The Daily Signal - 'They Want to Go Deeper and Hear Something Beyond These Hack Talking Points,' Michael Knowles Says of Americans About New Podcast with Ted Cruz

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

 Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently launched a wildly popular podcast called the Verdict with Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show on The Daily Wire. Michael joins me on today’s podcast to give some behind-the-scenes perspective on the podcast, which originally started as a conversation about President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial. We also discusses why socialism is antithetical to the American dream. Plus, we share a conversation our colleague Virginia Allen had with James O'Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, on ABC News and media bias. We also cover these stories: A federal judge has ruled that Ken Cuccinelli, the acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director appointed by President Trump who was the former Attorney General of Virginia, was not legally appointed to his position.  The United States and the Taliban signed a deal on Saturday that would initiate a reduction in U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Coronavirus has killed 6 people in the United States and over 3,000 people have died from the disease worldwide.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, March 3rd. I'm Jared Stetman. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently launched a wildly popular podcast called The Verdict with Michael Nulls, host of the Michael Nulls show on The Daily Wire. The podcast originally started as a conversation about President Donald Trump's Senate impeachment trial. Michael joins me on today's podcast to give some behind-the-scenes perspective on the show and also discusses why socialism is antithetical to the American dream. Plus, we share a conversation our colleague Virginia Allen had with James O'Keefe,

founder of Project Veritas on ABC News and Media Bias. If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. A federal judge has ruled that Ken Cucinelli, the acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director, appointed by President Trump, who his former Attorney General of Virginia, was not legally appointed to his position. On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled that Cunchinelli was never qualified to become the acting USCIS chief.

Moss's decision affects some calls made by Cuccinelli, including directives from Cuccinelli that sped up asylum seekers' initial screenings, limited extensions of those hearings on the grounds that Cuchinelli lacked authority to. issue them, Politico reported. Moss wrote that Kuncinelli's appointment did not comply with part of the 1998 Federal Vacancies Reform Act, as previously thought by the Trump administration, because Kuncienelli never did and never will serve in a subordinate role, that is, as an assistant to any other USCIS official, and was assigned the rule of principle on day one. The United States and the Taliban signed a deal on Saturday that would initiate a reduction in U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Senator Lindsay Graham said on Fox and Friends on Monday that while he'd like

to see the war in Afghanistan end, he doesn't want to repeat of President Barack Obama's pullout of Iraq. I'd love to see the war in Afghanistan end, but the peace deal is not with al-Qaeda. It's not with ISIS. It's with the Taliban. We'll see if they honor the peace deal. But the one thing I want to stress to your viewers, let's don't do in Afghanistan what Obama did in Iraq, pull the plug on the place and allow radical Islam to come roaring back. Americans were killed as a result of the rise of ISIS. People all over the planet were killed. We got a chance to end this war in Afghanistan smartly and well, but we're going to need a residual

U.S. force, a counterterrorism presence for years to come, because I don't trust the Taliban to police al-Qaeda and ISIS. We foiled two plots last year where ISIS was trying to attack the American homeland. We're down to 8,600, Mr. President. Let's get the Taliban to the table, but let's don't trust the Taliban to defend America. We need some of our forces in place. That's what Obama failed to do in Iraq. Graham said that there will likely be a significant U.S. presence in the region for years to come to prevent terrorist activities.

The war in Afghanistan has lasted for 18 years following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. Coronavirus has killed six people in the United States, and over 3,000 people have died from the disease worldwide. After two people died in Washington State, the Washington Post reported that a genetic analysis suggested that the coronavirus, which causes a highly infectious respiratory disease called COVID-19, has been spreading undetected for about six weeks in Washington State. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Saturday took steps to sharply expand testing. A federal judge granted the request by a conservative watchdog group to get former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to sit in for a sworn deposition about the use of a private email server for official government business while she was in office. Clinton has said that she has answered enough questions about the topic and that it's unnecessary to do so again. Washington, D.C. District Court judge Roy C. Lamber said, according to Fox News, As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton's state of mind

when she decided to be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business. Clinton has responded to written requests before, but the judge said that her answers created more important questions that have not been answered. Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of the well-known company General Electric, has died at the age of 84. Welch was the son of a railroad conductor who built the value of the company, from $12 billion to $410 billion. President Trump mourn Welch's death on Twitter saying, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of GE, a business legend, has died.

