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Aug. 29, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:29
How State and Medical Institutions PROMOTED The Trans Church Shooting
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People, as new details emerge about the identity, thoughts, feelings, mental illness of this horrifying Catholic school shooter in Minnesota, it becomes clearer and clearer that we have an institutional problem.
Now, not every crime in a country of 330, 340 million people implies an institutional problem.
Sometimes you just have one off.
Sometimes you just have people who do things that are crazy or terrible, and there's really no way of preventing or minimizing that particular crime.
This is not one of those cases because what we are looking at here is symptomatic of a broader ideological ill that has afflicted our state institutions and our medical institutions and has massive downstream effects.
Those downstream effects aren't always school shootings.
In fact, only in rare occasions are they school shootings, but they are harming literally thousands of children across our country.
So one of the things that we have now found out about the school shooter, this trans school shooter named Robin, again, I haven't used the last name because I do not believe that glorifying these shooters or giving a lot of attention to their names is worthwhile.
And the reason for that is pretty obvious from the actual guns used by the shooter, which were emblazoned with the names of other school shooters and mass killers.
There's a sort of bizarre transmission effect that happens.
when the media grant enormous attention to evil mentally ill people who go and shoot a bunch of school children.
But one of the factors here is that the transgender shooter, whose name was Robert and then legally changed it to Robin and was a biological male, confessed he was, quote, tired of being trans and wished he had never brainwashed himself in a manifesto posted online before he slaughtered two children and wounded eighteen more in a Minneapolis church, according to the New York Post in a twisted handwritten journal he shared on YouTube but before the massacre, much of which was encrypted in a homespun code of Russian Cyrillic script and English words.
The shooter groaned about his long hair and his decision to transition, quote., I only keep the long hair because it pretty much is my last shred of being trans.
I am tired of being trans.
I wish I never brainwashed myself.
I can't cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported.
It just always gets in my way.
I will probably chop it on the day of the attack.
Hey, there's so many elements here that are astonishing.
Hey, number one, the belief that what would have put a red flag up is the removal of the long female like hair.
That's what would have thrown up a red flag to the Minnesota authorities is if a male could have grown his hair out to attempt to look more like a female had cut his hair to look more like a male again.
He was afraid that that would have actually thrown up a red flag to the authorities who might have said, there's something wrong.
So there was nothing wrong with a boy saying that he was a girl, his parents signing off on forms to transition him by name.
Nothing wrong with that in Minnesota as we'll get to, that's actually not only upheld in Minnesota, it is celebrated in Minnesota.
But if he had decided to detransition, he was afraid that the Minnesota authorities might take a second look at him.
Second of all, this was a person who was clearly suffering from gender identity disorder and was not satisfied with the solutions provided by the trans fake medical community.
Now we've been told by that fake medical community, the only way to prevent terrible things from happening to and from trans people, people who are trans identified, is to pretend along with them that they are members of the opposite sex.
And in fact, we are supposed to socially shame people who quote unquote detransition.
The shooter wrote, quote, I regret being trans.
I wish I was a girl.
I just know I can't achieve that body with the technology we have today.
I also can't afford that.
He said, I like to feel sexy and cute, but my face never matches how I feel.
I hate my face.
Maybe that's why I like furries so much.
You can give yourself a new body and face.
I want to be that black face mask on Beyonce's body, LMAO.
So was this person just a woman?
Because if you listen to the media, the answer is yes.
The headline from the New York Times, believe it or not, I mean, this is totally insane.
The headline from the New York Times yesterday was quote, Minneapolis suspect knew her target.
The motive is a mystery.
The amount of Orwellian double speak here is insane, totally crazy.
So respect the killer's pronouns preferred pronouns, but pretend that the motive is a mystery.
We know exactly what the motive was because it is spelled out in all of the journals, in the YouTube videos, on the guns themselves.
This is the media trying to cover up the reality of the situation, which is a mentally ill person who is not given proper treatment, who is told that his illusions were in fact a reflection of the evil patriarchy and a terrible traditional society,
whose parents were told by medical and state institutions the most important thing that they could do to minimize threat to their child and threat to others was to pretend along with this person that he was a woman, that any sort of corrective activity designed at alleviating gender identity disorder by saying,
no, actually you are a boy, and we need to deal with that in rational, psychologically tested ways instead of doing that., they decided to play along and the consequences were murder in this particular case.
It is also demonstrative of the fact that for a lot of people who have gender identity disorder, what they are actually suffering from is autogynophilia.
This is a person who obviously was turned on by the idea of himself as a girl, rather than believing that he was a girl.
But when I say this implies our institutions, I mean it.
It implies our schools.
It implies our medical institutions.
It implies state legislatures.
Begin with medical institutions.
Now, just by coincidence, over the course of the last couple of days, we dropped that story about the American Medical Association.
I'm the head of the AMA, Dr. Bobby McCamala.
We've been talking about it extensively on the show the last couple of days.
We recorded those shows before the actual shooting occurred.
It just so happened that the AMA has been promoting exactly the kind of fake medicine that leads to the abandonment of people who are truly suffering, truly psychologically suffering.
That fake medicine, which masquerades as empathy, is not in fact medicine.
It is in fact an ideologically driven crusade to pretend that men and women are identical and can switch bodies at will.
And it is a lie.
We know for a fact now that the shooter in this particular case was interested in detransitioning, didn't want to be trans anymore, but had been told by the medical establishment, by the state, by the influential authorities that that was an impossibility, that one's trans always trans, that a boy can become a girl but can't become a boy again, and that it would be shameful and somehow a surrender to do so.
And here is the head of the AMA, Dr. Bobby McConnell, saying that people literally don't transition.
It's just not a thing that happens.
We shouldn't worry about it.
And we certainly shouldn't leave the opportunity open for people with gender identity disorder or any other form of trans delusion to start to feel comfortable in their own biological body.
Instead, we ought to transition the body to meet the vagaries of the mind.
Yeah, but even so, so you're a doctor, you're a surgeon.
How can you justify doing surgery, the most radical surgeries that medicine has come up with on an individual who has an evolving or changing gender identity?
