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Oct. 8, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:46
Ep. 625 - It Was A Debate!

Pence wrecks Kamala, liberal celebs strip for democracy, and Trump works the art of the deal on China virus relief. 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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Time Text
Last night gave me more hope for President Trump's reelection chances than anything that has happened in recent weeks.
What happened?
Well, I will let Kamala Harris give it to you in her own words.
It was a debate.
Not everybody landed punches like you did, though.
It was a debate.
So you don't mean it.
It was a debate.
Literally, it was a debate.
It was called a debate.
Everyone traveled to the debate.
There were journalists there covering the debate, where there would be a debate.
It was a debate, and it showed that when there is a fair debate, then we crush them.
Now, unfortunately, Kamala Harris has not learned anything since her disastrous Stephen Colbert interview.
She got absolutely wrecked at that debate.
I hope that the GOP learns a whole lot from last night.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
My favorite comment from yesterday is from Norrushanese, something like that, on YouTube, referring to that young man who was a 10-year-old boy on his e-school.
He was asked by his teacher who is a role model that he looks up to.
He said Donald Trump got kicked out of the classroom.
Norrushanese says...
I bet if the kid said Che Guevara, he would have gotten an A. Ridiculous.
That's true.
That is 100% true.
If the kid showed up to school, if you're not allowed to show up to school anymore, if a kid showed up to school wearing a Make America Great Again shirt, that would be much, much, much more controversial than wearing the shirt of a communist murderer, Che Guevara.
That's the country we live in.
How's that for a radical establishment?
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K-N-O-W-L-E-S. After the presidential debate last week, which was mostly a shouting match and it could have gone better, let's put it that way.
Last night we saw a really well-manicured, much more old-style political debate.
You had two politicians on stage rather than A professional politician and Donald Trump, where anything can happen.
You had two politicians on stage, and in that battle, Mike Pence just mopped the floor with Kamala Harris.
The best moment of the debate was when Pence landed the punch that President Trump tried to land on Biden, that Chris Wallace was running interference for Biden, so he wouldn't force him to answer.
It was the question of whether or not the Biden-Harris administration would pack the courts.
When you speak about the Supreme Court though, I think the American people really deserve an answer, Senator Harris.
Are you and Joe Biden going to pack the court if Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed?
I mean, there have been 29 vacancies on the Supreme Court during presidential election years from George Washington to Barack Obama.
Presidents have nominated in all 29 cases.
But your party is actually openly advocating adding seats to the Supreme Court, which has had nine seats for 150 years, if you don't get your way.
This is a classic case of if you can't win by the rules.
You're going to change the rules.
Now, you've refused to answer the question.
Joe Biden has refused to answer the question.
So I think the American people would really like to know if Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed at the Supreme Court of the United States, are you and Joe Biden, if somehow you win this election, going to pack the Supreme Court to get your way?
I'm so glad we went through a little history lesson.
Let's do that a little more.
In 1864.
Well, I'd like you to answer the question.
Mr.
Vice President, I'm speaking.
I'm speaking.
This was her only defense the whole debate.
I mean, she went in unprepared.
She went in with indefensible positions.
and she went in against a seasoned pro.
Now there are pros and cons to being a really good politician.
The thing about Donald Trump is by the old model, he's not really a great politician because he actually does answer questions and he actually does do things that are pretty wacky and he's not all that manicured.
There's a room for that too because I think people get tired of the more stale political format.
However, when you got politician versus politician, you gotta go in recognizing how to play this and she absolutely did not.
So the only thing she had recourse to was she would say, I'm speaking!
And she would kind of get more and more angry about this all night.
I'm speaking!
And you'd say, yeah, well...
But answer the question.
It's fine if you're speaking.
You can read a litany of whatever you like.
But I asked you a specific question.
She couldn't answer it.
Why?
Because she knows if she says she won't pack the court, she's going to lose her base.
She knows if she says she will pack the court, she's going to seem like a radical.
There's nowhere for her to go.
And very likely they would pack the court.
So he hits her on the court packing.
That was the best one of the night.
The second best one was on energy.
Biden and Harris have been very clear.
