As Bernie Sanders racks up victories all around the country, conservatives struggle with whether to root for the radical socialist so Trump can sweep all 57 states plus Greenland in November or whether it would be better to root for one of the also-rans on the off-chance Bernie could somehow win in November. We will examine the conservative case for Bernie. Then, Pete Buttigieg has a prepubescent boy “come out” as homosexual onstage at a campaign rally, AOC likes luxury for herself but not for anyone else, and so much more!
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.
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As Bernie Sanders racks up victories all around the country, conservatives struggle with whether to root for the radical socialists so Trump can sweep all 57 states plus Greenland in November, or whether it would be better to root for one of the also-rans on the off chance Bernie could somehow win.
We will examine the conservative case for Bernie.
Then Pete Buttigieg has a prepubescent boy come out as homosexual on stage at a campaign rally.
AOC likes luxury for herself, but not for anyone else.
And so much more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Bernie wins Nevada.
Are you feeling the burn?
We will figure out if we should feel the burn.
By the way, we're going to add a new feature for the people watching in the Daily Wire app or the Daily Wire website.
While you're watching, if anything occurs to you, some brilliant thought, some pressing question, feel free to write that in, and we'll try to get to it live on the show, because there's a lot that happened over the last few days, namely the socialist revolution sweeping Nevada with 88% of precincts reporting. namely the socialist revolution sweeping Nevada with 88% of precincts 88%, by the way, the Nevada caucus happened days ago, but because of this chaos in the caucus system, we still only have 88%.
Still, 88% reporting, Bernie is crushing it.
He definitely won Nevada.
Bernie got 47.1% of the popular vote there.
For comparison, Joe Biden got less than half of that at 21%.
Buttigieg got 13.7%.
Liz Warren got a pathetic 9.6%.
And then everybody else followed afterward.
That means that in the way the delegates break down, Bernie got 13 delegates, Joe Biden got two delegates, Buttigieg got one, and Focahontas got zero.
Nobody else got anything.
Worth pointing out, too, Mike Bloomberg was not in the Nevada caucuses.
He also won't be in South Carolina.
And then he expects to sweep the Democratic nomination on Super Tuesday when you have a bunch of different states voting.
We'll see how that goes.
Joe Biden came in second place, right?
But he's still only got two delegates.
This should have been a pretty good state for him.
It didn't play out that way.
Joe Biden has been saying that South Carolina is going to be his firewall.
So South Carolina is happening next week on the 29th.
He's lost.
He's lost his massive lead.
He was crushing it in South Carolina.
According to the RealClearPolitics average, which is sort of the average of all the top polls, Joe Biden is now at 24.5% in South Carolina.
Bernie's at 21.5%.
They're running neck and neck in South Carolina.
South Carolina, Joe Biden was supposed to run away with that state.
Bernie wasn't supposed to be anywhere near him.
Last October, Joe Biden was at 38.3% in South Carolina.
Bernie was at 9.7%.
So Joe Biden had a 4X lead on Bernie Sanders there.
And yet, after Iowa, after New Hampshire, after Nevada, all of a sudden, that lead has completely disappeared.
Bernie's running second, and really, they're running neck and neck.
This shows you an important rule in politics.
It's a rule that I don't know that I've seen it violated in presidential politics, and yet people always forget it.
You don't win by losing.
The left and the right forget this rule all the time.
Okay, we see evidence of this repeatedly.
No one learns the lesson.
Rudy Giuliani tried this.
2008, Rudy Giuliani was running for president, but he decided he wasn't going to win Iowa.
He wasn't going to win New Hampshire.
He wasn't going to win South Carolina.
He's going to win Florida.
So we're going to lose all the first states, but then Rudy's going to come out of nowhere and magically win Florida.
That did not...
Mike Bloomberg, same thing.
Mike Bloomberg now is saying, okay, I'm not going to even be in Iowa or New Hampshire or Nevada or South Carolina, but then the big states come along and I'm magically going to win it.
And Bloomberg has incinerated well over half a billion dollars at this point.
Still unlikely that that happens.
Never Trump made this argument.
Never Trump made the argument in 2016 that That conservatives should not vote for Donald Trump because it would be better if Hillary won and then, you know, some bad things happened, but then don't worry because four years later we're going to come back better than ever.