How, how, how can you write that, that possibility?
So, I mean, people that actually change.
back.
So are you talking about so when an adult after twenty years of feeling like they are a woman instead of a man is considering suicide and wants to do something about that, then they go to a psychiatrist, they get medicine, and then they would consider an operation if that's what really was going to keep them healthy.
And that doesn't even happen in kids in Michigan, by the way.
If you're talking about pediatrics, it's a totally different thing.
Now, again, this sort of delusional insanity from the AMA.
the most important medical organization in America, it is embedded.
This trans ideology, this blight, this lie is embedded in our most important institutions, including medical institutions.
If you wonder why there is no trust in the CDC, if you wonder why there's no trust in the NIH, if you wonder why trust has been completely undermined in quote unquote science, it's because the ideological left infiltrated all of these organizations, took them over, and then wore their face around as a mask like Hannibal Lecter.
And then said, why don't you just trust the science?
And the answer is because you're not doing the science.
You're not interested in the science.
You're interested in the ideology.
This ideology has infiltratedated into our classrooms.
It's being taught to young kids.
Yesterday, a video emerged of a non-binary teacher.
Now, again, non-binary is another delusion.
There is no such thing as a non-binary human.
Human beings can be intersex that is still not non-binary.
Non-binary is the idea that you are neither male nor female in your heart.
The answer to which is who cares.
But here was a non-binary teacher named Nairobi Makiba Colon in Camden, New Jersey at the KIPP Hatch Middle School.
Now, first of all, I should point out, you know, how thoroughgoing this ideology is, how much it has infiltrated every part of American public life when this is infiltrating schools in Camden, New Jersey.
Camden, New Jersey happens to be one of the most high crime cities in all of America.
I know I visited there.
It's a horror show.
It's a true horror show.
If you want to see what it looks like, go check out our series from last year, Divided States of Biden.
We went to Camden.
It is awful.
It is a terrible place.
Instead of worrying about an enormous number of kids who don't have fathers in the home in an area blighted by crime, they're busy teaching kids that they must use the correct pronouns.
Good morning class.
My name is Teacher Roby.
I'm going to do a quick introduction before we get started.
Here's my teacher picture.
Everyone here will be able to take a picture this year, so I'm excited to see how those come out.
My pronouns are they them?
For example, they are a great art teacher.
They taught us how to draw stitch.
It is super important to get our pronouns right.
If you do make a mistake, I will politely correct you.
No worries.
That goes for me too.
So if I ever get your name or pronouns wrong, please correct me every single time.
The absolute insane narcissism of this and then cramming it down on kids.
This is happening at schools across the country.
This is not a sort of fringe thing happening at a few schools.
It is literally happening at public schools across the country.
Meanwhile, how about the state of the law in Minnesota?
So Minnesota in 2023 passed a law, chapter 28., HF number 16, section 1, 214.078, protection from conversion therapy.
Now, there have been a bunch of laws passed across the country with regard to conversion therapy.
When most people think of conversion therapy, what they think is that there is someone who takes a gay kid hooks the kids up, the kid up to electrodes and then zaps them until they're straight.
That's what conversion therapy is because that is like the old fashioned horror show that many people attempted back in like the 1970s, early 1980s, maybe.
Well, that is illegal, but that is not what these states now mean by conversion therapy.
What they mean by conversion therapy is that you are not allowed as I said.
as a psychologist, as a mental health care professional, as a parent, by the way, to bring your kid to a mental health care professional who tries to convince your boy that he is not, in fact, a girl that is illegal in the state of Minnesota.
So if the parents of the shooter had brought him to a mental health care professional or religious guidance professional, a priest, because this kid apparently went to a Catholic school.
who had said, you know, you might not in fact be a girl.
In fact, you are not a girl.
I know for a fact you're not a girl.
We need to work within the boundaries God gave you, drawing within the biological lines that could be illegal in the state of Minnesota because conversion.
therapy is banned in the state of Minnesota, but here is the definition of conversion therapy.
It means any practice by a mental health practitioner that seeks to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.
Conversion therapy does not include counseling practice or treatment that provides assistance to an individual undergoing gender transition.
or counseling practice or treatment that provides acceptance, support, and understanding of an individual or facilitates an individual's coping, social support, and identity exploration.
and development.
As long as the counseling practice or treatment does not seek to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, understand what this law does.
What this law says is that if your kid expresses gender confusion, says, Mommy, I might be a girl and he's a boy, and you bring him to a psychologist and the psychologist says, You're a boy, you're not a girl.
You should stop trying to claim that you're a girl because you're not.
That right there would violate the law in the state of Minnesota.
It effectively makes any help for a quote unquote detransitioner illegal in the state of Minnesota.
Illegal.
If you brought your kid, if you brought this shooter before he was a shooter, This troubled young man, deeply mentally disturbed young man to a mental health professional.
And he said, listen, I'm a boy.
I'm struggling with my gender identity, but I feel like a girl.
And he said, you know what?
You're not a girl.
You're a boy.
You might be violating the law in the state of California, in the state of Minnesota.
It's embedded in the law.
Again, it's also embedded in Minnesota law when it declared itself back in 2023 a trans refuge state.
Why?
Well, because that 2023 legislation signed by Governor Tim Walls, again, insanely enough, the vice presidential nominee for the Democrats, according to the New York Post, blocks out-of-state subpoenas, arrest warrants, and extradition requests for people who travel to the land of 10,000 lakes from other states for sex reassignment surgeries or homeown treatments.
So let's say that you are a parent and your kid absconds with another adult to the state of Minnesota for a gender transition and you say no, I want my kid back.
They will not extradite your kid in the state of Minnesota.
If you as a parent in the state of Minnesota say no to transition procedures or you wish to fight the insanity that is this ideology, you could have your kid removedoved from you under Minnesota law.
That is horrifying.
It's horrifying.
You have an entire delusion that is now being promoted by state legislatures, by governors across the country, particularly in blue states, reinforced by the lies of medical associations that are supposed to be all about doing no harm and instead are actively promoting harm promoted by an educational system completely honeycombed with members of the ideological left.