They would ban fracking.
But now, because that's pretty radical, because that would really raise energy prices, because that would take away a lot of jobs, now they're trying to pretend that they don't want to ban fracking.
And they tell you with a straight face they're not going to ban fracking.
They tell you with a straight face they're not going to try to get rid of fossil fuels.
Mike Pence knows how to twist the knife.
We literally have spared no expense to help the American people and the American worker through this.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to raise taxes.
They want to bury our economy under a $2 trillion Green New Deal, which you were one of the original co-sponsors of in the United States Senate.
They want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking, which would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs all across the heartland.
Joe Biden will not end fracking.
He has been very clear about that.
Senator Harris, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
You yourself said on multiple occasions when you were running for president that you would ban fracking.
Joe Biden looked at a supporter in the eye and pointed and said, I guarantee, I guarantee that we will abolish fossil fuels.
I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking.
That is a fact.
That is a fact.
The problem is that Kamala Harris said multiple times during these debates, explicitly, that she's going to ban fracking.
There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking.
And starting with what we can do on day one around public lands, right?
Whoops.
Whoopsie-daisy.
And you've heard, we've played on this show so many times, Joe Biden saying that he would ban fracking, no more fracking, try to get rid of fossil fuels.
So she had no recourse.
She couldn't say, listen, on August 5th, I said definitively I wouldn't ban fracking.
She can't do it.
I mean, also, as Mike Pence says, she was one of the Senate co-sponsors of the Green New Deal.
So what she chose to do was try to seem very smug, very condescending, kind of have this silly smirk on her face all night, shake her head, say no.
When Mike Pence uses a cliche, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts, she goes, good line.
There were other people saying that on Twitter.
And Mike Pence delivered it well, but that is an old line.
They were saying that as though they'd never heard anybody utter it.
That's a classic old politician line.
I think it was very effective.
But that's all she could get in that snide comment, yeah, good line, yeah, no, uh-uh, mm-mm.
And Mike Pence, on the other hand, just seemed so...
Sincere.
He just seemed so earnest all the time.
I've never seen anybody seem more earnest.
So you had this kind of performative smugness versus this performative earnestness.
And I gotta tell you, the latter played a lot better, at least from my vantage point.
Then they moved on to foreign policy.
Foreign policy, another area where Pence was just ready to land haymakers.
He comes in and he brings up the Big issue, which is China.
He brings up the big issue, which is the people who destroyed the global economy because of the virus, the people who have eaten America's lunch on trade and manufacturing for 20 years, and crucially, the people who then-Vice President Joe Biden cheered on as we gave them every advantage in the international trading scene.
How would you describe our fundamental relationship with China?
Are we competitors, adversaries, enemies?
You'll have two minutes uninterrupted.
Susan, the Trump administration's perspective and approach to China has resulted in the loss of American lives, American jobs, and America's standing.
There's a weird obsession that President Trump has had with getting rid of whatever accomplishment was achieved by President Obama and Vice President Biden.
What?
Come again?
What accomplishment?
She's asked an explicit question about China.
Here, I'll tell you what, let's role play.
I'm Kamala Harris.
Let's say I'm running for Vice President and you ask me, is China our enemy?
Yes!
No, I didn't get to the other answers.
You don't have to.
Yes, China's our enemy.
China is our number one geopolitical adversary.
It's not even close.
But Kamala Harris can't say that because Joe Biden for decades said that a rising China is good for everybody.
In explicitly those terms and not so long ago.
He said it is a good thing.
It's good that China's in the World Trade Organization.
It's good that China is being allowed to grow their economy, even at the expense of the American economy, even as they steal property from us, even as they take jobs from us.
And so she's got no answer to it.
So then she has recourse to what I think was a not very thinly veiled racism accusation.
She goes, you know, I don't know what it is about Trump.
He's got this weird obsession with repealing everything Obama did.
What do you mean it's a weird obsession?
Obama is a radical left Democrat.
Trump is a conservative Republican.
Of course he wants to repeal all of his radical legislation and radical executive orders.
