After a weak showing in Nevada and a total flop in South Carolina, smarmy radical and alleged rat Pete Buttigieg is dropping out of the presidential race, vindicating President Trump’s prophesy that Alfred E. Neuman cannot be president of the United States. We will examine who bought off Mayor Pete. Then, Bloomberg finally makes it to a ballot as we look forward to Super Tuesday, a drag queen twerks for a toddler, and President Trump kills it at CPAC!
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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After a week's showing in Nevada and a complete flop in South Carolina, smarmy radical and alleged rat Pete Buttigieg is dropping out of the presidential race, vindicating President Trump's prophecy that Alfred E. Newman cannot be president of the United States.
We will examine who bought off Mayor Pete.
Then, Bloomberg finally makes it to a ballot as we look forward to Super Tuesday.
A drag queen twerks for a toddler, and President Trump kills it at CPAC. All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much has happened in the last 24 hours that I actually forgot that CPAC was like 24 hours before that.
And I was at CPAC in Washington, D.C. I was there doing a live verdict show with Senator Cruz and with RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
So I want to get to that and give a little behind-the-scenes look at CPAC and why it made me feel really, really good about 2020.
But first, we've got to cover the biggest news, which is that Pete Buttigieg has dropped out of the race.
This was such great news when I got on my plane.
I get on my plane, I'm leaving D.C., and I think, I don't know, what's going on?
What's the interesting thing that's happening right now?
Boom!
Pete Buttigieg.
But it wasn't just a blessing.
It wasn't just great news.
It was also sort of a curse.
It was a blessing in the sense that Buttigieg was the oiliest, most deceptive, dishonest, smarmiest candidate in the race.
He was by far my least favorite candidate in the entire democratic field.
So I'm glad that the most culturally radical smarmy dude is not going to be the president.
But it's also kind of a curse.
It's also kind of sad because what it means is that a significant alleged moderate, self-styled moderate candidate, is not going to stay in and duke this thing out all the way to the convention.
I wanted to see a pure Democratic brawl all the way, and Buttigieg dropping out means that the allegedly moderate side of the party is going to start coalescing.
I say allegedly, he's not really a moderate, but he was presenting himself as a moderate, and so he was competing directly with guys like Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and against the Bernie vote.
The surface-level reason for why Pete Buttigieg got out is that Joe Biden absolutely destroyed him in South Carolina.
That was the other huge news.
So much has happened since I last spoke to you.
So you had the South Carolina primary.
Joe Biden did so much better than anybody thought he was going to do.
He actually vindicated his firewall strategy of doing poorly in the first states and then coming back roaring in South Carolina.
And so it totally took away Buttigieg's momentum.
Don't forget, the first state to go vote, the Iowa caucuses, Pete Buttigieg wins the Iowa.
Sort of.
We know he won Iowa because he announced that he won Iowa before any of the votes were in, so it seemed a little bit dodgy.
A little skeptical of how those votes came in.
It was a complete disaster on the vote count.
But he won the most delegates.
He tied for the popular vote with Bernie.
And Joe Biden came in fourth.
Then Buttigieg remained strong going into New Hampshire.
So he pretty much tied Bernie in New Hampshire.
He won the same number of delegates as Bernie out there.
Then you got Nevada.
He slipped in Nevada.
So Nevada was the first state where you start to get some minority candidates, or some minority voters rather, and he came in third.
He came in behind Bernie and behind Joe Biden.
Bernie in Nevada got 46.8% of the vote, so major, major showing.
Almost half the voters came out and voted for Bernie.
He got 24 delegates out of that.
Joe Biden in second place, but distant second, 20.2% of the vote and nine delegates.
Buttigieg had a...
Pathetic.
14.3% and three delegates.
Then he got completely wrecked in South Carolina.
So the way to think about the South Carolina primaries, it's kind of the flip of the Nevada caucuses.
Nevada caucuses, Bernie comes out, gets almost half the vote.
Joe Biden, distant second.
South Carolina was the opposite of that.
Joe Biden gets almost half the vote.
And Bernie Sanders comes in a distant second.
But South Carolina matters more because it's got many more black voters.
Black voters are very important to the Democratic coalition.
And it's just got more delegates.
It's a bigger state.
