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Feb. 18, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:32
Ep. 496 - Obama Didn’t Build That

Barack Obama claims credit for President Trump’s booming economy, Bernie Sanders loses his mic to topless vegans at a campaign rally, and Mike Bloomberg intends to win the presidency by telling Americans how stupid they are. Then, a Democratic Alabama legislator introduces a bill that would require men to get vasectomies. We will examine why I’m skipping Birmingham on this semester’s campus speaking tour. Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://www.dailywire.com/coldwar. In Part 1 we peel back the layers of mystery cloaking the Terror state run by the Kremlin, and watch as America takes its first small steps onto the stage of world leadership. 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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Barack Obama claims credit for President Trump's booming economy.
Bernie Sanders loses his mic to topless vegans at a campaign rally.
And Mike Bloomberg intends to win the presidency by telling Americans how stupid they are.
Then, a Democratic Alabama legislator introduces a bill that would require men to get vasectomies.
We will examine why I'm skipping Birmingham on this semester's campus speaking tour.
All that and more.
more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show.
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Barack Obama claiming credit for President Trump's economy.
To prepare for today's show, I spent some time watching old videos of Barack Obama, reading old stories about Barack Obama.
uh, I actually forgot what a terrible President Obama was.
And I bet you did too.
You've got to go back and just...
We're in such a different moment right now where we've got this energetic president.
We've got him pushing conservative policies.
We've got him being uncommonly honest with the American people, for better or for worse.
He's saying things and he's actually doing those things.
A great example of this would be the embassy in Jerusalem.
Every president for my lifetime has promised to follow American policy, move the embassy and Israel to Jerusalem.
No one expects him to do it.
Trump comes in because he's such a political novice.
He actually does it.
People are shocked by that.
Barack Obama, exactly the opposite.
He doesn't do what he says he's going to do.
He speaks in these mealy-mouthed words.
He flops.
He fails.
And then he tries to take credit for other people's success.
So here's the tweet that Obama sent out.
Quote, 11 years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way For more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.
So it's all thanks to Obama.
Trump guy didn't do anything.
He's just riding on Obama's success, right?
Wrong.
The historical record is pretty clear and Obama flopped on the economy.
What did Obama do?
2009 comes around.
He signs the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
That was supposed to provide a little under $800 billion in stimulus, so-called stimulus money.
It of course ran over budget, so the total was $831 billion.
And we were supposed to get shovel-ready jobs as a result of this stimulus package, except the shovel-ready jobs didn't materialize.
They didn't come.
For the first two years of Obama's presidency, the unemployment rate It was about 10%.
10%.
It's hard for us to imagine that now, to even remember our recent past, because we now have basically no unemployment.
We're now at record lows of unemployment.
But it remained at about 10% for the first two years under Obama.
The rate finally began to tick down.
But that doesn't even tell the whole story because part of the reason that the rate ticked down is because Americans just gave up looking for work.
So as the rate was ticking down after 2010, 2011, it started to go down a little bit.
That was because 8 million Americans who could have been working were not working.
And to be fair to Barack Obama, that number was going down already, so there were people who were leaving the workforce anyway, and that was expected to continue.
But they were only expecting an additional 3 million Americans to leave the workforce.
So you had about 5 million Americans who were of working age, who should have been working, who analysts predicted would be working under a good economy.
They were gone.
5 million people in the prime of their life who should have been working, gone.
So the unemployment rate dropped, sure, but that didn't even tell the story.
At the same time, wages flatlined.
So people who you would hope would be making a little bit more money were not.
At the same time, 300,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared.
It was actually a little more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs gone, sent overseas or automated out of existence or just disappeared because of the bad economy.
Now, Barack Obama, what he tried to do is say, look, this is the result of inevitable technological change and there's just nothing we can do about it.
Those jobs are just going to go away.
As late as 2016, So don't labor under the misimpression that this was in those terrible days of the recession and they didn't know what was happening.
This was as late as 2016, the year that President Trump was elected.
Barack Obama said the manufacturing jobs, a lot of them just aren't going to come back and there's nothing we can do about it.
At a town hall in June of that year, he was asked by an Indiana steel worker what happened to all the jobs and the answer he gave was to just throw up his hands.
How are you doing, Mr.