But that wouldn't have happened.
The incumbent always has an advantage in re-election and politics is based on momentum.
It's not based on, okay, momentum.
We're going to strategically lose and then you guys are going to win and get a bunch of victories for the next few years.
But really, by losing, we're secretly winning because that way, next time, we're going to come back and we're going to clobber you.
You can't predict that.
That's not how it works.
And by the way, the people who make these bets, Rudy Giuliani, Joe Biden, they're not very good at predicting the next six months.
Forget about the next six years or so.
So, Bernie Sanders right now has absolutely no business polling as well as he does, and yet he's almost at the top of the charts.
South Carolina is relatively conservative and heavily black in terms of the voting demographics.
Bernie is a Northeast socialist who had about two black supporters until the day before yesterday, right?
That was Joe Biden's whole case.
When you really boil down Joe Biden's case for his nomination to its crassest level, his case was, I can get black voters and no one else can in this race right now.
And yet...
All of a sudden, Bernie starts to do that.
Why?
Why is Bernie starting to pick up this diverse coalition?
It's because people like to pick a winner.
And Bernie right now is winning.
So the delegate count for everything, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, right now it stands at Bernie Sanders 34, Pete Buttigieg 23, Joe Biden 8, Liz Warren 8.
So right now, Biden, who was the frontrunner, is more or less tied with Liz Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
That's how badly he's doing.
And the big question that comes up for conservatives, given all of that, given the fact that Bernie right now is running away with the nomination, Should conservatives feel the burn?
We will get to that because there's some major debate going on, but I have strong feelings about it.
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Should conservatives feel the burn?
Yes.
Yes, we should.
Burn, baby, burn.
Democratic inferno.
This brings up a difference of opinion.
Some conservatives say that we should back Bernie because he's a 200-year-old insane socialist and Trump is going to win every single state if he gets the nomination.
The other side of this is...
Because some conservatives say we shouldn't back Bernie because anything can happen.
The fact that Donald Trump got elected president tells you anything can happen in politics.
And if somehow Bernie became president, that would be so devastating and horrible for the country.
We can't even risk it.
It would be better for the Democrats to nominate a candidate who is more likely to beat Trump than for them to nominate Bernie Sanders.
I think that is...
Not very sound reasoning.
I think we've got to feel the burn.
Why?
I am afraid of Bernie's popular support.
Unlike Mike Bloomberg or Hillary Clinton or John Kerry or Al Gore, Bernie actually does have popular support.
They're like real people who show up to his rallies.
However, his support is different from Trump's support.
Trump also had popular support.
That's why some conservatives now are a little nervous about Bernie.
In 2016, Trump's supporters were not hardcore ideologues.
So, Trump's supporters in 2016, I would say, were your kind of run-of-the-mill conservative people.
Maybe they wouldn't even describe themselves as conservative with a capital C. They just love their country.
They want better trade deals.
They feel they've been cheated by, definitely by the left, and really by both parties.
And they like that he fights back, and they like that he talks straight, and They voted for him.
They liked to be strong.
The hardcore ideologues in 2016 who were conservative liked Ted Cruz or they liked Rand Paul.
They liked people with these fully fleshed out, coherent views of the world that were based on years and years of research and reading, right?
That's where the hardline ideologues went.
That wasn't Trump.
Bernie supporters are the hardcore ideologues.
Okay, Bernie's supporters are actual socialists.
The people working for his campaign talk about how they've got gulags and they're going to line up the neoliberals and put them in front of a firing squad if Bernie gets elected.
Those are real quotes that you can see on video.
There aren't that many hardcore socialist ideologues in America.
There are too many for us to feel comfortable.
There are more than we'd like there to be, but there aren't all that many.
So when you look at just the base of support, Bernie's base is much narrower, much more off-putting, much less in line with the American tradition than Trump's base of support.
The other difference is that in 2016, Trump came out of nowhere.
Nobody took him seriously.
Nobody thought he was going to get the nomination.
He was a silly sideshow, right?
So the Democrats and the Republican primary candidates, they were preparing their oppo files on Ted Cruz, on Marco Rubio, on Jeb Bush, on all of the candidates that were more in the normal line, right?
So when Trump got the nomination, they were just, they didn't know what to do.