The only reason it would be weird is the usual accusation that comes up all the time that Kamala Harris made recourse to last night, which is race.
She played the race card.
Whenever she didn't have an answer, she goes, you know, and I... My mother came here as an immigrant and I'm very proud to be the first black woman to be the vice presidential nominee.
Nobody cares about that.
Nobody cares about that.
We have had a black president.
We have had a female presidential nominee from a major party.
It doesn't matter now, right?
You say, and I could be the, if Joe Biden is elected and then, you know, he doesn't make it through his term, I could be the second black president.
It's like, well, who cares?
Everyone cares about the first one.
Nobody cares about the second one.
It's just so silly.
And it was a way to evade the questions.
And it was a way to evade Mike Pence's attack.
He finally, and by the way, the first, right out the gate, We're good to go.
Difference was Mike Pence took the questions he was asked and gave the answer that he wanted to give.
He took control of the situation when he was in a situation that was not advantageous to him.
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Right out the gates.
This was actually the first question of the debate.
They bring up COVID. And Kamala accuses Trump and Pence of killing all these sorts of people and all this terrible stuff.
And then Mike Pence points out a question that the mainstream media would never ask Biden and Harris, which is, what's your plan?
And he goes a little further.
He points out that Biden plan, that sure looks a whole lot like that Trump plan.
We were able to reinvent testing.
More than 115 million tests have been done to date.
We were able to see to the delivery of billions of supplies, so our doctors and nurses had the resources, support they needed.
And we began, really, before the month of February was our, to develop a vaccine and to develop medicines and therapeutics that have been saving lives all along the way.
And under President Trump's leadership, Operation Warp Speed, we believe, will have Literally tens of millions of doses of a vaccine before the end of this year.
The reality is, when you look at the Biden plan, it reads an awful lot, like what President Trump and I and our task force have been doing every step of the way.
I mean, quite frankly, when I look at their plan that talks about advancing testing, creating new PPE, developing a vaccine, it looks a little bit like plagiarism, which is something Joe Biden knows a little bit about.
Oh man, Iron Mike just absolutely wrecking Biden right there at the end.
Joe Biden, of course, very famously, infamously had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race because he was plagiarizing his speeches.
So he gets that end, Kamala Harris, she doesn't even know what to say.
Then Mike takes it further.
The vice president says, okay, all right, we've got all this.
We all agree that our plan is great.
Thanks, Biden and Harris.
I'm glad you agree.
So now we're about to get this vaccine.
So, Senator Harris, you going to take it?
You're so interested in public health.
You're going to take that vaccine, right?
Right?
If the Trump administration approves a vaccine before or after the election, should Americans take it and would you take it?
If the public health professionals, if Dr.
Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it.
Absolutely.
But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I'm not taking it.
Oh, it's so awkward.
So Pence is kind of teeing this up, and then you get the question from the moderator, which is, okay, well, so are you going to take it?
And she can't say yes.
Now, we are told, oh my gosh, we are told that we Republicans are undermining public health because we won't wear these masks, you know, these dirty masks that many epidemiologists have said.
We read one just the other day from Columbia.
I've said people are not using correctly, right?
The guy from Columbia who was speaking to NPR said that the masks fail in studies because people just aren't wearing them right.
So that, I guess she's going to do that.
Obviously, they're not wearing masks during the debate.
But then...
When the vaccine comes out, listen to the experts of public health, she won't commit to taking it.
And Mike Pence sees his opening and takes it.
The reality is that we're going to have a vaccine, Senator, in record time, in unheard of time, in less than a year.
We have five companies in phase three clinical trials, and we're right now producing tens of millions of doses.
So The fact that you continue to undermine public confidence in a vaccine, if the vaccine emerges during the Trump administration, I think is unconscionable.
And Senator, I just ask you, stop playing politics with people's lives.
The reality is that we will have a vaccine, we believe, before the end of this year.
And it will have the capacity to save countless American lives.
And your continuous undermining of confidence in a vaccine is just unacceptable.
Mike Pence, the silent killer.
You just don't know when he's going to sneak up on you.
The rest of the debate went like that.
You get the picture.