It matters more for the nomination.
In that state, and this is what really put the nail in the coffin of Buttigieg having a long track here.
It was Biden at 48.4% getting 35 delegates.
Bernie at 19.9% getting 13 delegates.
Tom Steyer At 11.3%, still zero delegates, but you're getting beaten by Tom Steyer.
You need to get out of the race.
And then Pete Buttigieg at 8.2%, zero delegates.
So Tom Steyer already dropped out.
We will miss him.
He was really fun to watch on the debate stage.
He would always wear a kind of silly tartan tie like it was Christmas dinner.
He would always try to be really nice to all the other candidates, and all the other candidates were always jerks to him.
I'm sorry to see him go.
But no one really cared because he never had a shot at winning the nomination.
Buttigieg is different.
Buttigieg actually had...
I don't know that he was going to win the nomination, but he could have done some damage.
He could have really made the race much tenser moving forward.
The question for Pete was always, can he win minority votes?
And he had two things going against him.
One is the obvious one, which is his sexual preferences.
Polling showed that his sexual preferences did not play well with the minority voters in the Democratic presidential primary.
So, I mean, you remember, this is a story that's gone on for a long time, goes all the way back to Prop 8 during the gay marriage debate.
So the question was, could Pete Buttigieg win over those voters?
He didn't do a very good job at it.
I think he won something like 3% of the black vote in South Carolina.
He also had baggage on racial issues from South Bend.
So he's mayor of South Bend, Indiana, small town.
And he had some racial issues at his police department, allegations of police brutality.
Buttigieg did not handle that in the most politic way.
So he never seemed really to overcome that.
And you saw his trouble with minority voters a little bit in Nevada, and then you really saw it in South Carolina.
Now that doesn't answer the question of why he got out.
That's only the surface level.
That explains why it sort of makes sense that he's not going to win the nomination, so, you know, eventually he's going to have to get out.
But people who run for President of the United States do not do things out of the goodness of their heart, generally, when it comes to electoral politics.
Okay, he could have stayed in this race a long time, made a lot more trouble, maybe gotten some leverage, but he didn't.
He chose to get out before Super Tuesday.
Super Tuesday is the big contest that's coming up.
So many states are going to be voting tomorrow.
So he gets out right before then.
Why is it?
Who bought off Pete Buttigieg?
We'll analyze three theories, because there are two big ones that are going around.
I have a third one that I think actually makes more sense.
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So, we've got these three theories.
He obviously did not choose to get out because, you know, he just thought it was good for the party and, yeah, sure, I raised all this money and I gave up a year and a half of my life and I had plans to take on the most ambitious job in the world, but, you know, I'm just going to give it up.
That's okay.
It's better if I just give it up.
No, I don't think so.
He could have racked up more delegates.
He could have had a stronger hand to play at the DNC if we get to a contested convention.
So someone offered him something.
Someone could have offered him something pretty big.
We don't know.
Could have even been vice president.
Maybe.
I'm not saying it's definitely vice president.
I'm just saying he had to have been offered something pretty good to get out now.
Now, the VP play is possible because Pete Buttigieg made so much of his candidacy about how terrible Mike Pence is.
Over his alleged homophobia.
So Mayor Pete realized the way to give himself a national profile and win cred in the Democratic Party was to pretend that he was an oppressed homosexual who was always, you know, persecuted for his sexual preferences.
And the governor of Indiana, while Pete Buttigieg is mayor of South Bend, was Mike Pence, who's a Christian.
So it was an easy scapegoat to say, Mike Pence is a horrible homophobe.
He's persecuting me.
Grant you...
Pete Buttigieg and Mike Pence have always had a very nice relationship.
Mike Pence has been very flattering to him in public.
He's called him personally to help out.
But it didn't matter.
Buttigieg realized that's how he was going to frame it.
So Buttigieg has a pretty strong hand to play here as a potential VP nominee because he can say, I will show up to the VP debate and I will debate that troglodyte, knuckle-dragging, retrograde, homophobe Mike Pence.
And that could play very well to the Democratic base, who are the only people who are going to watch the VP debate, but it probably wouldn't hurt the ticket generally among people who maybe don't want LGBTQ politics to be at the forefront because very few people in the mainstream watch the VP debate.
