The state of our union is strong, and Nancy Pelosi couldn't be angrier about it. Meanwhile, Bernie rises to the top of the Democratic pack. We will examine two visions for America. If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/Knowles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| This is the Michael Knowles Show. | |
| I'm not Michael Knowles. | |
| I'm Ted Cruz, and it's 1.30 in the morning. | |
| Senator, just because you're the number one podcaster in America does not mean that you can also take my show. | |
| Well, enjoy your show, and thanks to everyone who tunes in. | |
| All right, I'll see you back here later tonight. | |
| You'll go do your real job. | |
| Off to work. | |
| You know, I don't show up to the Senate and start casting votes, but Senator Cruz will be heading over to the Capitol and this will be the final day of impeachment. | |
| He's going to cast that final vote on whether to acquit the president or to remove him from office. | |
| That will all be very exciting, and we will talk about it later on on Verdict with Ted Cruz. | |
| Before then, though, we have got to talk about much happier news, the State of the Union. | |
| The State of the Union, which is usually a boring, terrible speech, was magnificent. | |
| President Trump gave, and I think I am not exaggerating when I say this, the greatest State of the Union address in American history. | |
| It was wonderful for three distinct reasons. | |
| First of all, the stories that he told. | |
| He is a master showman, so it's not surprising that he's able to tell really good stories. | |
| Ronald Reagan did this very well, too. | |
| You saw this with moments with Rush Limbaugh, moments with a number of really beautiful moments. | |
| The second reason it was so great is that the Democrats reacted like monsters. | |
| I mean, you couldn't have scripted more villainous reactions. | |
| They couldn't applaud for low unemployment. | |
| They couldn't applaud for anything. | |
| Anything that Trump said they had to oppose. | |
| And then the third reason that the State of the Union speech was so good, I think it was truly the best in history, It's because it was true. | |
| The State of the Union actually is strong. | |
| The State of the Union has never been stronger in my lifetime. | |
| I mean, I've never watched the State of the Union while the country was doing this well, and there is really no substitute for the truth. | |
| So let's jump right into it. | |
| I think the biggest conclusion, the biggest takeaway is the Democrats couldn't clap For anything. | |
| Just an example, President Trump running down the list. | |
| Low unemployment. | |
| Low black unemployment. | |
| Low disabled unemployment. | |
| Low female unemployment. | |
| Watch the reaction. | |
| Listen. | |
| The unemployment rate for African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans has reached the lowest levels in history. | |
| African-American youth unemployment has reached an all-time low. | |
| APPLAUSE African American poverty has declined to the lowest rate ever recorded. | |
| The unemployment rate for women reached the lowest level in almost 70 years. | |
| And last year, women filled 72 percent of all new jobs added. | |
| We have to stop it right there because you can see in the House there are these female congresswomen on the Democratic side wearing all white. | |
| And the white is a symbol of the suffragettes and female activism and women getting the right to vote. | |
| And those women who are ostensibly standing up for women's rights are. | |
| When the president says that we've got record number of women in the workforce, they sit there frowning, angry, all upset. | |
| Now for me, I usually don't tout the female unemployment rate because the female unemployment rate is a different rate than, say, different racial unemployment rates or even age groups. | |
| Because it doesn't take into account women who choose to stay at home. | |
| So, I mean, if you have a perfectly low female unemployment rate, then what you're basically saying is women are not able to stay at home and raise their families and be stay-at-home wives. | |
| And I don't think we want to live in a country where women are not allowed to raise their children. | |
| So it's a little bit different. | |
| But those female Democratic congresswomen, they're all for it, right? | |
| That's what they're standing up for, except they can't stand up. | |
| They've got to sit down because Donald Trump is actually the guy who accomplished the things that they say that they want to accomplish. | |
| But it goes on. | |
| He keeps listing all of these achievements, particularly economic achievements, and they just can't smile. | |
| They just can't clap. | |
| The veterans unemployment rate dropped to a record low. | |
| The unemployment rate for disabled Americans has reached an all-time low. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Workers without a high school diploma have achieved the lowest unemployment rate recorded in U.S. history. | |
| A record number of young Americans are now employed. | |
| There it is. | |
| Anything. | |