In many ways, watching this debate was like getting into a time machine.
Because this is how all debates used to be.
And there was something kind of nice about it.
There was something kind of nice about this more orderly format and two politicians, you know, speaking in this very manicured, formal way so that they could get their hits in.
And you were just much more familiar with it.
President Trump blows that up because President Trump doesn't talk in that way.
He hasn't been trained in that way.
He doesn't know exactly how the hits work.
And there's something very refreshing about that as well.
The contrast of these two debates is, I think, an important one because I don't know exactly what kind of country I want.
I think a lot of conservatives are feeling that way.
I mean, I know what policy goals I want.
I know what kind of underlying premises I want.
But I don't know what kind of political culture I want.
Do I want a political culture that is like the old model where you couldn't quite tell what the politicians were saying because you knew they were all just jockeying for position?
Or do I want a political model where people actually just come right out and say what they mean and it's not always pretty, but hey, we don't have time for that.
We got big problems.
Which one do we want?
I don't think it's very...
Even the most rah-rah conservatives or even the most establishment squishes.
I'm not sure that it's very clear right now which they want.
It's why, though, I do know this.
There's one conclusion I can draw.
The combination of Trump and Pence is absolutely killer.
It's just...
There was a lot of talk early on.
They said, well, you've got to dump Pence from the ticket.
Pence doesn't add anything.
Pence adds a lot.
That guy is a varsity-level, total pro politician who knows how to work it, who is smooth, who has been in D.C., obviously, for considerably longer than Donald Trump.
And then Trump adds that populist pizzazz who's actually punching through the established norms.
That combination...
politics.
It was tremendous.
You don't get to see the Pence side of it so much because he's, he's silent.
He kind of works a little bit more in the background, but you got a glimpse of it last night.
That's very powerful, much, much better than the Biden Harris ticket.
I'm obviously, I'm not even just talking about policy as a matter of policy.
I much prefer the Trump ticket, but even just as a matter of political skill, Harris does not add very much to Joe Biden.
He's It was a mistake to pick her.
He backed himself into a corner because he chose to be a racist and a sexist, I guess, to use their language, right?
He said, my VP, it's not going to be necessarily the best person for the job.
It has to be a woman.
And it has to be a woman of color.
And I don't want it to be Elizabeth Warren, so I'm going to take Native Americans out of it.
And it's got to be this, and it's got to be that.
And he just chose all these divisive categories before he got to the person.
And then the two choices that were left at a prominent level were Karen Bass, who's a communist, and she's the head of the Congressional Black Talkers, and Kamala Harris, who's just not a skilled politician at that level.
At that level, she's very weak.
Biden should have gone with Buttigieg or Warren or Klobuchar or somebody like that.
He didn't do it and it's probably going to hurt him.
By the end of the debate, the spin doctors, the only thing that they could work with, the only thing left to attack the Republicans for was that Mike Pence's wife was not wearing a mask.
It was absolutely a preposterous line of attack.
But that's what they do.
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The biggest attack line on the left from the debate At the end of the debate, you have Kamala and Mike Pence are up there.
They obviously are not wearing masks.
The moderator is up there.
She's not wearing a mask.
You have Kamala's husband walks up to hug her, wearing a mask.
So lame, so obviously expected.
And then Karen Pence, who's a normal person, gets up there and kisses her husband without having this piece of cloth in between her and her husband.
The left was furious.
Also, his wife did not wear a mask when she was on stage at the end.
Everybody other than the candidates and the moderator were supposed to be wearing a mask.
Karen Pence was not wearing a mask at the end.
It's bizarre.
You know what?
You could save lives if you would do that.
And you might, in fact, be saving somebody's life in the room right now if, in fact, your husband was exposed to a COVID-infected person in the past week, which he was.
Yeah.
So let me just ask a question of my doppelganger over here from MSNBC, Rachel Maddow.
She's saying that if Karen Pence had worn a mask when she walked directly to her husband and kissed him, she could have saved lives.
Because then she wouldn't have exposed herself to someone who's been exposed to someone who had coronavirus.
And even though Mike Pence has tested negative ever since he was exposed to someone with coronavirus, that would have saved lives.
