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Feb. 15, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

52:29

Ep. 700 - The Most Acquitted President Ever

The Senate votes not to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, making him the most acquitted president in American history; Michael’s doppelgänger resigns from the White House; and President Biden remakes U.S. policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	The Senate has voted not to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, making him the most acquitted president in American history.
	Nobody, ain't nobody, more innocent than Donald Trump.
	Great news for him.
	I think very good news for the Republican Party.
	But the trial is not over.
	Actually, the real trial, the real trial for the future of the GOP is just about to begin.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	Welcome back to the show.
	My favorite comment from Friday is from Valor, who says, liberals say, we want strong and powerful women.
	Also liberals, this woman has an opinion we don't like.
	Fire her.
	I think this refers to Gina Carano, my favorite new colleague here at the Daily Wire.
	I Gina Carano gets canned by Disney Plus just for being a conservative.
	They made up some stuff about how she said something that was offensive.
	She didn't.
	She didn't say anything that was offensive.
	She is just conservative, and they don't like that, so Disney fired her.
	Well, the Libs loss is our gain.
	Of course, the left doesn't want to hear from women or any other group of people.
	Unless they're willing to toe the left-wing line, and when they don't, they think they can destroy their careers, and now we are pushing back against that.
	Too bad for them.
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	The smartest way to hire.
	Actually, my doppelganger just recently lost his job.
	We'll get to that in just a little bit.
	The big news of the day.
	Donald Trump acquitted in the Senate impeachment trial.
	There have been many questions.
	Is this even a legitimate impeachment trial?
	Can you impeach an ex-president?
	Well, I guess he was impeached when he was a president.
	Then the trial was of this private citizen now in Florida, this former president.
	Can't remove him from office.
	The chief justice is not presiding, as the Constitution demands.
	But they thought they could prevent him from running for office again in the future, maybe in 2024.
	None of that matters anymore.
	Because Donald Trump got acquitted.
	We always knew he was going to get acquitted, though the Trump legal team was a little bit shaky in their early arguments.
	The Democrat House impeachment managers were doing a very good job.
	Finally, in the last day of their presentation, the Trump lawyers brought the goods.
	Everything the Democrats had been setting them up for, the Trump lawyers let loose.
	The House managers spoke about rhetoric about a constant drumbeat of heated language.
	Well, as I'm sure everyone watching expected, we need to show you some of their own words.
	I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country.
	Maybe there will be.
	There needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there's unrest in our lives.
	You've got to be ready to throw a punch.
	You have to be ready to throw a punch.
	Donald Trump, I think you need to go back and punch him in the face.
	That I thought he should have punched him in the face.
	I feel like punching him.
	I'd like to take him behind the gym if I were in high school.
	We're in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
	No, I wish we were in high school, I could take him behind the gym.
	I will go and take Trump out tonight.
	Take him out now.
	When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?
	They're still gonna have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump.
	Show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
	And you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.
	I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.
	Please, get up in the face of some congresspeople.
	Ooh, that doesn't sound so great, because what the Democrats have been telling us for this entire trial is that if you call for aggressive political action, if you use terms like fight, you know, every politician uses fight, but Trump, he said, you got to go fight.
	He's inciting an insurrection.
	He is a traitor to his country.
	He needs to be impeached and prevented from running for office.
	But then you listen to the Democrats and they all said not just the same thing, they said things that were a lot worse.
	Lindsey Graham made a great point after the trial where he said, if we're going to impeach Trump, and don't forget, we did impeach Trump.
	He was impeached twice.
	Acquitted both times, but he was impeached twice.
	If we're going to do that, we've got to impeach Kamala Harris.
	We've opened Pandora's box to future presidents, and if you use this model, I don't know how Kamala Harris doesn't get impeached if the Republicans take over the House, because she actually bailed out rioters, and one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody's head open.
	So we've opened Pandora's box here, and I'm sad for the country.
	I agree.
	I think it is sad for the country.
	Well, it's sad for the country that Kamala Harris is vice president, that somebody like her would become a vice president.
	Obviously, nobody likes her.
	That's why she was one of the first people.
	I think she was the first person out of the presidential race.
	But she made it in sort of through the back door, and now she's the vice president.
	Heartbeat away from the Oval Office with the oldest president ever.
	She was not merely using harsh political rhetoric.
	She was openly encouraging political violence and then bailing out the violent rioters and sending them back to commit more violence on the streets.
	And there's no constitutional question as to whether or not she can be impeached.
	She's not a former official.
	I thought that the Republican-held Senate, if they had any spine whatsoever, ought to have censured her and even removed her from office when she was still a senator before she assumed the role of vice president.
	Mitch McConnell wasn't going to do that.
	Actually, he's disappointed a lot of Republicans in the past few days, which we'll get to in a second.
	But now Kamala Harris is the sitting vice president.
	No question you can impeach her.
	And you should, by the standards that the Democrats have imposed.
	Do I think that harsh political rhetoric?
	Ought to be sufficient for an impeachment?
	No, I wish that were not the case, but I'm also unwilling to unilaterally disarm if the left is going to voice this kind of politics on all of us.