There was no corporate leader like Neutron Jack. He was my friend and supporter. We made wonderful deals together. He will never be forgotten. My warmest sympathies to his wonderful wife and family. Next up, we'll have my interview with Michael Knowles about his podcast with Senator Ted Cruz. Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share?

Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at Letters atdailySignal.com. Yours could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. We are joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Michael Knowles of the Michael Noose show on the Daily Wire. Michael, thank you so much for being with us today. It's so good to be back with you. Well, we're glad to have you.

So along with the show that you already host on Daily Wire, you've recently started a podcast with Senator Ted Cruz called The Verdict, and you talk about impeachment in the whole impeachment push. Can you tell us about how this came about? Obviously it was impeachment, but how this came about with you and Senator Cruz. It was so fun because we had talked about doing a show with Senator Cruz. We had talked about in passing over dinner or things like that. Then impeachment happens, and the Senator calls us and says,

we're doing this show. Let's fly out to D.C. We're going to start this in two days. So we fly out, put a whole set together, put a whole crew together, do the show. And we think, look, it'll be cool, historic, informative. I don't know how many people are going to listen to it. But, you know, because it would be so in the weeds about this government process. No one was even watching impeachment, so much less a show about impeachment.

And then, to our great surprise, the thing takes off and it hits number one on the charts within, I think it was four days. And then it was there for two weeks or so. people were really hungry for it. And what I think the reason for that is is that people are a lot smarter than they get credit for. So, yeah, they're tuning out the impeachment. Yeah, they're tuning out cable news, five-minute sound bites about the impeachment.

That doesn't mean they don't want to know about their government. It actually means they want to go deeper and hear something beyond these kind of hack talking points. And so the senator would come straight from the Capitol every night at one or two in the morning. We would sit in this random basement studio, and I think part of it was because we were so exhausted. We would have a really kind of honest conversation. The senator would pull the curtain back a little bit on what was going on.

And so we were so pleased, I think it's at about 4.5 million downloads now on just the first 10 or 12 episodes. And we've been keeping the show going, so we've filmed three, actually, since I've been in D.C. For the last 24 hours. And it's been a blast, and we just did a live one here at CPEC. That's incredible. I didn't realize you were recording so late at night after the hearings ended. What was that like to be able to discuss all of that as it was happening right afterwards? So, I mean, I don't know, it's just a really cool environment to be able to do that.

It was one of a kind. It was an historic moment because, first of all, the senators got an engine like I've never seen. The guy does not sleep. And so he comes, he's raring to go. But we would analyze what was happening on the floor. We would analyze what it all meant for the president. You know, you see it, but you're getting a real close view. We would also then talk about what the cameras on C-SPAN didn't pick up.

So he would talk about what's happening in the cloakroom, how he's pulling this senator aside because Adam Schiff made this stupid comment, and that gives the Republicans an opening. And then he's talking to this person, and he's getting... It's all so much more relational. It's all so much more real than I think we would imagine. You know, we think that impeachment was just... It was written up. It was scripted.

It was always going to play out the way it was. But we found out, what I found out just talking to the senator is That's not really the case. The individual personalities really matter here, and the individual personalities really matter in our politics. Well, and Senator Cruz was at Heritage a couple months ago discussing this. He had mentioned how Democrats now, and you sort of alluded to this, are using impeachment now as a political weapon to now, and he said, you know, we won't be surprised if, again,

there's a Republican president and a Democrat House that doesn't appreciate what he's doing or just politically doesn't agree with it, that they're going to go this route again. Did you all talk about that? And what is your perspective on that as well? Yeah, the founding fathers were very nervous about this. They feared that impeachment could be used in this way. That's why, as part of the big debate over the impeachment provision of the Constitution, there was an open question.

Should presidents be able to be impeached for maladministration, for just not doing a good job because the Congress doesn't like the cut of their jib? And this was shot down. It was not, in fact, the case. Actually, to be impeached, you had to commit treason or bribery or other, high crimes and misdemeanors. And the Democratic House completely throughout the window, it was not only historic because it was the third impeachment in American history, it was the first totally partisan impeachment.

