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Sept. 30, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

49:47

Ep. 620 - Trump Or Surrender

Trump debates Joe Biden and Chris Wallace, the Atlantic makes up another anti-Trump story, and even conservatives get criminal justice wrong. If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/knowles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	In case you missed last night's presidential debate between President Trump and Joe Biden, I will sum it up for you in seven seconds.
	That was it.
	That was the debate.
	Except instead of seven seconds, it was 90 minutes of that.
	The debate was mostly a draw and a missed opportunity, and President Trump spent most of the time debating the moderator, Chris Wallace.
	But there was a point.
	President Trump did get a very important message out to people, and everyone seems to have missed it, but it was a very important message.
	It was actually worth that 90 minutes of yammering and screaming and heckling Which we will get into.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	Welcome back to the show.
	My favorite comment from yesterday comes from Top10Guy1, who says, for Democrats, stopping them from cheating equals voter suppression.
	Lol.
	Yes, that's true.
	It is voters.
	Because the Democrats don't want you to disenfranchise all of those dead voters in Ohio, all of those family pets that have been dead for 20 years, all of those illegal aliens, foreign nationals.
	They don't want you to disenfranchise those people.
	That would be suppression of votes that should not be cast in the first place.
	If you watched the debate last night, you probably left disappointed, regardless of what side you were on.
	Probably, if you were to sum up the debate, you'd say that Trump won it.
	He got more zingers in.
	He seemed more lively.
	And yet, probably Biden supporters are happier this morning than Trump supporters because Biden is allegedly ahead in the polls and because Biden didn't completely collapse on the stage and because the moderator Chris Wallace constantly ran interference for Joe Biden, bailed him out of a lot of tight spots, and was downright rude to President Trump.
	President Trump got some zingers in.
	He did hit some points that were substantive, and I think you'd be able to break out and put in some campaign commercials.
	The first one was framing the strongest issue for Democrats, health care.
	That's the one they always come back to, even when health care has absolutely nothing to do with the election or the issues at hand.
	So what President Trump did was flip it and show how a Joe Biden presidency would destroy American health care.
	What I proposed is that we expand Obamacare and we increase it.
	We do not wipe any...
	And one of the big debates we had with 23 of my colleagues trying to win the nomination that I won were saying that Biden wanted to allow people to have private insurance still.
	They can.
	They do.
	They will, under my proposal.
	It's not what you've said, and it's not what your party has said.
	That is simply a lie.
	Your party doesn't say it.
	Your party wants to go socialist medicine and socialist health care.
	And they're going to dominate you, Joe.
	You know that.
	I am the Democratic Party right now.
	Your party wants socialist medicine and socialist health care, and they're going to dominate you, Joe.
	You know that.
	This was a very smart framing here, which is not to say Joe Biden is a radical.
	He's a far leftist.
	He's a socialist, because nobody believes that.
	Joe Biden's been in office since before Karl Marx was born.
	Joe Biden's been around a long time.
	He's positioned himself at various times as a moderate, and at other times he's moved further to the left.
	So that wouldn't be persuasive.
	But what we do know, what is undeniable, is that Joe Biden is weak, He's a weak frontrunner.
	He's a weak leader of his party.
	He's a weak presidential nominee.
	And he will be swayed and dominated by other members of the party.
	Actually, when that communist woman, Angela Davis, this awful far-left woman who is very influential in the Democratic Party, when she endorsed Joe Biden, she said, I'm endorsing Joe Biden not because I think he's a radical, but because I think that we can bully him into doing what we want.
	Same thing is true of Bob Avakian, the head of the Revolutionary Communist Party in America.
	He said, yeah, I'm going to endorse Joe Biden because we're going to be able to bully him.
	So that was the point Trump picked up on.
	That, I think, is persuasive, because people who still have horrible memories of Obamacare losing their doctor, premiums going up, they're going to remember, oh, wait a second, Joe Biden's now promising more socialist health care.
	Joe Biden was in part responsible for the Obamacare mess.
	I don't think I want any part of that.
	That was a good zinger.
	Trump also got in one line.
	They clearly had written it out and rehearsed it about Joe Biden's pie-in-the-sky promises and the likelihood that they're actually going to come true.
	He says he's smart because he can take advantage of the tax code.
	And he does take advantage of the tax code.
	That's why I'm going to eliminate the Trump tax cuts.
	And we're going to eliminate those tax cuts and make sure that we invest in the people who, in fact, need the help.
	People out there need help.
	But why didn't you do it over the last 25 years?
	Because you weren't president screwing things up.
	You were a senator.
	You're the worst president America has ever had.
	Let me just tell you, Joe.
	I've done more in 47 months.
	I've done more than you've done in 47 years, Joe.
	Ooh, that's a good line.