So there's a chance it could have been the VP.
If it's VP or something like it, and that's very much possible, the question is, was it Bernie or Biden?
Right.
A lot of people right now are saying that Bernie is the one who offered Pete Buttigieg some big position in the administration.
Why would Bernie do this?
Bernie is still leading in the delegate count.
Bernie is still the front runner in the Democratic nomination.
Even though Joe Biden blew him out of the water in South Carolina, Bernie is still up overall.
One reason that Bernie might've offered Pete something is because Pete would balance the ticket, right?
Bernie is this hardcore radical socialist, Pete Buttigieg is pretending to be a moderate, so if you're just looking at it, it looks like a balanced ticket.
But actually, Pete Buttigieg is a pretty radical guy whose father is the founding member of a major communist academic institution.
And Pete Buttigieg wrote a very flattering, wonderful paper about how great Bernie Sanders is in high school.
So there's underneath the surface a real radicalism there.
It would look, in some ways, like a unity ticket.
You think of Reagan-Bush in 1980.
Reagan represented the conservatives on the right, and George H.W. Bush represented the Rockefeller Republicans, the liberal Republicans, what we would call today the RINOs.
And they fought this really tough primary, and People forget George H.W. Bush, who became Reagan's vice president, actually was the one who invented the term voodoo economics to criticize Ronald Reagan's economic policies.
So they have this really tough campaign, and then they come together.
It's a unity ticket.
You get the whole party going together.
I don't think it's really that, right?
Now, if it were Biden, if it were Biden who offered Pete Buttigieg something, then you're getting two self-styled moderates, which doesn't expand the base.
But I still don't think it's that.
I think this race is fundamentally different than something like 1980, you know, Reagan and Bush, because the two frontrunners in this race are extremely old.
Ronald Reagan was an old candidate at his time, too.
And the two serious candidates in the Democratic race right now Bloomberg, Biden and Bernie, and actually the third maybe serious candidate, Bloomberg, are all almost 10 years older than Ronald Reagan was in 1980.
So you've got these really, really old candidates.
Bernie Sanders had a heart attack on the campaign trail.
Joe Biden can barely finish an English sentence.
The VP actually matters here.
And so the trouble is, if you have a unity-type ticket, let's say it's Bernie Sanders, right, as the radical, and then Pete Buttigieg as the moderate.
The Bernie supporters don't really like Pete Buttigieg that much.
The Pete Buttigieg supporters don't really like Bernie Sanders that much.
Are the Bernie Sanders supporters really going to show up and say, all right, we're going to vote for this ticket, even though in five minutes we might end up with a Buttigieg presidency, which is the least preferable outcome that we could possibly hope for?
I don't think so.
Same thing on the other side, you know, with Joe Biden.
Let's say Joe Biden picks some crazy radical for his vice presidential pick.
Is that really going to...
Is that really going to drag the Biden voters out there?
I don't think so, because they're going to be just as nervous with the VP as they would be if Bernie Sanders were the nominee.
So, it does seem more likely that whatever the offer was, the offer didn't come from Bernie.
That it would have come from the same segment of the Democratic Party.
So for Pete, who's presenting himself as a moderate, that means it's more likely that it came from Biden.
But there is a third option.
We'll get to that third option in a second.
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By the way, by the way, on the age thing, before we move on to the third option, which I think is kind of interesting for why Buttigieg got out and who bought him off, Right now, Joe Biden, who is 77 years old, is the youngest man running for president in the Democratic Party.
The youngest candidate, 77.
Bernie Sanders, 78.
Right now, President Donald Trump, who is 73 years old, who is the oldest man ever elected president for the first time, 73-year-old President Trump is now the youngest man running for president Period.
These baby boomers just will not give it up.
They won't do it.
Really odd election.
We've never seen anything like that before.
And I think it's going to have a real effect on the other side of the ticket, on vice president, on who the cabinet is going to be.
Now, conventional wisdom is saying it's either Bernie or Biden who would offer something to Pete.
There is a third possibility on who is paying Pete to get out of the race.
And that's Mike Bloomberg.
Especially Mike Bloomberg.
The guy has all the money in the world.
Bloomberg is the wild card.
He's been the wild card in this race for months now.
Mike Bloomberg has not been on any ballots yet.
