LGBT youth pool party for little young teenagers.
Now, this guy is physically assaulting people on the street.
There was a journalist who was covering one of his courtroom appearances, and this guy, Jessica Yaniv, very, very ladylike, goes over and starts punching the reporter.
Will you be pleading guilt?
What?
No, don't touch me.
Don't touch me.
Hey!
Stop!
Go away from me!
Go away!
Go away from me!
Jesus, get away from me!
Go away from me!
Get away!
Get the f*** away from me!
Stay away from me!
Get away from me!
Now!
Right now!
You hurt me?
I'm calling the police on you.
I don't give a s***!
Get away from me!
You stay away from me.
Alright, this guy obviously has done some pretty bad things.
This guy putting poor women out of business and sending lewd messages to underage girls and trying to lure kids into this awful party and beating up journalists.
And this guy's done some awful things.
I actually have some sympathy for him, though.
I actually feel bad for the guy because I think it's pretty clear he's not all there in the head.
I think it's pretty clear he's got some issues that he's working on.
He's got some problems.
Five years ago, This would have been so obvious.
We would have all said, oh, this is a crazy person.
We need to get him psychiatric help.
Everything he does, which he does constantly, he's doing like every month this guy is in the international news, is insane.
We should get him some help.
We can't do that in this culture.
Because in this culture, we are elevating fantasy and delusion over reality.
And we are saying that your own subjective experience, whatever you want the world to be, is the way the world really is.
Justice Kennedy in the Planned Parenthood v.
Casey decision says people have a right to define their own reality.
And of course they don't.
None of us has a right to define reality.
Not a single one of us.
Reality is what it is.
And it's up to us to recognize that and to orient our lives to be in a relationship with reality.
In a culture driven crazy by identity politics, we need to pretend that Jessica Yaniv is normal.
And sure, we'd haul them to court and we'd say, hey, you shouldn't send those texts to those underage girls with the pictures and stuff.
Hey, you shouldn't put those immigrant women out of business.
Hey, you shouldn't assault journalists.
But overall, we need to pretend that everything else is fine in this guy's life.
Trying to completely redefine reality, that's totally fine.
It's just that you threw a punch at that independent journalist.
No.
The problem is the fantasy.
The problem is indulging people because we think that lies can be comforting.
I mean, that's what is at the bottom of all of this.
I gave a speech on it during my YAF lecture tour last semester.
At the bottom of this is this lie that the truth is cruel and that lies are comforting.
That it's cruel to say to Jessica, you're a man who has issues and you need some help.
That it's comforting to say, no, Jessica, you're really a woman.
No, pedophile in Michigan, you're really an eight-year-old girl.
No, Rachel Dolezal, you're really a black woman even though you're a white woman.
No, Jessica.
Very, very wealthy, glamorous people in Hollywood.
You're really oppressed.
All of you, regardless of your skin color and your sex, you're so oppressed.
No, Democratic candidates, you're so oppressed.
No, you're not.
You're not.
There's nothing comforting about that.
There's a great image on the bio tapestry, which is an image of the Battle of Hastings, right?
This is a thousand-year-old battle.
And in it, there's a picture of Bishop Odo.
Bishops were not allowed to fight in the battles, right?
They were clergy.
They're not allowed to actually hold a sword and start chopping people to bits.
But Bishop Odo was there in the battle to prevent his men from retreating.
To prevent them from running away.
And he had a club.
And the image on the bio tapestry is Bishop Odo smacking these young guys all over the head, right?
And the line on it is, here Bishop Odo wielding a club comforts the boys.
Comforts.
That's not what you and I would think of as comforting, to be smacked on the head with a club.
But sometimes that's what comforting means.
Because to comfort is to give strength.
And when you're in the heat of battle, giving strength might mean a little thwack with the club.
When you're in the heat of political crisis, comfort might mean telling people truths that they ironically call uncomfortable, but they're not.
The only thing uncomfortable in the long run is lies.
Speaking of which, a really big leftist lie, for years now, At Montana's Glacier National Park, there have been signs at the glaciers which say, these glaciers will be gone by 2020.
Because that's always the way it is, right?
Al Gore told us that New York and Florida were going to be underwater by, what, 2013?
Something like that.
We were told in the 60s that overpopulation was going to destroy the whole world, that there'd be mass starvation, 100 million people dying a year.
Now, between 1970 and today, the world population has doubled.
People have never been fatter.
People have never been better fed.
Poverty has never been lower.
So they have these signs.
They say that the glaciers will be gone by 2020.
Well, 2020 is here.
The glaciers are still there.
All the glaciers are still there.
29 glaciers, still there, not melted at all by climate change.
So they're trying to take the science down, one by one.
We should not let them do that.
If anybody in the White House is listening, President Trump, if you are listening, the president has control over the national parks.
You got to make sure that those signs stay up.
And if they've been taken down, put them back up.