President?
How are you?
My name is Eric Cottenham, and I'm representing the Steelworkers Union, local 1999, and I'm trying to find out what do we have left as far as all of our jobs are leaving.
Some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come back.
And when somebody says, like the person you just mentioned, who I'm not going to advertise for, that he's going to bring all these jobs back.
Well, how exactly are you going to do that?
What are you going to do?
There's no answer to it.
He just says, well, I'm going to negotiate a better deal.
Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that?
What magic wand do you have?
And usually the answer is he doesn't have an answer.
I don't know if he had a magic wand, but he did bring the jobs back.
In the first two years of Donald Trump's administration, more than six times as many manufacturing jobs were created as were created during the last two years of the Obama administration.
This was Barack Obama's big mistake.
This was his fatal flaw.
He was a pretty good rhetorician, meaning he was pretty good at using slick talking points to kind of get around his bad legacy and his bad record.
But he took it a So this big recession allowed Barack Obama to make excuses.
All we ever heard for years and years was, this was the worst recession since the Great Depression.
We pulled the country back from the brink.
This country was heading off the cliff, and we pulled it back from the cliff.
Republicans drove this country, put their feet on the accelerator, driving right off the cliff, right?
He just kept blaming everything on the economy that he inherited from George W. Bush.
But he made this one fatal error, which was that he made predictions.
And one of those predictions is the manufacturing jobs aren't coming back, like he just told that Indiana steel worker, except they did come back.
And so when the predictions are proven wrong, then you begin to see that his grasp of the economy isn't so great.
The best case that Barack Obama could make for his administration's handling of the economy was that he, quote, saved us from a Great Depression.
That's what you heard all of his defenders say, too.
The trouble is that's an unfalsifiable historical hypothetical, right?
There's no way for me to prove or disprove that Barack Obama saved us from a Great Depression because the Great Depression didn't happen.
And so he got a lot of credit for these unfalsifiable claims about what would have happened if Barack Obama hadn't come along.
You can falsify, however, his predictions.
And we did falsify his predictions.
And as a result of that, because he was wrong about such a key aspect of his economic policy, we begin to realize that his entire economic policy was that weak.
We begin to realize that the claims he's making that are hypothetical about saving us from a Great Depression, there's no evidence for that either.
President Trump responded to this yesterday, because of course he did.
You'd think there was going to be a tweet Claiming credit for what he has done.
A tweet from a former president that Trump is not going to respond to.
Of course he did.
And his response was really, really, really politically shrewd.
Some people don't want to give him credit for it, but it was a really great response.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Obama makes this claim, tries to take credit for the Trump economy.
President Trump responds.
Here's what he says, quote, did you hear the latest con job?
President Obama is now trying to take credit for the economic boom taking place under the Trump administration.
He had the weakest recovery since the great depression, despite zero fed rate and massive quantitative easing.
So there were low interest rates and the government was printing money.
Now best jobs numbers ever had to rebuild our military, which was totally depleted.
Fed rate up taxes and regulations way down.
If Dems won in 2016, the USA would be in big economic depression and military trouble right now.
The All caps, the best is yet to come.
Keep America great.
Now, it's hard to hear that because it's written in this kind of crazy-looking syntax, but it's that third-to-last line here, which is the key.
It's this hypothetical.
If Dems won in 2016...
Now, if you read it without the parentheses, he says, if Dems won in 2016, the USA would be in big economic and military trouble right now.
But then, right after economic, he puts in parentheses, depression, what he's doing is inverting the Obama hypothetical strategy.
Because Obama's only claim for his legacy is, I saved us from a Great Depression, which you can't prove or disprove because it's hypothetical.
What Trump is doing is he's going right at that legacy claim and saying, If the Democrats had won in 2016, we might have a depression.
Would we?
I don't know.
It's a question.
Thank goodness we didn't have to find out, though.
If Obama hadn't won in 2008, would we have gone into a depression?
Gosh, I don't know.
Really glad Obama won.
Trump is using the exact same thing, going right at their only claim.
It's really smart.
Lest you accuse me of saying the president is playing 4D chess here.
I don't know what dimension of chess he is playing, but I do know that he's very good at PR. He's very good at playing the media.
He sees the tactic that the Democrats are using, and he just clobbers it right back on top of them.