He decided to run too late, so he wasn't in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, but he has been blanketing the airwaves.
He has so far spent, conservative estimate says he's spent $410 million on just TV ads.
That's just television.
He's also running ads on like every single video on YouTube.
He's running ads on my show.
I go on my show.
I spend the whole time criticizing him.
And then I look because YouTube is the one who figures out all these ads.
It's not like we get a say in that.
I look and there's a Mike Bloomberg ad on my show.
And then the ad is over and then I go right back to criticizing him.
That's how much this guy is spending on advertising.
His campaign before Super Tuesday, before tomorrow...
has 2,400 events planned in 30 states.
And it's not even just the money he spent this cycle.
In 2018, Mike Bloomberg promised to spend $80 million buying house seats for Democrats.
And do you know how much he actually spent?
He spent $100 million.
He actually blew past his estimate and he bought the Democrats those seats so he could buy off all the politicians, so he could get some goodwill, so he could get the Democratic Party to change the rules to let him into the debate.
They didn't do that for the other candidates.
They did for him.
He made direct donations to the party.
Bloomberg even admitted this at the last debate on CBS News.
All of the new Democrats that came in, put Nancy Pelosi in charge, and gave the Congress the ability to control this president, I got them.
Okay.
I like how he caught it.
He goes, I got that.
I helped to do that.
You meant to say bought.
And you did buy it.
He did buy it.
Bloomberg could potentially do a lot more for Pete Buttigieg than either Bernie or Biden.
Right?
If it's Bernie or Biden who say, if you get out now before Super Tuesday, you let the vote consolidate, I'll give you VP. I'll give you Secretary of State.
I'll give you Ambassador to whatever.
Right?
Well, the only way Pete gets that favor then, the only way Pete gets to cash that in, is if the candidate who offered it to him first wins the nomination, then beats Donald Trump and wins the White House.
Those two things have to happen.
Otherwise, Pete gave up his presidential campaign for nothing.
With Bloomberg, it's not quite like that.
If Bloomberg was the one who said, hey Pete, get out of the race, I want to consolidate the moderates before Super Tuesday...
I'll give you a VP, I'll give you a Secretary of State, I'll give you whatever.
If Bloomberg somehow miraculously does win the nomination and the presidency, then Pete Buttigieg gets the political favor.
But let's say he doesn't.
Let's say he loses at any point along the way.
He could also say, hey Pete, by the way, if I lose, I'll buy you a Senate seat.
We know that he buys political offices.
He did it to the tune of 100 million last year and he admitted it, or two years ago, he admitted it during a debate.
So he could always say, hey, listen, Pete, I've got infinite money.
Bloomberg's net worth, I think, is upwards of $60 billion with a B. He's one of the richest men in the world.
So he could say...
Look, he could even say...
Let's say Biden wins the nomination.
Let's say Biden wins the presidency.
Bloomberg could just go in and say, Hey, Joe, I'm going to donate, you know, $200 million to your campaign or to some super PAC. Give Pete Buttigieg a spot.
He could do that, too.
You know, the $60 billion goes a long way.
So...
The timing works to Bloomberg's advantage on Super Tuesday, but it also works to Biden's advantage.
You could even make an argument it works to Bernie Sanders' advantage.
So I'm not saying Bloomberg was the one to do it.
I don't know.
We simply don't know.
I mean, the only thing we do know is that Pete certainly got something for this decision.
And if that wasn't dramatic enough to happen yesterday...
Looking tomorrow, you've got Super Tuesday.
Just very quickly, I know we throw around the term Super Tuesday a lot.
I think a lot of people don't know exactly what it means, exactly how important it is.
Super Tuesday is really when this nomination process is going to come together.
So you had four states so far, right?
Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina.
Those were weeks apart.
Tomorrow, simultaneously, you're going to get Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.
They all have primaries tomorrow.
Even American Samoa has its caucuses.
Now, they don't get to vote in the general election, but still, you know, they even throw American Samoa in there.
1,357 of the 3,979 pledged delegates that will be awarded will be awarded on Super Tuesday.
34% of all pledged delegates.
Now I say pledged delegates because in the Democratic primaries there is another type of delegate called a superdelegate.
Superdelegates are just party elites.
