Nearly 100,000 pro-lifers descend on Washington, D.C., for the 47th annual March For Life just one week after fewer than 10,000 shrieking, pink hat-clad leftists took to the nation’s capital for the fourth annual Women’s March. We will examine how the two back-to-back marches show us the stark difference between the modern Left and Right. Then, Bernie surges to the top of the polls just days before the Iowa caucuses. We will analyze how a decrepit communist became the future of the Democratic Party. Finally, in some sad news, basketball superstar Kobe Bryant and his young daughter die in a helicopter crash in California. We will try to make sense of the tragic news.
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Nearly 100,000 pro-lifers descend on Washington, D.C. for this 47th annual March for Life, just one week after fewer than 10,000 shrieking leftists took to the nation's capital for the fourth annual Women's March.
We will examine what the two back-to-back marches tell us about the stark difference between the modern left and the modern right.
Then Bernie surges to the top of the polls just days before the Iowa caucuses, seven days out.
We will analyze how a decrepit communist became the future of the Democratic Party.
Finally, some sad news.
Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant and his young daughter die in a helicopter crash in California.
We will try to make sense of the tragic news.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show.
. you There is a ton to get to right now, today, covering the past weekend.
You know, I'm in Washington, D.C. right now.
I was here for the March for Life.
We put a video up, talked to a lot of people.
We saw the president speak, the first time a president ever spoke at the March for Life.
And I got to tell you, just those marches, the March for Life and the Women's March, showed me that the difference between the left and the right is getting clearer every day.
We talk about polarization as an unqualified evil.
It's always bad that the parties are becoming polarized.
In some ways, it's a good thing because you can really tell the difference between the left and the right.
Both parties are getting more honest.
They're getting more clear about what they want, about who they are, about what they stand for.
You can see it in the presidential race.
That's becoming very clear in Iowa and New Hampshire.
We'll get to that in a second because it's pretty shocking news for the Democratic establishment.
But it's really clear.
I think it's most clear in these two marches, the March for Life and the Women's March.
So I go down.
This was truly an historic March for Life.
There were upwards of 100,000 people there.
The thing that's most shocking when you get there is how young it is.
You have no idea how young it is, especially because the media don't cover the event, even though it's a massive annual event that's been going on almost 50 years.
You go there.
I think the median age is probably like 19.
And these people are so young.
And I was trying to understand, why is the March for Life so young?
Obviously there are parents there, and there are priests and nuns, and there are some politicians, and so there are older people too.
But mostly it's teenagers and people in their 20s.
I think it's because for young Americans, abortion most visibly affects their generation.
A full quarter of millennials and Gen Z are not here because of abortion.
One-fourth of them have been killed through abortion.
So I think it really rings home for them.
I spoke to a number of people out there.
Let's just take a little listen to the difference between the March for Life and the Women's March.
Here's a young man I met named Jorge.
Jorge came up to me at a sign that said, tell us your story.
He said, hey, you still taking stories?
I said, absolutely.
He goes, all right, I've got one for you.
Jorge grew up in foster care.
Here's his reaction to the pro-abortion movement.
I grew up a foster child and I see many people who use people's bad experiences in foster care as a supportive reason for why abortion should be legalized and even promote abortion for those reasons.
Because my mother chose life, I'm able to be used as a vessel to help other people in this world.
And you don't think that the suffering that you had to endure It was just not worth it at all, and it would be better if you never even had a life.
No, I'm thankful for the life that I have, and just having that chance means so much to me, and today's a great day for me to remember that.
And you're out here marching and sending a message to the people who say that people like you shouldn't even be around.
No, I actually think that's a very ignorant argument.
Whether they mean to be offensive or not, to say it's probably better that you are dead than you have a hard life, that's not even their decision to be made, and it's just a very ignorant argument.
You know, that's just one of the stories from March for Life.
We have a video up at the Daily Wire YouTube page.
You can check out a number of them.
But it's profound, because what Jorge honed in on, as he said, Suffering is not a reason to end a life.
In other words, we all suffer.
Life has suffering, and yet life is a beautiful thing.
And we'll see that at the extreme at the end of the show when we talk about Kobe Bryant.
That's the one side of it, right?