There was no Republican who voted to impeach. Later on, Mitt Romney got a little angry at the president, so he voted to convict. He was the only Republican to do that. But on the vote to impeach, it was purely partisan. And the trouble is, if you just have partisan impeachments in the future, then the exact becomes subservient to the House. The president more or less will just serve at the pleasure of the Congress, and then you get a Congress from the other party, and they automatically impeach him.

I mean, that is a recipe for chaos. The founders were deeply terrified of that, and the left seems to be pushing us ever closer to that very awful outcome. So the verdict, you all take mailbag questions from your audience. What kinds of things were you hearing and what kinds of questions were you getting during this process? The questions were so sophisticated. This is my main takeaway.

I mean, when I say a big takeaway from the success is the people are smarter than they get credit for, you see it in the mailbag, too. Very often when you hear kind of sound-bitey interviews about impeachment, it's all just top of the line, juicy, political, who doesn't like whom, and that kind of thing. What we were finding out is the audience wanted to know about the corruption that Hunter Biden committed in Ukraine. We want to know, they wanted to know about the different provisions of the Constitution that would relate to impeachment. They wanted to know about how the law could be applied to prevent this kind of abuse in the future. I mean, these were very technical questions by people who are really, really tuned in, and all too often don't get their voices heard.

So we love looking at the podcast as a conversation. Obviously, it's an intimate, close, late-night conversation between me and the senator, but it's also a conversation with the audience. And hearing from them is my favorite part of the show. That's pretty incredible, and it's great that they have a voice there. So you're here at CPAC, you're speaking, and the theme this year is socialism versus the American. can dream. Why are you so passionate about this? Socialism is a wicked evil ideology, and unfortunately conservatives don't use that kind of clear language too much. The argument against socialism all too often is, oh, you know, it just doesn't work that well. Oh, you know, it's not the most efficient

way to allocate resources. Oh, it's going to reduce the size of the economy. Who cares? Nobody is motivated to go vote because of arguments from efficiency. The problem with socialism is that it is evil. It is utterly antithetical to the American project. It is antithetical to morality. I mean, I speak as a Catholic. The Catholic Church condemned socialism. It said you cannot be a socialist and a Christian.

They called it a wicked confederacy. Pests a plague that steals the gospel itself, right? That was popes who talked about this. And I think American conservatives, of all religious backgrounds, need to take on that kind of language. Because, look, if we have a Democratic president

and my net worth decreasing, by 5% and I got to pay more taxes. Yeah, that's awful. I don't want to do that, but who cares? The real trouble is they are robbing us of human dignity. That system is so inhuman that it has to be opposed. And if there's anything we can all agree on in America, it ought to be to reject that vile ideology.

That is an incredibly strong answer. I appreciate it, Michael. Thank you so much for being with us on the Daily Signal podcast. Always great to talk to you. Thank you. It's because of support from listeners like you that we can continue to produce podcasts like Heritage Explains and SCOTUS 101. And you can help us keep it up by going to www.org.org slash podcast today to make your tax deductible gift. I am joined by James O'Keefe, the founder and president of Project Veritas, a nonprofit dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste, and fraud in both public and,

private institutions. James, thank you so much for being here. Great to be here. Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of work that Project Veritas does and how you go about investigating corruption? We expose things with tape. We show people in their own words like the tape we released this week on ABC News featuring David Wright, the veteran correspondent, revealing confirming suspicions that we have, but we've never been able to prove it. So we have audio to back up our quotes, and I believe the type of journalism we do is the

purest form of investigative reporting. Just let people talk and exposing the sacred cows, the fourth estate, government institutions, the sorts of places the media does not want to talk about. That's what we do. We do it well. We're growing, and we're at CPAC here about to give a speech on Saturday on the main stage. That's very exciting. Now, tell me a little bit more about the story that you all broke at ABC and with correspondent,

David Wright. This is a story broke on Wednesday. It's a tape of Wright who's a veteran correspondent. admitting that his bosses at ABC News don't see an upside in reporting news. He also talks about how they don't care about voters. And the media is broken, he says. And he talks about Good Morning America, and he says they're more interested in selling Marvel Avengers comic book products for Disney

than they are in telling the news. Things that don't shock you and I, but to hear their own news person say it, now he did not think he was being recorded, but he did know he was talking to his colleagues. So we break this tape. The ABC suspends David Wright, says that they don't allow bias, their network, and the mainstream media, again, attacking me instead of reckoning with the truths that Wright admitted to. He also called himself a socialist, not just a democratic socialist.

