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Jan. 14, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
49:33
Ep. 680 - Impotent Impeachment

The House impeaches President Trump again, AOC unwittingly offers insight, and conservatives score a win at the Supreme Court. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Add another accomplishment to President Trump's record.
President Trump becomes the first president in history to be impeached twice.
House Democrats seem to think that they are destroying Trump's legacy.
If anything, I think the impeachment actually might help it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment from yesterday is from James Colley, who says the National Guard at Joey's inauguration will be his largest crowd.
That is true.
Not just his largest crowd, you know, of the day at the inauguration, his largest crowd ever.
We sort of forget because now we've certified the election results and Joe Biden's the president-elect.
We sort of forget that the guy couldn't get more than like 12 people to show up to any of his events for the entire campaign.
And now one suspects he's going to have mostly a Zoom inauguration.
It's all going to be virtual, all going to be digital, all pretty weird, won't it be?
Ties in a little bit to what we're going to be talking about with impeachment.
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President Trump has been impeached.
Again, this is like Groundhog Day.
I feel like I'm Bill Murray.
He's been impeached twice in just about two years.
A little more than, no, when was it?
It was the end of 2019 and now it's the beginning of 2021.
So just a little over a year he's been impeached.
Wow.
Are we going to impeach him again before he is taken out of office?
He won't be convicted.
This is the very good news.
There was some rumor that Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, was eager for impeachment.
Do you remember I read you that New York Times headline just this week?
And I said, according to the New York Times, so take that with a boulder-sized grain of salt, Mitch McConnell is looking forward to an impeachment trial so that he can purge the party of Trump and so that he can prevent Trump from running in 2024.
I said, you've got to take it with a big grain of salt, and it turns out you should, because Mitch McConnell has said that the Senate will not take up the matter of impeachment.
Before the inauguration, meaning the House impeaches and the Senate holds the trial.
But if President Trump is no longer the sitting president, then he cannot be the subject of an impeachment trial.
Doesn't work.
They lost.
The vote yesterday was purely symbolic.
One thing that this should remind us, first of all, is, you know, always wait a day when you hear something in the New York Times.
And, you know, maybe have a little bit more faith in Cocaine Mitch.
He's served us better in recent years than perhaps some of us thought he might.
But also, it reminds us how much power one has if we control the Senate.
You know, the fact that Republicans, for at least a few more days, control the Senate, It means that they can say impeachment trial completely off, completely ridiculous, and Democrats can't do anything about it.
There were a handful of Republicans who voted for impeachment in the House.
I think it's important to read their names so that we can remember those names.
John Katko of New York, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton, Jamie Butler, Dan Newhouse, Peter Meijer, Anthony Gonzalez, Tom Rice, and Tom Valadao.
Do you recognize any of those names?
I don't either.
They just sound like some GOP backbenchers.
Worth remembering, I guess, when they're up for re-election.
Obviously, Trump will be gone at that point.
But the squishiness and the disloyalty and the ignorance of the law, even just on the objective legal matters of the impeachment, really makes one question their judgment.
There is one name, though, that we can recognize here.
That would be Liz Cheney.
Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney.
Liz Cheney voted for impeachment.
And Liz Cheney is technically in leadership.
So she's not, you know, the minority leader, the Republican minority leader in the House or anything like that.
She's not chief whip or anything like that.
She is the chairman of the GOP conference.
And it is a very strange thing that someone who is at least technically in Republican leadership in the House would vote to impeach the Republican president With no real legal basis.
The legal charge here was that Trump incited a mob to attack the Capitol.
We played the clip on the show.
You might say that Trump's actions in the last month or two have been imprudent, unwise, irresponsible, reckless.
Use whatever adjective you want.
They haven't been illegal.
He did not incite the mob to commit violence at the Capitol.
He explicitly said, be peaceful.
So whatever you want to say about Trump, it's a frivolous charge.
Dan Crenshaw pointed that out.
Just a couple of days ago.
And yet Liz Cheney voted for.
Very strange to have that kind of a person in GOP leadership.
Really, really don't have a ton of faith in her judgment.
And I don't have faith in the judgment of GOP leadership if they're going to have a person like that there.
Just worth remembering.
Now, all of this is symbolic, but that's all they can voice on Trump right now is this kind of symbolism.
And what the Democrats and the Never Trumpers want to do is they want to say Trump is historically bad and evil.