| I mean, he could say that everybody is going to get $50 million for free and the Republicans would stand up and the Democrats are sitting down because there's always partisan rancor. | |
| Obviously, people will sit down when they disagree on some policy position, but this takes it a step further than we've seen in the past. | |
| This is truly an example of Democrats refusing to applaud any of the president's accomplishments. | |
| It plays very badly on television. | |
| It really makes them look anti-American, which in many cases, unfortunately, they are. | |
| Then President Trump takes this tactic of getting the Democrats to expose who they are, to expose that they're not really rooting for America. | |
| He takes this into the realm of pro-life. | |
| So he tells this story of a little girl who was able to survive. | |
| She was born very early and now she's a healthy child. | |
| And he says that he is now calling on Congress to finally ban the barbaric practice of late-term abortion. | |
| Not first-trimester abortion. | |
| Not the morning-after pill. | |
| Not all the areas where Democrats and... | |
| Pro-abortion people want to argue the pro-life point. | |
| He's talking about the very end stages when the baby looks just like a baby and moves like a baby and everybody more or less agrees that that's barbaric. | |
| And they won't stand for that either. | |
| Ella reminds us that every child is a miracle of life. | |
| And thanks to modern medical wonders, 50% of very premature babies delivered at the hospital Where Ellie was born, now survive. | |
| It's an incredible thing. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Our goal should be to ensure that every baby has the best chance to thrive and grow just like Ellie. | |
| That is why I'm asking Congress to provide an additional $50 million to fund neonatal research for America's youngest patients. | |
| That is why I'm also calling upon members of Congress here tonight to pass legislation finally banning the late-term abortion of babies. | |
| This is really an important point because for so long, tactically, pro-lifers and the right lose the abortion argument because the pro-abortion people say, oh, come on, a zygote is not a baby. | |
| An embryo is not a baby. | |
| A fetus is not a baby. | |
| It's a little clump of cells. | |
| It looks nothing like a baby. | |
| And tactically, it's much wiser for pro-lifers to argue at the later stages of pregnancy where you've got the vast, vast majority of Americans opposing abortion. | |
| And President Trump got the Democrats to reveal the logical conclusion of their abortion advocacy. | |
| Because they're not just talking about babies who are one or two weeks old. | |
| They're talking about babies who are seven months old, eight months old, nine months old. | |
| In the case of the governor of Virginia, he said that the baby could be born, and then maybe they'd kill the baby after he was born. | |
| In the case of the Democratic governor of New York, Andy Cuomo, changed the penal law in New York with his abortion law so that you can kill a baby up until the moment of birth. | |
| And if you kill a pregnant mother, you won't be charged with double homicide, just single homicide. | |
| Trump got them to expose that. | |
| Their hatred of Trump has driven them so crazy that they can't cheer on successes for all sorts of Americans. | |
| And they're actually sitting down in support of late-term abortion. | |
| And then, as if that didn't tug on the heartstrings enough, President Trump gets to some really personal moments. | |
| We will get to that as well. | |
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| President Trump moves from the economic questions onto this cultural issues, late-term abortion. | |
| Then he gets into some really personal stuff. | |
| He gets into stories about parents who have suffered terrible tragedies because of terrorism. | |
| Gets into American servicemen. | |
| Who have made big sacrifices. | |
| I mean, reuniting families during the State of the Union. | |
| And then one story that is particularly important for those of us in the conservative movement, especially those of us in broadcasting, is Rush Limbaugh. | |
| Rush Limbaugh, the peerless conservative broadcaster, the pioneer. | |
| He invented conservative talk radio. | |
| He remains the best political analyst in the history of radio. | |
| He's just... | |
| There is no number two. | |
| There's Rush Limbaugh and then a huge gap and then a bunch of other people below. | |
| Rush Limbaugh announces that he has late stage cancer of the lungs. | |
| President Trump immediately invites him to the State of the Union and Rush is sitting next to the First Lady Melania. | |
| President Trump gives him a truly tear jerking tribute. | |
| Here tonight is a special man, beloved by millions of Americans, who just received a stage 4 advanced cancer diagnosis. | |
| This is not good news, but what is good news is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that you will ever meet. | |
| Rush Limbaugh, thank you for your decades of tireless devotion to our country. | |
| I am proud to announce tonight that you will be receiving our country's highest civilian honor, | |