Does Rachel Maddow know that Mike and Perrin Pence are married?
Does she know that they're going to see each other?
They're probably going to drive home together.
They're probably going to walk into their house together.
I suspect they're going to get into bed together.
And they're not going to be wearing masks over their mouths while they sleep.
In what bizarro universe does a wife kissing her husband spread coronavirus?
But coronavirus is not gonna be spread by Mike Pence, the guy who was in contact with President Trump.
It's not gonna be spread by him not wearing a mask.
It's just Karen Pence.
And the moderator, it's fine if she doesn't.
And Kamala Harris, it's fine if she doesn't.
It was so weak.
I don't think even Rachel Maddow believed that line of attack.
They just had nothing else.
They had one more.
I'm sorry.
That's not true.
They had one more line of attack, which was, I guess, the DNC sent out the talking points right after the debate.
They probably wrote them before the debate to ABC, to CNN, to MSNBC. The attack on Mike Pence, because he won every point on the merits, but he was mansplaining.
Obviously, Mike Pence, his former television commentator, does have a very calm demeanor.
But I think a lot of people were noticing some mansplaining going on tonight.
I don't know.
I didn't see it that way, George.
It didn't come across to me.
This was a mansplainer in chief.
Mike Mansplainer all night.
I understand that.
One thing set out to me is I will not be lectured.
Dr.
Harris said that multiple times.
Women hate to be lectured by men.
And she drove that point home.
It was a debate, to use Kamala Harris' own words.
It's a debate.
That's where you lecture each other.
That's where you make points and you try to explain things.
Total weak sauce.
I don't think even these guys believe it.
You know, Van Jones, especially not Van Jones.
That guy's actually intelligent, I think.
But he has to use this line.
I guess the talking points came down.
He's a mansplainer.
They wrote this one, obviously, before the debate as a last-ditch effort, because by definition, Anything Mike Pence said in the debate is mansplaining because he's a man and she's a woman.
And that was the only card that they had to play.
Mansplaining is very good.
Girl understanding is very good, too, as my friend Andrew Klavan says.
There's nothing wrong with mansplaining.
Men are perfectly entitled to speak.
I'm sorry if that offends Kamala Harris, and I'm sorry if Kamala Harris is not quite as skilled at speaking or not as in command of the facts or not as able to defend her utterly indefensible positions.
Because the left is indefensible, they've got no good arguments to get people to vote for them in 2020.
So now, they've truly devolved, decayed, become debased.
The usual insufferable celebrity PSA has now become even yuckier because you have all of these, some frequently washed up celebrities, left-wingers, going out and saying, you gotta vote, you gotta vote, you gotta vote.
But this time, you wanna hear the hook?
This time, they're all naked.
I'm completely butt-ass naked.
I'm naked.
I'm, like, naked.
There isn't a man behind me.
These are my hands.
Why you want me to be naked?
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, Ruffalo, put your clothes on.
To be honest, I wish I could...
Cover my hands with my boobs, but here we are.
I'm here to talk to you about voting.
Did you know that ballots could be naked?
And if you don't do exactly what I tell you, your ballot could get thrown out.
This is my ballot.
Just got it.
First of all, when your ballot comes, you're supposed to read the instructions.
Read and follow the instructions that come with your ballot.
If they say to use a black pen, use a black pen.
I know that's like literally the least sexy thing a completely naked person could say, but.
But I have crumb like can of Pepsi.
Is problem?
Our founding fathers roll over in their graves because the left is kind of hilariously depicting what they warned us all against.
You know, the founding fathers had...
Deliberative discussion.
They had substantive debate.
The Federalist Papers were op-eds that were written to debate the Constitution.
But they all said, they said, you know, if license takes over, licentiousness, if people just give over to their base passions, we're not going to be able to have self-government.
You need to be in control of your passions to have self-government.
And so what do these people do?
They say, we're all naked!
We're all naked!
Come vote for us!
Credit where credit's due.
Sarah Silverman looks a lot better than I think any of us expected.
Okay, I'm willing, I don't want to be Totally one-sided here.
