The Left has long blamed President Trump for just about every political problem under the sun. They’ve blamed him for the sun itself and how much it’s heating our planet. That’s par for the course. But Trump Derangement Syndrome has now progressed to so advanced a stage that the American Left is blaming President Trump for schoolyard bullying. We will examine who the real bullies are and how they get away with it. Then, Postmodern Pete Buttigieg declares that words have no meaning, everyone comes out as queer, and President Trump pardons a couple of jailbirds.
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
The left has long blamed President Trump for just about every political problem under the sun.
They've blamed him for the sun itself and how much it's heating our planet.
That's par for the course.
But Trump derangement syndrome has now progressed to so advanced a stage that the American left is blaming President Trump for schoolyard bullying.
We will examine who the real bullies are and how they get away with it.
Then, postmodern Pete Buttigieg declares that words have no meaning.
Everyone comes out as queer, and President Trump pardons a couple of jailbirds.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
They can't get him on the economy.
They can't get him on foreign affairs.
They can't get him on trade.
So they got to get him on schoolyard bullying.
That's right.
That's what our terrible rotten president is doing.
Washington Post.
Washington Post just runs a huge article, news article.
Trump's words, bullied kids scarred schools.
Quote, the president's rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of children are harassed in American classrooms.
The post found.
Hundreds of children.
First of all, whenever I hear the post found, I start to discount it.
Then we're talking about a survey of hundreds of children when 50 million children in America go to public school and many more children go to private school and homeschool.
Okay, hundreds of children they talk to.
Here's how the article begins.
Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico.
And teenagers in Maine sneered, "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab.
In Tennessee, a group of middle schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let non-white students pass.
In Ohio, another group of middle schoolers surrounded a mixed race sixth grader and as she confided to her mother, told the girl, "This is Trump country." Was that Jussie Smollett?
Was that girl?
Is that a Smollett girl?
Since Trump's rise to the nation's highest office, his inflammatory language, often condemned as racist and xenophobic, condemned by whom?
By the Post, of course, goes on, has seeped into schools across America.
Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as six mimicking the president's insults and the cruel way he delivers them.
I don't believe that.
I don't believe the reporting.
I don't believe the Post.
I think they act in bad faith.
I think they lie all the time.
I think that this article was just as likely written out of the constantly revolving fiction in its writers' minds as it did from speaking to any school children.
Now, perhaps it's true.
Maybe some children are being bullied in America.
There has always been bullying for the entire history of schools, so I guess that wouldn't be any different in Trump's America as it would be at any other time.
The left is so deranged by Donald Trump that they are now blaming him for schoolyard bullying, an eternal fact of life.
By the way, before we get into why this is such BS, by the way, Just as a statistical matter, schoolyard bullying is actually down, and it's actually down significantly.
Now, how do you measure schoolyard bullying?
That's obviously a pretty difficult measurement to take.
However, in so much as we can take those measurements, and much more scientifically than the Post calling some people around the country, there is a study that came out of the U.S. Department of Education.
A recent study just showed the percentage of students reporting that they have been bullied has dropped by more than a third.
Over the last 10 years.
So, bullying has not increased because of Trump.
It's not a new epidemic invented under Donald Trump.
Schoolyard bullying is actually down by about 33%.
Look, the left is going to attack Donald Trump for anything, and if they can't find anything, they'll make something up.
But this question of bullying is pretty important, because I think bullying defines A lot of our politics today, just not in the way that the Washington Post says it does.
Some of Bernie Sanders' supporters have been accused of bullying.
Bernie Sanders says this is ridiculous.
Absolutely not.
His is not a campaign based on bullying.
It's a campaign based on love.
Here's Bernie.
What our people are involved in, we are a campaign which believes in compassion, which believes in justice.
So I don't tolerate ugly attacks against anybody.
But let me just say this.
Talk to the people in my campaign, often the African-American women in this campaign, talk to my wife about the kind of ugly attacks that have come in to us.
So right now, which is a very serious national problem, we have an internet which is essentially the Wild West.
Somebody could say, hey, I'm Anderson Cooper and Zippo say some ugly things.
And right now that cannot be stopped.
Did you catch that at the end?
At the very end, Bernie Sanders is implicitly denying that his campaign is engaging in any bullying.
He's saying, look, the internet's a crazy place.
A lot of people can pretend to be a lot of people.
The implication being people are pretending to be my supporters.
They're pretending to be me.
Never mind, by the way, that James O'Keefe at Project Veritas caught Bernie Sanders' campaign workers on video saying that once the revolution happens, they're going to send all the conservatives to the gulag, that they're going to line them up on a wall and shoot them.