They were hoping they could prevent him from running in 2024.
They failed to do that, but they just want to destroy his legacy.
I think they've done exactly the opposite.
I want to put aside for a second...
Anything about the Capitol, I want to put aside for a second anything about Trump's tweets, I want to put aside for a second anything about how you don't like the cut of his jib.
I want you to focus on the impeachers.
I want you to focus on not just the House Democrats and the handful of squishy Republicans.
I want you to focus on the broader ruling class.
Guys like Jack Dorsey, these Silicon Valley oligarchs, you know, hipster Rasputin, who decides that he ought to be able to censor the duly elected sitting president of the United States.
I want you to think about guys like Mark Zuckerberg.
Another zillionaire master of the universe who decides he can censor the duly elected president of the United States.
I want you to think about everybody over YouTube and Google decides they can censor the duly elected president of the United States.
When you think of that ruling class, and then you add the corporate class to that, and then you add the higher education part to that, then you add Hollywood, then you add the corrupt mainstream media, The ruling liberal class has come after Trump in a way that I've never seen them come after any Republican in my lifetime.
They hated Bush.
They hated Romney, even though now they love Romney.
They hated McCain, even though at other times they loved McCain.
We know, you know, way back in the olden days, they hated Reagan in particular.
They went after Reagan in a fairly similar way to how they've gone after Trump.
But Trump is like singular.
If you have faith in that ruling elite right now, then their impeaching Trump twice is a knock on his legacy.
There's no question.
But if you think that that ruling elite is corrupt, wrong-headed, idiotic, malevolent in some cases, certainly malignant, if you think that that ruling elite is a rotting oligarchy, That deserves none of our admiration or respect.
Then their second impeachment of Trump is a badge of honor.
Taking away any argument that they made for the impeachment, the fact that they've come after this guy again and again and again, they were so threatened by this guy that when he was running for president the first time, the ruling regime decided they had to spy on him to try to undermine his campaign.
Then the minute he gets inaugurated, you had Democratic representatives saying, we've got to impeach him because otherwise he might win re-election.
Then they try to impeach him for this.
Then they try to impeach him for that.
Then they try to impeach him for the other thing.
Then they finally do impeach him for some bogus nonsense.
He gets acquitted.
He isn't convicted in the Senate.
Then they go after him again and again and again.
They rewrite the election laws in the weeks and months before the election.
In some cases, explicitly violating state constitutions, like in Pennsylvania.
They're so threatened by this guy And then they impeach him again.
They'll probably try to impeach him a couple more times.
Is that a knock on his legacy?
Or is that a defense of his legacy?
I think in the long run, it's going to be the latter.
Consider the people who are doing this.
Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi.
And all the rest of them, by the way.
Think about Maxine Waters, who explicitly called for violence against Republicans.
Think about Hillary Clinton, who said you can't be civil with Republicans.
Think about All of these other people.
But Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, she decides that the people's business is very, very important that House Democrats pass a resolution such that the House rules will no longer include gendered language.
All the troubles we face right now, the draconian lockdowns, people losing their livelihoods, threats from abroad, rising China, all of these issues...
Nancy Pelosi says, very, very important.
We pass this resolution such that the House rules will not include gendered language.
Listen to the arguments she makes for that resolution.
This is not theoretical.
And this is not motivated by partisanship.
I stand before you today as an officer of the Constitution, a speaker of the House of Representatives.
I stand before you as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a daughter.
Hold on.
She wants to pass a resolution getting rid of gendered language in the house rules.
And to defend that, she says, I stand before you as a wife, a mother, a grandmother.
Would you call that gendered language?
I think I would.
That sounds like the most gendered language you can use.
Which is hilarious and it shows their sort of frivolity and ignorance.
But it also shows something a little bit deeper about all these moral claims that they're making.
Namely, they will not hold themselves to those standards.
They will hold you to those standards.
They won't hold themselves to those standards.
President Trump says, go peacefully protest at the Capitol, and then some violence occurs.
They say off with his head, basically.
But they explicitly encourage violence.
Maxine Waters, right?
Hillary Clinton, don't be civil.
Chris Cuomo comes out and says, protests don't need to be peaceful.
They encourage the quote-unquote peaceful protests that seem inevitably to turn into these riots.
They go on television, they say, with buildings on fire, this is a mostly peaceful protest.
They bail out the rioters, like Kamala Harris did, and then they try to impeach Trump.