You talk to people like Jorge, you talk to other people at the March for Life, and they are...
Normal.
For lack of a better word, they are normal.
They seem grounded.
They have a balanced view of the world.
They understand that life has suffering, but they're happy for life.
They're vibrant.
They're vital.
The thing that was so interesting about speaking to them is they weren't terribly emotional.
They had joy, but joy is not just an emotion.
Joy is this spirit of hope, this kind of energy, this kind of life.
And they weren't terribly emotional.
They weren't yelling.
They weren't screaming.
They were just joyful.
And so President Trump shows up for the first time ever.
American president shows up to the March for Life.
He gave a magnificent speech.
I don't know who wrote this speech, but whoever did should write more of his speeches.
And President Trump delivered it, and it was a really beautiful moment.
Here's just a little sample from President Trump's speech.
All of us here today understand an eternal truth.
Every child is a precious and sacred gift from God.
And from the first day in office, I've taken a historic action to support America's families and to protect the unborn.
I notified Congress that I would veto any legislation that weakens pro-life policies or that encourages the destruction of human life.
Unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House.
Absolutely right.
They haven't.
And I know it's crazy because what so many people say is, Donald Trump, he used to call himself very pro-choice.
He's a New Yorker.
He's full of it.
Whatever, guys.
It is simply a matter of fact that while in office, President Trump has been the most pro-life president.
We talked about it last show.
More so than Reagan.
More so than Bush.
It was a beautiful moment.
In some ways, when I was standing there watching President Trump give this speech, I thought, this is the evidence that I'm living in this simulation.
Then I remembered that the podcast I'm co-hosting with Ted Cruz has now become the number one podcast in the country.
It actually overtook the Joe Rogan experience, and I thought, now I know I'm living in this simulation.
We'll get to that a little bit later.
That was the pro-life side of things.
That was the march for life.
Now, compare that to the Women's March that took place just one week earlier.
Here's a little taste of the Women's March.
The patriarchy.
Donald Trump.
Mike Pence.
White supremacy.
Racism.
Misogyny.
Homophobia.
Transphobia.
Capitalism.
Classism.
Transphobia.
Ableism.
Islamophobia.
Anti-Semitism.
So, we obviously had to bleep out exactly half of what she was saying, but I think you can maybe infer what the word was.
It was four letters along the lines of the F, and she had her two middle fingers up as she is saying it.
Just very intense, F this, F that, F you, F these people.
And lest you think that I'm just pulling one little clip out of context, that actually the Women's March was some normal, totally balanced thing, and there was just one kook out there, That isn't the case.
Here's a shot from the Women's March of whole scores of people, I don't know, maybe 100 or 150 people out there, dancing and yelling and rapping and saying poetry about how we're all a bunch of rapists.
Here they are.
How I dress, and it's not my fault, I wear I was not how I dress, and the rapist was you.
And the rapist is you.
Well, first of all, I'd just like to say, no, we're not.
That's not who we are.
But we'll examine why they react that way, why the March for Life reacts the way they do, what it tells us about the left and the right.
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Okay.
So you've got the March for Life, vibrant, happy, normal, joyful.
Then you've got the Women's March, screaming, vulgar, creepy, weird, full of a bunch of people who don't seem to have everything together exactly.
It shows us which way the two parties are going.
Obviously on the question of life.
One of them is life-affirming.
One of them is not life-affirming.
But More broadly, one side, the right, is approaching politics from a position of gratitude.
We've talked about this before.
The March for Lifers, when you talk to them, they say, I'm just so happy for this life I have.
Jorge, who says, I grew up and I had a really tough upbringing in foster care, and I'm still so happy that I'm alive today.
Thank you so much to my mother for choosing life.
Thank you so much for supporting me.
It's true on the national level.
People who say, gosh, I love my country.
I love everything my country's done for me.
What a wonderful place.
What a wonderful time to be alive.
Thank you, family.
I love my family.
I love my tradition.
I love the cultural inheritance that I have.
That's increasingly what the right does.
How about the left?
The left does not approach politics primarily from a place of gratitude.
It approaches politics primarily from a place of entitlement.
So you have these screaming people out there saying, give me, give me, give me.
I want this.