We've played the videos on this show before.
Never mind that we can see examples of Bernie Sanders supporters saying they're going to burn Milwaukee to the ground if he doesn't get the nomination.
Never mind the left's bullying tactics as a matter of course.
He denies it.
But when you get past the rhetoric, when you get past the Washington Post newspaper, when you get past the CNN debate stage, you see that bullying is the defining tactic of the left.
We'll get to that in a second with one particularly disturbing scene that came out of Ohio University over the last couple days.
First...
I gotta thank our friends over at Bambi.
When you are running a business, HR issues can kill you, especially in cases of wrongful termination suits, minimum wage requirements, labor regulations, all sorts of things that we just can't keep track of all the time.
Now, HR manager salaries are not cheap.
The average HR manager salary, $70,000 a year.
It's a lot of money.
It's a good line of work.
Bambi can help you out.
Bambi, spelled B-A-M-B-E-E, was created specifically for small businesses.
You get a dedicated HR manager, you can craft HR policy and maintain your compliance, all for just $99 a month.
Dedicated HR manager, $99 a month.
It's unbelievable.
With Bambi, you can change HR from your biggest liability to your biggest strength.
Your dedicated HR manager is available by phone, Email or real-time chat.
Go to Bambi.com slash Michael right now.
Schedule your free HR audit.
That's Bambi.com slash Michael.
Bam, B-A-M-B-E-E dot com slash M-I-C-H-A-E-L. Check it out.
Bernie says, no way.
Our campaign's based on love.
Nobody would bully.
Okay, the left...
Always bullies.
That is right now probably the defining feature of the left.
Look no further than a video that just came out of Ohio University yesterday from the conservative activist Caitlin Bennett.
Caitlin Bennett walks into Ohio University.
Mobs and mobs of people throwing things at her, screaming at her, pouring coffee on her.
And my favorite moment of it is when some SJW gets in her face, crazed, hysterical, steam coming out of her ears, and screams, you don't understand oppression.
*Cheering* You are no oppression!
If they hit you in the face!
You don't understand oppression!
Someone just poured hot coffee on me.
I dare you to push me again.
I'm not punching.
I dare you to push me again.
I'm not pushing.
You're good.
You did?
How did I end up on the ground?
I didn't push me again.
Exactly.
Push me again.
I dare you.
I poured hot coffee.
I just think, and look, I don't really know anybody very well who's in that video, but I think the woman screaming, you don't understand oppression, I suspect she does not understand oppression.
We had a...
Bleep out a lot of that video just because of all this crazy expletives and people screaming and screaming all the time.
That conservative activist is Caitlin Bennett.
From a quick Google search, it would appear that people on the internet have very strong opinions about this girl.
Regardless of what your opinion is, if you're on the right, left, or center, just actually take her out of it for a second.
Or just replace her with a kind of like totally neutral figure.
And look at all the people around her.
Look at all the leftists.
Screaming, degrading themselves, whipping themselves up into a frenzy.
Why?
I googled this girl, Caitlin Bennett.
Do you know what her great crime is?
She took a photo in high school holding an AR-15 and somehow this became publicized and people lost their minds over it.
That's it.
Took a picture holding a gun and now she makes videos as a conservative activist.
People go crazy.
That, obviously, is bullying.
She's a fairly petite young lady, and you've got these mobs of people, men, women, giant people, kind of swarming around her, vandalizing her friend's car.
That is bullying.
It doesn't just happen immediately.
At that college campus, it doesn't just happen to her.
It happens to conservatives all over the country.
It happens socially.
There's a ton of social bullying.
There's obviously a lot of professional bullying.
That's why people in big tech, why people in academia, why people in corporate America hide their political views, because they know that if they voice their political views, they're liable to be fired.
They're liable to be discriminated against.
There's a story across the pond out of the United Kingdom saying that the National Health Service is able to deny non-emergency care to people who make transphobic comments, whatever that means.
You don't go along with the latest leftist ideological fad.
You can be denied health care.
Now, that's bullying.
And, of course, there's the political bullying, which we see all the time.
And we...
See it from left-wingers who now want to make certain forms of thought effectively illegal.
That's where the bullying comes in.
Now, I want to make sure that we get to some of these candidates on the Democratic side because Bernie Sanders says our campaign's about love.
His whole campaign is about bullying.
His whole campaign is saying you can't do this, you can't do that.
We're going to take away your money.
We're going to take away your choice.
We're going to vilify a whole class of people.
The class of people he used to vilify was the millionaires and the billionaires.
