Major U.S. cities shut down to stop the spread of the WuFlu. But as we rush to save our lives, is coronavirus killing our Constitution? We will examine the surprising civics lessons of this pandemic. Then, former future Democrat Governor of Florida and potential VP candidate Andrew Gillum is found vomiting in a hotel room with a naked male prostitute and a bunch of meth. We will analyze, as it were, how the press let him off the hook. Finally, DNC chairman Tom Perez illustrates the Left’s two contradictory takes on religion.
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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Major U.S. cities shut down to stop the spread of the Wu flu.
But as we rush to save our lives, as coronavirus killing our Constitution, we will examine the surprising civics lessons of the pandemic.
Then, former future Democrat governor of Florida and potential vice president candidate Andrew Gillum is found vomiting in a hotel room with a naked male prostitute and a bunch of meth.
We will analyze, as it were, how the press let him off the hook.
Finally, DNC Chairman Tom Perez illustrates the left's two contradictory takes on religion.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
All right.
What's the latest with our pandemic that we've got running around all of our cities?
New guidelines out from the Trump administration.
The Trump administration is calling this 15 days to slow the spread.
Typical stuff in here.
So it says, stay home if you're sick, stay home if you're old, stay home if you're frail, don't gather in groups of 10 or 20 or 30 people, don't host any mosh pits, don't go to any raves, kind of what you would expect.
But all of that is secondary to the most interesting thing in the document, which is the very first line.
The very first line says, listen to and follow the directions of your state and local authorities.
Now, if there is a silver lining of the Wu flu amid the death and the economic devastation and, worst of all, the closed bars, very frustrating, if there is to be said some sort of silver lining, it is this.
People are learning more about federalism.
We'll get to that in one second.
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They're actually learning more about our federal system of government.
Molly Jong Fast, who is a liberal who is all over Twitter and she writes for the Daily Beast, I think.
She writes for the Bulwark.
She tweets out, quote, So the states are basically governing themselves because our president doesn't know how to president at all?
Are you going to tell her or should I? I think a lot of people actually already told her this on Twitter.
The states are basically governing themselves because we have a form of government called federalism.
So, whether it be during a pandemic or whether it just be during a regular Tuesday, the states, at least theoretically, are supposed to mostly govern themselves because we have a federal system of government.
Actually, it looks like the president knows very well how to president because The federal government in Washington, D.C. is not supposed to make every single decision for how we run our lives.
Actually, it's supposed to make very, very few of those decisions.
It took a worldwide pandemic to get liberals to read the Constitution.
So that's what we're seeing.
From the federal level, there actually is some drastic action being taken, right?
We saw the last couple days...
The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates.
There's a program of quantitative easing that's going to go into effect, which is basically just printing money to help stimulate the economy.
President Trump is waiving interest on student loans.
There are Small Business Administration loans coming out.
There is disaster relief coming out.
And now we're seeing that the White House and Congress are talking about a potential $850 million.
It's a billion-dollar stimulus package.
So a lot of money.
Or is it million-dollar?
I guess these days, you know, with the liberals, it doesn't really matter.
Million, billion, one dollar from Mike Bloomberg, a million dollars from Mike Bloomberg.
Anyway, some sort of stimulus.
It's still in the works.
They're going to be talking about it.
It's going to put President Trump in a difficult position, though, because he's going to have to attack Trump.
President Obama's economic policies and yet it looks like these might be similar things to what we saw in 2008-2009.
Another very important thing from the federal government, the elimination of the payroll tax.
A big boost to employees and to employers.
That would be very, very good.
But most of the decisions that affect our lives, and they're affecting our lives during this pandemic, are coming from the state and local level.
Okay?
So we're now seeing in Los Angeles, disaster has finally hit because they closed all the bars.
So the bars are closed, restaurants are closed, certain shops are closed.
I mean, it is pretty weird.
That's not what's happening in every town across America.
That's just what Our schmucky mayor Eric Garcetti decided to do.
Eric Garcetti, who has not dealt with the homeless problem once.
Homelessness increased 16% during his time in office in just one year.
But now all of a sudden we're going to shut the bars.
That's going to slow the spread of the pandemic.
San Francisco putting the whole city on lockdown.
Ohio canceling the presidential primaries today.
And actually you saw some disagreement between two branches of government there.
Because the governor wanted to cancel the primaries and not have people come out and vote.
A judge said he did not have the authority to cancel the primaries, and so the governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, decided just not to open the polling places.