Really smart response.
And it's not going unnoticed.
the mainstream media are noticing the economic boom, even the mainstream media, even the networks, even ABC news.
And so Martha Raddatz on ABC just had Tom Steyer, who I guess is running for president.
He's that billionaire climate change guy who for some reason is still on the democratic debate stages.
He goes on the show and is asked about this.
Martha Raddatz says, 70% of Americans think the economy is doing well.
How are you going to convince them that it's not?
It's just, Steyer, you say that you can take on Donald Trump on the economy.
But the latest Quinnipiac national poll again released just this week says 70% of voters describe the nation's economy as excellent or good.
So how do you convince them that a change is needed when they think they're doing so well under Donald Trump?
I think if you take a look at what he says...
Everything he says superficially sounds right, but is actually a lie.
So when he says the economy is growing, I can show that in fact all the money is going to rich people.
But I want to go back to that 70% number.
You talk about the wealthy.
They're not all wealthy people.
70% say the economy is good and they're doing well.
Well, I'm just saying, here we are on a show and you're standing up for Mr.
Trump's version of the economy.
And I'm telling you...
I'm telling you about a national poll.
I'm not standing up for anybody.
I'm telling you about a national poll.
You know, every so often these news networks get one bit of unbiased journalism out there, and surely that's what we just saw from Martha Raddatz.
We actually had to edit out the awkward pauses because we don't have time, but she asks him these questions.
She says, what are you going to say to that?
I mean, 70% of Americans, those aren't just the super rich, it's 70% of people.
And he just kind of stammers.
He goes, uh, but it's bad.
It's really bad.
People know that it's not bad.
The polls show it.
Even the mainstream media want to admit it.
Puts the Dems We're good to go.
Bernie Sanders was recently at a campaign rally.
There's, I think, five or six days left for the Nevada caucuses.
Actually, it's even less than that now.
I think we're now down to four days left.
But Bernie Sanders is out there giving a campaign rally and some radical environmental activists jumps on the stage, some of whom were topless, jumps on the stage, grabs his microphone, and starts screaming about milk.
Bernie, I'm your biggest supporter and I'm here to ask you to stop propping up the dairy industry and to stop propping up animal agriculture.
I believe in you.
I believe in you, Bernie, but I don't believe in yogurt or cheese or milk.
Please, Bernie, stop.
This is the pressing issue of our time.
That woman was not topless, but there have been some activists.
I don't really know what the relation of being nude to the dairy industry is, but anyway, I don't know.
There's some connection because they keep doing that.
Or they're just obviously lunatics.
And that is certainly the case with this woman, right?
This group of activists with the Animal Rights Network, Direct Action, Everywhere are doing this.
They're jumping on stage.
They're following Bernie Sanders around.
They're becoming hysterical over the cruelty of drinking milk, how awful that is to animals.
Now, mind you, they're pretty quiet on the issue of abortion.
Taking milk from a cow is the gravest cruelty and evil in the world, but killing an unborn baby, that's totally fine.
Killing a million of them a year, no problem.
They don't really talk about it.
Something tells me if they did talk about it, they would very likely be in support of it.
The fact that Bernie Sanders' rallies attracts these kind of people tells you a lot about the candidate, tells you a lot about the people who go to the Bernie rallies.
But people are saying this is not good for him, he's got to get this under control.
I don't think so.
I think it's exactly the opposite.
I think these videos, these incidents, these crazy activist moments actually help Bernie Sanders.
And if we get enough of them, he's going to win the nomination.
We'll get to why that is in a second.
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I think these crazy moments help Bernie.
Okay, Bernie's biggest advantage in this race is his lifelong impotence.
His lifelong incompetence.
He hasn't done anything.
He hasn't really shown specific political power.
He hasn't passed big legislation.
This is why his career is taking off in his mid to late 70s.
Why wasn't he a big success when he was a young man?
The advantage he has here is he's cultivated this kind of hapless grandpa image.
He's cultivated this Larry David.
I don't know.
They took my microphone.
What can I do?
And it makes him seem harmless.
But the ideas that he's peddling are not harmless.
This guy, in political ideology, is a stone-cold commie thug, okay?
We've played the clips on this show many times.