	That question is not in dispute, whether or not we can impeach Kamala.
	Now, Joe Biden, licking his wounds here because they lost, the Democrats just completely lost again, he's saying that, okay, yeah, we lost the impeachment trial, but the substance of the issue is not in dispute.
	I guess that's true in the sense that he was acquitted by the Senate.
	So it's not in dispute.
	Yeah, you're right.
	He isn't guilty of the thing that the House Democrats accused him of.
	If it is in dispute in any way, you know, it might be because Democrats are still trying to make some farcical argument.
	But surely it's not the case that the charge is not in dispute in the favor of Joe Biden and the Democrats.
	It's done.
	The Trump part of it is over.
	But now the question is, where do we go from here?
	Because the Democrats are going to keep licking their wounds here.
	I mean, they were already setting this up.
	Earlier they said, look, there's no way we're going to get a fair trial here.
	This is all going to be run horribly.
	Eric Swalwell, former future president Eric Swalwell, who is me and you and everybody else, according to his campaign, he said that God could have been called as a witness.
	Republicans still wouldn't have listened.
	The choice was, well, do we chase those people, not knowing what they're going to say, to the courts for years, or do we go forward with a powerful, thundering case that we have?
	And also knowing that Mitch McConnell was already telling us that he believed the challenge was a jurisdictional one.
	So we could have called God herself, and the Republicans weren't going to be willing to convict.
	So we're proud of the case we put forward.
	God herself!
	Did you hear that?
	Wow!
	Zing!
	Oh, Eric!
	So edgy!
	By the way, whatever happened to respecting people's preferred pronouns?
	God has been very clear about his preferred pronouns.
	He goes by Father.
	He is incarnate in Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity.
	The third person of the Trinity is the bond of love between the Father and the Son goes by he and him throughout the entire Bible.
	Now Eric Swalwell, oh, he's going to be very insistent that we call Caitlyn Jenner she, but God goes by herself.
	Now this is not just a glib comment.
	I mean, I suppose for Eric Swalwell it is a glib comment.
	But you can read something a little bit deeper here.
	Which is that what the left is seeking to do, ultimately, is to upend the whole society.
	This is a simple point.
	It almost doesn't even need to be said.
	But I want to highlight it now because we're being told Republicans are upending the constitutional order.
	They have no respect for democracy and our political traditions.
	Give me a break.
	The only people in this country who are trying in any way or desire in any way to uphold our political traditions are the Republicans, are the conservatives.
	The left hates this stuff.
	They're trying to upend our entire language.
	They're trying to upend our social institutions.
	They're trying to upend the way the government is run.
	They're trying to upend even the family, the bedrock political institution.
	And they're trying to upend our religious principle too.
	Not just the politics, not just the culture, but even the religion.
	to invert the character and identity of God.
	Eric Swalwell could not tell you that's what he's doing.
	He can't tell you a whole lot, but that is what he's doing.
	And that is the implication of so much of what these Democrats and the left broadly are up to.
	So you've got this party line vote, basically.
	You've got, in the House, you've got a few squishes, notably Liz Cheney, who vote with the Democrats to impeach.
	But overwhelmingly, the Republicans vote against impeachment.
	And then you get to the Senate for the trial, and the Republicans overwhelmingly vote not to convict because Donald Trump did not do...
	Just the simple crime that they're accusing him of, incitement of an insurrection, he doesn't even come close to meeting the legal standard for that.
	So even if you're not talking about the jurisdictional question, is it a real trial?
	Does the Senate have the right to do this?
	Blah, blah, blah.
	He just didn't commit the crime.
	He doesn't meet the legal standard.
	But...
	There were a handful of Republicans who voted to convict him.
	And these guys are Losers.
	They are total losers.
	I mentioned this on Friday, and I try not to be Trumpian in my rhetoric and too blunt and insulting all the time, but sometimes you just got to call a spade a spade.
	And these guys, Romney, Collins, Sasse, Toomey, Burr, Murkowski, Cassidy, they're just losers who might talk a good game when they're in the room with Republican donors and maybe even when they're at the VFW hall or somewhere else on the campaign trail. they're just losers who might talk a good game when They'll talk a good game.
	They'll talk about how they want to preserve the country.
	And, you know, they're going to uphold conservative principles.
	And then the moment comes where it really matters.
	There's the heat of the fight.
	Things are really on the line.
	And what do they do?
	They cave.
	Because they might have a lot of political virtues.
	I think they do.
	Sass is obviously a very intelligent guy.
	You've got a PhD, right?
	Romney's pretty intelligent.
	Founded Bain Capital.
	But they lack one virtue that's really, really important, and that's courage.
	They're cowards.
	Now you might say, no, they're not cowards.
	They're courageous.
	They're standing up to their party.
	No.
	They're sucking up, they're licking the boots of the liberal establishment.
	Because that's their real party.
	And their job is to exist as court jester conservatives, to do a little soft shoe and justify the ruling regime.
	But they're not really fighting for conservative principles.
	It's cowardly and it's deceitful.
	And it goes all the way up to leadership.