| the Presidential Medal of Freedom. . the Presidential Medal of Freedom. . | |
| I will now ask the First Lady of the United States to present you with the honor, please. | |
| I dare you to have a dry eye after listening to that. | |
| I mean, it was so magnificent. | |
| First of all, God bless Rush Limbaugh. | |
| Personally, I'm so pleased. | |
| I so admire the guy. | |
| I'm so pleased that he got that kind of honor. | |
| But consider it from the perspective of President Trump. | |
| Very often there are these personal stories. | |
| Ronald Reagan actually kind of invented this tradition of inviting individuals from different walks of life and making their personal stories part of the broader narrative of the country. | |
| But as with everything President Trump does, he just turns it up to 11. | |
| So Rush gets this terrible diagnosis, late-stage cancer. | |
| So he immediately invites Rush, and then he takes it a step further and announces at the State of the Union that he's going to give Rush the highest civilian honor in the country, the Medal of Freedom. | |
| And Rush looked genuinely shocked. | |
| I don't think he saw leaked reports about that. | |
| And then Trump takes it a step further And has the First Lady sitting next to him present the medal at the State of the Union before a joint session of Congress? | |
| It's just incredible. | |
| The showmanship, first of all, and beyond that, the honor, the dignity of it. | |
| Oh my gosh, it was just beautiful. | |
| The State of the Union addresses are boring. | |
| They are chloroform on television, usually, until this presidency. | |
| Trump, all of his State of the Union addresses have been good. | |
| This one was by far the best. | |
| And the Democrats could not have been more furious. | |
| At least eight House Democrats boycotted the State of the Union. | |
| They were led by AOC. And it was just a bad look. | |
| I mean, you had them sitting down. | |
| They couldn't cheer for any of the great policies. | |
| But you had Nancy Pelosi wouldn't stand up for Rush Limbaugh. | |
| When the guy is being told he's got this awful illness, probably not going to end very well, just statistically. | |
| Obviously, he's getting this big honor now, and Nancy Pelosi wouldn't applaud, wouldn't stand up. | |
| House Democrats wouldn't stand up, wouldn't stand up for a number of these stories, for a number of these achievements. | |
| And then at the beginning of the State of the Union, you had Nancy Pelosi break protocol. | |
| Because usually when they open up the State of the Union, the Speaker of the House will say, I have the honor and the privilege of announcing the President of the United States. | |
| Nancy Pelosi nixed that, totally broke from tradition. | |
| She just said, members of Congress, the President of the United States. | |
| Seething, furious. | |
| And then at the end of the speech, she did something that was so disgusting. | |
| The President hands a copy of the speech to the Vice President and to the Speaker of the House. | |
| And at the end of the speech, right when President Trump said, you know, our best days are ahead. | |
| The best is yet to come. | |
| God bless America. | |
| She stood up and ripped up the speech, which is obviously offensive to half of the country because she has a different political point of view than the president. | |
| And so it's offensive. | |
| She's showing such disrespect for people who have a different political point of view. | |
| But she's showing such disrespect for the office of the president. | |
| She was showing such disrespect for the American people, I mean, he is their elected representative, right? | |
| He is their president. | |
| And she's ripping it up. | |
| I was under the impression she was ripping up the Constitution, but I realized, no, no, it wasn't that. | |
| She was actually ripping up the speech that he had given her. | |
| I mean, I guess this plays very well to the AOC crowd. | |
| This plays very well to a handful of super-woke millennials and blue check marks on Twitter. | |
| I don't think this plays well in Peoria. | |
| I don't think this plays well in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or any of those battleground states, Michigan, that the Democrats are going to have to win in 2020. | |
| And it's being played out in the polling. | |
| President Trump's polling has never been better, not just according to right-wing poll firms, also according to Gallup polling, which isn't particularly favorable to Trump. | |
| And the Democrats' polling couldn't be worse, and they really blew it tonight. | |
| I mean, they had a chance to move past impeachment. | |
| President Trump, so smart, did not bring up impeachment, didn't bring it up even once. | |
| Because watching this speech tonight, you realize that all of this impeachment, which makes up all the news cycles, that's all everybody's talking about, that's going to be a punchline in history. | |
| That is not going to be what historians talk about. | |
| It's going to be a shame for the Democratic Party, a low point and a punchline. | |