He has defended Fidel Castro long after the Cuban Revolution.
He said that American opposition to commies in Cuba made him want to puke.
And he defended that thug, that animal, Fidel Castro, for his whole life.
He defends Venezuela.
He defends the dictator of Venezuela right now.
He defended some of the worst regimes in history.
He defended the Soviet Union.
He didn't just defend the Soviet Union.
He honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
He didn't just honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
He sat shirtless, swilling vodka, singing commie folk songs with the Ruskies in the Soviet Union.
This guy defends stone cold killer regimes.
Now, in a younger man, this would be very off-putting.
In a man who seemed virile and potent and tough, this would be very scary.
We would reject it outright.
But because Bernie is this sort of lovable old coot, or at least he looks that way, it helps him.
It helps to mainstream his ideas.
All right?
If it were a young guy cheering on bread lines, bread lines are actually good.
Direct quote.
If he were a guy who seemed dangerous to us, we would reject it.
But because he seems helpless, it's going to allow those ideas to go on.
That's why Bernie Sanders should be praying that more people steal his microphone.
It softens him, and it provides the sugar that will coat the poison that they're trying to shove down the throats of Americans.
Now, we also have to get to the other old rich guy in the Democratic race.
I'm talking, of course...
I hate to do it.
I have to sort of defend Mike Bloomberg a little bit.
I'll attack him in a second, but I have to sort of defend him because I think there are some unfair attacks against Mike Bloomberg in that people are calling him a racist or a bigot or some evil guy.
I don't think that's the case.
There are plenty of good reasons to attack Mike Bloomberg, which we'll get to in a second.
His presidency, if it ever occurred, heaven forfend, would be terrible.
But I don't think the guy's a racial bigot.
So there's more footage has surfaced of Mike Bloomberg saying very un-PC things on the issue of race.
Here's the new video from years ago that's come up.
Black and Latino males aged, let's say, 16 to 25 that don't have jobs, don't have any prospects, don't know how to find jobs, don't know what their skill sets are, don't know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively.
Alright, so this clip, which was taken a little bit out of context, but it's from an interview he gave years ago where Bloomberg describes people who are more at risk of committing crime.
In the same interview, he went on to say,"...a lot of statistics show that if the father is engaged, it gives the kids some understanding that he's heading down the wrong path, and then assign mentors to them on a one-on-one basis so that there is somebody who has been successful, has a job, has a family." Fits in society and that they can go to.
You know, a lot of these kids, it isn't that they're bad kids, it's that once they've made a mistake, it's very difficult to recover from that.
But we have an obligation to them, if not for compassionate reasons, just for selfish reasons.
Three-quarters of all kids in New York City that go to jail serve a period and come out, go right back to the jail.
Bloomberg's critics, especially on the left, I think these clips are all being leaked by left-wing Democratic campaigns.
They're saying that this is evidence of Bloomberg's racism.
That is not racism.
It just isn't.
I mean, racism doesn't have to be this subjective thing that's based on our feelings.
There are objective measures, right?
Is he talking about race?
Is he making these categorical statements about race that are discriminatory and demeaning?
And no.
He's not saying that all black and Hispanic people are destined to a future of violence and failure.
He doesn't say that at all.
He's not making any categorical claims about people on the basis of their race.
If we're talking about his categories, he's talking also about sex.
He's talking also about age.
He's talking also about family structure.
Specifically, the age comments show that he's not making a racist or a sexist argument.
If he's saying young people in this demographic from the age of 18 to 25 are very likely to commit crime, but not people at age 26, the people at age 26 are the same race as the people at age 25.
So what he's saying is there are a lot of factors here.
Mike Bloomberg would be a terrible president, so it really pains me to defend him in any way.
He would be a terrible president and there are many reasons to attack him.
For one, he hates the Constitution and he gaslights people who defend the Constitution.
Mike Bloomberg, when he was mayor, and after he was mayor, started an organization called Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
And this was his anti-Second Amendment group and he wants to get rid of the Second Amendment.
He called it Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
Let me ask you a question.
How many mayors support illegal guns?
Where's the group that's mayors for illegal guns?
Nobody's for illegal guns.
But he knew that if he actually named the group what he wanted to, which is mayors against guns, he would be rightly accused of opposing our constitution, which he does.