I want that.
Give me free health care.
Give me abortions whenever I want them.
Let me kill my child.
Let me do this.
Let me do that.
It's my right.
Me, me, me, me.
And we know for a fact that when you approach life selflessly, when you give of yourself to others, you will be more gratified.
You will be more satisfied with your life.
You will be more joyful.
And when you live life primarily about satisfying your own desires and satisfying your own appetites, you are going to be miserable.
And if you don't believe me, just look at the two faces.
The face of Jorge at the March for Life and the face of that crazy British lady screaming F you and F you and F this and F that.
It's not just at the marches, though.
You can see it on the presidential campaign trail.
The entitlement mentality has made it all the way to the top of the polls in Iowa and in New Hampshire.
We are seven days away from the Iowa caucuses.
The Iowa caucuses are the first big moment in the presidential primary campaign.
This is the first time voters are going to go to the polls.
And it's not just going to be these different surveys and answering the phone and saying, I like this candidate more than that candidate.
They're actually going to put their vote on the line.
We are seven days away.
Bernie Sanders is killing it.
He's absolutely killing it, according to every poll.
There's a new New York Times-Siena College poll right now.
Bernie Sanders in first place at 25%, Pete Buttigieg at 18%, Joe Biden at 17%, Liz Warren at 15%.
That means that Bernie Sanders is outside the margin of error right now.
It couldn't just be explained away as some weird statistical fluke.
According to the New York Times, he's seven points up on his rivals, and the rest of the pack is basically all within a point or two of each other.
Another poll has Bernie up.
It's a little bit closer, but it's still up.
This is CBS News and YouGov has Bernie Sanders at 26, then Joe Biden at 25, then Buttigieg at 22, then Warren at 15.
There are other polls that are showing Bernie doing very, very well.
So as a result of this, The establishment is freaking out because the establishment wants either Joe Biden or, assuming Joe Biden's not going to work and there's a lot of reason to think he won't work, Elizabeth Warren.
The Des Moines Register is still trying to make Liz Warren happen, but they're not going to make Liz Warren happen because nobody likes Liz Warren, which is why she's at the bottom of all these polls.
The Des Moines Register endorses Warren.
What?
So the endorsement begins.
At this moment, when the very fabric of American life is at stake, Elizabeth Warren is the president this nation needs.
Okay, that's kind of normal boilerplate endorsement stuff.
But then they go further, and they describe Elizabeth Warren and the other candidates as someone who would, quote, treat truth as something that matters.
A woman whose nickname is Liawatha, Focahontas.
A woman who is lily white as the newly driven snow pretended for decades to be a Native American for professional gain.
A woman who submitted a recipe of basically crab and mayonnaise salad to a Native American cookbook called Pow Wow Chow, I Kid You Not.
A woman who lied about sending her kids to public school.
a woman who lied about being fired as a teacher because she was pregnant, a woman who probably lied about what she had for breakfast this morning, she is a candidate who would, quote, treat truth as something that matters.
The voters know that that is total BS.
And a lot of what you're seeing in terms of Bernie's rise, a lot of what you're seeing in terms of the polarization of the two political parties is because people know that the mainstream media and the establishment are just full of it.
They see through it now.
In part, that's because of how our politics has evolved.
In part, that's because of how technology has evolved.
We'll get into that in a second.
But this is not an isolated case, because guess what?
The polls are showing Bernie's up in New Hampshire do.
We'll get to all of that, but first, I have got to thank our friends over at Ring.
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Now, one thing that is not safe right now is the future of the Democratic Party because Bernie Sanders is surging to the lead, not just in Iowa, also in New Hampshire.
We have an NBC News Marist poll right now, puts Bernie at 22% in New Hampshire.
Second place is Buttigieg at 17%, then Biden at 15%, Warren again at the bottom of the pack at 13%.
CNN, University of New Hampshire poll, Bernie all the way up at 25%.
Biden way down at 16%, a nine-point gap between Bernie and the second-place candidate.
Then Buttigieg at 15%, then Warren again at the bottom at 12%.
And then there's another poll.
This one is pretty wild.
This is the craziest of all.
WBUR of New Hampshire.
Bernie up at 28% in New Hampshire.