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	The question of this impeachment trial is not whether Donald Trump incited an insurrection and does he meet the legal standard and does the Senate have jurisdiction and what is the Constitution?
	That's not the question of the trial.
	The question of the trial is what's the future of the GOP? What's the question of the conservative movement?
	What is the conservative movement?
	Traditionally, you know, in recent history, we trace the kind of modern conservative movement to the end of World War II, to people like William F. Buckley Jr., to people like Russell Kirk, to the founding of National Review, to the publication of God and Man at Yale, to the Goldwater movement to a degree, to the Reagan movement, to some of the questions that come up after the Reagan movement.
	You know, do we go with Bush?
	Do we go with Buchanan?
	What does the future look like?
	Then you get another Bush.
	We never really resolved.
	The conservative movement made sense when we had a common enemy in the Soviet Union, because you were able to bring together the libertarians and the traditionalists and the foreign policy hawks, because they all hated the evil Soviet Union for different reasons, but they all hated them.
	Then the Soviet Union goes away.
	You say, well, okay, what are these three groups?
	They don't really have that much in common.
	So what holds them together?
	And then we're kind of fighting over what is the future of the conservative movement.
	And so you've got, generally speaking, the more right-wing people, the more traditional conservative people, Generally speaking, they liked Trump.
	Trump was speaking closer to their language.
	He was giving them more of their priorities.
	He was taking their concerns seriously.
	And the more liberal wing of the Republican Party, the more liberal wing of the conservative movement, you saw kind of hate Trump.
	And they were, you know, the dogged never-Trumpers.
	You know, you think guys like Mitt Romney would be a good example of this.
	And the most insufferable among them were people like the Lincoln Project.
	They said they're the principled conservatives.
	We'll get to just how principled they are in a moment.
	But this goes up even to GOP leadership, guys like Mitch McConnell.
	What do we think about Mitch McConnell?
	Do we think Mitch McConnell is some conviction conservative?
	You know, he's a rock-ribbed right-winger.
	No, I never thought that.
	During the Tea Party, conservatives hated Mitch McConnell.
	They felt he was weak.
	They didn't have a spine.
	He was a squish.
	Then, during the 2016 campaign, when he held up the filling of Antonin Scalia's vacated Supreme Court seat, all of a sudden, he seemed to grow his spine.
	He was pretty good, especially in the judges.
	He was really good under Trump.
	Say, oh, wow, cocaine Mitch, man.
	That guy, he's doing it.
	Now, why was he doing it?
	I think he cared about the judges, and I think he's a great wielder of the levers of power.
	He's a great institutional kind of man.
	And he cares about certain priorities, but not all of them.
	So McConnell votes not to convict Trump in the trial.
	But he savaged Trump in a speech that he gave on the effect of the president.
	The House accused the former president of, quote, incitement.
	That is a specific term from the criminal law.
	Let me just put that aside for a moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago.
	There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.
	No question about it.
	The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.
	And having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole.
	Now, as always, Mitch McConnell is having it both ways, right?
	Because he votes not to convict.
	He votes to acquit.
	So that's why I don't want to go too hard after McConnell here, because he, you know, Bush comes to shove.
	He voted the right way.
	But then at the same time, he starts talking out of the other side of his mouth, and he says, Trump is awful.
	He's terrible.
	He's practically and morally responsible for what happened.
	I'm not going to hold him accountable, but he is responsible, but...
	He goes on to say, you know, it doesn't meet this legal definition, and so he gets off the hook.
	McConnell, he's this great weather vane.
	I'm not saying he's some kind of liberal, like a Lincoln Project Republican.
	He's not.
	He's also not a Trumpy Republican.
	He's sticking his finger in the air and he's saying, which way is the wind blowing?
	How can I maintain my power?
	How can I exercise power today?
	Well, that's the question we're all wondering.
	Which way is it going?
	Some good news.
	Obviously, Trump gets acquitted.
	That's good.
	He'll still exert quite an influence in the party.
	I think that's a good thing.
	His enemies, as always seems to happen, are destroying themselves.
	I think Drew Klavan made this point about Trump.
	Trump drives his enemies insane and then causes them to destroy themselves.
	And this is what's happened with the Lincoln Project.
	The Lincoln Project was always a degenerate con from the beginning.
	I don't use con or grift or those kind of words lightly, but that's just what it is.
	is.
	It was these out-of-work, indebted, dirtbag political consultants who couldn't get a job in Trump's America working for Republicans.
	So they switched teams.
	They betrayed their old co-partisans.
	They joined with the Democrats.
	They milked these Democrat donors for all they were worth.
	Frankly, I thought it was great.
	I'm glad the Lincoln Project was squandering their money on private expenses so that that money wasn't going toward actual good use during the campaign.
	But that's what they did.
	They were running ads on liberal TV shows in liberal markets.
	No, it wouldn't do anything to stop Trump.
	But these guys, and I actually know some of these guys personally, so I'm speaking with a little bit of authority here.
	They wanted to make a quick buck, and they did that.