Now it's just the billionaires because Bernie Sanders became a millionaire.
How convenient.
But all of these guys, the whole ideology is based on bullying.
It's based on do what I say or else.
Law be damned.
Votes be damned.
Now, the Democrats are trying to tell us that there is a radical lane and a moderate lane.
Well, moderate's a relative term.
The moderate lane is actually pretty radical itself.
And Pete Buttigieg showed that last night.
So there was a CNN town hall.
I know that nobody watched it.
I did not watch the whole thing.
It was unwatchable.
Pete Buttigieg showed up and he told us once and for all there is no moderate lane in this race because Pete Buttigieg came out and said that DACA dreamers, illegal aliens, whatever you want to call them, are just as American as Americans.
Do you believe that DACA deserves a protective plan to maintain DACA permanently?
I do.
Thank you.
I want you to know that I see you as an American.
That you belong to this country as much as anybody.
And I think everybody here supports you too.
You're not only contributing to your community, you're a taxpayer too.
And it is one of the reasons it is so important to secure the benefits of citizenship for you.
So, yes, in the meantime, we must reinstate and establish DACA protections.
But this is also why we must no longer have this hanging over your head and actually solve with a pathway to citizenship in which you are among the first to ensure that that uncertainty is cleared up.
And again, the American people overwhelmingly agree that this is the right thing to do.
So, that last part is not true.
The American people strongly oppose amnesty.
Even Democrats oppose amnesty, and it's a low priority for the ones who want to do it.
But...
That's not even my problem here.
He says he wants amnesty.
He wants illegal aliens to be able to become citizens.
I mean, he might as well have said, more importantly, I want you to know that I see you as a future Democratic voter, just as much as he could say I see you as an American.
The radicalism here, though, is not even on the amnesty.
The radicalism is on that statement.
I see you as an American.
You know, you're as American as anybody else.
If foreign nationals are as American as anybody, then the word American has no meaning.
If the word American can refer to Americans and not Americans, then there's no meaning to the word American.
It's sort of like...
How we talk about the redefinition of man and woman.
So man now means a person who is not a woman and also sometimes a person who is a woman, according to transgender ideology.
So the word man has no meaning and the word woman has no meaning.
Now it's the same thing with American.
Why does it matter?
We'll get to that in a second.
First, I've got to thank our friends over at Lightstream.
I have a lot of friends and family who do this.
They waste a whole lot of money paying high interest credit cards.
It is very easy right now with a credit card consolidation loan from Lightstream to take care of that.
Rates are as low as 5.95% APR with auto pay, which that's a much lower rate than the national average interest rate on credit cards.
The credit cards interest rates can be 20% APR. You can get a loan from $5,000 to $100,000 with absolutely no fees.
You can even get your money as soon as the day that you apply.
This is how one of their customers describes the experience.
He said, quote, I heard the radio ad and said it was worth looking at.
I was a little skeptical because I'd never done anything like this before.
To my great surprise, the loan process was very simple and easy to navigate through.
I wish all loans were this efficient.
Just for my listeners right now, apply to get a special interest rate discount and save even more.
The only way to get this discount is to go to lightstream.com slash Knowles, L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M.com slash Knowles.
Subject to credit approval.
Rate includes 0.50% auto pay.
Discount terms and conditions apply and offers are subject to change without notice.
visit lightstream.com slash Knowles for more information.
you That kind of radicalism, that the word American can mean not American too.
On the one hand, it means there is no chance that the Democrats are going to nominate a moderate.
The media keep playing up.
Mike Bloomberg, we'll get to that in a second.
We'll get to why Bloomberg is not really a moderate either.
As of now, Buttigieg is the leading moderate and he is nothing of the sort.
Buttigieg is not just your average hike your taxes kind of radical or soak the rich kind of radical.
Pete Buttigieg...
Is a words no longer have meaning kind of radical.
Very different thing.
And the left is increasingly embracing this kind of radicalism.
So they're not just saying, hey, we're going to take our policies in a more extreme direction.
They're actually saying words don't mean anything.
What does American mean?
American means whatever I say it wants to mean.
The one place you see this most clearly, I think, the one word they've defined into nothing, is actually one of their terms that they like to promote.
And that is the term queer.
What does queer mean?
Rosario Dawson, the actress who was allegedly dating Cory Booker, but only while he was running for president, and now it's very unclear if they're dating or not.
Rosario Dawson just came out as queer.
But nobody has any idea what that means.
She gave an interview to Bustle.
She said, quote, people keep saying that I came out.
I didn't do that.
This was a while ago.
I mean, it's not accurate, but I never did come out, come out.