David Wright says, I'm an out-and-run socialist. But he also says that the network ABC doesn't give Trump credit, enough credit for what Trump does right. No one's talking about that part of the tape. The media is obsessed with his admission that he's a socialist and is implying, that he was suspended because he's a socialist. Why do you think that the progressive media is so adamantly against President Trump? According to the people in the tape, they make the argument that they do not go out and talk to voters. They are kind of stuck together in Manhattan or Los Angeles.

They're cocooned together and maybe they need to start having conversations of people who don't see the world the way they do. And again, don't take my word for it. Just listen to what the people in this tape say. and they don't do an effort to care enough about what voters care about, and instead of practicing introspection, they're sort of doubling down. And this is what we're exposing inside these news agencies. They're just not willing to face the facts of what's going on, and it's becoming a huge problem for voters who watch Good Morning America

and think they're getting real information, but according to their own news people, they're getting a bunch of propaganda. So how widespread do you think, think this corruption is among the media. I mean, is this, you know, we have ABC and maybe a handful of other very mainstream media sites that are, you know, intentionally hiding information and really bashing Trump, or can we really trust any of them? No, you can't, you have to be skeptical of what you see and hear. The CNN tapes we did, this was Patrick Davis saying, you know, it's sad what we've become. We could be so much better than we are. They're so interested in appointment

viewership. The Washington Post is chasing digital clicks from their, they're serving their audience. They're doing the sort of things they would accuse the Heritage Foundation of doing. They're doing to a worse degree because they don't have the reputation for being partisan. Their democracy dies in darkness. All the truth is more, the most trusted name of news. And they're actually worse for democracy because they're not willing to admit on the record what their motivations are. And they've come out this week, say, I'm in bad faith. I'm operating in bad faith. What am I doing in bad faith? I'm just letting people talk.

So it seems to me they're not willing to face the brutal reality, and it's only going to get worse for them if they don't. What do you hope is the message that the mainstream media takes from this story that you all just broke at ABC? Have the moral courage to say the things you're saying privately publicly. Because if you work for a news agency, arguably you have more power than maybe a branch of government. In fact, most people in government, all they do is go on the morning shows on ABC and C and C. So you work for these programs, you have a duty to, you have responsibilities as much as you have rights.

Everyone, we have First Amendment rights. Well, I get it. But you also have a responsibility to tell the truth. And if you're not willing to say the things you're willing to say privately publicly, then that means you don't have integrity. There's a lack of integrity in the news agencies. And again, I am not alone in the sayings. I'm just, I just say it publicly. And I back up my claims with quotes from them and there's audio of it. So they got to, You've got to stop attacking me and attacking Project Veritas, and they have a reckoning with what they actually believe in and who they actually are. Because what's going to happen is more insiders are going to come public, come to us, because they don't trust the Washington Post in the New York Times, so they come to Project Veritas. Tell me about some of the other stories that you've been really proud to break and uncover at Project Veritas. You name it the topic.

I mean, education issues, teachers unions most recently. we got sued for reporting on a teacher's union cover-up of someone that was alleged to have raped an eight-year-old girl. And they sue me, and we don't settle the lawsuits. And then last year was the Amy Robach. I'm wearing the hat Epstein cover-up that was the tape involving the leaked hot mic moment of the anchor saying that they squash the Jeffrey Epstein story to protect the Clintons. Wow. Tell me about where you get your news. Are there news sites that you feel like you can trust and that they're going to report the facts?

I read everything. Okay. I read everything. I read. I watch MSNBC Morning Joe. I listen to CNN, although, you know, I feel like I have to take Tylenol after I do so. I read the New York Times. I read the Financial Times.

I browse Twitter. I do all the things. I'm skeptical. And you have to learn, you have to learn to not trust what you see. You have to know how to triangulate. the information and say, well, there's some things missing here. And as long as you do that and you practice extreme skepticism, I think you'll be okay. What we try to do is we don't report anything unless there's tape of it, right? So it's a firsthand account. And I would hope that people would do the same.