	Now, though, there's a big scandal because John Weaver, who's a sort of legendarily disliked political operative, a legendarily dirty political operative, he was hitting on teenage boys.
	And it's very sad for his family.
	He's married and his kids.
	And secretly, he was hitting on these teenage boys and offering to give them political jobs and help them in their careers.
	And the Lincoln Project did know about this, and they're now pretending that they didn't know about this, but a lot of evidence suggests they knew about it.
	Steve Schmidt, who's another one of these degenerates, he also resigned from the Lincoln Project.
	He said, Oh no, I never knew about Weaver.
	No, I only learned about John Weaver in January.
	And as the journalist, I think he's sort of a left-wing journalist, Yashar Ali pointed out, Steve Schmidt doesn't clarify which January he learned about it.
	Was it January of 2021?
	Was it January of 2010?
	January of 2005?
	I don't think he's referring to this January because these rumors about Weaver have been going on for a long time.
	Time.
	But now, like rats, you know, fleeing the ship as it goes down, all these dirtbags are just completely jumping off of the project.
	Meghan McCain just really went after the Lincoln Project.
	It was hilarious.
	Because, you know, John Weaver and some of these other guys worked for her dad, worked for John McCain.
	And John McCain was always a little bit more of a liberal Republican, so he's kind of being looped in with these guys.
	And Meghan comes out and says, don't you dare loop me in with guys like John Weaver and the rest of them.
	She says, quote, I've been very hesitant to comment, but since my deceased father keeps getting invoked, I will say this.
	John Weaver and Steve Schmidt were so despised by my dad, he made it a point to ban them from his funeral.
	Since 2008, no McCain would have spit on them if they were on fire.
	But Megan, what do you really feel?
	What do you really think?
	So I was glad to see that she made that point because when people attack guys like Weaver or Steve Schmidt or the Lincoln Project, if I were to attack them, Then you might say, well, it's because you have this ideological disagreement.
	You're vying for, you know, different sections of the conservative movement of the party.
	But Meghan, you know, is certainly a little more to the center, definitely to the left of me.
	I mean, Genghis Khan is slightly to the left of me, but Meghan certainly would be.
	And John McCain would have been to the left of me.
	And even she's saying, hey, don't...
	These guys are unprincipled.
	And so it's really rich when you hear from all of these sort of persistent never-Trumpers like the Lincoln Project or Egg McMuffin, whatever, you know, that spook who tried to beat Donald Trump as running third party in 2016.
	Didn't go very far.
	All these guys pretend that they're very, very principled.
	I don't find that to be the case.
	They say Trump is vulgar and we need to restore dignity.
	All these guys are way more vulgar than Donald Trump.
	And on top of that, they're deceitful.
	At least with Trump, what you see is what you get.
	With these guys, they're holier than thou.
	They're so sanctimonious.
	But point by point, they're much worse than Trump.
	So what does this mean in terms of the way the left is going to view us?
	How can we move forward?
	There is no good reason To follow the Lincoln Project strategy of sucking up to the left.
	Because it doesn't matter.
	I don't think it's all cynical.
	I don't think it's all just guys like Schmidt and Weaver getting rich by convincing liberal donors to give them money.
	I think some of them really believe it.
	I think there are people out there who are...
	Maybe some of the people who just voted to convict Donald Trump in the Republican Party who think, you know, look, I'm a conservative, but I'm not that kind of conservative.
	If I just, if I talk in a really mellow but sort of condescending way, and if I say nice things about the libs, and if I say orange man bad, then the left will respect me.
	I'll win the center, you know, and we'll all get together in kumbaya.
	And it's just so...
	Stupid.
	It's so wrong.
	The left makes no distinction.
	Once their useful idiots in the Lincoln Project have done all they can do, what happens?
	They fall apart.
	They're cast aside.
	They make no distinction between the Trump-supporting conservatives and the more liberal conservatives.
	You may have heard recently that Disney Plus has fired Gina Carano.
	You probably heard it in this show today because I already mentioned it.
	You might have thought that the left would succeed here.
	Why did they fire her?
	Because she was even vaguely conservative.
	Then they made up some nonsense about how she said something offensive.
	She didn't say anything, even remotely offensive.
	So Disney thought they could kill her career.
	We had another thing in store for them.
	The minute Disney tried to cancel Gina, we called up Gina.
	We said, hey, you want to work on something together?
	And we're going to fight back against this cancel culture.
	Gina will be developing, producing, and starring in an upcoming film that will be released exclusively to Daily Wire members.
	We ain't going to take it anymore.
	We're not just going to criticize what we call cancel culture.
	We are actually going to do something about it.
	Now, Disney Plus has an $8 or $9 billion annual budget planned.
	We have you.
	I'm pleased with our position in that split here, okay?
	I'd rather have you that, well, eight or nine billion is a lot of money.
	But I really would.
	I'd rather have you.
	You can really help us, though.
	If you join today in the fight to take back our culture, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code GINA. G-I-N-A. You'll get 25% off your membership today.
	Dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	code GINA.
	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	Joy Reid, who is some left-wing commentator on MSNBC, is in the process not who is some left-wing commentator on MSNBC, is in the process not just of trying to excise the Trump faction is in the process not just of trying to excise the Trump faction from the Republican Thank you.