	Some of these scripted lines are not that good, and they kind of go over as groaners, which Joe Biden had one of those later in the debate.
	He said, you say it's the art of the deal.
	You do the art of the steel.
	Please clap.
	Please.
	It was so lame.
	But that's a good line.
	I've done more in 47 months than you've done in 47 years.
	Because you have to look at the timeline of Joe Biden.
	say okay a guy gets elected to the senate in 1973 senate senate senate senate senate senate vice president vice president vice president vice president And he's out.
	He's running for office.
	But now he's going to change everything.
	Yeah.
	Now, he just needed 46 years head start, and now, starting in this 47th year, now he's going to change everything.
	Trump made another good point when Biden was hitting him on the tax code.
	He said, Joe, you wrote the tax bill.
	You're the one who gave me these tax advantages.
	So that was a good zinger.
	I think you can break that out.
	You're going to see some t-shirts of, I've done more in 47 months than you've done in 47 years.
	And then I thought the best hit, it was the closest thing that Trump got to a clean hit of the night.
	It wasn't a major hit, but it could be somewhat useful.
	Joe Biden was talking about how cops like him so much, and Trump said, name one, name one law enforcement agency that supports you.
	He has no law enforcement support.
	Almost nothing.
	Who do you have?
	Name one group that supports you.
	Name one group that came out and supported you.
	Go ahead.
	Think.
	We have time.
	We don't have time to do anything.
	Name one law enforcement group that came out and supported you.
	Gentlemen, I think I'm going to take back the moderator's role.
	And I want to get to another subject, which is the issue of protests in many cities that have turned violent.
	Gentlemen, gentlemen, I have to interject here because the president just landed a brutal blow on Joe Biden, so we cannot...
	Mr.
	Biden, don't answer that.
	I'll step in.
	You obviously can't step in, but I'll step in.
	I'm Chris Wallace, the moderator.
	Yeah, he's just trying to moderate all of the attacks.
	He's trying to temper all of the attacks that Trump landed on Joe Biden.
	There were a few moments that were pretty brutal where I felt Joe was really threatened.
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	So Trump landed some blows.
	Okay.
	Joe Biden also landed some...
	I wouldn't say he landed blows.
	He just landed insults.
	They were both insulting one another.
	I felt Trump got cleaner hits in against Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden, for all the talk we hear of civility and the soul of America and how Donald Trump is taking down the tone of our public discourse...
	Joe Biden was much nastier and more childish than Donald Trump.
	Much.
	It wasn't even close.
	Joe Biden said things that were shameful, downright shameful, to say to the President of the United States.
	Called him a clown, yelled at him to shut up, and called him that classic insult.
	It means any type of bad person called him a racist.
	You agreed with Bernie Sanders on a plan.
	Folks, do you have any idea what this clown's doing?
	Socialized medicine.
	Mr.
	President.
	I'll tell you what.
	Vote now.
	Make sure you, in fact, let people know you're a senator.
	I'm not going to answer the question.
	Why would you answer that question?
	Because the question is...
	The question is...
	Radical left.
	Will you shut up, man?
	Listen, who is on your list, Joe?
	This is so unprecedented.
	We have ended this segment.
	We're going to move on to the second segment.
	That was really a productive segment, wasn't it?
	Keep yapping, man.
	The people understand, Joe.
	47 years, you've done nothing.
	They understand.
	They were teaching people that our country is a horrible place, it's a racist place, and they were teaching people to hate our country.
	And I'm not going to allow that to happen.
	Vice President Biden?
	Nobody's doing that.
	He's just, he's a racist.
	Here's the deal.
	I know a lot more about this.
	Let him finish.
	So unpresidential.
	I'm not going to defend Trump's badgering the whole night, though.
	I actually, I do have a point on Trump's badgering generally.
	I felt it was ineffective because he did it too much.
	But generally, we will get to that.
	Who was more or less presidential here?
	Trump was much more presidential.
	And I get it that the badgering is sort of tedious.
	I get it.
	It is unacceptable, childish, stupid, disrespectful, rude, wrong.
	To tell the President of the United States to shut up.
	I find the phrase shut up to be one of the rudest phrases you can utter.
	You have to do it very selectively.
	One time when Ronald Reagan was being shouted down by a whole horde of these awful anti-American hippies, he famously told me, he goes, oh, shut up.
	You know, he's like sort of half joking.
	That was an effective use of that term.
	When you use that term, Just in normal conversation.
	It's incredibly rude.
	You could instead use a much more vile, vulgar sort of word, and it would be less rude than that.
	Call him a clown, the President of the United States a clown, and then to say he's a racist.
	I just don't, that phrase, maybe at some point it had some meaning, it certainly doesn't anymore.