And the costs are very real.
This happens to be an over sized cost because it's not just about the person who had the mental illness.
It's about all the people that that person decided to harm.
Obviously, that's the main story here.
But the point is that this is part of a broader systemic problem.
Now, Democrats, of course, have decided that it's all about the guns, always and forever, because that's the formula.
If this were a white supremacist shooting up a mosque or a Jewish school or a Catholic school for that matter, then there might be some talk about the ideology, about the system of white supremacy, about the basic philosophy of white supremacism and the evil that it promotes.
But if this is clearly an outshoot of trans ideology, which it is, it was the targeting of a religious Catholic school for the murder of school children by a trans identified person who had in his journals many references to not only his trans identity, but also to the evils of Catholics and Jews, President Trump and all the rest.
Well, then it must be the gun.
That's the way this works.
So here is Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who really should shut her face.
I mean Peggy Flanagan again, just a couple of months ago was wearing around a T-shirt that said protect trans kids with an actual emblazoned knife on it.
This is not a person with the moral authority to be speaking about this particular shooting, but here we go.
We continue to hear people say, why does God let things like this happen?
Right?
And I would just say that God weeps, that we have tools, that we have elected leaders who want to move legislation that could truly make a difference.
And I think we just need to have that willpower to take those steps that are needed to protect our communities.
Well, I mean, I don't wish to hear lectures about God from you.
I do not wish to hear lectures about God's mercy or justice from a person who believes in T-shirts that have knives on them, talking about how kids need to be protected by promoting the idea that they can be members of the opposite sex.
Meanwhile, the American Federation of Teachers Randy Weingarten doing the same routine.
She says a national assault weapon ban would work, would it though?
Because it turns out this particular school shooter had a bunch of different weapons and there was an assault weapons ban in place from the mid nineties until the early 2000s.
Then it expired and it had no impact on school shootings by the measures.
But it's always fun for Democrats to invoke their own religious mantra.
Assault weapons are the problem.
We are Who those young people were, who saved other young people, who those teachers were, who saved other teachers, who those medical professionals were, who went with a CT scan with a child, who those law enforcement people are.
That is who I see, Chris, in America.
I'm all around America.
That is the best of America, but we have to have the national conversation around a set of belief or policy that we know will work and a national assault weapons ban would work.
Okay, you have no actual data to back that, none.
The idea that the national assault weapons ban would be the thing that stops this sort of thing.
By the way, I do know what would actually promote the end of this particular sort of shooting, and that would be that people identified as suffering from gender identity disorder not be allowed to purchase weapons.
How about that?
How about that?
Again, Democrats are all very much in favor of red flag laws until it applies to people who legitimately are mentally ill, who they believe are actually just victims of society.
Meanwhile, David Hogg, he gets to have another moment in the sun.
So David Hogg, who originally made his name by being a student who attended Parkland, he was there during the Parkland shooting, but he parlayed that into a leader in activism and then a slot at Harvard University with a below average SAT score.
And then he parlayed that into a very short-lived stint as the vice president of the Democratic National Committee.
And then he was thrown out because he was basically destroying everything within.
But don't worry, he's still here to be useless.
So here he was on CNN going off on all people, President Trump, after a trans person shoots up a Catholic church in the blue state of Minnesota.
It's President Trump's fault, of course.
Donald Trump has the power to do something about this.
After Parkland, he repeatedly said, you guys are cowards.
You're not going to do anything because you're afraidid of the NRA.
We need to do something about guns.
That is what he said.
And then he met with the NRA and did nothing.
Why?
Because he is a coward.
And my message to Donald Trump is that you are a coward, sir.
You are not going to do anything about this issue because you were terrified of the NRA, even though you have the power to save tens of thousands of lives.
You were the strongest president in modern American history with a chokehold over your party and both chambers of Congress.
You have the power to end this, but you are not going to because you are a damn coward.
Okay, again, this sort of ridiculous pandering by people like David Hogg, a complete career useless person is what he will become.
He already has been.
He's young, maybe there's time to change prediction.
Fifty years from now, he's just as useless as he is right now.
But the idea that Trump can single handedly snap his fingers and bam, all school shootings stop, that of course is an absurdity and a moral blind.
That is not true.
Stephen King is trying to shift the focus away from the identity of the shooter, saying, quote, whether he was transgender is beside the point.
The point is he had a gun.
Well, actually, no, that is incredibly stupid.
I own multiple guns.
I am a threat to no one except a criminal who breaks into my house.
In fact, there are millions of Americans who own guns who are not going to shoot up at school.
If what we are doing is identifying the most likely causal factor that is correlative with school shootings, and it goes mental illness or gun ownership, I promise you that significant mental illness has a much higher correlation with school shootings than just gun ownership alone.
The gun didn't do anything on its own.
It had to be in the hands of a deranged human being.
The struggle to avoid the obvious here from the left is pretty incredible.
Former Homeland Security official, Danell Harvin, he added his voice to the mix over on CNN saying the same sort of thing.
This individual appears to be what we call a nihilist.
And not to get into too much detail about their ideology, they believe that no lives matter.
I believe that calling this or investigating this as an attack against Catholics, I believe, is a little disingenuous and it plays into the far right's narrative about Christians being under attack in this country.
Clearly, since this person went to this school, it appears to be, and we don't know their background.
But I think that we're starting to see the creepingsing politicization of the tragedy.
It is a politicization when you blame the tens of millions of gun owners in America who have nothing to do with the school shootings for the crimes of a deranged individual who was ideologically driven.
And we can see the connection between A and B already coming up.
The Republican response to this horrifying shooting.
Plus, we'll get into the latest from Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, up the ante once again.
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Meanwhile, the Republican response obviously seems to be significantly more tethered to reality.
The Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, he points out we have a pretty significant mental health crisis in the country, which of course is true.
The first lady, Melania, who really has a very big heart for children, obviously as a mother herself, she put out a statement earlier today that I think is really worth taking a look at because this happens too much in our country.
And if you look, we really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America.
We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth.