So he had to call it mayors against illegal guns.
Totally dishonest.
On a related note, actually, Mike Bloomberg has no regard for the rule of law.
So Mike Bloomberg, when he ran for mayor the first time, right after Rudy Giuliani...
Remember, this was right after 9-11.
Giuliani suggested maybe we make a third term for mayor so that he, America's mayor, could get the city through that awful experience.
You know, the worst crisis New York has ever faced, probably.
And Bloomberg said, no, absolutely not.
The rule of law has to stick.
No third term for Giuliani.
So...
No extra term.
So Mike Bloomberg wins, and then he immediately adds a third term.
So Mike Bloomberg adds a third term, and then immediately after he wins the third term, Says we've got to get rid of the third term again.
He's just flagrantly violating the law or changing the law to suit his own preferences.
He's also a nanny state liberal who wants to take away even the most trivial choices from people.
So you saw this especially in soda and cigarettes.
He wouldn't let you smoke anywhere.
He wouldn't even let you smoke in the parks.
And he made it illegal to buy big gulps at 7-Eleven.
You couldn't buy a large...
I'm not saying cigarettes are good.
I'm saying that these kind of indulgences are a small comfort and consolation to people.
They kind of like them.
It's not the biggest deal in the world, and yet...
Mike Bloomberg went after them.
He made it a top priority of his administration in New York.
Proof of H.L. Mencken's assertion that puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy.
That's what a Bloomberg presidency would look like.
On top of all that, Bloomberg seems to have zero connection to people.
Okay, he wants to tell people what to do, but he doesn't seem to enjoy spending any time with them.
And you saw this in another clip that is actually worth going after Bloomberg for.
You know, the clip where they pull up something from 20 years ago and he made some comment about crime.
That's not why you should go after Bloomberg, all right?
And I don't think it's evidence of racial bigotry.
You should go after Bloomberg because he seems not really to respect people.
You just saw this come out where he...
Made the claim that farmers are just a bunch of idiots.
Anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.
It's a process.
You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.
Then we had 300, you could learn that.
Then you have 300 years of the industrial society.
You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job.
And we created a lot of jobs.
One point Ninety-eight percent of the world worked in agriculture today.
It's two percent in the United States.
Now comes the information economy.
And the information economy is fundamentally different because it's built around replacing people with technology.
And the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze.
And that is a whole degree level You have to have a different skill set.
You have to have a lot more gray matter.
You have to have a lot more gray matter.
You know, you've got to have a lot more brains.
Not like those idiot farmers.
You've got to be able to think and analyze.
You see, look, what you don't understand, you...
Plebes, you peasants.
What you don't understand is that if you want to be a middle manager in the HR department of the widget factory, you need to use these really highly developed analytical skills.
But if you want to make food grow out of the ground, if you want to manage food, The seed, soil, climate, the changing weather, changing temperatures.
If you want to manage all of that, you don't need a brain.
You're basically a mule, right?
If you want to farm, or if you want to raise animals, you want to raise cattle, you don't need to analyze anything.
You just kind of walk out every day and say, I think it's warm today.
I hope it grows.
That's how it works.
Of course, it's the opposite of that.
Of course, it requires many, many more analytical skills.
It requires a lot more gray matter to make something grow out of the ground or to raise animals or to manage the whole economy of agriculture than it does to be some pencil pusher in some random department of the widget factory.
But that is the bias of Mike Bloomberg because Mike Bloomberg doesn't have a whole lot of respect for people, doesn't have a whole lot of respect for his fellow countrymen.
That's why he's willing to deprive them of their basic civil rights under the Constitution, like the Second Amendment.
And that's why he mocks farmers as not having a whole lot of gray matter.
That's why we should go after Mike Bloomberg.
Those are good arguments for it.
But taking these kind of cheap shots from the far left against him on crime or something, I don't think that's a particularly winning strategy.
And we've also got to get to the other really, really old guy in the Democratic race, Joe Biden, because he is, speaking of far leftism, he is now running as far to the left as he possibly can.
And this is not winning him left-wingers, but this is turning off a lot of moderates.
He made a claim that you hear the left make a lot of About immigration.
We will examine why that's just totally bogus.
