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March 28, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:48
Trans Mass Shooter Murders Children At Christian School
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Well, folks, as you know, we sometimes get into controversial content on this program, and not all platforms are okay with that.
So you gotta head on over to dailywire.com to hear everything I have to say.
Well, horrifying story out of Nashville, Tennessee.
Yesterday, a shooter who identified as a trans man, a 28-year-old woman, biological woman, shot three students and three adults at Covenant School in the Greenhills neighborhood of Nashville.
It's a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently, this person was a former student at the school.
On this show, we don't actually name shooters, because we believe that that gives glory to shooters, it gives them the attention they so desperately seek.
But the facts of the case are things that are highly relevant, so we are going to be discussing many things about the shooter that are highly relevant, especially given the politicized environment in which these shootings happen, and in which the media just decide to lie about the source of the shootings.
So, in this particular case, The Nashville Police spokesperson, Don Aaron, said police received the call of an active shooter at Covenant School, 10.13 a.m.
local time.
The suspect had entered the school on the first floor and then proceeded to the lobby area on the second floor, firing multiple shots.
Apparently, the shooter broke into the school.
The doors were not locked.
Aaron said that officers responding to the scene discovered the shooting occurred on the school's second floor and quickly engaged the shooter.
The suspect was dead by 10.27 a.m.
Unlike in other cases, officers actually did hear the gunshots and charged the shooter.
This immediately turned into a battle over narrative, which is what happens with every mass shooting in the United States.
The left immediately jumps to a series of narratives rooted in sort of left-wing storytelling.
And this happens with every single mass shooting.
You can tell before the shooting even happened.
If the victims of a shooting are X and if the shooter is Y, here's what the narrative will be.
If you have a mass shooting in the United States in which the shooter is white and the victim is black, then the narrative is going to be about both guns and racism.
If you have a mass shooting in which the shooter is black and the victim is white, it's going to be about guns and systemic racism and dispossession.
If the shooter is Muslim and the victim is gay, then it's going to be about Christian bigotry, which is exactly what happened in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.
If the shooter is Asian and the victims are white, as happened at Virginia Tech, then we're going to be talking about gun control.
If the shooter is trans and the victim is gay, as we'll discuss in a moment, we're going to be talking about guns and maybe about the virulent oppression of trans people in the United States.
If the shooter is trans and the victims are Christian, then it's going to be about guns and about Christian bigotry, which is the narrative that the media are taking away from this particular shooting, which is absolutely insane.
Because again, the details that have emerged suggest that the shooter, a former student, identified as a trans man.
Apparently, this person also left a manifesto.
Here's the national police chief confirming that the shooter was in fact a trans man, meaning a biological woman, and saying that there is a manifesto that sort of speaks to the politics of the shooting.
Does she identify as transgender?
She does identify as transgender, yes.
No motive at this point?
Anything discovered in the apartment or house?
No, we have a manifesto.
We have some writings that we're going over that pertain to this day, the actual incident.
We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.
There's right now a theory that we may be able to talk about later, but it's not confirmed.
And so we'll put that out as soon as we can.
Is there any reason to believe that how she identifies has any motive for targeting the school?
We can give you that at a later time.
There is some theory to that.
We're investigating all the leads and once we know exactly, we'll let you know.
So was this a targeted attack?
It was.
It was a targeted attack, which means that by any sort of stretch of the imagination, what we're talking about here is a trans-identified person shooting up a Christian school.
That would be, in any normal context, a hate crime.
If a Christian went to a very left-wing school and shot up the school on the basis of trans students being there, That would be a hate crime.
In the national news story, we've got the evils of the right wing and the quote-unquote anti-trans ideology that they push.
As we'll see, the media are going to try and push that narrative anyway, even though the story is actually the reverse.
This time, a trans-identified person shooting up a Christian school and murdering a bunch of very small school children.
One of the fascinating elements that emerged right after the shooting is the amount of quote-unquote misgendering that happened in the media.
So one of the things that we have been told by our mainstream media, our legacy media, is that you must never misgender ever under any circumstances.
Misgendering is super bad.
Misgendering is a practice whereby you speak the biological sex of a person as opposed to the sex to which they claim membership.
So a trans man, if I say that a woman just shot up the school, which is exactly what happened, then you're not allowed to say that.
This is apparently misgendering.
You're not.
It's discriminatory in some way.
And fascinatingly, the media engaged almost immediately in a bunch of quote unquote misgendering in this particular arena.
So you saw, for example, the Daily Beast put out a headline specifically misgendering the the shooter, saying that it was a woman.
You saw the Rolling Stones, a bunch of other publications.
CNN suggested that a woman had done it.
Daily Beast headline suggested that.
CNN said the shooter, a 28-year-old woman, who was once a student at the school, also killed three adults before responding officers killed her.
Now, again, in any other context, we're supposed to pretend that men who say they are women are actually women, but the media were having a real tough time with this one.