So he said, okay, judge, you made your decision, but I can decide whether or not to open these places, and if they're not open, then you can't vote.
Is this constitutional?
Probably.
I don't know if it's legal, but it's probably constitutional.
In that...
Not everything hateful or odious is covered by some provision of the Constitution.
The Constitution, at least in theory, is supposed to reign in the power of our federal government, but it actually gives the states and localities a lot of leeway to govern.
Actually, this is a big, big element of a debate going on on the right right now between the libertarians and the more traditional conservatives.
The libertarians are saying, you know, the government can never pass any kind of regulations ever.
It's always terrible.
It's always unconstitutional.
And what the traditional conservatives are looking at is saying, well, actually, maybe the federal government doesn't have the authority to do that, but state and local governments have always had the authority to do that.
I mean, we think about, just think about the First Amendment.
First Amendment says there cannot be an established church in America, right, for the federal government of America.
So the liberals interpret that to be a total separation of church and state, but that's not what the framers intended at all.
That's not what they meant.
How do we know that?
Because we know that states had established churches.
The federal government was not allowed to, but the states were allowed to.
And actually, the reason that the federal government was not allowed to is to permit the states to do just that.
So you might agree or disagree with the decisions of the states here, but that's not really a constitutional question.
That's more a question of the law of your state or the elected officials that you have put into office.
So we got the political update.
That's what's going on.
It's changing by the minute.
We'll keep you posted.
The economic update.
The global economy could lose between $1.1 and $2.7 trillion as a result of Lung Pao Sikkim.
That is a lot of money.
$1.1 and $2.7 trillion.
Okay, and those aren't just numbers floating in the air.
That actually affects the lives of people.
$2.7 trillion.
What's the economy of the United States?
I think the federal budget of the United States is three and a half, four trillion dollars, something like that.
So you're talking about a huge portion of that.
Or maybe the budget is a little higher than that because we're always running a deficit.
That's another problem with our federal government.
But still, you're talking about a huge amount of money with regard to our economy.
And that could be gone.
I just got a letter in from a listener to the show from Jennifer.
Hi, Michael.
I'm a huge fan and wait impatiently for your show.
I keep hearing about this mandatory two-week paid leave by companies employing 50 or more.
I work at a hotel on I-40 in Amarillo, Texas.
We deal with travelers coming and going.
Literally across our nation.
Most hotels, motels do not employ 50 people, and my employer does not offer any paid leave.
I, among others, can't afford even one day off.
We are at extremely high risk to coronavirus.
We Clorox wipe as often as possible and use hand sanitizer.
What else do you think we can do that wouldn't be off-putting or give guests the wrong idea?
Also, what do you think, if anything, should be done to help us during this time?
A couple questions in there, so let's get the easy one first.
I think that by Cloroxing everything, by having those hotel and motel rooms reek of cleaning supplies, you will put your customers at ease.
Okay?
I know sometimes cleaning supplies smell.
You don't want that when you get into a hotel.
During a pandemic, you do.
That's like the sweetest perfume you can smell.
So I think probably that would put the customers at ease.
What can be done for people who can't afford to miss work?
You are far from alone.
This is true for the vast majority of people in this country.
They can't afford to miss work.
And that's the consequence here that nobody is talking about when it comes to the response to this virus.
There are real consequences to hysteria.
Everyone's saying, better to overreact than underreact.
Is that true?
Maybe it's true.
I'm not so sure about that.
Okay, so what's the first consequence of hysteria?
People's nerves.
People are losing it, man.
People are on edge, especially if you look on Twitter, which I don't recommend.
People are losing their minds.
Also, there are some businesses that are closed now that don't need to be closed.
I just saw Pennsylvania is going to close liquor stores.
Why are you going to close liquor stores?
That doesn't make any sense.
Liquor stores are not places where people congregate all the time.
It doesn't add up.
We will get to The two popular views on the economic front here.
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So, you've got businesses closing now that don't need to close.
There is a cost to that.
Okay?
You know, we're going to lose $1.1 to $2.7 trillion out of the global economy.
That's gone.
That just disappears.
It's not like you get to bring that back later.
Okay?
That's gone.
All this wealth that we have in this country comes from our ability to produce things.
Countries that are very prosperous are prosperous because people are working a lot.
They're producing a lot of things.
Countries that are not prosperous...
It's not just some luck-of-the-draw whoopsie-daisy most of the time.