A lot of people were surprised by that.
However, however, the PSA was completely unconvincing and really off-putting and really, really gross.
Not even gross because those people generally don't look very good, but gross because you think, gosh, this is how debased our politics has become.
A quick update on the Trump COVID stimulus plan.
I told you this yesterday.
I predicted it.
I believe I was the only person yesterday to call this.
When everybody was freaking out, they were all so upset that President Trump said that he was not going to negotiate a COVID relief deal until after the election.
He said, sorry, Nancy, you're offering me $2.4 trillion.
I'm saying $1.6 trillion.
No deal.
We're just going to focus on Barrett.
We'll do it after the election.
All these conservatives said, no, what are you doing?
You're losing.
You're crazy.
Don't do it.
And I said yesterday, I said, guys, I'm not even going to take him at face value here because I think this is just a negotiating tactic.
Well...
Not 24 hours later.
Turns out that seems to be the case.
Trump tweets out yesterday, if I am sent a standalone bill for stimulus checks, $1,200, they will go out to our great people immediately.
I'm ready to sign now.
Are you listening, Nancy?
Move fast.
I'm waiting to sign, at Speaker Pelosi.
So this was a negotiating tactic.
We'll see if it happens.
Either way, I think it kind of works for him.
Trump's put himself in a bit of a win-win situation.
But very, very good news.
Art of the deal.
Shows you most people.
Still not catching it.
You know, President Trump has let us in now.
I mean, if you're paying close attention to Trump, you realize this is the kind of thing he does.
But a lot of people still, I think, they're just not used to it.
And it's why, by the way, that Trump strategy is usually more effective than the Pence strategy, even if the Pence strategy is much cleaner.
And when you put them both together, you've got a really dynamite ticket.
Yeah.
This is an art.
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You are going to be blown away by these guys.
I've got to get to a hilarious post from Media Matters yesterday, and I've got to get to the mailbag.
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today.
We will be right back with a lot more.
I've got to get I know I'm running late, but I have to point this out.
A guy from Media Matters yesterday posts this long, long thread about how after RBG died, he listened to AOC and he knew there's someone in your life who you've got to get to vote in this election.
It's your job to do it.
And he's been filled with anxiety.
And for him, it's his 94-year-old grandmother.
And it goes on and on and on and on.
It never ends, this whole long thread.
But then, finally at the end, He says, I told her that a vote for Republicans was a vote that would harm me and my future.
I told her I was scared.
And today my grandmother promised me she would vote for Joe Biden.
She told me I'm the love of her life.
She wouldn't break her promise.
I'm still crying.
I had never called her crying, but I did today.
I'm still crying.
Please call your loved ones.
The long and short of it is a grown man who works for Media Matters called his grandmother and cried until she agreed to vote for Biden.
Which is why You know I joke about Media Matters a lot.
I joke about our official Daily Wire intern, Jason Campbell, who works for Media Matters, who does all my publicity.
He breaks out my clips and things like that.
But I try not to be very mean to them.
I try not to be cruel.
Media Matters exists to get me and other people fired.
But I try not to be cruel to them because these are extremely broken people.
Obviously, I mean, this guy is, like, crying to his 94-year-old grandmother.
I mean, these people, some of them have put videos on the Internet, like, talking about how not broken they are, but they're obviously, like...
These are people who have troubles, okay?
And it just makes me think of a view of politics where you can go, you can totally knock these guys, you can have fun, you can hit them and just kill them with kindness.
That is kind of my view of it.
That's what Mike Pence did last night at the debate.
He killed them with kindness, okay?
He killed them in a way that was very civilized.
And I think a lot of us liked it.
And I would like to institute more of that in my personal behavior and I would like to see more of that in the country.
Unfortunately, if the left doesn't relent, then we're going to need more Trumps.
We're going to need more Trump strategies, which is a little less soft, a little less gentle than some of the older strategies.
Also have to point out, before we get to the mailbag, someone just died last week.
That would be the grandson of President John Tyler.
John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States.
He was president from 1841 to 1845.
And his grandson just died last week.