And the reason they were having a tough time with this one is because they don't want to acknowledge the narrative.
they actually go, they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they properly, biologically gender the person, the story is more accurate, but they have transgressed their own woke commandments. If, on the other hand, they do not do that, if in fact they they go with the transgender pronouns preferred by the shooter, then they are giving credence to the fact that a person who identified as trans and whose motivation likely had to do with that just shot up a bunch of And that cuts directly against the idea that victims can never be victimizers.
And again, this is part and parcel of a broader left-wing rubric, which is that if you're a member of a victim class, we can never call you a victimizer, even if you are shooting schoolchildren.
The misgendering aspect of this is fascinating.
So apparently, that strict rule of construct, in terms of the left, that goes immediately out by the wayside, so long as it does not serve the narrative.
Later, of course, the New York Times would come back and then try to correct the record.
The New York Times actually put out a tweet saying, Well, at least we cleared that up.
Later on Monday about the gender identity of the assailant in the national shooting, officials had used she and her to refer to the suspect.
Well, according to the social media post and a LinkedIn profile, appeared to identify as a man in recent months.
So, well, at least we cleared that up.
At least we made sure that the trans shooter is granted the honor of identifying as a particular type of human being.
The media have to construct some sort of narrative here.
Now, normally, one of the things that would come up, what's the actual narrative here?
Well, one thing that we certainly should discuss is the fact that when you create crisis narratives, as I said before, rhetoric, I don't tend to blame it rhetoric for actual violent activity on any side.
When Donald Trump says stuff that's really heated up and then a deranged fan of Donald Trump goes and does something, I don't blame Donald Trump for that.
When Barack Obama says something that really heats up the temperature and then a Barack Obama follower goes and does something, I don't say Barack Obama's responsible.
When a Bernie Sanders supporter shoots up a congressional baseball game, I don't say that Bernie Sanders is responsible for that.
However, what everyone is responsible for are the words that come out of their mouth, and they're also responsible for these sort of doomsday scenarioing that leads vulnerable people to go and do deranged... The deranged person is still responsible for their own activities.
However, when you keep raising the temperature dangerously, this is going to have some predictable side effects.
The pot is going to bubble over.
You've seen this almost universal attempt across the West on nearly every issue to suggest that the apocalypse is upon us.
On the issue of people who have gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder or who claim that they are a member of the opposite sex, they are told over and over and over that they are on the verge of being genocided.
This is just a thing that is said over and over and over in the transgender community and by legacy media.
That people on the right are attempting to wipe them off the face of the earth.
They're in literal genocidal danger.
And this, of course, necessitates violence.
It's sort of the same thing that Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist from NYU, said about microaggression ideas.
When you keep telling people that they are being aggressed upon, that everything that happens to them, everything they are insulted by, is a microaggression, they tend to react with macroaggression.
And so if you keep telling people, over and over and over again, That they're about to be destroyed.
They're about to be wiped off the face of the earth.
And you shouldn't be all that surprised when deranged people take that message and then go do horrific, horrific things.
And one of the things that Luke Rosiak, reporter over at Daily Wire, was pointing out is that this is from March 6, 2023.
There was a call for a Trans Day of Vengeance.
Stop transgenocide.
Trans Day of Vengeance, April 1st, 11 a.m.
in Washington, D.C.
That was a group of transgender activists.
And this sort of language is, unfortunately, not particularly rare.
The national group's website for Day of Vengeance has, like the Stonewall Riots, the gays and lesbians were experiencing what the trans community is facing now.
The cycle of hate needs to end.
In fact, it must.
Allies, siblings, we need you now more than ever.
I was a radical revolutionist.
I still am a radical revolutionist.
I'm glad I was in the Stonewall riot.
I remember when someone threw a Molotov cocktail, I thought, my God, the revolution is here.
The revolution is finally here.
Silvia Rivera.
You know, that sort of language, if we're... Remember, the entire media was willing to blame Sarah Palin for the shooting of a congresswoman by a deranged nut based on a map that targeted a congressional district.
Hey, that was not even close to a call for violence.
But here you have people who legitimately are calling for days of vengeance and days of rage, and you have people who are assaulting other people at rallies in New Zealand.
And the idea here is that this is all good and useful, but the media are complicit in this particular narrative, which means they have to come up with an alternative narrative.
And the alternative narrative is, wait for it, wait for it, you got it right.
Everybody who opposes the trans agenda is actually responsible for a trans person shooting up a Christian school.
The media have an incentive to cover up the actual source of shootings like this one, which is why, for example, you don't remember, like you literally do not recall the mass shooting that happened in Colorado in May 2019 at a school.
This is a report from ABC7, quote, a teenager who told authorities he launched a fatal shooting attack on his suburban Denver school last year with a classmate because he wanted them to experience trauma like he had experienced, was sentenced on Friday to life in prison plus 38 years with the possibility of parole after two decades behind bars.
The shooter apologized to the parents of Kendrick Castillo, who was killed as he tackled one of the gunmen in the attack at STEM School Highlands Ranch, and to each of the other eight students wounded in the attack, as well as those traumatized by it.