And some squishy Republicans still don't get it.
Those handful of people led by Liz Cheney that we named.
Maybe they do get it.
Maybe they're just not on the right side.
That's the leadership that we're talking about.
House Democrats, so serious, such an important body that they are focusing on the real issues, namely masks.
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House Democrats are proposing a new rule demanding that members of Congress wear a mask while they are on the House floor or have to pay a $500 fine.
The rule comes after three Democrats, Bonnie Coleman, Brad Schneider, and Pramila Jayapal claim they contracted COVID-19 while sheltering in place with Republican lawmakers during the Capitol Hill riot.
They say they were forced to share space with members of the GOP who refused to wear masks.
Now, what's funny about some of these claims, you've heard other Democratic lawmakers claim, make these sorts of claims before and make a big deal out of the masks.
And then some of them have been caught on camera not wearing the masks all the time.
This is true of almost everybody who demands that people wear masks.
Fauci, not least among them.
Dr.
Fauci, remember, he tried to throw out the baseball at the Nationals game, and he had the mask on, even though he's standing in the middle of a baseball diamond in an empty stadium.
Nobody's around him anywhere.
But he makes a big show.
He's got the mask on.
Then he goes back up to his seat, and he's sitting with some of his friends right next to them, and he takes the mask off.
Because he doesn't really care.
He's not worried about it.
He's just making a big show.
And I suspect that's true of many of these Democratic legislators as well.
It shows you what happens, though, when you can control the House and the Senate.
So much of it is about how you can set the rules, how you can put off certain things.
These masks, it would seem to me, are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.
And that's a really bad thing.
That's a really bad thing.
The Democrats are saying, it's very important.
It will help us get back to normal.
It hasn't helped us get back to normal.
How long are you going to believe this, folks?
15 days to slow the spread.
Just comply.
Just comply.
Just another couple weeks.
Just another couple weeks.
We're coming up on a year.
Seems like a very, very bad idea.
We're going to be talking about this two months from now, I bet.
People are still going to be wearing these masks.
On airplanes, they're going to be wearing them for a while.
I've spoken personally to public health experts who have told me.
I say, when are we going to get rid of the masks?
They say, well, you know, maybe...
Maybe we should just keep wearing the masks.
You know, it was so crazy of us before.
We used to be all these germs and we wouldn't wear them.
Put on the mask.
Comply, comply, comply.
Seems like a bad idea.
These are the sort of frivolous people who impeach the president.
led by the most frivolous of all of them, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just went on a long rant that is both hilarious, but I think insightful.
She did not realize it was insightful, but she unwittingly gave a lot of insight into the way the left is thinking.
So she opens up in this rant describing the tragedy of the scourge that we've been talking about all week.
You You know, this is the incarnation of evil in America.
It's a pervasive problem.
White supremacy.
You know.
Don't you feel you're walking around?
It's like you're surrounded by skinheads wherever you go, right?
Right?
Well, no.
Maybe you don't know any skinheads.
Maybe you don't know any neo-Nazis.
But I am reliably informed by the Democratic Party that this country is teeming With skinheads, 75 million of them, at least, right?
Doesn't matter that you don't know any of them.
Trust me, that Trump supporter that you don't talk to very much, but maybe you saw him across the street, that guy is a neo-Nazi.
That's the white supremacy.
So AOC goes on to describe the tragedy of white supremacy.
They would rather see our country burn than to see them be shoulder to shoulder equal to others.
That is the tragedy of white supremacy.
The tragedy of white supremacy is that it is doomed to fail.
It's doomed to fail.
White supremacists will never, ever, ever live in a world where they will see their fantasies come true.
Ever.
Hold on a second here.
I think I was listening to what she said.
Did AOC said the tragedy of white supremacy is that it will fail?
Is AOC a white supremacist?
Did I miss something?
I know politics is changing a lot, minute by minute.
But am I to understand that AOC considers it a tragedy that white supremacy will fail?
And I was trying to think, I thought, is it, is she describing tragedy in a sort of Shakespearean, a literary sense, you know, someone who starts off like really great and everything's working out really, really well and then it completely collapses?
No, I don't think she would say that about white supremacists.
I don't think she considers skinheads to be these sorts of, you know, people where they're heroes and everything's going great, but then, ah, some character flaw makes it, makes it not work.
She's saying it, the tragedy is that they're doomed to fail.
Because AOC, not the brightest bulb in the pack.