His grandson, Lyon Gardner Tyler Jr., died September 26th, 175 years after his grandfather left office.
He was the son of Lyon Gardner Tyler Sr., who was born in 1853, when his father, who was born in 1790, was 62.
Obviously, John Tyler and John Tyler's son both had kids when they were very late in life.
I mention that to remind you.
This is a young country.
The country was founded officially in 1776.
So when we talk about unprecedented, breaking all the norms, this is a very young country.
We still don't know how it's going to settle.
We haven't been around for a long time.
It's still a fragile institution, difficult to preserve.
And those are going to be stakes in this election.
Let's get to the mailbag from Dan.
Do you think, at this point, Joe Biden is the presidential equivalent of the Affordable Care Act?
Just like we were told we had to pass the act to find out what was in it.
The same is now true with Joe Biden.
Yes, Joe Biden is speaking out of both sides of his mouth.
It's very clear.
He says, I would never ban fracking.
I absolutely will ban fracking.
I'm not going to go after charter schools.
I absolutely will go after charter schools.
So you just, you don't know what you're going to get with him because I don't think he knows what he's going to get with him.
He, unlike the Affordable Care Act, which actually, no, no, actually I'll correct myself.
The Affordable Care Act is a good analogy because the Affordable Care Act Even though it was 7 zillion pages long, didn't include most of the specifics about the law, because what the Affordable Care Act did was just empower the deep state.
It empowered the administrative agencies, the bureaucracy, to write most of these regulations.
Well, same thing with Joe Biden.
That's what he's going to do.
If he gets into office, God forbid, he gets in, he's just going to empower the bureaucrats to make all of the decisions, which is a very bad thing.
And It's a bad thing, not just because of the uncertainty, but really because of the certainty, because we know that that is going to take the country in a much more leftward direction.
From Elizabeth, do you think Pope Francis will praise the peace deals made in the Middle East between Israel and those various countries?
You know, the Holy Father doesn't consult me on these things.
So, I don't know.
I couldn't make a prediction.
Obviously, a lot of conservatives are not too happy with the Pope because he has said many left-wing things.
He has appeared to be very critical of the President.
Sometimes he's been taken out of context by journalists, but then that raises the question, why is he still talking to these journalists who always take him out of context?
The issue here that I would always recommend to conservatives, even when we're talking about Pope Francis, is a little bit of caution because The Catholic Church and European history generally, European history which is shaped by the Catholic Church...
It's not quite as simple as our understanding of conservatism and liberalism and left and right today in America.
We have a much narrower understanding of those things, but when you open it up over time and you look at historical context, things get a little bit broader and more complicated.
I mean, just even in America, probably this is changing now, but it was true maybe for the past ten years.
You would say someone who is very, very libertarian is very, very conservative.
But for most of the history of our civilization, someone who is very, very libertarian would be considered very, very liberal or very much on the left.
Even our understanding of left and right are products of the French Revolution, which is very, very modern.
So I'd just urge a bit of caution.
Conservative thought Western civilization, Western culture is much broader than the ideological categories that we are talking about today.
From Aiden, I've been pondering this question for a while.
I was wanting your take on this.
A lot of conservatives state that the majority of the country supports Trump, but what exactly is the proof?
How can one prove that the majority of the country is in fact for Trump?
A simple conversation with a leftist.
They, of course, say no.
They point to the polls, how Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, even though I think that those votes were faked.
Well, some of them might have been, you know, but I don't know if all 2 million or however many were faked.
Thank you for your time and all that you do.
It depends what you mean by the country.
The majority of the country does support Donald Trump in the sense that we are the United States of America.
We are not the individuated people of America without any distinction by geography or by state.
We are not the simple national government of America without any subsidiary or federalism.
We're the United States of America.
The way the presidential vote is tallied is through the Electoral College, which has a relation to the popular vote, but it is not identical with the popular vote.
So the majority of the country, such as it is, elects Trump and supports Trump.
The majority of the individuals did not vote for Trump.
But the country is more than just the individuals.
And this is a point that conservatives have been a little bit weak on for the past 20 years because of the influence of libertarianism.