They are completely unaccountable to voters.
Republicans don't have them.
It's sort of ironic that the party called the Democratic Party has the least democratic process to nominate their candidate.
So there are going to be 775 superdelegates on top of that.
Superdelegates are going to make up 16% of the people who are going to choose who the nominee is.
And then the rest are going to come from those pledged delegates.
And we're going to get over a third of the pledged delegates tomorrow.
Going into Super Tuesday, Bernie is in the lead.
So you got Bernie in the lead.
You got Joe.
Saved his campaign.
His campaign was dead.
It was figuratively and literally dead.
He comes on in, wins big in South Carolina, and now you've got these two old guys who are competing for the nomination.
We're going to see if Mike Bloomberg can buy the nomination tomorrow.
It's going to be a real test of how far money can go in politics.
Mike Bloomberg has all the money.
He is totally committed to this race.
He is, for all of his flaws as a candidate, and there are many flaws, Donald Trump talks about some of those flaws at CPAC, and we'll give you a little glimpse into it.
But for all of his flaws, you know, the guy did win three terms as mayor of New York.
New York, one of the most important cities in the world.
He did manage to do that.
He does have a political skill.
So we're going to see how far he can take it.
Judging from the outside, I think President Trump may actually be slightly worried about Bloomberg.
I don't think that Trump is worried that he's going to lose to Bloomberg.
I don't think anybody in his right mind thinks it's likely that Trump could lose to Mike Bloomberg, okay?
But you've got to be worried about just about everything in politics because anything can happen.
And I think Trump sees a much bigger threat in a guy like Mike Bloomberg than he does in somebody like Bernie Sanders.
And I say this because Trump keeps...
Tweeting about Bloomberg.
I mean, just even yesterday, all these tweets coming out about Mini Mike, he should get out, it's so pathetic, he's a terrible mayor, he was awful in New York.
I just think if, you know, Trump isn't sending these tweets out about Tulsi Gabbard.
Trump isn't sending these tweets out about Tom Steyer or whoever, right?
He's sending them out about specific candidates and Look, if the outcome of that is that we get more of the hilarious stand-up routines that Trump has been doing about Mike Bloomberg, that's fine by me, but it also means conservative voters should keep an eye on Mike Bloomberg.
We did get one of those great stand-up routines at CPAC. I was at CPAC in D.C., and I was there on Friday, and he was there on Friday.
Saturday.
So I missed the president, unfortunately.
I was doing the event with Senator Cruz and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel.
I almost missed my event with Senator Cruz because the Secret Service was so intense about Vice President Mike Pence being there.
I literally, the RNC chairwoman had to come down the stairs personally, bring me up to get on stage, otherwise I was going to miss it.
So I wasn't able to make it to President Trump's event because the security obviously was even tougher for the president.
I had to watch the president from afar, and it was absolutely magnificent.
It was fabulous.
I can tell you, the energy in the room on the days that I was at CPAC was really, really high.
It was really young.
People super excited.
And then the president got there, and people lost their minds.
They loved it.
He walks out on stage.
The first thing he does, he walks out, and he hugs the American flag.
He's hugging the American flag.
He gives it a little kiss.
On the Stars and Stripes, and he's mouthing.
He doesn't have the microphone on at this point, but he's mouthing.
He says, I love you, baby.
Oh, how I love you.
It's just terrific.
Classic, vintage, excellent Trump.
And then he gets on stage, and he just starts making fun of Mike Bloomberg.
But she was really mean to Minnie Mike.
I'll tell you, the way she treated her.
He didn't know what hit him.
He's going, oh, get me off of this stage.
Get me off!
Give me up for these stars!
So when you hear the cheers is when President Trump just crouches down and lowers himself with a completely straight face so that, you know, his chin is barely above the podium to do a better mini Mike Bloomberg impression.
It was great.
It just reminds you what a tremendous showman this guy is.
This guy's got audiences wrapped around his little finger for 40 years.
It was just a great performance from Trump.
The crowd was so revved up.
And that matters.
People make fun of Trump for talking about the crowds, the crowd enthusiasm, and the crowd sizes.
Electoral politics is about big crowds.
And it's about the enthusiasm from big crowds.
When you look at the Democratic primaries, turnout is down, especially in those early states.