I mean, I guess I am now.
I've never had a relationship in that space, so it's never felt like an authentic calling to me.
I know that's a very mealy-mouthed, vague, and confusing statement, but But when you break down what she's actually saying, it's pretty shocking.
She says, people say a long time ago, I declared myself a lesbian or gay or transgender or bisexual or some part of the gender and sexual alphabet.
I didn't do that.
I didn't do that in the past.
It's not accurate.
I never came out.
But I am coming out now.
But also, I've never had an LGBTQ LMNOP relationship.
So it's never felt like an authentic calling to me.
So she's saying, I've never had a queer relationship.
Nevertheless, I am queer.
But how is that possible?
Replace the term queer with the older euphemism, gay.
If I came out and said, hey, I've never had an intimate sexual relationship with a man.
I'm not physically attracted to men.
I'm not gay.
But I'm gay.
That wouldn't make any sense.
Those are contradictory statements.
But with the term queer, I could come out as queer if I wanted to.
No one would have any idea what that means.
Another actress, Jamila Jamil.
This actress came out as queer recently because she was cast in an LGBT show and she got a lot of flack for this because they said, you're not LGBT, you're not queer, so you can't be in this queer show.
And then she just came out and said, no, I am queer.
And how dare you force me to come out of the closet as queer?
But Jamila Jamil is not queer by any meaningful sexual definition of queer.
Jamila Jamil is dating James Blake.
Who is very much a man.
James Blake is, he's like a hot guy.
I don't, as a straight man, I don't know if I'm permitted to use the term hot guy.
Maybe that makes me queer.
I don't know.
I don't know because it's very confusing.
But what I do know is that this actress, who's now conveniently coming out as queer, is dating a very, very much a man.
Okay.
How is that possible?
How is it possible that Cory Booker's girlfriend and James Blake's girlfriend can both come out as queer, even though they're dating men?
The word queer doesn't have any specific sexual meaning.
The word queer is just a means of claiming power.
I know it's considered a sexual term.
It's the Q in LGBTQ, but it is not a sexual term.
If straight people can be queer, it's not a sexual term.
If non-Americans can be Americans, then we're not referring to what we think we're referring to.
The left simply uses these terms to claim power.
It's the same thing with American.
For the left, American does not have any national meaning.
It does not imply citizenship in a country.
It's just a means of claiming power.
So for the left, they think, people that I like...
People that I think will benefit me, I will call them American, whether or not they are American citizens or not.
Other people, I will not call American.
When it is convenient to me to call myself queer, I will call myself queer.
That doesn't necessarily have to imply any sexual meaning.
It's a radical subjectivism.
It is a radical relative.
It's just all about me.
It's all about my desires, and I can change it at any given time.
Mayor Pete, postmodern Pete Buttigieg, applies this same principle to the word Christian.
So that was the other highlight of last night's CNN debate, is that we got a return of good old Pastor Pete, He takes all the moralizing, Bible-thumping, judgmental aspects of Christianity and just distills them down into this kind of leftist pseudo-religion.
Pastor Pete goes around and tells people what terrible Christians they are.
Specifically, he criticized unsubtly the Christians who support President Trump.
I won't be afraid to talk about how my positions are informed by my faith.
So, you know, to the point you talk about God not belonging to any kind of a political party, at the last CNN Town Hall, you said, if your faith calls upon you to help the marginalized, those who are afflicted, to comfort people, to strive for humility and decency, as the Christian faith does, and then I quote you, then, I just can't imagine that that requires of you that you be anywhere near this president.
Do you think it is impossible to be a Christian and support President Trump?
Well, I'm not going to tell other Christians how to be Christians, but I will say I cannot find any compatibility between the way this president conducts himself and anything that I find in Scripture.
Now, I guess that's my interpretation, but I think that's a lot of people's interpretation, and that interpretation deserves a voice.
Yeah, I just can't find any compatibility.
It's just so weird that the most pro-life president in American history, who constantly is defending people's freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, unlike his predecessor, and who has been uncommonly honest in office, meaning that he does more of what he says he will do than any of his predecessors, at least in my lifetime.
It's so weird that Christians might like that guy, especially when he's running against the party that is running on the sacramental view of abortion, killing babies up until the moment they're born, and in some cases, even after they're born.
The party that is running on redefining marriage beyond any sort of coherence.
The party that says America is a rotten, no good, terrible place.
The party that is embracing a radical secularism, The party that is now, in many ways, worshipping the sun.
Yeah, so weird.
I can't, oh man, I can't believe Christians would support that guy.