	Joy Reid is delegitimizing the entire GOP. Congressman Schiff, do we need to start having a serious conversation, not just about Donald Trump being a bad guy, but about the Republican Party becoming a radicalized, anti-democratic institution?
	Because you can't have a regular party like the Democrats who have their flaws and we can have issue with them, and a party that is willing to seize power by force, because that's what that sounded like to me.
	Yeah, you can't have a regular party which totally respects democracy and whose leading members explicitly encourage political violence and who actually provide material support to violent radical left insurrectionists for months and months from coast to coast.
	You know, a normal, good political party can't coexist with the party where the guy with the horns jumps on the Capitol desk for a few hours.
	You can't.
	The latter is completely illegitimate.
	The former, they're the great defenders of democracy.
	They're such defenders of democracy that if you don't support democracy, they're going to burn down your business.
	They're going to set that government building on fire through mostly peaceful democratic protests.
	You notice the left doesn't use the term alt-right anymore.
	They used to use the term alt-right.
	It actually sort of had a meeting.
	It was kind of interesting to debate what all these things meant.
	They don't use that anymore.
	It's not about the alt-right.
	There's the alt-right, and that's bad.
	But then there's the good conservatives, and we, like them, know it's just all the same.
	And now increasingly, because Donald Trump supported the nation-state over liberal imperialism, globalism, globalization, call it what you will, Now they go after nationalism and they try to say that all nationalism is neo-Nazism or white supremacism.
	So you'll hear, they'll say, this is white nationalism.
	This is Christian nationalism.
	I'm not a Christian nationalist.
	I'm a Christian imperialist.
	That's a topic for another time.
	They think it's all the same.
	We're all Nazis.
	75 million people are Nazis in this country.
	And Adam Schiff, who Joy Reid is interviewing, backs her up.
	I think that's absolutely right.
	And I think the managers, they're talking about Donald Trump's role because he's the one on trial, and that makes perfect sense.
	But there are broader, serious problems with the GOP right now as a party.
	It has really become a cult of personality around the president.
	It doesn't have an ideology anymore.
	It doesn't have...
	Principles anymore.
	And it's willing to welcome in white nationalists, QAnon conspiracy theorists, people that will use violence if they don't get their way.
	And that party needs to come to grips with what it's become.
	It needs to be a party, once again, that stands for something and not just the cult around Donald Trump.
	So the Republican Party now welcomes in racial identity politics, conspiracy theories, and political violence.
	So what Schiff is objecting to is that it's become the Democratic Party.
	He said, oh man, you know, I preferred it when those Republicans did not really resemble the Democrats quite so much.
	This is really bad.
	You know what they need to do?
	They need to get back to having principles.
	Now, what is Schiff's actual argument?
	He's just kind of spouting platitudes.
	But if he is making anything even resembling an argument, it's this.
	Because, so the Republican Party now supports identity politics, conspiracy theories, and political violence.
	And therefore, it's unprincipled.
	Now, you know, I don't like racial identity politics.
	I don't like conspiracy theories.
	I don't like political violence.
	But surely we have to admit those are principles.
	The reason that I don't like them is because I have different principles.
	But those are principles that I disagree with.
	Now, the charges he's making against the GOP are ridiculous.
	He's just projecting as the left often does.
	What does the GOP support?
	The GOP supports...
	National sovereignty, love of country, strong social institutions, the family, keeping your own property, recognizing a transcendent moral order.
	You know, you could go on and on.
	What are the conservatives really saying?
	They have principles.
	What Schiff is upset about is they have principles that the left disagrees with.
	And this broader left-wing project, it's sort of the topic of my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, now available for pre-order.
	It's got many more words than my first magnum opus, so it's a little trickier to write, but it's coming out soon.
	The left, through political correctness, woke-ism, whatever you want to call it, They are seeking this purely negative campaign to upend and destroy the old moral order.
	And practically what this does is it replaces the old moral codes with speech codes.
	And then what Schiff is saying is GOP has no ideology.
	Even though he's previously said they do have this ideology that I don't like.
	Then he says they have no ideology.
	It's become a cult of personality.
	It hasn't become a cult of personality.
	There is just a person who offered a different vision for the GOP. I felt Ann Coulter got this so right about Trump in 2016.
	The kind of common consensus view among all the typical establishment people is that the reason that Republicans voted for Trump is despite his policies because they loved his personality.
	And I think it's the opposite.
	I agree with Ann Coulter in her wonderfully titled book, E Pluribus Awesome in Trump We Trust.
	You can always count on Ann for a really, you know, grab you kind of title.
	Donald Trump, I think many people voted for him in spite of his personality.
	I get a kick out of a lot of aspects of his personality, but there are things he's said and done where I think, I don't really like that.
	I wish he wouldn't do that.
	That seems like he's shooting himself in the foot.
	I think a lot of people felt that way, but they thought, you know, when I would go out and I'd talk to a lot of people all around the country, I'd say, how do you think things are going?
	This was before COVID when you were still allowed to travel.