We were told turnout's supposed to be way up.
Oh, Democrats are going to do so great this time because everyone hates Trump and all those voters who stayed home in 2016 are going to come out.
Well, just to use New Hampshire as an example, turnout was down from 2016.
More people were excited about 2016 in the Democratic field than they are about this year.
Turnout among young voters who were supposed to be the big saviors of the Democratic Party.
They're the ones who are going to finally correct things and throw Trump out of office because they hate him so much.
Turnout among millennial Democrats is down.
Gen Z Democrats, it's down.
Excitement is really, really going to matter.
And it would seem, I can tell you firsthand on the CPAC side, I can tell you objectively just looking at turnout.
The excitement right now is for the Republicans.
It's for Trump.
We will get to maybe why that is.
One really creepy, freaky story from the latest in leftist woke politics is a video that went viral of a half-naked drag queen twerking in front of a little toddler at her birthday party.
and the toddler looks all freaked out and all the parents all around her are cheering it on.
How funny, how wonderful.
Love is love, I guess.
Birthdays are birthdays, I don't know.
We will examine how the left got to that point and why it's really playing very well for the conservatives.
First, I've got to say about Facebook and YouTube, and I've got to tell you, That our pal, Andrew Klavan, has released the second entry in the Another Kingdom trilogy, and that book is The Nightmare Feast.
You know, Drew and I started this three years ago.
We started as a narrative podcast, and it jumped and became one of the top arts podcasts of the year.
We got both additional seasons out of it.
Drew is releasing that as a book you got to get.
It's about Austin Lively, once just an out of luck Hollywood screenwriter, now a chosen hero caught between two worlds and dual quests in both Los Angeles, California, and the magical medieval world of Galeana.
It is a tremendous work.
I had the privilege of narrating it on the podcast and the audio book.
I think it's an enduring work.
I think it's so powerful.
It's just so much of what we talk about on the sort of critical level on this show.
You get the artistic and literary version on Another Kingdom.
So go out, buy that book.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
We've got Super Tuesday coming up tomorrow.
Daily Wire is going to be with you all night.
We're going to be there the whole time on Daily Wire backstage.
We want to hear from you.
Tell us who you think will win the Democratic nomination by texting either...
Biden, Bernie, Bloomberg, or Warren to 83400.
83400.
Text who you think is going to win the nomination, and on Tuesday night during our Daily Wire backstage, we will analyze the results live.
So it's Bernie, Biden, Bloomberg, or Warren.
Text it to 83400, and we will analyze the results on Daily Wire backstage tomorrow.
Super Tuesday.
Super Tuesday's going to be a big day.
We should probably call it Super Socialist Tuesday because the Democrats are currently poised to nominate an actual socialist to go up against President Trump.
So we are offering 25% off all Daily Wire membership plans when you use the coupon code NEVERSOCIALIST. Go on over, check it out, dailywire.com slash subscribe.
We'll be right back.
Why is excitement so high up on the conservative side?
Why are so many people being driven away from the left?
Well, it might have something to do with their creepy, weird sex stuff that they keep forcing on children.
Video goes viral, uh, It goes on TikTok, and then it made the rounds everywhere else.
By the way, TikTok, I think, is just where the worst things in the world happen.
There's another video going around TikTok.
It's a new campaign of women who are pregnant.
They're showing off their pregnant bellies.
And then the next scene, they go to an abortion clinic and get an abortion.
And the videos actually look pretty real.
I think they might be real.
So that's the worst thing on TikTok.
And then the second worst thing that we've seen is this creepy drag queen crawling up to a toddler at what appears to be her birthday party.
And the guy is kind of dancing around.
And all the parents, they think this is so fun.
This is so wonderful and cool.
Isn't it great?
We're so progressive.
We're so hip.
And the little girl looks just like horrified.
It's like, what on earth am I looking at?
Why am I here?
Why are you doing this to me?
Everything about this is wrong.
The drag queen is then touching the little girl.
Drag queen not wearing a ton of clothing, by the way.
There are some people who describe this sort of thing.
Even on the right, even conservatives, they describe these sort of scenes.
They say, oh, it's a blessing of liberty.
Isn't it great?
We live in a country, you can do whatever you want.