What exactly happened here?
Well, this was a person who says that he was mocked because he was transgender.
Quote, he wanted everyone in that school to suffer and realize the world is a bad place, an affidavit summing up his statements.
But that shooting got memory hold because, of course, that doesn't fit the narrative, which is that victims, supposed victims in American society, can sometimes be horrible victimizers.
Or perhaps you remember the Club Q shooting.
You remember that that shooter, it was a shooting at a gay club, and originally the entire legacy media apparatus decided This was an act of Christian bigotry against a gay nightclub.
In fact, it turns out that the shooter had a very dicey childhood, that his mom identified as gender non-binary, and that the shooter, in this particular case, identified as gender non-binary and used they-them pronouns as well.
That story disappeared from the headlines pretty quickly after that came out.
That had to be memory-holed.
Okay, so a new narrative has to now be created about this particular shooting.
If you can't memory-hole what exactly is going on, a quote-unquote trans man shooting up a Christian school, you have to come up with a new narrative.
The new narrative that is being promoted by some members of the media is that the people to blame truly Are Tennessee Republicans.
Tennessee Republicans, we here at the Daily Wire, we are the people to blame.
Because after all, we are pushing the idea that you shouldn't trans the kids.
That you shouldn't actually attempt to gender mutilate small children who are gender confused.
You shouldn't give hormone treatments.
You shouldn't shoot girls full of testosterone.
It might be bad for them.
You might not want to actually carve a fake flesh penis out of an arm.
You might not want to do those things.
Right, if we say that, then apparently we are somehow responsible for a trans person shooting up a Christian school.
Yesterday, in one of the most insane clips of the day, ABC correspondent Terry Moran tried to blame Tennessee Republicans and Christians, apparently, for a shooting at a Christian school by a self-identified trans person.
The police confirming six dead, three children, one eight years old, two nine years old, and three adults, including Catherine Koontz, who is the head of the Covenant School.
The police chief also said that the shooter has been identified as 28-year-old female Audrey Hale.
He said she's a former student of the school and confirmed that Audrey Hale identified herself as a transgender person.
State of Tennessee earlier this month passed and the governor signed a bill that banned transgender medical care for minors as well as a law that prohibited adult entertainment including male and female impersonators after a series of drag show controversies in that state.
Ah, it was the drag show controversies you see.
It's because of all the concerns about exposing children to perverse sexual material.
Because of that, now you can see why this sort of thing might have happened.
And we are now making excuses for people who shoot children.
It's apparently the way this works.
Now, it is the push to protect children on an ideological level from indoctrination into a gender cult.
That is now the excuse for shooting actual children.
The logic boggles my mind, but I guess when you have a narrative to push, and the narrative is that the right is always somehow responsible for a school shooting, even a school shooting in which a trans person murders a bunch of Christian kids, then you have to go with it.
You have to go with it.
That wasn't even the worst take of the day. The worst take of the day came courtesy of Ben Ryan, who has been going after the Daily Wire with a rhetorical hatchet for weeks now, suggesting of course that the Daily Wire basically runs Tennessee, which would that it were so, but that is not in fact the case.
Ben Ryan tweeted out as an NBC reporter, quote, NBC has ID'd the Nashville school shooter as the person, 28, who identifies as transgender and had no previous criminal record.
Nashville is home to The Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by Matt Walsh blog, Ben Shapiro and Michael J. Knowles.
So just to get this straight, if a person does violence against a trans person, and none of us have called for violence against the trans person, we are all responsible for that.
Also, if a trans person does violence against Christians, we're responsible for that too.
I feel like it almost doesn't matter what happens, you just say that we're responsible for the violence.
Meanwhile, you have Newsweek pushing a similar sort of story.
Newsweek had an entire tweet.
It said, This is the other alternative take.
The other alternative take is, why are you even focused on things like protecting children from LGBTQ indoctrination?
Focus on the guns, man.
This is the Jon Stewart take that we saw a couple of weeks ago, where he's asking Republican legislators, why aren't you banning guns if you're trying to protect kids?
And it's like, well, maybe I don't think banning guns protects the kids.
And also, I don't see why men dressed as women should be gyrating sexually in front of children and what that has to do with school shootings, precisely.
But this is the going line as well.
Alejandro Caraballo, who is a trans person, Well, here's the thing.
They weren't shot up by just an AR-15 randomly.
It is truly amazing how when the left does not wish to, for example, blame certain groups of people or certain ideologies for an idea, they just blame the instrument.
So when a radical Muslim terrorist drives a car over a bunch of Israelis, then the car did it.
And when a trans man shoots a bunch of Christian schoolchildren, the gun did it.
The shift in narrative is absolutely clear and absolutely odious.
Narrative number one that the left has tried to promote is the pathetically stupid narrative that people who don't wish to see children mutilated or indoctrinated into a gender cult are responsible for a trans person shooting up a Christian school.
That's narrative number one, which, by the way, is actually a narrative that helps foment the ideological insanity that contributes to stuff like this.