	George Orwell in Politics in the English Language said that the term fascist now has no meaning, it just means something that is not desirable, something that I don't like.
	Well, the same is true of racist.
	It doesn't matter.
	There's no, even if somebody has racial bigotry, racial prejudices, the term doesn't matter.
	Even if you walked up to David Duke, you walked up to the head of the Ku Klux Klan, you said, you're a racist.
	The phrase itself has been deprived of meaning because of people like Joe Biden.
	He says, you're, ah, I can't, oh, man, I lost my train of thought, and I can't, gosh, Trump's off-footing me with the badge.
	You're a racist!
	You're a racist.
	It was pathetic.
	It was totally pathetic.
	Then, at certain moments, Joe Biden actually, beyond the petty insults, actually seemed to undermine his own arguments.
	So when they were sniping at each other over the lockdowns, Joe Biden seemed to come out against the lockdowns.
	I'll tell you, Joe, you could never have done the job that we did.
	You don't have it in your blood.
	You could have never done that job.
	I know how to do the job.
	I know how to get the job.
	Well, you didn't do very well in swine flu.
	H1N1, you were a disaster.
	Your own chief staff said you were a disaster.
	14,000 people died, not 200,000.
	There was no economic recession.
	You made a point.
	You made a point.
	Let him answer it.
	And there was no one.
	We didn't shut down the economy.
	This is his economy.
	He shut down.
	What?
	First of all, H1N1, I mean, this is why the attack on H1N1, I see why Trump launched it, but because the two diseases are so incomparable, and then he tried to make that point later, right?
	He said it was much less lethal, but because they're so, he left himself open to that counterattack.
	But I didn't expect Joe's counterattack to say, well, we didn't shut down the economy for H1N1. Joe, it's you guys who are trying to shut down the economy now.
	Trump wants to open the economy, and just five seconds ago you were demagoguing the issue and saying Trump's killing people because he won't shut down the economy.
	So what is it?
	Do the Democrats want to shut down the economy, or do they want to open up the economy?
	Right now it's only the Democratic governors, practically, who are trying to keep it shut down, right?
	Gavin Newsom, the mayor, Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles, Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York.
	Bill de Blasio, mayor in New York.
	It's all the Democrats who want to shut it down.
	But Joe, this is the trouble with being a cynical, empty-suit politician.
	He doesn't have any beliefs.
	It's not just that he's lying.
	It's that he has no regard for the truth.
	So he says, okay, now it's good to hit him for the lockdowns.
	And it doesn't even occur to him, like, wait a second, but we were the ones pushing the lockdowns on him.
	I just undercut our argument.
	That doesn't matter.
	And I think for a lot of his partisans, it probably won't matter much either.
	And then the most ridiculous thing Biden said all night, beyond the petty insults, which you kind of expect, He was asked to condemn Antifa, and he held the party line.
	He said, Antifa doesn't exist.
	Somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem.
	This is a left-wing problem.
	This is a left-wing problem.
	I'm a white supremacist.
	Antifa's an idea, not an organization.
	Oh, you've got to be kidding me.
	That's what his FBI... His FBI director said.
	We're done, sir.
	We're done.
	We're done, Mr.
	Trump.
	Please don't respond to that because that statement that Joe made was so obviously indefensible.
	Please, please don't respond.
	We've got to move on.
	New segment.
	It's the sacred, sacred new segment.
	Antifa's an idea, not an organization.
	Antifa may be an idea.
	But it's an idea that has gotten into people's heads, and those people wear uniforms, and they wave a flag, and they march and organize together.
	That is an organization.
	You could say, look, fascism is an idea.
	It's not an organization.
	Which is true...
	But in Mussolini's Italy, that idea was embodied by people who wore black shirts and committed violence in the streets.
	Nazism is an idea.
	It's not an organization.
	Sure, it is an idea.
	It was embodied by people who wore brown shirts and worked for Adolf Hitler in Germany.
	Well, communism is an idea.
	It's not an organization.
	Sure, but it manifests in organizations.
	And Antifa has a real organization right now.
	Coincidentally, members of Antifa are alternately anarchists and communists and all sorts of miscreants and ne'er do wells and very bad people.
	We know that they exist.
	I can see the videos of them waving their flag.
	That is the definition of an organization, but they can't cop to it.
	And so Trump's getting a lot of flack right now because they pulled out the typical court.
	They say, Trump, do you condemn white supremacists?
	He goes, sure.
	Yeah, okay.
	Yes, I defend white supremacists.
	Pardon me, I condemn white supremacists.
	Who do you want me to condemn?
	Who do you want me to condemn?
	And they say, the Proud Boys.
	Okay, yeah, Proud Boys, go away.
	Okay, yeah.
	Do we do it?
	But Joe, you're defending.
	Antifa.
	And Joe says, there's no such thing as Antifa.