I don't think you should trust anything unless you can see and hear it. And they say, well, you don't know if it's doctored. Well, first of all, name the edit, name the specific example of what we've doctored. But moreover, why should we trust something unless there is tape of it? Because you've given no reason for us to trust you in the mainstream press. In fact, you keep relying upon anonymous sources, and then whenever we actually find out about these things, it's not exactly what we were led to believe is true. Washington Post has printed eight retractions about me.

Eight. Eight. I haven't made a retraction in nine years. Wow. So they're kind of doing the same things they accuse us of. They're going to have to practice introspection to have a reckoning. At some point, I don't know when that will happen, but I think with all these insiders coming out, it's bound to happen this year. So how do you all actually go about getting those tapes?

Are those your folks at Project Veritas going into situations and talking with people? Are people sending you those tapes? Both. Both. Both. We have two different ways. We have the insiders and we literally give them a camera. These are brave souls.

These are kind of, I call them unicorns, people wanting to lose their jobs for the public's right to know. And then we have our undercover people who sometimes go in and support, assist, investigate the claims that those people, just like any investigative person would. And on Saturday here at CPAC, we're going to have the CNN insider, the person who recorded Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN. He's going to be on the main stage. And we were able to raise him 100 grand to pay for his family's issues after he lost his job working for CNN. and he believed so strongly, he said, for me, there was no other option. I couldn't, there was no choice. It was a choiceless choice.

I had to do this because of how the network had become a nightmare for me instead of being my dream. You mentioned Twitter earlier, and now with the rise of social media, you know, really anyone can be a journalist. How have you seen social media really affect the field of journalism and honest reporting? It's become more tribal. people don't talk to each other anymore. Like the blue, I call them the blue checkmark brigade. These are the verified accounts on. I'm not verified on Twitter.

I have 720,000 followers. The only person I know who has more who is Dave Portnoy at Barstool. I don't know of many people with a million followers who are not verified. And I think that there's a lack of conversation, like the New York Times, just to answer your question about social media. Sophan Deb. I've forgotten her last name is Deb of the New York. times was saying James, you know, she wouldn't mention me my name. This people operate in bad faith.

And she wouldn't tag me. She wouldn't mention my name. And she ascribed motives to me. She said, I operate in bad faith. What does that mean? Does that mean that I'm unpeer in my heart, that I hate? I don't know what, where, how do they know I operate in bad faith? So them ascribing motives to who I am and why I do what I do when all I'm doing is

letting David Wright talk, I think they're operating in bad faith. Washington Post headline. You know, O'Keefe scam. What do you mean scam? What's scam about it? In fact, I would argue it's more pure than you with a headline ascribing what I do to be a scam. And the reason they do it is in the digital age, they have to appeal to their woke audience. They have to get more subscribers.

Jeff Bezos bought the post and has turned it into, from a venerable institution, has turned it into a woke clickbait farm, much like a blog, you know, 15 years. ago. And the digital era has done this, and no one is willing to confront that. They're not, it's not democracy dies in darkness. It's not the truth is more important. It's let's make money feeding our specific ideological audience in the District of Columbia and Manhattan. Let's confirm what they want to know. James, how can our audience follow you, find out more information about Project Veritas? Projectveritas.com slash brave, B-R-A-V-E. You can either be a journalist. You can work for us, You can be an insider.

There's an alternative way to make a difference. You can put a camera on your body and record what you see. And if what you're seeing is in your workplace in Washington, D.C. is really bad, and the public must know it, I think you kind of have a right to – people have a right to see that. And I don't think they're going to retaliate against people, as long as you make that evidence public. We do that. So the answer to the question, what can I do? Where are the answer to that question?

We're a camera. send us the footage. We'll have your back. Thank you so much for your time, Danes. We really appreciate it. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio

at the Heritage Foundation. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And please leave us a review or rating on Apple Podcasts to give us any feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow. The Daily Signal Podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by

Kate Shrinco and Rachel Del Judas. Sound design by Lauren Evans, Thalia Rampersad, Mark Geinie, and John Pop. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.