The reason that they're not prosperous is because they don't have systems in place that allow people to produce things and to work and to make a lot of money.
So when you're just sitting on the couch for two weeks, there's no way to fix that.
There's no magic pill to make that all better.
You've got to be producing things.
So just to use an easy example, in L.A., I have friends who are waiters and waitresses.
They're not going to be able to pay their bills.
Maybe they'll get the payroll tax.
Maybe that'll help.
Maybe they'll get unemployment.
But it's going to be very difficult to pay their bills.
There are two popular opinions on this, both of which are wrong and demagogic, but they're very popular.
There's one view.
We can call it the political viewpoint.
That view is we should pay no attention to any economic questions.
We should be willing to shut down everything, grind the entire global economy to a complete halt if it means that it increases our chances of making people healthier by one percent or half a percent or half of a half a percent.
Forget the economic questions.
What monster are you that you would consider economic questions during a natural disaster, during a time of pandemic?
Okay, that's the political viewpoint.
You're hearing this especially by the people who are getting hysterical online.
Then on the other side, there's what you might call the economic viewpoint.
And the economic viewpoint basically says, hey guys, look, some people are going to get sick, especially old people, especially frail people, but who needs them anyway?
Let's not stop the economy at all.
Let's just keep things going as usual and we'll figure it out.
It'll be okay.
This is what you're seeing happened in places like the Netherlands, where they're basically pursuing the strategy of herd immunity and saying, keep everything going, you'll figure it out.
Some people are going to get sick, whatever, too bad.
Some people are going to die, even worse, but hey, that's life.
We'll figure it out.
At least we won't stop producing things.
This, you might call the economic model, doesn't view people exactly like people.
It views them more as cogs in a machine.
No responsibility here to take care of people.
Both of those views get it wrong.
Why?
Because politics is not just politics.
Economics is not just economics.
This is the problem, especially you see this when you have experts running the economy, experts running our government, is they only focus on their one area of expertise.
They miss the forest for the trees.
Politics and economics and other viewpoints tell us about society, about real things, about real men and women.
So, We want a civilization that views human beings as human beings, full human beings, men and women with dignity, whose lives matter, whose lives cannot just be expended by some cold calculation, right?
We also want a civilization.
We don't want to descend into chaos.
What's going to happen?
Let's say they shut down Los Angeles.
They completely lock it down.
Business is shut down.
You're supposed to stay home.
How long is that going to last before people start losing it?
This is Los Angeles, okay?
When the roads get a little wet, you know, when it rains once or twice a year, people lose their minds.
There's like violence in the streets, basically.
What's going to happen when that city is completely shut down for a week or two weeks or three weeks?
I think people are just going to, okay, that's fine.
We'll just stay at home.
We'll just watch Netflix.
I don't think so.
Other cities too.
San Francisco.
You think it's going to be like that?
San Francisco's got public defecation on the best of days.
What's going to happen when things start to go haywire?
What's going to happen when people can't go to establishments, can't go to coffee shops, can't go to bars, can't go to restaurants, can't go anywhere?
They're going to get restless.
Idle hands are the devil's playground, all right?
And especially in places that already are not the most peaceful all the time.
That's not a great thing.
So you've got to take that into consideration.
And by the way, Europe is not a guarantee of what's going to happen in the United States.
I got into a lot of trouble with left-wing blue checkmark Twitter the other day because I said that the United States is not Italy.
That's not saying we shouldn't take the Wuhan virus seriously, but it is to say Italy has the oldest population in Europe.
They kiss each other when they greet one another, and they haven't had a functioning government since Octavian.
It's kind of a flippant way of pointing out there are big cultural differences here.
Well, here's another big difference.
Europeans are used to being absolutely subservient to their governments.
There is at least continental Europe, maybe not the UK. The Anglo-American tradition of liberty, the Anglo-American tradition of not letting the government push you around and tell you what to do all the time is a very real thing.
You don't see that in continental Europe.
You do see it here.
How long are we going to be on lockdown before...
Some American says, no, I don't think so.
I think I'm going to go out there.
Sir, where's your license to walk outside?
Yeah, here's my license.
Probably lift up one of their fingers.
There is an attitude in the United States that does not like to be pushed around by our government.
You've got to take that into consideration as well.
Right now, it's considered impolite to talk about economics.
The reason for that is there is no political cost to overreaction.
There's going to be a massive cost, right?