	Now, you've heard in some of these clips, Chris Wallace.
	Chris Wallace is the key.
	He just keeps jumping in and in and in, okay?
	And it became a one versus two debate, which made the whole thing much more frustrating to watch, okay?
	But I think Trump had to know that going in.
	He had to realize that there were going to be threats that were not totally fair.
	That he, you know, coming out of the shadows, coming out of the corner is Chris Wallace.
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	There was this secret threat that came into the debate, though I'm sure Trump predicted it, and that was Chris Wallace.
	Chris Wallace, I believe, is a Democrat, but he's on Fox News, and Fox News is supposed to be the sort of conservative news channel, and we're only getting one debate.
	One of these debates will be moderated by someone who even has an association, really, with conservatives, and it was this unfair.
	This unfair.
	So what are the other ones going to be like?
	What, when you've got actual, not just regular old left-wingers, but left-wingers at totally 100% left-wing networks, not just sort of middle-of-the-road networks, what's that two-on-one going to look like?
	Trump called him out at one point.
	Trump said, oh, okay, Chris, I didn't realize I wasn't billed to be debating you tonight, but that's fine, no big deal.
	The individual mandate was the most unpopular aspect of Obamacare.
	I got rid of it.
	And we will protect people.
	Mr.
	President, I'm the moderator of this debate, and I would like you to let me ask my question, and then you can answer your question.
	You, in the course of these four years, have never come up with a comprehensive plan to replace Obamacare.
	And just this last Thursday, you signed a largely symbolic executive order to protect people with pre-existing conditions five days before this debate.
	So my question, sir, is what is the Trump health care plan?
	Well, first of all, I guess I'm debating you, not him.
	But that's okay.
	I'm not surprised.
	Let me just tell you something.
	There's nothing symbolic.
	I'm cutting drug prices.
	I'm going with favored nations, which no president has the courage to do because you're going against big pharma.
	Drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90 percent.
	You could have done it during your 47-year period in government, but you didn't do it.
	And Wallace, he goes on that line, whenever you call out the moderator, the moderator does have to take a little bit of a step back, but not for very long.
	And it was pretty pathetic.
	Even Chris Wallace's Fox News colleagues, some of them privately, but many of them even publicly, said this was not a great performance.
	You can see they were posting it all on Twitter last night.
	It was too much.
	That is always at risk.
	I remember I did a debate with a Fox News Democrat at Politicon.
	This was, I guess, a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, over in Nashville.
	And the moderator was Clay Aiken, and the Fox News Democrat was Chris Hahn, the bald guy Chris Hahn.
	Called me skinny boy.
	And so I prepared the debate against Chris Hahn.
	But at the very last minute, I realized, wait a second, There's another guy here who's technically the moderator, but I know that Clay Aiken ran for office as a Democrat.
	I know that Clay Aiken probably has political views, and I know how these debates tend to go against conservatives.
	So I said, you know, last minute, I'm just going to do a little research on Clay Aiken just to make sure I go.
	So I go into the debate.
	Chris Hahn and I basically did not debate.
	That was, Chris Hahn was just like kind of a wallflower, though.
	I mean, we got a few barbs in or whatever.
	The actual debate was against the moderator, Clay Aiken.
	And that's what happened last night.
	Joe Biden did not come with his best, or maybe he did come with his best, but his best ain't very much these days.
	And frankly, it wasn't even that much during the height of his career in the 80s and 90s.
	Trump had to debate Chris Wallace.
	So, it does raise questions about the ground rules for the debate and for the strategy.
	The first thing I'll say about how this came out, which I think was a draw, I don't think it moved the needle one little bit one way or the other.
	Incumbents lose the first debate.
	That happens all the time.
	You remember it with Barack Obama.
	He got crushed in the first debate by Mitt Romney in 2012.
	And Mitt Romney, right, is not exactly the fiercest debater out there.
	He ran roughshod over Barack Obama.
	Ronald Reagan very famously got crushed in the first debate to Walter Mondale in 1984.
	Ronald Reagan, there was plenty of reporting on this, according to Lou Cannon, who's written about this, said as soon as Reagan left the stage, he confessed to his advisor, Stu Spencer, that he had flopped.
	You had...
	Mondale walking off of the stage saying to an aide, this guy is gone, meaning he mentally wasn't all there.
	Kind of the thing we would say about Joe Biden.
	Two days after the debate, the RNC chairman, Paul Laxalt, held a press conference admitting that Reagan had done a bad job and said, no, but it wasn't because his brain has turned to mush.
	It's because the briefing process didn't work very well.
	You know, the preparation process didn't work any well.
	And he just got clobbered.
	And then he came back.
	And crushed Mondale in the later debates.
	Same thing with Obama.