You know, the other great advantage that President Trump has, by the way, is not constantly preening and prattling on and spouting heresy and criticizing Christians wrongly about what terrible people they are and belittling them for their faith.
That might be why.
I think that might be why some Christians prefer President Trump to Pete Buttigieg.
And by the way, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting because most Christians in America do support President Trump.
Pete Buttigieg is not a moderate.
This is his worst feature, is Pastor Pete.
His worst feature is when Buttigieg goes out and egregiously misinterprets the Bible.
One would have to conclude he's sort of intentionally doing it.
Just to use one example, Pete Buttigieg was on radio when he was interpreting the Bible and said that he found in the Bible, somewhere, I'm not sure where, A great defense of abortion.
The way he tried to defend this, he said, in the Bible there's such an emphasis on breath.
And so when I think about babies, I think that before they take their first breath, it's totally fine to mash them up and vacuum them out and chop them up with scissors.
That's pretty much what he said.
I'm making more clear what he said, but the conclusion is exactly the same.
Obviously not biblical, egregious, heretical, blasphemous, terrible thing to say.
And yet, you don't see the right regularly going out there and haranguing Pete for his personal behavior, saying you're a terrible, awful, no good, rotten, fake Christian, whatever he accuses people of doing.
You don't see the right Bullying Pete Buttigieg very much.
You do see him wrongly, uncredibly, incredibly bullying Christians on the right.
He is not the moderate in the race.
There is no moderate in the race.
Mike Bloomberg isn't the moderate either.
And, you know, people have been going after Mike Bloomberg for these videos that have been cropping up.
Videos from his past when he was mayor of New York.
And they're saying it's evidence that Mike Bloomberg is a racial bigot.
I don't think there's evidence Mike Bloomberg is a racial bigot, but I do think some of these old videos are damning for his campaign.
One in particular, it proves just about everything the right has been predicting about the left over the past ten or so years, and Mike Bloomberg just comes out and admits it.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, I've got to thank our friends over at First Leaf.
Oh, how I love First Leaf.
I got started by taking the First Leaf Wine Quiz right when they came on as a sponsor to assess my exact wine drinking preferences.
You get to choose sweetness, wine styles, even how adventurous you're feeling.
And then I learned all about, you know, what I like and they learned what I like.
So what they do is they create an introductory six-pack of wine, all for just $29.95.
Six bottles of wine, $29.95.
These wines normally go for at least $20 a piece.
When my bottles arrived, I tasted and I rated them.
Because First Leaf didn't totally believe my own assessment of my tastes.
So they sent me some interesting ones, which I'm very glad that they did because I found out that I liked some different wines than I thought that I liked.
So I go on and rate them, and what makes it amazing is they then start to...
I love this thing.
After my freebie ran out, I've continued to subscribe.
I really love this company.
They know what they're doing.
They ship more than 17,000 unique wine shipments each month.
Go get it right now.
Sign up with my link.
You will get six bottles of wine for $29.95, plus free shipping for a year.
Go to tryfirstleaf.com.
That is, if you rate all six bottles of wine from your first box, you get $10 off your second box.
Check out this exclusive offer only at tryfirstleaf.com slash Knowles, K-N-A-W-L-E-S. Another video of Mike Bloomberg.
This one's pretty bad.
This one, not great.
Mike Bloomberg said in this video that just cropped up that government health care, which all of the Democrats are calling for, That means that we need to deprive the elderly of care.
That we need to push granny off a cliff.
Here he is.
If you're bleeding, don't stop the bleeding.
If you need an x-ray, you're going to have to wait.
That's just...
All of these costs keep going up.
Nobody wants to pay any more money.
And at the rate we're going, healthcare is going to bankrupt us.
So not only do we have a problem, it's going to bankrupt us.
And we've got to sit here and say which things we're going to do and which things we're not.
Nobody wants to do that.
You know, if you show up with prostate cancer and you're 95 years old, we should say, go and enjoy, have a nice meal, lead a long life.
There's no cure, and you can't do it.
If you're a young person, we should do something about it.
Society's not willing to do that yet.
If you show up with cancer and you're in your 90s, you should die.
And we'll let young people get the treatment.
Because I'm Mike Bloomberg, and I know better than every single person on Earth how to live their lives.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, everybody.
I'm Mike Bloomberg.
Whoa, man, that's pretty radical.
Bad news for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I thought the left is trying to do everything they can to get a few more months out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
No, Mike Bloomberg, one of their now surging presidential candidates, says, oh, somebody like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, if she's got health problems and she's elderly?
Yeah, we're going to tell her, that's fine.
Go live the rest of your life and then go die.