Then, there is a failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate who is now going to accept the vice presidential nomination.
Nobody's asked her, but she's going to accept it anyway.
We'll get to that in a second, and we'll get to why I'm not speaking on campus in Alabama this year, because I don't want to get a forced vasectomy.
We'll get to all of that in a second.
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We hit Bloomberg.
We got to get to Joe Biden.
Of those three guys, Joe Biden may be saying the most radical thing of all of them right now.
Which you wouldn't imagine, right?
You got this crazy old communist.
You got a guy who, as mayor, all he wanted to do was steal people's Second Amendment civil liberties and steal their sodas and steal their cigarettes.
And then you got Joe Biden, allegedly the moderate in this race, but he's running so far to the left now because he's flailing.
He sees the nomination running away from him.
It's not working.
Polls are showing it's not winning him some massive new left-wing support.
It's just killing his support among the moderates.
The comment that Biden made, which I find so offensive, both intellectually and nationally offensive, is that he said that illegal aliens...
Who are here, who are young.
They call them dreamers or DACA. Mind you, some of these guys are in their 40s at this point, but we all are supposed to imagine these five-year-olds looking up with these big cute eyes or something.
Some of these people are fully grown adults.
Joe Biden says that DACA, dreamers, illegal aliens, are more American than many Americans.
These DACA students are more Americans than most Americans are.
No, I'm serious.
Think about it.
No, I'm serious.
Think about it.
They're not.
People who are not Americans cannot be more American than Americans.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I hope my argument has been convincing.
I'll take you through it again.
People who are not Americans People who do not have the quality of being American cannot be more American than Americans.
That's the whole argument.
This is one of these dumb talking points that comes up on the left a lot.
And they're always of the, if you really think about it, variety, right?
They'll say something that's just patently untrue and absurd, and then they'll say, but if you really think about it, actually, Joe Biden literally said that, right?
He goes, these DACA students are more American than most Americans.
I mean, think about it.
Okay, well, I have thought about it, and that doesn't make any sense.
Part of what's going on here is Because, just on a philosophical level, the left has lost its grasp of objective reality because the left now tells us that men are not really men and women are not really women and we can't really know anything and there's your truth and my truth but know the truth.
Because of that, They will make absurd statements, but if they say them emphatically and repeatedly, then they think that that is enough to make those false statements true, which they're not.
The other error they're falling into here is they're trying to make American-ness something more than it is.
Somebody responded when I pointed this out on Twitter.
They said, Michael, the question is, what does it mean to be American?
Is it just merely having American citizenship?
Yes.
Yep.
There are things that are like Americans do or like Americans are.
There are certain qualities that Americans have.
Grit, determination, independence, religiosity.
Those are all qualities of Americans.
But those are not synonymous with being American.
The only thing that makes you an American is being a citizen of America.
That's it.
That's the whole story.
There are plenty of...
Non-Americans, there are plenty of foreigners, plenty of illegal aliens, who are wonderful people.
There are also plenty of Americans who are rotten, no good people.
American is not a synonym for perfect, wonderful.
There are qualities that these things have, but American refers to Americans.
They want to confuse this issue because what the left really wants to say is there's no such thing as citizenship.
Citizenship doesn't mean anything.
That's why they went from illegal alien, which is the precise term, to illegal immigrant, to undocumented immigrant, to future American.
As though the only distinction between Americans and non-Americans is some documents.
No, it's a specific document, namely if you are a citizen or not.
The only difference between illegal aliens and Americans is Americans are current Americans and illegal aliens are future Americans.
No, they're not entitled to American citizenship, just like I'm not entitled to Danish citizenship or Chinese citizenship.
I'm not a future Chinese person.
I'm an American.
I'm something different, okay?
This substitution of American for just goodness is very tempting to conservatives because we love our country and we know that we have a very good country.
We should not fall into that.
We've got to be very, very precise about our language because the way that the left wins the culture...
I've talked about this ad nauseum.
I did a Prager video on it.
I've done speeches on it.
I'm writing a book on it.
The way that the left wins the culture...
Is by using vague language, using tempting language, intoxicating language.
American, yeah, American just means good and some of these illegal aliens are good.
No.
Be very specific because what they would have us do by using that kind of vague, tempting language is totally subvert the country, undermine any kind of American identity.