They didn't have a lot of good oppo.
They got some video clips, they got the Access Hollywood tape, but we all knew about those They didn't show us anything we didn't know.
Oh, yeah, Trump makes comments about women.
Well, he's been doing that in the public eye for 40 years.
They didn't get any good stuff.
They didn't get any private business scandals.
They actually had to get the federal government to spy on the Trump campaign, and they still came up empty-handed.
So, Trump comes out of nowhere.
He wins the nomination.
Bernie doesn't come out of nowhere.
Bernie...
Comes from 50 years in politics.
So the opophile on Bernie Sanders is massive.
Okay, Bernie is very well known among political nerds, right?
But he's not known like an international celebrity and reality TV star and real estate mogul and guy who's been in the press for 40 years, okay?
He's been in politics.
He's been in government, mostly obscure, getting nothing done.
Now, the Trump team knows about Bernie, okay?
Bernie was the big threat in 2016.
Bernie almost got the nomination in 2016.
So the Trump team has been building that oppo file in a way that the Democrats were not doing that on Trump going into 2016.
Bernie keeps making new fodder for that oppo file.
He was on 60 Minutes last night, doubling down on his support of Fidel Castro.
I want to get to that in a second.
First, a question just came in from the live chat from JS. The question is, is Bernie's campaign just run on Envy?
Yes, it is.
That's the way to put it.
Winston Churchill said that socialism is the gospel of envy and the creed of ignorance.
That's all it is.
And what the left manages to do, because the left always flips everything exactly backwards, is they've managed to convince you that envy is a virtue.
It's the same way that they now celebrate pride.
Pride is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins.
It goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Pride caused Satan to fall from heaven.
It's like the worst thing you can possibly have.
And yet they've made pride into the greatest virtue and they celebrate it for a whole month.
It's the same thing with envy.
They've convinced you that if you work hard and are satisfied with what you have and are selfless and charitable, that you're a sucker, you're an idiot, you're a dupe, you're actually sort of evil if you advocate that kind of system.
But if you covet other people's goods and you want to steal all their money and property, somehow you're generous and charitable, right?
It's backwards, it's incoherent.
But, as sweet little Lisa pointed out when we were discussing whether Bernie Sanders, we should feel the burn or not feel the burn, she said, you know, Mac, people do like free stuff.
People do like free stuff.
That is the fear of the Sanders campaign, and he's really tapping into that.
But I think people will still see through it because he keeps making such huge mistakes, like last night when he doubled down on his support of Fidel Castro.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Bernie Sanders is on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper.
And Anderson Cooper, to his credit, brings up this question from Bernie's, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 years ago.
He's been saying the same thing for a long time.
He defends these communist thugs, these dictators who slaughter their own people, including Fidel Castro.
And he says, hey, Bernie, you probably want to take back some of your support for Fidel Castro, don't you?
And what does Bernie do?
He absolutely doubles down on it.
Back in the 1980s, Sanders had some positive things to say about the former Soviet Union and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
And everybody was totally convinced.
Here he is explaining why the Cuban people didn't rise up and help the U.S. overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
He educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.
We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba.
But you know, it's unfair to simply say everything is bad.
You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did?
He had a massive literacy program.
Is that a bad thing?
Even though Fidel Castro did it?
There's a lot of dissidents imprisoned in Canada.
That's right, and we condemn that.
Yeah, yeah, we condemn that.
But, you know, look, Castro, you can't say Castro's so bad.
What?
You're telling me Stalin was that bad?
He never did any good thing in his whole life?
Come on.
He kissed his mother one time.
Come on.
He's a good guy.
As usual, Bernie Sanders is completely misrepresenting history here.
But this is one of these lines that communist useful idiots have been used since the 60s.
And certainly since the 80s when Bernie was doing it.
They say, well, when Fidel Castro took over, he instituted a literacy program.
Sort of.
Not really.
When Fidel Castro took over, Cuba had a very high literacy rate.
The image they want to present is that the Cuban people were totally ignorant, didn't know how to read completely, and that's why they were oppressed, and then this man of the people, Fidel Castro, comes in and teaches them to read.
That's not what happened.
As early as the 1950s, well before Fidel Castro got into power, Cuba had a relatively high literacy rate.
It was about 80%.