Followed by Buttigieg at 16%.
Followed by Biden at 13 and Warren at 12.
So there's a 12-point gap there for Bernie, according to that New Hampshire poll.
What all of this means is that Bernie is a real threat.
What all of this means is that Bernie might be the Democrats' Trump.
We'll get to what that means in a second.
What all of this means is that the Democratic Party is becoming more honest.
You know, for years and years, for a century...
The American left defended radical regimes.
The Soviet Union, I think of the reporters Lincoln Steffens and Walter Durante, talked about how they saw the future in the Soviet Union and it worked, carried water for Joseph Stalin.
You had the American left, the honest voices of the American left, defending Fidel Castro, defending Mao Zedong, defending all sorts of awful, radical, socialist, communist regimes.
But there was this kind of veneer of moderation or respectability.
That is now falling away.
It's falling away because the establishment is losing its credibility.
Bernie is the Democrats' Trump.
He is the answer to Trump.
How is that?
They're very different people, obviously.
Donald Trump, billionaire businessman, instinctively patriotic, anti-politically correct, and he's a big tough guy.
Bernie Sanders, none of those things.
Bernie is a career politician.
It's the only job he's ever had.
It's the nearest thing to a job he's ever had.
He's a radical socialist, a true believer.
He's never accomplished anything other than complaining for 50 years.
Even as a legislator, he's never really accomplished a thing.
And yet, there are some similarities between the two guys.
First of all, they're both absolute middle fingers to the establishment.
They're also both cartoons of their political parties.
When you think of, what's the difference between the left and the right?
Well, the right is more patriotic.
The right is more grateful.
The right is more interested in private property.
The right is more willing to speak bluntly.
Trump is the caricature of that.
He's the cartoon of that.
I mean, there was an early campaign event in 2016 where Donald Trump literally hugged the American flag, smiling, beaming ear to ear with that.
It's the total extreme of everything we think of when we think of conservatives or of the right.
And what is Bernie?
Bernie is, he is a living complaint, right?
That's why Larry David plays him on Saturday Night Live, is because you have this kind of old guy who all he does is always complains about everything.
That's Bernie Sanders, and that is the American left.
When you think about the American left, you think about people complaining and whining and moaning because they don't get enough free stuff and they want everything to be for free.
And nothing's good enough for them in this country and they just feel entitled to everybody else's money and property and me, me, me, me, me.
Right.
Bernie Sanders said that he would raise taxes on everybody making more than $29,000 a year, which is virtually everybody.
He's saying, yeah, I'm going to take money from pretty much everybody when I get into office.
OK, those are the cartoons of the left and the right.
And you see them in Trump and Bernie.
You don't really see that in Trump and Biden.
Biden isn't a cartoon of the Democratic Party, certainly not the Democratic Party today.
And the other thing that Trump and Bernie have in common, they're both authentic.
There are a ton of reasons to criticize Bernie, maybe even some reasons to criticize Trump.
But what you can't say about them is that they're inauthentic.
I mean, with both of those guys, what you see is what you get.
I remember Trump mentioned this when they asked him if he was going to get a dog in the White House.
Because every president needs to have a dog, and it looks really good for the photos, and the magazines want you to have a dog.
And they said, are you going to get a dog?
And he said, nah, I don't really like dogs.
I feel like it wouldn't work for me.
I feel like people would see through that.
And they would.
They would.
If all of a sudden Trump pretended to be this nice, warm, fuzzy guy, they would of course see through that.
And he said, I'm going to be authentic.
I'm not going to pretend to voters that I'm something that I'm not.
Same thing with Bernie Sanders.
You know, he's a pretty authentic guy.
Pretty sincere as far as politicians go.
And both of them have a very personal connection to their supporters.
I mean, Trump, you know, won the presidential campaign in 2016 on grassroots supporters in a bunch of cheap hats.
It's not like this guy was the favorite of the big dollar donors, okay?
This guy had genuine grassroots support.
Same thing with Bernie.
Bernie is all small dollar donations.
He's not a favorite of the donor class.
Far from it.
They're doing their best to deprive him of the nomination, just like they did in 2016.
The reason that that authenticity and that personal touch matters right now is because the media have become much more personal.