People are going to lose their jobs.
They're going to lose their livelihoods.
Who knows?
Very easily, someone could be harmed or die as a result of this.
Perfectly simple to consider.
Someone can't get the services that they need, that they rely on every single day, but because of the disruption of the global economy, they're not able to get it.
So even just in terms of life or death, certainly that could be a consequence, but there will be no political cost to that.
If you are a mayor or a governor of a state, or the president of the United States for that matter, all the political cost is on underreaction because you get all the negative headlines of 20,000 people died, 25,000 people died.
And it doesn't matter if you could point to it and say, that's fewer people than died from the flu.
That won't matter.
The headlines will be there.
And so you've got every incentive to overreact.
But the headline will never be, the economy ground to a halt.
Because guess what?
The economy around the world ground to a halt.
You say, of course, we had to do that to save lives.
And you can't prove a negative.
So that will be a successful political argument.
But just as we should avoid an emotional response...
When it comes to panicking or not panicking.
That was our show yesterday.
Hysterics aren't helping.
Just as we avoid an emotional response there, so too we should avoid an emotional response when it comes to simplistic answers here.
These are very complex questions and we should not entirely ignore the political side.
We should not entirely ignore the economic side of things.
We've got to take them as a whole because they're all part of the same question, which is of society.
Now there is one simple question in all this.
The question is, what do we call this virus?
What do we call it?
President Trump had an answer yesterday.
He tweeted out a reference to the Chinese coronavirus.
Okay, Trump has been doing this the whole time.
See, yesterday he tweets, the United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese virus.
We will be stronger than ever before.
And the left, they're furious about this.
I say, how dare you call it the Chinese virus?
What, just because it's a virus that comes from China, all of a sudden it's Chinese?
Yeah, uh-huh, that's true.
They say that's racist, that's xenophobic.
Oh, the letters, I'll show you, the tweets, the messages, the emails that I've gotten from left-wingers who are irate that I would refer to the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus or anything that talks about the origin of this illness.
They have short memories because if they could remember even back a week ago or two weeks ago, they would see that President Trump and I are simply taking our cues from the mainstream media.
At least six people have died from the Wuhan coronavirus.
The Wuhan coronavirus has now surpassed the 2003 SARS outbreak and the number of lives it's claimed.
They're under quarantine out of concern that passengers and crew were exposed to the Wuhan coronavirus.
And this breaking news just into CNN. The official death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus in China's Hubei province has now risen to 780.
Having to deal with it, the total number of deaths from the Wuhan coronavirus has now surpassed the SARS outbreak from 2002 to 2003.
Spreading fast as the number of confirmed cases of the Wuhan virus continue to surge.
In a matter of days, Dr.
Li Wenliang went from treating patients to becoming one.
The 34-year-old ophthalmologist diagnosed Saturday with the Wuhan coronavirus.
We have new information about how the Wuhan coronavirus is spread.
The Wuhan virus, which originated, as we know, in Wuhan, China.
Just in case the name Wuhan virus didn't give you an idea of where it's from, it's from Wuhan, China.
I could play another 10 minutes of that.
Montage, okay?
That's just like 50 or 55 seconds.
I could go on and on and on.
Everybody was calling this the Wuhan virus, the Chinese virus, the whole mainstream media.
And then...
A bunch of cynical leftists decided, wait a second, this might be an almost plausible opportunity to baselessly smear our opponents as racists, like we usually do.
You know, because it's almost plausible, because it involves a location, and locations can sometimes imply race, and so anyway, you're all a bunch of racists.
They don't even remember that two weeks ago they were all doing this.
Forget the Spanish flu, the Ebola, the West Nile virus.
Forget all of that.
They themselves on CNN, on NPR, and all of these stations were doing it just a couple weeks ago.
New York Times.
And now those very same outlets are saying it's racist and bigoted and terrible.
Really pathetic stuff, guys.
It shows you how the left is willing to exploit any little thing.
And when they tell you that Trump and conservatives are not taking this seriously, play them that clip.
Who's not taking this seriously?
I think we're taking it very seriously.
I think we're taking it much more seriously than the left.
We've got to get to Andrew Gillum, speaking of unserious people, and speaking of sick, sick stuff, we'll get to Andrew Gillum, who was found hurling in a hotel room next to a naked male prostitute surrounded by a bunch of meth.
Probably just a coincidence, probably just an accident.
We'll get to that in one second.