If you keep saying that there is an existential threat to trans people in the world when you just say that boys are boys and girls are girls, and then people take that seriously and they go out and they say, OK, well, you know, I'm just going to attack anybody who says that, because after all, I'm an existential threat.
Then you're actually using this shooting as a platform in order to push forward a narrative that actually makes similar events more likely statistically.
That's insane.
But the secondary narrative that the left always has on these ones is guns, of course.
So Joe Biden, yesterday, Our incoherent president, he came downstairs and he began his press conference.
He apparently already knew that the shooting had taken place.
He randomly started talking about ice cream, which was very strange.
He came down and started talking to the press about ice cream before he even got to his assault weapons ban call.
Here was Joe Biden talking about ice cream.
My name is Joe Biden.
I'm Dr. Joe Biden's husband.
And I ate Jenny's ice cream, chocolate chip.
I came down because I heard there was chocolate chip ice cream.
By the way, I have a whole refrigerator full upstairs.
You think I'm kidding.
I'm not.
No one thinks you're kidding.
We all think that you're essentially a small school child in a president's body.
You have the brain power of some lower-end mammals, is pretty much where we are at this point.
He then launched into his call for an assault weapons ban, of course.
And we have to do more to stop gun violence.
It's ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation, ripping at the very soul of the nation.
And we have to do more to protect our schools so they aren't turned into prisons.
You know, the shooter in this situation reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol, two AK-47s.
So I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban.
It's about time that we Began to make some more progress.
Oh, well, I mean, he's already got the answer ready to go with school shootings.
And of course, you have the regular sort of cultural leaders out there suggesting that gun control is the answer.
Peter Frampton, another cultural leader, he tweeted out, you know, there was a school shooting in the 1990s in the UK, and they called for a massive gun buyback and registration and seizure program.
There haven't been any school shootings since.
I would just like to note at this point that there were no school shootings before.
The school shooting in Scotland that happened in, I believe, 1996.
That school shooting was, I believe, the only recorded school shooting in all of the UK in decades.
So you're taking a sample size that does not exist, and then you are suggesting that the addition of an independent variable now changed the sample.
I mean, if you have zero in the 40s, zero in the 50s, zero in the 60s, zero in the 70s, zero in the 80s, one in the 90s, piece of legislation, zero in the 2000s, zero in the 2010s, I'd like to suggest that it might not have been the gun legislation that actually changed that when you have a sample size of one, that is very difficult to draw any sort of serious data-based conclusion.
But again, the left doesn't need data.
The left has a do-something mentality, and the do-something is always take the rights of normal Americans who aren't the problem.
So, for example, you have Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary, out there saying, doing the, how many people have to be murdered routine.
And let's be real about this.
If Democrats really took this seriously, you know what they would have done?
They might have tried to push this sort of assault weapons ban, gun control routine.
They might have tried to seriously push that when they controlled both branches of Congress and the presidency, which was, last I checked, about 35 seconds ago.
Here's Karine Jean-Pierre doing the, what if I get very emotional about gun control, to push this.
In his State of the Union, the President called on Congress to do something to stop the epidemic of gun violence tearing families apart, tearing communities apart.
How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban?
I mean, do something is not an actual plan.
You know what would be an actual plan?
I'll name you a few things that would be an actual plan.
The Democrats have rejected all of these, by the way, so far as I'm aware.
Addition of school security at all schools.
You know, Jewish day schools are guarded like bangs, and they should be, because there is a high level of suspicion that if there's going to be a target of attack, that you need somebody there in order to stop it.
Better school lockdown procedures, obviously.
I should have to lock the outer doors, which didn't happen in this particular scenario.
But we're not going to do that.
We're going to do the do-something routine.
Here is Jill Biden doing that.
I hate to say what I'm going to say next because, you know, you're so enthusiastic and with so much energy and hope and I feel it.
But while you've been in this room, I don't know whether you've been on your phones, but we just learned about another shooting in Tennessee.
A school shooting.
And I am truly without words.
And our children deserve better.
And we stand, all of us, we stand with Nashville in prayer.
Well, she's allowed to say it in prayer, by the way.
People on the right are not allowed to say it in prayer.
Joe Biden's allowed to say it.
I'm sorry, but do better is not actually a legislative proposal.
It is likely to result in anything useful.
But it's not about useful.
It's about what you can demagogue off of, apparently, which presumably is why Barack Obama's former education secretary, Arne Duncan, tweeted out, at what point do we consider a national boycott of schools until our children are safe to learn there and our adults are safe to teach?
How many lives need to be lost before we actually decide to do something and keep everyone safe?
A national boycott of schools.
Genius level stuff there from the actual former education secretary of the United States of America.
Just don't go to school anymore.
Wonderful.
Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, he's doing the same routine.
He says it's hard to sit with the Republicans because they're the ones who are at fault for this.
Which is weird because there's an actual shooter who did an actual thing.
It had an actual personality, an actual description, an actual agenda.