However, however, she is very effective.
She is very effective at communicating her views, to rile up her base, and to rile up our base, too.
She is singularly talented at getting her radicals riled up, but also triggering all of us.
That is kind of her singular feature.
And then she gets a lot of headlines in conservative media, and that helps her become more popular, and that helps her amass more influence within the Democratic Party.
And it really has worked out for her pretty well.
So AOC spins a good yarn.
AOC, during this rant, it was part of a larger riff about how she feared for her life during the Capitol riot.
Listen to her harrowing tale.
As for myself, I had a pretty traumatizing event happen to me.
And I do not know...
If I can even disclose the full details of that event due to security concerns, but I can tell you that I had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die.
And you have all of those thoughts where, you know, at the end of your life and all of these thoughts come rushing to you And that's what happened to a lot of us on Wednesday.
And I thought, I did not think, I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive.
A harrowing tale.
You remember AOC the other day said that almost half of Congress died.
And of course that isn't true.
No member of Congress died and doesn't appear that any member of Congress came even close to dying or really got so much as a scratch.
Which is good, right?
We're very glad no member of Congress was injured in the riot.
And I have no doubt it was very scary.
If you were a member of Congress, I'm sure it was terrifying.
You don't want to experience that sort of thing.
Now they're taking riots really, really seriously.
However...
Where was AOC's concern when businesses were being burned, people's houses were being burned, when people's lives were being threatened and ended in city upon city upon city this summer during the BLM riots?
Where was AOC? Where was her concern then?
Well, that was good, wasn't it?
That was the cry of the oppressed masses.
That was a wonderful thing that we had to encourage in our words and, for some lawmakers, With our money, Kamala Harris bailing the rioters out of jail so they could go burn more businesses down.
I bet those business owners were pretty afraid.
I bet some of them feared for their lives.
Some innocent people lost their lives during the riots that the Democrats encouraged and made excuses for and said we're mostly peaceful.
They weren't mostly peaceful.
If the riot on Capitol Hill was a riot, if the riot on Capitol Hill was not mostly peaceful, certainly the destruction we saw around the country during BLM was not mostly peaceful.
It's amazing.
These Democratic lawmakers, they only seem to really worry when it affects them.
But then AOC goes on and unwittingly gives a very important insight into the left-wing ideology.
She said that the South is the Democrats for the taking.
That's what we got to do.
We got to organize.
And I think what we saw in Georgia is a really good example with Black women leading the way, with multiracial and multicultural organizations leading the way.
They proved that Southern states are not red states.
They are suppressed states.
Which means the only way that our country is going to heal is through the actual liberation of Southern states, the actual liberation of the poor, the actual liberation of working people from economic, social, and racial oppression.
That's the only way.
Southern states are not red states.
They're suppressed states.
This tells you so much about the left's ideology and the way the left views democracy.
According to the left, if they lose elections, that is simply evidence that the election was completely illegitimate.
Now, the right questions elections sometimes, too, but it's in a very, very different way.
you know, if you want to hear more on this topic and many others, you don't just need to listen to me.
You don't just need to listen to Ben Shapiro.
You don't just need to listen to Matt Walsh.
You can listen once again, finally, at long last to Andrew Klavan.
Drew is back every Friday.
It will be a longer show, a 90 minute show to wrap up the week.
There will be special guests.
The first show is this Friday.
Tomorrow it will air Friday evening.
We still don't have an exact time.
This stuff is happening all live.
Also tonight is the big, big night for the Daily Wire.
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At 7 p.m.
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Tonight's event is free for everyone to watch, but after the live stream is over, the movie will be available exclusively to Daily Wire members.
I really enjoyed the movie.
I got to screen it before we even acquired the movie.
And I thought, wow, this is cool.
It got, you know, a good reaction at Venice Film Festival.
It was getting good reaction places.
Why isn't it being shown?
Well, part of that is it was a little politically incorrect.
It's not a propaganda movie.
It's not a political movie.
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AOC said something very important during her rambly social media rant.
She said that it is her view that southern states are not red states.
They are suppressed states.
Meaning that when you go in there and you completely change the election laws and you get rid of election day and make it election season and you have widespread mail-in ballots and you take away the election integrity measures that have been in place for decades, then all of a sudden Democrats win.
And, you know, maybe it takes a few extra days to count the votes, but don't worry, Democrats win.
Now, I'm not saying Democrats are alone in questioning election results.