And I think it's time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence.
And I'm going to be part of that.
And the first lady and the president are going to be part of that.
But that's going to be an American conversation that we're going to have together.
Hey, that does need to be a conversation that is, in fact, had.
Now, there is something else that's been happening across the country, and it is connected to this school shooting.
And that is the radical heating up of rhetoric that we have seen.
Obviously, this has been ongoing.
It is not relegated solely to the left.
It would be dishonest to claim that it is.
It is ratcheting up very, very high from the left right now, obviously.
And that is particularly true when you consider that literally.
zero percent of Democrats are happy with the direction of the country right now, according to the latest Gallup polls, zero percent.
Pretty astonishing.
And when you look at those numbers, what you see is that independents are somewhere in the thirty some percent range, Republicans are in the seventy six percent range, and Democrats are at zero in general.
Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States?
What that does is it creates a political wave on behalf of Democrats who use extremely, extremely polarizing and extreme language.
If you are a Democrat and you want to capture the democratic Zeitgeist.
You have to understand, everyone is fighting mad on the democratic side of the aisle.
And that means you're going to keep racketing up the rhetoric over and over again.
You're going to claim that your opponents are the Gestapo.
You're going to claim that the President of the United States is an incipient dictator who is going to overthrow all the mechanisms of constitutional government and we're on the order of something truly horrifying.
Does that promote violence?
Now, as I've said before, the connection between rhetoric and violence is there, but we have to be pretty calibrated in how we analyze that.
There's a difference between somebody getting up and saying go shoot the president, which is illegal, right?
That's incitement to violence.
And somebody saying the president is a terrible person.
He's a tyrant.
He's a Nazi.
Okay, the latter is wrong, but it's not terri technical incitement.
What the ladder does is it raises the temperature.
I've used this metaphor a lot because it happens to be a good metaphor.
The metaphor is that the American body politic is essentially a pot of water.
You can raise the temperature on the water.
You can increase the temperature on the stove and the pot starts to boil.
The higher you hit the temperature, the more the pot is going to boil.
And the more the pot boils, the more there's a chance that it boils over.
And so you are increasing the chances in this metaphor of the pot boiling over, meaning violence, when you use unhinged rhetoric.
And again, this is nothing that is relegated solely to the left.
You've seen it from the right as well as well.
You can see it in a wide variety of countries.
It's not relegated to the United States alone.
And so if you're a Democrat and the incentive structure is for you to say extreme things to get attention, you're going to keep saying more and more extreme things to get attention.
And then there's going to be some unhinged people who look at what you're saying and take it absolutely literally, absolutely seriously, and then they go do things about it.
So it's a bad thing when you have, for example, Democratic representative John Larson of Connecticut comparing Ice to the Gestapo and saying to rise up.
That is a problem.
This is a time for good trouble.
This is a time for Americans to rise up.
This is not Germany, that's the SS and the Gestapo.
This is the United States of America.
Unmask yourselves.
So, you know, again, the Gestapo, I mean, if somebody does an act of violence against a member of ICE, well, based on the fact that you're saying that they're good, they're Gestapo and it's time to rise up.
I mean, to pretend that there is no connection there is kind of crazy.
Gavin Newsom is playing this game as well, the governor of California.
Hey, he is so radically dishonest.
So here he was at a politico event the other day suggesting that Donald Trump does not want another election.
that he is legitimately a Hitlerian figure who is going to cancel all future elections and essentially take total power in the United States.
First of all, if Gavin Newsom believed this as the governor of the largest and most populous state in the Union, economically the largest, most populous state in America, then he would have a duty to probably lead an insurrection.
If he actually thought that were real, he does not think that's real.
Of course, he does not believe that President Trump wants to cancel all future elections.
It's ridiculous when people claim this sort of stuff.
There will be an election in 2028 and then there will be one in 2032 and then there will be one in 2036.
We can hope Gavin Newsom does not make the finish line in any of those elections.
But there is a market for this sort of rhetoric on the Democratic left.
Here is Gavin Newsom saying a lie.
I mean, this is a lie.
I don't think Donald Trump wants another election.
You think for a second, you want, I have two dozen Trump 2028 hats.
His folks keep sending me.
And you think he's going to run again.
Don't give me, you don't, who spends $200 million on a ballroom at their home and then leaves the house?
This is serious, guys.
This is serious.
So it'll be Newsom Trump in 2028.
No, no.
This is, there's no., this guy doesn't believe in free, fair elections.
He could, he's tried to wreck this country.
I wonder, were we, were you there, January 6?
Okay, so notice that the audience itself is laughing at this, literally laughing out loud at Gavin Newsom.
He's pretending that he's serious about this in the audience because it's a political audience, so presumably they know something about politics.
They're laughing.
The host is laughing.
Gavin Newsom's like, no, it's perfectly serious.
There will never be another election if Donald Trump has his way.
Okay, if you believe that, if you truly believe that Hitler is on the move, then you have a moral duty to stop it.
This sort of ratcheting up is terrible for our constitutional republic.
Truly a bad thing.
Truly a bad thing.
Now, do I think Gavin Newsom believes anything?
Of course he doesn't.
Gavin Newsom doesn't believe a single bit of this because you know what you don't do?
You don't troll Hitler.
That's not something that people generally do when they are worried about incipient Hitlerian fascism.
But that's what Gavin Newsom is doing full time because again, he's just seeking attention.
He's a little child who's screaming in the other room and kicking his feet desperately hoping for attention.
So yesterday he released a video of himself doing a fake Trump conference.
So he looked at President Trump.
President Trump has these long pressers where all the members of the cabinet are there praising him and talking about how great he is.
And Gavin Newsom decided that he was going to mock that and then talk about how crime rates in red states are really bad, neglecting, of course, the fact that the crime rates in red states, the ones that are bad, it tends to be because of blue governed large cities in red states, like, say, New Orleans in Louisiana.
But here is Gavin Newsom mocking President Trump.
This is why I say I can't take him seriously when he says there won't be another election if Trump has his way.
He doesn't believe that.
He doesn't know.