But apparently it's just generalized Republicans.
Dead Kids didn't work in Newtown.
Dead Kids didn't work in Sandy Hook.
Dead Kids didn't really work in Uvalde.
The NRA works.
Their political power, their money that they make, gun manufacturers' money, that's what pushes the NRA.
It's horrific to think that the Congress people won't adjust their thinking and do anything better than thoughts and prayers.
That's what we've heard from people.
Right now in Congress, it's pathetic.
It's hard for me to serve up there now with some of the people that I've had to serve with.
I mean, they're part of the danger.
I mean, they could go.
I'm not going to get into that, but it's just that they are so attached to guns.
And this, of course, is part of a broader attack by anybody in the press and on the left, on anybody who actually likes guns.
So, for example, it's hard to come up with the dumbest headline of the day because there are just too many of them.
It's just a firehose of stupidity.
So between Steve Cohen suggesting that he can't serve with people who are pro-gun because they're responsible for a trans person shooting a bunch of Christian school kids.
And the Washington Post, which printed this actual headline, GOP congressman from Nashville district heartbroken by shooting.
But Democrats gun control advocates highlighted a 2021 Christmas photo showing representative Andrew Ogles and members of his family with firearms.
So just to get this absolutely clear, the GOP congressman is not allowed to be heartbroken by a shooting in his district.
Because he and his family held guns in a Christmas photo in 2021.
They are responsible.
The wild misdirection.
The insane misdirection.
It really is almost too much to take.
Meanwhile, there's a study out from the Wall Street Journal that is just fascinating and has some real consequences to it.
It came out yesterday.
And what it found is that America, American values, they're basically dying, generation over generation.
Here is what the Wall Street Journal finds.
Patriotism, religious faith, having children, and other priorities that help define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, according to a Wall Street Journal NORC poll.
And the findings of this poll are just astonishing.
And the poll asked some pretty simple questions like, do you have faith in the economy?
Do you think that it's excellent or good?
Eighty percent, by the way, say that the economy is poor or not so good in the United States.
Asked if they think that their kids are going to live a better life than they do, a huge number of Americans say that they think it'll be actually worse for their kids than it is right now.
But what is really quite fascinating about this Wall Street Journal poll is it shows that central values to social cohesion are completely fading away in the United States.
So, for example, patriotism.
In 1998, 70% of Americans said that patriotism was a very important value to them.
70%.
Which would Obviously imply significant bipartisan agreement that patriotism is pretty important.
But if you live in the United States, you should be pretty excited about living in the United States and you should believe in American exceptionalism.
By 2019, that number had dropped some, but not entirely radical, to 61%.
By 2023, that number had dropped to 38%, like off a cliff.
that number had dropped to 38% like off a cliff.
So between 2019 and 2023, that number dropped from 61% to 38%, Americans who think that patriotism is important.
Religion.
62% of Americans said in 1998 that religion was important to them.
48% said religion was important by 2019.
Today, it's at 39%.
So, less than 4 in 10 Americans say that religion is very important to them.
How about having children?
In 1998, 59% of Americans said that having children was an important value to them.
By 2019, that was down to 43%, and today it is down to 30%.
Less than 1 in 3 Americans say that having children is a very important value.
This one is kind of fascinating.
Community involvement.
And you need to be involved in your community.
47% of Americans said that it was very important to be involved in your community in 1998.
That jumped to 62% in 2019.
I can only assume that people meant politically because by 2023, that number was down to 27%.
Again, less than one in three Americans at a quarter of Americans believe that community involvement is actually an important value.
The only area in which Americans said that they had more interest in this as an American value than anything else than since 1998 is money.
When it comes to making money, that is now considered very important.
By 43% of Americans, it was 41% of Americans in 2019, it was 31% of Americans in 1998.
And this breaks down pretty significantly by age.
The number of people who say, for example, in the 18 to 29 age group, that patriotism is really important to them, is slightly over 20%.
Less than a quarter of people between 18 and 29 say having children is important to them.
Barely 30% of young people say that religion is very important to them.
And even only 61 and 62% of 18 to 29 year olds say that hard work is important to them right now.
There's a massive partisan breakdown in all of these questions.
When it comes to, for example, patriotism, 59% of Republicans say patriotism is important compared to 23% of Democrats.
When it comes to religion, 53% of Republicans say religion is important compared to 27% of Democrats.
Having children, 38% of Republicans say it's important compared to 26% of Democrats.
When it comes to community involvement, this one's kind of shocking.
Democrats say that they believe more in community involvement to the tune of 32%.
Republicans now say only 25% say that they believe in community involvement as an important thing, mainly because the nature of what community involvement involved in, say, 1998 is very different from what we mean today.
In 1998, if you'd said community involvement, people immediately would have said, oh, you mean go to church.
Today, community involvement means go to a protest march or something.
Where there is no gap at all is when it comes to making money.
When it comes to making money, 45% of Democrats and 45% of Republicans say that making money is a priority.
When it comes to other values like transgenderism, massive gap between Republicans and Democrats.