Then Fidel Castro comes in and institutes a literacy program, but it wasn't to teach people to read.
Relative to the region, everybody already knew how to read.
He instituted the literacy program as part of a broader political strategy to brainwash the people.
It wasn't to teach them how to read.
It was to indoctrinate them into communism.
Guess what they were reading in the literacy program, all right?
It wasn't Hayek.
It wasn't Adam Smith.
It wasn't John Locke.
It was communism.
And why would you make it one of your first priorities to institute a literacy program when pretty much everybody already knows how to read?
It's because he had to brainwash the people.
And the brainwashing didn't even work.
I've visited Cuba.
I've talked to Cuban people about the Castros.
Not one single Cuban person likes Fidel Castro, okay?
The only people who like Fidel Castro are useful idiot communists in the West.
Specifically in the United States, specifically the future nominee of the Democratic Party.
This is very good news that Bernie is backing Fidel Castro.
Again, these kind of, the more cautious conservatives, the more risk-averse conservatives are the ones who say, this is so bad, we've got a nominee now who's, for the Democratic Party, who says he kind of likes Fidel Castro.
It's a good thing.
Why?
Because I know that the vote is nine months away, but something tells me Trump just won Florida.
Okay, if Bernie is the Democratic nominee, he ain't going to win Florida.
There's a lot of Cubans in Miami, okay?
Another story just came out of the Daily Beast.
It said in the late 1970s, Bernie Sanders defended Iran's taking of American hostages.
He actually defended, through a party that he was affiliated with in Vermont, defended the Iranian seizure of Americans.
Right now, Let's play out all the scenarios right now.
If Bernie wins the nomination, the Democratic Party will be in chaos and he will most likely lose the general election because he's simply too radical and his base isn't wide enough.
That's one scenario.
Second scenario, if Bernie catches momentum but loses the Democratic nomination, the Democratic Party will be in even greater chaos, and that will certainly weaken them in the general election.
You thought the Bernie bros stayed home in 2016, wait until 2020.
All right, then the third aspect of this, beyond sort of merely partisan considerations, what helps the Republicans, what hurts the Democrats, a Trump versus Bernie fight Is maybe the clearest choice America's ever had.
It's an honest choice, and it's good in self-governing republics to have honest choices.
You've got Trump, who is a symbol of the American original businessman, and you've got Bernie Sanders, who is a lifelong ne'er-do-well communist propagandist who's never held down a real job in the private sector in his whole life.
All of which means conservatives should be feeling the burn.
And by the way, Bernie Sanders is not even the most radical candidate in the race.
I know he seems like it because on the surface he says the most radical things and he's got the craziest looking hair and he's like a thousand years old and he waves his arms around all the time.
Bernie may be the most radical candidate when it comes to economics and government, but when it gets to cultural questions, which don't forget that's where a lot of our politics lives, When it comes to cultural questions, there's another candidate who is at least as radical.
That candidate is Pete Buttigieg, my least favorite candidate in the race.
There was an amazing and horrifying moment on the campaign trail for Pete just the other day.
We'll get to that in a second.
I want to give people a little context though, because no one knows anything about Pete Buttigieg.
That is another guy who really came out of nowhere.
I don't know how the oppo file on him is.
It's not like Bernie Sanders had been in politics for 50 years.
Pete Buttigieg is like 12 years old himself.
But Buttigieg is now portraying himself as the moderate candidate in the race.
He's no moderate.
He's got a nice haircut and he's a clean cut boy from the Midwest and he speaks in a very balanced way.
He's no moderate.
Pete Buttigieg's father was a founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society.
For those who don't know, Gramsci is sort of little known except among people who spend time studying communism.
Antonio Gramsci is one of the most famous communists in history.
He was a communist philosopher in Italy.
He was the leader of the Italian Communist Party.
He had a huge influence on what you would call neo-Marxism, so bringing Marxism from the realm of the economic into the realm of the cultural as well.
A very, very important philosopher in the history of Marxism.
Buttigieg's father, not just some kind of moderate Midwest guy, he was a devotee of Gramsci.
He was the president and founding member of his society.
Now, you might say, well, that was his father.
Pete's totally different.
Is Pete totally different?
There's a big irony in this Democratic primary, which is that Pete Buttigieg, for a lot of his life, was a great admirer of Bernie Sanders.