First, take one quick question from a listener from KC. Michael, can you do an impression of your sweet little Elisa?
I need to smile this morning.
Now!
Okay, let's go to the Daily Wire website.
Let's get out of Facebook and YouTube.
We've got a whole lot more to get to, but we'll have to take a quick break.
It's 2020.
We've only just begun what is bound to be the most insane year for news since the last presidential election.
That time we didn't even have a global pandemic.
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All right, Andrew Gillum.
Poor Andrew Gillum.
What happened?
The former future governor of Florida, Andrew Gillum, found vomiting in a hotel room surrounded by a bunch of meth and a naked male prostitute who worked for RentMen.com.
It's like, it might as well be from IllegalSex.com.
IamCommittingACrime.com.
Not a great look if you are in politics, or even if you're not in politics.
You don't want to be found hurling by the police, surrounded by a naked gay prostitute and drugs.
Gillum's story is that he went to a wedding.
He had a little bit too much to drink.
Look, you and I, we know this.
We know what happens.
You go to a wedding, right?
You have one or two A few too many drinks, maybe.
And then, next thing you know, you wake up in a hotel room next to a naked male prostitute and a bunch of meth.
How many times has that happened to us?
That's the story.
Never touched the meth.
Who was that guy?
I don't know who that naked male prostitute is.
Mind you, Andrew Gillum is married with three kids.
Married to a woman.
I know that these days you have to specify that.
Married to a woman with three kids.
So really, really bad look.
The guy just signed on as a CNN contributor.
Unfortunate.
I'm not bringing this up to a dunk on Andrew Gillum.
At least that's not the only reason I'm doing it.
He was a really unlikable candidate for governor.
He was one of these people who was insinuating that the election might be rigged and fixed.
He was really awful, and I'm glad he lost his election, especially now, now that we know who he is.
The reason I bring it up is this guy was still being talked about as a potential vice presidential candidate.
Because Democrats always do this.
If you lose, you win.
I don't know.
You lose up.
Stacey Abrams lost the Georgia governor race.
Now she is still seriously being considered as a vice presidential candidate.
She's like a top tier vice presidential candidate.
Beto O'Rourke loses the Texas Senate race.
Then all of a sudden he's the Vanity Fair cover glossy photo candidate for president.
Andrew Gillum, same thing.
Politico ran this story.
Another Democrat gets a 2020 look.
Andrew Gillum.
This was just about a year ago they ran it.
The Florida Democrat got a standing ovation at a closed-door DNC meeting.
Even in defeat, Democrat Andrew Gillum is proving to be one of the winners of 2018.
The former Tallahassee mayor is parlaying his razor-thin loss in the Florida governor's race into a role in the 2020 presidential primary as a kingmaker or perhaps even a candidate himself.
Wow.
Man, that guy is going to go places.
Daily Beast.
Daily Beast reported that Elizabeth Warren, remember her, she was considering Andrew Gillum to be her vice presidential running mate.
Probably not anymore.
Here is the Andrew Gillum statement.
Just think, if you were found in a hotel room, puking, naked prostitute next to you, male prostitute, meth on the floor, what would you say?
Probably nothing is what you would say.
Gillum releases a statement, quote, this has been a wake up call for me.
Since my race for governor ended, I fell into a depression that has led to alcohol abuse.
I witnessed my father suffer from alcoholism and I know the damaging effects it can have when untreated.
I also know that alcoholism is often a symptom of deeper struggles.
I will be stepping down from all public facing roles for the foreseeable future.
He apologized and asked for privacy.
What a terrible statement.
What a garbage, shameful statement.
I would be more than happy.
Frankly, I'd be more than happy to skip over the story.
If the guy's statement took any responsibility whatsoever for his actions, or owned up to the fact that he did these things, or acknowledged the naked prostitute next to him, or owned up to the fact that maybe he had something to do with the meth that was on the floor.
He insists, I had nothing to do.
I've never done meth in my life.
I don't know what meth looks like.
I don't know what it is.
Instead, He refuses any and all responsibility.
Look at the...
This has been a wake-up call for me.
Oh, good.
You got a wake-up call.
That's a good thing.
Wow, you're so observant.
You're so self-aware.
I'm...
Wow, you're taking responsibility, right?
Because it's a wake-up call, so you're waking up.
Since my race for governor ended, I fell into a depression that's led to alcohol abuse.
It's not that he went and hit the bottle.
It's not that he betrayed his wife and kids.