The way that the left gets away with these constant lies, this constant crisis, everything's a crisis, it's urgent.
Give us everything we want or the world is going to end.
That's what the most prominent voices on climate change are telling us and have been for 40 years.
The way they get away with it is we let them take down the signs.
We let them rewrite history.
We let them rewrite their own statements so that the Armageddon is always going to be the day after tomorrow.
Give us what we want today, otherwise tomorrow the whole world is going to fall apart.
Keep those signs up.
We need a national movement to keep those signs up and let their hypocrisy, let their lies, let their wild and untrue predictions, their hysteria be put on full display.
We've got some pretty good news.
We've got to end on a good note because we've got the left crumbling.
We've got the left falling apart.
And we've got Hollywood falling apart.
And we've got the right growing and growing.
Trump's numbers are doing very, very well.
Impeachment totally helped him.
Killing Soleimani totally helped him.
World War III definitely helped him.
Because World War III lasted about 15 minutes.
And we won it pretty clearly.
We won it more decisively than we won the last World War.
So President Trump was going to a football game.
It was the Louisiana Clemson game.
And you see all these videos over the past few months of Trump at a sports event.
And he gets booed.
Those are the ones that go on CNN. Those are the ones that go on MSNBC. He didn't get booed at this event.
He actually got raucous applause and a standing ovation.
Here's the president.
University and Clemson University, joined by the President of the United States and the First Lady.
There he is.
Very popular in lots of different areas of America.
You won't see that on the mainstream media, though.
And I think that's why they're always so surprised when the Democratic candidates don't do well, when people don't tune into the Oscars, when President Trump wins in 2016.
They're so surprised because we've never seen anybody applaud Trump.
As New York Times reporters were saying in the 70s, I don't know anybody who voted for Richard Nixon.
Except he keeps winning in a landslide.
And on that point, I encourage you to check out the dumbest article on the internet today from the LA Times.
This was written by Virginia Heffernan.
The column is titled, Call Trumpism What It Is, A Cult.
The article begins...
The comparisons have come hard and fast, at least since 2015.
Trump is like Silvio Berlusconi, like Adolf Hitler, like Boris Johnson.
It's time to stop searching for the exact analogy for Trump.
What demands analysis is less the arrogant 73-year-old mediocrity in the Oval Office, but the worshipful attitude so many Americans have toward him.
A lot of nutjobs have peddled lies to Americans before, even styled themselves as messianic, but at no time in history have so many Americans been drawn to what looks increasingly like a cult.
I don't use the term recklessly, but you can imagine.
I won't read the rest of it, but pretty reckless.
Then it just quotes a bunch of Democrats talking about how much they hate Trump.
Nowhere in the article, as far as I can tell, Is any fact about the Trump presidency?
Nowhere is any mention of the booming economy or the relative peace abroad or the killing of the two biggest errorists on the face of the earth, Baghdadi and Soleimani.
Or the 401ks going up or the record low unemployment or the record deregulation or wages rising for the first time in 10 years.
None of that is here.
All we hear is...
Mind control and brainwashing and how much they hate Trump and how he's terrible and how it's a cult.
What are cults?
Cults are religious or quasi-religious movements where people abandon their senses, abandon their reason, and follow people who are demagogues, who follow people who have some kind of irrational or emotional control over them.
That is not what's happening in the Trump movement.
The Trump movement, in 2016, for a great many people, the argument for voting for Trump is that he would certainly be better than Hillary, even if he were terrible.
He would almost certainly be better than Hillary.
Since then, we've got data points, we've got facts, which are totally missing from these diatribes against the president, which are totally missing from the Democratic presidential debates, which are totally missing from the hysteria on the left on the Internet and elsewhere.
We've got the facts.
The numbers are in.
To vote for Trump, to support Trump, to support conservatives is a pretty rational act.
If you like a good economy, you like relative peace abroad, you like all those judges who are interpreting our constitution as it was written, and you like all that stuff, and you don't like all the crazy divisiveness, then you support the president, you support the conservative.
Or on the left, if you think that America is the most racist, bigoted, awful, terrible, dangerous place that there ever was, and you believe that the world is going to end tomorrow because the glaciers melted in 2020, because climate change is going to kill us all, and you believe that a man is a woman, and you believe, trust me, it'll happen in, I don't know, two or three years, that...
People can identify as different ages, and a 45-year-old man can be an 8-year-old girl.
If you believe all that kind of stuff, then you probably prefer the left.
Which one of those is the cult?
Pretty clear to me.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Come back tomorrow.
I'll see you then.
The situation now is unacceptable.
The president has attacked, has demonized immigrants.
It's unacceptable.
I'm going to change the rest.
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Hey everyone, I'm Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know who the stupidest people in America are?
Intellectuals.
Those guys think so much, they think right through stuff like patriotism and freedom.
The people are finally rising up against them, not just here but all over the world, and that is a good thing.