	And very often people would say, you know, he's the greatest president.
	He doesn't know how to shut up, and he can't take yes for an answer, and he says things that drive me crazy, but you know, the guy is a really good president.
	Before Trump, you had a GOP that occasionally might pay lip service to certain ideas, but basically they were for open borders.
	They were basically for amnesty.
	All they really cared about were sort of corporate tax cuts.
	They were for total unfettered free trade, meaning prioritizing freedom.
	GDP as one sort of arbitrary economic measure over workers.
	When you ask them about outsourcing jobs, they'd say, well, it's inevitable.
	I wish we could do something, but it would be wrong.
	It would somehow offend the free market.
	Peace be upon her if we ever suggested that we keep manufacturing jobs in this country.
	Then we couldn't get cheap Chinese goods.
	And then Jeff Bezos would be mad.
	And so we can't do that at all.
	Trump offered a different vision.
	He offered a vision that questioned the inevitability of globalism, that fought strongly against globalism.
	He reoriented the Republican Party away from this kind of Thurston Howell III, you know, or the party of billionaires, which we had been perceived as for a long time, toward a working class party.
	And it was actually that shift toward the working class that got Trump in trouble.
	When he said, look, I love the educated and I love the uneducated.
	What did the liberals do?
	They made fun of him.
	Oh, you're...
	Donald Trump loves the uneducated.
	Oh my gosh, those idiots, those rubes, they didn't even go to Harvard.
	They don't even know that men can become women.
	Those idiots don't even know that babies aren't people.
	Can you believe those stupid rubes?
	And as a result, we got more working class people.
	And what did they call?
	They called them deplorable, irredeemable, bitter clingers.
	So in a way, Trump is sort of embodying this shift.
	He's a reference point for this shift.
	What's the future, though?
	Are we going back to the Bush days?
	Are we going back to the Romney days?
	Or are we going in another direction?
	A direction that has great roots in the American conservative tradition, but that had been lost for a number of decades, particularly after the Cold War.
	Now, what I would like to do, ideally, is be able to go in, just like the left went in and infiltrated and subverted our institutions, good conservative institutions, I want to be able to go in to the liberal institutions and subvert them from within.
	But my master plan to do this You know, some people have commented that no one has ever seen me and President Biden's Deputy Press Secretary, T.J. Ducklow, in the same place at the same time.
	It's an interesting observation.
	Unfortunately, though, T.J., my doppelganger, has been forced out of the White House because T.J., Sounds like a little bit of a dirtbag.
	You know, I mean, basically everybody in politics is a little suspect.
	They're not all like the Lincoln Project, but everyone's a little, you know, these are tough guys.
	And T.J. Ducklow got caught.
	He was in this relationship with a reporter and it hadn't really been disclosed.
	And they tried to spin it into this wonderful, quirky love story, but it's obviously deeply unethical.
	And then, when they were starting to write stories about this, he apparently called up a reporter and said horrifically offensive things to her.
	First he said, I'm going to destroy you, I'll bury you, you know.
	But then he was also saying sort of lurid sexual things to her.
	And anyway, this finally came out, and T.J. Ducklow said, quote, No words can express my regret, my embarrassment, and my disgust at my behavior.
	I use language that no women should ever have to hear from anyone, especially in a situation where she's just trying to do her job.
	It was language that was abhorrent, disrespectful, and unacceptable.
	Yeah, fair enough.
	I agree with that.
	And I don't even mention it to attack TJ Ducklow.
	I usually don't really go after the staffers because I don't care.
	You know, there are a lot of staffers.
	These guys are trying to, you know...
	Make a buck in politics, have a career, control the world.
	You know, honest living by D.C. standards.
	So I usually go after the principals.
	I don't go after the staffers.
	I only bring this up to remind you that when you hear in the coming days, as you've heard from the left, from the sort of liberal establishment, as well as from the liberal court jester conservatives, the fake conservatives in the Republican Party, you're going to hear that Trump is uniquely...
	Wicked, undignified, vulgar, upsetting of norms, and it's just not true.
	It's just not true.
	His opponents are at least as despicable as he is, and in many cases, much more so.
	So, Ducklow's out.
	My doppelganger's out.
	I no longer will have even a chance of affecting a policy in the Biden administration.
	And the policy is clearly shifting.
	It's funny, Joe Biden refuses to acknowledge that he's changing U.S. policy.
	What he keeps going back to is saying, no, I'm not passing new laws.
	I'm not issuing new regulations.
	I'm just going back to normal.
	I'm just undoing all the stuff Trump did.
	Now, if you have two brain cells to rub together and any sort of objectivity, you'd look at that and say, well, hold on.
	The policy was this for four years or however long, and now the policy is different, so you're making new policy.
	But the left can't acknowledge that because what they're doing is right.
	What they're doing is normal.
	What they're doing is inevitable.
	What they're doing is the arc of history, the science of history, progress.
	And there was this aberration for a little while, which was Trump, But now we're getting back on the line of progress.
	And many, many liberal Republicans believe this too.