Pete Buttigieg, in 2000, when he was still in high school, wrote an essay praising Bernie Sanders.
And this is an important moment because Bernie is mainstream now, by definition.
Because Bernie almost won the nomination in 2016, and he likely will win it this year.
But that's only because the Democratic Party has recently swung very, very far to the left.
In 2000, Bernie Sanders was a joke.
He was a punchline.
He was the most radical guy in the U.S. government.
And moderate Pete, good old Midwestern Pete, wrote an essay in high school praising him.
Pete Buttigieg is a smart guy, okay?
It's not like he was just some dummy when he was in high school.
The guy was, what, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard educated, you can, McKenzie, he's radical, he's distasteful, he's dishonest, but he's a smart guy.
He knew what he was doing, and I think he probably knew what he was doing even then.
So, Buttigieg, total fake moderate, actually quite a radical, and there was a disgusting and radical scene at a Pete Buttigieg rally over the weekend.
Tells us a lot about Pete, but more importantly, Because I actually don't care that much about Pete.
It doesn't look like Pete's going to win the nomination.
It gets to a bigger topic, which is our cultural identity crisis.
Why we've got the rise of woke identity politics.
What identity politics really means.
One of Pete Buttigieg's producers took a question from a gay nine-year-old.
What does that mean?
What does it mean to be a gay nine-year-old before you've gone through puberty?
I couldn't really tell you.
Here's the question.
The next question comes from Zachary, age 9.
And this is a really touching question.
He says, thank you for being so brave.
Would you help me tell the world I'm gay too?
I want to be brave like you.
Wow.
That question tells you a whole lot about the state of the Democratic Party, and Pete Buttigieg's answer tells you even more.
We'll get to that in a second.
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We'll be back with a lot more.
A child who has not yet gone through puberty wants to come out as gay on a presidential campaign stage on national television.
Thank you.
And the Democrats cheer him on.
They're so excited.
You hear that?
We've got a fun, a really touching, amazing question from a prepubescent child who wants to make bold sexual declarations on national television.
Woo!
Yeah!
Hooray!
Never mind that the kid almost certainly doesn't know what gay means.
He definitely doesn't know what gay means.
He might have some inclination that it refers to sexual attraction between members of the same sex.
What on earth could he possibly know about the significance of that statement?
He's nine years old.
Most 19-year-olds don't know quite what that means.
People who are struggling with their sexuality, they don't know all of the implications of that.
So you're We protect kids from this kind of stuff for a reason.
Alright, kids are too young to understand the complexities and consequences of sexual decisions.
That's why we have an age of consent.
The reason that it's illegal to sleep with a 16 or 17 year old is because we've decided as a society that 16 and 17 year olds are still too young to understand all of the implications, all of the consequences, all of the complexities that go along with sexual decision making.
So we protect them from that.
This is why it requires an ID if you want to go buy a Playboy.
We've decided, you know, even if you're in your teenage years, you still are too young.
You have to be protected from making sexual decisions, some of which will last your whole life.
You know, just to get to the age of consent thing, let's say you're 15, 16 years old and you have a one-night stand.
That one-night stand can have psychological consequences on you for the rest of your life.
And, of course, it could have...
Other consequences like STDs and pregnancy.
How much more so should we apply those kind of protections to a nine-year-old prepubescent child as we would to a 16 or 17-year-old teenager?
Buttigieg, to his credit, seems pretty uncomfortable with this question because he realizes how creepy and weird this is, that you've got the whole of this Democratic crowd saying, yeah, yeah, nine-year-old, make bold claims about sex.
Yeah, we love hearing that.
So Buttigieg stumbles around at first.
He's a He decides, you know what?
I'm in this thing.
It's 2020.
This is the Democratic Party.
I want to be president.
So he eventually just embraces it and gives the kid a shout out.
Zachary, if you're here and you want to give a wave, let me know.
Hey! Love is love! Love is love! Love is love! Love is love! Love is love.
This is the dark side of sentimentality.
And we increasingly, as a culture, are giving ourselves over to sentimentality.
We're abandoning our use of reason.
We are abandoning our logic.
We're abandoning rigorous analysis and we're just giving over to sentimentality.
How you feel.