Obviously, Republicans have been questioning election results for months at this point.
But they are different arguments.
Seems to me the Republican arguments for election integrity were, hey guys, we've got these election integrity measures in place.
Namely, you've got to, ideally you show an ID so you can prove that you are who you say you are.
You have to show up on election day where there are going to be poll watchers.
You need to count the ballots on election day too while there are poll watchers from the Democrats and the Republicans to make sure it's all good.
You need to make sure that the election laws are followed.
For instance, in Pennsylvania, the Constitution was violated during this recent election.
You need to do all sorts of these things.
And if you don't do that, one has to ask the question, why are you getting rid of all of these election integrity efforts?
It's not incumbent on me to prove every instance of fraud.
Fraud happens in every single election.
The question is, was it enough to sway an election?
But I think the best Republican argument, at least, was it's not incumbent on me to prove every single instance of fraud.
I'm noticing that you're getting rid of all the election integrity measures.
Why is that?
That would seem to me evidence of some shenanigans.
Now, there were some more eccentric election arguments saying, you know, the CIA was involved and Germany was involved and the computers and all that.
Fine, I guess worth hearing them out, but we didn't see a ton of evidence for widespread fraud in that way.
But I think the election integrity measures, totally legitimate argument.
Democrats make a different argument.
Their arguments on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of elections do not focus in on those kind of practical, tangible measures.
Their arguments are much broader.
For Democrats, if they lose an election, that is sufficient evidence that the election was rigged.
Okay, Republicans questioned the results of this election.
This was an unprecedented election in American history.
The entire system was upended in the weeks and months before it happened, so I understand why that happened.
Republicans did not contest the election in 2012, did we?
No.
When we lost.
We didn't contest the election in 2008 when we lost.
No.
We didn't contest the election in 1996 when we lost.
No.
Didn't contest the election in 1992 when we lost.
Hadn't really contested any election in modern memory.
What about the Democrats?
They lost in 2000.
They contested the election.
They lost in 2004.
Elected Democrats contested the certification of the electoral votes, which we were told was unprecedented a few weeks ago.
They did it in 2004.
Democrats contested the election in 2016.
Refused to give it up.
Hillary Clinton still insists that she was rightly going to be the president, and then Russia interfered or some other.
Macedonian click farms.
Democrats, Stacey Abrams still appears to contend that she's the governor of Georgia.
Democrats always contest these elections, regardless of any, doesn't matter if there's no change to the voter laws.
And the reason they do that is, for Democrats, evidence of democracy is their winning.
And this has actual intellectual basis, which is during the past century or so.
You heard from the second wave feminists this idea of a false consciousness.
That idea is also articulated by the father of the new left, Herbert Marcuse.
Herbert Marcuse, who came to prominence as a thinker with the Frankfurt School.
This is an idea that you've heard from Antonio Gramsci, one of the great thinkers of Western Marxism.
It comes from Marx himself, who describes this idea of a false consciousness.
What is a false consciousness?
It's when the oppressed people don't realize that they're oppressed, and so they need consciousness raising.
This was the slogan used by the feminists in the 1970s.
The version of it that we use today is called raising awareness.
We need to raise awareness.
Well, it's the same concept.
The idea is that oppressed people Maybe, you know, a black person or a homosexual or an immigrant votes for a Republican.
They might do it, but that's not legitimate because they are laboring under a false consciousness.
If they were fully conscious of their own oppression, they would realize how bad the Republicans are.
They would vote for Democrats.
And that is the subtle premise, sometimes not so subtle premise, of all of these democratic challenges to elections.
And that is what AOC is saying.
And she even goes into it further.
She's saying it's not just the southern states.
It's people on the basis of social status and economic status, race and this and that and the other thing.
They need to have their consciousness raised.
They need to stop being suppressed.
And they need to be, to use her words, liberated.
And you can't be liberated by the forces, the illiberal forces of Republicans or conservatives.
We cannot tolerate the intolerance of conservatives or Republicans.
This also comes from Herbert Marcuse, this very influential thinker of the New Left, or I suppose earlier than the New Left, but he kind of gave birth to the New Left.
Herbert Marcuse wrote this very famous essay called Repressive Tolerance, In which he said that what we need for a liberating tolerance, we need to suppress and censor views from the right and we need to encourage views from the left.
We need to have a new standard.
The old standards are suppressing radicalism, so we need a new standard and that's going to suppress conservatism.