We have thought that because the left is for big government and collectivism and socialism, we have thought that the best way to fight that is to be for individualism.
There's a role, obviously, for the individual in an opposition to the left, but that's not the whole story.
Actually, if you say that the individual is the basic unit of society rather than, say, the family or the local community, you're giving the left their premise because the left says the same thing, that the individual is the basic unit of society.
Socialists say the same thing.
Communists say the same thing.
Fascists, actually, say the same thing.
Now, those are all different political ideologies, right?
But they all share that basic premise.
That destroys the mediating institutions, that destroys the individual states and the local communities, and especially the family and the churches and the civic associations, and it has the individual.
And then libertarians say, we want the individuals to stand on their own, and the left-wingers say, and the fascists for that matter, say, we want the individuals to be bound up together.
Fascism means like a bundle, a bundle of sticks.
We want them all to be bound up together in the state.
And both of those guys get it wrong, because the correct answer is, The individual is not the atomic unit of society.
The family is.
Within the context of mediating institutions and local government and civic associations and churches, that's the basic unit.
And it's much, much tougher for political demagogues to come in and take power from that structure of subsidiarity and federalism.
Much tougher.
This is why, as libertarianism has advanced, leftism has advanced too, because they're not opposites.
They're actually two sides of the same coin.
So I think we've got to stop thinking about the essential unit of the country as individuals.
Of course, individuals have unique dignity.
They have so much to add, and we need to support...
Individualism in as much as it speaks to human dignity.
But as a political unit, we have to pay much, much, much more attention to the state government, to the local government, and especially to the family.
From Chris, on your show the other day, you talked about your support for capital punishment.
I did.
As a fellow Catholic, I'm conflicted on my support for the death penalty due to the church's opposition to it.
Not so fast there, but let's get the rest of your question and then I'll answer.
How do you justify your support of the death penalty along with your faith?
I'm not asking as a gotcha.
I'm genuinely interested in your thought process since this is something I've always been confused about.
Yeah, I think in recent years the church has been very confusing, sent out messages that are difficult to parse and in some cases perhaps even contrary to the history of the church and church's traditional teaching.
The death penalty is perfectly legitimate.
As Pope Benedict XVI said just a few years ago, there can be legitimate disagreement among faithful Catholics on the death penalty.
Pope John Paul II said the same thing, though he was very anti-death penalty.
Some of his predecessors were not so anti-death penalty.
Blessed Pope Pius IX not only supported the death penalty, he carried out many capital punishments in the papal states.
So was Blessed Pius IX, who is on his way to canonization, did he commit this intrinsically evil act and permit it?
No, I don't think so.
Thomas Aquinas defends the death penalty, capital punishment.
Was Thomas Aquinas, doctor of our church, one of the greatest theologians ever to live?
Was he advocating intrinsic evil?
No.
St.
Paul, who says that the civil authority wields the sword for a reason, does not wield it in vain, Was he teaching intrinsic evil in the New Testament?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
You'll notice, by the way, even the recent statements of the present Father, Holy Father, do not use the phrase intrinsic evil.
They say that it's inadmissible or sort of, you know, it's a little confusing.
But they won't use the phrase intrinsic evil because that would be indefensible.
That would be contrary to Scripture and contrary to 2,000 years of Church teaching.
So, no.
The Church may have, as the Catechism states...
And has stated now for a couple decades at least, a prudential opposition.
As a practical matter, they don't like it and discourage it.
But it is not against the moral teaching of the Catholic Church to say that the death penalty can be legitimate.
And so I have no problem reconciling my faith and my political views on that because they're very much in line.
From Jesse, one last question before we go.
I've noticed that you haven't given us a new piffy name for the novel coronavirus in recent weeks, so I thought I would give you a suggestion for one.
I think we should call the disease the Zhijin Plague in honor of the man slash willy-nilly silly old bear whose fault this pandemic truly is.
It's a great name, the Zhijin Plague.
On that note, I can't do better than that.
On that note, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you Monday.
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Kamala Harris accuses Mike Pence of mansplaining.
As far as I'm concerned, he should keep on mansplaining until she can girl understand.
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