They've become much more authentic.
Rather than, you think of the 1960 presidential election and John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon are going to debate the issues and they're both really kind of stiff and on television it's in grainy black and white.
That was as personal as it got 50, 60 years ago.
Now we're on TikTok, right?
Now we're on Instagram.
Now we're on Periscope and everything is so personal.
You can see the pores on somebody's face.
Requires you to be much more sincere, much more authentic.
I think that's why Elizabeth Warren is at the bottom of the pack right now.
She is by far the least sincere candidate in the race.
I mean, she's lied about every major point of her biography.
And in order to overcome that, she would have to get real and she's not capable of doing it.
Now, Bernie has some big weaknesses.
Joe Biden has some big advantages.
And there's actually some secret gossip going around among the Democratic senators, which Senator Ted Cruz told me the other night on our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz, that might shape the way we look at the rest of this race.
We will get to that.
We'll get to what that means for impeachment.
We will get to the very sad news about Kobe Bryant.
But first, I've got to thank our friends over at ExpressVPN.
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Bernie is a real threat here.
But Bernie has a big weakness.
Bernie's weakness is low support among black voters.
Democrats cannot win the race if they don't have 90% support among black voters.
High 80s at least.
They need to have a lock on the black vote in order to win the general election.
But Bernie does very poorly among black voters.
That's the only reason Joe Biden is still in the race.
Joe Biden does very well among black voters.
And so the only...
I mean, Joe Biden is such a bad candidate.
He has everything going against him.
Joe Biden is simply too old and he looks it on the campaign trail.
Unlike Bernie, who's very old, but at least he has energy.
Joe Biden is getting confused all the time.
Joe Biden has accomplished very, very little despite being in public office for about 50 years.
I guess the same as Bernie.
Joe Biden doesn't really seem to have any core beliefs that one can mention.
He's just a weak candidate.
And especially in an era where Democrats care so much about identity politics, he's an old white guy, so that counts against him too.
The reason Joe Biden is still in the race is because he has support among black voters.
But Democratic elites, they're called the superdelegates.
And the Democratic Party, these elites, these superdelegates, have an outsized influence on who the nominee is.
Regardless of who the voters pick, they get to cast their own votes and in some cases outweigh the will of the primary voters.
The superdelegates may be giving up on Biden.
I was speaking to Senator Ted Cruz the other night on our show, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
And he said the rumor going around the Senate is that the superdelegates have soured on Biden.
And that is why during impeachment, which we'll get to in a second, the Democratic House impeachment managers threw Joe Biden under the bus.
It's because the party elites don't think Biden has what it takes.
Trouble is, Joe Biden is the only relatively normal candidate who can beat Bernie Sanders.
And they don't want Bernie Sanders to win the nomination either.
So Bernie, right now, at this moment, with the current level of black support that he has, he would be very easy to beat in the general election.
I think the party elites among the Democrats are nervous about Bernie's radicalism, but they're also nervous that he's going to lose a bunch of states.
However, if Bernie can connect with black voters, and he has been able to reach out beyond just white voters, so he's got decent support among Hispanic voters, but if he can reach out to black voters, he could be a very dangerous candidate in a general election, because he does connect with people in a way that Biden, Buttigieg, and Warren simply do not.
And he does have an authenticity to him, and he is a middle finger to the establishment, which everybody wants to send, because the parties are getting clearer.
The left and the right are getting clearer and more honest, and they don't like that mealy-mouthed double talk from the establishment.
Speaking of impeachment, there is a pivotal moment going on right now as we speak in the impeachment trial.
The Democrats have finished their impeachment arguments.
The Trump team is now about to make their impeachment arguments.
and then we're going to see if I'm going to be stuck in D.C. covering impeachment for the next six weeks or if I'm going to get to go home.
All of that will rest on just a few people.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, I have got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, and I want to specifically mention the pro-life cause, because while the pro-abortion activists are shouting their abortions on national TV and calling pre-born babies parasites, pro-lifers are fighting back.
All of us here at The Daily Wire have spoken out for life.
You remember last year, Ben addressed a crowd of 100,000 people at the March for Life in DC.
Well, as a result of that, our advertisers were targeted by left-wing operatives, and we lost a lot of revenue.