That is what they mean by democracy.
I don't think AOC understands that's what she means.
I don't think she's a particularly sophisticated thinker.
But she has been steeped in this kind of ideology, and that's what she's communicating.
Shows you how naive these Republicans are, who would ever side with them, who would vote to impeach without a legal basis.
Naive or playing for the other side.
These are nasty guys on the other side.
You think Trump is nasty?
Wait until you hear the guys on the other side.
Jake Tapper.
You know, straight-laced Jake Tapper.
Calls it like he sees it.
You know, he's fair.
He's old school.
He's the last journalist in America.
Jake Tapper.
Or he's a Democrat hack.
Which is it?
I think it's maybe the latter.
Jake Tapper was just describing a congressman, a member of Congress, who he doesn't like.
And he...
He used the most disrespectful language I've heard from CNN in at least several hours.
The reams of evidence that we have.
There's one other thing I want to share.
Just one other thing.
That's relevant.
What you're saying right now is relevant.
Because Congressman Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida who lost his legs, by the way, fighting for democracy abroad.
Although, I don't know what his...
I don't know about his commitment to it here in the United States.
He said, did anybody say that?
Yes.
Yeah, we heard him.
The answer is yes.
Yes, yes.
Brian Mast, who lost his legs fighting for democracy abroad.
Huh, I don't think he cares too much about democracy here.
What do you mean he doesn't care about democracy here?
First of all, very, very disrespectful thing.
You can tell Jake Tapper knows that he's crossed a line because he hesitates when he says it.
And usually Jake Tapper's good at keeping a straight face, but even that he thought, oh, yikes, that's...
Well, whatever.
I'm just going to make the nasty comment.
But he's using democracy in exactly the same way AOC is.
There is nothing undemocratic about pursuing legal challenges to an election.
Nothing undemocratic about it at all.
There is nothing undemocratic about objecting to the certification of certain electoral votes.
Now, if...
For instance, Mike Pence had come out and unilaterally declared that he was going to reject the electoral votes.
That would have raised some issues.
That would have thrust us into a constitutional crisis.
We've actually seen that constitutional crisis happen before.
That would have happened in 1876.
And 1877.
But still, that would have been a crisis.
But to go out and follow the procedures that are available to you in a democracy as the people's representative and object to certain votes, that's not anti-democratic.
The reason Jake Tapper thinks it's anti-democratic is because it's a guy on the other side.
I don't remember Jake Tapper ever referring to the many, many democratic lawmakers who have objected to electoral votes as anti-democratic.
Did he?
No.
Of course not.
Because if you support the Democratic Party, you support democracy, and if you support the Republican Party, you're a neo-Nazi skinhead fascist who should be deplatformed, who should be ostracized from society, who should not be able to engage in commerce.
That's ramping up, too.
We went through it yesterday on the show.
President Trump can't even use his bank accounts in certain places now.
Parler.
Build your own Twitter, the left told us.
Okay, we built our own Twitter.
They said you can't do that.
Can't engage in commerce.
Can't engage in society.
Republicans need to wise up to this sort of thing.
Conservatives need to wise up.
I can't believe we've allowed ourselves to be duped.
I can't believe those extraordinarily naive or cynical Republicans who voted for impeachment would allow themselves to be duped like this.
I can't believe a member of the Republican leadership Would either fall for something like that or ally herself with something like that.
Really, really Pathetic, really concerning stuff.
You know, AOC was talking about allegedly aggrieved minorities.
And the left is always talking about allegedly aggrieved minorities.
When they can't find an aggrieved minority, they'll just invent one.
Well, we did get some good news recently for an actually aggrieved minority.
You know, there's a real problem in this country whereby People will abort babies on the basis of what they consider to be defects.
This is specifically true of babies with Down syndrome.
And it's disgusting, but it happens all over the place.
You'll go in.
I mean, when you're about to have a baby, you go into the doctor.
They say, okay, we're going to do a screening.
And then we're going to figure out if they have Down syndrome or something like that.
Then we can discuss our options.
What options?
What do you mean options?
Oh, the option is do you have the baby or do you kill the baby?
Do you kill the baby because you don't think he's perfect?
Because he's got Down syndrome or he's got some other condition?
That's the real thinking that goes on.
And it's led to extraordinarily high rates of abortion, of killing Down syndrome babies.
And some countries boast about it.