	Obama came back with the help of the moderator, quote-unquote Candy Crowley, and crushed Romney in the remainder of the debates.
	So I'm not too worried.
	If you have a little bit of an historical view, you say this isn't going to change anything.
	The trouble with last night's debate is it was exhausting.
	I was watching it there with Ben, Jeremy, and Drew.
	We just said like, oh gosh, guys, I don't have enough hours in my life to sit through this.
	There's nothing productive about this.
	It's so exhausting.
	And that's true.
	That's true.
	And we had a little bit of a disagreement because we all thought that Trump interrupted too much.
	But I think Ben was harsher on it than I was.
	And Ben kept bringing up this point, this is exhausting and this isn't good and it's going to turn away voters.
	But the reason I disagree with that a little bit is Trump has to be exhausting.
	He has to be if he wants to do anything that matters as a conservative.
	Now, you don't need to be exhausting if you want to just go along and get along with the liberal establishment.
	Because then you'll be treated relatively well.
	You know, they'll still probably beat you, but maybe they'll let you get in.
	As long as you play the game, as long as you as a conservative play your role as the court jester in the kingdom of liberalism, they'll more or less let you get along.
	But if you actually threaten things in the way that Trump has done...
	If you threaten their global trade regime, if you threaten their open borders regime, if you threaten the loss of national sovereignty to international and transnational organizations, as Trump has done, unlike any of his predecessors, frankly even including Ronald Reagan, If you do that, they are all going to come at you all of the time.
	Hollywood, the mainstream media, obviously the Democratic politicians, the bureaucracy that tried to have a coup d'etat and overthrow the 2016 election and kick him out of office.
	Higher education, lower education, the technology companies now, which are threatening to censor conservatives on election night.
	All of these things are coming...
	And they're already censoring conservatives.
	They're already censoring even the President of the United States, saying that he's posting misinformation when certainly that is not the case.
	All of these things are going to come after you.
	If you want to break through that at all, you have to badger.
	It's the same disagreement about the tweets.
	You hear some conservatives say, I hate the tweets, he's got to stop tweeting.
	Then you hear other ones, like me, who say, I love the tweets.
	I get that the tweets can be annoying, and sometimes they can be a little bit destructive, but the tweets are essential.
	You've got to keep badgering, because it's the only way that you can break through that liberal establishment.
	You know, Ronald Reagan famously said...
	There's only one guaranteed way that you can have peace and you can have it in the next minute.
	Surrender.
	Yeah, if you surrender to the left, then it'll all be genial and nice.
	Oh, old Joe's a return to normalcy.
	I don't like the normalcy.
	The normalcy was very bad.
	The normalcy is leading our country off of a cliff.
	The normalcy that we're talking about has led to a place where we probably haven't been this racially divided in 50 years.
	We've never been this sexually divided because of the advent of these new identity groups that have cropped up.
	We've never hated our country more.
	It's now controversial to listen to the national anthem and stand up and support your country.
	It's now controversial to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the flag.
	We've never hated our history more.
	Tearing down statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson.
	We've never been stupider.
	And this is the biggest problem with this debate, is how stupid it was.
	It was so dumb.
	And that's not just a perennial complaint and every generation feels that, oh gosh, things used to be better.
	They actually were better when it comes to the American mind and the American public discourse.
	Okay, but When you compare this debate, which I think is a consequential one, I think 2020 is going to be extremely consequential because you've got so radically different visions for the country.
	Compare that to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which also were consequential.
	They also were about an essential fundamental question in the country, slavery.
	The question was so essential that you had a bloody civil war where almost 700,000 Americans died over it.
	The Lincoln-Douglas debates were substantive.
	The rhetoric from both sides, more so from Lincoln, but from both sides, the rhetoric, the oratory was serious.
	It was contemplative.
	It reflected a deep mind, two deep minds, actually, with a deep understanding of the issues.
	And last night was just, yeah, come on, man, you're a racist, man.
	You're shut up, clown.
	You man.
	It was just pathetic.
	Mostly Joe Biden, much less so Trump.
	Trump got his Trumpy lines and he's a reality TV star, sure.
	But Joe Biden was the much more pathetic one.
	Pitiful.
	I won't even say pathetic.
	He didn't evoke much compassionate feeling in me for him.
	It was sad.
	Makes people sad for the country.
	And if you want to have that return to normalcy and just give it to Joe Biden, fine, you're going to get more of that, more of that degradation.
	Sometimes the only way out is through.
	Dante, famously, in his comedy where he's trying to get up to heaven and behold the beatific vision, he's got to go all the way down through hell.
	Sometimes the only way out is through.
	There are lots and lots of lies, not just in the debate, but the typical lies coming from the mainstream media.
	It's going to involve a lot more pestering.
	All of these threats, and by the way, we've got threats looking at the 2020 election in November.