And this is a constant battle to protect pro-life advocacy from the forces of abortion.
Live Action has experienced the same thing.
Live Action is one of the most important voices in the pro-life movement.
They've helped expose Planned Parenthood and other abortion mills for the horrific crimes that they commit.
Pro-abortion activists have targeted Live Action.
They've censored them on social media when they don't succeed in kicking them off altogether.
That's why our DailyWire.com members are so important.
Your membership helps keep our cameras on and our microphones turned up, even when the left pressures our sponsors.
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Head on over there and make your pro-life voice heard.
heard.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
All right.
We have got to get to impeachment because today is a pivotal day.
You can hear more about this in depth if you head on over to Verdict with Ted Cruz, which is the podcast we're doing every night the senator comes over from the Capitol.
And we immediately go into what happened on the day and he gives us a behind the scenes look into impeachment.
And thank you to everybody who's listened and subscribed and left a five-star review because now that show is the number one podcast on the charts.
Joe Rogan endorses Bernie Sanders, and then a day or two later...
Verdict with Ted Cruz becomes the number one podcast.
I'm just saying.
Look, maybe it's a coincidence.
Who knows?
Maybe it's not.
Let's just very quickly, in impeachment, cover what's happening today.
The House Democrats have finished their opening arguments.
The Trump team now gets to make their argument.
They gave us a preview of what that argument is going to be just on Saturday, two days ago.
Here is a quick clip that sums it up.
Everything that guy just said is bullshit.
Thank you.
Alright, that's pretty much the argument that Trump lawyers made.
Joe Pesci is not on the Trump legal team, but the Trump legal team did make what I call the My Cousin Vinny argument.
that House Democrats ran their mouths, Adam Schiff ran their mouths for three days, four days, and then going into the middle of the night.
And then the Trump legal team gets up there and pretty much said, hey, everything that guy just said is BS.
The defense really starts in earnest today.
And the defense actually matters.
I think some people are looking at impeachment and everyone's eyes are glazing over and they say, oh, who cares?
Trump is obviously going to be acquitted.
He's not going to be removed from office.
Let's just move on.
We'll think about something else.
The Trump legal team's defense matters, not because Trump could be removed from office.
I think that is virtually impossible.
It would require 20 Republican senators to suddenly flip on the president, flip on their voters, and Trump currently has a 95% approval rating among Republicans.
It's just not going to happen.
However, Republicans have 53 seats in the Senate.
Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have 47 seats.
53 to 47 seats.
The real vote is not about the vote to remove Trump from office.
You're not going to lose 20 Republican senators.
The real worry is about the vote to call witnesses.
That's what's really being debated right now.
Because if they don't call any more witnesses in this impeachment trial, then this whole thing could be over on Saturday and I can go home to LA. If they do vote to call more witnesses...
Like the House didn't get enough witnesses when they voted to impeachment, so now all of a sudden we need more witnesses.
If they vote to do that, this thing could drag on for weeks.
All you need for that to happen is four squishy Republicans.
53 to 47.
So you lose four Republicans, all of a sudden they're going to call all these witnesses.
It's going to go on forever.
My ability to return home to Los Angeles relies on Mitt Romney not being a huge jerk, which means I need to start shopping for apartments in Washington pretty soon, I think.
There are other Republicans, too, who are kind of squishy on this, obviously.
There's Susan Collins in Maine.
There's Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.
There's several others.
So the Trump team really does need to make a good case.
The good thing is that the facts are on their side.
The facts favor the Trump team.
The question is, are they going to play it safe or are they going to go for the jugular?
Gets to what we were talking about earlier.
The party is becoming more honest.
The party is becoming more clear.
The Trump legal team should be very clear here.
The Democrats have been clear.
The Democrats have been clear since 2017.
They have said since Trump got elected that they are going to impeach this guy.
They don't know what for, but they'll figure it out.
They tried to impeach him for Russia.
Then they tried to impeach him for his taxes.
Then they tried to impeach him for Stormy Daniels.
Then they tried to impeach him for Ukraine.
It's always been an impeachment in search of a crime.
Representative Al Green, the Democrat, said it in 2017.