| What historians are going to talk about are all the things that were mentioned in the State of the Union. | |
| He was very wise to leave it out. | |
| And if Democrats don't get beyond this angry, frowning, cross your arms... | |
| They're certainly not going to do well in November. | |
| And we're seeing that in the numbers. | |
| We're seeing that in Iowa. | |
| We will get to the debacle in Iowa in just a second. | |
| We will get to the imminent collapse of the Biden campaign and the surge of Bernie. | |
| What that means, too, because we're seeing two visions of America. | |
| We're seeing the State of the Union vision that the president gave us, and we're seeing the rising socialist vision of Bernie Sanders. | |
| And those two visions could not be more different. | |
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| It's good to be in good habits, not in bad habits. | |
| We saw a lot of bad habits in the audience at the State of the Union. | |
| We're seeing a lot of bad habits on the campaign trail right now. | |
| All of that is boding very well for the president. | |
| The president is now polling at 49%, according to Gallup Poll. | |
| Now, you might say, 49%, that's not good, that's less than 50. | |
| True. | |
| But it's the best that Gallup has given President Trump at any point in his presidency. | |
| And let's not forget, Trump won the election the first time, too. | |
| He's also beating Barack Obama at this same stage in his presidency. | |
| And don't forget, Barack Obama got re-elected. | |
| It's boding very well for Trump because he's doing the thing. | |
| He's actually delivering results. | |
| The real reason that the State of the Union address was so good is not the flair. | |
| It's the fact that it was true. | |
| He's really delivering on results. | |
| Whereas everything the Democrats are doing is just about a fictional narrative. | |
| So they have a ton of investigations about Russian collusion, but Russian collusion wasn't real. | |
| They're launching investigations about how he didn't pay his taxes. | |
| but we know he did pay his taxes. | |
| We saw some of his tax returns. | |
| They're launching investigations about a quid pro quo impeachable offense in the Ukraine that didn't happen. | |
| It's all just imaginary nonsense. | |
| Actually, bringing it back to Rush Limbaugh again, Rush Limbaugh had this beautiful moment in his announcement that he has this illness, and he said, I don't like to talk about myself, and he really doesn't. | |
| He tells some jokes about how he's got talent on loan from God. | |
| But the reason his show is so good, he's talking about the things that matter to people. | |
| He respects his audience, and he's really giving them some value. | |
| That's what the Trump administration is doing, not just in the state of the union, but in the union generally. | |
| The Democrats are not doing that, and it shows in the polling. | |
| So Trump doing very well in the polling. | |
| Democrats collapsing. | |
| They can't even conduct their own election. | |
| The first state that's voting in the Democratic presidential primary, we still don't have the results. | |
| As of this taping, we've got 62% of the results in. | |
| And they're pretty dodgy results, and I think everybody is pretty dismayed about this. | |
| You know, what we were told going into the 2020 Iowa caucuses is the Democrats are fired up. | |
| They can't wait to kick out Trump. | |
| They're so excited about this crop of candidates. | |
| Actually, the turnout was just as low as it was in 2016. | |
| That doesn't even account for population growth in Iowa. | |
| It was pretty low. | |
| And we still don't have the results. | |
| The results we have right now. | |
| Popular vote. | |
| This is the popular vote. | |
| This is not going to decide who wins the state, which would be decided by delegates. | |
| This is the popular vote. | |
| First place, Bernie Sanders. | |
| Second place, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. | |
| Third place, Elizabeth Warren. | |
| Fourth place, Joe Biden. | |
| A pitiful result for former Vice President Biden. | |
| Fifth place, Amy Klobuchar. | |
| That's a popular vote in terms of the delegate counts. | |
| Pete Buttigieg is in first place. | |
| He didn't win the most votes, but somehow he's winning in the delegate count. | |
| Second place, Bernie, then Warren, Biden, and Amy. | |
| That's with 62% in. | |
| This is a little strange because Pete Buttigieg, when 0% of the vote was in, declared himself the winner in Iowa. | |
| It's really strange, too, because the app that was used to report the results was produced by an ominously named company called Shadow Incorporated, which received a large infusion of cash from the Pete Buttigieg campaign. | |
| Very strange because the Democratic Party establishment has tried again and again to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders. | |
| I don't like Bernie Sanders. | |
| I don't like anything that he stands for. | |
| I think that his ideology is wicked and anti-American. | |
| We'll get to that in a second. | |
| But you gotta call a spade a spade. | |
| The guy is getting robbed. | |