When it comes to schools and universities using affirmative action, massive gap between Republicans and Democrats.
But here's the real thing that is happening right now.
All the values that used to be the quote-unquote unifying values are dying away.
They're falling apart.
And the reason they're falling apart, I think, is pretty obvious.
The centralizing institutions in American society, the intermediate institutions in American society have completely disappeared.
These were the things that allowed us to live together.
Churches, local schools, Social clubs, all the arenas, family, all of these things, all these arenas that used to actually allow us to unify, all of those have fallen away.
The intermediate institutions of American society have died away.
This is something that Robert Nisbet predicted in the Quest for Community back in the 1940s.
He suggested that over time, as the political state became more and more important, all those intermediate institutions would be removed.
And all that would be left, essentially, was a tutelary state at the very top of American society and a bunch of atomized individuals.
Those atomized individuals still have individual economic interests.
They're all still interested in making money on the personal individual level.
But they don't have any of the militating institutions in life that actually give people meaning and purpose.
It's no coincidence that at the exact same time, more and more Americans are saying that they are disconnected from American values.
More and more Americans are unhappy.
A huge number of Americans are now unhappy.
A huge number of Americans believe their kids are not better off.
A huge number of Americans believe that America is in serious trouble.
That is because, as you remove those intermediate institutions, we're supposed to have some sort of abiding faith in an overarching political infrastructure, but why should we?
That overarching political infrastructure used to be a reflection of common values that we share, but now those common values are basically gone.
And it's not as though this is, you know, some sort of giant mystery.
Going all the way back to Alexis de Tocqueville, De Tocqueville suggested, quite correctly, back in like 1836, exactly what would happen in Western societies, the rise of soft despotism.
Here's a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, and if this doesn't sound like modern American society to you, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Here's what de Tocqueville says, quote, I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.
The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.
Each of them living apart is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest.
His children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind.
As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he's close to them, but he doesn't see them.
He touches them, but he doesn't feel them.
He exists only in himself and for himself alone.
If his kindred still remain him, he may be said, at any rate, to have lost his country.
Above this race of man stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification and to watch over their fate.
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.
It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that parent, its object was to prepare men for manhood.
But it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood.
It is well-content that people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.
For their happiness, such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness.
It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances.
What remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent.
It circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.
The principle of equality has prepared men for these things.
It has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the Supreme Power then extends its arm over the whole community.
It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd.
The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided.
Men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting.
Uh, yeah.
Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence.
It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
I've always thought that the servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people." Uh, yeah, that.
Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in 1836.
Again, remove all of the actual institutions and roles and rules that shape us.
And what you end up with is people who are completely disconnected and pursuing their own version of what they think of as happiness, but restricted in that happiness from engaging with the things that actually make life meaningful.
And then we're shocked when there is additional mental illness.
And we are shocked when there is additional depression.
We are shocked when there's additional suicide.
We're shocked when people are anxious and scared for the future of the country and feel nothing in common with their neighbors.
When you abandon all of those institutions, that's how you get... This is how that national shooting, in some ways, on a symbolic level is... It says a lot on a symbolic level.
The attack of the radical individual on the small community church school.
The idea of the person who is freed from all rules and roles, and who must attack a source of rules and roles, and attack children in that way.
The left likes to use particular shootings, to use particular violent incidents as sort of metaphors for broader American society.
If we're talking about the metaphor of broader American society, that would be a pretty solid one.
All righty, meanwhile, in other news, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel has now suspended the judicial overhaul that chaos was causing serious shutdowns in the state of Israel.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday suspended a controversial judicial overhaul plan in an attempt to pull the country back from the brink after mass protests and strikes rocked the nation.
Netanyahu yesterday, he both explained what he was doing in terms of judicial reform and then he also explained why he was temporarily delaying the judicial overhaul.
Here he was with Piers Morgan explaining why exactly he was seeking judicial overhaul in the first place.
Right now you have a situation where 15 unelected members of the Supreme Court effectively govern Israel.
They can decide things that affect our military, our economy, our foreign relations, our battle with terrorism.
Is that right?
Is that democratic?
No, it's not democratic.
You want to correct it.
You don't say that those other democracies are somehow tainted, are somehow not democratic, because they have a better balance of power.
Okay, so that obviously is pretty uncontroversial.
And here's the thing, even in Israel, that's relatively uncontroversial.
Both the right and the left, many in the center, agree there has to be some reform of the judicial system.
The real battle in Israel, as I was explaining yesterday, the real battle is not really over judicial reform.
The real battle is over the future of the country.
So basically what happened in the last election cycle is that the right won a fairly solid victory in the polling.
They ended up with a 64-seat majority in the Knesset.
That allowed them to govern.
The left does not like the right one, and so the left decided to deploy to the streets in order to essentially shut down all of the major mechanisms of the Israeli economy.
They blocked highways.
They shut down the airports yesterday.
They used extra legal means in order to try and threaten the government into not pursuing this judicial reform.