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	At lifelock.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, 25% off with promo code Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. The trouble that we get to in these debates is the lies.
	All of the lies that the moderators, quote-unquote, will lie on behalf of the Democrats, and they will contradict the Republicans, and they will defend the lies of the Democrats.
	There was one clear one last night that just shows you how rigged this game is, which we'll get to in one second.
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	Today, we'll be right back with a lot more.
	Give you an example of a clear lie.
	There was an anonymous report confirmed by, confirmed quote unquote, by anonymous people that said that Trump called the troops fallen soldiers, idiots and losers and suckers and that sort of thing.
	No evidence, zero evidence that this ever happened.
	You have over 25 people gone on the record, even people who don't like Trump, on the record saying, now I was there.
	He never said that.
	That's complete BS. This was a story published by The Atlantic.
	Doesn't matter because they were clearly connected to the Joe Biden campaign because Joe Biden immediately makes ads using that story.
	We So, Joe Biden launches that attack on Trump.
	Then Trump points out, he says, wait, Joe, there's video of you calling the troops stupid bastards.
	Joe Biden flat out denies it.
	He made a statement about the military.
	He said I said something about the military.
	He and his friends made it up and then they went with it.
	I never said it.
	What he did is he called the military stupid bastards.
	He said it on tape.
	He said stupid bastards.
	I would never say that to the military.
	I love Chris Wallace.
	Stop it!
	Stop it, Trump!
	You're saying things that are true and they're not nice about Joe.
	Stop!
	Please cut the feed!
	Cut his mic!
	So ridiculous.
	But you heard the important exchange here.
	Joe Biden called the troops stupid bastards.
	Joe Biden said, I did not say that.
	Roll the tape.
	One, I married Jill.
	And two, I appointed Johnson to the academy.
	I just want you to know that.
	Just clap for that, you stupid bastards.
	We have the tape.
	He is talking to a whole audience of military.
	He says, clap for that, you stupid bastards.
	You called them stupid bastards.
	I did not.
	How dare you?
	So he lies, and then Chris Wallace, stop, please, no.
	Oh gosh, people are going to Google it if you mention it a couple more times, and that's it.
	That's it.
	The only way you can break through is if you hammer these things and you make it such an issue that even if you get the negative attention for it yourself, people take a look, Google it themselves.
	Those are the lies we're up against.
	I'll give you an example of another lie that we're up against.
	So you remember the Atlantic hit piece That said that Trump called the military suckers and losers.
	No evidence of that.
	Here's another one, also from the Atlantic.
	Trump secretly mocks his Christian supporters.
	Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.
	You don't even really need to read this.
	They're quoting Michael Cohen, the criminal degenerate traitor lawyer to Donald Trump.
	Coward hack.
	Who's now in prison, right?
	Or maybe they let him out because he was afraid of getting the woo flu or something.
	Okay, blah, blah.
	I don't even need to really read this.
	Do you think that Donald Trump hates Christians?
	Ask yourself that.
	Do you think Donald Trump hates Christians?
	Joe Biden, in the Biden-Obama administration, that administration sued nuns, took it all the way up through the courts, because they wanted the nuns to pay for abortion drugs.
	Sued nuns.
	Donald Trump doesn't do that.
	Donald Trump supports religious liberty, supports churches.
	When the left...
	Went over and burned down one of the most famous churches in the country, St.
	John's over in Washington, D.C., right by the White House.
	Donald Trump walked over there, dispersed the crowd of rioters, and held up the Bible as a sign of support.
	And you know what happened?
	Democrats attacked Trump for doing that.
	Which side do you think supports Christianity?
	Which side do you think holds Christianity in contempt?
	How many churches have been burned down, graffitied up?
	Attacked, smashed by the left in the last two months.
	Countless.
	Which do you think?
	This story was, I mean, what is the meat of this story?
	That Trump has made some jokes, maybe?
	I don't know.
	I guess I have no doubt that Trump has made jokes about religious people.
	I've made plenty of jokes about religious people, many of them on this show.
	Is that the issue?
	No.
	The question is, Who supports Christianity?
	Trump or Joe Biden?
	Joe Biden, who has denied communion because he is in grave scandal and mortal sin.
	Obviously, Trump is the supporter of people of faith, religious liberty, Christianity in particular.
	This gets to that issue of the cynicism, right?
	Joe Biden undermining his own attacks.
	Because we've been told the last few weeks, Joe Biden's a devout Catholic.
	Sure, he doesn't believe the stuff the Catholic Church believes.
	And sure, he was denied communion, rightly so, by a priest.
	But he's devout, and that's so wonderful.
	But also, Amy Barrett's a complete nutjob because she actually believes in Catholicism.
	Well, hold.