| He got robbed in 2016, and it looks like there might be some shenanigans in play again. | |
| Regardless of what happened in Iowa, Bernie and Buttigieg are in a dead heat. | |
| Again, it's a little weird because going into the Iowa caucuses, the polls showed Bernie surging. | |
| The polls showed Bernie with a lead outside the margin of error. | |
| Internal polling seemed to show Bernie with a big lead. | |
| Then all of a sudden... | |
| Buttigieg swoops in and declares victory. | |
| Very odd. | |
| Now, compare Buttigieg's reaction, which was all bravado, right? | |
| He just says, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. | |
| No evidence of that whatsoever. | |
| He said, tonight, an impossible hope became an undeniable reality, which is a meaningless statement that The only meaning you could pull from that is that it's undeniable that Pete Buttigieg won Iowa, and that was very deniable because 0% of the votes were in at the time. | |
| Compare that reaction to the Iowa caucuses to Bernie Sanders' reaction. | |
| He was asked, are you going to declare victory? | |
| And he said, no, I'm going to wait until the votes come in. | |
| What we're declaring is what Jeff just talked about. | |
| Based on the information we received from our precinct captains with about 60% of the vote in, we're in pretty good shape. | |
| What's your reaction, sir, to Mayor Buttigieg last night declaring victory? | |
| I don't know how anybody declares victory before you have an official statement as the election results. | |
| So we're not declaring victory. | |
| But what we are saying is that at a time when the people of Iowa, the people of America, really want to know what the result is, when they want to see some transparency, and when the Iowa Democratic Party is not providing that timely matter, we thought it was inappropriate just to give the results that have come in from our missing capital. | |
| That response from Bernie Sanders is the response of a guy who's confident that he's got the people behind him. | |
| Pete Buttigieg's response was the response of a guy who's trying to pull a fast one. | |
| Bernie, rather, had some real confidence there, and I think he's got that confidence because regardless of what happens with the Iowa tally, if we ever get the final vote tally, he's got a lot of momentum going into New Hampshire. | |
| Same cannot be said of Joe Biden. | |
| Absolute campaign collapse. | |
| Even if Joe Biden wasn't going to win Iowa, and really he should have won Iowa because Joe Biden's entire campaign pitch is that he's electable, particularly electable in these purple states, in the Midwest, in the Rust Belt that are really going to matter, and he lost in one of the states that he probably should have won, and he didn't lose by a little, he lost by a lot, came in fourth place. | |
| It's hard to see the argument for his campaign. | |
| He's not doing very well in New Hampshire. | |
| Maybe he'll be okay in Nevada. | |
| And he's losing even his lead in South Carolina, which was the big firewall. | |
| Probably the Biden campaign is finished. | |
| There was a pro-Biden political action committee that is now planning on spending $900,000 in New Hampshire to boost the campaign. | |
| Probably not going anywhere. | |
| It's probably too late. | |
| So it looks like right now... | |
| The momentum remains with Bernie. | |
| And then you'll get a Buttigieg or a Bloomberg trying to fill the moderate lane that Biden is quickly losing. | |
| So it's coming down to Bernie. | |
| This gives us two visions for America. | |
| You got the vision of growth, of flourishing, of... | |
| Making America Great Again, that you got from President Trump. | |
| I mean, at one point in Trump's State of the Union, he actually used the phrase manifest destiny to refer to our exploration of outer space, our exploration of Mars. | |
| When he said manifest destiny, I wanted him to go full King Charles II, dissolve Pelosi's Congress, he'll be king until... | |
| Maybe I didn't want to go quite that far, but I really felt great about it. | |
| That's a thriving, flourishing vision of America. | |
| You got that on one hand, and you've got Bernie-style communism on the other hand. | |
| I don't use communism lightly. | |
| Bernie Sanders actually has defended communist regimes for his whole freaking career. | |
| The man honeymooned in the Soviet Union. | |
| That's all true. | |
| Just a quick little rundown of Bernie's record on communism. | |
| Bernie Sanders defends breadlines. | |
| You know, it's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. | |
| That's a good thing. | |
| In other countries, people don't line up for food. | |
| The rich get the food and the poor starve to death. | |
| Bread lines are a good thing. | |
| That's good. | |
| Bernie 2020, bread lines are a good thing. | |
| Bernie defends Fidel Castro. | |
| But I remember, for some reason or another, being very excited when Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba. | |
| I was a kid and I remember reading that. | |
| And it just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people. | |
| And I remember, again, very distinctly, a very distinct feeling. | |