So to suggest that that's a democratic movement is sort of bizarre.
You have an elected coalition that is attempting to pursue a more democratic policy, which is taking power away from an unelected branch That is using that power in bad ways.
And then you have people mobbing in the streets, supposedly in defense of democracy, but trying to overthrow the will of a democratically elected majority.
Okay, now, that's not the whole story because the truth is that There are serious sort of underlying political issues here.
The left looks at the right and what they see is a coalition of some people who actually want some procedural changes for good reasons.
And then they also see some people who they believe are simply trying to grab the levers of power and to prevent any checks and balances from obtaining in the state of Israel at all.
But Netanyahu did the right thing yesterday.
He said, we have to slow this down.
We have to be more incremental in how we approach this, which is, in fact, the right solution.
The right moved forward too fast.
They drove enormous opposition.
And what they found out is that the extra-governmental levers of power in Israel are quite... are quite dynamic.
They're able to literally shut down pretty much the entire country because, again, a lot of the economic and even military power in Israel is not necessarily on the side of the government.
And so that split was sort of exposed, which means more incrementalism and more compromise.
That's exactly what Netanyahu pledged yesterday.
Out of a desire to prevent the conflict among the people, I have decided to condemn He's trying to avoid a rift within the people.
I decided to suspend the second and third reading from the law in this Knesset tenure in order to give time to get a broader consensus.
So they'll go back to the drawing board, which is probably what they should do.
It is worth noting, yesterday there was a massive counter-protest in Israel, probably 100,000 people minimum, in the middle of Israel.
Who are on the side of Netanyahu.
So the media only covered one side and suggested this was sort of a rising up against a totalitarian dictatorship.
That's a lie on every level.
And again, the suggestion that it is a one-sided issue, it is not.
There will be discussions.
Presumably some sort of judicial reform will eventually get done.
But compromise and conciliation are going to be the path forward right there.
I will say at this point that I think that this is a good indicator that there are just tons of people out there who are constantly seeking an end-of-the-world apocalyptic scenario to talk about.
On all sides, this is the last election.
If we don't get X done, the country will be over.
Civil war.
People are saying that in Israel.
You'll see that with every election in the United States.
That is not only bad politics, it is bad policy.
It may be good politics in the short term because you're allowed to get people in the streets and get people all ramped up, but if you actually wish to effectuate change, it's a real problem because it stands in the way of the actual constructive dialogues that we can actually have with one another in order to forward policy.
And instead, it just makes politics a series of reactionary swings from one side to the other.
One side says it's the apocalypse, and maybe they win.
Then the other side says, well, the other side won.
That's the apocalypse.
And then they win.
And then you never actually get to any effectuated change.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
Well, you can see the backdrop.
I haven't mentioned it the whole show, but we are actually in Rome today.
I'm filming with my friend Jordan Peterson.
We have a new series that's going to be coming out very soon in which we visit some of the world's great places and talk about the history and philosophy of Western civilization.
It really is fantastic.
Behind us, for those who don't know what we're looking at, is St.
Peter's And St.
Peter's obviously is the center of Catholicism, the most powerful church institution in the history of the world.
It's an astonishing building.
The city of Rome is absolutely incredible.
The history of Rome is fascinating from the actual sort of Rome of HBO, the swords and sandals Rome that was all about Senatorial power versus dictatorial power, democracy, republicanism, the people versus the elite, and all the rest of it, to the rise of Christianity in the aftermath of the New Testament.
Obviously, Rome, central to the identity of Western civilization.
I can't wait to bring you that series.
It really is quite amazing.
We couldn't resist actually doing Doing a shoot up here, because I mean, if you can shoot with this backdrop, why wouldn't you do that as opposed to shooting in a darkened studio somewhere?
Other things that I like today.
So, when you talk about rebuilding those local institutions, obviously, church is a major local institution that needs to be rebuilt, and that requires some actual forward-thinking leadership from people who are in the religious sphere.
That means that religious leaders should stop being so shy about what they believe and they should say it out.
They should speak out on what they believe rather than attempting to allow secular morality to essentially steer the boat.
It also means that we need a government that allows for the thriving of local institutions.
And so I'm very excited that in the state of Florida, the state of Florida has now passed universal school choice.
The money now follows the students, does not follow the schools, and that means that every kid will have the ability in the state of Florida to get a credit of something like $8,000 in order to pursue a private education if they so wish.
Here was Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.
This is a win for him.
And so people have said, wait a minute, if you give parents a choice, if you let parents take scholarship and go to the school of their choice, somehow that's going to hurt education performance.
And in Florida, we're proof positive that that's just the opposite of what actually happened.
The fact of the matter is our school districts perform better because they've embraced choice.
Our charter schools perform better because they have to compete.
Uh, for individual students.
They're not entitled to get anybody as a charter school.
And of course, uh, having private schools that can service the needs of parents so that a parent will take that scholarship and say, you know what?
I want to go to this particular school because of what they're offering.
All that has created a very positive feedback.
It's gonna be great.