You know, in Iceland, a few years ago, there was a big press release.
They said, Iceland has eradicated Down syndrome.
As if they cured a disease.
But there's no cure for Down syndrome.
It's not like they figured out some kind of gene therapy that would fix Down syndrome.
They just kill them all.
How ghastly is that?
And the left cheering this on.
Yes, we kill babies because they have intellectual deficiencies.
Aren't we wonderful?
Well, Governor Kristi Noem in South Dakota...
Has just come out against this process.
She says, children with Down syndrome are a gift to us all.
I'm asking the South Dakota legislature to pass a law that bans the abortion of a pre-born child just because that child is diagnosed with Down syndrome.
We must stand for the right to life of every pre-born child.
Absolutely right stuff.
And a good way, by the way, to go after this issue.
You know, there are...
What conservatives really want to do is get rid of legal abortion.
And sometimes conservatives are honest about that.
I try to be honest about that.
Sometimes conservatives make these really frivolous arguments where they say, you know, abortion, we want to get rid of abortion because it's bad for the mother.
Or it's harmful.
We want to protect mothers.
I mean, psychologically, spiritually, I guess that's true.
But no, you want to protect the baby that's being killed.
They'll say, we, you know...
We want to only have safe abortions, and that's why we're going to shut down the abortion clinics, because they're not safe.
Well, no, no abortion is safe.
It kills a baby.
Obviously, that's not...
You know, they're all kind of somewhat disingenuous arguments, but they're tactical, and they think it's going to chip away at the edges here and there.
Fine by me.
This is a good way to do it.
This is actually a good way to do it because you are appealing to the moral standard that the left at least pretends to have, namely that they oppose racism or sexism or ableism, ableism being discrimination and bigotry against people with handicaps.
What if we passed a law and said you can't abort a baby just because he's black?
Do you think the left would object to that?
I'm sure they'd find some way to object to that, but it'd be very difficult for them to.
What if we had a law that said you can't abort a baby just because she's a girl?
And that sort of thing does happen.
Maybe not so much in the United States yet, but certainly around the world.
I mean, we saw that happen in China, which is why there's a lopsided population now.
People were choosing boys and then aborting the girls.
What if we passed a law, like Kristi Noem says, to ban abortions of babies just because they have intellectual deficiencies?
I'm sure the left would find a way to argue against it, but it would be a very difficult argument.
It would make them look very, very ugly.
I think it would move the needle.
And as Kristi Noem has this kind of solid spine and I think real evidence of political acumen, she is positioning herself very well for 2024, which a lot of people have been talking about.
You know, I'm noticing there have been some people coming out.
There was actually a very prominent professor who came out against Christy Noem who said, Christy Noem, your state has one of the highest levels of COVID and COVID death and COVID hospitalization in the country.
That's true.
It's up in like the top five or top ten or something.
It's way below New York, though.
You know Andy Cuomo is being hailed by all of the left.
Kristi Noem put herself in a very, very good position and seems to have a lot of moral clarity.
We don't get a lot of wins these days on the right.
However, we did just get a win at the Supreme Court.
And this actually ties into everything we were talking about, about democracy and the legitimacy of elections and how Republicans are going to be able to win moving forward.
Right now in Texas, there's a law that says that you can't have universal widespread mail-in ballots, that you've got to request it and you've got to meet certain criteria to get a mail-in ballot.
Democrats in Texas challenged this law.
They wanted to invent a constitutional right to universal mail-in ballots, which is ironic because, as we have noted many times on this show, there are states where the Constitution explicitly forbids widespread mail-in ballots.
But Democrats challenge it anyway.
It goes all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court rejected that bid.
The Supreme Court rejected a Democratic bid for universal vote by mail-in Texas, leaving intact a state law.
Now, if Democrats take Texas, they can just get rid of the law and then they'll have universal widespread mail-in ballots.
This is going to be a very important issue.
I think if Republicans do not fight this thing, the universal widespread mail-in, it's going to be virtually impossible for us to win important elections in the future.
City machines, Democratic machines, have long engaged in shenanigans with elections.
They've long stuffed ballot boxes.
They stuffed the ballot box in Texas in 1948, gave us Lyndon Johnson.
Okay, I look forward to fact-checkers coming after me.
On this notion and defending democratic political machines because they've been going on a very long time, okay?
And the way that they function is by getting rid of ballot integrity measures.