| I was watching the debates. | |
| You remember the famous Nixon-Kennedy debates? | |
| That was the first time the presidential candidates actually debated. | |
| Actually, you know, when you read novels, people say there's a sick feeling in your stomach. | |
| Usually I'm sufficiently unemotional not to be sick, but I actually got up in the room and almost left to puke. | |
| Because for the first time in my adult life, what I was seeing is the Democrats and Republicans, both of them. | |
| And of course, as Rick points out, Kennedy was the flashing young liberal. | |
| And what we were seeing right before my eyes, way, way back then, and I didn't know anything about politics, but clearly that there really wasn't a whole lot of difference between the two. | |
| He wanted to puke because people were criticizing one of the worst commie thugs in history, Fidel Castro. | |
| Bernie defends other horrible regimes. | |
| We'll get to that in a second. | |
| And we'll get to the way to really make the argument here. | |
| Not just the argument for how great America is doing under a conservative vision, but the argument for why we must reject socialism. | |
| It's not just about economics. | |
| It's about so much more than economics. | |
| We'll get to that in a second. | |
| Doesn't it just feel like we're halfway through 2020? | |
| It does, but the truth is, we haven't even gotten started. | |
| The election is just heating up. | |
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| Bernie Sanders defends breadlines. | |
| Bernie Sanders defends Fidel Castro, said he wanted to puke when American presidents of both parties were condemning that awful dictator. | |
| Bernie Sanders doesn't just defend Castro, he defends communists in Nicaragua. | |
| How do you find the sincerity of Sandinista leaders? | |
| I was impressed. | |
| I was impressed by Father Descoto because he is a very gentle, very loving man. | |
| Ortega is an impressive guy. | |
| Actually, the bread lines are good. | |
| Actually, Fidel Castro is good. | |
| Actually, the Sandinistas are good. | |
| Bernie defends the USSR, the Soviet Union, the evil empire itself. | |
| When we were in Moscow, for example, we're extremely impressed by their public transportation system. | |
| The stations themselves were absolutely beautiful. | |
| Chandeliers that were beautiful. | |
| It was a very, very effective system. | |
| Also, I was impressed by the youth programs that they have. | |
| But this wasn't all just in the past. | |
| Wasn't all just back in the day when Bernie was a young idealist. | |
| It's even when Bernie was an ancient communist idealist. | |
| Bernie is still defending socialist thugs today like Maduro in Venezuela. | |
| Why have you stopped short of calling Maduro of Venezuela a dictator? | |
| Well, I think it's fair to say that the last election was undemocratic. | |
| But there are still democratic operations taking place in that country. | |
| And it's not just on foreign policy. | |
| Bernie Sanders, I remember this more clearly than any other aspect of his 2016 campaign. | |
| He was asked a question about consumer choice. | |
| And Bernie decided, right here at home, to emphasize what his style of socialism means. | |
| He decided to pull up One of the worst scourges facing the American people that we have too many deodorants to choose from. | |
| Bernie Sanders said he goes to the supermarket and he saw so many different types of deodorant and that filled him with rage because consumers should not be able to choose that many different types of deodorant. | |
| At the end of the day, you don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry. | |
| I have visited Cuba. | |
| I've been inside the stores in Cuba. | |
| They don't have a lot of different kinds of deodorant in Cuba. | |
| They don't have a lot of anything in Cuba. | |
| It's all the same government-approved brand. | |
| It's pretty low quality. | |
| It's pretty low quality because consumers don't have a choice. | |
| It is not an exaggeration to say that that Cuban-style communist vision is Bernie Sanders' vision for America. | |
| He said it himself. | |
| Not 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago. | |
| He said it the last time he ran for president, and he believes it today. | |
| All awful. | |
| Two visions of America. | |
| Thriving, flourishing, make America great again, our best days lie ahead. | |
| It's the State of the Union vision, the Trump vision. | |
| Socialism is the other vision. | |
| In another State of the Union address, President Trump said, America will never be a socialist country. | |
| Got a big round of applause. | |
| I hope that's true. | |
| There are signs that young people are moving towards socialism. | |
| The good news about that, the silver lining is that most of the people who say that don't even know what socialism is. | |
| Conservatives go wrong because we argue against socialism From a purely economic perspective and particularly from utility, often you'll hear socialism doesn't work. | |
| Socialism destroys the economy. | |
| Socialism is inefficient. | |
| It's not the best way to allocate different goods in the economy. | |