Again, no incipient dictator gets mocked this way.
If he is to invest in.
in crime suppression I hope the President of the United States would look at the facts.
Just consider Speaker Johnson's state and district.
Just look at the murder rate that's nearly four times higher than Californians in Louisiana.
This is Speaker Johnson, four x higher.
I'm just offering this again, you've not seen this on Fox News, so the president may not be familiar with these facts.
So I want to present some facts to the president of the United States and imagine this is alarming to the president to learn these facts.
Mississippi leads the nation as the number one murder state in America.
Imagine this in particular may resonate with the president of the United States.
It's got a murder rate 180% higher than Los Angeles.
Interesting.
LA has more people.
These are all per capita numbers.
More people than Los Angeles.
Perhaps the president could deploy the National Guard in every corner of Mississippi.
And the fact remains, if the president is sincere about the issue of crime and violence, there's no question in my mind that he will likely be sending the troops into Louisiana and Mississippi to address the just unconscionable wave of violence that continues to plague those states.
I mean, he is so gr incredibly cringy.
He's just a big ball of cringe, Gavin Newsom.
By the way, it should be mentioned that the number one murder city in Mississippi, just to take an example, is Jackson, Mississippi.
The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi is John Horne, Democrat.
In fact, I decided to ask my sponsors over a comet, a new web browser by perplexity, a question analyzing the top ten highest crime major cities in red states, right?
The red states would be Newsom's select group over the past thirty years.
What percentage of that time have those cities been governed by Democratic mayors?
Most of the top ten highest crime major cities in red states have been governed by Democratic mayors for a significant majority of the past thirty years, often exceeding eighty percent of that period or more.
This trend is clearest in cities such as Memphis, Tennessee, and Saint Louis, Missouri, and is broadly consistent with other high crime major cities in red states.
The top ten high crime cities in red states commonly include Memphis, Saint Louis, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Birmingham, Little Rock, Detroit, sometime included in red state analysis, Baltimore, disputed as to red, blue in terms of Maryland, Jackson, Mississippi, and Shreveport.
Those cities are mostly in states that have voted Republican in recent presidential elections and consistently have among the highest murder and violent crime rates.
And as it turns out, empirical pattern in major southern cities with the highest crime, Democratic mayors have typically governed for more than eighty percent to ninety percent of the last three decades.
This pattern aligns with findings that among the 100 largest US cities, the great majority, about 60 to 65 percent, are led by Democratic mayors.
And nearly all of the largest cities in the South with high crime rates are included in this group.
So blaming that on red states as opposed to blue mayors, that is a category error, but Newsom knows that and he's making it on purpose.
We'll get to the latest economic reports plus firings at the CDC in a moment.
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Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling on their own to come up with an answer to President Trump.
I mean, they themselves are far too radical.
James Carville, who again has occasional.
brushes with reality.
He exploded over the DNC doing a land acknowledgement to open the other day, which of course Carville at least has enough touch the grass to him to understand that most Americans are not interested in a party that opens its actual national convention every year by suggesting that America is stolen land.
Lady, you're right.
That land, what we did to Native Americans is really well documented.
And it is a sad part of our nation's history.
Why are you bringing this up in an election?
Understand this.
The DNC does not exist.
It doesn't exist to right wrongs.
It doesn't exist to acknowledge the more unpleasant parts of history.
It doesn't exist to make people feel good.
It exists to get this through your head to win elections.
Now, do you think that's going to help us win elections, say, like we did in Iowa, which is, I think, close to Minnesota, my geography is there, by our good land theft from the Dakotas.
We're not.
Please stop this in the next election.
In the name of a just, merciful God, don't you see what's happening?
Don't you see where this has brought us to?
Well, you know, luxury believes that's that's what the Democrats are very much into.
One of the more hilarious luxury beliefs clips that I've seen in the recent past involved a member of the Pod Save America crew who are increasingly out hinged with regard to a wide variety of issues, but no shock there.
Team Obama always masqueraded as moderate when in fact they were extraordinarily radical, but they had on a LA City Council member named Imelda Padilla and she was trying to explain how she was making housing more affordable in.
in Los Angeles and Giant Vale.
Under the emergency ordinance, I'm bringing a set of tiny homes into an underutilized MetroLink parking station.
I didn't have to do any outreach, but I started a neighborhood watch and I also had a whole town hall related to addressing that component.
And there's also an ED one that's being built on Victory and Balboa.
And going back to what you said, the neighbors didn't want it at all.
They just didn't want the density.
They wanted me to kill it.
But by law, I really have no jurisdiction anymore because it's an ED one, right?
But we still as a team got together with the developer, the high school across the street, other stakeholders, and instead of building something that was potentially six stories, we got it down to three stories.
And we also got the developer to also work with us to make sure that it helps the families of the area.
We also said, you know, instead of a ton of office space, we do want you to also incorporate a few more parking lots and EV chargers.
And there's John Lovett looking like his head is going to legitimately come off his body and explode, which is because this is what you guys look at the magic they are doing in lowering rent prices in California by preventing three stories of a building from being built and also getting rid of office space.
Genius level stuff here from your democrat friends.
Okay.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin continues to show over and over again.
He has no interest in peace at all.
According to the New York Post, Russia has launched a sweeping aerial assault across Ukraine late on Wednesday, pounding Kiev with ballistic missiles and swarms of drones killing at least seventeen people, including four children, injuring dozens more.
Andrey Yermak, the top advisor to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy, said, quote, many people are under the rubble, including children.
The barrage began around 9:30 pm setting off air raid sirens and prompting urgent shelter notification warnings in nearly every region nationwide.
Now, you know, I've been in Kiev when the journal alarms went off.
In fact, we released an extraordinary video this morning going through what Vladimir Putin wants, the history of Ukraine.
There's footage of me in Ukraine that's never been seen before.
Here's a little bit of what it looked like.
That is up on our YouTube page.
It will also be up over at Daily Wire, you should check it out.
But suffice it to say that Vladimir Putin has no interest in peace and we knew this.
We knew this.