We can never use the government to come in and stop this sort of thing.
That's not our place.
It's un-American.
There's nothing more American than tolerating this sort of child abuse.
That George Washington would be so happy right now looking at this TikTok.
James Madison would be so thrilled watching this video go viral on Twitter.
That's just complete BS, okay?
And I get why the left is pushing this stuff, but what really bugs me are the people who are allegedly on the right who are tolerating it.
We need to stop this.
We should use the arm of the state to stop this, okay?
To stop this radical sexual grooming that's going on for young people pushed by the political arm of the cultural left.
We have always had laws against this kind of stuff in America.
The argument that it's un-American to have laws against this kind of stuff is just not true.
We have always had laws, and we currently have laws that limit people's sexual expression.
We currently, today, 2020, we have laws against adultery.
Adultery.
Not weird child pedophilia grooming, drag queens twerking on kids.
No, just adultery.
We have laws against that in 19 states in America.
Until the middle of the 20th century, until the sexual revolution, we had laws in most states against adultery, fornication, Cohabitation, shacking up, living with your significant other before marriage, okay?
So it is simply historically false to say that to support a law against these kind of things is un-American.
Now, please do not misunderstand me, especially for the hacks over at Media Matters who are about to clip this out.
I am not saying that we now need to go out tomorrow and pass laws against shacking up.
I don't think very many people would support that kind of a law in the United States today.
But I bet that a lot of people would support a law banning drag queen strip shows from preschools.
Drag Queen Story Hour is actually moving into public schools now.
Gender theory is moving into preschools.
There was a preschool teacher in Brooklyn who just came out the other day.
He said, my curriculum is forcing me to teach little kids that they can be whatever sex they want.
And they're not really boys and they're not really girls and they can be whatever they want to be.
We should stop that.
The same type of regulation that put that into the curriculum should take that out of the curriculum.
The same kind of legal framework that is permitting these kind of weird drag queen twerking strip shows to go on in front of children should be used to take that away from children.
Okay?
Conservatives need to stop defending this insanity with anti-historical arguments about American liberty.
Because, by the way, they're not...
They're not persuasive arguments to the majority of the American people.
I mean, the way the left would kind of caricature the conservatives and say, oh, you want to ban everything.
You want to ban people from kissing before marriage.
You want to ban people from cohabitation.
No, we're not talking about any of that.
We're talking about stopping drag queen twerk shows on preschoolers.
And when you put it in those terms, when you explain what's actually going on, what people are actually talking about, I bet 97% of Americans would support that position.
The people who are supporting this kind of sick stuff is a very, very small sliver of a minority of the radical left.
Okay?
The public opinion, I very much believe, is on the side of don't have drag queens twerk in children's faces.
So, conservatives, for some reason, we just want to keep seeding the ground, seeding the ground.
We're so uncomfortable using political power in this way.
In fact, that's why conservatives always like to say that politics is downstream of culture.
It's true in many ways, but that's not a freebie card to stop conservatives from engaging in politics.
All right?
Conservatives kind of using that easy way out are why we've lost so much cultural ground over the past 60 years, and we should stop doing it.
You know, they accuse us of using religion to stop progress, using our religion to stop all the wonderful things that the left wants to do.
The left has a religion too.
I mean, this kind of crazy stuff that you see in that TikTok video, that has a religious underpinning.
I mean, the very basic religious argument there is that your body is not really emblematic of who you are.
That's the fundamental religious premise of gender theory, is that I am not really my body.
So I might look like a man, I might have all the parts of a man, I might have a deep voice and an Adam's apple, but actually, secretly, deep down somewhere, I'm really a woman.
And therefore, my body is evil because it's working against who I really am and I need to change my body to be more in line with who I am.
That is a religious concept.
It's actually an ancient religious heresy called Gnosticism, Gnostic dualism, and these dumb religious ideas crop up time and time again in history, most especially when people believe they're not being religious at all.
AOC proved this just the other day.
AOC said that if you make an argument from religious liberty, You're really just using a cynical talking point to cover up your own bigotry.
It's very difficult to sit here and listen to arguments in the long history of this country of using scripture and weaponizing and abusing scripture to justify bigotry.
White supremacists have done it.
Those who justified slavery did it.