He said, I'm afraid if we don't impeach this president, he might get re-elected.
Adam Schiff reiterated this just the other day during the impeachment trial.
He said, we cannot allow this impeachment to be decided at the ballot box.
We've got to handle it beforehand.
The obvious reason is because Adam Schiff thinks that the voters are going to re-elect Donald Trump.
So Are you going to play it safe?
Are you going to go for the jugular?
Are you going to be clear here or not?
The Trump team, on the one hand, could play it safe and say, hey, the things you're claiming we did, we didn't really do, and we'll go through it point by point and show why we didn't do that thing.
Okay, that would be the safe version.
The aggressive version, the clear version, would be to say, like Joe Pesci, everything that guy just said is BS, but more to it.
The president has the right to investigate corruption.
It's not a quid pro quo.
It's not an impeachable offense.
The president was investigating corruption.
Who's corruption?
Joe Biden's corruption.
They need to stop playing defense and start playing offense on the Trump legal team.
They need to say, look, this whole thing you're accusing us of doing, it's a bunch of BS. But what about what you did?
What about what Joe Biden and his son Hunter did?
What about Burisma?
What about this crooked deal that the Obama administration set up that they basically admitted to in official email threads about Joe and Hunter Biden, naming them specifically?
What about that?
Put it all on Ukraine, and what you will see happen is, first of all, it will be a much more convincing argument.
But second of all, it's going to affect the election in a way that's very helpful to the president.
Impeachment generally has helped President Trump and it has hurt the Democrats.
However, if all you're talking about is allegations of Trump's corruption, that doesn't look great.
Put it back on the Democrats.
Use this opportunity of impeachment as a way to really hammer home the utter corruption, not just of this impeachment trial, but of the Obama administration actions through Joe Biden in Ukraine that led to the impeachment in the first place.
Bring it up.
Go for the jugular.
I hope they do it.
We'll see it, because it's going to start in just a couple hours.
That the mainstream media is making a big deal out of, but actually does not matter at all, is a leak from John Bolton's new book.
And you're going to see this is going to be the top trend on Twitter all day.
John Bolton is the former national security advisor to Donald Trump.
There's a leak out now from his new memoir that's coming out that was sent to the New York Times, and it says that in his book, John Bolton accuses President Trump of personally telling him That $391 million in aid to Ukraine should be frozen until Ukrainian officials announce the investigation into the possible corruption from the Obama administration, from Joe Biden, from Hunter Biden.
That's the allegation.
Bombshell!
Now, John Bolton has come out and said this was an unprofessional, irresponsible leak.
I didn't leak this.
Clearly, someone in the review process leaked this.
And the Trump team has come out pretty strongly against John Bolton here.
And President Trump has denied speaking to John Bolton about it.
None of that matters.
Because the story is BS from the very beginning.
Let's say that Trump did exactly what John Bolton allegedly accuses him of doing.
The president has every right to do it.
The president has every right to investigate corruption.
The president has every right to use his negotiating leverage to force a partner overseas to live up to their obligations.
Every president has done this.
Every president should be able to do this.
This is basic and fundamental to foreign policy.
The way to really take the wind out of the Democrats' sails is to say, hold on, even if what you're saying is true, Trump was perfectly right to do it.
What's the problem?
What's the crime?
You're saying the president can't investigate corruption?
What the left has relied on through all of the impeachment farces, what they have relied on is the insinuation of doing something wrong.
Sources tell me that Trump did something really bad with Russia.
We don't know exactly what he did that was bad, but it was really bad.
Yeah, it might not have been a crime, but anyway, it was really bad, and so we gotta get rid of the guy.
Then it turns out, He didn't do anything with Russia, and we don't need to get rid of him, and the things they were alleging that he did aren't even illegal.
Well, we think that Trump might have done something bad on his taxes, so we got to get rid of him.
Well, we think what he did in Ukraine might have been really terrible and illegal.
You got to zero in on the details here.
What did he do?
If he did it, would that be illegal?
And the answer is no.
It's just all smoke.
It's all insinuation.
It's all sizzle, no steak.
How many more metaphors can I use?
It's just nothing.
The only people who are going to focus on this John Bolton thing are the mainstream media and the House Democrats, desperate to find something to impeach the guy for.