And this makes Florida the fourth state to actually adopt universal school choice.
More of this.
This is how you rebuild local institutions, give power back to parents to re-congregate in their communities instead of using the power of government to break up those communities.
Alrighty, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So, we've already seen the bolderization of Roald Dahl, and the public generally didn't like that, and so they walked it back a little bit.
This is the attempt to remove words like fat from Augustus Gloop's descriptors in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Well now, CNN reports that the novels of Agatha Christie are the latest works to be revised to remove racist references and other language considered offensive to modern audiences.
According to the UK's The Telegraph, publisher HarperCollins has edited some passages and entirely removed others from its new digital editions of some of Christie's detective mysteries featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
I'm a big Agatha Christie fan.
I really enjoy Hercule Poirot.
The amendments to the books?
Include changes to the narrator's inner monologue.
For example, Poirot's description of another character as a Jew, of course, in Christie's debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, has now been stripped out of the new version.
Now, as a Jew, of course, I can say that I don't find that particularly useful.
I think that actually understanding the biases of authors when they're writing is quite useful and historically interesting and necessary in order to actually understand the books that you are reading.
If you strip out all the stuff that we find offensive today from the books, you're missing half of their context.
Throughout the revised version of the short story collection, Ms.
Marple's final cases, and two other stories, the word native has now been replaced with local, which doesn't change anything.
A passage describing a servant as black and grinning has been revised, and the character is now simply referred to as nodding, with no reference to his race.
Also, you're not allowed to refer to Nubian people in Death on the Nile.
And none of this is going to...
Yeah, make the books better in any way, and it's not going to prevent people from taking offense at Agatha Christie's original verbiage, but it is a great way to demonstrate your fealty to the woke idiots who have decided that it's necessary to rewrite all of history in order to appease their modern sensibilities.
Well, meanwhile, speaking of woke idiots who are attempting to appease modern sensibilities and, yeah, attacking parents in the process, the inexpressibly foolish Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she, yesterday, was suggesting bad timing here.
She said that predatory cisgender and straight men are the ones after your kids.
This is a hell of a take.
Many of these disgusting and insinuating attacks on trans and LGBT people are actually projections of what predatory, cisgender, and often straight men do when left alone in the presence of women, or sometimes horribly, children.
So instead of getting you to challenge the patriarchy, they're trying to get you to challenge the very gender expressiveness that challenges patriarchy.
Don't get it twisted, because a lot of people attacking drag are projecting.
Oh, it's all projecting.
So now men gyrating, sexualized around kids.
If you object to that, it's because you wish to sexualize kids in some fetishistic way.
Oh, the utter insanity and stupidity of this point of view.
But again, none of it is designed for the benefit of the children.
It's all designed to make a particular constituency feel better about itself.
That's all this really is.
Okay, final thing that I hate.
So this would be, again, major national news story if the parties weren't reversed.
According to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, he confirmed on Monday that a member of his staff was brutally attacked on the streets of Washington, D.C.
over the weekend.
He said in a statement this weekend, a member of my staff was brutally attacked in broad daylight in Washington, D.C.
I ask you to join Kelly and me in praying for a speedy and complete recovery and thanking first responders, hospital staff, and police for their diligent actions.
Apparently, the person sustained life-threatening injuries.
A suspect was arrested with an assault with intent to kill using a knife.
Apparently, it was a repeat stabbing.
Again, if a Democrat had been attacked in a Republican area, that of course would be worthy of note, but it's a Republican being attacked in a Democratic area, so obviously that is not worthy of note whatsoever.
It is completely irrelevant to everyone.
Okay, final thing that I hate today.
Worst take of the day.
We were in search for the worst take of the day with regard to this shooting.
The worst take of the day actually came courtesy of a person named David Pakman, who is a left-wing podcaster, I believe.
And he tweeted this out, quote, Well, that's a hell of a take right there.
Is that probably they needed to... They were praying wrong.
The kids were praying wrong.
So, you know, that's probably why that happened.
Or, obviously, he's attempting to mock the idea of religion at all.
Isn't prayer supposed to protect you?
Well, I mean, behind me, as I mentioned before, is St.
Peter's.
What if I told David Pakman there's an entire religion predicated on the idea that the Son of God was killed by humans?
What if I told you there's an entire religion predicated on the idea that there are people that they call martyrs and there are a bunch of statues of them right over there.
You can see them.
And they prayed super hard and also died as martyrs.
What if I told David Pakman that?
One of my favorite things is when atheists pretend that their questions about theodicy are like the first questions that have been asked about this matter.
Oh my God, you're saying that bad things happen to religious people?
Well, doesn't that debunk your entire religion?
No, actually, let me just explain.
It does not debunk any of my religion or any of any religion because that's the stupidest fake of all time.
Sometimes God doesn't answer prayers in the way that we wish him to answer our prayers because God isn't us.
But that does not change why people pray.
It's so ugh.
All righty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not gonna wanna miss it.
We will be jumping into the mailbag here from Rome.
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