	I thought it was good to believe in, because you said he's a devout Catholic, and that's good.
	But then someone actually...
	And Dianne Feinstein's worried that the dogma lives loudly within her and Dick Durbin doesn't know what it means to have orthodoxy in your religion.
	They're trying to have it both ways, which is what makes an article like that complete trash.
	But that's what you're up against.
	So Trump's got his work cut out for him.
	The one substantive point I want to...
	Tell Republicans, and President Trump in particular, that I think is always a misstep, Trump made it last night, is Trump went after Joe Biden on the 1994 crime bill.
	He went after Joe Biden for being too tough on crime, which is a completely misguided attack.
	Republicans are launching this, I think, as a matter of racial pandering, and I actually find it racially very uncomfortable because it conflates black people with criminals, like, as a complete overlap, right?
	You're saying, no, look, I'm really good for black people.
	Look, I'm letting them all out of prison.
	You said, No, I don't think innocent black people want to identify themselves with a bunch of criminals who have done heinous things.
	The 1994 crime bill is the only good thing Joe Biden's ever done in his political career.
	It makes me more likely to vote for him if you mention the 1994 crime bill.
	The First Step Act, the Jail Spring Act that Trump passed, it actually makes me less likely to vote for Trump.
	I'm obviously going to support Trump regardless, but it's my least favorite thing probably that he's done in his administration.
	It's the wrong line of attack.
	It's not going to work.
	It's undercutting their other arguments on law and order.
	I'll give you an example of how the left is just, by its own nature, very weak on crime.
	There was a guy, a murderer, who just got executed.
	He finally got his punishment, his just punishment, which is capital punishment.
	The US plans to execute a man for a crime he committed at 19.
	Scientists say the research on brain development makes that wrong.
	So first of all, the scientists say by the left's own premises cannot have a conclusion in a moral argument.
	Because what the left has said is that there is science, right, physical science, and that you can't derive an ought from an is.
	You can't derive moral conclusions from the physical world.
	That's the basis of this whole physical science that we're talking about.
	But what are they trying to do?
	They're trying to derive a moral conclusion from the physical world.
	Right, but they're saying those things are supposed to be totally separate.
	Scientists and philosophers are supposed to be totally separate.
	But they don't separate them when it works for them.
	So they'll say, yes, science says you've got to lock yourself in your home for the next 10 years.
	Because science says that.
	No, nothing about science as they understand it would suggest that.
	It gets more complicated because one actually probably can derive an ought from an is.
	One probably actually can derive moral conclusions from the physical world.
	But that...
	That argument is for another day.
	That's certainly not what the left is trying to do.
	They're actually trying to invert that traditional understanding of things.
	The man committed a crime at 19 and now he's got to pay for it.
	First of all, he should have been executed at 19, right?
	He shouldn't have been languishing on death row for the past 21 years.
	They should have just executed him for his crime.
	But then they're trying to racially demagogue it because apparently this guy is black.
	He doesn't look black to me, but I guess he's black.
	So a number of the articles about this and the tweets about this have said the U.S. is going to execute a black man.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	He robbed them, he kidnapped them, and he stuffed them in the trunk.
	He then drove around for hours and tried to pawn the wife's wedding ring, apparently unsuccessfully.
	He then opened up the trunk and while they were pleading for their lives, the wife was reading him the Bible to convert him.
	He shot them both in the head, but the wife didn't die right away.
	So he set their bodies on fire and then they died.
	This is, by the way, this man would end up in Dante's sort of understanding of cosmic justice.
	This guy would end up in the very pit, the very lowest level of hell.
	He committed the worst sin, which is fraud and betraying, specifically betraying your benefactors.
	He asked these guys for a ride.
	Out of the kindness of their heart, they gave it to him.
	He kidnapped them, robbed them, tied them up, and burned this woman alive.
	That guy...
	Should be killed by the state.
	It is totally just.
	Capital punishment, very just thing.
	It perverts our system when there is no type of justice at that degree.
	When the president comes out, I understand there's a very big difference between, say, a drug crime and a crime such as Christopher Vialva committed.
	Though, I will point out, with some of these drug trafficking rings...
	There's a lot of blood involved.
	There's a lot of death involved in those two.
	But I get it.
	They're different.
	When Republicans come out and attack Democrats for being too tough on crime, you know they've lost the thread because we do not have a problem in this country being too tough on crime.
	We are way, way, way too weak on crime.
	Even conservatives.
	Many conservatives oppose capital punishment.
	Many conservatives even oppose tough punishment.
	Because it's not rehabilitative, maybe.
	It's not deterrent, they say.
	Now, it often is deterrent.
	The reason that these tough punishments are not deterrent is because they go on so long that they don't actually seem like a punishment.