I think that story goes absolutely nowhere.
Now, before we go, I want to get to Kobe Bryant.
Very sad story.
Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest athletes of his age, one of the greatest basketball players ever, personally a very interesting guy.
He spoke fluent Italian.
He grew up in part in Italy because he came from a basketball family and his father was playing over there.
He was Catholic.
He went to a Catholic parish right near where I go to church, actually.
Very interesting guy.
He was an Academy Award winner.
How many basketball players become Academy Award winners?
You know, I don't follow basketball, so I really can't comment on Kobe Bryant's basketball playing at all.
But I did see Kobe Bryant perform one time.
And I saw him perform.
It was a surprise performance at the Hollywood Bowl when John Williams, the composer of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, he was playing a concert.
And in the middle of the show, out walks Kobe Bryant to debut this poem that he wrote called Dear Basketball.
And there was a short film with it, and John Williams had composed the music.
And so there's Kobe Bryant, you know, one of the greatest athletes of his age, standing there reciting this poem at the Hollywood Bowl with John Williams, one of the greatest composers of his age, playing behind him.
And it was a really cool experience.
And I can't say that I saw Kobe perform at what he's known for performing, but I did get to see him perform.
And then the guy struck down in his youth, 41 years old, and his daughter, who I think was 13 years old.
So sad.
Really tragic.
What do we take away from this?
What can we do about this?
Obviously, we can pray for Kobe and for his daughter and for his family.
And everybody affected by this, for all the unnamed people who were on that helicopter, who are not making the headlines, but who also have families, who also have lives, we can pray for them.
What do we take away in terms of our own lives?
First part of it, and I think this is some of what's so shocking to us about Kobe's death, is that tragedy happens to everyone.
Kobe Bryant is a guy who has it all.
He's a guy who would commute to work in a helicopter, right?
Rich, famous, incredible athlete, handsome, Academy Award winner, great family, apparently a thriving spiritual life.
Just everything, right?
Cut down.
It reminds us that tragedy happens to everybody.
Everybody.
Doesn't matter how rich you are, doesn't matter how...
Wonderful and thriving and flourishing your life is.
Happens to everybody.
That scares us.
The other reason that we're reacting in this, I think, in this shocking way, even beyond Kobe's importance to the culture, is because it reminds us that you do not know when your time will come.
But what a fluke.
This guy is about to start the next chapter of his life, and the helicopter just goes down.
Off.
Lights go off like that.
And that scares us.
It reminds us that we will all die.
And we will all die sooner than we think.
We go about our lives day to day feeling as though we're never going to die.
But we will.
It will happen sooner than we think.
It's a reminder that life is a preparation for death.
It makes us think about what happens after death, what it all means, what the significance of our life is today.
Are you ready to die?
If it happened to you today, would you be ready?
That is a startling question.
And it brings us back to the March for Life, the difference between the March for Life and the Women's March that happened the week before.
Would you be ready?
On the one hand, you have these people at the March for Life, joyful, exuberant, vibrant, vital.
If the last thing that you saw of their lives were those frames from the March for Life, you would say, man, they lived a good life.
They really did it.
They really figured it out.
If the last frames of your life were you wearing some stupid pink hat screaming curse words and saying, F this and F that and F you, you would say, gosh, that person, they messed up somewhere.
They just didn't figure it out, did they?
Hmm.
I was a troubled person.
They didn't quite get to it.
And it's a reminder, too, that life is so precious.
I mean, we are...
None of us have met Kobe Bryant.
Statistically, zero people listening to this podcast right now, including me, have ever met Kobe Bryant.
And yet we're all really, really sad about his death.
And we're especially sad about the death of his daughter.
Because it's a reminder that life is precious.
It's a reminder that the March for Lifers are correct.
And the people who are marching against life and shrieking to end lives before they've barely begun are wrong.
We know, we just know in our gut that life is precious, that it matters, that even if there's suffering in there, there is meaning to life and that it is a good thing.
And we can all pray on that.
We can pray for Kobe and his daughter.
And we can pray for ourselves.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll be back tomorrow.
And in the meantime, you can catch me on Verdict with Ted Cruz tonight.
See you there.
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