According to the New York Post, at least four Russian MiG 31 jets armed with Kinshaw missiles decolled during the attack.
Missiles, drones and bombs were spotted throughout the country, particularly in Kiev, but also in western regions of the country where attacks have been rarer.
At least seventeen people, including four children, were killed.
More than twenty two were injured.
That's the second largest air attack on the nation's capital since the war began.
It's the biggest since President Trump's summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
Meanwhile, the Europeans are grasping at straws.
They've now been floating the possibility of the Ukraine Russia buffer zone in a push for peace.
According to Politico, they are weighing the creation of a 40 km buffer zone between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines as part of a peace deal, a lasting idea Moscow has embraced that would likely stretch the continent's modest number of peacekeeping troops.
The proposal, according to five European diplomats, is among several that military and civilian officials are considering for either a post-war or ceasefire scenario in Ukraine.
Officials disagree how deep the actual zone could be.
It's unclear whether a key would accept the plan as it would come with territorial concessions.
The US is not involved apparently in these buffer zone discussions.
So the idea would be that there would be a block, a strip of land inside Ukraine would be blocked off to force a fragile peace.
Now, the reason that Putin presumably would accept that is because he's figuring, okay fine, they'll put together some sort of buffer zone.
We'll just put some infiltrators in there, some little green men, as they call them, and those people will start doing violence and a uprising, and then the Europeans won't be able to do anything.
Are the Europeans going to up the ante?
Are they going to do counter insurgency offensives in that buffer zone?
There's a reason that Putin wants to sign on to that.
European diplomats have stayed away from likening this to the heavily guarded divide between North and South Korea.
They compare it more to the division of Germany during the Cold War, which again was an actual hard division.
Putin and his deputies have said they want to create buffer zones along Russia's borders with Ukraine.
No details have emerged to suggest what these these proposals would entail.
So Russia's probably figuring, okay, if we've got a buffer zone, then we will be able to again exploit that buffer zone.
Because the question, as always with Russia, is who's going to stand up to them when they push the Russian way of war is you push where there's mush.
This goes all the way back to Lenin and Stalin.
Nothing has changed.
You push where there's mush and there's awfully much mush happening on the European and yes, on the American side as well.
And if you want Vladimir Putin to come to the table, you need to up the ante in the other direction, which is what President Trump had signified he wanted to do on Truth Social last week.
And then Elbridge Colby and team over at the State Department and the Defense Department have decided that they want to hold up aid to the Ukrainians in the middle of all this, which is kind of unbelievable.
Meanwhile, Germany's Friedrich Merz says that there's not going to be a Putin-Zelensky summit.
So all that talk last week about it, not going to happen.
He said, unlike what had been agreed between President Trump and President Putin last week, when we were together in Washington, it's obviously not going to come to a meeting between Zelensky and Putin.
European leaders have privately expressed skepticism that the peace push with Putin will yield results.
But again, the Europeans are basically saying over and over and over that Putin is sabotaging whatever is left here.
That is not a surprise.
In order to understand what Vladimir Putin is doing, again, I recommend that you watch that YouTube video because I really go through in detail what Putin wants.
And the answer is he wants to ingest Ukraine.
He sees Ukraine as a giant stick in his eye.
He sees Ukraine as a Russian speaking historically Russian territory that has decided to move away from a Russian-dominated Eastern Europe that thwarts his ambitions for a Russia-dominated not only Eastern Europe but Western Europe, making essentially Western Europe into sort of a satellite of Russia.
That is the goal of that has been the goal of Vladimir Putin for decades.
There is nothing new here.
Russia is just the latest manifestation of all of that.
Get some more on this in a moment.
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Hey, meanwhile, some good news and some bad news on the economic front.
Good news is that the US economy grew at a 3.3% annualized rate in the second quarter.
According to an updated Commerce Department estimate, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, that is an upgrade of 0.3%, which is good.
That latest estimate changed because of revisions to investment and consumer spending.
Investments in IP, light trucks and commercial and health care structures were all revised upwards.
So again, there are revisions.
Those revisions had been historically kind of downwards.
That's what happened last time.
Now the revisions are upward.
So that means that the US economy grew at an annualized average 1.4 percent in the first half of the year, which is a significant slowdown from the pace in recent years.
But the economy continues to chug along.
Still a lot of uncertainty out there.
Meanwhile, a brand new inflation reading is out.
Apparently, the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure came in exactly where the economists thought that it would.
The personal consumption expenditures price index rose 2.6% in the twelve months through July.
That's perfectly in line with where it was in June.
So futures pricing suggests that traders currently see an 85% shot that the Fed lowers the interest rates.
Again, that is what is expected, which is a little bit surprising only because, again, the goal of the Federal Reserve is to get those interest rates down to 2% or below.
That's sort of their mandate.
It's currently riding at 2.6%, 2.9%.
But the basic idea here, and I think this is correct, is that the price spike that we are about to see will be temporary because demand will drop off.
And so what you want is to jog the demand from the other side in terms of monetary policy.
Now listen, if you're a monetarist, if you're somebody who believes in the way that Milton Friedman did, that monetary policy lies at the heart of economic manipulation by the central government, then I can see why you'd be interested in this sort of, if you're sort of a Vienna school person,
which is what I am, where you believe that the central government should not be flipping that switch up and down and up and down and up and down, then what I would really prefer is to allow the interest rates to go down to zero essentially in terms of the overnight rates and really allow the economy to do what it's going to do.
And that doesn't mean lowering the interest rates.
I'm just not of the generalized belief that that should be up to the government whether people speculate or whether they don't speculate.
That seems like a mistake to me, but that that's a broader economic discussion in terms of whether the interest rates come down.
Obviously, President Trump has been pushing for that for a long time for two reasons.
One, it jogs consumer spending.
Two, it also reduces the amount of outstanding debt that we have given the fact that we have this massive outstanding national debt.
The stock market is a little bit wavery.
It's certainly not jumping.
And this has been the problem for President Trump basically since Liberation Day.
You go back historically.
What you will see is that President Trump between.