No, no, no.
He's a victim.
He's a victim of losing the race for governor.
And he fell.
He just fell.
Whoops!
I tripped into alcohol abuse.
I witnessed my father suffer from alcohol abuse.
Ah, he had a bad childhood, I bet.
That's another reason he's a victim.
Total victim, no responsibility.
He knows the damaging effects alcohol can have.
But he fell into it.
Just happened.
He fell into the naked male prostitute on the floor.
He fell into the bag of meth on the floor.
Oh, whoops!
Whoopsie-daisy!
Could happen to anybody.
I know that alcoholism is often a symptom of deeper struggles.
Oh my God!
He's got deeper struggles?
And you have the audacity to even read about this story?
How awful.
I know people, I've got family members and friends who have struggled with addiction and alcohol.
It is a disease, right?
There is, that aspect of it is true.
It is something that, at a certain point, you really don't have a lot of control over.
That you're being pulled by this compulsion.
It's very hard to get out of it.
Right.
Right.
That doesn't mean that you have no responsibility.
And I don't know if Andrew Gillum's an alcoholic.
He might have just picked up a...
Was he an alcoholic when he called up rentmen.com?
Was he in a drunken stupor when he did that?
Or did he pre-plan that?
Was that maybe a little more thought out?
Was that a little more methodical?
You can't just, like, blame all of your problems on somebody else.
You have to take some responsibility.
This is what we want in our public servants, right?
The buck stops here.
The guy ran for governor of Florida.
And he is caught in about as bad a sex scandal as you can be caught in.
And he just tries...
It was my father's fault.
It was the alcohol's fault.
I'm struggling.
It was my struggle's fault.
Give me a break, dude.
Good grief.
So...
The other side of this, by the way, is the mainstream media won't talk about it.
Have you heard of the Andrew Gillum story?
Maybe you saw something passing on the internet, Facebook or Twitter or something.
But not a lot.
This is not getting wall-to-wall coverage.
If that had been a Republican, could you imagine?
And if a Republican had given that kind of statement, if a Republican gave that kind of statement, I would be attacking him just as much as I'm attacking Andrew Gillum.
So repulsive not to take any responsibility for your actions.
But I guess that's the left.
Being a leftist means never having to say you're sorry.
Another left-winger who is playing some really cynical politics...
is Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
And I bring it up because it shows you something.
I don't think he meant to show us this, but it shows you two contradictory strategies that the left has right now on religion.
Religion is a really tough topic for the left because the left ideologically is atheistic.
I'm not saying everyone who calls himself a left-winger is necessarily an atheist.
I'm not saying every Democrat is necessarily an atheist.
But the logical conclusion of leftism is atheism.
That's what we're seeing today.
So you see this in particular on an issue like abortion.
For years and years, the Democratic Party had a lot of pro-life people in it.
Then, starting a few decades ago with Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, whose son is now the governor of New York, Mario Cuomo came up with this really, really cynical but brilliant strategy for Catholics and other faithful people on the question of abortion, when really their religion is leftism, but they want to at least pretend to be Catholics in public.
So, how do you do that on the issue of abortion?
abortion is kind of the dividing line.
If you support abortion, you can't be a Catholic.
We'll get to that in a second.
But if you oppose abortion, you can't be a leftist.
And this has been building for a long time.
So what Mario Cuomo came up with was, he said, listen, I am personally against abortion, but publicly I'm for abortion.
He said, what, what, what, like you're two different people?
What does that mean?
Now, personally, I oppose abortion in my secret heart, but in everything that I do and in my role as governor, I'm very pro-abortion.
You say, well, then it doesn't really matter a lot to me if you're personally against abortion because it doesn't have any effect in the real world.
But anyway, they got away with this for a long time.
That led to then the next stage of the Democrat relationship to abortion, which was Hillary Clinton, who said, I think abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Wait a second, that doesn't make any sense.
Safe?
Abortion is never safe because it always kills somebody.
So, that's off the table.
Legal?
Why should it be legal?
Well, I guess the only reason it should be legal is if it's not morally similar to killing somebody.
Which we've, by the way, already established that it is, but if it's...
Let's say that it's not.
Somehow abortion is not what abortion is.
Then, okay, I guess it can be legal because it's not morally similar to killing somebody.
But then why should it be rare?
So if it doesn't have moral gravity to it, if it's just like getting your tonsils out, then it should be legal, and there's no reason for it to be rare.