If it feels good, do it.
My truth is the only truth that matters and it's certainly more important than the truth.
That kind of sentimentality.
Love is love, which is the mantra used to defend redefining marriage, is a ridiculous political mantra.
It doesn't mean anything.
I guess it means something.
What it just means is ridiculous.
It means that all types of love are exactly the same.
Love is love.
All love is the same.
This was very useful when they were trying to redefine marriage during the Obergefell decision and other previous legislative battles.
But on its face, it's absurd because not all love is the same.
We know this.
Love for your spouse is a lot different than love for your brother.
Unless you read Slight Magazine, then maybe it's a little more confusing.
Love for your child is different than love for your co-workers.
Love for your family, right, is different than love for your friends even.
Love is different depending on the context.
Love is a very complex thing.
In this case, the way we discuss love and sex should be very different for adults as for children.
I mean, imagine applying the same sort of sexual mantras that we apply to adults, consenting adults, As we do to nine-year-old children.
But love is love sentimentality sacrifices all of that on the altar of the sexual revolution.
So, Pete, who hesitates at first, and then they get the slogan going, and then they're all given away into this political moment.
Pete calls the kid up on stage, and he gives him advice that is so...
Typical of the modern Democratic Party and the modern left, but which is ultimately so destructive.
So let me tell you a couple things that might be useful.
The first thing is that it won't always be easy, but that's okay, because you know who you are.
And that's really important, because when you know who you are, you have a center of gravity that can hold you together when all kinds of There it is.
There it is.
That's the mistake.
You know who you are.
This is maybe the key to our sentimentality epidemic, is this idea of authenticity.
As long as you're authentic to yourself, then you will be firmly grounded in reality.
You might not know anything else about the world.
You might not know anything about arithmetic, or you might not know French, or you might not know history, but you know who you are, and therefore we will orient everything else to this self-knowledge.
Except...
Nine-year-olds don't know who they are.
Most 29-year-olds don't know who they are, but nine-year-olds certainly don't know who they are.
That's why you have education.
That's why you grow up.
That's why you go through your teenage years.
That's why you go through puberty.
You change during all of these moments.
The idea that you are exactly who you were when you were nine years old is totally absurd.
But beyond that sort of minor point, Is Pete's bigger point, which is even crazier.
Pete's larger point is that who you are is defined by the sum total of your sexual desires.
It's not just Pete making this point.
The whole left makes this point.
That who you are is just who you want to sleep with.
In this case, of sexual identity politics.
Or, in the case of racial identity politics, you could say, who you are is your skin color.
That's who you are at bottom.
Or in the case of gender politics, similar to sexual politics, who you are is based on your genitals.
Or now that we have transgender theory, now it's not based on your genitals.
Very, very confusing.
All identity politics, all of it, is absurd because it mistakes part of our identities with the whole of it or with the essence of it.
In a rightly ordered society, in the traditional society, Our identities are much more firmly rooted than that.
Okay, so in a rightly ordered society, our identity is rooted in, okay, I know who I am.
I know Michael.
That's me.
That's who I am.
I am born into a family, in a community, in a country, and ultimately my identity is, at bottom, religious because I am man made in the image of God, who is identity itself.
Very firmly rooted.
When God is talking to Moses, Moses says, Who shall I tell people that you are?
God says, I am that I am.
Which is to say, I am God.
Being itself.
I am identity.
And you're made in my image.
And if you trace your identity to me, you're going to be pretty firmly rooted.
And then we've got other identities that come downstream of that.
I'm an American.
I have a national identity.
I'm a New Yorker.
I was born in New York.
I'm a Knowles.
I'm born into a family.
That's the traditional view.
It's the most solid identity you can get.
But what happens when you rip all of that away?
When you rip, you certainly rip away the ultimate identity because people are denying traditional religion.
They're denying God.
They're saying, okay, forget about it.
We can't even think about that.
But they're not just getting rid of that.
They're getting rid of national identity, right?
You've got guys like Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden saying, oh, an American is whatever I say an American is.
People who are foreign nationals are actually more American than Americans, right?
They've got all the Democratic candidates saying we pretty much have to rip away our national borders, take down the wall, decriminalize illegal crossings.
So get rid of national How about family identity?
Increasingly, the state is encroaching on the role of the family, saying families can't do certain things.