Between him taking over in January of 2025 and Liberation Day, what you see is actually fairly significant and steady growth in terms of the in terms of the stock market.
And then you see as we approach Liberation Day, things start to hover and then you see them just drop off a cliff and now we've kind of made up back most of that ground.
But again, as I say, as I pointed out before, the actual measure that we should be using is not, have we hit record highs under President Trump?
If you had a natural rate of growth, you would.
The Dow Jones industrial average was 44,000 when he took office.
Today it is 45,500, which.
Which again is not the kind of radical increase that you would have expected.
All the crosswinds are having an impact.
Hopefully, the impact begins to shallow.
And meanwhile, huge controversy over the CDC because the White House decided to lay off the director of the CDC.
Presumably that was at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Now again, a lot of distrust over the CDC, a lot of it well earned.
The CDC was chocked filled with people who prioritized ideology over science.
As we talked about yesterday, one of the people who is leaving is the MPOC's guy,'s gone and that's good.
However, the question remains as to what exactly the CDC is going to be from here on out.
Is it going to be sort of a tool of RFK Jr.'s more bizarre medical beliefs or is it actually going to follow the science, which is what we were promised?
Well, apparently the person who's going to be selected to replace the outgoing head of the CDC, Susan Minerez, is Jim O'Neill.
He's currently the deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, that is the interim leader of the CDC.
So O'Neill served in the George W. Bush administration as a senior health official before becoming a close ally of Investor Peter Thiel.
He was confirmed by the Senate in June to serve as Deputy HHS Secretary.
As Acting CDC Director, O'Neill is set to play a key role in the agency's efforts to revise vaccine recommendations with the CDC scheduled to hold a meeting of vaccine advisers next month.
That process, overseen by RFK Jr., is expected to lead to a narrower CDC guidance on which Americans should receive coronavirus vaccines.
That's fine.
Again, I think that the original mandate that came down from the federal government with regard to the vaccines, which is that kids needed them, was an absurdity is something that Marty McCarry has talked about, who again is working inside the HHS.
So that's not a bad thing.
O'Neill was a frequent critic of the CDC.
He tweeted things like, is Omicron the best vaccine?
Remember, the CDC can redefine the word vaccine at will.
And I mean, I pointed that out at the time.
If you go back and listen to the show, I said Omicron may actually have ended the pandemic because everyone got it and fewer people were dying, which is typically what happens with viruses as they get less voracious.
They get more viral and less voracious.
They kill fewer people, but they affect more people.
Tevi Troy, who served as Deputy HHS Secretary under George W. Bush, described O'Neill as a tested health official.
He said he believes the CDC should focus on its core mission of combating dangerous communicable diseases.
I trust you'll bring that perspective to his new role.
Okay, so that seems like a fine pick.
Still not sure, you know, what the run in was with Monero's, but the person who is slated to replace her seems basically fine.
And as Caroline Lovett points out over at the CDC, the president does have the power to fire whoever he wants at the CDC.
That is under the prerogative of the executive branch.
Her lawyers' statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the president's mission to make America healthy again.
And the Secretary asked her to resign.
She said she would, and then she said she wouldn't.
So the president fired her, which he has every right to do.
No, obviously that is true.
Joining us online is Thomas Chatterton Williams.
He's an author and staff writer at The Atlantic.
He's also visiting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 2022, Guggenheim fellow and nonresident fellow at AEI.
His brand new book out titled The Summer of Art Discontent, The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.
Thomas, thanks so much for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
Hey, it's great to be with you, Ben.
So first of all, it sounds like this book has been a while in the making because it really focuses in on that insane summer of 2020 that basically broke the country in about ten different ways.
So what is the basic thesis of the book?
Well, I try to trace the trajectory of the bo kind of optimism and this kind of multi ethnic bargain that was struck under the rise of Barack Obama and his first term, through the disillusionment at the realization that the election of one man wouldn't solve all of America's racial tensions and the kind of great awakening,
if you want to call it, that occurred since I would put it at the death of Trayvon Martin, roughly, that went through all through Trump's first term through the Biden administration peaked in the summer of 2020 and I think contributed greatly to the kind of backlash and recalibration of culture that we're going through right now.
So when you look at that timeline, where do you see?
sort of the breaking point?
So you say that, and there was by the polling data, a tremendous upsurge in optimism with the election of Barack Obama.
Race relations in the United States were on an optimistic trajectory.
Both black Americans and white Americans, by all available polling data, were very optimistic about race relations in the United States circa about 2009, and then you can see a sharp dive starting about 2013.
And so, you know, there's a temptation always to sort of ascribe racial problems to the Trump administration, the first Trump election and all the rest, but the reality is that that seems to have been symptomatic of something that was already happening by the data that I'm looking at.
Oh, very much so.
So I think that the disillusionment, it's multifaceted, of course, but obviously, Occupy Wall Street and the kind of reaction to the economic crisis cannot be dismissed.
And that kind of formed a template for, I think, a left-wing kind of reaction and activism that then found its real purpose and calling with the rise of social media, with the ubiquity of smartphones and the distribution of videos of police violence and vigilante violence against black people, the circulation of those videos.
Trayvon Martin is a real inflection point, the beginning of Black Lives Matter and a kind of just growing.
disillusionment during the second term of the Obama administration that then found its real purpose once Trump was elected in twenty sixteen.
Well, again, looking at that trajectory, do you think that President Obama bears some responsibility for that?
I've made the case that the most important election of my lifetime was not twenty sixteen, twenty twenty or twenty twenty four, that the most important election was actually twenty twelve.
The reason being that in two thousand eight, President Obama came in, he basically suggested that he was a unifying figure, he was going to unify right and left.
There wasn't a red blue or a red America or a blue America.
There wasn't a black America or a white America.
This was legitimately the rhetoric he used in two thousand eight.
in 2008, coming in in sort of his own personage as a unifying figure.
And then by 2012, after his approval ratings had nosedive thanks to Obamacare, the rise of the Tea Party and all the rest, in 2012, he ran a significantly more polarizing campaign.
He really tried to kind of agglomerate various identity groups together, which is why you saw a radical shift in the way Democrats started to approach politics.
