On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles discusses the Democratic Party’s pandering to voters after several candidates, including Rep. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, made a point of speaking in other languages during Wednesday’s Democrat primary debate. Video and partial transcript below:
This was a mess, this Spanish thing. I remember I was working on the Jon Huntsman campaign in 2012. I love Jon Huntsman. He’s the current ambassador to Russia. I thought he was a terrific governor of Utah. I thought he was a great ambassador and I thought he was a great presidential candidate. He made a very strategically poor decision during one debate where he started speaking in Mandarin Chinese. The idea here was the same thing that these guys were trying to do. They want to show that they can speak this language. If China is going to be a big threat, and you can speak Chinese, that gives you a lot of credibility.
If America is becoming multilingual, if America has got all these Spanish-speaking immigrants coming in, it’s very impressive if you too can speak Spanish. It doesn’t work. People don’t like it. Especially in these early primary states, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. Do you think those guys are impressed that you speak Spanish? None of them speak Spanish. Nobody in those states speak Spanish. Very bad idea and it’s very offensive.
I found this to be the most offensive part of the debate last night. They were talking about basically having a post-birth abortion. They were talking about abortion at any time during pregnancy, on demand. They were talking about socialism. They were talking about getting rid of private health care. I found the most offensive part of it to be this stupid Spanish pandering.
This is America. We speak English in America. That’s it. There is very little that unites us as a country anymore. Most of us don’t share a religion. Most of us don’t share common experiences. We don’t share a common culture. We don’t all go watch the same TV shows, read the same books, or go to the same movies. We have a very little bit uniting us. If we don’t speak the same language, then we have basically nothing that unites us anymore.
I think it’s great to speak other languages. I speak other languages. I studied Italian in school, and I studied Italian literature. When I go to Italy, I speak Italian. I get along in Italian. When you go to Rome, do what the Romans do. When I’m in America I don’t speak Italian all the time. Even if I go to an Italian restaurant, I don’t sit there and say, ok I’ll have the wine and I’ll have the appetizer and — orders in Italian. No, and I don’t do that because that’s weird. Because you’re in America. I’ll say, “I’ll have this spaghetti a la carbonara please.” We speak English in America. This is America.
Now the Democrats, they don’t like America, they don’t like American traditions. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration anymore. They say they want to fundamentally transform the country. You don’t want to fundamentally transform things that you like. You want to fundamentally transform things that you don’t like. That was one of Barack Obama’s campaign platforms and one of the pillars of his campaign. One of the reasons that everyone is anxious about illegal immigration is because they fear that they’re going to lose the country. They fear that the country is going to be totally unrecognizable afterward. I don’t think it’s going to play well in early primary states.
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