I mean, what they're saying is that a country has nothing to do with the people of that country.
They've already said that country has nothing to do with borders, right?
They want to get rid of borders.
They say this is stolen land, occupied land.
It's not legitimate.
But now they're saying that even the people of the country have nothing to do with the country.
In other words, how many million Americans?
320 million, just about?
That if you took all 320 million Americans, removed them from the country, and then replaced them with foreigners who share these abstract, vague qualities of Americanness, that you would have the same country.
No country in the history of the world has ever believed that.
And America has never believed that.
And I don't think America believes that currently, which is why Joe Biden is collapsing.
And why the flailing is only getting worse.
Got to pay attention to that, though, because when the Democrats, when the left has no mooring in that objective reality, when they're just putting up these kind of spineless, flattering, oily politicians like Joe Biden, then all of a sudden the most moderate guy in the race all of a sudden can become one of the most radical.
Speaking of radical Democratic candidates, speaking of having no regard for truth, Stacey Abrams, failed candidate for governor of Georgia, has accepted the vice presidential nomination in 2020.
She hasn't been offered it, but she's accepted it.
For those of you who don't remember Stacey Abrams, which I suspect is most of you, Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, and she lost.
Then she claimed, without any evidence whatsoever, that the election was stolen.
Now she goes on TV as if she won the election.
So it is no surprise that in a recent appearance on The View, Abrams said that she would accept vice presidential nomination, which she, of course, has not received.
The first time I was on here, I got the question about running as VP during the primary.
And I very apparently famously said no, because you don't run for second in a primary.
However, because that conversation started, I'm now getting the question a lot from folks.
And the answer is, of course, I would be honored to run for vice president with the nominee.
And thank you.
I mean, it's a bit disconcerting because it seems really obnoxious for me to say that out loud since I'm not, you know, no one's asked me.
But what I want people to understand is that...
You're being asked in the media.
Exactly.
The issue is, as a woman of color, especially as a black woman, this is an unusual position to be in for someone to be considered possibly the next vice president.
This is a very unusual position.
It's just unimaginable that anyone would say that a woman or a person of color or a black person could ever be the vice president, right?
I mean, certainly not the president.
There's no...
Except the very last Democratic nominee for president was a woman.
And a couple times ago, the...
Vice presidential nominee for the Republicans was a woman.
And the last president himself, the very last president, was a black guy.
This isn't unimaginable at all.
This is very imaginable.
This is eminently imaginable.
This has become routine as a matter of fact.
What is unimaginable is that somebody who is a virtual unknown in American politics, who ran for a race in Georgia and lost, would then try to fail upward by elevating herself to become the vice president.
That is unimaginable.
Stacey Abrams is doing this thing that Democrats keep doing.
They can't...
You see it all the way back to Barack Obama trying to take credit for the economy.
They can't point to their own accomplishments.
They can't point to anything concrete that they've done.
So they just fall into imagination land.
I wonder if this is a result of the self-esteem movement.
I wonder if this is a result of participation trophies.
That these candidates, these politicians, just cannot fathom that they lost, that they failed, that they didn't do something.
That's not possible.
They have to get the trophy.
Even if President Trump won the trophy on his economy.
Even if your opponent in the Georgia governor election won, you've got to take the trophy yourself.
You have to win as well.
But that isn't the case.
And nobody believes it.
When people see Obama trying to take credit for Trump's economy, they laugh.
Sure, there are some hard partisans who buy anything that they say.
But most people, I think, they kind of laugh about it.
Most people, when they see this failed governor candidate go on television and say, okay, I will be the vice president, they laugh about that.
They say, who are you?
You lost.
Beto O'Rourke lost a Senate race.
Then he thought he could run for president because it's not possible for the Democrats to lose.
Reality is not binding on Democrats.
Reality is not binding on the left, except eventually it is.
This is the great conservative consolation.
Russell Kirk, who wrote a great book, The Conservative Mind, said that one of the great conservative consolations is that reality eventually reasserts itself.
And so you can go off in fantasy for a little while, but eventually reality comes crashing down.
It's one of the reasons why conservatives don't get totally routed.
Initially, that book was going to be called the conservative route.
The conservatives just keep losing everything, except every so often they come back because reality reasserts itself in the end.