We're not going to give you any medical care.
Bad news.
Mike Bloomberg in this way is vindicating so much of what Republicans and conservatives have been saying for 10 years.
We'll get to that in a second, but I want to bring your attention to a possibly overlooked and highly valued Daily Wire membership tier, the Reader's Pass.
A Reader's Pass gets you all the articles ad-free, including Ben Shapiro's op-eds, which are exclusive for Daily Wire members only.
You also get access to our mobile app to read all of our stories and receive push notifications for breaking news and special content.
Perfect when you want to stay up to date on the go.
This is only three bucks a month.
And if you're still skeptical about it, guess what?
We're offering you one month for 99 cents.
Mobile ad-free access to all of the Daily Wire news, exclusive op-eds from Ben, and breaking news and updates on our mobile app.
All for the low, low price of $1.
Check it out.
You won't be disappointed.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
If you're elderly, you're not going to get healthcare under the Bloomberg administration because only young people are going to get healthcare.
This is the height of technocratic liberalism.
This is the height of some self-appointed genius, some self-appointed expert, telling people how their lives should be run, cradle to grave, birth to death.
It's based on this bizarre statistic that keeps coming up in healthcare debates, which is that people spend half of their lifetime healthcare expenses in the last five years of their lives.
Duh!
Of course they do.
When you're young, you're healthy.
You don't need to spend a lot of money on healthcare.
Before you die, you get sick.
When you are sick, you spend money on healthcare.
Of course we spend most of our healthcare resources during the last few years of life.
That's when you're going to spend them.
But this line that the left always uses is taken as evidence that, oh gosh, if we could only kill people five years before they would otherwise die, think of all the money we could save.
That's your campaign pitch?
Is that going to be your slogan?
Mike Bloomberg throwing granny off a cliff.
You know, it's so frustrating as a conservative because 10 years ago, when guys like Paul Ryan and the kind of Reformacon fiscal hawk guys, when they were proposing entitlement reform, The left was merciless.
They said, they ran ads on television, which said that Paul Ryan was trying to throw granny off a cliff because he wanted to slightly tweak social security.
He wanted to make a few adjustments to Medicare entitlements for people who are 50 years old now, but, you know, for when they get to be 65.
And this was considered killing grandma.
Now you have the surging moderate candidate in the race come out and say, yeah, we're going to kill elderly people so that we can keep more money for ourselves.
It also proves something that the right was mocked for for a decade, which is the death panels.
You remember when Obamacare came out, conservatives said Obamacare includes a provision of death panels.
And what was meant by death panels was a government board that was appointed to determine whether or not you would receive health care.
And if you did get health care, then I guess you got to live or you had a good chance of it.
And if you didn't get health care, then you were going to die.
Conservatives dubbed these death panels and the left mocked us for it roundly.
Were you crazy?
You think Obamacare has death panels?
What do you think Mike Bloomberg is describing?
He couldn't put it more clearly.
He said elderly people are going to come in and then experts like me are going to decide, based on how old they are or whether we like the cut of their jib, whether or not they will live or die.
There's no other way to describe it.
This is inhuman.
You know, I don't think that when Mike Bloomberg talks about crime rates, that he's exhibiting some awful, terrible bigotry.
I don't think he's a racist or a sexist or anything like that.
But I don't think he respects people very much.
I don't think he respects voters very much.
And I don't think he respects the people that he governs.
I think he's a nanny state liberal scold technocrat who has a very, very poor understanding of Of life and the philosophical issues that undergird our politics.
And I think he's just a kind of technical expert who wants to make markets more efficient.
And so one of those markets is healthcare.
And if you want to make it really efficient, you've got to kill people five years before they would otherwise die.
And okay, makes sense.
That totally computes, right, if you're not a human.
This is why Bloomberg would be a very bad president.
It's also why Bloomberg is a pretty bad candidate.
It's also why there's no moderate in this race.
There is nothing moderate about killing granny.
So, Joe Biden falling apart, and he was running to the left even before he did fall apart, reverses his position on the Hyde Amendment, says that now people who are pro-lifers need to use their money to fund abortions, and not just any kind of abortion, late-term abortions too.
Joe Biden then comes out and says, illegal aliens are just as American as anybody.
The same line that Pete Buttigieg said last night.
A line which means that words don't have any meaning anymore.
And then you have Mike Bloomberg, the last moderate left, who says that we've got to kill people before they cost us too much money.
That's the party.
You know, we started the show on the Washington Post accusing Trump of being responsible for schoolyard bullying.
The left always accuses the right of what the left itself does.
And here's a pretty clear example of that.