	If you play for many liberal Republicans who pretend to love Ronald Reagan or Bill Buckley or whoever, if you play for these liberal Republicans, the actual words of Ronald Reagan or Bill Buckley or Barry Goldwater or Frank Meyer or Russell Kirk or whoever...
	If you play the things they actually believed, not what the caricature of these guys is by today's standards.
	Not, you know, oh, Ronald Reagan, he would have loved transgender bathrooms, you know, or whatever we hear from these ridiculous people.
	But if you actually hear what these guys said, the liberal Republicans would blanch.
	They would be shocked.
	They would disavow in a heartbeat.
	Because what they would actually say, I think, is...
	Yeah, sure, Bill Buckley defended McCarthyism or something, you know, whatever.
	Ronald Reagan did this or that.
	Ronald Reagan defended the Panama Canal, who knows, whatever.
	But that was just because it was a product of their time.
	They were not as advanced.
	If they were alive today, they would have moderated their views and become more liberal.
	And what becomes clear, and I'm speaking anecdotally, but I think I'm right about this.
	I think if you talk to enough of these liberal squishes, that's what they'll say.
	What becomes clear is they share the left's view of history and politics.
	That, you know, things are basically getting better and we shouldn't go back to the past.
	And, yeah, you know, some of our historical figures, they said a lot of horrible things that we hate.
	But it's just because they were in the past and the present's better and the future's going to be even better than that.
	That is just a different view of politics and history than conservatives hold.
	In a way, it's this kind of bizarro world version because I guess you could say any Christian has a progressive view of history, right?
	In the sense that at the end of time, Christ is going to come again and we're going to have a new heaven and a new earth and, you know, peace will abound and reign, right?
	But that progressive vision of history is a little different because things are going to get a lot worse before then, right?
	Things started out really well in the Garden of Eden, and then they got pretty bad, and then God had to destroy the world in a flood, and then things are getting kind of bad again.
	Even at a simpler level than that, the conservative view of history is that sometimes things get better, sometimes things get worse.
	And Right now, I think we need to obviously stop listening to these liberal Republicans, but start thinking of politics differently.
	Not just on this line of progress, but a capital P. Not just forward or backward, but just actually talking about what is good.
	What is enduring?
	What is true?
	What is good?
	What do we believe today, tomorrow, and the next day?
	What are those principles that we stand for?
	The only unprincipled people I see are these liberal, squishy, you know, guys like the Lincoln Project or them.
	They have mistaken, you know, I mean, they're deceivers.
	And then the actual true believing liberals in the Republican and Democratic Party, they've got mistaken principles.
	This faith in, you know, progress.
	We need to know what do we stand for.
	A good piece of evidence that the Biden administration is changing U.S. policy is with regard to one of our allies, Israel.
	You know that Israel had a great relationship with the United States under the Trump administration.
	It's funny because they would call Trump literally Hitler.
	You know, I'd say he was an anti-Semite.
	Worst anti-Semite in history.
	Least successful anti-Semite.
	They named a town for him in Israel.
	Can you imagine?
	Wow.
	Gosh.
	What an ineffective anti-Semite.
	I think his son-in-law is an Orthodox Jew, right?
	No, it's not very effective.
	So Israel has a great relationship under Trump.
	Now the question is, what's that relationship going to be like?
	Joe Biden has had a pretty good relationship with Israel back when Democrats were more moderate.
	But obviously, Joe Biden is not the man he once was.
	In terms of his policy views.
	I actually think he is the same man.
	I think he's not principled.
	He licks his finger, puts it in the air, figures out which way the wind is blowing, and that's what he believes.
	He's a total empty suit.
	He's just a glad-handing, typical politician.
	If he weren't a politician, he'd be selling used cars.
	And the party has moved very far to the left, so therefore, the administration would appear to be moving that way too.
	Listen to Jen Psaki explain the administration's view on Israel.
	Can you please just give us a broad sense of what the administration is trying to achieve in the Middle East?
	For example, does the administration still consider the Saudis and the Israelis important allies?
	Well, again, I think there are ongoing processes and internal interagency processes, one that we, I think, confirmed in an interagency meeting just last week to discuss a range of issues in the Middle East.
	We've only been here three and a half weeks, and I think I'm going to let those policy processes see themselves through before we give kind of a complete laydown of what our national security approaches will be to a range of issues.
	This woman is so bad at her job.
	I get that part of her job is dodging questions, so I'm not knocking her for that.
	But she's just bad at ducking questions.
	Ah, man.
	T.J. Ducklow, if he weren't such a derelict on those phone calls, he really would have had a great opportunity here.
	Question, you know, are you going to keep up these policies with Israel?
	Don't forget, we were told by John Kerry, who's in the Biden administration, by other prominent Democrats, you'll never get any peace with Israel and other Muslim nations if you don't first deal with the Palestinian question.
	It can't happen, you know.
	John Kerry, Thurston Howell III, said this verbatim.
	And then what does Trump do?
	He ignores the Palestinian question.
	He just starts dealing with these individual nations.
	He signs record peace deals with Israel and a lot of Muslim nations.
	So, you know...
	Is Biden going to keep this up?