It's reasserting itself on Stacey Abrams, reasserting itself on Joe Biden at the It's reasserting itself on Barack Obama.
And I can't wait until reality reasserts itself in Alabama.
Actually, speaking of The View, you see another clip on this same topic from Joy Behar on The View.
There is a new bill in Alabama, in the Alabama legislature, that would require men to get vasectomies.
This is seriously making me rethink my plans to retire to Mobile, Alabama someday.
Mobile is my favorite town in the country, and now it's looking a little less appealing if that law goes through.
State Representative Rolanda Hillis, Democrat from Birmingham, filed a bill last Thursday that would mandate every Alabama man to undergo a vasectomy.
Snip, snip, within one month of his 50th birthday or the birth of his third biological child, whichever comes first.
No one's allowed to.
These Democrats really, really don't like babies.
You notice that?
They want to get them in the womb.
They want to get them before the womb.
They want to get them a new third kid.
This is HB 314 that this woman is responding to.
And HB 314 is the Human Life Protection Act.
So this is basically to say you can't kill babies in the womb.
Now this woman is going to respond and say, okay, well, men have to get vasectomies.
She says, under existing law, there are no restrictions on the reproductive rights of men.
And, you know, we've heard this before from the left.
We hear it all the time.
Joy Behar on The View made the same dumb point.
The panel of men who did this.
In Alabama?
There it is.
Yeah.
Gee, what do they have in common?
Well, I think there were, weren't there four women?
All white guys.
There weren't four women on there?
Not here.
They are.
All white guys.
Maybe we should make up a law that they should all be required to get a vasectomy.
That group in particular.
Yeah, woo.
How clever!
You got her.
You got him.
How funny.
I've never heard that.
Of course that totally avoids the issue.
Conservatives don't want to avoid the issue.
The left does want to avoid the issue.
What's the issue?
When we're talking about abortion, which is what this whole thing is about, they're not really going to mandate vasectomies in Alabama.
We're talking about abortion.
What's the question?
Is the baby a baby?
Should we be allowed to kill the baby or a million babies a year without any legal protection?
That's the question.
It would seem that the evidence that the baby is a baby is pretty strong.
The baby is human.
Nobody suggests the baby is not human.
The baby is alive.
Nobody suggests the baby is dead.
That's a miscarriage or an abortion.
The point of an abortion is to take the baby from alive to dead.
The baby, if left alone, will grow up to be a toddler and then an adult and then an old person.
It is a human life.
And so we're saying you shouldn't kill that.
It has nothing to do with the reproductive rights of women, saying mothers shouldn't be able to kill their kids.
The left wants to avoid that issue and say, you're just trying to control women's ovaries.
No, I don't care about women's ovaries.
I care about if we're killing babies.
Yeah, we're going to give you vasectomies.
Totally misses the point.
Conservatives like to talk about the issue.
The left wants to avoid the issue.
Not just on this issue, but on many issues.
That's why, by the way, conservatives are always arguing with ourselves.
You'll notice there are always these fights on the right.
All these different segments of the right.
The libertarians versus the traditionalists versus the neocons versus the religious right.
You could go on and on and on between all these segments.
They're always arguing about each other, trying to get to the heart of the issue.
That doesn't happen on the left.
On the left, there is just progressivism.
There are the progressives and also the progressives.
That's it.
The left can't argue with itself for many reasons, but the left can't form these arguments.
The left doesn't understand what arguments are being made.
And the left, most importantly, has divorced itself from objective reality.
The left is saying there is no truth.
It's your truth and his truth, but not the truth.
The left is saying that you can't say that a man is a man or a woman is a woman.
It's all very subjective.
It's all just a bunch of different interest groups.
And so, I mean, literally, if you accept that premise, it's not capable of argument.
That's why the left goes off the rails.
That's why the right reigns itself in through that kind of argumentation.
That's why you see the left claiming credit for things it never did, accepting vice presidential nominations that it never got.
Making claims that are just philosophically impossible.
That's why you see it spinning off into absurdity.
That's why you see the right grounded in reality.
Now, absurdity and fantasy wins for a while, but the reality reasserts itself in the end, and that's a nice consolation for those of us who are right and who are on the right.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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