If you have universal widespread mail in, one, you can't check to make sure that the person who's voting really is the person who says they're voting.
And two, you won't have people tallying the results on election day.
You're going to have it dragged out and out and out.
It takes us a long time to conduct elections in this country now, doesn't it?
It didn't used to take us this long.
It gives a lot of opportunity for abuse.
A big win at the court.
We've got to follow it up, though, with legislative achievements.
Speaking of dubious legal doctrines, like the right to a universal widespread mail-in...
Mayor Bill de Bolshevik in New York, de Blasio, comes out.
He is severing the city's ties with the Trump Organization.
Obviously, Donald Trump has had a longstanding relationship with the city of New York.
Now, the radical mayor there is going to get rid of that relationship, according to a doctrine of the law that doesn't seem to hold up to me.
The city of New York is severing all contracts with the Trump Organization.
Our legal team has done the assessment, and the contracts make very clear.
If a company, the leadership of that company, is engaged in criminal activity, we have the right to sever the contract.
Inciting an insurrection.
Let's be clear.
I'm going to say these words again.
Inciting an insurrection against the United States government clearly constitutes criminal activity.
So the city of New York will no longer have anything to do with the Trump Organization.
They have profited from these contracts.
They will profit no longer.
So here's Bill de Blasio's argument.
The Trump Organization has a contract, has multiple contracts with the city of New York, and there are rules around these contracts.
You can't just pull out willy-nilly, but you can pull out if someone is engaging in criminal activity, and therefore Trump's engaging in criminal activity, therefore we can sever the contract.
What's the criminal activity, Bill?
Well, the criminal activity is inciting an insurrection.
Okay.
When was Trump convicted of inciting an insurrection?
Well, he was impeached, wasn't he?
Yes, he was impeached.
When was he convicted?
Impeachment is just a vote by the House that then sets up a trial and then the senators at that trial convict or acquit.
Donald Trump was never convicted of inciting an insurrection.
Donald Trump was never convicted of inciting an insurrection, in part because he never incited an insurrection.
He behaved recklessly.
He behaved irresponsibly.
He shouldn't have done that.
Okay, fine.
Sure.
Maybe.
Whatever.
He obviously did not incite the insurrection.
He said explicitly, be peaceful.
He said it before they went to the Capitol.
He said be peaceful.
Then he said it while they were at the Capitol.
Then he said it after they were at the Capitol.
Be peaceful.
Same can't be said of Maxine Waters, who said, get up in Republicans' faces, go to their homes where their children sleep, get up on them.
Is the city of New York going to sever ties with the Waters organization?
I guess there isn't one.
Is it enough now to just accuse somebody of a crime?
And that has the full force of law?
Well, apparently it is.
If I go out there and I say, Bill de Blasio is a communist.
This guy is a red, he is a pinko, he's a subversive, he's seditious.
Does that now have the weight of law?
Have I convicted him of that crime?
No, I obviously can't do that.
One, because it would violate the law, but two, because I'm a conservative.
But the left can do that, and that is what they're doing, and that's what they're about to do.
They're going to say you can't do business.
You can't bank.
You can't have your contracts.
You can't go to certain places.
They're going to try to continue this impeachment after Trump's out of office.
It's not possible, so I suspect it'll fizzle pretty quickly, but there will be a movement at least among Democrats to do that.
Then I strongly suspect there are going to be all sorts of investigations into Trump's personal life.
You can indict a ham sandwich, so they'll try to find something.
Then I strongly suspect there's going to be a movement among legislators to try to pass a law saying Trump can never run for office again because they're so afraid Now, that would violate the 14th Amendment, so I don't think it would work.
But who knows?
We're in a lawless era.
We're in a lawless era now where a baker can be sent out of business for not engaging in a gay wedding that violates his religious beliefs.
But social media companies, web companies can censor outright based on any reason they want.
Can refuse to engage in business with anybody because a mere accusation carries effectively the force of law.
Someone goes out there and says 75 million Americans are Nazis.
That would seem to be sufficient to begin to silence them, to begin to ostracize them, to begin to exile them.
We're in the beginning stages of that.
Trump is still the president.
Imagine how ramped up that is going to get.
What a corrupt ruling elite would do that sort of a thing.
And to incur their ire seems to me a badge of honor.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, I'll be talking about President Trump being impeached for the second time.
Plus, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the Senate's not going to take this up before the inauguration and law enforcement frets over the weekend.
That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show.
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