Those who fought against integration did it.
And we're seeing it today.
So most of what she's saying is not true, or it's got some kernel of truth because like some guy used some stupid argument from some weird sect that perverted the gospel.
What she's failing to point out is that the entire abolition movement was run by Christians.
All of it came from Christians.
The Catholic Church, the oldest Christian organization ever, has always opposed chattel slavery.
They don't talk about that.
They don't talk about how the church was the great defender of Native Americans, for instance, when Europeans first discovered North and South America.
Doesn't talk about any of that stuff, but I don't even really care.
I don't want to get into her dumb arguments.
I actually want to give her a little bit of credit You know, she's making an argument that Pete Buttigieg made last night in his concession speech.
The argument was, he said almost the same line.
He said it a little more articulately than she did, but he said, people use the term religious liberty to just try to get their own views across.
They're not actually talking about liberty and everybody gets the same kind of stuff.
They're talking about how we need a specific kind of religious view in this country.
They kind of have a point.
Not on the bigotry stuff.
I mean, that's just dumb.
But they have a point on religious liberty.
We have a terrific tradition of religious liberty in America.
But religious liberty should not be confused with religious neutrality.
We've had religious liberty for a very long time.
You can practice your religions.
But all states have a religious foundation.
Right.
The United States.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
The premise of our country is that there is a creator.
And the creator looks a certain way and has a certain character.
Maybe we don't all agree on the exact specifics, but that means that America has a religious premise.
And if you...
If you don't believe in a creator, then you don't really buy into that religious premise.
If you believe in two or three creators, then you also don't buy into that religious premise.
Doesn't mean you can't get on and have a good life and thrive in America, but we can't pretend that America doesn't have a religious underpinning.
The entire system of natural rights that we base our country on comes from the natural law.
The natural law has a religious tradition.
We should stop pretending that there is religious neutrality.
We must have a religious premise because political questions rely on cultural foundations.
Cultural foundations come from religious foundations.
Cult and culture derive from the same word.
What a culture worships will define that culture.
So you've got to pick which kind of basis you want.
Do you want what we've always had in America, which is a Christian basis for the country that is very tolerant of people's views, that allows people to have their religious life and their spiritual life and how they want to live it most of the time and almost always? that allows people to have their religious life and their
Do you want that kind of view that's traditional, respects man, comes from natural rights, or do you want the religious view that says that men are really women and babies are not really babies and we should kill a million babies a year and we should have drag queens twerk in front of children's faces?
is.
Those all rest on religious propositions and they disagree with one another.
The Christian view says babies are babies and you shouldn't kill a million of them a year.
And adult men should not rub their private areas that should remain very, very private off of TikTok out of the public view in front of children.
You got to pick one, okay?
And we again should not pretend that there's some neutrality here.
There isn't and I don't feel neutral about any of it.
Speaking of neutrality, before we go, I just have to, I have to mark a very special occasion, a very special anniversary.
Net neutrality killed us all two years ago.
And I just want to mark that occasion because we all died.
There was a change from the federal agency on a certain internet regulation.
The left assured us it would kill all of us.
And so we've all been dead for two years.
And I just want to take a moment to commemorate that.
CNN's front page, 2017.
Net neutrality is the end of the internet as we know it.
Sandra Fluke, who is a left-wing abortion activist and birth control contraception activist, she said that repealing the regulation, the net neutrality, would kill access to abortion information.
GLAAD insisted that GLAAD is a sort of We're good to go.
The ACLU said it would create a two-tier internet, and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat from my own state of California, said that without net neutrality, we would all be sent a bill for how much video, how many emails we sent, how many games we played, how many social media posts we made on the internet.
Every tweet would cost us like two dollars.
And, of course, none of that happened whatsoever.
This gets into a lot of media and left-wing generated hysterias.
They never have to admit that they were wrong.
I think that we're in the midst of one of those hysterias right now.
The markets are reacting to the coronavirus in a way that is, you know, plunging the global economy into correction territory.
And it doesn't seem to be based on very good scientific information.
But because the left never has to admit that they're wrong...
They keep getting away with it again and again.
We're out of time today, so we'll have to get back into why they should not get away with it this time tomorrow and get ready for Super Tuesday because we'll see you all night.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
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