Instead of sort of broadcasting, they started narrowcasting to various different audiences figuring that they had a rising majority minority coalition that this was never going to be defeated again because demographics were destiny.
And then I think they were totally shocked by the election of President Trump because of that.
And so we're now in this kind of reactionary cycle from one identity politics to the other.
Well, absolutely, we're in a reactionary cycle.
And I think the first time I really became aware of the dynamic you're talking about was with the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Mark Lilla, the Columbia University professor, wrote a very interesting book, The Once in Future Liberal, in which he talked about how if you just went on the Democrats' website, the DNC's website, they had seventeen different messages for seventeen different groups they had identified as part of their coalition.
Whereas if you went on the RNC's website, they had one platform, whether you might like it or not.
You might like it or not, but they had one platform, take it or leave it.
The Democrats were micromass messaging.
I saw that I became aware of that first in 2016, but I do think that Barack Obama is not entirely without fault.
I also I think I see things a little differently than you.
I think that he probably, no matter what he did, it was any misstep, there was very little attitude.
He had no leeway.
But I do think he really made a mistake in how he framed the Trayvon Martin killing.
When he mused that if he had a child, he would look like Trayvon, that injected a kind of identity angle when the country was already quite outraged and unified, I think, and appalled by the idea that you can't just walk to the store and come home without being stalked and targeted, right?
There was unity around that.
And I think that if you can imagine Donald Trump saying that about Lake and Riley or something like that, and it would be seized upon by the left as quite a kind of signal that white identity is foregrounded.
And I just think that, you know, there were ways to talk about the Trayvon situation based on universal principles that would have brought the country together.
I also think, you know, in the book I talk about how I think in retrospect it was quite a mistake the way he handled Officer Crowley's arrest of Henry Louis Gates junior at Harvard University, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
That also seemed to inject a level of interference from the president that wasn't necessary or called for and that, you know, violated part of what was the kind of post-racial bargain that Barack Obama had come into office with, which was the idea that we are happy to elect you and to believe that America can become a post-racial society.
So therefore, that means that when things like this happen, you trust the process and we already have elected you and you don't actually inject a kind of identity politics into something like the arrest of a Harvard professor.
That is just not part of what the post-racial president was supposed to bring to the table.
And one of the things that's been sort of fascinating to watch.
over the course of the last couple of decades has been the reality that our politics has become significantly less individualistic, and yet individualism is blamed for all of the failings of our politics.
And so you have a sort of woke collectivism that has risen on the left.
You've seen an identitarian collectivism that's risen on certain parts of the right.
I wouldn't say that that's the Trump movement, but I would say that there are certain parts of the Trump movement that are kind of at the fringes that are playing in those waters.
And what's blamed innerly is always the idea that meritocracy, rugged individualism are the problem and that the only solution is a collective solution.
And so a thing that really hasn't been tried all that much over the course of the last twenty years is the thing that now seems to be blamed by people on a number of sides of the political aisle.
Oh, well, individualism?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm my my history of writing and my last book especially, Self Portrait in Black and White is a kind of plea for a return to the dignity of the individual and the idea that, you know, we can't just be reduced to the membership of abstract identity categories that we're slotted into.
And I think that, you know, I really am optimistic that America will proceed to this kind of multiethnic culture where people are first and foremost, individuals and that what's most salient about you is not that you're that you're that you worship at a different place than I do on the weekend or that you trace your ancestry to a different part of the world, but that you, Ben, and I, Thomas, talk together and we find out what our actual values are and that we believe in values that we can all buy into, irrespective of ancestry or these kind of categories that we divide each other into.
Yeah, well, one of the things that's really happened, I think also, is because of the use of language in different ways by the left and the right.
There are certain terms that get used that get immediately coded by the brand.
So you say multi ethnic and people on the right immediately go, oh, you just mean open immigration.
Anyone can come in.
that we should multi ethnic just means multicultural.
It doesn't mean assimilation.
And I think what you're going for, correct me if I'm wrong here, is just that ethnicity is a category that really should not be relevant to the question of individual quality, which I grew up with.
I think those of us who grew up in the nineties were basically told this over and over again, which is why I think the nineties may have been the greatest era of American life in this sense, or at least, you know, coming into it.
What was the basic idea that it was taken for granted that your race really shouldn't matter, that the Martin Luther King idea that you should be judged by the contents of your character, not the color of your skin, which now you say that and people think that you're being ironic or they think that you're being naive.
That's amazing because we all grew up with with that basic concept that that was the hallmark of what it meant to be an American was to judge people by their individual virtue, individual moral quality, their belief in the American system, the constitution, freedom of speech, property, right, like all these things were sort of the things that we grew up with and those things have been exploded.
That's absolutely right.
I mean, yeah, we're roughly the same age.
I'm a bit older than you, but that's the kind of America that I still believe in and that I was raised in and I can't forget.
And it's worse than even being naive.
You know, I wrote, I've written quite a lot about the idea of, you know, really buying into the idea of color blindness.
multiethnic doesn't mean anything other than that we all trace ourselves back to different starting points.
And that's fine.
America is able to be a dynamic society because of that.
But it's not naivety that you're accused of for kind of espousing that point of view.
Now it's even worse.
It's actually that you are an agent of white supremacy.
And it doesn't matter that I myself descend from African slaves as much as I'm descended from European immigrants.
That is just a I'm just a black mouthpiece of white supremacy.
And just Coleman Hughes has faced that.
Many, many black writers and public intellectuals who try to make that point are dismissed quite easily as merely agents of white supremacy.
And so it's kind of nefarious that that has just and even, you know, in the discourse, you know, at times, Martin Luther King is not so fashionable when he's associated too closely with that point of view.
Well, the book is The Summer of Our Discontent, The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.
It's definitely worth reading.
Thomas Chatterton Williams always has something interesting to say.
Thomas, really appreciate the time.
Great to be with you, Ben.
Thanks a lot for having me.
We'll get to the left's definition of Americanism.
The answer remains totally unclear.
Vice President Vance has some interesting words on it.
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