Sort of inhuman politics.
It's bullying.
I mean, there's no greater bullying than telling someone they've got to die and you've got all the power over them.
I mean, that's a pretty extreme form of political bullying, and that's what they're embracing.
It's a politics of bullying.
And what's funny is you get this very hard-line politics on the left, and increasingly you're seeing a little bit of a softer politics on the right.
Because yesterday, President Trump sprung a couple jailbirds from the clink.
There were two major pardons that President Trump announced yesterday.
He pardoned Bernie Carrick, who was a New York police commissioner under Giuliani.
He was serving during 9/11, kind of a hero in New York.
And Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois, who tried to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat after Obama was elected president.
This guy's thoroughly corrupt.
And Trump decided to pardon Bernie Kerik and to commute the sentence of Rod Blagojevich.
So he didn't pardon Blagojevich, but he said that he can get out of jail.
He's already been in jail for eight years, and I think he was supposed to serve another six years in prison.
The left is furious.
Some people on the right are furious too.
But it's funny that the left is furious.
It's ironic.
Because all the left ever seems to want is decriminalization.
They talk about it all the time.
The people who want decriminalization of everything are now furious that Trump pardoned a hero cop who cheated on his taxes.
Who's like relatively a pretty good guy.
They're furious.
They're furious that President Trump used his constitutional pardon power to do this.
And they're furious that Trump pardoned one of their own guys, the former Democratic governor of Illinois.
So how should conservatives feel about this, beyond the irony of left-wing contradictions on this issue?
How should conservatives feel?
My view, here's my extreme hot take, it's fine.
It's whatever.
Calm down.
It's okay.
On the one hand, People should pay their debt to society, and people should stay in prison.
On the other hand, the Constitution gives the President the pardon power for a reason.
The Presidential pardon power is entirely legitimate.
It's right there, clear as day in the Constitution.
And part of this is because, I was just listening to a homily from my priest, the Great Father Rutler, about this.
It's an old idea.
He put it very well, though.
Justice without love leads to tyranny.
But so does love without justice.
So does sentimentality, right?
There's obviously a balance that must be had here.
And so President Trump is using that balancing power that the Constitution gives him.
And so now Blagojevich's family gets to be happy.
His kid is a little older.
It's nice that his kids and his wife get to see Blagojevich.
Bernie Carrick doesn't need to rot in a cell anymore.
Bernie Carrick is a hero cop.
He won a ton of medals.
He's a local hero for 9-11.
Okay, that's fine.
The real question here is, why did President Trump do it?
And here's, I think, why conservatives should be particularly okay with the pardons.
What was in the news before these pardons?
What was the legal news that was dominating the headlines?
The legal news dominating the headlines was that former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone is going to be sentenced maybe to nine years in prison for the unforgivable crime of working for Trump, and they caught him on lying to Congress, a few things like that.
Then there was word that the DOJ was going to try to reduce that sentence.
Then Bill Barr came in and said, President Trump, stop tweeting about this.
You're making my job much harder.
Then there were calls for investigations of corruption that Trump is interfering in a criminal case.
That was the news headline.
And Trump completely knocked that out of the news.
Just listen to the press conference that Trump gave.
It was a prosecution by the same people, Comey, Fitzpatrick, the same group, very far from his children.
They're growing older.
They're going to high school now.
They rarely get to see their father outside of an orange uniform.
I saw that, and I did commute his sentence.
So he'll be able to go back home with his family after serving eight years in jail.
That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence, in my opinion.
And in the opinion of many others, yes.
Now listen to that.
He's specifically talking about Blagojevich here.
Because Trump pardoning Bernie Kerik, who served under a Republican, and served under a Republican who's close to him, Rudy Giuliani, that's not huge news.
Him commuting the sentence of Rob Blagojevich.
Big deal.
Big news story.
And notice he gets in there.
Yeah, this was done by James Comey.
This was done by the guys who came after me.
As a defense, he's reminding people that there were these kind of illegitimate investigations into Trump.
There were these illegitimate prosecutions.
There was an illegitimate impeachment.
Really shrewd stuff.
He just used it to kick the bar and stone stuff out of the news and to remind people that The Democratic Party and the left perverted the wheels of justice to go after President Trump, and he wants to be able to flip that narrative.
It's pretty clear.
I don't see any other explanation for his doing what he was doing, and so I'm perfectly fine with it.
I don't particularly care about Rob Blagojevich, but the president has the legitimate power to do that, and if it helps, okay, that's fine.
In other news on great justice around the world, Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, head of Amazon and the Washington Post, He's giving $10 million to fight climate change.