If it should be rare, then it shouldn't be legal, because the reason it should be rare is that it's killing somebody.
It never made any sense, but anyway, it got a lot of approval from the chattering class.
It allowed left-wingers who struggled with this religion question to convince themselves that it was possible to be, say, Christian and support abortion, which it is not, which we will get to.
Now, they're past that.
2017, Tom Perez said, supporting abortion as a Democrat is non-negotiable.
He said pro-lifers are not welcome in the Democratic Party.
So Cardinal Dolan, who is the cardinal in New York, who tries to have a nice relationship with people of both parties, he's not a bomb thrower, he's not an arch-conservative, to put it mildly.
Cardinal Dolan comes out and says, quote, it saddens me.
That Democrats are considering this non-negotiable.
It saddens me and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us.
Dolan's saying, you can't...
Even Cardinal Dolan...
It's saying you can't be Catholic and support abortion.
So then Tom Perez comes back with a zinger.
He just says, quote, Well, actually, the majority of Catholics voted for Democrats in 2016.
So apparently the cardinal may not understand that Matthew 25 is a pretty important teaching.
And Matthew 25 says, you know, when you were hungry, I fed you.
When you were naked, I provided you with clothing.
When you were an immigrant, I welcomed you.
I think one of the reasons why so many people are moving away from Donald Trump is that he's abandoned all those values.
First of all, Catholics didn't vote for Hillary in 2016.
The vote was split.
It's 50-50.
I'm ashamed to say that too, but she didn't win Catholics.
Second of all, it's kind of a loose translation of Matthew 25.
That might be the authorized Tom Perez version of Matthew 25.
But he leaves out the very next line.
Also in Matthew 25, what he leaves out is...
And the king will answer them, Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me.
That could be the abortion line of all of scripture.
As you did it to the least of these, my brethren, the smallest, the quietest, the ones without a voice, the most vulnerable, you did it to me.
It's almost comical.
If it weren't so dark, it would be really funny that the chapter of scripture that Tom Perez chooses to cite as evidence that abortion doesn't matter and you can be pro-abortion and really Democrats are super Christian or something is the chapter that includes that verse.
As you did it to the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me.
It shows you two different ways to go.
Two different ways that the Democrats are trying to deal with religion.
Democrats have become more brazenly leftist and atheist over the last couple decades.
And the two responses to this are the Boo strategy and the Buttigieg strategy.
Those are the two responses to religion.
The Boo strategy...
It's actually the honest one.
That one is being honest about atheism, and it comes from when the Democrats booed God at their national convention.
So Antonio Villaraigosa was chairing this session at the Democratic National Convention.
They were going to add in an amendment that referred to people's God-given potential, and this was controversial because they had previously taken out the phrase, God-given.
Then that was a big hullabaloo.
It didn't play very well in Peoria.
So the Democrats added back in the language.
God-given.
Antonio Villaraigosa at the DNC says, all right, we're going to add it in.
This is going to be a simple voice vote.
Say, say, yay, yay.
Say, nay.
Nobody was going to say nay.
It was going to be easy to put in.
Except the Democrats at their convention did not want to add in God.
Is there any further discussion?
Hearing none, the matter requires a two-thirds vote in the affirmative.
All those delegates in favor, say aye.
Aye.
All those delegates opposed, say no.
No.
In the opinion of the...
Let me do that again.
All of those delegates in favor, say aye.
Aye.
All those delegates opposed, say no.
Okay, so it's a little awkward, isn't it?
Because he thought this was going to be very easy.
And Antonio Vieira goes, I actually know him.
He and I did a TV show together here in Los Angeles.
And he's a nice guy.
He's a kind of normal Democrat, as much as a Democrat can be normal at the party leadership in this day and age.
But he's kind of, look, he wanted, I know, he went in there thinking, all right, this will be two seconds.
This will be really easy.
We'll get out of there.
Okay.
Okay.
I, no, okay, we're good to go.
Except that's not what happened.
The no's seemed to carry it.
So he doesn't know what to do.
So he goes again to the vote.
I, um, I guess...
I'll do that one more time.
All those delegates in favor say aye.
Aye.
All those delegates opposed say no.
In the opinion of the chair, two-thirds have voted in the affirmative.
The motion is adopted and the platform has been amended as shown on the screen.
Thank you very much.
And there's the boo.
You can hear it because, I mean, it's obviously hard to pick up on these microphones, regardless of whether you think the eyes have it or the nose have it.