| Yeah, that's all true. | |
| But the real problem with socialism is not just that it's inefficient, you know, and you can't buy as much stuff with socialism. | |
| The real problem with socialism is that it is evil. | |
| It's evil. | |
| It's wicked. | |
| It's inhuman. | |
| It's wrong. | |
| It's vicious. | |
| That's how you gotta argue against socialism. | |
| Nobody cares if your taxes are gonna be a little bit higher and you can't buy as many cheap plastic goods from China. | |
| That's not the argument. | |
| That's not gonna resonate with anybody. | |
| The argument against socialism is that it is evil. | |
| When you speak in those kind of moral terms, it becomes clear. | |
| And you can look at it in the history of Western religion. | |
| Pope Leo XIII, one of the great popes, when socialism was getting really popular back 100, 120 years ago, Pope Leo XIII wrote a couple papal encyclicals about this. | |
| He referred to socialism not as inefficient and you can't buy as many things. | |
| He referred to it as a plague, a pest, a wicked confederacy stealing the very gospel itself to advance the depraved teachings of the socialists, depraved. | |
| He said that it was empathically unjust. | |
| He warned people. | |
| He said, And it wasn't just 100 or | |
| 120 years ago that we heard this from people. | |
| We heard it from Pope John Paul II, one of the guys who took down communism, one of the great men of the 20th century. | |
| He said, on the utilitarian argument, he said, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. | |
| Then he goes on to say, The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. | |
| Not that it's economic in nature. | |
| Not that it's just not that efficient. | |
| That it actually has to do with who we are as humans. | |
| He goes on. | |
| And that is evil. | |
| That is wicked. | |
| That is wrong. | |
| That is how we've got to talk about socialism. | |
| People are pulled by moral arguments. | |
| The left is always trying to make moral arguments. | |
| Their moral arguments are completely incoherent. | |
| I saw one tonight when President Trump was speaking about the State of the Union. | |
| I saw one argument that said on Twitter, the guy said, a lot of late-term abortions saves many lives. | |
| I thought that is the least coherent statement I've ever – late-term abortion by definition ends lives. | |
| It ends every life that it touches. | |
| But that's the kind of argument they make. | |
| They say we have to kill all those babies to save people. | |
| I mean it's like out of 1984. | |
| It's George Orwell. | |
| War is peace. | |
| Freedom is slavery. | |
| Ignorance is strength. | |
| Late-term abortion saves many lives. | |
| They're completely false, deceptive arguments. | |
| But they are moral arguments. | |
| They're making the argument from the perspective. | |
| Socialism is going to save people. | |
| Socialism is going to make people happier. | |
| It's going to make people more fulfilled. | |
| That's never been true anywhere in history. | |
| Socialism is going to fulfill man's promise. | |
| Never has. | |
| It's destroyed man's promise. | |
| Because it fundamentally misunderstands human nature. | |
| Those are the arguments that we have to make. | |
| I think President Trump has begun to make those arguments fairly well. | |
| We now need to make them, too, because the Trump era has been great. | |
| The state of our union is strong. | |
| When you look forward a couple generations, you see millennials, Gen Z, leaning pretty left-wing, leaning into socialism. | |
| And if we want to keep the good times going, and I do think our best days could lie ahead, but if we want to keep those good times going, we need to make clear that stark difference. | |
| Speaking of morality, I've got to call out Elizabeth Warren for another lie. | |
| It's not just enough to point out why the one vision is immoral. | |
| We also need to point out how the left doesn't even live up to their own standards. | |
| You know, Elizabeth Warren... | |
| Look, if all we did was focus on the lies that Elizabeth Warren tells on this show, we would never be able to talk about anything else. | |
| But Elizabeth Warren was just getting off a plane so that she could go campaign and... | |
| She got caught. | |
| She got caught with her hand in the cookie jar. | |
| She recently answered a question from a reporter about the environmental impact of her career and her campaign. | |
| She said, quote, so I've mostly been flying commercial, but we've been trying to look at other ways that we can reduce our carbon footprint. | |
| That's everything from the car we drive up and down, blah, blah. | |
| We're trying to reduce our footprint. | |
| Just take a little listen to this. | |
| I will narrate you through this little clip of Elizabeth Warren. | |
| She gets off of this private airplane And there's a reporter there filming, taking pictures. | |
| And Elizabeth Warren gets off. | |
| No big deal. | |
| She's got some staffers in front of her. | |
| Then you can see Liz Warren sees the reporter. | |
| And what does she do? | |
| She hides. | |