He posted it on Instagram, big picture of the earth, and now he's going to donate this.
$10 million, that's a lot of money.
I think Jeff Bezos makes that about every 30 seconds, but still, it's a lot of money for most of us mere mortals.
Now, of course, Jeff Bezos also owns a Gulfstream G650ER private jet.
Jeff Bezos flies that jet reportedly 12 times per month.
His company Amazon's carbon footprint contributed more to greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 than many of its competitors in retail.
So, it doesn't seem like he's exactly practicing what he's talking about, other than he writes a check, but then he keeps up all these practices that allegedly contradict what he's supposed to be doing.
LaRouche-Foucault said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but I wonder if right here it's just a little bit of PR, or if it's a little bit of empty religion.
The parallels between global warming and religion have been pretty clear.
You've got sin in pollution.
You've got atonement in recycling.
You've got the sale of indulgences in the form of carbon tax credits even.
NBC News last year created a confessional for the climate.
You could go onto its website and anonymously give your climate confessions like you were going into the box in the Catholic Church.
There are all of these.
There are secular saints on religion.
The list goes on and on.
That's the role that this has taken.
And so in the olden days, if Jeff Bezos wanted some good PR, he would have donated to the church.
But now the modern secular religion is global warming.
So he's going to donate to that instead.
And it just brought home to me a tweet that started to go viral the other night from a Twitter account called the Atheist Forum.
And the tweet said this.
It said, Christianity.
Belief that one God created a universe 13.79 billion years old, 93 billion light years in diameter, consisting of over 200 billion galaxies, each containing an average of 200 billion stars, only to have a personal relationship with you.
Which, yeah, more or less a pretty good description of Christianity.
Isn't that amazing?
Isn't that a wonderful thing?
God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believeth in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
That's pretty good.
It's the gospel in a nutshell, right?
But I responded to this tweet, and I pointed out that atheism...
Is this belief that everything is meaningless.
Everything is senseless.
Like we were talking about earlier, words don't have any meaning.
It's just words, words, words.
And we can't rely on any sort of objective reality.
Our arguments are unreliable.
They don't make sense.
Except, conveniently, the argument for atheism.
That we can know for certain.
Atheism, the theory that everything is physical and everything that is not physical, doesn't mean anything.
Except, of course, for the...
Non-physical argument for atheism.
Atheism is a belief that is unsupportable.
It's contradictory.
And so I pointed this out.
And someone said to me, you know, Michael, look, there are hundreds of gods.
I just happen to believe in one fewer god than you do.
And this misses the point.
The difference between monotheism and polytheism is a difference in kind.
It's not just that monotheists have one god, some fewer gods than the polytheists.
It's that polytheism, or paganism, or pantheism, or whatever you want to describe, is fundamentally different than monotheism, which posits a god outside of time and space who created all of the created things.
But on another level, what this guy's saying is, I believe in one fewer God than you.
That's not my experience.
My experience of atheists, having been an atheist for a while myself, is that it's not that atheists believe in one fewer God than monotheists.
It's that they believe in many more gods than monotheists because they don't root their belief in a God who is outside of time and space.
And so they are given to all of the tempting gods of this world.
Money, power, fame, sex, especially sex these days.
Ego, pride, the idea that you can redefine words to mean whatever you want them to mean.
Like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, in Alice in Wonderland.
And it goes to this fundamental worship of the creation.
Which we see in global warming, obviously.
Jeff Bezos is buying into that false religion.
And the creation meaning ourselves.
We are creatures.
We're part of the creation.
And that I think you're seeing broadly throughout the secular left.
The idea that I can define reality for myself.
Justice Kennedy wrote that in the Planned Parenthood v.
Casey decision in the early 1990s.
He said that we have a right to define reality.
reality for ourselves.
And of course, the Democratic candidates running for president right now say we can define what the word American means.
We can define what the word Queer means we can define man or woman.
It's all about us.
But of course, that isn't true.
Reality reasserts itself in the end.
That is the great conservative consolation, as we were talking about yesterday.
And we might be bullied and bullied and bullied, and people might scream and shout in our faces, but that just doesn't change reality.
All right, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Get your mailbag questions in.
See you tomorrow.
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
Supervising Producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Technical Producer, Austin Stevens.
Assistant Director, Pavel Widowski.
Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.
Audio mixer, Robin Fenderson.
Hair and makeup, Nika Geneva.
Production assistant, Ryan Love.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
If you prefer facts over feelings, aren't offended by the brutal truth, and you can still laugh at the insanity filling our national news cycle, well, tune in to The Ben Shapiro Show.