Families can't raise their kids certain ways.
Families can't teach their kids certain things.
You're ripping away the family itself.
And all of this is done on the thesis that once you rip away all of those, your religious identity, your national identity, your cultural identity, then you get the self, and you'll be more firmly rooted in yourself, which is your true identity, except The opposite happens.
When you rip away all those other identities, you are more isolated from yourself than ever.
That's why you have this loneliness epidemic.
That's why you have all of these sorts of crazy crises that are happening right now.
And we are having a cultural identity crisis.
So the result of that is that the supposedly moderate Democrat in the presidential race is trotting prepubescent kids on stage to tell them that they are the sum total of their sexual desires, all to the raucous applause of Democratic primary voters.
That is some radical stuff.
Before we get on to AOC's expensive dress, which is something of a controversy even among conservatives, I want to take a question from the live chat from JH. Hi, Michael.
What do you think of the rumors that Bloomberg wants Hillary as VP on his ticket and the likelihood that he would be Epstein'd at his coronation?
Oh, man.
Uh, Of all the stupid political decisions you could make, I think picking Hillary Clinton as your VP would be the top one.
Have you ever thought of a more dangerous position to be in than with Hillary just waiting for you to get suicided at the top of the ticket?
Even if she weren't going to suicide you, let's try to be fair for a moment and say that doesn't happen.
Typically, you don't want to pick a VP whose single ambition in life is to have your job and who is one heartbeat away from your job.
Probably not a good idea.
Mike Bloomberg is a very smart man, so I think he wouldn't make that mistake.
Although he's run one of the dumbest political campaigns in recent history, as we may have time to see in a second.
So, I don't know, maybe he'll make that mistake.
In which case, I'd like to say that I'm very, very sorry to hear of the imminent suicide of Mike Bloomberg.
I didn't even know he was depressed.
Let's get on to AOC. AOC went on The View.
AOC went on The View and wore an expensive dress.
Not like a $10,000 dress, but a dress that's like maybe $500.
And she's getting a lot of flack for it.
From the conservative Erica Nurnberg, tweets out, Don't you love it when an avowed socialist wears a $580 dress from Ricky Freeman?
I mean, who doesn't need a sequined leopard dress to be an effective congresswoman?
Obviously pointing out the hypocrisy.
AOC is this class warrior.
She says everyone has too much money, and yet she's wearing an expensive dress.
But then the plot thickens because someone found out that the dress was recently on sale for only $280.
But then the plot thickens even more because AOC made this kind of vague denial.
It wasn't a specific denial, so I don't believe it.
But she said, yeah, look, sometimes I rent my clothing.
Sometimes I get it at thrift stores.
So, hey, stop picking on me.
She doesn't say anything in particular about the dress itself.
She's just making these vague comments, most of which I don't really believe.
It's not really a denial so much as a dismissal.
Now, a lot of conservatives are defending AOC. They're saying, oh, this is, come on, this is a dumb thing to attack her for.
Yeah, politicians wear expensive clothing.
Come on, it's not even that expensive.
Well, who doesn't have $600 dresses?
A lot of people don't have $600 dresses, but that's beside the point.
The point is not how much the dress cost.
The point is AOC's hypocrisy.
First of all, for all of the people that AOC constantly invokes, the marginalized, the people who don't have two nickels to rub together, $580 or $280 is a lot of money to spend on a dress.
But beyond that, the point is that AOC's political philosophy boils down to castigating people for their wealth She's the one who says billionaires shouldn't exist.
And if you are going to base your whole political philosophy on castigating people for your wealth, you need to be able to explain why you are allowed to indulge in certain expensive luxuries, but other people are not.
Okay, I do not begrudge AOC her sequined $600 dress, but she and her fellow class hustlers need to answer this one simple question.
How much money are people allowed to have or to spend?
How much?
Just give me a number.
If that's your philosophy, that there's a cap and above a certain point people are not allowed to have the money or spend the money, then just give me a number so that we know what we're dealing with here.
But she won't answer it because the number is always changing and the number is always changing because her net income, her net wealth is always changing.
Same thing with Bernie Sanders.
Conveniently, the amount of money that you're not allowed to have or spend is always just a little bit more money than they have.