| She hides right behind one of her staffers. | |
| And whenever the reporter kind of moves, she kind of moves behind too because she knows where the camera line is and she doesn't want to get caught. | |
| They don't want to get caught in their hypocrisy. | |
| They don't want to get caught in the incoherence of the arguments that they're making. | |
| And it's our job to point them out. | |
| Trump did a great job of that tonight. | |
| You can make that in a positive way. | |
| You don't need to just dunk on people all the time. | |
| You don't need to make it personal. | |
| Trump didn't make it personal at all tonight, about himself at least. | |
| He didn't make it about this impeachment farce. | |
| He didn't make it about how the Democrats done him wrong. | |
| He didn't. | |
| He just made the positive argument for what he was doing, why his vision was better than the other vision. | |
| It was terribly effective. | |
| It was really great. | |
| I'll just leave you on this. | |
| I have to get to this story before we go. | |
| This is from CNN. Right. | |
| CNN is reporting on this public health crisis in a communist country, China. | |
| This is the coronavirus scare that is now claiming multiple lives. | |
| It seems to have started because people were eating bat soup, something that I just don't recommend you ever do. | |
| Everyone's very nervous about this. | |
| There have been some cases in the United States and in other places. | |
| So there's a task force now being assembled by the White House to deal with this so it doesn't become a big problem. | |
| How do you think CNN covers that? | |
| CNN covers it by tweeting out, quote, Coronavirus Task Force, another example of Trump administration's lack of diversity. | |
| That's the big takeaway. | |
| That the Trump administration task force to deal with the scary, crazy bat flu that's killing people has too many white guys on it. | |
| That's the problem. | |
| I'd like to point out that the Trump administration task force on this coronavirus is exactly as racially diverse as the 2020 Democratic presidential field right now. | |
| But that's neither here nor there. | |
| Who's counting? | |
| The point is, when you're looking at the problems... | |
| It doesn't have to be that complicated. | |
| I think people in politics, they're always trying to game this out. | |
| How can I get the advantage? | |
| How can I position myself? | |
| How can I make myself look really good and look better than that guy? | |
| It's kind of the Pete Buttigieg idea, right? | |
| I'm going to use these words in a mealy-mouthed way to pretend like I won Iowa even though there's no evidence that I won Iowa yet. | |
| How am I going to game it over? | |
| It can be a lot more simple than that. | |
| Tell the truth. | |
| Do the things that people want you to do. | |
| Mean what you say. | |
| Stop making everything about you. | |
| Just do your job. | |
| That's what the State of the Union was. | |
| Beyond all of the good rhetoric, and there was pretty good rhetoric. | |
| It wasn't Shakespeare or anything. | |
| It was well written. | |
| But beyond all of that, the reason it was a good State of the Union is because the guy did what he said he was going to do. | |
| Rush Limbaugh. | |
| The reason Rush Limbaugh is the peerless broadcaster is because it's just not about him. | |
| He just tells the truth as he sees it and he respects his audience. | |
| It's not that complicated. | |
| The reason that the task force out of the Trump administration is a good idea is because it's going to keep us all from getting this awful illness. | |
| Who cares what the people look like on the task force? | |
| No one's going to know their names, ever. | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| It can be that simple. | |
| If we just do the thing, I think that's one of the great lessons of the Trump era. | |
| There was so much malaise going into 2016. | |
| You remember eight years of Obama was so awful. | |
| Hillary Clinton had a 99% chance of winning. | |
| The country was just doomed. | |
| I mean, I just felt bad on election day. | |
| I didn't think Trump was going to win necessarily. | |
| The polls looked so bad. | |
| It's all lost, right? | |
| And then it wasn't. | |
| And then things are looking really good. | |
| The state of our union has never been stronger and the president says that our best days could lie ahead. | |
| They absolutely could. | |
| Won't be that complicated. | |
| We just have to do those very basic things. | |
| We have to lean into our duty. | |
| We have to love our country and we have to try to, regardless of whether half the country is going to sit down and yell at us and be so upset, we just do those basic things. | |
| Grow jobs. | |
| Treat people with dignity. | |
| Don't take away all of their stuff. | |
| Love America. | |
| Make America great again. | |
| It's as simple. | |
| Who knew that it was as simple as that? | |
| That's our show. | |
| We've got a lot more to get to. | |
| We'll just have to get to that tomorrow. | |
| In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| See you then. | |
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