Certainly, it was not the case that two-thirds of people voted to pass that amendment.
And what was the amendment?
The amendment was to add God back into the Democratic Party platform.
They didn't get their way, and they booed.
They booed God.
The boo strategy is honesty.
Okay, the boo strategy is, yeah, we're atheists.
We might have vague notions of the supernatural because, listen, people think that the religious are the most superstitious people on earth.
Actually, the religious are the least superstitious people.
It's the people who pretend they don't have religion.
They're the most superstitious.
They got the chakras and the crystals and the astrology and they go into all sorts of weird stuff.
So it's just a matter of practical religion, traditional religion.
The boost strategy is we don't have that anymore.
The other strategy is the Buttigieg strategy.
The Buttigieg strategy is where you pretend to be a believer, but...
You actually openly contradict orthodoxy and scripture at every single turn.
You constantly warp scripture to mean the opposite of what it plainly says and what people have said that it says for all of human history.
He did this, again, on the issue of abortion.
Pete Buttigieg was on a radio show called The Breakfast Club, and they said, you know, man, how are you going to square the abortion issue with how you're always prattling on about faith?
And he goes, well, actually, you know, there's a lot in scripture that says we should kill a lot of babies.
Now, right now, they hold everybody in line with this one kind of piece of doctrine about abortion, which is obviously a tough issue for a lot of people to think through morally.
Then again, there's a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath.
And so even that is something that we can interpret differently.
I'm pro-choice.
Me too.
But I think no matter where you think about the kind of cosmic question of how life begins, most Americans can get on the board with the idea of, all right, I might draw the line here, you might draw the line there.
But the most important thing is the person who should be drawing the line is the woman making the decision.
Absolutely.
Wow.
I'm so glad that guy went nowhere.
I'm so glad he's out of the race.
I love it.
He says, look, we might disagree on abortion, but what we should at least agree on is that we should have abortion.
We can all agree on that we should have abortion, even if we disagree on abortion.
Look, there's lots of parts of the Bible that say that it's great to kill babies.
No, there aren't, Buster.
Maybe crack that spine open again and give it another read.
So anyway, that's what Tom Perez is doing here.
He's twisting a chapter of gospel to pretend that it supports his modernist, atheist, political ideology.
And then he leaves out the punchline.
Because it contradicts the very point that he's trying to make.
Let's make this very simple.
Some questions are very complicated, like questions of public health and the global economy and pandemics.
Some questions are very simple.
A Christian cannot support abortion.
It is not possible.
Cannot do it.
A Christian cannot vote for a political candidate who supports abortion if there is an alternative.
It's a sin to do so.
The Catholic Church has always been very clear about this, and most other churches have too.
Most other denominations, most other groups of believers have felt that way.
The Buttigieg-Perez strategy is to just confuse the issue, right?
To say, well, it's really complicated.
It's not.
Some issues are complicated.
Some issues are simple.
Actually, by the way, by the way, before we go, the same is true of socialism.
I know now that's considered very complicated.
At least I speak as a Catholic.
The Catholic Church has always been very clear that socialism must be completely rejected.
Okay, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, the Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with communism or socialism.
Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds.
Doesn't mean the church wants no regulation at all, but nobody is supporting no regulation at all in mainstream politics.
There are people openly supporting socialism, some of whom are still running for president.
That's what the left is doing here.
For over a century, popes have called socialism a wicked confederacy, a pest, a plague that must be utterly opposed and rejected.
Democrats try to confuse this issue.
They take one or two verses out of context.
It is not unclear.
It is a simple question.
Christians cannot be socialists, alright?
The left is going to try to confuse a lot of things.
They do this all of the time.
This is why it's very important to look at these issues clearly, not to be pulled away with emotion.
I think this is the big theme of coronavirus.
Forget about the theme of the 2020 campaign.
It's the theme of this pandemic.
It's the theme of the times we're living in right now.
There are a lot of people who are trying to emotionally manipulate you into making bad decisions, into panicking, into becoming hysterical, into sentimentality.
Don't do it.
This is not the time, an important election or a global pandemic, this is not the time to abandon your faculties of reason.
This is when you must be most vigilant in using those faculties that you've got.
Okay, we've got a lot more to get to.
We'll have to do it tomorrow.
Hopefully we won't be quarantined tomorrow.
Because until Mayor Garcetti drags me out of my studio, I will be here with you.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
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