Bernie Sanders, you can track it on Twitter, castigates the millionaires and the billionaires for his whole political career.
All of 2016 was about the millionaires and the billionaires.
And then Bernie made a million dollars.
And he could no longer deny that he was a millionaire.
And do you know, like, the very day that he became a millionaire...
The millionaires were okay, and it's actually the billionaires who were the bad guys.
And he stopped talking about the millionaires and the billionaires, and it was just the billionaires.
Be consistent.
Any political view that is playing on envy, that is castigating whole classes of people because they happen to have a lot of things, is bad in and of itself.
But when you're cynically moving the goalposts, because you are getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier, and you keep hustling based on envy, that's even worse than all of that.
So, it's cynical, it's vicious, it promotes envy, and I'm very pleased that AOC is getting criticism for it.
It's a totally fair attack.
Before we go, I have to bring up these stupid billboards that Mike Bloomberg is using.
You know, evidence that Bloomberg could make the horrible political decision to pick Hillary as his VP. Bloomberg put these billboards up in Nevada, I believe.
The billboards were part of Mike's novel, wild, wacky campaign where he puts pictures of his face on a meatball and that's supposed to win him the presidency.
And the billboards all just made jokes about Trump.
So one said, Donald Trump cheats at golf, Mike Bloomberg doesn't.
The other one said, Donald Trump's wall fell over because a part of the border fence collapsed, like a little portion of it, and they're fixing it now.
And the third one is my favorite.
Donald Trump eats burnt steak.
Mike Bloomberg likes his medium rare.
Yeah, that's how you're going to appeal to the people.
That's how you're going to make yourself a man of the people, is make fun of the president for eating his food in a way that most people eat their food, frankly, and then say that you have a much more refined palate, even though most people don't eat their food that way.
Doesn't work.
Doesn't work for two reasons.
I mean, someday, poli-sci classes are going to teach full semesters on Mike Bloomberg's campaign as evidence of what not to do.
The first reason this doesn't work, Bloomberg gives Trump top billing.
In all of the signs, it's Donald Trump does this, Donald Trump doesn't do this, and then Mike Bloomberg, very tiny at the bottom.
But it's actually just an ad for Donald Trump.
Okay, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
And if you're making your opponent the focus of everything, you're losing.
This is why, traditionally, politicians don't name their opponents.
They always say, what my opponent said was blah, blah, blah.
Because they don't want to give the opponent free press.
But that's what Mike Bloomberg is doing.
He's spending half a billion dollars to give Donald Trump more press.
Donald Trump has got more publicity, maybe, than anyone who's ever lived, other than Alexander the Great.
You know, a few other people.
The second problem here is it's just incredibly condescending.
You say, oh, you overcook your steak.
First of all, most people don't get to eat steak that much, just generally speaking, because steak is expensive.
But when people do eat steak, I would wager that the majority of people eat their steak medium to more cooked.
Now, I don't, because I come from the same place as Mike Bloomberg does in New York.
So in New York, we like to eat our steak where it's barely cooked at all.
It's mooing, right?
It's completely red, if not black and blue.
But for most of the country, I don't think that's the case.
When I travel around a lot of different places, a lot of places won't even let you order something rare or, you know, totally rare.
So Bloomberg is saying, I'm so much better than you.
I've got so much better taste.
Not a good way to appeal to voters.
You know, Donald Trump is able to make sort of the opposite appeal.
He says he loves fast food.
And he actually does love fast food.
He's got a long record of this.
But the Bloomberg campaign, it's schizophrenic on this.
The other day they tweeted out and said, Mike Bloomberg loves eating at Subway.
No, he doesn't.
Bloomberg's never eaten at Subway.
They're trying to pretend this.
And then on the other hand, they're saying, oh, but he only eats a steak medium rare.
He only eats it topped with foie gras.
He would never eat that gruel like President Trump and overcook it.
Not a good way to win.
Polls show a drop in likability after that debate that took place.
The one debate that he was in where he just absolutely got torn limb from limb.
And so it would seem like it's Bernie's game.
This is risky.
We could have a socialist as the president, but I think it's a risk that conservatives should cheer on because it's honest and I think it gives us the best chance of winning every state plus Greenland.
Okay, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Come on back tomorrow.
tomorrow.
I'll see you then.
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