	If this guy had been killed at 20, as he damn well should have been, I think you'd see a much greater deterrent effect of capital punishment.
	They're not rehabilitative.
	I bet capital punishment has at least a chance of being rehabilitative on this man's soul.
	But there is a primary purpose of our justice system, which is justice.
	It's not just a therapy session, folks.
	It's justice.
	Punitive punishment.
	I know that that sounds a little bit redundant.
	Retributive punishment.
	That's what we're talking about.
	Getting retribution because justice demands it.
	There's a role for mercy, too.
	That's the pardon power.
	But there is a place for justice as well.
	We've completely lost that.
	You know what's so funny, too?
	We're also being very, very cruel to the prisoners in the process.
	I'll give you an example.
	In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has now decided that he's going to send transgender inmates, that is, men who pretend to be women, to be housed with the women prisoners.
	What could go wrong?
	What could go wrong?
	Get a People who are, by definition, criminals who do bad things to people.
	Put a bunch of these bad dudes in with the women.
	What could possibly go wrong?
	This is horrifically cruel to the female inmates.
	And, by the way, I'm calling for tough justice on criminals, but I'm not calling for cruelty.
	I think it's very wrong.
	I think it's extraordinarily wrong to be cruel.
	I totally oppose cruel and unusual punishment.
	This is cruel and unusual punishment.
	Putting a bunch of men in with the women.
	What could possibly go wrong?
	But it's because we've lost this thread of calling out objective moral reality.
	It actually gets to the science question.
	You see, there was a time when we could understand that the physical world has a purpose.
	My body has a purpose.
	This life that we have has an end.
	This cup has a purpose.
	The cup is to give me coffee.
	There are other things the cup could be used for, and there are some things that the cup should not be used for.
	The cup is not a telephone.
	I can't use the cup to be a telephone.
	It is not going to fulfill its telos.
	It's not going to fulfill its purpose by doing that.
	But the cup is here for giving me that delicious coffee.
	Then you had the kind of quote-unquote scientific revolution where we say, no, no, no, you can't derive any of these kind of Philosophical or metaphysical conclusions from physical objects.
	But now we've reverted back to the old thing.
	It's just on the left.
	It's the left saying, yeah, the scientists, the lab coat guys, who have no understanding of ethics or philosophy, those guys are now going to tell us how to run our moral lives based on nothing, based on their wild whims.
	What we have to do is return to a world in which we have a clear understanding of the moral order and where we have the courage to admit it.
	Say, some things are better than other things.
	There is such a thing as justice.
	There is such a thing as good.
	There is such a thing as courage.
	There is such a thing as wrong.
	Men should not be with the women inmates.
	That's wrong.
	Men who pretend to be women, we should have compassion for, sure, but we shouldn't indulge that fantasy because it's not true.
	It's wrong.
	It is actually wrong to do that.
	Wrong to pretend to do that and wrong to indulge that delusion.
	There's a kindergarten teacher in France.
	Kindergarten teacher just got fired from teaching kindergarten.
	He's still teaching first graders and second graders and third graders.
	He just got fired from kindergarten.
	Why?
	Sylvain Helene is his name.
	He's 35.
	He's the most tattooed man in France.
	His body, face, and tongue are covered in tattoos, and he just had the whites of his eyeballs surgically dyed black to look like a demon.
	He looks like a demon.
	And he was scaring the kindergartners, so finally he was moved, not out of the...
	Not out of the school.
	Not away from children.
	Not into a psychiatric hospital where he belongs.
	He was moved to first grade.
	And hopefully those kids and their parents won't complain and have nightmares.
	There was a time in this civilization where you could look at that and say, you know, it is wrong to dye your whole skin and dye your eyeballs black and try to look like a demon.
	That's wrong.
	That's evidence that something's gone wrong in your head.
	And we're going to give you treatment for that.
	We're going to explain to you why that's wrong.
	And they're even conservatives, quote-unquote, but they're really libertarians, who say, well, you know, look, if we say it's wrong to dye your eyeballs black and cover your whole body in tattoos to look like a demon, then they're going to tell us it's wrong to go to church.
	And it's like, who can really know which one's wrong, you know?
	So we just got to throw our hands up and anything goes.
	No.
	I'll tell you what.
	How about we just say the good things are the good things and the bad things are the bad things?
	We've done that throughout the entirety of our civilization, except for the past, I don't know, five minutes.
	In earnest, since the 1960s, how about we just do that?
	That is possible.
	We have the ability to do that.
	We just might not have the courage.
	All of that is to say, that is a system that conservatives are up against right now.
	That kind of insanity, that kind of unreason.
	And so, it is no surprise that when we have our national debates, I'll see you
	tomorrow.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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	You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
	I think there are enough of those already out there.
	We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
	So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
	Those are fundamental and that's what this show is about.

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