	Obviously, Biden's not going to keep this up because the way that the Trump administration secured these kind of deals was in large part leaning on Saudi Arabia against Iran, ripping up the Iran nuclear deal and that sort of thing.
	And by working with Saudi Arabia, they were able to secure a lot of these deals.
	But the Biden administration and the Democrats don't like Saudi Arabia.
	They like Iran.
	You kind of got to pick a side when you're talking about Saudi and Iran.
	The Democrats think that their path to success is to suck up to Iran, so obviously they're not going to pursue the same policy with regard to Israel or the Middle East.
	And Jen Psaki can't say that yet.
	But that's going to be a fundamental reordering of American policy to the Middle East.
	This is going to be true in China.
	This is going to be true all over.
	This is going to be true with road war policies in Europe, even.
	And with Russia, you're going to have an upending of this foreign policy.
	It's too bad because Trump, especially as a foreign policy president, is far and away the best of my lifetime.
	Certainly the best since Reagan.
	Maybe he rivals Reagan, too.
	Maybe he goes back even further.
	But on the domestic front, Joe Biden just announced he's going to end the border wall construction.
	This was the central Trump campaign promise, basically.
	We're going to build a big, beautiful wall and Mexico's going to pay for it.
	And he was held up a lot of steps of the way.
	I think he was trying.
	They did build some wall.
	They didn't build a ton of wall, but they did build some.
	They fixed old wall.
	And Biden has come in and said, nope, that's over now.
	That's completely over.
	And What we're being told from the liberals is that this is in defense of the open society.
	We're at the open society that conservatives once used to openly deplore, but now they sort of pretend to like because we've been duped by the left and we use all their own language.
	We say, well, we're free speech purists.
	We want total open marketplace of ideas, no boundaries whatsoever.
	I know a lot of conservatives say this today, but we've taken the bait from the left in the last 20 years.
	Guys like Bill Buckley, Ronald Reagan, they would not have said this.
	They explicitly argued against it, actually.
	Because this isn't an open society.
	This is not an open society.
	Joe Biden is not pushing an open society.
	It's an open society to illegal aliens.
	The society they're pushing is open to hostile foreign nations, like China and other places.
	To places where travel was banned because they could not secure it.
	Now travel is going to be open to them.
	That's open to them.
	But it isn't open to us.
	Because while Joe Biden is effectively opening our southern border, he is threatening to close the border with Florida.
	Mexico, totally fine.
	No wall, no border.
	Florida, they're probably going to build a big beautiful wall around Florida by the time Joe Biden is done.
	Jen Psaki was asked about this because it is being seriously floated now that the United States at the federal level could halt travel to and from Florida.
	The Miami Herald reported yesterday that the Biden administration is considering travel restrictions on states like Florida to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.
	Can you rule that out or is that, as they say, on the table?
	Well, I've seen those reports.
	We are always considering what steps are necessary to keep the American people safe.
	But we are not currently in the process of no decisions have been made around additional public health measures that would delay or would change, I should say, domestic travel considerations.
	Joe Biden should have used ZipRecruiter.
	Unfortunately for him, he did not.
	And this woman was not very persuasive.
	She doesn't want to come out right in front and say, yeah, we're going to cut off travel from Florida.
	We're going to prevent federal employees from however they're going to do it.
	But she doesn't say no.
	It's a ridiculous, it's an absolutely preposterous idea.
	Florida has done so much better on coronavirus than New York, than California, than Chicago, many other places in the country.
	But all those cities and states are run by liberals.
	So that's totally fine, totally open.
	Ron DeSantis, the Republican, is running Florida.
	Florida's done a great job, so now we've got to talk about the cases skyrocketing and whatever.
	We've got to cut it off.
	DeSantis came out, obviously, and pushed back against this pretty hard.
	It's a reordering of the country.
	Which way are we going to go?
	Are we going to knock down our national borders and build up borders within ourselves?
	Are we going to try to win the applause of the left and, you know, vote against Trump or sort of principled conservatives?
	No.
	So much of the way that the left has advanced over the last 40, 60, even 100 years is by manipulating language.
	All of these sorts of things we hear.
	Principles.
	The people who invoke principles all the time, they're the least principled people I know.
	Trump, he's impeached.
	Donald Trump is the most innocent president we've ever had, just by the number of acquittals.
	Two acquittals.
	No one's ever beaten that.
	Another record.
	Chalk it up for Trump.
	It's a question of open society, borders, locking down unity and healing.
	If it wasn't clear before, I hope it's clear now that the Democratic Party, that the White House is actually entertaining the idea of cutting off a U.S. state.
	The unity and healing is not going to happen.
	And these rats who, like the Lincoln Project, want to run away from the people who are actually on their side, defending principles that they at least once had or ought to have, If these rats think that they're going to be welcomed by the Democrats or by the liberal establishment, they've got another thing coming.
	It's just not going to work for them.
	The trial is not over.
	The impeachment farce is over.
	The real trial is about to begin.
	Where do you stand?
	That's our show.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is the Michael Knowles Show.
	show.
	See you tomorrow.
	The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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